GlacialTurtle

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GlacialTurtle @lemmy.ml 3mo ago

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GlacialTurtle @lemmy.ml 3mo ago

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GlacialTurtle @lemmy.ml 3mo ago

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GlacialTurtle @lemmy.ml 3mo ago

There was no misunderstanding, thanks.

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GlacialTurtle @lemmy.ml 3mo ago

Marx did not merely say they had an opportunity in the abstract, he was directly involved with them and actively seeking to aid them. That is not the action of someone who merely once on the side referenced it as a vague possibility then effectively rejected it, which is what you now have to claim to deny the actual history and Marx's own words on the topic to maintain the idea that Marx effectively only thought a revolution would happen in the west. Just stop going in circles.

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GlacialTurtle @lemmy.ml 3mo ago

I don’t know why you’re continuing to double and triple-down.

Because you keep repeating something which is not true.

However, he did not think this was more likely than revolution in western Europe.

This is directly contradicted by his letters and actions. He and Engels were directly corresponding with Russian revolutionaries, and literally surmised a Russian revolution could in fact be the first to set off a world revolution and was actively interested in aiding it. You're just refusing to take in new information.

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GlacialTurtle @lemmy.ml 3mo ago

To be annoyingly accurate, Marx still held the belief that the west would be the first to revolt and establish socialism

And he literally contradicts this, not just in this but his other research and letters, and even later editions of the communist manifesto.

https://monthlyreview.org/articles/marx-and-engels-and-russias-peasant-communes/

“The very existence of the Russian commune is now threatened by a conspiracy of powerful interests,” he noted—but if that threat is defeated, it “may become the direct starting-point of the economic system towards which modern society is tending; it may open a new chapter that does not begin with its own suicide.”14
Marx and Engels repeated that argument the next year in their preface to the second Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto.
In Russia we find, face-to-face with the rapidly flowering capitalist swindle and bourgeois property, just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West?
The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.
Marx and Engels did not study Russian conditions out of academic curiosity. On the contrary, they believed that Russia, once the heartland of backwardness and reaction, had become “the vanguard of revolutionary action in Europe,” so understanding it was a political necessity. This understanding fueled their consistent support for radical populists who took action against the Tsarist regime, and caused them to distance themselves from people who were limited to analysis and commentary. Their approach was motivated, as Marx wrote in another context, by the conviction that “every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programs.”

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GlacialTurtle @lemmy.ml 3mo ago

And you're entire response was denying this by suggesting Marx only thought this could happen in western, capitalist societies, which is flatly wrong. You aren't even understanding the contention, nor responding to it.

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GlacialTurtle @lemmy.ml 3mo ago

Marx still believed that the west would be the first to transition to socialism.

And Marx literally directly contradicts you on this. This letter comes after the publication of Capital, and Marx is explicitly stating the opportunity to not have to become a capitalist country.

Now what application to Russia can my critic make of this historical sketch? Only this: If Russia is tending to become a capitalist nation after the example of the Western European countries, and during the last years she has been taking a lot of trouble in this direction – she will not succeed without having first transformed a good part of her peasants into proletarians; and after that, once taken to the bosom of the capitalist regime, she will experience its pitiless laws like other profane peoples. That is all. But that is not enough for my critic. He feels himself obliged to metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into an historico-philosophic theory of the marche generale [general path] imposed by fate upon every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself, in order that it may ultimately arrive at the form of economy which will ensure, together with the greatest expansion of the productive powers of social labour, the most complete development of man. But I beg his pardon. (He is both honouring and shaming me too much.) Let us take an example.
In several parts of Capital I allude to the fate which overtook the plebeians of ancient Rome. They were originally free peasants, each cultivating his own piece of land on his own account. In the course of Roman history they were expropriated. The same movement which divorced them from their means of production and subsistence involved the formation not only of big landed property but also of big money capital. And so one fine morning there were to be found on the one hand free men, stripped of everything except their labour power, and on the other, in order to exploit this labour, those who held all the acquired wealth in possession. What happened? The Roman proletarians became, not wage labourers but a mob of do-nothings more abject than the former “poor whites” in the southern country of the United States, and alongside of them there developed a mode of production which was not capitalist but dependent upon slavery. Thus events strikingly analogous but taking place in different historic surroundings led to totally different results. By studying each of these forms of evolution separately and then comparing them one can easily find the clue to this phenomenon, but one will never arrive there by the universal passport of a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being super-historical.

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GlacialTurtle @lemmy.ml 3mo ago

To be annoyingly accurate, Marx still held the belief that the west would be the first to revolt and establish socialism

Marx himself in his research felt Russia could move straight into communism.

In the postscript to the second German edition of Capital – which the author of the article on M. Shukovsky knows, because he quotes it – I speak of “a great Russian critic and man of learning” with the high consideration he deserves. In his remarkable articles this writer has dealt with the question whether, as her liberal economists maintain, Russia must begin by destroying la commune rurale (the village commune) in order to pass to the capitalist regime, or whether, on the contrary, she can without experiencing the tortures of this regime appropriate all its fruits by developing ses propres donnees historiques [the particular historic conditions already given her]. He pronounces in favour of this latter solution. And my honourable critic would have had at least as much reason for inferring from my consideration for this “great Russian critic and man of learning” that I shared his views on the question, as for concluding from my polemic against the “literary man” and Pan-Slavist that I rejected them.
To conclude, as I am not fond of leaving “something to be guessed,” I will come straight to the point. In order that I might be qualified to estimate the economic development in Russia to-day, I learnt Russian and then for many years studied the official publications and others bearing on this subject. I have arrived at this conclusion: If Russia continues to pursue the path she has followed since 1861, she will lose the finest chance ever offered by history to a nation, in order to undergo all the fatal vicissitudes of the capitalist regime.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/11/russia.htm

https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/10.1521/siso.2018.82.1.67

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GlacialTurtle @lemmy.ml 3mo ago

Also don't ask how how the Arab population is actually treated in Israel.

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GlacialTurtle @lemmy.ml 3mo ago

I haven't read her myself yet, but Ursula K Le Guin is of note. Lathe of Heaven, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas and The Word for World is Forest are worth looking at.

Terry Pratchetts work is very good. Lots of humour and light parody of fantasy tropes, and some occasional commentary. You could probably pick almost anything from the Discworld series and find something enjoyable.

October By China Mieville is an account of the Russian revolution of 1917. It's not written as a perhaps more dry, academic account, but still decently researched and a good introduction that's easy to read almost as if it was fiction. Apparently his science-fiction is good too, but I have no idea.

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GlacialTurtle @lemmy.ml 4mo ago

Gabriel Rockhill for example just came out with a book talking about how the CIA and capitalist institutions monopolize mainstream “radical” theory, twisting it into something that coexists with imperialism, such as the work of Slavoj Zizek.

That's funny, because the book is objectively bad and full of awful readings of the Frankfurt school.

GlacialTurtle @lemmy.ml 4mo ago

What he meant to say was "No war with Venezuela...without me", as he's still hasn't finished his application for ~~Blackwater~~ Constellis.

GlacialTurtle @lemmy.ml 5mo ago

The quote from the TNR review is genuinely insane. Validating my intense dislike of Yasha Levine that they genuinely think a license to use the internet is some sort of reasonable response.

I wish there were better critics.