Category Archives: Socialism

Comment on Desultory Heroics: ‘The Skripal Poisonings and the Ongoing Vilification of Putin’

Posted on by under Capitalist ideology, China, dialectical materialism, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, Russia, Socialism, United States, V.I.Lenin, Western supremacism, White supremacism

The_Skripal_poisonings_and_the_ongoing_vilification_of_Putin

‘This was the first offensive use of a nerve agent in Europe since World War II, they told him; very, very serious’. Why should post the second capitalist world war over the redivision of areas of exploitation be the cut-off point? It was the US capitalist class that first and twice employed ‘nuclear agents’ on the Japanese, when they were trying to surrender, as a warning to the Soviet Union and all socialists. Whatever the West – particularly the US capitalist class – and their agents criticise anyone for, they have done over and again and worse themselves.

Big picture (not one that focuses on individuals, as the agents of capital want you to do): the crisis of capitalism continues to deepen as the world moves from capitalism to socialism just as inevitably as it moved from feudalism to capitalism. MOABs, black ops and psy ops can and will impede this, just as the development of capitalism was opposed, but nothing can stop it.

Why? Not because I like socialism, but because consciousness is secondary and derivative of what is primary – the necessity of nature, reflected in the level of development of the productive forces. It is this that has to be understood. Not only Trump with his bullying bluster, but all political leaders and all individuals are secondary to this.

The Russians will never be forgiven by the capitalist class and their agents for having had the world’s first and successful socialist revolution (military from those same nations now expelling Russian diplomats invaded Russia after the revolution and were defeated). The denigration and now open vilification of Putin points to scores still to be settled. Further, the number of nuclear weapons the Russians possess is on a par with those of the American capitalist class, both far exceeding those of any other nation.

Driven by the crisis of capitalism, the vilification of Putin is a necessary, deliberate and significant step towards revitalising the division between the capitalist West and Russia, China and North Korea.

1280px-A_maglev_train_coming_out,_Pudong_International_Airport,_Shanghai

Shanghai maglev train

Engels wrote brilliantly in 1894: ‘The war in China has given the death-blow to the old China. Isolation has become impossible; the introduction of railways, steam-engines, electricity, and modern large-scale industry has become a necessity, if only for reasons of military defence. But with it the old economic system of small peasant agriculture, where the family also made its industrial products itself, falls to pieces too, and with it the whole old social system which made relatively dense population possible. Millions will be turned out and forced to emigrate; and these millions will find their way even to Europe, and en masse. But as soon as Chinese competition sets in on a mass scale, it will rapidly bring things to a head in your country and over here, and thus the conquest of China by capitalism will at the same time furnish the impulse for the overthrow of capitalism in Europe and America’ (Engels to Friedrich Adolf Sorge in Hoboken; London, November 10, 1894, Marx Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1982, 450-451).

What Engels got wrong was that China would become capitalist. What he got right was the impact the development of such a huge nation would have on the world.

In order to compete with China, the West will have to become socialist!

The Chinese Communist Party has shown itself, particularly since Deng Xiaoping, to be adaptable, to be able and willing to learn – both from its experience, that of the Chinese people and of the Soviet Union. Lenin saw the need for the NEP but because of his hatred for the bourgeoisie and his theoretical commitment, it was insufficient. The Chinese have learnt essential lessons from this, all at great cost.

But they have had their revolution. Politically, socially and philosophically they are way ahead of the West and, with the potential of the size of their population, any other nation.

red-star

Top image and post/bottom image

Thought Police for the 21st Century — Desultory Heroics

Posted on by under dialectical materialism, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, Russian Revolution, Socialism, V.I.Lenin

By Chris Hedges Source: TruthDig The abolition of net neutrality and the use of algorithms by Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter to divert readers and viewers from progressive, left-wing and anti-war sites, along with demonizing as foreign agents the journalists who expose the crimes of corporate capitalism and imperialism, have given the corporate state the […]

via Thought Police for the 21st Century — Desultory Heroics

I highly recommend both the article and webinar (in which North’s left hand, frequently patriarchally reaching towards and tapping on Hedges was both informative and distracting).

red-star

Only socialism can defeat Trumpism

Posted on by under Capitalism, Socialism, United States culture

sanders_speaks_at_rally_09-08-15

Nicole Aschoff and Bhaskar Sunkara, ’Only socialism can defeat Trumpism’ The Nation, 07.11.16

…the past year has shown that millions of ordinary people are ready for an alternative, one pointed to by the success of Sanders and the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn in Britain. These leaders have tried to articulate a humanist, social-democratic vision—a platform with concrete demands that, if met, would improve the lives of the poor, restore dignity and means to workers, and assure young people that their efforts are not in vain. This vision resonates with voters. This is the vision that must be built on—and expanded—by any party that wants to be relevant in these times.

Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party would do well to take the popular demand for an alternative seriously. Americans—especially young adults and minorities—don’t see Sanders as a dinosaur trading on nostalgia or harking back to an irredeemable past. Instead, they see capitalism as a key source of their troubles. A recent Harvard University poll of Americans between the age of 18 and 29 found that 51 percent did not support capitalism, compared to only 42 percent who said they did. This doesn’t mean a socialist majority is right around the corner—only 33 percent offered it up as an alternative—but the poll indicates a significant shift in attitudes from just a few years ago.

Results like these fit within a broader picture of discontent. A majority of young Americans, including college-educated millennials, saddled with debt and dealing with bad jobs or no jobs, identify as working class—60 percent, more than any other group of Americans, suggesting that a class-based politics is increasingly salient. Even before Sanders ran for president, 66 percent of Americans saw “very strong” or “strong” conflicts between rich and poor, and recent data show that the wealth gap between middle-class Americans and elites has reached a record high. The vast majority of Americans are unhappy with the status quo, and most are willing to pay higher taxes or tax the rich for programs to improve public education and fund Social Security and Medicare.

Most Democratic politicians appear unwilling to acknowledge the extent of these shifts. But in this post-2008 climate, replete with anger against the establishment, the Clintonist approach of winning over moderates and drawing in reluctant leftists presupposes the existence of an ideological center that increasingly cannot hold. It might not be apparent on the eve of their November 8 triumph, but it will soon be.

As with the collapsing social democrats in Europe, the Democratic Party’s best bet is to move left and embrace a platform that speaks to the real needs, fears, and aspirations of working people. This doesn’t mean looking back with rose-colored glasses on the New Deal; it means building a coalition of young people, working-class whites, and minority voters around a new politics.

Those of us to the left of Clinton and the Democrats don’t have all the answers. But we have a good idea of where to start.

First, call for single-payer healthcare and free, quality public education—including higher education—for people of all ages. Fight for robust maternal and paternal leave and universal pre-K to help young families. These policies, despite debates on how to pay for them, are easily grasped and popular. The widespread support for Bernie’s broadsides against the “millionaire and billionaire” class shows that Americans are tired of handouts to Wall Street and the elite, and are ready for a new, progressive tax scheme to foot the bill.

But gains like single-payer and free higher education wouldn’t just be about giving a handout to working people instead of the rich. They would be part of a social movement demanding a decent life for all Americans. This movement would have a broader vision, one that includes the demand for a national job guarantee. Giving everyone a decent job isn’t a pipe dream. It’s a logical way to address pressing social problems and it’s achievable, through a robust expansion of public employment with an eye toward addressing social needs like infrastructure, education, and scientific research and scholarship in the public interest.

Policies like these will not only help alleviate material suffering, they will eventually help unite a divided electorate. Programs that benefit all Americans will foster the sense of solidarity and political engagement necessary to building a lasting progressive coalition in this country.

The alternative is more anxiety and inequality, a further decline in the Democratic Party’s base, and the continued growth of a Trump-like far right that is actively positioning itself to pick up the pieces. For the Democrats, no less than their peers in Europe, where the neoliberalisation of social democracy has opened up space for a populist right, the choice on offer might well be either socialism or irrelevance.

My thought: Trotsky articulated ‘the choice on offer’ far more accurately – socialism or barbarism

red-star

I recommend the following for your consideration. That the Chinese Communist Party has learnt the lesson of the necessity of financial reward for individual initiative and has so far managed that very well within a socialist framework at the same time as the global crisis of capitalism which is so clearly reflected in the current US Presidential election gives even greater emphasis to Engels’ words :

‘The war in China has given the death-blow to the old China. Isolation has become impossible; the introduction of railways, steam-engines, electricity, and modern large-scale industry has become a necessity, if only for reasons of military defence. But with it the old economic system of small peasant agriculture, where the family also made its industrial products itself, falls to pieces too, and with it the whole old social system which made relatively dense population possible. Millions will be turned out and forced to emigrate; and these millions will find their way even to Europe, and en masse. But as soon as Chinese competition sets in on a mass scale, it will rapidly bring things to a head in your country and over here, and thus the conquest of China by capitalism will at the same time furnish the impulse for the overthrow of capitalism in Europe and America…’

Engels to Friedrich Adolf Sorge in Hoboken; London, November 10, 1894, Marx Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1982, 450-451

red-star

Reply to Philomath

Posted on by under Capitalism, Capitalist ideology, China, Chinese culture, Karl Marx, Socialism
Tiencienwey (Tianjin [‘Heaven’s Ferry']), n.d., Wenceslaus Hollar (1607-1677)

Tiencienwey (Tianjin [‘Heaven’s Ferry’]), n.d., Wenceslaus Hollar (1607-1677)

Hi Philomath,

No, I haven’t read Fukuyama’s Political Order and Political Decay.

China is succeeding where the Soviet Union failed.

This makes sense because the first successful socialist revolution, opposed by the ‘Whites’ and invading capitalist nations, was in the Soviet Union.

Lessons, and extremely costly lessons, in both states, had to be learnt first.

Capitalist ideology holds these lessons up as proof that socialism could never work, and of its ‘evils’ (hence, to those who dare to dream, to think of and to want something better, ‘capitalism is your best – and only – option’).

But they are lessons, just as the first and second world wars (and the many other wars), the Great Depression and global warming were and are lessons – that this will always be what you must expect under capitalism, as reflections of its driving motive of profit and its unpreventable crises.

Clockwise from top: Jinwan Square, Tianjin Financial Centre and Hai River, Xikai Church, Panorama of downtown Tianjin, Tianjin Railroad Station, Tianjin Eye

Clockwise from top: Jinwan Square, Tianjin Financial Centre and Hai River, Xikai Church, Panorama of downtown Tianjin, Tianjin Railroad Station, Tianjin Eye

The Chinese have learnt that the motive for profit, which is the basis in consciousness of capitalism, must be incorporated within socialism – i.e. on a socialist base.

Over time, it is entirely reasonable that this profit motive can be modified (i.e. re-oriented from the individual to the society – in other words better utilised for the society).

Socialism, which, even more than capitalism, can only fully function internationally, is, as can be seen in China, very much a work in progress.

As China continues to develop, the capitalist nations will be forced by economic imperative, as Engels recognised in 1894, to follow.

Best wishes, Phil

red-star

Images: Top/bottom

Reply to Grimbeau

Posted on by under Capitalism, Capitalist ideology, dialectical materialism, International relations, Socialism

john-pilger

Hi Grimbeau,

It comes as no surprise to me that an Australian who speaks with the integrity and world-orientation John Pilger does is an ex-pat.

The problem is not ‘America’ nor ‘Americans,’ it is US capitalism and the system of international capitalism it dominates.

But the new is growing within the old.

The same necessity (that of the development of the productive forces) that saw capitalism rise out of feudalism will see socialism rise out of capitalism.

Socialism, despite all the evidence achieved of its immense potential, did not succeed in the Soviet Union because it was not international (of which the Bolsheviks were acutely aware), because the Soviet Union was surrounded by a hostile West which drove it to collapse in an arms race it couldn’t win and also because the Bolsheviks tried to deny the place of individual economic initiative and financial reward implicit in it.

Lenin’s half-hearted attempt to compensate for this failure with his NEP was unsuccessful.

The Chinese have learnt from this and from their own attempt to do the same, to impose theory – as can be seen in the process of reform initiated by Deng Xiaoping.

They have learnt that individual reward and the motive for profit must be incorporated into socialism. The rapid development of China since has been the result.

China is very much a work-in-progress, which the Chinese have so far successfully managed.

These developments within China, that are leading the world, will be models for the capitalist nations as they too turn, are forced to turn, to socialism – as Engels noted in a letter in 1894.1

And a ‘necessity,’ I might add, that the consummate Neoplatonist Hegel theorised in his philosophy.

Phil

red-star

Note

1. ‘The war in China has given the death-blow to the old China. Isolation has become impossible; the introduction of railways, steam-engines, electricity, and modern large-scale industry has become a necessity, if only for reasons of military defence. But with it the old economic system of small peasant agriculture, where the family also made its industrial products itself, falls to pieces too, and with it the whole old social system which made relatively dense population possible. Millions will be turned out and forced to emigrate; and these millions will find their way even to Europe, and en masse. But as soon as Chinese competition sets in on a mass scale, it will rapidly bring things to a head in your country and over here, and thus the conquest of China by capitalism will at the same time furnish the impulse for the overthrow of capitalism in Europe and America,’ Engels to Friedrich Adolf Sorge in Hoboken; London, November 10, 1894, Marx Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1982, 450-451 ↩

Image

John Pilger – break the silence

Posted on by under Australian culture, Australian servility, Capitalism, Capitalist ideology, International relations, Socialism, United States

Speech given at the University of Sydney 22.03.16

red-star

Reply to Anand – capitalism, socialism, mysticism and materialism

Posted on by under Capitalism, dialectical materialism, Mysticism, Neoplatonism, Socialism

090127-F-7383P-009

Hi Anand,

thank you for your interest.

The causes for the collapse of the Soviet Union are obviously multiple and complex but they include the fact that the Soviet Union was the first socialist state (which the capitalists will never forgive Russia for, as can be seen in their ongoing hostility to Russia), that, impoverished, it was surrounded from the outset by a hostile and invading West, that the arms race was a drain it could not maintain and, in my view, it was the price paid for ‘overleaping’ the bourgeois stage of development (the Chinese have learnt from this).

But again, fundamentally it is not a matter of what people like or don’t like, it is the working of objective reality and its necessity, and of understanding this.

That a system we know as ‘capitalism’ grew from another system we know as ‘feudalism’ was necessary, as the productive forces developed. Likewise, and for the same reason, capitalism will be replaced by another known as ‘socialism.’

Invasion, drone technology, black ops, psy ops and internet monitoring etc. can delay this as long as possible (again, that is the working of objective reality), but nothing can stop it. Consciousness is secondary to/the product of objective reality.

On your second point, the dominant mystical theory in the West (Neoplatonism) is a theory of knowledge and that theory, having been turned by Marx from ‘standing on its head’ to its material feet became the theory of knowledge of dialectical materialism.

At a time when there has been so much disillusion with Marxism and the ‘possibility’ of socialism (a mainly manufactured disillusion), this whole current needs to be reconsidered because after Marx, it is the epistemology of the future, because of the immense and ongoing contribution of mysticism to all aspects of culture which should be acknowledged and discussed openly, not denied and treated like pornography as academic philosophers do to it, and because by examining both its potential and shortfalls (particularly its teleology – one reason I am not a Marxist) embodied in Marxist theory, the theory now known as dialectical materialism can be further developed.

My blog is to argue for the living significance of mysticism in the West, for its relationship with materialism and for the entirety of that current’s reconsideration because of its importance.

Best regards,

Phil

red-star

Image