I’ve just had to write an article on this. The lion’s share of the most experienced Ukrainian soldiers seem to be encircled in Mariupol. Once the Russians finish pacifying Mariupol they’re likely to strike out west for Odessa, landlocking Ukraine. One potential end game scenario most commentators consider possible is that Ukraine will be reduced to a rump state, with all the Russian speaking people in the south and east being cobbled together into Russian aligned breakaway republics like Donetsk and Luhansk. This would leave Ukraine greatly diminished in territory and demographic power (~a quarter of Ukraine’s population is ethnically Russian), along with other economically disastrous factors like loss of access to all ports on the black sea, not to mention the loss of important urban centres like Odessa itself.
An important aspect to bear in mind which I think is a strong indicator of which way the wind is blowing is the use of air power in this war. While at first there was a lot of footage of Russian jetss and helicopters flying low to evade Ukrainian air defences and occasionally being shot down by MANPADs it now appears the Russian air force are targeting the Ukrainian rear at Lviv, seemingly with impunity, from far higher altitudes. This suggests to me that Russia has achieved air superiority.
Nah mate. My fellow activist recently tried applying this line axiomatically with an organised mass of anti-vaxxer people. Even if you go to these people open handed the fact of the matter is communism has 200 years of baggage against it these days. We have to adapt Marxism to our modern conditions, we can’t treat something Marx wrote in 1848 as a catechism.
In my experience Red Fightback are too sectarian. They won’t even agree to meeting representatives of other communist parties.
I recently tried to get all the various organisations in my area to come together around a monthly forum to discuss areas where we could all co-align and they didn’t even entertain the idea. The leadership in CPB, Workers Party, CPG, CPGBML etc at least approached the issue seriously and put forward proposals.
Half the reason why there are so many splinter groups in UK radical politics is because there is no intercourse between the various organisations. A radical political alternative will never coalesce around Britain’s labour movement if its active political organisations aren’t even open to communicating with each other. It’s precisely this kind of thing that has driven the stagnancy of British communism and the tendency towards squabbling little sects.
This is posturing for the sake of negotiation. In reality it appears the Germans and French have no real leverage in this situation so they’ll now jostle for a deal whereby the gas keeps flowing while allowing them to save face. It’ll take only a month of no heat before people are in the streets in Paris and Berlin.
My opinion is that its a divisive question that has often been exploited by agent provocateurs to undermine organisations.
In terms of practicality I don’t think anything good really comes from obsessing over it beyond acknowledging that age of consent is good in itself. Picking at the particulars of it does no one any good and isn’t really a special area of interest for socialists and communists anyway.
Just chiming in here to say welcome to all the new comrades and to recommend that you come join us at lemmygrad.ml/c/documentaries where we post documentary films and series of all kinds!
I’m a branch secretary and activist for the Workers Party of Britain and also a member of a communist party, as well as a very active member of ACORN, a community union. I spend most of my time leading and supporting member defence cases for ACORN members who have issues with their landlords, but I also occasionally do public speaking engagements, comms activities, party journalism, reading groups etc…
Is “Fuck Cars” a pro-city/anti-rural philosophy?
Pretty much, yeah. The only place where cars make a hell of a lot of sense is out in the sticks where everything is spread out for miles around. In urban centres this obstacle doesn’t exist, as everything is concentrated in a far more manageable distance.
Lenin’s Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism deals with this topic at length. He speaks about how industrial capital has given way to finance capital, that is, how banks have become the lynchpin of the world capitalist system and are consequently predominant over politics, displacing the political influence of the formerly dominant industrial capitalists of the 1800s due to the increasingly important role banks play in the controlling capital.