"Mac and Crane are joined by J. E. to continue the discussion about Lukács's politics and his essay "Legality and Illegality." This episode goes into depth on the historical and political context of Lukács's work, debates in the Comintern, and the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution."

https://www.patreon.com/posts/fighting-about-147789215?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link

#Lukacs #Marxism #CriticalTheory #Hungary #Comintern

#German + #Austrian #Communists in #China
#WWII #Comintern

https://www.kommunismusgeschichte.de/fileadmin/user_upload/JHK/1997/04_JHK1997_Kampen_S._088_104.pdf

"Revisiting the Comintern from the far side of its 1943 shuttering, one might see a vehicle always doomed to founder, sailing against the tide in a reactionary interwar conjuncture where incipient revolutionary-democratic mass politics became caught between the gears of imperialism, fascism, and Stalinism. For young communists in those electric years, however, the two, three, many Red Octobers that the Third International was charged with fostering — from Jakarta to Managua and from Emilia-Romagna to the Cape of Good Hope — appeared as a concrete, occasionally even imminent political prospect.

Their faith in the practicability of radical global transformation was fortified by daily participation within a real movement of thousands across every continent. For Brigitte Studer, “The Comintern employees who travelled the world on political missions made such internationalism a reality through their own activity, living their internationalism as action.” It is with these Travellers of the World Revolution, and their experience of life in the service of “one of the greatest collective experiments of the twentieth century,” that Studer’s new history of the Comintern is concerned.

Reading good Comintern history conjures the feeling of standing dead in the eye of the twentieth-century hurricane, immersed, nearly engulfed by the epochal storm winds of the age of extremes. Revolution and counterrevolution; communism and anti-communism; fascism and anti-fascism; colonialism and anti-colonialism; mass politics and state bureaucracy; intellectual-cultural innovation and censorship; interstate war and intrastate terror — these were the Olympian forces under whose caprices the foot soldiers of the Comintern lived (and died).”"

https://jacobin.com/2025/02/comintern-history-communism-history-stalinism/

#Communism #Comintern #CommunistInternational #History #Stalinism

"The #Bolsheviks’ geographical imagination of #revolution did not just include the 'West' but also the 'East.' And the 'East' in two senses. The internal east of the former #Russia|n empire, primarily #CentralAsia and the #Caucasus. And the external east of the colonized world–what we today call the #GlobalSouth."

guest: #MashaKirasirova, author of #TheEasternInternational

https://euraknot.org/2024/08/05/the-eastern-international/
#AnticolonialMovements #NationalLiberationMovements #Comintern #SovietHistory #USSR #books

Recommended read on Chinese Communist Partys global influence operations. The CCP does *not* want you know learn about this.

Remember the line about "China's peaceful rise" that foreign leaders swallowed along with hook and sinker? Read on...

“Most national security analysts in the United States will tell you that China presents a unique challenge to the U.S.-based order. What U.S. officials refer to as the “scope and scale” of the threat from Beijing outstrips that posed by other Western adversaries, even Russia, these officials say.

Yet the structure of China's intelligence apparatus remains relatively opaque. During the Cold War, the U.S. and its allies developed a granular understanding of the KGB, the Soviet Union’s main civilian intelligence agency, and the GRU, its military counterpart. It’s not that the CIA or the wider U.S. intelligence community had perfect insight into its main rival — far from it. But U.S. officials did have a clear sense of how the KGB functioned.

Not so with China, which remained cut off from the outside world for decades, and whose security services evolved in an isolated ideological hothouse. As China shed its isolationism and emerged as a world power, its intelligence operatives also fanned out across the globe.

But Western intelligence analysts were still looking through a glass, darkly, when it came to Beijing’s espionage abroad. That’s a gap that Alex Joske’s important new book, Spies and Lies: How China's Greatest Covert Operations Fooled the World, tries to fill. Joske, a former analyst with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, traces the evolution of the Ministry of State Security (MSS), China’s premier civilian intelligence agency, focusing on the MSS’s ubiquitous — and largely unknown— role in directing and executing Beijing’s influence operations abroad.”

Project Brazen: Alex Joske on China's Influence Operations Abroad
By @zachsdorfman
https://thebrushpass.projectbrazen.com/joskechinainfluenceoperations/

#CCP #PRC #china #UFWD #UnitedFront #UnitedFrontWorkDepartment #MSS #MinistryOfStateSecurity #NatSec #infosec #ASPI #intelligence #espionage #CIA #GRU #propaganda #chinese #dictatorship #authoritarianism #SovietUnion #comintern #Taiwan #Australia
#AlexJoske