Dank Adolph Reed Memes For Class Reductionist Teens

01/10/2026

“The development of socialist sectarianism and that of the real workers’ movement are always in inverse proportion.”

-Marx to Schweitzer (1868)

01/08/2026

There’s a difference between reading Lenin and building a political identity around Lenin. The first is normal Marxist literacy. The second is a historical reenactment hobby that keeps mistaking itself for organizing.

Lenin made sense in a very specific context: a collapsing autocracy, mass peasant unrest, a war-shattered state, illegal parties, underground networks. Trying to center a 21st-century American communist project on Lenin as a brand isn’t serious politics — it’s cosplay with citations. Most working people here don’t need to be convinced to love a dead Russian revolutionary; they need answers about rent, healthcare, jobs, dignity, and power where they live.

That’s why Lenin and Vanguardism peaked when it did. CPUSA in the 1920s worked not because people were emotionally attached to Lenin, but because it was embedded in real labor struggles, immigrant communities, and mass movements. After WWII, especially during the Cold War, Leninism in the U.S. stopped being a living strategy and turned into an identity bunker. From that point on, it steadily shrank, fractured, and substituted discipline and line-following for relevance.

Modern American “Marxist”-Leninist groups inherit the form without the conditions.
They talk about parties and vanguards while having no mass base, no unions under their influence, no leverage over production, and no credibility with workers outside a narrow online subculture. So what fills the gap? Moralism, geopolitical cheerleading, and purity tests. It’s easier to call people CIA agents than to explain how you’re actually going to win over a warehouse worker in Ohio.

And this is where they end up more delusional than anarchists in a weird way. Anarchists at least usually admit they’re marginal and distrust power on principle. Leninist sects think they’re the embryo of a future state, despite having zero material indicators pointing in that direction. That disconnect produces the arrogance, the hostility to critique, and the obsession with “the line.”

The U.S. left doesn’t need saints or foreign governments to defend; it needs strategy, analysis, and roots in the working class here. Lenin can be read, learned from, even respected but he’s not a substitute for understanding American capitalism in 2026.

01/08/2026

The post about Venezuela reminded me of a comment that highlighted the issue of intolerance of opinon within US “Leftism,” where disagreement is not tolerated and differing opinions are viewed with suspicion, labeling individuals as Mossad, CIA, FBI, Liberals, Conservatives, or Reactionaries.

If “Leftists,” cannot engage in debate without resorting to s**t talking and excommunication, how can they hope to bring working people to Socialism when those individuals likely hold reactionary and bigoted views?

01/08/2026

“It’s wild how inconsistent the “socialism” label gets used online. Some people insist Venezuela is socialist because of rhetoric about communes or anti‑imperial “21st‑century socialism.” But if you look at the actual relations of production: who controls what, who owns the means of production, how surplus value is extracted, thus Venezuela never really broke with capitalism. Critics even call Chávez’s project state capitalist because private capital remained dominant and markets still ruled most economic activity. 

Now compare that to the Scandinavian countries: Denmark, Sweden, Norway. Everybody knows they’re not socialist, not even Bernie Sanders tries to call them socialist anymore; their leaders explicitly say they’re market economies.  Yet these countries have far more durable social infrastructure, worker protections, and collective ownership of wealth (like Norway’s sovereign wealth fund) than Venezuela ever had. 

So here’s the irony: the same critique often used against Nordic “democratic socialism,” it’s still capitalist because production remains under private or market control, can be applied just as well, or even more so, to Venezuela under Maduro. But for some reason, one gets dismissed as “not real socialism” while the other gets celebrated as socialist because “America Bad,” even though both remain embedded in capitalist social relations. What’s going on isn’t principled Marxism, it’s inconsistent labeling.

If we’re serious about socialism, we need to be consistent about what it actually means: workers collectively controlling the means of production and abolishing capitalist accumulation. Neither Venezuelan rentier capitalism nor Nordic welfare capitalism gets you there, but the incoherence in how someone chooses to use the word “socialist” tells you a lot about why these debates become more about identity than analysis.”

-Ronnie “Goose” Milsap, International Journal of Tactical Twinks

01/08/2026

“Maduro’s Venezuela never exited the capitalist mode of production, nor did it seriously attempt a transitional socialist one. The state did not abolish private property, did not establish workers’ control over production, and did not replace market coordination with planning. Instead, it presided over a rentier economy overwhelmingly dependent on oil exports, where surplus was captured by the state and redistributed politically rather than transformed into socialist accumulation.

The class structure remained intact: a bureaucratic–military stratum managed rents, a national bourgeoisie persisted (often through import monopolies and arbitrage), and the working class remained subordinated rather than constituted as a ruling class.

This is not Marxism; it is capitalist reproduction mediated by the state, with oil rents masking the absence of productive transformation. What distinguishes Maduro’s rule is not socialism, but state management of capitalism under conditions of decline.

Chávez’s earlier Bonapartist mediation held contradictions together temporarily through charisma and redistribution; Maduro inherited a stalled system without expanding productive forces, resolving dependency, or constructing dual power. When oil prices collapsed and sanctions tightened, the regime responded not with socialist planning or proletarian control, but with ad hoc market concessions, currency liberalization, and informal privatization—all classic signs of capitalism under stress. From a Marxist standpoint, this represents neither a dictatorship of the proletariat nor a workers’ state, but a bureaucratic rentier capitalism that disciplined capital rhetorically while ultimately preserving it materially.

Calling this “socialism” confuses anti-imperialist posture and symbolism with class power and mode of production—and Marxism cannot afford that confusion if it is to remain a scientific critique rather than an ideological reflex.”

- Big Dick Rick, Neoliberalism and the American Gi**lo

01/08/2026