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.

This will probably be one of Rainer’s most controversial articles to date.

  • Neptium
    8·
    2 years ago

    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.

    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.