Hate to say it but, wtf does this mean anyway? Does the left have anything to offer to Russia, China, etc? What does it mean for us to support them, or to withdraw our support?
My honest and most realistic appraisal is that our support means nothing, we have nothing to offer, and any engagement in discourse about the moral or political value of the projects of the Russian state or the Chinese state is basically fruitless when the discussion among those in the halls of power is so far removed from our discussion that the difference between the most fervently critical Anarchist comrade and the most ridiculously pro-SMO ML is completely irrelevant. It’s not exactly arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but functionally it’s just as useless of a discussion. If we all agree that we have to show up at protests resisting the MIC, calling for peace, supporting leftist local politicians, and doing everything we can to raise union membership, what difference does it make that I ‘stan China’ but you ‘critically support Putin despite Duginist elements in the Russian government’? Is it not just as fruitless as political compass memes? Because from where I’m looking it literally is just PCM for people that have read the manifesto. The only value of the argument is to intellectually deduce the truth, a project that’s completely separate to actually achieving political power.
And yes, where you land in the spectrum of supporting Russia and China can influence which political party in your area to support, but practically the only material difference a minority party will make is whether it’s going to support sanctions and tariffs against Russia and China, or it won’t. However, not to No True Scotsman, but no true leftist party is going to jump on such a blatantly neoliberal and imperialist position as to economically punish 2 of the largest populations on Earth while knowing how little effect those sanctions will have on the ruling classes of the target states. So we’re back to square 1, regardless of your position, the actions you can take regarding Russia and China are the same.
Just to finish off the rant, here’s a comment from 72T that I found really insightful. TL;DR the question isn’t, “should we support a multipolar world,” because we have no power to change that reality, whether it’s going to arrive or not is entirely out of our hands. The question is “what is to be done about the incoming multipolar world,” especially locally, with regards to how it affects our approach to building power.
No shade on JT though, as far as the question exists in a vacuum that’s a good answer.
No, it’s important to, as Mao said, properly delineate who’s our friends and who’s our enemies. Otherwise, your org will do cringey shit like the DSA delegation snubbing the Cuban president and talking to a bunch of traitors working for the CIA instead.
Unless you want your org to be completely isolated from the international community and abandon internationalism, it has to connect and break bread with other orgs throughout the world and perhaps even anti-imperialist governments. While the DSA shit the bed with regards to Cuba, I think the DSA also send a delegation to Venezuela where they met Maduro. Obviously, Maduro isn’t going to meet with a bunch of dipshits who shittalk him by calling him an authoritarian dictator, but by personally meeting with Maduro, they have tacitly (and rightfully) support Maduro and uphold the Bolivarian Revolution.
Synthesis: The answer to this question,
Does the left have anything to offer to Russia, China, etc? What does it mean for us to support them, or to withdraw our support?
is that it is inconsequential what an individual leftist believes, but it matters a great deal for national leftist organizations to connect and build solidarity with international leftist organizations. What the American left (for example) has to offer China is quite simply a counterpart in America which can participate in the broader socialist movement, which is mutually beneficial. If/when shit does hit the fan, the left has to be ready both theoretically and organizationally.
I really agree with this but I’ll add a little more. A lot of the theory written by people like Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao occurred in the context of historical upheaval during which theory was absolutely necessary to chart a path forward for an actually existing political movement. So those writings should be understood first as practical and only second as abstractly philosophical.
Theoretical development is still worth doing in order to prepare, but there is way too much emphasis on abstract correctness over real successes.
Completely agree about the need for theory to evolve with material changes.
Science needs to advance, but does it follow that every individual leftist needs to be preoccupied with theory, with becoming a scientist? For every Lenin there were millions of average people trusting in the party line that he and the Bolsheviks produced. Most Russian revolutionaries, of whom only a fraction were serious party members, likely did not have a strong grasp of theory outside of their own experience.
Western leftists (myself included) have to combat their latent liberalism, one form of which is a belief in the “marketplace of ideas.” This belief is the basis of electoralism, which as most lefitsts understand theoretically, is ineffectual in practice. Yet with so much emphasis on perfecting science, one has to wonder if the Western left has actually internalized the truth that the best idea does not inevitably win, that progress doesn’t follow inevitably from worsening material conditions.
We could have a perfect theoretical understanding of capitalism and it would not matter until the left has politically organized in such a way as to put that theory into practice. There are enough theorizers/philosophers/“scientists” on the left and not enough direct action and organizing.
Reading the abstract theory of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao — it is too easy to forget the context in which those writings happen. Many believe that Marx invented communism, but his actual result was consolidating an otherwise disorganized proletarian movement under a single theoretical basis.
The manifesto itself was written intentionally watered down on some points so as to receive buy-in from various socialist factions. The intellectual disagreements between the factions worked themselves out because the correctness of this or that idea was demonstrated in practice. Engels wrote in his 1888 preface to the manifesto,
Marx, who drew up this programme to the satisfaction of all parties, entirely trusted to the intellectual development of the working class, which was sure to result from combined action and mutual discussion. The very events and vicissitudes in the struggle against capital, the defeats even more than the victories, could not help bringing home to men’ s minds the insufficiency of their various favorite nostrums, and preparing the way for a more complete insight into the true conditions for working-class emancipation. And Marx was right. The International, on its breaking in 1874, left the workers quite different men from what it found them in 1864. Proudhonism in France, Lassalleanism in Germany, were dying out, and even the conservative English trade unions, though most of them had long since severed their connection with the International, were gradually advancing towards that point at which, last year at Swansea, their president [W. Bevan] could say in their name: “Continental socialism has lost its terror for us.” In fact, the principles of the Manifesto had made considerable headway among the working men of all countries.
Leftist theory does need to advance, but not through contemplation alone. It needs to be tested in practice. And I think that is what JT is saying here, that theoretical correctness is secondary to direct action.
If you stand back and be silent when “enemy” countries get slandered, you are legitimizing imperalism and help cultural imperalism do its work. This applies on a micro & marco-level.
Foreign policy is not democratized. The range of acceptable discourse inside imperialist countries never spans past the point where you turn around and actually oppose imperialism, the opposition actually lands so far away that any speech against empire is thoroughly delegitimized and often holds negative power to change the reality of imperialism, because by holding that position you become the boogeyman for the moderates to rally against. Not that we shouldn’t be anti-imperialists, but thinking that you will just change reality by having the correct ideas, with no concrete plan as to how you’ll enact those ideas into material reality is ahistorical and antimaterialist. Note that when it comes to organizing in favor of Palestine the situation is entirely different because we do have things we can do to improve the situation for Palestinians, but the same can’t be said for Russia and Ukraine, or anything related to China. The only thing you have to offer is discourse, which the ruling class has the power to invert in their favor. No amount of 500 follower hammer and sickle accounts on Twitter dunking on White House press releases is going to stop aid to Ukraine, you’re probably getting Twitter to get even more reactionary if anything.
So that ties back into my point, we have no organization broad enough or strong enough to actually change reality w.r.t. foreign policy, especially towards the main enemies of empire. We’re just a part of the culture, part of the superstructure that maintains the base but has little power to materially change it until we can have enough workers willing to withhold their labor politically conscious and organized. Once we’re at that point then those questions do become important and we have a broader international left to fit into.
Being aware of what is good and bad, and spreading awareness of those distinctions, must surely be useful. Discussing and working out what sucks and what is cool is a big part of how we as commies organise in the first place to then get said power. If you don’t ask these questions before you have power, you’ll find yourself in bed with unsavory types.
You’ve posed a very pertinent question. Taken to its logical conclusion, this is the dilemma that encapsulates the entire project of “Western Marxism” in general and it’s a fair question that deserves more than ridicule or dismissal.
We are long past the era of Eugene Debbs where the Western left had a sliver of actionable material power, so even beyond the question of what the Western left can do for AES states, what is the point to being a Marxist at all? In practical terms, if you consider the things you can materially accomplish in the midst of the imperial core, is there really a point to being a ML and not simply submitting yourself to the Democrats or Labour or the SPD where you can at least organize to defend those few select social progressive interests permissible in this bourgeoisie system?
When you’re powerless, fragmented, isolated and sociopolitically ostracized, what’s the point to all of this, holding all those “geopolitics understander” positions and these “principally correct” Marxist stances at all if you can’t achieve anything real with them and, to most people looking at you from the outside, based on your accomplishable praxis inside the heartlands of anticommunism, you just look like a weird but generic liberal anyways?
Is the Western leftist doomed to be that soyjak meme, standing alone in the corner of a party, with that thought bubble thinking “Heh, they don’t know that Stalin = actually good.” Does it come down to that eternal philosophical question of “If a tree falls in the forest, but no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound at all?”
Marx lived during the apogee of imperialism, the cruelty of the American slave state and a bleak era where that meager revolutionary flicker within 1848 was subverted by the bourgeoisie and where the only successful proletariat uprising, the Paris Commune, was brutally squashed with ease. And yet, he persevered in his writings, which, of course, became the bedrock of what we stand for today. His writings where he railed against the hypocrisy of the Second Opium War against China and the British tyranny over India was meaningless in his own time, this was the height of European colonial despotism, after all, and the tirades of one lone individual was to scream against the void. Was there no point to his opposition towards imperialism and his solidarity, against his own class, with the oppressed then?
For someone in that time, in the midst of all the chauvinism and racism societally designed to socialize and induce the European individual to become a cheerleader for the imperialist cause, for him to reject all those narratives and to see things clear eyed for what they are, now means everything. That was an utterly hopeless time, yet he perserved in spite of it and gave so much to the cause of socialism in retrospect. This is the same with the likes of Michael Parenti, during the nihilism of the 1990s, where socialism was subverted everywhere and even the surviving socialist states like China, Vietnam and Cuba were eyed with paranoia. People like Parenti and Losurdo could have sold out like the rest of western “Marxism,” got a cushy tenure and professorship chair at Oxbridge or the Ivys, but they continued to defend the legacies and memory of Stalin and Mao.
This is not to say that your average Hexbear user will become the next Parenti or that the sequel to Das Kapital will be penned by a News Megathread regular, but to emphasize the important point that those Marxist figures understood. They understood that the imperialist West is a culture obsessed with discourse control and narrative purity. To stand in front of its propaganda and to say “no” in its face is a powerful thing, in of itself. This is why the liberals get so upset when they encounter MLs, why there was two Red Scare campaigns, why Communist Parties in many countries are outright banned, why they’ve legislated criminal charges against those who support designated enemy nations. If it’s all meaningless, the adversaries of the genuine Western left would have never put in so much effort to counter genuine leftist voices. If it’s all pointless, they would not be so livid at seeing ML counter-argumentation and have banned communities like r/genzedong such that the Western left is ostracized to isolated places like Hexbear and Lemmygrad.
As such, yes, the Western left does not have the capacity for its own liberation, but upholding internationalist solidarity and maintaining principled Marxist-Leninist lines has meaning. It’s true that this meaning is not as materially valuable as being the one who fired the October shot on the Aurora, or striding into the Chinese countryside to manage New China’s land reform and this can be demoralizing to many who want more actionable and material gains.
Over the past century, many people on the Western left, not just ultra chauvinists or Trots or sellouts but well meaning people, have allowed themselves to suppress their own socialist beliefs in order to join liberal ranks and push for “change from within” or to achieve acceptable goals within the confines of the imperial core because the capabilities of the Western left, reduced to just providing internationalist solidarity, are such intangible things. This is understandable but one point that must be emphasized is that while the things the Western left can achieve are principally ideological rather than material, however, does not mean those things are meaningless.
Though it understandably can be demoralizing that this is the crux of what we can contribute, principled Western Marxist-Leninists who have a clear eye of how things are represent a slap in the face to the West and its self-image of whitewash and apologia, its modern narrative of LARPing moral sainthood while kicking its 500 years of imperialism under the bed, which I’ve talked about in a previous post. At this point in time, they earnestly believe they’ve gotten away with it and an ML’s principled stance, refusing to play along, threatens that. There’s a reason why Hitler personally ordered the execution of Ernst Thälmann, despite the latter having been imprisoned for eleven years, during the collapse of the fascist reich in 1944 while those like SPD collaborationists were left unscathed. Though western Marxism has almost always been utterly impotent, they nonetheless have a genuine fear of what we stand for.
Above all, our principled stance, though it might seem “immaterial” and feckless, is the continuation of the memory of those comrades of the past, those who built the planks in the house of western Marxism, ramshackle shack though it may be. Those like Thälmann were never able to achieve anything material either, does that mean he should have disbanded the KPD, joining the SPD in hopes of “changing things from within” or that his existence and martyrdom was meaningless? If that was true, then fascist written popular media has a better sense of duty to their predecessors than us western Marxists do.
Ultimately, I think there’s a dialectical dialogue in Disco Elysium, of all things, that encapsulates all of the understandable nihilism inherent to western Marxism quite poignantly.
Rhetoric: The question you mean to ask is both very complicated and incredibly simple…
Endurance: Take a deep breath. Best to go one piece at a time.
You: If communism keeps failing every time we try it…
Steban: (he waits patiently for you to finish)
You: …And the rest of the world keep killing us for our beliefs…
Steban: Yes?
Volition: Say it.
You: …What’s the point?
Steban: (he considers your words for a minute)
Composure: You’re witnessing his ironic armour melt before you. This is his true self you’re seeing now.
Empathy: He’s thinking about someone…
You: Wait, who is he thinking about?
Empathy: Hard to say. Someone dear to him.
Visual Calculus: Track his gaze. He’s looking out past the broken wall, toward the opposite side of the Bay…
You: Toward the skyscrapers of La Delta.
Visual Calculus: They rise like electric obelisks in the night.
Steban: The theorists Puncher and Wattmann — not infra-materialists, but theorists nonetheless — say that communism is a secular version of Perikarnassian theology, that it replaces faith in the divine with faith in humanity’s future… I have to say, I’ve never entirely understood what they mean, but I think maybe the answer is in there, somewhere.
You: Wait, you’re saying communism is some kind of religion?
Steban: Only in this very specific sense. Communism doesn’t dangle any promises of eternal bliss or reward. The only promise it offers is that the future can be better than the past, if we’re willing to work and fight and die for it.
You: But what if humanity keeps letting us down?
Steban: Nobody said fulfilling the proletariat’s historic role would be easy. (he smiles a tight smile) It demands great faith with no promise of tangible reward. But that doesn’t mean we can simply give up.
You: Even when they ignore us?
Steban: Even then.
Ulixes: Mazov says it’s the arrogance of capital that will be its ultimate undoing. It does not believe it can fail, which is why it must fail.
Volition: So young. So unbearably young…
Half Light: Why do you see the two of them with their backs against a bullet-pocked wall, all of a sudden?
Inland Empire: Their faces, blurred yet frozen as though in ambrotype. You were never that young, were you?
Steban: I guess you could say we believe it because it’s impossible. (he looks at the scattered matchboxes on the ground) It’s our way of saying we refuse to accept that the world has to remain… like this…
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I think the only thing Western leftists have to offer is withholding their consent for war/conflict.
China’s recent changes in Visa policy are interesting. Previously it’s been evident that they’ve been willing to spend zero effort on their pop image in the West, which shows how much difference they think public opinion has on Western government policy. Visa free entry being opened to a swathe of Western countries reflects a change in attitude: maybe they think that a positive Westerner view of China is more valuable now, maybe they think it’s easier to push back against “China Bad” propaganda now.
The fact that US and UK are notably excluded from the visa-free policy suggests Beijing sees more potential in Australian and European public opinion.
