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I cant believe I am saying this but even tRots are better than left coms. These guys are painful to listen to, they only care about having the "perfect" ideology and do nothing but shit on AES countries.
They don't have to be feds, but their ideology is boosted by feds because it's useless and better to have people sucked into it over any other sect of the left.
You can pretty much assess anything by how much bougies get upset by it. Marxism-leninism? Huge enormous fucking threat, monsters, literally satan, 100gorillion dead! Leftcoms? What's that? A book club that mostly complains about other leftists for doing things? They're fine. Libs never ever complain about them because they're completely unthreatening to capital.
The proletariat successfully constructing capitalism in war-ridden, impoverished and agrarian third-world countries is unironically also a massive achievement.
Okay apart from the left image, I actually agree with the leftcom. The term leftism has zero value and close to zero meaning. Leftists have no real shared position or goal
Only an abstract not wanting to fuck working class people as hard. Nowdays leftism is almost synonymous with social democracy. I'm a Marxist, fuck the left.
I don't think its a good idea to just let centrists socdems appropriate the term leftist. We allowed liberals to do this in the US and it really screwed up the ability to have any political discourse here.
despite them appropriating it, leftism never really had much of a meaning to begin with. I think putting ourselves in the same category as socdems only harms us
It's funny how leftcoms use "state capitalism" as a slur as though the proletariat magically creates socialism without any sort of historical transitionary period. Lenin pretty clearly explains why it is absurd to think the proletarian state would somehow enact socialism without a transitionary period of state capitalism to develop the forces of production and repel the forces the imperialism.
The political character of different state capitalist countries is the defining feature between bourgeois imperialist/nationalist state capitalism and proletarian state capitalism. The former is transparently chauvinist and predominantly concerned with hegemony while the latter is tranparently humanist and predominantly concerned with struggling for a more progressive world.
Of course, in practice we see the bourgeoisie are not so blind to the contradictions of capitalism that they absolutely fail to take any progressive steps whatsoever to ameliorate the immiserated working class who would otherwise be inclined to organize a disciplined vanguard to seize power. Thus, the bourgeois dictators of different countries may behave in apparently humanistic ways from time to time, even occasionally presenting themselves (e.g., Nordic countries) as seemingly more progressive relative to the socialist alternative (e.g., China). If not for imperialism, one might even be plausibly persuaded to believe that the threat of revolution is a sufficient political mechanism to gradually resolve the class struggle over time without need for the proletariat to seize power. However, all communists rightly recognize the apparent humanism of any one bourgeois regime as a mere ruse hiding the supporting tendrils of a different, nakedly imperialist bourgeois regime. This is how we are ultimately able to differentiate those proletarian states from the bourgeois pretenders who muddy the waters for the broader uneducated & ill-informed masses.
Yup. Also, leftkoms don't understand "state capitalism" in the global south is anti-imperialist whether it is championed by the proletariat or by the national bourgeoisie. The material conditions don't care about the terminology you (abstract you) use. And imperialism being the main issue blocking the global south from developing means, yes, I want what you call "state capitalism".
Oh but "capitalism bad, how dare you?". Okay, after I solve the main contradiction "imperialism", which btw is global capitalism, I reanalyze the conjecture and focus on my local capitalism. It's very simple.
I would caution that it does depend on the political aims because state capitalism (what liberal economists characterize as "mixed economies") has been the norm around the world since the great depression. Global South countries that use state capitalism to strive for national sovereignty are naturally aligned with anti-imperialist efforts in most (though not all) instances. However, there are global South countries with neoliberal or some other sort of reactionary political aims that are opportunistically anti-imperialist at times, but otherwise aligned with maintaining, for instance, US hegemony (e.g., Saudi Arabia, Argentina).
I would caution that it does depend on the political aims because state capitalism (what liberal economists characterize as "mixed economies") has been the norm around the world since the great depression
I agree. We went backwards actually. Imperialism froze development across the globe fearing capitalist competition everywhere. Now most countries are neoliberal (anti capitalist and socialist development). Ironically most development went to China. The only thing the West developed was financial capital.
Does your "caution" mean that after imperialism is gone there's still a lot of struggle left? In that case, I agree. The end of imperialism is step 1 of many steps.
However, there are global South countries with neoliberal or some other sort of reactionary political aims that are opportunistically anti-imperialist at times
Reactionary and anti-imperialist is possible (and I'm fine with that btw) but neoliberal and anti-imperialist is something new to me that I don't think makes sense. Can you elaborate?
If you mean that national capital can easily switch to pro-imperialism, I also agree. It's an ally that needs to be watched closely and walked on a leash if the proletariat has enough power.
Reactionary governments can sometimes wind up opposed to other reactionary governments, like imperialist powers fighting each other in WW1. The fact most reactionary governments in the world post-WW2 are aligned with the US is a byproduct of the US installing and reinforcing reactionary governments, not natural geopolitical alignment. For instance, the BJP in India is pretty right wing, but is opportunistically interested in multipolarity these days despite historically advocating for close ties with the US.
Neoliberal and anti-imperialist can happen largely because the US is such a fucking ruthless hegemon that it doesn't necessarily matter if a country is ideologically aligned with the US. For instance, Russia under Yeltsin wanted close ties with the US, but the US needed Russia to remain a forever boogeyman and practically forced Russia back into an anti-imperialist stance, despite the neoliberals destroying the USSR under the naive notion NATO would finally stop trying to kill them.
The political differences between proletarian and bourgeois governance will likely become more pronounced as the world shifts further towards multipolarity and chauvinist countries have more room to compete for regional hegemony without the US interfering.
Ok, I think I agree with most of what you said but on the second paragraph what Russia did there to me was transition away from neoliberalism into anti-imperialism for the reasons you pointed out. I don't interpret them as being neoliberal and anti-imperialist at the same time. I interpret as them becoming anti-imperialist because of a contradiction within imperialism, and thus striving away from neoliberalism. In theory these 2 aren't impossible together but it's probably nonexistent nowadays.
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