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Roland Boer is a superb Marxist scholar.
I recommend his works “Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance” and “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: A Guide for Foreigners.”. The first is a fantastic overview of the theoretical bases of actually existing Socialism within Marx, Engels and Lenin; an primer on socialist governance in the USSR, DPRK and China; capping it off with a case study evaluation of Chinese socialist governance in response to Hong Kong and Xinjiang. In the second book, he provides a comprehensive overview of every major facet of Chinese socialist philosophy.
His evaluation of the material conditions that led to the 2019 Hong Kong protests is exceptionally cogent and cuts through the noise of Western ideological takes that clogged coverage on the issue. The precipitating problem wasn’t that there was too much “Communist China” in Hong Kong, but, quite oppositely, that there wasn’t enough of it, through the “One Country Two Systems” policy that essentially keeps Hong Kong in a hyper-capitalist time capsule unable to benefit from China’s socialist governance through the obligations of the Sino-British Joint Declaration:
To sum up: the development of oligopoly capitalism, financialisation, and capitalist globalisation; sluggish economic growth, stagnation, and then decline from early 2018; extreme economic polarisation, astronomical housing costs, and a city full of the poor and homeless; and very limited opportunities for young people who stayed in the city. It is a surprise that the unrest, riots, and violence of 2019–2020 did not erupt sooner.
The reality is that we still exist in the nightmare pangs of a world where the failsons of the past 500 years of imperialism and genocide strut around acting like the moral leaders of the planet. You enter into a sort of mental paralysis despair spiral when you read about the atrocities committed by those who built this western “civilization” through the genocide of the New World, the subjugation of the entire planet and see the chauvinism and nonchalance of how this west conducts itself today.
There has never been such a degree of inhumanity as what followed when the west got its grubby little hands on gunpowder and the compass and to have them now hide the butcher’s knife behind their back and act the saint today, gloatingly prancing about like peacocks about being the “first world,” one built with the inherited loot of 5 centuries of imperialism, gives you a wrenching dissonance at the Kafkaesque parody of a world “order” we now inhabit.
The most farcical aspect of this is that we of the West are the most filial children this species has ever produced. The institutional propaganda purpose of western academia and all those prestigious University Presses in terms of the humanities is to print out endless slop degrading the historical past of designated enemy nations and lionizing our own. It’s viewed as a great triumph to see designated enemy nations so self-conscious in casting down their forefathers as Khruschev did to Stalin and as feckless diaspora reactionaries fantasize about doing to Fidel and Mao.
Meanwhile, the 2020 BLM protests showed how the west would fight tooth and nail to defend every single inch of the historical pantheon of slave owning founding fathers and colonizers. A few like Robert E Lee were (grudgingly) cast down (sporadically) as a concession, but any wider challenge against the likes of Washington, Jefferson, the 19th century Oxbridge imperialism-abbetting dons and even a freak like Rhodes were slapped down. This is what all the pearl-clutching around the statues and the paintings and the named buildings were really about at its core.
This cognitive battle for historical memory is the bedrock of contemporary western chauvinism. The aim is to ensure that only the history of the west is worth being proud of. In the former socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the educational curriculum drills in the historical shame of the socialist half-century, ensuring that the people will always feel wretched about their socialist past while the west still gets to parade around Cold War war criminal Presidents, Prime Ministers and Chancellors as their heroes “with flaws.” The end result is that the past of former socialist states today is a blank nihilistic void with nothing of dignity to draw upon except going back centuries to fawn over inbred royalty or those Nazi-collaborationist freaks who terrorized their forefathers for their choice of socialism or just outright Westanbetung.
In the former DDR, it’s no surprise that the choice has become the far-right AfD. In this societal self-flagellation where the “Stasi” past is denounced, there’s not even some “post-Nazism redemption story” to grasp, like the fiction which the BRD parades around, because the socialist past is consigned to oblivion, equated almost on par with Hitler-fascism. Consequently, the only source of historical self-worth for many then can only inevitably come from LARPing as generic white people and importing American far-right and neo-Nazism as mimicry, vicariously associating with “Europe” and “the West” for that sense of post-socialist Europe pride that comes from being patted on the shoulder as being “semi-white” and “semi-European,” which has become the principal aspiration for those people.
The mental colonization that this represents is so pervasive that MLs are no exception to falling into this trap of helping to aggrandize western memory and denounce that of the designated enemies. In the nihilistic despair of the 90s and early 00s, Michael Parenti would praise Julius Caesar as a “hero for his time” for his cynical appropriation of Roman populism and yet condemned Deng Xiaoping in a fit of western Marxist paranoia. His example shows how easy it is for absolutely anyone to fall into this well worn groove and “cognitive comfort” that comes from accepting the western narrative of all things.
This is the cognitive dimension of why western hegemony is the primary contradiction of the contemporary world and must be recognized as such. Such a recognition accepts, and will never let go, of the historical fact of the west’s 500 year past of savagery. It steadfastly refuses the west’s song and dance at propagating historical nihilism (as Chinese comrades have fittingly coined) to the populace of its designated enemies while simultaneously patting itself on the back for being the failsons of war criminals and colonizing butchers. To awaken to this truth is a form of cognitive liberation, a moment of clarity that pulls the wool from one’s eyes. Even within the fragmented landscape of contemporary western “Marxism,” individuals in the suffocating midst of the imperial core can contribute to this principled stance.