adri
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Yes, this is another good angle for demonstrating the differences between those who followed Lenin, which includes left communists, and what Marx actually wrote.
I’m sure some left communists admire Lenin to some extent, but that really doesn’t characterize most left communists today or historically. Lenin, after all, did write an entire pamphlet (“Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder) criticizing the people to the left of him, including left communists in the UK like Pankhurst, which she actually commented on. Other left communists like the Russian Gavril Miasnikov also openly criticized Lenin and the dictatorial policies of the Russian Communist Party while Lenin was still alive, which he later paid for by being murdered by Stalin. The left communists who emphasize worker councils and workers’ control over production are perfectly in line with the writings of Marx, such as Marx’s commentary on the Paris Commune. The Leninists who emphasize centralizing decision-making in the hands of a small group of “professional revolutionaries,” on the other hand, are more like the Blanquists who Engels critiqued in his Refugee Literature:
Engels wrote: Blanqui is essentially a political revolutionary, a socialist only in sentiment, because of his sympathy for the sufferings of the people, but he has neither socialist theory nor definite practical proposals for social reforms. In his political activities he was essentially a “man of action”, believing that, if a small well-organised minority should attempt to effect a revolutionary uprising at the right moment, it might, after scoring a few initial successes, carry the mass of the people and thus accomplish a victorious revolution. […] Since Blanqui regards every revolution as a coup de main by a small revolutionary minority, it automatically follows that its victory must inevitably be succeeded by the establishment of a dictatorship—not, it should be well noted, of the entire revolutionary class, the proletariat, but of the small number of those who accomplished the coup and who themselves are, at first, organised under the dictatorship of one or several individuals. (MECW 24, p. 13)
Jesusland.
Eh, I would really avoid making blanket statements about entire regions. It’s not much of an improvement if a state voted Democratic over Republican; they’re both the party of capital after all.
If you compare the 2024 electoral map with the “Jesusland” map they are also far from being identical.
It isn’t just a bad joke?
I again doubt Trump will make it past his first year in office, especially considering the two, rather serious, assassination attempts during his campaign; he’s a bit of an idiot (well I mean he’s an idiot anyway) for even trying to run for a second term, especially in the US where guns are easily accessible. While he might have won both the electoral college and popular votes, his stance on Palestine and virtually everything else makes him intensely disliked by large swathes of people. There were also a number of people who voted for Trump simply to spite the Democrats and their position on Palestine, mistakenly thinking that Trump was somehow less pro-Israeli when he was in fact the most pro-Israeli president in US history, excluding Biden’s current facilitation of ethnic cleansing. While voter turnout was also relatively high by American standards, there were still millions of people who didn’t vote at all. His electoral victory shouldn’t be seen as reflecting his actual popularity, especially when he was voted out of office in 2020. Openly announcing that he wants to annex this and that territory certainly hasn’t helped his case.
He is going to need a big army to invade all those countries from his interventionist list, he does not remember that the USA has been defeated several times by less sophisticated armies, and he might need a large network of industries to produce and reproduce war commodities which do not exist in the USA
The US annexing Canada, if this ever happens, would also likely prevent people from evading any future wars/drafts by fleeing to Canada, like many Americans did during the Second Indochina War.
Incidentally, I would also consider the Second Indochina War a strategic rather than a military defeat for the US. The US was and is a nuclear power after all, and General Westmoreland (appropriately named) even entertained the idea of employing nuclear weapons to “save” the Saigon regime. The US did indeed lose around 58,000 American troops—which paled in comparison to the millions of deaths inflicted by the US on the Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotions—but it was really the anti-war movement in the US and elsewhere that was among the decisive factors in helping to end the war. The US also never directly invaded the North due to fears of a Soviet or Chinese retaliation, so the US mostly just bombed them instead, in addition to carrying out various special operations.
While we’re on the topic of Inodchina, Trump’s argument for annexing places for economic or national (i.e. capitalist/imperialist) security is also really no different, at least in its imperialist aims, from the American interests in Indochina during the First and Second Indochina Wars. The US wanted to keep Southeast Asia a part of the so-called “free-world” and to prevent countries like Japan (which the US occupied after the Second War World) from losing access to vital resources and non-“communist” trading partners. Eisenhower, in a press conference in 1954, expressed as much when he explicitly listed resources in Indochina that the US was interested in, as well as the supposed consequences of Indochina’s capitulation to so-called “communism”:
“Now, with respect to the first one, two of the items from this particular area that the world uses are tin and tungsten. They are very important. There are others, of course, the rubber plantations and so on” (91).
“But when we come to the possible sequence of events, the loss of Indochina, of Burma, of Thailand, of the Peninsula, and Indonesia following, now you begin to talk about areas that not only multiply the disadvantages that you would suffer through loss of materials, sources of materials, but now you are talking about millions and millions of people.
[…]
It takes away, in its economic aspects, that region that Japan must have as a trading area or Japan, in turn, will have only one place in the world to go—that is, toward the Communist areas in order to live.
So, the possible consequences of the loss are just incalculable to the free world” (91).
Fun fact, Elvis did not write a single one of his songs (or at least the vast majority of them). He was a bit of a square honestly, especially in relation to the counter-culture and anti-war movements of the ’60s and ’70s. That’s not to say that he didn’t create any good music though.
It’s also worth noting that Trump hardly talked about annexing Canada, Greenland, the Panama Canal or any other region during his campaign, so I imagine that this is sort of news for many of his supporters as well. He has talked about purchasing Greenland in the past, but Greenland wasn’t really a major theme of the 2024 election. As linked to above, I think it was also only recently that he has publicly discussed “not ruling out military means” in order to acquire Greenland or the Panama Canal, a comment which is obviously making headlines in the US.
Oh yeah, almost forgot myself, Trump also wants Canada.
The only bad part about Trump choking on a Big Mac, or being Mangionied, (both of which are probable scenarios considering past occurrences) is that the equally revolting JD Vance will just take his place. However, I don’t think Vance commands the same sort of support that the orange buffoon does, so perhaps that could limit some of what he and the Maga Republicans do. Trump certainly makes the job of socialists much easier though by openly stating that he wants this or that region for economic or national reasons.
Jeezua. Talk about blatant, unabashed imperialism …
“President-elect Donald Trump declined on Monday to rule out military or economic action as part of his avowed desire to have the U.S. take back control of the Panama Canal and acquire Danish-controlled Greenland.”
Don’t forget about Musk (co-president more or less) talking on Twitter about whether the US should “liberate” Britain…
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/06/elon-musk-asks-if-us-should-liberate-britain.html
They were just Trotskyists (or maybe Yippies?) like Lennon was; of course they’re gonna give an SPGBer dirty looks!
It’s certainly much easier these days to just jump on the Internet Archive or have your own pdf book collection, not to mention ebook readers. I’ve switched between physical and digital over the years, but lately I’ve been gravitating more towards physical books again. I don’t really like messing with ereaders, and reading everything in front a computer screen can get a bit dull after a while. I still think it’s important and helpful to have books and other materials archived though, making them accessible to people who might not be able to purchase them.
“Then there was Donbas. This region broke away from Ukraine after the CIA-backed Maidan coup – another provocation – that toppled the government there. Donbas did not want to remain under the new, clearly Russophobic, regime which, with the support of fascist elements, started shelling cities in Donbas from 2014 onwards.”
As far as the surveys and scholarship that I’m aware of, most of the residents in the Donbass region were actually not in favor of outright separation from Ukraine and joining Russia, but rather different forms of greater regional autonomy, which included separation. The 2014 survey I mentioned previously in this thread discusses this, which is also referenced by Sakwa in his scholarly work Frontline Ukraine.
You’re spot on though in noting how the Russian invasion of Kiev was, besides being a horrific act from a capitalist regime that involved massacres like the one in Bucha, just a strategic blunder on the part of Moscow. The invasion has distracted from the fact that there was quite a bit of Ukrainian opposition to the post-Maidan government in Kiev and its discriminatory policies from the more Russophilic parts of Ukraine. It has also allowed Ukrainian nationalists, along with the people who parrot them in the West, including quite a number of socialists, to present the Ukrainian recapturing of places like the Donbass and Crimea as a form of “self-defense,” when a number of residents in these regions would perhaps think differently. It is well-documented, for example, that the majority of Crimeans sympathize more with Russia than with Ukraine and mostly approved of the 2014 Russian annexation of the peninsula. It was certainly more possible to speak of Ukrainian self-defense when Russia was invading Kiev, amid a mostly hostile Kievan population, but it’s just ludicrous to speak of the “liberation” of places like Crimea when the majority of Crimeans (who are mostly ethnic-Russians) don’t even desire “liberation” to begin with.
“As I understand it – correct me if I am wrong – Russia´s initial response was not to get directly involved. It wanted Donbas to be a kind of semi-autonomous region within Ukraine with guaranteed language rights etc.”
It’s also worth noting that Russia annexed Crimea mostly due to fears of losing access to their only major warm-water sea port in Sevastopol, which they have maintained since the days of the Russian Empire. Moscow became apprehensive about their continued access to the naval base following the Maidan coup and the rise of an openly pro-Western and Russophobic government in Kiev.
Still annoys me how shameless Wolff is about distorting Marx, under the guise of “making him accessible,” just in order to promote his little worker-coop endeavor.
Reality is also much more interesting… such as how the US supported the Khmer Rouge (after inadvertently helping them come to power by obliterating the Cambodian countryside and swelling their ranks) as a counterweight to reunified Vietnam up until the 1990s. Here’s Secretary of State Kissinger speaking with Thai Foreign Minister Choonhavan on 26 November 1975, seven months after the fall of Phnom Penh:
“What do the Cambodians think of the United States? You should tell them that we bear no hostility towards them. We would like them to be independent as a counterweight to North Vietnam.” (Kissinger 3)
“You should also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way. We are prepared to improve relations with them.” (Kissinger 8)
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB193/
(Scroll down to document 17.)
It certainly was not a Bush conspiracy, unless you think the Bush administration was mad enough to strike the Pentagon/their own defense department. There’s a plethora of evidence debunking all of these nonsensical conspiracy theories (e.g. the jet fuel from the planes helped weaken the towers’ support beams) and also a plethora of reasons for the Arab world to have felt (and to continue to feel) animosity towards the US/Israel. If the Bush administration wanted to bring down the towers as a false flag to invade Iraq, then it also would have made more sense for the hijackers to come from Iraq rather than Saudi Arabia (i.e. an American ally), which was the nationality of most of the hijackers.
I’d also get off Twitter; it’s slowly turning into an alt-right platform after the Musk takeover, if it isn’t one already.
