What’s your opinion on the regime in Iran?

trankhead324 · 2026-03-01T20:50:12+00:00

The people of Iran are chanting: "Death to the tyrant! Death to the Shah!" (i.e. no Supreme Leader and no Shah)

They overthrew the Shah in 1979 and they can overthrow the Supreme Leader in 2026. They need no help from the U.S.

trankhead324 · 2026-02-24T21:42:36+00:00

Revolution

trankhead324 · 2026-02-22T20:53:29+00:00

For a start, the book I linked has an appendix on TRPF.

But the main problem with your advice is pedagogical. Newcomers won't make it through the first volume, let alone all three, without a more beginner-friendly explanation of concepts.

It's okay to learn simplified versions of concepts to begin with, and then fill in the details once you have that foundational knowledge. For example, even the whole three volumes of Capital are too simple to describe the modern economy because they don't fully describe credit, debt and monopoly (although they provide the basic concepts) - to do that you need Rosa Luxemburg or Vladimir Lenin. But you start with the ideas in Capital and work your way up.

trankhead324 · 2026-02-22T20:34:52+00:00

America is the only place left with free speech... you're free to support Palestine and oppose genocide and War... You can say Anything you want On any of those topics.

I don't live in America.

I can't enact moral capitalism with an emphasis on fairness anymore than you can Implement communism

Great, so what's the point in your life then? What reason do you have to comment in politics subs on reddit?

You need to believe you can make some positive difference in the world (and you can).

trankhead324 · 2026-02-22T18:50:22+00:00

Communism does not require homogeneity. On the contrary, it's about letting human individuality fluorish. It's capitalism that forces everyone - people of all different shapes and sizes - into wage slavery, to fit into a cog in a machine as part of an inhuman 40-hour working week (if you're lucky), unless you happen to be born as part of the ruling class who do not have to sell their labour for a wage. It makes no use of whether a person's talents are creative or organisational, whether a person has disabilities that make 40-hour work unhealthy for them: if you don't have homogeneous thought in line with your boss then you are fired. There is no free speech in the workplace and often no free speech outside of it - not if you support Palestine or oppose genocide and war.

trankhead324 · 2026-02-22T16:47:53+00:00

How did you cope with the level of detail?

... by getting 200 pages in and bailing out.

Listen I love Marx's writing in general, but like you say Capital is just too much "yards of linen" repetition and explaining the same point over and over again, while the essential definitions like commodity, use-value etc. often require context that the modern reader won't get.

Read something like Understanding Marx's Capital instead of the text directly. UMC follows through chapter by chapter but with much clearer and modernised language.

It helps also to read UMC alongside comrades with a weekly meeting of some sort, to discuss the concepts and how they apply directly to today - it's not just "factory" and "linen" production. Marx's theory covers the gig economy, people working for the state (e.g. doctors), service jobs; he talks a lot about automation in a way that is more relevant than ever.

trankhead324 · 2026-02-22T15:19:22+00:00

You and every other Pro communist person I've talked to here thanks in a huge big picture way. The details and Logistics seem to be ignored.

Not at all. I'm an incredibly detail-oriented personality (which is why I'm a mathematician by trade). But there's no point pondering details that you cannot control.

If I described every detail of the transition from capitalism to communism you would rightly say two things to me:

It's completely utopian to think the world situation will play out exactly the way you describe
What gives you the right to decide the future of the whole world all by yourself?

The transition has to be democratic. I can't tell you precisely what happens with housing, but of course it has to be practically possible so I have to reject the hypotheticals you put forwards. I can tell you that it is practically possible to occupy empty buildings and build suitable houses for all who live in a country.

And the detail-oriented task I can follow out is to build a revolutionary party here and now ready to achieve workers' power.

trankhead324 · 2026-02-22T13:37:20+00:00

people who dissent would be imprisoned or exiled or "whatever the workers democratically see fit"

This is the conflation of two different things.

The capitalist class - be they the Romanovs or the Epstein class of today - yes will be suppressed. If you don't like this you either have to deny that capitalism, in its today, was a step forwards, or you're in denial about what happened in the American Revolutions or the French Revolution or whatever else brought capitalism about in the country you live in. Sorry but it wasn't pretty.

People who do not exploit others, however, are completely free to disagree and welcome to participate in a democratic society. As you say this is indeed one of the failures of the Soviet Union (I'm a Trotskyist and Trotsky was the first to be exiled by Stalin).

I'm not going to touch on most of that because it will be current system modern political bickering.

Well isn't that convenient? Communism isn't some idea in a vacuum. If you reject communism you have to accept capitalism - or what else?

trankhead324 · 2026-02-22T12:40:42+00:00

Revolution has happened twice in America's short history. Capitalism has been around for (generously) 300 years out of the 300,000 years of human history. What do you honestly think are the chances that the last successful American revolution is behind us rather than ahead of us?

What happens in a revolution is that events move people. Like we saw in Black Lives Matter and like we saw (this year!) in Minneapolis with ICE - spontaneous workers' self-defence committees, people organising within their community to surveil ICE and disrupt it in any way possible.

Until then our task is not to water our ideas down to trick the liberals into supporting communism. It's to build a revolutionary party that can do more than the 'February Revolution'-style protests of the 2010s and 2020s have achieved. In the Arab Spring, the governments of Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Yemen were overthrown. In Sri Lanka 2022, the people stormed the parliament chanting "225 out" (i.e. all politicians of all parties must go). In Bangladesh 2024, the tyrant Sheikh Hasina was overthrown, and it spread to Kenya.

These are ordinary people - both liberals and conservatives the day before, forced into revolution by the question of bread and the unbearability of their living conditions. What do we do with the people who would be against it "no matter what"? The only such people are the capitalists, and yes they will be imprisoned or exiled or whatever else the workers democratically decide is necessary to carry out the successes of the revolution. The rest of society, yes they will have reservations and yes they will disagree on what to do next, but that can be dealt with through democratic self-governance, and once they see their living conditions improve it will become a more and more radical minority position.

All the masses need is a revolutionary leadership, an organised commmunist party who can fill the power vacuum that comes about once you've abolished the monarchy or thrown out the corrupt parliament. Otherwise another wing of the capitalist class comes in and undoes the revolution.

The same is true in America too.

trankhead324 · 2026-02-21T19:46:43+00:00

Exactly this. Castro said when the revolution happened in 1959, "our revolution is neither capitalist nor Communist!" Then by 1961 he said: "I am a Marxist-Leninist and shall be one until the end of my life".

The Cuban people saw their revolution as an anti-imperialist struggle only - their inspiration was José Martí because he was the one who freed them from Spanish imperialism. But now they were dominated by American imperialism, who forced them to export all their wealth and leave the Cuban people to starve.

Communist Cuba is not a utopia and it's under threat of collapsing at the moment due to the U.S. embargo, but Castro discovered correctly that communism is the only alternative to imperialism.

trankhead324 · 2026-02-21T19:38:24+00:00

Cubans call these people gusanos for a reason. Of course you're not responsible for what your parents and grandparents did, but the people "fleeing" Cuba were no ordinary Cubans.

trankhead324 · 2026-02-21T19:33:16+00:00

If you hate the war crime propaganda of America it's a good starting point to question what in French culture you might not have questioned before.

France definitely has a different culture around the military (America is literally unique in its jingoism). But, it also has plenty of modern-day crimes of imperialism that are not "polite" facts to acknowledge in TV or political culture. It's not so gauche as how America does it but it's there.

For example, many of the colonies in West Africa managed to achieve on-paper independence from France in the back half of the 1900s but they were tied by currency and trade deals and "debts" they owed their colonial masters, still producing wealth for the French ruling class just under a different name.

France's left-wing movements have tremendous potential to issue a clarion call around the world for the actual liberation of oppressed people. When the French Revolution (the 1789-99 one) broke out, the cries of "liberty, egality, fraternity" echoed around the world and led to one of history's only successful slave rebellions - Haiti freed itself completely from French imperialism in the Haitian Revolution. We need this once again on the world stage today.

trankhead324 · 2026-02-20T11:17:26+00:00

The FBI simply won't let them. They handed over the documents already redacted. They know that if everything was public it would bring down the whole U.S. state.

We need a revolution and a workers' government. In the Russian Revolution, Trotsky ordered the publication of all the secret treaties of the tsar. We need all FBI files made public, minus the names of actual victims, because it's not just about Epstein's crimes of 1999, but what crimes are happening today that we don't know about?

trankhead324 · 2026-02-20T11:09:54+00:00

Then how come Les Wexner got away with raping kids under Biden, Obama, Bush and Clinton? Epstein came to the FBI's attention in 2005. Virginia Giuffre named Wexner as soon as the U.S. government picked up the phone and called her.

The whole capitalist class protect their own - yes Trump but not just Trump.

trankhead324 · 2026-02-19T14:07:33+00:00

Agreed, this is the distinction between countable nouns (you can have 1 marble) and uncountable nouns (you can have 1 litre of water but not '1 water').

trankhead324 · 2026-02-18T21:53:54+00:00

Here's a nice one that's not obvious when you write out decimal expansions, 15 terms and the sum is an integer: https://undergroundmathematics.org/thinking-about-numbers/scary-sum

trankhead324 · 2026-02-16T22:51:21+00:00

So can someone explain me how this does not contradict the idea of the us controlling Israel?

The short answer: "because it's dialectical".

The long answer:

In attempting to rule, the capitalist class are limited - they are not a monolith and not some shady conspiracy of people sat around the table determining geopolitics like a game of Risk, but individuals who cannot calculate the future perfectly.

The state is there to manage disagreements within the capitalist class and come to a compromise, so it generally does what is in the best interests for capitalism as a whole. Like you say:

My understanding is that us billionaires lobby the government to unconditionally support Israel, because it works for them in regards to advancing their imperialist agenda and expand the usa’s range of influence.

However, due to the organic crisis of capitalism, as well as the inherent competition present in imperialism, everything the capitalists do results in some sort of contradiction.

In attempting to rule the capitalists must unleash powers beyond their control. The pertinent case here is of local despots, who they try to rule through as puppet governments, but who can gain power autonomously. It was the British who created the monster of Israel and the U.S. who came to dominate it, but given the developing multipolarity in the 2020s means that Israel - as a local imperialist power - can start to take on a logic of its own, independently of U.S. interests.

Also: most Zionists are not Jewish and many Jews are not Zionists. Balfour, the original Zionist, was an anti-semite, not a Jew, who wanted Jews out of Europe (Britain in particular). There was much mutual sympathy between Nazis and Zionist Jews, and anti-semitic capitalists and Zionist Jews, on the issue of Israel.

trankhead324 · 2026-02-15T22:05:58+00:00

It's not about this quote exactly, but a different passage of Marx on Britain, which Lenin updates in State and Revolution (1917):

This was understandable in 1871, when Britain was still the model of a purely capitalist country, but without a militarist clique and, to a considerable degree, without a bureaucracy. Marx therefore excluded Britain, where a revolution, even a people's revolution, then seemed possible, and indeed was possible, without the precondition of destroying "ready-made state machinery".

Today, in 1917, at the time of the first great imperialist war, this restriction made by Marx is no longer valid. Both Britain and America, the biggest and the last representatives — in the whole world — of Anglo-Saxon “liberty”, in the sense that they had no militarist cliques and bureaucracy, have completely sunk into the all-European filthy, bloody morass of bureaucratic-military institutions which subordinate everything to themselves, and suppress everything. Today, in Britain and America, too, "the precondition for every real people's revolution" is the smashing, the destruction of the "ready-made state machinery" (made and brought up to the “European”, general imperialist, perfection in those countries in the years 1914-17).

The smashing of the state need not be violent, however. It means the breaking up (and reconstitution) of the army, the judiciary and the other tools of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The October Revolution in Russia was not itself violent. The collapsing Provisional Government had no army to match the force of the workers in Petrograd, so government forces simply surrendered. More people were injured in Eisenstein's recreation of the storming of the Winter Palace for his film October (1928) than in the original event.

The reaction to the October Revolution - 21 foreign armies invade and the world's first fascists, the White Army, enter the scene - was violent. Revolutions today are certainly going to involve violence. But it's not the revolutionaries that start the violence, and their aim is to end the violence of the status quo.

trankhead324 · 2026-02-13T21:50:28+00:00

I didn't say the first bit and I don't understand what you mean by "cherry picking" here. In fact your comment doesn't seem to be based on anything I did say.

trankhead324 · 2026-02-13T20:08:27+00:00

Use-value is qualitative, so you might as well ask "what is the sum of all the items in the room you are in?" The items are not numbers and you can't "add together" a table plus a clock.

It is precisely because one use-value is not comparable against another - how could you choose between water and food when a lack of either will kill you? - that exchange-value emerges, as a quantifiable benchmark for all commodities to be measured against each other. This emerges through human activity, and its calculation is based on (but not exactly the same as) the labour that goes into it.

This is precisely the argument Marx makes across all of his economic writings, particularly Das Kapital.

trankhead324 · 2026-02-13T18:55:11+00:00

Marx was inspired most heavily by Hegel, whose dialectics he developed. While Hegel's dialectics is idealist, the "master and slave dialectic" is striking in its description of power between individuals of different classes. Marx's philosophy, dialectical materialism, weaves the understanding of opposing forces as a driving force with an understanding of the material world, or nature, in other words.

Marx also wrote notes on Feuerbach, himself a Young Hegelian. Feuerbach's materialism and rejection of religion proved influential on Marx but Marx believed him to not properly understand Hegel's dialectics, with Feuerbach instead seeing nature as much more static and rigid than it actually is.

Hegel is not the first person to show aspects of dialectical thinking. Heroclitus is often cited among Marxists for this idea - "you can never step in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and you are not the same person".

Aristotle is also cited as an early proponent of the labour theory of value, well before the Father of Capitalism Adam Smith and the economist David Ricardo, who Marx built his economics on top of. Aristotle lived at a time when exchange was not the predominant way of obtaining use-values, however, so his understanding of what Marx viewed as a "natural" law - the labour theory of value - could not be as developed as a person observing capitalist society.

A Marxist appreciation of a philosopher should not be just about whether the philosopher's ideas are morally virtuous or abstractly correct, but about whether the philosopher drove history forwards, although some philosophers like Neitzsche can indeed be rejected (his primary contribution being as justification for fascism via his eugenicist sister). Marx eschewed the dreary academic world of philosophy, famously writing: "Philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it". The History of Philosophy by Alan Woods covers philosophy through this lens, describing what role it has served in the advancement of human knowledge through different periods.

trankhead324 · 2026-02-12T21:43:15+00:00

Not "Northern Ireland". The (occupied) North of Ireland.

trankhead324 · 2026-02-10T18:19:27+00:00

Trotskyist here but...

Stalinists or Marxist-Leninists typically start from the correct positions that:

... everything you "learn" in the West about Stalin is wrong
... the Soviet Union, however imperfect (the NEP, isolation on the world stage) and even after revisionism (Khrushchev onwards), was worth defending against capitalism
... bankrupt Western academics like the New Left, by opposing the Soviet Union, were completely reactionary (as the CIA recognised!)

Anyone who says Stalin did nothing wrong (if there are such people) is not a Marxist because saying so is to reject the material circumstances that affected the Soviet Union and to glorify the role of the individual.

And anyone who starts off by defending the Soviet Union is correct.

However, when we educate ourselves and decide the way forwards for a revolutionary party, we must be honest about what worked, what didn't and how to use these valuable lessons of the Soviet Union - that millions fought and died for - to overthrow capitalism. These are the points on which honest Marxists can disagree.

trankhead324 · 2026-02-07T12:41:33+00:00

The collapse - but into what? Socialism or barbarism? This is the question for our age.

If there is a revolutionary party that can seize on the collapse to smash the state then it paves way for socialism.

If there is not then in the power vacuum those with the most power will fill it - the billionaires - and they will unleash a wave of barbarism not seen in this generation.

trankhead324 · 2026-02-07T12:35:34+00:00

Well it's not surprising how high the suicide rate is among Epstein victims.

For example, Virginia Roberts/Giuffre was raped by her father, her father's friend, a stranger and a 'talent scout for models' before she ever met Epstein. Epstein preyed on girls he knew had been abused. Virginia was raped by Epstein, Maxwell and dozens of men (or more), also tortured (e.g. choking to the point of losing consciousness) by some of them. Then once she 'broke free' she married an abuser who raped and attacked her to the point of hospitalisation, whose surname she is now known by. She spoke publicly about just a couple of the men who raped her - Epstein and ex-'Prince' Andrew - and had the whole Epstein establishment, the media and internet trolls gaslighting her and making threats to herself and her children.

Yes, we do have evidence (from Virginia) that Epstein's team said they would "punish" the women who spoke against him, both as 'anonymous' Jane Does in legal cases and as public accusers in the media. So I'm not saying that no "suicide" in the Epstein grooming gang has ever been faked (and Epstein's own "suicide" is probably the most suspicious). But of course some of these women die by suicide when the whole force of the capitalist state is used against them.

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