¡Venceremos!

Agreed.

It’s stuff like this that makes me realise how much better a head of state Thomas Sankara was than I’ll ever be though. Homie refused to use airconditioning in his office because it was considered a luxury in Burkina Faso.

I believe Suslov was another revolutionary figure who eschewed the privileges that he had access to on the grounds that if it was good enough for the masses then it’s good enough for him.

NAFO and its consequences have been a disaster for the online discourse.

Imagine having the confidence to make ahistorical claims that are this outrageous. Either you’re duped or you’re an op.

Oh, I forgot to mention something in my previous comment so please excuse the double-tap.

There’s absolutely no reason why you have to focus your learning on the ongoing dark history of the US. It’s still going to be there waiting for you whenever you’re ready to come back to it.

If you feel like you’re getting doompilled by staring long into that particular abyss then it is no longer serving you or the greater struggle. So abandon it, at least temporarily.

There are a ton of inspiring things from the past and the present moment that you can focus on so seek out those things and give yourself permission to put investigation into the stuff that brings you down on hold. Also, when you return to this stuff, remember that you need to be doing this with a sense of purpose. Mindless consumption of the doom doesn’t work towards anything but if you are learning about this stuff to develop your thoughts about how to intervene in it and defend the revolution (e.g. learning about Salvador Allende’s presidency and the coup in order to take lessons to heart which will inform your politics and how you would guard against subversions and coups) then it gives much more meaning to the difficult subject matter and it makes it less likely to sap your revolutionary spirit.

You might want to consider reducing your intake or disconnecting entirely from the news cycle as well. Of all the things I am exposed to, I find this brings me down like nothing else.

Try to find time for developing your aspirations and hopes as well as for your own leisure. I’m not of the opinion that self-care is a revolutionary act but it sure as hell is a radical act and it’s of critical importance because you’re not going to be of much use to communism, your community, your circle of loved ones, or yourself if you end up in a pit of endless despair.

You are far too important for that.

Thank you, robot.

Which probably doesn’t track well with my posts as I tend to ramble a lot but I’m going to try and cut back on that as much as possible. I would hate for anyone to get bored or frustrated reading my posts.

Unless it serves your interests or your own purposes not to, ramble away.

It’s entirely up to the readers of your posts to determine whether or not they choose to read your posts and how they decide to go about that (e.g. reading closely, skimming, skipping to the parts that interest them etc.) Let the reader figure out what they want to get from your post and to seek that out themselves. Don’t concern yourself with their needs because this is an exercise in reinforcing and enriching your own learnings. You aren’t writing a paper or a book, so your concern for the reader shouldn’t really be a high priority imo.

Im sure most of you know who Antonio Gramsci but he was discussed in class

Just be aware that Gramsci is used in the service of many purposes and his materialism is often downplayed or even erased from how his theory is interpreted or applied.

This is in large part a product of the fact that he was never able to really produce a body of work that is coherent and which nailed down his positions due to the circumstances of his imprisonment.

What this means is that I’d urge you to approach people’s takes and applications of Gramsci with a healthy skepticism unless they are Gramsci scholars.

Out of interest, it’s worth noting that the chief prosecutor for Mussolini said of Gramsci during his trial “We must prevent this brain from functioning for 20 years.”

My professor answered this in the pluralist perspective there’s production bourgeoisie vs some other type of bourgeoisie that I couldn’t quite catch but that hardly matters.

Potentially “rent-seeking bourgeoisie”, which is more relevant to liberalism but this is the group of bourgeoisie who are extractive rather than productive in the economy; landlords, speculators, financiers and investors etc.

To illustrate the point, imagine what the consequences would be if every member of the bourgeoisie made their money by being a landlord or an investment banker; the economy would collapse in a week.

My professor made sure to mention that in the Soviet Union, contrary to popular beliefs, it had factions and worked more like pluralists and he made this remark in regards to the criticism that pluralists cannot explain authoritarian regimes. He didn’t talk about the USSR with any contempt, and I feel like that’s important to mention.

This is promising!

Next, of course, was postmodernism

I’m an ex-postmodernist/poststructuralist. While there are useful tools in the poststructuralist toolkit, these days I am extremely skeptical of the overall utility of this intellectual movement.

If you want a crucial perspective on poststructuralism from an insider, the articles of Gabriel Rockhill are excellent and many his lectures hosted on his YouTube channel The Critical Theory workshop are also great. I can provide links if you need but I’m being lazy rn.

It depends on what your purpose is but, as a party which has not achieved a successful revolution, the party line on AES means very little.

It’s hard to imagine a successful socialist revolution being established that won’t rely upon China as a major trading partner and I suspect a lot of the pre-revolution positions will shake out in a post-revolution situation due to the material conditions.

Say your country achieves socialism tomorrow and it is faced with internal and external attempts at subversion, an effective blockade from the US and potentially other liberal economic blocs. Where do you think that your country will turn to in order for economic development and general support?

It’s going to turn to AES countries, undoubtedly. Either it will be incredibly isolationist and almost certainly doomed to fail or the pragmatic elements of the party will seek out support from AES countries and those ties will develop and sentiment towards AES countries will shift within the party as a matter of necessary.

But I’m rambling.

Maybe you can use the party as a platform to develop political connections. Maybe you can instigate a split. Maybe you can stay within the party and drive a line struggle.

There are many options but it depends on what your goal is and what the conditions are.

There are a few things to consider:

Mao’s paper tiger

The average lifespan of an empire is 250 years

That the situation has always been desperate and hopeless, perhaps moreso in periods of history than it is today. We can look to the battle of Stalingrad or the Long March or the period around the October Revolution as examples of just how desperate things have been and how we have been able to prevail against all odds. Heck, Lenin didn’t expect to see the revolution in his lifetime and then in a few short years he ended up leading it.

I’m not going to go into depth on this because I don’t have the focus rn but ultimately this is a question of having a world to win and daring to invent the future. We have two propositions:

• We are in a hopeless situation with no potential for achieving revolution
• We are in a situation which has potential for achieving a revolution

The importance of revolutionary optimism cannot be overstated. (There are some good video essays out there on this topic.)

Ultimately, the choice is between an attitude of defeatism or revolutionary optimism. If we choose defeatism then we foreclose on the potential for revolution because, if an opportunity for revolution exists, we will not be in a position to seize it.

If we choose revolutionary optimism, on the other hand, we have the ability to seize the opportunity.

We cannot allow ourselves to foreclose on the opportunity for revolution because we will only ever know if something is possible by striving for it and, in achieving it, proving that it is in fact possible retrospectively.

I’m assuming that’s because you uploaded the PDF directly and it attempted to extract the (non-existent) embedded text within the PDF and so it just skipped all the pages because it presumed that the pages were just images.

Here’s what the first page of the pdf returned for me by screenshotting it and uploading it to Google Lens:

As someone who does deep dives into finding historical sources to confirm what is claimed in secondary sources, believe me that it’s actually really hard work to turn up primary sources from the era prior to digitisation of media (as before the period where stuff like newspapers were regularly added into online archives as searchable text — say around the 70s or 80s.)

No shade on India here but because it was colonised for such a long time, it never had a chance to industrialise and develop its archiving and its historical record comprehensively while under the boot of colonialism in the same way that countries like the US or Britain have been able to, not until recently anyways, so it’s probably a later era that you’re looking at when it comes to newspapers being digitised.

What you’d likely need to do would be to go digging through a the major newspapers of the time in that year, likely in national archives or in the archives of major newspaper companies, in order to find the quote in question because it was likely published in the print news first and later quoted in this flyer. And I’m talking stuff which is likely scanned but never indexed or converted to searchable text. Which would be a ton of legwork to do and there’s no guarantee that you’d be able to find the exact newspaper article or that the newspaper article itself has been preserved in archives. It might even require searching in hard copy archives.

I appreciate your skepticism and it’s definitely an open question as to the historicity of this quote but at the same time, when you’re digging this far back into history for a particular source (especially when it’s across languages), it quickly become an especially arduous task to find primary sources. It’s the sort of thing that you’d likely need to get in contact with a historian who specialises in the famine from the perspective of India to ask for their assistance with tbh.

By leaving its current format do you mean keeping the translated text in the publication as it is?

You can use google translate to translate images/screenshots if that’s what you’re after although the text it produces is less than ideal for something that you plan on distributing. But it depends on your intended purpose really.

Errr why should we? Because jungle and imaginary yankee toughs? I’m not sold on this analogy.

I mean, your interpretation is as valid as mine. But I think you haven’t done my words justice in your summary of the points that I made to support my interpretation. You’ve either responded before reading my whole comment or you’ve spent too much time on Reddit.

Predator reads more like Wells’ “War of the worlds” - turning the situation upside down on the colonizers. Suddenly they’re the ones being hunted for sport by uncaring invader with absurd levels of technological superiority (while still acting as if it’s fair and square).

An analogy is such because it’s not a 1:1 representation and it never will be. If it were meant to be a perfect representation of the Vietnam war then it would be a biopic or a documentary. There’s no inviolable rule that you can’t invert parts of your allegory and clearly this was done to make a Hollywood blockbuster action-scifi film.

The predator wasn’t a coloniser imo. There’s less in the movie to support the idea that the predator was colonising the jungle than there is for the Vietnam war allegory. A foreigner in a different land doesn’t amount to colonisation.

I was trying to find the quote from someone who was involved in production who said that if it were a few years earlier then Predator would have been set in Vietnam when I came across this opinion piece which makes a better case for the film being a Vietnam War allegory (while explaining the predator’s high tech) than I did.

Didn’t nafo already use the “I’m doing my part” bit from the movie, completely serious and missing the satire?

Maybe I’m blessed because I haven’t been exposed to nearly anything from the NAFO chuds but I’d absolutely believe this from a group of people who are rapidly circling the ideological drain hole that is fascism.

I am of the opinion that the US is jockeying for a limited naval conflict with China in the South China Sea in order to disrupt the shipping lanes to which the Chinese economy is (currently) dependent upon.

I think the US is remilitarising its Allies in the Pacific in order to stack the odds in its favour.

I am waiting for the moment when the US manufactures a Gulf of Tokin incident as a pretext. But with that being said, the Century of Humiliation and its lessons are etched into the consciousness of modern Chinese politics so in many respects I would expect China to seek deescalation where possible. Although the US is like a rabid dog so who knows if deescalation would be a viable strategy once there’s blood in the water, so to speak.

Here’s a comment thread where I go into further detail and provide evidence for my position. Note that this comment was written a few days before the news of Huawei’s new chip being used in their latest phone so, although the Chinese semiconductor industry is still lagging behind, China is making strides to catching up on cutting edge chips. Whether this will provide deterrence for China or whether this will cause the US to accelerate its designs for war I do not know.

It’s extremely likely, to the point that it would be inconceivable that it wouldn’t be the case, that the Indian Embassy had multiple diplomats assigned to it and that P. Ratnam was Charge d’affaires or another embassy staffer with a lower rank than ambassador.

If we consider the Predator movie, at least the first one, to be an allegory for the Vietnam war because it featured jungle warfare and commando bros facing off against an enemy that is virtually invisible, implacable, utterly alien and incomprehensible, and entirely determined to hunt down and kill the invaders (often in torturous ways) while the commando bros are pretty much helpless against the predator as they get picked off one by one…

Then they’ve kinda missed the entire message underlying the movie.

If they think “better equipment = we’re like the predator” then they’re failing to grasp the fact that the true terror in the film doesn’t come from better technology but from an enemy which can blend seamlessly into the environment, which could be anywhere at any time, and is completely unstoppable. The technology is just window-dressing because if it were about a regiment of small Vietnamese people armed with AK-47s it wouldn’t be much of a spectacle and it wouldn’t play into macho power fantasies.

So, if the story is a metaphor about an enemy which is comparatively poorly armed using their skills and the terrain to their advantage, defeating what is assumed to be the best of the best, then why are they using it to brag about having better equipment again?

Next they’re going to use Starship Troopers in completely the wrong way as a metaphor for the war in the Ukraine, aren’t they?

[Rules-based order intensifies]

Go on then, tell me which leftist leaders you think should be upheld.

the strange phenomenon of people idealizing the past, specifically the 50s, and how the people who tend to have a fondness for the 50s tend to b white as back in the day only middle class white people had happy lives in the 50s, anyone else was screwed.

I have an effortpost here that goes into this in some detail (note the comments following that one - I completely forgot about the relevance of the Bonus Army to the subject.) I didn’t touch on the history of Pruitt and Igoe being the subject of military testing in that comment because it was already too long but:

https://gizmodo.com/pruitt-igoe-army-radiation-experiments-cold-war-1849833275

https://www.businessinsider.com/army-sprayed-st-louis-with-toxic-dust-2012-10

You might also be interested in the work of Alice Malone, which touches on the role of homeownership in relation to the state making concessions to workers and attempting to stifle the groundswell of radicalism:

https://redsails.org/concessions/

https://youtu.be/GqIHF-gurlU (also available in your podcast app, search for: Actually Existing Socialism and the episode How the Soviet “Threat” Benefitted Workers in the West.)

One glaring omission from Malone’s article is the quote from none other than William Levitt:

No man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist. He has too much to do.

Although I’ve tried to find the original source for this quote which is attributed to him in ‘On Communism and the Suburban Home’ from 1948 but I couldn’t turn anything up so maybe that’s why it got excluded.

He compared it to when the British and French went to war against an Arab Socialist, I don’t know hat event he was talking about specifically but it was significant enough that we should’ve learned from that experience and not replicate it in Iraq.

I suspect he was referring to Nasser and the Suez Crisis but I could be wrong.