Since I'd prefer we keep criticism of AOC accurate and substantive, I think it's worth noting that she said "Abolish ICE" is still her position a few days ago: https://xcancel.com/AOC/status/2011116393496813639

A comment on the thread today ~~about news that the US is relocating dozens of fighters to West Asia~~: https://hexbear.net/post/7297419

From what I heard, they're preparing a full-frontal assault to Iran.

Source: From one of my relatives in MİT—National Intelligence Organization, Türkiye's intelligence agency.

Direct link to the comment: https://hexbear.net/post/7297419/6819222

Edit: There's no evidence of a significant relocation of US fighters according to @MarmiteLover123@hexbear.net: https://hexbear.net/comment/6819297

A lot of people on this site using large amounts of hopium to imagine socialism is being built despite evidence pointing towards the capitalist roaders taking control of the country after Mao. Now we have people trying to pretend 5D chess is being played by the Politburo while they continue to abandon any proletarian internationalism, see for example their continued business with the Zionist Entity as one of its largest trading partners and that UN Security Council vote on the US "peace" plan that they abstained from rather than vetoing.

Also, we're supposed to believe that they'll transition to a more socialist economy in a few decades time because productive forces need to be built up. Somehow socialism was viable as a revolutionary force in the early 20th century, but now the largest economy on the planet, whose productive capacity easily outstrips the whole world pre-World War I and whose current population is 75% of the world population in 1914, somehow needs a few more decades of a mega-sized New Economic Policy before more expansive socialization of production. (I will remind people that capitalist states can also take control of the commanding heights of production in order to help keep their economy going, such as the nationalisations done in Britain after World War II.) Chances are China will have a lot of internal conflict if another sizeable part of the world has a revolution and is socialising production faster than them because it undermines the capitalist roaders' excuses.

Ultimately, imo, people waste their time here too often putting hope into China to bring about socialism. Do try to get to know fellow proles in other parts of the world including China, but you should spend much more time focusing on trying to organize where you are. The best thing to advocate regarding China is a policy of non-antagonism: everything I've written does not mean America & allies should be confrontational with them.

Very insightful writeup. Thank you.

I know some of us have been concerned about some of the post-primary developments in the Mamdani campaign. Do you have any thoughts on or insights into that?

I think Garrett Camfferman's letter published in Cosmonaut at the end of July provided a good overview of a lot of the concerning developments that happened in the first month after the primary: A Disappointing Month—Mamdani After the Primary

We had a thread here discussing Camfferman's letter a few weeks ago: https://hexbear.net/post/5715480

They already necroposted replies to me in old threads (1, 2) after I pushed back on comments they made in a /c/marxism thread: https://hexbear.net/post/5849684

Tbh we need a "Socialism" with Chinese Characteristics struggle session for this site's news community soon. Maybe it will help people here awaken to the fact that they need to help further the class struggle internationally wherever they are instead of just cheerleading on the sidelines and thinking China will on its own return to the cause of international proletarian revolution.

This is idealism.

1. You're trying to place hope just in the "third world" despite the presence of the class struggle throughout the world. The conditions of different countries require different tactics. For example in the US there is ripe ground given the unpopularity of what the government is doing.

2. You need to consider why active Maoists (who in many cases would identify themselves as Marxist-Leninists or Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, not Maoist Third-Worldists) do not have much love for China. The Communist Party of China hasn't just abandoned the cause of international socialism with the victorious capitalist roaders in the party (the bourgeois and petty bourgeois nationalists, as @SamotsvetyVIA@hexbear.net and I discussed here) using the excuse of building up productive forces, but they even will engage in such blatant acts as selling weapons to the government of the Phillipines which are then used to fight the guerillas of the Communist Party of the Phillipines.

I think this article I shared earlier in the week on /c/history is a pretty good piece to send to people, especially those at least sympathetic towards socialism. It outlines how the abolitionists actually managed to achieve lasting change in the United States, despite its 2 party system and powerful slave-owning aristocracy.

Basically it lays out what was done by the abolitionists to achieve a better world. That could help us start a serious discussion on what is to be done in our time.

The Abolitionist Dirty Break by Ben Grove

From the introduction of the piece:

How can a small movement challenge the Leviathan? How can it find strength in its independence? How can it topple a power that seems omnipotent and achieve a revolution?

In 2024, these tasks may seem hopelessly difficult to socialists in the United States. But defying the powerful has never been easy, and we will always have lessons to learn from our predecessors. One of the most important, yet also misunderstood, is the American abolitionist movement.

It’s easy enough to celebrate abolitionists for their righteous principles: activists of every stripe invoke their legacy. Yet abolitionists and their Radical Republican allies were more than just moral idealists. They were also cunning revolutionary strategists. Using principled independent politics, they successfully attacked America’s slaveholding oligarchy and the two-party system that protected it. Their insights and debates have tremendous relevance for modern socialists, because abolitionism helped to ignite the most important revolutionary rupture in U.S. history: the Civil War and the downfall of chattel slavery.

And these were the conditions that their movement built itself in:

By the 1820s, a two-party system of Whigs and Democrats was developing, nurtured by the brilliant New York politician Martin Van Buren. Van Buren’s explicit goal was to use the excitement of party politics to distract the masses from more dangerous conflicts over slavery. Whigs and Democrats would have fiery conflict and genuine power struggles—but both sides suppressed opposition to America’s true ruling class: the planters of the South, the Slave Power.

Is he really making a mistake? It seems to me like he's engaging in immanent critique of The Atlantic.

He's showing how what it does contradicts and differs from what it says it does.

What do you mean by the Marxist conception? Marx himself sometimes uses the term middle class.

Here's a few examples.

The Communist Manifesto, Chapter 1:

The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.

The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Chapter 1:

The bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe can be followed only by a bourgeois republic; that is to say, whereas a limited section of the bourgeoisie ruled in the name of the king, the whole of the bourgeoisie will now rule in the name of the people. The demands of the Paris proletariat are utopian nonsense, to which an end must be put. To this declaration of the Constituent National Assembly the Paris proletariat replied with the June insurrection, the most colossal event in the history of European civil wars. The bourgeois republic triumphed. On its side stood the aristocracy of finance, the industrial bourgeoisie, the middle class, the petty bourgeois, the army, the lumpen proletariat organized as the Mobile Guard, the intellectual lights, the clergy, and the rural population. On the side of the Paris proletariat stood none but itself.

Capital Volume 1, Chapter 25, Section 4:

Pauperism is the hospital of the active labour-army and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army. Its production is included in that of the relative surplus population, its necessity in theirs; along with the surplus population, pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the capitalist development of wealth. It enters into the faux frais of capitalist production; but capital knows how to throw these, for the most part, from its own shoulders on to those of the working class and the lower middle class.

There is no place yet in America for a third party, I believe. The divergence of interests even in the same class group is so great in that tremendous area that wholly different groups and interests are represented in each of the two big parties, depending on the locality, and almost each particular section of the possessing class has its representatives in each of the two parties to a very large degree, though today big industry forms the core of the Republicans on the whole, just as the big landowners of the South form that of the Democrats. The apparent haphazardness of this jumbling together is what provides the splendid soil for the corruption and the plundering of the government that flourish there so beautifully. Only when the land — the public lands — is completely in the hands of the speculators, and settlement on the land thus becomes more and more difficult or falls prey to gouging — only then, I think, will the time come, with peaceful development, for a third party. Land is the basis of speculation, and the American speculative mania and speculative opportunity are the chief levers that hold the native-born worker in bondage to the bourgeoisie. Only when there is a generation of native-born workers that cannot expect anything from speculation any more will we have a solid foothold in America. But, of course, who can count on peaceful development in America! There are economic jumps over there, like the political ones in France — to be sure, they produce the same momentary retrogressions.

From Friedrich Engels's 6th of January 1892 letter to Friedrich Adolph Sorge