🔴 Western Marxism, Anti-Communism and Imperialism
✍🏻 Immanuel Ness
Following the Russian Revolution, some Western Marxists began to replace support for revolution and fledgling socialist, instead promoting liberal-democracy and social reform in Europe and North America, restoring a position taken by the Second International before the Second World War. In the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, Georg Lukács, a supporter of the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet Union, published History and Class Consciousness (HCC) in German in1923, which paradoxically supplied the oxygen for Western Marxism over the next century by channeling class into a relationship between subject and object, appropriating the abstract Hegelian notion of class consciousness over a grounded historical materialism advanced by Karl Marx in Capital (1867) and Friedrich Engels in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1907). For Marx and Engels, class consciousness is a direct extension of the material being of the worker, but in HCC Lukács pursues the notion of working-class subjectivity as expressed in the communist party, a view which modifies class struggle from material dialectics into a philosophical abstraction. Lukács’s HCC distinguishes the individual as the historical subject in place of privileging the working class and nature, instead asserting that individual subjectivity is the primary force which is driven by ideas and not the material world. In spite of Lukács’s intention to philosophically situate the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet Union as the objective organ reflecting the working class, HCC becomes the driving force of Western Marxism in Europe and North America, re-centering the proletariat as a metaphysical and abstract subject and object of an undefined history...
Read the full article here:
https://anti-imperialist.net/blog/2024/12/24/western-marxism-anti-communism-and-imperialism/
✍🏻 Immanuel Ness
Following the Russian Revolution, some Western Marxists began to replace support for revolution and fledgling socialist, instead promoting liberal-democracy and social reform in Europe and North America, restoring a position taken by the Second International before the Second World War. In the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, Georg Lukács, a supporter of the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet Union, published History and Class Consciousness (HCC) in German in1923, which paradoxically supplied the oxygen for Western Marxism over the next century by channeling class into a relationship between subject and object, appropriating the abstract Hegelian notion of class consciousness over a grounded historical materialism advanced by Karl Marx in Capital (1867) and Friedrich Engels in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1907). For Marx and Engels, class consciousness is a direct extension of the material being of the worker, but in HCC Lukács pursues the notion of working-class subjectivity as expressed in the communist party, a view which modifies class struggle from material dialectics into a philosophical abstraction. Lukács’s HCC distinguishes the individual as the historical subject in place of privileging the working class and nature, instead asserting that individual subjectivity is the primary force which is driven by ideas and not the material world. In spite of Lukács’s intention to philosophically situate the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet Union as the objective organ reflecting the working class, HCC becomes the driving force of Western Marxism in Europe and North America, re-centering the proletariat as a metaphysical and abstract subject and object of an undefined history...
Read the full article here:
https://anti-imperialist.net/blog/2024/12/24/western-marxism-anti-communism-and-imperialism/
This article is reposted solely to foster discussion on communist issues. Our channel may not agree with all the arguments or positions expressed in this article or on the website it originates from.
Anti-Imperialist Network
Western Marxism, Anti-Communism and Imperialism - Anti-Imperialist Network
This article was originally published in International Critical Thought journal, and you can access it here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21598282.2024.2431960 We are reproducing the article with the permission of the author. ABSTRACT Many…
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Trotsky, the first to accuse Stalin, roamed freely in Mussolini’s Italy, a regime notorious for its ruthless persecution of genuine communists who were hunted like dogs. While Antonio Gramsci, the founder of the Italian Communist Party, languished in prison, gravely ill, Trotsky and his wife leisurely toured sites like Pompeii, the Amalfi Coast, and Naples under the protection of Fascist police.
This stark irony exposes Trotsky as a figure whose actions aligned more with fascist interests than the revolutionary cause—rightly earning him the label of "a prostitute of Fascism."
This stark irony exposes Trotsky as a figure whose actions aligned more with fascist interests than the revolutionary cause—rightly earning him the label of "a prostitute of Fascism."
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🔴 Nikola Tesla on the USSR: “The Russians are lucky — they have socialism and Stalin”
✍🏻 Nikos Mottas
“I am following the situation in Russia carefully. I try to get testimonies from eyewitnesses, not from newspapers that lie non-stop. I approve of the Russian revolution because it proclaimed the principle of honesty on one-sixth of the earth's surface. The Soviet Union faces incredible trials, but the country is ready to overcome them. The Russians are lucky - they have socialism and Stalin. A happy people with a wise leader. I envy the Russians and feel sorry for my compatriots who are ruled by three random people...”
Nikola Tesla
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@Communism
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✍🏻 Nikos Mottas
“I am following the situation in Russia carefully. I try to get testimonies from eyewitnesses, not from newspapers that lie non-stop. I approve of the Russian revolution because it proclaimed the principle of honesty on one-sixth of the earth's surface. The Soviet Union faces incredible trials, but the country is ready to overcome them. The Russians are lucky - they have socialism and Stalin. A happy people with a wise leader. I envy the Russians and feel sorry for my compatriots who are ruled by three random people...”
Nikola Tesla
Read more
#Stalin #SovietUnion #Tesla #NikolaTesla
@Communism
Join the @Communists
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What was the true legacy of the late US President Jimmy Carter? Did he really attempt to challenge US imperialism or advance and legitimize it?
theredstream
theredstream
#Carter #JimmyCarter #Imperialism
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Students with portraits of Stalin during a student demonstration in Milan, Italy, 1975.
@Communism
Everybody realises that when people who have not yet rid themselves of Trotskyist trends are called "Lefts," it is meant ironically. Lenin referred to the "Left Communists" as Lefts sometimes with and sometimes without quotation marks. But everyone realises that Lenin called them Lefts ironically, thereby emphasising that they were Lefts only in words, in appearance, but that in reality they represented petty-bourgeois Right trends.
J. V. Stalin
Industrialisation of the country and the Right Deviation in the C.P.S.U.(B.)
#Stalin #Lenin #Trotsky
@Communism
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Lenin during a walk in Gorki, 1922
(photo by V.V. Loboda)
@Communism
(photo by V.V. Loboda)
All that glitters is not gold. There is much glitter and sound in Trotsky’s phrases, but they are meaningless.
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Disruption of Unity Under Cover of Outcries for Unity
#Lenin #Trotsky
@Communism
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🟡 NOW: German police are once again cracking down on pro-Palestine protests as solidarity activists take to Berlin’s streets under the slogan “No New Year’s celebration during genocide!”
theredstream
theredstream
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Neither we nor anyone else can calculate precisely what portion of the proletariat is following and will follow the social-chauvinists and opportunists. This will be revealed only by the struggle, it will be definitely decided only by the socialist revolution. But we know for certain that the “defenders of the fatherland” in the imperialist war represent only a minority. And it is therefore our duty, if we wish to remain socialists to go down lower and deeper, to the real masses; this is the whole meaning and the whole purport of the struggle against opportunism. By exposing the fact that the opportunists and social-chauvinists are in reality betraying and selling the interests of the masses, that they are defending the temporary privileges of a minority of the workers, that they are the vehicles of bourgeois ideas and influences, that they are really allies and agents of the bourgeoisie, we teach the masses to appreciate their true political interests, to fight for socialism and for the revolution through all the long and painful vicissitudes of imperialist wars and imperialist armistices.
The only Marxist line in the world labour movement is to explain to the masses the inevitability and necessity of breaking with opportunism, to educate them for revolution by waging a relentless struggle against opportunism, to utilise the experience of the war to expose, not conceal, the utter vileness of national-liberal labour politics.
V. I. Lenin
Imperialism and the Split in Socialism
@Communism
The only Marxist line in the world labour movement is to explain to the masses the inevitability and necessity of breaking with opportunism, to educate them for revolution by waging a relentless struggle against opportunism, to utilise the experience of the war to expose, not conceal, the utter vileness of national-liberal labour politics.
V. I. Lenin
Imperialism and the Split in Socialism
@Communism
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