How would the cops stop them? If everyone has class consciousness at the same time, they can just all refuse to work at the same time and overwhelm the cops. The cops may be considered a separate class, but aren’t a separate entity from society and would quickly feel the effects of everyone turning against them. Even the US 2020 protests had a lot of cops quitting, in spite of it being a fraction of the populace organizing to protest police brutality, specifically, without even necessarily having class consciousness as the backbone of it.

I would venture to say one of the reasons organizing a vanguard is necessary is precisely because it’s so unrealistic to have everyone class conscious at the same time as a precursor to revolution. There is also outside repression too, so if you only had one people/nation class conscious, but not the whole world, then you could still have them violently repressed by outside forces anyway if they have no vanguard. But if we’re hypothesizing everyone the world over being class conscious at the same time, the only way I see repression working for long is if we’re supposing that class consciousness can be undone in this scenario, with violence enough that people cave. Otherwise, I’d think we’re talking about little more than a countdown until the capitalists are overwhelmed, with the worst case scenario for the working class being that the capitalists have a literal fortress to hide themselves in for a while - but even then, there wouldn’t be a whole lot they can rule over from hiding if nobody believes in the system they’re pedaling and understands that the liberation of the working class is more important and valuable to getting everyone’s needs met than any single person being immediately comfortable in the short-term. I’d think we’re talking about a level of belief and understanding that bypasses what could put many off of taking part in revolutionary struggle. Which is unrealistic in part because for many, their overriding concern is going to be when they get to eat next, and they’ll have limited patience for supposed sacrifice to make that better world over existing appearance of guarantees that the current system gives them in this way. And for some them, depending on where they land in money and such, it might be closer to a guarantee while the system lasts, even if it comes from an unsustainable system. So this is where the logistics come in, of being so critical to be capable of replacing the existing system with one that can get people’s immediate needs met, otherwise many will perceive it as a loss, even if it’s technically more “freeing” in the long-term. Along with just the humanitarian concerns, of course, of the point being to improve conditions for people.

Ultimately, I think the hypothetical can be an interesting jumping off point for getting into what it really means for people to be class conscious or not, but in practice, it’s sort of like asking, “What if a moving train suddenly became an airplane?” The consciousness for many is so tied up in their day to day capitalist living, it’s never only a matter of teaching them class consciousness, but also the maintenance of it against the inertia of the existing system and its propaganda and persuasion through how the structure of daily life informs people’s worldview. No one remains in a static state, in other words, and instead is always shifting in relation to internal and external forces.

This is state-conducted terrorism; and the media and the sycophants for the zionist regime are praising each other and making jokes about the 3000 civilians maimed (more than were killed in 9/11) and refusing to call this what this is: a war crime and an instance of terrorism.

The terrorism aspect of it is so very real and literal. This single act calls into question so much about supply chains and general trust in them, as well as being able to trust products as a whole, considering this was something so hidden from view until triggered. It sets off my imagination into where else stuff like this could already be in place, or have plans in progress for more like it, or be mistakenly placed somewhere it wasn’t meant to go. So yeah, congrats to the empire for putting a hole in the trust of their own system of global capital and product movement, just so they can murder more civilians.

I don’t even know what to say. Just thinking about the amount of planning going into this terrorism.

Isn’t it interesting how even within the US politician quote part, they’re contradicting themselves? It was the guns of the Secret Service / LE that brought down the would-be assassin. Not a ballot box. That’s what “resolved the difference” there. So they prove Mao’s point even while trying to deny its presence in their own model of power.

I would say yeah, art is about human connection, though also heavily about politics and culture. I’d venture to say that notions of separating art from those heavy hitters, politics and culture (which are arguably not even separate things in the first place, but I digress…), is largely a liberal capitalism thing and as unrealistic as most things about capitalism. Which, incidentally, is part of why it’s so weird when people are like, “Stop making art political!!” Like it never wasn’t political. It’s just a question of how obvious it is to any given person or group.

In my experience around image generation tech, it appears like it’s the sharing of cool generations among other people and the resulting human connection that is more attractive in the long-term than the “generate whatever” in private, which can be fun, similar as eating candy can be fun, but can get old fast if you overdo it. There’s a lot within that subject to unpack, but I’ve seen others point out something that appears to be true to an extent, which is that people don’t tend to be all that interested in others “AI art” and are more so interested in their own, which makes a kind of sense to me because the end result is usually shlocky flashy fast food “art” that might feel more meaningful to the person who spent hours experimenting with prompts to get to it. This might seem like a contradiction to the idea of sharing in “cool generations,” but it seems to me that such sharing is in part about the sharing itself, not entirely about the perceived quality of the art. Similar to how people can go to a movie together and maybe they’re critics about it or maybe they aren’t, but either way, they have that knowing that they shared the experience of seeing it simultaneously and can talk about what that experience was like.

I needed this laugh, thanks. 🙂

You know what’s weird, I don’t remember having a clear “what I want to be when I grow up” aspiration when I was a kid. I don’t even mean I had tons and couldn’t choose, I mean I don’t remember thinking about it much at all. The closest equivalent I can remember was at a certain point, having aspirations about figuring out what was “wrong with the world” and how to fix it once and for all. Then when I chose a college degree, I temporarily had aspirations toward that, but it didn’t pan out well after graduation and I found myself back at the “world fixing” mindset and eventually found my way to communism, though it was hard with all of the red herring paths out there to be led down. There’s more to what happened than that of course, but I think I’ve long had a hard time with the individualist “what will I be when I grow up” thought process. Maybe I was depressed so it didn’t appeal or it mostly didn’t make a lot of sense to me, I don’t know.

I don’t know what my point is other than I guess I never fully “got” the whole “what I want to be when” thing. Even with college, it felt like I was sort of picking something and rolling with it, not because it was “the best thing” but because it was “good enough.” That’s not to say I had no enthusiasm for it at any point - I definitely did at some points - but that it wasn’t exactly something I planned ahead on doing or long dreamed of.

I’m not saying this to sound noble either, it’s just weird to me that that’s how it was for me.

For sure. And becomes all the more obnoxious to deal with when being guilt-tripped or condescended to by people about it, whether it’s strangers online or people I know in RL.

I remember one person, saying words to me to the effect of, “Once we stop Trump, then we can worry about other stuff.” And this was coming from a person who afaik tends to be very busy with work and isn’t engaged with politics much beyond believing in the democrats still. So it’s like… uh, “What are you gonna do and when?” Biden has been in office for 4 years, what have the democrats done to meaningfully oppose the Trumpian faction during that period. What have they done to convince anyone they’re better.

I also remember encountering someone on twitter semi-recently who spoke of how they’re very involved in trying to help people who are in need. And that when the dems are in power, they notice they get less help from others with this. So it’s very much this thing of like, the liberals declare victory and then go to brunch. They more tend to go to sleep on systemic issues when their party is in power (or even go so far as to actively deny and downplay that their party has anything to do with these issues) and then guilt trip and blame game when the people who have been fighting on those issues the whole time don’t want to keep voting for their party. In other words, some of these liberals have condescension for people who are doing way more than them, politically, simply because those people don’t want to vote for the liberals’ party. It’s like this weird sense of entitlement.

I think it’s possible they’d be able to bring things to a point where even white people will start feeling more the systemically oppressive experience that has already been there for non-white people for the entire country’s history. But the state seems bent on doing that anyway, with stuff like the cop cities being built or already built, the treatment of student protesters, etc. So maybe they’d speed up the degradation of the neoliberal order, but it’s degrading either way and continuously rejecting any attempt to reform it.

If it happens, I’m doubtful the dem power brokers would be all that upset about it, considering they treat the most milquetoast reformists as more of an enemy than the faction they claim wants to “destroy democracy.” But idk with confidence, sometimes it’s a bit hard to tell how much of it is a show and how much of it is genuine disagreement on how to run a brutal capitalist empire. I lean toward thinking it’s more the loyalist followers who have the disagreement and the show part is among the power brokers running it. But if so, it’s not like you can just leash a thing like that. People believe fervently enough and some of them start acting on it, like with the Jan 6 thing or these assassination attempts made on Trump. One thing seems undeniable though, is neither faction is serious about human rights beyond lip service and future promises easily broken, and it may be much of what remains of it is codified more in the cultural loyalty to the constitution as a document and a fear of visceral backlash against anything that challenges the nature of the document and what extends from it. Like the religiosity that others have touched on before in analyzing the culture.

I keep trying to understand it better. It’s an odd situation.

It’s wild to think how for a moment there, Bernie represented some attempt, however minor in policy, to say, “Hey, maybe we could not try to be as reactionary as possible?” And then the democratic party was like, “No, that’s a terrible idea. Everyone drop out and support Biden. We’re just going to say he’s a reformer instead of electing an actual reformer, while we commit genocide.” Then election rolls around this time and they’re like, “Yeah, Dick Cheney endorsement, woohoo. We’re such reformists in the democratic party. Anyway, if you think this is weird and criticize it, you’re on Trump’s side.” Like they continuously rejected any attempt to have the party be less like their supposed contrasting, different party, and then they’re all “you’re being misleading and helping the other guy win” when people point it out. The performance of the dynamic seems something like: the democratic party moves further ‘right’, getting closer to the republican party, then the republican party goes ‘ew, we’re not like those dems’ and moves further ‘right’ than that to get away from them. And it just repeats like that. But in practice, I’m not convinced the reality is as different as the performance even makes it out to be. I think in reality, it’s more like overt and covert brand of the same stuff.

What comes to mind for me:

“It’s a big club and you ain’t in it.” - George Carlin

AKA, my impression is: A guy like Biden is willing to do this because on some level, he knows the differences between him and Trump aren’t actually that big, and that the divide between the two ruling parties is more performance art than visceral disagreement. And he’s not supposed to let this show so blatantly, but he’s slipping in his aging state of mind.

Every single fucking time.

Communists: We’re giving people basic rights and food and shelter, but we might make some mistakes along the way and we try to acknowledge them where we can.

Anti-Communists: Communists are evil. proceeds to do every fucking horrific thing they can possibly think of and get away with, and blame it on anyone else if it comes to light at all

Communists: Are you fucking kidding me? This is our opposition?

Anti-Communists: Stop being so evil, communists!

I need to research him in more detail again someday. I did some research on him when I was high school age, for a paper, but it’d be interesting to see how I’d view it now, knowing what I know about how the US works now and historically. Back then I had a very favorable view of him, but I have since encountered bits of information here and there indicating his views were a lot worse than they are made out to be. I am now naturally a bit more suspicious of what part he played in the on-paper end of full blown slavery (prison labor loophole aside), knowing how “reforms to dissipate revolutionary liberation energy” tend to be used. Like was he in some way, at some stage of it, genuinely trying to liberate, or was it always more akin to “this is the pill we have to swallow in order to keep the US project going”? Like the factional infighting we’re seeing play out in the US right now, where both candidates are full-throated imperialists and are into the order of elite rule who may have some disagreements on how to go about it.

I feel I need to point out that there have been those who for years have been crowing about the imminent collapse of the US, how they’re helpless, powerless.

There are frankly some people here who are optimistic to the point of being misleading about how things are going to go.

I would like to see such direct quotes addressed then rather than sniping at people who can’t defend themselves because they have no apparent substantive existence.

It also just seems like arguing over future prediction narratives and although I can sort of understand the need to direct people such that they are not complacent, for example, there’s a point where it falls off for me and it starts sounding like trying to be the accurate seer without our intervention in the world. One of the key points of all of this ideological stuff we focus on in spaces like this, is that we need to intervene, and we need to do it in a way that will make a difference toward our cause. We are not actually helpless, nor are we entirely removed from what is happening, no matter how the system can make it feel sometimes. The right organized action in the right place at the right time can change a lot. I would much rather people be focusing on that, instead of trying to out-predict each other on when US hegemony will collapse, as if from an outsider’s perspective, when it impacts everyone on the planet. Edit: And to be clear, I don’t mean discussing things that could get you into trouble, I just mean focus more on helping people understand what can be done and less on any narrative feeling of inevitability, regardless of what the narrative is.

I looked up the article and weirdly, Blinken’s response seems to be more aggressive than Biden’s, though it still sounds like little more than a strongly worded email in substance:

Earlier Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said her death was “unprovoked and unjustified” and called for Israel to make “fundamental changes” to how it operates in the West Bank.

“No one, no one should be shot and killed for attending a protest. No one should have to put their life at risk just for expressing their views,” he said. “Now we have the second American citizen killed at the hands of Israeli security forces. It’s not acceptable. It has to change. And we’ll be making that clear to the senior-most members of the Israeli government.”

I am reminded of the A Few Good Men “I strenuously object” line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOnRHAyXqYY

They can actually put pressure on israel, like by withholding some of the endless funding for more bombs. Instead, they talk at best as if they’re powerless activists trying to speak truth to power.

EDIT: this entire site is filled with ultras, third-worldists, and campists whose beliefs amount to little more than “america bad” but framed in whatever quotations of leftist thinkers they need to justify themselves. read for yourself, think for yourself, and above all just get organized instead of treating politics like religious salvation and orthodoxy like so many people do.

How about addressing the content of what is being said instead of doubling down on bad faith nonsense. From what I can gather, usually the term ultra is used to refer to people who expect purity out of socialism, rather than contending with conditions as they are. So not sure how you get that out of numerous people in this thread saying varying statements along the lines of that support for Russian leadership is a tenuous thing to have at best, relative to its resistance to imperialism, while you are saying no one should have any support for them. 🫠

And how do you arrive at such a liberal reddit-brain-sounding analysis as “people believe little more than ‘america bad’”? The western empire refers to more than the US, but the US is the power center of it at this point in history and has been for a while now. Please stop projecting your own reductionist thinking onto others because people disagreed with your views on Russia and Ukraine. I mean, for god’s sake, you accuse others of using quotations as justifications for those views like this is inherently a failing, but you did just that in this very post and when challenged on how the term you used applies to this situation, it appears you ignored it with an edit, doubling down with an even more ridiculous and nasty framing about the entire website.

I’m genuinely confused as to where this extreme rejection of everyone is coming from, as you otherwise seem to want to be here and otherwise appear to share similar views as others here have.

there are many people who call themselves marxist-leninists on this site who do not subscribe to anything marx or lenin had to say about inter-imperialist conflict.

This is a bad faith way to start your post on this and also doesn’t make sense in this context. Russia isn’t imperialist, so how is it inter-imperialist rivalry? Some reasoning on why Russia is not imperialist found here: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Imperialism#Russian_“imperialism”

It is possible we’re reading different posts, but in my time here, how I see Russia talked about is with the term “critical support” if support is given at all; meaning that (roughly speaking) the person supports them with regard to resisting the western empire, but does not support anything else about its leadership, necessarily. Russia and the US are far from equal powers dueling for hegemony, as a framing like “inter-imperialist conflict” might suggest, and it is not helpful to understanding imperialism or global conflict to reduce something to “both sides” simply because neither government is socialist.

IIRC, Mao goes into the concept in On Contradiction, of varying allying conditions with the Kuomintang and how that relationship evolved. I think it’s a decent analog to what we’re talking about here. Imperialism is the prevailing force of global power, not local reactionaries, and so some amount of allowance for that needs to be made in considering who is and isn’t worth “supporting”: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.htm

And modern day China seems to understand this and utilizes it to further an alternative to the western imperialist order. If they were only willing to have ties with those states who are controlled by a communist vanguard party, they’d have limited allies on the global stage, which would make it easier for the empire to isolate them, undermine them, etc.

It’s unfortunately not all that surprising, when considering how commonly US people have full-throated ignorance of imperialism and support it blindly, and then you combine that with somebody who has a big platform and gets validated for doing it. Not defending him at all, mind you, but when I think about the state of US political education, like even some of the more aware celebrities seem to linger in a hazy state where they sort of know something is screwy, but haven’t quite cottoned onto what imperialism is yet and what that means beyond vague notions like corruption. Bo Burnham is the one time I can recall seeing a major US celebrity tackle it head on with the kind of language we might use here and he even did it in comedy song form, but he also seems to be an oddity of a celebrity in terms of consciously fighting against celebrity going to his head almost as a form of protest against the nature of it.

Under the Trump administration, international approval of U.S. leadership fell to a historic low

Ah, right, so this is why even Cheney doesn’t want Trump in office. He’s bad for PR. “Keep out the guy who is bad at making us look good while we’re doing bad things.”

The language of it is really something.

“as long as [they] keep engaging in hostile influence campaigns.” - So if it was a pro-US campaign, it’d be fine?

“meddle in our free and open society” - So free and open that they want to shut down any “adversarial” viewpoints. I understand any state has to suppress alternative to a point in order to remain a state, but the fact they try to play both ends and act like it’s super freedom free in spite of the suppression they’re doing.

Of course, there’s also just the fact that this (and worse) is what the US has been doing to everybody else for decades on end, which I assume is meant to be the funny part coming from them.