Tbh we need a “Socialism” with Chinese Characteristics struggle session for this site’s news community soon. Maybe it will help people here awaken to the fact that they need to help further the class struggle internationally wherever they are instead of just cheerleading on the sidelines and thinking China will on its own return to the cause of international proletarian revolution.
This quote is so relevant that it warrants its own thread, although maybe tomorrow after the activity in this other thread about Hexbear’s ultra-leftism dies down.
This is idealism.
You’re trying to place hope just in the “third world” despite the presence of the class struggle throughout the world. The conditions of different countries require different tactics. For example in the US there is ripe ground given the unpopularity of what the government is doing.
You need to consider why active Maoists (who in many cases would identify themselves as Marxist-Leninists or Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, not Maoist Third-Worldists) do not have much love for China. The Communist Party of China hasn’t just abandoned the cause of international socialism with the victorious capitalist roaders in the party (the bourgeois and petty bourgeois nationalists, as @SamotsvetyVIA@hexbear.net and I discussed here) using the excuse of building up productive forces, but they even will engage in such blatant acts as selling weapons to the government of the Phillipines which are then used to fight the guerillas of the Communist Party of the Phillipines.
As far as I know in the CPC there is a thin layer of the proletariat and the nationalist sentiments are very strong and if you will not conduct genuinely Marxist-Leninist class policies and not conduct struggle against bourgeois nationalism, the nationalists will strangle you. Then not only will socialist construction be terminated, China may become a dangerous toy in the hands of American imperialists.
Joseph Stalin, 1949, https://revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv16n1/china.htm
I found the quote in this article: Against Dengism - The Red Spectre
Copying over a comment I made in another thread:
I think this article I shared earlier in the week on /c/history is a pretty good piece to send to people, especially those at least sympathetic towards socialism. It outlines how the abolitionists actually managed to achieve lasting change in the United States, despite its 2 party system and powerful slave-owning aristocracy.
Basically it lays out what was done by the abolitionists to achieve a better world. That could help us start a serious discussion on what is to be done in our time.
The Abolitionist Dirty Break by Ben Grove
From the introduction of the piece:
How can a small movement challenge the Leviathan? How can it find strength in its independence? How can it topple a power that seems omnipotent and achieve a revolution?
In 2024, these tasks may seem hopelessly difficult to socialists in the United States. But defying the powerful has never been easy, and we will always have lessons to learn from our predecessors. One of the most important, yet also misunderstood, is the American abolitionist movement.
It’s easy enough to celebrate abolitionists for their righteous principles: activists of every stripe invoke their legacy. Yet abolitionists and their Radical Republican allies were more than just moral idealists. They were also cunning revolutionary strategists. Using principled independent politics, they successfully attacked America’s slaveholding oligarchy and the two-party system that protected it. Their insights and debates have tremendous relevance for modern socialists, because abolitionism helped to ignite the most important revolutionary rupture in U.S. history: the Civil War and the downfall of chattel slavery.
And these were the conditions that their movement built itself in:
By the 1820s, a two-party system of Whigs and Democrats was developing, nurtured by the brilliant New York politician Martin Van Buren. Van Buren’s explicit goal was to use the excitement of party politics to distract the masses from more dangerous conflicts over slavery. Whigs and Democrats would have fiery conflict and genuine power struggles—but both sides suppressed opposition to America’s true ruling class: the planters of the South, the Slave Power.
I think this article I shared earlier in the week on /c/history is a pretty good piece to send to people, especially those at least sympathetic towards socialism. It outlines how the abolitionists actually managed to achieve lasting change in the United States, despite its 2 party system and powerful slave-owning aristocracy.
Basically it lays out what was done by the abolitionists to achieve a better world. That could help us start a serious discussion on what is to be done in our time.
The Abolitionist Dirty Break by Ben Grove
From the introduction of the piece:
How can a small movement challenge the Leviathan? How can it find strength in its independence? How can it topple a power that seems omnipotent and achieve a revolution?
In 2024, these tasks may seem hopelessly difficult to socialists in the United States. But defying the powerful has never been easy, and we will always have lessons to learn from our predecessors. One of the most important, yet also misunderstood, is the American abolitionist movement.
It’s easy enough to celebrate abolitionists for their righteous principles: activists of every stripe invoke their legacy. Yet abolitionists and their Radical Republican allies were more than just moral idealists. They were also cunning revolutionary strategists. Using principled independent politics, they successfully attacked America’s slaveholding oligarchy and the two-party system that protected it. Their insights and debates have tremendous relevance for modern socialists, because abolitionism helped to ignite the most important revolutionary rupture in U.S. history: the Civil War and the downfall of chattel slavery.
And these were the conditions that their movement built itself in:
By the 1820s, a two-party system of Whigs and Democrats was developing, nurtured by the brilliant New York politician Martin Van Buren. Van Buren’s explicit goal was to use the excitement of party politics to distract the masses from more dangerous conflicts over slavery. Whigs and Democrats would have fiery conflict and genuine power struggles—but both sides suppressed opposition to America’s true ruling class: the planters of the South, the Slave Power.
Haven’t gotten around to trying to really read this article in full but it looks like you’ve got a pretty serious misquote.
That last paragraph you quote, which is at the end of the article, is followed by a single sentence given its own paragraph. So it actually reads as follows:
The promise of an end to the drama might be enough to elect Kamala. I want it to be true.
But it is a lie.
Emphasis mine.
So he’s not saying it’ll actually happen. Of all things he’s rejecting the “40k Ork logic” that you’re trying to pin on him. It sounds more like he’s lamenting that ‘If Democrats weren’t lying, maybe Kamala Harris winning would lead to better circumstances, but they are lying.’
Cutrone has had some completely garbage takes (e.g. Palestine) but we don’t need to stoop to the level of misreading him so carelessly. That benefits no one.
Why do people on this site keep saying, without checking, that there are no resources available whatsoever to help people get out of evac zones? Making claims like this without checking first could get people fucking killed. Do better.
There are government resources available to help people evacuate. I actually made a thread that lists some resources including for the county that Tampa is part of: https://hexbear.net/post/3632288
For those who may be in need of it, I made a thread that includes info for using public transit to get to storm shelters: https://hexbear.net/post/3632288
They literally have made busses available to get people to shelters before the storm: https://hexbear.net/post/3632288
There are resources being made available to help people get to safety ahead of the storm: https://hexbear.net/post/3632288
To be clear I’m not singling out this comment by replying to it. A lot of other ones in this thread are saying similar things. This one is just near the top right now so I’m replying to it for visibility.
I don’t want anyone in the area getting killed because of incorrect doomposting. There are some services still available to help people evacuate.
From the Pinellas County website: https://pinellas.gov/news/pinellas-county-issues-mandatory-evacuation-orders-for-zones-a-b-c-and-mobile-homes/
Pinellas County has issued mandatory evacuation orders for all residents in evacuation zones A, B and C and all mobile home residents countywide, effective immediately, today, Monday, Oct. 7.
To support evacuations, the County has announced the opening of six emergency shelters, including shelters for people with special needs and pet-friendly shelters (see full list below).
…
The County previously announced mandatory evacuation orders for long-term care facilities, assisted living facilities and hospitals, and special needs residents in evacuation zones A, B and C. The County is also recommending that special needs residents in evacuation zones D and E evacuate due to the potential loss of electricity and water.
PSTA is offering free rides to the shelters 24/7, effective from now until conditions become unsafe for buses to be on the road. Pets are allowed on the bus: dogs and cats in a crate, large dogs on a muzzle leash. For the latest information on PSTA bus service, call the InfoLine at (727) 540-1900.
Residents who don’t know their evacuation zone can check it here.
Barrier islands info
The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office will be patrolling the barrier islands from Sand Key south to Pass-a-Grille and announcing the mandatory evacuation. PSTA will provide free transportation on regular bus routes or for anyone who is able to signal a passing bus or trolley.
I checked and the other two counties on Tampa Bay have similar services for transporting people to shelters:
Edit:
I’ve created a thread to gather Hurricane Milton resources to help people: https://hexbear.net/post/3632288
And for completeness here’s evacuation transportation assistance info for the other county expecting 10-15 feet of storm surge:
I still don’t see how this is radlib. It might be radical to your or me, but how is it a radical form of liberalism instead of just a form of mainstream liberalism?
We should be careful about watering down words. The Atlantic being radlib would mean there’s little liberalism that isn’t radlib.
How is The Atlantic radlib? There’s not really anything radical about it.
Is he really making a mistake? It seems to me like he’s engaging in immanent critique of The Atlantic.
He’s showing how what it does contradicts and differs from what it says it does.
What do you mean by the Marxist conception? Marx himself sometimes uses the term middle class.
Here’s a few examples.
The Communist Manifesto, Chapter 1:
The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.
The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Chapter 1:
The bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe can be followed only by a bourgeois republic; that is to say, whereas a limited section of the bourgeoisie ruled in the name of the king, the whole of the bourgeoisie will now rule in the name of the people. The demands of the Paris proletariat are utopian nonsense, to which an end must be put. To this declaration of the Constituent National Assembly the Paris proletariat replied with the June insurrection, the most colossal event in the history of European civil wars. The bourgeois republic triumphed. On its side stood the aristocracy of finance, the industrial bourgeoisie, the middle class, the petty bourgeois, the army, the lumpen proletariat organized as the Mobile Guard, the intellectual lights, the clergy, and the rural population. On the side of the Paris proletariat stood none but itself.
Capital Volume 1, Chapter 25, Section 4:
Pauperism is the hospital of the active labour-army and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army. Its production is included in that of the relative surplus population, its necessity in theirs; along with the surplus population, pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the capitalist development of wealth. It enters into the faux frais of capitalist production; but capital knows how to throw these, for the most part, from its own shoulders on to those of the working class and the lower middle class.
There is no place yet in America for a third party, I believe. The divergence of interests even in the same class group is so great in that tremendous area that wholly different groups and interests are represented in each of the two big parties, depending on the locality, and almost each particular section of the possessing class has its representatives in each of the two parties to a very large degree, though today big industry forms the core of the Republicans on the whole, just as the big landowners of the South form that of the Democrats. The apparent haphazardness of this jumbling together is what provides the splendid soil for the corruption and the plundering of the government that flourish there so beautifully. Only when the land — the public lands — is completely in the hands of the speculators, and settlement on the land thus becomes more and more difficult or falls prey to gouging — only then, I think, will the time come, with peaceful development, for a third party. Land is the basis of speculation, and the American speculative mania and speculative opportunity are the chief levers that hold the native-born worker in bondage to the bourgeoisie. Only when there is a generation of native-born workers that cannot expect anything from speculation any more will we have a solid foothold in America. But, of course, who can count on peaceful development in America! There are economic jumps over there, like the political ones in France — to be sure, they produce the same momentary retrogressions.
From Friedrich Engels’s 6th of January 1892 letter to Friedrich Adolph Sorge
To me he sounds opportunist with his continual references to expanding the “socialist” market economy (which walks and talks like capitalist commodity production). If he is a Marxist, why is he not openly criticizing these bourgeois economists in China that @xiaohongshu@hexbear.net mentioned and emphasizing a return to broader study of Marxist political economy?
On the Governance of China, p. 87 of the English Translation
Ibid., p. 134
Ibid., p. 149
(I credit this essay with making me aware of these statements: Against Dengism by The Red Spectre.)