GenZedong

Today is a good day.

I've been meaning to watch revolutionaryth0t's content for a while now and this video of theirs was absolutely great, to the point it changed my brain chemistry, I knew socialist productions were different, but not that it was this different when compared to western cartoons I have watched. It opened my eyes to the possibilities of messaging in art outside of capital.

If anyone have recommendations, I really need to watch some more socialist productions. So far the only stuff I've watched were two Soviet movies: Soy Cuba and Solaris.

Also, I've watched some other videos from them after this one and their channel is absolutely amazing, I highly recommend it.

I've seen it recommended a few times, and I generally intend to read it no matter what (unless there is some massively concerning thing about it or the author), but given its "Maoist" stance (not necessarily the most accurate word but whatever) I find it surprising how often I've seen it recommended in generally pro-china places without rebuttel (as compared to, say, J. Sakai's settlers and Grovurr Furr's work).

Another lovely video by "DPRK Explained".

As a sort of "bonus info" in the video, he tells that the DPRK is about to ease up their restrictions of foreign travelers visiting.

Results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Sri_Lankan_parliamentary_election#Results

Part 1 here: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/6231827

I left it off just when it was getting into the juicy bone of patsocism, softly suggesting that recognizing a settler class in present-day USA is a deviation of Marxism and part of the 'purity fetish' that Carlos talks so much about.

As way of apology, please accept this picture of a series of webinars Carlos of MWM is holding soon with tickets starting at 80$:

Anyway, let's get into the rest of chapter 2 and, hopefully, chapter 3 as well which is all about China.

This is what Carlos says of the 'settler' class, which he refutes exists:

And this is what footnote 82 is (again a whole subchapter is relegated to a footnote, please have an editor look at your books before you publish them):

To make his point, Carlos reduces decolonial Marxism to Sakai -- not Fanon, Rodney, or even Césaire or Nick Estes. You are also supposed to just believe him when he says, in a footnote, that Sakai was connected to the State Dept. Certainly Sakai enjoys some popularity in online marxist circles and certainly he is not above criticism. But, his popularity is precisely online; or at least Carlos has not made any attempt to connect Sakai to present real life movements (or any movement really; his entire argument is "some people like him"). Someone said on the last thread this read like a reddit post, and it is. And it's fine. But don't make it into a book that you sell for money!

And once again I have to ask why they imagine Sakai speaks to Brazilians which begs even more questions as to why they chose to have a Portuguese edition of this book published. It makes no sense.

The rest of this section is devoted to criticizing Marcuse's position on the issue, again focusing on a single theorist at a time, and as I'm not familiar about Marcuse's thought, I can't really comment on it. This is the same shortcoming of the book as I mentioned in the previous post, that the author expects you to already be familiar with the people he talks about. Lenin used to quote the subjects of his critiques at length, faithfully conveying their theories. Carlos of MWM just says "trust me bro".

The weirdness of this book is that certainly he talks about Adorno, Marcuse, Sakai, Žižek and I'm sure plenty of other theorists he finds problems with, but... he places all of them under the umbrella term of 'western marxist', hence why I said in the previous post that he needs to define his terms properly before getting into the subject matter. I don't know a single person that is a proponent of both Adorno and Marcuse at the same time. Maybe Carlos knows some, but they seem a very rare group. In the particular, he decries entire movements based on one theorist of that movement!

There is a kinda funny part further down from the last screenshot:

It is no coincidence that you will only find ‘Marxists’ who are more critical of socialism than capitalism within the academy and media. The hegemonic order creates, finances, and proliferates controlled counter-hegemonic institutions, movements, and forces that channel popular discontent into areas which fail to substantially challenge the existing order. The ‘Marxist’ authors hailed in Western academies are but the agents through which this process of controlled counter-hegemony concretizes.

When Carlos himself is part of the academia he criticizes, but doesn't address this (he is a PhD candidate, and maybe has earned it by now).

He is certainly correct to criticize Zizek here, but again... who is this for? Who seriously listens to Zizek and bases their view of the world on him? Basically my problem with this book at this point is that it's a screed; it's not a guide to action or theory. It informs no practice; it's an exercise in intellectual masturbation, showing off how much he knows and how much he's read.

I can certainly see this book being recommended to people to 'deprogram' them from their defeatist eurocom positions, but... I don't think it will really help them. There is matter in this book, but it's so superficial that it doesn't really help. It talks about everything and thus nothing.

The above screenshot continues on this page:

Taking an entire aside to talk about the 2014 Maidan coup. This is fine, I've talked about the coup as well. But you're preaching to the choir. The people that are going to pick up this book already think Zizek is a clown, you don't have to convince them. At least that's what I think.

This is the part where he fanboys over Parenti and Losurdo, but doesn't tell you to read them directly, but instead rely on his interpretation. It's not completely wrong as a method, it's just... strange. Like he's trying to make an argument of authority. The section, which we have just entered, is titled Lessons from Parenti and Losurdo: Left-Anticommunism and the Fetish for Defeat.

There is an interesting argument to be made about CIA involvement in COINTEL operations. It's been going on for decades. And it's important to be aware of it. But this is not the topic of this book -- remember, the book is The crisis of western marxism. The CIA is important as a plot device insofar as it allows the author to dismiss the arguments of his opponents with a handwave. "Oh, you think we shouldn't support the USSR? Well guess who else thought this. The CIA! That's right: checkmate, commie". It's not serious, despite all the name-dropping and the lengthy list of citations.

There is an argument post-modernists and left-communists (Adorno etc) make today, that even if the Frankfurt school was funded by the CIA, it doesn't diminish their arguments. And this is not a wrong argument to make. If you aim to write a book pulling on your academic background, then engage with the arguments, not with their connections. In the last thread, we looked at a screenshot that stated:

As Horkheimer stated in 1967, “in America, when it is necessary to conduct a war… it is not so much a question of the defense of the homeland, but it is essentially a matter of the defense of the constitution, the defense of the rights of man.”[61: Wolfgang raushaar, ed., Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung: Von der Flaschenpost zum Molotowcocktail 1946-1995, Vol. I: Chronik (Hamburg: Rogner & Bernhard GmbH & Co. Verlags KG, 1998), 252-3. Quoted from Rockhill, “The CIA and the Frankfurt School’s Anti-Communism.”]

But some people looked into it, and found that Horkheimer likely never said this. On Adorno, I counted each instance -- he names him 11 times throughout the book (all at the beginning of chapter 2) and gives only 4 examples of his connections and things he said. He never once delved into Adorno's theories, i.e. not criticizing him on the basis of unsound theory (theory that cannot be put into practice or theory that leads to wrong practice), but on grounds of his CIA connections.

Sorry for the detour. Going back to our chapter -- the first subsection of chapter 2, this made me laugh:

Dialectics is when nuance. And he of course quotes Parenti again, which just makes me want to read him directly instead of relying on this book.

Carlos himself is not doing a nuanced (i.e. dialectical) reading of western marxism's purity fetish here. He links it to CIA involvement, professing that this is enough to make the reader nod their head in complete understanding, and no more words need to be said. He doesn't look at the contradictions of what he calls western marxists and why they would arrive to the conclusion of purity testing materially. He doesn't even engage with the idea that the purity fetish he talks so much about is wrong in the first place: he holds that to be self-evident.

He then quotes Losurdo at length after he's quoted Parenti ad nauseam and thus ends Lessons from Parenti and Losurdo: Left-Anticommunism and the Fetish for Defeat

I can't seem to be able to upload more pictures and I think this post was much more lengthy, so we'll look at the last two sections of chapter 2 next time, and hopefully be able to get into chapter 3 which talks about China because I really, really want to see what he says there. Also excited for the part where he praises the american revolution lol

The democrats don't actually care about fascism!?

Also, here are two very interesting photos

Again, "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce".

i ain't gonna lie, this is very funny

I heard that Jones Manoel wrote the preface to the new Portuguese edition which was worrying and so I downloaded a PDF copy and skimmed it.

If you don't know MWM is a patsoc 'institute', and though they try very hard to appear serious and legit they fail at that and endlessly trail behind other patsocs, namely a twitter celebrity and a twitch streamer. Must feel bad.

My thoughts are that... I don't know who this book is for? The complete title is The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism, but it doesn't really talk about Western Marxism as a movement. The author expects you to be familiar with western marxism already, i.e. having the same definition he does, and he never really expands on it. I mean, the introduction opens with the words "Western Marxism" and the definition of which is relegated to a huge footnote that honestly doesn't really say much.

He essentially expects the reader to be familiar with the subject matter already, leading me to ask again: who is this book for? It doesn't seem to try and revolutionize western marxism, so it's not addressed to them to get them to change their views. It doesn't seem to try and do anything really new, so I'm not even sure it gives arguments to people that are opposed to western marxism. If I'm already opposed to western marxism then I don't need more arguments to convince me of it. And finally it doesn't even try to excise possible remnants of western marxism in the reader?

It reads more like bourgeois philosophy. Needlessly complicated, expecting you to be familiar with the subject matter before you read the book, and being an exercise in showing the reader just how much the author knows and has read.

But don't fear, because every little bit is cited... with no more explanation. If you want to learn more about the "Hitlerite forces [who] would have been able to – as the West expected (and hoped) – trample over the ‘Judeo-Bolshevik’ menace, destroying the first worker state and the notion that working class people could, indeed, rule themselves", you will have to get a copy of Losurdo's Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend because this is not explored at all in this book. I haven't read Losurdo yet but I have to wonder if he was as roundabout in his writing as Carlos is.

The introduction, which I'm only talking about now, starts with a comparison to The Great Gatsby, which again I'm not sure is doing here. Is it to make the subject content more relatable, by comparing it to a book most people had to read in high school? It just feels haphazard and out of topic, especially as the author promptly goes into Zeno, Aristotle, Plato, Hegel, Engels, and even Darwin just to explain dialectics, because somehow western marxism's false dialectics are rectified with overly unbearable dialectics. He's not dethroning Politzer any time soon.

It offers no historical examples, no clear definitions and topical explorations, instead laying out a bunch of broadly-connected segues from one topic to the next, relying on a definition of 'western marxism' that will certainly speak to many people, but is never once established.

I'm including the whole page so you can judge for yourself, but this is where the author speaks for the first time about Adorno and Horkheimer. He expects you to be familiar with them and everything around them -- the time period they wrote in, what they wrote about, who for, etc. The job of the writer is to persuade the audience. If you're starting from the premise that we're already persuaded, then, again, who is your book for?

The author insists that the two were western marxists, with claims such as:

This same duo, today promoted as Marxism par excellence in the academy, supported the US’s barbaric invasion of Vietnam with the sort of rhetoric commonly heard from the most far-right elements of US politics.

But why? Why is it important that they did that, and why did they do that? Why does academia today uphold them as 'marxism par excellence'? Why is it important for the reader to know about them? Why did you choose to mention them -- clearly you had a reason to pick these two over other examples?

We never get an answer. Instead, he segues into his next point like so:

The paradox here is that, on the subject of the Soviet system, the CIA was itself to the ‘left’ of these ‘Marxists.’ As a 1955 CIA document, accessible thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, says

Even in Stalin’s time there was collective leadership. The Western idea of a dictator within the Communist setup is exaggerated. Misunderstandings on that subject are caused by lack of comprehension of the real nature and organization of the Communist power structure. Stalin, although holding wide powers, was merely the captain of a team.[68]

The only link between his first and second point is the CIA. There's no more explanation. This is word association; the CIA was mentioned in point 1, so we can mention it in point 2. But the two arguments are so different as to not be connected at all.

When I ask who is this book for, there is perhaps the beginning of an answer later on:

But, this is enough for one session and I will maybe look at all of this later in a second post. There's also a whole chapter on China.

It's actually interesting that this book has been translated to Portuguese (I assume for the Brazilian audience) because... I really can't tell who this is for. Who will this speak to in Brazil. Who in Brazil will be familiar with The Great Gatsby and also care about US problems. To be honest I think they just wanted to show off on this with the Jones Manoel preface. Just like they show off with all the citations from Rockhill, Hegel, Parenti (which he cites more than 7 times almost consecutively), Prashad, etc. Very basic patsoc tactic complemented by the usual Dugin mysticism of being so broad and vague you can be interpreted in many different ways.

As the cherry on top, this book is 143 pages long in its official PDF format, including the references index at the end (of which there are over 200), and the word 'purity' appears 154 times -- a little bit over one instance per page!

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/6219619

I’m currently writing an article for a newspaper and one of the subsections revolves around a societal responsibility towards propaganda; especially racial or ideologically Nazi propaganda as in the example of Jud Suß.

For this, I wanted to discuss the Soviet reaction to Protocols as the book was a product of the Russian Empire and served as a driving justification for Nazi racial propaganda, making the Soviet reaction towards the book potentially very useful to my article.

I’ve found very little information regarding this, and thought it would makes sense to ask if anyone here has any sources as to the Soviet reaction to the book or if it was banned? English or Russian would do as I can read both.

I drew the Dominican republic in this because of convenience, easier for me to represent, this applies to all colonies

Red Pen is a great Marxist-Leninist YouTuber. This video is a great overview of Xi Jinping's Governance of China.

Red Pen has many great such summaries. Favorites of mine are:

• Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti, Part 1 and Part 2

Muslims won't vote for the people who kill their relatives 😦😦😦😱

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/6209678

Check it out.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/6201734

Interesting analysis.