as someone who still masks, its beyond depressing to see half my family and friends written off even by communists as "acceptable losses."

like even, basically all the communists ime, online and offline, are antimaskers. They might say or think that they aren't but in practice, they are antimaskers. They refuse to wear masks; they go to restaurants (and invite others); they host superspreading home parties and go to concerts and to dance classes and clubs and bars and on and on with not a single thought for their own health, much less those with weaker immune systems--and if any of this is brought up they look offended, like it's YOUR fault there's a plague and YOURE in the wrong for not wanting to die or spread death to ur family.

Antimaskers won.

As one of the "sex repulsed ace" folks who gets shot at / tokenised / ignored / etc by all sides

Allosexuality deeply normalised and world is scream. Can't use goddamn pleading emotes anymore because the goddamn allosexuals stole the goddamn emote to mean "bottom" and have turned anxious behaviours, nervousness, etc, into sexualised "bottom behaviour" to contrast "top behaviour" (fucking hell my fellow queers have recreated masculine and feminine gender roles down to their association with sexual behaviour! Infuriating!).

Also its fucking creepy that "pickup line" "stutter/blush/etc" "kissing / etc" being taken as "consent" is BACK but now its fine bc its gay? Like god i don't want my anxieties taken as "i just secretly want the hornies??"

Oh and the jokes from other queers about turning everyone gay etcetc and i'm like "fuck you i don't wanna be gay i hate this whole sex and romance thing"

So yeah notta fun month here ! ! !

If the sun destroys capitalism by frying all our technologies i will immediately convert to a sun cultist

Sorta. It's very materialist. It treats economics as the foundation of historical development. Interest groups attract people based primarily on material concerns. Classes hence struggle against each other (afaik without scripting) and create alliances with other classes and do revolutions. What its really missing imo is the environmental aspect to be truly 'marxist' tho (the 19th century is when concerns about "what happens when we run out of fertiliser/trees/fish/etc" started really growing as a result of unprecedented extractivism, and these are recurring concerns in Capital)

I wonder if it is because with the game becoming less popular again

A lotta the reason people keep talking about marxism in vicky3 is because the devs of vicky3 outright said they uesed some of Marx's economic theories because it makes for good game design.

Also something something reality has a marxist bias.

Khrushchev? What good has Khrushchev ever done?

-Deng, 1980

Assimilation of the Roman variety (i.e., the main language isn't forced on anyone, but all the popular media and good-paying jobs require it) go brrrrrrrrr.

Economic penetration and entwinement with Anglo empire has sociocultural ramifications (homogenization of social and economic structures to resemble Yankland).

Similar process shrunk a lotta the native languages in the east/north of the USSR, despite state efforts to prevent that.

Class society, capitalism, empire all lead to such homogenization, historically with a large state or market comes homogeneity.

Given enough time I imagine the global north nations would fully anglofy, with the english language turning into a language family (similar to latin turning into the romance languages)

I'm not shocked tbh. My (unstudied, mostly just based on Molotov's memoirs) impression is Khrushchev was very much a true believer; he was just incompetent and foolish. Quotes from around pages 203-205.

Molotov basically says that Stalin had a carrot and a stick but Khrushchev had only carrots. Stalin had an understanding of socialism as a very, very long (unknowable) period with lots of hardships and setbacks and requiring sacrifices and few luxuries until the inevitable fall of capitalism; Khrushchev turned this to "socialism as a...period with...few luxuries until the inevitable fall of capitalism" and by the 70s it was "socialism as a ... period with ... luxuries until the inevitable fall of capitalism". This was taught in schools, it was clung to, to quote Molotov "as if it were the sum total of or main thing in Stalin".

Molotov says Khrushchev's fatal mistake was the "communism by 1980" promise. "The Bolsheviks have never drawn up such rosy, such deceptive plans that promise that we shall live under communism by 1980. But Khrushchev promised it."

Molotov also says Khrushchev and post-Khrushchev leadership clung to some of the few theoretical failings of Stalin; two being "to each according to their work" and another being "money-commodity relations to be maintained through socialism"

Marx and Engels said, to each according to his work, but in an economy that has abolished money-commodity relations. In our country they say, on the contrary, money-commodity relations are indispensable, they are the main thing. Why do we write that way? We should say, according to one's work but with the gradual abolition of money commodity relations. We preach the opposite. Our 1961 program states: money-commodity relations are to be retained through the entire period of socialism. It has things turned around. Stalin said, "I acknowledge theory, I interpret it as follows: 'Life is one thing, theory another.' " That is why I sit, write, and pore over mountains of material . After all, it is horrible-what they write is confused beyond all bounds. Here I look at these Academicians--economists, philosophers--after all, they know they are lying day after day! Those Academicians and professors-no one raises a voice against them. Marx and Lenin said exactly the opposite. In Lenin's State and Revolution the words "commodity" and "money" are not even mentioned. Why? Everything was already based on them. But these are vestiges of capitalism. It's not a simple question but a complex and very serious one. Here we see young people growing up; honestly they say: this is stupid. What our elders babbled to us does not correspond to reality.

Trade. Specifically, trade overseas (sea transport is much faster than land transport to the point of qualitative difference) allowed by long-distance ships. This seems to have had dramatic effects from very early on centred around the Mediterranean (e.g. Bronze age, Hellenic world, Rome, etc for more detail see Broodbank's The Making of the Middle Sea). The secret to merchants' capital and hence merchants' power is found in ch5 of Kapital:

The form of circulation within which money is transformed into capital contradicts all the previously developed laws bearing on the nature of commodities, value, money and even circulation itself. What distinguishes this form from that of the simple circulation of commodities is the inverted order of succession of the two antithetical processes, sale and purchase. How can this purely formal distinction change the nature of these processes, as if by magic?

But that is not all. This inversion has no existence for two of the three persons who transact business together. As a capitalist, I buy commodities from A and sell them again to B... [A&B] step forth only as buyers or sellers of commodities. I myself confront them each time as a mere owner of either money or commodities, as a buyer or a seller, and what is more, in both sets of transactions I confront A only as a buyer and B only as a seller. I confront the one only as money, the other only as commodities, but neither of them as capital or a capitalist, or a representative of anything more than money or commodities, or of anything which might produce any effect beyond that produced by money or commodities.(258)

Even in the relatively even playing field of the Mediterranean, this creates the ability of one party, the capitalist, to hold an overwhelming advantage of knowledge of (closer to) the entire process of exchange, instead of one part. In addition, this creates impetus to find new sources of valuable materials (a source of relative surplus value) spurring expansion. These twin impulses help drive and enable early European expansion. The next key to super-imperialism lies in the medieval monasteries.

Moving quickly (for more detail; Landes The Invention of Time and parts of Crosby The Measure of Reality), medieval monks became very fixated on routine, schedule, fixed times unchanged by the movement of the sun, etc. This made them efficient workers, and it spread into the cities. This conception of time (time composed of homogenous, discrete units instead of heterogenous, continous movement) is a necessary precondition for the existence of the capitalist mode of production, but here we are interested in its relationship to the construction of the modern escapement clock (as opposed to e.g. water clocks, sun-dials, etc).

Modern clocks (basically the kind where time is measured by discrete intervals of sounds; the tick) arise from this conception of time, as a way to create clocks that are more consistent. At first, a main goal of such clocks was to regulate monastery life better; it spread to cities and burghers from there. At this point, we are at the pendulum clocks, and these serve well for use on land. However, the clock has applications for navigation.

In sea navigation you wanna know how far North/South you are (latitude) and how far East/West (longitude). Latitude is much easier to find to an accurate degree than longitude, so it was a major limiting factor in naval navigation. The pendulum clock allowed for much more accurate longitudinal readings, but pendulums do not work at sea. Even more complicated, smaller, mechanical clocks were needed, and they were created. This allowed Europe to reinforce its naval navigation advantage regarding trade.

From 1492 and even earlier, the ships developed through mass trade in the mediterranean saw Europe become a global middleman, buying (or stealing) goods in places where they were common and selling them in places where they were rarer. This was ultimately the source of European wealth and power, as they enjoyed a collective near monopoly on (direct) intercontinental trade, flow of information and military movement.

Europe's dependence on those ships gave it impetus to develop more intricate clocks and ships, and the wealth flowing into Europe gave it the means. As Europe shifted more towards exporting manufactured goods, this created impetus for methods to rapidly produce tons of shit. As manufacture turned into industry (meaning; as the machine was invented and the human turned into a mere motive power and machine-minder), a more controllable motive power was needed, and coincidentally existed in large quantities in the centre of manufacture (Britain).

The information gap also makes resistance, or even intention to resist more difficult:

The circulation of commodities differs from the direct exchange of products not only in form, but in its essence. We have only to consider the course of events. The weaver has undoubtedly exchanged his linen for a Bible, his own commodity for someone else's. But this phenomenon is only true for him. The Biblepusher, who prefers a warming drink to cold sheets, had no intention of exchanging linen for his Bible; the weaver did not know that wheat had been exchanged for his linen. B's commodity replaces that of A, but A and B do not mutually exchange their commodities...We see here, on the one hand, how the exchange of commodities breaks through all the individual and local limitations of the direct exchange of products, and develops the metabolic process of human labour. On the other hand, there develops a whole network of social connections of natural origin, entirely beyond the control of the human agents. (208)

...

Since money does not reveal what has been transformed into it, everything, commodity or not, is convertible into money. Everything becomes saleable and purchaseable. Circulation becomes the great social retort into which everything is thrown, to come out again as the money crystal.(229)

Conditions of production (e.g. extraordinarily brutal slavery, unprecendented ecocide, etc) are similarly in "the hidden abode of production on whose threshold there hangs the notice 'No admittance except on business'"(279-80), so for example while someone might reject trading furs for alcohol if they knew the alcohol was made with horrific slave labour, the conditions of international trade kept most knowledge in European hands. Without being aware of the conditions of oppression, without lines of communication, without immediate knowledge of the Europeans' goals, etc, co-ordinated defence against Europe is difficult.

Engels translated his own name as Fred actually

We have evidence of this as early as the 1838-9 letters to his sister Marie (Engels was in the habit of using random bits of English even in his earliest letters).

And it becomes more prominent ofc once he moves to England and lives there. Marx himself used 'Fred' to refer to Engels often, including in this Dec. 6 1868 letter

Rent is expensive

irony poisoning, it's bad folks! Boomers got lead in their blood but by god zoomers have iron in their brain

edit: i do wanna point out that this isn't so much an issue of 'smartness' as "large groups generally fail to understand anything more subtle than a hammer to the head" thing (i.e. a critique of irony in mass consumer culture of which the internet is a part)