If armed socialists in the United States got into a full confrontation with ICE I think you'd know because this site would probably be shut down by the FBI lol
Dual power, Zohran has to build it himself tbh. He's the new mayor in all but name, if he wants to enact his agenda he's going to need to take on the biggest gang that actually runs NYC, which is the NYPD. He's gonna need goons for that. If he's got any brains and is actually serious about enacting an even remotely socialist agenda he needs armed goons like a supervillain, and they've gotta be loyal to him. I don't think you'd be able to get an org to do this.
Yeah I was mostly bullshitting, I too wish we had actual third places in reality. Love you folks but nothing beats hanging out in person.
Buddy, you're posting in the tankie third place right now
If Zohran has any sense and is "hiding his power level" even a tiny amount, he needs an armed guard of committed socialists like yesterday to prevent this exact scenario from happening. If deporting him is at all hard for ICE to do without making it into a big public Incident, they'll have to come up with some other shenanigans unless they want riots in NYC.
It's because North Korea has no bourgeois class to speak of; both Russia and Iran have a ton of rich businessmen who desperately want to normalise with the West so they can make more money. This class of people simply does not exist in North Korea. Likewise, let's say you want to bribe a North Korean to work with you; how the fuck do you even pay them? Pay them with what? North Korea is entirely cut off from the global financial system, there's no workarounds that exist, unlike places like Russia and Iran.
You combine this with the DPRK state taking collaboration and intelligence far more seriously because it's a communist state, not just a global South aligned would be capitalist state like Russia or Iran. The DPRK is run by communists who watched the United States devastate their country in living memory, they take security extremely seriously. There's a reason the DPRK has nukes and Iran doesn't, and it's entirely because of this difference. Communists have no hope that they'll be able to work with the West, they see no benefit to working in good faith with those who would seek them dead.
I have read Lenin, and yes it's a bit more complicated since he does talk about financial imperialism but not in the same way things have developed post war. Also this is Jameson, in the introduction, describing his choice of "late."
What 'late' generally conveys is... the sense that something has changed, that things are different, that we have gone through a transformation of the life world which is somehow decisive but incomparable with the older convulsions of modernization and industrialization, less perceptible and dramatic, somehow, but more permanent precisely because more thoroughgoing and all-pervasive.
And Mandel on "late":
... will enable us to explain THE history of the capitalist mode of production and above all the THIRD phase of this mode OF production, which we shall call late capitalism', (page 42)
Neither of these convey the idea that this is the last stage or a terminal stage, just another, most recent stage. And indeed Mandel does try and claim late capitalism is different than the imperialism described by Lenin, writing
the structure of the world economy in the first phase of late capitalism is distinguished by several important characteristics from its structure in the age of classical imperialism. (page 69)
The dollar is going to remain central to the global economy until either China offers a replacement for a massive consumer market for other countries to dump their excess production into or the American empire is not longer capable of threatening other countries into using dollars. Also, that article you shared is using a long debunked rumour from a few months ago. SWIFT is still far bigger the CIPS, it processes around ~$35 trillion a day (per https://archive.is/YEWAx), which is far larger than even the figure the article you shared uses as a source (which says that CIPS processed ~$2 trillion in one day). Likewise, that source itself has been disputed by the Chinese central bank, per: https://finance.eastmoney.com/a/202504183381053098.html
昨日，市场有传闻称，当日人民币跨境支付系统（CIPS）的单天交易量出现天量增长，引发社会各界高度关注。今日上午，中国银行相关人士向财联社记者表示，上述网传消息不实。
No this is actually false, the living conditions of 19th century capitalism for labourers were substantially worse than subsistence farming, so much so that the only reason capitalists could even get people to work in factories was the enclosure movement, which forcibly kicked people out of commons, making it impossible to grow your own food, and thereby forcing people to either work in factories or starve. It wasn't until the late 19th century that, for example, life expectancy began rising in England, the home of the industrial revolution, and that was only because England had begun to outsource the most horrific of its jobs to its larger empire, using imperialism to bribe the working class English folk with quality of life improvements. Capitalism actually lowers living standards for all but the wealthiest; it just so happens "the wealthiest" began to include workers in the imperial core.
Yeah, and neither lived until now and I think both would agree that what they wrote about was not the last stage of capitalism. Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism was mostly correct for his time, but imperialism today (especially the American financialised imperialism that Michael Hudson has so thoroughly explored in Superimperialism) is meaningfully different and "higher" than Lenin's rather vulgar imperialism, which was naked territory grabbing and domination. Unfortunately we've yet to see "late stage" capitalism, nor will we until capitalism itself is smashed. For it's not on track to destroy itself any time soon, and every crisis it's encountered it's been able to absorb and change to suit its needs rather well. Capitalism will not die of its own accord, it must be killed.
Ekranoplans are so cool
It's time to continue our Memes with Citations series with my favorite work by everybody's poster child of postmodern literary theory, Jacques Derrida. His entire shtick, in a nutshell, is a continuation of Marxist materialism into the literary sphere that he called "deconstruction." Truth, justice, fact? All hogwash—all that exists is the sign, and signs derive meaning via contrast with other signs. "There is no outside-text," and all meaning must exist in conversation with everything else. This is all great and fun, but we're here to talk about his "political turn" in the 90's, and specifically his Spectres of Marx.
He wrote the book in 1993, after the collapse of actually existing communism with the left in total disarray. It was the "end of history" as Fukuyama declared, and neoliberalism was the "one true" system left. Not so fast, wrote Derrida. As he explains (and this is the meme):
Capitalist societies can always heave a sigh of relief and say to themselves: communism is finished since the collapse of the totalitarianism of the twentieth century and not only is it finished, but it did not take place, it was only a ghost. They do no more than disavow the undeniable itself: a ghost never dies, it remains always to come and to come-back.
Through this comment, the study of hauntology was born. A ghost from the past, haunting the present with a promised future that never came. It's been applied to all sorts of things, from music (see Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life) to climate change (by yours truly), but the kernel of the study is that Marxism will forever haunt the West, for it can never be truly killed.
The gall that Derrida has to write this book is amazing, for it seemed all was lost for the worldwide left. Destroyed in Europe, in retreat everywhere else, it was truly the end times. And here was this literary theorist, the boogeyman of the culture wars of the 80's and 90's, writing about how communism can never truly be killed.
Want to also share the following passage, which I think is the best arguement against capitalism in the modern era ever formulated. For every chud that screams at you that "poverty has never been lower," just tell them something like the following:
For it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelise in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realised itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the ‘end of ideologies’ and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the earth.
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When are the Zohran Fedayeen sign ups coming for New Yorkers? Only somewhat kidding.