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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Becker: has a based take on multipolarity
Z-posters: durrrr russia good