zugzwang
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They were just Trotskyists (or maybe Yippies?) like Lennon was; of course they’re gonna give an SPGBer dirty looks!
It’s certainly much easier these days to just jump on the Internet Archive or have your own pdf book collection, not to mention ebook readers. I’ve switched between physical and digital over the years, but lately I’ve been gravitating more towards physical books again. I don’t really like messing with ereaders, and reading everything in front a computer screen can get a bit dull after a while. I still think it’s important and helpful to have books and other materials archived though, making them accessible to people who might not be able to purchase them.
“Then there was Donbas. This region broke away from Ukraine after the CIA-backed Maidan coup – another provocation – that toppled the government there. Donbas did not want to remain under the new, clearly Russophobic, regime which, with the support of fascist elements, started shelling cities in Donbas from 2014 onwards.”
As far as the surveys and scholarship that I’m aware of, most of the residents in the Donbass region were actually not in favor of outright separation from Ukraine and joining Russia, but rather different forms of greater regional autonomy, which included separation. The 2014 survey I mentioned previously in this thread discusses this, which is also referenced by Sakwa in his scholarly work Frontline Ukraine.
You’re spot on though in noting how the Russian invasion of Kiev was, besides being a horrific act from a capitalist regime that involved massacres like the one in Bucha, just a strategic blunder on the part of Moscow. The invasion has distracted from the fact that there was quite a bit of Ukrainian opposition to the post-Maidan government in Kiev and its discriminatory policies from the more Russophilic parts of Ukraine. It has also allowed Ukrainian nationalists, along with the people who parrot them in the West, including quite a number of socialists, to present the Ukrainian recapturing of places like the Donbass and Crimea as a form of “self-defense,” when a number of residents in these regions would perhaps think differently. It is well-documented, for example, that the majority of Crimeans sympathize more with Russia than with Ukraine and mostly approved of the 2014 Russian annexation of the peninsula. It was certainly more possible to speak of Ukrainian self-defense when Russia was invading Kiev, amid a mostly hostile Kievan population, but it’s just ludicrous to speak of the “liberation” of places like Crimea when the majority of Crimeans (who are mostly ethnic-Russians) don’t even desire “liberation” to begin with.
“As I understand it – correct me if I am wrong – Russia´s initial response was not to get directly involved. It wanted Donbas to be a kind of semi-autonomous region within Ukraine with guaranteed language rights etc.”
It’s also worth noting that Russia annexed Crimea mostly due to fears of losing access to their only major warm-water sea port in Sevastopol, which they have maintained since the days of the Russian Empire. Moscow became apprehensive about their continued access to the naval base following the Maidan coup and the rise of an openly pro-Western and Russophobic government in Kiev.
Still annoys me how shameless Wolff is about distorting Marx, under the guise of “making him accessible,” just in order to promote his little worker-coop endeavor.
Reality is also much more interesting… such as how the US supported the Khmer Rouge (after inadvertently helping them come to power by obliterating the Cambodian countryside and swelling their ranks) as a counterweight to reunified Vietnam up until the 1990s. Here’s Secretary of State Kissinger speaking with Thai Foreign Minister Choonhavan on 26 November 1975, seven months after the fall of Phnom Penh:
“What do the Cambodians think of the United States? You should tell them that we bear no hostility towards them. We would like them to be independent as a counterweight to North Vietnam.” (Kissinger 3)
“You should also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way. We are prepared to improve relations with them.” (Kissinger 8)
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB193/
(Scroll down to document 17.)
It certainly was not a Bush conspiracy, unless you think the Bush administration was mad enough to strike the Pentagon/their own defense department. There’s a plethora of evidence debunking all of these nonsensical conspiracy theories (e.g. the jet fuel from the planes helped weaken the towers’ support beams) and also a plethora of reasons for the Arab world to have felt (and to continue to feel) animosity towards the US/Israel. If the Bush administration wanted to bring down the towers as a false flag to invade Iraq, then it also would have made more sense for the hijackers to come from Iraq rather than Saudi Arabia (i.e. an American ally), which was the nationality of most of the hijackers.
I’d also get off Twitter; it’s slowly turning into an alt-right platform after the Musk takeover, if it isn’t one already.
Fwiw Engels wrote about this topic in the Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. I’m not really sure how all of his anthropological/historical arguments stack up to our modern understandings, but there is still a lot of useful info in it. Engels also notably praised indigenous peoples like the Iroquois and described them as an example of early communism/socialism. The Iroquois’ mastery over their production (i.e. the fact that they were not dominated by their own products/commodities like in bourgeois society) and the greater social position of women in such societies greatly impressed him. He essentially described the socialism/communism of the future as being like this “primitive” communism but on a more advanced technological basis.
“At least in the swing states. Under the undemocratic US election system, where it is not the candidate who obtains the most votes who wins but the candidate who wins the most seats in a “electoral college” made up of representatives of the various states who vote as a bloc, this makes sense.
This system also means that the candidates base their campaign on appealing to electors in these ten or so states. Thus, since he has no chance of winning there anyway, Trump can deliberately alienate electors in California (“lefty liberals”) and New York (“Wall Street versus Main Street”) in order to win votes in the swing states.”
Yep, as Ira Katznelson and co note in their critical introduction to American political economy The Politics of Power, which is worth a read, the electoral college system itself was actually invented and favored by the “Founding Fathers” due to their fears of an excess of democracy:
After creating an executive independent of Congress, delegates [to the Constitutional Convention] were not about to propose selecting the president through direct election, which would reflect the same popular opinion they saw lurking in legislatures. Instead, the convention delegates devised a plan by which a majority of members of the newly created electoral college would elect the president.
The electoral college system was created because the Founding Fathers feared direct democracy and the southern slaveholding interests thought this would help protect them from the demands of more populated northern states. (182)
Here’s a list of some of the groups participating in the “2024 March on the DNC” in Chicago, https://www.marchondnc2024.org/join. There are loads of Trotskyist and other bourgeois-“progressive” organizations that I don’t particularly care for.
I should maybe also mention that the Yippies’ politics were also quite bad in many respects (e.g. their often uncritical support for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the National Liberation Front). There was certainly much to critique in the ideas of Abbie Hoffman and (the later yuppie-turncoat) Jerry Rubin, two of the co-founders of the Youth International Party.
No Festival of Life this time around, like there was at the infamous 1968 protests of the Democratic National Convention, but it seems that there are some pro-Palestinian protesters as the DNC starts up in Chicago. It’s sort of unfortunate, though understandable when one compares the different circumstances, how many of them are only pushing for the “freeing of Palestine,” for whatever each person means by that. While such anti-war (or anti-genocide) protests are important, they’re sort of a step back from 1968 when people, such as the Yippies and others, were talking about both ending American aggression in Indochina and implementing far more radical societal transformations. At any rate, a one- or two-state “solution” will never “liberate” Palestinians from capitalist hegemony or solve the innumerable environmental and other problems stemming from global capitalist production.
There’s also a great deal of irony in the fact that the far-right use terms like “red-pilled” (a Matrix reference) when the creators of the Matrix are both trans women who have repeatedly told their far-right fans to fuck off…
I don’t have much sympathy for Christian fundamentalism or religion in general, but it is interesting to note how religion and communistic/socialistic thinking often went hand in hand in the past. Many workers in nineteenth-century New England (e.g. textile workers) often attacked the developing capitalist system through a religious lens, noting how capitalists were idlers who, among other things, failed to “earn their bread by the sweat of their brow” as stated in Genesis. Here is one example from the labor newspaper The Voice of Industry, in which the editor (William Young) was commenting precisely on this issue:
If man is a laboring being by nature, what kind of philosophy is that which exempts a portion from fulfilling this law of their natures and allows them to live upon the products of others’ labor, while they lounge about in idleness or waste their energies in unproductive amusements? If labor is honorable and ennobling, should not all become honest and noble by becoming its votaries? and is it not dishonest and degrading to live upon the fruits of others? If labor is a Christian duty, are those Christians, who live without it, or are engaged in vocations useless and injurious to society? (Vol. 1 No. 13, 21 August 1845)
The same was also the case for many workers and intellectuals in Europe, most notably the utopian socialists. Similarly usury, or the act of obtaining interest from a loan, was for a long time condemned in medieval European Christendom as a sin (see for example Jacques Le Goff’s work Your Money or Your Life). Some might even say that Engels was slightly off the mark when he echoed the description of Das Kapital as the “Bible of the working class”; the working class had already been invoking the actual Bible to argue against capitalism for quite some time prior to the publication of Marx’s magnum opus. Unfortunately many of the Christians today are the obnoxious, right-wing sorts who haven’t carried on this anti-capitalist tradition and instead often worship capitalists and entrepreneurialism.
