Ideology

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Fri Feb 03, 2023 4:00 pm

Movement must analyze catastrophe in USSR
February 3, 2023 Sam Marcy

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Moscow workers defending Soviet socialism clashed with Boris Yeltsin’s riot police in October 1993. Thousands were massacred with the approval of President Bill Clinton’s administration.

Sam Marcy, a leading Marxist thinker and fighter of the second half of the 20th century, died 25 years ago on Feb. 1, 1998. To mark the occasion, Struggle-La Lucha is publishing a selection of Marcy’s articles that demonstrate the breadth and depth of his analysis and strategic thought on behalf of the workers and oppressed, while also providing insight into today’s struggles.

Marcy delivered the following statement on May 4, 1994, to a session of the International Seminar of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations in Brussels, Belgium.

We are submitting this statement in the hope it will contribute to a fuller discussion of the basic issue for our epoch — namely, what is the meaning of the collapse of the USSR?

There can be no question that this is the most important of all political issues. It would serve no purpose to shove it under the rug, even if that could be done, because the imperialist bourgeoisie and their kept press and media will invariably bring it up again and again. The movement would be defenseless without a thought-out approach to combat the propaganda of the bourgeoisie and their social-democratic helpers.

It is first necessary to understand that the contemporary struggle reduces itself in essence to a struggle between two diametrically opposed social systems based on two mutually antagonistic class structures.

It is impossible to have a discussion about the class struggle and the road to socialism unless we have some definite, although unfinished, view of Russia today and of how the greatest and most profound social and political revolution has been undone.

It would be most unfortunate if the discussion reduced itself to merely a defense of the positions of Stalin, Trotsky, Mao or others. Their importance in the historic evolution of the communist movement will not suffer if we proceed according to an evaluation of political and theoretical concepts, rather than the individual leaders who may stand for them. To do otherwise is not worthy of revolutionary communists who are seriously attempting to find their way out of the catastrophic predicament in which all socialists and revolutionary Marxist-Leninists in particular find themselves today.

Attributing the catastrophic destruction of the USSR solely to the policies of individual leaders, or even to a collection of them, is contrary to the materialist interpretation of history.

The ancient slave system, for example, produced many brilliant leaders. The bourgeois historians attribute the decline and fall of the Roman Empire to the fault of these leaders.

But what do Marxists say about the relation of these leaders to the ancient Roman and Greek empires? That slavery was becoming an outmoded social system. It was not the leaders who caused the collapse of these empires. It was the decay of slavery.

Bourgeois historiography puts the subjective causes first. They regard slavery, feudalism and especially capitalism as eternal categories. But the internal struggles of the leaders, the murders, the poisonings, all this symbolized the decay of the institution of slavery.

Nevertheless, we don’t want to deny the role of leadership. Leadership is crucial when the objective situation is ripe.

But leadership is not a substitute for the class. All history attests to that.

According to Marxist doctrine, no social system ever passes away without first fully exhausting its possibilities. The USSR had not exhausted its possibilities for growth. Its growth was aborted by a combination of internal corrosion and external pressures.

Does the collapse of the USSR undermine the nature of the contemporary struggle in capitalist society?

Of course, the overthrow of the Soviet Union enormously strengthened the power of capital all over the world, if only by virtue of the fact that it removed an enormous source of revolutionary energy, encouragement and material aid to the proletariat, oppressed peoples and all socialist countries.

Nevertheless, it must be very clearly affirmed that the nature of the class struggle as outlined by Marx in the Communist Manifesto remains wholly valid today.

The inevitability of the dictatorship of the proletariat on a world scale remains valid, despite the defeat in the USSR.

The main thing is to identify the basic forces in contemporary society. These still are the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. And what Marx said about them in 1848 is still basically true.

Should we return to Marx’s concept of the class struggle as outlined in the Communist Manifesto? That would also entail and fortify an understanding of the dictatorship of the proletariat as the rule of the workers and oppressed masses.

The need is for all revolutionary communists to unite on the basis of a common struggle against capitalist exploitation and imperialist oppression. It is not necessary for any grouping to abandon its propaganda in support of the views of individual leaders.

What is needed is the broadest united front of revolutionary communist groupings, as long as they adhere to the spirit of revolutionary class struggle as generally promoted by Lenin in his writings on admission to the Communist International.

In the course of further discussion, we will surely find out where we stand and how to continue the struggle for revolutionary Marxism-Leninism in this very difficult period.

The name of Lenin is a kind of synonym for revolutionary class struggle. The failure to agree on that is in reality a line of demarcation between communism and social democracy, with its various hues.

It would be a great achievement to be able to set aside secondary aspects and unite on the general understanding of the nature of our epoch and the tasks of the working class and the oppressed masses.

We must affirm in the strongest terms that the present expansionist period of U.S. monopoly capital is the most dangerous and aggressive since the collapse of the USSR. But the disintegration of the socialist camp does not necessarily add up to permanent stability for imperialism. It is unable to stabilize itself and the unbridled forces of capitalist production lead it inevitably into a new crisis.

What the collapse of the USSR confirms is that the world center of economic activity is and has remained in the imperialist countries — the “West” — whereas the revolutionary center of gravity has been in the “East” — the oppressed nations of the world, the bulk of humanity.

But today the material foundations are being laid for a return of revolutionary activity to the West.

The further development of monopoly capitalism in this stage will inevitably produce devastating convulsions within the imperialist system.

The present so-called capitalist prosperity in the United States, which the Clinton administration in particular is so boastful of, rests on a decrepit foundation. It conceals the extent of capitalist overproduction and the enormous debt that U.S. capitalist expansion has incurred.

For the moment, the analysts of imperialist finance capital have neglected to call this to the attention of the broad public. Such revelations coming at a time of high confidence could prove devastating to the so-called financial community.

It may be 1929 all over again. Whether this period is of a shorter or longer duration is impossible to say. What we have to prepare for is the next phase in this development. We must not be caught off guard.

Holding a firm position on the nature of monopoly capitalism — which, as Lenin pointed out, is really the precursor for socialist revolution — we can only view the future with confidence.

Source: Marxists Internet Archive

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2023/ ... e-in-ussr/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Sat Feb 04, 2023 3:43 pm

How many times can one skin an Ox / Сколько шкур можно содрать с вола
№ 1/77.I.2023

In Lenin’s work “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. A Popular Outline,” Lenin referred to certain international conduct as if they were “skinning an ox twice.” For example, a German bank issues a loan to a borrowing country (so interest is paid by the borrower to the lender, which is Germany), then Germany profits again from the same loan when the money is used by the debtor country to buy commodities from the lending country, which is also Germany herself. Therefore, it can be said that an ox (i.e. the debtor) is being skinned twice.

However, If a country can be skinned twice, then a proletarian can be skinned many more times. Here are a few sources that one can think of[1]:

1. Bourgeois wage theft: Here, proletarians are simply not paid according to the hours they have worked. This is illegal by bourgeois law, but is still often practiced. Straight up robbery. This is the only one recognized by bourgeois law, all the other ones are completely legal.

2. Absolute surplus value: 2 hours of labor time is needed to maintain oneself, 6 hours of surplus value goes to the capitalist.

3. Relative surplus value: as technology improves, 1 hour is actually needed to maintain oneself, but the working day remains the same, so now 7 hours of surplus value goes to the capitalist (up from 6 hours).

4. Supply and demand effect: because of the reserved army of the unemployed, the capitalist is free (and there is your so-called bourgeois “freedom,” by the way) to decrease wages even further, and proletarians will have to accept these low wages or face starvation and/or eviction. While terrorizing the proletariat with starvation and/or eviction is one way to drive down wages, the opposite can be used as well. I have seen many workers worry that even meager increases of their own salaries resulting from union struggles may bankrupt their workplaces, so they would actually refrain from participating in union struggles. Therefore, when appropriate, the bourgeoisie will terrorize in certain circumstances but it can also act pathetic in other situations.

5. An extra job: The proletariat needs to pick up an extra job to make up for stolen wages to survive, surplus value for the capitalist class is increased further.

6. Increased rate of exploitation: For example, for nurses during the COVID19 pandemic, the burnouts were simply not replaced, so you end up with one nurse doing two nurses’ work, causing even more burnouts. This can be thought of as doing 1.5X to 2X the job in the same period of time.[2] As the nurses quit, the capitalist would have already exploited them at an increased rate. When a capitalist throws a worker away, the worker still exists (imagine that!), so the stealing from proletarians does not stop even when the nurse quits (see point #10).

7. Merchant’s capital: Proletarian buying a commodity at higher price above value. Monopoly price falls under here. Demand does not change the value of a commodity; however, within the bourgeois marketplace, demand allows the price to be increased for swindling to happen.

8. Distress sale: Proletariat selling their personal commodities/properties at a lower price than it should be.

9. Proletarians provide the means of production: In some cases, proletarians have to buy their own equipment to be used for private profit creation. These equipment are bought out of the proletariat’s wages that remain after appropriation by parasites (in the form of rent, profit, and interest, etc). The deterioration of these equipment occurs when the proletariat is creating private profit for the capitalist, so the proletariat is being robbed again.

10. Physical and emotional exhaustion: Because of the increased rate of exploitation, capitalists wear out proletarians mentally and physically. In the USA, a nurse who quits may not get unemployment benefits, which the nurse paid into in the first place. Furthermore, if the traumatized nurse needs to attend therapy to treat her mind, then she is paying for the damage the capitalist caused out of her own pockets, which is a problem she had no hand in creating. Moreover, dear reader, what price tag do you put on your leg? Your mind?[3] These are priceless things.

11. Education: What is a proletariat? The proletariat are a propertyless class of workers in a capitalist economy. Before they became the proletariat, under the feudal system, they were largely self-sufficient peasants. Then they were violently displaced as land was being concentrated by a few and into pasture for animal products as seen in the 15th and 16th century in England during the prelude to the industrial revolution. The peasants’ land was then lost to big landowners and capitalists. Eventually, the proletariat became fully dependent on capitalists to survive. In today’s economy, to survive means that a proletarian needs to have appropriate skills in order for capitalists to choose them and to exploit them. Therefore, It is wholly the duty of the capitalists to feed and train up proletarians for exploitation through public education (here is the equality that the Western bourgeoisie love to talk about, by the way). Now the capitalists and their representatives do not even want to pay for that. Instead, the modern capitalists make the proletariat “pay” to train themselves for their own future enslavement by the capitalists. To describe the situation, we can hardly refrain from using the word “efficient,» a word which modern college students and graduates are trained to repeat ad nauseam as a virtue, and never do they realize that being “efficient means cutting of wages and benefits.

12. Insurance: Insurance profits by getting many people to buy it. As long as the amount of insurance claims is lower than total insurance premiums and operating costs, the insurance company is making money. A state can easily perform the functions done by insurance companies at lower costs. Of course, the difference between the total premiums and claim cost is money without equivalence that is paid to the insurance companies, which allows insurance CEOs and their hangers-on to buy mansions and houses. Gambling and the lottery works in a similar manner; as long as there are enough people playing the lottery and the prize money does not exceed the total money spent on the tickets and operating costs, the capitalists can cross their arms and let the cash roll in again and again. Insurance is one branch of surplus value.

13. Competitive spirit of the proletariat: when you put proletarians together, they often compete against each other and perform their work more efficiently. This is free for capitalists, and has no equivalence for the proletariat. The wage for workers is in fact effectively lowered, since more work is done per unit time than originally.

14. Combined ability of the proletariat: When proletarians work together, they work together such that the outcome is better than the sum of its parts. This is also free for capitalists, and also has no equivalence for the proletariat. For example: one person moves stones from point A to point B. With more workers, the application of labor reaches a higher quality that the people pass the stones along themselves without any of the workers walking from point A to point B at all.

15. Rent: Rent is recognized as parasitic even by classical economists. Landlords can charge as much as the proletarian can afford. Price has nothing to do with the value of creating the housing in question. Population growth, technological advancement, and fertility of nature increases the land price a landlord can charge, but these endowments are not created by the landlords in any way.

16. Loans: When proletarians are unable to afford school, they often take out loans. The bank creates credit using keystrokes on a computer. Even bourgeois states can conceivably perform the same function without paying bank executives obscene salaries. The interest that students pay is money without equivalence for the banks. In the United States, public transportation is decimated such that cars are absolutely necessary. Often, proletarians take out loans to purchase cars, along with houses. In summary, merchant’s capital & exploitation of labor creates a situation where workers cannot afford the commodities that they themselves have created, so proletarians resort to take out loans to buy their own goods; in the process, they are skinned another time by the loans, which enrich the banks. Furthermore, an indebted economy becomes fragile, culminating in financial crises.

17. Internships & volunteer work: guess what, proletarians? If employers say it’s not work, then it’s not work, even though value is created and someone is selling goods and services created by these processes! Hey, youngsters, you are gaining experience! It’s an investment for the future!

18. Tax avoidance: Tax avoidance by big private entities means that the proletariat have to foot the bill. For example, one hears about the 100 billion USD of tax bills avoided by Microsoft. Even if Microsoft pays the appropriate amount of so-called progressive taxes, it still does not mean all is well, since those values ultimately belong to the proletariat, not the capitalists, even if the capitalists pay taxes according to the most left-wing of economic theories. By the way, Microsoft is very happy to hire some bright and lucky college graduates whose education it tries tooth and nail to NOT fund by avoiding taxes.

19. Charity: often proletarians themselves pay charity to help the sections that have been ruined by capitalism. The mechanism is this: the capitalist extracts too much from the proletariat, causing social problems, then the proletariat willingly foot a portion of the bill to help the section of the ruined proletariat out of the kindness of their own hearts. The proletariat pays for the problem the capitalists created out of their own pockets. Food assistance and other programs fall into this category. Importantly, the bourgeois philanthropists may ostensibly look like they are committing to charity (like Carnegie & Koch billionaires funding libraries and research laboratories) but since their wealth came from exploitation, these charities are nothing but a charade. In effect, It is paying the victim of a robbery by giving the victim back a portion of the robbed total. In truth, the bourgeoisie has never done any charity, ever, in the history of mankind.

20. Trade unions: When wages are not enough, proletarians spontaneously organize into unions to fight the employers for wage increase. While it is a fantastic learning experience for the proletariat, much time and energy is spent in meetings, organizing, and representation. While some better unions often promote workers themselves to be the mainstay of representational and organizational work, often unions pay union staff to perform these duties instead, the result is time and money cost from day-to-day union work and from strikes. One argument for unions is that a person gains more from union contracts than the union due that one put in. In the banal bourgeois view, it is true, but Marxist economics tells us that the value from labor belongs ultimately to the proletariat. Therefore, for the proletariat to spend extra time and money on unions to get back a portion of appropriated labor is an extra unnecessary cost for the proletariat.

21. Unemployment: Capitalist economy is defined by persistent high unemployment (and lately, underemployment). The greatest saving for capitalists is to eliminate workers from the workplace, which increases surplus value and allows further exploitation of the remaining workers. Capitalists will cut workers so much that infrastructure and basic services suffer. Persistent high unemployment may mean that those remaining workers work at increased intensity of labor and leads to increased charity cost (paying for welfare programs & mental health). Family and relatives often have to pick up the tab for unemployed individuals. Familial conflicts arise because it is easy for ignorant proletarians to blame the unemployed individual, but not the system and the so-called university “intellectuals” for causing and not resolving these problems, respectively. Today, unemployment is hidden using the narrow definition of unemployment. However, If we look at the labor force participation rate or the employment-population ratio around the world, the world capitalist societies have still yet to recover from the 2008 financial crisis when unproductive lending parasitism caused a crash of the entire global economy. Uniquely, unemployment lowers the material well being of proletarians since the unemployed are not producing anything and are not building skills either, even if they are exploited in the process. Often, individuals can become permanently unemployed or have rendered skilless during their prime years. It is therefore a staggering cost to the proletariat financially and is especially traumatic for the unemployed persons as well as their family members. Finally, conservatives in the United States love to compete with each other in hollow conversations to see who among the soulless half-wits is more mean to the poor. The English monarchs have tried all sorts of brutal ways to “discourage” the unemployed who were created by the expropriation of land by lords and capitalists.[4] They were all unsuccessful.

22. Bourgeois government and its officials: Proletariat spend money on a government, officials, police, and “representatives” who maintain capitalism and their own oppression by extension. It’s a cost for the proletariat. 24/7 news cycle and mindless election every four years to waste population’s money and time on whether a particular running dog of private property relations triumphs over another running dog of private property relations. In the United States, bourgeois elections have been very successful in distracting the proletariat and turning the ignorant proletariat against each other.

23. Other Indirect costs: Once capitalists amass fortunes, some of the hoard is reinvested to yield profits, inevitably driving up prices.[5] This money also warps politics and culture. Now, the proletariat have to spend extra money in other areas and also their time off to figure out how to fight capitalists encroaching more and more into every other aspect of life. This is a broad category of extra costs to the proletariat as they pay extra money and time to try to halt social degeneration caused by capitalists. Furthermore, when proper infrastructure can’t be built due to lack of funds, natural disasters destroy much more value than necessary, which is also an extra cost that the proletariat need to pay when a disaster occurs. Finally, often capitalism drives people insane, so parents and relatives have to spend extra time and pay money to help their family, which is also an unnecessary and tragic cost to society. My dear reader can surely come up with other examples belonging to this category, such as spending money on recreational drugs to dull the pain and misery, or on video games to deliberately turn off one’s mind to the darkness of capitalism.

24. Warfare: values created by the proletariat are lost in war. These values are lost to another country or destroyed forever. If the proletariat don’t lose their lives, they lose their property at a minimum. Even if they revolt, the proletariat cannot regain this lost value from the capitalist class. Furthermore, even before any conflict, much resources are devoted to create/mobilize warmachines and armies, these violent endeavors consume so much time and labor that other areas inevitably suffer massively as opportunity cost. The proletariat has no power to object to war policies. Here is the “democracy” our bourgeois professors keep telling students about. I know, “democracy” could work if we reform here and there and so on and so forth…blah blah blah. our readers can fill in the excuses.

Ultimately, if we put all points above into a beaker and boil on a hotplate, then we will see that they all essentially boil down to point #1 wage theft, viz. value is extracted from the proletariat by the capitalists without equivalence. However, since surplus value is not offered up as wages, the sleight of hand on the proletariat serves its purpose. So far, “proletarian leaders” have not been able to identify this and agitate along this line.
Comrades, some people ask why are people so poor and why is there so much inequality. The proper question should be the opposite: how can people NOT be poor!? In reality, as a class, the capitalists steal value from the exploited proletarian class as a whole, and the capitalists have many ways to do so; many of which are work related and are ultimately permitted by private property relations and the bourgeois state enforcing them.

Literate working class leaders must have the ability to move past the most obvious point #1. Much of the above can be found in or deduced after reading volume 1 of capital, which every leftist purports to have read. However, one starts to question if they have really done their homework, since they generally believe that passing some program or winning a union contract is enough for the proletariat. I know leftists would say that they are aware of some of the issues above. Yes, but if they are aware of them and yet they still favor reform?[6] The proletariat needs to train leaders who do not read and learn to just pass exams, who then forget all the knowledge as soon as the exam is over.

Recently, in the West, a somewhat more realistic but nevertheless bourgeois economic theory called Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)[7] states that the bourgeois state can perform overt monetary financing (deficit spending) to increase employment without the risk of inflation (essentially Keynesianism with a new coat of paint in terms of policy prescription). However, make no mistake, most of the problems that we have reviewed above will remain and will get worse. We have seen capitalists sucking up all the extra spending from COVID stimulus and they shall do so again if we somehow are able to perform direct job creation. Furthermore, America will still be imperialist, the proletariat are still being exploited, employers will still have power over workers, and the state is still a bourgeois dictatorship along its powerful media apparatus and educational system that one has to fight tooth and nail just to get some exposure to an alternative view. On the other hand, a realistic scientific economic theory should focus on energy, labor, and other real resources, as variables for analyses. In any case, no matter how insightful these economic theories are, the bourgeois dictatorship will not allow any change in direction. Much like the ruling classes of the past, the bourgeoisie cannot and will not even tolerate any reduction of its domination in the economic sphere and the omnipotence of private enterprise; it will always escalate to match the proletariat’s efforts and fight the proletariat tooth and nail to defend their dominance and monopoly of job creation and to maintain the proletariat in a dependent position, which is the class struggle. Yes, our ignorance (particularly for the leaders) needs to be overcome, but telling the public that we all simply have to change our perspective is an idealistic way of “solving problems» as Marx identified in the 19th century. If we (well, who are “we”? The proletariat or the petit-bourgeois?) are talking about gaining political power, then the theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism is much more insightful than simply telling people the “new” idea of voting for candidates who would represent them, which we have done for decades already and still end up where we are now. Let us be clear: if the proletariat wants to reach the promised land, it must remove the bourgeois dictatorial state and create a proletarian dictatorial state and the guiding theory is Marxism-Leninism. The rich history of the communist struggles of the past can inspire us and also give us an idea on how to apply the theory to our particular struggles, along with teaching us what pitfalls to avoid.

If opportunism means to derail the historical task of the proletariat to create its own state, to eliminate private property & exploitation, to create economic equality, and to run society scientifically; our reader can see that limiting oneself to economic analyses and economic theories (even then they do not do it with enough clarity when compared to Marxist economics, as the reader can see above) easily turns into opportunism. Finally, we are not against fighting for certain economic concessions from the bourgeoisie, but the goal of socialism and communism must instead be the primary considerations for the conscious and scientifically literate proletarian leaders. If a concession from the bourgeoisie stops the proletariat from realizing its historical task, then it is bribery; but if a concession from the bourgeoisie is taken yet the goal of communism is still the primary objective, then such a concession should be seen as a captured resource by the advancing movement of socialism & communism. With this new resource, the proletariat are inspired and are able to launch even more daring assaults against capital in order to secure the ultimate victory of communism.

Huoshan
28/01/2023

___https://prorivists.org/77_ox/

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"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Mon Mar 06, 2023 4:13 pm

The Comprehensive Crisis in the US And the Revolutionary Way Forward
MARCH 5, 2023

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Cartoon showing Uncle Sam pointing his finger between the fire and some buildings in the background. Photo: File photo.

By Carlos L. Garrido – Mar 1, 2023

The United States tells the world and its citizenry that it is the best country on the planet, where freedom and democracy reign, and where an American dream exists which affords all the opportunity to live flourishing ‘middle class’ lives with white picket fence homes and two automobiles. However, for the working masses of the United States, as the great comedic critic George Carlin noted, “it’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.”[1] When awake, what the American masses experience is the American nightmare; lives plagued by stagnant wages, inflation, and various forms of crippling debt. In the era of an empire in decline, the inhabitants of the belly of the beast find their conditions more and more unbearable. What the American working class is experiencing is an era of comprehensive crisis which has infiltrated every sphere of the capitalist mode of life.

The Marxist position on social revolution recognizes that there are two central factors, or conditions, which must exist for a revolution to take place. The first are the objective conditions, or what is also referred to as a “revolutionary situation;”[2] the second are the subjective conditions, which corresponds to the consciousness and organization of the working masses and the vanguard party. In this section I will argue that the objective conditions for revolution are largely present in the US, and that whatever might be missing will arrive with the forthcoming general crisis of capital, expected to hit sometime in the next two years. However, I will argue that the emergence of the subjective conditions are fettered by the purity fetish which prevails in the socialist movement. Since it is the militants in this movement which are tasked with bringing the masses into the struggle for socialism, the overcoming of this purity fetish presents the precondition for a successful counter-hegemonic project. Lenin and the experience of the Bolshevik revolution shows that “the role of the vanguard fighter can be fulfilled only by a party that is guided by the most advanced theory.”[3] It is dialectical materialism, that outlook which Engels called Marxism’s “best working tool [and] sharpest weapon,” which can both cure the purity fetish of the socialist movement and afford it the means to realize its historically revolutionary role.[4]

Objective Conditions in The U.S.
There are a plethora of factors which, when analyzed comprehensively, can point to the existence of objectively revolutionary conditions in the U.S. “Since the late 1970s,” as the Economic Policy Institute reports, “wages for the bottom 70 percent of earners have been essentially stagnant, and between 2009 and 2013, real wages fell for the entire bottom 90 percent of the wage distribution.”[5] In no state of the US is the federal minimum wage ($7.25) enough to survive; even if it is raised to $15 – as the democratic socialists and other progressives have called for – the minimum wage would still not be enough for a working class family to survive anywhere in the country.[6] With stagnant wages and inflation at a 40 year high, almost 60% of Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck.[7] Many of these people are on the brinks of joining the 600,000 homeless people wandering around in a country with more than 17 million empty homes.[8] It is not surprising, in a country where there are 33 times more empty homes than homeless people, that 34 million people, including one in eight children, experience hunger while 30-40% of the U.S.’s food supply (40 million tons of food) is wasted every year.[9]

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As it becomes more difficult for working class Americans to survive, more and more have been forced to turn to borrowing. Currently, the average American “has $52,940 worth of debt across mortgage loans, home equity lines of credit, auto loans, credit card debt, student loan debt, and other debts.”[10] Additionally, because the US is the only developed country in the world without universal healthcare, the commodification of medicine has left more than half of Americans with such crippling medical debt that many have been prevented from “buying a house or saving for retirement”.[11] This same for-profit healthcare system found it unprofitable to take the measures necessary to properly prepare for the Covid pandemic, the result of which has been that the U.S., while being only 4% of the global population, accounts for more than 16% of the Covid deaths.[12] Meanwhile, socialist China has had only a very tiny fraction of the deaths found in the U.S. (0.49%) and has four times more people.

Although the U.S.’s post-WWII rise to the dominant imperialist force in the world afforded it the means to plunder its way into becoming the richest country on the planet, what one finds today is a decrepit empire with crumbling infrastructure consistently rated in the ‘D’ range.[13] While more than half of federal spending goes to sustaining the world’s most expensive military (spending more than the next 10 countries combined), many cities in the U.S., inhabited by millions of Americans, lack access to clean drinking water.[14] Additionally, the U.S. has been experiencing a “historic decline” in life expectancy; so much so that today the average Cuban, despite six decades of illegal blockades and hybrid warfare against their socialist project, lives around three years more than the average American.[15]

The hardships faced by the American people are intensified by the experience of living in one of the most economically unequal societies in human history, where even by conservative numbers the “top 0.1 percent hold roughly the same share of [the] wealth as our bottom 90 percent.”[16] In the U.S., the richest 59 Americans own more wealth than the poorest half of the population (165 million people).[17] While the majority of working class Americans face difficulties in meeting their everyday needs, the richest monopolists in the country, those who own what we watch, buy, and eat, have been getting richer than ever before.[18]

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However, the crisis most Americans are facing is not limited to their economic conditions. It is, instead, a comprehensive crisis which has rippled into all spheres of life, expressing itself through profound psychological and social ills. These can be seen in the millions affected by the opioid epidemic; in the rise in violent crime rates and school shootings; and in the mental health crisis where nearly a third of American adults are struggling with depression and anxiety.[19] All of these conditions are expected to be worsened by the forthcoming financial crisis, and of course, by the climate crisis and the effects it will produce in terms of migration and resource scarcity in various parts of the world.[20]

For more than a decade studies from bourgeois institutions have themselves confirmed what Marxists have known since the middle of the 19th century, namely, that “the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”[21] The U.S., which spreads its blood soaked hands around the world plundering in the name of democracy, has been outed as a place where the dēmos (common people) do anything but rule (kratos). As Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page show,

In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagree with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.[22]

Far from being the ‘beacon of democracy’ it fancies itself to be, what the U.S. has is a “democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich,” which is the essence of bourgeois democracy.[23] Or, in other words, what the U.S. actually has is an oligarchy. However, the American people, burdened by the conditions of moribund imperialism, have been catching up to the lies pundits and ideologues disseminate to sustain bourgeois hegemony. The U.S. has some of the lowest voter turnout rates in the developed world; around 40% of the population eligible to vote does not participate in presidential elections, and in local elections this number increases to around 73%.[24] More than 60% of Americans are dissatisfied with the two-party system and are ready for third party alternatives, and only around 20% approves of what congress does.[25] Naturally, it is difficult to participate in a political process one does not feel represented in. However, our two imperialist parties have reacted to this public dissatisfaction by cracking down on voting rights and on the ability for third parties to be on the ballot.[26] In addition, only 11% of Americans trust the media, 90% of which has been consolidated under the control of six companies.[27] Considering the aforementioned state of the American people, it is not surprising that despite countless resources dedicated to propagandize them against socialism, more than 40% of adults have a favorable view of socialism, and amongst millennials, polls show 70% would vote for a socialist candidate.[28]

In his pamphlet, “The Collapse of the Second International,” Lenin describes the symptoms of a revolutionary situation in the following manner:

What, generally speaking, are the symptoms of a revolutionary situation? We shall certainly not be mistaken if we indicate the following three major symptoms: (1) when it is impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their rule without any change; when there is a crisis, in one form or another, among the “upper classes”, a crisis in the policy of the ruling class, leading to a fissure through which the discontent and indignation of the oppressed classes burst forth. For a revolution to take place, it is usually insufficient for “the lower classes not to want” to live in the old way; it is also necessary that “the upper classes should be unable” to live in the old way; (2) when the suffering and want of the oppressed classes have grown more acute than usual; (3) when, as a consequence of the above causes, there is a considerable increase in the activity of the masses, who uncomplainingly allow themselves to be robbed in “peace time”, but, in turbulent times, are drawn both by all the circumstances of the crisis and by the “upper classes” themselves into independent historical action. Without these objective changes, which are independent of the will, not only of individual groups and parties but even of individual classes, a revolution, as a general rule, is impossible.[29]

These conditions constitute the objective factors one can generally find in a social revolution. In essence, as Lenin later stated concisely in Left-Wing Communism, “revolution is impossible without a nationwide crisis (affecting both the exploited and the exploiters).”[30] We have seen in the assessment above how the American masses are suffering more than usual, and additionally, how poll after poll has shown that they are unwilling to continue to live in the old way (e.g., immense disapproval of congress and the two-party system). These conditions are developing into what Gramsci called a “crisis of authority,” namely, the moment of a crisis when the “ruling class has lost its consensus [and] is no longer ‘leading’ but only ‘dominant.’”[31] As he famously argued, “the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”[32]

However, the masses’ dissatisfaction and their inability to live in the old way does not exhaust, as Lenin noted, all the conditions for an objectively revolutionary situation; first, the masses must not only be dissatisfied with the idea of continuing to live in the old way, they must also show the willingness to act, and secondly, the ruling class must itself be shaken by the crisis and in a position where they too cannot continue to rule in the old way.

The willingness of the dissatisfied masses to act can be seen in a variety of places: from the 2020 summer uprisings, where 25-35 million Americans protested the racist police state following the murder of George Floyd; to the 2021 ‘Striketober’ wave where hundreds of thousands of workers went on strike; to the mass unionization efforts coming from workers in Starbucks, Amazon (which is the second largest employer in the U.S.) and other industries; to the current crisis in the railroads, where the self-proclaimed ‘most pro-worker president’ (i.e., Biden) forced upon rail workers a contract they voted against, leading unions like Railroad Workers United to call for the nationalization of the railroads (amongst other radical demands).[33] However, all of these have been spontaneous movements (some less ephemeral than others) which have been largely unable to be elevated to the level of revolutionary consciousness and organization.[34] They represent, nonetheless, the prime matter with which a revolutionary organization may form a successful mass struggle for power.

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Have any of these conditions shaken the American ruling class? Do they find themselves unable to rule in the old way? Our response should be a resolute yes! The American empire, with its 900 bases around the world, used to be able to overthrow governments outside of its imperial sphere of influence with relative ease. In the international community, especially after the overthrow of the Soviet Union and the eastern socialist bloc, it achieved unparallel global hegemony, only opposed in the 1990s by Cuba and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. All things in this world, however, are in a constant state of flux, and sooner or later, it was expected that ‘the end of history’ would itself end, and that U.S./NATO imperialist unipolarity would be challenged. It is our era of flowering multipolarity which marks the fall the American empire, and with it, the ability of its rulers to ‘rule in the old way’.

Imperialism, it must be remembered, is not a separate political-military phenomenon governed by the set of foreign policies a nation takes. Instead, it is a stage of capitalism, where “the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.”[35] If the U.S. state, an instrument of American and transnational finance capital, is unable to internationally govern in the ways it used to – that is, if it is unable to continue the expropriation and superexploitation of the peoples of the world – this is not simply a ‘foreign policy’ crisis, but a crisis in the integral state.

From failed coup attempts in Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba, and other countries; to the failed ‘Summits of the Americas’; to failing proxy wars against Russia and China; it becomes an undeniable fact that the ruling class cannot continue ruling in the old way, that the age of American imperialist unipolarity is over. As the world continues to turn towards China for win-win relations in international trade; as la Patria Grande continues its leftward turn and its hemispheric unity against the U.S.’s Monroe Doctrine style engagement with the region; as movements towards de-dollarization occur across the planet; as European citizens continue to protest the exacerbation of their material conditions by the U.S. and NATO’s proxy war against Russia; this crisis in the ruling class will show itself to be more pronounced.

Additionally, what greater depiction of this crisis of legitimacy than the fact that both parties, over the last two presidential election cycles, have committed themselves to challenging the election results? First, with the election of Donald Trump in 2016 – a victory of course which was garnered while losing the popular vote – the democrats spent the next four years pushing the narrative that Trump colluded with Russia, and even attempted to impeach him over this. This, along with a long-standing history of anti-Soviet and anti-Russia propaganda, set the ideological grounds – especially amongst previously ‘anti-war’ liberals – for the Russia hysteria and Putin demonization driving the liberal thirst for WWIII now. Then, in 2020, the same was done by a significant portion of the republican party and by most of the MAGA base, who argued that the election was stolen by the democrats.

As Marxists know, democracy in liberal bourgeois states is limited to the peaceful transfer of power from one faction of the ruling class to another through elections. Today we can say that even this superficial appearance of democracy is crumbling. In doing so, we can see here another symptom of the ruling classes not being able to rule in the old way.

In essence, by every standard the Marxist tradition uses to assess objectively revolutionary conditions, we can say that the U.S. currently meets all of them and is heading towards making them only more pronounced in the coming months and years. However, “social revolution demands unity of objective and subjective conditions.”[36] As Lenin noted, “revolution arises only out of a situation in which the above-mentioned objective changes are accompanied by a subjective change, namely, the ability of the revolutionary class to take revolutionary mass action strong enough to break (or dislocate) the old government, which never, not even in a period of crisis, “falls”, if it is not toppled over.”[37]

Subjective Conditions in the US
The development of the subjective conditions for revolution is, in essence, synonymous with the development of a successful counter-hegemonic project – that is, with the development of an intellectual and moral vanguard that can win over the masses’ minds and hearts to the struggle for socialism. For Gramsci, “the starting point” of every counter-hegemonic struggle “must always be that common sense which is the spontaneous philosophy of the multitude and which has to be made ideologically coherent” by Marxist philosophy.[38] As Jean-Pierre Reed and myself have argued,

The intellectual leaders of a counter-hegemonic project will find that their theoretical weapon – the philosophy of praxis [dialectical materialism] – is null in persuading the masses insofar as it does not begin with a critical rearticulation of the popular beliefs the masses already hold. Within the incoherent, fragmentary, and contradictory clusters of beliefs which the masses hold, the intellectual leadership must find the kernels out of which socialist consciousness and emotions may develop… This educative process is comprehensive in character: the intellectual leadership does not simply wish to elevate the masses to a “higher conception of life,” but to a higher form of life in general – it is a transformation which modifies the outlook the masses have towards the world, and, alongside this, changes the masses’ desires, passions, emotions, and ethical life.[39]

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For the ideological and emotive rearticulation of the masses’ common sense and feelings, what is required from the intellectual leadership (i.e., the vanguard party) is a “dialectical and referential” relationship with the masses.[40] In order to successfully educate the masses, the vanguard must be grounded in them, they must learn from the masses and know them concretely. Its relationship with the masses must be “active and reciprocal,” such that “every teacher is always a pupil and every pupil a teacher.”[41] “The educator,” as the young Marx had noted, “must himself be educated.”[42]

This fundamental grounding in the working class is absent in the socialist ‘left’ in the U.S. There exists a profound gulf between the working class and socialist organizations, and what often comes to dominate in the latter is what Gus Hall called “petty bourgeois radicalism” – a mode of political practice and thinking which reflects the interests of the petty-bourgeoisie and, especially today, what Barbara and John Ehrenreich called the Professional Managerial Class (PMC).[43] We may refer to these class positions under the broader term of ‘middle class’. Nonetheless, what is important to note is that the class composition of the left in the US is dominated by this middle class.

This is not a new phenomenon. As Barbara and John Ehrenreich argued in the late 1970s,This ‘middle-class’ left, unlike its equivalent in early twentieth-century Europe or in the Third World today, is not a minority within a mass working class (or peasant) movement, it is, to a very large extent, the left itself.[44]

Although it is perfectly fine to include professionals, managers, and part of the petty-bourgeoisie in the socialist struggle, the base of any socialist organization must be the working masses, not these other classes which, although hurt by state-monopoly capital, bring with them class biases (some which are antagonistic to the working class) into the workers movement. Marx had already warned about the negative influence professionals could bring into the labor movement, and held that the precondition for professionals to be allowed within socialist organizations must be that “they should not bring with them the least remnant of bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, etc., prejudices, but should unreservedly adopt the proletarian outlook”.[45] It is impossible for these conditions to be met as the left stands today, where the PMC segment of the middle-class is the most dominant, and is composed of

Salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.[46]

This class functions and develops its political culture through what has been called the iron triangle institutions of academia, the media, and NGO’s.[47] Its engagements with the working class often leave the latter feeling as if they were approached by Human Resources (HR). The HR atmosphere estranges and repels working people while providing a warm home for more PMC individuals. This creates positive feedback loops that proliferate the influence of the PMC in socialist organizations. As Noah Khrachvik has argued:

It does not matter how nice or just the petty bourgeois radical’s ideas sound. It does not matter how many petty bourgeois radicals cancel the working class for not living up to [their] fantasy, or try to bully it into silence or subjugation to the lofty places the professionals and petty bourgeoisie occupy within their own minds–if the class interests of the proletariat are not being fulfilled–and more, if the proletariat does not see and understand that its interests are being fulfilled, then there will be no revolutionary motion or movement. There will be stagnation at best, and reaction at worst.[48]

However, the dominance of the PMC within socialist organizing in the U.S. is not a spontaneous phenomenon. It is grounded on a century of state sanctioned anti-communist attacks which have purged communists from trade unions and infiltrated socialist organizations to promote factionalism and forms of socialism which are compatible with the existing order. The work of Gabriel Rockhill on the “global theory industry” shows how, through groups like the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the works of classical authors from the Western Marxist tradition were propped up by a “political economy of knowledge” that was and is backed by Western capitalist state departments and intelligence agencies (as well as by major capitalist foundations like Rockefeller, Ford, etc.) which benefit from the dissemination of a compatible, anti-Communist ‘Marxism’ which, although critical of capitalism, denounces every socialist experiment seen around the world and justifies the wars of empire from the ‘left’ when it needs to.[49]

These are the objective forces grounding what I have called the purity fetish outlook of Western Marxism; an integrative term I use to comprehensively examine the abstract, idealist, and metaphysical obsession with only supporting or working with that which is pure. “For Western Marxists,” as I’ve previously argued,

the triumphant socialist experiments of the 20th and 21st century, in their mistakes and ‘totalitarianisms’, desecrate the purity in the holiness of their conception of socialism. The USSR must be rejected, the Spanish civil war upheld; Cuban socialism must be condemned, but the 1959 revolution praised; Allende and Sankara are idols, Fidel and Kim Il-Sung tyrants, etc. What has died in purity can be supported, what has had to grapple with the mistakes and pressures that arise out of the complexities and contradictions of building socialism in the imperialist phase of capitalism, that must be condemned.[50]

This is not only the only ‘Marxism’ which is acceptable within the American academy and civil society, but it has itself become an indispensable component for the defense of the existing order. This is a natural result of the fact that, if they genuinely consider (as they do) communism to be as evil as fascism, then bourgeois liberal democracy is, like the world Leibniz’s God has created, the best of all possible worlds. This makes it the ideal form of controlled opposition; an opposition that buys fully into Thatcher’s TINA (there is no alternative), and hence, will never substantially oppose the existing order, for it considers its alternative far worse. From a Gramscian perspective, this shows how controlled forms of ‘counter-hegemony’ have become necessary to sustain the hegemony of the existing order; and how the dominant institutions have been able to get ahead of the discontent capitalism creates by diverting dissenters into organizations and pathways of critique which don’t substantially threaten capitalist-imperialism.

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This position is pervasive in the Bernie Sanders and Democratic Socialist movement which composes the largest chunk of ‘socialist’ organizing in the US. For instance, in the 2019 socialism conference, hosted by the Democratic Socialists of America, Jacobin, and Haymarket Books, China, Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua were condemned as ‘authoritarian.’ Long behold, the following week a report from Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal would show that some of the hosted panelists had received aid from various imperialist organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy.[51] This raises an interesting paradox I have previously explored: “how can anyone be a socialist if they genuinely think each time a socialist or communist party has been in power, it has resulted in great failures? What sort of arrogance is required to claim that everyone in the third world has failed at socialism, but we, the virtuous West, we are the ones who will succeed!”[52]

This purity fetish position concerning socialist states is not only verifiably false, but revolutionary futile! Why would the working class follow something which has always failed? Especially since the working class under discussion has been generationally breastfed anti-communist propaganda. When workers ask the purity fetish Marxists: ‘why would I organize for socialism if the media, schools, and my family have always told me that it leads to poverty, genocide, and societal failure?’ what can the response of these ‘socialists’ be? Considering they themselves accept the same propaganda the workers have been force-fed to believe, it would look something like: ‘yes, yes, that is all true, the problem is that those attempts at socialism were never actually socialism; socialism is really this beautiful idea that exists in its pure form in my head’. To accept struggling for socialism, the worker under discussion would have to be as infantile and simple-minded as the socialist he speaks to.

Instead of this, socialists and communists should be using the immense successes achieved by socialism in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Bolivia, etc. as examples for what socialism can achieve even while under the boot of constant hybrid warfare from the global imperialist system. We must be able to show our working class what socialism has and can provide for the mass of people. Before this can be achieved, the left must be able to remove the blinders which have dogmatically made it have a narrow, imperialist-friendly, view of socialist and anti-imperialist states. They must be able to engage in a concrete study of past and present socialist experiments, to learn from their successes, and to understand their mistakes within their proper context, not in an abstract and ahistorical manner.

In the context of the US, the purity fetish also manifests itself in the assessment of which parts of the working class are ‘pure’ enough to organize, and which must be left alone in fear of contamination. If a large chunk of the working class is socially conservative, and henceforth, fails to meet all the purity markers the enlightened PMC left has set as the a priori conditions for approval, they will be rejected as – in the words of Hillary Clinton – a “basket of deplorables,” or worst, as ‘fascists’ uncapable of being brought to the socialist movement. For these Marxists the traditional communist slogan is no longer “workers and oppressed people of the world unite,” it is “socially enlightened workers and oppressed people of the world unite.” These ‘Marxists’ don’t see in the millions of working class Americans who voted for Trump a group of people deceived by Trump’s shallow and fake anti-establishment discourse; they don’t see that what is implicit in that vote is a desire for something new, something which only the socialist movement, not Trump or any bourgeois party, could provide. Instead, they see in this large chunk of the working class a bunch of racists bringing forth a ‘fascist’ threat which can only be defeated by tailing the democrats. Silly as it may sound, this policy dominates the contemporary communist movement in the U.S.

The purity fetish preeminent in Western Marxism forgets that, as Lenin said, one “can (and must) begin to build socialism, not with abstract human material, or with human material specially prepared by us, but with the human material bequeathed to us by capitalism.”[53] Communists cannot pop into existence a ‘pure’ working class from a void, they must learn how to organize all workers irrespective of the differences the ruling class foists on the working masses to divide them. Communists must understand that the backwardness the working class may have will not be overcome if one ignores them – this will only lead them into the hands of the fascists, who are always a contending force in capitalism’s moments of crisis. Instead, it must be acknowledged that only through class struggle can the most backward elements of the working class evolve. This does not mean you ‘tail’ behind them, but that you understand that because of their class position they are objectively revolutionary, and therefore, that their consciousness and emotions can always be elevated and rearticulated towards socialism. If communists do not have confidence in their ability to convince workers who don’t already agree with them to struggle for socialism, how can they consider themselves communists? What are they doing besides preaching to the choir?[54] As Lenin eloquently noted,

It would be an egregious folly to fear this “reactionism” or to try to evade or leap over it, for it would mean fearing that function of the proletarian vanguard which consists in training, educating, enlightening and drawing into the new life the most backward strata and masses of the working class and the peasantry. On the other hand, it would be a still graver error to postpone the achievement of the dictatorship of the proletariat until a time when there will not be a single worker with a narrow-minded craft outlook, or with craft and craft-union prejudices… The task devolving on Communists is to convince the backward elements, to work among them, and not to fence themselves off from them with artificial and childishly “Left” slogans.[55]

The purity fetish ‘Marxists’, however, see the world statically and through an essentialist framework; they do not understand the struggle for socialism as a process – to them the forces that exists currently will always remain where and as they are. This outlook is fundamentally antagonistic with the task bequeathed to communists by history, namely, to develop the subjective conditions for revolution. However, this outlook is not eternal, it too is subject to change and can be overcome through the development of the dialectical materialist worldview. When one consistently applies in their revolutionary practice the understanding that the world is “dominated by change and interconnection, and that if we study the world concretely, we may begin to decipher the forms and structures through which change and interconnection take place,” the anti-dialectical essence of the purity fetish can be overcome.[56]

There is a second unique form the purity fetish takes in the US. Gramsci’s work helps us understand that communists must appeal to the common sense understanding and feelings of the masses, and from there critically rearticulate kernels towards socialism. If rejecting socialist experiments abroad and large chunks of the working class at home was not enough, the purity fetish Marxists add on to their futility in developing subjective conditions for revolution by completely disconnecting themselves from the traditions the American masses have come to accept. Bombastic and ultra-left slogans such as “Abolish America” have become more and more popular in American communist spaces. For them and their one-sided outlook, the U.S. is reducible to settler colonialism, imperialism, exploitation, slavery, and all the crimes of the ruling class and its state. Since US history is not pure enough for their purity fetish outlook, it must be discarded wholesale. This is done through synecdochally treating the history of the owning class and its state as the whole history of America.

Paradoxically enough, although US history is too impure for US communists to accept, it was always praised by the leaders of the global communist movement, from Marx to Lenin to Mao to Ho Chi Minh and Fidel. For instance, in his 1918 ‘Letter to American Workers,’ Lenin would say that

The history of modern, civilised America opened with one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few compared to the vast number of wars of conquest which, like the present imperialist war, were caused by squabbles among kings, landowners or capitalists over the division of usurped lands or ill-gotten gains. That was the war the American people waged against the British robbers who oppressed America and held her in colonial slavery, in the same way as these “civilised” bloodsuckers are still oppressing and holding in colonial slavery hundreds of millions of people in India, Egypt, and all parts of the world

The American people have a revolutionary tradition which has been adopted by the best representatives of the American proletariat, who have repeatedly expressed their complete solidarity with us Bolsheviks. That tradition is the war of liberation against the British in the eighteenth century and the Civil War in the nineteenth century. In some respects, if we only take into consideration the “destruction” of some branches of industry and of the national economy, America in 1870 was behind 1860. But what a pedant, what an idiot would anyone be to deny on these grounds the immense, world-historic, progressive and revolutionary significance of the American Civil War of 1863-65![57]​


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A century and a half after the American Declaration of Independence from the English crown, in 1945, Ho Chi Minh would quote its ideals in the Vietnamese declaration of independence from France and Japan, where he sums them up in the following manner: “All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.”[58] Almost a decade after, in 1953, Fidel Castro would quote this document at length in his eminent ‘History Will Absolve Me’ defense, following the assault on the Moncada barracks. A little more than a decade after, Mao Tse-Tung would say in a 1965 interview with American journalist Edgar Snow that the US

Had first fought a progressive war of independence from British imperialism, and then fought a civil war to establish a free labor market. Washington and Lincoln were progressive men of their time. When the United States first established a republic, it was hated and dreaded by all the crowned heads of Europe. That showed that the Americans were then revolutionaries.[59]

For all the undeniable and condemnable flaws of the ruling class’s history, we must not forget that in the underbelly of this history lies its opposite – a long, arduous history of struggle against various forms of exploitation and oppression. This is the history of figures like Thomas Paine, Thomas Skidmore, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, August Willich, Daniel DeLeon, Eugene Debs, Bill and Harry Haywood, Elizabeth Flynn, William Foster, Henry Winston, W.E.B. DuBois, Martin Luther King Jr., and thousands more. This is the history, further, of the abolitionist movement, of the workers movement, of the suffrage movement, of the various socialist, communist, and anarchist organizations that emerge in the late 19th and early 20th century. This is the history, in essence, of the struggle against capital, the state, and the various tactics used to keep the working mass divided amongst race, sex, religion, and other factors which hinder the collective class struggle.

This is a history which should raise the spirits of today’s communists with pride, letting us feel that the struggles we wage today redeem those who for centuries have fought the same fight in the same land. It should offer our struggles a new dimension of historical urgency, grounded on the commitment to not let struggles of previous generations of compatriots go in vain.

An honest glance at our history will help one recognize that the country has been composed of a unity of two opposed struggling poles – one which fights to defend the interests of the accumulation of capital, the other which seeks to defend the interest of working and oppressed peoples. These poles represent the political struggles of what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the “two Americas” – one which is “perishing on a lonely island of poverty” in the “midst” of the other, which delves in “a vast ocean of material prosperity”.[60]

The history of those who have fought for socialism, peace, workers’ rights, indigenous, black, and women’s rights, is not a separate history which stands outside of America fighting against it. Instead, this history is an immanent extension of the injustices that have permeated our country. The workers who partook in these struggles, in their great majority, saw themselves as the real representatives of the American people and of the American values of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, sovereignty, the right to revolution and to a government genuinely of, by, and for the people. They saw themselves as taking the progressive side of the 1776 revolutionary tradition to socialism, which they considered to be its practical and logical conclusion. As the late historian Staughton Lynd wrote,

For almost two hundred years all kinds of American radicals have traced their intellectual origins to the Declaration of Independence and to the Revolution it justified. They have stubbornly refused to surrender the memory of the American Revolution to liberalism or reaction, insisting that only radicalism could make real the rhetoric of 1776.[61]

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The progressive and socialist struggles of our country’s past were not ‘Anti-American’ or working under slogans such as “death to America”. They saw the owning classes, their state, and the various bourgeois apparatuses as the real anti-Americans, as the ones who keep our population alienated, exploited, and oppressed while periodically sending them to wars abroad, where they lose limbs and lives to fight people whom they have more in common with than those who sent them to war. We must recall the words of the great Paul Robeson as he was being tried by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1956: “Jefferson could be sitting here, and Frederick Douglass could be sitting here, and Eugene Debs could be here.”[62] And when he was asked about the patriotism of his friend, Ben Davis, a Communist Party leader and New York City councilmen, he said “that he is as patriotic an American as there can be, and you gentlemen belong with the Alien and Sedition Acts, and you are the nonpatriots, and you are the un-Americans, and you ought to be ashamed of yourselves”.[63]

If this tradition is forgotten, we will be doing the owning classes a favor – for this is what they’ve done to the tradition in the history books taught in our schools, where it has either been erased, sanitized, or domesticated. If we ignore this tradition because of its lack of purity, we tear the historical legs off the socialist movement and yield to what McCarthyism has been erroneously propagandizing the American working masses to believe – namely, that socialism and communism are foreign and antagonistic to America. We would (as we currently are) tear ourselves off from establishing any connection with the masses and their common sense understanding and feelings.

No working class person will support a struggle which aims at bringing about the annihilation of their country. They would, however, support the sublation, i.e., the overcoming, of our present bourgeois state by a worker’s state. This is how the communists of the past, guided by the dialectical materialist worldview, understood their connection to their history and their masses. The qualitative transformation involved in a revolution is not a full-fledged annihilation, something is always preserved and elevated into the new society. For American communists this has meant a fight to eliminate the evils of capitalism, imperialism, racism, sexism, and so on, while preserving and having pride in the history our people have in fighting against the former. In the process of doing this, communists in generations past would lead the masses to understand, as the saying goes, that socialism is as American as apple pie! This is something that, if we can overcome the purity fetish, we may do once again.

Conclusion

Today we may safely say that the US is under objectively revolutionary conditions, expected only to intensify in the near future. These conditions provide fertile soil for a revolutionary transformation. However, objective conditions are not enough, it is necessary for the subjective factor (i.e., the masses’ development of socialist consciousness with the aid of a revolutionary vanguard) to develop into revolutionary organs of power grounded in the working class. In the U.S., the purity fetish which predominates in the outlook of communists presents a fetter for the actualization of this subjective factor. Only by overcoming this outlook can the subjective conditions for revolution develop, and hence, can social revolution genuinely be put on the table.

This requires, however, three processes to occur. I must note that the following three processes should not be thought of separately, but dialectically, the development in one simultaneously brings forth the development in another.

(Notes at link)

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Wed Mar 08, 2023 3:31 pm

Identity Issues are Class Issues: How the Imperial Center’s “Left” Opposes Workers Seizing Power
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MARCH 4, 2023
Rainer Shea

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RAWM’s organizers are now working to turn their project into a permanent coalition, and that goal will be advanced by ANSWER’s rally on the 18th. This rally represents a strengthening of anti-imperialist unity, especially among Marxists… The outcome of these developments could be the full breaking of the monopoly which the ABC left has held over organizing spaces ever since McCarthyism handicapped the communist movement.

At the center of the Marxist view of the world is the question: “What’s the material explanation behind the things we observe?” Marxists investigate which factors have produced the present conditions, because this is the key to changing those conditions.

Because by the Marxist criteria, U.S. imperial hegemony is the globe’s primary contradiction, the biggest of these points of Marxist investigation is the one pertaining to how the world got so unequal. Upon looking at the history of how the modern global economic system was formed, the answer Marxists find is that this inequality has been engineered for the benefit of international capital. From the Marxist perspective, it’s apparent that the true purpose of the Bretton Woods agreement and the global financial institutions it created was not to uplift the people of the colonized and formerly colonized countries. It was to make these people and their natural resources best able to be exploited by multinational corporations, entailing that their societies remain forcibly underdeveloped and unable to stand on their own feet economically.

Because this macro analysis of the economy makes it clear that organizations like the IMF, the World Bank, and the World Economic Forum exist to advance the interests of the capitalist ruling class, it logically follows that the economic dynamics within imperialism’s center are also products of such class-based designs. The regressive taxation, deregulation, privatization, dismantling of social services, destruction and co-optation of unions, and effective wage cuts that our government has carried out since the start of the neoliberal era all have the function of keeping profits up. As do the destabilizing events that have inevitably come about from these attacks on the tools for keeping our economy balanced.

When the economy unraveled in 2008, and when it recently entered into a new stage of collapse with the present pandemic-era housing crisis, it wasn’t because of any mistake. It was because of deliberate policy. Capitalism not just naturally leads to crises, but depends on them in order to maintain profits. When our ruling class deregulated the banks, as well as took away the support systems for keeping the people from falling into poverty during financial meltdowns, they accepted the consequences this would have. And the plan implicitly became that after the economy broke down, this would be used to gain further profits.

Such is the class character of our social reality. Neo-colonialism is the tool the capitalists have used to draw wealth from the economic peripheries since capitalism entered into its monopoly stage, and neoliberalism is the tool they’ve used to further the uneven development which came from this extractive project. The effect is one where the entire globe’s working class, both peripheral and core, has seen its wealth diminish. The proletarians of the neo-colonies have become even poorer than they were prior to neoliberalism, while the proletarians of the imperial center have seen their hopes for attaining mid-20th century living standards disappear. As the Marxist Michael Parenti writes, “Loans, investments, and most forms of aid are designed not to fight poverty but to augment the wealth of transnational investors at the expense of local populations.” With neoliberalism, this destructive policy has been able to be imported from the neo-colonies to the core, while the neo-colonies suffer even more than they used to.

What happens when one attempts to critique our social order while discounting these class realities? They come to the conclusions that Parenti observed America’s predominant “left” forces put forth:

Even among persons normally identified as progressive, one finds a reluctance to deal with the reality of capitalist class power. Sometimes the dismissal of the C-word is quite categorical. At a meeting in New York in 1986 I heard the sociologist Stanley Aronowitz comment, “When I hear the word ‘class’ I just yawn.” For Aronowitz, class is a concept of diminishing importance used by those he repeatedly referred to as “orthodox Marxists.” Another left academic, Ronald Aronson, in a book entitled After Marxism, claims—in the face of all recent evidence—that classes in capitalist society have become “less polarized” and class exploitation is not an urgent issue nowadays because labor unions “have achieved power to protect their members and affect social policy.” This occurs at a time when many unions are being destroyed, workers are being downgraded to the status of contract laborers, and the income gap is wider than in decades. Many who pretend to be on the Left are so rabidly anti-Marxist as to seize upon any conceivable notion except class power to explain what is happening in the world. They are the Anything-But-Class (ABC) theorists who, while not allied with conservatives on most political issues, do their part in stunting class consciousness.

Parenti was writing during the immediate years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, when anti-Marxism was at its strongest point in history. With the continued rise of inequality, and our multiple economic collapses that have accelerated the decline in living standards, the conditions have changed since then. Occupy Wall Street, and the discrediting of ruling class ideology that the financial crisis brought, have forced the ABC leftists to no longer object towards class analysis as brazenly as they used to. They’ve needed to pivot towards a new rhetorical practice. One that tries to divert the outrage created by our extreme inequalities towards those non-class based sources of blame.

This is an elevated version of the left anti-Marxism that Parenti described, a situation where even as our class contradictions have become far greater than they were even in the Reagan era, social media has given these opportunists a greater weapon for attacking those who advance the class struggle. These actors can call themselves communists, but they break from the essential communist stance of being a majoritarian. With virtually no exceptions, Marxists who are serious about winning power always recognize that the bulk of the people in their society have revolutionary potential. The only times it’s appropriate to view the people as fundamentally reactionary are when one is living in a place where practically every citizen can actually be called a reactionary, like Israel. And even there, the borders of the “country” in question are tiny, and surrounded by vast communities which stand in opposition towards its existence. Because the USA and Canada likewise were founded on genocide, and continue to depend on exploiting indigenous lands, one can argue they should also be abolished, and that’s in fact what I continue to argue. The big difference between them and Israel is that their borders encompass most of a continent, naturally making Americans have vastly more revolutionary potential than Israelis.

That most Americans at present hold the ideas of their imperialist government does not mean the people are fundamentally reactionary. It means they’ve so far exclusively been exposed to these ideas. Because so many of them have been proletarianized by neoliberalism, and with inflation are now living paycheck to paycheck in a proportion of around two-thirds, their material interests do not lie in the maintenance of capitalism. They lie in proletarian revolution. This is the reality of our conditions that the ABC leftists still won’t admit. If they were to admit it, they would be able to attain a much more hopeful view of the world, as class solidarity gives one great optimism. But their priorities are not aligned with class solidarity, they’re aligned with advancing an opportunistic project.

This project is observable in the gatekeeping, pettiness, and insularity that dominates the social media spaces of these actors who claim to represent the “left.” Their goal is to perpetuate the ideas that Parenti observed keep us away from a class analysis, and stuck in atomized factions which view their own struggles as more important than the liberation of the proletariat as a whole: “Both orthodox social scientists and ‘left’ ABC theorists treat the diverse social factions within the non-capitalist class as classes unto themselves; so they speak of a ‘blue-collar class,’ a ‘professional class,’ and the like. In doing so, they claim to be moving beyond a ‘reductionist,’ Marxist dualistic model of classes. But what is more reductionist than to ignore the underlying dynamics of economic power and the conflict between capital and labor? What is more misleading than to treat occupational groups as autonomous classes, giving attention to every social group in capitalist society except the capitalist class itself, to every social conflict except class conflict?”

This effort to act like the positional subsets of the working class have wholly different interests extends to the myopic views regarding the different identity groups. To the ideas that replace class with race, gender, or sexuality, ignoring how the struggles of every identity group can only be truly resolved when the working class gains victory.

There’s a narcissistic motive behind these ideas, one that disregards the interests of the entire working class movement in favor of one’s immediate surroundings. It’s the mentality that’s compelled American ultra-leftists to actively reject the idea of fighting against U.S. imperialism, and to exclusively focus on their local conditions. Even though these leftists reside in the center of imperialism, where they have the ability to disrupt the U.S. government’s sanctions, occupations, bombings, and proxy wars, they prefer to detach themselves from the globe’s struggle against imperialist violence. The realities that U.S. hegemony is the globe’s primary contradiction, and that class oppression is the primary contradiction in the core, are both discounted in their analysis. As is the logical conclusion of these two facts, which is that workers victory can’t come in the core without there being a movement to weaken the empire that keeps our capitalist state strong. They’ve decided to turn away from the macro perspective—the perspective that can actually let us change the power dynamics—and embrace the micro.

When one embraces the macro analysis, the one that requires asking what the material explanation is behind our conditions, they’re also led to ask: “What are the best courses of action to take in order to advance history to the next developmental stage?” This question defeats all the ideological obstacles that the ABC left has created towards adopting the optimal revolutionary practice. The fact that Russia is presently a capitalist state, for instance, should have no effect on whether somebody who’s serious about dialectics supports Operation Z. Z is weakening U.S. hegemony regardless, and a Marxist analysis disproves the NATO-adjacent ideas about Russia being a fascist or imperialist state. Because Z is weakening imperialism without exacerbating an equivalent contradiction, it’s worth the support from Marxists. Who within America can assist Z, in a way, by waging informational warfare against NATO and thereby helping make the Ukraine arms project untenable. The equivalent reasoning applies to China’s BRI, which is economically defeating the U.S. empire and should therefore be defended from accusations of “imperialism.”

That’s the big lesson which communists in the imperial center need to learn about geopolitics, namely that they shouldn’t ignore it like the ABC leftists want them to. The big lesson they need to learn about advancing the class struggle within our local conditions is that this geopolitical/informational fight against the U.S. State Department is essential for bringing our class struggle to escalation. To make this struggle succeed, we must build our anti-imperialist coalition, a coalition that was recently made stronger with the Rage Against the War Machine rally in DC.

RAWM’s organizers are now working to turn their project into a permanent coalition, and that goal will be advanced by ANSWER’s rally on the 18th. This rally represents a strengthening of anti-imperialist unity, especially among Marxists, because its Bay Area counterpart is being organized by the PCUSA in partnership with the PSL. PCUSA is the same party that organized a Bay Area demonstration in tandem with RAWM, and PSL essentially runs ANSWER. This means these two parties, which are among the most relevant socialist organizations in the country, are building a working relationship based on the resistance towards Washington’s proxy war.

The outcome of these developments could be the full breaking of the monopoly which the ABC left has held over organizing spaces ever since McCarthyism handicapped the communist movement.

Communism has an opportunity to become mainstream again. For this to happen, communists must act to continue destroying the influence of the imperialism-compatible, ABC leftists. They represent the initial stage in the state’s counterinsurgency, and this is evidenced by how COINTELPRO has been weaponizing anarchist and Maoist ideology since the counterculture movement. Once we’ve sufficiently gotten rid of their stifling control, and the communist movement is no longer held back by them, the state will intensify its backlash against us. Then a new stage in the struggle will begin.

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Thu Mar 23, 2023 2:41 pm

The Significance of the Paris Commune 152 Years After
MARCH 22, 2023

Image
Illustration of the Paris Commune, from the century edition of Cassell's History of England (ca. 1900).

By Carlos L Garrido – Mar 18, 2023

This is an elongated version of a speech for the International Manifesto Group and Midwestern Marx Institute co-hosted event on the significance of the Paris Commune.

I would like to thank the International Manifesto Group for hosting this event, and for inviting me to say a few words about the relevance of that heroic experiment in socialist democracy which took place 152 years ago.

My discussion of the Paris Commune’s relevance, and of the relevance of Marx and Engels’s reflections on it, will revolve around three key points.

First, the worldview through which Marx and Engels approach the Paris Commune.

Second, the conclusions they derived from their study of the Commune, how the Commune helped them refine and concretize their understanding of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and what relevance these have today.

Third, if we are faithful to the worldview through which Marx and Engels approach the Commune—and not limit ourselves to simply accepting the conclusions, we come to see that after 152 years since the birth of the Commune, we have had many socialist experiments from which we can learn in ways similar to Marx and Engels with the Paris Commune. The experience of these offers us many lessons – I would like to mention just two of them: 1 – the necessity of developing the productive forces, the sciences and technologies, and the military capacities of the state to protect its sovereignty from imperialism; and 2 – the necessity of adapting socialism to the conditions of the context it is taking root in.

1. Marx and Engels’s approach to the Commune
As I am sure most know, in September 1870, six months before the establishment of the Paris Commune, Marx would say that “any attempt at upsetting the new government in the present crisis, when the enemy is almost knocking at the doors of Paris, would be a desperate folly.” [1] In the coming months, as the antagonism between the bourgeois government and the armed workers developed, an attempt was made in March 18, 1871 to disarm the workers. The workers refused to give up arms, and war between Paris and the French government ensued. The Commune was elected on March 26, and proclaimed on the 28th. As the situation unfolded, Marx was turned from a skeptic to an ardent supporter of the Communard’s actions. Less than a month after the Commune was proclaimed, he would go on to say, “what resilience, what historical initiative, what a capacity for sacrifice in these Parisians!” They were “storming the heavens,” and “History has no like example of [such] greatness.” [2]

I think the significance of this transition in Marx is often undermined. Over the last century, large sections of the Western left have expected the socialist and anti-colonial people’s movements which have arisen in the global South and East to measure up to their standards of what socialism ought to be. If these movements fail to meet the purity with which socialism is treated in their minds, they are condemned by the Western left as ‘authoritarian,’ ‘Stalinist,’ ‘state capitalist,’ or ‘not real socialism’ (which is my personal favorite because of its paradoxical character). The outlook of the Western Marxists is a complete inversion of the one which mediates Marx’s study of the Commune. The Commune was not ‘pure,’ it had its downfalls and contained serious ideological deviations from Marx and Engels’s thought, not least of which is the influence of Blanquism and Proudhonism. This did not prohibit them, however, from supporting the Commune and learning from it.

Lenin, as always, saw this with extreme clarity. He said that “when the mass revolutionary movement of the proletariat burst forth, Marx, in spite of the failure of that movement, in spite of its short life and its patent weakness, began to study what forms it had discovered.” [3] Marx and Engels, Lenin would go on to say, “examined the actual experience of a mass proletarian movement and tried to draw practical lessons from it,” “re-examining [their] theory in light of it.” [4] They did not treat socialism as an abstract ideal they could use to denounce emancipatory movements. Since the middle of the 1840s, Marx and Engels refused to treat communism as a static “state of affairs… an ideal to which reality [would] have to adjust itself.” [5] Instead, their commitment was to “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” [6]

Today, many self-proclaimed Marxists in the West prefer to hold on to socialism as a pure unchanging ideal than to have that ideal be desecrated by the lessons which have arisen from the difficulties of constructing socialism in the imperialist stage of capitalism. Instead of learning from the successes and failures of revolutionary movements in Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Venezuela, and so on, many are content with condemning these real movements of history because they don’t measure up to the pure ideal in their heads. Samir Amin put it nicely in respect to China when he said that “China bashing panders to the infantile opinion found in some currents of the powerless Western left: if it is not the communism of the twenty-third century, it is a betrayal!” [7] I think it is clear that the truth of this statement spans well beyond just China. It is grounded in the purity fetish outlook—a form of engagement with the world which couldn’t be any further from Marx and Engels’s dialectical materialist worldview.

Where Marx and Engels, as dialectical materialists, emphasize the material movement of history, the purity fetish of the Western left emphasizes a static pure ideal. If we are to celebrate, as we are, the Paris Commune by reflecting on the relevance of Marx and Engels’s insights on it, without a doubt the question of the worldview through which they approached the world is of utmost primacy. Without this, their genuine insights are nothing more than dead conclusions, severed from the form of thinking which would allow us to do today what Marx and Engels did 152 years ago; that is, to learn from the dialectical movement of the working masses towards freedom.

2. What the Commune taught Marx and Engels
In emphasizing the worldview behind Marx and Engels’s assessment of the Commune I am not saying that the conclusions drawn are unimportant or outdated. Both the worldview and the conclusions must be seen in light of each other, and each in light of their context. Nonetheless, the fundamental lessons of the Commune remain today as relevant and true as ever. In the preface to the 1872 German edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx and Engels would make only one correction to that historical document explicit – they said, “One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.’” [8]

Previously, Marx and Engels’s comments in the Manifesto on the working class’s conquest of political power said the following:

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible. [9]

I will return to the question of the development of the productive forces in the following section, but for now, it is important to note how the Commune helped Marx and Engels refine their understanding of the state itself, and more specifically, of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In a speech given the month the Commune was overthrown, Marx would say that as the antagonism between capital and labor intensified, “state power assumed more and more the character of the national power of capital over labor, of a public force organized for social enslavement, of an engine of class despotism.” [10] It was not simply the case that the modern state was “a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie,” but also that the state institutions and structures through which this aim was achieved – that is, the “standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, judicature,” and so on, were designed precisely for the sake of this function. [11]

The proletariat could not successfully wield state power through state institutions crafted to keep labor subordinated to capital. For the proletariat, as the Manifesto urges, to be organized as the ruling class, it needed to smash the existing bourgeois state and replace it with working class institutions of “a fundamentally different order.” [12] The Commune showed that the state had to be transformed from being “a ‘special force’ for the suppression of a particular class to the suppression of the oppressors by the ‘general force’ of the majority of the people—the workers and peasants.” [13] Hence, Marx says that “Paris could resist only because … the first decree of the Commune … was the suppression of the standing army, and the substitution for it of the armed people.” [14]

Qualitative changes of this character were found in the Commune’s transformations of public functionaries, which were now paid “workmen’s wages” and “revocable”; in the application of universal suffrage; in the new judicature; in the making of “education … accessible to all,” freeing science “from the fetters which class prejudice and governmental force had imposed upon it;” in short, in destroying the state as a “parasitic excrescence” which represses labor for the sake of capital, and putting in its place a genuinely democratic working class state which would use the general force of society to repress the old exploiting classes and administer state functions in the interests of the mass of people. [15] This is what the dictatorship of the proletariat, as a higher form of socialist democracy, entails.

This lesson is more vital today in our neoimperialist stage of capitalism—as Cheng Enfu and Lu Baolin label it—than it was in 1871, and perhaps even more vital than it was in 1916 at the time of Lenin’s major writing on Imperialism.[16] Today, any revolutionary process which sustains even the smallest space for bourgeois political parties and participation will be leaving a door open for imperialism’s entry through its collaboration with the national bourgeoisie. Since the tragic overthrow of Salvador Allende’s Chile in September 11th 1973; to the lawfare coups against Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff from 2016 to 2018; to the astroturfed 2018 protests against Daniel Ortega and the Sandinista revolution; to the propping up of the clownish Juan Guaidó as ‘interim president’ of Venezuela in an effort to destroy the Bolivarian revolution; to the fascist 2019 coup in Bolivia which killed dozens of workers and indigenous protesters; it is clear that in so far as bourgeois state structures remain—even if under the control of a worker’s or socialist party—a window will always be open for the national bourgeoisie to collaborate with imperialism in bringing forth what W.E.B. Du Bois called a “counterrevolution of property.” [17]

It is much more difficult to imagine a figure like Guaidó or Jeanine Áñez getting as far as they did under worker states like Cuba, China, Vietnam, and the DPRK. Why is this the case? Let us recall the categorial distinction Mao makes in 1957 between political and economic capital. While sustaining that economic capital does not necessarily have to be stripped all at once, that is, as Marx had already noted, that it can be ‘wrested by degree’ from the bourgeoisie, in accordance with the role it plays in developing the productive forces for socialism, “political capital,” Mao says, must be “deprived … until not one jot is left to [the capitalists].”[18] As Domenico Losurdo has eloquently noted:

It is, therefore, a matter of distinguishing between the economic expropriation and the political expropriation of the bourgeoisie. Only the latter should be carried out to the end, while the former, if not contained within clear limits, risks undermining the development of the productive forces. Unlike ‘political capital,’ the bourgeoisie’s economic capital should not be subject to total expropriation, at least as long as it serves the development of the national economy and thus, indirectly, the cause of socialism. [19]

This is where revolutions like the Bolivarian, the Bolivian, the Nicaraguan, and others (for all their successes) have fallen somewhat short—they have not been able to fully expropriate the political capital of their bourgeoisie, and neither have they been able, subsequently, to complete the process of the proletarianization of the state, that is, of the construction of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

This is not a condemnation. I am, like Marx and Engels were with the Commune, an ardent supporter of these emancipatory movements; I consider there to be a lot to learn from them. But as Marx and Engels had already noted with the Commune, in not going far enough in their use of the repressive apparatuses of the worker’s state, the door was left open for counterrevolution. As Engels wrote in 1872, “would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?” [20] Lenin says something similar in 1908, arguing that the Commune, “instead of destroying its enemies it sought to exert moral influence on them; it underestimated the significance of direct military operations in civil war, and instead of launching a resolute offensive against Versailles that would have crowned its victory in Paris, it tarried and gave the Versailles government time to gather the dark forces and prepare for the blood-soaked week of May.” [21]

I think a similar question should, and from what I have seen is, asked by our comrades in Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and so on—that is, to what extent can the proletarianization of the state prevent the conditions which gave rise to the disturbances of 2018 to 2020? In other words, how can the interests of the bourgeois and landholding sections of the population, those which have consistently collaborated with imperialism’s hybrid warfare to overthrow popular revolutions, be excluded from power in any of the state’s institutions? These are all complex questions which must be addressed organically as these revolutions develop. It is also clear that, in some of these left-wing governments in South and Central America (especially the more moderate ones), certain biases inherited from the sham bourgeois notion of democracy—which reduces democracy to a parliamentarian game of choosing which flavor of bourgeois rule a people will have for the next few years—must be outgrown and replaced by the concrete question of “democracy for which class?” [22]

Without a doubt, these recent Latin American experiments in 21st century socialism have succeeded in making this transition in many areas. Who can forget, for example, the eight Silvercorp mercenaries caught in 2020 by Venezuelan fishermen and Bolivarian militias in the coastal town of Chuao? What a better example of the general force of the people taking up the role of repressing the enemies of the revolution? However, the threat presented by imperialist hybrid warfare—it seems to me at least—can be better averted as bourgeois state institutions are overcome, and proletarian and popular ones are put in their place.

3. Learning from the many communes of the 20th and 21st century
Since the fall of the Commune 152 years ago we have seen many Socialist experiments arise, some which are still with us, others which suffered the same fate as the Commune. The ‘Marxists’ of the West, in their majority, have been unable to carry forth the legacy of Marx and Engels’s approach to the Commune. The plethora of Socialist experiments which have arisen have been, in one form or another, condemned for their impurities. This has prevented not only a genuine show of anti-imperialist solidarity, but also the ability to draw lessons from the successes and failures of these experiments. The failures have often been magnified, de-contextualized, and synecdochally painted as the whole experience.

Against this theoretical current dominant in the powerless Western left, we must bring forth the living spirit of Marxism to our study of 20th and 21st century Socialist experiments – the vast majority of which have been incredibly successful despite being under the boot of constant imperialist hybrid warfare. Out of this study I think two key lessons must be drawn, both of which are found already in Marx and Engels’s analysis of the Commune in a more or less implicit fashion.

First, in the age of imperialism, or Neoimperialism, socialist experiments must focus on developing not only an efficient worker’s state, but also the forces of production, the sciences and technologies, and the securities and defense structures of the state. In China, for instance, these goals were conceptualized by Zhou Enlai as the four modernizations. Without these developments, which are made exceedingly difficult by the reality of imperialism and its global dominance over intellectual property, a socialist project will be unable to flourish. Without these developments, the global inequality between the looting imperialist powers and everyone else – or, to use the despicable metaphor from EU foreign-policy chief Joseph Borrell, the inequalities between the garden and the jungle, will not be bridged, and the imperialist powers will maintain their global position unthreatened.

The success of China, which stands today as the beacon of a new, post-Columbian world, testifies to the immense importance of these developments in the battle against capitalist-imperialism.

The emphasis on developing the productive forces, of course, is seen throughout the whole corpus of Marx and Engels’s work—their writings on the Commune included. For instance, an important critique Engels levied on the Commune was that “in the economic sphere, much was left undone;” they did not take the Bank of France, which could have put “pressure on the whole of the French bourgeoisie [to have] peace with the Commune.” [23] Lenin made a similar critique, saying that the Communards “stopped half-way: instead of setting about ‘expropriating the expropriators,’ [they] allowed [themselves] to be led astray by dreams of establishing a higher justice in the country united by a common national task.” [24]

In our age, after the experience of the Soviet New Economic Policy, Yugoslavia’s socialist market economy, and most importantly, of China’s Reform and Opening up—where socialist markets have been developed and private ownership sustains a large but auxiliary role in the development of the productive forces—we have learned that this development can take many forms. In some cases, such as Cuba, the full expropriation of the expropriators was immediately necessary. In other cases, such as China, the development of socialism has always maintained—since the pre-49 liberated areas—a ‘mixed’ economic form, where private property and markets exist within the centrally planned state economy. Far from using cherry picked comments from Marx and Engels to condemn these developments, we should do with them what they did with the Commune. We should learn from them and attempt to understand how these forms have become necessary for the real movement of history which abolishes the present state of things.

The second important lesson which subsequent socialist experiments have taught us concerns the relationship of socialism to a people’s national history. I think here, again, the failure of the Western and US left is grounded in a problem of worldview. The dialectical worldview (both in Hegel and in Marxism) rejects the idea of an unchanging, pure, ahistorical universal, and instead urges that universals are necessarily tied to historically changing concrete particulars. Universals are always concrete—that is, they exist and take their form through the particular. “The universal,” as Hegel and Lenin emphasized, “embraces within itself the wealth of the particular.” [25]

What does this tell us about socialism? Well, simply that there is no such thing as abstract socialism. Socialism is the universal which cannot exist unless concretized through the particular. In every country it has taken root in, socialism has had to adapt itself to the unique characteristics of the peoples that have waged and won the struggle for political power. In China this has taken the form of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics; in Cuba this has meant incorporating José Martí and the anti-colonial traditions into socialist construction; in Venezuela this has taken the form of Bolivarian socialism; in the Plurinational state of Bolivia this has taken the form of combining Marxism with the indigenous communist traditions which have been around for centuries; in the continent of Africa this has taken the form of Pan-African socialism, and so on. In each case the struggle has been, as Georgi Dimitrov had already noted in 1935, “national in form and socialist in content.” [26]

In various parts of the US left, the purity fetish outlook has obscured this historical lesson, and made rampant the phenomenon which Dimitrov called national nihilism. Their people’s history is reduced to slavery, settler colonialism, imperialism, and all the evils of capital and the state. In doing so, they reject drawing from their national past to give form to socialist content. Far from the ‘progressivism’ they see in this, what this actually depicts is a liberal tinted American exceptionalism, which thinks that the struggle for socialism in the US will itself not have to follow this concrete universal tendency seen around the world, where socialism functions as the content which takes form (i.e., concretizes) according to the unique circumstances in which it is being developed. [27]

This has prevented the US left from genuinely learning from its progressive history and connecting with its people. A perfect example of this is the fact that, from 1865 to the counterrevolution of 1876, in many previous slave states of the US South, reconstruction developed a dictatorship of labor. This dictatorship of labor was headed by the black proletariat—who had recently freed itself through a general strike that converted the war to preserve the union into a revolutionary war to emancipate slave labor. It was organized by the Freedman’s Bureau and defended militarily by the federal government. It was our Paris Commune; it started before and lasted way longer than the original. Like the Paris Commune, it also fell thanks to a counterrevolution of property. Besides the few on the US left who take the work of the great Dr. Du Bois serious—this legendary experience of a new worker’s democracy, not unlike the Paris Commune, is a largely erased and forgotten period of US revolutionary history, and it has so, so much to teach us, both tactically and theoretically.

Conclusion
I am honored to have had the privilege of discussing this Titanic event in world-history with all of you today.

Whether we consider the Paris Commune the first modern dictatorship of the proletariat, or give that title to the black proletariat in the U.S. South, is somewhat irrelevant. What matters, in my view, is that the Paris Commune, as Lenin argued, by fighting “for the freedom of toiling humanity, of all the downtrodden and oppressed,” is still being honored 152 years after its fall “by the proletariat of the whole world.” [28] This is why, in the words of Lenin, “the cause of the Commune did not die … it lives to the present day in every one of us.” [29]



References
[1] Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 2021), 35.

[2] Karl Marx, “Marx to Kugelmann,” April 12, 1871. In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol 44, International Publishers., pp. 131-132.

[3] V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1970), 47.

[4] Lenin, The State and Revolution, 40, 30.

[5] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, MECW Vol. 5 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), 49.

[6] Engels, MECW Vol. 5, 49.

[7] Samir Amin, Only People Make Their Own History: Writings on Capitalism, Imperialism, and Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019), 110.

[8] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (New York: Barnes and Nobles Classics, 2005), 45.

[9] Marx and Engels, MECW Vol. 6, 504.

[10] Marx, The Civil War in France, 62, 61.

[11] Marx, MECW Vol. 6, 486; Marx, The Civil War in France, 61.

[12] Lenin, The State and Revolution, 35.

[13] Lenin, The State and Revolution, 36.

[14] Marx, The Civil War in France, 64.

[15] Marx, The Civil War in France, 65.

[16] Cheng Enfu and Lu Baolin, “Five Characteristics of Neoimperialism,” Monthly Review 73(1) (May 2021).

[17] W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (New York: The Library of America, 2021), 697- 762.

[18] Mao Tse-Tung, “Talks at a Conference of Secretaries of Provincial, Municipal and Autonomous Regions Party Committees,” In Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung Vol 5 (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1977), 357.

[19] Domenico Losurdo, “Has China Turned to Capitalism?—Reflections on the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism,” International Critical Thought 7(1) (2017), 18-19.

[20] Engels, MECW Vol. 23, 425.

[21] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 13 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978), 476.

[22] Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 28, 249.

[23] Engels, “Introduction,” in The Civil War in France, 10-11.

[24] Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 13, 476.

[25] G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, Trans. A.V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1993), 58.

[26] Georgi Dimitrov, The United Front: The Struggle Against Fascism and War (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1938), 61-64.

[27] For more on national nihilism and the Western left see my article “The Importance of Combatting National and Historical Nihilism,” Midwestern Marx Institute (February 2023): https://www.midwesternmarx.com/articles ... -l-garrido or my book The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (Dubuque: Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2023).

[28] Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 17, 143.

[29] Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 17, 143.

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Thu Mar 30, 2023 2:29 pm

Against Economism
No. 3/79.III.2023

Economism is one of the cornerstones of opportunism . Economism is a most powerful brake on the development of the communist movement.

What is Economism? If we give a brief definition, then economism is a form of opportunism, namely: the adaptation of the goals and tasks of the Communist Party to serve the elements of the economic (trade union, strike) struggle of the working masses.

Economism was theoretically crushed in Lenin's What Is to Be Done? But history is an ironic lady. And today the majority of left organizations, having inscribed the image of Lenin on their banners, suffer to a greater or lesser extent from the disease of economism.

Consider briefly the history of economism.

In the environment of the Russian social democracy, the trend of economism arose in the 90s. XIX century., That is, along with the spread of Marxism. Its essence was that the political struggle of the proletarians was allegedly possible only or mainly through the development of "economic struggle". It was a reverence for the spontaneity, the unconsciousness of the political wishes and demands growing out of the proletarian movement. The main peddlers of Economism were the Mensheviks.

At first, the Mensheviks proceeded from the prematurity of introducing a scientific worldview into the labor movement, then they advocated the development of only economic forms of resistance, then they fiercely fought against the “premature” October Revolution, right up to participation in anti-Soviet rebellions during the Civil War. Trotskyism grew out of bankrupt Menshevism. Trotskyism stood for the same economism, but disguised it with ringing "revolutionary" demagogy about the bureaucracy, which, they say, "also" exploits Soviet workers, as the capitalists once did, and called on the workers to strike against the Soviet regime.

Trotskyism, having suffered a political defeat in the factional struggle during Stalin's time, turned into a disguised current of thought within the Soviet intelligentsia. Its representatives, by hook or by crook, introduced opportunism, defended such concepts as "socialist money", "socialist prices", "socialist law of value", "socialist market", etc. Moreover, some part of the party members and professors even sincerely believed that the development of problems of self-financing and "improvement of the pricing mechanism" in the USSR would bring the victory of communism closer. Khrushchevin and the Gorbachev that followed him are, among other things, the products of the infection of the CPSU with economism.

Thus, one more side of economism is revealed, namely, that communism can be reached by the market way, through the mechanism of perfecting "market levers".

In the 1990s, when the strike movement in the Russian Federation was on the rise, economism dominated everywhere in parties and parteykas with workers' communist names. Everyone, literally all the leftists at that time, if they did not fight with the riot police at the rally, then fiercely danced ritual dances around the workers' strikes. The future activist of the "Breakthrough" acted with merciless criticism of the RCWP (which then consisted of the breakthroughs), the largest extra-parliamentary party, which subordinated all its activities to the service of the strike movement.

But time passed, young Russian capitalism was getting on its feet, the era of "Putin's stability" was advancing, and the element of strikes gradually subsided. If in 1997, when the scope of strikes reached its peak, more than 880 thousand workers were on strike, then in 2000 only 30 thousand were on strike, in 2001 - 13 thousand, in 2002 - 3.9 thousand The last outbreak of the economic "struggle" occurred in 2004, when 195,000 people went on strike. From 2009 onwards, fewer than 1,000 workers strike each year.

The strike movement in Russia died out, but economism did not die out, it mutated , taking on a particularly sophisticated form. If before that Economism was typical tailism, now it has become just trade unionism. Now there is a call to devote all forces and means to fomenting the economic "struggle" of the proletariat, because supposedly only after this is it possible for the full-blooded transition of the proletarians to the political struggle. Say, the working masses today are divided, deprived of solidarity. And in order to overcome this "atomization" of the proletarians, it is necessary to create trade unions, "swing" the population to fight "for their rights." Here is a typical argument of a modern "economist":

"The party is born from people who have a need to create a party, and the need arises as a result of practical activity, which is the class struggle."

The author of the quote understands the class struggle as a “struggle” for wages, working conditions and rights. They say that the proletarians now do not feel the need for a party, therefore they, the opportunist "economists", cannot do anything. They want, they really want, they just want to create a party, to launch a broad political struggle, but—an insurmountable obstacle! - the masses do not feel the need ! And here, as Filatov’s character said: “Somehow when I dare / Against the masses!” Therefore, we must wait until the masses "ripen". And the best assistant in this matter is the trade union, and not just a simple one, but a "combat" one! And the more "militant" trade unions can be equipped, the faster the masses will "ripen"!

Back in 2010, when the element of strikes had already subsided, V. Podguzov ridiculed the “theorists” from the RCWP:

“They are reminiscent of sclerotic old women who, having forgotten the content of the Manifesto, sit on a historical mound and ascertain the absence of facts of “political class consciousness” among modern proletarians. They sit and WAIT for the workers to have an advanced “political class consciousness”, so that they “at least” start the “real economic struggle” themselves. They do not see their fault in the fact that they themselves are not able to introduce political, and moreover, scientific consciousness into the proletarian milieu.

<...> It turns out that when the proletariat, figuratively speaking, sits and does nothing, the active members of the RCWP-RPK should ... also sit and do nothing more. But when the proletarians begin, out of desperation and political illiteracy, to do what they do from time to time with cars, shops and ATMs, then on the outskirts of Paris, then in Chisinau, then in Athens, Bishkek or Osh, only then the propagandists of the RCWP- The PKKs will come out of their basement and on the run will start injecting communist consciousness into the heads of people smashing banks and shops, choking on tear gas. In the meantime, the workers are sitting in the shops of bankrupt enterprises, propagandists will not turn their tongues to talk to them about the communist program, which guarantees workers work, a reduction in the working day, the disappearance of inflation, which guarantees free apartments and sanatoriums, free education, i.e. free education. e. full social security for them and their children. No, when the police are not yet beating the workers, at that moment you need to whisper completely idiotic recipes for proletarian ... privatization into their ears and convince them that all this ... will not do anything good, but you need to do something at least for survival.


13 years have passed, and ... nothing has changed. The RCWP, driven to the brink by the ideologists of economism, actually dissolved itself; the gray-haired opportunists have sunk into oblivion, but their ideas have been successfully adopted by the left-wing youth, who now rush not to rallies, but to groups in social networks, spreading everywhere the r-revolutionary idea: “go to the workers” and create trade unions!

Out of blatant ignorance, the modern left repeats - literally word for word! - those stupidities that Lenin refuted in his work “What is to be done?”. For example, the idea that the element of protests will give rise to a party.

Well, let me quote large excerpts from What Is to Be Done?, which will sound - alas! - topical:

“We said that there could be no social-democratic consciousness among the workers. It could only be brought from outside [hereinafter, the emphasis is mine - R.O.]. The history of all countries testifies that the working class, solely by its own efforts, is only able to work outtrade unionist consciousness, i.e. the conviction of the need to unite in unions, to wage a struggle against the employers, to obtain from the government the issuance of certain laws necessary for the workers, etc. The teaching of socialism grew out of those philosophical, historical, economic theories that were developed by educated representatives of the propertied classes, the intelligentsia. The founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves, according to their social position, belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia. In the same way, in Russia the theoretical doctrine of Social Democracy arose completely independently of the spontaneous growth of the working-class movement, it arose as a natural and inevitablethe result of the development of thought among the revolutionary socialist intelligentsia. By the time we are talking about, i.e. By the middle of the 1990s, this doctrine was not only a fully developed program of the Emancipation of Labor group, but also won over the majority of the revolutionary youth in Russia.

“ All reverence for the spontaneity of the mass movement, all reduction of the Social-Democratic policy to the level of trade unionism, is precisely the preparation of the ground for the transformation of the working-class movement into an instrument of bourgeois democracy . The spontaneous labor movement in itself is capable of creating (and inevitably creates) only trade unionism, and the trade unionist policy of the working class is precisely the bourgeois policy of the working class. The participation of the working class in the political struggle and even in the political revolution does not in the least make its policy a Social-Democratic policy.

"Our task, the task of the Social Democracy, is to fight spontaneity , to draw the working-class movement away from this spontaneous striving of trade unionism under the wing of the bourgeoisie and to draw it under the wing of the revolutionary Social Democracy."

“It is often said that the working class is spontaneously attracted to socialism. This is perfectly just, in the sense that the socialist theory of all more profoundly and most accurately determines the causes of the misfortunes of the working class, and that is why the workers assimilate it so easily, as long as this theory does not itself succumb to spontaneity , if only it subordinates spontaneity to itself.

“Everyone agrees that it is necessary to develop the political consciousness of the working class. The question is how to do it and what is needed in order to do it? The economic struggle "leads" the workers only to questions about the attitude of the government towards the working class , and therefore, no matter how much we work on the task of "giving the economic struggle itself a political character", we neverwe will not be able to develop the political consciousness of the workers (to the level of social-democratic political consciousness) within the framework of this task, because this very framework is narrow. Martynov's formula [to give the economic struggle a political character] is valuable to us, not at all because it illustrates Martynov's ability to confuse, but because it vividly expresses the basic mistake of all "economists", namely the conviction that it is possible to develop the class political consciousness of the workers from within, so say, their economic struggle, ie. proceeding only (or at least mainly) from this struggle, based only (or at least mainly) on this struggle.

“What concrete, real meaning, in the words of Martynov, does the setting by the Social Democracy of the task of ‘give the economic struggle itself a political character’? The economic struggle is a collective struggle between workers and employers for favorable terms for the sale of labor power, for improving the working and living conditions of the workers. This struggle is necessarily a professional struggle, because working conditions are extremely varied in different professions, and, consequently, the struggle to improve these conditions cannot but be waged by profession (trade unions in the West, temporary trade associations and leaflets in Russia, etc.). P.). To give "the economic struggle itself a political character" means, therefore, to seek the implementation of the same professional demands, the same professional improvement of working conditions through “legislative and administrative measures”. This is precisely what all the trade unions of the workers are doing and have always done. Take a look at the work of the well-founded scholars (and "hard-core" opportunists) of the Webbs, and you will see that the British workers' unions have long ago recognized and are carrying out the task of "giving the economic struggle itself a political character", have long been fighting for freedom to strike, for the elimination of all kinds of legal obstacles to the cooperative and professional movement, for the issuance of laws in defense of women and children, for the improvement of working conditions through sanitary and factory legislation, etc.

Thus, behind the pompous phrase: “to give the economic struggle itself a political character”, which sounds “terribly” profound and revolutionary, hides, in essence, the traditional desire to reduce Social-Democratic politics to trade union politics!

“Class political consciousness can only be brought to the worker from outside , that is, from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers. The realm from which alone this knowledge can be drawn is the realm of the relations of all classes and strata to the state and government, the realm of the mutual relations between all classes. Therefore, to the question: what should be done to bring political knowledge to the workers? it is impossible to give only one answer, which in most cases is satisfied with the practitioners, not to mention the practitioners inclined towards "economism", namely the answer: "go to the workers." In order to bring political knowledge to the workers, the Social-Democrats must go to all classes of the population, they must send detachments of their army in all directions.


I would like to draw attention to these words: "Social-Democrats [Communists] must go to all classes of the population." Many leftists today are convinced that only real workers from the machine tool constitute the "social base" for communist propaganda. No, Ilyich explains to them, propaganda and agitation must be carried on among different classes and strata of the population, not limited to the workers alone, for “the ideal of a Social Democrat should not be the secretary of the trade union, but a people’s tribune who knows how to respond to any and all manifestations of arbitrariness and oppression, wherever they occur, whatever stratum or class they touch.

And another quote, so to speak, for finishing:

“The demand “to give the economic struggle itself a political character” expresses in the most striking way the admiration for spontaneity in the field of political activity. The economic struggle assumes a political character quite often spontaneously, that is, without the intervention of the "revolutionary bacillus - the intelligentsia", without the intervention of conscious Social Democrats [in our case, the Communists]. For example, the economic struggle of the workers in England also acquired a political character without any participation of the socialists. The task of the Social Democrats, however, is not limited to political agitation on economic grounds, their task is to transformthis trade unionist policy into the social democratic political struggle, to take advantage of those glimmers of political consciousness which the economic struggle has sown in the workers in order to raise the workers to social democratic political consciousness. And the Martynovs, instead of raising and pushing forward the spontaneously awakening political consciousness, fall on their faces before spontaneity and repeat, ad nauseam often repeat, that the economic struggle "prompts" the workers to the question of their political lack of rights. The bad thing, gentlemen, is that this spontaneous awakening of a trade unionist political consciousness does not “push” you to the question of your Social-Democratic tasks!”

So, a communist organization, especially a party, contrary to the mantras of the current "Marxists", cannot be born from the elements - it is created by progressive intellectuals, regardless of the presence / absence of economic struggle. Further. The task of the communists is to bring Marxist truths into the consciousness of the masses, to unite the spontaneous proletarian movement with science. Here the adherents of economism (without recognizing themselves as such for anything in the world) clutch at straws: “SO THERE IS NO PROLETARIAN MOVEMENT! they exclaim desperately. “There is nowhere to bring in Marxist science!”

Our leftists, referring to individual statements by Lenin about the need to participate in strikes, are guided by the following “logic”: 1) the success of Bolshevism took place against the backdrop of open forms of economic struggle, 2) today workers do not become Marxists, 3) today workers do not strike, the conclusion is that by all means "ignite" the economic struggle and then it will be possible to repeat the success of the Bolsheviks.

The opportunists ignore the fact that the economic strike from V.I. Lenin is a fact of the real life of that time. It was born and passed spontaneously without any participation of any political forces. The beginning of the 20th century was a period of spontaneous upsurge of the proletarian movement all over the world, caused by merciless exploitation and the disenfranchised position of the working people. Today the situation is radically different. The bourgeoisie learned the lessons of the socialist revolutions and learned how to effectively "quench" the waves of discontent among the masses with handouts and resignations of politicians. The proletarians themselves are infected with bourgeois-democratic illusions, they believe that specific politicians, neighboring nations, etc., are the source of their misfortunes, and they see nothing shameful in the very institution of wage slavery (“if you work well, the owner will pay well”) or do they believe

The attempts of the left to "ignite" the economic struggle of the workers are meaningless, primarily because the workers themselves do not consider strikes to be beneficial for themselves. At the same time, as soon as they feel the benefit, they immediately organize a strike without any help from the leftists. There are many examples of this both around the world and in Russia.

Funny moment. Our opponents like to accuse us of an allegedly contemptuous attitude towards the workers, allegedly the breakthroughists consider all workers to be "cattle". But for whom do these gentlemen hold the workers themselves, if they, in their opinion, are not capable of independently, without the help of "friends of the people", to read the Labor Code or ask a question on a legal website? So, gentlemen, worker-philes, do not consider the workers idiots. If they decide to go on strike, they will do so without your "help" and without your advice. Tea, not small children.

The absence of a strike movement in the Russian Federation is connected not with the “atomization of society”, but with the fact that the proletarians still consider the strategy of opportunism to be more advantageous for themselves. In many respects, this position of the proletarians is connected with the policy of the “welfare state”, which was adopted by the Putin leadership. And no matter how crooked and crooked this policy may look in practice, as long as it fulfills its task, "calming down" the masses.

The whole point is that the proletarian is not a born revolutionary, his revolutionary spirit is relative to other classes and strata of bourgeois society. The proletarian is a market subject, a seller of the commodity "labor power". By themselves, the proletarians are unwilling and unable to wage a struggle against the capitalists, but can, provided they only offer resistance, the essence of which is to increase the value of their commodity (labor power), and improve working conditions.

From the point of view of the methodology of dialectical materialism, FIGHT is such a relationship between opposites, in particular between CLASSES, which is accompanied by mutual NEGATION of the opposing sides . If, however, there is no negation of the bourgeois class in the course of the strike, i.e. the very institution of wage-slavery, then here one should speak precisely of the resistance of the proletarians to the tyranny of capital.

It is the struggle that can take shape . Those. it is not the “collection of forms” that forms in its unity the class struggle of the proletarians, but, on the contrary, the struggle of the proletarians assumes lower and higher forms, depending on the content of the actions of the proletarians. Content is the source of the emergence of forms, and not vice versa.

The economic "struggle" is thus not a stage, but a state of the proletariat . We see its active phase in the form of strikes. The fact that a significant number of workers today have outgrown economism, never participating in economic strikes, and consider the economic "struggle" to be stupidity that will not solve their problems, is interpreted by the opportunists as "the absence of class consciousness among the masses."

Podguzov aptly pointed out:

“‘Economic struggle’ is an unjustifiably strong verbal turn adopted for pedagogical reasons to designate a form of proletarian resistance, which is used from time to time by separate, in most cases small, detachments of the proletarian class, but this form has never been and cannot be the struggle of the WHOLE the proletarian class and even the WHOLE national detachment of the proletariat. The expression “kneeling rebellion” best captures the essence of the “economic form of the class struggle”. In other words, the “economic form of the class struggle” turnover is a kind of reinforcement turnover, a form of moral encouragement for the fact that the proletariat itself at least somehow reacts to its robbery and humiliation.

The sharpest forms of the economic "struggle" of the proletarians are now in full swing in Europe: in France, Greece, Great Britain. In the latter, the largest strike in the last decade is raging - 700 thousand people take part in it. And what? Never mind. The "grapes of wrath" are ripening, and there was no communism in Western Europe, there is only "Euro-communism", but even that is so miserable that it is not able to carry along with it not only striking teachers, doctors and physicians, but at least scavengers...

A common misconception is that the proletarians acquire skills useful for the political struggle during the strike. Allegedly, by participating in trade unions, workers acquire class consciousness and go through the “school of collective action skills” necessary for organizing a party. In a word, the economic strike is a stepping stone to the political struggle. This is not true. Those specific skills that the proletarians acquire are the skills of getting wages. The driving forces of the economic strike and the mechanisms of its organization are fundamentally different from those required for the organization of the revolutionary seizure of power. Economic struggle gives rise to only the most primitive forms of workers' organization, while revolutionary action requires a political organization - a party .. And the party is organized without any strikes and without any "striking experience", on the basis of communist propaganda among the working masses. The workers' organizations that arise on the basis of economism can contribute to the struggle for communism only if they are under the ideological influence of the communists.

Another widespread myth is that allegedly proletarians, participating in a strike, become more susceptible to communist propaganda. Such cases do happen, but it strongly depends on the specific circumstances and is not a regularity. The effectiveness of propaganda is determined, first of all, by the quality of propaganda, secondly, by the mass of propaganda, and only thirdly, by external circumstances. Therefore, the task of the communists is to provide high-quality and mass propaganda. Because in the present conditions, when there is no party, the emphasis in propaganda should be on quality, not quantity. The ideas of the opportunists that the economic "struggle" revolutionizes the masses are false; in fact, the success of the strikes, as a rule, only strengthens syndicalist sentiments among the workers. A successful general strike revolutionizes a class only if

"Economist" opportunists insist that communists are obliged to participate in the trade union movement, they say, in this way the communists acquire "connection with the masses" and carry out "practice", without which theory is dead. This is so if real communists, talented propagandists and agitators go to the trade unions, and the trade union masses show sympathy for the cause of communism. But in the main communication with the masses is established not through trade union fuss, but through party organs and the Marxist press. Because the masses follow not individual speakers, slogans and ideas, but organization. If the Communists have a party, there are publications that produce high-quality propaganda materials, then they should participate in the trade union movement, but by no means in the form and not for the purposes that the adherents of economism represent.

As for practice. Any revolutionary practice is doomed to degenerate into a reactionary one if its bearers do not actually know the theory of Marxism. Communist practice can be carried out only by those whose knowledge and method of thinking correspond to the objective laws of the development of nature, society and consciousness, who is able to critically assess the compliance of their practice with the requirements of Marxist theory and bring the theory into line with the changed conditions of practice. The dance of the Left around the strikes is precisely that, opportunism, and not practice. Because it stems from ignorance, faith in the spontaneous self-organization of the masses. As a matter of fact, the masses themselves cannot produce anything but syndicalism and trade unionism.

The idea of ​​the left that the communists should "awaken" the workers, push them in the back to a saving revolution is naivete, political infantilism. Communists participate in the proletarian economic movement not in order to "help" the hard workers, express solidarity or gain authority (which must be won, first of all, by scientific competence, the ability to make right decisions), but, firstly , to criticize economism among the workers, bringing science into their minds; secondly , for the purpose of recruiting personnelfor the cause of communism. Why among workers? Because, in the final analysis, the workers are the only social group that will not shine in a capitalist society, but which is the most organized at the same time. It is possible and necessary to work with a number of other social groups that have no chance of anything, but it is easier with the workers - they are organized into collectives. It is the workers who form the basis of the revolutionary working class.

It is impossible to carry on the political struggle of the working class and at the same time agitate for the economic "struggle". One excludes the other. When the Bolsheviks announced an all-Russian strike, it was precisely a political act, thus undermining the economic domination of the bourgeoisie, which prepared the conditions for the seizure of power by the working class.

It must be understood that the victory of October marked not only a victory over capitalism, but also over organized economism .

No matter how many proletarians are coaxed with handouts, market anarchy coupled with imperialist squabbling will inevitably give rise to a social explosion. It is necessary that at the moment of this explosion a party with such personnel potential be ready, which will be able not only to organize a successful uprising, but also to form the composition of a new socialist government, which will begin to dismantle the market economy and establish scientific central planning. That's what's most important. And what do "economists" preach? They preach the opposite: no cadres are needed! The workers themselves, in the heat of the trade union struggle, will give birth to a party, put forward leaders and leaders, take power themselves and begin to build socialism. The role of the Communists is assigned here as consultants,

Well, gentlemen, opportunists, have been waiting for 300 years for the trade unions to give birth to something other than anarcho-syndicalism, shall we wait again? Or is it better not to wait, but to follow the victorious path of Bolshevism? I hope it is clear to the reader which way is more correct.

I would like to end the article with the words of Lenin:

““How many Social-Democratic Lomonosovs have appeared in our country lately!” one comrade once remarked, referring to the amazing tendency of many of those inclined towards "economism" to reach great truths "with their own mind" without fail (such as the one that the economic struggle pushes the workers to the question of lack of rights) and to ignore, with magnificent disdain, the genius nugget, everything that the previous development of revolutionary thought and the revolutionary movement has already given.

R. Ogienko
29/03/2023

https://prorivists.org/79_antieconomism/

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Fri Mar 31, 2023 2:25 pm

An example of Marx's falsification
No. 3/79.III.2023

Another unfortunate critic of the Breakthrough claims that we, the breakthroughs, misunderstand the diamatic category of time. Like, Marx taught in a completely different way, etc. He quotes from Marx, in which he allegedly gives a brief definition of time, which does not correspond to our understanding.

He writes verbatim the following:

““The quantitative being of movement is time” (Marx, vol. 13, p. 16). For Marx, "time" is the "quantity" of movement; for Podguzov, “time” is “movement” itself, while the second, being “pure”, can even “embodied” in the form of time. Where did Podguzov get this from, if the flesh is more important than quantity?

It is difficult to say what the critic generally understands by time, what is the essence of his remark. First, let's reflect on the introductory ones that were offered to us. For example, I didn’t know such a quote from the classic, it didn’t stick in my head when I read it. And before getting into the collected works, I had the following train of thought.

Let us assume that Marx really "the quantitative being of movement is time." A natural question arises: the quantitative existence of the movement of what ? It seems that there are few options, the answer is on the surface: the quantitative existence of the movement of matter . So, if we take the quantitative side of the movement of any unit of matter, we get time. Suppose object A moves at a certain speed, which, of course, can be expressed quantitatively, and this movement, like any movement, has a quantitative component. It is clear that the speed of movement in itself cannot be considered time, it is only expressed relative to time. In our case, relative to a generally accepted unit of time, such as seconds, minutes, hours, etc.

So what's the deal?

The point here is that, based on this definition, time can be understood as the amount of motion of matter. But this is absurd, because the momentum of matter is energy. It is the physical concept of energy that expresses the total amount of motion of a material object.

Perhaps, it means that the movement as such has, as it were, two beings: qualitative (matter itself) and quantitative (time)? But this directly contradicts the axiom of materialism that quality, certainty are primary , and their quantitative parameters are derivatives. Only mathematics allows itself to abstract from quality, and only within the limits of the study of quantity. In real life, when it comes to quantity, the question arises: the quantity of what? Quantity without quality, a kind of separate quantitative being, all the more so the quantitative being of motion (and motion is the mode of existence of matter), is some kind of stupid idealism. Yes, and the critic himself correctly writes that "flesh is more primary than quantity."

Another option: maybe there is some pure being of motion separate from matter, which is time. But then it is not clear how this differs from our understanding of time. And even more incomprehensible, why is it quantitative? What is the quality of this being of movement?

When you open the text of Marx, it becomes clear that the quoter is either a fool, or a fool and a falsifier.

This is what an uncircumcised classic quote looks like:

“If one ounce of gold, one ton of iron, one quarter of wheat, and 20 yards of silk are equal exchange values, or equivalents, then one ounce of gold, 1/2 ton of iron, 3 bushels of wheat, and 5 yards of silk are exchange values ​​of completely different magnitude, and this quantitative difference is the only difference that they have at all as exchange values. As exchange values ​​of varying magnitude, they represent something greater or lesser, greater or lesser quantities of that simple, homogeneous, abstractly universal labor which forms the substance of exchange value. The question is how to measure these quantities? Or rather, what is the quantitative being of this work itself ?for the quantitative differences of commodities, as exchange values, are only the quantitative differences of the labor embodied in them. Just as the quantitative being of movement is time, so the quantitative being of labor is labor time . The difference in the duration of labor itself is the only difference inherent in it, assuming its quality as data.

If you are able to understand what you read, you will see that Marx is not writing here about time as such. It is correct to understand the segment of interest to us as follows: the quantitative being of the motion of matter is the time of this motion . The quantitative being of labor is labor time, that is, labor time .

How strongly do you have to want to spit on Proryv in order to falsify the fundamental category of the philosophy of Marxism by misinterpreting Marx?

As is known, in the remarkable comradely and scientific-revolutionary union of the founders of Marxism, an informal division of labor developed, according to which F. Engels covered questions of philosophy in his works. In the great work Anti-Dühring, he quite clearly gives the understanding of time, which served as the basis of our position:

“The matter is not about the concept of time, but about real time ... no matter how much the concept of time turns into a more general idea of ​​being, this does not move us one step forward, because the basic forms of any being are space and time, and being outside of time is the same nonsense, like being out of space. Hegel's "being that passed without time" and New Schelling's "unrepresentable being" are rational representations...

We ask only whether the world, in the state assumed here, lasts, experiences duration in time? We know very well that nothing will come of measuring such a duration, devoid of content , as well as from a similar, aimless measurement in space, and Hegel, precisely because of the senselessness of such an occupation, calls this infinity bad. According to ... relativists, time exists only due to change, and not change exists in time and through it. It is precisely because time is different, regardless of change, that it can be measured thanks to change, for in order to measure it is necessary to always have something different from the thing being measured.. And time, during which there are no changes accessible to knowledge, is far from not being time at all, it rather represents pure, untouched by any foreign impurities and, therefore, true time, time as such . Indeed, when we want to imagine the concept of time in all its purity, free from all alien, extraneous impurities, we are forced to leave aside, as irrelevant, all the various events that occur in time next to each other and after each other, and thus imagine a time in which nothing happens. By doing so, we do not at all dissolve the concept of time in the general idea of ​​being, but we get just the pure concept of time.

Add to this the famous quote from Lenin:

"There is nothing in the world but moving matter, and moving matter cannot move except in space and time."

Therefore, it is clear that time, firstly , is objective, and secondly , independently of matter . By itself, the flow of time does not affect matter, and matter is not able to influence the flow of time. Consequently, time is neither a form of our contemplation of motion, nor a property, side, moment, etc. of the motion of matter.

Will the falsifier of Marx agree with this? Based on the quote he cited, no.

The sad state of the left movement gives rise to such philosophical monsters. Therefore, read the classics, think with your head on your own and do not take anyone's word for it.

A. Redin
30/03/2023

https://prorivists.org/79_time/

" do not take anyone's word for it."...Goddamn absolutely straight. That's the core philosophy of the old Russian 'Nihilists' and the seed of revolutionary thought. Go to the source, always, ain't just for historians..
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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Tue Apr 11, 2023 4:08 pm

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PM Sanna Marin. (Photo: Snorki sarai tu!)

The discreet charm of the bourgeoisie
Originally published: In Defense of Communism on April 4, 2023 by Panos Alepliotis (more by In Defense of Communism) | (Posted Apr 11, 2023)

No, it’s not about another unknown Bunuel film. But if he had lived and knew about Finland’s election results, he could write a script and direct something similar.

After the Social Democrats did the “dirty work” of throwing the country into NATO and building a 300 km long wall against Russia, they failed to come on top in the elections. No particular surprise… The right came in first place, the ultra-right in second and Sanna only in third place. It seems that the Finns are ungrateful…

They had a very modern Prime Minister. Female, young, beautiful, activist, leftist… a very suitable combination to do the dirty work that the right could not or dare not do.

Sanna was the lesser evil in 2019. The fascists weren’t allowed to come, it was said then, and therefore Sanna emerged as the Finland’s democratic alternative. But she did rough work for the bourgeoisie and then you think just like in Sweden, Italy, Hungary and other countries: Why should you vote for supposed democrats and leftists when they still run a right-wing policy?

The original was voted for and the otherwise vile fascists increased and became the second largest power. Just like in Sweden, when the Social Democrats applied to NATO, they restricted workers’ rights, introduced austerity policies and favored capital especially during the pandemic–and therefore no longer appeared as the lesser evil.

Such political formations that call themselves “left” or “centrist” have proven throughout history that they are weak to the charms of the bourgeoisie. They become more loyal to capital than those called right or blue or conservative. Unfortunately, they still dominate throughout Europe and pave the way for harsher capitalist policies, especially when they simultaneously contribute to the division and pacification of the labor movement.

Sanna, Tsipras and Macron should feel proud. They have proven to the capital that they are a good reserve should they be needed again.

One should not be surprised and wonder why the fascists–or, okay, the ultra-right–are getting stronger. You shouldn’t stand with your hands down like the actors in Bunuel’s film. Take things into your own hands and fight the fascists, those who pretend the democrats and the supposed left by fighting capitalism.

Translated from riktpunkt.nu

https://mronline.org/2023/04/11/the-dis ... urgeoisie/

Well, they are more like skirmishers in front of the first line than the reserve. That is the fascists.
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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Sat Apr 15, 2023 11:16 am

Karl Kautsky, “Ultra-imperialism,” and Multipolarity

The fashionable term “multipolarity” -- popular with a significant section of the international left-- has an historical antecedent. In 1914, Karl Kautsky-- then possibly the most prominent Marxist theoretician in the world-- wrote an essay on the phases of capitalism-- past, current, and future. Like many modern-day multipolaristas who imagine a stable, peaceful imperialism after the taming of the US, Kautsky foresaw a benign phase of capitalist cooperation and peace after the war, after the belligerents were exhausted.



The capitalist countries would find peace on the international level through a process similar to cartelization-- the formation of monopolies. Kautsky believed that the growth of monopoly concentration on the corporate level-- a process ongoing in the late nineteenth century and acknowledged by nearly everyone-- was parallel with the concentration of countries, their colonies, and spheres of interest on the international level. As monopolies reduce competition among corporations, Kautsky reasoned, ultra-imperialism would reduce competition and rivalry among state powers.



Written a few months before the First World War and published a few months after the war began (with revisions), Ultra-imperialism (September, 1914) sought-- first and foremost-- to explain qualitative changes in capitalism: from its nineteenth-century phase as “free market” capitalism led and dominated by Great Britain, to its imperialist phase or form, existing at the time of Kautsky’s essay, to its ultra-imperialist phase, anticipated by Kautsky after the war would end.



To today’s reader, Ultra-imperialism may express some unusual, even eccentric ideas, though they reflect the rapidly changing circumstances that engaged Marxists at the turn of the last century. Capitalism was changing; the working-class movement was changing; the socialist parties were changing; and the movement’s leaders were changing.



Capitalist enterprises were growing larger and larger, absorbing smaller competitors and concentrating significant industries into fewer units. Capital accumulation had grown as well, with the result that financiers were looking farther afield for investment opportunities. And states were encouraging the export of capital, while committing to protection of those investments through acquiring colonies and developing spheres of interest.



These profound qualitative changes did not go unnoticed; within Marxist circles, not only Kautsky, but others-- Bukharin, Luxemburg, and, of course, Lenin-- were exploring the meaning of these changes. Without question, Lenin’s contribution-- the book, Imperialism-- placed the most indelible stamp on the left’s understanding of imperialism over the next one hundred years.



For Kautsky, changes in the form or phase of capitalism sprang from disproportionalities between industrial and agricultural production. Granting that capitalist industrial production knew no bounds, exchange with the agricultural sector was always limited by the slower growth in the production of foodstuffs and the availability of raw materials, as well as the number of customers for industrial goods. While drawing a distinction between industrial and agricultural sectors may seem artificial to today’s readers, it reflects a difference better expressed as the difference between advanced capitalist countries and pre-industrial regions, countries, and even continents in the early twentieth century.



Kautsky sketches a plausible natural history of the advanced capitalist countries seeking answers to the problem of the “agricultural sector” through exporting capital to other countries for trade and markets. Colonization arises because these new markets lack infrastructure and--frequently-- state structures. The capital exporter finds it easier to impose its state than to create a new state: “Naturally, this is best supplied by the State power of these capitalists themselves… Hence as the drive for increasing capital export from the industrial States to the agrarian zones of the world grows, so too does the tendency to subjugate these zones under their State power.”



This is Kautsky’s theory of the rise of imperialism. Interestingly, Kautsky, unlike Lenin, characterizes this relationship between colonizer and colonized as oppressive, rather than exploitative.



Not all countries that develop by the importation of capital are locked into a subordinate role by the industrialized countries; Kautsky cites the US and Russia as enjoying exported capital from other countries, but possessing “the strength to protect [their] autonomy… The desire to hinder this [autonomy] is another motive for the capitalist states to subject the agrarian zones, directly-- as colonies-- or indirectly-- as spheres of influence…”



Where Lenin sees imperialism as an imperative of mature monopoly capitalism-- a stage dictated by the very mechanism powering capitalism-- Kautsky understands imperialism as a policy, a choice made somehow by the collective capitalist: “Does [imperialism] represent the last possible phenomenal form of capitalist world policy, or is another still possible?”



Significantly, Lenin’s Marxism engages laws of motion to explain the imperialist stage, while Kautsky’s Marxism counts imperialism as a path taken, among others available.



Further, Kautsky separates the arms race, militarism, and war from the logic of capitalism:



But imperialism has another side. The tendency towards the occupation and subjugation of the agrarian zones has produced sharp contradictions between the industrialized capitalist States, with the result that the arms race… and… the long-prophesied World War has now become a fact. Is this side of imperialism, too, a necessity for the continued existence of capitalism, one that can only be overcome with capitalism itself?



There is no economic necessity for continuing the arms race after the World War, even from the standpoint of the capitalist class itself, with the exception of at most certain armaments [sic] interests. On the contrary, the capitalist economy is seriously threatened precisely by the contradictions between its States. Every far-sighted capitalist today must call on his fellows: capitalists of all countries, unite! [my emphasis]



Thus, for Kautsky-- as opposed to Lenin-- war is not a constant, expected outcome of imperialism. Certainly, the call for capitalists to unite behind peace underscores the difference!



Because the economics of imperialism are turning against the capitalist-- returns on capital exports evidenced a decline, according to Kautsky-- “Imperialism is thus digging its own grave… the policy of imperialism therefore cannot be continued much longer.”



So, what comes next, in light of the pitfalls of continuing imperialism?



Kautsky answers:



What Marx said of capitalism can also be applied to imperialism: monopoly creates competition and competition monopoly. The frantic competition of giant firms, giant banks and multi-millionaires obliged the great financial groups, who were absorbing the small ones, to think up the notion of the cartel. In the same way, the result of the World War between the great imperialist powers may be a federation of the strongest, who renounce their arms race.



Hence from the purely economic standpoint it is not impossible that capitalism may still Jive [sic] through another phase, the translation of cartelization into foreign policy: a phase of ultra-imperialism, which of course we must struggle against as energetically as we do against imperialism, but whose perils lie in another direction, not in that of the arms race and the threat to world peace.



So Kautsky effectively bails out capitalism as the source of war and aggression.



With the finished manuscript about to be published in Die Neue Zeit only a few months after the beginning of what was shaping up to be a world war, Kautsky recognized that readers might find the promise of a post-imperialist lasting peace somewhat questionable. Nonetheless, he foresaw “this last solution, however unlikely it may seem at the moment.”



How do we judge this remarkable projection? Is there merit to the theory of ultra-imperialism?



Clearly, Lenin scathingly rejected it. He wrote in a December, 1915 Introduction to N. Bukharin’s Imperialism and World Economy in his characteristically caustic fashion:



Reasoning theoretically and in the abstract, one may arrive at the conclusion reached by Kautsky… that the time is not far off when those magnates of capital will unite into one world trust which would replace the rivalries and the struggle of nationally limited finance capital by an internationally united finance capital…



Particularly as regards Kautsky, his open break with Marxism has led him, not to reject or forget politics, nor to skim over the numerous and varied political conflicts, convulsions and transformations that particularly characterise the imperialist epoch; nor to become an apologist of imperialism; but to dream about a "peaceful capitalism." "Peaceful" capitalism has been replaced by unpeaceful, militant, catastrophic imperialism… If it is thus impossible simply, directly, and bluntly to dream of going from imperialism back to "peaceful" capitalism, is it not possible to give those essentially petty-bourgeois dreams the appearance of innocent contemplations regarding "peaceful" ultra-imperialism? If the name of ultra-imperialism is given to an international unification of national (or, more correctly, statebound) imperialisms which "would be able" to eliminate the most unpleasant, the most disturbing and distasteful conflicts such as wars, political convulsions, etc., which the petty bourgeois is so much afraid of, then why not turn away from the present epoch of imperialism that has already arrived -- the epoch that stares one in the face, that is full of all sorts of conflicts and catastrophes? Why not turn to innocent dreams of a comparatively peaceful, comparatively conflictless, comparatively non-catastrophic ultra-imperialism? And why not wave aside the "exacting" tasks that have been posed by the epoch of imperialism now ruling in Europe? Why not turn instead of dreaming that this epoch will perhaps soon be over, that perhaps it will be followed by a comparatively "peaceful" epoch of ultra-imperialism which demands no such "sharp tactics"[?]



In this tendency to evade the imperialism that is here and to pass in dreams to an epoch of "ultra-imperialism," of which we do not even know whether it is realisable, there is not a grain of Marxism… [H]e offers us not Marxism, but a petty-bourgeois and deeply reactionary tendency to soften contradictions… Kautsky again only promises to be a Marxist in the coming epoch of ultra-imperialism, of which he does not know whether it will arrive! …For to-morrow we have Marxism on credit, Marxism as a promise, Marxism deferred. For to-day we have a petty-bourgeois opportunist theory -- and not only a theory -- of softening contradictions.



Lenin was, first and foremost, a political polemicist. While he was a profoundly deep thinker, he worked most often in the heat of political battles, where sarcasm and ridicule struck with the greatest force.



He explains Kautsky’s theory in the context of opportunism. Because Kautsky’s intellectual ship-- and that of other Social Democratic leaders- - had left their Marxist moorings, they were susceptible to the allure of idealized, dream-like illusions of peaceful capitalism and, subsequently, peaceful imperialism.



Against these illusions, Lenin pressed the realities of a growing human catastrophe-- World War I-- which was only beginning to reveal the human misery that lay ahead. It was this imperialist war-- a war with no meaning besides imperialist rivalry-- that shatters Kausky’s dream.



With over a hundred years and the benefit of hindsight, we can better judge whether Kautsky’s “Marxism on credit, Marxism as a promise” can be cashed or redeemed. History is always the laboratory for the science of Marxism.



Clearly, Lenin was correct and Kautsky wildly mistaken-- no period of peaceful capitalism or peaceful imperialism followed the first great war of the twentieth century. To the contrary, the last century was one of constant wars, imperialist aggression, and unprecedented human devastation. Nor could it be otherwise, as Lenin would argue, as long as capitalism continued to generate competition and rivalry.



Movements could and should rise to oppose this tendency. Revolutionaries should stand firmly against these wars and they should attempt to marshal as much broad support to delay, thwart, and stop these wars, but they should not be under the illusion that capitalism and its instrument, imperialism, would not continually express this tendency.



Kautsky’s theoretical argument for ultra-imperialism rests on a common mistake in understanding both Marx and monopoly. On the level of enterprises, Kautsky sees discrete stages where a competitive industrial sector moves inexorably towards a monopolized industry (he concedes that Marx always notes that monopoly always goes to competition, as well-- an inconvenient formulation that he conveniently ignores). His theory of imperialism builds on this model: on the level of countries, he argues that imperialist competition (rivalry) always moves towards a global monopoly, an imperialist combine or cartel.



Hence, the global economy will usher in an era of stability and peace-- ultra-imperialism.



But this is neither true to Marx’s thinking nor consistent with the dialectics of competition. The foundation of the Marxist theory of competition is found in the earliest published Marxist tract on political economy, Frederich Engels’ neglected Outlines of A Critique of Political Economy (1844), which gives considerable attention to competition and monopoly and birthed the proposition: “Monopoly produces free competition, and the latter, in turn, produces monopoly.”



While Engels understands the dialectical relation of competition to monopoly, he insists on the constancy of competition: “We have seen that in the end everything comes down to competition, so long as private property exists.”



In this, one of the clearest statements of the dialectics of competition, Engels explains this as, not necessarily discrete stages, but as a fundamental interplay:



The opposite of competition is monopoly… It is easy to see that this antithesis is again quite hollow…Competition is based on self-interest, and self interest in turn breeds monopoly. In short, competition passes over into monopoly. On the other hand, monopoly cannot stem the tide of competition-- indeed, it itself breeds competition.



Engels emphasizes that competition is fundamental to what Marxists would call the capitalist mode of production-- it permeates every aspect of capitalist social and economic life. While concentration (monopoly) is an ever-present process, it never supersedes competition, nor does it erase competition. Kautsky’s mechanical Marxism-- like later day theorists of monopoly such as Sweezy and Baran-- misunderstands both the constancy of competition and the process of monopoly or cartelization. Competition (rivalry) is the mainspring of capitalism in all of its forms and remains so as capitalism evolves.



Is Today’s Multipolarity the same as Kautsky’s Ultra-imperialism?



It has become popular, especially with the left, to hail the weakening of US and NATO imperialism as the singular goal of the anti-imperialist project. Certainly, a weaker, defanged US foreign policy, corporate reach, and military posture is both an urgent task and a fully justified goal for anti-imperialists. But should it be the singular goal?



After the fall of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies, the world might have appeared to be unipolar. The US, the remaining superpower that survived the Cold War, exercised near-absolute control over global institutions, maintained military bases in every region, and met little early resistance to its plans. As the US intervened in more and more countries' internal affairs, the description of a “unipolar world” seemed more and more apt.



Predictably, resistance emerged. Several countries rebelled, especially in the Middle East and Central and South America. Popular movements, in defiance of the US, chose independent policies, insisted on national sovereignty, even waged what Lenin called “national wars” -- direct or proxy national liberation wars (e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria) -- against the US.



The twenty-first century saw further erosion of the US’s unipolar status and increasing resistance to the US government’s diktats. The growing economic might of People's China, largely untouched by global economic turmoil, challenged the US on that front, as did Russia’s growing military might and energy competitiveness.



Clearly, only decades after declaring itself the global leader, US hegemony was under stress. Influence, power, and leadership were diversifying. In significant ways, the world was becoming multipolar. And, insofar as this new order restricts the US arena of action, it is a good thing.



But multipolarity as reality is different from multipolarity as a doctrine. To welcome multipolarity because it restrains the US is one thing; to welcome multipolarity because it heralds a new age of peaceful coexistence and world harmony is another-- something far more misleading and dangerous.



Like Kautsky, some on the left leap to the conclusion that capitalism can be delinked from competition or rivalry, if only the US were contained. As Lenin observed, there is more wishful thinking in this position than a reflection of reality.



For doctrinaire multipolaristas, a century-old history of imperialist rivalry among the great powers, disrupted only partially by a united anti-Soviet, anti-Communist crusade, counts as little evidence that capitalism invariably stokes imperialist rivalries. They choose to overlook this pattern.



Less than two decades after the end of the great imperialist war, Japan, Italy, and Germany had begun quests of imperialist expansion, often at the expense of the empires of other great powers like the UK and France.



At mid-century, the Cold War confrontation and the threat of nuclear annihilation tempered the danger of global war, yet wars of both national liberation and anti-insurgency raged-- imperialist wars. In many cases, economic aggression replaced military aggression, as former colonial masters sought to establish neo-colonial relations.



Despite this backdrop of persistent, unending imperialist competition and conflict, multipolaristas imagine a coming era of multilateral cooperation and mutual respect.



They imagine that India and Pakistan will establish an unprecedented harmony; that Japanese claims to the Kuril Islands will dissolve; that Balkan rivalries and Armenian and Azerbaijan conflicts will magically resolve; that the long-standing and always simmering rivalries in the Middle East will disappear; and that the struggle to control the vast wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo will wither away and be settled peacefully, once US imperialism is contained.



They see no ominous signs in the growing belligerence and greatly expanded military budgets of Germany and Japan. They hail global realignments and new alliances as steps toward peace, rather than potential sources of conflict.



The war in Ukraine unleashed a far greater threat to local, regional, and even global war than we have seen in fifty years. As Ian Buruma has noted, the war has licensed Germany to expand its war budget by 100 million euros, while loosening the post-war shackles on this former instigator of the last global war, a moment that Chancellor Scholz calls a “historic turning point.”



Buruma cites a commitment that Japanese prime minister Kishida makes to increase military spending by 50% in 5 years, a dangerous break with Japan’s constitutional fetters. This is an omen of the utopian multipolarity to come?



Like Kautsky’s theory of ultra-imperialism, this theory of a peaceful and harmonious world of capitalist powers is a radical departure from what history teaches and from today’s realities. And like Kautsky, its proponents have lost touch with the dynamics of capitalism in the era of imperialism. Kautsky saw the basic contradiction of his time between competitive capitalism and monopoly capitalism, with the “cartelization” of empires eliminating global rivalries.



Today’s multipolaristas see the struggle between unipolarity and multipolarity as the principal contradiction facing the world. As with ultra-imperialism, this is an illusion that allows them to evade the great contradiction of our time: the struggle between an overripe, failed system-- capitalism-- and socialism.



Since the demise of Soviet socialism, advocacy of socialism has fallen out of fashion. To most on the left, socialism is, at best, a far-off dream, well beyond our reach. No doubt this despair-- unmatched even by the most desperate times of the past-- informs the attraction of multipolarity, something that appears within reach.



But intellectual integrity requires that we go where the truth takes us. And the truth in our day-- like the truth in Kautsky’s day-- demands that we recognize that capitalism generates war. And the final solution to war is socialism.



Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/2023/04/kar ... m-and.html
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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Sun Apr 16, 2023 8:11 pm

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The First International issue of Wenhua Zongheng is a landmark event for the Global Left
By John Ross (Posted Apr 15, 2023)

Originally published: Learning from China on April 2023 (more by Learning from China) |

Wenhua Zongheng is a newly launched international publication bringing together articles originally produced in the Mainland China magazine of the same name in Chinese. It is jointly published in English, Spanish and Portuguese, by Wenhua Zongheng, the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, and Dongsheng—which produces the newsletter News on China. Most importantly, its appearance is a landmark moment for the entire global left. The reason for this is not only the high quality of the individual articles, which are excellent, but what it signifies for the present and future orientation of the entire international left. It makes available for the first time in a regular fashion, in excellent translations, key analyses from the Chinese left—allowing it to speak with its own voice and not through the interpretation or comments of others. In addition to showing the extremely high level of discussion in the Chinese left, the significance of this can be clearly seen by placing it against the entire trajectory which is reorganising the global left.

The international left after the collapse of the USSR
Prior to the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 by far the largest part of the international left had been oriented towards it—as the left’s most progressive forces had been since the Russian Revolution of 1917 led to the USSR’s creation. That position had been sustained by the immense role the USSR played in the defeat of Nazism, in it both inspiring and materially aiding the destruction of the colonial empires, in the practical aid the Soviet Union had given to key progressive struggles internationally, in the vast improvement in the lives of the Soviet people that had been created and many other reasons. The restoration of capitalism in the former USSR in 1991 was therefore an immense defeat for the international working class not only objectively but it also broke up the previous orientation of the largest part of the international left.

Other socialist countries, including Cuba and Vietnam, certainly still existed. The former was a great inspiration to the left due to its internationalist record since its 1959 revolution, exemplified most dramatically in its critical military aid to the struggle to defeat the South African apartheid regime, Cuba’s integral interrelation with progressive struggles in Latin America and other continents, its enormous domestic medical and other achievements and numerous other measures. Regarding Vietnam, in addition to theoretical understanding, significant parts of the international left also directly grasped its importance from their own experience in the global movement opposing the U.S. war against that country from the 1950s to the 1970s—a formative experience for an entire generation of the global left. But despite their inspiration Cuba and Vietnam were too small to replace the decisive material role in the international struggle which the USSR had played.

The development of China
There was, however, one country which did have much greater and growing material weight in the international situation—China. For a prolonged period large parts of the international left were hampered in relating to China by an incorrect analysis of the transformations in that country which took place following the death of Mao Zedong and the beginning of the China’s Reform and Opening Up in 1978. During this period, the communications between China and most of the left declined and there was a subsequent dearth of information. The transformations inside China were incorrectly analysed particularly in the imperialist countries, but also more widely, as representing the restoration of capitalism in China.

This analysis went against the Marxist theory of the state. Starting with China’s revolution, it was clear when the capitalist state in China had been destroyed and power transferred to a socialist state—in China’s civil war up to 1949. The fact that the destruction of the capitalist state in China took place via prolonged civil war, in contrast to the short urban insurrection on 7 November 1917 in Russia, did not alter anything of the essence of the matter—in Cuba and Vietnam also power had been transferred to the working class via wars lasting years. To take an opposite process to a revolution, counterrevolution, it was also clear when capitalist power had been restored in the USSR—on 19-21 August 1991 when the Yeltsin led defeat of the move against Gorbachev by the majority of the CPSU’s leaders destroyed the power of that party, which in reality had been the core of the Soviet State apparatus. By 29 August 1991 the activity of the CPSU was suspended throughout the entire USSR and on 6 November Yeltsin banned the activities of the party in Russia. The core of the existing Soviet state apparatus had been destroyed.

The revolutions in Russia, Cuba, and Vietnam, and the counter-revolution in the USSR, therefore confirmed the Marxist analysis of the state as laid out in Marx’s The Civil War in France, Lenin’s State and Revolution, and other works—that the transfer of power from one class to another cannot occur via a simple change in government, the state apparatus of the class which previously held power must be broken.

But if it was entirely clear when socialist state power had been established in China, in 1949 by war, then for those who argued that capitalism had been restored in China, when on earth had that state power been broken in China? The CPC had been in power continuously from 1949 to the present day, the People’s Liberation Army had been the armed forces of that state from 1949 to the present day. When had the transition to capitalism occurred in China and how come no one, unlike in August 1991 in Russia, noticed this breaking of the state created in 1949? The analysis that capitalism had been restored in China was, as it was put in another context, to “run the film of reformism in reverse”. That is, it was a theory that the transfer of power from one class to another could take place by peaceful gradual means on the basis of the existing state apparatus—whether in the direction of capitalism to socialism (revolution) or from socialism to capitalism (counter-revolution).

As those who claimed capitalism had been restored in China could not point to when this transfer of state class power took place, and the former socialist state power had been destroyed, instead they put forward a series of complaints about China after 1978—that there were was a stock exchange, that China had adopted a bad foreign policy, that there were billionaires, allegedly migrant workers were held in inhuman conditions etc etc. But whether these claims were correct or false was not decisive, and many were irrelevant, to the question of deciding which class held power in China—that was decided by state power, not by such issues.

Those on the left who recognised that China continued to be a socialist state
While a large part of the international left in the Global North, and to a lesser extent more widely, held such a false analysis of China, it should be stated that a part of that left, in which the present author was included, argued against this. The present author published more than 1,000 articles and books analysing China’s socialist development—some of these are collected in the book China’s Great Road. From 1992-2000 he was living in Russia attempting to persuade it to adopt the Chinese path of economic development. A number of these articles, with others from 1991 to 2018, are included here. From 2009 he was invited to work in Chinese universities and think tanks.

Clearly arguing against any position that capitalism had been restored in China in the Global North were a number of Communist Parties, individuals, publications, and organisations. These included, for example, publications in the leading U.S. socialist journal Monthly R eview, and the U.S. Party of Socialism and Liberation, the early part of whose developing analysis can be found in the book China: Revolution and Counterrevolution. Some of these holding these views were critical of the path China adopted from 1978 onwards, some were strongly supportive, but all agreed on the most fundamental issue—that China was a socialist state.

This was the decisive issue. For those supportive of the path China embarked on in 1978 this was obvious, while for those who were critical of it if China was a socialist state then the mistakes they criticised could potentially be corrected—which they could not if capitalism had been restored.

But in line with this development of China as a powerful socialist country, also by far the numerically largest left—using left in the Western sense—of any country in the world developed in China. Apart from state media, this left also developed important publications and media. Among the most significant of these were Guancha.cn, certainly the most read non-state left wing website in the world, with articles regularly receiving hundreds of thousands of hits and with 19 million followers on weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. Another was the bimonthly Wenhua Zongheng magazine itself. In addition, a significant number of left-wing writers had millions of followers on weibo, social media and other publications.

China begins to reshape the international left
While the debates referred to outside China were of the utmost importance theoretically, given China’s weight in the world, nevertheless they at first seemed extremely abstract, without decisive practical importance, in major parts of the world. The author remembers being told in the 1990s in Russia, by people who should have known better: “Why are you so interested in China? It is a very poor country. Russia has nothing to learn from China.” My response was “China is socialist. Its economic policy is correct from the point of view of Marxist theory. Therefore, it will be a tremendous success. If you are not convinced now just wait and see.”

In the West the response was also very frequently “Why are you going on about China all the time”. My response: “The development of China is enormously more powerful than anything in the left in the Global North. It will remake the entire international left.” That is what is now happening and of which the publication of the international edition of Wenhua Zongheng is a qualitative landmark.

Rather than summarise the articles in in this issue of Wenhua Zongheng, for reasons analysed below its significance is precisely that it allows the Chinese left to express itself in its own words, so the original should be read, what will be analysed here is the process which led to the international publication of the journal and what it means in terms of the dynamic of the global left.

Developments in the Global South
The focus of this first international issue of Wenhua Zongheng is the relation of China and the Global South. This is crucial because in the Global South a different and more powerful process was taking place than in the Global North. The interrelation of China with this is summed up in the lead article of this issue of Wenhua Zongheng by the quotation “China’s historical destiny Is to stand with the third world” by Yang Ping, Wenhua Zonghen g’s editor in China.

At a theoretical level this is a restatement of the fundamental strategic analysis of Lenin. In the words of his address to the Congress Of Communist Organisations of the Peoples Of The East: “the socialist revolution will not be solely, or chiefly, a struggle of the revolutionary proletarians in each country against their bourgeoisie—no, it will be a struggle of all the imperialist-oppressed colonies and countries, of all dependent countries, against international imperialism… we said that the civil war of the working people against the imperialists and exploiters in all the advanced countries is beginning to be combined with national wars against international imperialism. That is confirmed by the course of the revolution, and will be more and more confirmed as time goes on.” But, in addition to this fundamental strategic conclusion, the analysis of the first issue of Wenhua Zongheng also corresponds to the present situation of the left internationally.

After the immediate impact of the collapse of the USSR, and developing initially largely independently of developments in China, strongly divergent trends began to appear in the left in the Global South (in this context not including China) and the Global North—the imperialist countries.

In the Global South, particularly in Latin America, a strong upturn of the left began with the victory of Chavez in the December 1998 Venezuelan presidential election and the defeat of the right-wing coup in that country of 2002. This was followed by the “pink tide” of left-wing victories and left wing forming of governments in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador and other countries. Then, after 2014, there were defeats in Brazil, Ecuador and other countries. But by the early 2020s a clear new upswing of the left was taking place—with the defeat of the regime established by the 2019 right wing coup in Bolivia, victories for left wing candidates in Mexico and Colombia, the re-election of Lula to the presidency in Brazil and other developments.

The left and the issue of China
These left-wing currents, particularly but not exclusively those in government, were however immediately practically confronted with at least two decisive aspects of China. First, China’s enormously successful economic development made it a decisive trading partner, and potential source of investment, for the Global South—for many Global South countries China, not the U.S. was their largest trading partner. Second China’s gigantic social achievements—lifting over 850 million people out of internationally defined poverty, 70% of those lifted out of poverty in the world, the fastest increase in wages and consumption of any country in the world, a life expectancy which by 2022 was higher than the U.S., going in only just over 70 years from almost the world’s poorest country to the brink of high-income status by international classification—were precisely the types of development they wanted for their own people. These achievements were also so obviously in the interests of the ordinary people of China that it showed in a dramatic fashion the practical benefits of socialism. For these reasons the left in the Global South became more and more interested in, and favourable to, China. They were also strongly against the current U.S. aggression against China—the “new cold war”.

In the Global North, on the contrary, overall a series of defeats continued—symbolised, at the most mass level, by the defeat of Bernie Sanders in the contest to be Democratic Party candidate for President, the ousting of Corbyn a leader of the Labour Party, the weakening of Die Linke in Germany etc.

These positive developments in the Global South naturally sought links with each other and the systematic organisation of such relations. Aside from the state-to-state relations of various progressive governments, the most publicly developed of these organisations was the creation of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, whose Director was Vijay Prashad, and the International People’s Assembly. Based on the most dynamic and largest part of the left outside of socialist countries, the Global South, these organisations have increased in influence—Prashad has become probably the most influential Marxist author not in a socialist country. Tricontinental is the publishing partner for Wenhua Zongheng in the new international publication.

The international edition of Wenhua Zongheng
Even before this publication of the international edition of Wenhua Zongheng there were interconnections between the left in China and forces outside it. There was, in the state media produced in China in foreign languages, of course expressions of the key positions of the Chinese leadership. Going in the other language direction, there were a small number of non-Chinese progressive authors who were regularly published in China and had significant readerships there. The international No Cold War campaign in the last three years had brought together significant forces opposed to U.S. policy to China, had linked these to forces in China and had received significant publicity in China. Dongsheng had on a weekly basis been bringing together for a non-Chinese audience key material on and produced by China—unlike Wenhua Zongheng this was chiefly material published in English. There was also some, but very limited, amount of translation of significant figures on the left in China, outside of the state leadership, into non-Chinese languages. Given the development of modern translation software it was also possible for anyone who wanted to follow the discussions online in China to do so.

But while the international edition of Wenhua Zongheng follows on from these developments it is a great step forward because it is a regular, institutional, place in which an important part of the Chinese left can explain its analyses internationally. This, therefore, creates a far more systematic understanding of and dialogue internationally with the broader left in China. Given that by far the largest and most dynamic progressive forces outside China were in the Global South it was entirely logical that it was only the interaction of the Global South with the Chinese left that would bring sufficient forces to bear to create such a structured ongoing dialogue between the left inside China and the left outside China.

This is what the creation of the international edition of Wenhua Zongheng signifies and why it is a qualitative landmark for the international left. For the first time there is an ongoing structured institutional mechanism for making some of the key publications of the progressive Chinese intellectuals available to a non-Chinese audience. In addition, the goal is to enable Global South commentary on the articles and topics available to Chinese readers of Wenhua Zongheng.

The interaction of the Global South, China and the Global North
Of course, not only the Global South is engaged in this dialogue with the Chinese left. Naturally, and fortunately, not all of the left in the Global North went backwards. Some figures resolutely stood against the U.S. aggression against China even when, in some cases, they had disagreements with it—Noam Chomsky and Yanis Varoufakis to name only two of the best known. Some other parts of the Western left took a stance understanding the enormous achievements of China. The leading U.S. socialist magazine Monthly Review, unlike its British counterpart New Left Review (NLR), linked itself to and reflected these new progressive forces—NLR, in contrast, has been featuring reviews with supporters of capitalism in China, pro-U.S. separatists in Hong Kong etc.

As a result, already some networks of republications had been created between Monthly Review, Tricontinental, and Guancha.cn. Initially, both to the shame of the Western left, and for historic reasons, there are far more socialists in China who speak foreign languages than socialists and progressives in the West who speak Chinese. Therefore initially, regrettably, these republications went more from foreign languages to Chinese than the other way round, Guancha.cn published translations of a number of non-Chinese left wing authors into Chinese—some were written originally for a “Western” audience and some specifically for a Chinese audience. Monthly Review made a number of these articles available in English and Tricontinental had also published a number of these articles outside China. Recently the book Washington’s New Cold War: A Socialist Perspective, drawing together analysis of the reasons the U.S. had launched its new policy of aggression against China, had also been published in English and Chinese as well as Portuguese, Spanish and Korean. So, up until now, the left in China had much better knowledge of the left outside China than vice versa. The issue of making material from China available outside China is dealt with below.

The significance of the international edition of Wenhua Zongheng
Under the impact of global events the left outside China is progressively dividing into two parts. That which has a fundamentally favourable analysis of China, which of course does not exclude criticisms, and that part which is fundamentally hostile. A few forces attempt to avoid the issue, for example holding up the Latin American left as the example to be followed while ignoring China—a position which becomes increasingly untenable given that the Latin American left itself is consciously seeking good relations with China.

So the international edition of Wenhua Zongheng was very far from springing from nowhere. But it was a big step forward in a process that was underway. The Chinese state obviously has the resources to make the views of its leaders known in foreign languages. But, as already seen, there is an enormous left in China, the world’s largest, which has its own network of publications and its own intense discussions—the idea that China is some sort of monolith is a ridiculous caricature simply put out by anti-socialist propaganda in the West. But, given the shortage of Chinese language resources in the West it was a difficult task, requiring serious resources, to make this debate available outside China in first class translations. Inevitably, given that the left in the Global South is much bigger and more politically significant than the left in the Global North, and the interest in alternative models of modernization is needed in the Global South, it was forces from the Global South which had the resources to undertake that task. This is why the international edition of Wenhua Zongheng is a joint publication between that Chinese magazine, the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, and Dongsheng.

This also makes clear why this publication of an international edition is a true landmark event in taking the process of dialogue between the left inside and outside China forward. It means for the first time, as noted, that on a regular basis, the views of key parts of the Chinese left are available in their own words. Anyone who reads the first issue will already get an idea of the extremely high level of analysis in China.

The dynamic of the international discussion for socialism
The dynamic which is now taking place is clear. The international left is being reshaped by this interaction between China and the world. This now increasingly includes a dialogue between the Chinese left and the left in the Global South—the two parts of the international left which are advancing. Forces in the Global North are either relating to this process, and going forward, or not relating to it and at best are increasingly bypassed or at worst are going backwards, emphasising anti-China position etc. Given the fundamental global forces which are operating this process will continue to deepen.

Naturally, because the interaction of the left inside and outside China is still only just in its first stages there are many issues to be discussed. As the two have developed for a prolonged period with entirely insufficient contact with each other, it is entirely unrealistic to believe that at the beginning of this process there will not be misunderstandings, lack of knowledge, differences etc Two conditions, at least, are necessary to deal with this situation.

First, at all times, to use China’s terminology, these discussions must be regarded as “contradictions among the people” not “contradictions between the people and the enemy”. That is, they are differences among those attempting to take progressive steps forward. Indeed, in a wider sense, the most fundamental practical divide of all is between those who oppose the U.S.’s aggression towards China and those who did not—China, as well as international progress, needs all those who oppose such aggression to work together regardless of whether or not they agree with China, either in whole or in part. To seek to unite purely “pro-China” forces is not the most effective aid to China, to the international left, or human progress. But among those who were supportive of China’s course, also, it is necessary to carry out a calm discussion and at all times to act consistently with a framework of “contradictions among the people”.

Second, in that framework, it is necessary to have a correct, that is medium/long term, time framework for such discussion. In addition to the fact that different experiences in the left outside China, and the left inside China, would itself necessary create differences even among these currents themselves, this was even more the case when the Chinese left, and the non-Chinese left, had such insufficient contact for a prolonged period. Many people will have views on such differences. It is completely utopian to believe that such misunderstandings, differences etc could be overcome, or in some cases even accurately formulated, rapidly. This is a discussion with a timeframe of years, not a few months. But for success the first precondition was to establish the best possible channels of communication. And, for getting the views of a key part of the Chinese left to a non-Chinese audience the launching of the international edition of Wenhua Zongheng is a decisive step forward. Now the non-Chinese left can read directly what key parts of the Chinese left are discussing and their views.

For anyone who wishes to follow the most advanced discussions in the international left therefore the international edition of Wenhua Zongheng is indispensable. Those who do not read it will not be informed of key positions of the largest left in the world—that in China. That is why the launch of the international edition of Wenhua Zongheng is more than a simple publication. It is a landmark event for the whole global left.

https://mronline.org/2023/04/15/the-fir ... obal-left/

Should be interesting to see how the "China is capitalist' crowd responds.

Here's a link:
https://dongshengnews.org/en/whzh-vol1-no1/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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