There is a certain type of ‘Communist’ on Twitter that really riles me up.
You won’t see me write this kind of shit here normally, because normally, like, I try and keep what I write here salient to real-life issues. That’s also my vision for this blog if I ever get the mental energy to raise it off the ground and into a regular publication (let’s try and squeeze that between a zero hour contract!) — but honestly, I just need to vent about internet idiots, and frankly given how much of the actual Communist Ecosystem revolves around online interactions, and how this is actually now a potential inroad to organising, I think there’s limited utility in weighing in on twitter discourse if only to prevent dumb narratives on NatLib to keep running rampant.
This is not a formulated critique. This is a rant. It is late at night. I am tired. I am a creature driven by a cocktail of caffeine and nicotine.
Enjoy.
I repeat: There is a certain kind of ‘Communist’ on Twitter. This kind of ‘Communist’ annoys me.
This ‘Communist’ probably identifies as a ‘Left-Communist’, or LeftCom. I will thus refer to them as a LeftCom, even though there are a few LeftComs who support National Liberation. Sorry guys, call came from your house. Hope the futile internet factionalism jabs don’t rile you up too bad.
So, these types of LeftCom basically believe after WW1, some sort of event horizon emerged for self-determination. Historically, Marxists have supported self-determination for oppressed peoples. Don’t take my word for it, the Big Man Himself said so:
Thus I hold the view that there are two nations in Europe which do not only have the right but the duty to be nationalistic before they become internationalists: the Irish and the Poles. They are internationalists of the best kind if they are very nationalistic.
(he then proceeds to go on a tirade against south slavs. marx was also a very weird dude sometimes)
You therefore cannot hold advocacy for oppressed peoples to be alien from the history of Marxism. Marx noted that in these nations, it was pretty difficult to Do A Hecking Revolution, because, you see, they were dealing with both the general oppression of capitalism, and also the occupation of their nations frustrating their own national development and also providing a neat break for the proletariat of the imperialising country.
I REPEAT. MARX RECOGNISED THIS:
For a long time I believed that it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working class ascendancy. I always expressed this point of view in the New York Tribune. Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland.
Now, I’m aware of the fallacies of ‘The Big Man Said It, Bro’. There’s a reason we don’t go around talking about Volkerabfalle. You gotta realise M&E have no unique handle on human history and their claims must be measured like anyone else’s (though, if you spoke to some of these LeftComs, you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise). They were also 19th Century German Guys, so like, there’s still gonna be some primordial proto-Hitler particles lurking around there, because Europeans were and continue to be really fucking racist.
But regardless, the main point of this shit makes sense. Dude, the proletariat isn’t some hecking wholesome unit that fits into one neat fucking category, unless you want to seriously tell me the average worker in Britain and the average Congolese child labourer are on equal fucking footing. They aren’t, and the former benefits from the explotiation of the latter because they get their funko pops and shit from that same grotesque system of exploitation. This is measureable, and it is real.
So anyway, these LeftComs will tell you that while this was true in the 19th Century, imperialism has now become universal enough to be inescapable; that imperial powers dominate the world and are poised to carve it up ad infinitum until a generalised workers revolution destroys it from all corners of the globe. As such, all nationalism invariably feeds back into this loop, and ipso facto should be opposed by all means possible.
You could be forgiven for wondering what the fuck these people are talking about, because as we can see there is no fucking workers’ revolution coming any time soon, the first world proletariat has been largely docile for the best part of the last century, and the only serious communist militancy has emerged from racialised populations and third-world countries.
Which brings me on to my next point.
So, what gives for these people?
Basically, their point is that communist movements in the third world allying with nationalist movements are gonna get pasted by the national bourgeoisie, and therefore that angle of struggle is pointless. This is moronic slop thought up by people who refuse to do any investigation.
Look, the BIG FUCKING QUESTION of postwar communism is this:
A lot of the first world set up wholesome welfare states, mostly to counter renewed Communist popularity ‘cuz the USSR’s prestige was through the roof. They understood there’d be a big fuck off revolution if they didn’t calm their workers down, because even in the imperial core there were giant fuck off underclasses who felt really alienated and kinda liked the cut of Uncle Joe’s Five Year Plan.
Even when they didn’t set up welfare states, they still had enough money to go around, and investing in your own proletariat became really fashionable. Eventually, the first world proletariat was blinged out on all these big social programmes, were earning fatter pay packets, had better working hours, et cetera and so forth. Still alienated, but with the means to put it at bay.
What the Heck!!!! What happened to my proletariat!!! It’s no longer revolutionary!!! Sound the alarm buddy!!!!
Ever since this became apparent, it’s become the quest of the Biggest Minds in Marxism to find out What Happened To Their Damn Proletariat.
Well, what if I told you there was an incredibly obvious fucking solution that solves this conundrum?
Yeah, Emmanuel Arghiri came out with it IN 1972.
There’s a lot to Unequal Exchange. Too much to cover. I’m four shots in and feeling all wibbly wobbly. I don’t have work tomorrow so I can do what I fucking want. I’m a grown, mature, adult, so let me have my fucking drinkies.
Basically, the TL;DR to end all TL;DRs is this really obscure nugget of information these LeftCom morons fail to consider:
So, man. What if all the money to fund these first world proletarians came from SOMEWHERE ELSE? Somewhere like, idk, the majority of ‘decolonised’ countries which are now battlegrounds for the foremost imperialist powers???? I mean, damn bro…
(i mean, lenin was noting smth along these lines in 1916)
This is even more inexcusable now globalisation is nearly fully developed. Buddy, we exported lots of our primary and secondary industry to these countries and now they make our iPhones and shit. Clearly the global division of labour is being modified on a really fundamental level, especially because so many values end up coming here, after leaving over there. What the fuck do you think is happening?
So we have our answer: the first world proletarians will not be the principal architects of the struggle to come, and the goal for first world communists needs to be workshopped accordingly. Throwing off the chains of exploitation via unequal exchange is still necessary for the development of various countries. I mean, I don’t know how you envision a Palestinian workers’ movement if you don’t address the fact Israel keeps bombing their shit to hell and back thereby annihilating the Palestinian nation’s capacity for wage-labour—where you gonna get that proletariat for your revolution from, buddy? You gotta stop the Israelis first! ‘Cuz their ‘proletariat’ is currently divvying up the stolen land for themselves and figuring where they’re gonna put their new beachfront house in Ethnically Cleansed Gaza. Israelis don’t give a FUCK about your ‘revolution’ either, because unlike you they are class-conscious and see genocidal ethnonationalism as a way to front their settler interests.
Like, there is a role for first world communists in this model! We’re in the belly of the beast! We can mobilise oppressed communities against the encroaching walled garden of the fascist police state! We just need to be sober about our capacities and accept we won’t be the ones to raise the red flag first. Which is fine, because this is about emancipating humanity, not petty personal aggrandisement. Right?
Right?
‘Anti-NatLib’ LeftComs: you are acting like chuds. You are just doing shock value anti-anti-zionism to piss off twitter maoists because you are bored of intellectual circlejerks in your mutually antagonistic book clubs.
Please read a book.