You might want to consider World-Systems Theory as a good starting point. Workers in the imperial core do not experience the same kind of exploitation as people in the periphery. The USA is a high-income country.

And nothing lasts forever. Nothing is necessarily so. We are in the midst of a massive global paradigm shift. Multipolarity is on the rise. Things are changing everywhere fast.

Settlers by J Sakai is a brilliant expose of American settler-colonial culture and vital history book that attempts to answer this question, but if you decide to give it a read, I would advise you not to draw too many hard and fast conclusions about its contents. Discussions about this book get explosive because they touch on very sensitive racial tensions, and a lot of people get very ridiculous about the whole thing.

I highly doubt most local libraries carry a copy of Settlers. Where are you seeing this?

MBTI is fine as far as personality systems go, but the reason I bounced off of it was that it eventually became clear there’s zero method to objectively distinguish one type from another. Every single person who gets typed and classified by this system is categorized by vibes, and that’s pretty much it.

All I know about Carl Jung is that he features in every piece of pop-psych “connect with the energy” nonsense published or printed in the past several decades. The instant I hear his name in any conversation or read it in any article, my eyes start to glaze over.

Can you link to the book you’re talking about? I’m having trouble finding it.

This may sound kind of silly, but part of me wonders if geography is a component here. China is a distant, exotic state in the far-east. There is a definite ignorance of what is actually happening in China, but that might be a consequence of general ignorance of China’s past. People know about eastern Europe and its history, so there’s a point of reference for how things changed under socialism. China might as well be the moon.

We always hear about how great and perfect and wholesome pre-socialist China was, with the peaceful monks and what not. Could the West really sell this lie about the Soviet Union?

I suspect that China is not truly so controversial outside of the western “left.” It may help to understand that there are more CPC members then there are people in Germany. Marxism-Leninism is the dominant ideological strain of leftist thought, globally speaking. “Maoists,” Hoxhaists, Anarchists, etc. are extremely marginal and don’t even have the power and influence proportional to their minuscule population of adherents. They have no states, irrelevant parties, zero organization, and consequently no capacity for struggle, armed or otherwise. I cannot emphasize enough that these so-called socialists and communists can be safely ignored. They can not help or even meaningfully hinder their own political “projects,” much less those of typical Marxist-Leninists.

As for why they exist, it boils down to an unscientific, anti-dialectical and idealist worldview. They don’t conceive of political and economic systems as containing contradictory elements, but as pure, static forces that only change due to external influence. Notice how the libertarian types will insist that the presence of any public industry, welfare state, or regulatory agency in a capitalist country indicates it has “fallen to socialism/communism” and “isn’t real capitalism” anymore. Likewise, ultras and leftcoms will take the existence of a stock market in China as evidence that the CPC has “abandoned Marxism/communism” and “isn’t real socialism” anymore. Both of these groups will go on to insist that their pure, unadulterated version of their ideal system has “never been tried.” One has to wonder why.

In capitalist/liberal economies, private profit is the guiding principle of all economic and political activity. The presence of “socialist” elements in these systems always serves that purpose, albeit sometimes indirectly. In socialist economies, the guiding principle is social necessity, and likewise, seemingly liberal elements of their systems serve the worker-led state. This is the difference between a Dictatorship of the Proletariat vs a Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie. The composition of these systems will be similar, but will serve different functions. This understanding is essential not just to being a good ML, but for making sense of the world in general and avoiding the purist mindset.

I would use the same ones Wikipedia uses. Scroll down, find out where the information in the article comes from, and scrutinize those sources.

If the question is “are they legitimate targets,” that’s not easy to answer. One could argue that merely occupying stolen land is an act of war, but others might not agree. Even so, I feel this question fails to get at the core of how the resistance should conduct itself. Dividing colonizers into “military targets” vs. “innocent civilians” is counterproductive, since each has their role to play in colonialism. No one has their hands clean. That isn’t to say violence can be wrought against the colonizers indiscriminately, however. It’s important to keep certain objectives in mind any time one engages in violent resistance.

Violence, even against noncombatants, can be used as a means of liberation. Hamas captures “civilians” with the intent of freeing their own people. “We will capture more until the jails are emptied.” We have already seen this strategy bear fruit. It’s also important to remember that such violence is not retributive, but conducted with the goals of decolonization and emancipation in mind and with a clear idea of how capturing or otherwise targeting “civilians” will achieve these ends. Hamas understands this.

I think people get caught up in ideas of “just deserts” when it comes to anticolonial resistance, when in reality it has nothing to do with who deserves what, but by what method colonialism can be brought to its knees. Targeting civilians can absolutely achieve this, as we have seen. Israel is no longer safe for settlers, and that is more important than the idealism of a perfectly morally defensible revolution.

Armchair socialist