What is it like to be a student in Alpha School’s high school boot camp?

This is one of the strangest accounts of what, I would call, widescale academic child abuse I have ever seen. Alpha School, naturally, is a big believer in both genAI and x.com, America's two largest fascist propaganda networks.

Numerous students report that they are currently experiencing what Alpha School calls “boot camp,” which is not something I found described anywhere on Alpha’s official website, or anywhere else. The students share that, as part of boot camp, they are required to join Twitter and obtain at least 100 “authentic” followers by early October 2026.

For those who are not familiar with the Marxist revolutionary canon, I will attempt — against all good counsel — to sum up the wildly varying traditions of revolutionary Marxism in a single, pithy sentence: Marxists believed —and believe — that the ruling capitalist class had enslaved the working class in all but name, and that the only way to truly free them of those social bonds would be through a revolutionary transformation of society that instituted equitable control of its means of production and its output.

An interesting piece that I appreciated reading. If I have any major critiques, they are that I think that Lenin's more liberal affectations (not ungenuine affectations by any stretch) were more pronounced in his earlier writings, especially when he was more fond of Karl Kautsky.

I don't mean this as a denigration of Lenin. I think that the political function of a strive toward "liberty", while correct in moral weighting, is insufficient for a revolutionary drive -- and I believe Lenin himself recognized this, after attempts at compromise with the bourgeoisie led to frustration and stagnation (see: the Provisional Government era).

It is, of course, also useful to note the role of Menshevik propaganda against the Bolsheviks, which this piece covers quite well.

Broadly, they argued that Lenin was unscrupulously power-hungry, inclined toward reckless revolutionary adventurism, impatient with the project of democratic revolution, and predisposed toward conspiratorial machinations that belied his conniving and deceitful nature.[25] These Menshevik descriptions of Lenin became the foundational bedrock of how he and his works would be evaluated by Western academics. Without access to — let alone awareness of — any alternative narrative, early Western scholarship on Lenin had little choice but to work with the only information they had available to them.

The beginnings, one might say, of the creation of a compatible "anti-revolutionary" Western Left.

The other major critique I would have of the piece is the disappointing and stereotypical arguments around Stalin's leadership, which ironically enough is such a trademark of the Western Left's understanding of the USSR as much as it is an echo of the Mensheviks. The ghost lives on.

I do have criticisms of the USSR -- honestly, who doesn't -- but I think it is misrepresenting the issue to blithely state that "censorship" is the crucial flaw in Stalin's era of leadership (I will cede some ground to the notion that "over-centralization" was a flaw, however -- but on the side of "Stalin overestimated the convictions of those closest to him, because he, like so many others of his cohort, was too much of a dreamer who believed wholeheartedly in the goodness of the communist effort")

I think the USSR (ironically, like the USA but for opposite reasons) overestimated the power of individual writings and popular culture. For the USA, the goal was to use popular culture as a bludgeon against the Evil Soviet Union. For the USSR, the fear was that too much critical writing or art or whatever would topple the Union. In both cases I believe they were wrong, but that is a bit of a tangent.

Regardless, there is a difference between speech and organizing, and in both the USA and the USSR, there were crackdowns on dissident organizing. This is often brought up as an example of the USSR's intolerance, even as the intolerance was against anti-communist actions, which of course... should probably be intolerated in a socialist state. Whatever! I am tangenting. Again.

I appreciated this section:

Overall, surprisingly little serious effort has been made to compare the repressions under Lenin to myriad similar measures taken by Western liberal governments under the extreme pressures of a domestic war during roughly the same period. In calling for energetic repression of their political and ideological opponents during wartime, Lenin and the Bolsheviks have no shortage of otherwise admired historical company.

For stating basically what I am saying above. If the actions are similar (or, at least, comparable), then we should judge by the goals and intent of the actions. The goals and intent of the United States in its myriad war crimes was to further American extraction, colonialism, racial hegemonies, et cetera. The goal of Bolshevik violence was to build a more just world. Yes, I judge those differently.

A revolutionary vanguard cannot afford theoretical ambiguity on the colonial question or electoral strategy. The American working class requires a party grounded in scientific socialism, and rhetorical compromises will do nothing but dilute revolutionary potential. Now, the burden falls squarely on the ACP leadership to provide the necessary ideological clarity.

New York Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, who is pretty clearly running for president in 2028, made a disappointing statement recently. She was asked about the idea of defunding and/or abolishing the police, and she responded that “woke 1.0 was crazy.”[...] I found that disappointing.

You know, I think the broad point of this essay is sound -- that the oppressor forces will always find a way to denigrate their opponents, whether or not that is "logical", and thus it is worthwhile to not play that game -- but I found myself kind of annoyed by the end of it. Here, take this passage:

Even if we grant the rather large assumption that [communism] is a de facto danger, communism isn’t the remotest danger for any of us. It’s the very furthest thing from us in an empire currently in end-stage capitalist collapse. Like being in a leaking submarine and fearing a volcanic eruption.

I fully agree with the author that it is silly for Americans to be afraid of communism and that the reason why most Americans are scared of communism is due to decades of propaganda. But this passage demonstrates that the author, too, has fallen for a bit of that propaganda.

Of course, the framing within the piece that delineates a difference between socialism and communism is a tell, but this passage -- with its implication that it is the "furthest thing" from "an empire in collapse" is just. Well, it's silly. Empires in collapse are where communism has sprouted up (the collapse of the Russian empire, the chaos of the Chinese monarchy, the revolutions of Vietnam, etc)!

Furthermore, that is a good thing! In moments of rupture there are also opportunities. That is not to minimize the potential harm inherent in rupture spaces like the one we are facing, to be clear, but we have to be open-eyed about this.

"Communist" is not just a bully's label -- though it is a bully's label in the current American political discourse, and it is one used by both the Democrats and the Republicans -- it is a political stance and a goal. Yes, we should all be Communists, but not as a defensive marker, as an identification with a program greater than the one we currently live under.

Yet, just as the Sun rises in the east and sets in the west, so too does the center of gravity shift toward those who reject unilateralism. As American dominance wanes and the US regime digs its own grave, more and more countries have shifted accordingly, diversifying and thereby further hastening the fall of American hegemony.

...two possibly unexpected beneficiaries of the contemporary prison slavery system were none other than Bill and Hillary Clinton, who during their time at the Arkansas governor’s mansion in the 1980’s used inmates to perform various household tasks in order to “keep costs down.” Hillary Clinton wrote of the practice openly and without any apparent sense of moral conflict.

How Democratic consultants, committees, and party leaders built a fundraising spam pipeline that funnels money from a captive pool of elderly donors into their own operations.

A thorough analysis of the current DNC method du jour of soliciting money from citizens -- weird-ass spam texts written in all-caps targeted at the elderly. It is a disgusting, shameless tactic and a great example of why the Democratic party is a capitalist dead-end.

The propaganda is often visibly shoddy. But this paradox is resolved once we realise that Israel’s hasbara apparatus does not aim for plausibility. Its mission is expediency, to find something that might introduce a trace of doubt, or give those who wish to look away a reason to do so. [...] But while outfits like the legitimisation cell manufacture these pretexts, the demand for them comes from a Western ear that is desperate to avoid the truth.

I genuinely feel like in some years from now, perhaps a long time but hopefully not so long, we will see the long suffering of the Palestinian people as one of the most glowing, hot-red contradictions of the current American imperialist world order. And, as Stalin said and I am paraphrasing, it is where those contradictions are the sharpest that we can start to see a different future.

Ultimately the problem lies entirely outside of documentation or argument. For Western institutions, the excess of evidence has produced the opposite of a crisis of conscience. Instead there is a saturation that enables the desire to put this all behind us. Bearing witness to everything, registering the horror as it passes through the digital feed, creates a comforting illusion of a debt discharged, of a crisis already dealt with. This is why more evidence fails to move the needle. The Western subject already has the facts; what they require is a disruption that prevents this sense of closure. Even when the evidence compels an admission that genocide is taking place, what follows is too often a passive resignation: an assumption that nothing can be done about this truth, or that naming it is all that is required, while Israel carries on killing and dispossessing. The structure of moral stupidity functions by converting raw evidence into the mere performance of its own absorption. Witnessing is revealed to be an insufficient means of preventing a genocide.
[...]
All of this is designed to prevent a single, shattering realisation: that to truly hear Palestine is to hear a total indictment of Israel, but also of the global order that sustains it. This is a system built on the foundational myth of a “rules-based” liberal internationalism, which is underpinned by the flow of Western capital and weapons, and dependent on a selective and racialised definition of humanity. Moral stupidity is essential to the perpetuation of this order.

The role of the intellectual -- the writer or poet or philosopher -- is also critiqued well here alongside that of the (presumably Western) observer.

The intellectuals of this era did not speak on behalf of the collective; they were continuous with the people, constituted by the same dispossession, and subject to the same erasure. [...] One way to measure this collapse is to ask: can one imagine a writer doing today for the Palestinian Authority what Kanafani did for the PFLP, or what Darwish did for the PLO? The question answers itself.

The intellectual is often, but not always, situated as some part of the more prosperous native classes. This is as true in Palestine as it was in turn-of-the-century Russia, and as such there are contradictions in the ways that the intellectual can support a revolutionary movement. In order to truly "support" such a movement, they must accept that the future they are building may inherently remove their class position (or, at least, shake it critically). This makes the intellectual a complex figure! They can be interlocutors with the greater powers (imperialist, capitalist, whatever) but they are also vulnerable to counterrevolution by their very position -- it would not be unusual for them to side with a counterrevolutionary (or, in the Palestinian case, imperialist) force because that force would allow them to maintain a comfortable position.

This leads to a dangerous dynamic between the national liberation forces -- in this case groups like the PLO and PFLP, and now Hamas -- and the intellectual classes. To be sure, this can be seen even in modern work from Palestinian intellectuals who are well-worth lauding as much as criticizing.

All of this is not to say that "the intellectual" as a figure is inherently counterrevolutionary or inherently a class enemy or anything like that -- but that the position of the intellectual within the national liberation struggle is... well... nuanced! Complex. Fraught with contradictions.

It’s not simply that intellectuals talk while others fight, or that fighters distrust words. The real crisis unfolds when speaking and acting finally meet. When the intellectual takes the logic of their own analysis seriously enough to act on it, they encounter the full weight of the abandonment that the words had been circling around all along.

Also touched on here is the role of Germany, which I do think is worth noting specifically. The creation of Israel as a state -- imperialist outpost as it is -- is inextricable from Nazism.

Some years ago, a German Jewish friend visited me in Ramallah. She walked its streets, observed the settlements that surround the city, met my family. [...] What unsettled her most was not the hills or the walls, but the checkpoint on her return to Jerusalem: an old Palestinian woman struggling to pass while soldiers, with their smirks and revulsion, enacted the routine of humiliation. [...] Shaken, she texted me afterwards: “Now I know why Palestinians blow themselves up.”

Post-war, post-Imperialist-takeover Germany has to align itself with Israel, due to its position in the US-aligned world order. Of course it does! To materially support Palestine would be to admit a fault, to admit a crack in the logic of the current imperialist order. This is, of course, existential for the heirs of West Germany, indebted as they are to the United States power-mad hegemony.

To speak is to risk becoming part of the system that absorbs speech and renders it harmless: to produce, for the Western ear, another document to be acknowledged and archived and acted on by no one. To fall silent is to abandon the field to those whose version of events requires no refutation, and to perform, at the level of the intellectual, the disappearance that the colonial project has always demanded. And to act – to follow the logic of one’s own analysis into the domain where words give way to something else, as al-Araj did – is to be already betrayed by the organisations and formations that should have received his words.

Revolutionary suicide, as Huey Newton put it. To know that to act is to doom you, and choosing to act anyway. The hard part is choosing how to act.

The international left’s angst and disappointment regarding Venezuela’s retreats is understandable. But the Global South is not about to fulfill the revolutionary aspirations of those living in the belly of the beast. That, it should be clear, is the task for people in the imperial core.

The ACP presents itself as a new, ideologically pure group, the sole heir to the Leninist tradition in the United States, uncompromising in its rejection of bourgeois politics. But looking at what the ACP actually says and who it tries to reach reveals a party whose politics and messaging are nationalist, chauvinist, and reactionary.

I have my doubts about the material/populational power of the ACP -- I find them more of an online blowhard community, but if the past few years have taught me anything it is that we should not underestimate the destructive potential of weird niche online hate groups. Just because they are more correct than the modern CPUSA on issues of Russia, China, and anti-liberalism does not excuse their reactionary tendencies around race, gender, and religion. Relating them to the historical recurring scab that is "national bolshevism" is quite apt, imo.

The ACP split from the CPUSA over what it called liberal compromises, yet ended up with an ideology that is more fringe and less coherent than what it left behind. A rejection of left-wing coalitions in favor of far-right ones was intended to expand a base, but instead dramatically narrowed it. Support for far-right bourgeois figures is masked as outreach to the working class, but it is capitulation to the class interests those figures serve.
[...]
The ACP is a movement that cannot be considered communist in any meaningful sense. The closest they get is patriotic socialists, in the same vein as National Bolsheviks, reactionaries pretending to be communists to steal the name of a tradition they have effectively abandoned.

We all crave the kind of justice it seems unlikely we will see in our lifetimes. So instead, we consider it justice when a woman loses her job for stealing a commemorative trash can, or when two cheaters get caught on the kiss cam, or when someone at Pepsi gets in trouble because everyone on Threads read their post in bad faith.

Good final takeaways from an essay that makes me think the author would be someone to whom I would say "you need to maybe log off more" were i ever to meet them in real life.

Even simple equipment failed with slapstick regularity, six workers said. Conveyor belts broke down. Automated carts got lost. Safety gates meant to shut down machines when workers approached did not shut down machines when workers approached. A pipe exploded, spraying water up to the ceiling.

Hilarious article about the USA's super efficient military capitalism. Paper tiger!

“You can’t even go to the mall no more without a parent. You can’t go to the movies no more — they’re asking for a parent and stuff like that,” said Ahmir Peterson, 16, a student at Kenwood Academy High School. “There used to be teen jobs, but those jobs are taken by adults. As a teenager, you are fighting against grown adults with real work experiences that have been working all their life. Everybody is fighting for a living. So it’s way harder.”

I imagine in the next few years and decades we're going to get a lot of writing -- both of the moral panic and the academic varieties -- about these so-called "teen takeovers". The way these kids themselves talk about them is wildly thoughtful, and I think any story that comes out in the next few years that does not include actual talking to kids involved will be a failure.

It is a material and sociological phenomenon that I believe is linked to our decaying cities, our COVID recovery policies, and the material downturn of the USA. All of these things are material, and these kids are reacting to it -- albeit in the chaotic, disjointed way that children often do.

Once abolition is framed as an abstract proposition that all coercion must vanish forever, it becomes easy to dismiss as unrealistic. Instead of being seen as a strategy for dismantling institutions that reproduce capitalism and racial domination it’s framed as either the fantastical idealism of anarchism or the limited purview of policy reform.

Good piece.

It’s important to acknowledge that this retreat from abolition emerges from a real contradiction facing the socialist movement. The George Floyd uprising was the largest mass rebellion against policing in a generation, and yet it produced few lasting structural victories. It’s reasonable to ask whether the movement’s politics, including the rallying cry to abolish the police, contributed to that outcome. But this mistakes the primary lessons of 2020. The principal failure was not that abolition proved to be bad politics or messaging, but that the socialist movement lacked the durable organization, institutions, mass base, and independent politics necessary to adequately absorb the energy of the uprising and carry it forward once the streets emptied.

Strong organizations are always taking calculated risks, and to do so, occasionally march into the unknown; they must, if they’re to innovate, succeed, and excel. But we're not calculating the risks.

I am skeptical of the DSA's focus on electoralism, here is another good critique of it.

We can no longer place ourselves in a position of passivity where our endorsed elected officials are permitted to govern exclusive of our involvement after we’ve attached our name to them.

“Since the beginning of the modern era, Black mobility has always been contained and policed,” Saucier says. “There is no one definitive form of segregation that has led to excluding black people from cycling—the whole problem is overdetermined by a host of historical and contemporary practices,” he adds. “The bike, and cycling in general, is really a microcosm of American society and global society in terms of access to things.”

Equating wealth, especially generational wealth, with virtue and ability is a deeply American pathology. This country loves to believe that people get what they deserve, despite the abundant evidence to the contrary. Nowhere is this more obviously untrue than with our gentry class.

Good modern American class analysis.

The main thing I'd want to communicate is that the places where these signs go up are uniformly miserable. It sucks to be a person on foot in a place where the state has to warn you that it's too dangerous to cross a regular city street. These streets are terrible, loud, dirty, and they smell bad. A crowded urban street with a "no pedestrian crossing" sign is a place created by infrastructural and institutional failure and it sucks that we have any of them in these busy neighborhoods.

New York City may be part of a dying empire, but the USA is the dying empire. [..] The only reason DSA has gotten this far in the first place is that we are in an era of imperial decline, meaning the status quo will no longer be good enough. Normal methods of governance no longer suffice, not even from the standpoint of the elite.

The contemporary DSA is rife with arguments for and against supporting a hypothetical AOC run for president in 2028. The "inevitability" of AOC is often bandied about and I cannot say I am a fan -- we are many legislative sessions from that point and AOC has not had a flawless record on those. I consider it viable to run candidates that are outwardly identifying as Socialist/Communist, assuming that the goal is not victory for the candidate but victory for the party, and the party remaining the spearpoint of the people.

I do not believe that AOC, or the current incarnation of the DSA, fits that bill. The DSA is not (yet, perhaps) an electoral Communist organization. Even if it was, I would have some concerns about an electoral-first strategy (an extremely Kautskyist angle, if I may say so!).

In summary, to meet the minimum standard of "good governance," AOC would need to go well beyond liberal progressivism and embrace a radical socialism that she has thus far avoided.

I found this piece a good dismantling of some of the assumptions surrounding the electoralist, Kautskyist approach that favors Just Winning The Presidency as the be-all-end-all of American socialism. The goal is not the presidency, the goal is the world.

My argument, as laid out in both of the two relevant articles, is that a President AOC with DSA’s endorsement but no accountability to its program will not be willing or able to do what it takes to have a "successful" socialist Presidency, thus fatally discrediting the movement when she flounders. Hopefully the evidence already provided makes it clear which of the two futures is more likely.

Although reality shouldn’t be up for debate, the question is what happened in 2020. Even though we all lived through it, our current medical establishment doesn’t want you to remember most of it.