Re: <nettime> The Left Needs a New Strategy

[Dmytri Kleiner <dk@telekommunisten.net>]

On 2021-01-16 16:53, Joseph Rabie wrote:
> > Le 16 janv. 2021 à 11:24, Dmytri Kleiner <dk@telekommunisten.net> a 
> > écrit :
> >
> > Judging China is not a part of his strategy, and should not be, 
> > because it's a bad strategy. We should trust the Chinese workers to 
> > resolve their contradictions, and focus on our own rather than 
> > allowing our elite to propagandize into thinking they are our enemies.
>
> My layman's understanding of Communism is that one of its essential
> markers is the collective ownership of the means of production.
> China's reversion to a market economy suggests that Communism in that
> country has for all intents and purposes failed.

Instead of judging china according your layman's understanding of 
doctrine, you should recognize the outcomes, especially those of human 
development and popular approval of government policies, and figure out 
how you can achieve these in your own country.

It's very unlikely a doctrinaire analysis will help, and any attempt to 
do so becomes very technical and context specific very quickly, so it's 
best to forget this mirage.

You can't do "a China" in your country. You can, however, work to 
improve the conditions of people in your country, while working against 
the aggression of your country abroad.


> For those (as myself) who consider Capitalism a dead end, trying to
> understand why Communism could not perdure in a country such as China
> (or the USSR, or the Eastern Bloc) is of interest.

Communism is an ends, not a means, it must be achieved, and it can not 
be "tried" or just "done." This is the first thing to understand, and 
rest assured the Chinese workers do understand this. China has a 
Communist party, but it does not "have Communism" and can not.

We do not move toward such ends by implementing some sort of 
plug-and-play doctrine that checks a list of idealist checkboxes. 
Communism can not be installed and fix everything like a software 
upgrade.

We move forward by way of a mobilized and militant working class 
identifying it's principle contradictions and using it's class power to 
overcome them, and iteratively moving on to the next contradiction.

This is a dialogical process, I've made many citations towards work that 
has elaborated on this, most accessible and applicable in a western 
context is Freire and McAlevey, the process is broadly called 
dialectical materialism, which is a fancy way of saying "problems and 
loops."

If you want to understand problems and loops from the Chinese 
perspective, Mao's On Practice and On Contradiction are key, if you 
prefer something that wont trigger the PTSD all westerns have from 
decades of propagandist brainwashing, then you can find a lot of the key 
concepts in business management literature, old-school like Eliyahu 
Goldratt "The Goal", which explains the "Theory of Constraints" from a 
business point view, but of course is bounded by the same logic of Mao's 
On Contradiction, and W. Edwards Deming's "The New Economics" which 
explains iterative cycles and statistical management, along the lines of 
Mao's On Practice. If you want something more tech-conference hipster, 
then these same ideas, completely devoid of any political content, can 
be found in the agile and design literature of people like Jeff Gothelf.




--
Dmytri Kleiner
@dmytri
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