The reality is thus: the people in charge either have no plan, or see no path forwards other than keeping their heads down. [...] The world’s organisations have been captured by people in the throes of frothing excitement, and saner people who now live in a state of constant commingled fear and frustration.

Not much to say here other than "yeah, I have felt the same for quite a while now."

Executives that tell the press that their company has gone insane will quickly find themselves removed from their positions. Employees who are honest will find themselves fired in short-order, or “randomly” selected for a round of layoffs. In fact, it is in the interests of almost every actor in the space – boards, executives, employees, vendors, consultants – to obfuscate and misrepresent the success rate of AI projects. Many publicly traded companies are putting out announcements about their AI productivity gains when I know for a fact that the businesses have done nothing other than purchase Copilot licenses and declare victory.

A long read but extremely worth your time.

It has become outright dangerous to even raise the possibility that AI might not be the solution to a problem, let alone be the sole focus of a company’s entire strategy.

In every sufficiently large business we have observed (say, with 500+ employees), we have noted that continued advancement, and increasingly continued employment, has started to require repeated professions of belief in the transformative power of AI for said business. I am not talking about providing ideas about how to use AI in the business – I mean religious profession, declarations of faith.

The final section of the essay -- "Navigating AI Mania" is, imo, crucial reading in this era of, well, AI mania. Funnily enough, I'd call a lot of this pretty bog-standard labor organization tips, but tailored for the AI regime. It's good reading -- if you don't want to read this whole thing, at least read that final bit.

The neoliberal austerity regime has left no shortage of opportunities for alternative and counter institutions to fill the gaps left by the state, and capital continues to chase exponential returns on worthless scams rather than providing for many basic human needs. Those gaps, along with the social alienation inherent to capitalism, are the lowest hanging fruit for a dual power approach.

well-reasoned materialist analysis of how dual power can work, looking at examples from social democratic Sweden and islamic nationalist Palestine. I appreciate very much how this keeps the grounding of dual power not as an endgoal but as a tactic.

The important thing (again I stress IMHO) to remember is that all revolutionary orgs started out small, and had to earn the trust of the people as Fidel Castro said "I began revolution with 82 men. If I had to do it again, I'd do it with 10 to 15 and absolute faith. It doesn't matter how small you are if you have faith and a plan of action”. The Communist Party of China just celebrated its 105th birthday and they began with 50 people. The Bolsheviks started as a book club.

But the reality of a leaderless and structureless movement started by 50 people is, who decides who’s in and who’s out? When millions are now joining you, how do you centralize messaging? How do you stay on target for what you are organizing? In a running theme of this era, the political explosion that MPL created against not a fascist military dictatorship, but a progressive, left-leaning democratic administration, gave open ground for the far-right to take control.

I think that it would be understandable for people to take issue with my growing feelings around needing strong, verticalized, centralist structures to build movements on, but it comes from the same feelings that motivate this piece. Horizontalism is a deeply frustrating way to organize an entire movement, or even worse an organization. Best case scenario is things are slow. Worst case scenario, you are destroyed by the same fascist forces you are hoping to defeat.

It is obvious we have seen consecutive ‘biggest protests in human history’ to little global systemic change. Spontaneous uprisings have been a feature of the 21st century. In some places, one political elite was simply replaced with another. In other places, the states and capitalists cracked down on the movement so hard it hasn’t recovered. Other places were broken by the political vacuums created with no real, organized working class movement to fill that gap.

Imagine for a minute, the ICE uprisings keep scaling upwards. Millions and millions are shutting down the country. Rolling General Strikes from state to state. Then mass marches on the capital, and Trump’s goons flee to Epstein’s Island or some other far hideaway. Who, or what groups, will take over the political power of the country? How will the next decision get made? Did classes disappear? Did the social ills created by US settler colonial society disappear?

This is the key question and my greatest frustration with the modern American left. I am tired of "street protests". I am tired of "calls to action". Not because these things are bad, or even unnecessary, but because in order to work they have to be backed up by concrete organization, something that I feel we are terribly lacking.

So when looking at the vast field of lost revolutions of the 21st century, and the gravestones of all the martyrs we lost along the way, we have to ask ourselves, did we organize correctly? And the answer from the available evidence in most cases says we didn’t. Now we are facing an even worse ecological crisis, rising fascism, a new state of imperialist world order, and mass fascist violence in the streets of the capitalist hegemon—the U.S.. What changes have been made? Are we organizing differently from 2011? Because if we wish to succeed, we must.

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.

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.