The masses are the drivers of history, not the polarity of the world. Your faith should be in the masses, instead of Russia, BRICS, and geopolitics.
GucciMane
joined 2 years ago
Also I’d like to add, I totally believe revolution is possible in the 1st world, at least in america since that’s what I’m familiar with, and I’m not a 3rd worldist. I just think the revolution here will take multiple stages.
The more involved I am in IRL organizing, the less interested I am in this site and the more I find it downright cringe…the things you guys talk about, even a lot of the topics brought up in this thread, don’t matter at all outside of this site.
Edit to bring it closer to the top of my post: I’ve been here since the start.
I used to browse r/FULLCOMMUNISM years ago as a teenager who was new to and interested in communism, until I politically outgrew it. Kinda starting to feel the same way about this place, that like my politics have changed enough to outgrow y’all. Btw I’ve been here since the site was started.
Also, Maoism (and I’m not talking about gonzaloism, weird cult stuff, or 3rd worldism) would solve 99% of the problems of the western left. That’s probably the bigger unpopular opinion no hexberian would want to hear lmao. The Maoist anti-CCP movements in the Philippines and India make any movement here look complete child’s play. In fact they make western movements in general look like child’s play…the Black Panthers (who I idolize btw lol), the closest we’ve ever had to a “vanguard” (supposedly? even though the BPP was more of a broad unity group, rather than the most advanced sections of the working class that a vanguard is supposed to be..anyway), took 2 decades of fascism and the assassination of Fred Hampton, and were vanquished. Meanwhile, 3rd world movements, which any hexbearian would roll their eyes over, probs because they’ve been going on for so long, have endured decades of CIA-backed forced disappearences, imprisonment, torture, surveillance, and killings of 10s of thousands of their comrades (how many Indian and Filipino “Fred Hamptons” do you think have been killed in the protracted people’s wars so far?) and yet they’ve only continued growing. Without selling out like the Communist Party of China has. This is the kind of politically mature, advanced, anti-revisionist movement, nothing less than the movement to establish a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, that I want to build in this country, which is probably a different vision from some DSA settlers who stan china because it’s done social democratic stuff for its people lmao. Now I’m not mad at americans or the movement here, and I totally understand why it’s so impotent, but kind of going back to my first statement my experiences on the streets are really different from the concerns and topics prioritized here, because I meet a lot of people who agree with me. They’re not interested in caping for Shenzhen sweatshops, they’re interested in building socialism.
Federating was a mistake lmaooo
Hey, sorry for the no response, life is busy but I can dm you sometime this weekend.
From an article on Maoist organizing techniques, specifically the Mass Line:
We go to the masses, conducting mass meetings, discussing situations and problems with them at bus stops, demonstrations, classrooms, workplaces, bars, homes, churches, and wherever else they can be found. Consider the mass line a sort of factory except instead of products, we make revolution. The ideas, correct ones, from the masses, represent the raw materials. Everywhere we go, our task is to ask people what’s going on in their communities and on their jobs. The police are killing people. There is struggle with landlords. The houseless are being suppressed. Alright. What are we going to do about it? This is another thing we must ask ourselves, and the masses. Prating and whining are not revolutionary solutions, neither is begging the power structure that keeps us in these atrocious situations in the first place for some warmed over solution. Maoists understand that the only way to develop a revolutionary movement is to actually go among the people, do research, talk to everybody and collect both correct and incorrect ideas, and develop ourselves theoretically to ensure that we are able to tell the difference between the two.
And the most important part:
Maoists seek to unite the advanced, win over the intermediate (most people are intermediate), and isolate the worst of the backward.
Every person you encounter falls into 1 of these 3 groups. Usually, like in this case you’re explaining, class relations and material interests come first in deciding where they are (so it’s typical that a petty bourgeoisie will trend towards backward, proletariats may be more intermediate etc). Your job is to ignore the backward, and conduct political education among the intermediate and advanced sections of the masses. So that means really listening to and getting to know people, and more specifically their concerns and the things they care about the most. Then, the goal is to connect these things that they care about to socialism (or depending on where the person is, connecting what they care about to prerequisite ideas like anti-capitalism, with the goal of building up to revolutionary socialism).
This is the concept of agitation. Agitation means to connect the interests of the people to socialism. An exploited worker who cannot pay rent, an immigrant who faces violence from the state, a minority who faces white supremacist or state violence, a person who has/is facing police violence and incarceration. Sometimes you find people who already care about something, like a person who already cares about climate change but doesn’t understand that capitalism is causing and profitting from it. These are all issues, caused by capitalism, that can be sharpened and connected to revolutionary ideas.
If you have not already, you should check out The Tasks of the Russian Social-Democrats and What is to be done?, both by Lenin:
“Our task is to merge our activities with the practical, everyday questions of working-class life, to help the workers understand these questions, to draw the workers’ attention to the most important abuses, to help them formulate their demands to the employers more precisely and practically, to develop among the workers consciousness of their solidarity, consciousness of the common interests and common cause of all the Russian workers as a united working class that is part of the international army of the proletariat.”
Where to find unorganized people who are intermediate and advanced? You mentioned being poor, so you can readily encounter the masses in proletariat workplaces. 3 comrades I know began working at a restaurant, and through their efforts, it has become unionized, and they are more able to conduct political education and agitation among their co workers.
I will give you 2 pieces of advice:
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Remember that agitation, education, and organizing should never be individual. It should be collective. Over the internet you’re usually seeing the thoughts of a bunch of faceless people you don’t know whose words usually don’t have anything directly to do with your material reality, or when you read theory you’re usually just individually consuming the knowledge within the pages, but organizing should be as opposite of this as possible. This makes sense from a Marxist perspective because we probably already understand that the masses make history, and not individuals. Every now and then you can have an individual agitational conversation with someone, but it’s difficult individually trying to bring an intermediate or semi-backwards person to a higher political awareness. Humans are very social, so having multiple people conducting agitation/education with you is very helpful, especially in socially atomized countries like America (not sure where you are tho). A strategy I use is inviting an intermediate person who I want to organize to a political event, either from my org or people we know, then allow them to get to know and make connections with comrades who are also present. From there, when there’s multiple friendly, trusted people telling you something, or offering their own perspectives on an issue, it’s easier to bring that person to higher politics. This is how we’re conducting further education among the unionized workers I was talking about earlier.
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Unless you’re talking about US imperialism and its devastating effects, generally avoid stuff like geopolitics and, more specifically, trying to convince people that China is a good country. You need to meet people where they are, starting what the material reality around them and their interests. Usually defending China isn’t where they’re at. But you did do a good job of deflecting it back to america.
Feel free to ask questions, criticize, disagree, etc with anything I said.
Well the PAVN did win the war, but Vietnam was forced to abandon revolutionary society and enter the capitalist dominated world economy of privatization, free trade, debt, commodity/labor export, and resource extraction, so American capitalism did win in the end even if they lost the war. Not to mention the billions made for defense contractors.
Vietnam is a part of 15 Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). This is opening markets like South Korea where, more than seven years after implementing the VKFTA, Vietnam has become the third largest mango supply market for S. Korea, reaching 1.7 thousand tons. This is equal to US$7.4 million.
As a result of the EVFTA that is now in place, Vietnam has also become the largest source of cashew nuts for the EU. In the first 10 months of 2022, Vietnam exported 98.97 thousand tons of cashews to European markets, worth US$699 million. This represents an increase of 9.8 percent over the same period in 2021.
[…] There are, however, a number of government incentives supporting the agricultural sector, as well as FTAs, that, though a challenge in many ways, are also opening up foreign markets to Vietnamese agricultural products.
Src: https://www.vietnam-briefing.com/news/vietnam-agricultural-products.html/
While foreign companies are not allowed to directly own land in Vietnam (they must pay rent) it seems there’s a lot of foreign participation in the agricultural center (cited from the same article):
Three firms that have been relatively successful in the Vietnamese market are Cargill, Olam, and the Louis Dreyfus Company
Now as expected these “free trade” agreements and foreign corps contribute to the exploitation of workers, including children:
The last official survey to assess child labour in Vietnam was undertaken in 2018 with the Second National Child Labour Survey. The survey found that more than 1 million children aged between 5-17 were engaged in child labour and it is estimated that over 50 percent of those children were working in the agricultural, forestry, and fishery sectors
[…] As part of the assessment, we spoke to a range of people involved in the pepper harvest and visited the plantations first-hand. During this trip we met Y.D.A, an 11-year-old boy from an ethnic minority group who was working on the plantations with his parents and had never been to school. In many ways, Y.D.A. became a symbol of the unknown numbers of children in rural Vietnam who too were out of school due to poverty, working and making “invisible” contributions to an international company’s supply chain.
So yeah let’s stop pretending the world situation is still 1976, vietnam is a still imperialised country with a long way to go in the process of national soverignty, anti imperialism, workers’ rights, education, and socialism.
E; Just had a further thought that the Vietnamese victory in their wars of liberation is more comparable to the British leaving India than say, the establishment of USSR
Your post is totally useless and needlessly hostile.
Given this place is so heavily ML, how do you tolerate sticking around here? I’m just curious because pretty much everything political that’s posted here would contradict your worldview
First time I’ve seen a leftcom on this site lol.
It helps, but does not determine the success of communist movements, nor should it be the primary factor in appraising whether a communist movement is near success. What should be analyzed, discussed, and improved, is the internal strength of the vanguard and its relationship to the masses. Because that is really what will determine whether a revolution happens, whether a party/movement can weather the storm of fascism, etc. Not the internal strength of BRICS…