The Midwest Passage

A lot of my non-Nevada writing on here has been geopolitical and/or historical class analysis. I've gotten a lot of mileage out of describing the world and noticing patterns.

But as any good Marxist will tell you, the point isn't to understand the world, but to change it. Using that in-depth class analysis, I've figured out the likeliest ways that a dedicated cadre of communists could legally take power within the American political system, and advocated for a political project that accomplishes those things, all in that Class Analysis and Revolution book.

But all of that is just analyzing patterns in history to figure out how to assume state power. Once that's accomplished, what should we do with it?

I usually don't get into things like this in my writings not because I don't have these ideas, but because it's too easy for the debate in the minutiae of such things to distract us from more unifying proposals. Here's an example: in saying I want to end poverty, and I do, I'm not necessarily speaking up for or against any given proposal to end poverty. The chief contradiction in the world today is American imperialism. Ending American imperialism will do a lot to end poverty worldwide, but some of the people who would join me in ending American imperialism might not join me in supporting a given program to end poverty. Plenty of libertarians both want to return to the foreign policy of George Washington and to take an axe to the welfare state; the welfare state doesn't directly serve communist interests but American non-interventionism does.

This is also a great place to touch on the notion of the democratic demand irreconcilable with capitalism that sparks a bourgeois counter-revolution. It's a standard, even defining, feature of Marxism-Lincolnism that in a bourgeois democracy, this is how the revolution against capitalism is made. But it's also, if you read between the lines, part of the strategy of the Center for Political Innovation. In my case, the irreconcilable democratic demand is ending American imperialism itself. In the CPI's case, it's to advocate four things, and each of these things is a major program or nationalization that the American bourgeoisie could in no wise accept while retaining their economic and political power.

Receipts folder: Liam Askew

Sometimes there's a debate so cursed, you end up being forced to agree with a Trot about something. I did this in a discussion about the culpability of Stalin in the murder of a bunch of reactionary Polish military officers once, and mentioned how odd it felt agreeing with a Trot about something, because in general no absolutely not.

Rather than take the odd bedfellow in stride, he launched upon a huge wall of text defending the honor of Lev Bronstein. I responded the most apropos way I knew how. I could have matched theorypost with theorypost, but my God that sounds like an exhausting sidequest for an already exhausting debate, and you can waste weeks of your life arguing with academics about this stuff accomplishing nothing.

So I did this instead:

How did the house stand up over the winter part 2: electric boogaloo

This is a post concept I did last year, and it was a bit anticlimactic but still stands as a good window into what everyday is like out there. Since it was a good post concept, I decided to roll with it again this spring. I basically started rolling tape as soon as I was off Highway 93, and talked about my hopes and expectations. It's a nice little drive with me on the backroads of Nevada.

I then shot some footage once I rolled up to the house, and commented on what I saw. I got to work almost immediately, even during the video. Once again, the angles are terrible - I am not good at photographing myself, especially on video. But you get a good look at the way things stand when I left. To spoil myself...

Receipts folder: Jacob Hodges (if I ever get this pedantic and tiresome, shoot me)

Times are hard for internet leftists. They're liable to get rolled by the same deep state they were cheering on 1/6, so some of them have decided it's safer to organize using Facebook Messenger instead of groups.

Jacob Hodges was one of these. He sent me a friend request a few months ago. I'd seen him around commie spaces, so I approved it. Out of the blue, he sends me one of his writings. It's fine, I give him some approving comments but criticize one aspect of his approach. Kind of a standard thing I (and many reviewers/editors) do when someone thrusts a draft in front of their face: we find something to praise, and something to criticize to make the work stronger and the writer better.

Dude used the phrase "colonialism" like a crutch, but did not otherwise appear to be a Landbackeroo. So that was my gentle criticism: use more proletarian language. And he just could not process that, and the conversation degenerated from there. Dude fills my inbox with an obligation, I read said obligation and try to be useful about it, he becomes tedious and I finally get tired of being given homework and lectured like I was an idiot by the peanut gallery in my inbox. The most galling part of it, for me, was when he "taught" me stuff about Lincoln. Dude, I mentioned Charles Dana in my book, which Lincoln is on the cover of.

This conversation happened when I was visiting friends between Omaha and Nevada, and I'm taking the time now to post it by popular request, and because I want to keep busy as Facebook uploads the videos I took when I got here. I've got one other receipts folder post in the pipeline, it's from a while ago and it generally goes along with this whole theme here of pompous pseudo-intellectuals needing to be stuffed in a collective locker.

But anyway, here's the receipts after the jump:

Receipts Folder: Kira Dalton

I've picked on the Landbackeroos a lot in this series, but they aren't the only shit "comrades" out there. Among others, there are also radfems. And some of them even think that screenshotting my words is a sort of own, as if I didn't resolutely stand by everything I say (pic utterly related).

You know the type. I'm not referring to the average feminist, someone with spicy takes like "everyone ought to be equal." I'm referring to the species of pinkhair that performatively (and sometimes actually) hates men. The sort of person who will wade into an internet fight to uphold women's rights and literally nobody else's, whose political program therefore resembles woman supremacy in practice even if it's hidden behind egalitarian fig leaves.

Today's entry is Kira Dalton, who goes by a plethora of other names on her multiple accounts. A friend of mine raised a valid point, that short men and chubby women are equally discriminated against on dating sites, but that short men can't do anything about it and don't have social sympathy for their plight. Now, the radfem reactionaries (like Kira) would instinctively pick the "leave women alone, fat people are a marginalized group!!11!" line, while the MRA reactionaries would instinctively pick the "short men did nothing wrong, put them hamplanets on a diet" line. Both lines are equally chauvinist and wrong; the correct line is to uphold the rights of both. But saying so out loud in the presence of either is liable to get you cancelled.

Which is why that's exactly what I did.

This Is The Guy Calling You A Nazbol Online

So the Center for Political Innovation held an event in Austin on the 12th of this month.

I was in the group that helped plan it, and I was initially going to take part, but it snowballed massively and I cut myself from the lineup to provide more of a platform to people who know how to use the limelight most effectively.

I only mention that because I need to explain why I was privy to some of the planning details for the event. When the talks were happening, the need for security was mentioned. I wasn't expecting this, but yeah it ended up being the prerequisite to a successful event.

There is a group of woke frat boys called the Red Guards of Austin, and they do absolutely terrible and violent things. They are Black Hammer for white people. Here's a pretty good summation of where they come from, even if that source is written by someone ignorant of communist history and unsympathetic to us. Their ideological foundations go back to a guy named Bernard Rapoport, a financier who worked to obtain labor union and credit union accounts, who bundled donations for various Zionist causes, the Kennedys, Bill and Hillary's presidential campaigns, as well as Planned Parenthood. The last Democrat governor of Texas, Ann Richards, appointed this loon to the University of Texas Board of Regents. This self-proclaimed "capitalist with a conscience" died in 2012, but his bratty ideological stepchildren survive him. So the Austin Red Guards, despite preaching adventurist revolutionary violence, are actually quite integrated into the Democrat machine.

Receipts Folder: Vellum and Vinyl but less liberal

Context: this is the admin of a page that reposts Vellum and Vinyl stuff. Despite the name, they're still pretty liberal. They posted anti-Rogan anti-worker cringe, I corrected them, they banned me because theory makes their fee-fees hurt.

On to the receipts!

Receipts Folder: Cinco Blasi

In today's screenshot dump, I journey to an internet land of anarchists both based and foul to do battle with State Department narratives. Anarchists? Mouthing deep state lines? Whoda thunk.

On to the receipts!

Receipts Folder: Christopher Seadog

This is the first of a new style of post: a screenshot dump.

I have interesting discussions online, and despite my writer's block I never seem to have any problem writing theory for these discussions. Sometimes these discussions are productive, sometimes they're like this instead. But if I'm going to be writing anyway, I might as well get useful content out of it. So here you go.

The context of this discussion is that a friend of mine started a thread about Land Back, and I got sucked into it. What I expected to happen is precisely what ended up happening. But instead of blocking the synthleft weirdo like I usually do, I decided to see the conversation to its conclusion and record it for posterity. Got your popcorn? Then let's dive in.

The politics of fatshaming

Interesting times on the communist right.

Yep, I've decided to take the plunge. Since "left" and "right" have been dialectically stripped of their class relations, and since Haz came out swinging against the modern left at the recent CPI conference in Austin, the time is probably nigh for me to implement one of the ideas I've had on the backburner for a while, but held off on because I didn't figure people were ready for it: self-referencing as being on the "communist right." Also, other communists that I respect are referring to me as being on the right, so there's that.

These days, right and left do not seem to indicate one's position on the class war any longer, but one's position on the culture war. As far as the culture war goes, I'm really a centrist because I'm interested in egalitarianism, plain and simple. But as we've reviewed elsewhere, refusing to go along with every last jot and tittle of woke theology is cancellation fodder. So my centrism on the culture war reads as reactionary and right-wing to the anarcho-mallgoth ultras on the left. Since I'm not interested in organizing the petty bourgeoisie, this is not only fine, but ideal. Owning their hatred gives me an opportunity to talk to workers on the right, since I now have the hatred of pinkhairs in common with them. A lot of politics is just having something to talk about together, and now we can bond over hating liberals. Ergo, yes, in that non-economic sense, I am on the communist right.

Now, the communist right is a new thing in this country again. It's been here before, and it was inevitable that it would return. Communism getting into the hands of the actual working class inevitably results in right-wing communism, a based order. (That'd be a sick name for a book title; I call dibs, no jousting.) And as the communist right comes into its own, asserts its identity and its right to exist and its core values, cultural attitudes taken for granted on the modern left are being called into question.

We've seen this elsewhere, with the transphobic dogwhistling of the Workers' Party of Britain. (Dogwhistling, because Galloway has worked and is currently working alongside trans and queer comrades to advance the class war, but has chosen this particular form of messaging to wedge some Labour voters away from Labour.) And now, we're seeing it with fatshaming.

Liberals have probably gone too far on the issue, making the same mistake that some trans extremists have: saying anyone who isn't inherently attracted to fat people is bigoted. This is incorrect, on the same grounds as gay people not being attracted to the opposite sex making them bigots would be incorrect. In both the trans and fat rights extremist cases, it's the scorn of the jilted masquerading as theory. But nobody owns your libido, or has the right to tell you that you must be attracted to them. Insisting that they do is a bigotry all its own, a classist bigotry of rich people unaccustomed to being told "no" and assuming it must be a new form of oppression.

New bookshelf entry!

Good news everyone!

Some great news for the blog: I just published a new article, called "The Wages of Settlers is Srebrenica." It's linked in the sidebar, and you can read it starting here.

There is additional news! Before I go out to Nevada this spring, I'm going to be playing some music at an antiwar conference in Austin. It's being put together by the CPI, and it'll be happening March 12. I hope to see many of you there, and I hope the rest of you will eagerly check out the video that will come out of that conference. I'll be posting some of the stuff I'll be playing there in the coming days (as well as some little extras), so stay tuned!

The Greater Game

In the 1800s, tsarist Russia and the British Empire squared off against one another. One based in the breadbaskets of eastern Europe, one based in the legal fiction that was Mughal India, they made alliances and conquests across central Asia in order to keep the other off balance.

Geopolitics isn't destiny, but a similar sort of game was played in Soviet times for the same sorts of reasons. Tsarist Russia and the USSR were radically different regimes, but they held in common the same geography, and therefore the same geopolitical imperatives. Russia is easy to defend from the Pacific due to thousands of miles of virtually nothing that the enemy's supply lines would have to stretch across, from the north by the barren Arctic clogged with icebergs, shorn of useful ports, and possessing few viable ways inland to the south from the coast, any of which can serve as natural chokepoints for the Russian defender. The Caucasus isn't a good direction of invasion either; so long as Russia or its allies control land up to the northern ridge of the range, and they do, it's as iron a gate to invasion as any Alexander could ever build.

Really, the only directions a successful invasion of Russia in the modern era could come from are from eastern Europe, or central Asia. The Russian heartland has little in the way of natural barriers and is best defended with the largest buffer possible. This is always why Russian governments, regardless of regime, always strive to move their sphere of influence west towards the Carpathian Mountains and south towards the Iranian Plateau and the Pamirs. Everything Russiaward from those points is flat, indefensible land whose chief strategic value is that it can be traded to the enemy for time.

When Gorbachev's hyperutopian ass traded the Red Navy to Pepsico for history's most ill-advised slice of Pizza Hut, when he named Soviet foreign policy after an American lounge singer and let the Soviet satellite states of eastern Europe fall to capitalist revanchism, he was operating out of an assumption that the Americans would honor their gentleman's agreement with him that NATO wouldn't advance eastwards. May the Russian people never forgive him his abject stupidity.

So with that backstory out of the way, let's focus on Francis Fukuyama being wrong, history not ending, and these same geopolitical tensions revving up again. I'm going to explain them, and also explain how they're all connected, because it's useless to just see "oh this happened, oh that happened, oh this other thing over here happened" without looking at the bigger picture, the wider chess game being played between the two sides.

NATO broke that gentleman's agreement, and now everything west of Russia but Belarus is firmly in the imperialist camp.

Taking the Struggle from the Rittenhouses to the Financial Houses

When I first got the idea to write an article addressing the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, it was only a few days ago, and I figured I would be able to publish the article within a day, because I'd already written a couple posts examining the issue from my perspective on Facebook, and it would only be a matter of editing to consolidate them into one.

But Marxism is a science, not a dogma, and when our understanding of the facts change, our application of Marxism must change as well.

Some news about the ads around here.

Apparently my previous ad service has been doing browser crypto mining without my knowledge. They paid next to nothing anyway, so I've fired them. For all none of you who'll miss the opportunity to get shitcoins pitched to you, I feel your pain.

I could just as easily not have ads at all; it would certainly make my life easier. But, as funny as this may sound, there's a certain legitimacy in advertising. Ads say a lot of dumb capitalist things, but they also say, in essence, that the advertiser believes in the medium it's advertising in. It's a declaration of solidarity of sorts. To a certain degree, a website that has a select few tasteful advertisements looks more established and legitimate than a website that does not.

After reviewing the advertising situation, I'm convinced that I will have no luck whatsoever selling ads through any established agency. First off, literally nobody is catering online ad sales to a communist market. That's just not a thing. If I sell ad space to any currently existing ad company, it'll be a wild mismatch of product and reader. I can't imagine any of my readership actually bought any of the shitcoins being hawked, and I certainly hope they didn't.

"The New Deal and the Fifth Party System" is up on the bookshelf!

I gone done did me a theory again, y'all. It's called "The New Deal and the Fifth Party System" and I hope you'll do me the honor of reading it.

I've mentioned in previous essays, and in Class Analysis and Rev, that I think that communists who actually want to die in a communist America ought to be Republicans. There are so many different arguments for it, and I have only begun to make them. Nevertheless, this notion flies in the face of mainstream socialist theory, which still maintains that we should all be AOC simps. I'll leave that job to Chuckles Kirk, however.

Mostly I've made the historical argument for our involvement in the GOP: that it was once a Marxist workers' party that did cool Marxist workers' party things, and can be made to do so again. I've also pointed out that Trump proved it is manifestly the easier of the two big parties to take over, and that it's already become an anti-imperialist party again of its own accord.

Well, in this essay, I delve more deeply into the history of America's party systems, what question our current party system is designed to answer, and the proper communist orientation to this party system. So please, check it out!

Kent Chamberlain and the Red Rock Forests: Pictures

I kept alluding to this thread in the main thread. Indeed, this might be the worthier of the two. I got me some pixels that day, y'all. I'm going to break it up into sections, so you can know what you're looking at. It's hard enough for me to keep it all together; it's been long enough now that I have to group the pictures by date to even know what I'm looking at.

First was some scenic area I stopped at before even getting to Highway 89. It didn't make it into the main narrative because there isn't much to tell besides the pictures. Anyhow, after you make the jump, here's that:

Kent Chamberlain and the Red Rock Forests

It's been a while since the last installment of this series, and I'd better write it up while my memories are still relatively fresh. I never did get back to it, because life has a way of going sideways all at once, especially in Nevada. But here, in the autumnal tranquillity of the Omaha 'burbs, I've got coffee and I've got jazz playing in the background, so let's do this.

I woke up in a Utah rest area off I-70 just shy of Green River. I pulled into Green River soon after that, in search of some gas and coffee. I paid for the gas with my quarter supply, and I made my own coffee with their hot water and some soup cans I've kept for this purpose (usually the hot water comes from my fireplace though). Refuelled, I got back on the interstate, getting back off of it on Highway 89 headed south. I was not yet aware of the price of admission at Bryce Canyon, so I was headed in that direction.

Racists criticizing theory

Critical race theory is a chimera. It's been banned in various states by Republican politicians responding to their voters, but Democrats respond that those schools weren't even teaching critical race theory, and their opponents don't even know what it is.

So, nobody can agree on what it even means, yet the conservative working class is utterly enraged by it and that's all the proof the middle class and bourgeois radlibs need to dismiss them all as irredeemable Klansmen.

What the hell is going on? What should we as communists uphold in this situation?

Let's start with a personal example. As a teenager, I was a libertarian. Member of the Libertarian Party and everything. I wasn't greedy, I wasn't rich. I had a hard childhood where I felt unfree, and this was the party that seemed to believe in human freedom the most. So I joined. Having still been brainwashed by the false consciousness of capitalism, I also incorrectly figured their economic platform of extreme free market capitalism would liberate the workers if ever truly implemented (as opposed to the "crony capitalism" that libertarians blame capitalist problems on).

I was a reactionary on a theoretical level when it came to economics, but my heart was in the right place. On just about every other issue, I upheld the correct line as I understand it now: I was anti-imperialist, anti-fascist, anti-cop. And even economically, I had similar praxis to today: I wanted to start businesses to employ people at good wages. I just hadn't realized all of communist theory yet, and those businesses were going to be capitalist ones run by a really nice boss instead of the collective enterprise I'm starting now, where we're all equal and vote on everything.

The good intentions were there, but the theory wasn't.

Then I went to college.

"Everything happens for a reason."

What an infuriating phrase. People say it at the worst times, too: at a funeral, during a tragedy of any sort, when you're fuming or distraught and unprepared to get into the finer points of philosophy, like "Did the Holocaust happen for a reason, Janice?" And what's more, they seem to say this as comfort. Like it's helping.

But why?

I think some people like the sound of their own voice, and will just trot out the first nostrum that comes to mind, regardless of occasion. But that alone can't explain the utter domination of our culture by this phrase.

Is it said out of ignorance? I've heard it out of workers and bourgeois alike, so if it's ignorance, it's some element of false consciousness that the bourgeoisie swallowed wholesale itself first.

But because the workers can't afford the luxury of utopian thinking, if it's believed by widespread numbers of workers, it has to at least not be hurting them, or even perhaps helping them, if they have believed it for any length of time. Predestination and magic as memes involved in religious practice reoccur over and over again over the millennia, both of them demonstrations of some kind of belief that random chance does not ordain the cosmos.

But why?

What is so useful about the belief that everything happens for a reason?

Back in Omaha for the winter

Hello everyone, long time no post.

As always, there's a good reason for that. The laptop is on its last legs, but everytime it seems to get better at the last moment so I don't replace it. If the laptop's electric is bad, the van's electric is worse, and I have to resort to electroshock therapy half the time to get it moving. Going into town from my homestead became such a chore that I ended up dreading it, and avoiding trips for all but the most important things, because it'd often be a day or two before I could get the van moving again.

It's not the battery, and after extensive unprofessional diagnosing I'm pretty sure it's not the alternator either. I haven't fully ruled out the spark plugs, but I don't think it's that either, because sometimes when the electric is low the AC will randomly come on even though it's off. That is a symptom of every Chrysler owner's most dreaded problem: a fault with the electric brain. The electric brain is a part that never used to exist, it's not strictly necessary to the operation of a motor vehicle, but it improves gas mileage at the cost of rendering the vehicle a particularly well-engineered brick when it dies. The electric brain itself isn't particularly expensive, but like many things in a Chrysler it's buried someplace almost inaccessible, in this case inside the engine block. So a few hundred dollars of part is accompanied by about a thousand dollars of labor.

The van isn't undriveable, after all I did get here in the end. But it's touch-and-go enough that I won't be leaving Omaha in the spring until and unless it's fixed. And it was getting less driveable as the weather got colder, which is why I called the season a bit early and came home. But at least this way, I get to see the leaves fall.