However, he did not think this was more likely than revolution in western Europe. He simply saw it as it was, a great but likely squandered opportinity.

We’ve been over this already, with sources I was able to provide. I directly responded to this. If you’re gonna complain about listening, don’t do it while repeating shit at me I already responded to.

I do agree, this isn’t ever going to get anywhere if you can’t even treat me with the respect of listening to what I said.

I listened to what you said, disagreed, and now you want to keep whining about it and insisting that its wrecker behaviour as if that’s respectful. Grow the fuck up or just leave it be.

Removed by mod

I am when people decide to be annoying. I can have a back and forth with someone without you feeling the need to pretend this is some major issue.

Removed by mod

Removed by mod

Removed by mod

deleted by creator

There was no misunderstanding, thanks.

Marx did not merely say they had an opportunity in the abstract, he was directly involved with them and actively seeking to aid them. That is not the action of someone who merely once on the side referenced it as a vague possibility then effectively rejected it, which is what you now have to claim to deny the actual history and Marx’s own words on the topic to maintain the idea that Marx effectively only thought a revolution would happen in the west. Just stop going in circles.

I don’t know why you’re continuing to double and triple-down.

Because you keep repeating something which is not true.

However, he did not think this was more likely than revolution in western Europe.

This is directly contradicted by his letters and actions. He and Engels were directly corresponding with Russian revolutionaries, and literally surmised a Russian revolution could in fact be the first to set off a world revolution and was actively interested in aiding it. You’re just refusing to take in new information.

To be annoyingly accurate, Marx still held the belief that the west would be the first to revolt and establish socialism

And he literally contradicts this, not just in this but his other research and letters, and even later editions of the communist manifesto.

https://monthlyreview.org/articles/marx-and-engels-and-russias-peasant-communes/

“The very existence of the Russian commune is now threatened by a conspiracy of powerful interests,” he noted—but if that threat is defeated, it “may become the direct starting-point of the economic system towards which modern society is tending; it may open a new chapter that does not begin with its own suicide.”14

Marx and Engels repeated that argument the next year in their preface to the second Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto.

In Russia we find, face-to-face with the rapidly flowering capitalist swindle and bourgeois property, just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West?

The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.

Marx and Engels did not study Russian conditions out of academic curiosity. On the contrary, they believed that Russia, once the heartland of backwardness and reaction, had become “the vanguard of revolutionary action in Europe,” so understanding it was a political necessity. This understanding fueled their consistent support for radical populists who took action against the Tsarist regime, and caused them to distance themselves from people who were limited to analysis and commentary. Their approach was motivated, as Marx wrote in another context, by the conviction that “every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programs.”

And you’re entire response was denying this by suggesting Marx only thought this could happen in western, capitalist societies, which is flatly wrong. You aren’t even understanding the contention, nor responding to it.

Marx still believed that the west would be the first to transition to socialism.

And Marx literally directly contradicts you on this. This letter comes after the publication of Capital, and Marx is explicitly stating the opportunity to not have to become a capitalist country.

Now what application to Russia can my critic make of this historical sketch? Only this: If Russia is tending to become a capitalist nation after the example of the Western European countries, and during the last years she has been taking a lot of trouble in this direction – she will not succeed without having first transformed a good part of her peasants into proletarians; and after that, once taken to the bosom of the capitalist regime, she will experience its pitiless laws like other profane peoples. That is all. But that is not enough for my critic. He feels himself obliged to metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into an historico-philosophic theory of the marche generale [general path] imposed by fate upon every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself, in order that it may ultimately arrive at the form of economy which will ensure, together with the greatest expansion of the productive powers of social labour, the most complete development of man. But I beg his pardon. (He is both honouring and shaming me too much.) Let us take an example.

In several parts of Capital I allude to the fate which overtook the plebeians of ancient Rome. They were originally free peasants, each cultivating his own piece of land on his own account. In the course of Roman history they were expropriated. The same movement which divorced them from their means of production and subsistence involved the formation not only of big landed property but also of big money capital. And so one fine morning there were to be found on the one hand free men, stripped of everything except their labour power, and on the other, in order to exploit this labour, those who held all the acquired wealth in possession. What happened? The Roman proletarians became, not wage labourers but a mob of do-nothings more abject than the former “poor whites” in the southern country of the United States, and alongside of them there developed a mode of production which was not capitalist but dependent upon slavery. Thus events strikingly analogous but taking place in different historic surroundings led to totally different results. By studying each of these forms of evolution separately and then comparing them one can easily find the clue to this phenomenon, but one will never arrive there by the universal passport of a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being super-historical.

To be annoyingly accurate, Marx still held the belief that the west would be the first to revolt and establish socialism

Marx himself in his research felt Russia could move straight into communism.

In the postscript to the second German edition of Capital – which the author of the article on M. Shukovsky knows, because he quotes it – I speak of “a great Russian critic and man of learning” with the high consideration he deserves. In his remarkable articles this writer has dealt with the question whether, as her liberal economists maintain, Russia must begin by destroying la commune rurale (the village commune) in order to pass to the capitalist regime, or whether, on the contrary, she can without experiencing the tortures of this regime appropriate all its fruits by developing ses propres donnees historiques [the particular historic conditions already given her]. He pronounces in favour of this latter solution. And my honourable critic would have had at least as much reason for inferring from my consideration for this “great Russian critic and man of learning” that I shared his views on the question, as for concluding from my polemic against the “literary man” and Pan-Slavist that I rejected them.

To conclude, as I am not fond of leaving “something to be guessed,” I will come straight to the point. In order that I might be qualified to estimate the economic development in Russia to-day, I learnt Russian and then for many years studied the official publications and others bearing on this subject. I have arrived at this conclusion: If Russia continues to pursue the path she has followed since 1861, she will lose the finest chance ever offered by history to a nation, in order to undergo all the fatal vicissitudes of the capitalist regime.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/11/russia.htm

https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/10.1521/siso.2018.82.1.67

I haven’t read her myself yet, but Ursula K Le Guin is of note. Lathe of Heaven, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas and The Word for World is Forest are worth looking at.

Terry Pratchetts work is very good. Lots of humour and light parody of fantasy tropes, and some occasional commentary. You could probably pick almost anything from the Discworld series and find something enjoyable.

October By China Mieville is an account of the Russian revolution of 1917. It’s not written as a perhaps more dry, academic account, but still decently researched and a good introduction that’s easy to read almost as if it was fiction. Apparently his science-fiction is good too, but I have no idea.

What he meant to say was “No war with Venezuela…without me”, as he’s still hasn’t finished his application for Blackwater Constellis.

Very odd, divorced from reality response. TNR has regularly criticised Democrats, including on Gaza and Palestinian genocide.

https://newrepublic.com/post/198630/senate-democrats-vote-keep-arming-israel-bernie-sanders-resolutions

https://newrepublic.com/article/199769/america-gaza-policy-bipartisan-catastrophe

https://newrepublic.com/article/197994/centrist-democrats-cuomo-jeffries-traitors-party

https://newrepublic.com/article/179841/uncommitted-michigan-gaza-biden

They’re still a liberal outlet, but they’re not “committed to covering for establishment dems”. The article is merely specifically about the report they’re burying, they’re not personally trying to cover up Dems position on Gaza.

The quote from the TNR review is genuinely insane. Validating my intense dislike of Yasha Levine that they genuinely think a license to use the internet is some sort of reasonable response.

I wish there were better critics.

And the far right will get what they want anyway:

First, after the October 29 vote, the core trio of far-right parties — PVV, JA21 (Conservative Liberals), and Forum for Democracy — hold forty-two of hundred fifty seats. In 2023, they held forty-one. Wilders’s party lost eleven, yet JA21 jumped from one to nine and Forum rose from three to seven. In total, they control nearly one-third of the 150-seat parliament. This reshuffle is mainly tactical: once every mainstream party said it would refuse to govern with Wilders, many hard-right voters simply parked their ballot with JA21 or Forum, instead of abandoning this kind of politics altogether.

[…]

The historically more radical-left Socialist Party adopted the opposite pose as the GreenLeft-Labor alliance. It tried to copy the playbook of Germany’s Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance: talk tough on borders while hankering after a lost social democracy. This may have seemed a viable strategy, since the far right predictably failed to deliver on its pro-welfare promises. But voters are used to governments of all stripes failing to deliver on bread-and-butter economic issues. So those attracted to the anti-immigration message stuck with the familiar far-right narrative — which the Socialist Party helped legitimize. Progressives and voters with a migration background just turned away.

D66, the Dutch left-liberal party, has made a sharp turn on asylum migration, demanding that asylum applications are made from outside Europe’s borders.

Party leader Rob Jetten said he wanted a change of international treaties and pushed forward what he called “the Canadian model” as an alternative to the current policies.

He said “the parties of the middle should take a step forward” to prevent, he said, the subject taking national politics hostage again.

“The current migration system is broken,” said Jetten. “From migration that happens to us, we will have to move to migration that we control ourselves.”

Under the Canadian model, all asylum applications would have to be requested outside the borders of the European Union, meaning asylum seekers who applied in the Netherlands would not be allowed in.

https://brusselssignal.eu/2025/06/dutch-d66-party-calls-for-stricter-asylum-policies/

Same fucking bullshit everywhere: Centrist parties winning after scandal and failure by right wing or far right party in government celebrates as if it’s some return to normalcy, when actually they increasingly adopt far right policy, rhetoric and framing, especially on immigration. At best they try to soft sell it through triangulation and borrowing vaguely progressive sounding buzzwords.

Meanwhile, no actual meaningful decline in the far rights share of the vote and party representation, and the perfect stage for a one term centrist government as people swap between far right parties and liberals continue to flounder and take for granted their own voters as having “nowhere to go” as they shift right.

It happened with Biden, it’s happening with Keir, and it’s the perfect setup to happen in the Netherlands.

At the very least it’s linked directly from their homepage and their masto page: https://fosstodon.org/@lutris