Scrree posted:

lotta western libs turned off self-determination when they realized that, assuming the end of history and domination of their own ideology, it would inevitably lead to the preeminence of high population south-of-the-equator nations. brazil, nigeria, india, etc. would all surge forward while germany and the rest of europe fell into geriatric torpor. this is horrific to them, and now the standard high liberal line is "we need to intervene in this countries, sterilize their women, and prevent them from developing their industry in Order To Save The World From Climate Change And Overpopulation" see the clintons in haiti

Makeshift_Swahili posted:

"responsibility to protect" is the term they use in liberal International Relations now. i suspect there's been a real push to re-frame wars in this way after WMD in iraq turned out to be a joke.

it's cool that canadian international relations etc exists only as a think tank to come up with ways to justify the american status quo. i am pretty sure we came up with that one, and the last few self-justifying popular terms. canadians have been a huge chunk of the UN for a long time and are very good at it. do you have anything you need rationalized into liberal mush? let me know

getfiscal posted:

We should all support self-determination, like Woodrow Wilson.

Unfortunately Koreans took Wilson seriously and begged the US for help during the March 1st Movement. Then Wilson was like "lol jk I wasn't actually gonna support self-determination" and the Japanese crushed Korean independence for 25 years. Even again when the Japanese left the People's Republic of Korea attempted to make peace with the US and use the UN Charter to justify Korean independence. The US of course ignored this and crushed democracy in the south. This was basically Kim il-sung's criticism of the Korean communist movement and he was correct. Needs moar scientific Marxism-Leninism.

getfiscal posted:

Like I'm not sure any ML would say "Russian troops in WW2 were just people, just like the Nazis, and it was solely material factors that decided who won, we shouldn't say they were better as people".

to play devil's advocate i think most of them would say that it was 'solely material factors' that made them 'better as people'

getfiscal posted:

Apparently one Trotskyist theory is that the USSR and PRC should have merged in the 1950s. Can you imagine though if even in Asia, China tried to unite with Vietnam, Korea, Thailand, Japan, etc. in one formal socialist state?

im sure a vietnam-china-korea superstate would go just super for everyone involved

Guyovich posted:

getfiscal posted:


Can you imagine though if even in Asia, China tried to unite with Vietnam, Korea, Thailand, Japan, etc. in one formal socialist state? I mean assuming that revolutions took power there. It would be basically impossible in practical terms even if it were desirable in some senses.




china has enough trouble with its current borders, of course. i think national identity is just too strong to be superseded anytime soon, even by proletarian internationalism. we won't see those borders erode until socialism wins worldwide, and even then it isn't a given, as material conditions in each nation would lead to different socialist paths, which could in turn create new national identities.

I know bhpn has mentioned this before, but in the hypothetical case where its possible to start building fullcommunism, the theory of revolutionary intercommunalism could be a serious aid to preserving national identity in the context of a stateless, classless world-system

roseweird posted:

Guyovich posted:
nationalism probably isn't reducible to 'national identity' when nationality involves practical considerations like 'do we even speak the same language'

i used it more as a blanket term which covers those considerations too

chickeon posted:

idk if htere's a troop thread somewhere and i donno where else to put this
http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/21/asia/australia-military-abuse/?iid=ob_lockedrail_topeditorial

5Ho10_UUlf0

Guyovich posted:

Russian intruders had broken into their homes late at night, only to rearrange the furniture or turn on all the lights and televisions.

my grandmother is also having this problem. it's called dementia.

getfiscal posted:

I thought Die Linke was still generally pro-Soviet-war-against-Hitler? Like wouldn't all the ex-PDS people support that?

Yes, Die Linke generally is, and also some of the farther left parts of Die Linke shelter ukrainian anti-fascists and let them come live in Germany when the crazy death threats get too much. That Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung thing is another case entirely, and are more or less a neo-nazi thinktank except with glossy social democratic coating.

aerdil posted:

ah yes, not a cia conspiracy, simply good reporting: https://twitter.com/joshrogin/status/752266210386075648

we are fortunate to witness this, the era of marketing as statecraft

Pradella posted:

This article aims at contributing to current debates on the ‘new imperialism’ by presenting the main results of a reading of Marx’s Capital in light of his writings on colonialism, which were unknown in the early Marxist debate on imperialism. It aims to prove that, in his main work, Marx does not analyse a national economy or – correspondingly – an abstract model of capitalist society, but a world-polarising and ever-expanding system. This abstraction allows the identification of the laws of development of capitalism and its antagonisms, and reflects the tendency of the capital of the dominant states, by making permanent recourse also to methods of so-called ‘primitive accumulation’, to expand and increase the exploitation of workers worldwide, and, at the same time, the cooperation between them. What, for Marx, was later defined as imperialism is the concrete form of the process of ‘globalisation’ of the capital of the dominant states.

a lot of marx's writings were not collected or otherwise available for study for some decades after his death, including those appearing in the New York Daily Tribune, as well as numerous notebooks. starting mid-20th century, these began to surface and make their way into (mostly academic) circulation. indeed, "when the great debate on imperialism took place before and during World War I, neither Rosa Luxemburg nor Lenin showed any awareness of their existence." however, pradella notes that they works have remained 'peripheral' since their publication. perhaps, one supposes, this has to do with the timeframe. i can't speak for the rest of the world, but in the usa the period of these publications corresponded with broad purges of marxists and fellow travelers from academia and more. point is, there hasn't been a ton of work done on this.

pradella nevertheless gives a shoutout to Kevin Anderson (I initially somehow mistook this for kevin carson lol), whose 2010 book Marx at the Margins "presents Marx's writings on pre-capitalist and non-Western societies from the 1850s onwards." (good news, also! you can find a nice pdf copy just by googling that book's title.) how does her paper differ from this? by examining "the relation between these writings and Marx's critique of political economy" in order to refute the charge that "'Marx concentrated on a closed capitalist economy ... within a single nation state.'" coming in for criticism for promoting this idea nowadays are folks like david harvey, ellen meiksins wood (rip), sam ashman and alex callinicos.

Pradella posted:

I want to prove that Marx’s Capital overcame the statist contradictory assumption of classical political economy through its development of the theories of value and surplus value: by examining British capitalism as a world-polarising and ever-expanding system, Marx developed a systematic analysis of British ‘free-trade imperialism’. The general law of capitalist accumulation has to be understood as a law of capital accumulation on a world scale and, as the state maintains a fundamental role in this process, of imperialism.

incidentally, she also directs readers to previous works of hers that focus on the finer details of these connections, including her own phd thesis, as well as that of john smith, who since the publication of this essay has written the book Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century (and an article of the same name in last year's imperialism-focused issue of MR), which has been pretty well praised by people whose opinions i trust, though i haven't had a chance to read it yet myself

passing from the intro, we find the essay is divided into four main parts. 1: how Marx addressed international investments and expansionism; 2: dynamics of capital accumulation, including imperialism; 3: links the development of Marx’s analysis and his evolving views on international revolution; 4: interpretations of Marx within the Second International

since this is meant to be a summary and not a close reading, i'll try to limit my remarks on these. i doubt i'll be as measured and discerning as scrree has been in his capital chapter summaries, but here goes.

part 1: Capital as a globalizing system

• "From the specific characteristics of English capitalism (as world hegemonic power and a developed capitalist economy), Marx determines the laws of development of the antagonisms of the capitalist mode of production itself" -- general laws not limited to a specific historical stage
  
• she calls attention to the notion of "total social capital" (a.k.a. capital-c Capital). another scholar i've seen speak at length about this, btw, is Marxist accountant Rob Bryer.
  
• "Marx's notebooks and articles confirm that, from the 1840s onward, he did not examine English capitalism as a national, but as a colonial system." Moreover, he distinguishes between the "old colonial system" and British "liberal imperialism" of the industrial era, with colonies being either "settlement colonies" or "dominions." In this respect, he still considered the usa to be a european colony in 1866
  
• Marx: "Whenever we look closely into the nature of British free trade, monopoly is pretty generally found to lie at the bottom of its 'freedom.'"
  
• Vol 1 Ch 15: the new and international division of labor of the industrial era convert 'one part of the globe into a chiefly agricultural field of production, for supplying the other part which remains a chiefly industrial field.' Ch 24 explicitly notes "we must treat the whole world as one nation" because of the export of capital and workers, wage-laborers and dispossessed farmers alike
  
• "In the 1872-5 French edition of Volume I ... (Marx explains) that in the age of mechanical industry the external market prevails on the internal, impelling the annexation of new countries and increased rivalries among industrial powers." Anderson: this passage "apparently unknown" to Lenin/Luxemburg
  
• Pradella says international investments & labor migration are structurally taken into account in vol 1. "Expansionism is an immanent necessity for capital at every stage of its development and allows expansion of its 'field of action' independently from its actual dimensions."

• "Accumulation increases capital's expansive power and tends towards the extreme limit of absolute, universal wealth. As competition is capital's very essence, however, this limit cannot actually be reached: accumulation continuously reproduces competition at a higher level, expressing itself in the form of increasing inter-capitalist and inter-state antagonisms."
  
• "In the 1872-5 French edition, Marx distinguishes for the first time between the concentration and centralization of capital." Concentration = more absolute accumulation by a given capitalist or capitalists broadly; centralization = change in distribution of existing capital into fewer and fewer hands. "The long-run combined effect of concentration and centralization is an increase in capital's organic composition and a relative reduction in the demand for labor, which coexists with an absolute increase of the number of proletarians," which heightens the contradictions.
  
• "From the 1870s onwards, Marx had studied the growth of German and US 'trusts' ... and considered the US as the power destined to replace Britain's global hegemony."

Pradella posted:

Marx’s Capital, moreover, does not examine a ‘pure economical accumulation’ – a concept that reflects the division between ‘state’ and ‘market’ contradictorily asserted by classical political economy – but includes state intervention as an essential part of it. In the chapter on so-called primitive accumulation, he incorporates the state system into the analysis of capital’s accumulation. In this chapter he does not describe ‘incidental’ processes, ‘illustrating merely the genesis of capital, its first appearance in the world’, as Rosa Luxemburg argues, but analyses the state’s fundamental role in generating the capitalist relation, both nationally and internationally, and in reproducing the social order as a whole. For Marx the logic of the state is internal to the logic of capital. For this reason, although historically state intervention was primary for the genesis of industrial capital, its analysis logically follows the analysis of accumulation. This dialectical relationship expresses the fusion of the process of inter-state rivalries, which characterised the formation of the world market, with the expansion of industrial capitalism, which gave rise to the intensified antagonisms among the great powers attempting to extend their ‘spheres of influence’, which Lenin addressed in his work. The concentrated violence of the state is, for Marx, an economic force, necessary to expand and increase the exploitation of the workers internally, also by regulating class conflict, and externally. As we can read in Marx’s notes from Arnold Hermann Ludwig von Heeren’s Handbuch der Geschichte des europäischen Staatensystems und seiner Colonien, the colonial expansion corresponded to the worldwide expansion of the European state system: with the British conquest of India a ‘worldwide system of states’ was born.

as she notes later, Luxemburg is thus not so much arguing against marx as the 'nationalistic' reading of him in her discussion of an ongoing process of primitive accumulation unseating pre-capitalist/non-capitalist production. people of our time will easily recognize that included here is the process of privatization, both in its domestic and international sense -- capital had a big damn lunch with the fall of the soviet union, etc.

incidentally, according to the us congressional research service, 73% of employment in syria was in the public sector as of 2005, and the rebel groups nato/gcc powers back are all very keen on privatization. but i'm sure that's a coincidence

part 3: imperialism & world revolution

Pradella posted:

As the international context is inherent to the condition of the working class of every single nation, workers cannot limit themselves to economic struggles and to the demand for a better distribution of the ‘national’ product. In the 1867 Address written on behalf of the General Council of the International Workingmen’s Association to its Lausanne congress, Marx explains why this kind of approach is impotent against the effects of international investments and immigration, and why it is of fundamental importance for workers in industrialised nations to build international solidarity.

Marx posted:

The power of the human individual has disappeared before the power of capital, in the factory the worker is now nothing but a cog in the machine. In order to recover his individuality, the worker has had to unite together with others and create associations to defend his wages and his life. Until today these associations had remained purely local, while the power of capital, thanks to new industrial inventions, is increasing day by day; furthermore in many cases national associations have become powerless: a study of the struggle waged by the English working class reveals that, in order to oppose their workers, the employers either bring in workers from abroad or else transfer manufacture to countries where there is a cheap labour force. Given this state of affairs, if the working class wishes to continue its struggle with some chance of success, the national organisations must become international.

• "In his 1850–3 New York Daily Tribune articles on India Marx identified not only the destructive effects of the conquest but also the material conditions for a unified anti-colonial uprising of the Indian people. In the early 1850s, therefore, Marx recognised the agency of colonised and oppressed people, which was denied, at the time, by most bourgeois thinkers: an aspect often downplayed if not completely ignored in the postcolonial critiques of Marx. Four years later the Indian national anti-colonial struggle did indeed emerge, partially confirming Marx’s analysis. ... Marx unconditionally supported (the Sepoy uprising) and the Chinese Taiping Revolution."
  
• "The expansion of the world market laid the basis for the reciprocal reinforcement of the struggles on an international scale. But Marx and Engels recognised, at the same time, that the exploitation of the whole world by Britain was creating a ‘bourgeois proletariat’, rendering this interconnection more and more difficult. If the connection between anti-colonial and proletarian struggles did not take place, for Marx, anti-colonial revolutions could be the starting-point for the capitalist national development of these countries, as actually happened with the anti-colonial movement and the birth of modern capitalist nations in the twentieth century."
  
• "According to Anderson, Marx’s articles on the Civil War show a deepening of his understanding of the issue of racism within the working class: ‘by the 1860s, in addition to his abolitionist perspective, Marx had developed an appreciation of African Americans as revolutionary subjects."
  
• in the 1870s marx became more focused on global history and deepened his research on colonialism, pre-capitalist societies and forms of resistance to capital outside the West. he was gonna rewrite the section on rent using Russia as his historical model. also the preface to the second Russian edition (1882) denies the "linear" reading of his work, saying peasant revolution in Russia could indeed kick off the party, as it were, though he was hoping it would also hearten the proletariat of more developed european nations to do likewise, so the two revolutions could complete one another

Pradella posted:

Marx’s lengthiest statement of his (mature) view on Ireland was contained in a letter of 9 April 1870 to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt, where he refers to a confidential circular written in January by himself and issued by the General Council. This text not only analyses the economic interests of the English landed aristocracy and bourgeoisie in Ireland, but also the consequences of Irish immigration on the working-class movement in England.

Marx posted:

Owing to the constantly increasing concentration of leaseholds, Ireland constantly sends her own surplus to the English labour market, and thus forces down wages and lowers the material and moral position of the English working class. And most important of all! Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. . . . The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of the English rulers in Ireland. . . . This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And the latter is quite aware of this.

sounds familiar...

(i imagine many of us are already familiar with that passage, but idgaf, it's good)

part 4 has some interesting stuff but it's less about imperialism than its theorizing and the contentious post-Marx period of debate. fuck kautsky, etc.

she closes by cautioning: "The analysis presented in this article does not mean that everything had already been developed by Marx." despite the impression that may have been given, it's clear lenin and luxemburg both understood marx's system well enough to wind up in the same place (and expanded on it) even without the full range of context we can apply now, which is pretty damn cool. "fuck yeah science" or whatever the kids are saying.

anyway, for all this talk about supporting governments and imperialist warfare, it helps to re-ground a discussion in the more fundamental theories that get us to those points. this is especially the case in light of how guyovich's Other Place thread has become a free-fire zone of bullshit (what with one guy arguing that the revolutionary bolsheviks weren't internationalists and another using the entire death toll of the war in syria to represent the number of civilians assad has personally killed)

edit: for some reason it doesn't display properly when i use square brackets for paraphrasings, so i just used parentheses. it will probably lead to confusion, but that's ok because you can refer to the doc itself when needed!

Edited by Constantignoble (June 26, 2017 15:57:39)