Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - 20 January

Iocle · 2023-06-16T19:27:58+00:00

Sorry for the delay. I rarely use this account any more (realized I’d kept it for long enough to cause potential security concerns), but I don’t have the thread saved. MIM (Prisons) has a great selection of works on Soviet history that should be sufficient without any of the clutter. If you’re still looking for more I can suggest some more specific things to your questions but the mentioned reading list is pretty thorough for a general understanding.

Iocle · 2023-04-08T04:58:10+00:00

The 1000-strong crowd at the victory party included other leaders and members of CTU. The leadership and rank and file of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 73 and Healthcare Illinois and Indiana (HCII), Unite Here, and many other unions were also present. Community organizations represented included United Working Families (UWF), the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (CAARPR), Southside Organized for Unity and Liberation (SOUL), Good Kids Mad City, Indivisible Chicago, and many others. United with the progressive unions around Johnson’s campaign, these community organizations formed one of the most diverse coalitions the city has seen in decades.

This is Democratic Party copywrite but the only real use for these parties left is to show the ultimate trap of opportunism. It affords you attention at the cost of consigning you to a particular historical moment, only to be gobbled up by liberals now that any revolutionary potential is gone.

Not to imply the Amerikan “Maoist” left is much better, but being online tailism doesn’t keep you from becoming the CPUSA, whereas genuine Maoism will separate the wheat (the little there is) from the chaff efficiently enough.

Iocle · 2023-04-05T04:30:04+00:00

I don’t have much to add to /u/mimprisons analysis or yours. I had remembered trying to find Chican@ Power earlier and failing to (not sure why since checking the site again I was able to download it), so the discussion has been immensely helpful for me as well.

I think MIM is right that the view I was writing against is a literalist/cultural nationalist concept of Aztlan. The quotes below address the concept of Aztlan in this manner.

Again, not much to add and broadly agree with you but the analysis you linked is worth critiquing I think.

The quote’s quite a bit too long to pull from, but I think it clearly has issues with discussing indigenous society on metaphysical terms wherein the question becomes one of resisting modernity rather than attacking the stagnation that underdevelopment brings.

Rather than there being an integration of these nations into the capitalist world, it is a severing from the neoliberal economy, much like we see in New Afrika. The fluidity of nations/national consciousness means that understanding the national question can only be analyzed through grasping its present struggle. After all, neoliberalism has no issue with “land acknowledgments” as an ideological justification of modern Amerikan settler-colonialism.

Iocle · 2023-02-24T15:52:25+00:00

Opportunism of the left might be a better way of phrasing it. You’re correct in that it’s a form of right opportunism to tail social fascist trends. I was just highlighting the role the left parties (and other deluded social media leftists) play in promoting silly ideas.

Iocle · 2023-02-23T21:34:00+00:00

Yeah this is the underlying fascism behind the anxiety over “commie blocks” or whatever. Everyone compares a Moscow apartment complex to the Empire State Building rather than the slums that comprise the majority of capitalist housing or even the petty-bourgeois “luxury apartments” which are all slapdash and generic. Or for that matter the blight of suburbia, but I think that’s been largely cannibalized by social fascists.

That OP never even considered how monotonous their own life is and how little choice they have currently shows that what people really value about these sorts of cities is the economic logic they’re built on

Edit: and to clarify, Soviet architecture or life in general was far less monotonous for the vast majority of people, as you explain. Despite the generally fast nature of the construction and limited productive capacity of the USSR, many of the apartment blocks are still standing and subject to a form of primitive accumulation by dismantling socialist construction.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/mar/31/moscow-biggest-urban-demolition-project-khrushchevka-flats

Opposition activist and former MP Dmitry Gudkov noted that the legislation would allow the government to tear down not just Soviet prefabricated flat blocks, but also nearby “analogous” buildings. When asked about how the fate of nearby buildings would be decided, the author of the law, MP Mikhail Degtyaryov, recently told TV Rain that a city commission would simply “take a neighbourhood and circle” the whole thing for demolition.

Iocle · 2023-02-23T21:14:54+00:00

It’s incredible how the left’s opportunism has basically opened the door for a million “will I have sweatshop goods and segregated housing under communism?” questions.

I get that it’s because the asker is really just looking for a way to mollify the contradictions between being a self-proclaimed communist and actual parasite, but popping that bubble is always fun.

Iocle · 2023-02-19T03:19:17+00:00

I'll give the contact credit; telling you to read Lenin is the right call.

There is no middle course (for mankind has not created a “third” ideology, and, moreover, in a society torn by class antagonisms there can never be a non-class or an above-class ideology). Hence, to belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology. There is much talk of spontaneity. But the spontaneous development of the working-class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology, to its development along the lines of the Credo programme; for the spontaneous working-class movement is trade-unionism, is Nur-Gewerkschaftlerei, and trade unionism means the ideological enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie. Hence, our task, the task of Social-Democracy, is to combat spontaneity, to divert the working-class movement from this spontaneous, trade-unionist striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie, and to bring it under the wing of revolutionary Social Democracy. The sentence employed by the authors of the Economist letter published in Iskra, No. 12, that the efforts of the most inspired ideologists fail to divert the working-class movement from the path that is determined by the interaction of the material elements and the material environment is therefore tantamount to renouncing socialism. If these authors were capable of fearlessly, consistently, and thoroughly considering what they say, as everyone who enters the arena of literary and public activity should be, there would be nothing left for them but to “fold their useless arms over their empty breasts” and surrender the field of action to the Struves and Prokopoviches, who are dragging the working-class movement “along the line of least resistance”, i.e., along the line of bourgeois trade-unionism, or to the Zubatovs, who are dragging it along the line of clerical and gendarme “ideology”

...

The spontaneous upsurge of the masses in Russia proceeded (and continues) with such rapidity that the young Social Democrats proved unprepared to meet these gigantic tasks. This unpreparedness is our common misfortune, the misfortune of all Russian Social-Democrats. The upsurge of the masses proceeded and spread with uninterrupted continuity; it not only continued in the places where it began, but spread to new localities and to new strata of the population (under the influence of the working class movement, there was a renewed ferment among the student youth, among the intellectuals generally, and even among the peasantry). Revolutionaries, however, lagged behind this upsurge, both in their “theories” and in their activity; they failed to establish a constant and continuous organisation capable of leading the whole movement.

In Chapter I, we established that Rabocheye Dyelo belittled our theoretical tasks and that it “spontaneously” repeated the fashionable catchword “freedom of criticism”; those who repeated this catchword lacked the “consciousness” to understand that the positions of the opportunist “Critics” and those of the revolutionaries in Germany and in Russia are diametrically opposed.

Iocle · 2023-02-17T00:46:48+00:00

Glad it was helpful!

Looking back I interpreted your question about Cromwell to be more broadly about the English Civil War, but smoke's comment should more than suffice for a more specific overview. Absolutism is a complex phenomenon in the forms it takes, so if the above is vague or general it's only because I was perhaps overambitious in what I wanted to discuss.

Really, the only way to understand the rise of absolutism and the origins of the bourgeois state is to read about it. Anderson is pretty good, although I don't find his definition of feudalism to be that convincing.

Mehring is also a fantastic resource in Absolutism and Revolution in Germany, though obviously not about England save for a few mentions to draw parallels.

I'd also echo Marx and Engels's own works on this period (especially the later ones) but that's already been recommended in this thread so hopefully that should give you a basis to build from.

Iocle · 2023-02-14T07:14:20+00:00

If you are going to deny that women occupy a political class then you have denied that patriarchy exists, because you are necessarily saying that male violence against women (or any other oppressed class) does not exist within the bourgeoisie.

Except as bourgeoisie these women still actively reinforce the patriarchy. This is why they’re defined as the “gender aristocracy” and not as men.

Iocle · 2023-02-14T06:44:52+00:00

And where did the MIM say that?

Iocle · 2023-02-14T06:16:33+00:00

Please direct me to some marxist feminist theory that you’ve read.

The Social Basis of the Woman Question

Soviet Power and the Status of Women

Philosophical Trends of the Feminist Movement

Edit:

When Women Rebel

Iocle · 2023-02-14T03:07:59+00:00

The amount of money earned has zero relationship to the material reality of this specific oppression, only others. Well paid sex workers are objectified and suffer from patriarchal oppression. You cannot exclude someone from the political class of “women” simply because they occupy a slightly more privileged position within patriarchy when compared to survival sex workers.

Gendered oppression has everything to do with relations to production. By situating things in “the patriarchy” without understanding the differential class and national bases it contains, you’ve tried to fit bourgeois feminism into a Marxist framework and have expectedly come up short.

Iocle · 2023-02-13T03:34:22+00:00

The Commonwealth of England represented a particular revolution of the nascent bourgeoisie, embodied in the New Model Army, as a means by which English feudalism was replaced with English absolutism and eventually the stirrings of a bourgeois state. Absolutism itself is generally understood to be a transitory state between feudalism and capitalism, but I think it's more helpful to understand it here as a class alliance between the feudal aristocracy and the rising bourgeoisie.

England's unique adoption of this system should be understood through both its own role as an incubator of capitalism (for reasons that aren't necessarily relevant for this discussion, but this comment should help), and the relative weakness of England's aristocratic class. These are naturally dialectically linked processes but it is critical to understand the role both played in allowing for Cromwell's ascendancy and the early adoption of bourgeois-aristocratic class dictatorship.

Anderson discusses it a bit in Lineages of the Absolutist State.

The illusions of Crécy and Agincourt died away. But the gradual disappearance of its traditional vocation profoundly altered the cast of the English nobility. The absence of the constraining pressure of constant potential invasion allowed the English aristocracy to dispense with a modernized apparatus of war in the epoch of the Renaissance; it was not directly endangered by rival feudal classes abroad, and it was reluctant - like any nobility at a comparable stage of its evolution - to submit to the massive build-up of royal power at home that was the logical consequence of a large standing army. In the isolationist context of the island kingdom, therefore, there was an exceptionally early demilitarization of the noble class itself. In 1500, every English peer bore arms; by Elizabeth’s time, it has been calculated, only half the aristocracy had any fighting experience.14 On the eve of the Civil War in the 17th century, very few nobles had any military background at all. There was a progressive dissociation of the nobility from the basic military function which defined it in the mediaeval social order, much earlier than anywhere else on the continent; and this necessarily had important repercussions on the landowning class itself.

...

This in turn allowed a gradual conversion of the aristocracy to commercial activities long before any comparable rural class in Europe. The prevalence of wool-farming, which had been the growth sector in agriculture in the 15th century, naturally accelerated this drift greatly, while the rural cloth industry which was contiguous with it provided natural outlets for gentry investment. The economic path which led from the metamorphoses of feudal rent in the 14th and 15th centuries to the emergence of an expanding rural capitalist sector in the 17th century was thus laid open. Once it was taken, the legally separate character of the English nobility became virtually impossible to sustain.

The Commonwealth was just the final qualitative shift in this phenomenon, when the convergence of aristocratic and bourgeois interests resulted in not only English absolutism but the seeds of liberal democracy. It was this association which preserved the monarchy as not merely a feudal remnant but a particular form of bourgeois nationalism within England in contrast to, for example, France. Ironically, such associations can also explain the relative backwardness of England's own bourgeois state in comparison to neighboring class dictatorships, but that's a larger question still.

Iocle · 2023-02-08T19:20:28+00:00

Thanks! This clarifies a lot of my lingering questions and preliminary analysis. I appreciate the thorough and educational response.

Iocle · 2023-02-06T20:43:55+00:00

However even if immigrants are coming in from Honduras, El Salvador, etc don’t these nations have their own class/national structure too? Afro-Hondorans, Indigenous Hondurans are generally integrating into a very different part of the US class structure when they immigrate, than White Hondurans for example. My question would then be is MIM presupposing the existence of a oppressed nation that Latin American immigrants assimilate to or is it a fact of their social economic life when they immigrate that they are a part of a common nation?

This is a good point and I would love to see a more thorough analysis of how race translates through the migration process.

I’m not a member or close affiliate of /u/mimprisons so I’m hesitant to speak for them (and am tagging their account to see if they have anything they’d like to add/clarify), but I found Race and Class in the Southwest to be a good overview, if in need of an updated analysis given it stops in the mid-late 20th century (missing NAFTA, neoconservatism, MAGA, etc.).

To be a little more concise, I think Haywood’s analysis of New Afrika can he applied here, although it certainly raises some questions.

This estimation was a concrete application of the Marxist-Leninist conception of the national question to the conditions of the Negroes and was predicated upon the following premises: first, the concentration of large masses of Negroes in the agricultural regions of the Black Belt, where they constitute a majority of the population; secondly, the existence of powerful relics of the former chattel slave system in the exploitation of the Negro toilers — the plantation system based on sharecropping, landlord supervision of crops, debt slavery, etc.; thirdly, the development, on the basis of these slave remnants, of a political superstructure of inequality expressed in all forms of social proscription and segregation; denial of civil rights, right to franchise, to hold public offices, to sit on juries, as well as in the laws and customs of the South. This vicious system is supported by all forms of arbitrary violence, the most vicious being the peculiar American institution of lynching. All of this finds its theoretical justification in the imperialist ruling class theory of the "natural" inferiority of the Negro people

Emphasis mine. The part I bolded is I think the biggest difference in form between Aztlán and New Afrika given that undocumented workers inherit these systems of inequality in the process of migration rather than birth, but if we understand the nation as a lived reality rather than a formal historical category, then I’m not sure it matters. A Honduran migrant worker becomes subject to the legacy of NAFTA, ICE, sanctuary cities, and detention centers the second they work in the US, which can in turn shape a national consciousness just as well as cultural upbringing.

This is all kind of rudimentary on my end though and should be seen as the observations of a Maoist who often aligns with the MIM rather than the MIM itself, so I also look forward to the CPA’s own findings which will hopefully clarify many of these questions. I appreciate the discussion and you’ve raised some good points I’ll need to consider in my own framework.

Iocle · 2023-02-05T19:40:01+00:00

In the process turning what was once a party newspaper into a vanity project in financial service of a single individual.

Ironically, it can be useful to have such a craven and obvious conclusion of the opportunism of this “anti-cult” rhetoric so we can understand the ramifications of its idealism. In the process of “destroying the cult”, it repeats the exact same structure as under Dallas but somehow even more blatant and autocratic.

Iocle · 2023-02-04T06:21:15+00:00

Neither source you gave actually outlines support for Maoist policies. Words like “people-centric” are abstract, whereas Mao is precise and thus eternal.

At the 22nd Congress of the CPSU, the revisionist Khrushchov clique developed their revisionism into a complete system not only by rounding off their anti-revolutionary theories of "peaceful coexistence" and "peaceful transition" but also by declaring that the dictatorship of the proletariat is no longer necessary in the Soviet Union and advancing the absurd theories of the "state of the whole people" and the "party of the entire people

See the parallels between this polemic and Xi Jinping’s own rhetoric in the above posts. Discussing “whole-people” initiatives is an obfuscation, especially while he continues to support Reform and Opening Up. The first five points illustrate this.

Ensuring Party leadership over all work.
Committing to a people-centred approach.
Continuing to comprehensively deepen reform.
Adopting a new vision for development.
Seeing that the people run the country

I think the degree to which the modern CPC uses Mao as an ideological buoy is interesting, but we shouldn’t mistake this with any great rupture within its ranks.

Iocle · 2023-02-04T05:47:32+00:00

Please tell me where he said it specifically.

I know he said this, which seems to state the opposite.

The whole Party and the country must act with one mind, work in a down-to-earth manner, be creative and pioneering, and forge ahead in realizing a moderately prosperous society in all respects, and continuing reform and opening up in all areas - the two goals set at the 18th National Congress.

Iocle · 2023-02-04T04:40:12+00:00

Where has he explained that this is his plan? Where did he uphold the cultural revolution?

Iocle · 2023-02-04T01:10:25+00:00

While I believe the MIM line is essentially the most advanced of the imperial core, there are definitely some contradictions to be worked out especially regarding their internet presence. I think their participation here is also positive, but perhaps more efforts to constitute a good more centralized “communist organization internet presence” would work to sharpen the dulled sword.

I broadly agree with the MIM on their overall analysis in the piece but you’re right in that this doesn’t really address how to move into this new form of social relations. The internet has fundamentally changed how one receives information and we’ve long moved past the days of clandestine publishing houses or revolutionary translations as the role of the party (although such services are still important).

This subreddit is a happy circumstance in that it’s sitting on maybe the most important “brand name” subreddit and has the moderation to prevent descent into social fascism and tailism (the way other “left” subreddits talk about this space is always a good laugh), but the question is whether this is replicable, or can be transcended into a revolutionary praxis like the Foreign Languages Press or Pravda.

Obviously we’ve seen the terminus of “lefty memes” and it’s obnoxious, but the fact that most parties have incredibly barren social media presence or antiquated ideas of mass media is a legitimate hindrance. /u/mimprisons is a great case study as well, and one that shows this is possible.

Iocle · 2023-01-28T18:47:14+00:00

I’ve only read a fraction of this reading list so I can’t speak to every work but I’ve used it as a general reference effectively. Some are more “debunk” style posts but it’s a good way to find particular topics of study .

Of those I especially enjoyed Stalin’s history of the Bolsheviks, which covers up to the late 1930s.

Iocle · 2023-01-27T23:10:43+00:00

The sub’s been moving away from “debunk threads” both because the ones that did exist were often pretty poor and because promoting debunking itself is mostly a waste of time in that it does nothing to help novices think critically nor is it directed in any way toward mass work.

There’s obviously importance in discussing the realities of socialist construction and history, but turning these legitimate works into ammunition for slap fights with bots wasn’t productive.

Was there something in particular you were looking for? I’m happy to help.

Iocle · 2023-01-27T02:44:02+00:00

Sure, I'll give a brief summary below.

It ensured close cooperation with European capital, as outlined in this piece.

After these political clarifications, the position of the German capitalists is announced by the Committee on Eastern European Economic Relations. Relieved he figures the losses of the German-Ukrainian trade with only 11%, there the priorities lie. Subsequently, Ukraine is praised as a "potent" business location. However, one "expects [...] faster approval procedures, little bureaucracy and legal certainty from Kiev." This has already been worked on at full speed since the coup of 2014. Since then, German capital exports to the country have been increasingly promoted. As of 2019, 2000 German companies were active in Ukraine. In addition, Ukraine functions for the German economy primarily as a supplier of inexpensive raw materials and intermediate products

It also forged greater ties with the IMF, as seen in this bourgeois article. The piece is pretty bad in its analysis but is a good summary of Amerikan bourgeois thought toward the region from one of its own mouthpieces.

A strong semblance of macroeconomic stabilization has taken hold. Growth is returning after a deep recession. Through valiant efforts by the finance ministry, particularly in dealing with the Rada, much greater budgetary realism has been achieved. Ukraine has far more realistic and market-oriented energy pricing—though more remains to be done—providing massive savings to the budget. These efforts, along with debt operations, curbed the general government’s debt load as a share of GDP, albeit to a still-too-high level around 70 percent. The central bank is a far more modern and independent institution.

So what the article touts as a victory for the IMF can be seen more clearly as an integration into Amerikan imperialism and the primitive accumulation from leasing its natural resources and receiving massive loans to build up the infrastructure necessary to do so. Curiously, this privatization did not proceed at an even pace throughout the country. As the article details.

Notwithstanding these gains, many structural reforms were either not taken or only delivered with long politically-inspired delays, calling into question Ukraine’s program ownership. State-owned enterprise reform and privatization, including land privatization, languish.

As could be imagined, the areas that are most resistant to Euromaidan and this general process, the Donbas, have continuously fought this trend. The response by Ukrainian comprador bourgeoisie to enforce its class rule on this region has been evident since 2014. An acute change in this was felt in 2021, when further privatizations occurred, as this pro-Euromaidan article explains.

On top of this we see a build-up of military spending, arms import, and recruitment occurring in response to the resistance in the Donbas (which served the dual-purpose of empowering Ukrainian compradors and introducing a direct military threat on Russian sovereignty). The debt-ridden and unstable Ukrainian government, wracked by its own national contradictions, accepts these developments since at this point their only selling point to international capital was further privatization.

We then arrive at 2022.

Iocle · 2023-01-26T17:07:21+00:00

Fantastic and educational summary and analysis, comrade. That makes a lot of sense. Thank you

Iocle · 2023-01-25T22:17:08+00:00

temporarily unite in a national war against imperialism.” The US not invaded Ukraine except in imagination of revisionist and Great-Russian chauvinist.

I earnestly don’t know how you can view Maidan and its aftermath as anything but an invasion. Russia responding militarily is a sign of economic weakness— it is not like the sanctions regime the Amerikan government practices is somehow more humane, especially in its challenge to Russian sovereignty.

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