This is what (bourgeois) democracy looks like!
Three things I heard in Chicago that I didn’t have time to mention in this audio:
Activists saying again and again that the Palestinians are “winning” a “revolutionary” victory in Gaza. Strange revolutionary victory: 90% of the Gazan population displaced, more than 40,000 Gazans officially killed, famine and disease running rampant.
When I confronted a Freedom Road socialist with objective evidence that “communist” China is savagely capitalist, he said “well, it’s just a difference of opinion.” For this activist, truth is subjective. It’s what you think it is: I have my truth and you have your truth and she has her truth and he has his truth and they have their truth, etc. Many narratives, many truths! Under this minsdet, the truth that wins out is not the one closest to objective/scientific reality but the one with the most power to be heard and enforced over other truths. As Bob Avakian points out, subjectivist relativism helps keep humanity “in a state in which ‘might makes right’ - and where things ultimately come down to raw power relations” (Avakian, Breakthroughs: The Historic Breakthrough with Marx and the Further Breakthrough with the New Communism, Chicago: Insight Press, 2019, p. 30).
A reproductive rights activists told a rally in Grant Park last Monday that “we don’t need to worry about politics and fascism because we have a revolutinary weapon in our hands: abortion pills.” I’m not making this up. My quote may be slightly off but it is very, very close to the actual statement. The speaker referred to the ability to store up abortion pills as “revolutionary.” This (by the way) was a bizarre narrative advanced by “repro” activists who sickeningly red-baited the remarkable united front women’s liberation organzation Rise Up for Abortion Rights (RU4AR) in the summer of 2022.
Marxism = Working Class Struggle in Rich Industrialized Nations
Suicide nets alongside worker dormitories in “socialist China”
Bad Thinking on a Dumb Left