That conclusion would be to confuse the concepts of subset with superset.

Just because some characteristic (X) is exhibited by Y does not mean that thing X is an exclusive property of Y. A cat being a mammal doesn’t mean all mammals are cats and just because MMT illustrates some mechanics of economic statecraft does not mean those mechanics are exclusive to MMT.

Keynesian economics also illustrates some useful methods of state intervention which Marxists can and have studied but that doesn’t logically follow to mean that to utilize those methods, you then need to adopt Keynesian economics. In fact, this is the same kinda of “gotcha” that Keynes used to do to “dunk” on Marxist economics: “My Keynesianism already accounts for these forms of state intervention so if you practice these forms, you’re actually doing Keynesian economics, not Marxism!”

All its valuable observations about the mechanisms of state economy can already be derived from pre-existing schools of thought, including Marxist economics as the article’s analysis shows. His assessment notes that MMT provides no special conclusions which cannot be reached through a “non-MMT” Marxist economic assessment. As the article observed, Marx himself already assessed in his own time that:

“money in capitalism has three main functions: as a measure of value; as a means of exchange; and ‘money as money’ which includes debt payments. Marx’s theorisation of money as a measure of value derives from his labour theory of value; and this is the main difference between Marx and the Chartalists/MMT supporters, who have no theory of value whatsoever. In effect, for MMT exponents, value is ignored for the primacy of money in social and economic relations.”

The basic errors of MMT are what the article attributes to its intellectual lineage from the 19th century economic theories of Proudhon, who Marx himself refuted in words that can directly be pointed against MMT, its contemporary descendant:

For Marx, ‘the doctrine that proposes tricks of circulation as a way of, on the one hand, avoiding the violent character of these social changes and on the other, of making these changes appear not to be a presupposition but gradual result of these transformations in circulation’ would be a fundamental error and misunderstanding of the reality of capitalism.

In other words, separating money from value, and indeed making money the primary force for change in capitalism, fails to recognise the reality of social relations under capitalism and production for profit. Without a theory of value, MMTers enter a fictitious economic world – one where the state can issue debt and have it converted into credits on the state account by a central bank at will and with no limit or repercussions in the real world of productive capital

To summarize, MMT’s purpose is to repackage Marx’s “measure of value” and ship it out as an “independent unit” while kicking the corresponding Marxist theory of value under the bed while exclaiming, “Eww, we don’t need that,” which is exactly what its Keynesian predecessors did. Through this, it embodies a literal half of Marxist economics with the other half cleaved off through its disdain and/or ignorance of the necessary dialectical analysis that formulated Marx’s own conception of monetary function.

In the past, the purpose of Keynesian economics was to borrow one half of Marxist economics to prevent the other half’s realization: that is, to prevent any consideration of class conscious economic analysis. Similarly, MMT plays the same role, which is both why its value to Marxists is minimal - having itself derived from Marxist thought on the measure of value - and why it is fundamentally adversarial to Marxist economics through its ignorance of the theory of value.

Through that, I will say this: if there ever comes a day where the material conditions of contemporary capitalism deteriorates to that of the mid 20th century post-Great Depression era, mechanisms along the lines of MMT will absolutely be adopted, just as FDR’s New Deal and Keynesian economics were, to prevent the alternative of socialism from being truly considered by the people. Just as that moment proved the true antagonistic and adversarial character of Keynesian economics to socialism, so too will MMT drop the “cousin to Marxist economics” act in order to shut the door to the choice of socialism.

It’s a deliberately chameleon-esque “theory” that obfuscates its Keynesian roots with the massive dollops of economic jargon that every “explanation” of the theory you’ll encounter describing it indulges in. The end result is that its incomprehensibility leads to people ascribing to it what they want it to be, slapping whatever label they want onto it - a “theory” that works like mayonnaise, something supposedly “good on anything” - for all political ideologies.

For neoliberals and soc dems, it’s the perfect bandaid for the ails of contemporary capitalism; for some leftists, it’s not only “compatible” with socialism but they’d argue that historical socialism actually “sleepwalked” through the precepts of MMT “unknowingly.” This is why you’d see some online leftists on the likes of Hexbear and Reddit who are very vocal on their support of “MMT.” Some of the other comments in this thread actually represent the typical argumentation pattern of “leftist MMT” where they travel back in time to historically backdate past socialist economic successes as “representative” of “MMT in practice.”

The “leftist” argument for MMT is therefore unfalsifiable because any historical or contemporary socialist economic policy with sovereigntist characteristics and state involvement can be appropriated and claimed as demonstrating “MMT in action, if not in name” just like how some Western Marxist historians once tried to untenably label every mildly populist historical figure from the Roman Republic like Julius Caesar as “proto-Marxist.” TL;DR, “leftist MMT” would claim it’s a DLC to classical Marxist economics when in reality, it’s the Keynesian competitor.

In practice, MMT is the modern reincarnation of the FDR New Deal snake oil, something meant to provide a backstop to the contradictions of contemporary capitalism and divert popular attention from the real alternative of socialism, just as how the original New Deal suppressed support for the socialist path. I’ve written my immense skepticism on it before but here’s a proper Marxist critique:

This brings me to the third question: what is the aim of MMT? MMT does not touch on the important issues of the failure of capitalism to deliver social needs and the underlying exploitation of the many by the few. On these questions, MMT has nothing to say, and indeed different MMTers have different views. Most, if not all MMTers (like traditional Keynesians), want governments to intervene to meet social needs. Some even support socialist measures to replace the law of value and the capitalist mode of production; others (like Kelton) don’t. Kelton even insists that is not the point of MMT. She simply wants to show that it is a myth that the state cannot run up deficits without consequences. Again, this does not seem very new or radical – nor even correct in all circumstances.

[…] Where MMT does differ from Keynesian-type fiscal deficit spending is that its proponents see government deficits as permanent in order to drive the economy up and achieve full employment of resources. In this way, the state becomes the ‘employer of last resort’. Indeed, the MMT exponents claim that unemployment can be solved within capitalism. So there is no need to change the social formations based on private capital. Politicians and economists only need only realise that state spending ‘financed’ by money creation can sustain full employment.

[…] It seems that MMT eventually just boils down to offering a theory to justify unrestricted government spending to sustain and/or restore full employment. That’s its task, and no other. This is why it attracts support in the reformist left of the labour movement. But this apparent virtue of MMT hides its much greater vice as an obstacle for real change. MMT says nothing about why there are convulsions in capitalist accumulation. It has no policy for radical change in the social structure.

This is the most telling critique of MMT: that, because it fails to recognise the capitalist sector in its macro model of the circuit of money and instead only focuses on ‘the state’ and ‘the non-state’, it can tell us nothing about why and how there are regular slumps in production and investment in modern economies.

But the answer to unemployment or the end of crises does not lie in the simple recourse of issuing money, as MMT claims. MMT ignores or hides the social relations of exploitation of labour for profit. And by selling the snake oil of MMT instead, it misleads the labour movement away from fundamental change.

https://salvage.zone/the-modern-monetary-trick/

The entryist nature of the major Communist Parties in Nepal aside, the rarity of new leftist successes beyond AES following the end of the Cold War means that the condition of Nepal shouldn’t be entirely dismissed out of hand outright, despite their lack of significant achievements following the dissolution of the armed struggle.

The country was an absolute monarchy for most of the Cold War. It slowly transitioned into a constitutional monarchy, a deal where the royals could be expected to retreat to their palace and parasitize off the public budget just like their welfare leech counterparts in Europe. Then, in 2001, their crown prince did a Romanov and went on a shooting massacre against his own family and parents in their palace, shooting the reigning king and queen. He then shot himself and his uncle became the new king. His autocratic obsession with reconsolidating monarchical institutional power stumbled against the shattered prestige of the Nepalese royalty due to this self-inflicted extermination of the royal household and this ultimately led to the complete abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of a republic in 2008.

Meanwhile, as this was happening, there was a Maoist People’s War conducted through the leadership of the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist after the government’s violent suppression of attempted land reform in the 1990s. This period of armed struggle lasted twenty years from 1996 to 2006. The concession to liberal reformers by agreeing to a bourgeois liberal republic and a constituent assembly when the Maoists had the upper hand through its control of most of the countryside broke the party’s unity and some of its founding members left afterwards who saw the party as having betrayed its goal of New Democracy. The armed wing of the Party, the People’s Liberation Army of Nepal was also disbanded and eventually integrated with the national army.

This is the major contradiction between the two major Communist Parties: CPN-UML (Unified Marxist-Leninist) and CPN-MC (Maoist Center) with the rather plentiful breakway and splinter Communist Parties, who saw the 2006-8 establishment of the bourgeois republic as a betrayal of the armed struggle and comprador parliamentarianism.

You could say that the electoralist Communist Parties are merely working within the contradictions of the times. The establishment of a true New Democracy and an official Marxist-Leninist state during the 2000s right as the United States had its full attention on the region during its “War on Terror” nearby in Afghanistan would have been unwise. Nevertheless, despite the suppression of land reform in the 1990s having been the catalyst for the Nepalese People’s War, there is still no comprehensive land reform in Nepal to this day, which can be directly attributable to the concession of the CPN-Maoists. Here is a criticism of the current “Land Bank” system, more akin to the liberal land reform of post-WW2 granted to Japan and Taiwan by the US as a concession to destroy socialist sentiment (the redistribution of land) than those of a socialist land reform (the breakdown of land relations, destruction of the landlord class and its intergenerational communal ties and power base).

Nevertheless, the difference between the Nepalese electoral entryism and that of the West’s leftists is their strong territorial control of the countryside and their military power prior to their swerve towards entryist politics which prevented the liberals in the bourgeois republic from suppressing them like what was done to the CPI in Italy and the KKE in Greece or from outright ignoring and sidelining them like what was recently done to the so-called French left coalition NPF by Macron. As such, the only way to suppress the various leftists by the liberals is through the parliamentary system itself. This original leading position in the parliamentary system has now indeed been slowly eroded with the liberal “soc-dem” Nepali Congress party ending with the most seats in the 2022 election.

Geopolitically, Nepal is the Mongolia of the Himalayas, a country between two larger ones, but even worse geographically positioned. It is near entirely on the southern side of the Himalayas, meaning that it is almost completely dependent on India as a route to the sea and as a conduit for trade. It has been subjected to regular Indian interference, especially in its southern territories which are on the Gangetic plain and whose Madhesi ethnic minority population are said to be aligned more in interests with India than Kathmandu generally. India views Nepal as essentially a second Bhutan though slightly more “unruly,” the latter being essentially an Indian client monarchy whose foreign affairs are completely dictated by New Delhi. The Indian manufactured annexation of the independent state of Sikkim right next door in 1973 has Nepal’s principal foreign policy objective being to avoid that same outcome.

In 2015, the newly elected BJP Modi government of India blockaded Nepal following a constitutional reform that, according to it, disfavored the Madhesi ethnic minority. India was outraged because its appropriation of ethnic minority constituencies was how it had been able to annex Sikkim and this reform weakened its ability to repeat it in Nepal if it ever wanted to utilize the option. India then froze fuel and goods imports into Nepal, demanding that the constitution include clauses of self-determination and an autonomous territory for the Madhesi. This had the potential of a humanitarian disaster in the making as Nepal had just suffered an earthquake earlier in the year and it relied on fuel imports through India for heating in the winter months. It was at this point that Modi’s India outplayed its hand and Nepal reached out to China. Nepal agreed to the construction of a railway linking Kathmandu to China’s national rail system with China’s rail gauge as a result of this blackmail. Nevertheless, a near decade long bureaucratic stalling has delayed the railway negotiations and construction which still continues to the present day. It was only in July of this year that an agreement was finally signed. As such, over 64% of Nepalese imports come from India and only 13% from China as of 2022, meaning that Nepal is still deeply dependent on India. It also recently signed during the Trump period the US State Department aid program, the Millennium Challenge Compact, as it allows for US infiltration of Nepal against China in the New Cold War.

This external dynamic has a sizeable dampening influence on the internal willingness of Nepal’s Communist Parties to pursue more significant socialist reforms such as comprehensive land reform.

The comical thing about this rag is that it is so consistent in its cheerleading agenda for Western imperialism and chauvinism since its creation in the early 19th century that both Marx and Lenin dunked on it.

“Having stood forward as one of the staunchest apologists of the late invasion of China” is how Karl Marx himself described “that eminent organ of British Free Trade, the London Economist” back in October 1858 regarding its support for the First Opium War. In October 1859, following the Anglo-French naval bombing of the city of Guangzhou during the 1857 Battle of Canton in the Second Opium War, Marx wrote “The Economist, which had distinguished itself by its fervent apology for the Canton bombardment” Over a hundred and sixty years since then, this rag has been just as anti-China today as it was back in Marx’s time. Back then, it was the apologist of British “free trade,” the pretext for both the Opium Wars it supported (along with supporting the Confederacy), now that the tables have turned, the “free trade” magazine’s cover illustrations now depict Chinese EV exports as akin to bombarding the Earth like a meteor shower.

This closure is referring to the Economist’s “Chaguan” column, penned by a single author in Beijing yellowface-cosplaying under that Chinese column name. It was analyzed in a January 2024 King’s College London report as having not a single “clearly positive” story on China despite that this journalist “travels extensively in China to produce his reports, and on-the-ground anecdotes are a strong feature”:

Another source of influential reporting on China is The Economist’s Chaguan column, launched in September 2018. It takes up one page of the print version of the newspaper (in the region of 1,000 words per article), and appears most weeks (The Economist is a weekly publication). Chaguan is written solely by one journalist, David Rennie, who is based in Beijing. […] given that this period covered the COVID-19 pandemic in China, there were numerous reports on public health (12 in total) – particularly in 2020 (the first year of COVID) and again in 2022, when China’s COVID policy faced several challenges; when China was doing better than other countries in managing COVID, it was treated less by Chaguan and the media generally. Our framing analysis identified negative coverage in 84 per cent of Chaguan’s columns, with only four reports (1.5 per cent) being coded neutral-to-positive (and none clearly positive).

[…] Chaguan echoes the practice of other media in consistently repeating and emphasising particular terms or images of China, many of which are negative. For example, when discussing the economy, China’s economic behaviour towards foreign firms or governments is often described as ‘bullying’ or ‘threatening’. The use of negative terms is most common in reports on politics. Frequent keywords used in reports on Chinese domestic politics include ‘authoritarian’/‘authority’/‘autocracy’, ‘censorship’/ ‘controlling’/‘surveillance’, ‘irresponsible’ and ‘violate’/‘limit human rights’. Keywords regarding China’s foreign relations include authoritarian/autocratic, bully/cheat/harass, aggressive/reckless and blame/accuse foreign countries. These words directly define the nature of China or its behaviour as negative, and their frequent appearance in political coverage creates their links to Chinese politics, subliminally transforming the framework constructed by the media into the reader’s own perception. This constitutes a normalisation of a strongly negative picture of China’s politics.

The way that Hong Kong or Xinjiang are referred to across all of these media outlets reinforces this pattern. These two places, and the central government’s policies towards them, have become media bywords for repression and authoritarianism. They are frequently mentioned in passing in reports on topics that are not related to either place, in a way that frames China negatively: a template to plug into any story that needs evidence for Chinese ‘repression’, even if that story does not relate either to Hong Kong or Xinjiang.

Summers, Tim. 2024. “Shaping the policy debate: How the British media presents China.” King’s College London.

Edit: Also just found out that this particular journalist is the son of a MI6 director, John Rennie. His brother was caught in the Hong Kong heroin trade which caused their father to resign from MI6. The fact that the Economist chose a literal MI6 failson as their “Beijing bureau chief” and that the son of Britain’s top spy was permitted and trusted to “travel extensively” in the country at all and LARP as a “journalist” for six years is an excessive tolerance by the Chinese government and sinks whatever sob story they spun about being finally being shown the door.

The truth is that, when it comes down to it, the debates about the numbers, the optics and the moralizing that the Western narrative revolves around, and which MLs since have poured ink doing “damage control” for, are fundamentally irrelevant. The only question at all for ML discourse between MLs is that, when it comes down to it, does the Party and the People have the duty and the resolve to defend the revolution by all means from genuine counter-revolution. A principled position was already given just a few months after the defeat of the counter-revolution and it remains the most well articulated to this day.

[…] The facts are that in Beijing not all the guns were fired by the soldiers. In Tienanmen Square the army negotiated with the students and a majority of the latter decided to leave of their own accord. But the criminal counter-revolutionary elements, who were in charge and bent upon over-throwing the socialist system, were by no means agreeable to such an outcome. They tried forcibly to prevent ordinary students from leaving. They instigated and indulged in wanton violence against the soldiery.

When it became absolutely clear that this criminal coteries would accept no other resolution of the problem than the complete overthrow of the socialist system and its replacement by capitalism, that to achieve this nefarious end the conspirators were prepared to kill, burn and loot, to practise thuggery and intimidation, the Chinese Government and the army decided to take resolute action. It would have been a criminal dereliction of duty in such grave circumstance for the Government and the army not to have resorted to the use of force. In fact, should we not accuse the Chinese Government and the army of not having acted resolutely early enough? Should we not accuse them of showing patience for far too long? Should we not accuse the Chinese authorities of tolerating the presence in Beijing and elsewhere of hundreds of bourgeois journalists, who acted as cheerleaders for the criminal conspirators in Beijing in flagrant disregard of Chinese law?

The Chinese people achieved the liberation from imperialism in 1949 after a long and arduous struggle. During the course of this struggle millions of Chinese people perished and many more suffered extreme hardship. After liberation they completed the democratic task of the revolution and under the leadership of the CPC, the vanguard of the Chinese working class, they went on to begin the construction of socialism. They have made untold sacrifices and suffered much in order to reach the present stage of affairs when no Chinese dies of hunger, there is no illiteracy, there is basic health care available to everyone, and last but not least, China is no longer a pushover for imperialism. It is no longer possible for the imperialist powers to wage opium wars against China or to sack Nanking or Beijing.

Having reached this state of affairs, the Chinese people, with their long revolutionary traditions, the history of their struggle and sacrifice, are not lightly going to let a few thousand criminal elements, albeit with strong connections with international imperialism, overthrow the socialist system. The People’s Liberation Army is a guarantee of that: it is the cutting edge of the dictatorship of the proletariat in China and if this causes outrage among imperialist circles, their hired hacks and their ideologues, the Chinese people can afford to treat it with the contempt such outrage deserves. If the resolute actions of the Chinese Government and the PLA sent petty-bourgeois ‘socialists’ - the Trotskyists and the Euros and even some would-be Marxist Leninists - into a stat of paroxysm, this only goes to show that at every critical juncture in the development of the revolutionary movement the world over, during every major crisis, our petty bourgeois socialists are as unfailingly bound to support the imperialist bourgeoisie as they are to stab the working-class and the national liberation movements in the back. […]

[…] It is for this reason, and being guided solely by the interests of the proletariat, that we unhesitatingly support the suppression by the PLA of the counterrevolutionary rebellion in Tienanmen Square. It is for this reason that we denounce and oppose the sanctions and pressure being sought to be put on the Chinese government by US Imperialism and its junior partners.

• Harpal Brar, Chinese Counter-Revolution Crushed. August/September 1989.

The real takeaway lesson, both for modern AES and all MLs in general, is whether they take the words of Engels’ On Authority seriously, as the CPC did in 1989:

“A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is. It is the act by which one part of the population imposes its will on the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannons — by the most authoritarian means possible; and the victors, if they do not want to have fought in vain, must maintain this rule by means of the terror which their arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if the communards had not used the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach them for not having used it enough?”

There’s too many fellow travellers here for them to see the point you’re trying to make, some people in the West resist the New Cold War not out of any moral or principled anti-imperialist reasons but principally a selfish self-preservational fear from a potential MAD scenario they have floating in their heads.

We’ve been through all this before. Back in the 1980s, you had some Western “leftists” too busy celebrating over the supposed European nuclear disarmament through the “Zero Option” scam that Reagan pitched to Gorbachev to see the capitulation to imperialist hegemony that Gorbachev represented. There was a rather disgusting, though largely unserious at first, struggle session over on Hexbear a while back where they debated whether China should “bother” launching its second strike if the US suddenly launches a first strike against it. “Yes, 1.4 billion people will be murdered, 1/5th of the human race exterminated, but since things are already too late, China should prevent the loss of ‘more lives’ and let bygones be bygones.” I’m sure they thought writing a few articles in Monthly Review afterwards condemning this nuclear holocaust would be a balanced recompense for this fantasy genocide scenario. You don’t need enemies with “comrades” like these.

All these nonsense stories about Ukrainian “dirty nukes” or NATO escalatory gimmicks, that tries to make it seem like the Western leadership is more like the fictional General Ripper rather than the chicken-hawk it really is, obfuscates the fact that Russian nuclear superiority, particularly its still-active Perimeter program will always ensure that there is always a bottom line the West will avoid stepping on. China has completely bypassed the nuclear unilateralism nonsense that gripped the USSR, having rejected so far all Western attempts to shackle it to “trilateral arms agreements” (where the West combines its stockpile with Russia’s against their own) when it still has not reached nuclear parity. The material conditions of a contemporary arms race are different from the first Cold War in that China’s industrial capacity can afford it to outcompete the West in a nuclear buildup when this had once been an active US strategy to drain the Soviet budget.

The difference in the treatment of Libya and the DPRK, the first having drawn back from its nuclear program and the latter having heroically ensured its sovereignty through a mere modest nuclear capacity is plain to see for anyone in the Global South.

A perspective that I’ve personally come to adopt is to dialectically consider the Ukraine conflict through the lens of a “Soviet or post-Soviet civil war.” This assessment acknowledges, for one, that the ongoing conflict is embedded within the broader paradigm of the Cold War, which has persisted since 1945, experiencing periods of (what can now be seen as) mere “detente” in the 1990s and 2000s. Much like the extended decade long pauses seen in the historical “Hundred Year’s War” did not prevent that from being classified as “one” war, I believe future historical assessments may categorize the contemporary period as a continuation of a singular Cold War narrative, rather than distinct “old” and “new” Cold Wars as commonly discussed today.

The significance of this perspective is that it once again reinforces the sheer catastrophe that is the collapse of the USSR, a perpetually relevant historical lesson for all surviving AES states and MLs today. I distinctly remember that, back when the conflict escalated in 2022, there was a post on r/genzedong (which I can no longer find) that showcased street interviews of people in Moscow during (likely) the failed August 1991 intervention where one interviewee in the video presciently predicted there would be conflict between the newly separated nation states of Russia and Ukraine over Crimea.

In such a sense, the fact that there is now a Russo-Ukrainian conflict at all and to have it develop into a proxy war by NATO is the, in full frankness, undeniable victory of US hegemony within the macroscopic historical perspective. This is near entirely forgotten these days, but during the 20th century phase of the Cold War, it seemed inevitable that a NATO-Russia conflict would break out. This was not meant to be in Ukraine, of course, but Germany and specifically over Berlin. NATO has moved this war that was supposedly bound to occur in the middle of Europe all the way into the heartland of the USSR, furthermore subverting the former Warsaw Pact countries into its most fervent belligerents.

This US achievement must be recognized as it highlights that this is Russia’s defeat in the sense that its leaders since Khrushchev have failed to appreciate the unchangingly permanent material conditions underlying US-NATO antagonism towards the pole of regional power which the USSR and Russia represents. Their utter idealism led to fantasies that such antagonism could be massaged or overcome through “peaceful coexistence” and then outright capitulation. Through this, the clash between the two was ultimately merely moved a thousand miles eastward and the immense scale of the Soviet surrender just buying two decades of detente as NATO swallowed up the former socialist states between West Germany and Moscow.

However, this does not mean that the escalation of the Ukraine conflict itself by Russia in 2022 is some geopolitical victory for US hegemony, however, rather than a colossal blunder by the geopolitically mediocre benchwarmer Biden presidency. To put it metaphorically, this is akin to having scammed someone of their own house and property and just as you were about to scam them of the very last clothes off their back, they finally wise up and sock you in the jaw. Yes, you still managed to take their house from them, but they ideally weren’t supposed to wise up at all nor give you a distracting broken jaw right before you were planning to move on and pick that next fight across the city in the Asian neighborhood.

It’s not just a theory, this is literally what happened to ZAUM and Disco Elysium. The most outwardly leftist studio was destroyed in the most obscene way by capital.

It is true, in a plainly quantitative sense of body counting, that the barrage of disease unleashed by the Europeans among the so-called “virgin soil” populations of the Americas caused more deaths than any other single force of destruction. However, by focusing almost entirely on disease, by displacing responsibility for the mass killing onto an army of invading microbes, contemporary authors increasingly have created the impression that the eradication of those tens of millions of people was inadvertent - a sad, but both inevitable and “unintended consequence” of human migration and progress. This is a modern version of what Alexander Saxton recently has described as the “soft side of anti-Indian racism” that emerged in America in the nineteenth century and that incorporated “expressions of regret over the fate of Indians into narratives that traced the inevitability of their extinction. Ideologically,” Saxton adds, “the effect was to exonerate individuals, parties, nations, of any moral blame for what history had decreed.” In fact, however, the near-total destruction of the Western Hemisphere’s native people was neither inadvertent nor inevitable.

From almost the instant of first human contact between Europe and the Americas firestorms of microbial pestilence and purposeful genocide began laying waste the American natives. Although at times operating independently, for most of the long centuries of devastation that followed 1492, disease and genocide were interdependent forces acting dynamically - whipsawing their victims between plague and violence, each one feeding upon the other, and together driving countless numbers of entire ancient societies to the brink - and often over the brink - of total extermination.

Stannard, D.E. 1992. “American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World.” Oxford University Press.

I should add that the “legitimacy” narrative still very much exists to the present day in the Western discourse throughout the propaganda in the media and in academic works on contemporary socialist states. It’s like shining a UV light on a shoddy roadside hotel room in that once you recognize the narrative utility, you start to see it everywhere like an ooze. It’s particularly evident in coverage of China and Vietnam, through less so with the DPRK and Cuba because the economic warfare against the latter two states has encouraged their governments to actively emphasize the inherent value of socialism against the (historically nihilistic) logic of the “legitimacy” narrative. This Western propagated narrative festered across socialist states in the late 20th century and drove those states to the decisions of pursuing IMF loans and neoliberal Chicago school shock therapy which brought about capitalist restoration and the progress of Cuba and the DPRK in maintaining socialism in spite of their externally-induced economic hardships is a positive step to countering the narrative.

To summarize, “legitimacy” is one of those irregular verbs in the Western dictionary: “You seek continual legitimacy but I have a perpetual, unquestionable right to rule.” The concept never applies to the Western capitalist structure even with the routine collective generational economic trauma inflicted from the boom-bust “business cycles.” Japan has now gone through three “lost decades” of stagnating GDP per capita and yet its socioeconomic condition will never be discussed in the narrative framework of “legitimacy” for obvious reasons, whereas every single fiscal quarter of perceived lackluster economic performance in China and Vietnam brings about endless citations of this narrative like clockwork.

The real underlying answer is that socialist governments bought into the Western propaganda narrative of “legitimacy.” This is where, if socialist governance fails to deliver economic growth, it loses its “legitimacy” and should then be overthrown in favor of capitalist restoration.

Socialism, therefore, is not seen of intrinsic value in of itself, nor are the socioeconomic achievements and benefits of a socialist society recognized. The “purpose” of socialism is solely for delivering and maintaining perpetual economic prosperity agnostic of externally suppressive economic pressures. This is due to the cyclical nature of 1) socialist governance buying into the need for “legitimacy,” 2) pursuing “legitimacy,” 3) creating public cognizance in their population on the idea of “legitimacy” - and 4) then setting their own population’s expectations on the necessity for their governments to maintain this “legitimacy or else …” approach - which then further 5) reinforces the narrative of “legitimacy” for socialist governments.

Meanwhile, all of this happens as Western propaganda further eggs on the narrative through channels like Radio Free Europe which expands the class of capitalist restoration comprador aspirants in those socialist states.

The 80s were a time of international economic headwinds through the export of the fallout of Reaganomics to the global economy. This caused economic crises most famously in places like Japan, but even though the rest of the world was going into the shitter through the American weaponization of their financial hegemony under Reagan to rescue their own domestic economy, socialist governments weren’t “permitted” to stumble themselves, even though everyone else was, through the buying in of the “legitimacy” narrative.

Governments in the Warsaw Pact and Yugoslavia then, through desperation in maintaining “legitimacy,” approached the IMF with its poison pill loans and structural adjustment program austerity mandates. Because the conditions of these loans were purposely designed to sabotage socialist societal stability, this then further exacerbated the economic stagnation such that eventually the socialist governments fell victim to the appeal of pursuing the ultimate Western poison pill - shock therapy - which led to the collapse of these socialist states.

The result was that, rather than being overthrown by the collective people as Western propaganda had fantasized, these governments voluntarily, and unilaterally, committed suicide due to the idea that they, and the entirety of socialism, had “lost legitimacy” and the only remedy to this being full-on capitalist restoration.

The diminishment of Yuri Gagarin’s historic achievement as “no big deal” by the usual suspects will always be hilarious because it’s one cope against the achievement of a man who is destined to be vindicated in the course of the future.

In the far future, whether that’s when the human colonies of Mars declare independence from Earth and or eons later when humanity, if ever, reaches systems like Alpha Centauri, when they teach human history, frankly, they won’t give a shit about Armstrong who stepped on the Earth’s moon (oh excuse me, I forgot the proper spin: the “first to step on another ‘celestial object’”).

The one human from Earth that will matter, perhaps the only one that will matter at all, to those humans who will be so far distanced from humanity’s homeworld will be that person who first entered space, setting off the teleological historical narrative to the context of the journey to their extraterrestrial homes.

That one individual is Yuri Gagarin and it’s both profound to realize and empowering to think that while the entire weight of the contemporary West’s academic, political and intellectual classes might be arrayed to downplay the achievement of the first human to reach outer space as accomplished by the collective hands of the USSR, this is one struggle despite all their teeth gnashing that they will never win, will never be able to take away from socialist achievement and that, as sure as anyone can be, he will be commemorated long after perhaps any other human from this planet.

Pretty momentous occasion as far as UNSC affairs go. This is the infamous March resolution that has been renewing the sanctions supervisory regime that was first implemented in 2014 and renewed every spring since. This year’s would have been the 10 year anniversary of it and having it squashed by Russia and abstained by China is a positive step towards drawing back from a long cooperation with the West on this matter and a necessary preliminary move to re-legitimize any re-establishment of economic relations with the DPRK.

Her biggest accomplishment is paying homage to Mao with a kowtow when she fell down the stairs of the Great Hall of the People. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Evr9IJCUUAEbGzR.jpg

That there is, but there is also no rule that denies the capacity of any non-ML struggle from achieving good or combating imperialism and the philosophical distinction I gave above were made precisely for those groups.

Personally, I view those groups as fellow travellers and not as comrades. For me, the only distinction between those two terms being that we can both talk about the destination down the road we’re heading to, but I will tune you out if you start talking about how we should be riding donkeys rather than driving the EV.

Until world communism has been achieved, there’s no simple “choice” between nationalism or internationalism, even then there will be new problems in the new world order.

Fair enough.

I’ll also add that “nationalism” is one of those spooky words the West likes to trot out to beat the Global South with simply on the premise that because Western nationalism was an absolute clusterfuck (and here they’ll usually point to the “nationalism as reason for WWI and WWII so it must be bad” gimmick which is agnostic of the Marxist discourse on the role of capital and imperialism in those wars), it must mean that Global South nationalism must transitively be bad as well.

Similar to how Western sexpats post pictures on Reddit of Buddhist swastikas trinkets in Asian flea markets and the comments use it as a sign that Asians don’t care about the Holocaust. Yes, places like Modi’s India show that Global South currents of nationalism can be warped into profound fascism and cultural chauvinism, but this should not be seen as the prima facie character of Global South nationalism, particularly for AES states.

In essence, nationalism in the Global South operates on a different register from how it is seen in the West and this distinction should not fail to be appreciated. The reason why the West itself downplays nationalism is because the entire bloc is now more or less subordinated to American hegemony not unlike how their propaganda once portrayed Comintern/Cominform Internationalism. Countries with flare-ups of nationalistic (or “patriotic”) state character like right-wing Hungary interfere with the ease of coordination to Washington directives and thus are a distinctly problem child for US state interests, which is why nationalist currents are generally suppressed today in the West.

The truth is that there’s some straight up freaks that pose as MLs and the unfortunate thing about the marginalization of the left in the non-AES world and the need for leftist “unity” is that we have to suffer their presence in our discourse. It’s been the state of things back when the USSR still endured and it’s still the case today as seen with “ML” takes on China.

I remember reading Keeran and Kenny’s work on the dissolution of the USSR, how the capitalist restoration led the greatest humanitarian disaster since the Second World War, still ongoing today through legacy conflicts like Ukraine. K&K observed how some sociopathic Western “MLs” actually celebrated its collapse at the time because “now that the USSR was gone, real socialism could finally begin.”

Xi’s seeming belief in supernatural forces.

And of course, we all know the most supernatural force of all is the eternal science of Marxism-Leninism 😎

The initial book that radicalized me as a early teenager was reading Victor Malarek’s “The Natashas: Inside the New Global Sex Trade” precisely on the massive wave of human trafficking that arose from the former USSR and Eastern Europe through the economic genocide enacted on the former Socialist peoples.

The work was such a categorical denunciation of the living conditions of that region since the 90s, not through any ideologically-inclined argument but through its coverage of this atrocity that it was impossible for me to ever accept afterwards that the collapse of the “enemy” system was a “good thing” worth celebrating. At that point, it didn’t matter how many redditors came up to me with their “my friend’s neighbor’s grand-uncle had a bad time under communism” bit and the libertarian emphasis on legalizing the sex trade alienated me at a fundamental level from those groups as well, even before I remotely touched any theory or met any comrade groups.