The Russian October Revolution dealt a devastating blow to Marxi-
*closing pdf*
One of the ways the return of nationalism is expressed is in growing inter-state rivalry. “Rivals” are not “competitors,” in the sense that they do not necessarily accept the rules of the market when pursuing their interests; they employ any means that appear useful. During the past decade, we have seen significant arms buildups around the world. The USA’s military spending is higher than that of the seven following countries combined, although Russia and China have also made significant investments in their armed forces. A more nationalist capitalism means an imperialism that is strongly based on territorial dominance, akin to the situation before World War I. This is where the USA’s interest in buying Greenland comes from; climate change means that the shipping routes North and South of Greenland will be of great strategic importance. Another example of this trend is Trump’s making “outer space” itself into a new potential battlefield.
As mentioned previously, tensions between NATO, Russia, and China are growing. In comparison, Europe appears militarily weak. The EU was formed under US hegemony, primarily as an economic and political union. It never established an independent military force of any significance; it is dependent on NATO and, therefore, US command. This has caused much concern in recent years, especially in France. There has been an authoritarian turn in many states, legitimized by the “terrorist threat” and “foreign enemies.” The size of the intelligence services and levels of surveillance have increased enormously.
If the national aspect becomes particularly strong, the world’s principal contradiction could shift from “neoliberalism vs. nationalism” to one between the most powerful rival blocs or countries, for example “USA vs. China.” Even if such a rivalry remained a “cold war,” or if armed confrontations remained geographically limited, it would have enormous consequences if it became the world’s principal contradiction. It would, for example, make a solution to the climate crisis near impossible. It would also entail the danger of nuclear weapons being deployed. In such a situation, a global peace movement would be mandatory to avoid military escalations with catastrophic outcomes.
This transition into a multipolar world seems to be bringing interstate rivalry into the front and center of the US ruling class obsession. The labor aristocracy of the US is whipped concurrently into numbness and a frenzy, as the most inane conspiracy theories against China are launched. This isn't just about the Wuhan Chinese lab stuff, but also attacking China for greenhouse gas emissions that are being used to produce every facet of life within the imperialist core.
India is scampering to take the role of China as a more pliant reservoir of raw materials and superexploited labor. Fascist Indians went to Twitter to support the IDF this year, showing that they are ready and willing to serve as front line soldiers. Their government's sacrifice of their population with COVID is meant to show their dedication to the profitability of international value chains.
Within the domestic US, the other contradictions like capitalism vs climate, neoliberalism vs the state, transnational capital vs national capital, etc will be folded into national rivalries and expressed that way. The US left is dutifully following this program by assembling into their formations like they did in the 60s and 70s. The rise of Dengism isn't just an online phenomenon.
In the 60s and 70s, the question of whether a group sided with Beijing, Washington, Moscow, or none was all-consuming. Tactics, strategy, and contradictions fall away as all that matters is what side of the state rivalry you are on. I don't think I need to tell anyone here that the "neither Beijing nor Washington" position is the most cowardly of all possible positions, since it abandons any sort of analysis of the contradictions at play.
This shift into interstate rivalry embodying all other contradictions opens up the possibility of breakthroughs, as Mao said:
The US policy of aggression has several targets. The three main targets are Europe, Asia and the Americas. China, the centre of gravity in Asia, is a large country with a population of 475 million; by seizing China, the United States would possess all of Asia. … But in the first place, the American people and the peoples of the world do not want war. Secondly, the attention of the United States has largely been absorbed by the awakening of the peoples of Europe, by the rise of the People’s Democracies in Eastern Europe, and particularly by the towering presence of the Soviet Union, this unprecedentedly powerful bulwark of peace bestriding Europe and Asia, and by its strong resistance to the US policy of aggression. Thirdly, and this is most important, the Chinese people have awakened, and the armed forces and the organized strength of the people under the leadership of the Communist Party of China have become more powerful than ever before.
Edited by pogfan1996 ()
osman empire 1500-1683
the first one is supposed to be the byz*ntines i guess but lol
Edgar Bauer returned to Berlin in April 1848 after Prussia declared a general amnesty for political prisoners on 18 March. He participated actively in the revolution and had to flee to Schleswig-Holstein in 1849. By 1851 Denmark had won him over to its cause in this region. Starting in 1852, the Danes employed him in London as a spy against leftist revolutionaries, including Marx.46 By this time his friendship with Marx was quite strained, mainly as the result of Marx’s attacks on Bruno, Marx’s former teacher and close friend.47 Nevertheless, Edgar and Marx remained fre- quent drinking buddies. Londoners in the Hampstead, Highgate, and Fitzrovia sections still recall a legendary “pub crawl” made by Edgar and Marx to at least seventeen businesses along Tottenham Court Road, an evening that ended with the pair’s outrunning the bobbies who sought to arrest them for breaking streetlamps with paving stones. On 28 January 1861, German police, also spying in London, reported that when Marx and Edgar fell to insulting each other’s wives during an argument about money, Edgar lost his temper and punched Marx in the face.48 This incident destroyed Edgar’s effectiveness in London, so thereafter the Danes used him to gather intelligence against politicians in Germany.
a lot of the information about various deviations in line and shifts in ideas within the party is really interesting and is making me way more concious of the dynamics where different lines, often ones that seen really divergent, can develop within communist parties. the debate about economism and the development of productive forces seems really relevant to some of the debates that go on around china and their post mao development, since the justification for deng and his successors' policies seems to be that the productive forces need to be developed before anything else can be done, which is precisely what bettelheim says is both wrong and a break with lenin. i want to read the later volumes too, although it seems like by volume 3 bettelheim had changed his views a bit and arrived at an almost trotlike position where the ussr never had a dictatorship of the proletariat, which seems pretty dubious but i think he became super disillusioned after the end of the cultural revolution and the collapse of socialism in general so maybe it's sort of understandable.
Parenti posted:Stalin talks about the productive forces in Foundations of Leninism, Io, and had this to say:
i'm not sure this really contradicts what bettelheim is saying. like he's not claiming that stalin was a kautskyist or something, he's saying that there was still an underlying notion of economism present in the thought of most of the bolsheviks that was expressed in different ways later on when they were trying to actually construct socialism. he thinks that one of the results of this was that the class struggle was sometimes and increasingly subordinated in importance to the development of productive forces, which caused problems because there was also an erroneous idea that the exploiting classes in the ussr had been successfully and completely eliminated(hence masking the contradictions that continued to be present). this volume actually doesn't talk very much about stalin specifically because it only goes up to lenin's death but there's this bit in the introduction that is relevant:
In a very general form, the thesis according to which the
productive forces are the driving force of history was set forth
by Stalin in his essay of September 1938 entitled “Dialectical
and Historical Materialism,”21 in which he wrote. “First the
productive forces of society change and develop, and then,
depending on these changes and in conformity with them,
men’s relations of production, their economic relations,
change.”22
The thesis thus formulated does not deny the role of the
class struggle—in so far as there is a society in which antagonistic
classes confront one another—but relegates this to
the secondary level: the class struggle intervenes essentially
in order to smash production relations that hinder the development
of the productive forces, thus engendering new
production relations which conform to the needs of the development
of the productive forces.
Actually, in the passage quoted above, Stalin acknowledges
that the new production relations can appear independently of
a revolutionary process, when he writes: “The rise of new
productive forces and of the relations of production corresponding
to them does not take place separately from the old
system, after the disappearance of the old system, but within
the old system . . . ”23
One can certainly find passages in Marx which suggest a
similar problematic: but his work as a whole shows that, for
him, the driving force of history is the class struggle, and that,
as long as classes exist, it is through conflicts between classes
that social relations are transformed; it shows also that
socialist social relations can arise only through class struggle.
Similarly, Lenin would never have been able to formulate his
theory of “the weakest link in the imperialist chain”—the
theory which explains why a proletarian revolution could take
place in Russia—if, like the Mensheviks, he had held to a
conception which put the main stress on the development of
the productive forces, since, according to this conception, a
proletarian revolution could not happen elsewhere than in the
most highly industrialized countries.
The thesis of the primacy of the productive forces prevents
one from using rigorously the concepts of historical materialism,
and leads to incorrect political formulations, such as
this one, put forward by Stalin in the above-quoted essay: “If
it is not to err in policy, the party of the proletariat must both
in drafting its programme and in its practical activities proceed
primarily from the laws of development of production,
from the laws of economic development of society.”24 The
conception of the productive forces developed in this way
certainly gave rise to a number of difficulties when it came to
fitting it into the theses of historical materialism as a whole;
but it was a necessary corollary to the thesis about the disappearance
from the USSR of exploiting classes, and therefore
also of exploited ones.
The connection between these theses is seen, for example,
when Stalin writes that “the basis of the relations of production
under the socialist system . . . is the social ownership of
the means of production. Here there are no longer exploiters
and exploited . . . Here the relations of production fully correspond
to the state of productive forces . . .”25
One of the difficulties arising from this formulation (according
to which there is “full conformity” between productive
forces and production relations) is that it does away with any
possibility of contradiction between the two elements of the
economic basis.This led Stalin in 1952 to make a partial
rectification of his earlier formulation, when he reproached A.
Ya. Notkin for having taken literally his formulation regarding
“full conformity,” and said that this referred only to the fact
that “under socialism . . . society is in a position to take
timely steps to bring the lagging relations of production into
conformity with the character of the productive forces.
Socialist society is in a position to do so because it does not
include obsolescent classes that might organise resistance.”
The heroes of independence movements in the Global South were well-known to DDR citizens, even as the West continued to portray them as criminals and uneducated beggars who would have no future without the help and guidance of the West. The names and fates of people like Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah, Ahmed Sékou Touré, Julius Nyerere, Agostinho Neto, Samora Machel, and Nelson Mandela were known and celebrated in the DDR. Solidarity was even extended to those in the belly of the beast; when Angela Davis was tried as a terrorist in the United States, a DDR correspondent presented her with flowers for Women’s Day. In a much greater display of solidarity, students in the DDR led the One Million Roses for Angela Davis campaign, during which they delivered truckloads of cards with hand-painted roses to her in prison. The judge was impressed and every child in East Germany knew who Angela Davis was.
Though their stories are not as well-known, there was nonetheless a huge number of DDR citizens – young people, students, scientists, and workers – who took part in solidarity projects all over the world. Between 1964 and 1988, sixty friendship brigades of the Free German Youth (the DDR youth mass organisation) were deployed to twenty-seven countries in order to share their knowledge, help with construction, and create training opportunities and conditions for economic self-sufficiency. A number of these projects still exist today, though some have taken on different names, such as the Carlos Marx Hospital in Managua (Nicaragua), the German-Vietnamese Friendship Hospital (Hanoi, Vietnam), and the Karl Marx Cement Factory (Cienfuegos, Cuba), to name but a few.
https://www.leftwingbooks.net/book/content/riding-wave-sweden
also i have started the third volume of richad j evans third reich trilogy and its a good book, if you read any trilogy of books about the nazis, i recommend this one
kinch posted:I'm reading baby huey p newton's reddit history and I like what I see
to be perfectly honest i'd rather read a cereal box
lo posted:kinch posted:
I'm reading baby huey p newton's reddit history and I like what I see
to be perfectly honest i'd rather read a cereal box
kinch posted:the malformed questions of redittors put him in top shape
It's the only thing that motivates me to post on the internet anymore. I need something stupid to deconstruct and then go on tangents.
Today a friend of mine today said she started to read Capital because of Vaush (or rather listen to the Audiobook) so now I'm considering starting a youtube or twitch. I don't think I have the personality type for it but I watched him and it's basically the same thing, he watches some conservative dumbass or debates someone on completely unfair terms and uses it to make his own points. And I understand that's where politics is now, at least the same petty-bourgeois politics as on reddit. In my day I've influenced a decent number of people and there's even a guy who apes my posting style and has a spreadsheet somewhere of all my posts but I still feel there's a void in the market for good youtube content, in the meantime reddit has moved on to pro-China memes and what I do feels stale. Look at bayarea415, his videos are terrible but he's skyrocketed in popularity and now has his own "AMAs." I saw it happen in real time and he has no particular intelligence or competence, just the right place and time. Vaush himself is both a gross gamer type and excruciating to watch but that doesn't stop people. Also he's an awful reactionary. And yeah,his audience is ideologically inclined towards social fascism anyway, that's true. But even that's changing, smartphones are the first media technology in history to proliferate in the third world at basically the same time as in the first world and unlike television the content is already globalized. There are actually a decent number of Indians and Brazilians on reddit and every once in a while a random person from a third world diaspora who is young and knows little but wants someone to talk to about Myanmar or Ethiopia now that they're in the crosshairs of imperialism. SA never had that. And even they begin forming their political vocabulary on YouTube and then go to text mediums.
That's what the internet is now, basically everyone here could have been a major political "influencer" if we didn't have ideological vestiges of the old SA ethos that the internet makes you stupid. Which is true but the world is stupid in the same way. Even if you talked about movies or anime or something good analysis doesn't exist and social media has made reviews untrustworthy, young people are way more radical than we were at that age but they're dumb and need to be shown what critique actually looks like. I always wished that tpain or impper or crow had started channels to follow their thoughts on the world instead of vanishing (I'm sure people in the know here know what happened to them but that's kind of my point). Then again, I still go to SA to read supermechagodzilla posts, he's been doing that for over adecade, but now that SA is dead and the great deconstructive work of cracking open the Star Wars fandom is completed he's kinda tame without nerds to needle. My point is people here and on SA hate reddit but reddit is already passe, it's the last text based medium for discussion.
That's not to say you should be an influencer or YouTuber, it seems miserable and even I get randomly doxxed and harassed despite my minor status. But if we're the vanguard of getting your political education on the internet and we're gonna keep posting into our 30s now might as well do something with all that accumulated knowledge and web 1.0 cynicism which allows us to use the internet rather than be used by it. I feel this way teaching college kids as well, they are radical but have no one to tell them: this is what you need to read and this is how you need to think. Gramsci is the best antidote to liberation pedagogy which unfortunately has been totally absorbed by neoliberalism, youtubers are de facto educators with completely hierarchical methods, we might as well admit it and use it. Communist parties are hopeless, either they treat the internet like a newspaper to be strictly c
Since this is the reading thread I'm reading Roy Bhaskar's A Realist Theory of Science. The introduction is unreadable and the text itself is tedious, which isn't surprising since it was a dissertation and analytic philosophy is tedious by design. It's short so I'm gonna power through but I wouldn't recommend it except that I don't know any other Marxist works on philosophy of science. I know works on Marx's philosophy of science and philosophies of science which can be used for Marxism if you already know what you're doing (Deleuze for example). Is his second book better? And before you recommend Levins and Lewontin, I already read their stuff and it's great but their Marxist ontology is pretty weak, it's a heuristic or corrective and though they imply nature is dialectical they run from it given the time they were working in and their political isolation. Deleuze to his credit is like math is rhizomatic without waffling.
Anyway please continue to read and enjoy my posts.
Edited by dimashq ()
i'm finding weird connections between midcentury (analytic) philosophy, and military-industrial-complex pass throughs/spookshops like RAND Corp
probably gonna take a Heg Break and pursue this line of inquiry. at least for a while. sorry hegel
radical_dave posted:just spent a ~2 months diving into cybernetics and its relationship to (analytic) philosophy (e.g. carnap and russell and frege and the logicist tradition). ended up buying a bunch of books about cybernetics and philosophy books about artificial intelligence, but have only made a dent in a few of them.
i'm finding weird connections between midcentury (analytic) philosophy, and military-industrial-complex pass throughs/spookshops like RAND Corp
probably gonna take a Heg Break and pursue this line of inquiry. at least for a while. sorry hegel
I know Johnbeige was working on cybernetics as well, just gonna put it out there that some sort of write up or summation would be cool + valuable
babyhueypnewton posted:Today a friend of mine today said she started to read Capital because of Vaush (or rather listen to the Audiobook) so now I'm considering starting a youtube or twitch
bhpn i feel like i get your motivation but this whole sentence is like.. wince emoji... to me..... but i mean they're your friend so maybe they're the like extremely rare exception to the sort of person who starts reading Capital because of a twitch streamer and that's who you're aiming for. ganbatte in that case. unless it goes bad, then i predicted it.