Image is sourced from this People’s Dispatch article, depicting communists attending the 2023 funeral of Communist Party President Guillermo Teillier, who was tortured for years under Pinochet’s regime and helped rebuild the Communist Party while under a fascist dictatorship.
We had the Six Day War in 1967, we had the Nineteen Day War (Yom Kippur) in 1973, and now we’ve had the Twelve Day War. I wonder how many more very short wars will plague the region until Palestine is freed?
However, moving on from Western Asia from a little while, we have some interesting news from Chile - the former labor minister and communist, Jeannette Jara, has won the primary election for the left-wing bloc in a landslide (~60% of the vote), as the current President, Gabriel Boric, is term-limited. Her achievements include a minimum wage increase and a reduction of the work week to 40 hours.
In November, Jara will face down the contenders from other parties, including José Antonio Kast, who is analogous to Brazil’s Bolsonaro. Unfortunately, Jara is now the lead figure of a party that has been taking quite a few Ls under Boric’s leadership. Ostensibly a Democratic Socialist, he ruled as - you guessed it - a neoliberal, bending the knee to the US and EU. He not only failed to overthrow the Pinochet-era constitution, he actually allowed the right-wing to turn the proposed new constitution into something worse, and had to settle for campaigning against the new one and keeping the old one. And he had very little solidarity with other left-leaning leaders on the continent, like Maduro, Lula, Petro, or Castillo.
With this in mind, I cannot help but look at Argentina’s very recent history and feel a little dread - but if anybody can save Chile at this point, it can only be a communist.
Last week’s thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
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The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel’s destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia’s youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don’t want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it’s just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists’ side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR’s former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR’s forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster’s telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a ‘propaganda tax’, if you don’t believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
The Democratic party are showing themselves to be a disfuncional party. That said, I have a question: How likely is the Democratic party to collapse?
If the Dems end up collapsing, IMO that’s the best possible outcome for the political left wing, considering that:
a) The democrats usually are more attuned to the needs of the national and international bourgeoisie in material terms.
And
b) The democrats are the only left wing outlet today, so them collapsing provides an opening for a proper left wing party to gain prominence.
The Democrats as we know them will never go away. They might never win a national election ever again, but they will gatekeep and backstab and coopt until Hell freezes over.
The democrats are necessary for the establishment, they act as the good side while continuing to the decline of the country.
They detract from the fact the USA is not a democracy. And they will never go away. Most likely they will come into power again by winning congress next year and the presidency again after that.
But their wins only solidify the overt corruption of the republicans, who themselves will win again in the next one or two election cycles after that .
This is possible because enough votes are counted by private companies who do not have their counts verified.
This is a very expensive game of “good cop, bad cop”. A mutual codependency . It’s been going on for decades, and every iteration of it moves money from the lower classes to the super rich
what does collapse look like? there are no dues. even with zero support they will still get propped up by bourgeois media
I’m not trying to be difficult but how we would know if the democratic party collapsed? I’d argue it already happened
i’d imagine losing the reliability of the black vote would get close but that probably takes a few more decades and some kind of properly working class party
I would think about it as losing popular support and being boycotted
They already lost popular support and are majority boycotted by the eligible voting population.
It’s less that the Dems need to collapse and more that we need to organize alternatives.
They’re not dysfunctional at all. They only look that way if you assume they want to do good things, but they do not. They want to do Republican things with a veneer of politeness.
On the political end of course, but on the possibility of representing the “left” they are more and more alienated from the mass of their voters.
The party just needs donors to function, and they’ve got those. They’d have to lose a lot more than Presidential elections to lose that donor input. Their donors are just as happy with them losing the Presidency and helping the GOP pass GOP legislation as they are with Dems winning the Presidency and treading water until the next GOP win.
The Dems are effective only because of their perceived legitimacy. If they completely stop winning elections, then the public will look elsewhere: to either the Bernie/AOC types, or to MAGA. No one wants to follow a loser.
Money is necessary but insufficient for the DNC to effectively stifle opposition
They need to lose more than just the Presidency for them to lose legitimacy. Take a look at the House and Senate - they have a very long way to go before that happens. They can keep on in the same way they’re doing right now and they’re still going to win on incumbency and local issues in the House and Senate, plus they’ll still pick up the Presidency once every 4-8 years in the same way Biden won against Trump - offering nothing really other than not being the guy who is currently right now in charge. The people who vote blue are nowhere near giving up on the Dems yet. Maybe in four years, maybe in twelve, but they’re still all in on the DNC for the time being.
I think we don’t disagree significantly. I had in mind the Democrats generally losing elections up and down the ballot as they fail to respond to the undermining of what little democracy did exist in the US. There’s a real possibility that MAGA solidifies control over the entire government for more than the usual back-and-forth of presidential terms. If that happens, the Democrats won’t be taken seriously anymore by anyone except their most dedicated followers.
I just don’t think the dems are going to have that much trouble down ballot, at least not in the next decade. They haven’t even bothered to have a legitimate Presidential primary since 2008 and the voters don’t care.
“The purpose of a system is what it does”.
So what collapsr actually means is: fail to contain the working class through dead end electoralism