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Several different events happened in 1917. He could also be referring to the failed Kornilov coup. He could be referring to the forced abdication of the Tsar and the establishment of Kerensky's provisional government. But given that we know that he is an anti-communist and despises Lenin the likeliest option is that he means the October revolution and the subsequent signing of Brest-Litovsk which is viewed by Russian nationalists as a sort of stab in the back as they believe they were winning and that was a needless capitulation.

I don't know if i have enough knowledge on the theory of Protracted People's War to say how it differs from regular guerilla warfare, but certainly the kind of guerilla warfare that for example Che Guevara describes in his famous manual on guerilla warfare seems to either have arrived independently at some of the same strategies or have been inspired by it.

As for the various ultra-left tendencies, i am on the whole not too worried about them. I personally gravitate towards believing in a kind of natural selection of ideologies in the sense that those ideological frameworks that are not rooted in reality will, over time, tend to be supplanted by those that are simply because the latter will invariably achieve better results in practice. Maoism has all but died out as a politically relevant ideology with the exception of a few frozen guerilla conflicts that have been treading water for decades never actually managing to seize state power.

Of course the degree to which such idealism manages to take root in the revolutionary movement, even if only temporarily, still matters because it can weaken revolutionary forces and delay their victory or cause them to blunder into some pretty serious setbacks. It is for this reason that COINTELPRO has tried to foster ultra left deviationism, promoting it over the ideologies that have an actual track record of success and which the bourgeois state actually fears.

But as it becomes increasingly impossible to deny the success of AES states and all of the progress and development that they are achieving, it will be harder and harder to still convince people to subscribe to these unserious and by now mostly meme ideologies. They will still exist in niche online communities but the people doing real work in the real world will have very little interest in them.

Oh wow, really? Well in that case i am very positively surprised. I have become so jaded and cynical about the state of leftist politics in Europe, and in particular in Germany where i am the most familiar with the political scene, that i fully did not expect to hear this sort of challenge to the Atlanticist narrative coming from the left. That's great! There are maybe a handful of voices on the left in Germany who would dare to say something like this, but i doubt any of them would be allowed to speak in parliament. So it's been largely left up to the AfD to play the role of skeptics on this issue, which only further reinforces the notion that anyone who questions the narrative is a crazy conspiracy theorist.

One of the things i really appreciate about ML spaces is the ability to address controversial subjects and not be immediately shut down for it in the way it happens in liberal and ultra spaces. And if someone is egregiously wrong but is engaging in an honest fashion and not just trying to troll there are always comrades who are ready and willing to educate them and explain exactly how and why they are wrong.

Sometimes this takes a lot of effort, and it can become tiresome and we always have to remain cognizant that getting communists to waste their time having to explain the same thing over and over again is a wrecker tactic, so it may be necessary on occasion in the interest of saving time to simply point people in the direction of sources they can go to learn more.

But on the whole i find that we can generally tell when someone is engaging in good faith and we are willing to discuss and explain. I don't find the same willingness in ultra-left spaces to engage with arguments and do the work of investigating what the actual facts are. Reality is messy and complex and not always so black and white as they prefer to pretend.

Instead ultras adopt the liberal preference for simple, well-established narratives that are considered true by virtue of being repeated often enough, and of course the prioritizing of moralistic idealism and ideological purity over actual materialist analysis and engaging with the real world as it exists not as we may wish it.

Speaking of Belgium, there is this clip going around on social media at the moment of a representative in Belgian parliament (French speaking) trying to address the question of the Nordstream bombing and getting yelled at for it by other members of parliament who are trying to shut him up. Do you know any details about that incident? Was that a member of a right wing party (i would assume so since in Europe it's unfortunately mostly only right wing populists who are going against the anti-Russia narrative at the moment) and does this sort of thing happen often in Belgian politics? Was that a one-off or is there any chance that more and more questions are starting to be asked about this (and hopefully not just by right wing bigots)?

Awesome work comrade! Just one small correction in case you want to repost this somewhere else: you wrote "in order to compromise for rising energy costs", i believe you meant "compensate". Oh and where you wrote "a big priority of them" i believe it's supposed to be "of theirs". Grammar pedantry aside this is all wonderful to read and while it is just a small start it is of immense value to the struggle. Not only is it beneficial for communists to gain practical experience in actually governing and dealing with the day to day problems and needs of a community, but successes like this help to boost the standing of communists in the eyes of the people, it earns the trust of the masses and does more to attract people to communism than any amount of pure propaganda work ever could (not that propaganda work isn't also important). Small local government successes such as this coupled with vigorous workplace organizing efforts and other direct action initiatives are a very effective combo.

First of all, don't start by assuming there is anything to refute - never accept the premise of an anti-communist argument without investigating whether it's actually true! Does China really have billionaires in the ranks of the party or is that just a myth that has been popularized to try and discredit the CPC in the eyes of gullible western leftists with ultra tendencies? If they do then how many and in what positions? What is the proportion of capitalists to non-capitalists in the party, and more importantly how much actual influence and power do they really have?

Do not simply accept the framing of these sorts of "gotchas", you must always dig deeper and investigate beyond the cliche phrases and surface appearances instead looking into the actual dialectical conditions that exist. Whether or not individual capitalist elements exist in the ranks of the party says nothing about the fundamental class character of the party itself. If the party was supposedly taken over by revisionist and bourgeois forces how is it that the way the Chinese state and economy are run and the results that their system produces are still so radically different from what we see in Western capitalist systems? If the same class is supposedly in power why are they not experiencing the same social and economic dynamics? If the CPC is so revisionist why has it not liberalized the country into the ground and abolished itself like the CPSU did once it was hijacked by revisionists?

And bear in mind that what happened in the USSR happened despite there technically being no capitalists whatsoever in their ruling party right up until that party voluntarily totally disempowered itself and dissolved the dictatorship of the proletariat handing the country to the enemies of the working class on a silver platter.

Clearly one must look not just at the composition (though that also matters) but at the guiding ideology and the dominant political line within the party, in addition to how the party is organized and how it governs in practice.

By "10 years of democracy" they mean the 1990s, when the drunk Yeltsin dissolved the parliament with tanks, when he increased the executive powers of the presidency under the pretext of the emergency situation to the point that he basically ruled by decree for most of his time in office, when the US literally openly admitted to rigging the election so that the communists wouldn't win, and when Russia experienced the worst inflation and economic crash in its entire modern history. In short, the "good, democratic Russia" that Westerners and Russian libs like is Russia during its Decade of Humiliation, when it was on its knees, being plundered and robbed by Western capital, its people committing suicide en masse, crime and gangs running rampant, and the country itself barely hanging on almost to the point of falling apart and being even further balkanized due to the terrorist insurgency in the Caucasus that British and American intelligence services had orchestrated.

Of course they are furious that someone came along and put a stop to that. They hoped for that "democracy" to continue, they wanted to "democratize" Russia to pieces like they did Yugoslavia, to rip entire chunks out of it and make Western controlled puppet states out of them where they would get to put their military bases into to surround whatever core was left of Russia and permanently keep it from ever reconstituting itself while the West got to extract all of Russia's wealth in natural resources for themselves. And why? Because that is the only thing that at this point could give their morbund capitalism a much needed infusion of vitality, even if only temporarily.

Yeah the pros and cons are pretty simple: Pro: He's not a Democrat or a Republican; Con: He's not a Democrat or a Republican so he stands literally no chance of winning

Still the point of third party candidates running isn't necessarily to win it's to scare one of the two main parties that the third party candidate will siphon off just enough of their votes that it will cost them the victory. Because of this potential for vote splitting third party candidates can sometimes use their platform to apply pressure to the the mainstream candidates to abandon some unpopular policies and adopt some popular ones to win back votes.

This is the theory at least. In practice this turns out to not actually work that way because politicians once elected don't give a single shit about anything they promised in their campaign, instead they just do whatever the big money interests tell them to. Also it's pretty much common knowledge that both Democrats and Republicans alike would rather lose to the other party than give even a single crumb to the people. After all, they are not really two opposing political parties but two sides of the same corporate uniparty. Whichever one wins, you lose.

Not to mention that elected representatives really don't have that much power to meaningfully change the big policy directions of the US anyway. The real power is in the hands of the permanent security state, the intelligence agencies and other tentacles of the deep state apparatus, as well as the military industrial complex and the corporate-financial oligarchy. If politicians try to go against the interests of these groups who actually rule the country everything they try to do will be obstructed after which at best they find their political careers ruined, and if that isn't an option they get a bullet to the back of the head.

You make a very good point that BAR should not be discarded just because they have some bad takes on the Ukraine conflict. We need them for all the good work that they do in so many other respects, we simply support the good positions that they take and reject the bad ones. But by the same logic however, could you not simply disregard the reactionary positions of those involved in the RAWM protests and just focus on supporting their anti-NATO and anti-war activism? Is that not something that is inherently valuable for the communist movement regardless which ideological direction that it comes from? As communists we should have enough confidence in our own convictions that we don't need fear being subsumed and losing our identity just because we work together on occasion with people and groups from different ideological camps. After all, we also have no problem working with anarchists and even socdems when it comes to things like labor organizing, tenant unions, prisoner advocacy, etc. So long as the practical results are positive isn't that what really matters?

I think that's a fair point and a totally understandable position.

Yes that is a debatable point. It brings up once again the old concept of labor aristocracy and we have to ask ourselves to what extent do the material interests that have been formed in the imperial core even allow for the development of true revolutionary potential...

I myself find that i alternate between doomerism and revolutionary optimism on this topic. On the one hand i am perpetually disappointed seeing how bribed and/or complicit the population of the imperial core is, their lack of class consciousness and solidarity with the oppressed peoples of the global south... but on the other hand it feels wrong and elitist to simply discard the majority of the western masses as inherently reactionary.

Because how can one call onesself a communist if one does not trust in the masses? As a communist i am part of the masses, i am not above them, i am not better than them, i am not smarter than them, i just happen to have had my eyes opened a little earlier than the rest, and if i could come to the correct conclusions and learn to reject liberalism, idealism and reactionary prejudices then so can they.

It would be easy to give in to the temptation to simply discard the majority of Americans as reactionary so that i could feel superior, especially as i am not American so i could pretend like my own country is somehow better, but frankly from what i've seen and experienced so far it's really not.

Sure, maybe their material circumstances will have to change first in some way before that kind of change can take place on a scale large enough to begin to make real difference, but it can and it will happen eventually.