#what do you think your anti-communist histories are?

[damnesdelamer]

‘Socialism has never worked’?

What do you call Russia, China, and Cuba functionally eradicating homelessness and illiteracy in their respective spheres within a few years of the massive upheaval of revolution, and radically improving the living conditions of millions after generations of poverty? What do you call the Soviet Union bearing the brunt of the greatest military conflict the world has ever seen and emerging victorious? What do you call the Soviet Union holding out for four decades of sustained military and economic warfare against the greatest military and economic superpower the world has ever known? What do you call Vietnam defeating the greatest military empire the world has ever known in its anti-imperialist resistance campaign? What do you call China emerging from the 20th Century as the most populous country on earth with the highest GDP? What do you call China reducing daily covid numbers to double digits in a population of 1.4 billion? What do you call Cuba thriving after six decades of brutal embargoes? What do you call Cuba passing the most progressive and practically protective legislation for family and LGBT rights in a world historical moment marked by increased LGBTphobia among the Western powers? What do you call the people of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe shrugging off the muck of ages to usher in an era of progress, all while Western powers conspire to sabotage them at every turn while growing fat off the earth they’ve scorched?

I’d ask what history books you’re reading, but I know that you’re not reading any, and the only information you have on the subject is spoon-fed into your colonised mind by the people’s enemies, whose vested interest in fabricating events is readily apparent to any who bother to look into these things.

‘Socialism has never worked’? It has been one of the dominant political-economic models of the past century, and has made drastic strides on every front despite its relative infancy and constant opposition from Western superpowers. If you fear socialism, what do you really fear? Socialism is the people. Socialism is me; socialism is you; socialism is all of us, together.

‘Socialism has never worked’? Socialism has always worked. Socialism is working right now. We will see socialism work again, always.

[specialagentartemis]

I get variations on this comment on my post about history misinformation all the time: "why does it matter?" Why does it matter that people believe falsehoods about history? Why does it matter if people spread history misinformation? Why does it matter if people on tumblr believe that those bronze dodecahedra were used for knitting, or that Persephone had a daughter named Mespyrian? It's not the kind of misinformation that actually hurts people, like anti-vaxx propaganda or climate change denial. It doesn't hurt anyone to believe something false about the past.

Which, one, thanks for letting me know on my post that you think my job doesn't matter and what I do is pointless, if it doesn't really matter if we know the truth or make up lies about history because lies don't hurt anyone. But two, there are lots of reasons that it matters.

It encourages us to distrust historians when they talk about other aspects of history. You might think it's harmless to believe that Pharaoh Hatshepsut was trans. It's less harmless when you're espousing that the Holocaust wasn't really about Jews because the Nazis "came for trans people first." You might think it's harmless to believe that the French royalty of Versailles pooped and urinated on the floor of the palace all the time, because they were asshole rich people anyway, who cares, we hate the rich here; it's rather less harmless when you decide that the USSR was the communist ideal and Good, Actually, and that reports of its genocidal oppression are actually lies.

It encourages anti-intellectualism in other areas of scholarship. Deciding based on your own gut that the experts don't know what they're talking about and are either too stupid to realize the truth, or maliciously hiding the truth, is how you get to anti-vaxxers and climate change denial. It is also how you come to discount housing-first solutions for homelessness or the idea that long-term sustained weight loss is both biologically unlikely and health-wise unnecessary for the majority of fat people - because they conflict with what you feel should be true. Believing what you want to be true about history, because you want to believe it, and discounting fact-based corrections because you don't want them to be true, can then bleed over into how you approach other sociological and scientific topics.

How we think about history informs how we think about the present. A lot of people want certain things to be true - this famous person from history was gay or trans, this sexist story was actually feminist in its origin - because we want proof that gay people, trans people, and women deserve to be respected, and this gives evidence to prove we once were and deserve to be. But let me tell you a different story: on Thanksgiving of 2016, I was at a family friend's house and listening to their drunk conservative relative rant, and he told me, confidently, that the Roman Empire fell because they instituted universal healthcare, which was proof that Obama was destroying America. Of course that's nonsense. But projecting what we think is true about the world back onto history, and then using that as recursive proof that that is how the world is... is shoddy scholarship, and gets used for topics you don't agree with just as much as the ones you do. We should not be encouraging this, because our politics should be informed by the truth and material reality, not how we wish the past proved us right.

It frequently reinforces "Good vs. Bad" dichotomies that are at best unhelpful and at worst victim-blaming. A very common thread of historical misinformation on tumblr is about the innocence or benevolence of oppressed groups, slandered by oppressors who were far worse. This very frequently has truth to it - but makes the lies hard to separate out. It often simplifies the narrative, and implies that the reason that colonialism and oppression were bad was because the victims were Good and didn't deserve it... not because colonialism and oppression are bad. You see this sometimes with radical feminist mother goddess Neolithic feminist utopia stuff, but you also see it a lot regarding Native American and African history. I have seen people earnestly argue that Aztecs did not practice human sacrifice, that that was a lie made up by the Spanish to slander them. That is not true. Human sacrifice was part of Aztec, Maya, and many Central American war/religious practices. They are significantly more complex than often presented, and came from a captive-based system of warfare that significantly reduced the number of people who got killed in war compared to European styles of war that primarily killed people on the battlefield rather than taking them captive for sacrifice... but the human sacrifice was real and did happen. This can often come off with the implications of a 'noble savage' or an 'innocent victim' that implies that the bad things the Spanish conquistadors did were bad because the victims were innocent or good. This is a very easy trap to fall into; if the victims were good, they didn't deserve it. Right? This logic is dangerous when you are presented with a person or group who did something bad... you're caught in a bind. Did they deserve their injustice or oppression because they did something bad? This kind of logic drives a lot of transphobia, homophobia, racism, and defenses of Kyle Rittenhouse today. The answer to a colonialist logic of "The Aztecs deserved to be conquered because they did human sacrifice and that's bad" is not "The Aztecs didn't do human sacrifice actually, that's just Spanish propaganda" (which is a lie) it should be "We Americans do human sacrifice all the god damn time with our forever wars in the Middle East, we just don't call it that. We use bullets and bombs rather than obsidian knives but we kill way, way more people in the name of our country. What does that make us? Maybe genocide is not okay regardless of if you think the people are weird and scary." It becomes hard to square your ethics of the Innocent Victim and Lying Perpetrator when you see real, complicated, individual-level and group-level interactions, where no group is made up of members who are all completely pure and good, and they don't deserve to be oppressed anyway.

It makes you an unwitting tool of the oppressor. The favorite, favorite allegation transphobes level at trans people, and conservatives at queer people, is that we're lying to push the Gay Agenda. We're liars or deluded fools. If you say something about queer or trans history that's easy to debunk as false, you have permanently hurt your credibility - and the cause of queer history. It makes you easy to write off as a liar or a deluded fool who needs misinformation to make your case. If you say Louisa May Alcott was trans, that's easy to counter with "there is literally no evidence of that, and lots of evidence that she was fine being a woman," and instantly tanks your credibility going forward, so when you then say James Barry was trans and push back against a novel or biopic that treats James Barry as a woman, you get "you don't know what you're talking about, didn't you say Louisa May Alcott was trans too?" TERFs love to call trans people liars - do not hand them ammunition, not even a single bullet. Make sure you can back up what you say with facts and evidence. This is true of homophobes, of racists, of sexists. Be confident of your facts, and have facts to give to the hopeful and questioning learners who you are relating this story to, or the bigots who you are telling off, because misinformation can only hurt you and your cause.

It makes the queer, female, POC, or other marginalized listeners hurt, sad, and betrayed when something they thought was a reflection of their own experiences turns out not to be real. This is a good response to a performance art piece purporting to tell a real story of gay WWI soldiers, until the author revealed it as fiction. Why would you want to set yourself up for disappointment like that? Why would you want to risk inflicting that disappointment and betrayal on anyone else?

It makes it harder to learn the actual truth.

Historical misinformation has consequences, and those consequences are best avoided - by checking your facts, citing your sources, and taking the time and effort to make sure you are actually telling the truth.

[999-roses]

The political speech of the Chinese diaspora has a long history as a site of critique and co-optation by U.S empire and its enabling discourses. Amidst a new apex in Cold War Sinophobia, we trace the revolutionary and reactionary framings of “overseas Chinese” as a political category, from Qing-era anti-colonialism to 20th century Cold War liberalism and beyond.

I think I just gotta straight up post this article more frequently whenever anti-China diaspora like to do the whole song and dance. Point being, "take it from me, that's where I'm from, China is bad!" isn't new at all, and it's part of the long and extended project of assimilation of diaspora into the empire. And it's not just some process that happens passively, many diaspora groups, both historically and presently, are active participants.

Just because you're of X heritage doesn't mean you actually know your history, at least without the filter of the liberal and anti-communist epistemology. I grew up in Texas so what little I was formally taught or gleaned from adults, I spackled in the holes with assumptions formed out of the liberal of the society I lived in. For diaspora in the west, this is the default, and it develops into a sort of background radiation of sinophobia: authoritarianism just like my heavy-handed parents sucks! confucianism is anti-feminist! communist brainwashing etc etc. But why buy into "oh the people back in the mainland are brainwashed" (and therefore untrustworthy sources) narrative? Why would your distance and unfamiliarity grant you more credence as a Knower of History and Truth? Why does "authoritarianism" only ever apply to the accused but never even considered for the accuser? And funniest of all, applying dynastic era history to modern China as a whole - as if that means that the present day systems after more recent history aren't relevant - acting like the "backwards" people back in the motherland would be happy to go back to that era.

[read-marx-and-lenin]

hey, two questions.

1) do you have any good resources on art & marxism? im currently studying art history from the western/capitalist perspective and im looking to read the materialist perspective aswell. rn i know of john berger.

2) as a stalinist, what are your opinions on art or socialist realism?

I don't know of any particular works. Art history has never been a focus of mine. If anyone else has any suggestions, please leave them in the notes.

I don't consider "Stalinism" to be a real thing. It's an anti-communist boogeyman, like "authoritarianism" and "totalitarianism". I don't think Stalin made any major theoretical breaks from Lenin, he simply had a lot more experience with the practical side than Lenin did since he lived so much longer. The Stalin years, especially pre-war, exhibited some of the most progressive and radical social developments in the history of the USSR, many of which would not be seen again after his death and Khrushchev's de-Stalinization campaign. Obviously he was not the sole person responsible for this, he was never a dictator as so many anti-communists claim, and there were conservative elements during this period too such as the re-criminalization of homosexuality in the Soviet Union. But despite Stalin's flaws, it was the USSR under his leadership that succeeded in so many ways and demonstrated the possibility of long-lasting socialism to the world.

On the subject of Stalin, I recommend Pat Sloan's "Soviet Democracy" for an account of life in the USSR in the mid-1930s and to see why I deemed the period to be especially progressive. I recommend Anna Louise Strong's "The Stalin Era" for a much larger historical account of the USSR under Stalin, which goes into WW2 and the post-war period, including his death and a few years after it. And this one is a bit controversial, and I must admit I have not taken the time to go through it myself to a satisfactory degree since it is very dense, but I suggest that you read Grover Furr's "Khrushchev Lied" because it is the only work I know of that takes the effort to examine the claims Khrushchev made in his "Secret Speech" in detail.

When it comes to socialist realism, what comes to mind for me is a scene in a documentary called "My Brothers and Sisters in the North" (timestamp at 37:31 included in the link), about a woman from South Korea documenting her experiences traveling in North Korea. She meets with and interviews an artist there who is in the middle of creating a socialist realist painting, and asks him why he only paints beauty and why he doesn't paint "nastiness" and "ugliness". He simply says that he paints beauty because he enjoys it, because he's good at it, and because he wants to bring joy to other people. I don't see any reason why I should take stock in the typical Western narrative about artists under socialism being forced into narrow genres (and to be clear, I am not accusing you of holding this view). Socialist realist art has never been the only form of art to emerge out of the socialist world, and at the end of the day, socialist countries have been far more enthusiastic about giving artists the resources and opportunities they need to create than capitalist countries ever have.

[tom-hossain-minis]

Holy shit politics tumblr what the fuck. Are there no communists on this site? Or people with memory greater than that of dory from finding nemo ? Does nobody recall every promise Biden not only broke but actively did the opposite of what he said he was gonna do? And I also have to ask, and I’m sorry to do so, but I think it’s important, are you all white? Cause I seen yall saying “your pic friends will suffer” and the way it’s phrased makes me think perhaps yall are not yourselves poc, for the most part. Furthermore, all *my* poc friends are well fucking aware that Joe “I’m against desegregation” Biden is a fucking racist POS, as is his entire administration. Let’s not even get into increased climate destruction, his support for trans people being barred from sports, his general apathy towards lgbt people, his really fucking vile southern border behaviour and policy, his explicit fucking islamaphobia, anti black racism, and anti-Asian racism, his supreme belief in police barbarism, his total economic shitshow these last four years, and finally, something I suspect non Americans literally are unable to fathom, his vitriolic hatred of the rest of the world, and the danger he poses to humanity’s continued survival as a result. It’s true, your political system sucks fucking balls, I pity you for having only one party and not being able to remove your head of state, but don’t you dare tell me that you think Joe Biden is a “good president in most regards except Palestine”. And guess what, “trump is worse” is something I wholeheartedly agree with. But for some reason you Americans have no concept of “saying no”. You don’t have a permanent minimum standard. I can’t understand it, is there some weird part of American culture that says you can’t have a sense of personal dignity, or, dare I say it, a spine? It’s inconciliables to me that every person in the most well off, powerful, heavily defended nation on earth would not only allow themselves to be, in the most shakespearien sense, raped by their political system every four years, but that *some* would revel in it. I genuinely mean it when I say I cannot understand this behaviour. Aren’t you outraged at this treatment? Where is your fury against such degradation? Wouldn’t you fight and work and claw at everything against you until your bones were raw and white and broken rather than settle for this most violating and humiliating of lifestyles, in the hope of something better? Don’t get me wrong, I come from the cesspool that is Britain, and that’s its own thing, but I know why and how the British spirit was so thoroughly crushed so I know why people have given up there, and even then, we not only still have some resemblance of fight, but also a system that at least in theory can allow for some better representation than the American one. Britain has a proud history of rioting when things get too bad, we stole the idea from the French, just like everything in our history and culture, but America never seemed to have the same; is it just too vast a country? I just, really need someone to explain it. When and how were the American people politically lobotomised? And I’m sorry if this is rude or confusing but I really am at a loss. As a scientist I really am dedicated to and obsessed with making the world a better place for everyone, but America, the biggest problem by a landslide so massive it could be its own planet, completely and totally baffles me.

Tl;dr: fuck Joe Biden, I have a sneaking suspicion tumblr is mostly racist white people, America’s very existence can drive a man insane like the visage of Cthulhu

[titusandronicusonice]

What I read in 2024

Non-Fiction

History and Class Consciousness (1923) by Georg Lukács – okay, I didn't finish this book. BUT, I'm still mentioning it because the 80-ish pages I did read were so terribly influential on me that I couldn't not include it. Considered one of the foundational texts of 'Western Marxism', the first three essays (especially the one on 'Class Consciousness') show just how dynamic historical materialism can be.

'Theses on the Philosophy of History' (1940), and 'The Author as Producer' (1934) by Walter Benjamin – I read in a John Berger piece that Benjamin wanted to compose a book made up entirely of quotations. I think about that a lot.

Marxism and Form (1971) by Fredric Jameson – Jameson's account of the aesthetic theories of Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Bloch, Lukács, and Sartre, plus an extended account of what dialectical criticism is and can be. (That last chapter is an expansion of his excellent 'Metacommentary' essay which you should read right now.)

Marxist Modernism (2024) by Gillian Rose – A transcript of Rose's 1979 lectures on Frankfurt School critical theory from Lukács to Adorno by way of Benjamin, Bloch, and Brecht. The lecture format makes it far more approachable than Marxism and Form but necessarily more simplistic. Regardless, Rose does a phenomenal job contextualising every theory discussed, outlining the unifying threads that might not be evident when approaching each thinker individually.

The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism by Rodney Hilton and others – Collecting the 1950s transition debate and complementary material. All your favourites are here: Sweezy, Dobb, Hilton, Hill, Lefebvre, Hobsbawm. I particularly loved the essay by Kohachiro Takahashi.

A Singular Modernity (2002) by Fredric Jameson – A rigorous theorisation of 'modernity' and 'modernism'. All your favourites are closet dialecticians. I devoured this in a week, so good.

Fiction

Guards! Guards! (1989) by Terry Pratchett – My second Discworld novel after having read The Colour of Magic 5 years ago. A joy to read.

Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939) by Aimé Césaire – A long poem tracing the coming-into-consciousness of an anti-colonial subject. Rich with history and anger. 'I would go to this land of mine and I would say to it: "Embrace me without fear ... And if all I can do is speak, it is for you I shall speak."'

Hard to Be a God (1964) by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky – Future communist spacemen observe a planet whose civilisation is stuck in its Middle Ages (or, more accurately, backsliding into quasi-fascist reaction). A favourite, feels like it was written specifically for me.

The Tombs of Atuan (1971), The Farthest Shore (1972) by Ursula K. Le Guin – The second and third books of Earthsea. Tombs was excellent, probably the high point of the trilogy, or at least the only novel I felt was truly subversive of contemporary fantasy. The Farthest Shore I very much liked, but the narrative was far more conventional, if not conservative.

Mother Courage and Her Children (1939) by Bertolt Brecht – No one does it like him. I would do anything to be able to see the 2006 Meryl Streep production.

The City and the City (2009) by China Miéville – My first Miéville. This scratched a very specific itch for me, looking forward to when I have the time to start his New Crobuzon series.

Shadow & Claw (1980, 1981) by Gene Wolfe – The first half of the Book of the New Sun. A favourite, if not the favourite.

Melville (1941) by Jean Giono – Something between an essay and novella: a fictionalised account of Melville's time in London in 1849 and his decision to write Moby-Dick. I had very high hopes coming into this but it was not very great. Too hetero.

Heart of Darkness (1899) by Joseph Conrad – I quite enjoyed reading this so I say in the most neutral way possible that this was the longest hundred pages I've ever read.

Gardens of the Moon (1999) by Steven Erikson – The first book in the Malazan Book of the Fallen series. I wanted a huge fantasy world to get invested in (googled 'books like Elden Ring') and this one stood out to me. Erikson's prose left a lot to be desired, but the worldbuilding and plot construction were great. I'll probably read one of these books a year; will provide a series overview in 2034.

Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) (2019) by Hazel Jane Plante – An elegy for a trans woman by a trans woman, told through encyclopaedia entries about her favourite (fictional) show. So much life packed into this short book.

To the Lighthouse (1927) by Virginia Woolf – A favourite. From this novel alone Woolf ranks among the best prose stylists I've read.

Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853) by Herman Melville – [edit, forgot to mention this one]

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Ruth Ben-Ghiat at Lucid:

"Should I leave the country now for somewhere safer?” “How do you know when it's time to move?" “Where should I go?” Almost every day now, as the inauguration of Donald Trump approaches, I receive queries like these from fellow Americans. The personalized nature of the decision to go into exile means that it is very difficult to counsel people. However, we can learn from the history of such fateful choices, which also teaches us that exile is not a linear path, nor an irreversible one. I have been engaging with the history of émigrés from dictatorships for decades. My interest in studying Fascism was sparked by growing up in Pacific Palisades, California, where the writer Thomas Mann and other famous exiles had sought refuge from Nazism. Over the next century, America became a destination for so many others fleeing dictatorship. Now it may be our turn to experience some form of autocracy. The title of this essay sums up the eternal dilemma of the anti-authoritarian: do I stay and resist, or go into exile? In reality, there is a third option, and as everywhere in the world, it is likely to be the most popular one. You stay put, and keep your head down and your criticism of the government private. That way you and your loved ones can minimize any adverse consequences while you “wait it out.” Only a small percentage of the population leaves the country, or stays and actively resists, not least because these choices pose financial, legal, physical, and other challenges. And yet it is often these minorities who make history, whether by leading the opposition from abroad (as Belarusian politician Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya is doing from Lithuania) or from inside the country, organizing protests or other resistance actions. And in our age of transnational repression, being abroad can still be dangerous for dissidents who persist with political activities.

Yet the questions that the politically active have grappled with have changed little since the dawn of authoritarianism. If all the resisters leave, who is left to fight for freedom? How can I turn my back on my country? “Guilt is exile’s eternal companion,” reflects the writer Hisham Matar, who, as the son of Jaballa Matar, an opponent of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, was forced to follow his compatriots’ fates from abroad and had no information about his imprisoned relatives back home. And if the resisters who stay are silenced, who is left to lead the struggle, document the abuses, and counter the propaganda? Isn’t it more pragmatic to leave and be able to work for freedom rather than sit in jail? Alexi Navalny’s death in a Siberian lager is an example of what can happen to high-profile opponents of the dictator when they do not leave. Navalny could have easily remained abroad after his stay in Germany to recover from a Kremlin poisoning, but he refused to remove himself voluntarily and make it easier for the “thieving little man in his bunker,” as he memorably referred to Vladimir Putin during his 2021 Moscow sentencing, to claim victory over him and his anti-corruption work.

Some people escape one dictatorship by going to another. That might seem strange, and yet geographical proximity or the ability to get residence papers make it a not uncommon choice. Chileans who fled Augusto Pinochet’s military regime after the 1973 coup settled in Brazil’s military regime, or (if they were Communists) in East Germany. Germans found refuge from Nazism in Fascist Italy, and Syrians crossed the border to Turkey as they fled the Assad regime. Some exiles also return home, thinking maybe it won’t be that bad, before leaving again for good. Many people want to know the right time to leave, and history is full of stories of people who did not leave their countries in time to escape persecution. There are good reasons for this. Dictators are impulsive, and love “shock events,” as I refer to them in Strongmen (which has exile as a theme). What is fine today may be grounds for persecution tomorrow, and all bets are off if a state of emergency is declared.

Going into exile also requires money and other things that many individuals do not have: a job offer, the right connections, entry papers, a way to care for loved ones who cannot leave, or a place to stay in another country. Those at elite institutions or multinational/global companies might have more possibilities to move abroad than activists or politicians rooted in local contexts. That’s why we should not assume that those who stay in dictatorships are in denial. The Jewish linguist Viktor Klemperer is a case in point. He remained in Nazi Germany because he could not find a university position abroad (unlike his famous conductor cousin, Otto Klemperer, who moved to Los Angeles). “Don’t think about it, live one’s life, bury oneself in the most private matters!" he wrote in late September 1938, hoping, like other Jews who stayed in Germany, that each new round of persecution would be the last. "Fine resolution, but so difficult to keep.”

As we prepare for some form of autocracy in America, it is no comfort to know that Trump and his zealous and unscrupulous associates have advertised their desire to go after groups of people perennially targeted by authoritarians: immigrants, Muslims, Jews, opposition politicians, the unhoused, LGBTQ+ people, activists, journalists, scientists, and educators. It will be especially dangerous to be a transgender person in America, or anyone involved with reproductive and immigrant rights. American movements in response to autocracy may differ from those of other populations due to the strength of states’ rights here. We are likely to see internal migration instead of exile, with people leaving states where voting, reproductive, LGBTQ+ and other rights are being extinguished.

There's also a history of regional movement in search of freedom in our country that we can build on. The Jim Crow South was a regional authoritarianism in many respects. That’s why the former CEO and President of the NAACP, Cornell William Brooks, states in our 2021 Lucid interview that we might begin to see “Black Southerners who came to New York and Chicago and Detroit” as “refugees; they were fleeing terrorism. And so Black folk are the descendants of these refugees, as well as of enslaved people." While every person contemplating exile has their own unique situation and resources, there is one constant among such departures: when you exit your homeland, you enter into a state of waiting. Waiting for things to get better; waiting for the tyrant to die or, if elections still exist, be voted out; waiting for freedom to arrive so you can return to beloved places and people.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote a solid piece on the tough decision for those opposed to tyrannical regimes as to whether to stay and fight back or leave for exile.

[mesetacadre]

do you think religion and communism are compatible?

I'd say it depends on the maturity of the social relations and the starting point of socialism. Religion was identified by Marx as the opium of the masses not because he was a radical anti-theist bent on the immediate destruction of any semblance of religiosity, rather because religion, as it accompanies the evolution of the economy, serves to alleviate the alienation caused the the exploitative nature of work ever since labor was organized. It acts like an anesthetic, or rather, an opiate.

Therefore if religion began to take form in this way, and considering its pervasiveness across most aspects of almost all societies, its removal will have to be slow, much like the family. Take Spain, where a little over half of the population considers themselves to be catholic, along with the comfortable place the church has within society and most people's minds. If the communist revolution were to happen tomorrow, and assuming its continuance, it would take a multi-generational effort for the dismantling of all causes of alienation along with the appropiate education to make religion wither out, or perhaps mutate into something completely new. For me this is at the same level of speculation as the conclusion of family abolition.

Keeping all of this in mind, and getting at your question, communism is, nowadays, compatible with religion insofar as the objective conditions demand it to be. If religion is important to the working class in your region of intervention, it would be an immediatist error to viciously attack that religion and demand people stop believing in it. It is one thing to remove the financial and political privileges some religious institutions might have, which should be done albeit avoiding excessive antagonization, and another to go after people's faith.

To give a couple of examples, the USSR's policy on religion was to remove the power that the religious institutions and leaders had achieved by allowing workers to stop being reliant on them, emphasizing science and technology. The first chapter of Anna Louise Strong's The Soviets Expected gives a good example of what this looked like at the beginning of industrialization. In Cuba, on the other hand, christianity was, to an extent, included in the narrative created around their national liberation struggle and revolution, it had a part in the creation of that revolutionary patriotism that's characteristic of communist national liberation. The difference in the preconditions for Cuba and the USSR is that the USSR was a mosaic of tens of religions, if not hundreds, with contrasting levels of reactionary tendencies and influence, whereas in Cuba the population was pretty monolithically christian. There is no single recipe for the policies to take regarding religion in socialism.

When it comes to currents like christian socialism or liberation theology, I personally think that mixing theology with marxism should be avoided at all costs. Philosophically speaking there are very little similarities when you go beyond the surface, the scientific approach to analizing history and society that marxism takes has nothing to do with the irrational or spiritual explanations theology gives. I don't really care if people choose to go that way, I just think it's a waste of time because if you ever wish to go deeper so to speak, there will be a time, sooner rather than later, when you'll have to choose one over the other. I consider the approach I explained earlier to be a sufficiently close relationship to religion and that, strategically speaking, it is also unnecessary to intertwine the two.

In East Asia, especially China, the label of religion and its difference with spirituality and philosophy is less clear than in the west as far as I'm aware, but I don't know anything beyond that so maybe someone can expand on it, though I assume the approach is similar.

[grandhotelabyss]

Any thoughts on nick land / mark fisher?

I've encountered both of them essentially as bloggers—I don't think I've ever read a word of either on paper—so I can't say I've studied them formally or mastered their thinking.

Land's concept of capital as autonomous alien intelligence assembling itself through retroaction on human agents—do I have this right?—is fun science fiction. I accept that as a theory of cultural temporality in general but not necessarily as a theory of technology or capitalism in particular. As for his more (shall we say) "ethnic" idea about "exit" and the Anglo character—maybe there's something to that. Modern history as the struggle between decentralized commercial sea empires (UK, US) and despotic communist land empires (Germany, Russia, China). And his new thing about Anglo-Zionism—I believe he's read Milton deeply—is right on time. All his Compact pieces on the English canon are paywalled, so I haven't read them, but it seems like he's approaching the idea that the God of the Bible is the force he previously identified as capital. (I think this is similar to what Mitchell Heisman outlined in his Suicide Note, but I only read some of that, and only once, on one sleepless night over 10 years ago, and doubt I'll revisit it. Does Heisman cite Land? I don't recall.) Hyperstition is real, as any manifestation girl on here or on TikTok or on YouTube will tell you.

Now Fisher was a sad case. I think all that anti-humanist theory did him no favors, personally. I'm not sure he could stand in that desolate place, the way Land could. I don't believe I ever directly interacted with him online when we both were bloggers in the same milieu circa 2005 or so. Maybe once or twice. He had a positive Marxist take on Batman Begins, and I had a negative one, and I think somebody sent him mine when he had comments open. (He had a whole thing, which anticipated the "vampire's castle" image, about "gray vampires" who stalk the comments section and suck the life out of your imaginative assertions with their point-missing nitpickery. He wasn't wrong!) I'm sure he thought I was hideously naive if he ever thought about me at all, and I was naive, I was essentially a Stalinist, an obvious example of humanist theory gone wrong, but there are limits, too, to that gothic style he picked up from Land and the CCRU.

I think he said Kafka was his first major author. There's a case to be made that you should read Kafka only after Dickens. (I don't mean literally but metonymically. Nor do I mean the 19th century vs. the 20th or even realism vs. modernism. Replace Kafka with Baudelaire and Dickens with Joyce and it'll mean the same.) And I'm not talking about politics here or even ethics. No panacea for politics and ethics can be found in books. Kafka, for that matter, was probably a nicer guy qua guy than Dickens was. But, just as someone who has to live in the world in your skin, it can't hurt to read a non-anti-humanist book from time to time if you're a bookish person. To not always try to conceptually outflank as a ruse of power every obvious humane sentiment. And to try not to need your humane sentiments to be conveyed only by the most alienating stimulus, to need them to come in the form of their opposite. I never got over his review of The Passion of the Christ:

What, from one perspective, is the utter humiliation and degradation of Jesus's body is on the other a coldly ruthless vision of the body liberated from the 'wisdom and limits of the organism'.

Masochristianity.

Christ's Example is simply this: it is better to die than to pass on abuse virus or to in any way vindicate the idiot vacuity and stupidity of the World of authority.

Power depends upon the weakness of the organism. When authority is seriously challenged, when its tolerance is tested to the limit, it has the ultimate recourse of torture. The slow, graphic scenes of mindless physical degradation in The Passion of the Christ are necessary for revealing the horrors to which Jesus' organism was subject. It is made clear that he could have escaped the excruciating agony simply by renouncing his Truth and by assenting to the Authority of the World. Christ's Example insists: better to let the organism be tortured to death ('If thine own eye offend thee, pluck it out') than to bow, bent-headed, to Authority.

This is what is perhaps most astonishing about Gibson's film. Far from being a statement of Catholic bigotry, it can only be read as an anti-authoritarian AND THEREFORE anti-Catholic film. For the Pharisees of two millennia ago, puffed up in their absurd finery, substitute the child-abuser apologists of today's gilt-laden, guilt-ridden Vatican. Against all the odds, against two thousand years of cover-ups and dissimulation, The Passion of the Christ recovers the original Christ, the anti-Wordly but not otherwordly Christ of Liberation Theology: the Gnostic herald of Apocalypse Now.

This is why I found him frustrating when I read him as a daily blogger almost 20 years ago. Plus the over-solemnity about pop-culture ephemera. I found him a bit naive, too, in the end, though he was almost 15 years my senior. I also sometimes just didn't and don't know what he was talking about, because I sort of hated and hate theory.

In his purely political commentary, he was right, however, to focus on bureaucratization as an effect of neoliberalism—the way capitalism and communism converge in the present for the worst of both worlds, everything is at once a competition and frozen in a statist hierarchy. I'm not sure I'm persuaded by the "hauntology" thesis. I've thought through that issue in a different way and am not convinced the end of the myth of the revolution or the myth of the avant-garde has to mean that we have no future. In fact it might mean the opposite. But good for him for putting into public consciousness an interesting and melancholically beautiful idea that would otherwise have remained confined to smug Derrida-readers.

He is fun to read. That's the highest compliment I can pay. I'm sure the big K-Punk book is a wonderful thing to own and to browse through: to watch a movie or read a book or listen to an album and then see what he had to say about it. He was one model of the blogger as true essayist.

[selamat-linting]

related to last rb but a few years ago i was reading a book about an indonesian anarchist's analysis on indigenous cultures here and there is this bit of a thread that interests me.

its about how ethnic groupings and cultural traditions slowly become incorporated with the capitalist state the moment people and the communities pursue friendly relations or try to live with the government to the point that their identity is eventually homogenized and reduced to be synonymous with the state with a bunch of sanitized and hollow cultural signifiers of their ancestors' ethnic group.

to tell you the truth, i actually have a little issue with this. a lot of ethnic identities are tied to the monarchies that stood before colonization. theyre already friendly with the state. not every ethnic groups are like dayak where you can argue they're principally anarchist (plus it kind of has the unfortunate implications that there is no way to preserve your culture in a way that matters if you intermix and mingle with people outside of your ethnicity). but also, as a disparate bunch of islands and regions, it was dutch colonialism that forcibly tied everything together to give it a national identity.

but i don't think the concerns were stupid. its true that the indonesian state as it is now, uses indigenous cultural symbols and do token lip service about diversity between ethnic and religious groups while oppressing and stealing lands to be used as projects like food estate or mining sites or palm oil plantations. and its not just a matter of corruption, food estate farms usually plant rice in places where the climates are bad for it and where the people living around it doesn't even consume rice as their primary staple foods. and when the projects fail, the farmers sometimes default on palm oil because there is a national and international market for it, then indigenous communities suffer because their source of livelihood and food are gone. and in the case of mining sites, most of the goods and profits aren't even landing to the pockets to the national bourgeoise lol. yes theyre still rich beyond imagining and oppress people but its the people (and i mean people as a whole, including the poor ones) of the imperial core that gets cheap phones and electronics and building materials.

there's also certain regions where the relationship to the indonesian state are downright colonial. like west papua, horribly militarized and exploited for resources with barely any government spending given for the people and "transmigration" programs sending non-papuans to live in the "unused lands" there (fyi transmigration programs isnt a new thing).

interestingly, i also read in another book about the history of communist movements here that notes that we were actually developing a shared national identity organically during 1945-1955, as we were fresh off independence and were spearheading non-block movements and there was widespread literacy programs and multiple party-affiliated recreation clubs. there was an anecdote that a lot of people were given "revolutionary" sounding names, and when people do small talk, they asked of your party affiliation instead of whats your ethnic group. it wasnt until suharto rose to power that he began the campaign of rewriting a revisionist history where the anti colonial movement was mostly a win from military defense with barely any political or ideological battles occuring, and somewhat reviving the concept of ethnic groups being important to the national identity of indonesians (see the troubled development of taman mini indonesia), even though said concept is horrifically outdated since it was mostly politically relevant before dutch colonialism. and of course we have to mention that suharto's time as president is noted even in civics class textbooks as "java-centric", which probably explains why some javanese people are Weird™ about other ethnic groups, if you know what i mean?

but eh, whatever, im just yapping. im tired man i have to like, write this article to my org about the election and it has to be done soon and i had to explain for the 90th time to people who is not even a good prospect for the org about how uu perampasan aset is just a stupid distraction to make ppl believe prabowo is handling corruption but those damn pesky legislative government bodies are just too damn corrupt (implying that the president should have more power here with no checks and balances)

[honeyriot]

You're a woman hater! You're pro rape if you think women aren't allowed to have boundaries from men, especially lesbians who are not sexually attracted to male bodies, whether they're in a skirt or not. You have the audacity to suggest the only people standing up for women are Nazis???? So you love rush Limbaugh and male supremacy and hate women. Got it. Loud and clear, bigot

Yeah, pretty much. Who comes to the #letwomenspeak rallies? Who fawns at Tucker Carlson and Fox News? You have no idea you are even indulging it because you have turned feminism into a single issue: trans. As if that were the crux and final coffin in feminism and then sneak around and condone or tolerate LITERAL FASCISTS like Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Mr. "What is a Woman" Matt Walsh, organizations like Libs of Tik Tok, Reduxx, Gays Against Groomers, who are racist, nationalist organizations funded by right wing investors. We never question that nature of the prison system or how sports have historically been a means of demonstrating male superiority and a means of perpetuating capitalist competition and we need an entire revamping of bathroom privacy but no let's burn the gays and the trans (because these fascists want you dead as much as they want trans people. to them a feminist is a witch the same as a trans person. they only accept you because you glorify them. you don't want to look at nationalism and capitalism as the machinations of men. You have never come in contact with any trans person you are just a paranoid person who fell for the propaganda from fascists. It was considered crossdressing for a woman to wear pants. Gender essentialism ties in nicely with eugenics and ethnonationalism. Why are so many prominent terfs complete nazis?

Anna Slatz cofounder of Reduxx, a vastly huge and respected GC TERF company, is a absolute fascist collaborating with white nationalist Lauren Southern, who preaches Great Replacement theory is under investigation for receiving Russian funds to spread white supremacist propaganda. Who's that on the left?

That's what reactionaries do in Terf communities. You will all write it off and call me the evil one for pointing it out. To you, feminism is a big joke. You don't study feminist theory and history, you spend more time on trans issues because they seem like a bigger deal and leave the rest of the issues on the back burner because they are tougher and would require real change.

You will never talk about it. It will never be addressed although you will be promoting neonazis and by you tacit refusal to investigate this very real reality, you become an accomplice to it. Many "feminists" spend more time attacking trans people than talking about any real feminist issue, of which there are many that need much more attention than these people are giving at the same time as them NEVER being around trans people.

In fact you probably do not see fascism as a very real thing. Your political science may not be very scientific or historical. If you are so mad, prove me wrong rather than saying I hate women and condone rape when that is obviously not true. I get called the same when I call out racist anti immigration speech. Nationalism and racism are diseases to community.

Do we have to answer the "trans question"? We all know there is a final solution to all the undesirables of society: communists, feminists, gay/lesbian and gender nonconforming/trans. But the questionan is that the systems need to be imagined from the ground up. We cannot build the future on yesterday's institutions.

So yes, it is possibly flattening reality to just randomly call a "trans excluding radical feminist" a nazi. But you have got to know you are flattening reality as well with a skewed understanding of history and political movements (including feminism). I will be posting a link to a bunch of feminist pdfs in a few days so check back!

If that's an ad hominem I hope it forces you to study harder and be a better feminist and, ya know, maybe pick up on doing actual feminist activism instead mischaracterizing the fight for women's liberation.

if you shrug this off as crazy ramblings and cease to understand the political aligning with fascism that trans (and gay and lesbian and gender nonconforming) hate groups have, you will unkowingly perpetuate the very structures and conditions that we are fighting against.

[paradoxcase]

@maiden-roar:

I think the anti-voting people do seem to want a communist revolution, nothing else is good enough for them, there's just the small problem that conditions in 21st century USA are extremely different from conditions in early 20th century Russia

I feel like maybe I should be more open-minded towards their POV, like I appreciate it when conservatives turn away from trump, it's perfectly rational to be able to criticize your own side, and maybe that's largely what people are doing, so I should care more about their criticisms. By voting based on my fear of the other side, am I just as bad as conservatives who think gay rights and public health care will send us to the gulags? Far-right is so crazy scary tho.

I think a lot of these people are very young. And every single young person in the entire history of the world has always hated to be told by their elders that they should sit down, and be patient, and work hard, and maybe some day in the distant future they'll get what they want. They are young and full of righteous anger and are just so sure that there is a secret way that no one else has figured out to get everything they want right now

As for how you know you're not like the people who think gay people are going install Sharia Law, it comes down to where you get your information about the world from. Their problem is they rely exclusively on an echo-chamber of far-right news outlets. And like, if you start to feel like the places you get your news from are starting to become echo-chamber-like, it's good to branch out. There are plenty of reliable sources that rate news sites for bias, and you generally want to avoid sources that always validate the things you think you know already, or which are making emotional appeals or direct calls to action, even if they are sources on the left. Like, advocacy groups are fine and all, but you should get your actual news from somewhere else. And then, after reading news from multiple sources with limited bias, if you still think a Donald Trump presidency is scary as fuck, it probably is.

also MLs believe that revolution is the only way, and democratic socialism is evil, and marx apparently based his analysis on the french revolution, but like france and england and the USA all had their own paths to liberal democracy. French were extremist, USA compromised with slave owners, UK gradually expanded democracy. History says there's not only one way to do things. We don't know what the future holds. Also modern anarchists seem to be allergic to doing things.

French revolutionaries killed their political enemies, bolshevik-style, but their resulting goverment was unstable and france spent like the next 100 years flip-flopping between modes of goverment. The USA made compromises resulting in a more stable government but then people had to battle slavery for most of the following century. The UK as far as I know didn't have an equivalent event but they still made to basically the same liberal democratic endpoint.

I don't think the US and France are actually super comparable here - the US started out with a philosophy of embracing democracy. A very racist, sexist, classist kind of democracy, yes, but it was some democracy, which opens the door to gradually getting more democracy in a peaceful manner, and what do you know, that's what happened. Whereas, France was going from zero democracy to any democracy, which is much harder, and who knows if the French kings actually would have allowed that without some kind of violence? And also, the creation of the US and its nascent democracy did begin with a revolution. It was just kind of lucky that it happened in a colony where Britain couldn't oppose it as effectively and the revolutionaries didn't feel like they had to murder the king and all of his relatives in order to succeed (and also, they weren't really able to).

Whatever the UK did is probably a much better option than either of those. Although, I don't know a lot of the history of this time period, but I kind of suspect that the transition to democracy in the UK and other countries that kept their royals might have been influenced by observation of what was happening in France. It's kind of hard to imagine a situation where absolute monarchy transitions to democracy on a world-wide scale with no violence at all. But at the same time... the Romans had a partial democracy 2000 years before all of this happened. It wasn't actually ever necessary to go through an absolute monarchy stage, which means it's not necessary to have a revolution. Maybe if Caesar had never declared himself Imperator none of this violence would ever have had to happen.

Also I think if there's any kind of revolution-type activity happening in modernized industrial capitalist countries, it's going to be fascists overthrowing the government. There is almost zero desire for a left-wing revolution. You'd have to do a lot of convincing to get people to give up their comfortable lives and go to war and make sacrifices just to live in a communist country where their boss works them just as hard but maybe things will get better in 100 years.

Yeah, like I said in the last post, once you're in a position where you can change things peacefully through democracy, even slowly, violence becomes a lot less attractive. It's really only attractive to people who feel like they don't have the numbers necessary to get their way through democracy, and right now it's the left wing that feels secure that they have the numbers, and the right wing that doesn't, which you can tell based on which people are the ones attempting voter suppression tactics.

Communist revolutions seem to have happened mostly in poor farming economies, which then industrialize after the revolution. Meanwhile, in countries like the USA, people seem to find fascism to be a much more palatable form of violence. No waiting for the country to slowly transition from state capitalism, people get the immediate reward of killing inferior people.

I really don't think this is based on economic issues, I think it's just very hard to go from no political freedom to some political freedom, and then people look back on those early revolutions and don't understand (or forget) the actual reason they happened, which is no longer an issue in the modern day in most countries.

Also random side note, people like to say "if voting did anything, they wouldn't let us do it" when actually uh yeah the GOP actually does try to restrict voting, yes

The big problem is that no one thinks strategically or tactically about HOW to get from crappy point A to utopian point B. Just people being overly emotional on the website that rewards you with internet points for being overly emotional. Rage gets clicks, reason does not.

I mean, yeah, that's teenagers for you

Anarchists and MLs etc only want change to happen outside of voting. But realistically, the way that workers would realize they have the power to do direct action is through participating in unions. And we have parties that are more and less hostile to unions.

Yeah, definitely

[selkiesstories]

Nice post on the Anti-Semitism in HOTD and while I don't think it was their intention to do that, I can't deny that their progressive politics (both GRRM and Condal/Hess) makes them susceptible to adding those anti-sematic tropes because most sects of socialism (both Communisms and Fascism) are imbedded deeply with anti-Semitic and Anti-Christian doctrine. The Soviets, the Chi-Coms, and the Nazi - even the British as well - have both anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic ideologies baked into their cultural make up, some till this very day.

I could say that the portrayal of the Greens are just as filled with Anti-Catholic tropes as Anti-Sematic, but anyone who studies history knows that both go hand in hand in a lot places in Protestant dominated areas of both the past and present West.

To add to your post, I would say that Daemon exemplifies the Nazi trop of the Uber-Mensch - Super-man - who believes in the supremacy of himself due to his race and holds no religion but the idea that he is his own god and cannot be judged by the moral constraints of the "Normal People". GRRM and his rewriting deification of Daemon in later editions of Westrosi history has veered dangerously close to these Nazi tropes.

And while his aim was to write a character "in equal parts heroic and villainous" - his nihilistic writing and philosophies along with his progressive politics have set him on the path to the Fascistic fetishizations that we're starting to see from the left-wing in the West in the revival of Nazi authoritarianism and attitudes under a different more 'compassionate' guise. As wells as the moral good being relative and self-principled rather than the divine ideals of Jerusalem wed to the philosophy of Athens, and the civilized social orders of Rome.

With all the current day bullshit of "Anti-Zionism" - which we all know what they really mean, even if they can't admit it to themselves - it's hard not to see the anti-Semitism in a lot of things. But I do think that GRRM, Condal, and Hess's bullshit politics make them incredibly vulnerable to falling into Anti-Jewish storytelling based on progressivism being built entirely on anti-Semitism and Ant-Christian values.

They wouldn't even question it.

Oh I definitely don’t think it was intentional if only because I think the show runners have only the most shallow knowledge of history if that. Doubtless what little they know is of the-why should we learn about Henry VIII just because he’s a white man?- variety. I agree that they lean towards the ideological purity of the Communist rather than the racial purity of Nazis, and because most of academia never fell out of love with Stalin the way they did with Hitler this is seen as a good thing. (Obviously ideological vs racial purity is an oversimplification since the two got hopelessly muddled but it’s a good starting point) The rest of s2 certainly made it plain that Condal & Hess have never heard about Ravensbrück or really anything about women and Nazism besides the tired “the Nazis were misogynistic”.

I didn’t really get into Daemon but you’re right, maybe at some point I’ll do a post on the Aryan tropes I’ve noticed with them.

Personally I find it fascinating that Nazism is so often conflated with Christian nationalism since historically it was very much not the case. There were places that is was such as the Ustaše in Croatia, but Nazism very much downplayed Christianity to the point where Wilm Hosenfeld wrote in his diary in 1944 that the youngest German soldiers had no real concept of Christmas. There’s probably a great paper on Nazi anti Christianity as an expression of Nazi antisemitism especially if you can work in the overlap with antisemitism and anti Catholicism vis-à-vis Protestantism as Christianity to Catholicism’s Judaism.

Thanks for the ask!

[libertineangel]

even tho theres basically zero marxist-leninist punk bands, i think having that framework in the back of your mind when youre learning the history and deep diving into the different politics of the genre really helps put some pieces together. punk is a bit all over the place politically, often very 'incoherent leftist' (aka that nebulous type of leftist who hasnt actually read any theory and just has Concepts they like and agree with- vibes based leftists basically), socially progressive yet often very reactionary (youre anti-capitalism and anti-tory thats cool but what do you want instead of all that?). theres a reason why a lot of the old school punk stars either became conservative in their old age or just seemed to have tapped out of politics entirely. you need that theory framework to avoid falling prey to nigel farages of the world. a valuable lesson for all of us!

Yeah like while the kids online these days drastically overstate the political nature of the subculture and its significance it would still be reductive to say that it had no significance, especially the British scene - Marxism-Leninism has always been impotent here but it's well worth noting that things like Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League, which were genuinely important in both the development of British punk and the fight against the National Front, were organised & run by the explicitly Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (loath as I am to give them credit for anything), at a time where the other Trots in Militant were achieving actual national influence in Labour; these may have ultimately amounted to nothing but that's because Trotskyist programs are useless, not because the punk movement was inherently useless, and I do believe if our MLs weren't a waste of air they might have identified an actual opportunity to act as a vanguard in a movement so readily susceptible to it.

Punk has always been full of bollocks but there was a segment of it that did inspire a significant level of youth political engagement, and multiple leading bands of that segment were explicitly inspired by left-communist movements & theory (Gang Of Four weren't called that for nothing); the fact that much of the sentiment and subsequent bands the initial wave inspired rapidly devolved into aimless or reactionary workerism is not a reason to entirely dismiss and disparage the subculture as a whole but I think instead yet another demonstration of the failures of left-communism's uncoordinated undirected nature, and another place in which British Marxism-Leninism utterly failed to engage with a potential opportunity. There are things to be learned here, and I think genuinely engaging with that has genuine merit.

[mesetacadre]

Hi this might be a silly question to ask you, though I'm not sure how to go about it. I've been getting more into actually understanding marxism-leninism and reexamining my world views, and I just started studying foreign affairs.

I'm from an Eastern European country, and I intend to work in diplomacy, but I've been worried about whether or not working in a state apparatus is a mistake. My country has a history of close relations to the Global South and anti colonial movements, my main hope was to get to know the world better and meet different people from different countries, with a hope to focus on countries like Cuba and China, and I guess try and build credibility and resources that I can use to help my comrades, both here and abroad. Do you think that's realistic? Do you have any advice on analyzing smaller, ex communist nations that are either "in-between" blocs or look more favourably towards the PRC [and well Russia]? Do communists have a place in the "running" of a bourgeoise country?

Aside from that I intend to join a marxist-leninist party as soon as I'm physically able to, and work from there. I'm sorry if this sounds like a nothing question, or if it's a bit nonsensical haha. I know me as an individual isn't formulating foreign policy or the like and I'm not from a country that has a "say" in the exploitation of the , but I wouldn't like to become a cog in a harmful machine so to say. Thank you for your time, even if you don't end up answering!

Personally I would always avoid working for the state like that, even if it's eastern european countries. Anything to do with international relations just gives off a stench of realpolitik and twisted calculations of human life, but maybe that's because I'm from Spain. I don't know which country exactly you're talking about, but I can't think of any in eastern Europe that aren't in some way courting the EU or NATO, or even be part of them. If your country is part of any of those two organizations, you're not going to do anything good in diplomacy, same goes for Russia. What I really doubt is that job enabling you to help communists abroad.

Either way I'm happy to hear you plan on getting organized, definitely be careful about what you're joining nevertheless.

[pazodetrasalba]

Vae Victis

Dear Caroline:

Just finished reading yesterday this recommendation of yours. It wasn't bad, but if I am to be sincere, it is up to now the least interesting of your 5 star choices. I imagine this comes as a result of my absence from the world it depicts: what might have been personally relevant for an (ex)finance bro like you is mostly irrelevant for me.

Yes, the book is a bit slow and rambling, and yes, it does accelerate and get more thriller-like once the bids are out (title gives away the resolution, though, if for some reason you had never heard of the RJR Nabisco leveraged buyout in the first place). The cast is too big - I actually benefited from watching the movie adaptation before finishing the book so that I could at least make a clear mental picture of the, say, 10 or so main characters.

One way of reading this book (and the popular narrative at the time of the events) is as a story of greed, with stereotyped and villainous figures (the film is much less nuanced than the book, and really goes full-hog in this direction: Ross Johnson is a a snake charmer wallowing in luxury who'd sell his mother for the right price, and Henry Kravis is literally Count Dracula - nobody does 'slightly creepy old dude' better than Jonathan Pryce), the worst of which are Wall Street bankers and lawyers who are out to make a catch with complete disregard for the well-being of businesses, shareholders, workers and public. This is how I would have read it many years ago, in my Marxist years. Now that I have become attuned to the fact that capitalism and markets are (mostly) good and the financial sector is necessary for keeping our social machine well oiled and running, I'd be inclined to make other readings as well.

On a side note -actually, it's not that much in the sidelines-, schools do a very poor job at pushing forward what is an extremely anti-intuitive but truthful view, first espoused by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, and expressed in your own review as "You think about market participants each trying to maximize their profits, and everyone acting in their own interest ends up maximizing total welfare, and that makes sense in a zoomed-out way, and as far as I can tell is not a crazy model of the behavior of companies". But this really beggars belief until you actually see it: it feels no less stupid and false to a smart teenager than religious dogma. On the contrary, the same teenager who reads The Communist Manifesto will find a very believable narrative of the moral and economic progress of History through class conflict, and if he further pursues some basic readings (and remains, as we mostly do, economically illiterate), will also find the theory of surplus value scientific-sounding and a good basis for accusing all capitalists of being exploiters and thieves.

It is, indeed, nothing short of miraculous that individual egoisms actually end up creating a quasi-optimal arrangement for the most part, but I feel Barbarians at the Gate is mostly showing you the scenario when this doesn't actually happen. That is to say, for RJR Nabisco under Johnson's leadership, and through the LBO, it does indeed appear that (quoting you again):

- there is a CEO, who is a guy - there is a board, consisting of a bunch of guys who are friends with the CEO - they all have fiduciary duties and if they fail to meet them they will get yelled at by a judge in Delaware - ??? - shareholder value gets maximized

Love the ???. Actually, if one goes back to those dull, first chapters at the beginning of the book, we do get a glimpse of how companies manage to turn individual egoisms into positive enterprises. The book dwells a lot on the first years of Nabisco and Reynolds tobacco, on how founders made all the right choices of wise investment and expansion, use of local knowledge, ethics, hard work and know-how, treating workers and shareholders well, taking advantage of rising opportunities... It really reads like a guide on what to do, as contrasted with the relative vacuity of what Ross Johnson actually ends up doing. Does he actually create any positive value? Perhaps his best contribution is his rejection of stability and routine, a chaotic undermining of conformity which might help against the inevitable stagnation of consolidated companies, but that appears to be all he does. Yes, he charms board members and presidents, parties hard and lavishes wealth on executives and board members (including himself). on the face of it, all this doesn't seem at all better than its opposite.

I am not economically savvy enough, but moving to LBOs, I imagine one could make the case for them in that they judge company value more efficiently than markets (as seemed to be the case with the stagnantly low value of RJR Nabisco shares), and in that the debt and diet they impose on their companies trim out the fat, the redundant, the inefficient and (once the debt is paid), end with a more economically efficient company that can survive and thrive in the market better. Like all tools, though, they can be misused, making some people very rich (CEOs, their cronies and the lenders) and a lot of people quite miserable (workers and shareholders) through financial trickery and assaults orchestrated through 'phoney money'. It is all a matter of trade-offs, I guess. Still, I like some of the anti-LBO voices: even though the book has no heroes (Johnson might be an anti-hero of sorts), Ted Forstmann comes pretty close (and btw, he become a signatory of the Giving Pledge in 2011). It's a pity the way he's massacred in the movie. And crypto doesn't feel that far away from junk bonds...

The book did have some lovely snippets of humor (loved the private jet piloting Mr. G. Shepherd to safety). As for your belief that "it is reassuring that the whole system seems to kinda work anyway", I fear it seems to be the wrong lesson to learn from all of this; in fact, the book seems peppered with quotes that are the absolutely worst possible lessons one could take, most of them from the lips of Ross Johnson, about disregarding protocols, logic, reason and checks and balances. Your final quote about rows of figures with millions of dollars that no one knows the proper meaning of is actually quite an ominous note to end the review with, a precursor to the apparently very lax and chaotic management of vastly superior sums of money in FTX and Alameda.

Quote:

"It all started with a small lemonade stand in Manitoba,” read one Johnson parody. “The next thing I knew I had sold my mother. The rest was easy.”

P.S.: Among the things you mention that motivate you, "making guys think I am attractive" seems particularly ill-phrased. You are incredibly attractive, Caroline (both as a person and as a woman), so there should be little need of persuasion, except we usually find that these truths and feelings are seldom commutative.