No.575540
>they only adopted the Black Belt thesis because Stalin told them to
No.575541
A mix of factors lead people to want to believe in CPUSA.
One is a higher diversity. Idea is they can thus appeal to more of America.
Second they have nominal ties with foreign communist parties, unlike most other parties (I think a handful have links to maybe one or two countries at most).
Also an established party, has people experienced in unions and a history to look back on.
No.575542
>>575539They did a lot wrong but they also did a lot right.
>They didn’t originally give a shit about Black people either, they only adopted the Black Belt thesis because Stalin told them to.Okay now I know you're bullshitting.
No.575543
The things you mentioned were historic failings of the international communist movement. That needed and in some cases still need to be corrected. If you do this under the banner of the cpusa or some other party doesn't really matter
No.575544
>midwestern marx has left the chat
No.575545
>>575539>Foster was power-hungry and mad because his steel strike failedAlso his reputation in the American labour movement has been massively overblown. He didn’t have the reputation of a cutthroat militant when he was alive and a lot of other Wobblies viewed him as kind of a moderate.
No.575546
>>575541>Also an established party, has people experienced in unions and a history to look back on.CPUSA in NYC has done a lot of work with the Amazon Union if I recall correctly.
No.575547
Also Foster was a literal eugenicist.
No.575548
Any revolutionary movement in the US will start with black and indigenous workers or migrant workers.
No.575549
>>575548It has to. You can't make socialism in a settler-colony.
No.575550
>>575545That's why you check the oral histories from the comrades who were there and not the stuff first day kids are saying on the internet.
No.575551
>>575539The vast majority of world communist movements failed. It's survivorship bias: we remember the handful of revolutions that won (Russia, China, DPRK, Cuba, Vietnam, Burkina Faso) and ignore the ones that lost.
No.575552
>>575551buddy how bout you try thinking about the Finnish civil war regularly and see how it affects your fucking mental health fuck you.
damn it all the hell.
No.575555
Someone send this thread to the widely acclaimed speaker, writer, journalist, and political analyst Caleb Maupin and see how he responds.
No.575556
>>575545>Also his reputation in the American labour movement has been massively overblown. He didn’t have the reputation of a cutthroat militant when he was alive and a lot of other Wobblies viewed him as kind of a moderate.Philip Foner says the opposite but okay.
No.575557
The CPUSA endorsed Biden
The DSA didn't endorse Biden.
Yet the latter is considered the 'democrats' Shepherd' while the latter isn't. Funny.
No.575558
they were good with william z foster but now they're cia
No.575563
>>575561Yeah she also helped organize the ALU.
No.575564
>>575544Holy shit I fucking hate settler socialists so fucking much.
No.575565
>>575559>both are bad, just look at those feds sabotaging the conventionsus
No.575568
>>575550Any good oral histories about CPUSA during its golden years?
No.575569
>>575562We used to do jazz hands back in the day. People were applauding too much which made everything take too long so we switched to jazz hands internally. Pretty amusing in hindsight, new people were especially confused.
No.575570
>>575557THEY DIDN'T ENDORSE BIDEN YOU FUCKING RETARD I AM GOING TO CURB STOMP YOU LMAO
WHEN YOU FIND OUT I'M RIGHT YOU'RE JUST GONNA SAY "TACITLY ENDORSING" OR SOME WEASEL WORDS FUCK YOU
No.575573
I’m pretty sure the people gassing up CPUSA’s reputation are first-day communist kids who watch a lot of the widely acclaimed speaker, writer, journalist, and political analyst Caleb Maupin or Midwestern Marx. I don’t think any experienced communist would do such a thing.
No.575575
>>575573That's very online of you, but not online enough to understand the patsocs despise the CPUSA and are trying to destroy it from within. You clearly have no idea what the fuck is going on.
I'm definitely gonna check out this other youtuber who apparently makes you seethe, thanks btw
No.575576
>>575571Yeah Fox News was absolutely horrified by this move from the CPUSA, you wouldn't ignore their concerns would you?
No.575577
>>575575I actually don't think there are many of those patsocs and they're actually kinda like an ultra-left thing with different symbols. They make a show out of trying to appear "normal" to everyday Americans too but they sound like "fringe" people to me or "kooks." Like the whole logic of "we have to appear normal around the normies" is an admission that you're a fringe weirdo.
>>575576Well I think Fox News highlights that stuff because it's like a Red Scare move. "Golly, communists have endorsed Biden!!!" So rush out and vote for Trump!! But I think that one reason why the CPUSA in the 1930s was so frightening to the establishment is because they didn't go out of their way to appear like a threat or wear it on their sleeve. If you watch that documentary, the people there were not trying to appear like the most radical people on the street. The ruling class wants communists to be a fringe thing and not something that ordinary working people would be interested in. So Maupin was right was about that but he's a deeply weird and narcissistic person who hangs out with kooks and I think those types are really self-destructive.
No.575578
>>575574Am I going to cry while watching this?
No.575579
>>575577>So Maupin was right was about that but he's a deeply weird and narcissistic person who hangs out with kooks and I think those types are really self-destructive.I was in the anti-war movement around the same time Maupin was (we're the same age) and one thing I've noticed is, a lot of the "big names" from the 2000s anti-war/anti-imperialist movement have either gone full anti-Trump (see: Democracy Now!) or are full-blown reactionaries (George Galloway, Medea Benjamin, etc.). Back in the mid 2000s the anti-war movement was very, very socially progressive as well as anti-imperialist. You could be openly queer and be accepted. You could be staunchly feminist and be accepted. You could be a bell hooks/Judith Butler fan and be accepted. Now, it seems like what remains of the movement are a bunch of NazBols who think anything socially progressive amounts to "wokeness" and is a de facto front for modern American imperialism. "You can be 'woke' or you can be anti-war, you can't be both."
I know several comrades who are queer, feminist, etc. who told me they're strongly against the US funding Ukraine but don't want to go to any anti-war rallies because they know the bulk of people there will be red fashies like Maupin or Hinkle.
No.575580
>>575577>louis budenzRat.
No.575581
>>575579How the fuck is George Galloway a reactionary lmao
No.575582
>>575581He's really transphobic.
No.575583
>>575579I don't blame them for just becoming cynical and dropping out. Won't help them any, but at least they'll keep their dignity. The state of left discourse is fucking dire.
No.575586
>>575585What did Sakai say that was wrong?
No.575587
>>575539>American communists tried to follow the Bolshevik strategy and failed. They didn’t originally give a shit about Black people either, they only adopted the Black Belt thesis because Stalin told them to. They were way too close to the Comintern and that bit them in the ass later on. Foster was power-hungry and mad because his steel strike failed while Browder was a clout demon. The whole thing was a mess from the start.What kind of bullshit is this?
>I’m kind of relieved the feds took them down.Oh okay. I get it now.
No.575588
>>575539Unironically, Amerikkkans can't get over the fact that the US is the heart of the imperial system, that victory for communism means the end of America, etc. They continue to cling to the idea that there is anything good or that can be rehabilitated about America, so they try to rehabilitate CPUSA - but they are wrong.
No.575589
>>575539People buy into the image and what high school history textbooks say about the supposed "threat" of communism coming to America. You're going to see the same thing in 50 years when history textbooks write about the post-9/11 atmosphere and the notion that Islam in America was a "threat" to regular Americans.
No.575592
>>575548>muh race science >only muh BBC can revolutionary crackkkkkers cant even season their foodthe burger mind cannot stop its race obsessions; the white guy who works across from you is an evil yakubian so don't organize with him!!
>>575571and this is what the CPUSA is now, a social club for black boomers who want you to vooooot democrat. The idea that black people will form the vanguard is the opposite of reality, as even the much maligned PMC college educated types have learned not to trust political parties at this point. Whereas 'the black community' (love to put everyone with the same skin color in the same scenario, very class based analysis!) literally cannot stop voooooting for democrats
No.575593
>>575545I admire Foster as much as the next comrade, but these are not the words of a "moderate".
>>575592TBH some genuine MLs (not infracels but actual Marxists) need to coup the leadership and revive the Party again.
No.575595
>>575593>TBH some genuine MLs (not infracels but actual Marxists) need to coup the leadership and revive the Party again.How does one "coup" the leadership? I don't think it's like the DSA here where a bunch of young people show up and say "we have the majority vote now so you have to do what we say" and they go "aww but we don't wanna but the rules say we have to so…"
If you don't like the party program, Sims can just tell you to get lost. It's a hierarchical Leninist structure. They'll select their own replacements.
No.575599
>>575539>They didn’t originally give a shit about Black people either, they only adopted the Black Belt thesis because Stalin told them to.At the time, black people were facing legal, on-the-books discrimination in the form of Segregation and the Jim Crow laws. A separate, autonomous "black belt" state would have been a way for achieving legal equality for the majority of American blacks quickly and without the need for a big protracted Civil Rights movement that we would eventually see later on in the century.
No.575600
>>575596I hate to say it, but you're right. 1930s organization methods just don't work anymore.
No.575601
Patsoc contradiction: loathing any suggestion among leftists of voting for Democrats while idealizing J6 uprisers who see no contradiction between voting for Republicans and engaging in illegal actions that threaten those same Republicans
No.575602
>>575596It's called democratic centralism and the DSA is retarded for not having it.
If you disagree with the PSL and CPUSA actions then yeah you're fucked gotta start a new demcent party or gtfo America.
No.575603
I’m amazed this thread is still going; guess we’re more popular than I thought.
Though I think this is because the CPUSA is to wider American Leftism as The Catholic Church is to strains of American Protestantism.
>”NUUUU! YOU AREN’T CHRISTIAN! YOURE DAMNING SO MANY SOULS!”
No.575604
>>575603What are your thoughts on OP's claims, CPUSAnon?
No.575606
>>575604Seems like it's baiting for responses.
That aside, I guess the longer I spend on the Left, the more I notice we're spinning our wheels in the mud trying to "crack the code" as it were, and we've been doing it for decades.
I don't know if I ever posted this or not, I think I was gonna write it down in the Vatican II thread, but I think an interesting thing worth noting is that, historically, Communism seems to have taken route in countries with some degree of ideological or state centralization. There's predominantly Catholic Latin America, Orthodox Russia, and China had spent hundreds of years under various centralized dynasties.
Even in countries without successful Communist revolutions, like France or Japan, there are still fairly strong Communist parties as well as a history of ideological/governmental centralization.
And it seems predominantly in the Protestant World, Communism has struggled. And not to make leaps in logic here, but I think that there's this subconscious ethos in predominantly Protestant Nations, that the individual and the text alone are all that's necessary. So you'd see all these religious schisms (not all ending in war) over different peoples' interpretations of The Bible. The text. I've even heard that early colonization in New England was facilitated by schisms between different parishes, that once one grew large enough, a schism would form, people would settle another area, and on and on it'd go. These different schisms would split off and create nodes that'd grow, split, and repeat in an endless cycle.
As it stands, I think modern "PatSocs" like Haz are somewhat equivalent to the Evangelicals or Charismatics of Christianity. In the sense that there's this huge emphasis on theatrics. From speaking in tongues to making insane claims like "The Founding Fathers were the original Socialist Revolutionaries!" There's this bizarre idea that everything and anything revolves around having the right messaging, the right theatrics, you can win the crowd over and get us out of this muck we're in. Alternatively, it's all about having "The Proper Line" and if people just did X, Y, and Z we'd have Communism by now. In much the same way that Evangelicals think all the Jews returning to Israel would usher in The Rapture.
I suppose I see things a bit differently, as a Catholic-American. Which is to say, coming to accept that this great rift in our flock might be permanent. We'll have thousands of Trotskyists, Marxist-Leninists, Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, and so on. All of them will claim to be "The True Church."
Under such conditions, honestly I think the best shot we have is developing a kind of Secular Ecumenism. Which is to say, perhaps we can create a national institution which tries to focus on what Socialists agree on rather than what separates us. Thinking that we can unite every Leftist (who's capable of reading all of Marx and Lenin's works and coming to their own interpretations) under one Party is about as wishful as thinking all of Christendom can be mended, Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, and Reformed. The best we can do is develop an understanding that we're on one ship, and even if we vehemently disagree with each other, we either keep this ship sailing or we drown.
I know this isn't exactly what you asked for, but I'm drunk and wanted to get these thoughts out.
No.575607
>>575606>I know this isn't exactly what you asked for, but I'm drunk and wanted to get these thoughts out.Same but I'm waving my Makarov around and demanding everyone obey the Party but I think you're probably correct.
No.575608
>>575606Someone in the other thread about why American socialists keep appealing to Christianity made the same point you did, that historically speaking communism had a much, much harder time taking root in Protestant nations.
No.575609
>>575606Nothing you said was relevant but okay.
No.575610
>>575608I don't think it's
just Protestantism that did it. Of course, the material conditions on the ground impact things as well. The biggest, I think, was literacy.
This may be my own biases showing, but I think that literacy is maybe the greatest impact on turning people into individuals, for better or worse. Once you're able to engage with the texts yourself, then you aren't reliant on any kind of mediator between you and the ideas or the divine. You can become the equal of the aristocrats entirely because you can understand the written word. And once you're mentally their equal, well soon you'll demand legal equality.
However, that same literacy perhaps makes the traditional Marxist-Leninist Vanguard tactics difficult to work around. Because everyone, absolutely everyone, can engage with Marx's works, and Lenin's works, and all other authors that came after them. And by nature of just being human, there are certain facets that'll stand out to them based on their personal experience: "Oh, they aren't doing X, Y, or Z? They're not the REAL Communist Party!"
Part of the authority that some Communist revolutionaries could muster was because, in general, they were literate in the background of a broadly illiterate population. People would be inducted into The Party and taught to think and read how it thought and read. Yet when people are reading Marx and Lenin on their own and considering themselves "Communists" before even joining a Communist Party, well then they're coming into it with their own preconceptions, and should they not get their way, they may just up and leave, maybe taking a few comrades with them.
It's much the same as a Protestant reading The Bible, having some "born again" experience, and then going from parish to parish constantly dissatisfied that none of these pastors seem to reflect their own individual experience with Christianity: "Oh this one doesn't like Trump! He's not a Christian! This one is vaxxed, he's not a Christian! This one doesn't hate gay people! He's not a Christian! This one supports women pastors, they aren't Christian!"
I think we legitimately have to find some way to work around this absolutely bizarre condition unique to our society. This'll require some creativity, but I think we can do it.
No.575611
>>575593>that textHonest question: why did Foster flip from anarchist to ML? He seemed like a very good anarchist.
No.575612
>>575606Do you think CPUSA has been mythologized too much?
No.575613
>>575611Just randomly but I believe Lucy Parsons also did and joined the party. I don't know about her or Foster's specific reasons but the October Revolution had a big effect on the American left like in other countries.
It's a little funny to me because I've seen Parsons referenced a lot in the anarchist scene and her Wikipedia bio says she became a Communist Party member but "the Communist Party didn't explicitly say she was a member when they published her obituary so who's to say really?"
A much better anarchist than Emma Goldman imo
No.575614
Bernie Sanders happened and a lot of people discovered that the US still had some rump organizations left. That's basically it.
No.575615
>>575589You’re being way too generous. You barely learn about American communism in high school history. A much better explanation is the widely acclaimed speaker, writer, journalist, and political analyst Caleb Maupin’s resurge in popularity after he debated V_ush and all the bullshit he claims about CPUSA.
No.575616
>>575606>>575610I think a much better explanation for why America has such a difficult time embracing Marxist-oriented socialism has been the fact that the school of thought that's arguably had the most influence on the American left has been the individualist anarchism of the late 19th century. There's a reason that ideology took off in America a few decades before Marxism did and has stuck around in various forms even today.
You could even argue that the idpol we've been seeing in the past 15 years or so is heavily influenced by individualist anarchism, in the sense that collective direct action isn't as important as "living defiantly" with a stigmatized identity. "Leftism" essentially means "affirmation of personal identity". So for example every other leftist will claim to be neurodivergent and queer or something and will insist living in the world with said identities force society to come to terms with itself and examine itself or whatever. Everything begins and ends with the self, not collective struggle.
No.575617
>>575579Wokeness is a fed spook designed to destroy left wing organizations from the inside, so I'm glad you and your dipshit friends feel excluded, you should be excluded.
No.575618
>>575617>Wokeness is a fed spookDo you have evidence for this claim? I ask, because "idpol divides the left" has been thrown around for decades and to call all idpol "fed shit" needs substantial evidence to prove it.
No.575620
>>575619Like I said, what it means to be "leftist" today in America means having a laundry list of marginalized identities (neurodivergent, queer, polyamorous, vegan, hijabi, sex worker, whatever) rather than a laundry list of direct actions you've engaged in or movements you've helped organize. It's all about struggle with identity rather than identification with struggle.
No.575621
>>575611>>575613I get the impression WZF was highly impressionable. He went to France in 1911 and became intrigued by the praxis of the French syndicalists, which ended up causing him to leave the IWW. Then after the Russian Revolution he went to Russia and saw all the progress the Bolsheviks were making, which inspired him to become an ML. At least, that's what I get from reading his writings.
No.575622
Many of the more centristic, Fabian, or bourgeois socialists of the early 1900s were racist or eugenicist, but the CPUSA has at least quite made up for that and also have historically been far more progressive, about the racial problems of America and has had multiracial militants since who knows.
No.575623
>>575606Yes, the DSA exists for this purpose. Why not just join them? the CPUSA is far less effective than the DSA on accomplishing their goals.
No.575624
>>575617i know you're just baiting but your post is a perfect example of something I've been thinking about
>destroy left wing organizations from the inside>I'm glad you and your dipshit friends feel excluded, you should be excluded.You don't see the irony in this?
No.575625
>>575596>But that's a "hierarchy" and that has been out of fashion since the 1960s and you can't really demand people do that anyways so.Anarchists in particular have this whole obsession with "kill your heroes", the notion that you should be completely non-attached to any person or any strong set of principles.
And that's exactly why I believe leftist authoritarianism is coming back and you see so many 23-year old young Americans romanticizing the old CPUSA or openly admiring Stalin. It's a backlash against the current weaknesses of the left which since the late 80s has become completely dominated by postmodernism. The thing about PoMo is that doesn't give you any answers; it tells you to be skeptical of the answers the people in power give you, but it doesn't give you any answers on its own. Rather, PoMo tells you that you should just accept the fact that we can't know anything and that everything is ambiguous and words don't really have meaning and whatever. It's kind of like an absence of intellect, which is exactly why every time postmodernism becomes super prevalent on the left the right has an easy time sneaking in there and imposing itself.
So, as living standards in America start to crumble, and the fuchsia-haired grad students aren't giving them any answers, it makes sense for young Americans who genuinely want to better their society and fight for the oppressed would turn to authoritarianism and romanticize a time when American communists had real goals they were collectively working towards.
No.575626
>>575625 (me)
Wanted to add that I feel a lot of anarchists in the US have very good strategies as far as actions go, but their analyses are stuck in the 90s-2000s. The "kill your heroes, no attachments, just experiment with your identity" thing doesn't really work in 2023 now that it's obvious capitalism is finally crashing for real. People want strong communist leaders who are genuine. (And by that, I do NOT mean egomaniacs like Maupin or Hinkle but comrades who are sincere.)
No.575627
>>575612Not quite? I think we earned a reputation as being the historic Communist Party, and with that history, we have a bit more weight. This isn't to shit on other parties, I respect the PSL and FRSO, but those are relatively young-ish organizations, and I'm unaware of if they've had historical impact. Angela Davis could crack the mainstream, I'm unaware of people in other, still-existing parties that did.
>>575616I was gonna mention that. A while back I saw a map of countries based off of whether "State and Revolution" or "The Conquest of Bread" was more popular. America was firmly in the "Bread" camp.
Still, I think back to the old paper by Stalin, "Anarchism vs Socialism", and can't help but wonder if maybe the popularity of Anarchism over here too (beyond just having more time to gain ground) is facilitated by us being a liberal-protestant culture.
But that's less than hypothesizing on my part. Just a gut feeling.
No.575628
>>575614I think most Berniebros joined DSA, not CPUSA.
No.575629
>>575627Why did Foster flip from anarchist to ML?
No.575630
>>575629I wouldn't personally know; if I had to guess, maybe he just thought the Leninists were going somewhere and the Anarchists weren't. The fact they successfully overthrew The State and began to establish a Socialist Experiment in Russia, well, there's no underselling that. It was a huge event, and success spawns imitation I suppose.
No.575631
>>575630>>575606I think part of the problem that causes splits is how democratic centralism has changed from "diversity in thought, unity of action" to "unity of thought, unity of action". The inability of members to publicly disagree with the leadership of the party and the fact that members cannot form factions without facing expulsions allows for the party leadership to gradually centralise power while expelling anyone who threatens said power. It also means that any member who opposes any policy of the party essentially only has the options to ignore their principles or to split from the party. These problems aren't limited to just the USA, it's quite common with DemCent organisations around the world.
I agree a bit with the idea of Secular Ecumenism, if parties are unable to unite they should at least attempt to cooperate rather than compete. I do think, however, there needs to be a change in the way existing organisations work. Instead of interpreting Democratic Centralism to mean "Follow the party line or be purged" it should mean "When we agree to an *action* then it should be followed." For example, if the party has a few seats in a local, regional or national legislative branch then those representatives must vote as the party leadership, that is elected by the party congress decides. Factions should be allowed as long as those factions do not work against an agreed *action* of the party(not "line" or "stance"). For example, if the party decides to support a particular party member to run in an election, if a group of members from a different faction decide to run a different candidate then those members get kicked out of the party.
I think in this way Democratic Centralism can function to allow the party to act united while allowing members to disagree. This doesn't mean there wouldn't ever be splits, however I think it would allow parties to gain far more members of differing views while loosing less members due to splits. It would also allow democratic centralism to act as a way for the membership of the party to control the leadership rather than the other way around, ensuring the party bureaucracy and representatives are accountable to the membership, while also allowing the party leadership to take action even if some parts of the membership disagree.
No.575632
>>575628CPUSA had their membership spike after his campaign as well.
No.575633
>>575625>Rather, PoMo tells you that you should just accept the fact that we can't know anything and that everything is ambiguous and words don't really have meaning and whatever. It's kind of like an absence of intellect, which is exactly why every time postmodernism becomes super prevalent on the left the right has an easy time sneaking in there and imposing itself.I agree but I want something that's clear and predictable within a broader left that is all over the place. There are other orgs as well, some of them which seem quite good, but they also seem to be among the more "sane" if that makes sense. The more "anti-revisionist" orgs of people who either left it or got kicked out always seemed like lunatics to me who can barely keep it together for two years until it implodes, and then I go "oh, that's why they got kicked out." Those types can claim to be more "communist" but I don't think the difference here is mainly ideological.
>>575631>I agree a bit with the idea of Secular Ecumenism, if parties are unable to unite they should at least attempt to cooperate rather than compete.If we want to build a cooperative society, we should behave that way. I don't believe that one org's gain is another's loss, if a bunch of people are joining a socialist org, then other orgs are probably seeing gains too. I think there are still differences which can't just be skated over completely, but I really do want to take a page from Xi Jinping Thought or something about win/win cooperation and non-interference in the affairs of others. I'm still very new to this whole thing, but I think people should be very clear and diplomatic about what they're doing, but also draw certain lines and be very firm with those in the case of Infrared and LaRouche types and in a basically cold and hard and unforgiving way, but that's just my opinion.
>>575632>CPUSA had their membership spike after his campaign as well.People draw different conclusions from participation in movements or events.
I know of at least one (rather longstanding) club that effectively was the local Bernie campaign organization in 2016 which a lot of local organizing sprouted out of, a local DSA chapter (which wasn't them) started because of people who were drawn into it. There are ex-DSA members in CPUSA and I'm sure in other orgs like the PSL and FRSO now too because that's how they were introduced to socialism and then worked their way there. From what I understand about that local club, they're very pragmatic about this stuff. Their attitude is focused on wielding some kinda power or influence in politics which means being able to stop a bill, and that can be done through the legal process, but it can also mean applying pressure via movements and campaigns within our current situation where, frankly, the state is very stable. A healthy and powerful left movement in this country will have to do both.
And people can dismiss all of that as a waste of time. But it often feels to me that people who completely reject all of that were Bernie supporters three years ago, and now they're convinced everyone who supports engaging in those movements is a waste of oxygen, but they haven't yet negated their own negation of their liberalism to see how such things can be a means to an end rather than an end in itself. I think people will eventually fail their way into socialism in the end, or get there by failing to make the system work.
No.575634
>>575630That's what I figured. If you were engaging in strike after strike and nothing brought down capitalism, then saw a successful socialist revolution finally take place in Russia, of course you'd want to copy their strategy.
No.575635
The DSA not only, despite all the claims democratic organization, frequently has its national leadership reject the demands of the organizational base, but also cannot even hold its elected officials to account. If the CPUSA has lots of boomer African Americans and older people, that's already the better indicator of potential than all those new leftist, demsoc, or campus centric organizations, which serve as college, suburban whites' venue for promotion of middle class pathologie sand resentments.
No.575636
The CPUSA was a good party in the past, the work they did in Alabama with black workers is particularly admirable.
No.575637
>>575548Based and correct
No.575638
>>575632Any stats on this?
No.575639
Why is CPUSA against police abolition?
No.575640
>>575593>those paragraphsYikes.
No.575642
>>575593>he is turned from his course neither by the inspired warnings of physiciansI didn’t know bro-aborts existed in 1913…
No.575643
>>575641Other tankies want to abolish police though. Not just anarchists.
No.575645
>>575640Ever consider WZF, like most workers in America during his day, worked in conditions no one should ever have to be working in, and was exposed to things no one should ever have to be exposed to? Some people just take their grievances down a more extreme path than others.
No.575649
>>575606HEY CPUSA ANON
What are the views of the party (official and informal), and actions taken to gain support within the United States military forces, law enforcement agencies, and the veterans of these groups.
You know, the people who decide which way a non-trivial conflict or struggle goes and who ultimately choose to enforce the rule of the openly anti-worker governments.
No.575650
>>575541Well, yeah, this is why I joined them over some rando "party" I don't see why people hate them so much. they are better than nothing.
No.575651
>>575642I love how in that pamphlet Foster talks about killing bosses and scabs and shit, yet it's the birth strike stuff that freaks you out.
No.575652
>>575647Yeah I've seen that too. If I was living in the US I'd probably join CPUSA but they've become so liberal now I don't know how I would deal. I know a few good MLs in the party though.
No.575653
>>575630It could have also been because anarchists were being heavily repressed during and after WWI, and he and many others wanted to distance themselves from anarchism so they wouldn't get into legal issues.
No.575654
>>575644Current NAARPR is refounded in 2010s, like new sds, iirc.
No.575655
>>575654Yeah. There were a bunch of groups that signed onto it including the CP and they promote it and encourage members to get involved if there's a local branch of NAARPR.
>>575652If they are too revisionist the other orgs have the problem of being too dogmatic I think. Like if they are too far to the "right" then others are too "left" but one doesn't solve the first problem by swapping "right" for "left." A lot of young people (admittedly this is not a lot in the grand scheme of things) also seem to join PSL but I find it a little alarming when there are apparently older members and then a lot of very young people but not much in the middle, because 10 years ago it was the same structure, so where did all those young people who were members 10 years ago disappear to now that it's all different people?
I don't know and they might have it figured out (but I do think the CP has a wider spread). A flaw that seems to afflict American socialist organizations is a seriously aging structure or a big gap and qualified replacements don't get trained because they don't stick around long enough and then the whole thing dissolves or splits.
No.575658
>>575657You'll have to ask a Maoist-Third Worldist about that.
No.575659
Because
No.575660
>>575645Oh FFS. People don’t become fanatical anarchists and Stalinists due to some kind of workplace trauma.
No.575661
>>575660And the idealism in your post is blatantly obvious.
No.575662
Is it possible CPUSA will ever go back to being tankie or are they forever going to be shitlibs?
No.575663
>>575629Better question: why did his buddy Mao flip from anarchist to Marxist?
No.575665
The real 70's success was the revolutionary communist party. CPUSA hasn't been relevant for a long ass time.
No.575666
>>575665The New Left did a lot more good shit than CPUSA did in its heyday IMHO.
No.575668
>>575591Notice how the BPP never pushed for this division? They encouraged the complete opposite. They promoted unity and solidarity with whites.
No.575669
>>575668The original BPP had multiple factions…
No.575671
>>575664Maybe Xi would be like Richard Blumenthal. I can only hope.
>>575669I think there was a faction of the BPP that was favorable to a Popular Front alliance with the CPUSA and other "progressive forces." That seemed to be a tendency represented by Bobby Seale, and they began reaching out:
>As has been noted elsewhere in this volume, in forming their own United Front in 1969, the Panthers resurrected analyses of the Communist Party USA, reaching out to personnel who were active during the Popular Front period. Interestingly visible in this piece is how their fellow radicals subjected the Panthers to some of the same critiques leveled at the earlier Popular Front: namely, that they watered down their previously revolutionary language and demands in the interests of overly broad coalition building. Following the conference, many whites in the New Left, while continuing to rhetorically support the Panthers as a vanguard, increasingly disdained the shift as “reformist.”https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4735-black-panthers-united-front-against-fascism-conferenceHenry Winston, one of the main CPUSA leaders at the time, also wrote about the BPP and criticized Eldridge Cleaver as representing an ultra-left position, and Huey Newton as essentially being a right-opportunist but left in "form." Winston seemed to align with Seale:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/winston/1971/08/crisis-black-panther-party.htm No.575672
>>575670What did CPUSA accomplish aside from organizing Black and white farmers in the south?
No.575673
>>575672That would probably take a book. The CIO was pretty much started by CPUSA members at that time. Plenty of other unions were organized by communists. They threw their weight behind Social Security, unemployment compensation, eight-hour work days. Of course a lot of this has been rolled back or weakened due to a ferocious counterattack, and in the case of the unions the communists were just purged during the Red Scare, but the CPUSA in the 1930s-1940s was *the* American Left at a time of significant influence in American society which has shaped it ever since, and everything that came after them on the left was influenced by them even if those who came later pitted their whole approach against them. There were no significant competitors.
No.575674
>>575545Porky feared him enough to almost assassinate him twice.
No.575675
>>575664Either Xi admitted to Abe that all he cares about is having a political career regardless of policy and ideology or Xi doesn't understand how American politics works. Or he's being badly misrepresented by Abe.
No.575676
>>575671>>575673Great posts. Henry Winston is one of my favorite American communists. Some of CPUSA’s best writings are from the 70s and 80s touching on criticisms of the the New Left. Strongly recommend anyone reading this who is interested in the Communist Party to watch Seeing Red, linked by the comrade I’m replying to @
>>575574. By PBS but still very good. Among the interviewees are some of the greatest men and women America has offered, Bill Bailey for instance is an absolute legend. Faith in the Masses is also a very interesting book I can recommend, a collection of writings about the party on the account of its 100th anniversary, published in 2020.
No.575677
Where did CPUSA go wrong?
No.575678
>>575677Location and timing, you can't create socialism in a settler colonialist society unless it's being imperialized from the outside, which the US hasn't suffered since 1812
No.575680
>>575679They were pretty heavily imperialized from the outside, making the settler colonial contradiction secondary instead of primary
No.575681
>>575680Well Maupin and his ilk promote the idea the US is being "colonized" by the big banks and British royals.
No.575682
>>575681I think those guys kinda start out thinking about revolutions led by communists in other countries, and that didn't happen in the U.S., and to square the inconsistency they try to retcon their own country's history so the conditions "fit." It's like the mirror image of that epic furry troop guy who "theoretically" is imagining America if it was leftist in a world that's not (and supports everything the U.S. government does anyways).
So what did some of those revolutions have in common? They were anticolonial, as it makes no sense for a little island country like Britain to control half the planet, and the October Revolution was not just "worker's unite" but workers AND oppressed people uniting which lit up the third world. I think Maupin on the other hand is entirely cynical and believes that if people just pretend that the British are still occupying America, then that will activate some "essence" or historical DNA code inherited from 1776. British troops were actual occupiers, they'd go around the world planting their flag and proclaiming it their crown's sovereign territory and everyone there are now subjects. Cuba had actual U.S. troops occupying it (still do, in fact, in a portion of it). For that matter, most Americans don't have a problem with the British Royal Family, they might see them as a little weird, but they're mainly just another group of celebrities to them.
For these micro-sects though, it doesn't matter if most people will think you're a kook if you can recruit that 0.01% of people who will be like "yeah, this makes sense."
No.575683
>>575678>you can't create socialism in a settler colonialist society unless it's being imperialized from the outsideThat only makes sense if the settler-colonial contradictions are stronger than the standard class contradictions. Idk what you're smoking if you think that the contradictions between white proles and black/indigenous ones are stronger than the contradictions between white proles and white porkies. The thing about settler colonialism is that once the Indigenous population is fully colonized, their relationship to the rest of society becomes more comparable to that of any other racialized minority (assuming they become a minority). I suppose Indigenous people in the US/Canada still have unique grievances in the form of land claims, but for the most part these have no impact on the interests of the vast majority of non-Indigenous workers.
No.575684
>>575579The movement is a grift and those people all take NGO money. Anyone independent of that hydra is shut down in short order. You see what people independent of that system think and it's alien to this entire narrative that has been constructed for public consumption.
No.575685
>>575641I also think you must live in the city you police as well if you want to be a cop. No more suburban cocksucker going into cities to hunt uyghurs.
No.575686
>>575684Who’s doing the grifting?
No.575687
>>575684>entire narrative that has been constructed for public consumptionYes the anti-war movement should stop doing that
No.575688
>>575687There isn't an "anti-war movement". There are a lot of people who hate war, who are directed to trained liars who feed them right back into the maw of the beast. A meaningful anti-war movement would disrupt the means by which war can be fought, and that is no longer possible. Opposition to war in general is never principled, anyway. Every war has its causes and the actors in war have some intention. Offering people empty sops that are transparently infantilizing does not oppose war. The warmongers laugh at people who are herded to that.
No.575689
>>575688Why are anti-war movements useless now?
No.575690
>>575689Because they're so ridiculously controlled that they won't stop anything. It's all performative and there to jump in front of any actual opposition to the government's actions.
The dumbasses here are so sucked into it that they keep reposting Grayzone and similar such fakeshit, but then leftypol has always been a cesspit and an op.
No.575691
>>575688I might've misread you because I agree.
Seriously if you wanted to disrupt the war effort in a serious way, you'd have to stop war materiel from being loaded onto ships, which is something that organized and militant stevedores would be able to do. But that's not gonna happen.
No.575692
>>575690people cant be retarded, they must actually be paid shills/a government psyop/bots/funded by right-wing orgs/etc
No.575694
>>575678I was going to say when they rejected the Black Belt thesis but close enough.
No.575695
>>575677Day One. Most of the shit Browder gets blamed for we’re things Foster advocated too.
No.575696
>>575579>one thing I've noticed is, a lot of the "big names" from the 2000s anti-war/anti-imperialist movement have either gone full anti-Trump (see: Democracy Now!) or are full-blown reactionaries (George Galloway, Medea Benjamin, etc.). Because 2000s anti-war was a big tent movement. Leftism today is too bogged down with idpol to the point where an autistic queer person who supports US imperialism is considered a “better leftist” than a neurotypical straight/cis person who’s anti-imperialist.
Ask yourself why that is.
No.575697
>>575695The popular front was something all communist parties at the time were doing.
No.575698
Question: did CPUSA back on the day really have goon squads or GPU/KGB agents to take out their opps (or ex-members) like a lot of Cold War propaganda claims?
No.575699
>>575698I wish they did. The CPUSA really goes downhill with Eugene Dennis. Gus Hall was a good guy but at the same time under his leadership liquidationism did occur (foreign language papers, offices, mass orgs).
The CPUSA really goes into the grave when the CoC try to wreck the party in 1991, after which Gus Hall (old and being controlled) let the CoC traitors back into the Party in 1993.
No.575700
>>575699CPUSA was always shit M8. They had no ability to win anything.
No.575701
>>575699Why was Uncle Gus so cucked?
No.575702
>>575696Revolutions are made by young people. George Galloway is an old man. the widely acclaimed speaker, writer, journalist, and political analyst Caleb Maupin is also an old man in the body of a man who's only in his late 30s. If you really want a large anti-war street protest movement, you're gonna need lots of people who are in their teens and twenties.
Why is it that the military puts out woke ads nowadays? It's because the military spends a lot of money surveying people, and they understand that they have an image problem with young people, who are the people who actually join the military. They've researched this and found the people who won't join the military because it's too woke is really small. Far more people among the military age cohort think it's not woke enough, that it's not accepting enough of women in particular (because women are half the population), besides the usual stuff about the military being dangerous and just not good.
They're trying to align the military's "values" with the values of the generation of potential recruits. The anti-imperialist / anti-war "movement," on the other hand, appears to be trying to do the opposite. It has various "leaders" in the "movement" who say the values of young people in a broad sense are incompatible with an anti-imperialist movement. If you ask me, the U.S. military actually seems smarter than this "movement."
No.575703
>>575702There's actually a very strong point to be made that American culture has "gone woke" exactly for the reasons you mentioned: Gen Z (and to a lesser extent, millennials) are unquestionably socially liberal. Zoomers are the least religious, most pro-abortion, most pro-LGBTQ, least traditional, least patriotic, etc. and millennials aren't too far behind. Boomers are dying off and their attitudes and votes aren't being replaced, which is exactly why the GOP is frantic about their party's survival. That "red wave" we were all expecting last November turned out to be a red puddle, mostly due to zoomers who voted en masse for liberals and abortion rights.
The socially-conservative-economically-Marxist bullshit Maupin and Hinkle are pushing is going to crash and burn very soon, because it's just not appealing.
No.575705
>>575702>the U.S. military actually seems smarter than this "movement."obviously
No.575706
>>575703They're missing a kinda obvious point which is that the U.S. military doesn't really care about the ideological purity of the people they recruit. They think the military acts like leftists, when what they really care about is turning people into helmet heads who will play ball with the military. The rest is just a means to an end. If social liberalism is popular with younger people, and it's easier to use it as a hook to lure people in than work against it, then the U.S. military will do so.
You've likely seen La Chinoise. Kinda random, this scene is funny because these Maoist students here are saying that China is where the real communists are at, not in the USSR because at this moment (1967), the U.S. is more belligerent toward China (and Vietnam obv) than it is toward the USSR, but what they don't understand is that from the U.S. point of view, they're all communists, the U.S. just sees European communism as more established and harder to act against. They neglect too that the USSR was supplying Vietnam. And in a few years, Nixon would be visiting China which would start opening up.
The essence of the mistake here is to dismiss the primary to only focus on the secondary, Hungarian swimmers being invited to Los Angeles and Czech violinists playing with the Boston symphony, etc. These are shallow expressions of the superstructural elements of society, not the underlying economic relationships that drove the Cold War.
No.575707
American communist movment was always a joke tbh
No.575708
>>575696You're sort of right. I was a participant in the movement against the Iraq War when I was a teenager in the 2000s, and the idea it was some "big tent" is not really true. If you were Evangelical (or a conservative Catholic), anti-abortion, and anti-gay there's a 99% chance you supported Bush's oil war. On the other side, the anti-war movement was heavily made up of run-of-the-mill shitlibs and old school progressives. Communists and anarchists weren't super-visible until the middle of the movement.
The issue I see with Maupin in this case is, he came out of a movement where people saw themselves as having a common mission (ending the wars/imperialism). Since the early 2010s, leftist politics has become entirely focused on promoting one's identity brand (neurodivergent, queer, BIPOC, etc.) and getting clout/credit for that brand. Idpolers don't want to work in a large, collective movement even if everyone respects their identity because they see it as "invalidating" to be part of a team where mission, not identity box, is the focus.
No.575709
>>575708Tbh, the point of identity politics is to galvanize an alliance of proles from different identities to unite in a common goal(i.e government accountability, ending wars) liberals twist this dynamic on its head, making identity the end goal of all leftist politics instead of a springboard for channeling general discontent
No.575710
>>575709Well, the problem with most idpol is that it seldom proposes a political program. Defunding or abolishing the police is a real set goal. Getting rid of oppressive anti-abortion laws is a real set goal. Demanding an end to housing discrimination for trans people is a real goal. But when it comes to things like "white people need to stop wearing dreadlocks" or "neurotypical people need to let autistics stim in public without complaining" it turns into a clusterfuck because the solution lies solely in the cultural superstructure.
No.575711
>>575708I have a different experience too because my formative political experience was with the marriage equality movement. Not the anti-war movement. Not OWS either although I was sympathetic to it at the time. This is why the meme about Pride stuff being "invented" by capitalists to "distract" people comes across like absurd scapegoating to me, because this movement had started to generate protest marches before OWS took off. I'm not talking about Pride parades either which have been a thing since the 1970s, but actual political protests with Lady Gaga showing up to give speeches. It was a fundamentally liberal civil "rights" type reform movement of course, involving specific laws that people were seeking to get overturned.
I remember it being at odds with the Democratic Party's mainstream too, but existing within it in a dialectic. Obama did not explicitly endorse same-sex marriage at the time. He'd say vague stuff about civil unions but "I believe everyone has a right to love each other" or whatever. So I kinda knew he supported it, that was a "signal," but people were also frustrated that he wouldn't say so for his triangulating political reasons, but you could generate enough momentum to pressure a Democratic administration into being like "oh okay, if you say so…" and then make a lot of little changes that added up until the Supreme Court ruled against all the Republican-controlled states, and that was a wrap.
But if you ask me about politics based on promoting one's identity brand and getting clout for it, I think that's obviously not going to lead anywhere. Like you said, it turns into a bunch of boutique Tumblr issues like white people wearing dreadlocks.
But I saw someone promoting this Libertarian anti-war rally that's coming up, and he got argumentative online and was like "if you don't like it, then why don't you just go hand out flyers at the WOMEN'S MARCH." And I'm like, well, okay. Why not? It is super liberal and we can criticize it all day, but that kinda attitude is somewhat odd to me. "I wouldn't be caught dead out there, I'm a communist." But there were 200,000 people out there. Angela Davis was out there. "Oh, but she's a lib…"
No.575712
>>575706>>575708>>575710>The essence of the mistake here is to dismiss the primary to only focus on the secondary, Hungarian swimmers being invited to Los Angeles and Czech violinists playing with the Boston symphony, etc. These are shallow expressions of the superstructural elements of society, not the underlying economic relationships that drove the Cold War.I think this is exactly correct. What the left is desperately suffering from today is a chronic inability to determine what is actually important, which in turn stems from a focus on abstract ideology and principles rather than engaging in serious political activity. For far too many people the derailment in Ohio and that new Harry Potter game are equally important issues, since in the abstract the environment/public health and trans liberation are both equally important issues, even though in practice the derailment obviously has a far more direct and severe impact on actual living people.
You see it a lot when it comes to the Ukraine stuff, with a lot of leftists being fence sitters because they lack the ability to actually identify where their immediate interests lie, what outcomes of that conflict would best serve these, and what they need to do to achieve those outcomes. You have mfs insisting that Russia is just as bad as the US, and as a result not firmly taking a stand a against US imperialism, and not really agitating against the war. The issue here isn't even the misconception that Russia and the US have equally destructive impacts on the world, since even if that were true it wouldn't change the fact that from a practical perspective, the American government is obviously the most immediate enemy of the American anti-capitalist movement and working class. This in turn is a misconception that can only exist among somebody who has never been harassed by cops for organizing anti-police brutality actions, who has never had to deal with organizing efforts being crushed by anti-union legislation, who has never had a firehose turned on them at a Indigenous land claim blockade. It's the viewpoint of somebody who does not on a regular basis actually confront the American state as their enemy, and thus conceives of it only in the abstract in relation to themselves and other countries like Russia. In other words you can draw a direct line from being a keyboard warrior with no practical experience to the warped perception of the war in Ukraine, and from there to the weakness of the antiwar movement.
To summarize, the lack of experience and real world political organizing allows people to develop a skewed idea about what really matters, because they have never engaged in the actual political work and had to address the real concerns of the working class or faced the real obstacles to their efforts. These skewed ideas then lead to all kinds of retarded takes, constant disunity, chasing irrelevant culture war or eceleb bullshit, etc. that all demonstrate crippling inability to determine where we should be focusing our energy. In short, it's a symptom of severe immaturity of the worker's movement. The good news is that as more and more people find their conditions intolerable, resistance will naturally increase from among the working class, and practical political experience will become more and more common among its committed activist wing. It's also worth noting that the problems I described will always be overrepresented on social media and the internet, since people who do nothing but never shut the fuck up are always going to outnumber serious activists, organizers, and agitators.
No.575713
>>575712>For far too many people the derailment in Ohio and that new Harry Potter game are equally important issues, since in the abstract the environment/public health and trans liberation are both equally important issues, even though in practice the derailment obviously has a far more direct and severe impact on actual living people. I'm seeing this a lot right now and it's killing me. The disaster in East Palestine is horrendous, and if the left was smart they'd be jumping on it immediately.
No.575714
>>575712>It's also worth noting that the problems I described will always be overrepresented on social media and the internet, since people who do nothing but never shut the fuck up are always going to outnumber serious activists, organizers, and agitators.This is why I turned off my social media. People posting crazy stuff here doesn't bother me because this forum is inherently rather "absurd" to me, and nothing here can anger me, but if it's on social media and I'll see someone shouting about the war with Russia either for/against but tying it in with either attacks on or a defense of LGBT people, and I have to just turn that off because it'll screw with my own perception of reality about what's important and what isn't, or about what is primary and what is secondary, and so on. People who are ensconced in that bubble and taking positions on these things based on the positioning of their posting enemies is really bad and leads to all kinds of grotesque distortions, I gotta say, or they take positions on important issues based on whether their posting enemies will "win" or "lose."
Which is also why I don't feel that way when listening to Vijay Prashad or Noam Chomsky talking about NATO, because they're not terminally online.
No.575716
>>575628>>575632>>575633>>575627PSL saw huge growth after Bernie. Really, speaking to the history of an organization that was founded in 2004, there were a few spikes in its growth correlating generally with political developments in the U.S, for example PSL worked with A.N.S.W.E.R. coalition to protest the Iraq War and it was the largest Iraq War protest. But the big three developments for PSL were Ferguson, Bernie in 2016, and, of course, the uprisings against racism in 2020. That last one in particular caused the PSL to grow very large very quickly. PSL was basically the biggest mobilizer in the immediate wake of the Roe overturn draft being leaked, such to the point that itsgoingdown anarchist website published a screed acknowdledging this and then proceeding to call PSL "Stalinist," arguing that PSL doesn't really care about abortion, etc, etc. The first tyre nichols protests in memphis had a huge PSL presence. Supposedly over 8,000 people try to join PSL now.
No.575717
>>575716PSL are actually trots…
No.575718
>>575717No larouchists are trots what with the spectacular entryism and cult characteristics etc
Not that there's anything wrong with that ecumenical etc etcPSL are honorary MLs
No.575720
>>575717They're Marcyite Trots (aka they actually advocate the positions that Trotsky did) which makes them virtually MLs.
No.575721
>>575539>clout demonBack2SoundCloud
No.575722
>>575708I can assure you as a young male of soldier recruitment age, everyone regardless of political persuasion knew it was bullshit. Whether they would go along with the bullshit is another matter, but unless you had money, you had no business supporting the war. No one was convinced bumfuckistan was any sort of serious geopolitical threat. You wouldn't have Jon Stewart mocking supporters of the war if you were supposed to be rah rah rah for any of it. Giving those people anything was known to be another disaster.
Generally, the common people, wherever they are, dislike arranged war. The grand narrative version of history does not allow you to say this, but the people see correctly that the war, whatever the pretext, is just about getting poor people killed so a bunch of rich assholes can tell us how great they are.
You were going to accept the war even though no one could say why the hell anyone was there, and Bush made it a point to emulate the Nazis and run the same playbook, to see who was a Good German and who still had any brains. If you had any independent thought, that was going to be corrected in short order. No one could actually stop the war, so why would Bush care about popular support? All they needed were enough volunteers to keep the show going and keep feeding Halliburton et al more money. As far as the neocons cared, they were freerolling. The suckers were going to pay for all of it, and then the rich would bail themselves out. It was not hard to see this, but if you made any serious oppositional noise, all you got was being marked down for future suppression.
No.575723
>>575545>He didn’t have the reputation of a cutthroat militant when he was alive and a lot of other Wobblies viewed him as kind of a moderate.Anyone know how true this is?
No.575724
>>575719>materialism is when you do a heccin pragmatismits all so tiresome
No.575726
>>575539>they only adopted the Black Belt thesis because Stalin told them to. Ummmmmmmm
No.575728
>>575723He barely did anything in the Labor Movement. Most of his attempts at organizing workers failed.
No.575731
CPUSAnons, how does it feel knowing your heroes all died in vain and American communism achieved virtually nothing?
No.575732
How did everyone celebrate WZF's birthday yesterday?
No.575733
>>575717>>575717>>575718PSL is Marxist-Leninist, not "Trotskyist" or "Stalinist" or "Maoist." PSL members don't read "Trotskyist" literature. Trotsky is not a prominent feature of cadre training (it is NOT in cadre training classes). PSL members defend the Soviet Union, call its dissolution one of the greatest modern catastrophes. They don't agree with Trotskyists on the national question.
It is true that some of the founding members of PSL were influenced by Sam Marcy as they came from Worker's World Party, which was itself a splinter organization from a Trotskyist party, but PSL members are not Trotskyists when it comes to issues like the national question. They don't even read Trotsky as a part of official cadre training. They don't give a fuck about the Trotsky v. Stalin thing. Why should they? What value does the idiotic Trotskyism vs Stalinism debate have to actually fighting for revolution here, in a post-Soviet context, in North America?
They are Marxist-Leninists because they agree with democratic centralism, because they agree with Lenin's analysis of imperialism and nationalism. The PSL position about AES states is to support them against imperialist aggression, or rather, to oppose imperialist aggression against them, just as they oppose imperialist aggression against countries with "reactionary governments" like Iran or Syria. They recognize they can support a country in its fight for national liberation against imperialist oppression without necessarily agreeing with every single policy that country has enacted. They understand that countries that are subject to imperialist aggression are under duress and that their current material conditions are informed by a material history of exploitation and imperialism.
No.575734
>>575733Why is it that PSL is just a protest hustle for Brian Becker and acts holier than thou by rat fucking other ML orgs thru ANSWER coalition?
No.575735
>>575734I want to know why ANSWER takes over every fucking protest.
No.575736
>>575593With how much of a meme this pamphlet has become on leftypol and with neo-laroucheites, I'm wonder if anyone is interested in transcribing it for Marxists.org to give it even more notoriety. I'm a volunteer there. I don't want to do all the work myself, but if someone wants to proofread the text into a clean Word doc or similar I can turn it into HTML and upload it.
No.575738
>>575736I'd transcribe it but I'm afraid I'd fuck it up.
No.575739
>>575657Not a "third worldist", but Cuba never has been socialist. This is the position of the ICM.
No.575740
>>575539CPUSA was good until the 50s, or maybe even the 40s.
No.575743
>>575740They went downhill as soon as they gave up on the Black Belt thesis.
No.575744
>>575736I just love how people take a pamphlet WZF wrote when he was an anarchist and treat its contents like they were part of the Communist Party’s political program.
No.575747
>>575745>>575746 (me)
Or, just see if you can find a different transcript that's completed.
No.575749
>>575741Amazing, thanks comrade! Keep it up the good work! You can give me a name to credit for the transcription, but I'm inclined to just credit the whole thing to "Anonymous comrades from leftypol.org".
>>575745You have to wing it, there's only one poor quality scan of this work available. Let readers that there was guessing involved though. I would put the words that you had to guess in [editor's brackets] and then add a footnote letting readers know the situation.
No.575750
Okay I've finished the rough draft, tomorrow I will clean it up.
>>575747Youre a life saver, I managed to find a much better scan of the book
https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uiug.30112052609747>>575749>Anonymous comrades from leftypol.orgThat would be swell
No.575751
>>575750Based and thank you for transcribing this. I would love to see it on MIA.
No.575752
>>575539>American communists tried to follow the Bolshevik strategy and failed.This statement can only be uttered aloud by people who haven't read Lenin's work "'Left' Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder." Lenin correctly pointed out that the actual amount of control a vanguard party has in bringing about revolution is highly variable and based on what is possible in the current material conditions, and is also informed by historical material conditions. There is a reason that you can't simply do PPW in the United States at this current time. I am not even CPUSA and I can clearly see that this post isn't even making a legitimate, well-formed criticism of CPUSA. The rest of what you wrote is a complete dumpsterfire. This notion that CPUSA only started work with the black section of the working class because Stalin told them is completely ahistorical and false. That is not to say that there isn't a legitimate criticism to be made of CPUSA, but it isn't rooted in falsehoods like "uhmm actually they only cared about racism when stalin told them to" or trying to argue that Americans were trying to try the "Bolshevik strategy," as though the bolshevik strategy was articulated to be a uniform blueprint by the Bolsheviks. Lenin was very up front about the fact that many of the challenges of the Russian revolutionaries were unique to Russia.
>It’s also straight up anti-communism. The Red Summer of 1919 — called that because of the bloody violence of white mobs against black soldiers returning from World War I — was blamed on the Bolsheviks. Rather than recognizing that people were sick and tired of being lynched and attacked, the major newspapers blamed legitimate black fightback on “the Reds,” who were somehow inciting black people to riot.>The combination of anti-communism and antiblackness has rendered parts of history invisible. Strong parties that are anti-racist are invisible because of antiblackness, and legitimate grassroots communist or socialist movements are eliminated because of anti-communism.https://jacobin.com/2022/11/black-women-communist-party-usa-imperialism>>575564?
>>575544Midwestern Marx's Eddie was pretty critical of CPUSA, arguing that the Popular Front with the Democrats was the wrong move and that CPUSA should run its own candidates to help create awareness for CPUSA.
>>575559There are many good CPUSA and DSA comrades, but the leadership structure for both groups has problems. DSA's biggest issue is not having democratic centralism, which causes
problems in decision making because much of it has to be unanimous in order to work, in order for their to be unity of action, but there is no requirement of unity of action, there is no requirement for there being a democratic majority, everyone has to constantly debate and critique and they can do so in public even if their critiques expose rifts between members that expose the organization to the federal government.
No.575753
>>575734>>575735Why are you doing fed shit? If you claim to be a "true revolutionary," how do you reconcile the fact that you are literally doing the job of the feds by trying to smear and degrade socialists who are actively struggling alongside the working class? In your post there is no critique, only baseless vibes based arguments?
>I want to know why ANSWER takes over every fucking protest.Explain yourself. What the fuck is "taking over" a protest? What protests have been fucking taken over by ANSWER? You are saying this as though ANSWER is a monolith when it is in reality a coalition of multiple organizations with varying ideologies. Why are you doing fed shit, by shitting on organizers who are actually trying to go against the narrative of the state department, the mainstream, capitalist, media?
No.575754
>>575753>Explain yourself. What the fuck is "taking over" a protest? When you show up at a protest with a bunch of your org members and try to make the protest all about your org. Basically, using this issue specifically to advertise your org.
ANSWER did this with every single Palestine protest from 2008-2016 and tried doing it with Occupy.
No.575755
>>575749>>575750This is making me excited.
No.575756
>>575655>but I find it a little alarming when there are apparently older members and then a lot of very young people but not much in the middleI have spoken to PSL comrades about this and they attribute this to the conditions of when Gen X came of age. Politically, they are a bit of a lost generation in the US.
>>575739Cuba IS socialist, but they are actively building socialism, they are by no means finished undergoing the transition from capitalism to socialism, because the development of socialism is contingent on multiple material factors. There is socialist, central planning. There is social ownership. There is the dictatorship of the proletariat. There is socialised healthcare. There is socialised housing. There is workplace democracy and instances of state-owned enterprises being transformed into worker-owned direct socialist cooperatives. There are still contradictions, of course, as every society building socialism will have. There are still elements of capitalism, such as self-employed entrepreneurs, like private taxis. There is a tourism industry that is somewhat capitalistic.
>>575548This is true. They are the most exploited, most alienated, most oppressed section of the united states, historically and currently.
>>575549 The United States went through a revolution in the Civil Rights Movement, but it was not a proletarian revolution but its real bourgeois democratic revolution. The American Revolution should not be conceived as a social revolution but as a political war of separation that ultimately severed the American colonial ruling class from the British ruling class. The first economic configuration of production revolved primarily around slavery but overtime materially developed more and more into imperialism. Imperialism's seeds were visible in the Declaration of Independence, where Jefferson made a point of listing as one of the grievances that the colonists had was that they weren't allowed to take the land of the indigenous people just west of the Appalachian mountains.
But we should be clear here that the working class is not merely its most severely exploited national section.The working class is multinational. But that does not mean that all the nations of the working class are equally exploited, or that their individual history of exploitation took on the same forms as that of other nations.
No.575757
>>575754>>575754>ANSWER did this with every single Palestine protest from 2008-2016Why would they stop now? ANSWER still does Palestine protests?
>Basically, using this issue specifically to advertise your org.Guys, you heard it here first, it is not being a good ally to advertise your own organization, even when engaging in solidarity.
>ANSWER did this with every single Palestine protest from 2008-2016 and tried doing it with Occupy.Let's suppose this was true, even though this is ridiculous hyperbolic and unqualified claim. Why would ANSWER stop doing this? Because ANSWER has not stopped advocating for Palestine to be freed. How did they "do it" with occupy?
No.575758
>>575752You forgot to address:
>They were way too close to the Comintern and that bit them in the ass later on. Foster was power-hungry and mad because his steel strike failed while Browder was a clout demon. The whole thing was a mess from the start. I’m kind of relieved the feds took them down. No.575759
>>575717>hur dur sam marcy was a trotdude would a trot meet with kim il sung?
https://youtu.be/5Arb33Q8SN0 No.575760
Dunno why this became a pissing contest about PSL and the like.
Regardless of personal thoughts on the party; I'm just as willing to stand shoulder to shoulder with my Comrades in a "competing" Communist Party as I am with Comrades of a different race or nation or gender. We all should be willing to.
Goddamn, we need some fire. We need people engaged in not an internet hobby, but a genuine desire to propel mankind towards its historic destiny: liberation and life for one and all. Jesus, doesn't the idea tug at something deep in your heart? The moment man took his first tentative steps towards civilization, he had chains put on him: by scarcity, by cruel autocrats, by superstition. And Communism, Communism alone, offers us the chance to finally free ourselves. Hundreds of generations of our ancestors, all of our ancestors, have spent years leading us to that moment, whittling away the bonds around mankind. Dying satisfied knowing that they shaved off half an inch, knowing that one day, centuries from now, one of their descendants will be free?
The chain's old and rusted now, it's obviously starting to fracture. A thousand generations before you laid down their lives to get to this moment. To dream of a day the yolk around humanity's neck has become so weak as to smash with a single blow. Yet here we are, we've stopped our march, and now we're sitting around in the dark screaming about who'll be the one to break the chain, letting our worst impulses direct us toward our feet, rather than the horizon.
Someone being a "Trot" or a "Crypto Trot" is irrelevant to whether they're advancing the movement for the liberation of all mankind. Even if they're bumbling out a request to sell you a newspaper in the year 2023.
Fuck, I'm sorry for rambling, but I'm tired of seeing Revolution as a tertiary goal to organizational spats.
No.575761
>>575760PSL has a shit reputation plus abuse cover-up.
No.575762
>>575761Admittedly I've heard about the allegations, though I haven't looked into them. I wrote
>>575760 while stoned out of my skull and exhausted with the petty spats between parties.
No.575763
>>575545That’s literally everyone from the Labour Movement.
No.575764
>>575761>>575762Don't know about it, but I'm not sure any of these parties can really do anything except kick them out or suspend them depending on the degree of the infraction.
There was the ISO which imploded because of it, from what I read it seemed badly handled and then that became the hinge for a factional struggle to then take place around it which led to the collapse of the organization.
No.575765
>>575753I can criticize the protest hustle that is PSL. I'm in an ML Party, and I've attended a ton of their protests. The way they acted in regards to Feb 19th is disgraceful. Only PCUSA, ASU, the Uhuru/APSP, PLP, and a couple of other principled comrades showed up as well (I even saw a DSA flag there lol).
If they truly wanted to build a mass anti-war movement they would've joined Feb 19th. So what if there are right-wingers, libertarians, and other forces there? It is our duty as communists to be the premier fighters against NATO, fascism, and war. If you're a principled communist you need to bring forward the property question and anti-imperialist struggle towards upsurges against the current status quo.
No.575767
>>575765You sound like a Maupinoid.
No.575768
>>575767>Caring this much about the widely acclaimed speaker, writer, journalist, and political analyst Caleb MaupinMyself I'm very disappointed to hear PSL failed to attend an antiwar rally in the heart of the imperial core and am considering retracting their honorary ML status
No.575769
>>575768I'm not comfortable taking direction from a known sexual predator and manipulator.
No.575770
>>575769My brother in Marx have you ever been active in a broad mass movement?
If you think geneologically trot cults like Caleb's are bad you would cry and maybe vomit at the rotten shit some anarchists get up to sometimes in their personal lives
Bluntly the widely acclaimed speaker, writer, journalist, and political analyst Caleb Maupin's flaws are petty and ending up a cult leader makes people do stupid things from the cocaine level narcissism I remember Maupin planning the CPI with an old anarchist comrade and he was just planning to have an org to distribute public domain theory like the green book and have conferences
His push to his disciples was literally him trying to teach them the trot newspaper selling thing that made him who he was
Would you like more of the psychological profiling analysis of what happened?Deliberately needling you here, but I am simply testifying from deep long experience and I am not exaggerating
No.575771
>>575765This is just being sectarian. They've organized plenty of demonstrations. I'm not even a member and went to one of their anti-NATO demonstrations a year ago.
But realistically, almost everyone who shows up at these things are already part of organizations to begin with. It's not like "the masses" are showing up. The one in D.C. looked like mostly LaRouche boomers. To make matters worse, if any normies off the street do actually show up, they're going to be immediately bombarded by a dozen different people from a dozen different groups calling themselves PCUSA, ASU, Uhuru/APSP, PLP and OMGWTFBBQ shoving handbills at them written in Impact font. Is that really necessary? Sometimes, less is more.
No.575772
>>575771I'd like to see the breakdown for Feb 19th
the motherfucking DSA was there and the protest was bait
No.575773
>>575771There were more people who showed up at a pro-abortion rights rally in the city where my brother lives, than there were at Rage Against the War Machine.
Bloody hell, there were more LGBTQ rights activists bombarding the Oklahoma state house the other day.
No.575774
>>575773Mmm thanks for the datapoint it's useful but I was asking for a breakdown
How did you determine these boomers were larouchists?
No.575775
>>575774Sorry was thinking out loud
Second clause meant for
>>575771Just assumed you were both the same protest because you've watched footage of the protests
Not being Unitedstatsian the exact details of the protest don't interest me much beyond that low numbers is disappointing
The boomer demographic is expected who the fuck else other than retired people are going to fly to Washington for a protest
No.575776
>>575775They just looked like them to me. And there were some random Twitter people who were there who said most of the people looked like LaRouche people. A lot of them live around there. I do know that some LaRouche people flew in for it because I recognized some. Or the Twitter fans of some of the speakers and some libertarian burnouts from New Hampshire. I haven't commissioned a peer reviewed study of it though. These aren't mass organizations that organized it, but petit-bourgeois journalists.
As far as low numbers, I suspect most Americans don't really care about the war or have strong opinions about it. So they were trying to overcome that by getting everyone who does have strong opinions (towards the negative) together, but the lack of ideological consistency makes it hard to get people whipped up.
>>575773More energy too.
No.575777
>>575767I'm not, I'm just sick of the PSL protest hustle to fill Brian Becker's pockets. They are impotent and weak. America is now more anti-war than ever, we've gone thru a massive economic recession, a pandemic, and political upheaval. Communist groups have no excuse for why they are as weak as they currently are. America is a country with hundreds of millions of people.
No.575778
>>575777Personally, I wish CPUSA had gone to East Palestine. I also wish they'd just fucking purge their revisionist leadership and install actual communists (not Maupinoids) in charge again.
No.575779
>>575778Did they at least talk about it in Washington?
No.575781
Why is CPUSA still headquartered in NYC? Shouldn't they be in Chicago?
No.575782
>>575781Because they've been in a liquidationist process for decades. CPUSA used to own bookstores and offices all across the country, even up until the 80s. Old CPUSA people from the 30s-40s were so dedicated they would often leave their houses in their wills to the Party. The CPUSA today has two buildings, one in Chicago and another in NYC.
The one in NYC is in Chelsea and it's worth millions. What's truly criminal is that the CPUSA only uses two floors and rents out the other floors to corporations. If you have a multi-story building in NY you could do a lot with it if you were an actual functioning Communist Party. The CPUSA needs to be more like the KPRF. The KPRF has gyms, a soccer league, a boxing/mma league, runs for office, and is massive.
Floor One: Lobby
Floor Two: Communist Gym for free use by the Komsomol of your party and other youth across the city
Floor Three: Library
Floor Four: Media room for filming/viewing media
Floor Five: Party Office
etc, etc.
No.575783
>>575782>truly criminalOh come on, it's not like they murdered somebody.
No.575784
>>575783They had goon squads in the 1930s who did.
No.575785
>>575782>Old CPUSA people from the 30s-40s were so dedicated they would often leave their houses in their wills to the Party. They didn't have any kids?
No.575787
>>575760>>575761>>575762I will give you the cliff notes. An anonymous online "maoist" made a rather spurious accusation that a local PSL branch (which one, they did not say) and its leadership (also unnamed) "covered up" a sexual assault involving unnamed individuals. There was no evidence. There is no independent verifiability. It is just a claim that people repeat online because they decided that they hate "Stalinists." It is just COINTELPRO.
But let's critically examine this claim: if this had genuinely happened with a local branch, why is it, then, an indictment of the entire national organization? Every branch has its own steering committee. The Democrats frequently protect abusers (such as Joe Biden) who have been publicly known to be abusers, whose accusors went public (they were not anonymous accusations), and it won't even matter.
No.575789
>>575734>protest hustle>>575765>protest hustle>>575777>protest hustlefederal Samefag
>They are impotent and weakAlso, how rich can we get? PSL is literally the largest Leninist-type party in the U.S. This is just next level federal coping.
No.575790
>>575778PSL went to East Palestine. BreakThrough News and BreakThrough News Disruptors have been doing a lot in East Palestine.
No.575791
>>575768>>575768>Myself I'm very disappointed to hear PSL failed to attend an antiwar rally in the heart of the imperial core and am considering retracting their honorary ML statusPSL was with ANSWER coalition in New York City to protest the war in Ukraine, what are you guys even talking about? There is another anti-war demo that they're doing in Washington D.C on the 18th. Can you weird fucking dorks stop repeating baseless rumors on the internet and literally just google things before you repeat them?
No.575792
>>575782>The CPUSA needs to be more like the KPRF. The KPRF has gyms, a soccer league, a boxing/mma league, runs for office, and is massiveAnd where are they going to get the resources to do that?
No.575793
>>575760If you want to real political organizing, actually join an organization, like PSL, CPUSA, whatever. At the very least, attend their candidacy courses, get a feel for their political program, understand their history. Most likely you will be surprised how many things about CPUSA or PSL that you hear online end up being blatantly false. I would know. Don't get caught up in the drama of leftypol because I guarantee that of the people talking shit here are feds.
No.575794
This Jewish account is talking about McCarthyism and how the majority of comrades targeted were Jewish. McCarthyism was just as much antisemitism as it was anti-communism.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CpVa4-oumI4/?igshid=NTdlMDg3MTY= No.575795
>>575787Who’s defending the Democrats?
No.575796
>>575789To be honest, I find it telling how Maupin and his crew are obsessed with linking every leftist in history who went against their views to the feds or intelligence agencies, when LaRouche and Dugin were proven to have ties to the FBI and CIA.
No.575798
>>575797Nothing wrong with being Jewish and Marxist.
No.575799
>>575797That was literally the whole narrative of McCarthyism along with “CPUSA was a Soviet spy ring”.
No.575800
CPUSA has many traditions.
No.575801
>>575792>And where are they going to get the resources to do that?Well they can sell the building and then use the money to open the gym in the build… oh shit no that's not gonna work.
Hmm
No.575802
>>575800>many traditionsSuch as?
No.575803
>>575539>Why has CPUSA been so mythologized in the past two years when they were a massive failure and sucked even in their “good days?”1. They didn't "suck". They fought for civil rights when no one else was.
2. Interest in CPUSA has gone up in the past two years because American youth want a socialism that focuses on winning rather than masturbating to your own victimhood.
No.575805
>>575539What are you basing your “facts” on? Seems like you’re making bold statements without much to back them up.
No.575806
>>575794Uncle Gus was Finnish, not Jewish.
No.575807
>>575795>>575796Of course! We have to understand that the feds are professional counter-revolutionaries who learn the best practices and adapt them for their purposes. Most prominent example are Marines reading Guerilla Warfare texts from Mao (like actually). They have adapted such principles of Lenininism like unity of action and centralism for their own counter-revolutionary purposes. I think the formation of the so-called "compatible left" is directly related to this.
No.575808
>>575539Define “massive failure”.
No.575809
There will never be a “socialist America”.
If anything, leftism in the US will always look more like anarchism. Anarchists are way more organized and do more activism than any ML or trot group in the Stares.
No.575810
>>575809IS that really true though? Not American but outside of being loudly obnoxious and wrong on the internet I don't really see or simple cousins across the sea ever really doing much or even writing that much.
No.575811
>>575809Anarchism might be more popular overall in the U.S. although I heard a comment from Vijay Prashad once that leftism in the U.S. is also less serious and these are related. His point of comparison was Latin America where anarchism isn't as much of a thing on the left as it is in the U.S., whereas down there it's more based around popular front-type movements, parties and electoral campaigns interacting with each other.
The U.S. left has kinda started to go in this direction. Realistically, it feels like "anarchism" has less in common with, say, early 20th century anarchism or is ideologically that far removed from socialists, it's more about just protesting with some mutual aid thrown in and having that wedded to horizontalist organizing techniques. But you can protest until hell freezes over.
No.575812
>>575811>His point of comparison was Latin America where anarchism isn't as much of a thing on the left as it is in the U.S.Anarchism is probably bigger in latam than USA. this is dumb.
No.575813
>>575810Anarchists in the US organize a lot more than tankies do and have a much wider appeal.
No.575814
>>575813They have better optics too. Like those anarchists that went around repairing potholes. They also are behind guerilla gardening and likely involved in some meshnets that were set up for people who couldnt afford internet. Tankies never do anything these days but post memes online or take photoshoots with guns.
No.575815
>>575814That's the thing: Americans are individualist whether we like it or not. A huge part of the so-called "American spirit" is self-sufficiency, being a "pioneer", whatever. Americans who are critical of the establishment often complain one of the biggest problems is the government almost criminalizes self-sufficiency, like you can't grow your own garden or you have to get a billion permits for something benign. When Americans hear about socialism, they automatically equate it with the government railroading your personal life rather than commanding the economy for need and not greed. I think anarchism, rather than ML, fits the American attitude much better.
No.575818
>>575813>>575814Just doing stuff like failing to plant a garden is not organizing. MLs at least have a foot in the unions while CHAZ, the last big anarchist thing was a laughing stock. Also, taking photos with guns is something anarchists do all the time.
>>575815Collectivism vs individualism is a false dichotomy. American capitalism has many collectivist aspects in a way but they get marketed as individualism. Also anarchists wanna raise communes and are big into mutual aid how the fuck is that feeding into American individualism?
No.575819
>>575815I live in a state with fair number of conservatives and even here there are mutual aid groups people can join. They are all over the country.
>>575816Dominos repairing potholes on their delivery route was self interest. That's obviously not what i waa referring to.
>>575818CHAZ or whatever it kept changing it's name to was never anarchist it was just liberals playing around. They even were getting food from local businesses offering discounts to people who said "black lives matter" lol
No.575820
>>575819>was just liberals playing around.So….anarchism?
No.575821
>>575819>mutual aid From what I've seen Americans interpret that simply as charity.
Also there are CPUSA chapters in conservative states as well. And don't pull that "not true anarchism" on me.
No.575822
>>575813As a European, with latam comrades, I simply do not believe you are stronger in North America than the traidtional left, sorry.
Let us take the Cospito ccase currently for example. lots of support comming from latam to our comrade, yet from NAm nothing but crickets.
No.575823
>>575821I dont know. A lo of the mutual aid groups sites explicitly state they arent a charity and then explain what mutual aid is and what things their specific group does currently.
No.575824
>>575818Anarchists are the ones organizing the protests against Cop City. CPUSA and PSL (and CPI) aren’t.
No.575825
>>575824There are CPUSA members defending Atlanta Forest right now…
No.575826
>>575561Go follow Justine. She's our modern-day Rebel Girl.
No.575828
>>575809>There will never be a “socialist America”.>If anything, leftism in the US will always look more like anarchism.>anarchism>not socialismwe're off to a horrible start
>Anarchists are way more organized and do more activism than any ML or trot group in the Stares.How? In what way? What is your metric?
This seems like a needlessly ideological, hyperbolic statement, and should not warrant a fully qualified reply, but the question that I am forced to ask is how you can argue that anarchists are more organized when they lack unity of action?
No.575830
>>575814>They have better optics too. Like those anarchists that went around repairing potholes. >They have better optics tooWhat are you talking about? You don't get to choose your optics if you are considered a threat to the ruling class; you suffer whatever portrayal that the bourgeois press chooses to make of you.
>They also are behind guerilla gardening And what is guerilla gardening doing to spread class consciousness? What threat does guerilla gardening pose to the bourgeois class rule? To the bourgeois state?
>and likely involved in some meshnetsso you don't know if they are actually involved in some meshnets?
>Tankies never do anything these dayswhat is labor organizing?
what is tenant organizing?
what is anti-war organizing?
what is abortion rights / women's liberation organizing?
this is the most bizarre, most uninformed post I have ever seen. you can't even name the """tankies""" you are mad at for "doing too little" or for not doing gardening like you. Are you a Agent Kochinski fan?
No.575831
>>575750Do you still intend to finish this? Clean copy that's been proofread without transcription errors, etc. is important.
No.575832
>>575828Anarchists are organizing the protests in Atlanta against Cop City, CPUSA and PSL aren't.
Anarchists are organizing against the massive influx of fascist anti-trans laws, CPUSA and PSL aren't.
Anarchists are the ones unionizing Starbucks and other workplaces, CPUSA and PSL aren't.
Anarchists are overwhelmingly the ones fighting for housing rights, CPUSA and PSL aren't.
In fact I'd go so far as to say anarchists in America are doing everything WZF's CPUSA was doing back in the early 1930s but better.
No.575835
>>575834Such a despicable line
>Handwaves anti-fascist effort>Purges bad>GPCR bad>By his own logic he should then also dispense with the dumb Russian backwater slav "Lenin" for not being an enlightened American """communist""". No.575836
Syndicalism>CPUSA
No.575838
>>575837You got the French terminology. Good.
No.575839
>>575834FFS real MLs need to coup the CPUSA leadership. This is getting embarrassing.
No.575840
>>575832This is why Amekkkica needs to collapse.
The most the left can do here is protest for the 100s time in the last century. Wow, and look how much has changed, truly global capitalism is ending because where unionizing and holding up signs saying "noooo you can't do this!". The ruling class is shivering in it's boots.
CPUSA is only good for some of the theory it produced and spying for the soviets. Anarchists are good for going apeshit and mentioning Spain the 1000s time.
No.575841
>>575840>CPUSA is only good for some of the theory it producedSuch as? American communists weren't known for being big into theory.
No.575842
>>575841Obviously, the mighty advancements of Based Browder!!!
No.575843
>>575842So long Gay Bowser
No.575844
>>575832>Anarchists are the ones unionizing Starbucks and other workplaces, CPUSA and PSL aren't.We were working pretty closely on the Amazon Labor Union and TJs Union IIRC
No.575845
>>575844How active are Party members in organizing? All I know is the work Justine Medina has put in with Amazon.
No.575846
>>575841>Such as? American communists weren't known for being big into theory.Clarification: Americans aren't known for being big into theory. Really though Americans tend to be distrustful of theories and are more like "whatever works." It's a much more Pragmatist culture and one also obsessed with novelty. This is why I kinda think so many American liberals have trouble believing China is a socialist country because it seems like whatever China is doing "works" and socialism was ruled out in America because it "doesn't work." But then, China's rise might be good for American socialism in the long run, because that means "it works" now.
BTW, I kinda think this is why the term "critical race theory" took off in such a negative way, because it has the word "theory" in it. So many American leftists don't like people telling them to "read theory." I realize you need a theory, but I'm just saying…
You know, I can't imagine an American rightist either who is like Alexander Dugin. That whole eschatological Russian mystic philosopher is a particular thing there but it's just not with Americans. Get 'ir done and all that.
No.575847
>>575846China is not socialist.
No.575849
>>575847And you are not human.
See, anyone can just claim shit.
No.575850
>>575848>has organ trafficking>has members of the party calling for more work hours>has a thriving bourgeoisie while wages remain low>capital expanding to countries in asia, latam, africa>has worse healthcare than fucking brazil>higher positions of the party are all occupied by descendants of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie>exports absolutely no revolution>surveilance and censorship of online criticism towards the government>fake traditional medicine propaganda during the pandemic>revisionists<socialistHow is this a "dictatorship of the proletariat"? Stop deluding yourself, are you a materialist or an idealist?
>XI JINPING 2021: "Marx and Engels did not envisage that a market economy could be developed under socialist conditions, and of course they could not foresee how socialist countries would treat capital. Although Lenin and Stalin led the socialist construction of the Soviet Union, at that time the Soviet Union implemented a highly centralized planned economic system and basically did not encounter large-scale capital problems. To engage in a socialist market economy is a great creation of our party. >Since it is a socialist market economy, it will inevitably produce various forms of capital. Although there are many differences between capital in capitalist society and capital in socialist society, capital is all about chasing profits. “The key to uniting the people is to manage their wealth appropriately." We should explore how to play the positive role of capital under the conditions of a socialist market economy, while effectively controlling the negative role of capital. >In recent years, due to lack of awareness and lack of supervision, capital has expanded in a disorderly way, manipulated arbitrarily, and made huge profits in some areas of our country. This requires regulating the behavior of capital, seeking advantages and avoiding disadvantages, not allowing “capital predators” to act recklessly, but also giving full play to the function of capital as a factor of production. This is a major political and economic issue that cannot be avoided." No.575851
>>575850
>has organ traffickingsource
>has members of the party calling for more work hourssource
>has a thriving bourgeoisie while wages remain low90% of chiniese people own a house
>capital expanding to countries in asia, latam, africagood
>has worse healthcare than fucking braziluntrue with even seconds of research
>higher positions of the party are all occupied by descendants of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisieprove it
>exports absolutely no revolutionthey are exporting revolution to africa
>surveilance and censorship of online criticism towards the governmentgood read lenin freedom to lie is not freedom of press
>fake traditional medicine propaganda during the pandemicthey had a 0 covid policy retard and built hospitals on demand
>revisionistsyou havent met that burden of proof try again
No.575852
>>575850You focus on details, some of which are ridiculous, fake news by Falun Gong, or actively fought against by the government, as if to prove that the Chinese socialist project hasn't been a massive success, and continues to be, unlike any other country in the history of Earth, apart from, perhaps, the USSR. Further still, the resiliency of Chinese political sovereignty is something not seen basically anywhere except DPRK and Cuba, not even the USSR can claim that past the Stalin era.
No.575853
>>575851Horrendous diarrhea, zero-effort post.
>source for organ traffickinghttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1600613522058257The anti organ trafficking law reduced the practice only in 50% in 2007. The CCP has been in power for 60 years. China just didn't give a shit about it before, it seems.
>source for members of the party calling for more work hoursI'm wrong on this one, my bad (sincerely). Was misremembering some info.
>90% of chinese people own a houseAnd yet worker protection laws are, again, worse than in The Great People's Socialist Republic of… Brazil.
https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3089128/china-confirms-more-40-cent-population-survived-just-us141https://www.amcham-shanghai.org/en/article/work-hour-systems-china#!
Explain how this "overtime" industry is any better than in Japan
From a colleague who works there (translated to English by myself):
<I have only 2 sick leave days per year. If the industry stops the production due to malfunction in the machines, they don't need to account for the days the workers were at home when paying their wages. I also have no health insurance>untrue with even seconds of researchSource? I'd rather trust someone I know rather than an asshat in an imageboard. In their words:
<I'd like to know when is healthcare going to be free for everyone. One of my workmate's father had to pay twice for catheterization, one hundred thousand CNY each time>prove itLi Qiang is buddies with Jack Ma lol.
>they are exporting revolution to africaYou can't be serious.
>good read lenin freedom to lie is not freedom of pressTake Lenin's name out of your fucking mouth, you sniveling Keynesian, social-democrat, first-world eurocommunist. I am not against censorship a priori, like fake news or shit like comparing the president to a cartoon character. I'm telling you that the government will censor COMMUNISTS on the internet for criticizing the status quo. Whatever happened to ruthless criticism, right?
>you havent met that burden of proof try againI want to see you try to defend how Xi's speech is not revisionism.
I won't reply further if you're just gonna post another abhorrent turd like this one. You don't deserve my time, do your own research. I have attatched a pdf to my previous post, make of it what you want.
>>575852I don't inform myself about China on the news, I have a colleague who lives and works there with Chinese citizens.
>massive successYes, planned economies are a success, that's why private enterprises in the US have economic planning nowadays. Yes, cheap labor with somewhat developed forces of production are a great target for foreign investment, that's why Deng's economy was not bad. Socialism is not "when planned economies", it's when the proletariat hold power above the bourgeoisie and work towards the higher stage of Communism. Don't kid yourself, Mao's China doesn't exist anymore.
>the resiliency of Chinese political sovereignty is something not seen basically anywhere except DPRK and CubaRussia is very sovereign, is it a socialist state?
No.575854
Organ trafficking is everywhere, people need they organs
No.575855
>>575853
>source WHOlmao
>I'm wrong on this one, my bad (sincerely). Was misremembering some info.something tells me this will be a reoccuring theme in this post
>And yet worker protection laws are, again, worse than in The Great People's Socialist Republic of… Brazil.what is the economic domination of china by the UK
read up about the opium wars and the rape of nanking then get back to me
>Take Lenin's name out of your fucking mouth, you sniveling Keynesian, social-democrat, first-world eurocommunist. I am not against censorship a priori, like fake news or shit like comparing the president to a cartoon character. I'm telling you that the government will censor COMMUNISTS on the internet for criticizing the status quo. Whatever happened to ruthless criticism, right?hysterics masquarding as critique
No.575856
>>575854sources so far:
1. a science direct article
2. Asian American Chamber of Commerce american gov article
3. an scmp article
yikes
No.575857
>>575855>>575856Sorry, next time I will try sourcing a trotskist blog. The neolibs control media hegemony, I can't do anything about it. Doesn't mean that everything is a lie propagated by the feds ffs
I won't engage further because it is clear you will not be convinced by me. China is not a socialist country. If you disagree, then we'll agree on disagreeing. You keep crossing your fingers for China to export revolution while I try my best at my org
No.575859
>>575857dont let the door hit you on the way out king
No.575860
>>575837You’re the hero we need but don’t deserve.
No.575861
>>575545What direct actions did Foster do apart from the 1919 strike and 1930 National Unemployment Day?
No.575862
>>575837MIA bro, when can we see this on MIA?
No.575863
>>575862Once proofreader anon says they're done with their line-by-line proofread, I'll turn it into HTML and upload it.
I will say however that >>575837 looks pretty good already, and if proofreader anon doesn't deliver in the coming week or so I will use that. No.575865
>>575837FYI everything in that pamphlet is 100% negative and I hope you understand that. Calling for violence and industrial sabotage has never resulted in any kind of historical progress toward socialism.
No.575866
>>575863Where's BBOC and Latex anon?
No.575867
>>575865How does that boot taste?
No.575869
>>575868How many comrades did he snitch on though? Bella Dodd and Louis Budenz ratted out way more people. Like, Bella Dodd incriminated over 1400 teachers with Party affiliations.
No.575870
>>575832Every. Single. One. Of. Those. Things. You. Accuse. PSL. And. CPUSA. Of. Not. Doing. Are. Things. That. Members. From. Both. Organizations. Are. Actually. Doing.
No.575872
>>575871comrade, literally open up instagram on your dumbass smartphone and look up literally any psl or cpusa branch. this "i don't see it so it's not happening" style argument is getting really tired.
No.575876
>>575846>BTW, I kinda think this is why the term "critical race theory" took off in such a negative way, because it has the word "theory" in it. So many American leftists don't like people telling them to "read theory." I realize you need a theory, but I'm just saying… Yeah uh you might want to look into the whole discourse about evolution vs creationism and how "it's only a theory!!!!!!1!!!" was used as a thought terminating cliché for decades and decades in the US. You are probably more correct about this than you even realize.
No.575877
It's the only communist party we have that isn't caught up with some insane infighting lore.
No.575880
>>575878If the revolution doesn't put on drag shows to trigger the conservatives, I don't want any part of it.
No.575881
>>575834>Well it's a good thing we don't>we always felt you have to develop a model and concept of socialism in the united states based on what happens here, you know, not based on what happens in another country>what happened in the communist movement … in the 20th century … because the movement was new … we mechanically borrowed from the Soviet or Chinese experience and try to apply it to American conditions, or French, or Japanese … etc experiences. There are no universal models. >The other thing you gotta address what are the political practices of joe stalin during the soviet union, when he was leader of the country>there were a lot of problematic issues >yeah mao led the revolution and the long march and helped organize the chinese people and peasantry for the liberation of their country>there were a lot of problems … trials … liquidation>in China there was the cultural revolution … which led to suffering>… we can't take "power comes from the barrel of the gun" quote from mao and apply it our political struggle .. sadly, a lot of people did in the 60s and 70sso listen. i agree with Joe Sims on the fact that socialism in America will develop differently here than in say, Vietnam, or Cuba, or Russia. This is actually an obvious point to people who have actually read Lenin. I disagree with Joe Sims somewhat when he talks about how horrible the tenure of Stalin is, but you know, we also don't have to make a point of siding with trotsky or stalin or whether we are pro-Soviet or pro-China. It's stupid. the debates about trotsky vs stalin or kruschev or mao are not actually relevant for current, modern day, real world organizing.
I don't agree with Joe Sims when he tries to describe the black panthers self defense patrols as a tragedy. I think it was vital. But, also, he maybe is alluding to ultras thinking they can do a guerilla war in the U.S. right at this given historical moment as though our conditions are exactly the same as semi feudal china or cuba under batista.
>i don't quote mao and stalin because it seems to me that it would be letting the bourgeoisie dictate our ideological work>there is this tendency in anti-communism to reduce the entire soviet experience to stalin and how horrible and to do the same thing in china with mao >it is kind of a cover because you don't actually have to engage with the complexicity of the process of socialist development and the pressure of imperialism and capitalism >i think some people in the communist movement want to quote stalin and mao not with the intent of replicating what they did and more to just performatively push back against the bourgeois anti-communism>the question is not whether we should quote stalin or mao>the question is what we are actually doing for the working class>we should not fall into the trap of mistaking someone's name for a [political] program itselfif your main concern of a communist party is whether they are quoting stalin or mao enough, you are not a serious person.
>we have to develop our own way, our own path, based on what is happening in our country>we have our own rich socialist history, we can literally just quote our own socialiststhis is objectively true. how is anyone bent out of shape about this? this is just true.
also, can we appreciate the fact that while I dsiagree with joe sims I can still understand his arguments better than a third of the dipshits on this board who clearly need to READ MORE.
honestly, if you don't like what the cpusa leadership is doing, literally join another organization like psl or something.
No.575882
>>575875PSL and CPUSA aren't in Atlanta protesting Cop City right now.
No.575883
>your main concern of a communist party is whether they are quoting stalin or mao enough, you are not a serious person.
I want to learn about making revolution from the leaders who actually accomplished it. A communist party goal is to overthrow the bourgioise government and abolish capitalism, It is a necessity for a communist party to use them in arguments to support their line. I take seriously their teachings because the proletariat has international solidarity as one class and also contributer to Marxist theory on dialectics.
No.575884
>>575876Hah. I hadn't thought about that in a long time. But yeah, "theory" basically being a synonym for "a hypothetical."
>>575881Just throwing this on the pile, but the CPUSA was critical of the BPP at the time.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/winston/1971/08/crisis-black-panther-party.htm>>575883NTA and you can do whatever you wanna do, but in my experience a lot of communists pull the equivalent of punch cards with little quotations on them to justify whatever position they have, but which doesn't have much to do with the concrete political decisions that those people were actually debating about at the time, and also neglecting how they often contradicted themselves later on (often for pragmatic and sensible reasons because of changing circumstances). Honestly I've seen them do this so much that I started tuning people out when they're like "as Stalin said…"
No.575885
>>575884>Just throwing this on the pile, but the CPUSA was critical of the BPP at the time.Why?
No.575886
CPUSA's hierarchical structure is what really killed them.
No.575889
>>575887>all those anerikkkan flagsBarf.
No.575890
>>575863>>575837Just FYI, I am planning to begin work on the Marxists.org edition starting on Friday night burger time in two days.
No.575894
>>575559Nobody gives a shit about the national convention, which should be blatent to everyone.
No.575895
The CPUSA actually had one of their conventions broadcast on C-SPAN:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?320055-1/communist-party-national-convention-keynote-addressesBut that was in 2014 when they were treading water and trying to just stay afloat. They should do it again but dress it up a bit more, maybe like the JCP with the party flag up there and broadcast it on television where everyone is singing The Internationale.
No.575896
>>575895Nice. Was there a special circumstance, or they just were able to and wanted publicity?
No.575897
>>575896I dunno but I assume they just wanted to air it and C-SPAN showed up with a camera. C-SPAN will air all kinds of stuff, they're non-partisan in that way. They aired Gus Hall's memorial service and the Vietnamese ambassador made an appearance.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?160702-1/gus-hall-memorial-serviceFor the convention, it doesn't appear they just ran a livestream like the DSA did, but just the keynote address and a panel discussion.
No.575899
>>575545Didn’t he backdoor the Wobblies?
No.575900
>>575541What do you mean by appeal to more Americans?
No.575901
>>575890Update: work is well under way and should be ready to publish by noon tomorrow (maybe even tonight).
I'm trying to figure out whether it would work better split into separate chapter pages or as one giant web page for the whole book, would appreciate your thoughts.
No.575902
>>575901I'd prefer one giant web page but that's just me.
No.575904
>>575736>>575837>>575901It's done! Here's the link:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/foster/1912/syndicalism/index.htmlI ended up making both a segmented and a single-page version
which was not worth it BTW so you can choose which one you like.
There may be a few glitched links and the like, I just finished so I haven't checked the errors yet. Let me know if you run into any big errors (or small typos for that matter) and I will try to fix them tomorrow.
Anyway, I'm tired as fuck now and will go to bed after this post. Feel free to make a separate gloat thread if you think this project deserves one.
No.575905
>>575904Holy shit I love you.
No.575906
>>575904One thing I'd suggest doing.
See how it says "William Z. Foster archive" on the bottom?
https://www.marxists.org/archive/foster/1932/toward/06.htmYou might want to add that at the bottom.
Great work though.
No.575907
>>575733>PSL is Marxist-Leninist, not "Stalinist" or "Maoist."Stopped reading here
No.575909
>>575574That was a fantastic video and put a lot of things in perspective. To hear how genuinely inspired people were in the 20s and 30s by the Soviet Union, and then just how badly Khrushchev's speech (coming right on the heels of McCarthyite suppression) fucked everything up, is pretty stark. 80% of the party leaving within 2 years of that speech is a catastrophe.
The newsletter snippets in the aftermath of the secret speech are particularly interesting to me. Lenin explicitly modeled democratic centralism on a military command structure, but party members started considering it a weakness rather than a strength. That demand for openness and "full" democracy on the one hand and the need for disciplined party members taking orders from experienced and militant leadership on the other is a circle this country's been trying to square for 70 years now.
No.575910
>>575909>That demand for openness and "full" democracy on the one hand and the need for disciplined party members taking orders from experienced and militant leadership on the other is a circle this country's been trying to square for 70 years now.Cuba seems to have done it successfully.
No.575911
>>575910After the revolution, sure, but prospective party members here are wary of even getting a foot in the door for fear of undemocratic tendencies. It isn't even a matter of petty bourgeois/middle class/PMC sensibilities, as the people in the video were committed, hardcore working class communists for most of their adult lives during the height of the communist movement in America, yet most of them ditched CPUSA all the same after the secret speech.
No.575912
>>575911>yet most of them ditched CPUSA all the same after the secret speechI suppose it's hard for us to understand the shock that these people must have experienced at the time. The 40s were easily the height of Soviet prestige in the West for obvious reasons relating to the war, and even when the liberal establishment turned on the Soviets at the start of the Cold War it would have been easy to dismiss those attacks as propaganda. Then along comes cornman who appears to say that actually a lot of these accusations are true. I can see why the shock would stun and disillusion people, and at least lead them into various other anti-Soviet leftist tendencies.
No.575913
>>575909> Lenin explicitly modeled democratic centralism on a military command structure, but party members started considering it a weakness rather than a strength. That demand for openness and "full" democracy on the one hand and the need for disciplined party members taking orders from experienced and militant leadership on the other is a circle this country's been trying to square for 70 years now.Maybe this is proof anarchism, not ML, will be what brings socialism to America?
No.575914
>>575913No. You had your chance with the IWW.
No.575915
>>575914How was the IWW a failure but CPUSA not?
No.575916
>>575906I put in a directory link thingy at the top that is pretty similar. You can click from MIA > Archive > Foster > Syndicalism, or at the bottom of the page click the top of page link to get back up. Probably best to have both, but I'm too lazy rn to add it to all eight pages.
I encourage anyone that spots any transcription errors to post them here! I don't think there are many left, but this is an easy place to identify them.
On a different note, I have had an idea for a collective project for the MIA for a while now that involves Stalin and his
Foundations of Leninism. I want to take a break for now but I will make a thread about it when I'm ready.
No.575917
>>575915The CPUSA succeeded the IWW because it was a much better organization in articulating the demands by the immigrant workers (until they were enticed by the wages of whiteness). In short, the IWW was the best and only vehicle to deliver anarchism and it failtered when the superiority of marxism prevailed with the russian revolution as it's proof.
No.575918
>>575917Being able to point to the Soviet Union as an example was apparently extremely effective for the communist party pre-WWII and I'd say that more than anything is what helped gain supporters. They could point to them and say "here's a society
right now without unemployment, without bosses, where everyone gets what they need, where working people matter, what we want IS possible." There aren't powerful examples like that anymore, popular imagination is restricted to things like Nordic welfare states and lines going up in China.
No.575919
>>575918Ummmm, Rojava?
Chiapas?
No.575920
>>575919The Soviet Union spanned a continent, had a population of more than 100 million people, and inspired fear in capitalists the world over. Rojava and Chiapas don't come anywhere close to that in the minds of people, laudable as they might be.
No.575921
>>575904Odd question, but can you tell where the clicks to the page are coming from?
Like if I posted the link on Twitter, and ten people clicked on it, would you be able to see that they came from Twitter?
No.575923
>>575918And also
Marinaleda
All in the Federation of Egalitarian Communities
You could even get away with Cherán for certain arguments.
I know it's not comparable in the 'this is a huge world power', I'm not pretending these serve the same purpose, but these examples are much more viable to a post-Cold-War audience. The closest thing to an atrocity committed by Marinaleda is the mayor commanding a group of raiders to shoplift staple food supplies from supermarkets in other towns.
No.575925
>>575923They're led by Eurocommunists and are in an electoral alliance with the PCE. Local projects are well and good but this is a far from not being.
>but these examples are much more viable to a post-Cold-War audience. Because on a communal level the ruling class doesn't really care whether communists take over a small town or not. At best they belittle it. On a national level, a movement like that would get smeared into oblivion, and I don't know if that is more palpable to normies - as far as I can tell, they are not CHAZ-type anarcho-liberals but an alliance between communists, Eurocommunists and social democrats.
No.575926
>>575925not being the type of alternative to traditional communist politics as you describe it*
No.575927
Also lol @ "atrocities". How can a small town in Spain commit atrocities. Close a playground?
Atrocities are committed in war and during massive social transformations of entire peoples.
No.575928
>>575925Look, talking about three different communities without saying which one you're talking about made a fucking mess of a comment. Please just greentext the name of which one/s you mean.
Not that it matters, because I don't even think any of them are communists, let alone Eurocommunists.
Cheran doesn't really derive from any recognized ideology beyond 'fuck organized crime and the politicians and police they rode in on' and CEF are anarchistic commune utopians who hold property in common.
Zapatistas (mentioned in the other comment) contradict your suggestion that they're trivial because they did have a minor war with the Mexican government and hold territory containing hundreds of thousands of citizens.
>Because on a communal level the ruling class doesn't really care whether communists take over a small town or not.What? No. Because there wasn't a fucking national war against them, littered with ingrained allegations of egregious disasterous mismanagement, totalitarian brutality, brainwashing and national genocides. Regardless of whether they're true or not, those are normalized mindsets that you have to overcome unless you want X0% of people to just shut you out as if you were talking about how Nazi Germany was good. Yes, to normalfags Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia are truly comparable.
>>575927>Also lol @ "atrocities". How can a small town in Spain commit atrocities.Pogroms or starvation or some shit. But yeah, they didn't and were very unlikely to. Sure. It doesn't really matter
why they didn't, you're missing the point.
The fact is, a small town in Spain is able to demonstrate advantages (see it as an outlier of GFC 2008) and there is no blatant disadvantages someone could point to like with the USSR.
Don't tell me why. I know they're completely different. I know the USSR was a supermassive state that lasted over 70 years and was involved in two world wars and socio-economic overall. No-one gives a shit about context. Any argument you can give to support the USSR, an opposing guy can just point to an atrocity to smear it, and claim it was because of socialism, and a large proportion of people will accept it.
No.575929
>>575907and
>>575908the duality of man.
<this is literally some next level shit right here. here we have people implying PSL is not Marxist Leninist by way of disagreeing with it being called Marxist-Leninist because it is not "stalinist"* or "maoist"* and then someone else saying that marxist leninist because it is "stalinist".lmao
this is not unlike the time when someone wrote a screed on the itsgoingdown anarchist website where they called PSL 'Stalinist' and tried to argue that all of its activities in the struggle for abortion rights were actually invalid because
* terms like stalinist and maoist are anticommunist terms. there is no universal blueprint for building socialism. the idea that communists have to adhere to only the methods used by specific revolutionaries in one country, in one movement, or one individual revolutionary figure, like Lenin, or Mao, or Honecker, or Castro, or Sankara, or Il-Sung, is at best limiting. we should want to learn from all of them and to understand the experiences of those struggles, but the idea that we can replicate their successes by only mechanically practicing their same methods is a contradiction, and cannot be revolutionary. our approach has to also take into consideration the material history of our class, and of our people. we have to be acquainted we are informed by theory, of course, but also by practice. it is through practice, and a thorough examination of the material world that we can even hope to build socialism with our people. the idea that we could apply all the methods that worked specifically for Lenin and his fellow people, that they used to build socialism over in Russia, and take that and put that into our country, without any adjustments whatsoever, is both mechanical thinking, non-critical, and blunted. we cannot shove a square peg into a round hole. the experience of building socialism in vietnam, of course, is different from the experience of building it in cuba, or in the democratic people's republic of korea, or in china. Each of these revolutions involved trial and error, and each of these revolutions had specific obstacles. The same theory of development that explains the material circumstances of those countries, with a thorough review of the material history of those countries, is also the same theory that explains why Marx had once thought that revolution would first occur in the most developed countries in Western Europe, and why he ended up being wrong. He was writing with the best information he had available at the time, as we all are.
stalin was not perfect by any means, but, also, we recognize that communists, believe it or not, can also make mistakes, and that it is mostly experimentation through which that we learn what the theory of revolution actually is. stalin was a marxist-leninist. mao was a marxist-leninist. but their lack of "purity," the fact that they sometimes made mistakes (mao would admit to many mistakes), is not something we should look at exclusively. we should concern ourselves with real world outcomes, which is the object of policy and decision-making in most cases. China went from being a backward semi-feudal country, subject to imperialist invasion, to a superpower that is soon to break through the world unipolarity. Vietnam was also a backward, semi-feudal country, that was colonized by France and invaded by the Japanese. Vietnam has grown significantly because of socialism, and though it was besieged seemingly on all sides, it not only overcame odds but won its soverignty, and stopped pol pot, a CIA puppet.
No.575930
>>575539Question: is the widely acclaimed speaker, writer, journalist, and political analyst Caleb Maupin closer to Foster or Browder ideologically-speaking?
No.575931
>>575930Foster, Caleb in his live streams criticizes Browder and his actions in the 1940s period such as dissolving the Party, its actions during WW2, Browder's poor treatment of Foster and Flynn, and other factors which led to liquidationism and weakening of the CPUSA right before getting hit by the sledgehammer of McCarthyism.
No.575932
>>575930Neither.
Browder to his credit at least didn’t justify aligning with FDR using conspiracy theories.
No.575933
>>575931So why does Maupin pretty much repeat the same popular front strategy Browder advocated?
No.575934
Foster's downfall was being a true believer. He said in 1953 (?) that the Soviet Union was only five years away from achieving full communism, which I don't even think his most die-hard apologists would think of defending. When you go around your whole life thinking that revolution is going to come ANY DAY NOW that's going to motivate you to be proactive but it's also going to put a huge target on your back in terms of repression, which is exactly what happened. Red Scare propaganda from the 1950s literally makes the guy look like a cartoon villain.
I don't think a lot of comrades on here understand. When you choose the life of an agitator, you have to get lucky every day. Every day when you wake up and get on the picket line, when you engage in sabotage, when you do that direct action, everything has to go exactly right so you can make it out in one piece. But the State only has to get lucky once, and in an instant it can take away everything you fought and struggled for.
No.575936
>>575934>But the State only has to get lucky once, and in an instant it can take away everything you fought and struggled for.The Party was already imploding before McCarthyism.
Ever thought that maybe you just can’t have communism in America?
No.575937
A lot of Black radicals today have a lot of grievances towards CPUSA. The party survived largely off of Black (and Jewish) labour.
No.575938
>>575936>you cant have communism in americaYes you can. You can have communism in haudenosaunee, new england, dixie, aztlan, texas, california, cascadia, lakotah, hawaii, alaska, puerto rico, guam, samoa. But you cant turn the USA communist. The CPUSA failed because it was a party in the USA. It was a USA party. Thats why the CPUSA failed. It accepted the territorial claims of an apartheid settler state as being legitimate. The CPUSA was an apartheid settler party for apartheid settlers.
No.575940
>>575934> I don't think a lot of comrades on here understand. When you choose the life of an agitator, you have to get lucky every day. Every day when you wake up and get on the picket line, when you engage in sabotage, when you do that direct action, everything has to go exactly right so you can make it out in one piece. But the State only has to get lucky once, and in an instant it can take away everything you fought and struggled for.I swear you stole this from The Wire.
No.575942
>>575934>But the State only has to get lucky once,You forgetting WZF had criminal syndicalism charges levied against him in the 1920s and only beat the case because the ACLU pulled some strings?
No.575943
>>575940>>575941That’s actually a really old saying that the cops say to gangbangers - "You gotta be lucky everyday but we only gotta get lucky once."
>>575942>and only beat the case because the ACLU pulled some stringsBack when the ACLU was based and communist-controlled.
No.575945
>>575930Browder definitely.
Foster would've called Caleb a chauvinist and revisionist, possibly an antisemite too.
No.575946
>>575934To be fair it made sense to kiss Soviet ass back then.
No.575947
>>575930Maupin is a full-blown Browderite.
No.575948
>>575947He's also just kinda retarded
No.575949
>>575948He tells a lot of half-truths and I have no clue if he's legitimately ignorant or if he's leading his audience on.
No.575951
>>575950Pumpkins: so good you'll tell everyone.
No.575952
Is CPUSA currently the American leftist party that's doing the most activism right now?
How do they compare to DSA and PSL?
No.575953
>>575900Broader age range and racial range.
No.575954
>>575952PSL seem like "protest warriors." They are pretty good at generating a crowd and I think their media game is better. But realistically, to get anything done on the U.S. left involves working within some kinda coalition, so when you do see MLs in a crowd there's usually gonna be a mix of people. This one had PSL up front but the local CPUSA people were in this march.
CPUSA is coming out of a nadir. They don't tend to be as in-your-face (though that's changing), and often work within coalitions and within mass orgs. This pic was from a march by the Poor People's Campaign. More labor focused as well. CPUSA members are expected to be in a union or in a mass org of one kind of another.
No.575955
Fascinating article about Anna Hass Morgan, a CPUSA legend who defied the Ohio Un-American Activities Committee:
https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/the-ohio-woman-who-beat-the-red-scare-blacklists/ No.575956
>>575785They did, but you'd be shocked by how many of the old timers left the Party everything they had.
No.575957
>>575792They have a budget of 10 million per year, not to mention what they have in savings.
No.575960
>>575959That doesn’t mean whites are revolutionary. Non-sequitur.
No.575961
>>575954>PSL seem like "protest warriors."How is CPUSA or DSA not also "protest warriors"? What is the meaning of this phrase? That these organizations are not sufficiently militant?
No.575962
>>575961No. Not intended as a criticism, but that in my experience I've usually seen them be "first responders" to national calls to protest with standardized signs / language that's produced quickly.
No.575963
>>575961When does CPUSA become chronically addicted to protesting?
No.575964
>>575959Even if it weren't posted 3 months ago, you'd still be an idiot for replying.
No.575967
>>575965Is it wrong I think the woman on the panel was actually good?
No.575968
>>575952Compared to actual labor battles, I see Trotskyist organizations and even the PSL with their #RedforEd more active in these militant struggles and wildcat strikes. FRSO and PLP are both very active in promoting tenant unions and fighting for affordable housing. CPUSA, having membership being mostly aged middle class people and whom purge their youth leagues regularly to the point that it’s just legacy red babies following the whims of their parents, isn’t active at all.
CPUSA are very active in promoting the Democratic party even moreso than the DSA, even in the face of Biden being against the railway unions and leading a declining empire into promoting militarism abroad.
No.575969
>>575968I'm literally at a labor thing with multiple CPUSA members right now.
No.575971
>>575968>Compared to actual labor battles, I see Trotskyist organizations and even the PSL with their #RedforEd more active in these militant struggles and wildcat strikes.PSL is not trotskyist. The stalin vs. trotsky debate is not a debate that is relevant in current year.
No.575972
>>575971PSL are Lin Biaoists like WWP.
No.575974
>>575973*reading about it* These positions developed over time as part of a process.
The CPUSA was formed shortly after the October Revolution and inspired by it as a split from the Socialist Party. Eugene Debs is well-regarded to this day, but the Socialist Party which he's associated with in the early 20th century could frequently be hamfisted and be like "Stupidpol: The Organization," and they even had an open segregationist wing, which the founders of the Communist Party rejected for active anti-racist struggle ("workers and oppressed peoples unite!" – Comintern). Then as we go through the 1920s, the most prominent African-American group by far was Marcus Garvey's UNIA, which had a utopian back-to-Africa ideology. Garvey was kinda like Malcolm X (in some ways) and believed in black separatism but was demagogic and proclaimed himself the "Provisional President of Africa." This organization was basically finished though by the 1920s and Calvin Coolidge deported him to Jamaica (which he didn't even particularly like and then moved to London).
UNIA also developed out of the conditions of the time. You had a lot of black migration during WWI, then ferocious white mob violence against blacks in 1919 and over the next few years, and Garvey emerged as an answer to widespread feeling of helplessness, desperation and cynicism.
So the CPUSA thought this was basically reactionary. So the Black Belt thesis developed to call for black national self-determination within the United States in addition to full equality throughout the U.S. in an alliance with politically conscious white workers. The party recruited a lot of black members during this period. (The second pic here is Benjamin J. Davis, a party member elected to the New York city council, later imprisoned during McCarthyism.) Then the thesis was dropped at the 17th National Convention in 1959 with the new position articulated by James Jackson (speaking at the podium in the third pic a few years later) and others, which looks like it summed up as the objective conditions developed past the point of an independent and sovereign black republic in the U.S. being a feasible solution. The party switched to describing black Americans as a specially oppressed national group developing, in Jackson's words:
>But the objective factors operating in relation to the Black people in the United States are working not in the direction of national insularity or separate development but in the direction of self-organization within a broad multi-racial coalition of the oppressed and exploited to put an end to the rule of the monopoly successors of the slave power. No.575975
>>575972What does that make CPUSA, tail end of the liberals
No.575976
So, no one is ever going to address the fact Foster was a racist and CPUSA was a false friend when it came to Black struggles, despite being so heavily dependent upon Black labor?
No.575977
>>575976>false friend when it came to Black strugglesIn what way? The only major failure I can think of is reversing course on national self-determination in the 30s and doubling down after Khruschev's secret speech by expelling anti-revisionists like Haywood.
No.575978
>>575976That's just a lie. The CPUSA was exceptional for the sacrifices its members made in the black struggle in the U.S. and in the 1930s was basically the only major political organization in the country that refused to practice segregation which was widespread everywhere else. A lot of its members took part in the civil rights movement to the extent that if you were a white person in the 1950s and involved in that, it was widely assumed you were a communist (and often they were).
No.575979
>>575976>Foster was a racistElaborate.
>CPUSA was a false friend when it came to Black struggles, despite being so heavily dependent upon Black laborCPUSA did more for New Afrikans in America than any other organization at that time.
No.575980
>>575577>They make a show out of trying to appear "normal" to everyday Americans too but they sound like "fringe" people to me or "kooks." Like the whole logic of "we have to appear normal around the normies" is an admission that you're a fringe weirdo.Their problem is the same problem as pols. Believing insane reactionarisim/social conservativsim is the norm. And not just a culture jamming op. Most normies don't consume politics like we do or like any of the other online political weirdos. Especially when it comes to social issues, they get their views from Disney morality plays or t.v shows like this is us. There isn't some voter base of dusty coal miners who will pick up the communist cause because they denounced trans people. It's just another asine online movement that thinks they can backdoor they're way through power with the culture War. That racket as already been taken by the dems and Republicans.
No.575982
>>575981Ah okay so you're a disingenuous Sakaioid who takes is statements out of context. In that statement he's lamenting how the racist policies of white unions drives away black workers and makes them more likely to be turned into scabs or white capital. He says that white labour needs to abandon its racism in order to unite with black workers for their common interest.
<The need for action looking towards better relations between whites and blacks in the industrial field should be instantly patent; for there can be no doubt but that the employing class, taking advantage of the bitter animosities of the two groups, are deliberately attempting to turn the negroes into a race of strike-breakers, with whom to hold the white workers in check; on much the same principle as the Czars used the Cossacks to keep in subjection the balance of the Russian people. Should they succeed to any degree it would make our industrial disputes take on more and more the character of race wars, a consummation that would be highly injurious to the white workers and eventually ruinous to the blacks.
<For the tense situation existing the unions are themselves in no small part to blame. Many of them sharply draw the color line, thus feeding the flames of race hatred. This discriminatory practice is in direct conflict with the fundamental which demands that all the workers be organized, without regard to sex, race, creed, politics or nationality. It injures Labor’s cause greatly. Company agents harp upon it continually, to prevent negroes from joining even the organizations willing to take them in. This was the case in the steel campaign. Moreover these same company agents cited this discriminatory practice most effectively to induce thousands of outside colored workers to come into the industry as strike-breakers. Such a condition cannot be allowed to persist. But to relieve it the unions will have to meet the issue honestly and broad-mindedly. They must open their ranks to negroes, make an earnest effort to organize them, and then give them a square deal when they do join. Nothing short of this will accomplish the desired result.(5) No.575983
>>575982Yea it was actually much worse
>Few, however, of the imported negro strike-breakers showed the splendid spirit of this unlettered boy. Most of them seemed to take a keen delight in stealing the white men’s jobs and crushing their strike. They clashed badly with the pickets, where picketing was allowed. And between them and the white strike-breakers many murderous encounters occurred in the mills, although the companies were very careful to suppress news of these outbreaks.
>So serious was the race situation in the steel strike that the National Committee for Organizing Iron and Steel Workers requested President Gompers to arrange a conference between prominent negro leaders and trade-union officials, to the end that the proper remedies may be indicated. The need for action looking towards better relations between whites and blacks in the industrial field should be instantly patent; for there can be no doubt but that the employing class, taking advantage of the bitter animosities of the two groups, are deliberately attempting to turn the negroes into a race of strike-breakers, with whom to hold the white workers in check; on much the same principle as the Czars used the Cossacks to keep in subjection the balance of the Russian people. Should they succeed to any degree it would make our industrial disputes take on more and more the character of race wars, a consummation that would be highly injurious to the white workers and eventually ruinous to the blacks. No.575985
>>575984I think its pretty racist calling the entire race of Afrikan people strike breakers that might steal the white mans job. And drawing parallels between Black people and Cossaks.
No.575986
>>575985>I think its pretty racist calling the entire race of Afrikan people strike breakers that might steal the white mans jobThat's not what he's doing, he's saying that the ruling class is attempting to use racial animosity to keep Black workers out of unions and get them to scab. He's saying that the exclusion of Black workers from unions is making them more likely to scab, and that the solution is to end the racist membership policies of the unions. How is this racist? It's literally doing the opposite by appealing to the common interests of white and black workers to undermine racial animosity.
No.575987
>>575986It was the white workers who were keeping black workers out of unions. To not call out his own white workers while simultaneously blaming Black people as a
race of striker who
seemed to take a keen delight in stealing the white men’s jobs and crushing their strike is white chauvinism.
https://readsettlers.org/ch6.htmlYou can read the entire account of the steel strike in Settlers.
No.575988
>>575987>It was the white workers who were keeping black workers out of unions. To not call out his own white workers while simultaneously blaming Black people as a race of striker who seemed to take a keen delight in stealing the white men’s jobs and crushing their strike is white chauvinism.You're actually illiterate. Read it again:
<For the tense situation existing the unions are themselves in no small part to blame. Many of them sharply draw the color line, thus feeding the flames of race hatred. This discriminatory practice is in direct conflict with the fundamental which demands that all the workers be organized, without regard to sex, race, creed, politics or nationality. It injures Labor’s cause greatly… Such a condition cannot be allowed to persist. But to relieve it the unions will have to meet the issue honestly and broad-mindedly. They must open their ranks to negroes, make an earnest effort to organize them, and then give them a square deal when they do join. Nothing short of this will accomplish the desired result.(5)In other words, he does blame the white unions and their racist policies, and says those policies must end if there is to be any victory for the working class.
>You can read the entire account of the steel strike in Settlers.Sorry I don't read the writings of feds.
No.575989
>>575988Then why is he repeating white supremacist rhetoric of Black people coming to take the white man's job? This is literally no different than fascists claiming the immigrants are coming to take their jobs.
Also it was false that Afrikans were the strike breakers so Foster's analysis is fundamentally flawed.
>In fact, although this was widely accepted, it was clearly untrue. To begin with, 30,000 Afrikan workers fresh from the South could hardly have replaced 365,000 strikers. There also was by all accounts a tremendous turnover and desire to quit by those Afrikan workers, and within a few months supposedly few if any of them remained.
>The reason is that most of them were not "strikebreakers", but workers who had been systematically deceived and brought to the mills by force. That's why they left as soon as they could. The testimony during the strike of 19 year-old Eugene Steward of Baltimore illustrates this. He was recruited along with 200 others (including whites) to work in Philadelphia for $4 per day. But once inside the railroad car they found the doors locked and guarded by armed company police. They were taken without food or water to Pittsburgh, unloaded under guard behind barbed wire, and told that they were to work at the mills. Seeing that a strike was going on, many of them wanted to quit. The guards told them that any Afrikans attempting to leave would be shot down. Steward did succeed in escaping, but was found and forcibly returned by the guards. It was only after a second attempt that he managed to get free. It is obvious that the Afrikan "strikebreakers" were deliberate propaganda set up by the capitalists - and swallowed wholesale by the white workers.
>In regard to the Afrikan steelworkers already at work in the North (and who declined to join the strike), it should be remembered that this was a white strike. Many of the striking A.F.L. unions did not admit Afrikans; those that did so (solely to get Afrikans to honor their strikes) usually kept Afrikans in "seg" locals. The Euro-Amerikan leadership of the strike had promised Afrikans nothing, and plainly meant to keep their promise. That is, this strike had a definite oppressor nation character to it and was wholely white-supremacist.
>Nor did the white steel strike develop separate from the continuous struggle between oppressor and oppressed nations. During the two previous years there had arisen a national movement of settler workers to bar Afrikans from Northern industry by terroristic attacks. Between 1917-19 there had been twenty major campaigns by settler mobs against Afrikan exile communities in the North. The July, 1917, East St. Louis "race riot" was organized by that steel city's A.F.L. Central Trades Council, which had called for "violence" to remove the "growing menace" of the Afrikan exile community. In two days of attacks some 39 Afrikans were killed and hundreds injured. The hand of the capitalists was evident when the Chicago Tribune editorially praised the white attackers, and told its readers that Afrikans were "happiest when the white race asserts its superiority." (43) Again, we see the organized Euro-Amerikan workers as the social troops of one faction or another of the imperialists. No.575990
>>575989>Then why is he repeating white supremacist rhetoric of Black people coming to take the white man's job? He isn't. He's saying that Black workers were being brought in as scabs by the bosses, which they were.
>In regard to the Afrikan steelworkers already at work in the North (and who declined to join the strike), it should be remembered that this was a white strike. Many of the striking A.F.L. unions did not admit Afrikans; those that did so (solely to get Afrikans to honor their strikes) usually kept Afrikans in "seg" locals. The Euro-Amerikan leadership of the strike had promised Afrikans nothing, and plainly meant to keep their promise. That is, this strike had a definite oppressor nation character to it and was wholely white-supremacist.So in other words Sakai admits that Black workers were acting as scabs, and that the racist policies of the white unions were to blame, which is exactly what Foster is saying. The only difference is that Sakai is a fed that's trying to slander the communist movement and excuse scabbing, while Foster was a revolutionary aiming to destroy race hatred between workers and unite them for their common interest.
No.575991
>>575983Oh I missed this
>industrial disputes take on more and more the character of race wars, a consummation that would be highly injurious to the white workers and eventually ruinous to the blacks.Foster literally fearmongering about a potential race war between whites and blacks as if they're some antagonistic class even though he was calling for "unity" a sentence ago.
No.575992
>>575991Jesus Christ you're retarded. He's saying that the bosses were engaged in deliberate efforts to turn workers against each other on the basis of race, and that they are attempting to instigate conflicts along racial lines. He's drawing attention to this to say that it's contrary to the interests of the working class and should be avoided at all costs, starting with an end to racist union policies.
>race war between whites and blacks as if they're some antagonistic classThe idea that whites and blacks are inherently antagonistic to one another is literally the whole premise of Sakai's theory. His position is more reminiscent of a fascist than a Marxist.
No.575993
>>575990
>Sakai admits that Black workers were acting as scabsNo, he was saying that the black steel workers were brought there against their will and wanted to get the fuck out of the workplace as fast as they can.
<The reason is that most of them were not "strikebreakers", but workers who had been systematically deceived and brought to the mills by force. That's why they left as soon as they couldWhy the hell would they have solidarity with the strike when doing so would bring them no benefits from the white union and were essentially trapped against their will?
The point that Sakai is making is that black "strikebreakers" is capitalist boss propaganda and Foster is accepting this claim wholeheartedly when he says that
for there can be no doubt but that the employing class, taking advantage of the bitter animosities of the two groups, are deliberately attempting to turn the negroes into a race of strike-breakers
>The idea that whites and blacks are inherently antagonistic to one another is literally the whole premise of Sakai's theoryI was pointing out the inconsistency of Foster's logic. Foster says he wants to unite with black workers or else he will threaten to a race war between the whites and blacks. Foster wants black workers to obediently follow the white unions despite the clear antagonism between the two. Given Foster called Black workers
race of strike-breakers, he is taking the side of white workers over black workers. The only way Foster's rhetoric can be explained is if it
"had a definite oppressor nation character to it and was wholely white-supremacist"
>while Foster was a revolutionary aiming to destroy race hatred between workers and unite them for their common interest.Yea a """revolutionary""" denouncing the Puerto Rican Nationalist attempting to assassinate the president of a country
who is currently occupying Puerto Rico
<Like all our fellow Americans we Communists were profoundly shocked by this afternoon's report of an attempt to enter Blair House with the apparent purpose of taking President Truman's life.
<As is well known, the Communist Party condemns and rejects assassination and all acts of violence and terror. This can only be the act of terrorists, deranged men, or agents.. No.575994
>>575993>No, he was saying that the black steel workers were brought there against their will and wanted to get the fuck out of the workplace as fast as they can. Which Foster also acknowledges. In fact he recounts the story of Eugene Steward in detail, and commends him for not scabbing. He also notes several other cases where Black workers refused to scab and joined the strike, and heaps praise on them for doing so. However it's an undeniable fact that many others did scab, and Sakai himself admits this. He also agrees with Foster when he points out that the racist policies of the unions is largely to blame for this.
>The point that Sakai is making is that black "strikebreakers" is capitalist boss propaganda and Foster is accepting this claim wholeheartedlySakai contradicts himself. He says that it was capitalist boss propaganda and in the very next paragraph admits that there were Black scabs. Moreover Foster isn't saying that Black workers are necessarily a race of scabs, he's saying that the bosses are attempting to turn them into one, and that in order to foil these efforts the white unions need to stop being racist.
>Foster says he wants to unite with black workers or else he will threaten to a race war between the whites and blacks.No he doesn't. He says that if Black and white workers can't put aside their differences, that there will be a race war, and this needs to be prevented. He's saying that a race war is what the bosses want, and that class conscious workers need to prevent it by eliminating racism from their ranks. Your whole position is based on grossly (and I think deliberately) misinterpreting what Foster is actually saying. Foster's position here is anti-racist and anti-segregation.
>The only way Foster's rhetoric can be explained is if it "had a definite oppressor nation character to it and was wholely white-supremacist"Tell me, if Foster was racist, then why was he calling for an end to racist union policies? For the full admittance of Black workers into the unions, an end to segregation within them, and fair and equal treatment for them? Why did the CPUSA play a leading role in the Civil Rights movement prior to WW2?
>Yea a """revolutionary""" denouncing the Puerto Rican Nationalist attempting to assassinate the president of a country who is currently occupying Puerto RicoTerrorism is stupid and doesn't work.
No.575995
>>575994Where does Sakai admit for Black workers being scabbers?
> a race of scabs, he's saying that the bosses are attempting to turn them into oneThat is precisely the problem. Why are black workers being called a "race" of strike breakers? This is clearly untrue
>In fact, although this was widely accepted, it was clearly untrue. To begin with, 30,000 Afrikan workers fresh from the South could hardly have replaced 365,000 strikers. There also was by all accounts a tremendous turnover and desire to quit by those Afrikan workers, and within a few months supposedly few if any of them remained.
>Tell me, if Foster was racist, then why was he calling for an end to racist union policies? For the full admittance of Black workers into the unions, an end to segregation within them, and fair and equal treatment for them? Why did the CPUSA play a leading role in the Civil Rights movement prior to WW2?If you read settlers you would get your answers. Theres literally an entire chapter dedicated to the CPUSA
https://readsettlers.org/ch10.html
>Terrorism is stupid and doesn't work.What communist "rejects assassination and all acts of violence and terror"?
No.575996
>>575995>Where does Sakai admit for Black workers being scabbers?<In regard to the Afrikan steelworkers already at work in the North (and who declined to join the strike), it should be remembered that this was a white strike. Here he is clearly acknowledging that there were scabs among the Black workers already in the North, which are the ones Foster is mainly referring to here.
>Why are black workers being called a "race" of strike breakers?For the last time, they aren't. Foster is saying that the bosses are
attempting to turn them into strikebreakers. He's not saying that they all are, and he certainly isn't saying that those that do scab are doing so for any inherent reason. On the contrary he blames the white unions for it by alienating Black workers with their racist policies.
>This is clearly untrueIt's 100% true that bosses attempt to use racial hatred to divide workers and undermine organized labour, which is what Foster is criticizing when he draws attention to the efforts of bosses to do this in the steel strike.
>If you read settlers you would get your answersI have read parts of it, and it's packed with logical inconsistencies, idealism, and outright lies (like the ones spread about Foster which you are so adamant about believing). Doesn't it strike you odd that every leading figure of the Black Liberation struggle saw the necessity of unity between Black Liberation and the class struggle? That all the ones who openly advocated for this wound up dead while reactionary clowns like Farrakhan are allowed to preach with impunity? Doesn't it strike you as odd that some mysterious person who nobody can even produce a photograph of suddenly comes along and says thay actually unity between white and black workers is impossible and bad? Sakai glows brighter than the sun.
No.575997
>>575996Sakai also completely misrepresents history and refuses to cite his sources. Pathetic.
No.576001
>>575980>Their problem is the same problem as pols. Believing insane reactionarisim/social conservativsim is the norm.This happened the other day in Philly, a city council candidate defending his involvement in the Communist Party (around 15 years ago) with a surprising applause. And what's his defense? The Communist Party's involvement in real-life struggles and that he takes pride in that. It's not making any apologies or excuses or "we're not that…"
>Most normies don't consume politics like we do or like any of the other online political weirdos. Especially when it comes to social issues, they get their views from Disney morality plays or t.v shows like this is us. That's also true. Well the left has its own culture, but it's also not like we're not part of the general culture, y'know? I like to watch commercial movies and play video games, and there's a lot to criticize in the content, but it's not all bad either and we're still participating in it. Not everything produced in a bourgeois-ruled capitalist country is bad. You know it's interesting, Harry Belafonte died recently, and while I don't know if he was still a dues-paying party member, he had a long-time association with the party or was in those circles.
https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/harry-belafonte-giant-of-the-arts-and-the-struggle-for-justice-and-democracy/ No.576002
>>575996When does Sakai ever reject class struggle though?
No.576003
>>575974I agree with this.
American blacks are a part of the broader American nation and need to be understood as nationals if you want a meaningful and realistic solution to the problems of black people in the United States. To be a bit controversial, I think the modern "New Afrikan" movement is more about preserving "blackness" than it is genuinely tackling race problems.
No.576005
>>576004The jord orwalds didn't give it away?
Soybabies are truly special
No.576006
>>576005I didn't look at your pic.
No.576007
>>576002His whole thesis is that the labour-aristocratic character of white workers is so intense that it renders the entire population necessarily counterrevolutionary. This theory as expressed in Settlers had some materialist grounding, but he dropped it in Shock of Recognition when he said that the ideological grip of white supremacy was so strong that white proles would cling to it even as they lost their labour-aristocratic status in the wake of neoliberalism. In other words, he tries to argue that white workers just love racism so much that they will stick with it even when the material basis for doing so disappears and it no longer serves their interest. It's obvious that he's starting from the conclusion that white proles are bad and working backwards from that, completely unending his entire theoretical framework when it suits him. He's basically one step away from saying they were devils made in a lab by Yakub.
No.576008
>>576007Can you quote where he says that.
No.576009
>>575996So why does Foster blame Black workers for not joining on the Union strike despite literally admitting that the union's policies were explicitly racist?
>For the last time, they aren'tFoster literally says
<Most of them seemed to take a keen delight in stealing the white men’s jobs and crushing their strike. They clashed badly with the pickets, where picketing was allowed.That sounds like he does think black workers are the race of strike breakers.
>It's 100% true that bosses attempt to use racial hatred to divide workers and undermine organized labour, which is what Foster is criticizing when he draws attention to the efforts of bosses to do this in the steel strike.Then why do white workers consistently keep falling for it? Thats what the book is set out to explain.
>I have read parts of it, and it's packed with logical inconsistencies, idealism, and outright liesPlease tell me where any inconsistencies, idealism or outright lies appear in the book. The work is very rigorously cited and it would be a very damning claim if you could point it out. As I've already explained to you, the Foster quote is actually much worse than what Sakai cites in his book.
>Doesn't it strike you odd that every leading figure of the Black Liberation struggle saw the necessity of unity between Black Liberation and the class struggle? None of them said to unite Black Liberation with the
white class struggle. Settlers explains that every single time White workers organize on own, it eventually turns racists and reactionary. Sakai is creating a theory on why that is the case, to explain history through historical materialism. The golden era of the CPUSA when it was strong on black liberation issues were forced onto it by the COMINTERN and was always a minority in the party. Once the COMINTERN dissolved, the CPUSA quickly abandoned any pretense of Black Liberation.
>Doesn't it strike you as odd that some mysterious person who nobody can even produce a photograph of suddenly comes along and says thay actually unity between white and black workers is impossible and bad? Sakai glows brighter than the sun.Yea some obscure leftist who basically has no influence on the labor movement is a fed lol. The only reason why people know about the book Settlers is because a handful of people on the Rhizzone decided to revive the text. Sakai is still giving interviews that you can read now. How many leftists are willing to call out both the US and Mexican state for facilitating drug trafficking and aiding in the creation of the Mexican Cartel?
No.576010
>>576002He never does. The beginning of Chapter 5 is literally him citing Engels and Lenin on imperialism and how it relates to the white labor aristocracy and how they have no class interest in ending a system of superexploitation that they're reaping the benefits of.
https://readsettlers.org/ch5.html No.576011
>>576009>The golden era of the CPUSA when it was strong on black liberation issues were forced onto it by the COMINTERN and was always a minority in the party.The Comintern didn't force anyone to do anything.
No.576012
>>576011>The newly united Communist Party’s halting efforts to orient more seriously to the race question were much enhanced by the intervention of the Communist International in 1922. At the Comintern Congress of that year, the body established a Negro Commission and subsequently passed “Theses on the Negro Question.” These theses, while less famous than the Black Belt Thesis of 1928, were arguably more important in steering the party toward a greater focus on antiracist struggle.https://jacobin.com/2018/04/socialism-marx-race-class-struggle-color-lineThe theses were writtten by Harry Haywood who constituted a minor anti-revisionist faction within the CPUSA.
No.576013
>>576009>So why does Foster blame Black workers for not joining on the Union strike despite literally admitting that the union's policies were explicitly racist?Because unions being assholes doesn't excuse scabbing.
>That sounds like he does think black workers are the race of strike breakersNo it sounds like he thinks the strike breakers enjoyed being strike breakers, largely due to poor relations between white and black workers, which he again, blames on the racism of white unions.
>Then why do white workers consistently keep falling for it? Thats what the book is set out to explain. Black workers fall for it too, unless you want to just ignore the fact that they were scabbing here, and ignore the existence of reactionary Black nationalist orgs like the NOI. Shit even in the last election they rejected even the basic social democracy of Bernie to support Biden in droves. This idea that class collaborationism, allowing identity to distract from class, etc is a purely white phenomenon is objectively untrue.
>As I've already explained to you, the Foster quote is actually much worse than what Sakai cites in his book. No you haven't. You're flailing wildly trying to spin Foster's obvious anti-racist and anti-segregationist views into the opposite of what they actually are. You get so hung up on misinterpreting a single sentence that you ignore the entire point of the text, which is that racism among white workers needs to be defeated, segregation of unions ended, and black workers treated as equals and comrades. As for Sakai's idealism, it's obvious when you read his comment about Timothy McVeigh in Shock of Recognition that he drops the materialist explanation the moment it no longer serves his purpose. He literally argues that as neoliberalism eats away at the privileges enjoyed by white workers, they will become more racist rather than less. How can he be a materialist if he believes that the collapse of the material basis of white working class racism will intensify rather than undermine it?
>None of them said to unite Black Liberation with the white class struggle. Yes they did. The unity between Black liberation and white class struggle was literally the entire point underlying Fred Hampton's Rainbow Coalition, and MLK's Poor People's Campaign. What happened to these people when they started talking about the unity of poor whites and Black liberation? They were murdered for it. What happens to Farrakhan and the NOI? Still kicking with membership in the tens of thousands. It should be obvious from studying the history of the Black Liberation struggle that the thing the ruling class fears more than anything else is the unity between Black and white labour. How convenient that Sakai is here to tell us to abandon this goal.
>Once the COMINTERN dissolved, the CPUSA quickly abandoned any pretense of Black Liberation. Complete nonsense. They were still extremely active in the Civil Rights movement and the liberation struggle more broadly. They simply changed their stance on creating a Black autonomous zone within the US, which was a position shared by plenty of other Black revolutionaries and leaders.
No.576014
>>576013You've very clearly expressed your chauvinism in this post so I thank you for writing the response.
>Because unions being assholes doesn't excuse scabbing.So Black people must always follow the White unions because they know whats best for them.
>Shit even in the last election they rejected even the basic social democracy of Bernie to support Biden in drovesThis is reactionary nonsense. Sanders is a social-fasicst who appeals to the same class interests as Trump supporters do. You would think repeating this line 3 years after the Minneapolis uprising would be embarrassing but social-fascists and racists are shameless.
>How can he be a materialist if he believes that the collapse of the material basis of white working class racism will intensify rather than undermine it?Because White workers want to hold onto these privileges that were given to them by the superexploitation of the entire world?
>They simply changed their stance on creating a Black autonomous zone within the US, which was a position shared by plenty of other Black revolutionaries and leadersWhich leaders? It sure isnt Hampton nor Newton or Malcolm X. All of them led Black Nationalist struggles. The Rainbow Coalition was led by Black leaders to make sure that the other organizations were subordinated to the Black liberation struggle.
Your just some racist buffoon.
No.576015
>>576012The Comintern was like a conference where communists from different parties met and presented papers and talked about what was going on, but they didn't have that kind of power to force the CPUSA to adopt a particular position, that came about internally within the CPUSA as that article points out:
>The politics that allowed the CP to play such an important role in the black liberation struggle during the 1930s were forged, not in Moscow of 1928, but in the United States of the mid 1920s by black and white American communists. No.576016
>>576014>So Black people must always follow the White unions because they know whats best for them. Workers shouldn't scab because scabbing is objectively contrary to the interests of the entire ruling class. Are you honestly about to start justfying scabbing?
>Sanders is a social-fasicst who appeals to the same class interests as Trump supporters do.Lmao imagine unironically believing that social democracy in America would be bad for Black people. It's not like they suffer from chronic poverty and are in desperate need of social services or anything.
>Because White workers want to hold onto these privileges that were given to them by the superexploitation of the entire world? Except those privileges are being dissolved, the postwar labour aristocracy is shrinking. Sakai himself acknowledges this:
<McVeigh can’t be the real white man his father was, because the lifelong, high paying, industrial labor aristocracy of the steel mills and auto plants is shrinking not expanding. And he’s not suited to be a softwear designer or patent attorney or tourist resort manager or any ofthe other good slots in the new yuppie economy. Formerly, Tim would have been guaranteed security and respect as white settler policeman or army officer, but he couldn’t adjust to being lesser in the “multicultural” age of Colin Powells.
>It is the classes dislocated out of productive life, the humiliated layers of middle class men who are angry and frightened, who feel they have nowhere to turn to restore their status…except towards fascism.In other words, Sakai realized that the advent of neoliberalism had changed things, that it was undermining the material basis of his theory. Instead of recognizing the obvious, that this would open up the opportunity to fuse the cause of white labour with Black liberation on the basis of shared economic interest, he doubles down and abandons any pretense of materialism. His new thesis is essentially that the grip of racist ideology on white workers is so strong that they hold onto it even when its directly contrary to their interests. This is a sharp turn into idealism, and it shows he will cling to his earlier conclusions even when his own methodology now disprove them. Even when we consider the time in which Settlers was written, the entire premise has some glaring flaws. While of course its correct to point out that a much larger number of white proles were included in the labour aristocracy (and that this contributes to the strength of reaction among them), the majority (or at least a plurality) of workers outside of this group would inevitably be white. Only around 10% of the white population lives below the poverty line, but they still make up a majority of poor people. If you are going to define the revolutionary subject according to materialist categories like wealth or income, then no matter how you define that, you are going to find large numbers of white people included.
>It sure isnt Hampton nor Newton or Malcolm X. All of them led Black Nationalist struggles.Both the Panthers and Malcolm X abandoned Black Nationalism, at least of the type preached by Marcus Garvey and Elijah Mohammed. The Panthers were Marxist-Leninists, they adopted Huey Newton's theory of revolutionary intercommunalism which rejected formal nationalism in favour of an alliance between all liberated and revolutionary communities, which did not exclude poor whites.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IntercommunalismMalcolm X abandoned Black separatism when he visited Mecca and realized that racism is a product of specific conditions and ideology rather than inherent to white people. When he returned to the US he was of the opinion that racism could be rooted out of white society. Funny that it was after this transformation that he was killed.
>>576015The fact that the failure of American socialists to take a strong stance against racism until after the October Revolution makes a lot more sense when you consider that the Bolsheviks were essentially the first to propose the theory of the unity between the workers and the oppressed nations. Attacking them for not adopting this position earlier is silly when you consider that it hadn't been developed yet. It's essentially just attacking them for not thinking of it before Lenin and co. did.
No.576017
>>576016>objectively contrary to the interests of the entire ruling class*entire working class
No.576018
>>576016Sakai’s thesis makes no sense today when you realize the “labour aristocracy” barely exists anymore.
No.576022
>>576021>heyy guy Fanon worked for the CIA!!Not this shit again
No.576023
>>576022>M-muh F-fanonThat's not who you're influenced by, stop lying.
No.576024
>>576022>>576023Fanon wasn't CIA. That's fucking stupid.
No.576027
>>576026Wow yeah you're right I love multiethnic states like Israel now, it can't be bad if stalin created it right
No.576028
>>576027>IsraelDon't most Palestinian Marxists support a one state solution? At any rate the only way dismantling the US makes sense is if you assume that racial antagonisms are literally irreconcilable, which is a pretty reactionary outlook. Decolonization doesn't necessarily mean independence.
No.576029
>>576028What should the indigenous peoples in "America" and "Canada" do then?
No.576030
>>576029That's up to them. If they want to separate then of course I won't stop them, but idk what they hope to accomplish with hundreds of tiny statelets. They way I see it secession while colonial relations persist between them and the majority would only turn their communities into dependent bantustans, and if the colonial relationship is abolished then so too is the need for independence. Worth noting that this is what Huey Newton said about Black people as well.
No.576032
Odd question, but is there anywhere I can find old photos of CPUSA members and actions, i.e. pics of WZF in the Soviet Union, pics of May Day marches, pics of unemployment marches, that kind of thing.
No.576033
>>576022>>576024Fanon was literally flown to the United States to seek treatment for leukemia by the CIA.
What's more, his work is treated with nothing shore of adoration in the highest halls of the American establishment academia. If his weirdly cozy relationship with the CIA wasn't cause for concern, certainly American academics furiously jerking off to him should be.
But that's beyond the point, since the Gonzaloids who say this shit are more influenced by the likes of Sakai than Fanon.
No.576034
>>576033*nothing short of adoration
No.576035
>>576033Yet Fanon denounced America multiple times and was highly reluctant to come to America.
>his work is treated with nothing shore of adoration in the highest halls of the American establishment academia.I didn't read Fanon once in college.
No.576036
>>576035>Yet Fanon denounced America multiple times and was highly reluctant to come to America.That means literally nothing. The feds don't actually care if you say nice things about the United States.
>I didn't read Fanon once in college.Good for you.
No.576039
>>576036>That means literally nothing. The feds don't actually care if you say nice things about the United States.Fanon was a leading member of the FLN which – and this may come as a shock – had contacts with the CIA. I don't think that's surprising. The U.S. in this period was also not necessarily pro-colonial, although of course the U.S. had its own agenda in these countries, but somewhat different from the French. (I suspect one reason why Kennedy was assassinated by a hardline faction is because his administration had a more moderate policy towards anti-colonial independence movements.)
Also Mao, in fact, met with a U.S. delegation during the "Dixie Missions" which included five OSS agents and the Chinese communists gave lectures to them on their military tactics. The Americans also taught the communists some tactics of their own according to an essay in the CIA journal "Studies in Intelligence."
No.576041
>>576039The CIA promoted anti-colonial movements to the extent that they could take advantage of the newly freed african nations and conduct neo-colonialism on them via installing comprador bourgeoisies in them. Old colonialism was reactionary in comparasion to Neo-colonialism and therefore the western bourgeoisie supported de-colonizing all of their held nations to be able to continue to exploit them later on.
No.576043
>>576027>Wow yeah you're right I love multiethnic states like Israel nowProve to me that Israel isn't the model "decolonial" ethno-state.
Israel is the historical, cultural, legendary and sacred homeland of the Jewish people. They were forced off of that land by a colonizing empire. They have since returned to their sacred homeland, set up a state for their people and are in the process of removing what they view as settlers that moved in after they were forced out.
No.576044
>>576043Decolonization isn’t biological essentialism.
No.576046
>>576044Who said anything about biological essentialism?
No.576047
>>576042So Miss Fosterite was an AOC aid this entire time.
Someone show this to Caleb.
No.576049
>>576048It's technically a political term. It essentially means someone who controls some major faction or institution within a party. Basically, anyone who holds significant political power without holding elected office because of their position or influence within the party is called a "party boss." There are Democratic and Republican party bosses that are referred to as such by the media.
Don't get me wrong, though. Simply sitting on the executive committee of the NYSCP alone wouldn't really qualify her as a party boss. This is undoubtedly meant to make her seem scary, powerful and authoritarian and make her association with AOC more meaningful than it is. The New York Post is a right-wing rag on par with the likes of Fox News or OAN. But they didn't invent the term "party boss."
No.576051
>>576016>Lmao imagine unironically believing that social democracy in America would be bad for Black people. It's not like they suffer from chronic poverty and are in desperate need of social services or anythingBlack people have never asked for social democracy, they desire liberation. That you think all they can desire is addressing their immediate needs shows that you do not have much faith in the masses and can only think in your very narrow class interest. Also hilarious that you think America can support even more social-democracy.
Malcolm X never abandoned Black Nationalism. He created an org called the OOAU that explictly promoted unity of black national between the oppressed Black Masses in America and White Imperialism inflicted over Africans via colonialism/neo-colonialism. The video you linked is proposing the opposite of what Malcom X belived, that white people can remold themselves if they get rid of their white ideology and integrate themselves into the Black struggle among the oppressed and not advocate for their own white settler interests.
>When a reporter asked whether white people could join the OAAU, Malcolm X said, "Definitely not." Then he added, "If John Brown were still alive, we might accept him."[4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organization_of_Afro-American_Unity>The Panthers were Marxist-Leninists, they adopted Huey Newton's theory of revolutionary intercommunalism which rejected formal nationalism in favour of an alliance between all liberated and revolutionary communities, which did not exclude poor whitesThe theory of intercommunalism is postmodern nonsense. The premise of the theory was fully developed by Lacalu and Mouffe , both examples of post-marxism that you ironically chide Sakai for. Its pretty intesting you use the BPP model of the 70s as an example since it was criticized by a lot of people in the BPP as revisionists and re-oriented the BPP into charity politics to make liberals feel better about themselves.
>Bolsheviks were essentially the first to propose the theory of the unity between the workers and the oppressed nationsWhere did the Bolsheviks propose this? They had a very advanced understanding of nations and the right to self-determination but never has the abstract line that the interests of workers in oppressed countries should unite with the workers who have been "bourgiosified". Lenin consistently criticized the workers in first world countries for taking the chauvinistic attitudes and not the international proletarian line to actually struggle against their oppressor nation. Stalin's National Question can easily apply to the Black Nation.
>that this would open up the opportunity to fuse the cause of white labour with Black liberation on the basis of shared economic interestPlease show me the Trump supporters that have turned to communism as their answers for their struggles. I know people are trying to make 'MAGACommunism' a movement but all its done is watered down communism and increasingly taking reactionary stances to appeal to these "white workers" that you fetishize about. That so many white workers have stuck to their settler interests and other white "socialists" becoming part of the SDS or revisionist communist parties confirm Sakai's thesis for me. Your theory or strategy has no explanatory power and has been failing for the past decade.
>Only around 10% of the white population lives below the poverty line, but they still make up a majority of poor peopleYou're objectively wrong. Poor people of other nationalities make up more of living below the poverty line than white people do. These poor white people should link up to the other nationalist struggles of the other nations in America and take a stand with them. White settlers can definitely be allies with the proleteriat as long as they can remold their mind to get rid of settler tendencies within them. Sakai is saying to temper expectations, we likely will not see this conversion as a mass phenomenon (perhaps if Moaist had done a better job organizing, the situation could be more favorable) Why should the 10% advocate for the interests of 90% of the other white population for the interests of labor aristocracy and social democracy.
No.576052
>The actual history disproves the thesis that in settler Amerika "common working class interests" override the imperialist contradictions of oppressor and oppressed nations when it comes to tactical unity around economic issues. The same applies to the thesis that supposed ideological unity with the Euro-Amerikan "Left" also overrides imperialist contradictions, and hence, even with their admitted shortcomings, they are supposed allies of the oppressed against U.S. Imperialism. Could it be the other way around? That despite their tactical contradictions with the bourgeoisie, that Euro-Amerikan workers and revisionistic radicals have strategic unity with U.S. Imperialism? Most importantly, how has imperialism been so successful in using this tactical unity against the oppressed?
>The thesis we have advanced about the settleristic and non-proletarian nature of the U.S. oppressor nation is a historic truth, and thereby a key to leading the concrete struggles of today. Self-reliance and building mass institutions and movements of a specific national character, under the leadership of a communist party, are absolute necessities for the oppressed. Without these there can be no national liberation. This thesis is not "anti-white" or "racialist" or "narrow nationalism." Rather, it is the advocates of oppressor nation hegemony over all struggles of the masses that are promoting the narrowest of nationalisms - that of the U.S. settler nation. When we say that the principal characteristic of imperialism is parasitism, we are also saying that the principal characteristic of settler trade-unionism is parasitism, and that the principal characteristic of settler radicalism is parasitism.
>Every nation and people has its own contribution to make to the world revolution. This is true for all of us, and obviously for Euro-Amerikans as well. But this is another discussion, one that can only really take place in the context of breaking up the U.S. Empire and ending the U.S. oppressor nation.
No.576053
>>576052The trade unionists were not settlers. The settler-colonial period had ended decades ago by that point, at least in the places where they lived. This treats settler-colonialism less like an actual economic force and more like the "original sin" of white people.
It's also inaccurate to portray white Americans as the sole supporters of US imperialism. In reality, you'll find that there has been multi-racial and multi-ethnic support for US imperial projects throughout history. This is the other thing Sakai does. Pretends that anyone who isn't white, and black people especially, are all communists to a man.
No.576054
>>576051>Black people have never asked for social democracyThey have absolutely been demanding redistribution of wealth and economic power. This was the cornerstone of MLK's Poor People's Campaign.
>The video you linked is proposing the opposite of what Malcom X belivedThe video is literally a reading of Malcolm's letter from Mecca, those are his own words lmao. You've actually read the Autobiography of Malcolm X haven't you Anon? You are aware that he said in interviews after returning from Mecca that he rejected the NOI's program of a separate Black state?
>The theory of intercommunalism is postmodern nonsense. Say what you want, but I'd much rather defer to the views of leading Black revolutionaries line the Panthers instead of listening to some anonymous Asian mf who's totally not a fed.
>never has the abstract line that the interests of workers in oppressed countries should unite with the workers who have been "bourgiosified".Lenin is adamant that the labour aristocracy consists only of the top strata of workers in imperialist countries, as well as the self-serving opportunistic labour bureaucracy that grows up around them (trade union and SPD officials, etc). He very much held the view that rank and file workers in imperialist countries have an interest in revolution, and that they remained revolutionary subjects.
<It was possible in those days to bribe and corrupt the working class of one country for decades. This is now improbable, if not impossible. But on the other hand, every imperialist “Great” Power can and does bribe smaller strata (than in England in 1848–68) of the “labour aristocracy”. Formerly a “bourgeois labour party”, to use Engels’s remarkably profound expression, could arise only in one country, because it alone enjoyed a monopoly, but, on the other hand, it could exist for a long time. Now a “bourgeois labour party” is inevitable and typical in all imperialist countries; but in view of the desperate struggle they are waging for the division of spoils it is improbable that such a party can prevail for long in a number of countries. For the trusts, the financial oligarchy, high prices, etc., while enabling the bribery of a handful in the top layers, are increasingly oppressing, crushing, ruining and torturing the mass of the proletariat and the semi-proletariat.<On the one hand, there is the tendency of the bourgeoisie and the opportunists to convert a handful of very rich and privileged nations into “eternal” parasites on the body of the rest of mankind, to “rest on the laurels” of the exploitation of Negroes, Indians, etc., keeping them in subjection with the aid of the excellent weapons of extermination provided by modern militarism. On the other hand, there is the tendency of the masses, who are more oppressed than before and who bear the whole brunt of imperialist wars, to cast off this yoke and to overthrow the bourgeoisie. It is in the struggle between these two tendencies that the history of the labour movement will now inevitably develop.https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/oct/x01.htm>Please show me the Trump supporters that have turned to communism as their answers for their struggles. Who said anything about Trump supporters? The GOP has always been a party of the big bourgeoisie and segments of the upper middle class. I wouldn't expect anybody from these categories to support a revolutionary movement, including racialized people. I'm talking about the white working poor that make up the bulk of poor people in America, who by and large are not politically mobilized.
>Your theory or strategy has no explanatory power and has been failing for the past decade. It's Sakai's theory that lacks explanatory power. Not only has his idealist prediction that the collapse of the white middle class would cause the declassed white workers to flock to fascism (modern far righr movements in the US draw primarily from the remaining middle class), it behaves as if Black people are necessarily revolutionary. In reality they flock in droves to the Democratic Party, even rejecting the social democratic policies that would objectively advance their interests. Or else to reactionary controlled opposition like NOI. Let's not sit here and pretend that they're joining revolutionary socialist organizations in droves, because most of them are liberals just like white people.
>Poor people of other nationalities make up more of living below the poverty line than white people do.It varies depending on the year and methodology, but most statistics show that whites make up at least a large plurality, if not a slim majority, of the people living in poverty. This means that not only is Sakai's central thesis objectively incorrect, and that there is in fact a white proletariat (assuming you use a materialist definition of proletariat), but that their participation in the revolutionary struggle is absolutely essential for there to be any success.
>These poor white people should link up to the other nationalist struggles of the other nations in America and take a stand with them. Glad to see you have rejected Sakaism and embrace Marxism. The possibility and necessity of an alliance with the white working class with the national liberation struggles is my entire point.
>Sakai is saying to temper expectationsNo he isn't. His whole point is that there is no revolutionary subject among white apart from extremely small isolated elements.
No.576056
>>576053So fifth-generation Israelis aren’t settlers?
No.576058
https://www.idcommunism.com/2016/06/clinton-makes-history-cpusas.html?m=0I remember when CPUSAnon used to utilize the supposed “international links” of the party on why it is regarded as superior. Well let’s take a look into what they have to say about that. KKE also condemned the revisionist actions of CPUSA like three years ago on the same site. Surely there’s a good explanation for this?
Outside of CPUSA’s blatant revisionism with their “Bill of Rights” socialism and barely being active in organizing even in labor battles compared to trots in the USA, what exactly is the reason to join them over a host of other parties who do actual work. Socialist Alternative and even the Socialist party, whom CPUSA split over revisionism, have done more in promoting labor rights and engaging in anti-imperialism and they only claim to have 2,000 members combined. CPUSA has like 5,000 members and it has been documented on this site that they’re nowhere to be found compared to the PSL which is only really based in California. Even the FRSO with 500 members which they officially stated are more active in anti-war activities.
No.576061
>>576058
>I like their T.V. ads but I don't understand why the KKE is weighing in on what a small communist party in another country is doing. The Communist Party of China doesn't condemn the CPUSA for "revisionism." What do you think Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder is doing? Critiquing other communists, right?
No.576062
>>576050Justine is getting attacked a lot right now on Twitter.
No.576063
>>576062What is she getting attacked for? Working for AOC or joining the CPUSA?
No.576064
>>576063By boomers. She'll by fine.
>>576061I suppose, they can do whatever they want.
No.576065
>>576059The KKE basically run the IMCWP, the largest internationale in the world and one CPUSA is apart of.
No.576066
>>576062Does her background have any of the sus markers common to NY socialists like aoc and that other socialist woman with a jewish florida background that broke through at the same time as her?
No.576067
>>576063Being a communist, basically.
No.576069
>>576065Well if they're going to act like that then maybe we need a new international because that's really inappropriate in my opinion.
>>576068This is a way to redpill liberals. The right calls everyone to the left of ᴉuᴉlossnW a communist and also wants to erase the progressive contribution to American history because it involves communists.
No.576070
>>576069>This is a way to redpill liberals. The right calls everyone to the left of ᴉuᴉlossnW a communist and also wants to erase the progressive contribution to American history because it involves communists.Good call. Plus from the sound of the article it seems like the liberals in Concord were the ones who put the marker up in the first place.
Keep in mind, "an"-caps control about half of the NH state government. Concord, Portsmouth, and Hanover (location of Dartmouth College) are the only parts of the state full of white liberals.
No.576071
Joining CPUSA over all other parties makes sense since CPUSA has a real history. It’s biggest problem is that its leadership is ass.
No.576072
>>576071I was theorizing to myself earlier that one of the biggest problems is that the left reflects the same "service economy" behavior in their politics, so even people who might consider joining left-wing groups treat it like a customer service oriented thing. I'm not sure what people expect, but most of the people who sign up to join these orgs go to one meeting and then never come back.
People also don't want to do anything boring or uncomfortable. Basically a bunch of Karens who whine all the time about the service.
No.576073
>>576071why? what revolutionary theory do they have? all the praxis ive seen is shilling for democrats and have indicated no change to that approach. i guess its fine if you want to waste years of your life.
No.576074
>>576073>what revolutionary theory do they have?No point in reinventing the wheel.
>all the praxis ive seen is shilling for democrats and have indicated no change to that approachUnder consultation with communists in AES countries (mainly Cuba and China), they advise people to vote Dem in presidential elections as a harm reduction tactic. In local races they run their own candidates, or endorse pro-labour candidates. They're also heavily involved in labour actions, tenant unions, racial justice movements, antiwar activities, etc.
No.576075
>>576073>>576074That can be applied to almost every single organization. Taken to its extreme, you might as well join the Socialist Labor Party as it existed before CPUSA or the Socialist Party here given it harkens back to the OG SPA. And no, the only candidates CPUSA has ran in a long time are some guy in California and some woman in Wisconsin. That and their labor activities are at least equal to or lacking to organizations of smaller size by factors of five or more, like the various trot groups who run a bunch of candidates or who basically act as the primary sponsors of Starbucks or teacher unionization and strike efforts. Also stop fooling us CPUSAnon, not even the KKE who runs the main communist club likes you and Xi Jinping said that he wouldn’t waste his time with you.
No.576076
>>576075>That can be applied to almost every single organization. Pretty much, which is why they aren't any worse than most other socialist orgs and why we need greater collaboration and a united front instead of all this petty sectarianism.
>Xi Jinping said that he wouldn’t waste his time with youSorry Anon, but Xi Jinping isn't an authority here. He was born in an AES country and wouldn't know the first thing about organizing in the imperial core.
No.576077
>>576074You've been trying the same "popular front" tactic for 40 years now. Maybe the next election cycle, the democrats will finally unite with AES and achieve revolution through voting.
No.576078
>>576077>You've been trying the same "popular front" tactic for 40 years now. That's not a popular front Anon, it's just a harm reduction tactic. Popular front would be an electoral and political coalition with social democrats and left liberals. The CPUSA just says that people should vote Dem in national elections because no better alternative yet exists (even as they are attempting to create one). Remember that this position is adopted at the urging of AES governments. I don't think any CPUSA members think electoralism is the solution, but as Lenin and Marx said participating in elections is a valid tactic in building a worker's movement, which is what they are actually attempting to do.
No.576079
>>576078"Participating in elections" is not voting Democrat.
>It is the popular front — or the people’s front — that captures the dialectical essence of this on a broad scale, both theoretically and in practice. Only out of such a popular front can a robust and mass-based party emerge that bucks the binary of evil, that is, the two faces of capitalism: reformist or fascist.https://cpusa.org/party_voices/dialectics-of-the-popular-front/Are you even a member of the CPUSA? The popular front strategy is their explicit line.
No.576080
>>576079>"Participating in elections" is not voting Democrat. They also participate independently.
>Are you even a member of the CPUSA?No I'm not even American. There are two sabo flags posting ITT.
>The popular front strategy is their explicit line.Actually didn't know that, and that's pretty cringe. I always preferred PSL anyway.
No.576081
>>576076>>576080That’s the thing that really drives it all home, better opportunities do exist on the state, local, and national level. Why CPUSA only chooses and promotes one bourgeois partner over fellow communists is revealing of their own revisionism.
No.576082
>>576075>Also stop fooling us CPUSAnon, not even the KKE who runs the main communist club likes you and Xi Jinping said that he wouldn’t waste his time with you.Didn't he reportedly say he'd just be a Democrat though because he's pragmatic.
No.576083
Apropos the recent posts about the popular front, the CPUSA website just published this article
https://cpusa.org/article/our-plan-of-action-uses-every-tool-in-the-toolbox/>The history of democratic struggle shows that the working class wins when every tool is utilized to chip away at capitalist power. And yes, it includes participation in the electoral arena. Ignoring this would be a grave error, not only because it would hand over control of an entire section of our existing democratic institutions solely to the upper strata of class society, but also because this is the primary political tool of struggle for social progress being utilized by the working class in the era of neoliberalism. To reject the need for an evaluation of a concrete situation in order to determine the appropriateness, or inappropriateness, of a given form of struggle, would be to reject one crucial aspect of Leninism, leading to confusion.
>Yet, so many self-described Marxists have rejected the electoral arena of struggle in a matter that is uncritically sweeping. Some of them, likely a large number, seem to have forgotten that it was the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders and his open identification as a socialist that spurred them on to read Marx, Lenin and other socialist theorists in the first place. This is especially heinous in our period of crisis, where fascist politics are seeping into the GOP, and in turn are empowering fascist groups such as the Three Percenters, the Proud Boys, and the Patriot Front to terrorize oppressed minorities.[…]
>Recent history shows that working-class consciousness has the ability to influence the political atmosphere in Washington, and in turn, the political atmosphere in Washington influences working-class consciousness. Some leftists are ignoring this fact and stomping their feet instead of working to advance the progressive movement, helped by the Sanders campaign, to one guided by a Marxist-Leninist analysis.
>Our engagement with the masses must be rooted in the concrete realities of the working class. It must reflect the “on the ground” momentum, while also resonating with their political demands. To capitulate to those who reject electoral (i.e. political) struggle and Leninism, will only lead to us slipping into the middle class radicalism that Gus Hall warned about.
>Exaggerated revolutionism and short-term strategies that fall flat won’t win broad support from the masses because they do not reflect the realities of the stage of struggle that we’re in. But that does not mean the working class will reject an agenda deemed too radical by the capitalist class. We’ve seen progressive leaders, like the ones discussed here, and their ideas be labeled too “pie in the sky” by capitalist-class operatives, yet they have remained positively looked upon by working people. Although the progressive movement has yet to broadly embrace Marxism-Leninism, that doesn’t mean that Communists are to sit by until some divine moment when “our time” comes. It is our time when a progressive, working class fight is being fought. And through this fight — the fight for democracy and progress — workers are imbued with the ideas of Leninism, so long as we, the Communists, are in it as well. No.576084
>>576082People do this kind of appeal to authority all the time, that the leaders of this or that socialist country said whatever about communists in another country. Of course their opinions should be respected and considered, but the fact is that we're talking about conditions and problems completely outside of their own experience or expertise. Let's not forget all those communist party members and officials in former Warsaw Pact countries that were totally useless in defending the interests of workers in the 90s because they had never lived in a society where communists weren't in power, and had no idea how to organize without state power backing them.
No.576085
>>576083The problem with this is that Marxist parties or people that participate in the electoral arena either have bad relations with the liberal elite they primary or run against, and usually do so without the support of liberal groups backing them. They’re also much more successful than CPUSA, look at the PSL or even the Green party that are more left wing than the democrats, but aren’t supported by CPUSA and are at times condemned for vote splitting supposed democratic voters.
No.576086
>>576085Yeah. But I don't think the electoral arena is the main metric of success, it's whether more people are brought into struggle because of it, which means getting involved in it. The point of a vanguard party isn't necessarily to do everything, but act as a cell within larger movements and mass organizations that push it forward. A bit like the mysterious spectre that people claim communism acts as where we control everything behind the scenes, but we should be like that unironically.
(I think that the reason people think it acts that way is because they read our shit and believed it, but our shit was also our wish fulfillment too so they assumed that we were a lot more successful than we actually were, but ultimately it doesn't matter if you get 1% of the vote or 0.5% of the vote as a third party, at best that kind of thing for the PSL is kinda like skywriting where you get your name on the ballot to show people that you exist.)
No.576087
>>576085The CPUSA surely spends a lot of time attacking other socialist or even just left-wing organizations that aren't Democrat-affiliated. But the CPUSA doesn't even field candidates on a national or state level, so what are people supposed to vote for?
No.576088
>>576083Why do American socialists never ever wave red or party flags like in every other country? Whenever I see a protest in the US everyone has an ugly-ass sign but not a single flag is to be seen
No.576089
>>576088Cuz socialism scares them
No.576090
>>576084Dude, you’re a wobbly and defending CPUSA? Didn’t Foster backdoor you guys in the 1910s?
No.576091
>>576088Because it puts a target on the back of the person holding the flag despite socialism being (mostly) de-stigmatized in Burgerland
No.576092
>>576088It usually doesn’t get reported in mainstream news sites. The only time a red flag was widely reported was during 2020 and the more recent Stop Asian Hate protests where PSL waived their own banners.
No.576093
>>576091Moreso than just attending a march and holding a sign? Even just 10 red flags or party flags create a much stimulating image for bystanders. I mean, right-wingers wave American flags and oddly enough South Vietnamese flags.
No.576094
>>576086>>576090bro why are you worrying about shit that happened literally over a hundred years ago as though it is relevant to the current struggle? what the fuck. this is like being mad at wisconsinites for something they did in 1867
No.576095
>>576088>Why do American socialists never ever wave red or party flags like in every other country?Socialism has been taboo in the U.S. for many years but the taboo has been broken so it's starting to become more common.
>>576094>being mad at wisconsinites for something they did in 1867Well this is the CPUSA thread so some party members might have first-hand experience with what happened in Wisconsin in 1867
No.576096
>>576090I'm not a wobbly, I'm an ML.
No.576097
well, how many soup kitchens, school support and clothes donations has the cpusa organized in low income neighbourhoods? how many people or cooperative enterprises have they helped with paperwork, acquiring goverment welfare, lending expert knowledge in their tasks, or connecting with other people, experts or enterprises?
btw dont stop on other uyghas branch of socialism. who cares if they nazbol or woke or whatever. you need to make a united front, that kind of infighting lost the spanish civil war and is totally unnecesary. limit yourself to fixing capitals contradictions
No.576098
>>576087They attack PCUSA but the PCUSA has ran multiple candidates and overall has a better line.
No.576101
>>576100There’s no contradiction between being anti-Malthusian and pro-birth control. Maupin is a fucking reetard to constantly conflate the two.
No.576102
>>576100Kek, Bill Foster’s mother had 23 children, only ten of whom survived.
I bet “Ava” thinks mama Foster was a good Catholic woman.
No.576103
>>576102>23 childrenSmallest Irish family
No.576104
>>576102>I bet “Ava”*the widely acclaimed speaker, writer, journalist, and political analyst Caleb Maupin
No.576105
>>576096Then why are you using the Wobbly flag?
No.576106
>>576105It's a good piece of North American communist symbolism. If there was a Communist Party of Canada flag I would use that.
No.576108
>>576107Is there any place where old Daily Workers are archived?
No.576109
>>576102It’s easy to be a Malthusian when your mother was a perpetual baby factory I guess.
No.576110
>>576107Nice! Are they archived anywhere?
No.576111
>>575972>>575972Who has PSL betrayed? Go on, tell us. Share with the class.
No.576112
>>576110>>576108I also need to know
No.576115
>>575553The rising ultra-right was, and has been fought with bats, firecrackers, punches, milkshakes, and bike locks. Demonrats have had shit to do with it.
No.576117
>>576116>Why not use gunsBecause rocking up to a demonstration wih gun will quickly escelate the situation and see you arested in minutes
retard.
No.576118
>>576117Just keep a gun in your pocket. If you need a baseball bat just use a fucking gun
Retard
No.576120
>>576119>SecondThoughtI knew they were based but didnt realise they were CPUSA.
No.576121
>>576118>Just keep a gun in your pocket. If you need a baseball bat just use a fucking gunIf you new just how fucking dumb this sounded you would not have ended your sentence with 'retard'.
Do us all a favour and actually develop an offline antifascist praxis for no other reason than ridding the rest of us of this infantile understanding of the world you subject us to.
You thalidomide cuck.
No.576123
>>576116I am not in any way opposed to guns. I am just saying how easily an organized people can beat back fascism with crude tools.
The point being do not believe for a second the demonrats that tell you that you NEED them to save you from the scary ski-sunglasses guys.
No.576124
>>576122Your teacher sounds cucked.
No.576125
>>576121I would love to but I have more important things to worry about, like my education and my future
No.576126
>>576122>(basically Browder avoided things which wouldve made the CPUSA unpopular, even if it included supporting civil rights)Did your prof say what those were exactly?
No.576127
>>576122Bethesda really must have used Browder as an inspiration.
I was reading some of his "People's Front" (I have no idea why they went with this pic of him smiling like a Cheshire cat) and admittedly LOL'd at parts where he was pressing his case for FDR in '36 as hard as he could without explicitly endorsing him. He had some rhetorical skills.
He's like "oh no, the Communist Party doesn't depend on Roosevelt to check the power of Wall Street, we don't accept any responsibility for Roosevelt, but the question on the ballot isn't socialism or capitalism, it's democracy or Alf-Landon-Ku Klux Klan-Black Legion fascism and Hearst lurking in the background, and the confusionists in the Socialist Party, who have made common cause with counter-revolutionary Trotskyites, whether wittingly or unwittingly, are disarming themselves and attempting to spread panic among the mighty forces of progress and the masses until their mistake ends with them inside a concentration camp! I'm talking about you, Norman Thomas!"
No.576129
Given the conversation turned towards guns and how to fight the ultra right, I figure I’d mention a few things regarding that topic.
As far as guns in the CPUSA goes, I think there’s a generational divide. Among older folks they’re used to the guys advocating the loudest for guns being feds or otherwise useful idiots for them. The “hey kid wanna blow up a federal building” glow meme is something they had to live through.
Additionally, a lot of them are grandparents. Like to us, we have a different view on guns because mass shootings is just something we’ve had to live through. I think that can normalize guns—especially given we’ve been told they’re here to stay—in a way that doesn’t exist for older folks. They’re terrified about their grandkids being shot up in school or some psychotic mass shooter gunning down their family at a park or what have you.
I think younger people have come to be more pessimistic, for us, we’ve determined that mass shootings are just a thing that happens so would you rather be armed just in case, or would you rather be unarmed. Older folks aren’t as cynical. Or maybe it’d make more sense to say, mass shootings are still something abnormal and viscerally horrifying to them, and there’s still some chance it can be bucked.
Now as for my perspective. I’m a gun owner. And I do worry sometimes that firearms can create the illusion of action without really engaging in it. The Chapos did a reading once on American gun culture. It highlighted some guy that suffered from a ton of medical issues who suddenly became some gun freak to cultivate a sense of security or power over his own life. And I think to some extent there’s a similar subconscious drive among leftists. It’s a reaction to the broad disorganization and powerlessness of the post-Cold War Left.
>”Yeah we’re split and far from power but at least I have the power of life and death over people!”
Let’s say you demand your entire party get armed: how many of those people have the resources and means to do it? Of those with the means, how many have the will? Of those with the means and will, what then? Do you just stand outside a courthouse one day, armed?
I’m sure someone will share the Mao quote, but what goes unsaid in that quote is that Mao expects you to actually use the guns, not just hold them. How many of your comrades are willing to bring guns to a protest? How many are willing to fire them? When they fire them, are you prepared to face life in prison or death? Because for as much as America is in decline, it’s not so broken that it can’t hunt down some adventurous leftist bank robbers.
Of your comrades that aren’t in jail, will they stand by you after you do something monumentally stupid? Are you prepared to put their lives at risk as the feds raid their homes and put them all on terror watch lists? And do you think the masses are gonna say “Damn straight! I’m glad they did it!” Or think you’re just lunatics?
I think there’s a strong desire for action of some kind amongst radicals, but that action is either tempered by a fear of the state or a fear that people will find it futile.
No.576131
>>576127Banger book. Browder was based in the 1930s. He turned cringe in the 40s. People can play a positive and negative role at different times.
No.576132
>>576131>Browder was basedT. the widely acclaimed speaker, writer, journalist, and political analyst Caleb Maupin
No.576133
>>575739One reason to accuse them of ultraretardation
No.576134
>>576133I always thought the Maoist hate boner for Cuba was really strange. Aside from the DPRK they're the AES country with the smallest degree of capitalist restoration, and probably moreso than any other have a near impeccable record of internationalism and aid to third world liberation struggles. I guess sending tends of thousands of troops to help destroy Apartheid in Africa doesn't count if its done in concern with evil Soviet KKKraKKKa social imperialist revisionists.
No.576135
>>576134Dogmato-revisionism. They're so dogmatic they've become revisionists.
No.576137
>>576134Saying Cuba is not socialist is not equivalent to having a "hate boner" for Cuba. The conclusion is using sober analysis to diagnose the class conflict within Cuba. You are free to disagree with the conclusion and provide an alternative explanation or present evidence. All Maoists support Cuba as an anti-imperialist ally but still think revisionism has taken hold within the country that needs to be exposed and defeated for the socialist road to continue.
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