In my neck of the woods? We disrupt any and all form of aid our country sends to the U.S. in its imperialist war, the purpose of which is to no doubt seize Mexico’s nationalised natural resources.
From the sound of things, if an invasion happens then international volunteers from across the world will flock to Mexico to fight Yankee imperialism, as is only right. With that said, at the same time efforts must be made in the west to disrupt any and all outside lines of supply to the U.S. war machine. As someone inside such a country, I think myself and others in my position are well placed to fulfil that role.
Take for example the disruption Palestine Action have caused in my country to weapons manufacturers that provide for Israel. In the event of a new war in Mexico, similar tactics will be required to disarm American imperialism.
Western countries will certainly have a crisis on their hands with such an exodus. They’ll have to deal with a similar “disposal problem” to what the US has with the Cuban exile community in Miami; violent fascist revanchist groups increasingly agitating for further war to reclaim Ukraine, but now from European countries against Russia.
They’ll complicate international relations between western Europe and Russia for years to come.
I am very curious to see how the western media will try to spin this as anything but a comprehensive defeat for NATO.
I suppose that will depend on the final settlement, which hinges very much on the degree and nature of the Ukrainian collapse. If Ukrainian military command holds together but there is a collapse on the front, its possible to see much greater territorial gains for Russia than if the Ukrainian brass turns on Zelensky to save their own skins. I think that given the costly nature of this crisis the red lines for the Russian side would probably be the reduction of Ukraine to a kind of landlocked rump state in Russia’s sphere of influence, with the entire black sea coast annexed. The persecution of ethnic Russians has presented Russia with the political justification for the annexation of any majority ethnic area in Ukraine’s east.
A protracted conflict probably favours the Russians, who presently seem fairly comfortable expending ordnance so that the Ukrainians are forced to spend precious lives. Logistically speaking, the Ukrainians cannot match the current pace of consumption from the Russian artillery with their own, so they’ll be forced to instead increasingly substitute shells for soldiers in human wave style assaults.
Such attacks are very draining and cannot be sustained over an extended period. As a result of this, it seems likely to me that Ukraine and the west will push for some kind of decisive battle within the next year or so, before the shortages of essential equipment becomes too acute. NATO’s member states are increasingly seeing their own stockpiles of weapons stripped away to fight this proxy war, with the lead time on replacements of essential materiel and equipment running into the years. If the behaviour of Germany towards Italy throughout the PPE shortage during the initial waves of COVID are anything to go by, countries in the west will not risk their own essential supplies of weapons in order to help a neighbour, not without an explicit geopolitical interest, of course.
First things first, you need to be honest and put your best foot forward in all your dealings with this friend of yours. If they’re genuinely interested in Marxist theory then just read it all as normal. People are smart. Most can and will anticipate an angle, so don’t do it. Just share all that good theory; start with the absolute basics if they haven’t gotten that far.
How are the millions of As in the global north supposed to act in solidarity with the billions of Bs in the global south, when the basic prosperity of A relies on exploiting B?
Because that “prosperity” is a relation that can only be temporary due to TRPF. Eventually all workers must be exploited and immiserated; labour aristocrats can only be maintained so long as there is sufficient surplus profit to go around, a surplus which is constantly shrinking. Therefore, in the final analysis it is still in the interest of the working masses in the north to unite with those in the south against their exploiters.
The sublation of the contradiction brings about the withering of the state, which loses its reason for existence.
As Lenin states in the first chapter of State and Revolution, the state exists to mediate the class antagonisms of society, in the interests of the ruling class of society. In a state where the dominant class is the proletariat, the state imposes itself in order to eliminate class antagonisms altogether, as this is the only way it can realise the interests of the class as a whole. Once class antagonisms are effectively abolished, there is no longer a need for a massive organisation whose role is to manage said antagonisms; when there are no outside enemies seeking to destroy you, there is no need for an enormously expensive standing army, for example.
I second the advice of @suspended and urge you to seek advice from medical professionals. My background’s in biochemistry and I advise you to at least exhaust all medical avenues available to you before approaching self-medication, which is the last resort of only the most desperate.
I’ve been down this road myself. Its long, frustrating and seems utterly pointless and in my personal experience a lot of it genuinely was! A lot of the medications they’ll put you on will be a bust, assuming you get that far at all. But be it SSRIs like citalopram, sertraline or some other form of anti-depressant or anti-psychotic, you should at the very least still eliminate these possibilities before resorting to what you’re asking for. The effects of meds on an individidual’s personal biochemistry are slippery; there are no absolute guarantees of things working like they’re supposed to. This is why its so important that the process is overseen by trained professionals with a full record of what you’ve had and what your response is, so that they may adjust accordingly or intervene in the event of an unforeseen development that puts your immediate or long term health in jeopardy.
What you ultimately decide to do is up to you alone, but please at least consider what me and @suspended are saying. We’re telling you this out of concern for your own wellbeing.
Exactly. The likeliest response to a collapse in European consumption is a crisis of overproduction. This will of course have a cascade effect, resulting in myriad other economic crises, culminating in balance of payments crises, the economic equivalent of a heart attack. Each national crisis is in turn an opportunity for its competitors, circling like vultures to seize anything of value from the country in its moment of economic weakness. This, I think, is where the specific nature of the EU’s loose confederation of nations will cause calamity; there is serious disunity between the national bourgeois of the various member states, particularly France and Germany. In the event economic crisis hits Europe there won’t be a truly coordinated, unified response. Instead, individual member states and their ruling classes will jostle for advantage with each other. This has already been heralded by the hoarding of PPE by individual states when supplies were limited in the initial stint of the pandemic, when they left Italy to languish.
Its hard to tell.
Its clear that they’ve at least laid the groundwork for their challenge against American hegemony very well so far; slowly prying away trade dominance over the third world while remaining just close enough to the US through their trade relations to dissuade any attempts to break them up earlier, back when their national situation wasn’t as firmly secured. Now they seem to be closing in on all economic fronts; industrial production, international development, technological innovation etc… Given 20 more years of this, they may well leave the US eating their dust.
The question that weighs down on my mind is what the final fate of Ukraine will be, and ultimately much of that depends greatly on the conclusion of the conflict. A while ago I anticipated the possibility of a landlocked, rump state Ukraine. Militarily speaking this scenario seems further away now as the attempted Russian advance towards Odessa appears to have come to a standstill at the southern bank of the Dnieper. Does anyone here anticipate a renewed offensive when winter really starts to bite? It seems like the natural follow up to this recent campaign of destroying energy infrastructure.
Most of the media I’m seeing only view Bakhmut in terms of its value for a Russian offensive, rather than the effect it may have on the Ukrainians’ ability to mobilise their own. On the one hand I see them acknowledge the “crucial” transport links to Kramatorsk and Slavyansk, but then in the same breath claim that the city isn’t worth the blood and treasure.
The discourse on the issue seems fishy, but I’m not a military expert so I honestly struggle to see how much of the messaging from the media is there to mislead and how much isn’t.
Increasingly the most realistic looking way to arm up would be to something akin to what’s happened here; knock out the local grid and take advantage of the chaos to rob gun stores. Provided the plan was well organised and executed like this, a group of people could stand to walk away with a personal armoury.
The shooting range is simply a networking environment. Its where a would-be gun buyer can get connected with the individuals who have ties to the black market and can hook them up with weapons in countries where gun ownership is restricted. In other words, its the place where legal gun enthusiasts come into contact with the sort of figures you would only otherwise reach through involvement in criminal gangs.
What these weapons dealers have available for their customers varies greatly, but typically most of their stuff will originally come from Eastern Europe. A lot of weapons disappeared out of the arsenals of collapsed communist states at the end of the Cold War and fell into the hands of criminals in this way, though today the primest equipment is that being sent to Ukraine by NATO countries that then conveniently disappears once it changes hands.
I’ve broken down Anarchism in another comment in this thread. As for the demsocs, they aspire towards integrating themselves with the bourgeois political establishment. In essence, they will only repeat the mistakes of social democratic parties abroad by forming something analogous to the British Labour party; a political organ of the establishment whose development corrals and contains the British labour movement, suppressing an otherwise radical leadership of the working class from emerging.
A workers democracy cannot be achieved through engaging in a bourgeois political system whose form serves only to perpetuate bourgeois class rule. History has repeatedly shown us that this strategy never works and rapidly degraded the political vehicle the workers pin their hopes on into a form of workfare for opportunistic charlatans. Be it the SPD in Germany or Labour in Britain, the development of mass political parties focussed only on electoral success has inevitably resulted in these organisations betraying the working class to become junior partners with the capitalists. I could talk at length about the various ways in which building socialism through engagement with bourgeois democracy is impossible, complete with historical examples dating back to at least the foundation of British Labour by the Labour Representation Committee of 1900.
Yet, to quote Guevara, the revolution isn’t an apple that simply falls from the tree once its ripe. You have to make it fall.
You’re 100% correct about present conditions being laughably inadequate for such a socialist movement even finding its feet in the US. At its current level of consciousness, I’d say the US is roughly equivalent to the stage Russia was at before Plekhanov came along and popularised Marxism there. American radicalism and its primary strains of thought at present; democratic socialism and anarchism, are basically analogous to Russia when Narodism was in full swing. It naturally follows that America will need its own Plekhanovs and Bolsheviks to forge a path for Marxism in America; people who will build up cadre all over the country, before eventually welding them together into one cohesive movement that is united in thought and action. One of the key tasks that underline this process will be the thorough denunciation and defeat of American Anarchism and Democratic Socialists, America’s Narodniks and Mensheviks. There is an unbelievable amount of work to be done when you actually assess the full scope of the problem.
America will steadily shed its anarchism as more people are proletarianised over time. Anarchism is a petty bourgeois tendency that aims to shore up the interests of the threatened small proprietor. Even the aspirations of the best intentioned anarchists ultimately boil down to squatting on a plot of land with their pals and forming a society that runs on vibes. There’s no serious consideration for anything other than the appropriation of said land amongst a circle of friends.
As more petit-bourgeois “sink” to the level of a proletarian, more and more of them will come to acknowledge that pining for property isn’t in their interests and thus develop a proper socialist consciousness; complete with the characteristics that lend themselves to successful movement building, particularly tenacity and discipline. Contrast this with the vacillation and the spontaneous flights of fancy that often seize the average anarchist.
~1,000,000 people were killed out of fear of a working class takeover in Indonesia, carried out by Suharto at the behest of the US and British governments. This “Jakarta method” of pushing back communist movements through extreme violence was then exported all over the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_1965–66
Lets not sell this achievement short. There were almost certainly intense back channel efforts and negotiations to pull this diplomatic coup off. It’s difficult to put into words exactly how much work it is to get everyone on the same page before you pull them together for a meeting to officiate new political realities. I’ve been involved with these kinds of things on an infinitesimally smaller scale stitching together local communist groups previously cleaved off from each other by sectarian divisions. Its taken me a long time just to get a hearing with some of them, groups with virtually no serious political differences at all, let alone two state authorities that have been divided by deep seated religious and military conflict.