“I am a citizen of Pyongyang. I can’t understand [RoK] keeping me away from my husband and daughter and parents for seven years. Please send me back now to the arms of my family who love me.” (x)
Kim was tricked into defecting from DPRK to RoK in 2011 by a human trafficker (referred to as a “broker” due to imperial media influence). After RoK govt released Kim into RoK society, the trafficker tricked her again, forcing her to give up half her $6000 settlement allowance.
Human traffickers harass DPRK defectors even after the latter arrive in RoK. Additionally, evangelical Christians target defectors throughout and after their mandatory sequestration period at Hanawon, RoK’s center for newly arrived defectors.
Many DPRK defectors are trafficked or tricked into coming to RoK and are particularly vulnerable. It seems that RoK government entrusts evangelical protestant churches with controlling the new arrivals and instilling in them a positive view of life under U.S. occupation.
One DPRK defector says that during her stay in Hanawon, defectors were subjected daily to sermons by a pastor from the evangelical Christian Council of Korea. She doesn’t mention Catholic or Buddhist services’ having had the same place of privilege.
The Christian Council of Korea has actually lobbied against RoK having operational control of its own military (OPCON). They argue that the US should control RoK’s military until “peace is established on the Korean Peninsula.”
In 2003, the Christian Council of Korea held a “prayer rally” in support of the US military occupation of RoK.
According to Chaneung Jung’s “Effective Evangelistic Strategies for North Korean Defectors in South Korea,” individual evangelical churches are allowed to visit Hanawon, where they begin to proselytize their targets.
Evangelical Protestant churches spare no expense to bribe the newly arrived DPRK defectors, who “typically prefer Protestants to other religious groups because of the quality of snacks and gifts” they hand out.
Immediately after DPRK defectors are released from Hanawon, they may find evangelical Christians waiting for them at their new homes. Jung praises the example set by Namseoul Grace Presbyterian Church. (“Talbukmin” = defectors)
This church “recognizes that the most effective evangelism period for [defectors] is when they leave Hanawon and take their first step into [RoK] society. So the department established a weekday evangelism team.”
The proselytizing team “wait for [a defector] at the front door of their new house. When the resident arrives, the team holds a simple worship service, cleans the house together, shares a meal, and supplies used furniture and electronics.”
According to a defector interviewed in this link, 60% to 70% of DPRK defectors leave Hanawon as Protestants, presumably evangelical. That’s obviously due to the efforts of the US and its puppets in the RoK ruling class. (x)
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Literature on the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (ČSSR)
There has been a lot of anti-communist propaganda spread about the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, particularly the 1968 Prague Spring and subsequent Warsaw Pact invasion, so I'd like to offer some more sources about Czechoslovakia which cover these topics well, are in English (unfortunately, not much socialist Czechoslovak literature has been translated into English, though I have been trying to translate some things from authors such as K. Gottwald, the first communist president, and other Czechoslovak theorists/economists) and are fully available online for free.
Most of these I have read to the end, and for the ones I haven't (I'm not really big on English-language sources), I still checked to make sure they're not actively hostile to communism, of course.
I will very likely add more, but finding communist-aligned perspectives on Czechoslovakia online is quite hard
ABOUT THE PRAGUE SPRING
Czechoslovakia and Counter-Revolution: Why the Socialist Countries Intervened
Czechoslovakia 1968: The Class Character of the Events
HISTORY
Socialism and democracy in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1948 (describes the lead-up to the February 1948 takeover)
ECONOMY
Central Planning in Czechoslovakia
Urbanization Under Socialism: The Case of Czechoslovakia
ECONOMIC REVISIONISM
(The lead-up to the Prague Spring saw the rise of many economic "reformists", in particular Ota Šik. I believe his works are important to properly understanding economics in 60s Czechoslovakia, despite my own disagreements.)
Czechoslovakia: The Bureaucratic economy
The Communist Power System
Plan and Market Under Socialism
The Third Way: Marxist-Leninist Theory and Modern Industrial Society
CRITIQUE OF ŠIK'S ECONOMIC THEORIES: From Revisionism to Betrayal: A Criticism of Ota Šik’s Economic Views
Source: This Soviet World (1936) by Anna Louise Strong
Take for instance propaganda against the study of climate change, or staying at home during a pandemic, or simply the tobacco industry muddying health research for their profits; in worst cases even the theory of evolution is thrown out the window and race realism is brought back again.
Dismantling the underlying profit motive leaves science up to people's needs and desires.
For the Soviets, this was an even sharper break with traditions. Consider peasant life in the Russian Empire: voiceless, exploited, robbed by the higher castes, seeing no point in working more than absolutely necessary as they would see no fruits of their own labor.
Source: Rude and Barbarous Kingdom (1968) by Lloyd Eason Berry
Quoting: Of the Russe Commonwealth (1591) by Giles Fletcher
Between the 1600s and the 1800s the situation improved but not drastically: serfdom only ended in 1861 and even that, formally. Serfs were made to "reimburse" their former owners before they could leave their hold, in quantities that meant many had to labor for decades. Stuck in that purgatory of poverty, pursuing science was unthinkable.
The shift from complete illiteracy to widespread scientific curiosity was so drastic that Strong even invokes Marx's concept of socialism blurring the line between mental and manual labor:
It's worth remembering that these gains are not theoretical predictions, we we see them again and again after popular revolts around the world. Socialism works.
97 million people visited Spain last year — more than double its population. They spent an average of 1375€, slightly more than the minimum wage in Spain for a month of full time work. Furthermore, almost 70% of these intend to visit again this year. This tourist mass is not equally distributed among its regions: Barcelona saw 900 tourists for every 100 residents, the Balearic Islands held 1200 tourists for every 100 residents, the Canary Islands recieved 7 times its population in tourists. To this, there is a popular reprise: "guiris go home". Barcelona's streets were not built for 10 million tourists; from the Roman grid of its historical origin to the incredibly influential ensanche (widening) of Ildefonso Cerdá, to its current periphery, they were drawn with Barcelona's residents in mind, and perhaps a healthy amount of tourism. However, the symptoms suffered by my coastal siblings are not really about the groups of clueless tourists clogging up sidewalks, plazas and beaches, as annoying as it is. Any urban center with its own metropolitan area will suffer from congestion and crowding, perfect planning notwithstanding. No, the actual ill moving more residents to the streets every year is that this mass of visitors is displacing the residents of these tourist attractors away from their neighborhoods, pushed towards a periphery that's not necessarily more affordable, just not priced for the central-northern European "expat" living with the salary and retirement of a richer country.
As disrupting as this trend is, gentrification in the form of touristification, it is hardly the fault of any of these 94 million tourists visiting in the year 2025. The tourist model of Spain in its current form finds its roots in a fascist, un-isolating Spain that has just received the "General Stabilization Plan" from John Hollister and the IMF, and is looking to wipe the memory of the Civil War and summary executions from the minds of the Europeans now, at least, nominally repulsed by the remains of the fascism that embroiled the world in a war barely a decade prior. The mayor of a small coastal village, Benidorm, sees in the prospective opening up of Spain a chance to enrich his municipality and, with the guidance and support of the dictatorship, the sol y playa (sun and beach) model of tourism is implanted, looking to appeal to as many tourists as possible with as cheap a hotel room and drinks as is possible. In a few decades time, and at a rate of generally constant growth, the Mediterranean coast of the Iberian peninsula and the Balearic and Canary archipelagos become covered in a blanket of development, whether through the monomunetal skyscrapers that now outline Benidorm's skyline or the scattered homes dotted through the mountains to its east. Today, there is, generally speaking, a continuous cord of urbanized constructions from Girona to Cádiz.
As hinted earlier, it wasn't the "middle class" tourists of Liverpool and Bremen who built these new cities and homes on the coasts. Strictly speaking, it was the workers of the construction sector, which has employed both Spaniards and migrants from Latin America and the northern half of Africa at varying proportions through the years. In a more essential sense, though, it has been the Spanish haute and middle capital and land owner class that has, through its continuous ownership of the land from the decades of the Falange, that has transformed the coastal cities and countryside. Earlier, we spoke of the streets of Barcelona. The streets of a city are usually permanent and stable; the map of Roman Barcelona can be neatly superposed on the same series or streets today, more than 2000 years later. Nothing remains, however, of the military constructions of the Roman garrison. What is contained by a city's streets is subject to a continuous renewal; owners pass on ownership, buildings are remodeled to fit new uses, new needs, and new rules. On a larger timescale, every block sheds its skin; from wood to stone, from stone to adobe, from adobe to brick and mortar, and concrete. The owners of the land and the buildings that sit atop it continuously look to make the use of their property that will ensure their own sustenance and, they all hope, growth. The open blocks of the ensanche plan of Barcelona that previously breathed through green spaces inside each one and were meant to house the 1.5 million emigrees from rural Spain have now been filled in completely or almost so with more housing to squeeze rents out of and, semi-simultaneously, changed the intended tenants from permanent residents to tourists who will remain for a month at most.
The interior of the cities more applicable to the sun and beach model (and other, smaller, models) has been internally shifted by everyone from the tiny owners of a second or third homes to the investments funds that own entire apartment blocks. The tourists only go to the extent that they are accommodated and catered to; the mutation of entire neighborhoods into glorified theme parks happened before and in parallel with the arrival of millions, not after they arrived. The tourist, in this view, is not an active agent. They are the object of desire of a landowning class not content any longer with just extracting half or more of the salary of their compatriots. The tourist brings money and, in exchange, they get a pantomime of culture, the set dressing of a play whose actors live outside the theater. The resident is alienated from their neighborhood for the sake of the tourist, who in turn is also denied what they're ostensibly paying for, which is visiting a different place where different people live. Of course, between the tourist and the resident, there is a gradient of severity, but neither gain anything meaningful. The only agent of the social relations of mass tourism that gains from this arrangement and is sufficiently incentivized to keep it this way is the local landowner and the capitalist who can enjoy highly flexibilized (read: precarious) service work from the old residents. 2.75 million Spaniards worked in the tourism industry last year.
"Guiris go home" is a popular reprise, as said earlier. It is shouted both by the mass of workers who are kicked out of their streets and by the small capital owners who are also unable to face the unsolidary predation of their bigger class siblings, those who run businesses unsuited for an area that has been designated by the major land owners, sometimes with the help of the municipal government, as one that will be used to cater to those millions upon millions of tourists. A proletarian reprise, if one were to imagine it, would strike at the actual radicular element of touristification. It would not look at the tourist but at the big and small capitalists who froth at the mouth at the idea of being able to hire the residents of a city for 39hrs a week in a contract of 30hrs in a shop that is only affordable to the tourist mass, and at the landowners, caseros, who are enabled to increase the rent of the peripheral housing slightly less than the rents of the center. This is a commonality anywhere that suffers from the illls of excessive tourist activity, tourists in the millions will only go where they are catered to. The chaining of a local population to the whims of tourist ebbs and flows in any form, from precarious hospitality work to coerced sex work (where it is worth mentioning the much more active role of the sex tourist in its perpetuation), only happens when land and capital owners are able to place their land and their workers into the relative niche that is mass tourism.
making democracy synonymous with liberal democracy is some of the most powerful propaganda the capitalist system has ever produced. people see a one party state and conclude that it's obviously not democratic, then switch off their brains without investigating how the system actually functions. but shockingly, socialist democracy doesn't follow the same model as liberal democracy, since liberal democracy is born of capitalism to serve the capitalist class
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Women in the GDR were the largest group to lose out through [German] unification. They may now have access to material goods not available before, but they have been pushed back into dependence by a dominant ideology of women serving men. In the GDR, 88 per cent of all adult women worked and another 8.5 per cent were in full-time education, which meant that 96.5 per cent took an active part in the wider social context outside the home and they also had their own income. Work was the basis for economic independence, a sense of self-worth, a place for communication and social interaction, not just a source for additional household income or, as some critics have argued, a state-imposed, obligatory activity.
Women were highly skilled - only 6 per cent had no qualification at all, as against 24 per cent of West German working women. In the GDR, 50 per cent of all jobs in medicine and law were carried out by women and a third of women worked in technical professions. Given the great importance that work represented to women in terms of their identity, unemployment on the scale, that happened after unification, had a devastating effect. Even after 20 years, on the territory of the former GDR, two thirds of the unemployed were women (in agriculture it was as much as 75 per cent) and they made up at least 70 per cent of the long-term unemployed.
Post-unification, the labour market was biased against women; men had a better chance of finding alternative work. For women over 50 it was especially difficult, and many suddenly found themselves unemployable. Women doctors over 40, who lost their jobs when the health centres - the typical form of health provision in the GDR - were closed found it difficult to set up their own practices - the typical form of health provision in the Federal Republic. Women academics too found themselves in a very difficult situation. In the highly competitive job market, where academics are chasing diminishing funds, a predictable hierarchy operates: first West German men, second East German men, third West German women, fourth East German women.
Stasi State or Socialist Paradise?, Chapter 9, by Bruni de la Motte and John Green
Two images from the series "the conditions of winter" from Russian artist Rina Voligamsi. In these two you can see Soviet Soldiers and the constellation "the big dipper"
The history of socialist movements in Amerikkka is a history of mass mobalizations around genuinely progressive demands being divided and smothered by the imperialist bourgeoisie, using the spoils of empire to buy off enough proletarians that they can unleash violence on the rest.* Crucially, this bribery has never actually produced stable prosperity for even the white working class: the economic expansion of the 1920s led to the great depression; the recovery of the New Deal and the WWII economy led to the financial crisis of the 1970s; the neo-liberal turn of the 1980s led to our present economic mire. Historically, these crises have led to outbursts of revolutionary activity, however the 1980s counterrevolution so thoroughly dismembered our left, that our new generation of activists has a long way to go.
What we are currently seeing is the slow but steady reemergence of socialist politics here, at the same time that the system of wealth production/extraction with which the bourgeoisie bribed past generations is rapidly going up in smoke. That the ruling class will soon be unable to govern in their old style is all but cerfain—how long it takes for the socialisits here to actually build a movement capable of seizing state power is the main question
*Historically, this dynamic of the dollar for some, the sword for others has been generally drawn across racial/national lines. If we are to ever overcome this, it's important to understand both the cultural experience of this phenomenon, but also the abstract economic character which reveals the mechanism and motive.
On the ideological differences between tumblr Marxist-Leninists
I know it’s a bit silly, but I wanted to spend a little time talking about the variation in positions between self-identified Marxist-Leninists on this website. Because this is a social website with all the dynamics and cliquish tendencies that come with it, the political content of arguments between MLs on specific issues has a tendency to blend with interpersonal issues and ends up being obscured to the point that it may all appear to be interpersonal drama to an outside observer. To be sure, there is no shortage of interpersonal drama among tumblr communists, and I think all of us at some time or another have taken things very personally and handled disagreements without much grace. I don’t expect that to stop any time soon, but I do find it frustrating to see people from different ML perspectives and traditions write off other positions as uninformed nonsense only driven by internet cliques. I will admit I’ve been guilty of this myself, but I’ve been thinking about it more carefully recently. So, I want to get into the substance behind some of the disagreements we see here, not because I think it will stop any disagreements but out of hope that it can help us all at least understand where the different perspectives here come from. I’m going to try to portray this as objectively as I can, and I’ll follow up with my own position later. For now, I’d just like to establish an overview of this subject.
To start, we have to acknowledge that Marxist-Leninism is not a specific set of positions, but an organizational and analytical scheme based on democratic centralism and dialectical materialism. It entails some underlying assumptions — for instance, that all states are dictatorships of the ruling class, that socialism must follow from a dictatorship of the proletariat, and that revolution is required to overthrow the ruling class, etc. — but ML organizations may reach different conclusions on strategy, priorities, and partners based on their specific conditions, organizational histories, and analyses of the current correlation of class forces. This results in a natural variation of stances between different MLs, especially those who belong to different organizations or organize in different countries. On tumblr, we see a lot of examples of such variation, and of course many users who do not participate in ML organizing who attach themselves to one or another version of ML analysis. (That’s totally fine by the way, I don’t mean that as a criticism of tumblr communists who don’t belong to an org — it’s good for the analysis of a would-be vanguard org to reach beyond its members!) The reason I am saying this is to clarify that neither of the positions I will explore is more or less ML than the other — both are conclusions that ML parties have reached through democratic centralist application of dialectical materialism, even though they aren’t necessarily being directly advanced on tumblr by the parties themselves.
So, let’s get to the substance.
The subject that causes the most conflict between tumblr MLs is internationalism, and what it means to be anti-imperialist. This reflects a very real split in the global communist movement. Here, we see most tumblr MLs (and most real-life ML organizations!) adhering to two different tendencies, which I will here refer to as Orthodox MLs and Tricontinental MLs. (These are not established terms, but I don’t know of any better names for these tendencies.) Of course, there are more tendencies than just these two, but they are two of the dominant currents among communist parties globally, and certainly the two most represented here on tumblr.
Orthodox MLs
The Orthodox ML position, as I understand it, essentially extends Lenin’s 1916 definition of imperialism to the present. Imperialism is viewed as a global economic system defined by monopoly capitalism, finance capital, and the territorial/logistical division of the world among rival imperialist camps. This position acknowledges the US-led camp as dominant, but still considers powers like Russia, China, and Iran to be imperialist competitors who should not necessarily be supported in opposition to the US (there may be conditional or tactical exceptions, but they are rare). Typically, Orthodox MLs will condemn the US camp’s aggression, but are either agnostic or hostile to the governments and organizations that lead resistance to such aggression if they are not communist themselves. For instance, they will typically affirm the right of the Palestinian people to resist Israeli aggression, and they will support the PFLP, but they will oppose Hamas as an organization and consider its Islamist character to be incompatible with working-class internationalism.
Orthodox MLs also have strict standards of what ruling communist parties are deserving of support based on whether or not they are pursuing purely socialist economics. The use of state-regulated market economies — which is the line pursued by most surviving communist-led states — is viewed as an unacceptable distortion of communist thought. In this view, current conditions are adequate for implementing a planned economy, which they view as the fundamental expression of anti-imperialism. When states like the People’s Republic of China turn to market economics for strategic purposes — including the presence of monopoly capital, finance capital, the export of capital — and compete for influence abroad, Orthodox MLs view this as a surrender to and endorsement of the imperialist system. The PRC is considered a capitalist state, regardless of the Marxist-Leninist political structures of the ruling party.
In this view, there is no anti-imperialist camp of states. The primary contradiction remains capital versus labor; national liberation struggles are important, but only insofar as they are led and waged by the working class. Anti-imperialist action only exists in the form of struggle against the ruling classes. The only enemies of the US-led camp that are viable allies are those that oppose any kind of internal capitalist development. It is important to maintain diligent criticism of any participant in the global system of imperialism and be vigilant to oppose bourgeois nationalist or state capitalist tendencies.
Tricontinental MLs
The other tendency present among tumblr MLs is what I’m here calling Tricontinental Marxism-Leninism (I am using this name to note this tendency’s roots in the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, which gathered anti-colonial and anti-imperialist forces from across Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The Tricontinental Conference is really the historical root of this tendency, and it is already frequently invoked by proponents of this framework.) (Shout out to comrade Vijay Prashad and the Tricontinental Institute.) These MLs view imperialism as substantially changed since Lenin’s definition in 1916. In this view, imperialism is no longer simply defined by the struggle for dominance between rival powers, but rather is defined by the hegemony of the United States and its allies/subordinates since 1945 (and intensified in 1991 with the collapse of the USSR). Rather than a competition of rival capitalist peers, global finance and military power are dominated by the US-led camp. This amounts to a single imperial core extracting surplus from the vast periphery (alternatively framed as the Global North which extracts wealth from the Global South). The imperial core’s control of global finance creates unequal conditions for competition, such that even other capitalist economies are burdened by structurally unequal currency exchange, crises of debt, and vulnerability to economic sanctions. States and organizations that oppose this US-led hegemonic world order are thereby considered at least tactically anti-imperialist regardless of their internal contradictions or economic structures. Support is extended to opponents of the US-led world order whether or not they are communist or socialist themselves. Any state that attempts to nationalize its resources and industries and develop them outside the direction of the US camp, even through capitalist means, is resisting the global imperialist system as it exists today.
Given this framework of imperialism, Tricontinental MLs are more sympathetic to the strategic employment of state-controlled market economics and capitalist development by communist parties in power as a means of surviving this era of imperialism defined by the singular hegemony of the US-led camp. In fact, this tendency’s stance is that doing so has proven to be an effective strategy for maintaining state power under constant assault from the imperialist camp. They see this as strategy developed by ML parties that has proved more effective at not only surviving but internally developing to the point of reducing reliance on the international economic and financial systems under the control of the US-led bloc. This option maintains communist control of state power such that a transition to planned economics can be made when US hegemony over global economics and finance does not represent such an existential threat to socialist development. In this view, even where physical and logistical conditions exist to create a centrally planned economy, geopolitical conditions may not yet exist to maintain one, as the US capacity for asymmetrical warfare is perceived as a significant threat to states openly defying the capitalist world economy. This is not to say that all MLs of the Tricontinental tendency agree completely with every aspect of such an analysis, but they see it as a viable strategy and an acceptable retreat from planned economics.
In this tendency, there is a clear imperialist camp upholding and controlling the exploitative global economy that extracts wealth from the periphery. The organizations and states that resist this camp do not necessarily make up a single camp themselves, but they are natural allies in the struggle against the imperialist system as it exists today. This means that MLs following this line of analysis will more freely support national liberation movements and economic frameworks that oppose US-led imperialist extraction, even if this means support for bourgeois nationalist or religious actors. These MLs will maintain critical support for Hamas, the People’s Republic of China, the Sahel States, the Islamic Republic of Iran, etc. etc. and treat them as allies in the anti-imperialist struggle. Internally, Tricontinental ML organizations will not shy away from critical analysis of allies, but they are highly averse to doing so in public, as they want to present themselves as reliable allies as well, who can be trusted not to slander or weaken the rhetorical position of other anti-imperialist forces. While often perceived as knee-jerk and uncritical cheerleading by Orthodox MLs, Tricontinental MLs would argue that such criticism is better handled internally, through party channels and in conversation with comrades, rather than aired on social media.
A geographic note on these tendencies
These tendencies are dominant among MLs in different geographies. The Orthodox ML tendency is particularly dominant among communist parties in Europe and parts of the former Soviet bloc. The KKE (Communist Party of Greece) is arguably the most influential party promoting this tendency, and most ML parties in Europe follow this line, with few exceptions. Outside of Europe, however, its influence is small and diminishing. By contrast, most influential Marxist-Leninist organizations in the global periphery tend more toward the Tricontinental approach. In these contexts, the US-led world order is experienced as a more immediate and significant threat than the national bourgeoisie or clerical forces. This makes sense: communist parties operating under the shadow of direct US intervention, neocolonial debt structures, or military occupation are more likely to see anti-imperialism as the immediate priority, while parties in the imperial core — where class struggle is less directly mediated by national oppression — are more inclined to focus on the capital-labor contradiction as the priority. The Orthodox tendency used to be dominant among USAmerican MLs as well, but that has been upended by the sustained growth of the PSL (Party for Socialism and Liberation), which adheres very closely to the Tricontinental framework and is driven by solidarity with comrades in the periphery. This is unusual for a party based in the imperial core, and it reflects a conscious political alignment with national liberation movements both in the Global South and within the borders of the United States.
How all of this plays out among tumblr MLs
Because nobody really uses this language to describe these tendencies, a given ML’s position may be extremely unclear — someone who describes themselves as “Marxist-Leninist” or “anti-imperialist” may well fall into either camp, but they are essentially working with different models of imperialism and conflicting levels of flexibility versus doctrinal rigidity. On a site like tumblr, where users are anonymized and generally not open about specific party affiliations, this leads to many misunderstandings between MLs working from these very different analytical viewpoints. These are usually accompanied by arguments that completely misunderstand the other position and write them off as “left communists,” “campists,” or other such thought-terminating refrains that miss the substance of the disagreement. We should continue to disagree about this — such dialogue is healthy — but I think we need to come at it from a clearer understanding of the traditions and analyses at play. I’m hoping this post will, at the very least, help clarify and contextualize some of the arguments we see around here.
I sincerely thank you if you’ve read this far! I’d like to know what you think about this framing and I welcome feedback and criticism♡
Excellent write-up! I would add that regardless of where specific ML organizations stand on this debate (which is by no means a small issue as it informs on ones collective strategy), all ML parties I know of are engaged in educating those they can reach and forming themselves for the tasks to come.
So regardless of how ugly debates and disputes can get on this platform or IRL, it is important to remember that we are closer to each other's lines than we would like to admit. And the work we have before us will unite us in some ways in the coming years and decades. So leniency and good faith exchanges will be necessary for us to get anywhere.
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Only tangentially related but I do think that the arrogance of imperial-core communists has led to a critical failing where because we have failed to organize within the imperial core to destroy the global imperial system, that it'll stay in place until we get our shit together and otherwise won't collapse, deliberately sticking their head in the sand and refusing to acknowledge that the system of global imperialism is being destroyed before our very eyes, and the only communists meaningfully contributing to it are those of the PRC, and that much of that work is being done by non-communists. The fact that they cannot acknowledge that this is happening or why, or seek to learn from these movements just because they aren't communist, is both a major cause and symptom of the fecklessness of imperial core communism.
Yes, the global imperialist order is changing, the US, Japan & Europe are in a weird place where structural methods of extracting profits are failing and new challengers are rising. But this unfortunately doesn't mean that the system of global imperialism is destroyed or even on the brink of destruction.
Faced with their own contradictions, the Western imperialists have chosen to prepare for war. The "defense budgets" of EU countries have collectively gone up 63% between 2020 and 2025, and are projected to grow even faster in the coming years. Currently sitting at 381 billion euros (450 billion dollars) which is about 7 times more than Russia. Russia is also being painted as this belligerent and barbaric country that's coming to invade Europe which is extremely effective rhetoric despite the evident hypocrisy. Japan is sitting at 58 billion dollars and is also expected to ramp up in the coming years. The US has always spent obscene amounts of military spending and have not taken the foot off the pedal. With every president they break the record of bombs dropped.
These budget increases are paired with launching military services for the youth. Who has always been reactionary but even more so now that youth unemployment is through the roof and there is no competent communist movement in most imperialist countries. Hell even some labor unions are pro-militarization as they want to protect their factories and thus their jobs.
I don't see how we're approaching the destruction of the global imperialist order when all signs point to an interimperialist war that the Western imperialists are more than happy to take part in.
My unnecessary two cents is that ppl in the imperial core are prone to viewing "benefiting from imperialism" as some sort of personal attack on their character or moral standing (& the higher moral ground they believe they have the more they resist this idea, imo) -- like you realize that its just factual. In a somewhat similar way to the principle that men as a class benefit from misogyny
The monetary plunder of imperialism on a gradient being "walled off" based on class race gender citizenship status etc. etc. does not make the imperial core a tragic outlier, this is the case in most if not all places, including places that are outside the empire. But fact of the matter is some people have imperial warfare in their countries or the ever present threat of imperial warfare in their countries and you do not, some people have to worry about imperial aggression and extraction on top of the million things that you worry about, and you do not, some people have to worry about massive currency fluctuation/degradation and the exponential impact this has on their ability to live their lives well or at all, and you do not, some people have to worry about access to minimally upwardly mobile jobs based on their ability to "speak english" regardless of what their native language may be or what the dominant language of their environment may be, and you, for the most part, do not. And on and on and on. Everything is affected. All the little or big things that add up to make some peoples' lives relatively easy and others' lives relatively impossible -- these things exist everywhere, but for those living outside the core, there's more often than not an added, significant layer of instability and insecurity and wanton destruction, alongside the pervasive feeling (and reality) of there being nowhere to go to escape from the way of things. Bc of how the world is ordered. Namely in a manner that ensures that wealth and bounty and opportunity only flows one way at the expense of the other and the gates between these places are, largely, locked off
I think feeling entitled to working in a field that has little to no productive economic output (which is not to say "makes money" those are different things) is a follow-your-dreams ideology entitlement that is indicative of ideological bourgeois attitude.
I don't think you have a right to "make it" as a petit bourgeois vtuber or fanart trinket printer. If we are to follow "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" the implicit understanding is that we make society together, collectively, and that the efficient and logical allocation of human economic resources also means that it is most desirable for the collective that we put our energy towards economic projects which collectively better humanity. for that reason, not every job has a justifiable existence, in the same way that "landlord" or "private health insurance company" don't have justifiable existences.
I can know from personal experience the unsustainable enterprise of doing something like, say, writing poetry, which has never paid my bills at all despite me being relatively successful with it and having two full books out. I don't feel entitled to writing poetry as my full-time job. we can't all be dreamers, or poets, or novelists, or whatever. at least, not necessarily as a career path for our livelihoods. society needs sanitation workers. it needs agricultural workers. it needs industrial workers. these things may not be glamorous but they provide for the very real material needs for the sustainable existence of humanity as a whole, and if we are to advocate for a socialist future, we must understand how to effectively and thoughtfully design the economy of that society.
a thoughtfully designed economy is not necessarily one where "everyone gets to follow their dreams," if those dreams do not sustainably afford valuable economic output. we are not yet in a post-scarcity world. as such, we must engage with the economic realities implicit to a world with scarcity. the attitude of "I should be able to pursue my dreams doing whatever I desire" is one which has embedded concerns which are characteristic of ideologically bourgeois entitlement. this is what I mean when I consider something to be "Follow-your-dreams ideology"
ngl i really feel like those protests where usamericans were flying vietcong flags in the late 60s were one very specific and rare occasion. the idea of usamerican leftists even mildly supporting a group or country directly fighting the US army is pretty absurd today
I was going to say Palestine but a good chunk of the pro-Palestinian protestors are not pro armed resistance.
It's the classic "I stand with the victim as long as they play their victim role within the moral boundaries I've set for them". Pair that with a total disregard for imperialism and an obsession with international law as a bastion of justice.
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all we ever do is worthless, we feed the machine, its all we do. Every day we wake up, go to work, go to school, feed the machine, we get money but in the end its a closed system, the money redirects itself to the same place everytime, the money you make from your megacorp will end up right back in your megacorps pockets. We see the news, good, bad, up down front back its all the same we don't do anything really, as long as we remain living this lie. We play by their rules, the same social media sites we use to yap about the issues are owned by the issue makers, its a theatre and they are laughing at us backstage
Lemme try and give a bit of context as I'm tired of seeing people claim that Western imperialism is just the US and it's lackeys. Europe, and its specific nations, should be understood as distinct imperialist powers. They have their own individual political and coercive means, that they can pool together through european supranational institutions. These tactics match their distinct interests and sometimes lead to inter-imperialist rivalries.
For a clearer example, I would advise to look into the Spanish social-democrats that have gained favor with online leftists as they have (very superficially) rejected US imperialism in the specific case of Iran. However, they are probably the biggest promoters of the consolidation of a european mega army. This is typical of the european social-democrat playbook : reject NATO, US hegemony etc. to build up european or domestic imperialism. LFI (La France Insoumise) is a good example of this too in France.
Lenin was right in the beginning of the 20th century and he is still right today : European capital cannot sustain its rate of profit domestically. It requires access to cheap raw materials, cheap labor, and captive markets in the periphery. The EU's institutions (Commission, Parliament, foreign policy apparatus etc.) exist in part to manage and legitimize this extraction. As such military and "security" missions like those in the Sahel, should be understood as moves to protect supply chains and political conditions favorable to European capital.
Onto the 4 horsewomen of the bourgeoisie :
Top left is Ursula von der Leyen :
President of the European Commission. Essentially the chief executive of European capital. She directly negotiates trade and partnership agreements that lock peripheral states into unequal exchange : exporting raw materials, importing finished goods. She's a big political backer to the Global Gateway initiative which is a sort of pro-european capital counter to Chinese investments.
Top right is Kaja Kallas :
Security and foreign affairs. She manages the coercive dimension of this imperialist machine, so the military and diplomatic arm that enforces compliance. The expulsion of EU missions from the Sahel represents a direct challenge to this enforcement capacity, which is why her commission's response has been hostile to this move.
Her response to the US imperialist aggression of Iran is particularly telling. Europe doesn't want to liquidate it's forces and it's current political capital in a poorly organized destabilization attempt.
Bottom is Pina Picierno (left) & Roberta Metsola (right) :
Respectively the Vice-President & President of the European Parliament. The institution serves to legitimize bourgeois interests with the veneer of liberal democracy.
Essentially serves to promote EU external missions and conditioned aid on governance criteria. This is the foundation upon which european capital stands on to extract profits.
