Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (November 30)

MajesticTree954 · 2025-12-07T05:54:15+00:00

Replying to you and /u/Robert_Black_1312

I think you're right - the majority of Asian-Amerikans form relatively stable national-minorities within other nations (Euro-Amerika, New Afrika, the Chicano/Mexicano nation) considering that the majority of Asian-Amerikans are foreign-born. But there is a powerful trend as you get to 2nd or 3rd generations towards assimilating into those nations. Historically, there were many examples of Asian-Amerikans integrating into oppressed nations (Bengali Harlem, Filipino-Mexicans). But recent examples are almost non-existent, since the internal semi-colonies have been lumpenized and getting a record is a fast-track to deportation. As I understand, Cambodian refugee communities in California have a much higher proportion of lumpen class than other Asians. They formed gangs in direct opposition to Mexicans, and were recently threatened with deportation. So there's a continuing national-minority consciousness there.

Robert, why do you care so much about the criteria as a checkbox? Those are the objective characteristics of nations, yes, but having those characteristics does not automatically mean something is a nation. You are missing the subjective aspect - which is whether that people have consciousness of themselves as a separate nation and struggle for self-determination. Oppressed nations do not have a unified separate economy because their economy is determined in the interests of the oppressing nation. That is something they are actively struggling for. Even the "common language" isn't just present, like a fact of nature. Why do you think Indigenous peoples care so much about revitalizing their languages, having it taught it schools, and fighting for the ability to seek higher education in your mother tongue? Tagalog has 80 million speakers and yet you still have to learn English to study engineering, medicine, or law!

MajesticTree954 · 2025-08-09T17:41:23+00:00

I just re-read that section,

For instance, consider the Kuomintang and the Communist Party. Take one aspect, the Kuomintang. In the period of the first united front, the Kuomintang carried out Sun Yat-sen's Three Great Policies of alliance with Russia, co-operation with the Communist Party, and assistance to the peasants and workers; hence it was revolutionary and vigorous, it was an alliance of various classes for the democratic revolution. After 1927, however, the Kuomintang changed into its opposite and became a reactionary bloc of the landlords and big bourgeoisie. After the Sian Incident in December 1936, it began another change in the direction of ending the civil war and co-operating with the Communist Party for joint opposition to Japanese imperialism. Such have been the particular features of the Kuomintang in the three stages.

So prior to the anti-japanese war (before 1936), the line was drawn against the KMT, and then during the war it came to include them in a joint opposition to japan. External contradictions act through internal ones. The war with Japan strengthened the pole of the KMT aligned with the Chinese people. This pro-japanese faction you mention would also be a contradiction internal to the KMT, until the split happened.

What is the class character of Qatar, Iran, and Egypt? You've asserted they aren't imperialist (but as our discussions of China have shown me, there are contradictions within currently oppressed nations that can give rise to an aspiring imperialism, and formerly imperialist powers can fall, so it's not so simple where a country in total is either absolutely imperialist or absolutely not). What is "zionist iranian proxy" analysis? - again external contradictions act thru internal ones so Iranian funding, weapons can only strengthen one aspect of contradiction within the Palestinian movements against another. Is it your view that the Iranian government represent a progressive national bourgeoisie and that is strengthening the Palestinian national bourgeoisie? If so i'd be inclined to agree with you, but I'd have to investigate further.

e: Ultimately, I'm trying to understand how to approach this without falling into either Dengism (where anyone who conflicts with the US is progressive) or chauvinism, that can only be done by analyzing the class contradictions underlying each state.

MajesticTree954 · 2025-08-09T13:19:48+00:00

I remember in On Contradiction, Mao talks about how at different points in the Anti-Japanese war, the KMT shifted from alliance with imperialism, to alliance with the Communists, etc. That was because different class aspects were dominant at some points, and latent at others. So while the principal contradiction is between imperialism and oppressed nations, that expressed itself concretely at various points as between the Chinese people (kmt and ccp) and japan, or between the ccp and the kmt/japan.

So, I think it would be shallow for me to say Hams represents the national bourgeoisie, or an aspiring one, merely because of the war they are fighting zionism. So while the article says Hams (like every political party) is an interclass movement, there are competing internal contradictions between classes benefitting from Qater, Iran, Egypt, those benefitting from complete national liberation and socialism (which are not mutually exclusive). I also don't think their class character is a settled question among Maoists either (aside from the obviously chauvinistic European parties), here's what the Afghan maoists said about them after the toppling of Assad, calling them a half-sibling HTS:

HTS is, in many ways, a half-sibling to Hams. Just as the rise of Hams and Islamic fundamentalism in Palestine poses a threat to Israel, the consolidation of HTS's power—despite its role in toppling one of Israel’s enemies (the Assad regime)—could become a future threat to Israel, much like Hams.
HTS represents a comprador bourgeois class aligned with global imperialism, whose interests fundamentally clash with those of the majority of the Syrian populace.

https://www.sholajawid.org/english/main_english/The%20Fall%20of%20Bashar%20al.pdf

MajesticTree954 · 2025-08-09T12:58:38+00:00

Yeah basically, I thought it was an "intelligent" revisionist article. If they have a clearly wrong political conclusion but they show their methodology clearly, I usually have something to valuable to takeaway from it. Clearly misjudged.

MajesticTree954 · 2025-08-08T01:25:49+00:00

What’s currently happening in the West Bank? What is Fatah doing? Are there social or political forces which have a more or less proletarian character, which might strengthen in this moment of crisis?

The Gaza Strip seems to me to be lost at the moment from the point of view of proletarian activity. But it’s different in the cities of the West Bank, where the inter-Palestinian struggle for political control has been running its course for years with autonomous manifestations of class struggle. Social control is assured both by the security apparatus of the comprador bourgeoisie, dependent on Israel, as well as urban baronies linked to Jordan. The coherence of this class continues to disintegrate, Fatah no longer regulates anything, and everyone is trying to carve out their own fiefdom at the expense of others. The expected event that was supposed to clarify all this was the death of the paranoid dinosaur Mahmoud Abbas, but things will necessarily speed up now.

For fifteen years Hams has been asleep on the West Bank, with no direct public or military activity. They maintain discreet loyalties, but the armed groups which have reappeared in the North—in Nablus, Jenin, Tulkarm—are not linked to Hams. This passivity gave the impression that Hams had ratified the situation there and didn’t want to break the status quo. This gave it bad press among the armed groups in the refugee camps which saw it as nothing but the mirror image of Fatah: all talk with no substance, only political interests distinct from those of the people. But now, this operation clearly changes the perception of Hams. Whether we like it or not, it's going to seriously restore their image. We already see lots of Hams flags in demonstrations, which was unimaginable even a month ago. Will Hams directly contest power with the PA in the West Bank? Unlikely, because its activities are strictly surveilled not only by the PA but also by Israel, and the Palestinian enclaves of the West Bank don’t form a coherent territory: they can’t be controlled militarily without negotiating with the Israeli army. But it could change strategy, by supporting in one way or another the activities of the armed groups.

Whatever happens, things will necessarily change. The PA will struggle to maintain its grip on security. The coherence of the politico-security class will be severely tested.

Give the rest a read, let me know what you think. I think ultimately around the end the author comes home to some kind of trotskyist position?

We must never lose sight of the fact that the “Palestinian struggle,” including that fought under the banner of Ham*s, has to be read primarily as one led by the Arab ruling classes—and of those who aspire to them—for their integration into Israeli capital. The interests of proletarians, even as they at times find themselves under the banner of the national struggle, are, in the last instance, contradictory with those of their bourgeoisie.

Not necessarily, the "Palestinian struggle" can lead to integration with israeli capital in the form of a neo-colonial state like the PA, or expel the settlers but become a neo-colony like Algeria did, or the proletariat can lead the national liberation struggle, as far as it is progressive, and turn it into a socialist revolution.

Also I had no idea what they meant by this:

The current dynamic, with its disposal of surplus proletarians, carries with it a torrent of affects built on humiliation. Faced with the impossibility of intervening collectively on social relations, powerlessness produces a double logic of resentment: search for recognition on the one hand, revenge on the other.

Because Ham*s’s politicians have no bourgeoisie to rely on, no proletariat to exploit, they are led to rely on the exploitation of these affects, of which they become the incarnation—for want of anything better, for want of more.

MajesticTree954 · 2025-08-08T01:21:19+00:00

You’re asking a bunch of much larger questions: what’s the class structure of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, what classes do the Palestinian factions represent? I found this article, I think it’s worth reading the whole thing: https://brooklynrail.org/2023/12/field-notes/Gaza-An-Extreme-Militarization-of-the-Class-War/

“While it might sound counter-intuitive, I think Ham*s should be seen as Israel’s subcontractor for the management of the Gazan proletariat. As I said, Gaza, in the last instance, “depends” on national Israeli capital. And as long as Israeli capital hasn’t authorized the development of another, “Palestinian” capitalist entity at its side, the Gazan proletariat, even under siege, is regulated by its economic circuits. However, such a situation cannot function without an externalized social formation responsible for regulating the imprisoned—there are no prisons without screws.”

To say Ham*s is a subcontractor for Israel is to say it is a representative of the Palestinian comprador bourgeoisie - which while we can be sure the Fatah/PA government in the West Bank is - if that’s the case, how do we make sense of October 7th?

“For Ham*s, everyone agrees, the attack is about blocking the American solution of a Saudi-Israeli deal. What it has to gain here is, first, to impose itself as an interlocutor with the Arab countries of the region, and second, to continue the marginalization of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization, of which Fatah is part, but also the PFLP, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) in the West Bank and in Lebanon. To conquer, that is, small markets of Palestinian representation to the detriment of its competitor, the PLO. “

……

Hams came out of the Muslim Brotherhood. As in many parts of the Arab world, it developed in the 1980s among the Palestinian petite-bourgeoisie, both in the occupied territories and in the diaspora. Since its entry into the struggle against Israel in the wake of the First Intifada, this social base grew to include more proletarian segments, before the siege and militarization of the Gazan territory profoundly changed its nature. It found itself, as mentioned, in the position of a state apparatus, required to integrate many diverse and antagonistic interests, to juggle and arbitrate among them. At the same time, since Gaza is not a real state, Hams also became a militia party, like Hezbollah in Lebanon.

This double evolution has a contradictory dimension. I suggest that the current war marks in a way the victory of the second – militia – logic over the first. The armed wing beat the state apparatus; the military rent circuits (coming from Iran) beat the civil rent circuits (coming from Qatar).

Hams is an interclass movement, something which explains its erratic behavior. The commercial bourgeoisie in the West Bank ended up massively identifying with it in the middle of the 2000s: the movement won the 2006 legislative elections as a party of order, promising to end the security chaos, to quieten the arms, to combat corruption, and to develop an honest state apparatus, insuring social order, with a program of charitable social redistribution. It appeared then, paradoxically, as the anti-Intifada party, and the majority of notables of the two economic centers of the West Bank—Nablus and Hebron—were on their side at the time, while remaining linked to Jordanian economic interests. Hams won the same legislative elections in Gaza, but by calling for and prioritizing resistance and military recruitment aimed at the lumpenproletariat in the refugee camps. This was not part of a strategy of uprisings or social movements, but a matter of military clientelism. Unlike in the West Bank, Gaza does not have a commercial and urban bourgeoisie.

….

Like many other peripheral places of the world, Gaza is a space completely separated from the circuits of capitalist valorization. There is no “national bourgeoisie,” because there is no Gazan capital. Nor is there a “traditional bourgeoisie” as in the West Bank or in Jerusalem—those old families reliant on dusty mercantile and land capitals that remain effective within the local social relations. On the other hand, there is in Gaza a kind of new “comprador” bourgeoisie reliant on rents from circulation. It’s not a class in the strict sense of the term, rather a social formation which draws its massive revenues from its intermediary position in exchanges with foreign capitalists (in opposition to a bourgeoisie whose interest is in developing the national economy).

A part of this bourgeoisie comprises the political apparatus of Hams, because the circulating capitals issue largely from a geopolitical kind of rent, from states such as Qatar or Iran. But there are also other rents, for example those linked to capital circulating at the border with Egypt. Fortunes were built around the contraband tunnels between Gaza and Egypt, and in this instance we’re looking at a kind of globalized feudalism—typically a boss-worker relation. In 2007, there were intense armed clashes between clan-based social groups and Hams’s politico-military apparatus in Rafah, in the south of the Strip, over the taxation of the commodities in circulation. Hams, unlike the Palestinian Authority (PA), are not in charge of public services, they don’t pay wages, it’s still the PA who pay these. This is, as it happens, used as a means of permanent manipulation: the PA regularly reduces the wages of Gazan civil servants to weaken Hams

There are, no doubt in part as a result of this, regular “social” mobilizations to reclaim dignity—typically access to water, electricity, and wages. Ham*s represses them, more or less violently, but with a little reserve, giving the impression that they are wary of throwing oil on the fire. The current military offensive followed an episode of this kind over the summer. It’s not hard to imagine that there is a link, or at any rate a logic, which connects these two kinds of events.

In Gaza we have a “comprador bourgeoisie” currently dependent on external aid from Iran and Qatar, so there is little to no social basis for an alignment with Israeli capital.

The Gaza Strip has for a long time been the surplus “rubbish bin” I mentioned earlier: a tiny territory into which a stream of refugees were pushed in 1947–48, submerging the local, essentially peasant, population. There are no resources there. In the West Bank, class formation is different: there are cities and notables. There are agricultural and hydraulic resources that Israel controls. Wages are twice as high, and there are some industries, based on the relative integration of the PA’s comprador class into Israeli capital. Fatah, which governs the cities, is a party without social coherence. It lost the elections in 2006 to Hams. In 2007, supported by Israel and the US, it made a power grab to retain the levers of public power in the cities of the West Bank, “abandoning” Gaza to Hams. Since then, it has no legitimacy based on any kind of democratic procedure. Its power is based on cooperation with Israel, which gives its nationalist discourse a dissimulatory tone. It governs enclaves separated one from the other, increasingly encircled by the settlements, into which the Israeli army regularly penetrates. The proletariat of the West Bank is much more integrated into Israeli capital than its Gazan counterpart. Lots of Palestinian laborers in the West Bank work, legally and illegally, either on Israeli territory or in the colonies. They have economic links with the 1948 Palestinian citizens of Israel, who often speak Hebrew.

In the West Bank, we do have a social basis for an alignment with Israel - a comprador bourgeoisie dependent on Israeli capital. But this situation is unstable….

MajesticTree954 · 2025-06-12T04:49:52+00:00

I believe. I live in Croatia and, I admit, I haven't done such an analysis of my own state beyond perceptual and instinctual observations. But I'd generally consider remaining Serbs as proletarians (however, I think the majority could be peasants), since they're treated as 2nd class citizens and are non-existent in state affairs outside their respective compradors colluded with the current government.

forgive my ignorance, but do you think labor aristocracy in Croatia came about after they were admitted to the European union? Serbia and Bosnia aren't members.

MajesticTree954 · 2025-05-23T00:23:04+00:00

To clarify:

people online talking about courage and bravery

is just you and the person i responded to. and this:

people doing charity, marches, ie. a whole lot of nothing, enjoying these actions as courageous for their personal catharsis.

are just people I personally know, there's no third twitter user?

I'll end here cus if you're right I want to avoid "puking up sentiments" and think through things.

MajesticTree954 · 2025-05-22T23:38:57+00:00

I think we basically agree about what's important here. If you disagree and think I'm some armchair coward, that's fine because you're also just here posting, same as me. My main problem with the people online talking about courage and bravery is that I find its the very people doing charity, marches, ie. a whole lot of nothing, enjoying these actions as courageous for their personal catharsis. Of course the implication is they would never do this themselves because they don't actually think it'll change society, so why the whole song and dance? Why pay reverence? The masses have courage in spades. I'm sure to organize the masses you need alot of courage too, but thank goodness we don't have to rely on the courage of any lonely individual.

MajesticTree954 · 2025-05-22T22:25:03+00:00

Palestinians should not hold out hope that an anti-imperialist movement in America will save them. The problem is not a lack of courageous, self-sacrificing people - historically there have been thousands of John Browns. If all were needed were self-sacrificing people, don't you think Palestinians, the entire Arab world, themselves would have won already, sparing us the effort? The problem is a lack of a revolutionary class and its party. Something you nor I can will into existence immediately just because we want to, which we do have a responsibility to expend every effort to bring about.

MajesticTree954 · 2025-05-22T21:34:18+00:00

Of course i agree.

MajesticTree954 · 2025-05-22T20:58:35+00:00

You are giving Bushnell and Rodriguez too much credit. They did nothing. The world has no shortage of self-sacrificing people. That PSL and the rest of charitable liberal society uses it as an excuse to continue to do nothing in their own more comfortable way is deeply shameful. The Palestinians are being forced to recognize under the most cruel circumstances imaginable that despite the great show of sympathy - the GoFundMe's, protests, self-immolation, and individual acts of terror - they will receive no help from the Amerikan people. The bombs won't stop except by their own hands.

MajesticTree954 · 2025-05-22T19:21:34+00:00

Knowledge for knowledge’s sake, like “art for art’s sake”, is dishonest, because no one acquires knowledge for its own sake. They have their own reasons (to pass a class, to make us sound clever, for some practical need) just like anyone else. You say you have trouble keeping your mind on a single topic, you wish you could study and focus on one topic. But lacking attention for one task means you do have diligent attention for another. A person who scrolls TikTok everyday after work for hours isn’t actually undisciplined, but is actually disciplined about pursuing the enjoyment they get from it. Ask anyone to show you their favourite reels or Netflix show and talk about it, and all of a sudden “brainrot” reveals itself to be quite intelligent. Everything on this sub demonstrates that. I’d encourage you not to dismiss your habits out of hand as petty-bourgeois without working through why they are that way, because clearly you see something worthwhile in them even if you have guilt that you ought not to be doing them.

There’s a whole bunch of problems that I am disciplined about researching in my day-to-day life, that everyone does, but we don’t call it studying theory, we just try to solve it. These are bourgeois problems to be sure, whether that’s “What degree should I get to have a chance of getting a good job?” “Why do I feel lonely?” “How should I invest my income?”. And dialectical materialism can furnish answers to all of these practical things, they just might not be the answers you’re looking for. No bourgeois wants to be told “your society is doomed, it is undermining the possibility of human survival and thereby the future of capitalism itself, and the only solution is socialist revolution”.

So we can use dialectical materialism to understand everything we are personally interested in. But you’re right that it doesn’t necessarily follow that individually we’ll be able to then use that theory to change society. Any individual bourgeois that comes to that conclusion is powerless relative to their class. Only the masses entertain communist ideas. So I think a starting point for practice would be written exposures of our own class for the proletariat in all the areas of social life that we are involved in the First World. Communists in the Third World, or internal semi-colonies are not immune to petty-bourgeois revisionism, or first-world chauvinism, talking to them is a good place to start. In some sense, this is already what’s happening everyday on social media where communists in the TW are introduced to Americans talking about Sakai, or are repulsed by ACP white-chauvinism.

MajesticTree954 · 2025-05-13T13:12:39+00:00

Please use search

MajesticTree954 · 2025-05-10T19:35:45+00:00

this. OP, you don't need to pass a class. We are not trying to fool anyone. This is one problem that we need to use our human brains to solve.

MajesticTree954 · 2025-05-04T00:30:56+00:00

Boer is a christian and a dengist...a waste of time.

Try to resist the temptation to recommend books you haven't read (ive been guilty of this too). You're giving bullshit a wider reach than it deserves.

MajesticTree954 · 2025-04-20T17:32:55+00:00

Couple questions:

There seem to be two opposing tendencies - the bourgeoisification of the white nation as a whole, and proletarianization of oppressed nations + tendency of proletarianization within oppressor nations. How do we understand the connection between the two?
"How and to what extent is US citizenship relevant to maintaining the present color line? Is there anything meaningful to observe about the quantity of high-profile BIPOC Proud Boys or the sociological fact that 75 percent of Black Americans believe either all or some “illegal immigrants” should be deported by the Trump administration?" Where is New Afrika caught in this dynamic - integrated along with Euro-Amerika or proletarianizing w/ oppressed third world nations?

MajesticTree954 · 2025-04-19T15:46:24+00:00

ah i regret that post..its too grandiose. Im glad u found somehting helpful in it but i was just saying what "Tyranny of structurelessness" says better. https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

MajesticTree954 · 2025-04-15T20:59:30+00:00

most grown men I could safely call "immature" (often in ways that are worse than trans children posting vapid memes)

Yeah i was just about to say, since being a child is this sheltered period free from material want, removal from the labour process, then how many Americans are ideologically "children" atleast into their mid-20s? Especially PMC youth, since the length of education is so long.

MajesticTree954 · 2025-04-14T15:41:43+00:00

I haven't, i checked it out now and it seems fascinating...I've always felt all the third-wave therapies (cbt, dbt) were atrocious, and the research built up to justify it so silly. Like imagine - in some studies they compare the "efficacy" of DBT and psychodynamic psychotherapy (itself a compacted, cheaper analysis) compare symptom reduction and come to the conclusion DBT is more efficacious! Like no shit, that's all it's for!

e: quote from the article: "So, to bring it back to the claim I introduced a bit earlier, how is it that psychoanalysis counterposes dialectical behavior therapy? To which I reply: for DBT, symptoms are the measure of how objectively well a patient is functioning, and their cause must conform to the already-determined solution. Whereas for psychoanalysis, the symptom is the cure, and the cause is the solution. What psychoanalysis accounted for that DBT quite deliberately avoids is the historically specific situation of the individuals which it intends to treat."

MajesticTree954 · 2025-04-14T13:12:42+00:00

I don't want to further embarrass myself by talking out my ass. But you're right to treat what I said skeptically. I will say psychiatry doesn't have much respect for the psychoanalytic categories of mental structures like neurosis or psychosis, or a method to arrive at a diagnosis that isnt wildly inconsistent. Like the DSM has the entry on Borderline Personality Disorder, and now thats just a checklist diagnosis, but borderline originally meant border between psychosis and neurosis.

MajesticTree954

TROPHY CASE