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.

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.

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.

"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!

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?

George Galloway and the Great Experiment

Over across the pond, the left has enjoyed slightly more success since World War II, and therefore has a little bit more of an institutional structure. One of these institutional structures are the labor unions that still provide much of the funding to the Labour Party to this very day, and several of these unions are in the hands of literal comrades.

Over the years, one such comrade has been a fellow by the name of George Galloway. In 2005, George Galloway ran a campaign under the ephemeral Respect Party, appealing to the anti-imperialist left in the critical swing district of Bethnal Green and Bow who felt they had nowhere to go during a byelection. He won outright, destabilizing internal Labour politics in the process. This hastened the end of the Blair-Brown years and the beginning of the era of anti-imperialist Jeremy Corbyn.

Well, with Corbyn thrown under the bus by candidates for building roads in the Falklands Polly Toynbee, Nick Cohen, and their pals in the bourgeoisie's paper of record the Guardian, warmed-over Blairite Keir Starmer has taken over Labour. He's proceeded to stand for nothing, letting the Tory government of Boris Johnson get to his economic left several times without effective pushback. (That in itself is another tale I've waited a while to tell, but the story of our Tory quarries' poring over hoary theory isn't core to the moral of this story so I'm foregoing it; sorry but more later for sure.)

Anyhoo, the fall of Corbyn has left Galloway and his ilk on the Labour hard left with zero influence in the party now. On that basis, Galloway decided to resort to the tactic that had already successfully dickpunched the Blairites once before: running in a byelection as the candidate for a throwaway lefty party. The contours were going to be a little different this time though, and Galloway was going to go in a direction either pioneering or heretical for a leftist, possibly both.

On the end of Krystal and Saagar on "Rising"

I started watching Rising with Krystal Ball and some Republican in August 2019. I say it like that because initially, she was the draw for my commie ass. But I'm now watching my last bit of Rising with premier contemporary Republican theorist Saagar Enjeti and his Bernie-voting friend Krystal.

This show has fulfilled its deepest purpose, at least as far as I'm concerned. Seeing a Republican who wasn't a stereotype of heartless ignorance changed my thinking. It got me to connect the dots between our ideologies. The heartlessness in the Republican coalition is just caused by the propaganda fed to the workers; it's false consciousness and not their fault. The ignorance is deliberately kept and maintained by the rich through that same false consciousness, or as the GOP now calls it, "fake news."

Meanwhile, I came to see the Dems not as my halfhearted allies who just needed to be radicalized more, but as wealthy decadent bloats paying just enough guillotine insurance to forestall the loss of their enterprises. In the Democrat-Republican split in American politics, I came to realize it mirrored exactly the split in socialist politics between reformers (the Bernie camp) and revolutionaries (all hail the immortal science of Marxism-Leninism; also hello).

Fill The Wedding Hall With Guests Y'all

It is written about an early socialist philosopher that He said the following:

Matthew 22:1-10 And Jesus answered and spoke to them again by parables and said: “The kingdom of heaven is like a certain king who arranged a marriage for his son, and sent out his servants to call those who were invited to the wedding; and they were not willing to come. Again, he sent out other servants, saying, ‘Tell those who are invited, “See, I have prepared my dinner; my oxen and fatted cattle are killed, and all things are ready. Come to the wedding.” ’ But they made light of it and went their ways, one to his own farm, another to his business. And the rest seized his servants, treated them [a]spitefully, and killed them. But when the king heard about it, he was furious. And he sent out his armies, destroyed those murderers, and burned up their city. Then he said to his servants, ‘The wedding is ready, but those who were invited were not worthy. Therefore go into the highways, and as many as you find, invite to the wedding.’ So those servants went out into the highways and gathered together all whom they found, both bad and good. And the wedding hall was filled with guests.

Why do I bring this up? Because Marco Rubio backs the Amazon warehouse unionization drive in Bessemer, Alabama as a way to own Amazon for having woke PR departments. His reason to back this is not my reason to back this, to put it mildly. He doesn't like the idea of unions in principle, doesn't have anything against billionaires in principle, but is so triggered by culture war bullshit that he's gotta own the libs by organizing Bessemer.

The Quantum Mechanics of Kennedy and Khrushchev

There is a peculiar notion among some people in the hard sciences that they practice the purest, surest forms of knowledge. Biology is just applied chemistry, chemistry is just applied physics, and physics is just applied mathematics, and mathematics is axiomatically true (probably). All of these fields' laws and theories can be tested empirically with quantifiable data, or with basic logical analysis as in mathematics. A historian like me, on the other hand, only has sketchy qualitative data with which to work, no way to ethically repeat experiments in the field, and constant interference from politics seeking to assert historical narratives favorable to themselves. (And the less said about literature majors, the better.)

But this notion coyly pays tribute to the truth of the matter when it mentions how each field just applies knowledge from another. Every field does this, at least if it prospers in scientific discovery. Sometimes a new set of eyes is needed to see what's in front of them. Sometimes a bit of knowledge locked away in the advanced section of one field can help drive fundamental discoveries in another. History owes a lot to other fields. Radiocarbon dating, for one, has made mute stones sing like canaries at long last; so thank you, nuclear physics and chemistry. Linguistics has given us a lot of evidence for human migration throughout history, as has DNA sequencing. The hard scientist chauvinist might rebut, well, these are all hard sciences or soft sciences giving to history. What has history ever given to us?

My answer would be: understanding the nature of existence itself. Thank you, Khrushchev and Kennedy.

Class Analysis and Revolution is hereby published in full!

I'm so happy about it that I decided to skip the rest of the serialization and just give you the last three chapters all at once. It's a Martin Luther King Jr. Day miracle! Go read it on the blog if you want the memes, or just download you a copy of the e-book to read offline.

The final publication of Class Analysis and Revolution is also the closing of a chapter of my life, but a beginning of a much bigger one all the same.

When I began writing this book, I lived in Florida. I had finally read up enough communist theory to start having ideas of my own about it all. My first idea was the triangle compass, featured prominently in the beginning of the book, as well as the subject of its own essay. The triangle compass proved its worth as a tool of class analysis, but the conclusions it was giving me ran counter to the synthetic left theories prevailing in Leftbook at the time (and today, to a slightly diminished degree). Nonetheless, they checked out with my own knowledge and experience in life, and I continued elaborating on them. The triangle compass led me straight to Marxism-Lincolnism, the application of Marxism-Leninism to the material conditions of American bourgeois democracy.

New bookshelf entry: the first chapter of Class Analysis and Revolution!

I've begun serializing Class Analysis and Revolution, y'all. I will post a chapter every day for the next eleven days, with the last chapter going live on the last day of Trump's administration, a coincidence I didn't plan but that I embrace all the same. The first chapter is up, but you might as well start with the brief introduction.

This has been a moment building for a while. A lot of it was in the editing moreso than the writing. I know what I want to say, I just want to say so much, all at once, and it comes out all jumbled and confused. Editing it so the arguments progressed linearly and flowed from one to the other was the hardest part. I also had to figure out where to stop. There were initially going to be two extra chapters, one dedicated to what I expect a post-capitalist United States to look like, and one class analyzing the People's Republic of China. But the book is ambitious enough as it is; explaining to my comrades the dialectical logic in joining the GOP is going to be difficult enough that I should dedicate the first book to that. What comes after the civil war that will prompt can and rightly will be the subject of its own entire book. Class analyzing China in a fair and evenhanded manner is also going to be a weighty matter that will require all manner of documentation to ward off charges of revisionism from the Maoist ultras on the one hand, and charges of ultraradicalism from the Dengists on the other, and will also require its own book.

After the entire book has been published serially here, I'll release it in .pdf format, with a PayPal link attached since I won't be able to sell adspace on that. I want this knowledge out in the world, first and foremost. I'd like to be paid for it as a secondary matter, but I actively encourage people to steal, share, host, and republish this book. The method of class analysis it explains is simple enough to be understood by just about anyone, yet profound enough that it can change the world, I believe, if it becomes widely adopted by the working class.

Black Scammer, 24-hour postbloccs, and reading Settlers.

They're also probably cops. I'm on 24-hour postblock because I called one of these grifters a "piggie." Butthurt cop is butthurt.

It's remarkable how quickly it happened, too. Immediately after posting the piggie comment below, I was on postblock. It's as if they had people on the inside in Facebook, or something.

Their biggest "accusation" against me is that I'm white. Nevermind my Shawnee, Potowatomi, and Haudenosaunee ancestry; I don't get to live here without grovelling before them, I guess, because some of my ancestors came from Scotland. My ancestors had more revolutionary energy in their little toes than the entire Black Hammer org; they knew implicitly that the working class must be united in resistance to imperialism and capitalism, which is why all these people oppressed by British colonialism intermarried with each other as equals.

The Gospel is revolutionary.

"Chains shall He break
For the slave is our brother;
And in His Name
All oppression shall cease."

I hope you're all having a very merry Christmas. I'm spending mine with my family, and enjoying their company this winter before I head back out to Nevada to get back to work in the spring. I set this up to autopost when I'll be waking up.

I don't have a whole lot of insight to offer you this morning other than a notion I'll be expanding on in a full-blown essay, maybe even a full-blown book: the Christian gospel is revolutionary. So is the Jewish Law, so is the Muslim sharia, so is the Buddhist Eightfold Path, so is just about any other original religious tradition you can think of. Religions are just metaphysical ideologies, and they spring out of the same conditions that create materialist ideologies like socialism or fascism. Fascism never lasts very long, and neither do fascist religions. Religions that spring from socialist roots outlast them, and religions that retain their socialist roots longer and stronger remain cherished in the heart of the working class all the more for it.

This isn't to say that nothing bad ever happens as a result of religion, or that you must be religious to be socialist, or that the particular metaphysical claims of any given religion must definitely be true. What it is to say is, that Whosoever breaks the chains of the slaves my brothers is my King, and any such Name that would end oppression will forever be upon my lips.

Merry Christmas everyone!

"Performative Axisship" is up on the bookshelf!

I just formatted and published another essay I wrote out in the field, Performative Axisship. It's an investigation of how dogwhistles, pacts with fashy idiots, and deliberately tweaking the pinkhairs are occasionally necessary to help communists advance our emancipatory goals. I expect to be so cancelled, you guys, but I also just don't care. Read up on it if you want to learn the contours of this theory. Although many communists have embraced this theory in practice in times past, I'm unaware of any communists explicitly writing theory about it before. Today, it's my humble contribution to the collective effort.