cucumovirus

Michael Parenti - To Kill a Nation

Yep, same here and not just books.

Unfortunately, the situation is largely the same in many countries. Especially the previously socialist European countries that are now in EU/NATO.

I mostly just go to second-hand bookshops where a lot of the good older books can still be found.

Ginkgo biloba, it's a living fossil, has some very interesting properties, and I really like the unique shape of its leaves.

Sorry, can't really recommend anyone. I don't follow much Marxist content on youtube/in podcast form.

Yes, I like seeing articles/talks by communists from other countries. There's always something new to learn.

Roderic Day seems to be one of the few people (at least that I'm aware of) involved in translating some of these to English and publishing them.

Some examples of them interacting with patsocs on twitter. There are also youtube comments where they praise Haz. Also this happened.

Some of their other employees also interact on twitter with patsocs and their communities seem to be tolerant of misogyny among other things. Now they just use the "purity fetish" as a conversation-ender to attack any criticism thrown at them without engaging with the substance.

They sort of try to hide it/keep it away from their main stuff, but the connections are there if you look. MWM themselves have some problematic content as shown by some of their articles posted in this thread and their broad anti-decolonial takes. There is more evidence of other stuff out there, although I haven't looked into this specifically.

To me it's just too much clearly bad stuff to consider them a good source for things. They have had some good content about certain topics, but I'd rather not sift through the patsoc or patsoc-adjacent stuff to get to it. Not to mention that they recently seem to be going down the open patsoc line more and more. There are plenty of other Marxists online who don't have this kind of track record.

Yes, although I think we should be skeptical of basing our movement on the lumpen. As Marx and Engels point out, the lumpen can be quite easily bribed by the ruling classes and doesn't really form a solid revolutionary movement. But classes like colonized people and black people in the US have already historically been involved in vanguard formation (e.g. the Black Panthers), and even today we see genuine movements popping up which are led by these classes (e.g. Stop cop city, and even things like the Amazon union led by Chris Smalls). The patsocs disregard (or even attack in the case of land back) all this and instead choose to pander to reactionary white sections of the population whose revolutionary potential is non existent.

To circle back a bit to the purity discussion, today I found this great pamphlet by Lenin in which he talks about factionalism and I think that discussion nicely mirrors the purity discussion and responds to MWM's position (which despite what they claim boils down to "everyone in unpure except us").

the Americans have never defeated their outward Imperialism. It has always been defeated by their victims themselves.

Yes, and I think this point is very important. This is true pretty much anywhere that imperialism has been defeated, even temporarily, and we shouldn't expect it to happen the other way around. In fact, the US being a settler colony makes this already unrealistic scenario even more unrealistic. The people of Imperial core nations simply benefit too much. That's where revolutionary defeatism comes in. In cases where an imperialist/colonialist nation was defeated militarily (e.g. in a world war), the colonies of those nations that won independence still had to fight for it. It wasn't ever just given. And cases where it might seem like it was, are cases where imperialist ties still persisted and the formerly colonized nations were still exploited through imperialism.

I think the fact that some people don't understand this and push basically a white savior narrative in which settlers in the US have a revolution or do something to free all the lands the US extracts wealth from is a symptom of the prevalent and baked in white supremacy of these settler states. There is a dialectical relationship between the colonized and the colonizer classes that also needs to be resolved in order to actually build towards communism and that resolution will not come from the class in power just stepping down. I'm not a settler myself so I guess it's easier to see this more clearly from the outside, but our comrades that are settlers need to do this analysis and self-crit accordingly. No one is saying that white communists in the US can't support these indigenous and black movements, in fact they have to support them against the mass of settlers but they cannot replace them.

The thing is that the majority of the working class in the US and the white sections of the working class in particular simply aren't revolutionary classes due to their material conditions. They all benefit from imperialist superprofits from abroad (not just by higher wages but also by cheap goods, commodities, services, and things like entertainment, etc.) and the whites also benefit from the greater exploitation and oppression of minorities within the US. Not all workers in the US are the same, some are much more oppressed than others. These are key points to analyze when considering the revolutionary potential in any country.

You can see examples in the US historically of large sections of white workers being opposed to or at best indifferent towards indigenous or black revolutionary liberation movements. These examples exist because of the material conditions causing differences in interests between these groups. The white settler population will not give up its position without significant pressure both internal and external. Not necessarily military defeat (although that's a likely road due to current imperialist politics) but certainly economically by breaking enough of the chains of imperialism externally (by the third world liberating itself) causing more exploitation internally which will push larger sections of the population to revolutionary action the first among which will again be the minorities.

though they are a severe right deviation, not understanding dialectics, material conditions or the character of nationalism.

I agree, but at some point a deviation becomes a full disconnect. I think some of the people that end up in patsoc spaces are just misguided while actually searching for an alternative to mainstream narratives, but I don't think that applies to the leadership. I'm constantly reminded of stories of fascist movements starting out in Europe using all sorts of leftist sounding rhetoric while obviously being reactionary. A perfect example I think is Mussolini's story.

I know you're not saying we shouldn't criticize (this part is not necessarily directed at you but at everyone in general), but we must criticize the patsoc positions (and ones like MWM that are either there already or seem to be on their way). How else will we ever build a proper communist movement? Marx, Lenin and all the other great communist theorists relentlessly criticized anyone that was deviating. Of course, this didn't stop, for instance, the Bolsheviks from forming strategic alliance with e.g. the Mensheviks, but only to achieve specific political goals, and all the while still criticizing the incorrect positions held by their temporary, strategic allies.

I don't think there's much, if anything, to be gained from US communists allying with patsocs. Lenin talks about compromises, their nature and how to approach them (which types of compromises are beneficial and which aren't) in '"Left-wing" communism, An infantile disorder' and I think we should take that lesson a bit more seriously.

I'm also reminded of his criticisms of the Economists in 'What is to be done?' while talking about the need to build a genuine Marxist movement, and not to allow the class struggle to be limited only to certain areas (in that particular example, trade unionism) and that the Party should be ahead of the spontaneous class consciousness of the proletariat so it can guide it to the correct line and not chase it's tail (tailism). The patsocs and patsoc-adjacent positions limit class struggle in the realms of settler colonialism and corresponding land-back and decolonial movements, and in a lot of cases in the realm of struggle for LGBTQ and other minority rights.

In the imperial core in general the conditions are not ripe for revolution (and I don't think they will be for quite some time) so I think that building a proper ML party/movement should be the main goal. A movement that is ideologically "pure" if you want to call it that, but one that will be strong internally and ready to lead the revolutionary masses when the time come. Lenin talks about keeping the correct line and thus achieving actual results for the proletariat which will itself bring more people to the movement as opposed to other, deviating movements. Doing all this is of course much easier said than done but I think more effort going in that direction is sorely needed.

The main point I would like to say about this "purity" discussion is that I think it's framed in an entirely wrong way. The material conditions simply aren't revolutionary in the imperial core yet and we need to be thinking about long-term plans. This talk of purity in ideology is largely useless when the majority of the western working class is benefiting from imperialism. Of course they aren't flocking to the ML line. The material conditions guide ideology, not the other way around. (sorry for the long comment)

I've noticed a few times that decolonial points get brought up, specifically in relation to US settlers today, the comments expressing these ideas tend to get quite a few downvotes without anyone really offering a substantive critique. I find it a bit worrying but I don't know if it's some external brigading or if some of the users here hold these views.

In any case, like you said, the US is very much still a white-supremacist settler state. There is a very real material basis leading to differences in interests between racial groups in the US. This kind of divide makes it very difficult if not impossible to rely on a predominantly white working class to be a revolutionary force. There's a reason that most of the theoretical development and all the revolutionary movements in the US have been led by minorities and the conditions to change that aren't there yet. Not even close.

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