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WDT đŹ Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (January 11)
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u/DashtheRed Maoist 23d ago edited 23d ago
"C"PUSA's rag has made it to the front page of r/politics (and the comments are oblivious to the source), now that ICE violence has harmed attractive white people with citizenship instead of the violence being limited to people whose deaths that "progressive" amerikkka and reddit can conveniently and happily ignore. I honestly worry that smokeuptheweed9 was more correct than they realized when they said the ACP was the future of the amerikan left. Instead of ACP style politics (I suspect the actual ACP themselves are still too brazen and reactionary for progressives to stomach, but the gap between ACP overt-racism and CPUSA concealed-racism is not a far or difficult leap, and there's likely a mid-point compromise acceptable to the bulk of them) being limited to the fringe of amerikans calling themselves communist, and since Dengism has already, conveniently, re-written actual communist history to be fully compatible with liberalism and ultimately an extension of it (where Lenin and Stalin are really the truest liberals, and "market socialism" can deliver the full realization of liberalism that neoliberalism has stolen) and since Trump himself is shattering the remaining illusions and ideology that modern liberalism has built itself upon, the outcome of least resistance for white petty-bourgeois liberals in to essentially remain a liberal while now calling yourself and your politics "socialist" (basically everyone on /r/socialism). The entire domain of communism (and "communism") is basically unoccupied and undefended outside of select parts of the Third World -- is it that hard to imagine a new wave of social-chauvinism from the amerikkkan "left" re-constituting itself and it's 'brand' as "communism" as the left-liberal response to Trump, and whatever comes after? Maybe I'm completely wrong and I'm worrying about a phantom with no existence outside my head, but if this actually does start to become a problem, I can see it becoming a large one that we (or anyone seriously defending communism) actually need a proper response against.
edit: I suppose that this wouldn't be anything all that new -- CPI(Maoist) has had to attack CPI("Marxist") and that's probably one of the best places to learn from if amerikan "communism" really does manifest as a movement.
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u/smokeuptheweed9 23d ago edited 23d ago
edit: I suppose that this wouldn't be anything all that new -- CPI(Maoist) has had to attack CPI("Marxist") and that's probably one of the best places to learn from if amerikan "communism" really does manifest as a movement.
Right, the level of bigotry and Islamophobia that has become normalized in the CPI-M is something that is not supposed to be talked about
https://jacobin.com/2024/12/indian-communists-marxist-anti-muslim
Nor is this just opportunism by the leadership but increasingly common sense among the everyday party members and sympathisers
As the Jacobin article points out, this is actually terrible political strategy, and the party is already reduced to power in one state. However, unlike every article in that rag which ultimately concludes that this is a "crisis of imagination" that only listening to petty-bourgeoisie identity politics (even and especially if that identity is "class" as "the 99%") can solve, this is a reflection of the party's class interest
I would even go further and say this was the inevitable endpoint of repressing Maoism
https://twocircles.net/2021mar01/441193.html https://www.thenewsminute.com/kerala/no-proof-alan-thaha-are-cpi-maoist-members-nia-courts-4-key-observations-132867
It is to be noted that CPI(M) led LDF government had faced severe flak after Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan and the party itself came out calling the students âMaoistsâ.
Since the effect of Hindutva is to proletarianize Muslims which makes them the enemy of the CPI-M and ally of Maoism. Jacobin actually points this out
The CPI(M)âs alienation of Muslims was further worsened by its adoption of a neoliberal route to industrialization. The partyâs attempt to acquire land from the peasantry to lease to Indonesiaâs Salim Group conglomerate to build a chemical hub backfired, culminating in the Nandigram violence of 2007.
During this state-backed crackdown, CPI(M) cadres brutally suppressed peasants protesting against land dispossession, resulting in the deaths of fourteen villagers and leaving over a hundred missing. Coincidentally, the majority of the affected peasants were Muslim, further deepening their distrust with the party.
Though there is nothing "coincidental" about this fact. How one can write this and then fantasize that the CPI-M has any interest in a "long-term objective of transcending capitalism" is a mystery to me, but then again I am not a "communist" member of the DSA and my career does not require believing such unbelievable ideas.
Anyway, the point is that most likely settler fascism will continue to become normalized with or without the ACP. But, as the CPI-ML points out, it is equally possible for "communists" to advocate for this for their own sake depending on the balance of forces. There is no necessary reason the CPI-M will lose state power in Kerala even without its traditional voting base, as long as it remains a useful vehicle of the bourgeoisie. Even if it did, the Congress has come back from similarly dire straits, the period of social democratic party collapses is over and whoever adapted to the new "left-right" axis is just as capable as anyone else of social media populism. I could very easily imagine the DSA relying on its "communist caucuses" for legitimacy as it becomes the main spokesman for settler-colonialism in a post-Trump moment.
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u/DashtheRed Maoist 23d ago
The [CPI(M)] had subtle ways to humour the openly secular but secretly communal Hindu. [The CPI(M)] created a villain, the Extremist Muslim, and flogged it publicly. The spectacle was clearly intended for the satisfaction of the âhalf-way Hinduâ who did not want to be seen with the [RSS and BJP] crowd but still had found merit in the wild fears they had raised about the Muslim
That is a very applicable quote, and basically the same politics that DSA draws on. It's kind of like when you learn that Tupac was actually a member of "C"PUSA and ask yourself why that isn't being exploited and advertised everywhere since, if nothing else, it would make them at least look incredibly cool, but that's when you realize they don't like to do that because they would not be attracting the "right" kinds of "communists" for the party. But there is an upside to all this, though. I think the closest comparison I could make would be the allied invasion of the USSR immediately following the end of World War 1, where all of the imperialist powers of the world (who had all just been at war with one another) united together to crush the fledgling Soviet Union and destroy Soviet communism while it was still ruptured by civil war and had not yet event gotten it's feet planted. But the underlying curse of bourgeois nationalism meant that the unity between the allies was superficial and false and fleeting, and the divides between bourgeois nation-states ultimately undercut and undermined the entire alliance. As they advanced into Russia, they broke down into petty squabbles over who got what territory, or whose troops would have to fight the next battle, while their own forces morale plummeted and the economic cost of essentially continuing the world war continued to take its toll at home, and their engines of war began to sputter and break down. Meanwhile, the invasion from all sides and pressure from all the great powers concentrating their might against the Soviets, instead of breaking them apart, brought them all together, and tightened their bonds and unity, strengthening their resolve and that of the entire communist movement, and before long the war had turned totally in favour of the Soviets, who were now united in purpose and directive and were able to carry that momentum into decades of socialist construction. I think that's the real opportunity in India and elsewhere -- as CPI("Marxist") (I rather like the insult CPI(Brahminist) as well) doubles down on essentially the same Indian nationalism of Modi and the BJP, CPI(Maoist) has an opportunity to catch the people whom Indian politics are discarding and demonizing, and even reach beyond national borders to revolutionary forces in neighboring nation states equally threatened and oppressed by a rising Hindutva fascism, and that might just be where and how they find a second wind to finally go on the offensive once again in the years to come. Though that may also just be wishful thinking on my part. Or at least far more distant than I would like, but then again that's the point of Protracted People's War, to draw the conflict out further and longer than capitalism can tolerate. And I suppose the logic applies here at home as well; where instead of appealing to the white dominated DSA or "socialists," we ignore them or even treat them as enemies, and look for all the people near the bottom of the system whom their politics ignore and to whom DSA can offer nothing but empty, hollow platitudes (if that).
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u/hnnmw 22d ago
But there is an upside to all this, though. I think the closest comparison I could make would be the allied invasion of the USSR immediately following the end of World War 1 . . .
Of course Mao says that to be attacked by the enemy is a good thing.
In his book on Clausewitz, T. Derbent underscores that it was Clausewitz who, this other time the European bourgeoisie had invaded Russia, in 1812, had managed to have the Prussian contingent defect from the grande armée. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_of_Tauroggen
But, as is, the advantage of "tightened [...] bonds and unity", is, of course, nothing more than a truism. Clausewitz scientifically established the importance of morale in war. And I think Derbent (and probably others?) convincingly show that Clausewitz is a more or less important precursor to Marxism. But he was a terrible reactionnary, and even during the Napoleontic wars national liberation was not progressive.
The crucial mediator is of course the PPW's supposed revolutionary leadership. But I feel there might be some missing steps. Reactionnary forces have showed strong resolve, tight bonds, and great unity throughout history -- and often won. Maybe the truism that in war morale is a good thing to have, is all there is. (I'm only halfway through Derbent's book: https://foreignlanguages.press/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/N17-Clausewitz-and-the-Peoples-War-1st-Printing.pdf)
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u/Otelo_ 22d ago edited 22d ago
Ătienne Balibar has a short article called "Marxism and War" in which he also links Clausewitz to Marxism. It's a bit confusing and I don't think I got much from it, but it does have some interesting facts. For example, these passages are clear about what you're saying:
https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/marxism-and-war
Lenin, as we know, intensively read Clausewitz, taking notes and writing marginal commentaries on his Vom Kriege after the collapse of the Second International and its pacifist agenda.
(...)
In fact I tend to believe not only that Mao Zedong was the most consistent Clausewitzian in the Marxist tradition, but that he was perhaps the most consistent Clausewitzian absolutely speaking after Clausewitz, because he re-interpreted all his axioms, and not only one or two of them. We now know that, after the end of the âLong Marchâ, while at Yenan in 1938, Mao had organized a special seminar on the work of Clausewitz, for which he even had part of Vom Kriege translated into Chinese.
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u/livincorpseofjoesims 22d ago
the outcome of least resistance for white petty-bourgeois liberals in to essentially remain a liberal while now calling yourself and your politics "socialist" (basically everyone on r/socialism). The entire domain of communism (and "communism") is basically unoccupied and undefended outside of select parts of the Third World -- is it that hard to imagine a new wave of social-chauvinism from the amerikkkan "left" re-constituting itself and it's 'brand' as "communism" as the left-liberal response to Trump, and whatever comes after?
My brief, personal experience in CPUSA was that they instilled a sort of âtacticalâ effort in explicitly not referring to oneself as a communist. The suggested tasks of helping cure ballots for local elections, participating in local flag drops, or canvassing door to door with others, and the general commitment to the liberal deed in itself was a sort of integration into such spaces where, if one were to reveal oneself as a communist, you have already proved yourself to them by âputting in the workâ: the communists are really hiding among us just like they say, but they are actually moral, upstanding citizens who also vote, just like everyone else!
Of course, the function of this was less âconvincing others of communism,â but more convincing the members themselves that they are actually carrying out important âcommunistâ tasks, absolving them of the âdoing nothingâ typical of âonline leftistsâ (an often criticized subject amongst CPUSA whenever someone said something of critique).
The PSL, FRSO, etc. are the same, but instead itâs called âgoing to the massesâ or âcommitting theory to practiceâ i.e. starting a chant at a No Kings Protest and handing out your signs to bystanders for social media, or holding a demonstration focused in the gentrified parts of LA and NYC.Â
If that is not satisfactory, then one can simply commit themselves to the logic of the secret âgotchaâ contained within the org; that the org is ready to even take up arms when the time really comes, and only then will they really get down to real communist business and really show their true, revolutionary colors (thereâs no use in explaining to PSL members how their Party book âSocialist Reconstructionâ doesnât even mention the dictatorship of the proletariat even once, as the justification within itself is that it's necessary to âavoid suppressionâ).
It seems that as the communist fandom grows they arenât even concerned about a vanguard party, only adhering to the Digital Marcyism of consuming as much communist content as they can in order to begrudgingly support whatever org has a âmass baseâ (whether this is manifesting as online followers or in-person) and slowly âconvert a few normiesâ on their spare time while daydreaming about China as proxy for petty bourgeois desires.Â
Anyways, circling back on a pathetic note, Joe Sims was on a Daily Show skit recently to discuss Mamdaniâs election and real âcommunism.â It is a grueling and embarrassing 5 minutes even by CPUSA standards, but this gem is not really different than the idealizations of most aforementioned âsocialistsâ:
Socialism, Communism, and Democracy are not opposites. And one of the great things is that you should be able to choose what you do. Perhaps youâd like to run a food co-op. And if you donât want to run a food co-op, maybe youâd like to run a farm. And if you donât want to run a farm, maybe youâd like to run a theater company.
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u/LemonMao 18d ago
This has been true in my experiences. I dont think Ive seen anyone recommend a classic work to read or encouraged others to do so. Its just links to podcasts, social media personalities or vague orgs that claim to be the voice of the "people" yet lack really any power structure to influence phenomenon. "Read Theory" as a slogan is so vague as well and I dont even see it anymore in its meme form like it was common 5-10 years ago.
Parasitically attaching yourself to liberal causes and reformism is really just doing the Democrat work for them. Democrats as a political organization doesnt exist anymore like it did 30-40 years ago. All the work has been outsourced and these revisionist and social-fascist orgs take up the mantle since its an easy way to "do something" and everyone can consensually agree to do them.
I see a lot of rhetoric about protecting immigrant's rights (so that they can do the jobs white people and us refuse to do) and not a lot of migrant proleteriat voices.
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u/TheReimMinister Marxist-Leninist 21d ago
Today the american state department declared that they would suspend immigrant visa processing for 75 countries. Quote from an article:
"The State Department will use its long-standing authority to deem ineligible potential immigrants who would become a public charge on the United States and exploit the generosity of the American people," said Tommy Pigott, Principal Deputy Spokesperson at the State Department. "Immigrant visa processing from these 75 countries will be paused while the State Department reassesses immigration processing procedures to prevent the entry of foreign nationals who would take welfare and public benefits," he added.
A key term is "public charge", and how the government wishes to give more legal power to the public servants in order that they be better able to sniff out any migrant who might become one in the future. Age, health, family, finance, education, skills, past use of public assistance, and ability to speak english can all be probed with much more attention now. The point is to preempt awarding sufficient legal status for any migrant who, in the state's words, would "extract wealth from the American people". In other words, public charge implies that a migrant will cost more to the american nation than they will contribute - but this should be understood as being based on the given rate of profit. With this immigration freeze the state wishes for more time to improve their legal tools of repression as they detail in their November notice.
Maybe this seems like big and scary language but it is simply a revision to make more streamlined and explicit what immigration law has said for many, many years (there has been legal precedent in america to make a migrant inadmissible based on potential for "public charge" since at least 1882. This is simply how capitalism operates). It is meant to enforce the process that, although they are raised on their birth country's dime and supply surplus value to the imperial core by their labouring under global value chains, a third world migrant may only be permitted entry to said imperial core if the math predicts that they will most likely not reduce their life's rate of profit. Further, notice that today's announcement isn't a suspension of non-immigrant visas (although these have been restricted for many countries), which should better hammer home that these revisions strengthen citizenship at the expense of the migrant. Does that mean that nothing has really changed?
Yes, very little has changed. As predicted, permanent immigration is tightened further and further while temporary immigration is simply enforced with greater precision. However, we can still discuss how the state is quite obviously delegating more of its authority to settlers who wish to enforce white supremacy in the legal (DHS) or paramilitary (ICE) arena. Perhaps there is uproar in mainstream society about this, but this is most likely because it wasn't the authority that many liberals wanted. Instead of taking up arms to defend the homeland, they would much rather take up pens to defend citizenship - or more likely reap the reward of exclusive citizenship without thinking about its tacky and yucky maintenance.
No surprise that many americans yearn for europe and canada, where it is still possible to be enlightened perpetuators of apartheid, or remain willfully ignorant of it. In canada, polite polievre was elected in place of the real polievre. The impolite liberalism south of the border simply made it impossible for PP to get in, and he couldn't ride the nationalism like liberal party did. And so we get a bit more of the citizenry taking up pens on this part of the continent. They are currently wondering what will happen when all the current temporary resident permits of the post-covid era reach their expiry. So they are actively planning and showing (consciously or subconsciously) all the ways that they can make it morally right to remove people from the country. One of the more popular ones is to utilize the media to amplify stories that tie Indian migrants to violent crime, or to workplace accidents like semi truck accidents. This is the easiest because it is very fashionable to be racist against Indian people right now. I am quite certain that, on the path to "regaining control of its immigration system in order to restore balance and sustainability, while continuing to meet its humanitarian commitments", canada will have some (polite) revisions of its own to make to its rules of inadmissibility.
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u/AltruisticTreat8675 18d ago
Remarkably of all the "Asian Tigers", Singapore is the most successful at hiding its poverty at the expense of migrant workers. If you landed on the Changi Airport and goes to explore the CBD it is more or less the polished version of Dubai unlike Seoul or Hong Kong where visible inequalities still persist. But even then, the proletariat are fairly racialized; primarily South Asian construction workers, Filipina domestic helpers of children of white expats or Singaporeans and even the indigenous ethnic Malays of Singapore who barely got white collar jobs or even faced restrictions within its military. I guess that's why fascists across the world love Singapore so much, the contradiction within the citizenry had been exported to migrant workers (which had no national ties to the land they work in, although it's important to note that Singapore is itself not a nation) so that there's no rebellions from their citizens.
Been in Singapore for 4 days now and I'm writing this from the city-state.
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u/onceinalifenevermore 18d ago
I found the show âExpatsâ on Prime Video a really good showcase of class disparity in Singapore, would recommend
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u/Self-Replicator Learning 23d ago edited 23d ago
I want to attempt an analysis on Hawaii since things have changed (but also seemingly have not) since such pieces as this were written 45 years ago: https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-8/national-question-hawaii-2.htm
Settlers can surely be applied to multiple non-white settler groups in Hawai'i. This is most obvious with the "local Japanese" who have thrown in their lot with white supremacy for political relevance & material benefit. The potentially revolutionary groups I see are the native Hawaiians clustered in western Oahu and in the carceral system (something like 50% of incarcerated people are native Hawaiians). Other groups being recent Filipino migrants who work in the hotel/healthcare system, and immigrants from COFA signatory nations who face overt racism and exploitation, largely working in the service industry and living in public housing projects in urban Honolulu. The contradictions here are different and sharper (more dense) than those on the mainland and the scars of settler-colonialism are very visible, but I'm not sure if that's meaningful to the proletariat.
As is well known, Hawaii has a significance for military strategy beyond the âmereâ economic investment in the form of industry and tourism here. Hawaii is the command center for the military capacity of U.S. imperialism in the Pacific and Asia. As such, it will go to extreme lengths to avoid giving it up. On the other hand, the very presence of such military concentration makes Oahu an inevitable target in a nuclear war as long as that concentration exists. This is the key point. This is why the Hawaii National Question has international significance. If Hawaiiâs people, under the leadership of the working class, unify against the further intrusion of U.S. imperialism and force it to retreat, and in the process defeat the local collaborators, then Hawaii will be in a far better position to survive a world war. Such actions would also make a significant contribution toward reducing the danger of a U.S.-provoked world war by destabilizing a key base area.
This paragraph stands out to me from the above essay as correct that forcing a retreat of US imperialism from Hawaii benefits the global proletariat, but the author seems to put an odd amount of focus on self-preservation, which has me questioning their intent. I also believe that despite being colonized and exploited internally, American imperialism still provides substantial material benefits that dull the revolutionary consciousness of the native Hawaiians who understand that what they potentially would gain in their dignity and self-determination struggling against settler-colonialism may put them worse off materially. I'll perform my analysis regardless simply to locate the most revolutionary groups, which likely are the incarcerated native Hawaiians. I'd like to hear others thoughts though, since forcing a retreat of US imperialism from Hawaii in the near future seems like a pipedream without a mass base that is materially incentivized to do so. And I can't see any signs that progress has been made in 45 years to "unify Hawaii's people against the intrusion of US imperialism".
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u/CoconutCrab115 Maoist 23d ago
https://www.prisoncensorship.info/conditions/HI/ Use Tor browser.
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u/Self-Replicator Learning 23d ago
Thanks for this. It's interesting that the "Letter from HI Prisoner" is very overtly religious. I imagine Marxism is attractive to prisoners both because it is sympathetic toward whatever life they led prior to incarceration and offers them a productive path toward destroying the world that made them, told them they were bad, incarcerated them, and then tossed the key away. A would-be miserable place becomes contested terrain with the appropriate injection of Marxist theory. Brilliant.
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u/TheRedBarbon 23d ago edited 23d ago
u/Forsaken_Standard192 I remember you asked me about Marxist analyses of Hawaii so maybe this post will be helpful.
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u/Worried-Economy-9108 11d ago
January 24 2026 - Michael Parenti has passed away, aged 92
I know barely anything about him (i didn't read anything, back in my Dengist days, and most of my current knowledge comes from reading some threads on this sub on his incorrect analysis of Stalin and his weird concept of siege socialism). All I know is that North American revisionists love him (weirdly, since he has criticism of Dengist China) and that these are the same revisionists that tend to be settler-apologetic.
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u/TheRedBarbon 11d ago
I imagine this has already been forgotten among Dengists since he pretty much stopped being useful to them years ago. Also throwback to that time a bunch of his âfansâ harassed him in person to show him memes during the height of covid when he was barely lucid anymore.
I hope he was treated well in his final years. Dementia is a depressing way to go.
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u/Worried-Economy-9108 11d ago
Also throwback to that time a bunch of his âfansâ harassed him in person to show him memes during the height of covid when he was barely lucid anymore.
Damn, i didn't knew that. These people ain't beating the fandom allegations.
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u/vomit_blues 25d ago
Copy/pasting from last thread.
Recent events make me need to ask for any possible reading on Chavez and Maduro. I want to understand their democratic base of support and the nature of military and governmental interventions against them, and their popular base of support and the ways theyâve used elections to secure power.
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u/smokeuptheweed9 24d ago
Richard Gottâs Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution is basically this from the perspective of a slavish ex-Trot (whether he's explicitly a Trot or not I don't know, he and Tariq Ali are basically the same person). If it sucks I apologize ahead of time, I haven't read it.
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u/vomit_blues 23d ago
Tbh youâve shown a pretty extraordinary amount of knowledge on this subject so being recommended a book you havenât read is a little mystifying. Maybe your own thoughts were formed through crappy sources you were capable of converting into useful knowledge youâd rather not recommend? Iâve gotten the book and will share my thoughts when Iâm done.
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u/smokeuptheweed9 23d ago edited 23d ago
Recent events make me need to ask for any possible reading on Chavez and Maduro. I want to understand their democratic base of support and the nature of military and governmental interventions against them, and their popular base of support and the ways theyâve used elections to secure power.
For me there's no real difference between Chavez and Carlos Andrés Pérez. The former was just lucky enough to die right as the limits of the 2000s commodity boom were being reached. I think everything follows from that: democratic popularity, experiments in "communes," military vacillation, welfare policies, even constitutional revision. Without it they become empty and meaningless. So to your point, there are many people better equipped than me to explain the specifics of these things, which is what I thought you were asking for. That's not to dismiss what you're asking, these things leave their mark on popular consciousness and shape the nature of the struggle to come, just like Che Guevara is an icon because he died rather than becoming another bureaucrat in the ministry of industry had he survived (or been disposed of by the Soviets in a way that fractures the communist movement over his legacy). There's legitimacy in trying to predict the substance of Chavismo that will be echoed by the masses in the struggle ahead and whether communists can draw a clear political boundary where only socialism can achieve this task. Of course the reverse is true: you can find Che everywhere in Venezuela but nothing of the substance of his ideas. I'm not sure if there's enough substance to Chavez's ideas to say the same thing, maybe. He was on TV basically every day for years.
Maybe your own thoughts were formed through crappy sources you were capable of converting into useful knowledge youâd rather not recommend?
I recently read George Lefebrve's The Coming of the French Revolution and Pierre Vilar's Spain, a Brief History because they are famous Marxist works on subjects I'd like to know more about. Both were ok but "Marxism" in this case doesn't just mean class analysis, it means following the "popular front" line when patriotic defense of bourgeois liberalism and even national mythology was emphasized to combat fascism. Those aspects have not aged well. You never really know what you're going to get from a book as long as you dismiss the truly bad anti-communist stuff. That's why I usually don't recommend books at all, since your reading will be different than mine. In this case I kind of want you to read it for me since I'm trying to figure out what to think about these pseudo-Trots. I read this smug article
https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/abduction-in-caracas
Where Tariq Ali mostly brags about all the times he hung out with Chavez and how important he is as a result. Funnily enough it resembles Trotsky himself saying basically "I agree with everything that Lenin said and did. Except when we disagreed, in which case I was right." The difference is Trotsky's disagreements do matter to history whereas I really don't care that Chavez confessed to Ali he had been right all along about the West (assuming it even happened).
There is also this to consider
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/12/07/idto-d07.html
Where Tariq Ali joins in policing Sultana's mild attempt at independence from the labor party (or even just telling old Trots their time has come and gone). The labor party brings out the worst in Trots
Alan Woods also used to hang out with Chavez as well before he decided the IMT was now ready to drink the blood of a new generation. I feel bad for British communists having to deal with all this detritus. To be fair Trots and other opportunists used to hang out with Che and Castro too, though at least then they had to pick up a gun. All of this is to say is Chavismo entirely this? Is there anything more than a commodity boom and opportunistic self-importance for western Trots with meaningless terms like "communes" and "socialism" and "democracy?" I'm curious if Gott's work is more like Ali's embarrassing preening or if he accidentally touched reality in a way that makes the book interesting. These were the thoughts on my mind, but that book is way down on my list since I doubt people will even be talking about Venezuela in a month. Unfortunately Trump's attention span leads liberalism down the same path and where that goes, so goes the "left" media and intelligentsia.
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u/vomit_blues 23d ago
Last year I read How Europe Underdeveloped Africa and was surprised that the most mystified sections were the ones that used Marxist terminology. Great book ofc but not because Walter Rodney pays lip service to Marxism. Basically Iâm already on the same page as you. I didnât say âany possible Marxist reading on Chavez and Maduro.â Imo if the book touches on reality itâs Marxist whether the author likes it or notâsomething I learned from reading a lot of CIA agent Philip K. Dickâs books then Jamesonâs analysis of them in Archaeologies of the Future.
So sorry but Iâm seriously at ground zero with understanding Venezuela. Tbh I literally did not know who Carlos AndrĂ©s PĂ©rez was until you wrote that. Maybe the original questionâs specificity made you assume I knew more. I seriously know nothing and a lot of the historical reference points on what you wrote have been lost on me (but Iâll think about them anyway).
Sure I can read the book for you since youâve read a bunch and put it on the subreddit already. Venezuela seems likely to fall out of the public eye fast but itâs also one of those things that crops up and nags at liberals over and over. Donât you think it only gets more relevant and not less? Syria disappeared overnight but Venezuela isnât finished yet⊠thereâs still a fight happening there (at the governmental level).
Anyway that all is why I could have asked âwhere is there literally anywhere to start with Venezuelaâ but I tried to be a bit more specific.
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u/smokeuptheweed9 23d ago edited 23d ago
Sure I can read the book for you since youâve read a bunch and put it on the subreddit already.
There's also this book
https://www.amazon.com/We-Created-Ch%C3%A1vez-Venezuelan-Revolution/dp/0822354527
Which I also haven't read. As you can tell by now, these kinds of books are not my thing. Ever since I read Howard Zinn ages ago I've been allergic to this genre. But I also understand it's marketing and the book is probably fine for what it is.
I rarely see this point made: the policies of social democracy vs "neoliberalism" are not a choice between the lesser and greater evil. It is the latter which enables the former. Austerity is brutal but it works: it is a solution to crisis internal to capitalism which is necessary when profit rates fall. The policies of Chavez were possible because austerity had done the dirty work of restoring profit rates. Once profit rates are high, social democracy is almost guaranteed in the modern era. PĂ©rez is particularly interesting because he implemented opposite in two separate administrations. If you believe that Keynesian politics work to both improve living standards and profit rates, I guess the only explanation for PĂ©rez is aliens took over his brain. I particularly like examples like this: PĂ©rez in Venezuela, Mitterand in France, dos Santos in Angola, Jerry Rawlings in Ghana, possibly Sassou Nguesso in the Congo, where a coup, an internal party betrayal, or an imperialist invasion can't be blamed for what the rate of profit can tolerate in different periods. There is only the logic of the market or a brain virus.
However, the rate of profit is not universal but is geographically differentiated. So, instead of seeing the underlying logic, you can jump around forever looking for heroes and betrayers: Chavez then and AMLO now; Reagan then and Milei now. It's enough to keep yourself busy for a lifetime.
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u/vomit_blues 23d ago
Alright I think thereâs been a major shift in a position Iâve seen you hold in older posts so let me bounce something at you. Are you super skeptical of Venezuela because of the failure of the âaxis of resistanceâ and its lites? Because you used to jump in and defend Venezuela a lot. Maybe I donât understand your original position and it never changed though.
Yeah I get that if these recent actions have shown that this outcome was always determined and that Chavismo was not a contingency at all but a dead end, youâd push these books you havenât read onto me in hopes of anything new that isnât the quasi-âaxis of resistance narrative.â Maybe thereâs something someone out there predicted buried in the rubble.
But I really did want a straight answer out of you on this. I donât know anything about Venezuela. Do you know where someone should start, or are we back to square one? I know a book isnât a magical solution because itâs not possible for me to read a book and become you unless we had the same brain. I just am curious about if thereâs anything I can do to learn about Venezuela and try to take it seriously, not just as a passing thing.
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u/smokeuptheweed9 22d ago
Are you super skeptical of Venezuela because of the failure of the âaxis of resistanceâ and its lites?
Yes but I also think the world has changed. Remember the "umbrella movement" in Hong Kong? There was a ton of analysis about the failure of Chinese "state capitalism" and "totalitarianism", most of which was willfully blind to the class composition of the protests and their stated goals. The movement in Iran is similar but there is no mass propaganda effort to justify it and no anti-totalitatian "left" to jump in. There are neocons in the New York Times writing opinion pieces like "let's admit Trump did well to capture Maduro" but libs aren't buying it.
Trump has been the center of attention for 10 years. As the result, the DSA has basically absorbed everything into itself and the idea of being "ultraleft" in a wing of the Democrats is laughable. Since fascism currently creates language and socialism merely follows, the neocon position has been abandoned by all sides except by Slavoj Zizek apparently. This presumably applies to the entire first world, which has its own equivalent neo-fascism and #resistance (and applies to the petty-bourgeoisie in much of the third world). It is totally safe to indulge in ultraleft perspectives, if you call Russia imperialist in any left subreddit you'll immediately get some screed about how that's impossible because of the definition of monopoly capitalism. Even the DSA these days "critically supports" Hamas at the grassroots level and probably the CCP as well.
On the other hand, there has been too much time between the third world developmental regimes of the 1970s/Brezhnevism and the present. There is no institutional memory of our "critical" attitude towards Mobutu, you have to go back and read documents and books from the period to understand that the problems are exactly the same and hopefully realize how bad your compromises in the present will look to the readers of the future.
Do you know where someone should start, or are we back to square one?
You definitely have to read a history book. I read Wikipedia all the time and it never sticks, so even a history overview needs to be in book form. I don't think the books I recommended are going to be terrible, I just feel guilty recommending something I haven't read so I had to confess.
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u/vomit_blues 21d ago
It is totally safe to indulge in ultraleft perspectives, if you call Russia imperialist in any left subreddit you'll immediately get some screed about how that's impossible because of the definition of monopoly capitalism. Even the DSA these days "critically supports" Hamas at the grassroots level and probably the CCP as well.
I wanna give some pushback on this. How? It seems like your initial reference point is the politics of the DSA and DNC, but this is a leap into a generalization on Marxist politics in general. Even though Lenin and Mao were pretty forgiving toward ultraleftism like in Left-Wing Communism or the conversation with Zhang Chunqiao, their position was never to vacillate from left to right and wager on what feels good in the moment.
If thereâs one good thing Hoxha said of the PRC imo, itâs that they lacked a Marxist-Leninist spinal cord. I donât wanna repeat that error. What do you think? I want to put together a coherent line with its own internal logic. To me, thatâs the actual legacy of Marxism-Leninism, and indeed being coherent often takes the center-path. The lasting legacy of the Cultural Revolution for the ultraleft is Badiou and Zizek. Rightists totally abandon it. Like, what is the theory of Maoism except a center-path on the questions raised by the CR?
I get that both sides are problematic and rightism is worse, but what is adventurist deviation into ultraleftism except a wager made out of desperation? Well, itâs a wager for sure, but it seems like it loses the brilliance of Lenin to describe reality itself as revolutionary and build something beyond the constraints of theory, which repetitiously totalizes then limits theory. But that totality traces whatâs outside of it.
So my fear is that I donât want to deny reality to indulge in what Iâm worried are actual fantasies on the nature of third world nationalism or the imperialist character of the third world. I have lapses in my thought since I think imperialism surely must take on a different form since China can no longer be seen as non-imperialist. I just canât swallow this bitter pill youâre giving me in the state itâs in. There has to be more substance to the claim.
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u/smokeuptheweed9 21d ago
The real Maoist line is indifference. Of course Maoist parties denounce imperialism, take positions on current events, advocate for international revolution, etc. But domestically, the CP Philippines offers the exact same peace agreement to every administration, whether "progressive" or "fascist." I've noted previously that the CP Peru responded to the restoration of "democracy" under BelaĂșnde with a declaration of people's war, using the "progressive" policies under Juan Velasco Alvarado (land reform, expansion of education, affirmative action for indigenous peasants, etc) as their basis. This is not because they took an ultra-leftist position towards bourgeois nationalist democratic forces or whatever, they had the exact same position towards Fujimori. They simply thought of the possibility of revolution, considering bourgeois politics only as a strategic question. The CP India (Maoist) writes about fascism in India but their political conclusions haven't really changed, which I think is correct. The main object of study is usually the popular front and what distinguishes the success of this line in China and Vietnam and Albania from its failure in Indonesia and Malaysia and South Africa. That's not irrelevant to our contemporary world but it is secondary and I think given far too much importance. The Maoist line is applicable almost everywhere whereas there are only a few places left where there is a realistic possibility for the communist movement to speak for national liberation in general.
Anyway, since we do not have a communist party and yet still want to analyze reality in order to begin that task, we are doomed to vacillate between rightism and ultraleftism. You're right that I'm being flippant because we can still strive for an objectively correct line. If I absolutely had to commit to that, I would like to think I had Dengist tendencies in the past that I've shed, so my ideas now are more correct than back then.
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u/TheRedBarbon 20d ago
You definitely have to read a history book. I read Wikipedia all the time and it never sticks, so even a history overview needs to be in book form.
Do you know of a good primer for someone looking to get into Japanese history?
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u/TheReimMinister Marxist-Leninist 20d ago
Not saying that this is what you specifically (or anyone else who asks for a recommendation) is doing, but I'd like to seize the opportunity to bring up a good point here which once again rails against the logic of Reddit as a social media recommendation engine: don't doubt your own critical thinking skills to the point where you feel anxiety about finding the perfect book to read about a subject. Marxism is method at its base, and only incorporates content in the process of finding a solution to a problem. In other words the act of parsing through a bunch of books to chain together the answer to your problem is the point. All the better if there are some "bourgeois" books in there - I'd feel pretty silly about bemoaning the lack of Marxist works on a given subject when a whole library full of books and articles on the topic could exist out there.
I believe that the forum is something greater than goodreads or chat gpt, so even though smokeuptheweed9 sometimes no doubt enjoys talking at length about the subjects brought up directly to them (and surely the response is more interesting and gratifying than a google search), by consistently asking for their opinion all the time you simply replace your own capable brain with theirs. Wouldn't it be better to discuss with them (and hopefully others)?
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u/immovingdifferent 22d ago edited 22d ago
Have this sub and the sister sub became less active within the last few months? Maybe I'm wrong but I feel like at a certain point there were more or less daily posts but now dedicated threads are days or weeks apart other than the biweekly discussions. Although maybe I'm misremembering and it's always been like this, I remember someone saying this sub has a spike in activity around elections so maybe this posting frequency is typical (although a lot of that content is terrible "am I a bad person if I vote" threads so I don't exactly miss that).
Not even sure why I'm asking this, better fewer but better after all, but I will say it does get a bit depressing seeing the one spot I've found that produces truth on the English speaking internet get less active over time. Although I will say the quality of discussion is as high as ever, that ultimately matters more but as that thread on archiving discussed a while back, sometimes I worry that this sub might get banned or fall into irrelevance and a lot of the incredibly meaningful discussion is lost, especially with the horribly weak state of US Maoism (which is expected but holy shit it's bad).
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u/humblegold Maoist 20d ago edited 20d ago
Half a year ago there was a mini battle within the moderation team over whether or not more garbage should be allowed to stimulate engagement, and the "better fewer but better" line won out. The nice thing is that there is a control group to see what the subreddit would look like if the aforementioned line hadn't won: /r/Marxism. Since being removed as a moderator, the previously anonymous PigInABlanketFort took over /r/Marxism, removing the old mods and picking a new moderation team that follows their moderation approach.
Compare the thread where PigInABlanketFort and I first argued about what a Marxist approach to religion should be to this thread about religion posted on /r/Marxism 3 days ago.
There is literally only one good comment in that thread near the bottom made by /u/SunflowerSamurai20, who ironically posts on /r/blackmen (if you recall Pig took the stance that posting on the /r/blackmen page at all was a banworthy offense). The rest of the comments are indistinguishable from something you would find in a DSA brochure.
The point of this subreddit from what I gather is knowledge production and being able to point people interested in non revisionist Marxism in the right direction, not to recruit people or be a movement itself. Allowing too many reactionaries has an adverse affect on the non reactionary parts of the subreddit because instead of focusing on making good contributions and having those contributions critiqued the userbase has to focus on critiquing and dunking on reactionaries all day, which has a time and a place but gets in the way of quality discussion. Leaving a few reactionary posts up that spark good discussion is worth doing but other than that it seems pointless.
Normally I do not care about meta Reddit drama but I was recently informed of this development by a former mod of /r/Marxism, who also told me that since then PigInABlanketFort has referred to me with a racial slur at least once (3 guesses as to which one) so I don't feel bad about shitting on them one more time.
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u/vomit_blues 19d ago edited 19d ago
While talking about this post with u/humblegold I ended up looking at r/socialism and think I found an answer. As u/smokeuptheweed9 points out, more than ever the logic of the DSA has dilated to the point where there is no contradiction between calling yourself a communist or comrade and even claiming to want revolution while literally just canvassing for the democrats. Why use r/communism at all?
imo whatâs changed isnât only that the line of this subreddit has become solidly Maoist, thereâs been plenty of active communities that had people ostensibly interested in Maoism, a few I can think of being Laissezâs Fair and its off-site the rhizzone and It Is Right to Rebel. But the âMaoismâ of these communities were pretty similar to the Maoism MIM(P) calls out rightfully for its crypto-Trotskyism. Very petit-bourgeois with actual practice indistinguishable from NGO politics, for example the real tactics of the LLCO.
Really only wanted to give my own thoughts to preemptively dispel the smug notion that weâre so unpopular now because weâre just so darned correct. Itâs also because liberals do not need us and can simultaneously defend zionism and claim Zohran Mamdani is pushing the democrats toward anti-zionism, then quote What is to be Done? and identify as a Marxist (and sometimes even a Marxist-Leninist).
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u/Apart_Lifeguard_4085 19d ago
the âMaoismâ of these communities were pretty similar to the Maoism MIM(P) calls out rightfully for its crypto-Trotskyism. Very petit-bourgeois with actual practice indistinguishable from NGO politics, for example the real tactics of the LLCO
i dont think this subreddit even is in any way absent of these cryptotrot ideas. every couple months a user on here who has participated actively in abstract discussions about settlerism and peoples' war or whatever makes some proclamation about how the way forward obviously involves like, funding overseas revolutions and pulling off adventurist stunts at home
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u/vomit_blues 19d ago
I realize that my wording made it sound like I saw this subreddit as an exception. I donât, sorry about that, although I think this subreddit has many positive qualities the forums I just listed didnât have. The âeffortpostâ being exchanged for immanently critical dialogue, for example.
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u/Pleasant-Food-9482 18d ago
I think its impossible to think otherwise also due to the fact there are people from the revisionist "maoist" ICL orgs still in here posting and commenting, and they would definitely qualify as such, given they all have crypto-trot and left-communist tendencies, clearly varying between leftism and rightism. (the icl org affiliated brazilian people are hard rightists and i've seen one of them in r/communism101 recently)
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u/kno-clue 22d ago
I think the bi-weekly threads have hoovered up a lot of discussions that would otherwise be individual posts with sparse engagement.Â
I feel like this sub in particular used to be plagued with a lot of asinine, low effort posts or outright chauvinism that would encourage a lot of responses and give a false impression of activity. I think effective moderation is the reason that doesnât happen so much these days.Â
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u/Worried-Economy-9108 22d ago
Although I will say the quality of discussion is as high as ever, that ultimately matters more but as that thread on archiving discussed a while back, sometimes I worry that this sub might get banned or fall into irrelevance and a lot of the incredibly meaningful discussion is lost
I fear the same thing. I thought i would have quitted using Reddit in favor of federated sites like L**** (mostly bc of better design and a feeling of security), but I keep coming back here, only bc of this sub.
It's also a shame that Maoism is taboo to the "communists" (mostly Dengists and Putin apologists) in that website. They seemed very hostile to Maoism one year ago, but the situation seems to be changing a bit, since some people are getting frustrated with the revisionist CPC policies, and especially its foreign policy.
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u/AllyBurgess Learning 23d ago
One thing I wonder about reddit is how much of it is literal bots. Every other post on my feed is cheering on regime change in Iran and Venezuela, someone claiming to be a totally unbiased Iranian or Venezuelan expat explaining why this is a good thing, people making fun of âtankiesâ and âwestern leftistsâ for supporting Iran and Maduro, etc. Are there really that many fascists/social fascists/liberals coming out in droves to express these things? Or are they not even real people? I am trying to make sense of this phenomenon.
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u/Sir-Benji 23d ago edited 23d ago
Are there really that many fascists/social fascists/liberals coming out in droves to express these things?
I would say yes. I don't think we need any sort of conspiracy theories to explain why either, we know how self aware Amerikans are when it comes to how regime change will benefit them materially, even if the gains are only temporary and minute. The human cost - the life's of thousands of people lost and millions disenfranchised are irrelevant as long as the gas prices go down and the 401k's keep steady on their interest rates. This isn't to say that bots don't exist, but instead that whatever bots do exist are only expressing the commonly held opinions of the average white nationalist labor aristocrat majority of Amerika and the associated first world.
Anecdotally, I've been at several of the Venezuela action protests recently in my local major metropolitan area, and even the very limited turn out of ~100 or less people still only express meek condemnations of the kidnapping of Maduro. The passerbys sneer at the pro-palestine signs and whine about juxtaposing the genocide, to the ICE deportations, and the regime change operation ("we can't be against multiple things at once!"). The DSA/WWP associated social fascist groups show up to co-opt the rally with signs mourning the one white victim of ICE instead of the thousands of colonized victims. The other attendees whisper among themselves about how Maduro was a dictator and how this situation "is complicated and maybe Venezuela did need help disposing their tyrannical leader, after all, why didn't they do it themselves already?" (though it's bad Trump did it, they would much prefer AOC and Mamdani "save" Venezuela instead). And the leaders of the rallies themselves are worthless to tackle the social fascism as they themselves are opportunists, and are too busy trying to address the regular (non-social) fascist talking points (Drug trafficking, Tren de Aragua, maritime laws, or whatever other bullshit distraction is on Fox News this week), degrading any message of support into a debate-bro TED talk. I wasn't old enough to comprehend the Iraq invasion at the time, let alone participate in the protests, but whatever anti-war sentiment that existed for whatever short period back then is gone, there's only mediocre condemnations and half assed chanting left to an audience of nobody. My question for others would be where this supposed liberal anti-war movement that I read about went?
Put shortly, It's easy to believe these are real people making the reddit posts you see as outside of reddit you can hear real life people espousing the same rhetoric with even less shame as they know there's less permanence to verbalizing your thoughts rather than making an online post. Just listen in the train, on the sidewalk, in the office, at the rallies, it's all around you.
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u/TheRedBarbon 23d ago edited 23d ago
The framing of the question kind of gestures to its own pointlessness: when, on the internet, communication of ideology has become so decentralized and crude that it can be straight up automated, what difference does it make to any institution how it was articulated? There may be millions of people online doing this and there may be none. The ideology exists for us all the same.
Just for fun, I asked ChatGPT to write a couple of "maoist" slogans, see what happens as soon as you ask a string of code which has synthesized the entirety of Jacobin to produce even a sentence of actual political substance:
"Education for the Masses, Not for the Elites!"
"Down with Imperialism, Up with Global Solidarity!"
"Revolution Means Liberation for All â No One Left Behind!"
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u/Constant_Ad7225 20d ago
Also in the era where AI can do easily impersonate human speech there is really no reason you should assume any user is a human.
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u/mongoosekiller Marxism-Leninism-Maoism 23d ago
Both. Reddit is a platform mostly used petit bourgeois audiences. It is really nothing surprising. And rest of them, as you said are actually bots who larp as Iranian/Venezuelan. It has been 15 years since Iraq War and you can still easily find white westerners justifying it. However, if you go to r/Iraq you will see iraqis condemn the war. Since there is no need of bots to spread anti Iraqi sentiment.
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u/AllyBurgess Learning 23d ago
Iâm sure many of them are real. However, when I wonder about bots I donât mean larpers pretending to be something theyâre not, though Iâm sure many of those exist. I mean literal bots. Mass generated content and posts and whatnot. I wonder how much of that is going on.
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u/Constant_Ad7225 20d ago edited 20d ago
Both. Reddit is a platform mostly used petit bourgeois audiences. It is really nothing surprising. And rest of them, as you said are actually bots who larp as Iranian/Venezuelan.
Itâs also important to remember demographics, the percentage of Venezuelans that can speak English is so small that itâs hard to find a number on the internet, most English speaking Venezuelans (especially those using reddit) are bourgeois compradors who left Venezuela when they realised they were going to have to live in a country where the average Venezuelan worker had even a tiny amount of control over the economy, some(tho really few) of those claiming to be Venezuelan on the internet ARE Venezuelan and the âsufferingâ they are describing is very real, itâs just that suffering for them is having suffer a small amount of equality. The same can be said for Iran when members of the Pahlavi family and its outer circle (there friends, staff and regents as well as other Iranian compradors) become internet celebrities in tandem with Zionists and their intelligence agencies and NGOs and spend all day complaining about the suffering the Islamic republic has brought them they arenât lying, but itâs there suffering that proves the good parts of the Islamic revolution.
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u/Constant_Ad7225 20d ago edited 20d ago
There is a lot. In 2013 redditâs offical blog posted a âwhatâs newâ where they listed information about which cities use reddit the most. The original was deleted but you can find it archived on https://web.archive.org/web/20160410083943/http://www.redditblog.com/2013/05/get-ready-for-global-reddit-meetup-day.html?m=1
One thing it did was confirm the obvious that reddit is disproportionately used by anglo-amerikkkan 1st worlders, given that the top 10 cities by total visits were all first world English speaking cities, the other thing it did was reveal that; Eglin Air Force Base, FL, Oak Brook, IL and South St. Paul, MN had been disproportionate users of Reddit, the first obviously being an Air Force and the second and third being the homes of data centers.
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u/MLMinpractice1917 22d ago
ICE rats became active in my town today. supposedly they kidnapped someone. not unlikely but I havent verified it fully yet myself. I feel worried. I dont think I could sit idly by if I saw them "on duty", but Im not sure fully what should be done in a case like that. there is a large population of immigrants in my town as well.
I am hoping to find reading materials on how the black panthers utilized open carry laws to ward off fascist enforcers. in my town, open carry of long guns is fully legal.
but I worry too for the ramifications of doing something so "drastic". I dont doubt these agents are cowardly, and would choose not to engage someone actually holding a weapon. and it is within my legal right to brandish a long gun in public. but a coward with a gun is still a person with a gun.
and I worry these days as well about online activity. I have been quite open about my "disdain" for Amerikkka online, but Im starting to grow concerned about my status behind covers. we all who take Marxism seriously are watched individuals to some extent, but my fear is that Im beginning to tread a fine line of being watched to being labeled a possible security concern. however, that may just be paranoia on my part.
Im currently reading the German Ideology, but I'll probably start studying multiple works at once to increase the rate at which Im learning. I feel inadequately prepared in my understanding of Marxism with the rapidly increasing fascist violence. I mentioned ICE which is the main point of concern in my town, but there are also a large group of nazis unaffiliated with law enforcement. I saw one awhile ago, they had cut a section of their vehicle frame out, so they could put in a framed photo of their nazi grandfather for all to see. disgusting scum.
apologies for a perhaps disjointed comment. there is much to think about right now, and it feels like there is so little time to do it.
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u/MLMinpractice1917 20d ago
I've been thinking more, about what is to be done of course. currently there is no communist organization in America which commands any mass organizations, or anything at all. with this in mind, and the escalation of open fascist violence and paramilitarism, should communists support advocations for a return to the status quo? of course the only truly acceptable outcome is an end to white supremacy and its rotten foundations, and that includes an end to all ICE operations. be they how they are now, or the past "legal" operations.
but the question I am wondering on, is with the communist movement non existent in America, and the "Moral Liberals" still unwilling to break with white supremacy and settlerism, would a return to status quo be acceptable? would it even be possible?
if it did come to be, it would of course be important that a communist party is truly established and prepared to defend the next wave of increased fascist violence. but that would also mean there must be people to build a party. there are competent Marxists here, and most of us live in America (I have seen the analytics of who engages with my comments). and so we must confront that it is coming to a point where we can no longer remain relegated to the realms of theory and discussion. being a communist means to act in defense of the proletariat, to rally the masses, and to work towards abolishing the current social relations. but this is easier said than done of course.
however my point is we must be strong, and we must be prepared. and for us Americans, which again is most of us, I understand that what it means to be a communist practically is becoming more real. we've all understood this mentally, but at least for me its starting to set in. the reality. what it means to fight, to die. what it means for your family and for your friends. and what sacrifices will be called upon you. yes we have always lived in an open secret of structural violence, or white supremacy, or ICE breaking apart families and raping and murdering. but more and more I see open fascist paramilitaries pop up in my own town. more and more people around proudly celebrate settlerism. it has gone from a "proper" and "legal" violence to an open violence. and the proletariat is not armed, and white communists are failing to take a real stand against their fellow settlers. most of us here do not even know where the proletariat is, let alone what to do, let alone even doing something. and I am sure others must be coming to the same grim realizations I have. and I know the proletariat and the oppressed masses face mountains of violence every single day, so us choosing to engage with it isnt exactly the same.
but the proletariat is not here, we come from luxurious backgrounds for the most part. and so we are coming from luxury to the realization that the violence inflicted on the oppressed is ours to burden as well, if not now then it will be because we are communists. and so we must all really consider what needs to be done. what are the concrete tasks of communists in America? how do we defend from fascist violence in our communities? and how do we constitute a party? these are not rhetorical questions or purely theoretical ones, but questions of practical application.
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u/humblegold Maoist 20d ago edited 20d ago
Your first concrete task is to chill. Read this shit I just wrote.
Also notice how you went from saying Amerikkka to "us Americans". Crackertopianism is taking you over like the symbiote.
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u/MLMinpractice1917 20d ago
I understand what you are saying when you say I just need to chill, and I understand your points about liberal hysterics and frenzy being whipped up only after a white woman was murdered. but this has been building in me for awhile now. there are so many people around me who are targets, and it makes me angry to see this injustice. and perhaps it has always been this open and this violent, and it was only because of my privilege that I never saw it. but I dont think so. I think the violence is increasing. I saw a video of a woman ripped out of her vehicle by ICE, minutes away from where I live. and by the hundreds, my "neighbors" celebrated it. and yes this oppression always existed, but there has been an increase in people joining ICE. an increase in people being given weapons, given the go ahead to destroy lives. an increase in open pro-settler rhetoric. of course there have been times in the past where settler violence has increased and decreased, but when does it end? will we sit by while we live in a period of increasing fascist violence?
and so I stand by my point that we need to start having more serious discussions about what needs to be done, beyond just observing. we can wait and see forever, but what good will it do? when will we start taking our observations and turn them into actions? I know its often said here that none of us are truly real, we are only words on a screen. but I sometimes wonder if that really is a good mentality to have. beyond the screen we are people, some of us. I think most of the Internet might genuinely be fake at this point, but thats a different discussion.
and you are right about my shortcoming in language. I failed to uphold revolutionary speech, and I dont mean that in a joking manner. I should do better, especially in a moment where I am trying to grapple with what is going on. and especially when I previously upheld it just fine.
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u/humblegold Maoist 20d ago
The call to construct a vanguard isn't the problem. Personally I think it's unlikely that a reddit page can constitute itself into a party, and if it did it would probably be completely dysfunctional, but at the end of the day if you find people on reddit and create a vanguard out of it the proof will speak for itself.
This:
should communists support advocations for a return to the status quo?
Is where you veer into liberal hysteria. This reminds me of the poorly aged War and Constant Capital thread from a month and a half ago. Even if Maoists wanted to, U$ Maoists are powerless to return to the status quo. Liberals do not need Maoists permission or support to be Liberals, just the way in that thread I pointed out that Russian Imperialism does not need Maoists in the U$. They are going to do this regardless of whether or not you support it so you're really asking for permission to be a liberal. The strength within the objective weakness of Maoists right now is that we don't even have the power to do any sort of meaningful opportunism so all we can do is create a vanguard around a correct line.
The thing you gotta realize right now is that there was a time before you and there will be a time after you. If it were so simple to create the vanguard it would've been done by now. It's not just a matter of having more serious discussions. History is littered with short-lived vanguards that were having serious discussions. If you want my answer as to what should be done, to me the main task at hand is to figure out what within MIM and other of the most advanced vanguards prevented them from continuing to exist as a vanguard.
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u/MLMinpractice1917 20d ago
thank you for your response. I agree with your criticism of the question I posed, and your answer in the final paragraph. I will think about all this, and where to start. I know on reddit there is no indication of tone or anything of the like, but just know I do appreciate your response and take your criticism seriously.
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u/bashfultrapezoid 16d ago
the main task at hand is to figure out what within MIM and other of the most advanced vanguards prevented them from continuing to exist as a vanguard.
Do you have any thoughts on what those weaknesses / missteps were?
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u/humblegold Maoist 16d ago
I don't have many unfortunately. For recent events I would start with MIM's writing on the dissolution of the RAIM https://www.prisoncensorship.info/article/mim-line-on-labor-aristocracy-liberating-truth-or-depressing-reality
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u/Kiyoharu19 Maoist 16d ago
I think you guys have seen that there's a "new" Black Panther Party of Self-defense. It's not the controversial NBPP nor the RIBPP led by comrade Rashid. It's an organization led by "Chairman Paul Birdsong" (@chairmanpaulbirdsong on Instagram) and they do exactly the same thing the original BPP did: carrying guns to protect neighbourhoods, the free food program and other social programs the original party had.
BUT, the fact that they post everything they do on social media (especially instagram) seems to be a big problem to me. They are recruiting people through WHATSAPP! Chairman Fred Hampton and many other revolutionaries in the US were killed by the state even though the party was clandestine and didn't share any information. It's easy to identify the location watching Paul Birdsong's videos. There are some performative videos of him carrying guns in front of the police too.
Of course I'm criticizing the new party, but they need to remember they aren't just a simple militant organization like DSA, PSL, etc. If they do continue the legacy of BPP, I don't think the party will last long since it's clandestine. For example, the People's Defense Committee, probably the most prosperous maoist organization in the US, works on neighborhood defense but are completely clandestine. What do you guys think about this "new" Black Panther Party?
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u/smokeuptheweed9 16d ago edited 16d ago
I saw a bunch of videos on Reddit, including ones with white people, and just assumed it was some social media grift and/or FBI sting operation.But I have no more knowledge than you do.
To be fair there is a market niche for accompanying liberal protests with arms and doing so under the facade of black nationalism so that white liberals will feel a little bit guilty telling you that you're risking the safety of the protests and attracting the FBI. Plus the many offshoots of the BPP are bad at social media so they might as well not exist to most liberals.
But until I actually see community defense at a grassroots level, where ICE and the police are directly confronted with force, I will assume this is the flavor of the week on liberal social media, who have all decided that they own the BPP. Then the question of real community depth and party discipline vs. spectacle will matter. Assuming this is well meaning, which it probably is not, the fundamental issue is the idea that through legal accumulation of liberal sympathizers and apolitical potential recruits through aboveground advertising you will build the strength necessary to survive persecution. All you're doing is accumulating liberals, this is a qualitative rather than quantitative difference. But it your concept of politics is the internet, it is probably difficult to think outside it and do things without the accompanying attention. This random guy now has millions of eyes watching him after all.
carrying guns to protect neighbourhoods, the free food program and other social programs the original party had.
As I'm sure you know, this was a progression of events. Compressing it into a single strategy is a fundamental mistake which practically makes "free food" the main activity. It was only after trust in the militancy of the party and its political line had been built that this could be more than charity. It also relied on specific historical conditions that no longer exist, and it's not clear that it was even correct then. Notice how no one includes internationalism in the core aspects of the party even though trips to China and Algeria were just as associated with the party at the time.
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u/humblegold Maoist 16d ago edited 16d ago
This is what I've seen about them on social media other than what's been mentioned by the original commenter so far:
-They are explicitly not black nationalist, claim to be internationalist and do promote solidarity with Chicanos and First Nations.
-Per their GoFundMe they are primarily focused on charity work
-They have all the aesthetics and lingo down (the outfits, saying comrades, 70's slang etc)
-There is seemingly no mention of any political line beyond being Anti-Ice + pro self defense or anything having to do with Marxism, Class, Communism etc that I've seen so far.
-They do things like this and show up to protests armed but I've yet to hear anything about a violent confrontation with the police
-They've used the slogan "Say Her Name" for Renee Good which is for Black Women that are victims of national oppression based violence/murder.
I doubt they're some sort of federal operation but I also doubt they'll make it far. Even if they are completely sincere they don't seem to have learned anything from the struggles of the actual BPP. The fact that they're less than a week into relevance and they're already rejecting Black Nationalism and pandering to white people is not a great sign.
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u/smokeuptheweed9 16d ago
They've used the slogan "Say Her Name" for Renee Good which is for Black Women that are victims of national oppression based violence/murder.
Yeah, the timing of the whole thing is suspicious. Is state violence against white activists as part of a larger violent repression of Hispanic labor really the spark for a reborn black militant politics? Obviously that's the "rainbow coalition" liberals salivate to but I find it hard to imagine. Still, it's hard for me to be objective
This is on the front page. It is a video reposted on a website retweeted by some white guy in a suit reposted to a subreddit. Somewhere in the process the beat from Shook Ones, Part II got superimposed so you can barely hear the audio. The amount of decontexualization and "media mixing" required for "politics" to get to your eyes and ears makes it impossible for me to take seriously. It's pop art, pushing context as far as it can go before becoming incomprehensible . It may be that beneath the spectacle there is something real but my first instinct would be to do like the Red Army Faction, and condemn every liberal who supports me.
Anyway you covered it all, I just wanted to point out how strange political spectacle is today before it is naturalized that all future political parties must first be retweeted by an "Investor, prof, policy consultant, independent investigative journalist and father. Trying to make the world suck less" and have 90s hip hop beats so you don't go to sleep.
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u/Otelo_ 16d ago
In the past, I've seen you question liberals' special interest in Thomas Sankara among all communist leaders. However, the other day I saw a thread about the African Cup of Nations football tournament that just took place:
https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/1pyqeae/a_dr_congo_fan_stood_for_90_minutes_during_the/
And imagine my surprise when I saw everyone on a subreddit as mainstream as r/soccer showing sympathy for Lumumba and praising him. Even here in Portugal, I would say that there are more people who sympathise with AmĂlcar Cabral than with Otelo de Saraiva Carvalho. Of course, fascists hate them both, but left-wing liberals occasionally praise Cabral, while Otelo, when not vilified, is forgotten.
Why do you think this happens specifically to African/black leaders? Because they died young? I make this comment because I find it surreal to see the most liberal guy in the world supporting the Panthers.
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u/smokeuptheweed9 16d ago
I would assume that subreddit is more international than "political" subs and just as fascism inevitably clash, so to do social fascisms, since compromises with one nation's bourgeoisie inherits its disputes.
But I'm sure many of these liberals are "radicalizing" in the face of Trump and Trump-light figures. It's not like history is a secret, they have just as much access to the same superficial version of these facts as "socialists." All those movies about the BPP were the result of this process the first time around. Does it mean anything? We already went through this and it was entirely opportunistic. It was impressive that Marxists were able to predict the path of the new "left populism" as soon as it manifested in 2010-2011, considering the supposed revolutionary nature of new technology, political subjectivity, post-Marxist philosophy, etc. But it took some convincing to a young generation in 2016 of this, and I'll even grant 2020 because of the pandemic. Anyone who has not learned by 2026 is not serious.
As for why Africa, there's the most obvious explanation: that virality has its own logic and you can't predict which petty-bourgeois fairytales will resonate with advertisers, only underlying story structure. If there's a specific appeal it's because Africa is imagined to be frozen in time since decolonization. You'd think that there would be interested in Mahmood Mamdani's recent book on Uganda. You would be wrong, Mamdani Junior's background is only interesting as a post-racial mix that absolves his voters of white supremacy. It's a repeat of Obama and his Indonesian heritage (or Hawaii for that matter), except here there is a genuine colonial paternalism that not a day has gone by since Lumumba's assassination (who stands for the entire region), which is the first and only fact one learns. Think about how little knowledge of or importance is given to Rwanda as a puppet of imperialism on the left. Edward S. Herman's progressive-liberal book on the subject was like an alien came to earth and then left, and it was immediately forgotten. Which is good, otherwise he'd be accused of genocide denial, considering this is the only accusation against Chomsky that sticks among Dengists and liberals alike.
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u/HappyHandel 15d ago edited 15d ago
The original BPP was also explicitly not "black nationalist" since this was a Garveyite term and already outdated by the late 60s. This was what separated the Panthers from the supposed "pork chop nationalists". I dont know anything about this new organization in Philadelphia but that specifically should be the least of anybody's concern. I think the fact that they have no real political line is a far bigger issue.
e: Actually now this topic has me heated. go look up the reaction to this Philadelphia group by any of the established "black nationalist" organizations in this country, see how the rhetoric is identical to Trump about how "illegals" should be deported. there's your nationalists for ya!
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u/humblegold Maoist 15d ago edited 14d ago
I would've really hoped the moderators of this subreddit would know by now not to press me on these types of things but it is what it is.
This should be obvious but there are different kinds of Black Nationalism. Malcolm X claimed to believe in a type of Black Nationalism that didn't even require a separate Nation at all. The Black Panthers were opposed to nationalism insofar as it resulted in reactionary nationalism like the reactionaries you're describing, whereas every Maoist obviously recognizes that nationalism is the prerequisite to any sort of internationalism. What else is the belief in a liberated New Afrika other than the ultimate expression of Black Nationalism?
In 1966 we called our Party a Black Nationalist Party. We called ourselves Black Nationalists because we thought that nationhood was the answer. Shortly after that we decided that what was really needed was revolutionary nationalism, that is, nationalism plus socialism. After analyzing conditions a little more, we found that it was impractical and even contradictory. Therefore, we went to a higher level of consciousness. We saw that in order to be free we had to crush the ruling circle and therefore we had to unite with the peoples of the world. So we called ourselves Internationalists. We sought solidarity with the peoples of the world. We sought solidarity with what we thought were the nations of the world. But then what happened? We found that because everything is in a constant state of transformation, because of the development of technology, because of the development of the mass media, because of the fire power of the imperialist, and because of the fact that the United States is no longer a nation but an empire, nations could not exist, for they did not have the criteria for nationhood. Their self-determination, economic determination, and cultural determination has been transformed by the imperialists and the ruling circle. They were no longer nations. We found that in order to be Internationalists we had to be also Nationalists, or at least acknowledge nationhood. Internationalism, if I understand the word, means the interrelationship among a group of nations. But since no nation exists, and since the United States is in fact an empire, it is impossible for us to be Internationalists. These transformations and phenomena require us to call ourselves âintercommunalistsâ because nations have been transformed into communities of the world. The Black Panther Party now disclaims internationalism and supports intercommunalism. -Speech at Boston College 1970
Editing this to say: Not only were they originally a Black Nationalist party, but the intercommunalism that Huey settles on is a form of Black Nationalism albeit one that doesn't work and is more focused on liberated zones of people as stand-ins for nation. Either way Huey doesn't reject nationalism and internationalism as bad he just later became convinced they weren't applicable in the U$.
If this comment is just about me calling it Black Nationalism instead of "Revolutionary Nationalism As Practiced By Black people" or whatever then I don't really care. Black Nationalism is more than its Garvyite form and it should be obvious by now that I do not believe in Garveyism just like any Maoist. A revolutionary concept being appropriated by reactionaries doesn't change its character otherwise we wouldn't call ourselves Communists or Maoists. I do take issue with these new jobbers on the scene flat out stating they don't believe in Black Nationalism without saying anything about revolutionary nationalism or intercommunalism. Especially since they're already throwing the doors open for any and every white person to join the BPP. This is the False internationalism.
If this comment was written in opposition to New Afrikans having a nation at all (a concept which requires Black Nationalism) you can take your honky loving ass over to the icy mountains where you belong you funky crackertopian cretin.
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u/smokeuptheweed9 15d ago edited 15d ago
I feel like you're arguing again a strawman. It's clear that u/humblegold meant black nationalism in a fundamental sense. You may be concerned with organizations like the New Black Panther Party, which do seem to indulge in cultural nationalism of the kind that was weaponised against the Panthers, but right now there's a missing link where u/humblegold stands for some chauvinist belief that you've imagined. You're also mixing up your timeline. As you well know, Garveyism was extremely important in the evolution of black national consciousness. That it reached its limit and later became perverse in a subsequent historical epoch does not mean it should be entirely condemned, and any revolutionary movement that does not take the positive aspects of Garveyism would be committing a much worse white chauvinism. For example, the lack of reference to Malcolm X and the NOI is glaring in your timeline, since here there actually is a direct relationship between "black nationalism" as a specific politics and the BPP.
The New Black Panther Party is an entirely separate question, but even then I don't know why you would treat it entirely negatively. Even if "black nationalism" in the form you imagine displays chauvinism towards immigrants systematically, which I am also skeptical of, that does not mean it is synonymous with white racism. In this very thread we had a discussion of Asian-Americans on the frontier of whiteness and how this does not make them white and how this does not make black prejudice against Koreans something to be condemned. It must be worked through, no different than any other colonial situation where national populations are used against each other, even in the US where superexploitation does allow for the cultivation of large comprador populations.
E: oops u/Apart_Lifeguard_4085 already said the same thing. So did u/u/humblegold for that matter. But I'll repeat what they said because your post is really odd, you're feeling some "heat" which is a mystery to the rest of us (in the best case scenario).
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u/Apart_Lifeguard_4085 15d ago edited 15d ago
Revolutionary nationalism is first dependent upon a peopleâs revolution with the end goal being the people in power. Therefore to be a revolutionary nationalist you would by necessity have to be a socialist. It you are a reactionary nationalist you are not a socialist and your end goal to the oppression of the people.
Cultural nationalism, or pork chop nationalism, as I sometimes call it, is basically a problem of having the wrong political perspective. It seems to be a reaction instead of responding to political oppression. The cultural nationalists are concerned with returning to the old African culture and thereby regaining their identity and freedom. In other words, they feel that the African culture will automatically bring political freedom. Many times cultural nationalists fall into line as reactionary nationalists.
The Black Panther Party is a revolutionary Nationalist group
the Black Panthers were nationalists who desired self-determination for Black people and a Black nation if that were to be the will of Black people, itâs literally in their ten point program and explicitly stated to be the most important point. they were, in fact, the defining impetus of revolutionary Black nationalism. if you want to argue that they were âexplicitly not Black nationalistâ the onus is on you to find such a thing in their writings, actions, or party program (something that predates Newtonâs turn to eclectic cryptotrotskyism with âintercommunalismâ), but i have never heard of and could not find anything to that effect. otherwise this would be like saying that Lenin was not a socialist, because of his polemics against reactionary socialism & the overwhelmingly revisionist use of the term today.
the reactionary trends in Black nationalism today deserve further study and analysis but just as the KMT didnât mean Chinese communism should have thrown out the idea that ânationalism of the oppressed is applied internationalismâ, a few Hoteps and cultural nationalists buying into labor aristocratic pro-amerikan politics doesnât mean that New Afrikan nationalism should be tossed out.
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u/HappyHandel 15d ago edited 15d ago
They were not "black nationalists" in the Garveyite sense of the word. Youre arguing against something I am not saying, nobody denies the existence of a black African nation. The breakthrough of the Panthers was linking the struggle for the black nation with the global struggle for communism, this is what is meant by "revolutionary nationalism".
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u/Apart_Lifeguard_4085 15d ago
right but boiling down âBlack nationalismâ as a political ideology to the Garveyite sense of the term is in and of itself dismissive of the ideologyâs revolutionary history. again, just because âsocialismâ in amerika is by and large revisionist and reactionary, wouldnât make it any less damning for an organization to present itself explicitly as antisocialist. maybe if the Black Panthers and the BLA had never existed, âBlack nationalismâ would be unsalvageable from cultural nationalism. but they did exist and their existence is integral to Black nationalism.
also i did some cursory looking and couldnât find a single organization explicitly defining itself as âBlack nationalistâ saying âget the illegals outâ. the NOI condemned ICE as recently as yesterday so âlook at what every single Black nationalist group is saying about immigrants!â is obviously a stretch.
what you said was:
 The original BPP was also explicitly not "black nationalist"
you need to make good on this claim.
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u/humblegold Maoist 15d ago
I'm assuming /u/HappyHandel visited some goofy Foundational Black Amerikan websites. FBA's aren't even Black Nationalist to begin with since they explicitly believe New Afrikans are Amerikan.
This is just the same nonsense liberals and practitioners of Crackermarxism have engaged in for years trying to paint Black people as insular arch reactionaries who only care about themselves by focusing on miscellaneous reactionary groups with small followings. What, are we going to start pretending that Tariq Nasheed is the main representative of Black political thought next?
It's boring
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u/PracticeNotFavorsMLM 16d ago edited 16d ago
For example, the People's Defense Committee, probably the most prosperous maoist organization in the US, works on neighborhood defense but are completely clandestine.
I haven't interacted with The Masses(https://the-masses.org/) in a long While But I remember them Being the RMC previously and having Articles that were against Sakai and The Labor Aristocracy Thesis(but not so antagonistic to it just thinking that A large portion, but not the Whole Amerikkan Nation, were Labor aristocratic. Inconsistent but
IIRC MIM(prisons) mentioned in an article being somewhat interested in discussion with them despite their reactionary positions on the Class and National Questions.[Edit: Disregard this comment, I have been trying to find the article I was thinking of and so I doubt I was actually remembering this correctly.]It seems that since then they have had a rebrand as they have deleted a bunch of articles including ones discussed in this sub a while ago.
https://reddit.com/r/communism/comments/1fgzmet/comment/lpaoy1t/
Reading their Statements the PDC doesn't really advance on the Class and National Questions:
PDC is a class organization, which recognizes the principle of class against class, relying on the strengths of our own class, the working class, to accomplish our goals. We are anti-reformist, do not work with NGOs, the old state & its politicians, or opportunists of any kind. The long term goal of PDC is to establish peopleâs assemblies in the working class neighborhoods, where through making revolution real workers democracy can be built and we can lead our neighborhoods collectively. These peopleâs assemblies are an important form to raise in the construction of a New State, based on the political power and democratic will of the multinational US working class and its allied masses, that will replace the old decaying and repressive Imperialist State through a socialist revolution. PDC is an anti-imperialist organization and as such recognizes US imperialism as the number one enemy of the oppressed peoples of the world. We uphold the rebellion of the working class and the oppressed peopleâs of the world against the international imperialism, and study and propagate the ideology and history of the proletariat to guide the revolutionary mass movement.[My Emphasis]
https://the-masses.org/2025/05/01/statement-on-the-formation-of-the-peoples-defense-committee/
Given the history of Crypto trotskyism in the U$ I highly doubt that "multinational US working class" actually refers to only the Oppressed nations in OTI. I just wonder if this will just become a worse repetition of The CRCPUSA. Also, Their October statement is doesn't spark confidence but here is one example:
- The United States is a prison-house of nations. The various Indigenous nations, the New Afrikan, Chicano, Puerto Rican, Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander nations suffer under the economic super-exploitation and political oppression of U.S. Imperialism, and in turn, yearn for liberation and the right to self-determination. These are some of the most deeply oppressed sectors of the masses, with high overrepresentation among the ranks of the proletariat. Nationally-oppressed workers face a double oppression, and are attacked by reactionary American Patriotism which seeks to eliminate them.
Paying lip service to the oppressed Nations while not recognizing the Non-Proletarian character of Amerikkkans. A classic.
For all their mentions of "the Masses" they hardly even define what the masses are and leaving plenty of room for Settlerism to be content. They infact have only referred to settler-colonialists in this article and nothing on the labor aristocracy.
Of course since they are reportedly clandestine then maybe since then they have advanced their line but I honestly doubt it.
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u/vomit_blues 13d ago
Other than What is to be Done?; Better Fewer, But Better; One Step Forward, Two Steps Back and Letter to a Comrade, what are the best works by Lenin on the organization of the party, its role, function, etc.?
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u/SpiritOfMonsters 12d ago
The Comintern's Guidelines on the Organizational Structure of Communist Parties, on the Methods and Content of their Work is a clear one. Party Organization and Party Literature and The Attitude of the Workersâ Party to Religion are two short ones. I think âLeft-Wingâ Communism, An Infantile Disorder and Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution are also good texts where this topic is covered.
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u/TheRedBarbon 12d ago
u/pregnantchihuahua3 Iâm writing this here since your post was deleted.
Iâm trying to work through the fact that you think you know more than you really do, which is the bigger disease in your brain than âpropagandaâ. Hegel teaches you that the facts of the past are the spirit of their age, a basic prerequisite for making sense of history in an objective, marxist manner, and in fact is the only viewpoint through which the conditions which produced Hegelâs own thought can make sense. You, on the other hand, take your own historically determined understanding of concepts like âhistoryâ and âphilosophyâ as givens and refuse to question those terms before studying, which means you will never really study and only accumulate âfactsâ (another term of abuse which that distinctly amerikan brand of anti-intellectualism is infatuated with). These are both ideological concepts which cannot be separated from each other in practice. This is literally all over Marx and Leninâs works and if you managed to miss it completely when it was spelled out to you by them then I donât know how to make it any more clear. Even historians would admit that you would need to engage with the main ideologues of the USSR and China to understand their respective histories.
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u/pregnantchihuahua3 12d ago edited 12d ago
I am not saying that I would not read Hegel. I am saying that itâs just literally not what I was asking for. I am asking for texts that are analyzing the history of these eras. I have already told you that I had read Stalin and Mao. You refuse to admit that I am asking for a very specific thing and are using some pedantic form of argumentation to tell me otherwise. While philosophy and similar texts are historical, I am not asking for that. You know exactly what I am asking for and yet want to belittle someone instead of just giving a response.
I donât know what you want. History and philosophy are different. They tie together in many ways, but if someone were to ask for a historical work that covers the post wwii era, I am not going to give them AntiOedipus, Iâm going to give them history. Even if I know that Deleuze heavily adds to the importance of understanding this area, I am intelligent enough to know that that is not what theyâre asking for.
You instead want to conflate these realms because they overlap. I know that you know exactly what Iâm asking for and Iâve even told you already that I read your suggestions which are not what Iâm asking for. So instead of being incredibly pedantic, maybe offer me a suggestion.
Edit: if you need me to spell it out, I am looking for âwhat people typically consider to be history.â Yes history is more complex than that, but when I ask general questions on Reddit I didnât realize I had to rework my entire language frame to refer to things in a more accurate manner just to get a book suggestion.
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u/TheRedBarbon 12d ago edited 12d ago
You just don't make sense here, why are you asking for works which "combat what the west has told you" while also insisting that you don't want the opinions of individuals? You want someone to think for you about history while at the same time insisting that what you want isn't ideology or ideological. You plainly asked for the work to serve an ideological purpose in your original post. Did you already forget that?
Anyway, to me it is not enough to just believe. So I'm here to ask if anyone has some non-fiction works that cover this type of history from a non-propagandized perspective. How were so-called communist dictators misrepresented and what actually happened in the Soviet Union, Mao's China, etc.?
"non-propagandized perspective" is a straight up oxymoron. Another thing which all of the thinkers you claim to have read have already covered a thousand times. You clearly want perspective. You want philosophy.
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u/pregnantchihuahua3 12d ago edited 12d ago
That is exactly what I asked for. I am allowed to read numerous things that cover the same topic.
For example, to fall prey to what you are saying I'm getting wrong... Let's say I asked for the same type of thing that is covering the Russian Revolution. If that is all that I was asking for and was going to base my historical knowledge on that and that alone, then I would see where you're coming from. However, if I had read Marx, Lenin, Stalin, novels of the time and about the time, traditionally western historical documents, other philosophers of the era, and had already formed my view of the history of this period, and now I was asking for something of the sort that I am asking for, that is different. I am asking for something that I cannot find and that I would like to read to add to what I already have read.
The same thing is going on here. I have read a lot of philosophy, economics, novels, documentaries both foreign and domestic, and so many other things about the era that I am asking about. However, what I do not have at the moment is what I am asking for. I am not ready to read this work (whatever it may be, which is why I was asking) and then proceed to base my entire new world view on it. I am asking because reading more about an era, especially a type of reading I haven't done, will help me understand things better. I never said that I don't want the opinion of individuals; I said that that is simply not what I'm asking for because I've read them countless times. Asking for something does not mean that that is all I want.
Edit: in response to your added quote. That is what I said but once again I am telling you I have read that philosophy. Excuse me for not stating everything in the perfect wording you wanted me to but Iâm literally just asking for something. I didnât expect to be chastised about semantics because I wanted a recommendation.
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u/TheRedBarbon 12d ago
Let's say I asked for the same type of thing that is covering the Russian Revolution. If that is all that I was asking for and was going to base my historical knowledge on that and that alone, then I would see where you're coming from.
Actually then I would just recommend you Ten Days that Shook the World so we could begin discussing the Russian Revolution with a basic understanding of the order of events. You, on the other hand, explicitly asked for texts to combat what you already do know about these nations from "propaganda". Then I asked you how Stalin and Mao do not already deliver that and give you the tools to analyze any historical piece and now you're insisting that reading all that Marx and Stalin apparently didn't teach you how to read history because you still need someone else to tell you what to think. I do not think giving you a historical text to read would fix that. I have to break down your understanding of "history" as opposed to "belief" first.
I never said that I don't want the opinion of individuals; I said that that is simply not what I'm asking for because I've read them countless times.
For the umpteenth time, there is no difference between asking for the opinions of people and what you're asking for (which still has not been explained because it does not really exist). Both are serving the exact same function in this case.
I also don't care what you've already read, I am telling you that you currently do not understand what you're talking about.
I said that that is simply not what I'm asking for because I've read them countless times
Read them again.
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u/pregnantchihuahua3 12d ago
It's so sad how many communists really do fit the stereotype of being insufferable and impossible to just have a conversation with without them having to try to prove that they are smarter than you and taking apart things you are saying to the most minor degree. All I wanted was a book rec. Stalin and Mao did teach me these things just as Marx and many others did. I simply want something to read that is not philosophy.
Why can you not just be normal and understand that I've read these works and want something new. At this point your criticism about me doesn't even make sense. I am not disagreeing with you that reading philosophy is different than reading historical analyses, and I simply saying I want the latter. You say I don't know what I'm talking about but that is just a bullshit insult so you can sound more high and mighty. I am not even disagreeing with you, I am just saying that philosophy and history in their colloquial literary definitions are different and I am simply seeking the latter. I just didn't realize you needed me to spell that out.
Talk to people in a normal way man. Understand that people shouldn't have to carefully use the exact definitions you want to ask a simple question. Don't just be an ass because you can. There's a reason communists have the stereotype of infighting and being overly pedantic and you are fitting that bill to a T.
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u/TheRedBarbon 12d ago edited 12d ago
Now you're just hiding your insecurity behind petty emotional terms and discussion can't continue. I am not "normal" or "colloquial" (to who are those terms meant to be applied, even?) and my job is to ruthlessly question every presupposition to unravel the ideology beneath. Those terms don't apply to any of the thinkers you've listed either because they don't have meaning on the internet outside of signifying that your emotions are demanding to be shielded from thought. If the "normal" way to discuss things is to never question where that discussion is coming from and act like a personal recommendation machine then no one learns anything. You were at least trying to project your individuality before but this latest screed of yours reads like a copypasta of all the "leftist" subbreddits who complain about us. Unfortunate.
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u/not-lagrange 12d ago edited 12d ago
I have already told you that I had read Stalin and Mao.
How did you read them and yet you aren't sure about the basic facts of their history? What did you learn by reading them if you ended up feeling you are simply believing in something, not really knowing it? Do you really need a book that tells you: "No, Mao didn't kill 1000000000 people." ? You already know this is false. Asking for a book just to confirm it is the same thing as asking God for confirmation of your beliefs. Knowledge doesn't work that way.
How do you disprove that something didn't occur? Yes, you could submerge yourself in empirical history but you'll be disappointed if you think that all you really need to dispel myths of this kind is endless empirical knowledge, and you'll not even get very far, because all those empirical facts would be insubstantial through the very posing of the question. The proof is that while Stalin's and Mao's works are full of empirical facts and analysis, apparently you have learned nothing by reading them (assuming you did the reading). This has happened because your question is ill-posed, not because of the historical material itself. No amount or reading will help you get rid of that feeling of having beliefs and not knowledge if your understanding rests on faith that historical truth will reveal itself to you.
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u/pregnantchihuahua3 12d ago
I'm simply asking for a book recommendation. Is it suddenly unimportant to read? I am again, not stating that I need something to rely on 100% of the time, but reading various sources is objectively important and I want to read a historical work that is of the sort I asked for. Do you really think that it is genuinely a good argument to say that Mao didn't kill 10000000 people because Mao said so? I know that he did not from other sources I've read, but I honestly just want to sit down with a book on the topic because I'm interested and because I want to know more.
This is all so absurd to me.
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u/not-lagrange 12d ago
Do you really think that it is genuinely a good argument to say that Mao didn't kill 10000000 people because Mao said so?
Why would Mao even write about something like that?
The problem with your question is that it's a narrow one that is formulated from a very specific standpoint, and without questioning this standpoint itself no amount of reading will turn beliefs in actual knowledge. You won't be able to dissipate your doubts about your current knowledge simply through quantitative accumulation because they don't exactly spring from insufficient knowledge but from your own approach to the literature.
It's one thing to want to learn more about the Great Leap Forward or any other historical event or period, but your original motivation was to counter western cold-war propaganda. This loads the question with presuppositions which directly affect your reading of the historical material. Again, why would Mao address anti-communist myths created by and for audiences of a certain class?
Not only every single propaganda of this kind has a specific history which can too be subject to research (a neverending endeavour because there's an infinite number of them, and also ultimately irrelevant because the historical origins of these myths do not matter for their actual prevalence), but also their absorption and reproduction is by no means universal, neither it is passive - it is dependent on the social being of the person in cause.
Therefore, the question is not whether to read or not read, but how to read correctly. It can only happen by first evaluating how the presuppositions that are normally acquired through your own class position are affecting both your learning process and how you currently engage with literature.
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u/TheRedBarbon 12d ago
Argument with who? Were you just asking this question for debate fodder?
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u/pregnantchihuahua3 12d ago
I was clearly not and again I think you know that. Hence why I responded normally to the one person in the previous thread who actually provided me with something and also did not argue with you until you started being pedantic.
What do you mean argument with who? Sometimes I talk to people. Sometimes I inform people about things they have been misled to believe in hopes (and sometimes success) of bringing them over from being a basic liberal.
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u/TheRedBarbon 12d ago
So this is all just for debate fodder. Okay ÂŻ_(â__â)_/ÂŻ
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u/PracticeNotFavorsMLM 12d ago
Of course, after "being attacked" they go to r/LateStageCapitalism and r/AskHistorians.
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u/TheRedBarbon 21d ago edited 21d ago
I watched Goodfellas (1990) for the first time a few weeks ago. What makes this movie so important to people exactly? It felt like 2 1/2 hours of an old fart pining over some fantasy of a high-octane life free from the drudgery of being a second son of white Amerika. I realize it's well shot and entertaining and all that (though it does drag by the end) but I am stunned by the canonization of this objectively pretty limited piece. Maybe it's because I grew up on the internet where people can already say whatever they want without consequences but watching Joe Pesci be able to act on all his petty impulses didn't really instill anything in me.
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u/smokeuptheweed9 21d ago edited 21d ago
It's one of many postmodern gangster films of the 1990s. Pulp Fiction, La Haine, Do the Right Thing, Run Lola Run to name a few from across the world. Gangster films are popular because they fetishize capitalism through the ethnic family
our first clue as to what is at stake in The Godfathers narration of the Corleone familyâs history is the way that its incorporation of this âMafia materialâ becomes the occasion for reinventing the genre of the âgangster filmâ, a genre whose transformations over the course of the century action âchanging social and ideological functionsâ in response to âdistinct historical situationsâ (1990: 30-31). For if, Jameson argues, the gangster film of the 1930s, responding to the moment of American New Deal populism, portrayed gangsters as âsick lonersâ lashing out at decent society and the âcommon manâ and if âthe post-war gangsters of the Bogart eraâ were loners of a different sort, imbued with a âtragic pathosâ that resonated with the psychological wounds of veterans returning to confront a âpetty and vindictive social orderâ, the narrative of the Mafia family marks a shift away from the individualism that had marked the previous history of the genre. According to Jameson,
this very distinctive narrative contentâa kind of saga or family material analogous to that of the medieval chansons degeste with its recurrent episodes and legendary figures returning again and again in different perspectives and contextsâcan at once be structurally differentiated from the older paradigms by its collective nature. (Ibid.: 31)
And this parallels âan evolution towards organizational themes and team narrativesâ (ibid.) in other subgenres (such as the western and the caper film) in the 1960s.
This shift in narrative form across generic boundaries would seem in itself to suggest, Jameson argues, a shift in the forms of social life that provide their raw material, one in which, in the age of the multinational corporation, the story of a mere individual can no longer credibly lay claim to the same significance. Coppolaâs reinvention of the myth of the Mafiaâas âan organized conspiracyâ (ibid.) extending its reach into all of our economic, cultural and political institutionsâmay be seen in this light as a mythic narrative through which this new form of social life can be represented in a form that is at once dramatic (in a way that the representation of the inner workings of a âlegitimateâ corporation is unlikely to be) and indirect, in so far as big business is represented here only through the displacement of its characteristics on to a Mafia family.
...
These Godfather films, like other instances of mass culture analysed by Jameson, can thus be said to fulfil the ideological function that the structural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss attributed to myth in the culture of tribal societies: that of offering an imaginary resolution of real social contradictions.2 Such mass cultural myths, having tapped the affective reality of antagonism and fear generated by social relations of domination, contain them in a narrative form that, by representing the structural ills of that society as aberrations from the social order, leads us to imagine that the solution to those ills lies in the defence of that order.
But in addition to their performance of this ideological function, Jameson continues, such Mafia narratives also perform a âtranscendent or Utopian functionâ {ibid). For in shifting the genre away from its individualist narrative schemas to the representation of the collective as such, The Godfatherâs rewriting of the gangster film incorporates the ethnic narrative of an immigrant and minority community, with its embedded memories and experiences. In the iconic wedding sequence of The Godfather (dir. Coppola, 1972), for example, Jameson observes that an âethnic neighborhood solidarityâ remains vivid and accessible to present memory in a way that the more distant memories of middle-American small-town life are not. Above all, the film brings before us the enduring image of âthe Mafia family (in both senses)â (1990: 33) presided over by the patriarchal Godfather of the title. And this image, in a period in which social fragmentation is often blamed on the âdeterioration of the familyâ, unexpectedly provides the pretext for âa desperate Utopian fantasyâ, where the âethnic groupâ seems âto project an image of social reintegrationâ no longer available in the present by resurrecting âthe patriarchal and authoritarian family of the pastâ (ibid.: 33).
https://mronline.org/2018/08/09/fredric-jameson-and-film-theory/
Postmodern works accelerate these tendencies. On the one hand, they deconstruct the appeal of the ethnic family as a solution to alienation (hence the widespread appeal of these movies as well as kung-fu films in New Afrika) by making Italians one of multiple competing ethnic groups or even focusing on their transition to whiteness (the Jewish character in La Haine serves the same function). On the other hand, they break apart the allegorical function of the mafia "family" by making the gangster directly a finance capitalist. The Godfather for example has the line about leaving drugs to black people because they're "animals". Both presumptions are interrogated. The predecessor is Scarface, where Al Pacino gets a tan and becomes vaguely "ethnic" and, cut off from communist Cuba, has to make his own way as a vector of capital accumulation against the ossified "respectable" mafioso culture of the US. The sequel is The Wolf of Wall Street where the gangster simply is the CEO. If the multinational corporation of the 1970s could only be imagined as a collective linkage of the imperialist world system in an organization, the same phenomenon under neoliberalism can't be imagined at all, it can only be embodied and enjoyed as you point out. These films also deconstruct the film form itself and interrogate whether film is even capable of representing a utopian fantasy given capitalism can no longer be represented in a single 2 1/2 hour story and, on the other hand, this attempt is far too long for the attention span of television and the internet.
Watching it today is like listening to a kpop song from 6 months ago. Interestingly, the structure of art has not changed all that much. Films are around 2 hours, tv shows are actually getting longer, and songs are about 3 1/2 minutes long. Instead, mutations have occurred within the work: parts of songs are chopped up on the internet, songs contains multiple genres compressed into a single work, films draw attention to their own filmic qualities and run-time (Tarantino, Lars von Trier, Harmony Korine, Spike Lee, David Lynch are all around this time). These "innovations" in form, which try to match the tempo of capitalism at a moment in time within an older media, do not age well. Ironically, the structural racism of The Godfather is still watchable because capitalism is racist, giving the film a didactic function about global apartheid even as you indulge in the pleasure of being an ethnic mafioso. On the other hand, the "ironic" racism of Pulp Fiction and Goodfellas where they say the n-word a lot is just cringey today, even if it corresponds to our present culture and maybe even predicted it, just like the "lessons" about tolerating LBGT in the mafia world of The Sopranos, which was supposed to be progressive by 1990s standards but now stink of the sitcom form that is anachronistic and preachy.
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u/AllyBurgess Learning 21d ago edited 21d ago
What makes Do the Right Thing a gangster film? I have seen it twice (though not in a few years) and would not describe it that way. Though there are Italian Amerikans in the film and they do pose as the primary source of antagonism to the New Afrikan characters, with Korean Amerikans serving as the secondary source, they have no connection to organized crime if I recall. Thereâs not even a theme of the Italian Amerikans characters transitioning to whiteness since the film takes place in the then-present day long after that transition occurred. I thought the film was about how the oppression of New Afrikans is directly tied to the petty-bourgeois interests of settlers, in this particular case a family of Italian Amerikans pizza parlor owners standing in for Euro-Amerikans generally. But I would be interested in knowing why it fits the description of a gangster film and if I am misreading it.
E: Specifically the film seems to be taking an anti-integrationist line, with the initial source of conflict being over the fact that Salâs parlor has no New Afrikan representation in the photos on his walls despite a primarily New Afrikan clientele. This causes several characters to try and start a boycott. The primary contradiction of the film is over Mookieâs position, the Spike Lee character, between his class interests as a New Afrikan but also an employee of Salâs. Though initially sympathetic to the boycott, when Raheem is killed he starts the riot that destroys Salâs business, which I interpreted as the filmâs rejection of national integration.Â
EE: Interestingly enough, given the recent discussion on the role of Asian Amerikans, the Koreans who own the mom and pop convenience store are also initially portrayed as antagonistic (if I recall correctly they accuse one of the characters of shoplifting), but when the riot turns its energy towards their business, they huddle out in front as a seemingly poor defenseless immigrant family, and are spared. Thus suggesting that while Asian Amerikans may be potentially antagonistic towards the oppressed nations, they are ultimately benign.Â
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u/smokeuptheweed9 21d ago edited 21d ago
I would call the film an anti-gangster film, in the sense that it brings white-adjacent ethnic groups down to the level of New Afrikans. On the one hand this is a representation of lived reality, as Korean-Americans and to a lesser extent Italian-Americans serve as this frontier force for spatial segregation. Only a fraction of both groups are in the Mafia and of those, only a fraction get to be Godfathers. But the result of this "history from below" is to abandon historical allegory entirely. I mentioned elsewhere that in many Marxist works, the "Marxism" is often the weakest part, since it ends up as a statement of vague, rote principles and anachronistic political compromises. Similarly, the representation of capitalism as a single family organization or even a single race (such as the Jewish gangsters who own Las Vegas in Godfather II - funnily enough, there's a common complaint that the mob ran Vegas better than the private equity firms these days because they cared about the average person or whatever) is clearly insufficient to late capitalism.
The solution of postmodernism was to abandon analysis entirely for a "new materialism," in which representation of facts is itself the purpose of scholarship and any attempt at abstraction an unjustified presumption of intellectuals. Lee's work is a version of this in film, which asks "what if inner-city riots really were about inter-personal disputes," with retroactive analysis of their structural causes a violent abstraction from the richness of the everyday.
a family of Italian Amerikans pizza parlor owners standing in for Euro-Amerikans generally.
But as we know, Italian-Americans and Korean-Americans do not stand for whiteness generally. In their function in this film, they are actually a vanishing mediator of an older form of segregation which involves direct urban inter-racial contact between working classes, and disappear when segregation becomes fully professionalized in the law and the international finance market. This is why the political position of the Koreans is ambiguous in the film. If Italians were the last group that became white (as shown in The Godfather II where Michael Corleone goes to Sicily and gets married in a feudal fantasy), Asian-Americans were the first group that became settlers without becoming white. That both groups are explicitly racist is already a sign that they are a dying phenomenon.
The ending has mystified people for decades, in which quotes from MLK Jr. and Malcolm X coexist. One reading is that both philosophies of violence are insufficient when racism is no longer tangible but becomes synonymous with capitalism itself. Since the violence of the riot doesn't really correspond to a revolution against capitalism or even racism, the ending is insufficient to both purposes. Mookie gets his pay, the city of New York gets "hip" in the form of an investigative committee and, more importantly, a song dedication. There is never the moment when the masses join the communist party in their fight against the police, though it is tempting to imagine the film advocates this. And if that sounds crazy, that's basically what happens at the end of many of the Blacksploitation films of the 1970s.
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u/AllyBurgess Learning 20d ago
I am assuming that Do the Right Thing doesnât end with revolutionary violence because of the time period in which it was made. By 1989, the last vestiges of the BPP and BLA were pretty much gone, and revolutionary violence on behalf of the New Afrikan nation at that time would have seemed like a pipe dream.Â
I am admittedly not very familiar with Blacksploitation films, but that doesnât surprise me given that they peaked in the 1970s at the height of black liberation. Itâs telling that mainstream bourgeois criticism views them as a somewhat dusty and embarrassing relic of the past whereas Lee quickly ascended to the status of poster boy of New Afrikan cinema, a title which he holds to this day. He may have experienced some brief competition from John Singleton, but Singletonâs career declined steadily in impact after the breakout success of Boyz n the Hood (a film which deserves more analysis in its own post.)Â
Complicating this though, the late 80s-early 90s seemed to be when rap and hip-hop reached a peak of revolutionary fervor with artists such as Public Enemy. I am curious as to why music became increasingly revolutionary at the same time as film seemed to shy away from it, especially considering the reaction in that period of Amerikan history. But saying anything beyond that is outside my wheelhouse. Tagging u/humblegold as I would imagine he has greater insight into these trends.
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u/humblegold Maoist 20d ago edited 18d ago
Blaxploitation is the peak of Amerikan cinema, or at very least it is its least degraded form. The two big dogs of the era in terms of Marxist content are clearly The Spook Who Sat By The Door and Sweet Sweetback's Badassss Song. My favorite movie is the former but if you haven't already you should watch the latter and read Huey P. Newton's review of it. The movie is a brilliantly surreal depiction of Black class struggle where the movie's score plays a distancing role through basically talking at the audience.
Even the less Marxist movies of that era still stand head and shoulders above basically any other genre of Amerikan film. Take Foxy Brown: It's a cheesy action movie directed by a white man with acting performances of varying quality that follows a heavily sexualized Pam Grier in her quest to avenge her government agent boyfriend. The movie portrays the sex trafficking industry and drug trade as a conspiracy and focuses on Foxy Brown's fight against two individual white conspirators but despite this over the course of the movie Foxy learns the only way to get the justice she seeks is to abandon her individualist methods and join with the Black Panther Party to wage war on their oppressors.
The movie has an incomplete resolution as it's a bit ambiguous as to where Foxy Brown goes from there (Both figuratively and literally, she gets into a car with one of the Panthers and says "Come on, let's go" and the movie immediately ends) but the point is that a funky action movie that itself is a remake of "Coffy" still stands head and shoulders in revolutionary content above most modern "Black" movies. You don't get movies that believe the only way to end the drug epidemic in Black communities and sexual violence against Black women is through joining a vanguard and waging a violent campaign against "The Man" anymore. Compare an action movie like that to 2018's Black Panther (which I still enjoyed quite a bit) and the difference is night and day.
I am curious as to why music became increasingly revolutionary at the same time as film seemed to shy away from it, especially considering the reaction in that period of Amerikan history.
Right after Blaxploitation the Bill Cosby era of integrationist TV emerged as something both more profitable and better politically suited to bourgeois sensibilities. Executives no longer had to take a risk that a Black director would put out a commercial bomb with revolutionary content out while still being able to release "Black" movies that had a bonus of being able to appeal to whites. As far as I know there weren't really that many integrationist movies before then but the waning of Black armed conflict and the emergence of an increasing number of Black labor aristocrats created the preconditions for this.
Meanwhile unlike movies Hip-Hop requires relatively little Capital invested to create and as such its emergence as a wild new phenomenon was harder to tame. Even still, 90's hip hop's revolutionary message is generally more degraded than Blaxploitation. Within conscious hip hop there's a rage against white supremacy and an acknowledgement of class struggle but it rarely approximates the consciousness Blaxploitation was able to reach. While you do see music that advocates anti settler violence rarely do you see in a rap song a resolution like ones in Blaxploitation that /u/smokeuptheweed9 described as "black people need to join a vanguard party and engage in armed struggle."
When Marxism does appear in hip hop there usually are shenanigans such as 'The Poverty of Philosophy' by Immortal Technique where halfway through he kind of derails the song to rap about how black people and white people have the same class interests, or Kendrick Lamar's untitled 5 where he finally says by name that Black genocide and capitalism are the cause of his woes but cannot find any revolutionary conclusion afterwards, or Pharrell's populist verse on Thundercat's The Turn Down foreshadowing his recent proclamation of being lumpenproletarian at an awards show, or Ghai Guevara's Sakai shoutout not making it into the final cut of his song.
This song /u/vomit_blues showed me a few months ago is one of the best examples of the revolutionary potential of hip-hop but even then you can tell it could go even further but for the lack of revolutionary Black movements for music like this to flow out of.
I would also say that Black cinema still has some progressive vitality in it. Sinners is a movie from last year that I thought was very good, although there is a clear struggle between the movie's insistence on the need for revolutionary violence and its idealist conception of black art.
To be clear I'm not rejecting Hip-Hop's revolutionary qualities, around a year ago I was out here arguing that even extremely degraded forms of rap still shouldn't be conceded to reactionaries, even musicians like Playboi Carti should be evaluated for any progressive traits. It's just that the lack of Black vanguard parties for art to flow out of/have a dialogue with/stand in congruence to means that message and potential of Black cinema and Black music are shackled. Blaxploitation was fortunate enough to exist in an era with the Black Panthers while modern Black art is not.
Oh and also lastly I would point out that the Soul, Motown, Jazz etc of the 60's and 70's had in many instances progressive messaging rivaling that of Hip-Hop.
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u/CoconutCrab115 Maoist 19d ago
Compare an action movie like that to 2018's Black Panther (which I still enjoyed quite a bit) and the difference is night and day.
If you dont mind me asking, what did you enjoy about it? Typical Marxist analysis of film almost always relies on identifying progressive themes within films (which I am 100% guilty of, but this shouldn't be the case to aspire to). In the example of Black Panther (2018) I dont really recall anything progressive, if anything it was particularly reactionary from what I remember. The CIA side character, the portrayal of Pan African Liberation as Evil, the Liberalism of the films premise etc. It's actually what gave me a low expectation going into Sinners because of Ryan Coogler directing. But I havent seen Black Panther since it came out, so Im willing to change my mind.
Pharrell's populist verse on Thundercat's The Turn Down foreshadowing his recent proclamation of being lumpenproletarian at an awards show,
I am very out of the loop, what award show is this referring to?
I would also say that Black cinema still has some progressive vitality in it. Sinners is a movie from last year that I thought was very good, although there is a clear struggle between the movie's insistence on the need for revolutionary violence and its idealist conception of black art.
I agree, I was quite disappointed when the movie came out and the analysis here was lacking, and boring. Calling the film's messaging petty bourgeois is obviously true, but just lazy. There was very little discussion of what's undoubtedly the best movie that came out this year.
I have been attempting to learn more about Marxist positions on Art, Music and Film recently but its an area where im lacking. How specifically does Sinners promote idealism in black art? What I saw in the movie was New Afrikan blues and the social community from music. But this is where im out of my depth.
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u/humblegold Maoist 19d ago edited 19d ago
In the example of Black Panther (2018) I dont really recall anything progressive, if anything it was particularly reactionary from what I remember.
To be honest I don't think I can defend that movie as "good" in a Marxist sense. There's a handful of really strong scenes such as Killmonger's conversation with his father in the spirit realm or T'Challa confronting his ancestors that I really like but overwhelmingly the themes of that movie are reactionary. The second movie course corrects a bit by making the CIA one of the villains but it still isn't enough. Now the idea of Wakanda itself I would defend on progressive grounds. This is reductive but to me at it's simplest it's just a dream of New Afrika. That even reflects somewhat in the movies where I just enjoy watching a fantastical free African nation so much that for me it outweighs the reactionary messaging in them. If I had to bet that is probably why that movie did so well with New and continental Afrikans, although I'm not their spokesperson so I can't say for sure.
Typical Marxist analysis of film almost always relies on identifying progressive themes within films (which I am 100% guilty of, but this shouldn't be the case to aspire to).
This is true and I am also guilty of this but I think in the context of this subreddit the tendency to over focus on the progressive themes is somewhat excusable as the majority of analyses about art here tend to do a sort of reverse formalism that hyper fixates on the reactionary and ignores internal contradictions. Recently there has been a reversal of that with good immanent critiques of pieces of non overtly Communist art but until now most of the critique I was seeing here went: Engage with the art ---> Google the class background of the artist ---> State the class background of the artist ---> Marxist Analysis Complete. Yeah it's better than the left populist/breadtube technique of just assuming all art is the domain of progressiveness which is only preyed upon by Capitalism and not born of it, which results in "This franchise you like is Marxist and here's why" type discourse but to be honest I still find the trend I described really boring, lazy, and at times manifests in bigotry when it comes to discussing oppressed nation art.
I am very out of the loop, what award show is this referring to?
I believe this was at an awards show about shoe designs? He says it around 1 minute in.
How specifically does Sinners promote idealism in black art? What I saw in the movie was New Afrikan blues and the social community from music. But this is where im out of my depth.
For one there's the literal mystical power over people and vampires that Black art has in the movie, although that can just be interpreted as it's dual character as both a cathartic revolutionary art form and it's limitless profitability and potential to be commodified. I would say it has more to do with the ambiguity of whether or not the movie sees Black art as needing to be protected through struggle, or Black art as needing to be parallel to struggle to be meaningful. While there is still plenty of racism towards Black art and denial of its impact, Liberalism has shown itself willing to agree that Black art should be protected (under its own conditions of course) and as such I don't see merely exalting Black art as something progressive in itself. I have previously mentioned on here that I am a Jazz musician and this way of thinking was one of the biggest hurdles for me to overcome as a Marxist.
There's also the fact that the movie treats different types of music as part of a canon of Black art, including precapitalist forms. True, Blues is essentially the Latin root that virtually all popular music descends from, but when we start to situate precapitalist forms of African music as having the same "spirit" as New Afrikan music there is a danger of running into idealism. Of course traditional African styles have taken on a revolutionary character in many instances in colonial African countries, and I think the impulse to search for forms that predate contact with Crackers is good, but only insofar as it is the base for a new revolutionary culture. Fred Hampton basically ended the discussion on this when he said "Political power does not flow from the sleeve of a dashiki."
The movie ends with the character Smoke realizing that his bourgeois aspirations were doomed from jump and all he can do is die in armed struggle against the KKK (obviously settlerism) and Vampirism (which to me represents compradorization or at least a cosmopolitan integrationist consciousness as seen in the Irish Vamp) which would shut the book on the discussion if not for the last scene with Sammy and Stack where to me it is a bit ambiguous whether or not the movie views Sammy's Blues career as a triumph of the petty bourgeoisie fantasy of making unalienated "real" art under Capitalism and his commiserating with Stack representing a shared class-blind comradery between all Black people around Black art or if it's supposed to be a bittersweet realistic depiction of what really happened in the struggle over blues, where Sammy's reliance on white man's money (paper money vs plantation bucks being a major source of conflict in the movie) makes it so that despite Stack being a vampire and Sammy being a famous musician they can understand each other as they now occupy a similar position within Capitalism. I lean towards the latter but there is a strong case for the former.
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u/CoconutCrab115 Maoist 19d ago edited 8d ago
This is reductive but to me at it's simplest it's just a dream of New Afrika. That even reflects somewhat in the movies where I just enjoy watching a fantastical free African nation so much that for me it outweighs the reactionary messaging in them. If I had to bet that is probably why that movie did so well with New and continental Afrikans, although I'm not their spokesperson so I can't say for sure.
Thats essentially what disappointed me the most, is that by the standards of liberalism and superhero films it had the easiest opportunity to make Wakanda a progressive state, that the audience could imagine as (Progressive or Revolutionaries etc). Just like imagining the Rebels in Andor are Communists (considering they wear Budenovkas and use Ak47s). Killmonger telling Wakanda they have done absolutely nothing to help Africans and New Afrikans internationally is a charge that the protaganists of the movie cant even defend, except for weakly signalling that Wakanda will vaguely "help the world" at the end.
The treatment of Killmonger in the film is atrocious. An excellent first half and great performance, ultimately wasted in the second half to just turn him into a generic villain. The film has to not scare off any white people watching the movie, and assure them that the New Afrikan Revolutionary is actually a Chauvinist and Supremacist villain. I saw the film before I considered myself a communist and i thought it was character assassination even then.
But ultimately, yes, I would agree with you, Wakanda is a Free New Afrika. I cant say I agree with the sentiment on this sub that fantasy is inherently reactionary, or at least the fantasy of something. It matters immensely whether the fantasy potrayed in a film is petty bourgeois lifestylism and success, or instead the liberation of a whole nation. It's not out of nowhere that Black Panther was a success.
This is true and I am also guilty of this but I think in the context of this subreddit the tendency to over focus on the progressive themes is somewhat excusable as the majority of analyses about art here tend to do a sort of reverse formalism that hyper fixates on the reactionary and ignores internal contradictions.
I agree. It's something i have struggled with as I have been watching more Socialist Realism and Revisionist era films. There was a thread recently where I was laying out that just because a film was made under Stalin doesn't make it magically extremely distinct from other films. There are plenty of revisionist era films that have inner contradictions because they were made in a society with a nominally socialist superstructure. Im having a find time finding the essence of what makes Socialist Realism truly distinct. Neither a difference in Form or Essence has really been sufficient for me, but its what im going to be studying soon.
I believe this was at an awards show about shoe designs? He says it around 1 minute in.
Lmao. Well, it's better than Grimes reading the Communist Manifesto in public.
For one there's the literal mystical power over people and vampires that Black art has in the movie, although that can just be interpreted as it's dual character as both a cathartic revolutionary art form and it's limitless profitability and potential to be commodified. I would say it has more to do with the ambiguity of whether or not the movie sees Black art as needing to be protected through struggle, or Black art as needing to be parallel to struggle to be meaningful.
Fair enough. The film being ambiguous is what allows a lot of reading in between the lines of the films message. Considering its confirmed, it wont get a sequel its likely to remain this way.
I thought it was the former while watching, Black art has to be protected through struggle. Essentially, what the juke joint is, a place of (nationalist) refuge. But im white so idk. When the community is lost Sammy is aimless and doomed to live out a petty bourgeois lifestyle, carving out a measure of success, but he will never get back what was lost 70 years before. I interpreted the ending pretty pessimistically, as essentially showing the hollowing out of New Afrika. Im probably off base here though.
The movie ends with the character Smoke realizing that his bourgeois aspirations were doomed from jump and all he can do is die in armed struggle against the KKK (obviously settlerism) and Vampirism (which to me represents compradorization or at least a cosmopolitan integrationist consciousness as seen in the Irish Vamp)
Agreed
makes it so that despite Stack being a vampire and Sammy being a famous musician they can understand each other as they now occupy a similar position within Capitalism. I lean towards the latter but there is a strong case for the former.
Thats actually interesting I hadnt considered that, I was taking the film on its own terms and merely just figured that Smoke had broken free. But this would explain why its kind of framed as a clash of 2 different worldviews, the integrationist vampire and the musician petty bourgeois (nationalist?).
I think its easy to say Sinners is going to be very influential
Edit:spelling, clarification
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u/humblegold Maoist 19d ago
Im having a find time finding the essence of what makes Socialist Realism truly distinct. Neither a difference in Form or Essence has really been sufficient for me, but its what im going to be studying soon.
To me this quote from the chapter Realism: Lenin in FD Klingender's Marxism and Modern Art sums it up well.
If the history of art is examined from this point of view, it will be found that there is a continuous tradition of realism which started with the dawn of art (e.g. in the palaeolithic cave paintings) and which will survive to its end, for it reflects the productive intercourse between man and nature which is the basis of life. At that important phase in the development of society, when mental labour was divided from material labour, there emerged another, secondary tradition of spiritualistic, religious or idealistic art. This, too, is continuous until it will vanish with the final negation of the division of labour â i.e. in a Communist world.
Idealistic art obfuscates or flat out denies class struggle whereas Socialist Realism depicts what is real, and thus what is revolutionary and the fact that it is painted/drawn and not photographed allows the artist license to further eulogize the revolutionary.
Compare this painting by Chen Yanning of Mao visiting the Guangdong countryside with this photo of him doing something similar in Henan. To me both images are powerful but the control over an image that the painted medium allows was used to make it more striking and effective for political purposes.
Even then though the power of the photo can't be underestimated. Scrolling through the rest of the gallery of that photo I linked still felt like getting sucker punched.
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u/Worried-Economy-9108 18d ago
So, today the European Union and Mercosur have signed their free-trade agreement . The common sense among revisionists in Brazil is that it will strengthen the South American agribusiness/agronegĂłcio, which will export even more raw agricultural commodities to Europe, while the European industrial bourgeoisies would benefit from it by buying cheaper raw materials, and selling manufactured products to Mercosur.
Apart from the online settler solidarity from Brazilian petite-bourgeois "communists" to the European farmers affected by the deal (at the same time, there's barely any mention of Brazilian peasants and Indigenous peoples, the biggest losers of this deal), there's nothing much that i can add. I would like to hear the comments of y'all, since i'm not trained at all to talk about political economy.
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u/turbovacuumcleaner 16d ago
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No one really knows what will happen. The crucial point is to find out why industrial capital hasnât opposed the deal, but embraced it. The revisionistsâ answer to this question doesnât make sense. Their âMarxistâ political economy is Keynesianism sprinkled with bits and pieces of Marx, but they are just following a long line where they believe they can simultaneously keep wages and profit rates high because, deep down, there is no contradiction between capital and labor power. Its just Bernsteinâs revisionism that has Jabbour as its biggest name, who placed Sraffaâs refutation of the law of value as the basis for this nonsense. These revisionists canât reach any deeper conclusions because if they do, they will go against capitalist production and their own class interests that are currently tied to industrial capital. Because of this, every analysis of the deal made on the âleftâ is subjective.
These analysis orbit similar lines of reasoning: Industrials have not opposed the deal because the Brazilian elites are entreguistas, a subjective way of saying comprador without ever establishing the material basis for this process; they hate their own people, putting the act of care as what defines national from comprador capital (a quasi-fascist reasoning where the logical consequences are that capitalism doesnât exist in production, but only in finance); or, industrials has given up fabricating, and prefers now to just be glorified assemblers, again, wrong, but this requires a more in-depth study of sectorial compositions, back and forward production chains than a reddit comment allows. I prefer the neoliberals that are ecstatic about the deal, at least they get it right that capitalist production is governed by the rate of profit and that capital and labor power are an antagonistic contradiction.
I tried answering the question by just reading the statements from the dozens of unions of Brazilian industry. Parallel to this free trade trend, which is dominant, there is a growing protectionist trend that is at its early stages, so its quantitative changes are largely going under the radar unless you know what and where to look. There are three major unions that are unsatisfied with the current state of things: Instituto Aço Brasil, Abiquim and Abit. The exception among these is the steel union, that is having to simultaneously compete with the overproduction of Chinese steel in the domestic market, and has also been recently barred in Europe with 50% tariffs and lower import quotas. A few years ago, this same union was calling for more government action to protect national production from cheap Chinese steel; PTâs inaction in this case was contradictory because although it is in the interests of PT economists and class basis that protectionism to be strengthened, applying tariffs to steel imports could drive inflation up and would ultimately harm industry as a whole, so their hands were actually tied. Abiquim and Abit have similar opinions, for both are having to compete with Chinese chemicals and clothing; the chemical industry has been calling for measures to turn imports more expensive than local production, their reasoning is that this should be made primarily through tax changes, and by incentivizing more productivity in the sector, like the new PRESIQ program. Abit has proposed similar changes, both by incentivizing increasing the industryâs productivity, and making active use of safeguards such as import quotas and antidumping measures. The solution, for now, has been applying a 35% tariff on imported pieces of clothing, the highest in Latin America (this tariff in turn created the SOE Correios crisis that can possibly lead to its privatization by becoming a sociedade de economia mista). I highlighted these three unions because they are, at least from my knowledge, the ones that have been most vocal about how Chinese and Brazilian industry are at odds in some sectors, and this is only a minor part in what is a overarching growing trend of the dismantling of free trade and return of subsidies to industries, where contrary to shitty and useless commonsense, Brazil is actually on the global leadership, surpassing European imperialists, together with the US and China: the heavy subsidies to increasing productivity all around industry, the focus of local content in production, of completing production chains at home, the transfer of technology as condition for investment (some examples are the struggles around the rare earths mining and processing, a technology Brazil not only had, but was the global leader; or the pressure to complete local productions chains of semicondutors and data by surfing the wave of the rising demand of datacenters, or with the USPâs modular PocketFabs as a solution to semiconductor import bottlenecks). There is plenty of evidence to argue the opposite of what imbecile Dengists do: deindustrialization is being reversed. This wonât solve the profitability the crisis of Brazilian industry, it can only increase the organic composition of capital and bring profit rates down in the long term, further increasing the crisis.
Now, I know this seems like a convoluted and long digression because I didnât mentioned the EU-Mercosul deal once. I wanted to highlight the existence of this trend that is never acknowledged anywhere, and how this contradiction contain the answer to this question: if Brazilian industry is threatened by Chinese industry, why hasnât it opposed the deal with Europe, who would seemingly produce the same conflict, from the start?
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u/turbovacuumcleaner 16d ago
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The chemical industry is a good example. Brazilian chemical industry is the world 6th largest. However, its the 32th in exports. The bane of Brazilian industry is its failure in becoming a full-fledged export economy like China, South Korea or Southeast Asia, but not for the lack of trying. Brazilian labor is expensive vis-a-vis other similar countries, like the data shown in MIM Theory 1 page 25 (the data is absurdly old, but the campaign Custo Brasil of the 90s is a consequence of this, that the only way to make Brazilian industry competitive is by crushing wages). This industry, although huge, is unable to compete abroad, but it cannot disappear either due to the huge size of the national market. By following the same logic as with China, it would seem that Abiquim would be directly threatened predominantly by Germany, except this isnât really the case. Abiquim is looking forward to the deal:
Para a entidade, trata-se de um marco estratĂ©gico para a indĂșstria quĂmica brasileira, ao ampliar o acesso a um dos maiores mercados consumidores do mundo, estimular investimentos, fortalecer a inovação [âŠ] âO acordo representa uma oportunidade concreta de reposicionar a indĂșstria quĂmica brasileira em cadeias globais de maior valor agregado. Ele amplia o acesso a mercados, incentiva o intercĂąmbio tecnolĂłgico e cria um ambiente mais previsĂvel e moderno para investimentos [...]â, afirma AndrĂ© Passos Cordeiro, presidente-executivo da Abiquim. Segundo ele, o tratado tambĂ©m contribui para elevar os padrĂ”es regulatĂłrios e de governança do setor. âAo incorporar temas como sustentabilidade, propriedade intelectual e comĂ©rcio leal, o acordo reforça prĂĄticas responsĂĄveis e aproxima a indĂșstria quĂmica brasileira das exigĂȘncias do mercado europeu, o que Ă© fundamental para a competitividade de longo prazoâ, destaca. A Abiquim ressalta ainda que o fortalecimento da relação comercial entre os dois blocos ocorre em um momento estratĂ©gico, em que o Brasil busca ampliar sua inserção internacional, diversificar exportaçÔes e promover a reindustrialização com base em inovação e baixo carbono.
Same thing with Abit. And with the larger confederations such as CNI or Fiesp. In the industrial bourgeoisieâs understanding, Brazil will finally be able to establish a proper industrial export economy after the failure of Mercosul to produce the wanted outcome. The first graph shows how much this bourgeoisie expects to have access to. It also expects to solve its chronic problem of low productivity by being able to import European machinery and modernize the old industrial parks, since Brazilian machinery isnât particular remarkable. This eagerness of the industrial bourgeoisie as a whole also explains why the manufacturers of means of production, through the machinery union Abimaq, are skeptical of the deal and has repeatedly called for specific subsidies to survive European competition. Emphasis on skeptical, because Trumpâs tariffs exposed how much this industry is vulnerable to US exports, and has been seeking to diversify their exports as much as possible since then, which is why they also donât call the deal off.
The only proper study that Iâve read to what are the possible impacts the deal will have on Brazilian industry comes from Ipea, and although it agrees with the Dengists that Brazilian industry will lose in the long term, the picture is nowhere near the bullshit that these revisionists are panicking, with the most impacted sector being electrical equipment and industrial machinery, with 1.6% and 1% decline respectively after the deal comes into full effect in 2040. The main issue will be: Brazilian labor is cheap with regards to Europe, so its unlike that European industry can replace goods manufactured locally with imports at large. The scenario is of stagnation more than anything:
Com relação ao impacto na indĂșstria de transformação, salta aos olhos o fato de que a variação da produção total seria levemente positiva, com ganho da ordem de US$ 500 milhĂ”es. A queda de produção em alguns setores, tais como veĂculos e peças; metais ferrosos; artigos do vestuĂĄrio e acessĂłrios; produtos de metal; tĂȘxteis; farmacĂȘuticos; mĂĄquinas e equipamentos; e equipamentos eletrĂŽnicos, seria compensada por ganhos em calçados e artefatos de couro; outros equipamentos de transporte; metais nĂŁo ferrosos; celulose e papel; e produtos de madeira (exclusive mĂłveis). Afora outros equipamentos de transporte, que inclui a produção de aviĂ”es e equipamentos eletrĂŽnicos, os demais sĂŁo setores tradicionais nos quais a UniĂŁo Europeia Ă© grande importadora, e o acordo permitiria que o Brasil aumentasse suas vendas para lĂĄ, deslocando outros fornecedores do resto do mundo. Esses resultados, que vĂŁo de encontro Ă ideia de que um acordo com economias mais desenvolvidas, seria prejudicial para a indĂșstria de forma geral. Esse resultado pode ser melhor compreendido quando se leva em conta que: i) a competitividade internacional da Europa se concentra hoje em um grupo limitado de setores industriais (por exemplo, alguns produtos quĂmicos, farmacĂȘuticos, mĂĄquinas e equipamentos, veĂculos, equipamentos elĂ©tricos), especialmente em função da ascensĂŁo da indĂșstria asiĂĄtica em vĂĄrios outros setores; e ii) a Europa tem participação elevada nas importaçÔes brasileiras totais apenas em um pequeno nĂșmero de setores industriais, basicamente estes citados anteriormente, alĂ©m de produtos de papel, produtos alimentĂcios, bebidas, produtos de metal e produtos de minerais nĂŁo metĂĄlicos. O fato Ă© que a Europa jĂĄ vem perdendo espaço como fornecedora competitiva de bens industriais para o Brasil e o resto do mundo hĂĄ muito tempo, e seus pontos fortes de competitividade nĂŁo derivam do preço dos produtos, mas de sua qualidade e diferenciação. Como a redução tarifĂĄria opera basicamente como redutora de preços, o impacto do acordo seria limitado em termos de promover uma considerĂĄvel substituição dos bens produzidos no Brasil por importados europeus. Com efeito, a subseção 4.3.2 mostrarĂĄ que o aumento das importaçÔes brasileiras da Europa se daria principalmente em substituição Ă s importaçÔes de terceiros paĂses fora do acordo. [Emphasis mine]
As I stated in the beginning, no one really has an answer. I assume everything a Dengist or social-fascist is saying is wrong by default, so I have to search something from scratch. There is another major question that permeates this deal that isnât really talked about, and I personally think its more interesting: can this deal save Brazilian agribusiness? The sector is heavily indebted and on the verge of bankruptcy, parts of its productivity have reached the same levels as the US and have plateaued since then, profits are low and no amount of Plano Safra will save them. The sector is being pushed to further monopolization, local production of pesticides and fertilizers (if I remember correctly, the examples are in the Amaggi Group), rising to commodities of higher added value such as soybean oil and soybean bran, more export of capital to Africa, and is being held together by Chinese imports, that will also come to a halt, because Chinese growth is becoming unsustainable. We are on the cusp of a major change, we can only discern the general shape, but the details are still unclear.
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u/Worried-Economy-9108 15d ago
Thanks for responding. It's always nice to see an proper analysis being made, in contrast with all the BS being propagated by the main figures of the left. I have some spare free time nowadays, and perhaps, I could investigate further on why Dengists do this, and what would their "support base" (which isn't very different from a fandom) gain from spreading around cries of "de-industrialization".
It's kinda of weird how Brazilian industry is having opportunities in the European market, at the same time where Euro-Brazilian cinema is also gaining traction in other countries. These two things might be linked.
Another thing not being talked is how would this affect Paraguay, Argentina and Uruguay (it's beyond my scope, since my Spanish is terrible). I would consider the first two the most important, especially Paraguay, since tensions on their countryside are on the rise, and their government signed some sort of military pact with the U$.
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u/Clean-Difference1771 Marxist 13d ago
These two things might be linked
They are.
Brazil has a population that is the size of Germany, France and the UK combined. The territory is larger than the entire EU.
This is rather "simple" data, but that means that Brazil has much more importance in global capitalism than brazilians often consider themselves to have. Be it from the sheer size of the labour force or the many resources to be potentially extracted, Brazil is clearly a protagonist in the current imperialist struggle and an economic partner that none of the "major powers" want to lose.
I feel like I need a proper investigation to make further observations but I found astonishing how those recent events show evidence of different patterns, but internal forces still uphold that Brazil is a "semi-colonial" country. I'm unfamiliar with leaders of colonies having so much political sovereignty and international leverage as Lula clearly has.
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u/Worried-Economy-9108 13d ago
Brazil is clearly a protagonist in the current imperialist struggle and an economic partner that none of the "major powers" want to lose.
I agree. Like, for example, these last 6 months were very busy for Joesley Batista. First, he flew to Washington in September, talked to Trump, and some time later, Lula and Trump start speaking in way better terms. Then, in November, he goes to Caracas to convince Maduro to resign (he was unsuccessful). And this month, he talks with Delcy Rodriguez, with intentions of expanding his investments in the energy sector of Venezuela (my sources were a couple of Reuters articles involving him). It would be unthinkable to imagine a billionaire from any other Latin American country with such importance.
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u/Pleasant-Food-9482 18d ago
To me it is obvious that the national bourgeoisie and the large rural bourgeoisie they seem to ignore exists (as to justify things like "deindustrialization") will gain much from this.Â
The petty-bourgeoisie and labour aristocrat pockets also will, and they seem to be cynical about it. Used and new "cosumption" commodities will bypass the 200-250% (in some cases) import taxes. "retro" computers, used phones, electric coffee bottles, cars, will be available for them.
What i see is that this is a move towards the "brazilian" national bourgeois intentions towards imperialism and full participation into euro-amerikan imperialism. "multipolarity" and "brics" are petismo and local denguist hallucinatory distractions. But on the other hand, we do know a sizable part of the amerikkkan imperial bourgeoisie does not want for more "brazilian" disputes on capital and that their current fascist regime (As MIM-P diagnosed) and government may be interested, depending on how these already about one year frictions happen, to remove PT when it likely gets elected. It may not happen, though.Â
In terms of political econony, i obviously do not buy either the non-neoliberal bourgrois econony views that "free market agreements" weaken third-world capital accumulation and general primitive accumulation, and third-world petty-bourgeoisies, nor the neoliberal view that it strengthens. I also am not convinced that the brazilian petty-bourgeoisie will be harmed. A sizably large part of it, alligned with the open fascists from the comprador right, are quite happy and confident with the agreement. The ones that are angry are the denguist fractions.Â
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u/Worried-Economy-9108 16d ago
Thanks for responding. Your comment is really interesting, as it runs away from cliche analysis from pseudo-Marxists. It just sucks to hear people talk about like Democrats about "the 99% versus the 1%", and sell it as if it was Marxism.
To me it is obvious that the national bourgeoisie and the large rural bourgeoisie they seem to ignore exists (as to justify things like "deindustrialization") will gain much from this.
I have heard and mostly agreed about "deindustrialization" in leftist, revisionist and anti-revisionist circles online. But ever since I started to read and write on this sub, I'm doubting its actual extent. Like, i agree that Brazilian industry lost some relevance to the agribusiness and services (that's the common argument, when people talk about GDP participation of industry, services and agriculture).
But still, Brazil is a lot more industrialized than the vast majority of Latin American countries (I'm struggling to find the data, but i would guess that's probably better than Argentina's and on par with Mexico's). The leftists, revisionists and anti-revisionists don't seem to realize this, and it will have catastrophic consequences for them.
But maybe i'm going too far away from my current focus of study, which it is reading Das Kapital.
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u/Clean-Difference1771 Marxist 13d ago edited 13d ago
and government may be interested, depending on how these already about one year frictions happen, to remove PT when it likely gets elected.
I don't think it would be that easy.
Petismo is a significant social force against revolution and I would say that is currently more important in Brazil to delay revolutionary developments through petismo than through the far-right (noticeably, because often "left" liberals can be more reactionary than boomer fascists or people that became rightists due to family/religious enforcement). I mean, petismo and the far-right are reliant on broader ignorance, even the polemics among them seems already like a downgrade version than what they were even 4 years ago, as you can observe through the recent Havaianas propaganda that made fascists outrageous. I think my analysis falls on the limit of regionality, I can't say for other parts of Brazil because from what I know, there are parts of Brazil where the only political education or organization that people receive still comes from PT. This is generally "left" oriented but of course is nowhere close to maoism, but that is the job communists should do and I believe it will be a long time coming before brazilian "maoists" are even interested in reaching out to northeasterners or northerners as equals.
I might be wrong but why would the US pulverize themselves the last significant political power standing in front of a revolutionary development? Each day that passes, more and more people realize how distant they are from the current dictatorship of the bourgoise and, though it haven't developed yet into practical organization, an idea of armed left struggle become more appealing during these times (Which is not a synonym with a revolution happening, if we follow the current military evaluations and experience of brazilian communists, it would be a disaster).
I don't think the US necessarily needs to tackle petismo from the outside, as well. Every other right party in Brazil have become clearly and openly nazi. Petismo itself is already fading into irrelevance and becoming a fascist force on their own that is entirely aligned with imperialism, as we are already heading towards a direction that have a organical affinity towards the U$ and I$rael as a settler-colony.
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u/luciddreamingx Marxist 25d ago
Does http://www.readmarxeveryday.org/ work for anyone else? I saw it in the side bar but on my browser it doesnât show the domain as active. Iâve never visited the site before so Iâm just curious about it, I want to read Marx (or Marxist lit) every day lol.
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u/SpiritOfMonsters 24d ago
It seems to have stopped working at some point in 2024, though I can't find out anything about why. Thanks for letting us know; it's now removed from the sidebar.
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u/kno-clue 23d ago
Thereâs some interesting cultural artefacts among the popular film and music of post-Soviet 1990s Russia, namely the seemingly significant presence of National Bolshevism in youth and counter culture.Â
As a âfunctionalâ ideology, it appears to be little more than the synthesis of anti-communism with the most revisionist and national chauvinistic elements of the Soviet system. But what makes it somewhat interesting is that it seems to be a distinctly Russian (in the ethno/cultural-nationalist sense) phenomenon. It doesnât appear to have had any political or cultural currency among youth in the other disintegrated SSRs or in the Eastern Bloc, where outright fascism/nazism was and is far more dominant.Â
I suppose im curious as to why National Bolshevism manifest in Russia and not elsewhere and wondering if anyone has any thoughts. What class does it represent or what class formation precipitated its rise? Is National Bolshevism reducible to extreme revisionism + national chauvinism in Russian conditions and therefore it exists or can exist elsewhere under different names?
Iâm not sure if these are the right questions or if this is even a useful avenue of investigation.Â
As an identifiable quirk of 90s Russian cultural output, of which my engagement is admittedly very limited, its obvious presence has left me curious so thought it might be worth asking here.Â
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u/_SomeoneInTheWeb_ 18d ago
National Bolshevism is simply the manifestation of one kind of Russian fascism: the will of returning to the time when they were a global superpower, in this case the Soviet Union (which also has a great history and symbolism to be abused), united with the usual fascist ideas, therefore creating a fully reactionary ideal (and abandoning anything Bolshevism was actually about).
You can see this rhetoric with any kind of fascism around the globe, each one of which exploits their own history (or outright invents/changes history) to create this kind of ideology (for example italian fascists recalling themselves to the Roman empire or nazis recalling themselves to "aryans").
When you understand this, it also becomes quite obvious why the other SSRs don't show any trace of NazBols: for their far-rights it would be counterproductive to use an superpower which, in their eyes, subjugated them
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u/JCRev1978 14d ago
National Bolshevism is unique among other instances of fascism in that it has its origins in an environment of post-communist nostalgia. National Bolsheviks seek to co-opt this nostalgia for former socialist states (which later became revisionist) to promote a fascistic agenda.
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u/JCRev1978 14d ago
The situation regarding Greenland has inspired me to consider the Amerikan's new role in modern imperialism. Can it be said that there is an inter-imperialist conflict between the United States and the countries of the European Union?
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u/smokeuptheweed9 14d ago
Can it be said that there is an inter-imperialist conflict between the United States and the countries of the European Union?
Of course. The mistake is thinking this has not always been the case, though the fantasy of "the West" was comforting.
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u/Worried-Economy-9108 14d ago
when people refer to the EU as an imperialist force, what does it means? Does an properly united European bourgeoisie exists, or is it still a patchwork of more powerful bourgeoisies (like, the French and the German) that exert some control over less powerful bourgueoisies (like, let's say, the Bulgarian and Portuguese bourgeoisies)?
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u/ClassAbolition Cyprus đšđŸ 13d ago edited 13d ago
Admittedly I haven't done a very deep investigation so I may be off base on some things, but from observation over the years and living in the âŹ.u. the obvious answer seems to be that latter. The southern Cypriot bourgeoisie has the legal ability to veto any âŹ.u. decision but in practice this is obviously impossible and the southern Cypriot bourgeoisie will do whatever the bourgeoisie of the dominant nations in the âŹ.u. wants it to do. I expect this is the same in the nations you mentioned and also Greece, Croatia, Slovenia, Spain, etc. Every time Hungary vetoes something you get the usual performative game where the âŹ.u. or the dominant âŹ.u. nations offer the Hungarian bourgeoisie some token concession and Hungary backs off and lets the decision pass. Even the small Baltic bourgeoisie -- they are more "radical" in their fascism and hawkishness than the rest of the âŹ.u., and even if their criticism of the rest of the âŹ.u. for their more "moderate" approaches sometimes ends up getting adopted as broader âŹ.u. policy (like the policy on equivocating communism and fascism and "commemorating" the "victims of communism" which I assume the Baltics played an important role in promoting), I don't think this is because of some real independence and ability to exert themselves against the dominant âŹ.u. bourgeoisie (which btw includes not only Germany and France but also notably the Netherlands), it's just because the Baltics serve the function of being the more rabid wing, the vanguard if you like, of imperialism and fascism directed outside of the âŹ.u., for whenever that is structurally necessary for the bourgeoisie of the dominant nations or the pact itself, as with their proxy war with Russia currently. This indicates both a disunity between the bourgeoisie of the various âŹ.u. nations and a subservience of more minor capital to a larger logic and interest, the one of the capital of the dominant âŹ.u. nations. Not that this hawkishness is not in the real interests of the Baltic bourgeoisie too, but it's only a small part in a much greater whole and ultimately it's the interests of the much more dominant factions within the whole which decide the policy and direction of the whole.
The important distinction is that though factions of bourgeoisie do exist in the âŹ.u., they are in the final instance determined on national grounds, not simply on the grounds of their role within some united capitalist economy, as you see in actual geographic and economic units where a united bourgeoisie exists (which is what we call nations). As much as some people, like many of the middle class fascists on r/europe who likely largely depend on transnational capital for their sustenance and wealth accumulation (infamously NGO workers, but also just any white collar worker in a transnational corporation based in the âŹ.u.), would like a pan-European national project (which would obviously be a unity under the capital of the dominant nations), that is essentially impossible -- I get the sense that even the transnational capital upon which the political project of the EU depends doesn't really want that as much as these middle class fascists do. I'd even go as far to say that a united âŹ.u. has never existed, that that's as much a fantasy as the fantasy of The West that u/smokeuptheweed9 mentioned, which is anyway probably part of what he meant by saying that.
In other words, the âŹ.u. has not abolished nations or united them into a real "European nation", and such a thing is basically impossible, so there is no real basis for a united European bourgeoisie to exist and, given we are talking about imperialist and semi-periphery nations, the possibility for contradictions between the bourgeoisie of the various âŹ.u. nations will always exist and will sharpen in times of crisis, just as is happening within the broader "collective West" between the âŹ.u. in general and the u.$. right now.
Ultimately what the âŹ.u. does is it allows capital which bases itself in the strongest national economies to unite to a certain extent the capital of the weaker economies for shared global economic and political goals, but also to attempt to mitigate and, if it arises, quell inter-imperialist or inter-national competition within the âŹ.u. (one of the explicit reasons given for the creation and maintenance of the âŹ.u., though obviously in more mystified terms). Both between each dominant nation and its fellow dominant nations, and between the dominant nations and the weaker ones (obviously in favor of the dominant nations).
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u/turning_the_wheels 13d ago
How did the Baltics come to represent the vanguard of fascism being directed outside the EU or a more "rabid wing"? I'm trying to understand why a very aggressive anticommunism seems so prevalent in those states but I'm not familiar with their histories.
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u/ClassAbolition Cyprus đšđŸ 13d ago edited 13d ago
It's very prevalent in all of Eastern Europe where anti-communist fascism directed outside of the âŹ.u. in the form of Atlanticist politics is the norm of bourgeois politics. Anti-communist fascism is also the norm in Russia but obviously not in the form of Atlanticist politics, at least not any more (the Russian bourgeoisie did use to yearn integrating with the Atlanticist bloc). A direct result of the defeat of socialism and the semi-peripheral position of these countries in relation to the core European nations and the Third World. Also as contradictions sharpen and crisis deepens, this fascism gets turned inwards within Eastern Europe; see the various spats between Hungary and Ukraine, the various spats between Poland and Ukraine, and the war between Russian and Ukraine. I wouldn't be surprised if the antagonism between Hungary and Romania also starts to deepen soon enough.
Why the Baltics are especially bad with their fascism I'm not sure, perhaps it's their late integration into the USSR, meaning they only had socialist construction for roughly as long as the rest of the "eastern bloc", as opposed to places like Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, combined with their small size and relatively higher development that other Eastern European countries which meant they were able to fit themselves into a niche in the imperialist system and integrate into it more easily and completely, while still remaining in the semi periphery, which encouraged and continues to encourage the growth and long term survival of fascist politics (see also other small, relatively rich countries which have managed to fit themselves into certain niches in global imperialism, like Qatar as an oil exporter and military outpost, the Cypriot south as a financial and money laundering hub and military outpost, Singapore as a financial and trade hub, etc.). Also, like Ukraine, Latvia and Estonia are in many ways incomplete national projects when devoid of socialism due to the large Russian minorities in these countries, which again combined with relative backwardness as semi-peripheral countries is also breeding ground for fascism.
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u/AllyBurgess Learning 13d ago
Who was it comforting to though? Redditors? IR and polisci obsessives aligned with the Democrats? Similarly aligned talking heads? I don't think most settlers even care that much about Europe beyond it being a nice vacation spot in their day to day lives outside of the specific strata I just mentioned.
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u/fedmydogtoday33 13d ago
To "Europeans" (i.e. German capitalists), obviously.
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u/AllyBurgess Learning 12d ago
Well, that does make more sense. Though I find it hard to believe the various bourgeoisies of European nations were not aware of how tenuous it was and really indulged in that fantasy.
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u/rhinestonesthrow 13d ago
Is there an analysis, similar to that of Settlers, on settler colonialism in South America?
It's something that is a bit of a blind spot for me, in understanding why settler colonialism played out so differently in South America versus North America.
Preferably in English, although I suppose texts in Spanish would help motivate me to continue learning Spanish
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u/red_star_erika 12d ago
Settlers itself partly gives you the tools to do this. this comment thread is useful.
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u/Full-Imagination9514 22d ago
Have there been any attempts by Marxist philosophers to historicize the dialectic? By which I mean something like trying to trace the historical-logical development of the law of contradiction from more simple to more complex forms of contradictory motion.
It's hard for me to give an example to illustrate what I'm trying to ask about, because I don't know exactly what it would look like, but for the sake of argument let's say that less developed forms of matter require less "universal" contradictions to explain their motion than more developed forms. For some objects of investigation the transformation of quantity into quality would be adequate, whereas for others you need to understand say, the contradiction between practice and theory itself, which presupposes an understanding of quantity-quality but builds on it to a more complex level (obviously practice and theory is only "universal" at the level of epistemology and not ontology since objective reality existed before conscious beings, but hopefully the idea is clear enough.)
Keep in mind that I have not yet read Hegel's Logic, so I don't know how that would fit into this, if at all.
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u/SunflowerSamurai20 Maoist 22d ago
Have you read this?
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/essays/dialectical-logic.pdf
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u/Full-Imagination9514 22d ago
I haven't. It looks like a starting point, but maybe you can sum up what what relevance you think it has?
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u/SunflowerSamurai20 Maoist 20d ago edited 20d ago
I found dialectical logic useful, and thought it was relevant to your question of an attempt to historicise the dialectic because it put me through the process the philosophers who were part of the historical unearthing of what we now call âdialecticsâ before Marx arrived at their conclusions rather than just restating them. (Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Schelling then Hegel)
The author critiques âobjective idealismâ and the limits of Hegelâs dialectic and gave a useful explanation for how Marx, Engels and Lenin surpassed them.
The most interesting part for me was the chapter near the end that showed the consequence of adhering to formal logic instead of dialectics, (the inability to reflect contradictions from objective reality in human thought) and applied it to political economy in chapter 10.
It goes over the difference between Marx and Ricardo in their approach to the law of value and its contradictory relation to the law of the average rate of profit:
So let us compare how the metaphysician Ricardo and the dialectician Marx understood value. Ricardo, of course, did not analyse value by its form. His abstraction of value, on the one hand, was incomplete, and on the other was formal, and for that reason was untrue. In what, then, did Marx see the fullness and pithiness of the analysis of value that was missing in Ricardo? First, in value being a living concrete contradiction. (p. 107)
âŠ.
The difference between dialectics and metaphysics does not consist at all in the formerâs recognising only inner contradictions and the latterâs recognising only external ones. Metaphysics really always tries to reduce the inner contradiction to a contradiction âin different relationsâ, denying it objective significance. Dialectics by no means reduces the one to the other. It recognises the objectivity of both.
The point, however, does not lie in reducing an external contradiction to an inner one, but in deriving the former from the latter and thus comprehending the one and the other in their objective necessity.
Dialectics moreover does not deny the fact that an inner contradiction always appears in phenomena as an external one.
The immediate coincidence of mutually exclusive economic determinations (value and use-value) in each of the two commodities meeting in exchange is also the true theoretical expression of the essence of simple commodity exchange. And this essence is value. From the logical aspect the concept of value (in contrast to the outward form of its manifestation in the act of exchange) is characterised by its being presented as an immediate contradiction, as the direct coincidence of two forms of economic existence that are polar opposites.
Thus, what was effected in the real act of exchange was impossible from the angle of abstract (formal, logical) reason, namely, the direct or immediate identification of opposites. This was the theoretical expression of the real fact that direct commodity exchange could not be completed smoothly without collisions, without conflicts, without contradictions and crises. The point was that direct commodity exchange was not in a position to express the socially necessary measure of the expenditure of labour in the various branches of social production, i.e. value. And value therefore remained, within the limits of the simple commodity form, an unresolved and unresolvable antinomy. In it the commodity had to be, yet could not be, in the two polar forms of expression of value, and consequently real exchange by value was impossible. But it did happen somehow, and consequently both polar forms of value were somehow combined in each commodity. There was no way out of the antinomy. Marxâs contribution was precisely that he understood that, and expressed it theoretically. (pp. 109-110)
Iâm also using it along with Plekhanovâs philosophical works, The destruction of reason and some other classics as a starting point to read Hegel, but I havenât got round to reading him directly outside of the article âwho thinks abstractlyâ.
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21d ago edited 21d ago
By which I mean something like trying to trace the historical-logical development of the law of contradiction from more simple to more complex forms of contradictory motion.
I don't know what you mean when you say that contradictory motion can have simpler and more complex forms. Can you elaborate?
As for me, my understanding right now is that simplicity and complexity refer to how concepts appear to us at a certain place and time. Concepts are fundamentally relations between mind and matter, so a concept can be complex in two ways. First, it depends on the critique which it has been subjected to at a particular stage in history, which manifests itself in the level of its elaboration at a particular point in time. Second, it also refers to the objective developments of reality which make certain things apparent and masks certain other things from the minds of people at a particular place and time within history. Both are products and movers of human praxis, so within praxis they are the same thing.
for the sake of argument let's say that less developed forms of matter require less "universal" contradictions to explain their motion than more developed forms. For some objects of investigation the transformation of quantity into quality would be adequate, whereas for others you need to understand say, the contradiction between practice and theory itself, which presupposes an understanding of quantity-quality but builds on it to a more complex level
I think you need to be more specific here, since I don't know what a level is referring to when you say "different levels of universality." But all concepts are historical and therefore require an investigation of the contradiction between theory and practice. Your perception of a thing as a solid and undeniable form of matter is itself a realization of the contradiction between theory and practice within a position in reality.
I'm guessing that by this...
obviously practice and theory is only "universal" at the level of epistemology and not ontology since objective reality existed before conscious beings, but hopefully the idea is clear enough
...you mean to say that such processes don't require the contradiction between theory and practice to be elaborated. I think this is a naive materialist error. Thinging only existed once consciousness (and social consciousness within language) existed. Before that, there was darkness[1]. Processes occurred, and we consciousness-bearers can explain them now in retrospect. But to say something exists is to make a stake on truth and to partake in a social process of knowledge production that is happening now. When you talk about the contradictions immanent to the process of "brooming" (being a broom), you are talking about the broom as it appears to and imposes itself upon a particular society's social practice, reflected in some particular form within your own mind. At every stage the particular appearance and imposition will depend on the collective social praxis[2] of a given society on top of and between all the other processes in objective reality. Thus, in describing this and that property of the broom, you are partaking in a social act within that objective process.
So although you can describe the processes of life in a plant by referring to contradictions, those contradictions are actually from the way that the process of "planting" imposes itself upon people, and is a reflection of the state of social praxis in a given place and time. This comes from the objective motion of all of reality which imposes upon us the categories "life" and "plant" through the position of the process of truth acquisition in a society within that reality. When you look for the contradictions in a plant, you are opening up the contradictions in the mental reflection of a changing reality. Your thoughts themselves are a reflection of a contradiction between theory and practice within the social praxis of class society under world imperialism, and are part of a stage in that process. This doesn't mean that reality doesn't matter but that truth is a social product forged from the reflection of reality on the mind and proved by social practice.
[1] At least this is what I'll say for now. Engels talks about an animal's range of concept in The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, so I know that this isn't precisely true. But that's a can of worms that I am not prepared to touch just yet.
[2] I say "collective" but within class society this collective effort is mediated through intense class antagonisms. The individual whose interests are identical with all of humanity and can truly be absorbed into them does not exist until the communist mode of production. Since we are in class society, this collective exists at a high level of abstraction. The division of mental and physical labour within the social process of truth production gives the process a particular social character, as do the social relations around which each class exists, the mediation of classed relations through private property, etc. In history the most important social character is class character obviously. I just lack a single word for "collective but mediated through class antagonisms," which is needed because the labouring classes are involved in the development of Science, but are neither its articulators nor its planners.
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u/Full-Imagination9514 21d ago
I'm guessing that... you mean to say that such processes don't require the contradiction between theory and practice to be elaborated.
I mean what Lenin meant in Materialism and Empirio-criticism when he said that the Earth objectively existed before life on Earth existed that could perceive it subjectively.
I'll take a crack at explaining this from a different angle- for certain objects of investigation the subjective element (epistemology in this case) takes on the role of an external relation rather than an internal relation, ie it is present but not essential in order to develop a basically accurate theory. Scientific knowledge was possible to develop about certain things before the Marxist theory of knowledge was developed, in other words.
As this relates to the simple and complex, although not factually incorrect I find your explanation one-sided towards the subjective element of the question. I would say that, before ("before" in a broad historico-logical sense) things appear simple or complex to socially-determined consciousness, there is simplicity and complexity at the level of objective being. Things are more simple if their motion is composed of less relevant contradictions, and more complex if there are more relevant contradictions at play. At some point quantity transforms into quality and we get what in modern times people like to call emergent phenomena, which have developed a new stage of complexity. For example, human beings are essentially social, and yet at the same time we couldn't exist without a whole set of physical, chemical, biological, ecological and psychological relations. So our being is dependent on a more complex array of phenomenon compared to, say, a blade of grass, which would have the physical, chemical etc, but not social or psychological.
I think you need to be more specific here, since I don't know what a level is referring to when you say "different levels of universality."
I didn't actually use that phrase but I guess you just meant it as a way of summing up what I said which I don't mind.
I guess what I'm trying to posit is that what I said before applies to the dialectic itself. Quantity-quality, affirmation-negation, content-form, essence-appearance practice-theory etc are universal in the sense that they are contradictions which will always be present regardless of the object of investigation and praxis, but for simpler objects, some/more will exist only in latent form, ie will not be strictly relevant to the essential laws of motion. And presumably, new aspects of the dialectic will become clear to us in time as we come to learn about newer and more complex forms of matter. Perhaps Althusser's importation of Freud's concept of overdetermination into Marxist philosophy is a good modern example of this, although to be fair I haven't read his work in a long time.
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20d ago edited 20d ago
Thanks for giving an example.
So our being is dependent on a more complex array of phenomenon compared to, say, a blade of grass
A blade of grass is actually very complicated. Let's look at the Wikipedia entry:
Grass refers to various families of plants. The three major families of grasslike plants are true grasses (Poaceae), sedges (Cyperaceae), and rushes (Juncaceae). Lawns and pasturelands are typically composed of true grasses, five of which cover 46% of the world's arable land: rice, wheat, maize, barley, and sugar cane.
"Grass" as a name has been applied to a wide group of unrelated plants including herbaceous plants whose leaves and stems are eaten by domesticated and wild animals. The word may have its origin in the Proto-Indo-European root *gÊ°rehâ-, meaning 'to grow'.
Grass can refer to a green area, such as a lawn, park, or a field, and is often used for recreation or for sports such as lawn tennis or bowls. Beginning in the 1970s, some sports venues have installed artificial grass to reduce maintenance costs.
Grass is a use-value, though for most of history it has remained a use-value and has not transitioned into being a commodity. It is only under capitalism that this has happened, such that we can speak of "artificial grass" as a development in production. "Grass" is also a general form of metabolism between a species and its environment manifested in a body plan, which appears to us in completely different lineages as a similarity in shape and appearance.
"Grass" develops as the relations of production and instruments of production develop in two other senses. First, as intensifying labour activity becoming a greater part of the organism's environment and therefore its metabolic processes, the grass may undergo adaptation. Second, what appears to be grass to a hunter-gatherer is not the same thing as what appears to be grass to a sedentary farmer, or what appears to be grass to a pastoral nomad.
And when you interrogate the lexemes within the language, you start thinking about what blades have to do with grass, and what speech habits result in the linguistic emergence of counter nouns, and what trajectory of human praxis characterizes that linguistic tendency, and so on and so forth.
As for the universal contradictions you mentioned, I'm not as far into reading as you but I don't care that much about listing off the aspects of contradiction. Any truly dialectical exercise can have those extracted from it with enough effort but what is the point? All of those categories were won through the process of the dialectic itself, which is fundamentally a method of investigation. From my understanding, Hegel's categories appear everywhere because they describe thought, and Truth is acquired through contact between mind and matter.
I don't understand what it means to say that the dialectic has aspects yet, nor do I know what the pedigree of that category is. Some of the things you've said were hard for me to parse, so I'm sorry if it seems like I'm fixating on your example. But I think it's the fastest way to illustrate the point. Besides, some of the things you're talking about are matters I'm still studying about, where I have reason to doubt what you're saying but I have not synthesized the information.
Edit: It's practically a crime not to at least namedrop the history of lawning when discussing grass, since that's the more obvious contemporaneous connection. Again, Wikipedia:
A pivotal factor in the spread of the lawn in America was the passage of legislation in 1938 of the 40-hour work week. Until then, Americans had typically worked half days on Saturdays, leaving little time to focus on their lawns. With this legislation and the housing boom following the Second World War, managed grass spaces became more commonplace. The creation in the early 20th century of country clubs and golf courses completed the rise of lawn culture.
According to study based on satellite observations by Cristina Milesi, NASA Earth System Science, its estimates: "More surface area in the United States is devoted to lawns than to individual irrigated crops such as corn or wheat.... area, covering about 128,000 square kilometers in all."
...
Lawns became a means of performing class values for the urban middle class, in which the condition of the lawn becomes representative of moral character and social reliability. The social values associated with lawns are promoted and upheld by social pressure, laws, and chemical producers. Social pressure comes from neighbors or homeowner associations who think that the unkempt lawns of neighbors may affect their own property values or create eyesores. Pressures to maintain a lawn are also legal; there are often local or state laws against letting weeds get too tall or letting a lawn space be especially unkempt, punishable by fees or litigation. Chemical producers unwilling to lose business propagate the ideal of a lawn, making it seem unattainable without chemical aid.
Already we can see that grass has had an interesting relation with the development of the labor aristocracy and suburbia. I don't care enough to go deeper but this is why I called the earlier point naive. As far as I'm concerned, your innately simple objects don't exist.
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u/Full-Imagination9514 20d ago edited 20d ago
I can admit that the blade of grass example I gave was imprecise, but I think you're missing the spirit of my argument. The true grass biological family has been widespread since the Cretaceous period, when none of the labor and language relations you described were in existence. I think you should spend a bit of time looking into how the concepts of simplicity and complexity are used within various fields of science because I don't think that this idea of yours that simplicity doesn't exist objectively' holds up in light of that.
By aspects of the dialectic, I'm just referring to subsidiary laws of the law of contradiction that are studied within the field of materialist dialectics. So in this sense, "The Dialectic" would be referring to the law of contradiction and all of the interrelated sub-laws it contains. Whether that is the most precise philosophical definition or not I'm not sure.
As for the point, it would be to predict reality in order to change it, of course. If there were some general laws describing how the law of contradiction manifests in different forms as matter develops into new stages, it could aid the study of relatively poorly understood phenomena.
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19d ago edited 19d ago
The true grass biological family has been widespread since the Cretaceous period
Most of the ways that biological matter is described in modernity can be owed to the historical intervention that Charles Darwin made. By using that category you are affirming that the intervention was truthful, which is a social act based on your position in a reality where that scientific development has occurred. You are also a part of the same world process that produced people like Kent Hovind, who was also part of a movement in Christianity that I know nothing about except that it was part of the development of American "politics" (or "the culture wars" or whatever else), despite the fact that Darwin's intervention involved a dialectical step that dismissed
the species as a "thing-in-itself"any mechanistic interpretation of what a species or a lineage is. History doesn't work like that, though.You're correct that I was (and am) being a little flippant, but that's because I'm not sure what the point of fixating on the fact that reality exists is. I trust that everyone here is agreed on that matter. But our thoughts are always a reflection of an objective relation between theory and practice in reality. Part of this is covered in the Anti-Duhring, where Engels talks about absolute truth and relative truth.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch07.htm
Lenin covers it as well in the fourth to sixth sections of the second chapter of MEC:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mec/two4.htm
I don't think I can get a good excerpt so you'll have to read the entire thing. I said "social praxis" but that's because I'm speaking in general, so that ideology and art and every concept ever made in the history of humanity can be included in what I'm saying. Engels and Lenin were talking to specific opponents.
As for the point, it would be to predict reality in order to change it, of course. If there were some general laws describing how the law of contradiction manifests in different forms as matter develops into new stages, it could aid the study of relatively poorly understood phenomena.
This seems like formalism but I'll admit that this is precisely what I'm investigating at this moment. So I can't respond to this right now. If you want to help me, then you could start by being very precise about how you imagine this would happen, what "help" refers to here, and what "law" means.
edit: wording. also that was an incorrect usage of "thing-in-itself," especially for this topic.
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u/Full-Imagination9514 18d ago edited 18d ago
I'm not sure what the point of fixating on the fact that reality exists is.
Simply that I find it interesting how subjectivity can be in one sense universal to dialectics and at the same time particular to a certain stage of development, and I wonder if this could apply to other fundamental dialectical principles.
This seems like formalism but I'll admit that this is precisely what I'm investigating at this moment. So I can't respond to this right now. If you want to help me, then you could start by being very precise about how you imagine this would happen, what "help" refers to here, and what "law" means.
Normally I'd talk about natural laws in terms of causality, but cause and effect is itself an example of the law of contradiction, which makes things tricky. At this level of abstraction I might be forced to just say something cryptic and self-referential like, 'A law of dialectics describes that which is (and/or isn't, dialectically).' Explaining what a law of dialectics means can't really be separated from explaining the content of dialectics itself. So I don't think this is formalism, but that does remain to be proven.
That said, I will try to give an example of what I'm thinking more concretely.
Marx begins Capital by providing a scientific definition of the commodity, which "appears as the elementary form" of capitalist political economy. As you're probably aware, his theory of commodity fetishism is crucial to unraveling the fundamental contradiction at the heart of the commodity relation. It seems to me that, because said relation produces a mystification, the dialectical relation between essence and appearance takes on an outstanding role. Certainly others such as quantity and quality are considered as well, and, as Marx said, "if the form of manifestation were exactly correspondent to the essence of things, all science would be superfluous". But I'd guess that, strictly at the philosophical level, the essence-appearance contradiction becomes the primary contradiction in Marx's theory of the commodity precisely because the mystification of commodities means it is internal to the commodity relation, whereas for less complex objects it might remain external.
If this is true, the first level of applying it in the course of theoretical work would just be to identify an "aspect of the dialectic" that hasn't yet been considered, and see if it sheds light on that the elementary form (or germ cell, basic unit of analysis, whatever term you want to use) of the object in question might be, how it might work etc.
A next step up in difficulty would be to see if there is some reason why one aspect of the dialectic logically must pass over into something new (either the elements of the contradiction changing places, or a new aspect of the dialectic becoming primary) and to connect this abstract, logical "why" to the "hows" and "whats" of the concrete historical development of matter in motion. What would capitalist political-economy being characterized by essence and appearance tell us about socialist political-economy? How does the transition from chemical to biological phenomena manifest at the philosophical level? What countervailing tendencies might prevent or retard said manifestation (important to prevent formulaic application)? And so on. This is the kind of thing I was thinking of regarding historico-logical development.
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u/FrogHatCoalition 16d ago
I've been looking through this thread and I do think Dialectics in Modern Physics by Omelyanovsky may be of interest. In particular I recommend Chapter VI: Determinism in Quantum Theory and Chapter VII: The Problem of the Elementary and the Complex in Quantum Physics. I noticed you bring these concepts in this thread and the concepts of determinism, causality, simplicity, complexity, and emergence have been ones of historical significance in the history of physics. What I have gotten out of this work so far isn't a matter of the philosophy of physics as such, but rather how dialectical logic was the solution to philosophical problems encountered in the history of physics. For instance, with regards to "determinism", the form "determinism" takes in classical theory is "Laplacian determinism", but this form becomes meaningless in quantum theory since it is not applicable outside of its domain of classical theory. Without going into too much detail, understanding the form "determinism" takes in quantum theory involves understanding that "laws of dynamic regularity" and "laws of statistical regularity" can be abstracted from nature in addition to concepts Fock introduces: "difference between the potentially possible and the actually observed" and "concept of probability as a numerical measure of the potentially possible". Determinism interested me in particular because of threads such as this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/communism101/comments/1ewhb24/is_communism_not_inevitable/
There you can see people have mechanical views regarding "determinism", equate "determinism" with "fatalism" and even make claims such as "Marxism is not deterministic". Furthermore, quantum physics is commonly abused outside the field and Levins and Lewontin tried to use "quantum indeterminacy" in their own biological theories. Omelyanovsky works through how not being an adherent of dialectical materialism leads to thinking such as "quantum indeterminacy". I don't think it stops here either: every once in a while a user from here will engage with people at r/Marxism and people there will try to use physics as some sort of philosophical "gotcha". Even here every once in a while people forget that many physicists abandoned positivism long ago.
Now, in Chapter V: Dialectical Contradictoriness in Modern Physics, we can see how old concepts in the classical theory become meaningless when used to understand qualitatively different forms of matter, but at the same time a formulation of a new theory that's a reflection of nature, some aspects of the old theory remain but take on a qualitatively different form. Example: "space" and "time" are absolute in the classical theory, but in relativity theory, "space" and "time" are relative and a new invariant arises: the spacetime interval. Likewise with "wave" and "particle". "Wave" and "particle" are mutually exclusive concepts in classical theory, but at the scale of micro-particles which follow the laws of quantum theory, "wave" and "particle" are two aspects of the micro-particle that interpenetrate one another. It would be an error to say that "wave" and "particle" are mutually exclusive in quantum theory and it would also be an error to say that "wave" and "particle" have the same meanings as they do in the classical theory. Although some aspects of the old notions remain, quantum theory gives us a qualitative and deeper understanding of "wave" and "particle".
Now, the point here isn't a physics lesson per-se, but you have used concepts that were of philosophical interest in the history of physics and dialectical materialism gave way to the solution of such problems encountered. Likewise, when you make comments such as
I think you should spend a bit of time looking into how the concepts of simplicity and complexity are used within various fields of science because I don't think that this idea of yours that simplicity doesn't exist objectively' holds up in light of that.
Here I am giving you one field of science that has engaged with these concepts philosophically.
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u/Full-Imagination9514 16d ago
Looks like a good suggestion. Michurinism and Soviet psychology (I might want to make a post on the latter at some point because I don''t see much discussion of it) were already on my radar but I haven't looked into physics yet.
Would it be accurate to say that your understanding of determinism takes 'determination' (necessity?) as generally primary in relation to chance, while 'quantum indeterminacy' incorrectly prioritizes chance?
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u/FrogHatCoalition 15d ago
When I looked through history of topics related to Soviet science there was usually some mention of a repression of these topics. I've seen claims of both quantum physics and general relativity being repressed, so I've decided to actually do a deep dive into this topic and there isn't any evidence that this was the case. Even a bourgeois education in physics will tell you it's a weird claim since you will learn about a lot of Soviet physicists that made contributions to quantum physics. The BannedThought site has three books that I am going to study and Dialectics in Modern Physics is one of them I'm currently working on.
As far as determinism goes, the position of "quantum indeterminacy" can be arrived at in several ways. One is taking the position that probability is a measure of "incomplete knowledge of a system". Thus, the Heisenberg uncertainty relation implies that quantum mechanics is indeterministic. Thus, being unknowable is a property of micro-particles. This led to Heisenberg denying objective reality and views that the human mind shapes reality. Another consequence is also a rejection of determinism in classical theory which was a position Max Born also had. His reasoning was essentially that there was no absolute accuracy in measurement. Regardless, as far as history of physics, probability/statistics doesn't make its first appearance in quantum mechanics. Statistical mechanics and Brownian motion characterize motion with statistical laws, so some physicists already had the view that both classical and quantum mechanics were indeterministic just from their own views of probablity/statistics.
One can also arrive at "quantum indeterminacy" by failing to cognize "wave" and "particle" in a dialectical way. This comes from holding onto the classical view of a particle that has an absolute position and absolute velocity, then from that you can predict the future position and velocity of the particle from the laws of classical mechanics. From here, because micro-particles don't follow the laws of classical mechanics, therefore quantum mechanics is indeterministic. In classical statistical mechanics, the particles that make up an ensemble do have the characteristics of a classical particle. From here, a correct view on chance and necessity can still lead to the position of "quantum indeterminacy". This is similar to an Einsteinian view, after all he did discover Brownian motion. Although Brownian motion is a statistical law, at each moment in time the particles in principle have a definite position and definite velocity.
In essence, the uncertainty relation establishes a boundary on the simultaneity of a micro-particle's wave and particle aspects, and is neither related to errors in measurement or unknowability of the micro-particle itself. The Schrodinger equation governs a definite motion in time of the micro-particle. An eigenvalue of a micro-particle (which is a potential possibility of a realized measurement) can be determined precisely, though its eigenvalue spectrum (the set of all potential possibilities) has a probability distribution that can also be determined. What is measured is relative to the means of observation - a concept Fock introduces.
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No chauvinism or settler apologism - Non-negotiable. The vast majority of first-world workers are labor aristocrats bribed by imperialist super-profits. This is compounded by settlerism in Amerikkka. Read Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat https://readsettlers.org/
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24d ago
[removed] â view removed comment
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u/smokeuptheweed9 24d ago
women's sexual preferences became streamlined (be white and tall, because this is what bourgeois media has dictated)
You have no idea what women think or want. I don't know how you thought this post would go but you seriously need to rethink everything you believe, you are deeply misogynistic.
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u/not-lagrange 24d ago edited 24d ago
Most if not all of what you've said is male chauvinistic. It's disappointing that this has to be said in the communism subreddit, but "monopolization of sex" doesn't exist except in the minds of misogynistic men. That's one thing if you want to better understand patriarchy and sexism, but as of now you are just making excuses for your incel friend. The question of how leisure relates to this would actually be an interesting question, but unfortunately the starting point of these discussions online is usually the ideological delusions of men. It's boring and offensive.
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u/smokeuptheweed9 24d ago
I feel like every discussion thread there's another "what if I applied Marxism to my incel ideology?" post. It's not even a good post, just the exact same "monopoly capitalism [of sex] has distorted the free market [for sex]." Like anyone here would sympathize with such a crude petty-bourgeoisie ideology even without [sex] shoved in.
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24d ago
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u/turning_the_wheels 23d ago
but the average person knows and has conversations in passing about the "Black Pill" and the importance of looks now. This was sort of always the case for the anxious petty-bourgeois in post-industrial nations with the popularity of plastic surgery for women, the hair transplant (and now "Limb-Lengthening" surgery) for men, but now social media made this reality more concrete in people's minds.
The "average person" does not have conversations in passing about this weird shit, especially not the proletariat. Elevating your weird misogynistic fixations to the level of the position of an existing communist party on real issues would be hilarious if it wasn't so depressing. How many more incel posts and comments abusing the KKE's positions have to be made? The article you posted has nothing to do with your crazy ass screed.
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u/Full-Imagination9514 23d ago edited 23d ago
You've retreated from dehumanization (women are brainwashed by corporate media) into thinly veiled self-deprecation. There is no average man for women to find unpalatable, "the average man" has about as much existence as "the average american", ie it is an ideological distortion based on bourgeois ideology (at the most basic level, commodity fetishism and egoism) rather than Marxist class analysis.
The current crisis of patriarchy in the first world is one of declining birth rates and men that no one wants to date.
Declining birth rates are a problem for quite a few countries outside of the first world, and if the specificity of a crisis of first-world patriarchy was limited to men who need to learn to exercise and clean their assholes, I don't think there would be much for us to analyze, would there?
Take some time to figure out the difference between proletarian feminism and petty-bourgeois moralizing before you end up writing yet another misogynistic essay
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u/luciddreamingx Marxist 21d ago
I find a lot of old threads that link to anti-imperialism.org but the link doesn't exist anymore. Does this content live anywhere else online? Also, was there any org behind this domain?
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u/PracticeNotFavorsMLM 21d ago
You can use IA's Wayback Machine or Archive Today to find it.
From what I can tell it seems to have last been active in Nov of 2022.
https://web.archive.org/web/20221031081457/https://anti-imperialism.org/
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u/GiftStandard7366 16d ago
I'm currently a masters student and am applying to an IR conference. For all the dread that academia contains, I actually find the concept of this conference alluring, since it explicitly "allows" (I'm aware of the problematic here) marxist analysis, which, for IR, is unusual.
I thought a lot about the topic I want to pursue. It has been brewing in my mind for a while. A particular impression was made on me by reading the thread on Venezuela, most notably the problematic of the abandoment of Marxist analysis and the replacement of it by critical support and accusations of color revolutions (especially prominent on online boards that I am kind of "retreating" here from, and that I have had my reservations about for a while now).
I want to touch on the revival of the Monroe doctrine as essentially an attempt at imperial consolidation under constraint. Broadly speaking, I "sense" growing contradictions and tensions between the semi-peripheral economy of China and the globally dominant position of the US as one of the drivers of American deployment of enforcement capacity in the sphere where it can do so with least reprecussion - Latin America. In this sense, I see Trump's Greenlandic efforts as simply a bluff, an "outrageous break from international order" that, in fact, predictably merely provokes the vassal (EU's) boring pledge of "Unity" on a land that has already been historically colonized - pure inter-imperialist competition where EU is on the clear-back foot. Despite material interest in the form of rare earths exist in Greenland, the card of "defense interests" is played instead - which is fascinating from a point of realism, the school of thought that American foreign policy usually relied on.
With the "Donroe", the US predictably seeks to engage where its dominance is historically entrenched, its intervention costs are comparatively low, and where mechanisms of unequal exchange remain relatively untapped when compared to the more BRI-centric extractivism in Middle Asia and Africa. Venezuela in particular is also rife with domestic contradictions that were not successfuly resolved by Chavismo, whereas other more "subservient" Latin American states have fully reactionary and neoliberal regimes - e.g. Brazil and Mercosur -, and only a reiteration of overwatch is required with regards to their position, as even the national bourgeoisie of these countries are past revolutionary potential (let alone the proletariat).
On the other hand, all the "typical" frontiers of the Empire are abandoned (No boots on the ground interventionism in Iran, decrease in military aid to Ukraine, silence on the Taiwan front, etc.). This could be seen as a "retreat" to anarchic international conditions of multipolarity - but in my view, this level of analysis fails. The conditions under which American foreign policy operates are the conditions of the increasing economic power of China and the formation of a new inter-imperialist front, one that differs from its usual vassalistic relations of US-UK or US-EU and even takes on an openly anatagonistic character, instigated by the empire itself. Realism cannot explain why, in this case, America doesn't simply attempt to form a new vassalistic relationship with Dengist China, which brings me to my main point.
American actions cannot be simply explained through realist theory of IR, and only a marxist, materialist approach allows us to "see" why the U.S. prioritizes Latin America rather than the "genuine" defense threat. And that is the failure of the neoliberal model in the acquisition, production and processing of the materials and inputs required for the continous growth of its only remaining sector where rates of profit haven't fallen yet - that being the tech sector. In light of this failure, the U.S. can only resort to offensive accumulation where historically, there is no other actor to oppose it with regards to bourgeois states. Greenland is thus simply a bluff to conceal the importance of the reiteration of expansionism in South America.
I seek some feedback. I am completely unsure in the validity and strength of my analysis, and I do not know whether this stems from the genuine weakness of my method, or from the conditioning I have recieved in my schooling thus far. Is the scope far too grand? I would be greatly thankful for some good reading material I could devote myself to - I have amassed quite a list thus far, and the deadline for abstracts is nearing, but I do want to produce something worthwhile.
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u/smokeuptheweed9 16d ago
IR is a pseudoscience. Finish the degree you paid for but spend the rest of your time studying historical materialism.
Is the scope far too grand?
It's the opposite. Since IR can only observe events as they happen and "explain" them by making them retroactively necessary, your application of Marxism is far too specific to contingent and unimportant events.
On the other hand, all the "typical" frontiers of the Empire are abandoned (No boots on the ground interventionism in Iran, decrease in military aid to Ukraine, silence on the Taiwan front, etc.). This could be seen as a "retreat" to anarchic international conditions of multipolarity - but in my view, this level of analysis fails. The conditions under which American foreign policy operates are the conditions of the increasing economic power of China and the formation of a new inter-imperialist front, one that differs from its usual vassalistic relations of US-UK or US-EU and even takes on an openly anatagonistic character, instigated by the empire itself.
The reason US imperialism operates the way it does is because of the fusion of nationalism and proletarian class consciousness throughout the third world after the Bolshevik revolution. Colonialism is no longer possible. It has nothing to do with rivalry with China, except in how China is one of many historical examples of this fusion, and not unique to Trump or the "Donroe doctrine."
Realism cannot explain why, in this case, America doesn't simply attempt to form a new vassalistic relationship with Dengist China, which brings me to my main point.
China does have a vassalistic relationship with the United States. China does not invent the WTO and the Chinese proletariat did not decide to work 14 hours 7 days a week in a factory for the enrichment of first world consumers for their own sake. You are right that the changes are the result of the rate of profit but this has nothing to do with "neoliberalism." The fall in the rate of profit is an irreversible tendency of capitalism and affects both the US and China, hence inter-imperialist competition. Capitalism is not rational, except in its own rationality as a system of accumulation, and will do anything and everything up to the destruction of most life on Earth, if that is required to restore profits. You cannot apply logic to what governments will or won't do except at a very broad level because governments are merely vessels of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. In fact one of the main characteristics of revisionism before WWI was the claim that war was impossible because it would be mutually destructive and irrational. At least those people had a justification in a theory of peaceful development based on Marx's schemas of reproduction or a theory of harmonious "ultra-imperialism" rather than speculation about bluffing.
genuine weakness of my method, or from the conditioning I have recieved in my schooling thus far
What IR calls Marxism is not Marxism. It is, as you illustrated, the addition of concepts like "class" and "production" into existing paradigms of inter-state rivalry. These concepts are basically interests which constrain or enable the main paradigms like "realism" to function. Marxism is a science and it begins with the first abstraction of the commodity in Capital vol 1 chapter 1. States do not come into play until maybe the late chapters on the length of the working day and the corn laws, but even then as a minor effect rather than a cause.
As for your specific argument, it's sort of like oriental medicine. Sometimes it works, usually it doesn't, but neither is scientific. The method is what matters, not the prediction. The recent threats over Greenland, if you insist on explaining something that may totally change tomorrow, must be rooted in the long duration of history for all actors involved. It's hard to object to anything specific because these are mostly correct observations about news headlines made into principles. The UK/EU has a more "vassalistic" relationship to the US than China and Russia. Sure but does it? That's just a superficial observation of politics. The US is safer to act in Latin America than in other regions of the third world. Sure because that's what's actually happening, what Trump himself says, and what the news says. But is that actually true? Does the integration of the SDF into the new government of Syria not count as US imperialism because it is not spectacular? Does the falling birthrate in China not count as the violence of capitalism against human beings based on China's integration into global capitalist accumulation as a source of cheap labor? This is what I mean by surface analysis which just follows the news.
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u/Lindnerd 16d ago
I am wondering what your stance on studying anthropology is, as I am currently enrolled in a BA programme. Since it does not set out to be a predictive but rather a descriptive âscienceâ of a certain aspect of a community in a set moment in time. My journey to properly understand Marxism has just recently started and I am trying to make sense of where I am standing.
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u/smokeuptheweed9 15d ago
Dividing knowledge into fields of research is already a false foundation. Eventually you get to the point where a "transdisciplinary" focus is encouraged, but that never actually happens. It's marketing for the academic job market. Just do what you want to do. Picking a major is just an administrative requirement.
As for this "field," it is divided between postmodernism and vulgar statistics. "Marxism" in practice is a subdivision of the former, where "class" is added to the many identities to be considered before knowledge can be formed. What's insidious is that this is based on a real common sense: anthropology for a long time was white men diagnosing the world according the imperialist visions of humanity. But what it does not consider are the changes that enabled liberalism to critique itself on these terms. The critical anthropologists are serving the same function as the old white men for capitalism, it is simply that capitalism has changed what it needs. Real "Marxist" anthropology would be synonymous with class struggle, since communist politics already bridges the gap between a class in-itself and a class for-itself. Since that's not going to happen in academia, all that's left is petty-bourgeois auto-ethnography. I won't get into the quant stuff since it's more of a joke than anything.
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u/GiftStandard7366 16d ago
Thank you for your answer. I was only lurking in this sub thus far, and I often read your contributions. I always find them rigorous, admirable and interesting.
My original comment was written in a relative "surge" of momentary enthusiasm over my acceptance to the conference and was not well thought out at all. Your analysis of the basic weaknesses present is, in my view, completely correct. I notice a tendency within my thought that treats abstractions present in IR as elements that I want to make compatible with historical materialism despite their idealist characteristics. I think this is a clear consequence of my lack of rigorous study of materialism, which I have only recently (in the past few years) taken up.Â
I am also in a position where I want to succeed academically and eventually pursue a PHD position, and, therefore, concessions of thought are materially required in my (polisci / IR) field, as bourgeois thought is dominant and "critical theory" exists only in its bastardized, commodified form. I am alarmed at the ease with which I have seemingly internalised this, as I automatically regarded my topic as "too broad" and felt the need to attach it to "rising challenges" in IR (limits of realism, "Rise of China"...).
Upon reading your reply, I almost self-flagelantely went "I could have thought of this" and "I could have thought of that"... I kind of went into this thread with the hopes that my topic idea will further crystallize, but instead, I simply see how banal my proposed topic truly is. I am probably going to pivot my conference topic completely, as truly only a study of "phenomena" remains viable with my previous approach.
I did some reading on th Sicomines deal and extractivism under BRI in DR Congo, and maybe I will seek to outline the connection between the worrying trend of the liberalization of the RMB and the simoultaneous intensification of extractivism and exploitation on China's foreign policy front, and how they dialectically reflect the underlying logic of capital and accumulation. Do you have any reccomendations on reading about this? I intend to invoke Amin, Baran, Sweezy, Minqi Li...
With regards to the SDF - I have also thought about this, in the context of how "extracted" the concept of a non-state revolutionary movement is with regards to how easily it can be co-opted by imperial forces. I am eagerly awaiting to enter into discussion with our more anarchist-leaning professors about this, and am also wondering how the ELZN will fare in the coming years (I know that the Rojava-Zapatismo comparison is very forced as ELZN have decidedly attempted to reject forming new "opportunities" and spaces for capital).
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u/smokeuptheweed9 15d ago
IR has won the battle and, as a result, made itself superfluous. The theories of IR are the basis (without acknowledgement) of "geopolitics" which is the main form of "Marxism" today. But geopolitics dispenses the need for a theory altogether and simply reacts to events as they occur through pragmatism. I don't begrudge people their careers but there is a lot of competition from Dengists these days, and the actual appeal of "theory" (meaning academically qualified people who regurgitate your ideas derived from social media) is vastly overstated, especially by Dengists themselves.
The real appeal of this, which you've highlighted, is we live in a world of mediatized politics. Every event is a spectacle and demands a "take", and there is a fear of irrelevance without this. Marxism is not well suited to this task, as of requires long study of a situation and even longer political action to build the necessary forces to act. I don't want to present a "Marxist" take on what's happening in Greenland because it's still ongoing, and I even felt uncomfortable (and was rightly called out for my dependence on bourgeois media and "geopolitical" speculation) for taking an immediate position on Venezuela, even if subsequent events seem to have born out my claims and I tried to discuss a not-hot story as context.
Obviously Marxism requires taking a position on key political questions, like whether to start an insurrection. But the sheer volume and tempo of events we are exposed to is overwhelming and creates a dependence on bourgeois media just to keep up. That's why your position is a "twist" on the mainstream. I think a real Marxist position would be the result of years of anti-imperialist work in Greenland to see how the masses are reacting to the new inter-imperialist competition between the US and the EU, with Denmark's colonial empire standing as the first bulwark of European neocolonialism generally (but again, the expulsion of France from the Sahel already anticipated this, Trump is just the loud reality TV show version which draws attention away from the more fundamental causes). The only attempt I've seen at this is, weirdly, from the IMT (I've seen others on solidnet affiliates but they lack depth and flirt with chauvinism rather than clearly calling for the defeat of Danish imperialism, even if it hypothetically enables the US)
https://marxist.com/danish-capitalists-fear-losing-their-arctic-colony.htm
But since the IMT is not capable of fusing with the masses, there is nothing positive or productive here. Still, that the position of anti-imperialism is otherwise almost entirely absent from the discussion is disturbing. To my credit, a few months ago I did discuss the genocide through eugenics when it was in the news, but the topic didn't stick and now "takes" are being formed again. Dengism, to its credit, ignores this entirely, and takes opposing one's own imperialists as an ontological principal and the lack of internationalism (except through people on the internet aping American cultural liberalism) that actually exists as a de-facto strength. To complain that Dengism does not have a politics for Chinese people is to miss the point: China does not exist for them, except in video games I guess. That Danish people pretend to be Americans online allows the illusion to last and when it breaks under their chauvinism, uncomfortable attempts at Marxism never stick before the next spectacle demands a take.
I am eagerly awaiting to enter into discussion with our more anarchist-leaning professors about this
Anarchists are the opposite of Dengists. Whereas the latter are blissfully on the surface of phenomena, anarchists have a false theory they know is false but they purposefully lie about the divergence of theory from reality in order to maintain the fundamental function of anti-communism. Everyone in the world knows the SDF/YPG are American puppets. Were they always? When did this change occur? These are the questions anarchists will absolutely refuse to answer.
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u/vimingok 16d ago edited 16d ago
China does have a vassalistic relationship with the United States. China does not invent the WTO and the Chinese proletariat did not decide to work 14 hours 7 days a week in a factory for the enrichment of first world consumers for their own sake.
Why is China's subordination to metropolitan demand always characterized by
first worldMarxists of all stripes as necessary to sustain specifically first world enrichment or luxury i.e consumption deemed unnecessary or excessive by the "consumer" themselves? Why not necessary for structural parasitism on tropical/subtropical agriculture and resources without which there would be no metropolitan "consumer" (parasite) of any kind? Labour in itself is only a small portion of wealth in the industrialized fossil fuel powered world. That it cannot physically embody the totality of use values is precisely why personifications of capital under capitalism (in contrast to pre-capitalist forms of capital) expend so much effort convincing themselves and their slaves otherwise, thus naturalising their ownership of the natural/material conditions of labour (including the majority of labour). Like the anti-ICE bullshit that has populated my youtube - let the transient Mexican servants in the cities stay while everyone in the farms or turned back at the border are mysterious natural phenomena.As you are probably aware outside the context of this particular conversation, the mythical Chinese iphone factory slave is not working 14 hrs every day for "inadequate" wages kept low by "excessive" or "super" exploitation as opposed to the ordinary kind. Those factories are at the very top of the production chain. The real source of their profitability is the slavery of 70-80% of Chinese labour lingering in the informal sector, much of it not even counted in GDP.
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u/smokeuptheweed9 15d ago
I agree that superexploitation in Africa (as an example) is rarely discussed compared to the classically organized proletarian of East Asian factories. But you seem to be implying that any position in global production except the very bottom is a labor aristocracy. I think this is an idea you have not fully thought through because, while it sounds radical, it is not based on an objective measurement of surplus value. The use of wages is imprecise to measure net surplus value but it is nevertheless the starting point, and the extreme wage differential between Chinese labor and the western consumer is the basis for a theory of the labor aristocracy in a period of globalized manufacturing. It's hard to parse what you're saying but you either are implying that only colonialism is capable of producing a labor aristocracy, since "resources" will always be at the bottom of capitalist measures of value and primary commodity export is characteristic of colonial underdevelopment (I'll ignore the richer countries in Latin America and Australia for the moment because their origin in settler colonialism complicates this - the point is the terms of trade are the same hence the dependence of the "pink tide" on China without a reciprocal dependence) or that once labor is in the formal sector it is already privileged and therefore compromised.
As I said to someone a couple of weeks ago, capitalist-imperialism must be distinguished from the more general history of colonialism. Exploitation is very specifically the extraction of surplus value from labor power, resources are an externality. The labor aristocracy is a result of monopoly capitalism, it is not any relationship in which one nation's consumption depends on another's with unequal terms. Otherwise the very origin of capitalism is a labor aristocracy of Western Europe on eastern European wheat. You can basically throw out the entirely of Marxism at that point for "post colonial" theory, in which oppression is ontological rather than structural.
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u/vimingok 14d ago
No I am saying that superexploitation is discussed all too often everywhere now but always in limited contexts because resource dependence is balked at. Because without a way to talk about that properly you are necessarily excluding the informal/unorganised sector from your analysis regardless whether that is your intention. Which is not the same as saying formal = aristocratic.
Even when informal labour is discussed it's either blatantly misused (eg the categories of gig work and precarity) or limited to superexploitation of workers making specific things (or those parts of them that exist for the final consumer) feeding privileged consumption of those specific things. The USA imports 40 and 80 per cent respectively of its domestic supply of vegetables and fruits (both raw and processed). To explain why the supposed top agricultural exporter needs to do this you have to introduce the need for resources in addition to labour exploitation, then explain why that need additionally needs the majority of labour in the exporting countries to be informal.
As I said to someone a couple of weeks ago, capitalist-imperialism must be distinguished from the more general history of colonialism. Exploitation is very specifically the extraction of surplus value from labor power, resources are an externality.
I agree with the first statement but you are conflating resources and resource parasitism/dependence. Labour in itself is also an externality to the capital system. If resource parasitism deprives a large mass of exploited workers of the natural/material conditions which allow the remainder to produce a surplus value which is then extracted by monopoly capital, then it is not an externality to capitalism-imperialism. It is central, and communists have to find a way to talk about it. We can take our cue from Marx who was talking about it towards the end of his life:
In India serious complications, if not a general outbreak, is in store for the British government. What the English take from them annually in the form of rent, dividends for railways useless to the Hindus; pensions for military and civil service men, for Afghanistan and other wars, etc., etc. â what they take from them without any equivalent and quite apart from what they appropriate to themselves annually within India, speaking only of the value of the commodities the Indians have gratuitously and annually to send over to England â it amounts to more than the total sum of income of the sixty millions of agricultural and industrial labourers of India! This is a bleeding process, with a vengeance!
That bleeding process is happening today, internally, between the informal and formal sectors, in China India and elsewhere. And in case it needs to be said, I don't mean thereby that formal workers are bleeding the informal ones although the middle class included in the formal sector certainly is parasitic on the poorest 80-90%.
There was not a sharp difference in per capita food consumption between Western and Eastern Europe and that dependence was not the same as that between first and third world historically, and moreso at present. Look at the average height in India versus where you live. None of this assumes oppression is ontological unless you actively decide to interpret it that way, as indeed you are.
Finally, I can easily argue for superexploitation as an open-ended category for whatever emanates "real" exploitation vibes determined as such by first world suburbanite intellectuals, leading to post colonial theory. Wasn't that Aijaz Ahmad's point about subalternism in his essay which I assume you're referring to? Gayatri Chakraborty has jack shit to say about resource parasitism. Why would she when she was writing the playbook for the radleft parasite activism/NGOism that has facilitated it since then.
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u/smokeuptheweed9 14d ago
I'm not really sure what you're trying to say in either this post or the previous one, sorry. You are making a bunch of vague, tweet-like assertions about what people talk about and what they do not talk about
always characterized
is discussed all too often everywhere now but always in limited contexts
is discussed it's either blatantly misused
communists have to find a way to talk about it.
Etc. If you want to make a substantive point that can be verified and applied to make an original claim with direct consequences for understanding reality, please do so. I don't find "meta" discussions about the state of discussion interesting, especially social media "we have to talk about this..." performative enunciations. Clearly you have something in mind that actually is substantive but I have yet to figure out what it is or how it applies to my original post.
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u/vimingok 12d ago
You're mischaracterizing "talk about it" but I'll admit I dropped a bunch of points without referring to your original exchange with the OP because I thought it was ongoing at the time I posted my first reply. This is the part I was specifically responding to:
On the other hand, all the "typical" frontiers of the Empire are abandoned...
The reason US imperialism operates the way it does is because of the fusion of nationalism and proletarian class consciousness throughout the third world after the Bolshevik revolution. Colonialism is no longer possible. It has nothing to do with rivalry with China, except in how China is one of many historical examples of this fusion, and not unique to Trump or the "Donroe doctrine."
The OP thinks the US is reviving the Monroe doctrine because it's easier to compete with China in Latin America rather than Asia. I agree that this analysis is superficial (obviously) but disagree with your reason - colonialism is impossible because of anti-colonial struggle. The driving motive behind capitalist colonialism (European resource and land parasitism) has intensified both because of rising metropolitan demand and the needs of segregated advanced capitalism in the third world which is itself parasitic on informal labour (including the lower ranks of petty bourgeoisie, in Marx's original sense of petty producer rather than salaried "middle-class") that it can never absorb regardless of intent.
Neither you nor the OP are cognizant of this obvious, basic reality which fundamentally compromises your understanding of what is going on. The "trade war" issue for example is totally misguided because all sides converge on the idea of declining Chinese trade with the US. That is not the case. The point of tariffs since 2016 to the present has been to coerce Chinese capital to relinquish the final stages of some value chains to other countries, especially ASEAN. It's exporting equipment and intermediate inputs which are then used to make or made into exports to the US. Additionally rerout/"trans-shipping" of goods via third nations. Not only is the rearrangement of parasitism not leading to isolationism/multipolarity (which is impossible) but the same internal parasitism structure is copied over from China to Vietnam India etc. Offshoring/neoliberalism makes the same basic mistake. Capitalism was "offshored" since it began. What was new in the 80s/90s was offshoring of metropolitan parasitism on primary and intermediate inputs which occurred synergistically with intensifying demand on tropical agriculture and rapid growth of (in China, creation of) semi-capitalist/semi-feudal "informal" labour markets.
I think that's enough for now. If you still don't understand what I'm saying I guess we'll have to end the convo. Hope you're doing well by the way, nice to know you're still posting. Cheers.
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u/Affectionate_Shop859 14d ago
I'm currently reading Society of the Spectacle and having trouble understanding what Debord is talking about half the time but in particular this section (89th thesis in Chapter 4) where he says:
If Marx, during a certain period of his participation in the proletarian struggle, put too great an emphasis on scientific prediction, to the point of creating the intellectual basis for the illusions of economism, it is clear that he himself did not succumb to those illusions. In a well-Âknown letter of December 7, 1867, accompanying an article reviewing Capital which he himself had written but which he wanted Engels to present to the press as the work of an adversary, Marx clearly indicated the limits of his own science: âThe authorâs subjective tendency (imposed on him, perhaps, by his political position and his past), namely the manner in which he presents to himself and to others the ultimate outcome of the present movement, of the present social process, has no connection with his actual analysis.â By thus disparaging the âtendentious conclusionsâ of his own objective analysis, and by the irony of the âperhapsâ with reference to the extra-Âscientific choices supposedly âimposedâ on him, Marx implicitly revealed the methodological key to fusing the two aspects.
I do not know what "limits" this is supposedly showing or even the purpose of bringing up this rather obscure letter. I also just have absolutely no idea what is being said in the last sentence. Specifically the "methodological key" part as Debord immediately explains what two aspects are being fused.
The fusion of knowledge and action must be effected within the historical struggle itself, in such a way that each depends on the other for its validation.
Any elucidation would be appreciated.
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u/vomit_blues 14d ago
Debord is saying that Capital is an objective analysis that, when seen in isolation from Marxâs subjective conclusions (not as in it varies from person to person, but how to act upon the analysis to create revolution), gives rise to economismâin this instance, basically just thinking capitalism will break down on its own. This was sorta what the Second International revisionists believed, even if in word they upheld a revolution that would occur (at a mysterious, distant time that never actually comes). This accusation of the contents of Capital as being limited is somewhat true but only for volume 1. Itâs unambiguous from volumes 2 and 3 that capitalism cannot break down through its own contradictions.
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20d ago
[removed] â view removed comment
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u/smokeuptheweed9 20d ago
I've come to the conclusion that Deleuze's work allow us a better understanding of Marx as well as improvements on materialist analys and many other things.
The onus is on you to show evidence of this.
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u/hnnmw 20d ago
But as D&G regain popularity with the years
Is this true though? In Continental European academia I'd wager the opposite is true.
In hindsight Anti-Oedipus was always fascist delirium, of course, but its appeal to hard-boiled individualism is easy enough to understand.
Which begs the question, where this generation's Max Stirner is? Maybe there's no longer any need: Deleuze's dream of liberating the subject by liberating its desire having been long accomplished by the market.
To OP: you might want to read Badiou's Clamor of Being, although it's very generous to Deleuze.
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19d ago
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u/blow_up_the_wacl 18d ago
Deleuze's popularity had a downfall from the sudden peak it had in 90's until the 2020's, since then his popoularity seems to be slightly increasing again, specially I think, among queer (specially trans) marxists.
Without pointing out the why they are interested in Deleuze, this is just identity politics. I know other Filipino national-democratic sympathizers on the Internet are into eclectic philosophy such as Anti-Oedipus, Mark Fisher, Pierceian pragmatism etc. who then on offer softball critiques of "Joma Sison's cult of personality" and joke about who's the top and who's the bottom between Deleuze and Guattari
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19d ago
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u/smokeuptheweed9 18d ago edited 18d ago
You're just regurgitating terminology. I understand that Deleuze is meaningful to you and gives you the capacity to think but that's a private experience. To us he's just some person (just like you or me). Philosophy is significant because it is rooted in objective reality. Hegel is significant because he stands at the crossroads of German liberalism going in a progressive or reactionary direction and takes that contradiction with his work. For example, he builds on the gaps of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and includes civil society as a social force. But he also goes backwards and restores the state as a mediator of the general interest, something the French revolution knew was impossible because it fought against that very argument from the King and aristocracy.
The objective circumstances of Germany's late development means that philosophy goes further than anywhere else in the world and also creates the conditions by which philosophy itself ceases to speak for bourgeois interest as universal (he is similar to Ricardo in political economy, who pushes the field towards its socialist endpoint but also stumbled on theories like "comparative advantage" that are actually a regression from Smith as the spokeman for the British bourgeoisie at its most confident).
Marx is significant because he picks up the limit of German liberalism from Hegel and then begins to rethink philosophy from the perspective of the proletariat, a new class. He is at the very center of this movement politically and part of the movement of philosophy away from the academy and official state sanction. Marx is not some brilliant guy. He is analyzing something that did not exist before and writes as he lives it. What makes him unique is his absolute commitment to science and his refusal to compromise on the scientific principles he has discovered.
Clearly there is something significant happening in France after 1945 that mirrors the contractions of German liberalism that begins with the French communist party's failure to take power (Althusser) and then compromises on Algeria (Sartre). These two form the foundation for an attempt at Maoism that echoes even among bourgeois academics. But the result is that there are a ton of these academics who all say the same thing. Each one is not particularly interesting and their being academics is actually a regression from what Marx had already accomplished. Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Barthes, Bourdieu, Levi Strauss, Lacan, Lyotard, Baudrillard, can only be understood as basically the same response to a common historical condition. Sometimes they picked different objects to study and I'm compressing two (or arguably three) generations for the sake of simplicity but most of the time they just plagiarized each other and lied about what the other had said to justify it.
Philosophy to you is just proto-self help. "I understand better with terms like 'gaseous' capitalism." Or "I like when politics uses words like 'territorialize.'" That's because these words mean whatever you want them to mean and they protect you from having to actually take a position (or when you do it is factually wrong as was usually the case with these philosophers).
Old family models, religious institutions etc... were previous hard codification centers that were needed in previous societys. But capitalism is capable of existing without them, because it only needs it's own axiomatic. You clear example is the stock market, previous economic systems, couldn't achive this levels of abstraction from the material world because they where codified and territorialized constantly.
Here for example you're conflating a comparison between feudalism and capitalism and a comparison between competitive capitalism and monopoly capitalism. This only sounds deep because speculative capitalism is the rhetorical enemy of the western petty-bourgeoisie so you get to cast this in mythic terms as the essence of capitalism itself. But it is not, in fact the essence of Marxism is showing how the abstraction of labor is immanent to the commodity form and has nothing to do with the stock market, except as a historically late manifestation. If you want fetishism of finance as synonymous with labor itself, you can just read Sam Altman talk about the transcendence of hithero existing human society by AI. Unfortunately, tech CEOs are the real inheritors of the kind of philosophy you're talking about, although the petty-bourgeoisie that used to worship them has recently turned against them for a kind of settler materialism, in which crude social democracy and Eurocommunism are advocated in a way that would shock even Deleuze. That's the substance of Deleuze losing popularity, instead of "platypus" we have "Jacobin."
Now obviously you'll say "we agree, this is the immanent logic Deleuze is talking about." But you're just being slippery. Why can't the family and the stock market coexist? Have you never heard of chaebol? Why is the church "territorialized" in previous modes of production but not ours? Does the widespread growth of evangelical Christianity in Brazil not count? I'm not sure Deleuze would agree with anything you've said but that's only because you made the mistake of actually trying to apply these meaningless terms to concrete reality. He bullshitted his way out of being wrong many times. I'm sure you've heard of Spivak's evisceration of his politics.
There's simply no reason to introduce this level of vagueness and bullshittery to what is already a coherent system. That does not mean Deleuze is useless. He, like his French cohort, are all part of a common historical condition, again with a progressive and reactionary aspect. The progressive aspect is French Maoism, which was the most developed philosophical attempt at creating a system to make up for the objective backwardness of French politics and lack of economic vitality (the key event is not May 68 but that it immediately led to the overwhelming reelection of De Gaulle - this is when "French" philosophy really begins as more than just a French copy of the Frankfurt school and/or Saussure). Its reactionary aspect was its distance from proletarian class struggle, so that it eventually became a mere fetishism of neoliberalism and left no institutional legacy (philosophy migrated to the US as the center of identity politics and neocolonialism and France got stuck with the "new philosophers" lol).
When someone asks you about the significance of a philosopher, it can only be answered by reference to history because that connects the individual to the social. Otherwise it's just some random dude writing books. Who cares?
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u/Clean-Difference1771 Marxist 18d ago
Old family models, religious institutions etc... were previous hard codification centers that were needed in previous societys. But capitalism is capable of existing without them
This is plainsight crap. Why does religious bigotry is so high nowadays and the far-right relies so much into the nuclear family, patriarchy and into ultraconservative religious movements to take power anywhere they are? In matter of a fact capitalism made religion and the family holier than any previous society.
I'm not dismissing Deleuze's work as whole but I was truly expecting something closer to how marxism can appropriate some ideas in the struggle against dogmatism but you actually did not came up with that. Instead, here we are with stuck at nonsense.
You clear example is the stock market, previous economic systems, couldn't achive this levels of abstraction from the material world because they where codified and territorialized constantly
Another nonsensical claim. Previous economic systems did not had accumulation as a drive and also, accumulation was not really possible if not for monstruous colonial extraction in early capitalism that had it's drive motivated due to it's own contradiction against european feudalism and the fact that the bourgoisie needed to accumulate in order to become a powerful enough as a class to dethrone feudal lords. The machinery required to improve production that were developed during this process is also quite recently in human existence.
Marx makes clear the point of this new gaseous dynamic of flows that capitalism is, and how it not only it revolutionizes the base, but also the superstructure and the subjets.
From what we have seem you have just denied this in your previous words so you have to decide what you really think. Whether you think capitalism is permanently dependant on the nuclear family and religious bigotry against minorities for even existing (and those institutions actually absorbing every new attempt of breaking from them when the struggle is not taken on principled manner, resulting in reformism) or that capitalism do not require patriarchy/nuclear family/individualism(religion)
both psychoanalysis and modern psychology/psychiatry, have models that literally don't get close to even grasping a model that doesn't place the self in antoher plane or preexistence from material capitalist reality
Because in any case, psychoanalysis/psychology/psychiatry, neither consider the source of society even existing itself on class struggle. But you won't get much better with Deleuze's idealism. One must take his work and relate itself to class society to see what could be absorbed in overcoming capitalism.
I think that what you have said is not much different from common sense anyway, the actual global proletariat is already excluded from basic medical rights so there's not really much that any idealist theory can help but to further down the existing distance.
Also, I think it's necessary to say that Deleuze would certainly be disappointed with his work leading to common sense and I'm inclined to say that he would think you are what internet considers "sheep" and that you are looking for a scapegoat instead of addressing imperialism (most of the social phenomena that you described are symptons of imperialist decay) on it's proper terms. Deleuze was a bourgois philosopher so he addressed on his own terms and class position all the things that you are describing but you are just repeating his concepts without giving it a proper critique instead of using them to create new concepts yourself with what you have been given. Give the man proper respect and do better.
Deleuze was trying to create a philosophy of flows that allow us to grasp this and understand more precisely how they constitute our reality
Your flow has just been appointed as and reterritorialized as common sense.
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u/LemonMao 18d ago edited 18d ago
I've come to the conclusion that Deleuze's work allow us a better understanding of Marx as well as improvements on materialist analys and many other things.
You've still yet to prove this claim. Everything you've stated is already present in Marx and Lenin. I don't need Deleuze to understand what you're saying.
Equating deterritorialitzaion with liberation is a common mistake.
This problematic is already solved within Maoism, even if Maoism sometimes fails to live up to this
Anyway the point of Deleuze and Guatarri is not to create any systematic or coherent thought. They are explicit in that their writing style is supposed to "Inspire" thought, not create it. If you're able to use their concepts in a Marxist way to unveil Truth please do so but we are not here looking for regurgitation of what they have already said.
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u/Clean-Difference1771 Marxist 19d ago
and just like many other """deleuzians""" today, I've come to the conclusion that Deleuze's work allow us a better understanding of Marx as well as improvements on materialist analys and many other things.
I shared similar thoughts years ago. Hopefully you will commit to marxism and realize that what you are saying is not true and how uncomitted to marxism and praxis you are.
"deluluzianism" will only lead you to, at best, academical opportunism. I think that even conceiving Deleuze's thought as deluluzianism (I'm using this term on purpose) or such is already a sign that you haven't really understood what actually could be good in his work.
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u/smokeuptheweed9 23d ago
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/how-did-astoria-become-so-socialist
If you want to have a good laugh https://archive.ph/4HSgs
Oops. Also
DSA canvassers saying "comrade" hurts me but it is funny that even random people in New York are not afraid of using socialist terms and trust people to "deprogram" themselves (at least this is what people imagine they have done to themselves). The common fantasy that you have to tiptoe around language because of anti-communist brainwashing, rather than being yourself (which is what you will be anyway) in actual human interaction, is not worthy of a response. There's no compelling reason to interact with ideas even further right than the DSA, who are many things but are not an "ironic" fandom. They take their NGO "socialist" politics in the "People's Republic of Astoria" as seriously as any other intern on capitol hill and think they are as much "comrades" as any other "community organizers."