Damn I feel like I'm nitpicking, but

Trump, no matter how hard he tries, will not be able to fully kill the Proletarian movement, as the reindustrialization of the US required to wage a world war will necessarily provide a catalyst for the regeneration of the industrial Proletariat; the most revolutionary segment of the Proletariat.

Is this implying that the US' lack of proletarian movement is due to a lack of an industrial base? And is the industrial proletariat the most revolutionary segment as a general rule, or is this particular to the US, or some other option? The most revolutionary segment of the proletariat has been service workers

Hence, the more Trump embraces Bonapartism, the more fully realized American Bonapartism becomes, the more Trump creates the conditions for a viable American Bolshevism

By American Bolshevism, we aren't referring to something like an Israeli 'Marxism' or an 'Israeli left' - correct?

People do not simply passively experience history; history is made by people, but not in conditions of their choosing.

I've read the above quote in full context, in reference to Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte - this statement would be meant for Mr. Trump and his ilk, not for ourselves

While the Democratic Party deserves credit where it is due for passing such historic legislation, this does not ultimately change the fact that these progressive policies are an exception to the rule. The New Deal had explicit carve-outs designed to keep racialized peoples in poverty. The Democratic Party fought hard to maintain racial segregation until it was essentially forced to pass the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts by mass movements.

Thank God we are able to discuss this more openly as Marxists, I cannot stand pretending that presidents like FDR or Kennedy or Carter were good people or even 'progressive'

All these “progressive” Democrats really do is help the larger party launder its image.

But why would we even want a “return to normal”? The “old normal” is precisely what produced Trump. The “old normal” wasn’t good for most people. The “old normal” was never sustainable. The conditions we currently find ourselves in are the results of that “old normal.” There is no salvation to be found in the old status quo, nor in the current one. What we require is a real movement which seeks to abolish the current state of things.

Agree and agree

The story of Trump’s 2024 election victory is not so much a story of growth, so much as it’s a story of consolidation. Even though Trump lost the 2020 election, the high vote counts of both he and Biden were, at the time, speculated to be an anomaly, as the necessity of mail-in voting created by the pandemic allowed both candidates to reach more voters than during a regular election. With the passage of the 2024 election however, we can see that Trump’s 2020 vote total was not a fluke, but, in actuality, was the emergence of a political formation which Trump began constructing in 2016. The 2024 election served as an affirmation of the vitality of the formation Trump has built.

Along with the best analysis of the increase in American Latino vote I've seen thus far, I would like to point to the emphasized sentences above as extremely relevant

Russia can go wherever they want and the problem won't be resolved. It's not about what countries are involved in Ukraine, it's about why countries feel the need to go there in the first place. Ukraine, like Haiti, Syria, and Sudan - to name a few more - is a site of inter-capitalist rivalry

You can get peace - sure - but the Ukrainian economy will be subjugated to whoever the 'victor' is. You can argue that economic integration reduces conflict and wars, but what will remain is a sort of neo-colonial relationship; or a dependency of sorts. That's what I have an issue with.

But that is the only realistic outcome - that exact economic dependency on one power or another (whether that be the US, the EU, or even Russia, or even a mixture, say, for instance, the EU+US or EU+Russia)

There are no liberationary movements in Ukraine to my knowledge, just a reactionary military regime where political rights have been greatly reduced, even by liberal standards for governance. It is exceptionally rare that a country caught between two capitalist rivals gets the ability to form their own sovereign and independent liberation

be respectful now, there could be libertarians among us

Philosophy should not be used to justify regular human actions, and non-scientists should not expect their crank-adjacent theories to be taken seriously in the respective science communities. We don't need awful people running around calling themselves 'solipsists' to 'explain' their behavior, and we do not need Marxist-Leninists and Trotskyists popping their heads into debates about the Big Bang Theory or whether electrons exist

this is definitely controversial, you got that down

you're arguing for something extremely non-conventional among philosophers themselves - without sufficient arguments to make anyone believe you. That doesn't mean you're wrong, it just means people won't take you as seriously

one thing i would say, where you would likely agree, is that most people calling themselves Marxist are not well-versed enough to argue for their Marxist or Marx-influenced philosophy - if Lenin wasn't confident in his Marxism without starting to understand Hegel's Greater Logic... I think we all know what I'm implying here

What you're arguing for here sounds like something that requires several months of studying philosophers from their own works. You can go even further and argue something like Derrida, that maybe we've all been reading philosophers who misread their contemporaries who misread their contemporaries and so on and so forth.

This isn't something I myself am well-versed enough to do, so all I can do is wish you luck on this one

i recall C. Derick Varn making a similar point and it's mostly true. that's why i'm personally annoyed when people still do the "right-wingers are stupid" bit

diamonds, so i can disprove the labor theory of value like a boss, epic style

i personally thought the most common form of idealism was summed up as this: "humans cannot perceive reality perfectly, they perceive things to their human limit and see appearances of things"

or, alternatively: "humans have experiences that trascend humanity itself and can't be fully understood by humans"

For Marx in particular, he saw any theory divorced from practical experience as a slipperly slope towards idealism - I'm still working through this argument myself, though, and I believe I misunderstood his point. I'm not very strong on my Young Hegelian critiques, truthfully

The bird flu? yeah they tend to do that

there are no communist parties in the US, except in embyronic or party-building formation, to my understanding (unless you count the CPUSA). if anyone is working to 'overthrow' anything, they certainly won't succeed anyways. the choices are 'America' (the US) or 'America' (social-democratic US) for the time being

i'm not sure if we can apply this logic - we tried working within the confines of regimes such as the United States, Nazi Germany, West Germany, and Israel for many years, if not decades.

even when these movements were Marxist, they failed or denigrated into American chauvinism/nationalism, Strasserism and National Bolshevism, petit-bourgeois idealism, and Labor Zionism - respective to the list, in that order.

that's not to say we don't care, but previous orgs had material basis for their success.

The Black Panthers (+ BLA), Brown Berets, Young Lords, American Indian Movement were leading the struggle - it was through their collective struggle that they were able to assist the Young Patriots and the student groups to form the correct line and analysis

I, for one, am not interested in treating Donald Trump like some political outsider, as if I can take the 'America' and leave the Trump; take the 'Nazi Germany' and leave the Hitler; take the 'Israel' and leave the Netanyahu

this isn't just about 'overthrowing the government' - the program of the Communist party is not coupist - and we aren't populists, either

Rosa Luxembourg would probably disagree with me here and claim capitalism has a tendency towards its own collapse under the weight of its contradictions. For the moment, I do not share this viewpoint; I believe capitalism can only end by workers' self-conscious activity towards that aim and towards their own abolition.

There is no limit to accumulation itself (=> profit), but there is a law of diminishing returns, so to speak

Profit itself can trend towards infinity, but the rate at which it is extracted has a tendency to fall; in theory, a low rate of profit can continue for several centuries towards that $$$

In practice, however, we have to consider that war (and other means) can contribute to a destruction of capital; that unequal trade relations exist; that climate catastrophe is on the horizon; that humans cannot live forever; and so on.

tl;dr - assuming humans live forever, there is nothing setting a limit on profit itself

i'm trying to think up a method or a book that'd be helpful to work from, but i don't want to limit Marx to philosophy

maybe trying these strategies with something light, but theory-heavy enough, would be helpful. for that i would recommend reading Chapter 1 of Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Feel free to work through other portions as you please, or if you feel necessary, like the Introduction.

There's also Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Freire, and Development as Modernity by Lushaba

for the purposes of a book club, though, i'm sure The Communist Manifesto and Principles of Communism will be alright. When you discuss with other people, you'll learn a lot faster. They'll pick up on details that you won't, and vice versa.

there's a good decent book on him

LaRouche and the New American Fascism by Dennis King

PS: I forgot to mention that Capital, at least the first volume, will be required at some point; and also, Theses on Feuerbach is deceptively short, each 'thesis' is densely packed info, I did not know this and, as a result, didn't really understand any thesis except the last

i would keep it simple and limited, when it comes to theory. The Communist Manifesto, Principles of Communist, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Civil War in France, Critique of the Gotha Programme, Capital Vol. 1 - that's more than enough. if you like, you can replace Capital with books like Lenin's Imperialism or State and Revolution.

something i would keep in mind - at the end of the day Marx was true to his roots as a philosopher. i would be surprised if you can pick up an 'introductory' or 'easy' text by Marx without taking notes and reading a second or third time.

when reading, questions you may ask: "Marx argues [point], but why? Is this argument convincing? There are a lot of words I'm familiar with here, is he using them in the common sense, or is he referencing something else? Is that his own theory and what he personally believes, or is he making a point about another thinker (i.e., Proudhon, Hegel, Smith, Ricardo, Lassalle, Feuerbach)? What assumptions is he making? Why should I believe this? Why do I agree/disagree with this?"

If you agree with everything you read on first encounter, without questioning or doubting it, you might've misread something or you might be missing context. I, for example, had to read Critique of the Gotha Programme multiple times because on first time I was careless and failed to distinguish between Lassalle and Marx, and the second time I failed to distinguish between 'wealth' and 'value' - both mistakes are so wrong I would've been better reading nothing.

i think bordiga would be cool with it

read hegel, play disco elysium. play disco elysium, read marx

hegel's revolutionary plasm

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"In the dark times, should the stars also go out?"