Thomas_More
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I agree with Wez here about Freud. I think it is a shortcoming in socialists to ignore and not face the multiplicity of factors that prevent most of the working class from becoming aware.
Nationalism restricts the personality. I, for instance see kinship in all life, not just other humans. So, how can one grow in the perception that we are kin with all mammals and other animals if one can’t even accept other humans as kin?
It’s like a sketch in The Likely Lads, where Terry says he hates Germans, Italians, Chinese, Arabs, Pakistanis; then that he also hates Scots, Irish and Welsh; hates his English neighbours too, and hates the sod who lives downstairs in the same building.
We are every one of us a descendant of a nonhuman, and we are all relatives.
And Russia’s workers could have sabotaged the invasion by following Rosa Luxemburg’s advice to workers in wartime: a mass industrial strike, stopping the war machine in its tracks.
Unfortunately, patriotism stops the workers from realising how much power they have to stop war and save lives.
By ignoring Zelensky’s call to fight and die, the people of Ukraine would have made all this unnecessary. There would simply have been a change of leaders, from Zelensky to Putin; no bombings, no war, no displacement of people. By recognising this is a quarrel between capitalist exploiters, the workers should have just made no resistance, and their lives and communities would have carried on as before. A different colour flag would be the only difference.
From WILD SWANS by Jung Chang, pp 387-88:
“Books were major targets of Mao’s order to destroy. Because they had not been written within the last few months, and therefore did not quote Mao on every page, some Red Guards declared that they were all ‘poisonous weeds.’ With the exception of Marxist classics and the works of Stalin, Mao, and the late Lu Xun, whose name Mme. Mao was using for her personal vendettas, books were burning all across China. The country lost most of its written heritage.”
Unlike the caste system in India, in which caste is rigidly determined by birth, in China there was no inheritance per se. The sons of officials had to earn the post and thus the wealth their fathers had had, via the scholastic examination system. This system was theoretically open to everyone, including peasants. Many mandarins were peasants’ sons.
Of course, when China was occupied by the Manchus, Manchu birth was favoured at all levels, but the examination system functioned as it had for two thousand years, except during the brief era of Mongol rule.No, peasants are not necessarily serfs. The peasants of China were free farmers. Of course, they were prey to corrupt tax-collectors, and prey to the elements.
You cannot generalise about the Asian lands. China had a unique system.
How can you equate any with Soviet state-capitalism, which was capitalism nonetheless?That’s Lenin’s conclusion (privately), and simplistic, but yes.
But factors could also impede capitalist development, for instance Mao’s megalomania in China.
(Which, by the way, hadn’t been feudal for two thousand years).Resorting to sexual innuendos is one of the lowest forms of verbal abuse. TS does it constantly, which reinforces my belief that he is young.
The SPGB does know more about Russian history than Putin. We are historical materialists. Putin is a politician, and a nationalist.
You might as well say Boris Johnson knows more about British history than we do.
We’ve been about a lot longer too, and analysed the nature of the Russian Revolution, knowing already by 1918 what it was.
State-capitalism was often held back by ideology, in the case of Mao especially.
After the Mao-made famine of the late fifties, Mao was squeezed out of politics for a few years. He was ignored, and his articles for the press were left unpublished.
During this time, capitalist development revived and progressed. Then Mao, desperate, attacked the CPC using the teenage Red Guards imbued with his cult, and both schooling and production again suffered. These are prime examples of state-capitalism being retarded in its purpose of capitalist development by the whims of the head of state.
