Adding some files.

aimixin_transitions_to_socialism.md

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+# /u/aimixin - On coops, the public sector, the transition to socialism while private property still exists, and socialism with chinese characteristics
+
+[link](https://www.reddit.com/r/GenZhou/comments/pzcwzr/apparently_president_xi_does_not_believe_in/hf0bnv0/)
+
+Was Engels a class collaborationist for proposing the idea of a proletarian-peasant could cooperate in a revolution? In fact, Trotsky did go onto make this very argument and said the Comintern were evil class collaborationists for this.
+
+What Lenin and Stalin had argued is that working with other classes is not inherently wrong as long as the proletariat maintains a leadership position. The alliance is not equal, the peasantry could not be the leading force in the revolution, but that doesn't mean they can't work together when they share common interests.
+
+The reason Engels, Lenin, and Stalin all defended this viewpoint was because it made sense given their material conditions. They couldn't just wave a magic wand and abolish the peasantry because they were part of the material foundations of the economic system, and so you had to work with them when possible. Mao also defended working with the peasantry and the national bourgeoisie during socialist construction and was really only opposed to working with foreign bourgeoisie and landlords.
+
+Economic planning is founded on public ownership, public ownership is founded on incredibly large-scale production built by markets. When the proletarian revolution occurs, if the entire economy is not *already* under a giant private monopoly, then inevitably, the material foundations to transform the economy into a fully planned economy would not exist, and you'd still have a large market sector. You can only establish economic planning to a scale proportional to your level of economic development which means the economy would not be fully planned.  
+
+This was something Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin were all very well aware of. The *Manifesto* does not argue for the immediate abolition of all private property but a gradual abolition alongside economic development. Engels specifically says in *The Principles of Communism* that private property can only be abolished in proportion to the level of the development of the productive forces. Lenin argued in *The Tax in Kind* that immediate abolition of small producers would be economically impossible and suicidal. While Stalin went the furthest trying to fully plan the economy, he also admits in *Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR* that he found such a task to be fundamentally impossible to achieve because of the low level of development of the USSR and that some markets had to remain.
+
+Stalin had the additional idea of taking those market elements and transforming them into worker co-operatives in order to get rid of bourgeois ownership. However, there really is no theoretical basis for this in Marxism but just a strategy Stalin thought was useful in the USSR at the time. 
+
+Che Guevara wrote a good critique of this in his book *Apuntes Críticos a la Economía Política* where he criticizes the USSR's economic textbooks for conflating things the USSR did with socialism in general, that the USSR being the first socialist experiment often failed to separate between what was specific to the USSR's material conditions and what could be applied universally.
+
+He goes onto criticize how there is no theoretical basis in Marxism for replacing all private ownership with co-ops and that co-ops do not constitute a form a socialist property, and in fact goes onto argue that workers in co-ops have fundamentally different class interests than workers in the public sector. The public sector workers benefit from an expansion of it, the co-op workers benefit from shrinking it, handing more power to the co-ops, accumulating more wealth individually, etc, etc.
+
+He actually speculated the USSR might return to capitalism because they didn't take this problem seriously, that they assumed co-op workers had the same class interests as public-sector workers, and were not really concerned with what potential dangers they could present to constructing socialism. He also provides a couple examples where the co-op sector (the "kolkhozian class") conflicted with the public sector and the conflicts were resolved in favor of the kolkhozians, leading to deregulation and the restoration of buying and selling of means of production, something Stalin feared would end up laying the basis for the dismantling of the kolkhoz system in *Economic Problems* and potentially even the restoration of capitalism in the long-run.
+
+Transforming the market sector fully into a co-operative sector was something the Soviets experimented due to the particularities of their material conditions, but it is nowhere to be found in Marxism and cannot be universalized to all countries nor is there any reason to, and the insistence that we have to embrace such as thing or else we're "revisionist" makes absolutely no sense and is just a dogmatic application of everything the Soviet Union did into other countries.
+
+If we are not to be idealists that believe we can just wave a magic wand and instantly change our material conditions, then we would be forced to conclude that private property would continue to exist as a subordinated form of property for a long time post-revolution. If private property continues to exist, definitionally, so does the bourgeoisie. They would exist as a real material part of the economy and you have to work with that.
+
+You can't just ignore your material basis and refuse to ever talk to the bourgeoisie because of an emotional visceral reaction against doing so. You can't pretend the economic base of your country isn't real because you don't like it. Even if you make them illegal, they will continue to exist in the form of black markets which plagued socialist countries which overly planned their economies in a way that was far too ahead of their productive forces. 
+
+Private property was recently legalized in Cuba very recently in the constitutional referendum and this was the same argument they had made as well. They made private property illegal, it sprung up as black markets anyways. These black markets flourished not because of evil people wanting to destroy socialism, but because the productive forces were underdeveloped and so the Cuban state was simply not economically efficient enough to plan the whole economy, and so many of these spontaneous black markets were providing real and genuinely useful services. We have seen in the DPRK for example a lot of black markets appear around food production due to food shortages where people grow and sell food independently of the central government that is not adequately providing enough on its own.
+
+Simply crushing the small producers would thus only hurt their own economy, and making them illegal made it difficult for the state to regulate them. If a black market private business is actually providing a useful service, if they're illegal, the state would have to disperse them, and so they would be inclined to hide their activities, making it difficult for the state to regulate them.
+
+By legalizing them, they no longer have a reason to hide their activities and it makes it easier for the state to regulate them, and thus control their development, and make sure the development of a non-state sector, which is inevitable from underdevelopment of the productive forces, would develop in a way beneficial towards the construction of socialism and not damaging towards it.
+
+The only response to this ultraleftists give are visceral emotional reactions. They just hear "working with the bourgeoisie!!! evil!!!" and then get angry and upset about it because they think the only way to not be a "revisionist" is to just keep killing all private business owners until you have none left.
+
+Yet, this was not what Marx nor Engels nor Lenin ever proposed. They all understood that markets have to develop alongside and supplementary to the development of planning, you can't just abolish one because you don't like it. 
+
+Stalin's economic model was specific to the Soviet Union's material conditions and the necessity to rapidly bring the country together and industrialize in order prepare for a fight against the Nazis. There is no reason to think Stalin's model should be universalized to every socialist country. But this is exactly what people are doing when they call China or Cuba or whatever revisionist for not making all private property illegal and turning all private businesses into co-ops. 
+
+And, again, if you don't make all private property illegal, you will inevitably have a bourgeoisie, and that means you'll inevitably at some point have to talk to them if you want to actually run an economy and not virtue signal. That doesn't mean the proletariat and the bourgeoisie share equal political power and footing, nor did the proletariat and peasantry share equal political power in that alliance, either. The country is still a dictatorship of the proletariat, but that doesn't mean the proletariat can't ever cooperate with other classes on any issue ever.

dash_rendar_what_is_capitalism.md

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+# /u/TheDashRendar - What exactly is Capitalism?
+
+- [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/communism101/comments/a0mwut/what_exactly_is_capitalism/eaj3b4a/)
+
+Capitalism is, fundamentally, about the underlying property relations at the base of society.   Claims on ownership granting special rules.  So kind of like how in feudalism - the King got a bunch of special rules that only applied to him (sometimes from God), and later some of those would extend to the nobility and aristocracy, but not to the serfs and peasants - or how in ancient Rome, masters got one set of rules and slaves got a different set of rules - well Marxists make the argument that we've still got a two-tiered ruleset in place today - where one group of people (or CLASS of people) have to live and play by a basic set of rules, but another, smaller group (or CLASS) of people get some bonus special rules that help them out extra and give them bonus power and authority that members of the much larger group don't have the same access to or ability to wield.  Even moreso, Marxists make the argument that these bonus rules are actually detrimental and damaging to the larger group, in order to amplify the benefit provided to the smaller group.
+
+So let's talk about these two groups.  The first group is probably the one that you and I are a part of, as is the overwhelming majority of humanity.  This group is a CLASS of people that acquire and grow their wealth - that is to say, make their money, earn their income, etc - primarily through doing work -ie/ labour.  This can be a lot of different things:  flipping burgers, writing code, building houses, transporting goods, etc.  Lots of different things.  But how they all get paid is largely the same.  They perform this task, over a certain amount of time, and they receive money from the person or people who owns the business at a fixed rate of pay, multiplied by the amount of time that they spent working.  So you make X dollars per hour (called a wage), or you make Y dollars per month or per year (called a salary), or you get paid Z dollars for doing a specific job that will take a specific amount of time. 
+
+Now there's a lot of interesting characteristics to talk about with this relationship - but one of the obvious ones is the mathematical limit to wealth growth through labour.  Karl Marx calls this group the PROLETARIAT.
+
+If you are getting paid at X dollars an hour, then there's only so many hours in a day that you can work, (and lets face it, you need to sleep to some extent, and there's likely transit and other life obligations involved in there too) and there is a clear upper limit to how quickly you can grow your wealth.  Yes, if you have the fortune of being born into a very privileged position, you might be able to negotiate a higher X dollars per hour rate, but it is still a fixed rate, and it still is capped off by how many hours you can physically perform work over the course of a day (or a week, or a year).  So even if you are a super skilled, super hard worker who negotiated a good contract, you can still only grow your wealth arithmetically - in direct proportion to the time you put in.  But overwhelmingly, that's not how fortunes are made.  
+
+Now let's talk about that other group in society - the much smaller and much more powerful one - the one with all the fortunes - the one that really gets to make use of those bonus rules I mentioned.  So remember, the PROLETARIAT primarily makes their money from doing work - that's the defining characteristic of that class.  Well this group, who Marx calls the BOURGEOISIE, grows their wealth, makes their money in a very different way.  Their wealth does not primarily come from doing work - their money comes primarily from ownership claims.  They make their money simply by owning things.
+
+Rich people sell you a story about working hard for their money - for the most part, that's a myth - most of their money is made via ownership.  In the old days is was the certificate they had that said 'this factory belongs to me (or me and my business partner), and in more modern times, it's divvied up a little differently with things like stocks and bonds - people with differing amounts of equity and portions of the total ownership claim.  But the money they make from the ownership claim - that money is made while they sleep and play golf.  That money is the money made by the workers, that they only pay a fractional portion back to the people who did the labour to make the money in the first place (salaries, wages, etc).  The owners pocket the rest, and the mechanics of how this system works is not the standard of history, but something that has come into place only in the past few hundred years.
+
+Think of a coal mine for example. The owner doesn't physically go into the mine and dig up the coal. He doesn't run the local office and organize the labour. The owner lives thousands of miles away. Yet, because he has a little sheet of paper that say he owns it, every three months he can expect a substantial cheque in the mail paid out to him. He gets a (very large, rather significant) cut of everything that mine produced this quarter. But he didn't mine any coal. Capitalists love to say that "There's no free lunch" - except that there is - as long as you have enough wealth to belong to the ownership class - you can extract free lunches from actual working men and women for as long as you own property. It's not the poor and powerless who are leeches - it's the wealthy who are the parasites.

paying_one_half_the_poor_to_kill_the_other_half.md

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+IE, why pushing for social democracy in the imperial core countries is a terrible idea. 
+
+In Settlers, Sakai talks about how a lot of poor proles from europe who came to the US, *still pushed for the genocide and expropriation of native american lands*, because it meant that they could potentially get land for next to nothing. The colonial bourgeoisie were happy to give them that slice of the american pie, because it meant furthering the US goals of westward expansion, and building a garrison / middle layer of settler troops who would have their same goals in driving out Native Americans.
+
+The same thing happened with the new deal, where workers were bribed with welfare and higher wages to abandon revolutionary organizations, coalitions with black and brown workers, and be pushed into settler unions (and management positions) who could do their bidding against various other working groups, creating yet another grouping of "middle class / labor aristocrats" whose goals aligned more with the bourgeoisie than with the poor. 
+
+This new *new deal* Sanders is proposing is the same idea: that workers in the imperial core will accept a new round of welfare policies. Since the US is primarily a service / consumer goods import economy, social services are entirely funded off the backs of third world workers who get paid next to nothing in wages. [Sanders record of voting for US military intervention in 15+ countries](https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/socialism_faq.md#whats-wrong-with-bernie-sanders), his preference for lighter skinned social imperialists (like the nordic countries), his denigration of actually existing socialist movements (he calls Maduro a "vicious tyrant"), and his anti-immigration stances are more than enough evidence that he wants to continue the US policy of enslaving the third world to feed the imperial core.
+
+All of these are instances of **one half of the poor being bribed into killing the other half;** but in the modern day, its imperial core workers being bribed into continuing the exploitation of the third world to provide cheap products and enough surplus value to fund welfare policies. Rather than dismantling capitalism / imperialism, Sanders wants to increase taxes on billyahnayas, in which a cut of their imperialist superprofits will go towards first world welfare, thus strengthening the alliance between capital, and its labor aristocracy, much like the new deal. I know, we can call this new class collaborationist garrison of labor aristocrats, the "middle class"! 
+
+In fact, many forward-thinking capitalists are openly in support of this project: [Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Sam Altman, are just a few billionaires who support a universal basic income](https://www.industryleadersmagazine.com/billionaire-entrepreneurs-who-support-universal-basic-income/), seeing its potential use as a finely tunable fuel source to quell class struggle, gain public support, and preserve their fortunes.
+
+To quote /u/Guillotron9000 : 
+
+> Nothing of the sort will happen. Even if Sanders is elected he'll pass M4A and most of his base will be satisfied. And the capitalists won't care too much either. They'll just make up for the losses by fucking over the third world even harder.
+>
+> The whole movement around Bernie isn't about socialism. It's about the Americans demanding a bigger part of the pie from their imperialist overlords. This is just a compromise between the capital and the workers in the imperial core. And it's not at all surprising either. Americans are already provided much more than their counterparts in the developing world.
+
+The Marxist antivenom for this western chauvinist poison is organization that is internationalist in scope/aim, like many movements in the Global south (such as the Bolivarian revolution). Workers in the imperial core must continue to refuse these new deals, these bribes to preserve the US empire / western colonialism, keep supporting actually existing socialist movements, advocate for the [defeat of the US empire](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/jul/26.htm), and begin to build armed organization that can eventually challenge their police states.

recipes/baked_potato.md

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+# Baked potato
+
+- Poke holes in potats
+- brine in saltwater for a few seconds
+- bake at 450 for 1 hour or until 205 internal temp on rack
+- brush skin with vegetable or canola oil
+- cook for another 15
+- crack open immediately, add stuff

recipes/bens_tek.md

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+# Uncle Bens TEK 
+
+- [Full shroomtek guide](https://www.reddit.com/r/unclebens/comments/el1da3/part_1_how_mushrooms_and_mycelium_grow/)
+- [Ready rice syringe inoculation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1doXheZi-co)
+- [Container fruiting](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qbb7Wuaw2D4)

recipes/milkshake.md

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+# Milkshake
+
+## Ingredients
+
+- 2.24 ratio: grams of milk to grams of ice cream
+- Or 1/3rd cup of whole milk (78g) to 175 grams of ice cream

recipes/mushrooms.md

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+# Uncle bens mushroom guide
+
+- [Original uncle ben tek guide](https://www.reddit.com/r/unclebens/comments/el1da3/part_1_how_mushrooms_and_mycelium_grow/)
+- [Inoculation day (twist tek)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaPEVc5rDos)
+- [Spawn to bulk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUPeTDlDow0&t=2577)

recipes/oat milk.md

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+[Recipe](https://simplegreensmoothies.com/recipes/how-to-make-oat-milk)

recipes/seasoned_fries.md

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+# Seasoned Fries
+
+## Fry part
+
+- Cut 1cm or 1/2 inch width
+- Rinse water 15 minutes
+- Pat dry with towel
+- Fry for 270 deg for 10 minutes
+- Let cool / put in freezer for 30 mins
+- 400 deg for 10-12 minutes
+
+## Ingredients
+
+- 5 tbsp flour 
+- 1 tsp cayenne 
+- 1 tsp Smoked paprika 
+- 1 tsp Cayenne pepper 
+- 1 tsp onion powder
+- 1 tsp garlic powder 
+- 1 tbsp ground black pepper Powder
+- 1 cup water 
+
+### Mix
+
+## Directions
+
+- Deep fry fries
+- Freeze for 2 hours
+-

recipes/taco_rice.md

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+# Taco rice
+
+## Ingredients
+
+- 1 cup long grain white rice
+- 1/8 small onion
+- 1 clove garlic
+- 1 Tbsp tomato paste
+- 1 3/4 cups water, divided
+- 1 tsp Knorr caldo de pollo 
+- 1/2 tsp salt
+- 3 Tbsp corn oil
+
+---
+
+- 4 cups rice
+- 7 cups water
+- 1/2 small onion
+- 4 cloves garlic
+- 2 tablespoons caldo de pollo

why_torrents_are_better.md

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+# Why Torrents are better than streaming servers as a self hosted solution.
+
+Instead of using plex or emby, consider using a dedicated torrent server, and torrent clients elsewhere.
+
+## Quality
+
+- Streaming servers can **never** have the same quality as local music / video players.
+  - Video streaming servers like plex or emby, often have to transcode / convert the video to lower-quality formats. Native video players can handle `x265`.
+  - Audio streaming servers often can't handle high quality formats like `flac`, whereas local media players can handle these easily.
+
+## Amount of Content
+
+- The content on streaming services are limited to what you *specifically* have downloaded. This can never match the hundreds of thousands of torrents being shared by people across the globe. Search sites like [Torrents.csv](https://torrents-csv.ml/) have often faster searching than self-hosted solutions (and you can self host the searching if you wish).
+- Which is better, having a collection of *my music*, or having a collection of *all music*?
+
+## Choice of media player
+
+- With torrents, I can use **any media player I want**. Most OSs make this as simple as a double-click to play media. VLC / MPV can natively play high quality video and audio, x265, flac, opus, etc.
+- With streamers, I'm forced either to use a web client, or their own (often proprietary, sometimes paid) app. I prefer open-source standards like VLC.
+
+## Availability / Reliability
+
+- Torrents have effectively solved the data distribution problem: content is shared in a web of connections, and a torrent with more than one seeder is already more resilient than the strongest streaming server.
+  - Why should there be 10,000 separate streaming services, not helping each other host or share the data, when torrents have made it so 10,000 clients **are helping each other share the data**?
+- Services like plex don't offer this shared hosting.
+- Music / content is often removed from services like youtube frequently. Torrents can never be removed.
+- People often goto video streaming sites, and these are taken down rapidly. Many torrents have been reliably shared for 10+ years.
+- What about hardware failure? If your streaming servers hard drive goes down, you lost everything. With torrents, any with more than one seeder is safe.
+
+## Ease of use
+
+- Streaming servers require you to set up a web server, often requiring you to learn nginx / apache, as well as follow various setup processes for the services themselves. This is understandable for some tech-oriented people, but what about a non-techie, who just likes music / movies? Why should they be required to learn these tools? 
+  - Content should be available **for all**, regardless of technical skill, or ability.
+- Downloading a torrent, and enjoying the media, involves:
+  - Clicking a download magnet link. Wait for it to finish.
+  - Open it.
+
+## Caching / Saving / Streaming
+
+- Many of us don't have data, or are often in areas where data is spotty. 
+  - Its often a *feature* of services like plex to be able to save media locally, to avoid this problem. This is default with torrents.
+- Torrent clients like qbittorrent and libretorrent for android let you *download files in sequential order*, IE stream, at the click of a button.
+- Services like [Torrents.csv](https://torrents-csv.ml) let you search for files within torrents, so you can easily download / stream individual songs.
+- Its your choice where things are downloaded to. You can have a desktop or server with a highly available torrent client, and/or a smartphone torrent client.
+

workout_routine.md

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+# Current workout routine
+
+These are all ~10-15 minute videos, so I try to do at least one per day.
+
+I also use the android app XPlayer, a video player you can mute, so I can listen to audiobooks / music while I work out.
+
+## Equipment
+
+- Dumbbell set
+- Pullup Bar
+- A chair
+
+## Videos
+
+- [Athlean X - 6 pack abs, ~10 mins](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OF3q6MHie8)
+- [Fraser Wilson - 10 min ab workout](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9p7-YC91Q74)
+- [Austin Dunham - 10 min home pullup bar workout](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmUjoSKOEXM)
+- [Fraser Wilson - 15 Minute Arm Workout (dumbbells only)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY6-JzdnHUM)
+- [MidASMVMT - 15 Minute Dumbbell back workout](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjzlUcjsRLs)
+- [MidASMVMT - 15 Minute shoulder and traps workout](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQ5kX8BBmw)
+- [FitnessBlender - Brutal HIIT Ladder Workout (20 mins cardio)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZnsLVArIt8)
+- [FitnessBlender - Squats and Deadlifts w/ dumbbells (30 mins)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0FxMguetIw)
+- [ThenX - Morning Shredded routine (10 mins)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_zHF-UwO5A)