“Comrades, come rally! The last fight let us face! The Internationale unites the human race!”
Comrades, after a bit of digestion, I think this should be promulgated and publicized, if at least for discussion purposes.
The international Communist movement is not in good shape. We are facing the combined crisis of failed revolutions, liberal subversion, aging parties, and mounting fascism, and traditional Communist praxis no longer offers a solution to the need for a global socialist revolution.
To solve these crises, I introduce the notion of Dengist revolution and Communist Zaibatsu as a solution, using Party-owned industrial cooperatives as a mechanism for global Communist subversion, with the end goal of abolishing capitalism simply by out-competing the capitalists and ultimately buying them out.
As for replacement Praxis, I suggest embracing Stakhanovitism, looking to encourage existing Communist parties to go into business, as well as for new start-ups to seek a worker cooperative model and aim to be party-owned.
Examples to learn from would be the Japanese Communist Party’s influential newspaper, which earns the JCP 110 million USD a year, Mondragon, a European industrial cooperative with more than 60,000 workers, Haier, a Chinese SOE known for its radical organizational structure and exceptional growth, and Huawei, technically a worker’s cooperative but generally so successful that the United States levied sanctions on it.
Here are the problems of existing Communist praxis.
The Soviet Union has fallen, and the Chinese have gone Dengist. There is no longer a serious and viable base of Actually Existing Socialism to support, nor can the Soviets continue to fund foreign Communist Parties.
Consequently, Communist parties are no longer vibrant and powerful in much of the world. Worker’s revolution simply does not succeed; most parties are in incipient stages globally, and are essentially doomed to stillbirth.
Illegal action, as with the Japanese Red Army, or the Japanese Red Army faction may make the news for a couple of years, but the forces of reaction generally track down the members, then jail or kill them.
Unionizing action, in much of the world, simply does not get that far, and it can easily be subverted by social democracy increasing government subsidies and protections to workers.
The electoral strategy does not work. The actual Communist Parties with electoral dominance got their way through an insurgency (the Nepalese), or simply by being there after the fall of the Soviet Union (the Mongolians).
The Japanese Communist Party, as an example, is graying and aging, and its representation in the Japanese Diet is on a long-term decline.
The remaining two options are either to wait for the downfall of capitalism on its own accord (late-stage capitalism theory), or to hope the Chinese somehow bail Communism out.
The problem with the former option is that due to bourgeois control of bourgeois democracy, the degeneration of capitalism sees the rise of far-right parties (as in France, Germany, Italy), right-wing populists (the United States), and the terminal stage of capitalism is fascism, which often does a good job of suppressing Communist movements.
Praying to the Communist Party of China is fraught with its own risks. First, the Communist Party of China may not succeed. There are Western rumors that they managed to subvert the Chinese defense minister, there is strong Sinophobia in the West, the Chinese state and corporate sector is saddled with high levels of debt (around 120% of GDP in each, whereas 100% usually sets off alarm bells in capitalist democracies), and the Chinese are threatened by the most powerful and advanced military force on the planet.
Second, there is no guarantee that the CPC will bail you out. While the CPC claims to be Marxist, it has already embraced capitalism in the sense of Dengist reforms, and it’s always had nationalist memetics.
Even if the Chinese win, you are not guaranteed that the Chinese, seeing the wreck of the West, won’t behave in the same way as the Americans did to the fallen Soviet Union, and through malign neglect, allow the West to fester in fascism.
If the Chinese aren’t guaranteed to save us from capitalism, what options do we still have?
Here is where I introduce the concept of Communist Zaibatsu and the Dengist Revolution, exhorting Western and international Communist parties to follow the CPC’s lead in developing a modern, competitive, and powerful Communist nation-state.
The incredible thing is, you don’t even need to seize the means of production, whether electorally or through other means.
To begin with, one oft-overlooked fact is how ridiculously rich the CPC is. The total level of assets managed by the Chinese central government and the localities is around the level of 40 trillion USD.
You heard right, the Communist Party of China owns 40 trillion dollars worth of stocks and companies.
The richest Communist Party in the West, the Japanese Communist Party, owns only 1.1 billion worth of companies, mainly its newspaper.
The total market capitalization of the New York Stock Exchange is only about 45 trillion. The total net wealth of all of America, haute bourgeoisie, petites, and workers alike, comes up to 120 trillion.
What I am exhorting you to do, then, is to make your own Communist parties rich. The essence of Dengist revolution, as opposed to Maoist (Protracted People’s War) and Leninist (a coup against a weakened moderate state), is to control the means of production through capitalist mechanisms.
That is to say, if the wealth of Communist Parties in the West were a substantial percentage of total privately held wealth, Communist Parties could employ the exact same means bourgeois individuals and entities use to influence the levers of power.
This would allow Communist Parties to gradually manipulate the political system to favor their own firms, allowing further expansion of the co-op / party-owned enterprise model, with a goal of eventually just buying out some of the remaining capitalists and abolishing the rest.
The goal is that in 20 years, the POE sector of various Western countries comprises 1% of total production, in 30 years, 10%, and in 40 years, we will have abolished capitalism from the inside.
What then, are the means?
partial post (will get back to this later, but:
-Generate worker cooperatives that are substantially party owned to outcompete existing capitalist firms
-Most of the details would be in how to obtain market advantage and start outcompeting Porky
-As well as keeping the firms Marxist, where “unfair labor practices” are acceptable, where they are not
-How to design a socialist economy inside of a capitalist one
-How much it would cost for Communist parties to attempt such a project, what potential funding sources may be, etc
-Actual praxis of existing Communist workers)
I’ve never said anything about having the right people in charge; this post is about a change in strategy and methods.
I also don’t think I’ve jettisoned the idea of class struggle because the idea of using industrial cooperatives that are also party-owned means that such enterprises are essentially proletarian and proletarian controlled in character, but it moves class struggle from the social and political environment to the economic marketplace.
Destroy Porky’s market share. Kill bourgeois profits. Different mindset, different mechanisms.