this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2026
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Image is of a Khorramshahr-4 medium range ballistic missile, which has a range of about 2000km.
As I said in the last megathread, trying to figure out what exactly is happening is becoming ever more difficult. The gist of things is that Iran has, very justifiably, refused to negotiate (assassinating their leader and striking their country with hundreds of missiles in the middle of negotiations causes some reluctance to return to the table, I suppose). Censorship across the Middle East has further ramped up, with reportedly extreme punishments for posting footage of Iranian strikes online. From what I can gather, Iran's number of strikes have stabilized at a comfortable daily rate, with strikes into both the Gulf monarchies and Occupied Palestine continuing apace. Official charts of these strikes over time seem very disconnected from reality on the ground, but again, it's hard to really get at the specifics.
The messaging on how long the war is expected to last is rather muddled on both sides. The Trump administration fluctuates more than daily - and even sometimes in the same speech - on whether the war is already won or whether it's going to last months longer. The US seems to be coming up a new possible scheme every few hours: a ground invasion with the Kurds? A ground invasion without the Kurds? An amphibious assault? A series of commando operations to steal Iranian uranium? A massive parachuting operation into Tehran? Fuck it, let's just send the Navy into the Strait of Hormuz? There doesn't seem to be a coherent plan for continuing hostilities beyond firing more and more of a limited stockpile of cruise missiles into mostly non-military targets, hitting easily replaceable drone and missile launchers with a limited stockpile of drones, and burning a limited stockpile of interceptors at an astounding rate (and, in the process, disarming every other Western-aligned country of their interceptors).
Meanwhile, from Iran, I've seen rumors and reports from classic anonymous "senior IRGC officials" (no doubt some invented by Zionists to sow confusion), that I don't know how to substantiate, ranging anywhere from "If the US pulls back their forces now, we will restart negotiations," to "It doesn't matter what the US or the Zionists do or say, we aren't stopping until every last trace of Zionism in the Middle East has been extinguished," to a few positions in between those poles. Despite the damage to infrastructure in Iran, it doesn't seem like there has been any political or social fracturing. Not to speak too soon - perhaps the West will start earnestly trying to overfly Iranian territory to drop their very plentiful bombs soon - but every indication is that there will be no regime change nor societal collapse in Iran in the short and medium term.
The US is desperately trying - and mostly failing - to keep a lid on the economic firestorm they have ignited. There has been much ado about oil prices and oil futures and indexes and what all the myriad Lines going up and down signify and things like that, which is befitting such a financialized empire which is so disconnected from the actual physical flows of materials and much more attuned to vibes and speeches. The only thing I'm personally paying much attention to on the economic front is the drones and missiles slamming into fossil fuel infrastructure, the Hormuz blockade, and the resulting global shockwave of shortages, stoppages, closures, bankruptcies, and force majeures spreading out from the epicenter that is Iran.
Last week's thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on the Zionists' 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.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
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.
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It’s been a while since I’ve read about 1905 in depth ((and I was still a Trotskyist then) but I’ve been thinking of looking at it as an example of (1) shaking the foundations of any national / occidental chauvinism and (2) awakening people to the inadequacy of the entire system of government, such that they truly distrust the possibility of reform. I don’t expect that a dozen years need to pass between that and the next step, but I don’t see the current Western left as being capable of February > October growth without being pulled to the right or adding too many “American characteristics” to their socialism. We need, like, a Minneapolis Soviet or a successful major strike first, or a U.S. version of China’s Warlord Era would be more likely than a 1917 speedrun.
I have immense respect for the work PSL has been doing lately, but how do you think you’d handle ten-fold growth like the Bolsheviks had in the summer of 1917?
(Edit - forgot a word)
I agree with the Minneapolis Soviety analogy. The construction of on-the-ground collective realities is a major pre-revolutionary task that I think can only emerge under increasingly dire economic and repressive conditions. I don't see anything remotely like a Warlord Era playing out. That scale of violence and disruption is really only possible with the involvement of multiple states, especially in a context of colonial war. There's no such possible dynamic in the US. No one is going to military interfere or provide external support to the old regime in a significant way because only the US is really capable of that.
This is a great question that I've been thinking about and discussing with comrades a lot. It's hard to predict when that moment hits and the party doesn't, obviously, have any official timeline for that. Could the Iran War precipitate a crisis of sufficient scale related to popping the AI bubble and the withdrawal of the US from West Asia leading to compensatory imperialist adventurism in Latin America? Quite possibly! Or maybe it's in 2028, when Trump's term should be coming to an end, the Dems run Fetterman, the UAW and other big union contracts align, the financial contradictions massively compound, and Trump openly and flagrantly attempts to obliterate the electoral process. It could also be a ways further out, of course, but we should do our best to anticipate what might be coming soon.
We have a strong recruitment and candidacy system for making high-quality cadre and it's been tested during the major crises of the last few years (Gaza, Trump's reelection) at handling rapid membership growth. But we're talking, at max, the party doubling in size in six months or so. Nothing like the ten or twenty fold increase we'd expected in the lead up to a proper revolutionary outbreak. It's continually being improved and tweaked for a greater scale of onboarding, with the development of mass recruitment/onboarding meetings that move away from the one-on-one approach we use during down times.
However, that's really more logistical than ideological. Our dem cent structure is very effective at retaining the party line and developing internal unity with new comrades. Candidacy class is a powerful tool to that end. And our positions that were a hard sell a few years ago, like support for China or Palestine, are much easier these days as public consciousness has shifted. I think our stances that remain controversial, like our support for the DPRK or Iran, are rapidly becoming easier under the current circumstances. We always forefront anti-imperialism in our recruitment and cadre development. I think we can handle it, even if it's inevitably going to be bumpy along the way. I should see if there's good writing from the Bolsheviks on how they handled that phase cadre-wise.
Great response, thanks.
You’re right, of course. I exaggerated too much. I was thinking about something along the lines of “the new national government can’t control much, and regional powers intensify oppression and exploitation.” County sheriffs and red-state paramilitaries or something.
…
The speed at which this is changing is what encourages me the most. Anyone who’s learning is learning fast. It’s the adoption of democratic centralism that could be the biggest hurdle. It took me a long time to get used to it, and I think that was true for a lot of people in the last big org I was in. U.S. leftists, if they reached the left before being part of an organization, arrived at their politics as rebels and defended their positions as individualists. Or is that just a problem for people who come to the left as students instead of as part of a struggle? I don’t know, but it’s a consciousness shift that requires experience and error to overcome as well as instruction.
Maybe once the economic crisis hits the necessity for dem cent will become readily apparent, especially since we see it coming and can prepare the ground for it. But the moralistic and individualistic tendencies of the rank-and-file of the currently existing left are easy for wreckers to take advantage of.
Vincent Bevins’s most recent book has been good for getting people to recognize the need for hierarchy. There’s that Red Sails essay on Christianity’s influence on western Marxists. Other than that I can’t come up with many readings that take direct aim at killing the individualist in our heads. I guess it all comes down to having a tangible victory that sets an example, and that’s why I want to see what we can learn from 1905. If events move too quickly we’ll meet the moment armed only with “I told you so”s.
I’ll get back to you once I do some research on this myself. Might not be today but I do have a few books on my shelf that can at least direct me toward where to look.
These are things I see being a problem more post-revolution than during the revolution. It'll be a difficult and hazard-filled process to deal with the deep reactionary sentiment in some suburban and rural areas.
On all of your demcent thoughts about getting people bought in, it's got challenges and opportunities (we call that dialectics
). Lots of people have been through the ringer with some form of non-hierarchical/horizontal/directionless organizing. When they arrive to PSL, they're interested because they see us as effective. When we explain demcent, it's often a lightbulb moment that perfectly explains why PSL is able to get so much done while your local anarchist affinity group is only good at yelling at each other and doing "mutual aid" (it's the same six people doing a vegan potluck). On the other hand though, people coming to the party, obviously, tend towards a rebellious personality. We are trying to literally rebel, after all! What I emphasize in those discussions during recruitment is that we do no want to rebel for rebellion's sake, we don't want to fight for the glory of the struggle itself, we don't want to be martyrs to be remembered - we want to win. I make a case for a single-minded obsession with victory at all costs contrasted against the price of defeat. Demcent is the historically proven path to victory. This overlaps with our ideas about seizing the state as well, of course.
Another important tool is individualism versus collectivism. Young Americans are sick to death of individualism, and the idea of a true collective task is enticing. I lay out my own experience in the party as someone with a very rebellious personality and a big ego about my intellectual capacity and how that's been both humbled and sharpened. I always say that no matter how smart and capable you are, you're never going to be smarter and more capable than the big collective brain of all the comrades put together.
One of my go-to pieces in recruitment is From Allies to Comrades. This piece is great at explaining why the comrade dynamic is different from any other relationship. It opens great conversations on the failures of liberal identity politics, activist culture, and individualism in politics.
Yes! This is great. I hope to go through the PSL candidacy myself if I can improve my health enough.
I hope whatever ails you is overcome, comrade! Are you in the action network?
Thanks!
I’m on a contact list, anyway, and although I’m on the wrong side of my metro area from most of the branch’s events I should be able to get to something in the next couple of weeks if my health cooperates.
Sign up for the action network! It's for people in exactly positions like yours, where you support the party but aren't in position to be a member right now.
Pslweb.org/action
Will do! Much appreciated.