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commetis.bsky.social
an absolute state
@commetis.bsky.social
1.2K followers 620 following 880 posts
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commetis.bsky.social
This is the great age of justice these freaks yearn for.
Margaret Sharples was prosecuted for stealing cloth, "which she had converted into a petticoat for her own wearing," from Richard Bennett's shop. Her defense was that she had bargained with Bennett's servant for the cloth, "but having not money sufficient in her purse to pay for it, took it away with purpose to pay for it so soon as she could: and that she afterwards agreed with Mr Bennett of a price for it." Bennett confirmed that this was so: after agreeing to pay him 22 shillings, Margaret "deliv-ered a hamper with goods in it as a pawn for security of the money, and four shillings ninepence in money." But "soon after he disliked upon better consideration to hold agreement with her: and delivered the hamper and goods back," and commenced formal legal proceedings against her. As a result, Margaret Sharples was hanged.
November 24, 2025 at 3:50 AM
commetis.bsky.social
Whenever some know-nothing on here is banging on about how idealism actually means something totally different and surely you reductive marxists have not accounted for this or that, this is the text my mind always jumps to; www.marxists.org/archive/marx...
According to the Materialist Conception of History, the factor which is in the last instance decisive in history is the production and reproduction of actual life. More than this neither Marx nor myself ever claimed. If now someone has distorted the meaning in such a way that the economic factor is the only decisive one, this man has changed the above proposition into an abstract, absurd phrase which says nothing. The economic situation is the base, but the different parts of the structure-the political forms of the class struggle and its results, the constitutions established by the victorious class after the battle is won, forms of law and even the reflections of all these real struggles in the brains of the participants, political theories, juridical, philosophical, religious opinions, and their further development into dogmatic systems-all this exercises also its influence on the development of the historical struggles and in cases determines their form. It is under the mutual influence of all these factors that, rejecting the infinitesimal number of accidental occurrences (that is, things and happenings whose intimate sense is so far removed and of so little probability that we can consider them non-existent, and can ignore them, that the economical movement is ultimately carried out. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of any simple equation. We ourselves make our history, but, primarily, under pre-suppositions and conditions which are very well determined. But even the political tradition, nay, even the tradition that man creates in his head, plays an important part even if not the decisive one.
November 24, 2025 at 1:43 AM
commetis.bsky.social
What, you mean like when you got divorced and then became a massive transphobe?
September 14, 2025 at 5:04 PM
commetis.bsky.social
Doodle of Max Stirner: You are more than a "man"! You are more than a "worker"! You are more than a "human"! Your ever-changing real existence escapes all concept! The unique cannot be conceptualised! Wojak: Shut up, Nihilist Photo of Deleuze: The individual is not an individual "Being" nor even an individual, but a multiplicity of drives and forces asserting themselves in a duration. Wojak: So true!!
September 5, 2025 at 6:35 PM
commetis.bsky.social
Headline: Iran can't hit back over Soleimani's killing because America has only fictional heroes like Spongebob SquarePants, a prominent cleric has said Image: A picture of Qassem Soleimani counterposed against one of spongebob
May 24, 2025 at 6:43 PM
commetis.bsky.social
Like asking me to pick my favourite kids, narrowing it down to fit in a post is a wrench 😭
Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend - Domenico Losurdo The Dawn of Everything - David Graeber and David Whengrow Scattered Minds - Gabor Mate Legacy of Violence - Caroline Elkins
May 21, 2025 at 11:14 PM
commetis.bsky.social
Image with alt text added cos I was on my phone
"Above all else, Our politics initially sprang from the shared belief that Black women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else's may because of our need as human persons for autonomy ... This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression ... We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses. Material resources must be equally distributed among those who create these resources. We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation ... If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression," The Combahee River Collective Statement, April 1977
May 19, 2025 at 9:57 PM
commetis.bsky.social
If you don't think there is anything politically useful to be drawn from this when Palestine and trans rights are daily issues in political discourse around the world, I'm sorry you're not going to make it, pack it in.
May 19, 2025 at 9:53 PM
commetis.bsky.social
A man sits in a broadcasting booth in front of a microphone, wearing a black suit and tie "These are marxists, not normal people." he says, "They do not reason the way you reason. They're not motivated by human emotion such as rage and pity"
May 10, 2025 at 10:18 PM
commetis.bsky.social
Cover image for Brutus by The Buttress
May 9, 2025 at 5:08 PM
commetis.bsky.social
He is also simply talking past the source material of the views he is criticising. If anything this is what Marxists means when we say dialectical reasoning.
April 22, 2025 at 8:59 PM
commetis.bsky.social
A woodcut style print of a lion in a an archaic style; the text reads "shake your chains to earth like dew. Ye are many - They are few"
April 19, 2025 at 6:56 PM
commetis.bsky.social
Huge Fathers 4 Justice vibes
A poster in which a visibly divorced man is counterposed with a gitmo jumpsuited prisoner with a bag over his head. Beside the man: DAD Contact Order. Secret Court. No rights to see your children. Beside the prisoner: TERRORIST Control Order. Open Court. Human Rights to Family Life. I am a Dad. Not a terrorist. My name is Matt O'Connor. I am the founder of Fathers4Justice. I have fewer rights than a terrorist in my country. I have no right in law to see my children. I have no right to a hearing in an open court. I have no right to freedom of assembly. I am not allowed to go to my place of work. My crime? I am a Dad. Matt o'connor
April 16, 2025 at 11:42 PM
commetis.bsky.social
OMG thank you Gerrard Winstanley, 17th Century founder of the True Levellers, I'm a huge fan.
April 15, 2025 at 3:48 PM
commetis.bsky.social
I mean come the fuck on, really.
PARIS, Feb. 5 (Reuters)—Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn's controversial new book on Soviet prison‐camps was described as “folklore” by his former wife in an interview published here today. Natelya Reshetovskaya told the conservative newspaper Le Figaro that the book, “The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956,” was based on unreliable information: She also told the newspaper's Moscow correspondent that she was still living with Mr. Soizhenitsyn when he wrote the book and that she had typed part of it. They parted in 1970 and were subsequently divorced. She said: “The subject of ‘Gulag Archipelago,’ as I felt at the moment when he was writing it, is not in fact the life of the country and not even the life of the camps but the folklore of the camps.”
April 15, 2025 at 12:48 AM
commetis.bsky.social
Frankly, given the state of what is laughably called 'scholarship' about the second world, if people actually come out and say that a work is methodologically poor and not accurate, I think as a leftist you should probably assume it is a total fabrication.
UCLA historian J. Arch Getty wrote of Solzhenitsyn's methodology that "such documentation is methodologically unacceptable in other fields of history" and that "the work is of limited value to the serious student of the 1930s for it provides no important new information or original analytical framework.[26][27] Gabor Rittersporn shared Getty's criticism, saying that "he is inclined to give priority to vague reminiscences and hearsay ... [and] inevitably [leads] towards selective bias", adding that "one might dwell at length on the inaccuracies discernible in Solzhenitsyn’s work".[28] Vadim Rogovin writes of the eyewitness accounts that Solzhenitsyn had read, saying he "took plenty of license in outlining their contents and interpreting them".[29] Both Rogovin and Walter Laquer argue that the book belongs to the genre of 'oral history'.[30][31]
April 15, 2025 at 12:46 AM
commetis.bsky.social
Also an antisemitic conspiracy theory, and utterly without support in modern scholarship.
On the Holodomor Solzhenitsyn gave a speech in America to AFL–CIO in Washington, D.C., on 30 June 1975 in which he said that the system created by the Bolsheviks in 1917 caused dozens of problems in the Soviet Union.[137] He described how this system was responsible for the Holodomor: "It was a system which, in time of peace, artificially created a famine, causing 6 million people to die in the Ukraine in 1932 and 1933." Solzhenitsyn added, "they died on the very edge of Europe. And Europe didn't even notice it. The world didn't even notice it—6 million people!"[137] Shortly before his death, Solzhenitsyn said in an interview published 2 April 2008 in Izvestia that, while the famine in Ukraine was both artificial and caused by the state, it was no different from the Russian famine of 1921–1922. Solzhenitsyn stated that both famines were caused by systematic armed robbery of the harvests from both Russian and Ukrainian peasants by Bolshevik units, which were under orders from the Politburo to bring back food for the starving urban population centers while refusing for ideological reasons to permit any private sale of food supplies in the cities or to give any payment to the peasants in return for the food that was seized.[138] Solzhenitsyn further said that the theory that the Holodomor was a genocide which only victimized the Ukrainian people, was created decades later by believers in an anti-Russian form of extreme Ukrainian nationalism. Solzhenitsyn also cautioned that the ultranationalists' claims risked being accepted without question in the West due to widespread ignorance and misunderstanding there of both Russian and Ukrainian history.[138]
April 15, 2025 at 12:31 AM
commetis.bsky.social
"anarchists"
Solzhenitsyn made a speaking tour after Francisco Franco's death, and "told liberals not to push too hard for changes because Spain had more freedoms now than the Soviet Union had ever known." As reported by The New York Times, he "blamed Communism for the death of 110 million Russians and derided those in Spain who complained of dictatorship." Solzhenitsyn recalled: "I had to explain to the people of Spain in the most concise possible terms what it meant to have been subjugated by an ideology as we in the Soviet Union had been, and give the Spanish to understand what a terrible fate they escaped in 1939". This was because Solzhenitsyn saw at least some parallels between the Spanish Civil War between the Nationalists and the Republicans and the Russian Civil War between the anti-communist White Army and the Communist Red Army.
April 15, 2025 at 12:28 AM
commetis.bsky.social
There's only one Confederate flag.
A white flag.
April 9, 2025 at 10:24 PM
commetis.bsky.social
www.marxists.org/archive/marx...
Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it. We had to emphasise the main principle vis-à-vis our adversaries, who denied it, and we had not always the time, the place or the opportunity to give their due to the other elements involved in the interaction. But when it came to presenting a section of history, that is, to making a practical application, it was a different matter and there no error was permissible. Unfortunately, however, it happens only too often that people think they have fully understood a new theory and can apply it without more ado from the moment they have assimilated its main principles, and even those not always correctly. And I cannot exempt many of the more recent "Marxists" from this reproach, for the most amazing rubbish has been produced in this quarter, too....
April 8, 2025 at 12:33 AM
commetis.bsky.social
From the Preface to the Contributions by Marx, even.
The first work which I undertook to dispel the doubts assailing me was a critical re-examination of the Hegelian philosophy of law; the introduction to this work being published in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher issued in Paris in 1844. My inquiry led me to the conclusion that neither legal relations nor political forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-called general development of the human mind, but that on the contrary they originate in the material conditions of life, the totality of which Hegel, following the example of English and French thinkers of the eighteenth century, embraces within the term "civil society"; that the anatomy of this civil society, however, has to be sought in political economy.
April 7, 2025 at 11:06 PM
commetis.bsky.social
only this morning
chat: "Can we repurpose all the golf courses, by petty decree" "100%, Climate Stalin will end golf forever"
March 23, 2025 at 6:07 PM
commetis.bsky.social
So hear me out, wouldn't Occam's razor suggest that they're dirty cynical racists who clearly understand their own decision to play to anti-immigration sentiment and that your profession exists to pretend this isn't obvious?
February 24, 2025 at 3:02 PM
commetis.bsky.social
February 11, 2025 at 11:55 AM
commetis.bsky.social
Finally, understanding between nations.
February 8, 2025 at 10:03 PM