Online leftists will be like "My enemies deserve death." Not realizing that thinking about the world in terms of who deserves what is the problem that got us here in the first place, and it is only by thinking about what your enemies need in order to be better (and what your allies and the world and the oppressed need) can healing and change happen. We cant overthrow systems of oppression by adopting the same oppressive mindsets that got us there in the firat place. Stop talking about wanting to hurt and kill your enemies and do the hard work of loving them instead. I dont want to tear down capitalism only for a new oppressive form of society to take its place, I want a socialism that values humans full stop with no caveats or asterisks.
Believing one’s enemies deserve death isn’t an “online leftist” thing, it’s a pervasive historical phenomenon in every age and population and context. There is a world outside what you see online, don’t mistake things which are visible online for being things which originate online. For starters, every revolutionary movement has basically thought this, inevitably so. The French revolutionaries were pearless humanists and lovers of humanity, and they discovered, faced up to, and resolved the apparent paradox that a universal, unconditional love for everyone meant to hate humanity, and a universal love for humanity meant to hate certain people. They were far smarter people than you or I and they cut this Gordian knot centuries ago, there’s no need for us to re-invent the wheel. If you love humanity, you have to fight those who seek to oppress and enslave and degrade humanity; if you love humanity, you have to seek to oppress and destroy those humans who are opposed to humanity. If you want to take humanism seriously, and make it a robust political principle, this is what you have to do, there’s no escaping it— and you shouldn’t want to. Robespierre was especially eloquent on this, but to save space and time I’ll quote the historian Sophie Wahnich, writing about the position Robespierre and others reached vis-a-vis the demands of real humanism:
Robespierre is thus [by calling for the execution of Louis XVI] replying here with a veritable call to vengeance, and stressing the necessity to choose one’s camp in order to found the values of the Revolution: happiness, equality, justice. [...] The revolutionaries directly experienced this conflict over human sentiments, and the manner in which they dealt with it determined their political camp. [...] It was thus in the name of humanity, and to struggle against one’s particular emotions, that it became imperative in the eyes of the revolutionaries to constrain their immediate sentiment of humanity. [...] The Terror thus brought two sentiments of humanity into conflict. One of these, committed to saving bodies indifferently (those of friends, enemies, accomplices, traitors, slaves) so as not to injure its sentiment of natural humanity, was attached above all to the life of each human being as such, while the other was attached to preserving the meaning that a person wishes to give to life, to the common wellbeing. Emotion towards living human beings seems constrained by a different emotion, arising from the risk of seeing damage not to human bodies, not to bare lives, but to the foundation of their humanity, i.e. their mutual liberty.
This is why ‘we have to desire the Terror as we desire liberty’ [Claude Lefort]. This is always an effort — a constraint on oneself, on one’s personal sentiments, on natural emotions. Here, what is involved with the definition of the sentiment of ‘humanity’ as no longer a natural but a political sentiment is also the notion of ‘fraternity’, which must no longer describe the vast family of the human race, but rather the political capacity of men to produce effective conventions of peace. In this respect, ‘fraternity’ becomes above all else a political sentiment specific to men who respect natural right. The notion of ‘humanity’ is then no longer a descriptive notion, but a prescriptive one: it is the dutiful character of the human race, provided that the French revolutionaries do not fail.
(Sophie Wahnich, In Defence of the Terror (Verso, 2012), pp. 50–53, emphasis added. Wahnich is quoting Robespierre and others extensively in these pages, so if you want to see what they were saying themselves this is also a good source for that.)
Anyway: a revolution is a struggle to the death (Castro), communism is a hammer to smash our enemies (Mao— are these—and Robespierre!—online leftists?); you need to do a hell of a lot more than to think (!) about how to help (!) and heal (!) your enemies to fundamentally alter the balance of power in society. I agree that we shouldn’t be worrying about who “deserves” what—I’d go so far as to say that kind of moralism is reactionary and opposed to genuinely revolutionary politics—but to think that this means we should view those who are trying to immiserate, oppress, and even kill us as friends and people we need to heal is bizarre. And is that not also thinking about the world in terms of what people deserve? Inverting the judgement doesn’t change what kind of judgement it is, you’re doing exactly what you claim to oppose. And all this is to say nothing of the eye-watering idealism of thinking changing the world is a matter of having good intentions towards the people who oppress us.
Read actual humanists. Read Machiavelli; read the French revolutionaries; read the young Marx; read Ernst Bloch: universal love is a reactionary emotion when elevated to an ideological principle in the context of a society in which humans are not the same and they are divided into hostile groups, because to do so is to call on them to treat everyone equally, i.e. to ignore what makes them really different in favour of the ideological fiction of what supposedly makes them the same, something which can only aid those who have power and harm those who don’t.
And as a final thought: loving people is easy. Love is like water; it flows out of us freely like blood from a cut, it’s difficult to dam up, and it can drown us and flood whole countries, bringing misery and death. At best it is a blunt hammer, one of which you never quite know where and what it’ll strike when it’s swung; at worst it is a suffocating pillow that levels everything and strangles out any fresh air and clarity of thought and action. Hate, or anger, and especially indignation—what Aristotle called the moral virtue of nemesis, righteous indingnation at injustice—is scalpel-like, laser-focused on its target, precise in scope and aim and fixated on concrete change. Revolutions and social transformations are emotionally-laden processes, as is anything that involves millions of people— or one. Everything human will occur in a revolution, in the changing from one kind of society to the next. We don’t need to worry about certain emotions being somehow left out; they will grip the minds and hearts of masses of people and play their roles. But if we’re going to go about praising certain emotions and ascribing to them immense revolutionary potential, let’s not make it something as nondescript and prone to collaborationism as love; let’s not be so palpably Christian and so utterly trapped within slave morality. If you’re going to be a humanist, at least be a good one, and embrace hate as part of love and, to parpahrase Robespierre, learn to suppress some of your feelings of common humanity towards tyrants lest you lose sight of the mass of humanity and the goal of freedom which you are meant to be fighting for.
can they invent some new political parties that actually seem like something you want to vote for. idk. like. really it's either labour or tories. I know lib dems and green and some others exist and do get votes but.... realistically in at least the next several general elections either labour or conservatives will be in power. I feel like something should be done to make it interesting because now it's like "oh well guess I'll vote labour because I'd like to at least have a chance of affording things". rather than what I think it should be where you go into an election like "okay time to evaluate the policies of each candidate and what they could offer to my local area, and what their party will offer to the country as a whole".
The Labour Party was founded to act as the political arm of the labour movement, hence its name; it was initially an appendage of the trade unions operating in parliament. Its stated aim, as enshrined in Clause 4 of the party’s constitution, was to establish workers’ control over the means of production, communication, and exchange, and with that power fundamentally restructure society into something new— a socialist society in which production is organised for use rather than profit. Today the Labour Party is not a workers’ party: it is a capitalist party, a party that represents and fights for the interests of the owners in society, of the rich, of bankers and landlords and financiers. Participation in the state has gradually eroded the original character of the party and replaced it with one which accords with the reality of parliament and the state as a whole. This is, sooner or later, the inevitable fate of any organisation that seeks to exist within the state. Establishing new parties, or effecting a major change in existing ones, might do all kinds of good things, but at best all it would achieve is to set back the clock a little, and we’d end up here again— probably quite quickly. Look how rapidly the very moderating, equivocating Corbyn leadership, coming from the left of the party, dissipated in favour of the Starmer leadership coming from its right, or even how quickly the Cameron-era Tory promise of a modern, friendly Conservative Party that was in favour of gay marriage and all things shiny and new collapsed into the vitriolically reactionary entity it is now (not that it ever wasn’t reactionary). It is simultaneously a very long and a very short distance from Cameron’s “one-nation conservatism” to the “national conservatism” peddled by people like Braverman.
Every major political party in the UK exists to advocate for the status quo in one way or another. They have tactical and strategic disputes over how best to govern society, but their ultimate aims are the same: the preservation of the country as it currently exists, with only very minor, surface-level changes ever contemplated. That is why none of them offer us anything “new” to vote for them for; they don’t want anything new, nor will any political organisation that sets itself the goal of working within the state. You’re right that a new political party is needed, one which gives people things to hope in and fight for, things to actively, positively advocate for and believe in, but for exactly that reason it can’t be a party which just tries to replace one of the two mainstream capitalist parties in the existing political system, because it’ll experience the same thing the Labour Party did. It needs to be an extraparliamentary force with its roots in ordinary people and their lives, and above all in the labour movement. It needs to be a genuine workers’ party. And to begin working towards that, we have to recognise that mainstream politics has absolutely nothing to offer us and is deeply hostile to us. Labour or the Conservatives will likely be in government for a long time to come—it’s been well over a hundred years since a different party ruled—so we shouldn’t let ourselves get distracted by the pantomime of parliamentary squabbles and the lies politicians peddle to try and win support. We should be contemptuous of the entire thing, and focus on a kind of politics which doesn’t begin and end in the MP’s surgery and in the Palace of Westminster.
What is your opinion on Marxist-Leninism, Tankies, and is Left Unity between Anarchists and Marxists is a good idea?
truth be told i haven't read as much theory as i would like to or familiarized myself with the persuasions of various schools of thought to the extent that most online leftists have, both due to my collection of syndromes and disorders, and due to the fact that i'm admittedly pretty young as far as leftist theorists go
that said my understanding of marxist-leninism is that it places a lot of focus on the idea of erecting an explicitly leftist state (if such a thing is possible) to replace the capitalist state?
as an anarchist i think that idea kinda sucks, not going to lie. i think there is no way to form or maintain any kind of state apparatus without constant, egregious abuses of power and of people, even if those running said apparatus have collectivism as a value/goal.
i think leftist organization is good, i vibe with a little syndicalism sometimes, i'm an iww gal, but that all has to come with a heavy dose of free association and that is not something that a state apparatus seems capable of providing.
obviously if i'm wrong in my understanding of marxist-leninism then correct me, but that's how i see it.
i think "tankie" is a fun perjorative that some leftists, mostly anarchists, use to describe (and decry) leftists that they perceive as too authoritarian, people who have maybe killed the boss in their head but not the cop, or people who claim to be leftists but end up being really classist/ableist/generally shitty and uptight about it. i don't think it's a specific or serious enough term to use as a definitive label or to have debates about, it's just a funny insult.
i haven't read much marx yet but from what i have read i liked. he seems to have generally correct analyses of economics and i think his theories aren't too incompatible with anarchism. i don't think any theorist is required reading because a lot of the things leftists agree on is pretty self evident, it just gets beaten out of everyone, but i do think marx is pretty good.
i don't think anarchists should have solidarity with people that hate anarchists and want to throw them in jail, but i don't think that's true of most marxists, so
You’re right that the Marxist position on the state is that we need to construct a state of our own, but I want to clarify a couple of things to put it into a fuller context and point out where I think your approach to our analysis is coming from a bit a wrong direction.
You say “leftist” state, but Marxists think of it as a workers’ state; the emphasis isn’t on an ideological position but on a class position, on what we call the class character of the state. A state’s class character isn’t dependent on what individuals within (or outside) the state apparatus think, hope for, intend, etc.; it’s an objective quality of a social force in a given environment. Presumably you’d agree that it doesn’t matter how well-intentioned the bourgeois political class is, the capitalist state is never going to be on our side; it’s impossible for it to be on our side. If that’s true (and Marxists and anarchists are generally agreed that it is), then I’d argue it follows that the same must apply to workers’ states; no amount of corruption, abuse of power, or opportunism—as bad as these things are—from the people involved is going to change the structural nature of the state. Likewise, while the bourgeois state is our enemy and can never be on our side, we can recognise that it can do things which are good for us and advance our interests, such as through the provision of welfare or even something as foundational as overseeing basic social infrastructure without which society would be non-functional. The inverse also applies to a workers’ state: that it could do things contrary to the working class’ interests (and we can expect that at least every now and then this would happen) wouldn’t change the state’s character as a workers’ state. Just as desirable policies from a bourgeois state don’t make it non-bourgeois, undesirable policies from a workers’ state don’t make it non-worker.
You’re right that the state can’t operate through free association. It’s part of the nature of states that they are coercive structures. But this is why Marxists advocate for a workers’ state: we need coercion to dismantle the bourgeois class. Free association is something that only occurs, in its full and universalised form, in communism, which can only be reached if a state has previously been used to destroy the conditions which give rise to capitalism, conditions which will never go away without a fight. The purpose of the workers’ state is exactly to compel the bourgeoisie to associate with the working class in the way the workers’ demand them to, up to and including dismantling the bourgeois class altogether by declassing and proletarianising it, something which could never happen through free association as any class will seek to resist its own destruction. The purpose of the workers’ state, as with all states, is to enforce an unfree association between the different classes in accordance with the interests of one of those classes, the ruling class, and thereby create and maintain a given kind of class regime. The difference between the workers’ state and all other states, however, is that the working class in the position of ruling class has an interest in bringing the entire population into itself, and thereby ending class relations altogether, unlike all previous ruling classes which have an interest in differentiating themselves from the other classes and perpetuating that division. The coercive, unfree association achieved by the workers’ state is therefore a necessary condition for the free association that follows.
As for Marx, many anarchists are heavily influenced by Marx, as are loads of people from across the political spectrum and in areas that aren’t overtly political (such as literary analysis). So you can definitely read Marx and take a lot from him, in fact I’d say it’s impossible not to. But it’s important to see where and why you break with him, and to understand why Marx was not an anarchist and anarchists are not Marxists. Marx’s analysis on the whole (you could try and isolate various parts) is totally incompatible with any form of anarchism as he explicitly rejected and opposed any form of politics based on principles or values (e.g. Equality, or Justice, or Freedom), and his understanding of what a social class is, and what it means for a class to rule and to overthrow another class’ rule, necessarily led him to the theory and historical reality of the dictatorship of the proletariat, so to avoid that you have to adopt a different conception of class to him, and class is so central to everything that Marx did that doing so makes any claim to be a Marxist as such implausible.
Charles Mountbatten-Windsor has been crowned, by the Grace of God, King of the United Kingdom and His other Realms. Great and egregious expense has gone towards the requisite magics, gone to pay for the actors and costumes required for performing the long-since written play. The ideological farce is done, and this walking survival sits anointed above the United Kingdom, this bastard monarchy unbefitting of the union of British nations it claims to be. Do not mistake the compliant client media and reprehensible political class for a true representation of the country: a great many of us are hungry and angry and want the whole thing burned to the ground. The pageantry is a distraction, as much for themselves as for anyone else. They rule atop a fragile semblance of order that, in the coming decades, will be pushed beyond its fettered limits by forces outside its control. But it is worth remembering that there was once a time when England dared to dream for something better, dared to fight, dared to win:— that there was once a time when England and the whole Isles was a republic, commonwealth, and free state.
A revolutionary army of the downtrodden and the oppressed fought for England to be free from kings and popes, for the wealth of this land to be held in common, for its leaders to belong to the people. This army defeated those who opposed it, both in revolutionary war to take power and in a coup d’état to purge the government of those who would not follow through on the victory. 374 years ago, a king of England, Scotland, and Ireland—a man the revolution called Charles Stuart, an act of glorious contempt to later be echoed by the lèse-majesté of the French address “Citizen Louis Capet”—was tried by a revolutionary tribunal for crimes against the people, found guilty of tyranny, treason, and murder, and executed. What ecstasy the common people must have felt that day! To see the heavens evaporate and all the possibilities of history open up to you now the divinely ordained tyranny was ended! To have sought the impossible and succeeded!
The tragedy of England is that her revolution died in its success: unable to cut the Gordian knot of the balancing act between aristocracy, bourgeoisie, and common people, and therefore unable to go far enough to secure its long-term survival by breaking the power of the nobility once and for all, the regime never found real stability, the radicals were sidelined, promises were broken, and all that had been achieved slowed to an inertia and a Restoration. But for a decade the British Isles were free from the stain of monarchy, and even at the last moment, as it all came crashing down around them, the loyal revolutionaries were willing to fight and tried to resist. The revolution ended, as it were, in the person of Daniel Axtell: a fervent revolutionary who had participated in the coup against the Long Parliament and served as captain of the guard during the trial of Charles Stuart, Axtell went to his death on the scaffold—went to be hung, drawn and quartered by the counterrevolution—unrepentant and proud, promising: ‘If I had a thousand lives, I could lay them all down for the Cause.’ The name of the Good Old Cause was still in the psyche of working-class politics in Britain as late as the nineteenth century and the Chartist movement.
How did it all come to this? Britain is a green and pleasant land, bleached white-yellow by the dying its masters have inflicted upon the earth; an island nation, fed by raging seas and rivers flowing off the snow-capped mountains and through the hedge-lined fields, that has been turned to a land of drought and shit-filled waterways; a rich country, grown fat off plunder and war and exploitation, in which a third of its children are malnourished; a country which led the world in rejecting the feudal order, in fighting for something new and free and good, which is today one of the most backwards regimes on earth and the most fragile and decrepit member of the imperialist chain that still encircles the world. Capitalism was born here. One day, it will die here. And when it does, the British people will have rediscovered the radicalism with which they once led history, and proclaimed again that their state will be a commonwealth, belonging to the working people, without a king or a house of lords. And when they do, we can look back and smile, knowing that we have relegated the likes of Charles and his palaces to oblivion. Should we ever get the chance, with delight and in the memory of those who came before us, we shall make no excuses for the terror, and for the republic: ‘We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror. But the royal terrorists, the terrorists by the grace of God and the law, are in practice brutal, disdainful, and mean, in theory cowardly, secretive, and deceitful, and in both respects disreputable.’
I shall now enumerate what seems to me the most essential points of Marxism in a condensed form:
1. All the propositions of Marxism, including those that are apparently general, are specific.
2. Marxism is not positive but critical.
3. Its subject-matter is not existing capitalist society in its affirmative state, but declining capitalist society as revealed in the demonstrably operative tendencies of its breaking-up and decay.
4. Its primary purpose is not contemplative enjoyment of the existing world but its active transformation (praktische Umwaelzung).
Karl Korsch, “Why I Am a Marxist” (1934)
I believe that Marxist theory is “finite,” limited: that it is limited to the analysis of the capitalist mode of production, and of its contradictory tendency, which opens up the possibility of the transition to the abolition of capitalism and its replacement by “something else” which already appears implicitly in capitalist society. I believe that Marxist theory is entirely the opposite of a philosophy of history which “encompasses” the whole future of humanity, and which would thus be capable of defining the “end”: communism, in a positive manner. Marxist theory (if we leave aside the temptation of the philosophy of history to which Marx himself sometimes succumbed, and which dominated in a crushing fashion the Second International and the Stalinist period) is inscribed within and limited to the current existing phase: that of capitalist exploitation. All that it can say about the future is the fragmented and negative extension of the current tendency, the tendency to communism, observable in a whole series of phenomena of capitalist society. It is entirely necessary to see that it is on the basis of the current society that the transition (dictatorship of the proletariat) and the ultimate extinction of the state are thought. These are only indications deduced from the current tendency, which like every tendency in Marx, is counteracted and may not be achieved, unless the political struggle makes it real. But this reality cannot be predicted in its positive form: it is only in the course of the struggle that the possible forms come to light, are discovered, and become real.
Louis Althusser, “Marxism as a Finite Theory” (1978). Trans. Asad Haider
Marx’s mere notes [the Critique of the Gotha Programme] are invaluable. They discuss the principles which ought to have guided any policy of unification, revolution and socialism, four years after the Paris Commune. In them there is the starting-point for a theory of Law: Law is always bourgeois. It is not the ‘collective ownership’ (legal notion) ‘of the means of production’, but their ‘collective appropriation’ which defines the socialist mode of production. The fundamental thesis: legal relations and the relations of production must not be confused.
Louis Althusser, Preface to Capital, Volume 1 (1969). Trans. Ben Brewster
In Marx’s magnificent construction [in the Grundrisse], economic individualism is erased and social man appears, with boundaries that are those of the entire human society – indeed, of the human species.
[...]
[...] When the proletarian revolution puts an end to the squandering of science, a work of the social brain; when labour time is reduced to a minimum and becomes human joy; when the Monster of fixed capital – CAPITAL, this transient historical product – is raised to a human form, which does not mean conquered for man and for society but abolished – THEN industry will behave like the land, once instruments such as the soil have been liberated from any form of ownership.
[...] As for the means of production, in the society organised in a higher form – international communism – they will not be held as property and capital but as usufruct, saving the future of the species, at every step, against the physical necessity of nature, which will be its only adversary.
With the death of property and of capital, both in agriculture and in industry, another platitude that was a concession to the arduous task of traditional propaganda, namely ‘personal ownership of consumer products’, must be relegated to the shadows of the past. Indeed revolutionary palingenesis [rebirth, i.e. the rebuilding of the communist movement] in its entirety crumbles to dust if every single object does not throw off its commodity character, and if labour does not cease to be the measure of ‘exchange value’ – another form that, together with the measure based on money, must die with the death of capitalism.
Members of the future society will no longer consume as human beasts, in the name of the infamous ownership of the exchanged object. Use – consumption – will be based on the higher need of social man, perpetuator of the species, and no longer, as is the rule today, under the effect of drugs.
Amadeo Bordiga, “The Revolutionary Programme of Communist Society Eliminates Every Form of Landed Property, of Production Plants, and of the Products of Labour” (1958). Trans. Giacomo Donis and Patrick Camiller
Popular virtue, the “good” worker, good father, good husband, respectful of the legal system — that is the image that since the 18th century the bourgeoisie proposed and imposed on the proletariat in order to turn it away from any form of violent agitation, insurrection, any attempt to usurp power and its rules.
[…] Isn’t this puritanism an obstacle for the revolutionary leader? I would say, currently, yes. There exists […] today in our societies truly revolutionary forces made up of just those strata who are poorly integrated into society, those strata who are perpetually rejected, and who, in their turn, reject the bourgeois moral system. How can you work with them in the political battle if you do not get rid of those moral prejudices that are ours? After all, if one takes into account the habitually unemployed who say, “Me, I prefer not working to working”; if one takes into account women, prostitutes, homosexuals, drug addicts, etc., there is a force for questioning society that one has no right, I think, to neglect in the political struggle.
[…]
[…] ultimately committing a misdemeanor, committing a crime, questions the way society functions in a most fundamental way[.] So fundamental that we forget that it is social, that we have the impression that it is moral, that it involves peoples’ rights….
Michel Foucault, “Michel Foucault on Attica: An Interview” (1972)
At a time in which Russia is once again embroiled in an imperialist war and world imperialism is escalating towards catastrophe, I wanted to give a critical precis of Lenin’s so-called April Theses, “The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution”. Given the current dearth of socialist internationalism and the continued escalation of imperialist war and competition, it’s useful to look back at moments when our movement was strongest and most mature and how it addressed the same problems with that strength and maturity. So I’m going to summarise his points thesis by thesis, and briefly explain their relevance, as I see them, for us now.
Lenin remains an invaluable source for the modern communist movement, and his most important, pivotal interventions—such as this one—are worth studying, because, for the most part, they show the impetus and demands placed upon a revolutionary movement in extreme clarity, as mediated through an intelligent and dedicated leader. In the April Theses, delivered in the days following Lenin’s return to Petrograd, he advocated for a decisive break with the bourgeois revolution and for the Party to commit itself solely and totally to the working class and its state organs: the soviets.
Introduction: in his preamble, Lenin takes pains to make clear that he welcomes and has actively facilitated genuine, meaningful criticism, even and especially from ‘honest opponents’, including socialist members of the Provisional Government (!). The relevance today: wherever social criticism and political demands are parochial, sect-like, or allergic to the light of day, we must treat them with contempt. Any genuinely socialist, revolutionary message must be public and subject to the broadest scrutiny and readership possible within the limits of the progressive movement; appeal to reactionary criticism is malicious and acts to stifle any forward momentum.
First thesis: there can be no revolutionary war for bourgeois power, only for workers’ power. After the February Revolution, the mainstream socialist leadership supported a policy of “revolutionary defencism”, i.e. of Russia’s continued participation in the First World War, supposedly because of the need to defend the gains of the Revolution. So what makes a revolutionary war? For a war to be worth fighting for the proletariat, i.e. for it to count as a revolutionary war, Lenin proposed three criteria: there must be (a) workers’ state power, that is, it must be a war being fought by the workers all the way up, not just in the human materiel of the army, a war fought for workers’ power by workers’ power; (b) internationalism, that is, there must be a renunciation of any demands for the peace that goes against the international proletariat’s interests, such as annexations or crippling indemnities; (c) ‘a complete break with all capitalist interests’, such as the designs of imperialist alliances. Russia under the Provisional Government failed on all three counts. In the face of a bourgeois war—as Lenin knew Russia’s war to be—the workers’ must pursue, he argued, a policy of internationalism: of the sabotage of the war effort, of propagandising against the war, of the fraternisation of warring armies, not continued fighting. But the masses wanted to defend the Revolution, which was promising them so much after centuries of tsarism, and so even as they desperately wanted peace they listened to the Government when it told them to keep fighting. Lenin, as was so typical of him, emphasised the ‘broad sections of the mass believers’ in false policies; socialists must always be overwhelmingly concerned with the masses. In the grand scheme of things it does not matter what a minority thinks, what minor little strata think: the Party must go to the masses, show them the deception being pulled by the Government, and rally them around their true hope, around their soviets.
The relevance today: to claim that the Ukrainian workers must “defend”—with their lives and livelihoods—the bourgeois regime in Kyiv, or the international proletariat facilitate “their own” imperialist governments’ war drive in Ukraine, or the strategy of tension and genocidal repression in occupied Palestine, or any of the other flash-points of the world, is to exist at a level of social-chauvinism that would put all the apologists of bourgeois power in 1917 Russia to shame, for at least they had the excuse that history was young and moving, that the bourgeois government really was freer than any other country on earth, and that the nascent bourgeois state really was revolutionary, even if it was revolutionary for a hostile class that had become reactionary on the world stage. To “progressively” support the policy of Biden, Zelenskyy, or Putin is, in the historical sense, to make a “progressive” supporter of Lvov or Kerensky blush. It is a mark of just how degenerated the workers’ movement is that such views are fairly easy to find today amongst those who purport socialist politics. And so it is even more important that communists go to masses and propagandise against the bourgeoisie’s wars, against its rule, and support, as the classic formulation goes, every struggle against the present state of things.
Second thesis: Lenin analyses Russia as passing through the epoch of bourgeois rule; the only reason the workers didn’t take power in February, he says, was because of a lack of class consciousness and organisation, i.e., for political reasons rather than economic ones to do with the supposedly immature conditions of Russia for socialism, reasons that, in April, were declining and moving towards a moment of collision. This is one of Lenin’s central insistences throughout his revolutionary life, one of the things that best marks out Leninism as a distinct revolutionary tradition: the insistence on the primacy of politics, on what Mao called the need to put politics in command. The proletariat cannot merely limp behind trends in production and ape out a revolutionary (“revolutionary”) programme on the presumption that socialism is just around the corner, and we need only wait for a X millions more in GDP, for a few more innovations in automation, for a few higher percentage points of inflation. History won't happen without a push. Lenin here stresses the need for the Party to work on this basis, of working in the context of a mass of workers and poor peasants ‘who have just awakened to political life’ and started to recognise the impending need for a new regime but who lack the organisation to fight and to see through the lies of the bourgeois regime.
The relevance for today: we must be aware of the line of historical movement, of the phases through which the world is passing. Imperialism is in crisis conditions and is fighting to get out of it by intensifying the crisis to trigger a resolution through force, i.e. through war. The nature of such a historical movement will politicise broad masses of people who were previously politically inert, and thereby introduce one of Lenin’s conditions for a revolutionary crisis. Communists must be working to bring these newly politicised people onto the workers’ side instead of being won over by the bourgeoisie to support their wars. To make a revolutionary situation a revolutionary crisis, i.e. to turn an objective instability in the regime into a subjective dislocation of its power, requires the energising, propagandising, and leading of the masses brought into politics by the crisis.
Third thesis: very simple, categorical: there can be no “critical support” for imperialism. Workers must be shown the true nature of the bourgeois state and of imperialism, and thereby shown that the regime is incapable of meeting their demands and serving their best interests. There must be an emphasis on the structure of society, on the determinate relationship between forces, and a dismissal of the best-laid plans and pretty words that bourgeois leaders offer us: whether they are genuine in their intent or not doesn’t matter, because they are structurally incapable of anything other than imperialism. This thesis doesn’t need any “modernising” to be relevant to today; simply replace ‘Provisional Government’ with the name of your own government. This is itself a demonstration of the structural character of history that Lenin is pointing out: despite all the promises and efforts of their well-meaning progressive strata, the bourgeoisie has not changed the basic nature of the world since 1917: it is imperialist, and they are its masters, masters of a regime spiralling into oblivion— this time not just under the looming threat of thousands of kilometres of sprawling trenches, of green countryside turned to the black-brown mud of no man’s land by artillery, nor even of whole cities swallowed by fire bombs and starved by continental blockades, but under the apotheosis of the mushroom cloud and the shadow of nuclear winter.
Fourth through eighth theses: Lenin calls upon the Bolsheviks to recognise that they are small minority in the soviets, and that most of the masses follow the leadership of those factions of the workers’ movement that in practice support the bourgeoisie. The role of the Party is therefore to expose and criticise the counterrevolution in order to show the masses the falsity of their leaders. The Bolsheviks must work to show the workers that they must take power themselves, as a mass, and that they must learn through experience, through doing, not through mere instruction by the Party, which cannot forcefully lead them to take power if they do not have this experience (the error of commandism). One of the things the Bolsheviks must show the workers, he argues, is that their councils—the soviets—are the only possible mechanism of their rule, i.e., that parliamentarianism and democracy are counterrevolutionary and to be opposed, that such things are a ‘retrograde step’ in comparison with the councils. What the workers need, and what they have already begun to build, is a commune-state, i.e. a republic of workers’ and poor peasants’ councils, i.e. a dictatorship of the proletariat and its allied social forces. The workers need a semi-state, a state which is decaying, a state in which state functions cease to be performed by distinct apparatus and become the common tasks of the masses themselves (Lenin names the abolition of the police, the army, and the bureaucracy as immediate demands in this respect). As the central task of the coming revolution was ‘transferring the entire state power to the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies, so that the people may overcome their mistakes by experience’, and as Lenin stressed the primacy of politics, he called for the Bolsheviks to shift the discussion of land redistribution and control of the banks from one of a demand for land or money per se to one of a demand for political power over them, i.e. for their direct administration by the councils. ‘It is not our immediate task to “introduce” socialism, but only to bring social production and the distribution of products at once under the control of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies’ (8th thesis).
The relevance to today: the bourgeois state must be opposed as such, i.e. as a bourgeois state, and not merely in terms of being governed by a particular government which is enacting particular policies. Those currents that promise socialism and meaningful change through the bourgeois state are dead-ends, they are actively anti-worker in deeds if not in words or intentions (not to dismiss the importance of reforms as reforms, as non-revolutionary demands). Likewise, in a different way, those who promise a break with the bourgeois state but who can only envisage the proletarian dictatorship as an affirmation of the state, as a retrenching and reaffirmation of state power, only this time “in the service of the workers”. Such degenerations have been forced on the revolutionary movement many times before due to impossible conditions: they do not represent the real (Lenin: only possible) basis for workers’ state power as a class, as a deliberate ruler of society. Again, the primacy of politics: all that matters, ultimately, is power. ‘“I grant you everything except power,” tsarism declares. “Everything is illusory except power,” the revolutionary people reply’ (Lenin, “The Denouement is At Hand”, 1905).
Ninth and tenth theses: here Lenin calls for changes to the Party programme, to its name, and for the convocation of a new International to replace the counterrevolutionary Second International. His overriding concern is that the Party must reflect the masses and their conditions. He therefore stresses, first, internationalism, that the Party must commit to workers everywhere, independent of nationality; second, the commune-state, that the Party must demonstrate the need of the workers to reject bourgeois democracy and refuse any state apparatus which is not their own; and third, that the Party must distinguish itself from false leaders, by making an obvious and explicit distinction between themselves and those elements of the workers’ movement that had more or less turned over to the side of the bourgeoisie over the course of the War. Apart from the commune-state, which history had not yet showed to be the proletarian state form, these are things Marx and Engels identified as defining communists as a distinct social force in the Manifesto of the Communist Party.
The relevance for today: any communist party must adhere to these three points: it must unite workers everywhere and not fall into nationalism, social-chauvinism, campism, etc.; it must demand a complete break with the bourgeois state, a dictatorship of the proletariat and nothing short of that; and it must show the masses the falsity of their would-be leaders, those who deny the above two points and who generally serve the capitalist class whether they know it or not.
Lenin’s April Theses are, like so many short, programmatic communist texts, both a historical and a contemporary-political document. Historical because it is obviously something written for a specific moment in time which has long since gone; contemporary because, precisely for its programmaticism (which is what makes it historical, i.e. makes it belong to specific conditions and not others), it shows what is important to the proletariat as a class, what is relevant across historical moments— what is retained in its maximal programme across time: unity internationally, our own state, and the self-conscious distinction of the revolutionary movement and its leadership from the reformist, opportunist, bourgeois elements that perpetually infect and typically dominate the working class.
In a period in which imperialism is pushing the world further towards a third, and most likely final, world war, and capitalism lingers in crisis conditions and, in the core countries, economic stagnation and political impotence, Lenin’s simple, essential recommendations to his party over a hundred years ago are worth considering and internalising. Though we are not in a revolutionary crisis today, nowhere near it, the conditions are brewing for the debilitation of the bourgeoisie internationally and especially at its weakest points. Of chief importance for us today, from Lenin, is his internationalism, the thing which characterised his politics more than anything else, the thing which made him break from the mainstream and lead the workers in Russia and the world towards a new direction and a new programme; without internationalism, communism is nothing.
Here, then are the two ends of the chain: the economy is determinant, but in the last instance, Engels is prepared to say, in the long run, the run of History. But History ‘asserts itself’ through the multiform world of the superstructures, from local tradition to international circumstance. Leaving aside the theoretical solution Engels proposes for the problem of the relation between determination in the last instance—the economic—and those determinations imposed by the superstructures—national traditions and international events—it is sufficient to retain from him what should be called the accumulation of effective determinations (deriving from the superstructures and from special national and international circumstances) on the determination in the last instance by the economic. It seems to me that this clarifies the expression overdetermined contradiction, which I have put forward, this specifically because the existence of overdetermination is no longer a fact pure and simple, for in its essentials we have related it to its bases, even if our exposition has so far been merely gestural. This overdetermination is inevitable and thinkable as soon as the real existence of the forms of the superstructure and of the national and international conjuncture has been recognised— an existence largely specific and autonomous, and therefore irreducible to a pure phenomenon. We must carry this through to its conclusion and say that this overdetermination does not just refer to apparently unique and aberrant historical situations (Germany, for example), but is universal; the economic dialectic is never active in the pure state; in History, these instances—the superstructures, etc.—are never seen to step respectfully aside when their work is done or, when the Time comes, as his pure phenomena, to scatter before His Majesty the Economy as he strides along the royal road of the Dialectic. From the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the ‘last instance’ never comes.
Louis Althusser, “Contradiction and Overdetermination: Notes for an Investigation” (1962). Trans. Ben Brewster
Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said in an interview posted to his YouTube channel on Saturday that the US and its Western allies “blocked” his efforts of mediating between Russia and Ukraine to bring an end to the war in its early days.
On March 5, 2022, Bennett traveled to Russia to meet with President Vladimir Putin. In the interview, he detailed his mediation at the time between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which he said he coordinated with the US, France, Germany, and the UK.
Bennett said that both sides agreed to major concessions during his mediation effort. For the Russian side, he said they dropped “denazification” as a requirement for a ceasefire. Bennett defined “denazification” as the removal of Zelensky. During his meeting in Moscow with Putin, Bennett said the Russian leader guaranteed that he wouldn’t try to kill Zelensky.
The other concession Russia made, according to Bennett, is that it wouldn’t seek the disarmament of Ukraine. For the Ukrainian side, Zelensky “renounced” that he would seek NATO membership, which Bennett said was the “reason” for Russia’s invasion.
Reports at the time reflect Bennet’s comments and said Russia and Ukraine were softening their positions. Citing Israeli officials, Axios reported on March 8 that Putin’s “proposal is difficult for Zelensky to accept but not as extreme as they anticipated. They said the proposal doesn’t include regime change in Kyiv and allows Ukraine to keep its sovereignty.”
Discussing how Western leaders felt about his mediation efforts, Bennett said then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson took an “aggressive line” while French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz were more “pragmatic.” Bennett said President Biden adopted “both” positions.
But ultimately, the Western leaders opposed Bennet’s efforts. “I’ll say this in the broad sense. I think there was a legitimate decision by the West to keep striking Putin and not [negotiate],” Bennett said.
When asked if the Western powers “blocked” the mediation efforts, Bennet said, “Basically, yes. They blocked it, and I thought they were wrong.”
Explaining his decision to mediate, Bennett said that it was in Israel’s national interest not to pick a side in the war, citing Israel’s frequent airstrikes in Syria. Bennett said Russia has S-300 air defenses in Syria and that if “they press the button, Israeli pilots will fall.”
Negotiations between Russia and Ukraine didn’t stop with Bennett’s efforts. Later in March, Russian and Ukrainian officials met in Istanbul, Turkey, and followed up with virtual consultations. According to the account of former US officials speaking to Foreign Affairs, the two sides agreed on the framework for a tentative deal. Russian officials, including Putin, have said publicly that a deal was close following the Istanbul talks.
But the negotiations ultimately failed after more Western pressure. Boris Johnson visited Kyiv in April 2022, urging Zelensky not to negotiate with Russia. According to a report from Ukrainska Pravda, he said even if Ukraine was ready to sign a deal with Russia, Kyiv’s Western backers were not.
Later in April, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said there were some NATO countries that wanted to prolong the war in Ukraine. “After the talks in Istanbul, we did not think that the war would take this long … But, following the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting, it was the impression that… there are those within the NATO member states that want the war to continue, let the war continue and Russia gets weaker. They don’t care much about the situation in Ukraine,” Cavusoglu said.
A few days after Cavusoglu’s comments, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin admitted that one of the US’s goals in supporting Ukraine is to see Russia “weakened.”
Workers’ councils does not designate a form of organization whose lines are fixed once and for all, and which requires only the subsequent elaboration of the details. It is concerned with a principle— the principle of the workers’ self-management of enterprises and of production. This principle can in no way be implemented by a theoretical discussion about the best practical forms it should take. It concerns a practical struggle against the apparatus of capitalist domination. In our day, ‘workers’ councils,’ certainly does not mean a brotherhood that is its own end and purpose; ‘workers’ councils’ is synonymous with the class struggle (where brotherhood plays its part), with revolutionary action against state power. Revolutions cannot, of course, be summoned at will; they arise spontaneously in moments of crisis, when the situation becomes intolerable. They occur only on two conditions: first, if a feeling of intolerability exercises greater and greater pressures on the masses; second, if simultaneously a certain generally accepted awareness of what ought to be done grows up among them. It is at this level that propaganda and public discussion play their part. And these actions cannot secure a lasting success unless large sections of the working class have a clear understanding of the nature and purposes of their warfare; hence the necessity for making the workers councils a theme for discussion.
So, therefore, the idea of workers councils does not involve a program of practical objectives to be realized tomorrow or next year. It serves solely as a guide for the long and severe fight for freedom, which still lies ahead for the working class. Marx, it will be remembered, said that the hour of capitalism has sounded; but he was careful to add that, in his view, this hour would cover a whole historical period.
Anton Pannekoek, qtd. in Serge Bricianer, Pannekoek and the Workers’ Councils (1969). Trans. Malachy Carroll
I think the west is propping up Palestinian claims to Israel to create the same war situation there and like Ukrainian Russo war they make it look like they support Israel in a right wing way, and Palestine in a left wing way, but really they instigate conflict between both in a imperialist war profiteer way. Like Ukrainians I don’t blame some Palestinians and Jewish Israelis for not seeing it this way but sorry, it is. Neither side in that conflict is real and like you say it exists to divide the proletariat.
I’m going to assume you’re trolling because I can’t even begin to imagine how anyone could think the anticolonial struggle in Palestine is in any way comparable to a bourgeois army fighting in an imperialist war. There can be no class solidarity between the different sections of the proletariat in Palestine while some parts of it are committing genocide against others. Class solidarity can only be found in the proletariat coming together as one and fighting colonialism; if the reactionary strata and fractions within the class cannot do that, then their eclipse and defeat by the revolutionary elements is unavoidable if a workers’ dictatorship is ever going to be built in Palestine. Israel is structurally incompatible, at its most fundamental levels, with workers’ rule because its existence is predicated on the subjection and neutralisation of the mass of the population, something which is not true for Ukraine or Russia as has been demonstrated by the period of workers’ rule that has already happened in those countries.
It’s important that we as communists don’t lose sight of our fundamental attitude to the world— the analytic, philosophical, and political outlook that Marx laid out 180 years ago: the ruthless criticism of all that exists.
This doesn’t mean we oppose and seek to abolish everything (that would be a contradiction), or that we reject the totality of a given “negative” thing and refuse to accept that even elements of it might be beneficial (that would be contrary to our dialectical approach). It does mean, however, that we cannot ever accept some field or subject to lie a priori beyond the scope of our critique. None of the sacred taboos of polite society—religion, sexuality, violence, terror, the family, genetics, whatever—are too precious or privileged. Plenty of things will inevitably be passed over because they’re not of any serious relevance to our task of social transformation or the kind of knowledge of the world that it requires, but that’s not at all the same as steering clear of them because they are beyond reproach. We must never accept a theoretical or practical cordon sanitaire.
This is one of the reasons why Marx viewed the criticism of religion as the precondition for all further criticism. If the “spiritual aroma” of a society is untouchable—if questioning and rejecting it, or showing its basis in human life (which is the same thing), is made impossible—then its economy, its politics, its arts and its sciences are also untouchable. Without criticism of religion, there can be no social criticism, because religion is what Marx characterised as the inverted ideological image of society. If the representation is too sacred to question, then the reality is totally beyond us. Marx thought that the criticism of religion was more or less completed in the backwater of 1840s Germany; in the nearly 200 years since, materialist criticism has sunk its teeth into ever-expanding areas of life. At its best, it has understood that the nature of the radical is to go to the root of a thing— and then to uproot it. Adorno’s melancholy science of the Minima Moralia, or Firestone’s concrete utopias of potential postfamilial social regimes in The Dialectic of Sex, are good examples of this kind of thinking.
Communism is a critical project aided by critical theory. It fights against things and builds positive alternatives as they are produced by that struggle. It rejects all ready-made utopias and schematics of the future. But it is insistent that the dead weight of tradition must be cast off like shackles— not because we are omnipotent and able to free ourselves from history, but precisely because history has pulled the foundations out from every preexisting tradition and any politics which doesn’t embrace this is sticking its head in the sand. ‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind’ (Marx/Engels). Such a sober facing up to reality amounts to ruthless critique. Anything else is retreating back into the already collapsing faux-solidity of ideology. We have a world to win, and we must be conscious to think and act accordingly. If we don’t, then what should be a fundamentally radical, liberatory movement lapses into economism, technologism, productivism, reformism and all the other more or less anticommunist deviations that have grown out of capitalism’s rotting gut and communism’s earnest miscarriages.
I have a legitimate question for the “we need to stop arming Ukraine and end the war” leftists. I’ve been wondering this for a while and I sincerely hope someone answers this!
If you’ve paid any attention to what’s happening in Ukraine (which might be asking too much of Westerners, idk) you’ll notice that when a territory is liberated from Russian occupation, soldiers find: torture chambers, executed civilians, and hastily-dug graves. You get horror stories from survivors of occupation about rape, child kidnapping, and people being dragged out of their houses with their hands bound being their backs to be shot. It happened in Bucha, in Izyum, in Kherson. At this point, we should 100% assume that these horrors are currently happening in the territories that Russia still holds. If we cut aid now and push to negotiate, and Russia gets to “keep” any of these territories, it’s not just redrawing lines on a map. It’s condemning people to brutal occupation and ethnic cleansing.
Most importantly though, to anyone saying “ask the Ukrainians what they want instead of forcing a war on them”: have YOU talked to a Ukrainian? Even one?
For right-wingers, I understand why they are against sending aid to Ukraine. But leftists supposedly care about other people and want to make the world a better place, no matter what it takes. Why would you turn your back and condemn people to brutality and murder when you can make a massive difference, without personally lifting a finger?
Anti-imperialism isn’t based on states or social movements meeting certain pre-set criteria. If Russia wasn’t doing all these things you mention, would that make the invasion acceptable for the working class? Suppose Russia had somehow magically managed to fight a “clean” war, without civilian casualties or mistreatment (such a war is a fantasy and can never exist). Would that make the war okay? Are communists merely opposed to imperialist war because it is ugly? What if, in this hypothetical other war, Ukraine was systematically doing all the things Russia is being accused of? Would that mean communists would have to support Russia? The communists in Vietnam did plenty of brutal and cruel things— if they did enough of them, would that have made the US war and its puppet regime good? Would it have meant workers should have supported the bombing campaigns, the Phoenix Program, the corrupt and repressive Saigon government, the entire imperialist effort of making Vietnam submit? At that point, why should the French colonial rule have ever ended?
Hopefully those questions have made you intuitively realise that our opposition to imperialism is not a crude opposition to “bad things” happening. All wars are more or less horrific, but communists are not opposed to wars as such, and have fought wars before when they are (or are thought to be) in the interest of the working class. The world is brutal, and classes have to fight for their interests; in extreme cases, this necessarily means war. We oppose imperialist war because such wars are hostile to our class interests, such as the solidarity and active cooperation of the proletariat internationally, which is necessary if we are to ever build lasting proletarian power; this war has debilitated any potential solidarity between the Ukrainian and Russian proletariat, and, to a lesser degree, many others. So, ultimately, the specific horrors that occur on and off the battlefield are irrelevant to the question of whether we should support or oppose the war effort of our state or alliance. It is very relevant to all sorts of other questions, but not to this one, not to the fundamental question of what the proletariat’s attitude towards the war as such should be.
As for Russia’s possession of its occupied territories: Russia is not going to give them up and Ukraine will never have the military capacity to force Russia out of them. That is not happening. Any restoration of Ukrainian control over the occupied territories as a whole, as opposed to the back-and-forth of a fluctuating frontline, will only ever be achieved through negotiation and Russia agreeing to withdraw in return for various guarantees— which is exactly what Russia was offering and asking for in the initial round of peace talks. I think that course is now off the table, largely because of Ukraine’s decision (under NATO advisement and coercion) to abandon talks and commit to a long war once the initial Russian campaign had failed; Russia’s war aims escalated at that point and became annexationist. So that means the restoration of Ukraine’s control over its lost territories requires, even if it were feasible, the industrial slaughter of a protracted war of attrition that, if Ukraine really did begin to be that successful, would threaten nuclear war as Russia searched for any means to restore control of the battlefield. That’s what support for the war means, on the NATO-Ukrainian side; it means, at best, commitment to a brutal war with no end in sight that will destroy all of Ukraine. At worst, it means the death of us all. Neither option is in any way to the benefit of the proletariat anywhere, least of all in Ukraine.
Of course communists want to make the world a better place— but so does everyone. Literally everyone will characterise their politics like that, so it’s a hopeless, pointless, empty statement. The Nazis and ultranationalists in the Russian and Ukrainian fighting forces want a better world, the ordinary depolitical conscripts want a better world, Putin and Zelenskyy and Biden want a better world, the communists that the Ukrainian state has disappeared—such as the Kononovich brothers—want a better world. Unless you actually know what that means for someone, it’s a useless thing to ask. For communists, it means we want the proletariat to overthrow the bourgeoisie and establish itself as the ruling class. It will never do this by bleeding itself dry fighting the bourgeoisie’s wars, nor by supporting its national bourgeoisie plunging it into further and further destitution so that it can fund its class peers elsewhere in fighting such a war.
You say that we can make a massive difference without doing anything. How? The NATO states didn’t consult their populations before they threw materiel and money into Ukraine to cause as much damage to Russia as possible. The proletariat in those countries hasn’t done anything to help Ukraine; the bourgeoisie has, and has made the proletariat pay for it. As for lifting fingers, the NATO-aligned European states are plunging their economies into chaos to follow Washington’s orders; is it the German bourgeoise that are going to shiver in the cold and struggle to afford food? Or its proletariat? We didn’t ask for, nor do, this, but we’re going to have to face the consequences of it, even if the war itself doesn’t escalate outside of Ukraine. So are the Russian proletariat, and, above all, the Ukrainian. No workers anywhere gain anything from a war like this, and not just because it’s bloody and people die and cities are destroyed. None of us gains because of the nature of the war itself as a war between competing geopolitical blocs for spheres of influence and access to markets. Why do you think the Americans have been so eager to trap Ukraine into hundreds of billions of dollars of debt?
All wars are destructive and immiserating, and almost all are against our interests as workers. We will get nowhere by following our national bourgeoisie into a war— a war which we will have to fight and suffer for, not them. The most urgent need is for the war to end without escalating, and that can only be achieved by the warring governments agreeing to a ceasefire and entering into negotiations. Arms companies making more money than we can comprehend, and NATO states unloading their strategic reserve, not to mention actively training the Ukrainian military, does the absolute opposite of encouraging that; it’s directly intended to prolong the war for as long as possible and weaken Russia as much as possible.
In case anyone noticed, I changed my convoluted tagging system on here a while ago. The old system was specifically designed to not show up in searches and stuff to allow me to avoid the things which come with publicity (I started this blog at the exact point I got fed up with the relative size/exposure of my main) and try and keep out of the discourse which I’d got totally bored by and no longer found even slightly productive. But I’ve finally got annoyed enough by the bs that shows up in some of the leftblr tags, and I suppose put enough distance between myself and that era of leftblr, that I thought I should try and muscle my way back in again. Also thought I should be more active on here in general, so there’s that too.
Assuming you mean mandatory planning contra indicative planning, I’m a communist, what do you think? We want a regime where social production is subject to social administration— administration by the working class as a whole, “from the centre” as Bordiga says. Indicative, non-directive planning might have a role in the years immediately following the seizure of state power in countries with immature economies, but it’s incompatible with the elimination of anarchy in production as it’s predicated on the existence of independent economic units which can respond (or not!) to the indications being given, something communism is inherently opposed to. Proletarian dictatorship is incompatible with private economic units having the power to ignore our instructions in anything other than the most temporary and instrumental contexts where our class lacks the power to properly enforce them.
