In Iran, the protests are unified only by what they oppose, namely the female dress code and more broadly the theocracy. However, they’re not unified by political ideology, which frequently defaults to liberalism premised on individual freedoms when you watch interviews of Iranian activists.
Should anti-imperialist US socialists at the heart of the Anglo-American empire appropriate their national flag? Yes.
No matter what political ideology Russia chooses for itself, the Anglo-American empire, driven by the hegemony of the US Dollar, will ALWAYS see the Eurasian heartland as a space to be broken up, divided, destabilised, and contained.
In 1920 Lenin redefined imperialism to mean the division of the world into “oppressor” and “oppressed” nations, with the former exploiting the latter, which comprises 70 percent of the world’s population – a clear reference to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This raises the question of how nations exploit nations, which was largely by taxation, indemnity…
Yes, happy birthday Karl Marx, but his work on political economy was incomplete as he only ever presented exactly half the conceptual picture he intended to publish before he died. In Capital 1 Marx begins with the dialectic of the commodity, saying that it has both use-value and exchange-value, the former representing the utility of the commodity, the later its price in the market.
Marxism was always split by the cold war. It was founded at a time when 30% of the world’s population either ruled over nations that were to some extent enslaved, or were at least politically independent. That part of the world, particularly Europe, produced Marxism, which embodied the subjectivity of the European working class. The ideology was universal, meaning that it attracted labouring classes from those enslaved nations.
Skimming his book ‘The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy’ (1920) because it was referenced by Domenico Losurdo’s book on Stalin to point out that white supremacist prejudices essentially reflected the geopolitical significance of the USSR as an ally of third-world national liberation movements.
You can’t have unity among Communists/”Leftists” in the Anglo empire without priorities, which you can’t have without priorities about the level of tolerance for differing opinions. Within my own lifetime…
In many dictatorships, especially ones defended by conscripted soldiers, the legitimacy of the state depends, not on legality, but on whether it can provide for its people, otherwise it collapses in revolution. Liberal democracy by contrast deifies the processes of governance rather than its outcomes…
Anti-Stalinism denigrates the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin for building “socialism in one country” while professing the correctness of Leon Trotsky’s line of “permanent revolution” which calls for “world revolution”. The reason “world revolution” was the dominant theme in the lead up to the first world war was because this was a time when the world map was dominated by European empires…
