On the DSA question

Karl Marx said parliamentary cretinism would get the workers everything they wanted in America. And the present Potus repeatedly befriends communists and identifies as one.

KARL MARX in 1871 - Parliamentary cretinism will get the workers everything they want in America and England.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/09/08.htm

“… we do not deny that there are countries – such as America, England, and if I were more familiar with your institutions, I would perhaps also add Holland – where the workers can attain their goal by peaceful means…”

The real question for the DSA is whether an organization that has channeled almost all its energy into electoral work can generate that kind of outside pressure at all or only ever hopes to be the parliamentary wing of a movement it isn't building.

Calls for a bolt ladder

. Sorry . . . Bold Leader

This would explain his recourse to “Aesopian language” when circumstances demanded it. It is the meaning I attach to “two steps forward, one step back". I seem to recall also that he somewhere wrote that “the only principle is that which moves the revolution forward”. Thw abandonment of War Communism in favour of the NEP and“state capitalism” was perhaps the most striking example of his tactical flexibility. As for Cannon, was it opportunism when he, Foster, and other leaders of the fledgling CPUSA decided to  “Americanize” the party by shifting the focus  from the Russian Revolution and Communism to the American revolutionary tradition and Thomas Paine as a means of connecting with the mass of workers who could more readily identify with it?

It's well to remember that Lenin and Cannon were writing in the glow of the Revolution which drew a growing number of workers in the US and globally to Communism. That period has long since passed, and today both Communism and the USSR have been widely discredited by the victors of the Cold War and rejected by the mssses.  Invoking that tradition is now plainly an obstacle rather than a bridge to transforming class consciousness. I learned to allude to public ownership under workers control when trying to persuade liberal and social democratic workmates and other interested parties to socialism. I employed Marxist and Leninist terminology in groups where it was understood and accepted by like-minded comrades and close contacts moving in that direction.

 

More than a century following the Russian Revolution and 35 years since the collapse of the Soviet experiment and the withering away of Communist parties in the advanced capitalist countries, I’m even more hard pressed to understand why some small left-wing groups still persist in publicly identifying their organizations as “Communist”  and prominently feature the hammer-and-sickle on the masthead of their publications. Those who regard it as a matter of principle to declare their affiliation so openly to a cause now widely percieved as alien would not IMO have won the approval of Lenin and Cannon and their comrades. I believe they would have seen the practice as an example of left-wing sectarianism further isolating these groups from the the working class and preventing them from acquiring influence at all stages of its struggle as a necessary prerequisite to leading it in a revolutionary crisis. 

 

This mattered less when there were mass Communist parties, as in Europe and elsewhere. The Trotskyist, Maoist and other splinter groups could comfortably reappropriate the name as did the the Ligue communiste revolutionaire, the FI's section in France.  I now  better understand why the Canadian section, the League for Socialist Action, and the US Socialist Workers Party, despite belonging to the same tradition, balked at following suit because of the stronger anti-Communist animus in North American society during and after the Cold War to which their labour movements were not immune

atically receive all group message

Listen Marxist!

 A general prohibition of child labor is incompatible with the existence of large-scale industry and hence an empty, pious wish. Its realization -- if it were possible -- would be reactionary

Critique of the Gotha Programme-- Appendix

The Swiss critical theorist Rahel Jaeggi, in her recent book Progress and Regression, seeks to distinguish ‘progress’ from mere technological development or change. Progress entails injustice being overcome through collective action over time, with outcomes that come to appear obviously right. 

Jaeggi uses the example of corporal punishment in schools, something that was once treated as normal but is now considered beyond the pale thanks to a reflexive process of argument, campaigning and consensus formation. This is evidence of progress, not just policy change or modernisation. Progress also provokes the hallucinatory forces of reaction that swirl around us today, which are based on fantasies of the way life was lived in a poorly remembered past.

Bonnie Prince Ludwig

" . . .  Despite its various armed uprisings, Scotland in the first half of the 18th century has reassuring lessons for those concerned about current trends towards political polarisation. It shows that less obtrusive countervailing forces have the potential to quell the intensity of party rancour. Good neighbourliness and the corporate identity of Scotland’s landed elites – as Daniel Szechi’s work has also demonstrated – helped to soften animosities and patch up partisan divisions. Whig gentlemen lobbied the state to spare the lives and estates of their rebel neighbours. During his stint at the Paris embassy between 1714 and 1720, the Earl of Stair perceived that obtaining pardons for Jacobites in exile might, as MacInnes notes, turn them into ‘passive Jacobites once home’. Scotland’s leading Whig aristocrats, the Duke of Argyll and his brother the Earl of Islay, found posts in government and the military for members of families implicated in Jacobite plotting. As a result, Jacobites came to collaborate with the Hanoverian regime; to find themselves caught in webs of obligation to their Whig neighbours; to become ever more diffident about their Jacobite allegiance. For many formerly active Jacobites, militant commitment dwindled into wishful inertia. . . ."

(SNIP)

 " . . .In the UK as a whole, the travails of the House of Windsor have left the monarchy as precarious as at any time since 1688. Should public opinion demand regime change but shrink from the grey prospect of a republic with a superannuated politician at its head, the Bavarian royal family, which inherited the Jacobite claim, might offer an impeccably legitimist alternative. . ."

LRB 

Flight of the Cagey Bee

Rus delenda - a work in progress

 CAOS EN MOSCÚ. Varios helicópteros rusos intentando apagar el masivo incendio en la refinería

Key power infrastructure linking Russia to Crimea, military repair base are struck in massive attack

BONUS!

CLIMATE CHANGE IN COMMUNIST CHINA!

Apocalypse Scene Returns: Chinese City Looks Bombed As Disasters Hit Across The Nation

Ken McCleod land

Mighty North Korean ten lane highway (DPRK)

The happiest kingdom

When the rubber hits the road

Senate candidate, G. Platner has suspended his campaign in the US state of Maine. This followed accusations of deliberately removed condoms and sexual assault.  RELATED NEWS . . .

GEOFFREY "sexual offence for a man to deliberately deceive a partner whose consent has been conditional upon his use of a condom" ROBERTSON

Julian Assange arrested in London on rape charges

https://www.csmonitor.com/World/terrorism-security/2010/1207/WikiLeaks-Julian-Assange-arrested-in-London-on-rape-charges

JULIAN " Being guilty of aggravated rape has nothing to do with our party" A. Broinowski. Wikileaks Party NSW candidate for au Senate. 2013.

There is chaos under Heaven

  Quantum computing, along with artificial intelligence breakthroughs, has compressed the time frame in which cryptocurrencies will become widely vulnerable to hackers.

THE SITUATION IS EXCELLENT!

BLOCKCHAINS USE DECADES-OLD CRYPTOGRAPHY

Most blockchains rely on decades-old elliptic-curve cryptography to generate the public and private keys and digital signatures used to verify ownership of crypto assets and authorize transactions. Public keys are mathematically derived from private keys and, in many blockchain networks, become publicly visible once crypto assets are used in a transaction or transferred.

While conventional computers cannot feasibly derive a private key from a public key, a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could potentially do so, allowing hackers to forge digital signatures and authorize fraudulent transactions.

That is a particularly acute risk for public crypto networks where transactions, unlike traditional payments, are irreversible.

“Crypto especially is uniquely exposed because blockchains are transparent and permanent,” said Utkarsh Ahuja, managing partner at Moon Pursuit Capital, a crypto investor. 

Bitcoin, the biggest cryptocurrency, is considered particularly vulnerable because its 17-year history of transactions has generated a large number of visible public keys.

Roughly 35% of the token's circulating supply could be exposed to a quantum computing attack, according to an unpublished June 2026 working paper by independent researcher Ahmed Raza Muhammad Umer. Other research from last year has estimated that figure could be as high as 50%.