“Tech-forward” should have no place in how we think about the future. There is not a single axis. Things are not either forward or back, accelerating or retreating, primitive or modern, fast or slow. If we are having debates about who owns global compute, what AI infrastructure sits on the interconnection queue, who is paying for rate increases, who signs NDAs or negotiates the terms of data center projects, it becomes painfully obvious how shallow this framing is.

On Taylor Lorenz, AI, the Right, and the tech industry. Of course, I disagree on one point put forth in the article: There is a future vision of tech-collaborative socialism, and it is ("as much as you may not like it") the People's Republic of China.

Broadly speaking, the left represents movements, political figures, and organizations united by a critique of the capitalist system and the Republican and Democratic establishments and the fight for more social protections and power for the working class and other underprivileged classes. But this unity encompasses fundamentally different strategies for achieving this goal and visions of what it would require.

During the tumultuous interwar period in Germany, two strains of Left organization held the majority position -- the largely reformist SPD and the largely revolutionary KPD.

It was the SPD who ultimately took the cause of socialism forward, allying with centrist and rightist elements of the Weimar bureaucracy to crush the KPD. This turned out to be a relatively short period of celebration, however, as the SPD were then destroyed by the NSDAP, more commonly known as the Nazi party.

Raman regularly votes for increasing the police budget, and has repeatedly doubled down on her support of Israel. Despite their campaign promises of stopping police sweeps on unhoused communities, Raman, Soto-Martinez, and Hernandez have not only continued but even increased them during their tenure. Hernandez betrayed her campaign promise to the Hillside Villa tenant union, one of the LA tenant movement’s strongest forces in recent years. During her campaign, she promised to support the tenants’ initial demand that the city acquire the building from their slumlord through eminent domain. Instead, upon her victory, her office negotiated concessions with the tenants’ landlord behind the tenants’ backs and pressured the tenants to accept them.

Most concerningly, there is little mechanism for holding these officials accountable for positions they take that are contrary to the will of DSA-LA’s own membership. They are not even accountable to each other: three of its elected officials would even sacrifice solidarity with their own political ally’s bid for power to back the establishment candidate. This bizarre situation, in which Raman’s closest political allies have instead endorsed her establishment rival’s run, only all too perfectly captures the chapter’s distance from, not expression of, power. This approach, just like that of the Democratic establishment, may secure some policy gains and electoral successes that may benefit workers. However, it contributes little to strengthening the political independence of the working class, and developing a strategy that goes beyond simply incremental reforms.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Self-reform is how the CPC answers the oldest question in Chinese statecraft: how to escape the historical cycle of rise and decline. Its answer is to never stop struggling, and never let up on its fighting spirit in order to improve and to better represent the interests of the people.

Funny that I ran into this right after posting (positively!) about this piece on Ukraine from Fight For A Future, which is a publication that I do not agree with about their views on China (though I will admit they are not the rabid anti-China sort like many other worse members of the commentariat).

Carlos Martinez is one of my favorite writers on modern China not just because he is a fanboy (which I think is completely fair given the state of modern China compared to most of the US-aligned global West) but because he is a skilled writer and arguer about the ways that the CPC is specifically utilizing Marxist-Leninist thinking in their operations. Not shying away from fair criticisms, but taking the stance that adaptation is crucial to any ongoing communist project.

Where I think the PRC, and the CPC specifically, excels is the understanding that progress will take a long time, and thus it is imperative that a socialist project survive, even if that means taking some Ls along the way (and for what it's worth, I think the PRC has made a lot of mistakes, both historically and contemporarily! I just also think those mistakes do not change the progressive direction of CPC leadership). Or, to quote Martinez:

Ultimately, however, the test on these new battlefields is the same test the CPC has passed before, in a new form: Whether it can keep identifying the principal contradiction of the period and mobilizing society to resolve it, without either capitulating to external pressure or abandoning the peaceful, people-centered and win-win character that has defined Chinese modernization. On the record of the last 105 years, I would not bet against the CPC and the Chinese people surmounting these new challenges.

The plain fact is that the climate crisis cannot be addressed within capitalism. This may be difficult for some to come to terms with, but it is vital that we understand this fact and develop our strategies accordingly, otherwise we are headed for certain failure. And on this issue, failure is not an option.

Jason Hickel, as usual, right on the money.

Whether a state is socialist should be judged by real-world outcomes rather than rigid ideological purity.

I wrote about it a bit on the Big Blog already, but Deng Xiaoping and the 1980s China period (that was the immediate precursor to China's current era of Xi Jinping leadership) was a huge influence on THE REVISIONIST. I like this post.

Ali Kadri is an esteemed Professor at various institutions around the world, as well as the author of many important books including Arab Development Denied: Dynamics of Accumulation by Wars of Encroachment, The Accumulation of Waste: A Political Economy of Systemic Destruction, and The Unmaking of Arab Socialism.

Okay, I'll admit that I haven't finished listening to this episode yet. But what I've heard so far is excellent. A great breakdown of the role of the CPC in constraining and managing capital excesses from the Mao to Deng era and beyond.

Educational and inspirational resources to help us imagine the end of capitalism instead of the end of the world.

This looks like a great set of resources/links for folks interested in communist, socialist, or anarchist education.