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Shut up, goofball.

My brother in Christ, the “west is a lost cause for revolution” exactly BECAUSE of sentiments and takes like this! You actually posted this seriously thinking that it wasn’t anything other than counterrevolutionary drivel (that, again, Stalin would’ve 100% had you liquidated for stating back in the day – have you thought about why you admire people who would have branded you as enemies and destroyed you, are you into radical politics because you are a masochist?). The lack of self awareness and idealism is just too much. I’m going to block you and move on from this convo, I hope you are not actually involved in any orgs while holding onto these anti-people and frankly dangerous ideas. Better yet, feel free to state what orgs you are involved in so any of our UK comrades who are serious with their love the people and are dedicated in wanting to serve them can avoid them.

Right, just like Gorbachev and Yeltsin, famous MLs who were born in the 1930s in the USSR right? Anyway, I don’t understand the point you’re trying to make and I think you’ve missed mine.

What I’m saying is that it’s nonsensical to say you support Stalin in one breath and then say we should support Corbyn/Galloway in the next breath. The former was an genuinely principled revolutionary, while the latter are socdems, revisionists, opportunists etc who Stalin would have had liquidated if they were in the party. Even before the Bolsheviks had state power there were other revisionist, non-Marxist left parties and trade unions etc that existed who the Bolsheviks had frayed relationships with at best and hostility with at worst, but over the course of the 1920’s-1930’s these other parties were gradually removed from any power they held and placed in the dustbin of history.

So, if we genuinely support Stalin and his legacy, the lesson to learn is that we must maintain our principles. We must advance the positions of the masses instead of giving into reactionary tailism. Our energy should be focused on constructing the genuinely revolutionary vanguard party. In general, other opportunist parties aren’t worth our time, and will not get us any closer to socialism (at worst they will delay us). Now to be more specific, its definitely important for the revolutionary movement to draw into the struggle, work with, and build relations with leftist mass organizations, including ones that may not be specifically Marxist or hold principled positions, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.

Something other than a boot on the face of humanity would be nice for a change tbh

Yes, but your folly is thinking that social democrats, right-opportunists, and revisionist pseudo-revolutionaries like Galloway and Corbyn can bring that about. This is a tremendous error and the western left will not mature until it realizes that we cannot compromise on our politics.

Did Marx compromise on the Gotha programme just because “something other than a boot” would be nice?

Ask yourself when Marx, Lenin, Engels, Stalin, Mao etc EVER compromised on their politics?

Please realize that ONLY a revolutionary ML/MLM vanguard party seizing power can remove that boot, anything other than that like these opportunist movements is just not going to fucking cut it, and is not worth our support.

I don’t. He was a product of his time - no doubt historically revolutionary, but committed many mistakes and held onto many backwardisms of his own time. I don’t want Stalin back, I want to build a genuinely revolutionary vanguard party that can cultivate modern day Stalins. But hey do you

Right-opportunism and tailism on my hexbear? It’s more common than you think

If Galloway was completely immovable on green energy/trans rights, I don’t think he’d be offering Corbyn to lead his party

Stalin would’ve had them both shot. Your thoughts on that?

Kind of interesting that the name works though, considering that the jacobins were bourgeois liberal revolutionaries.

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He condemned Hamas and Oct 7th when it happened lol. For me the dividing line would be recognizing the Al Aqsa Flood as genuine expression of colonized people under military dictatorship fighting for liberation, rather than an act of “terrorism” against “innocent civillians” (which is what Lula characterised it as in his condemnation).

Though it’s a different context, I think in State and Revolution, Lenin says something similar, that the real mark of a revolutionary (or something along those lines) is not just in recognizing the class struggle, but embracing the dictatorship of the proletariat.

I don’t have books that disprove your idea besides general Marxist and Maoist works, but approaching from a Maoist perspective, I would critique the first part of your thoughts because I think it falls way to deeply into great man theory.

If the communist movement faltered because of the death of people like Fred Hampton, then the movement was weak to begin with and probably would have faltered anyway had those people stayed alive/true to the cause. Successful communist movements do not rely on strong role models, as you put it. You can have all the strong role models you want but it really means nothing if: a) the internal strength of the vanguard party is weak, b) the relationship between the vanguard party and the oppressed masses is weak, c) the unity of the united front is weak, d) the conditions necessary for revolution simply aren’t present (crises, specifically)

• As formulated by Huey Newton with his theory of “revolutionary suicide”, but also just by intuition, the death of a great number of people, civilians and revolutionaries alike, is inevitable in revolutionary war. Any revolutionaries like Hampton that were killed by the state may have been killed later on when the movement shifted to people’s war. How many “great, strong” revolutionaries do you think were killed during the Long March? A proper vanguard party and united front should be prepared for this inevitability by maintaining strong internal unity, linking themselves firmly with the masses, political education etc. Or do you think the solution would have been to wheel Fred Hampton in like a bulletproof steel vessel or something, lest he be destroyed?
• There were plenty of great revolutionaries who existed contemporaneously to Fred Hampton – he certainly wasn’t the only “great revolutionary” of his time. Many of them either a) fell to revisionism (Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleaver) b) were killed, imprisoned, or exiled for life by the state (Imam Jamil al Amin, Mumia Abu Jamal, Assata Shakur) c) or just died of natural causes after a life of being a successful revolutionary (Kwame Ture).
• The New Left of the 60’s, and their organizations and revolutionaries, were plagued by a great number of internal issues (misogyny, improper political education, splits/lack of unity, lacking security measures, adventurism), and these issues led them to be especially susceptible to being vanquished by the state powers. IMO this is what actually led to the downfall of the BPP and the other 60’s orgs, not so much Fred Hampton’s death.

and in a formal sense, by pushing parents and teachers that would pass those revolutionary behaviors and lifestyles down to their students to the periphery of livelihood and often killing them through social murder.

Don’t know what you mean by this, you could either elaborate using more accessible/clear language, or I can accept it if the question isn’t meant for me lol.

It’s not a valid excuse.

You’re seeing the opinions of the western left, and in our countries our movements have only just been rebounding after decades of very harsh repression and propaganda, so it’ll take more time, struggle, and political development for people to see the difference between social democracy and revolutionary society. It is unfortunate, but for now, many will be captivated by the former.

Name-dropping communism astonishes you? Would Pol Pot astonish you?

I need a weimar history buff to help me understand this, wasn’t the United Front only created after the “failure” of Comintern’s social fascism theory, where the KPD opposed both the SPD and Nazis equally? (I put failure in quotes because I’m not sure if it actually failed or not)

Or is this meme referring to the earlier 1919 revolution, which was backstabbed by libs?

Not to mention, the american revolution happened because the settlers wanted to keep their slaves, keep expanding their colonies and genociding indigenous people, and didn’t want to pay taxes on shit. And it’s permissible and noble for them to revolt under those conditions

Meanwhile it’s bad when Palestinians rise up when they have been refugees and ethnically cleansed for 75 years

Federating was a mistake lmaooo

Hey, sorry for the no response, life is busy but I can dm you sometime this weekend.

From an article on Maoist organizing techniques, specifically the Mass Line:

We go to the masses, conducting mass meetings, discussing situations and problems with them at bus stops, demonstrations, classrooms, workplaces, bars, homes, churches, and wherever else they can be found. Consider the mass line a sort of factory except instead of products, we make revolution. The ideas, correct ones, from the masses, represent the raw materials. Everywhere we go, our task is to ask people what’s going on in their communities and on their jobs. The police are killing people. There is struggle with landlords. The houseless are being suppressed. Alright. What are we going to do about it? This is another thing we must ask ourselves, and the masses. Prating and whining are not revolutionary solutions, neither is begging the power structure that keeps us in these atrocious situations in the first place for some warmed over solution. Maoists understand that the only way to develop a revolutionary movement is to actually go among the people, do research, talk to everybody and collect both correct and incorrect ideas, and develop ourselves theoretically to ensure that we are able to tell the difference between the two.

And the most important part:

Maoists seek to unite the advanced, win over the intermediate (most people are intermediate), and isolate the worst of the backward.

Every person you encounter falls into 1 of these 3 groups. Usually, like in this case you’re explaining, class relations and material interests come first in deciding where they are (so it’s typical that a petty bourgeoisie will trend towards backward, proletariats may be more intermediate etc). Your job is to ignore the backward, and conduct political education among the intermediate and advanced sections of the masses. So that means really listening to and getting to know people, and more specifically their concerns and the things they care about the most. Then, the goal is to connect these things that they care about to socialism (or depending on where the person is, connecting what they care about to prerequisite ideas like anti-capitalism, with the goal of building up to revolutionary socialism).

This is the concept of agitation. Agitation means to connect the interests of the people to socialism. An exploited worker who cannot pay rent, an immigrant who faces violence from the state, a minority who faces white supremacist or state violence, a person who has/is facing police violence and incarceration. Sometimes you find people who already care about something, like a person who already cares about climate change but doesn’t understand that capitalism is causing and profitting from it. These are all issues, caused by capitalism, that can be sharpened and connected to revolutionary ideas.

If you have not already, you should check out The Tasks of the Russian Social-Democrats and What is to be done?, both by Lenin:

“Our task is to merge our activities with the practical, everyday questions of working-class life, to help the workers understand these questions, to draw the workers’ attention to the most important abuses, to help them formulate their demands to the employers more precisely and practically, to develop among the workers consciousness of their solidarity, consciousness of the common interests and common cause of all the Russian workers as a united working class that is part of the international army of the proletariat.”

Where to find unorganized people who are intermediate and advanced? You mentioned being poor, so you can readily encounter the masses in proletariat workplaces. 3 comrades I know began working at a restaurant, and through their efforts, it has become unionized, and they are more able to conduct political education and agitation among their co workers.

I will give you 2 pieces of advice:

1. Remember that agitation, education, and organizing should never be individual. It should be collective. Over the internet you’re usually seeing the thoughts of a bunch of faceless people you don’t know whose words usually don’t have anything directly to do with your material reality, or when you read theory you’re usually just individually consuming the knowledge within the pages, but organizing should be as opposite of this as possible. This makes sense from a Marxist perspective because we probably already understand that the masses make history, and not individuals. Every now and then you can have an individual agitational conversation with someone, but it’s difficult individually trying to bring an intermediate or semi-backwards person to a higher political awareness. Humans are very social, so having multiple people conducting agitation/education with you is very helpful, especially in socially atomized countries like America (not sure where you are tho). A strategy I use is inviting an intermediate person who I want to organize to a political event, either from my org or people we know, then allow them to get to know and make connections with comrades who are also present. From there, when there’s multiple friendly, trusted people telling you something, or offering their own perspectives on an issue, it’s easier to bring that person to higher politics. This is how we’re conducting further education among the unionized workers I was talking about earlier.

2. Unless you’re talking about US imperialism and its devastating effects, generally avoid stuff like geopolitics and, more specifically, trying to convince people that China is a good country. You need to meet people where they are, starting what the material reality around them and their interests. Usually defending China isn’t where they’re at. But you did do a good job of deflecting it back to america.

Feel free to ask questions, criticize, disagree, etc with anything I said.

Well the PAVN did win the war, but Vietnam was forced to abandon revolutionary society and enter the capitalist dominated world economy of privatization, free trade, debt, commodity/labor export, and resource extraction, so American capitalism did win in the end even if they lost the war. Not to mention the billions made for defense contractors.

Vietnam is a part of 15 Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). This is opening markets like South Korea where, more than seven years after implementing the VKFTA, Vietnam has become the third largest mango supply market for S. Korea, reaching 1.7 thousand tons. This is equal to US$7.4 million.

As a result of the EVFTA that is now in place, Vietnam has also become the largest source of cashew nuts for the EU. In the first 10 months of 2022, Vietnam exported 98.97 thousand tons of cashews to European markets, worth US$699 million. This represents an increase of 9.8 percent over the same period in 2021.

[…] There are, however, a number of government incentives supporting the agricultural sector, as well as FTAs, that, though a challenge in many ways, are also opening up foreign markets to Vietnamese agricultural products.

Src: https://www.vietnam-briefing.com/news/vietnam-agricultural-products.html/

While foreign companies are not allowed to directly own land in Vietnam (they must pay rent) it seems there’s a lot of foreign participation in the agricultural center (cited from the same article):

Three firms that have been relatively successful in the Vietnamese market are Cargill, Olam, and the Louis Dreyfus Company

Now as expected these “free trade” agreements and foreign corps contribute to the exploitation of workers, including children:

The last official survey to assess child labour in Vietnam was undertaken in 2018 with the Second National Child Labour Survey. The survey found that more than 1 million children aged between 5-17 were engaged in child labour and it is estimated that over 50 percent of those children were working in the agricultural, forestry, and fishery sectors

[…] As part of the assessment, we spoke to a range of people involved in the pepper harvest and visited the plantations first-hand. During this trip we met Y.D.A, an 11-year-old boy from an ethnic minority group who was working on the plantations with his parents and had never been to school. In many ways, Y.D.A. became a symbol of the unknown numbers of children in rural Vietnam who too were out of school due to poverty, working and making “invisible” contributions to an international company’s supply chain.

src: https://www.childrights-business.org/impact/child-labour-in-vietnam-s-agriculture-sector-the-story-of-one-boy-in-vietnam-the-fate-of-millions-of-children-worldwide.html

So yeah let’s stop pretending the world situation is still 1976, vietnam is a still imperialised country with a long way to go in the process of national soverignty, anti imperialism, workers’ rights, education, and socialism.

E; Just had a further thought that the Vietnamese victory in their wars of liberation is more comparable to the British leaving India than say, the establishment of USSR