Discover Top Posts Tagged with #exmagician

what are your thoughts on Fortinbras' usurpment of the throne of Denmark?

not a real guy! the real usurper of the danish throne was struensee and he was right

weakerthans - plea from a cat named virtute

WA I LIKED IT the lyrics made me a little 😭 cuz i miss my cats.. its not usually the kind of music i listen to but it was nice :’) thank you!!

#ask meme #asks #exmagician #i listened to it twice just i only started paying attention to the lyrics like halfway through LOL

hey max, you seem really knowledgeable so i have a question about maoism. so i called myself an ml for a long time but i’ve come to realize that i have some real problems with the concept of purging the party from the top-down (i.e. party leadership having people ejected from the party and even arrested for alleged counter revolutionary activities). like, even if stalin was 100% correct with every person he purged, which he obviously wasn’t, in my view it’s still an unstable system because all it takes is the wrong person getting into power (gorbachev) to launch a coup. i’ve read a little about how the cultural revolution was sort of an attempt to do this in reverse, to “unleash the masses on the party,” and i was just wondering, do you think this is a viable solution to the problem of how to purge the party of reactionaries without putting too much power in too few hands?

tl;dr: quibbles with your historical stuff aside, yeah, i think maoism does have good answers, but they go a long way beyond the cultural revolution into broad fundamental concepts such as the mass line that attach to a broader theory of revolution and struggle.

this is a tough one, because it’s not really a question about maoism; it’s a question about revolutionary movements in general. i think even a brief look at the history of left-wing movements shows that the kind of betrayal and assimilationism you allude to isn’t unique to marxist movements - just look at tony blair or napoleon in europe, sukarno in indonesia, mugabe in zimbabwe, or maduro in venezuela (sorry). hell, we can even go back to 14th century florence and the assimilation of the ciompi rebels into city government. even maoists have to account for the abandonment of people’s war in nepal and the grotesque revisionism of prachanda path. unfortunately, i don’t have a single unified theory of revisionism/bonapartism, and i don’t think anyone does; it’s possible to define this process as an outgrowth of the inherent flexibility/assimilationism/dialecticality of capital, but that requires way more philosophy and marxology than i’m comfortable getting into, and i think also requires a lot of historical generalization. in addition, it requires us to answer a lot of important questions about where political change actually comes from, and how it operates, which in turn takes us into yet more philosophy that i don’t want to do.

on the other hand, i think it’s inarguable that marxists have actually engaged with these problems to a much greater degree than any other tradition - maoists, especially, have developed a fairly comprehensive, sophisticated vocabulary of concepts that deal with these issues of change and reaction within the party, which tend to hinge around the concept of revisionism. a comprehensive overview of that vocabulary will have to wait until i finally write that guide to maoism i keep threatening to write, but i can talk about a few little things. firstly, it has to be noted that the post-1949 chinese revolution was largely defined by its encounters with soviet revisionism, which i think gave chinese communists the impetus to talk about these processes. to the cpc, krushchev’s policies of peaceful coexistence and the ‘state of the whole people’ were betrayals of fundamental marxist principles, and clear examples that something had gone wrong within the party, which then provided the foundation for an interrogation of the ccp itself. this then led to the developments of concepts such as the ‘struggle of the headquarters’ and the ‘mass line’ which, i think, allow for an understanding of how these things occur and how to deal with them. again, an actual explanation of these concepts will have to wait, but for the former, see here (yes it’s a whole book but it’s short and you can stick to question iii) and for the latter see here. other maoist movements, such as the shining path and the naxalites, have their own takes on this, as their lack of hegemony forced them to struggle with revisionist groupings that, in some cases, were more powerful than they were. generally, though, the key point they make is that revolutionary fidelity can’t be found in the party, and that mass politics requires actual, sustained institutional engagement with the masses. what exactly this looks like varies a lot, but i think the cpp’s araling aktibisya (mandatory reading for all cpp cadres) will help you get a feel for it.

what has to be noted is the implicit rejection of the stalin model you allude to (although it’s unclear what that model really was thanks to stephen kotkin and friends) but also an implicit rejection of your claims regarding gorbachev. i think the key point that this maoist trend makes is that revisionism/betrayal/capitalist-roading has to be seen as a trend that is present in any revolutionary movement from its beginning which can manifest in a lot of different ways. in the case of the ussr, for example, even if we defend mister corn, we have to account for the 1965 kosygin reforms, the influence of the 1973 oil shock/boom, and the role that public debt played in determining the economic life of the ussr. you can even take a crtiical look at edinonachalie (one-man management) and, very generally, the ussr’s obsession with monetary value and ‘socialist economics’ which goes all the way back to war communism.

similarly, this viewpoint has to see the cultural revolution as an outgrowth of that same struggle within the cpc and prc, which again can be reflected in the struggles over professionalization and regularization of the pla, the eight-step wage system, the angang constitution, and so on. unfortunately, it’s very dificult to construct a robust account of the cultural revolution because the archival research required is simply impossible, as the prc has those archives locked down pretty hard. the best you’ll get is mobo gao’s the battle for china’s past and dongping han’s the unknown cultural revolution, both of which are excellent but very limited in scope. i also think any adequate account of the cultural revolution has to situate it alongside its predecessors such as the socialist education movement, which is even tougher.

anyways, i know this is confusing and mostly just references to other works, but unfortunately your question is perhaps the single most important and fundamental question for any communist movement, and i can’t really answer it without constructing a comprehensive theory of revolution. i hope these words and readings will help you answer your own questions, and please feel free to send me any follow-up questions you may have (so i can sit on them for three months and then write two incomprehensible paragraphs while very stoned)

#exmagician #mil

I'm trying to understand more about China's economic system, do you have any good readings on deng's shift to a more market based economy?

yeah, i have quite a few.

pao-yu ching’s work is superb, coming as she does from both a long tradition of rigorous marxist political economy and militant socialism; she basically nailed the nature of capitalist restoration in the prc back in 1994. it’s hard to find her material since it’s not on libgen, but there are bits and pieces scattered around. her latest work, from victory to defeat, is superb, but it’s not out as an ebook yet (note: i wrote this a long time ago; you can find a free pdf here)

if you want something that you can wave in front of professional bourgeois economists, i recommend chris bramall’s ‘chinese economic development’ which, despite its milquetoast title, approvingly quotes althusser in the introduction. the statistical work is impeccable, and while he doesn’t exactly call for revolution you can tell he’s suppressing a lot of explicitly socialist commentary in the name of mainstream acceptance. his other stuff is quite good too, but it’s ced that is the most comprehensive and which covers the most controversial areas.

if you want a more cultural perspective that provides some much-needed contexrt, i recommend mobo gao’s the battle for china’s past, as it’s really impossible to understand the dengist transition without seeing it alongside the cultural revolution, especially the shanghai commune.

if you want a remarkable level of detail on the exact details of the shift itself, i recommend the political economy of counterrevolution in china by henry park: because it was written in 1988, it focuses directly on the mechanisms of power transfer and institutional change without shadowing the events in what they would eventually lead to.

lastly, for some remarkably written on-the-ground microhistory, you can’t go past william hinton’s fanshen; it’s a classic for a good reason, and the rest of his bibliography is excellent too.

i have a few more, as well: if you want more readings on a specific subject please let me know. hope this helps!

#mil #exmagician