Lets not sell this achievement short. There were almost certainly intense back channel efforts and negotiations to pull this diplomatic coup off. It’s difficult to put into words exactly how much work it is to get everyone on the same page before you pull them together for a meeting to officiate new political realities. I’ve been involved with these kinds of things on an infinitesimally smaller scale stitching together local communist groups previously cleaved off from each other by sectarian divisions. Its taken me a long time just to get a hearing with some of them, groups with virtually no serious political differences at all, let alone two state authorities that have been divided by deep seated religious and military conflict.
By definition, Mestizo people have indigenous blood in their veins. Arguing over their status via genealogy is racial politics and should be rejected. What matters is simple; do the Mestizo people in question side with their indigenous nation against the settler nation? Those who identify with and fight for the indigenous side of their family have chosen their side. As Che argues, all of Latin America is one Mestizo people. The masses are one. The settler state is supported by a vanishingly small minority of people who self-identify as white settlers; these are the compradors with their boot on the peoples’ neck on the behalf of international imperialism.
In my neck of the woods? We disrupt any and all form of aid our country sends to the U.S. in its imperialist war, the purpose of which is to no doubt seize Mexico’s nationalised natural resources.
From the sound of things, if an invasion happens then international volunteers from across the world will flock to Mexico to fight Yankee imperialism, as is only right. With that said, at the same time efforts must be made in the west to disrupt any and all outside lines of supply to the U.S. war machine. As someone inside such a country, I think myself and others in my position are well placed to fulfil that role.
Take for example the disruption Palestine Action have caused in my country to weapons manufacturers that provide for Israel. In the event of a new war in Mexico, similar tactics will be required to disarm American imperialism.
Opinions differ on how to organise a socialist revolution. According to the Marxist-Leninist thesis, the organ that actually carries forward the revolution is the Proletarian vanguard; a clandestine revolutionary party comprised of the most advanced sections of the working class. This party is what organises and ultimately leads the workers as a class against their oppressors when the revolution moves into a phase of open class war.
Opinions are split as to what strategies and tactics are the most effective way of building the vanguard into a force capable of conquering political power from the bourgeoisie; It honestly varies depending on where you are and what the conditions are there.
Before anything else, it is necessary to sink deep roots into the community from which you intend to draw political support for the party. Winning popular support amongst the working class is an essential condition for the growth and success of a revolutionary vanguard. Take a look at your community and look at what you can do to win them to your side and build the local party organisation from there. Reach out to like-minded groups and establish ties so that sectarianism can be rooted out and class unity ensured. Talk to the workers in your community and figure out their grievances, then campaign on those issues to demonstrate that the party is the friend of the working class.
Propaganda is a huge part of this equation and takes on a variety of different forms and dimensions. Classical forms of propaganda such as party journalism, political education and leafletting campaigns are important as always, but can only be made possible so long as the party is active. In the 21st century, video is the dominant medium and as a result mastering it is an essential requirement if you want to spread the message of the party to the masses. This means recruiting, training and organising people with a wide variety of skills; from spokespeople who are capable orators, to filmmakers with the technical skills to create high quality video features, film editors with the necessary technical and creative expertise and flair to formulate video into effective propaganda content, graphic designers to create eye popping visual design, to writers to commentate on current political events and theorise to the masses and so on.
I’ve thought about it but I won’t leave. No matter how bad it gets. This is my home; I was born here and I’ve lived here my entire life. My roots are here. My family is here. My dad is buried here. I won’t abandon them.
A great many of my better educated and professionally qualified friends have already jumped ship. The early leavers took off out of a cosmopolitan conception of what it means to be successful; that it was socially respectable to be a globetrotter; a citizen of the world. The latecomers who felt the call of cosmopolitan life but still struggled to “cut the cord” are now finally taking the plunge, citing the decline of their country as the main reason why. “It’s the smart thing to do”, they say.
And that may be so. But that is an individualist’s calculus. If you apply that same logic on a social scale, every professional in my country would simply up sticks and leave. What then would become of the millions of people who don’t share their privileged positions in society? They will be left in an anaemic country, with their throats in the ever tightening grip of the capitalist class. In time, this perspective will reduce my country to a dead zone.
So you see, there is no choice but to stay, organise and fight for the future. Fight for the masses who cannot yet fight for themselves. That is the only way forward.
If you’ve made up your mind to run away then Vietnam is the answer tbh. I have a lot of friends who emigrated to teach English and have built very nice lives there. Besides some minor complaints about corruption in the police (and unfortunate and disappointing complaints about the lockdown policy of the Vietnamese government) my friends love it there; cost of living is an order of magnitude cheaper than life in the west and the people are friendly and accommodating. You can have a very happy night out on as little as £5 there.
From what I can tell, the prosperity of the utopia presented isn’t produced through socialist workers’ control of the means of production, but is instead simply the product of the genius of one “great man”, the scientist Sechenov. In this sense, the setting of Atomic Heart is actually that of a technocratic political economy where political power is wrested from politicians and falls into the hands of technical experts through their control of increasingly advanced technology. From a propaganda perspective, it is a simple canard; it dresses this technocratic political setting in Soviet aesthetics in order to conflate the two with each other. The audience subsequently relate them to each other and are consequently misled.
Its worse. I have first hand testimony from a long term homeless man that the homeless are actively murdered on a day to day basis.
This old boy told me some absolutely bone chilling stories of his time as a bum in the 70s and 80s. He had this awful hernia that confined him to a couch at this squat I was staying at for a while. My friend was living there rent free and the homeless guy was his uncle. I asked him to show me where it hurt one time and when he lifted his shirt I was shocked to see that his entire belly was deep purple. It was clear to me that he was slowly dying, but he refused to see a doctor. He was absolutely petrified of going to the hospital, and hated the police.
That the CIA killed JFK in conjunction with its connections in the Cuban exile community and the mob. As reported by several credible bystanders at the scene, there were men on the grassy knoll that fired the shots that hit the presidential car, Texas Governor John Connally and the President himself, including the so-called “magic bullet”. It appears the plan was to pin the blame for the shooting on Lee Harvey Oswald, a man who was almost certainly a spy in the employ of the United States government. The plan went awry when Oswald left the book dispensary. He was never meant to leave that building alive. Known mob associate Jack Ruby’s dramatic murder of him as he was being escorted out of the police station was a last minute improvisation that was necessary to silence him before he got to share his side of the story with the public, which would have blown the lid on everything. In the immediate aftermath of the shootings the car was removed from the scene of the crime and tampered with to remove the glass windscreen with the bullet holes that would have confirmed the actual trajectory of the shots.
Each group involved in the plot had a particular motive for the killing; the CIA and the security establishment had feuded with JFK over numerous plots and schemes that had gone awry, most notably the Bay of Pigs fiasco and that time they all nearly blew up the world together. Critical comments made by JFK seem to suggest he was threatening to dismantle the CIA, with its wide ranging and unaccountable extra-legal powers. The Cuban exiles, particularly those of the militant group the DRE, were all increasingly exacerbated by JFK’s non-commitment to overthrowing Fidel Castro’s government in Cuba, and feared that if he remained in power then the US government might move towards rapprochement with the Communists, which would doom their counter-revolution. The American Mob had ties to both the CIA and the Cubans, with several prominent gangsters formerly connected with the pre-revolutionary crime scene in Havana being tapped by the CIA in their tireless efforts to assassinate Castro. Their motives were therefore inextricably bound up with those of their partners; to protect their CIA employers on the one hand and to help their Cuban émigré friends to make Cuba a safe and lucrative place for of their illegal rackets once again.
It’s far and away the most compelling explanation in my book.
Western countries will certainly have a crisis on their hands with such an exodus. They’ll have to deal with a similar “disposal problem” to what the US has with the Cuban exile community in Miami; violent fascist revanchist groups increasingly agitating for further war to reclaim Ukraine, but now from European countries against Russia.
They’ll complicate international relations between western Europe and Russia for years to come.
I am very curious to see how the western media will try to spin this as anything but a comprehensive defeat for NATO.
I suppose that will depend on the final settlement, which hinges very much on the degree and nature of the Ukrainian collapse. If Ukrainian military command holds together but there is a collapse on the front, its possible to see much greater territorial gains for Russia than if the Ukrainian brass turns on Zelensky to save their own skins. I think that given the costly nature of this crisis the red lines for the Russian side would probably be the reduction of Ukraine to a kind of landlocked rump state in Russia’s sphere of influence, with the entire black sea coast annexed. The persecution of ethnic Russians has presented Russia with the political justification for the annexation of any majority ethnic area in Ukraine’s east.
A protracted conflict probably favours the Russians, who presently seem fairly comfortable expending ordnance so that the Ukrainians are forced to spend precious lives. Logistically speaking, the Ukrainians cannot match the current pace of consumption from the Russian artillery with their own, so they’ll be forced to instead increasingly substitute shells for soldiers in human wave style assaults.
Such attacks are very draining and cannot be sustained over an extended period. As a result of this, it seems likely to me that Ukraine and the west will push for some kind of decisive battle within the next year or so, before the shortages of essential equipment becomes too acute. NATO’s member states are increasingly seeing their own stockpiles of weapons stripped away to fight this proxy war, with the lead time on replacements of essential materiel and equipment running into the years. If the behaviour of Germany towards Italy throughout the PPE shortage during the initial waves of COVID are anything to go by, countries in the west will not risk their own essential supplies of weapons in order to help a neighbour, not without an explicit geopolitical interest, of course.
- @Shaggy0291@lemmygrad.ml to
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The aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis was the real watershed for me. Until that point, as a teenager I was vaguely liberal in terms of my political sensibilities, if nothing else than from a lack of knowledge, education and experience.
The fact that the underlying reasons for the financial crash were clearly an enormous, systematic fraud shocked me. This really reached an inflection point for me when I watched this documentary, which analysed the background to the crisis in detail. The combination of all those facts, being spoken about in such stark language by such credible figures as prime ministers, finance ministers, billionaires and academics made the nature and extent of the crisis undeniable to me. It marked the beginning of my journey leftward.
The next pitstop on my political journey is the Occupy movement that erupted throughout the 2010s as a direct consequence of the aforementioned financial crisis of the late 2000s. A great many young people, particularly those of my generation that were just entering the workforce or were full time students at uni. I supported their stand for a redistribution of wealth and wished them success, but was rudely awakened to the realities of state power when the police violently suppressed these activists and dismantled their camps. The brutality of the police left an indelible mark on me from this point onwards. I’d come to understand that the government was at this point almost completely in the hands of robbers.
Some years pass, and my politics slide further and further left. As the government repeatedly demonstrates that it cannot be negotiated with, I learn from history that only one popular movement has ever decisively won power for ordinary working people; the international labour movement. I gradually begin to reassess my views of 20th century socialist experiments, until eventually I studied Marxism myself and became an adherent to that worldview.
Its very dense, though brilliant in parts. My favourite episode is the one that covers the Bosnian crisis. The final lines between Grey and King Edward VII sent a chill down my spine. You really get a sense that the world was sleep walking towards disaster.
First things first, you need to be honest and put your best foot forward in all your dealings with this friend of yours. If they’re genuinely interested in Marxist theory then just read it all as normal. People are smart. Most can and will anticipate an angle, so don’t do it. Just share all that good theory; start with the absolute basics if they haven’t gotten that far.
- @Shaggy0291@lemmygrad.ml to
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Do you reckon your old company is going to be able to recover from losing so many of their most productive workers all in one go? If nothing else, hopefully your dogshit old boss has sunk his own business into the dirt.
What do you think you’re going to do now btw?