(cw: NATOpedia) Lyudmila Pavlichenko

China became the first nation to propose and pledge a No First Use policy when it first gained nuclear capabilities in 1964, stating “not to be the first to use nuclear weapons at any time or under any circumstances.” During the Cold War, China decided to keep the size of its nuclear arsenal small, rather than compete in an international arms race with the United States and the Soviet Union. China has repeatedly reaffirmed its no-first-use policy in recent years, doing so in 2005, 2008, 2009 and again in 2011. China has also consistently called on the United States to adopt a no-first-use policy, to reach an NFU agreement bilaterally with China, and to conclude an NFU agreement among the five nuclear weapon states. The United States has repeatedly refused these calls.

glad you enjoyed it— you may have already seen these but if you want more, here’s some other highlights

• https://redsails.org/why-marxism/
• https://redsails.org/concessions/
• https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/

the US security state funded a bunch of anarchists in the 1960s because they aren’t a threat to state power and were an effective way to split the left against MLs

Anyway, the basic point is that socialist revolution is neither easy (as the Trotskyists and ultraleftists would have it) nor impossible (as the liberals and conservatives would have it), but hard. It will require dedication and sacrifice and it won’t be won in a day. Tankies are those people who think the millions of communists who fought and died for socialism in the twentieth century weren’t evil, dupes, or wasting their time, but people to whom we owe a great deal and who can still teach us a lot.

Or, to put it another way: socialism has powerful enemies. Those enemies don’t care how you feel about Marx or Makhno or Deleuze or communism in the abstract, they care about your feelings towards FARC, the Naxals, Cuba, DPRK, etc. They care about your position with respect to states and contenders-for-statehood, and how likely you are to try and emulate them. They are not worried about the molecular and the rhizomatic because they know that those things can be brought back into line by the application of force. It’s their monopoly on force that they are primarily concerned to protect. When you desert real socialism in favor of ideal socialism, the kind that never took up arms against anybody, you’re doing them a favor.

from https://redsails.org/tankies/

petit bourgeois control local police and they believe feeding the homeless will undercut their profits from restaurants and grocery stores

EDIT: I guess you also have to bring in the Reserve Army of Labor aspect of this and maintaining destitution as a warning to those who won’t accept prevailing wages

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

here’s a couple great interviews of Stalin to start with, one with Emil Ludwig and one with H.G. Wells

https://redsails.org/stalin-and-ludwig/

https://redsails.org/stalin-and-wells/

Tankies [1] don’t usually believe that Stalin or Mao “did nothing wrong”, although many do use that phrase for effect (this is the internet, remember). We believe that Stalin and Mao were committed socialists who, despite their mistakes, did much more for humanity than most of the bourgeois politicians who are typically put forward as role models (Washington? Jefferson? JFK? Jimmy Carter?), and that they haven’t been judged according to the same standard as those bourgeois politicians. People call this “whataboutism” [2], but the claim “Stalin was a monster” is implicitly a comparative claim meaning “Stalin was qualitatively different from and worse than e.g. Churchill,” and I think the opposite is the case. If people are going to make veiled comparisons, us tankies have the right to answer with open ones.

To defend someone from an unfair attack you don’t have to deify them, you just have to notice that they’re being unfairly attacked. This is unquestionably the case for Stalin and Mao, who have been unjustly demonized more than any other heads of state in history. Tankies understand that there is a reason for this: the Cold War, in which the US spent countless billions of dollars trying to undermine and destroy socialism [3], specifically Marxist-Leninist states. Many western leftists think that all this money and energy had no substantial effect on their opinions, but this seems extremely naive. We all grew up in ideological/media environments shaped profoundly by the Cold War, which is why Cold War anticommunist ideas about the Soviets being monsters are so pervasive a dogma (in the West).

The reason we “defend authoritarian dictators” is because we want to defend the accomplishments of really existing socialism, and other people’s false or exaggerated beliefs about those “dictators” almost always get in the way — it’s not tankies but normies [4] who commit the synecdoche of reducing all of really existing socialism to Stalin and Mao. Those accomplishments include raising standards of living, achieving unprecedented income equality, massive gains in women’s rights and the position of women vis-a-vis men, defeating the Nazis, raising life expectancy, ending illiteracy, putting an end to periodic famines, inspiring and providing material aid to decolonizing movements (e.g. Vietnam, China, South Africa, Burkina Faso, Indonesia), which scared the West into conceding civil rights and the welfare state. These were greater strides in the direction of abolishing capitalism than any other society has ever made. These are the gains that are so important to insist on, against the CIA/Trotskyist/ultraleft consensus that the Soviet Union was basically an evil empire and Stalin a deranged butcher.

There are two approaches one can take to people who say “socialism = Stalin = bad”: you can try to break the first leg of the equation or the second. Trotskyists take the first option; they’ve had the blessing of the academy, foundation and CIA money for their publishing outfits, and controlled the narrative in the West for the better part of the last century. But they haven’t managed to make a successful revolution anywhere in all that time. Recently, socialism has been gaining in popularity… and so have Marxism-Leninism and support for Stalin and Mao. Thus it’s not the case that socialism can only gain ground in the West by throwing really existing socialism and socialist leaders under the bus.

The thing is, delinking socialism from Stalin also means delinking it from the Soviet Union, disavowing everything that’s been done under the name of socialism as “Stalinist”. The “socialism” that results from this procedure is defined as grassroots, bottom-up, democratic, non-bureaucratic, nonviolent, non-hierarchical… in other words, perfect. So whenever real revolutionaries (say, for example, the Naxals in India) do things imperfectly they are cast out of “socialism” and labeled “Stalinists”. This is clearly an example of respectability politics run amok. Tankies believe that this failure of solidarity, along with the utopian ideas that the revolution can win without any kind of serious conflict or without party discipline, are more significant problems for the left than is “authoritarianism” (see Engels for more on this last point). We believe that understanding the problems faced by Stalin and Mao helps us understand problems generic to socialism, that any successful socialism will have to face sooner or later. This is much more instructive and useful than just painting nicer and nicer pictures of socialism while the world gets worse and worse.

It’s extremely unconvincing to say “Sure it was horrible last time, but next time it’ll be different”. Trotskyists and ultraleftists compensate by prettying up their picture of socialism and picking more obscure (usually short-lived) experiments to uphold as the real deal. But this just gives ammunition to those who say “Socialism doesn’t work” or “Socialism is a utopian fantasy”. And lurking behind the whole conversation is Stalin, who for the average Westerner represents the unadvisability of trying to radically change the world at all. No matter how much you insist that your thing isn’t Stalinist, the specter of Stalin is still going to affect how people think about (any form of) socialism — tankies have decided that there is no getting around the problem of addressing Stalin’s legacy. That legacy, as it stands, at least in Western public opinion (they feel differently about him in other parts of the world), is largely the product of Cold War propaganda.

And shouldn’t we expect capitalists to smear socialists, especially effective socialists? Shouldn’t we expect to hear made up horror stories about really existing socialism to try and deter us from trying to overthrow our own capitalist governments? Think of how the media treats antifa. Think of WMDs in Iraq, think of how concentrated media ownership is, think of the regularity with which the CIA gets involved in Hollywood productions, think of the entirety of dirty tricks employed by the West during the Cold War (starting with the invasion of the Soviet Union immediately after the October Revolution by nearly every Western power), and then tell me they wouldn’t lie about Stalin. Robert Conquest was IRD [5]. Gareth Jones worked for the Rockefeller Institute, the Chrysler Foundation and Standard Oil and was buddies with Heinz and Hitler. Solzhenitsyn was a virulently antisemitic fiction writer. Everything we know about the power of media and suggestion indicates that the anticommunist and anti-Stalin consensus could easily have been manufactured irrespective of the facts — couple that with an appreciation for how legitimately terrified the ruling classes of the West were by the Russian and Chinese revolutions and you have means and motive.

Anyway, the basic point is that socialist revolution is neither easy (as the Trotskyists and ultraleftists would have it) nor impossible (as the liberals and conservatives would have it), but hard. It will require dedication and sacrifice and it won’t be won in a day. Tankies are those people who think the millions of communists who fought and died for socialism in the twentieth century weren’t evil, dupes, or wasting their time, but people to whom we owe a great deal and who can still teach us a lot.

Or, to put it another way: socialism has powerful enemies. Those enemies don’t care how you feel about Marx or Makhno or Deleuze or communism in the abstract, they care about your feelings towards FARC, the Naxals, Cuba, DPRK, etc. They care about your position with respect to states and contenders-for-statehood, and how likely you are to try and emulate them. They are not worried about the molecular and the rhizomatic because they know that those things can be brought back into line by the application of force. It’s their monopoly on force that they are primarily concerned to protect. When you desert real socialism in favor of ideal socialism, the kind that never took up arms against anybody, you’re doing them a favor.

from https://redsails.org/tankies/

Education and awareness is key.

so I’m sure you’ll read these!

Mango Press: The Tian’anmen Square ‘Massacre’: The West’s Most Persuasive, Most Pervasive Lie.
Red Sails: Another View of Tiananmen

what is free speech without a platform? an aimixin rant:

You have the “right” to free speech, but you don’t have the right to an actual platform, i.e. the right for your speech to actually be heard. If the system doesn’t like what you say, they can just kick you from all platforms. You have the “right” to shout as loud as you want as long as it’s in a place no one can hear you, so you don’t actually have the right for your speech to actually mean anything.

That’s how all liberal “rights” are. They’re in practice useless, because you have the right to something in principle, but don’t have the right to actually use that right, you just have the right in some vague, ethereal, almost magical sense, disconnected from reality, and many indeed view it as magic, saying these “rights” are handed down by God almighty and not social constructions.

Because you can’t actually use these “rights” in practice, then in the real world, they only serve as justification for restricting people’s freedoms. Why does this corporate giant get to censor dissenters? Because they have the “right” to do what they want with their platform! Why do billionaires get the “right” to control hoards of wealth and other people’s labor? Because they have the “right” to do so! Why does this landlord get to tell me how I should live when I’m the one taking care of the actual apartment and living here? Because they have the “right”!

notice that the last paragraph is all private property rights, one of the highest priorities of the bourgeois state.

“Freedom of the press” is another of the principal slogans of “pure democracy”. And here, too, the workers know — and socialists everywhere have admitted it millions of times — that this freedom is a deception while the best printing presses and the biggest stocks of paper are appropriated by the capitalists and while capitalist rule over the press remains, a rule that is manifested throughout the world all the more strikingly, sharply, and cynically, the more democracy and the republican system are developed, as in America for example.

The first thing to do to win real equality and genuine democracy for the working people, for the workers and peasants, is to deprive capital of the possibility of hiring writers, buying up publishing houses, and hiring newspapers. And to do that the capitalists and exploiters have to be overthrown and their resistance suppressed.

The capitalists have always used the term ‘freedom’ to mean freedom for the rich to get richer and for the workers to starve to death.

In capitalist usage, freedom of the press means freedom of the rich to bribe the press, freedom to use their wealth to shape and fabricate so-called public opinion.

In this respect, too, the defenders of ‘pure democracy’ prove to be defenders of an utterly foul and venal system that gives the rich control over the mass media. They prove to be deceivers of the people who, with the aid of plausible, fine-sounding, but thoroughly false phrases, divert them from the concrete historical task of liberating the press from capitalist enslavement.

—Lenin, Congress of the First Comintern

In 1991, in the context of the destruction of the Soviet Union (Cuba’s largest trading partner), with neighbors salivating at the prospect of capitalist restoration, a Mexican journalist asked Fidel Castro, “why do you not allow the organization of people who think differently, or open up space for political freedom?” He answers frankly:

We’ve endured over thirty years of hostility, over thirty years of war in all its forms — among them the brutal economic blockade that stops us from purchasing a single aspirin in the United States. It’s incredible that when there’s talk of human rights, not a single word is said about the brutal violation this constitutes for the human rights of an entire people, the economic blockade of the United States to impede Cuba’s development. The revolution polarized forces: those who were for it and those who, along with the United States, were against it. And really, I say this with the utmost sincerity, and I believe it’s consistent with the facts on the ground, but while such realities persist, we cannot give the enemy any quarter for them to carry out their historical task of destroying the revolution.

(This implies, for example, that political dissidence will not have a space in Cuba?)

If it’s a pro-Yankee dissidence, it will have no space. But there are many people who think differently in Cuba and are respected. Now, the creation of all the conditions for a party of imperialism? That does not exist, and we will never allow it. [8]

As far as I can tell, on this score, there’s only two main differences between Fidel Castro and Western leadership. The first is that he stands for anti-imperialism and socialism, and they for imperialism and capitalism. And the other is that he’s honest about what Cuba does and why, whereas capitalist states brutally crush communist organization with mass-murder and imprisonment — COINTELPRO, Operation Cóndor, Operation Gladio, etc. — then simply lie about embracing plurality. Just think here about the notion of white North Americans celebrating “Thanksgiving.”

And I tend to think that this is, in the final analysis, the crux of the matter. The question of “free press” and “free speech” is not separable from the question of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie versus the dictatorship of the proletariat. The idea of “political plurality” as such turns out to be the negation of the possibility of achieving any kind of truth in the realm of politics, it reduces all historical and value claims to the rank of mere opinion. And of course, so long as someone’s political convictions are mere opinion, they won’t rise to defend them. And so the liberal state remains the dictatorial organ of the bourgeoisie, with roads being built or legislation being passed only as commanded by the interests of capital, completely disregarding the interests of workers. Under regimes where political plurality is falsely upheld as a supreme virtue, the very notion of asserting oneself as possessing a truth appears aggressive and “authoritarian.”

from https://redsails.org/brainwashing/

here’s two good articles on it

Mango Press: The Tian’anmen Square ‘Massacre’: The West’s Most Persuasive, Most Pervasive Lie.
Red Sails: Another View of Tiananmen

In the dark times, should the stars also go out?

[What makes a country “socialist”?]

A society where public ownership of the means of production, a state controlled by a politically organized proletariat, and production for societal use rather than for profit is the principal aspect (main body) of the economy.

Key term here is principal aspect. There is a weird phenomenon from both anti-communists as well as a lot of ultraleft and leftcom communists themselves of applying a “one drop rule” to socialism, where socialism is only socialism if it’s absolutely pure without a single internal contradiction. But no society in the history of humankind has been pure, they all contain internal contradictions and internal contradictions are necessary for one form of society to develop into the next.

If you applied that same logic to capitalism, then if there was any economic planning or public ownership, then capitalism would cease to be “true capitalism” and become “actually socialism”, which is an argument a lot of right-wing libertarians unironically make. The whole “not true capitalism” and “not true socialism” arguments are two sides of the same coin, that is, people weirdly applying an absolute purity standard to a particular economic system which is fundamentally impossible to exist in reality, so they then can declare their preferred system “has never truly been tried”. But it will never be tried ever because it’s an idealized form which cannot exist in concrete reality, actually-existing capitalism and socialism will always have internal contradictions within itself.

If no idealized form exists and all things contain internal contradictions within themselves, then the only way to define them in a consistent way is not to define them in terms of perfectly and purely matching up to that idealized form, but that description merely becoming the principal aspect in a society filled with other forms and internal contradictions within itself.

A capitalist society introducing some economic planning and public ownership doesn’t make it socialist because the principal aspect is still bourgeois rule and production for profit. This would mean the state and institutions carrying out the economic planning would be most influenced by the bourgeoisie and not by the working class, i.e. they would still behave somewhat privately, the “public ownership” would really be bourgeois ownership and the economic planning would be for the benefit of the bourgeoisie first and foremost.

A similar story in a socialist society with markets and private ownership. If you have a society dominated by public ownership and someone decides to open a shop, where do they get the land, the raw materials, permission for that shop, etc? If they get everything from the public sector, then they exist purely by the explicit approval by the public sector, they don’t have real autonomy. The business may be internally run privately but would be forced to fit into the public plan due to everything around them demanding it for their survival.

Whatever is the dominant aspect of society will shape the subordinated forms. You have to understand societies as all containing internal contradictions and seeking for what is the dominant form in that society that shapes subordinated forms, rather than through an abstract and impossible to realize idealized version of “true socialism”.

Countries like Norway may have things that seemingly contradict capitalism like large social safety nets for workers funded by large amounts of public ownership, but these came as concessions due to the proximity of Nordic countries to the USSR which pressured the bourgeoisie to make concessions with the working class. However, the working class and public ownership and economic planning never became the principal aspect of Norway. The bourgeoisie still remains in control, arguably with a weaker position, but they are still by principal aspect, and in many Nordic countries ever since the dissolution of the USSR, the bourgeoisie has been using that dominant position to roll back concessions.

The argument for China being socialist is not that China has fully achieved some pure, idealized form of socialism, but that China is a DOTP where public ownership alongside the CPC’s Five-Year plans remain the principal aspect of the economy and other economic organization is a subordinated form.

Deng Xiaoping Theory is not a rejection of the economic system the Soviets were trying to build but a criticism of the Soviet understanding socialist development. After the Soviets deemed they had sufficient productive forces to transition into socialism, they attempted to transition into a nearly pure socialist society within a very short amount of time, and then declared socialist construction was completed and the next step was to transition towards communism.

Deng Xiaoping Theory instead argues that socialism itself has to be broken up into development stages a bit like how capitalism also has a “lower” and “higher” phase, so does socialism. The initial stage is to the “primary stage” of underdeveloped socialism, and then the main goal of the communist party is to build towards the developed stage of socialism. The CPC disagreed that the Soviets had actually completed their socialist construction and trying to then build towards communism was rushing things far faster than what the level of productive forces of the country could sustain and inevitably would lead to such great internal contradictions in the economic system to halt economic development.

The argument was not a rejection of the Marxist or Marxist-Leninist understanding of what socialism is, but a disagreement over the development stages, viewing socialism’s development as much more gradual and a country may remain in the primary stage like China is currently in for a long, long time, Deng Xiaoping speculated even 100 years.

I recall reading somethings from Mao where he criticized the Marxian understanding of communism, but not from the basis of it being wrong, but it being speculative. He made the argument that Marx’s detailed analysis of capitalism was only possible because Marx lived in a capitalist society and could see and research its development in real time, therefore Mao was skeptical the current understanding of communism would remain forever, because when you actually try to construct it you would inevitably learn far more than you could speculate about in the future, have a much more detailed understanding of what it is in concrete reality and what its development stages look like.

In a sense, that’s the same position the modern CPC takes towards socialism, that the Soviets and Mao rushed into socialism due to geopolitical circumstances and did not have time to actually fully grasp what socialist development would look like in practice, and Deng Xiaoping Theory introduces the concept of the primary stage of socialism based on their experience actually trying to implement it under Mao.

Despite common misconception, the CPC’s position is indeed that China is currently socialist, not “will be socialist in 2049” or whatever. The argument is that China is in the primary stage of socialism, a system where socialist aspects of the political and economic system have become the main body but in a very underdeveloped form.

by aimixin

pretty thin on details here. was the brain still inside a human body? if it wasn’t, what’s the standard for success

We know, as our readers know, that the people are the resistance and vice versa: it is the relationship between the sword and shield, the heart and arm. Every Palestinian struggles under the occupation. As this historic battle rages on, we know that the tactics of the occupation will evolve. They will continue to target homes regardless of the presence of resistance activity in an attempt to demoralize the Palestinian people, draw blood, and accelerate their genocide.

As this happens, it is our obligation to our principles that dictates we must not fall into the trap of distinguishing between armed resistance fighters and non-combatants, as every Palestinian has a role in the current state of affairs. Every martyr must be mourned, and every zionist strike must be seen for the crime that it is. We will not allow the occupier or Western media to dehumanize us by creating distinctions between a colonized people whose remained existence on their lands is “militant.”

Every Palestinian is a civilian even if they hold arms. A settler is an aggressor, a soldier, and an occupier even if they are lounging on our occupied beaches. As the IOF calls up thousands of reserves, it is clear that all settlers are soldiers. There exists a colonizer and the colonized, an oppressed and the oppressor. The people cannot be dissociated from resistance, because we are in a constant state of resistance.

Certainly, an explosive response is coming.

This struggle has been imposed on us. To resist is to survive, and to resist is a right.

from https://t.me/PalestineResist/13782?single

yet another entry in a long series of gaffes by the Biden regime