To get straight to the point, I’ve been trying to move right back to reading from the original Marxists, esp. Marx and Engels themselves.
I think the online left and people organizing in real life are not paying enough attention to the trends at hand. Some people we are calling comrades today are going to be fascists, and I believe as undisputed fact.
People are making reference to an “industrial” versus “financial” capitalism, or reference to a so-called PMC class, or reference to a “critical support” of countries like Russia, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and many others. I see a lot of talk about multipolarity and geopolitics.
At first glance, this doesn’t look harmful, but if we go back in time and imagine similar debates as though it were still World War I? These would be the ones first to try to pull a Mussolini and jump from Communist and anti-Imperialist to writing fascist theory.
As these perversions of Marx continue, I really do fear that a lot of middle-class (and those middle-class falling to proles) will see this and end up re-inventing fascism.
There is far too much crude and vulgar anti-capitalism, anti-liberalism, anti-imperalism. It’s a grave error. Liberalism is born out of the French Revolution and brought us progressively towards radical socialism and Communism. Capitalism, for all its faults, brought us progressively towards alternative structures and the ability for workers to seize mass production for their class. Anti-imperialism, for some of its faults, brought us the Russian, Chinese, Cuban, Vietnamese, and Korean revolutions, all but one with total victory.
But I hear people calling themselves anti-capitalist, anti-liberal, anti-imperalist as if there was nothing more behind those words. We’re in World War III it seems, but people who are clearly infiltrated and have a lack of understanding of serious conflicts are running left-wing parties. What are they doing? Who is there to critique them? Over the years we’ve had to deal with nonsense from the IMT, Midwestern Marx, the Black Hammer Party, PCUSA, and so on. There is no working class party with the tools and experience and support base to properly analyze and critique them.
I think we need to request of working class parties a way to redefine the use of anti-imperialist forces and the idea of nationalism and ideas of “oppressed nations” and the way the Global North and Global South are organized. To be blunt, Palestine is one of the only places on this earth where a real national liberation would be legitimate. From so many years of a weakened leftist movement, it looks like decades of work are going to be put in to fix it.
I get the idea that Cuba and North Korea are the last breath of Communism on this planet and, for how much of a fight they put up, they are still struggling. Hard. N. Korea is reliant on Russia. Cuba is facing so many leaving the country while their economy hasn’t fully recovered, and they are turning to private sector to fix problems while still under a painful embargo. These are not pleasant places to live and I can’t think of anyone in the real world that would see this socialism and decide it’s the way to go. So much progress is squeezed into these tiny countries and there’s nothing to show the world for it. On top of that, if Palestine doesn’t get a real success in the near future, we are pushed even further back in terms of progess while the leftist movement is barely getting back to development.
I am still Marxist-Leninist, but I hope people understand that the mistakes of leftist movements today are going to be the framework for fascists tomorrow. I won’t lose hope, but a lot of people will.
Who is going to be the one to transform the contradictions of today into the working class movements of tomorrow, speaking figuratively?
Sorry to let down many on Lemmygrad and Hexbear with this statement, but neither the rise of China nor the fall of the US will be way to success. Those are just inevitabilities based on present conditions, but the events alone aren’t going to do much. The fall of the US might even put hell on some of the most vulnerable people on earth. And the rise of China isn’t going to inspire much except a vague sense of “economic stability and prosperity”.
At this point, my position is almost right in the middle, right between the average (in-practice) Marxist-Leninist and the average (in-practice) ML-Maoist. My views are starting to diverge a little too much from what I see online, but my views are still useful in real life situations and among the real world, which is a good sign, but it doesn’t even look like half the people calling themselves some form of leftists are even trying to understand what they are doing. The world is moving too fast and too dangerously for so many people to make these deadly errors
I think you are misunderstanding the contradictions here, and why people on the left “critically” support China.
The ultimate line is going to be drawn on whether the landlord/rentier class can be successfully purged by the industrial capital, which is mostly concentrated in China today, and finishing what the bourgeois revolution set out to but failed to achieve more than a century ago.
Whether you like it or not, China’s industrial capital still has not been fully financialized yet, its money creation is run by a state bank, not central banks run by private bankers as have happened in every Western country since the 1900s. This is why there is still hope for an alternative mode of economic system left that can lead to socialism, and one that directly competes with and ultimately replaces the neoliberal model of the West.
I think it would be very helpful if leftists starting thinking about the world’s problems in terms of contradictions. What is happening around the world today is simply the motions of material forces that will eventually and inevitably end with the clash between finance capital (dominated by the US) and industrial capital (dominated by China).
The question is who will prevail? Can industrial capital succeed in purging the landlord/rentier/financial class which as Marx had envisioned will lead to socialist revolutions? Or will finance capital - through the use of sheer money creation - crush industrial capital for the second time?
This is the principal contradiction of capitalism today. BRICS (mostly China) presents an alternative where socialism is a possibility (and if you believe Marx, inevitable even), to the neoliberal economy where socialism (as least in the form as envisioned by Marx’s knowledge of the conditions under 19th century industrial capitalism) is simply impossible to be achieved.
@SweetLava@hexbear.net, Gabriel Rockhill tries to explain how to think about China (and Russia) dialectically (i.e. in terms of contradictions and stages, always in motion): How The Left Should Analyze the Rise of a Multipolar World, China, Russia & BRICS
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I guess my idea is that these are only external contradictions. I wouldn’t really praise or applaud BRICS or multipolarity, but I’d look at them as heightening the contradictions of capitalism, the hegemonic form lead by Wall St. and London. The real goal, of course, requires an actual socialist revolution, or a Communist force that succeeds and wins over swaths of the working class across the globe. or, really, to replace capitalist globalization with proletarian internationalism. Just like the difficulties establishing Communism with the first revolutions, noting the Russian Revolution, we are at another beggining/intermediate phase where any tiny mistake could be put under extreme scrutiny but any tiny success could be seen as a potential “domino effect”.
The only option is to heighten the contradictions at home (meaning, within the head of Empire leading capitalism today via the US). But you can never doubt the depravity of the oppressor(s). If Palestine even dares to consider a chance of victory right now, even if it’s the mind of Israeli hysteria and completely false, there is no shortage of Americans willing to put even the most milquetoast of leftist reformers to death or prison. I’m sure you know what I’m getting at considering my confusion with how neoliberalism works and its relation to fascistic ideology — I’m saying the US will force fascism via the exact means everyone on this forum already has seen and been made aware of. But the Atlanticist modernized and “liberalized”/watered-down fascism of post-WWII, while dominant, is still up against rising, pseudo-internationlist, anti-West fascism with strong contenders.
Getting too excited about this shakey in-between world we are living in is a danger and could just as easily crumble into fascism with a different name and flavor. The alternative media, oligarchs, intellectuals, and networks are already formed.
With how much is going on in the world, I can’t say what compromises are acceptable or not, but I partially want people like you to be correct — it would make the long future go a lot smoother.
If I understand the gist of your post correctly, I am in agreement. I think these times are quite momentous and communists like us should see that we will be required in the not too distant future. At this point we should be preparing ourselves and building the movement, critically, as you say, in the correct way. I think the current situation can be likened to the situation which prompted Lenin to start the Iskra (Spark) newspaper (heightening contradictions, but a disorganised opposition). I think this is a time where we have to begin the work for a unified communist front in our respective nations, which of course must be of the correct ideological grounding. I also have seen worrying examples of supposedly communist parties actually spewing fascist, nationalist rhetoric. Eg. “The immigrants are a problem because they are hurting the british working class” - courtesy of the CPBML (Not the CPGBML, they are different, the latter generally holds views congruent with discussion that occurs here and on lemmygrad). This completely misses the point of imperialism and the exploitation of the global proletariat. I think comrades in currently-imperial core countries have a task ahead of them. The development of socialism in prior imperialist nations has not occurred yet, and will be a novel development of marxism.
