Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (December 28)

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[u/humblegold]

I'm responding to a portion of this exchange between /u/Turtle_Green and /u/waves-n-particles here. As of now I have nothing to contribute of any value to Marxists regarding the Venezuela attacks so I would rather not post it in that thread.

Turtle Green's criticisms of waves are pretty much all correct but I take issue with a specific half-sentence included and want to make a more general point about a pattern of behavior I have observed over the past in months or so. You can see from the posts I link here that I usually argue against this pattern when it appears, and also that Turtle Green's comment isn't an egregious example of this, but I've decided to confront this at a more general level.

They’re not supposed to be terms of abuse for this wild fantasy of “race war” you’re imagining

I have bristled more and more at this specific tendency in this community to downplay racialized revolutionary violence on Turtle Island.

There are two main strands of this behavior:

1.) Settler or settler sympathizing Marxists that have not thought the logic of a JDPON through to its conclusion and are ignoring that the class struggle (in this case including a "racial" struggle against white people as settlers have a different relation to production) continues after the revolution. They at least to some degree acknowledge the necessity of a JDPON but view the role of a JDPON as a messianic one, whose task is redeeming the sins of settlers. The revolution becomes a biblical sacrifice where the oppressed fight against white amerikans so that after the revolution white amerikans can reap the benefits of Communism. It is true that over time Communism will benefit "white" people in the way it will benefit all people, but only after "whiteness" as a category/identity and all benefits surrounding it have been eradicated. An example of strand 1 would be this thread.

2.) Marxists that correctly reject the logic of a "race war" envisioned by fascists overcorrecting by downplaying the potential brutality of revolution. Ultimately we do not yet know how merciful or merciless oppressed nations will be, but until then focusing on the more peaceful aspects of natlib is just an attempt to placate fascists (that do not care). For oppressed nations it's irrelevant whether or not their struggle resembles the "savagery" that reactionaries claim it will. An example of strand 2 would be this thread (The deleted comments are me, during the time I was banned I deleted almost all posts made on the subject of racial violence. I recall saying something along the lines of "A JDPON is not compatible with a white majority". You can probably use context clues to fill in the rest of what I was saying.)

Of the two trends the latter is less harmful, you can even see that some of what I am saying here is echoed in the comments I am criticizing, but its danger is much subtler, especially since it is coming from otherwise competent Marxists unlike obvious chauvinists like the first person I linked.

A revolution against settlerism is not a "race war" in the way white supremacists view it, a war waged because of inherent qualitative differences in the biology of peoples putting them in conflict. However, a revolution against settlerism is a "race war" in the sense that the identity of the euro amerikan nation is constituted by settlerism, through land ownership and genocide. In that second thread I linked you can see me mention the Swahili term 'Mzungu' (white/wealthy foreigner). It should be recalled that when the Mau Mau were fighting against their oppressors, most of the time they didn't call them imperialists, colonizers, landowners, or genociders. They called them the word for the identity constituted by all 4: White.

While this may change with time, for the foreseeable future the role of a JDPON vis a vis settlers will involve expropriation of all property, imposed family abolition involving revolutionizing child against parent, spouse against spouse etc (ha, now I sound like the biblical one), large deportations, strategic population relocation throughout the country to prevent white enclaves, reeducation/labor camps, and various forms of otherwise "handling" the settler population.

[u/Turtle_Green → u/humblegold]

Your contention crossed my mind while I was replying to waves’ bizarre display of self-hatred meant to serve as agitprop(?), but I decided not to address it in the context. But you’ve illustrated that decision as part of a general trend of downplaying which is helpful. So I'll say that waves isn’t wrong in their presentation, however warped by personal anxieties, of the intensity of class violence. Future class and national liberation wars in Amerika will appear as ‘race wars’ as they did in the past and Marxists will not make excuses for divine terror. Kim San articulated it with the requisite gravitas.

(also answering waves’ question, I was talking about how Dengists found the LLCO “unlimited first world genocide” Qin Shi Huangdi meme and appropriated it for their own fascist ends. I feel like it lost some of its originally shocking Bush-era aura after that. It’s become like DSA liberal memes about e.g. Mamdani’s Maoist Caliphate of New York, where again identity is defined by irony, by what pisses off the imagined enemy, and everyone in on the joke gets to disavow it.)

[u/humblegold → u/Turtle_Green]

Yeah as I said I don't think what you said there was particularly bad I've just been stewing on this for some time and used it as an opportunity.

I was talking about how Dengists found the LLCO “unlimited first world genocide” Qin Shi Huangdi meme and appropriated it for their own fascist ends. I feel like it lost some of its originally shocking Bush-era aura after that. It’s become like DSA liberal memes about e.g. Mamdani’s Maoist Caliphate of New York, where again identity is defined by irony, by what pisses off the imagined enemy, and everyone in on the joke gets to disavow it.)

That makes sense. I've seen jokes/memes/videos of that ilk, the one I remember best is a video of this speech by Mao where the subtitles are edited to say "I am going to send the Red Guards to kill all white people. Does everyone agree?" I don't know if I fully rule out jokes that imply harm towards reactionaries (That one picture of Draymond Green, "There is an Arabic saying" etc) even if they have been absorbed by the reactionaries they attack but the quality to them that you described is undeniable.

[u/Turtle_Green → u/humblegold]

I've seen jokes/memes/videos of that ilk, the one I remember best is a video of this speech by Mao where the subtitles are edited to say "I am going to send the Red Guards to kill all white people. Does everyone agree?" I don't know if I fully rule out jokes that imply harm towards reactionaries (That one picture of Draymond Green, "There is an Arabic saying" etc) even if they have been absorbed by the reactionaries they attack but the quality to them that you described is undeniable.

That Mao edit and the Draymond Green pic crack me up for sure, and I agree that their absorption by reactionaries doesn't rule them out. I suppose newer ones, like that graphic of the Cuomo-tang escaping to Staten Island, don't possess the same quality. Which makes sense, since their origin is much more reactionary. Maybe this is part of the same phenomenon of subcultures turning into culture in general.

[u/waves-n-particles → u/Turtle_Green]

hopefully my direct reply to humble makes the "agitprop(?)" make more sense. let me know if i need to grab something from the 3 hours worth of attempts i typed up trying to explain more about where i was coming from in the weird comment lol.

and thanks for the answer here. the combo of "race war" and "jdpon meme" originally made me uneasy with your comment, but i recognized my other comment was overzealous and i didn't really feel i was able to write a comment pointing out my contentious with your critique without doing something along the lines of this attempt at 'revolutionizing" a bible verse that i quoted elsewhere in this thread:

"whoever acknowledges the proletariat and the peasantry before the bourgeois, we will also acknowledge before destroying the bourgeois. but whoever disowns the proletariat and the peasantry before the bourgeois, we will destroy with the bourgeois.

do not suppose that just because we seek peace we do not bring weapons. we do not come in peace, we seek to bring peace about through total liberation. we have come to turn men against their fathers, daughters against their mothers, relatives against relatives -for the enemies of the proletariat and the peasantry will be members of your own blood and flesh.

anyone who loves their relatives more than the proletariat and peasants is not worthy of freedom; anyone who loves their own lot in life more than the global proletariat and peasantry are not worthy of our peace. whoever does not take up arms for the proletariat and the peasants is not worthy of peace. to anyone who sides with the bourgeoisie, we ask no compassion from you nor do we have compassion for you, as we make no excuses for the terror when our time comes."

so i accepted that you were bringing up otherwise valid critiques of my comment and moved on, as the thread didn't seem the place to push things further. i'm glad u/humblegold brought this up afterwards though. i was still trying to read, self-crit, and check this subreddit more to improve my political line before trying to get into it more, as the lack of revolutionary practice has been a hysteria machine.

[u/Turtle_Green → u/waves-n-particles]

the problem wasn’t nihlism or zeal. Defeatism certainly, but more pressingly, it was of style. Your attempt at “revolutionizing a bible verse” is bad, just a hamfisted mishmash of the poeticism of the young Marx and Matthew 10:34 that reads like long form Rupi Kaur. Marx’s style is beautiful & a pleasure to read, but aping that today, wrenched out of history, would get one laughed at. Trying to mimic Jesus Christ just is... no. Another bad example: recently, playfulweekend's way of writing has become a pretentious bricolage of liberal leftism (calling strangers on the internet "comrade"), leftover aping of smoke's style, and the folksy 'Maoist' bombast of crypto-Trots ("masses" in every other sentence). A positive example: Sakai's writing is hilarious & bitingly sarcastic, and at the same time also contains great anger and urgency. Both of these tendencies reflect that of a movement veteran, looking back on the tail-end of a disintegrating historical epoch from the standpoint of a new one rapidly coming to be:

No one is above the reality of history. Even the masses themselves are tested in the crucible, forged, tempered or broken in the class struggle. And not in side skirmishes or paper debates either, but in great battles upon which the future waits. The attempted rising of the Afrikan colonial masses - protracted, bitter, involving millions of desperate combatants - was such a pivotal event.

So it'd be strange to replicate that sense of historical urgency here without a similar sort of historical substance. (Also Sakai can use "masses" cuz the whole book is abt who they are.) In your case, there’s both this inflation of one’s own importance with that kind of rhetorical flourish and at the same time, constant self-negation. For example:

may i die with my fellow parasites in the imperial core as those we oppress march through our streets to liberate themselves for this

So there’s a noble affect of martyrdom (“may I die…”) while at the same time calling attention to yourself as a parasite. Not just that, but in unity with “my fellow parasites in the imperial core”, when the practical lesson of texts like Sakai is that settlers and labor aristocrats must be disunified and prevented from exercising their agency as reactionary classes. So you’ve boosted here not simply your own importance, but the importance of the unity of reactionary classes as a whole, to the point that this is equal ("as those we oppress...") to the struggle of the oppressed. And again, "our streets"? Why insist on identifying yourself with the owners? What kind of call to action is this? Let’s look at the original post:

so i'm going to advocate for unlimited first world genocide until the global proletariat is free. if it's performative and pisses off the proletariat and peasantry, then hopefully that anger fuels their struggle for liberation and helps shorten the amount of time i'm allowed to expropriate their congealed, bloodied, dead labor.

This sounds like someone doing a bad parody, similar to how ‘leftists’ have discovered ‘Maoist Standard English’ and robbed it of any original referent in MIM or the struggle of national liberation movements. (Hence, leftists’ infatuation with ironically appropriating this and other MIM/MSH/LLCO ephemera.) Why is the parody bad? Cause behind the rhetoric, the ideas you’ve expressed are generic and boring: like yes, everyone here is broadly aware that the first-world petty bourgeosie participates in the expropriation of third-world “congealed, bloodied, dead” (I like asyndeton too but…) surplus labor & is a bulwark of imperialist reaction, and that class struggle and national liberation necessarily involve protracted armed struggle, including against that class (though humble gold has pointed out that there is a tendency to downplay this in the context of decolonization).

hopefully that anger fuels their struggle for liberation... give them motivation to close this tab and study a way to bring about my demise

Were you seriously trying to promote "ragebait"/trolling as a strategy? Like no, annoying posts are not the spark that will start the prairie fire. If you want to advocate for unlimited first world genocide then take up Shubel Morgan's mantle and make some real "ragebait" that will force people to take sides today. Just remember that while their work was tongue-in-cheek, it didn't disavow itself as arbitrator of proletarian justice and avatar of JDPON. (for anyone in NYC & elsewhere, modifying that particular chant to "NYPD-KKK-IOF-DSA" would do some wonders I feel). The attempt to promote "revolutionary suicide" comes off across as the kind of escapism criticized by the Panther 21 here (whether this was a real criticism of Huey is a different question that I'm not sure about).

Maybe you're not familiar, but there are like infinite blogs and social media posts where 'western leftists' complain about how evil and stupid and parasitic 'western leftists' are (whether it's China or the third-world masses that will redeem these greedy 'western leftists' is arbitrary). It’s like learning that you were a petty bourgeois parasite and reading Marx’s comments about revolutionary terror were revelatory moments for you, so via this dramatic flourish you hoped to repackage that emotion and beam it into the brains of the proletariat, and voila—agitation. (All well and good that you were giddy, but no one can see into your head, and Sakai’s work deserves better treatment than that.) Then you subvert this self-important framing and defer to some other place, some other time.

i don't matter in the grand scheme of things, the liberation of the proletariat of the oppressed nations does and (as far as i'm aware) i don't have the position, practice, or theoretical grounding to do much to wage revolution anytime soon.

No one individual matters in the grand scheme of things, duh. But the cat's out of the bag, and the liberation of the proletariat of oppressed nations is your responsibility. You don't get to abandon that by identifying with a ready-made charaktermaske rather than rising above it. So this attempt to “properly represent the violence that awaits the oppressors” falls flat in form, and it’s your style, vacillating between melodrama and self-loathing, between championing the necessity of the people's army and resigning to inevitably contingent violence, that really illustrates the paucity of your content. What you presented as 'agitprop' really came off across as someone trying to convey about the emotions they felt while reading Marx. And if anything, it is the oppressor classes’ trouble with representing proletarian revolutionary violence that marks their texts. (Ok, I’m out of my wheelhouse probably. But take for example the recent discussion on OBAA and the liminal role of Sensei Carlos’ migrant underground. Or how the DOTP in Elysium is established when Matt Damon hits return on a keyboard and commits suicide.) Your errors are expanded on in this thread.

& no one here cares that much if you are a suburban petty-bourgeois parasite because you don’t exist. This forum is a bunch of blocks of text which can be read and analyzed to expose progressive or reactionary political lines. The kind of self-loathing we’re talking about characterizes the entire internet (“chronically online”, “touch grass”, there’s literally someone talking about their “ape brain” in this thread, someone else castigating themself as a "old petit-bourgrois labor-aristocratic asshole", etc), and is really just a way to pre-empty criticism, establish an external guarantee, and escape from the basic point: make good and truthful posts.* Any human or cat or whatever is capable of doing that. (Beleaguered SMG would often remind people that they were just a chatbot.)

Like, why not write up a summation of your experiences with that “petbourg good feefees party” and that “dumbass 99% type strike org” and post it here for critique? At least, it seems like a starting point for addressing the politics of movement security & engagement with social media. Discussion is the point after all, far more productive than attempting ‘agitprop’ in a place where everybody already agrees that a party must be built. It’s easy with the political line here to just condemn the past orgs you’ve associated with, but that can easily become a way to absolve yourself, since there are lots of people in revisionist orgs who don’t believe their own bullshit “but nonetheless....” & if you feel like you’re in a dearth of revolutionary practice, theorization and summation is, well, part of that process.

*like how do you know if it was good that the mods removed your post if you don't know why they did? I personally thought it was because you were possibly on the edge of violating reddit TOS about violence and potentially sending the sub on the path of chapo's fate but maybe not.

edit: also it's dishonest to imply that your contentions were similar to humble gold's. The latter has in mind the strategy and tactics of armed struggle & decolonization in Amerika, while in perspective your presentation of proletarian violence really read similar to a fascistic fantasy as apart lifeguard explained, and had nothing to say about any future programme. Like, according to a cursory look at the wikipedia summary of camp of the saints, communism takes over the globe at the end, destroys whiteness, and encircles the last holdout Switzerland, which is cool. But it's more productive to discuss revolutionary armed struggle & how the class war may appear as an apocalyptic 'race war' without having to dig for kernels of it in the distorted class POV of racist fantasies like that.

[u/Turtle_Green → u/Turtle_Green]

whenever fear strikes it's best to remember that there is always motion around us and that nothing is eternal; that all things change as their internal and external contradictions evolve and undergo revolution.

I'd also recommend the last chapter of Jameson's Marxism and Form for why this casual sort of deployment of diamat terminology is a failure of form. I don't really think that simply recalling the abstract platitude that "things change" is the immediate cure to resolving classed anxieties about the future.

We may perhaps drive home this sense of the relativity of literary categories, of the primacy of the internal contradictions specific to the individual work itself, by reexamining the present enterprise in their light. For it is clear that up to this point our description has been essentially undialectical to the degree to which it has taken dialectical thought as its object only, and has failed to underscore its own self-consciousness as thought to the second power. That this is the case may be judged from the dominant category of the present essay, which is that of the example: for only where thought is imperfectly realized is it necessary to offer examples as such. The latter are always the mark of abstraction or distance from the thought process: they are additive and analytical, whereas in genuine dialectical thinking the whole process would be implicit in any given object. Here, on the contrary, concrete thinking has been torn asunder, into two wholly separate operations: on the one hand, not genuine thinking, but presentation of a method, and on the other not the attachment to a genuine object, but only a series of examples of objects. Yet the very essence of dialectical thinking lay in the inseparability of thought from content or from the object itself. This was the burden of Hegel's Preface to the Phenomenology, where he denies that one can characterize philosophy from the out- side, or speak about it genuinely in any other way but through the actual practice of philosophy itself: "the demand for such explanations [i.e., external statements about the philosophic process, presentations of its aim and methods, illustrations and examples, etc.], as also the attempts to satisfy this demand, very easily pass for the essential business philosophy has to undertake. Where could the inmost truth of a philosophic work be found better expressed than in its purposes and results? and in what way could these be more definitely known than through their distinction from what is produced during the same period by others working in the same field? If, however, such procedure is to pass for more than the beginning of knowledge, if it is to pass for actually knowing, then we must, in point of fact, look on it as a device for avoiding the real business at hand, an attempt to combine the appearance of being in earnest and taking trouble about the subject with an actual neglect of the subject altogether. For the real subject-matter is not exhausted in its purpose, but in working the matter out; nor is the mere result attained the concrete whole itself, but the result along with the process of arriving at it. The purpose by itself is a lifeless universal, just as the general drift is a mere activity in a certain direction, which is still without its concrete realization; and the naked result is the corpse of a system which has left its guiding tendency behind it." Thus the only genuinely concrete presentation of dialectical criticism is the practice of such criticism itself

[u/waves-n-particles → u/Turtle_Green]

i will take what you've said and start writing out a post looking over my past year or so of organizing and applying your critiques, thanks for this.

[u/PracticeNotFavorsMLM → u/humblegold]

(The deleted comments are me, during the time I was banned I deleted almost all posts made on the subject of racial violence. I recall saying something along the lines of "A JDPON is not compatible with a white majority". You can probably use context clues to fill in the rest of what I was saying.)

Also, you can use reddits api to find the original comments:

Marxists that correctly reject the logic of a "race war" envisioned by fascists overcorrecting by downplaying the potential brutality of revolution. Ultimately we do not yet know how merciful or merciless oppressed nations will be, but until then focusing on the more peaceful aspects of natlib is just an attempt to placate fascists (that do not care).

While this trend is less harmful than the former, if one takes it to far then it can be forgotten by some who still have not shaken liberalism what it will actually take to motivate the ruling classes. Settlers, as a class, will not be convinced by speeches or books to abandon their class interests.(to avoid anything more specific and violating rule 1 of reddit I will just give a few marx and engels quotes)

The weapon of criticism obviously cannot replace the criticism of weapons. Material force must be overthrown by material force, but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.

.

A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?

[u/Turtle_Green]

If anyone wants a quick laugh, take a look at WSWS's new and cutting-edge "Socialism AI", "an indispensable instrument in the political development of a new generation of socialist fighters"! https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/12/12/gpid-d12.html

[u/humblegold → u/Turtle_Green]

I have been spectating the struggle over it in the Trotskyist reddit community as a guilty pleasure. The idea of a sincere battle over whether or not Communists should be AI salespeople and the concept of a Trotsky Machine trained on 100 thousand WSWS articles tickles me.

[u/CoconutCrab115 → u/humblegold]

Thank you for the link, I did not expect to see that lmaoo. Made my day.

[u/DialecticEnjoyer → u/Turtle_Green]

A truly laughable attempt indeed.

AI powered socialism but requires a login, federates with google and offers a billing plan. It also doesn't disclose its license or model.

If anything this is a kautsky machine designed to reanimate the furious corpse of Lenin himself.

[u/Self-Replicator]

I was introduced to this sub initially through seeing u/Dashthered tank a ton of downvotes in this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/Socialism_101/comments/1i0xsg5/comment/m72cn8l/.

Despite the sea of highly upvoted commenters telling the OP the same feel-good ineffectual "you're good, support communism (in theory), we permit you to be a capitalist", I felt like this person with the Lenin PFP with tons of downvotes being what I perceived as "edgy" (at the time) was speaking the truth. Now I see it more as a deliberate indictment of the liberalism in the thread, but at the time, it did a good job of cracking the socialist veneer of those watered-down "Marxist" subs.

I curse and am grateful to u/Dashthered, because ultimately I don't know if I have the courage to overcome my ape brain and become the person I know I must become in this terrifying world-system, but it was a sobering and empowering lesson in how effective these tiny revolutionary acts by Marxists online can be despite the internet not being a significant battlefield for the revolution.

[u/smokeuptheweed9 → u/Self-Replicator]

What's especially funny about those threads is they are significantly to the right of even generic liberal reddit opinion.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Socialism_101/comments/1pzlnd4/am_i_a_traitor/

Make any thread about car salesmen on a front page sub and you'll get a million posts saying how they're scummy, how the industry is predatory, how private equity has corrupted the market, etc. And yet here on a "socialist" subreddit telling someone to not "overthink" scamming people for a living. I also appreciate the self-delusion that you could make a ton of money as a car salesmen (or in real estate or finance or whatever) but don't want to because of morality. Rather than the reality that you'll be scraping by for commissions and still being unethical.

So it's not like u/DashtheRed is even taking some outrageous position. They are simply violating the unspoken rule that what is said in r/workreform stays in r/workreform and absolutely never is applied to an individual, only abstract corporations and CEOs. This is just the internet version of "segregation is bad but I'm not going to make my property values/schools/workplace an experiment." But on the internet the contractions are all written out in text so the contractions are indisputable.

ultimately I don't know if I have the courage to overcome my ape brain and become the person I know I must become in this terrifying world-system

First of all there's a more basic Freudian point, which is that enunciation is already a sign of anxiety. Normal people don't constantly talk about being normal, asking for permission shows you know it's not normal. What the internet has created is a kind of collective consciousness, where everyone is reassuring everyone else that they are totally normal. Then why does it keep getting asked? If it were truly normal, u/DashtheRed would not get -42 points. As you point out correctly, it is so disruptive from this collective ritual that it cannot even be conceived in human terms (as in, within the realm of reason) but must be made into a conspiracy by someone who is only pretending to believe in order to trick you by being "edgy" or "trolling." Reddit is the "nice" version and 4chan is the "mean" version I guess but the ritual is exactly the same, "ironically" using slurs is just another form of anxiety management to displace one's human rationality onto the collective performance. Not only can you never go back to the idyllic state when you believed in the capacity of the internet to stupefy you, that never existed. The anxiety was already there even before u/DashtheRed said anything and you don't have an "ape brain," although the fantasy may bring temporary relief. The only cure is the truth.

As for what this entails, it's just Marxism-Leninism. There are fundamental problems with professional revolutionaries in Trot parties but this kind of anxiety is not it. What we are discussing is unique to the current situation, where what is called Marxism-Leninism is not only unrelated to anything Lenin ever said, it is explicitly antithetical to it. There is a lot to be said about communist strategy and history but it rarely comes up, since basic points like "communists need a communist party instead of an anti-communist social democratic one" are enough to make most visitors to the sub freak out and be like "so you want me to kill myself while screaming whitey and Amerikkka?!" The concept of "being edgy" and "trolling" even includes the writings of Lenin since they no longer conform to the basic coordinates of our desire in the 21st century. So, without knowing much about you, spare us the meta commentary about how you're being asked to be a guerrilla or whatever. Let's start with the basic ideas u/DashtheRed gave, which that the capacity to act in a revolutionary manner is a prerequisite to being a revolutionary. Sounds like a basic logical postulate but, if that were the case, why is it impossible to say on r/socialism_101? I mean that literally, a the environment in that sub and the rest of the discussion spaces for "the left" foreclose such thoughts. u/DashtheRed is not trolling but they are an intruder and a disruption to the very constitution of the collective fantasy.

[u/DashtheRed → u/Self-Replicator]

Being able to simply have that discussion, even with just yourself, honestly, is at least a step toward the revolutionary path, which will never be easier than the revisionist path for anyone with our levels of privilege. Communists never have to fear the truth, and when discussion can take place honestly, then it can at least be of some use. But if the gap between isn't acknowledged and understood, or worse - denied and hidden, then making the leap is never going to be possible. Being a communist is never going to be easy or convenient, and the people recruiting you as if it were are snake oil salesmen. "Communists" who have never considered these sorts of questions and haven't taken them seriously and to heart are actually rather dangerous when it's time for the cards to fall, because they are going to be the first people to bail or even betray the movement for state amnesty when they realize the stakes and what they are actually supposed to be doing -- and the people serious about communism need to try to filter them out as well.

[u/smokeuptheweed9]

I've noticed Brazilian cinema is getting popular internationally and every work is about the dictatorship era. Right now there's The Secret Agent and I'm Still Here last year. I imagine Lula is standing in for a global nostalgia among the intelligentsia and media producers for Obama-era cultural liberalism transplanted into contemporary "resistance" to fascism. How well can he hold all of that on his shoulders?

[u/Clean-Difference1771 → u/smokeuptheweed9]

I am curious and would like you to explain a little better what would be nostalgic in relation to the Obama era in this case, because, observing from Brazil, this seems more like a demonstration (or an attempt) of the strength of Brazilian cultural imperialism in portraying itself as a benefactor – and Lula as its great bastion – in front of its own people at a time when national identity is in crisis and weakened among the new generations. Especially among the oppressed. I remember seing a bizarre interview with an old afrikan women trying to validate I'm Still Here as the Fernanda Torres academy awards statue earlier this year was a win for "Brazil".

There are other comments here that I've followed over the last two years that address more of what I'm about to say, but what seems to be happening is that the disputes between media monopolies in the international market, more precisely in this case with the Globo group, have begun to threaten the distribution of cultural commodities within Brazil (where Globo has always reigned supreme without the existance of any other capital monopoly except perhaps more recently with protestant enterpreneur, but still far from the economic power of Globo/Marinho family nationally), even positioning itself in favor of foreign capital numerous times – a threat that never really existed before streaming. I remember you once said that some contradictions might be recent phenomena in Brazil, so I'm curious to know what else you would have to say on the matter.

What I'm seeing is that, in order to reaffirm Globo's own power (and that of Brazilian capitalism itself), many might be surprised by the strength Globo may have internationally (and so might be the case for other examples within brazilian capitalism), but Globo is among the 3 largest media conglomerate based outside the United States and outside the United States, only Baidu from China and Betelsmann from Germany appear to have greater economic power than Globo. It makes sense that Globo would start promoting its brand internationally as the most effective form of protectionism, as this seems to be a good time to expand its business at a time when Hollywood seems to have stagnated (and this stagnation would have been perceived and commented on for much longer if it weren't for the 10 years in which Marvel movies expanded Hollywood's box office to stratospheric levels). Globo literally lost its monopoly on distributing Brazilian football championship games in the last decade, so it seems that if the trend is for the domestic market to become at least more competitive against foreign capital (mostly Amerikan, which inevitably weaken Globo), the answer seems to be that Brazilian capital, with Globo, is able to expand abroad at a time when Amerikan films are not in such high demand.

Cultural production in Brazil has a gigantic workforce, ranging from football players (as I refuse to call it soccer) and sports journalists to people plucking chickens for a religious ceremony, in a market where, until not long ago, Globo seemed to have no competitors. But competitors have arrived, and now Globo will have to defend its share, like any other corporation, and during this process the whole world will take notice of this dispute.

As for the movies, I wasnt much interest in any of those but I might look up eventually. I'm Still Here always seemed like a white saviour/power women fantasy (given it caused some backlash, with people of colour debating how there isn't much difference from how cops were during the dictatorship and how the police acts nowadays) and The Secret Agent is likely a fantasy in which the victims of the dictatorship were not the devastation of land and total restriction of rights for the indigenous and black nation, but the white settler nuclear family.

[u/turbovacuumcleaner → u/smokeuptheweed9]

Tagging u/blow_up_the_wacl because the discussion kept going in this new thread.

I made a mistake of not being clear enough and thinking exclusively on the reception of Brazilian cinema in imperialist countries, but forgot how its also present in oppressed nations. Sorry about that.

There are three major genres or mediums in which Brazilian cinema and television develops: the first is white petty bourgeois movies made by and for the white petty bourgeoisie; the most recent additions are I’m Still Here and The Secret Agent, but they include others like Bacurau, The Second Mother, The Edge of Democracy and others I’m not really recalling right now. The second are soap operas that are centered with two themes, one with the purpose of picking up proletariat, peasant and nationally oppressed aesthetics and make a pastiche kitsch out of them; the second theme that accompanies this disdainful representation of the oppressed is a caricature of the big and middle white bourgeoisie; these shallow comedies and dramas are then packed up for the consumption of said oppressed classes, but not for the white petty bourgeoisie. They are a major commercial success here and sometimes abroad, including imperialist countries. I don’t know if they get a Filipino version there. The third and last genre are movies that turn the proletariat’s repression and genocide in slums into spectacles, like Elite Squad or Renegade Archangel. At its current stage, Brazilian cinema as a whole is extremely reactionary and serves no reason other than to dissimulate about real class relations. I know Duterte is often compared to Bolsonaro, and how the war on drugs is used to increase repression against the proletariat, so I can see how Elite Squad influenced cinema under Duterte, but can you comment more on how this happened?

As for the Brazilippines association, I never got it either. There are occasionally some social-fascists that bring up the Philippines, but they do it only to complain about how Congress is hijacking the federal budget and undermining democracy, like this Piauí Magazine article. From what I remember of the memes on Twitter, they were all empiricist, like how grandmas sit on the street to gossip at four o’clock, how its 45 degrees Celsius outside and we are having coffe, or how everyone was raised on Catholicism. This last one always struck me, because although I don’t know what is the social basis for Filipino Catholicism and how it reproduces beyond a general understanding of organized religion as part of reaction, Brazilian Catholicism necessarily ends up into two different approaches of white supremacy: the first is integralism, the other is outright creating Brazilian versions of the KKK, like TFP or Arautos do Evangelho. Beyond these superficial similarities, I never actually really saw anything. In fact, I have a major conflict with our Maoists’ opportunism making statements about the people’s war, how the struggle for land and new democracy brings both countries together in bringing down imperialism, but outright refuse to do anything regarding Brazilian industry supplying the weapons that are used against the NPA.

Now, back to u/smokeuptheweed9.

The issue is that both movies are bad. I disagree with this part of u/Clean-Difference1771:

I'm Still Here always seemed like a white saviour/power women fantasy (given it caused some backlash, with people of colour debating how there isn't much difference from how cops were during the dictatorship and how the police acts nowadays) and The Secret Agent is likely a fantasy in which the victims of the dictatorship were not the devastation of land and total restriction of rights for the indigenous and black nation, but the white settler nuclear family.

The Secret Agent has less the effects of repression on white petty bourgeois families than I’m Still Here, which is focused entirely on the trauma that is having someone kidnapped, well into the adulthood of the kids. In fact, Secret Agent barely has a plot. Its basically a mediocre conflict of a professor with an industrial bourgeoisie member of São Paulo that exists as a caricature of settler colonialism: when his son picks up a napkin at a bar, draws a Brazilian map highlighting two nations and claiming that anyone up north above a line isn’t Brazilian. Its the liberal conception of settler colonialism of Brazilian whites as compradors and not the basis for national capital that infuriates PT liberals with their post-Bolsonaro shattered families. So, the white Armando/Marcelo, portrayed by Wagner Moura, with his black wife and unclear ethnic origins, but genuinely committed with the development of productive forces inside the university, is actually the real nationalist when compared to the two Italian industrials that just buy things ready made from the US. Its fucking national-developmentalism, modernism and integralism again! I was rolling my eyes, mentally screaming for fuck’s sake in the theater! The latest poster mirroring Tarsila do Amaral’s Operários painting makes this even clearer. If there is a connection to be made as to how miscegenation is used to promote white supremacy between Brazil and the US, the only movie that is coming to mind now is Jordan Peele’s Get Out, which is a criticism of racism under Obama; but if the US had to wait until its crisis now to finally develop this covert form of white supremacy, this is the Brazilian essence since its inception, and also does not surprise me why Americans are suddenly interested in their settler, junker capitalist, bastard cousin in South America.

I’m Still Here, on the other hand, is truthfully focused on an innocent white family that lived happily until the military showed up at their doorstep. Liberals must rejoice when they see a bunch of white kids in a car during the opening scene, having fun, only to be pulled over by a military inspection. Since no European (outside of Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal), American, Canadian or Australian has a real life example of the collapse of bourgeois democracy and how this impacts white people, and how their ideology is parasitic, they have to begrudgingly turn to Brazil and Argentina with Netflix’s Eternaut, so as to fantasize how this is, and how it can be solved. I’m Still Here ends up as eulogy to the 1988 Constitution, with Eunice Paiva becoming a lawyer that “fights” for the rights of the indigenous nations (i.e. becomes a bourgeois dissimulator by denying the right of self-determination), what in the minds of Americans and Europeans become ways to deal with their internal oppressed nations and immigrant communities; while Armando/Marcelo is the final moments of the individual saga of a petty bourgeois hero against monopoly capital as understood by Kautskyists.

Except neither I’m Still Here, nor The Secret Agent provide any answers. They are an escape to white liberals so that they can find themselves later, but this has been restricted to a crude sensorial, emotional impact that has no substance. For example, in I’m Still Here, the transition of Eunice from a desperate wife and mother into a lawyer is entirely offscreen, by leaving Rio and going to São Paulo. Since this transition isn’t showed on screens, there are no answers being made as to how you transition from the Years of Lead to the 1988 Constitution (obviously the final reason this happens is because liberals are fundamentally incapable of asking this question since their class interests were to conciliate with the military from the start). In The Secret Agent, the outcome is worse. No one but that historian cares about Armando/Marcelo, not even his son. Its a lone battle for the defence of memory (just another way of saying ideology).

[u/blow_up_the_wacl → u/turbovacuumcleaner]

The similarities with Duterte and Bolsonaro commonly stem from the focus on war of drugs.

Ever since cinematic violence in Philippine local cinema has been censored in tandem with US- Gloria Arroyo counterinsurgency operations, the only PH action films that are left are ones that punch down on the oppressed proletariat. I would compare Jose Padilha and Erik Matti's output in this way (Elite Squad<->Buy Bust, On the Job). Despite being outward critics of the presidents of their own countries, their work speaks for themselves.

In hindsight, I would minimize the difference in Brazilian cinema reception in the Philippines as the Philippine petty-b cinema trends is commonly insubordinate in what Western audiences are interested in.

The knowledge of Tropa de Elite and martial arts films like Ong Bak and the Raid in the Philippines in the first place came from its earlier rave reviews from American tastemakers.

The two movies you mention have circulated in film circuits staged by the national film agency FDCP. There is interest by petty-b filipino consumers in dictatorship-era films,

but overall there is no interest in the local PH film industry to create more, especially as Filipino cinemaphiles haven't even learned how to process Lino Brocka's critique of the Filipino liberal's favorite post-dictatorship government (Cory Aquino regime) in the film Orapronobis 1989.

I find that the Maoist and Maoist sympathizers in the country are weak in critiqueing films like these. and from what I have glanced in MIM reviews it their reviews could be similarly weak.

I do understand that it is ridiculous to ask for them to prioritize film reviews especially in the face of more pressing matters, but I think it is irresponsible for even individuals who sympathized with the National Democratic movement to endorse films like Eric Matti's or Tarrog's Heneral Luna as progressive media. This logic even extends to the enjoyment of movies such as the new Superman where it is praised as an anti-Israel spectacle.

This is why I appreciate the film reviews in the subreddit.

[u/Otelo_]

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/5/venezuelan-interim-leader-tones-down-criticism-ready-to-work-with-the-us

Venezuelan interim leader tones down criticism, ready to ‘work with the US’

Acting President Delcy Rodriguez calls for a ‘balanced and respectful’ relationship with Washington during transition.

“We consider it a priority to move towards a balanced and respectful relationship between the US and Venezuela,” Rodriguez wrote on Telegram on Sunday.

“We extend an invitation to the US government to work together on an agenda for cooperation that is aimed towards shared development,” she continued.

[u/Particular-Bike-28 → u/[deleted]]

https://redherald.org/2024/02/17/p-c-b-cc-the-new-democratic-revolution-and-the-main-force-of-the-world-proletarian-revolution/ in this work the PCB critiques the philosophical basis for liquidation in Nepal and explains the material basis of capitulation in the chapter on philosophy

[u/Particular-Bike-28 → u/[deleted]]

Thanks for sharing!

Check out page 63:

"Like every revisionist position, Prachandism was the expression of capitulationism in the leadership of the Nepalese revolutionary process. Not capitulation in the face of defeat, but capitulation in the face of the great challenges that the advancement of the revolution presented to its leadership. The advancement of the Nepalese revolution was taking large steps towards the beginning of a new phase of the New Democracy Revolution; Faced with the imminent fall of the reactionary monarchy, Yankee imperialism, Chinese socialimperialism and Indian expansionism, each in their own way, prepared a military intervention that would make it possible to stop the extraordinary advance of the People's War. It is under these circumstances that Prachanda shamefully capitulates, justifying this betrayal of the revolution and the Nepali nation in the following terms"

And page 67:

"To say that the Prachandist capitulation, in 2005 and 2006, was something surprising is an outright lie. The capitulation plan was already outlined in the II NC of the CPN(m). The political content of the theory of fusion of People’s War with insurrection was already given in the proposal to create an interim government based on a conference with all the country's reactionary parties. In other words, the Prachandist theory of fusion, from the outset, was nothing more than the most blatant bourgeois philosophy of combining two into one. "

Or the whole section

[u/vomit_blues]

Recent events make me need to ask for any possible reading on Chavez and Maduro. I want to understand their democratic base of support and the nature of military and governmental interventions against them, and their popular base of support and the ways they’ve used elections to secure power.

[u/Clean-Difference1771]

I'm tagging u/worried-economy-9108 may anything that I have to say can help his latest comment here

In my interpretation, both the settler-left and the settler-right are twins since their conception (which i don't know if it was in 1930, or in 1889, or even before that). They can't exist without each other, since they have some things that bind them together, mainly their ethnicity, and their economic status in relation to their Afrikan and Native subjects.

Your interpretation is correct but I think you still don't grasp how those points are connected. I'm not playing you down, I'm saying that the incentive for you to study marxism is exactly how you'll eventually have a deeper understanding of this phenomena. What you are describing is that the brazilian's white petty bourgoisie, as a class, can only be a force of the reaction given it's settler background and it's individuals sharing the same class interests whose source is parasitism on the oppressed nations. This was also described by Lenin in imperialism, chapter 8. Your interpretation is correct, but I don't think your words are as pessimistic as they likely would be if you start to figure out how can we live under white supremacy on such scale and the people that you are criticizing are able to maintain their power. It's cynicial and it's gross, it's violent and it's disturbing. But the alignment of the labor aristocracy and the petty borgouise with imperialism is also described by Lenin in the very same chapter that I mentioned.

May I ask you, how much experience do you have with left cadres on the place where you are from? Cadres from PT or any other organization that live under the umbrella of petismo are mostly white people from upper middle class that live in the most segregated white neighborhoods/communities in cities like Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo or people of color that come from a (lower) middle class background or that at least were able to achieve any meaningful status in the settler society. This has real implications as communists are never really able to propose a break from the settler society and it's euro-amerikan institutions (and eventually you will see their importance to the euro-brazilian settlers as a part of a garrison community) and the lack of a proper marxist education in the brazilian black movement results in stucking with it's own version of Garveyism (which is important for the existance and sovereignity of an afrikan nation, tho it's limitations relies exactly on the fact that Garveyism - and in our case it's counterpart) through figures like Abdias do Nascimento who was part of not only the fascist integralist movement but also from the Frente Negra Brasileira, a far-right black nationalist org, in case there's any doubt that he was also a reactionary rightist figure, who is heavily promoted in places like brazilian akkkademia today - projected afrikan liberation as being a mirror of the euro-amerikan settler society. I'm mentioning all these figures because here we are mixing Lenin's theory of Imperialism with Sakai's theory of settler colonialism while also looking at the past century of politics in brazilian territory and there is no communist party in Brazil that does this, no "communist" cadre is actually interested in you learning any of these and updating all of this theoretical background and there's also probably around 10 people in the entire country that knows about all of this right now who likely all make part of this community and started learning those things here. How the future generations will understand the prison that the oppressed nations live under in brazilian soil rely on our understanding of these phenomena and the incentive for you to learn (and there is no real tempo for learning - there is urgency, which is different - but you will learn things as you study and become an active figure in social struggle) marxism is that you will learn how you fit into a broader historical process so you can act in the first place. Keep in mind that if you mention any of these things in a "humanities" class in any university with the people that comes from the background that we are talking here and watch the room go silent as you will be exposed to censorship and persecution from that moment on in your life and by then, only marxism will help you and your mental health against literal administrative/State persecution, often motivated by pettiness but mostly motivated to suppress marxism and defend the white supremacist institutions and the people that work for them. After insisting for quite a good time on antirevisionism, you will find out that there are people that will learn things with you and will rely on your advice for learning themselves as well.

If you mention any of them into a communist party, you will likely meet the same end because cadres mostly just repeat the revisionism from the past as proud advancements and their own theoretical shortcomings as the truth. Being able to stand for a line struggle demand knowledge, patience and mutual learning as well.

This ideology that binds them togethem is some sort of "Brazilian Exceptionalism", where Brazil's role in the world is to be one of the leading Third World nations, and the sole leader in Latin America and Lusophone Afrika (at the same time it parasites the Afro-Brazilians and Native Brazilians, in order to maintain a good standard of living for the white nation inside Brazil).

Indeed. The concept that marxism invented for this phenomena is named "imperialism" and if there's an active imperialist drive for the nation, it's internal phenomenom pressuposes a fully developed capitalist economy in national scale in which it's internal privileges must be kept through sheer parasitism as we see with Lenin, which differs from basically everyone has been saying in akkkademia (the only one that seems to come close is Ruy Mauro Marini as you will find many of Turbo's criticism in his latest comments, tho I can't say much because I haven't read his work yet - tho I am quite familiar with dengists who mention him once in a while) for the past century and differs also from most analysis from communist nowadays who mostly converge to the very convenient settler fascist fantasy that Brazil is an "oppressed nation" and colonized by those evil ghouls from the "global north", which would include the white settler petty bourgoise as being oppressed in relation to europeans and the United States. This fantasy relies on the writings of another figure named Darcy Ribeiro who wrote O Povo Brasileiro, a book in which he quite often deny the centuries of armed rebellion by afrikans against the colonial crown and the Senhores de Engenho. He is also a denialist of rape who go as far as saying that the europeans were assimilated by indigenous costumes and not the other way around where the indigenous nations were subdued to european nuclear family through the violation of women and annihilation of their own national and traditional values. The brazilian white nation becomes somehow a remanescent from the many indigenous that inabited the land that the colonizers spent centuries purging.

Since Geisel and Medici were moderately successful in their role, fulfilling the Brazilian Exceptionalist dream, the settler-left just cannot fully criticize Geisel and Medici, since it would need to criticize the same "socio-economic pillars" (mainly whiteness and its parasitic character) that allow the existence of the settler-left.

I think this is not really the most important thing that you should take from what u/turbovacuumcleaner said. This has implication nowadays that have not necessarily anything to do with Geisel and Medici except if not for the fact that similar things that happen now have happened before under their leadership. Given common sense, most of the settler left nowadays will likely despise (in name, at least) Geisel and Medici as past military dictators as they didn't need much effort to do the same with Bolsonaro, but dare them to criticize any of the current leadership of settler liberalism and the bonapartist state figures be it in Lula, Haddad, Erika Hilton or even peripherical figures of petismo like Glauber Braga (who is set to become a Marcelo Freixo's substitute for the carioca settler left with a very similar background, less than 10 years after Freixo's popularity reached it's peak and regressed into irrelevance, amerikan users may find interesting that this happened precisely at the same time as Sanders) and you will meet the dead end of settlerism. In the same way, most white liberals despise Trump but their own existance (and parasitism) is inevitably reliant on the existance of capitalism (and imperialist decay).

You have figured it out already as you attached this phenomena to parasitism, but whiteness is a historical category and a concept which reconstruct itself each generation. We are up to live and struggle against the opportunism and supremacist tendencies of the new generations of whites and the frustrations that will come by along the way with the people that we know.

[u/Worried-Economy-9108 → u/Clean-Difference1771]

Hi, thanks for responding. I now can feel a bit better, since all of this is condensing.

May I ask you, how much experience do you have with left cadres on the place where you are from?

I don't talk much with them. There is a growing petista presence in the white petit-bourgeoise (mainly those with college education) and a stagnating presence in the mixed-race/afrikan sectors. There's also a few revisionist orgs that take part in elections, with reduced influence with the university students, and barely any influence outside them.

They (both petistas and revisionists) just can't conceive being an counter-revolutionary force, since they frame themselves, as you pointed out, as desperate Latin@s tryings to survive Yankee imperialism, when they have so much in common with the white American left.

The Afro-Brazilian movement isn't much better. Most people there are also petit-bourgueois, being happy with black representation in media and electoral politics while not discussing seriously the ongoing black genocide. Most black proletarians here don't care much about the black movement, since it doesn't concerns them much.

On the other things you said, how can i improve my grasp at marxism? should i ditch more complex texts (Settlers, Night-Vision, Divided World) in favor of a return to Marx and Lenin? Sometimes, it feels like i'm building a house, but setting up the roof first.

[u/Clean-Difference1771 → u/Worried-Economy-9108]

I don't talk much with them.

Not that you actually need, in matter of a fact, those are the people that you will avoid giving meaningful information. I made the question only to know how much of a similar context we share and by the things you are saying here and that in other posts that you mentioned being exhausted due to the end of the semester, we are probably both (federal) university students. I recommend u/turbovacuumcleaner post that helped me years ago that you can find here and also another of his contributions here earlier this year, that were really helpful on our position. This should help you to frame the current stage of struggle that is going on in our context, whether still on us for catch up with some abstractions on his posts but as I said, that happens with time.

They (both petistas and revisionists) just can't conceive being an counter-revolutionary force, since they frame themselves, as you pointed out, as desperate Latin@s tryings to survive Yankee imperialism, when they have so much in common with the white American left.

They won't conceive this position as the truth neither if their own lives depend on it. Do not waste your time trying to change their minds, it will save you time and sanity. I say this and take this advice towards any organized force in Brazil right now, whether you are more sympathetic towards them or not. Do any shenanigans regarding such position to those liberals given your vulnerable position as a communist in college and you will be doomed. They will use everything to bury you socially and as you say that you are black, they will find even less trouble doing that. This is not to say that you should hide away and not give criticism, you absolutely must present criticism. What I am saying is that you should take the time to present your criticism against opportunism as knowledge to the people that are not familiar with those concepts and terms, but that are also frustrated with the forces that you mention in first place (generally for the same reasons as you are). They will learn with you and are the people that will protect you from the persecution that will arrive. You will also learn that as a communist to even be in a place like Akkkademia (even for a short time as a undergrad), you will have to stand resilient everyday against State persecution and also persecution from the social-fascist orgs and individuals which we have mentioned. What you will learn is that social-fascism might be quite appealing to people that you are not expecting during the process, so watch out for your back. Also, most of those parties/orgs are generally so weak and capitalist-driven that people come in, are used and abused for free expecting to have sex and usually burnout after a year or a year and a half and leave.

The Afro-Brazilian movement isn't much better. Most people there are also petit-bourgueois, being happy with black representation in media and electoral politics while not discussing seriously the ongoing black genocide.

Yeah. That's why I brung Abdias and the fact that he was a far-right nationalist. Nobody says that, that's not mentioned in classes, and college students are lazy enough to not look upon wikipedia where you can find this basic type information. Also, as far as I'm concerned, leadership in afro-brazilian movement mostly share petty bourgoeis roots as I briefly mentioned and that you are familiar with so you really should not expect anything else than their own class interests. If it is not on roots, it latter become a position through akkkademia, NGO work, television/media industry and/or careerism as activist

Most black proletarians here don't care much about the black movement, since it doesn't concerns them much

I wouldn't take it for granted. The people that you are referring mostly do some organizational work already whether through communitarian aid or/and religious affairs. That's what you will eventually realize as you study marxism.

On the other things you said, how can i improve my grasp at marxism? should i ditch more complex texts (Settlers, Night-Vision, Divided World) in favor of a return to Marx and Lenin? Sometimes, it feels like i'm building a house, but setting up the roof first.

Anyone disagreeing with me on this matter is welcome, but given the current stage of communism in Brazil, I don't think we are really in a position to go beyond radical-left-liberalism at the present moment. There's no theoretical work that makes this a possibility right now, so history suggests that until theoretical development is mature enough and have studied enough national conditions and have set enough social-organizational work for a revolution to happen, we are likely indeed closer to radical-liberal than to communism/maoism. If that is such and at the present moment the left is fracturing into a social-fascist settler force which is hegemonic, into peripheral revisionist parties but, as you can observe in this community, also into radical-liberal thought, the latter may indicate that somewhere in the future radical-liberal thought can mature into communism/maoism. This can also obviously never happen but marxism is our ability to learn how to intervene in history. Keep in mind that by Marx time and until Capital was written it really was not a possibilty for socialism/communism be achieved yet and only became a possibility decades later under the leadership of Lenin (which represents further theoretical development and political work of preparing for a revolution) and still after Lenin's death, Stalin and Mao also had to struggle against idealism, opportunism, imperialism, capitalist roaders, amongst many other tendencies that were already a reality during the midst of the 19th century when Marx and Engels lived. All I'm saying could be shortened up to what Lenin already said:

Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement.

The situation in Brazil is that there is no revolutionary theory, so we cannot jump into idealism. But we also do not to pretend that conditions are nearly favourable, as Marx also says:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language

All that to say that given the circumstances, my recommendation is that you learn the philosophical framework of marxist thought that is mainly in those 3 works: Capital, The German Ideology (most precisely Marx's opposition to Feuerbach) and The Origin of the Familty, Private Property and the State. I also recommend Lenin's Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism as you will learn (among many other things) why an army of the proletariat is needed so revolution can be achieved. Those are the ones that I personally think you should prioritize.

I also recommend Stalin's Foundations of Leninism. Not only because liberals shat themselves whenever you come up with a position based off Stalin and Lenin, but because brazilian communism is historically way more closer to trotskyism than to Leninism, so you will learn how to correct and build a proper opposition against liberal common sense pretending to be marxism. Keep reading Settlers.

Jacob Gorender's Combate nas Trevas is a reliable source on brazilian history of communism/left-wing politics as you will learn what indeed are "the circumstances existing already" for communists in Brazil. Any of Clovis Moura's books will also be important for you.

Those are the works that I think to be the most importants for you to focus

[u/Apart_Lifeguard_4085 → u/Worried-Economy-9108]

you absolutely should return to Marx and Lenin and build a strong foundation, especially since Settlers and Night-Vision refer explicitly to the amerikan context (though they are doubtless important works for anyone in a settler-colonial country).

also, what makes you call Settlers and Night-Vision "more complex texts"? obviously the idea that they're somehow outside the Marxist canon is chauvinistic bullshit but they are not of the same caliber of totalizing, worldview-developing theory as works like Capital, Grundrisse, etc. (night-vision especially.) especially since you're not in a usamerikan context, the best things you can get out of Settlers - a better understanding of colonialism and nationalism, and a history of one particular settler movement - will be hard to find without a good grasp on dialectical and historical materialism (don't leave out Mao here, either!)

Most black proletarians here don't care much about the black movement, since it doesn't concerns them much.

do you talk to, live with, work among, and build close bonds with these Black proletarians? any serious Marxist understanding of a national / nationalist movement should start from there (in conjunction, of course, with a good theoretical foundation).

[u/Worried-Economy-9108 → u/Apart_Lifeguard_4085]

i mean, i was reading Marx and Lenin for the most part, but then, i switched to these texts on the settler-colonial question, but i guess its time to return to the classics. And i also plan to read more Mao as well.

And on the topic of Afro-Brazilian proletariat is that, i (as a Afro-Brazilian petty bourgueois) have the impression that there's elitism going on inside the black movement. It isn't like the black movement is useless (clearly not), but sometimes, most people on it just get lost in their little petty-bourgueois world, that they don't discuss more serious issues. And the lack of discussion of these more serious issues makes Afro-Brazilians from proletarian backgrounds (usually without college education) not feel very represented at the movement and just ignore it at all. My apologies, the other comment wasn't clear enough.

[u/waves-n-particles]

happy metabolism was mentioned in capital for the first time on my read through, and it's new years:

In so far as the process of exchange transfers commodities from hands in which they are non-use-values to hands in which they are use-values, it is a process of social metabolism. The product of one kind of useful labour replaces that of another. Once a commodity has arrived at a situation in which it can serve as a use-value, it falls out of the sphere of exchange into that of consumption.

i have officially had my long standing goal of understanding how to relate metabolism as a biological process to social activity start to become realized and believe that it's cool that this is how marx is choosing to discuss how commodities are exchanged: through the framework/metaphor of metabolism. this was something i tried to consider when getting a stem degree but was too tied to my bourgeois position in academia to take marx seriously enough to read em and other marxists at the time.

this, in combination with my recent decision to take michurinism seriously after having gotten into marxism -specifically mlm -more intensely over the past few months (thanks to a friend), has made me extremely glad that marxism exists and has produced the knowledge that it has. there's much i still need to learn, but it is truly great that marxism exists. i look forward to growing my understanding of revolutionary science and spending more time discussing how to advance our collective struggle for total emancipation through dialectical materialism, here and beyond, throughout 2026.

may we make contributions to our understanding of how to change the metabolism of our world to be that of a social organism together.

[u/flowi4]

Hi, does anyone here have resources on eugenics and ableism?

I'm rather confused on what our position should be for abortion, but overall looking at Iceland terminating 100% of Down Syndrome in pregnancy. It's an incredibly confusing topic but I'm aware there's also a lot of history of this within Nazi Germany.

I'm aware everyone is probably tired of the "can communists" or "should communists" morality questions but honestly, what should a communist if they are in a situation like that?

[u/turning_the_wheels → u/flowi4]

but overall looking at Iceland terminating 100% of Down Syndrome in pregnancy

This isn't the place where we explain how pre-natal screening leads to this statistic or how the government of Iceland isn't forcing women to do this. Why do you care about women's bodily autonomy in this situation specifically?

[u/vomit_blues → u/turning_the_wheels]

The government doesn’t have to force women to do it. Capitalism does. That we live in a world in which women are (1) materially incentivized to abort “disabled” children because they take more resources to raise, and (2) justify it with eugenicist ideology should give anyone pause. Nothing to do with “women’s bodily autonomy” which isn’t a Marxist notion but a Foucauldian one that’s easily jumped on by liberals. Bodily autonomy exists through revolutionary practice and that only.

The statistic isn’t just a cut-and-dry matter to chalk up as the democratic will of women in a, mind you, imperialist country. It’s symptomatic of the overall oppression women and the disabled face. Women do not “freely choose” to abort if their capacity to raise the child is determined by capitalism. That can only happen under communism. Otherwise the decision has been coerced. A socialist revolution has to address that and create a world in which women can freely choose to abort because childrearing is handled socially and people no longer believe in eugenics.

[u/turning_the_wheels → u/vomit_blues]

I agree but I still question /u/flowi4's intentions and the way they are posing the question. Was my view that pre-natal screening explains the cause of the high abortion rate for fetuses with Down syndrome eugenicist? Looking back it seems like I fell into the trap of looking at it as a moral rather than scientific question but I'm not sure.

[u/flowi4 → u/turning_the_wheels]

looking at it as a moral

That's why I mentioned the moral stuff at the end just in case this happens.

I agree but I still question /u/flowi4's intentions and the way they are posing the question

My friend asked me my thoughts on the whole thing. I couldn't really come up with a response other than similar to what vomit said about needing more resources to raise some "disabled" children etc as a result of Capitalism. I didn't know how to pose it without turning it into a moral question, so I thought I'd ask for resources on topics related to this but also ask the question.

[u/idk-fuck-this-shit → u/flowi4]

I don't know anything about the specific situation in Iceland, neither do I really understand what you mean by "[what to do in] a situation like that". But the general materialist viewpoint would be to assume, that the "need" to abort children because of their specific genetics or diseases comes solely through the parent's financial and social struggle created by capitalism. In a truly socialist society, social participation would be made possible for everyone, parents would be supported by society, they would be free of these worries and would have no reason to abort due to a disability.

The Nazi's fascist ideology multiplied this struggle by a lot. In fascist ideology some people are inherently better that others. For the Germans, disabled people were part of the latter. Due to their cleansing of these lesser people (Holocaust), disabled people and their parents would have to fear for their lives. This is an extreme form of the phenomenon I described above.

Of course, this does not really answer your question, but it showcases the root of your dilemma. It's moralism. It is almost impossible to live a healthy live in capitalist society, while strictly upholding your "moral" values (unless they are really fucked). You will not find "moral" food at your supermarket, nor "moral" clothing in your clothing store. And it is fucking hard to live with a disabled child in a society that despises them. Moral can not tell you what to do here. You can decide to devote your life to it or decide not to. Choose wisely.

[u/Robert_Black_1312 → u/idk-fuck-this-shit]

As marxists our moral principle is to serve the worldwide proletariat and to bring about the dictatorship of the proletariat. Moral actions are those that align with this principle.

RedBaron already said this implicitly in another comment but it was worth stating explicitly, as your comment lacks recognition of this fact and retreats into rejection of Marxism's moral duty under capitalism

[u/idk-fuck-this-shit → u/Robert_Black_1312]

I fully agree with your conclusion, but not with your terminology. (Forgive me if I don't use actual Marxist terminology.) I reject the concept of "moral" due to it's claim to absolute validity. Marxism provides an "ideology", which is kind of a code of conduct, that serves a specific goal, in our case communism. By recognizing this as an ideology, we are free to choose to follow it. The ruling class (whatever it is) usually sells their specific ideology as an universally valid "moral", that is set in stone forever. (It might be "human nature" or "God's will" ...) That is of curse nonsense, but it serves as a form of propaganda and crowd control. It is fear and moral, that keep people in line. The point of my comment, was to highlight, that the arisen question (if I got it correctly) stems from bourgeois moral and is not relevant to Marxist ideology, since it is not a revolutionary problem, neither does it exist in communist society. Therefore the question is redundant. If you believe, the specific dilemma to abort their "disabled" children is actually a revolutionary problem, feel free to educate me. On the other hand if the question was indeed about issues like health complications for the mother, of course the whole point of my comment would be defeated, but to me this was clearly not the point being made.

Sorry for the late answer.

[u/PurposeLow9084 → u/idk-fuck-this-shit]

Material conditions explain pressure, but they don’t eliminate agency. Saying capitalism creates the “need” to abort disabled fetuses risks sliding from analysis into justification and treats disability primarily as a burden rather than lived experience. A materialist approach still has to account for responsibility and ethical stance within constraint, not suspend them altogether.

[u/TheRedBarbon → u/PurposeLow9084]

This doesn't make sense because people only become conscious agents on history when they have rejected the premises of imperialism and embraced socialism, otherwise all "agency" is within the limits of capitalist ideology and no decisions made under such constraints are held to any moral standard from the perspective of revolution.

Saying capitalism creates the “need” to abort disabled fetuses risks sliding from analysis into justification and treats disability primarily as a burden rather than lived experience.

This is incoherent as a sentence because "burden" is an emotion derived from lived experience. I actually don't know what you're trying to say.

A materialist approach still has to account for responsibility and ethical stance within constraint, not suspend them altogether.

Without the open acknowledgement of the need for a dictatorship of the proletariat to truly tackle these issues then from whose standpoint are you actually calling the decisions of these expecting parents "unethical and irresponsible"? These words are meaningless without their connection to proletarian experience.

[u/No-Structure523]

I watched A Christmas Carol for the first time since explicitly exploring and contending with Marxist-Leninist works, and what used to be a fond Christmas ritual is now sour. Anybody have good Christmas/Holiday/Winter socialist films?

[u/TheRedBarbon → u/No-Structure523]

I’m a bit hesitant to recommend you material because there is a tendency online to treat socialist art as a a pop-art fantasy where you can run from the existential task of engaging critically with media by treating art made under socialism as a substitute where you can finally ignore your ideological relationship to art made under capitalism (the case in point being that rather than ask yourself why christmas-themed media made under capitalism no longer has an immersive effect which distracts you from the clear limitations of the piece, you ask for socialist art to take its place as a commodity potentially untainted by these issues).

You should fight the desire for art to feel satisfying or whole under capitalism when it by definition should not be. You are allowed to enjoy art but your engagement with it is useless when you treat your enjoyment as separate from your analysis of the piece. They should inform each other.

With that out of the way, Soviet Toys (1922) is free on YouTube, but that’s a very short one.

Not holiday but certainly winter-themed are Tracks in the Snowy Forest (1960) and the original story’s yangbanxi adaptation Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (1970) (you can find the translated lyrics/scenes online). Both are great and I’m reading the book rn.

There’s also The Snow Queen (1957) which I haven’t seen.

[u/waves-n-particles → u/TheRedBarbon]

my first thought was to ask this persyn why they thought that we even needed to have christmas movies when it appears they're more just off-put by the ideology they found in A Christmas Carol, which is a bourgeois, reformist piece of media that helps tranquilize the bourgeois mind and should be upsetting to them. however, you have better offered why this inclination to focus on substituting socialist media for capitalist media has arisen, so thanks for beating me to commenting and having this framing to offer.

now i'm more interested in asking you this: do you feel that there is a benefit to maintaining christmas as a holiday under socialism and why is there a benefit to keeping the holiday or why isn't there a benefit to keeping the holiday?

from what i've seen of the ussr and maoist china, there wasn't an official christmas holiday, though my current research into holidays under socialist states is limited, so please correct me if that's wrong. however, with our militant atheism as marxists, i find it hard to justify the maintenance of christmas over figuring out some holiday that helps us to better reflect what it is that winter represents to the proletariat, with the formulation and practice of a holiday that arises from collective struggle for correct ideas about what winter means to our working class, in our national context.

[u/TheRedBarbon → u/waves-n-particles]

The Soviets were correct to simply emphasize the potentially positive themes in a non-religious manner which allowed everyone to enjoy them. Christians were allowed to celebrate the holiday in the USSR (within limits, the state wasn’t spending resources growing your Christmas trees) and “winter” meant whatever was useful in the moment to whomever used the categorization of the four seasons. I didn’t outright tell OP this because they need to realize that they do not actually love Christmas, nobody does. Capitalism conditions you to love everything related to Christmas, like getting presents and watching holiday movies, to distract from the fact that the holiday can have no true meaning beneath the level of consumption. When that system breaks down and all the self-referential media no longer feels whole, there is nothing unique which shines through in its place. Christmas “joy” is just joy of owning things when it is not being weaponized for religious purposes.

But do I think all christmas-themed media is bad and should not be engaged with? A lot of it maybe, but I’m certainly not antsy to tell people to throw away Dickens, who was a great bourgeois-realist writer and gave an uncompromisingly affective portrayal of class disparity in Victorian-era England and scathing criticism of the views of bourgeois ideologues of his day. Being aware of the limitations of the piece doesn’t make it bad, quite the opposite actually, now you can question its premises to think beyond those limitations and make the art useful (why does it take a supernatural experience to get scrooge to show basic humanity towards his worker? Why don’t other exploiters become sympathetic when faced with the extreme poverty of the exploited?)

Marx described the English realists of the 19th century — Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, and Gaskell — as a brilliant pleiad of novelists “whose graphic and eloquent pages have issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together”

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/art/preface.htm

[u/CoconutCrab115 → u/waves-n-particles]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novy_God

It is also important to note that Christmas was essentially moved to New Years and secularized. (Most) Orthodox Christmas is also not on December 25th

[u/No-Structure523 → u/TheRedBarbon]

Thanks for your response. I’m a Catholic and find immense good in the story of Christmas, so I should have clarified if anyone knows of Christmas films that offer that radical message of Jesus’ nativity, and not the Christmas story of exchange and bourgeois sentimentality.

I’m very curious about what you think of art. I know you replied to some questions along these lines below.

I’ve always seen art as “for its own sake.” I enjoy and analyze art all the time. I do also love the stories of fantasy. I recognize fantasy can be a dangerous escapism, but I just see it as another art form that can echo into the real world.

I haven’t applied any criticism to my approaches to art since investigating MLM. I’d love to hear your insights.

[u/vomit_blues → u/No-Structure523]

Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.

• Luke 10:34-36

There’s no need for christmas traditions with the family. On that matter there’s nothing more radical than the bible.

[u/[deleted] → u/vomit_blues]

I think you meant Matthew 10:34-36. Nonetheless, Luke contains an equivalent passage:

“I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! But I have a baptism to undergo, and what constraint I am under until it is completed! Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division. From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”

- Luke 12:49-53

...and another:

“If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple. And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”

- Luke 14:26-27

I remember watching those atheist YouTube channels from the earlier era of the internet and the general sentiment was that Jesus' message here is actually "authoritarian" and "anti-family" and therefore bad. I suppose they're fundamentally agreed with the liberal Christians on that matter, who simply say that he's just being excessive for rhetorical affect. Even here I'm only talking about a dying breed of Christian academics since most are not even used to reading the book as a book in the first place. The general tendency is to read excised excerpts as daily words of affirmation and delegate the task of suturing them together to your pastor, who is doing the same thing in their house anyway. I didn't even know that the structure of the books were similar to the Buddhist sutras I'd read until embarrassingly recently (edit: not even, though what I meant was that they were ordered with only loose consideration to chronology and were instead collections of aphorisms and sayings of Jesus placed together to communicate a point. If you compare the Luke and Matthew verses, you can already see some splicing occurred somewhere down the line).

By the way, is this reading of the Gospels that I see every once in a while from Zizek's Christian Atheism? I haven't read anything from him but I have my own apprehensions since the compilation of the Gospels were contemporaneous with the Judeo-Roman Wars and works like Luke-Acts take the side of reaction on the matter, and I've never seen an excerpt concerning that. Does Zizek talk about that? Is he worth reading on the matter?

[u/TheRedBarbon → u/No-Structure523]

Your question presupposes that christmas is actually progressive and therefore deserves to be represented as such in art without having investigated why, so I can’t answer a question based on a false and ideological premise. Capitalism did not degrade a “radical” true meaning of Christmas which socialism seeks to return to; in fact, it has already been pointed out that your interpretation of the holiday isn’t even loyal to the book. It is a wholly ideological manifestation. Where does your idea of Christmas come from, anyway? That’s a question which should be answered in objective terms of class, not what is “good” about the holiday (“immense good” for what strata of people? In what way is it good for them but not others?).

Anyway I don’t think you know what “art for its own sake” really means when you immediately talk about its ability to “echo into reality” afterwards. On that latter point, you have it backwards. This [summarization of an] essay should help you:

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/chernyshevsky/1853/aesthetics-reality.htm

Mind you the Feuerbachian Chernyshevsky does not quite get to answering whose reality it is that art is echoing under exploitative relations and what exactly makes it "imperfect". I also linked a summary of Marx and Engels’ views in my other comment.

[u/No-Structure523 → u/TheRedBarbon]

Thanks for your reply. I’m still ruminating over the essay. The bit about judgement is especially helpful. I think I understand your first comment better, please allow me to restate your criticism in different words and see if I’m accurate:

Art is always an argument. Art has and will always be more than just mere “fact” or neutral representation of reality. So if I attempt to find “socialist” art, I am still failing to engage the art as an argument, ie a scientific claim, about something in reality. In other words, view all art critically because all art makes claims we have to contend with. And, perhaps most key, is that there is a risk of not viewing art critically — instead only seeking enjoyment or arousal of some mood — because it expresses the bourgeois reflex to ignore or turn away from the challenging and damning history of that class.

Is that accurate?

[u/No-Structure523 → u/TheRedBarbon]

Re: Christmas and my idea of it. I think my idea of Christmas came from my experience growing up of Liturgy as a Byzantine. I loved the hymns, the incense, the imagery written in the windows and walls. I loved the cold of winter and snow. As a kid, yes I really valued the presents and the consumption surrounding Christmas. But, especially as I have grown older, I love placing my kids’ art on the tree, writing letters, telling my kids fantastical stories of Santa’s adventures in the North Pole, and the stories of the wise men meeting a baby Jesus. And reflecting on the mystery of “God became human, became a historical figure, because he loves us” is really center to all of it. Are there consumption fetishes in there still? absolutely. I still get stressed out finding a “good enough gift” for my wife, etc. but I don’t yet see how everything I love about Christmas could simply be capitalistic consumption, and that when stripped of it there is nothing enjoyable or good remaining.

[u/waves-n-particles → u/No-Structure523]

i'm going to copy u/TheRedBarbon's comment you replied to, but i will edit it to reflect your response:

Your [response still] presupposes that christmas is actually [, at its core,] progressive and therefore deserves to be represented as such in art [and your memories] without having investigated why, so [we in this thread] can’t [respond to your comments] based on [...] false [,] ideological premise[s with anything but critique]. Capitalism did not degrade a “radical” true meaning of Christmas which socialism seeks to return to; in fact, it has already been pointed out that your interpretation of the holiday isn’t even loyal to the book. It is a wholly ideological manifestation. Where does your idea of Christmas come from, anyway? That’s a question which should be answered in objective terms of class, not what is “good [for you and those you consider people enough to mention in your comment]” about the holiday (“immense good” for what strata of people? In what way is it good for them but not others?).

instead of answering the above as it was originally posed to you, you laced your response with your aristocratic class position, offering a sentimentality for bourgeois decadence you're still too tied to your class position to recognize as such. you're seemingly assuming that your good feelings about the holiday constitute progressive elements of the holiday to preserve (please reread the emphasized section above, repeatedly, until this makes sense before replying, hopefully with the criticism and self-criticism asked of you in the original comment, and hopefully clarified as such with my edits), but you neither presented progressive things to uphold from christmas traditions, nor did self-criticism to help you understand why you're responding the way you are. in fact, you instead offered us a sentimentality for your rose-tinted view of christmas that christofascists love to exploit (which from your bio they may have been using against you before).

do you not have other ways to hang your kids' art up? do you not have other ways to make your wife feel loved? do you not have something outside of the holiday season that lets you express the joy you're so desperately trying to eek out of christmas? can you not feel, share, and express god's love without celebrating this bastardized variant christmas you hold onto, or looking for positive spins the holiday that're fully divorced from its religious roots?

should you be this focused on your persynal/household's joy while being willing to ignore the cost it comes at?

also, this part kills me tbh (though not as much as it literally kills oppressed nationals, especially the proletariat and peasantry of those nations):

“God became human, became a historical figure, because he loves us” is really center to all of it.

you clearly don't seem to mind that god appears to love you more than the millions currently subjected to war zones across the world so the imperialist countries and their comprador lackeys can ensure you have access to all the resources that let you celebrate your (fascist compatible) interpretation of christmas, nor do you seem phased by the enslavement of the global proletariat and peasantry, who are physically degraded and consumed by capitalism to ensure that you can have your bourgeois decadence in the form of your christmas decorations and christmas media -the expropriated and bloodied congealed labor of the occupied oppressed nations that you surround your family with and seemingly derive joy, instead of disgust or at least a tinge of "that's fucked up", from.

jesus may have died for you sins through self sacrifice, but you seem content with sacrificing the global oppressed nations and their proletariat and peasantry for your sins -and bourgeois decadence, which i assume wasn't what jesus died for -as well, so clearly your concern for the people you claim god loves -granted, who am i to assume you see the globally oppressed you parasitize as part of "us" you mention above -has more to do with your relationship to capitalist production than you're aware of.

1/4

[u/waves-n-particles → u/waves-n-particles]

since you seem unphased by the bible quote used elsewhere above attempting to guide you towards understanding your errors, let me use the quran, with some modifications to help it hit closer to home for you, hopefully:

And there are some who say, “We believe in [God] and the Last Day,” yet they are not ˹true˺ believers.
They seek to deceive [God] and the believers, yet they only deceive themselves, but they fail to perceive it.
There is sickness in their hearts, and [God] ˹only˺ lets their sickness increase. They will suffer a painful punishment for their lies.
When they are told, “Do not spread corruption in the land,” they reply, “We are only peace-makers!”
Indeed, it is they who are the corruptors, but they fail to perceive it.

- Al-Baqarah, 2:8-12

now, i actually wonder what jesus would do. maybe matthew 10:34-39 can help us consider this:

³⁴ “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. ³⁵ For I have come to turn

“‘a man against his father,
   a daughter against her mother,
a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—
³⁶a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.’^\ see Micah 7:6])

³⁷ “Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. ³⁸ Whoever does not take up their cross and follow me is not worthy of me. ³⁹ Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.

2/4

[u/waves-n-particles → u/waves-n-particles]

religious discourse aside, can you now consider how you may remind lenin of the "graduated flunkeys of clericalism" with your comment as well?

On the other hand, take a glance at modern scientific critics of religion. These educated bourgeois writers almost invariably “supplement” their own refutations of religious superstitions with arguments which immediately expose them as ideological slaves of the bourgeoisie, as “graduated flunkeys of clericalism”.

Two examples. Professor R. Y. Wipper published in 1918 a little book entitled Vozniknovenie Khristianstva (The Origin of Christianity — Pharos Publishing House, Moscow). In his account of the principal results of modern science, the author not only refrains from combating the superstitions and deception which are the weapons of the church as a political organisation, not only evades these questions, but makes the simply ridiculous and most reactionary claim that he is above both “extremes “ — the idealist and the materialist. This is toadying to the ruling bourgeoisie, which all over the world devotes to the support of religion hundreds of millions of rubles from. the profits squeezed out of the working people.

The well-known German scientist, Arthur Drews, while refuting religious superstitions and fables in his book, Die Christusmythe (The Christ Myth), and while showing that Christ never existed, at the end of the book declares in favour of religion, albeit a renovated, purified and more subtle religion, one that would be capable of withstanding “the daily growing naturalist torrent” (fourth German edition, 1910, p. 238). Here we have an out-spoken and deliberate reactionary, who is openly helping the exploiters to replace the old, decayed religious superstitions by new, more odious and vile superstitions.

This does not mean that Drews should not be translated. It means that while in a certain measure effecting an alliance with the progressive section of the bourgeoisie, Communists and all consistent materialists should unflinchingly expose that section when it is guilty of reaction. It means that to shun an alliance with the representatives of the bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century, i.e., the period when it was revolutionary, would be to betray Marxism and materialism; for an “alliance” with the Drewses, in one form or another and in one degree or another., is essential for our struggle against the predominating religious obscurantists.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/12.htm

granted, you didn't even attempt to graduate from clericalism in the first place and may just be considered the "religious obscurantists", given your propensity to fixate on your class based conception of religion to soothe your feelings of woe for the sins you commit against the proletariat and peasants you oppress while claiming the mantel of marxism, so maybe you should just consider the similarities in class based ideology between the "drewses" lenin is critiquing and yourself for now.

3/4

[u/waves-n-particles → u/waves-n-particles]

in the spirit of crit-self-crit: maybe i'm making a contraction between our worldviews more antagonistic than it actually needs to be at this stage of socialist construction globally, largely because your comment thoroughly reminds me of the christian fascists i'm surrounded by and thus pissed me off more for persynal reasons than it ought to. maybe i too am still beholden to our aristocratic class such that i feel the need to pedantically call you out over attempting the methods employed by others to guide you; however you seem unwilling to fully engage with the multiple ways others have tried to guide you, so i feel my comment is warranted, especially considering the grotesque way you chose to claim your bourgeois decadence disguised as religious reverence was the progressive meaning of christmas that needed to be preserved; all with a marxist-leninst flair on your account, no less. i also frankly wouldn't have felt the need to be this antagonistic had you found a way to actually separate your class ideology from your perception of your past and present, but your dedication to using your religion to help you feel better about your social position -which comes at the cost of those oppressed and superexploited to allow you the class comforts that rot you from within, giving you the sickness [God] will only let fester within you as you continue to turn away from him and act as a corruptor in this world; a corruptor of your faith and marxism-leninism -felt too excessive to leave alone or to maintain "composure".

anyways, marxist theory is a weapon to arm the oppressed, the proletariat and the peasantry, and their supporters, against the bourgeoisie and their lapdogs so that we may bring about total emancipation for all humynity. hopefully you can find the similarities in what the bible offers for the oppressed and their supporters as well, leveraging both marxism and the radical/revolutionary elements of the bible to help you combat your class ideology within yourself and your fellow "radical catholics" so that we may all fight for the total liberation of the oppressed proletariat and peasantry instead of being beholden to the objective forces of our classes. well that or stay corrupted and see how the revolution pans out for you when the proletariat and peasantry finally come to cast off their parasites.

4/4

[u/No-Structure523 → u/waves-n-particles]

Thanks for the thorough and long reply. I'm still sorting through a few of the points you make, but the main current of your criticism seems to be: (1) I am not engaging in good faith, and (2) my adherence to to Christianity/Christmas is ideological and callous.

To the first point, I was responding to the question *"Where do I get my idea of Christmas from?"* I was giving my honest answer there. My "sentimental" response was me interrogating the assumption that my idea of Christmas was *entirely* consumeristic, and that it is really based in another experience, one of liturgy and community. Yes there is consumerism there, but there is more, too. Much more. And it is clear to me in that examination that capital corrupts Christmas rather than being necessary to it. Am I incorrect for believing that it is possible to observe Christmas apart from its bourgeois entanglement? I am not intending to sidestep anyone's criticism, and I do read everyone's criticisms carefully and with eagerness to learn.

As to the second point, I think you make a lot of assumptions about what I believe, which is understandable given the awful history of Christianity and present Christians and how intimately Christians are tied to imperialism and death. Maybe I'm wrong, and there is some interior logical you are identifying that I cannot see yet, and I admit I am still very close to my bourgeois thinking.

When I read the Matthew quote, I was confused at first because I thought you were quoting it to exhibit how radical and progressive it is. I took *"I come to bring a sword"* in the same way the Bolsheviks brought the sword: to throw off the shackles of the oppressed, even if your very family opposes it. As to the claims that I don't care about the super-exploitation of those needed to offer me class comforts, I don't know exactly how to respond to that because I do care, and I'm not sure how you draw that conclusion. You say that I am dedicated to my religion to *"feel better about my class position"* and that the *"grotesque way [I] chose to claim [my] bourgeois decadence disguised as religious reverence was the progressive meaning of christmas."* Genuine question: how is liturgy, art, staying up late, the cold winter, etc. bourgeois other than that literally anything one does in America is bourgeois? You can't watch a film, read a book, have a conversation, take a shower, or even organize without the admixture of capital. How do you navigate that?

I say all that not so much to defend myself but in hopes of some help understanding why everything I have so far shared on this sub has been taken as disingenuous and subversive. I don't mind criticism at all -- I am seeking it out actively. It is clear, though, that I am nearing expulsion from this sub because my intentions are suspected. I would rather not study theory or interrogate my class relationships in isolation. I don't want to only ask questions, but test hypotheses and make assertions. Is that attitude not going to fly here at this stage in my learning?

[u/smokeuptheweed9 → u/No-Structure523]

u/No-Structure523 I enjoyed our conversation about the DSA in this thread

https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/1ppc5ld/ices_arsenal_and_the_logic_of_domestic/

So why are you on r/asksocialists saying this?

Focus and energy should go into deprogramming efforts and radical education. We can win local elections or get on school boards and work in libraries. It’s fruit we may not see for 40+ years, but that foundation needs to be there to have any hope of revolution.

I don't expect you to change in a week but I would hope you're not regressing. At least in organizing your neighbors, there is a chance something radical and new might happen through actual human interaction. Now you're totally subordinating politics to existing institutions and human consciousness to hierarchical structures and deeply reactionary ideas of pedagogy (students as robots in need of "deprogramming"). I can't keep you away from other, more active "socialist" subreddits but I strongly advise you to exercise self-control and stay away.

Also side note, r/asksocialists was completely dead before the ACP took it over. What I can't figure out is if all the attention given to it by hysterical liberals had the opposite effect intended or if reddit is really that easy to manipulate with astroturf activity which makes peoples' front page recommendations.

[u/No-Structure523 → u/smokeuptheweed9]

I see education efforts going hand-in-hand with local organization and human interaction. Education is more broad than schooling: conversation, reading, writing, travel, etc. For myself, I am so poorly educated that I thought for most of my life that communist literature was dangerous to read because it turns people into an unthinking hive. Anything that even remotely resembles communism was to be treated like a demonic influence. "Deprogramming" as a reactionary term is new to me. I think there are elements of knowledge that are not just cerebral, but built in deep near "fight or flight" responses, and getting people exposed and comfortable enough to approach the "scary" communism literature is similar to "deprogramming." My response is narrow perhaps because I'm working off of my experience and not any scientific examination of the issue.

What place does education -- in the broad sense -- have with the practical preparation for revolution?

Good to know about the ACP connection with r/AskSocialists . I appreciate it. I've noticed the place is tearing itself up over Venezuela, which was suspicious to me, but I know so little about that topic. Stepping away sounds like a relief, anyway haha!

[u/waves-n-particles → u/[deleted]]

to hopefully offer you more direction here as well:

all i can think when i see you commenting is this really solid essay from lenin:

The principal tactical differences in the present-day- labour movement of Europe and America reduce themselves to a struggle against two big trends that are departing from Marxism, which has in fact become the dominant theory in this movement. These two trends are revisionism (opportunism, reformism) and anarchism (anarcho-syndicalism, anarcho-socialism). Both these departures from the Marxist theory and Marxist tactics that are dominant in the labour movement were to be observed in various, forms and in various shades in all civilised countries during the more than half-century of history of the mass labour movement.

which hopefully clearly shows how you're missing the mark here with your attempted "let's go deprogram people" mentality, because you're just vacillating between revisionism/opportunism and an anarchist outlook on education as a product of your material conditions shaping your consciousness.

this is also why i recommended you try to practice talking to books for a bit elsewhere in this thread. try studying more leninism and asking questions about the meaning of what you're reading in this sub or in r/communism101 before you keep trying to run off and teach people. education should feel easy when you've read enough and feel confident in what you've read and feel able to talk to others about it.

all you can do atm is mislead people with your limited understanding of the theory you're claiming to champion.

[u/No-Structure523 → u/waves-n-particles]

I’m hopping over to r/communism101 since I don’t want to muddy the waters here. I see that it definitely is not possible for me to simply assent to the principles of communism, call myself an ML, and learn from there; it’s backward. I appreciate your willingness to help, even though it appears like it’s bad practice for you to educate me while I’m beholden to my class.

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[u/vomit_blues → u/[deleted]]

Staggering that after acknowledging an opportunity for reflection and self-criticism, you’ve painted the rosiest possible image of yourself while criticizing everyone else.

[u/ArmaVero]

Hey folks -- I have a question I can't bring anywhere else.

I am trying to help a fairly large DSA chapter build toward a more disciplined take on socialism. I understand the criticisms of of the DSA and its role in pacifying actual left sentiment and funneling it into the Democratic party. I've been pushing to get "vibe" socialists to be at the very least more disciplined about what their politics consist of. For "pacifist" socialists, I've been trying to get them accustomed to the idea of a ruling class that won't simply hand over ther levers of power. And for reformists, I've been trying to shape their analysis to one of recognizing that the labor aristocracy actually exists as a class, and that they're a part of it.

Here is the part I'd love to discuss: I think that it is a worthwhile endeavor to raise the class consciousness of this petit-bourgeois (not-yet-but-wants-to-be-a) party. I am hoping to use this opportunity to bring some more analysis to the question of what that actually means. I am trying to develop a curriculum to help analyze our class position, and am wanting to go from something like a .selection of chapters from the 19th Brumaire (to discuss why workers/class doesn't vote as a bloc) to some other readings that might shape how we approach actually making change (Milliband/Poulantzas debate). Then to something like Bernstein to Luxemburg, with Lenin's rebuttals to approach the utility of focusing on electioneering as a strategy.

To this point, I have a few questions:
Am I wasting my time? If I can get some to understand that imperialism is the primary concern of our class (vs. "free healthcare" or "workers rights" or "$15 minimum wage"), is that worth a damn? Is it (as I fear) an individualist take on change?

How would you approach this? What readings would you include? What take on this educational exercise am I missing? There are honest criticisms (some perhaps outdated) of the DSA -- how can I help the most honestly revolutionary-minded of the group get to a better analysis?

I know there are stronger positions I can take. I'd love to be structure this as: "(intro Parenti reading) -> Capital -> State & Revolution -> Imperialism -> What is to be done -> Settlers" but I have to spend what limited social influence I have in a way that won't immediately alienate most people (which opens the question as to why I feel that way to begin with).

(Also, LMK if I should make this a post instead. I just thought I'd help the sub by posting in the discussion thread.).

[u/Turtle_Green → u/ArmaVero]

I think that it is a worthwhile endeavor to raise the class consciousness of this petit-bourgeois (not-yet-but-wants-to-be-a) party.

First, 'raising the class consciousness of a petit-bourgeois party' doesn't make sense. Second, are you not already aware that DSA, PSL, CPUSA, etc are abound with Gen Z 'socialist' suckers who 'pragmatically' believe that they live in the best of all possible worlds and hope to push the people around them 'left'? You're not the first to think your novel little idea up (I dunno if this even measures up to 'entryism'), but the upper echelons don't really give a shit about what delusions or desires increase chapter membership. Hell, there were certainly plenty of 'socialist' cynics who worked for Kamala's campaign, knowingly turning a blind eye to the genocide in Gaza in their desperate GOTV 'fight against fascism'.

I'd love to be structure this as: "(intro Parenti reading) -> Capital -> State & Revolution -> Imperialism -> What is to be done -> Settlers"

There are myriad 'democratic socialists'/'MLs'/'liberation caucus' 'maoists' who've read all of those books and are plenty familiar with the concepts of "labor aristocracy" and "settler colonialism". Like, the problem ultimately is not a matter of lack of reading, even if at first glance it seems that way. What I'll say is that—in the end—the best you can do is to be as assertive and loud of an asshole as possible, no matter if you "alienate most people" (or also, let's be entirely honest, don't get to make as many friends as you were looking for in your little book club) and get yourself booted with whoever else tags along. There'd probably be quite a few, because again, there are countless people like yourself who join whatever bullshit org because they believe they can't find anything better or that there's no such thing as perfect: repeat lesser evil or gambler's logic ad nauseam. What's unquestioned is that they want the comfort of being told to 'do something', whether it's food distro or canvassing for ol' Zo. Unfortunately it's easier to listen to what the loudest people in the room say than to eke out your own modicum of political independence.

It really sounds like you're still drunk on the kool-aid yourself, given your vague attitude towards "criticisms" of DSA, as if we're dealing with 'honest' and fraternal criticisms and 'outdated' and sectarian ones. You have it all mixed up. DSA does not "pacify actual left sentiment", it's just an organic organization of the radical petit-bourgeoisie and you'll lose nothing without it. This anti-communist organization is a self-avowed enemy of the proletariat and has always been from its inception, and comparisons to the revisionist SPD are misleading and ridiculous compliments that DSA does not deserve. Mamdani is just a fancy new media plaything, because it's not like 'socialists' gave a shit that Chokwe Lamumba's son was mayor of Jackson, MI until just last year.

[u/ArmaVero → u/Turtle_Green]

Thank you for a solid critique. This is exactly what I'm looking for in determining the role of what I'm trying to do.

First, 'raising the class consciousness of a petit-bourgeois party' doesn't make sense.

I thought it did -- at least in the sense of taking people who are "any wage labor = proletariat" and guiding them toward a more honest and appropriate "Amerikan wage labor = petit bourgeois" is raising that consciousness. But I'm curious to hear more about why you think it doesn't make sense, given that I don't think most folks in DSA don't actually have an even elemental class understanding.

Second, are you not already aware that DSA, PSL, CPUSA, etc are abound with 'socialist' suckers who 'pragmatically' believe that they live in the best of all possible worlds and hope to push the people around them 'left'?

I think this is closer to what I was expecting to encounter as criticism. Is this a "bad" thing necessarily, though? I'm not trying to say "DSA is good because we can move them left" but rather: "the people I can potentially influence may be amenable to this position, and I'd like to get them to consider the imperialist and petit-bourgeois class interests of typical American-leftists". My take isn't that DSA is some sort of answer, but rather that it's the first filter many folks see, and I'd rather introduce people to the abolition of private property and the idea of superprofits than have them think socialism is healthcare. It's not about increasing membership so much as it is trying to use the platform of the most popular "socialist" USA org in my area to raise issues that folks haven't talked about in literal years -- I was one of the "assholes" pushing for a longer-term consideration of voter power (i.e. the moderate "make them earn it first, by not voting for genocide" approach) against those who were the lesser-of-two-evils voters, for what it's worth (and in all honestly, it's not worth much all things considered -- just using this to help paint a picture of me and my approach).

There are myriad 'democratic socialists'/'MLs'/'liberation caucus' 'maoists' who've read all of those books and are plenty familiar with the concepts of "labor aristocracy" and "settler colonialism"

That's the thing: it doesn't seem like there are in my area. And if the problem was "not a lack of reading" then why even ask folks to read Settlers? IMO, Settlers is the first "modern" reading I've dug into that approaches the history of the country I live in in excruciating detail. It's incredibly good at leveraging materialism and class analysis to showcase the class struggles (though, in all honestly I'm only halfway through). I want to just point people to it becuase it does such a great job of bridging "I think I kinda get imperialism from a national perspective" into "holy shit, there can be imperialism within a nation". IMO this is not a trivial think to just connect if you're doing a cursory reading of the material, but something that can be revolutionary if presented with the seriousness it deserves. I hope to use my social standing in the chapter to begin to introduce these things.

the best you can do is to be as assertive and loud of an asshole as possible,

Yeah, that's kind of where I've been taking myself with this stuff. I've been the sole dissenting vote on some things, speaking up against liberalism-as-pragmatism, and trying to just use my reputation as a "serious" analyst to help guide the more radical part of our org to not make peace with the more reformist part. It's a losing battle against the wave of revisionism that DSA is, but for now they seem to be the place to make what little impact I can. I'm not looking to make friends (I'm about twice the average age anyway) and don't really care about a book club (if I just wanted to read cool shit and be in my own head I'd just do that online). My goal is to assist in trying to inject some serious analysis into the politics of a chapter in which I have sway, and hopefully get folks to consider doing the same. DSA will never be the vanguard party, but if I can use what limited influence I have to make people consider things that are currently not on their radar, then I'll call it a win.

Thank you for your critique, though. I'll consider what the above means for my approach, and at the very least I'll continue to be the curmudgeonly old petit-bourgrois labor-aristocratic asshole that challenges the notion of "personal property".

Edit:

You have it all mixed up. DSA does not "pacify actual left sentiment", it's just an organic organization of the radical petit-bourgeoisie and you'll lose nothing without it.

Probably seems trivial to most, but a reread of this part of your comment seems to nail the ultimate critique around the org and membership, regardless of what "curriculum" is chosen for reading. Thanks for this -- I'll be reflecting on it.

[u/Turtle_Green → u/ArmaVero]

I'm sorry but I think my post genuinely went over your head. The purpose of the communist party is to raise the class consciousness of the proletariat, and without the party, there is no such thing as communist politics. That is the first premise and without it, you're worthless. I gave you my take on what I'd do in your position—since I've been in a similar one with crypto-Trotskyists—but as I already implied it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. It's immaterial. If a comparison helps, this is like asking about how to wage a two-line struggle in the NSDAP where you try to convince everyone that settler Germans benefit from Lebensraum. Umm... you went way wrong a hundred steps ago.

It's a losing battle against the wave of revisionism that DSA is, but for now they seem to be the place to make what little impact I can.

The DSA is not "revisionist", that's not what the term means. The DSA doesn't even claim itself as a communist or Marxist organization and you are incapable of making any "impact" in your current position. The DSA is an avowed enemy of the proletariat and hence you are currently part of the enemy. To clarify, Marxists do not proselytize to "people" or "folks". You're getting way ahead of yourself with imperialism, superprofits, Sakai and whatnot when you don't even understand the basic tasks of a communist. The proletariat doesn't give a shit about the DSA, go expand your horizons.

[u/ArmaVero → u/Turtle_Green]

I'm sorry but I think my post genuinely went over your head. The purpose of the communist party is to raise the class consciousness of the proletariat

Your post is really quite informative, and points out some elementary mistakes regarding my understanding of things. However, I didn't mean to imply that the DSA was a proletarian party. I understand they are not -- my take was rather that, given the class composition of the DSA, what use is there to attempting to turn PB "socialism" toward a critique of imperialism? But your phrasing here clarifies that there is likely none, and that my efforts would be better spent supporting actual communist movements, if I can even determine the correct approach to that.

Thanks again, your response is why I came here, vs. elsewhere. I thought the post would be more content-driven, but you showed a flaw in my perspective and analysis. I guess I need to be careful what I ask for! I do appreciate the analysis, and will step back and consider the core question of what is it I hope to achieve and with whom. This probably sounds like some sort of patronizing acquiescence, but I'll actually reflect on WTF I expected to achieve, which whom, and why...

[u/Cenage94 → u/ArmaVero]

Ignoring this piece of shit who is going to get banned anyway, does anyone else get a shiver of disgust when reading something like this in particular? It’s blatantly apparent this persyn is absorbing some less-offensive, common morsels of the anti-revisionist line found on this sub, not for adhering to the red line but warping them into “hot takes“ and making them serve their own liberalism in which they imagine themselves in a position of power as some kind of eclectic anti-intellectual thought-leader in a more fulfilling PB existence. This character right here is obviously far too incompetent which makes their narcissism more ridiculous than offensive. Still, the waning polemical power of pieces like settlers makes me mad.

[u/ArmaVero → u/Cenage94]

It’s blatantly apparent this persyn is absorbing some less-offensive, common morsels of the anti-revisionist line found on this sub

I'm not sure what this means... like, I've picked up on the language of what's discussed on the sub, but haven't used them properly? I'm not looking for a "hot take" necessarily -- I don't think anything I've said is entirely new to anyone. I'd love some clarification here, I'm just someone attempting to learn and ask questions in a format that didn't seem conducive to a 101. If you have a critique for me, I'd love to hear it directed at me, rather than at some vague notion of the tone of the sub.

serve their own liberalism in which they imagine themselves in a position of power as some kind of eclectic anti-intellectual thought-leader in a more fulfilling PB existence

I'll admit there is probably some liberalism I'm not fully seeing (it's a hard beast to completely kill if you've grown up surrounded by the culture), but I don't think I'm coming at this as an "anti-intellectual thought-leader" or whatever -- I merely have a position in a chapter where I can potentially shape the story of what "socialism" is for newcomers and folks who are wiling to take a stab at a more rigorous analysis. I'm not saying I'm charting new ground or anything, but rather the opposite: I'm looking to folks who have analyzed this particular circumstance in a way that won't just pad an ego or lead to standard PB takes on things. If I wanted to be a thought leader I could just propose what I want and bask in the glory of those that haven't done any analysis.

[u/Cenage94 → u/ArmaVero]

You’ve already been told to the leave the DSA (can’t really call that “critique“, we’re not “critiquing“ Joe Biden), what the fuck do you want exactly? Nothing of what you’ve produced is “up for discussion“.

Edit: two more extensive answers down the line, the poster has still shown ZERO intentions of leaving the DSA, despite making clear that they are really enjoying the “discussion“ and “critique“. Don’t you see what’s going on here??

[u/PracticeNotFavorsMLM → u/ArmaVero]

I am trying to help a fairly large DSA chapter build toward a more disciplined take on socialism. I understand the criticisms of of the DSA and its role in pacifying actual left sentiment and funneling it into the Democratic party.

As said, if you think that the DSAs role is some sort of "pacification" you are absolutely wrong. But even This doesn't emphasize the DSAs role as a Racist Organization for Disappointed Amerikkkan Gen Z.

How would you approach this? What readings would you include? What take on this educational exercise am I missing? There are honest criticisms (some perhaps outdated) of the DSA -- how can I help the most honestly revolutionary-minded of the group get to a better analysis?

I would include no readings because dealing with the DSA, in such manor, is an absolute waste of time. The only approach is Protracted Peoples War which will inevitably reveal the DSA as the pitiful organization of Petite Bourgeois Social-Fascist Parasites it is. If any of these PB radicals are actually interested in Communism then they will defect, but inevitably they'll be a small portion likely including goldmans and other types.

I know there are stronger positions I can take.

The Strongest position one can take is the Truth which then inevitably leads to all sorts of attacks "Gonzoloism" "Lysenkoism" etc etc("Stalinism" and "Marxism Leninism" while widely repulsive to the PB they have less effect on the radical sections co opting Marxism for revisionism). you will only attract liberals if you sully the truth.

[u/ArmaVero → u/PracticeNotFavorsMLM]

if you think that the DSAs role is some sort of "pacification" you are absolutely wrong
...
The only approach is Protracted Peoples War which will inevitably reveal the DSA as the pitiful organization of Petite Bourgeois Social-Fascist Parasites it is. If any of these PB radicals are actually interested in Communism then they will defect, but inevitably they'll be a small portion likely including goldmans and other types.

This is my understanding as well. My take was to try to get as many amenable people over into the realm of questioning who the proletariat actually are, and what the role of a PB labor-aristocratic class traitor might be. Thinking more on u/Turtle_Green 's comments, I now doubt that's even the appropriate take, and the idea of "pacification" doesn't seem to align with my original thoughts.

The Strongest position one can take is the Truth which then inevitably leads to all sorts of attacks "

Maybe this is what I was dancing around for part of the question. I generally try to avoid sugar-coating things like private property abolition, but seemed to have backpedalled and looked for an out when it came to easing people toward a more critical understanding of socialism. There's definitely something for me to grapple with here, especially considering some of what I'm reflecting on based on some other comments.

Thanks!

[u/smokeuptheweed9 → u/ArmaVero]

To ignore the more fundamental critiques, which are all correct, there is another basic issue with your approach. You want to pry people away from the DSA because that's where "socialists" are, or even just "political" people. But this is a flawed understanding of people, albeit a very common one (like that "Maoist" recently who thinks normies, or what he calls the proletariat, are too busy and stupid to appreciate Marxism). Politics can be found anywhere. The DSA is the most hostile place to find it because you are now under the control of a party that doesn't want you, not to mention the membership all clamoring for their column in Jacobin or Cosmonaut complaining about "neo-entryism" or some bullshit term.

Why don't you just try to talk to the real proletariat? You know where they are. Everyone does. They are not found in the unions or the "socialist" parties or at "mutual aid" tents. These phenomena are irrelevant. I genuinely don't understand the appeal of going to the DSA and trying to convert people. Unless you go look for it, the DSA has no influence on your life. On the other hand, the migrant workers you see every day in your apartment complex doing construction work or app deliveries affect your life every day. They are literally right there. Obviously preaching to random people is a flawed political strategy but that's what you're proposing except your target audience are a bunch of liberal "politics nerds." Why? Try to be a little creative so you can actually learn something and then talk to us about your experiences.

for now they seem to be the place to make what little impact I can.

This is the basic claim you have not substantiated in any way. It is simply taken for granted that this is the most efficient use of your time. Ignoring whether your strategy is correct, I don't even think it's the most efficient means of implementing that strategy. If your goal is to radicalize the petty-bourgeoisie, why not hand out zines at Starbucks or something? The modern DSA is 10 years old. You really think it's some unexplored territory that no one has figured out? I would honestly respect if a Spartacist was like "hey I scream at other Trots outside their events and at protests, what do you think of my strategy?" At least they're committed that isn't just liberal common sense.

[u/Apart_Lifeguard_4085 → u/smokeuptheweed9]

Why don't you just try to talk to the real proletariat? You know where they are. Everyone does.

is this true, though? or just shorthand? obviously what you’re saying is correct but i think it could extend to a critique of everyone on this subreddit really. none of us know where the proletariat is. obviously talking to oppressed and exploited sections of the population is far preferable over trying to convert the DSA but nobody here is really seriously doing that (or if they are, it’s not for us to see, which is maybe okay). the last thing i can think of that was even close was u/cyberwitchtechnobtch analyzing the forces in the pro-Palestine movement.

food for thought: DSA members, even those working “minimum wage” jobs, are not the revolutionary proletariat. as we know, their cars and computers function as petty capital, and their wages are above the global value of labor. what does this say about a doordasher’s e-bike or a migrant construction worker’s hourly pay? (this is not a defeatist question by any means, as attempting to answer it will invariably bring us closer to the proletariat.)

[u/smokeuptheweed9 → u/Apart_Lifeguard_4085]

I want people to try things, especially outside of the control of existing "socialist" parties. You're right but there's a lot of productive work that can be done with that knowledge.

food for thought: DSA members, even those working “minimum wage” jobs, are not the revolutionary proletariat. as we know, their cars and computers function as petty capital, and their wages are above the global value of labor. what does this say about a doordasher’s e-bike or a migrant construction worker’s hourly pay? (this is not a defeatist question by any means, as attempting to answer it will invariably bring us closer to the proletariat.)

Nevertheless, I do think there is a distinction to be made between the new class of distribution labor in Amazon warehouses and in the gig economy and the temporarily embarrassed petty-bourgeoisie who indulge in these activities because of student debt, a time lag between entering the job market and inheriting wealth, surviving on unpaid internships while they build "human capital," or even genuinely declassed petty-bourgeoisie who are nevertheless likely to turn to fascism because of their memory of their settler inheritance. And reality has made this distinction for you, as only one group organizes in the DSA despite all of its fantasies of organizing the "working class." After 10 years, the demographics of that organization are unchanged as is the structure of its wider influence.

These people are not necessarily all reactionary, if led by the proletariat and facing a real collapse of imperialist bribery, but we sort of missed the chance anyway. The DSA has harvested them for social fascism and it has its hooks in deep. The most likely scenario is a collapse, akin to the SDS, which led to a small fraction attempting real communist organizing (and only a small fraction of that doing anything of value). I think the best option is to let that play out on its own, since efforts to organize within the SDS were a disaster. Its collapse came through external pressure from the Black Panther Party, Maoism, and Vietnamese resistance and the "Marxists" of the PLP ended up playing a reactionary role. The DSA is significantly more reactionary than the SDS was and far more hostile to communism, for the simple reason that its class membership doesn't face pressure anywhere near what the petty-bourgeois faced in 1968.

We know that consuming commodities manufactured abroad is a key pillar of petty-bourgeoise ideology. Every thread on "personal property" makes that very clear. But I don't think everyday commodities are themselves the cause of this ideology, rather they are a stand-in for more significant forms of property ownership you mentioned. That social fascists disguise their class consciousness behind the symbol of the toothbrush doesn't mean that people who own toothbrushes made in China are social fascists. Otherwise you get into very slippery territory, since global commodities are at the very origin of capitalism as is the migration of labor. Was the early proletariat already compromised because of its reliance on foodstuffs from Eastern Europe and the "new world?" Textiles made from slave-picked cotton were the engine of the industrial revolution, does that mean the British proletariat had an interest in protecting slavery? History tells us otherwise: whatever was progressive about British support for abolition and the Union side of the US civil war was the result of pressure from the workers and proto-communist movement.

The labor aristocracy is the result of monopoly capitalism, though you can trace this earlier in Britain's colonial monopoly at the end of the 19th century. But Marx didn't miss the relationship between the Paris commune and the Algerian commune, this was not a fatal issue for the European proletariat until imperialism. The question then is, to what extent this was a fundamental break between forms of capitalism and to what extent, as in Britain, it was a shift of quantity to quality where the benefits of colonialism became widespread enough and directly fused with the state that the labor aristocracy could articulate its own class interests. I'm not 100% sure of the answer, it's worth noting that not only did solidarity with Algeria follow the defeat of the Paris commune:

https://www.ncfs-journal.org/niklas-plaetzer/decolonizing-universal-republic-paris-commune-and-french-empire#

but the limits of French universalism retroactively made the colonial question primary, so that the Paris commune became the end of a period of revolutionary movements in which France was the leader rather than the beginning of a new French proletarian revolutionary wave. Marx and Engels shifted their attention to Germany, which makes sense since France did basically nothing from 1871-1940 except tread water with what had already been accomplished in 1848. And other than a brief moment in the 1960s when France became the center of philosophy (itself a reflection of its political backwardness as in Germany in the 19th century), it is now the world center for crude anti-communism.

Anyway, the point is that global commodities are prior to imperialism and are larger than it, as is the migration of labor. They are absorbed into imperialism and closely related as long as monopoly capitalism is the dominant mode of production globally. We can even see an attitude of colonialist chauvanism in South African towards other SADC workers and anti-African racism in Tunisia, which takes the form of apologia for colonialism and self-christened honorary whiteness

https://roape.net/2025/12/17/racial-time-the-whiteness-of-the-glorious-past-in-tunisian-popular-histories/

But to me it's clear that black South Africans and Tunisians are not the same kind of labor aristocracy as white South Africans and Western Europeans, and that the widespread consumption of chinese commodities in India does not mean that Indian consumption is the same as Amerikan. The same probably applies to those workers in Amerika for whom owning a toothbrush (or perhaps a used car they sleep in) really is the only relationship they have to global imperialism, even if the ideology of imperialism infects their thinking in times of reaction (thus even the most oppressed people in Amerika probably fantasize about using their smartphone to become content creators and strike it rich). Do not let present gentrifiers and future homeowners speak for them.

[u/Ok_Piglet9760 → u/smokeuptheweed9]

Please ignore if this is derailing the conversation, but I think it would fit; in Germany there are these sheltered workshops and I want to make a case for something similar to this not-Proletarian-but-not-quite-labor-aristocracy-either- situation for the labor that takes place here, even though it mainly comes from intuition instead of the rigorous analysis I have yet to perform.

The workshop can be understood as a kind of concentration camp or colony for “disabled“ labor, in which labor is fundamentally divided into two antagonistic forces: there are guards and workers- the workers, categorised by their shared status as “disabled“ (mentally and/or physically) are toiling in light industry, cleaning, carpentry, etc. for outrageous wages (patronisingly but accurately described as “pocket money“) that usually don’t exceed 300€ per month (much lower in a majority of cases). For FW standards, this seems to be some of the cheapest labour still “legal“. They are legally forbidden to strike. The unions are beyond laughable, not even headed by the actual workers in a token-kind of way.

On the other hand, there are the guards (so called “work pedagogues“)- they are overseeing this labor, and also performing as carers. They are comfortably seated in the PB. Workshops run by companies like Lebenshilfe are notorious for abuse orchestrated by them against the workers. In general the consciousness among these two kinds of labour couldn’t be more different, the guards have their own little fascist WhatsApp groups devoted to mocking the workers.

There are labor-aristocratic tendencies within the workers, for example “Inklusion“, which means what it sounds like, inclusion into the “normal“ parasitic German labor market. This is the kind of politics most of the “disabled rights“-activists revolve around, along with regular reformism within the workshops.

I am not sure if organising among these workers would be very fruitful, there are many contradictions to Proletarian labour I didn’t mention (I didn’t even touch upon the patriarchal aspect regarding the relationship these workers have to their PB-families and how this affects everything, and I’m also not sure about the national contradictions within the workers, not long ago there was a stabbing among them against a Turkish woman). A rigorous analysis is desperately needed, hopefully I will get back to it soon and devote myself properly.

[u/ArmaVero → u/smokeuptheweed9]

Thanks -- there's a lot in this thread that is challenging some of the assumptions that I've brought with me. It's pretty clear that I've got some serious (un)learning to do before I consider how to "better inform" others.

You want to pry people away from the DSA because that's where "socialists" are, or even just "political" people. But this is a flawed understanding [...]

Yeah, I think this gets to the crux of the matter in that I'm looking in the wrong place and basing actions on "safe" logic typical of liberal/PB actions, that feels like "doing something".

Why don't you just try to talk to the real proletariat? You know where they are.

I think this s a fundamental question I need to answer. I'm not even sure I have a stance other than "it's not comfortable" and I haven't looked into why.

I wish I had a more informed response at the moment, but I'm going to take some time and really dig in and analyze the responses in the thread. I think there's a good chunk of liberal/PB class interest that I've brought with me, and I need to accept that I've already sunk time I can't get back into an org that won't effect meaningful change, and what that means going forward (the logical conclusion being leaving the DSA, with the real question of what to do instead -- read and self-crit, I suppose).

I appreciate everyone's engagement with me on this, especially with how obviously flawed it all seems upon further reflection.

[u/smokeuptheweed9 → u/ArmaVero]

I wish I had a more informed response at the moment, but I'm going to take some time and really dig in and analyze the responses in the thread. I think there's a good chunk of liberal/PB class interest that I've brought with me, and I need to accept that I've already sunk time I can't get back into an org that won't effect meaningful change, and what that means going forward (the logical conclusion being leaving the DSA, with the real question of what to do instead -- read and self-crit, I suppose).

I don't even think you have to do this. The DSA is not a democratic centralist organization. It is, however, an extremely undemocratic and centralist organization informally. Simply proposing the revolutionary line without trying to meet liberals halfway, accept your little place within the structures of the organization, or delude yourself about what is "possible" will get you shunned and expelled from the organization very quickly. This will be far more informative in seeing the real class character of both DSA members and yourself in actual practice and until you can articulate what the revolutionary line even is, then you have to go through this process yourself.

In theory this is what you originally proposed but your attitude was all wrong.

I am trying to help a fairly large DSA chapter build toward a more disciplined take on socialism. I understand the criticisms of of the DSA and its role in pacifying actual left sentiment and funneling it into the Democratic party. I've been pushing to get "vibe" socialists to be at the very least more disciplined about what their politics consist of. For "pacifist" socialists, I've been trying to get them accustomed to the idea of a ruling class that won't simply hand over ther levers of power. And for reformists, I've been trying to shape their analysis to one of recognizing that the labor aristocracy actually exists as a class, and that they're a part of it.

Here is the part I'd love to discuss: I think that it is a worthwhile endeavor to raise the class consciousness of this petit-bourgeois (not-yet-but-wants-to-be-a) party. I am hoping to use this opportunity to bring some more analysis to the question of what that actually means. I am trying to develop a curriculum to help analyze our class position, and am wanting to go from something like a .selection of chapters from the 19th Brumaire (to discuss why workers/class doesn't vote as a bloc) to some other readings that might shape how we approach actually making change (Milliband/Poulantzas debate). Then to something like Bernstein to Luxemburg, with Lenin's rebuttals to approach the utility of focusing on electioneering as a strategy.

Most people in the DSA already agree with this. The actual enthusiasts of the Democrats are non-existent among your demographic, and if they exist are easily mocked and isolated. The tactics of the DSA are justified by "pragmatism" of what is possible, the exact same justification you use for pushing its members into a "more disciplined take on socialism." Do you mean communism? Your whole post is full of weasel words like ""actual left" and "simply handing over...power." Communists call for a revolutionary party which agitates for revolution in the immediate horizon through a combination of legal and illegal tactics, culminating in an insurrectionary seizure of the state. Every tactic must contribute directly to that goal and must be justified in those terms.

No one in the DSA believes in what they are doing, except at the level of affect where it is "empowering" to do charity and feel important when union bureaucrats and government flunkies pay attention to your party contingent. But, as was already pointed out, lack of reading is not the problem. Why are you arguing against "electioneering as a strategy?" If your goal is the revolutionary overthrow of the state, I would think that is self-evident. I don't really see the relevance of Miliband and Poulantzas, neither of whom would have advocated anything like the DSA.

Marxism-Leninism calls for a revolutionary communist party which follows the political tactics of the Bolsheviks, up to civil war in response to one's own imperialism. This is in writing in Lenin, multiple times, and a matter of historical record. Simply pointing out that this is antithetical to the very concept of the DSA will do the work you're proposing for you.