Today #Russia and #China play best friends forever and #USSR had been traditionally placed in the same “communist” basked as China. Some fun facts that especially tankies are getting completely wrong today.^1
Since 1950’s China and USSR were actually conflicted over each other’s interpretations of #Marxism and in 1960’s the conflict nearly escalated into a full-scale nuclear war between the two countries.
China criticised CPSU (Communist Party of Soviet Union) over Soviet invasion of #Czechoslovakia (1968)^2 and “Brezhnev Doctrine” which denounced any Marxism version outside of the Soviet one as “reactionary” (Marxist newspeak for “heresy”). This included both Czechoslovak reforms and Mao’s Cultural Revolution in equal manner. At that time China actually developed complex relations with Eastern Bloc countries such as Romania and Czechoslovakia behind Kremlin’s back.
Essentially, everyone called each other “reactionary” and claimed their Marxism is the correct one. Any resemblance to past religious wars is entirely incidental. 😉 In 1968 Chinese diplomat Zhou Enlai speaking in Romanian embassy in Beijing called Soviets for “fascist politics, great power chauvinism, national egoism and social imperialism”.^3
Does that ring any bells? 😉
Soviets and China had a number of unresolved border issues in Manchuria. In 1968 China started escalating these, actually killing Soviet border guards. Moscow, knowing of China’s nuclear weapons and Mao’s confrontative attitude preferred to deescalate… which only encouraged Chinese.
Does that remind anything from contemporary history? 😉
At the peak of the conflict in 1969 USSR found itself in the position of a country with high-tech army challenged by a low-tech army which relied on millions of conscripts and human wave tactics.
Does this ring any bells? 😉
In 1969 Soviet army managed to push back overwhelming several Chinese offensives near the island of Zhenbao in spite of their overwhelming numbers with ratios up to 1:10 Soviet to Chinese. That was possible primarily due to the technical advantage, such as then-advanced T-62 tanks.
A ceasefire was signed in 1969 - on Chinese side by the very same Zhou Enlai who called Soviets “fascists” only a year before, but the actual peace agreement was only signed in 1991. The conflict was only completely resolved in 2008 (!) when Russia ceded 340 km² of the disputed lands to China.
As you can see, contrary to the mythology carefully constructed by modern “geopolitical realists”, there’s nothing constant in Russian or Soviet policies. Russia can not always win armed conflicts, it can cede territories and in general conflicts can be won in spite of imbalance of power. Oh, and calling others “fascists” was used by everyone and Russia was both an user and a recipient of this nomination.
Intriguing analysis of Asimov’s Foundation trilogy and its central flaw.
From M. Keith Booker’s Monsters, Mushroom Clouds, and the Cold War: American Science Fiction and the Roots of Postmodernism, 1946-1964 (2001) #scifi#sciencefiction#Marxism#history
“Whoever is a socialist or wants to become one does not obey: he commands himself, he imposes a rule of life on his impulses, on his disorderly aspirations. … The discipline imposed on citizens by the bourgeois state makes them into subjects, people who delude themselves that they exert an influence on the course of events. The discipline of the Socialist Party makes the subject into a citizen: a citizen who is now rebellious, precisely because he has become conscious of his personality and feels it is shackled and cannot freely express itself in the world.”
COMMUNISM IS FREE TIME FOR ALL and nothing more. Any political regime or mode of production that does not have as the ultimate goal of society the reduction of working hours in tandem with the satisfaction of basic human needs cannot be considered truly free. That is the the permanent goal, not something you try and just because you fail once, or10 times, you have to give it up. You have to try 500000, 10000000000, ∞ times. Otherwise, there will be absolutely nothing to distinguish human beings from wild animals.
#Marxism#Communism#FreeTime#Freedom: "Marxism is about leisure, not labour. The only good reason for being a socialist, apart from annoying people you don’t like, is that you don’t like to work. For Oscar Wilde, who was closer in this respect to Marx than to Morris, communism was the condition in which we would lie around all day in various interesting postures of jouissance, dressed in loose crimson garments, reciting Homer to one another and sipping absinthe. And that was just the working day.
There are problems with this vision, as there are with any ethics. Are all your powers to be realised? What about that obsessive desire to beat up Tony Blair? Or should one realise only those impulses that spring from the authentic core of the self? But by what criteria do we judge this? What if my self-realisation clashes with yours? And why should all-round expression beat devoting oneself to a single cause, like Alexei Navalny or Emma Raducanu? Do human capabilities really grow malevolent only by being alienated, lopsided or repressed? And what if we’re half in love with the powers that alienate and repress us, installed as they are inside the human subject rather than purely external to it?
Hegel and Marx have an answer of a kind to the problem of clashing self-fulfilments, which goes like this: realise only those capabilities which allow others to do the same. Marx’s name for this reciprocal self-realisation is ‘communism’."
Today is 87 years since Antonio Gramsci died at the hands of the Italian Fascists.
Gramsci, a founder and leader of the Italian Communist Party, was imprisoned by Mussolini’s regime in 1926. During his imprisonment he wrote extensively about history, politics and society.
His work on the role of culture, ideology, and the consent rulers obtain from those they rule has been influential in understanding how groups gain and maintain power.
#Marx#Marxism#CriticalTheory#PoliticalEconomy#Capitalism: "Ultimately, Bonefeld masterfully interweaves the best of critical theory, placing the critique of the capitalist form of wealth at its heart. In doing so, he has succeeded in producing a book that is sure to illuminate and provoke in equal measure. Some readers may be left despairing having had their hopes shattered. Such an outcome, though, may not be so bad. Bonefeld’s critical theory, much like Adorno’s, does not shy away from despair. The power of critical theory in its despairing mode lies in its evocation of the necessity for another world. One must recognise just how bad things are to pull the handbrake. Perhaps here we should invert the oft-quoted Raymond Williams’ line. To be truly radical is to make despair possible rather than false hopes convincing. In this, Bonefeld has surely succeeded." https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/21476_a-critical-theory-of-economic-compulsion-wealth-suffering-negation-by-werner-bonefeld-reviewed-by-ross-sparkes/
#Marx#Marxism#Spinoza#Philosophy#WageSlavery#Work: "WILL LEWALLEN: You write that most resistance to work is often focused on the specific conditions of employment rather than the general conditions of wage labor. How could something like a four-day workweek help tackle these more universal conditions? And more broadly, what would the effect of a shorter working week be on the political imaginary?
JASON READ: That’s an important question. I think reducing work time would necessarily have the positive impact of creating new ways for people to think about their identities and place in the world other than through work. One of the things you have to take seriously about people’s investment in work, given that they are working so much, is that their free time is usually dedicated to what Marx calls the basic “animal functions” of sleeping, eating, etc. You create a sense in which people go to work because their friends are there; everything they understand about sociality comes from work. The more people work, the more they will begin to identify with work.
So reducing the working week or working days would free people from this cycle. If people have time to do something other than buy groceries and do their laundry just to return to work the next day, they can produce another sense of themselves outside the confines of work. Imagination functions like a wedge, a small point of entry for another way of thinking; if acted upon, it can then push for more. For example, the reduced workweek would give people more time to engage in politics, to demand less work still. One thing that limits political possibilities is work itself." https://jacobin.com/2024/04/marx-spinoza-four-day-workweek
"Even if nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were not fundamentally racist (it was), there could be no doubt that the far-right #nationalism on offer today is. ...
national belonging satisfies not a political need but rather a baser human one, a need for meaning and belonging. If that is indeed the case, we are likely living not through the twilight of nationalism but rather its violent rebirth."
#Lefebvre#Marxism#Cities#Urbanism#Communism#Ecology#Environmentalism: "Describing Lefebvre as an ‘ecological thinker’, however anachronistic it may seem, is not absurd in the eyes of his daughter, quite the contrary. She reports that he was ‘very good friends’ with Bernard Charbonneau (1910-96), a precursor of radical ecology and author of the book Le Jardin de Babylone, published in 1969 and reissued by the post-Situationist publisher L’Encyclopédie des Nuisances in 2002. ‘They saw each other in the Pyrenees, where they lived 15 km apart. Charbonneau was a secondary school teacher and lived in a house with no electricity or any modern comforts,’ recalls Armelle Lefebvre, who sees in her father’s legacy the seeds of an ‘ecosocialism’.
Kristin Ross maintains that Lefebvre’s conceptualisation of the Marxist notion of ‘appropriation’ helps her to understand the strength of contemporary territorial struggles, ‘in particular this idea of reclaiming lived space and lived time’. ‘Lefebvre believed that individuals and groups could not constitute themselves as political subjects without generating a space – both physical and social – that they themselves appropriate, manage and “produce”,’ she explains. ‘This is a profoundly ecological idea, and one that is certainly at the heart of territorial movements and struggles for land restitution such as Notre-Dame-des-Landes, StopCopCity in Atlanta, Standing Rock and, of course, Earth Uprisings. Appropriation implies “use” rather than ownership.’
She adds that ‘Lefebvre wrote in a very visionary way in the 1970s about how struggles against land grabbing invariably created alliances between different kinds of people, who sometimes came together despite great ideological and identity differences – that was a process that the people of the ZAD experienced, lived and described as “composition”.’ Lefebvre’s work, long obscured in France, still deserves our full attention." https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/henri-lefebvre-dogmatism-in-reverse?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=verso_blog
#Gramsci#Marx#Marxism#Communism#Italy: "Originally published in Italian in 1996, on the cusp of the 60th anniversary of Gramsci’s death, this recently republished work is still timely and necessary. Without a doubt, Gramsci Contested is a great contribution to furthering Gramscian thought for future activists and scholars. Since the point at which the book ends in 2012, there have been many more books creatively using Gramsci’s ideas in order to write history and theory, from Sara Salem’s Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt to Massimo Modonesi’s and Diana Fuentes’ Gramsci en México – both of which are forging new grounds for the study of Gramsci in both English and Spanish.
As a reactionary counterrevolution remade society, the New Left was decimated by violent repression, and the Soviet Union collapsed, many on the radical left reevaluated the politics of the 1960s-1970s.
A new generation of radicals—together with many ‘60s veterans—critiqued the failures of Marxism-Leninism and grappled with fundamental changes in social, political, and economic life. As the ruling class embraced neoliberalism and repressive law and order politics, much of the left turned away from party building and attempting to capture state power.
Their analysis of social changes and the failures of state socialism led many militants to reject the state, and the late twentieth century was marked by a spread of anarchist politics throughout the radical left. This subterranean growth of US anarchism burst into view in the 1999 revolt against the World Trade Organization.
Beyond the growing popularity of formal anarchist ideology and organizations, an anarchist ethos had spread across the radical left. As David Graeber put it in 2010, “for activists, ‘anarchist process’ has become synonymous with the basic principles of how one facilitates a meeting or organizes street actions.”
This anarchist process includes consensus-based decision making, organizing in horizontal and non-hierarchical fashions, coalescing in networks and bottom-up federations rather than democratic centralist parties, and a commitment to direct action in many forms.
#Marxism#ClassStruggle#History#PhIlosophy#Capitalism: "For Bensaïd, “indignation is a beginning. A way to stand up and start moving. First comes indignation, then rebellion, then we shall see.” Among all of Bensaïd’s “heretical” contributions to the renewal of Marxism and revolutionary theory, the most important, in my eyes, is his radical break with the positivist, determinist, and fatalist ideology of inevitable Progress that so heavily weighed on “orthodox” Marxism, particularly in France.
His rereading of Marx, with the help of Auguste Blanqui and Walter Benjamin, led him to understand history as a series of crossroads and bifurcations; a field of possibilities whose issue is unpredictable. Class struggle is central in the historical process, but its result is uncertain."
It's #BlackHistoryMonth, and in 2024 I'm reflecting on the fact that although I've known about Walter Rodney and his seminal work "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa" for years, it wasn't until I started reading it last year that I found out that Rodney was assassinated by his own Guyanese government in a car bombing. He was 38.
I'm obligated to point out to fellow white people, in case you missed it, the trend of white people lionizing a heroic Black person in a show of solidarity while studiously ignoring the vicious violence enacted against that person by the powers that be.
Also, Rodney was banned from Jamaica and from his teaching position at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica. This caused protests that escalated to riots in Kingston in 1968. Part of the wave of protests that swept the world from that year to the next.
#Marx#Marxism#Capitalism#Ecology: "I think that the ‘original Marxian message’ – the theory of revolution as the self-emancipation of the oppressed – is still relevant today. The fall of the Wall confirmed Marx’s intuition: it is impossible to ‘build socialism’ without the working people (or against them), without a genuine revolutionary democracy – of which the Paris Commune gave the first historic example.
However, I believe that this 19th-century Marxian heritage must be complemented by the contributions of 20th-century Marxists: Marxism is a thought in motion, which did not stop with the death of Marx and Engels. It is also an open form of thought, capable of integrating (critically) the contributions of other revolutionary currents: utopian socialisms and feminisms, libertarian socialisms and romantic socialisms (William Morris, Charles Péguy, Georges Sorel, Bernard Lazare, Gustav Landauer), as well as the contributions of the human sciences, from Max Weber to Sigmund Freud, to cite two obvious examples.
A word on the ecological question. It is present in Marx’s writings, as the work of John Bellamy Foster, Paul Burkett and Kohei Saito has shown, especially from the 1860s onwards. But it occupies only a marginal place, which is easily explained by the fact that the ecological crisis was not in his time, as it is today, a decisive social and political issue. The Marxism of the 21st century can only be an eco-Marxism, in other words, a theory that places the question of the destruction of ecosystems and climate change at the centre of the debate on capitalism and the socialist alternative."
#Capitalism#Marx#Marxism#BigTech#Technofeudalism#Feudalism: "In Technofeudalism, you argue capitalism has brought about its own demise, but not in the way that, say, Marx would have expected. Capitalism has its own contradictions — most fundamentally in the antagonism between capital and labor — and yet those contradictions seem to have produced a mutation that is perhaps worse than anyone might’ve expected. So how did capitalism kill itself and what is replacing it?
YANIS VAROUFAKIS
This book falls squarely within the Marxist political-economic tradition. I wrote it as a piece of Marxist scholarship. So, from my Marxist perspective, this is a tragic book to have to write.
The contradictions of capitalism didn’t lead to the anticipated resolution where, after all these centuries of class stratification, society would be distilled into two classes, poised for a high-noon clash. This decisive confrontation between oppressor and oppressed would result in the liberation of humanity — the emancipation of humanity from all class conflict. Instead of that, however, this clash between the capitalist — the bourgeoisie — and the proletariat ended up in the complete victory of the bourgeoisie: a complete loss after 1991, especially.
In the absence of a competitor in the form of trade unions — the organized working class — capitalism went into a rampant dynamic evolution that caused this mutation into what I call cloud capital. This transformation effectively marked the end of traditional capitalism. It killed capitalism — a development that embodies a Marxist-Hegelian contradiction, but not the kind of contradiction we would have hoped for.
Cloud capital has killed off markets and replaced them with a kind of a digital fiefdom where not just proletarians — the precarious — but bourgeois people and vassal capitalists are all producing surplus value for the vassal capitalists. They are producing rents."
"If raw economies of scale are the deciding factor in struggle, then meaningful social change can only come through proletarian uprisings or movements of sufficient size. Hence anything that isn't building up working-class institutions and/or The Party is a waste of time.
But if capitalism is riddled with inefficiencies and potential exploits, then actively being able to search through them to find critical points of leverage is far more effective because it enables force multipliers and attack vectors which can give you capacity on par if not exceeding mass movements."
Cheers to whoever posted this. It's an excellent essay. Yes it's long but it needs that.
Today in Labor History February 15, 1764: the city of St. Louis was established in Spanish Louisiana (now Missouri). In the 1800s, St. Louis would grow to become the second largest port in the U.S. and one of the major centers of labor organizing. In 1877, during the Great Train Strike, black and white workers united to take over the town in what some called the St. Louis Commune, after the Paris Commune, a few years earlier. The uprising in St. Louis was led by the socialist Workingmen’s Party, fighting for the 8-hour workday and an end to child labor. The Commune was quashed after soldiers killed 18 workers.
SESSION CLIPS: We are working on getting our 101 sessions broken into clips that are more easily digestible & referenceable. Accompanied by Chris Blankenhorn & @thegreengarret.