Welcome again to everybody! Make yourself at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our sect, here is our weekly discussion thread.
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We are living in very interesting times. A lot of people will agree with your opinions if you never use the words “proletariat”, “class struggle”, “communist” and other Marxist terminology. And they say people living in Socialist countries are brainwashed…
Anyways, it’s going to be barbarism, isn’t it? I can’t help but feel hopeless sometimes. I know AES countries have been making a lot of progress lately, but the Empire is slowly decaying into Fascism (wow who would’ve thought) while the bourgeois puppet regimes blame communism (don’t laugh!) for the inherent problems of capitalism.
The empire is and always has been fascism. It’s not decaying into fascism. What’s decaying is its ability to manage its internal contradictions. This is, ultimately, a necessary process. Do not feel hopeless while you watch the empire crumble. It will have to go through a battle with its own demons no matter what.
Fascism is the empire turning inward to manage its internal contradictions.
I do think it’s useful to frame this as decay, but it’s decaying in the sense that the empire is coming home.
I think that’s an incomplete analysis of fascism. Hitler wrote clearly that the USA model of eugenics, apartheid, slavery, indigenous concentration camps, cultural genocide, and propaganda was the model he wanted to build from. The first gas chambers were French ships during the Haitian revolution. When America went to WW2, they went to save the fascists from the communists. Through Operation Paperclip they worked with the Vatican to save fascists from all levels and integrated them into their global neo-empire. Through NATO they took the fascist officers and gave them new jobs leading an undemocratic transnational nuclear military that was specifically organized to counter Russia and internally create a culture of fascism. Through Operation Gladio the USA used NATO and the CIA to create fascist partisan militias that they funded, trained, protected, and armed all over Europe.
If the only standard for fascism is that all the dominance that was applied to non-white people starts being applied to white people, I don’t find that to be a useful definition. Fascism did to Europeans what Europeans had been doing for centuries to the globe. I don’t think it’s useful, except for liberals, to distinguish between the historical period before the Third Reich and the period of the Third Reich solely by the racialized categories of the victims.
If the only standard for fascism is that all the dominance that was applied to non-white people starts being applied to white people, I don’t find that to be a useful definition.
That’s literally what it is, though. It’s when the empire stops using superprofits generated by the empire to manage internal contradictions and switches to imperial management of the entire internal population, including the previously elevated segments of the population. Fascism did to Europeans what Europeans had been doing for centuries to the globe, that’s what makes it fascism.
This is a useful framework if you understand that a segment of privileged workers within the imperial core are boureoisified by the distribution of superprofits, and that this is why revolution is impossible within the empire. It’s only when the empire can no longer generate enough superprofit to pacify that racial/caste/ethnic segment of the working class that they become a revolutionary subject.
Revolution only becomes possible in the imperial core when the empire comes home.
I think that definition potentially suffers from being non-universal. It’s not clear to me that the logic of society requires such conditions to exist as clearly as the definition states. That is to say, it sounds like a very accurate definition of a very specific time and place, namely Europe. It’s unclear to me that, given the colonial nature of America that such a clear delineation between America being not fascist and then becoming fascist is accurate in the least. It’s not like Germany or Italy was out there committing genocide against an entire continent and then eventually needed to bring it home. The conditions are completely different.
If we expand the scope to try to include the historical underpinnings of Eurofascism, it appears not to be a distinct phase but rather a continuously ongoing process that simply has come to include some group of people it didn’t previously include. If we take a 1-into-2 analysis, that would point us to the recognition that such arbitrary groupings of people can’t possibly be the demarcation between fascism and non-fascism.
As far as I can tell, fascism has been around since the Western European powers started going around genociding and dominating everyone they could. And when it finally came back via the Third Reich, it was the liberal imperial society that imagined this as a net new phenomenon that required a new name as it appeared to them to be a rupture from the past. But that’s an ideological myopia. The reality is that all of the elements of what liberals identify as fascism have been ongoing processes for several centuries.
And when we consider how Eurofascism was inspired by, funded by, and lauded by the bourgeoisie in the USA, and then how that Eurofascism was protected from eradication, internationalized, cultivated, and extended into the present day, I have a hard time saying that fascism was born and then ended and that we are at risk of it reemerging. Instead I think the historical reality is that it has been an ongoing process for the last several centuries and the USA is its epidemiological reservoir.
Fascism is a stage of colonial development, when the rate of imperial superprofit began to fall and the empire came home. It “emerges” in the sense that it’s just the exact same thing the empire was always doing but turned inward. Fascism never went away, it just turned outwards again with the emergence of neocolonialism. Now that neocolonial development has again reached a stage when the rate of profit begins to fall and the empire turns inward, fascism (or some kind of neofascism) is the next stage of development.
It’s only useful as a way to understand historical development, and it’s not as if fascism and colonialism are truly different things; they’re part of the same ongoing process, two sides of the imperial boomerang. When fascism “emerges” is when the revolutionary potential of the imperial core is at its highest, which is why the empire has to come home to manage the internal contradictions and stave off revolution. As a way to define political moments its only useful as a way to understand revolutionary potential within the imperial core.
Umm… Europeans have been colonizing other Europeans long before 1492. The most notable example of this was Ireland:
Irishmen could not own land, sue in the king’s courts, hold office in central or local government, or be admitted to any ecclesiastical benefice in the territories under English control. In addition, the killing of an Irish man or woman was not a felony in English law; at most, the killer might owe compensation to the dead person’s lord.
This last provision did not, as is sometimes assumed, imply murderous intent. The point was that Irishmen, as aliens rather than subjects, were outside the protection of the law. But the implications of that principle, where settler and native shared the same territory, were far reaching.
(Source.)
Capitalist colonialism within Europe was phenomenal years before the Fascist era. A byspel of this was World War I:
In 1918 Germany annexed huge tracts of territory from the Russian Empire, taking direct control of almost all its coal mines, three‐quarters of its iron ore, half its industry, and a third of its rail system. An increasingly anti‐Slavic ideology added a racial dimension to this imperial expansion.
Generals Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff wanted not only to control the resources of Eastern Europe, but also to subdue the region’s Slavic nationalities, settle Germans there, and create a “frontier wall of ‘physically and mentally healthy human beings.’” First in Poland then later further east, the German army commandeered forced labor, deported thousands of Slavic workers, and monitored the local population through registration and identity cards.46
(Source and see Elusive Alliance: The German Occupation of Poland in World War I for more.)
If by ‘empire coming home’ you mean ‘white capitalists superexploiting their fellow white citizens’, then that is likewise a prefascist phenomenon:
Of the witnesses that Commissioner White examined (1863), 270 were under 18, 50 under 10, 10 only 8, and 5 only 6 years old. A range of the working‐day from 12 to 14 or 15 hours, night‐labour, irregular meal‐times, meals for the most part taken in the very workrooms that are pestilent with phosphorus. Dante would have found the worst horrors of his Inferno surpassed in this manufacture.
(Source.)
All that aside, what really disappoints me is seeing another person overlook the Fascist colonies in Afrasia. It bums me out. I try to regularly inform other users on that subject, so when I see a statement like ‘Fascism is the empire turning inward’, it makes me feel like my topics haven’t been of much help and haven’t really made a difference.
Fascism is a stage of colonial development, when the rate of imperial superprofit began to fall and the empire came home
But this didn’t actually happen! Germany was crushed under the new WW1 order, wasn’t fielding an imperial colonial army abroad, and it didn’t come home. It emerged from the material conditions where it was, it did not leave and come back.
In fact, all the examples of the empire turning inward that we have are not examples that people would call fascism. For example, the system in the USA called “state police”, which are different from local police, was a returning of the empire to their home in that the model for the state police was the design of the USA occupation forces in The Philippines. The rise of military weapons in the hands of USA cops is a direct returning of the empire to home, yet people are still talking about the USA as if it might become fascist later.
I understand the points you’re making, I just don’t think they reflect history at all.
and it’s not as if fascism and colonialism are truly different things; they’re part of the same ongoing process, two sides of the imperial boomerang.
I think they aren’t different things - they are the same side of the process. I don’t think there is an imperial boomerang. Again, I think the entire idea of the boomerang and the idea that fascism is when fascism becomes fascism is a white liberal ideological construction and doesn’t match the material reality. If the only time its fascism is when powerful white people become oppressed, then that’s not a useful analysis. White people are oppressed all the time in the USA and Europe - not to anywhere near the same degree, and not systemically/structurally on the basis of their racialized grouping, but it’s undeniable that there are plenty of white people under the boot domestically.
When fascism “emerges” is when the revolutionary potential of the imperial core is at its highest
Again, also not borne out by history. You can say that fascism is deployed when there is a risk of revolution, but to say the potential is the highest is to ignore the reality that the states and periods we traditionally label as “fascist” did not exhibit any meaningful revolutionary potential.
As a way to define political moments its only useful as a way to understand revolutionary potential within the imperial core.
Maybe. This hasn’t been shown though. The greatest revolutionary potential in the imperial core doesn’t seem to be associated with anything like what happened in the Third Reich nor what happened to the American Indians nor what happened to Haiti. Instead, it seems to have been associated with labor organizing and with anti-war movements. Once European fascism materialized in the “Axis”, revolutionary potential was gone.
So, in Greece there is a discussion on a law proposed by the centre-right government which will allow homosexual pairs to be officially married and adopt children and the Communist Party has declared that it will vote against it.
Today they published a lengthy text explaining their controversial decision with arguments like claiming the law will abolish the proletariat’s rights to “maternity” and “paternity” in favour of having “parent 1” and “parent 2” and possibly more, according to what is apparently dictated by European law (which it claims will be detrimental to the interests of the child). It makes the (probably not totally wrong) argument that there are too few children for adoption in Greece and too many people already waiting to adopt a child, and that might lead pairs to seek children through surrogacy, thus reinforcing the commercialization of birth and exploitation of women. And then it goes on to say that it is wrong to totally disregard biological sexes and their needs, rejects the theory that gender is a social construct and makes the claim that the liberalisation of gender policy leads to estrangement of the proletariat from class struggle (!). And after all this, they still claim to be protecting the interests of people of all sexual orientations.
I am pretty new to marxism and this position confuses the heck out of me. Is the Party position as controversial as I think it to be, or is there something that I am failing to grasp in its analysis?
What’s really absurd about their position is they’re taking an anti-materialist stance on the family and its origins. There’s nothing natural about the nuclear family, it is a modern construct that emerged alongside the state and capitalism.
My guess is that the way that liberalism and capitalist modernity now pretends to embrace gender and sexuality minorities has caused them to take a reflexive stance against it, as if communism is just reactionary anti-liberalism. Do they even read theory?
That isn’t controversial for a modern Marxist party, unfortunately. Most of them seem to be neck-deep in homophobia and/or TERF shit.
CW: homophobia
The Greek party position could be sound but only if you’re missing something important in the wording of the proposed law. Maybe there’s a clause that abolishes parental leave/pay while granting equal marriage rights. I can see why they’d challenge that if it would (a) remove support for all parents on the very day of the victory (i.e. for equal marriage/parental rights) and (b) lead reactionaries to blame homosexual couples for their loss of support. Idk, though. If that’s the case, it’d be better to campaign for amendments than to vote against it completely.
Either way, it’s problematic to challenge homosexual couples adopting due to surrogacy because unless they plan to abolish surrogacy, it essentially means a ban on homosexuals having children unless they have a child by a different heterosexual relationship (I imagine single people can’t easily adopt). Maybe they plan to get into power, abolish surrogacy, and then grant full family rights to homosexual couples. If that’s the case, it’s a terrible plan; how long are homosexuales supposed to wait?
If you’ve got a link to an English (or Spanish) translation, I’ll have a look. Is it this? https://inter.kke.gr/en/articles/The-commercialization-of-surrogacy-is-a-billion-dollar-business-obscurantism-modern-day-barbarity-and-brutal-exploitation/ If it is: shit show of a communist party. Accusing the bill-proposers of obscuring the true benefactors and of appealing to the right wing while complaining about the loss of the mother-father binary. A reactionary US local government is trying to ban the use of ‘pregnant people’ and other ‘woke language’ and here we have a Greek ‘communist’ arguing that he wants to stop the same thing from even entering Greek discourse.
Who gives af if the state calls parents ‘parent 1’ and ‘parent 2’, anyway, even if that does happen elsewhere (I’m not convinced it does). Or ‘parent 3’ for that matter. Kids will still be raised to call their moms ‘mom’ and their dads ‘dad’ if the family wants that. I can’t see any family of any sexual orientation numbering the parents except as a joke. Utterly bizarre argument. The kind of thing you hear from the conservatives.
And opposing progress because the right wing might take advantage of it? We won’t get very far if we take that approach.
Sounds like the KKE has found what they think is a clever way of pandering to conservatives under the guise of ‘thinking about the working class’. I can’t wait for the day that ‘communists’ realise that conservatives aren’t put off by this or that progressive position but because they’re bloody communists. We might actually build some solidarity and get the revolution going when that happens.
Welcome to being a communist in the west. You’re not wrong. You’re just realising how many Western marxists are wrong.
A lot of the points that you raise were actually brought up in discussion about the time that the stance of KKE on this topic was announced. The article you linked is, I think, the first time the decision was made public by the party gensec himself, but the text I was referring to was actually only published yesterday, so far only in Greek AFAICT. Still, if you want to have a go with a translator, this is it: [https://m.902.gr/eidisi/politiki/354061/oi-theseis-toy-kke-gia-ton-politiko-gamo-ton-omofylon-zeygarion-kai-tis].
The reality is, KKE is the strongest communist party in the country and I support its stance on most other topics, but on a few approaches its approach is at best questionable or at worst inadequate and conservative. It certainly feels like they care too much about their percentages in the elections (which, truth be told, are better than they have ever been), so far as to support homophobic views in an attempt to win conservative and right-wing sympathizers (very pathetic). Still, I find it hard to believe that they can implement their program by just winning the elections. The bourgeoisie won’t give up easily on their benefits, and NATO and EU will almost certainly react.
Still I think that if any party deserves support in the elections, it is KKE, and I have hopes that things will change for the better over time, especially considering its increasing popularity among the youth.
European “communists” never fail to disappoint.
argument that there are too few children for adoption
That’s an insane problem to have. Mfs like “I want my own physical being to take care of and put tons of effort into in addition to my work.” This problem calls for less traditional family norms, not more. Have these revisionists not even read the manifesto?
Abolition [Aufhebung] of the family!
Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists. On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.
The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital. Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty. But, you say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.
-Karl Marx
Earlier he notes:
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.
Your Greek opportunists do not understand that we are trying to move past capitalism, not to revert to earlier relations.
One more thing. I’m sure one of the worries is the “demographic crisis.” The solution they should be putting forward is making the bourgeoisie lower the cost of living. Criminalizing gay people isn’t going to make them be straight and have kids.
I sometimes struggle with the urge of western marxists who want to make everything fun and enjoyable when it comes to organizing. Like, not everything has to be quirky, or funny, or with witty chants or at a bar with beers or whatever.
People can be to serious too, but I’m sure the opposite can be a problem.
This is a bit of a rant sparked by someone showing me a gore video, unprompted. I have some mental issues and I always feel totally foreign to the rest of humanity. I feel like a weirdo, an outcast. I have weird hobbies and don’t talk to people much, I’m always very nervous and jittery around others. This makes me come off as very strange and on bad days I can really get lost in my own head and start mentally beating myself up for not fitting in. But then something like this happens and I realize that while I may have an unusual personality, I’m not weird in the negative sense. Not like these fucking sick people who seek out, enjoy, laugh at, share, etc. videos and pictures of people and animals suffering. Why do they do this? Why did this person think it was okay to show that to me? Why did he have a big fucking grin on his face? Why did he cackle like a hyena when the thing happened in the video? Why did snicker and smirk when I showed distress and disgust? Why did he smugly say “are you triggered?” Yes I am in fact triggered. I literally have PTSD, though he doesn’t know that. Yes I am a weirdo, because I keep a messy home, do hobbies most people have never even heard of, smoke a lot of weed and have an odd way of speaking, I don’t go out much and don’t know how to navigate social situations. I keep to myself and while others may find me disconcerting because I’m not like them, I’m harmless and just trying to get through life. This person who decided to show that video to me is a fucking weirdo of the highest degree, but his shit is somehow more normalized, especially on the internet. Is this behavior the product of a violent and inhumane culture? Is it human nature and I truly am the odd one out? Why is this a thing, why do some people enjoy seeing the suffering of others?
Speaking from only people I know, but, uh, that is definitely very weird and I’m pretty sure most people think torturing people/animals is a really weird thing. You’re the normal one here. As for the content… it’s probably just some really, really niche stuff.
So our party just expressed support for Belgian farmers’ protests. They are protesting for the same reasons the Dutch farmers have been protesting in recent years: nitrogen emissions which have to be pushed back by EU law.
In The Netherlands the protests have been taken over by far right movements and big agro corps and I have to admit the left shit the bed when it comes to offering solutions. But, the things the farmers do are actually bad for the environment. Most of the emissions are caused by mega factory livestock companies which mostly export their products anyway. And they make up a tiny percentage of total trade in The Netherlands and probably over here as well.
I just hope we don’t support thing for the sake of remaining popular.
So the farmers protests are still going on over here and I had my doubts about our party supporting them. But they have surprised me I must admit. We are managing to highlight the messed up ways of the big Agricultural Industry in which everything becomes more expensive and the bigger profits stay at the big corps instead of with the farmers.
Neither Berlin, nor Korea nor the atom bomb is attracting here as much attention as the tremendous fact that Russia is planting trees!
Stop for a moment, please, and think about that!Happy Black History Month! Make sure to remind your lib friends that their heroes were commies.
I am angry to myself that I missed 100 anniversary of Lenin’s death.
Hello
Hii
Hiiii 👋😊
🧄🧄🧄🧄
I hope you all have a nice week :D
yea
this is an acceptable substitute, if you reveal what the music is
It’s Crazy Train by Ozzy Osbourne I think
I think this is correct. For your great service to the people and the rodent liberation army. shall I now bestow you with a medal of Oppo 🏅. comrade this is the greatest honour I can bestow.
much appreciated
I have used every resource available to me
🫡
I saw that but I’m convinced that I’ve heard the music somewhere before
For some reason it reminds me of AC/DC thunderstruck but it could also be DOOM music
I can confirm that it’s not Doom music, at least not from the old games
The coconut hamster!! So fast!!! Coming like a storm!!!
You too :D
They just like me fr
I have three midterms this week 🥲
midterm solidarity
Sending you all my good vibes, comrade! May we both pass.
Good fortune for you both 🌟
good luck
Thanks comrade. Can’t wait for this week to be over 😭
I had six last week, but they were extremely easy. Good luck.
You’re a legend! Thank you, my first is in two hours 😭 I gotta calm down because if I don’t do well I have other exams to make up for it.
“Of the illegal settler colonial entity… and also the United States as a result…” -Hakim smh
Also JT
why can’t I know the best guerrilla warfare weapons?Apparently Russian State Humanities University (РГГУ) is opening a new branch. It is called “High Political School”, named after famous fascist sympathiser Ilyin and will be headed by Dugin (you know Dugin). The announced goal is to “Channel the attendees into traditional values” with “orthodox gymnasiums as an example”. Folks here been saying Russia “isn’t heading to fascism”. Guess this isn’t it, hm.
In other news, two AFU drones have reportedly been intercepted in my region, close to the city. We’re hundreds of kilometres away from Ukrainian border.
If mild celebrating of fascist sympathizers (still too much, I agree) and some institutions promoting “traditional values” were enough to define fascism, most countries in existence could be labeled fascist, one way or another.
Obviously none of this is good, but no, I don’t think Russia is heading to fascism. Too comfortable with some forms of it? Definitely, 100%. But it is incomparable to what is going on on a daily basis not only in Israel, Ukraine and the Baltics (ie. the most extreme forms of it), but in the USA, Brussels and across the EU, in the UK, Canada, Australia, etc…
Things can have more nuance than “everything is fascism/heading to fascism” and this is one of those things. Russia remains a civilization-state with many constituent peoples and proper autonomous regions rather than a supremacist ethno-state nor a unrepentant, genocidal squatter-state like Israel, the US, and Canada; it remains anti-imperialist and a major part of the forces against white, western supremacy, exploitation, and genocide worldwide (even if a large part of it is due to circumstance); obviously, it should receive critical rather than unconditional support, but same goes with Iran, Afghanistan, with the Saudis’ move away from the west, with Mexico, Brazil, the list goes on… hell, same goes (if to a far lesser extent as there simply is far less to criticize, and proletarian rule is something that must inherently be defended in and of itself) for AES states.
I tried making a Stalin bot on Character.ai, https://c.ai/c/nGAHElraINbFMK3WVSt2Z4jyaPnmvIfqeq-y2KhjrEM
Can you try and give me some feedback, or even provide some good conversations
this is really funny. 🤣
All in all, this bot is very neat! And the responses it generates seem quite to the point so far. Also, Comrade Stalin seems ridiculously well informed on 21st century stuff.
hey this is cool
