Chavista Club World • Page 5

Depending on whichever sect one belongs to, one's interpretation of China, Mao and Maoism will differ. The classical Trotskyist/anarchist line is that China was never socialist to begin with; rather, Mao took as his example the bureaucratic form of capitalism that the Soviet Union had built. Mao made it clear that this was the case, but argued that this was the basis of socialist plenitude in the future. The socialist veneer, however, was just that and the actual ideological framework could more accurately described as nationalist. This makes sense. The class character of the leadership was essentially middle-class, hence their focus on developing capitalist industry as the pathway for socialism, and national independence as an end unto itself. This character, however, mutated with the repression leading up to the revolution; that is, as there was no large working-class in China, the members of the Chinese Communist Party was driven into the countryside, where they adopted guerilla tactics and military style hierarchies. The peasantry, for example, was subordinated to the leadership and then used as fighters for their purposes. This culture, the class character of their objectives and the influence of Stalin coalesced to create an early, authoritarian iteration of China. Personally, I don't dismiss the experience out of some ideological purity, because I do think there are ideas worth taking from them and Maoism more generally.

 

Здравствуйте.

Религиозное убожество есть в одно и то же время выражение действительного убожества и протест против этого действительного убожества. Религия — это вздох угнетённой твари, сердце бессердечного мира, подобно тому как она — дух бездушных порядков. Религия есть опиум народа.
Упразднение религии, как иллюзорного счастья народа, есть требование его действительного счастья. Требование отказа от иллюзий о своём положении есть требование отказа от такого положения, которое нуждается в иллюзиях. Критика религии есть, следовательно, в зародыше критика той юдоли плача, священным ореолом которой является религия. - Карл Маркс
«К критике гегелевской философии права» - 1843 год

For Zyuganov: We are blessed. For Mumiy Troll: The wedding was divorce. RIP Sergei Sergeyevich Bodrovю You are missed.
Все с ног на голову.
Last summer was a petition to put Felix Dzerzhinsky back at Lubyanka square but not Teremok or Volgograd. Only plant flowers in potholes at Yekaterinburg and Omsk since nothing can grow in Oymyokon.
Not to forget the Foxconn suicides. China is class-based...

 

Neoliberalism Is a Political Project | Jacobin

And I think the danger is, when I listen to people talking about anti-neoliberalism, that there is no sense that capitalism is itself, in whatever form, a problem.

Most anti-neoliberalism fails to deal with the macro-problems of endless compound growth — ecological, political, and economic problems. So I would rather be talking about anticapitalism than anti-neoliberalism.

 

@Wharf Rat thank you for posting those links from AP on here, just used Harman and Luxemburg in the third version of my thesis' lit review haha.

 

Hell yeah glad I could help. I had a paper last semester that was basically "here is some marxist analysis, and here is some ancap analysis. pick one to take a giant shit on"

 

What are you studying if you don't mind me asking? I had a decent amount of exposure to Marxist political economy, geography etc. as a Geography/International Studies major, and utilized that in my BA thesis too, but am kicking myself now that I didn't take some of the electives that explicitly dealt with those topics (including an entire class dedicated to reading Capital).

 

I wonder which you picked

 

History + one of IR/poli sci, i have 3 classes that went toward both and have to pick lol

 

sometimes i wish i could buy into RCP bullshit just so i could unironically say "chairman bob"

i mean cmon

 

All the Bob Avakian people I've ever met are pretty weird.

 

apparently the DNC flag burner guy is a disciple and compared him to Lenin and Mao

 

Rly good twitter account

https://i.imgur.com/xkU9ka9.jpg

 

Classic essay:


"Any modern approach to a Marxist theory of culture must begin by considering the proposition of a determining base and a determined superstructure. From a strictly theoretical point of view this is not, in fact, where we might choose to begin. [1] It would be in many ways preferable if we could begin from a proposition which originally was equally central, equally authentic: namely the proposition that social being determines consciousness. It is not that the two propositions necessarily deny each other or are in contradiction. But the proposition of base and superstructure, with its figurative element, with its suggestion of a definite and fixed spatial relationship, constitutes, at least in certain hands, a very specialized and at times unacceptable version of the other proposition. Yet in the transition from Marx to Marxism, and in the development of mainstream Marxism itself, the proposition of the determining base and the determined superstructure has been commonly held to be the key to Marxist cultural analysis."

Raymond Williams: Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory. New Left Review I/82, November-December 1973.

 

I watched the Big Lebowski last night for the first time in about ten years.

The Dude trying to quote Lenin and Donny informing him that the correct end to the quote was "I am the Walrus" had me dying. I didn't remember that.

 

I want this:


The Politics of Transindividuality

 

Third chapter of Capital is killing me

 

Anyone know of any good books/documentaries/etc. on Fela Kuti?

 

@Dominick do you happen to have a decent understanding of the historical context re: Marx's incredibly long, dull expositions of commodities and money in the first few chapters of Capital? Like, is he actually saying anything that wasn't already known at the time? Or possibly, rather, how exactly do his understandings of money/the commodity differ from the classical liberal understandings of them? Because when you get down to it, what he's saying seems like relatively common knowledge today (the C-M-C metamorphoses, for example), but I'm sure there's a good reason for why he included it, let alone made it the entire first section of the project.

 

The first seven or so chapters of Capital Vol. 1 are establishing the parameters of his analysis. He begins with he commodity because it is "congealed labor power" and the nucleus of capital, so following that, he establishes how, in reality, the process by which capital is valorized is the extraction of surplus value from workers. This sets up the rest of the book in terms of how he will be approaching the labor process, accumulation and the need to extract more and more surplus value from workers in service of the aforementioned accumulation. Marx certainly was influenced by classical economists, like Ricardo and Smith, when speaking about the labor theory of value. What distinguished Marx from them, however, was the concept of surplus value. For them, the value of a commodity was derived from labor, but the exchange, more or less, was equal, whereas Marx demonstrated that surplus value is the source of profit itself. The other way in which he distinguished himself from those economists is he completely rejected their conceptualization of these relations as both natural and eternal. Marx brought history and his dialectical method into political economy, which allowed him to analyze capital as a manifestation of particular, historical social processes, rather than being a state of nature for man or something which is eternal. Does this answer your question? I'm at work right now, but if you have any questions, I can go into further detail on this if you'd like. I would also recommend checking out David Harvey's courses on the matter. He has YouTube videos and a couple of books on Vol. 1 and 2.

 

Yes it does, thanks! And yeah I've been following Harvey's online lectures. I'm only reading 10pgs per day so it never becomes burdensome

 

«(...)[ Bourgeois Socialists: ]

The second category consists of adherents of present-day society who have been frightened for its future by the evils to which it necessarily gives rise. What they want, therefore, is to maintain this society while getting rid of the evils which are an inherent part of it.

To this end, some propose mere welfare measures – while others come forward with grandiose systems of reform which, under the pretense of re-organizing society, are in fact intended to preserve the foundations, and hence the life, of existing society.

Communists must unremittingly struggle against these bourgeois socialists because they work for the enemies of communists and protect the society which communists aim to overthrow.(...)»

Engels, The Principles of Communism


Hm? O idk no reason

 

hey
Why is /r/socialism so incompetent at anti-imperialism? • /r/communism

 

Weird post but good quote

 

Who Works for the Workers?