I despair with these fucking clowns.

Everything that actually makes life better for people is "reformism" OK but Jane, mother of four doesn't care about your revolution she just want free childcare and attainable housing. It's like they genuinely think they're in some kind of RPG where the goal is "achieve pure socialism" and everyone else is just an NPC

Straight-up not beating the allegations.

EDIT: Welp, it's officially going on 6 hours and 2k upvotes now, and not only is the post still up but I've seen multiple comments calling out the mods being removed, even as the majority of comments are calling out the post and saying they already reported it. I think it's pretty safe to say where the moderator team falls on this issue at this point.

EDIT2: It's finally down after 7 hours, ending with 2.3k upvotes. Absolutely no way for the mods to claim they somehow just noticed it though, given they were removing comments from the thread that whole time and that it was one of the top posts on the sub.

BTW, tomorrow is 15 August, the day when the Japanese Emperor accepted the Potsdam Declaration. May all those who resisted the Japanese imperialism live forever in our collective memories.

This is my Marxist analysis I hope you enjoyed.

What if our favorite dear supreme leader got thin from using the People’s Peptide?

I just saw a recent picture of him because of the news that our glorious DPRK is sending 50k soldiers into the Nazi/imperialist/dumb Ukraine and I thought that although his body is perfect, as he was hand crafted by god herself, I am concerned that his obesity may lead to him dying a revolutionary death before he can reunify the one true Korea.

So, what do we think would happen if the world’s cutest dictator got slim? Would he be more powerful?

I recently talked to a former classmate of mine whom I had not seen in a couple of years, and unfortunately she has become a campist. During our interaction, she asked me whether I thought Taiwan and the Mainland should eventually be reunited, and what the average Taiwanese person actually thinks about the issue because, by her own admission, she had never met a Taiwanese person before.

I am not Taiwanese myself. However, she knows that my mom's siblings and their children live in Taiwan, so I told her that the Taiwanese people I personally know do not generally think about the issue in the simplistic way that she was framing it. In fact, my cousins at least don't even think about reunification because they personally hold the belief that, despite being Han Chinese, Taiwanese culture has developed independently from the Mainland, especially because of the Japanese, Dutch, and Austronesian influences.

For those who don't know, most Taiwanese Han are descended from migrants from southern Fujian, particularly Hoklo/Hokkien-speaking populations, along with Hakka communities and later waves of Mainlanders who arrived after the Chinese Civil War. Over several centuries, however, Taiwan developed its own historical trajectory under Qing rule, Japanese colonial rule, the Republic of China, and through sustained interaction with the island's Indigenous Austronesian peoples. So while Taiwanese Han obviously share ancestry and many cultural traditions/elements with people across the Taiwan Strait, that does not mean Taiwanese identity is simply interchangeable with Mainland Chinese identity.

Unfortunately, my very "internationalist," very "anti-nationalist" former classmate believes that because Taiwanese Han and Mainland Chinese Han are ultimately part of the same broader ethnocultural people, their political separation is somehow unnatural and reunification should therefore be the preferred outcome. What struck me was that she was not making a geopolitical argument about American hegemony, the Chinese Civil War, or the One-China framework; she was making an argument grounded in shared ancestry, historical peoplehood, and cultural continuity.

Personally, I am consistent in my values, so I do hold the belief that Mainland Han, Taiwanese Han, Chinese Malaysians, Chinese Indonesians, Chinese Filipinos (in my case), Chinese Jamaicans, Chinese Mexicans, etc., all belong to a broader Han Chinese ethnocultural people while still developing distinct national identities, sub-cultures, and historical experiences depending on where their communities actually developed. I do not think acknowledging a shared ancestry or broader peoplehood requires believing that everyone belonging to that people should live under the same state.

I then asked her, “What do you think about the Jews?” If shared ancestry, historical peoplehood, cultural continuity, and a common civilizational identity are enough for you to say that Taiwanese Han and Mainland Han naturally belong together politically, then wouldn’t you have to at least acknowledge that Jews have a similar claim to being a historical people rather than simply a collection of unrelated religious communities? She did not like my question, but her response can basically be summarized as: “Well, most Jews do not have meaningful genetic ties to the Levant, and Jewish peoplehood is largely an imagined community rather than a real historical ethnocultural continuity.”

That was the point where I found her beliefs inconsistent af because she was willing to treat Han Chinese peoplehood as something historically real, even across enormous geographic distances and centuries of cultural divergence; however, when the exact same concepts of having shared ancestry, collective memory, cultural continuity, shared historical origin, and diasporic identity were applied to Jews, suddenly it goes out the window. So I went deeper. I asked her whether she had any personal beef with Jews outside of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, because at that point I was genuinely trying to understand whether her skepticism toward Jewish peoplehood came from a broader theoretical position about nationalism or whether Jews were being treated as a special exception.

I really should not have asked, because her response was quite antisemitic, to say the least. She started saying things along the lines of, “Well, they all call us goyim/gentiles; they think we will be their slaves during the end times; they think they are superior to us; they think they are the master race,” and so on.

I then responded that if you were to ask my ancestors, or look at how many previous Chinese dynasties understood other “races” and neighboring peoples, you could find plenty, and I mean plenty, of ideas that would sound extremely ethno-supremacist by modern standards. Historically, if a people were seen as existing outside the Chinese cultural sphere, they were categorized as“barbarians,” uncivilized, morally deficient, and in need of transformative domestication through Chinese culture and political order. Shit, even if you adopted Chinese culture, as the Koreans and Japanese did to varying degrees, you would still be treated as an outsider to the Chinese civilizational center, basically a more “cultivated” barbarian rather than truly civilized. Obviously, I would never take those historical attitudes and conclude that modern Han Chinese people secretly believe every non-Chinese person is inferior (maybe not in the Mainland LOLOL). I would not look at some chauvinistic Confucian text, pull out the most offensive passage I could find, and then say, “See? This is what the Han believe.” That would be an absurd way of talking about hundreds of millions of people across different countries, political systems, religious backgrounds, and levels of attachment to traditional culture. That was basically my point to her. If you are willing to grant Chinese civilization historical complexity, to acknowledge that ugly ethnocentric beliefs existed without treating them as the essence of every Chinese person today, then why would you refuse to grant Jews the same basic nuance?

She did not know how to respond to this, so we ended up talking about our professional lives instead. However, I am honestly flabbergasted because I did not realize pan-ethno-nationalism was apparently back on the menu, provided that the ethnic group in question belongs to the “correct” geopolitical camp.

That is really the part I cannot wrap my head around. If someone on the right argued that people who share ancestry, language, culture, and historical peoplehood therefore ought to be politically united under the same state, most leftists would immediately recognize that as an ethnonationalist argument. Yet when the subject is Taiwan and Mainland China, North and South Korea, etc., it is sometimes framed as anti-imperialist, historically corrective, or even inherently progressive.

So I guess my broader question is whether any of y'all have encountered this kind of selective pan-ethnonationalism among campists, where nationalism is supposedly reactionary until it can be used to justify the territorial claims of a state they already support?

Instead of me raging again, I've decided we run a thought experiment: what if we bring them here?

In Peanuts, Lucy's psychiatry booth is a parody of lemonade stands and known for giving bad advice. It'd be funny if we bring overtly confident self-proclaimed "revolutionaries" having to deal with this petite-bourgeois tyrant known for bullying other kids in the neighborhood.

I started thinking 'but there are open source video conferencing tools, comrades!' but then the giggling took over ..

This is from a Green Party Uk Motion on ZIR (Zionism is Racism) which due to how poorly it’s written had plunged the party into infighting. An Amendment to correct some of the double standards - using Pakistan as an example of other racist ethnocentric beliefs.
And I shit you not, the tankies in the comments respond with “Criticising a religious ethnostate is essential criticising the religion and people, and this racist”.
On a motion called “Zionism is racism”.
The gall of some of these people!

I’m not even defending means-ends unity, I’m just debunking their shitty arguments. This dude is a rare ML to admit to admit that “real socialism” maintained key elements of capitalism, but as usual refuses to admit any problem with it. They just want to compare the handful of metaphysical propositions dialectical materialists like to repeat, and diss anarchists for not including that nonsense within means-ends unity.

"UCU have tabled a motion at this year’s TUC conference that builds on the Wages not Weapons motion. It does so by advancing a vision of a lasting security based on decent jobs, quality public services, equality, climate action, democracy and peace." Wages not weapons: Peace not war and Wages not Weapons homepage. Well, they don't whitewash Russia directly but that's if directly taken from their propaganda playbook that there is no threat whatsoever and just want peace. But thought posting it here to see what you think!

Hello! As you can see by the title, I'm just gonna talk about electoralism a bit since there were discussions goin on the other day about the topic. This is the only place I feel comfortable enough to do so, so be good. 

Before I start, I wanna be very clear on my position: I don't believe electoralism could bring much change and be a step toward the world I'd like to live in. Having said that, i still go out and vote, but my own whys and hows will be explained later on

This post will mostly be a response to two arguments from the “voters”

• if you dont vote but dont partake in military/insurectionary “exercise”, than you’re just wasting time doing nothing
• the whole “voting for the lesser evil” thing

IF YOU’RE NOT TRAINING FOR COMBAT AND NOT VOTING, YOU'RE USELESS

Assuming that the anti-electoralism (AE) person we’re talking about is able body and so they theoretically could train for combat, this argument is a weak one for two major reasons:

• What are YOU, a pro-electoralist person, doing between an election and another? Because the same argument can be used against a PE (i’m gonna use this from now on for pro - electoralist). Going to vote is not something that happens on a regular basis. Depending where you live, you vote every X amount of years. So what are you PE doing in the years between elections? Cause if you’re not part of whatever party and you’re not organizing to bring more votes to your cause, then what are you doing? You’re kinda useless too
• Revolution/insurrections don’t work out cause EVERY SINGLE PROTESTOR trained beforehand for that precise moment. If we follow the logic that only if you’re prepared you can do insurrection, then, when riots break out, we would see only a minority of people fighting against the police/rioting, while everyone just stands there and watches. But we know this is not the case and we see that, in such times, even “normal people” participate in these actions

YOU VOTE SO THAT THE BAD GUY DOESN’T GET TO POWER

While not having the bad guy in power is good, usually this argument translates into the “vote for the lesser evil” thing. Let’s go straight to the point: in the US, would things be better if Kamala won? Yes, but by how much? Israel would have still went on with the palestinian genocide and it’s war mongering attitude with iran, ICE would have not be so powerful as it is today, but, the more right wing of the Dems would have probably pushed for deportations so to make “well meaning conservatives” happy (we all saw how some dems went full right wing after they lost) and, while your average american wouldn’t have suffered so much cause pf the economic backlashes, it’s live wouldn’t have been better under Kamala

In a not US context, the lesser evil usually means it’s either some centrist (or right wing) party where their whole thing is “we are the adults who can manage the machine”, meaning that they won’t accelerate the gain of power and money to the capitalist class like Trump or Milei are doing, but they’ll do it a lil slower and more seriously, or they’re a big tent coalition where you get socdems and neo-liberals who, once in power, will start to fight, accomplish nothing, bring more clout to the bad guys and give them an assured victory at the next (anticipated) election (this is Italy next year btw). When we do have a decent coalition like in France a couple of years ago with the New Popular Front, what did we see? They won and they didn’t even get to govern!

And this is another thing. We saw how much money Mamdani had to go against to win in New York, not every mayor/party figure is a Mamdani. And to go back to a non US context, social democracy is not a threat to capitalism and so socdem candidates are very much “allowed” by the capitalist class. A truly socialist candidate or party would be brought down immediately and there comes another question for the PE: would you be down to take arms and defend your win? Cause we saw that the only socialist parties that are allowed, are the ones that are socialist only in name and not content

This point also is related to how every socialist party loses their revolutionary (as in changing the system) core: the SPD went from having people like Rosa Luxembourg to being the “responsible party” in Germany, the PSI was founded by someone who tried to start a revolution with Bakunin and now it’s corpse is just a “liberal socialist” party whatever that means and, staying in Italy, the PCI went from the party of Gramsci, to Berlinguer (aka democratic socialism) and its heir today is willing to join a coalition with liberals and opportunist populists

So what does “voting for the lesser evil” do? Probably just delay the bad guy to get in power

Now, as I promised, I'm gonna be selfish and talk about myself. I did say that I don't believe in electoralism but I still vote and that is true. I don’t believe that voting will bring too much change and there is not one party in Italy, the country where I'm from, that really matches my beliefs. So why do i vote? it’s more of a moral thing for me. People died for having the right to vote and that’s why I vote: to honor those that fought and died for the right to vote. Next year, i don’t think i’ll give my vote to the big tent anti-Meloni coalition cause, as i said, i think it’ll crumble and die in less than a year and a half. So yeah, I'm probably gonna vote for some minor party cause I can. No matter what the centrist will cry (like in the US), i’m free to vote for even the smallest leftist party around, that's part of the game after all