No.

I assume “tankie” is a roundabout way to lump revolutionary leftists with those fomenting red-brown alliances. That is, a “tankie” in the modern day is a way to describe someone as Strasserist, NazBol, LaRouchite, etc.

The chances of me not being Marxist is as high as the chance imperialism collapses.

The shelf for Kautsky, Dugin, and Keynes is further down. It should be easier for you to digest.

Moishe Postone might have something interesting for you, when you’re ready to come back to earth to discover my support for North Korea and Palestine (clearly from what I wrote, if anyone spent the time to extrapolate and use some thinking skills) is not an anachist position, but is almost verbatim what Lenin and Stalin would argue.

That’s fair, I can give finishing remarks as well - I’ll make it even shorter.

I see where Marxism influenced you, but that doesn’t make you a Marxist.

You don’t know class struggle, you know struggle of civilizations and races.

That’s exactly what it is - competition. They don’t want to cooperate with China, they want to compete. I’m not talking about the domestic “free market,” I’m talking about the world economy and power politics. If the US keeps pursuing this path of foreign policy and no longer wants to play friendly, then, yes, either China or Russia (or some other country) will have to step up and be the competing imperialist power. Either that, or they have to choose the submissive role, a puppet government. There’s no way around this. We live in the era of imperialism and globalization - all countries have to be interconnected by some way and we can’t backtrack. Something like BRICS is an alternative, not a revolutionary new thing, but just a plain alternative to what already exists. That’s not inherently a good or bad thing. But when we have the US pushing countries into competiting spheres of influence, what happens in a system like this? The same that already happened before.

This isn’t a moral concept, this isn’t a voluntary thing. This is just what happens when you have a bunch of sufficiently developed capitalist countries. They will all demand imperialism at some point, that’s their aspiration, and those competing interests will interfere in the peace of all other (both capitalist and socialist) countries. People will be forced to pick sides at some point, that’s the competition.

It just sounds like a long way of saying that China and Russia should function as imperialist powers using some type of Keynesian economic policy or war economy boost. This is undeniably what the US is trying to do. They want to drive competition. Either China or Russia hardens their stance into an imperialist bloc, or the US destroys them. That’s the goal. The US will not collapse nor will the imperialist system lead by the US. Weaken, lost influence, lose relevance or merit - yes. Collapse is still a resounding no. It’s the reason China is so careful with the US, so willing to go the extra mile to satisfy, the reason China wants to cooperate in international politics as a neutral player. China has reiterated time and time again that they are against bloc formation. This is why: China doesn’t want to be seen as an imperialist power or even a competing superpower. They want cooperation with all, whether that be Russia, the US, the Eurozone, or major countries in Africa and Latin America.

If the US keeps pushing power politics, China will be forced to push back, just as Russia was pushed to do in 2022. No one seriously wants that. It will be devastating. That’s not progress, that’s reaction. The DPRK has even admitted peaceful reunification isn’t possible in relation to the South (RoK). Of course it’s the truth, but peace is always what we demand first. That can’t happen in a world dominated by capitalism, and capitalism has to be taken down consciously with great effort. Peace holds off struggle for another day, it buys time. But we can’t fool ourselves. That peace is as much of a facade as American liberal democracy. It’s stable and looks good, maybe feels good, but it’s fake, another way of obstructing reality.

Though peace can’t be shaken out of regular conflict to get rid of capitalism. It has to be liberation, the wars have to be revolutionary wars. Otherwise we’re back to step one, always on the edge of a new imperialist competitor, the ultimate aspiration for all capitalist countries at sufficient level of development. At the moment, only Palestine and the DPRK are really capable of fighting those types of wars. Even if the US adopts an America First policy (we all know this is just coded fascism), we know they’ll still perform covert operations illegally and against their supposed policy.

It’s socialism or barbarism.

You mean to tell me that Israel, with all those billions of dollars, couldn’t see with their own eyes people flying in to their territory with guns? There is no convoluted middle east history, at least not any more than anywhere else on this planet. There is no excuse to kill anyone in violation of international law, especially when the politicians guiding that policy see the enemy as less than human and makes reference to genocidial intent in doing so. If you want to talk about history, the history that is so convoluted and confusing to you, just start in 1947-1948. That should make it a lot easier for you to understand.

Every event in ‘Israeli’ history can be checked. They never acted in genuine self-defense. They always had ulterior motives, to drive their force as an imperialist proxy with a massive budget, extremist ideology, and settler-colonialism. There is no blame game. Palestinians have fought against occupation. Israel is the one occupying. Now this rougue state is claiming, implicitly, that they lay claim to a Greater Israel project that threatened the entire Middle East and North Africa region. Rather than occupying territory in war, they occupy territory in aims of extermination of the native population. If they were an occupying force in war, they would be required to ensure every citizen has access to food, water, security, and other necessities of life. Instead, they occupy territories and kill or displace the population there. Either it’s not a war or this rogue entity is incapable of conducting itself without constantly committing war crimes.

I have to be honest. The only thing that will happen is either 1.) The US goes full mask-off fascism; or 2.) militant union organizing and popularization of left-wing, even explicitly Communist, ideas. Yes it’s true that imperialism is broken, it’s also true that the US is running out of force abroad. It’s still an economic power house with a functioning (albiet backsliding) liberal democracy. No one really likes the government, but you can tell at least 30-40% of the population is on board 100% with pushing desired candidates and they believe the US has a chance in electoralism.

If you want to know the truth, we are essentially going to have to repeat the work of SDS, the Black Panthers, and all the other post-Civil Rights activisist left-wing movements. Now, instead of the Russian Empire going down as an imperialist force in favor of the Communists, we will have to organize to make that happen in the US or the UK.

As much as we clown on the Democrats and their supporters, it’s true that if the Democrats fail we will not have a liberal democracy. Fascism is weak and fragile, but it gets the job done for whoever needs that job done. Bullets are cheap. Prison labor is already raking in plenty of cash and the US doesn’t care about overcapacity in the cells or abuse of solitary confinement. Biden himself is already sliding away from the liberal democratic facade that at least Obama was able to keep up. Trump did real damage and pushed us away from keeping up our image, but, yes, there were real conditions behind it (namely between 1980 and 2009).

A collapse is still a pipe dream, either way. Even when the feudal order was weakened and unable to sustain itself, we still had many bloody conflicts and revolutions to push through. The monarchs didn’t care, they fled or escaped along with the aristocrats and landowners and landlords. Even some decades after the French Revolution, people were lamenting the death of the old order. To this day we have anti-revolution propaganda from monarchs.

In all honesty, we can exploit external conditions but we still have to realize those conditions alone are not revolutionary or even necessarily progressive. What the US is doing right now is exactly what we expect in a weakened state that used to be so powerful. But this exact policy is also going to force China and Russia to be more agggressive, more competitive, and even form alliances and tighten up on separating their sphere of influence from that of “the West” or the US. This is very bad. This will push China to align more with the right-wing of the CPC. We don’t want that. Thankfully we have Xi Jingping as prevention, but I don’t trust whoever is going to succeed. It’s too shakey, too unpredictable.

I still follow in my belief that we need fresh revolution. If Americans or the British can’t do it, there’s going to be some serious issues. It will be the equivalent of the German Revolution failing. The US wants China and Russia to get into the politcs of bloc-formation, while the US is also pushing to allow Western Europe to go fascist. Then we have Nigeria playing too neutral. The US has Argentina, Peru, Ecuador in their pockets as well. The Sahel is too weak at the moment.

I won’t entertain an idea of collapse for these reasons alone. It’s too dangerous to spread that idea. We have decades to keep pushing.

If anyone wants their prediction to be true, let us pick the most liberal of choices, say this can happen by 2050. Then, expect to be actively organizing regulary starting today (if not ten years earlier) and continuing until the 2050s. That’s about three or more whole decades, not including a success story where you’d have to also manage the governing body and/or manage civil war and/or manage post-revolution struggle.

It’s not going to collapse. It’s more likely that we’ll have a full-scale inter-imperialist conflict before anything resembling a collapse would occur, and I still don’t think it’ll be a collapse, for any participants.

You would need revolution, requiring revolutionary conditions. Like the ruling capitalist class of the United States turning to a situation where capitalism just can’t function anymore. We know, based on the 20th Century, that these conditions haven’t really occurred in “the West”, except temorarily and only causing at best what amounted to general strike, increased union activity, or spontaneous riot/uprising. Maybe we can give credit to the failed revolutions of Germany (Sparticist) and France (Paris Commune).

Aside from that, they turn their inability to rule into an irrationalist or even illiberal form of government. They strip away the facade and turn to fascism. That’s how they save themselves from crisis, that paired with the ability to extract resources a la carte from the countries oppressed by the imperialist/neo-colonial relationship. If they don’t bend to the will, we can crush their economies or incite political crisis. On top of that, the US is the most highly advanced and most stable liberal democracy in the history of democracy as we know it. They’re doing just fine and a general crisis of capitalism can be managed to benefit exactly who needs to benefit and hurt exactly who they need to hurt.

If anything does happen, however, that creates revolutionary conditions, we have to remember that there is no economic determinism, no inevitable crisis/crash/collapse, no guarantee of choosing socialism over barbarism. China isn’t going to save us. The deep global recession won’t save us. Accelerationism isn’t going to work.

It’s simple. If you want revolution, you need to make it happen. There is no other solution, no easy way around it, no shortcuts.

Lowest approval out of all recent presidents and people want me to believe my single sympathy vote can save them. I don’t think I have the heart to tell some of them my voting habits when the time inevitably comes. Investors and major leaders already accepted the good numbers for a Trump victory and they’re hoping for a good year in business when he rolls around again, some fresh profit margins. They don’t understand that I’m not rich enough to decide, the rulers of the country already made their picks and they won’t accept less without some serious promises from Biden

The numbers are going up and there are far more campuses involved, iirc.

Colorado, Arizona, Louisiana, South Carolina, Oregon from what I can see. Check the latest NYTimes article. And yes, there are already mass arrests being made at these more recent campus protests. They are taking this very seriously.

I really thought Israel was gone in 2022 and was going to accept a silent death. Look how wrong I was to assume…

It’s a real dissapointment living in a time where it’s bad to criticize the Ukrainian “national hero symbols” (AKA Nazi collaboration symbols). I actually read first hand accounts from World War II Jewish populations, even ones written by anti-“Stalinist” authors that lived in regions where there were alleged local Soviet politicians with antisemitic leanings. You know what they had to say? The nationalists were known to hide from the Soviets, but they treated their encounters with the Germans like a game. All that energy to kill young Communists and round up Jews, but every time they “hid” from the Germans they always ended up fighting together against the Soviets.

You know who else unified their nation and to this day has to be credited for a national identity and unity? Benito Mussolini among Italians. I never thought I’d have to explain how that incompetent yet genocidal maniac is a bad image, but we have this Meloni gal as Prime Minister right now.

Why should I be ashamed to say Communists put these criminals to death and should be glorified for it? But no, supporting NATO with Mussolini-loving Meloni, never-denazified-Germany, and their unofficial recruits in Ukraine is more important to our beloved “Western Values” (Hiterlite-coded lingo for pan-European neo-fascist values in my opinion) than defending the legacy of the people who saved Europe from barbarism.

There is no value with Russian foreign policy right now, no mass movement to use the potential for heightened class contradiction. Besides, modern day Russia is just the hotbed for disguntled nationalists who only exist with even a modicum of power because of US strategic interests. The ideology guiding the ruling class of Russia is bland, incompatible with the concept of class struggle, and archaic. I see Russia to China as Canada is to the US. Do I really care that Canada may have better standards than the US or better foreign policy or better whatever? No, not really. I’m looking at countries that can actually do something useful for me, and the choices are between the US and China, not between Canada and Russia.

China > > > > > > North Korea > > > Russia

Their worldview is unscientific. You just have to educate the people willing to be educated and hope their lessons come back to people like those in your family.

If you can’t agree on the fundamentals, the higher level issues are going to be far too abstract. If compassion and being nice is where they start, you have to meet them there. to be compassionate and nice, an American, especially a liberal American, would have to refute death and killing of any sort. If they are “bothsidesing” the issue, that is consistent with their framework.

This same framework is being constantly reinforced through other family members, middle class liberals, liberal news outlets, government officials, think tanks, and active digital spaces.

Unless you can find someone in the bunch who understands colonialism and struggle/resistance against oppressors, you are only putting yourself on the offensive. Pushing back would just further reinforce their ideas.

Try what Kwame Ture said in response to someone who opposes violence here. Think about the situation. If the only way for a slave to free himself is to kill his master, what should the slave do? Watch part I and II of this speech and ask your family some open ended questions about the oppressed-oppressor relationship. See if you can get anyone to consider that Israel and Palestine are in no way on equal footing. Explain what relationship exists. Explain how oppressed people had to fight for their freedoms. Explain that some anti-colonial forces committed some atrocities while explaining how the relationship makes peace between oppressed and oppressor impossible. Explain how one needs to focus on the primary contradiction, that bringing up one or two atrocities is a tactic used to distract from the broader relationship and the broader moral and compassionate position of the resistance.

If you can’t find a single person within the circle of any family member to get on board with this, you just need to move on to people willing to learn and willing to listen. Educate the others, maybe your family isn’t primed to hear it yet.

Why do we need to do favors for the people of other countries to just force them in line with our policies? Why can’t we just let Cuba trade with the US, China and Russia, and the EU, keeping their connection with their usual countries in Latin America and Africa? Easing a brutal foreign policy that has removed billions in value from another country only by strict condition is pretty fucked up. With all the talk with the US and their freedom, we should really let Cuba have real freedom, their own freedom.

Unfortunately wouldn’t be so meaningful without also doing the same for North Korea. North Korea and Cuba are brotherly nations with similar short-term and long-term goals, with great admiration for each other. There is no excuse for most sanctions on these two countries, even by the standards of the US, and each country has made it abundantly clear that they will do everything they can to keep their entire populations educated, fed, housed, and politically active.