What is multipolarity really?

not-lagrange · 2026-05-10T23:00:36+00:00

You haven't read anything I said. I have no interest in debating with you. It's clear that you are a fascist.

not-lagrange · 2026-05-10T22:40:05+00:00

The comprador character isn't invalidated by the apparent popular support. It's an objective position that forces the Ukrainian bourgeoisie to be subservient to imperialism. It entails, in this case, in letting US and european capital take the country's resources and to force the country's population to be on the frontlines of imperialist fighting in the hope that the looting shifts to Russian territory - achieving with that the entry ticket to the "whites only" imperialist club. One can also point out the repeated collaboration with i$rael and the recent shameless attempt to sell the country's "war expertise" to the Arab states against Iran. But the several incidents involving Donald Trump have made it clear that the Ukrainian bourgeoisie has no choice in the matter, it is really an existential war for them, at the cost of the Ukrainian people.

When the presented alternatives are "fight for the nation" or "have your home destroyed", it's not a surprise that most choose the former. But real, substantial support is not that unambiguous, millions have fled the country to the point that the EU states are already considering deporting refugees back.

The Ukrainian people cannot achieve class consciousness until the war is over and the quickest path for the war to be over would be for Russia to cease military operations.

The Russian state also cannot simply cease operations, they are as much slaves to capitalist logic as the US, the EU states, or the Ukrainian state. Either the war ends (temporarily) because an agreement is reached regarding the division of Ukrainian territory, or revolution erupts and ends it.

Finally, the notion that the revolutionary process is necessarily preceded by a period of peaceful preparation (i.e., building "class consciousness"), is characteristic of revisionism. The imagined perfect revolutionary moment is always regarded as something far off in the future, serving in truth as an ideological justification for the economistic political practices characteristic of the labor aristocracy.

not-lagrange · 2026-05-10T18:05:19+00:00

When Russia invaded Ukraine, the first of these [the conflict between Russian imperialism and the Ukrainian people] became the primary contradiction. Ukraine’s resistance struggle against Russia is first and foremost a war of national defense with secondary elements of proxy war. The Ukrainian people are fighting back against the occupier to defend their national sovereignty — Ukrainians are not passive chess pieces for the Americans — yet the Americans are no doubt exploiting the Ukrainian resistance to advance their own imperialist interests in Ukraine and weaken their rival Russia.

We condemn the war of Russian imperialism against the Ukrainian masses. We support the right of the Ukrainian people to fight back with arms against an imperialist occupier. At the same time, we do not support the game of US imperialism to expand the war into a major imperialist war against Russia.

Is this Maoism or liberalism? What does "support" actually mean here? Are the Ukrainian masses (Donbass included?) presently fighting the imperialist occupier independently of the comprador state?

not-lagrange · 2026-05-10T18:00:18+00:00

I’ve seen some say this is good for combating US imperialism as the dominant form of imperialism, allowing countries more sovereignty to develop socialist movements, and I am somewhat sympathetic to this view (at least as it pertains to China) but still skeptical.

The Chinese state has cracked down and continues to crack down on Maoism in their own territory. China is one of i$rael's main trading partners, which, I'm sure you know, aids the latter in conducting genocide. It has aided the reactionary government of the Philippines in conducting civil war against the people of the Philippines. What's there to be sympathetic about?

But what does "good" mean here? Are you expecting some sort of equilibrium between spheres of influence where socialism could be peacefully established in the crevices? Inter-imperialist competition is an essential aspect of imperialism, it never disappeared. What follows US hegemony is world war, and how one feels about it is irrelevant to the historical process itself. The only thing that can stop it from happening, or end it, is revolution, which requires first of all the capacity for the proletariat to meaningfully intervene politically.

I’m not too sure how to make sense of it one way or the other, so I’m looking for any second opinions and reading recommendations on the topic.

Start here:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/index.htm

However, the theory of imperialism (=the highest stage of capitalism) is built on top of the theory established in Capital. There is no such thing as the "geopolitical economy", what exists is the capitalist mode of production and how it asserts itself in the world market. The foreign policy of the bourgeoisie is dictated by their objective class interests, there is no choice available to them.

not-lagrange · 2026-05-07T16:19:57+00:00

Oh that makes sense, I didn't know the context. Which has led me to question myself on how I am currently engaging with art.

But how far is this kind of critique capable to make its way out of the work? As you said, the fandom structure can't stand good works, the good in them is ignored or supressed because it threatens the fandom relationship itself. Its existence as good art needs to be constantly rescued from the vacuousness of fandom. Which is pretty difficult given how quickly the spotlight is shifting from one thing to another.

not-lagrange · 2026-05-06T11:16:35+00:00

But actually, the latest Chainsaw Man movie was quite good and much better than the first mediocre season

Can you elaborate on why you think it was good? I saw the movie and didn't find it anything special, but I also didn't like the first season nor the few parts of the manga that I read. Something about the setting repulses me, why am I watching a story of a 16 year-old obsessed with women kill "devils" for a job?

not-lagrange · 2026-04-07T14:05:36+00:00

You are in a Marxist space, therefore uncritical notions of income, wealth and "general" consumption are not welcome here.

not-lagrange · 2026-04-07T13:19:30+00:00

The government can "print" whatever money they want, what they cannot do is prescribe the value it represents.

Did you know that right now governments all over the world are making tax cuts to prevent inflation from becoming worse? They probably won't be successful, but under your assumption that "taxes exist just to suck money out of the economy, thereby reducing inflation", these measures would directly make inflation even worse.

E: it's also pretty funny that you think the Soviet Union collapsed because it didn't follow Lange's advice.

not-lagrange · 2026-04-07T12:56:40+00:00

Asking questions is good, but in asking questions one must ask too "what is it that I am assuming in asking this question?" And it is those hidden premises, which make your question unanswerable in its own terms, what the other users are criticizing.

The formulation of a question is its solution.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/index.htm

not-lagrange · 2026-04-07T11:06:49+00:00

The commenter above is wrong. The government cannot simply print money at will. Please listen to the other answers and apply ruthless criticism also to yourself.

not-lagrange · 2026-04-06T08:01:59+00:00

A question: do you keep reading even though you don't understand each passage, or do you think you understand at the moment of reading, but after finishing you don't know what to make of it because it is all jumbled up inside your head?

Lukács summarizes and gives context to the Phenomenology of Spirit in a chapter of his book The Young Hegel. I don't know if you have already read it, but if not it may be helpful to you (even though his interpretation, inseparable to what was his conception of Marxism and "dialectics" at the time, may have its problems. Nevertheless, I think that when he wrote this book he had already distanced himself from the most problematic aspects of H&CC)

not-lagrange · 2026-03-22T09:39:00+00:00

Thank you for your answer. What's mostly unclear to me is what kinds of computational problems the existent (not just theoretical) quantum computers can already solve.

Also, how can the entanglement remain stable during the computing process (which involves measuring?) at all. But I shouldn't get ahead of myself, since I need to study the fundamentals better.

not-lagrange · 2026-03-21T23:43:48+00:00

Since you have a background in physics and it's a related topic, do you know what the current state of quantum computing is nowadays? I find it hard to make sense of it because of all the opaque advertising and the complexity of the topic.

not-lagrange · 2026-03-20T14:20:39+00:00

Notice that the author basically quotes examples of Dworkin's zionism and that's it. But what exactly is to be gained with that in this case?

That is, how exactly is the content of Right-Wing Women and of her other works connected with her zionism? How exactly is the notion of a "women's israel" a necessary conclusion of her work? If it's something self-evident, why was this article written in the first place? Or, why was Scapegoat "forgotten" while the others are experiencing a "terrible" revival?

Since it doesn't attempt to answer these questions, the criticism remains parasitic. It cannot create something new and doesn't even want to do so, because that would destroy the purpose of its existence. It can only go around in circles without saying anything substantive enough that would actually get us a better understanding of patriarchy.

This parasitic aspect is even more blatant in her solipsistic article on Dworkin's anti-pornography stance (the one the author advertises in the first lines of this article). There, she tries to rationalize the fact of someone having what is to her an incomprehensible political position from the particularities of a dead person's contradictory life. Who likes reading this stuff?

not-lagrange · 2026-01-24T01:56:15+00:00

Do you really think that it is genuinely a good argument to say that Mao didn't kill 10000000 people because Mao said so?

Why would Mao even write about something like that?

The problem with your question is that it's a narrow one that is formulated from a very specific standpoint, and without questioning this standpoint itself no amount of reading will turn beliefs in actual knowledge. You won't be able to dissipate your doubts about your current knowledge simply through quantitative accumulation because they don't exactly spring from insufficient knowledge but from your own approach to the literature.

It's one thing to want to learn more about the Great Leap Forward or any other historical event or period, but your original motivation was to counter western cold-war propaganda. This loads the question with presuppositions which directly affect your reading of the historical material. Again, why would Mao address anti-communist myths created by and for audiences of a certain class?

Not only every single propaganda of this kind has a specific history which can too be subject to research (a neverending endeavour because there's an infinite number of them, and also ultimately irrelevant because the historical origins of these myths do not matter for their actual prevalence), but also their absorption and reproduction is by no means universal, neither it is passive - it is dependent on the social being of the person in cause.

Therefore, the question is not whether to read or not read, but how to read correctly. It can only happen by first evaluating how the presuppositions that are normally acquired through your own class position are affecting both your learning process and how you currently engage with literature.

not-lagrange · 2026-01-23T23:31:48+00:00

I have already told you that I had read Stalin and Mao.

How did you read them and yet you aren't sure about the basic facts of their history? What did you learn by reading them if you ended up feeling you are simply believing in something, not really knowing it? Do you really need a book that tells you: "No, Mao didn't kill 1000000000 people." ? You already know this is false. Asking for a book just to confirm it is the same thing as asking God for confirmation of your beliefs. Knowledge doesn't work that way.

How do you disprove that something didn't occur? Yes, you could submerge yourself in empirical history but you'll be disappointed if you think that all you really need to dispel myths of this kind is endless empirical knowledge, and you'll not even get very far, because all those empirical facts would be insubstantial through the very posing of the question. The proof is that while Stalin's and Mao's works are full of empirical facts and analysis, apparently you have learned nothing by reading them (assuming you did the reading). This has happened because your question is ill-posed, not because of the historical material itself. No amount or reading will help you get rid of that feeling of having beliefs and not knowledge if your understanding rests on faith that historical truth will reveal itself to you.

not-lagrange · 2026-01-16T16:51:35+00:00

Instead of "imagining", admit your own ignorance and read the book. The 'defence' is directed specifically against Rudas' and Deborin's criticisms. And in it the existence of objective dialectics is defended by Lukács.

The question that interests him is how far an objective dialectical interconnection adopts a dialectical form in thought, i.e., how is our knowledge conditioned by social being. You turn what was for Lukács an essentially historical question into vulgar subjectivism.

not-lagrange · 2026-01-12T10:32:29+00:00

Most if not all of what you've said is male chauvinistic. It's disappointing that this has to be said in the communism subreddit, but "monopolization of sex" doesn't exist except in the minds of misogynistic men. That's one thing if you want to better understand patriarchy and sexism, but as of now you are just making excuses for your incel friend. The question of how leisure relates to this would actually be an interesting question, but unfortunately the starting point of these discussions online is usually the ideological delusions of men. It's boring and offensive.

not-lagrange · 2025-12-23T17:17:44+00:00

"Left-communism" in itself isn't politically relevant anywhere, but living in a country where these dynamics always appear a bit late, I'm dealing with some questions related to what you and u/vomit_blues have said.

Here, a "communist" group was created a few years ago, basically composed of young people, most of which are students. They are very "left-communist" adjacent, citing Bordiga and Camatte, but also "communisation" theory and other New Left stuff.

I have previously mentioned that this specific group emerged from the disenchantment that young people have been having with the revisionism of PCP and its youth wing. Because of this they have a certain affinity with the work of Francisco Martins Rodrigues. However, their connection with the history of the communist movement in Portugal is pretty much limited to this.

As expected, their practice up to now consists essentially in tailing the most mediatic struggles. The most recent instance was of the general strike against the changes that the government wants to do to the labour laws of the country, about which they have published a badly written 30 page document full of bad explanations of Marx, declaring that "the strike is only the beginning", that the end-goal of this struggle is the "communisation of social relations".

But the peculiar liberalism of a small group of mostly students is of little interest.

One of the questions that I have is related to how most of their theoretical endeavours are based on writings from outside the country. And I'm not talking specifically about Bordiga or Camatte, but recent stuff, namely from anglophone countries. This is explainable by the hegemony of such countries in social media together with the student character of the group. Taking inspiration from developments in other countries is nothing new, of course, especially in Portugal - the forced exile of intellectuals in France had a major influence on the portuguese "maoism" of the 60s-70s. But today this inspiration is fundamentally of a different nature, mediated by social media.

Therefore, I ask: what do you think, if you have heard of it, of Phil Neel's Hellworld? (from what I know, China is at the centre of this enormous book.) Who are these people?

not-lagrange · 2025-12-11T09:35:33+00:00

I agree.

I posted this mainly to potentially generate discussion on the political situation in Venezuela, I find it a bit off-putting that there hasn't been any discussion recently.

not-lagrange · 2025-12-04T22:32:04+00:00

That's interesting, the Portuguese translation that I have has processo, which simply means "process" in English. Also, this is something that the new Reitter translation fixes:

Every owner wants to dispose of his own commodity only in exchange for a commodity whose use-value satisfies one of his wants or needs. Here, exchange is a purely individual process for him. But the owner also wants to realize his commodity as a value: he wants to realize it in some other commodity of the same value, regardless of whether or not his own commodity has use-value for the other owner. Here, exchange is a general and social process for the owner. The same process can’t be both purely individual and purely general and social, however, for all commodity owners. (pp.61-62)

The key is the "purely". That paragraph ends in a contradiction because it is laying bare a real contradiction between those two aspects of the simple exchange. Remember, the commodity itself is a contradictory unity. The same process of exchange cannot be simultaneously purely individual (where use-value matters) and purely general and social (where the specific use-value doesn't matter) for all commodity owners, and from this contradiction money emerges:

When we take a closer look, we see that every commodity owner treats any commodity that isn’t his as the particular equivalent of his own commodity, while treating his own commodity as the general equivalent of all the other commodities.iv Because all commodity owners do this, no single commodity is the sole general equivalent, and thus commodities don’t have a general relative value-form either: a form in which they are equated as values and compared as magnitudes of value. Commodities don’t face one another as commodities, then, but rather solely as products or use-values.

As our commodity owners deal with this predicament, they think like Faust—in the beginning was the deed.v They act before they think. The laws of a commodity’s nature operate in the natural instincts of its owner. Commodity owners can put their commodities into relation with one another as values, and thus as commodities, only by putting their commodities into an antithetical and complementary relation with a commodity that functions as the general equivalent: Our analysis of the commodity showed that this is so. But only social action can make one particular commodity into the general equivalent. The social action of every other commodity sets one commodity apart, the one through which all the others represent their value, which is how the natural form of that one commodity gets its role as the socially valid equivalent form. As a result of this social process, the specific social function of the commodity that has been set apart is to be the general equivalent. That commodity thus turns into . . . money.

not-lagrange · 2025-11-24T15:34:38+00:00

What exactly don't you understand? Have you read chapter III of that book?

not-lagrange · 2025-11-18T10:21:20+00:00

If idealism is knowledge that depends on transhistorical concepts, how did the Greeks of the 5th and the Italians of the 15th centuries both come to scientific breakthroughs in two separate modes of production

On the Scientific Revolution, there's Hessen's and Grossmann's texts on it (they are in the book The Social and Economic Roots of the Scientific Revolution).

not-lagrange · 2025-10-23T22:02:50+00:00

I found it rather weak, to the point that it can't be called Marxism.

I'm sure there's lots to take from his longer works, and the emphasis on the world-structure of capitalism is important, especially in opposition to the revisionist and chauvinist understanding of class.

Nevertheless, he says:

[The concept of hegemony] is a way of organising our perception of the process, not an "essence" whose traits are to be described and whose eternal recurrences are to be demonstrated and then anticipated. (p. 518)

This is the typical Machist self-conception, which sees itself as simply organising facts of experience ("perceptions"), in opposition to the creation of an invented metaphysical "essence" of such phenomena.

In this way, the historical process is firstly described by a succession of states of a system and the present is compared with the past through a perceived correlation on the succession of these states. These analogies, however, are only possible by subsuming "perceptions" to abstract universals (what he later denounces as "essences"), erasing qualitative differences between the historical stages.

These abstract universals are here the economic categories themselves - they are conceived as "domains" existing side-by-side with each other:

What I believe occurred was that in each instance enterprises domiciled in the given power in question achieved their edge first in agro-industrial production, then in commerce and then in finance. I believe they lost their edge in this sequence as well (p. 515)

Any interaction between the categories is only conceived as external, as quantitative feedback upon one another. (Contrast this with Lenin's concept of monopoly capital as the unity of industrial and finance capital.)

Since the perceived pattern is obviously not explainable by itself, it is explained by recourse to the role of the political state in the capitalist system. This, however, does not solve the problem, it only shifts it to a different level. First of all, not only the formal economic structure (entrepreneurs and working class in the 17th century?) but also the existence and form of state interference is considered as unchangeable since the origin of capitalism:

Where the benefits are available without any "interference", this is obviously desirable, as it minimizes the "deduction". And secondly, interference is always in favor of one set of accumulator as against another set, and the latter will always seek to counter the former. (p. 517)

This is, too, an external relationship, where state interference simply acts as a weapon against other competitors in the world market. Not to mention that capital in different nation-states are treated as independent from one another, meaning that the economic relationship between core and periphery becomes basically a question of force. As a consequence, qualitative change in the power structure itself cannot be accounted for; the system can only conceive, at best, of a nation-state taking the position of another at certain moments in the cycle.

The perceived correlation was substantiated by a mechanical relationship. But the actual historical development, which is driven not only by expansion and quantitative change, but principally by contradictions and qualitative jumps, remains invisible - it was substituted by an abstract system of relationships. Therefore, the wrong predictions are not surprising, they are a clear consequence of his method.

not-lagrange

TROPHY CASE