No worries! Yea it has humorous undertones, and to communists it might get a chuckle but not really a laugh.

Yep, still settler-colonial, but in a manner that preserves much of indigenous culture and ties to the land. The US and Canada are much closer to Israel in how settlers colonialism is handled, past and present.

It sparks conversations. Plus, this is a community run by communists, so the target audience is communists.

Mostly agreed, though I think south Korea/Corea and north Korea/Corea are valid terms (specifically keeping the cardinal directions lowercase). Capitalizing the direction reinforces the idea that these are separate peoples, but frequently the distinction is necessary when discussing this or that subject, such as the fact that taxation has been abolished in northern Corea. I even more strongly prefer “northern” and “southern” as signifiers.

The problem with using DPRK and ROK alone arises when we are discussing region, not state. The illegitimacy of the ROK as a colonial state set up by the US Empire does not really help us linguistically. The Corean people are one nation, divided. Essentially, I use DPRK/ROK the vast majority of the time, and “northern/southern Korea/Corea” when discussing relational, geographic matters. When discussing the people, I do not distinguish, they are simply “Korean/Corean.”

Regarding Japan, it’s less a colony and more a vassal state like western Europe. The ROK is more of a direct colony. Japan benefits more directly from imperialism, whereas the ROK is a neocolonial forward operating base for the US to keep China in check.

A bit more gray area. The answer is yes, but the fundamental process of settler-colonialism in Mexico led to the majority of the population becoming mixed. Indigenous groups like in Chiapas still fight for sovereignty, but it isn’t the same as the US and Canada, where indigenous peoples were shut out, killed, and stripped from their land the same way.

Ultimately, it’s a topic I have not studied enough to have a definitive answer to, like the US and Canada. The process of decolonization in Mexico will look pretty different from the US and Canada.

Turtle Island should be decolonized.

Why not decolonize Turtle Island? Canada is also a settler-colony.

I don’t think analyzing the world in terms of “good guys” and “bad guys” is particularly useful. I’m working class, and I support the working class, so therefore I support communists, generally. I’m a communist.

I don’t think it’s a secret at this point that communists use Lemmy.ml’s meme community to try to spark conversations that can make those willing to engage with the subject more sympathetic to communism. There’s also the self-serving meme factor too, of course.

I think it’s worth separating your ideal of a borderless world from the actual struggle of Koreans today to establish sovereignty. The age of a borderless world can only be achieved after indigenous sovereignty around the world.

The United States occupied the south under pretenses of facilitating an end to Japanese colonialism, as the soviets were doing in the north. The major difference is that in the south, General MacArthur declared himself dictator:

[Article I] All powers of Government over the territory of Korea south of 38 degrees north latitude and the people thereof will be for the present exercised under my authority . . . [Article III] All persons will obey promptly all my orders and orders issued under my authority.

While the colonial government was being eradicated in the north, and land redistributed to Koreans, General MacArthur asked that the former Japanese colonial government and the compradors remain. While the Soviet Union was leaving the north to Koreans, the US declared the government being set up across Korea, the People’s Republic of Korea, illegal. This formalized the 38th parallel not just as a military zone, but an actual administrative division, which it was never meant to be.

The United States installed a puppet dictator, Syngman Rhee, who then murdered hundreds of thousands of Koreans south of the 38th parallel. Before the division, there were actually more communists in the south than the north. Communists were either killed by Rhee Syngman, like in the Jeju Island massacre, or fled to the north. The strong sympathies for the north also explained why it only took the KPA 3 months to get to Daegu, before the US fully invaded Korea and turned the Korean Civil War into an international war.

To this day, the US has control over the ROK’s millitary, and has a seat at any table where leaders of the north and south speak. The US has colonized the ROK, and therefore the demand of progressive southern Koreans is for the US to leave the peninsula, so that reunification can happen peacefully and Korean sovereignty be restored.

Reddit isn’t particularly left-leaning, it leans more liberal. Lemmy is definitely left-leaning, as it is developed primarily by Marxist-Leninists. As for bots on Reddit, it’s profitable.

Look to what Engels did. There are plenty of class traitors throughout history.

I’m aware of Graeber’s work. I don’t really agree with much of his conclusions or analysis, as he is an anarchist and I’m a Marxist-Leninist, but we would agree that much of office work is indeed socially unproductive, if we were to pivot to a socialist economy. That being said, we exist in capitalism, and thus office workers are working class, regardless of how necessary the work they do is beyond helping generate profit.

The driving distinction between capitalism and socialism are the following:

1. Which class controls the state?

2. Which form of social ownership forms the principal, ie rising and dominant, aspect of the economy?

The socialist market economy of China has, as I already demonstrated above, a working-class state with public ownership as the principal aspect. It thus falls squarely into how Marxists understand socialism. This is reflected by how the working classes are the ones seeing the primary focus on development and upliftment in China:

State capitalism, on the other hand, may have strong public ownership, but ultimately will be a capitalist dominated state. This is reflected in how state-owned industry ultimately is run in a manner that supports the capitalist class. Famous historical examples include Nazi Germany, as well as modern Singapore and the Republic of Korea (for at least the first few decades).

This is why Marxist analysis is enormously clarifying. Without understanding Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought, it can be difficult to understand China’s social structure, as well as why the majority of communists support China. If your understanding of socialism looks like a fully collectivized, horizontalist system, then anything that exists in real life gets measured against such a model. However, socialism is enormously dynamic, as it is a transition between capitalism and communism, and thus there is no “one” socialism, not even within a single socialist state!

That doesn’t make the people filling those roles not working class, in fact it highlights how disposable the working class is to the capitalist class, and further reinforces my point: capitalists are the enemy.

Office jobs are still jobs. If a business genuinely was wasting vast amounts of money on fake work, then these jobs would be eliminated already. They are gradually being automated away, same as physical labor, but they still exist because they are still important for production.

The target of your ire should not be this or that subsection of the working class, but instead the capitalist class.

I’ll never forget the lies about WMD to justify killing 1 million Iraqis in an imperialist conquest of oil.

Approval of Stalin is rising and over 70%, the majority of people regret the fall of the USSR, and the majority disprove of the shift to market economy. It isn’t a homogenous result, but the idea that capitalism is popular in Russia isn’t backed by data.

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