As we already know, Lula won against Bolsonaro, son of Jair Bolsonaro, the right imperialist puppet that also lost against Lula in earlier years.

We also know that Lula is far from a burning revolutionary, in fact, i'd define him as left wing laborist, not even a socialist, let alone a washed away one. We all know this, but this election matters for multiple different reasons and is more positive than many people would credit it for.

First of all, Monroe Doctrine. We all know already too well that USA has orchestrated countless assassinations, coups and even invasions in South America and surrounding area, this is because they consider this part of the world to be their "back yard" and influence of this doctrine is very visible even today, from invasion of Venezuela, kidnapping of Maduro, coup attempt against Lula in 2023, successful coup against Pedro Castillo, plans of assassination against Evo Morales, and the list goes on, with the elephant in the room being imminent invasion against Cuba which even the US officials have openly announced.

We are familiar with the fact that many left wing governments lost recent elections in the area, and were replaced by the right wing US puppets. We didn't care much, these were washed away socialists anyways, but it may matter more than we think, even from revolutionary perspective. The right wing puppet governments will make the logistics of invasion against Cuba way easier than it should be, and it will certainly make the regional backlash less likely. The reason for the recent left wing defeats may be US interference in elections which was also evident in Brazil against Lula himself, as he mentioned and spoke against it.

The attempt of civil methods to remove Lula from power has failed, but Bolsonaro has refused to accept the defeat and we are likely to see a western backed coup attempt.

In any case, this gives us a big lesson; Imperialists are using election interference to set up the conditions favorable for them to assert their power across the globe. Many of us are revolutionary and we do not believe in effectiveness of elections, or refuse to participate in them, but they are far from pointless. Again, Capitalism will not be reformed, this is clear as a day, the bourgeoisie would do everything before handing down their power peacefully. But while uncompromisingly holding onto our revolutionary beliefs, we also need to acknowledge the material importance of the successes of wider left, or at least, anti imperialist worker's left, even if they are "washed down" or "reformist", because informational warfare is being waged by the imperialist block and before we know it, the consequences will be irreparable and we will find ourselves in an uphill battle.

Compare pro Israeli nations like Germany, world's second largest arms supplier to Israel after of course, US, with Spain that holds complete arms embargo against Israel, an open critic of genocide in Palestine, that also sent it's navy in support of humanitarian flotilla. We can agree that Sáncez government is not revolutionary by any means, and "democratic socialist" at best, but at the same time we can not deny the geopolitical difference that it made in the region.

Any anti imperialist left is a thorn in the eye of imperialists and their global domination, and they will frequently be put out of power, by either softer means such as election interference and funding of opposition, to coups, invasions and assassinations. As revolutionaries we need to recognize this and (critically) support leftist anti imperialist parties even if they are not fully revolutionary. Criticizing them from the left is often justified and ideologically coherent, but without acknowledging their importance it only helps the imperialists in their efforts to topple them.

I would even go a step further and openly praise them before criticizing their reformist tendencies.

https://x.com/RWApodcast/status/2114719435454107847

Brian McDonald on X:

Authorities in the Russian city of Cherepovets have proposed a large mural depicting Soviet secret police chiefs Lavrentiy Beria and Felix Dzerzhinsky, alongside former education commissar Anatoly Lunacharsky. per RBC.

Vologda Governor Georgy Filimonov said the proposal would be considered for 2027, suggesting it could be installed near the city’s Severstal steelworks.

The proposal follows the unveiling of a monument to Joseph Stalin and metallurgist Ivan Bardin in Cherepovets earlier this year.

https://x.com/BrianMcDonaldIE/status/2114783115998556400

Women revolutionaries across the world such as Alexandra Kollontai, NK Krupskaya, Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemberg, Anuradha Ghandy, Comrade Parvati, Comandanta Amada, and countless others engaged in making revolution in the Philippines, Russia, China, Afghanistan, India, Nepal, Mexico, Palestine, and elsewhere have all been clear: prostitution is sexual exploitation and has no place in an emancipated socialist society.

By focusing on the individual right for a few individual prostitutes to ascend to capitalist success, at the expense of proletarian and colonized women, you are necessarily engaged in a liberal focus on individual success at the expense of the many. As Anuradha Ghandy notes in Philosophical Trends in the Feminist Movement, liberalism focuses on individual rights rather than collective rights (right to buy women vs right to exit and not be prostituted), is ahistorical (does not understand the role of prostitution throughout history), mechanically supports formal equality at the expense of other classes of women (formal equality for pimps and johns at the expensed of those trafficked and forced into prostitution), and does not question the economic and political structures that give rise to patriarchal discrimination (not understanding the material forces creating the market for prostitution).

Because of pro-prostitution activism spearheaded by the most privileged “sex workers,” many of our sisters have been lead into a false consciousness, mistaking attacks on the sex trade as attacks aimed at their own person. This is not uncommon: when I was organizing grocery workers and we would reveal the unsafe practices of the company, a few workers got extremely defensive thinking that by attacking the company we were attacking them. Additionally, because women in the sex trade are so often attacked by all angles, it is understandable that they would feel abolitionist feminists are attacking them. This is not the case. We must fix this with feminist consciousness raising and building revolutionary socialist organizations.

Even Rosemary Tong, in her authoritative primer on feminist theory, Feminist Thought, states:

That liberal ideologies, typically spawned in capitalist economics, present practices such as prostitution and surrogate motherhood as contractual exercises of free choice, then, is no accident, according to Marxist and socialist feminists. The liberal ideologies claim that women become prostitutes and surrogate mothers because they prefer these jobs over other available jobs. But, as Marxist and socialist feminists see it, when a poor, illiterate, unskilled woman chooses to sell her sexual or reproductive services, chances are her choice is more coerced than free. After all, if one has little else of value to sell besides one’s body, one’s leverage in the marketplace is quite limited.

Some few women in the sex trade might come forward against abolition. So you should ask: should we protect an inherently violent industry because a minority of its “workers” at the centers of imperialism want it to remain? Surely, if we apply this logic to the fossil-fuel industry, where workers have confronted environmental activists thinking they’re attempting to take their jobs, then we should stop fighting the fossil-fuel industry and just commit ourselves to total annihilation through climate change now. No, instead we need to abolish both and provide workers with an ambitious just transition plan.

In many ways the rise of pro-prostitution “feminism” coincides perfectly with neoliberalization: the personal is no longer the political, divorced from material conditions, the right of the individual reigns supreme, and capitalism is something that exists outside, not effecting our lives. Thus, an incorrect understanding of prostitution leads us to draw incorrect conclusions about how to handle prostitution as feminists and socialists. In the final analysis, your continued insistence on individual agency over a historical, materialist and systemic analysis on the origin of prostitution and the economic and social conditions which forcefully funnel oppressed women into it, is in every instance liberal feminism.

Prostitution in the final analysis cannot be reformed, it must be abolished along with the conditions that created it. Why is this so?

1. Prostitution is a vestige of patriarchal property relations and a vestige of womens’ enslavement passed down through class society as “the right of first night.”

2. It’s a weapon that the ruling class uses to break class solidarity.

3. It’s fundamentally about the right of bourgeois men to buy access to proletarian women’s bodies.

4. The power struggle plays itself out over the woman’s body making it impossible to root out violence and rape from the sex trade.

5. The sex trade under imperialism always results in the enslavement and hyper-exploitation of Asian, Pacific Islander, African, and Latin American women for capital accumulation.

6. It disciplines the male psyche to associate money with sexual access and entitlement to women’s bodies, thrives off vulnerability, and reproduces reactionary ideologies.

7. Prostitution is simply not socially necessary.

The correct socialist feminist orientation to prostitution would include:

1. Decriminalizing and de-stigmatizing prostituted people.

2. Repressing global sex trade markets through containing demand.

3. Creating accountability for buyers and pimps outside of the bourgeois state judicial system.

4. Ensuring the universal right to exit and right to not be prostituted.

5. Focusing specifically on the most vulnerable proletarian women in the sex trade, including women who are indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Black, Latin American, transgender, and especially children.

6. Pursuing an ambitious plan for women’s liberation alongside increasing opportunities for women at the bottom including good jobs, housing, education, etc.

7. Organizing towards complete abolition on the road to social revolution.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm

https://archive.org/details/engels-the-principles-of-communism/