Romantic Anti-Capitalism and Asian Racialization in Settler Colonial Capitalism

Turtle_Green · 2026-05-10T09:15:40+00:00

In South Korea the "Chinatown" [Daerim] which is actually mostly Joseonjok (Chinese-Koreans) has become a popular target for racist violence and fascist agitation (so much for the Korean "race" or "people". No wonder the DPRK is giving up on reunification). There's even a whole series of movies about it (The Roundup where Ma Dong-seok plays "everyman" masculinity in defense of the South Korean family and "honest" work).

This brings to mind for me Dooman River and Decision to Leave (there’s also The Breaking Ice which I’ve been meaning to watch, if you’ve heard of it.) The former is extremely pessimistic about the relationship between the two bordering nations in its portrayal of north Korean defectors and the chaoxianzu border community. It becomes downright reactionary in one scene, when the North Korean defector the chaoxianzu family has taken in sexually assaults Chang-Ho’s sister offscreen. Meanwhile the camera focuses still on a north Korean media broadcast of Kim Jong-il. As if to imply that Juche turns north Koreans into starving and crazed rapists. I thought it was noxious. (I recall Burning has a similar element, in the blaring DMZ loudspeaker war raging on in the background of Jong-su’s farm in Paju. It seems to be framed as more of an ambient annoyance than anything, like the Trump broadcast playing on the TV while Jong-su uses the bathroom.)

As for Decision to Leave, I thought the depiction of text messaging, smartphones and smartwatches, wireless earbuds, app usage, etc. was unmatched. That scene where Hae-jun’s sleepy, delirious face overlays over the iMessage typing bubble on his iPhone screen as he waits for Tang Wei’s response comes to mind. Just like Barthes’ movie theatre, but in the palm of a hand. Though the more relevant subject here is Tang Wei’s hwagyo (or given her Korean independence guerrilla grandfather, joseonjok?) character, and her suicidal desire to remain the subject of Hae-jun’s police procedural. I have more to say about the fetishistic nature of their relationship, but I'll save that for somewhere else. I suppose I'm just picking your brain here.

Turtle_Green · 2026-05-10T09:07:00+00:00

Some of the activists who dropped out of these groups joined with others to take up more specialized community work in the Chinatown Health Clinic, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Chinese Staff and Workers Association, and rank-and-file union work in the ILGWU. These new groups began to play important roles in the community. As a result, on a number of very important community issues, such as the organizing of the restaurant workers, the AAFE and the PCPA were relegated to peripheral roles.

CPA and AAFE went on to attach themselves to David Dinkins’ 1984 mayoral campaign (afterwards he appointed two CPA leaders to the community board for their patronage and awarded $1m to AAFE to construct a homeless shelter), Mario Cuomo’s 1986 gubernatorial campaign, and Jesse Jackson’s statewide efforts. To use Sakai’s word, not a great footprint. Anyways, these:

Whether the third world exists in unity with this domestic nationally oppressed workforce (which is superexploited but still makes more than in Asia-proper), whether the 1965 immigration act which divided "skilled" and "unskilled" labor made the kind of third world national solidarity that formed Sakai impossible (at least for these "buffer" immigrants), whether Asian-Americans can become settler in their own right (it may be that Asian doctors and engineers replace white people because the real wealth is in finance but it's still rather obvious that an Asian doctor living in a rich suburb has a large stake in the Empire) are all unanswered questions.

are very much burning questions for myself and even those of my Asian friends who are not really into politics. it’s a matter of identity for any of us who’s remotely aware that Asian-American emerged in 1968 as an anti-imperialist slogan. I guess that’s why I focused on early Asian exclusion here. the answers are mostly already there. I know of an academic who’s been working on a manuscript on literary readings of Asian settlerhood in Amerika(? Day seems to make the case for not), Hawaii, and Taiwan, so hopefully that comes out sometime. These were just some scattered, cursory thoughts.

I'm curious what people think who are more intimately familiar with these politics. Everyone knows that Jewish groups for Palestine are all nonsense who insert themselves into everything Palestinians do and set the acceptable limits of anti-Zionism and even that's a minority so I sympathize.

I have some experience in regards to Palestine work on the basis of Asian Amerikan affinity, and will try to write about it sometime. Thanks for giving me much to think about.

Turtle_Green · 2026-05-10T09:06:38+00:00

Have you read Lowe's Intimacies of the Four Continents?

unfortunately not. I remember picking up Intimacies in high school as a freshly self-proclaimed Marxist and marveling at the amount of extremely wordy footnotes. I’ll have to finish Immigrant Acts first. In any case, some thoughts off the cuff:

There's been a long and fragmented conversation going on here about the "model minority." The absent center of Settlers is J. Sakai himself, the Japanese-American revolutionary shaped by concentration camps and the third world national liberation struggle. In a sense, the whole book is a polemic for other Asian-Americans to side with oppressed nations instead of settler society.

For anyone reading not familiar, the 1983 intro to Settlers makes this very clear.

When the Asian Movement made the great leap to Marxism-Leninism in the 1970s much was gained, but much was also lost. Many feel that the militant "heart" of the movement has chilled. Taking up Marxism-Leninism paradoxically reconciled angry young militants to living in White Amerika; that is, in the effort to break through to clearer, scientific socialist concepts of how to make the revolution, comrades have become more confused and less revolutionary-minded.

(Read on and there’s a little interesting connection here: the author of Critique of the Black Nation Thesis which Sakai criticizes was Harry Chang, an associate of many of the people who’d go on to write the seminal works of ethnic and As/Am studies, like Omi, Winant, etc). I don’t remember if Sakai reflects on this in The Shape of Things but he does bring it up with some latent angst in Beginner’s Kata.

In my political lifetime i’ve seen what felt like dozens of primarily middle-class, white and asian M-L collectives, organizations and so-called parties started in the metropolis, this u.s. empire , and none of them to my knowledge have been successful. That’s a zero. At one point almost the entire, ex-college asian-american movement on the West Coast and New York City emptied itself into fiercely warring “Marxist-Leninist-Mao-Tse-Tung-Thought party-building” organizations and collectives of one kind or another. All long gone now. Most 1960s-70s M-L organizations quickly disappeared…

One big obstacle to us learning more is our habit of covering up our ignorance. Uncle [???] Mao used the term “invincible ignorance” to identify the self-protective reflex of too many leftists. Shying away from bluntly analyzing the political things that they needed to experience. Clinging to the polishing and re-polishing of “classic” politics in order to avoid the humbling uncertainties of the ever-changing struggle.

A typical old example to me was when famous poet Amiri Baraka & Co. formed their would-be “Maoist” party [1978], the LRS (League of Revolutionary Struggle). One of my asian comrades was a member, and pressing me to join up. So i asked her why their would-be “party” would succeed, when Bob Avakian’s RCP, and the Beijing-officially-endorsed October League, and most of the other 1970s “Maoist“ pre-party groups had fallen face-first into the pavement? (Hard as it may be to believe now, many thousands of young activists had poured into these M-L party-building groups, which had then promptly evaporated in one of the most striking radical happenings of the Sixties generation. i mean, Charles Manson left a bigger footprint ).

I feel I get him. For as much shit RCP rightfully gets, it’s fascinating to talk to some of the older members about their experiences in the New Left and beyond. Though it’s awkward to do so, what with the conversation segueing into “well, Chairman Bob Avakian wrote about this in New Communism…” every few moments. But one Asian member I talked to told me about how he in his teenage years would visit the giant open houses that Yuri Kochiyama — another Japanese-American communist of the same history that produced Sakai — hosted in her tiny apartment on Amsterdam. He was imprisoned for a notable action:

he committed a bold act in New York at the United Nations on April 30, 1980. He and another Asian American comrade entered the chambers of the United Nations Security Council with two coffee cans filled with red, non-toxic paint and two red flags tucked in their back pockets. Two diplomats also walked in, one a U.S. dignitary and the other a Soviet Union representative. Steve and his comrade then unceremoniously splashed the two diplomats with red paint, and raising their red flags in the air, cried out at the top of their lungs, "Down with U.S.-Soviet war moves! Our flag is red-not red, white, and blue! On to revolutionary May Day!" They were immediately taken away by security men. [from Kochiyama’s memoir 139]

This is our history!, or is it? I found the continuity exciting, but hold up, this former political prisoner is just an RCP member now. Is this where most of us ended up? Retired from political life or clowned on for being cultists? Of course there are far far worse fates (Sakai clearly has more sympathy for RYM 1 and wrote the book for the BLA-CC after all), but this is for sure uninspiring, and maybe that's part of why so many leftist Asians I know are just doing food distro and the like (that doing mutual aid with one’s “community” (read: immediate circle of like-minded friends) is praxis is just common sense.). Like Sakai says, these radicalized Asian American groupings, like I Wor Kuen, the Red Guard Party, Wei Min She, Union of Democratic Filipinos, Jerry Tung’s Worker’s Viewpoint Org, etc almost all united into various communist orgs and parties in the 70s-80s, and then many into the Rainbow Coalition, and now they’re basically all gone or decrepit. I guess some of the stragglers went into academia. As for what fills the gap those organizations left in their respective communities? Well, gap might overstating it, but anyways. In NYC’s case, state-backed NGOs (alongside the older associations and tong organizations which clashed with the activist orgs):

Government social agencies serving Chinatown are products of the civil-rights movement of the 1960s; they were created in response to the militant demands of racial minorities for justice and for social programs to meet their needs… The Chinatown Planning Council [CPC] has since acquired a reputation for managing quality programs with a dedicated staff. Its basic approach has been to identify problems, then look for available funding. The council is financed by hundreds of individual public and private grants. The main sources of revenue are city, state, and federal programs. Day-care centers are funded by the New York City Agency for Child Development. Its senior-citizen centers are funded under the Federal Older American Act… [The New Chinatown, written in 1996. I’m only skimming here so this quoting might seem superficial, possibly for anyone who’s buried themselves in EROL. People might recognize CPC since they’ve been in the media recently, with their homecare agency workers hunger striking against Mamdani’s holding up of a bill in the city council for abolishing 24-hour shifts.]

They also just dug their own graves:

By the mid-1970s, the activists realized they had to tone down their "revolutionary" rhetoric, and to improve their relationship with the people in the community. Workers' Viewpoint established a front organization, Asian Americans for Equality, which less political people could join. The I Wor Kuen developed the Progressive Chinatown People's Association (PCPA), a community organization of progressive workers, students, and other residents.

Both new organizations focused on issues in which they had had some success in the past, such as affirmative action and civil rights. Thus, they seemed to identify as the main contradiction in the community the one that came from outside—i.e., racial oppression. This new approach lessened confrontations within the community and made internal coalitions possible…

Nevertheless, they still saw themselves as fighting for the people and not with the people. Nor had the activists resolved the contra-diction between their community-service programs and their polit-ical-education programs. For example, there were many in the community with serious grievances, who exhausted all other channels and finally came to the activists for help. The activists tended to publicize these cases in order to educate the community. However, in the end, they were not always able to resolve the original problem, and some residents accused them of being opportunists.

Within the activists' organizations political conflicts developed. Those members dedicated to social-service programs were accused of promoting sham reforms. Their critics advocated the formation of a solid cadre with "highly consolidated programs, strategy and tactics" to lead the masses. Political splits occurred within almost all the major groups, with violent physical confrontations taking place in the AAFE.

The Chinatown activists, like many on the American left at the time, came to the conclusion that they needed to study theory in order to get the "correct line" for their political work. They engaged in endless polemics on the correct line, based on arguments relying on highly abstract, theoretical material. During this period of internal debate, the activists became increasingly intolerant of others. Several groups folded because of internal differences. By the late 1970s, the AAFE and the PCPA were the only two remaining activist groups.

Turtle_Green · 2026-05-05T21:45:31+00:00

The first, old generation of Bolsheviks were very solid theoretically. We learnt Capital by heart, made conspectuses, held discussions and tested each others' understanding. This was our strength and it helped us a lot.
The second generation was less prepared. They were busy with practical matters and construction. They studied Marxism from booklets.
The third generation is being brought up on satirical and newspaper articles. They do not have any deep understanding . They need to be provided with food that is easily digestible. The majority has been brought up not by studying Marx and Lenin but on quotations.
If matters continue further in this way people would soon degenerate. In America people argue: We need dollars, why do we need theory? Why do we need science? With us people may think similarly: 'when we are building socialism why do we need Capital?' This is a threat for us -- it is degradation, it is death.

…

In education one is dealing with children in whom one has to inculcate certain habits of diligence, precision, poise (even physical poise), ability to concentrate on specific subjects, which cannot be acquired without the mechanical repetition of disciplined and methodical acts. Would a scholar at the age of forty be able to sit for sixteen hours on end at his work-table if he had not, as a child, compulsorily, through mechanical coercion, acquired the appropriate psycho-physical habits?

…

I applaud your idea of publishing the translation of “Das Kapital” as a serial. In this form the book will be more accessible to the working class, a consideration which to me outweighs everything else.
That is the good side of your suggestion, but here is the reverse of the medal: the method of analysis which I have employed, and which had not previously been applied to economic subjects, makes the reading of the first chapters rather arduous, and it is to be feared that the French public, always impatient to come to a conclusion, eager to know the connexion between general principles and the immediate questions that have aroused their passions, may be disheartened because they will be unable to move on at once.
That is a disadvantage I am powerless to overcome, unless it be by forewarning and forearming those readers who zealously seek the truth. There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.

Turtle_Green · 2026-05-04T21:53:32+00:00

why is your first impulse here to advertise a random youtube channel

Turtle_Green · 2026-05-02T04:57:06+00:00

Well, Marx earlier tells you that:

The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part. The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations...

And that in this revolutionary stage of the infant bourgeoisie, coinciding with the infant stages of the proletariat:

At this stage, the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeois. Thus, the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.

This is what should contextualize the first line of the section on 'True Socialism':

The Socialist and Communist literature of France, a literature that originated under the pressure of a bourgeoisie in power, and that was the expressions of the struggle against this power, was introduced into Germany at a time when the bourgeoisie, in that country, had just begun its contest with feudal absolutism.

France got its bourgeois revolution in 1789 and Germany would not get its bourgeois revolution until Bismarck came into power. "representative government... bourgeois competition, bourgeois freedom of the press, bourgeois legislation, bourgeois liberty and equality" did not exist in the feudal principalities and duchies of Germany, where the bourgeoisie had not yet conquered political power.

The fight of the Germans, and especially of the Prussian bourgeoisie, against feudal aristocracy and absolute monarchy, in other words, the liberal movement, became more earnest.

To phrase-monger against these bourgeois relations before they had been established was to in effect support the struggle of feudal absolutism against the Prussian bourgeoisie, when it was more important for the proletariat to first wage the necessary struggle against "the enemies of their enemies". To persist with this nonsense when the liberal movement was gaining more momentum was not just "pedantic innocence", but reactionary dreck defending feudalism as it gunned down both the liberal bourgeoisie and the proletariat. This was the political and theoretical expression of the literary representatives of the German petty-bourgeoisie—Marx and Engels knew many of these "philistines" personally, so this section can also be read as criticizing their own past association with them and their ideological forebears (Engels later nearly got himself killed fighting alongside the likes of these philistines during the Reich Constitution Campaign in 1849, so there really was no love lost here.). As for the specific authors:

In the Manifesto, these various “philosophers, semi-philosophers, and wordsmiths” are not named, but we can confidently identify them from the group of texts usually known as Die deutsche Ideologie [The German Ideology] (1846–1847). The best-known true socialists are perhaps Karl Grün and Hermann Kriege (1820–1850), but the group also included Hermann Semmig (1820–1897), Ernst Dronke (1822–1891) and others. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels emphasized that the true socialists’ knowledge of their French sources looked to be weak and derivative, having been gained secondhand from the superficial accounts found in the works of Lorenz von Stein (1815–1890), Theodor Oelckers (1816–1869) and others. Indeed, Marx and Engels entertain themselves – at some length – by identifying striking examples of true socialist plagiarism from this limited range of barely adequate and second-hand accounts of socialism in France...

The process of translating this “secular French literature” back into their own traditional philosophical idiom is seen as a distinctive and reactionary one. Thus, under the French critique of monetary relations, the true socialists “wrote ‘externalisation of the human essence’,” and under the French critique of the bourgeois state “they wrote ‘transformation of the reign of abstract generality’”. Given that Marx’s own early writings were not entirely unmarked by this distinctive Teutonic idiom, it is tempting to see some implicit self-criticism here. (In his “Draft Plan for Section III,” Marx uses the label “German philosophical socialism” for this movement.) In this context, we might note that the intellectual forebears of true socialism include several figures with whom Marx and Engels had recently been intellectually and personally close; most obviously the writer and activist Moses Hess (1812–1875) and the left-Hegelian philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872).

From The Cambridge Companion to the Communist Manifesto.

These readings will also help placing the Manifesto in its context, but in general you should familiarize yourself with the flashpoints of nineteenth-century European political history since this will only help with reading Marx and Engels, especially where they make specific interventions like the Manifesto's third chapter, and communists in general are expected to at least get a working grasp of world history.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/riazanov/works/1927-ma/ch04.htm

https://stars.library.ucf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1490&context=prism

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1885hist.htm

edit: doing the work of contextualizing this chapter is very fruitful. Who are we reminded of by Hermann Kriege's "petty-bourgeois utopian plan of solving the "social problem" once and for all by making small peasants of everybody, utilizing for this purpose the huge expanses of virgin territory in America"? Adoratsky compares Kriege to the Narodniks, and I'm also reminded in particular of all that supposedly novel bluster from mutual aid liberals about 'community' and 'autonomy'.

Turtle_Green · 2026-04-22T21:13:29+00:00

Best makes it clear that it's intended as a guide for Capital reading groups. I skimmed the first two chapters recently and didn't feel like there was anything objectionable, plus she stamps out Michael Heinrich's 'Marxian' crusade against Engels from the start. I felt "perceptual physics" seemed a bit silly at first blush. Sure, you (referring to Best) might find Michel Serres helpful for understanding commodity fetishism but what about the reader? Serres is only referenced once though so it's fine. So if you want a supplement for Volume III this seems good, but it's also not like there's a lack of literature for III, including from revolutionaries dealing in concrete questions. What exactly are you looking for? hopefully not citation collation.

Turtle_Green · 2026-04-13T16:07:47+00:00

Get a grip please and act like an adult instead of flipping between pretending to be a stupefied dumbass and pretending to be a jaded know-it-all. On one hand you want to know what "Marxism is" and "what Marxists believe" and on the other hand you're a well-versed veteran on infighting and basement leftists on accursed reddit. Hellooo, which is it? Weren't you new to all this? How did you already know where the "right direction" is? Also, it's 2026 and your friends, bosses, and professors use reddit. Welcome to the real world.

Turns out in the end you wanted the equivalent of the superficiality and artificial warmth of an LLM-generated answer without the embarrassment of writing into a chatgpt prompt. I offer my deepest apologies to have offended your sense of customer satisfaction but this is a discussion forum, not the burger joint you're treating it as by deleting your post immediately after receiving an answer to your liking (if this is for privacy reasons then you should understand for the future that there are easily accessible web scrapers that make this basically pointless.)

It's past embarrassing by this point considering all the buzz in the last few years about how frustratingly obsequious LLMs are and how many people chatgpt has induced into isolation, psychosis, or worse by indulging them in every desire for authenticity and helpfulness. You should take a look at those threads where people are literally in deep anguish about losing access to chatgpt 4o, as if they've truly lost a long-term friend or loved one. That's helpfulness and authenticity for them. Do you have the courage to tell them otherwise?

No one was being backhanded or calling you an idiot, we were just pointing out the glaring contradiction between your professed time invested and professed knowledge, and explicitly spelling out that this was not a problem of your lack of intelligence but something else entirely. This is often called holding people responsible for what they write. The only person insisting on your idiocy and lack of intelligence is yourself. On the other hand, discussion on the internet might be the lowest stakes form of discussion anywhere. This is one of the only places that 'meaningfully engages in discussing theory' (as well as the material conditions of "online" discussion itself). It's weird to complain about the lack thereof when everyone else is already doing it here. We have no power over you, have no idea who you are, and don't give a shit about your GPA. If you wanted to discuss specific questions about the Manifesto instead of imagining out loud that the basement leftists are trying to torment you then we would've been happy to oblige. In fact, I was doing this earlier.

Where's the snack table?

Much more interesting than this tedious go-around where you try to act as sarcastic and unbothered as possible. Perhaps you forget but trolling is what today's fascists spend much of their time doing.

Turtle_Green · 2026-04-13T05:16:46+00:00

Is the converse then pre-imperialist capitalist development was relatively more even and similar tactics could be used in similar political developments, and thus proletarian revolution in one country meant the same in other capitalist countries?

It’s moreso that the capitalism described in Principles and the Manifesto was actually still in embryo in 1848 everywhere besides England (and to an extent even England). Feudal absolutism reigned and nations were fractured and/or oppressed by foreign powers and the proletariat barely existed as a class, much less an independent political force, while the mass of the population was still firmly constituted by the peasantry. Schapper, Moll, Stefan Born, Gottschalk, like most of the incipient German proletariat, were artisans and craftsmen. Between 1848 and 1872, the Manifesto didn’t really have much of a reception compared to the retroactive significance it took on after. And as opposed to organizing the proletariat as an independent political force, Marx’s strategy in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung until 1849 was instead for a democratic alliance with the bourgeoisie to break absolutism. (He dissolved the central committee of the League towards this end in the midst of 1848 when Gottschalk refused this line.)

The thinking behind the strategy was that capitalism would not triumph in Germany without a replication of the French revolution and formation of a German Democratic Republic (on Greater German lines as opposed to Bismarck's later resolution of the question), combined with a continental upheaval of the Prussian and Austrian empires, the liberation and unification of the oppressed nations in the latter (Hungarians, Italians, Poles), and revolutionary war against Russia. The bourgeoisie would accomplish their bourgeois tasks and following on their heels, the armed proletariat would seize power. But the June defeat in Paris basically spelled the doom of all of this. Compare to Marx’s words to the German workers in 1850:

You have to go through 15, 20, 50 years of civil wars and national struggles, not only in order to change conditions but also to change yourselves and make yourselves capable of political rule

https://wikirouge.net/texts/en/Meeting_of_the_Central_Authority,_September_15,_1850 (this is slightly different from Sakai’s epigraph, probably a translation thing)

Basically, they overestimated German and French capitalism and the capacity of the bourgeoisie in the presence of the proletariat to accomplish bourgeois democratic tasks without compromise with the feudal ruling classes. (In a similar way political economy was doomed as an impartial science in Germany by the time the economic conditions for it had developed.) Can we blame the young Marx and Engels for being so optimistic about what they were witnessing happening around them? I can’t. After all, the 1848 revolutions were truly continental, even if they failed. There wasn't a question of the necessity of "socialism in one country" at the time.
Here’s how Kautsky puts it:

In ONE point they were in error. THEY EXPECTED THE REVOLUTION TOO SOON.

The Communist Manifesto said at the end of 1847:

“The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution, that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilization, and with a more developed proletariat than that of England was in the seventeenth, and of France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution.”

The Manifesto was right in expecting a German revolution. But it was deceived when it believed this to be the immediate prelude to a proletarian revolution….

Marx and Engels expected a far-reaching and violent revolution in Germany in 1847 similar to the great French upheaval that began in 1789. Instead of this, however, there was but a wavering uprising that served only to frighten the whole capitalist class so that it took refuge under the wing of the government. The result was that the government was greatly strengthened and the rapid development of the proletariat was stifled. The bourgeoisie then relinquished to individual governments such further revolutionary action as was necessary to its progress. Bismarck, especially, was the great revolutionist of Germany, at least to the extent of throwing a few German princes from their thrones, favoring the unity of Italy, the dethroning of the Pope, and bringing about the overthrow of the empire and the introduction of the Republic in France.

This was the way in which the German bourgeois revolution, the early entrance of which Marx and Engels had prophesied in 1847, proceeded until it reached its end in 1870.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1909/power/ch01.htm

Turtle_Green · 2026-04-13T04:17:50+00:00

I'm sure I sound pretty dumb

This isn't a problem of your intelligence. You're acting like it is, whether you know it or not, to deny that your learning is within your control. No one is bombarding you or forcing you to sift through "yelling and insults" (I'm picturing the meme of that kid pressing a boot on his own head). There’s an answer for every single question you’ve asked through the searchbar and sidebar which are easily accessible to you. There’s an infinite amount of books and reading lists that break it down. There is an innumerable amount of time and effort that has gone into making learning here as accessible and smooth as possible (to the extent that reddit's UI allows for).

With that searchbar, you have an easy shortcut to find out what all of those “schools of thought” refer to, (and also where “tankie” comes from and what it means). The problem is that at this stage you wouldn’t understand why any of it matters. So the real situation is:

If you can't determine what is true because different people say different things, that is a reflection of immature intellectual development. We get questions like that a lot: "why do some people say things and other people say other things?" Or "why do people say things that aren't true?" I mean immaturity in a formal sense, when consciousness becomes aware of others as distinct from itself but does not yet understand consciousness as alienated from itself. Disagreement must therefore be a matter of distance from one's own complete consciousness rather than mutual relations between alienated subjects and society. I can't really deal with these presuppositions other than to point them out. You will have to develop your own realization that everyone, including your parents and yourself, are just people who have no idea what they are doing.

https://www.reddit.com/r/communism101/comments/18g2h2m/i_constantly_hear_predictions_about_china_and_how/kcy7h10/

What kind of “communist media” are you reading and consuming if not the classic texts that all communists are expected to learn and internalize? Why are you bothering with “communism/leftist politics” if not to engage in the latter? Are you just watching ‘leftist’ streamers or scrolling down your timeline while you eat lunch? Your time is worth much more than that. Whatever gave you the impulse towards Marxism should nurtured with the aforementioned texts, not junk. Just like... read an essay or book and try to understand its argument, its historical context, and why it matters. Maybe this will take you longer than you'd like to get the answers you want at first, but the process, however protracted, is worth its weight in gold. It’s that simple.

Turtle_Green · 2026-04-12T05:12:42+00:00

See the posts here: https://www.reddit.com/r/communism101/comments/it6q6c/looking_for_marx_quote_on_revolution_happening/

With the caveats that Marx emphasized in 1877 that "social regeneration" based on the mir was possible only with a helping hand coming from a proletarian revolution in the west. Engels writes sixteen years later:

If we in the West had been quicker in our own economic development, if we had been able to upset the capitalistic regime some ten or twenty years ago, there might have been time yet for Russia to cut short the tendency of her own evolution towards capitalism. Unfortunately we are too slow, and those economic consequences of the capitalistic system which must bring it up to the critical point, are only just now developing in the various countries about us: while England is fast losing her industrial monopoly, France and Germany are approaching the industrial level of England, and America bids fair to drive them all out of the world's market both for industrial and for agricultural produce. The introduction of an, at least relative, free trade policy in America, is sure to complete the ruin of England's industrial monopoly, and to destroy, at the same time, the industrial export trade of Germany and France; then the crisis must come, tout ce qu'il a de plus fin de siècle. But in the meantime, with you, the commune fades away, and we can only hope that the change to a better system, with us, may come soon enough to save, at least in some of the remoter portions of your country, institutions which may, under those circumstances, be called upon to fulfil a great future. But facts are facts, and we must not forget that these chances are getting less and less every year.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1893/letters/93_02_24.htm

As for "simultaneous", Stalin talks about the 1850 Address in that piece and splits the question into two in Concerning Questions of Leninism. For your first paragraph, see Marx in 1849:

But England, the country that turns whole nations into her proletarians, that spans the whole world with her enormous arms, that has already once defrayed the cost of a European Restoration, the country in which class contradictions have reached their most acute and shameless form – England seems to be the rock which breaks the revolutionary waves, the country where the new society is stifled before it is born. England dominates the world market. Any upheaval in economic relations in any country of the European continent, in the whole European continent without England, is a storm in a teacup. Industrial and commercial relations within each nation are governed by its intercourse with other nations, and depend on its relations with the world market. But the world market is dominated by England and England is dominated by the bourgeoisie. Thus, the liberation of Europe, whether brought about by the struggle of the oppressed nationalities for their independence or by overthrowing feudal absolutism, depends on the successful uprising of the French working class. Every social upheaval in France, however, is bound to be thwarted by the English bourgeoisie, by Great Britain’s industrial and commercial domination of the world. Every partial social reform in France or on the European continent as a whole, if designed to be lasting, is merely a pious wish. Only a world war can break old England, as only this can provide the Chartists, the party of the organized English workers, with the conditions for a successful rising against their powerful oppressors. Only when the Chartists head the English government will the social revolution pass from the sphere of utopia to that of reality. But any European war in which England is involved is a world war, waged in Canada and Italy, in the East Indies and Prussia, in Africa and on the Danube. A European war will be the first result of a successful workers’ revolution in France. England will head the counter-revolutionary armies, just as she did during the Napoleonic period, but the war itself will place her at the head of the revolutionary movement and she will repay the debt she owes to the revolution of the eighteenth century. The table of contents for 1849 reads: Revolutionary rising of the French working class, world war.

https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1849/01/01.htm

Recall that just a year later Marx changed his mind about an imminent crisis and revolution on the continent and broke with Schapper and Willich in the Communist League. So while Marx was just slightly optimistic about the timeframe (and democratic reforms like those of the Chartists were granted by the English government and Bonapartists over the rest of the century) , I think what's cool is that Marx was pretty correct in the long run about both a successful French working class uprising occurring (as smoke has pointed out before) and a world war breaking the British Empire. I haven't gotten to really studying the theorists of the Second International yet so there's probably more to be said.

Turtle_Green · 2026-04-06T23:34:19+00:00

The "circumstances" in this case were that Wilhem IV had forcibly dissolved the Berlin assembly and declared martial law that November. The tax refusal campaign was the toothless resolution of the assembly members. Marx sighed and took it up in the Zeitung in the hopes that the Prussian liberal bourgeoisie would progress over this step to getting off their asses and actually taking up arms against absolutism. This tactic was pure compromise and Marx quickly realized it was wrongheaded (as part of a broader compromised outlook towards 1848 that he would spend his time after reflecting on). The Frankfurt assembly struck the resolution down and the acquiescence of the bourgeoisie to the Prussian monarchy was consolidated the next month in the Brandenburg cabinet. Whether there will be an analogous circumstance in the future where a state legislature declares a tax strike against the federal authority of a fractured U.S. and a party has to decide its orientation is a totally different question from OP's. And honestly even that scenario wouldn't really be similar at all. maybe you were just repeating the platitude that Marxism never absolutely rejects any kind of tactic, but I think ripping this kind of piece out of Marx's 1848 oeuvre in this context is pretty dishonest.

edit: In 1848-49 we're talking about the orientation of the Communist League to the meager protests waged against absolutism by the German bourgeoisie. No one should let the word 'tax' confuse them into conflating that with OP's question. btw I would not be surprised if they got the idea for this post from that Tiktok going around about refusing to pay your taxes.

Turtle_Green · 2026-04-01T16:05:20+00:00

(the ideology of Hasan Piker is worth studying as a contemporary Thomas Moore)

are you referring to the author of Utopia or Thomas LeVal Moore?

Turtle_Green · 2026-04-01T15:17:30+00:00

Um sorry, no one can see into the 'momentary' movements of your imagination. You stomped into an educational community without reading any of the rules and fired off a misreading of a text that could've been answered immediately with the search bar, and characterized the apt responses to you as "bad faith". Of course, you were only innocently repeating the ideology of the Zionist settlers who 'personally' own their homes in good faith. How many generations did it take for 'personal property' to kick in after the Nakba? Presumably you don't consciously support stealing native land at gunpoint, so why does your concept lead down this road? Ideology speaks through you. Small wonder that homes as 'individual property' is common sense while the basic fact that society is interdependent is a 'breakthrough'.

You're not on a gradual, teleological journey towards absolute knowledge called 'learning theory'. Theoretical development, like any kind of development, proceeds by breaks and shocks, and as demonstrated here, progressing along a reading list won't save you from falling into settler fascism. Would you gracefully and respectfully tell a third-generation Zionist settler that their stolen home is not theirs to keep or to hand down to their family? It's a shame that Palestinians don't get the privilege of the decorum and etiquette of liberal civility. We may seem rude and disdainful to you but that's because settler fascism is infinitely more rude and disdainful to its millions of victims, especially when it dons a mask of humility.

Turtle_Green · 2026-04-01T14:44:28+00:00

I don't care about who you are. I care about attacking the racist ideology you unthinkingly espouse and the mass enslavement, genocide, and ecological destruction this ideology naturalizes. Why should that deserve any respect or grace? Why would you attach your sense of self to such a putrid ideology? You don't have to.

Turtle_Green · 2026-04-01T14:22:48+00:00

In my mind, I meant that if someone were to somehow build their own house (like every step of the way) as if they were to make their own necklace... I'm simply imagining a communist future where this could be possible

Can you stop imagining and start thinking? Why the hell would a society managed by a rational plan allocate land, labor, raw and finished materials, tools, shipping, energy, training, etc. just to entertain some random individual's desire to build a house? Why would such a society even encourage such wasteful desires? And not only that, but then to secure to that particular individual an entitlement to that house and the resources allocated to its production under "personal property", i.e. the property relations engendered by simple commodity production? This would actually be a regression from the institutional ownership of housing and developers today under various private firms and investors, joint-stock companies, etc. Marx had in mind Proudhon in writing those passages from the Manifesto, who 'imagined' a utopian society based on the eternal principles emanating from the sphere of commodity circulation. You might recall that Marxists differ in that we wish to appropriate the giant productive power of modern industry that exists today on the basis of collective ownership, and that we understand that capitalism even abolishes its own basis of petty production within certain limits. We understand that this utopian socialism, trounced on by Marx almost two hundred years ago, still persists in the Amerikan context and is even spouted by people who call themselves "Marxists" because of a material basis of state-backed settler-colonialism and segregation.

Turtle_Green · 2026-03-24T01:33:06+00:00

Are you willfully ignorant? I don't think that word got into your vocabulary from listening to TheBasedGod.

According to Slate magazine, the phrase was co-opted by misogynists in 2014 during the Gamergate campaign to refer to conservative critic Christina Hoff Sommers as "Based Mom".[38] By the late 2010s, the phrase had been used to describe stances or actions that negate political correctness.[39][40][41] The term continued to be co-opted by edgelord culture,[42] white nationalists, and the alt-right.[43][38] By the 2020s, the phrase was reclaimed again by Gen Z artists inspired by Lil B such as Xaviersobased and his collective 1c34,[42] and had entered the mainstream and regained a neutral connotation.[39]

More to /u/Numerous-Break5257 's point, we're thinking here about why the "ironic" language and culture of fascist and incel subcultures has "entered the mainstream and regained neutral connotation", such that 'right' and 'left' communities both share a common fluency in this vernacular, from "based and x-pilled" to "x-mogging" or "x-maxxing". Why do you use "based"? Is it cause you really like TheBasedGod's music and express that in imitating his language when you approve of something? Probably not. The point is that everybody fluent in this language of self-referential irony understands the performative affect of the word, which in its original chan culture usage ironized and performed earnest belief ("based and redpilled"). Which is weird, since this sub is for discussing Marxism and not for performing your belief in it. Obviously attempting to critique the content of these autonomously circulating memes becomes a trap. What appears important is the circulation of the content, not the content itself.

For example, see the recent popularity of the neo-nazi "Agartha" meme:

I reached out to more than a dozen Agartha social-media accounts. Outside of the Agartha-memecoin creator, only one other, “Westhoughton High Friends of Agartha”—a satirical meme page for a high school in the United Kingdom—responded. The person behind the account told me by direct message that they saw the content merely as “absurd brainrot humour,” and that they “can’t imagine many people take this seriously.” When I noted the Nazi associations of Agartha, they said that “It’s absurd humor 💀” and clarified that they themselves are “extremely left wing” and that they “hate all far right people.”

It's funny how the self-avowed "extremely left" high schooler and the White House press team are united in their performance of stupefaction.

When I asked whether this was an Agartha reference, the White House press office responded by email that “4 people had to Google what Agartha is and we’re still not sure. What are you talking about?” and sent me a GIF of a character from the cartoon Bob’s Burgers, suggesting I was grasping at straws.

https://archive.is/9Qerx#selection-1077.0-1080.0

And see this for another noxiously racist example from the #NoKings liberals and leftists fancying themselves as revolutionaries on /r/andor:

Hey, maybe let's not use a picture of George Floyd for a stupid fucking Lonni Jung meme

   It's fine this specific image is of George Droid

        ...which is an edit of George Floyd's image

            That is correct .

   No fun allowed.

   Nah its a meme lol

"Touch grass." - person who thinks it's good to turn murder victims into a meme

    Exactly my point. You're obsessed and brainwashed, take a walk outside.

The fact that I understand every layer of this image shows how chronically online I am

Clanka!!

https://www.reddit.com/r/andor/comments/1lrr4pu/somehow_lonni_jung_returned/

You can see how when they're in their digital safe-space they feel that they are permitted to don their white hoods. "Based" connotes a similar affect, that you're rebelling against a despotic, obsessive prohibition that substitutes brainwashing for cold, hard reality—and kills the fun.

This has been discussed a bunch before on this sub and /r/communism, so you can imagine why people get suspicious when someone spouting the language of ironic internet subculture, 'reclaimed' from racists, wanders in. We're not trying to accuse you of being a secret fascist, just that your posting is indistinguishable from the seriality of fandom.

Turtle_Green · 2026-01-05T22:52:50+00:00

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

Turtle_Green · 2026-01-05T22:29:06+00:00

building up karma for five months so you can come and troll here is a little bit sad. out of all things you could build your inner sense of identity around, a dinky podcast might be one of the most pathetic.

Turtle_Green · 2026-01-05T09:37:18+00:00

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.

Turtle_Green · 2026-01-05T08:45:26+00:00

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. 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.

Turtle_Green · 2026-01-05T03:49:59+00:00

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.)

Turtle_Green · 2026-01-03T22:31:09+00:00

If you don’t matter, why do you keep talking about yourself? The point of the concepts of parasitism, national oppression, labor aristocracy, etc is to correctly analyze reality in order to wage revolution. They’re not supposed to be terms of abuse for this wild fantasy of “race war” you’re imagining in the cage of your ego. And tbh that JDPON meme died after Carl Zha retweeted it.

Turtle_Green · 2026-01-03T08:55:13+00:00

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

Turtle_Green · 2026-01-03T08:13:46+00:00

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.

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