Why against multipolarity despite many socialist state arise after ww1 and even more after ww2 end? I ask this question because I see many people in r/communism view multipolarity negatively.
I would say it’s idealism in action. Being against multipolarity currently is by definition supporting the status quo. Sure there are valid criticism but again, the only real alternative is the continuation of USA hegemony.
The reddit r/communism is mostly (last I checked) maoist or what we’d consider “ultraleft” here.
If you can share screenshots of what you’re referring to, that would help. The tendency here is largely (at least nominally) Marxism-leninism, which isn’t the same as that particular subreddit.
yeah, I remember them collectively mourning Gonzalo while /r/genzedong was crabposting
Hah they seethed so hard the r/communism and r/communism101 maoist mods carpet banned everyone who had r/genzedong in their posting history.
Haha I remember that vividly, what a day 🥰
One of the few occasions to celebrate on 9/11 lmao
What’s the issue with maoism?
Didn’t they get some revolution to happen and get the benefit (or at least a large part of it) to the working class?
Maoists have never had a successful revolution and have never really won lasting gains for the working class.
Now when I say Maoists as in Maoist Ultras I am talking about Gonzalo thought or MLM (Marxism-Leninism-Maoism) as they call themselves usually. I am not talking about ML-MZT or Marxist-Leninist with Mao-Zedong-Thought.
Mao adapted ML thought to China’s unique conditions and succeeded. The communist party he helped found (CPC) is now the leading socialist nation and the largest in pure numbers of membership as well as the one of the only ones actively advancing theory (Cuba is also doing some things but smaller given their circumstances). MLM’s condemn modern China for not being pure enough. They are a left deviation, the same kind Mao wrote against and condemned at various points. On the other hand they celebrate, venerate and support a deranged man (Gonzalo) who died in prison without leading a successful revolution or doing anything but founding a group of theoretically unsound guerillas who turned to adventurism and violence over substance.
Too many of these MLM’s seek glory and adventure instead of service. Of course those in the west would scream and run away at the prospect of having to commit violence themselves but through their purity fetishism they get to condemn all existing communist movements and all capitalists states and put themselves above it all as some imaginary, idealist, superior system. In that way they serve capital and empire. These people have a martyr complex and a martyr worship complex. It is in that way not surprising how attractive they are in the soup of western Christian civilization and thought, such ideas being promulgated as very honorable, attractive, etc in keeping with such philosophies.
They sound a lots like Donglin party at the end of Ming Dynasty.
Thank you! Mapping the names of variant ideas is so hard! Often counterintuitive since branches want to claim the big names for them.
Funnily enough, Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao apparently didn’t really want their names appended to the ideas.
In that space, how did ML came to be named that? Was it Lenin’s huge body of work and early death to fault?
Lenin’s work and Stalin’s synthesis and expanding of that work is how we got ML.
Didn’t Stalin coin the term?
I always thought based on theory communism was iconoclastic like myself but the usual naming is after figures. I wish the community moved away from that and I don’t ever adapt that naming myself. I think naming convention around the time periods of important communist time landmarks would be more suitable but oh well.
Is there like mlm theory? What’s their most popular book?
Darkcalling’s already answered the question pretty well! I’ll point out that MLM’s are welcome here, just that most of LG aren’t MLM.
I think there is likely some western chauvinism element to a lot of newer leftists that are not in favor of multipolarity. The propaganda doesn’t wash away from the mind so quickly for many. So they have a tendency to think Actual Existing Socialist states are not valid in some way because they have not learned anything beyond the propaganda.
In their minds, this would make multipolarity messy. Better to have a global authority to keep order. And yet they call those in favor of multipolarity authoritarians.
How do you reconcile that with the fact the vast majority of the IMCWP stands close to or right on the KKE’s position on the whole shitshow in Ukraine?
Are these all “new communists”? Seems to me that’s more like the OG guard that safeguarded ML wherever they were throughout the liquidationist and opportunist shitshow that was the 90s to the 2000s.
I’m the first one to call out ultra-leftism but it seems to me there is a certain bias to right deviation in here.
I would wager it is because most comrades here are unfortunately not active organizationally, may that be in their local youth league or party. As much as this space is great, it smells a bit overly online. That’s understandable tho
Since multipolarity today depends on PRC not making moves to become yet another hegemon, it also depends on one’s position on China.
You may have a point in who leans in which direction, in that comrades that have been organised for some time have a bias against China, but that’s not a clever value judgement. Since older comrades lean this way, and the leadership are older in many parties, unions etc, it makes sense that this bias would be made official policy.
It might read like I’m devaluing it calling it bias, and that’s exactly what I am because that’s all that it is. I say this having talked to many of them and seen the clear contradiction in the party policy. Old leftists are quite often parroting anticommunist tropes re China, such as no freeze peach, no free thought, or direct quote ”They run people over with tanks over there." These people aren’t stupid, they just come from a time when China didn’t respond to western misinformation.
if you want any indication of this, most third world country communist parties support russias actions and china; the anti-china bias only manifests in western european orientated communist parties and the reason why is obvious to me; they drank the cool aid.
I’m sure many lemmygrad users here can give you a good analysis of multipolarity, but it’s generally viewed favorably here. If you are looking for arguments against multipolarity from the horse’s mouth, this isn’t the place.
Rainer Shea is a good communist on Substack and I like hearing his opinions on occasion. They had a real clunker of an episode where they suggested Multipolarity is bad and that the class struggle is most important. No duh, but how do we get to a class struggle when so many countries are dominated by US/Euro hegemony and IMF loans along with insane debt and skyrocketing inflation due to Western sanctions on much of the 3rd world’s trading partners? Sorta seem like Anti-Imperialism (aka Multipolarity) is the only way forward to even getting to the class struggle IN THE FIRST PLACE in most of the world
Isn’t rainer shea like a white supremacist fascist or something?
No, he’s just a book worshiper who doesn’t acknowledge his privilege. (He’s a white kid who hardly considers landback and thinks rage against the war machine is the most revolutionary thing of our time).
Yes. He’ll deny it, but anyone who opposes decolonization is a fascist.
Except that he doesn’t, he constantly states that he supports decolonization.
He says that, but then argues for fascists like those from RATWM and denies that settler colonialism is the primary contradiction in burgerland. He’s a 2-faced snake, an actual redfash.
undefined> ad a real clunker of an episode where they suggested Multipolarity is bad and that the class struggle is mo
i’m afraid you have the infantile disorder
Is your block quote supposed to be a quote of what I said somewhere? Because I didn’t say that. If you’re attempting to paraphrase me, the sentence is cut in a way that I don’t know what you’re trying to say.
Lol, no, where did you get that idea from?
Multipolarity is bad and that the class struggle is most important.
I’m struggling to understand takes like this. If we accept that imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, then surely the contradiction between colonizers and the colonized is the highest contradiction under imperialism. Anti-imperialism is class struggle.
lol r/communism is a mess, def have my views and bad experiences from them…
I think r/communism position is that the current available alternatives to US power, that is China and Russia, and their largest allies (Brazil, Iran, India, etc) all fail the “is it communism” test and therefore should not gain in power. You’ll have to ask them though.
As a means, it’s good. As an end, it’s bad.
It’s a nothing argument really. Some people are just making blog posts pretending that those who “support multipolarity” are going to claim Mission Accomplished once it’s there and never be active again.
Disclaimer: I certainly do not want to give credit to the maoist gonzaloite sickoes of /r/communism.
That being said, positioning oneself as a communist against or for multipolarity within the context that we are in is just a nonsensical question if you understand imperialism in the marxist-leninist understanding: the monopoly stage of capitalism, marked by the merging of bank and industrial capital into financial capital. Shifting which financial capital pole is dominant, or whether there are multiple financial capital imperialist poles matters little for communists: the end result is inter-imperialist war.
Should I quote Lenin in Socialism and the War and Imperialism: the Latest Stage of Capitalism, on that? Do I need to remind comrades that Lenin saw Tsarist Russia as a nascent imperialist state with a mix of feudal colonial elements and modern imperialist elements all that tied to it being dominated by British and especially French capital? The excuses then that today’s Russia, an advanced capitalist state with sizeable capital export and control in its immediate region (larger than under Tsarist Russia to be noted), is therefore not imperialist is lazy. We must remain consistent. We must remain scientific, but very importantly we must remain clear eyed: The fact that the current war is an inter-imperialist one does not mean that we must ignore that the primary aggressor is undeniably western imperialism and its war dog the NATO “alliance”.
The question of the war in Ukraine from the perspective of european and north american communists regardless of the above mentioned questions is simple: total and compete commitment to revolutionary defeatism. Full opposition to NATO. Building the mass base to make that happen. Implent that in the labour unions. That requires not to be larpy fucks too. That requires saying: “being pro or anti russia is none of our business, let the russian comrades deal with that, we oppose nato and demand peace negotiations and the stop of arm shipments, we demand investing all those billions in our working class instead of tools to kill Ukrainians and Russians”. It might be cliche to say but we demand peace and bread, and in the context of enormous ass inflation and rising costs of leaving, along with trailing wages, the masses have never been more receptive to that message in decades.
I’ll give you a concrete example: KKE is openly stating (only within the sphere of the IMCWP and communist organizing) that the war is an inter-imperialist war. And yet they are the single BEST party right now across europe in opposing NATO arms shipments to Ukraine, and dedicate their vast majority of energy opposing the war from a revolutionary defeatist basis. Anyone who shits on them from the comfort of their computers that haven’t personally engaged in blocking trainloads of armoured vehicles for Ukraine can only shut the fuck up.
Edit: as to whether multipolarity bringing socialist states into emergence bring revolution slower or faster: i’d say this is a completely nonsensical thesis that is tied to accelerationism. It has zero basis in concrete organizing, and I would dare say, is an example of disgustingly “wishful” opportunism indicative of a complete and total disconnection from the working class.
Edit 2: I see a lot of downvotes and zero counter arguments. The echo chamber some of you lot lived in presumably with zero on the ground organizing has messed with your scientific socialism and your connection to proletarian internationalism. Join a party, engage in real life struggle, learn what it means to struggle against the NATO war in Ukraine outside internet micro-niches.
Should I quote Lenin in Socialism and the War and Imperialism: the Latest Stage of Capitalism, on that? Do I need to remind comrades that Lenin saw Tsarist Russia as a nascent imperialist state with a mix of feudal colonial elements and modern imperialist elements all that tied to it being dominated by British and especially French capital? The excuses then that today’s Russia, an advanced capitalist state with sizeable capital export and control in its immediate region (larger than under Tsarist Russia to be noted), is therefore not imperialist is lazy. We must remain consistent. We must remain scientific, but very importantly we must remain clear eyed: The fact that the current war is an inter-imperialist one does not mean that we must ignore that the primary aggressor is undeniably western imperialism and its war dog the NATO “alliance”.
We indeed must remain scientific. That requires us to consider things that happened post-1924. This idea of labelling Russia imperialist, a shaky argument to being with, and then asserting that this makes the sides similar enough to not proclaim support is little more than idealism.
If we’re throwing out quotes, let’s also being in Stalin, Litvinov, Molotov. Why are we even pretending war between capitalists is happening for the first time since 1918, why are we ignoring the monumental though largely fruitless efforts of the USSR to rally the imperialists against Nazi Germany? Why pretend we’ve never allied ourselves with the US and UK when so many people’s movements received assistance from them, even if for the purpose of fighting their enemies?
Correct, however, even if we only limit ourselves to Lenin, we can quote his work A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism (1916) where he gives us general principles to analyze any conflict which again strengthens our position here on Lemmygrad and that of many communist parties (especially in the 3rd world) which give critical support to Russia:
How, then, can we disclose and define the “substance” of a war? War is the continuation of policy. Consequently, we must examine the policy pursued prior to the war, the policy that led to and brought about the war.
For the philistine the important thing is where the armies stand, who is winning at the moment. For the Marxist the important thing is what issues are at stake in this war, during which first one, then the other army may be on top.
The situation today is not the same as it was in World War 1, and we need to adjust our analysis accordingly.
Hey, I hadn’t read that. Thanks!
Your cringe bad faith remarks brings my desire to even engage with your actually relatively well thought-out arguments to absolute nil.
You do not know the people active here. Many of the downvoters could be newbie trolls for all you’re aware of, and many of us are quite active in our local politics and even regularly discuss it, which you might notice were you not too busy denigrating communists every turn. Many of our comrades here live in the periphery and global south. You are not only addressing these straw white guy LARPers.
This is a space mainly for education and there is a definite level of anonymity that should be and is maintained. No one should have to discuss their local real-world organizing experiences to prove to a bad faith actor that they’re not ‘terminally online’ and that their mostly valuable insights are worth listening to, yet it feels a little like you’re baiting for that proof.
I suggest actively participating in mutual conversation rather than making dehumanizing overgeneralizations about the comrades active here.
You have not convinced me that struggling for multipolarity is an unworthy task, either.
Imperialism is highlander, imperialist hegemons will never allow another imperialist power to rise.
