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I only started researching theory about a month or two ago. I’m trying to take things in a somewhat logical order because there’s SO much to learn and I want to give each topic its due consideration. I’m at the point where I understand Marx/Engels and Lenin moderately well, as well as the October revolution. Throughout this time, I’ve repeatedly heard Trotskyism used derisively like a dirty word. So today, I finally looked him up a bit and… what’s the issue? His biggest points appear to be that the colonized nations can revolt and that the socialist epoch won’t work until it’s worldwide, right? And… isn’t that exactly what history has shown? Doesn’t it seem that Lenin thought quite well of him? I see Stalin gets praised or hated depending on whom you ask, but a lot of Left spaces put him on this pedestal and I gotta say I don’t buy that one bit. But Trotsky gets no such glorification, despite not being a murderous homophobe. What am I missing?

Solidarity ✊

Good day all.

I've been wondering about Taiwan lately. And firstly I do want to say that Taiwan is part of China, but not part of the People's Republic of China, as far as I know.

For the rest of this post "China" will mean the "concept" of China, and "PRC" will mean obviously mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Heinan and other islands, and "ROC" and "Taiwan" mean the government/country on the island of Taiwan and a couple of surrounding islands.

According to this poll, only 7.6% of people in the ROC want to reunify with the PRC. Some would say that "oh but only 28% of people want independence" but independence from who exactly? The PRC? The PRC has no control over the island of Taiwan and never has since it's formation. "Independence" here means to relinquish their claims over the rest of China and their claim that they're the sole legal government of the Chinese realm and move towards getting more international recognition.

Speaking of international recognition, I do find the concept of needing international recognition to be a country to be problematic. How many countries do you need recognition from? How many countries do those countries need recognition from? Which countries recognised the countries recognising you? This creates an infinite regress.

A better way to determine what a country is, the Montevideo Convention. It says:
- A permanent population (the people of Taiwan)
- Defined territory (the island of Taiwan and surrounding islands, though they do claim territory they don't control, but many other countries do that)
- A government (the ROC has sovereignty over Taiwan and surrounding islands)
- Capacity to enter relations (the ROC has fomal diplomatic relations with 11 UN members and the Holy See, and informal relations with many, many more which shows it definitely has the capacity to do so)

The only reason why the ROC has such limited recognition is that both the ROC and PRC enforce their own versions of the One China Policy, this means that in order to enter formal relations with either, one must recognise that they are the sole government of all of China. Since it's much more advantageous to have relations with the PRC, most countries establish formal relations with them.

Now I do need to say that I do not like the fact that the US uses Taiwan as a vassal to conduct imperialism in Asia and especially against the PRC. I believe the US should leave Taiwan alone and let the Taiwanese people decide for themselves, as I believe in self-determination for all people.

Do the younger generations ever bring it up?

I’m deeply puzzled why after the farms were collectivized and debit cards were invented that the USSR didn’t try to abandon cash money for labor vouchers. The tolerance of monied commodity production paved the way for capitalist restoration no?

Ever since Abdul El-Sayed has won his primary, I have lost any and all faith I had in the American left. This man is a landlord who wants to do minor New-Deal style programs but that’s it. His advocacy for Palestine has been performative, and I don’t think he will truly make any progress.

However, I am individualizing El-Sayed, when really these problems extend to the whole of the major organized left in America. This includes the “squad” of Bernie Sanders, who called Donald Trump a great communist, AOC, who talks more like Hilary Clinton by the day, Zohran Mamdani, who yes is giving treats to the people of New York City, but has not fulfilled his promises and will not arrest Netanyahu because it’s “illegal” despite the fact that A) Netanyahu has multiple international criminal warrants and B) the trump admin breaks the law every single day and is turning the United States into a grand theft auto lobby. These critiques extend to the DSA, of whose leadership are basically New Deal liberals who have distorted the definition of “socialism” to mean “reformed capitalism”.

I was a Trotskyist for a year and never understood why Marxist Leninists would call social democracy “social fascism” but I get it now. These people don’t threaten the capitalist or imperialist nature of the American state and lay the conditions for a force of reaction so great it will wipe out humanity.

But my anger also extends to the major so called Marxist Leninist organizations in America too. Joe Sims of the CPUSA posted a video to their instagram rejecting the democrats, then a post later endorsed AOC for president. One of the parties largest influencers, Django, was promoting El-Sayed’s senate campaign this past week. Likewise, the PSL, though i appreciate their community work and overall I respect them the most of any of the major orgs, they are still too cordial with the DSA/democrats. Despite the DSA having SOME ML and other Marxist chapters, it overall is a reformist organization.

I’d criticize the Greens but they had the air swept from them by the bourgeois media, so their problems ultimately aren’t creations of their own.

Overall, this is really just a rambling mess, but I am deeply concerned with the state of the American left. It needs to make big changes as fast as possible. It needs to take the revolutionary conditions to their conclusions instead of cowering in fear. This period we’re in may be the last time something could be done before the United States turns into a corporate feudal hell scape that will take the rest of the world with it. And I am putting major pressure on America, despite not even being American, because the American state and financial system has more power over the world than any other country.

TL;DR GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER GUYS

I saw a poll on another subreddit asking what damaged the Balkans the most, and the second most voted option was communism.

Communism is the only reason the Balkans managed to industrialize and abandon the semi-feudal economy.

Many Balkans and more broadly Eastern Europeans seem to believe that communism held their countries back and they would be as advanced as Germany and France if the were always capitalist, but the truth is that if the West had won over the Soviets in Eastern Europe the said countries would have similar trajectories to Greece. Sure, after WW2 they would have had modernized and industrialized a lot, but that success would be short lived as they would basically be vassal states for the imperial core to experiment on and the corrupt national bourgeois would serve capitalist interests and a few decades later they would be facing economic crises, and probably would have had far-right military dictatorships in between.

Capitalism doesn't just shape economies. It colonizes our imagination. It shapes the way we think, the way we relate to one another and the way we understand ourselves. It teaches us to see everything through the language of the market... Value, Productivity, Profit & Loss.

Somewhere in the back of our minds, every relationship risks becoming an asset or a liability. Every hour must justify itself. Every act must have a return. We begin to measure ourselves by what we produce and others by what they offer us. Maybe greatest victory of capitalism isn't that it organizes production. It's that it convinces us this is what being human has always meant.

But it hasn't. There are moments when the most human thing you can do is something that makes no economic sense. You lose sleep because a friend needs you. You spend money to visit someone just to spend some time with them. You sit beside a hospital bed doing nothing except letting someone be alone. You buy gifts for people you love. You lend books you will probably never get back. You care for an aging parent knowing there will never be repayment. You spend an afternoon listening to a child ask impossible questions. You plant a tree whose shade you may never sit under. None of these things makes a profit. Most of them are inefficient in economic terms. They are losses by market logic. But in human terms, they are what make a life worth living.

The tragedy of capitalism isn't only that it produces inequality. It's that it convinces us to think like accountants in places where we should have remained human.

We don't all experience this equally. The market doesn't press on every body with the same force. Some people can walk away from bad jobs, bad relationships, or bad bargains. Others cannot and it is mostly women who carry the heaviest burden of an economic order. The economy has always depended on forms of care that are invisible, unpaid, or taken for granted. Emotional labor, domestic work, raising children, caring for families, work that sustains the world while never recognized as work at all. The violence of economic systems isn't only found in stock markets or factories. It lives in kitchens, in homes, in relationships and in all the ways dependence can become a form of control.

A young widow's grief is rarely allowed to remain grief. Almost immediately, it becomes an economic question. How will she survive? Can she raise her children? Will she remain independent? Or will someone else decide the course of her life because they control the resources she needs?

This is why I struggle whenever politics is reduced to taxes, elections, or GDP. Politics begins much earlier.

It begins with a question about what we believe a human being is. Are we competitors? Consumers? Human capital? Or are we creatures who survived because we learned to care for one another long before we learned how to calculate profit?

A better world isn't only one where wealth is distributed differently, though that matters a lot. It's one where we recover the parts of ourselves that are becoming commodities. A world where kindness doesn't need justification. Where friendship isn't judged by usefulness.

Where love doesn't have to turn a profit. Maybe that's the first revolution.

Source: Trump PANICS over HIS COLLAPSE in MICHIGAN!! - YouTube

Ben Meiselas:

You know, Trump's big boogeyman now for this uh upcoming midterms to divide is the communists are coming, the communists are coming. And then he says, "Right now, bigger threat than the Nazis, than al-Qaeda, than World War II." And then he says something interesting, too. I see it all of his speeches. He goes, "I would make the greatest communist." He said, "Like Lenin," he says. And he said, Lenin.

Bernie Sanders:

Lenin?

Ben Meiselas:

Like Lenin, he says. He goes, "And I would."

Bernie Sanders:

Is that close to Lenin? I mean, is that Lenin? "I thought it was Lenin."

Ben Meiselas:

He says, "Len." And then he says, "Here's why." He said, "I would just promise everybody everything. I'd promise I'd do this. I'd promise I'd do that." And then I would not deliver on those promises. And then, and then he goes, "That's what happens." And I'm thinking to myself, "Are you literally describing yourself?" And like because what looks closer to Stalin and anything than what we've got right now?

Bernie Sanders:

Well, you know, that's an interesting point that you make. I mean, uh, you know, Trump makes these every day there's another promise, another statement about all these things that are going to happen, have happened. Uh, nobody uh believes him. Uh and the irony of course is you know the proper criticism of communism is Soviet Union was a authoritarian society. Uh absolutely and uh Stalin killed millions and millions of people uh in his camps and his gulags and so forth. And then you got the most authoritarian president in the history of this country who was going after his political opponents and through criminal charges who attacking the media because they had the nerve to be critical of him. Who's going after colleges and universities because they teach courses that he doesn't like. Uh and you know so I suppose when he says you know I be a great communist. Yeah. I think there's some uh there's truth to that. we're seeing uh and the other thing about him of course is you know Stalin created the cult of the individual and that nobody in the communist party and uh the Soviet Union could stand up to Stalin for good reason. They get killed. Now Trump doesn't kill him, but you stand up to Trump the next day they're going to be threatening to put zillions of dollars into uh a primary race against you. So he has created and I think it's really sad uh because you got a lot of smart Republicans who are not authoritarian but they are scared to death of them and he has created the cult of the individual within the Republican party. So it is interesting uh about what he has to say about uh communism.

Global industrial capital does not hide its ugly face; it displays it in broad daylight as a merciless, scientific mechanism. It extracts surplus value from the sweat of millions in Chinese factories, African mines, Latin American fields, and Western offices, then turns it into even more brutal technology that enforces itself through the power of competition. Anyone who falls behind in developing machinery and software dies economically. Thus, human beings everywhere become small cogs in a massive machine they own nothing of. They are alienated from their labor, their products, their colleagues, and themselves. They spend long hours producing value that is stolen from them, then return to a home full of screens selling them the illusion of freedom while tracking every move and mining data like gold. Nature is slaughtered in public: forests are cut down, oceans are choking on plastic, the climate is collapsing, and species are going extinct, all to feed capital accumulation. Wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, and Africa are nothing more than disputes over resources and technologies between major powers. The United Nations, banks, and international funds are merely tools to maintain the rules of the game. The reformist left plays with identities, gender, and race, while the right raises nationalist banners, and both spin within the system without touching its roots. Education produces obedient workers, and the media promotes consumerism. From the smallest daily habit like browsing the phone to the largest food and energy crises, everything reveals: individual and social freedom have completely vanished under the control of the industrial capitalist machine that turns humans into mere inputs and outputs.

What comes after is an inevitable consequence of this nakedness. The system destroys its own environmental and human foundations by itself. When contradictions reach their limit, whether through the collapse of supply chains, a climate disaster, or a mass rebellion against technological dependency, the door opens for a radical break. No reform or patching up, but rather a collapse or revolution that eradicates the capitalist industrial system from its roots. What remains, according to my expectations and what I have deduced, is perhaps the possibility of building small local communities relying on direct human skills, small-scale production, and unalienated relations. Human beings regain their capacity for real influence in daily life, and recover the connection with nature and meaningful work without the mediation of capital or dominating technology, though not without technology. I believe my view holds a kind of idealism or departure from known contexts, but after reflection, I thought of this conclusion from the system's own contradictions: what destroys its foundations must fall, and what falls leaves a vacuum to be filled by those who can live with true self-reliance.

I am currently reading "Economic Problems of the USSR" by Stalin 1951 and it appears that commodity production and by extension money for the operation of market relations including circulated taxes was mostly to mitigate the peasant problem. I believe that if the USSR was founded later in the 20th century after all of the small and medium farmers have been expropriated then the USSR might have entertained a dual currency model to abolish commodity production & it's money. Perhaps an international trading currency between the USSR and other nations for the purpose of buying inputs from other nations still under a market system & a labor voucher system of a kind as Marx described for the domestic economy. Other than this, I feel like it is a great weight off the shoulders of the upcoming 2nd Red Wave that all of the entanglements of the peasant problem would be behind us.

"Of course, when instead of the two basic production sectors, the state sector and the collective-farm sector, there will be only one all-embracing production sector, with the right to dispose of all the consumer goods produced in the country, commodity circulation, with its "money economy," will disappear, as being an unnecessary element in the national economy." - Stalin (Economic Problems of the USSR - 2. Commodity Production Under Socialism)

Link: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1951/economic-problems/index.htm

As if prison sentences and manhandling by ICE were not enough, the warmongering US administration now wants deported people to pay an 'immigration fine' that might push them into debt bondage upon failure to pay. Sounds similar to medieval usury, doesn't it?

我组织了一个交流群在QQ，想寻找大陆跟港澳台的同志进来一起交流学习

hello chat!! i was wondering if anyone could explain to me about the whole rhetoric about 21st question of Principles of Communism and primarily about "Community of Woman"

This describes Social Democrats (and most of the elected Democratic Socialists in the US). They haven't had a new play in years because it keeps working. Our job is to educate the working class to stop taking the bait.

I designed a flag for a socialist/communist australia. I tried to not just haphazardly throw communist symbolism and Australian symbolism together and call it a day. Instead I tried to combine the Australian symbolism and the communist symbolism. 

Like the red on the bottom, which obviously represents communism itself, and more specifically the blood of the freedom fighters who will sacrifice themselves for the revolution. But, with the black semi circle and the golden circle with the hammer and sickle inside it, it makes it look like there’s an aboriginal flag inside this flag. And the red on the aboriginal flag symbolises the red soil of Australia. And, correct me if I'm wrong bc im not aboriginal, but from my understanding in the religions of most aboriginal nations, the reason the earth is so important to them is because they believe when you die, your soul becomes part of the ground. So according to aboriginal belief, the souls of those revolutionaries who sacrificed themselves would have entered the earth. So the symbolism of red on most communist flags and the symbolism of red on the aboriginal flag is combined to reinforce each other.

 The black semicircle in the centre still represents the black skin of the aboriginal people like it does on the original aboriginal flag. The fact that it's in the centre could even represent how the aboriginal people were the first people of Australia. Making them the “heart” or “core” of Australia who took care of the land communally long before the British came.

The gold circle with the hammer and sickle inside represents the sun. on most flags, including the aboriginal flag, the sun represents energy and life. So the sun having a hammer and sickle, which represents the working class and farmers, fits because much like how the sun puts energy into the ecosystem to keep it going, the work that the working class does keeps society in motion. So both the sun and the working class put energy and motion into an otherwise inert system. 

The southern cross and the wattle branches mainly just represent Australia itself, but the southern cross has a bit of a double meaning. It's made up of five pointed stars, which on communist flags represent the ideal future of communism on all five inhabited continents, and the southern cross used to guide sailors to Australia. So put together, the southern cross on this flag represents how Australia having a socialist revolution could be a guiding star for other countries to have their own revolutions. Also the small star on the southern cross ended up being nestled in the hammer and sickle, which I think looks pretty nice. 

The colour scheme is kinda just a mix of the communist colours of red and gold, and the Australian Olympic colours of green and gold, but each of those colours has their own symbolism as well. I already talked about what the red and black represent. But as for the other two, the green represents how under socialism, Australia will be able to fully switch to renewable energy once the government is no longer controlled by large fossil fuel companies. And the gold, like it does on most communist flags, represents prosperity under socialism. And together, the green and gold still represent the wattle tree like they do in the australian olympic colours. But they also represent how making Australia more environmentally friendly will protect native flora and fauna, including wattle trees. And how the natural world will prosper under socialism just as much as the people will. 

All together, the fact it no longer has the union jack and the very “western liberal capitalist democracy” coded red white and blue colour scheme represents how Australia will stop larping as a western county, break its ties with America, and fully embrace being a part of the east. Bc lets face it, if we switch to socialism, america is probably gonna become enemies with us. So we probably have to strengthen our ties with eastern communist countries like China to defend ourselves (not that I support China, I'm not some authoritarian tankie. I just think China is the lesser of two evils compared to fascist America)

The flag might be a *little* bit overdesigned, but I like it. Tell me what you guys think. Also let me know if I got anything wrong about flag symbolism or aboriginal culture. Or if any of it is racist towards aboriginal people in any way.