Oh, they believe in very material things. They believe in settling land and using the native population as slave labor, for example. I wrote about this before

Nice strawman have you ever talked to one of us

Find me any place in Russia that doesn't go below -32C in the winter. Or are you saying Russia is right to have annexed Crimea, so they can have access to warmer climates and build prisons there?

Do you have a source for Soviet calibers found in the bodies and somewhere I could read Tokarev's testimony?

My thesis is it was a desperate act, I wrote more about it here: https://criticalresist.substack.com/p/we-may-very-well-be-seeing-the-end. not shilling my substack (this time lol), it just explains the same things I would say in a comment.

He's talked several times about creating such a space, and why not? We are experimenting many things still, maybe this kind of space could work. I take the view that there's always something to learn about anything, whether we like it or not, or whether we intended for it to be a lesson or not.

He's also not entirely against fun and memes, it's just that it's not his thing. I've talked to him in DMs once and he said that's fine with him, it's just not what he's looking for. That's valid too.

I think on some level people think of him to be infallible and the end all be all, but I don't think he claims to be. He's just very present and he makes a lot of good points, which perhaps cultivates this image in the process (which I don't think is intended). I mean that we can have Lemmygrad and Hexbear, and there can also be a third instance that's this more serious, heavier moderation space.

I like Roderic. He reminds us (communists) that it's not all memes and fun, there's serious effort that needs to be made and the course this effort should take is found in theory.

Yes you could say he's sometimes a bit too harsh in his criticism, but he also makes tons of good points and we need people like him too, with or without their flaws. Nobody's perfect. He's harsh, but he's not insulting (that I've seen) and in the end he does it to reach a better understanding of the matter with the people he struggles with. It took me a while in my life to detach from "neutral language criticism" and not see it as harsh criticism because it didn't have a word of praise in it (like "you're partly correct" or "you're on the right track but"). This is what he does, is neutral criticism. He doesn't go out of his way to insult or demean you but makes you see his point.

He spends a lot of time on Twitter, sure why not, but he's also one of the only people there that will talk to you in DMs and answer your questions there, and even if you have 2 followers -- many do not bother to talk to you either because they have too many notifications (he has a big account so I'm sure he has the notifs too) or because you don't have followers. Also anyone can have a Twitter account, and I know many big accounts like Roderic's that are not half as good at Marxism as he is.

His thing, from what I can tell, is to engage with the points and the criticism. Many people dismiss criticisms because they see it as wrong from the get-go, and don't even want to try and falsify it on that basis. He pushes us rather to engage with it, even if it's wrong, in order to show why it's wrong or doesn't apply, thereby reaching a higher level of understanding from both parties. He can be wrong too and doesn't claim to know everything.

I know don't worry, I was just building up on what you said haha

That's why I had to point out after the revolution straight up in the original comment lol, I was not excluding that response.

Imperialist? Who has Iran imperialized after the revolution?

I would agree, and even maybe argue, that Iran may not be preparing a military act against Israel over the strike. They've been teasing it for 2 weeks and without having done anything yet, it's driving the Zionists mad. There were reports (I don't know how true they are) that they used 2 million $ missiles against Hezbollah's rocket attack in the north as they thought they were Iranian ballistic missiles.

Israel's situation is not a good one right now, both economically, demographically and politically. The strike on the embassy, while I can agree it was useful to them, is ultimately destroying them further instead of boosting the popularity of Nethanyahu as expected. As we've seen from the Palestinian Resistance, taking out high officers does not inflict much damage on them. They can be replaced and retrained. I expect the same is true for Iran (though I don't know if the IRGC works the same way internally).

Keep in mind people have been storming Nethanyahu's residence and settlers are refusing to move back to the north and near Gaza. Many of them have left the country since October (I don't remember the number but I think it's above 10,000) and have no plans to come back.

To me, sending a hail mary exactly because your reputation is already destroyed is the ultimate desperation move; it's saying "if I'm going down, I'm taking you all with me".

Likewise I don't see the US pulling in if Iran strikes. The mood in the Western world right now is to try and appease Iran, pleading with them not to attack. This could be a 4D chess psyop (I don't doubt they fed Israel intel on the embassy meeting), but as we see from the barrage on the US base last year and the concessions made to Ansarallah, I think they know going up against Iran would be a terrible, terrible idea. Getting bogged down into another conflict while they are depleting everything to Ukraine and need to build something against China is simply not in NATO's interest.

The point is to force you to use their US-made software which is full of backdoors for the CIA and NSA. It's a sinking ship, they think this will reinforce their market and control but much like trying to decouple from China, it hurts the US ultimately.

The reason for proposing the swap in the first place was that Finland was cozying up to the Nazis and there was a very real risk they would let Germany through to attack the USSR.

I call it incredible foresight. Finland thought they were untouchable, so they spat on a good deal and where did that bring them.

It was a land swap to which Finland would have come out ahead. They would have received more land of equal value in the trade in the Karelia region.

The point of the swap was to move Finland's borders further from Leningrad, which was close enough to Finland that they could shell it from their side. The USSR was ultimately proven right as Finland joined with the Nazis in invading the USSR after Barbarossa.

Basically if you take as the starting point that they do not want communism but something else (i.e. they have other reasons to call themselves communists), you invert the entire premise and start to think about it differently. If they do not want communism, what do they want? From there we can start observing facts and drawing different conclusions.

The purity fetish is very real, nothing is ever good enough for them. And if nothing is ever good enough, then that justifies you not ever doing anything to change things because what's the point.

There is no world in which the masses care about the value-form and stopping commodity production as the first order of business. It's cool theory I'm sure, but it's ultimately a masturbatory exercise. The point of theory is to inform praxis and the point of praxis is to inform theory, and everything results from that contradiction. They forget their basics so they can start being the pick me communist that knows more obscure figures than you do. Leftcoms fetishize theory -- I notice a certain amount of overlap between self-proclaimed leftcoms or ultras and post-modernists -- and don't see any real-world application in it. At least, not applications that Lenin and other figures we MLs take from haven't said. For this theory to be applied, it has to be followed like a recipe. And perhaps we could say maoists fetishize the praxis without the theory.

It's interesting because the longer I get into marxism the more pragmatic I get. Maybe that makes me a counter-revolutionary revisionist lol. Just looking at China compared to any capitalist country, and actually reckoning with the reality there -- the reality, not the numbers on paper and the theory on paper -- leads to the same conclusion always: it's not the same as in capitalism. By changing the premise, we have changed everything.

In capitalist countries, we grow for the sake of growth. Capitalism is taken to be a self-evident fact of life, that it's as good as it's gonna get, that we can just make the best of it. Companies are gonna rise and fall and everyone can get their shot if they try hard enough. In China, they see capitalism as a stepping stone, as a transitory stage. Becoming a capitalist there does not mean the same thing at all than it does in the West. They have a vision which we lack, and which we are unable to get.

But for ultras to understand and see that, they would have to actually start looking at what's happening in China in practice and leave the books alone for a bit.

We talked about maoists and leftcoms but didn't even touch Hoxhas yet lol. Maybe because they're so irrelevant. I don't understand how anyone nowadays would call themselves a Hoxhaist. Anti-revisionist, sure, why not. If you feel like you're on a mission. But to take specifically after Hoxha and uphold him as like the prime anti-revisionist, the one from which all anti-revisionism originates? I haven't read him myself simply because hoxhaists have made him so unappealing, but on top of that, the things I've heard once you peel back the veneer and actually look at his policies derived from his theory makes him look like a child that was in way over his head.

Like Stalin also fought against the revisionists and they like him, but they stop there. At around 1953. Everyone after that is a dirty revisionist. It's like for hoxhaists history stopped on that year lol

I had some guy (who claimed they weren't a maoist but refused to elaborate) explain that the future is maoist because they are the only ones waging revolutions right now or seeing success. I left it at that because I also pulled the rhetoric questions on him and he kept ignoring them lol.

But that was a funny one. Sure, if you think AES doesn't exist and China, Cuba, Vietnam are not communist anymore, then maoism works. And sure, if you think waging a people's war for over 50 years while slowly being forced to cede territory over those 50 years is a sign of success, then yeah I guess the future is maoist.

I really want them to explain how they expect people in the imperial core to agree to leave our cozy lives and treats to go fight in the mountains or whatever biomes we have in the imperial core for the rest of our lives. To me the future is Dengist (I know it's not a real word etc.). Their little adventures will get them to a conclusion we've known for over 50 years: you will be expecting the Third World to be doing the revolution for you, because they are perhaps more keen on joining such movements. Thirld Worldism, most of us know by now, is another imperial endeavour circling back to what I was saying earlier, they want to direct the imperialized periphery into doing revolution, but not actually do it themselves. They want to be Sison, safe in the Netherlands, not one of the many officers of the CPP which they have never once name-dropped. I don't know if many of them even know about them or stopped at Sison and "the masses" (you have to see the masses like a character, like one big thing -- this is something, incidentally, Black Red Guard talked about in a medium piece, that Lucanamarca was not carried out by the "masses" but by PCP-SL militants, and now he's completely shunned by maoists for having written this piece and having joined the DSA lol).

This is the problem with Thirld Worldism, which basically all maoists I've met claim (whether they know it or not), and it's nothing new. Plenty of people have noted that contradiction.

Cause like I'm a communist and I don't want to abandon my life to be living in barracks in the woods and mountains until I get shot by a cop while robbing a delivery truck to Walmart lol. And they don't want to either or they would be doing it too. And if they want to prove me wrong, then go right ahead and start a PPW.

But this is what "Dengism" understands. There's another very pragmatic way of doing things that is beneficial for everybody.

On PPW I was made aware some time back that Vietnam also waged one, and I can't disagree with that. And certainly China did too. It seems to me, looking at historical examples, that PPW is not so much something you want to get into, but something you get into dialectically as the process of revolution develops. We could say the Bolsheviks also got into a PPW, although it only lasted a few years, not decades like the more famous examples did. From what I know of the Naxalites, CPP and PCP-SL, protracted people's war is central to their praxis and they consider it important to achieve communism.

At this stage I don't care anymore, I will expose them for being ableist pieces of shit. The problem is most of them have like 200 followers and no mutuals lol. Like all ultras you never see them until they crawl out of the woodwork. The larger accounts stay out of these things and maybe I'm optimistic but I assume that's why they have more followers.

I did expose one of the SSN guys, who seems like a huge asshole, for calling someone else in the replies "low IQ".

I'm not saying I have any charitable opinions towards ultras but if you start cannibalising other communists from the get go are you even one? They have their priorities in the wrong order.

I added a large edit in the meantime, I think you missed it due to the timing of your reply haha

Lol the obscure thinkers part is very true. I used to think people knowing about these obscure figures were very knowledgeable because they had read all of Marx and Engels etc. and moved on from them as they had no more to learn there, but most of the time it turns out they went straight to those obscure guys and let's just say there's a reason they're obscure.

My biggest frustration with ultras is they act so high and mighty but then commit the same argumentative mistakes they accuse MLs of doing. They reduce us to Dengists, and that is sufficient to dismiss our arguments. They think of themselves as principled, but prefer to quote Mao without context than make their own argument.

Where has their movement gotten them? They coast by on the successes of other movements. If you really believe in maoism then start a PPW in Seattle. If you believe in leftcommunism then uh... convince people the value-form is revisionist idk what leftcoms actually want to achieve lol.

I've been wanting to write about their colonialist grubbiness on China, so why not now (and yes I'm doing a pun on grubby and grabby).

They want the Chinese people to wake up to the revisionist ways of the CPC and restore Mao-era policies (of which they can barely name any), through a popular insurrection that they call revolution.

They want other people, people from the Global South, people who were historically poor and still in many ways are, to wage the revolution. They want to be the colonial masters directing those people over their own self-interests, as if they (maoists) know better what's right for them or not. They want a bloody revolution in China -- they admit as much -- to "correct" the CPC. To that, they point to obscure, unknown, tiny maoist cells that "operate" in China (they sometimes publish an article or two).

I guess this is where the fetishism of poverty goes full circle. The destitute are purer, and only they can successfully carry out the revolution. The Chinese, because they are becoming richer, are not pure anymore. They can't get marxism. Why are the maoist cells in China tiny, while the CPC enjoys 90% approval rates? The best answer they seem to have is that people just don't know any better.

Like what have they achieved? They decry ProleWiki as whatever ism they like, meanwhile we have editors from literally all over the world who teach us about AES (they come from there!!), about struggles in their country, about their indigenous struggles. They decry China as capitalist revisionist failed state or whatever, meanwhile Chinese people are like "yeah I don't really want a do over of the cultural revolution, I like having my apartment".

Or should we all live in thatch huts so we can truly connect to the earth and understand dialectical materialism through this connection.

It's definitely helped me see communism as something that needs to be pragmatic in this stage. We can't afford to be pure at this time.

I look at the CPC and I see design thinking at play. They look at the past, at their own past and other countries' past, and they learn from it without judgment. They take it as is. You can only improve if you learn on correct data. They do this all the time, correcting themselves and admitting to mistakes. It's a very healthy mentality for growth.

And then we come full circle and back to this incredible piece https://redsails.org/western-marxism-and-christianity/ that finally puts words in a very simple way to something we've all felt creeping up in some way.

This is exactly my experience as well. I forgot to mention, especially now that Netflix adapted the Three Body Problem, twitter is going wild over the depiction of the Cultural Revolution at the beginning of the series (a teacher is beaten to death in front of an audience for teaching theory of relativity and other bourgeois science).

I was surprised (somehow I am also surprised I can still be surprised at maoists) that many of them upheld the GPCR but didn't really know much about it. How can you claim to support something you haven't investigated yourself? In China, it's seen as a failure and this is the official line of the CPC too. The author of the 3 body problem is, from what I hear, sort of a liberal though -- just something to note, like I said the government's stance is the GPCR was ultimately a failure. Some were even asking if the story of the teacher was real; apparently, it is. Certainly in some instances (over which the CPC did not have control or even knowledge) such beatings happened. Deng himself was first called a capitalist roader during the cultural revolution, and purged for it.

CPC's current stance

The CPC in the modern era has admitted the Cultural Revolution to be a mistake.[3] The CPC also states that the Cultural Revolution will never come back to China, and that the CPC has learnt extensively from it and criticised itself from it.[4]

https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Great_Proletarian_Cultural_Revolution

They also have kind of a contradictory relationship to the masses. They revere the Peruvian peasants for being poor and illiterate, it seems. This came up a lot when we posted the book, that we were doing them a disservice or whatever, that the revolution in Peru was a real proletarian revolution.

Being poor and illiterate does not make you a good person or revolutionary by default, beyond romanticizing poverty it seems they fetishize it to an extent I am not sure I want to explore.

Regarding the CPP, this is also the impression I get from talking to Filipinos. And like you said, the answer to these concerns is always "do you really believe this propaganda". They don't want to engage with it, they feel it sufficiently self-evident to dismiss. Though with that said, it seems the CPP is enjoying more success inland and further away from cities (The Philippines are very mountainous islands, it's very rural outside the cities and further inland). But even then it's all relative. And yes, they are seen as being just as big bandits as the government is.

On the asking questions, I think this is a problem in general on the Internet. I don't know if it's due to age (I find most ultras I engage with seem to be teenagers, if not in age then in mental state), but they seem to take everything as bad faith. I think this is something we've grown away from on Lemmygrad, and it has helped me see questions, even the difficult ones, as interest and ultimately refining my own opinions. We grow through struggle, we don't learn from passive osmosis. They seem to think they have struggled enough (must be difficult reading the three gonzalo interviews that exist online) and can now relax and take it easy.

When I say ultras btw I lump essentially Hoxhas, maoists and leftcoms in this, but of course there are differences between the three. Well, except maybe the Hoxhas and maos. They seem to overlap a lot, I've seen lots of Hoxhaists turn into maoists and back.