I appreciate the vote of confidence unfortunately I know nothing about PSL and never felt the need to learn more about them so this is as good as it gets lol. One thing I’d look for is if they recognize the US to be a settler-colonial state, I don’t think any of the major parties do. Oh, this comes up sometimes but some will weasel their way out of it implying or outright saying settler-colonialism is a thing of the past and that the US was settler-colonial but isn’t anymore (implying the colonization has succeeded and the settlers have somehow transcended their settler status to become part of the global proletariat). That’s probably the first thing I’d look for in a US org tbh. It’s the old “the imperial hegemon thinks it knows communism better than the people that practice it”, but this isn’t unique to PSL or anything, just what I’d personally look for to determine an org.

Comparative math is pretty good. I correctly estimated the IOF deaths in Gaza+Lebanon up to mid-2025 by just extrapolating published data (it was some 3000 dead if I’m not mistaken, then you times 3 for wounded). IOF maintained some abysmally low number like 150 for 3 years. Then shortly after my piece they admitted the number, and lo and behold, it was 3000. But it wasn’t anything special lol, it was easy enough just using public resources like the haaretz article on the hospital casualties before censorship, and the resistance’s own numbers extrapolated in time, which assumed steady operations every day.

It’s on the wayback machine and it’s possible they’re having trouble right now. If you stop the page loading (clicking the X button in the URL bar on your browser) it should display the text. Otherwise the medium posts says it was a copy of this google doc: https://web.archive.org/web/20230321124107/https://docs.google.com/document/d/14wF1Ti5GT2w5GZmwqvhvk6uH4zUss_a-B2GZ9NZEx74/edit, that is also archived.

my own estimate based on nothing but vibes is as many as 2000 dead, as many as 9000 wounded.

IRGC themselves said in the first 48 hours they estimated ~150 US troops dead. If we take that as a baseline and extrapolate over the duration + accounting for Iran tapering off missile launches, I get approximately 2000 which imo is much closer to the real toll than the US’ 7.

(By which I mean don’t take my napkin number as anything more than that lol, but if I had to pick between 2000 and 7 to make further guesses on, I’d pick 2000 every time)

We have a page on them here, https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Party_for_Socialism_and_Liberation, might wanna check the sources directly and make your own conclusions

“MAGAcommunism”'s whole thing was to tail the reactionaries. Every communist told them that doesn’t work, you’ll just become reactionaries yourself, and they kept saying “nah trust it’ll happen”. Then it happened, and they said “sike we were reactionaries all along”

Their name is correct, it’s the ‘mid’ and ‘western’ marx institute (with this and a commenter pointing out ACP stands for Anti-Communist Psyop honestly I wonder how they pick their names lol).

We have some info on them here: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Midwestern_Marx. follow the blue links to the names to read more afterwards. As a whole their ‘institute’ is basically tailist. The problem with tailism is eventually you stop tailing and just start following the reactionaries.

There’s three guys in it, primarily.

Edward Smith is, there’s not really any other way to put it, a midwit - to loosely reuse their name lol. Self-important clout chaser who thinks the following makes the theorist. His entire reason for living is that he peaked in high school when he was a wrestler, and since then has been trying to relive these glory days. He once posted this to Twitter:

Sorry for imposing this sight on you but that way you can see we have the receipts lol. It’s in his prolewiki page, like I said you should read it afterwards it has a lot more info. Dude was posting thirst traps and trying to get some sympathy points by comparing himself to the GENOCIDE in Gaza.

Noah Krachvik is the second guy of this boy’s club. His whole thing, having talked to him (against my will!) a few times on social media, is that he craves to be relatable and approachable. He talks in the most faux-reddit way, like I don’t know how else to put it. Super online “Hello friendo!” shtick that just grates me to no end. Noah Krachvik is also not his real name but it’s not that it’s a pseudonym, he claims it’s his real name like to the point he uses it for everything - e.g. he signed a Noah Krachvik signature onto the ACP constituting document. He is also known for posting pictures of run-down places that he says is “his neighborhood” but he’s done it all over the country. Just a complete liar through and through, this guy is creepy as fuck honestly.

Carlos Guerrido/Guerrida (I always get it wrong not even making a joke lol) has a PhD in philosophy from what I understand, or at least he says he does (edit: he was a PhD student, but doesn’t mention it anymore at all), and now that he doesn’t know what to do with it, he charges people up to 80$ a head for a “marxism seminar” he was teaching (archive). He also sells books on the side. 80$ a pop, no possibility of financing or offering free seats.

He also writes books, that he sells of course - no copy is available unless you look on annas-archive and such. I opened one of his books that was recommended once just to see what was in it, and it opened with what you’d expect a philosophy major to write: deep as a puddle but wide as the ocean, he was seriously pretending Xeno’s paradox of motion was some profound insight that not many people knew about, and wrote in the most complicated way possible to say some pretty basic stuff. Self-published and did not go through an editor, which is fine, but then why write a book? Why not make it into a blog article? Oh but you can’t charge people 25 bucks for a blog… I’m trying to find the book but I need to look deeper.

Carlos’ other claim to fame is that he is of Cuban origins, because as we all know, anyone who is ever born in AES is a saint and instantly born with the knowledge of dialectics into them.

Oh, they used to have Danny Shaw at the institute and the guy had a falling out with the ACP, because he was a nazi, and he didn’t like that the ACP was not nazi enough.

So yeah that about sums it up

It’s easy to infiltrate and coopt something that’s been built after years of hard work, It’s harder to stay working through the lull years until it pays off.

Currently the process to help add books to the library is to request an account by going through the full vetting process. We have a library role that allows a user to only edit the library, and for that reason we are a bit more lenient on vetting editors who might want to only help with the library, but it’s still a long-ish process with a certain bar to clear to be able to start uploading books.

We don’t know what copyright is 🤓

We also have a bunch of fun stuff on the prolewiki library if you look at the topics now that I think about it: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/ProleWiki:Library#Other_topics

the first book of On War by Clausewitz of course!

Lol actually lemmy instances are starting to get them. For now these agents (if they are indeed actual agents of course) are truthful that they’re an agent in their vetting answers but who knows what it look like soon.

but it doesn’t produce buggy code like the article is implying was my point

Not bad advice when it comes to how to organize around AI in the workplace, but by diminishing its capabilities (reducing it to ‘producing buggy code’ and ‘badly summarizing data’ at several points in the article), they will be making workers think that it’s not a big problem to think about, so it diminishes the message they want to convey. The reality is developers at all levels are already using agentic methods a lot. Can’t speak to numbers but it’s widespread, and they’re doing it themselves without management telling them to - so on that for example I agree with the article that workers should be able to choose how they integrate AI in their workspace, just like they should be able to choose their preferred tools and methods of work.

I think people are more likely to say what they really think online than IRL, so you spot them more easily. Even I wouldn’t open like I did in this post talking to people outside of some communities lol, I once had a discussion with a friend of a friend I’d just met about the DPRK and kept it to the “they’re a sovereign country that were split up in half illegally and I believe people are allowed to choose their path without foreign interference and war” for the most part lol.

As for organizations I can’t speak to some universal truth but my experience was that you have a lot of very knowledgeable, disciplined youth but then the party itself is a cycle of “electoralism is a dead-end but we still need to do it now who wants to hang up the posters for the elections that we’ve been doing for the past 50 years!” - and rarely anything else. So it’s not like I would expect a (western) party to publish a polemic on the DPRK, they’re more concerned about winning seats. Same rot but different characteristics.

Like it’s weird in a way. I look at what my previous party publishes on foreign affairs, and it’s generally good. Better than I would expect from my experience there. For example in January during the mossad riots in Iran, while they did add two lines about “the reactionary Iranian regime that kills protestors”, the entirety of their statement was about the sanctions, the color revolution attempt (didn’t name it as such but recognized it for what it was), and that all Iranians needed from us was to lift the sanctions and let them decide their own path. I think there’s two ways to read it, but it’s not so bad in my opinion. Could be better because it is a bit of a “trust me bro” which I don’t think will convince westerners.

But then internally they’re mostly concerned about finding people for local elections, getting votes, passing around petitions. Some people are not communist at all in there, and I was told “it’s not a communist party” (great so what am I doing here lol). Any time you wanted to propose something it was shut down instantly because it deviated from what the important people wanted. The ex-president once said we are the guardrail to the social-democrats. They almost had a split over their position over the RU-UA war but ended up having, once again, a not-so-bad statement on it.

I think part of what made breadtube big is we have no (living) figures in the west to look up to as they did elsewhere, like Mao Stalin etc. No vanguard of socialism has emerged and many want someone to guide them theoretically.

haha yes basically what we are on lemmygrad, MLs. Losurdo coined it and I think it kinda captures it better (though he may have used it differently than I did here). I see it not so much as making a differentiation between east and west as a point of struggle but the unity of thought in following the same line, where giving it a unique name removes all ambiguity. We know MLism as the marxism that wins, and so is “eastern marxism”, but it’s a bit more ‘precise’ I guess. It also sets the record straight instantly in comparison to thinking of ourselves as westerners and I think some people need to hear it lol

We must learn from wherever there is something to be learned.

I was talking to a self-proclaimed leftist (of what kind I do not know) about the DPRK and Iran the other day. They were adamant other leftists should not support the islamic republic or the DPRK, because they’re “not socialist”.

I said there is something to be learned from them anyway, maybe just not where you thought you’d find it. The islamic revolution succeeded in Iran - why? how? what did they do that worked? Why did people rally behind the islamic faction that won and not the communists? And yes the communists were massacred during the revolution (partly by the SAVAK), but this is the reality we face: iran is an islamic republic right now and not a socialist republic, and we just have to accept that.

Same with the Taliban in Afghanistan. How did they succeed, what did they do to win against the NATO coalition? Whether we like them or not they’re in charge of Afghanistan.

‘Purist’ socialists, for lack of a better term, will say this is not supporting the class struggle, and therefore should not be studied. They are stuck in 1917 - for all our insistence on materialism too few people actually seem to try and look at the material conditions!

Tunnel visioning into ‘socialism or nothing’ is part of western marxism. They want to will a revolution into existence without playing with the cards they are dealt. We have iranian editors on prolewiki, they are communists and they are not religious. They have a lot of criticism of the iranian state, of course. but that’s for them to figure out, not for me to impose or use as a cudgel against Iran. And they are well aware that right now marxism is just non-existent in Iran (though we did set up a Persian language instance of prolewiki).

Like imagine if China said “we’re going to bomb Europe because you guys are not communists yet”.

The conclusion is: seize state power, then we will live free.