Even wealthy proles would substantially and materially benefit from the overhaul capitalism. Thus, class consciousness would and should reasonably lead them to support socialism. That is the point.

Except sometimes they wouldn’t. There are people who nominally earn their income as employees who would absolutely earn less and have less privileges and “treats” under socialism. They are not a majority but they exist.

I’m not claiming this analysis is new. Of course the labor aristocracy also existed in Marx’s time. And i’m not just referring to how the working class in the imperial core broadly benefits from the exploitation of the global proletariat. I’m taking about people who even compared to the majority of the working class in the imperial core, are much more well off. These are typically the intelligentsia, highly skilled professionals, and a small portion of artists who get very lucky. As a result they are extremely individualistic and perceive things like unions or collective bargaining as dragging them down, because they are (or think they are) sufficiently irreplaceable to be able to negotiate better contracts individually. Whether or not this is actually the case is another matter, but this is how they perceive their material interests.

The point i’m trying to make is that you are discounting the impact that lifestyle and social (not economic) class has on a person’s perception of their own material interests. It’s easy to say “they just need class consciousness” but it is very hard to get people to have class consciousness when their lived experience has more in common with that of a capitalist than of the average worker (sometimes they are even better off than most petty bourgeois).

If you refuse to understand this you will be perpetually disappointed and wonder why time and again people who in theory are supposed to be working class according to their relation to the means of production, consistently act against their own class interest and reliably side with capital instead.

Like, i’m sorry, but you’re just not going to get someone who makes a six figure salary support a communist party or socialist revolution (at least not until the momentum of the revolution has grown to a point where not supporting it would be dangerous, at which point some of the petty bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy may switch sides). If you think otherwise you really need to get out more, learn how people in that income bracket think and how they align politically.

Technically yes, but in practice it’s not that simple. The term labor aristocracy exists for a reason. A minority segment of the working class can be bribed to sufficiently align their material interests with those of capital. On a personal level you can really observe a shift in the mentality of someone who reaches a certain level of wealth, even if they are still technically workers, when their lived experience diverges so much form that of the average working class person, when their material interest becomes tied to maintaining that level of wealth, when the people they surround themselves with are also within the same elevated social strata. They begin to develop a real petty bourgeois mentality that aligns with their non-working class social and material conditions, regardless of how they earn their income.

I know the relation-to-means-of-production purists don’t want to hear this but this is a real psychological and social phenomenon that we do ourselves a disservice to discount. It’s because this is not always understood that some Marxists get confused as to why so much of the western working class is as reactionary as it is, but you cannot get the full picture just by looking at class in the strictest orthodox Marxist definition alone.

How is this any different from those cringe MAGA merch peddlers? Really does feel like all these liberals are just blue MAGA.

To speak about more or less exploitative in this context doesn’t really make sense. They’re all part of the same system. Just because one country plays “bad cop” and the other “good cop” doesn’t change the fact that they’re working together to further the same goal, of exploitation, resource extraction and unequal trade. European social democracy relies on the brute strength of American imperialism to clear the way and maintain the global system in which they operate.

It should be well known at this point that Turkey has one of the most two faced governments in the world. They perpetually try and play both sides.

I would argue a certain segment of Europeans are even more propagandized than the average USian. At least in the US, for one reason or another (usually political tribalism), a lot of people mistrust their government, and to a lesser extent, their media. People in Europe still have way too much faith in their bourgeois institutions.

Yep, this pretty much sums it all up.

I read their expression as a mix of confusion and disgust rather than anger.

Also, China has been constantly warning both the Europeans and the Americans that their actions are self-destructive. Of course Westerners always think they know better, or they think that China is just for some reason trying to trick or manipulate them. So they keep digging their own hole deeper.

Not exactly accurate. The US is not only sticking a knife in itself, it is also sticking an even bigger one in Europe. Europe meanwhile is basically saying thank you to the US for doing this, and even helping them by adding another knife in themselves.

Another fun fact: the density this thing would have would be far higher than the density of anything found outside of the cores of stars.

I’m pretty sure you couldn’t see something this small at that distance with current telescopes unless it emitted some pretty bright light. Like say, if it had a very bright tail much bigger than itself (not possible in this case, too small, you only see tails on much bigger comets) or if it entered an atmosphere at high speed and burned up. Problem is Mars barely has any atmosphere to speak of…i mean it has one but it’s a hundred times less dense than Earth’s.

Another way of detecting fairly small objects in space is by observing occlusion of light sources behind them, since you can detect fairly tiny decreases in the intensity of a light source when something passes in front of it even if that object itself is too small to be seen. It’s how we detect exoplanets. But i don’t think that is applicable in this case, and even this method has limits.

Yet another method by which you could detect and measure the mass of things that can’t be visibly seen is by observing gravitational pull on other nearby objects that are visible. But again this is most likely not applicable here because the size is too small. On anything asteroid sized you generally measure mass via spectroscopy (for which you need to be able to see the thing), analyzing chemical composition and inferring mass from density and observable size.

At least this is what i remember from my astrophysics classes back in uni. It’s been over a decade though so things have advanced since then, i could be out of date on my knowledge…

Maybe they meant baby elephant seals? Still way too big but it’s closer.

Oh hey, the elephant shrew could work! But not as babies tho…too small…

Yeah there’s no way that size is correct. It’d have to be a pretty big can of Dr Pepper, about the size of a very large flower pot…maybe 36 liters or so.

I’m also not sure how small is too small for something to be detectable with current technology when it’s as far away as Mars, but i’m fairly sure a 6-12 cm diameter is too small. I think the smallest asteroids recorded are at least a meter or two across, and those were detected much closer to Earth.

This one was about one meter in diameter but that came as close as 12,600 km to Earth. Mars is at least 56 million km away.

Burgerland units aside, the math on this ain’t mathing…

A 12oz can is about 360 ml. A baby elephant is something like 100 +/- 10kg. That’s a density of 300kg / 360cm³ = 833.3 g/cm³ (plus or minus 10%). The heaviest element that is common enough to be found naturally floating about in big chunks is lead, and that’s just 11.3 g/cm³. The actual heaviest with sufficiently stable isotopes is Osmium with 22.6 g/cm³. Most meteorites are nowhere near even that, with the heaviest usually being made of iron and around 7 or 8 g/cm³.

Since i don’t think there are any compressive forces acting on a free floating chunk of… whatever this is supposed to be out in space that could increase density to the point where these numbers work out, i assume this is either a joke or someone misread the data by a factor of 100.

Alternatively, the asteroid could be travelling at 99.995% the speed of light for a relativistic mass dilation by a factor of 100. I also highly doubt this.

They are, but neither is good, both are too sweet.

Yeah i’m referring to the typical pictures you would see of Shanghai or Guangzhou for instance, especially at night, or some of those futuristic looking train stations China has. I’m sure if you go to the back streets of any city they won’t look quite so perfect, but nowhere in the world is perfect.

This meme went over like a lead balloon at the other instance

Probably because it looks AI generated. A common problem with pictures from China. Their shit is so advanced (not that monorails are that advanced but there is a lot of other infrastructure in China that you literally won’t see in any other country, and certainly not on that scale) and so clean that a lot of people literally have trouble believing it’s true.

If that is the case then Germany is currently backsliding hard on the civilization scale. The state of the German railways seems to get worse by the day. Feels like every other train is either delayed or cancelled these days. And they don’t even announce the cancellation ahead of time, if you go online they have the train as on time and supposedly running according to schedule until 10 min before it was supposed to come and then it’s suddenly “never mind, it’s not coming after all”. And by then it’s too late to look for alternative connections, you just gotta wait for the next one and hope that one comes. Makes getting anywhere on time impossible.

Sorry i know this was barely related to the topic of the post, i just needed to get that rant off my chest.

I’m not saying Christianity as a personal practice needs to be destroyed, but essentially that the country needs to be secularized […] There can be no privileging Christians above other citizens, no “teaching the controversy” on science and myth, no cultish Christian home"schools" […]

On this we are in complete agreement. I think even most Christian communists would agree with this. This is what i meant by denouncing the reactionary elements of religion.