cfgaussian

I would go even further. The southern half of so-called "actual Spanish territory" is actually Andalusian territory. As for "actual Germany", there is no such thing, or if there is it's just Franconia, as Swabia and the Rhineland have their own distinct cultures. And "actual France" should not include Burgundy or Gascony. And East Germany should be its own thing again, this time permanently...cause reunited Germany has been a disaster.

What they're saying is they're afraid that Marxism makes too much sense. They prefer to stay ignorant, that way there is no risk of having their views changed by an evidently more correct theory of how the world works.

My thoughts exactly!

Other commenters here have given some great answers. The answer is a pretty resounding: No. There is nothing to indicate that "free will" exists, and in fact it is not clear how such a thing even could exist in a universe which operates according to a set of physical laws.

That being said, this is really a moot academic point. For all practical intents and purposes we have no choice but to live our lives and organize our societies as though we had free will. Socially speaking this is a necessary pretense, otherwise nothing would get done.

And it's lucky that he did. If Julian Assange had gotten stuck in Russia too instead of trusting the Ecuadorian embassy to protect him he would be a free man today.

Navalny is a convicted criminal.

That promise was conditioned on Ukraine remaining a neutral state.

Turns out Russia is the real free speech haven. Snowden isn't the only American who went to Russia to escape political persecution...

How to say you're a Nazi without saying you're a Nazi.

These are excellent, where was this posted?

You've hit upon a very interesting point that i myself have thought about for some time. I see other comrades here being dismissive of the cultural hegemony that the West enjoys but in my opinion this is not quite so trivial an issue. The reason why is because Western culture reinforces and propagates liberal ideology and it does so very aggressively and successfully. We stand little chance of countering the predominance of liberal ideology in the world until the dominance of Western cultural exports is broken. This is a major obstacle to socialism, revolution, decolonization and other liberation efforts as spontaneous movements will tend to degenerate into liberal avenues and attempt to emulate western liberal society and thereby its political and economic structures.

The undoing of this iron grip of the West on the global cultural consciousness will only happen very slowly as it loses its economic and military dominance. Even as it experiences material decline, politically and ideologically the West will remain strong for quite some time thanks to its global cultural indoctrination apparatus. Only once it becomes evident to the people of the global south that the West's promises of material wellbeing being linked to the kind of society the West promotes through its artistic output are false will enough people in the periphery realize that it is not worth subordinating themselves to and trying to emulate the West. Unfortunately we are not there yet. As we can see from the sad outcome of the Argentinian election there are still a lot of people who buy into the West's garbage.

Many people in countries that have been abused and exploited for decades by the imperial core still strongly cling to the delusion that their problems can be solved if only they bend the knee enough to the West and do capitalism hard enough. This is where in my view having a very strong ideological counter-force to liberalism embedded in your culture can be of great help, and so far there are few options powerful enough and unfortunately most include significant reactionary tendencies. Religion and nationalism are two forces strong enough to form such an ideological barrier, though of course as communists we would strongly prefer that people be motivated by socialist internationalism instead. Fortunately China's success is bringing back some of the lost global popularity of socialist ideas which took a big hit with the fall of the Soviet Union.

Yes. Anything that breaks the dupoly's iron grip on any part of the electoral process is tactically beneficial. Not because we expect anything substantive to come from electoral means but because the process itself can be used as a platform for radicalization and agitation.

This is not to say that Cornel West will be the one to play this role on any but a very small number of issues where his role as controlled opposition "from the left" allows him to do so. Rather the opening up of debates to third party and independent candidates can set a precedent that might open the floodgates to more radical anti-establishment and anti-imperialist candidates. Regardless of the actual chances of winning of such candidates, it would be a disaster for the bourgeois dupoly to have their narrative challenged on such a large platform by non-systemic opposition.