Productivity made everyday life a legitimate trade-union concern. Once domestic conditions entered that remit, however, women could make claims that exceeded the goal of increasing labor output.

Really remarkable article analyzing the pathways of feminist societal change through the history of the Soviet Union, up until its final days in the 1980s.

We explore the modern history of putting big guns on wheels, then dive into the history of Chad and its border dispute with Libya to learn how a humble pickup truck became a quintessential weapon of war.

Fantastic podcast episode. This isn't brought up in the episode directly, but given who I am, I am sooooooooo struck by how similar the introduction of the Hilux Technical in the Chad/Libya conflict is to the Byzantine/Muslim wars of the 700s.

it's a very similar paradigm -- one military built on slow moving, heavy armor is completely blindsided by a new army built on fast moving light cavalry. In both cases it's the army that is able to move faster and shoot further (not to mention "can melt back into the environment") that matters MUCH more than the army that has stronger shields.

T.E. Lawrence is also not brought up in this episode but this feels absolutely in line with his wartime observations about How To Win. I feel like I am Understanding War Theory more now.

In this episode of Guerrilla History, we bring on Alexey Sakhnin to discuss the history of Russia/Ukraine relations. Given the current events, this is an important topic for us to understand the historical context of.

This is a bit older now (2022, recorded right after the initial invasion maneuvers), but I found this a great primer on Russia/Ukraine relations dating from the Medieval era to today.

These passages are unusual enough that earlier editors and scholars were made uncomfortable about them. We discuss their devotional context but also the broader context of homoeroticism and homophobia in the monastic world of that time. The conversation is based on Derek's recent monograph, Monastic Desires: Homoeroticism, Homophobia, and the Love of God in Medieval Constantinople (Cambridge University Press 2026).

Browse IKEA catalogues through the ages, reflecting different eras and lifestyles - a goldmine for the nostalgic, design enthusiasts and history buffs.

Behind the high school students spearheading the movement, the larger battalions are beginning to grow restless. The fatal error of Macronism: because it corrupts everything, everything can work towards its overthrow.

I want to agree with this. I want to believe that this may Be something.

Without the seemingly irrational "smashing and looting riots" triggered by hunger among tens of thousands of ordinary people tearing open the breach ahead, the bourgeois representatives in parliament wouldn't even have been able to pass a single piece of paper. This chaotic, spontaneous riot forced the entire French society onto the irreversible path of the Great Revolution.

I have been observing the chaos in France from my American standpoint with some cautious optimism. I appreciated this piece putting it in a historical context.

The classic pattern of new technology adoption is something like an S-curve: it starts out serving niche uses for users who need its particular combination of attributes, but as the technology gets more capable and less expensive, it gets adopted more broadly, until it reaches some particular peak. When a technology gets replaced, in turn, it tends to follow this pattern in reverse, getting removed from more and more uses but continuing to be used by users who value its particular combination of attributes.

As a big fan of the warm amber glow of early plasma screens (much like CRD, who made a good companion video for this article if you are like me), this was a fun read.

Today, IF is probably the best-preserved cross-section of video game history we have. Every game, from Zork through Infocom's latter-day output, through every game made with Inform from the 90s until today, is playable and runs on any machine you could name; there are almost as many ports of the z-machine as there are ports of Doom.

A fantastic historiography of interactive fiction from its inception to today, written by Bruno.

IF has long had an arms-length relationship to video games at large. It is a genre and a surrounding community that is insistently noncommercial, relentlessly critical-minded, insular (and at times, though not so much today, exclusionary). It's more like a (large, unruly, eccentric) extended family than anything that could be described as a "fandom."

Of course, as would be expected from the title and from... recent history, this also touches on the increasing and disgusting practice of the use of generative AI in interactive fiction. Not only does this feel creatively insulting, it feels particularly galling in a small, bespoke scene like intfic.

AI sells the promise that you don't even have to imagine something; that your vague impulses, half-formed ideas, or just the result of a delusional conversation with a machine can become productized for an audience of none. The effect has been immediately toxic to all sorts of institutions that take submissions from all comers—from literary magazines like Clarkesworld to open-source code hosting service Codeberg.

The good news is that people will always want to create things, and will always create the best things. Better things than AI will, and ever could.

Park Jee-hoon highlights various issues that caused and escalated the Ukraine crisis, including NATO expansion, neo-Nazism, and mistreatment of Russians and Russian speakers living in Ukraine.

A very exhaustive detailing of the current situation in Ukraine and how it relates to the material concerns both of Russia and Ukraine. It's a thorny subject in the broader West to talk about Ukraine without being completely engulfed in pro-Ukraine angled propaganda, so I found this a breath of fresh air.

I found myself in a conversation with a friend recently about the nature of Russian far-right agitation and how that relates to the broader Rightist upturn globally these days, and it is complex how the anticommunism of the United States (and the post-Soviet Russian state) has contributed to the building-up of right-wing forces within modern Russia. But that doesn't change the material realities at play here -- NATO/the EU threatens Russia militarily on the regular, and Ukraine's swing toward those powers (as part of a broader right-wing upswell in the region) makes it a very fragile situation for Russia's survival as a state.

The International Research Centre (IF DDR) researches the history of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and its enduring relevance for international movements today.

Cool resource that I want to dig more into later. I <3 the DDR (game and country)

Marx and Engels were attempting to understand a new social order that had emerged from the destruction of feudal relationships and was rapidly expanding across national borders. Their argument was not that history had ended with capitalism. Quite the opposite: capitalism itself was historically produced, and therefore historically transformable.

I agree with this guy!

After a popular uprising against neoliberalism, an attempt to charter a new constitution, and a politically dead Gabriel Boric administration, the Pro-Pinochet right now holds power in Chile. In an interview with Gabriel Delacoste, Daniel Tutt asks what went wrong.

I have a lacking knowledge in South American leftism, and I know there's a lot there to learn from. This piece offers a pretty digestible history of Chile from the colonial era all the way to today, and all of its various swings.

Speaking personally, I think you can see (as shows up time and time again in national histories in the 20th century, both in South America and outside it), a stronger Leninist (or Lenin-ish) vanguard being opposed by a more moderate leftist current that wins victories in the democratic arena, only to be targeted by a revanchist imperialist/colonialist wing and deposed. I think it's a bit more complex than a simple "Leftist or liberal" binary -- many of the powers that held on for some time or another were closer to what we'd call social democrats -- but the tendencies appear often.

It is possible to say that Boric started as a radical and then turned to the center, but if we understand what kind of radical he was this becomes less clear. He came from a radically pluralist left-libertarian intellectual milieu that fiercely criticized neoliberalism and the party system, but that didn’t necessarily have roots in the socialist tradition. He had tattoos and a mohawk but had not necessarily spent hours studying how to transition to a planned economy.

Right, a classic left-libertarian approach, basically. "Depower the state", but before the machinery of power is fully held by the people. A simple error by Leninist analysis, but a deeply harmful one. After beating back the Communists for seventy-odd years, this is where the resisting forces often end up -- without a clear theory of power or transition.

Choosing not to look is a subconscious act of pulling the blinds, because confronting it would shatter the tinted windows that shape their worldview, protect their assets, and preserve their moral standing.

On boomers, wealth, and America.

I argue that from 1920 onward, Communist women pioneered efforts to link social reproduction to women’s unwaged labor and care work. Communist women discussed the economic and social conditions necessary for mothers and families, attentive to class, ethnic, and racial inequalities. This way they formulated core principles of intersectionality and reproductive justice before these frameworks entered mainstream feminist discourse.

You know, I hate to be the guy who is vagueposting about a dumb thing that I saw online, but I really liked this article because it feels like it directly counterargues against a dumb thing I saw online, which was a statement of "intersectionality is incompatible with principled Marxist-Leninism". Which is, on its face, a bad argument and I don't want to give it a lot of air.

But! If you would like a good article to throw in the face of someone who makes that dumb sort of argument, this is a good one. Historical analysis, well argued and interesting.

The interwar Communist Women’s Movement was not a passive recipient of Comintern or Soviet directives but an active, theoretically innovative vanguard that positioned women’s emancipation at the center of socialist transformation. By linking unwaged domestic labor to social reproduction, the movement pioneered a profound rethinking of care work as a structural economic and political question.

Now as a ‘level of war’ coequal with strategy and tactics, operations can and indeed must be more than just that, because it would have to consider uses of force beyond simply maneuvering against enemy armies in the field for the purpose of battles, but that frame will serve us pretty well here because it is the frame Hearts of Iron adopts across the entire series. Which is not a critique: this is a game about World War II, which was very substantially a war concerned with large conventional armies maneuvering in the field.

I feel like I have to note that I recently unfollowed and blocked Bret Devereaux on socials for being an anticommunist pedant. That said, that reactionary knows how to write about war

Here I will detail a perspective on how to understand the Cuban reforms from a Marxist point of view and, by comparing them with other socialist experiences of reform, try to elucidate how we can think about this kind of policy change under Communist-led governments.

It is impossible to consider Cuba, and Cuba's oppression by the American state, without getting into complex, contradictory feelings. Even before the current reforms, Cuba was contentious -- not initially a communist revolution, wrenched into communism by circumstance, and then under siege for the entirety of its existence by one of the most powerful capitalist empires on the planet. It is a model of resilience and survival, and of compromise. This last bit, I think, is well-defended in this piece.

And what have been Cuba’s playing cards in the 21st century? Arguably, the worst ones out of any Communist-led state. Any complete analysis of the Cuban Revolution in general, but especially in the 21stcentury, should always start from the decades-long, bipartisan effort by the United States to subjugate Cuba once again. Until the late 1980s, Cuba had the help of the Socialist Bloc and could benefit from the echoes of early Soviet hopes of developed socialist countries reversing unequal exchange and breaking the chains of underdevelopment in other regions. The impact that the 1989-1991 collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe had on Cuba is impossible to overstate; it is tempting to see it as isolated as the early Soviet Union, but with the crucial difference that one was a transcontinental mammoth and the other an island of a similar size to Iceland, 90 miles away from a state committed to defeat it.

A small note in this piece that I think about often is that -- as the author correctly details -- Cuba was almost entirely a monocrop economy until the 90s. Much of its money to survive was provided by the Soviet Union, who, beautifully and tragically, paid exorbitant and unnecessary prices for Cuban sugar until its collapse. An internationalism that feels almost unbelievable now. Even great China makes sure to not disturb the monster of the United States overmuch, and one can hardly blame them for it. But still.

This essay will trace the main contours of his biography and examine three critical aspects of his thought: his understanding of the nature of the majority of the peasantry and their role in the revolution; his exposition of Marxist epistemology; and his analysis of the challenges of building socialism after Liberation.

Ken Hammond is one of the best english-language writers on the history of modern China and this piece is a great read if you want a 101 on Mao and why he was so important.

[L]et me express a perhaps controversial view that no single person in history has ever made a greater contribution to the liberation of humanity as that made by Mao Zedong. Further, if that is the case, then it is not unreasonable to suggest that he is the greatest person to have ever lived.

Rest in peace, big man.

It is a simple fact that the People’s Republic of China has now lasted longer than the Soviet Union. That the Soviet Union no longer exists and People’s China does. That it has developed further than any other major non-imperialist country has ever done. That China accounts for the overwhelming majority of global poverty reduction. That China leads the world in the fight against climate catastrophe. None of this would have happened, none of this would have been possible, without Mao and his leadership.

In other words, she contained multitudes of things in apparent mutual tension with one another, albeit in her case the overall effect was anticommunist and pro-American, even as it was anti-sexist and beneficial, in particular, to "working women" in the imperial core.

The best piece on Steinem I've read so far, pointing out both her massive flaws as well as her respectable actions.