Marxists still can’t seem to grasp the idiocy of the term ‘dicatatorship of the proletariat’ as terminology and the long and confused history of the term laid out by Hal Draper in a book by that name.
And the term produced tragic results as the working class was exploited by a new dictatorship, of the bourgeoisie. The Marx cadre can’t seem to grasp their own legacy and rehash this atrocious terminology ad nauseam. The issue of the working class is not even clear at this point. If it is the class of wage laborers then it includes almost everyone. If it is the industrial proletariat then what of the other sectors of the working class? Note the incoherence of the term and the complete swindle by the Bolsheviks when they came to paper. Continue reading ” Memo to Marx idiots: how not to build a revolutionary party…”
Tag: stalinism
Cuba is NOT socialist….//Fernandez: Cuba is not ready to ‘sacrifice’ socialism | Politics | Al Jazeera
Cuba needs a break so to speak given the outrageous treatment by the US but the fact remains that Cuba, despite its remarkable saga of revolution, is a near-Stalinist oligarchy and that is not socialism. Our model of ‘democratic market neo-communism’ can help to debrief the slovenly and misleading terminology created by Marxism and suggest that in one way the dilemma over ‘socialism’ is false: we need a socialism that remorphs liberalism, and models of socialism in terms of extended concepts and systems to give the term real meaning. It is not enough to have a revolution then turn around and create a dictatorship of the ‘marxist bourgeoisie’ with hidden villas, etc, and the gross distortion of any semblance of equality. To that add the braindead economic systems emerging from marxism and its failure to consider the road to a socialist economy. Our model suggests a way to a viable socialist economy and that would make the dilemma over socialism false.
Unfortunately both the American and Cuban elites are too far gone in their dumbkoffery to expect any hope of solving the basic problem. Sadly it is a fairly easy problem to solve. Consider the DNMNC model: you can have socialist markets and that renders the capitalist argument null. To do that you must create a Commons, which Cuba has not really done. State ownership in a one party state is a monstrosity of the original hope for socialism….
Cuba’s deputy foreign minister discusses decades of hostile relations with the US.
Source: Fernandez: Cuba is not ready to ‘sacrifice’ socialism | Politics | Al Jazeera
On the sinicization of Marxism – Friends of Socialist China
Chinese communism, or rather, pseudo-communism represents the Stalinist destruction of the Marxist hopes for a socialist/communist social transformation. We cannot turn away from the reality of the abortion of the legacy which should have passed away in 1989 along with the Soviet equal abortion.
We have tried here to start over completely with a new model and terminology in a complete break with the Marxist tradition in its path to Stalinism and the Chinese version which now is empowered with its basically capitalist character mixing all the faults of Stalinism with those of capitalism.
We need failsafed terminology: we cannot use the terms socialism/communism alone anymore: they must be completed terms in at least a four-term system of some kind: our DMNC, or ‘democratic market neo-communism’ demands at least four qualifiers without which the term ‘communism’ is derelict: a democratic foundation, an economic set of socialist markets, a legally defined Commons independent of the state system, a new form in parallel of planning, and clearly defined legal, economic, and political rights, failsafed revolution without gulags, secret police, revolutionary marshals and observers, etc… By this standard China is NOT a communism at all but a deviation into monstrosity.
We need to be on guard because Chinese means to make its definitions global and enforced by fascist domination. We can be done with the sinicization of Marxism, because we done with Marxism, with intent to start over and do it rieght.
We are very pleased to publish (for the first time in English) this detailed and insightful article by Carlos Miguel Pereira Hernández, Cuba’s ambassador to China. Comrade Pereira delves into the meaning of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, carefully noting that it should be understood on its own terms, rather than being compared against a one-size-fits-all … Continue reading On the sinicization of Marxism
Source: On the sinicization of Marxism – Friends of Socialist China
The CPC/Bolshevik monstrosities
I have tried for quite a while to critique the Marxist legacy from the left, along with its outcomes, Bolshevik, and in the Chinese case, and others. The realm of Marx had really bad luck, and the Bolshevik case (with the Chinese basically in that category) produced a distortion that is almost impossible to deal with short of starting over with new and very careful use of terms. China emerged very closely matched at the start with Bolshevik then Stalinist thinking. It has always been so. The left must face reality, they have produced nothing but one mess after another. And yet the real McCoy shouldn’t be so hard to bring off. Where has the left gone wrong?
It is time face reality: The CPC is a pseudo-communism, authoritarian, fascist, ethnocentric, neo-colonialist and racist, genocidal gangster operation tied to and strangely a colony of neoliberal capitalism. It is determined to infiltrate the global left and will liquidate most of the subscribers to Marxmail at the endgame. The left raised on Marxist dogmas cannot discriminate between interpretations of a ‘shared’ Marxist jargon universe. All we can do is leave the Chinese case behind and start over, however reluctant many would be to accept that. Here we have dropped for good the term ‘communism’ for ‘neo-communism’, for example not that that really solves the problem, to keep one step ahead of cognitive dissonance. But changing terms can make clear that, as here the term ‘communism’ is obsolete.
The fault we must consider lies with the original Marxist corpus, mindful that can be unfair. And yet there is a vein of flawed thinking in the Marx legacy, which is depressing in its total failure to produce any successes.
You may call this extreme, but what is the alternative? Communism in any real sense requires overthrowing the Chinese monstrosity and starting over. As we have noted many times, part of the problem is the use of slogan nouns, like socialism, undefined and which then refer to doomed realizations. We must have a new and rigorous terminology. Part of the problem lies with ‘stages of production’ theory, which prophesies communism to come after capitalism. But the historical theory behind that is not science in any sense, and it has led to a complacency about the inevitability of postcapitalism when the stark reality is that an intelligent left of some sort has to define what that means and do the job right, not so simple, and beyond the capacity of cadre Marxists who imagine solidarity with the CPC.
The world is waiting anxiously and short of conviction for a new path to socialism. But that is not so simple given monstrosities like the CPC and its Bolshevik sources.
Within and outside DSA, many on the Left have aligned themselves with the Communist Party of China (CPC). Guest author Travis S. submitted this piece to Tempest in the interest of furthering debate on the question of how the left should relate to the CPC. He explores the contradictions and implications of tying the Left to the ruling party of China.
Source: Building a mass movement with no apologism – Tempest
We Can Only Go Beyond Communism …//[Yankee bourgeois democracy/capitalocracy] by Coming to Terms With Its History
We have addressed all this directly with a demand to start over on a new left, a break with its history, which is not the same as ignoring that history, and starting with a larger and looser framework of history/evolution, and a construction of explicit socialist political and economic systems, starting by ‘going beyond communism’ with a new term: neo-communism in the block four term plus term: democratic market neo-communism. This approach tries to deal with the calculation debate, allow socialist markets based on a Commons, and a fundamental inheritance of issues: expropriation of capital into a Commons, which is not the same as state capitalism. This system demands democracy but will inherit a revolutionary cadre that must have a failsafed protocol to yield power to a new government, something only the American Revolution ever achieved, however illusory the reality and later catastrophic failure in the neoliberal era.
This system is very different from the classic versions that all end in Stalinism, but it needs a failsafed transition sequence that can survive its own revolutions, and at worst a civil war. The left must study what the American Revolution alone achieved: a starting point: a middle interval: and a constitutional start, after an anti-imperial war. That is a real achievement even if the task demanded was allowed an oversimplification: the ‘laissez-faire’ of ‘democracy’ and a large continental space about which no discipline was asked. This process made life easy for itself and could acheive a transition to a new system because it was a simple tinkertoy. We must face its actual long delayed failure as surely as that of the French Revolution., not forgetting its historic struggle with slavery. The American system ended in genocide of indigenous peoples, and then the slow but steady erosion created by capitalism, and then the catastrophe of covert agencies, commercial militarism, and the hidden drug trade and general criminalization of the whole government apparatus: an easy early success and final catastrophic failure.
Cf. our The Last Revolution
Thirty years ago today, the Soviet Union collapsed. Twentieth-century communism should be understood in all its complexity, as revolution and regime, a spur to anti-colonialism and an alternative form of social democracy.
Source: We Can Only Go Beyond Communism by Coming to Terms With Its History
Actually I’m just getting started…as we used to say as kids, ‘we now take prisoners, beg for mercy…’///Good riddance to the deadbeat pseudo-leftists at marxmail
A final email to the marx group so-called moderator who destroyed the start of a good discussion
at the baren and mentally closed marxmail list.
It is sad, the left has died of anemia and any radical so-called group that can discuss the fascist
9/11 coup is at a deadend.the closed cults of marxists
From: Nemonemini
To: les.schaffer@gmail.com ; marxmail@groups.io
Date: Mon, Sep 6, 2021 11:43 pm
Mr. Schaffer: I was just on the verge of a fruitful discussion on the list and you interrupted that and destroyed it. To excommunicate people for trying to discuss 9/11 is a malevolent act, and the signature of the latent stalin ism in the marxist left.
That’s a completely shitty and Stalinist thing to do. These marx groups are suffering a kind of anemia and the people in them
could never lead a revolutionary transformation to anything by a deadend.
And this incident shows the problem.
In one stroke you create emnity for no good reason except your own group fundamentalism and violent
stalinist antagonism even to fellow socialists.good riddance in any case
Slavoj Žižek: Last Exit to Socialism
The best thing Zizek might do is retire, he looks light a ghost, that of lost era of bolshevism
: I cannot via Google figure if he is a Stalinist or not??? He might make an expose the failure of Bolshevism, Stalinism and look to a new sense of the term ‘socialism’. As things stand, he is negative advertisement for socialism, a term we have suggested should no longer get used in isolation, and as in relation to neo-communism with a neo-. The field of Marx isn’t going to work. A radical shift is needed.
Our idea of ‘democratic market neo-communism’ is one way to failsafe the term ‘socialism’, which might also become ‘neo-socialism’, …
Slavoj Žižek writes in Jacobin that today’s exploding ecological crises open up a realistic prospect of the final exit of humanity itself. Might socialism be our off-ramp, or is it already too late?
1848+: The End(s) of History 