Productivity made everyday life a legitimate trade-union concern. Once domestic conditions entered that remit, however, women could make claims that exceeded the goal of increasing labor output.

Really remarkable article analyzing the pathways of feminist societal change through the history of the Soviet Union, up until its final days in the 1980s.

If a person works in a factory or a retail store every day for their entire life, none of the work that they do will lead to the discovery of the historical development of the capitalist mode of production. In their work they do not conduct the experiments which would lead to this knowledge. An understanding of historical materialism and political economy can only come from a scientific analysis of philosophy, history, and the conditions of the working class.

If you need a quick explainer on the communist theory of social revolution, I think this is a pretty solid one. Part II can be read here and gets more into specific US contexts.

By analysing the dynamics that underlie HRT shortages, we can better understand the involvement of companies that control the pharmaceutical industry and offer a response that supports everyone’s right to have their healthcare needs met.

Good post about the intersection of healthcare and gender care.

State ownership of pharmaceutical production is ultimately necessary for it to be coordinated with the other aspects of healthcare. By establishing a program that progressively works towards separating the production and distribution of pharmaceuticals from profits and strengthening the power workers can have on these processes, a universal and guaranteed healthcare system can be developed in which pharmaceutical production is not owned by corporations, but by a workers’ party.

US Marxist-Leninists have sought to manage the contradiction — between the goals of Marxism and the petit-bourgeois fear of workers power — not by confronting it, but by adopting a tailist strategy. [...] No revolution has ever succeeded in this way, but this strategy has the benefit of keeping the masses (and their troublesome contradictions) at a safe distance.

The International Research Centre (IF DDR) researches the history of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and its enduring relevance for international movements today.

Cool resource that I want to dig more into later. I <3 the DDR (game and country)

Marx and Engels were attempting to understand a new social order that had emerged from the destruction of feudal relationships and was rapidly expanding across national borders. Their argument was not that history had ended with capitalism. Quite the opposite: capitalism itself was historically produced, and therefore historically transformable.

I agree with this guy!

After a popular uprising against neoliberalism, an attempt to charter a new constitution, and a politically dead Gabriel Boric administration, the Pro-Pinochet right now holds power in Chile. In an interview with Gabriel Delacoste, Daniel Tutt asks what went wrong.

I have a lacking knowledge in South American leftism, and I know there's a lot there to learn from. This piece offers a pretty digestible history of Chile from the colonial era all the way to today, and all of its various swings.

Speaking personally, I think you can see (as shows up time and time again in national histories in the 20th century, both in South America and outside it), a stronger Leninist (or Lenin-ish) vanguard being opposed by a more moderate leftist current that wins victories in the democratic arena, only to be targeted by a revanchist imperialist/colonialist wing and deposed. I think it's a bit more complex than a simple "Leftist or liberal" binary -- many of the powers that held on for some time or another were closer to what we'd call social democrats -- but the tendencies appear often.

It is possible to say that Boric started as a radical and then turned to the center, but if we understand what kind of radical he was this becomes less clear. He came from a radically pluralist left-libertarian intellectual milieu that fiercely criticized neoliberalism and the party system, but that didn’t necessarily have roots in the socialist tradition. He had tattoos and a mohawk but had not necessarily spent hours studying how to transition to a planned economy.

Right, a classic left-libertarian approach, basically. "Depower the state", but before the machinery of power is fully held by the people. A simple error by Leninist analysis, but a deeply harmful one. After beating back the Communists for seventy-odd years, this is where the resisting forces often end up -- without a clear theory of power or transition.

I argue that from 1920 onward, Communist women pioneered efforts to link social reproduction to women’s unwaged labor and care work. Communist women discussed the economic and social conditions necessary for mothers and families, attentive to class, ethnic, and racial inequalities. This way they formulated core principles of intersectionality and reproductive justice before these frameworks entered mainstream feminist discourse.

You know, I hate to be the guy who is vagueposting about a dumb thing that I saw online, but I really liked this article because it feels like it directly counterargues against a dumb thing I saw online, which was a statement of "intersectionality is incompatible with principled Marxist-Leninism". Which is, on its face, a bad argument and I don't want to give it a lot of air.

But! If you would like a good article to throw in the face of someone who makes that dumb sort of argument, this is a good one. Historical analysis, well argued and interesting.

The interwar Communist Women’s Movement was not a passive recipient of Comintern or Soviet directives but an active, theoretically innovative vanguard that positioned women’s emancipation at the center of socialist transformation. By linking unwaged domestic labor to social reproduction, the movement pioneered a profound rethinking of care work as a structural economic and political question.

So, how does China’s economy work today? [...] Private capital exists mainly in creative industries, yet these capitalists are fully aware of their short leash; they are given power, but not enough to form an independent class. Their freedoms, as many Western economists have described, can be taken away at any moment if they fail to serve the fundamental interests of the masses.

US imperialism stands as the greatest obstacle to everything that communists want to achieve, and it is urgently important for communists in the US to build an anti-imperialist opposition.

Good piece in Cosmonaut arguing the need for better discipline within the DSA for anti-imperialist stances.

Many members in DSA argue that, by campaigning for Democrats like Zohran Mamdani or AOC, they are already building a workers’ party. They say that DSA’s elected representatives are merely “using the Democratic Party ballot line”. This is a delusion.

Here I will detail a perspective on how to understand the Cuban reforms from a Marxist point of view and, by comparing them with other socialist experiences of reform, try to elucidate how we can think about this kind of policy change under Communist-led governments.

It is impossible to consider Cuba, and Cuba's oppression by the American state, without getting into complex, contradictory feelings. Even before the current reforms, Cuba was contentious -- not initially a communist revolution, wrenched into communism by circumstance, and then under siege for the entirety of its existence by one of the most powerful capitalist empires on the planet. It is a model of resilience and survival, and of compromise. This last bit, I think, is well-defended in this piece.

And what have been Cuba’s playing cards in the 21st century? Arguably, the worst ones out of any Communist-led state. Any complete analysis of the Cuban Revolution in general, but especially in the 21stcentury, should always start from the decades-long, bipartisan effort by the United States to subjugate Cuba once again. Until the late 1980s, Cuba had the help of the Socialist Bloc and could benefit from the echoes of early Soviet hopes of developed socialist countries reversing unequal exchange and breaking the chains of underdevelopment in other regions. The impact that the 1989-1991 collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe had on Cuba is impossible to overstate; it is tempting to see it as isolated as the early Soviet Union, but with the crucial difference that one was a transcontinental mammoth and the other an island of a similar size to Iceland, 90 miles away from a state committed to defeat it.

A small note in this piece that I think about often is that -- as the author correctly details -- Cuba was almost entirely a monocrop economy until the 90s. Much of its money to survive was provided by the Soviet Union, who, beautifully and tragically, paid exorbitant and unnecessary prices for Cuban sugar until its collapse. An internationalism that feels almost unbelievable now. Even great China makes sure to not disturb the monster of the United States overmuch, and one can hardly blame them for it. But still.

This essay will trace the main contours of his biography and examine three critical aspects of his thought: his understanding of the nature of the majority of the peasantry and their role in the revolution; his exposition of Marxist epistemology; and his analysis of the challenges of building socialism after Liberation.

Ken Hammond is one of the best english-language writers on the history of modern China and this piece is a great read if you want a 101 on Mao and why he was so important.

[L]et me express a perhaps controversial view that no single person in history has ever made a greater contribution to the liberation of humanity as that made by Mao Zedong. Further, if that is the case, then it is not unreasonable to suggest that he is the greatest person to have ever lived.

Rest in peace, big man.

It is a simple fact that the People’s Republic of China has now lasted longer than the Soviet Union. That the Soviet Union no longer exists and People’s China does. That it has developed further than any other major non-imperialist country has ever done. That China accounts for the overwhelming majority of global poverty reduction. That China leads the world in the fight against climate catastrophe. None of this would have happened, none of this would have been possible, without Mao and his leadership.

This video explores how Cartesian dualism shapes capitalism's relationship to the body, why your body often knows something is wrong before your mind admits it, and what any of this actually has to do with building a better world.

Ignoring the clickbait headline, I think this is a really good exploration of Cartesian dualism and how that relates to dialectical materialism, communism, and revolutionary thought.

In other words, she contained multitudes of things in apparent mutual tension with one another, albeit in her case the overall effect was anticommunist and pro-American, even as it was anti-sexist and beneficial, in particular, to "working women" in the imperial core.

The best piece on Steinem I've read so far, pointing out both her massive flaws as well as her respectable actions.

Beijing clearly had no desire to go further down the US laissez faire path where private capital accumulators would steadily more powerful. It presumably believes that the benefits of reigning in its tech industry clearly outweigh costs and risks.

A good and only-a-little-sinophobic analysis of the China 'tech crackdown', from within its timeframe (2021).

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.

The proletariat must be educated to the position of affirming what is true in scientific knowledge and seeing what it points to as being the case and why. Materialism is the best defense of the science we need. It is the best because it is true and because politically it provides the simplest defense of science.

NGL some of the philosophical talk in here is way over my head (or more accurately over my head without seriously sitting down and deep-reading the text) BUT i think this final point resonates quite deeply with me.

If scientists wish to be heard, they must organize themselves, and they must make clear that they are not enemies of the people. To make clear they are conscientious seekers after the truth, they must make clear they are responsible members of society, and even better, champions of the working class. Otherwise, do not expect trust; do not expect people to respect your authority; earn it.