Last time it was when we released ‘The CIA’s Shining Path’, this time it’s because they took issue with ProleWiki’s Bordiga page lmao
that Bordiga page doing a lot of work with just two little sentences, they hate it so much lol
Last time it was when we released ‘The CIA’s Shining Path’, this time it’s because they took issue with ProleWiki’s Bordiga page lmao
that Bordiga page doing a lot of work with just two little sentences, they hate it so much lol
Basically if you take as the starting point that they do not want communism but something else (i.e. they have other reasons to call themselves communists), you invert the entire premise and start to think about it differently. If they do not want communism, what do they want? From there we can start observing facts and drawing different conclusions.
The purity fetish is very real, nothing is ever good enough for them. And if nothing is ever good enough, then that justifies you not ever doing anything to change things because what’s the point.
There is no world in which the masses care about the value-form and stopping commodity production as the first order of business. It’s cool theory I’m sure, but it’s ultimately a masturbatory exercise. The point of theory is to inform praxis and the point of praxis is to inform theory, and everything results from that contradiction. They forget their basics so they can start being the pick me communist that knows more obscure figures than you do. Leftcoms fetishize theory – I notice a certain amount of overlap between self-proclaimed leftcoms or ultras and post-modernists – and don’t see any real-world application in it. At least, not applications that Lenin and other figures we MLs take from haven’t said. For this theory to be applied, it has to be followed like a recipe. And perhaps we could say maoists fetishize the praxis without the theory.
It’s interesting because the longer I get into marxism the more pragmatic I get. Maybe that makes me a counter-revolutionary revisionist lol. Just looking at China compared to any capitalist country, and actually reckoning with the reality there – the reality, not the numbers on paper and the theory on paper – leads to the same conclusion always: it’s not the same as in capitalism. By changing the premise, we have changed everything.
In capitalist countries, we grow for the sake of growth. Capitalism is taken to be a self-evident fact of life, that it’s as good as it’s gonna get, that we can just make the best of it. Companies are gonna rise and fall and everyone can get their shot if they try hard enough. In China, they see capitalism as a stepping stone, as a transitory stage. Becoming a capitalist there does not mean the same thing at all than it does in the West. They have a vision which we lack, and which we are unable to get.
But for ultras to understand and see that, they would have to actually start looking at what’s happening in China in practice and leave the books alone for a bit.
We talked about maoists and leftcoms but didn’t even touch Hoxhas yet lol. Maybe because they’re so irrelevant. I don’t understand how anyone nowadays would call themselves a Hoxhaist. Anti-revisionist, sure, why not. If you feel like you’re on a mission. But to take specifically after Hoxha and uphold him as like the prime anti-revisionist, the one from which all anti-revisionism originates? I haven’t read him myself simply because hoxhaists have made him so unappealing, but on top of that, the things I’ve heard once you peel back the veneer and actually look at his policies derived from his theory makes him look like a child that was in way over his head.
Like Stalin also fought against the revisionists and they like him, but they stop there. At around 1953. Everyone after that is a dirty revisionist. It’s like for hoxhaists history stopped on that year lol
I think I get what you mean especially with the part about, “It’s like for hoxhaists history stopped on that year.” I’m not familiar with that term itself, but the notion of history stopping for some people, I think, is an important point and relates to the larger point you’re making about China’s current state as well as about those who fetishize theory. I want to choose my words carefully lest I sound like someone who is saying the history does not matter or that we can just abandon all past experiences and methods and pretend they’re irrelevant (an equally silly notion in its own right) but it does appear like some people are effectively stopping after a certain point in history and saying, “This is where socialism [or communism, whichever you prefer to call it for the sake of this example] was halted and from here on out, it has been a failure.” A notion that appears to happen both in the kind of instance you’re describing and in other instances, such as people who are getting their feet wet in theory and who say AES states are “not real socialism/communism.” I’m not sure the motives are the same in every case (I think for the people getting their feet wet, for example, there is a real fear of supporting existing socialist projects because they’re still in this place of viewing them through the lens of imperialist vilification).
Either way, we come back to what you say about “start looking at what’s happening in China in practice and leave the books alone for a bit”, whether it is for China or another country. I know in my own case, I’ve adopted a stance that goes something like: “I don’t know and until I do, I will not act like I do.” So when someone comes to me with empire news perspectives on a historically vilified country, rather than saying “it’s a perfect place, don’t question it” or saying “yeah, real socialism hasn’t been tried” or saying “it was good and then revisionists ruined it,” I will say, “I don’t know.” If I get to a point I understand enough about the details of its conditions through sources I can trust, then I can begin to grapple with the day to day realities of it and I can talk to people about those realities rather than through generalizations that obscure the conditions. But reaching that point is, I think, especially for those of us who live immersed in empire news locales, a difficult thing to do. And it is very easy for us to instead go by the western chauvinist mindset of, “I understand the ‘lesser’ country better than they understand themselves.” That is what those of us growing up in the imperial core have been socialized to do.