Late Imperial China
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Will all those comrades working as covert agents for the capitalist state please raise your hand NOW! The notion that a tiny organisation of socialist revolutionaries which, moreover, is as transparent as glass as far as its inner workings are concerned , poses such a mortal threat to global capitalism at this point in time such that the capitalist state feels the need to despatch not just one but “many” agents to work secretively within this movement – though in a sense enormously flattering – is, sadly, ludicrously out of touch with reality
I do not think you have understood what I have said. I was not referring to the SPGB, the SPGB is not the movement, is the whole working-class movement and all the organizations involved in this type movement, I have been more involved than you in this movement including the WSM, and I know what I am talking about, during the 60 the whole movement was infiltrated by a different type of agents, in the open one, and in the closed open, you are taking side with a person who is an amateur in this movement and he can leave, but I am not leaving the movement, I have seen many in this movement giving up, I have seen many members of this movement who have ended up working for the capitalist class, you have not travelled around the world as I have done, I was in contact with many organizations around the world, from party to party, from congress to congress, and I know their reports. You are the one out of reality because you only know this organization and I have known several organizations from different part of the world. I have been in the Soviet Union, in Eastern Europe, in Albania and in Cuba, in times when It was prohibited to travel to those places, and let me tell you do not bother me and I do not get involved in my affairs, take care of your Bingo and I take care of mine, you even brought shit about me in this forum in regard to the WSPUS that is not your fucking business either
Closer to the animal kingdom than the rest of us?
But the “inherited stupidity” of the “barbarous” Chinese isn’t him joking, is it?
If you go to the website of the USA and the Cuban right-wingers you will find a bunch of lies created against Marx and Engels, and expressions who have been twisted, and most of them have not read a preface of any book written by Marx and Engels, using expression out of context. I had a bunch of them in my WSM forum and they are terrible because they send you messages to the Homeland Security and to the FBI, and have received threats from them. There are many expressions used by Marx and Engels which were expressions used in that time, and many were translated wrongly to other languages. They have also said that Marx received thousand of dollars from Rothschild in order to write capital and that communism is a creation of the Illuminati and the Jews, and that the whole nomenclature was controlled by Jews, they had said that Marx was having sex with little girls and with his maid that he had a bunch of children, and that he had a man as his lover. You are just posting ideas from right-wingers and anticommunists, I lived under that type of propaganda, we were bombarded with that of nonsenses
No. But it was a bit of a journalistic flourish introduced by “it seems that”. What he was getting at was the (apparently) unchanging nature of Chinese society. A bit like his famous (?) comment about the idiocy of rural life. I don’t think he “despised” people in China. In fact he was seeing them as victims of the opium trade.
In the past, I had all the collected works of what we used to call the Classic of Marxism ( Engels, Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao and Enver Hoxha ) in three different languages,( I am not fluent in Russian but I kept one as a souvenir ) and I found some wrong translations in some of them, from German to Spanish I found several mistakes and from English to Spanish ( Pathfinder has a copyright on the English version of Trotsky ) Some Chinese friends of mine found the wrong translation in the works of Mao into the English language. I have found mistakes made from the Spanish El Quijote into the English language because they used pure Castilian languages. This is what we call looking for the pubic hair in the soup
When the article written by Marx on Simon Bolivar was published, the Bolivarians and the followers of Socialism of the XXI started to create a bunch of lies about Marx ( before Chavez has asked everybody to read Marx, Lenin and Trotsky ) the things is that nobody had pointed out that Simon Bolivar was the Latin American Bonaparte, and he was a slave owner, and he declared himself a dictator, but they wanted to cover Bolivar past by creating lies against Marx, the whole troops of Cuban right-wingers also helped them in the propaganda, but two famous Marxist theoreticians from Chile and from Cuba clarified all the expressions, and both have written books on Marxism, and both were part of the movement, even more, one of their books was used to train new members to most of the ML parties
Engels sent a private letter using the expression false consciousness defining ideology and it was spread around the whole world, but Marx had a different definition about ideology. As Dunayevskaya said you must go deep and deeper and you must know the body of ideas of Marx to understand many aspects of his writings
“I like the idea of a world without wage-labour and where everything is free.”
Like Marx then, though of course he didn’t think up either idea but learned them from already existing movements that capitalist conditions had thrown up. in the 1830s and 1840s. Before him workers had raised the demand “Abolish the Wages System” and critics of capitalism had called for “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”. Another reason for not over-doing the word “Marxism”. When describing us I deliberately put this in inverted commas for this reason as well as to indicate that we employed the same language and analysis to back up these demands that Marx did (though not because he did), as I’m sure you recognised.
Marxist-Leninists, Marcos, are nothing to do with our movement.
Tm. I don’t argue with amateur or little children you might get wet. Those anecdotes proves that translators made mistakes and certain expressions belong to certain epoch. Period
Several of those expressions mark took them from the French anarchists. He was a theoretician of anarchism
I do not think you have understood what I have said. I was not referring to the SPGB, the SPGB is not the movement, is the whole working-class movement and all the organizations involved in this type movement
You could have fooled me. In the context of what you wrote coupled with your constant niggling insinuations about TM it was perfectly reasonable to infer you were talking about the SPGB. Read again what you wrote and see for yourself
I take care of mine, you even brought shit about me in this forum in regard to the WSPUS that is not your fucking business either
When people start the WSPUS a bunch of Stalinists then, sorry, but I will make it my business to call them out on that, whether you like it or not. I dont take kindly to my American comrades being smeared like that. In the same way I called you out for the undemocratic manner in which you moderated the WSM forum by banning certain people like the anarcho-capitalist McDonagh from what was supposed to be an open public forum. If you find it embarrassing to be reminded of that then – tough! From the way you go on about yourself as if you are some sort uber class warrior to which the rest of us should look up to, you need to be taken down a peg or two tbh
There is no ambiguity or contemporary language in the endorsement Marx and Engels had for supporting the United States against Mexico. As i explained other radicals were well aware of the motivation – not merely the expansion of the nation-state but the widening of the slave-states.
We can rightly express questions about such statements as “peoples without history” (Slavic ) “reactionary peoples” or “remnants of peoples long gone” (Celtic)
Roman Rosdolsky’s ‘Engels and the Non-Historic Peoples’ is an interesting read on the topic which can be downloaded free at
https://b-ok.asia/book/2378384/66c767?regionChanged=&redirect=4228779
What should we make of Engels words here? Genocide? Germanisation?
“We shall fight “an implacable life-and-death struggle” with
Slavdom, which has betrayed the revolution; a war of annihilation and
ruthless terrorism, not in the interests of Germany but in the interests of the revolution… the Austrian Germans and the Magyars will gain their freedom and take a bloody revenge on the Slav barbarians. The general war which will then break out will scatter this Slav Sonderbund, and annihilate all these small pig-headed nations even to their very names. The next world war will not only cause reactionary classes and dynasties to disappear from the face of the earth, but also entire reactionary peoples. And that too is an advance…”Even Kautsky was taken aback.
“It was proclaimed that, except for the Poles, the Slavs were all by nature
counter-revolutionary, and therefore they had to be fought not merely in the present situation, which found them in the camp of the counter-revolution. No, they had to be exterminated. Brotherhood with them was precluded; the only thing to do was to fight against them until they were annihilated. …This was said a little more than a year after the Communist Manifesto was written, which ended with the words: ‘Working men of all countries, unite!'”Engels again-
“…Amongst all the nations and nationalities of Austria there are only three bearers of progress, which have actively intervened in history and are still capable of independent life: Germans, Poles and Magyars. They are therefore revolutionary now. The next mission of all the other great and small peoples is to perish in the universal revolutionary storm. They are therefore now counter-revolutionary. We repeat: apart from the Poles, the Russians and at most the Slavs of Turkey [not of Austria and Hungary! (rr)], no Slav people has a future, for the simple reason that all the other Slavs lack the primary historical, geographical, political and industrial conditions for a viable independence… Peoples which have never had a history of their own, which come under foreign domination the moment they have achieved the first, crudest level of civilization, or are forced onto the first level of civilization by the yoke of a foreigner, have no capacity for survival and will never be able to attain any kind of independence. And that has been the fate of the Austrian Slavs…”
Was it only early Engels?
Engels to Kautsky, 7 February 1882: “Now you could ask me whether I
have, then, no sympathy at all for the small Slavic peoples and ruins of
peoples who are split up from one another by the three wedges driven into
Slavdom: the German, Magyar and Turkish wedges. In fact, I have damned
little…”Engels’ letter to Bebel, 17 November 1885, “pitiable splinters of former nations—the Serbs, Bulgarians, Greeks and other robber riff-raff.”
Yes, that is where we have explicitly stated that we disagree with the political stance taken up by Marx and Engels and that they were wrong.
Their justification for taking up these positions was that Tsarist Russia was a threat to the “European Revolution” by which they meant not the socialist revolution but the revolution to establish and consolidate capitalist political conditions, ie political democracy in a nation- state, throughout Western and Central Europe.
This led them to take up the aberrant political positions you mention — and other such as support for the Franco-British-Turkish side in the Crimean War, opposition to all Slav nationalism (except Polish — they saw an independent Poland as a buffer between Tsarist Russia and Europe ) since those speaking Slavic languages and practising Orthodox Christianity were seen as actual or potential tools of Russia, taking sides in European wars (in fact in all wars as in the US-Mexican one you mention).
Marx had what can be called an obsession about Tsarist Russia, arguing that it had been plotting for centuries to conquer the world and advancing a conspiracy theory that the British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston was a Russian agent.
What Engels wrote about the non-Polish Slavs was also completely out of order, though I think he meant they should be Germanised rather than literally exterminated. Incidentally, no wonder Kautsky should object as he was half-Czech and had been a Czech nationalist before he became a socialist.
In their attitude towards Russia and the other Slavs (except the Poles) they were behaving as old 48ers as those German bourgeois democrats and nationalists who were involved in the abortive German Revolution in 1848-9 were known. And they were wrong. But, as was to be expected, they were products of their time.
The explicit repudiation by the Party of these positions taken up by Marx and Engels is in chapter 13 of the original 1950 edition of our pamphlet The Socialist Party and War. Unfortunately it is not in the pamphlet section on this site. Maybe I will scan it as it should be ( unless somebody else wants to volunteer).
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