Like many of us, I put a lot of miles on my car. Between commuting to work, taking the kids to school, and grocery runs, I definitely feel the pain of higher gas prices.

As our daily struggles intensify, the politicians pretend to care while they pursue the very policies that are making our lives more difficult.

These political actors have auditioned for a role. They have proven themselves capable of representing the billionaire class while pretending to care about the oppositional interests of the rest of us. They have learned their lines perfectly – but the script was never written for us.

They use terms like “inflation” or “supply chain issues” or “global instability.” They use jargon to hide the fact that they start wars to help the elites they serve. They expect us to choose between food and rent while big corporations get bigger and rake in windfall profits. They laugh all the way to the bank.

Trump says he’s surprised gas prices aren’t higher. Trump said he doesn’t think about Americans’ financial situation – “not even a little bit” – as he negotiates an end to the Iran war he started. Trump says the federal government has no money for healthcare or childcare – only for war. Europe echoes his call. They empty our pockets while they fill up their own.

Most people intuitively know all of this even if they can’t articulate it. Most people know their voice does not matter and that both parties serve the same elites. What results is “did not vote” wins every state in a landslide.

This “two-party” system ensures our revulsion. And that revulsion has itself become a currency that billionaire-backed candidates pander to. Obama sold us “hope and change.” Trump sold us “drain the swamp.” Both won. Both did the opposite.

Obama bailed out the banks, not the homeowners. Trump started a war with Iran – and gas prices skyrocketed.

They know what to say. They know what you want to hear. They have no intention of doing any of it. They work for the billionaires. They don’t work for you.

A government that represents workers would not be starting wars to control global energy supplies. It would not be destroying market competitors so oil executives can price-gouge you at the pump. A truly representative government would break up the private energy cartels – not do their dirty work.

We need a government that represents the working class majority. We need truth tellers that don’t say one thing and do another. We need a party that stands up for our interests. We need a party that stops pretending that the interests of billionaires are no different than the interests of workers. We need a party that is unapologetic about picking our side. We need a party willing to speak this truth, fight the entrenched billionaire interests, and not pretend that they care about workers while they throw us under the bus.

The American Communist Party (ACP) is doing just that. If you are interested in organizing with your neighbors, strengthening your community, and building the power necessary to take our government back from the oligarch class, reach out to the ACP and join a local chapter. Together, we can build a government that works for regular people, not just billionaires.

Source: @ACP_California

Just finished watching this and all I can say is hallelujah. Over the years I have tried to tell the truth about the western left as it was given to me by my father and his friends, real Stalinists who were around in the original time. The told me all about this.

I've talked with various RTSG people over the years, they asked me questions, and here is the result: the long overarching plan the US rentier elites did to Marxism Leninism now has an authoritative and beautifully made video.

Of course it will be simultaneously attacked and ignored—but now it exists as a thesis—and I will be referring people to this video forever.

Thank you, and the soul of my dead teacher thanks you.

Originally published on x.com.

To find an alternative to AOC’s (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) “democratic socialism,” we must investigate why exactly these politics are harmful to Palestine, and all other areas in the popular struggle. Putting forth such an alternative is an important part of critiquing social democrats, because without presenting a credible solution, we’ll fall into ultra-leftist patterns. When I decry social democrat politicians as a Marxist, I am doing so with the awareness that these figures are the only version of “socialism” which their supporters have overall been exposed to. And to draw these working-class Americans away from social democracy, which is now a highly urgent task, we must explain which forces of popular revolution the socdems have set themselves up against.

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In global terms, these forces are the mass movements that have been waging wars of resistance against U.S. imperial aggression, with the Palestinian resistance being the foremost struggle that leaders like AOC oppose. We know they oppose this struggle because every one of these “progressive” leaders, when they’ve come across opportunities to align with Palestine’s fight for liberation, have done what the occupier prefers. They’ve served as “progressive” launderers for Zionism at a moment when Zionism is in unprecedented existential danger, is surrounded by a world that hates it more than ever, and needs spokespeople who can put a friendly face on it.

Because the bulk of Gen Z have come to understand why Zionism is irredeemable, every time these politicians betray the Palestinian cause they further alienate themselves from their primary base. Bernie Sanders and AOC have voted to continue funding the Zionist occupier’s “defensive” military equipment, and Zohran Mamdani has taken the Zionist position by affirming the occupier’s supposed right to exist. Now, AOC has again shown a lack of commitment to fighting against aid to the occupation by stating that due to existing U.S. foreign aid policies, “I believe the Israeli government is well able to fund the Iron Dome system, which has proven critical to keep innocent civilians safe from rocket attacks and bombardment.” This was how AOC qualified her pledge not to continue voting for the Iron Dome aid, which evidently still comes with a fundamental desire to counter Gaza’s resistance coalition; AOC’s language clearly implies that this choice comes from a confidence in the occupier being able to wage its colonial war without her help. When this changes, AOC will get behind the occupier, along with every other “soft” Zionist leader.

Because of how transparent AOC’s opportunism is, it’s harder for AOC to keep up a “pro-Palestine” image than it is for someone in Zohran’s position. These figures are always going to play a gatekeeping role in relation to Palestine, though. And one indication of this is that Zohran still doesn’t appear to be pursuing his campaign promise of having New York City implement BDS (boycott divest sanction).

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Instead he’s taken a position in the middle, and revoked a previous anti-BDS measure while not going all the way. And we should draw attention to this failure, as it illustrates how much of an impact these figures would have if they were to truly act principled on Palestine; NYC adopting BDS would have a gargantuan domino effect, encouraging other cities to do the same. It was exciting prospects like this one that gained Zohran such a large base. Yet these prospects are not materializing, which isn’t something Marxists are glad about; we we don’t want it to be true that the biggest “socialist” faction is obstructing the fight against the Gaza genocide. We aren’t here to be ankle-biters against these leaders, but to offer a mode of struggle where the popular masses are truly in control.

I’m not just talking about my own communist party, the American Communist Party; a party is only a vehicle for advancing the interests of the masses, who are the core drivers of the struggle. And in the case of the Palestinian liberation struggle, the primary masses who we must account for are the Palestinian people themselves. This is something that the Palestinian community’s internal critics of reformism and capitulationism have stressed. One example of this is a statement from March 10, attributed by Al-Akhbar to numerous Palestinian and Arab thinkers. They explain how:

Concepts of liberation and the national project must be formulated from the real material conditions of resistance environments: the refugee camp, the village, the prison cell, the trench and the tunnel. We reject imported liberal frameworks and ready-made formulas designed according to the preferences and interests of comprador forces and the colonial core. These models are used as tools for social engineering to freeze and neutralize Arab social and political forces from the real struggle, while the enemy continues to pursue its goals ruthlessly to their conclusion. True liberation begins with dismantling epistemic colonialism as a prerequisite for full liberation…

This charter calls for reclaiming national decision-making from elites accustomed to acting as intermediaries and agents, and returning it to the masses and the social environments that sustain resistance and shape history through their sacrifices. It is a call to move beyond the politics of begging towards the dismantling of colonial structures.

This is the posture that the Palestinian resistance takes, and our own movements must adopt the equivalent of this posture in order to succeed. We have to take example from Palestine’s liberation movement, and the other Global South struggles, by rejecting the false allies who are collaborators with capital.

After the 1967 Zionist land grab, Palestine’s communists concluded that they had to identify who their cause’s core allies were among the different Palestinian economic classes, with the enslaved proletarians and the imprisoned masses being the ones they decided to prioritize. And this reckoning with the question of class has allowed the struggle to get much further since then. In the case of the American popular struggle, applying this practice looks like aligning ourselves with such working-class forces within Palestine and all other countries, while recognizing who our foremost class allies are domestically.

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We must reject the compatible left politics that seeks alignment with the professional-managerial class, which is the element that these pro-imperialist “progressives” most seek to serve. There are indications that our ruling class will soon act to expand the PMC (professional managerial class) by bribing many more U.S. workers with imperialist super-profits, thus creating a larger social base for the empire’s next wars. But this strategy will fail if we don’t cede the working class to the socdems, and bring them into the proletarian struggle before our enemies intercept them; while also reaching into the parts of the American masses who won’t be given these benefits. Rural America is where we must especially look while undertaking this mission, because though our ruling class can rebuild the labor aristocracy, liberalism inevitably exacerbates the contradiction between the metropole and the countryside.

It is in these parts of the masses where we’ll find the most reliable allies of the Palestinian resistance, and of the wider effort to overthrow monopoly financial rule. The socdems seek to build an alliance between the bourgeoisified American workers—who they may soon create more of—and the comprador elites who protect Zionism with the rhetoric of progress. We will overwhelm them from below, building an alliance between those who share an interest in the imperial order’s destruction.

The Material Reality of Motherhood in California

While California overall has an infant mortality rate of approximately 5.41 per 1,000 live births (as of late 2025), this number is a deceptive average that masks a deep class and racial chasm. Working class and impoverished neighborhoods experience infant mortality rates that are up to three times higher, exposing the deep class divide underneath the Hollywood glamour.

Environmental Racism and the “Freeway Legacy”

The geography of California was designed with class interests in mind. Working-class neighborhoods were often bisected by massive freeway systems to facilitate the movement of capital, while affluent enclaves remained protected.

• Airborne Disease: Mothers in neighborhoods like Vallejo or East L.A. breathe air with double the traffic density of their wealthier peers. This leads to higher rates of asthma, low birth weight, and chronic respiratory illness during critical developmental stages of life.

• Epigenetic Trauma: Chronic stress from poverty and environmental toxins doesn’t just affect the mother; it is “programmed” into the child’s biology through epigenetic changes, predisposing the next generation to metabolic and stress-related disorders.

The “Communist Program” for Maternal Liberation

From a Marxist-Leninist perspective, these issues are not “glitches” but features of a system that prioritizes profit over the reproduction of life. A communist program would seek to socialize the labor of “mothering” and eliminate the profit motive from survival.

1. Socialization of Childcare: Rather than childcare being a private expense, it becomes a state responsibility. This includes 24-hour high-quality nurseries and “Milk Kitchens” (publicly funded nutrition centers) to ensure every child receives the same caloric and developmental start, regardless of their mother’s income.

2. Abolition of the “Food Desert”: Replacing the anarchy of the market with a planned distribution of resources. Under a communist program, high-quality, organic nutrition is treated as a public utility, like water, distributed through community-run centers rather than for-profit grocery chains.

3. Environmental Transformation: Aggressive dismantling of polluting infrastructure in working-class areas. Moving away from pollution-producing car-centric freeway culture toward massive public transit investment and the “greening” of urban centers to ensure the air in Compton is as clean as the air in Malibu.

4. Maternal and Paternal Leave: Comprehensive paid leave (often 12–18 months in historic socialist models) with a guaranteed return to the workforce, ensuring that the bond between parent and child is protected from the “market logic” of productivity.

Statistics for Reflection

• Single Mothers: Roughly 19% of California households are headed by single parents (mostly mothers), who represent a vital but exploited segment of the workforce.

• Labor Force: Single mothers have an employment rate of roughly 78%, yet many remain at the median wage of $18/hr, which is insufficient for the cost of living in most California counties.

This Mother’s Day, we recognize that true appreciation for mothers requires more than flowers—it requires a fundamental restructuring of society to ensure that the “struggle” of motherhood is no longer a requirement for survival.

What does it mean that many still think we can change the Democratic Party, even after Gen Z turned on Kamala for the Gaza holocaust? It means bad ideas don’t simply go away on their own. The only way to defeat these ideas is by actively struggling against them, without waiting for a hypothetical moment when the masses have become ready to hear the revolutionary positions.

This doesn’t mean taking an ultra-left posture, and treating the supporters of “democratic socialism” as enemies. There’s a layer of opportunists who need to be combated, but they aren’t most of the socdem base. It means gaining the skills to go into the masses, which here looks like showing why the Democratic Party is inseparable from the imperial state. The DNC (Democratic National Committee) will remain genocidal, no matter the efforts to change this. If we can explain this, while building an independent infrastructure for the working class, we’ll defeat the project to recapture today’s popular upsurge.

We have to become so learned in the nuances of mass work because reformism holds a unique kind of potential mass pull. Pull that can only come from the masses having a real material reason to want bourgeois electoralism. As Ken Lawrence said in his critique of the Italian ultra-leftists, who thought they could bring the people out of reformism by merely activating armed struggle: “While it is true that reformism is the bourgeoisie’s carrot and repression is its stick, that is not the whole story, nor even the most important part. Reformism is the aspect of capital that the working class has internalized. It is an alien class ideology, yes, but it is precisely because it has been internalized, and represents a pole within the proletariat’s consciousness, that it constitutes such an effective tool of bourgeois hegemony.”

To see an example of success in overcoming reformism, we can look to the most obvious case, this being the Bolsheviks. And to grasp why they were successful in this, we have to recognize how they refused to “bow to spontaneity,” and passively reinforce the reformist ideas that workers will initially come to. In What is to be Done, Lenin said that the Marxists who rejected reforms as the end goal were “dissatisfied with this worship of spontaneity, i.e., of that which exists ‘at the present moment’. We demand that the tactics that have prevailed in recent years be changed; we declare that ‘before we can unite, and in order that we may unite, we must first of all draw firm and definite lines of demarcation’…In a word, the Germans stand for that which exists and reject changes; we demand a change of that which exists, and reject subservience thereto and reconciliation to it. This ‘slight’ difference our ‘free’ copyists of German resolutions failed to notice.”

These historical insights are so indispensable for unpacking today’s “democratic socialist” movement because if we don’t learn from history, we’ll end up tailing behind the Democratic Party, as the biggest “Marxist” orgs are doing. “Democratic socialism” relies on historical illiteracy; the whole purpose of choosing this name for it was to assuage concerns about past and present socialist states being “dictatorships,” while reinforcing such anti-communist nonsense beliefs. For many who got behind Sanders in 2016, as soon as they pulled back the veil of anti-communist propaganda, they successfully developed to the next stage of consciousness.

Their journey of critical thinking could not end there, though. For decades, socialism in the USA had been just talk, unable to escape the niche that it had been forced into during the 20th century. And to truly break out of this niche, American communists would need to relearn their own working-class history. To rediscover trade unionism, party-building, unemployment councils, and the other working-class practices that had made their forebears strong.

Even the most advanced among American communists are in the very early stages of learning what these things look like, because we’ve needed to start up from absolutely nothing. We are determined to stick with the mission for the rest of our lives, though. And when we show this dedication of ours to the masses, they’ll see a clear alternative to the socdems who’ve seemed so compelling. Or rather when they see the material results of our dedication—the worker struggles we’ve led to victory, the services we’ve provided, the popular infrastructure we’ve built—they’ll have a good reason to take our side.

The next confrontation within the left will be between the aesthetics of the reactionary NATO Dems, and the tangible workers power-building of the proletarian movement. And this aesthetic vs. material theme has special relevance to the direction that our culture is going in. Because now that the youngest generation has only ever known the social media age, we are going to see an increase in the proportion of people who are compelled by aesthetics in themselves. This shrinking of intelligence is the logical outcome for the cyberpunk age.

When Hasan Piker uses the image of himself reading Lenin, he’s marketing towards the individuals who’ve already been conditioned to think through a mainly superficial lens, taking advantage of how successfully our ruling class has replaced actual left-wing politics with pure counterculture vibes.

There is a larger battle going on right now, though, that has players who are capable of overcoming oligarchic propaganda power. In these last four years, we’ve been mainly seeing the enemy fight this battle against the armies of resistance throughout West Asia—Gaza’s guerrilla movement, Yemen’s patriots, Iran and Lebanon’s heroic fighters. Soon the Chinese people will likely join the fight, according to the plans of these left “populist” neocons who desire war over Taiwan.

All of this is going to further the systemic breakdown that our government has catalyzed, and all of it matters for where the class war goes next. There will be many who respond by entering into the political struggle, and won’t be intimidated into inaction by the state’s police tactics. If we provide this layer of dedicated freedom fighters with the structure they need, the entire game will change.

Within the left, the next main line of demarcation is going to be between the pro-imperialist reformists, and the actual working-class movement. We know this because the “democratic socialists” have been adopting a strategy that’s capable of actually drawing in a mass base for their politics: discard the woke rhetoric that used to be predominant within the left, and appeal towards a broader audience via economic populism. The new posture of the “progressive” Democrats is one where they copy the MAGA Communist strategy, i.e. reach a mass base that includes the conservative workers.

It’s a bourgeois diversion from Marxism, one that may be very deliberate depending on just how directly our movement has inspired this recent pivot by the socdems. They’re omitting all of MAGA Communism’s anti-imperialist aspects, while solely promoting policies that will uplift the workers in the empire’s core; which always amounts to an effort at strengthening capital, and at condemning the world’s people to more imperial violence.

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To unpack social democratic ideology, and figure out how Marxists can defeat it, we must investigate why social democracy always benefits the bourgeoisie. And when speaking to the masses about why social democracy should be rejected, we must illustrate why victory for the bourgeoisie always means defeat for the proletariat. Because according to the worldview that social democrats draw from, supposedly the workers and the capitalists are able to achieve a mutual triumph. Supposedly we can come to a “class peace,” where the proletariat has been lifted up to an extent where it no longer matters that the proletariat is exploited.

Such is the ideal that H.G. Wells had in mind while he was interviewing Stalin, and posing to him the social-democratic liberal view of class. Wells was coming from the same perspective as the “American exceptionalists” within the socialist movement, who believed U.S. capitalism is so uniquely advanced that the workers had come to no longer be in material conflict with the capitalist class. Such was the perspective of the camp that viewed Roosevelt’s pro-worker reforms as being part of an actual path towards socialism, rather than as an effort to stave off socialist revolution. In response to the statement from Wells that such reforms could let Roosevelt abolish the financial oligarchy and bring about socialism, Stalin said:

What will this “socialism” be? At best, bridling to some extent, the most unbridled of individual representatives of capitalist profit, some increase in the application of the principle of regulation in national economy. That is all very well. But as soon as Roosevelt, or any other captain in the contemporary bourgeois world, proceeds to undertake something serious against the foundation of capitalism, he will inevitably suffer utter defeat. The banks, the industries, the large enterprises, the large farms are not in Roosevelt’s hands. All these are private property. The railroads, the mercantile fleet, all these belong to private owners. And, finally, the army of skilled workers, the engineers, the technicians, these too are not at Roosevelt’s command, they are at the command of the private owners; they all work for the private owners. We must not forget the functions of the State in the bourgeois world.

The State is an institution that organises the defence of the country, organises the maintenance of “order”; it is an apparatus for collecting taxes. The capitalist State does not deal much with economy in the strict sense of the word; the latter is not in the hands of the State. On the contrary, the State is in the hands of capitalist economy. That is why I fear that in spite of all his energies and abilities, Roosevelt will not achieve the goal you mention, if indeed that is his goal. Perhaps, in the course of several generations it will be possible to approach this goal somewhat; but I personally think that even this is not very probable.

This debate happened in 1934, when essentially the whole capitalist world was reckoning with the crisis of overproduction which had produced the era’s economic collapse. The United States, which had become one of if not the biggest world monopolist centers, was facing the choice to preserve capitalism through reforms or undergo a workers revolution. And by that point, the American masses had come to have enough revolutionary consciousness for proletarian victory to be quite plausible. But the opportunist forces, the actors who sought to tail behind the Roosevelt wing of the ruling class, would win out within the communist and labor movements. This enabled Wall Street to fortify its control after Roosevelt’s death—which there’s evidence to suggest was an assassination—and crush the country’s working-class organizations.

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It was in this next decade or so after World War II that America would undergo the cultural shift which ultimately made the MAGA movement viable. What happened was that in the midst of the McCarthyist paranoia, the conservative forces which aligned with capital’s lower levels redefined “communism” as being synonymous with the designs of monopoly finance capital. According to this narrative, propagated by groups like the John Birch Society, any sentiment within our institutions which aligns with social progressivism is evidence of Marxist infiltration. And what solidified this narrative was the co-optation of Marxism by the academic “critical theorists,” who’ve divorced Marxism from the class struggle so that they can treat identity politics as “Marxist.” ACP chairman Haz Al-Din explains this in his article which clarifies MAGA Communism’s role:

Leftists sneer at MAGA Communists owing to the supposedly unbridgeable rift between Communism and the MAGA movement. But they are themselves the prime cause, and the greatest beneficiaries of such a rift in the first place! It is the betrayal of the revisionists, and the traitors to the working class movement - career climbing through institutional academia, NGOs and ultimately the highest levels of government - that has earned Communism the dirty name that it has now acquired in America. The ‘communists,’ sitting at their posts as the most vicious representatives of the professional managerial class, are themselves chiefly to blame for the unpopularity of Communism. It is thus inevitable that the greatest enemies of the MAGA Communist movement will be leftists, who stand the most to lose from the unity of Marxism with the worker’s movement. It will outmode them into irrelevance, and turn the ideology that has for so long been the sanction of their parasitism and evil into the weapon of social forces disposed with the intention of liquidating them as a class.

If communists had stopped these charlatans from taking over Marxism, many if not most of today’s right-wingers would now be aligned with our cause. We know this because during the pre-war era, much of what would become the modern Republican base had been part of the masses who were suffering under the Wall Street-created crisis; the American working class has collectively lived through these historical struggles, and the presence of reactionary ideas among the working class hasn’t negated this shared nature of their experience.

At that time, racism and nativism were on the rise compared to a generation earlier, as the ruling class had successfully revived the Ku Klux Klan and popularized its propaganda. William Z. Foster pointed out how this rising fascist menace showed “the working class must retain the initiative, and establish and maintain its leadership over all of the oppressed masses. It must impress its program and its goal upon the minds of the lower middle class and farmers, as the only substantial hope for the solution of their problems, and thus establish such sympathetic contact and alliances with these classes that their support or neutrality in the revolutionary struggle is secured.” Due to a combination of the reformist leaders winning out within the workers movement, and this movement being overwhelmed by the repressive strength of capital, the communists were set back in this goal. Which allowed the capitalists to reach much of these petty-bourgeois and working-class whites, bringing them into what’s now the modern American conservative movement.

A famous peculiarity about this movement is that originally, it was the Democrats who represented its primary home. As it’s commonly phrased, the Democrats and the Republicans “switched platforms” when the Democratic Party absorbed the Civil Rights movement, and the Republicans captured the “Dixiecrat” whites. This was the moment when the brand which would become MAGA solidified, making the rise of Trump into an inevitability. But all throughout this process, even as the workers movement was dismantled and capital went on an unprecedented offensive, America was being haunted by the specter of communism (specifically MAGA Communism).

Among the conservative masses, there remained that desire to fight against the liberal social engineering projects, which were more insidious than even they could have anticipated. The schemes of monopoly finance capital are bipartisan, with America’s people having never truly had any powerful allies within their government’s leadership; and now that America’s collapse has become so advanced, many former Dems and Trump supporters are realizing this.

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The psyop to cast communism as the driving force of monopoly finance capital, like the psyop to co-opt the left, was about seizing upon real contradictions within the peoples they were targeted at. The John Bircher narratives and their fascist predecessors were about exploiting the pre-existing racial inequalities in American society. And the campaign to insert idpol liberalism into Marxism took advantage of ultra-leftist tendencies that were already there within the left. These efforts to cut the working class off from communism have been effective, due to the real conflicts inside American society that can nurture anti-Marxist trends. Yet all the while, these trends have been struggling against their shared nemesis, which is the immutable potential for revolutionary consciousness. It’s immutable because it arises from the struggles which these material contradictions create, inexorably pushing society towards confronting what’s been ignored.

Every enemy that Marxists face must reckon with the fact that they are fighting against the scientific recognition of material reality. Marxism cannot be refuted, so consistently what the anti-Marxists do is try to divert the masses from getting exposed towards Marxism’s analyses. This is what we’re seeing from the socdems, who will soon become our main enemies. They’re having to take care not to present a message that’s too class-conscious, that may bring the people further towards anti-imperialism and actual working-class organization. What they’re putting forth is crude economism, where someone exclusively focuses on workplace or social welfare benefits while disregarding the actual class war.

By employing a bastardized version of the MAGA Communist strategy, the socdems have shown they understand MAGA’s separation from Marxism is not unbridgeable, and in fact could easily be resolved if the underlying contradictions are reckoned with. The socdems have been sent in to keep the American working class from having this reckoning, and figuring out its true history and interests. We are here to expose everything that they seek to keep hidden, and give the workers a path to final victory.

A recent article published by The Grayzone reports on Stephen Curry’s business ties and financial investments in technology companies connected to former Israeli military intelligence personnel. This news came as a surprise to many, especially since Curry has a reputation for being outspoken on social justice issues.

Endorsement deals with major companies like Chase, Rakuten, Fanatics, JPMorgan Chase, Callaway Golf, CarMax, Panini, Google, Subway, Brita, and Simplicity apparently have not been enough for him. Investment in Zafran Security, a tech startup led by former Israel Defense Forces operatives, has also been added to the portfolio, further expanding Curry’s range of business ventures.

What is more surprising is not that an NBA superstar can be politically inconsistent or even hypocritical, but that many people still have not come to terms with a deeper reality: the same forces that shape the rest of society are also found beneath the glamour and spectacle of professional sports.

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The $132 Billion Machine

The NBA generated a record $11.3 billion in revenue during the 2023-24 season, continuing its strong post-pandemic recovery. At the same time, the 30 teams in the league are worth about $132.8 billion altogether, showing how massive and valuable the league has become globally. Every aspect of the league—from the games themselves to the players and the branding—is organized to maximize revenue.

The sponsorship world around the NBA is massive, featuring:

• More than 1,700 brands.

• Over 2,600 deals including team partnerships and player endorsements.

• A heavy presence on social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and X.

Much of the recent growth is coming from industries like technology, healthcare, and cars, which are spending more to be part of the league.

The Golden State Warriors, in particular, blend sports with Silicon Valley-style thinking. Under owner Joe Lacob, the team is run more like a startup than a traditional sports franchise, focusing on data-driven decision-making and a corporate culture that mirrors a tech company.

The Fan as Idealist

Deep down, most fans understand that professional sports are driven by profit, yet they still hold on to the belief that the game is about teams competing and athletes striving to win. A sports fan is an idealist at heart. In Sacramento, tens of thousands of fans show their loyalty to the Kings, insisting every October that “this is our year,” despite evidence to the contrary.

Unlike the routine grind of everyday life, professional sports are filled with redemption arcs and miracles. As Ljubodrag Simonović writes:

“A sports fan is ‘lifted out of everyday dullness by an athlete in whose dribbling and drive toward the goal he recognizes his own life path... What an adventure for a person who exists like a tiny grain, mercilessly tossed by the winds of history, who, by identifying with the unattainable, seeks to reach his own social worth...’”

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The Path to the Dark Side

Professional athletes may start out like the fans who follow them, driven by a love of the game. Early in their careers, they are much like a young Jedi guided by values such as service and balance. But as success grows, so do the pressures of fame and the fear of loss. That’s when “Emperor Palpatine-like” figures step in, whispering, “Why just play the game when you can own it?”

Just like Anakin Skywalker, who sought more control and certainty, Stephen Curry likely sees good reasons behind each new corporate deal: security for his family and his future. However, the shift from Anakin to Vader happens slowly. Eventually, one might find themselves presenting as a voice for social justice while simultaneously investing in entities connected to systems of apartheid.

In professional sports, the capitalist system reduces everything to profit. Even though athletes drive the machine, they are pushed into serving a fixed goal where they can be replaced at any moment by media companies or corporate sponsors. Under these conditions, athletes are reduced to tools for profit.

If this is simply how profit-driven sports work, why act shocked when a superstar follows that logic to its harshest conclusions?

Works Cited

• Ljubodrag Simonović. Profesionalizam i/li socijalizam. Mladost, Beograd, 1985.

• SponsorUnited. “NBA Marketing Partnerships Report 2024-25.”

• Sports Value. “NBA Teams Surpassed US$ 11.3 Billion in Revenue in 2024; Total Valuation Reached US$ 132.8 Billion.”

• The Grayzone. “NBA star Stephen Curry’s ties to Israeli intelligence exposed.”

• The New York Times (The Athletic). “Warriors in the Arena Where Silicon Valley Merges With Steph Curry and Co.”

All of Marx's written material was literally financed by direct exploitation of workers in Engels’ Salford factory. During Marx's life, Engels gave Marx around the equivalent of $3 million dollars. This is just an inflation adjusted number—if we drill down into the PPP (purchasing power parity) aspect it was more like $6 million easily.

Engels inherited around $6-7 million, again adding PPP and other factors he was definitely the equivalent of a contemporaneous HNWI (high net worth individual - meaning a person with $1 million in fluid assets alone).

Engels had around $15-$20 million by the 1880's - that was his value adjusted for purchasing power. Without his patronage, Marx's theory would not have existed. Marx would have been likely a beat writer always a step away from the poor house.

Without Marx's distance from and isolation to proletarian labor, he would never have had the time to sit in the round reading room at the British library for 10 hours a day. He would never have had the mental dimension of separation from proletarian consciousness necessary to objectively analyze it.

Neither did Marx have to worry about administering production from the factory floor—this was Engels cross to bear. For nearly a decade Engels used his family stipend (salary basically) to give to Marx- around $200,000 a year.

Chinese Marxist Leninists, in the oddest way, do the same thing on a societal level—they isolate themselves within the party cadre from the national bourgeois class—they use their ability to seek out markets and competition and integrative ability in the global economy (dollar system). Then they take this "salary" and feed it back into a centralized industrial planning model. They exist both outside the system and right on top of it's command structure.

Engels is most likely the most important functional part of Marxism, his class betrayal is what gave us the civilizational movement of Marxism Leninism.

Just as Christians "win" by imitating Christ, the CPC "wins" by imitating the Engelsian process.

Originally published on x.com.

On April 8, 2026 an employee at a Kimberly-Clarke warehouse in Ontario, CA started a Facebook Live, (allegedly) remarked that, “all you had to do was pay us enough to live,” struck a windproof lighter and set the inventory ablaze. One hundred seventy responders from 11 jurisdictions extinguished the blaze.

The underlying crime (arson) we can reasonably assume that, like most crime, was based on a need, perceived or real. Our alleged perpetrator discerned the absence or removal of a necessity and acted in a way to alter or eliminate the situation.

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The phrase quoted above is repeated time and again in the article that we’ve gathered to analyze, this I believe is a deliberate choice. We are given a contrast in the article. The irrational, grievance based folly of Mr Chamel Abdulkarim is counterbalanced by the voice of reason. Co-worker Alejandro Montero is in the article to help our author make a little sense of what happened.

“I just met him that night. He was helping me load my trailer,” Montero said. “I was working together with him right there for two hours before break and then right at break... I went to my car, and that’s when it happened.”

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We have in this news story two of the clearest examples of Proletarian individuals reacting to material conditions. The tale sounds almost like a thought experiment for its perfection of detail. Mr Abdulkarim is the example of a worker with no Revolutionary direction toward a wider future. The exact person that the American Communist Party desperately must reach and redirect. If he is guilty of the arson at his workplace, Mr Abdulkarim engaged in an individual act intended to bring about wider material change. What Liberals would brand simple terrorism, Communists recognize as useless adventurism. I would love to suppose that had the proper recruitment effort met with him, that he would be today, unfettered and even more effective an agitator. I cannot accurately suppose that because of our other archetype…

The disgustingly lumpenproletariat Montero rushes to the defense of the wounded $32b corporation. His mystified lack of understanding is typified with his insistence that he is personally well paid, presented for either added context or to counterbalance the violent grievance. There is always a contingent within the workforce that has attained a level of comfort from which any change, let alone violent change, represents only negative. They have erroneously identified with the very system creating lethal friction in the people present with him in his same cohort. The contradiction between upholding the system and the system being designed to harm you becomes entirely fantastical if the victim can be convinced that he is in fact in conspiracy with the oppressor and that is what we hear in Montero’s complaint that they are now out of work because of Mr Abdulkarim’s actions. Let us not waste time trying to remind Montero that there is no scenario in which a company worth $32b is unable to help its workers, displaced by the actions of a lone malefactor.

Walz, other MN officials served subpoenas amid protests, ICE raids

USA Today reports that the federal Department of Justice served Minnesota state officials, including the governor, with subpoenas. The nature of the subpoenas remain unclear, though the article notes tensions related to federal immigration enforcement. Federal officials assume supremacy while state officials disagree with their methods.

Analysis: For freedom loving Americans who have ever paid lip service to the notion that our dexterity as a people come from the ability of states to (within reason) govern themselves as their environment and populace dictate, we take notice of these overreaches, however minor. This is not the worst thing that has happened in this administration, but it is indicative of how far the bar for acceptability has fallen. If America had ever been great in a way that allowed for American style freedom, such impropriety within the government would have been rooted out preventing wider rot. Such as the example of Nixon’s petty, crime-city style fiefdom; being a racist piece of shit notwithstanding.

A non-distinct judicial subpoena from the feds to the state should be cause for alarm. Why have we allowed it to be just another Tuesday?

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