Whether understood or not, it is because of the implications of flying any western nation flag has a similar liability. Israel’s crimes are the west’s crimes and that is too close a comfort for most westerners ie functionally westerner = zionist (the western project is poisoned from the roots up with the only hope is the dialectics of it becoming the opposite of the montrosity it now is, negating itself in the process. To convey this in a way a westerner understands: if a nazi has a chance to redeems himself then it at least starts by being no longer a nazi.)

^This.

If you don’t make the case then you don’t have a case and everything you said will then be apolgism for US Veteran support without a scientific basis.

Getting indignated on the completely human response to these war criminals without making the materialist case we should supercede it is just moralism by another name. There is no neutrality about good or evil, or lack of morals or not; we determine all these things by praxis - we are not above it all.

You’re asking for a supposed scientific neutrality to analysis where none such exists. And you can’t even give the case why all this supposed effort is even worth it.

This stuff is obvious even without marxism. It is only confounding because of the class position as a westerner.

You’ve missed the point. The post is not for or against judging peoples morality. It is about understanding that morality is learned. It is a product of material conditions. So having superior morality does not make an Ubermench. Just like how a person who has good education or health isn’t superior to someone who is uneducated or has health issues.

Labor aristocrats aren’t inferior to colonized peoples just because they get crumbs from imperialism. People are people. We all have blind spots and shortcomings but if we decide that some of faults are so bad we can deny there is a human underneath that is idealism not materialism. I’m not saying we should overlook faulty morality but we need to analyze it through a materialist lens.

What in all of that allows to determine revolutionary potential? The supposed subjective inferiority/superiority inferred is besides the point; I am saying all that is secondary to material conditions - our subjective value judgement may be consequence of our relationships with all this but it is not the primary reason to determine anybody revolutionary potential from a marxist perspective.

Put it bluntly, what is the material analysis for the revolutionary potential for US Veterans? What relation to property have you concluded to make the case?

Haha and pretty much agree with the sentiment!

Nietzschean leftists here are extremely stupid. Everyone “moralizes” and Christianity didn’t invent morals or ethics you fucking goofs.

I was trying to be kinder and deliberately left out Nietzsche as I figured it would be a trigger word here.

To clarify:

• idealism here = battle of ideas to win folks over rather than understand the material conditions that form their (and our) ideas. We have to make the case our project is more beneficial than what imperialism provides; for a lot of the imperial core folks it will not be
• ahistorical = not historical materialism
• the rest: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/10992751/7897527

Moralism comes from material conditions.

Arguing for anti-moralism is not the same as an argument whether or not to support these western veterans from a marxist perspective.

How does one understand the revolutionary potential of a given class? By doing class analysis; understanding the relation to property. The primary global contradiction is imperialism and the US is the imperial core. Imperialism is class relationship of protecting and gaining private property against Global South proleteriat.

Let’s consider it from a different perspective. Let’s imagine there was no military industrial complex in the US as we know it now ie all state owned. Would that army’s relationship as a whole to imperialism change? Ie what is the purpose of the army? It is there to help subsidise the lives of the USAmerican proleteriat + bourgoisie + petite-bourgoisie through imperialist extraction; it is this relationship that is centre of whether veterans have revolutionary potential or not, it is to consider what is their role is in these material conditions, how they benefit from it and any moralism has a whole comes secondary to this.

In this context for the imperial core bourgoisie proleteriat you have to consider how and whether you are going to make the case that your project in the short term will offer them better material condtions than one provided by imperialism (challenging to put it mildly).

That is how you step away from idealism and towards dialectical materialism and a deeper class analysis. The PSL have not done so because their material conditions as bourgoisie proleteriat has led them to the ideas they have now.

Ironically your anti-moralism in this context is moralism (crude analogy: “colour blindness” in a response to racism), which is partly why I am not saying your argument is bad because of moralism; rather I am leaning into it but suggesting that moralism should be guided by the science instead.

There isn’t an easy way to say this that will not sound like an attack, so let’s just rip the band aid off.

This extends to demonization of the troops. Yes members of the western armed forces actively benefit from imperialism and do horrific things supporting imperialism but they do this out of a response to their material conditions not because they are evil. That is not to say they are absolved of their crimes. It means many of them could be redeemable

Nah, fuck PSL. (Btw most of your post was moralism; arguing for or against how liable a person is for their actions is not what allows us to decide revolutionary potential of any given class)

Let’s take an example.

You’re in Germany in the early-mid 20th century and you would like to take down the Nazi government and the way we are going to go about this is we are going to do this to use a Nazi veteran who is sorry about the war crimes he was involved in. The idea is by appealing to Nazi society who we think will be persuaded to ultimately take down Nazi governance by being convinced by the rhetoric of this Nazi soldier who we hope they consider an authorative voice given that (1) he’s a nazi (2) he’s a soldier.

Has the above idealism worked ever in history or you know, did we need to raise a massive advanced bolshevik army to defeat the nazis? Would you understand why the above would be considered idealism and ahistorical?

Now consider this: USAmerican soldiers, by every reasonably considerable metric, are significantly worse than Nazis. Heck, if we are putting up numbers liberals have killed way more than fascists - fascism is inherenrly shortlived and unstable needing non-communists to collaborate with communists to take them down, where as liberals can continue with killing for longer as they create more stablity domestically and with the comprador classes abroad.

The moralism justified in using veterans in the US (an imperial supercore of which global hegemony tilts towards till late, ie the consolidation of all sub imperialisms) can be juxtaposed by the moralism a marxist might then take against the US soldier; the reality of the material conditons of what produces veterans and the material conditions of using veterans in a veteran-honoring-society.

(Moralism and identarianism is part of the human condition, marxism is what hones our lance and point it in the right direction. We may de-emphasise the moralism is in marxism so that the moralism of the marxist can be guided by the science and serve towards the dictatorship of the proleteriat: https://redsails.org/on-identitarianism-a-defense-of-a-strawman/ )

A lot of the most famous marxists betrayed the relative class positions and aspirations but the revolutionary potential is towards the science of wielding marxism - the effort in using veterans as a class would be more useful in actually finding revolutionary classes - in the US this may involve the lumpenproleteriat and migrant populations where the downfall of US imperialism and the dissolution of the US project is in their material interests.

(If you want to convert veterans to marxists so they form a large enough group to take down the fascist military from within, well then that’s an underground movement and you’re not advertising veteran support because the above is essentially anti-veteran. And even then actually successful coups in the direction of socialism (ie not another bourgoisie take over) came from the masses from which some veterans fell in line - it was not tailism)

Excellent write up (starred/saved) and thanks for sharing (and the effort that went into this)!

Why aren’t you living up to the idealised sentimentalised revolutionary in my head while you have a gun to yours? Oh how dare you question how I am materially supporting and showing solidarity to Venezuela!

🫡

Thank you very much for sharing this

You might find this interesting: https://redsails.org/algunos-recursos/

Pretty much agree.

Don’t get me wrong, Shelley’s Frankenstein is clearly a more sophisticated piece of art than the movie and much to be learned from it, and arguably influenced a lot of western fiction thereafter but we do we have to be cognizant of the classes it is batting for.

It is the celebration of the sacrifices made that highlights what it means to be an Übermensch. The immigrant sublimates his exploitation by becoming the exploiter.

It is made even more clear in the conversations of Michael with Roth about Cuba - Michael commentary on the cuban revolutionaries in some ways highlights the problem with western literary critique: one could say he has sympathy with them just because he pointed it out but is pointing out really justify such an interpretation? Do we ignore his class? Much of godfather has those “leimotifs”; that simply showing bad things happens is considered criticism while it painstakingly takes the time in the story so that we empathise with its protagonist, for example.

Still love the movie though because, well, im not that sophisticated and learned (but primarily, let’s be honest, material conditions).

In my opinion it is one of the easier arguments to make that the workers of the west used the Soviet Union as leverage of threat of domestic revolution to gain the concessions they did for the welfare state, and thereby forced capitalists to invest in “human capital” that allowed massive upskilling of the work force and unlock the tech ladder as we know it today. And when the USSR collapsed (and potentially you could even use the fall of the Berlin wall) that leverage was lost and thereby the losing of concessions gained leading to the state of affairs as we know it now. It puts the like of Stalin and Lenin head and shoulders over any known Western leader.

Thanks for the share; an interesting read!

I don’t know if this is a hot take but I think the narrative of the film, even though in many ways is more simplistic, is better than the original written story from what I remember of it.

I think the original story, coming from a society’s popularised literature that gives the impression of minimising the agency of the proleteriat class and has heaps of apologism for the bourgoisie (the most you get is Dickens’ exotica of poverty, and liberal bourgoisie concepts of women’s emancipation, ie would like a bigger piece of the imperialist pie) - both-sides the victim (the creature/monster).

I think Western literature and media in generally is rife with a story technique where if you just nominally show the “bad” thing then that itself can be considered a criticism (eg the Godfather nominally could be considered a criticism of organise crime, when all the narrative techniques such as what is centred, what isn’t historicised, what is rewarded etc would all suggest otherwise and thereby giving praise to the traits of the bourgoisie considered worthy. [I am brought up in this liberal world, I am flawed and therefore still like the movie]).

You or others lurking here may find this useful, if you haven’t read it already:

1. Malone’s Concessions ie birth of the modern west: https://redsails.org/concessions/

2. Kyle Ferrana’s Why the World Needs China

I think this is a logical conclusion if one believes “brainwashing” on mass is a thing for an explanation of the bourgoisie proleteriat; it will lead to a biolgical determinist rationale for resistance to being “unbrainwashed” and then it’s a short hop from that to eugenicism echoing essentially fascist sentiments.

Instead consider a more dialectical materialist take:

https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/

Ie narratives as a social license for bigotry along imperialist and settler colonial lines because at some level that individual benefits from those material conditions. The material always come before the idea.

(There’s all sorts of other problems with yugopnik’s take - like folks with learning difficulties who don’t lean right wing, removing the agency of the fascist, using ablism to explain fascism, where these Nietzschean takes of the untermenschen comes from, mechanical vs dialectical materialism etc etc)

https://redsails.org/on-identitarianism-a-defense-of-a-strawman/

He’s taking the piss (ie sardonic/ironic) given his whole angle (see below).

Doesn’t mean he’s always right (though his irony here in this is example is just generally correct) or even a scientific socialist given his anti-russian and anti-chinese rhetoric echoing imperial talking points (even anti-maduro stuff in the past regarding elections, from what I recall).

But he is otherwise quite anti-west including holding most westerners (especially USAmericans) accountable for the crimes of their countries. Which is why he sometimes comes off sounding correct because even if you don’t know a thing about socialism or imperialism, being anti-western can sometimes be not too bad an heuristic on politics given how awful the West is and the commanding heights of imperialism being the US.

He openly admits that his viewers have a parasocial relationship with youtubers, that his channel isn’t some revolutionary avenue, and that he is happy to make money making easy dunks such as on pro-zionists. Some of the videos on his main channel can be educational (such as on Nazi Germany’s inspiration from the US with manifest Destiny and Lebensraum).

But he is also a good example that if one wants to extend their political educstion beyond BE level of anti-western imperialism then self claimed marxists better get to grips of prodhounism, dialectical materialism and start reading broadly beyond Settlers*.

*= has no real grounded theory of political economy on why the global labour aristocracy / bourgoisie proleteriat also includes people of colour, especially in the West. It’s great book to introduce someone how bad the history of white western proleteriat is but then hits its limitations quickly.