#theoryquote

[whitesalmanrushdie]

i would like to extend an official apology to all 2 followers of mine who read my book quotes; i started doing that to keep myself reading regularly, but i reached a point where i DO read regularly anyway and it's more of an extra task than it is helpful. Now this is apparently a bird image/mkultra meme blog, I'll see if i can eventually get back to some kinda history/theory quote posting again tho, maybe just less regularly 🙏

[whitesalmanrushdie]

"It is folly, not revolutionism, to deprive ourselves in advance of any freedom of action, openly to inform an enemy who is at present better armed than we are whether we shall fight him, and when. To accept battle at a time when it is obviously advantageous to the enemy, but not to us, is criminal; political leaders of the revolutionary class are absolutely useless if they are incapable of “changing tack, or offering conciliation and compromise” in order to take evasive action in a patently disadvantageous battle."

Lenin - Left Communism, an Infantile Disorder

Taking a lil break from Müntzer, im reading this atm and thought this was worth posting.

[whitesalmanrushdie]

once again my man's on point - frequently commie lit is either the most boring shit you ever read, or full of anachronisms and like, cartoonish repetition of phrases and slogans as if their use promises you better treatment in the hereafter - when you're saying proletariat and revolution the way an arab grandfather would say mashallah youve gone wrong somewhere; similarly if you're intentionally writing as if you're inflicting your thoughts on an ungrateful world it's time to ask what you're doing exactly

[whitesalmanrushdie]

Nikolai Bukharin - Historical Materialism

I met some people who sometimes went a bit hard on "proletarian morality/ethics," and so i Thought this was a useful section on the topic. Applicable to any "ethics" question as well tbh

[whitesalmanrushdie]

We have argued that overcoming the current crisis, whether within the confines of a single economy or globally, requires overcoming the hegemony of international finance capital. No nation-state, not even one where the fascists are in power, can overcome the crisis unless it is willing to overcome this hegemony. And a hallmark of contemporary fascism is that, far from trying to overcome this hegemony, it is on the contrary keen to enlist the support of international finace capital for its accession to, and stay in, power. This fact has an important implication. Earlier fascism had proceeded from rearmament to war, and had burned itself out through war, though at great cost to mankind. Contemporary fascism, just as it cannot overcome the crisis through rearmament ...  also would not burn itself out through war. It is therefore likely to be around for a long time, which means that it will succeed in bringing about a more gradual, more "peaceful" and less coercive fascification of the society and the polity, with even the political formations of the liberal bourgeois establishment emulating the fascist ones in expressing themselves against persecuted minority groups. With fascist and liberal political formations competing against one another electorally, and with the crisis showing no signs of abating, which keeps alive popular discontent, liberal political formations would find themselves being forced increasingly to echo the same [racist] rhetoric that the fascists would be spewing out. ... This enjoins a historic task upon the left. It alone is in a position to prevent this damage to the social fabric by pursuing policies that can take these countries out of their current crisis, policies that would contest the hegemony of international finance capital, and in the process bring about a transcendence of capitalism. Since overcoming the hegemony of international finance capital will unleash a process of transcendence of capitalism, none of the other political formations is equal to the task. We are once again, in other words, facing a choice between socialism and barbarism, but in a different way from what Rosa Luxemburg had visualized in her specific context.

Utsa + Prabhat Patnaik, Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present

Long one I know, but I think it’s probably the best single passage from the book.

[whitesalmanrushdie]

Kwame Nkrumah - Class Struggle in Africa

A critically important insight - the clearest statement of the difference between an anticolonial and a socialist revolution. The explanation for what went wrong with Arab socialism/nasserism, as well as all other anticolonial movements which stagnated and fell back into conservativism.

It's exactly this critique that's needed today imo; "the left" is frequently contented with the revolutionary stage being described here, and unwilling or unable to imagine moving beyond the creation of new, "fairer" bourgeois states, and towards socialism; this is usually justified with accusations of left communism or western radicalism, but here we see it coming from one of the most consequential revolutionaries of the pan african movement.

[whitesalmanrushdie]

Kwame Nkrumah - Class Struggle in Africa

aight so i took a huge break on quoteposting but the time has come again

Here we see what I think is Nkrumah's most useful contribution to the anticolonial movement - strictly grounding it in class struggle, and highlighting the necessity of combatting the national bourgeoisie, even if for some period of time during the acute struggle against direct colonial control the indigenous proletariat and bourgeoisie share some limited interests.

[whitesalmanrushdie]

Kwame Nkrumah - Class Struggle in Africa

A little excerpt from the intro to a book Nkrumah wrote post-coup (plus his funny little chart, he did a bunch in this book lol). Here we see more of what i think Nkrumah was a bit unclear about in Neocolonialism; here he makes clear there ISN'T an undifferentiated mass, the African Peoples, who ALL share an interest in socialism and liberation from imperialist domination. He explicitly rejects such readings, and demands we apply a class analysis to the African context, which requires we acknowledge the contradictory interests - the class conflict - existing between african bourgeoisie and african proletariat and peasantry.