Not only is he unreasonably angry at other leftists for actually understanding what imperialism is, but he has yet to make a video on Pelosi’s attack on Chinese sovereignty whilst implying China is imperialist (see the below clip; he seems to be directly referencing the Taiwan issue considering the timing) https://youtu.be/VScL9efeKxs - 23:25 onward is just a gold mine

  • @lil_tank
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    242 years ago

    Ok so imperialism is when you refuse to let imperialists do whatever the fuck they want to destroy you, thank Mr Leftist very sound

  • @Samubai
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    192 years ago

    I’m glad you bring this up. I’ve been thinking about S4A. I’m all mixed up about how to feel about S4A. I can’t tell if he has a point. The biggest red flag is the lack of support for China that I see from them… At the same time, I think he has a legitimate concern with Russian state support of Dugin or whatever. I don’t think he has an honest opinion ab imperialism.

    Also, is whether or not to support Russia’s Special Military Op really THAT important as to how to move forward as communists? Personally, I’m starting to think it doesn’t really matter as a source of division. It’s a battle that needn’t be fought between communists(is it worth a global, opportunist/ultra split?). I’d say no.

    I’d say this war doesn’t concern communists. I’d be happy to hear another take.

    I’d say the danger here is chasing a red-herring, wasting time and energy in a nation that doesn’t share our values or outlook, regardless of their importance as a sovereign nation.

    The main reason I support this war is the opportunity it opens for communists abroad, mainly by weakening America. I think China and Russia have been shoved together and have realized they benefit a lot more from their friendship than “the west.” If the western powers weren’t run by buffoons, Russia might’ve pivoted west.

    I don’t see how anybody could think Russia was not backed into a corner by NATO and US, however, I think we should be cautious with full support for Russia. They could behave in a way we don’t expect, since they are not guided by our ideology. Therefore, we have a blurry understanding of how they might behave. I think there is a risk that Russia could take things too far with Ukraine. I couldn’t define too far. But, they might pivot to more bourgeois nationalist tendencies. It’s possible, maybe unlikely, but that’s kind of my point. I don’t think we can really know, so we should hold a tentative outlook on Russia.

    I have my private reasons for supporting Russia beyond what I laid out, but it’s not more than indirectly related to a communist revolution.

    • @cfgaussian
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      2 years ago

      I want to remind people of this important quote by Stalin from “Foundations of Leninism” which i feel has relevance in this discussion:

      "The revolutionary character of a national movement under the conditions of imperialist oppression does not necessarily presuppose the existence of proletarian elements in the movement, the existence of a revolutionary or a republican programme of the movement, the existence of a democratic basis of the movement. The struggle that the Emir of Afghanistan is waging for the independence of Afghanistan is objectively a revolutionary struggle, despite the monarchist views of the Emir and his associates, for it weakens, disintegrates and undermines imperialism; whereas the struggle waged by such “desperate” democrats and “Socialists,” “revolutionaries” and republicans as, for example, Kerensky and Tsereteli, Renaudel and Scheidemann, Chernov and Dan, Henderson and Clynes, during the imperialist war was a reactionary struggle, for its results was the embellishment, the strengthening, the victory, of imperialism.

      For the same reasons, the struggle that the Egyptians merchants and bourgeois intellectuals are waging for the independence of Egypt is objectively a revolutionary struggle, despite the bourgeois origin and bourgeois title of the leaders of Egyptian national movement, despite the fact that they are opposed to socialism; whereas the struggle that the British “Labour” Government is waging to preserve Egypt’s dependent position is for the same reason a reactionary struggle, despite the proletarian origin and the proletarian title of the members of the government, despite the fact that they are “for” socialism. There is no need to mention the national movement in other, larger, colonial and dependent countries, such as India and China, every step of which along the road to liberation, even if it runs counter to the demands of formal democracy, is a steam-hammer blow at imperialism, i.e., is undoubtedly a revolutionary step."

      • @REEEEvolution
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        72 years ago

        “But muh campism!11111” - dipshit with the newest talking points

    • @cfgaussian
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      2 years ago

      I think the base line for a communist in this conflict should be even if you don’t support Russia to at least not support the fascist Kiev regime and its western imperialist backers.

      Beyond that i would personally argue that while Russia is a bourgeois capitalist state with clear reactionary tendencies domestically, this war is a proxy war entirely engineered and provoked by the imperialist USA in hopes of destabilizing and damaging Russia, to achieve regime change and maybe even balkanization.

      Further, if you don’t care about the fate of the bourgeois Russian state despite the anti-imperialist role it currently serves in the world today (defending Syria, giving military aid to Venezuela, Nicaragua, being allies with China and now increasingly Iran, etc.), this conflict is still fundamentally a war of national liberation for the Donbass.

      Even ignoring the role that the US has played and how it is using Ukraine through the fascist puppet regime they have installed in Kiev, this is at its core a civil war between the nationalist Ukrainian forces and the ethnic Russian Ukrainians they have been attempting to genocide these past eight years.

      In my view the more you learn about the conflict, its history and the real situation in Ukraine the more reasons you find to side with Russia even if you - and this applies to me - highly dislike Putin and the current state of affairs inside Russia itself.

    • @freagle
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      102 years ago

      I think the value of the opportunist/ultra split is not that we need to critically support Russia, it’s to take the mask off of national socialists who use idealistic moral framing to demonize Russia and rationalize support for NATO and Western hegemony.

      All those people who claim to be leftists or socialists who then turn around and argue that Russia is evil and their defeat would be a net positive for the world are now clearly identified as reactionary and it allows us to filter them out.

    • @Black_VenomOP
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      92 years ago

      I just watch for the audiobooks tbh, their comments/analyses are really hit or miss. But like you said, the Ukraine conflict doesn’t warrant this level of holier-than-thou moral outrage but S4A insists on pushing the issue in the most inflammatory and bad-faith way possible

    • @cfgaussian
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      2 years ago

      Keeping in mind the passage i have quoted above, things become quite clear:

      If it is correct to support even an undemocratic monarchist force when it serves a clear anti-imperialist function, surely hoping that the people of Donbass and other parts of Ukraine who have been brutalized and repressed by the Kiev junta all these years can be liberated, while striking a blow at one of imperialism’s most important proxy projects while advancing multipolarity, even if it is a bourgeois Russia doing it, is justified.

      Ultimately the greatest obstacle to socialist revolutions in the present day is not bourgeois Russia, it is US imperialism and the global neoliberal system propped up by western economic and military hegemony. Anything that undermines the stability, prestige and power of these hegemonic forces is a step toward a world where revolutions can flourish again and socialist experiments can have breathing space.

      I find it very sad that so many western leftists who claim to be opposed to imperialism immediately denounce any country or group that actually strikes a real blow at the imperialists and their proxies. It’s like we like the idea of resistance in theory but are too squeamish to see it put into practice. We talk of revolution but would balk at the violence, the inevitable collateral damage and the pragmatic compromises that revolutions entail.

      And i foresee the same kind of attitude coming eventually toward the war that will likely be waged to liberate Palestine when the protective umbrella of the US over the Zionist regime starts to weaken. For now Palestinians are mostly seen as victims by the western left, but if and when the resistance forces in Palestine and its allies in the region finally become strong enough to seriously confront the Zionist occupier i would not be surprised to see many of the same leftists who now denounce Russia also turn on the Palestinians.

      There is a disappointing lack of substantial dialectical analysis among the imperial core’s left and a hyper focus on the superficial aesthetics of a situation with no regard to the real historical and material context. And because many of us know little about the actual conditions on the ground in places outside of our western bubble, we are far too easily manipulated by imperialist propaganda when it is constructed to appeal to “leftist” sensibilities, to say the right buzzwords, to victimize the oppressor and villainize the victim when the latter strikes back at the former.

      • @Samubai
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        92 years ago

        You are right. I mean even the communists of China fought with KMT in order to defeat a greater enemy, the Japanese imperialists. Would ultras call them opportunists, campists and revisionists today?

  • @cayde6ml
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    2 years ago

    What the shit. I thought Socialism for All seemed pretty based until he started slandering Russia and China as imperialist.

    • @REEEEvolution
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      82 years ago

      What no reading comprehension and materialist analysis does to a mf’er.

  • @carpe_modo
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    142 years ago

    While quoting Lenin, maybe they should look up revolutionary defeatism and think about how that applies to those of us in the west. Maybe also stop forgetting what Lenin said about self determination struggles(even when they aren’t proletariat-led) and the fact that the DPR and LPR have been carrying out that struggle for nearly a decade.

  • @EuthanatosMurderhobo
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    2 years ago

    I can quote Lenin too, buddy:

    "…War is a continuation of politics. It is necessary to study the policy before the war, the policy leading and leading to the war. If the policy was imperialist, i.e., protecting the interests of financial capital, plundering and oppressing colonies and foreign countries, then the war resulting from this policy is imperialist war. If the policy was national-liberation, i.e., it expressed the mass movement against national oppression, then, as a result of such a policy, it is a national-liberation war.

    <…>

    The “defence of the fatherland” on the part of a national-oppressed country against a national-oppressive country is not a fraud, and the Socialists are not at all opposed to the “defence of the fatherland” in such a war.

    To deny “defence of the fatherland,” i.e., participation in a democratic war, is an absurdity which has nothing in common with Marxism. To embellish the imperialist war by applying to it the concept of “defence of the fatherland,” i.e., by presenting it as democratic, is to deceive the workers, to go over to the side of the reactionary bourgeoisie."

    Lenin V.I. “On the caricature of Marxism and on “imperialist economism”.

    Russian military is there at the request of DPR/LPR to defend them, remember?

    On a more serious note, not a lot of Russian oligarchs are actually winning from what’s happening, as the lazy fuckwits never wanted to bother recovering from deindustrialization of the 90-s, which is something sanctions are going to force them to do a bit of, and Russian capital simply isn’t stronk enough to be imperialist. It’s a unique case of a peripheral economy that can tell the biggest ones to go fuck themselves every now and then by the virtue of inheriting USSR’s military bling.

  • HoodProl
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    112 years ago

    What a shame, but i just listen for the audiobooks tbh.

  • @GloriousDoubleK
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    92 years ago

    They would rather reject the whole world before they rejct the west.