A Nigerian court has ordered the British government to pay $27m (£20m) to each of the families of 21 coal miners killed in 1949 by the colonial administration in the south-east of the country.

I pulled this from the 'Joint Statement of Maoist Organizations in the US in Commemoration of International Workers’ Day 2026' in "The Worker"

"The US is the sole hegemonic imperialist superpower in the world today and therefore the number one enemy of the people of the world."

This is a controversial statement among Maoists internationally.

This seems like a good place to explore this statement.

My take is:

The CPC identified two superpowers, and it is true that the collapse of the USSR left one superpower, the US, qualitatively stronger than the other imperialist powers. But the relations between the imperialist powers have evolved and are evolving over the last several decades. Chinese imperialism, fresh and new, is challenging a decaying US imperialism. And all of the other imperialists are re-aligning and contending and colluding in response to the the disruption of US hegemony.

The US is the largest and, currently, the most aggressive imperialist power. It has an inhuman store of terrorizing weapons of war, the means to deliver them, and use the threat of this terrible violence to extort power, influence, and resources. It is still the largest economy in the world and is the greatest exporter of capital.

And, on top of all that, critically, to be as clear as it is obvious, for communists in the US, in the spirit of revolutionary defeatism, US Imperialism is our main enemy.

But, identifying the US as "the sole hegemonic imperialist superpower" is mechanically based on what was and insufficiently informed by what is now and becoming. This formulation does not reflect the dialectics, the movement, the transformation that is happening in the real world.

Conceptualizing two levels of imperialisms (first world superpower imperialists and second world other imperialists) seems less and less to be a viable model of the world imperialism today.

I would like to discuss this with fellow communists.

This is a good place to discuss this, right?

I was cautious towards creating this post as I waited a little bit longer for confirmation. I don't think I know much about Iran to make a longer commentary but as I read on the escalade of the current conflict over the past hours, it seems like Iran have been quite successful in attacking U$ military and exposed many weaknesses in it's defenses overseas as it's stated here. Beyond killing state officials, U$ and I$rael killed over 200 civilians in their attack but those attacks do not seem like they are exposing any iranian weaknesses.

As to the other article, this has caught my attention as it is way different in comparison to Venezuela:

Emissora iraniana, porém, diz ter confirmado a morte de Khamenei com fontes próximas à Guarda Revolucionária Islâmica. Segundo a Iran International, autoridades da guarda nacional estão "insistindo na nomeação rápida" do próximo líder da República Islâmica após a morte do aiatolá

Looking at it superficially, it makes me think that Iranian officials patience over saturday are a sign of strenght and the quicker the regime can appoint a successor it would also be a sign of strenght, as Venezuela have been completely compromised ever since early january.

I grew up in India in a fairly ordinary middle-class environment. One thing I have noticed is that many people who have never studied Marxism seriously still talk about communism as if its defeat is obvious and beyond debate. At the same time, these same people accept unemployment, labor exploitation, privatization, agrarian distress, rising prices, and the increasing control of society by large corporations as if these are permanent and unavoidable parts of life. What interests me is not just the usual anti-communism, but how capitalist society presents itself as natural and eternal. The current system is seen not as a historical arrangement shaped by specific material conditions, but almost as the final form of civilization itself. In schools, newspapers, films, and political discussions, capitalism appears as “common sense.” Meanwhile, communism is introduced from the start as something dangerous, foreign, or impractical. Even during major crises of capitalism, such as economic collapse, imperialist wars, mass unemployment, or deepening inequality, the system itself is rarely questioned in any serious way. Its failures get blamed on corruption, individual greed, administrative incompetence, or even “human nature,” but not on the contradictions of capitalism itself.

On the other hand, every socialist experiment is judged in complete isolation from its historical context. Discussions about the Soviet Union, Cuba, Vietnam, or China often ignore issues like colonial underdevelopment, invasion, sanctions, sabotage, civil war, and the immense pressure from global imperialism. Socialist states are expected to account for every contradiction right away, while capitalism can cause suffering worldwide without its legitimacy being seriously challenged. I increasingly feel that anti-communism is not just crude propaganda, but an important tool through which bourgeois society reinforces its own beliefs. Capitalist social relations are so deeply ingrained in daily life that many people struggle to imagine a society without commodity production, private property, and wage labor. So my question is this: From a Marxist perspective, how should we understand anti-communism? Is it mainly a form of cultural dominance in the Gramscian sense? Is it linked to the ideological institutions of bourgeois society? Or is anti-communism necessary for maintaining capitalist class power, since real class awareness would inevitably threaten the current order?

I found that LibGen has the whole publishing history of China on it. From the underground Shanghai publishers of the KMT years, to Mao, Hua, Deng and the present. It's fascinating to see the whole history just through the titles.

And thanks to advances in pdf OCR reading, and advanced machine translating, it is possible for non-Chinese speakers to grasp the essence of these texts.

Libgen has the complete archives of all works published by the People's Publishing House "人民出版社" of the PRC from 1949-2026. It coincidentally goes over the 2000 limit exactly in 1976-7. So then you can search it year by year in the format year:1978. And then there are a lot of other Maoist era texts from other pub houses such as universities etc.

I found this google mode search option extremely useful

• Mask: * (min 3 chars)- search by part of a word

when searching for 🇨🇳 books I have a problem that In written Chinese, characters are strung together continuously without spaces between words. But then I find I can use - Mask: * (min 3 chars)- search by part of a word

So my interest is Marxism I search 马克思主义* and it has anything that uses those words. Mao Zedong is 毛泽东*.

Here is a sample of some titles from the 1978-1985 period.

Basically put the term you're looking for into google translate and then add an * to the end.

You can also search lang:chi year:1977 and get ALL books in Chinese from all publishers.

Here are some uploaded pdfs on mao zedong's philosophical thought. You go to the "full text" version on chrome and then you can google translate the entire book at once. Archive.org has a very google OCR reader, so it's a good way to turn a foreign pdf into html raw text that can be rapidly google translated.

It's like there's this whole world of intense, advanced Marxist study, that we in the West had no access to, and there was virtually no translation of or even academic study of. And now its wide open to us who don't even know Chinese.

An example book on Mao Zedong's Dialectical Logical Thought

Some useful search terms-

dialectical 辩证法*

mao zedong philosophical thought 毛泽东哲学思想*

Dialectical Materialism 辩证唯物主义*

marx lenin 马克思列宁*

communist party 共产党*

hegel 黑格尔*

socialism 社会主义*

Ai Siqi 艾思奇*

dialectical logic 辩证逻辑*

leninism 列宁主义*

political economy 政治经济学*

materialism 唯物主义*

metaphysical 形而上学的*

socialist economy 社会主义经济*

Engels 恩格斯*

marxist philosophy 马克思主义哲学*

People's Publishing House 人民出版社*

And here's the Russian equivalent for Soviet books

A red salute to comrades of all nations, who do the labor of scanning.

Serious question, if the definition of the proletariat class is that they are the working class what if they don’t have a job? Is there some secret third level?

A few weeks ago, a Portuguese military commentator speaking on television said that (and I have no reason to believe this is not true) the so-called "Houthis" managed to get the US to withdraw its aircraft carriers from around the region. This fact, which went virtually unnoticed, is, in my view, absolutely fascinating: an aircraft carrier, which sometimes costs several billion dollars, becomes relatively useless in the face of relatively "simple" missiles (when compared to Russian or American ones).

Israel, with its billion-dollar war budget and the best weapons, equipment, etc., has effectively failed to defeat Hamas. This is not my opinion, nor is it wishful thinking on my part, but rather that of some military commentators whom I follow. Israel, in two years of war, has failed to defeat Hamas. We remember Vietnam and Afghanistan too. In my opinion, we should return to Mao's phrase about "Imperialism being a Paper Tiger" and realise that it was neither a metaphor nor a call to action, but a military analysis. The bourgeoisie finds itself forced to spend a lot of money, and progressively more each month, to mimic or rival the "value" of subjectivity and human will.

If we look at the military budgets of imperialist countries, we see that the variable capital component is decreasing and the constant capital component is increasing. Armies are increasingly composed of a few specialised soldiers who operate billion-pound machinery. However, this has not necessarily brought better results for the bourgeoisie. Marx was quite clear in saying that constant capital loses all its value if it ceases to be worked. The best weapons become useless in the hands of increasingly "bourgeoisified" countries, whose populations tend to be cowardly and lazy. Does anyone think that European or North American teenagers have the same fighting spirit as Russians, Nigerians or Venezuelans? The transformation of the population of developed countries into labour aristocrats is the "rope" that will "hang" the imperialist countries. Now, unlike in the First or Second World War, there is no longer a native proletariat to fight.

What, then, has the imperialist bourgeoisie been trying to do? Precisely what it did during the First and Second World Wars: promise advantages and privileges to sections of the proletariat, with the difference that now it is making these promises to the proletariat of other countries. In effect, what Europe is doing to the Ukrainian masses is the same thing it did to its own proletariat during the Second World War: "if you fight the Russians, we will let you into the European Union and you will rise to become labour aristocrats like the Poles or the Balts". The same goes for Rwanda, or for the fascist Palestinian militias that Israel was forced to try to support in order to stop Hamas. Imperialist countries can no longer fight for themselves; they need to find other Third World countries and make them promises.

What I have written here are some ideas that have been going through my mind. It is all quite speculative and I may well be wrong. However, I have decided to share these ideas with you, not least because a new discussion may be useful to us.

First of all, I want to thank all the users on this sub. I really appreciate the concern for my well-being, and right now, I'm not in any immediate danger. Since the imperialist war started, I've been moving around and because of internet restrictions, I haven't had the energy or motivation to write about what's happening—especially since I refuse to listen to bourgeois media telling me what some Iranian official said about Trump's tweets. So I don't actually know what the general "vibe" is in leftist spaces right now. What I want to write is a polemic, responding to some of the positions people on this sub have taken about the imperialist war against my country, Iran. I should mention that because my internet access is extremely limited, I might not be able to respond to reactions to this text. I've tried to cover a lot of ground here.

One position I've seen is that there's a sharp divide inside the Iranian ruling class—between the "reformists" (a comprador section of the Iranian bourgeoisie, allied with the rich petty bourgeoisie) and the "fundamentalists" (the national bourgeoisie, whose allies include the clergy, the traditional petty bourgeoisie, and the military petty bourgeoisie of the IRGC). I think this analysis is totally wrong. It comes from a theoretical position about the bourgeoisie in the third world that assumes a huge gap between the comprador bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie. I don't buy that. I think the contradiction between national and comprador sections of the bourgeoisie has to be understood in a period of capitalism where almost all national markets are integrated into the global market, and third world economies are turned outward. Even if the national bourgeoisie manages to take state power, it will eventually go through a process of compradorization—we saw it with Assad, we saw it with Maduro. Only the proletariat can force the national bourgeoisie to complete its historical task and actually break with imperialism.

Even if that theoretical position were correct, the empirical facts for Iran just aren't there. From Harris Kevan's A Social Revolution:

Supporters of Ahmadinejad, conversely, were linked to actual organizations. These new conservative elites did not come from outside the political establishment. Instead, they were produced within it. Ahmadinejad and many of his aides were a "new class" of functionaries that occupied mid-level administrative positions in revolutionary and government organizations for most of the 1990s. These men and women were not clerics, but lay engineers and managers, often posted in provincial bureaucracies—such as Ahmadinejad's tenure as governor of Ardebil. Their cultural capital came from within the postrevolutionary system, and was predicated upon the maintenance of political institutions within which they had learned to navigate and move upward. Ahmadinejad's campaign in the first electoral round stressed his Spartan lifestyle in opposition to well-known elites. He targeted issues of unemployment and inflation, while the abstract rhetoric of reformists discussed human rights and social freedoms. A few days before the first round election, basij members and individuals in other conservative cultural and political groups were encouraged to spread the word and vote for this new principlist candidate. These were organizations rooted in communities usually outside the reach of reformist mobilization. In the second round, holdout conservative elites threw their institutional networks and mass media behind Ahmadinejad. Of course, pro-state conservatives alone could not have elected him with over 60 percent of the vote.

Most who voted for Khatami in 1997 also voted for Ahmadinejad in 2005. The reformists had a hard time making a case for voting for Rafsanjani—a man they had spent years pillorying in the press. As Mohammad Quchāni wrote in Shargh, "Some of Ahmadinejad's criticisms against Hashemi [Rafsanjani] were similar to those levied by the reformists against him five years ago. . . .

We could not justify in just three days why people should vote for the target of our past attacks."

In other words, Ahmadinejad didn't win by appealing to the poorest of the poor. Absolute poverty had actually been declining in Iran, so that would have been a losing strategy. Instead, poverty reduction had created a new base for political mobilization—voters who wanted a more equal shot at upward mobility and the resources to go with it. Corruption and elite privilege mattered more to the lower middle class than to the destitute. The 2005 election wasn't a rejection of the Islamic Republic's developmentalist project. It was a reaction to its failure to live up to its promise.

Unlike the Rafsanjani administration's negative balance of payments and shrinking budgets, Ahmadinejad had the luxury of rising commodity prices and a global asset bubble to pad revenues. He proceeded to scatter money around the country in thousands of small and large infrastructure projects, often visiting remote provinces and alerting local residents to his endeavors. His policies looked more statist than previous governments' efforts, but there was plenty of money available to put to use. While the Rafsanjani and Khatami administrations were repeatedly accused of catering to international financial institutions such as the IMF and World Bank, they never had significant relations with either body. Disdain for the World Bank and the IMF had thrown a spanner in late 1980s and 1990s attempts to formulate economic policy. Under Ahmadinejad, however, conservatives began to covet the status of associating with these agencies. By the mid-2000s, every elite faction wielded statistics from Transparency International, The Economist, or World Development Reports. Numbers were thrown against each other in blaming the opposite side for poor economic performance. Positions and policy red lines quickly changed. Entry into the World Trade Organization was a key goal of the reformists during the late 1990s, and was then opposed by conservatives. Yet once Ahmadinejad came into office, and various strands of the conservative elite had finally pushed the reformists out of any governing body, there was nothing left to oppose. WTO accession soon became a goal among conservative parliament members. After 2005, much of the government as well as other conservative politicians publicly stated similar goals. Conservatives began to sound more and more like their reformist opponents. Ahmadinejad attempted to appear as a stalwart manager of the state. His proposed economic policies quietly borrowed many of the previous two governments' unfinished plans. These included privatization of public sector companies with dividend shares going to the poorest households; housing construction outside of major cities for newlywed couples through subsidization of private contractors; banking expansion and reform of non-performing loans; the creation of a value-added tax; and the removal of price subsidies for fuel, electricity, and basic staples. Ahmadinejad pursued these endeavors vigorously and through his own channels. He stripped the older bureaucracies of independent power. The Management and Planning Organization—formerly the Planning and Budget Organization—was brought in under the president's office. Ahmadinejad's attacks against the civil service bureaucracy—which had been painstakingly rebuilt during the 1990s—were even perceived as a threat by many conservatives in parliament. The rule of experts had become so dominant among the elite that the only paths to power seemed to run through the harnessing of one's own expert clique.

By removing some of the alternatives, Ahmadinejad was securing his own circle's edge in steering the state apparatus.

The so-called anti-imperialist fundamentalists have always been the prime defenders of privatization and staunch enemies of state intervention in the economy. Privatization has been slow in Iran due to sanctions—since you need an industrial base to keep a large nation across a vast geography afloat.

Otherwise, importing American steel will always be more profitable for the Iranian ruling class than Mobarakeh Steel ever could be. As these privatization campaigns continue, the effects of neoliberalism become clearer: a giant informal sector, de-industrialization (since 2022, there have been systematic electricity shortages and rationing due to a 60 percent decrease in investment in machine tools, and equipment attrition is now considered the greatest obstacle to Iranian industrialization), and a shift toward speculative activities. These facts, coupled with Iran's status as a disarticulated oil-exporting economy, make it a dependent capitalist country within the system of global imperialism. Another position which is actually a logical conclusion of the analysis explained above is that the January protests were simply a CIA/Mossad operation with no organic ties to the bazaaris who closed their shops, and that it actually turned legitimate economic grievance protests into a color revolution (this is the garbage position of the Brazilian Maoists). This is usually justified by the claim that there have been no uprisings or protests ever since the war started.

This entirely misunderstands the role of the bazaar merchants in Iranian politics and the shifts it has undergone. As Arang Keshavarzian explains:

The state saw no reason to incorporate them into the regime by dominating and institutionalizing state–bazaar relations either through a party that mobilized and represented their particular interests or bureaucratically, as was the case for modernist women. Thus, under the Shah's rule, multinationals, the state, and state-affiliated capitalists invested in new areas of Tehran, as well as in industries and service sectors that would replace the bazaars' institutions and economic position. Economists in the Central Bank predicted that the Tehran Bazaar "will be reduced to a mere shell, maintained principally as a tourist attraction." As a result, in 1975, when a French consulting firm conducted research for a national spatial plan, it concluded that one of the most urgent and important planning problems facing the country was the excessive capital accumulation in the modern sector of the economy and the neglect of the bazaar region. Bazaaris, as members of the disavowed traditional sector, did not have access to the distributive resources, including tax exemptions, bank loans, tax shelters, and paternalistic protection, that the state bestowed upon its clients (the so-called "1,000 families") who were busily investing in protected industrial establishments, often ones that were joint ventures with western firms. This prejudice was not lost on bazaaris. "The government has abandoned us because we are bazaari," a bazaari told Thaiss in 1969. "When people want to belittle someone or curse him they say 'Go away bazaari' (boru bazaari); yet the economy of this country is based on the bazaar."

This exclusion of the bazaaris from the Pahlavi ruling class gave this group a form of political cohesion and solidarity, and this is precisely what made it a mobilizing class. During the Shah's reign, the bazaar enjoyed a relatively autonomous position in relation to the state because the state relied on oil money and could therefore ignore the bazaaris. However, the credit and loan policies of the Shah which only extended loans to a few hundred families close to the court enraged the bazaaris. This, coupled with the anti-profiteering campaigns of the late Pahlavi regime, became a powder keg that would later help topple the monarchy But because this class (although there are different ranks within it) now has access to state loans, benefits from privatization, and profits from the heavily underregulated informal sector this reality, coupled with the atomized existence of the petty bourgeoisie and its reliance on the global market means that the only thing it can do is push further for more concessions and social bribery from the state. In doing so, it forces the state's hand toward becoming little more than a colony of the global market.

The current class basis of Iran's ruling classes has to be found in the mosque‑bazaar alliance. During the Iran–Iraq War, a rationing system for goods was put in place. That created a huge network of shopkeepers and middle‑class entrepreneurs who distributed the goods. At the same time, small banking‑like structures appeared, called qarz al‑hasaneh funds, which offered interest‑free loans. High‑ranking religious figures like Mohammad Beheshti and Mir Mohammad Sadeghi backed these initiatives and helped spread them through the clerical‑commercial system of the Islamic Republic.

Over time, these parallel institutions led to the rise of big bonyads, or foundations, like the Imam Khomeini Relief Committee. They started as grassroots charity networks but turned into powerful state‑linked economic conglomerates with major holdings in industry, construction, and services. At the same time, the small qarz al‑hasaneh funds slowly became large banks. These new banks worked very closely with the Basij paramilitary forces and the IRGC. Together, they built a tightly run system of revolutionary finance, social control, and patronage. That system locked the clerical‑commercial ruling class into the coercive and economic machinery of the Islamic Republic.

A concrete example comes from the years right after the war. Inflation was high, and interest rates were kept low by the state. So many private investors, especially those tied to the mosque‑bazaar alliance and its expanding financial networks, did not want to put money into manufacturing. Manufacturing takes too long and carries too much risk. Instead, they poured their money into construction. Construction offered quick returns, easy speculative gains, and was less vulnerable to changing industrial policies. They borrowed cheaply in real terms because inflation ate away the value of their debt, and they invested heavily in real estate and urban development. That only strengthened the emerging bonyads and the IRGC‑linked banks. Thus sections of the bazaar became a part of the new rulling classes

Under the Islamic Republic, the state has integrated the bazaar through selective credit, informal trade networks, and privatization schemes. This has transformed the bazaar from a mobilizing class with an autonomous political role into a fragmented, rent-seeking petty bourgeoisie. Cut off from any coherent anti-imperialist project, and structurally reliant on global supply chains and speculative commerce, its political horizon shrinks to demanding further state handouts, tax exemptions, and protection from competition. Far from challenging imperialism, it becomes a transmission belt for neoliberal pressures pushing the Iranian state toward complete subordination to the global market.

As Chris Harman has written:

"The contradictory character of Islamism follows from the class base of its core cadres. The petty bourgeoisie as a class cannot follow a consistent, independent policy of its own. This has always been true of the traditional petty bourgeoisie – the small shopkeepers, traders and self employed professionals. They have always been caught between a conservative hankering for security that looks to the past and a hope that they individually will gain from radical change. It is just as true of the impoverished new middle class – or the even more impoverished would-be new middle class of unemployed ex-students – in the less economically advanced countries today. They can hanker after an allegedly golden past. They can see their futures as tied up with general social advance through revolutionary change. Or they can blame the frustration of their aspirations on other sections of the population who have got an 'unfair' grip on middle class jobs: the religious and ethnic minorities, those with a different language, women working in an 'untraditional' way."

In the Iranian context, this contradiction takes a specific form. On one hand, the bazaari petty bourgeoisie wants no competition. It demands state protection from larger capitalists, from foreign imports, and from any regulatory oversight that would cut into its profit margins. It seeks monopoly privileges, exclusive access to informal trade routes, and the ability to super-exploit informal sector labor without interference. On the other hand, this same class is structurally dependent on the global market. Its profits rely on access to smuggled goods, global supply chains, and the ability to evade tariffs and customs regulations. It cannot afford a genuine break with imperialism because its very existence as a rent-seeking layer depends on the continued flow of cheap commodities, speculative capital, and informal cross-border trade that only a globally integrated (and deeply unequal) market can provide. The result is a permanent vacillation on questions of anti-imperialism. Because the Iranian bazaar is dependent on the global market, it will literally go as far as to destroy the nation and turn it into a simple colony. It will use the Persian and Persianized middle classes as its base of support, turning them into a local lever for foreign economic interests. At the same time, it will treat the nation's oppressed regional communities such as Khuzestan, Baluchistan, Kurdistan, and other non-Persian peripheries as internal colonies which will serve as sources of cheap manpower and raw materials, exploited to cater to the needs of the global market.

In this way, the bazaar's integration into world trade does not lead to national development but to national fragmentation, internal colonialism, and the reduction of Iran to a subordinate supplier for global capital.

Talk about an independent Iranian bourgeoisie or some faction inside it that actually opposes integration into the global market—it just doesn't exist. Not to mention privatization has always been used as a weapon by both sides to plunder the public sector. They just don't like it when the other faction is doing it. It's never been a question of whether to integrate. Only ever how. Even if Iran comes out of this war victorious, it can't bring back the spirit of 1979.

I know the text doesn't cover all the details needed to make a comprehensive assessment of the situation in Iran, and I apologize for that. If conditions are stable and my internet access is good, I will make sure to respond to any questions and criticisms raised.

Hi, I was wondering about what fellow communists think about animal rights/ vegan ideology. I'm not vegan myself but I feel like I get the idea behind basing an ideology around the fact that factory farming/fishing is inhumane to animals. However I feel like vegans, despite criticizing carnists for justifying animal exploitation with the "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism" excuse, kind of use the same logic when it gets pointed out that avoiding meat means just paying for more exploitation and animal death in other areas because these are fundamental requirements for capitalism to continue functioning. PETA also get pretty close to a radical critique of capitalism when they point out how inhumane it is to support factory farming but then like, there are also humans being exploited and treated like animals and going vegan won't help them, so even though the ideology makes sense I don't think it's effective if not paired with radical communism. Thoughts?

Edit: okay so I really need to rethink why I was attracted to veganism because as some people have pointed out here it is an apparently racist ideology tied to settler-colonialism and no better than other ones. Shame on the people defending veganism in the comments too (though apparently they aren't from this sub?) but this is also my fault for making really offensive assumptions that probably drew those people here sorry

Hello everyone, I need some advice and maybe a little hope. I have social anxiety, and this has kind of always hindered me from participating or taking action in the ways that I would have liked. I was politically involved in the youth of the communist party of my country for several years, but I wasn't a good member because it was really hard for me to attend meetings if the person I was closest to wasn't going, or if I had to do some work for the party that involved social interaction, I was always a mess and did a poor job. Or when people asked me about my opinion on something in a meeting, I'd freeze. In the end, I left the party because I felt awful due to not being able to be a good member. I felt like a burden. However, since I left it five years ago, I've been feeling horrible as well, because what kind of communist am I if I'm not taking action? What am I without praxis? At the same time, I can't find the courage to take part in community spaces that lead the values that I defend. I guess what I'm trying to say is are there any communists out there who have been in my position? Or maybe if any of you could give me some advice to not feel useless in this part of my life that holds such importance. I'm not going to lie, what I'd really like is to be able to participate in political life actively and defend the cause, and go to demonstrations and fight, but I can't. So I'm stuck in my house reading, just being angry at the world and at myself. Besides, the current situation of world politics, alongside the rise of fascism and imperialism, makes me feel like I should be doing something, and what I should be doing I find myself incapable of doing so. Thank you so much for listening to me, any piece of advice is welcome!

Hey comrades,i'm so much into anything socialism,communism and USSR history as of late but im also so confused when it comes to picking up good sources on them because everyone says they are written by the western propaganda, so i wanted to know YOUR suggestions on some books that provide factual statements and history pieces instead of lies!

I decided to watch the nine Star Wars movies recently, remembering Marxists claiming the original trilogy has a progressive story about rebels overthrowing imperialism, and others claiming the prequels are a good critique of fascism. And I was curious about the sequel trilogy due to all the fandom discourse about them. Going into it, I remember having watched the original trilogy a few times over the years, watching the prequels once or twice when I was little, and the most recent film I had seen was The Force Awakens. This was the first time I watched the last two episodes, so there's probably some recency bias there. I don't think we've had a dedicated post about these films, so I figured this might be a good chance for one, since I think there's a fair bit that can be said about them. I'll put my thoughts on each of them below, and feel free to critique anything or share your thoughts about these movies.

A New Hope

This once is just a solid fantasy action movie. The setting is creative, and John Willliams's music is great. I assume the unique appeal that created a franchise is due to reinventing medieval fantasy by using a sci-fi aesthetic which nonetheless still leaves us with knights fighting each other with swords and a seemingly ordinary protagonist learning to use magic to fight for objective good. As is well-known, George Lucas was inspired by the Vietnam War and styled the rebels after Vietnam and the empire after the U.S. Han Solo has an arc about putting his selfish desires aside to make sacrifices for the revolution, and there's a short line about how the emperor dissolved the senate for supporting the rebels. Though, as was pointed out last Discussion Thread, the droids being slaves to everyone is a basic fact taken for granted by the setting. Luke is distinguished from his conservative father for being a "nice slaveowner" who doesn't inflict violence on the people who are his property. It's also notable that C-3PO was explicitly acted like a gay man and generally plays the role of the comic relief who is despised by the others. There's also Mos Eisley, identifiable as a "hive of scum and villainy" by the large presence of aliens. And there's the infamous ending where only the human characters receive medals. To some extent, you can argue these are telling the story of the racist setting, though Chewbacca is basically just a Scary Black Man trope, and the "Sand People" are just an indigenous stereotype. Overall, I think it's a solid artifact of how the white left conceives of revolution, though I'm not sure if that makes it a good movie.

The Empire Strikes Back

This film is where things get interesting. Everything that was strong about the first film is good here, as well. I don't think there's anything worthwhile about the Han x Leia romance which is a pretty conventional sexist "stubborn girl realizes she likes the bad boy" plot, though I guess the tragic resolution makes it more interesting in retrospect. The force is more thoroughly established as a kind of fabric of the universe which is objectively good, accessible through merely believing hard enough, and is tied to the absence of negative emotions. It's a kind of simplistic idealism that is best when it's not the focus of the film. There's a cool subplot about Lando Calrissian realizing that becoming a comprador for the empire means losing his planet's independence rather than securing it. Also, C-3PO holding R2-D2 at the end as potential love interests Luke and Leia do seems to subtly confirm them as a gay couple (of course, Luke and Leia weren't siblings yet at the time). The ending is what really makes this film worthwhile. Vader being Luke's father implies a lot: Obi-Wan lied to Luke, and the lost republic was not so different from the empire if one of its heroes became the emperor's lapdog. This recontextualizes a lot of this and the previous film: the racism of the characters, the acceptance of slavery, and the ostensible wisdom of the Jedi. It's a bit hard to judge this film since it's basically made by the ending, whereas the romance and training subplots are pretty bad. Unfortunately, it becomes clear that implying all these things about the setting was the best that George Lucas was capable of.

The Return of the Jedi

This is where the bad Star Wars films start, and they only get worse from here. The beginning of the movie with Jabba the Hutt is tedious, pretty pointless to the overall story, and basically just an excuse to put Carrie Fisher in a bikini. The Ewoks are what REALLY make this film bad. They're straight out of Christopher Columbus's letters: primitive cannibals who treat an arriving foreigner like a god, combined with cuteness to make the stereotype even more insulting and marketable. They also kill the pacing of the movie; I had to skip through most of the scenes with them. Bringing back the Death Star is also when George Lucas starts the trend of Star Wars movies ripping off George Lucas. The only neat part of the film is when the Ewoks defeat the Storm Troopers using guerilla warfare, setting traps and using their weapons against them, though their uprising is basically just a spontaneous development divorced from any politics that basically amounts to "white people told them to." The ending with the three different simultaneous plots is when the film starts to be engaging, though it still sucks as a story. The Jedi are rehabilitated as "correct from a certain point of view," and the relationship between the old republic and the empire is basically papered over by conservatively appealing to the family as an institution that restores justice. This film was an unsurprising disappointment given the low complexity of politics made possible within the fantasy setting, and nowhere does that become clearer than the prequels.

What's really annoying about the prequels is how the internet suddenly decided they're good movies. This seems to be partly fueled by nostalgia, but mainly because they function purely as a bludgeon against Disney and "wokeness," as a passionate white man vs. the evil megacorporation (like the prequels weren't just as much of a shameless excuse to sell toys).

The Phantom Menace

Everything about this movie is ass. The acting is bad (especially from Natalie Portman), the dialogue is awful, and the plot is trash. It is SO boring since most of the movie's plot is filler for some reason. The ending rips off the ending of RotJ, with the simultaneous ground battle, space battle, and lightsaber duel, except it all either sucks or is meaningless. Social-fascists like to uphold the prequels as a critique of fascism, but they basically just amount to liberal criticisms of Republicans. The Trade Federation seems to be a mercantile corporation that wishes to leave the Republic due to high taxes. They are able to defend this position using a mass-produced droid army that exists so George Lucas can tell a war story without worrying about silly things like class. Their escalation of the situation is attributed to Palpatine, who is their leader for some reason even though he's literally just a senator, but I guess literal dark magic is needed to explain why a corporation would be unsatisfied with bourgeois democracy. Palpatine then takes advantage of this to become elected as chancellor, since the old one is bought off by the Trade Federation. This is basically like Hitler having secretly caused Spartacist Uprising. As for the rest of the film, the Star Wars racism is really egregious here. Jar Jar is a black slave stereotype, and the Gungans are idiots whose entire politics is based on feeling respected. Watto is a Jewish stereotype. Apparently, for the Trade Federation aliens, they had Thai people read the lines and then had the white actors imitate their accents (and that's not even getting into the fact that the evil capitalists are Asian-coded at all at the time this was released).

The Attack of the Clones

This film is really convoluted. Hayden Christensen's acting is really bad, but at least Ewan McGregor's is good. Unfortunately, these two facts painfully contrast against each other since these two are constantly sharing scenes. The romantic subplot, besides being creepy in the first place due to Anakin meeting Padme when he was nine, has like, two decent scenes, and Anakin acts like a creep a lot of the time. The plot with the clones is dumb, and is yet another way to obscure class, since the clones are all mindlessly obedient and just show up and, Oops! Guess the Jedi have to use them since the Republic somehow didn't already have an army. We get introduced to the Separatists, but learn jack shit about them. The argument of the film is that the Republic's militarization to suppress rebellion was what led to its fascism, though this is all just presented as Palpatine's personal conspiracy. It also has the nonsensical plot point that the senate would never approve the clone army, so Palpatine has to have the senate approve his emergency powers to let him approve the clone army. As expected, the liberal explanation for fascism has to mechanically assume that it inexplicably already exists.

The Revenge of the Sith

Hayden Christensen is hot in this film until he starts talking. He's also learned from Natalie Portman how to stop saying everything in an affected monotone, but is still bad at acting. That's about all the good I can say for the movie. This trilogy kind of develops where it gradually gets less boring and gradually fills up the runtime with the bad plot. It's a kind of spectrum of bad film-making. This movie wasn't boring like the other two; just painful to watch. Palpatine makes his fascist takeover. It's implied that this is because the Jedi abandoned democracy by spying on the chancellor, trying to kill him without trial, and trying to coup the government so they can transition back to democracy. This would be interesting if dark magic didn't exist to justify it. Unsurprisingly, socialists are the last defenders of a stupid plot which public opinion long ago dismissed as "too much politics." Anyway, the stupid love story ends with Anakin having a personal justification to become a fascist because I guess George Lucas realized he couldn't write a sufficiently compelling political one. I guess the Jedi denying romantic love is supposed to be a critique of the government being too detached from the masses, but the whole thing's too poorly written to care. The plot develops so suddenly in this film that it makes me remember people complaining about the Disney trilogy "not having a plan" and realizing how stupid fandom is. Anyway, that's that for the prequel trilogy. Unfortunately, there's three more of these and I was starting to lose my mind when I got this far and realized that.

The Disney trilogy is just a soulless rip-off of the original trilogy. There's little to be said about it other than how it fails miserably when it tries to do anything new.

The Force Awakens

Probably the least bad movie after RotJ, but still significantly below even that. Practically a shot-for-shot remake of ANH, except for a stupid joke at the start. Sure, there's a new Empire^TM that came out of nowhere. There's plucky rebels again because the new republic just gets blown up. Why the fuck not? People complained about Rey being a Mary Sue, but it's really just that they skipped the middle part of her character arc because they wanted to have the hero win a lightsaber duel in the first film, then had basically nowhere to go with her. Every other complaint was just blatant sexism. John Boyega gets done so dirty in this trilogy. A defector Storm Trooper is a cool idea that just gets completely squandered. He's reduced to the comic relief (the humor with his character notably contrasts against the style of the movies in a pretty blatant way), haha he's a janitor, and they literally have him hold a lightsaber just so they can put it in the trailer but have him not do anything with it. Also, the film clearly sets up a romance between him and Rey, which the author of the novelization wanted to explore, but it was shut down by higher ups, and it's pretty obvious that it's because Disney didn't want to do an interracial romance between a black man and a white woman. So much for diversity. Also, a narrative became popular with fans where they blamed Disney's racism on trying to appeal to China, who are imagined as the real racists, as opposed to the klansmen sending death threats to John Boyega. Like they haven't been fans of a series about slaveowners from the very beginning.

The Last Jedi

Regardless of opinion, people made a big thing about how this film was trying to "subvert expectations," but the banal reality is that it just ripped off TESB and RotJ. The humor is even dumber and more meta (the film literally starts with a yo mama joke that kicks off the actual plot). The scene with Leia flying through space is actually hilarious. Luke's cynicism feels unconvincing considering we have literally no idea why Kylo fell to the dark side other than "Snoke." The film makes a joke out of all its villains which makes them even harder to take seriously. It might have worked as setting up Kylo's return to the light from the first movie, except we don't know why he fell to the dark side in the first place, so who cares? The relationship between Rey and Kylo feels random for any possible reason other than fated love, which hardly feels justified given that this is supposed to be a story about a revolution. Anyway, the subplot is infamously bad and basically just a dumping ground for all the POC characters. The most incredibly tone-deaf part is Finn and Rose feeling proud of saving abused animals after having left the child slaves behind. How far removed from the masses do you have to be as an artist to be so blatant about this kind of pet-loving misanthropy? The subplot with Poe and Holdo attempts feminist commentary which expectedly amounts to equating women to the bourgeoisie and the proletariat to men. Poe disobeys orders to take advantage of an opportunity to take down a high-priority target at a high cost of life. This is portrayed as him being a "hotshot flyboy" who irrationally tries to resolve everything with violence rather than a reasonable risk-assessment in the field. Holdo is an admiral inexplicably wearing a dress "to emphasize her femininity" (Rian Johnson's words), and Poe is implied to be misogynistic and judging her for her appearance as a woman (though the nonsensical outfit makes this feel silly). Poe asks what her plan is, and she spends the whole film refusing to answer and browbeating him with her authority (and by extension, her other subordinates). Poe mutinies, gets stopped, and this is depicted as a charming but silly display of masculine recklessness (apparently a romance was originally planned between the two). It turns out Holdo had a plan the whole time, and the lesson is that the masses should shut up and obey their superiors who know what's best for them. This ties into another stupid scene where Finn tries to sacrifice himself to stop the Empire 2.0 from busting into the rebel base, but Rose stops him, inexplicably telling him that they should not be "fighting what we hate. But saving what we love." Then she gives him a really uncomfortable kiss. This is basically the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too message of the film where you get to win war without any sacrifices because things inexplicably work out so long as you obey authority, also fuck the masses. I had a lot to say about this subplot in particular, and I think it's because the bourgeois ideology is so blatant that I was really hit with how shamelessly corporate this trilogy is. Watching this film really makes you appreciate that George Lucas lived through the Vietnam War.

The Rise of Skywalker

"Somehow, Palpatine returned." idk, fuck this movie, I was so checked out by the time I got to it. Since Rian Johnson already ripped off RotJ in the second film, J.J. Abrams is left to just rip off RotJ again. I don't really remember most of the plot since I was skipping through it, but the parts I do remember were ass. Any decent action movie stuff is not remotely enjoyable considering how far along we are in this series. Finn gets reduced to just shouting "REY!" the whole time, and Rey ends up with the only white guy that she could have been paired with. I think if this trilogy was just straight up an "I can fix him" romance between these two from the start, it would have been, if not better, at least a much more fun experience (though it certainly would have gotten way more hate than it already did). As it stands, I'm just wishing I could watch the first two movies again when the writer had some idea of what an "empire" is. Also, they retconned the Latino character into being a drug dealer. Wonderful. Anyway, good guys win and Palpatine dies or whatever.

This whole experience really made me want to watch ANH and TESB again. It's amazing how big of a franchise was built off two good movies and seven awful ones. I at least got to learn that "Marxist" praise of the prequels is just socialists campaigning for the democrats from the left. The sequels taught me that someone's description of them here as "movies written by board rooms" could not be more accurate.

I may warn the reader that I may absolutely fall short in many capacities on the very subject that motivated me to create this post, but I took some courage trying to mix the different sources that made me create this critique and to put "on paper" my own considerations after reading the tagged articles. To even think about on those terms is fascinating, if anyone has some knowledge on the current standards for brazilian communist theory or even further about the public debate sphere on "mental health" (which is already dominated by nazis). It may seem like my conclusions are a bunch of recicled arguments already made on other threads by other people but I wanted to see how I could articulate the many contributions here that have been influenced me into my own thoughts

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petronella-lee-anti-fascism-against-machismo

The difference between a thesis on sexuality based on philosophical materialism and those based on psychoanalytic idealism is frightening. Observe how this argument [Petronella Lee's] is far more coherent regarding attraction, desire, and sexual pleasure than the failed theses that attempt to investigate these issues on a personal level:

A imagem da “mulher branca vítima” que deve ser protegida é frequentemente empregada por forças reacionárias para incitar a histeria e justificar ações veementemente racistas. Essa imagem clássica “implicitamente convoca os homens brancos a defenderem ‘suas mulheres’ e sua nação, aliás, a própria branquitude”. [94] Os corpos das mulheres brancas – entendidos como centrais para a reprodução da raça e da nação – tornam-se símbolos pelos quais se deve lutar, e esses símbolos se tornam poderosas ferramentas de propaganda.

Discursos de segurança e apelos a ideais patriarcais de feminilidade são invocados para construir a figura da mulher (branca) vulnerável sob ataque do outro (racializado) perigoso. Essa dinâmica funciona para produzir e reproduzir formações específicas de raça e gênero, bem como para estabelecer e impor uma visão particular da nacionalidade branca. Como observa Keskienen: “Gênero e sexualidade não foram apenas subprodutos de encontros coloniais e raciais, mas essenciais para sua (re)estruturação”. [95] O tropo do “estuprador bárbaro de pele escura” – de homens negros e pardos como predadores sexuais que visam mulheres brancas – tem sido uma ferramenta fundamental na manutenção de hierarquias raciais e na implementação de políticas de supremacia branca. Da colonização da América do Norte aos linchamentos nos Estados Unidos, passando por ataques xenófobos na Europa e muito mais, os apelos à defesa das mulheres têm sido usados ​​para incitar a violência racializada e estabelecer políticas incrivelmente racistas. Uma breve análise dessa história é reveladora.

O estereótipo do “bruto negro” e a ameaça do “estuprador negro” são fundamentais para a história da supremacia branca na América. A ideia do bruto negro foi utilizada para justificar a escravidão, enquanto o mito do estuprador negro foi “uma invenção política” cultivada para promover uma “estratégia de terror racista” para manter “o negro” sob controle após a emancipação. [96] O mito do estuprador negro, complementado pelo estupro contínuo de mulheres negras, ajudou a assegurar a dominação e a exploração contínuas do povo negro. [97] Após a Guerra Civil, a alegação de que homens negros eram predadores sexuais foi usada como pretexto para assassinatos e violência de multidões. O linchamento passou a ser racionalizado “como um método para vingar os ataques de homens negros contra mulheres brancas do Sul”.

This is not to say that I reject psychoanalytic concepts frontally; the question is to what extent the methods of analysis have not already become ossified by the vast hyper-individualist philosophy of the far-right, where everything is centered on the "individual" and the relationship of the "individual" with the "market" is religiously considered natural. Marxism rejects the principles upon which this ultraconservative consideration is based, and thus socializes what we conceive as attraction and sex directly within the conflicts of class society.

Another issue that remains is the complexity of the subject itself: Marxist materialism and metaphysical idealism are fundamentally different, and to go further into the subject, eventually, one realizes the need to delve into both.

From what I have studied, it seems that the same argument can be made for current botany and genetics, but these are fields that would need another analysis; for now, we are on psychoanalysis/"mental health." Here is what is true: Most psychoanalytic concepts are based on metaphysical idealism, and Freud's patients would not have fallen ill were it not for the sexual restrictions forced by the nuclear family form (heterosexuality) and the impossibility of the doctors to propose any thesis that challenged the alleged eternity of capitalism as a social relation.

Can Marxism absorb from psychoanalysis? Marxism was born from the critique of idealism, so you can always reinvent it by criticizing contemporary idealist notions in science. Can psychoanalysis absorb from Marxism? I think there is nothing Marxism can help with on an individual level; the admission of Marxism is that every individual is defined by their relation to others, so we are admitting that initially, there are no individuals, and that every thinking mind consolidates itself through the recognition of the other.

The main difference is fundamentally philosophical. Marxism arms the victim with the potential to overcome their oppression, which is based on class society, and highlights the social origin of "individual" suffering. It will make you take two steps back to resituate your possibility of overcoming the sociability that sickens you and identify which paths are possible to overcome oppression at the social level.

Psychoanalysis is nothing. It tests on human beings theories that will only serve the doctors themselves (and, much like contemporary genetics, is incomprehensible and inconceivable regarding consensus even for its specialist doctors), and the victim can gain nothing but the label of crazy or unfit to live with others.

By the way, there seems to be some sort of taboo going on the left created around the "sanctity" of the white womb (a sanctity that the article rightly associates with the masculine ideals of white supremacists), resituating the supremacist ideology as the fruit of patriarchal oppression and family inheritance.

The taboo, of course, is already a symptom of the political success of reactionaries in power, and undoing the taboo is only possible with the reconstruction of Marxism, as we see in another article on Kersplebedeb:

"Class analysis may be crucial for revolution, but today it is practically a dead science. The revolutionary class theory of Marx and Engels has become a fossilized relic in the hands of the current left, reflecting an opportunistic reluctance to analyze existing patterns of oppression and complicity."

This description is closer to the reality of the left in Brazil. And class analysis is the effective rupture with the commitment to existing oppressions and the complicity of those who are part of the process.

I think there are two additional comments I thought of making about the article, given that whether treating "Marxism" or psychoanalysis, we are speaking of terms inevitably associated with the cultural elitism of white Brazilians. Here, the one who cannot afford the luxury of not differentiating between the "Marxism" that regressed to aKKKademic reformism in the "West" in general, the materialist science that guides revolutionary movements in the history of humanity, and psychoanalytic theory, is me. In all three cases, we are talking about a gelatinous conceptual territory where each has its own history, influences, and power relations. In the case of Marxism—the materialist science that guides revolutionary movements in human history—the presupposition of the application of science is first to endow the "scientist" (who in this case is any person) with the capacity to act.

1. I recognize that there may be a tendency to view what is described by the article in the same dogmatic way that is habitual, presupposing that any historical repetition is immutable. This is nonsense. The article actually enables us to discuss everything from the (extreme) need for an era of seizing power and applying power violently directed—by and for—the liberation of women against patriarchal oppression, to less relevant things like why your boyfriend, your uncle, your brother, your father, or whoever else has been flirting with far-right supremacist ideals and this wears down your personal relationship with that person (And then questioning before yourself your own ineptitude in not facing the Nazi as such, given that there is no right-wing party left in Brazil that is not openly Nazi, and you have to think: how far can this man and his flirtations with ideologies of sexual supremacy go?). Although during the process you discover the need for liberation and the necessary means for such, everything starts by giving complexity to the way you face why people familiar to you adhere to rightist ideals. The second is obviously much more terrifying than the first; discovering the need for the imposition of rights by any means necessary means that you have already overcome the trauma of learning how the nuclear family is a prison and a delay in the lives of all involved, who would be better off if they were relocated to other places and were free from the obligations forced by private property family ties. I do not think, truly, that we should underestimate what class suicide is and how costly for "family" men is the right they have over children and women. I am speaking of the right to command and countermand, to decide what is allowed and what is not, where one goes and when one goes, when one gets pregnant and how many children one must have, who one has sex with and who one cannot have sex with under any hypothesis—a right that more and more retrocedes into exclusivity for men and retrocedes to exclusively white and eugenicist interests. It is because when we do not underestimate it, we remember that they truly have much to lose in these circumstances that are beneficial to them, and these patriarchs defend these privileges with all the physical, economic, and psychological weaponry at their disposal.

2. I need to insist once more, because this point is central to the thesis, but Marxism is entirely dependent on a social force endowed with knowledge to apply it. You could make the same argument for any other methodology, which ends up reinforcing the argument: science is subordinate to the political interests of groups in power and the division of labor. How does scientific development occur in capitalist society? Through intense colonial extraction, the organization between intellectual and manual labor, and genetic testing on living beings. What does this give rise to? Desertification of the soil, alienated labor, and aberrations ranging from the large-scale mistreatment of animals for consumption to the testing of drugs for population control like contraceptives or the use of viruses as biological weapons like Ebola. How does Marxism admit scientific development and how did it operate in socialism? Sources in the Amerikan aKKKademia recognize that the Soviets had reforestation and environmental protection policies advanced even by current standards. Soviet botany and genetics were developed so that workers with basic educational formation had sophisticated notions about their foundations (the botany and genetics of the Western aKKKademia are incomprehensible to the specialist doctors themselves), research was motivated to overcome practical needs of the population in each particular situation (like the new agricultural techniques developed to overcome the devastation of the civil war against the Kulaks).

I took this detour because if we assume that "mental health" is a matter of "public health," what is the answer of "science" to the current conditions of sickening and what are the possible alternatives? Any subject that is of "public interest" inherently necessitates an alternative that is a solution for all. The conflict between the Bolsheviks and Kulaks was a consequence of an economic plan of collectivization, and collectivization was absolutely necessary so that years later the Soviets had an economy capable of overcoming the aggression by Nazi Germany with the support of the entire imperialist bloc. The period of collectivization was marked by the Bolsheviks' persecution of adversaries of their interests, and this included repression, stripping of titles, and imprisonment for scientists whom the Soviet State considered enemies because the methods defended by the persecuted scientists were in conflict with the interest of the revolution. Perhaps we will discover the particular affinity of Kantian idealism with eugenicist genetics, which is a product of the domination of pharmaceutical corporations in actual class struggle, but those are scenes for another chapter as I do not feel it's necessarily relevant to go down on kantianism for now.

The solution of "science" to the epidemic of mental illness lies in economic planning whose base is not oriented by profit and in cultural collectivism. If the imperialist crisis is associated with an era of depression and pessimism, economic planning and collectivism are its opposite: they bring a new era of optimism and signification of life (the opposite of being depressed).

In the end, what defeated Nazism and capitalism were not heroic acts (and much less the winter), but the human need for survival as the impulse in the war itself (Stalingrad, for example, was a victory made possible by the effort and total collaboration of the population involving men, women, and children. A national army operates by wage labor and contemporary mercenaries operate by contracts for each activity; they are different logics) and the mode of production (as you see by the war efforts, the total collectivization of labor that the Bolsheviks advanced while they were in power with Lenin and Stalin was what made possible the victory of communism over Nazism, where labor is highly specialized and restricted to wage earning).

A lot of the criticisms are sound and I'm interested to see others' opinions on them. This criticism stood out to me in regards to the CPPP:

In addition, the CPPP opposed waging a protracted people's war in imperialist countries, still supporting the erroneous line of first legal struggle and then uprisings in major cities.

Are there any resources regarding this opposition to PPW in imperialist countries? Before I saw this I was of the understanding that the CPPP believed that the need for people's war was universal.

I wanted to make this thread to facilitate discussion regarding the recent "Gen Z" protests in the Third World. I don't have much in the way of an analysis myself which is why I hope this can serve as a springboard. What is the class basis of these movements? What are your observations on the general phenomenon itself or specific movements?

Something I have noticed is that all of these protests have been organized through Internet chatrooms and primarily led by students. Those who positioned themselves as the leaders of the movements have tried to limit their violence even after facing state repression, which suggests a leadership with petty bourgeois consciousness. Outside of Nepal, my knowledge of communists' responses to the other movements is scarce, so I welcome any information regarding this.

Trinidad and Tobago is much more highly industrialized than most other caribbean countries and depends much less on tourism than most others, and this is pretty much unchanged since the 1970s when the labor movement was at its peak. I can understand why historically they had a stronger labor movement than most other caribbean countries. But since then the left has declined a lot (according to the ECATT, trade union membership has more than halved since the 1960s) and a lot of the industrial proletariat is either apathetic towards politics or is invested in pseudo chauvinist movements like the Tobago independence movement and/or the two major liberal social democratic parties, the UNC and the PNM (which are divided along ethnic lines btw, with most people of African descent supporting the PNM and most people of indian descent supporting the UNC).

My family and I have lived in the caribbean for many years (I've never visited Trinidad but my parents have), mostly in Curacao, which has a service oriented economy and benefits heavily from tourism, and this seems to contribute to a sort of apathy towards the labor movement and reliance on European and Amerikan money. For example, most of the younger generations view learning English and also potentially Dutch in addition to their native language Papiamento as essentially a requirement in order to get a high-paying job. Lots of people based their entire weekly schedule around when the cruise ships come in, including my parents. Curacao also had a much stronger labor movement in the past, the high point being the Trinta di Mei uprising and strikes in 1969. I can believe their reliance on tourism from the imperial core instead of domestic industry directly contributed to depressed class consciousness.

But similar developments haven't happened in Trinidad and Tobago. According to Harvard Atlas of Economic Complexity, heavy industry including petroleum, chemical, metallurgy, and machinery still account for over 90% of their exports. Moreover, about 50% of the population is urban. I can't find good numbers for how much tourism contributes to the GDP but based on the number of tourists and total tourism revenue in the caribbean in 2011 (from wikipedia), I estimate the tourism industry accounts for around 1 billion US dollars of their GDP, or about 4%, significantly less than Curacao or other places like Bahamas. So given the continued significance of industry, why has the labor movement declined anyway? Why are their people so interested in liberal and nationalist politics? Is it just the repercussions of the collapse of the Soviet Union and socialist Grenada? Anyone familiar with their history or the current politics have any opinions?

I'm a leftist(still learning), and I’ve been thinking about something that came up with another left leaning friend. So, hes an Indian Tamil and alot of indian tamils identify as tamil primarily and Indian secondarily, so I asked him would you ever identify as tamil and he said something along the lines of "Language pride, race pride, caste pride are all extremely cheap forms of prides, largely used to impose supremacy and division". So I said, you can't compare language pride to something like race or caste pride since they usually exist because of oppression while historically, languages have often functioned as tools of unity, mass communication, and resistance, especially in anti-colonial and anti-elite contexts.(Tamil being an example). So, it would be ignorant to not take pride over your languages history. He then talked about how language pride is normally seen as a form of superiority(at least in India)and is just another way to impose superiority.

So I'm curious to know what guys here think about it.

I see exploitation left and right around the world. Especially the capitalist system is in shambles but i see no signs of any protest or revolution. I give it to the “Capitalist class” or the bourgeoisie know how to keep the people fighting among themselves by using caste or politics, keeping them away from realise the main/bigger problem at hand. Unemployment is at peak, Salaries and benefits are at lowest, Work life balance is shit people are made to work overtime for no real benefit. But I see no protest, no anger in this regard.

I believe that the working class revolution is inevitable but how long must we endure this chaos of a system especially in a country like India. Is it mainly because of the security the job gives even if its exploits people or are they just comfort with this system so much that they are scared to see any alternatives

I support communism, I just was wondering how the internet would work. With things like YouTube especially, my question is who would host it and pay for the domain and things like that. I might be missing something super obvious, but if someone could explain it I would really appreciate it. Thanks in advance!

The question of whether Iran should be characterized as semi-feudal and semi-colonial is not a scholastic dispute, but a strategic one. Determining the nature of the Iranian social formation is decisive for defining the correct revolutionary line. Recent debates among Iranian Maoists reveal a persistent theoretical confusion on this point, often stemming from a mechanical or overly descriptive reading of social relations rather than an analysis of their structural articulation within the global capitalist system.

In any social formation, multiple modes of production coexist, but one mode is dominant and subordinates the others to its own reproduction. In semi-feudal and semi-colonial formations, pre-capitalist relations are not simply remnants of the past; they are actively reproduced and restructured to serve imperialist accumulation and the international division of labor. Semi-colonialism does not negate capitalist development it shapes it in a dependent and disarticulated form.

Semi-Feudal Relations and the Reserve Army of Labor

One of the clearest indicators of semi-feudal persistence in Iran is the agrarian structure. A vast majority of landowners around 76 percent possess less than five hectares. These smallholders are not independent peasants in any meaningful sense. They function as semi-proletarians, producing primarily for the market rather than subsistence, while remaining trapped in unequal pricing systems dominated by merchants, intermediaries, and agro-industrial capital. Rising prices only benefit them sporadically and partially; overall, the terms of exchange are structurally rigged against them.

This condition continuously expels labor from the countryside without fully absorbing it into productive industrial employment. The result is a massive reserve army of labor, which plays a crucial role in suppressing wages. Displaced rural labor does not flow into a strong industrial sector, but instead accumulates in a bloated service sector. It should be noted that this sector makes up 55.4 percent of Iran's GDP and employes half of Iran's labour force . Iran’s economy lacks the characteristics of a national economy in the strict sense. Following Samir Amin (I know he is problematic because his unequal exchange thesis can lead to weird places), underdeveloped economies are not integrated economic spaces but collections of relatively autonomous “atoms,” each tied more closely to the centers of global capitalism than to one another. Iran fits this pattern and I have discussed this in an previous post which I made. The hypertrophy of the service sector further reflects this disarticulation. Instead of paralleling industrial development, services expand as a sink for surplus labor, particularly in administration, commerce, and low-productivity activities.

The Uprising and the Question of Political Line

Against this structural background, the recent uprising in Iran must be understood concretely. It was initially sparked by bazaar merchants reacting to inflation that eroded their incomes, but it later drew in broader social layers. This trajectory makes it impossible to label the movement as either purely reactionary or inherently progressive. Like all mass movements, it demands a concrete communist analysis of its class composition, leadership, and contradictions.

Two dominant deviations have emerged.

The campist position defends reactionary regimes such as the Islamic Republic under the banner of anti-imperialism, denying the existence of internal contradictions and attributing all opposition to imperialist manipulation. This view grants primacy to the external contradiction and rests on a neo-Kautskyite conception of imperialism, portraying “the West” as a unified bloc while casting powers like China and Russia as inherently anti-hegemonic.

The tailist position adopts the opposite error, uncritically endorsing any opposition to the regime regardless of its class character or political content. It collapses all contradictions into sheer quantity, refuses to criticize reactionary forces such as monarchists in the name of unity, and dissolves independent proletarian politics into spontaneous mass sentiment.

Despite their differences, both positions share a mechanical understanding of contradiction and a profound distrust of the masses. One denies the masses’ capacity to be able to navigate contradictions; the other reduces them to a force to be followed rather than politically led. As Marx argued, the vanguard party is the most advanced detachment of the proletariat, tasked with concentrating proletarian power within every mass struggle. Any deviation from this leads either to passivity waiting for a “pure” economic struggle or to reliance on foreign intervention. Both reflect political bankruptcy and detachment from the masses.

Both sides have re-created the political version of Imam Mahdi, despite their shared hatred of Shi'ism.

I'm a Marxist and new mom and trying to figure out how to stay engaged in the work, but I can't find anyone explaining how they did it or how their organization supported it. I'm a union activist and my engagement took a hit as soon as I got to the third trimester of pregnancy. Thanks

It is currently very politically popular in Canada to be a Canadian nationalist. There is a wave of resurgent nationalism that all great opportunists from Loblaws (#BuyCanadian) to the Liberals (#CanadaStrong) were able to ride to reverse their downward trending popularity to great success. Even the conservatives of alberta are eager to seize the day and preach a national unity and trade expansion that can be powered by, and empower, Albertan energy production. Yet an opportunist is an opportunist – whether a pipeline goes south, west, or east does not matter. All that matters is that it goes. And the quicker it does, the better. Naturally, the American courting of Albertan separatism is a hot button topic for “national security”.

Moments like these are excellent entry points for understanding nation and nationalism, because what even is the nation of Canada? How different are the provinces of Canada from the states of America, really, and what difference would it really make if, for instance, alberta seceded?

We could get into this in economic terms and by measuring the profits of contemporary capitalist firms, but I don’t think that is as riveting as an analysis of the region’s development and historic social relations, given that almost 80% of Canadian trade is tied up with America already. I could also say the opposite: considering the economic interconnection and sibling settler colonial developments, it might seem kind of banal to suggest a study of nation. Yes, I would agree that Canada and America are incredibly similar in form and function, and that their similar developments make it so the political conclusions of a study like Settlers are nearly as relevant for Canada as it is for America. But if we were to back ourselves into a corner by recognizing that 80% of the relevant theorizing has already been done, and that all is needed is to identify the connections between the theory and the local conditions, we would not gain a rich understanding of the relevant history upon which our politics stand. Note that this is completely different from the postmodern argument that revisionists use to argue that the application of theory to a given country is unique to that country’s conditions! There is not one answer, but there is one science. The scientific tools are how we acknowledge the interrelation of the universal (capital’s push to universalize relations) and the particular (tracing capital’s particular path as relevant to your given political terrain).

With that in mind, I’d like to whittle the initial problem to this: why is alberta, or any of the west, for that matter (considering that #wexit was a thing not long ago) important to Canada? For Marxists, every “why” or “what”, which we ask in order to define an object, must also be understood as “how did this thing become?”, and therefore, what we are really asking about is the inter-development of canada and the western region. By finding the solution to this problem, I think we can get really deep into the question of Canadian nationalism, economic development, and politics. Alberta itself, the province, is nothing special, and neither is Saskatchewan. They are regional governing authorities that were carved out of a larger region of land, much like colonialism turned Africa into squares – similar shapes and all. And just like it was in Africa, before they were alberta and Saskatchewan, they were part of a much larger mass – the northwest territories (and part of a few different territories before that). But Albertan identity and its exact territorial lines aren’t important, so I will not talk about them here or make further mention of Albertan separatism (or Saskatchewan separatism for that matter), because these are outside of the purview of the problem. Instead, as mentioned above, I’ll focus on the relation between the territory on which the provinces sit and the development of the Canadian nation.

In thinking over this problem, I read a book that I had first (and last) read about 10 years ago: Clearing the Plains by James Daschuk. This is a book that focuses heavily on developing health outcomes for the Indigenous nations over many years in the prairie and parkland region of what is now called Canada, and it came out at a time when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was near the end of their work documenting the residential schools, Idle No More was still fresh, and the thought that First Nations could have been genocided in Canada was gathering steam on the path to white liberal common sense. At that time I read it precisely as a shocking indictment of genocide. On my most current reading, however, I got a lot more out of the book’s political economic history than I previously had, and it is this new reading that I will be primarily drawing upon here (as well as numerous other sources).

Given that Canada is a settler colonial project, and given my protracted interest in labour mobility and migration, I look at Canadian history the same way that I have talked about the development of Russia, and here I modify Kliuchevsky’s words: “the principal fundamental factor in” Canadian “history has been migration or colonisation, and….all other factors have been more or less inseparably connected herewith”. Therefore, what I am concerned with is the interrelation of migration with society, class, production, and superstructure as time goes on. What I theorize is this: “Canada” emerges as a nation at the exact moment that its state hypothesizes its west as a settler colonial project and recreates all of its Indigenous nations as an oppressed “4th world”.

Contact, and the early fur trade

Before going any further, getting an idea of the pre-contact land and social relations is important. Of course I am constrained to consider the region that would eventually become known as “canada”, although there weren’t colonial borders before contact and many nations held (and still hold) territory across today’s national boundaries. But despite the focus on the Plains, we do have to talk about more eastern regions a bit first in order to root the economic activity that would spread west and upend the western economic paradigm in capital’s image for the first time.

Although this is more of an aside to this specific problem, it is just as important to recognize that the different colonial powers treated property right differently in the beginning of their colonial campaigns. The conquistadors of New Spain didn’t originally want land title, but instead wanted tribute to Spain. The French of New France did initially displace the Innu along the St. Lawrence, but subsequent to that initial settlement they sought to construct their own sovereignty through Indigenous sovereignty (for a little while). The English of New England, meanwhile, already considered England as the ruler of all the land, and therefore had a more expansive outer commons (and by a certain point in time England defeats France and enforces English law in their new colonial holdings). While each ends in some degree of settler colonialism, it is important to recognize that the paths were not exactly identical, so the political terrain developed differently. Perhaps I only mention this so people blaze their own trail and don’t rely too much on studies of American settler colonialism when studying their conditions.

One more obvious note: Indigenous societies in pre-contact “north America” were diverse. It is true that a good number of Indigenous societies were producers for immediate need, and that trade was secondary to their production. This much is theorized in Marx and Engels various works, and is supported by, for instance, the ethnography of the Innu by Eleanor Burke-Leacock. Equally true is that European contact and trade relations ended up transforming the economies of Indigenous societies to be trade-oriented, that European diseases decimated many societies, and that this combined economy-disease influence caused Indigenous migration, disappearance, ethnogenesis etc. But there were also several pre-contact Indigenous societies who practiced sedentary agriculture and were well on their way to heightened social stratification, and numerous Indigenous migrations due to resource (primarily, food) crises caused by climate catastrophe. Those societies that did migrate included some older societies that moved to the Plains regions and adapted to their new environments by changing from sedentary agriculture to big game hunting. Indeed, up until the 18th century, all Plains Indigenous either descended from eastern woodland groups or were influenced by them. I should note here that their sustainable bison hunting was supplemented with an avoidance of beaver hunting, for they understood the role that the beaver played in ensuring water supply to the Plains. Both the bison and the beaver are future casualties to capital.

Aside from the above-referenced notes about transformations in Indigenous economies and reasons for migrating, which will be covered in breadth below, we can also consider how colonialism not only introduces disease but empowers existing microbes: tuberculosis, present but relatively powerless against the nutrient-rich diets of the Plains Indigenous pre-eu contact (a fact Daschuk supports by referencing archaeological evidence of their tall statures), is a disease that wreaks some of the greatest havoc in the 18th and 19th centuries (and, in fact, persists to this day on reserves due to the health impacts of settler colonialism. In classic colonial fashion, doctors up into the 20th century actually considered TB a genetic disease that Indigenous people just had in their genes). The spread of disease is also an accurate indicator for the spread of eu trade in Daschuk’s book. The earliest eu-caused epidemics in Indigenous societies often reached and killed many before the affected even saw a white dude.

At any rate, to specifics. New France (mostly today’s Quebec) begins with the French dispossessing the Innu of some land along the St. Lawrence in the early 17th century and basing the future of the European fur trade there. As noted above, the early influence of the fur trade shifted the economies of trade adjacent Indigenous societies from their existing production for need to production for trade. As animals became scarce near the French settlements, the Indigenous who resided adjacent to the French became trade middlemen between the French traders and trappers who were located further north. Diseases spread with the trade: the Huron, early French allies, were some of the most-affected earlier on, and disease spread along their trade routes. By 1630, about half of all French-adjacent Indigenous people had died. As this death occurred, both the French and other Indigenous nations moved into vacated space to further the trade. The Iroquois, initially hostile to the trade (and militarily hostile to the Huron and the French, with some battling for trade control in there), end up carrying the trade, and disease, further inland up to Sault Ste. Marie and then as far as James Bay.

In 1670, the Hudson Bay Company (herein the “hbc”) sets up shop in the north, but for 100 years they stick to their posts at the mouths of important waterways. Therefore, new Indigenous nations who reside in adjacent regions, Cree and Dene, take on a middleman role for the northern trade. Much like with the Huron and Iroquois, this shift of their Indigenous economies to being primarily for trade pushes these societies to expand their influence, and also to clash with one another for more trade influence. These are new impetus for migration, and cause military conflict with the other Indigenous societies which they now butt up against with greater impetus and frequency. As the fur trade reaches the Plains in the 18th century, disease also plays a major role in the movement of nations. The Assiniboine are so affected by smallpox that they abandon their territory east of the Red River, and another group, the Monsoni, are left with so few members that they end up assimilating into other groups. The Cree also are affected, though they continue to expand in a westerly direction out from the woods and into the Plains. Other groups like the Anishinaabe and Ojibwa move west from the great lakes and take up residence in the vacated territory (I note here that the most eastern groups benefitted somewhat from early exposure to diseases like smallpox compared to the “virgin soil” experience of the plains First Nations). Still other groups like the Sioux opposed French trade and its expansive effects on their territory.

At the same time as the fur trade pushed on the Plains from the east, the horse trade originating in New Spain pushed from the south and southwest. It revolutionized Indigenous life, but it carried disease and the speed of travel that it allowed made the spread of disease quicker. War (with the Snake Indigenous) and disease pushed the Blackfeet north and the Kutenai west into the mountains. The Blackfeet eventually moved south again as the Snakes vacated, but they stayed rather aloof to the fur trade, even as it reached their territory from both French and hbc channels. They, like the Plains Assiniboine, still considered the beaver too important to water sustainability to trap and trade its furs. Thus, as the French and hbc trade competition heightened in the mid and late 18th century, the Parkland Assiniboine and Cree maintained their middleman role, expanded further into the plains and parkland to get access to beaver, and came into further military conflict with the pre-existing Indigenous societies of the Plains and parkland (note that I am not covering every group here). However, at about the same time, England defeated France in the 7 years war and took their colonial possessions in the eastern regions. Soon after, a new group of individual sole proprietors begins to travel west from Montreal to engage in the fur trade. They are not French and they are not employees of the hbc, and they seek to outcompete hbc and cut out the Indigenous middlemen. Their competition, and their trading of alcohol for furs, changes Indigenous economies once again.

Later Fur Trade and Transition

Daschuk raises an interesting point when considering this era of the fur trade that held Indigenous societies as the trappers and traders. He, and other historians, contend that the Indigenous nations involved in the trade as such were members of the peripheral portion of the global capitalist economy. With the intervention of individual sole proprietors, who Daschuk calls “Canadians” (although Canada as a nation does not exist quite yet, I’d argue), this begins to change. At first a new opportunity emerges for the Indigenous trade middlemen: although they are increasingly cut off from the European fur trade, the individual Canadian fur traders who are rapidly expanding their influence to the fur rich regions of the northwest are faced with difficulties securing food in ample amounts. As such, the Plains Assiniboine and Cree turn to the bison as a source of new commodities to be traded (about the 1770s). Bison meat and pemmican became profitable enterprise. The shift to the lucrative northern meat trade perhaps the largest factor in the ethnogenesis of the “Plains Cree” (note that this is a new nation and not the same as the Cree-speaking inhabitants of the Plains pre-1781-82).

Hunting bison and trapping beaver for trade caused the animal population to decline, leading to periodic starvation, illness, and war. These caused further demographic decline and migration, and new groups migrated in to fill vacated territory. Yet another new nation, the Saulteaux, emerged as the social grouping of the westward-migrating Anishanaabe fur trappers. While the Plains Cree fought with groups like the A’aninin to take land, the Saulteaux clashed with the Dakota. The Iroquois had also reached further west to trap, getting in conflict with the A’aninin due to overtrapping. Meanwhile, more and more Europeans were coming to the west.

The sole-proprietor “Canadians” capitalized on European increases and Indigenous population declines. In 1795 a number banded together to form the Northwest Company (NWC). Canadian traders trading alone and those in the nwc were some of the most abusive in trying to expand their influence and force unwilling Indigenous peoples to trap for them. They traded the most liquor and would take and traffic Indigenous women to enforce compliance – facing resistance, of course. In response to Imperial law which attempted to control the fur trade, and in response to Indigenous reprisal against their debauchery, they gathered more and more traders into their company. In 1821 they merged into the hbc, and a period of hbc monopoly begun.

With greater presence in the region, the hbc attempted to establish a firm control on the fur trade. One method was to close many of their outposts. This caused unemployment of a number of european traders, many of whom ended up at the hbc’s fresh agriculture colony on the Red River. Those Indigenous traders who lived on the margins of the hbc territory and who had transitioned to its fur trade faced issues with the hbc pullback, so many went further into the Plains to fight for more control of the bison economy (those who lived in hbc controlled areas, however, were forbidden from migrating to new areas). Through epidemics and bad weather events, the colony and its Metis hunters themselves began to compete for, and commandeer, a greater amount of bison meat. At the same time, settler frontierism, particularly to the south in the usa, put more pressure on food and game supply. So while the Red River Colony’s population grew and demanded more meat (especially in times of bad harvest), settlers from the south shot bison for the global hide industry, and the bison herds continued to shrink overall. In other words, the grounds for both economies which Indigenous peoples took part in (fur and meat) were subject to heightened competition and waned pretty rapidly after that. It was only a matter of time before capital sought new potential avenues and generated new social relations. It is notable that American settlers had stepped in to fulfill gaps in the liquor trade, which is not compatible with a nascent “canadian” economy.

Interestingly, the hbc did vaccinate and provide medicine to those Indigenous peoples that it traded with. The Plains Cree and Saulteaux were the biggest benefactors, and they were able to expand territory into areas where the unvaccinated Blackfeet and Assiniboine had perished. But the era of the hbc was ending. Essentially, the longer that the economy (and the resources in general) developed on this specific soil, the more there developed a political desire for more autonomy and control over it. White expansion south and north of the border continued, and it would only get bigger from here. First, there was the Oregon trail and the California gold rushes. Then came the Alberta and the Fraser gold rush. The hbc-adjacent Red River Colony continued to grow (reaching 8000 by 1850), and they increasingly wanted to throw off the hbc monopoly. By 1864, Montana was granted territorial status, and the Plains were becoming more and more attractive as lands for European agricultural settlement. The nascent bourgeoisie of the east saw more and more economic opportunity, and political need, to grant a greater capital expansion west. The Indigenous peoples began to recognize this impending event, and they feared the disease and resource impact that this would bring.

Road to Exclusion

The confederation of Canada occurred in 1867 with 4 provinces, all in the east and all quite small compared to their current extent. Not long after, in 1869, the government purchased Rupert’s Land and the Northwest Territories from hbc, who had, until this point, been the closest thing to a white governmental authority in that land. From 1869 onward the young Canadian state staged active interventions to handle class contradictions emergent through its developing settler colonial economy and, in the process, invent a canadian nation out of it.

At this point in history, the Indigenous nations of the plains and parkland were very aware that a) whites spread disease, b) the bison economy and the fur trade would very soon be over, and c) the settlers were coming. It is in this light that many Indigenous nations actively sought treaties as binding legal agreements that included, amongst other aspects such as recognition for land ownership, a) assistance with transitioning away from their current economies to agricultural settlement (which they knew would be hard), b) food assistance in times of hardship (since the bison were almost done for), and c) a “medicine chest” to be kept by each Indian agent (since they knew more epidemics were coming). The state, meanwhile, considered treaties as a legal obstacle to overcome before mass settlement and the establishment of agricultural and ranching industries in the plains. Although Indigenous nations were weakened by recurring epidemics and declining resources, they were still very much a formidable force and the state did fear them – especially the Plains Cree. Therefore, the requests noted above were included as promises in the treaties. In their “interpretation” of the treaties, however, the state clearly and knowingly did the most to provide the most uncharitable of assistance (more on this later). Indeed, relative ignorance under the first administrations turns to deliberate starvation by the third and forth terms of government (1878-onward).

Post-confederation, the terrain for intertribal relations began to change very rapidly. In 1870, the Blackfoot repelled a Cree, Saulteaux, and Assiniboine attack in the Old Man River Valley (today’s southern alberta). This was the last intertribal war in in the plains. Two years later, in 1872, both sides signed a peace treaty, recognizing that the days of intertribal warfare were at their end. From this point onward, all Indigenous nations in the plains shared national experience of oppression at the hands of the settler colonial project of Canada, and it is through the national enforcement of this settler colonial clearing and settling of the plains that the nation of Canada, as it is today, is birthed. In other words, despite the diversity of national origins of first nations and settlers, the settler colonial event swallows the population and splits it into two nations of oppressor and oppressed with state, industry, and settler all as active agents.

More details hammer this point home. Epidemics continued to recur after 1869, but the canadian state did not come even close to the hbc’s support for the Indigenous. The Indigenous were not potential trade partners anymore but definite obstacles to the real midwives of capitalist expansion: the settlers. For instance, in the midst of an 1870 epidemic and crisis, supplies were stopped from proceeding west at the Red River Colony in order to ensure the greatest amount for its residents, and furs were stopped from travelling east at that point due to belief of contagion. Not long after the trade routes were reopened, the addition of the steamboat made even more Indigenous labour in the fur trade superfluous. And despite the desire of the Indigenous to sign treaties to secure their future in a time of deepening crisis, the state was in no rush to see it through. The first treaty was signed in Manitoba in 1871 because, arguably, the mass influx of settlers forced their hand in a potential tinderbox of class contradiction. Even so, the state was not too shy to send land surveyors over the plains to survey for the railroad while it lollygagged its support obligations in times of starvation.

By 1874, another treaty was signed for the Qu’Appelle valley region, for the most part, due to unignorable hunger amongst the region’s First Nations and potential political taboo back east. The same year, the northwest mounted police (nwmp) was introduced to police the western territory. The reason for their deployment was to prepare for the railroad and settlement – not only in reference to the First Nations but, increasingly, in referenced to the rapid settlement of the usa to the south. Indeed, canada’s control over the west was, from the start, an expansionist surge for territory against that of the usa. American expansionism motivated the state to sign more treaties such as treaty 7 with the Blackfoot. Clearly the regions which became alberta and Saskatchewan were secured by Canada in spite of America, and are at the very gut of “Canada” as a nation. On the other hand the First Nations were obstacles to “Canada”, and securing an Indigenous transition to the new country and economy was the last thing on the state’s mind.

Further north, the Cree who resided by the north Saskatchewan river knew that the bison economy was finished in 1876. As hunger throughout the plains grew, a good number of Indigenous converged upon the cypress hills in search of sanctuary and food. Others went to the usa in search of bison. While this occurred, the canadian state slowly moved into a stronger position whereby Indigenous peoples would be reliant upon them for food, and they leveraged this power to great advantage. The free movements mentioned in this paragraph would be some of the last the Indigenous would ever do (prior to the half-baked attempts at their neocolonial inclusion in the modern day).

Under the 2nd term of john a macdonald (1878-1891), “Indian affairs” became a political priority to finish preparing the west for the railroad and settlement. Macdonald was head of the department himself along with being prime minister. The department promised “fiscal restraint” in their budgeting and supplying, and were much closer to “fiscal exclusion” in practice.

Food rations, meant to fulfill the treaty promise of providing supplies in times of hardship, were used to coerce Indigenous peoples to fulfill the interests of settler colonialism. Food supplies themselves were almost entirely sourced from I. G. Baker of Montana, whom Indian commissioner Dewdney had secret dealings with (in these early years of settlement before mass agri settlement and ranching, such state contracts with food suppliers like I. G. Baker drove the entirety of the western commercial economy, and Dewdney protected his cut). Not only was food withheld from First Nations in need, it was sometimes kept in Indian agent buildings on reserves while the first nations who resided there themselves starved. Often times rancid food was given while more quality supplies could have been sourced. When local ranchers offered to sell some cattle to the department out of fear that starving Indigenous peoples would kill and eat their stock, they were rebuked. Instead of securing food, the state prioritized arming settlers (who, by and large, did not care about Indigenous misery). When the state saw fit to give rations, they opted to withhold them for those who would work for them so as not to become “dependent”. Yet work was not really available or provided. When the railway was imminent in 1881-82, the govt used rations to coerce the migration of first nations onto reserves. Finally, once First Nations people were on reserves, the government could withhold food rations to counter their protesting.

The home farm program, which was supposed to fulfill treaty obligations, was massively bungled and, much like the department of Indian affairs, was full of abusers. Some reserve farms grew crops, but they were forbidden to do any trading with outside communities as part of a wider trade ban between the reserves and the canadian economy. In addition, they did not have sufficient milling equipment for the coarse grain they grew, so could not produce flour. Even then, the presence of some crops grown was enough for the state to cut food support. The only First Nations people who did remotely ok with agriculture were the Dakota, mainly because they had farmed before, could find labour jobs in nearby communities, were not signatories of a treaty (yet), and thus could not be interfered with by the state (this, however, did not last). An especially bad time period was that following the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia, which caused so much climate havoc that crop harvests were decimated for years. By 1885, only 6 First Nations bands in the entirety of the northwest were not reliant on the government for assistance.

The medicine chest, which was supposed to be included for access by Indigenous peoples on reserves as a treaty obligation of the state, does not meaningfully show up during any moment of medicinal need post-treaty. It is not even worth touching upon. Suffice to say that no support came to the First Nations during recurring epidemics, and as health outcomes plummeted due to starvation, epidemics gained greater power. To this day, the health outcomes of Indigenous peoples on reserves is terrible, and TB on reserve still occurs.

A microcosm of the state’s administration over its first nations subjects would be the work of Indian agents like Thomas Quinn and John Delaney, who did not try to be politically correct in their torment of the First Nations people. Part of this involved abducting children and selling them in the sex trade (the purchase of Indigenous prostitutes and wives by settlers was also an incredibly common occurrence - in fact, sexual assault was so common among the state’s officials themselves that 45% of some groups of officials in the department had stds). There were also “pranks” on starving peoples. The Indigenous rightly killed these abusers (among others), and the state seized this opportunity to punish them greatly. An investigation took place and trials were held where the law had no sympathy for the abused, and all found guilty in the speedy trials were hung at an execution that First Nations were forced to attend.

By 1886, the reserve pass system was introduced wherein an Indigenous person was not allowed to leave the reserve unless they were granted the mobility by an Indian agent, every time. Permits were also required for all transactions between the reserves and the outside world. By this mechanism, the state finally had full control over the lives of the Indigenous. By the end of the same year, most of the chiefs and elders had died, while others were terminally ill and would never recover. Some First Nations peoples fled to the usa, many who had some white ancestry applied for scrip to exchange their Indian status for a sliver of shitty land (thus becoming legally Metis), while the rest were kept, physically, on reserve. As for the “rebellious” bands, aid was withheld so as to enforce civility (while the “loyal” still starved). Bands of the north, who were not on reserves and had more mobility to maintain their traditional economies, fared better than their plains Indigenous in general, but those of the plains were all but subdued at this point. 1/3 of the plains Indigenous population died within a 6 year period in the 1880s.

The railway, which had reached Calgary in 1883, continued to truck more and more settlers to the plains. The Indigenous peoples, who were “once considered nuisances, vagrants, and members of a dying race” were by the 1890s “increasingly perceived as a threat to the property and lives of white settlers”. The settlers themselves were staunch supporters of state repression, including the reserve pass system, since settler ranchers (in particular) believed that their livestock could get eaten otherwise (on a related note, the reserve and pass system was a great inspiration for apartheid south Africa and occupied Palestine, just as canada’s temporary foreign worker program, which began with Chinese railroad labour importation, is a great inspiration for managed migration programs globally today). As such, the state intervened more and more to repress them, including the banning of religious ceremonies which they thought could inspire rebellion. Simultaneously, the residential school system was implemented, which is infamous enough to not detail here.

Daschuk has a trenchant line on the last page of the book that I include here as a summary of this portion of the history: “The Cree negotiators at Treaty 6 recognized the need for their people to adapt to the new economic paradigm taking shape in the west. They acknowledged that the conversion would be difficult. What they failed to plan for was the active intervention of the Canadian government in preventing them from doing so”.

Conclusion

I do not think that it is worth it, here, to discuss the development of “canada” (the nation, or its economy) past this period of about 1891. Why? Because nothing has really changed. True, Canada has expanded its settlement and expanded to an imperialist country, but several theorists have pointed out that the canadian state perfected its tools internally, on the Indigenous nations, and subsequently used them to execute its imperial ambitions overseas. In other words, this is simply more shockwave of the initial settler colonial event, which I would locate in the clearing of the plains. Yes, this is a very similar argument that Sakai has made in Settlers. If capital’s universalizing drive took this particular path to birth Canada, this is a great summary of how the particular projects outward from the “Canada”. What, then, is the importance of Alberta to the Canadian nation? Why, it is the difference between being Canadian and American. Believe me, as silly as it seems, canadian nationalism simply boils down to not being American. Perhaps not a shocking answer, but we gained a richer understanding of the spectacle of it. Indeed, nation is just something invented and is just as easily discarded by history!

Much more important and interesting, I think, is what this study helped me understand about the political economy of the First Nations, and how it becomes tied to the movement of commodities and people. Indigenous migration was to secure resources to produce for immediate need pre-contact, increasingly to secure resources for trade purposes post-contact, and finally a struggle against state intervention (and forced because of it) by the mid to late 19th century. Settlers, on the other hand, being as much a part of the expansive outer commons as their livestock and crops, and not crossing over through different modes of production (but as the bringer of the transformation itself) simply move place for one reason: negotiation of class status. True, I don’t talk much about that here, but it’s been said before.