Ideology

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Sat Mar 05, 2022 3:06 pm

ON DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM
Posted by MLToday | Feb 22, 2022

Renzo Llorente engages with contemporary advocates of Democratic Socialism and argues that they ultimately fail to demarcate between liberal and socialist visions of democracy, resulting in capitulation to the liberal status quo.


‘Either death to capitalism, or death under the heel of capitalism’ (1919 Soviet poster)
It is sheer insanity to believe that capitalists would good-humoredly obey the socialist verdict of a parliament or of a national assembly, that they would calmly renounce property, profit, the right to exploit. All ruling classes fought to the end, with tenacious energy, to preserve their privileges. – Rosa Luxemburg1

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BY RENZO LLORENTE
December 19, 2021 Cosmonaut

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‘Either death to capitalism, or death under the heel of capitalism’ (1919 Soviet poster)

INTRODUCTION

The renewed interest in socialism in the United States has generated a lively theoretical debate in many articles and books addressed to the general reader, as a broad array of activists, intellectuals and academics have sought to rethink the contours of what we might call, to borrow a phrase associated with the work of Alec Nove,2 a feasible socialism. The contributors to this burgeoning literature have all considered, to one degree or another, at least some of the basic programmatic questions, ranging from political strategy to institutional design, that need to be addressed if some form of socialism is to be a realistic possibility in the United States (and elsewhere) in a not-too-distant future. Unfortunately, many of the articles and books making up this literature do not really advocate socialism at all, but offer instead a defense of social democracy, or else revitalized and refurbished versions of left-liberalism. As for those works that do defend distinctively socialist models for the future, one invariably finds the same basic flaw: these writings’ arguments for socialism rest on an equivocal notion of democracy, as they appeal both to a distinctively socialist, post-liberal notion of democracy and to a standard liberal-democratic notion of democracy. As a result of this equivocal use of the concept of democracy, as well as the failure to come to terms with the likelihood of violent resistance to a socialist political program (itself due partly to the lack of clarity concerning democracy), much of the new advocacy for socialism—and nearly all of the socialist advocacy coming from the self-styled “democratic socialists”—proves contradictory, and ultimately self-defeating.

To avoid this outcome, socialists must bear in mind that true socialism will be “democratic” in ways that constitute major departures from the liberal democracy of contemporary liberal-democratic capitalist societies. In other words, socialists’ rejection of liberal democracy should be much more far-reaching than what we find in most of the recent articles and books in defense of socialism, and they can reject it precisely by appealing to democracy, albeit a notion of democracy quite unlike the one routinely celebrated in capitalist societies. This is, in any event, what I will argue in the following pages. I should perhaps underscore at the outset that this essay examines popular—that is to say, non-scholarly, non-academic—expositions and defenses of “democratic socialism” and, in keeping with the kind of content under consideration, my critical remarks are not meant to take the form of an academic or scholarly critique. There is a wealth of valuable work by political theorists, philosophers, economists and others on the topics discussed in this essay—the work of such figures as Ellen Meiksins Wood, Ted Honderich, Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis, C.B. Macpherson, Frank Cunningham, Andrew Levine and Henry Shue will immediately come to mind—but my aim in the present essay is to consider the popular literature on democratic socialism on, so to speak, its own terms.

SOCIALISM AS A MISNOMER

Socialists and communists should, without question, welcome the recent rehabilitation of socialism in the United States, and they should do so for at least two reasons, both of which I have already evoked above. First, many of the (positive) definitions and defenses of socialism are addressed not to academic audiences or the converted, but to the general public; and secondly, they specifically consider the prospect of socialism in the United States, a country which has historically been, for the most part, uncongenial to socialist ideas. Yet, however important and commendable the recent efforts to rehabilitate socialism in the US, it is not unreasonable to reject the use of the concept and term “socialism” for many of the proposals, models, policies and so on that have been posited in recent years as examples of socialism. In fact, many who profess to be making a case for socialism, and practically all of the self-styled “democratic socialists,” are actually offering us, as we shall see, little more than up-to-date versions of left-liberalism or social democracy.

Let us begin with the essays collected in We Own the Future: Democratic Socialism—American Style, a book edited by Kate Aronoff, Peter Dreir and Michael Kazin and published in 2020. This volume includes, in addition to the chapters written by the editors, contributions from Naomi Klein, Robert Kuttner, Bill Fletcher Jr. and Harold Meyerson, among many others, and it undoubtedly contains many excellent ideas for social reform and regeneration. However, a rudimentary analysis of these ideas reveals that most of them hardly qualify as “socialist” and that “democratic socialism—American style” turns out to refer to left-liberalism or social democracy—which is particularly surprising, considering that the editors themselves acknowledge that “there is plenty of daylight between democratic socialism and social democracy and left-liberalism”.3

Consider, for instance, Aronoff, Dreir and Kazin’s enumeration of things that everyone ought to enjoy: quality, universal health care; guaranteed food; a guaranteed job for all who wish to work; a society free of racial discrimination; an education whose quality is not determined by where one lives; control of global warming; paid vacations; public beaches and parks; a first-rate public transportation system and high-speed intercity trains.4 Attaining all of these goods—or even just a majority of them—would, of course, represent an immense improvement in the quality of life of people in the United States; but is that what we should understand by socialism? Are these not goods that social democracy also promises to deliver? Indeed, are there not ideological opponents of socialism who claim that each and every one of these things is attainable under capitalism?

Unfortunately, the tendency to identify socialism with policies and arrangements that in no way go beyond social democratic and left-liberal political aspirations is not confined to We Own the Future’s Introduction; on the contrary, many of the book’s contributors likewise conflate socialism with social democracy and left-liberalism. As it turns out, both the language favored by the book’s authors and the examples of putatively socialistic social arrangements which they offer tend to promote this very misidentification of socialism with social democracy and left-liberalism.

As to the question of language, consider, for example, Aronoff, Dreir and Kazin’s characterization of the essays comprising We Own the Future, a book whose subject—let us not forget—is (as indicated in the subtitle)“democratic socialism—American style”: “The chapters that follow propose ways to build a kinder, more humane, and altogether freer society…”.5 For older readers, this statement will surely conjure up George H. W. Bush’s appeal for “a kinder, gentler nation” in the speech in which he accepted the Republican presidential nomination,6 and this rhetorical similarity is hardly insignificant: Aronoff, Dreir and Kazin’s words suggest a project that an adherent of welfare-state capitalism could readily embrace. For another example of the same predilection for language that renders socialism indistinguishable from other political theories and orientations, we can turn to the chapter “How Socialists Changed America,” written by Dreir and Kazin. In this essay, Dreir and Kazin tell us that the “idea” of socialism “is about advancing human progress by creating laws and institutions that give people the chance to reach their full potential and to tame the forces of greed, racism, inequality, and exploitation inherent in capitalism”7 This formulation is not only vague and tepid but also states several goals largely achievable within welfare-state capitalism—aspiring to “tame” the forces mentioned is not the same thing as aspiring to eliminate them—and social-democratic capitalist regimes. Of course, the fact that Dreir and Kazin also neglect to identify the “idea” of socialism with the abolition of capitalism speaks volumes about the nature of their “socialist” program.

As for the examples of putatively socialist social arrangements, the problem is that the contributors to We Own the Future typically adduce past and present social democracies, or at least some of their policies, as illustrations of a democratic socialist society; such a practice inevitably leads to a certain conflation of social democracy and socialism, notwithstanding the editors’ caveat concerning “existing social democracies,” which “offer many lessons, but…are by no means a blueprint for building a sustainable and multiracial democracy in today’s United States.”8 (Notice that the editors refer not to socialism, but to “a sustainable and multiracial democracy,” a goal that differs from, and is attainable without, socialism.9) So it is, for instance, that Naomi Klein can refer, in one and the same paragraph, to “countries with a strong democratic socialist tradition—like Denmark, Sweden” and “Scandinavian-style social democracy”.10 In a similar vein, Darrick Hamilton begins a sentence, “In a social democratic or democratic socialist America…”,11 while David Zirin, for his part, contributes a chapter that includes “socialism” in its title (“Reclaiming Competition: Sports and Socialism”) but prefers to identify his proposals with “any movement for social democracy”.12

In short, when the contributors to We Own the Future: Democratic Socialism—American Style discuss socialism at all—and several of the essayists seem to mention it as an afterthought, or merely because some reference to socialism is de rigueur, given the book’s subtitle—they either conflate it with social democracy, or identify it with a set of policies, institutions, practices, etc that do not amount to either socialism or social democracy. In one sense, such theoretical imprecision and political confusion were inevitable, considering the editors’ decision, explicitly acknowledged in the Introduction, to include essays from both democratic socialists and social democrats —as well as the fact that the democratic socialists among the book’s contributors do not actually propose socialist agendas. In the end, therefore, We Own the Future will only satisfy readers who can content themselves with policy proposals and principles for social renewal along left-liberal or social-democratic—or what used to be called “progressive”—lines; anyone in search of a genuinely socialist program, on the other hand, will find this collection deeply disappointing.

Unfortunately, the theoretical imprecision and ambiguity that we find in We Own the Future is also characteristic of other recent popular defenses of socialism. A case in point is The ABCs of Socialism, a volume of short essays edited by Bhaskar Sunkara and published jointly by Jacobin Books and Verso. However, whereas the main problem with We Own the Future’s case for democratic socialism derives from a systematic misrepresentation (or misidentification) of socialism, the main problem with The ABCs of Socialism derives from an incoherent conceptualization of democracy. As most recent popular defenses of socialism, including many that claim to be advocating “democratic socialism,”13 exhibit this shortcoming and the nature of socialist democracy is a fundamental topic in socialist theory, it will be worthwhile to consider the sources of this shortcoming at some length. I do so in the following section.

WHICH DEMOCRACY?

In an article titled “How Should the Contemporary Socialist Left Relate to the History of ‘Actually Existing Socialism’?” an avowed democratic socialist writes, “When I’ve met people at DSA meetings who call themselves ‘Marxists-Leninists’ and who defend what ‘tankies’ used to call ‘actually existing socialism’…, I’ve wanted to scream at them. ‘Don’t you know what the D stands for? Why do you think we call ourselves this?’”.14 I would suggest that the most appropriate response to the author’s rhetorical question is itself a question, and one that is, admittedly, no less rhetorical: Do the democratic socialists themselves know what the D. stands for? After reading a fair amount of popular “democratic socialist” literature published in the United States over the last few years (including the article that I have just quoted and the texts cited in the previous section of this essay), I have no doubt that most of them do not. In defending their position, democratic socialists (as well as many contemporary socialists who do not explicitly identify themselves as such) equivocate with respect to the meaning of “democracy”. Their writings sometimes assume a distinctively socialist, post-liberal notion of democracy, as when they insist on the importance of “economic democracy” (however much they may disagree about the nature of this democracy and the methods for attaining it)15 or champion “workers’ rule”; at other times, however, these writings assume a standard liberal notion of democracy; and sometimes they tend to conflate the two types of democracy.16 The notion of socialism that results from such equivocation is internally contradictory and, accordingly, proves to be an obstacle to the development of a coherent socialist program.

Consider, in this connection, the Democratic Socialists of America’s statement of its credo. On the page of its website titled “What is Democratic Socialism?” the DSA—the American democratic socialist organization par excellence—tells us that it fights for a “democracy that creates space for us all to flourish, not just survive, and answers the fundamental questions of our lives with the input of all,” and that it “want[s] a democracy powered by everyday people.” These statements are, needless to say, of little help in grasping the meaning of “democracy” in the DSA’s democratic socialism. Far more illuminating is the succinct statement of the DSA’s basic outlook that appears on the bottom of the same page, in the form of ribbon that accompanies, as far as one can tell, every page of the organization’s website: “We believe that working people should run both the economy and society democratically to meet human needs, not to make profits for a few”. Unlike the first two statements, this one unequivocally expresses a classical socialist conviction. But notice that in asserting that “working people should run both the economy and society democratically,” the word “democratically” cannot mean what it means for liberal-democratic theory, which rejects the view that a particular class, stratum, sector, etc. of society is uniquely entitled to run the economy and society. This incompatibility would not pose a problem for the DSA, were it not the case that this organization also embraces a standard liberal conception of democracy, as is evident in “Where We Stand: Building the Next Left,” a programmatic statement which, while written in the 1990s, “still reflects DSA’s basic political analysis and values.”17 In this text, the DSA states that “democratic socialism is committed both to…freedom of speech…and to the freedom to organize independent trade unions, women’s groups, political parties, and other social movements. … Control of economic, social, and cultural life by either government or corporate elites is hostile to the vision of democratic pluralism embraced by democratic socialism”. DSA thereby appeals to two different conceptions of democracy; the problems that arise from doing so become apparent once we consider questions such as the following: Is the conviction that “working people should run…the economy and society” compatible with a commitment “democratic pluralism” (unlike “control of economic…[and] social…life by…government or corporate elites”)? If the workers must not “control” the economy through government, what are the mechanisms whereby they “run…the economy”? And, not least important: What is the likelihood that workers will succeed in running “both the economy and society democratically to meet human needs” if capitalists and all those who do their bidding enjoy “freedom of speech…and…the freedom to organize…political parties, and other social movements”?18 Or does the DSA have in mind a—mildly? severely?—restricted form of the rights and protections that the US populace normally associates with freedom of speech and freedom of association? (This passage also implies other problems for democratic socialism, which I discuss below).

Lest the reader think that the equivocation regarding democracy that one finds in DSA literature is peculiar to this organization, let us consider another text that exemplifies the same problem: “Democratic Socialists Want to Fight for Minority Rights, Not Suppress Them,” written by Shawn Gude and Michael A. McCarthy and published in Jacobin in 2018. “Democratic socialism,” observes Gude and McCarthy, “requires protected rights. … Without freedom of assembly, freedom to communicate and express one’s own opinions, freedom to form associations and groups, we would not have a democracy.” They add: “Democratic socialism would not curtail the political rights of the rich as individuals. But it would democratize their private control over the allocation of resources and end their ‘right’ to eat caviar and champagne at every meal”.19 Notice that these passages reject a key component of mainstream liberal-democratic theory, which upholds extensive property rights, while at the same time endorsing, without qualification, liberal-democratic principles that would constitute an enormous hindrance to the establishment of socialist social arrangements, including efforts to “democratize…private control over the allocation of resources.” In other words, Gude and McCarthy propose a socialist policy on rights that involves both the abrogation of one set of (mainstream) liberal-democratic rights and the full protection of the very liberal-democratic rights that would make that abrogation practically impossible.20 (Gude and McCarthy’s argument also presupposes, incidentally, an uncritical acceptance of the distinction between “political” and “economic” rights, which is more than a little puzzling, considering that at least one of the authors appears to situate himself within the Marxist tradition.)

While democratic socialists’ equivocation in connection with “democracy” typically occurs in their programmatic statements regarding a socialist future, we also encounter this problem in these socialists’ criticisms of avowedly socialist or communist projects which they reject as undemocratic or anti-democratic. So it is, for example, that when the prominent democratic socialist Joseph M. Schwartz condemns the “anti-democratic nature of capitalism”,21 he is implicitly employing a socialist conception of democracy, which centrally rests on the economic democracy that he defends only a few pages earlier.2223 Yet when the same author asserts that “democratic socialists consistently opposed authoritarian governments that claim to be socialist”24 he invokes, among other things, liberal-democratic values—at least some of which will prove, at some point, incompatible with the pursuit of economic democracy. This last consideration reflects a problem—the certainty of violent resistance to socialism—that “democratic socialists” seldom address directly, let alone resolve, but so far I have only mentioned it in passing. In the following section, I address this difficulty in more detail.

RESISTANCE AND RIGHTS

A transition to socialism in the United States will, without question, face extreme opposition from capitalists and the most privileged strata of society, as well as from many who would benefit from socialism but who nonetheless uphold the capitalist status quo (because of indoctrination, or “false consciousness,” or fear of the untried and unknown). Moreover, some of this opposition will almost certainly involve violent resistance, of one form or another: after all, if “the socialist vision” involves, as Bhaskar Sunkara rightly observes in The ABCs of Socialism, both “democratic control over our workplaces and the other institutions that shape our communities” and “abolishing private ownership of the things we all need and use—factories, banks, offices, natural resources, utilities, communication and transportation infrastructure—and replacing it with social ownership”,25 capitalists have good reason to combat efforts to abolish capitalism and introduce socialism. Given the importance of this topic, one would think that it would have received adequate consideration in some of the recent writings aimed at popularizing democratic socialism. In fact, there is very little discussion of opposition to the building of socialism, violent or otherwise, in this body of literature, and the inadequacy of the analyses of those writers who do address this topic often derives from a failure to wholeheartedly embrace a socialist conception of democracy.

I should mention at the outset two problems that arise in assessing democratic socialists’ treatment of the problem of opposition and resistance to socialism. First of all, it is often unclear which stage of socialism democratic socialists have in mind when discussing this topic: Is it a transitional stage leading from capitalism to socialism, or a fully consolidated, functioning socialist society (or both)? Secondly, most of the literature on democratic socialism plainly seems to envision—and endorse—an electoral, parliamentary-reformist route to socialism, ignoring, if not rejecting outright, a revolutionary strategy for achieving socialism,26 even though democratic socialism is not, strictly speaking, synonymous with the former. In the end, however, it does not really matter whether these writers are referring to the stages of building socialism or to a full-fledged socialist social order, as their views prove untenable whichever of the two phases we consider. Nor does it matter whether democratic socialists envision the advent of socialism as the ultimate result of electoral victories or as the consequence of a successful revolution: the measures implemented by democratically elected socialists will face ferocious, sometimes violent, opposition, just as surely as would socialist revolutionaries during, and in the immediate aftermath of, a revolution. So, then, how do democratic socialists propose to deal with this opposition and resistance?

One obvious approach to dealing with and neutralizing the resistance of the capitalist class is to curtail some of the capitalists’ rights. As we have seen, democratic socialists readily acknowledge that they would severely diminish, if not abolish altogether, some of the capitalists’ property, or “economic,” rights; yet, and as we have also seen, democratic socialists appear to regard capitalists’ political rights as inviolable (“Democratic socialism would not curtail the political rights of the rich as individuals”). This is, in fact, a position even held by some who, while occasionally using “democratic socialist” phraseology, bring to their conceptualization of the socialist struggle a measure of political realism that is typically wanting in the literature of democratic socialism. Julio Huato, for example, maintains, in his “Theses on the Path to Socialism,” that “the rights of capitalists are [to be] respected within the confines of existing law…, and their rights as individuals and as citizens (including here their political freedoms, human rights, etc.) should be inviolable”. Unlike many a democratic socialist, however, Huato also explicitly acknowledges and emphasizes that “the ruling class will seek to sabotage, disrupt, disunite, throw a monkey wrench in economic and social conditions overall, and then blame socialism for the mess” and “will resort to terror with 100% certainty”.2728

In assessing the democratic socialist position that upholds capitalists’ political rights while rejecting their property/economic rights, it is worth noting, first of all, that a political arrangement that severely curtailed currently existing property rights in the United States would not necessarily represent a repudiation of political liberalism. As a matter of fact, John Rawls, widely regarded as both the most important contemporary theorist of political liberalism and the twentieth century’s premier political philosopher, denies the existence of a basic right to private property in either natural resources or the means of production.29. Indeed, this is one reason that Rawls reckons a “liberal socialist regime” compatible with the fundamental principles of his theory of justice.30 One democratic socialist31 actually cites Rawls by way of arguing for liberal socialism. In the end, however, Rawls, or his version of liberalism, proves less helpful than one might think in grounding a democratic socialism. For one thing, the socially dominant conceptions of political liberalism hold that there do exist basic rights to ownership of the means of production and that such rights are, if anything, political rights; these are, accordingly, the ideas that those who fight for “a truly socialist society,” with its “combination of political and economic equality”32 will have to challenge and successfully discredit (as opposed to the views of one particular giant, however influential, of twentieth-century political philosophy). Secondly, Rawls rejects what he calls “the equal right to participate in the control of the means of production and of natural resources, both of which are to be socially, not privately, owned”,33 and it is difficult to see how any consistent socialist—as opposed to a left-liberal or social democrat—could accept a social arrangement that fails to recognize the right to equality of participation in the control of the major means of production.34

But let us return to the view according to which democratic socialists ought to uphold the political rights of capitalists (and “the rich”) while abrogating many of their (present) economic/property rights. Is this position, which naturally is of relevance only to the process of socialist construction (the social category of “capitalists” and “the rich” will presumably have become obsolete in a socialist society), a realistic position for socialists?

In my opinion, it is exceedingly unlikely that the United States could attain socialism without at least temporarily infringing some liberal-democratic norms, whether the initial impetus for socialism originates in a series of electoral and legislative victories or in a successful socialist revolution; these infringements would include curtailing some of the political rights of capitalists and their allies.35 As for the electoral road to socialism—which is all that I will discuss here, since nearly all avowed “democratic socialists” appear to reject a revolutionary strategy for the US (and, in any event, the latter strategy infringes, by definition, liberal-democratic norms)—it is certainly conceivable that a socialist coalition or movement could win enough representation, perhaps following a lengthy succession of electoral victories, at the federal and state levels to constitute a political majority in favor of socialism. Yet the fact that socialists have achieved a majority democratically (in the familiar, liberal-democratic sense) hardly implies that opposition and resistance to socialist proposals will be mild or insignificant, either in the stages preceding the implementation of socialist policies and legislation (i.e., the drafting of proposals and public—including congressional—debate) or in the stages that issue from said policies and legislation (i.e., the phases of actually building socialism).

Nor will it be particularly difficult for capitalists and their agents to exercise their resistance within the framework of liberal-democratic capitalism. As Kit Wainer and Mel Bienenfeld36 have shown in their sober and illuminating analysis of the structural obstacles to a socialist transformation of the United States, the American political system is such that “capital can continue to exercise authority and constitutionally wield instruments of repression against working-class movements, even if it has lost control of the highest elected offices.” If this is so, it will almost certainly be necessary to curtail or restrict some of the capitalists’ liberal-democratic political rights—e.g., the scope of their freedom of expression—in order to ensure successful approval of laws that would abrogate their property rights. In other words, effectively and successfully eliminating the economic power of the capitalist class may require antecedent measures to minimize its political power, which is to say, may require restrictions on its liberal-democratic political rights.37 Of course, faced with a serious threat to its wealth, privileges and power, the capitalist class will surely not limit itself to the instruments of lawful resistance to socialist transformation, but will also avail itself of extra-legal expedients—the very forms of violence evoked by Huato in the passage cited from his provocative “Theses on the Path to Socialism.”38

In any event, it is important to underscore that the question as to whether or not a liberal-democratic path to socialism is possible in a liberal-democratic capitalist society will be of only relative importance for a consistent socialist.39 This is so for two reasons, both of which follow from considerations that I have already discussed. The first reason has to do with the social order to which socialists aspire, which represents something beyond liberal democracy. Is it not rather peculiar, then, for socialists (as opposed to left-liberals and social democrats) to worry about due respect for, and adherence to, liberal-democratic norms, values and procedures when these things define an institutional arrangement that socialism aims to leave behind? For even if we grant that liberal democracy need not include the extensive property rights characteristic of contemporary liberal-democratic capitalism (recall, for example, Rawls’s position, mentioned above), insofar as socialists maintain that “working people should run…the economy and society” or espouse “economic democracy,” they are in fact advocating a socio-economic arrangement that will necessarily diverge from liberal democracy. I have already noted above the incompatibility between these commitments and liberal democracy. Here I will only add that we should not overlook the ways in which socialism requires a reconceptualization of rights. We will not achieve “economic democracy,” for example, by simply adding some new economic right(s) to an existing set of political rights, but only by instituting such practices as, to cite Sunkara again, “democratic control over our workplaces and the other institutions that shape our communities” and “social ownership,” thereby combining “political” and “economic” rights in a manner quite foreign to the postulates of liberal-democratic capitalism. Likewise, when Sam Gindin identifies the socialist goal with “a society based on public ownership of the means of production, distribution, and communication”,40 he is not only offering a reasonable (general) characterization of socialism but also evoking a social arrangement in which individuals’ economic and political rights no longer correspond to the rights so designated in contemporary liberal-democratic capitalist societies.

The second reason why the prospects for a liberal-democratic path to socialism will be of only relative importance for a consistent socialist is that a departure from liberal-democratic procedures, norms, and constraints can be defended on the grounds that these things may undermine or hinder democracy, assuming the democracy in question is socialist democracy. As we have already seen, democratic socialists defend their condemnation of—and, accordingly, readiness to transcend—capitalism by appealing to a notion of socialist democracy, as in Schwartz’s condemnation of capitalism on the basis of its “anti-democratic nature”; they could likewise make the case for abandoning some features of the liberal-democratic component of liberal-democratic capitalism by appealing to the very same notion. Since the “features” in question are certain rights (e.g., rights to certain forms of expression and association), it may be helpful to point out that we may also describe the tension between liberal democracy and socialist democracy in this regard in terms of a conflict between different rights. If, as it seems fair to assume, democratic socialists hold that economic democracy involves a determinate set of rights, then liberal-democratic capitalism violates rights. As this is the case, a socialist course of action that seeks to end the violation of these rights by curtailing some rights that capitalists enjoy under a liberal-democratic regime is merely limiting some rights to advance others, a perfectly normal practice.After all, we often accept limitations on rights to freedom of movement and expression, for example, in order to advance our rights to safety and security.41 In short, socialists who condone restrictions on some of capitalists’ rights for the purpose of initiating a socialist democratization of the economy and society do not ignore the value of these rights, but simply pursue a policy that prioritizes socialist-democratic rights over liberal-democratic rights in at least some of the conflicts that emerge between these sets of rights (which is what must occur if the socialist rights are to achieve de jure status). One can, in other words, reject various liberal-democratic practices, at least in certain conjunctures or stages of socio-economic development, in the name of democracy.42 A social system can be democratic without being liberal-democratic, and socialism can be, contrary to what Aronoff, Dreir and Kazin appear to maintain, “fiercely democratic” even when it does not accept the full array of liberal-democratic rights for some people, such as members of the capitalist class, “who oppose socialism itself.”43

Before concluding this section, I should perhaps reiterate that my remarks in the preceding paragraphs apply to pre-socialist phases of socialist construction. If, in advocating the utmost respect for political rights, proponents of “democratic socialism” have in mind the political rights of the members of a socialist society,44 then their position is certainly the correct one; although one must bear in mind that, as noted above, socialist political rights differ from liberal-democratic political rights. It is interesting to consider in this connection Joseph M. Schwartz’s reference to the “democratic socialists” who “led the brief, but extraordinary experiment of ‘socialism with a human face’ under the Dubček government in Czechoslovakia in 1968”.45 The “Prague Spring” did indeed involve political liberalization and democratic reform, but the measures comprising this experiment were implemented in a country that had been non-capitalist for two decades. This example is of scant value, therefore, in thinking about the framework for a socialist government’s policies concerning the rights and freedoms of the members of a capitalist class that has not only not been expropriated but also retains the ability to mount formidable resistance to every possible advance in the direction of socialism.

THE COLD WAR MINDSET OF DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS

Before concluding this essay, it is important to mention one additional contradiction or, from the perspective of socialist theory and strategy. The popular statements of the democratic socialist outlook often appear to further confirm democratic socialists’ allegiance to the liberal democracy of liberal-democratic capitalist regimes, with the near-exclusive use of examples from capitalist countries by way of illustrating the kinds of practices, policies and institutions that democratic socialists might emulate.

Consider the following democratic socialist response to the question, “Why are there no models of democratic socialism?”:

Although no country has fully instituted democratic socialism, the socialist parties and labor movements of other countries have won many victories for their people. We can learn from the comprehensive welfare state maintained by the Swedes, from Canada’s national health care system, France’s nationwide childcare program, and Nicaragua’s literacy programs. Lastly, we can learn from efforts initiated right here in the US, such as the community health centers created by the government in the 1960s. They provided high quality family care, with community involvement in decision-making.46

Notice that all—or, if we grant that Nicaragua was at least socialistically oriented, so to speak, at the beginning of the 1980s, nearly all— examples cited are policies enacted in capitalist societies, whether of a liberal-democratic or social-democratic variety. One would think that democratic socialists would eschew the use of examples such as these to promote their doctrine: after all, if all of these things—which are, to be sure, quite commendable—can be achieved within capitalism, who needs socialism, “democratic” or otherwise? In any event, the point I wish to emphasize here is a rather different one: the fact that democratic socialists typically cite only the progressive achievements of capitalist countries with liberal-democratic (including social-democratic) regimes. We Own the Future’s editors likewise tell us that “existing social democracies offer many lessons,” mentioning, for example, some of the achievements of “Scandinavia’s social democracies”47 and studiously avoid any reference to the achievements of the former or current (avowedly) socialist nations. This reflects democratic socialism’s unshakeable allegiance to, or rather ideological investment in, liberal democracy. How else are we to explain the fact that democratic socialists readily cite progressive social programs from capitalist societies in spite of these societies’ grievous shortcomings (social inequality and exclusion, corporate welfare, the disenfranchisement of immigrants, regressive fiscal policy, exploitative trade relations, structural racism, imperialism, systematic mistreatment of prisoners, the arming of oppressive regimes, neo-colonialism, etc.) and the “anti-democratic nature of capitalism” itself (Schwartz), but never mention any of the positive accomplishments (as regards, for example, education, job security, women’s rights, access to culture, child care, international solidarity, or healthcare), of the avowedly socialist countries, past and present, despite their grievous shortcomings? In other words, if one can, and ought to, both praise and condemn when it comes to liberal-democratic capitalist countries’ policies, why should we not adopt the same approach to—which is to say, why can we not likewise “learn from”—some of the socialist countries’ policies?

The answer, I believe, is that democratic socialists’ commitment to liberal democracy is, despite the latter’s incompatibility with socialist democracy, such that a society whose political arrangements do not conform to the principles, practices and institutions of contemporary liberal democracies does not merit any consideration; it disqualifies itself, so to speak, altogether, and there can be nothing to commend and value in any of its principles, practices or institutions. This would certainly explain, for instance, Aronoff, Dreir and Kazin’s brief, sweeping dismissal of the whole of the avowedly socialist states, past and present: “We hold no brief for the one-party dictatorships that still exist in North Korea, China, and Cuba—or for the failed states of the old USSR and its allies in Eastern Europe, which gave socialism a bad name”.48 It would also explain the fact that we find only one reference to Revolutionary Cuba, a country which holds many positive lessons for democratic socialists, in the pages of The ABCs of Socialism, and that this reference is likewise of a dismissive nature.4950 It is in the chapter just cited, incidentally, that Joseph Schwartz refers to the “rich history of experiments in democratic socialism in the developing world,” among which he includes not only Allende’s Chile but also “the early years of Michael Manley’s government in Jamaica that same decade [i.e., the 1970s]”.51 Schwartz’s identification of Manley’s early social democratic reform program with “democratic socialism” is certainly significant.52 But even more significant for our purposes is something that Schwartz neglects to mention, namely that both Allende and Manley had excellent relations with Fidel Castro and Revolutionary Cuba. Perhaps this was because these two men believed, in contrast to Schwartz and so many other “democratic socialists,” that the Cuban experiment, whatever its shortcomings and flaws, offers many positive examples for socialists and leftwing social democrats, particularly in the developing world.53 And surely most countries that have defined themselves as “socialist” have at least some achievements worthy of socialists’ attention…unless, of course, the existence of a political framework that includes all of the basic elements of contemporary liberal democracies is a sine qua non for a positive evaluation of any of a country’s policies or institutions.

CONCLUSION

As I have sought to show in the preceding sections of this article, popular presentations of “democratic socialism” involve many contradictions and considerable confusion with regard to the meaning of socialism and central elements of socialist theory. One consequence of these problems is that some democratic socialists advocate, in the name of “socialism,” political positions that are in fact not discernibly socialist—and are hardly incompatible with capitalism—but rather range from left-liberalism to centrist social democracy. Another consequence is that those democratic socialists who do advocate distinctively socialist social arrangements include inconsistent conceptions of democracy in their theorizing, with predictably unfortunate results. Both groups of democratic socialists remain—and this is perhaps the principal cause of the confusions and contradictions that I have considered—much too wedded to the practices and norms of liberal democracy: Jesse Jackson was indeed correct when he declared, “Here’s the reality. The important word in ‘democratic socialism’ isn’t socialism, it’s democratic” (2020). One could hardly improve on Jackson’s pronouncement, except to add that the “democratic” means, as should now be clear, “liberal-democratic.” But socialists should not forget that liberal democracy is, at bottom, an ideology in the distinctively Marxist sense of the term, namely “thought which serves class interests”5455; this is, indeed, the justification for the other conventional term, especially on the Left, for this political system—bourgeois democracy. And just as socialism will enable us to go beyond capitalism, socialist democracy will enable us to go beyond liberal democracy.

https://mltoday.com/on-democratic-socialism/
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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Tue Mar 08, 2022 2:52 pm

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What is the Fetishism of Commodities?
Originally published: Midwestern Marx by Thomas Riggins (March 3, 2022 ) | - Posted Mar 07, 2022

Towards the end of the first chapter of Das Kapital, after having established the validity of the labor theory of value, Marx has a section on the “Fetishism of Commodities”. To understand this section is to understand the whole first chapter and also to see why socialism is necessary. This article is an attempt to explain the meaning of this section and to apply its lessons to our times.
A commodity looks simple enough, says the bourgeois economist. Most bourgeois economists say it is any object with a use value that somebody wants and is willing to pay for and its value is determined by supply and demand. Nothing drives such a common sense economist more to distraction than reading Karl Marx who says a commodity is “a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.” What can Marx mean? Economics is a science, even a mathematical science, what has it got to do with metaphysics and theology?

Take a wooden table, says Marx. It is just wood that human labor has turned into a table and taken to market. Wood + Labor = Table. Where is the mystery? When it gets to the market the table finds itself in the company of the stool and the chair. All three have use values, are made of the same wood, and may be in equal supply and equal demand– yet each has its own different price.

Why these different prices? Same wood, same demand, same supply. They are all the products of human labor. What is the difference between them that justifies different prices? The prices are reflections of the underlying values of the products. Could the values be different? What does Marx say determines value? It is the different quantities of socially necessary labor time embodied in the commodities.

The table, the stool, and the chair are three “things” that are related to each other as the embodiment of the social relations and necessary labor of human beings that created them. Human social relations have been objectified as the relations between non human things. The chair is more valuable than the table but the reason is now hidden away from the perception of people.

“A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing,” Marx writes, “simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relations of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour.”

To find an analogy Marx tells us we have to turn to the “mist-enveloped regions of the religious world.” In that world the inventions of the human mind take on an independent existence and humans begin to interact with their own fantastical creations as if they were really independently existing objective things. This is similar to the Fetishism of Commodities. All the commodities we see about us are part of the sum total of all the socially produced objects and services created by human labor in our society. People all over the world are making things which are traded, shipped, sold, resold, etc. But their use values cannot be realized until they are sold–i.e., exchanged, especially exchanged for money. But why are some more expensive than others? Why do some have more value than others? Supply and demand has a role to play in setting price but it merely causes price to fluctuate around value.

The fact that we know that value results from the socially necessary labor time spent in making commodities “by no means,” Marx says, “dissipates the mist through which the social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves.”

This is because we are so use to how the market operates under capitalism, how prices fluctuate, commodities rise and fall in prices, the working people naturally just think the values (which they don’t differentiate from prices) are products of the natural world, that is, are functions of the things for sale or barter themselves. This is why “supply and demand” seems to be the basis of the value of things. They don’t see it’s all really the result of the socially necessary labor time expended in the labor process that is the determining factor in value

This leads Marx to say, “The determination of the magnitude of value by labor time therefore is a secret, hidden under the apparent fluctuations in the relative values of commodities.”

We are reminded that to understand the real nature of a social formation we have to reverse our knowledge of its historical development. We begin with the full fledged capitalist system and we try to figure why the prices of things are the way they are. Looking at the mature system we don’t really see its primitive origins. In the same way a religious person looking at a human being fails to see an ape in the background.

This leads Marx to say of his own theory, “When I state that coats and boots stand in a relation to linen, because it is the universal incarnation of abstract human labor, the absurdity of the statement is self-evident.” This has been remarked upon both by the most astute of thinkers (Bertrand Russell) and the most pedestrian (Ayn Rand).

The problem is that the bourgeoisie looks upon a historically transient economic formation, its own, as an eternally existing social order. Of course prices are set by supply and demand. What is that crazy Marx talking about? As the economist Brad Delong said, he had never known anyone who thought that way.

Well, let’s look at something other than the full blown capitalist system at work. Marx says, “The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labor as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production.”

Marx gives the example of Robinson Crusoe. He chose Robinson because he was a popular example used in the texts of the day. Robinson has to make everything for himself, obtain his own food, and provide his own shelter. It is pretty obvious that the things that are most important for his survival are those he expends most of his labor time upon and are consequently the most valuable to him.

Marx then says we should consider a community of free people working together cooperatively to make all things necessary for their society. Whereas Robinson was just making use values for himself, in this community a social product is being created. The people have to set aside part of the product for future production, but the rest they can consume. How would they divide it in a fair manner? They would divide the product in proportion to the labor time each individual had contributed to the joint production of the social product.

This is how barter went on in the Middle Ages. Peasants knew very well how much labor time was involved in making cheese, for example, and in making a pair of shoes . If it took twice as long to make a pound cheese that to make a pair of shoes, you can be sure that no one was going to trade more than a half pound of cheese for his shoes. It is only in the complicated processes of commodity production, especially in capitalism, that the Fetichism of Commodities begins to manifest itself and the true nature of the source of value is lost.

People have confused consciousness in our world. Our alienation from our own social product, the effects of commodity fetichism, and the continuing influence of religion all work together to keep us confused and off guard. But seeing what our condition is with respect to such mental blights also tells how far along the road to liberation we are (not far) and how far we have to go (quite a distance I fear).

The world, though in a distorted way, is reflected in these distorted forms of consciousness. “The religious world,” Marx tells us, “is but the reflex of the real world.” And, for our capitalist society where all human relations, and relations of humans with the things they create, are reducible to commodification based on the value of “homogeneous human labor” the best form of religion is Christianity and especially Protestantism (or alternatively, Deism) and maybe for our day we can toss in Secular Humanism.

Why is this? Marx says it is because the idea of “abstract man” is the basis of the religious outlook of these systems. A religion based on an abstract view of “human nature” is just the ticket for an economic system that the bourgeoisie says is also based on “human nature.” The religion reinforces the basic presuppositions of the capitalist view of abstract man and since Catholicism represents a pre-bourgeois human abstraction more suitable to feudalism it is the Protestant form that is more congruent with bourgeois conceptions.

As long as humans are confused and alienated, and ignorant of how capitalism works and are mystified by their relation to the objects of their labor they will never be free, or free from the spell of religion, according to Marx. “The religious reflex of the real world,” he writes, can only vanish “when the practical relations of every-day life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible relations with regard to his fellowmen and to Nature.”

The next two sentences from Marx are extremely important as they explain, in very general terms, the failure of the Russian Revolution and the downfall of the socialist world system. The first sentence describes what the Bolsheviks set out to do in 1917. “The life processes of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan.”

This is certainly what was attempted– first by war communism, then the NEP, and then by the five year plans, forced collectivization and industrialization. But why the failure? Where were the “freely associated men?”

To pull off this great transformation, the goal of communism, Marx wrote “demands for society a certain material ground-work or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development.”

In other words, the seizure of power was premature. The material ground-work had not been sufficiently developed. If Lenin represented the negation of the ancien regime, Gorbachev and Yeltsin represented the negation of the negation– brought about by the failure of that long and painful process of development to properly develop production by freely associated human beings. For all its efforts the socialist world still belonged to that world in which the processes of production had the mastery over human beings and not the other way around. So we must still put up with the Fetichism of Commodities for a while longer.

The recent crisis (2008) gives us an opportunity to educate working people about this Fetichism and how to free themselves from it. GM became 70% owned by the government and the UAW will have a stake of about 17.5%. This leaves 12.5% in the hands of the capitalists. The commodities the workers make (cars) don’t have a life of their own. Their value is determined by the socially necessary labor time it takes workers to make them. They are extensions of the being of the working people not the capitalists who have proved themselves totally incompetent.

The working people of this country far out number the number of monopoly capitalists– both industrial and financial. The UAW and the AFL-CIO as well other Unions should have seen to it that the government represented the interests of the working class majority. The 87.5% joint Government-worker control of GM should not have been used to put the private interests back in control, but to rationalize the auto industry by means of worker control, eliminate the capitalists and the Fetichism that keeps people thinking private interests have a role to play in production, and lay the groundwork for further nationalizations in the future.

What do you think?

https://mronline.org/2022/03/07/what-is ... mmodities/

I think Mr Riggins sounds like a social democrat to me...waiting and calculating that 'magic moment' postpones it eternally, which for some is the point...

It's an old argument with some merit, but the Old Man had something to say about the idealization of program:

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”

― Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte


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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Wed Mar 09, 2022 2:32 pm

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The Unity of Theory and Practice
March 8, 2022
By Yanis Iqbal – Mar 6, 2022

In 1969, Fred Hampton – chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party – said: “we saying that theory’s cool, but theory with no practice ain’t shit.” He elaborated this statement in another speech that he gave in the same year: “I don’t care how much theory you got, if it don’t have any practice applied to it, then that theory happens to be irrelevant. Right? Any theory you get, practice it. And when you practice it you make some mistakes. When you make a mistake, you correct that theory, and then it will be corrected theory that will be able to be applied and used in any situation. That’s what we’ve got to be able to do.”

Hampton’s words continue to be relevant. In the current conjuncture, Western Leftists – with a few principled exceptions – have been denigrating and viciously condemning concrete mass struggles and socialistic experiments in the Global South from a perspective of self-congratulatory moral purism. Their worldview is informed by a fundamental disconnect between theory and practice. The Western Left follows a strategy of utopianism in which it first imaginatively fashions an “ideal” society and then turns to the question of its achievement. Here, socialism is sought to be created ex nihilo, through a mechanical application of certain ideals to the given reality.

In contrast, the experience of Third World leftists – engaged in real working-class struggles – indicates that socialism is a complex process comprising the following two moments described by Konstantinos Kavoulakos: “the moment of rupture, of the emergence of the new out of the contradictions of the present, and the moment of its gradual development on the basis of new contradictions occurring in the process each time.” The fact that socialism has to be constructed through a concrete movement of contradictions means that practical work – however rough and theoretically unpolished – is necessary for exploring those realities. In other words, the only way we get to know the socialist universal is through contradictory particulars – party, people, organization etc.

Socialists, therefore, have to search for the future that is immanent within the present, rather than exploit the ideological discrepancy between bourgeois society and some abstract ideals. While the former forms a socio-political praxis derived from the actual complexity of reality, the latter leads to an impotent cultural criticism that is incapable of determinately negating capitalism. Thus, Western leftists frequently oppose the supposed reformism of Global South socialist states and make abstract declarations of an immediate revolution. Such ideological operations fail to understand the fact that communists must maintain close contact with the working class, tuning in with their existing mood and facilitating the internal development of their consciousness.

In this process, experience is accumulated whose importance was succinctly outlined by Paul Lafargue: “Criticism does not begin to be fruitful instead of futile, until it comes after experience, which, better than the most subtle reasoning, makes us sensible of imperfections and teaches us to correct them. Man first used the clumsy stone hammer, and its use taught him to transform it into more than a hundred types, differing in their raw material, their weight, and their form.” Since the Western Left does not have experience, its strategy and tactics are dictated by a practically inapplicable comprehension of the pure form of the laws of capitalism. In their view, the logic of capital unfolds via a series of mediations into a totality whose surface consists of non-economic appearances where people see the world through the prism of commodities.

As the capitalist totality is always dominated by the homogeneous time of profit-maximization, singular phenomena can be perceived as expressions of the whole; all parts of the whole linearly reflect an economic essence. Insofar that capitalism is conceptualized as an invariant and underlying structure that generates a self-reproducing totality of ideological appearances, there is no space for politics, for a practice that can destroy capitalism through the identification and intensification of its multiple contradictions. As Alex Demirovic writes: “Since there could be no…understanding of the future effects of present appearances, there could be no…politics. At best, this position holds, change can only be thought of in terms of a complete systemic collapse of the totality or as the transition from one moment to the next.”

The mass movements of Global South leftists have shown that capitalism can’t be destroyed through a merely contemplative comprehension of its economic laws. Instead, these laws are tendential and politico-historical in nature, to be understood only in relation to a specific social context. Guglielmo Carchedi comments: “The movement (change) of social phenomena (change) is tendential, i.e. at any given level of abstraction (given a section of reality under scrutiny) some social phenomenon is a tendency and others are the countertendencies.” In other words, we need to highlight the process of determination which starts from the simple relation of production, and ends with the concrete complexity of the social system.

“Capitalist relations are always articulated with other production relations”, notes Bob Jessop, “and are, at most, relatively dominant; moreover, their operation is always vulnerable to disruption through internal contradictions, the intrusion of relations anchored in other institutional orders and the lifeworld (civil society), and resistance rooted in conflicting interests, competing identities, and rival modes of calculation.” These intermeshing social relations can only be detected when the Left tries to meet the masses where they are at in terms of their consciousness; in this way, it will be able to observe how the mechanical law expressed at the level of the production process is translated into organically interconnected relations of forces through the everyday resistance and socio-cultural activities of the subalterns.

The ability of the Third World Left to produce an adequate practical form of a theory, capable of increasing its capacity to know, is closely linked to its involvement in mass organizational work. With the help of this practical activity, the Southern Left avoids the error of prefabricating socialist strategies in utopianistic manners – the actual content of the communist goal does not exist in advance but is crafted through the social relations of knowledge embodied in processes of collective engagement, intervention and confrontation. There is no sovereign subject of the Enlightenment tradition that contemplates socialist thoughts in an individualized way. Instead, there is the party – the apparatus that produces political subjectivities through a real movement of contradictions on the terrain of struggle. The contours of this unity of theory and practice were brilliantly outlined by Mao Zedong:

“In all the practical work of our Party, all correct leadership is necessarily ‘from the masses, to the masses.’ This means: take the ideas of the masses (scattered and unsystematic ideas) and concentrate them (through study turn them into concentrated and systematic ideas), then go to the masses and propagate and explain these ideas until the masses embrace them as their own, hold fast to them and translate them into action, and test the correctness of these ideas in such action. Then once again concentrate ideas from the masses and once again go to the masses so that the ideas are persevered in and carried through. And so on, over and over again in an endless spiral, with the ideas becoming more correct, more vital and richer each time. Such is the Marxist theory of knowledge.”

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Thu Mar 10, 2022 2:35 pm

CP of the Russian Federation, Juozas Ermalavičius: "The objective law of communism"
3/9/22 3:44 PM

Russia, Communist Party of the Russian Federation Ru Europe Communist and workers' parties
Juozas Ermalavičius: "The objective law of communism"

The founders of scientific communism K. Marx and F. Engels proceeded from the fact that “revolution is the driving force of history, as well as religion, philosophy and any other theory” (Marx K., Engels F. Soch., ed. 2nd, vol. 3, p. 37).

Juozas Ermalavičius, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor.

2022-03-09

Guided by his own dialectical materialist understanding of history, K. Marx formulated the basic objective law of the social revolution. This law is expressed by certain propositions: “At a certain stage of its development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or – which is only a legal expression of the latter – with the property relations within which they have so far developed. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations are transformed into their fetters. Then comes the era of social revolution. With a change in the economic basis, a revolution takes place more or less quickly in the entire vast superstructure” (K. Marx, F. Engels Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 13, p. 7). The social revolution ensures that the nature of society's production relations corresponds to the level of development of its productive forces, which is the content of the basic objective law of the social development of mankind. Therefore, in the world historical process, a dialectical interaction between production and social revolutions is observed: raising the level of development of material production for the peoples of the globe prepares a social revolution that expands the social space for further growth of productive forces up to a new revolution.

K. Marx and F. Engels attributed socialist revolutions to a special type of social revolutions. F. Engels interpreted their essence as “humanity’s leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom”, when “objective, alien forces that have hitherto dominated history come under the control of the people themselves” (Marx K., Engels F. Soch., ed. 2nd, vol. 19, pp. 227-228). The main content of the socialist revolution is the change in the types of ownership of the means of production, which K. Marx and F. Engels expressed “in one proposition: the destruction of private property” (Marx K., Engels F. Soch., ed. 2nd, vol. 4 , p. 428). By abolishing private property and establishing the social type of ownership of the means of production on a worldwide scale, the socialist revolution overcomes the spontaneous, blind, the chaotic development of the world's population and opens up opportunities for the conscious, planned, harmonious development of society. The socialist revolution liberates society from social inequality and antagonism, oppression and exploitation of man by man, domination over them by the objective laws of the movement of the world, which corresponds to the class interests of the world proletariat, which basically coincide with the objective laws of historical progress. The realization of these possibilities presupposes a scientific understanding and scientific substantiation of the historical development of society. Therefore, F. Engels perceived the prospect of a socialist revolution as “the greatest revolution of all time” (K. Marx, F. Engels Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 13, p. 491). The socialist revolution liberates society from social inequality and antagonism, oppression and exploitation of man by man, domination over them by the objective laws of the movement of the world, which corresponds to the class interests of the world proletariat, which basically coincide with the objective laws of historical progress. The realization of these possibilities presupposes a scientific understanding and scientific substantiation of the historical development of society. Therefore, F. Engels perceived the prospect of a socialist revolution as “the greatest revolution of all time” (K. Marx, F. Engels Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 13, p. 491). The socialist revolution liberates society from social inequality and antagonism, oppression and exploitation of man by man, domination over them by the objective laws of the movement of the world, which corresponds to the class interests of the world proletariat, which basically coincide with the objective laws of historical progress. The realization of these possibilities presupposes a scientific understanding and scientific substantiation of the historical development of society. Therefore, F. Engels perceived the prospect of a socialist revolution as “the greatest revolution of all time” (K. Marx, F. Engels Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 13, p. 491). coinciding mainly with the objective laws of historical progress. The realization of these possibilities presupposes a scientific understanding and scientific substantiation of the historical development of society. Therefore, F. Engels perceived the prospect of a socialist revolution as “the greatest revolution of all time” (K. Marx, F. Engels Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 13, p. 491). coinciding mainly with the objective laws of historical progress. The realization of these possibilities presupposes a scientific understanding and scientific substantiation of the historical development of society. Therefore, F. Engels perceived the prospect of a socialist revolution as “the greatest revolution of all time” (K. Marx, F. Engels Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 13, p. 491).

The scientific theory of the socialist revolution, developed by K. Marx and F. Engels, began to receive practical implementation in historical reality at the beginning of the 20th century, when capitalism reached the highest, imperialist stage of its development and entered into a national crisis. Having studied the regularities of the existence of capitalism in the imperialist station, V. I. Lenin discovered “features of the transitional era from capitalism to a higher socio-economic structure”, since “the main properties of capitalism began to turn into their opposite” (Lenin V. I. Full. collection cit., vol. 27, p. 385). The socialization of material production under the influence of its scientific improvement by the peoples contributed to the transformation of private property into public ownership of the means of production. free competition, which ensured the flourishing of capitalist production, began to suppress the domination of the monopoly. These tendencies testified to the degeneration and self-destruction of capitalism, its revolutionary replacement by socialism.

As a result of the sharpening of all the social contradictions of capitalism at the imperialist stage, bourgeois society turned away from political democracy towards violence, reaction, and terror. Imperialist wars have become an integral feature of the general crisis of capitalism, sharpening its contradictions to the extreme. Lenin found a way out of the catastrophic situation in the world socialist revolution. In 1917 he wrote: “Only a proletarian, socialist revolution can lead humanity out of the impasse created by imperialism and imperialist wars. Whatever the difficulties of the revolution and its possible temporary setbacks or waves of counter-revolution, the final victory of the proletariat is inevitable (V. I. Lenin, Poln. sobr. soch., vol. 54, p. 483).

The first practical confirmation of the scientific theory of the socialist revolution in world history was the Great October Socialist Revolution in Russia. It had a profound transformative effect on the social development of all countries and peoples of the globe. The Great October led the coming historical epoch of modern times, determining its content, character, direction of development - the revolutionary transition of mankind from capitalism to socialism. Assessing the impact of the Great October Revolution on the world historical process, V. I. Lenin noted that “the whole world is now moving towards such a movement that should give rise to a world socialist revolution” (V. I. Lenin, Poln. sobr. soch., vol. 45 , p. 403). Thus, the Great October Socialist Revolution was the start of the world socialist revolution.

Born by the Great October Socialist Revolution, world-historical shifts in the social development of mankind destroyed by the middle of the 20th century the greatest production revolution in world history - the world scientific and technological revolution, which qualitatively transformed the material and production foundation of the life of the world's population, radically outpacing the productive achievements of its predecessors. agricultural and industrial revolutions. The scientific and technological revolution has achieved a direct connection of science - a way of theoretical understanding of the objective laws of the development of nature and society - with material production and the creation on this basis of a science-intensive type of production, characterized by its automation and unlimited development up to the complete satisfaction of the human needs of all inhabitants of the planet, which opens the material prerequisites for the formation of the communist mode of production. Science-intensive production is the basis for building the material and technical base of communist society.

The world scientific and technological revolution ensured the rise of the total productive forces of mankind to a qualitatively new level of development on the basis of the gradual transformation of science - the general social productive force - into the direct productive force of society. Thanks to this achievement, the nature of labor and production began to change significantly, labor productivity increased many times over, and production efficiency increased. As a result, all aspects and spheres of society's life change accordingly, presenting completely new requirements for its social maturity and mental development. The scientific and technological revolution contributes to the gigantic growth of the material and spiritual possibilities of the world community of peoples, to the achievement by them of the greatest qualitative leap in the development of their productive forces, the implementation of a radical transformation of the social order of life, the determination of the necessary needs for further historical progress. By directly linking science with material production, the scientific and technological revolution brought into play the boundless power of scientific thought, which guarantees boundless possibilities for further historical progress.

The main role in the world scientific and technological revolution is played by science - the product of the general labor of people for the benefit of all mankind. Therefore, the formation of science as a direct productive force of society serves as the basis for the socialization of material production on a worldwide scale, since the level of knowledge intensity of production determines the degree of its socialization. Correspondingly, the interconnection and interaction of social phenomena, processes, relations are globalized, which greatly complicates the functioning of the earth's civilization. The global socialization of production is incompatible with economic anarchy and social chaos, it requires the abolition of private property and the establishment of a social type of ownership of the means of production on a planetary scale. A scientific substantiation of the organization of the life of society and the scientific management of its development are supposed. The practical solution of these socio-economic problems belongs to the historical vocation of the world socialist revolution - the greatest social revolution in world history.

The transformation of science into a direct productive force of society also makes significant adjustments to the dialectic of the interaction of social being and the social consciousness of mankind, significantly enhancing the transformative impact of the scientific consciousness of people on the social development of peoples, since social being is the content of their social consciousness. An adequate perception and scientific understanding of the social reality of the world has become a natural necessity for the historical creativity of the masses. Without scientific understanding and scientific substantiation of the life of society, the further social development of the international community through historical progress is impossible. The satisfaction of these social and spiritual needs of the peoples is carried out by the world spiritual revolution,

Since the features of science as a direct productive force of society lie in its boundlessness, in the unlimited possibilities for the development of material production, the realization of such powerful possibilities in historical reality presupposes the appropriate preparation of the human personality - the main productive force of society, in which the achievements of social maturity and mental development of mankind are embodied. Due to the fact that science-intensive production determines the highest social and spiritual needs of people, their satisfaction brings to the forefront of the life of society an increase in the consciousness of the masses, their assimilation of the scientific worldview of dialectical materialism, and the strengthening of the subjective or human factor in the historical creativity of peoples. Moreover, the public consciousness of people not only cognizes social existence, but also has an active impact on historical progress, depending on their mental development, spiritual wealth, intellectual potential, culture of thinking. Science permeates all spheres of society.

The highest achievement of the world scientific and technological revolution - science-intensive production - became the basis for its socialization on a worldwide scale, which turned private ownership of the means of production into a destroyer of production - the material foundation of society. Therefore, in the 1970s, a global crisis of private property civilization broke out. Private property is called upon to replace public ownership of the means of production, which is the basis of the communist way of life in society. Public property meets the essential needs of human life in mastering the productive achievements of the scientific and technological revolution. The scientific organization of material production is called upon to ensure that the nature of society's production relations corresponds to the level of development of its productive forces, what is really possible and necessary under the communist mode of production. The scientific basis of production requires a scientific substantiation of the entire organization of the life of society and the scientific management of its development. It is necessary to observe and use the objective laws of social development for the specific purposes of historical progress in order to ensure the planned, progressive, harmonious development of all spheres of social life.

By changing the types of ownership of the means of production on a planetary scale, the greatest social revolution in world history begins. Its main content is the introduction of science-intensive technologies in all types of material production, which is a radical qualitative leap in the world historical process of the revolutionary transition of mankind from capitalism to communism. And the imperialist redistribution of world wealth has caused global chaos, which is not amenable to arbitrary control by the ruling "tops" of the planet, which is tantamount to a world revolutionary situation, which is an introduction to a worldwide social explosion. Intermonopolistic competition unfolds the process of self-destruction of private ownership of the means of production - the basis of class-antagonistic civilization. In addition, the vulgarization and dogmatization of scientific discoveries lead to the extreme heat of the universal catastrophe and the destruction of the international community in it. Only the conscious and purposeful use of the universal objective laws of dialectics in revolutionary practice promise humanity a viable way out of global chaos to the highest, communist level of earthly civilization. Materialistic dialectics turned out to be the only teaching in the world that does not succumb to the destructive effects of global chaos, but promotes scientific knowledge of the causes of its occurrence and ways to overcome it. Only the conscious and purposeful use of the universal objective laws of dialectics in revolutionary practice promise humanity a viable way out of global chaos to the highest, communist level of earthly civilization. Materialistic dialectics turned out to be the only teaching in the world that does not succumb to the destructive effects of global chaos, but promotes scientific knowledge of the causes of its occurrence and ways to overcome it. Only the conscious and purposeful use of the universal objective laws of dialectics in revolutionary practice promise humanity a viable way out of global chaos to the highest, communist level of earthly civilization. Materialistic dialectics turned out to be the only teaching in the world that does not succumb to the destructive effects of global chaos, but promotes scientific knowledge of the causes of its occurrence and ways to overcome it.

By assimilating the scientific worldview of dialectical materialism, a person acquires unlimited mental strength. By mastering the scientific worldview, he is spiritually freed from the dominance over him of the objective laws of the development of nature and society, acting independently of the will and consciousness of people. Thanks to the dialectical-materialistic worldview, a person reveals his mental capacity for scientific awareness of objective reality, historical reality. The scientific understanding of the world allows a person to practically master the operation of the universal objective laws of dialectics in his own vital interests, to satisfy human needs. An adequate perception and correct understanding of the surrounding world is embodied in the scientific consciousness of a person, which serves as the initial position for the scientific substantiation of the organization of the life of society and the scientific management of its development. Scientific thinking motivates a person's social responsibility for the state of society. Man enters the center of social life of the world community of peoples, indeed becomes the main subject of the historical creativity of mankind. As a result, humanity turns into a public human collective, which is the human world. Science becomes the basis of communism. representing the human world. Science becomes the basis of communism. representing the human world. Science becomes the basis of communism.



Juozas Ermalavičius

Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor.

http://solidnet.org/article/CP-of-the-R ... on--00001/

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

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Sat Apr 16, 2022 2:14 pm

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Domenico Losurdo: Reflections on the transition from capitalism to socialism
We are pleased to republish from Workers Today this very important article by the late Domenico Losurdo (1941-2018), a distinguished Italian Marxist scholar and communist militant. Losurdo outlines three distinct waves of social experiment in the young Soviet state in the 15 years following the October Revolution and makes a comparative analysis with the development of the People’s Republic of China, with particular reference to the post-Mao period. Both theoretical and empirical in his approach, Lusurdo draws on the work of Marx, Lenin, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping and, interestingly, Antonio Gramsci to formulate and outline his thesis whilst further illustrating it with reference to the work of scholars and journalists, both Marxist and non-Marxist. His conclusion should serve as a watchword:

“It is very clear which weapons will be used to fight in the country that has emerged from the greatest anti-colonial revolution in history to engage in a long-term process of building a post-capitalist and socialist society. Which side will the Western left take?”
Abstract

If we analyse the first 15 years of Soviet Russia, we see three social experiments. The first experiment, based on the equal distribution of poverty, suggests the “universal asceticism” and “rough egalitarianism” criticised by the Communist Manifesto. We can now understand the decision to move to Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which was often interpreted as a return to capitalism. The increasing threat of war pushed Stalin into sweeping economic collectivisation. The third experiment produced a very advanced welfare state but ended in failure: in the last years of the Soviet Union, it was characterised by mass absenteeism and disengagement in the workplace; this stalled productivity, and it became hard to find any application of the principle that Marx said should preside over socialism — remuneration according to the quantity and quality of work delivered.

The history of China is different: Mao believed that, unlike “political capital,” the economic capital of the bourgeoisie should not be subject to total expropriation, at least until it can serve the development of the national economy. After the tragedy of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, it took Deng Xiaoping to emphasise that socialism implies the development of the productive forces. Chinese market socialism has achieved extraordinary success.

Soviet Russia and Various Experiments in Post-Capitalism

Nowadays it is common to talk about the restoration of capitalism in China as resulting from the reforms of Deng Xiaoping. But what is the basis for this judgment? Is there a more or less coherent vision of socialism that can be contrasted with the reality of the current socio-economic relations in China today? Let’s take a quick look at the history of attempts to build a post-capitalist society. If we analyse the first 15 years of Soviet Russia, we see war communism, then the New Economic Policy (NEP), and finally the complete collectivisation of the economy (including agriculture) in quick succession. These were three totally different experiments, but all of them were an attempt to build a post-capitalist society. Why should we be shocked that, in the course of the more than 80 years that followed these experiments, other variations like market socialism and Chinese socialism appeared?

Let’s concentrate for now on Soviet Russia: which of the three experiments mentioned is closest to the socialism espoused by Marx and Engels? War communism was greeted by a devout French Catholic, Pierre Pascal, then in Moscow, as a “unique and intoxicating performance […] The rich are gone: only the poor and the very poor […] high and low salaries draw closer. The right to property is reduced to personal effects.” [1] This author read the widespread poverty and privation not as wretchedness caused by the war, to be overcome as quickly as possible; in his eyes, as long as they are distributed more or less equally, poverty and want are a condition of purity and moral excellence; on the contrary, affluence and wealth are sins. It is a vision that we can call populist, one that was criticised with great precision by the Communist Manifesto: there is “nothing easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist coat of paint”; the “first movements of the proletariat” often feature claims in the name of “universal asceticism and a rough egalitarianism.” [2] Lenin’s orientation was the opposite of Pascal’s, as he was far from the view that socialism would be the collectivisation of poverty, a more or less egalitarian distribution of privation. In October 1920 (“The Tasks of the Youth Associations”) Lenin declared, “We want to transform Russia from a poor and needy country to a rich country.” First, the country needed to be modernised and wired with electricity; therefore, it required “organised work” and “conscious and disciplined work,” overcoming anarchy in the workplace, with a methodical assimilation of the “latest technical achievements,” if necessary, by importing them from the most advanced capitalist countries. [3]

A few years later, the NEP took over from war communism. It was essential to overcome the desperate mass poverty and starvation that followed the catastrophe of World War I and the civil war, and to restart the economy and develop the productive forces. This was necessary not only to improve the living conditions of the people and to broaden the social basis of consensus on revolutionary power; it was also about avoiding an increase in Russia’s lag in development compared to the more advanced capitalist countries, which could affect the national security of the country emerging from the October Revolution, not to mention it being surrounded and besieged by the capitalist powers. To achieve these objectives, the Soviet government also made use of private initiative and a (limited) part of the capitalist economy; it used “bourgeois” specialists who were rewarded generously, and it sought to take advanced technology and capital, which were guaranteed attractive returns, from the West. The NEP had positive results: production started up again, and a certain development of the productive forces began to take place. Overall, the situation in Soviet Russia improved noticeably: on the international level it did not worsen; rather, Russia’s delay in development started to decrease compared to the successful capitalist countries. Domestically, the living conditions of the masses improved significantly. Precisely because social wealth increased, there were more than just “the poor and the very poor,” as in the war communism celebrated by Pierre Pascal; desperate hunger and starvation disappeared, but social inequalities increased.

These inequalities in Soviet Russia provoked a widespread and intense feeling of betrayal of the original ideals. Pierre Pascal was not the only one wanting to abandon the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; there were literally tens of thousands of Bolshevik workers who tore up their party cards in disgust at the NEP, which they re-named the “New Extortion from the Proletariat.” In the 1940s, a rank-and-file militant very effectively described the spiritual atmosphere prevailing in the immediate aftermath of the October Revolution — the atmosphere arose from the horror of war caused by imperialist competition in plundering the colonies in order to conquer markets and acquire raw materials, as well as by capitalists searching for profit and super-profit:

We young Communists had all grown up in the belief that money was done away with once and for all. […] If money was reappearing, wouldn’t rich people reappear too? Weren’t we on the slippery slope that led back to capitalism? [4]

Therefore, one can understand the scandal and a persistent feeling of repugnance for the market and the commodity economy at the introduction of the NEP; it was above all the growing danger of war that caused the abandonment of the NEP and the removal of every trace of the private economy. The wholesale collectivisation of the country’s agriculture provoked a civil war that was fought ruthlessly by both sides. And yet, after this horrible tragedy, the Soviet economy seemed to proceed marvellously: the rapid development of modern industry was interwoven with the construction of a welfare state that guaranteed the economic and social rights of citizens in a way that was unprecedented. This, however, was a model that fell into crisis after a couple of decades. With the transition from great historical crisis to a more “normal” period (“peaceful coexistence”), the masses’ enthusiasm and commitment to production and work weakened and then disappeared. In the last years of its existence, the Soviet Union was characterised by massive absenteeism and disengagement in the workplace: not only did production development stagnate, but there was no longer any application of the principle that Marx said drove socialism — remuneration according to the quantity and quality of work delivered. You could say that during the final stage of Soviet society, the dialectic of capitalist society that Marx described in The Poverty of Philosophy had been overturned:

While inside the modern factory the division of labour is meticulously regulated by the authority of the entrepreneur, modern society has no other rule or authority to distribute the work, except for free competition. […] One can also determine, as a general principle, that the less the authority presides over the division of labour inside the society, the more the division of labour develops inside of the factory, and it is placed under the authority of just one person. Thus the authorities in the factory and in society, in relation to the division of labour, are inversely related to each other. [5]

In the last years of the Soviet Union, the tight control exercised by the political powers over civil society coincided with a substantial amount of anarchy in workplaces. It was the reversal of the dialectic of capitalist society, but the overthrow of the capitalist society’s dialectic was not socialism and, therefore, it produced a weak economic order unable to resist the ideological and political offensives of the capitalist-imperialist world.

The Peculiarity of the Chinese Experience

China’s history is different. Although the Communist Party of China seized power at the national level in 1949, 20 years earlier it had already started to exercise its power in one region or another, regions whose size and population were comparable to those of a small or medium-sized European country. For much of these 85 years in power, China, partly or totally ruled by the communists, was characterised by the coexistence of different forms of economy and property. This was how Edgar Snow described the situation in the late 1930s in the “liberated” areas:

To guarantee success at these tasks it was necessary for the Reds, even from the earliest days, to begin some kind of economic construction. […] Soviet economy in the Northwest was a curious mixture of private capitalism, state capitalism, and primitive socialism. Private enterprise and industry were permitted and encouraged, and private transactions dealing in the land and its products were allowed with restrictions. At the same time the state owned and exploited enterprises such as oil wells, salt wells, and coal mines, and it traded in cattle, hides, salt, wool, cotton, paper, and other raw materials. But it did not establish a monopoly in these articles and in all of them private enterprises could, and to some extent did, compete. A third kind of economy was created by the establishment of cooperatives, in which the government and the masses participated as partners, competing not only with private capitalism but also with state capitalism! [6]

This picture is confirmed by a modern historian: in Yan’an, the city where Mao Zedong directed the struggle against Japanese imperialism and promoted the construction of a new China, the Communist Party of China did not pretend “to control the whole of the base area’s economy.” It rather supervised a “significant private economy,” which also included “large private landholdings.” [7]

In an essay in January 1940 (“On the New Democracy”), Mao Zedong clarified the meaning of the revolution taking place at that time:

Although such a revolution in a colonial and semi-colonial country is still fundamentally bourgeois-democratic in its social character during its first stage or first step, and although its objective mission is to clear the path for the development of capitalism, it is no longer a revolution of the old type led by the bourgeoisie with the aim of establishing a capitalist society and a state under bourgeois dictatorship. It belongs to the new type of revolution led by the proletariat with the aim, in the first stage, of establishing a new-democratic society and a state under the joint dictatorship of all the revolutionary classes. Thus this revolution actually serves the purpose of clearing a still wider path for the development of socialism. [8]

This was a model characterised, at the economic level, by the coexistence of different forms of ownership; at the level of political power, by a dictatorship exercised by the “revolutionary classes” as well as the leadership of the Communist Party of China. It is a pattern confirmed 17 years later, although in the meantime the People’s Republic of China was founded, in a speech on January 18, 1957 (“Talks at a Conference of Secretaries of Provincial, Municipal and Autonomous Regions Party Committees”):

As for the charge that our urban policy has deviated to the Right, this seems to be the case, as we have undertaken to provide for the capitalists and pay them a fixed rate of interest for a period of seven years. What is to be done after the seven years? That is to be decided according to the circumstances prevailing then. It is better to leave the matter open, that is, to go on giving them a certain amount in fixed interest. At this small cost we are buying over this class. […] By buying over this class, we have deprived them of their political capital and kept their mouths shut. […] Thus political capital will not be in their hands but in ours. We must deprive them of every bit of their political capital and continue to do so until not one jot is left to them. Therefore, neither can our urban policy be said to have deviated to the Right. [9]

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

After taking off in the second half of the 1920s, this model revealed a remarkable continuity and offered great economic vitality before 1949 to the “liberated” areas governed by the communists and then the People’s Republic of China as a whole. The dramatic moment of breakthrough came with the Great Leap Forward of 1958–59 and with the Cultural Revolution unleashed in 1966. The coexistence of different forms of ownership and the use of material incentives were radically thrown on the table. There was an illusion of accelerating economic development through calls for mass mobilisation and mass enthusiasm, but this approach and these attempts failed miserably. Moreover, the struggle of everyone against everyone heightened the anarchy in factories and production sites.

The anarchy was so widespread and deep-rooted that it did not disappear immediately with the reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping. For some time, customs continued in the public sector as described by a witness and Western scholar, “even the last attendant […], if he wants to, can decide to do nothing, stay home for a year or two and still receive his salary at the end of the month.” The “culture of laziness” also infected the expanding private sector of the economy. “The former employees of the State […] arrive late, then they read the newspaper, go to the canteen a half-hour early, leave the office an hour early,” and they were often absent for family reasons, for example, “because my wife is sick.” And the executives and technicians who tried to introduce discipline and efficiency into the workplace were forced to face not only resistance and the moral outrage of the employees (who considered it infamy to impose a fine on an absent worker caring for his wife), but sometimes even threats and violence from below. [10]

Thus, there was a paradox. After distinguishing itself for decades for its peculiar history and its commitment to stimulating production through competition not only between individuals but also between different forms of ownership, the China that arose from the Cultural Revolution resembled the Soviet Union to an extraordinary degree in its last years of existence: the socialist principle of compensation based on the amount and quality of work delivered was substantially liquidated, and disaffection, disengagement, absenteeism and anarchy reigned in the workplace. Before being ousted from power, the “Gang of Four” attempted to justify the economic stagnation, debating the populist reason for a socialism that is poor but beautiful, the populist “socialism” that in the early years of Soviet Russia was dear to Pierre Pascal, the fervent Catholic whom we already know.

Then populism became the target of Deng Xiaoping’s criticism. He called on the Marxists to realise “that poverty is not socialism, that socialism means eliminating poverty.” He wanted one thing to be absolutely clear: “Unless you are developing the productive forces and raising people’s living standards, you cannot say you are building socialism.” No, “there can be no communism with pauperism, or socialism with pauperism. So to get rich is no sin.” [11] Deng Xiaoping had the historic merit of understanding that socialism had nothing to do with the more or less egalitarian distribution of poverty and privation. In the eyes of Marx and Engels, socialism was superior to capitalism not only because it ensured a more equitable distribution of resources but also, and especially, because it ensured a faster and more equal development of social wealth, and to achieve this goal, socialism stimulated competition by affirming and putting into practice the principle of remuneration according to the quantity and quality of work delivered.

Deng Xiaoping’s reforms reintroduced in China the model that we already know, although giving it new coherence and radicalism. The fact remains that the coexistence of different forms of ownership was counterbalanced by strict state control directed by the Communist Party of China. If we analyse the history of China, not beginning with the founding of the People’s Republic, but as early as the first “liberated” areas being set up and governed by communists, we will find out that it was not China of the reforms of Deng Xiaoping, but China in the years of the Great Leap Forward and of the Cultural Revolution that was the exception or the anomaly.

Marxism or Populism? A Confrontation of Long Duration

Well beyond the borders of Russia and China, during the twentieth century and even now, populism influenced and still negatively influences the reading of the great revolutions that radically changed the face of the world. In this sense, we can say that, after having played a part as an essential feature of the twentieth century, the conflict between populism and Marxism is far from over.

Pascal condemned the abandonment of war communism, or the society in which there are “only the poor and the very poor,” and that is precisely why it was free of the tensions and rifts caused by inequality and social polarisation. The attitude taken by fervent Christians at that time in Moscow was not in any way confined to Soviet Russia. Traces of populism can be felt in the young Ernst Bloch. In 1918, when he published the first edition of Spirit of Utopia, he called on the Soviets to effect a “transformation of power into love” and to put an end not only to “every private economy,” but also to any “money economy” and with it the “mercantile values that consecrate whatever is most evil in man.” [12] Here the populist trend was intertwined with Messianism: no attention was paid to the task of rebuilding the economy and developing the productive forces in a country destroyed by war and having a history marked by recurrent and devastating famines. The horror at the carnage of World War I stimulated the dream of a community that is satisfied with the scarce material resources available and that only in this circumstance, freed from worrying about wealth and power, can people live shielded from the “money economy” and instead live in “love.”

When he published the second edition of Spirit of Utopia in 1923, Bloch believed that it was appropriate to delete the populist and Messianic passages, as previously mentioned. However, the state of mind and the vision that inspired them did not vanish either in the Soviet Union or outside of it. The transition to NEP found perhaps its most passionate or sentimental critics among the militants as well as among Western communist leaders. As for them, in the “Political Report” he presented to the XI Congress of the Communist Party held on March 27, 1922, Lenin sarcastically wrote:

Seeing that we were withdrawing, some of them scattered, childishly and shamefully, even with tears, as happened at the last large session of the Executive Committee of the International Communist Party. Motivated by the best communist sentiments and the most ardent communist aspirations, some friends burst into tears. [13]

Antonio Gramsci had a very different attitude as early as the October Revolution, which he expressed in this way:

Collectivism of poverty and suffering will be the principle. But those very conditions of poverty and suffering would be inherited from a bourgeois regime. Capitalism could not immediately do more than collectivism did in Russia. Today, it would do even less, because it would have immediately run afoul of an unhappy, frantic proletariat, now unable to bear for others to endure the pain and bitterness that the economic hardship would have brought. […] The suffering that will come after peace will be tolerated only because the workers feel that it is their will and their determination to work to suppress it as quickly as possible. [14]

In this context, the war communism about to prevail in Soviet Russia was at the same time legitimised tactically and delegitimised strategically, legitimised immediately and delegitimised with an eye to the future. The “collectivism of poverty and suffering” is justified by the specific conditions prevailing in Russia at the time: capitalism would not be able to do anything better. It was understood, however, that the privation had to be overcome as quickly as possible.

Precisely for this reason, Gramsci had no difficulty in recognising himself in the NEP, the meaning of which he made sharply clear in his October 1926 stance: the reality of the Soviet Union put us in the presence of a phenomenon “never before seen in history.” A politically “dominant” class “as a whole” finds itself “in living conditions inferior to certain elements and strata of the [politically] dominated and dependent class.” The masses of people who continued to suffer a life of hardship were confused by the spectacle of “the NEPman dressed in fur who has at his disposal all the goods of the earth.” And yet this should not constitute grounds for a scandal or feelings of repugnance, because the proletariat, as it cannot gain power, also cannot even keep power if it is not capable of sacrificing individual and immediate interests to the “general and permanent interests of the class.” [15] Those who read the NEP as synonymous with a return to capitalism committed two serious errors: ignoring the issue of the fight against mass poverty and thus the development of the productive forces; they also wrongly identified the economically privileged class and the politically dominant class.

A reading of the NEP not unlike that seen in Gramsci came from another great intellectual of the twentieth century. He was Walter Benjamin, who, after returning from a trip to Moscow in 1927, summed up his impressions:

In a capitalist society, power and money have become of equal dimension. Any given amount of money can be converted into a well-defined portion of power and the exchange value of all power is a calculable entity. […] The Soviet state has interrupted this osmosis of money and power. The Party, of course, reserves power for itself; it does, however, leave the money to the NEPman. [16]

The latter, however, underwent a “terrible social isolation.” For Benjamin, too, there was no correspondence between economic wealth and political power. The NEP had nothing to do with the restoration of bourgeois and capitalist power. Soviet Russia could not help but engage in the reconstruction of the economy and the development of the productive forces. The task was made more difficult by the persistence of customs that were not suited to a modern industrial society. In Moscow, Benjamin was a direct witness to a very instructive display:

Not even in the Russian capital is there, in spite of all the “rationalisation,” a sense of the value of time. The “trud,” the Trade Union Institute of Work, by means of wall posters, waged […] a campaign for punctuality […] “time is money”; to give credence to such a strange rallying cry, they had to draw on Lenin’s authority in the posters. So, this mentality is foreign to Russians. Their playful instinct prevails over everything […] If, for example, a movie scene is being shot in the street, they forget where they are going and why, they queue up behind the crew for hours and arrive at work befuddled. [17]

Pascal also witnessed the developments in Soviet Russia, forming an opinion of strong condemnation: now in Moscow and in the rest of the country, everything revolved around the question of whether “industrialisation must be a little faster or a little slower,” around the problem of “how to get the necessary money.” The consequences of this new approach, which put aside “every revolutionary purpose,” were devastating: yes, “on the material level we approach Americanisation, a great development of national wealth,” but at what cost? “The docile mass became a slave to it, to its work, to its exploitation. It produces, there is an economic recovery, but the revolution is well buried.” [18]

The great Austrian writer Joseph Roth, not involved in the communist movement, reached the same conclusions. When visiting the land of the Soviets between September 1926 and January 1927, he expressed his disappointment at the “Americanisation” in progress. “They despise America, meaning big soulless capitalism; the country where gold is God. But they admire America, meaning progress, the electric iron, the hygiene and the waterworks.” In conclusion, “This is a modern Russia, technically advanced, with American ambitions. This is no longer Russia.” [19] The “spiritual void” had opened in a country that initially aroused many hopes. [20] The popular inspiration for these positions was obvious: as expressions of betrayal of the original revolutionary inspiration and of a drift toward a philistine and vulgar worldview, they pointed to the desire to improve living conditions and the pursuit of comfort (or of a minimum of comfort).

As Pascal did, Roth also expressed his distaste for the “Americanisation” under way. These were the years in which the Bolsheviks engaged in the reconstruction and development of the economy to try to learn from the most advanced capitalist countries and the United States in particular. In March and April 1918 (“The Immediate Tasks of Soviet Power”) Lenin noted that “compared to workers in the most advanced nations, the Russian is a bad worker”; therefore, he must “learn to work,” assimilating critically the “rich scientific achievements” of the “Taylor system” developed and implemented in the North American Republic. [21] On the same wavelength, Bukharin proclaimed in 1923, “We need to add Americanism to Marxism.” [22] The following year, Stalin made a significant appeal to the Bolshevik cadres: if they really wanted to be at the height of “principles of Leninism,” they should try to weave “Russian revolutionary impulses” with “the practical American approach.” [23] “Americanism” and “the practical American approach” were here synonyms for the development of productive forces and the escape from poverty or scarcity: socialism is not the equal sharing of poverty or deprivation, but the definitive and widespread overcoming of these conditions.

From outside of Russia, Gramsci countered populism with particular rigour and consistency. As we know, from the beginning he stressed the need for a rapid end to this “collectivism of poverty and suffering.” It was a political position with a wider theoretical vision as its foundation. L’Ordine Nuovo (The New Order) — the weekly he founded in the wake of the October Revolution in Russia — plus the movement to occupy factories in Italy, asked the revolutionary workers to fight for wages and thus for a more equitable distribution of social wealth, but also and above all to be “producers” taking “control of production” and the “development of work plans.” In doing so, in order also to promote the development of the productive forces, the revolutionary workers must know how to make use of the “most advanced industrial technology” that “(in a sense) is independent from the method of appropriating the assets produced,” that is, it got its autonomy from capitalism or socialism. [24] Not coincidentally, between October and November 1919, L’Ordine Nuovo devoted several articles to Taylorism, analysed beginning with the latest analysis of the distinction between “rich scientific achievements” (mentioned by Lenin) and their capitalist use. [25] In this sense, the Prison Notebooks later observed that already L’Ordine Nuovo had claimed its “Americanism.” [26] It was the Americanism that Lenin, Bukharin and Stalin directly or indirectly referenced.

And it should be clear that this is an Americanism that does not in any way rule out a judgment and clear condemnation of US capitalism and imperialism. In Gramsci’s eyes, this was a country that, despite its professions of democratic faith, imposed slavery on blacks for a long time and that, even after the Civil War, was characterised by a terrorist regime of white supremacy, as shown by “lynching of blacks by crowds incited by atrocious merchants dispossessed of human flesh.” [27] That terrorism was also manifested in terms of foreign policy: The North American Republic threatened to deprive the Russians of the grain necessary for their survival and, therefore, to starve to death the people who felt the pull of the October Revolution and were tempted to follow its example.

The “Americanism” understood as attention reserved for the problem of development of the productive forces pushed Gramsci, in the early 1930s, to greet enthusiastically the launching of the first Soviet five-year plan: the economic and industrial development of the country that emerged from the October Revolution was proof that, far from stimulating “fatalism and passivity,” in fact, “the concept of historical materialism […] gives rise to a flowering of initiatives and enterprises that astonishes many observers.” [28] Materialism and Marxism showed the ability to influence reality concretely, not only inspiring revolutions like the one that occurred in Russia but also promoting the growth of social wealth and freeing the masses from centuries of poverty and deprivation.

More disappointed than ever, even outraged by the developments in Soviet Russia, however, was Simone Weil, who in 1932 proceeded to a final showdown with the country which she had initially looked to with sympathy and hope: Soviet Russia had ended up taking America, American efficiency, productivity and “Taylorism” as its models. There could no longer be any doubts.

The fact that Stalin, on this issue, which is at the centre of the conflict between capital and labour, has abandoned the views of Marx and has been seduced by the capitalist system in its most perfect form, shows that the USSR is still quite far from having a working-class culture. [29]

In fact, the position taken here had nothing to do with Marx and Engels: according to the Communist Manifesto, capitalism is destined to be overcome because, after developing the productive forces with unprecedented scope and speed, it became an obstacle to their further development, as confirmed by the recurrent crises of overproduction. This deeply Christian French philosopher, also inclined to populism, recognised the country that emerged from the October Revolution only up to the stage of more or less equal distribution of poverty or deprivation; later, in addition to Soviet Russia, Weil also broke with Marx and Engels.

Global Inequality and Inequality in China

Populism continues to make its presence felt more than ever in the dismissive judgment that the Western left passes on today’s China. It is true that the reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping spurred an economic boom unprecedented in history, with hundreds and thousands of millions of people liberated from poverty, but this is basically irrelevant for the populists.

Did the elimination of desperate and mass poverty happen at the same time as the worsening inequality? The answer to that question is less obvious than it may appear at first glance. Throughout history, the communist parties have won power only in countries that are relatively undeveloped economically and technologically; for this reason, they had to fight against not one but two types of inequality: 1) inequality existing on the global scale between the most and least developed countries; and 2) the inequality existing within each individual country. Only if we take into account both sides of the struggle can we adequately take stock of policy reform. With regard to the first type of inequality, there are no doubts: internationally, global inequality is levelling out sharply. Yes, China is gradually catching up to the most advanced Western capitalist countries. It is a turning point!

In the last years of the twentieth century, a prominent American political scientist noted that if the process of industrialisation and modernisation that started with Deng Xiaoping is to be successful, “China’s emergence as a major power will dwarf any comparable phenomena during the last half of the second millennium.” [30] About 15 years later, again with reference to the prodigious development of this great Asian country, a no less illustrious British historian noted, “What we are living through now is the end of 500 years of Western predominance.” [31] The two authors cited here share the same, emphatic, view of timing. About five centuries ago, the discovery/conquest of America took place. In other words, the extraordinarily rapid rise of China is ending or promises to end the “Colombian epoch,” a period characterised by extreme inequality in international relations: the distinct lead held by the West in economics, technology and military might has allowed it to subdue and plunder the rest of the world for centuries.

The fight against global inequality is part of the struggle against colonialism and neo-colonialism. Mao understood this well and, in a speech given on September 16, 1949 (“The Bankruptcy of the Idealist Conception of History”) warned that Washington wants China reduced to relying “on US flour, in other words, to become a US colony.” [32] In fact, the newly founded People’s Republic of China became the target of a deadly embargo imposed by the United States. Its objectives are clear from studies done by the Truman administration and the confessions and statements of its leaders. It started from the premise that the type of measure that could defeat and oust the communist government “is economic rather than military or political.” And so, they needed to ensure that China suffered or continued to suffer the scourge of a “general standard of living around and below the subsistence level”; Washington felt committed to causing “economic backwardness” and “cultural lag” and leading a country of “desperate needs” to “a catastrophic economic situation,” “toward disaster” and “collapse.” [33] At the White House, one president succeeds another, but the embargo remains, and it is so ruthless as to include medicines, tractors and fertilisers. [34] In short: in the early 1960s, a collaborator of the Kennedy administration, Walt W. Rostow, pointed out that, because of this policy, the economic development of China was delayed for at least “tens of years.” [35]

There is no doubt: Deng Xiaoping’s reforms greatly stimulated the fight against global inequality and thus placed the economic (and political) independence of China on a solid footing. High technology is no longer a monopoly of the West, either. Now we see the prospect of overcoming the international division of labour, which for centuries has subjected people outside the West to a servile or semi-servile condition or relegated them in the bottom of the labour market. It is thus outlining a worldwide revolution that the Western left does not seem to be noticing. Rationally, they consider a strike obtaining better wages or better working conditions in a factory as an integral part of the process of emancipation, or they discuss it in the context of the patriarchal division of labour. It is very strange, then, that the struggle to end the oppressive international division of labour that was established through armed force during the “Colombian epoch” is considered something alien to the process of emancipation.

In any case, those who condemn China today as a whole due to its inequalities would do well to consider that Deng Xiaoping also promoted his reform policies as a part of the fight against planetary inequality. In a conversation on October 10, 1978, he noted that the technology “gap” was expanding compared to more advanced countries; these were developing “with tremendous speed,” while China could not keep up in any way. [36] And, 10 years later, “High technology is advancing at a tremendous pace”; so that there was a risk that “the gap between China and other countries will grow wider.” [37]

Quantitative and Qualitative Inequality

Drawing attention to the importance of global inequality does not mean losing sight of the second type of inequality. So, what is happening with China’s existing inequality? Have the reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping escalated it to an intolerable point?

Before answering these questions, we should make a preliminary observation: both the Soviet NEP and the new Chinese course were preceded by poverty and shortages acute and widespread enough to cause large-scale starvation; this situation had to be ended and a repetition had to be prevented, and this marked the turning point within Soviet Russia and China. But how is inequality fought in such a desperate economic situation? In the quantitative sense, the distribution of the scarce available resources can be inspired by emphasising egalitarianism, so as to try to feed individuals, families and villages uniformly; however, the overall inadequacy of the available resources does not change, nor does the differing degree of need (the weakest individuals succumb more easily than the others); in such conditions, starvation can be contained but not eliminated. Well, the piece of bread that allows the most fortunate to survive, as modest and reduced in terms of quantity as it may be, nevertheless sanctions an absolute inequality in terms of quality, the absolute inequality that exists between life and death. In other words, when scarcity reaches an extreme level, the struggle against inequality can only be tackled effectively by focusing on the development of the productive forces. That is, even with regard to the second type of inequality, the inequality within a single country, Deng Xiaoping’s reforms eliminated once and for all the absolute qualitative inequality inherent in starvation and the risk of starvation.

Of course, once this scourge has been ended once and for all, it is time to address the problem of the struggle against quantitative inequality, as well as to achieve what Deng Xiaoping called “common prosperity.” [38] There is no doubt: the achievement of this goal is still far away. According to the Gini coefficient, which measures income distribution within a single country, social polarisation has reached alarming levels in China. We should of course pay close attention to the Gini coefficient, but without overemphasising its significance. Despite its utility, it has fundamental limitations: not only does it not distinguish between the two types of inequality (the global and the local), but it also tells us nothing about the underlying trends in local inequality in a given country.

The changes that have occurred in recent decades in China might be illustrated with a metaphor. There are two trains running from a station called “underdevelopment” and heading towards a station called “development.” One of the two trains is very fast, while the other train is slower: consequently, the distance between the two increases progressively. This discrepancy can be explained easily if you keep in mind the size of continental China and its tormented history: the coastal regions, which already had infrastructure (albeit elementary), enjoying easier access and the possibility of trade with developed areas, are in a better situation than the traditionally less developed regions that are landlocked and have as neighbours countries and areas marked by economic stagnation. It is clear that the distance between the two trains travelling at different speeds widens, but we should not lose sight of three fundamental points: in the first place, the direction (the development) is the same; second, today some interior regions are seeing their income grow faster than that of the coastal regions; third, because of the impressive urbanisation process (which pushes the population to the most developed regions and areas), the faster train tends to carry more passengers. Not surprisingly, if we take China as a whole, we see a steady and sizable growth of the middle class, as well as a wider diffusion of social protection and features of the welfare state.

However, the implicit warning in the values reported by the Gini coefficient still applies: if not contained in a proper and timely manner, quantitative inequality can also result in social and political destabilisation.

Wealth and Political Power: An Adversarial Relationship

Social and political destabilisation can also come from another front. How long will the new rich continue to accept a situation in which they can quietly enjoy their economic wealth (accumulated legitimately) but cannot turn it into political power?

Mao was aware of this problem. In 1958, he responded to criticism from the Soviet Union regarding the persistence of capitalist areas in the Chinese economy by saying, “There are still capitalists in China, but the state is under the leadership of the Communist Party.” [39] Almost 30 years later, to be exact, in August 1985, Deng Xiaoping made a remark we should ponder: “Perhaps Lenin had a good idea when he adopted the New Economic Policy.” [40] Here is an indirect comparison between the Soviet NEP and the reform policies adopted by Deng Xiaoping in China. It is obvious what the two have in common: total political expropriation of the bourgeoisie does not equal total economic expropriation. Of course there are also differences. The NEP involved a very small part of the private economy and was primarily intended as a temporary “retreat.” In other words, what was driving the Soviet NEP was the need to find some way out of an economically hopeless situation. There was no comprehensive reflection on which economic model to pursue: not surprisingly, according to Benjamin’s testimony, which we have already seen, the rich NEP man, who was also expected to contribute to developing the productive forces, was facing a “terrible social isolation.” The policy adopted by Deng Xiaoping, on the other hand, leaves behind a clear historic toll: experience has shown that the totally collectivist economy erases all material incentives and motives for competition, paving the way (as previously seen) for mass disaffection and absenteeism; moreover, the populism that saw wealth and gain as such a sin hindered the development of entrepreneurship and technological innovation.

While initiating his policies of reform and openness, Deng was aware of their inherent risks. In October 1978, he cautioned, “We shall not allow a new bourgeoisie to take shape.” This goal is not contradicted by tolerance granted to individual capitalists. Of course, they must be given much consideration. However, one point is constant: “the struggle against these individuals is different from the struggle of one class against another, which occurred in the past (these individuals cannot form a cohesive and overt class).” [41] Although there are residues of the old class struggle, on the whole, with the strengthening of the revolution and the communist party’s power, a new situation was created. “Is it possible that a new bourgeoisie will emerge? A handful of bourgeois elements may appear, but they will not form a class,” especially as there is a “state apparatus” that is “powerful” and able to control them. [40] Besides the power of the state, ideology plays an important role: many of the new rich, although not communists, feel patriotic and share the horror at the “century of humiliation” that began with the Opium Wars and ended with the victory of the revolution, so these new rich also share the dream of “rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”

And yet, precisely as a result of the success of policy reforms and the extraordinary economic growth of China, the number of millionaires and billionaires is growing dramatically; will the wealth accumulated by the new capitalists have an influence on politics? It is in light of this concern that you may fully comprehend the ongoing campaign against corruption. The clean-up process does not aim only to consolidate social consensus on the Communist Party of China and the government; it means to implement Deng Xiaoping’s recommendation and thus prevent the “bourgeois elements” from forming a class that is ready to take power.

The Sights of the West: “Democratisation” or “Plutocratisation” of China?

The capitalists who were established and continue to get established can be a real danger only if they ally themselves with imperialist circles or pro-imperialists committed to achieving a “colour revolution” even in China. Strengthened by their excessive media power, for a very long time the United States has been trying to consolidate their world hegemony in order to impose a “democracy” on China in the time and manner Washington dictates.

In this behaviour, the United States shows ignorance of the lessons offered by their own national history and liberalism, that is, from the school of thought that they claim to represent. In 1787, just before the implementation of the Federal Constitution, Alexander Hamilton explained that limits on power and the establishment of the rule of law had been successful in two “insular” countries, Great Britain and the United States, thanks to the protection given by the ocean and their geopolitical position shielding them from threats from rival powers. If the plans for a federal union had failed and a system of states similar to the one in Europe had formed on its ruins, soon America would have seen a standing army, a strong central power and absolutism regardless. “Thus we should in a little time see established in every part of this country, the same engines of despotism, which have been the scourge of the old world.” [42] Hamilton ascribed so much weight to geopolitical security in creating a system based on the rule of law that he wrote how if, instead of being an island surrounded and protected by the sea, Britain had been placed on the continent, it “would in all probability, be at this day a victim to the absolute power of a single man,” just like the other European continental powers. [43] On the other hand, according to Hamilton, whenever “the preservation of the public peace” is threatened either by “external attacks” or by “internal convulsions,” even a country like the United States, which also enjoys an extremely fortunate geopolitical position, is authorised to resort to a strong power “without limitations” and without “constitutional shackles.” [44]

In fact, even protected by the Atlantic and the Pacific, every time it has felt, whether rightly or wrongly, in danger, the North American Republic has more or less drastically strengthened executive power and more or less heavily restricted freedom of association and expression. This was the case in the years immediately following the French Revolution (when its followers in America were affected by the harsh measures provided by the Alien and Sedition Acts) and during the Civil War, World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War and the situation created by the attack on the Twin Towers. To give an example: What happened to traditional liberal freedoms after the passage, on May 16, 1918, of the Espionage Act? Based on this act, a person could be sentenced to up to 20 years in prison for having expressed:

[…] any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States, or the flag […] or the uniform of the Army or Navy of the United States. [45]

If the leaders in Washington were really serious about the banner of democracy that never tires of waving, they would seek in some way to reinforce geopolitical peace and a sense of security in the countries they claim to want to see become democratic. At the end of the Cold War (as was calmly acknowledged by a scholar who was an adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney), the lone superpower used its naval and airforces to violate “China’s airspace and territorial waters with little fear of harassment and interdiction” unscrupulously and with impunity. The great Asian country was powerless at that time. Today, the situation has changed significantly. The United States is, however, still able to control the channels of maritime communications. Therefore, “China is already vulnerable to the effects of a naval blockade, and it will become even more so as its economy grows”; in fact, “its fate could depend on American forbearance.” [46] And it is this situation that the United States strives to perpetuate. All this is not conducive to the development of the rule of law.

The campaign of the West for the “democratisation” of China is taking place just as many political analysts are forced to see the decline of democracy in the West. A few years before the economic crisis, one could read in the International Herald Tribune that the United States had become a “plutocracy”; now the forces of private and corporate wealth have already taken hold of political institutions, while the rest of the population is cut off. [47] Nowadays, on the left as well as among those completely opposed to the Marxist tradition, it is common to read that in the West, and primarily in the United States, plutocracy has taken the place of democracy. We can conclude that the on-going campaign for the “democratisation” of China is actually a campaign for its plutocratisation, to turn in the opposite direction the “political expropriation” of the bourgeoisie that has taken place since 1949 in the big Asian country.

A second campaign, as usual, conducted by Washington and Brussels, requires substantial liquidation of the state-owned sector and the public economy which play such an important role in the fight against two great inequalities: on the international scene, this sector is making a major contribution to China’s technological development, which is increasingly closing the gap with the advanced countries; internally, the state-owned sector and the public economy reduce inequalities between different regions, accelerating the development of China’s less developed regions, which are now growing at a much faster pace than the coastal regions. If this second campaign launched by the West had been successful, the “economic” expropriation of the bourgeoisie, already reduced, would have been cancelled altogether, so that the bourgeoisie could enormously increase its influence in society and again pave the way for conquest of political power.

It is very clear which weapons will be used to fight in the country that has emerged from the greatest anti-colonial revolution in history to engage in a long-term process of building a post-capitalist and socialist society. Which side will the Western left take?

https://socialistchina.org/2022/04/12/d ... socialism/

References at link.
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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Thu Apr 21, 2022 2:22 pm

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Relentless Criticism of All Things: The Key to Not Being Led Astray from Revolution
April 20, 2022
By Rainer Shea – Apr 16, 2022

“Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement” was the conclusion that Lenin came to in the section of What Is To Be Done? which pertained to the concept of “freedom of criticism.” As Lenin assessed, this concept had been twisted by the opportunists to refer not to the kind of criticism which improves revolutionary work, but which seeks to discredit revolutionary work. They had made it mean the freedom to attack the ideas of class struggle, dictatorship of the proletariat, and overthrowing the capitalist state. The counterrevolutionaries had taken criticism, a crucial part of Marxism, and made it diametrically opposed to Marxism.

This shows how nothing is above criticism—even the concept of “criticism” itself. Any facet of revolution can be co-opted, just as anything revolutionary can be commodified by capitalism. When you see liberals appropriating the language of class struggle to make empty promises for votes, it’s like when companies sell Che Guevara shirts; the things that these words and figures stand for get drained of their meaning, twisted into tools for perpetuating the system. The challenge is knowing when we’re aiding in this dynamic of distorted revolutionary theory, because when we do, it feels to us like we’re promoting sound theory.

For instance, when headlines recently reported that Los Angeles gangs are sending their members to follow and rob wealthy residents, online leftists reacted with praise. But what about the class character of the organized crime entities receiving the praise? What about the material impacts of the act? Gangs are fundamentally petty bourgeois in nature, and they’re used by the CIA to distribute drugs to marginalized communities while sowing division among the lumpen. This is reflected underneath the surface of this Robin Hood-esque media narrative about those LA gangs; what they’re doing is not actually revolutionary, because it’s not furthering any workers movement. If anything, it’s creating an excuse for intensified policing of the city, which is already one of the country’s most horrifically unequal and misery-ridden places. If you want to glorify thus, you should consider exactly what you’re portraying as good, and how this might impact the decisions that you make as an organizer; would the conditions truly call for your group to start imitating the gangs by committing crimes, or would you only be entertaining a fascination with the violence of a lumpen environment that you’re not even necessarily connected to?

Similar flaws in thinking can be found when anarchists momentarily seize city blocks, or when Maoists engage in guerrilla warfare, and leftists who haven’t yet been adequately acquainted with theory assume that these things deserve support. When these little victories occur, we must always ask: why are they so small in scale, and why are they so often temporary and tenuous? The anarchist Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone that was created two years ago wasn’t strategically built to last, but as a symbolic gesture that didn’t improve oppressed people’s conditions; this was shown by the project’s welcoming of liberals who promptly dismantled it, and by the picking of a location that was strategically absurd from a guerrilla warfare perspective. Namely near a militarized police station, during a time when the state’s forces hadn’t been made vulnerable in a way which would have let a breakaway zone there be sustainable.

The Maoist guerrillas in India and the Philippines have a better grasp of military theory than imperial center anarchists, but they too approach the struggle from a place of reaction rather than of practicality. It was Filipino communists who convinced me to stop supporting the Maoist guerrillas of the Philippines; their argument was that the Maoists are serving only to hold back the revolution by engaging in guerrilla struggle that’s based not around correct judgement of the conditions, but in ultra-leftism.

As Stalin said, the ultra-lefts are as much opposed to revolution as the rightists are. And though the context in these places today is different, we see this reflected in how the Maoist organizations of the last half-century have conducted themselves. As Prakash Karat of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has assessed, the Naxalite Maoists have stuck with a dogmatic embrace of adventurist tactics:

Naxalite tactics had been characterized by a dogmatic and sole reliance on armed struggle in its first phases. This was based on the sectarian ‘people’s war’ thesis put forward by Lin Biao at the ninth congress of the CPC (Communist Party of China). In India this brand of adventurism was interpreted by Charu Mazumdar to be the tactic of individual terrorism. After the debacle of this tactic in 1970-71 many groups split away condemning the ‘annihilation theory’. However the pro-Charu groups have persisted in defending this ‘revolutionary line’ and continue to be practitioners of terrorism. The pro-Lin Biao groups in West Bengal, the Vinod Mishra group in Bhojpur, the People’s War group in Andhra Pradesh, and the Venu group in Kerala have all in some form or another continued to rely on the line of annihilation. The difference exists only in the emphasis. The CRC (Venu group) began talking of a ‘revolutionary mass line’ in 1979, by which they mean that annihilation of any enemy must be part of the mass struggle and resorted to only if the masses of an area approve of it. Except for the extreme fringe of the pro-Lin Biao groups the other groups who uphold [this] line currently talk of annihilation of the class enemy as an extension of the mass line. Though many groups have denounced the past practices as wrong, the condemnation has stemmed more from the failure of the tactic rather than any honest self-introspection as to its anti-Marxist character. Even those who renounce it as anti-Marxist, still cling to the theory of permanent armed struggle.

This was written in 1985. The consequence of the Naxalite faction’s lack of willingness to self-criticize on a fundamental level, and reject the adventurist ideas that led to these errors, has entrenched the division within India’s communist movement. The split that happened in Russia’s communist movement before the revolution has repeated itself, with the ultra-left faction continuing armed struggle despite there still being demonstrable evidence that electoralism is worth pursuing—and that refraining from going on the offensive is likely the way to gain the broadest support from the masses. In both the Philippines and India, ultra-leftism has produced factions which represent the adventurists that Lenin warned about:

When Marxists say that certain groups are adventurist, they have in mind the very definite and specific social and historical features of a phenomenon, one that every class-conscious worker should be familiar with. The history of Russian Social-Democracy teems with tiny groups, which sprang up for an hour, for several months, with no roots whatever among the masses (and politics without the masses are adventurist politics), and with no serious and stable principles. In a petty-bourgeois country, which is passing through a historical period of bourgeois reconstruction, it is inevitable that a motley assortment of intellectuals should join the workers, and that these intellectuals should attempt to form all kinds of groups, adventurist in character in the sense referred to above. Workers who do not wish to be fooled should subject every group to the closest scrutiny and ascertain how serious its principles are, and what roots it has in the masses. Put no faith in words; subject everything to the closest scrutiny—such is the motto of the Marxist workers.

Whether the problem is right opportunism (as we see in the social democrats) or adventurism (as we see in many anarchists, Maoists, and ultra-left fetishists for gangs), this scrutiny is the way to stop us from being led astray. Have Maoist guerrillas, gangs, and anarchists done good things? At times yes, but that doesn’t exempt them from ideological scrutiny. The same goes for Marxism-Leninism, despite it representing a superior revolutionary route to all of these factions; we must judge something by how well it advances the global proletarian movement, not by what it claims to be.

https://orinocotribune.com/relentless-c ... evolution/
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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Wed Apr 27, 2022 1:58 pm

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Revisiting Lenin’s Views on Religion on His 152nd Birth Anniversary
April 26, 2022
By Yanis Iqbal – Apr 22, 2022

Fascist groupings and their associated policies of religious fanaticism are on the ascendant throughout the world. While some are emerging from the political peripheries – slowly but steadily gaining traction on the terrain of ideological hegemony – some have already taken the reins of state power. India is no exception to this global trend. In this political context, April 22, 2022 – the 152nd birth anniversary of Vladimir Ilych Lenin (the founder of the Soviet Union) – can serve as an occasion to explore the contemporary relevance of his perspective on the issue of religion. Following the materialism method, Lenin emphasized that religion is a byproduct of the concrete logic of its surrounding system of social organisation. In “Socialism and Religion,” he said:

“Religion is one of the forms of spiritual oppression which everywhere weighs down heavily upon the masses of the people, overburdened by their perpetual work for others, by want and isolation. Impotence of the exploited classes in their struggle against the exploiters just as inevitably gives rise to the belief in a better life after death as impotence of the savage in his battle with nature gives rise to belief in gods, devils, miracles, and the like. Those who toil and live in want all their lives are taught by religion to be submissive and patient while here on earth, and to take comfort in the hope of a heavenly reward. But those who live by the labour of others are taught by religion to practice charity while on earth, thus offering them a very cheap way of justifying their entire existence as exploiters and selling them at a moderate price tickets to well-being in heaven. Religion is opium for the people. Religion is a sort of spiritual booze, in which the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or less worthy of man.”

From this passage, two points can be gleaned. First, on the structural level, religion itself can’t be said to be a source of oppression; it is only an indication of oppression. In the words of Lenin, “economic slavery” is the “true source of the religious humbugging of mankind.” In “The Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion,” he commented: “The deepest root of religion today is the social oppression of the working masses and their apparently complete helplessness in the face of blind forces of capitalism, which every day and every hour inflicts upon ordinary working people the most horrible suffering and the most savage torment”. Second, on the ideological level, religion is a source of oppression because, as Lenin says, it leads to “the coarsening and darkening of the spiritual and moral life of the masses”. In his essay on the collapse of the Second International, he elaborates that “the priest is required to console the oppressed, to depict to them the prospects of their sufferings and sacrifices being mitigated (this is particularly easy to do without guaranteeing that these prospects will be “achieved”), while preserving class rule, and thereby to reconcile them to class rule, win them away from revolutionary action, undermine their revolutionary spirit and destroy their revolutionary determination.”

Considering that the survival of religious abstractions depends on historically specific modes of production, Lenin remarked that the “combating of religion cannot be confined to abstract ideological preaching, and it must not be reduced to such preaching. It must be linked up with the concrete practice of the class movement, which aims at eliminating the social roots of religion.” Interestingly, Lenin said that atheism should not be considered a prerequisite for joining this material struggle to deprive religion of its material support and make it a purely private affair. In defence of this viewpoint, he stated: “No number of pamphlets and no amount of preaching can enlighten the proletariat, if it is not enlightened by its own struggle against the dark forces of capitalism. Unity in this really revolutionary struggle of the oppressed class for the creation of a paradise on earth is more important to us than unity of proletarian opinion on paradise in heaven.”

In other words, while atheist propaganda is used to weaken religion, the process of secularisation is not singularly reliant on this pedagogic method; instead, it is internally driven by the productive tension that a proletarian individual feels between the supernatural character of their religious belief and the wholly earthly agenda of communism when they join a workers’ movement. In this dynamic interaction, religion’s passivising and reactionary aspects are thrown away, and the anthropological dimension is fully regained. Religion is, in part, the infinitisation and projection of humanity’s most cherished values (love, righteousness, wisdom and so on) onto a mythic notion called God. That’s why Ludwig Feuerbach had commented that “God has no other aim of action than the moral and eternal salvation of man: thus man has in fact no other aim than himself.” With the contradiction induced by the Leninist strategy of the political coexistence of private religious beliefs with a communist programmatic outlook, the positive and human-centred components of religion are re-appropriated.

What importance does Lenin’s opinion on religion have for India? Aijaz Ahmad notes that British colonialism harmed India’s cultural fabric. Due to the divide-and-rule policies of the imperial administration, Indian colonial society had become “organized, socially as well as politically, around the axes of caste, religion and region”. “So overwhelming was the weight of religion in all this, and so reluctant were the Indian liberal modernists to confront that power frontally, that even the canonical, multi-denominational, professedly secular nationalists simply redefined secularism as not a separation of religion and politics but as “equal respect for all religions,” in the telling and broadly accepted phrase of Dr Radhakrishnan, a conservative Brahminical scholar who served as the second president of independent India.” Ahmad explains that this redefinition of secularism was inherently problematic:

“For the actually believing person there is always something unique about his own religion so that he cannot possibly have “equal respect” for a different religion; for a believing Muslim, Hinduism is intrinsically inferior. More to the point, equal respect for all religions in the conduct of the affairs of the state would necessarily lead, especially in the context of the corruptions of liberal democratic politics, to greater respect for the religion of the demographic majority whose votes count for more, whose privileged classes command much more money and power, and among whose middle classes new kinds of religiosity are now rampant.”

In contrast to this attempt to restrict secularism to the traditional ethic of religious toleration, Lenin’s open attack on the crudeness of religious convictions and the proposal to secularize religion through the force of class struggle can function as effective ways to counter the extreme Right. By deploying these strategic tools in the present-day conjuncture, the Indian Left can create a new civic culture based upon a subjectively thick mode of religious understanding that facilitates a culturally informed openness toward different religions. In this Leninist model of secularism, the public importance of religion would decline not through its privatisation and individualisation but through the revolutionisation of religiosity that would make it expressive of subaltern needs and thus, extract a common humanistic core from every religion.

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Fri Apr 29, 2022 2:06 pm

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Refugees on a boat crossing the Mediterranean Sea, heading from Turkish coast to the north-eastern Greek island of Lesbos, 29 January 2016. (Photo: Mstyslav Chernov/Unframe; Wikimedia Commons).

Marxist anthropology in a world of surplus population
Originally published: Focaal Blog on January 26, 2022 by Matan Kaminer (more by Focaal Blog) (Posted Apr 29, 2022)

I was recently privileged to participate in a workshop about the Marxian concept of the “surplus population,” convoked by Stephen Campbell, Thomas Cowan, and Don Kalb as part of the Frontlines of Value research group at the University of Bergen. The workshop, featuring participants of different generations, academic fields and geographic specializations, was educating and revealing in a number of ways (see below for the full programme). In what follows, I will not try to do justice to the presentations or the engaging debates, but to pick out a few themes which seem to me to be of abiding importance for anthropology and related disciplines, and to make some tentative suggestions of my own.

As many have remarked, the Marxism now resurgent in certain sections of the academy, including European social anthropology (Neveling and Steur 2018), seems much more preoccupied than preceding generations of the tradition with questions surrounding the relations between this mode of production and its “outside”–whether conceived of in temporal terms, as pre-capitalist (or, much more rarely, post-capitalist); in spatial terms, as subsisting in regions outside the control of global capital; or in more complex theoretical terms. The concept of “primitive accumulation,” used by Marx himself to describe the events leading up to the flowering of capitalism in England, has been applied and even stretched (Glassman 2006), up to a point which some consider excessive. Accumulation by unequal exchange, backed up by the threat of force, certainly exists in our late-late capitalist society; but what do we gain, ask theorists like Henry Bernstein, by calling that accumulation “primitive”? (Agrarian Questions JAC 2019)

Additional questions regarding the relations between capitalism’s putative “inside” and “outside” are raised by the concept of the surplus population, which stood at the center of the workshop. As with other of Marx’s terminological choices, there is an easily missed irony at play here: proletarian populations can only be “surplus” from the point of view of capital itself, insofar as it does not find it profitable to exploit them as laborers. Furthermore, people deprived of access to their own means of production but denied the opportunity to participate in production by selling their labor-power to others are not necessarily superfluous to capital’s needs in every sense: they may be useful as consumers, as soldiers and guards, or indeed as a “reserve army” of strikebreaking laborers. They are only “surplus” in the specific sense that the ability of capital to absorb labor-power is limited on the one hand by aggregate effective demand–which grows sluggishly, due to the lopsided distribution of the fruits of capitalist development–and on the other by the productivity of labor, which grows swiftly as a result of capitalist competition. This is Marx’s “general law of capitalist accumulation”: the number of laborers required by the demands of profit-making enterprise, as a portion of the total proletarian population, will tend to fall (Marx 1990, chap. 25).

Anthropologists, who have always been curious about the lives of people outside Europe and outside wage-labor, have good reason to be interested in the concept of the surplus population. However, as the contributors to the workshop highlighted, operationalizing this concept for the analysis of particular ethnographic cases throws up real problems. The most obvious of these is that most people who lack access to “proper jobs” (Ferguson and Li 2018) do, after all, work. Some of them retain some access to land and other means of production, and engage in “petty commodity production”; others labor in the ill-defined “informal sector,” for example as petty merchants; still others do sell their labor-power, but not under conditions considered viable or legal by national and international institutions (Campbell 2020; Cowan 2019). All these people purchase at least some of their means of subsistence on the market, and are thus tied into capitalism as consumers, if nothing else. To be truly outside of capital, as one participant at the workshop remarked, one would need to be “undiscovered,” a member of one of those mythical, self-sufficient tribes of whose non-existence anthropologists are well aware. Hence, surplus populations are at best “inside-outside,” taking on a painfully ambiguous role.

The “functionality” of surplus populations is a related issue. Is the emergence of such populations a side-effect of the rise in the productivity of labor, primarily caused by capitalists’ desire to gain short-term “super-profits” by producing more efficiently than their competitors, or is it actively encouraged by these capitalists and their agents, such as the state? My own contribution to the workshop came down on the “functional” (if not functionalist) side of the debate. Setting aside the ample empirical evidence which could be used to make the case, I argued on purely theoretical grounds that exclusion from the labor market should not be understood as diametrically opposed to exploitation within it. It is easy enough to understand why lack of choice should force those at greater threat of exclusion to accede to greater exploitation, thus exposing the same individuals to the cruelest brunt of both processes.

There are, however, some important objections to this account. By all estimates, the surplus population is far vaster than capital could ever be expected to absorb into standard employment–perhaps around three quarters of the world’s total population (see Neilson and Stubbs 2011). Thus, most “surplus” workers have no hope of ever entering the army of labor, even as “reservists” or scabs, and any question of how they might behave given such a chance is moot. But the ethnographic evidence, which shows that many such people do in fact work and consume in quite recognizably capitalistic ways, casts doubt over such a formulation. Perhaps the calculations of scholars like Neilson and Stubbs are over-hasty? If surplus populations are only surplus from the point of view of capital, perhaps this perspective is less singular and unambiguous than the assumptions of such quantitative exercises require?

I would like to suggest one way of getting at the problem, through a category that remains under-theorized despite its crucial role in Marx’s labor theory of value: the value of labor-power. One of Marx’s greatest theoretical discoveries was the distinction between the value of labor-power and the value which labor can produce: in other words, the difference between what human beings need in order to live and work, and what they are capable of producing with their life and their work. It is only with the total commodification of life (and work) under capitalism that these two quantities become commensurable, as both the needs and the capacities of the worker can now be measured with one yardstick: money. At the same time, capitalism disguises the difference between the two quantities by insisting that after the costs of living and working are deducted and transferred to the worker as her wage, the remnant is not the product of her labor but a special sum called “profit,” which the employer is legally and morally entitled to appropriate.

But the value of labor-power is underdetermined. Even ignoring changes in productivity–we shall get to these in a moment–the needs of a worker, of the working family, and of the proletariat as a whole, are eminently contestable. Indeed, everyday class struggle consists to a great degree in disputations over the value of labor-power in the broad sense, which includes the wage itself as well as the length of the working day, “social wages” like health insurance and pensions, and so on. But despite this underdetermination, the value of labor-power can only fluctuate between two limits: at the top is the point where the wage begins to eat into profits to an extent unacceptable to employers, and at the bottom is the minimum of biological reproduction, below which the workers would begin to die off.

But even given a particular level of needs, the value of labor-power will shift with changes in the productivity of the types of labor which produce the essentials of life, however these are defined. The most obvious of these necessities, and the one which preoccupies Marx above all, is food. If the amount of labor necessary to produce the standard food basket goes down, for example through the introduction of agricultural technologies such as those of the Green Revolution, then so does the value of labor-power (Moore 2010). But many other technologies also play a role: for example, the great advances in hygienic and epidemiological science of the late 19th and early 20th centuries also lowered the value of labor-power by drastically reducing infant mortality and raising life expectancy. Here then is one of those paradoxical ironies of capitalism: the more we invest in improving the quality of life, the cheaper human life becomes, in a very literal sense.

The relation between the value of labor-power and surplus populations now becomes clear. Marx insists that there is no general “law of population” in capitalist societies, and specifically rejects (against Malthus) any tendency to exponential increase in population (Foster 2000). If anything, long-term trends appear to demonstrate that human populations adjust their birthrates to prevailing deathrates, such that population tends to increase quite slowly. The boom in world population over the last century, as Aaron Benanav (2019) shows, can be interpreted as following from an easily understandable lag between the introduction of the hygienic and medical reforms which lowered deathrates and the subsequent adjustment of birthrates. Thus, experts expect world population to stabilize by the end of the current century (United Nations 2015), while the environmental preconditions of cheap labor-power may be under threat from climate change and related environmental crises (Moore 2015), potentially triggering a secular rise in the price of food. Nevertheless, the minimum value of labor-power–the amount of work required to produce the basket of goods absolutely necessary to keep the proletariat capable of working and reproducing, per capita–has decreased drastically since the publication of Capital. Of course, the global working class is not satisfied with this level of bare subsistence: even in poor countries, workers demand additional goods, like electronics and education. But this only points to the growing extent to which the value of their commodity is not reducible to physical constraints, but determined by the outcome of political processes. So long as the supply of labor-power tends to outstrip demand–that is, for the next few decades at least–the pressure of competition over jobs will tend to push the value of labor-power toward the minimum. Only proletarian resistance can counter this trend.

But the agency of proletarians cannot be reduced to the extent to which capital needs them as laborers. Even the most outcast of populations have means of putting pressure on capital, and maintenance of global hegemony requires that their demands be dealt with in one way or another. One way is, of course, violence: when people are not needed as workers, the global power structure is happy to countenance their warehousing, and if need be, their mass death (Mbembe 2003). But since the necessities of life have become so cheap, maintaining them in a sort of social death while providing them with the means of bare existence through humanitarian aid or debt is also an option (Sanyal 2014). With regard to these populations, global capital has become something like the Calvinist God, capable of arbitrarily granting or denying their every wish yet devoid of any need for their labors and supplications.

Regardless of how precisely we parse the concept of the surplus population, its continuing and even growing relevance shows that the analytic categories of Marx’s Capital are as relevant to our world as they were to those of the 19th century. The workings of the “general law of capitalist accumulation” have produced a world in which even the possibility of being exploited has become a coveted privilege denied to billions. This certainly necessitates a rethinking of political strategy, one to which anthropology is particularly suited to contribute. However, the final goal of that strategy–a world in which each contributes according to her abilities and receives according to her needs–remains the same.

Matan Kaminer is an anthropologist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Martin Buber Society, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His article “Saving the Arabah: Thai migrant workers and the asymmetries of community in an Israeli agricultural settlement” is forthcoming in American Ethnologist. He is a member of Academia for Equality and LeftEast, among other political initiatives.

Sources

*Agrarian Questions JAC. 2019. An Interview with Henry Bernstein. (4/8) Primitive Accumulation. www.youtube.com
*Benanav, Aaron. 2019. “Demography and Dispossession: Explaining the Growth of the Global Informal Workforce, 1950-2000.” Social Science History 43 (4): 679–703.
*Campbell, Stephen. 2020. “Debt collection as labour discipline: the work of finance in a Myanmar squatter settlement.” Social Anthropology 28 (3): 729–742.
*Cowan, Thomas. 2021. “The Village as Urban Infrastructure: Social Reproduction, Agrarian Repair and Uneven Urbanisation.” Environment and Planning E 4 (3): pp. 736–755. doi.org
*Ferguson, James, and Tania Li. 2018. “Beyond the ‘Proper Job:’ Political-Economic Analysis after the Century of Labouring Man.” Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies.
*Foster, John Bellamy. 2000. Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press.
*Glassman, Jim. 2006. “Primitive Accumulation, Accumulation by Dispossession, Accumulation by ‘Extra-Economic’ Means.” Progress in Human Geography 30 (5): 608–25. doi.org
*Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Volume I). Translated by Ben Fowkes. Middlesex: Penguin.
*Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15 (1): 11–40.
*Moore, Jason W. 2010. “The End of the Road? Agricultural Revolutions in the Capitalist World-Ecology, 1450–2010.” Journal of Agrarian Change 10 (3): 389–413. doi.org ———. 2015. “Cheap Food and Bad Climate: From Surplus Value to Negative Value in the Capitalist World-Ecology.” Critical Historical Studies 2 (1): 1–43. doi.org
*Neilson, David, and Thomas Stubbs. 2011. “Relative Surplus Population and Uneven Development in the Neoliberal Era: Theory and Empirical Application.” Capital & Class 35 (3): 435–53.
*Neveling, Patrick, and Luisa Steur. 2018. “Introduction: Marxian Anthropology Resurgent.” Focaal 2018 (82): 1–15. doi.org
*Sanyal, Kalyan. 2014. Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality & Post-Colonial Capitalism. 1. paperback ed. London: Routledge.
*United Nations, ed. 2015. World Population Prospects. ST/ESA/SER.A 377. New York: United Nations.

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Sat Jun 11, 2022 2:51 pm

From the Global South to Ukraine, America’s Faux Left “Socialists” Do the CIA’s Work
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JUNE 10, 2022
Rainer Shea

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As Imperialism’s Spoils Dry Up, the Imperial Center & its “Left” Further Embrace Fantasy

The core imperialist countries are being confronted with the reality that when you build an entire civilization off of theft from other civilizations, your society can’t sustain itself. It goes straight from its rise, made possible by parasitic extraction and the destruction of numerous cultures, to collapse, where the global structure it depends on falls apart and the core descends into chaos. The main reason the U.S. became the most powerful empire in history was because of World War II, which wiped out tens of millions of lives and in the process created a power vacuum where Washington had no capitalist competitors. Then China, Korea, and Vietnam beat back the empire’s counterrevolutionary aggressions, starting off a spiral of decline which has only been accelerating.

A self-defeating society

To compensate for the economic damage from the great humiliation which the Vietnamese dealt to Washington, and from the fraying of Washington’s postwar oil extraction arrangement, the empire adopted neoliberalism. This was sold as the way to revive the imperial center’s prosperity after its inhabitants began to sense that their extractive benefits were drying up. But it was a way to engineer the collapse of society, destroying healthcare, infrastructure, utilities social welfare, workers rights, corporate regulations, and other facets of a functioning state, while maintaining the illusion that there’s such a thing as democracy under capitalism. The people of the core suffered, their living standards plummeting as many of their jobs were relocated to the neo-colonies, while the neo-colonies suffered even more.

The global poverty reductions that liberal “optimists” like Steven Pinker talk about have come not from some hidden success within the neoliberal plundering of the world’s working class. They’ve come primarily from China, which has carried out the largest anti-poverty operation in history, and increasingly from Vietnam as well. These socialist states, along with the three other ones (as well as socialist-led countries like Venezuela and Bolivia), are who’ve been making true civilizational progress. The capitalist world has been regressing, allowing inequality to reach astronomical levels, imposing further austerity onto the peoples of both the exploited and exploiting countries, and finding itself outpaced by the socialist world as a consequence.

As China and Vietnam have demonstrated their development prowess, the smaller socialist states have shown us social progress that Americans can only dream of. At the same time that the U.S. is threatening to take away what few rights it has for women and LGBT people, Cuba just passed a law which recognizes a family not on the criteria of blood relation, but merely on whether its members take on the contributing roles of a family. Marxism-Leninism is leading the world by example on how to respect people’s rights. The imperial center sticks out as a shame upon the world, eliciting disgust and horror for its cruel abortion policies, militarized police brutality against Black people, mass shootings by men who’ve been brought up in imperialism’s violent social conditioning, and inhumane detention centers for the southern Indigenous peoples it’s forced to flee through imperialist coups.

The United States, and the other decaying colonial powers, are societies which make themselves ever more sick. They’ve built their entire economic foundations on the exploitation of the formerly colonized world, and now that the imperialist spoils are drying up due to U.S. hegemonic decline and the shrinking rate of profit, they’re descending deeper into denial. Those with a major stake in maintaining imperialism will never take responsibility for the incalculable evils that they’ve benefited from. They’ll more fanatically believe their own propaganda, and blame the rest of the world for not supporting their desperate efforts towards more war.

We see this in how intensely the DPRK gets demonized by the imperialists and their ideological servants. The DPRK has shown an example of a society which can build up its living standards through its people’s own labor, rather than through exploiting colonies. As punishment, it’s portrayed as one of the world’s most evil regimes, even though it’s in every sense opposed to the tyrannical ideology of the empire which threatens it. The DPRK, China, Cuba, and ultimately Vietnam and Laos when they become more powerful, must be demonized. With the imperial center’s decay on display for the world to see, and the socialist countries progressing at astonishing rates, socialism’ superiority can never be acknowledged. Fantasies about spectacular communist evils must be pumped out constantly, soothing an empire that’s sold out its industrial capabilities and descending into failed state status.

Now that Washington has brought Ukraine into an unwinnable war by carrying out a fascist anti-Russian coup, and fomenting neo-Nazi terrorism so Russia can be provoked, the imperialists and their lackeys are doubling down on these hubristic fantasies.

We’re seeing imperial center columnists denouncing the Global South as immoral for supporting Russia, expecting the masses who imperialism has enslaved and slaughtered to embrace Washington’s absurd propaganda. A material analysis, which exploited peoples are inclined to embrace, says that Russia is not a rising imperialist power but a semi-peripheral country. One which has been beating back Washington’s proxies in Syria and Ukraine. But the empire’s propagandists will never take their perspective seriously, because according to the imperialist ideology, these are the people who should be bending to our will.

The benefactors of imperialism, including those on the “left,” refuse to take direction from colonized and exploited peoples. Not when these peoples liberate themselves and build civilizations which far outpace those of the decaying capitalist regimes. Not when these peoples voice support for Russia’s defending the world from Washington’s destruction. This is because whatever project for change that the imperial center’s “left” envisions inevitably includes the ongoing exploitation of the Global South.

“Socialists” who do the CIA’s work

The Democratic Socialists of America, the country’s largest “socialist” organization by far, has only gotten so big because the oligarchy has allowed it to. In every sense, right down to its founding, it’s a manifestation of the “compatible left” that the empire has manufactured. As The Internationalist has written about the DSA’s founders:

This tradition has often, and accurately, been described as “State Department socialism.” Those unfamiliar with the left may think the term is a polemical excess or empty epithet. Not at all. In fact, intimate ties to the Department of State are only the beginning of the intertwining of the official social democrats with the agencies of U.S. imperialism….In the 1950s, SP leader Norman Thomas headed the U.S. affiliate of one of the most notorious CIA fronts of all time: the Congress for Cultural Freedom. He also campaigned in support of the genocidal U.S. war on Korea waged by Democrat Harry Truman. Michael Harrington joined Thomas’ youth group in 1952 and the SP in 1960. In 1961, Thomas brain-truster and Harrington mentor Max Shachtman supported Democrat Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs invasion….In 1967, major media revelations led to a flood of details on how “Norman Thomas, the personification of social democracy in the United States,” had long “maintained ready access to top officials within the CIA,” among them not only his “trusted friend, Allen Dulles,” but also Cord Meyer of the “International Operations Division, the department handling the distribution of covert funding to front groups.”

Central to this social democratic alliance with the CIA was a campaign to exclude communists from organizing, and to attack “apologists for the Viet Cong.” Judging by the conduct of the DSA and the rest of the U.S. “democratic socialist” coalition since then, this alliance has only deepened. DSA, Jacobin, and Haymarket have funded platforms for regime change operatives, who’ve promoted Washington’s recent coup attempts throughout Latin America. The “Socialist International” has endorsed the coup effort of the U.S. puppet Juan Guaidó, and has repeated the Trump White House’s lies about Venezuela’s Chavistas perpetrating electoral fraud. Social democrat pundits such as David Pakman have promoted apologia for the violent 2019 U.S. coup in Bolivia, using the typical dishonest rhetoric about “nuance.” This rhetoric is predicated upon uncritical acceptance of every narrative Washington directs towards its targeted leaders, not on any serious analysis.

Naturally, this has extended to the Ukraine coup, which these propagandists portray as having been a democratic revolution against a “Putin puppet”—which is to say a leader who didn’t comply with Washington’s agenda for immediate hybrid warfare escalations against Russia. The historical context, both recent and long-term, is totally ignored by this narrative, which depends on a chauvinistic view of Russia as an innately bad actor that must be subdued by the West. The compatible left hasn’t considered that Ukraine’s regime, in direct collaboration with the neo-Nazi militias the CIA backs, has been committing ethnic cleansing against the Russian-speaking peoples of the Donbass. That Kiev has carried out collective punishment against the Donbass peoples in retaliation for fighting for their self-determination, shelling Donbass urban areas indiscriminately and forcing its people to put together mass graves for the casualty victims. That Russia was a victim of a Nazi invasion just a few generations ago, perpetrated by the numerous U.S. capitalists who provided industry for Hitler’s war machine. Russia’s seeking to prevent history from repeating itself is what’s seen as the outrage, as a crime on par with the Holocaust.

Of course social democracy supports these narratives, as social democracy is a tool of the same CIA that’s behind the Ukrainian Nazis. And social democracy’s stance on Ukraine does not come from naïveté, but from an ideological overlap with Nazism. As Jay Tharappel has written, the “anti-Stalinist” crusade, which is now being revived to absurdly analogise the right opportunist Putin with Stalin, is based in racism. Tharappel assesses that this racism is directed both against Russians, and against all other peoples who seek to determine their fates free from the grip of colonial domination:

Racism is not just a tool of capital to divide labour (which is the dominant definition of the term among first–world Left); it is also an ideological weapon employed primarily by empires to shape how their citizens think about other nations in accordance with their geopolitical strategy. To understand what this means, just watch the late Edward Said talk about Orientalism, or ‘Reel Bad Arabs’, a documentary based on a book by the late Lebanese American writer Jack Shaheen, both of which argue that the negative portrayal of Arabs in Hollywood is motivated by geopolitical interests. To uncritically assume therefore that Anti-Stalinism is unrelated to the anti-Soviet/Russian foreign policy of the United States and its allies over the past century is simply naïve. Two years ago, the United States vetoed a United Nations resolution tabled by Russia, condemning Nazism.

That same year a documentary came out called ‘Apocalypse’ claiming that because Joseph Stalin was Georgian, “his mindset is closer to that of a Middle Eastern despot”, which is a curious accusation to make at a time when Russia stands accused of supporting a “Middle Eastern despot” in Syria by both the Western corporate media and Anti-Stalinists alike. To justify empire building, colonising cultures produce racism of two kinds, one which justifies conquest on the grounds of naked national self-interest, and another which justifies conquest by claiming to ‘civilise’ conquered nations and ‘save’ them from ‘despots’, and ‘evil dictators’ (a saviour complex). Anti-Stalinism is comparable with the latter kind in the sense that it encourages its followers to believe they’re on the side of The People™


The arrogance of this mindset, where the imperial center left assumes it knows what’s right for the victims of colonial genocide and imperialist aggression, carries into how these leftists treat the masses in their own country. When leftists and leftism-adjacent communists view the world through the lens of the imperialists, dismissing every socialist project as a corrupt oligarchy and demonizing anti-imperialist actions at every turn, they detach themselves from the global working class. And by extension, from the working class in the core. Without internationalism, class solidarity becomes impossible, and one remains isolated to their political cult. Amid growing class and decolonial struggle, the U.S. empire seeks to cultivate this kind of hubris among those who otherwise could attain revolutionary consciousness.

Turning destabilization schemes inward

As Ukraine’s fascist regime copes with its military humiliation at the hands of Russia, and faces the loss of many of its territories to the forces of national liberation, it can only find comfort in the prospect of turning its brutality inwards. Zelensky has said Ukraine will become like a “big Israel” in the coming years, with an expanded role in daily life for the Ukrainian National Guard that’s infamous for its atrocities. This wounded colonial proxy state, with an economy that’s been virtually cut in half by the conflict it’s instigated, is a tool that the imperialists merely see as a means to an end. Washington’s goal is to weaken Russia enough that the country can be balkanized and colonized, making China vulnerable and letting Washington destabilize broader Eurasia.

This route towards winning on the “grand chessboard,” within which Eurasia is seen as the pivotal zone, is pure fantasy. The ruple has recovered from the sanctions, and the sanctions have ironically made the dollar far less likely to survive. The U.S. bloc will suffer from this war far more than Russia, and will end up bringing to itself the destabilization it so desperately wishes upon the anti-imperialist bloc.

Like fascist Ukraine, the imperialist powers and their decaying Global South neo-colonial regimes can only stay alive by inflicting violence upon their own people. They must intensify their primitive accumulation, which in Brazil’s case means a genocidal frontier capitalism and in the USA’s case means effectively reviving slavery. The U.S. prison-industrial complex, with its modern slave system, is a product of a settler state in decline. It’s a replacement for Jim Crow, designed to keep the U.S. empire’s internal colony the Africans from attaining self-determination or reparations. And it naturally depends on the poverty and violence which neoliberalism’s engineered societal collapse has produced.

This internal measure to preserve capital, like all of imperialism’s external aggressions, is ultimately what will destroy the empire. The mass disenfranchisement of the U.S. carceral system’s victims, compounded by an ever-deadlier settler police state that’s received weapons from late-stage imperialist wars, are combining to drive the internal colonies to a breaking point. The unprecedented unrest the U.S. has recently seen in response to racialized police violence will continue to get worse as the settler state tightens its bloody grip. It’s likely that during our generation, the colonized peoples in this country will rise up for their state sovereignty from oppression, like the Donbass peoples have risen up for theirs. The colonized will then assume their role as the vanguard of the revolution on this continent, supported by the progressive elements of the white proletariat and lumpenproletariat.

The settler state anticipates this revolt, and is doing all it can to preemptively destabilize society so that revolutionary efforts get frustrated. To internally apply the destructive tools that the empire has used against revolutions in Yugoslavia, Russia, and other places. Its failed attempts to destabilize Xinjiang, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Hong Kong, and other chessboard pieces indicate how hopeless imperialism’s situation is. Its coups in Latin America also keep failing, and its attempt to destroy Ethiopia’s anti-imperialist state remains unsuccessful. Its capital has no choice but to contract, making internal revolt all the more likely. When this decolonial struggle arises, it will be the confrontation that decides the fate of the hemisphere. That decides whether the U.S. empire survives to continue wreaking havoc, or gets supplanted by a post-colonial federation of nations.

To avoid its extinction, the state is flooding its people with propaganda, made legal by the 2013 lifting of a law prohibiting psychological operations against U.S. citizens. It’s doing everything possible to convince us that the socialist world’s gains are overshadowed by fictions of “authoritarian” communist oppression, and that Washington is fighting a righteous war against Russian “imperialism.” This is how the empire cultivates today’s compatible left, which includes not just social democrats, but anarchists, Trotskyists, Maoists, and smaller communist splinter factions like the “patriotic socialists.” Our cultural hegemony conditions partially radicalized individuals to block their full revolutionary consciousness, either through embracing pro-war narratives, seeing China as the world’s great rising imperialist power, or fixating on a vacuous glorification of the settler state’s flag and founding history. The “patriotic socialist” camp with the latter ideas ironically gets its geopolitical analysis correct, while believing that the settler question isn’t real and therefore doesn’t need to be addressed.

The possibilities for movement-wrecking are endless, because the amount of ahistorical ideas is endless. Therefore, Marxist-Leninists don’t need to try to win over every individual, as inevitably we’ll encounter individuals who are obstinate in embracing these ideas. Trying to appease every reactionary faction that we encounter is simply right opportunism, and against the principle that communists abhor to conceal their ideas. What we need to focus on are which parts of the masses to invest the most energy into, and which ideological factions to be wary of.

Ideological struggle means identifying incorrect ideas

What both the right opportunists and the ultra-leftists do is ignore these questions, and fixate on the elements of the masses which they’ve placed excessive importance on. The “patriotic socialists,” by claiming that an analysis of settlerism and a plan to return full tribal jurisdiction would alienate the workers, actually detach themselves from the workers by assuming they lack adequate intellectual capacity. As Lenin wrote in What is to be Done:

Our very first and most pressing duty is to help to train working-class revolutionaries who will be on the same level in regard to Party activity as the revolutionaries from amongst the intellectuals (we emphasise the words “in regard to Party activity”, for, although necessary, it is neither so easy nor so pressingly necessary to bring the workers up to the level of intellectuals in other respects). Attention, therefore, must be devoted principally to raising the workers to the level of revolutionaries; it is not at all our task to descend to the level of the “working masses” as the Economists wish to do, or to the level of the “average worker” as Svoboda desires to do (and by this ascends to the second grade of Economist “pedagogics”). I am far from denying the necessity for popular literature for the workers, and especially popular (of course, not vulgar) literature for the especially backward workers. But what annoys me is this constant confusion of pedagogics with questions of politics and organisation. You, gentlemen, who are so much concerned about the “average worker”, as a matter of fact, rather insult the workers by your desire to talk down to them when discussing working-class politics and working-class organisation.

Such an elitist attitude, where the masses are seen as simpletons that we must protect from their own foolishness, is diametrically opposed to proletarian revolution. The mass line says that we must not tell a U.S. flag-waver they’re right for displaying the symbol, but that we must open up a dialogue on the historical context of settler-colonialism. It’s in the interests of the settler population to abolish the settler state, and the arguments that it’s not in their interests depend on anti-communism. Under workers’ democracy, the living standards of every proletarian, regardless of their color, will be vastly improved compared to how they are now. The settler ideology, which “patriotic socialism” depends on, lies to the white workers, telling them that a socialist post-colonial federation would subjugate them. In reality, it would take away the meager relative benefits that imperialism and settler-colonialism grant to them, and give them unprecedented new benefits.

What colonial chauvinism does is encourage suspicion towards the colonized nations, assuming that if they’re in charge of the revolution, they won’t choose socialism. The Black, Indigenous, and Brown masses will never choose capitalism, because it innately goes against their interests. And they’re capable of keeping their own reactionary elements in check, far more than the white left is with theirs. The communists from these nations, and the whites who ally with them, understand that the most important part of winning the masses is providing for their needs. Not appealing to the chauvinistic sentiments that the U.S. empire seeks to keep their minds trapped in. By addressing the contradictions the masses face, we’ll be able to unite the masses behind decolonization, and demonstrate that decolonization is synonymous with building socialism when one lives under a settler state.

Doing so requires learning from the existing socialist projects, which have for the most part come about first through the overthrow of colonial occupiers and then through the construction of socialist workers states. Since our conditions of settler-colonialism in a core imperialist country are unprecedented among proletarian revolutions, we must use these examples to create an unprecedented revolutionary model.

What the state’s destabilization proxies do is obfuscate this reality. They put forth ahistorical ideas, and argue that history supports whichever liberal solutions they advocate for. They then use this undialectical analysis as an excuse to carry out violence against Marxist-Leninists, or at least to suppress them as the social democrats have done. On the flipside of the imperial center leftist idea that violence is never the answer, there’s the idea that violent insurrection must be embraced immediately, and that violence should be resorted to on a whim regardless of party discipline. To the “anti-civilization” anarchists who recently assaulted communist organizers at a public event, or the Maoists who attack activists they don’t like, such wrecker activity is merely fulfilling history’s demands. Whether this serves the people is irrelevant to them, as they’ve committed to an attitude of self-righteousness and reactive aggression. As the Cosmonaut blog has observed about the Maoists who act in this way:

The task of building a better world leaves no time for the narcissism of small differences endlessly dividing our own camp. But who exactly is in our own camp? What happens when a group crosses the line and ends up on the other side of the barricades? An example of a group that has done this is the combination of front groups and collectives associated with the organization Red Guards Austin, or Committee for the Reconstitution of the Communist Party USA. Konstantin Sverdlov argues that groups like the Red Guards have fully crossed the line to the point where they deserve to be treated as if they are class enemies just like fascists. By violently attacking other leftist organizations the Red Guards have joined the camp of the class enemy. We must point our guns at the enemy, not at those who fight at our side, even if they use methods we find ineffective or ideologies we find misguided.

Those supporting the violence of the anti-civ anarchists justify their position by saying the communists displayed Lenin and Stalin, which supposedly represented a declaration of war. This shows just how unserious these kinds of factions are. Ultraviolent ideologies rationalize their reckless aggression by claiming to defend some personal honor, which always takes precedence over the class struggle. It’s how one anarchist group could rationalize joining the Azov Battalion, which only needed to offer them an outlet for exacting violence against the Russians who these leftists dehumanize. Anarchists can function as an armed wing for the imperialists, perpetrating reactionary violence while claiming to fight for revolution.

Stalin said that “Some people believe that Marxism and anarchism are based on the same principles and that disagreements concern only tactics. This is a great mistake. We believe anarchists are enemies of Marxism, accordingly, a real struggle must be waged against real enemies.” Which doesn’t apply in absolute, as Stalin would go on to tactically back anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. But he was correct when he concluded that anarchism is incompatible with scientific socialism, because anarchism seeks not to scientifically analyze our conditions but to prescribe a solution (immediate abolition of the state) regardless of material reality. It’s no wonder why COINTELPRO has been able to weaponize anarchism for its movement-wrecking purposes, putting together publications which have attacked communism from an anarchist angle. Whenever you see this kind of anti-communist “leftism,” you’re looking at enemy propaganda, not at an internal debate among people who share the same goals.

Uniting the masses amid growing lumpenproletarianization

The equivalent can be said about the ultra-leftists who fetishize the lumpenproletariat, like the right opportunists fetishize the supposedly working class whites who voted for Trump. This faction claims that merely because the lumpen are growing as a class amid capitalism’s collapse, the lumpen should be treated as a ready-made revolutionary vanguard, or at least prioritized over the proletariat. This is distinct from the Marxist position on the lumpen, which says that the lumpen must be proletarianized to be compatible with a socialist society. In other words, our priority must be to provide social outlets and jobs which represent an alternative to the gangs. The lumpenprole fetishists, in contrast, claim the gangs are viable avenues for revolution. Such an idea is ahistorical, like the idea that stateless socialism is realistic under the conditions of imperialism.

It’s ahistorical both because gangs have a history of violently resisting attempts to reform them into communist organizations, and because this romanticization of gangs is based in an anti-Marxist view of the lumpen. In accordance with the belief that socialist states aren’t socialist because they haven’t yet reached full equality, imperial center leftists promote the idea that “socialism” means the general lifting up of the dispossessed, rather than the transferring of power to the workers. When you define socialism in this ultra-leftist way, you ignore that it’s the proletariat which possesses the unique potential to deprive the bourgeoisie of economic power. As Lenin wrote, “the proletariat is the only class that is consistently revolutionary, the only class that can unite all the working and exploited people in the struggle against the bourgeoisie, in completely removing it.” Because the lumpen have been pushed out of this position, a revolution which pretends they possess that type of potential is a revolution which will empower the gangs. Not one which will empower the workers. In other words, a bourgeois revolution.

The Chinese revolution didn’t unite the lumpen with the proletariat by putting criminal enterprises in charge. In China today, gangs are systematically suppressed by the state, because their lumpenbourgeois interests are fundamentally opposed to the proletariat’s interests. Instead, Mao proletarianized the lumpen, bringing the many compatible people among them into the revolution and then giving them jobs. If he had fetishized the lumpen, he would have had to abandon the code he laid down for combating liberalism. Because though the lumpen can possess revolutionary potential, they’re also a class that’s especially susceptible to becoming agents for reactionary intrigue, due to their detachment from the means of production. He and his modern successors would have to accomodate the criminal enterprises, treating them not as the tools for counterrevolutionary sabotage that they are, but as some idealized vision of an underclass rebel network. The imperialist propagandists have vilified China’s anti-crime crusade for a reason: many of the gangsters China has apprehended are the same anti-communist “dissidents” that U.S. propaganda glorifies.

When you don’t make your revolution a proletarian revolution, you get something like the self-defeating peasant revolt that Pol Pot led. At best, you get a gang-led revolt like the one in Haiti, which is not a project for workers democracy but merely a seizure of power by a rival bourgeois faction.

To avoid such mistakes, we need to not be lax in party discipline when it comes to the lumpen. Just because someone comes from a dispossessed social status, doesn’t mean they can’t be bought by the FBI to become an infiltrator (the spooks even seek out poorer people to fill that role), or commit errors in actions or ideas. If someone engages in adventurism, considers themselves exempt from criticism, or commits abuses, they should be held accountable, and ejected if they don’t correct their conduct. For this reason, one ex-gang member I’ve encountered has recommended that communist parties never allow active or semi-active gang members to join. Gangsterism is another source of social conditioning which fosters undisciplined violence, encouraging the mentality that any perceived violation of “honor” is grounds for threatening or engaging in violence. We can’t risk such reactionary traits compromising democratic centralism, and leaving us open to needless state repression or alienation from the masses.

Gang ideology has such a similar nature to anarchism because like anarchism, it’s supported by the spooks. The CIA funnels drugs through cartels all across the Americas, making for a U.S. intelligence influence within gangster guerrilla efforts like Haiti’s. To build unity with the lumpen, communists must recognize that such a thing as gang ideology exists, and that it’s not compatible with scientific socialism. Failure to do so leads to ahistorical ideas, like the myth that El Chapo was a man of the people. In reality, he was a lumpenbourgeois warlord who terrorized other colonized people with the assistance of the CIA. Military power and a lumpen identity aren’t alone sufficient for a revolutionary role. What makes someone revolutionary is if they advance the proletariat’s interests.

Engels has a quote on the lumpen that’s similar to Stalin’s quote on anarchists: “The lumpenproletariat, this scum of the decaying elements of all classes, which establishes headquarters in all the big cities, is the worst of all possible allies. It is an absolutely venal, an absolutely brazen crew. If the French workers, in the course of the Revolution, inscribed on the houses: Mort aux voleurs! (Death to the thieves!) and even shot down many, they did it, not out of enthusiasm for property, but because they rightly considered it necessary to hold that band at arm’s length. Every leader of the workers who utilises these gutter-proletarians as guards or supports, proves himself by this action alone a traitor to the movement.” Like has been the case for anarchists, communists actually can make tactical alliances with the lumpen, as Mao showed. But not without the end goal of proletarianizing the lumpen, or without preventing gang ideology and other reactionary lumpen tendencies from sabotaging the revolution.

This knowledge of how to approach the lumpen question is indispensable in the imperial center, because as I mentioned, it’s the millions of lumpen who’ve been disenfranchised by the carceral state which will be the first to fight in the coming revolt. We won’t be able to build an alliance with these fighters if we enable the same gangs which ravage their communities with warfare and drugs, and which assimilate many lumpenproles into fundamentally counterrevolutionary entities.

The ultra-leftist fetishization of gangs and the lumpen comes from the anti-intellectualism which imperial center leftism cultivates. As Red Sails has observed: “Western chauvinists, consciously or unconsciously, struggle with the idea that they should study and humbly take lessons from the imperial periphery. It is much easier for the chauvinist, psychologically, to position oneself as at the very front of a new vanguard.” This attitude abhors learning from the revolutions that the peoples in the imperial periphery have carried out. Even if someone recognizes the achievements of these peoples, that attitude can still prevent them from implementing the revolutionary practices which built those socialist states in the first place. Ho Chi Minh articulated these practices when he wrote:

There are three kinds of enemies: Capitalism and imperialism are very dangerous ones. Backward habits and traditions are also big enemies: they insidiously hinder the progress of the revolution. However, we cannot repress them, but must seek to correct them with caution, perseverance and over a long period of time. The third enemy is individualism, the petty-bourgeois mentality which still lurks in each of us. It is waiting for an opportunity – either failure or success – to rear its head. It is the ally of the two above-mentioned categories. Therefore revolutionary morality consists, in whatever circumstances, in resolutely struggling against all enemies, maintaining one’s vigilance, standing ready to fight, and refusing to submit, to bow one’s head. Only by doing so can we defeat the enemy, and fulfill our revolutionary tasks.

We in the core are especially at risk of succumbing to this petty-bourgeois mentality, because in our country, it’s incentivized by the desire to continue exploiting the peripheral peoples. But we can rise above it. The Black Panthers, the most successful communist party in U.S. history, showed that Americans can be brought towards revolution. They even provided an example of how we can give the lumpen an immediate alternative to gangsterism, building material aid networks which fed the victims of capitalism and colonialism. We can complete their legacy by defeating the U.S. empire.

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Sun Jun 12, 2022 9:56 pm

Multipolarity Then and Now: Reflections on the Non-Aligned Movement
10 Jun
By Ignatz Maria

Over the past few months, the Non-Aligned Movement seems to be the expression on socialists’ lips. It is not hard to see why. The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was founded in 1961 on the back of the 1955 Bandung Asian-African Conference, to defend the principle of national sovereignty for newly independent colonial countries in the midst of intensifying Cold War competition and war. The escalation of tensions around Ukraine, culminating in the Russian invasion earlier this year, has provoked widespread discussion, debate, and confusion over possible new international alignments in this next stage of the post-Cold War world. For many, equally concerned by Russia and by NATO, the golden age of the NAM suggests a time when leftists did not have to sully themselves with crude geopolitics.

For others, however, the widespread refusal of the global South to endorse US-UK led sanctions on Russia indicates already the re-emergence of an informal non-aligned movement, representing the weakening of US hegemony on the global scale. As Roger McKenzie and Vijay Prashad wrote for Globetrotter last month,

Already the contradictions of the present have raised the spectre of nonalignment in parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America… Already, the war and sanctions have created serious political crises in Honduras, Pakistan, Peru, and Sri Lanka, with others to follow as food and fuel prices rise astronomically.

Similarly, David Adler of the Progressive International, writing in the Guardian in March, explains that most countries have been reluctant to involve themselves outside of the UN vote on Russia’s actions, and have even explicitly rejected sanctions, no-fly zones, and military support against Russia: ‘Should this war in Ukraine escalate, we say and we say it loud: do not bring it to our shores.’ Adler positions this neutrality as an understandable response to the emergence of a ‘New Cold War’ between the US and China, but he warns that we may also see the resurgence of similar Cold War style tactics such as intensified wars, sanctions, and economic embargoes against nations that seek to stand apart from great power politics. In these conditions, it is necessary, says Adler, to emphasise the active dimensions of neutrality which characterised the NAM at its height, so as to withstand the pressure of the militarised blocs. As India’s Nehru and Yugoslavia’s Tito wrote in 1954, ‘[Neutrality] represents the positive, active and constructive policy that, as its goal, has collective peace as the foundation of collective security.’

Whilst it is clear that global trends are provoking a greater interest in non-alignment and the historical Non-Aligned Movement, it is nonetheless crucial that in attempting to reclaim radical histories of global non-alignment, we do not fall into a romanticised vision of the past, outside of the contradictions that make our present so hard to navigate. In fact, it is understanding the contradictions of the past that can clarify the present conjuncture for revolutionaries in Britain. This is, after all, not the first time socialists in Britain have been faced with dilemmas of international allegiance, or that we have been faced with a perceived choice between our own state’s policy and those of its international enemies. Though it would be easy to treat such questions as irrelevant to organising on the ground, the history suggests that British leftist movements’ apathy or abstentionism to confrontations between the great powers – of which the British state is one – has often left us bereft of tools and strategies for waging class war at home.

In some ways, Adler’s appeal in the Guardian echoes elements of Stuart Hall’s account of the international influences on the emergence of the New Left as a response to the conditions of post-war Britain.

The ‘first’ new Left was born in 1956, a conjuncture – not just a year – bounded on one side by the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution by Soviet tanks and on the other by the British and French invasion of the Suez Canal zone. These two events, whose dramatic impact was heightened by the fact that they occurred within days of each other, unmasked the underlying violence and aggression latent in the two systems that dominated political life at the time – Western imperialism and Stalinism – and sent a shock wave through the political world. In a deeper sense, they defined for people of my generation the boundaries and limits of the tolerable in politics[...] ‘Hungary’ brought to an end a certain kind of socialist innocence. On the other hand, ‘Suez’ underlined the enormity of the error in believing that lowering the Union Jack in a few ex-colonies necessarily signalled the ‘end of imperialism’, or that the real gains of the welfare state and the widening of material affluence meant the end of inequality and exploitation. ‘Hungary’ and ‘Suez’ were thus liminal, boundary-marking experiences. They symbolized the break-up of the political Ice Age.[1]

The New Left, as Hall explains, premised itself on the claim that the existing paradigms of the Left, whether that of the old guard in the Marxist-Leninist CPGB or the unionist-reformism of the Labour Party (in and out of government), could not account for the realities of post-war British capitalism, or provide a meaningful path to socialism from those realities. The events of 1956, for Hall, signified the shifting landscape of anti-imperialism, where formal occupation and governance gave way to other means of pressure and control, and leftists could, or should, no longer rely on the traditional Leninist formula of national liberation in the colonies and socialism at home. Specifically, socialists in Britain should seek an independent path, outside of those determined by Western imperialism or ‘Stalinism’.

If Hall does not say the words ‘non-alignment’, this is the clear international background to the British currents he describes. At the same time, however, Hall’s ‘non-alignment’ (what he calls ‘the third way’ or ‘third position’) remains relatively abstract; ‘Hungary’ and ‘Suez’ remain ideas, symbols, or even ‘metaphors’, rather than concrete places or events. This is perhaps unsurprising, since Hall’s essay is primarily a work of intellectual history, a document of his time as editor of the New Left Review. But the effect is an unfortunate, maybe accidental, isolation of that intellectual trajectory from the global movements that made non-alignment a real historical force.

In Egypt, for example, the policy of non-alignment was not the product of fastidious academic deliberation, but rather it seems to have happened almost by accident. Egyptian Communist scholar Anouar Abdel-Malek writes that in the early days of Nasser’s government, international neutrality was the only clearly defined ideological position held by the Free Officers group, a doctrine thrust upon them by the continued presence of British troops on Egyptian territory at that time. Simultaneously, however, the claim to neutrality was a response to claims in the West that the rapid advances of national liberation movements across the world, as well as in Egypt, were part of some sinister Communist plot. At this early stage, though, buoyed by the momentum of mass anti-imperialist mobilisations of the period, Nasser’s ‘neutrality’ took on a combative tone. His Minister of Culture and National Guidance, Salah Salem, stated:

You can call our new policy ‘neutrality’ or anything else that suits you. Some people will have a different idea of neutrality; what we mean is that we adopt a hostile attitude and refuse to co-operate in any way with anyone who takes a position against our dignity and our freedom, while we support and collaborate with whoever helps and supports us.[2]

This provided the backdrop for both Nasser’s refusal to engage in trade with the US while they insisted on military and political conditions to these relations, and for the increasing openness of Egypt to the Soviets and to other Third World currents at that time. Especially from the Tripartite Aggression onwards (what in the West is known as ‘the Suez Crisis’), feeling the support of the masses at home and a variety of other post-colonial nationalist states internationally, as well as the Soviet Union, Egypt felt increasing emboldened to stress the active components of neutrality, what was known as ‘positive neutralism’, emphasising anti-imperialism, international solidarity, and people’s struggle, against Western attempts to reimpose colonial relationships.

It is easy to narrate the history of non-alignment as if it were simply a matter of international policy or diplomacy, when in fact, as I have already mentioned, mass mobilisation played a key role in defining the character of Egypt’s ‘neutrality’ at this crucial stage. In particular, effective organising by the Communist movement in Egypt is what gave Nasser’s neutralism its positive content, in spite of his personal inclinations. Ironically, by placing rival Communist factions in prison camps together, the government unintentionally facilitated the unification of the Communist movement around a common programme of organising popular support for Nasser’s stands against the West, but at the same time using this organising as a basis for demanding the restoration of democratic freedoms and a new constitution ‘to provide substance to national unity’. Whilst it may seem strange that the Communists resolved to support Nasser from the camps he put them in, at that phase of struggle this was an effective strategic intervention, enabling them to capitalise on the surge of genuine popular support for Nasser whilst also forming autonomous organisations among the working class. The soundness of this policy was proven in the wake of the Tripartite Aggression in 1956, where Communist-led mass mobilisation was decisive in ensuring the domestic success of the nationalisation measures, directed against the colonial powers.

At the time of the bombardment of Cairo, the Communist organizations went into the streets, organizing firearm lessons and setting up resistance committees, while writers and journalists of the Left blanketed the country with intense patriotic propaganda that produced a few splendid poems.[3]

The early success of the Communist strategy in Egypt signals the dynamism of anti-imperialism in this period, a dynamism reflected more broadly in the Non-Aligned Movement. Nationalists in Egypt, and across the Third World, were suddenly faced with a whole new world of political possibilities, and a wide variety of potential forms and paths with which to respond to their local conditions. In Asia, the state-led capitalist development of India offered one possibility but the Chinese Revolution – with its successful mobilisation of mass movements and communes among both peasants and workers – at that time held centre stage in many people’s imaginations, an impact only amplified by the later, electrifying victory of the NLF in Vietnam. Similarly, movements in Africa towards both ‘scientific socialism’ and more ‘traditional’ alternatives held a certain allure in Egypt, and as the 60s progressed, Marxist, populist, and guerrilla currents in Latin America began to make their impact felt. Each of these approaches represented an attempt to navigate the pressures of imperialism, simultaneously weakened and revivified in different forms by the Second World War, responding with local forces to local conditions in an effort to forge a new path beyond western capital. All of these projects, until the complications introduced by the Sino-Soviet Split, were made possible by the presence of the Soviet Union, both as a military threat against Western intervention and, more crucially, as an alternative trade partner, whatever the ideological orientation of these projects to the socialist ‘superpower’.

In Britain, however, the Soviets played little role in new conceptions of ‘a third path’. Like many intellectuals of the New Left, Hall sought an analogous local path to socialism that included an analogous unlocking of popular power. This is part of why Hall invoked the events of 1956; to these New Left observers, the Soviet intervention in Hungary demonstrated the dangers of ‘Stalinism’s reliance on state power, whereas Britain’s role in Tripartite Aggression in Egypt, facilitated and supported by Labour Party politicians such as Nye Bevan and Clement Atlee, revealed the limits of the new welfare state in truly addressing exploitation and inequality in the post-war era. The ‘Third Space’ that these observers sought to forge, whether between Washington and Moscow or Labour and the CPGB, would be consistently defined through an attempt to find alternative forms of political organisation and strategy that did not rely on centralised authority. Whilst these concerns are obviously influenced by Trotskyism – especially, from the 1960s onwards, by the American Hal Draper’s understanding of ‘socialism from below’ – Hall highlights the pivotal role played by more distinctly British traditions of ‘co-operative’ or ‘Guild Socialism’. Originating in figures like Robert Owens and William Morris, and traced through the Fabians and G. D. H. Cole, who Hall and other New Left intellectuals encountered at Oxford, Guild Socialism was shaped by both an aim to reorganise ownership and productive relations via workers co-operatives, rather than state-led nationalisations, but also frequently a form of conservatism that saw industrial capitalism as an intrusion against traditional British ways of life, such as the history of craftsmen’s guilds going back to the middle ages, for which the theory was named. (Tellingly, whilst the Egyptian government discouraged the printing of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, books by Morris, George Bernard Shaw, and even Bevan were translated and republished by the state publishing house.)[4]

But if part of the New Left’s motivation for a ‘Third Space’ or an autonomous path, beyond Leninist orthodoxy, was the pressures of the Cold War, another was a distinctive impression among many observers that the nature of class was changing. In a 1958 essay titled ‘A sense of classlessness’, Hall named the gradual, uneven retreat of the social world oriented around industry, on which the Left in Britain had traditionally depended and its replacement by new, more ambivalent forms of social relation. Old industrial estates increasingly found themselves side by side with new middle class housing developments; the traditional industries of shipping and steel were receding to be replaced by new industries with new skills and styles of working; and a new commercial attitude, a new orientation to consumer goods like cars and washing machines, was increasingly taking hold among a working class that just a decade prior would have largely considered those same items unnecessary luxuries. It was not, as some commentators claimed (then and now), that the working class was ceasing to exist; the ways of living and social forms that had held the class together and forged its consciousness were decaying, fragmenting, and reassembling in new shapes. For Hall, and others, the Left needed to break from the practices of the Labour Party and the old Communist Party if they were to find the new theories, strategies, and tactics that could orient them on this newly unfamiliar terrain.[5]

Ironically, in their rush to articulate a ‘Third Space’ for British development, many on the New Left seem to have neglected that they weren’t alone in having to organise a class that was not composed in the forms known by Marx, Lenin, or Keir Hardie. If Marxism had an ambivalent role and reputation among the Non-Aligned Movement, this was at least partially due to a recognition that some of the key historical features of Marx’s work – especially the dominance of industrial capitalism and the concomitant presence of a large industrial proletariat – were not descriptive of colonial societies on the eve of independence after decades or even centuries of deliberate imperialist underdevelopment. Most had forms of industry, and emerging proletariats in the cities, but peasants and plantation workers predominated, and often even the wage-labourers moved seasonally between the factories and the countryside. If the Communists supported Nasser in Egypt it was partially out of recognition of a common enemy in the landowning class, and in Indonesia, Sukarno and the PKI found themselves aligned against the large British and American plantations. The appeal of the Chinese revolution, in this context, was not necessarily as a blanket model to be applied everywhere but as a demonstration that Communism could be a dynamic response to the instinctive feeling among the peasantry that decolonisation must mean ‘land to those who work it’, and not just ownership changing hands. What at first appears as the ambivalence of Marxism outside of the historic industrial core was in fact the source of vibrancy, dynamism, and power of the Communist movement throughout the Third World. By orienting themselves predominantly around American Trotskyism and traditions such as ‘Guild Socialism’, the New Left in Britain largely isolated themselves from these currents of internationalist creativity.

In fact, as Paul Gilroy argued in There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, over the course of successive post-war crises, the left in Britain increasingly defined the class alliance of the ‘populism’ they sought in terms of a union between class consciousness and nationalism. In the wake of manufactured controversies over increased Black and Asian migration, writers such as Benedict Anderson, Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, and Eric Hobsbawm sought to deploy an analogous ideological frame to figureheads of the New Right like Enoch Powell and Peregrine Worsthorne to attain their political objectives, primarily through ‘uniting the Nation’, conceived of implicitly or explicitly as homogeneously white, and ‘restoring national pride’. The key concern in this approach, according to Gilroy, is an attempt to struggle against the Conservative Party’s political monopoly on widespread xeno-nationalist sentiment; in this rush to outmanoeuvre the right, rarely did they pause to interrogate why patriotism had become such a primary focus, what advantages it actually possessed for radical consciousness, or what concretely radicals would need to do to break its thus far overwhelmingly reactionary direction.

It is as if the only problem with nationalism is that the Tories have secured a near exclusive monopoly of it[...] When it comes to their patriotism, it would appear that England’s left intellectuals become so many radical rabbits transfixed and immobile in the path of an onrushing populist nationalism.[6]

Further, Gilroy persuasively argues that the implicitly white ethno-nationalist social framings of much of the New Left drastically limited any constructive or creative engagement with the alternative forms of material political culture, or ‘black oppositional practice’, that were emerging over the post-war years among immigrant communities in Britain. Whilst organisations such as the Asian Youth Movements, the British Black Panther Movement, and the Black Unity and Freedom Party remained small if influential forces of formal organisation among migrant communities in the 70s and 80s, they were engaged with wider networks of subaltern cultural and political activity – from clubs and carnivals to mutual aid societies, dating back to the earliest stages of modern migrant settlement – which informed more spontaneous forms of unrest, disruption, and insurrection that the wider left remained largely oblivious too at best, and often actively antagonistic towards.

From 1967 onwards, the new editorial board of the New Left Review increasingly flirted with Maoist or Third Worldist tendencies informed by local organising such as the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. However, for the most part, such campaigns remained outside the dominant tendencies of leftist organising in this period, and this fleeting engagement, whilst suggestive, was too little too late.[7] Nancy Fraser has suggested that elements of postwar dissent such as the New Left Review, which founded themselves on a critique of the Labourite welfare state, were left with no leg to stand on once Thatcher swept welfarism away by decree. But this is only a half truth. What left British socialists in the lurch was not their critique of welfarism, but their failure to articulate or engage with alternatives to Labour’s compromise between the bourgeoisie and the industrial proletariat, premised on their mutual reliance on national industry. Once the bourgeoisie were able to replace that industrial production with other economic forms, outside the power of the historic forms of trade unionism and industrial working-class community, many leftists were left without means of defence besides the New Right paradigm of a return to ‘national unity’ between capital and labour, against ‘alien invaders’ (whether migrants, international enemies, or both).

In Egypt, the rug was similarly pulled out from under Communist strategy. In 1958 Nasser led Egypt into a unified state with Syria. Access to Syrian markets, resources, and labour strengthened the Egyptian bourgeoisie against attempts at organising working class autonomy, and Communist dissent over the distinctiveness of national identity enabled Nasser to launch a crackdown against the left as traitors to ‘the Arab nation’. Accompanying this repression was a shift in international policy, away from ‘positive neutralism’ and towards ‘non-alignment’. Increasingly, Egypt’s neutrality was defined as against not ‘imperialism’ but ‘the great powers’ – with the USSR regularly singled out for criticism. In 1959, Egypt had public fallings-out with the USSR, China, and Bulgaria, and in 1961, Nasser’s key ideological mouthpiece Mohammed Husain Heykal explicitly argued that, ‘as the Egyptian leaders saw it, Bandung no longer existed’, primarily due to its concept of neutrality being ‘too far advanced and too vulnerable to exploitation by the Communists.’[8]

The NAM was a dynamic movement driven by a variety of local contradictions. As such, it would be too simplistic to see this early consolidation of anti-Communism in Egyptian non-alignment as the end of the story.[9] At the same time, however, it is hard not to look back on the post-’58 repressions as early, local signs of what was to come. By the end of 1970, Sukarno had been deposed and both he and Nasser were dead. Thousands upon thousands of people had been killed in anti-communist counterinsurgencies in Indonesia, Iraq, and beyond, and those Third World leaders who still resisted the encroachments of neocolonialism increasingly recognised the need for a more radical stance, as signalled by the Tricontinental Conference in Havana in 1967. The tensions that created the NAM were giving way to a new period of capitalist crisis and a new high point of anti-imperialist class struggle. At the same time, the first seeds of what we now know as neoliberalism were being sown in Sadat’s ‘corrective revolution’ of 1971. In the face of an increasingly unipolar global capitalist hegemony, neutrality was no longer an option.

After the defeat and destruction of the USSR in 1990 – and the concomitant neutralisation of progressive mass movements across the world – some insisted this was ‘the end of history’, the final accomplishment of a unipolar liberal capitalist order under US guardianship. Suffice to say, this was not the case. In reality, popular struggles for sovereignty and freedom had not failed but were only temporarily defeated. As early as 1994, the Zapatista Uprising in Chiapas, where a movement of predominantly indigenous peasants not only seized land and multiple cities from the control of the Mexican state but symbolically reawakened questions of decolonisation and sovereignty on the world stage – shattering what Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros call ‘intellectual structural readjustment’ to capitalist development. This was not just an isolated incident. The Bolivarian Revolution of Hugo Chavez in 1998, the mass protests at the WTO Conference in Seattle in 1999, and Zimbabwe’s Land Reforms and accompanying mass land-occupation movement in 2000, among other upheavals, further demonstrated that globally, popular classes, whether peasants, proletariats, lumpen, or even some petit-bourgeois forces, are not resigned to the dictates of American finance, but are still prepared to forge new alliances and make new experiments in pursuit of sovereignty and their material needs, with or without Marxism.[10] These popular upheavals were of course not the only challenges to US hegemony to emerge in this period. In the West, these challenges were usually mediated through scaremongering about the global resurgence of Islamic social, cultural, and political movements known as the ‘Islamic Revival’, and especially its more conservative manifestations, a convenient bogeyman for the failure of neoliberal universalism. But at the same time, other relations between bourgeois nationalisms and nation states emerged, seeking to break their dependence on US capital, most clearly represented by Putin’s role in the formation of the BRICS group and the CSTO. Surviving and newly emerging socialist projects such as those in Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia are often criticised for the relations with more controversial forces such as those of Russia and Iran. As in the Non-Aligned Movement in its heyday, contemporary multipolarity is shaped by a form of ‘positive neutrality’, namely, the complicated relations between socialist and bourgeois projects, forged in the pressures of sanctions and the necessity of markets and political partners outside of circuits controlled by the US.

As with the history of the Non-Aligned Movement, it is easy to describe multipolarity as if it were simply a matter of international policy or diplomacy. But the newly emerging forces, social processes, upheavals, and mass mobilisations emerging against US hegemony in the past thirty years are not merely ‘geopolitics’. This is the real history of class struggle, popular democracy, and autonomous social organisation, the central demands of Communists within historic Non-Alignment, in the contemporary phase of global relations – from the communes of Venezuela, to Bolivia’s experiments in decolonial plurinationalism, to the whole range of measures undertaken in Cuba in recent decades to further social struggle on hunger, healthcare, racial justice, and the family. Even Iran, which makes no claims to socialism, has inspired and supported movements in Lebanon and Yemen, which have made significant victories over the economic and military stranglehold the US holds over the region. Where victories like this are possible, it is only because multipolarity has allowed for an intensified responsiveness to local conditions on the ground. Multipolarity – what the Zapatistas’ Subcommandante Marcos calls ‘a world in which many worlds fit’ – is the necessary condition for real class struggle in the present conjuncture. And Western capital knows it. Recent sanctions on Russia were explicitly designed to impact countries like Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba that ‘operate outside of the international financial system’ as mediated by the dollar and US-dominated institutions. There is no terrain for popular movements outside of these entanglements; the only choice is to engage in class struggle in and through multipolar relations or to abandon it altogether. As Communists under Nasser learned, it is always the left and the working class that are the first victims of a purified neutrality.

For Moyo and Yeros this signals a need for a National Left – not only an abstract internationalism. Whilst their intervention is salutary, it may risk a parallel abstraction of its own. Abdel-Malek reminds us that there is a key distinction between what he calls ‘nationalitarian construction’, the needs of underdeveloped countries to pursue their national interests towards economic sovereignty, and ‘nationalism’, the politics and movements that begin from national interest over and against a rejection of exploitation and oppression, originating first in imperialist nations before being exported around the globe. Nationalitarian construction, in Abdel-Malek’s account, whilst necessary, is not the same or even sufficient for a socialist programme, and indeed, often embodies a tension between popular projects and the nationalism of the local ruling class. In Britain, a nation built on the underdevelopment of the whole world, this is not even a tension; the national project can only ever be the perpetuation of British capitalism’s white supremacist alignment.

There is a reason why Jeremy Corbyn was regularly smeared as an agent of Putin; the threat of even mild social democracy to the British ruling class could only be recognised in the form of multipolarity and its threat to Britain’s central place in global capitalist hegemony. But to realise this threat as a serious alternative will demand more than a mere defence of Corbynism, let alone Putin. If there is to be a real movement of the popular classes in Britain – proletariat and lumpen, dynamised by the social formations of migration from the imperial periphery – it must begin with a rejection of the nation, and a break from that nation’s ruling class alignments, whether with Europe or, increasingly after Brexit, with the US. Not only a rejection, but the movement will need positive content, new formations and alignments, both at home and internationally, to support its struggle against the increasingly hardening ruling class state on these islands. This ‘populism without a nation’[11] must begin, following the lessons of the historic Communist movement, the New Left, and contemporary socialist experiments, with a multipolarity from below, if it is not to be crushed by a unipolarity from above.

[1] ‘The Life and Times of the First New Left’, New Left Review 61, Jan/Feb 2010. Link here.

[2] Anouar Abdel-Malek, Egypt: Military Society; The Army Regime, the Left, and Social Change under Nasser, translated by Charles Lam Makmann (Random House: New York, 1968), p. 223.

[3] Ibid., p. 120.

[4] Ibid. p. 305. The sole exception to this anti-Marxist bent was one state edition of Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.

[5] ‘A sense of classlessness’, in Selected Political Writings: The Great Moving Right Show and Other Essays, edited by Sally Davison, David Featherstone, Michael Rustin, and Bill Schwarz (Duke University Press: Durham, 2017), p. 28-46.

[6] Gilroy p. 56, 58

[7] A full account of what these various tendencies might suggest is a topic for another time.

[8] Abdel-Malek, p. 237.

[9] Abdel-Malek, p. 241.

[10] Cf. Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros, ‘Intervention: The Zimbabwe Question and the Two Lefts’, Historical Materialism 15 (2007), pp. 171-172.

[11] Inspired by G. A. Aloysios’ Nationalism without a Nation in India.

https://www.ebb-magazine.com/essays/mul ... en-and-now

I dunno that we should get all jazzed up about 'multipolarity'. While all no doubt wish to be relieved of the murderous burden of US hegemony and that in fact is necessary for survival we might think a little more deeply about what comes next. There has been no substantive imperialist competition since the end of WWII when the US was the only capitalist industrial power left standing. With the US de-throned will that not signal renewed capitalist competition among the old imperial powers which the US had contained? Not to mention rising stars like Brazil and India, possibly even capitalist Russia though it will need to regain it's manufacturing prowess first, which I kinda doubt the pirates in charge are inclined towards.

China, of course, could be the stabilizing factor. It's present course and especially the Belt and Road Initiative might preempt a lot of imperialist shenanigans by 'taking the high ground', as it were. Currently that seems our best bet, but still no panacea. As long as there is competition pitting workers against workers according to nation there will be friction. Only worldwide adoption of socialism will end that. Perhaps China will prove to be the vanguard nation, even if by circuitous means and despite the doubts of many.

I don't know how many more chances our species is going to get.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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