There are different ways to tackle this such as considering WEIRD bias or analysing whether the happiness considers alienation and individualism, or what the ideological purposes of these indicies are for, or how are they considered historically, or what positivist bourgeoisie axioms they rely on etc.

But I would consider a different approach; lean into it ie a sort of immanent critique - they are “happy” but at whose cost is their happiness maintained? How is their class as a westerner produced and reproduced? What do we understand about modern Herrenvolk democracies (https://redsails.org/lenin-and-herrenvolk-democracy/)? What is the basis for liberalism here (https://redsails.org/between-liberty-and-slavery/)?

This is where understanding labour aristocracy and unequal exchange becomes more important and I would consider HW Edward’s book as an excellent primer (in fact if you read only one thing I would read this book). If you wanted a more technical grounding then Amin’s Law of Worlwide Value is a worthwhile reference.

Nah, indigenous activism is incredibly weak and, at best, defensive in Brazil. A large portion of it has been co-opted by the “progressive” Lula’s party.

Who said otherwise? If Lula were able to out-organise communists do we blame the indigenous? What happened to the autodynamism of dialectical materialism? Furthermore, it is not just the indigenous who are hurt.

Well, they’re in luck. There are barely any in Brazil. And definitely very few in the indigenous movements. MLs typically grow in urban centers.

And?

The lumpenproletariat or the hyperexploited sections of the proletariat are never the main component of any professionalised vanguard party, which is key to ML theory.

ML theory is a living thing. It wasn’t too long ago the sickle was added to the hammer. Some of the most revolutionary in the US and Israel, for example, are borne from the lumpenproleteriat.

In the 21st century in large parts of the world the proleteriat is being pulled towards two poles - labour aristocracy and lumpenproleteriat. A communist who wants to de-emphasise the revolutionary potential of the latter will end up taling the former.

This all smacks of bad analysis. The reborn agitation against indigenous peoples is to manufacture consent for private exploration…

Manufacturing consent is a failed idealist theory made popular by a sheepdog idealist hack (Chomsky. Parenti attempted to bring a materialist analysis earlier but it is one of his weaker works). Social licensing is a much better materialist theory of how propaganda works.

It’s not a sign we’re doing well, or that we’re even politically relevant to this calculus at all.

I never said it was. When fascists posture it is a call to action against them. As Kwame Ture says wherever there is oppression there is resistance even if that resistance appears silent. It is up to the scientific socialist to awaken the beast of revolution. So what are you going to do about it? Clearly the political theory on the ground is left wanting. Why should the indigenous join losers who will not value their political potential?

=== Edited to add, oof I forgot this juicy number:

This is like saying trans people are an overwhelming threat to capital in the UK.

We’ll ignore your strawman weasel word “overwhelming”. Trans folks are a threat to capital, they are a threat to the binary division of gendered labour and the bourgeoisie ideal of the nuclear family unit. They expose how gender is a social construct. They totally are a fucking threat to capital. An effective vangaurd could be in part be made up of this threat. Some of the most awesome living marxist-leninists are trans. For example go read this absolute banger of an essay by Nia Frome:

https://redsails.org/the-problem-of-recognition-in-transitional-states/

1. HW Edward’s - Labour Aristocracy, Mass base for social democracy (there’s also a chapter specific for scandinavia)
2. Torkil Lauesen - Unequal Exchange (comes from a scandinavian focus, the author in the RevLeft Podcast that LD recommended)

These are not Finland specific though. There’s Jan Andersson’s Studies in the Theory of Unequal Exchange Between Nations which apparently has a Finnish focus (not read it personally).

All the nordic countries directly integrate into the US imperialist military organisations to maintain the unequal exhange, and have enthusiatic cooperation of intelligence services to aid the flow of value from the global south.

For Ireland, there is Austen Morgan, Labour and Partition: The Belfast Working Class 1905–23 (which I have now added to my reading list).

I wanted to know how they slot into the EU fold knowing they were under the british colonial oppression for a long ass time.

For this I would recommend Frantz Fanon’s work such as Black Skin, White Masks and Wretched of the Earth.

For a quick general overview of how workers gained concessions in the West, Alice Malone’s essay on Redails is a great read - it provides pretty good immunity against socdem politics:

https://redsails.org/concessions/

If those words didn’t hurt who she wants to hurt then she wouldn’t have to say them; she wants to hurt them because the threat against fascism is real enough to warrant it. Even in power, at some level, they understand how unstable their authority is. When fascists posture then it is a sign that what they fear is worth realising.

What fascists fear, above all else, are successful marxist-leninists. And marxists-leninists are borne out of the fruits of their barbarism. Those most subjugated are sometimes the most susceptible to being open to the science of socialism; so fascists project their fear so those that are hurt by that fear may never become brave enough to embrace the science of revolutionary socialism.

Fascists may not understand what they fear and how they come to fear it. Let us help them understand.

The real is rational and the rational is real. Use it to your advantage folks.

Good share

It was the perfect capitalist Trojan horse, because it convinced people to stop thinking of progress as a shared national endeavor and instead view it as an individual responsibility—which meant they didn’t need to organize into pressure groups, political movements, labor unions, student unions, or any other collectivist entity that the U.S. government considered “leftist” or “communist.” It was a resounding success and turned the world’s poorest people—in sub-Saharan Africa—into rabid, money-obsessed capitalists, albeit without capital.

Yup and enough of them saw material reward to back that ideology up. Take away that material and that ideological leverage then goes away with it. But that would require effective authority against it and the limitations of such freedoms (good!). If liberation theology is the way forward then it needs to develop the lines to counter the above (eg shia islam was able to do it to some extent in Iran and Yemen) - it cannot be passive in the face of imperialism and equivocate because of the secular lines it sees in the USSR/PRC etc

Lula made a very shitty government

Anti-marxism-leninism / anti-USSR / “anti-stalin” has only one destination in the end: fascism. If they want to crocodile-cry “authoritarianism” and then cede the ground to the authority of capital and fascists then they are either incomptetent, malicious or both.

Although a lot of people are blaming evangelicals, I came to stress here…

💯

Folks need to internalise that the material always comes before the ideological. CIA and their willing compradors have no weapon through imperialist versions of religion if the material conditions provides immunity against it. I would even say these malignancies would have grown even without western intelligence help.

https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/

I often get the sense that the autodynamism of dialectical materialism is severely understudied and undervalued in the West.

Yes, as it is now. But you have to replace it with something better. You’re not anti-welfare but to develop public organisations not beholden to market conditions and not beholden to the capitalist state either. Another way to put it is that we need to counter the left-liberal notion of the welfare state by offering our own, and decoupling the former from the capitalist state while at the same time not speedrunning those offerings through the private sector. A public sector that is not beholden to capital - either at the capitalist state level or the private sector level.

How is the big question though. Because the above will also need to then inevitably solve both food production and currency production (ie you need tokens to represent labour).

The contradiction to solve for western communists is this: the welfare state is subsidised through the unequal exchange of imperialism (eg the New Deal effectively heightened the brutality of imperialism - Jakarta Method as a more famous example), it also materially provides the structures to ideologically increase the divided between western workers and global south workers, effectively dissolving that international solidarity.

However, history also suggests that western workers on a whole turn towards more overt* fascism when precarity is turned up ie to steal more violently the remaining piece of the surplus value pie. You therefore need an effective vanguard to combat this but that vanguard also needs to offer something in the short term material benefit; you cannot rely on the hope of “empathy”.

In the US red power movements and new afrikan movements have ideas (I will have to research this more deeply, ie beyond what the likes of what Black Panther have done) on how to do this but they are effectively quite disorganised as whole after decades (if not centuries depending on how you want to define the movements) of brutal state suppression - the current prison system and police system is largely built on the foundations of kneecapping these most revolutionary of US folks.

So short answer is Losurdo is right but not from a left-liberal perspective. You can’t say “no welfare state” and then not offer something that is (1) significantly better (2) feasible. It requires careful creative and thoughtful collaboration to solve this.

(This ain’t pie-in-the sky by the way. I just don’t personally have a solution for the west. If you look at the global south, things like the Kumbasahree network in India (a capitalist state) is a partial example of this but it required a more local state capture to embolden it. Western communists on the whole should collaborate more with global south communists - you’re not going to build actual international solidarity without it - but people get upset when questioned why the likes of PSL effectively refuse to touch these pertinent questions. They have no answer to the question of labour aristocracy)

*there has to be a better way for me to articulate this (but I don’t have the mental fortitude or skill at present to convey this at present. I’m too fucking tired). Because fascism isn’t a WWII-esque phenomenon. It has been there since the birth of capitalism: https://redsails.org/really-existing-fascism/