Rosa Luxemburg coined the phrase “socialism or barbarism” in 1916, in the middle of the first world war, as a general statement about humanity’s choices. In the Caribbean in 2026, it is a concrete question on the table.
Carlos J. Martinez knocking it out of the park here. Viva communist Cuba.
When sexual harassment allegations against Thomas by Anita Hill, a Black woman, came to light, Crenshaw found herself watching what she called an intersectional failure unfold.
Reading Kimberlé Crenshaw's work in college was one of the first eye-opening experiences I had about structural racism in the United States. I'm happy to hear that she is also somewhat critical of the way that "intersectionalism" has become a thought-terminating cliche in the world of left-liberal work.
What the heck's a Game Dad?
A cheap little handheld games console that plays every game you grew up with and all the ones you never got the chance to play. It has a proper D-pad and buttons and a good bright screen, and sometimes it has one or two analog joysticks as well.
Love this terminology and will be using it from here on out. Game Dad.
This is what makes the Russia case still valuable for a global left: the trace of the desire for collective social reproduction is still damp, still excavatable. It has not yet fossilized.
No one is ever fully lost to the cause, if you can figure out how to leverage them.
What is now visible in the provincial factories and metalworking plants of post-2022 Russia is, I argue, an attempt to reconstruct something functionally analogous — not by the state but by individual firms, not through the mechanisms of Soviet paternalism but through an uneasy combination of Soviet idiom and neoliberal discipline. [...]
This sceptical realism is, in E. P. Thompson’s terms, a form of moral economy: an operative understanding of what is fair and what is not, what obligations employers owe to workers, what the minimum terms of dignified employment consist in. It draws on the Soviet legacy not as nostalgia but as a set of standards — imperfectly realized, often betrayed, but remembered — against which present conditions are assessed and found wanting. The vernacular socialism that others have traced in Russian working-class culture is not gone; it is simply subterranean, surfacing in the calibrations of people like Misha rather than in explicit political contestation.
emphasis mine.
Our relationship to the Soviet Union is simple. The USSR was the first country to build socialism, and we believe that we should analyze the Soviet experience in order to prevent the restoration of capitalism in the future, as it happened in the Soviet Union. Therefore, there is no reason to idealize or, on the contrary, try to abandon the Soviet legacy, as many “leftists” like to do. This is a wrong approach and has no practical utility.
Really deeply well-told interview with members of the Worker's Front of Ukraine, an explicitly Marxist-Leninist organization within Ukraine that is working against the current war. I very much appreciated the RFU representatives clear-eyed analysis of the current war as an imperialist conflict between NATO and the (imperialist, post-Soviet) Russian State.
I cannot imagine how hard and brave it is to be an avowed Marxist-Leninist in Ukraine these days. It's scary enough in the United States, but we are not quite yet at the stage where the state is killing you in the streets for it. The notes about international solidarity with underground and aboveground groups in Russia was also fascinating -- I think this is a great blueprint for how to organize in imperialist nations. Build the party, educate the people, refuse to participate in nationalist-chauvinist activity.
In fact, fascism is an open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist elements of financial capital. Different fascists may think differently about women, gender, and LGBTQ+, but that doesn’t change the essence of fascism. As for us, we consider all those issues as parts of the issue of the proletariat. No more no less. You cannot free women without freeing the working class. Period.
The Ukrainian delegations in the early Soviet union were some of its most ardent supporters. I wish one day that we will see that again.
Therefore, to truly defeat imperialism, we must carry out a socialist revolution and defend our military-industrial complex, which has been destroyed by the capitalist regime in 30 years of “independence.” Precisely when private ownership of the means of production is abolished and the dictatorship of the proletariat is established, only then will we be able to truly defeat imperialism, both Russian and Western.
The legal right to defend oneself has always proved far more fragile when exercised by the very people who most need protection.
The on-paper legality of carrying arms is irrelevant compared to the social legality of carrying arms, which will always be illegal for the targeted classes. We live under a dictatorship of capital, and capital has strong reasons to discriminate against social minorities. Trans freedom to live is non-negotiable in a true progressive future.
The US, then as now, remains committed to undermining and destroying Chinese socialism, and has relied heavily upon thinly veiled, CIA-sponsored bodies like Radio Free Asia, National Endowment for Democracy, and the fanatical anti-communist and fantasist Adrian Zenz, with the sole objective of bringing about the fall and disintegration of China, much as happened to the former USSR and Yugoslavia.
I find the propaganda project of the United States around the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 to be a really useful example of truth-twisting. Yes, there were legitimate grievances with the protests -- often centered around the dangerous repercussions of the 1980s Reform and Opening Up period and the lessened rules around capitalist development in China. Also, mass chaos in the streets is not like, good. The nature of the PRC and the CPC in general is one of holding onto power as the ruling class and party of Chinese society, thus it is in their interest to quell uprisings. I don't see this as contradictory to the mission of any proletariat-ruled society, because part of ruling a society involves making hard decisions about how to handle internal unrest.
The fact that China managed to fend off -- then and now -- attempts to replace the CPC with a more capitalist government should be seen as a massive achievement.
To put it another way: An observation doesn’t become a convincing piece of evidence because of any specific detail in what’s observed; the context in which that observation takes place is also essential.
Ted Chiang, once again, gets it.
Happy pride month!
Planning documents for "Scout" say the plan is to "make people addicted" to the tool before adding new features.
I truly feel like complete abstinence from these tools is the most practical option. Avoid as much as possible. You don't have "just a little" of an addictive substance like this! Just avoid it! Stay away!
A map of the 2026 Los Angeles mayoral primary through its political geographies: Conservative LA, Liberal LA, and Left LA.
Beautiful website with some claims I find a bit presumptive but still educational. I agree with the authors that there are effectively three cities voting in LA, I am not so sure about the projected turnout in races.
None of the three front-runners I believe will be substantively different than Bass in running Los Angeles -- Raman is a compromised candidate with a spotty voting record especially on public housing, Bass is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative liberal, and Pratt is a fascist. I have no faith that Raman will not fold immediately to conservative interests, Bass already has folded to conservative interests, and Pratt... is a fascist. The biggest scam in Los Angeles' city budget remains the LAPD, and I do not believe any of the three front-runners have the power to dismantle the funding apparatus of the LAPD.
Anyway, that's my opinions. I recommend reading the piece regardless -- my commie griping aside, I do think this is a well-argued article with some really lovely data visualization work. Where I am fully in agreement with the authors is the fact that this sort of power mapping is crucial to understanding how and why LA is the way it is.
COVID-19 infections have plummeted in recent years. In 2022, there were around 1.5 infections per person, meaning almost everyone was infected once and many people had more than one infection. In 2023, the number was around 1. In 2024, we stopped recording really good statistics on the number of infections, but every indicator we had showed another huge decline. By 2026, we are looking at record low rates of COVID-19 across hospitalizations, deaths, wastewater data, and cases.
Some good news, at least.
You can comment directly on linkposts now! Yay!
The NYPD plans to hire 580 additional uniformed officers by the end of the year, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said Monday, revealing an unexpected staffing increase given Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s vow to keep police headcount flat.
I feel like I am simultaneously more critical of Mamdani and more sympathetic these days. Of course he's making these concessions, they are concessions that (unlike most DNC representatives) actually are allowing him to get things done in other ways. But that doesn't excuse the fact that since he is working within the current system, the compromises he makes will be to the fascist elements of our ruling class.
The police in America I think functionally act as an arm of the ruling capitalist-fascist class. The desire of the capitalist-fascist class is to maintain stable rule over the populace and they see the expansion of the police forces as the way to do that. That is not going to change unless those class elements are purged from power in America, which is not going to happen without a comprehensive revolution.
So like, yeah I mean, I get it. Mamdani is able to execute quite well in his office -- better than many other Democratic representatives -- and that's praiseworthy! It's understandable for him to make these sort of concessions/compromises. Also, these compromises fucking suck and I wish he was not in this position, because the sort of charisma that he has could really be useful to an actually revolutionary organization/position.
It seems counterintuitive that Hitler could emerge in a country that led the world in science, architecture, and industrial design, where every town had orchestras playing Beethoven. Germany in the 1920s was one of those places and times in history where you had this critical mass of geniuses. And yet it went down the drain and was replaced by Hitler’s unspeakably barbaric regime.
Standard disclaimer here that Hett is very much a classic American liberal democrat and thus espouses plenty of that ideology in his responses here, but even so it is very funny to see Hett rebutting the interviewer who keeps trying to say "but isn't this just like Trump?" with "No, it's actually pretty different."
I think it's easy to look at Our Current American Moment and try to map it to, say, 1930s Germany but it's actually something quite a bit mutated from that. Relatable, yes, but not 1:1.
[Hitler's] supporters had a tendency toward political nationalism and were happy to be in a situation where they could break some left-wing skulls. The party may have been centered in lower-middle-class tradesmen, but some prominent, wealthy businesspeople around Munich were also attracted to him. It wasn’t until later that the Nazis’ following crystallized around the rural, Protestant middle classes and, to some extent, the upper-middle class.
This is, imo, the most comparable aspect of early Nazism to our current moment -- the linking-together of the rural regressive elements with the moneyed capitalist interests, which exist in the upper-middle to upper class strata of American society. This is very Nazi-esque, without a doubt.
I have to admit, I occasionally have the highly undemocratic thought that, though it’s great in theory for everybody to have a voice, not all voices are equal in merit.
Maybe so, Hett! Maybe so! Maybe that's not that ridiculous of an idea when some voices are actually quite harmful. Maybe those voices should face some sort of consequences, lmao.
Hitler was also pretty hardheaded about certain realities, such as the fact that to conquer parts of Eastern Europe, he needed modern industry — a military-industrial complex, as President Eisenhower would later put it.
Again, I think often people liken the Current American Moment to Nazis due to the traditionalist aspects, but that is, I think, not quite correct -- the Nazis were futurists, in a sense. Early fascism was very technologically focused, in the same way as many ideologies in the early 20th century were. It wasn't until after WW2 that you really saw the upswing in "back to the land" conservatism, partially in response to the horrors of WW2. An understandable trauma response in a sense, but not particularly progressive.
The Soviet Union carried the overwhelming weight of the war against fascism.The Eastern Front dwarfed the Western one in every measure that mattered. The Red Army faced and destroyed roughly 80% of the Wehrmacht's combat power. The Soviet people lost over 27 million lives — military and civilian alike. That is more than 60 times the combined military deaths of the United States and Britain. The Red Army stopped the Nazis at Moscow and Stalingrad, broke their back at Kursk, liberated Auschwitz, and planted the Victory Banner over the Reichstag in Berlin.Without the Eastern Front, there would have been no D-Day. Without the Soviet sacrifice, there would have been no victory in the West at all.
The right-wing push to “shrink the government” meant displacing the costs of social reproduction onto private households and privatizing many of the state’s administrative capacity. What came of that was a new practice of citizenship where the ideal of public deliberation over the organization of society gives way to what Berlant calls the privatization of citizenship where “acts that are not civic acts, like sex, are having to bear the burden of defining proper citizenship,” and issues regarding personal morality are central to public discourse.
A bit academic-brained and makes the mistake of assuming that communism died with the USSR, but other than that has some interesting insights.
Anyone who’s ever been to hear a paper or a talk given has seen the person who takes the mic with the pretense of asking a question, but who instead goes on at length about their own interests, or research, or supposed insights. This type of groan-inducing off-topic interruption may be bearable (may be!) in an academic conference, but where there’s real work to be done, it’s an unforgivable waste of time.
Inarguably provocative title of course, but that's the Red Clarion for you. I find a lot of their writing to come off as somewhat juvenile, even though I have (and will continue to!) praise many pieces that they've published, such as this and this and this. They embody a definite communist angle that I can quite respect, overall.
This is a good example -- yes, as mentioned, provocative title, but the overall point is much more moderate I think. The problems with the stack are embedded in its horizontalism, and horizontalism is something I am more and more finding a thorn in the side of any activist or organizational space (honestly, doesn't even have to be activist! this is as much true in corporate meetings as it is in radical spaces). I fundamentally agree with the concerns expressed in this piece: Complete horizontal free speech opens the door to actual harm as much as it opens the door to, frankly, just obstructionist behavior.
I am more and more finding myself aligned with models that allow for targeted suppression of behavior that does not align with the group's stated aims. The key is, of course, having a robust debate about the group's stated aims and a regular series of check-ins about the current status of the group's stated aims. One might call it a sort of democratic centralism, perhaps.
The underlying hope, one imagines, is that you’ll become more reliant on machines instead of real people for your informational needs. Pretty much every other AI slop factory has a similar operating mindset, which makes all of them, collectively, an active threat to human civilization.
As always fuck AI and fuck Google. I recommend Kagi.
Many Marxists now agree that the revolutionary left’s protracted crisis is rooted in its failure to escape the “sect” form. As Hal Draper has explained, revolutionary sects are defined less by size than by their mode of organisation: a top-down culture, a haughty and exclusivist attitude towards others on the left, and a puritanical fixation on a “perfect” programme enforced by an intransigent leadership. Such groups prioritise their own growth over the needs of the wider movement and, because their unity rests on rigid doctrinal agreement, have a tendency to repeatedly split over relatively minor theoretical differences. This sect form has become the norm among Marxist organisations, leaving revolutionaries scattered across many small, largely irrelevant groups.