“Comrades, come rally! The last fight let us face! The Internationale unites the human race!”
Comrades, after a bit of digestion, I think this should be promulgated and publicized, if at least for discussion purposes.
The international Communist movement is not in good shape. We are facing the combined crisis of failed revolutions, liberal subversion, aging parties, and mounting fascism, and traditional Communist praxis no longer offers a solution to the need for a global socialist revolution.
To solve these crises, I introduce the notion of Dengist revolution and Communist Zaibatsu as a solution, using Party-owned industrial cooperatives as a mechanism for global Communist subversion, with the end goal of abolishing capitalism simply by out-competing the capitalists and ultimately buying them out.
As for replacement Praxis, I suggest embracing Stakhanovitism, looking to encourage existing Communist parties to go into business, as well as for new start-ups to seek a worker cooperative model and aim to be party-owned.
Examples to learn from would be the Japanese Communist Party’s influential newspaper, which earns the JCP 110 million USD a year, Mondragon, a European industrial cooperative with more than 60,000 workers, Haier, a Chinese SOE known for its radical organizational structure and exceptional growth, and Huawei, technically a worker’s cooperative but generally so successful that the United States levied sanctions on it.
Here are the problems of existing Communist praxis.
The Soviet Union has fallen, and the Chinese have gone Dengist. There is no longer a serious and viable base of Actually Existing Socialism to support, nor can the Soviets continue to fund foreign Communist Parties.
Consequently, Communist parties are no longer vibrant and powerful in much of the world. Worker’s revolution simply does not succeed; most parties are in incipient stages globally, and are essentially doomed to stillbirth.
Illegal action, as with the Japanese Red Army, or the Japanese Red Army faction may make the news for a couple of years, but the forces of reaction generally track down the members, then jail or kill them.
Unionizing action, in much of the world, simply does not get that far, and it can easily be subverted by social democracy increasing government subsidies and protections to workers.
The electoral strategy does not work. The actual Communist Parties with electoral dominance got their way through an insurgency (the Nepalese), or simply by being there after the fall of the Soviet Union (the Mongolians).
The Japanese Communist Party, as an example, is graying and aging, and its representation in the Japanese Diet is on a long-term decline.
The remaining two options are either to wait for the downfall of capitalism on its own accord (late-stage capitalism theory), or to hope the Chinese somehow bail Communism out.
The problem with the former option is that due to bourgeois control of bourgeois democracy, the degeneration of capitalism sees the rise of far-right parties (as in France, Germany, Italy), right-wing populists (the United States), and the terminal stage of capitalism is fascism, which often does a good job of suppressing Communist movements.
Praying to the Communist Party of China is fraught with its own risks. First, the Communist Party of China may not succeed. There are Western rumors that they managed to subvert the Chinese defense minister, there is strong Sinophobia in the West, the Chinese state and corporate sector is saddled with high levels of debt (around 120% of GDP in each, whereas 100% usually sets off alarm bells in capitalist democracies), and the Chinese are threatened by the most powerful and advanced military force on the planet.
Second, there is no guarantee that the CPC will bail you out. While the CPC claims to be Marxist, it has already embraced capitalism in the sense of Dengist reforms, and it’s always had nationalist memetics.
Even if the Chinese win, you are not guaranteed that the Chinese, seeing the wreck of the West, won’t behave in the same way as the Americans did to the fallen Soviet Union, and through malign neglect, allow the West to fester in fascism.
If the Chinese aren’t guaranteed to save us from capitalism, what options do we still have?
Here is where I introduce the concept of Communist Zaibatsu and the Dengist Revolution, exhorting Western and international Communist parties to follow the CPC’s lead in developing a modern, competitive, and powerful Communist nation-state.
The incredible thing is, you don’t even need to seize the means of production, whether electorally or through other means.
To begin with, one oft-overlooked fact is how ridiculously rich the CPC is. The total level of assets managed by the Chinese central government and the localities is around the level of 40 trillion USD.
You heard right, the Communist Party of China owns 40 trillion dollars worth of stocks and companies.
The richest Communist Party in the West, the Japanese Communist Party, owns only 1.1 billion worth of companies, mainly its newspaper.
The total market capitalization of the New York Stock Exchange is only about 45 trillion. The total net wealth of all of America, haute bourgeoisie, petites, and workers alike, comes up to 120 trillion.
What I am exhorting you to do, then, is to make your own Communist parties rich. The essence of Dengist revolution, as opposed to Maoist (Protracted People’s War) and Leninist (a coup against a weakened moderate state), is to control the means of production through capitalist mechanisms.
That is to say, if the wealth of Communist Parties in the West were a substantial percentage of total privately held wealth, Communist Parties could employ the exact same means bourgeois individuals and entities use to influence the levers of power.
This would allow Communist Parties to gradually manipulate the political system to favor their own firms, allowing further expansion of the co-op / party-owned enterprise model, with a goal of eventually just buying out some of the remaining capitalists and abolishing the rest.
The goal is that in 20 years, the POE sector of various Western countries comprises 1% of total production, in 30 years, 10%, and in 40 years, we will have abolished capitalism from the inside.
What then, are the means?
partial post (will get back to this later, but:
-Generate worker cooperatives that are substantially party owned to outcompete existing capitalist firms
-Most of the details would be in how to obtain market advantage and start outcompeting Porky
-As well as keeping the firms Marxist, where “unfair labor practices” are acceptable, where they are not
-How to design a socialist economy inside of a capitalist one
-How much it would cost for Communist parties to attempt such a project, what potential funding sources may be, etc
-Actual praxis of existing Communist workers)
Honestly, by all means I think the west should be either left to fester in its own fascism and feces if that’s what they choose, or- if things get too appalling and/or they actually start a world war on the rest of humanity, they should be occupied when all is said and done and thoroughly decolonized/etc. Even as someone who lives in the west- why should the nations which are responsible for such atrocities and deprivation across the globe get a special treatment, or get theirs before their victims (those decent peoples, those friendly nations or non-imperialist nations at least across the global south)?
Fuck the west. China and what is developing in BRICS presents a model of prosperity and development- the formula is right there, and the only thing that is preventing the west from emulating it, and joining in (and being welcomed to join in on it) and contributing to it is their own racist, imperialist, capitalist contradictions, contradictions that are such that their system as it exists would literally rather burn the world to the ground than see this prosperity and equality develop. The west has had every advantage and has and will continue to squander it, right up until they demonstrate the humanity necessary to overthrow their inhumane, imperialist system (and yes, it will almost certainly require revolution). Any aid, any support to the west till then, should be done as “good business” and nothing else if you ask me- and even then it should be done with caution, because whatever is built within these regimes will certainly be used against you (against the proletarian cause within the west, against the cause across the global south, etc) if it can; this poisonous nature of the system can only be fixed through establishing a proletarian, anti-imperialist state.
The rest of the world won’t do anything remotely like what the west did to Russia and the post-Soviet bloc (the carving up, destabilization, shock therapy/blatant looting of everything of value, etc), despite the fact I don’t think anyone could blame the rest of the world for doing so to those who are responsible for 500 years of unparalleled barbarism and destruction and the genocide of most of three continents’ worth of indigenous peoples… but there is no reason that the west should get a hand up, unless they first get their heads out of their collective asses (which they won’t, not anytime soon I expect though I hope otherwise). Till then, any such aid would be no different from feeding and breeding rabid dogs, and it will have entirely predictable results…
As for the schtick of usurping capital within the capitalist state… no offense, but it sounds incredibly- idealistic. Even most capitalists can recognize how the game is played in the west, and it’s not some “free market” where worker cooperatives can magically usurp established monopolies and oligopolies (cartels) without immense interference, complications, and being usurped themselves in their own right. Idealist capitalists (the “traditional liberals”) will say that it’s how it should be, but the facts simply are that it just- isn’t, and presumably we’re all here due to the understanding of just why that is the case and is the inevitable reality of capitalism, and part of why the dictatorship of the proletariat is necessary.
Within capitalism, and particularly within the imperial cores of capital, you’re not dealing with an honest system nor one that will even bother to play by their own established rules, and they can and will usurp you long before you get to doing anything meaningful within their system. Western capital did not get to where they are now by simply being the “most competitive-” they got to where they are through being the most murderous, thieving, conniving SOBs around and that reality has never changed, one way or another within their system that’s how it works, and comparatively “honest” business has no place in such an environment, as anything more than a (constantly shrinking) niche if even that.
If you ask me, any communists (or any sensible people, period) with the assets or skills to do so, if they want to actually enrich themselves and through doing so perhaps aid the cause of their fellow proletariat- should head to China, or elsewhere. Maybe eventually you can return and do something meaningful then once the capitalist regimes of the west have crumbled in on themselves (or maybe you can come to the conclusion that the west should be left to fend for themselves, even as someone living within it that’s definitely my take on it), but needless to say, you can actually build something meaningful and substantial there without being usurped by the capitalist system, which is what would inevitably occur should it be tried and reach anywhere near such levels of success as you imagine in the west.
I’m probably going to repost a finished version soon, but I’ll leave this comment.
I’m basically trying to import/export socialism with Chinese characteristics to Western contexts.
The only real difference is that we generally do not have control, and are insurgents until we control enough of the economy. And adventurism around the 33% scale becomes viable: i.e, aggressive means to destabilize competitors, like forced unionization, industrial espionage, and financial warfare (hope you liked your CDS in 2008!)
You’re trying to put the cart before the horse. What China did worked because they had already had a revolution in which the working class seized state power. They had already laid the political and social basis which enabled the economic strategy to be implemented. Communists in the West cannot act like a governing communist party because we are not a governing communist party.
China is an inspiration for what to do after a successful revolution. You are better off reading Che’s Guerilla Warfare or Lenin’s What Is To Be Done and then coming up with a strategy for organizing and mobilizing the masses and seizing state power that is tailored to the specific conditions that exist in the West today rather than trying to emulate the policies of a communist party in totally different social, material and historical circumstances than your own.