StalinForTime [comrade/them]

Tbh, I’m not really sure what point you are making here (not trying to rude, so please feel free to clarify what the argument it).

Nowhere have I claimed that the Palestinian cause is tainted. Because I do not equate or identify the Palestinian movement with Hamas, and to do so is an external perspective.

You are correct that Israel bears ultimate responsibility for this. Yes the most important thing is that they stop the occupation. That’s not what this is about. Nor is it a judgment on the Palestinians or other Palestinian groups for feeling that they should, or have no choice but to, join a common front with Hamas. This is about perspective so that people don’t suddenly make the, frankly, stupid move of suddenly speaking of Hamas as if they are simply a progressive force. This is about recognizing that Hamas, precisely in virtue of who and what they are, will not be the ultimate force of Palestinian Liberation, and that in fact their interests are antithetical to it. The other groups also despise Hamas, and it’s important to ask why (not that they are necessarily great themselves). Because make no mistake, it is far from a given that these groups, let alone Palestinians in the West Bank or who are Arab Israeli citizens, are necessarily happy with this. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you seem also to be making the slip between ‘Hamas’ and ‘Palestinians’, when they are very far from the same thing. Do you think that every single Palestinian in Gaza is happy when they hear that Hamas has launched a new attack? It’s not that simple, even when, as we’ve seen, right now we see there is a display of general support among key groups, though again groups like the PA are also corrupt and do not speak for all Palestinians. But this is also as much a matter of maintaining legitimacy, because Hamas is dominant in Gaza and because now that Israel is launching a brutal attack and that it looks like they could be launching larger scale genocidal actions, especially once their military is more fully mobilized and they launch a ground operation into Gaza, there is naturally going to be a rallying against Israel, and that is justified, morally and politically.

Hamas were aware that that would happen. Hamas are perfectly aware that when they launch these kinds of attacks (made possible and caused ofc by Israel in the grand scheme of things), and Israel then attacks Gaza, this galvanizes support for them. Hamas are a product of Israel in more way than one. Also, and again, and I can’t stress this enough, as Islamists their political interests are not in the construction of a broad, radical, working-class movement which would launch another Intifada and force international powers to force Israel to a negotiating table to allow for a Palestinian state, as even if such a state were to be ruled by a national bourgeoisie, that would be preferable for the construction of Palestinian socialism to what they have now. Personally, i too would like a single, secular, state, but I also feel this is pie-in-the-sky idealism. Israel will never accept that, and neither will their imperialist backers. Nor will they accept a two state solution, as we know from their decades of sabotage of such an option. This is where my pessimism comes in, as the heydays of the secular Palestinian left of the 60s and 70s is gone, Israel is becoming more fascist by the day, and the main vehicle for armed opposition to Israel is Hamas. So I don’t see how this doesn’t even catastrophically. I don’t really see an opening for the left, except perhaps if a Palestinian left finds an opportunity to take prestige from Hamas, though the strength of religiosity makes this difficult, as does Hamas’ Islamism.

I feel like this is a point to try again to dispel some illusions some people are clearly in when they compare Hamas to groups like the ANC, the Vietcong. If anything they are like the FLN in Algeria. Now the FLN were completely fucked, vicious, ruthless and deeply reactionary, but they at least were attempting to construct a national bourgeois state with nationalist perspective and policies. I don’t think Hamas are even trying to do that honestly in that their s’ils seen broader. And even if they were, they are not the ANC or the Vietcong, who were genuinely progressive movements of national liberation.

And again, it’s amazing to me that self-described communists are able to make the obvious realization that if ostensibly ‘communist’ groups like Sendero Luminoso or the Khmer Rouge, even when fighting anti-imperialist struggles (complicated in the case of the Khmer Rouge as they were supported clandestinely by the US for geopolitical Cold War reasons) or at least struggling to overthrow their national bourgeoisie, engage in widespread indiscriminate atrocities against civilians, then their communism or status as a progressive force is compromised. Or to give another example: just because I support (or would have supported) unequivocally the Soviet struggle against Nazi Germany, would never in a trillion years say that the mass-sexual violence which occurred during the Soviet invasion of Nazi Germany was justified. That would be beyond depraved honestly, even though I understand that the men who did it had seen their country and families obliterated in the most depraved ways themselves. But revenge is not the basis of politics. That doesn’t mean it’s not always justified or permissible (like concentration camp survivors killing their guards), but I really don’t see how this is equivalent to killing children or unarmed workers intentionally.

Of course this situation is the result of where Palestinians have been pushed by Israel over the last 80 years. And yes. Intellectually I understand that. But that just a description. It’s not immediately a justification of anything. Nor does it establish by itself what the progressive form of political organization. For that the material conditions and the nature of the possible groups - such as Hamas - then has to be considered. I’m sure that if I saw my child die in front of my eyes due to an Israeli bomb, which I’m blessed enough to not have experienced, then I would want to do some pretty terrible shit to these people. Israeli guards and soldiers, when torturing Palestinians, have been known to joke that they’re like the Gestapo. It’s no surprise that this breeds desire for extremely violent retaliation. But jumping from that to what I’ve seen some people saying, namely ‘anything goes, the babies/kids have it coming’ or that that is politically or morally justified is a completely illogical leap no matter which way you spin it. And frankly that should be obvious. That is not a guide to thinking about what kind of political organization in Palestine is going to lead to Palestinian Liberation. In any case, I’m pretty sure that it’s not Hamas.

By-the-bye, the South African government did engage in militaristic repressions of its population, massacres, forced displacements, ethnic cleansing, torture, rape, terror, slavery. There was armed resistance, but the form this took was very different to Hamas. It was based on progressive movements, whereas Hamas is not.

Also, this is not a question about violence as such. Violence is necessary for the revolution. I wish it wasn’t but it is. When a Palestinian kills an Israeli soldier attacking their home, my heart cheers for them. But that’s not the same thing as an Islamist militant taking someone’s children hostage and raping and murdering the women. Hamas would cut our heads off in a heartbeat. And this is not an idle point that’s somehow irrelevant in some grand geopolitical third-worldist strategy. They are Islamists. They do not care about our revolution and their success, even Thinking the political math is that simple is naive. If it weren’t, then groups like the Khmer Rouge would have been justified. This is not an idle or moralistic point because not all forms of organization or methods are politically equal. Not least because the moral qualities they have does affect how politically effective they are going to be. The indiscriminate killing of unarmed women and children is not going to serve the cause of Palestinian Liberation. Now on the one hand I admit there’s a sense of comeuppance to the blowback Israel is seeing, such as at the attacked rave. The rave, with plenty of well-off Israelis who live off the fruits of apartheid, rolling on ecstasy next to an open-air prison camp - from which, apparently, the rave’s music could actually be heard - is obviously completely depraved. But this is cruel emotion of mine. Not a guide to politics or ethics.

This is also because the apartheid government caved under not only international but more important domestic pressure as they were perfectly aware that there would be civil war and mass bloodshed if they had not given in to reforms and the end of apartheid. It’s not clear what would have happened otherwise if, for instance, they had doubled down or intensified the apartheid system with even more extensive fascistic slave-labour in the 80s. As South Africa had an economic model that was descended from the settler-colonial plantation system, as seen, and utilized extensive unpaid (effectively slave) labor, it’s not unimaginable that if they’re pushed the system deeper then there would have been far more retaliatory bloodshed.

Indeed.

But the ANC and Hamas are not similar at all.

Hi comrade. Not coming at you personally or aggressively but I feel I do have to come back pretty hard on this take.

The same words can be used in different contexts with different implications, and in the one case they can be correct, in another they can be wrong. The difference which makes your analogy not hold is that the ANC is not Hamas, and pretending otherwise is either confused or disingenuous. They are extremely different organizations. The ANC was a broad-tent organization that included conservatives, nationalists, reactionaries, and revolutionary socialists, notably communists (especially in the armed wing). The armed wing did carry out military operations obvs, but they did not have as a common or explicit policy the indiscriminate torture of unarmed children or torture. They never carried out actions like Hamas has done. Not least because they were sufficiently progressive to recognize that this would politically idiotic, given that the anti-apartheid cause was perceived as depending on foreign pressure on apartheid SA. It seems clear to me that the same applies to the Palestinian case, thought the problem if ofc that the situation is so fucked that the main organization capable and willing of waging armed resistance would not only be terrible for a Palestinian left’s growth in the long-run but could also lead to a regional destabilization which would be harmful for the left in the region more broadly and would likely only benefit Islamists. The actual idea situation would be another leftist-led Intifada, but this has been prevented by Israel, but is also not in the interest of either Hamas or the PA, as it would undermine their authority and power they possess thanks to Israel in Gaza and the West Bank respectively.

By contrast, Hamas are very different. The is evidence for Hamas being the way they are has been there since their inception. They are Islamists. They are extremely fascistic in their politics. They explicitly equate Jews and Israel frequently in their media and they are otherwise clear in their genocidal anti-semitism. Murdering children in their homes is not national-liberation. I’d also add that Hamas are not identical to Palestinians and their actions are not immediately identical with, though they are unfortunately the main military vehicle currently available for, the struggle for Palestinian liberation. Not only that, but Hamas have consistently proven throughout their existence that they do not desire full Palestinian liberation, otherwise they would not have run affairs in Gaza (to the extent they are able in an Israeli open-air concentration-camp) the way they have. This is in no way surprising, given that the interests of Islamists are no less inimical to those of actual working class and liberation movements than fascists and ultra-nationalists, though the latter might also find themselves in the inferior position in asymmetrical warfare with an imperialist power and at the military head of the movement against said imperialism.

Quite frankly, it is an insult to the South African liberation movement to equate them with Hamas, as opposed to the genuinely progressive aspects of the Palestinian liberation movement.

I do think it is important to note these profoundly reactionary aspects of Hamas, otherwise we end up with a blinkered, confused view of what is happening, which is not simply reducible to Hamas being or leading a progressive revolution in Gaza. That in no way changes the fact that the mass of Palestinians who are taking part in these operations are attempting to combat Israeli apartheid and genocide and defend themselves. They evidently feel they have no other choice. But neither does the latter point make Hamas a progressive organization who should be explicitly supported as the solution to Palestinians’ oppression.

The right and need of Palestinians to depend themselves does not, however, in any way imply that every organization that happens to be the means they can do it through now is ideal, good, progressive, or that that will benefit them in the long run. Palestinian Marxists and other groups have found themselves in a situation where they feel they have no option or choice other than to form a front with Hamas in this. The deeper reasons and processes that led to that decision are not entirely clear from outside. We can unequivocally support Palestinian liberation and their self-defense while recognizing that Hamas is otherwise reactionary and therefore will not be the ideal vehicle Also, frankly, I’m never going to support an organization that tortures gay people and throws their Marxist opponents off of rooftops. Unfortunately I’m a pessimist on the front of how the political situation will develop in the long-term as I think the situation’s possible developments are going to be catastrophic in any case, given the genocidal nature of the Israeli apartheid state, how profoundly reactionary Hamas are, and that the material conditions do not allow for the strength of a Communist movement. That would require more ideal conditions which are not to be found in Gaza, and I also don’t think will be brought closer by this current round of war. Israel does of course have ultimate responsibility for this as the genocidal apartheid occupying power, but reaction can bread reaction.

Not all national liberation movements are equal. Not all methods are politically or morally equal. People on this site seem to be able to make this realization in several other cases, such as with ostensibly ‘communist’ groups like the Khmer Rouge and Sendero Luminoso, yet unable to consistently make the same obvious realization in the case of groups in the middle east who’s interests are opposed to those of Western imperialism. There’s a deep and hysterical need among a lot of the western left, not only including but above all among those who are not Marxists but ultras of various types, to unequivocally identify Hamas with the Palestinian people and the cause of Palestinian Liberation with anything that Hamas does, which is a really bizarre and honestly perverse (especially in its reduction of Palestinians to Hamas) form of metaphysical argument by semantic shift of the meaning of the words being used, to make something appear to imply something which it actually does not.

The slightest glance at the history of the relationship of the USSR to national liberation movements makes clear that serious and intelligent socialists of the past who have actually held political power and had geopolitical relevance were perfectly aware that not all national liberation groups are politically equal. Their support was never unconditional, because they were not ultra edgelords on the internet. They were a serious geopolitical power with a specific socialist ideology, and their support was therefore conditional on there being a minimum of progressive aspects to the movements they supported. Of course, this did lead to cases of of questionable or debatable support (such as the Guomingdang or the Derg), and the case is even worse when we consider the CPC’s foreign policy. But that these were mistakes (if they were) is made clear by how they contradicted with the socialist principles which were explicitly underlying them in the minds of socialists politicians who determined foreign policy.

IMO, the Egyptian state’s interests, as any local corrupt power run by a national bourgeoisie and military state apparatus, are determined by their perceived geopolitical interests. Given how developments in Palestine can catalyze domestic politics, and given that Egypt does not want to have to deal with millions of refugees, it’s not a given that they are going to get in the way of Israel bombing the crossings and blocking entry and exit of Gaza in general.

Yh a lot of mfers on this site need to actually read some theory.

Yes I’m aware that’s what you meant but that has nothing to do with my point and affects it in no way that you are expanding a definition in a way that has normally only been done by the right-wing, for obvious reasons (Elon Musk loves hammering this point).

• “What I mean to say is that in a market system the rational behaviour is to seek to maximise what you get for what you give. Anti-competetive practices are simply the logical way to behave in such a system. Trade unions do aim to use market forces to gain for workers an advantage and that is a good thing.” Sure. Up to a point, but you are assuming an understanding of rationality that is perfectly consistent with the neoclassical and neoliberal view of the world. The rational interests of the working class are not limited to restricting their behaviour to maximisation of their income in a private labor market.

• “The market isn’t fair and it never has been about fairness.”. Yeh. Sure. Who said otherwise?

• “deally we wouldn’t have a market system but while we do it makes no sense for the workers to not try and get ahead in it”. Up to a point, sure, except exclusive focus on this has historically and inevitably led to economism and reformism.

• “Take coffee growers for example they are pitted against each other by the buyers and thus live in poverty as competition pushes their wares lower and lower. If they were to cartelise they would be able to afford good things and have the basic dignity of always having enough to eat. Competition in the market makes everyone poorer”. The formation of unions can be useful but is limited in effectiveness, especially in periods of poor-bargaining power for working class groups such as now, with very low levels of organization. The purpose of supporting unionization, from a communist view, must also include the concern to increase our leverage during period of economic boom so as to be better prepared during downturns for pushes for radicalization.

“so while trade unions are an anti-competetive practice that’s only because competetive practices are stupid” - this is vague or ambiguous and it doesn’t look like the former point doesn’t step from the latter. Also stupid for whom? Why? How? For workers? then yes, as per my point.

I understand what you mean, but I’d really strongly object to the use you’ve made of the term though as that is precisely the use which was introduced by the right-wing for the purposes of delegitimizing labour organization by conflating labour organization with the anti-competitive nature of cartels in the ideological and rhethorical climate of Neoliberalism that has continuously fetishized supposed competition and playing off our fear of it while nevertheless tending the conditions that promote cartelization of the global economy to the hilt.

The difference is that cartels are firms controlled by capitalists for the purpose of profit and capital accumulation. They fix prices for this purpose. Workers do not, because by their very nature capital accumulation is the logic of the capitalists’ material interests, and so in strong contradiction, in the final analysis, with the material interests of labour. Cartel on this definition you’ve used would then just mean ‘price control’. But is then a monopoly or the government a cartel when they respectively fix or regulate prices? The purpose of the introduction of the term was to refer to new formations, concentrations and centralizations of capital in the late 19th century for purposes of overcoming the economic slowdown of this period. It seems harmful, confused and inevitably confusing to widen the meaning of the word so broadly.

I obviously agree that labour should organize, and there are circumstances in which markets might be tolerated in very restricted ways from a socialist perspective, and in such markets labour should therefore of course be organized in such a way as to control production and therefore prices. But the assumption in your question that markets are ‘legitimate’ in general strikes me as deeply problematic and politically un-Marxist.

‘Free-markets’ has never referred to a philosophical, moral or spiritual idea of freedom, except when used rhetorically in discourse by the right, especially since Thatcher and Reagan, i.e. the full onset of the Neoliberal counter-revolution.

Economists do not study the idea of ‘freedom’. That is a philosophical concept. When they say ‘free’, and you actually look at the structure of the propositions they use, they are referring essentially to the private autonomy of firms as ‘free’ to the degree that there is no non-private, social, public or governmental interest (it’s not only the government, as this definition implies that trade-unions make a market ‘less free’).

There is absolutely nothing inconsistent between free-markets and market concentration. If by a free-market, we use the standard neoclassical meaning of one where there is no/very little/minimal government or public regulation to influence demand or supply or the price mechanism, which in material terms implies that those are completely controlled by private capital and its owners, then there is nothing stopping this from being an oligopoly, a cartel or a monopoly. Actually lack of public regulation has generally lead to more concentration, not less.

I think you are confusing the neoclassical ‘perfect competition’ (which does not, and cannot, exist in the real world) and neoclassically defined ‘free’-markets.

Please don’t try drop econ-101 learns on Marxists if you don’t know the definitions of free-market economics, perfect competition or oligopolies.

Lmao westerners having a totally normal one over the lack of loyalty of a slop-house to the divinely-ordained imperial cause.

Firstly, I’m not sure your understanding of the meaning or relevance of ‘hypocrisy’ is very clear.

Secondly, you’re introducing a moralistic discourse about this when the first issue is what caused or explained the Russian intervention in Ukraine. Despite the evidence overwhelmingly pointing to NATO expansion, the fact that you are denying it when even Stoltenberg and Blinken are basically at the point of admitting it, implicit as those admissions may be, is pretty comic.

If you think that the Ukrainian government was not only not abusing, but in fact not committing acts amounting to ethnically cleansing Russians in eastern Ukraine, you have been living under a rock and its disgusting that you can utter such bullshit with such nonchalance and impunity. Contrary to, say, accusation of genocide in Xinjiang, for which there is no hard concrete evidence (in fact evidence and reason point to the contrary), there are mountains of evidence in every form of media, whether video, documents, government announcements, proving that there was repressive military and political action being taken against the Russophone and ethinically Russian, or simply anti-nationalist Ukrainians of the East, by the Ukrainian ultra-nationalist regime. There have been mass disappearances, lynchings, bombings, assassinations, and we could go on. Again, there is too much evidence for this in every form for any one person to peruse the entirety of, so either you are pig-shit ignorant, or you are lying. Trouble is you are doing it in the wrong place.

Your last sentence is barely comprehensible quite frankly. If you think that reocognizing that a state should not aggressively expand a demonstrably imperialist organisation and in the process break all related previous agreements and promises in doing so, in a way that every party involved is fully aware will be perceived as a threat to the national security of one of the concerned countries, if one wants to avoid hot conflict, given the self-evident realities of realpolitik, is communist or marxist, then go off I guess.

Yeah it’s important that we, as Marxists, therefore proceeding scientific,ally, make very clear from the onset as to what we mean when we use the term ‘imperialist’ with this more specific, narrow, Leninist definition which only really applies to modern capitalism, or more precisely the modern capitalist world-system. Conceptual clarification is essential for any scientific endeavor, including Marxism.

Even on this definition however, we can note that it is perfectly possible (and concretely, empirically, historically confirm this possibility by looking at the international situation pre-WW1) that there be several powers or polarized groups of powers each of which behaves imperialistically in the Leninist sense. The difference today is that we currently still have a more or less unipolar as opposed to multipolar imperialist (Leninist sense) world-system.

If someone calls Russia ‘imperialist’ in a different sense, then they might not be wrong, and saying that they are because our definition doesn’t apply isn’t relevant beyond the fact that there’s confusion over the concepts being used because people are equivocating between them, simply because we are using the same term/sound/word/signifier. If we do the latter we are engaging in a semantic debate disguised as, because confused with, a substantive debate.

Yes. Gaddafi was also certainly killed based on French intelligence, and there is substantial evidence that the men who assassinated him were French assets. Part of the reason, apart from the broader geopolitical aim of annihilating a country which wanted to engage in the construction of international monetary and commerical systems outside of the orbit and control of the American petro-dollar, Gaddafi had essentially bribed Sarkozy at a certain point and was holding this over the latter’s head (Sarkozy is infamously corrupt). See:

• https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/021012/gaddafi-executed-french-revelations-libyan-agent
• https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/french-secret-service-killed-gaddafi-sarkozys-orders-reports
• https://www.rfi.fr/en/africa/20121001-french-spy-killed-kadhafi-sarkozys-orders-papers-claim
• https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2210759/Gaddafi-killed-French-secret-serviceman-orders-Nicolas-Sarkozy-sources-claim.html
• https://www.euronews.com/2018/03/20/sarkozy-in-libya-case-what-does-it-all-mean-

Hegemon’s have to rule by fear. Read any bloodsoaked page from the history of the Roman Empire. Fear is best instilled through unimaginable atrocity. What do you think the rulers of the rest of Africa and the Middle East thought after they saw how Gaddafi, head of the most prosperous (per-capita, quality of life, standard of living, etc.) state in Africa, ended up?

I see. So are you going to follow this line of thought to it’s natural conclusion and become an anarchist? /s

Yeah I mean if we were being more fair we would not only have to trace these genres genealogically through Jazz to blues and gospel, ragtime, and also to Caribbean and Spanish music (especially for alot of rhythmic ideas) and also West African music (blues, pentatonic scales), but also recognize that European classical music also had deep influence on early black american music.

The only country music I’ve ever unironically enjoyed was bluegrass, and that confirms our point. That being said I’m nothing of an aficionado of this stuff so I dont doubt there’s decent stuff I dont know.

But yh white suburbs are really where culture goes to die. It reminds of a comment Pasolini once made, that only the lower classes and the upper classes in history have produced real culture. The middle classes have been cultureless on average.

There is an American culture of world-historical importance. It’s just not the white culture. Black music for instance has unparalleled influence partly because of its quality. White music culture has made no contributions to modern (including popular art) equal to, say, Jazz, Blues, Gospel, RnB, Hip-Hop, detroit techno, chicago house…I could go on. Of course white people in general, especially the bourgeois, have little to no access to or knowedge of these cultures, unless its been given to them through a gentrified, fetishized filter that doesn’t understand the value of these musical traditions. Alternatively they treat is as jokey party music for them to sniff coke to.

Apart from that I agree that the mainstream of American culture is literal proof of the decadence of a civilization.

I’d also say that apart from key land needing to be returned to give to native americans and key minorities, the most important thing is that there is equitable land and housing reform that ensures an equitable distribution and standard of living for everyone in the broader working class, though this doesn’t preclude certain groups being given more immediate priority.

But yeh America is satanic. Literal Mammon worshipers.

If you actually live in America, then I’m guessing you haven’t been poor in America. It’s extremely difficult, without the opiate of capitalist realism and liberal ideology, to believe that you have rights in any real world sense when you are dirt-poor in America.

It’s interesting, in your justification for the supposed superiority of the US, that you are only citing your anecdotal case that you have found your life subjectively better. What actually matters, especially if you’d like to play the game of which country has more democratic policy in the limited sense of in which country were the massive conditions of life most securely guaranteed as per the interests and desires of the populace, then it is very difficult to hand the medal to the US, especially if you have even the slightest knowledge of US economic, social and political history, to say nothing of its imperialist geopolitics. Your justification is a purely selfish, narcisistically egoist one. I don’t blame anyone for trying to get out of a shitty economic situation, but that isn’t really as absolutely relevant as you seem to think at the end of the day when we are discussing whether or not the US’s material effects on the rest of world justify us qualifying it as deeply reactionary, in fact perhaps the main impediment to a progressive future for humanity.

The social, political and economic collapse of the USSR is directly linked, directly caused, by the US (and the West). Capitalistic reforms had already begun under Khruschev, which allowed for the further development of black-market enriched criminal classes who would form the social base of the mafiosi who would start to devore the Russian economy in the late 80s and throughout the 90s. The traumatic experience of Russia in the last 30-40 years, with the literal mass death and one of the largest drops in living standards in any modern country’s history (and starting from a period of great development), was the blindingly, unequivocally, undeniable consequence of deeping capitalist reforms and political liberalization during the 80s, notably under Gorbachev. The advice was American. The advisors were American. The model was American. The pressures that had brought the USSR to this point were American. Modern Russia is a creation of America.

If we want to talk about quality of life, then the best time to be a Russia, was without a doubt, the 50s-70s. It is not a coincidence that a very high number of Russians, especially older ones who actually lived in the USSR, and even more so if they lived during the 50s-70s, are deeply nostaghic for it, even if this nostalgia is born out of a sense of relatively greater economic security that they were ensured during this period.

You do not seem to be grasping immuredanchorite’s point though, which is that if we even want to get into a discussion over which of these two political powers is ‘better’, morally or ethnically (to the extent that this even makes sense), you are not going to be able to do so coherently without looking at how the political entity we call the US has acted, and what it’s real, material effects and consequences have been. I.e., not only can you not answer those questions without considering politics (which is literally one of the most incoherent yet common assumptions of liberal ideology), but that you also cannot escape the essential importance of geopolitics. By any geopolitical measure, the US is the most reactionary and viciously imperialist power in the contemporary era.

I’d add that, reactionary as some aspects of the USSR or the PRC have unfortunately been (inevitable, because we are talking about history, not your abstract moral ideal, the purvue of ultra-‘leftists’ and reformists and social democrats everywhere), there is no evidence, at any point in these states’ histories, of genocide in the sense of planned destruction of a racial or ethnic group. You’re also going to have to be clearer about what you mean by ‘atrocity’, though yes, these happened.

Also, you need to make clear what you understand by the term ‘right’, because if you are using it in a liberal sense, you are going to find that communists do not understand it in that way, i.e. in a purely abstract, negative sense. Although even if we did just want to understand it in the latter sense, the existence of money as such as institution is an immense restriction on the negative freedom of the vast majority of people.

Yeh good convo. No beef obviously. Marxism is a part of science and so has to include continuous critique.

My point is simply that the confusion of these questions as if they are the same, when they are trivially not, actually gets in the way of precisely the important objective you’ve cited, namely understanding and taking the correct position on China. If our position does not make sense when explained to people then that it our fault and issue, not their’s. People not being Marxist is just as much, if not more, the fault of us as Marxist to clearly explain and convince that it is their’s.

However I’m still not fully understanding your first point. Breaking down concepts, making clear definition, and thus theoretical conditions, is for the sake of clarity and so that we can actually analyze properly, and is obligatory at the onset of any scientific analysis or inquiry, once we’ve gotten beyond the more intuition stage of concept formation. I’m not disagreeing with you that the answers to those questions, the properties and facts they are making reference to, all have to be taken into account in a holistic way if we are going to give a proper analysis or have a decent understanding of how democratic the Chinese political and socio-economic system is and whether it is moving in that direction. It’s also essential so that we know what conditions would produce these conditions, so that we know whether the socio-economic basis for a deepening of proletarian democracy is developing. But clear analysis of concepts at the very onset is still essential. Even tho this points have ofc, as you say, been analyzed to deathly minutiae ad infinitum by millions of Chinese comrades, I’m not seeing how this makes is irrelevant for those of us outside of China. It is still important for us, in our own position, to have a correct understanding of China as Marxists. Marx wrote much of his work before the conditions of as pure capitalism as he describes in works such as Das Capital were even really there. Marx reflected with scientific ruthlessness and lack of qualms about people’s political correctness ceaselessly. This is why we still read him today and not other analysts of capitalism from the time. Hell, even the Communist Manifesto describes a capitalism which is too purified for the time. But this was not an irrelevant mistake on Marx’s part. It was scientific foresight as to where European societies undergoing the transition to capitalism were headed. We need similar analysis today of China, if we think or hope that China will be a future global revolutionary center.

On the plan for socialist transition being laid out, the CPC most certainly have stated and presented such a plan, although I haven’t seen very detailed data demonstrating that such a plan is seriously being laid out and applied. It seems to be based on a kind of faith in the CPC. The argument that they have continued to massively improve the standard of living since the Reform and Opening up, bringing 800 million people out of poverty is of course correct and a historic achievement. However the same argument is often used by liberals to justify, say, the capitalism of the 50s-70s in which living standards in the West did considerably go up. The difference which might be brought up is the fact that China has done so without using imperialism. However, given that the core issue of imperialism is that it is exploitation (of some of the most extreme kind), and given that China has charged its development in recent decades (and did so in the 50s when Liu Shaoqi was saying things like ‘exploitation can be good!’) with exploitation of its working class and peasantry, citing improvements in living standards is not proof that the intentions of the part-leadership are necessarily geared towards a truly socialist transition. So I don’t think it’s just a philosophical point, but something to be always born in mind so that we suspend judgement until hard evidence is there that the CPC will, so to speak ‘push the big red button’. I’m not going to believe something unless I have actual incontrovertible evidence for it. That doesn’t mean that I know that they won’t. But something it’s just not possible to be confident either way. Another issue is that the current mode of production in China does not function like capitalism as we know it at the macro-level, nor does it operate fully like socialism. Maybe it is a type of transitionary stage (but then we hear the Leninist critique of the reforming, Menshevik notion of non-revolutionary transition to socialism in our heads). In either case, it makes clear to me again that one reason for so much of the theoretical impasse of people outside of China trying to understand it is that we don’t have a fully adequate understanding of the key mechanisms at the macro-level of their mode of production.

Of course I’m happy to be proven wrong on this point. The main issue is that I’ve only just recently started leaning Mandarin, so I cannot read Chinese sources. But if anyone has excellent economic data and analysis to give me on this point i’d be happy to see it.

This is, again, why intentions are important. Political groups with different interest take on different objectives and intentions in the same set of external material conditions, so the fact that the Dengist are in power and not the Maoists, and that the economic base of support for the party and the state is therefore different now in the aftermath of the reforms, is very significant for trying to understand what the intentions of the current CPC leadership actually is.

I personally don’t really understand how saying the truth about China, as far as we can discern it through scientific, Marxist analysis (which in no way contradicts, but rather radically extends, the methods of scientific enquiry of the past, whichever culture they were taken from), amongst ourselves is an issue. We have an political and therefore intellectual duty for our understanding of China to be as clear as possible, and that’s not going to be achieved by saying that certain questions which are relevant to understanding China’s contemporary political system are divisive. I’m not seeing how you and I having this convo is divisive. Furthermore, rigorous critique and debate is of the essence of Marxist methodology. Look at the records of the Bolshevik party until the Stalinist period. Before they were in power they were rigorously critiquing each other (perhaps too viviously) left, right and centre. Lenin was theoretically beefing with everyone all the time. In the 20s, once the Stalinist position was dominant, you can look for instance at economic debates or at the party debates on China. They were theoretically sophisticated and based on the premise that a clear theoretical understanding is essential for policy. Obviously we are not in anything like such a position of power of influence, but we do need to start, as part of a truly Marxist culture, to act and prepare for this, not only because liberal hegemony will not last forever, but because it’s important that in order to convince people of the correctness of our view, that we can do so rigorously and clearly.

I’m not using mediation in a Trotskyist position (not a Trotskyist). I was just checking whether you meant directness in a more philosophical, meta-theoretic sense appropriate to materialist dialectics or whether you were using it in a more colloquial sense. Obviously the latter as you’ve clarified that it has to do the time-aspect and thus the pragmatic importance. I’m also not disagreeing in the slightest that the Trotskyist position of that type, especially today, would be ultraleftism in the pejorative sense.

Those are not strictly speaking counterexamples. I didn’t claim they couldn’t transition back. Capitalist systems have tendencies which lead to socio-economic and political crisis. These, pushed far enough, and without a socialist revolution, tend to culminate in something like fascism in the modern era. But these are just tendencies. Nothing says that these tendencies must absolutely always, in every circumstance, proceed to completion. That’s determines by the other casual factors, the other objective and subjective material conditions. In this case, it was the geopolitical and global economic context.

As a matter of time I’m going to focus on Spain and Portugal in my answer.

The original fascist states also all went back to liberal democracy at the end of WWII. They were crushed by the liberal capitalist states (and ofc by the Soviet Union) which correctly perceived them as geopolitical rivals of the first importance by the mid-late 30s. The other fascist states were also pressured into transition back into the liberal imperialst orbit of the Cold War. In both cases, they were reintegrated as they proved unable to fully complete a world fascist counter-revolution. You are right to bring these up as very interesting cases because they are examples of how you can transition back to liberal capitalist bourgeois democracies. But this does alter the fact that there were serious changes in the political structures of both Portugal and Spain and that the supposed continuity of these transitions are often overstated.

The transition of Spain between the death of Franco in 1975 and 1978 was not as smooth or non-violent as it’s popularly imagined. It was a very violent period. Fascist regimes are inherently inefficient in the long-run from the POV of socio-economic and cultural development. Further, Franco had started to distance himself from a more aggressive fascism once it was clear by 1943 that the fascists would lose WWII into order to transition back, at least in appearance, into a traditionalist, Catholic, authoritarian one-party state. It was still fascistic, but to a lesser degree and I think it had also lost it’s dynamism. This was also reflected in the internal balance of power of the Spanish political regime. The more radical fascists lost influence and the Military and Church gained more influence. Instead of radical fascist mass mobilization and constant radicalizing of the populace, Franco betted on a gradual, partial de-fascicization in which the emphasis would be on technocratic governance and in which the population would be more depoliticized and deradicalized through economic growth and benefits. It remained fascistic in relation to ethnic and national minorities and especially towards the revolutionary left. But in general terms, and notably those of economic governance, it returned to a more conservative and liberal position, rather than outright radical fascist, were the latter implies a far more total, complete level of intervention in all aspects of society. Spain became heavily integrated into the Western European and Atlantic economy. It became an ultra-conservative client state of NATO in everything but name (it was not allowed to become a member). The Partido Popular are the continuation of this more liberalizing-trad-conservative wing of Falangists, wereas Vox are representative of the more radical fascist elements. It is not for nothing that they have been forming coalitions recently. But even if Vox came to power by itself, it is not clear that they would find themselves in a different situation to the Fratelli d’Italia at present, were many reactionary aspects of the country would certainly intensify, notably towards immigrants, Muslims, racial minorities and LGBT folks, but it would be limited because a fascist government, while not immediately inconsistent with fascism, does tend to contravene the liberal principles, as liberals are only one group of pro-capitalists, and there are many political positions which emphasize different forms of capitalism, notably through different governance structures over the economy, firms, capitalists, etc.

Another reason the transition was possible is because there was a recognized incentive to compromise in order to avoid another civil war, the terror of which was still very present in everyone’s minds, and this was made possible because, as noted above, the more radical elements of the falangists had been somewhat sidelined and Franco had also begun a process of deradicalizing his fascist government. Apartheid South Africa was similar in many respects, in terms of reasons for liberal transition, despite the context being extremely different in many ways, most obviously when it comes to the racial dynamics. Interestingly, it’s difficult to imagine Israeli doing that kind of liberal transition at this point. Imo Israel’s future may well be an extremely bloody one…

It’s also worth pointing out that the 70s was a far more radical time than today. There was a lot more pressure from the social-democrat European left that shaped the debates and ideological struggle in 70s Spain, again emphazing a need to transition. Also, Carter moved away somewhat from Nixon’s more active support of these regimes (the US supported their military by being their main weapon’s providers).

The Estado Novo was as strange type of fascism. It was not as aggressive in its foreign policy as fascist Italy or Nazi Germany, which attempted to recreate mystical conceptions of their ancient empires in a way that directly conflicted with the interests of the other western imperialist powers. It was also pulled back into the orbit. Neither Franco nor Salazar were idiots when it came to how they needed to geopolitically and economically pivot in order to ensure their survival. Salazar did something very similar to Franco, as described above.

These other fascist states, which were tolerated because they did not pose as serious a threat to the imperial interests of the US, Britain and France, and because they were willing to accommodate these other powers’ interests and cooperate. However they were also undermined by their own inefficiencies, economic and political, and pressure from the external climate of a dynamic post-war trans-Atlantic economy to reintegrate themselves, at least economically, with the liberal powers.

We know that the socio-economic base transforms itself in such a way as to overcome disequilibrating forces that emerge in their social relations, especially once the latter are no longer sufficient to further developing the means of production, especially in a system of like capitalism whose basic functioning is premised on the fact of continued production of profit to incentivize production. But what about the transformations of the superstructure? My point is that as the base structure develops in this manner, it not only does so in conjunction with the the superstructure, but not only transforms the superstructure in order to reach new points of temporary stability. It is not only the base structure that evolves, moving gradually, continually and something revolutionarily into different overall dominant modes of production, but also the superstructure, in particular the political regime, which develops, and not only between base-level modes of production, but also within the same overall type of mode of production. In some cases liberal capitalism becomes fascist capitalism. In some case fascist capitalism can transition to liberal capitalism. In some cases fascist capitalism turns into outright mass-slave economies.