Economics 🧵 on the national situation in the US, from a Marxist Leninist. The US budget deficit is at $1.4T in 2023 and is projected to grow to $2T in future years. In years past, the US could easily plug the deficit by issuing bonds (treasuries).
Seeing white people go from being in awe of riots in France a few months ago in response to the raised retirement age to saying racist shit about the riots today in response to an Arab teen being killed by cops is unsurprising.
“If those police officers were white”… is the wrong takeaway from MPD killing of Tyre Nichols. The even bigger takeaway is that police “looking like us” does not change the class character of the police under capitalism
If capitalism relies on the superstructure -- ie music, art -- to maintain itself, then it follows that artists under capitalism, unless class conscious themselves, inherently create art that reinforces capitalism.
You can study Marxism intensely for years and still barely scratch the surface. This is why reactionaries and liberals who critique it are not worth your time.
Abolitionists celebrating Tate getting arrested really shows that even they believe that carceral institutions have a place in class society. The issue is who those institutions are wielded on behalf of.
Becoming a communist takes so much intellectual humility. To have read and been surrounded by the mountain of radlib hogwash and to say, I really know nothing, before picking up your first theory read, is admirable.
Lol I was talking to liberals today about how Ukraine is a neocolony and has no sovereignty. I literally showed them documents from a coalition of corporations and nation-states laying out their plans for privatization of state assets. They said I was conspiratorial 🤣
China and Russia state owned companies invested $1.4 billion in Bolivia to build up its lithium extraction, processing, and finishing in the form of lithium ion batteries — all to be internally contained within Bolivia
Lots of ppl are being semantic in the replies. Truly good film with sharp social commentary is the exception and not the rule. It goes without saying that there are gems, most of which come from beyond Hollywood
The idea that it's on white wage workers to give financial reparations to Black people -- even if, say, a white wage worker may be making less than a Black person -- obfuscates the class basis of oppression and lets the bourgeoisie off scot free.
When ppl say police uphold a “white supremacist order” then the only solution one can surmise is changing hearts and minds, an impossible endeavor. Better to say police enforce capitalist class relations, upon which yt supremacy thrives. There, solution is clear: end capitalism
Communists should learn about the strategic alliance Chinese communists had to strike with the Kuomintang (national bourgeoisie) to liberate itself from Japanese imperialism. It's helpful in understanding the importance of the principal contradiction and combating ultra-leftism.
It's important to bring this up bc a lot of artists consider themselves political radicals when rlly they're purveyors of petty bourgeois radicalism. Idealism, nihilism, formlessness -- all are rampant themes in today's artists. All serve to reinforce capitalism.
“You’re getting angry. Could it be that you let this contradiction sit for too long to say anything, and now it’s an antagonistic, and you’re placing blame onto me for your lack of communication??”
But class consciousness and revolutionary art cannot emerge separate from the movement. They arise from being among the people, engaging in class struggle, & political education.
Ultimately, capitalist prisons are for oppressing the proletariat. If we’re to have any hope of repressing and even ending the basis for people like Tate to exist, we need socialism
These sorts of investments from China and Russia in global south countries demonstrate a qualitative shift: global south countries now have non-coercive avenues to build up their productive forces, which ultimately cuts off the export of western capital
I implicate my past self in this. As revolutionary art is still uncharted waters in the US, the sharpness of that art will develop in tandem with the sharpness of the political struggle.
In all likelihood, Tate will go off easy — whether through some backdoor deal for extradition or a weak sentence. And even if he does time, he won’t be restored, and he’ll later profit off of whatever martyrdom he gained from his heinous following.
You gotta ditch that idealist abolition literature that talks about “imagining” a future funded by big time book publishers and start reading some ML shit
Threads like these is why I use Twitter less these days. So many ultra takes that are ultimately pointless when you're in the imperial core. Not to mention, such a weak material analysis tbh
A radlib said to me that Putin is fascist because of his anti LGBTQ rhetoric. My brother in Christ, the Polish government literally represses women and queer people and like 90 municipalities and regions deem themselves “LGBT ideology free”
People who hate on Russia and Putin from the “left,” always getting their info from bourgeois media, don’t understand dialectics. Even if Putin can have reactionary subjective ideas, the objective conditions can force him into a progressive position — hence a contradiction
am getting some weird likes on this thread. just bc i said "white privilege" isn't real doesn't mean white supremacy isn't a mf scourge on this country that's the biggest hurdle to socialist revolution
Yes, we should absolutely demand that white workers struggle against white supremacy alongside us, but to place the onus of reparations on them is essentially a petty bourgeois pseudo-solution that doesn't strike at the heart of the issue
Still thinking about the Guerrilla History episode where they brought on a professor to talk about Burkina Faso, Sankara, and communism, and it was an extremely informative episode only to be totally ruined by the guest's ill-informed "China is capitalist" Trotskyite stuff lol
Losurdo masterfully laying out in his book on Stalin how abstract universalism can serve as a progressive force during a revolutionary movement and later a hindrance after the revolution when a new, concrete world must be built
I have a family member who's deep in the Black capitalism shit like he owns his own coffee company and hosts seminars for Black "entrepreneurs," should I beat him up
The university intellectual doesn’t act as an individual but is a conduit of bourgeois ideology. This shows that capitalists would rather exterminate the elderly than give up the means of production which they can no longer meaningfully grow under this mode of production
A Yale economics professor has some ideas for how to deal with the burdens of Japan’s rapidly aging society. The “only solution,” he said, is mass suicide of the elderly, including ritual disembowelment.
Corny liberal who thinks it’s ”so beautiful” how their immigrant friends “chose” to settle down in the US “for a better life,” neglecting to acknowledge how US foreign policy destroyed their home country and forced them to uproot their lives and come here in the first place
@nebula_kirby
Yeah they just deflect to Russia and say Ukraine is just defending itself bla bla but then whenever I say the Ukrainians they claim to care about are getting screwed over it’s crickets. Liberals’ framework can only conceive of the nation state as a monolith
We would all be so much farther along as a movement if ppl just read Lenin’s State & Revolution. The lack of direction in this country is a reflection of the lack of theory
Russia grinding Ukraine down slowly and draining the west’s finances and weaponry to where it can’t even really help the zionists or any other puppet regime. A master stroke.
The Economic Freedom Fighters party in South Africa (the third largest party in the country and identify as Marxist Leninist Fanonists) have called for a general strike on Monday 😵
Looool. Shock doctrine was an important book in my political development, but yeah, I revisited that Poland chapter recently and it was anti-communist cringe. Never trust them book deal “leftists”
@linton_6
@EmilyZFeng
They started dumping those bonds (fell below $1 trillion for the first time since 2010), and they’re negotiating with the Saudis to do their oil trade in yuan. Sounds like a government that actually has the capability to plan its future
@alwaysdastudent
Like I said elsewhere in the thread, it doesn’t need to be a competition. White ppl on the whole would benefit from ending capitalism just like oppressed nationalities would. Capitalism is a net negative for all workers
Actually talking to the masses will show you that there will never be a spontaneous revolution, and if you ascribe to that idea, it tells me you don’t actually organize
It's hard to imagine a white person having this kind of politics and not having some sort of complex about it. Rather than seeing mutual interest in destroying white supremacy and capitalism, it leads white people to infantilize Black ppl and self flagellate before them