/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

U.S. officials defend deal with controversial Venezuelan oil baron
In 2018, Betancourt was listed as an unnamed "conspirator" in a federal indictment of his cousin and seven others in a $1.2 billion international money-laundering scheme involving manipulated currency exchange rates between U.S. dollars and Venezuelan bolivars. Betancourt was never charged in the crimes, which largely occurred between 2014 and 2016, because his attorneys successfully argued he was unaware of the scheme.
https://www.axios.com/2026/09/01/us-officials-defend-deal-venezuelan-oil-baron
https://archive.ph/7VmWs

Forest Service chief faces scrutiny over logging ties as Trump plans to scrap protections
Donald Trump this month announced plans to rescind a landmark rule that has protected old-growth forests in the US for 25 years. If finalized, the rollback is expected to benefit the companies that Tom Schultz, chief of the US Forest Service, represented in his previous roles as a timber industry lobbyist and executive, according to research by consumer advocacy non-profit Public Citizen.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/01/trump-roadless-rule-old-growth-forests

House Democrats fume about GOP's anti-socialism bill
House Democrats are grumbling that Republicans are setting one last political trap for them before November by attaching language touting their marquee voter ID legislation to a resolution denouncing socialism. This is a classic election-year tactic by the majority party in Congress, but centrist Democrats say it is also a missed opportunity for a genuinely bipartisan vote to denounce socialism.
https://www.axios.com/2026/09/01/democrats-house-socialism-republicans-save-act
https://archive.ph/IG3aF

BofA vice president killed in Times Square stabbing
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

>BofA vice president killed in Times Square stabbing

Awesome

Burnham must stop housing back-sliding
IF IT is too early to come to any rounded judgement regarding Andy Burnham’s programme and policies – that should wait until the budget next month — it is not too soon to express concern about his government’s course in relation to the vital issue of housing. Here he is in danger of following Keir Starmer in under-delivering. One pledge after another has been discarded or diluted. First, a suggestion of introducing a private-sector rent freeze was dropped without explanation. This would have been a far more substantive measure to tackle the cost-of-living crisis than anything else the new government has announced, and would have indicated whose side Burnham is on – working people rather than rapacious landlords. Second, a clear commitment to promote council housing has been watered down in favour of more amorphous concepts of social or “affordable” housing. Only three of the more than 30 bodies to get new government funding for construction are actually councils.
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/burnham-must-stop-housing-back-sliding

Rosa Luxemburg: Down With Reformist Illusions—Hail the Revolutionary Class Struggle!
Proposals to hold out “the open hand to good will” marked the beginning of the nineties; promises of an inperceptible, “gradual evolution” into Socialism marked their end. Crises, wars, and revolutions were considered outworn theories, mere swaddling clothes of modern society; parliamentarism and trade unionism, democracy in the State and democracy in the industry were to open the gates to a new and better order. …. The actual course of events played frightful havoc with all these illusions. In place of the promised mild social-reformist development of culture there has set in since the end of the nineties a period of the most violent, extreme sharpening of capitalist conflicts, a period of storm and stress, of crashes and turmoil, of tottering and trembling in the very foundations of society. The ten-year period of the economic upward curve of development was compensated for in the following decade by two world-convulsing crises. After two decades of world peace there followed in the last decade of last century six bloody wars and in the first decade of the new century four bloody revolutPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>2904810
Was it ever under Iran's control?

>>2904822
If Iraqis want to overthrow the regime it becomes a resistance state against color revolution
Otherwise it's a comprador state that isn't REAL islamic resistance o algo

idk just wanted to put this here.

did it reached the bump limit?

>>2900750
NTA, but both the French and Russian revolutions made their states way stronger and followed their pre-revolutionary geopolitical goals. I wonder if Pentagon planners will ever figure that out as they watch their military get hollowed out by financiers.

>>2903598
>i would rather be worked to death on a farm
Nothing is stopping you from giving up your lifestyle of whining on the Internet 24/7 and joining up with the Zapatistas or something.
>>2903686
>Pentagon planners will ever figure that out as they watch their military get hollowed out by financiers
This is just pure cope. I wouldn’t be surprised if this talking point is a US military psyop to secure more funding.

>>2904534
class struggle doesn't care about your feelings thoughever

>>2904534
>There literally won’t be a First World anymore if imperialism against the Third World ended.
phew. that's eye opening. thank you for reminding me to support the troops

>>2904545
Global warming and the worst el nino in 200 years doesn’t care about class struggle

>>2904305
Yeah I've noticed musicians doing it, musicians in the "middle" of the industry who got destroyed by the internet taking their income away. I like "industrial" music and there's a band called PIG that I saw selling VIP tickets for the current tour this month where you can hang out with the guy for an hour before the show and get some special merch. He's actually a really nice guy (a goofy Englishman) and I met him once, but I think it's just the brutal economics of the industry.

In this genre/scene, virtually all of these musicians are middling at best with the exception of Nine Inch Nails. But that's more like U2 or Metallica or Coldplay. And even then Trent Reznor is still charging $120/ticket (plus fees) and will sell you a $60 hoodie at the enormo-dome because otherwise shit starts to fold up fast. I actually did go see Nine Inch Nails a couple of years ago and it was this gigantic, expensive production with a small army of crew setting up the lights and handling everything. That was one of the only times I've actually paid money to go see a "celebrity" rock star performer. I got my money's worth though.

But unless you're Trent Reznor, what are you gon do. The only time there was really any money from actual labels for this style of music was a very narrow window in the mid-90s when the mainstream briefly flirted with industrial rock because Nine Inch Nails was successful. Also the reason Nine Inch Nails sounds like that is because it took an 18-wheeler full of gear, recording engineers, and a massive studio with rooms designed to record drum sounds. That shit is expensive.

At any rate, the middle got completely hollowed out. You still have the Taylor Swifts who are a mega-huge, but there's a lot fewer middle-of-the-pack artists. You have a lot of people playing around on their computers and uploading their music to Bandcamp. Same with games. Either it's a Rockstar/Ubisoft/EA/Bethesda blockbuster that costs hundreds of millions of dollars (GTA VI apparently is going to cost over a billion dollars to make), and then you have shoestring budget indie games with retro 16-bit graphics from people who are essentially doing it as a hobby. So yeah if you're a musician, you charge $90 for a VIP session and if 12 people buy the VIP tickets and show up before the show in Phoenix, Arizona, you make $1,000.

>>2904305
stop spending money in shit that isnt food or basic necessities
stop consuming
save up
stop working

rock stars have always been raping teenage girls, it was only a matter of time before the record labels figured out how to set up a toll booth for that too.

>>2904328
It always seemed to me that the geography alone makes being a touring musician difficult in the US. Like, it's huge. It's not like you just gotta jump in the van and drive a few hours to the next city, you have to cross this vast and poorly connected, with regard to transport infrastructure, continent.
>>2904519
Rock music has always had a pedophilic current. Jerry Lee Lewis famously went for teenagers and a lot of lyrics in the genre revolve around teenage and young girls.

Moved to >>>/siberia/820066.

>>2904274
Stonks have always been a richfag's game.
>No matter how much I try to collaborate with capitalists, no true collaborative effort can be made, they just keep stealing from me.
It's almost like collaboration with these people is impossible, like we need a revolution or something…

>>2904274
Dividends aren't the only way to make money from stocks, or even the main way, they're just a bonus basically

just open a CD

Moved to >>>/siberia/819968.

>>2904045
erm, acktually its called détournement and its a good thing, chud

>>2904045 (me)
Although calling groypers "most raped goyslave" or whatever is sometimes funny because it's using their language against them. They spent so long hyping themselves up as the most badass based racist guys on the internet and now they're stuck with the Iran war so they have to complain that not castrating yourself for Israel is antisemitic. But the line between owning someone by their own logic and doing it unironically always evaporates eventually.

>people from across political of spectrum
>looks inside
>twitter users (center rightists that larp socialism because they like Hasan and turbochuds with a BBC cuckolding fetish)
Please touch digital grass. Twitter is a "normie" website in the same way FOX News is a "normie" news station.

>>2904194
Isn't Twitter one of the most popular social media sites on the internet though?

Moved to >>>/siberia/819944.

Pentagon plays down report of Hegseth regularly overruling military advice
Pete Hegseth regularly receives formal objections from senior commanders and proceeds anyway, the Pentagon’s top spokesman has said, as he tried to discredit a Washington Post report that four generals and admirals had advised against prolonging the war in Iran. “Of course, we demand candid military advice,” Sean Parnell wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “Non-concurs are standard. The Secretary sees them constantly. That’s how you run a real military.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/31/pentagon-report-pete-hegseth

Trump says US will refill its petroleum reserves using Venezuelan oil
United States President Donald Trump has said on social media that oil from a recently struck deal with Venezuela will be ⁠used to replenish the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve, an oil stockpile that the country keeps for emergencies and that has been drawn down sharply in ⁠recent years to respond to global supply disruptions and high fuel prices.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/30/trump-says-us-will-refill-its-petroleum-reserves-using-venezuelan-oil
https://archive.ph/9IZ9c

USDA cyclospora research projects shelved amid funding cuts and relocations, Politico reports
Although the third project remains ⁠funded, all scientists working on the parasite have declined to relocate ​to Iowa, Politico reported, citing people familiar with the plans and internal ​documents. Reuters could not immediately verify the report. "None of the research has been disrupted, and research will continue without disruption," a USDA spokesperson said, while pointing to Congress ​over the funding cuts.
https://www.reuters.com/world/usda-cyclospora-research-projects-shelved-amid-funding-cuts-relocations-politico-2026-08-30/

Cisco probably violated MiPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

Where is the climate movement?
At a time when climate change is no longer an abstract ‘question of the future’ for Britain, but is making itself devastatingly felt in the here-and-now, it’s right to ask: where has the climate movement gone? For young people today who only have further ecological collapse ahead of them, it can be seriously demoralising to not see anyone taking action to save the environment. It’s no wonder that this summer’s rising temperatures have brought with them a rise in ‘climate anxiety’. So what happened to the climate movement? And will we see its return any time soon?
https://communist.red/where-is-the-climate-movement/

Venezuela-U.S oil deal exposes the total bankruptcy of social democracy By Nikos Mottas, Editor-in-Chief of In Defense of Communism
There are moments when political developments strip away every disguise and expose the class character of political forces with unusual clarity. The latest oil agreement between Washington and the government of Delcy Rodríguez is one such moment. After years of “Bolivarian,” “anti-imperialist” and even “socialist” rhetoric, Venezuela’s social-democratic leadership is presiding over a further opening of the country’s strategic energy wealth to U.S. monopoly interests. This is not an isolated commercial arrangement. It follows the reform of the hydrocarbons framework, which widened the possibilities for transnational capital in the oil sector and continued the privileged position of companies such as Chevron. The Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV) has denounced this course as a retreat from national control over hydrocarbons and as a policy increasingly shaped by the demands of foreign capital. The political significance goes far beyond the terms of a single deal. For years, opportunist forces internationally demanded that communists identify solidarity with the Venezuelan people against U.S. imperialist aggression with political support for the PSUV government. Criticism of the capitalist character of the Venezuelan economy, of concessions to domestic and foreign capital, of attacks on workers’ rights or of the persecution of the PCV was often treated as if it objectively served Washington. Recent developments once again show how bankrupt that argument is. The same political current that presented the managePost too long. Click here to view the full text.

interesting post, I have nothing to add. it was all very observant and not very disagreeable.

>>2900637
>In seconds, Right Wingers can have hundreds of photographs that look real enough to impose ideas on the general public. If a person scrolls TikTok or Facebook or Twitter long enough and sees hundreds of AI generated images of London teeming with Muslims, or Blue-Haired Transgenders teaching school kids, or BLM protesters attacking white people, then even if he can recognize on a basic level that the image in front of him is fake, they could blur and coagulate in his subconscious, plant a seed of fascist myth that the Right will meticulously grow.
I have seen the right call this "spiritually true." This has always been the case btw. This is how they respond to racist caricatures in political cartoons for example: "It's spiritually true"

But you also see the inverse of this where Van Jones went on TV and called the genocide of Palestinians fake and used an example of a handful of AI videos (which were probably created by mossad to discredit the allegations) as a way to dismiss the entire thing as fake.

>>2902184
>But you also see the inverse of this where Van Jones went on TV and called the genocide of Palestinians fake and used an example of a handful of AI videos (which were probably created by mossad to discredit the allegations) as a way to dismiss the entire thing as fake.

Just posting rq before work but I think even if we accept some AI generated fake Pro-Palestine propaganda, that isn't really harmful in the long run.

This is something that hurts to hear for a few people. Like we generally, as people, want to be on the side of honesty and truth and all that. But as the old saying goes a lie travels the world in the time it takes the truth to tie it's shoes. I think in the long run Van Jones trying to "discredit" the Genocide accusations by saying "well some stuff is faked" wont do that much harm.

Shamelessly bumping the thread because I think we can still get some fun discussions out of this. But to at least make this bump interesting, I thought I'd write a little more about Sorel.

Now one of the critiques I've heard levied at Sorel is he's too much of an idealist or in some way "non-Marxist". Now Sorel himself would be considered heterodox or revisionist, but his stance on Marx wasn't "Marx was wrong". He'd quote Marx, reference Marx, it was undeniable that Marx was so central to his political thought that there likely wouldn't be a Sorel without a Marx!

Where Sorel diverged is that he eventually came to grow deeply cynical of the Marxists of his time; he believed they'd lost their revolutionary essence as it were. He saw self-proclaimed "Marxists" adopt what we'd maybe call "Vulgar Materialism" and surrender the fight based on some misguided kind of determinism: "Capitalism will collapse and Communism will come about, so why do I have to leave my armchair?" And he became deeply resentful of "Socialists" that adopted reformist attitudes and became little better than bourgeois parliamentarians.

So I figured I'd focus on a work that connects both Marx and Sorel: The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Other than being underrate, I think this work provides one of the strongest cases for Sorel's thought not being divorced from Marx's.

I believe the first chapter has the strongest point of comparison between what Marx wrote and what Sorel would later proclaim:

>Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise […] Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing bettPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>2903492
>Just posting rq before work but I think even if we accept some AI generated fake Pro-Palestine propaganda, that isn't really harmful in the long run.

that's not the point anon. the point is the bourgeoisie will use AI as a double edged sword. any time they are proven to be doing something bad, it doesn't matter how real the proof is, they can just use their media monopoly to say it was "fact checked not true" and "probably AI" meanwhile they can use the same AI to frame anybody who opposes them of crimes, and since anyone who opposes them does not have the media monopoly that they do, they can just signal boost the fake AI shit that serves their narrative while saying real shit is fake.

>the EU is not a communism
Explain this then.

how many times are you gonna make this thread

>>2902765
I only ever made another one once back in spring (I think?).

icelanders said fuck the eu, based tbh. libs seething.

>>2903091
It is what it is.

>>2860957
Damn the DSA seems even more useless than I thought

>>2858790
>What does leftypol think of the worker's party of belgium?
how do they feel about the congo

This explains them quite well: https://tribunemag.co.uk/2024/12/going-back-to-class

>>2860957
Rosa Luxemburg Stifling also produced a comparison between the PTB-PVDA and the DSA.