☭
Yes, I also quite like NYE, I don’t know why he chose to write about it in particular, maybe it was worse in his time. However, his point about about bourgeois holidays and commemorations of historical events that have no meaning to the vast majority of today’s people I find to be correct. There are several such “holidays” in my country which the bourgeoisie basically forces, and which the majority of people don’t care about. I guess getting the day off is still nice though.
I agree, it has that vibe a bit, and I have no particular problem with New Year’s, but his general point is definitely correct when it comes to some bourgeois holidays and commemorations of specific historical events that really don’t have any meaning to the vast majority today. I can think of several examples that are “celebrated” in my country.
I think prolewiki has a good overview: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia
No such thing as brainwashing:
Your comment here is way too favorable to the tzar. There was plenty of racism against the non-Russian peoples in the empire. Plenty of pogroms and other horrors committed. The “Great Russians” were very chauvinistic in their attitude towards the other nationalities, and were very privileged in what positions they could occupy, for example. An important part of Bolshevik propaganda was fighting against racism and “Great Russian” chauvinism.
From Walter Rodney’s ‘The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World’:
There was a group of people known as Russians, who ruled over Finns, Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians, Georgians, Ukrainians, Armenians, Mongolians, and Turks, to name just a few. The Russians monopolized political power and sent their governors and settlers into the countries of these other peoples. As in all colonial states, there was a legal distinction between the citizen (Russian) and the colonial subject. The constitution of Tsarist Russia explicitly based discriminatory measures on the racial or national origin or religion of those affected. It was in some ways like the distinctions made under Portuguese and Belgian colonialism, and under South African and Rhodesian apartheid. In other words, Russian colonial rule hardly differed from that of the Western European powers. The British sent warships; the Russians sent the Cossacks. When its colonial subjects revolted, as Georgian workers and peasants had during the 1905 Revolution, the tsar, as we’ve seen, agreed to a few minor reforms but ultimately crushed the uprising and reverted to the old system of colonialism.
Every colonial relationship in history has involved cultural domination, namely the imposition of language, religion and way of life on the subjugated peoples. In the Russian Empire, there were numerous other religions apart from the Russian Orthodox church. None of these were respected. The Catholics in Polish Russia were persecuted. The Jews were hounded wherever they were found, especially in the Ukraine. The Muslims were treated as enemies of Christian civilization. And those elements of the population who believed in their own family gods and traditional religion were the most despised of all, in the same way that European missionaries came to Africa and denounced African religion as devil worship and black magic. […] When faced with a more technologically advanced culture, such groups were victims of genocidal policies.
I’m not sure what point you’re making here. Russian colonialism doesn’t change the importance of settler-colonialism in general and specifically in the US. The USSR was built on a basis of national liberation, and not on the “Great Russian” identity which would be analogous to the US identity here.
Another difference is that the US is entirely settler colonial, a whole country founded solely by settlers, while the Russian empire’s colonies were all still tied to the metropolitan core in western Russia. The US was created through a revolt of the most reactionary settlers that wanted autonomy from Britain. The path forward for North America is strictly decolonial.
the basis is capitalist
And also settler-colonial, which is a very important factor when it comes to culture in this sense.
I agree, and when talking about consumerism, I’m always reminded of these two great essays on it:
https://redsails.org/women-and-the-myth-of-consumerism/
https://redsails.org/the-logic-of-stupid-poor-people/
Also, Marx’s own view of consumption is that it’s a real social need which capitalism itself restricts only to the bourgeoisie (we could also add the labour aristocracy) while the vast majority cannot engage in consumption like they need to. Of course, the goal here isn’t a form of bourgeois luxury, but the ability of everyone to live a fulfilling life.
IMO communism will not prevail through celebrating austerity
Exactly, and there was quite a big debate around this in the early years after the October revolution and the founding of the USSR (as there seems to be every time a revolution manages to survive the initial time of great crisis and then needs to build up the forces of production and increase quality of life). After the horrors of WW1 and the civil war, both caused by capitalism, there was a long period of crisis which meant that no one really had a lot, and the little that people had, they had to all share equally. It was a sort of rationing program that was necessary during the wars. This, however, cannot be continued forever, and both Lenin and Stalin (and others) understood this. It’s why the NEP was necessary, but these decisions caused outcry from some Soviet and even Wester European socialists who didn’t understand the actual situation, but clung on to an abstract principle.
From Losurdo’s ‘Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend’:
In the climate of horror at the carnage caused by capitalism and the auri sacra fames [accursed hunger for gold], a religious distrust of gold and of wealth as such is reproduced, alongside the idealization of poverty or at least of scarcity, understood and experienced as an expression of spiritual fullness or revolutionary rigor. And Stalin felt compelled to emphasize a central point: “It would be absurd to think that socialism can be built on the basis of poverty and privation, on the basis of reducing personal requirements and lowering the standard of living to the level of the poor”; instead, “socialism can be built only on the basis of a vigorous growth of the productive forces of society” and “on the basis of the prosperity of the working people,” for that matter, “a prosperous and cultured life for all members of society.”
Don’t know about the 1789 revolution, but Marx wrote ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ (about the 1848-1852 situation in France), and ‘The Civil War in France’ (about the commune).
I appreciate you reposting these threads to lemmygrad now as the twitter algorithm usually seems to not want to show them to me.
This article by Fayez A. Sayegh is an excellent account of the history of zionism and the earlier periods of colonization in Palestine:
I agree with you. The shock can be useful during radicalization at first, but the point is to stop being shocked and understand how these things work rationally in order to change them. Similarly, I don’t like how many are still shocked by some soc-dem politicians “betraying” us when it has always been clear that they’ve never been with us in the first place. Not being shocked anymore (unless it’s out of a defeatist resignation) is a good thing because it means you understand how things actually work. We want people to move past shock to an understanding and action.
Check out these two twitter threads (thread 1, thread 2) and this article for a different reading of Marx’s On the Jewish Question.
I think you’re somewhat failing to take into account how much antisemitizam there was in Europe and how prevalent it was, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries. Marx is writing about Jews in Europe in the mid 19th century, and is responding directly to widespread antisemitic rhetoric - “The Jewish Question”.
Anticommunists will always misrepresent us and everything we do, we don’t need to pander to them in any way. There are plenty of other people that will listen to us and be open to our ideas. Liberals (active political liberals, not the average “apolitical” person in the west) are not a group we can radicalize and we shouldn’t focus our efforts on them.
Also, the theory that people are brainwashed by propaganda is not scientific or Marxist and we shouldn’t use it. It leads to a dead end in terms of tactics to fight propaganda. Check out the full article I linked above for a Marxist theory of how propaganda works.
I would say that What Is To Be Done? is one of Lenin’s most important works, if anything I’d say it’s underrated. Like (mostly) all of his works, it talks directly about the situation in Russia at the time, but that doesn’t make it any less useful. You just have to extract the universal principles from the tactical particularity he’s writing about.
WITBD? focuses on the need for organizing, and not just any kind, but actual revolutionary organizing with both theory and practice, for bringing together the proletariat with all other revolutionary classes and even individual intellectuals. It speaks against just focusing on a binary interpretation of class struggle (proletariat vs bourgeoisie), and instead it tells us to focus on any struggle that is revolutionary (anti-colonial struggles, gender liberation struggles, etc.).
Here’s how Losurdo describes it in Class Struggle:
The Onion has always had good takes on israel.
https://www.theonion.com/the-onion-calls-on-israel-to-bomb-our-offices-in-case-1846912378
I’ve never seen her engage with these critiques in good faith. She seems to mostly just get really defensive and refuses to rethink her strategy or the theory in general. A big point here, I think, is the fact that her business model where her readers pay her, reinforces that kind of non-Marxist analysis of propaganda, because it lets the readers feel as an educated and truth-knowing elite above the majority of the masses that are ‘brainwashed’.
I want to try to fight those as best I can before worrying about being a perfect Marxist.
The problem with this is that it’s very hard to actually fight propaganda without a Marxist understanding of how it works. Just telling people the truth doesn’t really do a lot in most cases. To be effective at counter-propaganda, we have to understand how it actually works in the first place, and theories like ‘brainwashing’ don’t enable us to do that. To effectively fight propaganda, we have to first understand its material origins, relations to different classes, and modes of operation (licensing and bullying rather than brainwashing). These parts are missing from Johnstone’s analysis and that makes her counter-propaganda less effective. This article goes into it in more details, and Red Sails has a whole bunch of articles on the topic.
This is the point Marx makes when he’s making the distinction between labour and labour-power.
The worker sells his labour-power - his ability to work for a certain period of time - to the capitalist for a wage. That wage is determined by the value of the necessities needed to reproduce the labour-power of the worker (food, rent, etc.) - and it can also fulctuate due to supply and demand.
Labour-power is a special commodity because it creates additional value while it’s used up (while a person is working). The additional (surplus) value created is greater than the value necessary for the reproduction of the used up labour-power, and the capitalist owns the produced surplus value.
Engels explains this distinction, and the reasons why it’s necessary in the introduction to Marx’s Wage Labour and Capital.
But then again:
Based on this comment, I think you’d also enjoy Gramsci’s The Revolution against Das Kapital (1917)!