MLRL_Commie

joined 1 year ago
[–] MLRL_Commie@hexbear.net 5 points 8 hours ago

Well I at least recognize the phrasing from that discussion. Could be wrong, though.

[–] MLRL_Commie@hexbear.net 12 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (2 children)

Vague-posting lol. I am one of the people who said you were irresponsible, but that was you using 2 data points of likes (or maybe it was views? I can't remember) on Pahlavi propaganda on social media from somewhere before and after the blackout to argue that he was popular with an huge amount of Iran. It was shit methodology. You post very good stuff often, but you're not immune to mistakes and that was one. Calling it irresponsible was an adult way to engage with it, and it was not a way to call you inherently evil or unintelligent or something. Just something that you posted without the care and knowledge that you often have.

[–] MLRL_Commie@hexbear.net 4 points 16 hours ago

I am not sticking my head into the sand but asking for sober analyses that assumes the USA is as bad and dangerous as we say but still works around or through that. You stop analyzing at the moment of correct analysis of enemy strengths. I want to discuss how we can turn those strengths into downfalls.

[–] MLRL_Commie@hexbear.net 9 points 18 hours ago

How can Venezuela get the gun off their head? Or do you think they should just accept the situation until Americans suddenly do their revolution? Sounds very similar to Trotsky's argument for world revolution.

No, Venezuela and the rest of the world can take active roles in forming these forces. Deng was able to build off of a movement before his leadership, but that building started somewhere. We can do this, regardless of how hard, because the US position is as malleable as all things in a dialectical world

[–] MLRL_Commie@hexbear.net 5 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (2 children)

And how? Should Venezuela sit and wait for their primary contradiction (imperialism) to be ended?

I'm sorry but I don't take this sort of defeatism seriously. You leave the options immensely limited. There's a huge set of external contexts that can be used in resolving that contradiction. Not easily, but just acting like the US doing this ends all possibilities isn't useful in any way.

[–] MLRL_Commie@hexbear.net 9 points 1 day ago

The magic of strategy is that it is all encompassing! If it's unable to counteract the counterinsurgency, then the strategy must be changed ;)

But I agree in principal on all of this. I just always think that we should take responsibility for our failures no matte how abstract. We aren't losing because the US is too good, we need to get better to win and haven't managed it. Taking that responsibility forces us to think differently. Though I agree with your despair here

[–] MLRL_Commie@hexbear.net 16 points 1 day ago

I think we do something, as communists (mostly) not in the periphery, by discussing this sort of problem with the caveat 'Whether the US will militarily try to prevent this' instead of making that a starting point of the discussion. That is an assumption we must make, which is the US will intervene the moment it can safely do so (politically, not about safety of lives) whenever it deems the shifts to be against its interests. Deng started here also and found a way to become beloved by the US while accomplishing China's goals.

A state can make this assumption and takes the stance of increasing the difficulty of US invasion (get the nuke, make it so damaging that it's not worth it, partner up to increase the investment needed to win for the US). This is what the AES seems to be doing, and is what the USSR managed after WW2 (and Stalin tried hard beforehand). It's, in my opinion, a short-sighted position unless the rest of the world does the same. It relies on too many factors to be stable. It's noble, and I love them for trying. I want to make it work by keeping the west from invading, too. But it's an inherently unstable place to be, and I wouldn't recommend it except for the absolute most strong movements in the world. The bolivarian one isn't strong enough, I think, for this road. (not Latin American, but basing this off of how precarious it seems the past 20 years from outside)

The other lever to pull is the attractiveness of the invasion. Don't make it difficult, make it senseless for the US to want to invade. This is what China did. How can Venezuela theoretically do that now? Playing China and the US off each other is one way, though its a huge sacrifice and will likely damage the neighbors too. Then Venezuela can say 'look US, I'm helping you by trading with you and not China, with the only requirement being that you invest more capital into us from which you benefit'. I think this might work. Is that good for global communism? I'm genuinely not sure, but over a 75 year period, I think it might be because the US would've deindustrialized again and built up a new powerful enemy.

[–] MLRL_Commie@hexbear.net 17 points 1 day ago (2 children)

agreed, but that's why I wanted to talk about how to do Deng's strategy by changing some of the tactics according to material conditions. Now, with the current global political dynamics, how can a country get the capitalists to help them develop in a way that ultimately goes against the capitalists'/imperailists' interests? What needs to shift in the tactics or world situation to make it possible?

I think that China, for example, can be used as leverage. The US states its desire to decouple from China (probably gonna fail) and Venezuela could use that as leverage to pull a similar strategy. China won't be hurt by that in the long run, I think, because their independent development is so accelerated at the moment that I have little worry they would come through (inb4 Xiaohongshu comes in with the monetary failures and lack of internal demand lol).

[–] MLRL_Commie@hexbear.net 14 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Well my point is to explore how a country can do Deng's strategy of 'use the needs of the capitalist nations to China's own benefit' in a new way. Deng's tactical position 'invite capital to exploit labor but benefit from the construction' is probably untenable for the reasons you state. But how much does it need to change to make it tenable? That's what I want to discuss.

[–] MLRL_Commie@hexbear.net 16 points 1 day ago

This was my reading too. All just a lot of bullshit contextualization for a way too dynamic topic.

[–] MLRL_Commie@hexbear.net 10 points 1 day ago

Holy shit, huge if true

[–] MLRL_Commie@hexbear.net 39 points 1 day ago (26 children)

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/28/can-venezuelas-delcy-rodriguez-become-a-latin-american-deng-xiaoping

Article filled with brainworms, but I am wondering what Hexbears think about this concept in general. Delcy trying to follow the model of Deng (hallowed be his name deng-cowboy) seems like a very difficult path without major change to the method. Deng was able to leverage Chinese huge proletarian labor capacity, many ports, and sovereignty to invite capital, make that capital reproduction valuable for the capitalists, and benefit from the effect of built infrastructure and knowledge. Venezuela would need to make some huge changes to their infrastructure very quickly to be able to do this (could be posisble if enough outside investment comes) and would be taking a bigger risk seeing as the bolviarian revolution less defensible is than the CCP was. That, or Venezuela tries to do a Opening Up but limiting it to the oil industry.... which I think is a bad strategic path and will result in failure (with Oil being phased out for cheaper renewables). And it will only result in useless built up knowledge and infrastructure.

What am I missing here? Are there other strategic options that I'm ignoring or don't know about?

Or is this bullshit that is being assumed about Venezuela but not actually how anything on the ground is working?

 

Edit2: the ratio is amazing. I'm exhausted. This has quadrupled my hexbear time for the day and I will be limiting myself for a bit lol. I feel like we got somewhere in a couple of good threads thanks to Hellinkilla and ratboy. Good luck, comrades.

Edit: the rant wasn't clear enough. In Previous struggles users have expressed frustrations with how mods/admin decisions are made. I would like to discuss how they are made and hear from them. Mods have also stated before that they wish we could be better, I'd like to hear how and know how they think this should be approached.

Rant/effort post coming:

What's the follow up to the recent problems with how mods/admins have handled recent issues? Did I miss something? Can we get some explanations about how this site is structured and what roles we see for admins/mods generally?

history of struggle session, not necessary but gives context


We had a fairly large and fairly one-sided struggle session a couple weeks ago. Z_Poster was banned (and still is, as far as I know) and the emoji was added. Some users (thinking of @hellinkella, smong others) did some effort to really parse out where the pain points were and who was involved (largely Zionism inherent in some positions, Jewish exceptionalism). Only the emoji and banning occurred with no other promises/ideas from mods/admins.

There then followed a leak of mod logs where opinions were still very different than the userbase. I would encourage people not to open it or ask for it, please, and especially not to share it. But I think a significant amount of us did see messages that, regardless of context, gave an image of admins/mods that think the userbase hates them, disagreed with the userbase in significant ways, and which wants to steer us in a better direction. The mod chat was also absurdly active at the time, but there's been little talk about what WAS discussed, only discussions about what was missed, where more context is needed, and things that were not done in a timely manner. This was not further discussed. (Personally I'm super appreciative of you all, doing work I don't want to do on a website I enjoy thoroughly, and don't hate any of you--including previous ones I've argued with, but would like to see some changes which will follow below and hopefully other comrades will add to it/change it for the better).

We had an EM/POC post which was tangential to that, but where there seemed to be large support for the userbase with regards to the ideological differences between mods/admins and the broader userbase. There was also a banning for which apologies followed quickly, but which indicates the structural failure more generally. There were of course other topics covered, which I won't speak on here. I didn't see any solutions proposed and accepted, from any of the topics relevant to this post. (Please correct me if I read this thread wrong, don't want to speak for you, EM/POC comrades.)

Was there a follow up? Is that coming? Is the discussion behind the curtain of the mod chat? I understand you all have lives, so don't spend all your time working on this, but some knowledge of how you're working would be good. Otherwise it feels like purposeful pushing back of feedback/decisions so that we will forget the passionate feelings or give up. If that's the goal, it's a horrible strategy and should just be explicitly told. "3 months after a struggle session is the earliest we will make changes in processes" is better than nothing.

I would also recommend we have an open discussion about the direction of the site. It seems the mods/admins have indicated to have better ideas for what we can be (I remember this from the "dunk" discussions too), but have not made clear what their position in that is. Enforcers? A vanguard (with our input as leading determinant)? A different vanguard (against our input for but in our interests)? Theoreticians that have the ideas but want the users to take the lead? Knowing this would make clearer how to interact with you, and how to make our experiences better. Maybe we do need growth and improvement, but we haven't been clear about how, and talking down is how most have experienced that. I already love this place, so when I'm frustrated I don't think of leaving. But that's not universal

 

I'm no expert on Iran, so I was hoping some knowledgeable people here could give some context. I find it hard to figure out the speaker's exact strategy from the discussion. Any thoughts?

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