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Cake day: July 24th, 2023

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  • all of the infrastructural manifestations of fascism are here: sweeping police state (bodily autonomy, crackdowns on anti-zionism), paramilitary infiltration (3 percenters, proud boys), dehumanization of the other (queer, immigrant, muslim, arab, jews especially anti-zionist ones), etc. is already here.

    the last things left are explicit bans on proletarian organizations (unions, socialist parties) and sweeping restrictions on information (internet monitoring & censorship, especially of sexuality and anti-imperialism). oh wait, they’re already getting started on those (new york & antizionist social media, kosa/restrict, porn bans). fuck





  • Basically it’s self-professed centrists who support “the gays”, NATO, & Ukraine (PS) plus their right-wing Christian conservative allies (OLa’NO) vs nationalist welfare chauvinists who hate Roma people and “George Soros” (Smer-SD) but are NATO-skeptic and want out of Ukraine, plus their right-wing nationalist allies who like Josef Tiso (SNS). Our good Nazis versus their bad Nazis, am I right?

    Slovakia is a socially-conservative country in which since the fall of the socialist bloc, the nominal center-left and center-right have both expressed reactionary cultural attitudes. PS is a relatively new party that has been an exception; given that they would govern in coalition with right-wing Christian conservatives and with a socially-conservative center-left in opposition, I doubt their professed stance would do much other than pinkwash NATO. I’m not going to hold my nose and cheer for Smer, although if they actually pull Slovakia out of NATO it would be extremely funny (albeit unlikely — Smer is a party of the establishment and has governed for most of post-2000 without doing this, not some radical populist party as the media paints it).




  • Lenin was not a member of a purely vanguard Marxist party either; the RSDLP contained genuinely vanguardist elements, but also thoroughly reformist ones that agitated for better labor conditions but downplayed and even abandoned their struggle against the repressive Tsarist state (i.e. “Legal Marxism”). Organizations such as DSA in the States and Die Linke in Germany are similarly “Legal Socialist” or “Legal Social-Democratic” parties; unlike pure reformist parties (SPD, British Labour) they openly criticize capitalism, but are afraid to openly challenge the liberal constitutional order for (admittedly valid) fears of being criminalized. But there are elements that are worth engaging with, just as Lenin did. There is no shame in splitting to protect the revolutionary faction from revisionists/liberals, but it’s also not ideal.

    I would suggest to engage in the party’s associated organizations (youth orgs, student orgs). Look for what interests you, whether it is community/labor organizing, direct action, education, mutual aid, electoral campaigns, or even just showing up at a variety of the above and volunteering/baking cookies or something. If the party’s organizations have an open political culture, there are bound to be activists you have affinity for. Develop your politics with those comrades, participate in readings/campaigns with your circle, and maybe evolve into a revolutionary faction. Only by demonstrating that the revolutionaries of the party are more capable of leading the proletariat than reformists can Marxist-Leninists in a left party gain hegemony over the broader social-democratic movement.