★

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.

. . .

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.

. . .

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.

. . .

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.

. . .

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. [...]

[...] the propagandist, dealing with, say, the question of unemployment, must explain the capitalistic nature of crises, the cause of their inevitability in modern society, the necessity for the transformation of this society into a socialist society, etc. In a word, he must present “many ideas”, so many, indeed, that they will be understood as an integral whole only by a (comparatively) few persons. The agitator, however, speaking on the same subject, will take as an illustration a fact that is most glaring and most widely known to his audience, say, the death of an unemployed worker’s family from starvation, the growing impoverishment, etc., and, utilising this fact, known to all, will direct his efforts to presenting a single idea to the “masses”, e.g., the senselessness of the contradiction between the increase of wealth and the increase of poverty; he will strive to rouse discontent and indignation among the masses against this crying injustice, leaving a more complete explanation of this contradiction to the propagandist. Consequently, the propagandist operates chiefly by means of the printed word; the agitator by means of the spoken word. The propagandist requires qualities different from those of the agitator.

This is in the context of a polemic with Rabocheye Delo, over the conceptions of economist and political struggle. The question of agitation and propaganda is more of a side question due to the newspaper's attempt to deepen or correct the view defended by Plekhanov and later Lenin, which in this book only appears as a single sentence (a quotation within a quotation):

A propagandist presents many ideas to one or a few persons; an agitator presents only one or a few ideas, but he presents them to a mass of people.

Rabocheye Delo essentially attempts to define agitation by the fact that it proposes immediate action to the masses, whereas Lenin defends that both propaganda and agitation have this element.

Besides the seminal approach to economic and policial struggle established in this chapter, the question of what propaganda and agitation actually are has always felt very incomplete and excessively schematic or formalist. Luckily, Rabocheye Delo has the decency to mention the work they're quoting Plekhanov in: Tasks of the Socialists in the Fight Against the Famine in Russia. Published in 1892, this text was one of, if not the text that essentially germinated into the strategy and tactics of the Bolshevik party, even if Plekhanov himself was a decided Menshevik, about a decade after writing these lines. This work was surprisingly (to me) not in marxists.org, and it took more time to search for the original text in full than I would have expected for such an important piece of bokshevik history. Even then I could only find the full thing on a trotskyist blog with pretty useless comments from a "Sean Matgamna". It is also uploaded by itself to scribd, but missing the first half of the text, which contextualizes the exposition of agitation and propaganda.

As a summary (though I highly recommend reading it), Plekhanov does not really make such a compartmentalized distinction between agitation and propaganda. One bleeds into the other; agitation is a form of propaganda for Plekhanov, and agitation is the goal of propaganda. Agitation isn't simply giving speeches and putting up posters, it is the tool with which the Party makes its intended leadership real, the transmission that allows communists to interface with the total of the working class, and aid in its historical, revolutionary movement. Agitation, nevertheless, isn't "telling the masses what's what" in a paternalistic sense. The agitator "gives the mass nothing". The skill of agitation is being able to put into words and plans of action the will that is already present among workers, of not saying too little (and becoming an "agitator-brake") and not saying too much (and being ridiculous and maximalist).

Propaganda's only purpose is to make agitation possible. Its effects are limited quantitatively, since it is only ever intended for a reduced, already "agitated" audience, but great qualitatively; agitators for the Party become so when they've become convinced of the communist programme, by the means of propaganda. Through the continuous reciprocal movement between agitation and propaganda, the Communist Party is built from and within the working class itself; a gradual, and then accelerated, actualization of portions of the working class which subsequently turn to their class as a whole, to start the cycle again. It is the self-reproduction of class consciousness.

It gets worse

In a meeting that would have been unthinkable under the Maduro government, U.S.-backed interim President Delcy Rodríguez posed with an israeli delegation, just months after Washington's military operation kidnapped Nicolás Maduro and installed Rodríguez. israel, which celebrated Maduro's removal as the "removal of the dictator", now deepens ties with Caracas, a normalisation that betrays Venezuela's 17-year principled stance breaking relations with israel in 2009 over Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.

The meeting signals israel and the U.S. are tightening their grip on Venezuela's U.S.-installed leadership, using humanitarian aid as a cover for political rapprochement with a government that owes its existence to American military intervention