My prayers go out to Charles Manson and his family in this time of pain.

— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) November 16, 2017

Caesura109 posted:

uh, does anyone know what's wrong with this Red Kahina person? They seem to be legitimately Assadist and also have a podcast that is unintelligible.

theyre on twitter which means that you should probably ignore them

Today my comrades in Socialists of Dayton successfully got the Nazi featured in the New York Times fired from his place of employment.

The owners at 571 Grill and Draft House deserve endless praise for their swift action in terminating this guy.

— Corey Andon (@coreyandon) November 27, 2017

Constantignoble posted:

Thread: 2 months ago, a senior Hizbullah commander told me "current rules of engagement are no longer acceptable in Syria. Things cannot return to what they were before our victory." I mistook it for bravado. Days later Syrian anti-aircraft missiles hit an Israeli recon aircraft

— Amal Saad (@amalsaad_lb) December 2, 2017

Now amal saad about this

Caesura109 posted:

uh, does anyone know what's wrong with this Red Kahina person? They seem to be legitimately Assadist and also have a podcast that is unintelligible.

Assadist meaning what?

Caesura109 posted:

Resisting imperialist incursions to maintain your state doesn't make one "anti-imperialist"

maybe i'm missing some nuance but it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me to exclude what you've explicitly described as "resisting imperialist incursions" from the category of "genuine" anti-imperialist praxis

Caesura109 posted:

Anti-imperialism is explicitly anti-capitalist. The war in Syria is not a revolutionary war, it is not led by the proletariat, it's a right-wing nationalist resistance led by the Syrian bourgeoisie against regional right-wing bourgeoisie.

It looks to me like you're mixing paradigms, though. The Syrian national resistance is anti-imperialist in materialist (i.e., objective) terms, irrespective of ideological espousal. To prioritize the latter component, as you seem to be doing, is to permit idealist categories into your analysis.

For the sake of the discussion I'll take for granted your claims about the class character of Syria's government. In truth I haven't seen very much in the way of recent analysis substantiating it (this from 1991 paints a more complex picture), but let's just assume a typical bourgeois state, what with production primarily structured on the basis of exchange under a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, etc. Even then, Lenin's arguments for national self-determination were quite emphatically in favor of supporting national bourgeoisie against imperial bourgeoisie ("Insofar as the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation fights the oppressor, we are always, in every case, and more strongly than anyone else, in favour, for we are the staunchest and the most consistent enemies of oppression," etc).

Moreover, by the same token that we can call this objectively anti-imperialist, we can likewise call it objectively anti-capitalist. This may seem counterintuitive, but bear with me.

When people think of "anti-capitalist" praxis, it tends to evoke imagery of plant strikes and other forms of organized action perhaps culminating in a national political revolution. But there's no reason to halt our field of view there; the entire capitalist world is a totality unto itself, ever more integrated over time. The greatest and most important contradictions in play today tend not to be those within but between nations. For example, the rise of the labor aristocracy in core nations is only a part of the broader contradiction of imperialism, and yet by itself it successfully mutes the contradiction between proletariat and bourgeoisie within the core enough to forestall resolution, and obliterates solidarity between workers of oppressor and oppressed nations (at least at the mass level). Under such conditions, where "lower" levels of class struggle are overshadowed by "higher" ones, striking a blow at imperialism (as high an expression of capitalism as it is) even from a notionally non-revolutionary position nevertheless serves the aims of the global periphery and, in the last instance, the working class.

In particular, I found Mao's "On New Democracy" helpful in framing some of these matters:

In this era, any revolution in a colony or semi-colony that is directed against imperialism, i.e., against the international bourgeoisie or international capitalism, no longer comes within the old category of the bourgeois-democratic world revolution, but within the new category. It is no longer part of the old bourgeois, or capitalist, world revolution, but is part of the new world revolution, the proletarian-socialist world revolution. Such revolutionary colonies and semi-colonies can no longer be regarded as allies of the counter revolutionary front of world capitalism; they have become allies of the revolutionary front of world socialism.

Although such a revolution in a colonial and semi-colonial country is still fundamentally bourgeois-democratic in its social character during its first stage or first step, and although its objective mission is to clear the path for the development of capitalism, it is no longer a revolution of the old type led by the bourgeoisie with the aim of establishing a capitalist society and a state under bourgeois dictatorship. It belongs to the new type of revolution led by the proletariat with the aim, in the first stage, of establishing a new-democratic society and a state under the joint dictatorship of all the revolutionary classes. Thus this revolution actually serves the purpose of clearing a still wider path for the development of socialism. In the course of its progress, there may be a number of further sub-stages, because of changes on the enemy's side and within the ranks of our allies, but the fundamental character of the revolution remains unchanged.

Such a revolution attacks imperialism at its very roots, and is therefore not tolerated but opposed by imperialism. However, it is favoured by socialism and supported by the land of socialism and the socialist international proletariat.

Therefore, such a revolution inevitably becomes part of the proletarian-socialist world revolution.

...

Thus the numerous types of state system in the world can be reduced to three basic kinds according to the class character of their political power: (1) republics under bourgeois dictatorship; (2) republics under the dictatorship of the proletariat; and (3) republics under the joint dictatorship of several revolutionary classes.

The first kind comprises the old democratic states. Today, after the outbreak of the second imperialist war, there is hardly a trace of democracy in many of the capitalist countries, which have come or are coming under the bloody militarist dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Certain countries under the joint dictatorship of the landlords and the bourgeoisie can be grouped with this kind.

The second kind exists in the Soviet Union, and the conditions for its birth are ripening in capitalist countries. In the future, it will be the dominant form throughout the world for a certain period.

The third kind is the transitional form of state to be adopted in the revolutions of the colonial and semi-colonial countries. Each of these revolutions will necessarily have specific characteristics of its own, but these will be minor variations on a general theme. So long as they are revolutions in colonial or semi-colonial countries, their state and governmental structure will of necessity be basically the same, i.e., a new-democratic state under the joint dictatorship of several anti-imperialist classes.

This last category seems to describe Syria fairly precisely.

Stephen Gowans seems to be thinking along the same lines:

Socialism can be defined in many ways, but if it is defined as public-ownership of the commanding heights of the economy accompanied by economic planning, then Syria under its 1973 and 2012 constitutions clearly meets the definition of socialism. However, the Syrian Arab Republic had never been a working-class socialist state, of the category Marxists would recognize. It was, instead, an Arab socialist state inspired by the goal of achieving Arab political independence and overcoming the legacy of the Arab nation’s underdevelopment. The framers of the constitution saw socialism as a means to achieve national liberation and economic development. “The march toward the establishment of a socialist order,” the 1973 constitution’s framers wrote, is a “fundamental necessity for mobilizing the potentialities of the Arab masses in their battle with Zionism and imperialism.” Marxist socialism concerned itself with the struggle between an exploiting owning class and exploited working class, while Arab socialism addressed the struggle between exploiting and exploited nations. While these two different socialisms operated at different levels of exploitation, the distinctions were of no moment for Westerns banks, corporations and major investors as they cast their gaze across the globe in pursuit of profit. Socialism was against the profit-making interests of US industrial and financial capital, whether it was aimed at ending the exploitation of the working class or overcoming the imperialist oppression of national groups.

Ba’ath socialism had long irritated Washington. The Ba’athist state had exercised considerable influence over the Syrian economy, through ownership of enterprises, subsidies to privately-owned domestic firms, limits on foreign investment, and restrictions on imports. The Ba’athists regarded these measures as necessary economic tools of a post-colonial state trying to wrest its economic life from the grips of former colonial powers and to chart a course of development free from the domination of foreign interests.

On that same note, Amilcar Cabral had some relevant thoughts as well, placing the development of productive forces at the center of his analysis:

Our refusal, based as it is on concrete knowledge of the socio-economic reality of our countries and on the analysis of the process of development of the phenomenon ‘class’, as we have seen earlier, leads us to conclude that if class struggle is the motive force of history, it is so only in a specific historical period. This means that before the class struggle — and necessarily after it, since in this world there is no before without an after — one or several factors was and will be the motive force of history. It is not difficult to see that this factor in the history of each human group is the mode of production — the level of productive forces and the pattern of ownership — characteristic of that group. Furthermore, as we have seen, classes themselves, class struggle and their subsequent definition, are the result of the development of the productive forces in conjunction with the pattern of ownership of the means of production. It therefore seems correct to conclude that the level of productive forces, the essential determining element in the content and form of class struggle, is the true and permanent motive force of history.

...

(I)n colonialism and in neo-colonialism the essential characteristic of imperialist domination remains the same: the negation of the historical process of the dominated people by means of violent usurpation of the freedom of development of the national productive forces. This observation, which identifies the essence of the two apparent forms of imperialist domination, seems to us to be of major importance for the thought and action of liberation movements, both in the course of struggle and after the winning of independence.

On the basis of this, we can state that national liberation is the phenomenon in which a given socio-economic whole rejects the negation of its historical process. In other words, the national liberation of a people is the regaining of the historical personality of that people, its return to history through the destruction of the imperialist domination to which it was subjected.

We have seen that violent usurpation of the freedom of the process of development of the productive forces of the dominated socio-economic whole constitutes the principal and permanent characteristic of imperialist domination, whatever its form. We have also seen that this freedom alone can guarantee the normal development of the historical process of a people. We can therefore conclude that national liberation exists only when the national productive forces have been completely freed from every kind of foreign domination.

It is often said that national liberation is based on the right of every people to freely control its own destiny and that the objective of this liberation is national independence. Although we do not disagree with this vague and subjective way of expressing a complex reality, we prefer to be objective, since for us the basis of national liberation, whatever the formulas adopted on the level of international law, is the inalienable right of every people to have its own history, and the objective of national liberation is to regain this right usurped by imperialism, that is to say, to free the process of development of the national productive forces.

All of this is to say, the changing world context has changed the conditions of the problem. The global working class is not evenly distributed throughout the nations of the world, and the forces and relations of production do not illustrate any particular international parity. Imperialism should be the central tentpole of analysis, and opposition to it -- through the right of nations to self-determination -- should be viewed as direct attacks on global capital and, it follows, the perpetuation of its dictatorship.

That is to say, it's anti-capitalist in a systemic way, again irrespective of its subjective conditions.

Edited by Constantignoble (Jan. 19, 2018 16:36:18)