Conselheiro

Don't think it's only a capitalism thing, but I guess capitalism causes so much psychic damage both due to how individualised the burden of existing is and how you constantly have to deal with completely unnecessary nonsense. Also drugs are commodities, so they fit very naturally into "fixing yourself" in capitalism compared to other economic systems, despite all laws. My smoking buddies are usually either political activists or homeless people, and it makes sense as those are two sets of people who engage with the irrationality of the shape of society on a day to day basis.

I think I reached a new level of depression, cigarettes and alcohol are doing absolutely nothing. Silver lining is that it'll be easier to quit, I guess.

There should be a sovereign and popular-democratic Haiti. I think we all here agree that Marxism-Leninism is the best path to that, but that's up to the Haitian people and spamming all threads about random countries with comments like this is not productive conversation. What are you even trying to achieve here? What even is your conception of what a "Marxist-Leninist Haiti" would look like? Do either the PPD or VA fit your definition?

It's already depressing enough that there's so little attention on the current Haitian struggle on leftist spaces, you don't need to make it worse with empty declarations. I know I'm being rude, but this is a serious matter, and if you can't even answer those questions you should restrain yourself.

It's an annoying skill to develop, so no judgement. I'm autistic, so I usually spend ridiculous amounts of time rehearsing and practising. Feel free to elaborate if you think I misunderstood your point.

I love how liberals write "prosecute them through the justice system" with a hundred times more energy than I'd have when calling for every single Forbes 400 billionaire to be quartered on live television and have their severed heads dragged through the mud and shown off all through Wall Street until the flesh finally decomposes enough to stop stinking up the place. These Democrats have no bite, no wonder they're such pushovers. "Hard Ball".

I don’t want to deceive the people, it’s the ruling class I want to cheat.

In that case, there's not much stopping a party, besides the laws and the state and such. It's often a bad idea simply because it can give great excuses for stronger repression, but it really depends on the situation. The Bolsheviks for instance did armed bank robberies. Any self-respecting party must have its clandestine wing, it's just not as crucial and shareable as the main party tasks of building worker power structures.

Regarding the rest of what you wrote, I didn't quite understand it, but good out-and-about militants are naturally going to be known in their communities for good militancy. Whether they openly declare to be party members or not depends a lot on security and clandestine action, but you're right in that receiving support from workers is a must. It'll just happen naturally if the partywork is good.

I'm constantly surprised by how these emails show off that Epstein is kinda dumb. You hear a lot about billionaires being smart, and I at least expected maintaining his criminal ring going for so many years would require some smarts. Instead he has the arrogance to write and send emails with the intellectual depth of stoned conversations in a bar. Money really is everything.

“As usual i don’t have to agree but will support your decisions, congratulations,” Epstein replies. (Krauss recently told Nature, in response to questions about his interactions with Epstein, that he did not know about the “horrendous crimes” Epstein was accused of and that he was “as shocked as the rest of the world when Epstein was arrested.”)

Erm, just in case some people don't know about alleged sexual harasser Lawrence Kraus and don't want to leave with the wrong impression:

Most of the Krauss-related emails illustrate a friendship that spanned Epstein’s initial legal problems and the misconduct complaints against Krauss.
Krauss shared with Epstein his comments to the Daily Beast for a 2011 story defending Epstein.
“If anything, the unfortunate period he suffered has caused him to really think about what he wants to do with his money and his time, and support knowledge,” Krauss said at that time.
“Jeffrey has surrounded himself with beautiful women and young women, but they’re not as young as the ones that were claimed. I don’t feel tarnished in any way by my relationship with Jeffrey; I feel raised by it,” he said.
And both men gave passing acknowledgement to the sexual misconduct allegations that had derailed their lives and others.
In an April 2018 email, Epstein sent Krauss the long list of expected participants in an upcoming “Women in the World Summit,” promising “a power-packed agenda of remarkable female newsmakers sharing their stories of male misbehaviors.”
Krauss responded, “Let’s do a men of the world conference.” He then identified four men who faced allegations of sexual misconduct: Clinton, the actor Kevin Spacey, former Sen. Al Franken, D-Minnesota, and director Woody Allen.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/11/18/physicist-asked-epsteins-advice-accused-sexual-misconduct/87336945007/

Trying to learn how to program in Rust for the upteenth time. It's frankly not even that hard, I just never get to do much with it, since projects are either so unimportant that they can be in Python, or so critical that I need to use something I'm actually sort of an expert in, like C.

I'd love if we had a general strike in Brazil against the pretty similar trade deals we're getting here, and even though Brazilians are the second most obnoxious nationality online (I get to say it) I don't see how bringing that up would contribute to the conversation. No hate to the USA lefties, I think their strikes against ICE were pretty nice actually, but it doesn't have to always be about them.

Imagine seeing the "largest strike in human history" in the world's most populous country and your immediate reaction is to think about people in the USA and USA reporting and how the USA could do that too. Come on, you're better than this. Probably.

To avoid being just another comment pretending to be useful while actually just talking about the USA, here's the CPofIndia on the demands of the strike:

https://newagemukti.com/article/a6474dc9-333c-4d93-86de-1da29d1e588c

Carnival is over, now the Brazilian year of 2026 is finally allowed to begin. Under socialism, January will be fully deleted.

The slight problem with that idea is that, if anything, production of electronics is increasing. It's just that the ratio of output is shifting away from consumer devices like phones or PCs towards commercial devices like servers and AI GPUs.

In five more years AI will replace you[r power consumption, internet traffic, water usage, contribution to GDP, non-monetary artistic hobbies] and it'll be great [for NVIDIA specifically and nobody else]!

Unfortunately, both of Losurdo’s works are several hours long each. I’m very curious about La Sinistra Assente, is this an article or a full book?

It's a full book, but the preface reads like its own short essay. Sadly I can only find it online in either Portuguese or Spanish (it's probably out there in Italian too but my Italian is non-existent). Not sure if machine translation works well, but worth a try.

https://www.marxists.org/portugues/losurdo/2015/05/28.htm

https://www.elviejotopo.com/topoexpress/la-izquierda-ausente/

As a sidenote, it's really annoying how little of Losurdo's work is freely available online or translated to English. His absence is too conveniently occupied by infrared folks and even Dugin.

It was a not-so-subtle reference to how King Louis XVI was referred to as Citoyen Louis Capet, with a surname being a indicator of loss of status, after being arrested and sent to the guillotine. It's a call for the whole Windsor monarchy to be abolished by execution. That includes Charles.

Got stuck without internet access for a almost a whole week, came back and Trump is still threatening Iran like an apartment cat staring at a bird outside. Seems there were no decades this week.

Nice work! I'm bad at complimenting, but let me make clear I appreciate the effort.

That out of the way, you asked for feedback, not praise. Keep in mind some of my feedback is based on my own experience of learning, which is probably very different from native-English-speakers in the Imperial Core, which are probably the intended target.

The Feedback

Seems to me that this is too heavy on the "Marxism" side and too light on the "Leninism". There's a lot of really good texts on theory and developing a Marxist understanding of the world, but very little regarding party work and praxis.

Foundations of Leninism is a certified chonker but it's pulling all the weight there in the Leninism section (which should rightfully be the biggest), whereas WitbD is a really messy read without context and frankly Roderic Day's text is extremely lacking by portraying Lenin, in his words, as "a world-class observer and theoretician" rather than a dedicated party builder. I'd replace that one with something else that focuses on Lenin's practice instead of his analytical abilities. Lenin's too often reduced to just "writer of the Imperialism book", and I think this inclusion here does his theory a disservice. It's also so short that even Existential Comics twitter thread would be a decent drop-in replacement, but there's probably some better short biography out there.

On that note, I actually think a biographical summary is the wrong start here, as Leninism is not the study of Lenin the human. It'd be more useful to add "Where to Begin?" as it serves as a fine preamble to WitbD, and really drives home the necessity of (some form of) a Party Newspaper, something that is ignored by many MLs today. Even then, readers might come out without even knowing the names of key concepts such as "Democratic Centralism" as the old texts use different names.

I'm not sure what would be good inclusions here. Huey's "The Correct Handling of a Revolution", maybe? I see that in the advanced study guide you have included texts from Liu Shaoqi, which I haven't read so can't opine much, but maybe one of those could be included here? Besides that the best I can offer is Mao's "Rectify the Party's Style of Work" and "On the Correct Handling" as shorter texts exemplifying Leninism.

I think this section is critical enough that making it bigger wouldn't amount to bloat. Specially since a lot of leftists fall into the orthodox Marxist trap of knowing a lot, except for the knowledge of how to actually do something. There's also a genuine lack of post-Third-International texts in English on the topic, so compiling them would be rather useful.

On that note, on cultural hegemony. I'm quite biased due to heavily disagreeing with him lately, but I'd just scrap Jones Manoel there and replace him with something from his actual sources. His video essays naturally end up being very verbose while saying very little, which is fine for daily youtube videos but not for theory learning. And this is not even close to being his best video essay, so I don't understand why it got picked up so hard by the Anglosphere. I'd go with Losurdo's "Flight From History" or even "Western Marxism" if length is not an issue. "La Sinistra Assente" ("The Absent Left") would actually be perfect here, but I only realised now by trying to find the English name that it has only been translated to Spanish and Portuguese, but never English.

Now the minor nitpicks.

Section 4's checkpoint question on "level of development" makes little sense today without an understanding of imperialism and/or combined and uneven development, which is a section that would only be read afterwards. In those texts (and in general) Marx wrote about industrialising European countries which followed primitive accumulation, but today for most countries the trajectory is different due to the uneven development of imperialism.

In section 2, I'd swap the order of Biographical Sketch and Three Sources, as they deal with the same subject and the latter is much shorter and summarised. Three Sources serves as a neat introduction, but if one read and understood the entirety of Biographical Sketch beforehand it won't add much.

I feel like Part I of Capital Vol. I should be in either this or the advanced guide. It's self-contained enough to be read by itself, lays out the fundamentals really well and I don't think Inferno does a good enough job of summarising it considering the reader is already going through other complex texts through these guides.

Section 5's first checkpoint question opens the can of worms of "Socialism in One Country" that I think would be counterproductive given the texts in question are only from before the Soviet Revolution.

I actually sat down to read redsails's MER in order to give credence to my kneejerk rejection of it, but it surprised me by getting me to agree with most its claims. From the way I've seen people talk about it, I always assumed it was some typical first-world defeatist essay about how even the most lumpen of proletariat in the imperial core is metaphysically counter-revolutionary due to some supposed personal benefit from imperialism and settlerism. Instead it's a pretty fair critique of the elitism of "free thinking rebels" who see themselves above the "brainwashed masses". It's right there in the title, damn it! I think the checkpoint question about it could be more leading in pointing away from first-world defeatism, but in reality I really just wanted to comment on how you really shouldn't judge a book by its cover lol.

And lastly, it feels odd that the Social-Liberation section has nothing from the BPP.

And now to make this a big complaint sandwich: Nice work! I'm sorry, I'm just a complainy person!

There's something poetic about a Windsor being called by his citizen name while being arrested. I hope the entire family of "royal" nonces get a proper Citizen Louis Capet treatment.

Yeah. But at least it's a source that one can analyse and criticise. To be honest I literally just googled it and picked the first link because I've only read about this in telegram channels. And still, that was more effort than OP put in.

Please link a source next time, lots of ignorant replies in this thread due to the lack of one explaining the Baal thing.

Why were ‘Baal’ statues burned at Iran’s revolution anniversary rallies?

It's a reference to Epstein.

Por enquanto não tem nenhum emulador em estado funcional, e ao que tudo indica vai demorar bastante pra que algum funcione bem.