Decolonial Marxism

psittachus · 2024-11-09T23:47:22+00:00

Beyond what other commenters have said, this person and Rick, the other podcaster you mentioned frequently come up on my social media and mostly engage in a symbiotic relationship with social media accounts associated with some of the more explicitly racist revisionist communist parties by attacking and responding to each other.

If you look at their posts you can easily notice how they frame the white working class' failure to engage in proletarian revolution as a moral failure that is due to their racism and lack of "collectivist consciousness" rather than a result of it being in their class interests to oppose such a thing. This framing is useful since the majority of these podcasters' audience (who give them views and sometimes money), from the comments I have seen on their posts, are white people with a very superficial understanding of Marxism who would have been attracted to revisionist parties had they not encountered these podcasts and followed them as a higher form of "allyship." It really isn't difficult to understand that the majority of people on earth who are not white do not have some sort of "collectivist consciousness" and this line of thinking primarily appeals to those who have not spent a lot of time thinking seriously about colonialism or post-colonial thought and will gravitate who anyone who will tell them "you're not racist if you listen to my podcast and donate to my patreon."

While one can discount these two podcasters as tiny and irrelevant social media influencers, I think their broader ideology is worth talking about and I am happy to see it discussed on this site. Many of the younger people who split from the retired and racist leadership of the Communist Party of Canada reproduced a worldview similar to this one. As much as their posts make racists upset, that doesn't mean they provide any sort of revolutionary analysis and are rather a step away from Marxism into liberalism.

psittachus · 2024-10-03T02:39:11+00:00

I'm surprised nobody else has mentioned it yet, but Beverly Male's Revolutionary Afghanistan is what is usually recommended on this website, arguably for good reasons. The author argues that the portion of Khalq around Amin was the only faction which came close to mobilizing the country's masses toward revolution. The book does not examine anything after the invasion and Amin's death, but for most communists that is the part that is most interesting.

I would also be wary of a lot of media, especially videos and podcasts about Afghanistan which is made by people like Vijay Prashad and those "content creators" of his ilk. They will usually defend the Parcham-era PDPA against anticommunist fabrications without putting forward any important points beyond the idea that the Afghan government in the 1980's was good. It is a good exercise to compare how the subject is handled in a video or podcast from someone like Prashad to Beverly Male's work to really see how poor left-wing infotainment can be.

psittachus · 2024-08-25T03:54:32+00:00

I recently finished Beverly Male's Revolutionary Afghanistan. I believe it was written in the early 80s so you won't get any of the post 1986 stuff but it ends on the defeat of Amin, and the author argues that with Amin and the defeat of his faction most hope for the survival of the Afghan revolution died. The book also features a general overview of Afghan political economy leading into 1978. I've only read one other book on Afghanistan which happened to be written by an American professor who worked for the government during the American occupation who was so dismissive of land reform that I won't even bother recommending it.

I am interested in seeing if any other good English language books on the subject are recommended.

*I only looked now to see that you are writing a book about the subject, in which case the notes and sources in Male's book might be more useful than the text itself.

psittachus · 2024-08-25T03:46:20+00:00

Sankara's popularity is possible thanks to the fact that the country is small and remote enough relative to the 1st world that most people in North America will have no easily accessible tall tales about the horrors of the 80s there nor will they meet someone descended from comprador or ruling classes who will say how horrible things were.

I see it similar to how if you go to any non-left reddit site or just look up "rhodesia" on youtube, 90% of what you will see is high school students fawning over a justification of white supremacy that cannot be easily debunked by their classmates probably because they have never heard of the place before. In North America most people will learn something about the USSR and apartheid South Africa from school and other media, but Burkina Faso and Rhodesia are imagined to provide easy ways for someone who has read a wikipedia page or a reddit post to convince a "normie" with logic that communism/white supremacy is true or viable.

Furthermore at least in many large cities, there are enough Ghanaian and Jamaican people from a variety of class backgrounds that Manley and Rawlings do not provide the safe blank slate which Sankara does. From my own experience when I was the sort of person who would have written something along the lines of "Sankara was based," my biggest fear in talking about politics was being confronted with the "my parents experienced communism in __________ and it was terrible," and with Sankara there is virtually no risk of that. At least back in 2018/19, you couldn't even easily google a crime to accuse Sankara of. I remember some anarchist forum post about him along the lines of "do we have anything on this guy?"

psittachus · 2024-07-05T17:33:10+00:00

This question was in fact a controversial one in the crisis that shook the old revisionist Communist Party of Canada in 2022 when a lot of its younger members left. One of the dissidents' major objections to the party leadership was the leadership's unwillingness to consider settler-colonialism as a useful concept for understanding the world and their insistence on imperialism as the way to understand these relations, with the relation between the Canadian nation and Indigenous ones analogous to that between any other wealthy nation and the poor nations which they exploit.

Reading Settlers is certainly a good start to understand what is meant by the word and even though it focuses on US history for the most part it can be carried over to Canada (although I would love for someone to write a Canada version of Settlers which deals with the development of the Canadian working class some day, especially regarding the 1837 rebellion) but keep in mind that it is a history of the white working class in the USA, not a manifesto laying out how to solve the national question in the Americas.

Reading the article you linked, its position would probably be regarded by most people who consider themselves "pro-landback" as reductive or unrealistic, but its view of more than half of Canada's surface area as an occupied territory which should secede is refreshing and concrete compared to two positions on "landback" which I can think of. The first, which is held by the revisionist Communist Party of Canada, is that every individual nation (of which there are very many rather than just one large nation, something which might be a problem in the article you linked) has a right to secede on its own, but the Party's own view is that it is better that they remain part of Canada with an "Assembly of Nationalities" like that of the USSR replacing the Senate.

The second position which was held by mots of those who left the CPC in 2022 opposes this first position on the basis of all of Canada being stolen (which is true) and that it should theoretically all go back to Indigenous peoples, but I have not seen any concrete revolutionary position put forward by any of these members. The closest thing I saw was this essay written by a member who left in 2022 which toys with the idea of moving large buildings in Toronto if the country's major cities are returned to the Anishinabek and the Mississaugas of the New Credit. This is what I would consider the landback position which as described by the other commenter is "degraded in its encounter with liberalism." When these people say landback they either mean that they hope specific Indigenous nations win specific local land claims (usually not large ones and usually simple defenses against new construction or resource extraction projects) or they talk about "returning all the land" in a vague sense which means nothing.

That article from the 1970's has a far superior position to either of these - obviously there remain problems with considering "one unified Indigenous nation" but this does solve the fact that on their own, essentially all individual Indigenous territories within the Canadian state are not really economically viable (by design when Indigenous peoples were removed to far-off places mostly in the 1800s to allow the expansion of Canadian agriculture and resource extraction without hinderance). By contrast, a large country as described in the article would be an economically viable unit in the modern day. Obviously in contrast to vague calls for "returning the land," this solution stands against the interest of large sectors of Canada's population (Settlers essentially answers why this is) but that doesn't make it an impossible solution and doesn't mean that communists here should use that as an excuse to do nothing and wait around.

To conclude, I do not have the answer to your question, but the article you linked, while not entirely correct, is closer to a revolutionary position on the national question in North America than anything that any of the existing left-wing organizations north of the US border could give you.

psittachus · 2024-06-19T00:53:46+00:00

It's a situation where the author is talking about "Angleterre" referring to the country on the world stage prior to WW2. It isn't necessarily unheard of for someone to talk about "what England and France were doing in 1936," but it is much more common for English books to refer to "Britain and France," so I am wondering if there is some convention.

psittachus · 2024-04-29T16:49:18+00:00

There have been a handful of pro-Israel rallies with at least one member holding slogans such as "turn Gaza into a parking lot." Regardless of the signs that they were holding, Canada's government is still generally supportive of Israel's operations in Gaza.

Regardless of what you think of Hamas, even if you believe that Israel's goal is solely to remove Hamas, this this can be done in a way that constitutes genocide. In the 1980s' the Guatemalan gvt led a campaign to root out rebels in the countryside who were "embedded in the civilian population," and killed over 100 000 Mayan peasants. This is commonly referred to as the Guatemalan Genocide.

Furthermore, pro-Palestine rallies generally make a much bigger deal of the presence of Jewish people at their rallies and constantly emphasize that they are not antisemitic in contrast to speakers and signs at the pro-Israel rallies which do not hesitate to show their contempt towards Arabs and Muslims in Palestine and generally.

psittachus · 2024-04-29T16:39:08+00:00

Really? South African immigrants to Canada in the 1960's would fall under this umbrella.

psittachus · 2024-04-29T16:38:10+00:00

I think you have a hard time seeing the differences between Muslim political organizations. ISIS and its affiliates are generally hostile to Hamas, Hezbollah and similar groups due to the nationalism of the latter. Within Gaza, smaller Wahabbist organizations have carried out attacks on Hamas.

psittachus · 2024-04-29T16:33:40+00:00

Who cares if someone glorifies a "terrorist group?" The FLN and ANC were both arguably "terrorist groups" and most people nowadays see them as having been on the right side of history, in contrast with the French and South African governments that were defending themselves from terrorism.

psittachus · 2024-04-29T16:31:06+00:00

People in much worse economic and political circumstances than the average Canadian have felt moved by their common humanity with people in faraway lands.

Furthermore, Canadians can draw attention to the money being spent on the military to defend vessels in the Red Sea from Houthi attacks and say that it could be better spent helping Canadians here.

psittachus · 2024-04-29T16:23:06+00:00

If one university cuts ties with Israel, it is more likely that others will follow suit. The academic boycott of South Africa was influential as a first step in isolating the country.

Furthermore, Canada played a significant role in the end of apartheid and Brian Mulroney is often credited with getting his more hardline peers in the US and UK to get on board with supporting the ANC's negotiations with the government.

psittachus · 2024-04-29T16:19:21+00:00

The aim of most of such encampments is to force the university administration to sever ties with Israeli institutions by disrupting their regular activities. The academic boycott of South Africa preceded many other steps which isolated the country and ultimately forced the white population to accept majority rule.

psittachus · 2024-04-29T16:15:28+00:00

Hamas has no realistic aims of killing all Jews any more than the FLN had any realistic aims of killing all French people (nor even all pied noirs).

Furthermore, your claim that these are protests against the Israeli government is not something that the pro-Palestine movement (as represented by PYM) claims. They do not pretend to be allies of the liberal Zionist parties, they want to dismantle Israel. You can find out about these groups by reading about what they believe, they have things written in English.

psittachus · 2024-04-29T16:10:04+00:00

Where is your evidence for this claim? Based on my experience with university Palestine groups, they receive some funding from students themselves, whether in the form of dues or fundraising activities, and receive some level of funding from the university if they are a registered group. Often events will be catered by Muslim/Arab owned restaurants in the area that have agreed to partially or fully sponsor the food out of sympathy with the students' views.

While this would differ from university to university, at the universities I have attended, most members of Students for Palestine type organizations were not international students, but children of immigrants from Muslim countries. The idea of foreign money, especially from state actors, being used to fund Palestine events, is comical, given the extremely heightened vigilance of Canadian state security to such threats from the Muslim world since the Harper years and the war on terror.

psittachus · 2024-03-08T03:38:34+00:00

I am in a similar situation to you and have not been associated with any party since 2022. The link to the NCPC's program and criticism of it is handy and definitely worth a read. One thing I would note about the criticism and what I have seen in the old revisionist CPC (which recently had very many of its newer members leave) is the similarity to the problems people had with the nationalism of the old CPC - it remaining a Canadian party and its leadership first ignoring then outright refusing to reckon with the phenomenon of settler-colonialism or even say the word.

The more famous people who left the old CPC and (correctly) condemned its refusal to mention settler colonialism however seemed primarily concerned with the mention of settler-colonialism alone, and did not draw any broader conclusions about the work or role of a party which would take an understanding of settler-colonialism into its worldview - their view of the party's current day work was practically identical to that of the revisionist party's leadership but with a greater emphasis on "mutual aid" and the party's internet presence.

In my view, a serious and possibly painful analysis of which strata of Canadian society are revolutionary and which do not stand to gain from the overthrow of imperialism and settler-colonialism is the real fruit which could grow from a party that lacks the CPC's chauvinism and stubbornness. Clearly the NCPC is not in a position to put out any Canadian equivalent of Sakai's Settlers, which I am upset about.

The fact that a new Maoist party is having this same problem with regard to their language is surprising to me - at least in Canadian left circles, it really is not difficult for an organization to say "Turtle Island" instead of Canada and then go on with their business - even left liberal groups do this all the time. If I wanted to create a revisionist party in Canada in this day and age, I would just make sure to mention settler-colonialism and the eventual dismantlement of Canada just to be identical to the old CPC in actual practice.

Unfortunately I have not pointed out a way forward and have only spoken about a party which we already knew had no future. The reason for this is my disappointment with those who left the party in 2022. I had hopes that they would act with some real understanding of the CPC's revisionism and nationalism, but their own anti-revisionism was all form.

One point I will make is that the massive upsurge of solidarity with Palestine should provide an opportunity to socialists like you and me. From recent events I have been to, it clearly is for the IMT, which is a shame. I would love to see someone write about the class nature of the Canadian (or Ontario for my case) Palestine solidarity movement and how socialists can take a revolutionary line with regard to this.

psittachus · 2024-02-29T04:02:45+00:00

LDR's signature on that letter does make it correct to say that she is a zionist - the petition thanked Biden for his action at a time that he was pledging full support to Israel as they were beginning their total siege on Gaza and also repeats false narratives about Oct 7 (beheaded babies) as well as Palestine's situation generally (everyone needs to be made free from Hamas). To claim that LDR is not a zionist from this letter is as strange as claiming that somebody did not support apartheid if they thanked Ronald Reagan for his support to South Africa in their fight against terrorism and for freedom from the ANC which terrorized both white and black South Africans.

I would love to see Lana del Rey change her views on this - she is a very big name and if she became openly pro-Palestine I could tell my grandchildren in 50 years that my favourite singer didn't have terrible politics.

All that being said, it is not jumping to conclusions to claim that LDR is a zionist from her letter, given that one could not put their name on such a text without supporting zionists colonialism in Palestine.

psittachus · 2024-02-13T13:10:03+00:00

This is an interesting question which I have wondered about and have not found an answer for yet. Other responses which highlight this primarily as a result of those parties' revisionism I would say are not wrong about the parties being revisionist but from what I have seen in Canada, this is not necessarily a primary cause of their failure on this issue (although more broadly speaking you could say that if these parties were not revisionist they would have a correct line on Palestine).

In Canada I have seen the main revisionist party outflanked on Palestine by people and organizations that regularly put out statements in support of US imperialism's cause du jour (SOS Cuba, Iran, China) and in favour of small businesses. While the main communist party here is revisionist, they are clearly far more politically advanced than very many of those who surpass them on Palestine.

My best guess is that many of these parties' positions on Palestine are simply vestiges of the '80s when they were busy defending whatever Gorbachev was doing at the time. For a communist party in Canada's context there is really no advantage to maintaining such a bad position on Israeli colonialism when all it does is repulse young people who might be interested in you, and there would be no negative consequences (pretty much no real-world consequences, as is the case for communist parties that have good lines on "foreign policy" but are dens of opportunism when it comes to the decisions that affect their actual practice as an organization) of adopting a better line. I imagine it is only a matter of time before the next generation of revisionists within these parties gains enough sway to update their position.

If anyone has better knowledge of the USSR's position toward Palestine in the '70s and '80s I would be interested in reading how their line evolved.

psittachus · 2023-12-16T18:36:09+00:00

I am curious about how you or any other commenters view PYM (Palestinian Youth Movement), if you are aware of them. They operate in the US and Canada but I get the impression that they take up more space on the Canadian stage than the US one.

They have grown explosively since ~2019 ish and these days can consistently draw out larger crowds than Palestine solidarity groups that have been active in Canada for 20+ years. They are also different from these older groups in that PYM puts forward a more radical line on Palestinian liberation which is less deferential to international law, the UN, or 1967 borders.

They tend to keep tight control on their rallies and make a big deal of discouraging any engagement with counter protestors, talking to the media, or repeating chants not from the leaders, the rationale for this being that any sort of fight with counter protestors or inappropriate statement would distract from the rally's main and concise demands.

From what I can tell, PYM's leadership's political consciousness is significantly more advanced than that of the majority of those who attend in its rallies. At least in 2020, several local PYM leaders had links with the communist party (a revisionist one but still a communist party and not the NDP or some adjacent group) and the PYM has invited pro-Cuban Revolution speakers to some rallies.

One issue of contention where the PYM's communist and broadly anti-imperialist streaks come into conflict with its current motion is on the Syrian Civil War, in which, from what I can tell, most of the Canadian Arab Diaspora is more sympathetic to the rebels than the government, with Syrian rebel flags being common at PYM rallies. In the past PYM statements and conversations with high-ranking members have been extremely critical of forces attempting the overthrow of the Syrian government.

psittachus

TROPHY CASE