West/East

I assume that the emergence of a new supranational imperialist pole-world after there has already been another that has already been formed, creates the historical need for this new pole-world to emerge in a different way. In this case, the new imperialist East could not emerge in the same way that the West emerged. Due to the primary historical dominance of the West, the East developed in 2 relatively distinct separate phases, while the West developed in a single framework of determinants: The West emerged as a self-contradictory unity that was composed from the beginning simultaneously of the ethno-political units and the supranational Western system of domination as a whole (all this through a continuous process of conflicts and massacres, and not as outlined in liberal historiographies). While the East (as the most powerful representative of the non-Western world) as an emerging imperialist pole-world is obliged to follow a process in two separate phases: first the nation-state emerged and then (now) an attempt is made to emerge the broader special supranational framework (in essence the imperialist new east as such).

But I want to point out something: the historical priority of the West did not make it superior, and also the singularity of the imperialist New East does not simply mean that it imitates the West and on the other hand develops a singularity that would enable it to walk the general path that the west has already carved. Both what precedes and what follows constitute, from their objective historical-chronological position, a singularity each, which, however, includes the same degree of generality. The two peculiarities of emergence constitute a single phenomenon as absolutely necessary unfoldings of its dialectical nature.

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Speaking of the new imperialist East, we make a series of horrible abstractions. What about India? what about  Indonesia? what about Japan? The relationship of these countries with the hard-line new eastern imperialists does not make them as countries members of an aggressive as a whole neo-East. Japan in particular seems to function as an advanced outpost of the West, is not a candidate to participate in a new anti-Western totalscheme. Also, in the south there is Latin America, which probably approaches the new East more than the aforementioned eastern countries. Well, the distinction between the West and the new aggressive East must be understood in a non-exclusively geographical geostrategic way.

Ιωάννης Τζανάκος

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A comment on Michael Karadjis' answer..

 

 

Following the:

Questions to Michael Karadjis.

Some general remarks, in relation to your kind reply,

Michael Karadjis 

1.

When we refer to territorial-centric capitalism-imperialism, perhaps we should not limit ourselves to "territorial visions" of annexations, etc., but to a plan to return to the Westphalian or pseudo-Westphalian nation-state whose main characteristic is the homogenous and hard-line dominance over a territorial space.

Newer Western capitalism played with the scenario of a complete de-territorialization of it, while the emerging nation-statist state-centric Eastern capitalism of the emerging great or would-be great new Eastern imperialisms play with the scenario of a new territorialization.

There are of course great contradictions between them, there is no strictly demarcated and unified block of these forces, but they have strong common elements that do not only concern ideological or imaginary identifications.

They are converging on a new and hybrid model of state-centric capitalism (with a strong but controlled private sector), which is authoritarian in a structural rather than a circumstantial way.

The west has all the bourgeois possibilities "within" it (bourgeois democracy, dictatorship-junta, hybrid combinations thereof, etc.), but the east, I think, is developing a structural and now stabilized neo-despotism.

The territorial-centric model therefore means a tendency to remove what Deleuze defined as de-territorialization (as it exists in capitalism but also in Deleuze's desire to appropriate "nomadism", and to constitute a radical anarcho-Marxism -and others, it's not time to analyze them). The extreme reinstatement of territorial-centrism through the bloody campaign of the Russians apart from all else wich it means in practice perhaps also symbolizes a re-emergence of the ''self-enclosed territoriality'' of the nation-state. China still has no territorial claims beyond Formosa (although I think Vietnam should start to worry) (don't forget it swallowed Tibet) but the whole essence of its state policy is incomprehensible without seeing how it views its territory. I think China is now a well-polished and domesticated open concentration camp promoting a new type of techno-totalitarianism/capitalism (extreme surveillance of citizens, etc.).

2.

There is certainly no ontologically or even worse culturally understood "eastern pole", but an idiosyncratic and original revival of the first stages of the emergence of the "western pole", when together with the emergence of the Westphalian nation-states emerged the non-national context of their emergence.

In the first phase the non-Western capitalist world (as yet another new capitalist world) tried to emerge mainly as nation-state, the original modern-capitalist "unit" of sovereignty, without the wider special context (as happens in the West, where through horrific intra-capitalist and transnational antagonisms this wider framework was constituted: "west"), and in the phase we are in today, the non-western capitalist world (mainly the "east": China-Russia-Turkey-Iran perhaps) has conceives and has begun to implement the plan to make this strong broader special framework which it could not implement in the original first phase (despite the Soviet state capitalist "nudges" and the Soviet plan to create an alternative non-Western capitalism in the new countries etc.).

This second phase of the new capitalism of the non-Western world, as it is "interwoven" with the strong statist tendencies of its first phase, presents us with the possibility that there is, historically necessary, an extreme violence from the perspective of the "new east'', as if we could speak of a process of primary accumulation of power in two phases.

In the West, or rather, the West was something that emerged as a broader context of the emergence of a new mode of production but also a new mode of structuring of power (in nation states that exist as "units of sovereignty" and in the broader and more fluid "unit of sovereignty'' which is the west as such as a world-imperial system), while the east is something that emerges similarly to the west, but with a need to accelerate, and in two phases.

3.

The idiosyncratic new authoritarianism of the emerging new east does not arise from any inherent "cultural" characteristics of it, but from the historical necessity that means the emergence of the non-west nation-states and a wider authoritarian form of their capitalism, under the special condition of a ''late realization'', which mandates the structural existence-and-coexistence of two phases in a state of acceleration of this process:

First phase-acceleration: nation-state without a wider "familiar" cosmo-imperial non-national framework.

Second phase-acceleration: emergence of the wider "familiar" cosmo-imperial non-national framework with a simultaneous defense-attack against the already formed ("west"), given the idiosyncratic crystallizations of the first phase (strong existence of a strict version of the nation-state determination).

 

 

Ιωάννης Τζανάκος

 

 

Answers of Michael Karadjis.

 

Following the:

Questions to Michael Karadjis.

Michael Karadjis

Hi Ιωάννη

At the moment I’ll just respond to your first 3 questions – the Syria question is more major, and I also have a great deal more knowledge and conviction in relation to those important questions related to the whole course of the revolution, so I’ll leave that to a special response a little later. 

On the imperialism questions, I hardly claim to be an expert but am happy to offer my opinions:

1. 

Is the new imperialist world multipolar or (potentially) (again) bipolar?

I guess by bipolar you mean, is the Ukraine war pushing together US and European imperialism on one side and Russian and Chinese imperialism on the other side? Or do you simply mean, despite Ukraine, the real major imperialist rivals are only the US and China? Either way, I wouldn’t go so far, but I tend towards the second interpretation. 

I think there is serious inter-imperialist rivalry between the US and China; oddly, the Ukraine war comes as something of an aberration. Perhaps that’s not logical – obviously Putin must have been planning this for some time aware that it would put Russia into heightened conflict with the West. But from the US and EU point of view, it has remained business as usual with Russia despite the annexation of Crimea, the war in Donbas, the slaughter in Syria etc. 

Yes there were mild sanctions after Crimea, but so mild that no-one noticed; not only was Russia the major supplier of oil and gas to Europe, but nearly all European powers sold weapons to Russia; the US was somewhat more hawkish, but still for the most part it was business as usual, with a great deal of direct cooperation in Syria in particular. If the US was engaged in a “war drive against Russia” as “anti-imperialists” claim, it is funny that there was zero build-up in Eastern Europe right up until the Russian invasion. The US rivalry with Russia was, kin my view, more about US rivalry with the much more economically powerful (compared to Russia) EU; the US, since the 1990s, has feared a Eurasia-wide EU-Russia economic-military convergence that would freeze out the US and give more teeth to an economically powerful Europe. But as long as the S can keep this at bay (which Putin has just done for the US!), China remains the key US rival, not the EU nor Russia.

Nevertheless, Putin has forced a new West-Russia rivalry onto both the US and the EU, so we can hardly deny that at this moment there is a serious clash between US-EU and Russia!

But has the EU become completely subservient to the US? And has China lined up completely with Russia? I would say no to both. China has not voted for Russia in any UN resolution, and is not helping Russia other than by buying its oil, something China would buy from anyone. There is still underlying rivalry between China and Russia, eg, China’s ‘Belt and Road’ across southern Asia to Europe competes with the Russian-EU connection to some extent, and Putin has just boosted the ‘China road’. Meanwhile, China is happy to see the US get bogged down in Europe over Ukraine rather than spend too much energy in east Asia and the Pacific. And while NATO has been boosted and US hegemony over Europe seems stronger than at any time for 30 years, the overtures of France, Germany and Italy to Putin reveal a different underlying view and interests. Yes Germany used the crisis to double its defence budget and announce a ‘return of Germany’, but since ahs sent very little to Ukraine; an increased German military actually adds to the spectre more long term of a more independent Europe.

So my view is it is somewhat mixed, but with one major rivalry (US v China).

 

2. 

Is the territorial-centric aspect of the new "Eastern" imperialism (as its reactionary aspect) a complementary or an essential element of it?

By “Eastern” I assume you mean Russian? Because China for example has not annexed anywhere (well, except for the islands in the South China Sea formerly belonging to Vietnam, over several decades, but small islands that no-one in the world notices are hardly similar to a massive country like Ukraine). Meanwhile, China’s economic imperialism, without territorial conquest, now takes place on a massive global scale.

I guess for Russia it is a bit of both – ‘complementary’ in the sense that Russia does already engage in economic imperialism, especially in parts of the Mideast and Africa so it is not purely ‘territorial-centric’, but ‘essential’ in as much as Russia’s economic reach is so limited compared to the US, Europe or China. 

I think an imperialist superpower like Russia refuses to see itself as weaker, or as ‘hemmed in’ geographically by Europe on one side and China on the other; 

I believe domination of the Black Sea both for its resources and as a strategic waterway was seen as virtually do-or-die for Russian imperialism’s unrealistic aims of equality with other major imperialisms. It is arguably at odds with a more rational capitalist integration of Russia into Europe as part of ‘Eurasia’, but one which would not be dominated by the world’s new ‘Peter the Great’. 

I think we’re partly dealing with the subjective factor here alongside Russia’s underlying economic weakness.

Russia has this in common with certain other small-scale imperialist powers, above all Israel.

 

3. 

The necessary alliance with the "enemy of the enemy" is a cause of the alienation of the sectarian anti-imperialists of the West, but does it not also pose a danger to the leftists of the East "from the other way around"? Beyond wishful thinking, how and when will the peoples of the whole world meet, when they are thus divided into opposing, necessarily, allied formations?

I’m sure it poses the same problem for leftists in the East in reverse, in seeing Western ‘liberal’ imperialism as preferable, perhaps even tending to fall in behind the absurd rhetoric of ‘democracy versus autocracy’, as if the US does not continue to support bloody dictatorships, tyrannical monarchies and apartheid regimes. The more conscious leftists we are in touch with in Ukraine for instance are very well-aware of this, but it’s hard to be sure how widespread illusions may be. Of course, this is also a danger for leftists in the West who rightly reject the sectarian “anti-imperialist” shilling for Putin and other reactionary regimes on ‘the other side’ but out of disgust go one step too far. We need to be very aware of this danger and to reject it.

Just at this moment tough, the problem is that it is Russia invading and occupying a large country, so there is a need to get that defeated. In 2003, it was the US, in Iraq. The US has just been driven from Afghanistan. Israel continues to occupy Palestine, but this has not been an ‘East-West’ division, with Putin’s excellent relations with Israel and China, which bought the port of Haifa, having massive economic relations with Israel; and in any case this is an ongoing issue. Likewise the Saudi atrocities in Yemen; Saudi Arabia has excellent relations with both Russia and China and has refused to condemn Russia in the UN, and likewise Russia supports the Saudi-backed Yemeni government as the legitimate government (as does China). The acute world focus now is Ukraine, which both gives us western leftists responsibilities to support Ukraine evicting the Russian occupation, while also not letting up on the crimes of western imperialism and its smaller allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia.

--

Joseph Dietzgen

 

'Joseph Dietzgen: A Pioneer of Proletarian Science' by Ernest Untermann from International Socialist Review. Vol. 6 No. 11. May, 1906.

 

'TO LAY bare the historical roots of Marxism means to uncover the rootless theories of those who claim to have out grown it. The furies of private interest, who are stirred by every discussion of the question of private property, are re sponsible, on the field of economic science, for a spectacle which would be impossible on any other scientific field. A professor of natural history, who would revert from Darwin's theory of natural development to Cuvier's catastrophic theory, would be met by universal ridicule. But a man who turns back from Marx to Adam Smith or Kant is deemed as worthy of laurels in advance of the fray as a general who takes the field against the Chinese boxers. 

And yet all the confusion which poses nowadays as brand-new wisdom has been sifted and cleared as long ago as the forties of the nineteenth century by Marx and Engels. “No matter how many phantastic dummies of orthodox Marxists are put to the sword, in fortunately bloodless encounters, for the enjoyment of patriots and philistines, the field is ultimately held by the only orthodox Marxist that ever was, namely, the historical course of things.”

'Thus wrote Franz Mehring in the summer of 1901, in his preface to his edition of the "Posthumous Writings of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.” But a little more than four years of capitalist development have demonstrated that he had too good an opinion of bourgeois science. For in the meantime we have seen official spokesmen in capitalist universities repudiating the Darwinian theories and reverting to the Mosaic theories of creation, without encountering either great ridicule or strong opposition. 

We have seen theological dabblers in natural science openly supported or seriously discussed by "great authorities” in natural science. We have seen metaphysics and theology fastening themselves like a plague upon science and trying to revive the golden age of medieval scholasticism. And yet all this is but another proof that the historical course of things up holds the theories of Marx and Engels. 

Official bourgeois science, like all bourgeois intelligence, is on its declining curve, because the industrial basis of capitalism is disintegrating.

'So much more does the revolutionary proletariat feel the need of a reliable science and realize that science from the point of view of the proletariat, proletarian science, is the only safeguard of its historical interests. 

The defenders and lovers of capitalism may resign themselves to their adulterated science as they do to their adulterated food, and pretend to regard these things as divine retributions for their awful sins, while they persuade themselves that it pays them to do so. But by the same token the proletarian will not be so meek. 

Wherever official science recoils from its own logical conclusions, there the revolutionary proletariat will call for volunteers to follow up the thread of scientific investigation until they find the undisguised truth. 

For only the full truth can make us free. 

Whenever the ruling class shall attempt to drag any truth upon the scaffold, she will find a revolutionary working man ready to die in her defense.

'Under these circumstances it is high time that the American socialist movement should acquaint itself with the first scientific socialist who sprang to the side of Marx and Engels when they flung the gage of battle into the teeth of bourgeois political economists and historians, the man who “sifted and cleared all the confusion which nowadays poses as brand-new wisdom” in philosophy and natural science, just as Marx and Engels did in their own special fields.

'This man was Joseph Dietzgen. Born in 1828, he was but twenty years old (ten years younger than Marx) when the “Communist Manifesto" made a socialist of him and drove him out on the street to make socialist speeches. At 21, the victory of the Central European reaction served to improve his education by driving him to the United States. Two years later he returned to Germany and resumed his father's trade, the tanning business, at the same time spending all his leisure in the study of history and philosophy. 

In 1853, he married. At the age of thirty-one, we find him once more in the United States, trying his luck at storekeeping in Montgomery, Alabama. But his advanced views on the slave question irritated the good southern church people, who compelled the "ignorant foreigner” to flee for his life in 1861.

'He passed the greater part of the following twenty-three years in Germany, except a period of about five years, during which he superintended a government tannery in St. Petersburg, Russia. 

In all these years, he devoted as much time to study as he could spare from the struggle for existence.

'Just as he had been one of the first to respond to the call of the “Communist Manifesto”, so he was one of the first to greet with enthusiasm the publication of the first volume of Marx's "Capital.” It was especially the philosophical element in the Marxian theories which appealed to him, and nearly all the articles which he wrote for the struggling socialist papers of that day are permeated by the breath of a growing scientific philosophy. 

In these articles we find an answer to all the specious and shallow assertions which still pass in certain circles for an evidence of great learning.

'It was but natural that Dietzgen should feel himself attracted by Ludwig Feuerbach even more than Marx and Engels were, and that he remained to the end a close friend of the author of the "Essence of Christianity."

'The first great work of Dietzgen matured in 1869, two years after the publication of the first volume of Marx's “Capital” and two years before the death of Feuerbach. It was written in St. Petersburg and bore the title, “The Nature of Human Brain Work.” Dietzgen took issue in this book with Kant and Hegel, and vindicated the materialist conception of history by demonstrating that the human faculty of thought is itself a material product, not a supernatural entity. At the same time, this line of research led him to develop the Marxian method beyond Marx and the field of human society into a natural and cosmic theory of human understanding.

'Marx and Engels were quick in recognizing the genius of the young tanner, who, although economically of the middle class, was nevertheless, like themselves, a proletarian by intellectual adoption. Marx in his preface to "Capital”, and Engels in his " Feuerbach," have acclaimed Dietzgen as their independent and equal coworker. At the international socialist congress at The Hague, in 1872, Marx introduced him to the assembled delegates with the words: “Here is our philosopher.”

'The fury of the Bismarckian reaction, in 1878, struck also this proletarian philosopher. But it did not prevent him from continuing his contributions to the underground socialist press and his studies. His children had grown up in the meantime, and when his son Eugene emigrated to the United States, in 1880, in order to prepare a home in that country for the Dietzgen family, our philosopher devoted himself to the philosophical education of this son by a series of letters on logic, which showed that the man was marching undauntedly forward on the trail which he had begun to blaze in his younger years. When he followed his son to the United States in 1884, setting foot on this country for the third time, he at once took an active part in the socialist movement of that period by editing first the New York party organ, Der Socialist, and later, after removing to Chicago, by taking charge of the Arbeiterzeitung just when the capitalist storm was wreaking vengeance on the communist anarchists of that city.

'His maturest work, written in 1887, one year before his sudden death, is the “Positive Outcome of Philosophy," in which he perfected his naturalist dialectics into a consistent natural monism.

'The scattered contributions of Joseph Dietzgen to the literature of the socialist movement have been carefully collected by his son Eugene, and the first volume of an English edition will soon be published by Charles H. Kerr & Company, Chicago. A second volume will follow in the not distant future.

'The first volume opens with a sketch of Joseph Dietzgen's life, by his son Eugene Dietzgen, who also contributes an illustration of the proletarian method of study and world-conception, in an essay entitled "Max Stirner and Joseph Dietzgen." This is followed by a collection of some of the most important articles written by Joseph Dietzgen during the early stages of the German socialist movement for some of the first German socialist papers. In the article on " Scientific Socialism," Dietzgen gives a philosophical explanation of the principles of scientific socialism. In his six sermons on “The Religion of Social-Democracy” he shows that morality is based on common needs and that standards of ethics change with changes in the material conditions of peoples. The next essay, on “Social-Democratic Philosophy” demonstrates that human salvation depends on material work, not on theological moonshine, and that socialists, therefore, look for salvation not so much to religious and ethical preaching as to the organic growth of social development. In “The Limits of Cognition," "Our Professors on the Limits of Cognition," and “The Inconceivable,” he draws the veil from the contradictory and immature notions of official theology and science concerning the nature of the human faculty of thought, and shows that this faculty has only natural, not supernatural, limits. In the “Excursions of a Socialist into the Domain of Epistemology," he takes issue with the bourgeois Darwinians and belated followers of 18th century materialism, and shows that even the most advanced scientific materialist of the bourgeoisie, Haeckel, fails to apply his scientific method uniformly (or monistically). Especially the chapter on “Materialism versus Materialism,” in which he sets forth the difference between proletarian monism and bourgeois materialism, and that on “Darwin and Hegel,” in which he compares the relative merits of these two thinkers in the formulation of a scientific theory of evolution, are very valuable and should serve as eye openers, particularly for those who fancy that they have refuted the scientific naturalism of the modern proletariat when they have delivered themselves of a few commonplaces against the bourgeois conception of materialism.

'The socialist movement has hitherto given almost exclusive recognition to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. It will gradually learn to appreciate also Joseph Dietzgen and give him his dues. Karl Marx was the first to formulate in a general way the theory of historical materialism and to apply Darwinian principles to society by culling the natural kernel from the mystic shell of Hegelian evolution. Dietzgen proved the correctness of this general theory by demonstrating beyond peradventure the material origin and nature of the faculty of thought, thereby completing the explanation given of this faculty by modern biological psychology, and applying the very ultimate conclusions of his discovery with unfaltering consistency.

'It is this discovery of  Dietzgen's which gives the death, blow to all metaphysical and dualistic thought. Once that we have grasped the import of his work, we are armored against all attacks of reactionary speculation.

'Thanks to Joseph Dietzgen, we can apply the historical materialism of Marx with perfect understanding and with a conviction of its irrefutable truth. A proletarian armed with the intellectual weapons of Darwin's natural selection theory, Marx's historical materialism, and Dietzgen's theory of understanding, can approach every phenomenon in society and nature with scientific objectiveness and precision.

'And if the spokesmen of modern bourgeois philosophy prate learnedly of the Passing of Materialism, and if some bourgeois parrots in the socialist movement echo their glittering generalities, with an air of pronouncing the latest scientific truths, it is due to the work of these three revolutionary thinkers that we are enabled to reply: "Speak for yourselves! We know your tune, and we also know why you are singing it. There was a time when you used to sing another tune, which you called the Passing of Socialism. Now that the facts have proved your ignorance of social development, you have taken up the new tune of the Passing of Materialism. This tune is true enough so far as you and your class are concerned. Among you, the passing of materialism, that is to say, the passing of an uncompromising adherence to scientific induction and experiment, is but a reflex in your mind of the Passing of Capitalism. But scientific materialism has found a strong and young champ ion in the rising proletariat, and the Coming of Socialism means the Coming of Scientific Materialism and the Passing of dualistic Theology and Metaphysics.”

The International Socialist Review (ISR) was published monthly in Chicago from 1900 until 1918 by Charles H. Kerr and critically loyal to the Socialist Party of America. It is one of the essential publications in U.S. left history. During the editorship of A.M. Simons it was largely theoretical and moderate. In 1908, Charles H. Kerr took over as editor with strong influence from Mary E Marcy. The magazine became the foremost proponent of the SP's left wing growing to tens of thousands of subscribers. It remained revolutionary in outlook and anti-militarist during World War One. It liberally used photographs and images, with news, theory, arts and organizing in its pages. It articles, reports and essays are an invaluable record of the U.S. class struggle and the development of Marxism in the decades before the Soviet experience. It was closed down in government repression in 1918. 

 

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/.../isr/v06n11-may-1906-ISR-gog.pdf

Exclusive contrasts?

When you deny a bipolar contrast in order to propose another reduction to another, you are not always doing something smart, comrade.
Liberal democrats use the ''exclusive contrast'' "totalitarianism-democracy" to nullify the "capital-labor/work" contrast.

This fact, that they use this contrast TO cancel the "capital-labor/work" contrast, does not mean that both contrasts do not exist at the same time as intertwined.

The left ''exclusive contrast'' which reverses the ''exclusive contrast'' they ''use'' liberal democrats with another ''exclusive contrast'' (capital-labour/work contrast), is an anti-dialectical position, wich is so much anti-dialectical as much as is the position they ''use'' the liberal democrats bourgeois.

 

Ιωάννης Τζανάκος