👏 ; don’t have anything special to add here - just wanted to say we should have more posts like yours - well done and thank you.

If Israel is an outpost of Western colonisation and imperialism then you could make the same argument with the whole of the West especially the US; clearly isolationism is detrimental and to be avoided where possible as the PRC learned from USSR mistakes not withstanding slowing down the path to a hot WWIII.

Addendum for anyone still lurking - the West has orders of magnitude more death on its hands including every single death due to the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing from Nakba onwards. If you wanted to choke Israel’s material ability to commit crimes against humanity then you need to choke the West; China has made great strides in tech and warfare but it is a tall order to ask accelerate WWIII, fight it and win it with minimal loss of life for China and the Global South. However, this reality makes a solution of ending more deaths immediately more bleak (10s of 1000s of children are being purposely starved to death as we speak). It makes the work and fight of the Palestinian resistance and others like Yemen even more commendable. You can’t fight sociopaths with placards and rallies alone.

1. revolution is forced upon us because reform does not work or last
2. liberal democracy electoralism is not democracy for masses; it is a pressure valve for discontent to maintain the dictatorship of capital
3. when people allude to reform is working unfortunately it is at the expenses of the masses; in order to slow down the rate of profit reduction capital superexploits elsewhere and it is that surplus value that is used to subsidise welfare in the west
4. and even that took a revolution. What we consider developed in the west universally occured after the USSR October Revolution - the birth of the first worker’s state in 1917-1918. Western workers then used the threat of that revolution to gain concessions for welfare - children labour laws, pensions, sick pay, women’s rights, universal healthcare etc etc.
5. A certain faction of capital also saw the accelerated development of the USSR and understood to compete against this they need to invest in “human capital” to maintain longterm returns on profit
6. and all this began to be rolled back during Thatcher and Reagan with the fall of the USSR in the 1980s leading to present conditions

For further reading/listening:

• how the “developed” west was formed: https://redsails.org/concessions/
• reform vs revolution by economist Professor Richard Wolff https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77BBlVjkLbI
• why marxism: https://redsails.org/why-marxism/

That would be a society with such immense productive capacity and automation that it will change culture, education, and social relations so concepts like a police force may look significantly different (for example, the roles of a police force as we understand it now to be taken up by other sectors of society). Furthermore, given our growing understanding of epigenetics, microbiomes and medicine (as a discipline not just pharmaceutics), not withstanding bioengineering, the above quality of life improvements will likely change our biology as human beings as a whole.

This maybe a cop out answer but that is because we do not have the education yet of what a communist society will entail in the finer details; just a good scientific understanding how to get there. Heck, we haven’t even achieved global socialism yet. Quantitative changes will lead to changes of quality of society.

It is the result of competing US capital factions on how to maintain and expand the failing US hegemony. Trump’s personal reasons may be argued as the incompetence in believing in US exceptionalism and even perceived beneficial bonuses such as stock insider-trading but if we are to move away from Great Man Theory we must ask why does the system allow him to do what he does?

Consider the opposite, what if Trump decided to create a dictatorship of the proleteriat (this is a thought exercise, not the presumption that Trump is a secret marxist)? The system including the reactionary masses would end it very quickly. It clearly does not do that with what’s happening with the tariffs.

Tariffs in this context are a desperate measure where the end result is a tax on the domestic population to create state revenue along with attempts as bargaining chips (well outright brinkmanship), not just with the Global South with view to isolate and subjugate China, but also as political theater for domestic audience to create a convenient narrative for their bigotry (whether they agree with the tariffs or not, the US population is broadly sinophobic because of perceived material benefits) including to sell deepening austerity measures.

We may argue that they are hastening the self-destruction of the US and therefore cannot be “rational” but that argument could be made for capitalism in itself - we know it sows the seeds of its own destruction and yet it attempts to perservere.

Probably not because there is no real domestic marxist threat. The Nazis were so concerned about actual marxists that they adopted socialism in their name to dissuade local proleteriat from the alternative.

They may, however, do a Reichstag Fire to blame China.

Marxism-leninism (especially really understanding and practising dialectical materialism, amongst degenerate western liberalism it will feel like a superpower):

• Black Skin, White Masks - Frantz Fanon
• How Europe Underdeveloped Africa - Walter Rodney
• Darker Nations; a people’s history of the third world - Vijay Prashad
• Class Struggles - Dominic Losurdo
• Elementary Principles of Philosophy - Georges Politzer
• In Defence of Materialism - Plekhanov
• Dialectical Biologist - Lewis and Lewontin

Yes you are right - reminds me of when they kept asking Stalin to stay on.

War with vietnam; otherwise generally speaking he and his successors (if you wanted to take the Great Man approach to history, which is unscientific) helped accelerate global socialism.

1. Stop accusing the masses of being “brainwashed.” Stop treating them as cattle, stop attempting to rouse them into action by scolding them with exposure to “unpleasant truths.”
2. Accept instead that they have been avoiding those truths for a reason. You were able to break through the propaganda barrier, and so could they if they really wanted to. Many of these people see you as the fool, and in many cases not without reason.
3. Understanding people as intelligent beings, craft a political strategy that convincingly makes the case for why they and their lot are very likely to benefit from joining your political project. Not in some utopian infinite timescale, but soon.
4. If you cannot make this case, then forget about convincing the person in question. Focus instead on finding other people to whom such a case can be made. This will lead you directly to class analysis.

Save your energy for the most useful ways and you have a lifetime to hone them. And read broadly. Really understand and practise dialectical materialism; western cultures are so backwards because of liberalism it will feel like a superpower.

https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/

I get that you are hurting under capital but if you keep this up chances are you are going to go down a rabbit hole of reaction or at least neuter your radicalism. Wish you all the best that you don’t go down the wrong road, especially if you live in the imperial cores. For me Walter Rodney, Losurdo and Redsails.org helped a lot.

It appears some artisans who consider themselves marxist want to claim exception for themselves: that the mechanisation and automation of production by capital, through the development of technology, in attempt to push back against the falling rate of profit can apply to everyone else but not them - when it happens to them then apparently the technology itself is the problem.

This is just a defence of proprietorship, and romanticising anti-capitalism to “anti-corporatism”. These artisans who claim in these ways are just defending failing bourgoisie perspectives for themselves; they want a put up a walled garden around their skilled labor so effectively those unskilled do not have access to produce it for themselves, and claim authenticity because their defence of private property is at a smaller scale. It is a highly reactionary take. If this was not the case then they would frame the fight about their loss of income against capital itself and not the technology.

I can assure you most artists are not making a living from art even before AI generative stuff undermined them.

Putting aside the presumptions imposed, please elaborate how AI is undermining them; it may reveal the relative class dynamics behind the reaction.

most of the sources are literally just ‘some techbro in California made a twitter post about the AI slop they just made’

Even if true, why does it matter?

what do you mean?

What do you mean?

On producerism: https://socialistmag.us/2024/01/07/producerism-socialism-and-anti-imperialism-for-fools/

On workerism: https://redsails.org/losurdo-and-gargani/

(Edited to elaborate for anyone else lurking)

The privitisation of the technology is bad but not the technology itself. Labor should be socialised and to be against this is not marxist.

Properietorship is heavily baked into our modern cultures due to liberalism so you are going to hear a lot of bad takes such as “stealing” or moralism based on subjective quality on a given AI arts’ aesthetics (even if you were to homegenise the level of “quality” to call it substandard, all it then means is that the technology should improve. Talking, for example, the “soul” of art is just metaphysical nonsense. Human beings and their productions do not possess some other-worldly mysticism) - even from people who consider themselves marxists and communists.

The advance of technology at the cost of an individual’s job is the fault of the organisation and allpcation of resources, ie capital, not the technology itself. Put it this way: people can be free to make art however they want to and their livelihood should not have to depend on it.

If you enjoyed baking but lamented the industrialisation and mechanisation of baking because it costed your livelihood and you said it was because the machines were stealing your methods and the taste of the products weren’t as good would we still consider it a marxist position? Of course not.

The correct takes could be found here:

• https://redsails.org/artisanal-intelligence/
• the above author’s website in general has some good articles https://polclarissou.com/boudoir/archive.html

If you’re a marxist, do not lament the weaver for the machine (Alice Malone): https://redsails.org/the-sentimental-criticism-of-capitalism/

Marxism is not workerism or producerism; both could lead to fascism.

Artisans being concerned about proleterisation as they effectively lose their labor aristocracy or path to petite-bourgoisie may attempt to protect their material perspectives and have reactionary takes. Again this obviously is not marxist.

TLDR - bidetmarxman is correct. I would argue lot of so-called socialists need self-reflection but like I said their view probably reflect their relative class positions and it is really hard to convince someone against their perceived personal material benefits.

In addition to the other comments here, Has China Turned to Capitalism? Reflections on the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism (60 minutes): https://redsails.org/losurdo-on-china/

In a capitalist economy all surplus-value is labor.

The capitalist pays the worker for his labor-power (ie the capacity for labor) and not the total labor in a day. That “unpaid” labour makes up the surplus value which is monetised as profit.

A value of a commodity could be made up of constant capital (let’s say machinary for sake of simplicity) and variable capital (which is labor). But that constant capital itself is made up of labor as well; we could call constant capital dead labor and contrast that with the living labor of variable capital added to it make the total value.

Why is it called variable capital? Because that is part the capitalist can squeeze to increase the total value produced and therefore increase the capitalist’s surplus value ie profit. How do you “squeeze”? The worker has to either work harder or smarter (https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/10/why-machines-dont-create-value/)

Now the above could be considered as use value which is different from exchange value which is what it is traded at in the market.

All of the above presumes a competitive market where no-one is cheating (example wage theft) and the goods produced are socially determined to be useful.

The first chapter of Capital explains this but the following links may help as well:

4 min read: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value

20 min read: https://redsails.org/labour-and-labour-power/

80 min read: https://redsails.org/wage-labour-and-capital/

Look at the sources at the bottom within the above links for further reading.

"The basic call to action looks something like this:

1. Stop accusing the masses of being “brainwashed.” Stop treating them as cattle, stop attempting to rouse them into action by scolding them with exposure to “unpleasant truths.”
2. Accept instead that they have been avoiding those truths for a reason. You were able to break through the propaganda barrier, and so could they if they really wanted to. Many of these people see you as the fool, and in many cases not without reason.
3. Understanding people as intelligent beings, craft a political strategy that convincingly makes the case for why they and their lot are very likely to benefit from joining your political project. Not in some utopian infinite timescale, but soon.
4. If you cannot make this case, then forget about convincing the person in question. Focus instead on finding other people to whom such a case can be made. This will lead you directly to class analysis."

https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/

The whole thing is a good read (approx 80 min) and have a look through the sources as well.