Thread by @Itmechr3

1. Alright as promised here is a thread on nationalist vs internationalist tensions inside the CCP, the Sino-Soviet split, the defeat of the G77 and the death of Third World nationalism, the Chinese far right, and extremely online Marxist Leninism

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2. I was reading an article yesterday written by a Chinese communist about the the culture wars surrounding the release of the movie The Wandering Earth and was struck by their description of one of the far right factions

chuangcn.org/2019/08/wander…

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3. @chuangcn translates 工业党 to the Prometheans as a way to get at their underlying faith in the development of technology as the driver of human progress. Yuyan, who wrote the piece has an absolutely fascinating description of this faction.

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4. This description should look incredibly familiar to anyone who's been watching the current Hong Kong debates because it is, almost word for word, the position of a large faction the people who call themselves of Marxist Leninists.

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5. Let's look at this a bit closer. China’s industrial level surpassing the West is the stated goal of these Marxist Leninists, though their more advanced theorists call it the development of productive forces.

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6. In both cases the small educated elite is the CCP and any attempt by the "masses" to resist the Party by Hong Kong insurrectionaries or Uyghurs treated as the work of the CIA and their pawns to overthrow the CCP and derail Chinese development.

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7. These similarities are somewhat superficial but the connection runs much deeper when you consider what, exactly, the MLs actually think socialism is. Ajit Singh, probably the best example of this line of thought, focuses on poverty reduction.

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8. His argument is that had China actually undergone a transition to capitalism, there would have been a Russia-style collapse in living standards, but since living standards improved since the Reform period the dictatorship of the proletariat is

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9. still in place and thus China is still a socialist country. Ignoring for a moment arguably the best line of the second issue of Chuang, "we cannot learn the history of China by studying the history of Russia" and the question of how the fuck a

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10. party a party literally composed of capitalists maximizing their rate of profit can act as a dictatorship of the proletariat, we need to note something important about Singh's argument, or rather what isn't in Singh's argument: any discussion

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11. of the basic components of Marx's analysis of capitalism whatsoever. There's no mention of the dual nature of the commodity, no mention of the wage relation, no mention of the value form or even surplus value at all.

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12. The reason for this turns out to be fairly simple, Singh isn't actually a Marxist, he's a Third World developmentalist nationalist. For these nationalists, socialism was never about ending wage labor and abolishing the class system.

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13. Instead (and this is a trend you can see in the Chinese "Prometheans" as well), socialism was an index of development, about catching up to and exceeding the industrial production of the West and raising national living standards.

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14. These goals, obviously, are not inherently bad, they're just both not the end point of actual communism and are entirely compatible with the existence of a powerful national bourgeoisie and the continuation of capitalism.

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15. These same development models and indexes of development are hauled out by defenders of neoliberalism from Steven Pinker to Bill Gates when the efficacy of capitalism is questioned, and the Cold War became a battle between the US and USSR to

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16. to promote their version of "development" in the post-colonial nations. This led to the development of the G-77 and their New International Economic Order, a story way to long to explain here I did a thread on earlier.

https://twitter.com/Itmechr3/status/1088556401557876736

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17. The upshot is that the G-77, and the brand of developmentalism they favored, was utterly destroyed the Volker shock and the resulting debt crisis, and Third Word nationalism never recovered. It was replaced instead by a newly internationalist

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18. domestic bourgeoisie who basically threw away any plans for national development in favor of funneling IMF money into their bank accounts and systematically looting their economies. This is not to say that the Third World nationalists were

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19. socialists, as I've argued before. Cuba, for example, broadly opposed Qaddafi's radical faction of the Non-Aligned Movement because its focus on cartels of raw commodity producers was raising prices for poorer nations as well as developed ones

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20. And these governments, ranging from India to Saudi fucking Arabia, were more than happy to march communists to the firing squads as they ruthlessly extracted the labor of their peasants and workers.

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21. but as Engels put it all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, and thus rises the extremely online Marxist Leninist

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22. The convergence of Marxist Leninism and Third Word nationalism, particularly in the case of this kind of errant Chinese nationalism can be traced to the collapse of any kind of genuine internationalism in the wake of the Sino-Soviet Split.

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23. It's possible, of course, to trace this collapse to Stalin's hijacking of the 3rd International to serve as a tool of Soviet foreign policy, not of the global social revolution, but even as Stalin was turning German communists over to Hitler

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24. it can still be argued from a cynical realpolitik perspective that at least there were no other communist countries that Soviet foreign policy could be interfering with. The Sino-Soviet split is the moment those chickens come home to roost.

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25. I trace the origins of the Sino-Soviet split, and the real beginning of the internal tension between nationalists and internationalists, to the failure of the Shanghai insurrection in 1927. CCP leaders more willing to push back against the

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26. Comintern line repeatedly warned Stalin that Chiang Kai-shek, then known as the Red General and heavily armed and backed by the USSR, was an unreliable ally at best and a reactionary at worst. Stalin ignored them completely.

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27. The result was the KMT massacring the insurrectionary workers, liquidating the CCP's urban wing, and Chiang Kai-shek styling himself as Generalissimo and eventually allying himself with Hitler. Chen Duxiu and Wang Ming, two of the CCP's

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28. urban leaders and staunch internationalists, were completely discredited for their blind obedience to the Comintern line and the Party's nationalist wing retreated into the countryside to return only decades later at the head of peasant armies

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29. Nationalist CCP leaders again clashed with Stalin over the full-scale de-industrialization of the Japanese built Manchurian factory belt, which was dissembled by Soviet and KMT troops and shipped back to the USSR to rebuild its own economy.

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30. The result was the near total de-industrialization of China, which was left less total productive capacity than even Russia had had in 1917. This caused a cascading series of endemic crises as the CCP hit a production bottleneck, unable to

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31. increase agricultural output without the industrialization of farming and unable to industrialize agriculture without increasing their industrial output, which was constrained by their food supply. The result of this and tensions with the USSR

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32. over Khrushchev's secret speech was the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to push through the production bottleneck and leap towards a "higher phase" of socialism by increasing peasant labor and grain extraction. This was an utter disaster.

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33. Famines that dwarfed earlier socialist period shortages swept through the countryside, and as I've written about at length elsewhere peasant attempts to requisition enough grain to survive were brutally suppressed.

medium.com/@Itmechr3/peas…

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34. The most important part of the GLF for our purposes, however, was that it lead to a breakdown in Sino-Soviet relations that culminated in the Soviets withdrawing technical assistance and a hardening of Chinese isolationism.

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35. But even with the nationalist wing of the CCP ascendant as the CCP took power, an isolationist China was by no means assured. At the Bandung conference in 1955, Nerhu and Mao discussed their frustration with being

digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/117825

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36. unable to respond to other post-colonial nations' requests for technicians to help their economies develop. Chinese technicians would later appear in several countries, but with China cut out of the Non-Aligned Movement by more conservative

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37. countries, the spirit of Afro-Asian solidarity that Bandung ushered in would see China's influence spread indirectly through its allies in Indonesia and Mao's friendship with Sukarno. The late 50's and 60's, however, saw the total collapse of

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37. Chinese involvement with broader Third-World internationalism, beginning with their conflict with the USSR, continuing with Mao's invasion of India in 1962 and the overthrow of Sukarno in 1967, and ending with the 1969 Zhenbao island incident.

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38. That border conflict with the USSR, at the height of the repression of the rebellions of the short cultural revolution, would come to redefine the global geopolitical situation and solidify the nationalists as the allies of global capital.

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39. With all aid from the Soviets cut off, Mao began secret negotiations with the US to open lines of trade as a method to import heavy capital (entire factories in some cases) to push through the production bottleneck. This began the process by

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40. which China was integrated into international capital and marked a geopolitical shift of China towards the US imperialist alliance that internally solidified the connection, in the nationalist imagination, between geopolitics and development.

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41. This alliance would see the entrenchment of Chinese nationalism and nationalist geopolitical decisions overwhelming any pretense of spreading socialism internationally, culminating in the 1979 Chinese invasion of Vietnam.

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42. That war fueled a wave of nationalist politics on both sides of the boarder that persists to this day in Vietnamese anti-Chinese sentiments and Chinese resentment of Vietnam. It also completely shattered what shreds remained of China's

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43. credibility with the left, which abandoned it en mass. So how, from this mass abandonment of China by essentially all left-wing forces in 1979, do we get to the current Marxist-Leninist line on China? The answer, oddly enough, is through a

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44. strange interpretation of the work of renegade Trotskyite Sam Marcy, best know for leading a faction of the SWP out of the party to form the World Workers Party, who upheld the absolutely bizarre line of defending every "socialist" country

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45. even as the countries in question blasted each other to bloody bits. This position, of course, became almost completely incoherent in the world of 1991, where the only socialist countries left in the world upheld by anyone were Cuba and among

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46. the most extreme factions of the Stalinist left North Korea. The events of the 90's would prove critical to the formation of the new "Marxist-Leninist" left, who began to rally around any opponent of the US whatsoever as a champion of

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47. anti-imperialism, most gruesomely Slobodan Milošević but picking up steam in defense of the Pink Tide, a set of genuinely anti-imperialist but largely social democratic governments that would have been considered reactionary two decades before

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48. The rising movement against the IMF and the swath of American imperial expansions provided fodder for the new Marcyite mythology, in which the world became divided back into two camps: the North Atlantic powers and their allies in the IMF and

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49. the forces of the Third World, led by a resurgent China standing against American imperialism. This mythology drew heavily from the G-77 and even included some of its former heroes, reprising their roles no matter the change in geopolticial

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50. and economic situations. Qadaffi, for example, had spent his time since the collapse of the real G-77's radical wing torturing people for the CIA, backing neo-fascist groups in France and Italy, and imprisoning African refugees for the

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51. European Union. Bashar al-Assad too had done wetwork for the CIA, the CCP had extensive weapons deals with Israel and was propping up the entire American political system and effectively financing its wars through their purchase of American

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52. bonds, and even Hezbollah's origins slaughtering the Lebanese Communist Party was completely forgotten in this constructed bipolar world. The turn from analyzing the forces and relations of production towards an analysis of international

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53. politics marks the emergence this new Third World nationalism, complete with a constructed past that ignores the virulent anti-communism of the countries it now supports in favor of an embrace of national defense. This transition mirrors

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54. the internal movements of the Chinese political class, which abandoned any pretense of socialism in favor of developmentalism and ardent nationalism. The new Third World nationalists, still clinging to their past affiliation with socialism,

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55. inhabit a sort of ghost world, inhabited solely by the weight of the memory of dead generations. This world is stalked by the CIA, to which is attributed every bump in the night and every crisis of capitalism. This mystification has blinded

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56. these new nationalists completely, and wrapped in their own orientalism they remain unable to see beyond the shadows projected on the walls by the twin hands of capital, consumed by the image of a world that both never and no longer exists.

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