Thread by @mmabeuf

The Towers were built to be destroyed.

https://twitter.com/notbenfish/status/1436538802336669698

The Two Became One.

In the 1970s the Chinese and American bourgeoise combined into a single counterrevolutionary force.

https://twitter.com/mmabeuf/status/1419121048071589893

This is the contradiction that joins my Vietnam posting with all of my Maoist critiques of China - both the US and China were facing real bottom-up revolutions at the end of the 1960s, with the war in Vietnam as the fulcrum.

Radical, organized soldiers in the US military were pulling the politically intermediate and liberal soldiers into sustained actions against the military itself. This organizing was connected to the stateside antiwar and Black liberation movements...

which itself was starting to form connections with the Chinese and Vietnamese Communist Parties (think of those BPP delegations to China. Some American radicals were living in China at the invitation of the CPC)

This was connected to the Cultural Revolution in China which was supporting the revolutionary war in Vietnam (even my favorite herbal medicine ties in here as artemisinin was originally developed by China to treat Vietnamese soldiers for malaira)

https://twitter.com/mmabeuf/status/1322436168496107521

By the early 1970s the US and Chinese bourgeoisie both understood that they were backed into a corner and the only way out was to put away the cold war rivalry and join forces.

China bailed out capital by flooding the global market with cheap labor in the 1980s, undercutting the power of labor movements globally. But the deal was inked in those early meetings when Kissinger visited China - in 1971 or 1972.

Decollectivizing Chinese agriculture crushed the Chinese peasantry, which was the backbone of radicalism and people's war in Asia. Deindustrializing the US and UK crushed the proletariat, which was the backbone of radicalism and urban revolt in the US.

Deng armed the mujahideen because the CIA couldn't. The USSR was broken through the same kind of guerrilla war that almost broke the US. 9/11 was the culmination of the first stage of this global counterrevolution.

After the USSR fell and socialism was destroyed in Europe, the counteroffensive could begin, under the false pretense of a "war on terror."

The US understood that Marx and Mao was right. They knew that capitalism would eventually collapse under the weight of self-inflicted crises, as Marx said. They knew that one of those crises would collapse things so hard that capital wouldn't be able to pick itself

up again and the proletariat would seize the means of production out from under the capitalists. Deindustrialization wasn't just factory owners looking for cheaper labor. It was about moving the means of production out of the hands of the proletariat so they it couldn't be seized

It was about packing up those factories and shipping them to another country so the proletariat would have nothing from which to withhold their labor. They would cease to exist as a class with revolutionary potential by ceasing to exist as a class.

Remember the US was in bad shape in the early 1970s - humiliated by Vietnam, military collapsing, currency collapsing, and the economy paralyzed by an oil embargo. If China wanted to make a deal to open trade with the US they could have made it on much better terms.

There was no reason why Deng would need to sell Chinese labor to the US at bargain basement prices (undercutting workers globally) unless he wanted to do the US favor.

The Chinese and US capitalists also understood that Mao was right about people's war and the strength of the peasantry. Why did Deng invade Communist Vietnam, except (again) to do a favor for the US? The Vietnamese people's war was too powerful and it had been proven so.

The US launched a fake people's war against the USSR in Afghanistan (with China's help) because they knew how powerful it could be (Even with "the people" being mercenaries propped up by CIA smuggling.)

The Chinese revisionists liquidated their own peasantry (the very thing that liberated China) just like the US liquidated its own proletariat, in order to foreclose on the possibility of another People's War being waged in China.

Once when the military establishment was pushing back against Mao over the Great Leap Forward Mao threatened that if the Army wasn't with him, he would go down to the countryside and get another army. They backed down.

The Chinese masses were separated from their own means of food production the same was that the US masses were separated from their own means of industrial production.

All of the CPC's "economic development" efforts globally just furthers this pattern. For example in Bangladesh they built garment factories to take the garment factories away from Chinese workers, who were getting to expensive and rebellious.

After one of the garment factories in Bangladesh collapsed a few years ago and killed hundreds of workers, the Bangladeshi workers got organized and rebellious so the factories were moved to Ethiopia.

The Bangladeshi workers, former peasants who moved to the cities for wages, were left with nothing.

https://twitter.com/mmabeuf/status/1361798343362543617

So this style of "economic development" is proletarianizing peasants but then deindustrializing and liquidating the proletariat, leaving behind ruined landscapes and slums full of people who will take quasi-slavery migrant labor jobs out of desperation.

Competition within finance capital was also abolished in this same period - remember that the dotcom bubble popped a few months before 9/11 and Enron and a wave of other corporate ponzis were controlled-demo'd a few months after.

This culminated in 2008 when the biggest actors in finance capital created a credit bubble and then blew it up in a controlled demolition that wiped out their competitors and dispossessed a whole class of working-class homeowners out of their equity.

"Too big to fail" is another way of saying that risk and competition had been abolished by fiat at the highest levels of finance capital.

Two countries, but one bourgeoisie, and one counterrevolution.

The highest echelons of the bourgeoisie in both the US an China are "Marxist-Leninist" in the sense that they know that what Marx and Lenin wrote about capital and crises are true.

They have engineered a system that harnesses the energy of the inevitable crises of capitalism and uses those crises like a machine to crush and liquidate all of the old classes of the capitalist era....

altering social conditions such that the foundations necessary for socialist revolution, like freedom of movement, free association, and privacy of communication, are abolished.

The old setup where you sell your labor for wages is going away - the petit bourgeoisie and labor aristocrats aren't being turned into proletarians, they're being turned into an enforcer class. Who's doing the shaming and the shunning around masks and vax passes and horse paste?

The deal isn't to sell your labor time for wages, it's to trade your obedience to ruling class directives for some degraded simulation of a social life.

The labor that this new enforcer class is doing isn't to create new capital or provide socially useful services, it's to enforce obedience to ruling class directives around bodily autonomy.

Why is the proletarian different from the slave and the serf? Because the proletarian has possession of their own body, and is not bound to one employer in one place. (Principles of Communism 7 & 8)
marxists.org/archive/marx/w…

Working people who need to exchange their labor for sustenance no longer have any power in the bargain - they can't threaten profits by withholding labor because risk has been abolished among the monopolists - they can wait out a strike or move production elsewhere.