I decided to not be bitter and i followed a liberal influencer for like a week (they dont make political content usually) but today they posted that BULLSHIT about how trump is causing wars as a cover for the files and i had to unfollow. nobody is starting wars over that, theyre starting wars for capital and resources.
what the fuck is a ”eipstein class”? just those guys on the files? are the billionaires who refused or were not invited alright with you?
and of course the religious zealots doing the bit about how eipstein was satan incarnate while churning out money for their pastor to buy a new mansion.
the prolecattleiat is not being elevated to sapience by this situation alone. people have to read theory which is why i encourage them to do so. libs, anarchists and conservatives have the balls to talk about how mao, stalin and other leaders were also pedophiles or ray peests so communism is not worth it either so we just need a matriarchy as if a capitalist system would be fine if women were in charge.
Who is more revolutionary: the Chinese billionaire defending the CPC or the white trailer parker family who supported Trump/Biden?
The sex traffic rings are not extraneous of systems of power of capital, they are intrinsic to them. There was no mass revolt when the Epstein files were released but there are thousands of pogroms and attacks on minorities in the name of protecting white women against the Foreign Hordes. The complicity is not subtle. The scapegoating of elites against rest of westerners is to downplay then actual bribes of imperialist profits at play. It is why all your more visible communist parties will not really touch the question on labour aristocracy or settlerism.
Marxism-leninism is to truly recognise the classes we belong to as they are so we can then betray our classes successfully where appropriate. In the imperial cores it may mean we forgo collaboration with those who benefit more from their impetialist state than we can materially offer them and organise with those who don’t - the lumpen proletriat, migrant workers and oppressed nations within nations.
Chinese billionaires aren’t there to defend the CPC lol, what in the world. The CPC continues to succeed because political power is not in the hands of its billionaires, or any other billionaires. Billionaires would not be trustworthy to defend it, given they have fundamentally different class interests.
This is an overly vague characterization. Are we talking about somebody whose family members murder brown people overseas? Or somebody who filled out a ballot at election time? Because we as communists are supposed to recognize that bougie elections are largely farcical. Blaming the voting masses for a rigged electoral system is not a serious analysis.
Yeah, because revolution isn’t a spontaneous mass action. I feel confident that you should know this from what I can recall of your posts in the past, so why are you talking like something else is true. BTW, the last time the US had major spontaneous mass action (the 2020 protests) was in response to racist police brutality and they got chemical weapons used against them (tear gas), they got beaten, some organizers were murdered. People always leave out this part when they want to lazily characterize the entire west as an inert mass of horribleness.
And in Ireland, some people are fighting back: https://thespectaclemag.substack.com/p/foreign-invaders-are-destroying-irelandand
But sure, let’s ignore everyone who has ever sacrificed to try to fight the beast from within and lump them all into the same exact group. Again, this is not serious analysis.
It’s not scapegoating??? It is a world of class and power difference. Getting paid slightly more or having slightly better living conditions is not the same as bombing civilians in order to try to create a failed state so that imperial power can be maintained and expanded.
Last I knew, PSL does at least acknowledge the settler issue being a thing. That said, I have never claimed the west does super well on the settler issue, but it’s beside the point of what we’re talking about. You were misusing a term that has a specific material meaning to make it mean something else that doesn’t make any sense. And now you are doubling down in a way that comes off like you are defending billionaires. I think you need to take a step back.
If you want to say the west is not cleanly divided into elite and victim, that’s fine, you can make that point. But don’t go down this road that implies billionaires can have more revolutionary potential than somebody living in a trailer park because of their geography. I don’t know what that is, but it has nothing to do with dialectical materialism or communism.
It’s noteworthy that Ireland was once colonized, and the Irish who today are helping immigrants are doing so out of solidarity based on being a victim of british colonisation. Concerning America, an analogous phenomenon could be black and indigenous solidarity fighting against settlers, or to be more accurate, fighting settlers who are explicitly racist and dangerous.
Yes, that is a helpful thing to note and it’s part of the reason why the conditions of the US are far more complicated than “white people being privileged and bad”.
I would recommend H. W. Edward’s Labor Aristocracy, Mass Base of Social Democracy. And then (re) read Day’s essay on brainwashing (masses, elites and rebels) from Redsails thereafter.
You’re part of a class on the global stage. Truly understand its material conditions and learn how you are going to betray it.
Best of luck
You are not preaching about labor aristocracy in this thread. You are taking it to some other level where billionaires are revolutionary because they’re Chinese and people living in a trailer park in the US are villains because they voted for a US president. This is not an understanding of class on the global stage. It is a reductionist view of material conditions and contradictions that collapses the worldview into oversimplified nodes instead of broadening in order to be able to work through specific contradictions.
Consider reading it, and you may develop a different view.
Chareterisations of villains and heroes are besides the point. It is about understanding the science of who may be revolutionary domestically so we can spend most of our limited resources on them. This means carefully, and maybe painfully for some, understanding what it means to be a settler and bourgoisie proleteriat. It is step away from a simplistic dynamism of rich vs poor otherwise end up resulting in the same mistakes of those who Marx and Lenin criticised (eg Proudhon).
I found Cesaire snd Losurdo’s works useful too. Eg https://redsails.org/discours-sur-le-colonialisme/
You literally asked this before like it was a serious question:
And have not addressed the problems with it at all. Going beyond “simple dynamism of rich and poor” does not mean defending the rich and characterizing them as more revolutionary than somebody living in a trailer park because they live in a non-settler country.
But that’s not what you’ve been talking about.
You didn’t say, “Here is where you should focus your energies domestically.” You compared Chinese billionaire and white Yankee in a trailer park.
Don’t say one thing, act like you’re saying another, and then throw reading material at me when I don’t agree, as if this will clarify.
BTW, I have read the redsails article on brainwashing before, probably multiple times by now. And it is incredibly overrated as an analysis. Here’s a part that stands out to me:
The author almost realizes their own mistake, but then skips on by it and says nah, I’m not making that mistake. But they are. They are being incredibly reductionist in relation to hundreds of millions of people. They go on to double down on the reductionist rhetoric even more:
This is a nonsense argument. First, via no evidenced investigation, the author supposes that hundreds of millions of people, some of which are non-white peoples with a much more complicated history than this kind of rhetoric gives them any recognition of, share essentially the same point of view. This point of view is something they implicitly know, yet hide from. So now we have shifted from “they are brainwashed and this explains their lack of movement” to implying “they are a hyper intelligent hive mind who knows exactly what’s going on and pretends not to because it feels good to pretend.”
It’s the kind of article that reeks of academic marxism. Of trying to “cudgel one’s brains and develop an idea” without going out and investigating. The author encountered a problem, that sometimes people will reject the evidence you give them that challenges their existing worldview, and extrapolated a massive honker of a speculative generalization out of trying to answer why.
From my personal experience with lumpenproletariat, they will always smile in your face while driving the sword to the hilt and calling you family. There may be an exception but I’m probably the only lumpenproletariat I know who wouldn’t.
The lumpenproletetiat are ones the captial class has excluded fron easy access as a prolteriat. The black prison populafion in the US exists even though it’s a net cost to the state because it benefits the white population from labour competition and therefore preserves wage inflation and their greater cut of imperialist superprofits.
The likes of the PSL (only bringing this one up because of the rampant apologism on LG for this group. You can make the same case for all the other sickle and hammer cosplayers too) does not want to examine this dynamic because a greater share of the support draws from the latter group at the expense of the former. And the reason they have to particpate in electoralism is because there is not anything they can offer materially more to the white settler nation than what the inperialist state offers, and given they are meant to be marxist-leninist ie the material comes before the idea, it then begs the question why have they failed for several years to have any real question on labour aristocracy or settlerism.
The revolutionary groups are cleqrly those that you can offer maferiallly more than the imperialist state, which then will have to include the lumpenproleriat. It is why marxist prison movements are a thing.
Most of the lumpenprole around me traffic drugs, women, weapons, gambling and are heavily intertwined with the legal apparatus, so I’m not seeing them willing to work hard for the rest of their lives in hopes of reaping rewards for their children. Don’t get me wrong, as long as you stay in your lane, they’re not going out of their way to bother you, but plenty of tax free money is hard to beat.
Just from your example you can deduce there are more women lumpenproleteriat than the ones exploiting them. It is not that lumpenprolteriat are intrinsically revolutionary just like bourgoisie proleteriat aren’t intrinsically revolutionary.
Capitalist states and the bourgoisie proletriat who work for them are already engaged in this.
Consider maybe that who is a crimimal and who isn’t is by the power dynamics of any given capitalist society ie capitalist class dictats
The trafficked women become complicit to lure more in. It starts with the drugs, or loss of a job, or both. They have to want to be done with all of it, and be done with all of it for a while. Even then, loyalty to the abusers is the last thing to die, especially when it’s your blood family.
Which is exactly why Marx states the Lumpen are a volatile class, while simultaneously being easily swayed by socialist rhetoric. The destitute material conditions make the class ruthless.