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https://x.com/PAME_Greece/status/2112851327755694410

Author: William Balfour Ker (July 25, 1877 – October 20, 1918)

https://x.com/QB_Press/status/2112700739864994033

There’s been a lot of imperialism going on around the world, so it’s 100% understandable that a region that gets forgotten as is by the rest of the world would continue to go unaddressed by other socialists and communists, but I haven’t heard of a lot of recent activism for the Western Sahara.

Morocco has occupied the land for years ever since Spain left the region in 1975, and Algeria’s most of the help they can get in the form of refugee camps near Tindouf. There’s rarely been hostilies between the Polisario Front and Morocco, and from what I hear they may have given up largely on revolutionary socialism.

While not necessarily as crucial in a time like this to the genocide in Gaza, the Sahrawi people deserve their liberation from a reactionary government and its monarchy and I hope that this region gets the support it needs

🇪🇭

If a country does ever decide to become fully socialist/communist, what are things that they need in order to protect themselves against the rabid beast called America? How could they protect against having their leader killed, invasions, sanctions etc. like what we've seen happen previously?

https://x.com/BowesChay/status/2112881586270290156

People (particularly Americans) treat the US military as if it's just some unstoppable, invincible force of nature that just can't be beaten no matter what and I just find that to be bullshit. even in hypothetical posts of where the entire world is united against the US you'll still see a lot of people saying that the US would win and I genuinely don't believe that. there's just no way in hell the US can take on 200 countries combined. they couldn't even win against vietnam, like it has to be ego and propaganda because they just act as if they're invincible.

Iberian solidarity! There are talks of doing a general strike in the whole peninsula. The protesters together sang Grândola, Vila Morena, a famous Portuguese antifascist song.

The political ascendancy of Abdul El-Sayed—punctuated by his victory in the August 2026 Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate primary—offers a textbook case study in the structural limits of social democracy. While mainstream commentators breathlessly debate whether El-Sayed's economic populism is "too radical" or a threat to swing-state viability, a principled Marxist critique reveals the exact opposite. El-Sayed’s framework is fundamentally bourgeois, built upon a fatal misunderstanding of political economy, the role of the state, and the irreconcilable nature of class struggle. Furthermore, the institutional embrace of his candidacy by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) represents an ideological capitulation that actively harms the momentum, reputation, and long-term viability of actual socialist movements.

To understand the core flaw of El-Sayed's political identity, one must dissect his profound delusion regarding the mechanics of capitalism itself. Throughout his campaign, El-Sayed has explicitly rejected the socialist label. In a high-profile July 2026 primary debate against establishment candidate Haley Stevens, El-Sayed declared: "I’m not a socialist. I’m just a capitalist who understands how capitalism works. The biggest threat to capitalism was never the idea of government regulation. It was always monopoly" (Chait). He frequently leans on a classical framework to validate his platform, arguing on national programs like The Stephen A. Smith Show that "the term capitalism was coined by a guy named Adam Smith. And Adam Smith said there is no market without morals."

To a Marxist, this premise is an embarrassing failure of materialist analysis. As Karl Marx outlined in Chapter 32 of Capital, Volume I, monopoly is not an accidental byproduct, a moral failing, or a "rigging" of an otherwise fair free market:

“One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this centralization, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the cooperative form of the labour process... Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation.” (Marx, Capital 929)

Monopoly is the natural, mathematically inevitable endpoint of the capitalist mode of production. Through the brutal drive of market competition, capital inherently concentrates and centralizes. By promising to break up monopolies to restore a "moral" marketplace, El-Sayed attempts to roll back historical development toward an idealized, petty-bourgeois version of the nineteenth-century market that cannot exist in the modern imperialist era.

This theoretical error extends directly to his view of the state. El-Sayed’s socioeconomics treat the state apparatus as a neutral arbiter that can be captured by well-meaning technocrats to enforce regulations on corporate elites. Marxism reminds us that the capitalist state is never a neutral vessel; it is an instrument of class rule—the executive committee managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie. You cannot legislate away the predatory nature of capital when the legal, judicial, and political superstructures are designed fundamentally to protect private property and facilitate capital accumulation. By substituting the material reality of class struggle with "public health" metrics, El-Sayed sanitizes the exploitative relationship between labor and capital, treating poverty as an administrative system failure to be cured via public options rather than a product of an irreconcilable class antagonism.

To fully comprehend why this modern reformist project is doomed, the working class must connect these contemporary political illusions back to the baseline violence of capitalist development on this continent, which has never relied on morals but on absolute brutality from its very inception. As Marx noted, capital came into the world "dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt" (Marx, Capital 926). The foundational accumulation of capital in North America was built on two violent pillars: the systematic extermination of Native Americans to commodify stolen land, and the brutal institution of chattel slavery, which transformed human beings into fixed capital to fuel global agricultural markets.

When chattel slavery was formally abolished, the capitalist class did not abandon exploitation; it merely shifted the roles of workers to adapt to emerging industrial needs. The ruling class instituted sharecropping, convict leasing, and racialized wage labor to maintain a desperate, hyper-exploited underclass while simultaneously pulling waves of European immigrants into Northern factories. By creating a tiered hierarchy within the proletariat, capitalists intentionally pitted workers against one another, utilizing racism and artificial divisions to sabotage labor solidarity. Recognizing that the modern wage laborer, the gig-economy worker, and the historically marginalized underclass all share a common subjection to this continuous machinery of extraction is the spark of true class consciousness. It links past atrocities directly to modern exploitation.

The historical trajectory of mid-twentieth-century social democracy provides the ultimate empirical validation of this continuity. When contemporary populists point to the New Deal or the post-war welfare state as blueprints for modern economic justice, they overlook a fundamental material reality: because those reforms left the private ownership of capital intact, they were destined to be dismantled the moment capital required higher rates of profit. For Millennials and the generations following them, the total evaporation of New Deal-era protections is not a political accident, but the predictable consequence of attempting to regulate a system whose internal logic demands absolute exploitation.

The primary contradiction of the New Deal framework was that its concessions—such as robust public infrastructure, union protections, regulated banking, and a foundational social safety net—were only tolerated by the capitalist class under exceptional historical conditions. Confronted with a militant domestic labor movement and a competing global socialist bloc during the Great Depression and post-WWII eras, the bourgeoisie agreed to a temporary truce. They allowed a fraction of their surplus value to be redistributed to stabilize the system and prevent a genuine working-class revolution.

However, because these reforms did not alter the relations of production, the capitalist class retained the structural power to recapture the state. When the crisis of stagflation and a falling rate of industrial profit hit in the 1970s, capital launched a relentless, multi-decade counter-offensive known as the neoliberal turn. Because the working class had been house-trained by reformist politicians to rely on the bourgeois state rather than building independent revolutionary power, they were completely unprepared to defend the gains of the previous generation.

For Millennials, the fallout of this counter-offensive defines their entire material existence. Every major pillar of the post-war class compromise has been systematically eviscerated to feed the insatiable demands of capital accumulation. Where previous generations saw state-subsidized public universities and affordable housing, capital has commodified these spaces to create massive vectors for debt extraction, forcing Millennials to absorb trillions of dollars in predatory student loans. The New Deal's labor protections have been replaced by the gig economy and atomized, non-unionized workforces, shifting the entire burden of healthcare, retirement, and economic instability onto the individual worker. To bypass local labor regulations and drive down wages, the capitalist class utilized globalization to outsource manufacturing to highly exploited sectors of the Global South, hollowing out domestic metropolitan areas and replacing stable, unionized industrial jobs with low-wage, non-unionized service-sector employment.

When faced with these cascading structural betrayals, modern liberals routinely argue that voting is the singular, sacred mechanism for holding elected figures accountable. This defense reduces democracy to a performative ritual, operating under the assumption that an individual ballot can counteract the structural dictatorship of capital. In The Civil War in France, Karl Marx explicitly shattered this bourgeois illusion, noting that under capitalist democracy, the oppressed are merely allowed once every few years "to decide which particular member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in parliament" (Marx, Civil War 55). Democratic accountability under capitalism is a structural impossibility because power does not reside in the legislature; it resides in the boards of directors, the financial institutions, and the state apparatus that guards private property. A politician can promise radical transformations on the campaign trail, but once in office, they are held tightly accountable by the threats of capital flight, credit downgrades, and the unyielding requirements of the bourgeois state.

The danger of this regulatory delusion is proven by the material contradictions of the politicians anchoring El-Sayed’s campaign infrastructure. The October 2026 general election push has been deeply defined by the actions of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his progressive allies, who have actively stumped and raised funds for El-Sayed. For the principled left, Mamdani's trajectory serves as a stark warning of how progressive insurgents inevitably break their promises once absorbed into state machinery.

Mamdani built his mayoral campaign on anti-establishment, grassroots socialist defiance, yet his actual tenure has provided a swift lesson in structural capitulation. On the campaign trail, Mamdani boldly vowed to dismantle the NYPD's controversial Strategic Response Group (SRG) and even pledged to use city authority to execute the international arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Vilallonga).

Yet, the material realities of executive power within a bourgeois state crushed those performative promises. When Netanyahu arrived for the UN General Assembly in September 2026, Mamdani's own NYPD actively protected the Israeli leader while brutally arresting over 100 anti-war and anti-Netanyahu protesters—including several of Mamdani’s fellow DSA elected officials ("Mamdani Breaks Silence"). Rather than standing on the front lines with the movement that elected him, Mamdani explicitly stated he "never encouraged" the demonstrations and spent the day ducking the conflict (Washington). Further alienating his left flank, Mamdani repeatedly rejected demands from the NYC-DSA to fire NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch—a holdover widely criticized by the left for suppressing student protests—declaring instead that he has "no plans to change that" and praising her management ("Mayor Mamdani Rejects"). This rapid pivot from radical street rhetoric to protecting bourgeois police infrastructure was punctuated by reports that Mamdani was simultaneously attending exclusive, closed-door private fundraisers on Manhattan’s wealthy Upper West Side to bankroll El-Sayed’s Michigan campaign (Sommerfeldt).

This dynamic unmasks progressive populism as fundamentally an exercise in opportunism. Rather than seeking to build independent class power, the populist relies on charismatic rhetoric and amorphous "anti-elite" messaging designed to appeal across class lines without confronting the underlying mode of production. By grouping the working class together with small business owners and "patriotic" capitalists under a broad, non-Marxist banner of "the people," populism actively obscures the core contradiction of capitalism: the extraction of surplus value from labor. This obscuration is the definitive marker of opportunism. It trades long-term revolutionary objectives for short-term electoral gains within the existing state infrastructure. Populist candidates manipulate working-class grievances to secure political office, only to betray those grievances when forced to operate under the unyielding dictates of capital accumulation.

Vladimir Lenin meticulously cataloged this betrayal in What Is To Be Done?, identifying opportunism as the subordination of the working class's long-term revolutionary aims to immediate, superficial reforms (Lenin, What Is To Be Done? 42). Lenin argued that the reformist social-democrats of his era were content to trade real class emancipation for minor wage increases and legislative concessions within the bourgeois framework. In The State and Revolution, Lenin directly addressed the historical failures of these social-democratic parties—most notably the German Social Democratic Party (SPD)—which abandoned Marxist principles to support their own bourgeois governments during the First World War. This capitulation demonstrated that when a movement prioritizes electoral respectability and bourgeois state management over the overthrow of the capitalist system, it inevitably becomes an active defender of that system, ultimately using state violence to crush the genuine revolutionary left (Lenin, The State and Revolution 19).

This reality highlights the deep institutional hypocrisy of the DSA’s active support for El-Sayed. While local chapters have historically applauded him, mobilized field efforts, and labeled him a comrade, El-Sayed has repeatedly thrown the organization under the bus when speaking to bourgeois media. On national television circuits like CNN and NBC's Meet the Press, El-Sayed has repeatedly reiterated: "I am not somebody who is a socialist. I believe in capitalism, I just believe capitalism has to be regulated."

This unrequited relationship inflicts severe structural damage on the broader socialist movement. When a socialist organization expends its finite resources, credibility, and volunteer labor to elect a self-identified capitalist, it fundamentally muddies the waters of political consciousness. It teaches the working class that "socialism" simply means a slightly more benevolent capitalist welfare state managed by progressive Democrats. The DSA absorbs the reputational blow of being labeled "extremist" or "radical" by the right, while the candidate harvests their labor, rejects their label, and redirects that political momentum straight back into a corporate-backed political party. It channels authentic, revolutionary working-class anger away from independent base-building, labor organizing, and the creation of a distinct workers' party, redirecting it instead into a dead-end cycle of bourgeois electoralism.

To overcome the fatal shortcomings of current social-democratic strategies, which limit socialist activity to the ballot box and subordinate the left to the bourgeois state, Marxists must advance an entirely different framework of organization. Drawing directly from the historical lessons of the 1871 Paris Commune, Marx demonstrated what authentic working-class democracy must look like: all public officials, judges, and administrators must be elected by universal suffrage, paid average workers' wages to eliminate a separate political caste, and—crucially—subject to immediate recall at any moment by their constituents. Working-class democracy breaks the bourgeois separation between the executive and legislative branches, transforming the state from a talk-shop for professional politicians into a working body that both passes and executes its own laws (Marx, Civil War 54). Accountability is not deferred to an artificial four-year election cycle; it is a continuous, living relationship enforced by organized workers who retain direct control over their delegates.

Under contemporary capitalist circumstances, effective organizing requires the systematic development of dual power—the creation of autonomous working-class institutions that stand in direct opposition to the capitalist state and corporate finance. Socialists must move their primary theater of operations away from electoral campaigns and into the material spaces where capital extracts surplus value. This means building independent workers' assemblies, tenant unions, and rank-and-file factory and logistical committees capable of disrupting production through direct, coordinated action. Rather than treating trade unions as mere administrative bodies meant to manage contracts within capitalist law, Marxists must agitate within the labor movement to transform these organizations into combat units for class warfare, completely independent of the major capitalist political parties.

Furthermore, this revolutionary organizational strategy cannot succeed if it attempts to bypass or minimize the distinct struggles of historically oppressed communities. Within a materialist analysis, white supremacy, settler-colonialism, and patriarchy are recognized not as detached cultural concepts, but as foundational pillars of the capitalist architecture designed to fragment the proletariat and super-exploit specific segments of labor. The ruling class intentionally constructs racialized and gendered hierarchies within the working class to depress wages globally, utilizing precarity to isolate marginalized workers while granting minor relative privileges to more secure layers of labor to undermine solidarity. Therefore, effective Marxist organizing requires that the defense of Black, Indigenous, immigrant, and queer communities be structurally embedded into the baseline of independent class struggle. A socialist movement that relegates structural oppression to a secondary concern remains fundamentally vulnerable to ruling-class division. True class consciousness, and the effective organization required to sustain it, demands a united front that treats the destruction of these specialized vectors of oppression as an absolute prerequisite for the overthrow of the wages system itself.

By treating Abdul El-Sayed as a comrade, the progressive left is not infiltrating the halls of power; rather, the halls of power are successfully laundering capitalist management through the language of social justice. To build a true socialist movement, the left must abandon the illusion that capitalism can be reformed from within, reject the transactional betrayal of bourgeois populists, and commit to the independent, unapologetic organization of the working class.

Works Cited
Chait, Jonathan. "The Populist Delusion in Michigan's Primary." The Atlantic, July 2026.
El-Sayed, Abdul. Interview on The Stephen A. Smith Show, July 2026.
Lenin, Vladimir I. What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement. International Publishers, 1969.
---. The State and Revolution. International Publishers, 1932.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Ben Fowkes, vol. I, Penguin Books, 1990.
---. The Civil War in France. Foreign Languages Press, 1970.
"Mamdani Breaks Silence on United Nations Protests." The New York Times, 26 Sept. 2026.
"Mayor Mamdani Rejects Calls to Oust NYPD Commissioner Tisch." New York Post, 2 Oct. 2026.
Sommerfeldt, Chris. "Mamdani Attended Exclusive Fundraiser Hosted by His Supporters for Abdul El-Sayed." Politico, 8 Oct. 2026.
Vilallonga, Maria. "Mamdani Can No Longer Avoid the Issue of the NYPD." The Nation, 19 Oct. 2026.
Washington, Otto. "Mamdani Says He Supports Palestine, but Let the NYPD Arrest Anti-Netanyahu Protesters." Left Voice, 25 Sept. 2026.

https://x.com/Shanna__Bylka/status/2111944193040130527

I am taking a class on cyberwar and espionage and I have chosen to do my project on Israel and their use of cyberwar and espionage in the ongoing genocide and elsewhere in the world. One of my sources must be a book, and I am having trouble finding one without western bias. Does anyone have any recommendations for full books on this topic?