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History liker | Coder | Commie scum | From the River to the Sea
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Mar 12, 2023 • 23 tweets • 7 min read
Thread of some of my better threads. PDFs of most of these can be found at

🧵 In no particular order 👇bit.ly/urcommunistdad On revolutionary theory, anticommunism, and the cultivation of a Compatible Left which neglects imperialism and disciplined organization and in so doing is incapable of threatening capitalism
Feb 14, 2023 • 18 tweets • 5 min read
Many on the left hold a reductive view that Trade Unions = Good. While trade unions are a key vehicle for class struggle, they can and often do have a reactionary character. Reactionary unions are even a favorite tool of the CIA. Let's have a look. 🧵
The assumption that unions are an inherently progressive force is false. Trade unions which abandon the broader struggle to focus exclusively on their own interests at the expense of workers generally are no more progressive than highly paid workers bargaining individually.
Feb 13, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
For folks who want to learn more about the actual science of nuclear meltdowns, radiation, and mortality at Chernobyl, check out the two excellent videos linked below. TLDR: popular media and fiction like the HBO series overstate the danger by a factor of 1 MILLION. In terms of long-term health risks, there is vast uncertainty about the relationship between low level radiation and cancer risk. Studies of 66,000 liquidators (the ppl who cleaned up the area) found NO increased overall mortality, although thyroid cancer rates were elevated. Image
Feb 11, 2023 • 12 tweets • 4 min read
In addition to the more obvious political motives, there is a fourth factor I neglected to mention at play in the gross overstatement of the effects of Chernobyl: the intra-capitalist rivalry between nuclear power and fossil fuels. Struggle btw competing blocs of capital is often a determining force in capitalist development. While outcomes are largely determined by the relative size of the competing capitals, the bourgeois state intervenes to create conditions favorable for capital accumulation as a whole.
Feb 11, 2023 • 15 tweets • 5 min read
Chernobyl killed just 31 ppl thx to competent disaster management. A far more appropriate (but less ideologically convenient) comparison is India’s Bhopal Disaster, which claimed 4-16k lives when US company Union Carbide ignored safety procedures and poisoned an entire city. 🧵 The Bhopal disaster was the deadliest industrial accident in history and, like the East Palestine derailment, completely preventable.

theatlantic.com/photo/2014/12/…
Feb 8, 2023 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
Buried under all those beautiful rice fields and beaches are the bodies of hundreds of thousands of Indonesian peasants and workers who dreamed of a strong Indonesia free from Western exploitation. Their CIA-backed mass murder allowed Bali to become the tourist haven it is today. In 1965 the popular nationalist Third World leader Sukarno fell victim to a military coup. US-trained generals, Islamists and social reactionaries rounded up half a million Indonesian communists and suspected communists and murdered them. Learn more 👇
outrun.substack.com/p/the-jakarta-…
Feb 1, 2023 • 23 tweets • 7 min read
The CIA agrees with Lenin that, "without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement." Anticommunism, the Compatible Left, and the CIA's construction of an intellectual quarantine around revolutionary theory, a brief 🧵 . Since the start of the Cold War, the CIA has supported all manner of anticommunist intellectual projects across the political spectrum in its efforts to deprive revolutionary movements of revolutionary theory.
Feb 1, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
"Real socialism, it is argued, would be controlled by the workers themselves through direct participation instead of being run by Leninists, Stalinists, Castroites, or other ill-willed, power-hungry, bureaucratic, cabals of evil men who betray revolutions
Unfortunately, this “pure socialism” view is ahistorical and nonfalsifiable; it cannot be tested against the actualities of history. It compares an ideal against an imperfect reality, and the reality comes off a poor second.
Jan 15, 2023 • 18 tweets • 4 min read
Social democracy as a historic movement emerged out of and rested upon a particular set of material conditions. Those conditions have completely collapsed or are rapidly eroding, rendering social democracy a political dead end.

A 🧵 on the economic basis of social democracy. Social democracy as a strong political force emerged out of a particular conjuncture. Briefly, those conditions were as follows:
Jan 12, 2023 • 46 tweets • 12 min read
Capitalism and imperialism are dynamic systems which have taken many forms over the course of their development.

A modest 🧵 on the history, economics and ideology of US-led imperialism, the post-war Golden Age, and the rise of the neoliberal form of imperialism. The United States emerged from WWII in a dominant position relative to the old European colonial powers, devastated by war and occupation. American industry accounted for 40% of global GDP and Washington held billions of dollars in European debt.
Jan 12, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Relevant context when asking why Europe is sticking with the United States despite the disastrous economic effects of the war in Ukraine. Europe cannot do without the United States’ vast military acting as global police to repress the peoples of the periphery. Were the peripheral countries to establish true economic sovereignty, the advantages accruing to the imperial core countries through unequal exchange, imperialist rent and neocolonial drains of surplus would vanish, impoverishing the rich countries. This is unacceptable.
Jan 3, 2023 • 23 tweets • 13 min read
This photo isn’t even from the “Holodomor,” it was taken in 1921 as part of international relief efforts during the Volga famine.
Image Basically all photographic “evidence” purported to document the 1932-33 famine dramatized as “Holodomor” is fraudulent. Let’s look at examples, taken from Douglas Tottle’s Fraud, Famine and Fascism.

ia801502.us.archive.org/30/items/Dougl…


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Dec 29, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Monopoly price markups transformed economics, resulting in a chronic glut rather than a shortage of capital. The classic tendency of the rate of profit to fall is replaced by that of the surplus to rise. The economy is no longer supply-constrained, but demand-constrained. A major effect of the excess of investment-seeking surplus and shortage of outlets for productive investment is the rise of speculative investment and rentier behavior, as Capital seeks to accumulate without actually investing.
Dec 29, 2022 • 54 tweets • 22 min read
Monopoly capitalism is a phase of capitalist development distinct from and emerging out of the preceding period of competitive capitalism which birthed both classical bourgeois and Marxist economic theory. Let's talk about the history and contradictions of the monopoly system. 🧵 In competitive capitalism, innumerable small capitalists compete with one another to produce the maximum amount of a commodity at the lowest possible price. Capitalists gain market share by introducing labor-saving technology and undercutting the competition on price.
Dec 21, 2022 • 24 tweets • 6 min read
The homeownership society was not a “mistake,” it did exactly what was intended. Effects the author understandably considers harmful are in fact highly desirable outcomes for the highest strata of society. Let’s talk about the history and political economy of homeownership.🧵 After the October Revolution, panicked American capitalist launched the Own Your Own Home campaign, figuring that property-owning (white) Americans would be less likely to yearn for communist revolution. Home ownership was promoted as a patriotic duty. Image
Oct 7, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Uyghur propaganda blitz is wild cuz you’ll see citizens of the most violent imperialist countries who spent the past 21 years entertaining Jack Bauer fantasies & cheerleading the evisceration of majority Muslim countries suddenly anointing themselves some kind of Muslim defenders Check out this ghoul who spent the past decade cheerleading a deadly Western imperialist war on Libya that obliterated worlds largest irrigation system, destroyed the most prosperous nation in Africa and restored slave markets. Now he’s suddenly a champion for Chinese Muslims.
Sep 30, 2022 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
It's interesting how the Cultural Turn in the social sciences - the repudiation of social history and structural analysis in favor of a focus on culture & discourses - coincided with the rise of neoliberalism and the impasse at which global capitalism finds itself today. 🧵 Currently listening to @adnanahusain's readings from Sewell's Logics of History on @guerrilla_pod's Patreon stream (subscribe now!), and the episode about Social History and the Cultural Turn really connects with the final chapters of the Patnaik's book, Capital and Imperialism. Image
Jun 29, 2022 • 40 tweets • 13 min read
Gerald Horne's Counter-Revolution of 1776 shatters the myth of the American Revolution as a historically progressive force, demonstrating conclusively its reactionary character and offering critical lessons for aspiring revolutionaries in today's reformed slavers' republic. 🧵 The roots of the settler's revolt against Royal Tyranny are to be found in the development of a complex web of contradictions that afflicted London's North American colonial holdings, a wildly unstable project whose Destiny was anything but Manifest.
Jun 22, 2022 • 31 tweets • 9 min read
Some quick thoughts on liberal framing and reading between the lines with bourgeois authors, in the context of David Talbot's excellent book, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government 🧵 Learning from liberals is a critical skill for Marxists. As the hegemonic ideology of the bourgeoisie, Liberalism pervades nearly every source of information available to us. Like Marx and Lenin, we must rely on liberals' observations while criticizing their conclusions.
Jun 6, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Extremely funny learning that American colonist conscripts sucked shit in the British armed forces, with the British coming to favor armed Africans, which the supremely anti-African colonists big time resented lol. That contradiction would soon thereafter erupt in 1776. Settler denunciation of the “tyranny” of King George and the refusal of free men to be “slaves” takes on a whole new meaning when you realize part of that was being butt hurt over sucking ass as soldiers and being paid the same as black Jamaican soldiers lol.
Jun 5, 2022 • 15 tweets • 6 min read
Now’s a good time to read Operation Gladio by Paul Williams. From 1969-1980 the CIA actively stoked social conflict and carried out countless false flag terrorist attacks to create an atmosphere of fear and justify crackdowns on the left, the “Strategy of Tension.” At one point the CIA even carried out a false flag kidnapping and assassination of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, who was working towards a rapprochement with the communist left. Terrorist attacks and assassinations were regularly carried and blamed on the communists.