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ph. Danko Maksimovic - Dortmund, Germany (2025)

ph. Danko Maksimovic - Essen, Germany (2026)

More than a third of a century after the liberation of leftists from that 'iron cage', where exactly has the slew of glorious new revolutions built on innovative theories been? Why is every single major surviving and thriving socialist state led by a vanguard party that upholds the legacy of the Soviet Union as a monumentally positive influence? Why is the left, supposedly freed from the shackles of doctrine produced by an actual revolutionary superpower, struggling with a record degree of disorganization, alienation and dilution in the face of new fascisms?

The only 'liberation' that the fall of the USSR created for the left was the freedom to peddle ahistorical, revisionist and dilettantish nonsense dressed up in the robes of bold new theories, the freedom to engage in asinine debates on basic points clarified long ago by Soviet theory and practice, and the freedom to practice the kind of rank opportunism among imperial core leftists that leads inevitably into either malnourished social democracy or shameless social fascism.

Without seriously studying and examining the USSR in all its history- not just till Lenin's death, but right up to its final decade- as a serious socialist project that worked as a positive force in the world, made sincere attempts to combat imperialism, contended with serious internal and external issues of encirclement and revisionism that all successful socialist parties shall inevitably face, and produced, despite its ultimate failure, an incredibly diverse body of data and experience that is of vital educational value for the left, there will be no socialist movement that can surpass its achievements. The path beyond the USSR's era is not away from it, but through it, through an honest and comprehensive engagement with its tactics, struggles, errors, reversals and strategies, carried out from a place of deep engagement with the material and ideological conditions that it had to navigate, not with some projected fantasy of what it could have been.

Sacra di San Michele  X-XI century, Piedmont (northwestern Italy)

Iran launched a large-scale wave of retaliatory military operations targeting Washington’s assets in Jordan, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, and Bahrain early on 12 July, following an overnight US escalation involving heavy strikes against the Islamic Republic.

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The IRGC also announced a heavy attack on the logistical support centers and refueling platforms for US aircraft carriers at the Port of Duqm in Oman. It added that, in addition to striking and disabling a second non-compliant vessel in the Strait of Hormuz, it targeted the Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar with ballistic missiles. The statement said the strikes “destroyed” the base's fighter maintenance and repair center and its command-and-control center.

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Iran’s military made separate announcements detailing its attacks on a Patriot air defense system, ammunition depot, and radar site belonging to the US military in Kuwait.

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The US escalation began early on Sunday. Explosions were reported across the southern Iranian coast, including the port city of Bandar Abbas, Sirik, Chabahar, and Asaluyeh.

At least a dozen blasts were heard across southern Iran’s Bushehr Province during the US attack.

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This golden age for Western governing elites nevertheless bred potential problems for their class rule. First, the very transformation of asset wealth on which the new elite floated threatened to fracture the internal coherence of the ruling classes, for whom wealth, power and territory had traditionally gone hand in hand. The effects of economic globalization—bringing foreign-institutional ownership of national assets and the dilution of local capitalist classes, amid the swirl of international funds—has also broken the previous links of kinship and culture between state elites and asset-owners.

On the hori​zontal plane, meanwhile, the governing classes struggle to craft cohesion between different fractions of capital and help asset owners articulate interests across sectoral or geographic lines. This in turn renders strategic coherence difficult—something evident in the geo-economic tumult of the past year, from the tariff bonanza to the destruction of Gulf oil-and-gas infrastructure and terrorization of the low-wage migrant workforce. [...]

First, the reading proposed does not imply elite control over the social surplus has somehow diminished; there are good grounds to say it has increased. Yet the political unmooring of Western elites has widened the gaps between different fractions of capital and made long-term planning across them more difficult. Hence Krastev’s wonder over Trump’s ‘revolutionary sense of temporality’—an actor who has mercilessly seized on the apertures left by vanishing elite integrators, whose smash-and-grab politics at least promises direct gain. As the model hyperpolitician, Trump seems to offer easy rewards in the sordid struggle over rents. [...]