Ideology

[blindpig]

How to help end western Marxism’s purity fetish? Join the anti-NATO coalition the Ukraine proxy war has produced.

BY RAINER SHEA
JULY 22, 2023

Biden’s proxy war in Ukraine has exposed the problem that Carlos Garrido analyzes in his book The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism. As Garrido talks about, supposedly Marxist intellectuals like Zizek have responded to the conflict by calling to support NATO, portraying the alliance’s cause in Ukraine as just even though it was NATO’s fascist Kiev coup which started the conflict. This opportunistic accommodation of imperialist ideas is an extension of the same purist, undialectical mentality that’s also caused these “Marxists” to be anti-China, one the basis that its incorporation of markets means China’s state isn’t socialist.

Ukraine has revealed that the problem goes even deeper than that though. Because supporting China and its efforts to lift the exploited countries out of poverty is no longer the only big imperative for communists; there’s now an imperative for us to support Russia’s own counter-hegemonic actions—actions which have been advancing China’s projects. And this is also something these types on the left have refused to do.

This wouldn’t be surprising, except for how many of the Marxists who are pro-China have now simultaneously taken an anti-Russian stance. Not necessarily a pro-NATO stance; simply a position where they seek to distance themselves from Russia’s special military operation. And that’s undermined whatever good they could have done by supporting China, or by supporting the DPRK; because when a communist acts neutral in a conflict between imperialists and anti-imperialists, this by default helps the imperialists. It lets the hegemon better wage its narrative war, giving perceived credibility to its arguments for exacting reactionary violence. There’s a reason why radicals across the formerly colonized world have overwhelmingly been the ones voicing support for Russia, while the ones in the Euro-American sphere have overwhelmingly engaged in this “neutrality”; one side’s social conditions incentivize fighting NATO by any means necessary, while those of the other side incentivize ideological compromise with liberals.

I made these observations last year, when I noticed the socialist orgs in my country were making opportunistic decisions after the Ukraine war presented them with a choice. What I’ve since realized is that these decisions have been a consequence of a more fundamental deficiency within the thinking of today’s U.S. radicals. This was of course initially apparent from seeing the ultra-leftist reasoning behind these disavowals of the anti-imperialist cause; it was clear that this came from a failure to grasp primary vs secondary contradictions, and to see how the contradictions of the Russian state don’t make its weakening of U.S. hegemony a bad thing. Yet I still hadn’t so far seen how deeply this willful disregard for strategic thinking goes; these radicals are committing the error of purity fetishism on international issues parallel to the fetishistic error they’re committing on domestic issues.

This is the error of assuming that we can act idealistically within the domestic struggle, then expect to win. When ultra-lefts isolate themselves from essentially the entire anti-NATO movement because they only want to engage with others in left circles; or frame our society’s contradictions in ways that make it look like the differences between the workers are more important than their shared interests; they’re operating within the same logic that causes them to oppose the special military operation.

These stances are self-reinforcing; if somebody only sees leftists and liberals as worth reaching out to, and thinks every political person who isn’t on the left is by definition a fascist, they’re going to be further incentivized to join in on the vilifications of Russia. As due to the left’s own failures on anti-imperialism, the right has become a comparatively bigger source of anti-NATO sentiment; which can let the ultra-lefts attack serious anti-imperialist practice as innately right-wing, claiming anybody who’s open to participating in this practice is by default an irredeemable reactionary.

The truth is that the reactionaries they’re talking about, the culture war-obsessed individuals who’ve joined in on the recent anti-trans hysteria, naturally make themselves incompatible with a serious anti-imperialist movement; there’s no room for their polarizing rhetoric in a multi-tendency coalition. The anti-NATO coalition that’s emerged is predominantly made up of pro-Russian Marxists, and the types of libertarians whose main priority is challenging the war machine rather than fighting the left. If these ultras believe the presence of the latter element makes the pro-Russian stance of the former element incorrect; or makes the coalition hostile towards marginalized peoples; then they aren’t thinking about what it practically looks like to transform a society.

Every revolutionary movement starts by operating within a society that has contradictions. Should they effectively curse the same people they seek to liberate by isolating themselves to their own circle of “pure” minds? Or should they act like they have confidence in their own persuasive abilities, and build a relationship with the broad category of people? This is the question one can come to ask when they’ve realized the thing Garrido points out: that the people of this country are not their government, as increasingly their material interests don’t align with those of their capitalist ruling class:

Our country’s history, indeed, is a history marked by conquest, enslavement, genocide, exploitation, imperialism, and all the other evils brought by the development of the capitalist era in world history. It is also marked, however, by the struggles against feudal absolutism; by a promise for universal life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness — all demands which are unfulfillable within the capitalist mode of life; by the struggles against chattel slavery, wage slavery, genocidal attacks on indigenous communities; by the struggles, in the 20th century, against fascism, imperialism, for civil rights, for peace, etc. This is a complex, heterogeneous, and impure history. It is, in short, a contradictory history, containing within itself a unity of opposing forces — one which fights for human emancipation, the other which fights for preserving the tyranny of capital. We must learn how to use these objective contradictions to our advantage. The task ahead of us requires aligning our struggles today with the positive elements of the past and connecting the moribund capitalist-imperialist forces of our day with our past’s negative elements.

If many who oppose NATO are at the same time wrong about economic issues; or about the land question; then enter into their coalition so that you can help build a more progressive flank within the anti-imperialist front. Those who’ve come to an anti-imperialist consciousness represent the most advanced section of the masses, because fighting U.S. hegemony is at this stage the most impactful way to weaken U.S. capital; therefore this section of the people cannot be abandoned. Why render yourself politically handicapped by becoming isolated from the forces you need to work within in order to defeat the state? If anyone tells you this strategy means working with fascists, they’re either lying or misinformed; fascists naturally make themselves incompatible with a functional anti-imperialist front.

The communists who’ve joined this front seek to appeal neither to the imperialism-compatible left, nor to the fascists; they seek to go lower and deeper, as Lenin said, to find the real masses. Those being the quiet majority of apolitical individuals, and the kinds of more mildly conservative individuals who could become Marxists if they’re exposed to communist theory. Those within these elements don’t share the anti-Russian hysteria of the liberal minority, and therefore aren’t able to be alienated by an org’s backing Russia’s anti-fascist war.

When you start going lower and deeper, you see how misleading it is for left opportunism’s apologists to claim there’s no way to build a mass base while consistently backing anti-imperialist actions. It only looks like the broad masses view being pro-Russia as absolutely intolerable if you’ve only ever organized within left spaces, where residual anti-Russian attitudes from people’s past liberal phases are prevalent. This niche is not representative of the majority of the people; therefore putting forth a consistently anti-imperialist stance is not political suicide, it’s the opposite. If you compromise on fighting U.S. hegemony to appease liberals, the structure of imperial dominance which American capital depends on will remain strong enough for revolution to continue being delayed; break from the imperialism-compatible left so you can become principled, and you’ll actually be able to win.

The more of these things you realize, the more you see the nature of the ideological struggle that U.S. Marxists who are serious about anti-imperialism need to wage: we have to combat ideas that encourage idealism, and advance a practical means of struggle. History’s great Marxists have instructed us to do this in relation both to the international and domestic struggles; for an example of the international part of this type of theory, this is Kim Il Sung’s warning about the peril of opposing an anti-imperialist effort simply because its facilitators have contradictions:

In Asia, Africa and Latin America there are socialist and neutral countries, and big and small countries. All these countries except the puppet regimes of the imperialists and their satellite states constitute anti-imperialist, anti-U.S. forces. Despite the differences of state socio-political systems, political views and religious beliefs, the peoples of the countries in these areas, as the oppressed nations who were suppressed and exploited by the imperialists and colonialists, have the common goal and aspiration to achieve national independence and national prosperity against imperialism and old and new colonialism. The differences of state socio-political systems, political views or religious beliefs can by no means be an obstacle in the way of joint struggle against U.S. imperialism [emphasis mine]. All countries should form an anti-imperialist united front and take anti-U.S. joint action to crush the common enemy and attain the common goal…To split the anti-U.S. united front or reject the anti-U.S. joint action will only bring a serious consequence of weakening the anti-imperialist, anti-U.S. struggle.

This parallels the conclusion that Henry Winston came to about how oppressed peoples in the core of the empire can gain liberation; namely by rejecting the pseudo-revolutionary theories which can cause somebody to perpetuate needless divisions within the working class, and building a revolutionary coalition:

Among the radicals, Black and white, who have popularized the colony theory are Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton, Regis Debray, James Foreman, Tom Hayden, Harold Cruse, James Boggs, Stokely Carmichael and Robert L. Allen. It is ironic that many of these radicals, who claim that Marxism is European in origin and must be revised in order to apply to the Black people in the U.S., advance theories based on revisions of Marxism by such Europeans as Herbert Marcuse, Leon Trotsky and Regis Debray, as well as the Trotsky-like revisions to be found in the “thought” of Mao Tse-tung. It was especially under the influence of Marcuse and Maoism that the New Left radicals began to be attracted to one or another pseudo-revolutionary theory, including the concept of an “’internal colony” of Black people in the U.S. While Marcuse’s ideas are not identical with “the thought of Mao,” the views of both stimulated anti-Marxist misconceptions of the world revolutionary process, the historic role of the working class and its relationship to the liberation struggles of oppressed people, and the imperative need for strategies based on the specific features and historic development of each country, each working class and each national liberation movement. During every upsurge in the people’s struggles, especially those of the mainly working-class Black people, there is a more extensive activation of counter-measures designed to sustain disunity and block alliance between Black and white workers, together with the Black people as a whole, against corporate monopoly [emphasis mine].

In the age of the new cold war, where social media has become a powerful weapon which opportunists can easily use to warp perceptions of reality the measure these anti-revolutionary forces are employing is one of making serious anti-imperialist practice look like a betrayal of marginalized peoples. The narrative they’re promoting is that to commit to helping the anti-NATO movement is to enable white supremacy, since the most prominent parts of this movement at present are on the right.

The leftists who act like this are only abdicating their own responsibility to make up for their mistakes, and become serious about fighting U.S. hegemony; the way to make the anti-NATO movement more progressive is by doing the things necessary to gain influence (as in building a multi-tendency coalition), then use that influence to advance the struggle for class and social liberation. Which is a struggle that can’t be won until we’ve sufficiently weakened the Democratic Party’s control over organizing spaces; a task that can only be accomplished by consistently fighting NATO’s psyops.

The leftists who say this strategy necessarily comes at the cost of aiding reactionary politics support their argument by portraying the fight against U.S. hegemony as much less important than it actually is. They reject the reality that revolutionaries can’t win domestically without being serious about the international struggle, claiming revolution can come about through a policy of almost exclusively focusing on the domestic. This idea comes from a willfully limited perspective, where one neglects the macro in favor of what they can see in their own neighborhoods; American capitalist power is dozens of times bigger than the country’s capitalist state, its true size is as vast as Washington’s military and economic control abroad. Neglecting solidarity with the struggles against this control by peoples such as the Russians, however politically expedient that looks in the moment, can end only in the failure of your own organizing endeavor.

Conventional thinking in today’s American leftist circles incentivizes one to adopt such an opportunistic kind of practice when it comes to internationalism. This is because these circles also embrace the domestic equivalent of that practice, where building ties with the masses is rejected due to the masses being seen as too impure. That’s the way Marcuse, as Winston observed, taught his ideological students to see the people; he and those similar to him promoted the view that the masses are fundamentally reactionary, and can therefore only ever be brought to revolution if we were to first wait for some great crisis which changes their consciousness.

We’re half a century into the neoliberal era, where our ruling class has been progressively taking away the people’s economic rights; such a crisis has come, and yet what we call “the left” still encourages us to be insular. To act like the majority of Americans don’t have revolutionary potential, even though they’ve now likely had this potential for quite a while; and to therefore not feel encouraged when the people start to come to anti-imperialist ideas, but say “the only people open to those ideas are fascists.” This is the basis for the argument that the pro-Russian stance is necessarily a right opportunist one: an attitude of alienation from the majority of the people.

The purity fetish perpetuates this counterproductive thinking. It provides those seeking to discredit an effective revolutionary practice with endless arguments, since if one looks for reasons to judge something as impure, they’ll never run out of them. That’s not how a Marxist thinks; a Marxist who’s serious about winning sees that the contradictions within the efforts to defeat our government don’t mean we should forsake these efforts. They mean we should back these efforts, and advance an iteration of them which is more progressive in character.

https://newswiththeory.com/how-to-help- ... -produced/

Rainer is getting to be a 'broken record' on this issue, so shall I.

He's quite correct that we should not look to the liberals which pass for the 'left' in the mainstream media nor the so-called 'progressives' that tail them. And an 'alliance of convenience' against imperialism should quite definitely be in the 'playbook' and enacted asap. But to assume that this is a way to bring libertarians to communism is a mistake. Unless their 'libertarianism' is of the meekest form make no mistake, these people, given opportunity, are the most relentless enemies of communism. If they don't want us dead then in jail or out of the country.

What portion of the MAGAs are of this view I don't know, certainly a significant number. But not a majority I think, if only because most Americans are utterly superficial in their politics(No accident there, either...). And as near half of the qualified electorate apparently doesn't give a damn given the 'choices' the system presents them: there is the 'potential'. They want something completely different from the present, something that benefits them. I think we can work with that.

[blindpig]

To those who study the works of V.I. Lenin
No. 7/83.VII.2023

When I first got acquainted with the works of Lenin, I was struck not only by the sharpness of the leader's mind, the power of argumentation, the accuracy and clarity of style, but also the significance, the scale of generalizations, primarily about the movement of the masses. At first glance, they look like some Marxist schematics and politicized rhetoric. All sorts of bourgeois hacks and scientists perceive Lenin's texts in this way, not understanding and not wanting to understand the scientific significance of their generalizations.

For an example, to make it clear what we are talking about, let's open a completely arbitrary volume of Lenin's complete works and take a typical quote with a generalization:

“The international bourgeoisie, deprived of the opportunity to wage an open war against Soviet Russia, is waiting, watching for the moment when circumstances will allow it to resume this war.

The proletariat of the advanced capitalist countries has everywhere already put forward its vanguard, the communist parties, which are growing steadily moving towards winning over the majority of the proletariat in every country, destroying the influence of the old trade union bureaucrats and the top of the American and European working class corrupted by imperialist privileges.

The petty-bourgeois democracy of the capitalist countries, represented in its advanced part by the Second International and the II½ International, is at the present time the main pillar of capitalism, inasmuch as under its influence the majority or a considerable part of the industrial and commercial workers and employees remain, who are afraid, in the event of a revolution, of losing their comparative position. petty-bourgeois prosperity created by the privileges of imperialism. But the growing economic crisis is everywhere worsening the position of the broad masses, and this circumstance, along with the ever more obvious inevitability of new imperialist wars while capitalism is preserved, makes this support more and more shaky.

The working masses of the colonial and semi-colonial countries, constituting the vast majority of the world's population, have been awakened to political life since the beginning of the 20th century, especially by the revolutions in Russia, Turkey, Persia and China. The imperialist war of 1914-1918 and Soviet power in Russia finally transform these masses into an active factor in world politics and the revolutionary destruction of imperialism, although this is not yet seen by the stubbornly educated philistinism of Europe and America, including the leaders of the Second and Second½ Internationals. British India is at the head of these countries, and in it the revolution grows the faster, the more significant it becomes, on the one hand, the industrial and railway proletariat, and on the other hand, the more brutal the terror of the British becomes, resorting more and more often to massacres. (Amritsar), and to public floggings, etc.”

If you do not know history, do not understand the historical context of the era and are only familiar with the tertiary educational historical literature, then such reasoning does not look like something unusual. Approximately so they write about social processes and give political characteristics in textbooks. But Lenin did not write about the past, when everything more or less became clear, but spoke about the day for him today. He absolutely categorically stated what was happening at the moment when he wrote these lines.

Imagine the complexity, variegation, richness of real life and the scarcity, clutter of the information available to Lenin, which could be scientifically generalized to such conclusions.

When I first studied Lenin, I had an idea about history, about those events and processes on the basis of which Lenin's conclusions arose. I did not know and still do not know only the sources of Lenin's awareness, that is, the degree of completeness of information at his disposal. But, probably, she was very modest, dependent on newspaper reports, and in them, as a rule, only the most superficial information. It was all the more surprising to realize the accuracy of Lenin's characteristics and forecasts. Even today, far from all historians, even of a Marxist persuasion, could give such a generalization. Lenin knew how to examine reality very deeply, to notice in it the main thing, the causal in dynamics.

If, however, one treats Lenin disrespectfully, and treats his texts not as a source of scientific wisdom, then his conclusions look like politically biased schematics. Anti-Leninists will certainly find minor inaccuracies in the works of Lenin, and the main thing, in which he turned out to be right, will either be misrepresented or declared to be a coincidence.

Today there are many "theorists" who write in the style of such generalizations, based on various anti-scientific methodological approaches. But the problem is that their views are not confirmed by practice, forecasts do not come true, while Lenin's ones have been confirmed and come true. Yes, and some leftists have mastered a similar style and like to speculate about the development of the labor movement, the international situation, and the like, but there is no scientific value in their research. Life constantly refutes their conclusions and forecasts.

Reflecting for some time on the principles and mechanisms of Lenin's knowledge, especially in the process of such generalizations, I came to the following conclusions, which I want to share.

Firstly , Lenin's thinking was based on diamatics , that is, the recognition of the materiality of the world, that society is a highly developed matter, the movement (existence) of which is subject to known laws.

This allowed his thinking to immediately brush aside all frankly idealistic options for explanations and interpretations, from religious to all sorts of mystical ones.

For example, bourgeois ideologists are quite successful in convincing people that Western countries throughout their history have been striving to destroy Russia, whether it be the Russian Tsardom, the Russian Empire, Soviet Russia or the USSR, either out of Russophobia, or out of hatred for Orthodoxy and " Russian world. Of course, the diamatic cannot hold such a view, because it is speculative and thoroughly idealistic. And it's not even that there are many historical facts that contradict this "generalization", it is anti-scientific in its methodological basis. The policy of states, especially over the centuries, when these states themselves experienced revolutionary transformations, cannot be determined by principles, ideas, feelings, no matter how deep and rooted they may be.

It is clear to the impartial view of a Marxist that the political struggle of states in different epochs is based on the interests of the ruling classes in the possession of this or that property (from masses of slaves to oil fields) or control over the factors that increase this property (from trade routes to the finances of entire countries). And ideas, passions, feelings and political doctrines only served and continue to serve this private property struggle.

Diamatics allowed Leninist thinking:

1) remain objective;

2) to take the whole set of diverse relations of the subject of consideration to other things and processes, including from the point of view of the general and universal;

3) to see the development of an object, a process through negation (“repetition in the higher stage of known features, properties, etc. of the lower one, supposedly returning to the old”);

4) fix internal "contradictory tendencies", that is, those opposites (in their identity and unity) that make up any object or process;

5) to analyze and synthesize parts of the subject matter;

6) to mark the endless process of revealing new sides, the transition of its features, properties into their opposites;

7) distinguish form from content in their interconnection (struggle);

8) highlight quantitative parameters in the movement of quality.

For example, in the above quotation, an international situation is considered, the content of which is the struggle of capitalism against communism, and its form is the imperialist policy of the bourgeois states. The main pillar of capitalism, petty-bourgeois democracy, and the opposites that make it up and make it contradictory and shaky are indicated: the philistinism of the Western proletariat and the crisis in its position. Attention is drawn to the fact that the development of the system of imperialism is associated with the inclusion in its orbit of the peoples of the colonies, which inevitably become a revolutionary factor.

That is, when we examine Lenin's conclusions through the prism of methodology, all those principles and tools that we attribute to diamatics are visible in his presentation. But the problem is that admiring Leninism, moving thought from Lenin's conclusions to methodology, is not enough;

Secondly , Lenin's thinking was based not just on diamatics, but on diamatics applied to the study of society .

Diamatics as a methodology of thinking is a universal method of cognition, its subject is the laws of thinking, and its object is being, objective reality . All the truly valuable methodological developments of the private sciences, all the “spontaneous materialism of the naturalists”, everything dialectical and materialistic in philosophy is not fully understood, incomplete, cut diamatics.

Diamatics took place through the brilliant efforts of Marx and Engels as a critical revision and generalization of all previous scientific theory. Diamatics was developed not on the basis of experiments, statistics, surveys, or other empiricism, but as a result of a critical revision of the understanding of the entire socio-historical practice of mankind (including all significant empiricism), expressed primarily in "German classical philosophy".

Diamatics, focused on the study of society, primarily on the processing of "English political economy" and "French socialism" as the most mature schools of economic and political thought at that time, for the first time in the history of mankind, gave scientific answers to questions about the social structure . The founders of Marxism were forced to study the delusions of their predecessors in order to create a scientific, that is, diamatic version of history in the form of a change in production methods and socio-economic formations, which from a theoretical point of view is not the same thing.

*
If we try, purely from didactic considerations, to present the most fundamental conclusions of diamatics about the structure of society as theses that the researcher needs to adhere to, then we get the following (moreover, these theses are, as it were, matryoshka-like, each subsequent one clarifies the previous one, is derived from it).

1 . Human society develops and develops naturally and historically. This means, firstly, that, despite the diversity of conditions, regions, communities, peoples, cultures, etc., the same objective laws operate everywhere, that is, the essence of man and society in all epochs is the same for everyone and the same; secondly, that the explanation of the state of society at any historical moment must be based solely on material (in the broad sense) factors; the causes of the present must be looked for exclusively in the past, revealing how still immature tendencies make their way, how the "weak new" fights with the "strong old" and overturns it. It is unscientific to use causeless phenomena, foreign entities, exaggerated subjective factors in the explanation.

2 . The development of human society occurs in stages. There are three major stages associated with its final separation from the "animal kingdom": communist primitiveness (more than a hundred thousand years), class, exploitative societies (about 7 thousand years) and communism. In exploitative societies, the form of their existence changed: slavery, feudalism, capitalism (hence the term "formation").

If the confrontation between man and nature (including the cosmos) as his habitat is an eternal, fundamental law of social existence, then the opposition of people to each other, class division and exploitation is the law of the period of exploitative formations.

Initially, the opposition of people to each other occurs primarily about things, material goods. And the main thing and the main thing in the real sphere are the factors of production: land, means and tools of labor, which give control over labor resources.

The opposition of people to each other in the sphere of social relations is precisely the private relations of property.

The opposition of people in its extreme degree is associated with coercion, therefore private property relations are inconceivable without violence. Violence becomes the other side of private property.

The division of labor with the development of production activity deepens, separating a layer of managers from society. They, due to the dominance of semi-animal atavisms in the psyche, turn into private property first foreigners, then fellow tribesmen and land. So there was a class division of society. Together with the establishment of private property relations as dominant, the state was formed - a special apparatus of violence that rose above society, protecting the established order and the propertied classes.

For thousands of years, humanity has been marking time in social development, only the forms of domination of the minority over the majority (slavery, serfdom, hired labor) have been replaced. By a monstrous waste of effort and life, we have finally reached a sufficiently high technological level of production so that no one has any doubts that everyone can be provided with everything necessary for prosperity and work. The exploiting class has finally degraded from leaders-managers into meaningless in every sense oligarchs-perverts, whose competence does not exceed the level of a typical layman parasite. Everything in the world is produced by the proletarians, all production processes are controlled by the proletarians, many state administrators have left the proletariat, the rich only lead an idle lifestyle and sometimes sit back in parliamentary and presidential chairs.

3. Human society must be considered scientifically, that is, revealing the essential behind external phenomena. The people themselves, their relationships, including personal ones, all the phenomena of social life and culture - all this is society. However, if we look at society scientifically, we will see, firstly, that humanity exists through the transformation of the conditions of its existence (by labor, and not by adaptation, like animals), and secondly, that the transformation of conditions always occurs in a certain, more and more complex way. , which is a way of reproduction of society. That is, humanity reproduces itself by transforming nature and, as a result, transforming itself. True, the growth of reason, intellect, the emergence of scientific thinking have long allowed us to consciously configure the forms of our interaction in such a way that to make the transformation more intensive, we developed at a faster pace. And this will be embodied under communism, this is its essence - the connection of science with all spheres of society, primarily with production.

The method of reproduction of society is traditionally called the term "mode of production" and is divided into productive forces, that is, the people themselves with the instruments of production, and the production relations between them. It is in the bowels of the productive forces, that is, in the minds of people and the technologies that they have mastered, that tendencies are born to transform the relationship between them. On the other hand, relations of production are the economic basis of the exploitative formation, therefore their transformation is impossible without breaking the political system and overcoming the forceful resistance of the ruling classes.

4 . Hence, a scientific view is needed on the political structure of society. Outwardly, it seems to most that politics is regulation, management of society, the development of laws by which it must live. With this approach, no matter how much one understands it, it is not clear what lies at the basis of politics (why the laws and their application are such, and not others, why laws work here, but not here, and so on), so bourgeois political scientists reduce their explanations to the fact that politics is the result of some kind of compromise, a “social contract”, a kind of “normality” that satisfies everyone. The popularity and vitality of this view is due to the fact that in a capitalist country politics really does look somewhat like a compromise, not between citizens, but between the most influential clans and groups of the oligarchy.

Lenin said about capitalism that politics is the concentrated expression of economics, adding that "politics cannot but have primacy over economics." The diamatics here is as follows: the economy is primary in relation to everything in society, including politics, but politics in society plays a dominant role. People who are deeply traumatized by formal logic and the rational approach are confused by this: how can something primary not have primacy over secondary?

Politics is not "the art of statecraft" but class struggle. The state is the organization of the exploiting class, whose main task is to root and maintain, through violence, production relations. All other functions of the state, including competition with other states, are secondary and optional. In any state, the system of courts, prisons, and police is more powerful than the army, and where, by misunderstanding, this is not the case, the army is used to maintain internal order.

Moreover, the class struggle is understood not only as the struggle of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat, but also as the struggle of various detachments of the bourgeoisie against each other, the bourgeoisie of various national detachments, and so on.

Thus, consideration of all social processes is scientifically possible only through the prism of the formational approach. The economic basis is the relations of production, above them rises the political superstructure in the form, first of all, of the state. They relate to each other as form and content, and the form forcibly holds the content, although the productive forces, that is, people and technology, have long outgrown such base and semi-animal relations.

When you go to work for a capitalist in the morning, exchange your priceless life for money, ruin your talents for the sake of getting bread, instead of really benefiting society, this is the very compulsion to maintain the current quality of production relations. Everything is being done primarily to ensure that the narrow stratum of the oligarchy concentrates ever greater social wealth in its hands. And your enemy is not so much the specific capitalist for whom you work, he is also often pinned down by banks and monopolies, but the entire system of finance capital. That is, the personalized enemies of the working people are the upright who have climbed to the very top of this pyramid of exploitation and who are so powerful that they are able to dictate not only prices and wages, but also state decisions.

Although the state stands above society, including above the exploiting class, it acts in the interests of the latter. In addition to the fact that the bourgeoisie controls power, under capitalism as a whole society is split into two antagonistic classes and almost everything important and significant happens either in the interests of one class or in the interests of another.

5 . The question of the relationship between economics and politics is a special case of the question of the relationship between the objective and the subjective in society. What is objective in politics is only the inevitability of the state, coercion, violence and conflict of interests, that is, that which flows directly into politics from the economy. Engels wrote that the state is the inevitable product of the insolubility of class contradictions. Yet the forms and "figures" of political life depend on subjective factors.

To use a simple and apt analogy with a ball, the air with which it is inflated is the relations of production, and the chamber is the state and politics. The pressure created by the air is the only thing that makes the chamber objectively inevitable. And what this chamber is like, what kind of lining and tire is on it, depends on the will of classes, people, external conditions of life, and so on, that is, mainly subjective.

From the point of view of the political superstructure, capitalism in the United States, France, Sweden, Russia, Belarus, Iran and Zimbabwe is very different. From an economic point of view, it is identical and differs only in the level of development, that is, in the level of monopolization, militarization and decay.

Diamatics requires a clear distinction between the objective and the subjective, primarily because scientific knowledge is an adequate reflection of the objective in the subjective. Our task is to combine science with the movement of the masses and to subordinate all the activities of society to the objective laws of its development - this is the manifestation of freedom. People for the most part do not understand who they are in essence, why they are surrounded by such circumstances, what social forces dominate them. Therefore, they act on the basis of self-interest, fear and habits. That is why capitalism keeps afloat, despite the monstrously irrational organization of society.

Diamatics also requires that the scientific nature of conclusions and activities be clearly maintained, that is, not only that the subjective adequately reflect the objective, but also that the subjective in practice turns into an objective struggle, into an objective transformation of society.

Thus, the communist movement in bourgeois society and its highest manifestation, the policy of the communist party, are subjective. But they become objective when the total strength of the working class becomes threatening, or even more so after the establishment of a dictatorship with corresponding measures in the economy. The objectivity of capitalism is overturned by the objectivity of communism through the growth of the quality of the subjective factor: the organized revolutionary class under the leadership of a party of the vanguard type.

In society, only that which does not change at any stages and formations of its development is absolutely, unshakable objectively. All other objectivity is bound by the inertia and spontaneity of the masses. Today, the masses, due to ignorance and downtroddenness, believe in capitalism, they do not understand any other reality except the bourgeois one, they do not know the instruments of social revolution. Therefore, capitalism is objective. The violence of the state only reinforces this ignorance and this faith, crushing the will of all those who oppose capitalism.

6 . Communism is not a desire for abstract justice and not a desire to improve life, but the inevitable future of mankind. The essence of communism is to direct the activities of people along the path of meaningful development of society. Total, universal scientificity and communism are synonymous. It is precisely for this that the struggle for power, the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the organization of the dictatorship of the working class and the subsequent transformation of all social processes are necessary.

Spontaneity and non-science in the life of society always manifest themselves as private property relations. No matter how accidental stupidity or the machinations of villains and madmen may seem to be the tragedies and catastrophes of capitalism, their fundamental cause is private property. Ignorance and stupidity, meanness and villainy, selfishness and indifference take root and germinate only on the fertile soil of opposing people to each other.

If these theses are correctly understood and taken as the basis of a person's worldview and worldview, then something like a grid of coordinates, a materialistic framework, arises in the mind, which allows one to scientifically process and evaluate facts. This allows not only to discard false information without wasting time and effort searching for its refutation, but also to single out the main thing from the entire array of events.

Take, for example, the events of Prigogine's rebellion. Information about it was contradictory, the dynamics of events was fast, but nevertheless, Marxism allows us to draw the main conclusions about the essence and significance of this phenomenon almost instantly. A diamatic, unlike a bourgeois political scientist, does not need to delve into the kitchen of the PMC-Ministry of Defense-Putin relations in order to reveal the essence of the process, because we already understand in advance how society works and what internal mechanisms set in motion all its constituent parts. Class analysis in this sense is a universal method of comprehension in a class society.

The work of Lenin's thought proceeded in the same way in considering the international situation in the quotation above.

The only way to develop diamatic thinking is to repeatedly study the theory of Marxism-Leninism more and more deeply, think through its content and study historical and current events. The more conscientious a person is in comprehending the theory, the higher his skills of independent thinking become.

Today, more than ever before, it is necessary to master theoretical thinking in order to prepare the backbone of the cadres of the pariah of scientific centralism.

A. Redin
28/07/2023

https://prorivists.wordpress.com/83_leninism/

Google Translator

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British Communist Joti Brar: PCV & KKE do Disservice to the Anti-Imperialist Cause
JULY 28, 2023


Poster for OT's special interview with British communist leader Joti Brar, with a caption reading "On Imperialism and Communist Parties," next to a photo of Brar. Photo: Orinoco Tribune.

Caracas, June 5, 2023 (OrinocoTribune.com)—During an interview with British communist Joti Brar, the European political leader expressed her frustration with the way the Venezuelan Communist Party (PCV) and the Greek Communist Party (KKE) have initiated an international campaign against the Bolivarian Revolution and against the anti-imperialist cause, after the recent rupture of relations and subsequent confrontation between the PCV and the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV).

This Monday, July 24, Jesús Rodriguez-Espinoza—the editor and founder of the Orinoco Tribune—interviewed the British communist cadre, who is an anti-imperialist and socialist leader of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist). Brar has been involved in the socialist movement since early age, working as trade union organizer and as a writer on topica such as imperialism, socialism, and the working class. She also actively participates in the World Anti Imperialist Platform.

Inter-imperialist debate
Brar was first questioned about how some forces—especially in the Global North—hold the notion that the war in Ukraine is some sort of imperialist battle between Russia and Ukraine in a “neo-colonial” revival of the old Russian empire and also have created the idea of China as another imperial power. Brar clearly responded that capitalist forces has taken Marxist-Leninist terminology and “turned [them] against us,” including words like imperialism or colonialism.
“They use these terms which are Leninist, which are Marxist terms which have an emotional impact on socialists, right? And they use them to describe their actions. So they say, they talk about Russia as an aggressive imperialist power. So that immediately has an emotional impact on people who identify as socialists, right? “Oh gosh, I can’t be on the side of aggressive imperialists,” and then they say what they want to do, bless them, is to decolonize Russia … Don’t you understand? So the imperialists are very good at taking our terminology and using it against us. But of course, this only works if you’re a self identifying, emotional communist, and not an actual student of socialism. Because if you study Marxism, this won’t fool you … the root cause is opportunism.”

(Video at link.)

The Brirtish Marxist further spoke on the Ukrainian issue, regarding the idea that Vladimir Putin simply woke up one day and decided he was going to attack Ukraine because he’s an evil, aggressive monopolist and wants to loot the country, stating that such an idea “doesn’t make any sense.” In her opinion, this is one of the reasons behind the creation of the World Anti Imperialist Platform, “because clarity is really needed.”

On this same issue—specifically, regarding the component of political training—she highlighted the fact that many “Marxists” treat ideology as a “a reading list that they did once.” She emphasized that only a methodical and recurrent reading of the Marxist-Leninist classics is capable not only of countering the bourgeois propaganda that every person has to withstands on a daily basis, but to bring back one’s convictions and sharpen perspectives on relevant issues.

In response to a question about the responsibility of Trotskyists and Anarchists on the deviations from the real Marxist-Leninist ideology, Brar said that Trotskyism is “a modern movement created and funded by the state machinery of the west. It’s a petty bourgeois ideology, but it’s been heavily promoted, created, funded in order to catch revolutionary young people, particularly students—who would otherwise be a reserve of the revolution—to keep them busy for a while and then spit them out.”

Brar added that they are “catching people who sincerely want to do something about the injustice they see in the world,” when asked about how to bring those participating in good faith in these deviations to the Marxist-Leninist side. “So those people are really our people, they’re people who should be with us. But they’ve been caught by this machinery and that’s a shame for them … you’ve got to recognize that their ideology itself is absolutely incompatible with socialism.

“It’s a pro imperialist ideology, essentially, that the organizations, many of them, are led and funded by the state. They’re not going to be pulled into anything useful, but many of their people are sincere people, who are just misinformed and miseducated by this machinery. So is there hope for catching some of these people, changing their minds, pulling them back? Of course; if there wasn’t, if you can’t change people’s minds, you can’t make a revolution.”

“The good left and the bad left”
Referring to the stigmatized so-called “bad Latin American left” and the “good” one portrayed by Chile’s Boric, the British communist without blinking stated that “we’ve seen how Chile is earning its good boy points,” regarding “the latest statements from Boric about how Russia is an imperialist aggressor in Ukraine,” adding that “[the west is] demanding this submission before their holy crusade,” and that “those countries refusing to bow down are the countries which are independent, the countries which run their own foreign policy and make their own decisions and try to run their countries in the interests of their own people, and not in the interests of US or British or French banks. And because they do that, they are vilified.”

Brar also spoke about her visits to Venezuela, remembering her travels to the country in 2019—at the peak of US and European aggression—and also most recently in 2023. She noted that during the most recent trip, she could “feel that despite the difficulty, there was a change in the atmosphere, there was hope in the air that says, we have weathered everything they’ve thrown at us, and we’re still here. And not only are we still here, but the world is changing and the cavalry is coming, and we are going to have the ability to build our economy the way we’ve been promising ourselves we will,” a change that is not there yet but that is in the making.

“They try to isolate countries and then they tell us, oh, it’s isolated, as if it made the choice,” Brar stated, on the imperialist narrative regarding truly independent countries that are not bending to US and European hegemonic pressure. “We’ve been hearing it about North Korea for decades, haven’t we? ‘Oh, it’s hermetic hermetically sealed.’ And you’re like, you’re trying to seal it! I don’t think that’s the Korean’s choice.”

PSUV and PCV
For the second part of the interview, Brar became the interviewer, and questioned Jesús Rodriguez-Espinoza about the PCV’s recent allegations against the Venezuelan government, as well as its move asking international communist movements to join them in signing statements “condemning the Venezuelan government right at the moment when imperialism is attacking.”

“No matter what the content of your dispute is, this is not the behavior of an anti-imperialist,” Brar commented. “So I don’t even know about the details of the allegations that they make, but the way that they’re making them is extremely worrying to me.”

In his response, the editor of the Orinoco Tribune’s emphasized the fact that the whole confrontation is the result of the leadership of the PCV being co-opted by Troskyist tendencies, that most recently has taken the form of accusing President Maduro of being neoliberal. According to Rodriguez-Espinoza, such a position is a big mistake, because Chavismo has been always very committed to the people, to the working people, to the working class, and not to the corporations and the private sector and big capital.

Rodriguez-Espinoza added that since 2018, Maduro’s administration—forced by the illegal US-enforced blockade and the resulting economic crisis—has made some decisions that some people might term neoliberal without context, but, in reality, the decisions are strategic retreats in order to face the crisis; “a crisis never seen in Venezuelan history.”

Adding to this point, Brar linked the PCV behavior to that shown by the Greek Communist Party (KKE), which has in recent years been serving as ringleader of the aforementioned theory of an “inter-imperialist” war, regarding the NATO war against Russia in Ukraine. She worried about the damage these organizations are doing to the communist movement, noting that it feels like a tragedy because many might think that these organizations with allegedly strong cadre formation are going to be the “steel at the heart” of anti-imperialism, but are instead acting in the opposite direction.

The British communist leader added that she found the number of Communist Parties around the world who have rushed to sign every statement that the PCV asks them to sign both shocking and irresponsible. Rodriguez-Espinoza meanwhile commented that besides his criticism against the PCV’s actions, he doesn’t support movements to judicialize the PCV, condemning moves of the PCV leadership that have revealed their alignment with far-right organizations both inside and outside Venezuela.

Joti Brar was recently interviewed by Alexander McKay from Red Star Radio during the most recent meeting of the World Anti-Imperialist Platform, held last March in Caracas, Venezuela. As a part of the interview, she described in detail the inspiring experience she had during her recent visit to the home of Chavismo.

https://orinocotribune.com/british-comm ... ist-cause/

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Renewing political Marxism
Originally published: Spectre Journal on August 3, 2023 by Daniel Tutt (more by Spectre Journal) | (Posted Aug 07, 2023)

POLITICAL MARXISM FROM WOOD TO GARO


Communism and Strategy: Rethinking Political Mediations
by Isabelle Garo
VERSO BOOKS 2023

In just a matter of years before the collapse of the USSR, the Marxist historian Ellen Meiksins Wood wrote an incisive critique of the state of Marxist theory at the time. Wood’s now infamous work, The Retreat from Class: A New “True” Socialism was written in the late 1980s, a social context in which neoliberal reforms—from the gutting of social services and the decline of the labor movement, to the disappearance of socialist and mass parties—were already well-established features of social life. In this depoliticized context, in which there seemed no alternative to capitalism on the horizon, Wood accused Marxist theorists of leaning on opaque philosophy and stripping Marxism of its radical core.

Her polemic primarily took on the widely-read 1985 work, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. This text aimed to fundamentally reset socialist strategy for a post-Soviet world by synthesizing philosophical concepts that grew out of French theory and Althusserian Marxism during the 1960s and 70s. Inspired by Althusser and a mélange of French Theory, post-structuralism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Laclau and Mouffe turned away from an understanding of class as a matter of exploitation tied to relations of productive labor and towards an understanding of class and political subjectivity vis-à-vis discourse and language.

But it was not just the eclectic philosophical and academic terminology they smuggled into Marxist thought that proved problematic in Wood’s view. It was the ways that Laclau and Mouffe, along with Nicos Poulantaz and other “post-Marxists,” had seriously, if not irreparably, altered the core tenets of Marxism. The most damaging thesis that this constellation of thinkers proposed was the notion that there is nothing in the logic of capitalism that determines the development of a united working class. It followed that there could be no such thing as a working-class interest apart from and prior to its ideological construction.1 This new age of “post”-Marxist theorists had regressed to what Marx and Engels called “true socialism” in the Communist Manifesto. The so-called “true socialists” in Marx’s and Engels’s time were socialists in the revolutionary intelligentsia such as Bruno Bauer and Moses Hess who developed abstract philosophical conceptions of socialism untethered from working class interests.

Thirty-five years have passed since the publication of Wood’s polemic. While the state of Marxist theory today is often relegated to academic journals and conferences, it would be unfair to judge post-Marxist theory as completely disconnected from the practical struggles of the left. To the contrary, many Marxist theorists—whether they embrace the often-pejorative moniker of “post”-Marxist or not—have contributed to shaping the strategies and the ideas of political movements on the left. Antonio Negri’s and Michael Hardt’s Empire series was highly influential on the tactics of the alter-globalization protest movements throughout the early 2000s, and Laclau and Mouffe’s ideas proved fundamental for post-2008 anti-austerity and left populist struggles. Much of the rhetorical tactics of the left during this time, from Occupy Wall Street’s left-populist slogan “1% vs. the 99%,” to the democratic political coalitions of Syriza in Greece and PODEMOS in Spain, were articulations of a Laclauian method of politics. But with the defeat of these governing coalitions, combined with the defeat of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, and mixed with a post-COVID world in which worker agitations and labor union militancy are ascendent, the state of Marxist theory is due for another shake-up.

Isabelle Garo’s recently-translated work, Communism and Strategy: Rethinking Political Mediations was released in the spring of 2023 amid the largest worker uprisings France has seen in decades. Garo is a communist philosopher whose work is less well-known in Anglo-American contexts than it is in France. Her work examines the legacy of 1960s and 70s French philosophy and its often-idiosyncratic interaction with contemporary Marxist and communist theory and practice. Garo’s most substantive work prior to Communism and Strategy is called Foucault, Deleuze, Althusser & Marx; there, she argues that Althusserian Marxism has given rise to a generation of Marxist philosophers who have contributed to the depoliticization of Marxist practice.2 Althusser’s legacy is responsible for rendering Marxism entirely too philosophical. While proscribing a new politicized conception of struggle, it remained housed entirely within theory and philosophy.

The disciples of Althusser, from Jacques Ranciére, Étienne Balibar, and Alain Badiou, to more well-known figures such as Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, remain lodestars and touchstones for contemporary Marxist theory. In Garo’s reading, Althusser stands as the preeminent Marxist thinker from whom this assortment of the leading lights of French theory drew their understanding of Marxism. In Garo’s reading, Althusser simultaneously declared the defeat of Marxism and offered a completely revamped direction that Marxism is to take, one in which the philosophical understanding of antagonism is no longer based in a Hegelian account of mediation.

Most notably, Althusser incorporated a psychoanalytic conception of social antagonisms that draws from the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. He relied in particular on the idea of “over-determination,” a concept in which social and political contradictions are thought as irreducibly complex and generated by multiple factors rather than analyzed as forms composed by causal unity. In his polemics with French Stalinism, Althusser declared the defeat of Marxism and proceeded to usher in a major overhaul of Marxist theory and practice. Most notably, this overhaul moved Marxism away from humanism, Hegelianism, and towards a new foundation in science grounded in the French epistemological tradition. But Garo argues this overhaul contributed to a move away from a foothold in the critique of political economy and moved Marxist practice away from engagement with unions and political organizations. Althusser’s conception of “theoretical practice,” or the means by which the theorist arrives at scientific knowledge, has contributed to a politicization of philosophy within Marxist practice. Yet, by de-emphasizing the centrality of the critique of political economy, Althusser depoliticized core, labor-focused aspects of practical struggle. It is with this skepticism towards the legacy of French Marxism that Garo’s latest work Communism and Strategy must be assessed. The book is not to be understood as a narrow polemical tract against post-Marxist theory. The first half of the book is a comparative analysis of three radically divergent post-Marxist theorists: Alain Badiou, Ernesto Laclau, and Antonio Negri. Though incompatible with each other, each of them are distinguished and popular Marxist thinkers who have made crucial contributions to Marxist thought.

In the first four chapters, Garo narrows in on what is most novel about these authors’ contributions to Marxist thinking. In the case of Badiou, it is the question of the state and the party; Laclau is a thinker of revolutionary strategy, albeit on radically revised terms than those on which Marx theorized revolution; Negri is a thinker of the changing conditions of labor and property. The remaining chapters of the book concern Garo’s own singular approach to reading Marx through a theory of what she calls “strategy,” or a study of what enables “the collective construction of a project of general, mobilizing, radical transformation by the exploited and dominated.”3 But before we consider Garo’s prescriptions for a revitalized political Marxism, we must first turn to her original reading of Laclau, Badiou and Negri, as it is not quite Wood’s reading.

Isabelle Garo’s work examines the legacy of 1960s and 70s French philosophy and its often-idiosyncratic interaction with contemporary Marxist and communist theory and practice.

UNTETHERING THE PROLETARIAT FROM MARXIST POLITICAL ECONOMY

A central claim of Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is that the failure of communism implies that the very idea of socialism has also become discredited. This means that virtually everything in Marxist theory can be taken back to the drawing board and assessed anew. To understand the radicality of Laclau and Mouffe’s revisions to Marxist thought, Garo convincingly shows that these were not revisions inspired primarily by empirical analyses borne from the rise of neoliberal capitalism and the fall of the USSR. The radicality of their revision to Marxist thought is discovered in Laclau’s earlier work, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, published in 1977. In this work, Laclau began to move away from what he saw as a fundamentally class-reductionist worldview in Marx’s own thought and in the subsequent Marxism of the worker’s movement. Equipped with the epistemological insights from French philosophy and with close attention to Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts, Laclau sought to make Marxism into a theory which, like any other theory, must be made “subject to the exigency of a constructed coherence rather than of verifiable knowledge.”4 In his view, Marxist ideas are clarified by their own internal and formal rules of construction and Garo argues that this has the practical effect that ideology need no longer “relate to class interests or objective logics.”5

In this early intervention, Laclau rejects both the assertion of a basic antagonism between capital and labor and the notion that capitalism can be construed as a mode of production. By positing that there is no basic antagonism between capital and labor, he then proposes an account of contemporary society as in a continuous state of ontological disequilibrium. Over the course of his oeuvre, Laclau eventually adopts a populist conception of politics that is grounded in the controversial German jurist Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political, a position that maintains that politics is neutralized by the social sphere. Consequently, the social power of rhetoric and discourse become the central preoccupation of Laclau’s later political thought.

Laclau makes the main task of politics the coordination of heterogeneous social demands from a range of vaguely leftist social movements; he then aims for the conversion and organization of these social identity groups into more radical democratic coalitions. This political framework importantly calls for a new vocation of the leftist intellectual which, as we noted earlier, has been highly influential on the Left in both the alter-globalization period from the early 1990s through to the post-2008 turn to anti-austerity and left-populism. The Laclauian intellectual is not a critical analyst of material conditions but a conductor and sloganeer in the service of coalitional blocs that include a panoply of causes, from ecological, anti-racism, and labor, to feminist and so on. Having abandoned the core tenet of Marx that labor power is a commodity that must be abolished, Laclau enlarges the basis of leftist demands through a conception of the proletariat as broadly tied into an idea of the underdogs or the “plebs.”

Based on these significant revisions to core Marxist tenets regarding an understanding of capital and labor, Laclau has often been accused of falling sway to a postmodernist position. While Laclau is a believer in the power of discourse in shaping political identities, he endows the power of discourse with what Garo rightly calls a “quasi demiurgic power” once it is embodied. Thus, accusations that Laclau is a postmodernist who somehow submits to a fundamentally illusory conception of reality is an accusation that does not accurately depict his work.

While Laclau has made important contributions to radical strategy for the Left, he problematically maintains that capitalism is fundamentally untranscendable. Thus, not only does Laclau abandon an account of class as understood in terms of relations of domination and exploitation, his core idea of power makes the prospect of what a rhetorically charged left populist governing coalition can achieve fundamentally unclear. Laclau’s work leaves us with what Garo refers to as “a hyper politics, cut off from the reality of exploitation, social injustice and all forms of domination,” i.e., a politics “based on nothing but itself.”6

In the work of Alain Badiou, we find an equally creative confrontation and reworking of Marxist thought; but, unlike Laclau, Badiou insists on a systematic refusal of participation in elections, labor unions, and other capitalist institutions. Badiou proposes a radically revamped Twenty-First Century Marxism in which communist militants must subtract their activity from the machinery of capitalist dominated political institutions, a position inspired by Mao’s critique of bureaucratic representation. Garo reads Badiou’s political thought as a double-edged sword for contemporary Marxism: while he makes important contributions to communism in the areas of party, state, and revolutionary strategy, his thought is also voluntarist and abstractly disconnected from the world of existing institutions. This portrait of Badiou at times risks falling into the same clichés that Garo’s mentor, the communist thinker, Daniel Bensäid, fell into in his analysis of Badiou as a theological voluntarist.7 At times, Garo neglects the vastness of Badiou’s oeuvre and the multiple readings one can glean from it, including even a critique of political economy. Garo does not pay close attention to the ways that Badiou’s philosophy is informed by the strong declaration that our historical moment is “post-Leninist,” a theory he derives from local political militant activity with a group he co-founded called Organisation Politique, which organizes migrant laborers, the sans papier, or “those without papers” in French society.

And yet despite all her reservations with Badiou’s failure to think political economy—the same accusation she wages against his mentor, Althusser—Garo finds Badiou’s work incisive and radical, especially in a context of neoliberal ideology that has seemingly sapped any resolve for the emergence of an alternative to capitalism. Since the early 2000s, Badiou’s books have been highly popular and he is often cited as among the top three most important philosophers in the world. Following the crisis of the capitalist system brought on by the great recession in 2008, Badiou’s works have appealed to the Left as they aspire to a revitalized conception of communism such as we find in The Communist Hypothesis and the Rebirth of History, texts that grappled with the Arab Spring and the Movement of the Squares. Amongst Marxist thinkers today, Garo writes that Badiou is “the only theoretician to propose a negative view of institutions, of parties in their entirety and ongoing mobilizations, which in one and the same move helps to amplify the tendency to depoliticization and to nurture the spirit of rebellion.”8

While Badiou insists on a separation of politics from social issues, this position has the consequence of making his wider idea of communism depoliticized. In Badiou’s work, “the issues of the social alienation of the producers and social relations of sex and race” are absent and this separation results in a paradox in which his thought ends up linking the liberal tradition to Maoism.9 Instead of actively contesting liberal hegemony within social institutions and thinking that relation in a mediated fashion—as Garo reads Marx as doing—Badiou’s subtractive approach ends up unintentionally complicit with liberal forms of power, precisely because his approach is characterized by a refusal to contest liberal institutions.

It is this failure to mediate communist radicalism with existing political institutions that leads Garo to articulate a theory of mediation in the last several chapters of her book. Although Badiou’s politics insist on a subtraction from representative politics, his work has the merit of keeping a flame of radicalism alive by politicizing the idea of communism amidst a period of neoliberal triumph and disempowerment on the left. Thus—while Garo neglects to discuss how Badiou’s philosophy has influenced political movements such as the Shackdwellers Movement, known as “Abahlali base Mjondolo” in South Africa, or the ways that Badiou influenced the Congolese militant, Ernest Wamba dia Wamba—as noted, she draws useful insights into some theoretical shortcomings specifically involved in the application of Badiou’s thought to political practice in general.

Even though Badiou differs profoundly with Laclau in his refusal to engage with capitalist and parliamentary institutions, both thinkers share a general conception of the proletariat as untethered from relations of productive labor and exploitation. Like Wood, Garo pinpoints how the abandonment of concrete issues of labor, exploitation, and domination redefine both of their politics as local and experimental (in the case of Badiou) and a hyper-politics (in the case of Laclau). Here we are introduced to the novelty of Garo’s work: she shows how the intellectual ecosystem of 1970s French philosophy has contributed to a recasting of the modern proletariat away from the working class as the revolutionary agent of socialist struggle. For example, Badiou’s conception of the working class in Europe and the U.S. is thought to have been already integrated and pacified into the capitalist system. Laclau maintains a similar position on the working class, but his position is derived from a mostly theoretical rejection of Marx and the historical workers’ movement supposed class reductionism.10

In the third chapter, “Theories of the Common, or the Permanent Transition,” Garo assesses the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Negri with particular attention to his three-volume Empire series, co-authored with the American philosopher Michael Hardt. While these works have undoubtedly contributed to a revitalized idea of radical politics, Garo convincingly shows that they are based on dubious and contradictory theoretical positions. Inspired by Michel Foucault’s idea of biopolitics, which maintains that politics and production have fused such that capitalism no longer organizes production, Hardt and Negri argue that contemporary capitalism is longer a vertical relation with a figure of authority based in a contractual relation. The older nation-state forms of sovereignty have collapsed and given way to a decentralized and de-territorialized capitalism.

Hardt and Negri recast and redefine Marx’s proletariat as possessing a cooperative and social activity, and optimistically endow this emancipatory class, “the multitude,” with the capacity to destroy the traditional distinction between economic and political struggles.11 Although the multitude is tasked with this new liberatory agenda, Garo convincingly shows that the power of the multitude is paradoxically owed to Negri’s commitments to the tradition of Italian Operaismo Marxism. Italian Operaismo (or, “workerist Marxism”) put forward the thesis that the working class is the motor and engine of capitalist advances and change. Yet, when this thesis is combined with Foucault’s biopolitical thesis which abolishes class relations, the multitude is thought as untethered from relations of exploitation and productive labor. Negri and Hardt thus align with Laclau and Badiou, albeit from completely distinct theoretical points of influence, in eschewing an idea of the proletariat as understood in relations of exploitation and productive labor.

The crux of Hardt’s and Negri’s argument is that immaterial labor, mainly cognitive labor and service labor, has become generalized in contemporary capitalism and this has given way to a liberatory potential for cooperative action amongst these sectors of workers. But in a careful study of their theories of the common in Commonwealth, the third volume of the Empire series, Garo shows that the basis of their idea of revolution becomes nonsensical, and ultimately risks a technocratic, rather than a democratic footing. Similar to Laclau, Hardt and Negri do not seek a break with capitalism, they rather seek to embrace “the tendencies at work rather than fighting them in vain.”12 This results in a theory of revolution in which revolution has paradoxically already occurred and is already accomplished.

Taken together, the critiques of these theorists resonate powerfully in the context of our current political situation. We are witnessing the rumblings of working-class agitation and worker-based movements in labor and insurrection, from the gillets jaunes, or Yellow Vest movement across France, to the massive demonstrations in response to Emmanuel Macron’s pension reforms across France, to public service unionization strikes across the United States, to name only the most visible of examples. Marxist theorists must contend with this growing working-class militancy or risk a continual regression into what Garo aptly names a “hyper politics, cut off from the reality of exploitation, social injustice, and all forms of domination.”13

Garo looks to recast communist politics with labor power at the very center.

GARO’S MARXIST STRATEGY

Unlike Wood’s more pointed critique of post-Marxism, Garo manages to extract the strengths of these theorists’ work and apply them towards her own original conception of a revitalized political Marxism. Chapters 4 through 6 attempt to stake out a conception of political Marxism that places the concept of strategy at the very center of analysis. Strategy is defined not only as a method of reading the class struggle in which communism is thought beyond ways to merely win working class power, it is also a means to actively escape state control and reappropriate key domains of social existence. Against the post-Marxist refusal to think labor power in its subjective dimension as a relevant form of alienation to be overcome, Garo looks to recast communist politics with labor power at the very center. Communism must concern itself with winning power and the goal of achieving worker control over the mode of production.

With the strategic orientation, communism must interrogate three areas of political life: democracy and governance, overlapping areas of emancipation (anti-racism, ecological, feminist, and anti-fascist struggles) as well as labor. Contra Laclau, the demands that emerge from these domains of social life must not be approached with a narrowly social framework, but with a political aim that maintains the centrality of labor across each of these sites of struggle. To drive this argument home, Garo provides a reading of Marx’s engagement with the practical struggles in his own time, from the 1840s, to the Paris Commune and its aftermath in the 1870s, on through his later reflections on state power in Critique of the Gotha Program.

Garo avoids the Althusserian commitment to an epistemological break, that supposedly occurred in the move from a young Marx to the more mature Marx of Capital, by showing the ways that Marx maintained a consistent focus on revolutionary strategic mediation throughout his oeuvre. This means that at a philosophical level, Marx’s commitment to enlightenment universalism must be tied back to his early project of communism which was thought as the reappropriation of property and wealth. This orientation is thought as a concrete universal located at the level of social individuals and their activity remains a consistent orientation throughout Marx’s life.14

The strategic focus is found in Marx’s early, pre-1848 conception of communism, and it begins to mature immediately following the Paris Commune of 1871, particularly in his work, The Civil War in France. In this work, Marx begins to theorize any future socialist revolution as needing to first prioritize the political aim of winning free time for autonomous, collective decision-making amongst the working class. Communist activity entails a process of revolutionary struggle in which the working class gains political power and actively reappropriates all areas of proletarian social existence across culture, democratic institutions and labor. This strategic vision remains consistent in Marx’s commentary, The Critique of the Gotha Program, where he argues that working class capture of state power and the transition to communism is best understood as a process occurring within the state forms as they are, and as a movement that is continually recasting politics itself.15

Strategy involves the process of triangulating the construction of political mediations which includes forms of mobilization and organization, political programs and projects, and the reconstruction of a common oppositional culture associated with redesigned forms of social existence.16 Importantly, communism is not completely reducible to the strategic perspective, given that it is also the inheritor of the social order on whose abolition it aims to enact. Revolution is thus not to be construed as a fusional reconciliation of society with itself, but as political reappropriation; a practice that continues after the working class seizes power. Although the contours of how this movement of reappropriation is to occur is not fully articulated in Communism and Strategy, Garo points to some ideas for how it might be thought.

Most interestingly, this movement calls for a new form of practical reason that would be capable of making and realizing this wide scale collective reappropriation of the means of production. In articulating this idea, Garo turns to Antonio Gramsci, the Marxist thinker who also deeply influenced Laclau and other post-Marxists. But Garo invokes Gramsci as a thinker who is more antagonistic to liberal institutions than post-Marxist thinkers have tended to paint him. The process of reappropriation is not to occur in the domain of alternative economies as advocated by the Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright, but in militant political agitation. Wright’s embrace of alternative economies leans on a poorly developed notion of political knowledge and technocratic rationality.17 Reappropriation must avoid this technocratic trap just as it must avoid the libertarian trap that far-left movements such as the Nuit debout citizen assembly movement have adopted. Garo’s political Marxism is set on enlarging the scale and the tactics of social confrontation, to include the politicization of overlapping domains of emancipation and political struggle within the sphere of democratic institutions. While Garo is not opposed to electoral politics, she is attentive to the ways that electoralism often leads to depoliticization and organizational inertia on the left.

Garo’s vision calls on communist activity to begin from existing struggles, especially feminist, ecological and anti-racist struggles in the forms they take within existing organizations, even though bourgeois institutions are directly responsible for perpetuating and distorting the stakes of these conflicts. While communist approaches must engage with and mediate popular struggles with existing institutions, they must also address the discord that identitarian, anti-essentialist and pseudo-universalist discourses spark on the Left. Communist political activity must see itself as capable of articulating the way that anti-racist, gender rights, ecological, feminist, and anti-fascist struggles are tied back to exploitation, forms of domination, and specifically to labor power. Any renewal of political Marxism must set itself the task of continually linking these struggles back to capitalist social relations and their social reproduction.

Daniel Tutt is the author of “Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family” with the Palgrave Lacan Series and the forthcoming “How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche” with Repeater Books.

https://mronline.org/2023/08/07/renewin ... l-marxism/

[blindpig]

How the Right Hijack Class Analysis
AUGUST 12, 2023


School Begins: Uncle Sam (to his new class in civilization).- Now, children, you've got to learn these lessons whether you want to or not! But just take a look at the class ahead of you, and remember that, in a little while, you will feel as glad to be here as they are!. Photo: Wikipedia.

By Ekaterina Cabylis – Aug 4, 2023

The alt-right sometimes uses sneaky methods to promote their ideas without directly showing their extremist views. For example, people like Jordan Peterson may talk about controversial topics in a way that sounds academic and respectable. They might use coded language to appeal to certain groups without openly expressing extreme beliefs. They focus on divisive issues like gender pronouns and political correctness to get attention and draw people in. Some of them might act like they are being attacked or silenced, so they seem like defenders of free speech. They may also talk to or associate with groups linked to the alt-right, even if they don’t openly support extremist ideas.

The alt-right uses economic issues as a way to advance their larger goals, such as promoting white nationalism, xenophobia, and authoritarianism. They do this by manipulating people’s economic concerns to gain support from those who feel marginalized or dissatisfied with mainstream politics and socio-economic changes. Here are some tactics they use:

• Populism: The alt-right presents themselves as champions of the working class against the so-called elites and establishment. They use populist rhetoric to appeal to people who feel ignored or overlooked by traditional political leaders.

• Blaming Others: They often blame immigrants and other minority groups for economic problems, claiming that they are taking jobs and resources from native-born citizens. This tactic plays on people’s fears and prejudices.

• Identity Politics: The alt-right promotes a divisive “us versus them” mentality, pitting different social and cultural groups against each other. By scapegoating certain communities, they distract from larger systemic issues and fuel hostility towards vulnerable groups.

• Misinformation: They spread false information and conspiracy theories about economic issues and other societal matters. This misinformation aims to create confusion and manipulate people’s perceptions of reality.

• Online Radicalization: The alt-right exploits social media and internet platforms to recruit and radicalize individuals who are frustrated with their economic situation. Online echo chambers reinforce extremist views and isolate followers from alternative perspectives.

• Co-opting Legitimate Concerns: They may co-opt legitimate economic grievances, such as income inequality and job insecurity, to attract followers. However, their proposed solutions often serve their extremist agenda rather than addressing the root causes.

• Authoritarian Messaging: The alt-right sometimes advocates for a strong, centralized authority to address economic problems. This message resonates with individuals seeking quick and drastic solutions to complex issues.

Both the far left and far right criticize neoliberal globalization and its powerful leaders. When fascists reject liberal individualism, it is in the name of a vision of national unity and ethnic purity rooted in a romanticized past; when communists and socialists do so, it is in the name of international solidarity and the redistribution of wealth.

The horseshoe theory, which suggests similarities between the far left and far right, isn’t backed by historical or factual accuracy. Yet, some commentators with centrist views continue to discuss it. This allows them to criticize the left while distancing themselves from the far right. In history, centrist liberals in various countries have often used this theory to discredit the left while disassociating themselves from any connection to the far right.

Centrists are those who claim to support civil rights but are hesitant or unwilling to take meaningful action to address systemic racial injustice. It allows those in the centre to discredit the left while disavowing their complicity with the far right.

Malcolm X viewed them as people who wanted to maintain the status quo and avoid making significant changes to the existing power structures. He believed that centrists were often more concerned with preserving their privileges and positions of comfort than with challenging racial oppression.

It’s essential to be cautious and critically think about what these people are saying, as not all controversial figures are necessarily part of the alt-right. We should look at their words, actions, and who they associate with to understand their beliefs better and avoid falling for their sneaky tactics.

https://orinocotribune.com/how-the-righ ... -analysis/

The 'alt-right' doesn't act, it reacts. And what it reacts to these days is this turn to "woke-ness" very curiously displayed by both government(especially the feds) and major corporations. It is curious and curiouser, these entities have never been in such business, often quite the opposite. So what gives? It ain't enlightenment, they know no such thing. Unlike their unlikely new environmental consciousness, which is driven by avarice and phoney as a rich man's tax return. Mebbe I'm wrong but I think it's that old existential fear of socialism. They know hard times are coming for us proles and would get ahead of the game by directing people away from the issue of class by substituting 'diversity' in it's stead. The boss's favorite tool from time immemorial, divide and conquer. Class unites us, unity is our only strength and their greatest fear.

[blindpig]

Multipolarity: False Hope for the Left

Since the end of the Cold War, important, profound changes in the relations between capitalist states, coupled with equally sharp changes in the content of those relations, have seduced left-wing intellectuals and academics to embrace those countries whose governments clash-- for untold reasons-- with the political or economic demands of the US and its allies. They began to uncritically see these countries as fellow combatants in the struggle for social justice, for example, as anti-imperialists. Even upstart rivals for spheres of interest were seen as anti-imperialist, if they opposed US hegemony. Stated crudely, they present the enemy of their enemy-- the US and the” West” -- as their friend.

Why did so many on the left subscribe to this fallacy?

We must begin with the nature of imperialism in the Cold War.

The Cold War sustained unique, though historically bound alignments. The world was divided between socialist-oriented countries led by Communist or Workers’ Parties, the leading capitalist powers and their neo-colonies, and the non-aligned countries refusing to join in the anti-Communist crusade organized by the capitalist powers. Such a clearly defined order with an equally clearly defined conflict between the leader of the socialist camp, the USSR, and the leader of the capitalist camp, the US, led many to believe that the era of classical imperialism, the era of inter-imperialist rivalries, was over.

They were wrong.

The demise of the USSR and the emergence and intensification of numerous capitalist crises-- political, social, ecological, and, especially, economic-- created powerful centrifugal forces pulling apart the capitalist camp and dissolving its unity. In addition, global changes-- the mobility of capital, the ready marriage of capital and labor in new regions and countries, inexpensive, effective transportation, the emergence of new technologies, new classes of commodities, and the commodification of public, common, and freely accessed goods-- generated new competitors and intensified competition.

Crises and competition are the fertile soil of capitalist rivalries and state conflicts.

The world that emerged after 1991 had more in common with the world that Lenin knew before World War I than with the Cold War era and its clash of social systems and their blocs. Just as nineteenth-century capitalists strived to set the rules for peacefully carving up the world and establishing free trade by means of the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, the post-Cold War capitalist allies sought rules, alliances, trade agreements, and the elimination of barriers to capital movement, commodity exchange, and labor exploitation globally. Both periods were widely heralded as triumphant for capitalism and its inevitable reach to every corner of the globe.

But as the great nineteenth-century powers came to understand, uneven development, upstart rivals, and ruthless competition disrupted the promise of peace and harmony. After a promising interlude of relative peace-- the first period of modest Western harmony since the Napoleonic wars-- the new nineteenth century order began to unravel with economic instability, conflicts, military build-ups, colonial resistance, and nationalist wars.

Similarly, the post-Cold War capitalist powers enjoyed an interlude of rapidly expanding world trade-- so called “globalization” -- and the regulatory guidance of powerful international institutions. This harmony, too, proved elusive, to be shattered by a series of economic crises and regional wars at the turn of the twenty-first century. The so-called dot-com crisis marked “paid” on a decade of capitalist swagger and the ideology of there-is-no-alternative. Rocked again by a global “little” depression, a European debt crisis, a false debt-fueled recovery, a global public health disaster, and now a prolonged period of stagnation and inflation, the promised concord of capitalist rule has been shattered on the shoals of constant wars, social and political instability, and economic dysfunction.

That is the capitalist world of today-- not so different from the capitalist world on the eve of 1914.

The most farsighted thinkers of the turn of the last century saw the end of capitalism’s nineteenth-century stability and apparent harmony as an opportunity. Lenin and others perceived the beginning of a new era ripe for revolutionary change. They foresaw a stage of capitalism bringing war, misery, and suffering on the masses in Europe and beyond. For these visionaries, the only escape from the despair inevitably wrought by the dominance of finance and monopoly organized in a global system of imperialism was revolution and socialism. The tragic First World War proved them right.

Today, without a vision to rescue working people-- those feeling the brunt of capitalism’s expanding crises, more frequent wars, displacement of people, and bankruptcy of solutions-- the field of politics is left to the right-wing opportunists, the faux-populists, the demagogues, the nostalgia peddlers, and other assorted hucksters of right and left. Bizarrely, most of the Euro-American left treat these charlatans as though they were aliens dropping from the sky, rather than the natural, logical product of the vacuum remaining from a left that lacks ideological clarity, cohesion, and a revolutionary program.

More broadly, even “liberal” governments are turning to nationalism, trade barriers, tariffs, and sanctions, the traditional posture of the right. Largely not noted by the left, the Biden administration, for example, has continued most of the trade and sanction regimens, and even the immigration policies, of the Trump administration.

As capitalism retrenches behind narrow self-interest, fierce, ruthless competition, and state-against-state conflict, the vast majority of the Euro-American left continues to circle-the-wagons around an increasingly discredited liberalism and social-democracy. With no answer to a world of ever-growing nation-state rivalries and global tensions, far too many on the left are locked into a defensive strategy that promises more of the same or a return to an imagined “golden age”: before Trump and right-wing populism or before Reagan, Thatcher and market fundamentalism. Failing to locate capitalism’s decadence in capitalism itself, this left promises to manage capitalism to better results-- a hundred-year-old delusion.

Equally delusional is the notion-- popular with a prominent section of the left-- that an emerging bloc or order constitutes the foundation of a powerful movement against imperialism when that bloc itself is made up of capitalist-dominated states or states with a major capitalist economic sector. If Lenin is right-- and we have overwhelming reasons to believe that he is-- capitalism is at the very core of the system of imperialist rivalry. How can capitalism-dependent states collaborate, putting aside their own self-interest, to create a world without competition, friction, conflict, and war between states, themselves made up of competing capitals? Is not capitalism the essence of imperialism, and rivalry, conflict, and war the inevitable outcome? Has there been a counter-tendency since Lenin wrote Imperialism in 1916?

Beginning thirteen years ago, with the foundation of a modestly alternative grouping of five powerful states denied access to the top, exclusive club of capitalist states, the BRICS alignment became a cause for some leftists. Based more on blind faith than anything promised by the BRICS members-- Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa-- leftists nonetheless cobbled together an ideological construct called “multipolarity.”

When radical political prospects appear dim, when the prospect of socialism seems remote, many on the left turn to the global chessboard, pretending that some chess pieces represent the social change that they long for in their own backyard. Frustrated with the long, hard road of winning the masses in their own country to a program serving working people, leftists in the US and EU invest vicariously in the actions of other governments that, for various reasons, are in opposition to the US and the EU governments.

This surrogate identification must not be confused unthinkingly with solidarity or internationalism. Both solidarity and internationalism emerge with sympathy for other peoples and their interests or with their governments only when those governments are serving the people. Solidarity with Cuba, for example, is grounded on the long-standing resistance of the people of Cuba to the demands, coercion, and aggression of the US and its allies. Since the government of Cuba organizes and supports that resistance, it, too, earns our solidarity.

The zeal for multipolarity arises from a fact and a hope. It is indeed a fact that the US government may have lost some of its ability to impose its will on the rest of the world and that global powers have risen to challenge US domination. This accounts for some of the increasing conflict and chaos in international relations.

But the multipolarity zealots interpret this as a setback to the system of imperialism when it is, at best, a setback for US imperialism. The fallacy is in assuming that the capitalist challengers are somehow benign and that they, magically, will restrain their interests in order to establish global harmony and peace. There is no basis in historical precedence or contemporary currency for this assumption, beyond mere hope.

Certainly, it is a radical misread of recent history and today’s events. In just the last weeks, relations between the governments of Canada and India reached a boiling point, conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan broke out again, and two joined-at-the-hip reactionary governments, Poland and Ukraine sued and abused each other. All occurring without US government sponsorship. Venezuela’s government- a strong proponent of the multipolarity ideology-- is itself in a bitter conflict with Guyana over 160,000 square kilometers of oil-rich territory, rejecting a “consultative referendum” proposed by the government of Guyana.

The presence of multipolarity’s icons within BRICS hardly ensures that bringing down US hegemony will disable the imperialist system: members India and the PRC maintain festering relations that break out into open warfare from time to time. Brazil under Bolsonaro was openly hostile and confrontational with all the more progressive countries of Central and South America (which reminds us that imperialism is about governments and socio-economic systems and not simply countries), and Russia is hotly contesting with France over valuable resources in Central Africa.

And the new members of BRICS carry even more contradictory baggage. Egypt and Ethiopia have a long-standing water dispute that will not be resolved by BRICS. Iran and Saudi Arabia have an existential dispute carried on by proxy, notably in Yemen. The Saudis are prepared to recognize Israel in order to acquire nuclear technology to match Iran, an action hardly suggestive of peace and prosperity.

Is there a common progressive, anti-capitalist, or anti-imperialist interest uniting this formation? Or are they united merely for expediency in this or any other bloc that will have them? Modi’s India, for example, accepts membership in nearly all international formations-- Western-oriented or otherwise.

It is magical thinking to believe that without the heavy hand of the US empire, imperialist predation and conflict will melt away. Lenin scoffed at Kautsky’s notion that multipolar harmony (ultra-imperialism) would follow World War I, and events proved him right.

Moreover, the idealism invested in multipolarity and BRICS has fallen far short of what contemporary leftists have thought, as Patrick Bond and others have shown (despite his use of the unhelpful concept of “sub-imperialism”). BRICS sets a very low bar in reordering global relations, contrary to the wishes of many on the left.

Activists in Johannesburg, during the most recent BRICS meeting, organized a BRICS-from-below event. Though spawned by the center-left, social democratic Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, the South African coordinator made a keen observation:



Trevor Ngwane, said, “BRICS wants leverage. Instead of saying, ‘We are capitalists fighting to be bigger capitalists’, they want to get strong, they start pretending that if they get strong, life will get better for the working class. We know that there will be a question: Does this mean you favour America?



“During the Struggle, there was a party that used to say, ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow’, so we must not be swayed and convinced to choose between these two; we must find our own way as socialists towards socialism.



“The problem with BRICS projects is that it’s all top-down. It’s something organised by governments.”

Yes, BRICS is organized by governments, capitalist-oriented governments for the most part, as Trevor Ngwane is keenly aware.

But more importantly, he challenges how BRICS (and by implication, multipolarity) is in any way related to the goal of socialism. It is socialism that is missing from BRICS and the multipolarity discussion. A program offered to working people that merely shuffles the deck of capitalist powers is no answer at all.

In a recent discussion of BRICS and the Eastern Economic Forum among three leading exponents of multipolarity, there is not one word about socialism. There is talk of development, of startups, of public-private partnerships, strategic priorities, and investments-- even of Russian hypersonic missiles-- but not one word about socialism.

One discussant claims to capture BRICS with this piece of sophistry: “So we’re dealing really not only with a geographic split, but with a split of economic structures, a mixed public-private economy, not like the Western public-private partnership, which you socialize the losses and privatize the profits, but something where the aim is really not to make a profit, but to make the overall economy grow.” Capitalism with a human face?

For sure, there are multipolarity advocates who believe that they see multipolarity as a step towards socialism. They recognize in the deepening economic, social, political, and ecological crises facing capitalism that socialism may be a solution. But as John Smith so frankly puts it in an Interview: “Convincing people that socialism is necessary is not so difficult; what is much more difficult is to convince people that socialism is possible.”

We live in a time when, rather than joining with people, organizations, or parties that advocate, organize, and fight for socialism, many on our left have become observers of a chess game between capitalist governments, cheering any force that attempts to diminish US power. How this will or will not benefit the exploited masses of the world is of little count.

Smith, the author of a thoughtful analysis of twenty-first century imperialism, succinctly summarizes our challenge in the face of profound crises of capitalism:

Wherever we are subjectively, objectively, the necessity to begin a transition towards communism is posed by this existential crisis. There is no other way out for humanity than this. Anything that distracts us from this, any sort of fantasy that some kind of a multipolar world will be better in any way, must be dispelled because we do not have any more time to waste.



Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/2023/09/mul ... -left.html

I pretty much agree with this and have been saying so for a while. All ya need is a copy of 'Imperialism' and knowledge of subsequent history. I will say that 'multipolarity', while in itself is anything but a panacea is a necessary step as the diminution of US imperialism is implied. And that is as necessary as the destruction of the Democratic Party in order to clear the field. A rocky but probably necessary road ahead...

Better ideas welcome.

[blindpig]

Reflections of a young man when choosing a profession
No. 10/86.X.2023

"Reflections of a Young Man on Choosing a Profession" is one of Marx's earliest works. It was written by him on August 12, 1835, at the age of 17, as a graduation essay from high school. At the same time, 32 graduates wrote on the same topic, and even then the originality of the language and direction of thought of the young Marx was noticeable. Already in this early work we see Marx’s deeply humanistic orientation, his altruism and the complete absence of any egoism and pedantry. In this essay, the young Marx formulated the direction of his entire life - service to humanity.

“But the main leader who should guide us when choosing a profession is the good of humanity, our own improvement. One should not think that both of these interests can become hostile, come into conflict with each other, that one of them must destroy the other; human nature is designed in such a way that a person can achieve his improvement only by working to improve his contemporaries, for their good.

If a person works only for himself, he can perhaps become a famous scientist, a great sage, an excellent poet, but he can never become a truly perfect and great person.

History recognizes those people as great who, working for a common goal, themselves became nobler; experience extols, as the happiest, the one who brought happiness to the greatest number of people; Religion itself teaches us that the ideal to which everyone strives sacrificed itself for the sake of humanity - and who dares to deny such teachings?

If we have chosen a profession in which we can most work for humanity, then we will not bend under its burden, because it is a sacrifice for the sake of all; then we will not experience a pitiful, limited, selfish joy, and our happiness will belong to millions, our affairs will then live a quiet, but eternally effective life, and the hot tears of noble people will shed over our ashes.”

These lines convey great strength of mind and maturity. By the time he graduated from high school, Marx already understood that the happiness of everyone is the key to happiness for everyone. Only by working for the benefit of all humanity is it possible to achieve true happiness. As Marx himself would later say, happiness is in struggle. This was the banner of Marx's entire life and should be so for all communists.

What in the work of the young Marx he understands as the good of all humanity, he himself will later develop to an understanding of communism as the general emancipation of humanity from the shackles of slavery, exploitation and alienation. The goal of life for a communist is the struggle for communism against the system of human slavery, for the transition of humanity to the world of freedom, for the creation of a society based on science, for the rational organization of all human life. This, and nothing else, should be the vital credo of every person of conscience, every true humanist, and not opposed to the statement of Marx himself: “Nothing human is alien to me.”

Working for communism today means improving oneself in the sciences, especially in Marxist science! Only knowledge of the objective laws of nature and society will break the chains of slavery. Science is our sword, our only and most faithful weapon in the struggle for universal happiness, for world brotherhood, for the triumph of freedom. Take an example from our great teachers and leaders: Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, they are an example of the unity of science and revolution, the union of knowledge and struggle. Nothing great in the world is accomplished without passion. Morally, Marx was already ready to direct all his energy, all his strength and spiritual impulses to this great struggle. He believed that there was no task more noble and sacred than this struggle. In the words of Hegel:

“Bravely surrender yourself, son of the gods, to the continuation of the battle,

Give up reconciliation with yourself and destroy this world with work!

Try to surpass yourself, even though you won’t become better than Time,

Time itself will ascend by your daring effort.”

The historical task of the communists is to unite the oppressed into a revolutionary working class under the leadership of the party of scientific centralism. This is the Promethean essence of communists, their historical significance. And everyone who considers himself a communist must become worthy of this role. A party that is recognized by the working people must work to become the mind, honor and conscience of the era, only then can it be considered communist. There is no such party yet, and we have to create it. To create such a party, it is necessary to have personnel who have mastered the scientific revolutionary theory of human progress, without which no revolutionary practice is possible. Self-education and an uncompromising struggle for the minds of the generation is the slogan of the current stage. The magazine “Proryv” is our theoretical organ around which the future party is taking shape.

All this is written by a young man of the same age as Marx, who wrote his graduation essay, and, like Marx, I made my choice - to serve the good of all mankind in the great struggle for communism. With this banner I enter into life and will never renounce it!

I. Shapov
09/25/2023

https://prorivists.org/86_proff/

Google Translator

[blindpig]

Integrity and Party Unity
No. 10/86.X.2023

Studying the history of party building, the organizational foundations of Bolshevism and the internal party struggle on the organizational issue is an essential element not only in understanding and mastering the theory of Marxism-Leninism, but also as a means of comprehending and deepening the concept of scientific centralism.

The authors of “Breakthrough” are in no hurry to call scientific centralism updated, enriched by the experience of the victories and defeats of Bolshevism, an understanding of the party of the Leninist type, only because we need time to implement the concept, during which it will turn into a full-fledged scientific theory, confirmed by practice. For now, the editors of the magazine and our newspaper are coming up with an adequate left-wing proposal open to everyone: to study our achievements, to study is part more carefully, to think with your own head about how opportunism and revisionism decomposed the CPSU in the sphere of the organizational structure of the party . How and due to what, throughout the history of communism, traitors and scum have made their way into the party leadership and what means of protection from this disaster can be created. However, for now, the majority of the left is under the spell of illusions of democracy, believing that only democratic procedures introduced into circulation by the exploiting classes of different eras can guarantee the purity of the ranks, the scientific nature and competence of the leadership.

In general, one of the most malicious misconceptions of the left is that the power of the exploiters is associated exclusively with the exclusion of the exploited from the bodies of management, control, and development of political decisions of the state. They do not seem to notice that the exploiting classes themselves introduced democracy into practice: slave, feudal, bourgeois, without any fear that the class character of the state would change. The struggle of reactionary slave owners against ancient democracy was not carried out because it could develop into some kind of socialist forms, but was a means of struggle within and between exploiters. The struggle of the reactionary feudal lords against feudal democracy was also a struggle for localism against the central government, that is, an intra-class struggle. The struggle of the reactionary feudal lords against bourgeois democracy was a struggle for power with the young bourgeois class. And today, the collapse of bourgeois democracy in most cases is a struggle between groups and individuals in power.

The only example - when the bourgeois state curtails democracy out of fear of the growing labor movement - obscures in the minds of the left the understanding of the essence of democracy itself. It seems to them that since such historical practice took place, it means that democracy and democratization should be an integral element not only of the communist organization of the state, but also the principle of party building.

To this example taken out of context are added two striking facts, which together completely paralyze any scientific search of the left on the question of the essence of democracy.

Firstly , this is the fact that communist parties were founded by groups of intellectuals who, as a rule, tried to build relationships among themselves according to the most familiar and fashionable democratic patterns, corresponding to the then current ideas about the formation of a mass party as opposed to various secret clubs and conspiratorial groups . Hence, by the way, the addition of the word “democratic” to natural and reasonable centralism in the name of the organizing principle.

Secondly , that every socialist state proclaims itself the bearer of genuine popular or proletarian democracy. This fact is an important legal and propaganda element of the dictatorship of the working class, but it is devoid of any scientific meaning. Most leftists firmly believe that “dictatorship of the proletariat = proletarian democracy.” This is, of course, far from the case. Elements of proletarian democracy in the system of dictatorship of the working class were present in all communist states, but they are not a mandatory attribute, did not play a decisive role, and even more so it is impossible to reduce the entire magnitude of the dictatorship of the class to individual procedural moments in the formation of public authorities and means of control from below. In addition, the set of legally and factually significant techniques, rules and principles that are classified as proletarian democracy differs significantly from the known forms of democracy under the dictatorship of the exploiting classes. The Marxists of the past coined the term “proletarian democracy” for the convenience of communicating certain tactical and political decisions to the broad masses, as opposed to bourgeois propaganda.

In the theory of building a communist society, democracy, as a set of well-known procedures and techniques, is used only at the earliest stages of the lowest phase, with a still low level of consciousness of the party, near-party and non-party masses. Let's say by the 1950s. in the USSR, the most significant methods of proletarian democracy, such as the nomination of candidates to the Soviets from production collectives, recall of deputies, criticism from below, including using the press, have already lost the character of open political struggle, having turned into effective means of party control, self-control and interaction with the masses . Power in the USSR was actually exercised by the leadership of the Communist Party, which was organically the vanguard of the working class. And the subsequent practice of the loss of the CPSU’s vanguard role, the decomposition of the party and the class clearly showed that democracy did not and could not become a way to avoid the collapse of the dictatorship of the working class, although all its main levers were available right up to the collapse of the country. The same can be said about all other examples of withering, decay and degeneration of communist parties. Democracy has never saved anyone, anywhere or ever from degradation.

So, for those thinking comrades who have freed themselves from typical democratic errors, primarily in organizational construction, when considering various periods of the history of Bolshevism, the question of the relationship between adherence to principles, ideological, theoretical intransigence and the need to strengthen party unity seems to loom . Lenin and Stalin, in cases where the party majority did not follow them, almost instantly took a position of demarcation and actually waged a factional struggle with their opponents. In those cases when the majority had already been won by their political line, they insisted on the end of all factionalism and the need to maintain party unity. To an inexperienced observer, this does not look like an application of dialectics, but rather a manifestation of pragmatism and dictatorship raised to the absolute. Like, while I am a non-commanding force, let’s argue and fight, as soon as I have gained the upper hand, discussions must be put aside and only obey. In part, the Trotskyist theory of the cult of personality is based on such nonsense argumentation.

If you read the literature of the Lenin-Stalin period on this sensitive issue, it proposes the following formula: polemics and struggle of opinions can be conducted without prejudice to the unity of the party, discipline and within the framework of a general line recognized by all . However, in practice it faltered, giving rise to double-dealing and hypocrisy. And in general, the situation with personnel was overshadowed by a severe shortage in terms of managerial competence. Therefore, in many places it was necessary to give in and smooth out corners, since there was simply no one to replace the “oppositionists”. Sometimes delaying and being soft in the placement of unreliable people led to tragic consequences. But it is not for us to blame Lenin and Stalin for this - the greatest revolutionaries and Marxists, who, in extremely unfavorable conditions, trampling the road to the future, accomplished many unfading feats in the cause of communism.

The difficulties in implementing the above formula lie not only in the fact that it allows various scum to mask their true views and engage in sabotage, but also due to the fact that disagreement with comrades among decent and conscientious Marxists arises in the vast majority of cases not on fundamental issues of theory and politics, but in the course of a specific historical assessment of important events, processes and the current situation. Fear of something unexpected and new, of the need to react quickly, make decisions (often contrived by false efficiency) and fear of making a mistake only increase hesitation and uncertainty, exacerbating the reaction of disagreement. In this case, a person is forced to assess the potential harm of the consequences of demonstrating his adherence to principles and violating the like-mindedness, unity of the organization and leadership. And since he broke up with his leading comrades, most likely he will not be able to correctly assess the fallacy or infallibility of his position.

Of course, it would be wonderful if all or the absolute majority of people who consider themselves communists became politically mature individuals, excellent experts in diamatics, easily oriented in the situation, objective theorists and skillful practitioners. In other words, if all communists were geniuses on the level of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. In this case, the Communist Party would act as a cohesive monolithic entity, unanimity and absolute unity of will would reign within it. There would be one continuous adherence to principles, which would organically flow into the unshakable unity of the party.

However, nothing ideal exists in the world, there are never too many geniuses, we are all people with certain and significant shortcomings, different levels of maturity, and so on. In addition, there are objective conditions of a class society in which human development is artificially limited, and in order to become a real communist, it is necessary to make a lot of personal effort, for which not everyone has the opportunity.

In reality, the organization, the party will use the division of labor , including managerial and executive, to maintain discipline, unity of command and order, at least for the purpose of educational work with personnel. In this sense, an appropriate analogy is not with a monolithic subject, but with an organism that has a head (management) and hands (executive apparatus).

However, in contrast to the bureaucratic and functionalist structure of organizations usual for a class society, be it a religious sect, a corporation, the apparatus of a bourgeois state or an army, the communist party acts as a single organism only externally, in the nature of its political influence primarily on its own class . The division of labor in the Communist Party should not be strictly tied to the specialization of personnel.

The personnel history of Bolshevism shows the inconsistency of attempts to train narrow specialists, cultivate “pure theoreticians”, “pure politicians”, “pure business executives”, “pure commanders” and so on. On the contrary, it demonstrates the high effectiveness of the principle of endowing intelligent Marxists with different functionality depending on the requirements of the moment . If we trace what they did, what functions were performed at one time or another by Lenin, Stalin and their closest associates - strong Bolsheviks - then we will see that a good Marxist is able to quickly master any management craft, understand any field and industry, standing on his head above a narrow specialist. The main factors here are a deep mastery of the theory of Marxism-Leninism, the highest example of conscience and self-sacrifice. It was a cohort of such people that turned the Bolshevik Party into the most powerful force in the history of mankind. And we need not only to repeat the experience of our ancestors, but also to surpass them in order to solve the pressing problems of building communism throughout the world.

Returning to the issue of the relationship between integrity and unity of the organization. Strange as it may seem, it is precisely understanding the nature of the external influence of an organization as a kind of organism with a guiding intellectual core and a powerful execution apparatus that helps to advance in resolving the issue posed.

A person’s disagreement with his comrades, especially those whom he recognizes as leaders, comes in two forms. The first is when a person disagrees because he thinks differently or, on a sensory, intuitive level, experiences rejection of a certain position. This type of disagreement is a manifestation of immaturity and refers to people who have not yet fully formed as communists. The second is when a person experiences disagreement because he is sure that the position of his comrades is wrong and this will lead to undesirable consequences for the organization and communism. He doesn’t just disagree in his assessment in a spherical vacuum, but disagrees because the prospect of further development of the situation, in his opinion, promises extremely negative consequences.

I am sometimes reproached in my editorial work for the fact that I can let go of some rough edges or twists of thought. Allow the author to publish not the most successful formulations and express controversial thoughts on a private issue. And in another case, I cling to certain words as unsuccessful and demand significant reformulation, or I change the text myself with the consent of the author. If you don't go into depth, this may seem like some kind of inconsistency. But the fact is that my task as an editor is not only to produce a high-quality propaganda product for the reader, but also to create conditions for the theoretical and literary growth of authors, and to engage in personnel work. We are not a bourgeois newspaper whose task is to sell material in the interests of the customer and please the public due to competition. And we are not even a purely scientific publication, whose task is to issue scientific truths that in themselves supposedly will change the world for the better. We have a communist publication, and we must not only conduct theoretical work, but also organize the party and the class, that is, educate, lead, involve, captivate, and inspire the proletariat . Therefore, if the author shows some discrepancy on issues that are insensitive to the general cause, non-fundamental, then this can be completely tolerated for educational purposes . And it works. Many then gradually change their position on their own, and those who persist in errors themselves leave when their mistakes evolve into essential contradictions.

So, the problem of the relationship between integrity and unity of the organization is resolved through the recognition of the role of leadership, namely leaders . Anyone who wants to become a communist is obliged to educate himself and educate himself to the highest level of a leader. But this path is not short and not everyone is destined to have time to complete it. The main thing is to strive and improve. If a person considers himself capable of leading the Communist Party even now, then he must be absolutely principled, break off relations with all comrades with whom he does not agree and carry out independent work to attract supporters and convince the proletariat. If a person realizes that he has not yet reached the required level and recognizes the authority of his comrades, then he must diligently and persistently reflect on the reasons for disagreement, scientifically research the issue, share his opinion and discuss the problem with his comrades, but at the same time honestly and conscientiously maintain the unity of the organization. The authority of the opinion of the leader or leaders must exceed the feeling of protest .

Does this approach violate the unanimity of the communist team? The point is that unanimity should not be understood as absolute uniformity of thoughts. Thinking is inextricably linked with practice. The meaning of unanimity lies in the unity of manifestation of will and actions. Unity is always a combination of different things, but a connection that holds these different things together so that they appear as one whole . If the organization still acts as a single organism, then unity is not broken.

The advantage of this formulation of the relationship between integrity and party unity in comparison with the example from the literature of the Lenin-Stalin period is only... the very formulation of what Bolshevism actually came to. Then they were embarrassed to say how things really stood. But this, by the way, was later directly stated by the Jucheists in North Korea in the theory of the leader.

The question may arise: won’t excessive trust in the leaders be betrayed?

The truth is always the same for each specific issue, therefore there is always the only correct assessment of the situation and the order of the organization’s actions at each historical moment. However, every thought can be expressed in different words, and every action can be performed in different ways. When we talk about politics, about the actions of many different people, the truth manifests itself in the basic and main thing . Every statement and every action could be made better, and every person could be more perfect. The only thing that matters is whether victory was achieved, whether the desired result was achieved. There is no ideal strategy, ideal tactics, or ideal policy, but if the strategy, tactics and policy are close to the ideal, then victory is guaranteed .

Whatever the coherent and logical theory, strategy, tactics, only practice can finally establish their truth or fallacy . History, of course, will judge every communist party. However, in order to consistently and confidently test the validity of one's theories and policies, the entire organization must act without hesitation . That is why, only when absolute adherence to principles flows into the demand for absolute unity does this correspond to the diamatics and historical practice of Bolshevism and other victorious communist parties.

The main problem of the communist movement is not an overabundance of leaders, but, on the contrary, their absence. And those who are already calling themselves leaders of the struggle for communism turn out to be practically untenable.

A. Redin
10/22/2023

https://prorivists.org/86_unity/

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Serious people...

[blindpig]

Joti Brar: How can workers learn the truth if everyone is too scared to tell it?

We must respect the workers enough to believe they are capable of learning and we must create opportunities for them to do so.
Joti Brar

Friday 3 November 2023


One essential truth that needs to be grasped by workers in the imperialist countries is the connection between our class enemies’ strength and their looting and suppression of the oppressed peoples abroad.

The World Anti-imperialist Platform (the Platform) participated in the anti-imperialist congress organised by the Kommunistische Organisation (KO) in Berlin from 6 to 8 October.

At the congress, members of the Platform took part in panel discussions on imperialism and war, touching on the Ukraine war, national-liberation movements, the relationship between anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism, how we can unify the struggle worldwide, and more.

During the event, a solidarity demonstration for Palestine was held in response to the developing situation in Gaza.

Joti Brar, vice-chair of the CPGB-ML, spoke in her capacity as a spokesperson of the Platform. We reproduce her brief contribution to the panel below.

What should be the focus of our work today?
What is the essential political task and strategic orientation for communists and progressive forces in the current stage of struggle?

If we want to work out what our most important task is at any particular moment, we must be able to recognise which contradictions are the most fundamental and important and from there work out who are our main enemies and who are our allies.

Today, the main contradiction in the world, the one that is most decisive in shaping all events and the balance of class forces, is the conflict between the imperialist and the oppressed countries.

This means that our main aim at the present time must be strengthen the anti-imperialist movement and the role of communists within that movement.

And just as we use the communist forces to enhance the anti-imperialist movement, we must use the progress and limitations of the movement against imperialism to help workers everywhere understand the need for socialism to completely and finally solve their problems – and to understand the fundamental connection between those two struggles.

And all the time we are doing these things we must work to maximise the discipline, unity and dedication of the Marxist forces by strengthening our ideological foundations. For true steel and commitment in the struggle comes from iron discipline, and iron discipline is voluntary; it is based in a strong theoretical understanding of the need for our struggle to be carried through to the finish no matter the obstacles.

In this way, we will gain experience in waging the anti-imperialist struggle in such a way as to maintain our communist identity and analysis – we will learn how to cooperate with allied forces without becoming subservient to them. And the communists will earn the appreciation and respect of the masses.

We must put individual and collective study at the heart of everything we do so that we are able to deeply understand and to popularise scientific socialism – in leaflets, newspaper columns and brief speeches as well as in longer presentations and theoretical works.

We must use every means possible and every important event to help workers understand how crisis and inequality are built into the system of capitalist production. To help them see that only socialism will allow them to escape poverty and war. That capitalism means a permanent downward spiral for the masses.

And we in the imperialist countries must take every opportunity to expose to workers the connection between our class enemies’ strength and their looting and suppression of the oppressed peoples abroad.

To do all this we need to let go of fear or of a desire to be respectable. Our message will never be acceptable to the ruling class, and this means it will also not be acceptable to the social-democratic and opportunist left either.

Therefore to make progress we must give up on the idea of pleasing the media or the fake left. We must let go of our fear of the hysterical attacks of the bourgeois media, or the angry response of brainwashed workers to truths that challenge the bourgeois-defined worldview.

We must respect the workers enough to believe they are capable of learning when given the opportunity. And we must remember that the job of creating that opportunity is ours. Workers will certainly learn nothing if everyone is too scared to tell them what they need to hear, whether it is about the Soviet Union, the GDR, Marxist economics, imperialist relations or anything else.

We must also let go of the fear of seeming ‘unrealisable’ or ‘unrealistic’ in our demands. Of course, we do not want to make our movement ridiculous by Trotskyite-type demands for a general strike every time workers are in dispute. But if we believe a demand is the correct one, even if our small forces are as yet unable to bring it about, we should still be working to put it into workers’ minds and helping them think about the first step towards realising it in practice.

For example: one of our demands in Britain is that there should be an active campaign of non-cooperation against Nato and the imperialist war machine in Britain. We want the working class to refuse to cooperate and thus actively sabotage the war effort. The first step towards achieving this is helping them realise that this is something that needs to be – and could be – done, and they need to be organised in a way it can be achieved.

Our party works hard to propagate the information about why this task is necessary and what its execution would look like. We explain that a first step is building organisation that has the power to take such action. And we have written model motions for members and supporters to take into trade unions and other working-class organisations.

Even if they are initially defeated, by bringing these demands before the delegates, such motions can spread awareness of our analysis and programme and force the social-democrats to debate them and justify their refusal to countenance the actions we propose.

These are small steps in raising the consciousness and activity of the masses to the required level that even the smallest organisation can take.

Overall, I would say: we must not be afraid to act. While patience has been important in conditions of slow development, we should always be ready to change course if our actions are not having the intended consequences.

We must not be scared to make an alliance we might be attacked for, and we must not be scared to break an alliance that isn’t working.

And we must never be scared to see or admit to our mistakes; mistakes are how we learn.

We must assess and re-assess our work constantly and always bear in mind the ultimate goal of all our work. We must ask ourselves every day, individually and collectively: will this activity take us even a tiny step closer to socialism?

https://thecommunists.org/2023/11/03/ne ... red-speak/

[blindpig]

Eternal Chevengur of the Russian Federation
No. 11/87.XI.2023

Many people know (in perestroika/early 90s he was very popular and published) such a writer as Andrei Platonov. I'm afraid that the modern generation of young people knows him from an anecdote.

Moscow. Winter. Snow. A boy plays football. Suddenly - the sound of broken glass. A janitor, a stern Russian janitor, runs out with a broom and chases after the boy. The boy runs away from him and thinks: “Why, why is this all for? Why all this image of a street boy, all this football, all these friends? For what??? I’ve already done all my homework, why don’t I sit at home on the couch and read a book by my favorite writer, Ernest Hemingway?”

Havana. Ernest Hemingway sits in his office in a country villa, finishing his next novel and thinking: “Why, why is this all for? How tired of all this, this Cuba, these beaches, bananas, sugar cane, this heat, these Cubans!!! Why am I not in Paris, sitting with my best friend Andre Maurois in the company of two lovely courtesans, drinking a morning aperitif and talking about the meaning of life?

Paris. Andre Maurois in his bedroom, stroking the thigh of a lovely courtesan and drinking his morning aperitif, thinks: “Why, why is all this for? How tired of this Paris, these rude French, these stupid courtesans, this Eiffel Tower, from which they spit on your head! Why am I not in Moscow, where it’s cold and snowy, sitting with my best friend Andrei Platonov over a glass of Russian vodka and talking to him about the meaning of life?”

Moscow. Cold. Snow. Andrey Platonov. Wearing earflaps. In felt boots. With a broom. He chases the boy and thinks: “If I catch up, I’ll kill him!”

The anecdote plays on a not very successful period in Platonov’s life, when he worked as a janitor at the Literary Institute and was not published. What didn’t the Soviet government like about Platonov’s works? This, in fact, is what the conversation will be about.

There is no doubt that Andrei Platonov was not a dissident, but on the contrary, he was pro-Soviet. But... precisely pro-Soviet, not communist. More precisely, he could be called a communist, but only in the sense in which Marx, in the “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” examines various types of “communisms” that are not actually communism, that is, unscientific types of political doctrines that call themselves communisms.

If we read Platonov’s “The Pit” or, even more prominently, “Chevengur”, we will find that, despite the fact that some heroes almost literally pray to Marx and Lenin, they are actually communists, that is, people who know Marxist method and those actively applying it in social practice, there is no word “in general”. Platonov described and glorified, to put it briefly, a kind of “spontaneous” proto-communism of the peasant community and the marginal poor. I'll try to explain what this means.

Proto-communist teachings were spontaneously born almost simultaneously with private property (very insignificant echoes of these teachings have reached us from ancient times). Writing was poorly developed in those days, and everything rested on the personal talents and personal charisma of certain preachers, who expressed spontaneous egalitarian ideas, normal for the oppressed classes, and interpreted, putting into theoretical form, these ideas, as God bestowed on their souls (mainly in a religious form - for example, hence the idea in Christianity of the equality of all in Christ). Due to the fact that, in general, general social ties were quite weak and the peasant could not travel further than the outskirts of the village all his life, each hut had its own rattles - for example, in the territory of ancient Judea alone, the number of different prophets and preachers went off scale. That is, any idea that in one way or another expressed the concept of overcoming social inequality had a chance of mass support, no matter in what form it was expressed. A spontaneous egalitarian reaction to private property relations is what we call “spontaneous communism of the masses.”

Spontaneous mass “communism” is an IMMANDORABLE LAW of any exploitative society. It is as inevitable as the sunrise.

But the only significant factor remains the FORM in which it is implemented. If he grasps a form that contains a bit of scientific content, then he has a good chance of implementation (for example, the English Diggers (Levellers) carried this bit of reason within themselves - the actual seizure of the land of the nobility in the conditions of the revolution was an absolutely correct tactic to realize their equalization program, another thing is that the theoretical part itself, which believed that it was possible to destroy private property by transferring equal shares of land into private ownership, was poor). But the Christian form of “communism” has been marking time for centuries and even crawled further and further from the communist content until it has emptied almost everything of it, leaving only ritual.

In the USSR, stunned by the successes of Marxism in 1917, social science rested on its laurels, believing that the spontaneous utopian forms of communism after such impressive victories were completely over and should not be paid attention to. But this is a mistake. Because spontaneous communism is replaced by scientific communism only in the case when there is a SUFFICIENTLY DEEP UNDERSTANDING of this very scientific communism. And this is not equal to an “A” in the subject “History and Math” at the institute and is not equal to the memorized Charter of the CPSU and a dozen and a half quotes from the Program.

So, returning to Platonov. Platonov reflected in his works all possible facets of this “spontaneous utopian communism.” His heroes are sacrificial and heroic in the name of SOCIETY, but from their understanding of the meaning of all this, they only have very strange ideas about a “bright future” that are not consistent with Marxism. Some people see it as a mechanized factory body. Someone in the spirit of Chayanov sees a world without cities, producing only bread, someone dreams of joint (but for some reason exclusively physical) labor - in a word, there is a whole gallery of types who have a bright future of their own and who saw their realization in the revolution of 1917 this your future. And somehow it all happened in his books that the party did not stop all this bacchanalia of mostly peasant dreams, directing it with a harsh hand where it was needed, but democratically went somewhere far away, being present only formally somewhere over the horizon. Meanwhile, people are digging their own “pit”, based on very diverse motives and only in very specific things echoing the party’s policy (for example, the party told them to dig a pit).

It is logical that this socio-utopian literature did not arouse the delight of critics. In the 20-30s, emphasizing the fact that at different stages of the revolution and the Civil War the bulk of the population joined the Bolsheviks not for ideological reasons, but only as temporary fellow travelers who realized goals that were quite far from scientific communism, was already unnecessary. Such literature could not teach the new generation to UNDERSTAND what communism is; it hopelessly confused them in a heap of utopian ideas. The fact that the party understood that this was exactly what happened: the spontaneous communism of the rural community followed the Bolsheviks only because there was no one else to follow (on the opposite side there were such beasts and cannibalism that a normal peasant would have gone with the devil, if only against them), and the fact that this interpretation had to be propagated on every corner are very different things. It can be understood, but not propagated. Platonov did not understand this and waved his broom for several years.

Chevengur around us
The collapse of the USSR gave arrogant post-Soviet “Marxists” a tangible understanding that the very fact of the existence of the theory of scientific communism does not automatically destroy utopian socialism in any of its forms. The 90s gave us a brilliant example of the birth and death of social utopias of various kinds - in nationalist, religious forms, in individual civil sermons and movements. Who, for example, remembers the teaching of Fedorov, who is an ophthalmologist? And he ran for president with a funny utopian idea of ​​industrial cooperation and various social programs on a vague economic basis. Utopian forms of proto-communist teachings are spontaneously born and die among the Marxist illiterate masses with the same regularity with which capital either strengthens or weakens its pressure on the proletariat, like soap bubbles - they arise, burst, and new ones arise. Everything gurgles, but there is zero result. The fact of the generation of sentiments of utopian communism in the lower social strata HAS NO CONNECTION with Marxism or any activity of Marxists in general. Taking the effect of this spontaneous communism personally is quite dangerous, just as any overestimation of forces is dangerous.

Moreover, these sentiments, due to the lack of mass SCIENTIFIC communist propaganda, take on very bizarre forms - nationalism, religious egalitarianism, statism, propaganda of spontaneous communist ethics. Attempts by the masses to solve GENERAL SOCIAL issues in one way or another inevitably result in spontaneous communism, be it painting benches in the park or forming a militia to protect the Belgorod region from the invasion of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

In society as a whole there are a lot of PURE COMMUNIST ELEMENTS. Classics is a family institution. But this also includes weaving camouflage nets for the army, and raising funds for quadcopters and medicines. This also includes file sharing (there it is basically purely on the communist principle - “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”). Society has not yet been torn apart by a war of all against all solely because capitalists CANNOT VICTORY communist relations in society - they cannot turn everything into goods and begin exchanging them for other goods.

And in this environment, people cannot help but have and express corresponding moods in one way or another. That is, we live only partially in a world of purity, there is a certain part of the world around us, which is something like Plato’s mythical Chevengur, in which beautiful-hearted people create “good for everyone” (subjectively, of course) and many are even ready for hardships and heroism for this. But at the same time they have never been communists (and, perhaps, will never become one).

And briefly what follows from this
And it follows from it that 70 years of Soviet power have created conditions for us to partially ride and intercept this process. Communism in the mass consciousness has become quite firmly associated with Marxism.

However, this also has the opposite effect - a huge number of people who call themselves communists, verbally accept Marxism and even flaunt quotes from the classics, are in fact carriers of utopian communism. They simply cannot come up with any other, brighter “communism” and cling to the screen.

There are a sufficient number of people who will follow the communists, having something “of their own” in mind, and we need to understand with what hook we can hook spontaneous communists and how to use them in the revolutionary process.

And to do this, you need to understand what forms the spontaneous communism of the masses takes and where even in the most reactionary views there is a communist grain, and by this thread you need to pull the masses out of the swamp of reaction and conformism.

Attempts by the bourgeoisie to exploit these sentiments usually do not end in anything other than an escalation of spontaneous communist views. The call of the bourgeoisie to protect Paris from the Prussians led to the fact that the bourgeoisie was demanded to implement a program of spontaneous communist views, and they demanded it with bayonets. Therefore, in 1940, the bourgeoisie chose to surrender, because they understood that they could not keep this genie in the bottle.

From the previous, it is quite clear how the attempts of the Russian bourgeoisie to flirt with the spontaneous communism of the masses in conditions of wars and crises will end (and they flirt, try to kindle the labor and fighting enthusiasm of the proletarian for the “common cause” - the defense of the Motherland). They invariably forget that the proletarian will inevitably understand the goals and objectives of this common cause in his own way, and if the bourgeoisie does not constantly suppress these shoots, then they will end up with a natural Chevengur, where everyone heroically builds something of their own in the name of the common good.

This process must be both saddled and led. And at the same time get rid of the “communists”, for whom communism means something of its own, and not a scientific understanding of what SHOULD be .

I. Bortnik
7/11/2023

https://prorivists.org/87_chevengur/

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