I saw a BFM clip where a journalist was saying “il y a une fascisation des antifas ces dernières années”. French medias have bent so far right in the past 20years it is unbelievable. On the other hand the attacks against the left (LFI) and the far left are ramping up so much it makes me feel as if the bourgeoisie is really scared and consider a win from them a real possibility.

“Socialisme ou barbarie” as always.

I guess you live in the US since if I remember right in your country churches are tax exempt.

I think you have to know about your religion canon so you can pull examples to support your points and there are many such examples from the bible, criticizing the rich, helping the oppressed etc. And also you have to know about your religion historic currents that were/are socialist adjacent.

There is a historical movement called “Liberation Theology” that originated in south America who is a blend of Marxism and Christianity. Black Theology is also another one. You could study these to help you refine how you practice your religion and how to advocate for others to align their practice and also make them more sympathetic towards socialism and less bigoted.

Yes it’s a long way to say, read/watch some theory!

Yeah we do love dehumanizing/othering people in media and politics over here. As Césaire said:

the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him

No worries, thanks for the fix. It sounded even stranger specifically for her because the far right and media in France have tried many times to question her palestinian identity saying “she was born in Syria, she’s not palestinian” since she was born in a palestinian camp in Syria, thus omitting on purpose why many palestinians can’t actually be born on palestinian soil.

Rima is franco-palestinian, it sounds strange to say “of refugee descent”.

queen !

Chega is a fucking fascist party and the media class is fully helping them. Worse is that the Portuguese diaspora in my country apparently voted overwhelmingly for them according to a comrade who’s in the PCP and was in the electoral bureau to get data from voters after they voted.

They were talking about how chega is restoring Portugal and they are cleaning up immigrants. These are the same people who were treated like shit as immigrant since they came here (they are now used as “model immigrants who share our culture” to attack the more recent black and brown immigrants)

Their parents or themselves literally left their country because they had no water or electricity in their villages due to Salazar policies.

Ok I almost caught up. Just finished reading Chapter 9. I’ll try to do Chapter 10 first sections with next weeks reading.

I had to reread a lot the Senior argument and Marx’s answer regarding the last hour. At first I thought Marx was doing exactly the same as Senior in its argument (ie arbitrarily deciding the first hours pay the wage), but then I understood that whereas Marx was using it as a pedagogical tool to show more clearly that there is unpaid labor creating surplus value while still saying that actually every hour of labor actually is actually always fragments of c,v and p. Senior was actually fraudulently trying to assert that profit only actually occurs in the “last hour”, thus removing this last hour would remove all the profit.

This is such a diabolical thing from Senior and I actually encounter this kind of argument frequently by capitalists and right wing politicians when arguing against lowering the work day or having a minimum wage, although now they usually present it in a bit of a different form.

When hearing this without thinking too much about it, I can see how you can easily start nodding along even though when prodding it, the argument disintegrates.

🤮

I still have not wrapped up my chapter 2 but thanks for organizing this reading it forces and motivate me to push through and its been really stimulating to dive deep in the text. I hope I’ll be able to get back on track once I’m done with the more complex chapters.

I’m just making sure I m understanding well as they look like the foundations the rest of the book relies on.

Im currently reading it and participating in the annual reading club (join us!). So disclaimer I’m not an expert.

I would say it artificially lowers the value of labor power (it does not actually lower its value but masks its real value) as capitalists can get away with paying less than what’s necessary for the social reproduction of labor power thus pocketing more of the plus-value while preventing an underconsumption crisis. And they also make money by lending you what you’re borrowing through interests.

My understanding of this part is that in a given society at a given historical time the value of labor power is equal to the typical basket of goods a worker consumes to reproduce their labor power.

For example in 1850 in Europe it might have been food,cigarettes, rent. And in 2025 in Europe it would include among other things taking a 2day vacation semewhere.

The in-group must always get smaller.

Well said! I think you summarized how I feel about it.

I’m still a bit behind. I’m wrapping up Chapter 2 and have had to spend a lot of time in Chapter 1. I think I’m finally starting to get Chapter 1 but I feel like I’ll have to revisit it in a few months to really anchor what I learned.

One of the thing that jumped at me having read about diamat, was how I believe in Chapter 2. Value is approached from a dialectical perspective. The use value and the exchange value are contradictions contained in the commodity (unity of opposites). If I want to realize the exchange value I would have to “alienate” from my pov the use value and vice versa, making them clearly exclusion of one another. These contradictions forces the appearance of the exchange which brings selling/buying as the contradictions. The synthesis of it is money which creates new contradictions (C-M-C’ vs M-C-M’).

I was not even aware this is a trotskyist specific term, that was the first time I heard it. They are a trot though.

Yeah exactly who cares fascism is a process and the us is clearly moving in the direction of a by the book fascist state. Thankfully I’m not living there, but I know europe is headed in exactly the same direction.

I’m here watching another person getting executed by the Gestapo while having to hear a friend lecture me how I should not say the US is fascist but actually bonapartist/authoritarian because unions are still legal and he had some union guys 1 or 2 times behind him during his campaign.

Like what do you mean??

Sounds like the Revolutionary Communist International lmao. At least in my country the RCP (I think that’s the name when translated to English) are well known in militant circle to only show up at protests with their flags and try to sell their journal.

We have stopped inviting them to coalitions and strike/protests organizing because when they showed up they never helped and were causing tensions arguing all the time.

Same in french, it is always masculine for ideology. At least I can’t think of a single counterexample.