this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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GenZedong
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First of all, don't start by assuming there is anything to refute - never accept the premise of an anti-communist argument without investigating whether it's actually true! Does China really have billionaires in the ranks of the party or is that just a myth that has been popularized to try and discredit the CPC in the eyes of gullible western leftists with ultra tendencies? If they do then how many and in what positions? What is the proportion of capitalists to non-capitalists in the party, and more importantly how much actual influence and power do they really have?
Do not simply accept the framing of these sorts of "gotchas", you must always dig deeper and investigate beyond the cliche phrases and surface appearances, instead looking into the actual dialectical conditions that exist. Whether or not individual capitalist elements are allowed in the ranks of the party says nothing about the fundamental class character of the party itself. If the party was supposedly taken over by revisionist and bourgeois forces, then how is it that the way the Chinese state and economy are run and the results that their system produces are still so radically different from what we see in Western capitalist systems? If the same class is supposedly in power in China as in the West why are they not experiencing the same social and economic dynamics? If the CPC is so revisionist why has it not liberalized the country into the ground and abolished itself like the CPSU did once it was hijacked by revisionists?
And bear in mind that what happened in the USSR happened despite there technically being no capitalists whatsoever in their ruling party right up until that party voluntarily totally disempowered itself and dissolved the dictatorship of the proletariat handing the country to the enemies of the working class on a silver platter. Clearly one must look not just at the composition (though that also matters) but at the guiding ideology and the dominant political line within the party, in addition to how the party is organized and how it governs in practice.
Excellently stated, comrade!
One of the things i really appreciate about ML spaces is the ability to address controversial subjects and not be immediately shut down for it in the way it happens in liberal and ultra spaces. And if someone is egregiously wrong but is engaging in an honest fashion and not just trying to troll there are always comrades who are ready and willing to educate them and explain exactly how and why they are wrong.
Sometimes this takes a lot of effort, and it can become tiresome and we always have to remain cognizant that getting communists to waste their time having to explain the same thing over and over again is a wrecker tactic, so it may be necessary on occasion in the interest of saving time to simply point people in the direction of sources they can go to learn more.
But on the whole i find that we can generally tell when someone is engaging in good faith and we are willing to discuss and explain. I don't find the same willingness in ultra-left spaces to engage with arguments and do the work of investigating what the actual facts are. Reality is messy and complex and not always so black and white as they prefer to pretend.
Instead ultras adopt the liberal preference for simple, well-established narratives that are considered true by virtue of being repeated often enough, and of course the prioritizing of moralistic idealism and ideological purity over actual materialist analysis and engaging with the real world as it exists not as we may wish it.
I don't know if i have enough knowledge on the theory of Protracted People's War to say how it differs from regular guerilla warfare, but certainly the kind of guerilla warfare that for example Che Guevara describes in his famous manual on guerilla warfare seems to either have arrived independently at some of the same strategies or have been inspired by it.
As for the various ultra-left tendencies, i am on the whole not too worried about them. I personally gravitate towards believing in a kind of natural selection of ideologies in the sense that those ideological frameworks that are not rooted in reality will, over time, tend to be supplanted by those that are simply because the latter will invariably achieve better results in practice. Maoism has all but died out as a politically relevant ideology with the exception of a few frozen guerilla conflicts that have been treading water for decades never actually managing to seize state power.
Of course the degree to which such idealism manages to take root in the revolutionary movement, even if only temporarily, still matters because it can weaken revolutionary forces and delay their victory or cause them to blunder into some pretty serious setbacks. It is for this reason that COINTELPRO has tried to foster ultra left deviationism, promoting it over the ideologies that have an actual track record of success and which the bourgeois state actually fears.
But as it becomes increasingly impossible to deny the success of AES states and all of the progress and development that they are achieving, it will be harder and harder to still convince people to subscribe to these unserious and by now mostly meme ideologies. They will still exist in niche online communities but the people doing real work in the real world will have very little interest in them.
In the Maoist circles I was in, Che's Guerilla Warfare was considered mandatory reading.
It was pretty good, really inspiring honestly, though I can't speak to the universality of the tactics. I especially liked the bit where he admonished western leftists who excused lack of revolution on the presupposed indestructibility of the imperial militaries. Of course, Che did not have to face drones and robot dogs.
He does, however, make explicit note of how poor Cuban revolutionaries overthrew a military dictatorship supported by U.S. aircraft and other technologies well beyond the means of Cuban workers.
Funnily, though mandatory reading in my circle, I have seen Gonzaloite tweets come out since then denouncing Che's Guerilla Warfare as "Focoist revisionism", among other things. I do not see how becoming so enraged at a successful revolutionary giving tips on making revolution helps anyone, but ultras are a silly lot.
If i had to pick one word to describe ultras, "silly" would definitely be it.
Perhaps a little strangely, this paragraph evoked in me the memory of "All Cops Are Bastards (Including "Socialist" Ones!)" discourse I was subjected (and sometimes contributed) to in online anarchist circles.
An example of what I'm talking about
All virtue signaling and no substance beyond sloganeering. All cops means all cops! Wow, so true! The cool-ass slogan says "all cops", why wouldn't that include north Korean or Chinese cops?
As if "police" serve nearly the same function under a dictatorship of the proletariat as they do under a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The nonsense 'police protect the interests of capital and private property, that is their sole purpose'... I've heard it often from those aforementioned anarchists. Extrapolating the roles and actions of the Amerikan police onto the socialist world is just another example of the ultra (and the orientalist)'s incredible aptitude for projection.
Sorry, fellow Amerikans! The rest of the world is not so fucking savage as we are. DPRKorean police actually serve the people, you know, like law enforcement should in civilized society? Chinese police protect striking workers!
Amerikan cops are the ones murdering black folk en masse, not Chinese ones, not Iranian ones, not Korean ones, not Russian ones... take your "all cops" and shove it.
edit: (ACAB is still a good slogan tho and all Amerikan cops most certainly are, even the kindest ones)
Exactly! I could not have said it better myself.