u/Big-Entertainer6306

So ive been a Marxist-Leninist for a long time now and one if the things I keep coming back to the purges of the late 30's. I find the whole Stalin evil paradigm to be false. However the entirety of the purges to be a polarizing time in Soviet society as it seems the entirety of Soviet society was imploding from paranoia over the encroaching Fascist wave and in some aspects suffering from a lack of bureaucratic oversight. One thing that never sat well with me was the historical narrative that Stalin personally sent Ramón Mercader to assassinate Leon Trotsky in an exta-legal fashion. When in all reality the anto-Soviet bloc that Trotsky was apart of could have been grounds for him to legally execute Trotsky. That never made any sense to me. I could fully see the NKDV acting without oversight approving an assassination of Trotsky seeing how out-of-hand that iteration of Checkists was.

What is the objective narrative around this? Sources required.

A local strike here is in a state of attrition. The bourgeois owners have barely budged, they brought a negotiator to the table but wont show themselves. The bourgeois owners themselves have stated this wish to break the strike and liquidate the the Union. Furthermore, on the strike's facebook page most of the anti-Union comments are coming from out of state.

The strike itself is less about wages, more about benefits and the continued existence of the Local.

How do we push the needle in this context?

Gen Z has largely taken to socialism but seemingly unable to define socialism beyond policies. For example when ive attended protests and i start discussing the philosophical underpinnings of neoliberalism and how you need to attack those underpinings ive been told that "im doing too much". Yet what many comrades of this mindset do not understand is the large effect Ideology has on the maintenance of capitalism. If you started explaining Lenin's Empirio-Criticism, DeBord's Society of the Spectacle, or Zeizeks Ideology comrades become uneasy. Not becuase of the people mentioned but because the topics are too heavy. But yet there is a high imperative to understand philosophy from a marxist lense in order to combat the pervasive "common sense" philosophical trend that has helped maintain capitalism to blind the mind against the material world. We can have a touching chorus of union control and the such but if we cannot tackle "common sense" we cannot hope to win. Policies mean nothing if a deep philosophical underpinning cannot be expressed.

For example, Gen Z in its drive to implement socialism exclaims "free" Healthcare without realizing that nothing is "free". Healthcare requires labor. How do we decommodify healthcare? We control the resources, the material reality of the world and manage them.

Gen Z also cannot understand things beyond having a binary or two poles to base their understanding on. For example the answer to intolerance must always be a from of tolerance. But never a revolutionary solution that changes the material reality of the world that is hitherto creating intolerance such as the mentality that creates the colonizer/colonized mentality. That the colonizer and colonized must fight each other, but never understand the bourgeois philosophical underpinning in the political-economy is to create artificial scarcity in its under-classes' to drive a legitimate relationship in the minds of aforementiond under-classes' by derpiving them of their material reality to see colonization as "common sense" due to their material deprivation and to seek opportunities outside the mother country.

I can't find their stuff anymore

I want to write about the continued failure of activism in the USA but want to include a sub-chapter from Hunter S Thompsons The Great Shark Hunt where he's covering his run for sheriff. I want to copy and paste this section verbatim to build my arguement around it with such arguments the Democratic Socialists of America is just a rehash of Students for a Democratic Society and that American activism is cyclical. That the protest against bread and circuses is apart of the bread and circuses to maintain a status quo. But I need a first person account of where activism is failing and this is the place to start.

So im pretty sure we're all familiar with "The Idea of a Multinational, Multiracial Society Means Destruction of the Korean Nation”, a very racist article publish by Rodong Sinmun in 2006. Im trying to find the retraction/apology article that followed it. However due to link rot and the fact the internet anymore is just one big dog pile of websites that buries old content I can't find it. Anyone have the link to this retraction article?

So having a lot of family that where livestock farmers you'd always hear about events but the names never mentioned. One of these events is the "Russian Grain Robbery of 1972" or just "The Great Grain Robbery of 1972". Many farms went bankrupt overnight due to a lack of Grain to feed livestock. Does anyone have any reading on this from a marxist perspective?

I find myself coming back to this question time and time again. The autauky of Albainia at this time in history comes with the reality that the government of Albania faced coups and a hostile neighbor with Yugoslavia. The r/Albania subreddit is filled with horror stories of family members who went missing. Then again it seems half of the country is still supportive of Hoxhaist albainia. what are your thoughts