A 500% increase in wages and yet i still keep reading on Hexbear in very well upvoted comments that wages in China are stagnating and that workers have seen no increase in their standard of living despite the economic growth because China is neoliberal. Not pointing any fingers at any particular commenter…
Accelerationism means actively working to make things worse for most people. Not only is it unnecessary because the decline is already ongoing and an eventual crisis of some sort therefore inevitable, but it is also bad strategy. Communists should not be seen to be making things worse, needless to say that is very bad optics. We should be seen as those who are most strongly on the side of the working class, defending and advancing their interests.
We want the masses to see us as trustworthy and reliable, as having their back and as those who they can trust to lead them. In order to win that trust you need more than just the right words, you need action. You need to show to the people by standing side by side with them in their struggles against capital, landlords, fascists, state violence, etc. that communists are those who will fight the hardest for their well-being.
By helping workers in their struggles you also contribute to the sharpening of contradictions as the limitations of the liberal bourgeois system are exposed and the need for a radically different system in order to fulfill all the needs and demands of workers becomes evident for more and more people. Organizing the working class is also how you prepare for “after the collapse”, it’s how you prepare the working class for eventually seizing power.
It is not sufficient for a collapse to occur, revolutionaries must be prepared and have the necessary support from a sufficiently large class conscious subsegment of the masses (in order to achieve this educational and agitation work is necessary) as well as the organizational infrastructure to be able to quickly mobilize the masses and fill the vacuum of power before our class enemies do.
I don’t like AI but if it is to be this century’s arms race, then i am glad that China is pulling ahead, first with DeepSeek now Alibaba Cloud. Turns out if you do it right you don’t need to build massive GPU farms that drive up your country’s electricity prices to a level unaffordable by the average citizen.
Made out of solid gold.
“Moscow Times” isn’t even a Russian outlet, they are located in Amsterdam, owned by Dutch publishers and financed by the Dutch government. They are the definition of a Euro-propaganda rag and they are simply lying about the fuel situation in Russia. And they aren’t lying to Russians they are lying to dumbass gullible Westerners, because anyone who actually lives in Russia can just go to the gas station and see it’s not true.
There’s plenty of that too, i’m sure. But it’s hard to deny that there are also many people there who are genuinely ideologically invested in maintaining US hegemony.
They must really be desperate to try and bluff China like this. It was clear from the start that China would call their bluff.
You seem very confused. Let me break it down for you:
CIA backed cults - bad. Normal religion - fine. Protecting a socialist country’s sovereignty and social-political stability - good. Imperialist propagandist spin - irrelevant.
Another L for the CIA, another W for China. You love to see it.
Maduro isn’t a dictator. Venezuela has more democracy than the US.
Yeah. I don’t even like Hasan and i could immediately tell it was a coordinated Zionist campaign against him.
Because that has a severe impact on your reach and your ability to continue build the revolutionary movement.
If the conditions force you to go underground then so be it. I strongly believe and i have said before that any anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist leftist organization must be prepared for that eventuality and expect it. But to self-impose that on yourself when the conditions have not yet reached the level of a revolutionary situation is to self-sabotage. Lenin spoke about these sorts of strategic choices and about recognizing when it is more advantageous to work within the system as opposed to outside of it.
Lenin wrote extensively about how to organize under conditions of harsh state repression, because that became a necessity for the Bolsheviks at some point. But there were also times when he advocated for communists to work within the bourgeois system. A vanguard party must know how to do both, but most importantly it must know how to correctly read the political situation and understand what the present conditions allow and call for.
And in fact, to some extent, a vanguard party can and should do both simultaneously. You can maintain your open and legal activities while also having cells organizing underground work with the necessary operational secrecy, provided that you properly insulate one from the other to maintain deniability and prevent the underground activities from being used as a pretext to shut down your legal operations. This is something that revolutionaries and resistance movements have always done.
Here are some works of Lenin that may help you understand this topic in greater detail:
The Illegal Party and Legal Work (1912)
The Principal Stages in the History of Bolshevism (1920)
Should We Participate in Bourgeois Parliaments? (1920)
The Tasks of the Russian Social Democrats (1897)
And here is a compilation of Lenin’s views from dozens of different works:
Lenin - On Parliamentary Struggle
I find particularly Lenin’s early writings to be the most relevant when it comes to how to organize and what to prioritize at this very early stage of leftist revolutionary activity in the US and other imperial core countries. Because we have to admit that there is a long road still to go and we are only just at the beginning, and that we have not yet reached the sort of conditions that existed in Russia on the eve of the October Revolution, or even the first failed Russian Revolution of 1905.
If you want to gain more insight into how Lenin and other revolutionaries lived and worked during those early days i can also recommend perusing
Krupskaya’s Reminiscences of Lenin (1926)
There is evidence to support the color revolution assumption for Nepal, and perhaps for Indonesia, but so far we have not seen the same for Morocco or Madagascar. Don’t jump to conclusions, not every event that shares certain characteristics is of the same nature. We need to know more before we can make a judgement grounded in evidence.
Assume everything you say to an “AI” is being recorded.
Excellent answer and great quotes!
It is easier to die for a belief than it is living for one. The communist movement needs living people more than it needs dead martyrs.
I could not have said this better myself!
Most important things: start learning the language and make sure you can support yourself financially once you are there.
You are jumping much too far ahead of the existing conditions. Your thinking is idealistic and detached from the material reality that exists in the US at the moment.
The US left, right now, needs to focus on educating and organizing the working class, not doing pointless adventurism, fetishizing violence when the masses do not yet support it, or LARPing as “leaders”. Revolutionary leaders aren’t self-appointed, they emerge organically through struggle as they are recognized by the masses. Do something for the masses first before you expect them to follow you.
Right now the US left is not united about what needs to be done, there is disagreement on the correct political line and the correct organizational strategy. And you won’t find the answer just by talking about it, you need to get out there, do the work, participate in the struggle alongside the working class, and learn through experience what works and what doesn’t. Win the support of the masses by standing up for the exploited and oppressed.
Find ways to help with labor struggles, help workers to form unions, convince them to join collective organizations for mutual aid and communal self-defense, help tenants to protect their rights against landlords. Don’t discount non-violent means of struggle. Help people without the means to do so to navigate the legal system. Organize protests, strikes and direct action against the fascist repression and the imperialist war machine.
And while you are doing these things continue to educate the people about capitalism and the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (don’t use fancy theory lingo that will alienate them, use words that they understand from their day to day lives), educate them about how the system really works, the mechanisms that are used to represses and exploit them. Raise their level of class consciousness.
Contradictions are already intensifying and material conditions will continue to deteriorate. This will open up opportunities to radicalize more people. Once the organized and revolutionary left has done all that work which i just spoke of, then the people will know that you are on their side and willing to fight for them. They will recognize those organizations and those leaders as their vanguard who have proven themselves as such.
Unity and centralization will emerge in the same way, through struggle against those ideological tendencies and those organizational strategies which are erroneous and don’t work. This struggle helps to correct your party line and hone your party discipline. In the meantime, form a united front with other working class organizations which share your goals, even when they don’t necessarily share your exact ideological line or your exact methods.
The reason why studying theory is important is because people have been through this before in the past. They have grappled with many of the same questions and problems. You don’t need to re-invent the wheel. You can learn from history what worked and what didn’t, lessons that were learned by others through great hardship and sacrifice, and then you must analyze your own conditions at the present time to understand what is applicable.
Best answer here. This is 100% correct.
I will add one caveat to this which is that you will frequently see the term “accelerationism” used incorrectly by disingenuous liberals in an attempt to intimidate or shame communists and other leftists out of sticking by our principles. According to these people the definition of accelerationism is “when you don’t vote for or support Democrats”. That is of course ridiculous and people who say such things should be ridiculed.