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1 year agoIt’s hilarious seeing the liberals’ comments here that prove that despite being overeducated they literally don’t know how to read.
StalinForTime [comrade/them]
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Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: March 9th, 2023
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Firstly, I’m not sure your understanding of the meaning or relevance of ‘hypocrisy’ is very clear.
Secondly, you’re introducing a moralistic discourse about this when the first issue is what caused or explained the Russian intervention in Ukraine. Despite the evidence overwhelmingly pointing to NATO expansion, the fact that you are denying it when even Stoltenberg and Blinken are basically at the point of admitting it, implicit as those admissions may be, is pretty comic.
If you think that the Ukrainian government was not only not abusing, but in fact not committing acts amounting to ethnically cleansing Russians in eastern Ukraine, you have been living under a rock and its disgusting that you can utter such bullshit with such nonchalance and impunity. Contrary to, say, accusation of genocide in Xinjiang, for which there is no hard concrete evidence (in fact evidence and reason point to the contrary), there are mountains of evidence in every form of media, whether video, documents, government announcements, proving that there was repressive military and political action being taken against the Russophone and ethinically Russian, or simply anti-nationalist Ukrainians of the East, by the Ukrainian ultra-nationalist regime. There have been mass disappearances, lynchings, bombings, assassinations, and we could go on. Again, there is too much evidence for this in every form for any one person to peruse the entirety of, so either you are pig-shit ignorant, or you are lying. Trouble is you are doing it in the wrong place.
Your last sentence is barely comprehensible quite frankly. If you think that reocognizing that a state should not aggressively expand a demonstrably imperialist organisation and in the process break all related previous agreements and promises in doing so, in a way that every party involved is fully aware will be perceived as a threat to the national security of one of the concerned countries, if one wants to avoid hot conflict, given the self-evident realities of realpolitik, is communist or marxist, then go off I guess.
congratulations, you are beyond parody
This is an insult to the lovecraftian function of court jesters.
Are the brigades in the room with us right now?
they got them poor langley interns down the postin mines workin overtime i tell ya hwaht
Henry Kissinger on suicide watch
The Green parties are simply a way in which the capitalist superstructure ensures the security of the base by ensuring electoral support of the pearl-clutching petit-bourgeois.
oh look we found the intern at Langley
I for one am shocked and appalled those who serving poisoned slop have, in fact, considered lying about it.
Yeah it’s important that we, as Marxists, therefore proceeding scientific,ally, make very clear from the onset as to what we mean when we use the term ‘imperialist’ with this more specific, narrow, Leninist definition which only really applies to modern capitalism, or more precisely the modern capitalist world-system. Conceptual clarification is essential for any scientific endeavor, including Marxism.
Even on this definition however, we can note that it is perfectly possible (and concretely, empirically, historically confirm this possibility by looking at the international situation pre-WW1) that there be several powers or polarized groups of powers each of which behaves imperialistically in the Leninist sense. The difference today is that we currently still have a more or less unipolar as opposed to multipolar imperialist (Leninist sense) world-system.
If someone calls Russia ‘imperialist’ in a different sense, then they might not be wrong, and saying that they are because our definition doesn’t apply isn’t relevant beyond the fact that there’s confusion over the concepts being used because people are equivocating between them, simply because we are using the same term/sound/word/signifier. If we do the latter we are engaging in a semantic debate disguised as, because confused with, a substantive debate.
Yes. Gaddafi was also certainly killed based on French intelligence, and there is substantial evidence that the men who assassinated him were French assets. Part of the reason, apart from the broader geopolitical aim of annihilating a country which wanted to engage in the construction of international monetary and commerical systems outside of the orbit and control of the American petro-dollar, Gaddafi had essentially bribed Sarkozy at a certain point and was holding this over the latter’s head (Sarkozy is infamously corrupt). See:
- https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/021012/gaddafi-executed-french-revelations-libyan-agent
- https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/french-secret-service-killed-gaddafi-sarkozys-orders-reports
- https://www.rfi.fr/en/africa/20121001-french-spy-killed-kadhafi-sarkozys-orders-papers-claim
- https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2210759/Gaddafi-killed-French-secret-serviceman-orders-Nicolas-Sarkozy-sources-claim.html
- https://www.euronews.com/2018/03/20/sarkozy-in-libya-case-what-does-it-all-mean-
Hegemon’s have to rule by fear. Read any bloodsoaked page from the history of the Roman Empire. Fear is best instilled through unimaginable atrocity. What do you think the rulers of the rest of Africa and the Middle East thought after they saw how Gaddafi, head of the most prosperous (per-capita, quality of life, standard of living, etc.) state in Africa, ended up?
I see. So are you going to follow this line of thought to it’s natural conclusion and become an anarchist? /s
Yeah I mean if we were being more fair we would not only have to trace these genres genealogically through Jazz to blues and gospel, ragtime, and also to Caribbean and Spanish music (especially for alot of rhythmic ideas) and also West African music (blues, pentatonic scales), but also recognize that European classical music also had deep influence on early black american music.
The only country music I’ve ever unironically enjoyed was bluegrass, and that confirms our point. That being said I’m nothing of an aficionado of this stuff so I dont doubt there’s decent stuff I dont know.
But yh white suburbs are really where culture goes to die. It reminds of a comment Pasolini once made, that only the lower classes and the upper classes in history have produced real culture. The middle classes have been cultureless on average.
There is an American culture of world-historical importance. It’s just not the white culture. Black music for instance has unparalleled influence partly because of its quality. White music culture has made no contributions to modern (including popular art) equal to, say, Jazz, Blues, Gospel, RnB, Hip-Hop, detroit techno, chicago house…I could go on. Of course white people in general, especially the bourgeois, have little to no access to or knowedge of these cultures, unless its been given to them through a gentrified, fetishized filter that doesn’t understand the value of these musical traditions. Alternatively they treat is as jokey party music for them to sniff coke to.
Apart from that I agree that the mainstream of American culture is literal proof of the decadence of a civilization.
I’d also say that apart from key land needing to be returned to give to native americans and key minorities, the most important thing is that there is equitable land and housing reform that ensures an equitable distribution and standard of living for everyone in the broader working class, though this doesn’t preclude certain groups being given more immediate priority.
But yeh America is satanic. Literal Mammon worshipers.
If you actually live in America, then I’m guessing you haven’t been poor in America. It’s extremely difficult, without the opiate of capitalist realism and liberal ideology, to believe that you have rights in any real world sense when you are dirt-poor in America.
It’s interesting, in your justification for the supposed superiority of the US, that you are only citing your anecdotal case that you have found your life subjectively better. What actually matters, especially if you’d like to play the game of which country has more democratic policy in the limited sense of in which country were the massive conditions of life most securely guaranteed as per the interests and desires of the populace, then it is very difficult to hand the medal to the US, especially if you have even the slightest knowledge of US economic, social and political history, to say nothing of its imperialist geopolitics. Your justification is a purely selfish, narcisistically egoist one. I don’t blame anyone for trying to get out of a shitty economic situation, but that isn’t really as absolutely relevant as you seem to think at the end of the day when we are discussing whether or not the US’s material effects on the rest of world justify us qualifying it as deeply reactionary, in fact perhaps the main impediment to a progressive future for humanity.
The social, political and economic collapse of the USSR is directly linked, directly caused, by the US (and the West). Capitalistic reforms had already begun under Khruschev, which allowed for the further development of black-market enriched criminal classes who would form the social base of the mafiosi who would start to devore the Russian economy in the late 80s and throughout the 90s. The traumatic experience of Russia in the last 30-40 years, with the literal mass death and one of the largest drops in living standards in any modern country’s history (and starting from a period of great development), was the blindingly, unequivocally, undeniable consequence of deeping capitalist reforms and political liberalization during the 80s, notably under Gorbachev. The advice was American. The advisors were American. The model was American. The pressures that had brought the USSR to this point were American. Modern Russia is a creation of America.
If we want to talk about quality of life, then the best time to be a Russia, was without a doubt, the 50s-70s. It is not a coincidence that a very high number of Russians, especially older ones who actually lived in the USSR, and even more so if they lived during the 50s-70s, are deeply nostaghic for it, even if this nostalgia is born out of a sense of relatively greater economic security that they were ensured during this period.
You do not seem to be grasping immuredanchorite’s point though, which is that if we even want to get into a discussion over which of these two political powers is ‘better’, morally or ethnically (to the extent that this even makes sense), you are not going to be able to do so coherently without looking at how the political entity we call the US has acted, and what it’s real, material effects and consequences have been. I.e., not only can you not answer those questions without considering politics (which is literally one of the most incoherent yet common assumptions of liberal ideology), but that you also cannot escape the essential importance of geopolitics. By any geopolitical measure, the US is the most reactionary and viciously imperialist power in the contemporary era.
I’d add that, reactionary as some aspects of the USSR or the PRC have unfortunately been (inevitable, because we are talking about history, not your abstract moral ideal, the purvue of ultra-‘leftists’ and reformists and social democrats everywhere), there is no evidence, at any point in these states’ histories, of genocide in the sense of planned destruction of a racial or ethnic group. You’re also going to have to be clearer about what you mean by ‘atrocity’, though yes, these happened.
Also, you need to make clear what you understand by the term ‘right’, because if you are using it in a liberal sense, you are going to find that communists do not understand it in that way, i.e. in a purely abstract, negative sense. Although even if we did just want to understand it in the latter sense, the existence of money as such as institution is an immense restriction on the negative freedom of the vast majority of people.
Yeh good convo. No beef obviously. Marxism is a part of science and so has to include continuous critique.
My point is simply that the confusion of these questions as if they are the same, when they are trivially not, actually gets in the way of precisely the important objective you’ve cited, namely understanding and taking the correct position on China. If our position does not make sense when explained to people then that it our fault and issue, not their’s. People not being Marxist is just as much, if not more, the fault of us as Marxist to clearly explain and convince that it is their’s.
However I’m still not fully understanding your first point. Breaking down concepts, making clear definition, and thus theoretical conditions, is for the sake of clarity and so that we can actually analyze properly, and is obligatory at the onset of any scientific analysis or inquiry, once we’ve gotten beyond the more intuition stage of concept formation. I’m not disagreeing with you that the answers to those questions, the properties and facts they are making reference to, all have to be taken into account in a holistic way if we are going to give a proper analysis or have a decent understanding of how democratic the Chinese political and socio-economic system is and whether it is moving in that direction. It’s also essential so that we know what conditions would produce these conditions, so that we know whether the socio-economic basis for a deepening of proletarian democracy is developing. But clear analysis of concepts at the very onset is still essential. Even tho this points have ofc, as you say, been analyzed to deathly minutiae ad infinitum by millions of Chinese comrades, I’m not seeing how this makes is irrelevant for those of us outside of China. It is still important for us, in our own position, to have a correct understanding of China as Marxists. Marx wrote much of his work before the conditions of as pure capitalism as he describes in works such as Das Capital were even really there. Marx reflected with scientific ruthlessness and lack of qualms about people’s political correctness ceaselessly. This is why we still read him today and not other analysts of capitalism from the time. Hell, even the Communist Manifesto describes a capitalism which is too purified for the time. But this was not an irrelevant mistake on Marx’s part. It was scientific foresight as to where European societies undergoing the transition to capitalism were headed. We need similar analysis today of China, if we think or hope that China will be a future global revolutionary center.
On the plan for socialist transition being laid out, the CPC most certainly have stated and presented such a plan, although I haven’t seen very detailed data demonstrating that such a plan is seriously being laid out and applied. It seems to be based on a kind of faith in the CPC. The argument that they have continued to massively improve the standard of living since the Reform and Opening up, bringing 800 million people out of poverty is of course correct and a historic achievement. However the same argument is often used by liberals to justify, say, the capitalism of the 50s-70s in which living standards in the West did considerably go up. The difference which might be brought up is the fact that China has done so without using imperialism. However, given that the core issue of imperialism is that it is exploitation (of some of the most extreme kind), and given that China has charged its development in recent decades (and did so in the 50s when Liu Shaoqi was saying things like ‘exploitation can be good!’) with exploitation of its working class and peasantry, citing improvements in living standards is not proof that the intentions of the part-leadership are necessarily geared towards a truly socialist transition. So I don’t think it’s just a philosophical point, but something to be always born in mind so that we suspend judgement until hard evidence is there that the CPC will, so to speak ‘push the big red button’. I’m not going to believe something unless I have actual incontrovertible evidence for it. That doesn’t mean that I know that they won’t. But something it’s just not possible to be confident either way. Another issue is that the current mode of production in China does not function like capitalism as we know it at the macro-level, nor does it operate fully like socialism. Maybe it is a type of transitionary stage (but then we hear the Leninist critique of the reforming, Menshevik notion of non-revolutionary transition to socialism in our heads). In either case, it makes clear to me again that one reason for so much of the theoretical impasse of people outside of China trying to understand it is that we don’t have a fully adequate understanding of the key mechanisms at the macro-level of their mode of production.
Of course I’m happy to be proven wrong on this point. The main issue is that I’ve only just recently started leaning Mandarin, so I cannot read Chinese sources. But if anyone has excellent economic data and analysis to give me on this point i’d be happy to see it.
This is, again, why intentions are important. Political groups with different interest take on different objectives and intentions in the same set of external material conditions, so the fact that the Dengist are in power and not the Maoists, and that the economic base of support for the party and the state is therefore different now in the aftermath of the reforms, is very significant for trying to understand what the intentions of the current CPC leadership actually is.
I personally don’t really understand how saying the truth about China, as far as we can discern it through scientific, Marxist analysis (which in no way contradicts, but rather radically extends, the methods of scientific enquiry of the past, whichever culture they were taken from), amongst ourselves is an issue. We have an political and therefore intellectual duty for our understanding of China to be as clear as possible, and that’s not going to be achieved by saying that certain questions which are relevant to understanding China’s contemporary political system are divisive. I’m not seeing how you and I having this convo is divisive. Furthermore, rigorous critique and debate is of the essence of Marxist methodology. Look at the records of the Bolshevik party until the Stalinist period. Before they were in power they were rigorously critiquing each other (perhaps too viviously) left, right and centre. Lenin was theoretically beefing with everyone all the time. In the 20s, once the Stalinist position was dominant, you can look for instance at economic debates or at the party debates on China. They were theoretically sophisticated and based on the premise that a clear theoretical understanding is essential for policy. Obviously we are not in anything like such a position of power of influence, but we do need to start, as part of a truly Marxist culture, to act and prepare for this, not only because liberal hegemony will not last forever, but because it’s important that in order to convince people of the correctness of our view, that we can do so rigorously and clearly.
I’m not using mediation in a Trotskyist position (not a Trotskyist). I was just checking whether you meant directness in a more philosophical, meta-theoretic sense appropriate to materialist dialectics or whether you were using it in a more colloquial sense. Obviously the latter as you’ve clarified that it has to do the time-aspect and thus the pragmatic importance. I’m also not disagreeing in the slightest that the Trotskyist position of that type, especially today, would be ultraleftism in the pejorative sense.
Those are not strictly speaking counterexamples. I didn’t claim they couldn’t transition back. Capitalist systems have tendencies which lead to socio-economic and political crisis. These, pushed far enough, and without a socialist revolution, tend to culminate in something like fascism in the modern era. But these are just tendencies. Nothing says that these tendencies must absolutely always, in every circumstance, proceed to completion. That’s determines by the other casual factors, the other objective and subjective material conditions. In this case, it was the geopolitical and global economic context.
As a matter of time I’m going to focus on Spain and Portugal in my answer.
The original fascist states also all went back to liberal democracy at the end of WWII. They were crushed by the liberal capitalist states (and ofc by the Soviet Union) which correctly perceived them as geopolitical rivals of the first importance by the mid-late 30s. The other fascist states were also pressured into transition back into the liberal imperialst orbit of the Cold War. In both cases, they were reintegrated as they proved unable to fully complete a world fascist counter-revolution. You are right to bring these up as very interesting cases because they are examples of how you can transition back to liberal capitalist bourgeois democracies. But this does alter the fact that there were serious changes in the political structures of both Portugal and Spain and that the supposed continuity of these transitions are often overstated.
The transition of Spain between the death of Franco in 1975 and 1978 was not as smooth or non-violent as it’s popularly imagined. It was a very violent period. Fascist regimes are inherently inefficient in the long-run from the POV of socio-economic and cultural development. Further, Franco had started to distance himself from a more aggressive fascism once it was clear by 1943 that the fascists would lose WWII into order to transition back, at least in appearance, into a traditionalist, Catholic, authoritarian one-party state. It was still fascistic, but to a lesser degree and I think it had also lost it’s dynamism. This was also reflected in the internal balance of power of the Spanish political regime. The more radical fascists lost influence and the Military and Church gained more influence. Instead of radical fascist mass mobilization and constant radicalizing of the populace, Franco betted on a gradual, partial de-fascicization in which the emphasis would be on technocratic governance and in which the population would be more depoliticized and deradicalized through economic growth and benefits. It remained fascistic in relation to ethnic and national minorities and especially towards the revolutionary left. But in general terms, and notably those of economic governance, it returned to a more conservative and liberal position, rather than outright radical fascist, were the latter implies a far more total, complete level of intervention in all aspects of society. Spain became heavily integrated into the Western European and Atlantic economy. It became an ultra-conservative client state of NATO in everything but name (it was not allowed to become a member). The Partido Popular are the continuation of this more liberalizing-trad-conservative wing of Falangists, wereas Vox are representative of the more radical fascist elements. It is not for nothing that they have been forming coalitions recently. But even if Vox came to power by itself, it is not clear that they would find themselves in a different situation to the Fratelli d’Italia at present, were many reactionary aspects of the country would certainly intensify, notably towards immigrants, Muslims, racial minorities and LGBT folks, but it would be limited because a fascist government, while not immediately inconsistent with fascism, does tend to contravene the liberal principles, as liberals are only one group of pro-capitalists, and there are many political positions which emphasize different forms of capitalism, notably through different governance structures over the economy, firms, capitalists, etc.
Another reason the transition was possible is because there was a recognized incentive to compromise in order to avoid another civil war, the terror of which was still very present in everyone’s minds, and this was made possible because, as noted above, the more radical elements of the falangists had been somewhat sidelined and Franco had also begun a process of deradicalizing his fascist government. Apartheid South Africa was similar in many respects, in terms of reasons for liberal transition, despite the context being extremely different in many ways, most obviously when it comes to the racial dynamics. Interestingly, it’s difficult to imagine Israeli doing that kind of liberal transition at this point. Imo Israel’s future may well be an extremely bloody one…
It’s also worth pointing out that the 70s was a far more radical time than today. There was a lot more pressure from the social-democrat European left that shaped the debates and ideological struggle in 70s Spain, again emphazing a need to transition. Also, Carter moved away somewhat from Nixon’s more active support of these regimes (the US supported their military by being their main weapon’s providers).
The Estado Novo was as strange type of fascism. It was not as aggressive in its foreign policy as fascist Italy or Nazi Germany, which attempted to recreate mystical conceptions of their ancient empires in a way that directly conflicted with the interests of the other western imperialist powers. It was also pulled back into the orbit. Neither Franco nor Salazar were idiots when it came to how they needed to geopolitically and economically pivot in order to ensure their survival. Salazar did something very similar to Franco, as described above.
These other fascist states, which were tolerated because they did not pose as serious a threat to the imperial interests of the US, Britain and France, and because they were willing to accommodate these other powers’ interests and cooperate. However they were also undermined by their own inefficiencies, economic and political, and pressure from the external climate of a dynamic post-war trans-Atlantic economy to reintegrate themselves, at least economically, with the liberal powers.
We know that the socio-economic base transforms itself in such a way as to overcome disequilibrating forces that emerge in their social relations, especially once the latter are no longer sufficient to further developing the means of production, especially in a system of like capitalism whose basic functioning is premised on the fact of continued production of profit to incentivize production. But what about the transformations of the superstructure? My point is that as the base structure develops in this manner, it not only does so in conjunction with the the superstructure, but not only transforms the superstructure in order to reach new points of temporary stability. It is not only the base structure that evolves, moving gradually, continually and something revolutionarily into different overall dominant modes of production, but also the superstructure, in particular the political regime, which develops, and not only between base-level modes of production, but also within the same overall type of mode of production. In some cases liberal capitalism becomes fascist capitalism. In some case fascist capitalism can transition to liberal capitalism. In some cases fascist capitalism turns into outright mass-slave economies.
Learn to read.