chapotraphouse

No, it's important to, as Mao said, properly delineate who's our friends and who's our enemies. Otherwise, your org will do cringey shit like the DSA delegation snubbing the Cuban president and talking to a bunch of traitors working for the CIA instead.

Unless you want your org to be completely isolated from the international community and abandon internationalism, it has to connect and break bread with other orgs throughout the world and perhaps even anti-imperialist governments. While the DSA shit the bed with regards to Cuba, I think the DSA also send a delegation to Venezuela where they met Maduro. Obviously, Maduro isn't going to meet with a bunch of dipshits who shittalk him by calling him an authoritarian dictator, but by personally meeting with Maduro, they have tacitly (and rightfully) support Maduro and uphold the Bolivarian Revolution.

I really agree with this but I’ll add a little more. A lot of the theory written by people like Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao occurred in the context of historical upheaval during which theory was absolutely necessary to chart a path forward for an actually existing political movement. So those writings should be understood first as practical and only second as abstractly philosophical.

Theoretical development is still worth doing in order to prepare, but there is way too much emphasis on abstract correctness over real successes.

good comment

If you stand back and be silent when "enemy" countries get slandered, you are legitimizing imperalism and help cultural imperalism do its work. This applies on a micro & marco-level.

You failed to consider thoughts and prayers.

Sadly China has not been interested in actively building international socialism in a long time. Maybe that will change one day, but not yet.

It’s the standard Western leftist take that we have seen regurgitated so many times over the years.

It is no different that asking: why is Iran so conservative? why is Afghanistan so conservative? why are so many countries in the Global South so conservative? Why don’t they elect a left wing government that we can support?

Hint: read up the history of left wing movements from those countries, what happened to them and especially the role of US/Western imperialists behind it.

Again, it is sad we continue to see this kind of ahistorical and non-materialist takes from the Western left. It provides no explanatory power to the material conditions of our current world, nor does it have any prescriptive power to guide left wing movements toward defeating capitalism.

It ends up with a “good guy” vs “bad guy” delineation with a bit more nuance but really not so much different from your standard liberal take.

Argentina is one of the best real world examples on why voting for left always end up on the right. Again, with this kind of discourse you cannot explain how someone like Milei could get elected and so you end up blaming the Argentinian people for being stupid for electing a right wing libertarian to destroy their own country.

There is very little room for left wing movements in the Global South to survive until Western imperialism has been completely and thoroughly defeated.

But you don't support Ukraine, so that means you want all Ukrainians fed into a woodchipper and Putin to rule all of Eurasia forever

Liberals really mock conservatives for having no nuance, then turn around and proceed to show they have none either

There is a reason we say "critical support"

If I were a Iranian I would have major issues with my national government. If I were Russian I would have major issues with my elected leaders. If I were Cuban, Vietnamese, or Chinese, I'm sure I would find something to complain about.

From my current position, in the imperial core, I refuse to speak ill of the countries working to dismantle American hegemony.

Russia has a much better track record in Africa than China going way back to Tsar Nicholas II. It says a lot that even when Russia was at its most imperialist and reactionary, it still played a progressive role in Africa. Because if it wasn't for Tsarist Russia under Tsar Nicholas II, Ethiopia wouldn't have done so well in the First Italo-Ethiopian War, perhaps even be colonized by the Italians. At the height of European colonization of Africa, Ethiopia was the only African country that held onto its sovereignty (Liberia doesn't count since Liberia was a de facto US colony), and much of it was thanks to Tsarist Russia.

Russia's hands are almost completely clean when it comes to Africa. More Africans died from being tossed overboard in a single slave ship headed to the Americas than however many Africans Wagner or any other Russian-affiliated group has killed. As long as the current Russia leader isn't as bad as some inbred anti-Semitic chump who got owned by communists, Russia will most likely continue to play a progressive role in Africa.

Another factor that people often neglect is that Russia has been canceling debt across the Global South owed to both the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia. From 1991 to 2018, Russia has canceled over $140 billion debt in the Global South countries. Just last year, Russia canceled another $23 billion debt in Africa.

Russia is a very weak economy but even Putin understands that these African countries cannot possibly repay their debt. Russia could have used the debt to push for privatization in Africa and take over their assets to further exploitation as a colonial power, like what Western imperialists are doing through IMF.

Russia doesn’t do that. It is fundamentally not the same as a Western imperialist power no matter how much people try to equate Russia to the US empire.

Look at how the French furthered its colonialist ambitions in Africa through CFA franc and treat those countries and you’d instantly understand why people from Burkina Faso like Russia so much.

On the other hand, and unfortunately, China still has some issues with their image across the Global South (and I say this as a Chinese myself). Many countries are still quite suspicious of China’s intentions and there is an impression that China is only interested in doing business where profit matters.

The Chinese geopolitical strategy since Mao’s time has been to maximize benefit to its internal development even at the expense of other countries of the developing world, which is fundamentally different from the Soviet Union where foreign aid was dished out to arm anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles. As a result, even Russia as a capitalist country today continues to benefit from the good will the Soviet Union had sown over the years.

This is why I always say that if China is serious about leading the anti-imperialist movement against the global hegemon, it can start by using its vast amount of foreign reserves to pay back the Global South debt. This will improve China’s image in the eyes of many Global South countries.

From the Tucker Carlson interview. Putin compares Russia with the US. Putin says "We are bourgeois now as you are. We are a market economy and there is no communist party with power."

Depends, would they still have tried to out-pizza the Hut?

If not for the constant US/EU meddling and shitfuckery, there wouldn't be a Russian Federation nor a war in Ukraine, because there would be a USSR

Russia is literally the only reason why countries like Cuba or DPRK are still standing

This is an overstatement. These places are standing because they literally fought and WON against the US. Give them the credit they deserve.