gonna write enemies to enemies fanfiction about them

Next thread here.

The final week of Lenin’s Imperialism!

If you’re joining us when we move on to Michael Hudson’s Superimperialism next week, make sure to grab a copy of the book somewhere at some point over this week or next week. If you’re not joining us, let me know and I will take you off the ping list.

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Chapter 8: Parasitism and Decay of Capitalism

Monopoly capitalism engenders a tendency towards stagnation, due to the combination of 1) fixed monopoly prices (as prices are a major mechanism and motivator for technical progress under capitalism) and 2) it can become profitable for a capitalist or group of capitalists to deliberately slow down or stop technical progress if designs would threaten their own monopoly and/or prices. Competition and development can never be fully eliminated, and so there can never be total stagnation, but the tendency remains as a major impeding force.

Lenin draws on an example of a German bottle-manufacturing cartel purchasing and then ignoring a machine patent that would have made bottle production much easier (and therefore cheaper, and therefore less profitable).

Imperialism also allows for the accumulation of capital in a few countries and for relatively few people, creating a stratum of rentiers who do not contribute even slightly to enterprises; exporting capital further insulates them, allowing them to exploit countries thousands of miles away, with little possibility of rebellion.

In Britain, the income of the rentiers through this parasitism is five times greater than the income obtained from British foreign trade. In Lenin’s day, economists increasingly divided the world into the usurer states and the debtor states, with five countries standing above the rest: Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, and Switzerland. The United States is a creditor for its hemisphere, too. Britain is transforming from an industrial to creditor state; while industrial output is still increasing, the income from interests and dividends and speculation and such is increasing more rapidly; this is what allows Britain to be such a powerful imperialist.

This parasitism naturally influences everything inside the rentier state, including the working class movements inside it. The profits gained from imperialism make it possible to bribe the upper stratum of the proletariat and thereby strengthens opportunism. This upper stratum consists of the membership of cooperatives and trade unions and other highly-placed workers, and naturally this upper stratum has much more political representation than the lower stratum (the vast majority of workers). It is worth noting that in Britain, this temporary decay in the working class movement was present significantly before imperialism truly took hold, as described by Marx and Engels; the latter of which famously described the English proletariat as becoming increasingly bourgeois. English workers are unconcerned about (or are even supportive of) colonial policy because of Britain’s dominant position in the world economy. They have become social chauvinists, aligned with bourgeois policy; not only in Britain (it was merely the first country to become this strong), but throughout Europe.

To continue with the effects of imperialism on the imperialists: the land itself inside imperialist countries results in the transformation from agricultural land to that for the rich, such as horse-riding and fox hunting [today, we might think of golf courses]; this naturally means that the percentage of workers employed in productive enterprises is declining [the service economy!]

Emigration from imperialist countries declines (not just in relative but also in absolute terms; that is, even population increases aren’t counteracting it) and immigration into these countries increases from the exploited countries abroad. German emigration between 1881 and 1890 was 1.5 million, then fell to 350,000 over the next two decades. Meanwhile, workers from Austria, Italy, Russia, and other countries pour in by the hundreds of thousands; by 1907 there was a total of 1.3 million foreign workers inside Germany. Immigrants make up a great number of the workers in poorly-paid industries in France and the United States.

Chapter 7: Imperialism, as a Special Stage of Capitalism

Imperialism emerged from the characteristics of capitalism, but only at a certain point in capitalist development. Free competition transformed into its opposite - monopoly capitalism - which now exists above free competition, ignoring it almost entirely.

A brief (and not incorrect) definition of imperialism is that it is the monopoly stage of capitalism; that is, finance capital is established out of the merger of industrialists and bankers, and colonialists take control of swathes of the world’s territories to generate profit. A fuller definition has five key points:

1. Production and capital has been concentrated into monopolies that play a decisive role in the economy.
2. Bank capital has merged with industrial capital to create finance capital; imperialism is NOT a tendency of industrial capitalists, but rather of finance capitalists.
3. Capital - not just commodities - is substantially exported abroad; selling things on the market to other countries is NOT imperialism.
4. Monopoly capitalist associations become international; factories are owned abroad, there are bank branches throughout several countries, etc.
5. The world has been fully partitioned between capitalist powers; imperialist powers now struggle for control of semi-colonial powers or to repartition what already exists.

Imperialism is therefore a distinctly new phase of capitalism, though as system boundaries are fluid, it’s impossible to give an exact decade, year, month, etc on which the transformation between phases occurred (though the start of the 20th century is a useful general marking point).

Lenin then starts fighting with Kautsky, as he tends to do.

He disagrees with Kautsky’s definition of imperialism, which is essentially that it is a policy and not inherent to the capitalist system. Lenin has demonstrated that imperialism is not a consciously-chosen political policy of the capitalists; that is to say, it is not as if the capitalists could join together and agree to stop doing imperialism and start doing something else. It IS capitalism in its highest stage.

He disagrees with Kautsky’s argument against the progressivism of capitalism and imperialism as argued by Cunow; as Kautsky believes that imperialism is largely a widespread political policy that could be changed and reformed, he therefore opposes (what he believes to be) imperialism but does not want to truly change the economic conditions that allow and sustain imperialism.

He disagrees with Kautsky’s argument of the creation of an “ultra-imperialism”; that is, the ultimate drawing together of all the world’s monopoly corporations into a single, gargantuan monopoly corporation, internationally unified.

While imperialism might be tending towards this in the most abstract sense - one could draw a line of best fit on a graph and extrapolate it to centuries from now - this hypothesis is problematic in that it ignores existing antagonisms in the real world economy that would actually prevent this from occurring; after all, finance capital does not lessen contradictions and unevenness around the world, it instead increases them. There are increasingly violent struggles between imperialist states; there will not be a peaceful ultra-imperialist monopoly at the end of it, only total destruction. There are no solutions to contradictions inside capitalism other than the exertion of force and violence, and as unevenness continues to increase, so too will violence. This unevenness occurs both between an imperialist power and its colonies, but also between the imperialists themselves; Germany is a good example of this (as we, with the benefit of hindsight, know even better than Lenin).

In this week’s chapters, Lenin starts to move towards a conclusion and attacks Kautsky for a while, before moving on to perhaps the single most important question of the whole book: if monopoly capitalism is so dominant, how can it be brought down?

There’s some irony about how he attacks the concept of “ultra-imperialism” (or indeed, superimperialism) considering that’s the next book we’re reading, but I think Hudson’s usage of the term is a little different to Kautsky’s. Nonetheless, the ability of the US to singlehandedly command so much of the world economy (though certainly not all) is perhaps a slight factor against Lenin’s theory and predictions here. It doesn’t disprove anything, though - in fact, the 80s and 90s moment of American domination through globalization has now been predictably ended and is under strenuous attack by other imperialist powers as well as anti-imperialist ones, proving Lenin correct; that monopoly capitalism will decay.

Chapter summaries below.

of course he does, half the country rightfully dislikes him because of his tweets (if you’re a lib) or because he’s doing serious material harm (if you’re impoverished, in a minority group, etc)

I’m just explaining why he can even have an approval rating as high as 48% despite the fact that he’s such a bad leader; the combination of the aforementioned “cutting through the bullshit” and the fact that Biden’s economy sucked and Trump’s was relatively better

I think people just tend to like leaders who can “cut through all the bullshit procedures and just get things done”, which is an attractive trait if for your whole life you’re been scolded by liberals going “Mmm, well, I’ve been to university and studied this subject extensively, and it’s actually impossible for the president to do good things unless he a) has a Congressional supermajority; b) the full support of the parliamentarian; c) a 7/2 majority in the Supreme Court; d) a White House humidity below 40%, and; e) it’s the second Thursday of the month.”

And that’s not automatically bad - it’s actually really the only trait of the average white American or western European that gives me hope. And if somebody doesn’t have that desire (typical of consciously ideological liberals) then it’s much harder to convince them that socialism is both possible and necessary. It’s just a rather bad thing if the “bullshit procedures” are “what few protections for minorities previously existed” or “a dedication to a somewhat livable climate in three decades”.

The system relies on good faith

seems like a pretty shitty system. if somebody tries to write a law that will result in the mass suffering or death of homeless people and/or minorities, the revolutionary police should be knocking on their door within the hour; I don’t want to be reliant on those politicians or elite figures (if they still exist in the economic system) simply all being nice enough to not take away the rights of workers

I 100% agree and it’s one of the biggest unarguable black stains on China’s record over the last couple decades.

It’s just entertaining how geopolitics is now a race to the bottom.

Putin: “Yeah, sorry guys, I’m working on writing my 58th speech warning NATO about my red lines and letting my central bank fuck over my country. That, and withdrawing our forces from Syria… I’m a little busy at the moment.”
Pezeshkian/Khamenei: “I get ya, I get ya, we’ve got all our best writers working on threats towards Israel and how they’re making a big mistake while only actually doing anything big and meaningful to slow down an ongoing genocide every 8 months or so. Plus, we’ve got secret deals to make with the US after they murder our allies. It’s a tough job out here.”
Xi Jinping: “Why bother with the speeches, guys? We just give a statement every now and then about how America is bad and then proceed to not even threaten to do anything to counter them. Oh boy, they’ll be feeling that lack of germanium soon! No, we can’t start to detach our economic system from the West or even lessen our reliance on Western investors, we’re doing the opposite in fact.”
Trump: “No big deal guys, I’ll help you out. I’ll boycott the G20 and let China control it, leave the WHO and various climate accords, and freeze funding towards USAID to make the colour revolution pressure stop for a while.”

Everybody’s fucking up and doing things that are counterproductive to their own positions, INCLUDING the United States, so the net result is still imperial decline.

Talk of “manufacturing” and “inventing” suggests an imposition over and against the individual’s will. I believe that, on the contrary, the process of Western propaganda is better understood in terms of “licensing”: the issuing of moral license for the bourgeois proletariat to profitably go along with bourgeois designs without the feeling of shame overwhelming. In this alternative account people aren’t “brainwashed” insofar as they don’t actually believe the lies, not in the way that we generally understand belief. It’s more correct to say that they go along with them, whether enthusiastically or apprehensively, because it’s actually their optimal survival strategy.

Remove the licensing (created by pumping money into anti-communist narratives) and you remove a substantial amount of the people going for these narratives. They will still feel a low-lying level of hatred of communism created by decades of pre-existing media reporting, but with the propaganda receiving less funding, you then have an opening to show the counterpropaganda, which can be surprisingly successful if it’s reporting the positives of socialism. We saw this when TikTok briefly closed down and people went to Chinese social media and saw that all the “social credit” stuff is nonsense.

Debunks of atrocity propaganda are still very useful, just not in the way I originally imagined. Initially I hoped that sheer anger at becoming aware of imperialist machinations would elicit a response, but now I instead think of them as an auxiliary tool. Sharing positives is primary, and debunks are secondary. Secondary, however, does not mean optional. There is a persistent myth that social accomplishments like sane pandemic management or quality public transit come at the cost of one’s soul. Confronted with such a notion, appeals to hypocrisy — e.g. insisting one’s soul is already foregone due to complicity in Western genocides — are worse than useless. Insofar as they read like a confession, they are extremely harmful. A confident, evidence-based rejection of such claims is both a more principled and a more effective strategy. All it takes is work.

we better hope the accelerationists are correct because he’s following that ideology pretty strictly

The word “gaslighting” gets used a lot but the closest I have ever felt to being actually gaslit in a political sense is having dozens upon dozens of headlines beamed at me being like “Well, the economy is obviously doing great, so I wonder why people don’t believe it? I wonder what psychological effect is making people believe that things aren’t amazing?” Just to directly name a couple, here’s FAIR’s reporting over the last couple years:

January 2024: Media Obsession With Inflation Has Manufactured Discontent:

At the time, the misery index, a rough gauge of societal suffering that sums inflation and unemployment, clocked in at nearly 12%. Today, the same index sits around 7%. If the fall of 1984 was morning, we’re well into the day. The dark, turbulent night is not only behind us; it’s been over for a while. That’s not how most of the American public seems to feel, though. People continue to rate the economy stunningly poorly, given its performance of late. The University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment, for instance, most recently registered 61.3, versus 100.9 during “Morning in America.” In other words, consumer sentiment is currently 39% lower than it was at a time when the misery index was 41% higher.

The gap between consumer sentiment and economic performance has sparked extensive pontification online, with a variety of reasons being proposed for the disconnect. Arguments have been made for everything from increases in grocery prices (Atlantic, 12/21/23), to real wage declines during much of 2021 and 2022 (Vox, 8/10/23), to social media misinformation (Washington Post, 11/24/23), to partisan polarization (CBS, 8/14/23), to lagging perceptions and a desire for outright deflation (Wall Street Journal, 10/18/23).

At the end of the day, there’s probably some truth to all of these ideas. But there’s another fundamental cause of economic discontent that should be getting more attention: corporate media’s single-minded obsession with inflation, which has left the public with an objectively inaccurate view of the economy.

November 2024: It’s the Economic Reporting, Stupid

Conservative media, unsurprisingly, appears to be a major culprit in the miseducation of the American public, with people whose primary media source is conservative media registering lower familiarity with reality than those who stuck mainly to other media sources. (Reliance on social media, too, was associated with less knowledge of basic facts.) But even among those who primarily get their news from the more general category of cable/national newspapers, a third didn’t realize that inflation had declined over the past year. Voters’ lack of knowledge, therefore, cannot simply be laid at the feet of the conservative press. Corporate outlets more broadly must share the blame.

Another offending piece appeared recently in the Atlantic (11/11/24). There, staff writer Annie Lowrey made the case that the cost-of-living crisis, and the Democrats’ inability to tackle it, explains the election results. Curiously, the media’s role in distracting the public from the remarkable achievements of macroeconomic policy during Biden’s tenure in office went unmentioned.

This is not to say that Lowrey and others who have made similar arguments don’t have a point that there are real issues facing the American public. For such a wealthy country, the US has obscenely high poverty, internationally aberrant levels of inequality, and a notoriously ramshackle welfare state. Partially out of sheer necessity, the US welfare state was substantially boosted during the pandemic, and the unwinding of this enhanced safety net after 2021 must have had some effect on Americans’ perceptions of the economy and their own economic standing. Real disposable income, for example, spiked in 2021 due to temporary measures like stimulus checks, but then fell back to the pre-pandemic trend of growth, which may have felt like a loss to some.

Like, you actual motherfuckers. “Well, everybody is reporting in polling that their lives fucking suck under Biden, but these objective, god-given, absolutely infallible inflation numbers (that exclude everything that the average person is vulnerable to) and these employment figures (which, as anybody who works as a gig worker or similarly vulnerable positions, know are hilariously incorrect) are all so good! We can’t blame these poor, idiotic, easily misled, slack-jawed rubes that make up our population - no no no, that would be mean, and we are a kind and benevolent group of liberal analysts - we have the magnanimity to blame the media for misinforming them, instead.” Fuck off.

I’m surprised there aren’t more people who have a true love of the propaganda game. I post pro-Chinese/DPRK/Resistance propaganda here and I don’t get paid for it (though if Xi is ever offering…)

I guess it shows not only how astroturfed Reddit is (as HoiPolloi said) but in a more general sense, how much the establishing of false narratives relies on a constant application of money and force (physical or digital). It’s easy to be like “oh, human nature, blah blah blah, we’ll always believe and post untrue things because we’re all gullible and imperfect and sinful” but actually, when there’s no money to act as an counterincentive, true and good things tend to spread. Yet another thing proving Masses, Elites, and Rebels correct I suppose.

every single time we on this megathread critique China’s relative lack of activity compared to Russia or the West Asia Resistance, the US shows up and does shit like this that comfortably provides China with an avenue to just keep doing what they’re doing and still succeed

Less than 1%, imo. It’s already effectively the case that Canada is a US protectorate, and I personally doubt that they’d genuinely want to try and make their ownership official when the drawbacks of having to manage that territory are fairly substantial. American bureaucracy is already in severe decay, and the whole promoted image of American foreign interventions is that they, well, intervene, not invade and annex.

That being said, I could see it happening as a desperate gamble for American capitalists, besieged and drowned by Chinese innovation and pushed out of Asia and Africa, to try and slow the decline of their monopoly position in like 20-30 years. But I don’t think the benefits outweigh the costs right now. Their empire is certainly in the decay phase but there’s still quite a long way down to go before they’d truly have to stoop to the depths of nakedly occupying and cannabalizing their own allies, versus the more “delicate” approach of Biden blowing up their pipelines and creating massive wars to ensure obedience from Europe.

If there is an annexation within the next decade or so, it’ll probably be a coup and look very business-as-usual, to the point where popular discontent may not even last; it probably won’t look like American tanks driving towards Ottawa in columns. Beyond that timeframe, perhaps an annexation would have to be more forceful as America’s position would have declined relative to China and others’.

we gotta get the Mongolian Empire experts in here to explain which Khan son best correlates to each Trump son

every person who watches a Marvel movie or one of those war movies/series called like “Duty of Service” or whatever gains +5% resistance to bullets and artillery per movie/episode watched, making Westerners invulnerable supersoldiers who go on special black ops missions in experimental aircraft going behind enemy lines where their team of 5 plucky soldiers make quips to each other and kill at least 10,000 soldiers (and are simply forced, by their enemy’s brutal and unfair tactics, to blow up a piece of infrastructure that supports hundreds of thousands of civilians)

“They have great rare earth. And I want security of the rare earth, and they’re willing to do it.”

I would love for Trump to explain what he thinks a “rare earth” is, off the cuff

I’ve been focussing elsewhere so I’m not up to date on the whole China fentanyl thing; is this something the US made up as a casus belli to tariff China or is it just “China makes everything so they also make fentanyl and it finds its way to the US”?

either way, I’m assuming that China will fold on whatever Trump wants here