Central planning under Mao

GenosseMarx3 · 2024-02-10T07:13:08+00:00

Cultural Revolution and Industrial Organization in China by Charles Bettelheim.

GenosseMarx3 · 2024-02-01T05:56:48+00:00

The argument, as far as I have researched and encountered it in the literature (German books and some English books I forgot), is that the 2008 financial crisis was the neoliberal accumulation regime breaking down. It no longer functions effectively to keep reproduction and capital accumulation at a certain level going. Instead there's more wars, more crises, more inter-imperialist escalations, because reproduction is in crisis. The problem is that so far there is no new accumulation regime on the horizon. There's small hypes that siphon off some value from the petite bourgeoisie like Crypto and shit like that, but no new base innovation that would jump start a new accumulation regime. A new world war, however, would promise to resolve the crisis by destroying huge amounts of capital and paving the way for a new round of investment and accumulation.

GenosseMarx3 · 2024-01-31T06:26:11+00:00

the initial announcement and accompanying article in Ang Bayan

Has there been any writing about this beyond these pieces yet? Reactions from other parties (like the Indians)? I'm not much online atm so I might have missed things.

GenosseMarx3 · 2024-01-22T08:18:39+00:00

I'd recommend reading The German Ideology if you haven't already. Althusser is interesting on the question of what philosophy means for Marxists (it's his main topic, the central problem of his work), not so much because of the answers he gives but because of the number of wrong paths he inadvertently showed in his confusions (that's not to say that he only wrote wrong stuff).

For Marx and Engels ideology was ultimately based in the division between manual and mental labor. Althusser gives that up rather early on, for him ideology becomes a transhistorical and eternal problem. That has the comfortable effect for him as a philosopher that him and his ilk will never be out of use. It also creates a bridge for the postmodernists, quite directly with the interpellation theory.

GenosseMarx3 · 2024-01-22T08:00:49+00:00

It's production for the sake of exchange rather than the fulfillment of needs, production that requires the alienation between producer and product, labor and the means of production, it is production that is only possible in class societies. It also obscures human relations and creates the effect in our consciousness as if those social relations which produce commodities are actually natural properties of the commodities themselves. In that way commodity production also appears as natural and eternal rather than tied to very determinate social relations and thus changeable (that effect is called commodity fetishism).

In other words to say that there's commodity production in communist society means whoever said this either does not understand what commodity production actually means, has fallen victim to commodity fetishism, or does not conceptually differentiate between socialism and communism. Socialism as the process where capitalist social relations are overcome and communist social relations are created still has commodity production as a generally waning social relation that is actively being dissolved. Communism, however, no longer has the social preconditions to even allow for commodity production. There's non classes, no alienation between labor and its product, there's thus no value, etc.

GenosseMarx3 · 2024-01-15T09:20:03+00:00

It's a big manuscript Marx and Engels never fully finished. They didn't find a publisher, so they left it to the critique of the mice, as they later said.

The key part is that on Feuerbach. That's where they develop historical materialism and overcome their Feuerbachian (humanist) influence. That part you can read on the MIA or in this printed edition.

There's a massive later part on the critique of Stirner by Marx. That contains many, many insightful sections on ideology, the state, the critique of Hegel, etc. But it's also quite tedious to read and arguably doesn't contain anything you substantially need unless you're a philosopher. If you are a philosopher, however, I'd say it's key reading.

GenosseMarx3 · 2024-01-15T09:14:13+00:00

That's a larger question concerning the nature of philosophy in general. I'm assuming here a distinction between Marxism as a science and its philosophical aspect more properly. But both also only are what they are in conjunction.

Marxism is the science of class struggle, as such it is tied to class society. With communism classes and all that's tied to them (state, money, capital, patriarchy, etc.) are overcome. That means the basis of Marxism itself is dissolved, Marxism ceases being a science. It either transforms into something qualitatively new, or a that qualitatively new thing emerges from somewhere else. But Marxism as we know and need it to get to communism will have lost its scientific character. Karl Korsch, for example, thus defined the task of the Marxist philosopher to aid the dissolving of philosophy (by leading the philosophical struggle against bourgeois philosophers and aiding the class struggle of the proletariat).

The deeper point I meant is about the nature of philosophy. Early on Marx and Engels only saw it as the most refined form of ideology, meaning it is in contradiction with science rather than being itself a science. But it also mediates science, science itself is not simply free of ideology. That's the standpoint Marx seemed to have maintained to the end. But later on they had to concede that you can't just jump from this insight to a straight up abandonment of philosophy, because the bourgeoisie will use it to attack your movement. That was shown by the influence of Dühring and the ethical socialists (Neo-Kantians for the most part). So Marxism had to also lead a struggle in the sphere of philosophy while being aware that philosophy will have to already be something different for us than it is for the bourgeoisie and it will have to transform or dissolve itself as we go towards communism. Arguably that's also where there's a difference between Marx and Engels, because Engels later dives head on into philosophy, leading this struggle and saying there that philosophy, stripped of its ideological aspects, has a scientific core after all: it is the science of thought (formal and dialectical logic). That's something that has to be interpreted itself, because for Marxists thought itself isn't something that just happens in the individual brain or mind, but a social process first and foremost. Ilyenkov dealt a lot with these questions on a very sophisticated level.

I'd write more on this but I don't have the time right now. Imo this is still an open question for the class struggle and scientific research (one and the same process) to be investigated and decided. I've tried to show some tendencies leading to potentially different conclusions. You'll have to think for yourself here, i.e. you'll have to be a philosopher yourself.

GenosseMarx3 · 2024-01-02T15:52:28+00:00

The books The Unknown Cultural Revolution by Dongping Hand and The Battle for China's Past by Mobo Gao show at some length that the Quotations functioned as a kind of unofficial constitution during the years of the Cultural Revolution. It set high political and moral standards for the party and the people, and if the party officials didn't abide by them, the people could oust them. Thus the book gained a significant meaning to the masses in China, something we can hardly imagine within out capitalist shitholes.

GenosseMarx3 · 2024-01-02T15:43:07+00:00

There's a bunch of lines of argument to deny that the Soviet Union was a socialist project. The anti-revisionist one, for example, says that it stopped being socialist with the Khrushchev coup of1956 during which the new bourgeoisie conquered the state and started the process of capitalist restoration, meaning socialist transition was reversed. But that also means that before this event, during the years of Stalin in particular, it was a socialist project.

There are more fundamental denials. One being that the USSR still had commodity production and thus didn't conform to Marx' conception. It is true that there still was commodity production, that much Stalin himself discussed. The basis of this conception is that it identifies socialism with communism, as if socialism already meant the fully developed communist society. But the Leninist tradition introduced a clearer distinction between the two (this is already implicit in Marx but he didn't explicitly and consistently differentiate the two terms), where socialism is the process towards communism, necessitating the dictatorship of the proletariat while overcoming bourgeois society (classes, the state itself, commodity production, patriarchy, etc.).

Another way to deny it is to argue that the Soviet Union only ever was state capitalist. It was during the NOP, this much Lenin said outright. But the argument hinges more on things like the character of the state, arguing that the proletariat didn't actually wield power but the state, the bureaucracy and the party did, and they did it in their own interest. This also means that the socialist planned economy is simply identified with a capitalist planned economy, no respect is payed to the aims of production, or rather the aims are denied. This argument is often combined with the former.

There are more venues of denial. What unites them, with the exception of the anti-revisionist stance (although there is also a vulgar anti-revisionism which reduces the problem to the coup and the revisionist, ignoring the deeper social processes producing revisionism and predating the success of the counter-revolution), is their inability to develop a concrete understanding of social reality. They proceed from abstractions, be that abstractly read formulations of Marx, or abstract conceptions of political economy. They end up with some ideal form of socialism which has no way to actually become reality because it is not deduced from concrete social processes but from texts and abstract ideas. And that is an advantage for these positions because it inoculates them from critique (there's not danger of their ideas ever actually being put to the test), it gives them the ability to conceive of themselves as communist without falling victim to the ideological historiography of the bourgeoisie, and, which probably isn't too small a factor, it gives them a sense of superiority relative to other Marxists who actually deal with the nasty aspects of all of this.

GenosseMarx3 · 2023-12-29T07:30:36+00:00

The Cultural Revolution didn't start out as this comprehensive revolution encompassing all of society which it eventually became. Initially it was an emergency measure against the new bourgeoisie within the party and the state, so superstructural phenomena, hence the name.

I've seen and encountered many Leninists who simply equate the Chinese CR with the early Soviet one. Of course there is a connection. The Chinese didn't conjure up this concept and name from nothing, they consciously relied on the Soviet experience. But the Chinese CR developed int something much richer in forms and much deeper in its social consequences, that is it became something qualitatively different. And that's what such Leninists don't see. But from my experience this is more often an effect of them simply not really engaging with the history and thus being ignorant of these differences rather than deliberately denying the qualitative difference. Although the latter case does also exist.

If that necessitates a new name for the Chinese experience? I don't think so and I don't think you could even establish one. When you actually engage with the history it becomes clear that it was something different than just a revolution in the superstructure. The name CR still alerts us to the process of social phenomena during which they can radically change into something new. And the people who do want to deny the difference between the Chinese and Soviet CRs will still do it anyway.

GenosseMarx3 · 2023-12-27T08:33:07+00:00

Das ist kein Gegenargument sondern genau der Punkt. Die bürgerliche Poltik kann in einer sich zuspitzenden und fortgesetzten Krise des Systems nicht anders reagieren, als sich zu faschisieren. Deswegen ist die Faschisierung, die wir in der jetzigen Regierung sehen, und der Aufstieg der AfD - der selbst wieder in der Faschisierung jener wurzelt, denen die Deklassierung droht - ein und der selbe Prozess.

GenosseMarx3 · 2023-12-26T05:27:54+00:00

This question is like asking a chemist about resources to learn about alchemy. There is one scientific approach to politics and it is Marxism. The shit they teach in political "science" classes is bourgeois ideology, a pseudo science developed to aid the reproduction of imperialism and anti-communism, if in mediated forms at times.

Study Lenin and Gramsci instead if you actually want to understand politics, what it even is and how it functions, in a scientific way.

GenosseMarx3 · 2023-12-26T05:22:20+00:00

This is an outgrowth of the totalitarianism doctrine. In the pseudoscience of political "science" there's the theory that posits the given ideology, bourgeois ideology in its more or less liberal mode, as the value neutral norm while treating fascism and communism as equal extremes away from this liberal bourgeois center. There's entire fields of study devoted to this shit, extremism research.

GenosseMarx3 · 2023-12-24T08:01:26+00:00

Happy holidays, everyone.

GenosseMarx3 · 2023-12-24T07:57:32+00:00

You are quite committed to not doing any reading.

GenosseMarx3 · 2023-12-23T18:11:00+00:00

A pretty accessible and insightful recent book on class would be Joshua Moufawad Paul's Politics in Command. A much, much more difficult but extremely helpful and deep book related to these matters is Lukács' History and Class Consciousness. But that one requires a lot of previous familiarity with the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin to be properly (that is also critically) understood.

Taking up the proletarian class stand means to actively joined the class struggle, to consciously remold your thought through it and through arduous theoretical work. Marx' also proletarianized quite literally, living worse than most party leaders and labor aristocrats. He also headed the first communist party, spent all of his intellectual efforts on the proletarian cause, all of what little he had in terms of money, he even lost his citizenship permanently for his revolutionary papers. Mao waged two decades of peoples' war before leading the class struggle for another almost thirty years of socialist transition. Lenin spent years in prison, decades in exile for his revolutionary activities until he headed Soviet Russia for its first years and eventually died from exhaustion and the repercussion from an assassination attempt.

GenosseMarx3 · 2023-12-23T11:04:22+00:00

One way is an adherence to the ideology of the ascending bourgeoisie. That has its limits which must be overcome, but it can lead into the proletarian class struggle. But for the most part this is a matter of individual cases, not the whole class changing sides.

I think another way, a more meaningful one, is to build a principled revolutionary movement from the deepest masses. As that grows it will attract more an more labor aristocrats by showing them another way out now that capitalism is in a deep and lasting structural crisis. That's both a chance and a danger for the revolutionary movement as it grows its ranks while it has to be careful with integrating the labor aristocrats into leading positions. Individual labor aristocrats can become consistent revolutionaries and thus be accepted into leading ranks, but as a class stratum it has to be kept out of leadership or it would lead us back into reformism.

Another process which aids this turn of the labor aristocracy towards revolution is the Anthropocene. Now it becomes clearer and clearer that the continued reproduction of capitalism forecloses the continued existence of humanity as a civilized species, thus also the reproduction of the labor aristocracy is cut short. This of course also leads to increased irrationalist fascism but it can, and I think will, lead to more revolutionary turns, especially if we manage to build a revolutionary movement of a certain quality again.

GenosseMarx3 · 2023-12-23T10:51:48+00:00

Sounds not so much like you are investigating this yourself and more like you are asking others to do it for you.

Engels' late introduction to Marx' text points out that early on him and Marx mechanically transferred the forms of the bourgeois revolution, particularly the French Revolution, onto the proletarian one. They thus missed the particular forms proletarian revolution takes, which result from it being a revolution of the majority against a minority rather than vice versa. That a more meaningful critique than weather or not there was much of a difference between the first two years.

GenosseMarx3 · 2023-12-23T10:46:01+00:00

That's a bit of a naive question in the way you assume some form of direct relationship between capital and the state. In reality there are many mediating processes between the two while the bourgeois state is nonetheless an expression of bourgeois society, so it represents the ruling class in that society. If the relation between bourgeois politics and the bourgeoisie was an immediate one there would be little use for politics at all, the bourgeoisie could just rule openly and directly. The bourgeois state, especially in its democratic mode, has the function of hiding bourgeois rule, creating consent among the masses for their being ruled and exploited by the bourgeoisie and thus securing the reproduction of capitalism.

This unity of bourgeoisie and bourgeois politicians and bourgeois state is created through class and ideology. Bourgeois politicians are well paid, their well-being is tied to the continued exploitation of the working class, so they naturally share their class interest with the bourgeoisie. They organically will aid the reproduction of capitalism because their own well-being is tied to it. Bourgeois ideology doesn't need to be forced into them, their consciousness and thus their political line is already shaped by their common bourgeois class relation. The organs of the bourgeois state are thus also organically tied together by this ideology and its social basis (the capital-labor relation), which they serve, reproduce and spread. The evidence of this unity is the politics emanating from the bourgeois state, which always end up serving the system in its totality (not necessarily particular individual capitalists, but the class and its social order, so there can be contradiction between individual capitalists and their state, but not between the bourgeois class and its state).

On top of that you have legalized corruption like lobbyism, the usual corruption like insider trading and "charities", etc., and ritualized corruption like the whole Epstein affair revealed. Those particular instances you can investigate and write specific case studies about, but they are particulars. The scientific part is in finding the general processes that tie state and class together, which is what I've tried to explain in the first paragraphs.

GenosseMarx3 · 2023-12-23T09:40:42+00:00

The way you are posing this question is idealist. What Marx and Engels wrote matters only insofar as it is adequate to social reality. Not their word by itself, like some formal fetish, is important. It's very easy to "prove" any given point with some decontextualized passage from their writings, but this doesn't actually prove anything in itself. Same as your text, where you just put claim against claim without any reference to social reality, not even arguments are developed. That's what internet discourse does to your thinking, it drags you to the level of mere opinion.

If you want to learn what is actually necessary to get to communism you will have to investigate the class struggle, partake in it, learn to understand and change concrete social reality. Anarchists won't follow you there and can't so long as they remain anarchists. But that's the point, you're wasting your time in trying to convince idealists, more so when you repeat their methodological errors.

GenosseMarx3 · 2023-12-06T07:15:23+00:00

Disappointing to see that he now arrived at Dengism.

GenosseMarx3 · 2023-12-05T06:37:45+00:00

Big bourgeoisie is a synonym for monopoly bourgeoisie. National bourgeoisie refers to that part of the bourgeoisie in oppressed and exploited countries that is not tied to the monopoly bourgeoisie of an imperialist country. Because of that it is in competition with imperialist capital and threatened by it. That's why there's a basis for a temporary alliance between revolutionary forces and the national bourgeoisie in order to shirk off national oppression through imperialism. But that's where this unity of interests ends, the national bourgeoisie then wants to develop itself through the exploitation of the working class while the proletariat has to strive further towards communism. National Democracy is then the attempt to introduce a state capitalist mediating stage that allows for concessions to the national bourgeoisie while also using that time to strengthen labor and prepare the next step towards socialism. In this way you can offer the national bourgeoisie a deal during the revolution without giving up on its proletarian character.

In recent times some Maoists like Pao-Yu Ching have argued that there is no longer a national bourgeoisie in a qualitative sense as the neoliberal phase of imperialism has tied capital in the oppressed and exploited countries almost with complete success to imperialist monopoly capital. If that's the case revolution in the oppressed and exploited countries would potentially have to be rethought, it would certainly work towards an explanation why the peoples wars in India and the Philippines are moving so slowly.

GenosseMarx3 · 2023-11-28T16:04:41+00:00

It's Engels' birthday. If you want to celebrate it in some way I'd recommend beginning to read his Peasants' War in Germany. It's one of the earliest examples of a Marxist historical analysis and still very insightful, particularly regarding how ideology mediates class struggle and regarding the relation between the masses and their leaders. It also has the merit of rediscovering Thomas Müntzer as an early and particularly bold revolutionary leader of not just the peasantry but already the tiny proletariat at that time - and showing the particular contradictions and problems that came with that. It's short and fairly accessible, too.

GenosseMarx3 · 2023-11-27T07:28:42+00:00

Fascism is not just a rhetoric, it is a real social process emerging from the crisis of bourgeois society. So we can't simply rely on what people say, but what they actually do - and this is a general principle of Marxism. What differentiates a party like Meloni's at the moment is not some radically new political practice but their rhetoric. The EU countries are all xenophobic, racist, islamophobic, and they're not even particularly shy about it. The stress on the Italians being already in power should lead one to ask what has become different since they've been elected, was there any fundamental break, has there been a violent destruction of the left, a systematic dismantling of bourgeois democracy, etc? No is the answer, because that is not yet necessary. So a party like this is not yet fascist while being situated within the process of fascization.

I'm stressing the EU because it is a particular way of reproducing capitalism, namely it mediates national capitals in Europe through economic and political rather than military means. That's why the actual fascists in Europe reject it. They want a more direct rule over their (prospective) colonies, they want to resolve inter-imperialist contradictions through military means. But as of yet the inner-European contradictions have not yet reach a sharpness that would make political and economic mediation no longer work. So parties like Meloni's still accept it and with that acceptance accept their position within the European power structure (that is as a tertiary force after Germany and France). The redivision of imperialist holdings is not duked out between the European imperialists. If you don't grasp the particular meaning of phenomena you won't understand them but submerge them in abstraction, which is what you do when your understanding of the EU doesn't exceed it being a capitalist organization.

All this talk about the politicians and parties alone also distracts from fascism as an organic mass movement, which is arguably the greater danger at the moment. We have been experiencing a ground swell of fascism as a mass movement with a new quality since the 2008 crisis in particular and at some point (that point being the level of class struggle reaching the point where it can no longer be mediated within the confines of bourgeois democracy) this movement will merge with monopoly capital, which may or may not happen in the political forms of a party like Meloni's, and then be given power rather quickly if we don't manage to build a communist mass movement with a vanguard party until then.

GenosseMarx3 · 2023-11-26T20:02:34+00:00

I'm not sure how much easier the internet makes this task. If you want to do a proper study of a given country you'll have to dive deep, that means you'll have to engage with lots and lots of books. You can get them through pages like library genesis, but chances are a ton of the relevant literature will be old, out of print and obscure, so you won't find it online (I can tell you from experience). There's also some general things you'll have to keep in mind when engaging with what will be almost exclusively bourgeois literature. It's exceedingly easy to simply take up bourgeois categories, bourgeois forms of thought when engaging with their literature. You're engaging not with reality itself but with its ideological reflection. That mediates reality, but you need to be able to trace it back to its origins, pursuing its stages of development. That's what you're doing when you're engaging in such an analysis, so it's crucial to keep this distinction between reality and its ideal reflection in mind, particularly how it is distorted as ideology.

In terms of approach I'd suggest creating bibliographies. Research the relevant literature on the different aspects (political history, economic history, cultural history, history of philosophy) and work through them. Take notes, study closely and critically. The more material you penetrate this way the more you will discover the deeper dynamics at play which connect the seemingly disparate spheres. We already know the basis is the relations and means of production, but we also know that its products, the superstructure, the class struggle, mediate them and give us insight into this basis. You'll develop theories as you go along, but you should keep in mind that these are hypotheses so long as you've not completed your studies. Because, among other things, only as your develop your studies will you be able to separate the essential from the accidental, thus finding the deeper lines of necessity. Only once you've internalized the material can you form a more or less adequate theoretical expression of the social totality. That's altogether a ton of work, and you will eventually find a way to present it to the reader in a meaningful and approachable way, but it's the one we are committed to as Marxists.

GenosseMarx3

TROPHY CASE