You really witness the inhumanity of Western imperialism, that was then replayed in every first contact with the West since the 1500s, being first expressed through the period of early Spanish settler-colonialism. And you see the inability of those they encountered in grasping the refusal of Western chauvinism to ever see them as human equals.

You see it in Montezuma welcoming the armed Spanish conquistadors to the Aztec capital; you then see it with Lin Zexu’s letter to Britain’s inbred Victoria (which she never read) appealing to her “better virtues” to stop the opium trade right on the eve of the First Opium War; you see its modern reincarnation with Gorbachev betraying the entirety of Europe’s actually existing socialism with his delusion of a “Common European Home” and his weepy need for approval and “friendship” from Reagan, H.W. Bush, Thatcher and Kohl, an especially reactionary generation of mediocre Western leadership that had been utter domestic policy failures, which he then elevated into the history books through the credit they took for the capitalist restoration of Eastern Europe and the USSR.

Because English language academic “scholarship” on the extermination of the Aztec state are obsessed with getting the “conquistador” perspective and revisionist apologia, same as every other Western historical atrocity, to treat historical figures like Cortes “with more nuance,” the best history on the subject likely remains Miguel León-Portilla’s 1962 “Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico,” a compilation of Aztec primary source documents.

In the Aztec account, first contact between the Aztecs and the Spanish in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan begins like this:

When Motecuhzoma had given necklaces to each one, Cortes asked him: “Are you Motecuhzoma? Are you the king? Is it true that you are the king Motecuhzoma?” And the king said: “Yes, I am Motecuhzoma.” Then he stood up to welcome Cortes; he came forward, bowed his head low and addressed him in these words: “Our lord, you are weary. The journey has tired you, but now you have arrived on the earth. You have come to your city, Mexico. You have come here to sit on your throne, to sit under its canopy. […] You have come back to us; you have come down from the sky. Rest now, and take possession of your royal houses. Welcome to your land, my lords!”

When Motecuhzoma had finished, La Malinche translated his address into Spanish so that the Captain could understand it. Cortes replied in his strange and savage tongue, speaking first to La Malinche: “Tell Motecuhzoma that we are his friends. There is nothing to fear. We have wanted to see him for a long time, and now we have seen his face and heard his words. Tell him that we love him well and that our hearts are contented.” Then he said to Motecuhzoma: “We have come to your house in Mexico as friends. There is nothing to fear.” La Malinche translated this speech and the Spaniards grasped Motecuhzomas hands and patted his back to show their affection for him. […] When the Spaniards entered the Royal House, they placed Motecuhzoma under guard and kept him under their vigilance.

After the Spanish place Montezuma under house arrest in his own palace, a festival leads to a massacre:

[…] Motecuhzoma said to La Malinche: “Please ask the god to hear me. It is almost time to celebrate the fiesta of Tox- catl. It will last for only ten days, and we beg his permission to hold it. We merely burn some incense and dance our dances. There will be a little noise because of the music, but that is all.” The Captain said: “Very well, tell him they may hold it.” Then he left the city to meet another force of Spaniards who were marching in this direction. Pedro de Alvarado, called The Sun, was in command during his absence.

Then Tecatzin, the chief of the armory, said: “Please remind the lord that he is here, not in Cholula. You know how they trapped the Cholultecas in their patio! They have already caused us enough trouble. We should hide our weapons close at hand!” But Motecuhzoma said: “Are we at war with them? I tell you, we can trust them.” Tecatzin said: “Very well.”

Then the songs and dances began. A young captain wearing a lip plug guided the dancers; he was Cuatlazol, from Tolnahuac. But the songs had hardly begun when the Christians came out of the palace. They entered the patio and stationed four guards at each entrance. Then they attacked the captain who was guiding the dance. One of the Spaniards struck the idol in the face, and others attacked the three men who were playing the drums. After that there was a general slaughter until the patio was heaped with corpses. A priest from the Place of the Canefields5 cried out in a loud voice: “Mexicanos! Who said we are not at war? Who said we could trust them?” The Mexicans could only fight back with sticks of wood; they were cut to pieces by the swords. Finally the Spaniards retired to the palace where they were lodged.

Another account of the Fiesta of Toxatl Massacre:

At this moment in the fiesta, when the dance was loveliest and when song was linked to song, the Spaniards were siezed with an urge to kill the celebrants. They all ran forward, armed as if for battle. They closed the entrances and passageways, all the gates of the patio: the Eagle Gate in the lesser palace, the Gate of the Canestalk and the Gate of the Serpent of Mirrors. They posted guards so that no one could escape, and then rushed into the Sacred Patio to slaughter the celebrants. They came on foot, carrying their swords and their wooden or metal shields. They ran in among the dancers, forcing their way to the place where the drums were played. They attacked the man who was drumming and cut off his arms. Then they cut off his head, and it rolled across the floor.

They attacked all the celebrants, stabbing them, spearing them, striking them with their swords. They attacked some of them from behind, and these fell instantly to the ground with their entrails hanging out. Others they beheaded: they cut off their heads, or split their heads to pieces. They struck others in the shoulders, and their arms were torn from their bodies. They wounded some in the thigh and some in the calf. They slashed others in the abdomen, and their entrails all spilled to the ground. Some attempted to run away, but their intestines dragged as they ran; they seemed to tangle their feet in their own entrails. No matter how they tried to save themselves, they could find no escape.

Some attempted to force their way out, but the Spaniards murdered them at the gates. Others climbed the walls, but they could not save themselves. Those who ran into the communal houses were safe there for a while; so were those who lay down among the victims and pretended to be dead. But if they stood up again, the Spaniards saw them and killed them.

The blood of the warriors flowed like water and gathered into pools. The pools widened, and the stench of blood and entrails filled the air. The Spaniards ran into the communal houses to kill those who were hiding. They ran everywhere and searched everywhere; they invaded every room, hunting and killing.

After this moment, the Aztecs unite and retaliate, driving the Spanish out of the city. In a pathetic historiographical display of playing the victim card, the Spanish-dominated historical record calls this eviction “la Noche Triste” or “the Night of Sorrows.” They later return to put the city under siege and this leads to the fall of Tenochtitlan:

The Spanish blockade caused great anguish in the city. The people were tormented by hunger, and many starved to death. There was no fresh water to drink, only stagnant water and the brine of the lake, and many people died of dysentery. The only food was lizards, swallows, corncobs and the salt grasses of the lake. The people also ate water lilies and the seeds of the colorin, and chewed on deerhides and pieces of leather. They roasted and seared and scorched whatever they could find and then ate it. They ate the bitterest weeds and even dirt. Nothing can compare with the horrors of that siege and the agonies of the starving. We were so weakened by hunger that, little by little, the enemy forced us to retreat. Little by little they forced us to the wall.

After the Spanish colonial regime is established, one indigenous leader rebuilds on the land left to his people:

I remember, I will establish a little temple where we will place the new god that the men from Castile have given us. Truly this new god wants us to worship him. What will we do, my sons? Let us receive the water on our heads [be baptized], let us give ourselves to the men of Castile, perhaps in this way they will not kill us.

Let us remain here. Do not trespass [by] going on another’s land, perhaps in this way they will not kill us. Let us follow them; thus, perhaps we will awaken their compassion. It will be good if we surrender entirely to them. Oh, that the true god who resides in heaven will help us [coexist] close to the men of Castile.

And in order that they will not kill us, we will not claim all our lands. We will reduce in length the extension of our lands, and that which remains, our fathers will defend.

Now I declare that, in order for them not to kill us, . . . we accept to have water poured on our heads, that we worship the new god, as I declare he is the same as the one we had.

Now I reduce in length our lands. Thus it will be. Their limits will begin in the direction from which the sun rises and continue . . . [he mentions each of the limits].

I presume that for this small piece of land they will not kill us. It does not matter that it was much larger. This is my decision because I do not want my sons to be killed.

Therefore, we will work only this little piece of land, and thus our sons will do so. Let us hope in this manner they will not kill us. …

The result is that beyond the works of Grover Furr and Domenico Losurdo’s “Making of a Black Legend," there are virtually no widespread English literature that portrays Stalin in a positive light. When even the USSR adopted the position of denouncing Stalin following Khrushchev, there was no opportunity for works that positively portray Stalin to be published. If you were an anticommunist, you were against Stalin. If you supported the USSR, you accepted their narrative about Stalina and thus you were also against Stalin. Only a few principled Marxist-Leninists denounced anticommunism and stood by Stalin’s side, but they were deeply marginalized with no institutional publishers to support their writings and this ideological isolation led many of them to become ultra-leftists. It also means that any history of the Stalin period, including all coverage of Soviet feats in WWII, is inescapably covered with tedious tirades against “Stalinism” in every second paragraph. As Keeran and Kenny write:

Among many friends of the Soviet Union an un-examined assumption grew that, after Stalin, the USSR was perfecting socialism. Khrushchev was better than Stalin. Gorbachev was better than Brezhnev. With the rare exceptions of Isaac Deutscher and Ken Cameron, few attempted to deal with the Stalin, Khrushchev, or Brezhnev periods in a critical but balanced way. Particularly in the case of Stalin, Soviet supporters gave up the effort of an overall assessment, perhaps because of its inherent difficulty, perhaps because such an effort could have no possible payoff, or perhaps because of an assumption that Soviet progress would make Stalin a historical anomaly of diminishing importance. The enemies of the Soviet Union readily filled this vacuum with shelves of books portraying Stalin as a monster or a madman. These caricatures in turn influenced the views of Communists whose only knowledge of the Stalin period was second hand.

Compare this to Deng’s formulation of 70%/30% for Mao, which he borrowed from Mao’s own profound 70%/30% formulation for Stalin. The trick was not to claim that Stalin was faultless and without blame: he made mistakes and as shown above, many in the Comintern thought those mistakes were fairly sizeable. Claiming Stalin was 100% right would have been laughably dogmatic and would have sounded insincere to those who thought they knew better. 70% right and 30% wrong was the perfect balance: Stalin saved the USSR from Hitler’s genocidal lebenstraum and his leadership led to the indisputable (until today) role of the USSR as the primary contributor to the defeat of Hitler-fascism and the liberation of Europe and his faults, no matter how large they seemed to anticommunist freaks, were dwarfed by this shadow. 30% is not too high as to compete with his achievements but not too low as to dismiss his faults either. This is the principled line that should have been adopted with Stalin and was adopted for Mao. As such, Chinese people can cognitively accept the idea of Mao’s faults without having their entire worldview shaken like what happened with Soviet people and global leftists following the 20th Congress, who the USSR itself stripped them of their weapons to defend against anticommunist propaganda.

This is how, despite all the same copycat anticommunist propaganda barrage against Mao and all the Ivy League and Oxbridge University Presses printing out endless slop attacking Mao about his “great famine” and the “tragedy” of China’s liberation, they’ve ended up screaming into the void because the CPC maintained the achievements of Mao, allowing for a coherent historical narrative that has the strength to reject Western propaganda assault. This is why the modern Western academic line of attack on China is to promote “historical nihilism,” which is basically begging Chinese people to be “nihilistic” and forget the entire coherent historical narrative they are taught and accept the West’s anticommunist revisionist propaganda instead. With the USSR, there can be surgical strikes on Stalin himself. With China, the only option to to slam impotently against the wall of China’s own history to try and get at Mao.

Mao’s portrait still hangs proudly in Tiananmen and up to this day, Western Marxist-Leninist authors still often publish positive historical accounts of Mao and many leftist movements that distance themselves from modern China itself like the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist, Communist Party of the Philipines and Communist Party of India (Maoist) still nonetheless proudly call themselves Maoist parties. Through them, the term “Maoist" is a (chauvinistic) source of pride, distinguishing themselves and their “correct ideological stance” from normal Marxist-Leninists. The term "Stalinist,” however, through the disintegration of a counter-narrative, has been entirely appropriated by anticommunists as a slur.

Beyond the power struggles within the CPSU that allowed Khruschev to consolidate his position, the main reason why he was “allowed” to get away with de-Stalinization is because of his abuse of trust. It’s the same thing with Gorbachev later, really, but especially so during Khruschev’s time. Both Soviet citizens and leftists around the world trusted the USSR in the 1950s. They recognized the heroic struggle and undeniable contribution of the USSR and its people in the war against fascism. They saw the blatant persecution and censorship against the left in the Western world following the ousting of Wallace in the 1944 Democratic convention and Truman’s coup as FDR’s successor. They trusted the CPSU to do the right thing.

There were, in essence, two camps in the left before the 20th CPSU Congress: those that had grievances with Stalin and initially saw some criticism of Stalin as not necessarily unwelcome until they later realized over time how far Khrushchev took it and the fallout; those that deeply admired Stalin and thus transitively trusted the CPSU which he led and built, meaning that when the CPSU under Khrushchev turned against Stalin himself, the latter group was completely paralyzed and didn’t know how to respond.

Many leading parties in the Comintern belonged to the first camp. Stalin completely alienated the Yugoslavs through his overreaction to Tito’s attempt at market socialism. The Communist Parties that fell into the Western NATO sphere of influence felt betrayed, especially Italy’s CPI and Greece’s KKE, over his abandonment of them through Stalin’s fears of provoking a WWIII. Stalin may have been right and the USSR deserved peace, but being right had its consequences as well for the Italians who he advised to hand over their arms to the soon-to-be NATO regime and his feuding with Tito which allowed the reactionaries to defeat the KKE in the Greek Civil War. Churchill claimed that he settled the division of Europe and the surrender of Greece with Stalin through a simple five minute chat and officiated with a napkin agreement.

The CPC themselves initially did not denounce Khrushchev because Stalin deeply let down the party through his advice in the 1920s of demanding the CPC to subordinate themselves to the KMT, which led to the 1927 massacre and purge by the fascist Chiang once he took over the KMT. Stalin also deeply distrusted the CPC following 1949 and thought they were a nationalist force and a “fake revolution,” a denial of socialist comradery which was deeply insulting to all the CPC’s heroic first generation like Mao, Zhou Enlai and Deng that fought off the Japanese and liberated China from the KMT. To his credit, Stalin was a man of principled integrity and when he was proven wrong after seeing the Chinese People’s Volunteers rescue the DPRK, he completely corrected course and apparently never again disagreed with Mao on the handling of the Korean War again, even to the point of always siding with Mao against Kim Il-Sung.

Also importantly, like Caligula in the Julian-Claudian dynasty of imperial Rome, Khruschev’s early years were seen as a “honeymoon” period. The SED in the DDR also chafed under Stalin because while they understood and agreed with the necessity and righteousness of German reparations to the USSR, the fracture of Germany meant that the DDR was forced to foot the entire reparations bill. The USSR absolutely deserved reparations but this forced the DDR into a catastrophic lose-lose “catch-22.” As the least developed region of the old Germany and only half the size of the BRD, the DDR was already in an imbalance with the Wessis. With the US sponsoring the Marshall Plan (which contemporaries largely only saw for its “benevolent” face value and failed to see as the self-serving financial imperialism it really was), the reparations to the USSR meant that the DDR-BRD economic dichotomy went from the DDR stagnating-BRD improving to DDR worsening-BRD improving. This later led to the material disparity and population flight that then forced the SED to construct the Berlin Wall. Khruschev annulled the reparations and this was widely appreciated in the DDR. With the CPC, he further extended Soviet aid to China meaning that his early years were the height of the Sino-Soviet alliance and this furthered the CPC’s hesitation at instantly denouncing Khrushchev.

This was the camp in the left that initially tolerated the criticism of Stalin. The other camp, those that trusted Stalin and the CPSU, were for the most part too completely stunned, when the latter turned on the former, to denounce Khrushchev. At “best,” this led to simply rejection of Stalin and a swerve towards following Khrushchev. At worst, this led to complete disillusionment with the entire socialist cause. How this occurred is best exemplied from the story of Eva Kaufmann, a SED party member, and her reaction to the 20th Congress as a youth in the FDJ, the Communist youth organization in the DDR.

“People who thought like me had no doubts that the new order was a good thing, so when I heard from a friend who wrote to me from West Germany that there were camps in the Soviet Union and people were being murdered, I said to myself, “That’s propaganda, it’s simply lies.” Then when the Twentieth Party Congress of the CPSU revealed the atrocities, it was a terrible shock, even through the reports about the terrible number of victims were not very clear. We were allowed to listen to Khruschev’s secret speech which was read out to us and it was clear to me that what was now being revealed would mean a very deep crisis for the whole communist movement for the socialist countries.”

The Twentieth Congress abused the trust of people in the institution of the CPSU to then destroy their trust in Stalin. As a consequence, they felt betrayed not only by Stalin but also the CPSU which had “hidden” his actions prior to the revelations. This had immense consequences through its inescapable logical conclusion: if even Stalin, who led the USSR to become the principal force that defeated fascism and liberated Eastern Europe, did all these things, then all future socialist leaders could also have the potential to turn out to be “criminals.” No one could trust the motives of any socialist leadership if they accepted the narrative of the 20th Congress that Khruschev put out, since Stalin “got away with it” during his own time and it was only through the voluntary disclosure of his successor that allowed “the truth to come to light.” This led to a damnation of any socialist leadership that was unfalsifiable and the sustained rise of the chauvinistic and smug Euro-“Communism."

As Kaufmann’s story also showed, Khruschev’s betrayal also legitimized anticommunist Western propaganda. Leftists were used to the propaganda barrage against the socialist cause and against the USSR and had generally learned to dismiss it. Because the most openly anticommunist regime was the fascist reich, the revelation of its own atrocities after WWII thus transitively debunked all anticommunist and anti-USSR narratives as propaganda in the eyes of most leftists. As Kaufmann shows, this allowed a cognitive dismissal of all subsequent anticommunist propaganda as the Cold War began. For the CPSU to reveal that not only did Stalin do wrong things but criminal things beyond even what Western propaganda alleged then legitimized anticommunist sources of information from the West. This led to blowback against the USSR and led to the schism between Khruschev himself and Western leftism after the 1956 intervention in Hungary because Western leftists felt compelled to question Khruschev’s rationale and bought the shrill Western narratives that the Hungarian reactionaries were mere “reformers.”

In the socialist world itself, many people were utterly disillusioned and lost their trust in authorities entirely. Nearly all the dissidents, reactionaries and soc-dem “reformers” that came out of the woodwork in the Gorbachev era, reading through their writings, directly attribute trace their own disillusionment with the socialist system through the common origin story of their shock at the “revelations” of the 20th Congress. Some people like Keeran and Kenny in “Socialism Betrayed” see Khruschev’s later, more “evenhanded” comment that "All of us taken together aren’t worth Stalin’s shit” (the truest thing he ever said) as a sign of desperate damage control, but it was far too late. A CPSU leadership collectively worth less than Stalin’s shit had turned the image of Stalin, the CPSU and socialism itself to shit. Later, the anti-Stalin agenda was used in the Gorbachev period as a powerful propaganda cudgel for the reactionaries to resmirch and sideline Marxist-Leninists, as can be seen from the ouster of Ligachev following his promotion of the letter by Leningrad chemist Nina Andreevya who defended Stalin. The Overton window had moved so far to the right in the USSR that this defence of Stalin was able to be used to purge Marxist-Leninists from leading government positions, directly causing the counter revolution that led to the collapse of the USSR.

Given the scale of what took place and the response from the West not just to dismiss it but to justify and even celebrate it; given that this act of terrorism occurred exactly a week from 9/11, I think it’s time to finally talk about 9/11 and though, yes, while inserting the two decade boilerplate about condemning terrorism and recognizing the innocent lives lost, to assess what it really meant.

Who “won” after 9/11?

It has been said endlessly in the two decades since 9/11 that the attacks that day permanently ended the unipolar euphoria of the US Cold War victory: it derailed the consolidation of US unipolarity by diverting it into two decade-long West Asian entanglements. Especially nowadays with the US unipolar status in complete disarray, you frequently see US policy makers and the Washington think tank blob cry crocodile tears about what a “gift” 9/11 was to China. This is not necessarily untrue, Bush had been priming for a confrontation with China even as he allowed its entry into the WTO. Then 9/11 happened and it wasn’t until Obama, exactly ten years later, that finally formalized the policy shift of the "Pivot to Asia,” which due the innumerable contradictions of US hegemony forcing it to react to Europe and (once again) West Asia, is still a “work in progress” in the present day.

The US fixation with its West Asian conflicts did allow China a breathing space for much of an additional decade until Trump finally took the US jumping with both feet into the New Cold War. Though there was always the Washington think tank cope as the US got bogged down that the puppet Afghanistan project was actually a 5D chess move that would allow a US presence right on the doorstep of Western China and meant the two decade occupation would allow the US to have its cake and eat it too, the total rout of the US with its 2021 Saigon moment nullified even that.

There used to be rather infamous op-eds from NYT and what-not, once the 9/11 self-censorship taboo faded a little, asking rhetorically if “Bin Laden won?” From the perspective of US unipolar hegemony, it does look like the attack did an incalculable damage not through the event itself but the US outsized reaction to it. However, is US hegemony really what matters most to the US political ruling class, “über alles?”

The specific attacks of 9/11 didn’t attack the elementary schools, they didn’t attack LGBT clubs, they didn’t attack parades; Americans would target those places themselves. They attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. If the other plane didn’t crash land in Pennsylvania, the consensus based on its DC bound flight path after two decades is still that It would have likely been flown into the White House or the US Capitol building. As such the targets were principally the financial elite, the military elite and the political elite.

There was supposed to have been a precedent set with Pearl Harbor that the United States was never to be attacked, or in Roosevelt’s own words in his “Day of Infamy” speech: “will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.” The consequence for Pearl Harbor was the two nuclear bombs and the permanent semi-occupation and vassalage of the perpetrating Japan to the present day.

Pearl Harbor: the previous attack on “America”

As Daniel Immerwehr wrote in “How to Hide an Empire,” in the eyes of the US political elite like Roosevelt, an attack on Hawaii, nearly 5000 miles from Washington DC, was more of an opportunity than a threat to themselves. Not only that, in the just recently forcibly annexed settler-colonial holding of Hawaii (still not a state) far from the continental US, there was a chance that the average American also would fail to see it as a threat. As such, Roosevelt’s draft edits allude to an anxiety that the American people wouldn’t get it at all:

[…] when it came to Hawai‘i, Roosevelt felt a need to massage the point. Though the territory had a substantial white population, nearly three quarters of its inhabitants were Asians or Pacific Islanders. Roosevelt clearly worried that his audience might regard Hawai‘i as foreign. So on the morning of his speech, he made another edit. He changed it so that the Japanese squadrons had bombed not the “island of Oahu,” but the “American island of Oahu.” Damage there, Roosevelt continued, had been done to “American naval and military forces,” and “very many American lives” had been lost. An American island, where American lives were lost—that was the point he was trying to make.

Roosevelt insisted: “Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger.” Yet taken from the eyes of the American ruling class, Pearl Harbor, in comparison to 9/11, is respectively akin to someone setting your front lawn (which you just expanded in size by forcibly seizing from a neighbor) on fire compared to literally coming for your jugular with a knife. You can see someone setting your lawn on fire as the greatest possible threat to you only if you can never even conceive the possibility of someone being able to take a blade to your throat. The greatest threat to the ruling class was supposed to be just to their way of life, not to their very lives themselves.

The Unthinkable becomes Thinkable and the Impossible is actually Done

9/11 not only negated the historical meme that Americans propagandized themselves with that “they were geographically gifted” on their stolen continent and “untouchable,” buried under lines of defence from enemies with territorial meat-shields like Hawaii, Guam, Japan, Britain, Western Europe and West Berlin that would-be adversaries would be forced to chew through first like layers on an onion; it also struck at not principally the working class masses but the literal elite themselves. Generations of American imperialism was supposed to have created an utterly vast breathing space and this “lebenstraum” was meant to make the continental US on which the US ruling class inhabit untouchable.

Even in the scenario of “World War 3,” so long as it remains conventional, in the geo-strategic calculus of the US ruling class, those immense territorial meat shields that it set up (for China: the first island chain, then the second, then the third; for Russia: the former USSR territories like Ukraine, then the former Warsaw Pact NATO, then Western Europe) mean that it would take a “World War 4” for a conflict to conceivably reach the continental US, let alone threaten the elite themselves who could scurry into their bunkers in Cheyenne mountain if things get too hot.

9/11 cut past all of this calculus like a hot knife through butter and brought the truly utterly unthinkable to realization, not only was the US squatter state on occupied Turtle Island subject to attack but the ruling class themselves were the ones specifically targeted. It’s like the hierarchy of needs where you never realized, through your privileged material conditions, there was an even lower base on the pyramid of your needs that you had been always standing on and which could be pulled out from under you.

This is the reason for the overwhelming and psychopathic US military response and the two decade commitment to devastate West Asia. The lesson needed to be taught that that what was make thinkable and possible must be made unthinkable and impossible again. Of course, there is no putting the genie back in the bottle, but though the emperor was revealed to have no clothes, the world needed to be made to pretend he was still fully clothed - at gunpoint.

Through this, it didn’t really matter whether Iraq and Afghanistan could be built into stable client regimes to service US hegemonic interests, but that as much devastation as possible should be done so that every time someone glances at the misery of contemporary Iraq and Afghanistan, they would link it to the US and think that “this all happened because 9/11 attacked the US.” By such aims, the bigger the bloodbath, the better. Through this, the US ruling class really did achieve their goals, despite the ultimate failure of both invasions and occupations.

The Contradiction of Life and Way of Life

Does all this mean that the much bemoaned “wasted decade” for the US is actually a rare species of camouflaged victory if you look further into it? No, that would stretch the provided thesis too far. What the US reaction to 9/11 shows that there is a contradiction between the interests of US hegemony, which benefits all Americans through the dividends of its financial imperialism and the interests of the US ruling class, which benefit only itself and its preservation, which 9/11 was experienced as a startling reminder to them.

That there exists a distinction between the two, though in normal times both are aligned and in near perfect sync, is what 9/11 exploited and the US response has shown to exist more clearly than in any other moment in American history. The outsized retaliation by the ruling class to reassert their “untouchability” through the “counterterrorism decade” was actually a net negative for both normal Americans and for the system of US hegemony, but the ruling class did not care because 9/11 was what shown them that - when forced to choose - their individual life were more important than their way of life.

To put it in analogy, this is akin to a business owner unhesitatingly sacrificing the profitability of their own business, making it far less competitive to rivals, by a fire sale of assets and diverting earnings to pay for their own emergency surgical procedure. At that point, to that individual, there are bigger things at stake when made to realize they are forced to choose, even though what normally matters is their business and it suffers through this opportunity cost. Becoming cognizant of this contradiction is the most revealing lesson of the US response to 9/11.

I’d say this sort of ouroboros-esque argumentation that MMT proponents throw out arguing that people who disagree simply “don’t get it” and need to “read MMT theory” to “enlighten” themselves on the “logical” nature of it is certainly one aspect that propels me to the skeptic position towards the pitch. I have indeed read Hudson and actually I went out of my way to search for his ex cathedra comments about it. He seems personally supportive, from what I gather, and if so, you could ring that up as a right-hand constituent of his 70%/30%. Given his anti-Stalinist asides, I’m satisfied with having some disagreements with him.

His assessment of the global subsidization of US dollar hegemony shows that no currency is an island and this is something maintained by geopolitical coercion. This is the primary contradiction that makes a Gordian knot of any US currency sovereigntist schemes like MMT and the overall condition of US dollar hegemony. As it turns out, dollar hegemony is turning out to be a two way street turned single-way only by the traffic cop’s gun, and the implementation of domestic MMT-derived monetary policies will press upon further necessity for the US state to preserve the external status quo and coerce its involuntary creditors to further subsidize the American “monetary sovereignty.” To assert otherwise, that one can print as much as they want for the domestic market without external spillover is rather laughable as it maintains idealism over the materialist outlook, as this scheme under other names has taken place before. Reaganomics at home to rescue the domestic economy was ultimately paid by those economies abroad, to disastrous consequence for the likes of Japan.

However, the technical feasibility of MMT is secondary to my rejection of the pitch. It is, in plain terms, it is a new FDR style New Deal. Appetizing for your progressive liberals and your social democrats, but something entirely objectionable as a ML. It is to put a lipstick on a pig and to, once again, claim that an ever more perfect capitalism is preferable than socialism, suppressing the latter through material financial appeasement. This is why MMT proponents range from Trots like Hudson all the way to mainstream US economists like Kelton. The etiological base of support for an economic policy, the people that proponents stand beside and their fellow travelers says rather a lot. As for Marxists, I recommend reading “Modern Monetary Theory: A Marxist Critique.”

How MMT compares contra to neoclassical slop is something I care not for, as to that end, why not go one more step and compare how superior MMT is to feudal monetary economics or the currency price controls of Diocletian in the 4th century? How non-Marxist economics incestuously iterates upon itself to spit out its newest take is immaterial and in that sense, MMT is plainly the new rendition of Keynesianism, meant to plagiarize socialist theory to plaster onto a model of a “reformed, more humane and egalitarian” capitalism. Socialism is the alternative to which MMT must be compared to and in such a comparison, it’s the two century old Proudhon argument dusted off and brought out from the museum display: that the only real problem with capitalism is the monetary dynamics.

One thing I will concede is that I have no doubt that if exigent pressures, similar to that during the post-Depression era, were to resurface, this MMT would absolutely be very likely enacted as a concession to curb the winds of support for socialism. It would follow in those footsteps of FDR just as the New Deal followed that of Wilson’s “every American a homeowner” concession to sabotage the SPA of Eugene Debs.

You don’t have to look too far. It’s exactly what proponents of that “wunderwaffe economic miracle drug” MMT, unknowingly or otherwise, is advocating whenever it’s brought up here.

As I’ve seen it articulated, the problem with MMT is precisely that it’s the modern equivalent of 19th century takes like “This is how you can make the British Empire work to help you!”. It’s the contemporary “FDR New Deal” faustian bargain meant to co-opt the Western left and even the PatSoc chauvinists towards pursuing not any economic alternatives like socialism but an ever more perfect capitalism. There was a struggle session a while back when Roderic Day dunked on the Deprogram co-host JT for a pro-MMT video, which got the latter’s subscribers very upset. I’d actually recommend that JT video for a model representation of how MMT sells itself to the Western left. It’s “rational” and “logical.” All upswing and couched in enough Keynesian economic jargon that the only comprehensible issue with it to the general viewer seems to be just that “the greedy Western political leadership simply don’t want to share the pie,” thus blocking its enactment.

What goes unsaid is that the entire substructure which MMT rests upon is that of American dollar hegemony. The policies of MMT can only function in a jurisdiction where the imposition of such autarkic currency sovereignty can effectively ignore counter-threats of credit ratings downgrade, sanctions, divestment, IMF and World Bank condemnation and all consequential fallout with impunity. The only jurisdiction capable of that, perhaps even in the entire West, is the US alone, through the half century of work it’s done in solidifying its financial hegemony.

When non-imperial core (or wannabe imperial core) countries try to enact it, like Greece under Varoufakis era of the early 2010s, it was condemned by the ECB and the rest of the EU Troika. Greece succumbed to those political pressures, reversed its tracks and instead embarked on typical IMF-proscribed austerity SAPs. The standard of living has subsequently never recovered with current GDP per capita only approaching early 2000s levels.

As such, not only is MMT agnostic of its own basis on the bedrocks of American financial imperialism but it further advocates for the preservation of the current status quo of dollar hegemony through its proposal to trickle down some dividends of that system to the (exclusively American) working class. Therefore, its aim seems to be reeling in those of the tendency in the Western left that drifts towards the “socialism is the best way for gains to be distributed for me personally” in-it-for-myself sentiment rather than those of the anti-imperialist or socio-political bend of Western leftists.

Here’s a translation of the actual statute, which I would rather sift through than read the Western coverage take on this:

Decision of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress on the Implementation of a Gradual Delay in the Statutory Retirement Age

(Adopted on September 13, 2024, at the 11th Meeting of the 14th Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress)

In order to thoroughly implement the Central Committee’s decision on the gradual delay of the statutory retirement age, adapt to the new demographic situation in China, and make full use of human resources, the 11th Meeting of the 14th Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress decides as follows:

Gradual Adjustment of Retirement Age:

Men and Women: The statutory retirement age for male employees will be gradually extended from the current 60 years to 63 years over a period of 15 years. For female employees, the retirement age will be extended from the current 50 and 55 years to 55 and 58 years, respectively, over the same period.

Principles for Implementation: The gradual delay in the statutory retirement age will adhere to principles of incremental adjustment, flexible implementation, differentiated progress, and overall coordination.

Government Responsibilities: Local governments at all levels should actively respond to aging demographics, encourage and support employment and entrepreneurship, safeguard workers’ rights, and coordinate efforts related to pension and childcare services.

Approval of Detailed Measures:

The “Measures for the Gradual Delay of the Statutory Retirement Age” issued by the State Council are hereby approved. The State Council may supplement and refine these measures as needed.

Effective Date and Previous Regulations:

This decision will come into effect on January 1, 2025. The provisions regarding retirement age in the “Interim Measures on the Placement of Elderly, Disabled, and Sick Cadres” and the “Interim Measures on the Retirement and Resignation of Workers” approved by the 5th National People’s Congress Standing Committee at its 2nd meeting will no longer apply.

Measures for the Gradual Delay of the Statutory Retirement Age

Guided by Xi Jinping’s Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, and in deep implementation of the spirit of the 20th National Congress and the 2nd and 3rd Plenaries of the 20th Central Committee, and considering factors such as life expectancy, health levels, population structure, educational attainment, and labor supply, the following measures are enacted for the gradual delay of the statutory retirement age:

Article 1: Starting January 1, 2025:

For male employees and female employees whose statutory retirement age is 55 years, the retirement age will be gradually extended by one month every four months until it reaches 63 years and 58 years, respectively.

For female employees whose statutory retirement age is 50 years, the retirement age will be gradually extended by one month every two months until it reaches 55 years. National regulations will take precedence where applicable.

Article 2:

Starting January 1, 2030, the minimum contribution period for receiving basic pensions will be gradually increased from 15 years to 20 years, with an annual increment of six months. Employees reaching the statutory retirement age but not meeting the minimum contribution period may extend their contributions or make a lump-sum payment to meet the minimum requirement and receive monthly pensions.

Article 3:

Employees meeting the minimum contribution period may voluntarily choose flexible early retirement, up to three years before the statutory retirement age, provided that the retirement age is not lower than the original statutory age of 50 or 55 for women and 60 for men. Employees reaching the statutory retirement age may also choose flexible delayed retirement, up to three years, with mutual agreement from their employer. The implementation must respect employees’ wishes and cannot involve compulsory or disguised compulsory retirement.

Article 4:

The country will improve the pension insurance incentive mechanism, encouraging longer, higher, and later contributions for higher benefits. The calculation of basic pensions will be linked to individual contribution years and actual contributions, and personal account pensions will be determined based on retirement age and account balance.

Article 5:

The country will implement a priority employment strategy, promoting high-quality and full employment. The employment public service system will be improved, and lifelong vocational training will be enhanced. Support for youth employment and entrepreneurship will be provided, and job development for older workers and assistance for disadvantaged individuals will be strengthened. Measures against age discrimination in employment will be enhanced, and incentives for employers to hire older workers will be introduced.

Article 6:

Employers hiring workers beyond the statutory retirement age must ensure that workers receive fair wages, rest, labor safety and hygiene, and work injury protection. The rights of flexible employment and new employment form workers will be protected, and paid annual leave systems will be improved.

Article 7:

For individuals receiving unemployment benefits with less than one year until statutory retirement age, the duration of benefits will be extended to the statutory retirement age. During the period of gradual delay, the unemployment insurance fund will pay pension insurance contributions for these individuals as required.

Article 8:

The country will standardize and improve policies on early retirement for special occupations. Workers engaged in underground, high-altitude, high-temperature, or especially strenuous physical labor, as well as those working in high-altitude areas, may apply for early retirement if they meet the conditions.

Article 9:

The country will establish a coordinated pension service system combining home, community, and institutional care, and develop an inclusive childcare service system.

Obviously, the 60-55 retirement age has been one of the policies the goons at places like The Economist have long crocodile teared China on and that tantrum had been greatly memed on by leftists. Most 20th century socialist states maintained a retirement age around 55-60. This is a fairly sizeable clawback of a major worker’s concession, there’s no really denying it. The age increases to numbers like 63 and 58 for men and women respectively seem to be anticipating a further second increase to 65 and 60, whereupon the statutory age for white and blue collar working women might be even equalized at that stage (i.e. 55 to 60 for the latter). That is the game played in the West, where they seem to be gradually working their way to establishing the full pension retirement age at 70 with current “stretch-goal” numbers like 67 (US, Germany), 68 (UK).

The immediate one-two punch is the basic pension contribution period increase from 15 to 20 years (5 years) when retirement age increased only 3 years. Beyond the policy measures themselves, I would say that the promulgation of this statute indicates that the CPC believes that the demographic issue, and specifically, the decline in the overall working age population are real and rather serious if they would adjust the retirement age like this, a policy that affects the entire population and thus will have inevitable knock-on effects.

Of course, it’s arguable that this would merely be a bandage solution to artificially boost the working population numbers rather than addressing the root of the problem. If the CPC weren’t currently undergoing through the planned demolition of the real estate sector bubble, I would be seriously concerned at a lack of willingness in addressing, or even identifying, the base causes of the contemporary Chinese demographic issue.

Now this is character development.

I wanted to make a joke about that, but in seriousness, I would guess that the term “Long March” in contemporary Chinese culture, through the legendary status of that heroic campaign, has become rhetorically synonymous with a personal journey of perseverance and struggle basically akin to how Western cultures use the term “odyssey” from “The Odyssey.” It’s (justifiably) become one of those culturally enmeshed figurative terms, like how TERF island likes to append Dunkirk to the end of everything: “financial Dunkirk, political Dunkirk, etc.”

The title likely is an allusion to that or maybe laconically pointing out just that the protagonist absolutely gets their daily steps in because they’ve meandered all around Tang China.

Since this is being asked on Hexbear and not r/manga, I’d recommend “Sensou wa Onna no Kao wo Shiteinai,” the manga adaptation of Alexievich’s “The Unwomanly Face of War.” That book is a collection of interviews with female soldiers of the Red Army that fought in the Eastern Front of WWII. As with all things USSR that see the light of day in the English speaking world, the author is an anti-communist, which is why she won the Nobel Prize for Literature for this book. However, the work is still worth reading because the interviewees are all Soviet war heroes and their deeply personal stories are the focus. Alexievich’s “capital T Truth” fetishist shtick means that she doesn’t often editorialize or interject, for example, every time Stalin is mentioned with “By the way, dear reader, remember that he ate all the grain” like Western accounts of socialist history do (though there are a billion footnotes crammed in the book version that “clarify” the interviewees’ narratives with the anticommunist correct-think “fact checks”). The illustrations really bring to life the stories of the interviewees in a vivid way and so it’s worth checking out.

Some great historical fiction include “A Bride’s Story,” set in 19th century Central and West Asia, with a great cultural anthropology-lite style narrative, and “Song of the Long March,” which is set in Tang China and has a great portrayal of the deeply interwoven relationships between Han Chinese and Uyghurs in that historical period. I actually came across that work before all the Western atrocity propaganda started clogging the airwaves in the late 2010s and I’m personal grateful to it for pre-emptively being my first impression to the Uyghur Chinese people rather than having some shoddy copycat Holodomor 2.0 plagiarized slop become the introduction to that culture.

As a purely personal aside favorite, I’d also recommend “Fire Punch.” It has a lot of the typical anime genre nonsense and really, the only reason I’d recommend it is that it has one of the best portrayals of an LGBT character in manga and anime. I was deeply struck by it personally and I’ve also seen heteronormative responses to the manga remark that the character humanized “LGBT individuals” as something beyond a “concept” for them.

If this doesn’t end up as a typical memorandum nothing burger, this could potentially lead to levels of basedness in gaming unseen since Disco Elysium. There’s already collaboration between the two industries, Atomic Heart apparently only secured funding through principally an investment from Tencent according to its devs.

China’s biggest cultural export issue is the (understandable) restrictions against political and ideological products, especially in gaming where most historical settings then are only wuxia or classical literature-derived like ROTK games or Black Myth Wukong. This is understandable given the absolutely justifable concerns of loose restrictions causing historical nihilism and under the current conditions of siege socialism, treats like video game are frankly irrelevant in that context of the preservation of AES. Additionally, any “red” cultural product released for an international audience would be immediately cast as “communist propaganda” by the West, who are still desperately trying to plagiarize their old Cold War playbook and find a way to convince Global South capitalist ruling classes that China is “out to get them” just like the USSR “was.” Incidentally, I saw a transcript of a Chinese MOFA press conference from a couple days ago where Reuters tried to entrap the spokesperson into saying that the recent wildly financially successful Wukong game was “supported by the government” so that likely they could immediately put out a press release framing the game as a “government-sponsored cultural invasion” like they’ve done with the Confucious Institutes. Instead, the spokesperson deftly deflected with “haven’t heard of it but sounds neat.”

Russia’s biggest cultural export issue is that they have plenty of developers with leftist leanings, like the Atomic Heart team, but the current neoliberal governance in Russia is nervous of overly promoting Soviet and Communist nostalgia and the current Western cancellation frenzy on Russian works means that there is no significant infrastructure and financial support to promote and protect those leftist devs. Atomic Heart developer Mundfish had to relocate to Cyprus and if you read their interviews, they don’t mention “Russia” even once. Isolated devs in the worst case end up as ZA/UM did.

I might be now completely on hopium, but if this can amount to genuine collaboration, both sides could have their cake and eat it too: we could finally get a proper game about Stalingrad without the “Enemy at the Gates” million man rush propaganda and a grand strategy game where the devs don’t nerf Communism because it’s too efficient (Victoria 3). Chinese devs could excuse the presence of socialist political themes on the Russian side and the Russians could vice versa blame shift to prevent Western media from effectively pinning it as “Chinese red propaganda” or “funding the Russian invasion.”

Or this could be just a pretext to pumping out endless remakes of Tetris.

I would say that some part of the Russian experience comes from the Soviet campaign in the aid of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. You captured the major Afghan ring road and more or less all the major cities, but then what? The reactionary mujahideen simply retreated to the countryside in the same way the Taliban did following the later American invasion. Funded by American weapons in the same way that NATO now funds Ukraine, the entire strategic paradigm shifts towards an endless defensive slog against counter-insurgency. You can’t abandon your own established holdings, the major cities and its peoples, to consolidate properly for both PR/morale and humanitarian reasons and so the conflict is a long bleed. Once an equilibrium is established, you cannot strike out against the mujahideen-occupied countryside without drawing resources used to defend your established urban holdings. The Soviet and US Afghan Wars are examples of how precisely a long war should not be conducted.

The only long war in contemporary history which brutal attrition was the intention is a war that most ML don’t study because it’s a miserable inter-fraternal conflict between socialist states, the Sino-Vietnamese War.

The primary literature I’ll reference is from a Chinese gusano professor, Xiaoming Zhang, who worked for the US Air War College (and ironically was later recently targetted by the FBI China Initiative and subsequently lost his job): “Zhang, X. 2015. Deng Xiaoping’s Long War: The Conflict between China and Vietnam, 1979-1991. University of North Carolina Press.” As it was sponsored by the literal US DoD (the first book I’ve ever read where there’s a disclaimer that says: “The views expressed in this book are mine and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Department of the Air Force, the U.S. Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.”), it is obviously ideologically reactionary but because it is meant to provide for the US military an account of PLA strategic planning and thus largely focuses on military analysis, that part is therefore worth reading.

The Sino-Vietnamese War is actually the war in all with the most parallels to the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. Deng’s intentions for the war with Vietnam was principally “attitude adjustment.” Vietnam had sided with the USSR in the Sino-Soviet Split and this was seen as a betrayal of China’s support in the Vietnam War. It started with an initial invasion that was then, by Vietnamese argumentation, repelled. This is what NATOpedia classifies as the “official” Sino-Vietnamese War and in the Vietnamese narrative, it repelled an invader that was planning to sweep their their way through Hanoi all the way down to the Mekong Delta. But then the conflict kept going on.

As the author writes:

The Vietnamese leadership never seemed to comprehend the PRC’s strategy and war objectives, persistently maintaining that the 1979 invasion simply constituted a prelude to Beijing’s long-term scheme of infringing on Vietnamese sovereignty and independence. After China announced its withdrawal on 5 March, Hanoi called for a nationwide general mobilization for the war and began constructing defensive positions in and around Hanoi. By the end of May, the PLA had reverted to its normal alert status. Vietnam, however, remained on guard, stationing a large number of PAVN troops (allegedly 300,000) along border with China at a time when the economy was “in a worse state than at any time since 1975.”

As a result, Hanoi’s attempts to fight simultaneously in Cambodia and on its northern border took a growing national economic and social toll, subsuming Hanoi’s effort to modernize its economy and, more important, undermining its geopolitical ambitions. According to Fred Charles Iklé, “Governments tend to lose sight of the ending of wars and the nation’s interests that lie beyond it,” and many are “blind in failing to perceive that it is the outcome of the war, not the outcome of the campaigns within it” that determines how well their policies serve the nation’s interests. The Vietnamese leadership clearly failed to grasp the gravity of the situation and continued depending on the Soviet Union until its collapse in 1991. If the Vietnamese should draw any lessons from the 1979 war with China, one is, as one Vietnamese general later remarked, “We must learn how to live with our big neighbor.

By the conclusion of the border war in 1991-93, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, liberated from the US occupation and unified for over 20 years had still been unable to properly focus on its Doi Moi economic reforms, announced in 1986, due to the ongoing conflict:

In the end, only in 1990, after Vietnam’s withdrawal from Cambodia, did the PLA pull its forces back from the occupied Vietnamese hills. Vietnam’s national pride and domestic politics made Hanoi’s leadership unable to tolerate Chinese occupation of any Vietnamese territory, even hills in the remote border region, and it therefore responded to Chinese military pressure with a tit-for-tat strategy. After 1984, Vietnam vigorously resisted Chinese military encroachments, initiating attacks and counterattacks with huge forces even when its economy was weak. Although the fighting took place far from Vietnam’s political and industrial heartland, the conflict encumbered the country’s economy for a long period of time. For China, battlefield costs were fractional at a time of economic prosperity. In this way, China strategically outmaneuvered Vietnam. Since the Hanoi leadership played into Beijing’s hands, China’s military pressure appears to have worked.

In June 1990, during his meeting with the Chinese ambassador in Hanoi, (General Secretary of the CPV) Nguyen Van Linh claimed to have been a student of Mao’s revolutionary theory and stated his great appreciation for China’s aid during Vietnam’s struggles against the French and Americans. He then admitted that Vietnam had wronged China and was willing to correct its mistakes. With respect to Cambodia, the Vietnamese leader expressed confidence that the situation would be resolved peacefully but urged both Vietnam and China to work together to prevent the West and the UN from meddling in Cambodia in the future. The exclusion of the Khmer Rouge from a future Cambodian government, Nguyen Van Linh admitted, was impractical.

The author also makes an allegation of an “agreement” between the two Communist Parties, which is rather interesting in light of the much hyped public Vietnamese antagonism towards China by the West:

A secret deal may have been made regarding how to address the unpleasant thirteen years so that the interlude would not imperil future Sino-Vietnamese relations. The two sides allegedly reached a tacit agreement that prohibited the media from publishing stories and scholars from conducting studies about the border conflict in hopes that the recent hostility would then fade from memory on both sides of the border. Both countries could then concentrate on rejuvenating their relationship. Once again, Vietnam looked to China for direction and guidance, and the relationship was described officially as “good neighbors, good friends, good comrades, good partners” (haolinju, haopengyou, haotongzhi, haohuoban).

“Everyman his own historian journalist”

The issue with studying the collapse of the USSR is that everyone has an opinion on it and very few are principled Marxist-Leninist assessments, as K&K describe in the first chapter.

I’d recommend Carlos Martinez’s Why Doesn’t the Soviet Union Exist Anymore? for a brief but updated synthesis of K&K’s work once you’re finished, it helps in hammering in the main points.

Everything that has been said against suicide goes round and round in the same circle of ideas. People cite against it the decrees of Providence, but the existence of suicide is itself an open protest against her indecipherable decrees. They talk to us of our duties to this society without explaining or implementing our own claims on society, and finally they exalt the thousand times greater merit of overcoming pain rather than succumbing to it, a merit as sad as the prospects it opens up. In short, they make of suicide an act of cowardice, a crime against the law, [society] and honour.

“Why is it that in spite of so many anathemas people kill themselves? Because the blood of men in despair does not run through their veins in the same way as that of the cold beings who take the time to coin all those fruitless phrases. Man seems to be a mystery to man; he can only be blamed, he is not known. When we see how light-mindedly the institutions under whose domination Europe lives dispose of the blood and life of the nations, how civilised justice surrounds itself lavishly with prisons, chastisements and instruments of death so as to sanction its insecure decisions; when we see the numerical immensity of the classes which on all sides are left in misery, and the social pariahs who are battered by brutal contempt, meant to be preventive, perhaps to save the trouble of lifting them out of their squalor; when we see all this, we fail to understand what entitles us to command the individual to respect in himself an existence which our customs, our prejudices, our laws and our morals generally trample underfoot.

“It was thought that it would be possible to prevent suicide by degrading punishments and by branding the memory of the culprit with infamy. What can one say of the unworthiness of such branding of people who are no longer there to plead their case? The unfortunates, by the way, are little worried by that; and if suicide accuses anybody, it accuses above all the people who are left behind, because there is not one in this multitude who deserves that anyone should stay alive for him. Have the childish and cruel means devised been victorious against the whisperings of despair? What does he who wants to flee the world care about the insults which the world promises to his corpse? He only sees in them yet another act of cowardice on the part of the living. What kind of society is it, indeed, where one finds the profoundest solitude in the midst of millions; where one can be overwhelmed by an irrepressible desire to kill oneself wthout anybody being aware of it? This society is no society, it is as Rousseau says, a desert inhabited by wild animals. In the positions which I held in the police administration suicides were part of my responsibility; I wished to learn whether among the causes motivating them there were any whose effect could be obviated. I undertook extensive work on the subject.” I found that any attempts short of a total reform of the present order of society would be in vain.

• “On Suicide” by Jacques Peuchet; collated by Karl Marx, 1845.

You’ve posed a very pertinent question. Taken to its logical conclusion, this is the dilemma that encapsulates the entire project of “Western Marxism” in general and it’s a fair question that deserves more than ridicule or dismissal.

We are long past the era of Eugene Debbs where the Western left had a sliver of actionable material power, so even beyond the question of what the Western left can do for AES states, what is the point to being a Marxist at all? In practical terms, if you consider the things you can materially accomplish in the midst of the imperial core, is there really a point to being a ML and not simply submitting yourself to the Democrats or Labour or the SPD where you can at least organize to defend those few select social progressive interests permissible in this bourgeoisie system?

When you’re powerless, fragmented, isolated and sociopolitically ostracized, what’s the point to all of this, holding all those “geopolitics understander” positions and these “principally correct” Marxist stances at all if you can’t achieve anything real with them and, to most people looking at you from the outside, based on your accomplishable praxis inside the heartlands of anticommunism, you just look like a weird but generic liberal anyways?

Is the Western leftist doomed to be that soyjak meme, standing alone in the corner of a party, with that thought bubble thinking “Heh, they don’t know that Stalin = actually good.” Does it come down to that eternal philosophical question of “If a tree falls in the forest, but no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound at all?”

Marx lived during the apogee of imperialism, the cruelty of the American slave state and a bleak era where that meager revolutionary flicker within 1848 was subverted by the bourgeoisie and where the only successful proletariat uprising, the Paris Commune, was brutally squashed with ease. And yet, he persevered in his writings, which, of course, became the bedrock of what we stand for today. His writings where he railed against the hypocrisy of the Second Opium War against China and the British tyranny over India was meaningless in his own time, this was the height of European colonial despotism, after all, and the tirades of one lone individual was to scream against the void. Was there no point to his opposition towards imperialism and his solidarity, against his own class, with the oppressed then?

For someone in that time, in the midst of all the chauvinism and racism societally designed to socialize and induce the European individual to become a cheerleader for the imperialist cause, for him to reject all those narratives and to see things clear eyed for what they are, now means everything. That was an utterly hopeless time, yet he perserved in spite of it and gave so much to the cause of socialism in retrospect. This is the same with the likes of Michael Parenti, during the nihilism of the 1990s, where socialism was subverted everywhere and even the surviving socialist states like China, Vietnam and Cuba were eyed with paranoia. People like Parenti and Losurdo could have sold out like the rest of western “Marxism,” got a cushy tenure and professorship chair at Oxbridge or the Ivys, but they continued to defend the legacies and memory of Stalin and Mao.

This is not to say that your average Hexbear user will become the next Parenti or that the sequel to Das Kapital will be penned by a News Megathread regular, but to emphasize the important point that those Marxist figures understood. They understood that the imperialist West is a culture obsessed with discourse control and narrative purity. To stand in front of its propaganda and to say “no” in its face is a powerful thing, in of itself. This is why the liberals get so upset when they encounter MLs, why there was two Red Scare campaigns, why Communist Parties in many countries are outright banned, why they’ve legislated criminal charges against those who support designated enemy nations. If it’s all meaningless, the adversaries of the genuine Western left would have never put in so much effort to counter genuine leftist voices. If it’s all pointless, they would not be so livid at seeing ML counter-argumentation and have banned communities like r/genzedong such that the Western left is ostracized to isolated places like Hexbear and Lemmygrad.

As such, yes, the Western left does not have the capacity for its own liberation, but upholding internationalist solidarity and maintaining principled Marxist-Leninist lines has meaning. It’s true that this meaning is not as materially valuable as being the one who fired the October shot on the Aurora, or striding into the Chinese countryside to manage New China’s land reform and this can be demoralizing to many who want more actionable and material gains.

Over the past century, many people on the Western left, not just ultra chauvinists or Trots or sellouts but well meaning people, have allowed themselves to suppress their own socialist beliefs in order to join liberal ranks and push for “change from within” or to achieve acceptable goals within the confines of the imperial core because the capabilities of the Western left, reduced to just providing internationalist solidarity, are such intangible things. This is understandable but one point that must be emphasized is that while the things the Western left can achieve are principally ideological rather than material, however, does not mean those things are meaningless.

Though it understandably can be demoralizing that this is the crux of what we can contribute, principled Western Marxist-Leninists who have a clear eye of how things are represent a slap in the face to the West and its self-image of whitewash and apologia, its modern narrative of LARPing moral sainthood while kicking its 500 years of imperialism under the bed, which I’ve talked about in a previous post. At this point in time, they earnestly believe they’ve gotten away with it and an ML’s principled stance, refusing to play along, threatens that. There’s a reason why Hitler personally ordered the execution of Ernst Thälmann, despite the latter having been imprisoned for eleven years, during the collapse of the fascist reich in 1944 while those like SPD collaborationists were left unscathed. Though western Marxism has almost always been utterly impotent, they nonetheless have a genuine fear of what we stand for.

Above all, our principled stance, though it might seem “immaterial” and feckless, is the continuation of the memory of those comrades of the past, those who built the planks in the house of western Marxism, ramshackle shack though it may be. Those like Thälmann were never able to achieve anything material either, does that mean he should have disbanded the KPD, joining the SPD in hopes of “changing things from within” or that his existence and martyrdom was meaningless? If that was true, then fascist written popular media has a better sense of duty to their predecessors than us western Marxists do.

Ultimately, I think there’s a dialectical dialogue in Disco Elysium, of all things, that encapsulates all of the understandable nihilism inherent to western Marxism quite poignantly.

Rhetoric: The question you mean to ask is both very complicated and incredibly simple…

Endurance: Take a deep breath. Best to go one piece at a time.

You: If communism keeps failing every time we try it…

Steban: (he waits patiently for you to finish)

You: …And the rest of the world keep killing us for our beliefs…

Steban: Yes?

Volition: Say it.

You: …What’s the point?

Steban: (he considers your words for a minute)

Composure: You’re witnessing his ironic armour melt before you. This is his true self you’re seeing now.

Empathy: He’s thinking about someone…

You: Wait, who is he thinking about?

Empathy: Hard to say. Someone dear to him.

Visual Calculus: Track his gaze. He’s looking out past the broken wall, toward the opposite side of the Bay…

You: Toward the skyscrapers of La Delta.

Visual Calculus: They rise like electric obelisks in the night.

Steban: The theorists Puncher and Wattmann — not infra-materialists, but theorists nonetheless — say that communism is a secular version of Perikarnassian theology, that it replaces faith in the divine with faith in humanity’s future… I have to say, I’ve never entirely understood what they mean, but I think maybe the answer is in there, somewhere.

You: Wait, you’re saying communism is some kind of religion?

Steban: Only in this very specific sense. Communism doesn’t dangle any promises of eternal bliss or reward. The only promise it offers is that the future can be better than the past, if we’re willing to work and fight and die for it.

You: But what if humanity keeps letting us down?

Steban: Nobody said fulfilling the proletariat’s historic role would be easy. (he smiles a tight smile) It demands great faith with no promise of tangible reward. But that doesn’t mean we can simply give up.

You: Even when they ignore us?

Steban: Even then.

Ulixes: Mazov says it’s the arrogance of capital that will be its ultimate undoing. It does not believe it can fail, which is why it must fail.

Volition: So young. So unbearably young…

Half Light: Why do you see the two of them with their backs against a bullet-pocked wall, all of a sudden?

Inland Empire: Their faces, blurred yet frozen as though in ambrotype. You were never that young, were you?

Steban: I guess you could say we believe it because it’s impossible. (he looks at the scattered matchboxes on the ground) It’s our way of saying we refuse to accept that the world has to remain… like this…

Spoilers for the source novel plotline here.

It’s a fictionalized account which seems to be based on Beevor and Alexievich, so definitely junk food.

Here’s an overview of the politics behind Iranian foreign policy from the RTSG substack that they gave in their article on the 2022 protests.

To properly understand the events of late 2022, it is vital to analyze the role of different factions in Iran and their power struggles. Although many analysts in the West portray the political class of the Islamic Republic as a completely unified bloc under the control of a supreme dictator, this is far from the truth. Since the very early days of the Islamic Revolution, many factions have existed in the popular front bloc that formed the Islamic Republic. Although many of these factions, such as non-Islamic Liberal Democrats and Communists, were purged in the 1980s, strong disagreements persisted amongst the clerics and revolutionaries that ultimately consolidated their dominance in the revolutionary period

The issue that most divided this new political class was foreign policy. As opposed to the “hardline” or “principlist” faction that saw sovereignty and opposition to Israel and American imperialism as one of the primary aims of the revolution, a faction also existed that sought to work with the West, and although they saw no harm in ousting the Shah, they still believed that Iran should follow a Liberal economic and political path, albeit under a more Islamic framework. This faction came to be primarily led by Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and would even engage in negotiations with the US government in the 1980s known as the Iran-Contra Affair

After the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, Hashemi Rafsanjani, or Rafsanjani, as he now preferred to be called, became the first President of Iran under the new post-Khomeini constitution. He and his party, the Executives of Construction, were known as the ‘Moderate’ faction and they began a process of liberalization in the economic and socio-cultural spheres. Rafsanjani’s two terms as President were then followed up by the birth of the closely aligned ‘Reformist’ faction led by President Mohammad Khatami. Khatami’s government pushed a policy of increasing liberalization and attempted a rapprochement with the USA under the framework of a “Dialogue of Civilisations”. In his time, Iran saw his supporters conduct the first attempt at major political change conducted through street protests during the 18 Tir movement

Khatami’s Presidency was then followed up by Ahmadinejad, whose Presidency saw a patchwork of policies and political alignments as well as the largest protest movement in the Islamic Republic’s history as millions protested the outcome of the 2009 Presidential elections under the leadership of the Reformist candidate, former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi. In 2013, the Reformist-Moderate movement won back power as Hassan Rouhani won the presidential elections with the promise to negotiate with the USA and end Iran’s sanctions

To alleviate these sanctions, in 2013, Hassan Rouhani ran for the presidency, with an unprecedented level of advertisement and media excitement around his campaign, to negotiate with the West and get sanctions lifted. Rouhani won and pushed negotiations with the USA into overdrive, resulting in the 2015 ‘Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action’ or JCPoA, according to which Iran would limit its nuclear program and in return would have certain sanctions lifted. This was supposed to be the first step in a series of negotiations that would then target Iran’s military capabilities and regional network of alliances, finally resulting in the Islamic Republic becoming a Western-aligned nation, aiming to follow the developmental model of nations such as Japan and Germany. One such example was that in 2016, merely one day after US President Barack Obama’s executive order was signed lifting Iran nuclear sanctions as part of the JCPOA, Obama signed new sanctions targeting Iran’s missile/defense programs. Not long after, Reformists such as Rafsanjani hinted at being willing to negotiate away Iran’s missile program, by issuing statements such as “the world of tomorrow is a world of dialogue, not missiles”, which sparked political feuding between Reformists and Principlists

In 2018, however, everything changed when US President Donald Trump pulled out of the JCPOA, started his “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign, and Iran’s economy fell into an unprecedented recession. The Reformists, who continued to be the ruling party at the time under Rouhani, did not aid the economic situation. In addition to passing hyper-neoliberal economic policies, they had delayed Iranian trade deals with China that would have alleviated and offset pressures caused by Western sanctions, all in the hopes of returning to an idealistic JCPOA with the West. For instance, Xi Jinping proposed Iranian cooperation/entry into China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as early as 2015 and 2016; Rouhani wouldn’t take him up on his offer until years later in 2021 when Iran finally joined BRI, after mounting pressure from Khamenei and the economic situation. Adding to this, Trump also assassinated Iran’s highest-ranking military commander, General Qasem Soleimani, in early 2020, and destroyed all hopes for the Reformist project within Iran

Following the failure of the JCPOA and the terrible economic decline of Iran, caused by sanctions and the hyper-neoliberal policies of the Rouhani government, the Reformist movement lost all the wind in its sails. By the time of the 2019 parliamentary and 2021 presidential elections, they had no popular candidates who could run in the elections as the grand promises of the last two administrations had proven fruitless. As a result, a Principlist parliament was formed in 2020, and “hardliner” Seyyed Ebrahim Raisi won the 2021 presidential elections. For the first time in decades, the Iranian government seemed unified from top to bottom. However, before things could settle and Raisi could begin to implement his policies, the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement suspiciously sprung up, claiming to not only challenge Raisi but also to want an end to the Islamic Republic as a whole.

[…] This new foreign policy has thus far turned Iran into an important node in the new confrontation between Western powers and the non-Western world, with Iran acting as the third power in a triad that has formed with the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China. The derailing of this new foreign policy and the damages it would incur for Iran would weaken the new emerging global system and damage the non-Western world in its confrontation with American unipolarity. This would leave allies such as Russia in a more fragile state and could destroy the new-found confidence of states such as Saudi Arabia in their pursuit of less Western-orientated policies.

In short, it seems like the JCPOA was the darling project of the Iranian “Reformist” faction, the characterization of whom by RTSG immediately brings to mind a Westanbetung capitulationist like Gorbachev. It is rather interesting to read about the Rouhani government’s self-sabotaging liberal idealism given that Western coverage through the entirety of the contemporary Iranian period has been just static portrayals of an “unchanging hardliner leadership.”

No need to apologize between comrades. I get your point: the Zimbabwean land reform is flawed, in various aspects, and the economic conditions of the country are not exactly great despite having gone through these reforms. Your first response construed Zimbabwe’s land reforms to its current economic woes, which is a perspective I took issue with, as it puts the cart before the horse. It is misleading and does not invalidate the choice to undergo through its reforms as there is no cause to believe land reform alone guarantees economic prosperity or that the failings of Zimbabwe’s reforms are solely due to its own mishandling rather than the reprisals it received from global imperialism. Even the comprehensive socialist land reforms of Czechoslovakia led to an economic slump that was used as a pretext for the infamous reactionary uprising. This does not mean that Czechoslovak land reforms caused its later economic underperformance.

The important thing I’ve been emphasizing is the material conditions underpinning Zimbabwe’s land reforms. Zimbabwe is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the Maoist guerilla forces of the fascist Rhodesian occupation era were subsumed, akin to the acquiescing of the communists to the ANC in the South African experience, under what eventually became the Mugabe government. Furthermore, the goal of land reform in a non-socialist context is principally the redistribution of market power. This is the difference from socialist landform which is aimed at the eradiction of rentier and landlord classes, the equal distribution of wealth and dissolution of landed class privileges to create the material conditions for establishing collective and public land ownership. In terms of Zimbabwe, the intent was to break the hold of the settler colonial commercial landowners and to atomize 1 large farm into 50 smaller farms. The intent was not any of those that propel a socialist reform.

To expect a non-socialist state to conduct a more socialist manner of land reform is unrealistic. Post colonial governments across the Global South which have had their socialist revolutions suppressed are led by national bourgeoisie. The outcomes of socialist land reform is against their class interests.

The question then turns to whether market-based land reform like Zimbabwe is worth pursuing nonetheless. Zimbabwe’s example proves such a program form is possible so is the answer that it should be rejected and that the populace must wait for a socialist revolution in order to do a much more genuine and comprehensive land reform like those of the USSR, China and Cuba? This is the question that pertains most immediately to countries like South Africa but also in the miraculous but inevitable event of a liberated Palestine as Al_Sham had inquired about. My answer is to this is no and that Zimbabwe’s example does still serve as a model. Of course it goes without saying that it should obviously not be followed to the letter as the internal flaw of the Zimbabawe example is that this was a popular movement under the Jambanja that co-opted governmental inertia and forced the governent to go along with it but such is the nature of non-socialist land reforms where the national bourgeoisie will always be unwilling to accept the cost-benefit analysis of such a program, a dilemma that Zimbabwe’s case highlights very clearly.

The First Congress of the Communist International once famously said: “We say: In the colonial and semi-colonial countries the first phase of the revolutionary movement must inevitably be a national-democratic movement.” This must apply to the pursuit of land reform as well if a non-socialist state of the Global South embarks on the program. It is important and momentous enough for the working classes that even an imperfect rendition can be critically supported, particularly in the circumstances of decolonizing states like Zimbabwe that must contend with resolving settler colonial residual control which even market-based land reforms can ameliorate.

This is not a great argument. Land reform is a necessary step towards socioeconomic sovereignty but it does not guarantee economic prosperity. This is akin to blaming the hardships of Cuba’s heroic revolutionary struggle to its own decision of committing to socialist land reform rather than the economic blockade by American imperialism in response to its national liberation. Ian Scoones et al.'s work, in fact, explicitly challenges the “myth” that “Zimbabwean land reform has been a total failure.”

I don’t disagree that such a line of argumentation is definitely the predominant narrative regarding Zimbabwe nor with the depiction of its current socioeconomic conditions, but such an assessment needs to contend with the question of the chicken and the egg.

It’s a question of whether Zimbabwe’s contemporary problems (as much as it can be attributed to its land reforms) dialectically come principally from its non-socialist and rather haphazard land reform process and the Mugabe government’s mishandling or whether there is a predominant issue of the Western sanctions, foreign and IMF/World Bank divestment and economic ostracization that Zimbabwe faced following its decision to uphold the Jambanja period ‘land invasions’ which are the primary contradiction in determining its contemporary struggles.

The historical and contemporary severe poverty of Haiti is also not “a myth,” but the source of its material conditions principally stemmed from the counter-revolutionary reaction from Europe who sought to punish and make an example of the first independent black state in the New World and the only successful enslaved uprising in recorded history. The Haitian state was not recognized by any 19th century world power and France, following the Bourbon Restoration, imposed a huge indemnity that made destitute any possibility of Haitian prosperity.

This is what happened to Zimbabwe, which was punished just as Haiti was two centuries ago, for demonstrating a model towards sovereignty by an independent black state:

As in any land reform program, newly settled farmers needed timely inputs, such as seeds, fertilizer, tools, irrigation, mechanization, and financing to get established. Unfortunately, the state’s ability to provide that support was hampered from the start after the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act was enacted in the United States. The law instructed U.S. members of international financial institutions to vote against “any loan, credit, or guarantee to the government of Zimbabwe.” Since the United States wields decisive influence in those organizations, the effect was to severely curtail Zimbabwe’s access to credit and foreign exchange, without which no modern economy can effectively function. https://monthlyreview.org/2023/06/01/the-dynamics-of-rural-capitalist-accumulation-in-post-land-reform-zimbabwe/

The concluding tangent about China is wildly off the mark, however. China’s own socialist land reform process was the largest redistribution of wealth in human history and the foundation of China’s success stems from its near total eradication of imperialist influence under Mao, which was imperative to the success of Deng’s Reform and Opening Up. As Zhou Enlai famously articulated:

The imperialists still want to retain some privileges in China in the hope of sneaking back in. A few countries intend to negotiate with us about establishing relations, but we prefer to wait for a time. The remaining imperialist influence in China must be eradicated first, or the imperialists will have room to continue their activities. Although their military forces have been driven out, the economic power they have built up over the past century is still strong, and their cultural influence in particular is deep-rooted. All this will undermine our independence. We should therefore clean up the house before entertaining guests, that is, before establishing relations with them.

As such, the outcome of Zimbabwe’s national process does not invalidate the example it demonstrated, as Ian Scoones et al. note, which was that it “highlighted one potential path for countries unable or unwilling to deal with the unequal inheritance of apartheid or colonialism” in the form of settler expropriation and land reform. There is no world where you can have your cake and eat it too in the context of land reform: no settler is going to shake your hand and give you a smile when you kick them off your land and write a glowing letter back to the European metropole about you.

Thus, by nature of the Western reaction, this could not be a clean or thorough process and it did not end in economic success, but such is precisely the “fait accompli” which committing the ultimate form of property re-appropriation from legacy settler colonialism is made to perform and designed to suffer under in the contemporary global conditions of Western hegemony.