Thomas_More
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Why, generally, is it the elderly and retired element of the proletariat who are in favour of conscription and militarization (re: the Bundeswehr drills in Hamburg), and for sending their grandchildren off to die?
There has to be a serious flaw in their grandparental bond of affection instilled by nature, supposedly.
Russia seems to be much stronger now, with all its new BRICS allies. It is the US which is imploding, and Europe is economically killing itself whilst courting military self-destruction.
I remember an old interview with an arrested Khmer Rouge leader where the interviewer said in passing, “Now, you are Communists, …”
The KR leader at that point burst into uncontrollable chuckling.That’s the same as with the Jacobins. In the Journal des débats of the 1790s it is all personal attacks and rivalries.
Bolshevik groups and govts too.The terror has passed, with the Leninist hysteria. But it remains a one-party dictatorship.
It has allowed western pop culture and has opened to world markets. I don’t know if there were capitalists independent of the state machine. There certainly are now. The revolution ended in 1976 and apart from one-party rule and archaisms such as the death penalty, China now is no different from other states. Just less “liberal” and more authoritarian. In fact, not really different from Russia.
For socialists, living there would be much harsher, as no one can form a party or resist military service, without severe punishment.Ok. Let’s summarise.
In the 1950s, when Mao was dictator, China was in the mid-stage of its capitalist revolution, which had roots in the 19th century. The Chinese bourgeoisie, which, like the Russian, was small and weak, hedged its bets with the Kuomintang, its own party, which only partially succeeded. Its 1911 political revolution was hijacked by the former Ch’ing general Yuan Shi-k’ai in 1912, who sought to restore an Imperial aurocracy with himself as Emperor. But he died in 1916, and in 1917 monarchists restored P’u Yi to the throne.
The bourgeoisie could but trust in this or that strongman in the Kuomintang to realise its unfulfilled political revolution, and in 1924 Feng Yu-hsiang’s troops captured Peip’ing (as it was then) and expelled P’u Yi.
The Kuomintang then launched the “Northern Expedition” to seize the north from the various federalist provincial governors known as “warlords” (a dubious title) by westerners. The expedition stalled as KMT factions fought each other, and general Chiang Kai-shek seized Nanking as his power base in 1927.From 1927 onwards, the Nanking govt. strove to modernise urban life but could not harness the economic forces Chinese capitalism required. Little by little the “Communists” (not yet under Mao’s dictatorship, but containing the germs of state-capitalist dictatorship via their connections with Moscow) invited interested native capitalists to their “soviet republics” throughout the south and west, to set up factories, but realised that the vast majority of Chinese, the peasantry, would need to be used, first to place the “Communists” in power, and then as human fodder for developing a modern nation-state.
During the Long March to Yenan, Mao Tse-tung was “elected” leader of the “Communists” and from his beginnings in full power adopted Stalin-like terror in controlling dissent.
To move on, the “Communists” won the civil war in 1949 and a Bolshevik-style state-capitalism then turned, in the 1950s, to the expropriation of the peasantry which had carried Mao to power. His weapons were mass-starvation and “communes”- concentration camps with hard labour, the proceeds going to the state, i e. Mao and his CCP accomplices, the new bourgeoisie.Failures and shortfalls in economic growth were blamed on figures in the CCP Mao wanted rid of during the 1950s. These were mostly his own generation of civil war veterans and, to finish them off, he launched the so-called “Cultural Revolution” of the 1960s, furthering his personal cult and strengthening his hand through terror over the population as a whole. As Mao grew increasingly frail and died, “Thermidorian” – moderating and realistic – elements seized and reined in the “Jacobin” revolutionary impetus, and the reign of Teng Hsiao-p’ing could at last concentrate on the full advancement of stalled capitalist production which would lead to the economic hegemony of China today.
This new order still pays lip service to Mao and is a mixture of state-capitalism and private capitalism.
How can it benefit the exploited and the exploiting? The exploited are still exploited. The exploiters are still accumulating wealth on the backs of the exploited. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the worst master is a kind one, because his/her slaves are content.
Look at Japan, so often praised as a ‘cohesive’ society – where many workers are so ruthlessly regimented and robotised that they die on the job, falling asleep in the street on their way home, and where the famous fake smile is compulsory.
Still no elucidation on this question.
Capitalism, though insane, is supposed to have its own logic. Namely, that states fight wars to open markets, seize and secure trade routes, and open the way to greater accumulation of capital.
I am not seeing any of this in Europe’s frenzied militarism. I am seeing European states closing themselves off from markets, militarising without any benefit to their economic aggrandisement (quite the opposite), depriving themselves of resources and isolating themselves by insisting on a russophobic path that their master, the US, launched them on but is now lukewarm to.
It is like symptoms which linger after an infection has passed. A frenzy that lingers after the mover has given up on it.
War becoming more likely, says German politician.
Again, more people trying to set up novel groups and with no interest in applying to us.
They know about us, but no doubt regard us as a museum curiosity behind glass, not a living viable organism.
But this is always the case because most workers are not materialists. Their voting and their blaming, their adulation and condemnation, are personality-based and “star”-based. They don’t see people being moved by a system of society, by material forces of which most are unaware, or at best partly aware.
“Greatness”, guilt and blame, criminality and conspiracy are their points of reference, not historical materialism. So individuals occupying positions are targets of their discontent, which is a blind and muddled discontent.
Blame and guilt (mis)inform the entire culture. So does the adulation of wealth and “success.”
The capitalist world around them is one of Marvel-like supervillains, with everyone waiting upon “superheroes” to “lead” them out of the bleakness.
