https://www.ft.com/content/762cd291-2a62-4e00-b69f-c60f9ee31a6e?sharetype=blocked

The "functionality is entirely reliant on the US". I.e. in order for Trident to function we need missiles from the US to carry the atomic warheads and we need to spend money every few years to replace old and out of date missiles. If the US decided to stop selling us the missiles Trident would cease to function. Ergo they have outsized control over our nuclear deterrent.

Trident's functionality is entirely reliant on the US.

Our nuclear deterrent is the US's nuclear deterrent but it's parked in Scotland to have access to Russia's western front.

Absolute insane suggestion that completely ignores the reasons why Russia invaded Ukraine in the first place.

Foundations laid today will be vital for the ripening of the movement tomorrow.

Writerism shakes fist

Nothing was ever achieved by people writing and sharing political theory and analysis of current material conditions.

And people definitely shouldn't read what is to be done.

Looking forward to the rest of the Chinese century 🫡

The last time any of those things were won by the working class they had come home angry and fed up fighting a war, and were ready to demand at least some concessions from the ruling class. These concessions were granted because the capitalists were terrified that an even angrier working class that knew how to use weapons and fight in an army would lead to a 1917 Russian revolution situation.

Until the same style of conditions exist I don't think the working class are in any kind of place to just demand better from the capitalist class. Hopefully the next time we don't just accept a bribe and let the next generation(s) eat shit while lapping it up.

Transportation is not, by Marx's definition, work that belongs to circulation of commodities. And I would also say that logistics also falls into the same sphere as well. Both would constitute a part of the production process itself. As would, on social averages, the marketing departments that produce branding and the aesthetics of a commodity.

The clearest examples of unproductive workers are those paid from capital: workers involved in realising surplus value, I.e. sales teams, shop clerks. And workers paid from revenues: directly hired servants (More likely in Marx's time), and workers hired by the state for local and state administration, and others like them whose labour is paid out of taxes (i.e. surplus value collected by the state), but some of these are part of the 'faux frais' of production itself - like health and education workers, and can constitute productive labour as such.

A good article breaking down the topic from across vol 1, 2 and 3 of capital plus the theories of surplus value:

https://www.marxists.org/subject/economy/authors/howell/produnprod.htm

Also, and it's touched on in the article, the incessant need to split this or that labour into productive and unproductive feels almost entirely unnecessary in regards to the organisation of the proletariat toward revolutionary ends. That any given member of the working class is employed in productive or unproductive labour doesn't change the potential precarity of their position as a waged labourer subject to the whims of capital and its state.

More likely just plain old US assets tbh.

If Russia had all this intel on these old fucks then they'd have released it already.

I appreciate that books are a bit harder to read than Wikipedia pages, but I really do recommend it.

I'll be less glib: liberalism was used to justify French slave ownership too. It also has been the justification for global interventionist policy by the imperial core. "Bringing liberal democracy to dictatorships."

But equally racialised minorities are still the people that bare the brunt of the systematic violence of Capitalism and the state repression. In this instance as an example this is targeted at Muslims, but in the racialised sense any person of MENA or Indian subcontinent ethnic origin (or who looks like it).

Liberalism as a political project was first and foremost a way to justify american slave ownership.

Domenico Losurdo's "Liberalism: A Counter History" covers the history of the ideology well.

The stain on the politics of One Piece imo.

Sack all the reinstating of "good" monarchs and centre the revolutionary army more pls.

Zero possibility that this friend lied?

Some people love to lie especially if it gets a rise out of people. "Defectors" including the likes of Yeonmi Park from the DPRK also are financially incentivised to lie. I know people that lie about shit in the UK to make things sound worse than it is, and they will swear up and down it's true after being called out on it.

If your material conditions aren't basically forcing you to always try and find a way out (when you've already gained the beginnings of communist consciousness), you might just be struggling with the fact that your own life isn't really that bad, and slipping into old habits.

Keep reading Marxist theory and developing your class consciousness and killing the little bourgeois-self in your head trying to commandeer your brain.

Starmer and the rest of Labour besides a few good eggs deserve no respect.

Obviously this doesn't mean the press don't have a distorted way of presenting Labour relative to how they presented the Tory govs failings.

I'd rather the British public lose all hope in a future with any of the current political offerings than hold out hope for a neoliberal Labour party that are out of their depth. The sooner the farce and sham bourgeois democracy is realised for what it is by the masses the better. No more managed decline.

One thing to note is that machinery does not impart value onto the things they produce because they can produce so many things for a relatively low fixed cost. Marx equates the infinitesimal value imparted by machinery to that of the forces of nature. This is an important part of why the exchange value of goods produced by machinery drops dramatically.