Re sub-imperialism

Fred Feldman posted a contribution to the Green Left discussion group on Yahoo on the use of "sub-imperialism" to characterize a number of countries today, such as China, Russia and India.

I replied as follows:


--- In GreenLeft_discussion@yahoogroups.com, "Fred Feldman"  wrote:

> Actually, if Green Lefters defend China as an oppressed nation against
> imperialism (not just "oppose an attack" but SOLIDARIZE WITH CHINA against
> an attack), that would be adequate since there is a basis for reasonable
> Marxists to disagree about the class character of the state. But in fact the
> trend seems to be toward proclaiming China an imperialist power (perhaps
> with the highly subjective category of "sub-imperialist" as a transitional
> characterization), which clearly implies no defense against anybody anytime.
>
> Thus a war between China and the United States or China and Australia would
> be an inter-imperialist war with "a plague on both your houses" as the
> indicated political stance.
>
> If Green Left's Marxism still includes "revolutionary defeatism" in a war
> between China and Australia, that would mean considering the defeat of
> Australia as the lesser evil in a war with China from the standpoint of
> making a socialist
> revolution in Australia.  From this standpoint, Chinese revolutionaries
> would be expected to take the same stand - defeat of their "imperialism" as
> the lesser evil.  Chinese people who took the side of their country against
> US, Japanese, and/or Australian imperialism would be regarded as traitors to
> socialism.

This shows how important the question of the character of the Chinese state is to revolutionary Marxists. Because it's so important it's crucial not to play fast and loose with the terms in which the characterization is made. To speak of a "trend" towards considering China imperialist while at the same time claiming that "there is a basis for reasonable Marxists to disagree about the class character of the state" is to play fast and loose with terms like "imperialism" and "Marxism", not to mention "reasonable".

Marxism would not "trend" towards a characterization in this way. Some Marxists might, but then the question would be how far a trending impressionist agrees with Marxist economic analysis, and whether this is "reasonable". Let's be clear. There is disagreement, even among serious revolutionary Marxists, about the class character of the Chinese state. But so far this has not been the subject of any serious large-scale debate. A key issue for those who originally held with the characterization of Deformed Workers' State seems to be how far the reforms of 1979 constitute a restoration of capital. But the bullet in this debate hasn't yet been bitten.

Why was the situation different in the mid-1930s regarding the Soviet Union? For this argument it's enough to say there was a revolutionary Bolshevik current in the USSR and the world that was strong enough and confident enough in its Marxism and place in the class struggle to bite the bullet and consider the hugely contradictory situation that had arisen after October succeeded in overturning the capitalist state of Tsarist Russia, but where this new non-capitalist state had either become capitalist once more or remained non-capitalist while displaying blatantly anti-socialist and counter-revolutionary characteristics.

I'm referring, obviously, to the Left Opposition and the embodiment of its Bolshevik leadership in Trotsky and those closest to him.

In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky came down firmly, Marxist-style, on the side of the most contradictory alternative - a state which was at the same time non-capitalist, anti-socialist and counter-revolutionary. He did this because it best fitted the facts, and his presentation of these facts and his reasons for interpreting them as he did convinced the non-Stalinist revolutionary left that was moving towards the foundation of the Fourth International after the catastrophic defeat of the workers movement in Germany.

The closest thing this movement has had to a similar decisive intervention concerning the character of a state is Peng Shuzi's work on The Causes of the Victory of the Chinese Communist Party (www.marxists.org/archive/peng/1951/nov/causes.htm) and the debate leading to the characterization of Deformed Workers' State.

Neither Peng nor the Fourth had the theoretical or organizational authority of Trotsky or the pre-war Left Opposition, so there was little to deter impressionist non-revolutionary Lefts like Tony Cliff from proclaiming early in the 50s that The Revolution Betrayed had been mistaken, that the USSR was capitalist and that China was too. Their Marxism couldn't stand up to the combined pressure of bourgeois witch-hunting and Stalinist propaganda.

The problem for us today is that this has been happening by default within the genuinely revolutionary tradition of the Fourth and closely allied movements. The bitter contradictions digested in The Revolution Betrayed have not been understood as such. It could even be argued that the bitterness and scale of the contradictions inherent in the Chinese state and regime are even greater than those in the Soviet Union.

Whatever the case, the contradictions have not been confronted openly and massively, so the trial is not just not over, it hasn't even started.

Which presents us with a huge and responsible task.

Including the main reason for my present contribution, which is to disagree flatly regarding the term "sub-imperialism".

Fred declares that the category is "highly subjective" and used as a "transitional characterization". Maybe he meant "impressionistic" - in which case he should have said so. But "subjective" can be compared to "objective" and related to facts, which Fred doesn't do. As for "transitional", well, things change, powerful states and economies become weak and vice versa, so there is a case for terms describing such change to be labelled transitional. Trotsky and the Fourth labelled their programme "transitional" for good reasons.

Fred writes:

> The sub-imperialist category is misleading because it effectively eliminates
> the qualitative distinction between imperialism and not-imperialism,
> oppressed and oppressor nations, and it is infinitely expandable and
> basically un-scientific. If China is imperialist or sub-imperialist, why not
> Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea, or even Vietnam? If India is imperialist or
> sub-imperialist, why not Pakistan, Indonesia, and Malaysia?

But this is not so if sub-imperialism has been defined clearly in terms of transition from less powerful to more powerful, and its preconditions have been set out. In the first place, it is misleading to lump together "imperialism and not-imperialism,
oppressed and oppressor nations", simply because imperialist oppression is not the same as any old oppression of one nation (or entity) by another. So we'll ignore that, although it forms the basis of most of the arm-waving examples Fred gives. It is not in the least intrinsically "infinitely expandable", as that depends on the definition and preconditions.

For instance, sensible definitions of sub-imperialist would have to include such empirical qualities as great size, great population, and economic and military viability on a grand scale. The military viability would include things like complete impossibility of total invasion and occupation. The history of Russia gives an indication of the kind of countries that might come into consideration here. The "sub" would have to include the transitional element of not yet big enough and ugly enough to face down the US in an open confrontation, despite a desire to do so and probable capacity to put up a good fight.

There is nothing strange about any of this, and in fact the definition would enable a good description of the relative strength of such acknowledged imperialisms as Germany, Britain, France, Sweden, etc.

Lenin takes relative change between imperialist countries for granted when he writes of "aspiring imperialisms" such as Japan and Germany and compares them to the old established imperialist powers of Britain and France. And in 1900, the US was the biggest aspiring "sub-imperialism" of them all.

And the definition given here, preliminary as it is, would be able to handle the status of Korea, Thailand, Pakistan and Indonesia without pausing in its stride.

Fred concludes by writing:

> The tendency is to envision an almost exclusively imperialist world - one in
> which almost every state not directly controlled by imperialism economically
> and politically like the Marshall Islands or Puerto Rico or Chad tends to
> "rise" to imperialist or subimperialist status, becoming a challenger to
> "old" imperialist powers for re-dividing the world (like Germany in the two
> world wars) and thus one of the driving forces toward world war.  This is
> not theoretically impossible, but highly improbable in anything like the
> near future.      

Which of course is as impressionistic as the approach he is criticising. Much as most governments would dearly love to elbow their way closer to the fleshpots and bury their snouts in the trough with the US, it is farcical for them, or us, to dream of such a thing, let alone "envision" it. Put this generally, it is in fact "theoretically impossible" - at least for a Marxist Marxist - and it certainly has no bearing on whether or not one or two of the most powerful and expansive non-acknowledged imperialist countries (say Russia and India, leaving China and Brazil aside for the moment) are in a position to challenge or actually even in the course of challenging the currently hegemonic imperialist power(s).

As I understand it, "sub-imperialism" refers to imperialist potential in a country that for a variety of reasons is still clearly 'sub'ordinate to the leading imperialist countries. Some countries might make it all the way, and watch once leading countries eat their dust as they fall by the wayside. Some might just hover mid-league for ever, so to say. But we have to acknowledge change as it happens, and do our best to grasp what's going on and why. That is our duty both to the working class as revolutionary socialists and to science as thinking citizens.

The state of affairs at the moment

On a mailing list, GA posted the following, linking to an article in a Swedish daily ("We are living in the biggest bluff in history"):

http://www.svd.se/naringsliv/nyheter/varlden/vi-lever-i-historiens-storsta-bluff_7636778.svd#xtor=AD-500
One highlight from the article (translated on the fly):
"The IMF calculated the other year that the group of Americans that turned 65 in 2012 can count on the state paying out 333 billion dollars more than they paid in taxes. This jackpot is 17 higher than what those 25 year old at the time will have to make do with.
Europe isn't any better. A report issued by the EU Commission shows that with the welfare systems intact, the average member country's state debt will amount to 477% of the gross national product in 2060."
FWIW. Sorry I don't have the time to translate the rest. I hope GT will make a halfway decent job of it.

BR

GA 

I commented:

In other words -  either capitalism survives, or we do...

And capitalism is no bluff. It's very real. Its alleged benefits are all a bluff, but that's another matter altogether. 

What it really does is condemn most of humanity to a daily life of misery and pain and anxiety and insecurity. And that's those of us with work and an income. Shit, it can't even keep translators feeling bubbly, let alone people working in a factory or a sweatshop or a mine. Or scratching at debt-ridden soil. 

Meaningful daily activities, food, shelter and health - forget it. Food and shelter if you're lucky, maybe. If you're displaced or unemployed, tough luck.

What capitalism does do is waste an awful lot of the wealth produced by those working for it (let's call them "workers" :-) on things that are directly intended to repress, enslave and kill these workers. Armies and weapons. Not only intended, either, but doing it all day every day throughout the world. It also wastes an awful lot of our wealth on things intended to deceive us and brutalize us - advertising, media garbage (films, radio, tv, press).

It directly engenders its mirror image in mass organized crime - the arms, drugs and sex industries. No capitalism in America, no drug wars horrors in Mexico or Colombia. The freer a country is from US/imperialist influence, the freer it is from the arms drugs and sex industries..Just compare Guatemala and Cuba.

Capitalism is now so over-ripe and rotten it's liquefying. It still stands because it and its treacherous (for the workers) henchmen Social-Democracy and Stalinism have deliberately and brutally smashed anti-capitalist working class political and economic alternative leaderships. Capitalist China in 1948, for  instance, was as flimsy (as Peng Shuzi wrote) as a wooden house full of dry rot - one good kick and it would fall. The Chinese Communist Party led by Mao was still capable (despite the counter-revolutionary orders/advice it received from Moscow) of delivering such a kick, and it did. Castro's army did the same in 1959 in Cuba. But since then mass mobilizations have kicked out regimes (Nicaragua and Iran in 1979, Spain and Portugal in the mid-80s, Egypt and Libya today) but they have been leaderless with regard to the economic system which is at the root of all the trouble. So fascist and comprador regimes have been replaced by still bourgeois, still capitalist regimes with little hope to offer the workers for a qualitatively better life, including political, cultural and economic power. The same process but in an even more perverted fashion took place in the Soviet bloc in 1990, when the rage of the masses flung out the oppressive Stalinist regimes - and simultaneously destroyed the non-capitalist foundations of the state. Bringing in equally or more oppressive regimes, along with new and horrific economic and cultural inequalities and destitution.

So that's the state of affairs at the moment. And the multiplying newspaper reports like this one just rub it in a little bit more painfully with every new day it's allowed to continue.

As Marx said, we don't make history in conditions of our own choosing, but we do make our own history - and it's time we started doing it again and with a sense of purpose. 

And that purpose should be: 

Out with capitalism 
In with socialism.

Communism - good on paper but doesn't work

Here's a short Facebook exchange about "communism" not working. Naz had been discussing things at home with her dad.


Naz: 
Hello chops I was having a talk with my dad about communism and he was telling me that it looks good on paper, but it doesn't work. If you nationalize land there's less production, he said south africa was more successful under apartheid because they had more production. He also included that Poland had a lot more progress in 3 years of Capitalism than in 40 years of communism! Explain!! 

Thanks 

Me: 

Hi! Depends how you measure being "successful", doesn't it.

Ask him that first. Success is what? And for who? Would he be among those enjoying the "success"? Why?

Poland. "Progress" is like success - depends what you mean, how you measure it and for who.

And Russia is more appropriate to look at when it comes to what happened under the Stalinist version of "communism". Poland and the other eastern European countries did make progress under the Soviet regime, but they were also badly hit by being treated as occupied semi-colonies and forced to be run for foreign interests by agents of the foreigners.

Despite this Polish women have suffered very badly since 1990, and education and culture have been under the thumb of a very primitive Catholicism since then, too. And the jury's still out on the effects on the peasantry (the mass of small independent farmers) of the return of capitalism. So far the governments haven't dared to attack them in the interests of agribusiness the way they do in most other EU countries.

As for Russia, I don't think anyone living there thought life between 1990 and 2000 marked an improvement over Soviet days, except in relation to certain limited areas of civic rights (there was greater formal freedom of speech, but you could get shot if you exercised it) and the availability of some foreign goods. In the USSR people had money but little to buy. In post-Soviet Russia people had no money (their Soviet savings were DELIBERATELY wiped out by Yeltsin and his pro-western friends) but lots of things they could (NOT) buy with it.

Also the majority of Russians resented being governed by a drunken clown and his robber baron oligarch cronies - and the MOB, which was a genuine product of reborn capitalism. People died younger, were sicker, committed suicide more, drank more, were worse housed, got worse education and health care, had to put up with the horrors of racism, terrorism and war, and watched US-style crime grow unchecked.

Progress and success for some...

Now that was between 1990 and 2000. After Putin became president in 2000 most ordinary Russians felt an improvement came. A lot of the most important resources were brought back in to national ownership (oil, gas). A lot of the least "patriotic" oligarchs were driven abroad, jailed or bankrupted. The mob was tamed. Russia started winning international sports competitions again (like ice-hockey). Russians were very proud of Soviet achievements, and felt humiliated by Yeltsin turning them into a mockery and selling their arses to anyone with a fistful of dollars.

I'm inclined to think that Yeltsin himself was sick of being the laughing stock of the world. From super-power to mange backstreet mutt in ten years flat....k

Yeltsin chose Putin to be his successor. I'm pretty sure one of the reasons was to get his revenge on all the people who had been laughing at him to his face.

You should ask your dad what he thinks about Putin's Russia. By all the criteria of success he seems to use Russia is doing pretty well. But it's doing so by laughing in the face of the US and going back to greater state control. It's looking after its own interests, thank you very much. And of course it's tightened a lot of the civic freedoms that were relaxed after 1990.

Does that make the new Russia "communist" again?

It certainly looks like "our" (ie the West's) enemy again.

But of course the real question behind all this is what is "communism"?

Ask your dad what he thinks capitalism is, and when it started.

Ask him if he thinks capitalism in the US after independence was such a great success.

If he does, ask him if he really thinks the slavery of its first 90 years were such a great thing...

The thing is, new social systems grow, and even though they can be fundamentally stronger than previous ones (capitalism was fundamentally stronger than feudalism) their early years can be very ugly indeed.

Especially if they are surrounded by very hostile and powerful representatives of the old system doing their damndest to exterminate them, which was the case in the USSR.

And one last thing, if capitalism is so good and free and successful and progressive, how come it didn't just cheerlead the whole world to celebrate a capitalist white christmas after world war 2?

The poor people of China threw it out and laughed. Same thing in Cuba and Vietnam.

And all those millions of East Europeans just let themselves be corralled into slavery???

Stalin wanted to hand Yugoslavia to the West on a plate (like John the Baptist's head), but the Yugoslav's didn't want to be a head on someone else's plate and made their own revolution.

He did manage to hand Greece to the West, but not until the Greek people had fought and lost a revolution of their own.

Ask him to look at the world today. And ask him how attractive the rest of the world finds the US. Ask him how often he sees poor people in some war-torn part of the world running on the streets waving We Love America placards. Ask him why US soldiers don't dare walk around in jeans smoking Marlboros chatting and smiling to the locals.

Ask him what kind of success and progress a bunch of armoured SWAT goons smashing through a poor family's wall represents to the ordinary people of the world. US life on TV soaps is one thing. Murderous thugs in your back yard, pissing on your relatives' dead bodies and burning your sacred books, is another.

US forces don't even walk around smiling in places like Iceland any more.

Maybe Bob Hope and Bing Crosby looked like success and progress once. And John Wayne. But they're dead and no one wants them back. Their success has turned out to be a huge historic failure. US history is on fast rewind. Right now we're back in the Great Depression.

Have a great day, Naz! I

I'm taking the dog out for a walk now...

 ---

Carpet-slipper sadism, Imperial Rome, the Stasi, and now

Mary Beard reports on a visit to the Stasi Museum in Leipzig:

http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2007/03/the_stasi_and_e.html#comments

She finishes off:

But what was odd was that most of the objects on show didn’t obviously match up to the image of terror that I had been given. In one room there was a vast Heath Robinson machine – driven by a series of wheels, spun by a big metal handle. It was the mail scanner, which was supposed to have processed tons of suspicious mail, mechanically opening the letters, delivering them to the view of Stasi operator one by one, then resealing them. It took only a glance to see that this great lumbering machine could not possibly have worked as claimed – even if it did produce some annoyingly mangled letters.

The most extraordinary room, though, was the “disguise room”, where old Stasi camouflages were hung. It was indistinguishable from an amateur dramatic costume store. Cheap and ill-sewn outfits stuffed on bent hangers, each with a label pinned on. My favourite was “the Arab” (with the predictable towel for a headdress, a bit like this picture), but “the photographer” was a close second. Again they couldn’t possibly have worked in the way you would have imagined. Any Stasi agent sloping through the streets of Leipzig in “the Arab” get-up could hardly have gone unnoticed. They might just as well have carried a large placard saying “Stasi agent”.

So how do you account for the image of terror that my hosts conveyed? The only explanation was that terror doesn’t necessarily depend on efficiency, still less on subtlety. Menace can equally well be delivered by ridiculous half-disguises and bathetic contrivances. The sheer, almost comic, hopelessness of the Stasi’s repertoire was itself part of the weapon of fear -- a taunt to the people.

There is a nice Roman parallel in the reign of the emperor Commodus (AD 180-92). On one occasion, as I remember the story, the historian Dio Cassius was sitting with the other senators on the front row of the amphitheatre. The emperor had himself been taking pot-shots at animals in the arena and wandered over to them waving the head of an ostrich, and gesturing with it to the seated aristocracy that decapitation might always be their fate too. Dio – a rare eyewitness to such imperial displays – explains that he could hardly stop himself giggling and so plucked a laurel leaf from his wreath and stuffed it in his mouth. Funny it may have been. But Dio makes it absolutely clear that the emperor was simultaneously just as terrifying as a Stasi man with a towel on his head.

State terror can work in surprising ways.

Posted by Mary Beard on March 15, 2007 at 12:02 AM

****************************************************
Choppa's response:

FUD - "fear, uncertainty, doubt"
Always works - with kids ("what's daddy going to do now?"), spouses ("lovely dress", "where'd the money come from?"), employees ("good work", "afraid you're just not a team player") etc etc.

The smiling, reptilian, unpredictably violent mafia boss (Little Napoleon in Some Like It Hot).

RD Laing describes the pathology well in "The Divided Self". Mixed messages, double binds and so on.

More relevant to political thuggery is Trotsky's analysis of Stalin and Stalinism, for instance in The Revolution Betrayed:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1936-rev/index.htm

Here it becomes clear what the mass social base for the political regime of Stalinism was - a broad and diffuse crowd of privileged union and party bureaucrats. The minimal cultural level and maximal insecurity of these people defies belief, of course. Similar traits characterized the social base of imperial thuggery, except that that comprised a broad and diffuse crowd of slave-owning landowners, top military brass and moneylenders.

Of course, the Roman thugs already had slaves and rule by clout, although they had to disembowel the old body of the republic to achieve completely arbitrary rule by force. The Stalinist gangs had real trouble creating slavery and arbitrary rule. The emperors had the wind of history in their sails, the Stalinists didn't - just the putrescent gases of a much more powerful capitalist world market.

Orwell caught the gloomy atmosphere of oppression very well in 1984, as did Huxley the showbiz aspects of it in Brave New World. What the German and perhaps the Russian postmortems on Stalinism will produce will hopefully take us a bit nearer the limits of dystopia. A pre-post-mortem so to speak was Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (useful brief intro on Wikipedia). Farewell to Lenin, the Stasi Museum(s) and so on, like a French novel I recently read about Brecht and the Stasi (La Maîtresse de Brecht. (Brecht’s Mistress) by Jacques-Pierre Amette), highlight the BANALITY of what was going on. Suburban totalitarianism. The Nazi ethos without Ragnarök/Götterdämmerung. Carpet-slipper sadism at the dawn of a new day instead of the fiery end of a dying epoch.

Plenty of contradictions of the most titanic kind. Plenty to hate and spew bile over - and... yet...

Almost twenty years on the ordinary people of the old Eastern Bloc are still not at ease with their new system, and don't feel at home in it. And the shreds of the old Doris Day/Bing Crosby optimism of the Free World are lying in stinking piles around our ankles like the melted rubber of overinflated balloons.

Eppur si muove, I think Galileo would mutter about world history today. No stasis, despite the best efforts of the Stasi and the States.