cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/58586
Reviewing the fallout over Gabriel Rockhill’s critiques of Western Marxism, Donald Parkinson argues the controversy is ultimately a battle over what kind of intellectual culture the left needs.
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Worthy article to post, and useful for its contextualization of the discourse around Rockhill’s recent book.
I disagree with the main points, which I summarize like this:
- theoretical plurality is good
- pragmatism should not overshadow theoretical development, nor should the former be used as a cudgel against the latter
- Rockhill’s argument is reminiscent of “Stalinist” “heresy hunting” used to purge political adversaries, which has weakened socialism
- we all should self-crit, we’re all trying here, the solution isn’t to attack others
I want to be fair to the author, Donald Parkinson. On the one hand, I don’t know much about him. On the other hand, his view feels like a slightly refined, but still recycled, version of old Trotskyist complaints about Stalin and the alleged repression of intellectuals. I think my vibes are pretty close because as far as I can find out, Parkinson is a “neo-Kautskyian” ex-Trotskyist. That’s not to dismiss the article out-of-hand, but it does give me some basis for understanding his angle. My view is much more aligned with Rockhill.
In my view, Parkinson does not succeed in answering his own question, “What is at stake in the Western Marxism Debate?”. His answer is that we might slip into old “bureaucratic paranoia” alleged of the Soviet Union, thus falling into the same trap of the last century.
Instead of attempting to reframe Rockhill’s project, Parkinson should start from Rockhill’s own description of his project, “anti-imperial Marxism.” That is, in my opinion, the correct framing for 21st century socialism. But Parkinson, working from what I guess is a “post-Trotskyist” point of view, and unsure of how else to interpret Rockhill’s point of view, immediately retreats into the safety of more litigation of the Stalin era:
“Understanding the logic being deployed by Rockhill will require a detour in an exercise in Stalinology.”
Sorry, why is that required to understand the state of socialism in 2026, a year witnessing the continued ascent of the Global South and a PRC that has successfully spurned US imperialism? This reads to me like someone who has little to add, not someone introducing “theoretical pluralism.”
If you venture outside the confines of Trotskyist litigation of Stalin, it is plain to see that there has always been a tension of “theoretical pluralism” within anti-capitalist theory and organizations. This was the case during Marx’s time; even earlier still, going back to the earliest utopian socialism and anarchism arising in western Europe. The Communist Manifesto was itself, according to Engels, a triumph of unification of a variety of socialist tendencies present in the 1840s:
Marx, who drew up this programme to the satisfaction of all parties, entirely trusted to the intellectual development of the working class, which was sure to result from combined action and mutual discussion. The very events and vicissitudes in the struggle against capital, the defeats even more than the victories, could not help bringing home to men’ s minds the insufficiency of their various favorite nostrums, and preparing the way for a more complete insight into the true conditions for working-class emancipation.
It seems that we are faced not with a problem of “Stalinist” intellectual repression. Instead, the problem of today is whether we forget about the incredible achievements of Marx and Lenin who managed to identify the correct path for socialism amidst a sea of contradictory ideas emanating from the diverse class origins of those ideas. Not only did Marx unify the socialists under the banner of the Manifesto, but he wrote thousands of pages of critique (and polemic) against other socialists — not only against capitalism! Marx, himself a bourgeois class traitor, was interested in extracting the useful insights from bourgeois theory, and appropriating it for the purpose of the working class.
Lenin dedicated the first chapter of What Is To Be Done?, in fact the opening paragraph, under the heading: “Dogmatism and ‘Freedom of Criticism’”. Already in 1901, when the radical social democrats (out of which the Bolsheviks would later form) were a minority and not-at-all possessing the power to enforce theoretical purity, Lenin encountered charges from certain camps of an intolerance and unfreedom of speech. I won’t repeat the arguments here because Lenin expressed it perfectly. But is it not obvious that this same situation continues today, in this article? Here we see the same charges of intolerance and unfreedom of speech, this time leveraged against Rockhill’s contribution that can help us identify latent imperial ideology within our own theory.
Rockhill is correct: the question for socialism today is whether you allow imperial-chauvinist thought to infect your theory, or do you adapt your socialist theory to the conditions of 21st century socialism, which has a distinctly anti-imperial character.
Agreed with pretty much everything. Good post
Great post
Well said
The spectre of Stalin prevents Trotskyists from becoming capable theoreticians and revolutionaries. “Stalinism” is a black hole of an empty signifier, holding Trotskyists and the anticommunist left trapped in its orbit.
I don’t think the author reads losurdo,–his dismissal is the worst thing you could try to claim: that losurdo isn’t valued for reading those he disagrees with. Reading Losurdo, his most prominent method is reading his enemies, understanding them, and then using their own words to show their failures and evils (or at least their friends’ words).
I enjoyed reading it despite disagreements, but I dont think the writer has understood those he’s critiquing
This totally misrepresents Rockhill. His project is much broader and stands firm on sound dialectics: actually analysing the historic material prerequisites for producing theory. No more, no less. The incredibly well researched stories about the CIA, the Frankfurt school and so on: all those are merely examples (incredibly well sourced examples) for applying dialectics to theory production itself. From this clear analysis, it is to be expected that a compatible left will form within capitalism. Rockhill is so obviously correct on this core thesis, it’s really no question: he is right at least on this. And it’s just as clear, that a honest left that is actually interested in achieving what it claims as it’s aims, need to avoid being deemed “compatible” by the CIA who invented the term “compatible left”.
Having recognized that Rockhill is at the heart of his thesis correct, it’s a natural scientific question as well as a pressing strategic necessity to identify who were part of the compatible left historically as well as today. And here the anti-communist sources cited by Rockhill really speak for themselves.
The problem that people have with Rockhill is, that all his work has led him to the conviction, that imperialism is the principal contradiction of today. So that explains all of this controversy around his work. It has been here long before and it is simply the controversy between the anti-imperialist left and, well, the rest.
The problem that people have with Rockhill is, that all his work has led him to the conviction, that imperialism is the principal contradiction of today. So that explains all of this controversy around his work. It has been here long before and it is simply the controversy between the anti-imperialist left and, well, the rest.
Imperialist left, compatible left, western left. These are only so many synonyms for the same thing. There is no question about the centrality of imperialism except among “leftists” in the core. This makes Rockhill one of a very small group of American intellectuals worth listening to. On the other hand, anyone who downplays imperialism shouldn’t be allowed to claim Lenin.
You mean the people being directly called out for being ineffectual and “unintentionally” supporting empire are trying to turn this idea put forward into a battle of meaningless semantics?
Along with Anwar Shaikh and Vijay Prashad, I rank Gabriel Rockhill as one of the most important corrective intellectuals of Western Marxism in the last century
We have not seen theoreticians of this caliber since the first half of the twentieth century
Losurdo? He is the inspiration for the debate today, and standardized the framework within which we discuss it.
His contributions about Hegel alone are like huge, though not yet widespread. Let alone his takedown of Western Marxism!
I’d include him too, absolutely
If we could find a way to build communism where I don’t get purged, that would be ideal really.
UwU you look purgable today
Most of the time when you get purged you just continue on with your life, no longer a member of the party. It takes exceptional circumstances to also be imprisoned or executed.
This is liberalism, we should all hope to get purged, we should only hope that the purge also takes all of the Khrushchev’s with us
You do you, I’d much rather not get purged.
I won’t have time to give this a full read until later in the week but so far it’s looking like a valuable contribution to this debate. From what I’ve seen around Hexbear, this book, or perhaps just Rockhill himself, seems to be very popular. I haven’t gotten to it yet (Losurdo’s book on Western Marxism is higher on my list and I’m currently going through the rest of his bibliography to meet my Theory dietary needs) but from excerpts and other reviews I’ve read, I’m a little wary, even if many of the negative reviews also seem way off in certain ways.
I’d love to discuss this further (at some future date) with comrades here.
I’m a big practitioner of Losurdo and have read that one twice already. Always up to discuss! What are you wary about?
I meant that I was wary about the Rockhill. Sounds like a whole lot of guilt by association, which isn’t necessarily wrong, but might not be helpful in terms of critiquing their analytical failures. Maybe that’s ground that Losurdo already covers well enough, and since Rockhill edited Losurdo’s volume, perhaps he didn’t feel the need to tread that ground again. I’m surprised I haven’t seen more reviews that deal with both books in tandem.
For Losirdo, I’m just about finished with War and Revolution (excellent, excellent stuff), and I have Democracy or Bonapartism on deck.
So far my preferred critique of Western Marxism comes from Aijaz Ahmad in In Theory, but it’ll be a few more days until I’m back in the same room as my books and notes so I wouldn’t do a good enough job of articulating why until then.
Interested in your reasoning on Ahmad whenever you have time.
I’ll ping you later in the week. Good excuse to type up my notes from that book, which I’ve been procrastinating on.
What are you reading now?
I’m on a re-read of German Ideology because a new reading group in my party wants to do it and they need me to set up the leading questions. I’m also reading Marx’s Inferno, but I’ve had to slow that one down, though I find it a really intriguing book!
How familiar does one have to be with Marx and Engels’s opponents in The Holy Family or The German Ideology? I’ve only read excerpts in anthologies and not the full texts.
Some notes on Ahmad:
Rockhill favorably cites Ahmad in his introduction to Losurdo’s Western Marxism, so some of this may be covered in their works, as well. Ahmad is mostly focused on literary theory, and the ways many Western theorists clump all of “Third World” literature together, while also only treating examples of it written or translated into English, but he also discusses the general intellectual climate in Europe and the U.S. between 1968 and the fall of the U.S.S.R.
Although there are positive aspects of Theory that are “worth retaining,” the “dominant strands within this ‘theory’. as it has unfolded after the movements of the 1960s were essentially over, have been mobilized to domesticate, in institutional ways, the very forms of political dissent which their movements had sought to foreground.” (p. 1)
In the absence of a mass movement, theory turned away from political economy and the class struggle, while retaining some of the weaknesses of the movements that radicalized their participants. In France, the radical period coincided with the Algerian and Indochina Wars, but that period (1945-1965) was also the time of “the installation of a new-style, Fordist regime of capital accumulation, thanks largely to French acceptance of the Marshall Plan” (p. 59) In the U.S., the antiwar movement’s “predominant sentiment was that of anti-colonialism, and the bulk of the mobilization, including the main organizers (the role of the Church and pacifist groups is usually understated in accounts from the Left) represented the political traditions of decent liberalism thrown into agony by the scale of savagery and the number of American deaths” (p. 40).
The result (of this among other things – as you can tell my my page numbers I’m bouncing around a bit)
was that the radicalism that arose in the United States in 1968 or thereabouts did not, except in some small pockets, believe in the desirability of socialism in its own country or in any realistic possibility of a revolutionary movement in the West, while its counterparts in the Parisian intelligentsia seemed to believe more in Surrealism than in socialism and quickly settled into poststructuralisms and New Philosophies which were directly hostile to Marxism and to the idea of any historical role for the working class. The overwhelming majority of the Left in the metropolitan countries actually believed – whether it said so in as many words or not – that the combination of the Fordist regimes of accumulation and the welfarist compact for industrial labour, which had underwritten the anti-communist consensus in the advanced capitalist countries, was the best possible choice for their own countries, and what they needed to do now was to refine the democratic premisses of liberal-capitalist regimes on their own terms. . . . [S]ocialism, in other words, was poor man’s capitalism. (p. 27)
Another major issue was that of academic professionalism and professionalization. The generation that came of age after the '60s in the U.S. had no major homegrown theorists as their forebears. The previous generation of Communists were activists who were purged from the universities in the McCarthy Era and didn’t leave behind much written output. Meanwhile, once Nixon started pulling troops out of Vietnam, the movement was dead. “It is a measure of how much the American Left has needed to suppress the memory of Vietnam in the process of normalizing itself into a professionally responsible stratum that it organized no movement of any proportions either to demand from its state that it undertake reparations or to mobilize resources from the citizenry to help rebuild what their rulers and armies had destroyed so utterly” (p. 28).
Coupled with the turn from political economy to culture, this was a fatal error. “When this material devastation brought in its train the inevitable disorientations in the social and political domains, those who believe in the moral grandeur of revolutions but not in the brute reality of the material conditions in which people actually build their own lives and their revolutions were thoroughly disillusioned” (p. 29).
The new leftist academics, then, produced “a very academic kind of Marxism; and given the absence of a preceding Marxist cultural tradition, this new Marxism was frequently and fashionably combined with all sorts of other things, in all kinds of eclectic and even esoteric ways” (p. 62).
But they didn’t really critique themselves.
A difficult but also pressing question for theory, one would have thought, would consist of the proper specification of the dialectic between objective determination and individual agency in the theorist’s own production. This would be an especially pressing issue – not so much in the form of censorship as of self-censorship and spontaneous refashioning – as the radical theorist takes up the role of a professional academic in the metropolitan university, with no accountable relation between classes and class-fractions outside the culture industry. The characteristic feature of contemporary radicalism is that it rarely addresses the question of its own determination by the conditions of its production and the class location of its agents. In the rare case where the issue of one’s own location – hence of the social determination of one’s own practice – is addressed at all, even fleetingly, the stance is characteristically that of a very poststructuralist kind of ironic self-referentiality and self-pleasuring. (p. 6)
Marcuse’s turn toward the erotic, Adorno’s pessimism, Althusser’s all-too-broad account of ideological state apparatuses, etc., contributed to the (non- or anti-Marxist) development of poststructuralism, with its Foucauldian “discourses” and conversations (p. 38-39). And what of conversation?
The notable achievement of the ‘children of ‘68’ is that they did not even intend to give rise to a political formation that might organize any fundamental solidarity with the two million workers who are currently unemployed in France. Debates about culture and literature on the Left no longer presume a labour movement as the ground on which they arise; ‘theory’ is now seen . . . as a ‘conversation’ among academic professionals. (p. 2)
…
In some American dilutions of this theory of the dispersal and fracturing of historical subjects, the idea of ‘inquiry’, which presumes the possibility of finding some believable truth, was to be replaced with the idea of ‘conversation’ which is by its nature inconclusive. . . This theory-as conversation has a remarkably strong levelling effect. One is now free to cite Marxists and anti-Marxists, feminists and anti-feminists, deconstructionists, phenomenologists, or whatever other theorist comes to mind, to validate successive positions within an argument, so long as one has a long list of citations, bibliographies, etc., in the well-behaved academic manner. (p. 70)
The result is a theory with a “distinctly consumptionist slant” (p. 71).
Anyway, there’s a whole lot more to the book, especially on literature, post-colonialism, and anti-imperialism. The chapters where he critiques Fredric Jameson and Edward Said are really great, too.
Oh man that part about the string of citations is realllllly good. So I see that Ahmad is in the same sort of project as Rochkill, an analysis of how the major thinkers of the time got us to where we are. He takes positions which I am already pretty sympathetic or in agreement with, so it would be a good read! I’m putting it om the list!
On the german ideology and holy family, I’m of the opinion that passing knowledge is fine if you’re not trying to be a Marx scholar. I think it’s ok to trust that people like Losurdo can holistically describe marx through his life of learning and not become someone who knows the books in and out. German Ideology provides some useful points to grasp to understand how Marx thinks generally, but isn’t as useful to really grasp Capital and his mature works because he was still really working through his Hegelianism. My favorite example is his use of ‘alienation’ which still lacks in materialist rigour, but he later develops it into exploitation and commodity fetishism as the ways that alienation materially arises at both ends of the commodity process.
They are also useful to place yourself into Marxs shoes and understand the type of polemics he does and how he tries to argue his points generally. But if you’re already comfy in his later works then who cares unless you’re trying to make new claims about Marx?
Yeah I’m not a big fan of Rockhill generally, but more because he seems less intensely studied in his subjects than a Losurdo. I have the same critique of Vijay Prashad (though with him i also have strong ideological disagreements). I won’t shit talk or argue against Rockhill though, it just feels like his oeuvre is a bit more aimed towards newbies to MLism and I am a bit allergic to hollowness. But I’ve been spoiled by the likes of Lukasc and Losurdo. But I don’t recommend random people to read Losurdo, and I likely will about Rockhill
Oh yeah, I meant to ask about your ideological disagreements with Prashad, too.
I think i likely overstated them a tad, just that I have yet to find any ideological disagreements with Rockhill (possibly for lack of reading him much) and have meanwhile found Prashad odd in his inspirations/associations. In one of his books he praises Brezhnev as his like ideal leader and that just seems pretty weak on understanding revolutionary potential, and he has praised Chomsky on many occasions, which reads to me as either opportunism or some liberalism towards western academics that I can’t be on board with. I think this couples to his ‘I’m just a Marxist, not any specific sect’ shtick.
But generally he’s good and I have no trouble discussing him positively! I just am wary of his standpoints when I think on his heros.
he praises Brezhnev as his like ideal leader
Well, that’s eyebrow-raising.
Brezhnev, in fact, is very fondly remembered in the former USSR.
That one i just genuinely dont get, but i definitely read him call himself a brezhnevite before, and idk what to think of someone with thay position at all
Vijay Prashad can be corny a lot, and holds a lot of optimism which can come across as naïve to some more cynical types. But I would not ever consider him an opportunist. Dude is a genuine communist, has been for his whole life and is properly well informed on communist theory and history. In one of his recent videos he made a passing comment that financially life has been a struggle. He doesn’t have health insurance. If he’s an opportunist then he’s bad at it. He could make a lot more money selling out his principles to talk on cable news.
‘I’m just a Marxist, not any specific sect’ shtick.
I believe this is based in principle, not aesthetic. He is a big proponent of left unity. This is not to say he compromises on principle. I have seen him frankly disagree with people to their faces on several occasions. But he highly values that people sit and talk to each other, that that’s a necessary prerequisite to solving our problems. Especially in an era of capitalist antisocial fragmentation. Getting people into association together has to happen so that they can come to discuss politics and build class consciousness, just as the concentration of workers into factories and neighborhoods developed the proletariat as a class during the early capitalist era.
I definitely agree that Prashad isn’t doing the ‘marxist not NL’ thing for aesthetics, but I dont yet see how he can seek unity but not comrpomise on principles. Just taking Chomsky as the example, how does that look to you? I guess I’m fine on hexbear being a unity platform, but I would not organize or call people on here i disagree with inspiring or anything.
But for the rest, I agree, I should’ve made my initial comment a bit less enthusiastically (if I remember right, I was just done with a pretty intense argument and feeling a bit moody lol). I like Prashad, I just think his unity stuff is weak, personally, and think that less-than-ideal strategy of his comes out in lots of works. But I’m open to change on that, tbh, the distance between he and I is not that big
Does theoretical pluralism mean “anything goes”? Is this not the intellectual “anarchism” that Kautsky feared so much in party life? Let us not forget that Kautsky also saw as his ideal for the future society “communism in material production, anarchism in intellectual”. Perhaps as a transitional phase, rather than anarchism in intellectual life, we can have democratic-republicanism: not freedom from interference, but freedom from arbitrary domination. The Marxist intellectual should not be free to join with the CIA, to join with the bourgeoisie, and do propaganda for the class enemy, to become a useful idiot. Yet they should be free to pursue their work regardless of whether the party at any given moment finds it convenient for its tactical maneuvers. There shall be duties, but there shall also be rights, and the right to disagree and to question must be protected.
i would counterpose to this: either a marxist theorist is a worker and not in academy (l’intellectual organique) or they can instantly tell you the rate of exploitation in any broad industry (so an accountant, not sociologist) in their country. the rest will evolve into cultural circlejerk anyways.
Incidentally i think rockwell thesis (basically fruit of poisoned tree, eg getting cia money sometime somewhere as academic) is not good, but not in dismissive way, but rather that of course cia/ngos will find intellectuals that are compatible or obfuscatory, that’s their job as arm of capitalism. thus for me rather simple cleavage is: have opinions about culture - irrelevant pontification, talks about ownership, money and goods flows and production - worth engaging in, even if they surface skimming. marxist history is wonderful to read, because it just makes sense to me, and they are usually unburdened by high sociology studies and have to resort to plebeian grain prices, iron prices and means of production.
free marketplace of ideas is rather apt descriptor, intellectuals are shopping their wares to willing buyers (capitalists), and if there is no capitalist buyer for marxist theorist - too fucking bad huh.
of course cia/ngos will find intellectuals that are compatible or obfuscatory, that’s their job as arm of capitalism.
I haven’t read Rockhill’s book yet, but I’ve watched several of his interviews discussing the book. I think that’s basically the point he’s making. The focus is not so much on individuals but on the roles that they assume, roles that exist independently of them — a familiar concept to Marxists. Of course, the degree of individual culpability varies with the individual… some people were/are unashamed bastards (see Žižek) and some were more well-meaning but misguided.
but the fact they are finding and funding them doesn’t make the theory wrong in itself, just more likely to be useless. plus, maybe i’ve gotten the wrong impression, but i think he treats their disciples as guilty by association. marcuse and his ilk are shit marxists not because he sometime was oss-funded, he was oss funded cause he is a shit marxist (well not oss in his case, his work was later anyway) if that makes sense. zizek is a cultural influencer and thus not a marxist is very simple, zizek is funded by 50 ngos with some shaddy ties and thus not a marxist is very unclear lense. some marxists could receive funding incidentally (especially in academia, good luck avoiding rockafeller/ford/soros foundations somewhere)
trusting in cia funding as an indicator of shittiness rather than using your own eyes and mind is not a good recipe for rescuing marxism from sociology.
Theres an annoying tendency in leftist circles to instead of reading a book and examining it themselves while being aware of the biases the author may has had, to instead go use whatever a google search has turned up as an excuse not to read. Investigation seems often limited to finding reasons not to investigate further
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I agree most stuff is slop (as with most of the media produced in bourgeois society)
The issue i’m talking about is when instead of investigating the slop, its claims, criticising it, etc (as past marxists have), many online leftists beeline to google a reason not to do this work. “My google search said the author is a liberal bourgeois academic” should be the starting point of the investigation, but too often this is where peoples investigation ends, with an excuse not to read or criticise.
I will admit some people go after reading a bit “ok its definitely slop, i’ll read something else instead” and this is fine, but ime the vast majority go “the thought leader said its slop, i dont have to read it” and go back on youtube or tiktok.
I slightly disagree on all history being entertainment, at least of some aspects of the 20th and maybe 19th centuries. Before then I agree that reading about it is generally for entertainment with no real applicability to the struggle.
But the 19th and 20th centuries laid the whole foundations for where we find ourselves today, which I find useful in agitation, particularly around the imperialist nature of NATO and the origins of world economy. Also the 1848 revolutions, paris commune, russian revolution and soviet project, chinese revolution and their projects, socialist revolutions and experiements’ histories in general, are extremely useful and relevant to us as we look to replicate their successes and avoid their failures.
That isnt to say i think all histories of the 19th and 20th centuries are useful for the struggle; a lotta it is still entertainment stuff. But unlike the previous centuries, imo theres stuff in the 19th and 20th we still really gotta understand today to be effective revolutionaries
but the fact they are finding and funding them doesn’t make the theory wrong in itself, just more likely to be useless.
This is precisely what Rockhill says in the video I posted yesterday: https://hexbear.net/post/8857126. His elevator pitch starts at 7:07.
My approach is always to situate the production of ideas within production more generally, and that implies at least two fundamental principles.
One is that intellectual production is never done in isolation. It is done in a material system of production. Therefore, if we want to understand the intellectual production of any individual (Deleuze, Derrida, Lacan, etc.) it is imperative on us to situate that individual production within the overall system that produced both the thinker in question and the work that they produced.
Second is that any intellectual production is the result of a theoretical practice, and we need to analyze that theoretical practice, see how it operates and what it is its fundamental goals are. In the case of French theory, what you have, if we look at it from a larger historical perspective, is that these thinkers became prominent within the imperial core because it was largely driven by the theory industry that developed within the United States in the wake of World War II.
So the fact that people today read Lacan, you know, people like Baudrillard, Derrida, Deleuze, etc. isn’t because these people are, organically, on their own, individually finding these authors and becoming bewildered at how brilliant they are. It’s because there is an entire system of intellectual production, distribution, and consumption, that has promoted these thinkers as the most important in the world. Given that this system of intellectual production itself is situated within the larger social relations of production, it is necessary, then, to recognize that this is part of an outgrowth of the broader capitalist system.
Rockhill makes a careful and dialectical analysis. It’s kind of like saying pop music is not inherently bad, but it’s not as good as its popularity implies either. You have to account for the record labels, advertising, celebrity cliques, etc.
Criticism expressed too sharply can be seen as doubt, as vacillation in one’s historical task, and then as sabotage. It is easy to see how the capacity for genuine critical and scientific discussion, when put under such pressures, becomes muted, if not impossible. What does one expect when the political whims of the party-state can run roughshod over the protestations of actual experienced technical bureaucrats for fear of being tried as saboteurs?
Dont have time to find the quote this second, but James Harris’ The Great Urals has a great bit on this wrt
coppercoke production in the urals. If anyone is interested i’ll find the actual excerpt, but tldr: local (bourgeois specialist) geologists said localcoppercoke was too shit for use in industry; local party arrested them for wrecking and hired other scientists who said thecoppercoke was fine; thecoppercoke was not fine andmillionsbillions of rubles of machines were damaged by using sub parcoppercoke and the whole investment ended up failingEdit: coked coal, not copper, billions not millions
Hot take but I think communists have masturbated over theory for long enough that people need to accept you’re not going to intellectualize or theorize your way into a revolution happening. Like, this shit? There’s some debate about western Marxism? Some guy is mad about some criticism? who cares, we are all gonna die
I’m going to give light pushback because I get the sentiment, but I disagree 100%. I think that we are too lost in trying to achieve something with shitty parties and shitty theories and are losing for that reason. We really have to find some way to make the message work by finding ways to make our goals and theories seem not just sensible, but nonsense to not believe. Our work is still theoretical, not because we need intellectuals but because our actions have to feel like a natural extension of the classes we support instead of needing the translation. It’s hard work too, otherwise we’d be done
I think we are running into the wall of you can’t theorize yourself out of a prison, and it isn’t a matter of finding the right theory because the right theory still isn’t going to kill a guard or climb you out
Edit: even what you’re saying isn’t a matter of finding the hidden True Theory, it’s a propaganda and mass psychology issue that also has real world material limitations placed in how we can deal with it (we can’t just magic a tiktok or TV media out of our assholes, and even if we did that only solves outreach and not the propaganda and mass psychology components necessary to convince people) but the theory itself is at present adequate
What do you think we should do then?
Tbh i think we’re just totally absolutely fucked unless China or others use serious state assets to support us, because the sheer scale of coordination and necessary materiel to confront the bourgeoisie is just too great. Im straight doomed up, dawg. I think the best I should reasonably expect to see in my lifetime is fascist, reactionary balkanization of the U.S. over absolute fucking nonsense. I expect to be killed over something so absurd it could only be described as the results of a clown society in hell
P.s. this doesn’t imply I think Chinese support would be a magic bullet either and it would play into
EVIL FOREIGN INFLUENCE rhetoric too, i just think, like, it’s just not happening without resources that the working class today simply does not have. We are all too desperate.Edit: sorry i know this isn’t helpful but also at the same time i read “what is at stake in the western Marxism debate” and i can’t help but think “literally nothing of importance”
This is not how problem solving works, in any field, at any time.
Understanding of socialist theory and history is essential to affective socialist movement. In order to plan ahead and be affective, you must have a coherent and cohesive record of what was tried, and the thought processes around those methods.
If you look at it from this absurdly high level, then yeah, it’s gonna look impossible. And maybe it is impossible. However, you have no way of knowing that.
And you have theories, such as “I can reasonably expect the U.S. to balkanize into a bunch of separate fascist entities.” but I don’t know where you are getting these ideas from. I can hypothesize that it is mix of ad hoc historical knowledge combined with popular fictional culture war media, but getting people to even commit to basic social engagements is a chore, the idea that people will have the wherewithal and energy to physically balkanize is genuinely absurd and hilarious to me.
More likely is the continuation of the legal balkanization that we are already experiencing, which makes sense when view through Lenin’s Theory of Imperialism as much more that simply a system of colonial expansion, but as a system of laws that govern one area significantly different than another area within a single national entity. The creation of ‘frontiers’ for capital.
such as “I can reasonably expect the U.S. to balkanize into a bunch of separate fascist entities.” but I don’t know where you are getting these ideas from.
sigh, no, I said “the best i should reasonably expect”
the idea that people will have the wherewithal and energy to physically balkanize is genuinely absurd and hilarious to me.
More likely is the continuation of the legal balkanization
my incorrect and obviously never gonna happen “physical” balkanization
your materialistic and currently in progress “legal” balkanization
nevermind I only said “balkanization”
The question over this ‘legal balkanization’ process lies more in exactly how far is it going to go, and is it going to be applied only geographically.
And yes, the distinctions do matter, as a state undergoing legal balkanization is not necessarily at civil war, whereas a physical balkanization requires a civil war.
why even be communist then
because I’m not bourgeois, the labor theory of value succinctly explains where all real value actually comes from, the overwhelming majority of people are in some stage of being exploited or another, and I’m good at deluding myself but not good enough to just, like, ignore that
Anyone can recognize they are being exploited. That’s not what makes a communist. Communist also think that there is something that can be don’t about exploitation. If you think that nothing is to be done, then what is the point. This is liberalism.
Tbh i think we’re just totally absolutely fucked unless China or others use serious state assets to support us, because the sheer scale of coordination and necessary materiel to confront the bourgeoisie is just too great.
Tbf marx’a position in 1848-9 wasnt much different. He (and engels) argued proletarian revolution would require a napoleon-type world war between bourgeois revolutionary france and germany and britain+russia giving the proletariat of all european countries the opporunity to rise up. Marx’s new years greeting in his newspaper for 1849 therefore hoped for a world war, which never came and so the various proletarian revolutions were strangled in their cradles
best I should reasonably expect to see in my lifetime is fascist, reactionary balkanization of the U.S. over absolute fucking nonsense
This, but I think the coastal areas will arc toward social democracy if that happens. The process between here and there would be violent and fashy like you said. Many areas of north America will remain violent and fashy until they peter out and/or make it everyone else’s problem along the way. Obviously for those are in a particularly fashy area without the ability to leave it might get fucked up.
I’m curious to know if SWCC will lay the foundation to a new socialist global order made up of the global south over the next several decades. If there is a socdem US or balkanized socdem republics of the former US, they could make up the right wing of the new socialist order (there will be lib shit ever more, but the only thing less sustainable than a liberal economy is outright fascism).
I don’t have much to add to this piece, since you could fill a library with the Marxist literature and historiography/history I haven’t read. I did find this to be an interesting perspective though. I have read very little “Western Marxism”, only some core readings from Lenin, Marx, and Engles, supplemented by the ML textbook translations from noncompete. Therefore much of “my own” opinions are not backed by much reading, or praxis on the matter. So this was an interesting view into this conflict I see all around me in spaces like this.
Overall an interesting point that could have been waaay shorter and better if instead of the digressions into kautsky, stalin and althusser etc he just went back to marx’s 1840s article about prussian censorship and bureacracy, and in particular how the biggest issue with censorship is when/because the censor is a non-expert in the subject theyre censoring and the censoree is an expert in the subject, he could have made his point much quicker and more effectively
