EDIT: this entire site is filled with ultras, third-worldists, and campists whose beliefs amount to little more than “america bad” but framed in whatever quotations of leftist thinkers they need to justify themselves. read for yourself, think for yourself, and above all just get organized instead of treating politics like religious salvation and orthodoxy like so many people do.

How about addressing the content of what is being said instead of doubling down on bad faith nonsense. From what I can gather, usually the term ultra is used to refer to people who expect purity out of socialism, rather than contending with conditions as they are. So not sure how you get that out of numerous people in this thread saying varying statements along the lines of that support for Russian leadership is a tenuous thing to have at best, relative to its resistance to imperialism, while you are saying no one should have any support for them. 🫠

And how do you arrive at such a liberal reddit-brain-sounding analysis as “people believe little more than ‘america bad’”? The western empire refers to more than the US, but the US is the power center of it at this point in history and has been for a while now. Please stop projecting your own reductionist thinking onto others because people disagreed with your views on Russia and Ukraine. I mean, for god’s sake, you accuse others of using quotations as justifications for those views like this is inherently a failing, but you did just that in this very post and when challenged on how the term you used applies to this situation, it appears you ignored it with an edit, doubling down with an even more ridiculous and nasty framing about the entire website.

I’m genuinely confused as to where this extreme rejection of everyone is coming from, as you otherwise seem to want to be here and otherwise appear to share similar views as others here have.

there are many people who call themselves marxist-leninists on this site who do not subscribe to anything marx or lenin had to say about inter-imperialist conflict.

This is a bad faith way to start your post on this and also doesn’t make sense in this context. Russia isn’t imperialist, so how is it inter-imperialist rivalry? Some reasoning on why Russia is not imperialist found here: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Imperialism#Russian_“imperialism”

It is possible we’re reading different posts, but in my time here, how I see Russia talked about is with the term “critical support” if support is given at all; meaning that (roughly speaking) the person supports them with regard to resisting the western empire, but does not support anything else about its leadership, necessarily. Russia and the US are far from equal powers dueling for hegemony, as a framing like “inter-imperialist conflict” might suggest, and it is not helpful to understanding imperialism or global conflict to reduce something to “both sides” simply because neither government is socialist.

IIRC, Mao goes into the concept in On Contradiction, of varying allying conditions with the Kuomintang and how that relationship evolved. I think it’s a decent analog to what we’re talking about here. Imperialism is the prevailing force of global power, not local reactionaries, and so some amount of allowance for that needs to be made in considering who is and isn’t worth “supporting”: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.htm

And modern day China seems to understand this and utilizes it to further an alternative to the western imperialist order. If they were only willing to have ties with those states who are controlled by a communist vanguard party, they’d have limited allies on the global stage, which would make it easier for the empire to isolate them, undermine them, etc.

In my experience, when used unironically: “skill issue” is a psychological projection phrase used by people who don’t want to put any effort into helping others with [insert thing they’re calling a skill issue].

The real skill issue, in other words, is that they suck at being helpful to others with XYZ issue. But rather than letting that exist in their psyche as part of them and hurting their ego, they put it onto the other person as being that other person’s fault.

For context, I’ve encountered this phrase before in the most mundane of situations like “person wanting help with how to use a product and having complaints about how the product works.” Situations where those who help are often volunteers and face 0 obligation or moralizing to urge them to help. And still you get the sort of people who will go out of their way to call it a skill issue rather than, you know, just not saying anything if they don’t want to help.

It’s unfortunately not all that surprising, when considering how commonly US people have full-throated ignorance of imperialism and support it blindly, and then you combine that with somebody who has a big platform and gets validated for doing it. Not defending him at all, mind you, but when I think about the state of US political education, like even some of the more aware celebrities seem to linger in a hazy state where they sort of know something is screwy, but haven’t quite cottoned onto what imperialism is yet and what that means beyond vague notions like corruption. Bo Burnham is the one time I can recall seeing a major US celebrity tackle it head on with the kind of language we might use here and he even did it in comedy song form, but he also seems to be an oddity of a celebrity in terms of consciously fighting against celebrity going to his head almost as a form of protest against the nature of it.

Under the Trump administration, international approval of U.S. leadership fell to a historic low

Ah, right, so this is why even Cheney doesn’t want Trump in office. He’s bad for PR. “Keep out the guy who is bad at making us look good while we’re doing bad things.”

Psychoanalysis is quackery. It was progressive at a certain point, but it got pretty fast reactionary.

Systems getting warped by the cultural/social/economic conditions they exist under… I go to therapy every week and while I have derived a lot of benefit out of it, it is also persistently painful going to a therapist who talks in individualism and trying to figure how I can translate that back over to something that will make a difference in my life in the long-term. It honestly feels sometimes like a language barrier, even though we are both speaking in fluent English. I always get the sense they mean well and are doing everything they know how to do, to help me (and some of it does help) but I can also sense the underlying “the system works, it’s you that is broken” undercurrent of it that is not explicitly said, but is expressed in the solution focus always being on elements like “you have no control over others and can only change how you react to things.” I think if I were to say that I want to tear down the system in those exact words, they might actually support me to a point, but from a framework again of individualism and how does the individual do this as an individual without being too forceful toward other individuals.

And like, I don’t expect them to say “you have nothing to lose but your chains” and they could probably get in trouble depending on what they were advocating for in a therapy context. But then it comes back to, what is the status quo and what is considered something bad to advocate for, within that. And that’s where under capitalism, at least in my experience in the US, it’s confined to the individual. The very cause of wanting to make a difference is isolated out into a sort of personality trait, like what movies you like to watch, rather than an organized movement that goes beyond any one person. And in this way, it allows a sort of shallow “diversity” where people can be all sorts of directly conflicting things, as long as they don’t try to translate those things into organized behaviors. What I would call individualist therapy, in my experience, seems to encourage this as a solution, that you sort of figure out how to co-exist alongside those who are radically different or retreat from them and find others more like you, rather than directly confronting the contradictions and either forming alliances on clear grounds or rejecting one another entirely on an organized level.

Makes me think all the stuff about “purity tests” that “the left” gets accused of is pure projection. Because like, setting aside the fact that these people tend to use talking points of events that are exaggerated, distorted, or outright lies about something “communism did,” they are always so quick to attribute any sort of perceived failure under a socialist state to communism, but will drag their feet about ever doing the same with capitalism. I find it goes something like: “If someone dies under capitalism, it’s because human nature is flawed and you can’t prevent all harm, but capitalism is as good as it gets. If someone dies under communism, it’s because communists are always cartoonishly evil no matter how good it sounds on paper and they are simultaneously weak rulers who can’t accomplish anything and totalitarian regimes who monitor every minute of their citizens’ lives and do their best to make it a living hell for no apparent reason.” At least with capital, we can point to a system level motive for exploitation and dominance of others, how the mechanisms of accumulating and holding onto capital are directly tied to that. Where is the motive among communists? If they are as evil as they are made out to be, what is the point of them doing a communism when they can do a capitalism and be praised as “freedom free” while being exploitative of others?

It’s like that line in Blackshirts and Reds (bold emphasis mine):

If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.”

Communist theory and practice actively takes on the idea of being anything but purity, of contending with the “flaws”, so to speak, on a scientific level and working toward better. But it gets characterized as utopian and held to unrealistic standards of perfection because… it has a positive vision for the future? Augh, it makes my head hurt.

Speaking as someone from the US my whole life who became communist only in recent years, my general sense is people like me are raised to think that: 1) the world revolves around the US and everything else is secondary to it (not true). 2) the US is a people’s democracy (it isn’t). 3) democrats are the more moderate/progressive party (they aren’t, if they ever were truly - maybe going back to the FDR coalition, they were a bit).

But if you believe all 3 of these, and you strongly believe that Trump is a threat to a people’s democracy, then you might have a strong reaction to the idea of not supporting the alternative. To be clear, I’m not saying their behavior is reasonable at all. But I can kind of see how they arrive at it, with headspaces I’ve been in at times in the past, and the propaganda people tend to believe in the US.

Tbh, they sound like they are deep in western chauvinism, coming to your Eastern European country and yelling at you about their elections. As if you are supposed to be involved in it too somehow (this is where point 1 comes in). You did nothing wrong. Blue maga, aka: “vote blue no matter who”, the special brand of USian liberal who has adopted a stance of voting for a half-eaten ham sandwich over voting for Donald Trump, is not well-grounded in reality. In effect, I think whether they realize it consciously or not as what it is in substance, they are panicked about the neoliberal order crumbling and being replaced with naked fascism (e.g. no decorum to cover it up), but they lack the framework with which to see the neoliberal order as already being fascistic, so to them this is the absolute worst case scenario for their country and life. Meanwhile, people who see beneath the curtain are going like, “Is it really the worst thing if liberals start to see the US for what it is, rather than continuing to believe in the pomp and ceremony?” Migrant kids in cages went from being an issue liberals cared about under Trump to being a nothing under Biden.

People in this state of mind are effectively duped by the liberal decorum and really believe it’s better for that reason.

I’ll be glad if he does something that makes an actual difference, but right now, this reads like the same energy as Michael Scott in The Office “declaring bankruptcy.”

Huge disappointment of a man. His presidential campaign was marketed in part on the idea that he opposed the Iraq War and last I’ve checked, he can’t even call this a genocide. Best I can figure is that he was always less “left” than his presidential campaign made him seem and the activists involved pushed it further “left” than he would have done of his own accord.

Not consciously, but I watched the movie a long time back, so maybe some of the influences seeped into my brain. I just know I can pick up inspiration from all kinds of places, but may not remember where in the long-term.

So I watched the video and that was an interesting breakdown of the concept. One aspect that stood out to me was the idea of the bureaucracy of auditing labor and the sort of facade of accomplishment paved over practical use of labor. As an example, I have a contracting job that is hourly and online, and so a certain amount of time and energy and system-level process is put into recording time mostly accurately, in order to bill hours accurately and protect against fraudulent reporting of hours performed. And while this is somewhat understandable given the nature of the job, most of it would be unnecessary if it was salary based work rather than contracting; so, in order to cut costs through the contracting (or even just hourly) labor form, additional labor and bureaucracy is added on top of it to make sure it performs as intended. This, I would say, is counter to the narrative contracting tends to get, of “independence” - the practical reality of the contracted form seems to be, in reality, a greater level of scrutiny needed. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say, a more invasive level of scrutiny. I hesitate to say that in a sweeping way, as not all expressions of it will be identical, but I think of the nature of things like Airbnb and how I’ve read things in passing of renters who install cameras to an invasive degree, in order to make sure nothing untoward happens. Without organizational trust, the fear of the relative stranger taking advantage and the subsequent efforts to control them, seems to deepen. It is possible this also correlates to the overall estrangement of a society deep in capitalism as a whole; that there is, to some extent, more invasive monitoring the more estranged people are from each other and from any kind of reliable shared beliefs, morals, goals, etc. That might be too hasty of a generalization, but I do wonder if there is something to it that plays into the rise in invasive monitoring of people.

Good point, well said.

some liberal platitudes about how this is just the way things are in return.

I wonder if that relates to the intersection of it with Capitalist Realism that Larkin mentioned - people having a hard time viewing anything fundamentally different as being possible.

obscurantism

Didn’t know that word for it. Gonna look into that term more, thanks.

Interesting, I’m familiar with the general concept of Capitalist Realism, but never got around to knuckling down and reading the book. I’ll have to make a note to look into it in more detail.

Background:

Got inspired to write this when thinking about how disempowered people can be, in the face of the systems they’re working with. A lot of stuff in the US context, for example, expects you to be okay with it being “out of your control”. Now some therapists would tell you “nothing is under your control” (other than maybe yourself) and while that might be “technically the truth”, we absolutely have influence over the environments we exist in and they have influence over us. But when we live among processes that are so removed from us having any influence and so removed from us even understanding them, what does it leave us with other than being hopeless and helpless? Personal willpower, positive attitude, and magical thinking. Which as a method are nowhere near a dialectical, scientific way of moving through the world. It is beneficial to the imperialists for us to be in this position, blaming ourselves and not knowing how to bring about different through a quantifiable, reproducible process. What strikes me as important here is that it’s not only whether someone is educated to approach things in a dialectical way, it’s whether the systems they’re working with provide any sort of meaningful feedback that even allow them to assess and adjust. This is why I use the word “infantilization”. There is this common design of things where “you don’t need to know and don’t get to know”, and as a result, you become further and further from being able to influence anything, your own life or that of others. And where with an actual infant, you are normally taken care of at least, there is a stark difference here: you are infantilized while simultaneously being left to fend for yourself. And the only tools the capitalists, the imperialists, the colonizers expect you to use to overcome are a magical force of will and disposition that they themselves do not have and did not use to get to where they are.

Curious to know if this resonants you or not and in what way(s). I will read any responses I get, even if I don’t have a reply for them all.

😁

“I take the specs of an invention that somebody made and I pass it off as a white dude thing.”

“So you physically take the specs to US manufacturers and have US laborers put it into practice.”

“Well, uh, my secretary faxes it to a contracting company in a country I couped and they manufacture it for a fraction of the cost.”

“So, why couldn’t you just have these countries manufacture their own goods in an empowered way, with self determination?”

“Well, uh, I’ll tell you why. Foreign people are not good at managing themselves. I’m good at managing people.”

“And this management, you do it directly?”

“I mean, my compromised stooges do.”

“clears throat So, what is it you’d say, you do here?”

“I told you, I’m good at managing people. I deal with the management so the foreign people don’t have to. Can’t you see I’m good at dealing with people?!? Do you want me to bomb you people?!?”

(Your phrasing reminded me of Office Space, not sure if that was intentional, but I ran with it. Jokes aside tho, fuck the US empire.)

I feel like I heard of some method that is long enough to get through a REM cycle but also relatively short like 1:30-3:00 hour increments or something. But it’s been years, so I could be remembering wrong. I wonder how that would compare to this thing of 20-30 minute increments. On the face of it, it seems like the 2nd would be a disaster because of not giving sufficient time to get into REM sleep.

Great read, bookmarking this for future reference.