To get straight to the point, I've been trying to move right back to reading from the original Marxists, esp. Marx and Engels themselves.
I think the online left and people organizing in real life are not paying enough attention to the trends at hand. Some people we are calling comrades today are going to be fascists, and I believe as undisputed fact.
People are making reference to an "industrial" versus "financial" capitalism, or reference to a so-called PMC class, or reference to a "critical support" of countries like Russia, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and many others. I see a lot of talk about multipolarity and geopolitics.
At first glance, this doesn't look harmful, but if we go back in time and imagine similar debates as though it were still World War I? These would be the ones first to try to pull a Mussolini and jump from Communist and anti-Imperialist to writing fascist theory.
As these perversions of Marx continue, I really do fear that a lot of middle-class (and those middle-class falling to proles) will see this and end up re-inventing fascism.
There is far too much crude and vulgar anti-capitalism, anti-liberalism, anti-imperalism. It's a grave error. Liberalism is born out of the French Revolution and brought us progressively towards radical socialism and Communism. Capitalism, for all its faults, brought us progressively towards alternative structures and the ability for workers to seize mass production for their class. Anti-imperialism, for some of its faults, brought us the Russian, Chinese, Cuban, Vietnamese, and Korean revolutions, all but one with total victory.
But I hear people calling themselves anti-capitalist, anti-liberal, anti-imperalist as if there was nothing more behind those words. We're in World War III it seems, but people who are clearly infiltrated and have a lack of understanding of serious conflicts are running left-wing parties. What are they doing? Who is there to critique them? Over the years we've had to deal with nonsense from the IMT, Midwestern Marx, the Black Hammer Party, PCUSA, and so on. There is no working class party with the tools and experience and support base to properly analyze and critique them.
I think we need to request of working class parties a way to redefine the use of anti-imperialist forces and the idea of nationalism and ideas of "oppressed nations" and the way the Global North and Global South are organized. To be blunt, Palestine is one of the only places on this earth where a real national liberation would be legitimate. From so many years of a weakened leftist movement, it looks like decades of work are going to be put in to fix it.
I get the idea that Cuba and North Korea are the last breath of Communism on this planet and, for how much of a fight they put up, they are still struggling. Hard. N. Korea is reliant on Russia. Cuba is facing so many leaving the country while their economy hasn't fully recovered, and they are turning to private sector to fix problems while still under a painful embargo. These are not pleasant places to live and I can't think of anyone in the real world that would see this socialism and decide it's the way to go. So much progress is squeezed into these tiny countries and there's nothing to show the world for it. On top of that, if Palestine doesn't get a real success in the near future, we are pushed even further back in terms of progess while the leftist movement is barely getting back to development.
I am still Marxist-Leninist, but I hope people understand that the mistakes of leftist movements today are going to be the framework for fascists tomorrow. I won't lose hope, but a lot of people will.
Who is going to be the one to transform the contradictions of today into the working class movements of tomorrow, speaking figuratively?
Sorry to let down many on Lemmygrad and Hexbear with this statement, but neither the rise of China nor the fall of the US will be way to success. Those are just inevitabilities based on present conditions, but the events alone aren't going to do much. The fall of the US might even put hell on some of the most vulnerable people on earth. And the rise of China isn't going to inspire much except a vague sense of "economic stability and prosperity".
At this point, my position is almost right in the middle, right between the average (in-practice) Marxist-Leninist and the average (in-practice) ML-Maoist. My views are starting to diverge a little too much from what I see online, but my views are still useful in real life situations and among the real world, which is a good sign, but it doesn't even look like half the people calling themselves some form of leftists are even trying to understand what they are doing. The world is moving too fast and too dangerously for so many people to make these deadly errors
Damn I feel like I'm nitpicking, but
Is this implying that the US' lack of proletarian movement is due to a lack of an industrial base? And is the industrial proletariat the most revolutionary segment as a general rule, or is this particular to the US, or some other option? The most revolutionary segment of the proletariat has been service workers
By American Bolshevism, we aren't referring to something like an Israeli 'Marxism' or an 'Israeli left' - correct?
I've read the above quote in full context, in reference to Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte - this statement would be meant for Mr. Trump and his ilk, not for ourselves
Thank God we are able to discuss this more openly as Marxists, I cannot stand pretending that presidents like FDR or Kennedy or Carter were good people or even 'progressive'
Agree and agree
Along with the best analysis of the increase in American Latino vote I've seen thus far, I would like to point to the emphasized sentences above as extremely relevant