cucumovirus

I agree with you. The shock can be useful during radicalization at first, but the point is to stop being shocked and understand how these things work rationally in order to change them. Similarly, I don't like how many are still shocked by some soc-dem politicians "betraying" us when it has always been clear that they've never been with us in the first place. Not being shocked anymore (unless it's out of a defeatist resignation) is a good thing because it means you understand how things actually work. We want people to move past shock to an understanding and action.

I would say that What Is To Be Done? is one of Lenin's most important works, if anything I'd say it's underrated. Like (mostly) all of his works, it talks directly about the situation in Russia at the time, but that doesn't make it any less useful. You just have to extract the universal principles from the tactical particularity he's writing about.

WITBD? focuses on the need for organizing, and not just any kind, but actual revolutionary organizing with both theory and practice, for bringing together the proletariat with all other revolutionary classes and even individual intellectuals. It speaks against just focusing on a binary interpretation of class struggle (proletariat vs bourgeoisie), and instead it tells us to focus on any struggle that is revolutionary (anti-colonial struggles, gender liberation struggles, etc.).

Here's how Losurdo describes it in Class Struggle:

Wait till they find out about this: https://redsails.org/on-stalin/

Of course. As Lenin said, Communism is Soviet power and the electrification of the communal toothbrush.

She also recently tweeted about a Soviet documentary on Islam.

A barrel of oil.

Deinocheirus - even though it's a herbivore, I'm still pretty fucked.

Popper is often celebrated by libs, but he is just a racist western chauvinist (like most of the libs themselves).

Here's a quote from Domenico Losurdo's book, War and Revolution:

An explicit rehabilitation of colonialism is ventured by the theoretician of the 'open society' himself. Popper seems to offer an unequivocally positive assessment of the centuries-long domination of the rest of humanity by the great European and Western powers: 'We freed these states too quickly and too simplistically.'

Actually, the authors of this are professors from that university, lmao.

They were even given some grants and awards.

Arxiv and similar services are mostly used in actual academic circles to publish pre-prints or just to get articles out there while they're still being reviewed by actual journals, so it's possible that this will be published in a journal at some point.

Not to mention that the blackshirts and brownshirts of Europe were inspired by the KKK and similar groups in the Southern US.

You're replying to a comment about a lot more than just space travel. Those things are absolutely necessary to our civilization. They weren't necessary for all of history because we didn't have them but now we do. We know that there is no abstract civilization in general, each one exists in its historical context. Our civilization today needs all those things. If we just stopped doing them, huge numbers of people would suffer or die due to food and medicine shortages and all sorts of other related issues.

We are not arguing about what is subjectively valuable according to some people. These things are materially necessary for our society to function. It doesn't matter what someone says is important or not. What matters is the material reality of the situation.