this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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For anyone whose really interested in what Becker said, go to the 1 hour and 24 minute mark and watch the whole section. Becker never says that he's opposed to multipolarity, but that multipolarity as an end all be all is not what socialists should strive for. He asks the question "How can we make radical change in America by saying 'Vladimir Putin is our leader?', which is a very salient point. He goes on to say that we should strive for socialist leadership in all of our countries. What is so off about that? Seriously?
The point about the WW1 and multipolarity is making the point that multipolarity alone doesn't end war. Multipolarity between capitalist powers is still destructive.
Rainer Shead is really good at finding convenient quotes from revolutionaries and diluting it to hell and back. He cites Kim il Sung saying “The differences of state socio-political systems, political views or religious beliefs can by no means be an obstacle in the way of joint struggle against U.S. imperialism”, but just thinking about it for like 20 seconds, this obviously wouldn't mean supporting reactionary states against the US for the pure sake of it. Would Kim il Sung have supported Hitler? Obviously not.
This dude misses so often.
Becker: has a based take on multipolarity
Z-posters: durrrr russia good
Nothing is wrong with that in general, but who is he saying it to? Who are these people that only want multipolarity and simp for Putin? His call for socialism is good, but ignores the material reality of today's world in which new socialist construction is not possible without first the decline of US hegemony.
I don't like Shea and think he's quite problematic, but your comment about what Kim is saying is, I think, not a good portrayal.
The USSR and China did ally with other capitalist and imperialist forces against Japan and Germany in WW2. And today's world is largely split into two camps - the US and China. Critical support given to Russia (which while being reactionary still currently plays a progressive role globally in the struggle against US hegemony and is allied to the world's socialist countries, though only out of necessity) is not the same as "supporting Hitler". Putin and Russia today are not equivalent to Hitler and Nazi Germany.
As Losurdo puts it:
Brian Becker and the PSL critically support Russia. Shea takes the critical part and makes it seem like Becker is a "Russia bad" commentator. He's not. Don't listen to Shea talk about Becker. Listen to Becker directly and form your own opinion. When you do, you'll see Shea is dangerous.
I do not totally dismiss much of Shea's writing, yet this is wrecker behavior. Anyone who listens to what PSL is actually saying knows they are not against multipolarity, they're the only prominent Amerikan communist organization even tackling its importance!
I don't take anything Shea says at face value. I've listened to the part of the interview in question and find Becker's answers to be weird and contradictory. As I've explained in another comment, he answers the question “is it good that unipolarity has been challenged?” and his answer is in essence no because it seems like he just argues against some multipolarity in general without considering the material reality of today’s world split into the west and the rest (with China on top). His answer implies that today’s multipolarity is like that of pre-WW1 which is in contradiction with his stance in general.
He's answering the question. Multipolarity, in a vacuum, does not immediately lead to socialism. Socialism must be present along with multipolarity.
He's waffling and refusing to give a clear answer, and the only correct answer for a socialist to give is: yes, because without the defeat of the unipolar US hegemony socialism cannot arise or thrive anywhere.
I guess this is exactly where this belongs then, in leftist infighting. My comrade, you are applying a ridiculous purity test to a political figure who has a much bigger scope of influence, audience, and perspective than you do. And you are choosing to give Rainer Shea the benefit of the doubt in his assessment that the PSL isn't worth listening to despite being shows as a bad actor but not willing to listen to more of Brian Becker to understand where he's coming from despite multiple comrades telling you that it's worth the time because Becker explicitly supports the end of US hegemony.
My perspective is that of someone sitting outside of the US for whom the defeat of US imperialism is the primary interest since that is what is making my life worse and revolution in my country impossible at the moment. I don't know the conditions in the US well enough to say whether what Becker is doing is worth it to attract more people to his movement, but my impression is that he is misjudging the level of support that exists for anti-imperialist and anti-NATO position among the general population. Except that he seems to primarily be addressing a liberal and socdem audience which is why he thinks he needs to add all these caveats and hide his real views.
So your position is ignorant. Got it. Brian Becker used to be an anti-war liberal. He's been against US imperilaism since he began organizing during the Vietnam war. He understands better than any of us how popular sentiment flows around the US machine, the history of US imperialism, the history of NATO, etc.
Just stop trying to hold your position. It's unwinnable. You literally have no idea what you're talking about because you won't even engage with the content we're discussing.
Yes, he is trying to remain able to draw in liberals to the far left. This is a far better strategy than focusing purely on far right people just because they like Russia at the moment.
Dualism isn't dialectic, it's a patently blatant fallacy.
There's more than two sides to anything.
Eating the horse to catch the cow...
Meaningless word salad. Give me a clear answer: how can socialism arise let alone survive anywhere in the world today so long as the US empire, unless challenged in the way that Russia and China are currently doing, is free to use its global reach and all military and economic power at its disposal to strangle any nascent revolution in its infancy and slowly ratchet up the suffocating pressure on the remaining AES states? What other alternative is there than for some state or states to take the fight to the empire and actually hit them back and weaken them the way Russia and China are currently doing?
Please, if you know one, tell me of a practical path to revolution and socialism in a world where the US empire reigns supreme.
A lot of leftists like to talk about anti-imperialism in the abstract, but what Russia and China are currently doing is anti-imperialism put into practice. When push comes to shove suddenly opportunist elements of the western left don't like the way anti-imperialism looks when it's more than empty rhetoric... because it alienates your liberal friends, because it's messy and bloody and dangerous, because it requires some amount of compromise, or because the "wrong people" are doing it and that doesn't fit the idealized picture you had in your head.
These are all vestiges of a liberal idealist mentality that it seems much of the western left is not yet mature enough to have outgrown.
Please tell me you don't really believe those genocidal libertarian hard-c crackers are actually anti-imperialist; as opposed to using a cute little photo op to launder their reputations. If that's really what you believe, you're more lost than I ever thought you to be. It is not compromise to work with the genocidal, it's actively endorsing suicide.
I don't believe that they are, no, i think they are a mix of delusional idiots, contrarians and cynical opportunists. But results matter more than motives, and i see that they are among the only ones actually agitating against NATO and against the war and actually gaining some traction among the population. And i see that there are some sections of the left, such as the PCUSA, that have made a judgement call that it is worth to piggyback on this despite the contradictions present. I would love nothing more than to see a popular leftist movement against NATO and against the lies and propaganda that the West's support for this war is predicated on, that way there would be no need to share a platform with reactionaries. But instead much of the western left has chosen to side with the imperialist position on this conflict in order to stay in the good graces of the liberal establishment, and are doing so under the pretext that to support Russia or to refuse to support Ukraine is tantamount to siding with reactionaries.
Instead of attacking those who reluctantly piggyback on the libertarian platform because they have nowhere else to go if they want to be anti-NATO, why doesn't the part of the left that is also critical of NATO build its own platform for this purpose? This is a rhetorical question because i know the answer: the left isn't given the same freedoms and leeway to be critical of the liberal establishment that the right is. We have already seen communists persecuted and jailed for taking a pro-Russia stance. Unfortunately this is the environment that exists in the imperial core today, and it is in no small part being enabled by the more opportunist elements of the left which have chosen to side with the imperialist narrative and demonize pro-Russian communists as "tankies", "patsocs" or "Putin puppets". This leads some of us to conclude that, however distasteful it may be, the only choice that anti-imperialists have left is to use these dubious platforms because that is the only way to get the anti-imperialist narrative out to the people.
What good is tailing the right gonna do. Ukraine isn’t going to do better or worse thanks to a couple more people protesting. There are a lot more praxis that US left action should be going towards. All I’ve seen come out of RAtWM was radlibs getting evidence that we tankies are just fascists in red.
Do you really think we have any more of a hope of getting radlibs to switch to our side than we do people on the right? I think both are more or less the same level of brainwashed to be anti-communist. If you can turn one you can turn the other too. Or if you're a pessimist you could say both are hopeless. Or to put it another way, do you think that the communist revolutions in Russia and China didn't also include people who had reactionary biases? Didn't the Chinese communists work with the nationalists against the imperialist invaders?
Of course that doesn't mean we should tail the right, quite the opposite, we should unapologetically continue to advance our own progressive and revolutionary views. And we can do that better if we do not cede the anti-war and anti-imperialist position to the right. We need to be on the front lines of the anti-war movement since it clearly has great potential to gain popular support as most people are instinctively against such proxy wars abroad that for them serve no purpose and only come at a social cost. The only reason they continue to passively support them is because they are so propagandized and because there is no alternative presented to them.
And yes, it's true that we can't do anything to really help either side of this conflict directly, but what we can do is undermine the imperialist narrative about this conflict which will have the effect of slowly but surely depriving the imperialists of the social basis they need to maintain the support for the fascist Kiev regime even as their own countries slide further into crisis. The ruling class is not all-powerful, and though it may sometimes not seem like it, they do rely to some degree on the implicit consent of their populations.
Why else would they invest so much effort and resources into controlling the narrative? They have banned all pro-Russian media and are even imprisoning people in some countries, not even for being pro-Russian but simply for refuting the lies that are being told about what is happening in Ukraine. So if they consider it that important to keep the population propagandized about this conflict and about Russia (and also about China of course), then it follows that we must do all we can to break through their narrative control which they are petrified of losing, because that is the only thing we can realistically do to influence the outcome of this conflict.
I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure most of us came here from liberalism, not the far right. How is showing up at their events not tailing them?
Maybe i am confused but since when are libertarians far right? On the European spectrum at least they are usually not considered far right. And what makes RAWM "their event"? The essence of it as far as i understand was opposition to NATO and war, which is not inherently far right or even libertarian. Tailing means adopting someone else's positions out of opportunism, but being against NATO and against imperialist wars is not a right wing position. And so, as long as communists maintain their separate political identity, what is so wrong with having a broad-tent anti-war movement? Do you think that just because communists participate in the same anti-war event as some libertarians they will suddenly start singing the praises of the free market? Or do you really think that communists have the numbers in the US to build a meaningful anti-war movement on their own? Clearly the liberals are not interested in anti-war, they are fully on board with war, they are ecstatic about it and almost salivating at the mouth for bloodshed and killing Russians.
Libertarians are generally far right because they call for as little as possible control over their private property by the government. This is their most consistent line, as some more socially liberal parts aren’t pushed for very hard if at all. They can cry for the same things that republicans do without being called hypocrites as they never have the power that would force them to go back on their so called principles and support monopoly capital (ironic they claim to oppose “corporatism” when one of their main funders are the oil billionaire Koch brothers). Also, the further right faction known as the Mises Caucus dominates the party. Patriotism is inherently reactionary in a settler colonial and imperialist state, so it’s telling that only patsoc orgs feature in the “socialist” camp. The average liberal is not a bloodthirsty ukranazi. Most of them are just like “based on what the tv told me Putin looks bad, I wish this war would end” and they just need some more facts to cut through the lies. Twitter isn’t reality. I’m not saying people take all the positions of those they are in coalition with, but the libertarians are the stronger party and the stronger party usually dominates a coalition. I would also like to say what I noticed from the speakers. The top three, which I recognized were Jimmy Door, Ron Paul, and Tulsi Gabbard are trash. Jimmy is a liberal opportunist who sold anti-vaxx nonsense for clicks. Ron Paul is a libertarian and son of Alex Jones’ favorite senator Rand. Tulsi Gabbard is a fascist congress woman who has ties to the fascists in India sans has called for the Middle East wars not to end, but to be more quiet with more drone strikes and less troop death, what Obama was doing anyway.
Meaningless word salad. Give me a clear answer: how can socialism arise let alone survive anywhere in the world today so long as the US empire, unless challenged in the way that Russia and China are currently doing, is free to use its global reach and all military and economic power at its disposal to strangle any nascent revolution in its infancy and slowly ratchet up the suffocating pressure on the remaining AES states? What other alternative is there than for some state or states to take the fight to the empire and actually hit them back and weaken them the way Russia and China are currently doing?
Please, if you know one, tell me of a practical path to revolution and socialism in a world where the US empire reigns supreme.
A lot of leftists like to talk about anti-imperialism in the abstract, but what Russia and China are currently doing is anti-imperialism put into practice. When push comes to shove suddenly opportunist elements of the western left don't like the way anti-imperialism looks when it's more than empty rhetoric... because it alienates your liberal friends, because it's messy and bloody and dangerous, because it requires some amount of compromise, or because the "wrong people" are doing it and that doesn't fit the idealized picture you had in your head.
These are all vestiges of a liberal idealist mentality that it seems much of the western left is not yet mature enough to have outgrown.
Please tell me you don't really believe those genocidal libertarian hard-c crackers are actually anti-imperialist; as opposed to using a cute little photo op to launder their reputations. If that's really what you believe, you're more lost than I ever thought you to be. It is not compromise to work with the genocidal, it's actively endorsing suicide.
I don't believe that they are, no, i think they are a mix of delusional idiots, contrarians and cynical opportunists. But results matter more than motives, and i see that they are among the only ones actually agitating against NATO and against the war and actually gaining some traction among the population. And i see that there are some sections of the left, such as the PCUSA, that have made a judgement call that it is worth to piggyback on this despite the contradictions present. I would love nothing more than to see a popular leftist movement against NATO and against the lies and propaganda that the West's support for this war is predicated on, that way there would be no need to share a platform with reactionaries. But instead, much of the western left has chosen to side with the imperialist position on this conflict in order to stay in the good graces of the liberal establishment, and are doing so under the pretext that to support Russia or to refuse to support Ukraine is tantamount to siding with reactionaries.
Instead of attacking those who reluctantly piggyback on the libertarian platform because they have nowhere else to go if they want to be anti-NATO, why doesn't the part of the left that is also critical of NATO build its own platform for this purpose? This is a rhetorical question because i know the answer: the left isn't given the same freedoms and leeway to be critical of the liberal establishment that the right is. We have already seen communists persecuted and jailed for taking a pro-Russia stance. Unfortunately this is the environment that exists in the imperial core today, and it is in no small part being enabled by the more opportunist elements of the left which have chosen to side with the imperialist narrative and demonize pro-Russian communists as "tankies", "patsocs" or "Putin puppets". This leads some of us to conclude that, however distasteful it may be, the only choice that anti-imperialists have left is to use these dubious platforms because that is the only way to get the anti-imperialist narrative out to the people.
What good is tailing the right gonna do. Ukraine isn’t going to do better or worse thanks to a couple more people protesting. There are a lot more praxis that US left action should be going towards. All I’ve seen come out of RAtWM was radlibs getting evidence that we tankies are just fascists in red.
Do you really think we have any more of a hope of getting radlibs to switch to our side than we do people on the right? I think both are more or less the same level of brainwashed to be anti-communist. If you can turn one you can turn the other too. Or if you're a pessimist you could say both are hopeless. Or to put it another way, do you think that the communist revolutions in Russia and China didn't also include people who had reactionary biases? Didn't the Chinese communists work with the nationalists against the imperialist invaders?
Of course that doesn't mean we should tail the right, quite the opposite, we should unapologetically continue to advance our own progressive and revolutionary views. And we can do that better if we do not cede the anti-war and anti-imperialist position to the right. We need to be on the front lines of the anti-war movement since it clearly has great potential to gain popular support as most people are instinctively against such proxy wars abroad that for them serve no purpose and only come at a social cost. The only reason they continue to passively support them is because they are so propagandized and because there is no alternative presented to them.
And yes, it's true that we can't do anything to really help either side of this conflict directly, but what we can do is undermine the imperialist narrative about this conflict which will have the effect of slowly but surely depriving the imperialists of the social basis they need to maintain the support for the fascist Kiev regime even as their own countries slide further into crisis. The ruling class is not all-powerful, and though it may sometimes not seem like it, they do rely to some degree on the implicit consent of their populations.
Why else would they invest so much effort and resources into controlling the narrative? They have banned all pro-Russian media and are even imprisoning people in some countries, not even for being pro-Russian but simply for refuting the lies that are being told about what is happening in Ukraine. So if they consider it that important to keep the population propagandized about this conflict and about Russia (and also about China of course), then it follows that we must do all we can to break through their narrative control which they are petrified of losing, because that is the only thing we can realistically do to influence the outcome of this conflict.
I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure most of us came here from liberalism, not the far right. How is showing up at their events not tailing them?
If that is true then Shea is wrong and should have done his research on Becker and the PSL better. But i can only judge based on what i have read and heard from them so far. If you can point me to where they say they critically support Russia i would appreciate it.
Bro it's literally all you post about
Of the 36 posts i made over the last three months 5 have been about this rift that has developed among the western left between those who support Russia's SMO and those who do not. This is something that is not going away, the conflict has not yet been resolved and remains topical as it relates to one of the most impactful geopolitical developments of our generation.
I'm currently on the move so I can't currently give more lengthy response, but these are the people. There's a growing right wing opposition to NATO, which now, might seem insignificant, but as the war drags longer and longer?
The US knows it can't drag the war on in perpetuity, and if support falls come time for the next election, this puts Democrats in a dangerous and weakened position.
I'd be interested to see what instances you're referring to in terms of the SU and China allying with other imperialist forces. The instances I can think, such as the Molotov Ribbentrop pact we'rent so much allying as it was a stalemate that allowed the SU to gather up it's arms. Even then, the SU ended up going to war against those same forces, which points to the reality points to how alliances with reactionary forces is ultimately short lived and can be dangerous.
I do think that Russia plays a progressive tole in today's landscape, but that's different than expecting Putin to liberate us from NATO.
But that's not actual opposition to NATO or US wars in general. They are just opposing what the democrats are currently doing until they get elected again. These people very much want and are working towards US hegemony and open war with China, not just this proxy war against Russia. They do not want multipolarity and their appeals to Putin don't really mean anything. They're just part of a larger effort to be as contrarian as possible to the current democrat positions in public, while actually pursuing largely the same foreign policy as the democrats. There's also the factor of Trump "being friends" or whatever with Putin which is nonsense, but the republicans seem to like spreading that, if nothing else, just to piss off the democrats.
I don't really care what kind of position the democrats are in and neither should you. Both parties have the same imperialist and hegemonic policy and serve military-industrial, and other large corporation's shareholders' interests. The dems are not better than the republicans, and the US elections don't really decide anything. No one in the US should be allying with democrats (or republicans or relying on elections) and expecting achieve any sort of meaningful anti-imperialist changes.
I'm not talking about the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, that wasn't an act of allyship. I'm talking about the larger picture of WW2 in general. The USSR, along with the UK and US fought the Nazis in Europe, and the communists in China formed temporary alliances with capitalist/feudalist forces which were funded by US imperialists to fight against Japan.
Again, my point is that no one is actually expecting this. Maybe a few fringe voices, but its far from a real position taken by people.
So Putin is Hitler now? Have we fallen so far that we are now using the same vulgar propaganda language that the liberals use? Nazi Germany was an imperialist power and when it attacked the Soviet Union it had the backing of most of the western capitalists. Russia is NOT imperialist and it is currently one of the two biggest enemies of the western imperialist hegemony, and they are allied with the other which is a socialist state.
Of course multipolarity is not the end goal, no communist has ever said that. It is however a necessary prerequisite. All the rest of what Becker said is just waffling to obscure the main point: he refuses to support what Russia is doing because it's a bad look in the west right now to "support Putin". But which communist supports Putin? Fuck Putin. Every time that fucker opens his mouth to talk about Lenin he says nothing but bullshit. Of course we all wish that the communists were back in power.
But the point is that a communist should have the geopolitical understanding to grasp the fact that regardless who leads Russia what they are doing on the global stage is objectively beneficial for advancing the anti-imperialist cause and thereby the socialist cause in ALL nations - and yes, including the imperial core itself because when imperialism is dealt a crushing defeat that will open up opportunities for revolutionary action that are currently simply not there.
Unless Russia wins you will not get any kind of socialist leadership in your country, and in fact socialist leadership in the countries where it still exists may be strangled and crushed if imperialism is victorious in this conflict. After Russia China is next. And how long do you think states like Cuba or Vietnam or the DPRK can survive isolated and alone in a unipolar world?
I don’t think they’re not saying Putin is just like Hitler. They’re saying Rainer’s out of context quote implies Kim Il Sung would have supported Nazis as a power fighting US imperialism. It goes along with the logic that led the Trotskyists to support ISIS. Obviously we need to have some sort of line of reaction that cannot be supported. If there were an actual imperialist like Germany fighting the US we wouldn’t support them, but Russia is not at all imperialist so that doesn’t apply.
I really take seriously anyone who believes or pretends that Russia is communist or even remotely close to becoming communist.
Not
Communist Russia ended 32 years ago, please to be living in current century.
Who said that Russia is communist? Why does Russia need to be communist for it to be engaged in actions that are objectively anti-imperialist?
If the only two possible positions are Nato or Russia
And one favors Russia
Therefore that Russia > Nato
And if the assertion is that Russia beating Nato would mean more communism
And if the options are, again, communism or not communism,
Then, by dualist logic, Nato = not communism and Russia = communism.
Because everything can either be one or the other, using the same logic behind "Nato bad, therefore Russia good."
Russia IS better than NATO. That does not make Russia good. But what they are doing is. You seem unable to distinguish between an action and the entity taking said action.
Was this passage saying that a monarchist regime is good? No. It was saying that the actions taken by said regime in combatting imperialism were objectively beneficial for the global struggle.
"You seem unable to distinguish between an action and the entity taking said action."
This coming from someone who equates Ukraine with Nato, which it isn't even part of -- and manages to twist national territorial defense into global hegemonic imperialism.
You can't tell the difference between communism and anti-Americanism. One may be the other, but A->B != B->A. So you fall in with literally anything that is anti-American, no matter what, because you've conflated it with "maybe communism."
Did they? I thought you brought up NATO first
@Shinhoshi https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/1012416