isn't this the same group that went to Cuba and snubbed Diaz-Canal, met with "dissidents" and then wrote a lengthy article about how Cuba was bad and won't listen to other voices on "the left?"

I keep seeing articles saying that Russia has told the US it will retaliate against the US. So like, are we all going to get irradiated or worse because Biden's worm-filled brain is stuck inside the end-of-history? Is Russia in a position to end the war in Ukraine? I remember reading a lot in the news mega about the lines finally moving appreciably... but did that stop happening or is Russia advancing still? I feel like that might be the only way to actually stop the escalation. Other nations are starting to call the US's bluff, but it seems like the US regime just pretends they weren't bluffing and it keeps doing the dumbest shit imaginable and choosing mass death over a wounded ego. I just don't want everyone to die because an Alzheimers patient wound up in the US presidency in a sick combination of elder abuse, class warfare, and neoliberal hubris.

The US has showed absolutely no signs of lessening the sanctions against Cuba. If anything deepening their relationship with Russia could ease a lot of their economic problems, as Russia has created parallel trade systems that avoid sanctions and the dollar. Russia actually began to cut Cuba off and abandon them before the overthrow of the soviet union, as an attempt at appeasing and winning the approval of the empire. Now that Russia has cast off any illusion of US support or cooperation, building a relationship to Cuba is desirable again. Cuba loses nothing, but stands to gain a lot

idk how anyone could allow something like that to be tabled in good conscience

lmao, i take back anything i have ever said about them that had any nuance. imperialist running-dogs.

I remember when Biden won in 2020 a bunch of his sycophant politicos were essentially saying out loud that the lesson they had learned from 2016-2020 was that they can simply invent reality. They almost used those words. They looked at polling data about peoples perceptions of the economy before and after the 2016 elections, where people gave partisan answers (like republican affiliated people saying the economy was terrible and then the weeks after trumps inauguration they said that it was doing great-- but nothing had really changed) they saw that, and the capitulation of any Democratic Party left-wing (in both 2016 and 2020) and got completely absorbed in a sort of Hegelian idealism where they are able to dictate reality to whoever identifies with the democrats (or not with the republicans).

In a way, they were not wrong about how things had operated during the "end of history", more or less, except for the fact that there are moments where 1) material conditions can deteriorate and the moment the US electorate is subject to worsening conditions their narrative can fail 2) alternative media, like what can proliferate on social media, can expose the complete disconnect between words and actions and move consciousness.

You can see the hubris, when turbo-libs talk about how the real problem is people "not understanding" or "not knowing" all of Biden's "many accomplishments" or that these simple rubes don't know that the economy is actually doing "great." They have an incredibly powerful ability to control the way reality is presented for a ton of people, and that success was even on full display during the beginning of the SMO/Russia entering the Donbas & Ukraine. For a few weeks everyone had fucking Ukrainian flags out and everyone on tv was talking about Ukraine as a bastion of freedom and democracy, without knowing a fucking thing about Ukraine. I think back to 1999 to 2012 and I think a lot of the political class believed what they were saying about this policy or that policy. Because the window of debate was so narrow nearly at all times and nothing had a sense of urgency. Now they simply rage when the public adopts a belief that falls outside of what they are trying to construct. It was partly what they were seething about with the Facebook/russia-gate/fake news conspiracies that forced the tech bourgeoisie to adopt a more hard line on "acceptable" content and deployed state-sanctioned "debunkers" ... this is also was what paved the way to banning TikTok-- it wouldn't have been possible if the ruling class hadn't identified this as their primary challenge.

Sad!

Given the timing of this, I wonder if the US’s “red line” on Rafah was actually something Egypt told the US was a red line for them. The fact that “israel” rejected the (i think) US-Egyptian-Quatari ceasefire proposal that the resistance had accepted, and then entered Rafah the same day. … maybe the US was really only worried about having two client states at odds with each other and trying to have it both ways

In their mind, there is no reason to test for anything if they aren’t going to do anything with the results. They won’t do anything because the CDC has already lost so much credibility any guidance they give will cause half of the population to do the opposite thing. If pundits and officials were honest with the public, they would just explain that the CDC has become a defunct entity, and that it has failed at its only purpose: public health. They can’t do anyt meaningful public health work without public trust or the will to wield any kind of authority (which they don’t have). They won’t say any of that, so instead any charitable reading by liberals seems inexplicable instead of malicious and irresponsible.

Don't let this get to you, keep working to build a movement. I am sorry a lot of your friends are so unprincipled and have decided to act antagonistically toward you. it actually should be against their interests, but they live in an idealist bubble that is only maintained through policing the morality of other organizers through informal power structures and exclusion. These anarchist/chauvinists are in fact only a small minority even if they are very prevalent in inward-facing organizing circles, it is only a symptom of the defunct history & nature of the US left and the discontinuity in the US communist movement. However "very serious" these "organizers" are, they are not representative of the masses of people which is what we are looking to organize. Don't worry about them. I think their influence in the movement for Palestinian liberation is being very exaggerated in this thread, a lot of it seems to focus on the PNW. Most parts of the country don't have such a large anti-communist-left scene, and the student movement is a real mass movement that has incorporated so many different communities, most of this stuff becomes completely irrelevant day-to-day

idk, that's one example, and even if I disagree I can see why someone might say that. that is something anarchists say about every organization because anarchists don't "recruit" really. but I have more than a few direct counterexamples I have personally witnessed, so I would not say that encampments are primarily organized by anarchist groups. that is probably just something that varies from city to city

I guess this is the thread where hexbear learns that the student occupations are overwhelmingly organized by anarchist groups who don't like the PSL

not what I have seen at all. it isn't just being "overly sectarian" it is anticommunism-- literally fed shit. they risk a whole lot to pull this off and then use their statement to shit on communists

Yeah, this just seems divorced from reality and idealist in itself. A communist party is shaped by its membership, for sure, some of its original members had been a part of a party led by Sam Marcy, and had found their way to Marxism-Leninism that way, but the party has grown dramatically and that historical footnote has become more and more of just that, a footnote. People are joining the party identifying as Marxist Leninist… Sam Marcy’s contribution is sort of a footnote outside of those who left SWP, as the Global Class War Thesis was basically a class analysis of the Cold War during the Korean War identifying Imperialism as the primary contradiction(not exactly mind blowing these days). What is more, the PSL deviates significantly from your definition of Marcyism because they look to AES as socialist in character, and support them, with their own contradictions that leftists in the imperial core aren’t in a position to judge.

It is sort of idealist to always constantly view struggle through the lens of abstract tendencies and thoughts without giving consideration to the actual concrete reality at work and the people doing social practice. You are labeling a party because 70 years ago some guy led a different party? It is sort of meaningless. They identify themselves as an independent communist party, Marxist-Leninist and antifactionalist. Nobody is joining because of Sam Marcy. Education materials don’t typically mention him all that frequently, if they do at all. If anything all of this minutia about what constitutes a tendency is super alienating to working class people and often irrelevant today, because what other communists were struggling over internally in a different historical context, although important to study and learn from, isn’t really going to provide perfect answers to the material reality of organizing today, here, in a different context. We are so far from achieving what we need to do to build a revolutionary party, constantly splitting hairs without grounding it in practice isn’t really productive

not my experience. most branches had a connection/organizing relationship to sjp and other Palestinian organizations from well before October of 23. When we mobilized in October in most parts of the country worked in concert with them, with the guidance to take Palestinian organizer's lead. Many, but not all, of the student organizers likely have already been working with psl before the encampments. When the students started to form them, in my experience a lot of student organizers reach out to whoever has worked with them in the past for support. it is a mass movement, but one that psl has been incorporated into, in part because we have had longstanding relationships with Palestinian organizers... psl runs pretty openly these days too, and outside of answer and people's forum, there isn't really much of a proxy or trojan horse situation going on these days in most parts of the country, because the prevailing thought is that the country is more open to socialism than had been historically the case

nobody in the PSL identifies as Marcyite, its not really a thing. I don’t think he really deserves that kind of recognition. Most people in the PSL identify as ML, and the party is more open about describing itself t way than it might have been

dude looks like he just slithered out of his subterranean chrysalis before he could fully moult.

I agree completely. The DSA has been an anti-communist project from its conception. This person claims to be giving a "marxist critique" though, and that is what I was addressing. The unfortunate reality is that many people with revolutionary aspirations end up being siphoned into DSA and believe that they are communists. But in reality, most people who join the DSA are exposed to these garbage takes, the incessant factionalism, and ineffectual action, and think that that is what socialist organizing is. They become disaffected and it drives people away from communist parties and organizing in general when the goal should be to bring people in and change their understanding of democracy into a participatory, socialist one. Most DSA members are just members on paper because of this.

Her criticisms come from an incredibly idealist perspective and are divorced from any understanding of power or how a communist party functions. Even lauding Fidel, but ignoring him: "within the revolution, everything; against the revolution, nothing". introducing "alternative leftist voices" for its own sake accomplishes nothing but sating the unending liberal tendency to act indecisively and fight amongst each other, even when facing an existential threat. Constantly railing against the "bureaucracy" and constantly trying to create a distinction between the communist party from the masses, from the perspective of an outsider... from the imperial core... from the US no less, the primary enemy of the Cuban revolution... It is incredibly telling that that is what she spends her time on. If she is such an incredible organizer and ardent communist then she should focus on revolution within the US

I agree. The US government has levied untold suffering onto the Cuban people and the Cuban President was still willing to sit down with them. The US is Cuba's oppressor and despite that there are people in the DSA who would like to waste their breath pretending that they have a principled Marxist critique rather than combat their own governments cruelty. Imperial Chauvinism. I am sure that Maria thinks that she has a better understanding of Cuba's conditions than Cubans themselves, but she is just wasting people's time and hurting the movement she pretends to espouse.

Cool, why skip out on a meeting with the President of Cuba's government to discuss it in a constructive way then?

"To indulge in irresponsible criticism in private instead of actively putting forward one's suggestions to the organization. To say nothing to people to their faces but to gossip behind their backs, or to say nothing at a meeting but to gossip afterwards. To show no regard at all for the principles of collective life but to follow one's own inclination. This is a second type."

Maria has been working non stop for as long as I've known her. She's one of the best comrades I've had the pleasure of working with. She is a machine that turns liberals into communists. She has tirelessly organized for trans rights in Florida of all places. She is an anti-imperialist through and through.

"To regard oneself as having rendered great service to the revolution, to pride oneself on being a veteran, to disdain minor assignments while being quite unequal to major tasks, to be slipshod in work and slack in study. This is a tenth type."