I wasted a fucking hour on this guy. I argued for a while about imperialism being the primary contradiction before I realized he thinks all modern economic modes and equally bad. Doesn't help he's a slow typer.
This guy needs to read works by Marxists, his analysis sucks and is conceding massive ground to bourgeois ideology.
In order to truly understand this contradiction, the most explosive contradiction capitalism has engendered, the centers/peripheries polarization must be placed at the heart of the analysis and not at its margin.
"But after a whole series of concessions, the forces of the Left and of socialism in the West have finally given up on giving the imperialist dimension of capitalist expansion the central place that it must occupy both in critical analysis and in the development of progressive strategies. In so doing, they have been won over to bourgeois ideology in its most essential aspects: Eurocentrism and economism."
The very term imperialism has been placed under prohibition, having been judged to be unscientific. Considerable contortions are required to replace it with a more "objective" term like "international capital" or "transnational capital." As if the world were fashioned purely by economic laws, expressions of the technical demands of the reproduction of capital. As if the state and politics, diplomacy and armies had disappeared from the scene! Imperialism is precisely an amalgamation of the requirements and laws for the reproduction of capital; the social, national, and international alliances that underlie them; and the political strategies employed by these alliances.
It is therefore indispensable to center the analysis of the contemporary world on unequal development and imperialism. Then, and only then, does it become possible to devise a strategy for a transition beyond capitalism. The obstacle is disengaging oneself from the world system as it is in reality. This obstacle is even greater for the societies of the developed center than it is for those of the periphery. And therein lies the definitive implication of imperialism. The developed central societies, because both their social composition and the advantages they enjoy from access to the natural resources of the globe are based on imperialist surpluses, have difficulty seeing the need for an overall reorganization of the world. A popular, anti-imperialist alliance capable of reversing majority opinion is as a result more difficult to construct in the developed areas of the world. In the societies of the periphery, on the other hand, disengagement from the capitalist world system is the condition for a development of the forces of production sufficient to meet the needs and demands of the majority. This fundamental difference explains why all the breaches in the capitalist system have been made from the periphery of the system. The societies of the periphery, which are entering the period of "post-capitalism" through strategies that I prefer to qualify as popular and national rather than socialist, are constrained to tackle all of the difficulties that delinking implies.
Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, For a Truly Universal Culture
Deprogramming people from milquetoast liberalism to program them into equally empire-friendly (and ultimately more dangerous) ultra-lefti-ism. Very cool.
"Post-marxist hegelian thought", sometimes I think that philosophy was a fucking mistake. But then I remember that this idiocy is mostly confined to fans of postmodernism and the like.
Yeah fetishizing philosophy is fairly common in western spheres. But we Marxists are not philosophers, we are scientists and with that comes observations and experimentation (real world implementation, praxis, etc ).
I come from a natural sciences background so my honest feelings is that a lot of that pre Marx stuff is, while nice to know, not particularly necessary.
I come from a natural sciences background so my honest feelings is that a lot of that pre Marx stuff is, while nice to know, not particularly necessary.
Same. I've always been suspicious of pure philosophy and i still am.
For me one of the best sentences that Marx ever wrote is the last point he makes in "Theses on Feuerbach":
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it."
It's just important to know how the theory has been developed over time, and stress how even the development of dialectics is dialectical itself! Everything is a process.
Marx didn't develop dialectics in a vacuum, it was developed by building up from Hegel's dialectics, which in turn were built from someones else. And surely, people will continue to develop dialectics by building up from Marx. It's all a process.
We have to respect the previous philosophers for being part of the process but we must not idolize them, even Marx. Even if Marxism (dialectical materialism) may seem as the end of philosophy, there will come a time were someone builds up from it and renders it obsolete. It hasn't happened but it will.
the moment they said Hegelian dialectics as anything other than a joke i knew what was wrong with this clown. Marx spent and entire fucking book dunking on Hegel for being a fucking idiot and took his singular half contribution to human knowledge and made it good. Hegel was pure idealism in his philosophy and he was incoherent and flat out wrong in his pitiful attempts at natural philosophy, it is no wonder than someone who would hold Hegel in anything other than contempt would not understand the practical necessity of working with the national bourgeoisie against imperialism.
This guy is a personification of the defeatist Eurocentric Western left. Just sad. If he actually read works by Marxists, he would have had all his questions answered.
The reconstruction of social theory along truly universalist lines must have as its base a theory of actually existing capitalism, centered on the principal contradiction generated by the worldwide expansion of this system.
This contradiction could be defined in the following way: the integration of all of the societies of our planet into the world capitalist system has created the objective conditions for universalization. However, the tendency toward homogenization, produced by the universalizing force of the ideology of commodities, that underlies capitalist development is hindered by the very conditions of unequal accumulation. The material base of the tendency toward homogenization is the continuous extension of markets, in breadth as well as in depth. The commodity and capital markets gradually extend to the entire world and progressively take hold of all aspects of social life. The labor force, at first limited in its migrations by different social, linguistic, and legal handicaps, tends to acquire international mobility. [...]
The principal contradiction of capitalism has, thus, placed an anticapitalist revolution on the agenda--a revolution that is anti-capitalist because it is necessarily directed against capitalism as it is lived by those who endure its tragic consequences. But before that revolution can occur, it is necessary to finish the task that capitalism could not, and cannot, complete.
Some of these problems are not new, but rather have confronted the Russian and Chinese revolutions from the beginning. But these problems must be discussed in the light of the lessons of history, which implies something quite different from the sweeping Eurocentric judgment that socialism is bankrupt and the only alternative is a return to capitalism. The same may be said, mutatis mutandis, for any discussion of the lessons to be drawn from the radical movement of national liberation, which reached its apogee during the Bandung Era from 1955 until 1975.
Without a doubt, the so-called socialist societies (which are better qualified as "popular national" societies) have not solved the problem. This is quite simply because the popular national transition will necessarily be considerably longer than anyone had imagined, since it is faced with the task of developing the forces of production in a permanent struggle with the logic of world capitalist expansion and on the basis of conflicting internal social relationships (what I have called the dialectic of three tendencies: socialist, local capitalist, and statist). In societies that have successflilly made a popular national revolution (usually termed a "socialist revolution"), the dialectic of internal factors once again takes on a decisive role. Unquestionably, because the complexity of post-capitalist society had not been fully grasped, the Soviet experiment--such as it is--exercised a strong attraction over the peoples of the periphery for some forty years. The Maoist critique of this experiment also had considerable influence for approximately fifteen years.
Today, a better awareness of the real dimension of the challenge has already brought less naive enthusiasm and more circumspection concerning definitive prescriptions for development. There has been, in fact, progress in both practice and in thought, a crisis in the positive sense of the term and not a failure that would prefigure capitulation and a return to normalcy, that is, a reinsertion into the logic of worldwide capitalist expansion. The discouragement that has overtaken the forces of socialism in the West, who find in the situation of the "socialist" countries an alibi for their own weaknesses, has its source elsewhere, in the depths of the Western societies themselves. As long as it does not have a lucid understanding of the ravages of Eurocentrism, Western socialism will remain at a standstill.
For the peoples of the periphery, there is no other choice than that which has been the key to these so-called socialist revolutions. Certainly, things have changed gready since 1917 or 1949. The conditions for new popular national advances in the contemporary Third World do not allow the simple reproduction of earlier approaches, sketched out in advance by a few prescriptions. In this sense, the thought and practice inspired by Marxism retain their universal vocation and their Afro-Asiatic vocation even more. In this sense, the so-called socialist counter-model, despite its current limits, retains a growing force of attraction for the countries of the periphery.
Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, For a Truly Universal Culture
I love how these guys will talk about Stalin and Mao being un-marxist for being practical and pragmatic, especially funny in the case of Stalin, because he was only continuing on with programs that Lenin had already started.
NATO leftist is a NATO leftist. I for one am shocked. A lot of baby leftists from NATO and NATO-adjacent countries start out this way. Whether you want to spend your time deprogramming them (if theyāre even open-minded enough for that) is up to you
there is so much to unpack here lmao. I am too tired and relaxed to do it all, but just the first point, implying Mao or Stalin were nationalists in any sense other than some kind of opportunistic building of "nationality" to ignite it into full on proletarian revolution, like, fucking read a single text you lib shits, lol. W*stern "leftists" deserve the same hellfire as libs, they are just smug ideology shoppers
Started with them try to lecture me about my understanding of Mao. These people learn a bit about a lot of stuff and then use it to troll people who actually support the real movement for socialism.
are they trots or something else? im reading a little book called What is Dialects by Alexandre Konder, a brazilian author, he goes to similar points, he says that there was metaphysics tendencies growing in communists parties around europe, especially in germany with Berninstein, then Lenin dissed the shit out of everyone in What is to be done, to correct these tendencies, that made possible due to Lenin deep understanding of hegelian dialects, then everything went to crap when Stalin came to power because he despised theory, but had a amazing ability to make didactic examples like in the text historical materialism and dialectical materialism, but still weak on hegel, something something that paved way to revisionists like kruchov to rise.
i felt compelled to translate the part and bring to you guys, but coincidentally the subject came up, so, what is the deal with that? is any of this true that stalin wasn't up in theory and didn't understood stuff?
everything went to crap when Stalin came to power because he despised theory???
Is this a different Stalin they are talking about? Or are they talking about the actual historical Joseph Vissarionovich who was an avid reader and had an entire library full of books, who wrote multiple books on Marxist-Leninist theory, on Soviet economics, on philosophy, etc.? Come on, even all the anti-communist historians who call him a dictator don't deny how much of a nerd and a bookworm he was.
You see there are 2 Stalin. The material Stalin, a successful revolutionary that led the Soviet Union to a higher stage of development, and the metaphysical Stalin, developed by the anti-communist scholars and resentful politicians, that was reduced to literally Hitler.
Stalin despised theory, but at the same time wrote theory š cant make this shit up.
Read Stalin, some of his works are available in prolewiki and many other in the marxist library (which is run by trotskys mind you). He was a great theorytician that not only wrote but also put the stuff in action, liberals and revisionist despise Stalin because of how incredibly competent he was and all the MATERIAL achievements that happened under his command.
Yes there are trots, but this specific individual was like āstop trying to put labels on me, Iām just a Marxist,ā acknowledging the Trotskyism and left communism are dead and they donāt technically identify with them.
Bernstein was someone with an quite bourgeois mindset. He is mentioned enough in "What has do be done" and Renegade Kautsky. Give those books a chance and read them, they are not hard at all.
is any of this true that stalin wasn't up in theory and didn't understood stuff?
I would more like to encourage you to find it out. Even if someone will tell you, that it is true or not true, you are just relying on those words.
I've been reading a little, i got recommended the mentioned texts here on lemmygrad, not gonna lie that trying to learn philosophy has been a frustrating endeavor, to the point that i don't even know how to properly judge the quality of theory he produced, so i do rely on other people to help sort some thoughts.
i do know his about his achievements as a leader and why west demonizes him so much, ik it is stupid to use liberals as a compass, anyway, i will keep trying to read more.