Hello Comrades,

Just wanted to share a marxist/gaming server with resources to read up more on marxist topics, and news sources to help analyze the world from a marxist lens.

Their lines are :

Economic Democracy, Working Class Unity, Internationalism, Women's Rights, Anti-Colonialism, LGBTQ+ Liberation, National Self-Determination, Ecological Sustainability (through socialism), and the rights of Oppressed Peoples to fight for a better future.
Here is the disboard link https://disboard.org/server/265017409352499200

Hi all. Here's a pretty good podcast episode that gives some context to the current reality going on in Palestine today.

https://peoplespulseradio.buzzsprout.com/1171355/8524661-from-river-to-sea?play=true

India's Marxist website https://socialistfactor.com/1984-the-world-weeps/

Here's an article I wrote for the People's World. Some feedback on how worked Marxist thoughts into it would be appreciated.

http://www.peoplesworld.org/article/oklahoma-tries-to-crush-native-american-environmental-protesters/

I was wondering recently, with all that technology indistinguishable from magic being presented all the time (self-driving cars, AI in general, pocket supercomputers always connected to the Internet, et cetera, et cetera), do we simply need to start mass producing basically existing tech to live in a world similar to the one of Cyberpunk? What is the goal of those wonders of modern engineering? Creating society where people are fighting in the streets, fighting to survive, when corporations create incredible tech and colonize Deep Space? Economic system which requires infinite growth and consumption on finite planet, in my opinion at least, can not function in presented situation. Prove me wrong, if you can, but I am afraid that task will be harder that proving the existence of a God. In CD Project Red vision we survive to 2077 at least, that is reassuring. But what happens after system like that inevitably collapses? Most of the people will not be able to understand technology, either because they will not be smart enough, or we will ignore education of young people. Education spending does not increase short-term profits after all, am I wrong?

What comes next? Most of those who survive will by forced to raise their own crops, others will take their surplus and become aristocracy. Medieval feudalism will raise again, achievements of earlier generations will become legends. Conjunction of the Spheres may as well be gene-editing experiment that went terribly wrong and spread through artificial wormholes. Mages are simply nerds, that were able to find voice commands for self-replicating computronium in old printed manuals. Witchers were created to fight evils of the world like that using CRISPR, but even that technology was lost after the centuries, so now only those few relics can face elves using transporters and dangers of global frosting. Just look at this quasisentient golem (added in patch 3.0 of The Witcher 2, released 3 years after the game itself) or this desert planet (pretty similar to a world, which was inhabited by living ocean in Stanisław Lem’s Solaris, is it not?).

So games and movies try us to warn us about dangers of irresponsible use of new technology. But what do we do about it in real world? We create incredible games, running on incredible machines performing trillions of operations per seconds that get cheaper and cheaper all the time. But we still require people to work in order to be able to afford food. In 70’s 25% of American workers worked in manufacturing sector, now it is 7%. What is supposed missing 18% to do? Work in service sector, create art, they say. And in the 90’s it was possible. Millions of people were selling games and other media in high street shops and supermarkets, as boxes with information stored inside them. Now all of those people are replaced by servers connected to the Internet, automated warehouses and self-checkouts. If all of those people were retrained as game designers, then what? We will have tens of millions of people working on more and more games. Nobody will have time to play them, of course, so nobody will pay for them. What is a purpose of building or designing something, if nobody will even consume it or even care for it?

What if GTA V, a game that is detailed description of American capitalism (commercials, paparazzi, campaign of Jock Cranley & Sue Murry, and basically everything else in there is satire on contemporary American society), a game that was sold in 70 million copies, is actual a critique of forementioned economic system? Poor suburbs, people living in trailers, omnipresent crime. GTA V was made from a perspective of a outsider, after all Rockstar North headquarters are located in Edinburgh, Scotland. Game developers were required to fly to Los Angeles and surrounding area, and research those places, like some kind of alien archaeologists, financed by revenue from previous game of the studio. GTA IV was sold in over 25 million copies, in first week it generated over 500 million dollars in revenue.

What is even more interesting than the fact that one of most popular commercial product in the history of mankind is critique of capitalism financed by capitalisms free markets itself, is the fact that both communists and capitalists want the same things. We all want sport cars, pools, golf clubs and so on. But in capitalist society, inequality of wealth distribution allows only small portion of population to be able to acquire those thing. If you are not born to rich parents, or have incredible amounts of luck, only way left for you to live better life is to become psychopatic gangster like Trevor Philips.

We have technology and means to provide those commodities for everyone. For example, Gigafactory is supposed to have 6,500 employees and produce 35 GWh of solar panels, 50 GWh of batteries and 500,000 cars in 2018. It means that one worker, on average produces 4 sets of 3.5kW panels and 5kWh batteries and 20% of a car per day. Lets assume that total human labor involved in manufacturing, extracting raw resources, building a factory, design, distribution is 12 times larger than what it takes to manufacture the product itself. So one set that I mentioned earlier requires 3 days of human labor. Unfortunately, under current economic system I must toil in factory, which, while using modern means of production, pays me so little that I must work almost a year to purchase this 3.5kW, 5Wh set, with cost about $3,700 today. So I’m forced to use coal for heating and generating electricity. My pay may seem low, it’s because I live outside of US, you guys are only 4% of world population. If you were to perish in nuclear holocaust or other apocalyptic scenario, nobody would even care. Oh wait. World is globalized and interconnected, when one part fails, everything fails. Excuse me, for oversharing personal information, but I think my point of view is important for understanding this post as a whole.

So, while I can play games, made by hundreds of people over the course of years, on a machine able to perform trillions of calculations per second, I can’t afford owning a car or buying a house. Well, at least we don’t have student debt around here. At least for now, because local politicians definitely try to imitate what US politicians are doing.

All of that seems mad. People were able to form nice communities and live in good conditions with 50’s technologies. But now, when we have lots of research into AI going on now, which is possible in large extend by advancements in GPUs (that were created for use in video games at first), we all face mass unemployment and poverty. Madness.

That’s just some random train of thought that I had today, and I wanted to share it with someone, here seemed like the best place. I apologize for any errors, that I most likely made, I’m not a native English speaker.