Image depicts Bolivian trade unionists on strike in La Paz, Bolivia.
Long preamble/summary below of recent news events.
summary
The Iran ceasefire is grinding on. After a brief period over the weekend of heightened activity where it seemed that US strikes might be resuming, Trump announced a “Memorandum of Understanding” with Iran, which initially appeared to be an agreement along Iran’s demands.
For those not following along with the diplomatic minutia, Iran’s position for several weeks has been that the nuclear issue must be discussed separately - because, well, last time they started discussing the nuclear issue with the US, they got fucking bombed - and so have proposed a two-stage negotiation where the war is first officially ended with certain preconditions (e.g. the US has to end sanctions and unfreeze assets and presumably withdraw at least some military assets), and then the second stage will begin in which the nuclear issue is handled.
The reason why a deal has still not been signed after all this time is because the US disagrees with doing it this way, and wants the nuclear issue to be handled right away (and obviously also objects with things like Iran retaining control of the Strait). Therefore, Trump’s announcement appeared to be him finally accepting reality, but it quickly became apparent that this was just another market manipulation. I’m definitely in the camp among several other analysts that believes another round of war is going to happen barring some very sudden circumstances (e.g. Trump being forced out of power one way or another, or Iran obtaining a nuke) because the US still seems agreement-incapable. And in Lebanon, consternation for the Zionists against Hezbollah’s attacks continues as the FPV drone threat only continues to increase despite them desperately seeking countermeasures.
As I’ve been perhaps too focussed on Iran lately, here’s a brief roundup of big news events from the last month or so.
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Orban losing power: Pretty cool, though his replacement being Neoliberal #2980329891 means that big changes seem unlikely.
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Strikes in Bolivia against that dipshit Paz: Very nice to see, as it appears that Bolivia has among the best widespread on-the-ground popular support for worker-centric policies and politicians in Latin America that makes it so they can genuinely pressure power (already, the Labor Minister has resigned).
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Situation in the Sahel: “Mysterious” third parties sponsored a big offensive against the AES which they largely repelled with help from Russia. The situation there is still a little tenuous as I understand it with a greater focus by anti-government forces on blockades of cities to cause internal revolts. This tactic is currently broadly failing as armed convoys are getting fuel and food into the cities, but figures like Traore are aware that more needs to be done.
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Ukraine War: Aside from the usual grinding advance by Russia on the front, there have been back-and-forth missile and drone strikes as Ukraine hit some targets in the outskirts of Moscow with drones and then Russia fired a shitload of missiles, including the iconic Oreshnik, directly at Kiev, as Simplicius and others have covered in greater detail.
I could go on and on with the recent aggressions against Cuba, Modi’s recent victories in India and the AI/chip tech war between China and the US but this preamble has to end at some point due to the character limit.
Last week’s thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on the Zionists’ destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia’s youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don’t want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it’s just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists’ side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR’s former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR’s forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster’s telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a ‘propaganda tax’, if you don’t believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
that’s where we are at with Venezuelan leadership too, is the point. You can’t simultaneously say “Socialist nations need our uncritical support and they have more info than us so we need to shut up and do what they say” and also say “the rot set in so deep that nothing could be done”. These are antithetical statements. The rot was so deep because nobody did anything about it! Nobody adequately pressured the state and criticized it! They let it rot in meek subservience!
So let’s imagine it’s the 80s and I’m criticizing Gorbachev for being a revisionist. Your argument boils down to essentially “well Kruschev was also a revisionist, but all of the sudden now you’re mad!”. It doesn’t actually address the rot, it’s word games and excuses.
I don’t agree with this at all. A reasonable analysis should be able to pinpoint to Khrushchev instead of waiting until Gorbachev. Like, to continue using the analogy, even Brezhnev wasn’t that great either. The qualitative shifts are Stalin to Khrushchev and Gorbachev to Yeltsin. Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev are largely cut from the same cloth. It’s fine to start out with critiques of Gorbachev as a concerned Soviet citizen living during the 80s wondering what’s going on, but more in-depth research and study should lead to an a-ha moment where one recognizes Gorbachev as representing a rot that started with Khrushchev.
I don’t really get what your distinction or point is. We are both seemingly in agreement that Venezuela is in a similar state of rot and falling apart and revisionism as late era-USSR was, but quibbling over who to place blame on? It’s apparently OK for a soviet citizen to criticize Gorbachev’s revisionism, but Marxists outside of the USSR have to keep their mouth shut? That shit is stupid and anti-scientific positionalist nonsense, and we all know it.
I don’t care about the blame game or pointing fingers, I care about accepting the current state of reality and doing something about it instead of all lining up to defend Gorbachev 2.0 on a communist forum where the users here should know better. It really proves to me that there is a huge chunk of “communists” who know very little about Marxist theory and don’t know how to recognize or criticize revisionism, and will defend it when it comes to ruin any project we ever happen to succeed with (if we ever do).
My point is that you’re not being dialectical. You speak of “taking action,” but if you don’t know when to actually take action, then it’s not meaningful advice. If you only took action towards something when it’s literally happening right in front of your face, you’re going to constantly fail because you won’t be able to nip disasters at the bud nor seize opportunities. Even the metaphor of “rot” is subject to this: you don’t need to sniff at milk that’s left out in the sun before throwing it away. Milk being left out in the sun is sufficient enough to throw it away. I don’t need to put milk left out in the sun back in the fridge, wait for the few hours when it reeks and stinks up the fridge, go, “yep, this milk is spoiled,” and dump the milk down the drain when I could’ve just dumped it much earlier.
When Mao said that a single spark can start a prairie fire, he meant it within the context of revolutionary praxis, but it can easily apply to revisionism or balkanization or the lack of maintenance that almost caused a tank of toxic chemicals to explode or the literal observation of a literal spark starting a literal fire.
As far as personnel and cadre are considered, I do not see any qualitative shift from Maduro to Rodriquez. Going from Maduro to Rodriquez is going from large prairie fire to slightly larger prairie fire. She didn’t liquidate Maduristas and staffed the upper echelon of the party with Rodriquez loyalists after seizing power through a coup. I don’t think there was a single person who got purged. This strongly suggests to me that Maduro would’ve eventually capitulated too even if the kidnapping failed. Or more accurately, the party would’ve eventually capitulated too even if Maduro was still around because Maduro is still an individual in the end. He is no more a king than Rodriquez is a queen.
The US was bombing random Venezuelans with no real response from Venezuela, the rest of Latin America, Russia, China, or Iran. They only had Cuba for help. In a way, saying that Rodriquez betrayed Venezuela is cope that Maduro wouldn’t have done the same or eventually capitulated through similarly humiliating terms. I was honestly surprised that Maduro would willingly turn himself in instead of going down fighting taking a bunch of US goons with him. Sometimes countries get outmaneuvered and have to eat the shit sandwich.
Of course strict adherence to this discrepancy is undialectical.
However, I’d still advise western marxists to be more cautious in their approach and condemnation. We live in a complete and total propaganda sphere, and that does not disinclude propaganda aimed at influencing what we think about these events and decisions.
What is there to be gained from being vocal on our souring on Delcy Rodriguez? What useful advice are we capable of giving Chavistas? Would genuinely solid advice even be accepted by the Chavistas or dismissed out of hand as most western marxist cries of revisionism?
This is trivially the case.
Internet posters are not a vanguard party, nor are most people willing to be well-read enough to be capable of adapting theory to the current material conditions of Venezuela.
Most internet Marxists are trying to scrape together a coherent world view, but operating mostly on tweets, headlines, and shitposts…same as everyone else. The average hamsic display name profile is simply operating under the same “go team!” politics, but for team socialism.
Vanguardism and demcent would not be necessary if the average person was chewing through theory and actively, coherently synthesizing it with current events.
The most useful thing any of us can reasonably do is provide support to the people of Venezuela and actively try to frustrate efforts in our own countries to fuck with Venezuela.
This is not an “average person” forum. It’s a communist one ostensibly. The people here should be educated on revisionism and breaking international solidarity. I’m not chastising chavistas, i’m chastising other western marxists who are objectively wrong. Chavistas aren’t reading this, my posts aren’t for them. They are for the royal you, the reader, and the people here who bend over backwards to obfuscate revisionism. Those who are extremely hostile to me when I make any type of pessimistic analysis, who attempt to drive out any critical kind of thought from a marxist forum based on fallacious and unscientific appeals to authority instead of the principles of socialism and materialist analysis.
Our role here is not to be cheerleaders, and just attacking me by calling me a “western ultra” over and over isn’t doing it for me. Provide materialist arguments about the actual quantifiable state of things and I will engage in good faith. I support Venezuela, I support the workers of Venezuela, and in public I of course have solidarity against any imperialist incursion. That very fact is why I must call out the pro-imperialist relationship of wealth transfer that is occurring, and will not remain silent as the people of Venezuela are being robbed blind. Now the people of Venezuela don’t only have to struggle against the military and economy of the USA to gain control of their resources, they must also overcome their own government. That is a huge fucking problem and contradiction that is not being addressed, the “socialist” government of Venezuela is operating in the de facto position of a comprador puppet state, facilitating the ongoing transfers. This action was turning guns around, facing them towards the workers with the US at their back instead of vice versa. That is the underlying power dynamic with respects to the oil, which is the plurality of the entire economy. It is claimed this is temporary, I see no evidence of this - all of the exploitative relationships are only building and deepening. This isn’t a one-time tribute demand, it’s a permanent vassalage demand.