How are the central government tools of same West that has been funding, arming and backing the TPLF (which by the way started the conflict and has been committing most of the massacres)? Maybe at one point the West were hopeful for the new government being yet another one of their puppets and tried pre-emptively bribing them with awards, but it is clear they have long since turned on them. And please tell me when has Balkanization ever benefited a country?
This is just more divide and conquer by the imperialists. If Ethiopia is fractured along ethnic lines like Yugoslavia the result will be equally disastrous, devastating for the economy, triggering decades of conflict and ending with a bunch of Western puppet regimes/military bases like the Balkan pseudo-statelets surrounding and choking the core of the old multi-ethnic state to ensure it never re-constitutes itself.
Currently Ethiopia is big enough to be a significant regional power and a great economic partner for China in the region, hence why the US wants to destroy it or bring back the divisive and totally US subservient TPLF to power. A strong central government in this case is a good thing, it means less chances for the US to drive a wedge between the regions, playing them off against each other and weakening the country as a whole.
There is not and there will never be a legitimate reason to break up Ethiopia, it is the only African country whose borders are (mostly… the European colonialists still managed to steal their coastline and turn it into protectorates and colonies that they could control) not a result of European colonialism. It is one of the only non-artificially constructed states on the continent with a history going back more than a thousand years.
The Chinese MFA has also posted this same piece on its website: https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjbxw/202303/t20230329_11050809.html
Along with another good one: https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjbxw/202303/t20230320_11044481.html
In addition China has released this comprehensive report on the deplorable state of human rights in the US: http://ge.china-embassy.gov.cn/eng/xwdt/202303/t20230328_11050361.htm
And of course remember the famous report on US hegemony: https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjbxw/202302/t20230220_11027664.html
They have definitely been getting more vocal about exposing the US’s hypocrisy lately and i am loving it.
However many they had at the beginning of this year, they will start having a whole lot more now after the Xi-Putin meeting where i am almost certain that unofficially they discussed military technology transfer from Russia to China in particular in fields like hypersonic missiles, air defense and submarines where China is comparatively lagging behind.
For what it’s worth, Lenin calls the “Glass of Water” theory “completely un-Marxist”: https://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1920/lenin/zetkin1.htm
I think he comes off as a bit of a prude in this. Maybe Kollontai sometimes goes a little too far but on the whole I think she has a much more progressive position on the topic of sex than Lenin does.
I don’t think MLMs would have been familiar with Narodnik literature, it would have been way before their time and far too niche a subject to become widely known about outside of Russia. Also i get the impression that they didn’t really read all that much, otherwise they would have read Lenin’s scathing critiques of that sort of utopian peasant socialism.
Now personally i tend to be more sympathetic toward the Narodniks than i am toward MLMs because at least back then you could argue they didn’t know better. Leninism didn’t exist yet, and in a way they were an important precursor to Russian communism. Even Lenin’s brother i believe was associated with them.
Lenin and other like-minded Russian revolutionaries ended up embracing Marxism and scientific socialism after analyzing and coming to terms with why the Narodniks failed. It was an important learning experience. The problem with MLMs is that they don’t learn from past mistakes, they are too dogmatic, refuse to adapt and instead keep reinforcing failure.
They, like the Narodniks before them, have more in common with anarchists than with Marxist socialists.
It’s already being used to further attack and dehumanize trans people. We are now firmly in an equivalent to the satanic panic of the 1980s.
Where are all the human rights organizations that love to bash non-Western countries now that entire states are becoming physically unsafe for trans people? Not to mention the regular occurrence of mass shootings that everyone for some reason has gotten used to as the new normal? If this was happening in Russia or China we would never hear the end of it.
American society has become psychopathic. The Marxist concept of alienation isn’t just academic/theoretical, it does real world harm!
The reactionary segment of the peasantry maybe? Lenin pointed out that the peasantry unlike the proletariat was not inherently a progressive class and thus needed proletarian leadership. The closest comparison i can think of considering the very ideologically confused nature of the Khmer Rouge: they remind me of the Russian Narodniks of the late 19th century. Democratic Kampuchea probably resembles the kind of society they would have built had they succeeded in overthrowing the Tsars and then having no scientific socialist ideology to guide them. But i admit this is a subject that i am not too well versed in.
We are going to see more disparaging accusations and mudslinging leveled at anyone who dares challenge the war propaganda as the imperial decline progresses and the desperation sets in. They will try to discredit anti-imperialists with whatever spurious claims they can cook up. They will try to divide the anti-war left and have us turn against each other, taking out first and foremost those who are the most effective at advocating for the anti-imperialist position, those who pose the biggest danger to the mainstream propaganda narrative’s mission of getting the people on board for a world war with China and/or Russia.
And yes they will use ostensibly “leftist” even “Marxist” groups or individuals to do this. Cointelpro has never stopped operating, and now it is ramping up again.
Vertical farming is more energy intensive because it requires artificial light and vertical water transport. There is also the question of acquiring sufficient fertile soil and nutrients. Fertilizer takes energy to produce. Ultimately this becomes not a question of surface area but of sustainable and large scale energy production. If you have sufficient energy and enough raw materials you can expand farming by many orders of magnitude. Without those things you need to keep clearing more and more land and rely on sunlight which is not as dependable at higher latitudes.
I have always liked the idea of communal child rearing from a rational perspective, but even in the early USSR at a time when the revolutionary enthusiasm was at its strongest that was seen as kind of a radical proposal. A lot of people, even many who are otherwise solid communists and devoted to the socialist project will have a visceral resistance to the idea of replacing the traditional family with a fully communal model.
You need to think about how such a transition would be achieved and how to convince people to adopt it. I’m not saying it can’t be done or that it shouldn’t be done, but that it’s something that probably only a very stable communist society can achieve where the people have a great degree of trust in the communal way of doing things are are prepared to make a radical break with the traditional concept of the family.
Historically this was seen as an ultra-left idea and eventually fell out of favor entirely in all socialist states. It would have been too destabilizing politically as trying to make it happen would have provoked much resistance at a time when the situation was precarious enough already. Sometimes revolutionary enthusiasm gets ahead of what is possible given current conditions, and that is counterproductive and dangerous.
This is an admission that the so-called “progressive movement” is in an absolutely pathetic shape.
But we already knew that. The final nail in its coffin was when Bernie betrayed the workers and sided with the warmongers in the liberal establishment.
In a way this is a good thing because it opens up space for a real anti-imperialist left to emerge. The socdems have let down their masks and everyone can see them for who they really are.
Anyone who still thinks the Iraq war was a real war needs to read this.
I agree about the “heartland” theory being silly, it seems too ad hoc and esoteric. I don’t see any materialist justification for it.
The funny thing about it is that despite a lot of Russian nationalists having picked up on it (because as you say it strokes their egos), it actually originated in the West and has been used by Western imperialists to form their agenda. I find that quite amusing.
As for Dugin, i think you’re spot on about his irrelevance and about comparing him to Jordan Peterson. I personally just can’t take anyone seriously who claims to have invented a “fourth political theory” when there isn’t even a third, despite what fascists like to claim. The simple fact is that there can only be two “political theories” because there are only two classes, the bourgeois and the proletarian. Fascism and liberalism are just different manifestations of the same bourgeois ideological framework.
That is true but since there is no way to turn back the historical clock on this we may as well just call it all capitalism, albeit having went through different phases of development, each one being the logical and inevitable outcome of the social and material conditions and contradictions created by the previous one. Barring some kind of catastrophic global societal collapse the general trend of development in the world can only be forward towards higher forms of social and economic organization. And the only step forward from capitalism is socialism.
If there is such a thing as “whataboutism” then it would be bringing up something entirely unrelated to the topic of discussion. It is not “whataboutism” however when you point out rampant hypocrisy and how they are guilty of much worse instances of the exact same thing they are accusing others of. That shows that they are entirely engaging in bad faith and that they do not really care about the issue. In which case there is no point in continuing to argue with such a dishonest interlocutor.
My position is that we need not necessarily participate in anti-war initiatives organized by reactionaries, but we also should not oppose or denounce said initiatives (of course in all other contexts we should continue to ruthlessly criticize and fight against those reactionaries!) since that does not benefit us in any way. We should build and organize our own anti-war front just as Lenin advocated for communists to build their own party and not join bourgeois ones. Communists must not allow themselves to be subsumed into either liberal or reactionary politics, we must remain separate and advance our own revolutionary and unapologetically proletarian, class conscious views and agenda because no other groups will. Occasionally we can work with non-communist groups on an issue by issue basis but that is purely tactical.
The worst part is where he says women should not do a man’s job or even receive a man’s education. That goes totally opposite to what Lenin and the Bolsheviks were saying. One of the most famous phrases the Bolsheviks used to advocate for women’s equality was: “Every kitchen maid must learn to run the state.” Obviously Gaddafi’s views on gender/family policies are not acceptable for a communist.
I think we shouldn’t reject any anti-war initiative no matter which side it comes from. Ultimately anything that weakens and discredits the imperialist war machine is beneficial to the revolutionary cause. This doesn’t mean we join forces with reactionaries, but that we don’t actively fight against any initiative that for whatever reason advocates against NATO and its global warmongering, even when some very shitty people are involved who have a much different agenda than ours. Let them do their thing while we focus on our task which is to build our own principled working class anti-war, anti-imperialist movement. Wasting our energies denouncing reactionaries who are cynically trying to co-opt popular anti-war sentiments not only weakens the anti-war cause, it also discredits us in the eyes of the masses and is a boon to the reactionaries. If we think we can do better than them and build a more effective anti-war front (and i think we absolutely can because we are coming at this from a principled perspective and not from political opportunism) then we should just do it and not knock other anti-war voices down.
This might be an unpopular opinion but i say it because i really think we have to learn to think and act more strategically and resist the liberal impulses we may have for virtue signaling and purity tests. It is to the benefit of the class enemy that we waste our time constantly criticizing but never actually doing.
TheNewAtlas channel has done good coverage of the Myanmar crisis going on since the NED backed US puppet government was overthrown. Here are just a few of their videos on the subject:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=6DMNwyq_C0A https://youtube.com/watch?v=pHIVwGOj0Vw https://youtube.com/watch?v=AOf7ShaDUc4 https://youtube.com/watch?v=Y9h6L1pRR8w https://youtube.com/watch?v=hR5nvrPPRSM https://youtube.com/watch?v=VfxfIXGmY8o https://youtube.com/watch?v=DaOd7UaJ5FY
In particular you should watch the last two since they explain how this fits in the bigger picture.
From a Marxist perspective the military government is not ideal, but if it does not let itself be turned into a proxy against China it is preferable to the “liberal” opposition.
Excellent critique. I had some of the exact same thoughts. Of course the comments about Stalin immediately threw up red flags for me that this author is still buying into a fair bit of anti-communist propaganda. Also, thank you for finding the right words to describe what was bothering me so much about the underlying assumptions of this article. I called it idealism but really it’s more like you said a sort of “benign” orientalism or liberal racism. What is entirely missing from it is proper class analysis.
Russia was unprepared both economically and militarily in 2014 for a full scale confrontation with the collective West. And it was still holding out hope that the Minsk agreements would be fulfilled. Both of those factors had changed by 2022.
I hope you’re right about Taiwan. I for one don’t see the US giving it up without a fight. At minimum i believe they will try to destroy as much of Taiwan’s economic potential as possible if it becomes clear that reunification is inevitable.
The Banderites are doing the same to the parts of Eastern Ukraine which it is clear they cannot hold on to: they are demolishing everything that they can’t have. The US will likely destroy Taiwan’s semiconductor industries one way or another before they fall into Beijing’s hands.
Not that that will matter. Mainland China’s own semiconductor manufacturing will by then have already caught up with or surpassed Taiwan’s.
This. I want to believe that they adopt this relatively non-committal position so as not to alienate the “normies” who they hope to draw in and convert to communism, and that if they didn’t think it would put off these people who they hope to “deprogram” as it were they would adopt more openly unappologetic pro-AES and anti-imperialist positions. But frankly it bothers me, i find it very distasteful and at times i think it borders on opportunism.
One minute they are excoriating NATO and pointing out how the Ukraine war is a US proxy war and that we should not be continuing to arm them, the next they say that they don’t support Russia in this conflict and that Russia shouldn’t have launched their intervention and Ukraine has a right to defend itself. Which is it? Do you recognize that it was actually the US and its Nazi proxies that started this war or don’t you? Are you really opposed to NATO and US imperialism or are you just saying that but are too cowardly to support a country that has said enough is enough and is now actually fighting back and giving their lives to defeat the imperialists and their Nazi proxy army.