But then people respond with dogmatic, metaphysical analysis in opposition to all the revisionism. "China's either capitalist, or socialist, which are obvious and eternal binary categories! If China's capitalist, then it's the Enemy™️!" What that actually means for us here is unclear, except that we must spend our time yelling at revisionists in public instead of organizing the people (apparently).

People will openly mock the idea of China consciously transitioning to socialism from state capitalism (even though that's what the early USSR did, if quicker). "China's been state capitalist for generations, what proof is there that their strategy is the one for achieving communism?" But these same people will fetishize guerrilla movements that have been going on even longer, and have yet to break out of their core areas. Doesn't the same argument apply? Who's to say that the CPP's strategy will historically prove any more effective? And even if it does, this isn't the Philippines.

In both cases there are contradictions within the party, and between the party and the capitalist class. How these develop depends on geopolitical questions that have yet to resolve. There is a massive left contingent within the CPC and the Chinese proletariat. Xi isn't part of that left wing, but he represents a move toward the left from where China was in the 90s and 00s.

The argument for a purely developmental basis to communism is kind of bullshit, but ignoring that, the CPC still needs to construct the political basis for communism. The road is complicated by the presence of national and international bourgeoisie in their economy (Chinese NEP men), and the geopolitical advantage China gets from their keystone role in the global market. The reliance of the Western imperial capitalists on the Chinese economy may be the one thing preventing the US from nuking them. This means instead of bloating their military budget like the USSR they can focus on the economy and culture. Meanwhile, the CPP has had its fortunes go up and down, but it's military position is very difficult. It's fighting with no support against a key US neo-colonial government, in a geographically isolated situation.

What can we do here to force the development of historical processes and aid these left forces? Destroy the US and European empires, and establish socialist states. Do you think China's policies are a fair response to the threat of US imperialism, or do you think it's just cover for their capitalist interests? Either way, removing the threat of the US empire eliminates that factor in Chinese politics. And if/when shit does go down, who do you think will help us? The CPP? The Naxalites? They need help themselves. Who has the military force, the productive capacity, the manpower, and the geostrategic interest, to help us? China, Russia, and Vietnam. Don't kid yourselves.

This comes down to what I view as people's dogmatic and undialectical view toward revisionism. Politics gets reduced to ideological stances, which determine whether you're a good or bad communist (read: "person"). The fact is that Iran, an anti-communist theocracy, is doing more to materially aid the Palestinian struggle (which includes communist forces) than all Western Maoists combined. This remains true even while the Iranian government imposes neo-liberal measures on the people and suppresses communists.

If Iranian reactionaries can help destabilize the US empire, and thus create openings for communist forces, then certainly revisionist communists can play at least as positive a role. The inability to view the larger picture, instead framing things in terms of absolute, metaphysical friends and enemies, leads to severe errors like allying with the US against the USSR, and backing the Khmer Rouge against the Vietnamese. The collapse of the USSR was a result of many problems, some related to revisionist backsliding, but that doesn't mean the USSR collapsing was a good thing for Eastern Europe or global communism.

You've got people who can't muster the numbers or support to do fuck all, and they spend all their time dividing our forces by arguing with people who agree with them on everything that actually matters for achieving communism here. The ultimate enemy isn't revisionism, it's capitalism, and our current enemy isn't revisionism qua revisionism, it's ourselves: our own incompetence, cowardice, dogmatism, egotism, childishness, factionalism, disorganization, flakiness, and general lack of principles or creativity.

So much of right-deviation comes from dogmatically affirming other revolutions. If anything the USSR, or China, or whichever state does is Eternally Correct, then you'll follow their errors off a cliff. (Needless to say, that's not scientific or dialectical.) But in reaction to that, so many declare that because their movement is more outwardly radical in its statements, aesthetics, and tactics, then they must be better than those "revisionists" (evidence pending). They spend all their time criticizing others without seeing the pile of shit they're sitting on.

Sometimes I wonder if any of us actually want to win. You know, winning communism? Defeating global capitalism? That thing that supposedly makes us all communists? So many communists confuse having the Correct Opinion™️ with being politically effective.

if you are a revolutionary communist but have no answer to the question 'what political action could you take tomorrow' you are not doing revolutionary marxism, you are doing eschatology

A brilliant graphic from protectpalestineorg — 30 universities with the largest endowments in the USA , currently hosting encampments to protest against their institutions investments in the State of Israel. Harvard University contributing the most in Israeli investments, totalling $50 billion.

After a successful hunger strike in February, Darthmouth (New Hampshire) has begun a divestment process.

As of April 28th there are currently no encampments at: John Hopkins (MD), UVA (VA) and Notre Dame (IN).

Opinions on anarcho communists?

I feel like I've made my position clear. Individual anarchists have been great comrades but I have deep irreconcilable disagreements with the ideology.

See here and here.

This is my primary beef with modern Chinese productivism. Geopolitically yes, the capitalists are dominant, and thus have the power to gatekeep access to technology, knowledge, and skilled labor. Making concessions in order to get access to those things allows countries to accelerate their development until they can be more economically independent without the political risk of people craving capitalist goodies.

The problem is when this strays from strategic tradeoffs to core ideology. You see people saying China and Vietnam were correct to open their economies because capitalism is historically necessary for industrialization, implying communism is just about redistribution, and we shouldn't "redistribute poverty." This is a blatantly anti-historical argument, just wholesale reproducing fucking Menshevism. Communism is about control of production, not merely distribution.

These same people will affirm Stalin's correctness, arguing that forced collectivization and a planned economy were necessary to rapidly industrialize the USSR to fight the Nazis. So which is it? Is capitalism necessary for development, or is socialism superior? When you press people on this, they'll throw out "The material conditions are different in China than Russia or the US." How? What conditions? China is larger, more resource-rich, and more technologically advanced both absolutely and relatively than the USSR ever was. Do you think the USSR was in a better strategic position vis-a-vis the Western powers? Make some fucking sense and apply actual analysis.

This is why I hate the classical Marxist view of historical development: it's limited by the Western biases and limited data available at the time, and is now out of date. But because the mechanical idea of stagist development continues to float around (something that increasingly drove Marx and Engels nuts toward the end), you continue to have the ideological basis for people thinking that capitalism is superior to communism in fostering technological advancement.

I'd consider this an irrelevant issue given the subjective development of the international communist movement. When people start bringing that analysis home to the US though, it becomes a problem. Larouchites like Maupin want to argue for state capitalism being the actual goal, not communism, and they point to China as their example. The amount of confusion going around is painful. Proper economic democracy unleashes the creative capacities and motivation of the proletariat. The destructive competition of markets will be replaced with efficient common plans. To the extent that China already has economic democracy and planning, this is why it outperforms all other countries in its development.

if you are a revolutionary communist but have no answer to the question 'what political action could you take tomorrow' you are not doing revolutionary marxism, you are doing eschatology

April 15th: Global Strike

Bisan has called for a global strike on April 15th

"*April 15 is a day of global strike*.. No schools, no movement, no work, no electronic payment, no gas stations. Make more noise and disturb the peace of terrorist politicians in America and IsraHell."

Finding out that the Nazis privatized industry at a time in which such a thing was unheard of until decades later with neoliberalism has had my brain on fire. I already knew fascism was capitalist but this is the most capitalist.

quite frankly a lot of supposed leftists or Marxists on here are basically just revanchists or nationalists. i find it quite shocking how much revanchism is espoused on here, as long as people make the right noises. People feel as though they're on the underdog (or sometimes losing) team and that team is the Nation and not their class. I think in reality most are reactionary nationalists, at best the sort who get used by communists in a united front and then discarded.

well, i think this goes back much further than you're implying. i don't think they do get discarded during a united front; i think they historically got incorporated into a lot of revolutionary movements and ended up having a deeply harmful effect. the history of the 20th century basically is a history of nationalist developmentalism, and i think a lot of revolutionary movements, for very sound reasons, ended up essentially carrying out these projects, and i think a lot of national bourgeois basically ended up going along with the project because they thought, correctly, that the communists were the best able to do so, and that the communists needed to compromise with them in order to have a functioning state and fight the wars they needed to fight. i don't have a really detailed analysis just yet of how this played out, and this is just the embryo of an idea, but i think it explains a lot about both how the russian and chinese revolutions played out and why so many modern communists are functionally just anticolonial nationalists.

I understand that Ukraine has been made into some kind of vassal state of the US due to the military aid it has been receiving but why is the position among "leftists" essentially that everyone there is a Nazi and deserves the invasion?

it's partially russian propaganda but mostly crypto-nationalist cope. this might get me a bunch of hate but whatever.

a lot of post-independence ukrainian politics can be understood as a conflict between two groups of oligarchs (defined here as extremely rich capitalists who are also active politicians instead of existing alongside a separate political class) known as the dnipropetrovsk and donetsk "mafias." mafia should not be taken literally (with the exception of rinat akhmetov) although they do all have substantial links to organized crime groups. the modern dnipropetrovsk mafia should also not be confused with breznhev's group of cronies, who shared the same name. i'll call them the dnipropetrovsk and donetsk mafias "dnm" and "dom" to save myself typing. the most famous members of the dnm are probably igor kolomoisky (one of zelensky's major backers until z turned on him a few months ago), yulia timoshenko (who was regularly ranked as one of ukraine's richest women until she entered politics, whereupon she mysteriously vanished from the rankings) and leonid kuchma, former president and head of icbm-builder yuzhmash. the dom includes former president victor yanukovych (overthrown in 2014) and rinat akhmetov, owner of the azovstal steelworks, which was reduced to rubble in the recent war. of course, these are just the heads; innumerable businessmen and criminals are part of their sprawling patronage networks. they're not the only mafias, either - there's the "kyiv seven," the most famous members of which are probably viktor medvedchuk and the surkis brothers, not to mention the infamous odessa mafia. for whatever reason, it's been the dom and dnm who have dominated the political landscape of post-independence ukraine. broadly speaking, the dnm has been pro-eu/nato/us, and has tended to espouse liberal, free market ideology, often presenting eu membership as the key to ukrainian economic prosperity. the dom, on the other hand, has tended towards a more social-democratic/leftist ideology, and advocated for much more significant ties with russia. it needs to be stressed that these ideologies are very much skin-deep; i don't believe dom governments were meaningfully redistributive or that dnm governments actually tried to create free markets and the rule of law or any of that claptrap. instead, they just tried to do whatever make them the most money. the donetsk basin has, since late tsarist times, been one of the heartlands of the russian iron and steel industry thanks to its huge coal and iron deposits. donetsk itself was founded by a welshman (wales was renowned for its coal mines) eager to make money out of the coal, and many others followed. not only the great blast furnaces but the whole industrial ecosystems that grew up around them had always been very tightly integrated with the rest of the russian/soviet economy, leading to a very large population of ethnic russians in the area, and the fall of the ussr did nothing to stop either. in other words, dom oligarchs benefitted immensely from close ties to russia, as a severing of trade relations with russia would mean losing access to their primary markets. simultaneously, they had a great deal to lose from joining the european free trade zone, as ukrainian tariffs protected them from lower-cost german competition. the dnm, on the other hand, had far fewer connections to the russian market. some defense firms in dnipropetrovsk, such as yuzhmash, did a lot of business with the russian market, but the dnm as a whole focused on consumer industry and services, and could benefit immensely from economic integration with the economic juggernaut that is modern europe. it should be emphasized that these "mafias" are quite loose groupings, and it's not unusual for members of this mafia to be in conflict with each other, as you would expect from loose patronage networks, but they do nevertheless share certain fundamental characteristics.

my overall point here is that a large segment of the ukrainian ruling class has been desperate for euro-american satellite state status for a very long time, and this war has simply made irreversible what they have wanted for a long time. they didn't want this for ideological reasons, or even for anti-russian reasons; they just wanted to get richer. what is often left out in narratives of a """nato colour revolution""" in 2014 is that what sparked the whole thing wasn't nato accession (which was dead and buried) but a free trade agreement with the eu. yanukovych vetoed it (mostly) not for ideological reasons, or because putin told him to, but because it hurt the most important thing in the world to him - his wallet. to put it another way, it's about conflict within the ukrainian capitalist class.

the "denazification" line is largely for the benefit of the russian people themselves, not foreigners. yes, there are nazis in ukraine, but the idea that they actually have a substantial mass following is nonsense. but because of the difficulty of parsing who is an actual straight up heil hitler nazi and who is simply a sparkling far-right ultranationalist, i'll lump them all together into the latter category. svoboda, one of the biggest far-right parties, running as part of a conglomeration of several other far-right groups in ukraine, received 5% of the vote in 2014. hardly dominant. In the 2019 elections, this fell to around 2%. Not all the other independent parties have wikipedia articles, but they add up to at most another percentage point. by contrast, in the 2017 and 2021 german elections, the far-right afd won around 12% of the vote. in the uk, ukip also got 12% in 2015, and the tories have gone hard-right ever since. in france, the far-right fn won around 13% of the vote in both 2012 and 2017, increasing to 18% in 2022. in poland, the far-right pis ruled for over a decade until losing last year's election. as far as electoral results go, ukraine is, by a substantial margin, one of the less far-right countries in europe. you might argue that fn and afd aren't actually nazis, but then by that standard neither are svoboda or right sector. you might also argue that one should measure the influence of far-right groups not by electoral outcomes but by their ability to put guns in the field; i don't know enough about far-right organizations in other countries to make a meaningful comparison. it is true that far-right groups played a very substantial role in orchestrating the almost-certainly-false-flag massacre of the snipers in 2014 euromaidan, but that was only one factor. you also had the above-mentioned trade agreement veto, general disgust at the corruption of the ukrainian ruling class, and the general poverty and lack of economic growth in ukraine as a whole. there's no need to suggest magic ned mind control rays (although some will try in the replies) as an explanation for what can easily be accounted for as legitimate popular unrest. it's not like everything was fine and then the massacre turned it into a revolution; the fire was already raging when the massacre poured accelerant onto it.

as for nazis in the ukrainian military itself, when the little war started in 2014 and the ukrainian military found itself unfit for purpose, large numbers of far-right militias stepped into their shoes as they were the only ones with actual weapons, organization, and a will to fight. many of those militias ended up being incorporated into the post-2022 ukrainian army, which explains the frequency with which you see totenkopf patches in ukrainian combat footage. i haven't broken down what percentage of far-right patches are found in ex-far-right militias, but i wouldn't be surprised if it were the majority. it also should not be surprising that ultra-rightists tend to gravitate to armed forces and the military; it's certainly the case in the us and is probably the case in the rest of europe too.

it also needs to be stressed that there are nazis in russia, too. notorious mercenary outfit wagner's actual founder, dmitry utkin, was probably a nazi (wagner was his callsign and he has ss tattoos) and wagner has been associated with acts of fascist vandalism. you can also see a dnr ltcol with nazi patches here. other far-right groups like the russian imperial movement (not nazis, but still) had apparently sent significant numbers of volunteers to fight in donetsk and luhansk before 2022. there are also various accusations of kremlin-sponsored far right groups as controlled opposition, but i haven't read enough about them to make a meaningful judgment on the topic.

so, there are some nazis in ukraine, but at worst about as many as in any other european country. why, then, the obsession with denazification? the key is in what "nazi" symbolizes. in america and europe, a nazi is first and foremost a jew-killer, and many trenchant critiques have been made of how contemporary understandings of the holocaust focus on jewish deaths to the exclusion of slav and rroma deaths, to name only two categories. in russia, a nazi is first and foremost a russian-killer. this isn't unreasonable; about 400k americans died at the hands of the nazis, while over 20 million russians did. to americans and western europeans, nazi violence was directed at a third party; to the russians it was directed at them, with jews being secondary. by labelling the ukrainian state as a whole as nazi, it references not only the ideological cornerstone that is the great patriotic war in russian memory, but also incorporates the (again not unjustified) narrative of national persecution faced by the russian-speaking inhabitants of eastern ukraine, one of the key justifications for the seccession of the donetsk and luhansk people's republics. when you understand nazi as meaning anti-russian, the epithet makes a lot more sense.

why, then, has the idea of ukraine-as-nazi-filled gotten so much traction in the west? well, i'm not sure that it has. maybe i'm just following the right people, but i haven't really seen anyone straight-up spouting the russian nazi propaganda lines. mostly i see the war justified in terms of nato expansion and anti-imperialism. that's still bollocks, but it's slightly more plausible bollocks. i'm open to being proven wrong, however; i don't have my finger on the tumblr left pulse because i put effort into keeping my dashboard idiot-free. certainly people on here are not immune to propaganda from any side, but i don't think the "they're all nazis" line has gotten much traction on here. from what i've seen people usually just post a pic of some dude with a totenkopf and go "NATO BACKS NAZIS" (no shit, sherlock) without actually generalizing the condition to the ukrainian people as a whole. again, though, this is my highly uninformed personal perception. i am trying to separate this particular line of assertion from pro-russian sentiment as a whole, which is a different matter. that, imo, stems from the liberal-hegelian doctrine that states are the fundamental actors of history, and that anything that matters in world history is done by states. marxism, on the other hand, sees classes, not states, as the fundamental actors of world history. the fact that many marxists fail to grasp this is indicative. now i think the classic vulgar marxist viewpoint is a harmful oversimplification, and the more i read about the genesis of the modern state in the 17th century the more convinced i am of this. nevertheless, there's much more truth in the marxist viewpoint than the liberal-hegelian one, although the latter attitude is the most common one these days. the necessary consequence of this attitude, when combined with anti-americanism (even if said anti-americanism is downstream of anti-capitalism) is the idea that whichever country has an inter-imperialist rivalry with the united states must be the avatar of the world-historical process, and therefore is the only force capable of stopping the onslaught of american imperialism. as such, it is the duty of all anti-capitalists to support the russian cause, as they are fighting the great satan.

what reinforces this attitude are the two facts that (a) there is no actual socialist movement with any strength right now and (b) the world desperately needs one. as such, the two choices one faces are to admit there is no actual meaningful anti-imperialist force in the world right now or to cling onto a national bourgeoisie for dear life. many on this site choose the latter. i choose the former. i have sympathy for those who choose the latter; these are dark times and it's natural to crave psychological succour when surrounded by despair. lord knows i have my own emotional support ideologies. nevertheless, i think even implicitly accepting this liberal-hegelian attitude is, at its core, a reactionary move. seeing states as the essence of history is perhaps better than seeing god as the essence of history, but it's still wrong, and we can do better.

how did you become a commie

I played Red Alert 2 once and really liked this image

why do you support china

TL;DR,

As the daughter of a family of peasants on both sides, I would simply not exist if it was not for Mao Zedong and the communist party. My grandfather on my mom's side was the only person in his village to attend high school. My maternal grandparents became PLA medics then full on doctors. My grandfather on my dad's side was illiterate until the 50s, after which time, he became a local librarian. Every single senior citizen in the PRC has stories of the horror, war, death, starvation, poverty that Chinese people suffered for centuries, amplified by the century of humiliation. There's not a single farmer left in my family. They are artists. Teachers. Engineers. Physicists. Musicians. Doctors. Programmers. The oldest pictures in my family's collection are a set of prints from the 60's, after cameras came to the peasantry. In my very own lifetime, I saw Pudong, on the east bank of the Huangpu river which splits Shanghai in two, go from just the Oriental Pearl and a collection of buildings to the skyscraper metropolis it is today. When I was born, there was not a single kilometer of true HSR. In 22 years, they have built 45,000 kilometers of HSR, a number which is still growing. In 2021, the PRC completed the historical task of eliminating extreme poverty in the entire country. There are millions of families like mine living in the PRC, from Urumqi to Harbin.

In 1991, the Soviet Union was illegally and forcefully dismantled, a process which culminated in the constitutional crisis of 1993. Similar processes of primitive accumulation occurred in former Eastern Block countries, from East Germany to Bulgaria. State assets were stolen for cents on the dollar. Quality of life, especially average lifespan, dropped significantly and so dramatically that it took former Soviet countries 3 decades or more just to recover to pre-dissolution numbers; some still haven't. Pensioners lost their pensions and were forced to sell scrap and empty bottles just to survive. Those who had state jobs were laid off. Social welfare programs were cut back or eliminated entirely. Children were forced into prostitution or trafficked. Now the constituent republics which made up the USSR engage in petty regional wars to the detriment of all of their citizens. The Soviet Union was a country just shy of 300 million people. Over 1.4 BILLION people live in the PRC right now. Economic shock therapy of which the former USSR went through would be an unmitigated humanitarian disaster on a scale perhaps never seen on the planet.

The Communist Party of China has brought about unimaginable good to Chinese people. It took a backwaters, "sick man of Asia" and turned it into the 2nd strongest nation currently on the planet all within a single lifespan. The PRC is the most successful socialist project still around and should be a magnificent source of lessons to learn from, both the good and the bad. However, this is not to say the the PRC should be emulated or copied. Rather, communists should analyze their own material conditions and class make up and apply the lessons of the PRC as they see fit for their own countries.

"why didn't the Bolshevik's simply explain to the Tzar that the people were suffering and that his actions were not morally good"

oh you think we should 'kill fascists'? well my Dad is a fascist. you think he should die, hm?

Liberalism's superpower is the ability to take any Marxist concept and turn it into useless idealism. Instead of "settler-colonialism" being something you do, it's something you eternally are. It's your essence. The poor and oppressed will always be with us, so there's no point in struggling for a world where poverty and oppression don't exist. All that's left is to perform your role ameliorating the problem, to prove that you're One of the Good Ones™️.

One of the founding myths of the contemporary Western European and American world is that fascism was defeated in WWII by liberal democracies, and particularly by the United States. With the subsequent Nuremburg trials and the patient construction of a liberal world order, a bulwark was erected—in fits and starts, and with the constant threat of regression—against fascism and its evil twin in the East. American culture industries have rehearsed this narrative ad nauseum, brewing it into a saccharine ideological Kool-Aid and piping it into every household, shack and street corner with a TV or smartphone, tirelessly juxtaposing the supreme evil of Nazism to the freedom and prosperity of liberal democracy.

The material record suggests, however, that this narrative is actually based on a false antagonism, and that a paradigm shift is necessary in order to understand the history of actually existing liberalism and fascism. The latter, as we shall see, far from being eradicated at the end of WWII, was actually repurposed, or rather redeployed, to serve its primary historical function: to destroy godless communism and its threat to the capitalist civilizing mission. Since the colonial projects of Hitler and Mussolini had become so brazen and erratic, as they shifted from playing more or less by the liberal rules of the game to openly breaking them and then running amok, it was understood that the best way to construct the fascist international was to do so under liberal cover, meaning through clandestine operations that maintained a liberal façade. While this probably sounds like hyperbole to those whose understanding of history has been formatted by bourgeois social science, which focuses almost exclusively on visible government and the aforementioned liberal cover, the history of the invisible government of the national security apparatus suggests that fascism, far from being defeated in WWII, was successfully internationalized.