London Marxism Reading Group

China Study Group: Chuang Collective, "Sorghum & Steel" - PART 4

Thu, Mar 12 · 7:00 PM GMT

London Action Resource Centre, 62 Fieldgate Street, Whitechapel, E1 1ES, London, GB

This is a the next chapter of our longform reading group on China. If you didn't get to the first meetings, don't worry - please do come along anyway!

This time, we're finishing Chuang's Sorghum & Steel series with chapter 4, ***Ruination ***and the conclusion, titled Unbinding. Find the text here:

https://chuangcn.org/journal/one/sorghum-and-steel/4-ruination/
----

About the China Study Group:

What can we learn from the Chinese Revolution? That's the question we'll seek to answer as LMRG brings the heat to you once again, now on Tuesday nights, with our all-new China Study Group. In this long-form reading series, we'll meet monthly for in-depth discussion of a series of texts on China, its revolution, the socialist market economy, and more. As the New Cold War heats up, it's never been more important to learn what we can about the country which the US, UK and EU have all described - following the American phrasebook - as a "systemic rival".

For the first set of meetups within this series, we'll be tackling Sorghum and Steel: The Socialist Developmental Regime and the Forging of China by the Chuang collective. Chuang is an independent, autonomous collective of anti-authoritarian Chinese communists and labour activists whose work provides a rare opportunity for English readers to get vital detail on historical and contemporary dynamics within Chinese society from a materialist, communist, and crucially - balanced perspective. Sorghum and Steel will provide our Study Group with an essential foundation in Chinese history to equip us going forward.

Throughout this series, we'll give equal space to a wide variety of sources, from anti-authoritarian Chinese communists opposed to the contemporary Politburo to members of Xi Jinping's own ideological brain-trust. We'll dig deep into elements of the Chinese revolutionary experience such as the CPC's localist co-operative economics of the Civil War period, the forgotten grass roots of the Cultural Revolution, the Boulan Fazheng period and China's rejection of "shock therapy" as seen in the USSR, and the theory underpinning China's recent turn away from the liberal economics of the 2000s.

Take care everyone and happy reading!

NRWITBD 2026: Richard Appignanesi, Lenin for Beginners [1978]

Thu, Mar 19 · 7:30 PM GMT

London Action Resource Centre, 62 Fieldgate Street, Whitechapel, E1 1ES, London, GB

[Fade in] The year is 2026. Picture this: industrial-scale war on multiple continents. Cities in ruins, millions dead and millions more made refugees - starvation, disease, mutilations, deportations, pogroms, genocides, dispossessions. Across every land, a working class on its knees before an ever-shrinking class of oligarchs with an ever-growing pile of treasure, weapons and slaves - determined to pit brother against brother in endless wars for resources that can only end when the whole earth is a toxic wasteland. And what they call "peace" is not much better.

This is the brutal present, a Second Gilded Age, but we could travel back a hundred years and describe more or less the exact same scene. In the century since Lenin lived and walked the earth, less has changed than the eternal optimists - Panglossian techno-liberals like Steven Pinker and the other intellectuals of the Epstein class - would like us to think. Really, we're back where it all began in the First Gilded Age of the late 19th and early 20th century: on the outside looking in, asking the age-old question: what is to be done? Things are really getting quite bad. No, really - what is to be done!!?

In our gatherings of late, we've been tinkering around the edges of a few answers. Prior Lenin readings as well as our exploration of the Yan'an Forum and our whistle-stop tour through the last twenty years of street protests with Vincent Bevins have given us some things to chew on. Now there's been a clamour from plenty of regulars, as well as a few newcomers, that we continue to pull at the vital thread that seems to be running through all our discussions and see where it might lead us: namely, the revolutionary theories of Lenin.

This will be a series of readings running every other Thursday night in Whitechapel. We'll start with something a little unusual for us: Richard Appignanesi's Lenin for Beginners, an illustrated guide to Lenin's life and thought designed for newcomers to Lenin and the Russian Revolution. Despite having lots of pictures and goofy cartoons, it's very much not dumbed down - it simply provides an accessible intro to concepts which can seem obscure in Lenin's own writing (given translation issues and the old-world style of a man from the 19th century).

Find the text here (uploaded by me personally to Riseup Share, an encrypted service): https://share.riseup.net/#sk4GQeoLBxlb5U-Dn9D19w

With No, Really: What is to be done?, we'll be taking a deep dive into revolutionary Marxism with a read-through of texts like Lars Lih's Lenin rediscovered: what is to be done? in Context, non-standard biographies like Carter Ellwood's Non-Geometric Lenin: Essays on the Development of the Bolshevik Party 1910-1914 as well as some articles, essays and discussion prompts which most readers likely won't have encountered before.

Take care and happy reading!

IMPERIAL OVER-REACH: Iran, Ecuador & the Strait of Hormuz [INTERNATIONAL]

Fri, Mar 20 · 9:30 PM GMT

·

Online

Online

Welcome back, international readers! The subject of our next online discussion group really needs no introduction. In the past weeks, the United States and Israel finally made good on decades of drunken neocon boasting and launched an illegal all-out aerial attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran. All this so shortly after the ill-fated regime-change attempt in Venezuela, threats against Greenland, the ongoing economic strangulation of Cuba, and now, another imperial warfront in Ecuador.

No reading for this one - we'll be having an open discussion about the latest developments in geopolitics and their effects on all of us, particularly with regards to the economic meltdowns this latest eruption of imperial bloodlust has already created. Tom Stevenson's recent article in LRB is a good overview of the Iran situation.

We'll finally be using the encrypted Jitsi Meet service, courtesy of our friends at NerdVPN, an infosec/tech collective with no affiliation to the major VPN service of a similar name.

As of writing, the situation has escalated far beyond what US imperialist war planners seemed to be ready for, or at least what they tried to make the public ready for with their initial media spin. Say the line, Bart: what was supposed to be a two-week limited operation now, according to US war chief Pete Hegseth, looks set to last "eight weeks", which of course really means it can and will go on indefinitely.

And no wonder. Iranian retaliation has seen the entire Gulf region go into full-on panic mode as hypersonic missiles rain down on US bases across Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, the UAE, Qatar... Since this is a war for which the US-Zionist partnership had such a long time to prepare, let's consider the US military's own internal analysis of the situation. Former CENTCOM Commander Frank "Spuds" McKenzie wrote in 2024, “The United States will not be able to maintain these bases in a full-throated conflict, because they will be rendered unusable by sustained Iranian attack. It is the simple tyranny of geography.” Things do seem to be doing that way as admissions are finally made that all that billion-dollar hardware can't stop every Iranian missile or drone from landing. And supplies of interceptors are running out - not to be refilled. For the Gulf states, the imperialists' so-called friends, this is a death sentence, at least for their status as economic and trade hubs. As Middle East Eye reports, “The US is “stonewalling” requests by some Gulf states to replenish their air defence interceptors as pressure mounts on them to join the US and Israel in their war on Iran".

The death and destruction unleashed by the imperialists is breathtaking in its cruelty. Despite what Zionist trolls online have been saying for days, the US has now admitted it was "likely responsible" for the mass killing of 140 Iranian schoolgirls in an unprovoked, illegal strike in Minab, Hormozgan Province. This war crime was probably facilitated by Anthropic's Claude AI along with thousands of other "precision strikes" on the country.

But perhaps things don't seem so bad from where you're sitting. To be fair, after all, I've got it pretty good, things could be wors-- oh! There goes the global economy. All those missile strikes on the Gulf weren't going to leave markets and supply chains untouched. A few days ago, QatarEnergy declared "force majeure" - meaning that, due to circumstances beyond its control, it could no longer fulfil contracts. Energy exports from Qatar have completely halted, and Saudi production has fallen dramatically as operations halted at Ras Tanura, the world's largest oil refinery, after an Iranian drone strike. Already, Brent crude oil prices were up 10-133% as of the other day and liquified natural gas (LNG) up by even more. And it will get worse: as Energy Minister Saad al-Kaabi told the Financial Times in an ​interview published on Friday, “Qatar expects all Gulf energy producers to shut ​down exports within weeks and drive ‌oil to $150 a barrel ... Everybody that has ​not called for force majeure we expect ⁠will do so in the next ​few days that this continues. All exporters in ​the Gulf region will have to call force majeure".

Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of global oil trade and 83% of LNG supplies pass, remains effectively closed. Major container shipping companies including MSC, Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd have all suspended transits. Shipping is now too risky to be insurable, and therefore coming to a stop. According to Insurance Journal, "Marine insurers are canceling war risk coverage for vessels and oil shipping rates are set to surge further after the widening Iran conflict left at least three tankers damaged, a seafarer killed and 150 ships stranded around the Strait of Hormuz." Can a $20 billion US-backed reinsurance fund turn the ships around? Time will tell.

On the US home front, economically speaking, things have gone from bad to worse in the blink of an eye. The economy of the imperial core shed 92,000 jobs in the month of February, "far below the expected gain of 55,000 jobs. Unemployment ticked up to 4.4%, rather than the expected 4.3%." Financial markets, unmoored as they always are from reality, have had a turbulent week, with many investors taking a "complacent" view of the Gulf conflict and its knock-on effects on energy, agricultural production (which relies on fossil fuels for fertiliser), and more. Many have wondered why all this geopolitical risk hasn't been "priced in" to stock prices, with the Dow up even as the Nasdaq and S&P 500 fall. Do investors really know something we don't? Or has investor sentiment simply not yet revealed itself in the fullness of its panic? It's hard to say, because BlackRock's $26 billion Private Credit Fund recently put a block on withdrawals as investors clamoured to get their money out. That can't be a good sign.

All told, we may - or may not - be teetering on the edge of the long-awaited economic "big one"; the financial crash to put 2008 to shame. We shall see.

Join us and give us your read on things as us situation-monitor-ers continue to monitor the situation!

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle: PART TWO [Chapters 3-6]

Thu, Apr 2 · 7:30 PM BST

LARC, 62 Fieldgate Street Next to East London Mosque E1 1ES, London, GB

"In this complex and terrible development which has carried the epoch of class struggles toward new conditions, the proletariat of the industrial countries has completely lost the affirmation of its autonomous perspective and also, in the last analysis, its illusions, but not its being. It has not been suppressed. It remains irreducibly in existence within the intensified alienation of modern capitalism[.]"

- Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

Welcome back readers! By popular request, we're bringing back (for a new generation of LMRG readers) an old favourite: the always-relevant Guy Debord and his masterful Society of the Spectacle.

This is meeting two, where we'll be reading the fourth, fifth and sixth chapters.

Find the classic text here: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm

Or an alternative, possibly more readable translation here: https://files.libcom.org/files/The%20Society%20of%20the%20Spectacle%20Annotated%20Edition.pdf

Often maligned as theorymaxxed nonsense but little-read, this slim volume is certainly dense with ideas - all of which carry as much relevance today as those half-forgotten postwar years when the Situationist International made its mark on the world, if not more. With the rise of the Internet and social media, the decline of literacy and the closing of the mass mind, the endless doom-loop of doomscrolling and bed-rotting, increasingly performative protest, the commodification of everything, the Epstein-approved culture war, and the theatre of spectacular cruelty that is imperialist colonial policy from Gaza to Venezuela, we really are living an age where everything that was once directly participated in has passed into representation. Every hand-grip one searches for to get some kind of grasp on the world seems to be a mirage; "participation" in anything, from politics to culture, has been reduced to fandom - limited to nothing more than expressing approval or disapproval through totally mediated social media platforms.

Above it all stands an utterly corrupt, irresponsible elite class more and more transparent in how it relishes in conspiratorial play, power-games with unlimited stakes for us and no consequences for them. Such a world where power wears a shit-eating grin and keeps us off our balance by endlessly "flooding the zone" (in Steve Bannon's terms) with distractions so intricate they short-circuit the collective brain is exactly what Debord not only predicted but described in frightening detail, with more than a little bit of humour.

So let's dig in and find out: just what can we do to unplug from the spectacle? Is the spectacle even un-plug-from-able? Debord haters, cope and seethe: as a much more orthodox Marxist than he ever gets credit for, there really are some strategies in here. We just need to be creative.

Take care and happy reading!