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For the theory and practice of Marxism Powered by @r_channels and @reddit2telegram
question about this subreddits formatting
Hello, as an advocate of MLM communism, respectfully, why does the description of this subreddit say “For the theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism” when the name of this subreddit is “communism” and not “Marxist-Leninist-Maoism”? Yet Marx was never alive in the time of Lenin’s political prominence, nor Mao's, and yet he created the world’s first communist party and created the ideology and the framework of those leftist ideas and thoughts. However, when you say that this is “for the theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism,” and yet you use the name “communism” for the subreddit, which implies that the MLM strand of communism is the only “true” brand of communism. And so I was wondering if that was a direct statement on what your specific community of MLM members believes is true about leftists who call themselves communists.
thank you for your responses.
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Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (February 08)
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Looking for Theory and writings of Uganda from a Marxist/Communist perspective
Does anyone know any info? I have a friend of Ugandan descent who has socialist leanings, and I want to help them develop their analysis.
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Prerequisites to read Kosambi’s “An introduction to the study of Indian history”?
I must admit that I haven’t read Hegel or Marx’s writings on Dialectical Materialism in detail. Would they be necessary prerequisites for reading D D Kosambi’s history of India?
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The Iranian Uprising and Semi-Colonial Semi-Feudal Iran
The question of whether Iran should be characterized as semi-feudal and semi-colonial is not a scholastic dispute, but a strategic one. Determining the nature of the Iranian social formation is decisive for defining the correct revolutionary line. Recent debates among Iranian Maoists reveal a persistent theoretical confusion on this point, often stemming from a mechanical or overly descriptive reading of social relations rather than an analysis of their structural articulation within the global capitalist system.
In any social formation, multiple modes of production coexist, but one mode is dominant and subordinates the others to its own reproduction. In semi-feudal and semi-colonial formations, pre-capitalist relations are not simply remnants of the past; they are actively reproduced and restructured to serve imperialist accumulation and the international division of labor. Semi-colonialism does not negate capitalist development it shapes it in a dependent and disarticulated form.
Semi-Feudal Relations and the Reserve Army of Labor
One of the clearest indicators of semi-feudal persistence in Iran is the agrarian structure. A vast majority of landowners around 76 percent possess less than five hectares. These smallholders are not independent peasants in any meaningful sense. They function as semi-proletarians, producing primarily for the market rather than subsistence, while remaining trapped in unequal pricing systems dominated by merchants, intermediaries, and agro-industrial capital. Rising prices only benefit them sporadically and partially; overall, the terms of exchange are structurally rigged against them.
This condition continuously expels labor from the countryside without fully absorbing it into productive industrial employment. The result is a massive reserve army of labor, which plays a crucial role in suppressing wages. Displaced rural labor does not flow into a strong industrial sector, but instead accumulates in a bloated service sector. It should be noted that this sector makes up 55.4 percent of Iran's GDP and employes half of Iran's labour force . Iran’s economy lacks the characteristics of a national economy in the strict sense. Following Samir Amin (I know he is problematic because his unequal exchange thesis can lead to weird places), underdeveloped economies are not integrated economic spaces but collections of relatively autonomous “atoms,” each tied more closely to the centers of global capitalism than to one another. Iran fits this pattern and I have discussed this in an previous post which I made. The hypertrophy of the service sector further reflects this disarticulation. Instead of paralleling industrial development, services expand as a sink for surplus labor, particularly in administration, commerce, and low-productivity activities.
The Uprising and the Question of Political Line
Against this structural background, the recent uprising in Iran must be understood concretely. It was initially sparked by bazaar merchants reacting to inflation that eroded their incomes, but it later drew in broader social layers. This trajectory makes it impossible to label the movement as either purely reactionary or inherently progressive. Like all mass movements, it demands a concrete communist analysis of its class composition, leadership, and contradictions.
Two dominant deviations have emerged.
The campist position defends reactionary regimes such as the Islamic Republic under the banner of anti-imperialism, denying the existence of internal contradictions and attributing all opposition to imperialist manipulation. This view grants primacy to the external contradiction and rests on a neo-Kautskyite conception of imperialism, portraying “the West” as a unified bloc while casting powers like China and Russia as inherently anti-hegemonic.
The tailist position adopts the opposite error, uncritically endorsing any opposition to the regime regardless of its class character or political content. It collapses all contradictions into sheer quantity,
on the government for assistance.
The medicine chest, which was supposed to be included for access by Indigenous peoples on reserves as a treaty obligation of the state, does not meaningfully show up during any moment of medicinal need post-treaty. It is not even worth touching upon. Suffice to say that no support came to the First Nations during recurring epidemics, and as health outcomes plummeted due to starvation, epidemics gained greater power. To this day, the health outcomes of Indigenous peoples on reserves is terrible, and TB on reserve still occurs.
A microcosm of the state’s administration over its first nations subjects would be the work of Indian agents like Thomas Quinn and John Delaney, who did not try to be politically correct in their torment of the First Nations people. Part of this involved abducting children and selling them in the sex trade (the purchase of Indigenous prostitutes and wives by settlers was also an incredibly common occurrence - in fact, sexual assault was so common among the state’s officials themselves that 45% of some groups of officials in the department had stds). There were also “pranks” on starving peoples. The Indigenous rightly killed these abusers (among others), and the state seized this opportunity to punish them greatly. An investigation took place and trials were held where the law had no sympathy for the abused, and all found guilty in the speedy trials were hung at an execution that First Nations were forced to attend.
By 1886, the reserve pass system was introduced wherein an Indigenous person was not allowed to leave the reserve unless they were granted the mobility by an Indian agent, every time. Permits were also required for all transactions between the reserves and the outside world. By this mechanism, the state finally had full control over the lives of the Indigenous. By the end of the same year, most of the chiefs and elders had died, while others were terminally ill and would never recover. Some First Nations peoples fled to the usa, many who had some white ancestry applied for scrip to exchange their Indian status for a sliver of shitty land (thus becoming legally Metis), while the rest were kept, physically, on reserve. As for the “rebellious” bands, aid was withheld so as to enforce civility (while the “loyal” still starved). Bands of the north, who were not on reserves and had more mobility to maintain their traditional economies, fared better than their plains Indigenous in general, but those of the plains were all but subdued at this point. 1/3 of the plains Indigenous population died within a 6 year period in the 1880s.
The railway, which had reached Calgary in 1883, continued to truck more and more settlers to the plains. The Indigenous peoples, who were “once considered nuisances, vagrants, and members of a dying race” were by the 1890s “increasingly perceived as a threat to the property and lives of white settlers”. The settlers themselves were staunch supporters of state repression, including the reserve pass system, since settler ranchers (in particular) believed that their livestock could get eaten otherwise (on a related note, the reserve and pass system was a great inspiration for apartheid south Africa and occupied Palestine, just as canada’s temporary foreign worker program, which began with Chinese railroad labour importation, is a great inspiration for managed migration programs globally today). As such, the state intervened more and more to repress them, including the banning of religious ceremonies which they thought could inspire rebellion. Simultaneously, the residential school system was implemented, which is infamous enough to not detail here.
Daschuk has a trenchant line on the last page of the book that I include here as a summary of this portion of the history: “The Cree negotiators at Treaty 6 recognized the need for their people to adapt to the new economic paradigm taking shape in the west. They acknowledged that the conversion would be difficult. What they failed to plan for was the active intervention of the Canadian
would very soon be over, and c) the settlers were coming. It is in this light that many Indigenous nations actively sought treaties as binding legal agreements that included, amongst other aspects such as recognition for land ownership, a) assistance with transitioning away from their current economies to agricultural settlement (which they knew would be hard), b) food assistance in times of hardship (since the bison were almost done for), and c) a “medicine chest” to be kept by each Indian agent (since they knew more epidemics were coming). The state, meanwhile, considered treaties as a legal obstacle to overcome before mass settlement and the establishment of agricultural and ranching industries in the plains. Although Indigenous nations were weakened by recurring epidemics and declining resources, they were still very much a formidable force and the state did fear them – especially the Plains Cree. Therefore, the requests noted above were included as promises in the treaties. In their “interpretation” of the treaties, however, the state clearly and knowingly did the most to provide the most uncharitable of assistance (more on this later). Indeed, relative ignorance under the first administrations turns to deliberate starvation by the third and forth terms of government (1878-onward).
Post-confederation, the terrain for intertribal relations began to change very rapidly. In 1870, the Blackfoot repelled a Cree, Saulteaux, and Assiniboine attack in the Old Man River Valley (today’s southern alberta). This was the last intertribal war in in the plains. Two years later, in 1872, both sides signed a peace treaty, recognizing that the days of intertribal warfare were at their end. From this point onward, all Indigenous nations in the plains shared national experience of oppression at the hands of the settler colonial project of Canada, and it is through the national enforcement of this settler colonial clearing and settling of the plains that the nation of Canada, as it is today, is birthed. In other words, despite the diversity of national origins of first nations and settlers, the settler colonial event swallows the population and splits it into two nations of oppressor and oppressed with state, industry, and settler all as active agents.
More details hammer this point home. Epidemics continued to recur after 1869, but the canadian state did not come even close to the hbc’s support for the Indigenous. The Indigenous were not potential trade partners anymore but definite obstacles to the real midwives of capitalist expansion: the settlers. For instance, in the midst of an 1870 epidemic and crisis, supplies were stopped from proceeding west at the Red River Colony in order to ensure the greatest amount for its residents, and furs were stopped from travelling east at that point due to belief of contagion. Not long after the trade routes were reopened, the addition of the steamboat made even more Indigenous labour in the fur trade superfluous. And despite the desire of the Indigenous to sign treaties to secure their future in a time of deepening crisis, the state was in no rush to see it through. The first treaty was signed in Manitoba in 1871 because, arguably, the mass influx of settlers forced their hand in a potential tinderbox of class contradiction. Even so, the state was not too shy to send land surveyors over the plains to survey for the railroad while it lollygagged its support obligations in times of starvation.
By 1874, another treaty was signed for the Qu’Appelle valley region, for the most part, due to unignorable hunger amongst the region’s First Nations and potential political taboo back east. The same year, the northwest mounted police (nwmp) was introduced to police the western territory. The reason for their deployment was to prepare for the railroad and settlement – not only in reference to the First Nations but, increasingly, in referenced to the rapid settlement of the usa to the south. Indeed, canada’s control over the west was, from the start, an expansionist surge for territory against that of the
woods and into the Plains. Other groups like the Anishinaabe and Ojibwa move west from the great lakes and take up residence in the vacated territory (I note here that the most eastern groups benefitted somewhat from early exposure to diseases like smallpox compared to the “virgin soil” experience of the plains First Nations). Still other groups like the Sioux opposed French trade and its expansive effects on their territory.
At the same time as the fur trade pushed on the Plains from the east, the horse trade originating in New Spain pushed from the south and southwest. It revolutionized Indigenous life, but it carried disease and the speed of travel that it allowed made the spread of disease quicker. War (with the Snake Indigenous) and disease pushed the Blackfeet north and the Kutenai west into the mountains. The Blackfeet eventually moved south again as the Snakes vacated, but they stayed rather aloof to the fur trade, even as it reached their territory from both French and hbc channels. They, like the Plains Assiniboine, still considered the beaver too important to water sustainability to trap and trade its furs. Thus, as the French and hbc trade competition heightened in the mid and late 18th century, the Parkland Assiniboine and Cree maintained their middleman role, expanded further into the plains and parkland to get access to beaver, and came into further military conflict with the pre-existing Indigenous societies of the Plains and parkland (note that I am not covering every group here). However, at about the same time, England defeated France in the 7 years war and took their colonial possessions in the eastern regions. Soon after, a new group of individual sole proprietors begins to travel west from Montreal to engage in the fur trade. They are not French and they are not employees of the hbc, and they seek to outcompete hbc and cut out the Indigenous middlemen. Their competition, and their trading of alcohol for furs, changes Indigenous economies once again.
**Later Fur Trade and Transition**
Daschuk raises an interesting point when considering this era of the fur trade that held Indigenous societies as the trappers and traders. He, and other historians, contend that the Indigenous nations involved in the trade as such were members of the peripheral portion of the global capitalist economy. With the intervention of individual sole proprietors, who Daschuk calls “Canadians” (although Canada as a nation does not exist quite yet, I’d argue), this begins to change. At first a new opportunity emerges for the Indigenous trade middlemen: although they are increasingly cut off from the European fur trade, the individual Canadian fur traders who are rapidly expanding their influence to the fur rich regions of the northwest are faced with difficulties securing food in ample amounts. As such, the Plains Assiniboine and Cree turn to the bison as a source of new commodities to be traded (about the 1770s). Bison meat and pemmican became profitable enterprise. The shift to the lucrative northern meat trade perhaps the largest factor in the ethnogenesis of the “Plains Cree” (note that this is a new nation and not the same as the Cree-speaking inhabitants of the Plains pre-1781-82).
Hunting bison and trapping beaver for trade caused the animal population to decline, leading to periodic starvation, illness, and war. These caused further demographic decline and migration, and new groups migrated in to fill vacated territory. Yet another new nation, the Saulteaux, emerged as the social grouping of the westward-migrating Anishanaabe fur trappers. While the Plains Cree fought with groups like the A’aninin to take land, the Saulteaux clashed with the Dakota. The Iroquois had also reached further west to trap, getting in conflict with the A’aninin due to overtrapping. Meanwhile, more and more Europeans were coming to the west.
The sole-proprietor “Canadians” capitalized on European increases and Indigenous population declines. In 1795 a number banded together to form the Northwest Company (NWC). Canadian traders trading alone
the Plains* by James Daschuk. This is a book that focuses heavily on developing health outcomes for the Indigenous nations over many years in the prairie and parkland region of what is now called Canada, and it came out at a time when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was near the end of their work documenting the residential schools, Idle No More was still fresh, and the thought that First Nations could have been genocided in Canada was gathering steam on the path to white liberal common sense. At that time I read it precisely as a shocking indictment of genocide. On my most current reading, however, I got a lot more out of the book’s political economic history than I previously had, and it is this new reading that I will be primarily drawing upon here (as well as numerous other sources).
Given that Canada is a settler colonial project, and given my protracted interest in labour mobility and migration, I look at Canadian history the same way that I have talked about the development of Russia, and here I modify Kliuchevsky’s words: “the principal fundamental factor in” Canadian “history has been migration or colonisation, and….all other factors have been more or less inseparably connected herewith”. Therefore, what I am concerned with is the interrelation of migration with society, class, production, and superstructure as time goes on. What I theorize is this: “Canada” emerges as a nation at the exact moment that its state hypothesizes its west as a settler colonial project and recreates all of its Indigenous nations as an oppressed “4th world”.
**Contact, and the early fur trade**
Before going any further, getting an idea of the pre-contact land and social relations is important. Of course I am constrained to consider the region that would eventually become known as “canada”, although there weren’t colonial borders before contact and many nations held (and still hold) territory across today’s national boundaries. But despite the focus on the Plains, we do have to talk about more eastern regions a bit first in order to root the economic activity that would spread west and upend the western economic paradigm in capital’s image for the first time.
Although this is more of an aside to this specific problem, it is just as important to recognize that the different colonial powers treated property right differently in the beginning of their colonial campaigns. The conquistadors of New Spain didn’t originally want land title, but instead wanted tribute to Spain. The French of New France did initially displace the Innu along the St. Lawrence, but subsequent to that initial settlement they sought to construct their own sovereignty through Indigenous sovereignty (for a little while). The English of New England, meanwhile, already considered England as the ruler of all the land, and therefore had a more expansive outer commons (and by a certain point in time England defeats France and enforces English law in their new colonial holdings). While each ends in some degree of settler colonialism, it is important to recognize that the paths were not exactly identical, so the political terrain developed differently. Perhaps I only mention this so people blaze their own trail and don’t rely too much on studies of American settler colonialism when studying their conditions.
One more obvious note: Indigenous societies in pre-contact “north America” were diverse. It is true that a good number of Indigenous societies were producers for immediate need, and that trade was secondary to their production. This much is theorized in Marx and Engels various works, and is supported by, for instance, the ethnography of the Innu by Eleanor Burke-Leacock. Equally true is that European contact and trade relations ended up transforming the economies of Indigenous societies to be trade-oriented, that European diseases decimated many societies, and that this combined economy-disease influence caused Indigenous migration, disappearance, ethnogenesis etc. But there were also several pre-contact Indigenous societies who practiced sedentary
5 Persons With Alleged Links To The CPI (Maoist) Arrested By Police In Nagarkurnool District
https://www.communistnews.net/5-persons-with-alleged-links-to-the-cpi-maoist-arrested-by-police-in-nagarkurnool-district/
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surreptitiously sap the revolutionary power of the masses.
Given this background, with American reality being what it is, it’s not difficult to suppose what will be the attitude of the working class of the North American country when the problem of the abrupt loss of markets and sources of cheap raw materials is definitively posed.
This is, in my opinion, the stark reality facing Latin Americans. In the final analysis, the economic development of the United States and the need of its workers to maintain their standard of living means that our struggle for national liberation is not waged against a given social regime, but rather against the whole nation, bound as a bloc by the iron-clad supreme law of common interest, over their domination of the economic life of Latin America.
Let us prepare, then, to fight against the entire people of the United States, for the fruit of victory will be not only economic liberation and social equality, but the acquisition of a new and very welcome younger brother: the proletariat of that country.
1 Aidan Ratchford, 2022-10-21. “Che Guevara’s Anti-Imperialist Theory of Class.” New Socialist UK. web
2 Che uses the term “immanent,” translated here as “inherent” for the sake of readability.
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Che Guevara: The American Working Class: Friend or Foe?
Che Guevara: The American Working Class: Friend or Foe?
☭
Site & Languages
Selected Authors
Che Guevara
2022-10-25
Twitter Source
Original publication: biblioteca.clacso.edu.ar
Translation: Roderic Day
The American Working Class: Friend or Foe? (1954)
10 minutes | English Español | Latin America
Written in April 1954.
Originally published in Casa de las Américas magazine, Jan-Feb 1988.
Independently translated fragments of this same text were presented last week, interspersed with commentary, by A. Ratchford for New Socialist UK. 1
The world today is divided into two halves: the one where capitalism is exercised to full consequence, and the one where socialism has taken root. However, we cannot group all countries under a capitalist life-system in one single bucket. There are marked differences among them.
There are colonial countries where the landowning class, allied with foreign capital, monopolizes the life of the community, and keeps the nation backwards in order to better serve its profit motive. This includes almost all the countries of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. There are a few in which capitalism has not transcended its own national boundaries but where the meddling of foreign capital is not so dominant as to constitute a problem in need of immediate solution. This is the state in which we find one or two countries in Europe with small bourgeoisies developed to the extreme. There is another interesting group of countries that could be called colonial-imperialist or pre-imperialist, whose economy, without having fully taken on the characteristics of industrialized nations, begins to, under the auspices of dominant foreign capital, strive for the conquest of neighboring markets, while still manifestly belonging to the colonial group. Such is the case of Argentina, Brazil, India, and Egypt. A dominant feature of these countries is the propensity to form blocs over which they exercise certain leadership.
Another group, and one of the most important, is that of nations whose imperialist expansion was curbed after the last war. Such is the case of the Netherlands, Italy, France and, most importantly, England. Although we are witnessing the dismemberment of the colossal English empire, its leaders are still fighting for it. Naturally, they not only face the just yearning for freedom of the oppressed peoples, but also the predation of large North American capital interests, which precipitate crises in order to advance their own interests (e.g., Iran).
The last group is that of imperialist countries in full expansion. Here the United States stands alone — and that is the great problem of Latin America. One wonders: How is it possible that in the United States, a maximally industrialized country with all the characteristics of capitalist empires, the contradictions that lead to total war between capital and labor are not felt? The answer must be sought out in the special conditions of this Northern country. Except for Black people — segregated, and the germ of the first serious rebellion — the other workers (those who are employed, that is) can enjoy enormous wages compared with those commonly doled out by capitalist enterprises. This is because the overhead of this actual pay over the standard required for profiteering is more than made up for by groups of workers from two great communities of nations: Asians and Latin Americans.
Asia, shaken, and with precedent set by the magnificent victory of the Chinese people, fights with renewed faith for its own liberation, and slowly begins to remove sources of raw materials and cheap labor from the radius of operation of imperialist capitals. However, imperialist capitals won’t yet suffer this defeat in their own flesh: they transfer it whole onto the shoulders of the workers. Although part of the Asian victory hurts us Latin Americans, workers in the North also feel the impact, in the form of layoffs and lower real wages. A mass completely lacking in political
Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (January 25)
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Welcome message from the Brazilian Revolutionary Communist Party for the 22nd KKE Congress | 902 Mobile
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because if we assume that "mental health" is a matter of "public health," what is the answer of "science" to the current conditions of sickening and what are the possible alternatives? Any subject that is of "public interest" inherently necessitates an alternative that is a solution for all. The conflict between the Bolsheviks and Kulaks was a consequence of an economic plan of collectivization, and collectivization was absolutely necessary so that years later the Soviets had an economy capable of overcoming the aggression by Nazi Germany with the support of the entire imperialist bloc. The period of collectivization was marked by the Bolsheviks' persecution of adversaries of their interests, and this included repression, stripping of titles, and imprisonment for scientists whom the Soviet State considered enemies because the methods defended by the persecuted scientists were in conflict with the interest of the revolution. Perhaps we will discover the particular affinity of Kantian idealism with eugenicist genetics, which is a product of the domination of pharmaceutical corporations in actual class struggle, but those are scenes for another chapter as I do not feel it's necessarily relevant to go down on kantianism for now.
The solution of "science" to the epidemic of mental illness lies in economic planning whose base is not oriented by profit and in cultural collectivism. If the imperialist crisis is associated with an era of depression and pessimism, economic planning and collectivism are its opposite: they bring a new era of optimism and signification of life (the opposite of being depressed).
In the end, what defeated Nazism and capitalism were not heroic acts (and much less the winter), but the human need for survival as the impulse in the war itself (Stalingrad, for example, was a victory made possible by the effort and total collaboration of the population involving men, women, and children. A national army operates by wage labor and contemporary mercenaries operate by contracts for each activity; they are different logics) and the mode of production (as you see by the war efforts, the total collectivization of labor that the Bolsheviks advanced while they were in power with Lenin and Stalin was what made possible the victory of communism over Nazism, where labor is highly specialized and restricted to wage earning).
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Language pride
I'm a leftist(still learning), and I’ve been thinking about something that came up with another left leaning friend.
So, hes an Indian Tamil and alot of indian tamils identify as tamil primarily and Indian secondarily, so I asked him would you ever identify as tamil and he said something along the lines of "Language pride, race pride, caste pride are all extremely cheap forms of prides, largely used to impose supremacy and division".
So I said, you can't compare language pride to something like race or caste pride since they usually exist because of oppression while historically, languages have often functioned as tools of unity, mass communication, and resistance, especially in anti-colonial and anti-elite contexts.(Tamil being an example). So, it would be ignorant to not take pride over your languages history.
He then talked about how language pride is normally seen as a form of superiority(at least in India)and is just another way to impose superiority.
So I'm curious to know what guys here think about it.
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Sam King – "China’s Big Threat to Imperialist Monopoly"
https://red-spark.org/2026/01/22/chinas-big-threat-to-imperialist-monopoly/
King's newest article argues that growth in non-monopoly capital can "undermine" the dominance of monopoly capital without ever ascending to the level of becoming competing monopoly capitals.
I haven't studied imperialism enough to have a firm opinion on this, but this seems like a fundamental misunderstanding right? Like a repetition of Dengist 'multipolarity'?
Recommendations for how to understand China's shifting role in contemporary imperialism would be appreciated.
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refuses to criticize reactionary forces such as monarchists in the name of unity, and dissolves independent proletarian politics into spontaneous mass sentiment.
Despite their differences, both positions share a mechanical understanding of contradiction and a profound distrust of the masses. One denies the masses’ capacity to be able to navigate contradictions; the other reduces them to a force to be followed rather than politically led.
As Marx argued, the vanguard party is the most advanced detachment of the proletariat, tasked with concentrating proletarian power within every mass struggle. Any deviation from this leads either to passivity waiting for a “pure” economic struggle or to reliance on foreign intervention. Both reflect political bankruptcy and detachment from the masses.
Both sides have re-created the political version of Imam Mahdi, despite their shared hatred of Shi'ism.
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government in preventing them from doing so”.
**Conclusion**
I do not think that it is worth it, here, to discuss the development of “canada” (the nation, or its economy) past this period of about 1891. Why? Because nothing has really changed. True, Canada has expanded its settlement and expanded to an imperialist country, but several theorists have pointed out that the canadian state perfected its tools internally, on the Indigenous nations, and subsequently used them to execute its imperial ambitions overseas. In other words, this is simply more shockwave of the initial settler colonial event, which I would locate in the clearing of the plains. Yes, this is a very similar argument that Sakai has made in *Settlers*. If capital’s universalizing drive took this particular path to birth Canada, this is a great summary of how the particular projects outward from the “Canada”. What, then, is the importance of Alberta to the Canadian nation? Why, it is the difference between being Canadian and American. Believe me, as silly as it seems, canadian nationalism simply boils down to not being American. Perhaps not a shocking answer, but we gained a richer understanding of the spectacle of it. Indeed, nation is just something invented and is just as easily discarded by history!
Much more important and interesting, I think, is what this study helped me understand about the political economy of the First Nations, and how it becomes tied to the movement of commodities and people. Indigenous migration was to secure resources to produce for immediate need pre-contact, increasingly to secure resources for trade purposes post-contact, and finally a struggle against state intervention (and forced because of it) by the mid to late 19th century. Settlers, on the other hand, being as much a part of the expansive outer commons as their livestock and crops, and not crossing over through different modes of production (but as the bringer of the transformation itself) simply move place for one reason: negotiation of class status. True, I don’t talk much about that here, but it’s been said before.
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usa. American expansionism motivated the state to sign more treaties such as treaty 7 with the Blackfoot. Clearly the regions which became alberta and Saskatchewan were secured by Canada in spite of America, and are at the very gut of “Canada” as a nation. On the other hand the First Nations were obstacles to “Canada”, and securing an Indigenous transition to the new country and economy was the last thing on the state’s mind.
Further north, the Cree who resided by the north Saskatchewan river knew that the bison economy was finished in 1876. As hunger throughout the plains grew, a good number of Indigenous converged upon the cypress hills in search of sanctuary and food. Others went to the usa in search of bison. While this occurred, the canadian state slowly moved into a stronger position whereby Indigenous peoples would be reliant upon them for food, and they leveraged this power to great advantage. The free movements mentioned in this paragraph would be some of the last the Indigenous would ever do (prior to the half-baked attempts at their neocolonial inclusion in the modern day).
Under the 2nd term of john a macdonald (1878-1891), “Indian affairs” became a political priority to finish preparing the west for the railroad and settlement. Macdonald was head of the department himself along with being prime minister. The department promised “fiscal restraint” in their budgeting and supplying, and were much closer to “fiscal exclusion” in practice.
Food rations, meant to fulfill the treaty promise of providing supplies in times of hardship, were used to coerce Indigenous peoples to fulfill the interests of settler colonialism. Food supplies themselves were almost entirely sourced from I. G. Baker of Montana, whom Indian commissioner Dewdney had secret dealings with (in these early years of settlement before mass agri settlement and ranching, such state contracts with food suppliers like I. G. Baker drove the entirety of the western commercial economy, and Dewdney protected his cut). Not only was food withheld from First Nations in need, it was sometimes kept in Indian agent buildings on reserves while the first nations who resided there themselves starved. Often times rancid food was given while more quality supplies could have been sourced. When local ranchers offered to sell some cattle to the department out of fear that starving Indigenous peoples would kill and eat their stock, they were rebuked. Instead of securing food, the state prioritized arming settlers (who, by and large, did not care about Indigenous misery). When the state saw fit to give rations, they opted to withhold them for those who would work for them so as not to become “dependent”. Yet work was not really available or provided. When the railway was imminent in 1881-82, the govt used rations to coerce the migration of first nations onto reserves. Finally, once First Nations people were on reserves, the government could withhold food rations to counter their protesting.
The home farm program, which was supposed to fulfill treaty obligations, was massively bungled and, much like the department of Indian affairs, was full of abusers. Some reserve farms grew crops, but they were forbidden to do any trading with outside communities as part of a wider trade ban between the reserves and the canadian economy. In addition, they did not have sufficient milling equipment for the coarse grain they grew, so could not produce flour. Even then, the presence of some crops grown was enough for the state to cut food support. The only First Nations people who did remotely ok with agriculture were the Dakota, mainly because they had farmed before, could find labour jobs in nearby communities, were not signatories of a treaty (yet), and thus could not be interfered with by the state (this, however, did not last). An especially bad time period was that following the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia, which caused so much climate havoc that crop harvests were decimated for years. By 1885, only 6 First Nations bands in the entirety of the northwest were not reliant
and those in the nwc were some of the most abusive in trying to expand their influence and force unwilling Indigenous peoples to trap for them. They traded the most liquor and would take and traffic Indigenous women to enforce compliance – facing resistance, of course. In response to Imperial law which attempted to control the fur trade, and in response to Indigenous reprisal against their debauchery, they gathered more and more traders into their company. In 1821 they merged into the hbc, and a period of hbc monopoly begun.
With greater presence in the region, the hbc attempted to establish a firm control on the fur trade. One method was to close many of their outposts. This caused unemployment of a number of european traders, many of whom ended up at the hbc’s fresh agriculture colony on the Red River. Those Indigenous traders who lived on the margins of the hbc territory and who had transitioned to its fur trade faced issues with the hbc pullback, so many went further into the Plains to fight for more control of the bison economy (those who lived in hbc controlled areas, however, were forbidden from migrating to new areas). Through epidemics and bad weather events, the colony and its Metis hunters themselves began to compete for, and commandeer, a greater amount of bison meat. At the same time, settler frontierism, particularly to the south in the usa, put more pressure on food and game supply. So while the Red River Colony’s population grew and demanded more meat (especially in times of bad harvest), settlers from the south shot bison for the global hide industry, and the bison herds continued to shrink overall. In other words, the grounds for both economies which Indigenous peoples took part in (fur and meat) were subject to heightened competition and waned pretty rapidly after that. It was only a matter of time before capital sought new potential avenues and generated new social relations. It is notable that American settlers had stepped in to fulfill gaps in the liquor trade, which is not compatible with a nascent “canadian” economy.
Interestingly, the hbc did vaccinate and provide medicine to those Indigenous peoples that it traded with. The Plains Cree and Saulteaux were the biggest benefactors, and they were able to expand territory into areas where the unvaccinated Blackfeet and Assiniboine had perished. But the era of the hbc was ending. Essentially, the longer that the economy (and the resources in general) developed on this specific soil, the more there developed a political desire for more autonomy and control over it. White expansion south and north of the border continued, and it would only get bigger from here. First, there was the Oregon trail and the California gold rushes. Then came the Alberta and the Fraser gold rush. The hbc-adjacent Red River Colony continued to grow (reaching 8000 by 1850), and they increasingly wanted to throw off the hbc monopoly. By 1864, Montana was granted territorial status, and the Plains were becoming more and more attractive as lands for European agricultural settlement. The nascent bourgeoisie of the east saw more and more economic opportunity, and political need, to grant a greater capital expansion west. The Indigenous peoples began to recognize this impending event, and they feared the disease and resource impact that this would bring.
**Road to Exclusion**
The confederation of Canada occurred in 1867 with 4 provinces, all in the east and all quite small compared to their current extent. Not long after, in 1869, the government purchased Rupert’s Land and the Northwest Territories from hbc, who had, until this point, been the closest thing to a white governmental authority in that land. From 1869 onward the young Canadian state staged active interventions to handle class contradictions emergent through its developing settler colonial economy and, in the process, invent a canadian nation out of it.
At this point in history, the Indigenous nations of the plains and parkland were very aware that a) whites spread disease, b) the bison economy and the fur trade
agriculture and were well on their way to heightened social stratification, and numerous Indigenous migrations due to resource (primarily, food) crises caused by climate catastrophe. Those societies that did migrate included some older societies that moved to the Plains regions and adapted to their new environments by changing from sedentary agriculture to big game hunting. Indeed, up until the 18th century, all Plains Indigenous either descended from eastern woodland groups or were influenced by them. I should note here that their sustainable bison hunting was supplemented with an avoidance of beaver hunting, for they understood the role that the beaver played in ensuring water supply to the Plains. Both the bison and the beaver are future casualties to capital.
Aside from the above-referenced notes about transformations in Indigenous economies and reasons for migrating, which will be covered in breadth below, we can also consider how colonialism not only introduces disease but empowers existing microbes: tuberculosis, present but relatively powerless against the nutrient-rich diets of the Plains Indigenous pre-eu contact (a fact Daschuk supports by referencing archaeological evidence of their tall statures), is a disease that wreaks some of the greatest havoc in the 18th and 19th centuries (and, in fact, persists to this day on reserves due to the health impacts of settler colonialism. In classic colonial fashion, doctors up into the 20th century actually considered TB a genetic disease that Indigenous people just had in their genes). The spread of disease is also an accurate indicator for the spread of eu trade in Daschuk’s book. The earliest eu-caused epidemics in Indigenous societies often reached and killed many before the affected even saw a white dude.
At any rate, to specifics. New France (mostly today’s Quebec) begins with the French dispossessing the Innu of some land along the St. Lawrence in the early 17th century and basing the future of the European fur trade there. As noted above, the early influence of the fur trade shifted the economies of trade adjacent Indigenous societies from their existing production for need to production for trade. As animals became scarce near the French settlements, the Indigenous who resided adjacent to the French became trade middlemen between the French traders and trappers who were located further north. Diseases spread with the trade: the Huron, early French allies, were some of the most-affected earlier on, and disease spread along their trade routes. By 1630, about half of all French-adjacent Indigenous people had died. As this death occurred, both the French and other Indigenous nations moved into vacated space to further the trade. The Iroquois, initially hostile to the trade (and militarily hostile to the Huron and the French, with some battling for trade control in there), end up carrying the trade, and disease, further inland up to Sault Ste. Marie and then as far as James Bay.
In 1670, the Hudson Bay Company (herein the “hbc”) sets up shop in the north, but for 100 years they stick to their posts at the mouths of important waterways. Therefore, new Indigenous nations who reside in adjacent regions, Cree and Dene, take on a middleman role for the northern trade. Much like with the Huron and Iroquois, this shift of their Indigenous economies to being primarily for trade pushes these societies to expand their influence, and also to clash with one another for more trade influence. These are new impetus for migration, and cause military conflict with the other Indigenous societies which they now butt up against with greater impetus and frequency. As the fur trade reaches the Plains in the 18th century, disease also plays a major role in the movement of nations. The Assiniboine are so affected by smallpox that they abandon their territory east of the Red River, and another group, the Monsoni, are left with so few members that they end up assimilating into other groups. The Cree also are affected, though they continue to expand in a westerly direction out from the
How clearing the plains made canada
It is currently very politically popular in Canada to be a Canadian nationalist. There is a wave of resurgent nationalism that all great opportunists from Loblaws (#BuyCanadian) to the Liberals (#CanadaStrong) were able to ride to reverse their downward trending popularity to great success. Even the conservatives of alberta are eager to seize the day and preach a national unity and trade expansion that can be powered by, and empower, Albertan energy production. Yet an opportunist is an opportunist – whether a pipeline goes south, west, or east does not matter. All that matters is that it goes. And the quicker it does, the better. Naturally, the American courting of Albertan separatism is a hot button topic for “national security”.
Moments like these are excellent entry points for understanding nation and nationalism, because what even *is* the nation of Canada? How different are the provinces of Canada from the states of America, really, and what difference would it really make if, for instance, alberta seceded?
We could get into this in economic terms and by measuring the profits of contemporary capitalist firms, but I don’t think that is as riveting as an analysis of the region’s development and historic social relations, given that almost 80% of Canadian trade is tied up with America already. I could also say the opposite: considering the economic interconnection and sibling settler colonial developments, it might seem kind of banal to suggest a study of nation. Yes, I would agree that Canada and America are incredibly similar in form and function, and that their similar developments make it so the political conclusions of a study like *Settlers* are nearly as relevant for Canada as it is for America. But if we were to back ourselves into a corner by recognizing that 80% of the relevant theorizing has already been done, and that all is needed is to identify the connections between the theory and the local conditions, we would not gain a rich understanding of the relevant history upon which our politics stand. Note that this is completely different from the postmodern argument that revisionists use to argue that the application of theory to a given country is unique to that country’s conditions! There is not one answer, but there is one science. The scientific tools are how we acknowledge the interrelation of the universal (capital’s push to universalize relations) and the particular (tracing capital’s particular path as relevant to your given political terrain).
With that in mind, I’d like to whittle the initial problem to this: why is alberta, or any of the west, for that matter (considering that #wexit was a thing not long ago) important to Canada? For Marxists, every “why” or “what”, which we ask in order to define an object, must also be understood as “how did this thing *become*?”, and therefore, what we are really asking about is the inter-development of canada and the western region. By finding the solution to this problem, I think we can get really deep into the question of Canadian nationalism, economic development, and politics.
Alberta itself, the province, is nothing special, and neither is Saskatchewan. They are regional governing authorities that were carved out of a larger region of land, much like colonialism turned Africa into squares – similar shapes and all. And just like it was in Africa, before they were alberta and Saskatchewan, they were part of a much larger mass – the northwest territories (and part of a few different territories before that). But Albertan identity and its exact territorial lines aren’t important, so I will not talk about them here or make further mention of Albertan separatism (or Saskatchewan separatism for that matter), because these are outside of the purview of the problem. Instead, as mentioned above, I’ll focus on the relation between the territory on which the provinces sit and the development of the Canadian nation.
In thinking over this problem, I read a book that I had first (and last) read about 10 years ago: *Clearing
Elections (I'm new)
Do communist vote in elections?
(I'm new to the communist beliefs)
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culture cannot grasp evil beyond immediate first impressions, and staring at them directly is the triumph of “communist barbarism over democracies.” A warlike reaction is logical but difficult to realize — Asia is very distant, and has many people willing to die for the ideal of sovereignty. The American petty bourgeoisie, wielding serious political power, won’t allow even a significant minority of its children to meet their death in a foreign land. Facing this inexorable and impending loss of Asia, the imperialist power faces a dilemma: either wage total war against the entire socialist enemy and all peoples with nationalist yearnings, or abandon Asia and circumscribe its sphere of action to two continents that can be controlled for now: Africa and America. (This latter option of course entails small limited wars enabling it to maintain its arms industry without loss of life — it will always find traitorous rulers ready to sacrifice their land for a few crumbs of the master’s leftovers.)
The United States fears total war. It cannot unleash an atomic barrage because the reprisals would be terrible at this time, and in an “orthodox” war they would lose all of Europe in an instant. Asia would fall completely within a short time, as well. Against this backdrop, the United States is more inclined to defend its positions in America and recent ones in Africa. Each of these two continents has a different outlook: while U.S. domination of Latin America is complete and cannot be interfered with, in Africa it only possesses small territorial patches, and exercises control mainly through subsidiary nations spread out throughout the continent. That is why nationalism is tolerated and even stoked by the United States — with the steady waning of traditional European empires, it sees its own imperial reach extending.
Now, any such true nationalist sentiment would lead the peoples of Latin America to try to emancipate themselves from the oppressor — i.e. monopoly capital — but the larger share of the owners of this capital lives in the United States, and has enormous influence on the decisions of the government of that country. The composition of its government and its connections with the most important companies owned by these individuals is the key to understanding the political behavior of our Northern neighbors. In these uncertain times, with the United States at the helm of the portion of the world they’ve declared “free,” they cannot attack and interfere in any country unless there is a powerful motive; but this motive has already been invented and is being enkindled by them: “International Communism.” This hackneyed trope serves, for the moment, to excuse modern propaganda operating at maximum effectiveness in the organized spread of falsehood. Later, perhaps, it will justify economic intervention, and then, why not, armed intervention.
This whole defensive system is vital for the capitalists if they want to maintain their present system, but it also serves, for a period of time, the North American worker, since the abrupt loss of cheap sources of raw materials would immediately ignite the conflict inherent to the contradiction between capital and labor. 2 So long as it is incapable of taking over the sources of production this result would be disastrous to it. I insist that we cannot demand that the working class of the North look past its own nose. It would be useless to try to explain, from afar, with the press totally in the hands of big capital, that the process of internal decomposition of capitalism can only be deferred for a while longer, but never stopped, by the totalitarian measures taken towards maintaining Latin America in a colonial state. The reaction, to a certain extent logical, of the working class, will be to support the United States, rallying behind any given slogan, as “anti-communism” happens to be in this case. On the other hand, it should not be forgotten that the function of the workers’ unions in the United States is rather to serve as a buffer between the two forces in conflict, and to
Delcy Rodriguez signs oil industry overhaul bill, opens PDVSA to privatization
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Non-fiction Dispelling Cold War Propaganda
Hi all.
Over the past number of years I've read up on plenty of theory ranging from Marx to Engels to Lenin to Deleuze... but the one thing I cannot seem to find is historical works that challenge the traditional cold war narrative (or events that occurred parallel to the cold war). What I mean is, Americans often hear about the Khmer Rouge, dekulakization in the Soviet Union, the many issues with Mao's great leap, and various other Eastern European communist leaders.
But then, as someone highly critical of the traditional narratives, I also hear about how the Soviet Union is often misrepresented, or how most of the deaths attributed to Mao are overblown. And I do tend to believe the non-traditional narrative because, well, why would I believe what the west has told me for decades.
Anyway, to me it is not enough to just believe. So I'm here to ask if anyone has some non-fiction works that cover this type of history from a non-propagandized perspective. How were so-called communist dictators misrepresented and what actually happened in the Soviet Union, Mao's China, etc.?
Thank you!
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guides revolutionary movements in human history—the presupposition of the application of science is first to endow the "scientist" (who in this case is any person) with the capacity to act.
1. I recognize that there may be a tendency to view what is described by the article in the same dogmatic way that is habitual, presupposing that any historical repetition is immutable. This is nonsense. The article actually enables us to discuss everything from the (extreme) need for an era of seizing power and applying power violently directed—by and for—the liberation of women against patriarchal oppression, to less relevant things like why your boyfriend, your uncle, your brother, your father, or whoever else has been flirting with far-right supremacist ideals and this wears down your personal relationship with that person (And then questioning before yourself your own ineptitude in not facing the Nazi as such, given that there is no right-wing party left in Brazil that is not openly Nazi, and you have to think: how far can this man and his flirtations with ideologies of sexual supremacy go?). Although during the process you discover the need for liberation and the necessary means for such, everything starts by giving complexity to the way you face why people familiar to you adhere to rightist ideals. The second is obviously much more terrifying than the first; discovering the need for the imposition of rights by any means necessary means that you have already overcome the trauma of learning how the nuclear family is a prison and a delay in the lives of all involved, who would be better off if they were relocated to other places and were free from the obligations forced by private property family ties. I do not think, truly, that we should underestimate what class suicide is and how costly for "family" men is the right they have over children and women. I am speaking of the right to command and countermand, to decide what is allowed and what is not, where one goes and when one goes, when one gets pregnant and how many children one must have, who one has sex with and who one cannot have sex with under any hypothesis—a right that more and more retrocedes into exclusivity for men and retrocedes to exclusively white and eugenicist interests. It is because when we do not underestimate it, we remember that they truly have much to lose in these circumstances that are beneficial to them, and these patriarchs defend these privileges with all the physical, economic, and psychological weaponry at their disposal.
2. I need to insist once more, because this point is central to the thesis, but Marxism is entirely dependent on a social force endowed with knowledge to apply it. You could make the same argument for any other methodology, which ends up reinforcing the argument: science is subordinate to the political interests of groups in power and the division of labor. How does scientific development occur in capitalist society? Through intense colonial extraction, the organization between intellectual and manual labor, and genetic testing on living beings. What does this give rise to? Desertification of the soil, alienated labor, and aberrations ranging from the large-scale mistreatment of animals for consumption to the testing of drugs for population control like contraceptives or the use of viruses as biological weapons like Ebola. How does Marxism admit scientific development and how did it operate in socialism? Sources in the Amerikan aKKKademia recognize that the Soviets had reforestation and environmental protection policies advanced even by current standards. Soviet botany and genetics were developed so that workers with basic educational formation had sophisticated notions about their foundations (the botany and genetics of the Western aKKKademia are incomprehensible to the specialist doctors themselves), research was motivated to overcome practical needs of the population in each particular situation (like the new agricultural techniques developed to overcome the devastation of the civil war against the Kulaks).
I took this detour