Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

What I mean by the human condition is, the innate psychological weaknesses that humans suffer under systems and beneath myriad layers of structures (political, familial, social, existential), such that it is a rarity when one becomes free or strong-willed enough to sacrifice what meager conveniences they’ve been awarded (by unintended circumstance in most cases) by the dominant system in order to risk them for something that is so uncertain (e.g., political shift or trusting in strangers to uphold their end of the bargain), of which has largely been demonstrated as untrue by the world around them. In other words, for people to uphold what is most difficult while living in contradiction. This may rest in western nihilism, though western nihilism has made a tangible influence upon broad society, whether anyone wishes it or not. I don’t know. All I know is what I feel and observe.

Right, but “innate psychological weakness” and a focus on will to break free sounds more like idealism than dialectics. Dialectical materialism tells us that, as chinawatcherwatcher put it better than I can reword, “relations of exploitation contain within themselves the seeds of their own destruction, or change.” So it is not will that makes the difference, even though that does have an impact (else we’d be saying that people are mere passengers) but that it is a factor along with external factors and that both of these are always interacting with each other and developing in one direction or another.

One of the reasons that “breaking free” from it is rarer in the imperial core than, say, in the global south, is because the material conditions put people in the imperial core in a position of exploiter (whether they consent to it or not) via the exploitative relationships of empire. This allows them to, on average, experience somewhat better conditions than the most destitute in the world and as long as those conditions don’t go under a low enough bar for quality of life, many can linger there without a strong motive for change. Though I think with the empire in decline, this is already changing and could more rapidly change with how things are shifting under the mask off management of the Trump administration.

Another of the reasons is the narrative atop it (I believe what some term “superstructure”). This narrative feeds individualism, imperialism, and capitalism day in and day out. Working alongside the conditions to try to steer people toward support for empire and away from liberation.

And then there is of course the direct and indirect state violence (“political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”). This is and has been used to assassinate, imprison, and otherwise try to silence those who do resist. And there are often more who have resisted than people realize when they investigate beyond imperialist media.

The weight of all of this can be overwhelming if taken all at once as a thing to get past. But so can anything in life if we look at it as a challenge all at once. Quantitative leads to qualitative (another thing dialectical materialism teaches us).

AES states are subject to capitalist influence, yes, but they have also made great strides in spite of it. There’s a lesson from struggle that someone brought up recently. It goes something like: The USSR in its infancy has this moment where Germany of the time is demanding certain things of them and Lenin chooses to make a deal, rather than risk a confrontation when the USSR is not yet ready. Instead of this leading to a devastating loss, it is a temporary problem which leads to the USSR growing strong enough to overcome it.

The point of me bringing it up here is, don’t take every seeming capitulation on the part of an AES state, or liberation movement, as an inability to develop the world beyond capitalism. Socialist China has done an (I think astounding) job of engaging with the capitalist world economy in a way similar to that story about the USSR and in doing so, is now positioned where it and its anti-imperialist allies are rising and empire is declining. It is perhaps not yet in a position where it is believed that empire can be defeated with troops without devastating loss, but that doesn’t mean the day can never come that the capability is there.

There is even a term someone coined, that you may have heard before, that I think is relevant here: capitalist realism. “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” But this does not mean the belief is true. It’s an observation about the psychological grip that the status quo has on some people.

Being anti-social is a good thing though.

It’s not. Opposing a system of power and being anti-social are not the same thing. Anti-social in the context of conditions where revolution can form would be, at best, adventurist and aimless violence.

I want people to be angry and see trump for what he is, a war monger with an ambition to rule the world.

The problem goes far beyond Trump. He is the current face of the western empire, but the empire has been doing horrible things long before him and will after him if it’s not stopped.

I don’t believe in suppressing emotions, I mean that people should be less shocked by things especially when these shocking things happen all the time.

I mean, I would rather people always find brutality shocking than accept it as normal, but if you mean in the context of people acting like brutality began yesterday and has never been seen before, then sure. Liberals have a tendency to act like history began yesterday when colonialism has been going on for hundreds of years.

Being sociopathic isn’t about cheating or manipulating people

By definition, sociopathy is about being anti-social (not to be confused with being asocial, which is more just avoidant of social interaction). It is absurd to try to rewrite the definition of sociopathy into something entirely different and nice-sounding.

seeing the situation and not letting it negatively affect your emotions.

There are two ways I can think to look at this:

1. You’re describing denial/repression of emotions. Everyone has emotions and we have to learn how to regulate and process them. Denying or repressing them does not help anything.

2. You’re describing regulation of emotions, which has nothing to do with sociopathy and has to do with acknowledging and processing what you feel.

I think people generally don’t actually care about the evils of the world. They only want to exploit these problems for their own gain. It’s all anyone knows.

Individualism is not and has never been universal. If you want to see the big picture, then look more at collective cultures now and historically.

i mean you have to grow a thick skin if you are a socialist and kinda be a little sociopathic cuz any amount of empathy/emotional weakness does fuck you up

No, this is like the opposite of what you need. This is just toxic masculinity but with some words swapped out to make it about socialism.

The human condition and psychological barriers seem too strong and too embedded

What do you mean by “the human condition”? Because in this context, it’s sounding to me like a belief about humanity that is steeped in western nihilism and a static, cynical view about human behavior.

May as well let someone else do that and enjoy what tiny corner you’ve carved while you can, and let it burn.

This is individualism taken to its conclusion.

People don’t really care about defeating capitalism

The USSR, China, Cuba, Vietnam, the DPRK, just to name some of the more successful and better known efforts.

Maybe it’s just that I’m a pessimist and feel miserable today

That may play a part, but I don’t think it’s just that. I think it’s that coupled with lingering beliefs from the western imperialist system, which will follow you if you don’t challenge and dismantle them, even if your allegiance changes on paper.

Trying to stay positive seems sisyphean.

You don’t have to stay blindly positive. Positivity can come from organizing in person and if for some reason, that is not viable where you live, it can come from learning and growing with others online as well. The idealist version of positivity goes something like “be positive even while you are being lashed”, which is absurd. Fight back when you are being lashed, but where possible, in an organized way. Positivity will come when you know others stand beside you. This is one of the reasons to emphasis the existing efforts in the world. Even if you are not part of a given AES state or self-determining state project, you can still find some solace in knowing they fight for the same cause.

That said, I don’t want you to take this as admonishment or “toughen up” style response. Only as an attempt to remind and ground. Rest is critical as is compassion and understanding. And it’s not just physical activity that can wear a person down. Ruminating loops can do it too. So it’s good that you’ve shared, so that you can try to break the loop and get a chance to rest.

It was his escalating debts that led him to selling the wealth of secrets that he had access to.

“It was about the money, and I don’t think he ever really tried to lead anybody to believe it was anything more than that,” FBI agent Leslie G Wiser, who was involved in the investigation that led to Ames’s arrest, told the BBC’s Witness History in 2015.

So the BBC article alleges that he didn’t even do it because of allegiance, but because of debts and the financial payoff from selling out agents. Isn’t that such a fitting capitalism moment?

By Joshua Goodman and The Associated Press

So we can figure this is CIA news trying to confuse and disorient about what’s going on?

NPCs will be NPCs before, during, and after the revolution.

Why are you using dehumanizing language?

This year feels exhausting to me already and we’re not even a week in. I’m trying to keep in perspective that’s part of the goal of shock action is to wear down and demoralize, but it still grates.

Well much of what he’s doing either doesn’t directly target many white USians, or the impact of it is delayed and obfuscated enough that they can bury their head in the sand for now. As with previous US presidents, the majority of his overt brutality is racist violence. So a certain percentage will go along, not only because some of them are racist, but because so many are white and so the violence does not target them (yet).

That said, the belief that it doesn’t affect them is a faulty one. Racist violence is inseparable from class warfare. It is a distinct component of the same struggle in the sense that: like with how you can’t emancipate the proletariat by “making them all bourgeois” because that still requires an exploited underclass, you can’t emancipate the proletariat by improving their rights a bit via entrenched exploitation of a racialized underclass, i.e. neglecting anti-racist struggle in the context of white supremacy is neglecting a critical part of class struggle.

In order for the USian working class to advance its cause, it has to dismantle the institution of white supremacy. When understood from this perspective, I think it is much easier to see how even benefits of being “white” in the current climate are another dimension of class warfare; a kind of caste division for a “divide and conquer” strategy. And it is critical for people to understand this in order to grasp the importance of solidarity. When they don’t stand with AES states and they don’t stand with anti-imperialist self determination of peoples, they don’t stand with class struggle. They stand instead with the kind of brutal imperialists who would let them die homeless without a second thought if it meant their power expanded a bit more.

Very interesting to read, thanks for sharing.

This tracks with the impression I get. That some of this thinking of “just wipe things away / reset / etc., even if through indiscriminate violence” comes from a kind of depressed and worn down worldview. And I think, is also an extension of the normalization of imperial violence, but turned in the other direction. In other words, there are imperialists who think indiscriminate violence is good and fine because it’s against “bad” people. How does this point of view differ from what’s being said here? It’s just changing who is categorized as “bad”. To be clear, I’m not accusing of bad intention. The point is that if you come from that socialization and you change who the target is but you don’t change the mindset, then it’s not surprising you will still have some belief in indiscriminate violence.

Indiscriminate violence benefits colonial/imperial/capitalist interests of expansion and replacement. It does not benefit those who want peace or want to value human life. What matters is ending the institutions of white supremacy, colonialism, imperialism, etc. There’s no getting around the fact that violence is required in that process at one stage or another because ruling classes don’t hand over power willingly after being told “swiper no swiping.” But there is no benefit to the cause of liberation for it to be indiscriminate, wanton violence.

On the other point about “saving”, I think it’s normal for people in difficult conditions to have some desire to be saved. Maybe more so where Christian socializing and narratives of literal saviors are a thing. But also, I agree that China trying to step in to “save” the USian people would be the least of its priorities. The US’s level of notoriety is only because of its economic and military might and the way it has used that to terrorize the globe. Otherwise, it would be, to most people, just another region that they don’t know a whole lot about. Global anti-imperialist efforts have some motive to defang and stabilize the US and the imperial core in general, so that it doesn’t go even more violently rogue than it has been. International communist efforts have some motive to look after the USian proletariat, the colonized indigenous, the marginalized minorities to the extent that they can build ties with them and do mutual benefit and work toward strengthening their liberation efforts, but not in some exceptional way more so than the rest of the exploited peoples in the world. And that’s a critical point to keep in view. No matter what the socializing says, USians are not actually exceptional; neither exceptionally good, nor exceptionally bad, or exceptionally talented or exceptionally weak. The character of the actions can be better or worse (and good god are some of the US actions terrible), but the underlying humanity is much the same. Filtered through a different lens of material conditions and socializing, yes - but these things are mutable, they just don’t change all at once and often don’t change easily.

TL;DR: If you are from the imperial core, try to learn from other, non-imperial cultures, mindsets, and organized party efforts, and how they have gone about handling liberation, in both the beautiful victories and the devastating losses. Remember that changing your allegiance doesn’t immediately change how you are socialized.

There’s a somewhat explicit connection between the creation of suburbia in the US and anti-communism too.

“No man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist,” he once said. “He has too much to do.”

(This is attributed to William Levitt, who is credited as the father of USian suburbia.

https://time.com/archive/6598189/suburban-legend-william-levitt/

I’m assuming this is asked in good faith out of curiosity, but I don’t like how it is phrased. It implies that it was easy to do for the US, which is not, as far as I’m aware, proven. It could have taken them months or years of probing, infiltration, and regional military preparation to get to the point where they could do this. I also don’t like how some people are replying as if it definitely was easy and they have the answer for why. The US power base is not god (in spite of it liking to act like it is) and given how much and often it has couped countries over decades, if it was easy for them to coup Venezuela, they would have done so long ago. This terrorist’s act of kidnapping the president looks more like desperation to me than a show of strength. Don’t give them credit for strength they are not proven to have.

This is a good source on what communists mean by imperialism and why China does not fall under that: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Imperialism#Chinese_"imperialism"

You may need to explain both to people because I know some people have this idea of imperialism that it is something like “a country is big and influential beyond itself and has a desire to conquer”, which misses the entirety of why a country is influential, what helpful or exploitative influence can look like, and where a motive to conquer derives from (if one can’t explain where it comes from and they’re claiming it about a country in today’s world that is not predominantly “white”, there’s probably racism involved in the worldview).

To compare:

israel has a motive to “conquer” in the region it inhabits because it’s a colonial project based on occupation and expansion, and is an extension of the western empire more broadly, who not only can benefit from having more land, labor, and resources to exploit, but is systematized to the point of being propped up on this parasitic relationship with the rest of the world.

China, in contrast, does not have any such motive. They are, as far as I know, largely self-sustaining in access to resources, lifted 800 million people out of poverty locally, and have plenty of internal work to do still toward their socialist/communist development goals, none of which is improved by undermining the international working class. What they are doing fits with a country that saw the USSR fall, saw countless countries suffer sanctions, coups, and bombings under the global imperialist and anti-communist campaign of the west over decades, and sees some of that still going on now. They are reinforcing sovereignty (such as in tech), they build mutually beneficial ties with other countries where possible which makes it that much harder for the west to isolate and encircle them and is also just something that strengthens both them and other countries.

Of course they are accused of these ties being exploitative because the western empire doesn’t want people escaping dependency on them and doesn’t want China being powerful in general.

We also need to keep in mind how racist narratives work, the nature of responsibility, and the difference between something explicitly designed and enforced by the CPC, versus something that happens outside of its direct control. The global order is still largely a capitalist one and as such, the movements within it are going to have capitalist characteristics that go with them some of the time. CPC China cannot extricate itself from this reality anymore than anyone else can. The options are to engage with it and the contradictions involved, try to exist outside it and attack it from the outside which risks fast decline and annihilation, or try to exist outside it and survive it which risks isolation and encirclement. China since the reform and opening up policy chose the option to engage with it and the contradictions involved.

Those who want us to hate China want us to believe some confusing things like that: “communism bad” but also “China bad because it’s not communist enough”. Or “capitalism good” but also “China bad because it’s being too capitalist.”

They try to use our own views against us and this is undoubtedly some of where ultra-left positions come from. We have to understand that not every action taken by the CPC or by a Chinese business is going to be saintly in all of its characteristics and that its lack of sainthood does not mean the vanguard has fallen and China is equivalent to the western empire now.

Intention cannot magically transform circumstances for the better. We have to investigate the context of where things come from, the motives involved, and the details of the actions taken. Much of anti-China propaganda depends on people doing none of these things and rolling with a racist narrative that China is a hegemonic extension of the CPC while simultaneously distinct from it and repressed by it, and that the CPC is uh, “bad” “because communism.” While also accusing it of doing very uncommunist-like things… that are more just what capitalists do. But “capitalist good!.. except when it’s China, then bad.” The origins of most anti-China propaganda are not remotely honest, in other words.

Was imperialist propaganda always this unhinged and I’m just not used to seeing it unfold in real-time? I tried to read through it to see how they’re presenting it and it reads like a window into someone’s paranoid drug trip. The level of narcissism and red scare swill is wild.

The way I see it (I don’t know how mod, or mods, saw it, am looking at it after the fact), the issue is that the comment was victim blaming and counter to solidarity during a crisis. Posting in anger is one thing, but directing that anger at the victim instead of the aggressor is… to put it in the most good faith terms I can think of at the moment, a confused way to direct anger.

If nothing else, I will take this moment to remind people how important solidarity is in moments of crisis.

Even when that solidarity has the character of struggle too:

For instance, in the period of its first cooperation with the Communist Party, the Kuomintang stood in contradiction to foreign imperialism and was therefore anti-imperialist; on the other hand, it stood in contradiction to the great masses of the people within the country—although in words it promised many benefits to the working people, in fact it gave them little or nothing. In the period when it carried on the anti-Communist war, the Kuomintang collaborated with imperialism and feudalism against the great masses of the people and wiped out all the gains they had won in the revolution, and thereby intensified its contradictions with them. In the present period of the anti-Japanese war, the Kuomintang stands in contradiction to Japanese imperialism and wants co-operation with the Communist Party, without however relaxing its struggle against the Communist Party and the people or its oppression of them. As for the Communist Party, it has always, in every period, stood with the great masses of the people against imperialism and feudalism, but in the present period of the anti-Japanese war, it has adopted a moderate policy towards the Kuomintang and the domestic feudal forces because the Kuomintang has pressed itself in favour of resisting Japan. The above circumstances have resulted now in alliance between the two parties and now in struggle between them, and even during the periods of alliance there has been a complicated state of simultaneous alliance and struggle. If we do not study the particular features of both aspects of the contradiction, we shall fail to understand not only the relations of each party with the other forces, but also the relations between the two parties.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.htm

Note: This is not to draw direct parallel to Venezuela, but to make the point that even when there is significant struggle and contradiction within being allies, the historical lesson is to navigate contradictions in order to overcome the greater contradiction, not intensify resentment when solidarity is needed.

Recording audio is a lot of work. I’m sorry that happened and I appreciate that you do this. If I remember right, it was a recording of yours that got me through Blackshirts and Reds, and that’s a pivotal one for humanizing the USSR and its history.

Yes, it’s critical that we not fall into fatalistic/deterministic thinking. We are always wrestling to decide what the future turns out to be. We aren’t just passengers.