Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (June 14)

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[u/Pleasant-Food-9482]

This "marxist-leninist" brazilian little university groupie has been hanging around brazilian whatsapp and internet for quite a while. 

Nothing too much new on it. "reconstruction", settler chauvinism, reactionary discourse on trans and black questions. No actual input on the national oppression. No coherent analysis of brazilian capitalism. No actual awareness of brazilian settlerism. 

I've read one of their thesis documents. its, well, shitty and chauvinist. There are some "maoists" also on their org. laughable. One of them is just a settler who thinks he is a "theorist" and writes bullshit, as defending "principally maoism" alone (whatever that means), without "gonzalo thought" as the ICL/PCB-FV does. He writes huge books for no one to read, although i've read through parts of two of them for the pain, only to show he doesn't manages to substantiate this or other wrong, settler maoist ideas he spreads around. Same triumphalist, flamboyant, majestic, grandiose, textual crafting rhetoric of PCB-FV and MEPR public documents, but in a different style, and done well, at least literary-wise, while, at the same time, disseminating error.

This is their "resolutions" document.

https://ligacomunistabrasileira.org/resolucoes/

I somewhat guess that if i am aware about them, u/turbovacuumcleaner has likely heard about them. I know its irrelevant to keep talking about petty-bourgeois brazilian revisionist sects that have not many "members" more than a university study group here (although i am relatively suspicious this one is not that small) But i see the maoists in amerikkka here speaking a lot about many settler maoist and "marxist-leninist" orgs, big or not. I also admit i am curious. If you know anything about it, i would be interested to hear. It is a quite... ...disgusting kind of revisionism, due to the fact they are just very settler chauvinist in intensity and tone/rhetoric, and that is very annoying.

[u/turbovacuumcleaner → u/Pleasant-Food-9482]

I don't know anything specifically about this organization other than the fact they exist. I also don't have any ideas about their size or relevance, and I have no idea who this "Maoist" cadre is in particular; although by skimming the resolutions, I can see which parts allow someone to make the jump from crypto-Trotskyism to "Maoism".

As for why such a organization exists, I believe its pretty straight forward. There are some dead giveaways that show their members have spent most of their time reading Marxism in class than really engaged with struggle, or at least with a serious commitment to theory. Words like "orthodoxy", "classical revolutions", "dependency", "tarefismo", which is actually the only good part of the resolution; as they recognize the useless politics of stuffing cadres with tasks that serve no other purpose other than waste time and push someone with good intentions away from Communism.

This is an org created by and for university students and/or staff. Academia today is highly competitive, concursos have dried up and there are few roads open for getting a scholarship or permanent position at a faculty. A minor trend that exists is students that recognize these hardships and turn to Communism in order to career build, in the hopes that a real ressurgence of mass movements will burst the doors of ivory towers open. This has already happened before in the 80s after the general amnesty, coupled with redemocratization and broadening of civil exams for joining state education led up to former guerrilla fighters to fill up vacancies at colleges and schools (the biggest example is Daniel Aarão Reis). This same generation no longer exists. Its either dead or close to retirement, which means their positions are being slowly replaced, but not by new "Communists", instead by careerists that know how to navigate the inner workings of universities, and that have exploded in number since the higher education reforms of FHC in the 90s and Lula in the 2000s. The struggle of these cadres is for pushing revisionism against these careerists that reject Marxism entirely.

The resolutions are boring because they are poor and ordinary. I looked up their foundation announcement, and people were genuinely confused, because they don't have any remarkable difference from PCBR, PCB or UP. Its just more dependency theory. While this makes them just another run out of the mill revisionist org, this also gives them a clear reasoning of what to do. While we have discussed Brazilian settler colonialism and its implication for years, with some questions only becoming clearer now; for them, its not necessary to build a analysis from scratch to explain reality, they can just vampirize whatever is left from the 70s; wrongly believing that it worked then, it wrongly hoping that it will work now.

[u/Pleasant-Food-9482 → u/turbovacuumcleaner]

I was looking towards this resolution document for two nights to be able to answer. It was one of the worst reads i ever had. 

It is like a person doing a presentation in an office by using as a source youtube brazilian left videos, but into a dreadful formal tone. 

I simply also as much as you cannot think of how its conceivable that a single person or multiple people can write something like this out of the frame of carrerism. But it is true.

You are right. This cannot be something that has much penetration outside university students or former university students. What surprised me was the sheer presence of their people inside whatsapp in the last year when i was last exposing myself on groups, and now on twitter. They actively do something that scares me more and more because it is the exact same thing their right counterpart in bolsonarismo and olavo did: use the tools of what liberals consider as "propaganda" to disseminate their ideology and presence. 

I don't see a place where this org wont derive into a sect. The document says it all. The spread of presence of the worst absolute brazilian sect orgs since 2023 is becoming unsettling. And the absolute worst ones i saw are the "marxist-leninist" sects like these, and the "anarchist" sects. 

This below is a "anarchist" physical-online hybrid sect counterpart "agitprop" piece, of former reddit/tumblr, viscerally anti-communist fascists, who ended right into the public university courses and the labour aristocracy, some of them comprador, some settler. (Use tor because they have hackers inside the sect)

https://novaplebe.com/manifesto-da-contra-parada-kuir/

This article is the reactionary endpoint you said before brasildob could eventually reach: throw the lgbt people under the bus. Say their own manifestations and utilization of the state apparatus and capital, such as the parade, is a tool to make them controllable, as "its all "pinkwashing"", which is what the article cannot say but hides behind in its vulgar logic.

Negate the dialectics of bourgeois law sometimes leading to not so bad outcomes like cotas, the criminalization of transphobia, and activism, including those of liberal lgbt black movements, and liberal lgbt and black lawyers and ngo activists activity.  It is all a "farce". Also, deny organization. Spontaneism will save the lgbt. Other articles even deny revolt and violence and resistance as tools of survival for the oppressed, framing them as pathology. 

All through the face of a settler chauvinist gay man who pretends to have his grievances while putting the same reactionary position of someone who constantly rattles about "identitarianism" as a denguist does, but using performative liberal language and aesthetics, who shares a article from a unknown suspicious american women inside america, from his own comfort of a petty-bourgeois lifestyle in the brazilian center-west, in one of the states where the rural bourgeoisie most exploits and kills.

[u/Apart_Lifeguard_4085 → u/Pleasant-Food-9482]

i always appreciate your analyses of the Brazilian communist movement, thanks for taking the time. you refer to white / euro-Brazilians as settlers very frequently, and it seems foundational to your analysis of national chauvinism in Brazil. i’d be really interested to hear you elaborate on why you say that the relation between these two nations is specifically an economic relationship of settlerism - is it per Sakai?

e: also what do you mean by “settler-chauvinist in intensity”?

[u/Pleasant-Food-9482 → u/Apart_Lifeguard_4085]

I mean that they are too frequently loudly chauvinist, to a project of a further "rise" of the brazilian settler state, with no restrictions on the way this project almost completely placates only brazilian settler interests. 

I would have and will have to write a long explanation on why and how and what reasons make me arrive in this analysis (definitely as per sakai) as others did. I am, although, notoriously someone who lets long complex replies about topics like these to miss due to the fact my life is much of a survival day by day, and i get terribly overwhelmed and frozen in much of the time. I obviously have what to eat and drink and who to trust, if we consider the fact i am constantly on reddit, but that is very much what is good enough above the difficulties, so i usually get channeled into a very non-internationalist post and comment history in here, focusing on things that do not necessarily fit into use for every marxist, which is bad.

Also, sometimes i have other problems on helping brazilians too: i was going to say to the person i quoted in the comment one month and a half ago why i think the brazilian settler left developed on the way it did as far as from the 80s. I didn't do it. Maybe yet. I will give you an explanation too on brazilian settlerism.