To defeat the state, we in the core of imperialism need to make U.S. hegemony too weakened for our ruling class to be able to use it to hold back revolution. And to cripple the beast by attacking it from within its heart, we need to take away the social base Washington depends on to be able to maintain its global war machine; that social base being the U.S. working class.
I cannot believe PSL’s cofounder is equating competition between colonial empires to USA trying to subjugate Russia and China.
Based on the contradictory positions Becker takes on Russia compared to China, he’s probably just trying to appeal to liberals to grow the PSL. Saying ‘Russia not good’ is kinda necessary to prevent liberals from losing their minds right now. Does this stance temporarily screw up their real MLtheory? Yes. Does this stance attract more new members? Maybe.
This is exactly the problem. It is possible that this erroneous position was taken out of opportunism, a misguided impulse to try to appeal to liberals by capitulating to the imperialist narrative on Russia. I had a lot of respect for B.B. and the PSL before this, but sadly this has undermined a lot of that. I just don’t think you can build a principled socialist movement this way. You are much better off trying to appeal to the apolitical and even the more backwards sections of the working class than to the middle class liberals who have fully bought into the demonization of Russia. More and more i am convinced that no progress will ever be made by any “radical” group in the US until and unless they have completely severed themselves from the Democratic Party.
That’s what Rainer Shea is trying to do. If you want to lose respect for the PSL and for Becker, at least go listen to several hours of their content and read the sources instead of trusting Shea.
Have they in any of those hours of content ever expressed support for what Russia is doing in Ukraine or even Russia’s actions in Syria? Because if not, i’m not interested. At this point i have personally drawn a line in my life and i have no more time for westerners who call themselves communists or socialists but refuse to support or even defend the boldest and most serious military challenge to the US’ global imperialist hegmony in 50 years. Not to mention that Russia is literally fighting against a genocidal fascist regime. The least any principled leftist can do is critically support them in that. To me this goes hand in hand with supporting the economic challenge that China’s BRI represents to the global neocolonial yoke. They can praise the USSR and talk Marxist theory all day but the bottom line is: anyone who refuses to support either of these two main pillars of modern anti-imperialism is simply not worth taking seriously as a revolutionary. Because there is no way in hell you will ever get to socialism without first defeating imperialism, and the only ones currently striking any serious blows at it are Russia and China - and as much as i love the PRC at the moment the Russians are actually doing more, they are physically fighting and dying in battle against fascism and imperialism. Meanwhile the likes of Becker and the PSL can sit comfortably in the imperial core criticizing Russia for its contradictions while they themselves opportunistically work with the imperialist murderers of the Democratic Party. And don’t try to deny it, both the PSL and the CPUSA have ties to the Democrat political machine and both have at times advocated for voting Democrat.
Yes, critical support. War is bad. War is hell. But Russia didn’t start the war. They go into the history of NATO, they speak to Russia’s legitimate security concerns. Becker explicitly says something like “I may not personally agree with the choice to go to war but it’s not my choice, it’s Russia’s choice to defend it’s national sovereignty against NATO which is an existential nuclear threat”.
Becker isn’t a cheerleader for anyone attacking the US. That’s not his role. But he absolutely states the US should lose the proxy war, that the US is the most powerful anti-worker and anti-communist force in the world, and that it should not be defended. He also states, correctly that the US losing is insufficient for the socialist cause and if the US loses it could just result in an openly fascistic and crazed nuclear conflagration so we need to build socialism here and stop the US from destroying us all. It’s not enough for Russia to win this battle if the US just escalates to global conflagration, it’s got to be MORE than just Russia winning.
We all are, it’s called the North Atlantic. The Ukrainian state is genocidal and fascistic only through the influence and material support and cultivation of and by the North Atlantic.
They do. Stop listening to Shea. He’s deliberately misrepresenting this and we haven’t figured out why yet.
Becker and the PSL are not sitting around talking about glorious histories. They are engaged in trying to figure out how to get more people on the socialist track and hopefully with least amount of conflagration possible, knowing full well that war will happen. They don’t shit on China, nor the BRI. To the contrary, they defend it against attack. What they don’t do is glorify it and cheerlead for it. Again, not their role.
And Becker and the PSL know that. And they also know that they can only defeat imperialism domestically, so they waste as little time as possible in trying to get Americans to support China, because it literally does nothing material. They spend half their time tearing down liberal arguments and the other half trying to paint a picture of what socialism might look like in the hopes of inspiring people to actually support a socialist party in America and take down the imperialists from the inside.
Which is why the PSL and Becker defend them against liberal arguments but also try to build a movement domestically so that it isn’t solely on the shoulders of Russia and China.
We can agree to disagree here. The Russians didn’t invade Ukraine to undermine US hegemony. They invaded to protect their national security interests against a deadly encirclement. China, on the other hand, is proactively undermining US hegemony on multiple fronts simultaneously (diplomacy, industrialization, finance, currency, education, rhetoric, etc)
I have no love for the CPUSA. The PSL is currently the best option for a socialist party that I’ve seen. They’re not PatSocs, their not a voter mobilization association, they aren’t revisionists. Simultaneously, they’re not millenial/gen Z integrated - no memes, no loud calls for death to America, no cheerleading US opponents. They are sober, measured, and thoughtful.
Honestly though, I just remembered this is all so fucking silly. Becker’s show used to be on RT America before it got shutdown and he had to go to independent podcasting. Like, if you’re upset enough to not listen to some imperial core leftists, then stop listening to Rainer Shea. This article he wrote is literally trying to generate the response you’ve just had, and it’s crystal clear to me and anyone else who’s been listening to Becker and the PSL that Shea is full of shit and deliberately sowing discord.
Ok, this was a good response. I’ll take your word for it and give Becker and PSL the benefit of the doubt on this one, because i had previously only heard good things from them in the past. I still think Shea gets an unfairly bad rap on this site and for the life of me i can’t understand why.
We’re telling you why. It’s because he’s lying through his fucking teeth in a way that requires him to deeply understand what he’s doing.
I’m not sure how you conclude that he is lying. He may simply be overly critical and have picked up on something that was not meant that way. He’s not even saying that you shouldn’t support PSL, he is just critical of this one thing they said. I’m sure he has a bias, it’s clear he thinks PCUSA is a more preferable organization that has a better position on the Russia issue. But i don’t see where he is deliberately lying. You’re being just as uncharitable toward him as he is toward Becker. For my part i remain unconvinced that either of them are acting in bad faith, i think they are both hostage to their own biases, as we all are.
Becker and the PSL need to read this
The part about the world wars is such a blatantly false analogy that i really didn’t want to believe it came from someone like Becker. Not only is the situation today nothing like the situation prior to WWI, when there was no single global imperialist hegemony and more importantly no socialist pole existed, but to claim that it was multipolarity that led to WWII really almost sounds like Nazi apologetics. If he truly thinks this way then he also thinks that the existence of the USSR itself - which represented an alternative pole of power to that of the western imperialists - was a bad thing. Also, he seems to forget that after both world wars socialism came out stronger, both resulted in the creation of more socialist states than had previously existed, and in a significant retreat of capitalism.
There is a fundamental difference between a multipolarity of competing imperialist powers and one of imperialism vs anti-imperialism. The US today simply will not allow the existence of any other imperialist poles of power, we see this clearly in how it has tightened the leash of its various vassals and made sure to subordinate Europe to its will so that it cannot ever become the independent pole of global power that the EU not too long ago dreamed of being. As such all those that are left outside of the hegemon’s control are anti-imperialist, if not through ideology then by simple necessity and circumstance. And it is only outside of the suffocating grasp of the US’s neoliberal hegemony that socialism can arise, let alone survive and flourish. It seems virtually everyone in the global south can see this, but for some reason many western leftists cannot.
I don’t want to jump straight to accusations of chauvinism but there is definitely something wrong here.
Your actions are literally indistinguishable from those of a federal agent, except that feds are less visibly incompetent.
Fed behavior is reinforcing the western imperialist narrative on the Russia-NATO conflict under the guise of ostensibly leftist language or treating it as some kind of “both sides bad” situation.
That doesn’t make it incorrect.
(I’m also not aware the fed interpretation of the conflict is “both sides bad” so… that’s a curious thought)
Feds know they can’t convince socialists that NATO is good but it is enough for them if they convince you that both Russia and NATO are bad and that neither deserves your support.
@cfgaussian You know, I just realized this is the exact same argument used against “both parties are equally bad”
That is a false analogy.