Ideology

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Mon Apr 17, 2023 2:31 pm

The “Left”: Revolutionary vs “Infantile Disorder”
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on APRIL 15, 2023
Rainer Shea

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Degrowth, Drug Fetishism, & “Anti-Colonialism” Are Used as Weapons Against the Revolutionary Cause

Even if a communist can colloquially describe themselves as being on the left, there’s a distinction between communism and “the left.” This is implied right in the title of Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder. Whereas the left, a big tent term for a myriad of incompatible ideologies, aims merely to act as an opposition towards the present order for the sake of it, communists have a coherent vision for how to defeat the system: by advancing history’s development to the next stage. The left, because of its lack of commitment to that central Marxist goal, naturally takes on an opportunistic role. Because when you want only to build a movement as an end in itself, rather than use this movement as a means for defeating the system, you become nothing more than an actor who benefits from discontent without helping solve the problems behind that discontent.

This is the framework through which we can understand the inevitable rift that’s developing between the political actors who are serious about revolution, and the ones who only seek to perpetuate “the left” even if the left doesn’t actually win victory for the workers. That the left has failed the class struggle, and remains an inert force from the perspective of historical agency, doesn’t matter to the opportunists as long as they can keep benefiting from the left’s existence. From the discourse, organizing, and academic spaces that provide those in them with either social or monetary benefits. To maintain access to these spaces, there are certain ideas that you can’t challenge. Even if those ideas are instrumental in preventing the construction of an effective workers movement, and the overthrow of the capitalist state.

Selling eco-fascism through a “left” angle

During the stage of capitalist decline that we’ve been in since the 2008 collapse, where the consequences of American deindustrialization for working class living standards are being felt worse than ever, one of these untouchable ideas is “degrowth.” The defenders of degrowth who posture as Marxists insist that the idea’s Malthusian liberal iteration can be separated from what they imply to be a “Marxist” version of it, but the practical reality of our conditions in the imperial center shows that such a separation can’t come about. If we implemented a Marxist version of degrowth, it would no longer be degrowth, it would be something too far removed from that to still honestly be deserving of the label.

This is because the imperial center’s deindustrialization has made it so that in order to raise the continent’s workers up from their appalling present conditions, we’ll need to revitalize American industry. Not in the capitalist way of industry for the sake of profit, but in the socialist way of industry for the sake of humanitarianism. If the people within what’s now called the “United States” are to build a strong economy after they’ve cut themselves off from imperialism’s extractive benefits, they’re going to need to rebuild their decayed factories. The destruction of these factories has amounted to a decades-long series of what are effectively industrial terrorist attacks against the working class, carried out by the capitalist class. The bourgeoisie have committed these crimes so that they can intensify the subjugation of countries like Mexico, whose people were placed under such a cruel level of exploitation after NAFTA that this provoked the country’s southern tip into a revolution. To undo these wrongs, while bringing ourselves out of the poverty which neoliberalism has forced upon us, we’ll need to re-industrialize in at least some aspects.

This goal is compatible with the replacement of cars with high-speed rail transportation like in east Asia, the elimination of fossil fuels as an electricity source, and the other measures required for combating global warming. But the left’s dominant discourse voices don’t believe these things can be reconciled, instead deciding to put forth misleading arguments that make the solution I’ve described appear untenable (for example: portraying nuclear energy as still too unsafe to replace fossil fuels, even though existing socialist countries have successfully implemented nuclear). The only solution these leftists can help advance is, ironically, an eco-fascist one, where the wellbeing of the poor gets sacrificed to keep the climate crisis from destroying capitalism.

Even if these leftists imagine degrowth can mean something different, that’s the goal they’re advancing in effect. Because as long as they aren’t putting forth a serious alternative to capitalism, capitalism will persist and devolve into eco-fascism. Remember that the purpose of these actors is not to defeat the system, but to profit off of the discourse which arises in response to the system’s contradictions.

It’s this fundamental lack of seriousness, this prioritization of what keeps you in the left circle rather than of what’s needed to bring change, that’s behind another psyop the anti-Marxist left is promoting: the “drug workers” psyop. If the purpose of the degrowth psyop is to defend the “green” corporations, the purpose of the drug workers psyop is to defend the CIA. That’s what anyone who uses that phrase, or who minimizes the CIA’s role as the core source behind this hemisphere’s self-destructive drug use, is in effect doing.

Working to lumpenize the workers

Drugs, even the milder drugs like psychedelics and marijuana, have been historically weaponized by the state against the revolutionary cause. From the CIA’s ongoing operation to flood poor nonwhite communities with crack, to the project to replace reading theory with taking psychedelics as young people’s means for gaining an alternative consciousness, to the common COINTELPRO tactic of having infiltrators manipulate organizers by introducing them to narcotics, these substances have been used as tools to lumpenize the workers. To keep them from gaining organization by throwing their households into addiction-induced dysfunction, and by using milder substances to sway developing radicals away from becoming effective revolutionaries.

Therefore, the correct attitude for a Marxist to have towards drugs is one of resisting the liberal attempts at fetishizing them. To reject the recent effort by liberals on social media to classify drug pushers as “drug workers,” a phrase which in addition to obscuring the anti-revolutionary use of these substances also works to render the concept of the proletariat meaningless. Because if the agents of the CIA’s narcotics wing are proletarians now, then the word “worker” has lost its material significance. The thought process behind this abuse of language and theory comes from a fundamental misinterpretation of what socialism is. Socialism is not moralism. At its core, it’s not an effort to lift up the generally dispossessed. It’s an effort to put the workers, in particular, into power. That the street pushers are doing this out of economic dispossession doesn’t change their class character. They still lack the unique relationship to the means of production that the proletariat has, the role that makes the proletariat in a position to shut down the economy if they were to stop working.

That these liberals have an altruistic intent behind using the “drug worker” slogan, or behind their portraying drugs as something not worth combating in any capacity, is irrelevant. What matters are the consequences their actions have, which are to assist the CIA’s poisoning of the workers.

I don’t believe China’s anti-drug policy model, which came from a reaction to the opium crisis, is entirely applicable to America’s conditions or even entirely reasonable in its own conditions. China’s criminalizing marijuana isn’t necessary, though the substance can cause dementia symptoms in teens and it therefore may be worth restricting the sale of it to them. What China has taught us is that under a socialist system, where the government’s policies are by default designed to lift up even the dispossessed former lumpen, repression can still be effective at reducing addiction. In its descriptions of the progress the PRC has made in this, the country’s embassy explains how that progress hasn’t merely come from executing the suppliers, as arguably justifiable as this practice may be. Other crucial parts have been the initiatives the government has undertaken to improve the people’s conditions:

Rectification was carried forward and [the] situation in critical drug-affected areas had been fundamentally changed. Placing importance on key areas and prominent drug-related issues, the Chinese authorities urged local governments to earnestly fulfil their responsibilities, take targeted and integrated measures to effectively address the prominent issues faced by 139 counties, cities and districts, e.g. drug manufacturing, cultivation, trafficking, abuse, etc., contributing to the continuous improvement of the whole drug situation in China. The creation and demonstration of model cities was solidly advanced which brought visible improvement to the city-wide management of drug issues. The Chinese authorities innovatively conducted demonstration of model cities under the Safe China initiative and won great support from the governments of participating cities. The Chinese authorities also strengthened the organizational leadership, clarified responsibilities, optimized policies and measures, and deepened the comprehensive governance. China National Narcotics Control Commission designated the first batch of 41 national anti-drug demonstration cities, promoted their best practices and successful experience, and improved the drug control work at city level throughout China.

This progress has involved giving the lumpenproles who formerly had little choice other than to enter into the drug trade with opportunities to get better jobs. Meaning that when China has executed drug dealers, these dealers have not been victims of a cruel system, but rather opportunists who’ve been willing to harm the revolution’s interests out of personal greed. Even though the Chinese revolution’s saving 800 million from poverty has in effect involved generally lifting up the dispossessed, if the revolutionaries had let the criminal element share in state power prior to its having become proletarianized, the revolution would have dissipated long ago. This is because individuals with no material incentive to build up the productive forces, due to their being detached from these forces, will be susceptible to acting as agents for counterrevolution. The way to minimize the amount of people who have a material incentive to enter into the drug trade is by resisting liberalism’s deceptive, undialectical argument about how we have a supposed moral duty to treat the lumpen as if they were proletarians. Because if you do that, the revolution will fail, and these people the liberals claim to care so much about will never be able to escape their poverty.

Other important measures within an optimal socialist anti-drug program are setting up rehabilitation services for those addicted, and educating the party’s members about the risks that can come even from using marijuana or psychedelics. It would be excessive to purge anyone who uses them, that would be puritanical. Yet it would be completely irresponsible to let the liberal drug fetishization psyop influence our organizing culture without any kind of pushback. What the liberals seek to do is convince those in the process of developing revolutionary consciousness that there’s no need to caution oneself against getting a drug habit, or to seek rehabilitation if they’re addicted to these milder kinds of drugs. That these substances aren’t deadly doesn’t mean they can’t hinder somebody’s ability to act in a disciplined way, and to contribute to the struggle.

If someone has come into this situation, they should absolutely seek help to get out of it. Not take the advice of the liberals to pretend like there’s no possible problem with taking these drugs, or who advocate for total unrestrained legalization of even the worst kinds. Once we’ve built a system for supporting those who are addicted, and raised living standards so much that today’s drug dealers have the option to get out of that lifestyle, we’ll be able to go after the black market dealers without this having the oppressive effects of America’s War on Drugs. We could bypass the flawed rigidity of China’s own anti-drug campaign by even going so far as to open up legal means for distribution, which would make it more than justified to target those who still distribute illegally. As they would only be doing this for exploitative and destructive ends.

These are the dialectically informed solutions, which the liberals don’t want us to embrace. The idea the anti-Marxist wreckers consistently promote is that we don’t need to prioritize what’s demonstrably best for the revolutionary cause, that we can make up our own rules. That’s how the ultra-leftists among these types promote gang fetishization, which is naturally intertwined with drug fetishization. As the imperial center sees a growing resistance towards NATO and American militarism, this ahistorical way of analyzing our conditions is being used primarily to frustrate this resistance effort.

Replacing anti-imperialism with a radlib version of “anti-colonialism”

Laine Sheldon-Houle, a member of the Swan River first nation, has identified the way that “anti-colonialism” as we typically understand it is incompatible with Marxism:

In 2012, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang published an essay titled “Decolonization is not a metaphor”, in which they argue that decolonization means: “For social justice movements, like Occupy, to truly aspire to decolonization non-metaphorically, they would impoverish, not enrich, the 99%+ settler population of the United States.” This directy pits Indigenous people against “settlers”. The 99 per cent figure the Occupy movement was referring to is the entire population minus the wealthiest top one per cent. This is mostly referring to the working class, although not in a precise way. The cynical conclusion in “Decolonization is not a metaphor” is that the fundamental interests of Indigenous people are opposed to the interests of all non-ndigenous people. But in reality this is not the fundamental division in capitalism. In fact, within the Indigenous community there are Indigenous capitalists who benefit from the exploitation of Indigenous and non-Indigenous workers. In response to the explosion of the Indigenous movement, the Canadian Liberal government has been hard at work fostering an Indigenous ruling class to co-opt Indigenous leaders and give off an appearance of change.

That Decolonization is not a metaphor unambiguously calls for the further impoverishment of the working class has not stopped it from becoming a standard resource to be promoted within the left, much like J. Sakai’s Settlers or the works of Gerald Horne. This is because like Sakai and Horne, promoting it is maximally beneficial for somebody who seeks to gain favor within these opportunistic spaces. These resources can make those who cite them appear virtuous and in touch with marginalized peoples, while not actually posing a threat towards ruling class power.

This is apparent in how the 1619 Project, despite supposedly having the purpose of mounting a serious opposition towards this country’s structures of oppression, has been facilitated by the New York Times. The Times, the Democratic Party, “post-colonial” academia, and the online actors who uncritically propagate their version of “anti-colonialism” can denounce white supremacy all they like, while still not doing a thing to bring the state closer to its demise. And they like it that way, because their goal is not to advance the revolutionary cause but to gain the benefits which come from being a “left” critic. Systemic criticism isn’t helpful if you’re doing it in a way that actively harms the practical efforts towards revolutionary change. Which they’re doing not just by pitting indigenous and black people against the white workers, but by trying to discredit the dialectical view of history. The view which can guide a developing radical towards participating in the most important goal Marxists are tasked with during the present moment: combating U.S. imperialism.

What this opportunistic element seeks to do is replace anti-imperialism with anti-colonialism. Which, when used for such a purpose, is not an idea which actually has hope for undoing the effects of European colonialism. We can see this in how the New York Times, however willing it is to platform those who critique the USA’s power structure from this liberal “anti-colonial” perspective, continuously promotes imperialist propaganda. Why would the Times and its ideologically aligned liberal institutions embrace Horne’s arguments about the illegitimacy of the American state if they’re so obviously invested in reinforcing this state, and in perpetuating its global violence? Because the type of critique offered by Horne, and by the other “anti-colonialists” who lack a dialectical analysis, is so broad-reaching that it ironically undermines its own ability to pose a serious threat towards the state’s existence.

A central part of Horne’s ideas, and one which the Times has naturally ignored objections to, is the argument that 1776 was not a progressive historical event. In addition to this assertion’s relying on historical falsifications within Horne’s work, and contradicting the view of 1776 that’s been held by every major historical communist figure, it’s simply not a necessary one to make in the task of arguing that the United States needs to be abolished. All you have to do to make this argument is point out how the U.S. empire continues to subjugate and exploit its internal colonies. And how even if this state’s formation could be considered progressive within its context, there’s no reason this state needs to keep existing long after capitalism became ripe enough to make us ready for proletarian revolution.

But Horne and these other left critics still make this seemingly pointless argument, as well as the even more needless argument that the proletariat’s white section has material interests which are fundamentally opposed to those of the internal colonies. (As demonstrated in Horne’s statement about how “Euro-Americans vote across class lines for faux billionaires,” which leaves out the important context that MAGA has been disproportionately petty-bourgeois.) This is because their priority is not to advance the workers movement, but to “critique” society simply for the sake of doing so. What consequences these critiques may have for the workers movement are disregarded, for the same reason many among these critics devalue the concept of a workers movement by claiming it goes against the interests of the internal colonies.

This type of critique relies upon a view of history that’s incompatible with the Marxist view. The Marxist view considers a development as progressive when it acts to bring history’s development closer towards communism, when it progresses history to the next developmental stage. Within this mode of analysis, Russia’s war against Ukrainian fascism is progressive, not just because it’s destroying a fascist military but because it’s working to resolve the primary global contradiction: U.S. hegemony. The view of history promoted by the left opportunists is one which says if something has contradictions, it’s necessarily reactionary, which explains why they can rationalize calling 1776 reactionary despite whatever counter-evidence they’re confronted with.

What kind of impact does this analytical framework have on one’s practice? It leads one to neglect the primary revolutionary task of the present moment, which is combating U.S. imperialism and its psyops, in favor of an insular type of “anti-colonial” rhetorical discourse. A discourse that today has an even more skewed view of the world than the “anything but class” left discourses which Parenti described, because this new discourse is intensely online. The minds of those within this fandom-type space are not focused on building an antiwar coalition, or reaching the workers during this moment’s great opportunity for mass radicalization, or fighting imperialism’s psyops. They’re focused on whatever online enemies the fandom is at war with, limiting their ability to connect with anybody who hasn’t gone down the particular pipeline that leads someone to get assimilated into these kinds of circles.

Like with the degrowth discourse and the drug workers discourse, the actors driving this kind of “anti-colonial” discourse are fundamentally unserious. We do not need to appease them to succeed in our revolutionary task, in fact they’re a hindrance to our goals. And like with those other examples, existing socialism provides a solution to the problems they speak to, a solution that’s actually practicable. Socialist countries, historically and to this day, have anti-colonial programs. What I’ve had to learn is that there’s a difference between “decolonial” or “post-colonial” theory, which are liberal academic means for “critiquing” society, and Marxist anti-colonial theory, which is to say Marxism itself. The solution is to abolish the United States so that the internal colonies can be given self-determination with a socialist character, something that can’t happen unless we’re serious about reaching the people. Do not abandon the dialectical path to please the manipulatively moralistic cries of actors who don’t even have the revolution’s best interests in mind. Stick by what dialectics tells you is true, and you’ll win.

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Mon Apr 24, 2023 2:37 pm

What Parenti Warned Against: Making Workers’ Unity Impossible by Fixating on Their Racial Differences
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on APRIL 23, 2023
Rainer Shea

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…the most advanced segment of the workers, the ones with an anti-imperialist consciousness, have been building an anti-NATO movement. That this movement hasn’t exclusively been on the left is seen as offensive by the ABC leftists. But having a multi-tendency antiwar coalition is a healthy thing…

When Michael Parenti polemicized against what he called the “anything but class” left, he was describing a pattern of thinking that communists will need to expunge from our movement in order to defeat the state. This is the impulse to emphasize the differences between the workers, more than the things that unite the workers. To focus so much on the distinctions between white workers, black workers, Native workers, “professional managerial class” workers (which some now foolishly include service workers in the definition of), and so on that the rhetoric of these ABC leftists has the effect of making a unified workers movement less attainable.

I say “the effect” and not “the intent” because within radical spaces, the idealistic actors who put forth this rhetoric believe they’re doing the most revolutionary thing possible by emphasizing race or other identitarian distinctions so hard. When confronted on how their practice hinders proletarian unity, I’ve seen them fall back on the idea that they still seek to unite the workers. The problem is that as long as they continue their present model of practice, they won’t be able to actually show the workers why they must unite. They won’t be able to offer a serious labor movement, only a social media feed of condemnations against the moral character of the people.

And I’m talking about not only the white workers, but the ones of all colors and relationships to settler-colonialism. As even though the proletarians from the Native and African diaspora communities are the ones the ABC left seeks to reach out to, that the ABC left treats these demographics like the only ones with revolutionary potential means this left won’t be able to build an effective workers movement. A movement that’s capable of establishing strong ties to the broad category of proletarians, including the proletarians who’ve been victims of colonialism. The ABC left ironically hinders the liberation efforts of the peoples it claims to represent.

This practice is ineffective because it rejects the idea of majoritarianism, and by extension the idea of a popular front. Both of which are crucial for the success of a workers revolution. Unless you’re in a place like Israel, where the predominant population gets massive benefits from colonial theft and inhabits a tiny geographical space, as a communist it’s indispensable for you to be a majoritarian. The conditions of the United States are distinct from Israel’s in that the U.S. is a settler state so massive, its internal population is mostly compatible with revolutionary politics. It for the most part can’t keep nonwhites from existing within its borders, to the effect that whites will soon no longer be in the majority. And its white population has long included a large proportion of impoverished people, people who don’t have an equivalent among Israel’s settlers.

Even if the whites of rural Appalachia and other destitute places can still be called “settlers,” that term is absurdly reductive when applied to them without any additional context. This context is that the USA built an industrial economy so vast, enormous sections of its own citizens needed to be forced to the economy’s margins so profits could be kept up. And plenty of these people the ruling class has discarded are descendants of the same European immigrants who the empire initially used to build itself up.

…all proletarians by definition have a primary interest in proletarian revolution…

That these immigrants had the ability to assimilate into the “white” family, and become immune from racism, is one of the tools the ruling class has used to reinforce its power. The U.S. empire has survived so long by cultivating a social base of labor aristocrats who aren’t subject to the struggles of the actual working class, and this labor aristocracy has naturally been for the most part white. What the ABC left does is assist the ruling class in this tactic of preventing revolution via the elevation of a favored demographic. By emphasizing the ways the material interests of whites differ from those of other demographics, without accounting for the experiences of class exploitation which workers of all colors can relate to, they act like these interests give the white workers a primary material reason for betraying the revolution. When truly it’s the other way around: all proletarians by definition have a primary interest in proletarian revolution, which inextricably involves the decolonization of the United States. And because there are far more proletarians than labor aristocrats in the United States, to act like most Americans are labor aristocrats is to obstruct the revolutionary struggle.

The effect these ideas have on white radicals is ironically one which gives them the mentality of white saviorism. Because these radicals see themselves as the exceptional whites, the ones who’ve figured out special knowledge about the world that the other whites aren’t capable of ever absorbing, they come to view revolution as something that can be achieved through essentially magical means.

The route to victory, so claims this ideological strain, doesn’t run through efforts to connect with the people on the systemic injustices that impact them. It involves condemning the majority for not embracing the esoteric theoretical brand from within one’s own insular online discourse circle.

The brands I speak of are esoteric not because their ideas are necessarily incorrect, but because the way their arbiters operate keeps them alienated from the majority.


We can bring education about tribal sovereignty, New Afrika, and other important pieces of liberation theory to the people, yet only if we do so by connecting with the people on the issues they have an immediate practical incentive to be concerned about. Otherwise there’s going to be a fundamental gap in self-awareness that hinders communication with the uninitiated.

When one’s practice is based in this moralistic mentality, rather than in the analytical mentality that Marxists must have, the impact their practice has is not beneficial to the revolutionary cause. That’s why Parenti warned us about the anything but class mentality: it nurtures an impulse among the workers who’ve absorbed it to find reasons for fighting among themselves, as opposed to building the proletarian movement. The difference between serious Marxist-Leninist theory, and the theory offered by the left deviationists, is that Marxism-Leninism is actually capable of speaking to the people on the issues that are relevant to their lives.

The good news is that there are relatively few workers who actually embrace those anti-revolutionary types of theory. The ones who overwhelmingly absorb it, and who are most vocal about promoting it, are those in the “privileged minority” that Lenin identified as the opportunistic element within the left. This is the same element that Lenin named as the “defenders of the fatherland,” the political actors who will ally with their imperialist government when it comes to the wars this government wages. We see the equivalent pattern within the element of the modern American left that’s more interested in finding reasons to condemn the USA’s people than in doing what’s necessary for the revolution.


What’s necessary for the revolution can be found within a serious analysis of our conditions amid this proxy war. The war, along with the Fed, have exacerbated inflation to the point where almost two-thirds of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. In response, the most advanced segment of the workers, the ones with an anti-imperialist consciousness, have been building an anti-NATO movement. That this movement hasn’t exclusively been on the left is seen as offensive by the ABC leftists.

But having a multi-tendency antiwar coalition is a healthy thing. It represents the expansion of the class struggle—which is intertwined with the anti-imperialist struggle—beyond the spaces where people are already involved in activism and discourse. Because it’s these spaces that the left’s opportunists depend on to maintain their status, for the anti-NATO movement to disrupt their ability to gatekeep these spaces makes this movement a threat towards this status.

Naturally, these elements are attacking the anti-NATO movement, as seen in the “socialist” or “progressive” publications that have been defending NATO, its expansion, and the fascist Ukraine coup which Washington carried out in conjunction with that expansion.

With these pro-imperialist arguments have come bad-faith attacks against Rage Against the War Machine and the coalition it’s produced, attacks based in a desire to defend the pro-NATO stance. Their goal is to make those who identify as on the left loyal towards an idea set that’s in effect supportive of U.S. hegemony. Which is the key thing to pay attention to: the impacts of the things they do, as opposed to what they say they want to do.

If pressed, these actors would no doubt deny being pro-imperialist. Yet when somebody consistently puts forth ideas that hinder revolutionary progress, attacks the most advanced elements among the workers for their revolutionary stances, seeks to discredit the most radical projects for resisting imperialism, and doesn’t change their way of operating when confronted, what can we conclude about them other than that they’re on the side of the empire?

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Tue Apr 25, 2023 3:34 pm

Anti-Opportunism Today Looks Like Siding with Russia, China, & U.S. Imperialism’s Other Enemies
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on APRIL 23, 2023
Rainer Shea

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To find the real masses, the types who join a movement not for aesthetics but out of desire to win the struggle, look for which types of people have gravitated towards the anti-NATO movement. Liberals have not been the most inclined to join this movement, especially not the most serious element of it which backs Z.

There is an idea within the USA’s communist movement whose flawed reasoning is apparent when you look at our conditions from a dialectical standpoint, but which is getting promoted more as our revolutionary crisis intensifies. This is the idea that to succeed, communists must win over as many liberals as they can, even if this means adopting practices that we wouldn’t otherwise embrace. Practices such as minimizing the importance of class, minimizing the importance of fighting U.S. hegemony, and disavowing Russia’s war against Ukrainian fascism (which naturally doesn’t get defined as such within the framework of liberal appeasement).

Those three types of anti-Marxist activities are intertwined, they stem from the same core notion that gaining favor with the left gatekeepers of our organizing and discourse spaces is of utmost importance. So naturally when somebody engages in one of these habits, they’re inclined to engage in the others. They’re what’s necessary for gaining and maintaining access to the circles which define what’s considered “the left” in this country.

With the promotion of this notion comes the rejection of another notion, the one that Lenin came to after learning how a communist can win the people:

Engels draws a distinction between the “bourgeois labour party” of the old trade unions—the privileged minority—and the “lowest mass”, the real majority, and appeals to the latter, who are not infected by “bourgeois respectability”. This is the essence of Marxist tactics! Neither we nor anyone else can calculate precisely what portion of the proletariat is following and will follow the social-chauvinists and opportunists. This will be revealed only by the struggle, it will be definitely decided only by the socialist revolution. But we know for certain that the “defenders of the fatherland” in the imperialist war represent only a minority. And it is therefore our duty, if we wish to remain socialists to go down lower and deeper, to the real masses; this is the whole meaning and the whole purport of the struggle against opportunism. By exposing the fact that the opportunists and social-chauvinists are in reality betraying and selling the interests of the masses, that they are defending the temporary privileges of a minority of the workers, that they are the vehicles of bourgeois ideas and influences, that they are really allies and agents of the bourgeoisie, we teach the masses to appreciate their true political interests, to fight for socialism and for the revolution through all the long and painful vicissitudes of imperialist wars and imperialist armistices. The only Marxist line in the world labour movement is to explain to the masses the inevitability and necessity of breaking with opportunism, to educate them for revolution by waging a relentless struggle against opportunism, to utilise the experience of the war to expose, not conceal, the utter vileness of national-liberal labour politics.

With these statements, Lenin was implicitly warning us against the error which modern America’s “anything but class” leftists, anti-anti-imperialists, and “neither NATO nor Russia” Marxists are engaging in. This is the error of assuming that the privileged minority of the people, the facilitators of the “left” political spheres which are compatible with the bourgeois social order, represent the most important demographic for communists to win over. The foolishness of this conclusion is obvious, because how can you expect to win the class war when you’re trying to get the bourgeoisie’s controlled opposition on your side? The only version of communism these opportunists will ever accept is a “communism” that’s been robbed of what makes communism actually effective. Which has been rendered unable to bring the overthrow of the capitalist state.

I realize the ideological tendencies I referred to in the last paragraph are obscure to those who haven’t shared my unenviable experience of getting to know all the major strains of left opportunism. And my primary goal at this stage is to inform revolutionary organizers about the malign ideological actors who can manipulate them due to their good intentions, so I’ll elaborate on who these opportunists I’m talking about are. First there’s the anything but class leftists, a phrase that Parenti introduced.

Parenti describes the foundations of the ABC left’s arguments as one of distracting from the factors which unite the working class, by dividing this class with endless labels:

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? Both conventional and “left” ABC theorists have difficulty understanding that the creation of a managerial or technocratic social for­mation constitutes no basic change in the property relations of capitalism, no creation of new classes. Professionals and managers are not an autonomous class as such. Rather they are mental workers who live much better than most other employees but who still serve the accumulation process on behalf of corporate owners.

These opportunists can use any other variety of classifications to advance their mission of dividing the proletariat, of making it look like the proletariat can’t unify because different proletarians have irreconcilable interests. At the moment, race and ethnicity are the main points within this attempt at splintering the workers. This is shown by texts like Decolonization is not a metaphor, which asserts that Occupy was wrong for wanting to raise general working class living standards because supposedly the only way to empower nonwhites is by driving down the living standards of whites (including the ones exploited by the bourgeoisie). The same logic is applied on an international scale by dogmatists like the Maoist Third Worldists, who claim the U.S. working class is all or mostly a labor aristocracy and is therefore in antagonism with the interests of the workers of the neo-colonies.

Then there are the “anti-anti-imperialists,” as I feel is appropriate to call the types of commentators who only or mostly bring up U.S. imperialism when trying to discredit those who actually counter the empire’s narratives. The primary grievances of these actors has shifted over the years as the empire’s main propaganda target has switched between different countries. In 2018, they were attacking anti-imperialists for exposing the Syria gas attack hoaxes. Over the next several years, they began to moreso attack anti-imperialists for exposing the Xinjiang genocide hoax. Since Russia’s special operation began last year, they’ve been mainly going after those who challenge the idea that Russia was unprovoked.

It’s not even the neocons who’ve been at the center of these attack efforts. They’ve barely said anything about these anti-imperialist outlets and journalists, they don’t need to. Overwhelmingly the effort to represent anti-imperialists as genocide deniers, and to confront them with strawman arguments like “anti-Americanism is not an ideology,” has come from those who orient themselves as on “the left.” Every major “left-wing” source, from the Daily Beast to the Anarchist Library, has featured content intended to disrupt the efforts at fighting U.S. hegemony.

Yet as the class and geopolitical conflicts have escalated, it’s been revealed that the nature of this divide isn’t as simple as anti-NATO vs pro-NATO. There’s emerged an element among Marxists who take the stance of “neither NATO nor Russia,” claiming to oppose U.S. hegemony while showing that in practice, they’ll oppose some of the essential steps towards ending that hegemony. Steps like Russia’s war, which has accelerated the transition to multipolarity. That Z has let NATO expand into more countries hasn’t outweighed the larger shift in the global power balance that’s occurred throughout the last year or so. Z has prompted the Global South to side against Washington, while creating the conditions for the BRI’s advancement to be sped up. The war’s “benefits” for the empire have been internal, externally the empire’s influence has shrunk.

Within the context of this proxy war, and of the wider cold war that it’s part of, anti-Z Marxists are the ones who view the “defenders of the fatherland” as the foremost types to prioritize winning over. As they’ve adopted a stance that tries to reconcile the anti-imperialist position with the pro-imperialist position, which is the only way they’ll be able to please as many liberals as they want to.

They’ll succeed at getting a following among liberals, and may even get these liberals to read theory. But because this educational program won’t involve learning how to be a serious anti-imperialist, the organizing structure that comes from this won’t be what overthrows the state. Because if you try to tell a crowd of liberals that they need to back Russia, China, and imperialism’s other foils, you’ll inevitably have at least some of them turn against you. And within the analytical framework that certain types of U.S. communists are basing their practice off of, the worst possible thing would be to not maximize one’s liberal outreach.

What is this analytical framework? It’s the framework that says the further to the “left” somebody is, whatever that means, the more valuable they necessarily are to the revolution. Within this concept of what constitutes revolutionary potential, the liberals by default appear to be the ones who should be prioritized above all else. But the logic behind this concept ignores how much Russiagate has been able to turn the country’s left towards the neocon stance on foreign policy. When the left started getting told by the media that support for Russia is synonymous with being right-wing, the opportunists within the left—which there are many—solidified their alignment with the neocons when it came to Russia.

As the new cold war develops, this antagonism will increasingly extend to China as well, since China has already shown it in practice backs Russia against the United States. Another anti-imperialist power that these unreliable types of leftists find themselves in ideological opposition towards (whether or not they’re ready to admit it) is the DPRK, which has voiced explicit support for Operation Z. This is ironic, since the DPRK is viewed by these same types of American left opportunists as something useful to support. The issue is that whereas serious Marxists support China and the DPRK because they’re anti-imperialist countries, the less serious ones claim to “support” them because this can be viewed as trendy within some left spaces. As soon as these spaces turn against these countries, which gets more likely as people are forced to pick sides in the new cold war, this “support” will end.

To find the real masses, the types who join a movement not for aesthetics but out of desire to win the struggle, look for which types of people have gravitated towards the anti-NATO movement. Liberals have not been the most inclined to join this movement, especially not the most serious element of it which backs Z. Right-leaning types have been more reliable supporters of this struggle, by which I mean not the culture-war obsessed rightists or the fascists, but rather the libertarian-leaning element. The others who’ve been most receptive to anti-imperialist ideas are those who were previously apolitical, but have been gaining more of a consciousness due to hearing about this despicable proxy war. Those ones have only begun to be tapped into, and they constitute a bigger demographic than Democrats or Republicans.

The left opportunists rationalize excluding these individuals, even though they’re proving themselves compatible with the anti-imperialist struggle, because the left opportunists don’t view this struggle as the foremost priority. They usually view “anti-colonialism,” or rather their own anti-Leninist version of anti-colonialism, as the primary thing to focus on. Which shows how unserious they are. As when you think in terms of how a revolution develops, you see that colonialism, class, and our other domestic contradictions won’t be resolved until we’ve sufficiently beaten U.S. imperialism. U.S. imperialism is the primary global contradiction, the main obstacle we need to overcome during this stage if we want to defeat the American state. Any communist program that doesn’t put fighting imperialism at the height of its priorities is not a program we can use to win. It can only keep us trapped in the endless cycle of opportunism, chasing after liberals who don’t even care about the class struggle.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/04/ ... r-enemies/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Fri Apr 28, 2023 2:48 pm

About the meeting in Naberezhnye Chelny
No. 4/80.IV.2023

At a meeting with representatives of the left movement of our city, held in the city committee of the Communist Party, I proposed to discuss a number of interrelated issues:

1. Who are the communists, who can be considered communists, what should they do now?

2. Who are the Nazis?

3. What is a communist party, how should it be created and what should it do?


I
Looking ahead, I will immediately report: the discussion turned out to be stormy and I was once again convinced that in the left environment there is still no clear understanding of the essence of a communist. Our stilted revolutionaries cannot understand in any way that the communists are NOT saints, NOT ascetics, NOT sweethearts, NOT formal owners of party cards, but people into whose flesh and blood the science of Marxism has really entered, in whom it has become part of their life, whose the path of life is illuminated by the revolution, and not illuminated by philistine passions. In other words, communists are scientists of dialectical materialism (theoreticians and practitioners), propagandists and agitators, initiators and organizers of a future without private property, exploitation, market economy and other plagues of capitalism! To put it even simpler, a communist is a fighter for the TRIUMPH OF COMMUNISM, and NOT for the "rights of workers", "interests of the proletarians" and other petty-bourgeois Wishlist. For true revolutionaries, the desire for the communist system is not a temporary hobby, not a manifestation of youth, enthusiasm, youthful enthusiasm, but a part of nature that they persistently cultivate, overcoming ignorance and stubbornness, laziness and complacency, selfishness and narrow-mindedness ...

To become a communist, first of all, you need to work on yourself, and this is difficult, long and not fun. From here, in the left environment, by default, they amuse themselves with a secret thought: sooner or later, a natural catastrophe of capitalism will occur - another world or global environmental crisis, and then some “Ilya of Muromets” will roll out of the bowels of the awakened people to give us a chance to heal a sick society. Reassuring themselves with this, the leftists do not seem to notice that the "treatment" with fire and iron, and more often with "soft power" is already in full swing, and at this time, without understanding what the essence of the theoretical form of the class struggle is, they suffer from economism, actionism, trade unionism and other ailments of Menshevism. If they were aware of this, they would not be waiting for a popular tsunami that would move the blockages out of their way, but would set ambitious goals for themselves to become people, fully mastered Marxism in order to scientifically reflect the surrounding reality. Unfortunately, they do not have enough education and self-education to beGOOD researchers, i.e. communists.

Instead of understanding what is happening, using materialistic dialectics as a method of cognition, and deducing what needs to be done in this regard today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, the leftist, like a drowning man at a straw, clings to "practice", wanting to show off in the juicy thick of events, just as at one time the leader of Labor Russia, Viktor Anpilov, opened his mouth brightly, but incomprehensibly and to no avail in front of thousands of crowds.

Reproaches immediately follow in my direction, they say, I am a “couch theorist”, because I am afraid of “engaging in practical matters”. But they are not afraid - they distribute newspapers and leaflets among the workers, create "independent" trade unions, do not sit for years and do not write "a lot of bukaf", as in the Proryv magazine. And who needs articles? The workers are not able to overcome them!

But the left-wingers told me not about the workers (I am a worker myself), but about their loved ones. They cannot understand that theoretical modeling based on diamatics - the imposition of a categorical grid of extremely general, fundamental concepts, main, regular connections and relationships on a problem situation - allows you to identify opposites, their unity and struggle (the cause of the problem), turn the problem into a task and give a victorious decision. No, they don't have the guts for that. Seeing no further than their own nose, turning it up and wrinkling it, the leftists lead themselves by the nose, not understanding, or pretending that with some calls to the proletariat “Keep your nose up!” to wipe the noses of the bourgeoisie will not work. How can it not be possible to hide behind the opinion of near-political freeloaders, as if the creation of a MASS proletarian communist party requires simple and understandable slogans from the series: “Be simple, and people will be attracted to you. But such simplicity is worse than theft!

Approaching the question “From what moment does practice begin?”, the leftists chattered that, having read the works of the classics of Marxism (of course, “diagonally”), having “mastered” the theory with a swift jack, one must immediately proceed to “practice”. To start teasing the bourgeois geese with their bare bottoms: to preach ultra-revolutionary views, to rant about the importance of strikes, to unfoundedly and irresponsibly call for any economic “struggle”, to pour out heroic calls for meetings-barricades under red banners, in short, to expose themselves to ridicule in front of the townsfolk.

Indeed, what’s the point of a “practice” that in form and content is handicraft and childish babble: distributing and scattering your newspapers and leaflets at the factory gates (which at best will end up in the trash, and at worst - on the desk of the deputy director of personnel, and then in the local branch into three letters); cheap pathos of "heart-to-heart talks" with workers and other imitation of agitation? Sense - zero point horseradish! Yes, heated debates, and sometimes fights with helmets, gas wrenches, with flights of chairs and armchairs along the rembaza, slamming doors, etc. used to happen, but the empty criticism of capitalism has long become boring to everyone, and the texts in your printed publications, as they were at the level of a school wall newspaper, have remained! Criticize and then justifiably and logically show how and what needs to be done in order to turn the tide, persistently engage in self-education,

Real practice begins NOT with thoughtless breaking of firewood, but with reflection, with making the right-optimal decisions - FIRST think, but only THEN act! For example, how does a student's educational, industrial, coursework, pre-diploma practice begin?! From receiving a task, thinking, calculations, drawing diagrams and sketches, which are then embodied in the material, in life! Those. calculations, drawing, project ALREADYthere is an initial phase of practice! And for the leftists, it turns out that Marx was a shy theorist - he sat “on the couch” for 20 years and wrote. To match him, Engels is a kind of dreamer of the Manilov type. Of course, he took part in some places in 1848, and then the province went to write: "The Dialectics of Nature", "Anti-Dühring", "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State". And Lenin and Stalin were also armchair scientists when they wrote: “The development of capitalism in Russia”, “What to do?”, “Philosophical notebooks”, “Materialism and empirio-criticism”, “Imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism”, “History of the CPSU (b) ”, “Economic problems of socialism in the USSR”, etc.? Or did they ALREADY engage in communist practices?!

At the present time, it is both easier and more difficult to conduct communist agitation and propaganda SIMULTANEOUSLY than in the 19th and 20th centuries. The illusion that today's proletarians have something to lose has firmly entered the consciousness of the masses. The big bourgeoisie, with the help of paid clickers, wrapped the real chains of the proletariat in such an attractive fur-velvet-satin-brocade-techno-modern-glamorous wrapper that the working people, who understand, and the majority, without leaving everyday consciousness, not finding an alternative to rusty fetters, come to terms with the circumstances of his accursed life, although these circumstances are transient.

The factor of universal literacy, which did not exist at the dawn of capitalism, but now exists, is more formal than effective help. Yes, nominally today's proletarians can read and write, but do they know how to correctly understand what they read, draw the right conclusions and, accordingly, do the right thing?! Considering that teaching is not yet a lost trade, but respect for it has already been lost, the idea that the truth is plu-ra-lis-ti-chna is easily imposed on the masses! And only communists understand the plurality of interpretations as the leading "virtue" for fortune-tellers and bourgeois propagandists. In other words, due to the fact that the same task can be solved in different ways (and with different results, even negative ones!), "impartial" taratuts from capital draw conclusions that there is not one truth, that there are many truths, and even maybe everyone has their own!

The pluralist malaise in the left movement (despite the bitter and humiliating experience of "perestroika") grows out of the rr-revolutionaries' blind devotion to democracy. Individual fetishists from the rule of the people, who mistakenly call themselves communists, consider democracy as something frozen or absolute - outside of time and space. Forgetting that democracy is a form of the state and must go down in history together with the state when society reaches the second phase of communism. But leftists are leftists because, without plunging into the essence of the phenomenon, they hang out on the surface and, like liberals, assure that democracy is unshakable, that people in themselves are the main value of society, therefore, their opinion is also valuable, no matter what nonsense and it was not nonsense.

Conclusion :

A communist is an expert in social relations. No one can be considered a communist formally, i.e. the bearer of a party card is not yet a communist
[1]. If a person says that he is a communist, he must prove it, first of all by becoming an example for others in self-education and organizational work of the party.

[1] On July 10, 1988, the future "standard-bearer of Russian democracy", or rather, a hypocrite, thief and traitor c. A. Sobchak applied for membership in the ranks of the CPSU, formulating his desire to receive a party card as follows: “I ask you to accept me as a member of the CPSU, because at this crucial time for the party and the country I want to be in the front ranks of the fighters for the cause of socialism and communism. I have studied the program of the CPSU, I recognize it and undertake to fulfill it.”

II
If a communist is a fighter for progress, then a fascist is a product of the imperial policy of big business, a golem bred by big business to protect “omnipotent” monopolies, to fight against communists, for open terror – the modern inquisition against everyone who does not want to be slaves of parasites.

Interestingly, one of the leftists, the same one who argued with me on the Internet (admittedly, to the point of nausea), came to the meeting and, following its results, declared: “I take back my words that you are a fascist - you are a social chauvinist!”

Hmmm... It is known that looking at the sun hurts, but it is even more painful to see people trying to strike a pose, but remaining on all fours due to their amateurishness... I want to laugh and swear at the same time! After all, how many "communists" in my memory were swept away into the philistine quagmire by a wave of naked, thoughtless enthusiasm ...

I listened to the speakers on the second question, and it seemed to me that if the leftists do not understand who the communists are in essence, then they are unlikely to understand who the fascists are in essence! For the leftists, a fascist is just a bad person, a barmaley and an evil doctor in one guise - “tightening the screws”, forbidding democracy, terrifying “independent” trade unions, left-wing activists ... But this is for those who, playing a storm in a glass of water, instead of organizing class struggle with a guaranteed victory over the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie scoffs and expresses pseudo-tragic indignation at the power of capital. It is not surprising - it is easier and more pleasant for leftists to SPECIALLY substitute, to provoke the bourgeois punitive machine, i.e. pretend to be Don Quixote - a fighter with windmills for the sake of the toga "freedom-loving opponent of the regime." So how do they differ from liberals then?! That's just the point, that practically nothing. It's just that their rhetoric is reddish-revolutionary!

“Leftist citizens,” I say, “tell me, whose political regime is preferable for the communists to work: Charles de Gaulle or Franco, Lukashenka or Zelensky?! Who is preventing you from conscientiously studying the science of Marxism in the capitalist Russian Federation and Belarus, who is persecuting Soviet symbols and preventing you from engaging in communist (and NOT liberal-leftist) activities?! Apparently, it does not reach you that the communists DO NOT “shake the regime”, DO NOT fight for democracy (direct, proletarian, workers, electronic, etc.). The communists are fighting for the FORMATION of communism, and the struggle for democracy among the communists was ONCE just a HANDWAY in changing feudal, absolutist, autocratic remnants through the bourgeois-democratic regime of the formation of capitalism to the formation of communism!

Now bourgeois freedoms - eat, do not slop, why break into an open door and wake famously while it is quiet ?! Only to seem, but not to be. After all, if it were the other way around, if you did not grimace, but, rolling up your sleeves, would take up Marxism, you would understand that communism is a struggle in the name of progress against the petty interests of the time. What at the beginning of the XX century. the struggle for democracy contributed to the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, but in the 21st century, any fighter-democrat for the masses is a synonym for either a market chatterer who should have knocked his horns long ago, or a partocrat-talker - a sycophant and opportunist, whose place is at best in the gatehouse behind the cemetery fence. People objectively do not need either the first or the second. The people need to see in modern communists smart, principled, moral and courageous fighters against bankers,

In connection with the slander being erected about social chauvinism in relation to Proryv, I asked the leftists the following question: is it possible to enter the same river twice ?! Is 2014 the year 1914 and 2022 the year 1941?! Are you, citizens and women, really not embarrassed that there were completely DIFFERENT formations, political regimes, economic conditions and the presence or absence of real communist parties?! And if it doesn’t bother you, then why did n’t the fascisization of society occur in the capitalist RF and RB, but in the capitalist Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia the process is in full swing ?! Yes, because American imperialism contributed to this, just as Uncle Sam helped Pinochet in his time! Therefore, even if weak Russian imperialism achieves its goals in Ukraine, fascisization in the Russian FederationWILL NOT , because the battered Russian imperialism will be forced to cooperate with the communists both inside, and even more so outside the post-Soviet space, opposing strong American imperialism, the showdown with which Ukraine will not end!

The leftists of the Semino-Batovka spill, having been practicing “clapping with one hand” for years, do not understand that fascisization increases not with improvement, but with worsening of the situation! And in the event of the defeat of the Russian Federation in the NWO, the most realistic scenario will be like this. The unfinished and angry "patriots" will appoint ALL those who oppose the "sacred" private property as the perpetrators of their defeat and begin to take revenge. Navalnyats will quickly join them (a liberal differs from a Nazi no more than Bobchinsky from Dobchinsky), and they JOINTLYdismember Russia for the sake of the "world community". In the future, having established their political power in all the republics of the former USSR with the help of "peace-loving" NATO, they will send cannon fodder from the nationalists under the general command of American imperialism to the war against the socialist PRC and the DPRK. That's when my countryman-leftist will really feel sick, if by that time he has not yet been waved with a blue handkerchief, sending him on his last journey ...

In view of all this, the communists point out that NOT to interfere with the destruction of Bandera does not mean taking social-chauvinist positions. And it only means that while the old and young predators are dividing spheres of influence - and we have nothing to kill them now - the communists, given the lack of a single authoritative party center, should be engaged in organizational work to create it, and not run tail after the liberals! Now practically "hothouse" conditions have been created for the communists in the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus - why then waste time and ride like a goat for the glory of American imperialism ?!

Conclusion :

A fascist, as a manifestation of the natural “evolution” of a liberal supporter of private property, is a MILITARY, BRUTAL anti-communist, confident in his impunity !


III
Another misconception of my opponents is that the Communist Party should be mass and democratically created from the bottom up (from regional circles and factory cells through the congress to the central bodies), so the masses will not follow allegedly inventing the wheel "couch theorists", like us, breakthroughs. To which I replied like this:

“If the Communist Party is the scientific and organizational vanguard of the working class, i.e. fighting partnership of scientists of dialectical materialism, then why do you ignore the Leninist formula: leader-party-class-masses ?! Why do you prefer to back away like cancer for more than thirty years - to build a party, starting not from the head, as Lenin did, but from the tail!?

Yes, all because of the same - the theoretical confusion in the heads of the Stoeros can not give anything worthwhile in practice! In addition, the leftists, especially those liberally oriented, who advocate the victory of NATO in Ukraine, are visibly jarred by the word “leader”, like a vampire from garlic. For the most part, leftist narcissists cannot accept the fact that someone knows Marxism and applies it better and more successfully than they do. That is why the leader as SCIENTIFIC DIRECTOR OF THE REVOLUTIONARY ORGANIZATION FOR RESEARCH AND TRANSFORMATION OF SOCIETYarouses in them a persistent rejection, reaching to impotent anger and black envy. Democratic pluralists have hair moving all over their bodies when they hear that the leader unites the party under his competent leadership, forms all shades of thought into unanimity, and through one stream of practical actions leads the organization to victory. This Bolshevik truth that the Communist Party should be created NOT by bottom-up voting, but SCIENTIFICLYfrom top to bottom from the Central Organ of the Press, brings "anti-authoritarians" into shock and awe! It is immediately worth noting that the lack of authoritative leaders among the leftists (and this is natural, given the competitive environment of their petty-bourgeois elements) causes the masses, on the one hand, to smile - who and where leads these sheep, bleating in different ways, - and on the other - contemptuous annoyance - where do these windbags climb, if not to the budgetary feeder in place of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation that rotted alive ?!

Conclusion :

The Communist Party is built from top to bottom on the basis of scientific centralism
and should NOT sink to the level of economism, trade unionism, suffer from workerism, actionism, parliamentarism, liberal or nationalist tailism, or practice enterism. PRIMARY tasks of the Communist Party: training of Marxist cadres, their organization, the formation of their own political class and influence on the masses with the intention of overthrowing the dictatorship of capital. And further: the establishment of the dictatorship of the working class and the construction of communism!

K. Neverov
27/04/2023

https://prorivists.org/80_lefts/

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

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Tue May 02, 2023 2:42 pm

What is our strength?
No. 4/80.IV.2023

“ What is the strength, brother?- Asked cinematic Danila Bagrov. And received a vague and non-specific answer.

If you ask this question to some leftist, then the answers will be: “the people”, “workers”, “working class” and so on. To the question "Why?" - it will rather be either simply that “there are more proletarians”, or that “there is nothing to lose but our own chains”, but I will not be afraid of this word, stupidity. First, by feeding and pitting the proletariat against each other, the bourgeoisie securely hangs restrictions on its political activity - the proletariat that hopes for a massive proletariat is obliged by all means to achieve a simple numerical superiority. Those who rely on "nothing to lose" are just as constrained in their actions, because at the slightest handout, this "strength of the proletariat" immediately disappears into the sand. Yes, it worked before and did not completely exhaust the resource, but nevertheless this is not enough.

How would a Marxist answer this question?

Firstly , it is necessary to determine the factor for which there is a limitation for the bourgeoisie and no limitation for the communists.

Secondly , it is necessary to understand how to realize this force.

Not strength, but weakness
So, what can a communist take up that the bourgeoisie cannot seize on? Mass character? No, history knows a huge number of cases when the bourgeoisie, in the name of its interests, gathered jubilant crowds of the proletariat, so suppressing everyone and everything, not only communists, but even opposing liberals, that it is naive to consider that our strength is in the masses ... naive. The bourgeoisie gathers the masses around itself, not only because of the insufficient quantity and quality of communist propaganda, but also because in bourgeois society the overwhelming masses are initially bourgeois - this is its LAW .

That is, the communists are faced with the task of not just “organizing and leading”, the masses must first be wrested from the bourgeoisie. Mass character is not a bourgeois limitation, mass character, however strange it may sound to the leftist ear, is ourlimitation. It is we who are limited in our ability to gain mass. The fact that out of 200 countries in the world only in five the communists have an overwhelming influence on the masses (moreover, the quality of such influence, given the systematic anti-communist protests in Cuba, China, Vietnam, I would call into question), and in most of the rest they could not even do anything portraying something like a mass party, suggests that the capabilities of the bourgeoisie to mobilize the masses significantly exceed the capabilities of communist organizations (even very good ones from the point of view of ideology, like the ML Communist Party of Brazil, for example. Why go far - the Bolsheviks blew the elections to the Constituent Assembly , blew the elections to the Soviets in March 1917 and systematically fought in the course of the Civil War with small forces against overwhelmingly numerically superior peasant masses).

And therefore, one should not build illusions that the communists will definitely recruit so many supporters that they will crush the bourgeoisie with a mass (since the bourgeoisie is always orders of magnitude smaller than the proletariat). On the contrary, if the Communists and gain a majority, it will just be more of a successful exception to the rule , rather than a pattern. We need to build tactics, first of all, on the basis that, most likely, we will not be able to gain overwhelming mass character.

An even greater limitation is the humiliated and oppressed position of the proletarian, his absolute and relative impoverishment. The theories of the worker-lovers that, they say, the communists are more successful in propaganda among the poor, and even more so that the proletarian, if he is helped to organize a strike and bring the depreciating wages up to the subsistence level, will follow the communist and make a revolution, are so miserable that for all 30 years since 1991, we have seen how formed in 1992-93. the post-Soviet mass communist organizations, busy raising the economic struggle and appealing to the “humiliated and oppressed”, did nothing but fall apart, degrade and come to naught. Because the capitalists have much more effective means to manipulate the material situation of the poor, than even to gather the broad masses of the people to protect their interests in the fields of Ukraine. And humiliated obedience to the capitalist for the proletarian in a purely momentary perspective is much more profitable and easier than a hundred strikes - it does not bring any additional hardships, does not require organization, is legally and practically safe. Dragging the proletarian into conflict in the name of a three kopeck raise is an occupation for real masochists, however, the leftists, who misunderstand the essence of the communist struggle, have been doing this for more than one hundred years and do not understand what kind of barrier it is, which they still cannot overcome. I personally observed how, having poked into this limitation, even the most active and militant leftists were blown away after a couple of years and switched to combining “pleasant with useful” - for example, they were attached to the FNPR, to the bourgeois press, to legal consultations,

But is there something that the bourgeoisie cannot buy? Yes guys, there is. These are brains . That's something, but the bourgeoisie obviously cannot buy brains. And initially, the bourgeois have brains, as a rule ... no. But let's go in order.

Are Brains Needed in an Anti-Communist Party?
In moments of alcohol withdrawal, the idol of the liberal intelligentsia and professional parasite Serezha Dovlatov periodically wrote heartfelt letters to his drinking buddies, veiled with suffering for the fate of the anti-communist cause:

"SERGEY DOVLATOV TO IGOR SMIRNOV

July 6, 1983

The problem, it seems to me, is also that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (for all its vileness) was accepted with some analysis. If a man drank heavily, publicly tortured his wife, or stole music stands from a red corner, he was not accepted. Here, in the "anti-communist party" they take everyone who declares their ebullient hatred of the KGB and the Politburo, they take thieves, swindlers, scoundrels, <...>, stupid people and <...>.

If we translate this “lament of Yaroslavna” into the language of Marxism, then the drunken master is dissatisfied with the fact that in the bourgeois parties there is no selection based on the presence of not only intelligence and social science knowledge (he did not even dare to dream of this), but at least minimally sufficient social discipline and, in general, at least minimal philistine socialization.

But it can be argued that all that chant that hangs around the headquarters of the bulk on the one hand and the Yunarmiya on the other is not an indicator - the real owners of factories, newspapers, steamships are smarter, because they manage a huge economic colossus. They de elite education, managerial experience and so on.

Firstly, a significant part of the capitalists in general was simply born into the right family with a golden spoon in their mouth and did not even pass the intra-capitalist selection for a grasping reflex. If we look at the statistics of American millionaires, then we get that 20% of them received a fortune by inheritance, another 10% inherited amounts from 1 to 10% of their current fortune (which is also a lot), and more than half of American millionaires in fact by no means of American origin, but simply millionaires from all over the world who moved to the United States, which somewhat blurred the statistics on business dynasties. But even a third is already a lot. Forbes, for example, does not hide the fact that all the largest industrial and financial giants for more than one generation belong, in fact, to the same families. Occasionally, millionaires seem to "exchange" shares, because of which, again, the fact that the real leaders of the economy simply inherited their social role is blurred. That is, the larger the business, the less its owner has to do with its organization, and most of these "owners" have no ear or snout in the real economy and physical production, and make decisions in comparison with stock reports, which is why the quality of such decisions is approximately the same as with tarot card divination.

Secondly , even if all capitalists “get rich from scratch” (as propaganda drives into the minds of petty-bourgeois hamsters, they say, the capitalist is the organizer of the business), then all the same, real competence in solving social issues, and indeed everything that does not concern the increase in the bank accounts of oneself beloved is low, because NO SOCIAL SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE IS REQUIRED TO ENTER THE BOURGEOIS CLASS . In other words, a competent person can get there only by chance. History provides us with wonderful examples of completely illiterate and blatantly ignorant business creators, rather the cultured and thoughtful entrepreneur is the exception. For example, Savva Morozov was the onlyout of 30-something representatives of the Morozov business clan, who scientifically approached social issues and thought about the optimal social structure. The rest of his relatives, who owned networks of factories, estates and shops, were just banal ghouls with two reflexes in their heads - sucking and swallowing (the grandson of Savva Morozov wrote wonderfully about this in a book about his grandfather). Yes, there is no need to go far - the Federation Council of the Russian Federation is staffed for the most part by managers, representatives and directly by business owners. What its members publicly carry raises the question not only of their competence in managing society, but also of elementary mental sanity in general.

The low threshold of social science knowledge at the entrance to the bourgeois class creates within this class a very specific environment in which the wildest delusions dominate. The bourgeois in the content of their brains, if they differ from the petty-bourgeois and proletarian masses they are enthralling, is only in the fact that vapors of not cheap fusel spirits, but good cognac, hover in their heads. And so everything is the same - fascism, nationalism, religion, commodity-money fetishism. Let's take Malofeev, for example - his wildest social ideas were already second fresh in the 17th century, and by the 19th century they were completely rotten, but this does not prevent him in the face of Tsargrad and a host of other media projects from carrying amazing nonsense. Moreover, what is most regrettable, he does not pretend, he himself believes in all this in all seriousness. Even if a smart businessman who understands social and economic issues gets into this environment, then he will not only be in the minority (both in terms of the mass of capital and quantitatively), but the environment will inevitably lower him and bend him down to his level. Soros, who decided in a rather unbanal way to “teach the capitalists how to live,” was actually sent with his teachings as soon as the post-Soviet space was redistributed, and it turned out that his “Meinkampf” was simply tolerated as long as it helped to saw through the resources of the former socialist camp. That is, despite the fact that the appearance of smart people is not commanded, the bourgeois class has severe restrictions - even if someone above the average level appears there, an environment consisting of hereditary bourgeois loafers and people from the proletariat and petty bourgeoisie will still drag back.

The situation is no better with hired managers. The bourgeois has a very serious limitation here - if the hired manager is smarter than the bourgeois himself, then, as a rule, the property passes into his hands. That is why the bourgeoisie “exchanges shares” (so as not to put their eggs in one basket), overgrown with clusters of mutually competing and checking and rechecking audit and consulting firms, recruits managers on the basis of personal devotion, and not on real competencies, feeds an extensive clientele (that is, dependent people) from among managers in the form of analysts, consultants, lawyers, from which it draws a personnel reserve. Competence of an employee is often the last thing that comes to mind. For example, they told how one of the top managers of a large holding company demanded that all reports fit into the format of one A4 sheet - it was simply difficult for him to understand more. The task of another top in the company where I once worked was to distribute bribes to customs, the owners did not allow him to other processes, and attempts by such a personnel to steer real activities ended very badly.

The system of managerial education, on the other hand, was degrading, even before it really started - due to the large difference in the incomes of managers and the proletariat, it instantly became a form of extraction and redistribution of surplus value, into which all kinds of scammers from the education system were drawn. Therefore, the quality of real knowledge even among top managers is extremely low. HSE, for example, has long been the talk of the town. Even in the 90s, when the Soros and Chubais poured massive grants and funds into it, at the Institute of Philosophy, having a stigma in the cannon themselves, they only laughed at the attempts of the HSE to portray philosophy. The bourgeois, due to his low level of training, on average cannot distinguish between ersatz science created to fool the masses, such as Economics, from real scientific research in the socio-economic sphere. His offspring sent to elite and expensive "business schools" as a rule, they feed on the same propaganda crap as the rest of the population. The attempts of the bourgeoisie to study the economy "as it is" only increase the number of Marxists in the bourgeois environment and intensify the depressive mood among the bourgeoisie. Since the formation of chegevars within the walls of business colleges is not welcome, the sacrifice, as you might guess, is the truth. Although they study economics “according to Marx” at Eton, Marx is smoothed and vulgarized by emasculated bourgeois teachers there. Or, to put it more simply, the bourgeoisie is forced to use initially deceived or undereducated managers.

Commodity-money relations, which mediate and form the basis of management accounting, actually falsify and obscure real physical production processes. For example, the profitability indicator for the plant does not show anything physical, we can easily observe how the report that plant N became 15% more profitable than last year can be anything: price inflation during a decline in physical production, sale of inventory, an increase in quantity with a detriment to quality, the sale of a part of fixed assets, a decrease in staff wages, etc. Making physical production decisions based on financial data is a task of sorts to calculate the next card in poker. That is why management accounting in bourgeois organizations is very confusing and exorbitantly inflated,

As a result, we see how poorly trained and incompetent people try to press the buttons on the control panel of society, not having an accurate idea of ​​\u200b\u200bwhat is happening. In a word, the bourgeois Icarus can fly in matters of management, but, like that hippopotamus, "very, very low." And having come close to the truth, his wings quickly crumble and he helplessly falls into a tailspin. This is his objective limitation of the class due to heterogeneity, selfishness and lack of selection for competence. The probability that all capitalists will read Marx and start doing something smart is approximately equal to the probability that all the atoms of the chair will move up and the chair will jump.

How to use it
The absence of restrictions on competence is the main and main advantage of Marxists over the bourgeoisie . No one and nothing limits a Marxist in terms of scientific research regarding any bourgeois specialist, we can, with free hands, build our tactics and strategy based on objective social laws and put it into practice with well-trained personnel . In response, the bourgeoisie will not be able to oppose anything sensible, except for stupid monkey managers who randomly press the buttons of the universe, and an army of martinets trained in social science even worse than just civil managers. They can and will definitely be replayed.

To do this, firstly , you need to understand that you need to patiently and persistently cultivate a scientist in yourself. Read scientific literature, choose a certain specialization, systematically issue works in the form of articles, books, and even leaflets, the main thing is that the latter are scientifically substantiated.

Secondly , we can beat them if we can physically seize control of production and society, and we can really cope with management. Unfortunately, among leftists there is absolutely no desire to think about how we will govern and what to do. I'm not even talking about the fact that each of us must choose an industry in which, in addition to purely Marxist growth, he will grow as a specialist and manager (if there are no mechanisms for practical career growth, which in capitalist conditions does not always correlate with competence, then grow theoretically). That is, a lawyer must be not only morally, but also practically ready to write a code for the dictatorship of the proletariat that corresponds to the realities of the revolution; philologist - to reform the system of state languages, give suggestions on the organization of language education; a metallurgist must understand the prospects of certain technologies, have a specific project for the development of metallurgy. And all this is not just somewhere deep inside, but ready for distribution in the form of articles, brochures, scientific papers. When the revolution happens, it will be too late to substantiate our point of view on the organization of the work of industry - we will rely on ready-made works, and if these are the works of our like-minded people, verified by the diamatic method, then our policy will be on the whole more advantageous and successful than that of the Bolsheviks, who there was a shortage of specialists almost everywhere, and even more so there were not enough politically loyal ones, and even more so there were not enough loyal ones from the point of view of the diamatic method. The elemental dialectics of Academician Pavlov, for example, in the study of the physiology of nervous activity required a lot of additional work by many Soviet scientists (even though, being a political reactionary, Pavlov tried to refuse to teach "red graduate students").

Thirdly , already as a side effect of the qualitative professional and Marxist growth of our cadres, there will be an increase in the authority of Marxism, primarily among specialists, lower and middle managers, workers and employees. Some of them will accept our ideas, some will implement them to the best of their ability, but scientific ideas will certainly grow into authority. In such a situation, organizing into a party is a purely technical issue. Having flown to Russia, Marx, as a scientist, accepted and studied by a part of educated circles, made the formation of a party quite easy and simple; difficulties began only when it became clear that the part accepted Marx only formally.

Having behind them a certain number of cadres who are ready to really seize control from the bourgeoisie, the task of taking power turns into an almost routine procedure: deploying propaganda and selecting social instruments in the form of mass organizations, hitting weak points in the management of the capitalist system with a successful combination of circumstances. A lot of such circumstances are created almost every year, the whole problem is that the communists in the current state of mind are not ready to intercept anything and have neither authority nor tools for implementation. For example, in Ukraine in the spring of 2022 there was a very convenient situation for taking power, the current SVO is not much less convenient - a mass of volunteer and hired formations is being formed (for example, it would be possible to create your own Red Army in this form, no matter under what flag) , the main forces of the FSB are diverted to fight the Ukrainian and Western special services, the generals are discredited by marking time and the defeats of the past year. But no one takes advantage of all this, because there are no leftists among the whole mass of leftists who are ready theoretically and practically to outplay the bourgeoisie.

After all, the bourgeoisie does a lot of stupid things at every step, to catch it "with its pants down", to hit it in a sore spot, to trip it up - all these possibilities are quite clearly visible, and only people are needed, they do not need a lot - even a relatively small but competent minority is successful will play.

In a word, instead of chasing mass character or waiting for the apocalypse when the proletarian starts to eat soles, Marxists need to take care of their own theoretical growth, raising the scientific quality and authority of our expertise, searching for pain points in bourgeois governance and building up the force of impact on them - first in a theoretical form, while we will not acquire "meat" for practical strikes. And may the force be with us!

I. Bortnik
29/04/2023

https://prorivists.org/80_power/

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Re: Ideology

Post by kidoftheblackhole » Wed May 03, 2023 2:35 pm

Hey BP, Lazarus here. I've read Shea's work as well..I don't subscribe to everything he says (his definition of the left is not actually a definition for instance) but you can see the outlines of legitimate Marxist analysis taking shape.

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Wed May 03, 2023 3:36 pm

kidoftheblackhole wrote:
Wed May 03, 2023 2:35 pm
Hey BP, Lazarus here. I've read Shea's work as well..I don't subscribe to everything he says (his definition of the left is not actually a definition for instance) but you can see the outlines of legitimate Marxist analysis taking shape.
Damn good to hear from you, was wondering .....

Yeah, Shea is still a bit rough around the edges, a year ago I could barely tolerate him but he improves.

Whadda ya think about the 'Breakthrough' crowd? I think they are very helpful, serious people. Theory, mass agitation and labor organizing are all part of the 'program' but theory needs to be emphasized as it is so neglected, especially in the US and these days.

PM me concerning more mundane matters.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Thu May 04, 2023 2:32 pm

On the question of practice
No. 5/81.V.2023

For thousands of years, before the advent of Marxism, which materialistically substantiated the unity, identity and struggle of the categories "theory" and "practice", humanity solved the problems that arose before it by combining, compiling, intuition or by chance. Before Marx and Engels, there was nothing objectively to replace such tools. And the ruling classes also didn’t really want to, because this could lead to the loss of their dominance. Hence, only in the USSR, the practice is when interested and competent workers / peasants / engineers / agronomists set about building communism, based on the theory personified by the party. Things went uphill. Yes, it went at a pace that the world had never seen before. In other words, with the help of the theory of individualism, indecision, mismanagement, laziness, and so on. were overturned in practice. And thus, that it was the theory that closed all or almost all the questions of the new life arrangement, and practice needed to confirm that the competence of the CPSU(b) activists reflects the actual state of affairs, that their subjective consciousness of the objectively existing material world minimizes the contradiction between consciousness and being in general. In other words, the USSR turned out to be the first party of like-minded people in the history of mankind, where the philosophy of Marxism not only offered conclusions about what and how to do in order to win, but also led the process, turning practice into the achievement of specific goals that set new and new goals for theory. tasks. that their subjective consciousness of the objectively existing material world nullifies the contradiction between consciousness and being in general. In other words, the USSR turned out to be the first party of like-minded people in the history of mankind, where the philosophy of Marxism not only offered conclusions about what and how to do in order to win, but also led the process, turning practice into the achievement of specific goals that set new and new goals for theory. tasks. that their subjective consciousness of the objectively existing material world nullifies the contradiction between consciousness and being in general. In other words, the USSR turned out to be the first party of like-minded people in the history of mankind, where the philosophy of Marxism not only offered conclusions about what and how to do in order to win, but also led the process, turning practice into the achievement of specific goals that set new and new goals for theory. tasks.

In the reality of the Soviet Union until 1953, i.e. in the active, offensive phase of the struggle for a new society without bankers, speculators, kulaks, philistines and other parasites, it looked like this: having failed in some new business, a person had to conscientiously reconsider the solution of the problem - to identify where he fell into subjectivism, and then find out how and what he must correct in theory in order for practice to succeed. Otherwise - to answer in all severity for repeated mistakes. Those. subjectivism as a manifestation of idealism in practice under Lenin and Stalin was stopped by quite adequate measures of influence, which further emphasized the viability of the theory of strengthening the class struggle as society moved towards communism.

Modern reality, when subjectivism in assessing the causes of the collapse of the USSR replaces the actualization of Marxism, leads the left of the post-Soviet space to an objective incapacity. The propaganda of the vast majority of parties and movements with communist names, due to their own intellectual helplessness, revolves exclusively around and around the objective ulcers of capitalism - chronic underconsumption of the masses, facts of exploitation, and so on. market flaws that are visible to the naked eye and are obvious to almost every layman. It is precisely because of this obviousness that people are nostalgic for the USSR, and the leftists tritely parasitize on this longing for social justice, believing that stories about corrupt officials, presumptuous hucksters and the progressive incapacity of the ruling class as a whole, they will be able to gain authority among the masses. However, a typical bourgeois patriot - the majority of the Russian electorate - cannot be taken for such propaganda, because, behind numerous egregious cases of incompetence and direct sabotage, the majority still believes that the top knows better what to do, and therefore still "treats with understanding" to the tricks of the ruling minority. That is, against the backdrop of often unfounded and hype criticism of certain features of capitalism, despite the steady extinction and degradation of post-Soviet society, a specific “bird in hand” looks preferable to an abstract “pie in the sky”. In particular, the layman understands that the NWO is a much belated response to NATO actions,

Under these conditions, the emphasis in the daily work of the communists should be placed not on enumerating the shortcomings of Russian capitalism, these shortcomings, as particular, are already clear to the majority, but on the formation of an authoritative communist center on the territory of the former USSR, i.e. materialization of the theory of Scientific Centralism. A qualitative leap is needed from the spontaneous creativity of scattered left-wing LOMs to planned work based on the rejection of democratic centralism and the organizational building of a combat-ready communist party. Since the correctness of any decision is ensured not by a vote in its favor, but by knowledge arising from a correct understanding of reality, in particular, the reasons for the collapse of the USSR.

Thus, the authority of the communists grows not by artificially attracting attention, but by moving away from the tasks of progress, where the main task is to build a party of "ripe wise men" without hypocrites, double-dealers, infantiles, lovers of hanging out at circle gatherings, "combating" for a salary or getting into the deputy armchair. In other words, a communist today must understand that his main task is self-education, work primarily on himself, studying the works of the classics of Marxism, articles in the Proryv magazine and the Proryvist newspaper. Moreover, the acquisition of firm convictions in practice means one's own research work, on the basis of the materials studied, by elucidating specific issues of party building and social relations in the theoretical form of class struggle. Shifting attention to any other tasks is an obvious obstacle to the practical creation of the Party of Scientific Centralism, when a person does what he can or what he wants, instead of what is necessary. After all, if he does not do what is necessary, he naturally does what is not necessary. This is the essence of the issue of achieving a guaranteed victory over capital - in ensuring a practice that will be qualitatively and visibly different from "Gaponism", i.e. practices not based on sound theory.

D. Nazarenko
02/05/2023

https://prorivists.org/81_practice/

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Fri May 05, 2023 1:54 pm

General and special in the communist movement of countries
No. 5/81.V.2023

Bourgeois political scientists often talk about the importance of taking into account national peculiarities when shaping the strategy and tactics of political, advertising campaigns, etc. Undoubtedly, such accounting is also needed in the labor movement.

But now it is important to dwell on such an aspect as the communist / labor movement, which is fundamentally different from any spontaneous movement of the masses. A labor movement (communist movement/working class movement) is a movement led by an authoritative organization (communist party) that aims to take power and build communism. This movement is already a conscious political struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie. The communist movement as a political struggle of the proletariat, in turn, arises as a result of the combination of the real movement of the proletariat with scientific social science truths, with the theory of Marxism.

The spontaneous movement in this aspect is simply the resistance of the proletariat to capital, and most often to the consequences of the domination of capital in industrial and social life. An example of this is the trade union movements; movements for "democracy", protests against pension reforms ... and others, led by organizations that trail behind the momentary demands and ignorance of the proletariat and are themselves carriers of "spontaneous" knowledge about social development, unable to give an objective assessment of the event, to determine cause-and-effect relationships between the dominance of capital and the social problem.

Now that we have clarified the difference between the spontaneous movement of the proletariat and the conscious labor movement, we can begin to talk about the strategy of the labor movement in a particular country. Every country, nation for the whole existence of capitalism on the planet Earth managed to feel its consequences. Wars, crises of overproduction and their consequences have broken many times more lives than the “Stalinist repressions” falsely declared by liberals and nationalists. However, in each country the dominance of capital differs to some extent and, as a result, gives rise to various forms of false social theories and ideologies.

First of all, it is necessary to clarify the historical features of the development of capitalism, its specifics in a particular country, and the social problems associated with it. These social problems somehow find their response in the spontaneous movement of the proletariat, sometimes even in mass "social explosions".

For example, in my hometown, before the hostilities, there was an acute problem of the dominance of private developers who did not comply with urban planning standards and used the land for other purposes. Now this problem has been transformed into the slowness and inefficiency of the rebuilding of the city. But instead of thinking about the inefficiency of the market and capitalism itself, the activists suggested and still suggest shouting stupid slogans online and on the streets, essentially repeating everything that any average person can think of on the basis of bourgeois ideology and relevant sources of information.

So, in most capitalist countries, resistance to social problems occurs spontaneously. At the same time, any problem has a pronounced character, depending on the specific conditions. Thus, in the time of Marx and Engels, the problem of horrendous working conditions and poverty was widespread, which resulted in numerous spontaneous resistances of the proletariat in the form of strikes, strikes, etc. If, however, a "link" between the spontaneous movement and social science arises, resistance gives way to a conscious political struggle for communism.

The preface to the ninth volume of the collected works of Marx-Engels says:

“In connection with the characteristics of the working-class movement in England, Marx further develops the ideas he expressed in The Poverty of Philosophy about the unity of economic and political struggle and about the decisive importance of political struggle for the liberation of the proletariat from capitalist slavery. In a number of his articles, Marx emphasizes the insufficiency of the economic struggle alone, for all its importance for the rallying and education of the workers, the necessity of organizing the proletariat on a national scale, the importance for the working class of forming its own mass political party and launching a struggle to win political power.

And here you need to understand two things that the authors from the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the Central Committee of the CPSU did not bother to explain.

Firstly, the expression "economic struggle of the proletariat" was used by the classics with some advance in view of the mass nature of the strikes of that time. In fact, the strike, trade union struggle in the scientific sense is not a class struggle, it is impossible to deliver an effective blow to the domination of capital by local victories in the field of knocking out wages from individual capitalists and even in entire industries. The only refined example of a real economic struggle of the proletariat is the general strike leading to economic collapse and political crisis of the bourgeois government. But even this example is unthinkable without the dominance of the political struggle in it.

Secondly, "the unity of economic and political struggle" cannot be understood as a coordinated state of complementary processes. The political struggle, being a real class struggle, denies all economic forms of resistance of the proletariat, because they are incapable of going beyond the limits of the system of bourgeois society. A person either remains within the limits of the role of a proletarian, that is, a seller of labor power, competing both with the bourgeois class and with his fellow workers, or joins the ranks of fighters for the overthrow of the dictatorship of capital. The entire "combination of forms of struggle" is exhausted solely by the fact that one section of the proletarian masses has not yet realized the need for revolutionary struggle, while another has already joined in it. The task of the Marxists in this case is through propaganda,

Reading Marx "diagonally", some leftists are ready to drool over calling strikes, strikes, teaching the workers how to strike for a penny, and are surprised that our cause is standing still. Now, however, there is absolutely no question of calling the workers to strike, these strikes are the everyday objective reality of capitalism, and, as comrades have said a hundred times, the workers themselves know when and for how much they should strike. Moreover, now strike activity is not so massive, and economism and trade unionism block the development of communist theory and the growth of personnel. And certainly unionism and demands for higher wages are not the cornerstone of communist propaganda. And yet, the leftist organizations with their primitive propaganda and agitation, fear of scaring off the workers, they do not go beyond "economic" (in the sense of economism) demands and generally slide into tailism. This can be observed in absolutely all countries of Western Europe.

Other leftists, aware of the viciousness of economism, but not wanting to engage in the scientific-theoretical form of the class struggle, party personnel building and conducting serious propaganda of the theory of Marxism-Leninism in modern conditions, are slipping into revolutionary phrase-mongering. They put forward revolutionary slogans that no one understands and revel in their own posturing.

The rejection and overcoming of economism and leftism is one of the main general principles in the development of any communist movement at the national level. Whatever the specifics and whatever the local specifics, these forms of opportunism are common to all countries.

The second most important principle is the axiom of Marxism that all tragedies, misfortunes, suffering of people are directly or indirectly connected with the system of social order - with capitalism. Therefore, one can always start with one specific problem and propose an alternative solution, the condition of which is the overthrow of the dictatorship of capital. The fundamental solution to any social problem lies in the plane of the transformation of socio-economic relations.

Having determined what to do, it is impossible not to say how to do it.

Propaganda will not work properly on the masses if it is carried out by a scattered left without proper organization. The proletarian will then follow the communists when he sees in them a more organized and competent force than the bourgeoisie. To this end, in each country it is necessary to form a central body of the most competent Marxists, which will conduct appropriate propaganda, including the coverage and analysis of local problems. With the growth of competence and personnel, such a body will form a party, led by the most advanced leaders in theory and practice (leaders), as a truly scientific vanguard. Only such a party is capable of leading the movement of the working class, which the masses will already follow.

Such is now the realization of the Leninist formula: Leader-Party-Class-Masses.

Jane V.
04/05/2023

https://prorivists.org/81_commove/

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Thu May 11, 2023 2:32 pm

I dunno about this....

The Anti-NATO Movement’s Members Are the Most Conscious Element of the People, & Shouldn’t Be Underrated
MAY 10, 2023

Image
A demonstration by the Anti-NATO Movement. Photo: Social media.

By Rainer Shea – May 8, 2023

Lenin wrote that “The younger the socialist movement in any given country…the more resolutely the workers must be warned against the bad counsellors who shout against ‘overrating the conscious element.’” Even though the USA’s socialist movement is technically quite old, it might as well be as young as it was in Lenin’s time. Because the American communist movement got virtually destroyed by McCarthyism, then by the war against the Panthers. It’s now trying to rebuild itself, and regain the mainstream status it used to have. And the fact that the Democratic Party gained a vast amount of influence over the movement after the USSR’s fall, effectively turning the parts under its control into wings of the party, has made those same actors Lenin warned against into significant threats to this rebuilding effort.

These bad counselors are making the same argument today they made back then, now applied to the element within American politics that we should consider the most conscious: those within the principled part of the anti-imperialist movement. The part that’s pro-Russia, or at least not anxious to disavow Russia’s operation while speaking out against NATO like so many on the left are. They’re the element that’s most readily come to anti-imperialist consciousness, without being held back by the ideological blocks to gaining this consciousness which exist within so many minds on today’s left.

The phenomenon I’m speaking to has been described by the authors of the paper A Worldwide Anti-Imperialist Left: Why it is Needed, and What it Must Do:

In the West, those parties that identify as “Left,” headed by the allegedly left-leaning US Democratic Party, almost unanimously endorse the US-led proxy war on Russia. Further confusion arises because many governments of the Right, such as India, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, actively oppose sanctions, promote alternative trading relations to those hitherto imposed by the USA, and insist that Russia’s legitimate security concerns be given due consideration. This has led many in the nationalist wing of Russian politics to conclude that the interests of their country require alliances with the parties of the Western Right–notably the Trumpist Republican Party. Conversely the Western “Left” parties justify their support for NATO’s war aims as necessary to defeat Right wing forces, with whom they lump the current Russian government.

This describes the broad rationale behind why the left has decided not to be principled on anti-imperialism, namely that it views adopting such principles as synonymous with helping reactionary politics. But the nature of the crisis the left has created for itself is more extensive than what can be found in these instances of leftists outright supporting NATO, and the ideological roots of the problem go deeper than what can be summed up in a single sentence. It’s not just many of the “progressive” orgs that have failed to become assets for the anti-NATO movement, it’s also plenty of the Marxist ones. Because a common decision on the part of imperial center Marxists is to only oppose NATO in theory, not in practice.

There’s been an impulse among them to disavow Russia’s operation in Ukraine at the same time that they denounce NATO, acting like U.S. hegemony isn’t the globe’s primary contradiction and like Russia isn’t combating this contradiction. (Because this point is so hard to argue against, these leftists tend to rely on the argument that Russia is an imperialist or fascist state, which depends on an ahistorical analysis and on anti-Russian psyops.) As well as an impulse to focus on the contradictions within the imperial center’s anti-imperialist movement, more than the far more important contradiction this movement is fighting against.

The tendency among these leftists is to look for whatever excuses they can find not to become serious about challenging U.S. imperialism. The recent development that expanded how many on the left share this impulse was Russiagate. The core of the left opportunists have always been glad to reject anti-imperialism for the sake of appeasing the Democratic Party, but with Russiagate, an additional element got brought towards the opportunist stance as well. This is the element that wasn’t part of that core opportunist base, but got newly involved in politics when they got partly radicalized by joining the Bernie Sanders campaign.

After the idea of taking over the Democratic Party proved untenable, they were forced to follow either the reformist path (which includes both working within the party directly and tailing it from Democrat-adjacent outside orgs), or the revolutionary path, the path that’s fully independent from the Democrats. Many of these newer active leftists became principled Marxist-Leninists, and wholly broke from the Democratic Party. But many others instead followed their leader, and chose the opportunist option. And the latter were able to be won over because of the manipulative power of the Russiagate psyop.

When these individuals entered into the left’s organizing and discourse spaces, they encountered an environment where the Democratic Party and its narrative agents were able to exert great pressure in favor of their anti-Russian stance. Russiagate was a conspiracy theory that its propagators normalized by manufacturing social proof, where people become inclined to believe something simply because others also believe in it. The constant affirmations of the conspiracy’s founding lies—that Russia is seeking to influence U.S. politics, that Trump and the GOP are Putin’s puppets—didn’t succeed at swaying every newer active leftist. But they convinced enough of them for the discourse to be influenced in the long term. Because many in the Bernie movement embraced that narrative about how being pro-Russia is necessarily a right-wing stance, the reaction from the Marxists who view the Bernie movement as still the most revolution-compatible element decided that they had to disavow Russia. Which they justify by saying they simply don’t want to be construed as being “pro-Putin,” even though Z can’t honestly be called Putin’s war; it wasn’t his idea, he had to be pressured into it by Russia’s serious anti-imperialists after eight years of letting Kiev shell the Donbass.

There’s the essence of this ideological divide as it pertains to the American communist movement: one side believes the Sanders base continues to represent the greatest potential for spreading Marxist ideas, while the other recognizes that Russiagate has made this view outdated. At this stage, the element that’s most compatible with the anti-imperialist movement—and therefore with revolutionary politics—is a different one, a broader one. It’s made up of the communists who’ve already been brought towards the pro-Z, pro-multi tendency coalition stance; the libertarian types of conservatives who aren’t obsessed with the culture war, but have come to instead primarily focus on fighting imperialism, and therefore can be brought towards communism; and the quiet majority of apolitical people who don’t usually vote, due to their working class status making them alienated from our fraudulent democracy.

Only a minority of Americans are seriously invested in hating Russia, and they’re overwhelmingly made up of the liberals or the liberal-adjacent leftists. Most of the others only believe imperialism’s psyops at present because the empire’s propaganda is the sole side of the story they’ve been exposed to. If we show them the other side, most of them will ultimately come to the anti-imperialist stance. When liberals and imperialism-compatible leftists try to discredit this project of ours by saying that being pro-Russia is synonymous with aiding reactionaries, what they’re doing is warning against overrating the conscious element. Because these people who they call irredeemable reactionaries are, in actuality, the most advanced part of the masses. They’re the ones who recognize U.S. hegemony as the primary contradiction, and for that reason are not even reactionaries in practice. If someone has rejected the culture war, and is instead mainly focusing on the most important thing to be fighting against, then they’re at this stage an asset to the revolution. And many more of those who fit this description could become Marxists as the struggle continues to unfold.

https://orinocotribune.com/the-anti-nat ... nderrated/

Mr Shea is pretty much correct to disparage Bernie and his sheep being useless in revolutionary terms. Class interests, a faulty understanding of history and the decayed remains of the 'New Left'assure that.

However, if he thinks fertile ground for Marxism is to be found among the "non-culture war' libertarians" then he is delusional, or at the very least lacks experience with this species. These people are anti-NATO not for any political or humanitarian principle but only because it wastes their money with no return to them. They are all for individual rights: 'packing iron', polluting the environment, and most importantly individual ownership of the means of production. There is no way in hell that you can get from there to communism.

To be sure, on the issue of NATO we agree and might make a joint effort, temporary allies, even Stalin allied with the repulsive imperialist Churchill. But I can't see it getting much further than that as we disagree on just about every other topic. It is a wide philosophical chasm: they are asocial, we are social, they say the individual is paramount to the rest of society and we say the individual is best expressed in the matrix of society. They say "I want to be free" and we say that we are not free until all are free.

Besides, as we know too well from long experience at our serial message boards they are slippery bastards. They will agree with you until the cows come home and then slip in some wedge about 'common sense' individual rights and next thing ya know we're in 'Mises-land'. Nobody needs that aggravation and we got other fish to fry.

So forget about making sow's ears into silk purses. Rather, look to "the quiet majority of apolitical people who don’t usually vote, due to their working class status making them alienated from our fraudulent democracy". There's the fertile ground, converting the off-hand cynicism to incisive criticism is the job at hand.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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