CriticalResist8 @ CriticalResist8 @lemmygrad.ml

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6 yr. ago

Oh, they believe in very material things. They believe in settling land and using the native population as slave labor, for example. I wrote about this before

Nice strawman have you ever talked to one of us

I hadn't interacted with ultras for two years and I see nothing's changed lol. I mean I've been a marxist for 5-6 years now and it's always been like this with them, but it's funny seeing them act exactly the same with my own eyes in succession.

I have to ask why would you open to people with "China is capitalist and exploiting the workers" over "the US is doing wars for oil"? Why do you think that's the thing you have to start conversations with?

They're gonna say "oh it's just an example" because that's what we all say when we get caught, but the reason we choose one word over another is not random or unexplained, there's a process behind it. Personally I feel like "we're always at war because of oil" is a much simpler fact to convey and one that is more useful to the communist movement than "China is actually capitalist".

Basically if you take as the starting point that they do not want communism but something else (i.e. they have other reasons to call themselves communists), you invert the entire premise and start to think about it differently. If they do not want communism, what do they want? From there we can start observing facts and drawing different conclusions.

The purity fetish is very real, nothing is ever good enough for them. And if nothing is ever good enough, then that justifies you not ever doing anything to change things because what's the point.

There is no world in which the masses care about the value-form and stopping commodity production as the first order of business. It's cool theory I'm sure, but it's ultimately a masturbatory exercise. The point of theory is to inform praxis and the point of praxis is to inform theory, and everything results from that contradiction. They forget their basics so they can start being the pick me communist that knows more obscure figures than you do. Leftcoms fetishize theory -- I notice a certain amount of overlap between self-proclaimed leftcoms or ultras and post-modernists -- and don't see any real-world application in it. At least, not applications that Lenin and other figures we MLs take from haven't said. For this theory to be applied, it has to be followed like a recipe. And perhaps we could say maoists fetishize the praxis without the theory.

It's interesting because the longer I get into marxism the more pragmatic I get. Maybe that makes me a counter-revolutionary revisionist lol. Just looking at China compared to any capitalist country, and actually reckoning with the reality there -- the reality, not the numbers on paper and the theory on paper -- leads to the same conclusion always: it's not the same as in capitalism. By changing the premise, we have changed everything.

In capitalist countries, we grow for the sake of growth. Capitalism is taken to be a self-evident fact of life, that it's as good as it's gonna get, that we can just make the best of it. Companies are gonna rise and fall and everyone can get their shot if they try hard enough. In China, they see capitalism as a stepping stone, as a transitory stage. Becoming a capitalist there does not mean the same thing at all than it does in the West. They have a vision which we lack, and which we are unable to get.

But for ultras to understand and see that, they would have to actually start looking at what's happening in China in practice and leave the books alone for a bit.

We talked about maoists and leftcoms but didn't even touch Hoxhas yet lol. Maybe because they're so irrelevant. I don't understand how anyone nowadays would call themselves a Hoxhaist. Anti-revisionist, sure, why not. If you feel like you're on a mission. But to take specifically after Hoxha and uphold him as like the prime anti-revisionist, the one from which all anti-revisionism originates? I haven't read him myself simply because hoxhaists have made him so unappealing, but on top of that, the things I've heard once you peel back the veneer and actually look at his policies derived from his theory makes him look like a child that was in way over his head.

Like Stalin also fought against the revisionists and they like him, but they stop there. At around 1953. Everyone after that is a dirty revisionist. It's like for hoxhaists history stopped on that year lol

I had some guy (who claimed they weren't a maoist but refused to elaborate) explain that the future is maoist because they are the only ones waging revolutions right now or seeing success. I left it at that because I also pulled the rhetoric questions on him and he kept ignoring them lol.

But that was a funny one. Sure, if you think AES doesn't exist and China, Cuba, Vietnam are not communist anymore, then maoism works. And sure, if you think waging a people's war for over 50 years while slowly being forced to cede territory over those 50 years is a sign of success, then yeah I guess the future is maoist.

I really want them to explain how they expect people in the imperial core to agree to leave our cozy lives and treats to go fight in the mountains or whatever biomes we have in the imperial core for the rest of our lives. To me the future is Dengist (I know it's not a real word etc.). Their little adventures will get them to a conclusion we've known for over 50 years: you will be expecting the Third World to be doing the revolution for you, because they are perhaps more keen on joining such movements. Thirld Worldism, most of us know by now, is another imperial endeavour circling back to what I was saying earlier, they want to direct the imperialized periphery into doing revolution, but not actually do it themselves. They want to be Sison, safe in the Netherlands, not one of the many officers of the CPP which they have never once name-dropped. I don't know if many of them even know about them or stopped at Sison and "the masses" (you have to see the masses like a character, like one big thing -- this is something, incidentally, Black Red Guard talked about in a medium piece, that Lucanamarca was not carried out by the "masses" but by PCP-SL militants, and now he's completely shunned by maoists for having written this piece and having joined the DSA lol).

This is the problem with Thirld Worldism, which basically all maoists I've met claim (whether they know it or not), and it's nothing new. Plenty of people have noted that contradiction.

Cause like I'm a communist and I don't want to abandon my life to be living in barracks in the woods and mountains until I get shot by a cop while robbing a delivery truck to Walmart lol. And they don't want to either or they would be doing it too. And if they want to prove me wrong, then go right ahead and start a PPW.

But this is what "Dengism" understands. There's another very pragmatic way of doing things that is beneficial for everybody.

On PPW I was made aware some time back that Vietnam also waged one, and I can't disagree with that. And certainly China did too. It seems to me, looking at historical examples, that PPW is not so much something you want to get into, but something you get into dialectically as the process of revolution develops. We could say the Bolsheviks also got into a PPW, although it only lasted a few years, not decades like the more famous examples did. From what I know of the Naxalites, CPP and PCP-SL, protracted people's war is central to their praxis and they consider it important to achieve communism.

At this stage I don't care anymore, I will expose them for being ableist pieces of shit. The problem is most of them have like 200 followers and no mutuals lol. Like all ultras you never see them until they crawl out of the woodwork. The larger accounts stay out of these things and maybe I'm optimistic but I assume that's why they have more followers.

I did expose one of the SSN guys, who seems like a huge asshole, for calling someone else in the replies "low IQ".

I'm not saying I have any charitable opinions towards ultras but if you start cannibalising other communists from the get go are you even one? They have their priorities in the wrong order.

I added a large edit in the meantime, I think you missed it due to the timing of your reply haha

Lol the obscure thinkers part is very true. I used to think people knowing about these obscure figures were very knowledgeable because they had read all of Marx and Engels etc. and moved on from them as they had no more to learn there, but most of the time it turns out they went straight to those obscure guys and let's just say there's a reason they're obscure.

My biggest frustration with ultras is they act so high and mighty but then commit the same argumentative mistakes they accuse MLs of doing. They reduce us to Dengists, and that is sufficient to dismiss our arguments. They think of themselves as principled, but prefer to quote Mao without context than make their own argument.

Where has their movement gotten them? They coast by on the successes of other movements. If you really believe in maoism then start a PPW in Seattle. If you believe in leftcommunism then uh... convince people the value-form is revisionist idk what leftcoms actually want to achieve lol.

I've been wanting to write about their colonialist grubbiness on China, so why not now (and yes I'm doing a pun on grubby and grabby).

They want the Chinese people to wake up to the revisionist ways of the CPC and restore Mao-era policies (of which they can barely name any), through a popular insurrection that they call revolution.

They want other people, people from the Global South, people who were historically poor and still in many ways are, to wage the revolution. They want to be the colonial masters directing those people over their own self-interests, as if they (maoists) know better what's right for them or not. They want a bloody revolution in China -- they admit as much -- to "correct" the CPC. To that, they point to obscure, unknown, tiny maoist cells that "operate" in China (they sometimes publish an article or two).

I guess this is where the fetishism of poverty goes full circle. The destitute are purer, and only they can successfully carry out the revolution. The Chinese, because they are becoming richer, are not pure anymore. They can't get marxism. Why are the maoist cells in China tiny, while the CPC enjoys 90% approval rates? The best answer they seem to have is that people just don't know any better.

Like what have they achieved? They decry ProleWiki as whatever ism they like, meanwhile we have editors from literally all over the world who teach us about AES (they come from there!!), about struggles in their country, about their indigenous struggles. They decry China as capitalist revisionist failed state or whatever, meanwhile Chinese people are like "yeah I don't really want a do over of the cultural revolution, I like having my apartment".

Or should we all live in thatch huts so we can truly connect to the earth and understand dialectical materialism through this connection.

It's definitely helped me see communism as something that needs to be pragmatic in this stage. We can't afford to be pure at this time.

I look at the CPC and I see design thinking at play. They look at the past, at their own past and other countries' past, and they learn from it without judgment. They take it as is. You can only improve if you learn on correct data. They do this all the time, correcting themselves and admitting to mistakes. It's a very healthy mentality for growth.

And then we come full circle and back to this incredible piece https://redsails.org/western-marxism-and-christianity/ that finally puts words in a very simple way to something we've all felt creeping up in some way.

This is exactly my experience as well. I forgot to mention, especially now that Netflix adapted the Three Body Problem, twitter is going wild over the depiction of the Cultural Revolution at the beginning of the series (a teacher is beaten to death in front of an audience for teaching theory of relativity and other bourgeois science).

I was surprised (somehow I am also surprised I can still be surprised at maoists) that many of them upheld the GPCR but didn't really know much about it. How can you claim to support something you haven't investigated yourself? In China, it's seen as a failure and this is the official line of the CPC too. The author of the 3 body problem is, from what I hear, sort of a liberal though -- just something to note, like I said the government's stance is the GPCR was ultimately a failure. Some were even asking if the story of the teacher was real; apparently, it is. Certainly in some instances (over which the CPC did not have control or even knowledge) such beatings happened. Deng himself was first called a capitalist roader during the cultural revolution, and purged for it.

CPC's current stance

The CPC in the modern era has admitted the Cultural Revolution to be a mistake.[3] The CPC also states that the Cultural Revolution will never come back to China, and that the CPC has learnt extensively from it and criticised itself from it.[4]

https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Great_Proletarian_Cultural_Revolution

They also have kind of a contradictory relationship to the masses. They revere the Peruvian peasants for being poor and illiterate, it seems. This came up a lot when we posted the book, that we were doing them a disservice or whatever, that the revolution in Peru was a real proletarian revolution.

Being poor and illiterate does not make you a good person or revolutionary by default, beyond romanticizing poverty it seems they fetishize it to an extent I am not sure I want to explore.

Regarding the CPP, this is also the impression I get from talking to Filipinos. And like you said, the answer to these concerns is always "do you really believe this propaganda". They don't want to engage with it, they feel it sufficiently self-evident to dismiss. Though with that said, it seems the CPP is enjoying more success inland and further away from cities (The Philippines are very mountainous islands, it's very rural outside the cities and further inland). But even then it's all relative. And yes, they are seen as being just as big bandits as the government is.

On the asking questions, I think this is a problem in general on the Internet. I don't know if it's due to age (I find most ultras I engage with seem to be teenagers, if not in age then in mental state), but they seem to take everything as bad faith. I think this is something we've grown away from on Lemmygrad, and it has helped me see questions, even the difficult ones, as interest and ultimately refining my own opinions. We grow through struggle, we don't learn from passive osmosis. They seem to think they have struggled enough (must be difficult reading the three gonzalo interviews that exist online) and can now relax and take it easy.

When I say ultras btw I lump essentially Hoxhas, maoists and leftcoms in this, but of course there are differences between the three. Well, except maybe the Hoxhas and maos. They seem to overlap a lot, I've seen lots of Hoxhaists turn into maoists and back.

I give you an A+ on your usage of rhetoric!

I've said this in other places and I'll say it all the time, but the more I am forced to interact with ultras (of all kinds), the more I start to think they have violence fantasies and being communists allows them to live these out & their self-identification as communists doesn't go beyond that.

Consider this: when someone asks MLs about communism, when they ask about theory, when they have questions, we point them to resources. On the other hand, when they ask ultras, the answer is something like "you shouldn't even begin to read theory before you correct all your mistaken ideas about communism. You hold reactionary opinions so I have no interest or desire to help you. The revolution isn't meant for you".

They want you to do the work of getting their trust, when it should be the other way around. It is the other way around in any other setting.

When we published The CIA's Shining Path for example, none of the maoists we talked to were interested in correcting the record. Rather, they preferred to call the author bourgeois (despite not knowing the first thing about him), mistaken, counter-revolutionary, anti-communist, etc. etc.

Now imagine you're a lambda reader coming across this discussion. On the one hand, you have a freely accessible book that's right there that explains how the PCP-SL behaves like a CIA outfit. And on the other, you have people who go "no u". Who are you going to learn from, what are you going to take away, intellectually, after that conversation?

They're not interested in helping you, it's a very inbred (or consanguine, because one ultra didn't get it lol) ideology. You have to do the work first, you have to look all of the minute details about Gonzalo's life or Bordiga's mathematics before they will accept you.

And this is the part where I go armchair psychologist but ultimately, if we go by the violence fantasies theory, keeping their circle small helps them. Being able to deride others as revisionists, counter-revolutionaries, etc. makes them ideological enemies which makes them legitimate targets. It increases the pool of potential targets if you don't let too many people into your ideology.

That last part I'm not sure about. The violence fantasies I am becoming increasingly sure of and I have evidence. And again, they can try to debunk it, but they won't. They'll call me a fed or a revisionist, which will signal to their friends that they have someone to vicariously cannibalize for catharsis and they'll join in.

One maoist (mind you this is all on Twitter, which is fed central) sent us a gif of someone being executed by, I assume, a Red Army officer. Another called someone else "low iq". This was a bordigist, not a maoist. They love using the r-slur. The Gonzalo meme that's like "you should boil yourself" or something, it's based on the guy with lightning coming out of his eyes if you know the meme. I mean, even they are playing on the boiling babies atrocity when they repeat up and down till kingdom come that it didn't happen, that no one was boiled at Lucanamarca. They also love saying it was justified.

Can we talk about Shining Path itself? Violence fantasies need to find a suitable host to latch onto through whom they can live those fantasies. You're not gonna attach violence fantasies to Barbie, is what I'm saying. In 1989 the PCP-SL killed dogs and then hanged them to lampposts in Lima to protest Deng Xiaoping. That's the level we're dealing with here. The event is documented in pictures and witness testimony and Gonzalo claimed it.

Lucanamarca, as we've said, is something Maoists revel in. This is despite Gonzalo himself admitting there were excesses there.

Recently there was this quote about "if I killed him it was not because he's gay but because he was a counter-revolutionary". There is no indication on who the victim was, they just assume that because Gonzalo said it was justified, then it was justified. End of discussion. Gonzalo said it and that's that.

Meanwhile I've seen entire debates about whether Lenin called for the execution of (literal) prostitutes and pouring over historical records. The consensus is that there is no record of such a massacre or executions happening, there is no reference to it outside of that letter he wrote, and that by prostitutes he meant counter-revolutionaries, as calling your political enemies prostitutes was common enough in Russia at the time.

They deny the evidence of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee. They make the argument that it was held under a reactionary government, and sure, it started under Fujimori. But it's not a refutation. It's not a refutation of the accusations, of the witnesses, of the evidence, of the reports.

To do that you would have to systematically look at everything the committee investigated and then reinvestigate it yourself. Nobody is saying it's easy or fun. But it's necessary if you're gonna say shit like "Lucanamarca was justified".

The other option is to agree the Shining Path was a terrorist experiment and move away from whatever the fuck they thought they were achieving. But this is not what Gonzalo maoists do, so we have to ask why exactly do they cling to it?

You can compare to anything Stalin did. There's lots of material, and we happily share that material, about how for example the population transfers were justified or how they took place. I'm not saying one has to agree with it, I'm just saying there's arguments for it. The Maoist explanation for their perceived excesses is "no it didn't happen you fucking idiot, now stop asking about it".

Again you have to do the work to get them to let you in, and not the other way around. This is very cultish.

The thing is they know they're not being taken seriously but they swear up and down they're the reasonable ones, that we're just not accepting Gonzalo Thought as like the highest stage of Marxism and this makes us counter-revolutionary anti-communists. What do you think they'll do to us if their maoist revolution comes. What did the Shining Path do to other socialist movements in Peru?

We go back to the premise: don't ask why they like the PCP-SL, ask why it couldn't be any other way that they don't identify with anything else but the PCP-SL. Invert the premise and put it back right side up.

Forgot to add, they easily resort to using slurs and ableism when you start asking too many rhethorical questions

sick af. I don't write as much these days (read none at all) because I'm busy with lots of stuff but I'm glad someone was impacted by my writing.

Yooo 22 days later but thank you for quoting from my essay!!

He's apparently a Latino guy with a German name

I completely forgot to add when I posted this.

If you appreciate our work in bringing this exclusive translation, please make a donation to Palestinian relief orgs. Some that I know are legit:

UNRWA: https://donate.unrwa.org/-landing-page/en_EN

Middle East Children's Alliance: https://secure.everyaction.com/6QpeACExNkaVMdecq-ZPUg2

Palestine Red Cross: https://www.palestinercs.org/en/Donation

Nothing would make me more happy than to see support for Palestine right now being initiated by this book. UNRWA especially, which was created to act in Gaza specifically, is at risk of closing down following its loss of state funding.

Just looking at the replies and quote tweets https://twitter.com/prolewiki/status/1767598202956533769 you can tell they didn't even touch the page because everything is explained there.

There is one person who actually seems to have read the book (that would make them a very fast reader, but it happens) and they did bring some critiques of the author's work, which is actually great. This is what I want to happen; like the author said: the point is to open a debate and force the Shining Path to respond. I also hope (I'm not confident, but one can hope) this book will be incorporated in the MLM discourse so that it can be more closely scrutinized; take the good out of it and remove the bad. For this reason it's important Maoists read it as well, and they might actually learn a thing or two that would actually confirm their beliefs. Because it's in there. Likewise we don't have much information on the author and not much seems to exist on the Internet, I'm hopeful by bringing attention to this work, we'll be able to eventually have a wiki page on him.

Regardless the salty maoists who "move heaven and earth for chairman gonzalo" are like... 10, 15 people at most? Meanwhile we've registered over 400 visits on the page today after the announcements.

It's like clockwork

Thanks! We did notice some parts got removed in the English and we are in the process of adding them back in, slowly. Hence why I also wanted to host the Spanish version, so people can confirm our work for themselves.

Under the licence they are also able to complete/edit the translation and release it as well.

https://twitter.com/prolewiki/status/1767598202956533769 follow the quote tweets and replies lol

wtffffff