great things are happening on this platform

neat

how miniature are we talking?

Thanks for the second sentence actually, I decided to download the app and it looks great but it couldn’t play anything, and I was wondering if it was bc I have a Huawei phone without google services.

Unfortunately it seems free APIs are now becoming a thing of the past :(

Yoo does Spotube remove ads too? That’s exactly what I was looking for on mobile

Many such cases

https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:Elementary_principles_of_philosophy the audiobook linked on the page actually follows a slightly better translation imo that we’ve yet to incorporate. It flows better imo

tbh spotify solved a lot of headaches I had with organizing my music. I used to torrent full discographies from artists I discovered and organize the files on my PC which took up a lot of space. Eventually I started converting the mp3s to lower bitrates to save on space lol. I also had to spend time and harmonize the album titles and song titles within the folders because sometimes when you download music torrents the ripper likes to put a bunch of stuff or write everything in all caps. Spotify essentially does all that categorizing for me and with Spicetify I don’t even get ads anymore and I’m still on the free plan.

Only thing I don’t like with them is the algorithm, it’s so bad. Youtube’s is much better, google hasn’t enshitified that yet at least.

I recommend Cockshott’s video! He’s a terf but he’s a very good economist

This is factual, Gonzalo actually took ownership of the event. I don’t wanna say responsibility because he still defended it, but SP did claim the massacre.

Thanks for reading! The original theme maker basically mastered the header, as they should since they made the theme. For example, you could always press the / key to bring up the search menu on any page with this theme, it’s just that it wasn’t advertised. Hence, like them, we put the shortcut in the new search bar.

I’m not 100% sold on the pillbox and I’m looking at ways to think of it differently; it works well on their wiki for various reasons, but I feel it’s a bit out of place on our wiki and there’s an information overload. Still, it allows us to compactly (as you pointed out) direct visitors to areas that we want them to look at, like our marxism portal, or areas of the website that we know they are often looking for. I notice now I didn’t really talk about the pillbox in the article, I might go back in and edit that.

We have a TikTok (including a video that did 450k views!) but we don’t use it a lot. We don’t really have anyone who wants to revive it at this time, it’s a lot of work to do by oneself.

Hahaha the game is a scam but the wiki is a work of art, though I find them to be better on visuals than coding, there’s very little documentation for the theme and they rely heavily on css variables in a way that makes them very difficult to understand and modify.

There’s a little bit of stolen valor there because we got the header (up until the boxes that start with “read next”) from the star citizen wiki, that made the theme we use. Kind of a steal but I figure since we use their theme already, which was custom-made for their wiki but they released publicly for every other wiki to use, we can also take inspiration from their layout.

There’s also that, but I’m also using the word productive here to mean to produce an output, e.g. a text, a song, a pottery…

Taking a walk is also a hobby! Sometimes we don’t realize that the things we do are hobbies, and don’t consider them to be anything, but anything you do somewhat regularly during leisure time is one of your hobbies!

That’s not what I said at all 👍

I think in a marxist sense services are simply considered commodities: a product, though intangible, whose purpose for existing is to be bought and sold.

However, I think massage therapists and plumbers are productive because they create profit and thus accumulation of capital for their employer (or for themselves if they’re self-employed).

We look at them from the POV of who hires their work, e.g. the client booking an appointment, but the rendering of services is what matters and what creates profit: a massage company charging 100$ for a massage and paying their therapist 60$ per massage makes a 40$ profit off every client, rendered possible by the therapist’s labor.

The bakery in your example requires both types of labor: the bakers are productive because they imbue value in a commodity, but the cashiers are not because they don’t directly create profit, they turn the value of the commodity into its money-form – from what I understand of Cockshott’s video “Are barristas productive?”. If the bakers are also the cashiers as is often the case in this late-stage capitalism period, they perform both types of labor: some of it is productive, some of is unproductive.

We can take another example: a capitalist hiring a chef. In either cases, the chef produces a cooked meal with his labor-power. If the capitalist hires the chef to cook a meal for himself (and provided the chef didn’t come through a temp agency or whatever else but was directly hired as they used to do back in Marx’s days), then the labor was unproductive: it didn’t generate more capital. If however the capitalist hires the chef for his restaurant, the labor is the exact same, but it becomes productive because the meal is sold for a profit.

it was actually the other way around lol

I think with the hindsight we now have we can formally say that patsocs are distorters of marxism (Lenin had to contend with them already in his time!) and their role is to drive people away from marxism-leninism. There’s a reason they are almost entirely indistinguishable from fascists and rally all the most insufferable and toxic persons together. I also think there’s a reason the “ACP Chapters” that apparently exist have so far only done garbage clean-up instead of organizing reading groups, roundtable discussions or seminars and participating in protests. If they do it, they’ve never advertised it. Garbage clean-up is something any lib NGO can and already do.

They cherry-pick the most obscure excerpts and give it the most tortured reading to make arguments. In this way they seem like authoritative sources, giving you passages from books directly. Most of the time they cut out the very next paragraph that disproves their claim entirely. They attach themselves to these figures and also to other orgs so that they get authority by proxy. It’s very blatant once you notice it.

Marxism isn’t fundamentally difficult or obscure. It’s actually the opposite, it demystifies the world. It can’t be a proletarian ideology if it reproduces the behaviors of bourgeois ideology: that of being inaccessible in language, requiring years and years of studies to even start to grasp, requiring the reading of earlier philosophers in an academic manner (pouring over every word), and attaching itself not to the substance – despite what patsocs say they do – but to the form.

I see this in “academic” marxists too (I’m putting it in quotes because I’m not sure if they’re in academia or just very invested). They pour over every word, arguing over whether the inclusion of “the” changes the meaning of the sentence, whether you need to read Hegel to properly get Marx*, etc. They get bogged down into debates that surely interest them and their circle, but has very little bearing on the struggle.

Marxism is not a dogma passed down from Moses, and in a way it sucks to have to write that because I thought that whole topic had been settled and abandoned by 2021. Marx made mistakes too, he worked with the information he had available to him, and maybe on some days he was feeling a bit under the weather and didn’t write something properly while he was fleeing from the police! The gist of it is perfectly understandable without having to pull out oracle bones to interpret every single sentence he wrote and the order he put the words in. We are also capable of reason, the same reason Marx used, and make our own conclusions too.

It’s like, what are the actual implications of baristas doing “unproductive” labor? They’re attaching an emotional meaning to it, but unproductive for Marx only means that the labor does not reproduce capital, the M-C-M’ process is interrupted. So what’s the problem? That capitalism has bullshit jobs? That some people make minimum wage undeservedly? To patsocs, the problem is fabricated entirely: baristas perform unproductive labor and thus are undeserving of solidarity. But petit bourgeois business owners are actually productive [because they reproduce capital, a very capitalist thing to say lol] according to them. They’re not doing anything novel or even very clever, they’re just taking a body of theory and turning it upside down to say the opposite. Anyone can do that, Twitter blue checks have been doing it with Nietzche for years already.

On the barista thing, it’s funny because I saw patsocs arguing that you should try to “buy the latte, turn around and sell it to someone else”, implying nobody would buy a latte from you. They’re reinventing the subjective theory of value lol.

But to detach your friend from patsocs I would actually probably focus on their grift instead of their theory. This user on Twitter https://x.com/jonnysocialism has spent a lot of time exposing patsocs’ ties. You can see on his account the metamorphosis of Edward from Midwestern Marx into an actual fascist in real time. Hinkle’s ties to the feds too. I don’t think there’s a lot on Haz out there, he seems more like the muscles of the operation than the brain tbh. And then of course go into Larouche, there’s this podcast episode that’s pretty good https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/larouche and we transcribed/rewrote it for Larouche’s ProleWiki page if he prefers reading (said no one ever). It doesn’t go into the patsocs’ ties to Larouche though, for that you’ll need other sources. Probably just using search engines (reddit/twitter/google) and typing “Hinkle Larouche” or “Haz infrared Larouche” will yield results, or replace Larouche with the Schiller Institute which is for a fact presided over by his wife, from their website directly: https://schillerinstitute.com/inalienable-rights-man/.

Hinkle and Haz have talked about Larouche positively before, plenty of times, and Maupin was even selling his books (Maupin is now a moonie because I think even the larouchites wanted to distance themselves from him after the scandal lol).

*To add to the asterisk: read Hegel if you want to and you like philosophy, then read idealists and the Ancient Greeks too… again if you like philosophy and want to learn it deeply. I just don’t think it’s realistic to expect anyone, even cadres, to become doctors in philosophy, economics, history and socialist history to even be considered an “effective” marxist.