Even if a communist can colloquially describe themselves as being on the left, there’s a distinction between communism and “the left.” This is implied right in the title of Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder. Whereas the left, a big tent term for a myriad of incompatible ideologies, aims merely to act as an opposition towards the present order for the sake of it, communists have a coherent vision for how to defeat the system: by advancing history’s development to the next stage. The left, because of its lack of commitment to that central Marxist goal, naturally takes on an opportunistic role. Because when you want only to build a movement as an end in itself, rather than use this movement as a means for defeating the system, you become nothing more than an actor who benefits from discontent without helping solve the problems behind that discontent.
Just gonna be candid here. This is not true. We have no coherent vision for decisively challenging the US. Our comrades in the PRC might have something close to a coherent vision that is being developed through cooperation with others in other countries. But us in the US are pretty lost.
Also, and hopefully this isnt too out of left field, but imo these writers gotta think more criticality about these ideas about progressive linear history. It must be pretty convenient to be a prophet of the coming age but it basically serves as apologetics for genocide, not to mention it can serve to actually advance capital by effectively enforcing primative accumulation. This is how the US Empire was built and its how global capitalism reproduces.
I don’t see how it’s a way forward to building solidarity between proletarians, peasants, Indigenous peoples etc. - which I think is absolutely and fundamentally necessary - by forcing a eurocentric veiw of progress that has destroyed so much already. If we treat this as a zero sum game of proletarian purity and supremacy just to justify our own proletarianization then we alienate other sections of the masses, needlessly make other class enemies, and even strengthen capital.
I think we are hampered by the fact that it is literally illegal to even talk about what needs to be done to overthrow the US empire
Yes I agree. I believe there will come a time when radicalization becomes so developed that prols will overcome this. In poor urban areas, prols and lumpen develop methods of communicating which break social norms but effectively function. This is what will likely become more widespread to overcome this obstacle imo.
Big agree with you. Rainer is stuck in a thinking of every action must be “progressive”, but fails to see the dialectic of political and economic emancipation in a settler society.
He thinks the American War of Independence was progressive because it broke more feudal systems holding Capital back. Like Marx, he considers it progress on “political emancipation”, but disregards the collapse in political emancipation for enslaved Africans and indigenous people. How can the revolution have caused both political emancipation and de-emancipation? Because the emancipation of the settler was at the expense of the emancipation of the slaves and the occupants of desired territories for settlement.
He and the types of this mindset are ready to force “progress” upon the colonized groups. This comes in the form of projects that benefit the settlers at the expense of the indigenous. Like the dams in the PNW that killed off salmon and drowned native foraging land, as well as cultural sites.
The destination of this trend is emancipating the settler nation and doling out “emancipation” to the colonized in the form of us assimilating into their society.
There is one point i would correct you on and that’s the notion that the reason why bourgeois revolutions were seen by the early Marxists as progressive is because they led to “political emancipation”. From my understanding that is not what Marx meant by progress. The bourgeois revolutions were progressive in the sense that they emancipated the productive forces of society. Capitalism allowed for higher development of productive forces than feudalism did. Socialism is progressive because, as Deng said, it enables “faster and greater development of those forces than under the capitalist system”.
But Capital was already free, hence why the colonies started in the first place. This was Capital overthrowing the national barrier. The British bourgeoisie and extant aristocracy did not have an interest in letting the settlers conquer the whole continent, fearing they would overshadow the economy of the Isles.
I think it’s better to look at the American War as an intra-bourgeois conflict between the high bourgeoisie in England and Scotland and the middle classes who fled to the Americas to escape being accumulated and proletarianized.
Britain was entering the terminal phases of monopoly and financialization, hence the expanding need for new territories and pushing production to America, Germany, and later Russia. These economies soon became a threat to Britain’s Imperialism hence the high taxes and territorial limits on the Americans and a century later the world wars to slow down Germany and Russia.
What the American settlers ask for again is a new frontier to open by removing the Monopoly order ruling America, but not necessarily through the people taking control of Capital (Socialism) but a reform of the property order.
For describing what was happening at the time, it was the progress of capitalism maturing, based on the material conditions and over time we increased what humanity was capable of. Was the slavery necessary? No, and the civil war allowed the industrialists to move south and helped capital expand more. Was the genocide necessary? Probably not, but that alternate timeline would have had white and indigenous people working the goldmines and striking together against indigenous capitalists. We are not living at that time or timeline and can recognize that we need to make amends to our black and Indian brothers and sisters.
I think what the mixup is is that you are viewing things in terms of conflict as opposed to the further development of the productive forces of society. Slavery and Feudalism were overthrown because they could no longer satisfy the needs of society, and so the developmental forces had to evolve.
The settlers need constant reminders that ‘assimilation’ is most assuredly NOT ‘emancipation’.
That’s another one of the things with PCUSA that I was talking about earlier. They seem to think the only reason colonization was bad was because First Nation people weren’t properly assimilated into the settler population and that returning the land and sovereignty to them would mean just a bunch of inefficient isolationists and not co-operation throughout the continent without the control of empires.
Sounds like they lack a comprehensive plan to develop that goal as we have expressed on here.
This just reminds me of when the British struggled to entice the Malayan peasantry to become wage-labourers in the 19th and 20th century and was thus forced to bring people from other parts of their empire to work in their death plantations and mines in Malaya.
The colonizers then developed an elaborate ideological justification for this “lack of entrepreneurship” of the local peasantry when the peasants knew what awaits them in the coastal cities was much more suffering than the lives they currently were in.
Good points.