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 goodHe 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?
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.
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.
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:
we can speak of a struggle against a new colonial counter-revolution. We can speak of a struggle between the imperialist and colonialist powers — principally the United States — on the one side, and on the other we have China and the third world. Russia is an integral part of this greater third world, because it was in danger of becoming a colony of the West.
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.
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.
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 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.
“The struggle that the Emir of Afghanistan is waging for the independence of Afghanistan is objectively a revolutionary struggle, despite the monarchist views of the Emir and his associates, for it weakens, disintegrates and undermines imperialism;”
- J. Stalin, The Foundations of Leninism, 1924
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.
Rainer Shea is a patriotic socialist who made a hard turn to condemning the PSL at every opportunity after they failed to support his “anti-war” rally with Tulsi Gabbard, Jackson Hinckle, and the Libertarian Party USA.
Brian Becker is one of the most principled communist leaders in the west, and is so frequently portrayed as a “Russian asset” by liberals that the underlap with Rainer’s claim here is just funny.
Actions speak louder than words, but imo its disingenuous to say that the PSL failing to support RATWM is because of PSL disliking those lolbertarians.
I’ve spoken with Rainer about this, and while I don’t agree or like with everything he says, his point was that RATWM would expand the core message out to a broader populance, and that he doesn’t like associating with the Lolberts and likened this to the Bolsheviks working with reactionary trade unions and groups. Obviously not the same situation, but the general message is the same.
We didn’t fail to support the event. We rejected the event emphatically. It was a right-wing event.
The general message is not remotely the same. There is a difference between organizing workers in an imperial country where all non-explicitly-communist institutions are reactionary to some degree, and organizing with the fascists self-consciously responsible for making it that way. If you’re genuinely confused about that, you have a lot of reading to do, because even the democrats are better at recognizing their enemies.
The libertarian party is both fringe, and the most ideologically anti-worker organization in the US. It’s impossible to be further away from union organizing. You think they want to end the war and spend that money on healthcare for workers? They are literally repealing child labor laws. Some of them think slavery should be legalized.
You have good points in your final sentence. I was going to say that many of the audience at RATWM are probably led astray or misinformed by the establishment and not directly part of the capitalist oligarchical leaders, but now that I think about it, Tulsi Gabbard being there isn’t a great sign. You’re mostly right.
I mean, most of any audience is going to be workers, they’re 99% of the population. That’s never going to be sufficient for determining whether an action is worth supporting. This event was paid for by GOP-aligned billionaires. You couldn’t pick a less favorable environment for worker outreach. You could go up to random people on the street and ask them how they feel about the Ukraine war, and you’d have a more serious anti-war movement than this in a month.
Y’know what this is reminding me of? That time Chelsea Manning went partying with libertarians, paid for a ticket to their function, then turned around and tried to say she was ‘gatecrashing’. Got a lot of people lately who just wanna party with the enemy and try to reframe it as ‘coalition-building’.
Except that the people in RAWM are most certainly not “the fascists responsible for making it that way”, those fascists are sitting on the Atlantic Council, in the RAND corporation, at the State Department, in the CIA, in the White House, at the Federal Reserve, at NATO, and other institutions of bourgeois imperial power. What power do a bunch of libertarian nobodies have? Not to mention that reducing RAWM to just the right wingers is dishonest, afaik it’s a broad tent coalition and includes people from the left too as well as a lot of otherwise fairly apolitical people who are just sick of wars.
Of course i don’t think that the libertarians will support labor organizing or social spending. But that’s not what this is about, this is about one thing only and that is opposing NATO and the US empire’s proxy war on Russia. You can support that part without agreeing with the ideological viewpoints of everyone else in the coalition. It just comes down to whether you think it’s acceptable to put aside differences over domestic policy for the sake of preventing possible nuclear war and WWIII, because that’s where we may be heading if NATO’s escalations are not stopped.
I thought the same thing, that libertarians aren’t the most powerful group for reaction, but that doesn’t mean they are highly ideologically anti-worker and anti-communist. Libertarianism declined as a force once the rich realized they could get their same ideology in the mainstream through neoliberalism instead. It doesn’t make the more fringe form less bad.
Libertarian backers have immense wealth from both the fracking boom and silicon valley. The difference between neolib and libertarian is basically non-existent. The Libertarian anti-war stance is opportunism, and their criticism is just that their PMCs should be hired for more imperialist ventures.
Middle income Americans trend reactionary on political-economy because the bourgeois narratives work for them and their livelihood is secure, and the state does often end up helping them out.
America is an exceptionally bourgeois country, especially considering the colonial question. The proletariat is outnumbered and we really need to stop trying to pander to the settler petit bourgeoisie, they already have state power.
Libertarianism is basically controlled opposition. They’re just another far right party with billionaire backing, but they can pretend to be against the establishment because they have no hope at gaining electoral power. They can keep radlibs that might have hope of going left by talking about freedom (including social “progressivism” despite not having power to influence those issues on the right side or even trying to) from.
Yeah but their freedom slogan isn’t anything unique, it’s the core of Liberalism. The freedom slogan works for radlibs because like Libertarians they most likely lived a middle income life, which in America is very wealthy in global standards, and they only think about the state in terms of limiting their Liberty to get what they want, or not doing enough to protect their ability to get what they want.
Their overwhelming interests (needs rather than wants) are being served by the bourgeois settler state, in the same way as the ML AES’s proletariat’s interests are served by the vanguard and DotP.
I think the anti-establishment politics don’t really exist outside of the worker’s movement to take power. All bourgeois ideology is establishment.
