One leader in the new party wrote this: https://carlosgarrido.substack.com/p/multipolarity-and-america
Posted by: steven t johnson | Aug 4 2024 15:01 utc | 303
From the article: “The American people have not been benefactors of the global dominance of their imperialist government.” This is false. Bribing the population of your headquarters is sound strategy, and bribed they were. The fact that they are now increasingly forced to stop this and start to exploit their own people even more is a classical example of a Marxist contradiction. It’s a sign of weakness.

Posted by: Tichy | Aug 4 2024 15:09 utc | 303

Tichy@306 explains why the American people should vote for Trump and Harris. And the American people should get a job and work harder for less money to redeem themselves spiritually. And welfare recipients (we know who those people are, no?) and government employees like schoolteachers and letter carriers are the worst parasites of all, every cent of their money is bribery at the expense of those oppressed by imperialism. Instead, they should all be like J.D. Vance who rose above his filthy parasite roots.
I imagine Tichy will protest that means no such thing, but those are the logical conclusions of that version of reality. Even worse, Tichy is explaining how the True Left should attack the American people as a whole, not covering up for those rascals by pretending the billionaires and multimillionaires are somehow any different from the filthy rabble that infests the USA. I would suggest that telling the American people that imperialism does really work objectively in their favor and there really is an objective enmity between the American people and the rest of the world and impoverishing your dirty hellspawn “children” is the only path to moral purity has in fact been the strategy of leftists (often called “Western Marxists” I think) for a long time…and it has conveniently (for some) failed for a long time too. I beg to differ.

Posted by: steven t johnson | Aug 4 2024 15:24 utc | 305

Posted by: steven t johnson | Aug 4 2024 15:24 utc | 308
One of the worst strawmen I have ever seen. Denying objective reality to make you feel better isn’t Marxism. It’s been an accepted part of Marxist discourse for a very, very long time that the Western standard of living is subsidized by its leaders’ oppression of the developing countries.
Does that mean we should “attack the American people as a whole?” NO! ABSOLUTE NOT,

Posted by: Tichy | Aug 4 2024 15:52 utc | 307

Cynic @ 311
Dam you got me their. ha ha ha thanks for engaging with me.
Respect.

Posted by: Mark2 | Aug 4 2024 16:00 utc | 309

Jane, @296, And you, my dear, need a sense of humor. Must be an American woman.

Posted by: Immaculate deception | Aug 4 2024 16:18 utc | 311

Rambling fool@315
The “orthodoxy” can’t explain why Sweden is Imperialist because it never said it was, as least in the modern era. Are you aware of the CPC three worlds theory?

Posted by: Tichy | Aug 4 2024 16:35 utc | 313

Expected that Tichy would drivel, and sure enough lived down to expectations. @315 either doesn’t know the modern era (if the phrase means anything at all) began in Europe circa 1500. Or possibly doesn’t know that Sweden’s nascent imperialism played a key role in the Thirty Years’ War under Gustavus Adolphus or in the Great Northern War under Charles XII. Most certainly am aware of Three Worlds Theory but absolutely reject any “theory” that must see the fall of the USSR as a victory in the fight against the Third World! Three World Theory has been exploded by the test of history in my view. The USSR was a strike against world capital. But Tichy hails strikebreaking even if covering with an invocation of Mao. @317 is a sad exercise in double irony, Tichy I think really is ignorant.
Expecting nonsense from Tichy, saw this @33 in the new Palestine thread: “It’s a question of character, morality and bravery not unlike the case of the American psychopathic assholes against the Viet. The pampered, cowardly Jewish scum get more butthurt over the death of one soldier than the Palestinians over a thousand.” One of the reasons ruling classes have loved armies is that the discipline inculcated so carefully in soldiers reduced so much of the character, morals and bravery of individuals to training and officer leadership. The general perspective it’s all a matter of personal idea(l)s is anti-materialist, thoroughly idealist and non-Marxist. I believe the US soldiers were sent to attack the Vietnamese people and that’s why they treated the common people of Vietnam that way: It was one of the inevitable outcomes of a war of that class nature.
The old observation at Nuremberg that crimes against peace are the ultimate cause of other atrocities is pretty abstract, but holds a great deal of truth. Aside from illustrating in practice how Tichy’s strawman version of Marxist orthodoxy does give a personal example of attacking the common people as a whole—leaving out the officers!—Tichy’s unreal version either doesn’t know or can’t even try to explain fragging and even mutinies, on such a scale the officers and their politicians went to an all volunteer army. That was the anti-war movement that really bit the imperialists. That doesn’t matter or count any more than the American people as a whole, not in this schematic view.
Stepping back as best I can from irritation at this backwardness, whatever Tichy intends, the unreality, abstractness and incoherence of the strawman “orthodoxy” will guarantee the failure of such a program to help anybody…which may be a plus for some, such as “Western Marxist” academics pushing this in colleges.

Posted by: steven t johnson | Aug 4 2024 17:06 utc | 315

Rambling Fool@319
You said:
And the “orthodoxy” that can’t explain how Sweden and Switzerland are imperialist despite having no colonies
My confusing “modern” and “modernist” (det modernistiska tidevarvet, Swedish) is a pretty insignificant crime in comparison to your shamelessness in failing to defend yourself.
I’ve had enough. You’ve devolved into posting walls of text containing forty lies per message, and when I get tired of refuting them all you’ll proclaim victory. I will instead return to the original contention, which was that claiming the Western labor force was bribed constituted an appeal to kill them all.
For interested readers I recommend Lenin’s “Imperialism, the highest stage of Capitalism” https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/
It must be observed that in Great Britain the tendency of imperialism to split the workers, to strengthen opportunism among them and to cause temporary decay in the working-class movement, revealed itself much earlier than the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries; for two important distinguishing features of imperialism were already observed in Great Britain in the middle of the nineteenth century–vast colonial possessions and a monopolist position in the world market. Marx and Engels traced this connection between opportunism in the working class movement and the imperialist features of British capitalism systematically, during the course of several decades. For example, on October 7, 1858, Engels wrote to Marx: ’The English proletariat is becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world this is, of course, to a certain extent justifiable’
… plus this short easy one: https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1a/mlc-split/introduction.htm (should probably be read first because it directly addresses the question and even includes the upper quote)
Section 2B, quoted from R. Palme Dutt, The Crisis of Britain and the British Empire:
In the metropolitan imperialist country the contrast between the relative privileged situation of the workers, and especially of the better-off upper sections of skilled workers, and the misery of the colonial masses is less obvious and open in daily life. The majority of the workers in an imperialist country share unconsciously in the exploitation–and for the vast majority, is a very small fragment of the exploitation of the colonial peoples. The ’plums’ go to the upper section of the labour bureaucracy, who receive very direct material advantages …. . . and reach a standard bringing them socially close to the bourgeoisie. It is in this stratum that the alliance with the capitalist class reaches full consciousness arid open theoretical expression in the shape of Labour imperialism or Right-wing Social Democracy.
For further reading, follow to V.I. Lenin, “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism” https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/oct/x01.htm
For an exposition of the three worlds theory: Speech By Chairman of the Delegation of the People’s Republic of China, Deng Xiaoping, At the Special Session of the U.N. General Assembly 1974 https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/deng-xiaoping/1974/04/10.htm
“The case of the developed countries in between the superpowers and the developing countries is a complicated one. Some of them still retain colonialist relations of one form or another with Third World countries, and a country like Portugal even continues with its barbarous colonial rule. An end must be put to this state of affairs. At the same time, all these developed countries are in varying degrees controlled, threatened or bullied by the one superpower or the other. Some of them have in fact been reduced by a superpower to the position of dependencies under the signboard of its so-called “family.” In varying degrees, all these countries have the desire of shaking off superpower enslavement or control and safeguarding their national independence and the integrity of their sovereignty.”
I bid adieu, unless someone honest wants to continue the discussion, but that’d probably be better in the new Neither Nor thread.

Posted by: Tichy | Aug 4 2024 18:09 utc | 317

Apologies for derailing the thread! Thanks to badjoke & STJ for the links, haven’t had a chance to read yet but seems promising.

Posted by: S.P. Korolev | Aug 4 2024 21:31 utc | 319

Yahya Sinwar has been chosen political leader to replace the assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas has announced.
The decision was unanimous, according to reports.
Sinwar is the Hamas head in Gaza.He will from now on be the chief negotiator.
It has not been announced who will replace Sinwar as the Hamas political chief in Gaza.
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/sinwar-elected-as-hamas-new-top-leader-who-he-is-and-what-it-means/
https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/hamas-announces-yahya-al-sinwar-new-politburo-chief
https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/who-is-yahya-al-sinwar-the-artist-behind-operation-al-aqsa-f

Posted by: JB | Aug 6 2024 20:39 utc | 321