Koba of Lacustria ☭ 🏭 🌽 Profile picture
Marxism-Willichism. Pan-American Communist. Regime Mouthpiece. Ohio Apologist. ☭☰ Fellow Traveler. Backup: @RedLacustrian
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Aug 12 9 tweets 3 min read
🧵: War is a violent process of overcoming tactical obstacles in pursuit of definite strategic goals, with the latter defined politically and the former determined by the objective factors/context.

The goals/obstacles contradiction is resolved militarily by operational art. The definition of victory in military science is variable and contingent on a variety of material factors.

In revolutionary/total wars, absolute enmity defines victory. In cabinet/proxy wars, the relatively limited needs/wants of established states define victory. Image
Aug 10 16 tweets 6 min read
🧵: Rightists talking about Hinkle always amuses me.

They're BAFFLED by his media presence, even more than his leftist opponents are. They usually just crudely copy the common accusations leftists throw at Hinkle, that he's some agent/asset/grifter or hiding his true politics. Image The core difference between rightist and leftist ideologues on the oh so mysterious "Hinkle Question" is that rightists are ignorant/dismissive of his relationship with Haz and the ACP organization/milieu, while leftists somewhat understand the importance of those connections.
Jul 19 14 tweets 3 min read
🧵: Race is commonly used to soothe the angst caused by the void of positive determination, but it can never fill it because Race is just as much a negation of concrete humanity as the bourgeois formalism of universal equality.

Race is an abstraction of real communal being. The modern concept of Race has its origins in the Atlantic slave trade, with Blackness developing as a retroactive justification for the profitable act of ripping people from their homelands and turning them into cattle.

The utility of dehumanization gave rise to its ideology.
Jul 18 13 tweets 3 min read
🧵: Modern bourgeois consciousness is essentially a product of the runaway feedback loop of PolEcon development kickstarted by the Triangle Trade.

The Enlightenment just gave expression to the changes wrought by voracious merchants and the collapse of pre-modern state authority. Image In form, the Thirty Years' War was yet another German religious war.

In content, it was a proxy war led by the early modern English/French/Dutch states against the medieval Habsburg Empire, so they could force the Iberian/Italian merchants out of the colonial slave trade. Image
Jul 17 10 tweets 2 min read
You understand my threads if you understand their relation to this pic.

The unique feature of our species-being is the ability to express/transform our social being and objective premise consciously. That novelty, however, arises from the qualities all social animals share. Image Wolf packs don't consciously delimit borders on maps, but they unconsciously demarcate them according to natural laws of development.

Objective contradictions—between particular wolf packs and between wolves in general and their environment—produce shifting pack "fiefdoms."
Jul 16 5 tweets 1 min read
Ideological: Nativism/Cosmopolitanism.
⬇️
Structural: States/Federal.
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PolEcon: Rural/Urban.

That's the fractal contradiction of the US political form (the Duopoly). Class struggle is its material hypostasis, the essential content of both the whole and its constituent parts. This formal political contradiction, like the bourgeois republic it corresponds with, is a universal abstraction of a concrete society and its particular contradictions. It's a heuristic, a starting point for practical investigation and work rather than a definite conclusion.
Jul 13 6 tweets 2 min read
🧵: Nothing proves the Americanness of Black Americans more than their division on the national question between two extremes—parochial "fuck you I got mine" nativists and cosmopolitan "USAID Pan-African" radlibs, which mirrors (in essence) the division between White Americans. The Black radlib view of Pan-Africanism, like the White radlib view of SocDem Pan-Europeanism, is an empty universal that denies its particulars. Both groups deny their Americanness.

This contrasts with Sahelian Pan-Africanism—a concrete universal unified with its particulars.
Jul 12 7 tweets 2 min read
🧵: The basis of my support for the ACP is that it is the first organized break from the tyranny of 1968 and the moribund legacy of the academic "New Left."

It represents a *new beginning* for left-wing politics in America, the first step on a long-abandoned and unfamiliar path. It challenges the ideological subjectivity of the Left, yes, but more fundamentally, it questions the subconscious assumptions about objective reality that subtly influence the ideological subjectivity and activism of the Left—assumptions that have led it to its current nadir.
Jun 14 9 tweets 2 min read
Symbolism 🧵:
I understand why the consensus "Heads of Communism" ends with Mao, but ending it there feels incomplete. Five is an ugly and undialectical number.

Either remove Stalin and Mao to make it three heads (which I hate) or add Deng to make it six heads (what I prefer). Image Five is an undialectical number because the Hegelian dialectic has a triune structure (sublated unity of opposites, three in one).

Limiting the Heads to Marx/Engels/Lenin makes sense because Lenin "sublated" the revolutionary science of Marx/Engels into a revolutionary state.
May 20 8 tweets 2 min read
If you want a concrete understanding of the dialectic between "War of Position" and "War of Maneuver," you should study Ukraine's 2023 Offensive and the Russian defense.

The first map depicts the Ukrainian plan, and the second shows their actual gains (blue stripes, not arrows). Image
Image
Don't ignore the granular details in favor of the big picture; that will only keep you trapped in the realm of abstraction.

Study the *particular* positions and maneuvers held and taken by each side during their summer struggle on the Pontic Steppe.
Mar 24 6 tweets 1 min read
Internet Leftism's pathology is demanding it must ALWAYS be the target audience. If you're not pandering enough you get dogpiled.

The kernel of truth in this belief is that social media algos cybernetically reward engagement—offending leftists is a great way to get engagement! The entire media ecosystem of the online right is powered by countless leftists angrily running on hamster wheels.
Feb 25 12 tweets 3 min read
THREAD:
Russia's leverage in negotiations comes from the assertion that they're ready to abandon talks and switch from positional war to maneuver war at any time.

The RU MOD posting this video is part of the public jockeying process.

The question is if it's a bluff or not. Russia has the manpower/material reserves to conduct a Dnieper crossing and reopen the Kherson front, while Ukraine lacks enough of those things to do anything more than a fighting retreat.

Even with that objective (im)balance of forces, this would be a costly operation.
Feb 22 15 tweets 4 min read
THREAD
I want two basic things in politics as a communist:

• Proletarian power/influence.

• To discredit/destroy anything that obstructs proletarian power/influence.

Besides the repressive state, there is no greater obstacle to the first point than Institutional Leftism. Image Institutional Leftism permeates the US Empire's ideological state apparatus.

It's the ideology of aspirants/members of the urban PMC. Both organic student movements and manufactured color revolutions globally are driven by this broad tendency.

(Read the alt text on the pics) The Color Revolution playbook:  1) Combine an aimlessly angry crowd of institutional leftists with an organized, violent vanguard of imperial agents to overthrow a recalcitrant government.  2) Install a puppet government with a facade of democracy covering a fascistic deep state.  3) Use that new puppet state as cannon fodder against the enemies of the Atlanticist Cartel.
Populist slogans without disciplined DemCent always lead to the Democratic Party.
That complexity was not just chaos, it was also the process of cooptation and recuperation by bourgeois imperial institutions.
The Center for Social Development is funded by the Ford Foundation and the JPMorgan Chase Foundation, among MANY others.  https://csd.wustl.edu/partners/funding-partners-2/
Jan 26 8 tweets 4 min read
THREAD:
The current geopolitical landscape is usually compared to some part(s) of the 19th/20th centuries, but I think the best historical analogy to our current circumstances is actually found in the 16th/17th centuries in Europe—from Martin Luther to the Peace of Westphalia. The Protestant Reformation At the time, Europe was dominated by the hegemonic Catholic Church, and that hegemony was enforced by the Habsburg Empire.

For 100+ years, this Papal-Habsburg hegemony was embroiled in conflict with disparate forces that were unified only by their counter-hegemonic partisanship. De facto holdings of Emperor Charles V Habsburg, also the de jure Holy Roman (German) Emperor.
Dec 9, 2024 6 tweets 1 min read
What people colloquially refer to as the "American Empire" is, in reality, the Atlanticist *Cartel* — a syndicate of imperialist mafias unified under the leadership of the Wall Street-City of London axis. It is a product of the "Second Thirty Years War" (1914-1945). The cartel form represents the dialectical sublation/transcendence of the inter-imperial struggle that Lenin had analyzed. The national forms of the constituent mafias are an echo of the Cartel's historical basis, the period of intense rivalry between global European empires.
May 2, 2024 11 tweets 3 min read
🧵On the topic of the US-Israel relationship, it's not a question of "who controls who," it's a feedback loop that developed from the petrodollar and Suez Canal.

The world imperial system consists of a network of capital flows between metropoles that all lead back to the US. https://appliednetsci.springeropen.com/articles/10.1007/s41109-020-00304-z The most important metropole nodes in this network correspond with the locations of the Federal Reserve Banks, specifically NYC, DC, and San Francisco.

The US exports USD from these nodes and imports commodities and labor from the rest of the world. That is the American Empire. Image
Mar 25, 2024 6 tweets 2 min read
🧵
A lot of people on here contradictorily have extremely high expectations for the UN while viewing it with complete contempt.

I won't scold a Palestinian for cynicism but Westerners should adjust their expectations and understand why countries around the world value it. At its core, the UN is a standardized forum for diplomacy. It's not a law enforcement agency at the top of some international hierarchy, it's designed to be a connective tissue between states in what is otherwise an anarchic international system.
britannica.com/topic/anarchy
Jan 8, 2024 5 tweets 2 min read
🧵We really shouldn't be surprised that anti-communism took root in Iran when Soviet policy towards it was essentially a continuation of Tsarist policy.

The Anglo-Soviet invasion in 1941 was just another round of the long-running "Great Game" in the eyes of Iranians.

Russian territorial expansion in the Caucasus and spheres of influence.
Anglo-Soviet occupation zone during WW2.
We've all heard about the 1953 coup, but how many of you have heard of the 1946 Iran Crisis, when the USSR set up satellite states in the territory it occupied after the 1941 invasion? That wasn't the first time Iran's territorial integrity was threatened by Russians. Image
Oct 12, 2023 11 tweets 2 min read
🧵
I see a lot of socialists pointing out that Israel "created" Hamas. While there is truth to that, it's reductionist and counterproductive to bring up in most cases when discussing this conflict with people.

The rise of religious nationalism within the Palestinian... ...movement was driven by two key and connected events:

1) Gorbachev coming to power.
2) The Oslo Accords.

As we all know, the USSR had been the patron of many liberation movements around the world, including the leftist-secular PLO. When Gorbachev came to power, that changed.
Dec 20, 2022 18 tweets 5 min read
In the same vein as my thread on Yemen and its strategic importance, I'll be giving another geography lesson by partially answering this question, "Why is Russia so big?"

Perceptive types will see that this map hints at one of the main reasons, which I'll explain below. The history of Russia is defined by two problems, the lack of naturally defined borders and warm water ports with free access to ocean commerce.

Dark green on this map represents the borders of the Russian Tsardom at its establishment in 1547 under Ivan Grozny.
Dec 17, 2022 23 tweets 4 min read
Thread🧵

I never fully understood President Xi's quote about "historical nihilism" and the USSR, but that's starting to change as a result of the war in Ukraine and the stuff I talked about in the thread below.

Historical nihilism is the unprincipled rejection of history. Historical nihilism first took hold of the CPSU with De-Stalinization.

Before I get to my main points, I want to say that De-Stalinization was a well-meaning policy in the broadest sense and I don't hate Khruschev like some others. The problem was that it went WAY too far.