I’ve become very skeptical of the concept of “brainwashing.” Over the past few months this skepticism has boiled over into open and explicit disagreement with even well-meaning pushers within the Marxist-Leninist corner. I often find it difficult to explain concisely why it is… [read more]

Popular opinion on whether any given piece of media constitutes “a critique” is often split. Some people, for example, claim that Breaking Bad criticizes sexism, whereas others think it’s a sexist show. In this essay I want to shed some light on the different theories of… [read more]

A hazard facing mass movements is the NGO-ization of resistance. It will be easy to twist what I’m about to say into an indictment of all NGOs. That would be a falsehood. In the murky waters of fake NGOs set up or to siphon off grant money or as tax dodges (in states like Bihar… [read more]

The present rural policy of the Party is not one of Agrarian Revolution as during the ten years’ civil war, but is a rural policy for the National United Front Against Japan. The whole Party should carry out the Central Committee’s directives of July 7 and December 25, 1940, and… [read more]

1. Being Chavista means valorizing and being guided by LOVE: love for one’s neighbor, for one’s country, for those who suffer, for the People. It means knowing how to listen to those who most need to be heard and learning, together, how to handle problems — with common sense and… [read more]

Dialectical materialism is the worldview and methodology of Chinese Communists. Mao Zedong once said that Marxism consists of several branches of learning, but the foundation is Marxist philosophy. In his works produced during the years of the revolutionary war such as Oppose… [read more]

Clevinger knew so much because Clevinger was a genius with a pounding heart and blanching face. He was a gangling, gawky, feverish, famish-eyed brain. As a Harvard undergraduate he had won prizes in scholarship for just about everything, and the only reason he had not won prizes… [read more]

It is common to say that something is good in theory but not in practice. I always want to say, then it is not such a good theory, is it? To be good in theory but not in practice posits a relation between theory and practice that places theory prior to practice, both… [read more]

Howard: Should war come, Mr. Stalin, where is it most likely to break out? Where are the war clouds the most menacing, in the East or in the West? [read more]

I’ve been writing a four-part article for Field Newspaper Syndicate at the beginning of each year for several years now and in 1980, mindful of the approach of the year 1984, FNS asked me to write a thorough critique of George Orwell’s novel 1984. I was reluctant. I remembered… [read more]

This is, perhaps, the place to make a few remarks, by way of explanation and justification, about the Hegelian dialectic — both in general and in particular, as expounded in the Phenomenology and Logic, as well as about its relation to the modern critical movement. [read more]

There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the… [read more]

In 1976, after the death of Zhou Enlai, the Gang of Four initiated the Criticize Deng and Oppose the Rehabilitation of Right-leaning Elements campaign. As part of this campaign they passed around pamphlets titled Criticism of the Three Poisonous Weeds, which laid down guidelines… [read more]

This article is a further attempt to analyze the Gang of Four. After my first article entitled “The Rise and Fall of the Gang of Four” was published, I received many letters from readers questioning certain points made and asking about other aspects. In this article, I again use… [read more]

Q. For more than a month, China’s press has carried many articles on the crimes of the Gang of Four which brought disasters to China and her people. The disclosure of these facts is shocking, but the question I am presently concerned with is this: if the Gang of Four were so… [read more]

First of all: Socialism with Chinese Characteristics is socialism, not any other “ism.” The guiding principles of scientific socialism thus cannot be abandoned. Our Party has always emphasized adherence to the basic principles of scientific socialism, but adapted to the… [read more]

It’s possible to discern a bifurcation in the theoretical history of Marxism. If we represent this history as a great tree that splits near the base into two thick, well-defined branches — which in turn have divisions and subdivisions of their own — this would not be far removed… [read more]

If we analyse the first 15 years of Soviet Russia, we see three social experiments. The first experiment, based on the equal distribution of poverty, suggests the “universal asceticism” and “rough egalitarianism” criticised by the Communist Manifesto. We can now understand the… [read more]

There’s an ongoing debate within Marx studies over what’s called “Marx’s labor theory of value.” According to some, it’s an empirical and predictive law about prices that can be verified using quantitative methods — let’s call this tendency empirical Marxism. According to others… [read more]

Black Power is a doctrine about black people, for black people, preached by black people. I’m putting it to my black brothers and sisters that the colour of our skins is the most fundamental thing about us. I could have chosen to talk about people of the same island, or the same… [read more]

I was here in Guangdong in 1984. At that time rural reform had been under way for several years, and we were just beginning to introduce urban reform and to establish special economic zones. Eight years have passed since then. This time, during my trip here, I have found that the… [read more]

The purpose of this essay is to investigate in detail the notion of “dialectic,” and more particularly to do so by looking at the origins and operational logic of Mao Ze-dong’s military strategy. We are all aware of the Western dialectical tradition in philosophy; Hegel in The… [read more]

We hates us some poor people. First, they insist on being poor when it is so easy to not be poor. They do things like buy expensive designer belts and $2500 luxury handbags: [read more]

It’s important to relate every new concept you learn to whatever you already know, making adjustments for the new knowledge as you go along. Perhaps this entails discarding a previous misconception, or perhaps it entails making an odd analogy that only really makes sense to you… [read more]

Engels said in 1874, discussing Polish independence: “A people which oppresses another cannot emancipate itself.” This line, and other similar ones by Marx and Engels, are celebrated for their incipient proletarian internationalism. However, they are often subtly misinterpreted… [read more]

In his “Preface to the First German Edition” of the first volume of Capital, Marx wrote: “It is the ultimate aim of this work to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society.” Marx devoted his whole life to the study of capitalist economy, which had by then lasted two or… [read more]

A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization. [read more]

Visiting Brazil to launch his new book War and Revolution, the Italian professor from the University of Urbino made himself available for an interview with the editor-in-chief of Opera Magazine Pedro Marin and columnist and former international correspondent André Ortega. [read more]

Let us broach a polemical subject. The British author George Orwell is very well known for works such as Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and his book about the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia. Throughout 2022 I intend to discuss each of these three works in detail. [read more]

Despite all the wrongheaded effort on the part of “Anarcho-Communists,” the chasm between Marxism and Anarchism remains fundamental and unbridgeable. Engels and Lenin are often cited, but Marx was explicit, among other occasions, in this tear-down of Bakunin’s work. [read more]

You can identify a Very Important Person because they get the proper VIP treatment: they come surrounded by an entourage of PR gurus, secretaries, agents, media handlers and bodyguards. Access to the VIP is limited and controlled, their public appearances are stage managed, their… [read more]

Geek culture dominates popular media. Comic-book films like Iron Man, The Dark Knight (both 2008) and The Avengers (2012) are among Hollywood’s highest-grossing blockbusters, while geek/slacker comedies like Superbad and Knocked Up (both 2007) are runaway R-rated comedy hits. The… [read more]

The question has often been asked, in what degree are the different classes of society useful or even necessary? And the answer was naturally a different one for every different epoch of history considered. There was undoubtedly a time when a territorial aristocracy was an… [read more]

If the goal is emancipation, there’s no alternative to relentless, impeccable, fact- and trajectory-focused historical education. We all need to become decent students and able teachers of history. The teaching of history as a “sack of potatoes” is a vulnerability in capitalism… [read more]

2021 will go down in history. [read more]

Domenico Losurdo and William Clare Roberts are not often mentioned in the same breath. While they are both central theoretical reference points for Red Sails, it must be admitted that they make for an odd couple. Losurdo is concerned primarily with criticizing Western Marxism for… [read more]

The splitting of a single whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts is the essence — one of the “essentials,” one of the principal (if not the principal) characteristics or features — of dialectics. [read more]

In capitalism, we get most of the things we need to survive through exchange. Commodities are useful things people exchange. The fact that they’re exchanged is what makes them commodities. Each one has a double character: [read more]

The recent coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan appears to be the latest and greatest “Legitimacy Challenge” to the Communist Party of China (CPC), according to Tsinghua law professor Xu Zhangrun. In his essay titled “Viral Alarm: When Fury Overcomes Fear,” Xu lays out nine criticisms… [read more]

Now that I have returned from a visit to Germany I have at last got to your article, which I have just read with much interest. Here are my observations upon it, written in German, as this enables me to be more concise. [read more]

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded in October, 1966, in Oakland, California by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. The name was shortened to the Black Panther Party (BPP) and it began spreading eastward through the Black urban ghetto colonies across the country. [read more]

Whither is the NEP leading us: Toward capitalism or toward socialism? This is, of course, the central question. The market, the free trade in grain, competition, leases, concessions — what will be the upshot of all this? If you give the devil a finger, mightn’t it be necessary to… [read more]

I do not wish to get into useless fights about what Lenin “truly meant” or what he “would have wanted.” It’s not a discussion I can settle, and not even a discussion I care to settle. Instead, I want to explain what I take from his work. To this end, I will “cite” two short works… [read more]

People who read the news are probably accustomed to a type of story that keeps making headlines, and it goes like this: someone acting in the name of capital and/or white supremacy engages in an act of violence and is treated with what is relative leniency or understanding… [read more]

Leaving it to the bourgeois scholars to absorb themselves in discussion of the question of the superiority of one sex over the other, or in the weighing of brains and the comparing of the psychological structure of men and women, the followers of historical materialism fully… [read more]

Critics (of books or drama) often use two rather singular arguments. The first consists in suddenly deciding that the true subject of criticism is ineffable, and criticism, as a consequence, unnecessary. The other, which also reappears periodically, consists in confessing that… [read more]

On YouTube there are all these funny video compilations. Some are very specific and show nothing but people hurting themselves on slides or animals being clever. Others mix together everything anyone might consider funny: pranks, children being silly, failed acrobatics, etc. Most… [read more]

The category of “Really Existing Socialism” is usually invoked, both by proponents and detractors, in conversations about discrepancies between revolutionary theory and revolutionary practice. The general idea is that revolutionary statesmen — say, Stalin — fell short in some… [read more]

1. Aristocratic Marxism defines itself in opposition to moralism. Feelings associated with powerlessness (for Spinoza, the sad affects; for Nietzsche, slave morality or ressentiment) are held to be an obstacle to the self-emancipation of the working class, which needs to kick its… [read more]

Joseph Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature. He was simple, calm and courageous. He seldom lost his poise; pondered his problems slowly, made his decisions clearly and firmly; never yielded to ostentation nor coyly refrained from holding… [read more]

It has been said that we are living in “an era of primitive accumulation.” Whether or not processes of primitive accumulation especially mark the present, invocations of the term certainly do. When Taiaiake Alfred credits Glen Coulthard with having “rescued Karl Marx from his… [read more]

If white radicals are serious about revolution, they are going to have to discard a lot of bullshit ideology created by and for educated white middle-class males. A good example of what has to go is the popular theory of consumerism. [read more]

Constitutional illusions are what we call a political error when people believe in the existence of a normal, juridical, orderly and legalised — in short, “constitutional” — system, although it does not really exist. At first glance it may appear that in Russia today, July 1917… [read more]

In 1993, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, Italian journalist and liberal politician Jas Gawronski interviewed Fidel Castro in Havana. In the course of the conversation Fidel Castro defends the legitimacy of socialism in China and Vietnam, explains why he has some… [read more]

My noble friend, L Ram Saran Das, has asked me to write an introduction to his poetical work, The Dreamland. I am neither a poet nor a litterateur, neither am I a journalist nor a critic. Hence, by no stretch of imagination can I find the justification of the demand. But the… [read more]

Our movement is passing through a very important phase at present. After a year’s fierce struggle some definite proposals regarding the constitutional reforms have been formulated by the Round Table Conference and the Congress leaders have been invited to give this [words… [read more]

First of all, we must understand the background for this kind of debate. When one is asked to speak of the relevance of Marxism to Africa at this particular point in time one is being asked to involve oneself in a historical debate, an ongoing debate in this country, particularly… [read more]

The discovery of the New World by Columbus in 1492 is generally regarded as the beginning of global history. Not only because the Great Voyages discovered the entire face of the earth and connected all of humanity, but also because a modern civilization emerged from the West and… [read more]

In 2013, in the wake of the boom of the canonical “BitCoin,” using some of the same technological principles but tapping into contemporary internet-meme culture, “DogeCoin” was born. Despite its origins as a joke, on 5 May 2021 it reached a market capitalization of… [read more]

There is a widespread assumption that the violence and destruction witnessed over the last week are an aberration to the American experience. Countless headlines and social media posts, written in response to the latest onslaught of violence unleashed by the police against… [read more]

In the year 2000 the project of Pastors For Peace, run by the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization, had the opportunity to interview Assata Shakur, a Black revolutionary from the United States, in Havana. [read more]

What can we make of the tendency of Westerners to flippantly regurgitate the accusation of “brainwashing” against another country and its people, but then display indignation when that same allegation is made about their own? [read more]

Whenever one writes about a problem in the United States, especially concerning the racial atmosphere, the problem written about is usually black people, that they are either extremist, irresponsible, or ideologically naive. [read more]

The distinguishing feature of the period in which Sismondi wrote was the rapid development of exchange (what in modern terminology we refer to as “money economy”), which manifested particularly sharply after the remnants of feudalism were destroyed by the French Revolution. [read more]

What’s the difference between a fistfight and an argument? Both exist on a spectrum between dirty and clean. Both have to do with ego, or principle, or some weird mix of the two. Fistfights may end in injury or death for the combatants, so it seems like people should take them… [read more]

We are publishing this article by For Ever, even though it is a jumble of arrant nonsense and meaningless jargon. In the opinion of For Ever, the Weimar State is a Marxist State; we at the Ordine Nuovo are State-worshippers who want the State to exist ab aeterno (For Ever… [read more]

Domenico Losurdo, at the time Professor Emeritus at the University of Urbino in Italy, answers questions on the basis of two of his works: “Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History” (2013) and “The Absent Left: Crisis, the Society of the Spectacle, War” (2014). [read more]

The third chapter of Michael Parenti’s “Blackshirts & Reds” is often seen stand-alone under the title “Left Anticommunism: The Unkindest Cut.” Though it is amazing that such a brilliant piece of writing is widely available, and though it definitely holds up on its own, I tend… [read more]

Before I discovered Marxism, I discovered feminism. And before I discovered feminism, I used to be a chauvinistic liberal. As I grow older I sometimes like to look back and examine how this particular trajectory — of arriving at Marxism from a standard petty-bourgeois background… [read more]

The Bolshevik revolution has now definitively become part of the general revolution of the Russian people. As of two months ago the maximalists played the role of agitators against stagnation, urging the forward march not to slow down towards a premature settlement — one which… [read more]

I am very happy to meet fellow comrades. It is not easy to meet in person, as North and South America are far away from China, separated by the Pacific Ocean, in addition to the man-made obstacles presented by the United States. At present, China has not established diplomatic… [read more]

The past two decades, which have witnessed the collapse of European Imperialism and the progressive elimination of Western Colonialism from Asia and Africa, have witnessed also the introduction of a new form of Colonialism into the point-of-intersection of those two continents. [read more]

Dialectical materialism is the world outlook of the Marxist-Leninist party. It is called dialectical materialism because its approach to the phenomena of nature, its method of studying and apprehending them, is dialectical, while its interpretation of the phenomena of nature, its… [read more]

The dispute between some self-identified feminists and trans persons, trans women especially, and trans-supporting feminists has erupted into a full-scale ideological war. Once at the level of conflict, officially undeclared, we have moved into the territory of “you are either… [read more]

US Presidents historically reach their highest approval ratings due to war. George W. Bush reached an all-time-high of 90% in 2001 as the wrathful nation geared up to invade Afghanistan, and his father George H. W. Bush ranks second place with 89% in 1991, right as the US… [read more]

On July 26, 2020 I sat down for two hours and laid out on Twitter why I was skeptical of accusations that China was committing a genocide against the Uyghur people in its western province of Xinjiang. I spoke out, despite lacking professional credentials, because I was frustrated… [read more]

Your Honour, there are a few things I wish to say. For if what I say here serves even one whit to further dedicate growing millions of Americans to fight for peace and to repel the fascist drive on free speech and thought in our country, I shall consider my rising to speak… [read more]

On the question of minority nationalities, I am still a pupil. You comrades have done more research on this question than I have and you are specialized in this field of work. Today I shall speak mainly on the issue of minority nationalities in connection with the situation in… [read more]

On August 21 and 23, 1980 Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci interviewed Deng Xiaoping in Beijing. [read more]

A United States still struggling through the pandemic was also recently hit by a major snow storm. To date, 37 states have already faced emergency winter conditions, with the southwestern state of Texas being hit the hardest, where temperatures have dropped below -20 degrees… [read more]

Most of what we hear about Tiananmen in 1989 focuses on student activists, since they dominated Tiananmen square itself and waved banners demanding “freedom and democracy.” However, the real history of the protests is a bit more complex. [read more]

Iain M. Banks was a Scottish fiction writer. His most famous work, the Culture series, centers on a utopian, post-scarcity space society of humanoid aliens and advanced artificial intelligences living in constructed habitats spread across the Milky Way. In this essay he reflects… [read more]

At the beginning of every essay, a writer has to decide how familiar their intended audience is with the terms they’ll be using. The focus of this essay, H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, occupies a strange position in that it’s both niche and mainstream (e.g. spellcheck takes no… [read more]

There are four things one needs to know about Marx’s relationship to his immediate philosophical context. [read more]

Factories were designed by capitalists as exploitative panopticon enclosures. Nevertheless, they socialized workers, and became sites of organization and struggle. Yasha Levine’s superb research into surveillance technology should not lead to numbing cynicism about the potential… [read more]

The subjective essence of private property, private property as activity for itself, as subject, as person, is labor. It, therefore, goes without saying that only that political economy which recognized labor as its principle (Adam Smith), and which therefore no longer regarded… [read more]

Comrades! You have been invited to this forum today to exchange ideas and examine the relationship between work in the literary and artistic fields and revolutionary work in general. Our aim is to ensure that revolutionary literature and art follow the correct path of development… [read more]

There’s a common trope in media where it’s revealed, most often near the end of the story (but sometimes right off the bat), that trying too hard to do good makes you evil. Game of Thrones, HBO’s Watchmen, The Hunger Games, and many other shows, movies, and games all have endings… [read more]

A number of Socialists have recently launched a veritable crusade against what they call the principle of authority. It suffices to label this or that act authoritarian for them to condemn it. This summary procedure is abused to such an extent that it has become necessary to look… [read more]

A while back a friend was illustrating the many ways in which Slavoj Zizek fell short as a Marxist theorist (I had retained some sympathies from when I first discovered him as a liberal) with a pretty bad bit of writing on Mao Zedong. To Zizek’s credit, as usual, it’s at least… [read more]

I have long decried the fact that the right wants power while the left wants approval. This was never more evident that in the months up to and including the last election when the Tories and Libdems bent truth and law to breaking point, while Labour bent over backwards to prove… [read more]

In 1818, in the middle of the Restoration and just at that time when the collapse of the French Revolution seemed obvious to all, some of those who had initially welcomed the events of 1789 now placed them at arms length; for them it had become a colossal misunderstanding or… [read more]

H. G. Wells was a very famous English novelist, and has been referred to as the “Shakespeare of science fiction.” He interviewed Joseph Stalin during his trip to the USSR in 1934. [read more]

Emil Ludwig was a German-Swiss author, known for his biographies and study of historical “greats.” He interviewed Joseph Stalin in Moscow on 13 December 1931. [read more]

Nowadays it is almost commonplace to recognize that the fall of the USSR was a turning point in world history, after which market economy and Western-style democracy became almost unquestionable values. What is less discussed is the extent to which this process controls not only… [read more]

We should understand there is a difference between the rebellion of the anarchists and the black revolution or liberation of the black colony. [read more]

After World War I, I made my living in Paris, then as a retoucher at a photographer’s, now as painter of “Chinese antiquities” (made in France!). I would distribute leaflets denouncing the crimes committed by the French colonialists in Viet Nam. [read more]

In this paper I propose briefly to re-visit Francis Fukuyama’s in/famous end-of-history hypothesis, a little more than twenty years after the publication of his original essay in The National Interest. I will not delve again into the details of Fukuyama’s conception or compare… [read more]

We did a great deal of work between 1949, when the People’s Republic of China was founded, and 1976, when Chairman Mao Zedong passed away. We were particularly successful during the period of transition from new-democratic revolution to socialist revolution, in which we carried… [read more]

During the years in which the women’s liberation movement has been taking shape, a great emphasis has been placed on what are called leaderless, structureless groups as the main — if not sole — organizational form of the movement. The source of this idea was a natural reaction… [read more]

Along with the blood drenched landscape of religious conflict there is the experience of inner peace and solace that every religion promises, none more so than Buddhism. Standing in marked contrast to the intolerant savagery of other religions, Buddhism is neither fanatical nor… [read more]

Far too much has already been said and written about Noam Chomsky, and some of it has the counter-productive effect of further enhancing his myth. This is because his fans often read his being attacked from “both the right and the left” as inherent proof of his brilliance. The… [read more]

Not too many years ago, when protesters were running riot through the streets, disrupting meetings of the WTO, G7, and other international organizations, the Canadian newspaper The National Post served up a flattering and generous portrait of young people who had eschewed the… [read more]

Neoliberalism is not particularly hard to define. It’s not only an ideology or a set of principles; it’s a system of practices, and an era, the one we’re living in now. What it means, over and above everything, is untrammeled ruling-class power, an end to the… [read more]

When I was a kid I also believed ‘communists should ditch that label, for PR reasons.’ Now I think we make more headway owning it than dishonestly disavowing it. Not least because someone will almost always bring up Stalin no matter what we call ourselves. [read more]

White Supremacy is having a good month: On March 5th, the ACLU put its weight behind Pro Football Inc.’s fight to keep its Washington Redskins trademark. A few days later, legal scholars from the right and permissible left along with The New Republic scolded Oklahoma University… [read more]

The only people who misunderstand George Orwell’s 1984 are those that go around trying to imagine it has a leftist message. It is mistaken to imagine that children in the English-speaking world get his work drilled into them like a mantra because, somehow, genuine socialists… [read more]

Whenever there is a political incident in Latin America, instead of informing and clarifying, many “experts” set out to insist over and over that the situation is too complex to be understood in terms of archaic left-right dichotomies. [read more]

HackerNews is a discussion forum hosted by YCombinator, Silicon Valley’s premier “startup accelerator” investment fund. It has a longstanding and reflexive hostility to any ideas critical of the tech-worker turf, so I was surprised when a write-up of how to escape “toxicity in… [read more]

“Free market capitalism” is in terminal decline, to be replaced in this century or early in the next with state capitalism and other presently undeveloped form of socialist hybrid states. The decline is structural, political, but also social and cultural. By the end of February… [read more]

There is a fundamental contradiction in many of the Marxist studies that are produced in the West. Every time that they speak of Marxism in Asia — in China, Korea or Vietnam — or when they speak of popular movements in Africa such as in Egypt or Libya, they highlight the… [read more]

The universal has been blunted by difference, language games have overthrown universal reason, and solidarity has been betrayed by individualism: a common, severe doxa in our age of austerity. At the root of this threefold betrayal is the principle of identity which has allegedly… [read more]

In the last few months two men have asked me to read their unpublished manuscripts and give them my opinion, because they value my opinion. Indirectly and with great euphemism they gave me to understand that they were worried about the presence of problematic ideological elements… [read more]

Tankies don’t usually believe that Stalin or Mao “did nothing wrong,” although many do use that phrase for effect (this is the internet, remember). We believe that Stalin and Mao were committed socialists who, despite their mistakes, did much more for humanity than most of the… [read more]

I want to try to answer directly a set of questions that I keep encountering now that I publicly defend communist theory and history, legitimate questions that I have grappled with myself. I hope this particular synthesis of existing ideas sheds some light and understanding on… [read more]

The US tried hard to build Fidel Castro into a boogeyman. We translated this 1991 interview to help dismantle the myth. Holding forth on immigration and environmentalism, Castro embodies what Muriel Rukeyser said on communists being “exiles from the future”. [read more]