Yeah morality is a tricky subject.

One the one hand, I’ve never seen any convincing argument that morality is in any way objective when seen from a purely areligious material viewpoint. You can always argue things like murder and rape are morally wrong, but someone can easily just say “no it’s not” and you have no real argument besides invoking some religious or idealist postulates.

On the other hand, any one of us seeing some atrocity such as a child being abused or a mass attack on civilians will certainly trigger something inside of you that registers the event as morally wrong. The vast majority of people from all societies and times in history see these same groups of acts as morally abhorrent to a certain extent. This could just be some built in feature of humans’ biology and basal social instincts that consider these acts right or wrong, but that implies morality is just some lower level animal instinct to survive and that these acts, when looked at through a logical scientific lens, have no significance other than how it affects society and future events. Right and wrong are no longer real things but just what someone likes and doesn’t like. The idea of a child being murdered but no one knowing about it or caring meaning that the event has no real significance doesn’t sit well with me though, logically or emotionally, and I doubt it does to others either.

This is really kind of a non answer, but I think it gives a really good glimpse into why so many people who understand Marxism or are part of the proletariat or who otherwise should “know better” than to indulge in capitalist societal constructs still have strong moral and even religious convictions that have no basis in dialectical materialism. Many people aren’t religious because they fell for some state sponsored scheme of social control, but because there is much more to being human and living than just applying scientific social theory to your life. Religious and moral structures provide things that I personally believe humans, not being unfeeling robots but highly developed versions of irrational animals, can’t fill in other ways. At least not for a long, long time; possibly until fully formed world communism has been establish, and even then I’m not super sure.

To end this barely coherent rant, MLs would do well to understand that people will stubbornly cling to moral and religious structures because people can only be so rational without losing a distinctly obvious but indescribable part of being human. We all feel morality, and can’t properly ascribe it a material basis, but nevertheless should engage with it with others as it has proven a powerful tool in the struggle to ultimately establish a post capitalist society.

If things keep going in Ukraine as they’ve been and Russia comes out with the massive strategic victory that I think they will, Putin will be incredibly popular within Russia. Russia will be loaded from massive oil revenues from the price spikes and be looked up to by the anti imperialist world. Basically whatever he says goes at that point. I don’t know the guy, but it doesn’t seem like he’s a hardcore capitalist nor very a big fan of what the USSR was when he grew up. Seems like he just values Russian sovereignty and stability. Imo he’ll probably stay de facto leader for a long time, and if the CPRF gets enough popular support to take majority power in the duma, he might back them for stability’s sake. Idk if that would lead to a DOTP or something more like Bolivia and Venezuela with their socialist parties having power in a bourgeois state, but that’s a possibility. Kind of a remote one at that, though.

Much more likely though is United Russia stays the dominant party and the same sort of state capitalism remains. I honestly think Russia will be one of the last states to have a revolution simply because I figure they’ll be in such a stable and powerful position at the end of this war.

So that’s why all American politicians are 90 years old. The brain melange gives them extended life. Mitch McConnell is even turning into a Shai Halud himself

You’re definitely right in the short term. There’s no possible way a revolution would succeed in America as it stands right now. Things will get really bad and massive repression and open fascism will likely follow. But that can’t last long. The US has almost no internal economy. Post WWI Germany at least had a relatively intact industrial base for the Nazis to seize and send into overdrive to fund its military and terror campaigns. If the US’s resource supplies from puppet states in Latin America and Africa and it’s manufacturing bases in China, India, and Vietnam get cut off, US society will slam to a halt. And I think this likely will happen once countries are certain the US can’t retaliate against them for resisting anymore, which is coming soon enough. People won’t be able to buy food or basic supplies. The military won’t be able to get fuel, bullets, or jet/tank equipment. The US won’t be able to have the military/police successfully do anything, be it attack its own citizens or any foreign nation. It might flail out before all this occurs and try to fire nukes at China or something, but they’d likely all get intercepted and America invaded. Call me overly optimistic but I think it will be quite shocking how rapidly the US state falls apart, and stays broken, without it’s imperial spoils

Just because revolutions are class wars doesn’t mean the work like a typical war, most of the time. You won’t see factory unions leading tank battles against the 2nd armor division. The American Revolution will be a rise of organization and intensity of worker agitation and national liberation movements, caused precisely by the failing power of the US, taking the reigns of power from the collapsing US state. As the US loses its grip on the international proletarian labor pool, which its currently doing a fantastic job at, the American bourgeoisie will have no choice but to bring back all those contradictions they successfully exported a century ago in a desperate attempt to retain their profit margin. Labor laws will be stripped, mass shootings will skyrocket, police repression will be rampant, and Republican/Democrat political theater will go bananas as they try desperately to get Americans to focus on literally anything but class consciousness. This all in an attempt to keep the bourgeois way of life intact.

This ironically is the best cocktail of ingredients to induce revolutionary fervor. With the USD inflating to Weimar Mark levels, a complete loss of international support and legitimacy with Europe falling to pieces over Ukraine, structural break down of the government due to political infighting, and a non-existent productive base leading to economic disintegration, the most expensive military in the world will be left with no supplies, no organization, and no soldiers (you really think US soldiers will kill their own countrymen if their not at least getting paid?) At that point the US will either have disintegrated into chaos or, if we’re lucky, have an organized proletarian movement take the reigns of power locally and nationally simply by being the only real organized political force left.

I give it 15 years tops