used them in USAF safety-wiring patterned bolts after final torque. you don't want stuff shaking loose over the Atlantic...
-
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commies
- Thread starter Cannavore
- Start date
Blue Rhino
Well-known member
Prove that China is communist? Are you thick? I'm pretty sure the Chinese Communist Party being the ruling and solitary party of the PRC makes it communist.
"Xi Jinping Thought" is really just Marxist-Leninism with Chinese characteristics.
As for Democrats, it wouldn't be fair to say they're all straight up commies but there are some that are and communism does infect both large and small 'D' democrats. The co-founders of BLM admitted straight up they were Marxists. In fact they claimed to be "trained" Marxists which is even more insidious.
And holy crap man, ever since Jerry Brown, Cali has had a love affair going with the CCP. Is Cali commie? Probably not yet, but they're swirling round the whirlpool.
"Xi Jinping Thought" is really just Marxist-Leninism with Chinese characteristics.
As for Democrats, it wouldn't be fair to say they're all straight up commies but there are some that are and communism does infect both large and small 'D' democrats. The co-founders of BLM admitted straight up they were Marxists. In fact they claimed to be "trained" Marxists which is even more insidious.
And holy crap man, ever since Jerry Brown, Cali has had a love affair going with the CCP. Is Cali commie? Probably not yet, but they're swirling round the whirlpool.
china is state capitalist. state ownership within a capitalist, market based framework.
there are definitely zero elected democrats who are leftists. bernie is the furthest left we got and he's a centrist internationally.
if the dems were marxists i'd actually vote for them.
there are definitely zero elected democrats who are leftists. bernie is the furthest left we got and he's a centrist internationally.
if the dems were marxists i'd actually vote for them.
Blue Rhino
Well-known member
No, they just combined authoritarianism with elements of capitalism to create a new form of communism.
Only to morons. Bernie pushes national socialism. Nothing centrist about that.
I never said they were. I said some were. I also stated that it infects the party. That's not the same as being full-on Marxist.
And uh, if you happen to be an outspoken intellectual, you'd probably be better off not supporting Marxism.
Fun fact: If Karl Marx lived in a country ruled by the principles of Marxism, he'd have ended up in a shallow grave with a gun shot to the back of his head.
I also notice you're a Western "Marxist" so most likely you have no experience living in a communist country.
There's a serious disconnect between the communism that's propagandized and taught about in PoliSci or whatever and communism as practiced at a national scale. World of difference my friend, world of difference. The shit on paper is what they sell you hoping you'll swallow it. Garbage states like the Soviet Union, the PRC, Cuba or North Korea (among others) is what you actually end up with.
And if you don't/won't swallow it, then they resort to political violence aka terrorism. In fact Marx was a big proponent of political violence in the name of forcing the ideology upon others.
What a swell ideology. Right up there with nazis, fascists and jihadis.
Do you know what the difference is between communism and nazi fascism? Not a goddam thing according to the average person (who wasn't Jewish) who got to experience the "thrill" of living under both. They are both evil, dehumanizing and violent.
Made by three companies that share ninety percent of the market...
Why are they all $9??!!
Why are they all $9??!!
Eltitoguay
Well-known member
Hello. I am also another "Western Marxist." And for more information, from a country where different Marxist political parties have democratically managed to reach the Government. Both in the time of my grandparents where they became the majority, and now, in which a Marxist political party (Neo-Marxist or Eurocommunist current) governs as a minority partner with another social democrat. My country (and I in my childhood) has also known the fascist dictatorship that took up arms against that Marxist democratic government. Western Europe is the original place of Marxism, and for a Western and capitalist Europe, this philosophical-political-social-economic theory was initially formulated. Indeed, "eastern" currents can be and/or are very different from "western" ones.
As you can see, both I and even more so my country do have experience with Marxism, since currents as diverse as Leninism, Trotskyism, Libertarian Communism, (before), or Neo-Marxism-Eurocommunism (now), have reached local, regional or national power throughout history, democratically. . And since you allow yourself to make a "blank slate" of the opinions of others for not having had these experiences, allow me to tell you the obvious: If as Marxist models you only cite and know those of the classic dictatorial models (USSR, China, North Korea, Cuba), your knowledge on the subject is as deep as that of someone who identifies and exemplifies capitalism only with the capitalist dictatorships that there has been or may be in the world...:
" Capitalism: wasn't it the regime of Pinochet's Chile, Aparheit's South Africa or Franco's Spain?...Or what there is now in Equatorial Guinea, right?... Oh, really? That there are also democratic capitalist countries and models!?..."
Capitalism (even the democratic) has exercised violence against democratic Marxist governments and their countries and people throughout history, participating in coups d'état, civil wars, establishment of dictatorial governments, and their subsequent repression (coming close to genocide in Latin American or African countries)...:Can I also conclude (following your argument, whether intentional and vulgarly populist, or simply ignorant) that capitalism and all those who defend it, only want to be able to throw their opponents tied and alive from airplanes into the ocean, or kill them by forced labor in quarries?
And to finish illustrating to you that you practice simple populist demagoguery, or do not know what you are talking about, I tell you that I am a sympathizer of a Marxist and communist party, whose fight for freedom and democracy, not only in my country, but as volunteers fighting by foreign democracies WHICH COULD NOT BE MARXIST BUT CAPITALIST (France, United Kingdom, Belgium, Norway) or whose struggle for the restoration of democracy in others (Austria, Germany) receives annual tributes in various countries of capitalist Europe; such as for example the tributes from the French Government to the various monuments it has erected in its own country to "our" martyrs and fallen, as public tributes to the survivors.
The mayor of Paris and the French president, recognizing that there was an "intentional forgetting" both that those volunteers (marxist or anarchist) were the elite vanguard and spearhead of the Liberation of Paris (...or/and of their heroism, sacrifice and importance, in the Battle and evacuation of Dunkerke, in the Nazi-Fascism defeat in North Africa , in the Allied raid on Narvik (Norway), in the Taking of Hitler's Eagle's Nest...).
The total voluntariness and unconditional help of these leftist volunteers is also valued (there was no state or "red army" that forced them to fight); and even more so when all these capitalist democracies for which they fought had previously denied them help and abandoned them in the face of fascism, and after the Allied victory, they abandoned them again in the hands of fascism:
Sarkozy recognizing and thanking the fact; apart, something about 340,000 dual nationalities as a "historical gesture:"
Tribute from the Austrian government:
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Eltitoguay
Well-known member
...and while I'm at it, I take this opportunity to greet all the Marxist volunteer compatriots fighting for freedom against religious fascism in Iraq and Syria (Now, accused of "terrorism" by the US and the EU...and with a reward from ISIS on their heads)
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Eltitoguay
Well-known member
I don't know, but to me the Chinese economic regime, its private capitalist megacorporations, its draconian laws and meager labor rights, its nonexistence of a free public health system, but rather a co-payment... do not marry me very much with Marxism-Leninism, nor Stalinism nor Maoism...
It is another diferent thing or "ism"... A strange combination of dictatorial Stalinist-Maoist state power, but with labor exploitation of the worker typical of the most savage and Third World capitalism, and an economy that combines the above with the ideas of coexistence with the capitalist private initiative of Neo-Marxism, Eurocommunism, or most part of "Western European" (Marxist) Socialism...
As for the American Democratic Party, I don't know it in depth...but at least among the most famous, those classified as "most extremely leftist", would fit in my country as "the least leftist sector" of a centrist-left party, non-marxist capitalist social democrat. But others (the majority) of its candidates would oscillate between the center and center-right.
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Eltitoguay
Well-known member
Article with a very brief summary of the thought and political action of the previous (until 2000) and now deceased (2020), leader of the P.C.E. (Communist Party of Spain), Julio Anguita.
Nicknamed "The Red Caliph" during his time as mayor of Córdoba (he advocated for the joint religious use of the Mosque-Cathedral between Christians and Muslims); as national deputy and leader of the P.C.E. and the leftist coalition I.U. (Izquierda Unida) obtained more than 10% of the votes in the National Elections, and became the third political force in Spain. He retired from official politics, before the P.C.E. (within the acronym Unidos Podemos first, and SUMAR later) returned to the National Government as the minority partner of the government coalition with the P.S.O.E. (Spanish Socialist Workers Party; social democratic party that renounced Marxism during the transition to democracy); (The P.C.E. had not been able to enter the National Government since the Second Republic, when it managed to become the first political force).
As a curiosity about his life, his son, the famous journalist Julio Anguita Parrado, after entering the US Pentagon courses for war correspondents, was authorized to accompany in Irak the 3rd Infantry Division of the US Army as a journalist, and killed in Baghdad by a missile.
Professor of philosophy at the Complutense University of Madrid and writer.
05/16/2020
After the death of Julio Anguita, I feel, above all, very alone. What Althusser said about "a communist is never alone" should have been accompanied by a "better alone than in bad company", because there have always been and continue to be communists who are not at all recommendable, firstly because of their political actions, of which Stalinism and Maoism can give an idea, and secondly, because the scholastic interpretation they made of their teacher Marx was, very often, disastrous (as I have tried to explain in my last two books Marx from scratch and Marx 1857 ). But not Anguita, Anguita has been the best company we have had since the eighties, the communists and, in fact, this country as a whole.
First of all, it can be said that Anguita not only interpreted Marx's legacy well, but that, in a certain way, he invented very early on the political strategy that Podemos has had so much trouble embracing. Instead of asking for the moon by inventing what had already been invented, as so many leftists have tried to do since May 1968, Anguita limited himself to upholding the Constitution and the Declaration of Human Rights and challenging politicians and economic powers to have the decency to enforce them. Instead of advocating a new society of comrades and demanding a "new man" beyond the idea of "citizenship", Anguita made it very clear that if we communists are communists, it is not to be communists, but to be citizens. As a communist, he always said, I am content that the Constitution is enforced, that the Constitution stops being a piece of paper. To do this, it was necessary to arm the constitutional apparatus with the appropriate institutions of guarantee, providing it with the material conditions to make possible the right to housing, the right to work, the right to health and education. The right also to true freedom of expression, for which it would be necessary to end the monopoly of the public voice held by a handful of media oligopolies. The right to political participation, for which, he told us, it was necessary to end that "cancer of democracy" that is electoral propaganda. Above all, finally, the right to existence, which Robespierre proclaimed. Citizenship is a mere flatus voci if it is not accompanied by the material conditions that allow people to decide without "having to ask permission from another to exist." What defines the citizen is "civil independence," not depending on another, as a child depends on a parent, a servant on a lord, a slave on a master, or as (until not long ago) a wife on a husband (not so long ago the wife was referred to as the "lady of so-and-so").
It was not such a difficult formula. We communists do not fight for a world of moral athletes built by the proletarian ideology of the Party, but for a world in which the political program that the Enlightenment proposed to humanity becomes possible once and for all: a republic of citizens, a society in which those who obey the law are at the same time co-legislators, so that in obeying the law they obey only themselves. But for such a program to become possible, it is necessary for people to participate in political life as full citizens, and that is not compatible with them being at the same time servants, servants of a lord, a master, a husband, or as happens today to the point of delirium, servants of what we usually call "the markets", those new capricious, crazy and tyrannical gods that day after day blackmail the voice of our legislative powers. Probably never before in history has the general population been so "dependent on others" as it is today, when even parliaments do not dare to contradict the economic metabolism of business. Economic powers tolerate democracy as long as it does not dare to contradict them, that is, as long as it is economically superfluous or impotent. The 20th century was sufficiently informative in this regard: every attempt by the left to intervene in the economic sphere through parliamentary means was followed by a coup d'état, an invasion or a blockade (we have documented this extensively in our book Education for Citizenship ).
So we communists did not have to invent the wheel. It was enough to show that capitalism makes a coherent constitutional order impossible. And that is what Julio Anguita proclaimed better than anyone else. We had to appear as the true defenders of the Constitution. I kept repeating it when Podemos was founded. Now, Pablo Iglesias has adopted this formula and is doing very well. But the first person to practice it relentlessly in this country was Julio Anguita. "Fortunately" (it was said sarcastically by the PSOE at that time) "we do not think that the Constitution says what Mr. Anguita says, because if it did, we believe that it would have to be changed." And so they did; when the time came, they changed it, with the signing (under cover of darkness and treachery) of article 135, which made it clear once and for all that the entire constitutional text was subject to the will of the economic powers. It is impressive to read Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's book, The Dilemma , in which he explains with all sincerity (and no small amount of honesty) to what extent a Parliament and a Government are nothing when they are opposed by economic power.
(Synopsis of "The Dilemma; 600 days of vertigo" : This is the first-person account of the man who had the main responsibility for the Great Crisis' management in Spain in the period 2008-2011. Regarding the decisions taken by the P.S.OE. Government in May 2010, the author writes: “What a pressing dilemma. Either you cut back, or you could feed the spiral of insolvency, of the risk of meeting our debt commitments. There was no middle way. And in just a few days, almost hours, you had to act at an intersection where your ideas and commitments probably diverged irremediably.” From the dilemma of May 2010 to six hundred days of vertigo. Because every day, from then until the last of his mandate, former President Zapatero lived it as a crossroads full of uncertainties. This book reveals previously unpublished facts and documents, of great importance to understanding this period, as well as the positions of European and world leaders (Merkel, Sarkozy, Trichet, Obama, China, among others). It also contains an assessment by the author of the political responsibility for the genesis and evolution of the crisis and of the efforts made to limit its social consequences.)
All of this, and especially since the 15M movement, has provided the anti-capitalist left with an opportunity. That of presenting itself in society as the true defender of the constitutional order against the extremists and radical revolutionaries of economic liberalism, who, on the contrary, are prepared to leave no republican institution standing in order to make way for the insane and blind markets that are taking us who knows where at top speed, perhaps who knows, to the destruction of the most basic ecological and social balance. They are the revolutionaries, the radicals, the extremists, who carry on that legacy. For the first time, we communists could appear, on the contrary, as the defenders of order, democracy and the rule of law. They are the anarchists who do not respect any legal framework, since they operate and work from tax havens. They are the anti-patriots. And, in effect, as Pablo Iglesias and Iñigo Errejón have constantly repeated, we, in reality, are the true defenders of the homeland.
It was an unexpected twist of fate that had been thrown at us. But it must be said that it had already been invented. Firstly, by Julio Anguita, in the eighties. This strategy by Anguita caused as much fear to the PSOE as it had caused at the time of the birth of Podemos. To the point that they decided to kill him off with disgust and did not stop until they had caused him two heart attacks, using the PRISA group in such a scoundrel way that it brought El País down to the levels of Okdiario or El Español . There was not a day when slander and sarcasm were not poured on the red caliph, who was even accused of having a chalet! As Anguita refused to resort to propaganda and insisted on explaining things slowly, they accused him of being a schoolteacher! Despite everything, Anguita's figure was so impeccable that there was no way to completely ruin his reputation. The leftist latín-rock singer Joaquín Sabina summed it up well in one of his songs: "And what are you going to do? Vote for the Caliph? It would be very honourable, I'm not saying it isn't, but it's outdated! It's outdated!" In short, being right was already very out of fashion: it was the rise of postmodernism and the lobotomised "movida madrileña".
I just said that it was firstly an invention of Anguita's. It is false, it was secondly, because firstly, at least, that political strategy had already been invented by Marx. I often quote a text that deserves reflection:
"The realm of freedom begins only where labour determined by necessity and by external ends ceases; in the nature of things it therefore lies outside the sphere of material production proper. Just as the savage must struggle with nature for the satisfaction of his needs, for the preservation and reproduction of his life, so must the civilised man do so, and in all forms of society and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of natural necessity expands, because his needs expand; but at the same time the productive forces which satisfy them expand. Freedom in this sphere can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating his metabolism with nature, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as by a blind power, and carrying it out with the least expenditure of force and under the most worthy and appropriate conditions for their human nature. But this remains always a realm of necessity. Beyond this begins the development of human forces, considered as an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can only flourish on that realm of necessity as its basis. The reduction of the working day is the basic condition."
What is most interesting about this text is the "but" in question . That "socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulate their metabolism with nature, placing it under their collective control, instead of being dominated by it as by a blind power" is in fact what we have always understood by socialism or communism. And yet, Marx adds: "but" that is "still" part of the realm of necessity. There is a "beyond itself", a "beyond" that is interesting: the "realm of freedom", where for the first time ends will appear that are worth pursuing "for themselves". I have tried to show elsewhere that there is no other way to interpret this turn of Marx than by understanding that communism is not an end, but a means to achieve something else: a society of free, equal and fraternal citizens, a republican order, an order of ends in themselves. Until now, "surviving has prevented us from living", as Raoul Veneigem recalled in the seventies. "Communism" is not a recipe for life, but an essential means to begin a new kind of life, beyond the mere struggle for survival. And there is no need to reinvent the wheel in this respect, it has already been invented how things would be: it is the republican order of a society of citizens. So Anguita was, as a Marxist, completely right: if we are communists it is because we are convinced that our constitutional orders are not feasible under capitalism. But it is not that we want to be "communists." It is that we want to be republicans.
Poscript: a musical homenage:
.
Nicknamed "The Red Caliph" during his time as mayor of Córdoba (he advocated for the joint religious use of the Mosque-Cathedral between Christians and Muslims); as national deputy and leader of the P.C.E. and the leftist coalition I.U. (Izquierda Unida) obtained more than 10% of the votes in the National Elections, and became the third political force in Spain. He retired from official politics, before the P.C.E. (within the acronym Unidos Podemos first, and SUMAR later) returned to the National Government as the minority partner of the government coalition with the P.S.O.E. (Spanish Socialist Workers Party; social democratic party that renounced Marxism during the transition to democracy); (The P.C.E. had not been able to enter the National Government since the Second Republic, when it managed to become the first political force).
As a curiosity about his life, his son, the famous journalist Julio Anguita Parrado, after entering the US Pentagon courses for war correspondents, was authorized to accompany in Irak the 3rd Infantry Division of the US Army as a journalist, and killed in Baghdad by a missile.
Anguita, between Podemos and Marx:
By CARLOS FERNANDEZ LIRIA;Professor of philosophy at the Complutense University of Madrid and writer.
05/16/2020
After the death of Julio Anguita, I feel, above all, very alone. What Althusser said about "a communist is never alone" should have been accompanied by a "better alone than in bad company", because there have always been and continue to be communists who are not at all recommendable, firstly because of their political actions, of which Stalinism and Maoism can give an idea, and secondly, because the scholastic interpretation they made of their teacher Marx was, very often, disastrous (as I have tried to explain in my last two books Marx from scratch and Marx 1857 ). But not Anguita, Anguita has been the best company we have had since the eighties, the communists and, in fact, this country as a whole.
First of all, it can be said that Anguita not only interpreted Marx's legacy well, but that, in a certain way, he invented very early on the political strategy that Podemos has had so much trouble embracing. Instead of asking for the moon by inventing what had already been invented, as so many leftists have tried to do since May 1968, Anguita limited himself to upholding the Constitution and the Declaration of Human Rights and challenging politicians and economic powers to have the decency to enforce them. Instead of advocating a new society of comrades and demanding a "new man" beyond the idea of "citizenship", Anguita made it very clear that if we communists are communists, it is not to be communists, but to be citizens. As a communist, he always said, I am content that the Constitution is enforced, that the Constitution stops being a piece of paper. To do this, it was necessary to arm the constitutional apparatus with the appropriate institutions of guarantee, providing it with the material conditions to make possible the right to housing, the right to work, the right to health and education. The right also to true freedom of expression, for which it would be necessary to end the monopoly of the public voice held by a handful of media oligopolies. The right to political participation, for which, he told us, it was necessary to end that "cancer of democracy" that is electoral propaganda. Above all, finally, the right to existence, which Robespierre proclaimed. Citizenship is a mere flatus voci if it is not accompanied by the material conditions that allow people to decide without "having to ask permission from another to exist." What defines the citizen is "civil independence," not depending on another, as a child depends on a parent, a servant on a lord, a slave on a master, or as (until not long ago) a wife on a husband (not so long ago the wife was referred to as the "lady of so-and-so").
It was not such a difficult formula. We communists do not fight for a world of moral athletes built by the proletarian ideology of the Party, but for a world in which the political program that the Enlightenment proposed to humanity becomes possible once and for all: a republic of citizens, a society in which those who obey the law are at the same time co-legislators, so that in obeying the law they obey only themselves. But for such a program to become possible, it is necessary for people to participate in political life as full citizens, and that is not compatible with them being at the same time servants, servants of a lord, a master, a husband, or as happens today to the point of delirium, servants of what we usually call "the markets", those new capricious, crazy and tyrannical gods that day after day blackmail the voice of our legislative powers. Probably never before in history has the general population been so "dependent on others" as it is today, when even parliaments do not dare to contradict the economic metabolism of business. Economic powers tolerate democracy as long as it does not dare to contradict them, that is, as long as it is economically superfluous or impotent. The 20th century was sufficiently informative in this regard: every attempt by the left to intervene in the economic sphere through parliamentary means was followed by a coup d'état, an invasion or a blockade (we have documented this extensively in our book Education for Citizenship ).
So we communists did not have to invent the wheel. It was enough to show that capitalism makes a coherent constitutional order impossible. And that is what Julio Anguita proclaimed better than anyone else. We had to appear as the true defenders of the Constitution. I kept repeating it when Podemos was founded. Now, Pablo Iglesias has adopted this formula and is doing very well. But the first person to practice it relentlessly in this country was Julio Anguita. "Fortunately" (it was said sarcastically by the PSOE at that time) "we do not think that the Constitution says what Mr. Anguita says, because if it did, we believe that it would have to be changed." And so they did; when the time came, they changed it, with the signing (under cover of darkness and treachery) of article 135, which made it clear once and for all that the entire constitutional text was subject to the will of the economic powers. It is impressive to read Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's book, The Dilemma , in which he explains with all sincerity (and no small amount of honesty) to what extent a Parliament and a Government are nothing when they are opposed by economic power.
(Synopsis of "The Dilemma; 600 days of vertigo" : This is the first-person account of the man who had the main responsibility for the Great Crisis' management in Spain in the period 2008-2011. Regarding the decisions taken by the P.S.OE. Government in May 2010, the author writes: “What a pressing dilemma. Either you cut back, or you could feed the spiral of insolvency, of the risk of meeting our debt commitments. There was no middle way. And in just a few days, almost hours, you had to act at an intersection where your ideas and commitments probably diverged irremediably.” From the dilemma of May 2010 to six hundred days of vertigo. Because every day, from then until the last of his mandate, former President Zapatero lived it as a crossroads full of uncertainties. This book reveals previously unpublished facts and documents, of great importance to understanding this period, as well as the positions of European and world leaders (Merkel, Sarkozy, Trichet, Obama, China, among others). It also contains an assessment by the author of the political responsibility for the genesis and evolution of the crisis and of the efforts made to limit its social consequences.)
All of this, and especially since the 15M movement, has provided the anti-capitalist left with an opportunity. That of presenting itself in society as the true defender of the constitutional order against the extremists and radical revolutionaries of economic liberalism, who, on the contrary, are prepared to leave no republican institution standing in order to make way for the insane and blind markets that are taking us who knows where at top speed, perhaps who knows, to the destruction of the most basic ecological and social balance. They are the revolutionaries, the radicals, the extremists, who carry on that legacy. For the first time, we communists could appear, on the contrary, as the defenders of order, democracy and the rule of law. They are the anarchists who do not respect any legal framework, since they operate and work from tax havens. They are the anti-patriots. And, in effect, as Pablo Iglesias and Iñigo Errejón have constantly repeated, we, in reality, are the true defenders of the homeland.
It was an unexpected twist of fate that had been thrown at us. But it must be said that it had already been invented. Firstly, by Julio Anguita, in the eighties. This strategy by Anguita caused as much fear to the PSOE as it had caused at the time of the birth of Podemos. To the point that they decided to kill him off with disgust and did not stop until they had caused him two heart attacks, using the PRISA group in such a scoundrel way that it brought El País down to the levels of Okdiario or El Español . There was not a day when slander and sarcasm were not poured on the red caliph, who was even accused of having a chalet! As Anguita refused to resort to propaganda and insisted on explaining things slowly, they accused him of being a schoolteacher! Despite everything, Anguita's figure was so impeccable that there was no way to completely ruin his reputation. The leftist latín-rock singer Joaquín Sabina summed it up well in one of his songs: "And what are you going to do? Vote for the Caliph? It would be very honourable, I'm not saying it isn't, but it's outdated! It's outdated!" In short, being right was already very out of fashion: it was the rise of postmodernism and the lobotomised "movida madrileña".
I just said that it was firstly an invention of Anguita's. It is false, it was secondly, because firstly, at least, that political strategy had already been invented by Marx. I often quote a text that deserves reflection:
"The realm of freedom begins only where labour determined by necessity and by external ends ceases; in the nature of things it therefore lies outside the sphere of material production proper. Just as the savage must struggle with nature for the satisfaction of his needs, for the preservation and reproduction of his life, so must the civilised man do so, and in all forms of society and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of natural necessity expands, because his needs expand; but at the same time the productive forces which satisfy them expand. Freedom in this sphere can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating his metabolism with nature, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as by a blind power, and carrying it out with the least expenditure of force and under the most worthy and appropriate conditions for their human nature. But this remains always a realm of necessity. Beyond this begins the development of human forces, considered as an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can only flourish on that realm of necessity as its basis. The reduction of the working day is the basic condition."
What is most interesting about this text is the "but" in question . That "socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulate their metabolism with nature, placing it under their collective control, instead of being dominated by it as by a blind power" is in fact what we have always understood by socialism or communism. And yet, Marx adds: "but" that is "still" part of the realm of necessity. There is a "beyond itself", a "beyond" that is interesting: the "realm of freedom", where for the first time ends will appear that are worth pursuing "for themselves". I have tried to show elsewhere that there is no other way to interpret this turn of Marx than by understanding that communism is not an end, but a means to achieve something else: a society of free, equal and fraternal citizens, a republican order, an order of ends in themselves. Until now, "surviving has prevented us from living", as Raoul Veneigem recalled in the seventies. "Communism" is not a recipe for life, but an essential means to begin a new kind of life, beyond the mere struggle for survival. And there is no need to reinvent the wheel in this respect, it has already been invented how things would be: it is the republican order of a society of citizens. So Anguita was, as a Marxist, completely right: if we are communists it is because we are convinced that our constitutional orders are not feasible under capitalism. But it is not that we want to be "communists." It is that we want to be republicans.
Poscript: a musical homenage:
.
Last edited:
Eltitoguay
Well-known member
Brief excerpt from J. Anguita's famous speech on his concept of Freedom ("What is Freedom"?), together with the Portuguese Nobel Prize for Literature José Saramago:
FEATURED , STATE POLICY
"(...)Talking about freedom is a big deal. Because freedom means assuming that you have a free conscience, which is not the same as freedom and conscience. A free conscience means that I can decide if I have all the elements to make my decision,(...)" said Anguita .
“I am well informed, I am well educated, I eat every day, I have a roof over my head, I have clothes to wear, and once my most basic needs are met, I can begin to think about being a free man,” he continued.
"Because if I have to find work by cheating whatever it takes, by standing in the unemployment line, by selling myself for four cents because my family and I have to eat, I am not a free man even if they allow me to go and vote tomorrow. I am driven by my hunger, by my need to have to sell myself at every moment for a job (...)"
FEATURED , STATE POLICY
Julio Anguita's video on true freedom
"It is a very big thing, it is assuming that one has a free conscience, which is not the same as freedom of conscience," says the eternal politician.
A speech from more than 20 years ago by former secretary of the P.C.E. & United Left(I.U), Julio Anguita , at a conference in homage to José Saramago in which he defined what freedom meant to him:"(...)Talking about freedom is a big deal. Because freedom means assuming that you have a free conscience, which is not the same as freedom and conscience. A free conscience means that I can decide if I have all the elements to make my decision,(...)" said Anguita .
“I am well informed, I am well educated, I eat every day, I have a roof over my head, I have clothes to wear, and once my most basic needs are met, I can begin to think about being a free man,” he continued.
"Because if I have to find work by cheating whatever it takes, by standing in the unemployment line, by selling myself for four cents because my family and I have to eat, I am not a free man even if they allow me to go and vote tomorrow. I am driven by my hunger, by my need to have to sell myself at every moment for a job (...)"
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Eltitoguay
Well-known member
Addressing the youth of his time, J. Anguita about the Rebellion:
"(...)Rebellion is not a high-sounding gesture, it is not an insult, it is not a stone, it is not a bad answer. It is something deeper, it is a cry of intelligence, of the will that speaks, and I am going to say it plainly: I do not feel like saying yes to this situation, why? Because I do not want to. Because I understand that there can be another situation and therefore I do not participate in this rottenness. And I do not participate in it and I fight against it. And this attitude is an intellectual attitude. And I do not want to talk about university students, but about the mind of any human being. It is a position that is born from the mind and the heart, from the fire of wanting to change. This is the fundamental rebellion. The other is voices, screams, squawks, give it some stick in the Roman circus..."
"(...)They say that when they ask Jesus of Galilee if he has come to bring peace, he answers: -No, I have come to bring war-... But what would he really want to say?: -I have come to raise awareness; I have come to disturb consciences...-
Well, likewise, we do not want meek people either, obedient just because, anesthetized... We also come to disturb consciences and shake brains... We will exist to the extent that we mobilize thoughts."
" (...)Rebellion begins in the head;The fundamental characteristic of great revolutionaries is that they made people think; Get up and think, it's the most revolutionary thing I've ever seen in my life..."
"Get up and think":
″(...)Those of you who are at home and don't care about politics, start reading other things. Let go of your nonsense. You think you are rebels, but you are not. The rebel is the one who questions what there is. Because you answer back to your mother or your father badly, you are not a rebel. That is a lack of education, but it is not rebellion. (...) The rebellious pose suits me very badly. Those who say: 'I am very rebellious. I am an anarchist'. If the real anarchists saw you, they would have given you three slaps because you deserve it. Durruti was an anarchist. Ask him if he didn't care about anything...""(...)Rebellion is not a high-sounding gesture, it is not an insult, it is not a stone, it is not a bad answer. It is something deeper, it is a cry of intelligence, of the will that speaks, and I am going to say it plainly: I do not feel like saying yes to this situation, why? Because I do not want to. Because I understand that there can be another situation and therefore I do not participate in this rottenness. And I do not participate in it and I fight against it. And this attitude is an intellectual attitude. And I do not want to talk about university students, but about the mind of any human being. It is a position that is born from the mind and the heart, from the fire of wanting to change. This is the fundamental rebellion. The other is voices, screams, squawks, give it some stick in the Roman circus..."
"(...)They say that when they ask Jesus of Galilee if he has come to bring peace, he answers: -No, I have come to bring war-... But what would he really want to say?: -I have come to raise awareness; I have come to disturb consciences...-
Well, likewise, we do not want meek people either, obedient just because, anesthetized... We also come to disturb consciences and shake brains... We will exist to the extent that we mobilize thoughts."
" (...)Rebellion begins in the head;The fundamental characteristic of great revolutionaries is that they made people think; Get up and think, it's the most revolutionary thing I've ever seen in my life..."
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Eltitoguay
Well-known member
...Although looking at the current level of U.S.A. politics, I consider that worrying about whether a candidate is more or less Marxist (or more or less anti-Marxist, from the opposite perspective), is right now, like worrying about whether the passenger plane that is going to crash on a city, whether or not it can crush the grass of some urban park...:
When one of the main candidates and former presidents of the nation like the Republican Party's D. Trump is a sexual predator/abuser of women, the question of Marxism or anti-Marxism is very far away, and we have to go back to much more basic philosophical concepts, in a Sesame Street style...:
- "Let's see Coco, Epi, Blas: explain to us again what is ethically bad about sexual abuse, which the parish seems to find It's hard to grasp it...; and if in 1000 episodes you tell me about the bad and/or good of Marxism..."-
Eltitoguay
Well-known member
Returning to the debate on the definition of the current Chinese regime and its economy as Marxist-communist or capitalist, I extract the question and answer in this regard, from a
Andrés de Francisco (b. 1963) holds a PhD in Philosophy and is a professor at the Complutense University of Madrid. Author of La mirada republicana (Catarata, 2012), he has been the editor of Harrington, Stuart Mill and Marx. His most recent published book is Visconti y la decadencia (Vilassar de Dalt: El Viejo Topo, 2019)
(...)You said earlier that, from your point of view, not only in Russia but also in the People's Republic of China, there is a capitalist economic system. There is no socialism, in any of its forms, in the Asian country. Do I understand correctly?
In this I follow Milanovic. [5] The Chinese economy meets the requirements of the standard Marxian-Weberian model of capitalism: the bulk of production is carried out with private means of production, most workers are wage earners, and markets are the main (decentralized) price-setting mechanism. In 1978, 100% of enterprises were state-owned; today, barely 20%. Before the reforms, almost 80% of the entire urban workforce was public-sector; today, less than 16%. Before, the State set 93% of agricultural prices, 100% of industrial prices. Already from the mid-nineties, the market mechanism was largely dominant in price-setting. However, pace Weber, one could speak in the case of China of political capitalism : with a strong, highly technocratic bureaucracy, a highly interventionist one-party government (without legal restraints: there is no rule of law), and much corruption. The technocratic elite behaves to a large extent like a mafia. It is possible, as Milanovic believes, that this corruption is functional to such a decisionist system, and that is why it only stops when it exceeds a certain threshold. In my opinion, Chinese capitalism has many similarities with Franco's capitalism since the stabilization plan of 1959.
(...)
Interview with Andrés de Francisco on the current situation of democracy
Andrés de Francisco (b. 1963) holds a PhD in Philosophy and is a professor at the Complutense University of Madrid. Author of La mirada republicana (Catarata, 2012), he has been the editor of Harrington, Stuart Mill and Marx. His most recent published book is Visconti y la decadencia (Vilassar de Dalt: El Viejo Topo, 2019)
(...)You said earlier that, from your point of view, not only in Russia but also in the People's Republic of China, there is a capitalist economic system. There is no socialism, in any of its forms, in the Asian country. Do I understand correctly?
In this I follow Milanovic. [5] The Chinese economy meets the requirements of the standard Marxian-Weberian model of capitalism: the bulk of production is carried out with private means of production, most workers are wage earners, and markets are the main (decentralized) price-setting mechanism. In 1978, 100% of enterprises were state-owned; today, barely 20%. Before the reforms, almost 80% of the entire urban workforce was public-sector; today, less than 16%. Before, the State set 93% of agricultural prices, 100% of industrial prices. Already from the mid-nineties, the market mechanism was largely dominant in price-setting. However, pace Weber, one could speak in the case of China of political capitalism : with a strong, highly technocratic bureaucracy, a highly interventionist one-party government (without legal restraints: there is no rule of law), and much corruption. The technocratic elite behaves to a large extent like a mafia. It is possible, as Milanovic believes, that this corruption is functional to such a decisionist system, and that is why it only stops when it exceeds a certain threshold. In my opinion, Chinese capitalism has many similarities with Franco's capitalism since the stabilization plan of 1959.
(...)
Eltitoguay
Well-known member
Now that the conflict between Israel and Palestine threatens to blow up the world like never before, an article by Hicham Safieddine about the Lebanese Marxist Mahdi Amel, in which his ideas on colonialism, Islam, and the conflict with Israel are briefly explained:
With rare exceptions, non-Western theorists of Marxism receive little intellectual attention. When they do appear on the radar of ideological debates, their work is summarily presented as proof of Marxism's universalism rather than as a means of transforming Marxism itself.
This has largely been the case with the Arab Marxist Mahdi Am el, who was assassinated on this day, May 18, 1987. Born in 1936, Hassan Hamdan, who later adopted the pseudonym Mahdi Amel, was a member of the Lebanese Communist Party and had joined the party's national leadership at the time of his assassination.
Amel’s legacy experienced a renaissance during the Arab uprisings that erupted a decade ago. Her work received more attention after a volume containing a selection of her writings was translated into English in 2021. But interest in her philosophy of Marxism and its implications for understanding colonialism in relation to capitalism remains rudimentary.
A historical materialist reading of Amel would integrate his conceptual contribution and praxis into the ideological canon of twentieth-century Marxism. This requires a sustained and critical analysis of the assumptions, arguments and conclusions of his philosophy in comparison and contrast with European Marxism, as well as with the heterodox or radical schools of Marxism that emerged after World War II, such as dependency theory and racial capitalism.
We can take a modest step in that direction by briefly examining his methodology and its application to the major issues of post-World War II national liberation, including the current struggle for a free Palestine.
Marxism, colonialism and methodology
Amel called for a “methodological revolution” in Marxist philosophy to understand and overcome the historical reality of colonialism. He opposed the application of preformed Marxist thought to the colonial social structure, but not in the name of a supposedly authentic pre-capitalist thought. He also rejected forms of postcolonial analysis that threw historical materialism out with the Eurocentric bathwater. Instead, Amel worked dialectically to construct a theory of Marxism born out of colonial social reality and used for its socialist liberation, which, he argued, is also the liberation of all humanity.
Amel laid out the logic of his methodology, first briefly and then in detail, in a series of essays and treatises. He then applied it to a wide range of historical phenomena and forces, including sectarianism, Islam, education, and revolutionary culture. These writings engaged in direct conversation with ideological debates that arose during his time and that remain relevant in our own.
Although Amel's texts can be dense and sometimes repetitive, his reasoning was straightforward. Karl Marx's discussion of colonialism was incidental to his general analysis of capitalism. Given Marx's own historical background in a capitalist Europe and his ignorance of the socioeconomic conditions of the colonized countries, he was unable to take a full account of colonialism and incorporate it into his theory of capitalism.
The historical reality of colonized peoples is the opposite of that experienced by Marx. Their encounter with capitalism was fortuitous or mediated by colonialism. Colonization, in Amel's words, "cut the thread of continuity" in their history and "sent violent tremors through it."
He believed that these tremors reached down to the strata of production relations, since the material basis of pre-capitalist production was destroyed and the material basis of industrialization was denied. In other words, the difference between capitalist and colonial social formations does not only concern the level or scale of production, but the entire structure of production.
For Amel, it follows from this that the colonial relationship, which is all-encompassing and not purely economic, is the fundamental contradiction of colonized societies and that colonialism is the “objective basis of the social structure of the colonized country.” Colonialism therefore ends not with the end of military occupation or the attainment of political independence, but with the complete rupture of this relationship in a process of violent and revolutionary transition to socialism.
Amel’s research in this regard resulted in the concept of colonial mode of production (CMP), which he defined as “the form of capitalism structurally dependent on imperialism in its historical formation and contemporary development.” Marx’s distilled observations on colonialism provided Amel with a solid theoretical basis for developing his model. At each step, Amel drew on Marx’s relevant comments and identified first principles.
For example, Amel drew on Marx’s reference to the “fusion” of modes of production and Vladimir Lenin’s description of different modes coexisting in a single social space to support the idea of a colonial mode of production as a fusion of capitalist and pre-capitalist modes of production under the rubric of colonial conquest, and thus distinct from either. This methodology retained Marxian logic and concepts such as class formation, class struggle, capitalization, and class consciousness, but attempted to elucidate their specific historical form in a colonial setting.
Colonialism and class struggle
Amel's theorizing led him to conclude that the process of class formation under a MOPC is characterized by a lack of class differentiation. Thanks to the structural inhibition of large-scale industry, the colonial bourgeoisie is necessarily a mercantile rather than an industrial bourgeoisie.
In this context, small manufacturers are a faction of the petty bourgeoisie, whose members occasionally engage in finance on a similar scale. This apparent diversity of economic activity is not due to an "excess of energy" of this social class, but rather to limitations on the concentration of production.
These constrained economic relations of production have political implications. Tied in its very class existence to its colonialist or capitalist counterpart, the colonial bourgeoisie is incapable of carrying out a political revolution and establishing liberal democracy in its European bourgeois form. The instability of government in the colonized countries is therefore a result of the stability of the colonial social structure, not a reflection of orientalist inclinations toward military rule or dictatorship.
An extreme case of the lack of class differentiation is the fusion of two social factions, urban merchants linked to foreign trade and landowners who orient their agricultural production towards colonial trade. This fusion denies the existence of a national bourgeoisie, normally associated with industrialists, or of a feudal class, normally associated with a colonial alliance.
Similarly, the process of proletarianization of the colony’s working masses – primarily peasants – is never completed at the economic or social level. Given the centrality of land in colonial agricultural production, which is concentrated around cash crops and extractive labor, peasants are the overexploited class under the MOPC.
According to Amel, when peasants migrate to urban centres in search of employment, they rarely experience a radical transformation in terms of existence and class consciousness. Although they are incorporated into a new class position involving a small-scale consumer industry, they retain their previous class connections and maintain much of their past class consciousness, moving from one position to another with ease.
Amel described the situation in Lebanon:
He stressed the nature of class consciousness as a historical force of class development and resistance. He argued that before the Second World War, the sectoral and economic forms of struggle of the various factions of the working masses, independent of each other, impeded their own formation as a class. In the period after 1945, these struggles converged into a broader political struggle for liberation from colonialism.
At that point, the colonial relationship became mutually constitutive of the colonizing and colonized societies. It is necessary to cut this relationship in order to transcend, and thus destroy, both capitalist and colonial social structures.
The global rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s precipitated a conservative and culturalist turn across the Arab region. Amel's intellectual work focused on pertinent questions of culture and the growing role of religion, particularly Islam, in politics.
Unlike other Arab leftists or secularists such as Sadiq Jalal al-Azm and Adonis, Amel's thinking did not fall into orientalist clichés. He opposed the ideology of defeat that attributed the Arab defeat in the 1967 war against Israel to cultural rather than military factors and lashed out at the Arab bourgeoisie for presenting its own political failures as universal failures of Arab civilization and cultural heritage.
For Amel, turath , or cultural heritage, was itself a problem of interpretation of the past by a colonial present rather than a precolonial problem persisting in the contemporary world. At the same time, Amel avoided absolutist perspectives toward Islam of the kind found in secular or communist polemics that view Islam as intrinsically reactionary.
Islam and revolutionary thought
In the 1980s, the culturalist turn led to the emergence of what Amel called “everyday” thinking. He warned against this new discourse that depoliticized social struggle by ignoring the role of geopolitics, the structural forces of history, and class interests as motivations in sectarian or regional conflicts.
Amel developed critiques of various manifestations of this new trend, some of which he categorized as nihilistic, obscurantist, or Islamized bourgeois currents. His denunciation of the latter current did not lead him to dismiss Islam as an ontologically regressive force at all stages of history. Unlike many scholars of Islamic intellectual history who considered the primary contradiction in Islam—or any other religion—to be that between faith and atheism, or between religious and rational thought, Amel identified a dividing line between those who submit to power and those who challenge it.
The traditional classification of pre-capitalist Islamic scholars is one example. Mainstream scholarship associated progressive thought with reason, exemplified by Ibn Rushd a.k.a. Averroes (born 1126; Córdoba, Almoravid Empire, actual Spain), while it attributed conservatism to philosophies that elevated religion or belief above reason, exemplified by al-Ghazali a.k.a. Algazel (born 1058; Tus, Seljuc Empire, actual Iran) .
Amel argued that such a classification was simplistic and based on the assumption that reason was a monolith :
He noted that one could find the same scholar, such as Ibn Khaldun, invoking both scientific reasoning and Salafi legal reasoning. These contradictory forms of reason remained within a religious logic or paradigm, which meant that they were never entirely antithetical to each other. Subversive thought, as expressed in Sufi enlightenment Islam, consequently took the form of rejecting reason altogether .
For Amel, the main contradiction was not between religion and earthly life, but between two concepts of religion: spiritual (Sufi) and temporal (legal). Spiritual Islam, however, was not timeless in a metaphysical sense. Islam, by force of historical development, was temporal and, by extension, political. Sufism, or certain currents of it, denies the institutionalization of Islam, which turned it into an authoritarian apparatus.
The various manifestations of Islam demonstrate, according to Amel, that Islam was never a singular force. It was the material existence of Islam, rather than its extraterrestrial existence, that determined its reactionary or revolutionary character, even though, in Amel's view, it served above all the interests of the ruling classes.
He identified notable exceptions to this rule in pre-capitalist Islamic societies, such as the revolt against the third "rightly guided" caliph, 'Uthman ibn Affan, in the period after the death of Muhammad, as well as a certain phase of Qarmatian rule in Arabia. Among the modern examples Amel cited of Islam being part of a revolutionary struggle in the era of national liberation were the Algerian War of Independence and armed resistance against Israel.
Revolution, liberation and the Palestinian cause
Amel's treatment of the Algerian revolution and resistance to Israel sheds light on the particularities of class struggle under colonialism, including the role of non-economic factors such as racism and cultural identity. In the case of Algeria, Amel noted that the vast majority of European settlers, whether artisans, farmers, bourgeoisie or workers, opposed the national liberation revolution.
The politicized working class was no exception. The Algerian working-class district of Bab el-Oued had been nicknamed the “red light district” because it served as a popular base for the Algerian Communist Party. However, it became a “refuge of European racism” and a “centre of European fascist terrorism against the revolution” after the outbreak of the war of independence.
The same anti-colonial logic applies to the theorization of class struggle in Palestine. So-called worker Zionism was a racialized ideology complicit in the oppression of Palestinian workers and peasants and as such cannot be called socialist. On the contrary, Amel saw the Palestinian struggle for liberation from colonialism as a revolutionary class struggle force.
The failure of the Arab communist parties to recognize this distinction and their willingness to blindly follow Moscow's directives led the leaders of these parties to support the partition of Palestine in 1948. They rationalized this decision by a simplistic description of the conflict as a struggle between workers, both Arab and Jewish, and a merchant and landed bourgeoisie, both Arab and Jewish. This led to the communist movement suffering a loss of popular support in Arab societies.
In the case of Lebanon, the Communist Party’s revision of its pro-partition stance in the late 1960s and its alliance with the Palestinian liberation movement was a radicalising force that reverberated through the class struggle in Lebanon itself. Following the Israeli invasion in 1982, Amel ridiculed left-wing pundits who downplayed the significance of the success of armed resistance against the Israeli occupation in order to focus on the strengthening of the Lebanese central state at a time of right-wing Phalangist hegemony.
Israel’s own attitude towards the Lebanese and Palestinian political factions was and remains ultimately determined by the decision of these movements to adopt or reject strategies of national liberation, including armed resistance, regardless of whether their ideology is secular or religious. For Amel, the importance of armed resistance for Israel and its allies stems from the objective centrality of the colonial relationship in determining the character of class struggle in a colonial context.
Unlike many leftists of his time, Amel was careful to assess Islamist resistance forces in relation to this structural contradiction without ignoring the role of political (and therefore subjective) consciousness in orienting this struggle towards a socialist or progressive horizon. In 1984, when sectarian Islamist forces rebelled against pro-Israeli sectarian Christian forces in Beirut, Amel identified the objective revolutionary significance of the military victory, while stressing that it was uncertain whether this victory would point towards the end of sectarianism or towards its reproduction:
The global conjuncture of national liberation in the 20th century may have passed in relation to other regions of the world. However, the colonial social reality of the Palestinians remains unchanged, as does their right to resist by any means necessary. A Marxist analysis that ignores this primary contradiction is bound to repeat the mistake of the early Arab communists, and in this case, contrary to Marxist tradition, the second version will be as tragic as the first.
Source: Jacobin, May 18, 2024 ( https://jacobin.com/2024/05/anti-colonialism-marxism-mahdi-amel/ )
The anticolonial Marxism of Mahdi Amel
20-July-2024; by Hicham Safieddine :With rare exceptions, non-Western theorists of Marxism receive little intellectual attention. When they do appear on the radar of ideological debates, their work is summarily presented as proof of Marxism's universalism rather than as a means of transforming Marxism itself.
This has largely been the case with the Arab Marxist Mahdi Am el, who was assassinated on this day, May 18, 1987. Born in 1936, Hassan Hamdan, who later adopted the pseudonym Mahdi Amel, was a member of the Lebanese Communist Party and had joined the party's national leadership at the time of his assassination.
Amel’s legacy experienced a renaissance during the Arab uprisings that erupted a decade ago. Her work received more attention after a volume containing a selection of her writings was translated into English in 2021. But interest in her philosophy of Marxism and its implications for understanding colonialism in relation to capitalism remains rudimentary.
A historical materialist reading of Amel would integrate his conceptual contribution and praxis into the ideological canon of twentieth-century Marxism. This requires a sustained and critical analysis of the assumptions, arguments and conclusions of his philosophy in comparison and contrast with European Marxism, as well as with the heterodox or radical schools of Marxism that emerged after World War II, such as dependency theory and racial capitalism.
We can take a modest step in that direction by briefly examining his methodology and its application to the major issues of post-World War II national liberation, including the current struggle for a free Palestine.
Marxism, colonialism and methodology
Amel called for a “methodological revolution” in Marxist philosophy to understand and overcome the historical reality of colonialism. He opposed the application of preformed Marxist thought to the colonial social structure, but not in the name of a supposedly authentic pre-capitalist thought. He also rejected forms of postcolonial analysis that threw historical materialism out with the Eurocentric bathwater. Instead, Amel worked dialectically to construct a theory of Marxism born out of colonial social reality and used for its socialist liberation, which, he argued, is also the liberation of all humanity.
Amel laid out the logic of his methodology, first briefly and then in detail, in a series of essays and treatises. He then applied it to a wide range of historical phenomena and forces, including sectarianism, Islam, education, and revolutionary culture. These writings engaged in direct conversation with ideological debates that arose during his time and that remain relevant in our own.
Although Amel's texts can be dense and sometimes repetitive, his reasoning was straightforward. Karl Marx's discussion of colonialism was incidental to his general analysis of capitalism. Given Marx's own historical background in a capitalist Europe and his ignorance of the socioeconomic conditions of the colonized countries, he was unable to take a full account of colonialism and incorporate it into his theory of capitalism.
The historical reality of colonized peoples is the opposite of that experienced by Marx. Their encounter with capitalism was fortuitous or mediated by colonialism. Colonization, in Amel's words, "cut the thread of continuity" in their history and "sent violent tremors through it."
He believed that these tremors reached down to the strata of production relations, since the material basis of pre-capitalist production was destroyed and the material basis of industrialization was denied. In other words, the difference between capitalist and colonial social formations does not only concern the level or scale of production, but the entire structure of production.
For Amel, it follows from this that the colonial relationship, which is all-encompassing and not purely economic, is the fundamental contradiction of colonized societies and that colonialism is the “objective basis of the social structure of the colonized country.” Colonialism therefore ends not with the end of military occupation or the attainment of political independence, but with the complete rupture of this relationship in a process of violent and revolutionary transition to socialism.
Amel’s research in this regard resulted in the concept of colonial mode of production (CMP), which he defined as “the form of capitalism structurally dependent on imperialism in its historical formation and contemporary development.” Marx’s distilled observations on colonialism provided Amel with a solid theoretical basis for developing his model. At each step, Amel drew on Marx’s relevant comments and identified first principles.
For example, Amel drew on Marx’s reference to the “fusion” of modes of production and Vladimir Lenin’s description of different modes coexisting in a single social space to support the idea of a colonial mode of production as a fusion of capitalist and pre-capitalist modes of production under the rubric of colonial conquest, and thus distinct from either. This methodology retained Marxian logic and concepts such as class formation, class struggle, capitalization, and class consciousness, but attempted to elucidate their specific historical form in a colonial setting.
Colonialism and class struggle
Amel's theorizing led him to conclude that the process of class formation under a MOPC is characterized by a lack of class differentiation. Thanks to the structural inhibition of large-scale industry, the colonial bourgeoisie is necessarily a mercantile rather than an industrial bourgeoisie.
In this context, small manufacturers are a faction of the petty bourgeoisie, whose members occasionally engage in finance on a similar scale. This apparent diversity of economic activity is not due to an "excess of energy" of this social class, but rather to limitations on the concentration of production.
These constrained economic relations of production have political implications. Tied in its very class existence to its colonialist or capitalist counterpart, the colonial bourgeoisie is incapable of carrying out a political revolution and establishing liberal democracy in its European bourgeois form. The instability of government in the colonized countries is therefore a result of the stability of the colonial social structure, not a reflection of orientalist inclinations toward military rule or dictatorship.
An extreme case of the lack of class differentiation is the fusion of two social factions, urban merchants linked to foreign trade and landowners who orient their agricultural production towards colonial trade. This fusion denies the existence of a national bourgeoisie, normally associated with industrialists, or of a feudal class, normally associated with a colonial alliance.
Similarly, the process of proletarianization of the colony’s working masses – primarily peasants – is never completed at the economic or social level. Given the centrality of land in colonial agricultural production, which is concentrated around cash crops and extractive labor, peasants are the overexploited class under the MOPC.
According to Amel, when peasants migrate to urban centres in search of employment, they rarely experience a radical transformation in terms of existence and class consciousness. Although they are incorporated into a new class position involving a small-scale consumer industry, they retain their previous class connections and maintain much of their past class consciousness, moving from one position to another with ease.
Amel described the situation in Lebanon:
Amel warned that the lack of class differentiation does not mean that class struggle is absent in the colonial environment, as nationalist forces would like. Nor does it mean that the national question is insignificant, as some anti-imperialist or internationalist Marxists claim. Given the indirect relationship of exploitation under a MOPC that is governed by the colonial relationship, class struggle is directed against a structure of dependency and domination, not against another social class. This means that socialist revolution in colonized societies is synonymous with national liberation:
Amel prevented his philosophy from falling into determinism or economism by placing his structural analysis in a historical perspective while theorizing class struggle.
He stressed the nature of class consciousness as a historical force of class development and resistance. He argued that before the Second World War, the sectoral and economic forms of struggle of the various factions of the working masses, independent of each other, impeded their own formation as a class. In the period after 1945, these struggles converged into a broader political struggle for liberation from colonialism.
At that point, the colonial relationship became mutually constitutive of the colonizing and colonized societies. It is necessary to cut this relationship in order to transcend, and thus destroy, both capitalist and colonial social structures.
The global rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s precipitated a conservative and culturalist turn across the Arab region. Amel's intellectual work focused on pertinent questions of culture and the growing role of religion, particularly Islam, in politics.
Unlike other Arab leftists or secularists such as Sadiq Jalal al-Azm and Adonis, Amel's thinking did not fall into orientalist clichés. He opposed the ideology of defeat that attributed the Arab defeat in the 1967 war against Israel to cultural rather than military factors and lashed out at the Arab bourgeoisie for presenting its own political failures as universal failures of Arab civilization and cultural heritage.
For Amel, turath , or cultural heritage, was itself a problem of interpretation of the past by a colonial present rather than a precolonial problem persisting in the contemporary world. At the same time, Amel avoided absolutist perspectives toward Islam of the kind found in secular or communist polemics that view Islam as intrinsically reactionary.
Islam and revolutionary thought
In the 1980s, the culturalist turn led to the emergence of what Amel called “everyday” thinking. He warned against this new discourse that depoliticized social struggle by ignoring the role of geopolitics, the structural forces of history, and class interests as motivations in sectarian or regional conflicts.
Amel developed critiques of various manifestations of this new trend, some of which he categorized as nihilistic, obscurantist, or Islamized bourgeois currents. His denunciation of the latter current did not lead him to dismiss Islam as an ontologically regressive force at all stages of history. Unlike many scholars of Islamic intellectual history who considered the primary contradiction in Islam—or any other religion—to be that between faith and atheism, or between religious and rational thought, Amel identified a dividing line between those who submit to power and those who challenge it.
The traditional classification of pre-capitalist Islamic scholars is one example. Mainstream scholarship associated progressive thought with reason, exemplified by Ibn Rushd a.k.a. Averroes (born 1126; Córdoba, Almoravid Empire, actual Spain), while it attributed conservatism to philosophies that elevated religion or belief above reason, exemplified by al-Ghazali a.k.a. Algazel (born 1058; Tus, Seljuc Empire, actual Iran) .
Amel argued that such a classification was simplistic and based on the assumption that reason was a monolith :
He noted that one could find the same scholar, such as Ibn Khaldun, invoking both scientific reasoning and Salafi legal reasoning. These contradictory forms of reason remained within a religious logic or paradigm, which meant that they were never entirely antithetical to each other. Subversive thought, as expressed in Sufi enlightenment Islam, consequently took the form of rejecting reason altogether .
For Amel, the main contradiction was not between religion and earthly life, but between two concepts of religion: spiritual (Sufi) and temporal (legal). Spiritual Islam, however, was not timeless in a metaphysical sense. Islam, by force of historical development, was temporal and, by extension, political. Sufism, or certain currents of it, denies the institutionalization of Islam, which turned it into an authoritarian apparatus.
The various manifestations of Islam demonstrate, according to Amel, that Islam was never a singular force. It was the material existence of Islam, rather than its extraterrestrial existence, that determined its reactionary or revolutionary character, even though, in Amel's view, it served above all the interests of the ruling classes.
He identified notable exceptions to this rule in pre-capitalist Islamic societies, such as the revolt against the third "rightly guided" caliph, 'Uthman ibn Affan, in the period after the death of Muhammad, as well as a certain phase of Qarmatian rule in Arabia. Among the modern examples Amel cited of Islam being part of a revolutionary struggle in the era of national liberation were the Algerian War of Independence and armed resistance against Israel.
Revolution, liberation and the Palestinian cause
Amel's treatment of the Algerian revolution and resistance to Israel sheds light on the particularities of class struggle under colonialism, including the role of non-economic factors such as racism and cultural identity. In the case of Algeria, Amel noted that the vast majority of European settlers, whether artisans, farmers, bourgeoisie or workers, opposed the national liberation revolution.
The politicized working class was no exception. The Algerian working-class district of Bab el-Oued had been nicknamed the “red light district” because it served as a popular base for the Algerian Communist Party. However, it became a “refuge of European racism” and a “centre of European fascist terrorism against the revolution” after the outbreak of the war of independence.
The same anti-colonial logic applies to the theorization of class struggle in Palestine. So-called worker Zionism was a racialized ideology complicit in the oppression of Palestinian workers and peasants and as such cannot be called socialist. On the contrary, Amel saw the Palestinian struggle for liberation from colonialism as a revolutionary class struggle force.
The failure of the Arab communist parties to recognize this distinction and their willingness to blindly follow Moscow's directives led the leaders of these parties to support the partition of Palestine in 1948. They rationalized this decision by a simplistic description of the conflict as a struggle between workers, both Arab and Jewish, and a merchant and landed bourgeoisie, both Arab and Jewish. This led to the communist movement suffering a loss of popular support in Arab societies.
In the case of Lebanon, the Communist Party’s revision of its pro-partition stance in the late 1960s and its alliance with the Palestinian liberation movement was a radicalising force that reverberated through the class struggle in Lebanon itself. Following the Israeli invasion in 1982, Amel ridiculed left-wing pundits who downplayed the significance of the success of armed resistance against the Israeli occupation in order to focus on the strengthening of the Lebanese central state at a time of right-wing Phalangist hegemony.
Israel’s own attitude towards the Lebanese and Palestinian political factions was and remains ultimately determined by the decision of these movements to adopt or reject strategies of national liberation, including armed resistance, regardless of whether their ideology is secular or religious. For Amel, the importance of armed resistance for Israel and its allies stems from the objective centrality of the colonial relationship in determining the character of class struggle in a colonial context.
Unlike many leftists of his time, Amel was careful to assess Islamist resistance forces in relation to this structural contradiction without ignoring the role of political (and therefore subjective) consciousness in orienting this struggle towards a socialist or progressive horizon. In 1984, when sectarian Islamist forces rebelled against pro-Israeli sectarian Christian forces in Beirut, Amel identified the objective revolutionary significance of the military victory, while stressing that it was uncertain whether this victory would point towards the end of sectarianism or towards its reproduction:
There is no sectarian crisis in Palestine similar to that in Lebanon. But the main armed resistance forces today in Palestine and throughout the region are Islamist in ideology. To analyse this resistance without focusing on the colonial relationship, as Amel has shown elsewhere, is a methodological error that mischaracterises its revolutionary role as the last stage of the national liberation war.
The global conjuncture of national liberation in the 20th century may have passed in relation to other regions of the world. However, the colonial social reality of the Palestinians remains unchanged, as does their right to resist by any means necessary. A Marxist analysis that ignores this primary contradiction is bound to repeat the mistake of the early Arab communists, and in this case, contrary to Marxist tradition, the second version will be as tragic as the first.
Source: Jacobin, May 18, 2024 ( https://jacobin.com/2024/05/anti-colonialism-marxism-mahdi-amel/ )
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Eltitoguay
Well-known member
From the official acts of the 80th anniversary of the Liberation of Paris from the Nazis in 2024, I extract only the tributes to the Spanish volunteers who led it (socialists, communists or anarchists; the vast majority):
(From) THE FULL PROGRAM OF COMMEMORATIONS MARKING THE 80TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE LIBERATION OF PARIS THIS WEEK
To celebrate the Liberation of Paris in August 1944, the capital has prepared a week of intense commemorations, from August 19 to 25, 2024, to celebrate the 80th anniversary in style!: The Second World War was not so long ago - it was only 80 years ago that the capital was liberated from Nazi occupation. To celebrate this anniversary in style, the city of Paris is mixing tributes and festivities throughout the week of August 19 to 25, 2024, the dates of the liberation by the Allied forces. The commemorations will be marked by the passage of the Paralympic flame at the end of the week, providing an opportunity for sharing and joy:
- August 22 : At 11 a.m., a ceremony under the vaulted ceiling of the Paris City Hall pays tribute to the city councillors shot by the occupying forces. At 3pm, we head for the Musée de la Libération de Paris, for the inauguration of a free exhibition dedicated to the column commanded by Captain Dronne, made up mainly of Spanish Republican men from the "Nueve", who were the first military unit to enter Paris.
- August 23 : From 7pm, a free musical evening awaits you at the halle des Blancs Manteaux to pay tribute to "the Spanish antifascists of the Nueve". To mark the occasion, Paris is organizing a large-scale free public ball, with a wide range of entertainment on the program.
- August 24 : At 11am, a plaque in memory of the Dronne column will be unveiled at the corner of rue des Peupliers and rue Brillat-Savarin in the 13th arrondissement, before the inauguration of avenue Hubert Germain, in the 16th arrondissement, named after the last of the Compagnons de la Libération.
- At 6pm, a commemoration ceremony will pay tribute to the soldiers of the "Nueve" on the esplanade des Villes Compagnon, in the presence of Spanish authorities. From 7pm, a grand bal de la Libération awaits you on the Hôtel de Ville square, with concerts and an introduction to swing, before the bells of Parisian churches ring out in unison at 9pm.
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- August 25 : A big day ahead! We start with a mass for the 2nd Armored Division at Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois church, at 10 a.m., along with a commemorative ceremony at the Arbre de la Libération, place de la bataille de Stalingrad. At 10:30 a.m., we head for the Gare de l'Est for a ceremony in front of the plaque commemorating the departure of deportees from the Gare de l'Est. At noon, the French flag will be hoisted on the Eiffel Tower by the Paris fire department, along with a wreath-laying ceremony in tribute to José Manuel Baron Carreño, leader of the Spanish guerillas, at the Pantin cemetery in Paris.
- At 2.30pm, a ceremony to mark the German surrender takes place in front of the former Gare Montparnasse, Place du 18 juin 1940, before a new ceremony in tribute to the 2nd Armored Division, at 3.45pm in front of the monument to General Leclerc. The main ceremony begins at 4.15pm, with the departure of the military parade from Porte d'Orléans to Place Denfert-Rochereau.
- An hour later, on the latter, the official commemoration will begin in the presence of Emanuel Macron and Ana Hidalgo, marked by the arrival of the Paralympic flame, carried by a collective relay of the Compagnons de la Libération, before the bells of Parisian churches ring out at 7:30pm to mark the end of the commemorations. The Patrouille de France will also fly over the capital at 7pm, from Porte de Saint-Ouen to Porte d'Orléans with 8 aircraft.
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Eltitoguay
Well-known member
80 years since the liberation of Paris: the struggle continues
Dina Bousselham
Celebration of the surrender of the Nazis in Paris in August 1944, with the Spanish soldiers from La Nueve (The Nine, The 9, The Ninth Company) in the lead.
We cannot allow the heirs of Nazism to continue acting with total impunity. We must come together again and let international solidarity be the weapon from which the carnations that represent the democratic principles for which our ancestors fought blossom.
It is 80 years since the triumphant entry of Philips Leclerc's Ninth Company that managed to liberate Paris from the Nazi monster. 80 years since that beautiful example of international solidarity, where thousands and thosands of exiled Spanish republicans gave way to the beginning of the end of one of the darkest historical chapters in our recent history. It is curious that at the same time that we celebrate the liberation of Paris by those heroes, others are being sought in the thousands of ditches that remain hidden in our country. This is the case of the 451 bodies of the brigadiers buried in a mass grave in the Madrid neighbourhood of Montercarmelo, where the city council wants to build a cleaning canton. An image that also contrasts with a very peculiar political and social moment, where the rise of the extreme right has given way to a return to the past marked by the new Nazis.
Today the monsters we fight against no longer wear military uniforms, although they are still decorated. Today the Hitler of the moment does not wear a moustache. He uses his mobile phone and tool X to spread lies and attack the weakest. Today the Hitler of the moment has extensive media devices and the unconditional support of a certain part of the judiciary, all of them reckless that their privileges will end. Today the Hitler of the moment does not need to use concentration camps to finish off the “enemy”. It is enough for him to have an army of brainless people, or of poorly informed people whom he can convince of his lies in order to use them against the weakest (mainly against the migrant). Today the Hitler of the moment is part of a reactionary wave in which not only the traditional right participates in its growth (its successes and failures made possible the rapid rise of the extreme right) but also the role played by a certain progressive movement, especially the media. The same one that continues to this day to take a back seat when it suits it.
And liberating Paris was one of the most beautiful gestures that we remember because it not only meant the beginning of the end of a totalitarian regime but also the demonstration that solidarity is the tenderness of peoples. Without it, no social or political changes or transformations are possible. Solidarity is what made it possible for doctors and nurses from different parts of the world to be here in Spain helping to fight against Francoism, saving many lives while risking their own. Solidarity is what made it possible for Spanish women kidnapped in the Ravensbruck concentration camp and forced to work as prostitutes to survive that horror. Clinging to life alongside thousands of other Russian, Polish, French, Jewish and even German women who managed to resist the barbarities that were done to them. Many of them were used as “guinea pigs” for the madness of the Nazi regime, using their bodies and especially their vaginas and uteruses for experiments. Others were raped more than 50 times a day by Nazi soldiers. And many others were simply condemned to extermination in the famous gas chambers. Their sin? Defending freedom, equality and social justice. More than 400 Spanish women passed through this concentration camp, which had a total of more than 132,000 women. 11 Spanish women survived these atrocities, driven mainly by the international solidarity that made it possible to organize a resistance unit within the concentration camp itself. The most striking example of this resistance was the use they made of the tool of sabotage. They reduced the production of weapons that they had to manufacture daily and did everything possible to adulterate the quality of the gunpowder. After all, they were aware that this material would be used against the Allies, and therefore if they managed to minimize the damage they would be in some way saving the lives of their brothers and sisters. Little is said about the role of these heroines of Ravensbruck. My total admiration for all of them.
Returning to Paris, 80 years ago, the Spaniards of The Nine and the thousands of anonymous people who gave their lives along the way, those who resisted, those who did not let themselves be humiliated and did not give up, those who joined together to confront the Nazi monster, those who came from far away countries to defend democracy and those who dared to fight it sacrificing everything, made it possible for us to enjoy a certain freedom thanks to the (limited) Western democracies that we have today. Freedom that is once again in danger today by the heirs of that monster. Its mechanisms of confrontation and persecution are far removed from those methods used by Nazism, but its objectives remain the same. Today, thanks to the sophistication of new technologies, lies and hatred spread more quickly than 80 years ago. And above all today, as yesterday, they have the support of broad sectors among which the media and judicial powers stand out. Ignoring this detail is giving up fighting the enemy.
We cannot allow the heirs of Nazism to continue acting with total impunity. We must come together again and let international solidarity be the weapon from which the carnations that represent the democratic principles for which our ancestors fought blossom. Hope, illusion, joy, life must make way against their hatred, fear and lies.
80 años de la liberación de Paris: la lucha sigue
No podemos permitir que los herederos del nazismo sigan actuando con total impunidad. Debemos volver a juntarnos y que la solidaridad internacional sea ese fusil desde donde afloran los claveles que representan los principios democráticos por los que pelearon nuestros antepasados
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