Should We Discuss the Potholes on China’s Road to Socialism?

One can admire the Chinese revolution as one of the great setbacks to the imperialist and colonial undertakings of Europe, Japan, and the US. One can hail the extraordinary sacrifices and deep dedication of members of the Chinese Communist Party to both liberate the peoples of China from foreign domination and advance the people toward a better life.  

At the same time, one can recognize the errors, the missteps, and the failed campaigns that unsurprisingly went with establishing and developing the New China.

As with other previous revolutionary projects like the Americas and France -- in their times-- and the Soviet Republic, the European Peoples’ Democracies, Peoples’ Democratic Korea, Cuba, and Vietnam in our time, Peoples’ China’s fate will and must be decided by its own people and their leading forces. And we are obligated to defend their right to make that choice, whether we agree with it or not.

Those of us who are on the outside looking in need to demonstrate humility and reserve in assessing the progress of the Chinese revolution. We should make neither hasty critiques nor unqualified defenses. We should not rush to judgement on a job that is, by all accounts, unfinished. Even as late as February of 1952, Stalin was reminding us that commodity production still existed in the Soviet Union. At the same time, the goal of Communists remained, in Engels’ words from Anti-Duhring as cited by Stalin, “the seizure of the means of production by society” and putting “an end to commodity production, and therewith to the domination of the product over the producer.”

While conceding that the Soviet Union had yet to secure this aim, Stalin was unequivocal about how the Soviet Union and Soviet Communists pursued this goal: 

The specific role of Soviet government was due to two circumstances: first, that what Soviet government had to do was not to replace one form of exploitation by another, as was the case in earlier revolutions, but to abolish exploitation altogether; second, that in view of the absence in the country of any ready-made rudiments of a socialist economy, it had to create new, socialist forms of economy, "starting from scratch," so to speak. Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR [my emphasis]

For Stalin, the socialist project in the USSR was to hinge on eliminating exploitation and developing socialist economic forms.

Undoubtedly, there are many ways to target these objectives. Every country embarking on the revolutionary path faces a different set of circumstances determined by unique historical, geographical, national, and social features. These circumstances foreclose a “one-size-fits-all” program to secure socialism. Yet, ending capitalist exploitation-- the buying and selling of labor power and the private appropriation of surplus value-- and developing new non-capitalist forms of economic life stand as the common goals of the Communists. 

As Marx and Engels attest in Part III of The Communist Manifesto, there are many kinds of “socialisms.” Those “socialisms” compete with the socialism of the Communists, where the “distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.” (The Communist Manifesto [my emphasis])

It is significant that the grand debates raging over whether The People's Republic of China is socialist or capitalist so rarely invoke the “exploitation of the many by the few.” Reaching for relevance, the Western left-- Marxist and non-Marxist-- rarely couch the struggle for socialism in the language of exploitation, despite its centrality in the classics.

Consequently, the debate over China frequently has one side celebrating the impressive alleviation of extreme poverty in China’s recent history, while the other side decries the vast wealth and income inequality produced over the last decades. Both claims are true, seemingly leading to contradictory conclusions. 

A recent Jacobin article takes a different tact, provocatively arguing that “the greatest stretch of growth and poverty alleviation in human history [achieved by China]” was “made possible by the brutal exploitation of millions of workers.” Daniel Cheng’s article is a review of a book by Xiao Hai allegedly recounting his experience working in five different Chinese enterprises. The book's unabashedly anecdotal character-- vividly brutal, yet only one man’s experience-- may carry little weight in the larger picture. 

But even the most fervent friend of “Socialist China” will not deny that millions of rural Chinese migrated to the cities and special economic zones to work under similar harsh, capitalist conditions of exploitation. 

Certainly, the accumulation of the vast sums of capital by an emergent Chinese capitalist class (as well as by welcomed foreign capitalists) contributed greatly to the rapid growth of the Chinese economy. 

Undoubtedly, a “rich” China might better afford to provide a humane economic floor to a more and more stratified Chinese society. And surely, under the leadership of a seasoned Communist Party, the provision of such a guaranteed standard of living would be more likely than under a regime dominated by hidebound monopoly capitalists.

But in today’s China, the exploitation of the many by the few remains-- after nearly fifty years-- a central driving force in the country’s economic advance. Cheng’s article reminds us of that fact.

Into this conversation steps Carlos Martinez, a leading leftist supporter of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” the direction Chinese Communists embraced after 1978. His response to Cheng argues that “[e]xploitation must be contextualized.” Rather than addressing the fact that Chinese socialism encourages the exploitation of workers under capitalist conditions of labor, Martinez suggests that the ends justify the means; suffering capitalist exploitation will result ultimately in gains for the Chinese people. This may seem to some to be an uncomfortable counterpart to the Western capitalist promise that growth will “trickle down” to the least advantaged or that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” After all, life expectancy under capitalism in the UK has more than doubled since 1800 and average male height has increased by four inches. Caloric intake, access to ever-advancing medical care, improved sanitation, public goods, etc. all benefitted the people, while the UK working class continued to be profoundly exploited, generating a greater concentration of capital into the hands of monopoly corporations and the obscenely rich. The capitalist development of productive forces generally enables an increase in the relative costs of successfully reproducing labor power extracted from a restive, organized, and resistant working class.

Enduring exploitation has never been simply a matter of the classic Reagan-era rubric of “are you better off now than you were before?”. The recognition of a new meaning to exploitation-- labor exploitation-- traces its origins to early European industrialization and its adoption of capitalist social relations. Even before Marx and Engels, observers were cognizant of the injustices of capitalist exploitation, of using humans as instruments of capital accumulation, of compensating workers according to their sustainable cost of reproduction, of forcing them into the universe of commodities.

Conditions of labor were brutal and difficult in early Soviet industrialization as well. Life was hard. But the conditions were not exploitative because all of the wealth produced by working people promised a better future for everyone. Some of the accumulated wealth may have been squandered, misdirected, even stolen, but it was not systematically and methodically directed to the few and denied to the many. Sacrifice was voluntary because workers believed that it was destined to help the many. Martinez cynically seems to dismiss this experience as “an imagined socialist utopia.”

One easily forgets some of China’s early successes while following a model more congruent with the experiences in the Soviet Union and the Peoples’ Democracies. For example: 

The success of early land reform meant that at the founding of the PRC in 1949, China could credibly claim that for the first time since the late Qing period that it had succeeded in feeding one fifth of the world's population with only 7% of the world's cultivable land… By 1953, China had rapidly recovered its economy…  Its industrial outputs grew by 31% in 1955 and a further 10% in 1956… The collectivization process began slowly but accelerated in 1955 and 1956. In 1957 about 93.5 percent of all farm households had joined advanced producers' cooperatives. Although the agriculture sector only received 6.2% of the budget during the first five-year plan, agricultural gross outputs increased by 24.7%. The industrial working class grew from 6 million to 10 million.  Industrial work places organized as danwei (work units) provided subsidized housing, permanent jobs, education, and medical care.  In the early 1950s, China established a social security system covering workers at SOEs [state-owned enterprises], collectively owned enterprises, government administrative units (such as Ministries) and operative units (such as public universities and state-owned hospitals) ... Throughout the 1950s, a major challenge for the large-scale economic modernization was the relative lack of managerial talent.  Promotion of ordinary workers to management roles was intended to address this challenge while also serving the larger political goal of placing the proletariat in control. 

Thus, by including some ideas inspired from earlier Communist experiences and with help from the socialist community, People’s China achieved remarkable success in its first decade.

Unfortunately, this path was interrupted by The Great Leap Forward, an excessively idealist departure in the direction of what Martinez might more appropriately view as “an imagined socialist utopia.” Despite the disaster of the GLF (combined with a brutal famine), growth was restored in its wake, only to be disrupted again by the equally chaotic Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and beyond. 

The Communist Party’s ultra-leftist, voluntarist excesses of the time derailed the economic successes fostered by rational, reality-based projects. The notion that a collective will could overcome all material limitations-- a notion alien to Marxism-- led the Party to many policy dead ends, while exhausting the enthusiasm for socialism among many. 

Accompanying these twists and turns was a break with the Soviet Union, a break resulting in closer cooperation with US imperialism, friction and actual aggression against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and a shameful alliance with South African apartheid in the anti-colonial wars against Portugal’s African colonies. 

The Chinese Cold War anti-Soviet posture and the metaphysical romance of creating socialism by sheer collective will appealed to far too many in the New Left and with other anti-Communist “leftists.”

With the death of Mao, the Party leadership made an extremely sharp turn away from ultra-leftist adventurism, embracing the Deng capitalist-friendly reforms in 1978. Pragmatism replaced wild idealism.

When Martinez insists on “contextualizing” exploitation in the People’s Republic, he should be as enthusiastic in contextualizing the turn toward allowing capitalism in through the front door. It has its historical roots in the rejection of the mechanical, shock-troop socialism of the Mao era that delayed a planned, efficient march to a society without exploitation. Despite the chaos of the era, the PRC enjoyed an average growth rate of 6.2% from 1952 until 1978, according to Lin Chun in The Transformation of Chinese Socialism, an accomplishment achieved without relying on capitalist relations of production.

Martinez seizes upon Cheng’s comparison of emergent capitalism in nineteenth-century Manchester and the more recent emergent Chinese capitalism in Shenzhen. Indeed, it is an imperfect comparison in many ways. Cheng would have been better served by comparing the number of billionaires in Shenzhen (132) to the number of billionaires in New York City (146). There were no billionaires in Shenzhen in 1978. Billionaires in both places are the direct or indirect product of capitalist exploitation. From a Marxist perspective, what is the social utility of a billionaire? How does the existence of billionaires advance the cause of socialism in China or anywhere else?

Rather than contextualizing exploitation, Martinez succeeds in relativizing and-- consequently-- rationalizing the exploitation of the many by the few. He urges a comparison between today’s China and low-wage countries in the Global South. Indeed, the same changes in the mobility of capital, lowering of export and transportation costs, and trade liberalization that allowed China to offer up millions of low-wage workers to manufacturing is now shifting manufacturing to even lower-wage countries. Ironically, many Chinese companies are now taking advantage of these lower costs and shifting production to these new “Chinas.” In a race to the bottom, workers will always lose, as they have even outside of the global economy. Few on the left would celebrate the "prosperity" of the US South, when jobs migrated from the unionized North to non-union cheaper labor areas.

What Martinez fails to understand or chooses to ignore is that capitalism has a unique, focused logic that accumulates vast sums of capital into the hands of the few. Marx’s proclamation in Capital that accumulation is “Moses and the Prophets” is made to vividly, emphatically acknowledge that accumulation is a never-ending process. The existence of masses of capital in private hands commands that the owners of capital invest, reinvest, and reinvest again to grow their capital. China’s billionaires cannot escape that logic.

From 1978 on, the imperative of capital accumulation was expressed through investments in manufacturing and the turning of China into an enormous commodity-exporting engine. As capital has accumulated, China has become-- following the logic of capital-- more and more an exporter of capital to capital-poor countries, accumulating assets, financing projects, and expanding demand for its products. 

Whether or not China’s Belt and Road Initiative was intentionally meant for this purpose, it well serves as a vehicle for the exportation of the accumulated capital of China’s billionaires. 

As capitalist apologists have faithfully maintained since the dawn of the era of imperialism, global trade, the “reasonable” export of capital, and “a rules-based international order” are supposedly the road to mutual prosperity. Today, the Chinese government is the leading exponent of this “Moses and the Prophets” doctrine, while the rest of the capitalist world is increasingly engaging in protectionism, tariffs, and sanctions to cling to a tenuous hold on its place in a global economy more and more dominated by China and other Global South success stories.

Is this class struggle in today’s world or something else entirely? Is the clash for market share, stock market success, and capital accumulation a twenty-first-century class battle or a revisit of twentieth-century great-power rivalry for markets and spheres of interest? It is not enough to answer these questions by pointing to the glitzy cities, the incredible fast trains, and stunning technology of China, without discussing the status of the 400,000,000 workers and their relationship to Chinese private capital. 

Keen observers have noted China’s unexpected behavior in recent international conflicts, behavior more in step with a capitalist country, a country putting economic interests ahead of political principle. China has maintained strong economic ties with Israel during the ongoing genocide in Gaza, speaking with a loud oppositional voice at international forums, but actively doing next to nothing to stop Israel or break the blockade of Gaza. Similarly, China’s reaction to an unprovoked attack on Iran-- a BRICS partner-- by the US and Israel is best described as fence-sitting (apart from finding ways to continue economic activity with all parties). For arguably the most powerful potential counterforce to US imperialism to step aside from serious resistance to a rabid US administration is not what many of us would expect from a socialist country. 

With Cuba facing an extortionate, existential crisis imposed by the empowered North American gusanos, China’s response has been less than inspired.

Establishing a useful balance sheet on China’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics” may prove to be a daunting, even misguided challenge for Western leftists, but blindness to legitimate questions like those raised by Daniel Cheng and others serves neither the cause of the Chinese working class nor exploited workers in other countries.

After nearly fifty years of riding the capitalist tiger, China’s chosen road to socialism remains foggy and fraught with danger. Nonetheless, it is China’s road. 

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

 

Thinking About Capitalism

Sven Beckert is a Harvard economic historian noted for his masterful study of the rise and dominance (and fall) of cotton manufactory in the global economy: The Empire of Cotton, A Global History (2014). Beckert situates cotton’s emergence as a leading commodity in the world economy within the framework of capitalism’s evolution over several centuries.

Building on the subtext of capitalism’s “shape-shifting” that accompanied cotton’s rise and fall, Beckert has recently published an ambitious history of capitalism: Capitalism, A Global History (2025). In 1087 pages and 255 pages of extensive, supplemental notes, Beckert offers a well-researched, detailed account of capitalism’s trajectory-- from the early efforts of traders-for-profit to today’s global reach of giant, multinational corporations, from modest merchant purses of accumulated capital to unimaginable troves of capital concentrated in only a few privileged hands.

Beckert’s work is impressive, placing capitalism’s rise in a global context, finding seeds of its emergence throughout the world, and denying the chauvinist view that capitalism could only emerge in a European setting. At the same time, he does not deny that capitalism did reach its critical mass when certain vital conditions were met in Europe.

He goes to great lengths to show how “[t]hroughout history, it has been difficult to persuade people to work willingly for the benefit of others.” To drive home this seriously understated point-- a point central to understanding how capitalism differs from other modes of production-- Beckert chronicles in great detail the role of coercion in establishing capitalism. That “persuasion” began with chattel slavery and indentured labor. Even with the decline and abolition of slavery, indentures - coerced through contracts-- were transported to work under slave-like conditions. Beckert claims that in South Asia “[t]he number of people transported this way was greater than the number bought and sold by the Atlantic slave trade…”

This fact only underscores the often-overlooked long march from physically coerced labor to the circumstantially coerced “free labor” of today.

There is much that is insightful and suggestive in Beckert’s history, but nothing that deeply challenges Marx and Engels’ theory of capitalism’s birth and rise. Despite Beckert’s avowed distance from Marxism, Capitalism, A Global History does not contradict historical materialism. Beckert does accuse Marx of dismissing merchant capitalism, but that criticism dissolves when we understand that Marx and Beckert are engaged in two different projects. The object of Marx’s study is a mode of production (and circulation) centered on the commodity and on labor exploitation. Beckert, on the other hand, is constructing a chronological narrative beginning with the earliest sprouts of features that were later to be commonplace with mature capitalism, features that were found in proto-capitalism without capitalists, in primitive profit taking, in the earliest connection between buyer and seller, etc.

Perhaps Michael Roberts said it best: “But the book’s de-merit is its lack of any systematic understanding of capitalism. Indeed, it is like the work of Adam Tooze – namely, it is ‘more the how, than the why’.” [emphasis added]. Marx is concerned with the ‘why’ of capitalism; Beckert is searching for the ‘how’ of its journey.

Others besides Roberts have offered useful reviews of Beckert’s book. I would recommend Nelson Lichtenstein’s straight-forward, appreciative, and fairly comprehensive presentation of the book’s content in Jacobin.

But that is not my purpose here. Instead, I would like to examine whether Beckert’s findings have any bearing on current left perspectives and controversies.

Beckert finds an essential and ever-growing role for the state in capitalism’s trajectory: "...capital needed state support to control its masses of workers and access materials and markets. Capital thus became newly attached to the nation-state and the nation-state to capital. And because states competed with one another, this process was contagious.”

But the state is not an obsolete or a parasitic attachment to capital as some on the left argued in the wake of the rise of so-called globalization and still others have argued from the right with the intent of dramatically reducing its role. Beckert states early in his Introduction:

Capitalism, this book argues, is an extraordinarily statist form of economic life. Though the state changed over time; developed different institutional forms; grew in scale, scope, and territorial extent; and occupied more or less powerful positions within an international system of states, it always remained an essential ingredient in the capitalist revolution.

It is this bond between the state and capitalism that birthed an even more intimate relationship between the monopoly stage of capitalism and the modern state-- a stage where cartels and monopolies dominate the state and the state works primarily for the benefit of the monopolies and the cartels. This stage-- often usefully called state-monopoly capitalism-- reigned throughout the twentieth century and continues today; the grip on the state by capital and capital's dependence on the state is even tighter now. The state is, thus, an enabler and not a hindrance to the continuing maintenance of capitalism.

Capital may be transnational, but it still needs and controls the state.

*****

Unlike most of his academic counterparts, Beckert fully understands the powerful historical role of the Soviet Union in bending and shaping the trajectory of twentieth century capitalism:

...it could be argued that the greatest beneficiaries of global communism were not Russian but Western European and American workers. Labor politics might have seemed local, but they played out on a global stage, just like capitalism more broadly. Capital was politically weakened by communism’s removal of people and territories from the capitalist world, and by the bargain it made with an increasingly powerful state and mobilized workers…[E]ven some conservative Western policymakers supported social democratic policies and unions-- if only to weaken their communist competitors… It was Eisenhower who supported Reuther’s Treaty of Detroit, and who oversaw the massive public works program that built the nation’s Interstate Highway System. This coalition was the mold that formed the unprecedented political economy of the golden age [1945-1973, an era when workers’ wages tended to march in lockstep with productivity gains].

Too often, Cold War bias tends to blind commentators from understanding that the Communist alternative drove ruling classes to accept a tempered capitalism-with-a-more-human-face in the post-war period. Communism “...domesticated capitalism at the exact moment that the system faced its greatest challenges.”

The demise of the Soviet Union consequently undomesticated capitalism, unleashing its raw, brutal character under the banner of “shock therapy.” The so-called end of history-- the disappearance of the USSR and the PRC’s embrace of capitalist reforms-- opened the door wide to attacks on the gains made by working people. Austerity became the watchword for official policy. Beckert acknowledges:

The political space for the new policies emerged in part because two of the core pillars of the golden age wobbled: Labor weakened, and the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence disintegrated. These changes which came in the 1990s, undermined the need for capital owners and the state to accommodate labor, as they had been forced to do during the golden age….

The single most important postcapitalist project-- the North Star of global politics, either as friend or foe, for many decades-- suddenly unraveled with astounding celerity in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Overnight, the political calculus in the capitalist world changed. Even more consequentially, capitalism gained new breathing room by expanding into vast new areas of the globe-- into the homes, workplaces, and public spaces of billions of Russians, Chinese, and Eastern Europeans.

It is impossible to understand the raw, brutal edge of today’s global politics without grasping the impact of the demise of the Soviet Union.

*****

For those investing in a future shaped by the BRICS alternative, Beckert reminds us of the earlier promise advanced by OPEC, the coalition of oil producers: “The ‘oil revolution’ in the Global South for its promise to redistribute some of the world’s wealth, was a turning point, the first time that a group of countries from the Global South used their control over an essential raw material to shift the global economy’s basic structure… By building new solidarities, the resource rich countries of the Global South attained a more powerful voice not just in their own affairs but also in the affairs of the world economy at large.”

Spurred by the US and European support for Israel in the Yom Kippur war of 1973, Middle Eastern states acted to reduce oil shipments to Israel’s allies. This united act of solidarity with those fighting for the cause of Palestine demonstrated the potential of joint action for empowerment. But the fate of Palestine was advanced no further. And, as Beckert shows, the “solidarity” succeeded in producing the further integration of the oil-producing states into the global capitalist system, into securing for themselves a greater share of the oil booty for those states, but achieving little advancement-- even regression-- for the Global South as a whole. Today, the Middle Eastern oil producing countries, with the exception of Iran, stand on the sidelines or support Israel in the genocidal destruction of Gaza. The fractures in an expanded OPEC existing today-- the political impotence, the failure to act in concert, or to honor quotas-- demonstrate the limits of concerted action by countries deeply embedded in a competitive global market economy and guided by overriding self-interest.

It’s no surprise that an alignment made up of countries with a strong commitment to capitalism and with even more diverse interests, like today’s BRICS, is proving to have even less collective impact on global inequalities and political conflicts.

*****

Sven Beckert’s Global South of the twenty-first century is unrecognizable from the Global South depicted by far too many leftists in the Global North.

Among the most extraordinary changes was the formation of new modes of capital: Local capital owners and international investors forged new agglomerations of capital in what came to be called the Global South. Building upon the novel nodes of state power that had emerged in the wake of decolonialization, these superclusters of capital powered the world’s most significant industrialization ever. In the process, the world’s working class expanded at lightning speed… [my emphasis]

At first, the so-called Four Tigers-- Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore-- were in the vanguard, but other countries swiftly industrialized as well, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Mexico, and Brazil. No part of the world, however, industrialized as quickly and as radically as China. The value of the world’s manufacturing output increased almost five times in the years between 1973 and 2008, most of it coming from the Global South, with China contributing a stunning 31.5 percent by 2008. That year, China manufacturing added more value than the whole world had produced in 1973, a time when scholars in the North Atlantic area were convinced that Europe’s marked manufacturing prowess gave it an enduring global advantage. In retrospect, the theories they developed then to explain such a divergence seem like dated artifacts, better relegated to the status of a window on Western self-fashioning than to social science analysis.

Unfortunately, much of the North Atlantic left is under a similar spell, viewing the Global South as though they were still backward colonies. Having given up on workers in the Global North (they constitute an “aristocracy of labor”!), left intellectuals cling to an outdated, stereotypical picture of a river of wealth only flowing North to wealthy countries (and their workers!), while draining the South of its wealth (and that of its workers). As Beckert shows, that is not an accurate picture of the Global South or the North. Largely neglected in left conversations are the many multinationals based in the Global South like The Gerdau Group (Brazil), Ambev (Brazil), ARAMCO (Saudi Arabia), Tata (India), Dr. Reddy’s laboratories (India), to name a few.

To be sure, the mechanisms of capitalist exploitation of the Global South are still often legacies, organizations controlled by capital based in wealthier countries. Indeed, many monopolies, or near monopolies are the product of more than a century of concentration, beginning in the Global North. But to miss the story that Beckert tells is to underestimate the adaptability of capitalism and to misunderstand its logic.

Beckert offers the following telling note on capitalism’s mutation: “The richest 1 percent in India now control more of India’s income than the richest 1 percent (Indian and British) had under British colonial rule, 22.6.”

Thus, while corporations located in the Global North continue to exploit resources and workers of the Global South, many rapidly growing, industrialized countries of the Global South have become class societies mimicking those of the Global North. With often-unprecedented growth, their economies have distributed that wealth according to the logic of capitalism, leaving their working people far behind.

Despite the remarkable economic growth in Asia, especially the PRC and India, “almost half of the world’s people-- 46.4 percent, or a total of 3.6 billion-- live on $6.85 or less a day.”

Certainly, the legacy of colonialism plays a significant role in explaining this tragic fact. However, capitalist social relations-- class inequalities-- explain why that fact remains stubbornly with us today in the face of the enormous economic growth enjoyed by the Global South. The rapacious US and European corporations continue to exploit the Global South at every opportunity. But understand that the class societies constructed on the decades of explosive growth in the Global South owe as much or more to exploitation of workers by their own domestic capitalists. In the end, it is not some amorphous, class-neutral identity called the “Global North” that drains all the wealth and impoverishes working people in the Global South, but the capitalist system in general. Wherever it takes root-- North or South, East or West-- it reproduces class societies, inequalities, and injustices.

A final word from Sven Beckert:

The reemergence of Asia was a rebuke not just to generations of racist analysis that had posited a transhistorical superiority of Western civilization but also to some neo-Marxist theorizing of the 1960s and 1970s, which had seen the world economy as structured in ways that would not allow for the emergence of prosperity outside the Western industrial heartlands. As it turned out, the opposite was true….

Of course, it is vital that the EuroAmerican left defy their own ruling classes to stand against the aggressive action directed at the former colonies, the so-called Global South. It is the highest form of internationalism to defend the right of nations and states to self-determination in the face of domination and aggression by other countries, even if they are ruled by tyrants, theocracies, or a cabal of capitalists, as is true in the Global South.

It is another thing entirely to overlook or underplay the role of capitalism in creating the misery and injustice visited upon the working people of the Global South. To ascribe that misery and injustice to a vague geographical identity like the Global North is to deflect attention from the mechanism that systematically and historically extracted the product of labor in both the Global North and South. Labor exploitation knows no geographical limits, nor does it grant favoritism to its subjects. It extracts all it can from everyone within its scope.

Capitalism is the enemy of the Global South. Socialism is the answer to global capitalism.

Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com

Mark Carney’s “Eulogy” to a Fractured International Order

Mark Carney-- Canada’s premier-- shocked many with his recent speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos. He spoke bluntly about illusions and realities that were features of the post-World War II international order.

He reminded listeners that until recently, it was accepted among global elites that economic life was conducted under a set of rules, governed by institutions, and protected by military alliances that guaranteed free markets, fair exchange, and integration. Granted, it was constructed and maintained by the US. But it was thought that this constituted a post-war consensus that, despite its hierarchical structure and occasional bullying of the weaker by the stronger, created a formidable framework, offering the best outcomes for all.

Now, Carney tells us that widely-held belief is an illusion. To underscore this point, he treats his audience to a silly Cold War parable about neighborhoods of greengrocers in Peoples’ Czechoslovakia, a clumsy knockoff of the tale of the Emperor without clothes, but crafted to get a chuckle out of the rabidly anti-Communist business people and politicians present.

By pandering to Cold War prejudices, Carney unintentionally reveals the context for the post-war international order. The ruling classes of countries assented to the order because they saw it as a bulwark against Communism. They allowed the US to construct the order under its own terms because the US promised to anchor the fight against the Soviet Union and its allies. Institutions, alliances, military bases, and ideological unity constituted a formidable structure to meet a new post-war balance of forces more favorable to socialism and the many social, political, and economic alternatives offered by the socialist bloc. Economic liberalism was showcased as the moral and rational response to Communism. Fear of Communism was the glue that cemented US rulers and their allies to this new order.

It is important to emphasize that the referenced international order was constructed by ruling groups and not by the people. And it was elite interests behind the construction. Too often commentators blur the distinction by loosely attributing policies or actions to countries, as though state policies or actions represent the will of a uniform, homogeneous population. Whatever else the highly-regarded post-war international order was, it was not a popular, democratic, equality-based system, but a structure to grease the wheels of capitalist commerce.

Before conceding too much to Carney’s challenge to this order, it must be remembered that it was challenged earlier with the demise of the bête noire-- the Soviet Union-- in 1991. As a result of losing the arch enemy, the US and its closest allies responded in the following ways:

1. “naturalizing” the international order, painting it as the natural order of things. Margaret Thatcher’s “There is no Alternative” insists that free markets, profit-seeking, and unrestrained competition constitute the most rational way to organize economic activity. Another Pied Piper of the post-war order is the neo-Hegelian, Francis Fukuyama, who maintained that the post-Soviet world was the result of the synthesis of all that came before it-- marking the “end of history.”

2. Finding another "ugly beast" to replace Communism. The war on drugs, the war on terrorism (and the newly minted war on narcoterrorism), the war on Islamic fundamentalism, and the war on immigrants and criminal gangs became replacements for the war on Communism.

Thanks to these responses to the demise of the long Cold War, a fragile world order was maintained with the US remaining its police officer and chief beneficiary.

But the real challenge to the post-war global order came with the twenty-first-century economic crises, especially the deep downturn of 2007-2009. Like the great powers in the Great Depression, the major players sought both individual solutions and solutions that would push the problems onto their neighbors and “allies.” In the wake of the so-called Great Recession, I wrote of “centrifugal forces” breaking apart existing alliances, coalitions, agreements, and institutions. Crisis-induced economic stress threatened to fracture formations like the EU, changed the relationship between US capital and Peoples’ China, fostered an international retreat toward economic nationalism, and intensified rivalries.

That process continues to shape our world today. The European war-- between Russia, Ukraine, and its puppeteers-- reflects that process. The radical rearrangement of the Middle East and Central and South America reflect that process. The 2007-2009 disruption of the post-war economic order changed China from a tasty morsel for Western capital into a powerful rival, thanks to China’s successful navigation of the severe global turbulence. Today’s rise of nationalist, protectionist political movements and parties is certainly related to the failure of the existing world order to survive the twenty-first-century crises intact.

Predictably new economic, political, and military alliances and coalitions are springing up in response to the shattering of the old order. Ruling classes are seeking to promote their national interests at an especially volatile, uncertain moment by realigning, by seeking more favorable terms through courting opposing great powers, or by establishing and dominating spheres of interest.

That is the message that Mark Carney sought to convey with his address at Davos:

Today I will talk about a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality, where geopolitics, where the large, main power, geopolitics, is submitted to no limits, no constraints…

It seems that every day we're reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry, that the rules-based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.

While these remarks shocked many for their candor and implied a break with his government’s long-standing intimate relationship to the US ruling class, they simply reflected capital in Canada’s search for a more advantageous affair with a more appreciative suitor.

Similarly, some EU states are opting for warmer relations with Russia, while others are looking East, threatening to exit their abusive marriage with the US. The fragility of these new affairs, their basis in the immediate interests of ruling classes and in the capturing of markets and investments should not escape Communists and progressives. Russia’s rulers can pull Assad’s chestnuts out of the fire and pivot swiftly and throw those same chestnuts under the bus, while maintaining solid relations with both Israel and Iran. That illustrates the opportunism of capitalists seeking to restore order out of disorder.

Attempts to establish a new order to be centered around new arrangements, new alliances, new coalitions, and new rules should not be taken for a repudiation of the imperialist system, unless those attempts also repudiate capitalism. Re-centering the global capitalist order around a rival power or rival powers in no way guarantees a more just or equitable world for working people.

This an especially unpleasant conclusion for those who have invested deeply in the BRICS and BRICS+ formation-- an unlikely, heterogeneous, ideologically diverse, and largely capitalist grouping of states loosely organized around various grievances against the existing order. They offer no trade or investment strategies directed specifically at working people, not to mention any rejection of the exploitative imperialist system.

While Carney’s exposure of the “rupture” in the international order may have led some to believe that it signaled a positive reform of global economic relations, it did not sway the Central Executive Committee of the Communist Party of Canada. In a response to Carney’s address, they stated:

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at the World Economic Forum at Davos has been noted for its blunt talk about a “rupture” with the “old order” of U.S. hegemony. This has been seen as a breath of fresh air for some in Canada who are rightly concerned with escalating threats to our sovereignty and the U.S.’s descent into war and reaction. However, Carney’s newly articulated vision does not mark a fundamental shift towards policies that will make lives better for working people, nor does it signal a Canadian foreign policy of peace and respect for the sovereignty of all countries.

Carney’s speech confirms the sharpening contradictions within the global capitalist system and the decline of U.S. imperialist hegemony. He identifies a “rupture” in the post-WWII order, correctly noting that U.S. imperialism is moving away from leadership through dominating international institutions and toward unilateral coercion, even directed against its own allies. But we must not forget who he was addressing: the main bankers and representatives of global finance capital. His message is a strategic one for their benefit.

Indeed, the old order-- a system of predatory monopoly capitalism, maintained by finance capital-- may undergo restructuring and realignment, but it remains a system of predatory monopoly capitalism maintained by finance capitalism. A facelift should not be taken for a revolution.




Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com

A Tale of Colliding World Views

In December, documents were released asserting two radically different political perspectives. 

They could not be more different.

On December 4, under the President of the United States’ Seal, the White House published the administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy, expressing the government's current evaluation of the global challenges facing it. 

The next day, December 5, the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) publicly announced its forthcoming 22nd Congress, followed by the publication of its Theses of the Central Committee-- the product of long preparatory discussions by the KKE’s members-- constituting an assessment of the state of the world and the Party’s approach to it. 

A comparison of the two documents presents a violent clash of class outlooks.

The US National Security Strategy

The US ruling class-- in its current incarnation-- intends to maintain or re-establish US economic domination and grease the wheels for US corporations to succeed internationally. In this regard, the Trump administration is no different than earlier administrations, except-- perhaps-- being more transparent in this goal.

More specifically, extracting policy from the section on the Western Hemisphere, the strategy includes:

1. Militarizing the seas and the oceans. Previous administrations portrayed military force as an instrument of guaranteeing free “access” to trade. This administration, under the “America First” ideology explicitly uses military force to promote US economic success, foregoing the charade of promoting free trade for all.

2. Accessing strategic resources. In the document’s laundered language, the goal is “to identify strategic points and resources… with a view to their protection and joint development with regional partners.” More candidly, US policy makers in this administration project power to privilege US corporations in resource-rich countries like Bolivia or the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

3. Making it hard for other countries to compete. “The terms of our alliances, and the terms upon which we provide any kind of aid, must be contingent on winding down adversarial outside influence—from control of military installations, ports, and key infrastructure to the purchase of strategic assets broadly defined.” The strategy endorsed by the document uses economic leverage to deny success to others.

4. Helping US corporations to dominate. “[W]e will reform our own system to expedite approvals and licensing—again, to make ourselves the partner of first choice. The choice all countries should face is whether they want to live in an American-led world of sovereign countries and free economies or in a parallel one in which they are influenced by [other] countries…” Specifically and adamantly, “[e]very U.S. Government official that interacts with… countries should understand that part of their job is to help American companies compete and succeed.”

5. Accepting that “[t]he United States must also resist and reverse measures such as targeted taxation, unfair regulation, and expropriation that disadvantage U.S. businesses.” Of course, this policy only reiterates what every US administration for more than a hundred years has sought since the intervention in Cuba and the Philippines: a free hand for US economic exploitation.

While these goals are extracted from Trump’s new Monroe Doctrine for the Western Hemisphere, they are barely disguised as policy for the rest of the world. However, they represent considerable continuity with the foreign policy of earlier administrations, though shorn of any pretense to global fairness.

Commentators have been surprised with the Trump administration’s focus on the Western Hemisphere over the often-bitter hostility towards the People’s Republic of China. Surely, that simply acknowledges the formidable economic and military power of the PRC. US policy makers of Trump’s world have been forced to recognize that-- no matter how much they would like otherwise-- the US is in no position to bully the PRC. Therefore, they accept that they can only adjust or modify their economic relationship. Competing with the PRC-- the US’s most formidable rival-- consists, instead, in bullying those who do business with their rival.

The administration is explicit on how to “compete” for the allegiance of their Chinese rivals’ economic collaborators: “China’s state-led and state-backed companies excel in building physical and digital infrastructure, and China has recycled perhaps $1.3 trillion of its trade surpluses into loans to its trading partners. America and its allies have not yet formulated, much less executed, a joint plan for the so-called ‘Global South,’ but together possess tremendous resources. Europe, Japan, South Korea, and others hold net foreign assets of $7 trillion. International financial institutions, including the multilateral development banks, possess combined assets of $1.5 trillion. While mission creep has undermined some of these institutions’ effectiveness, this administration is dedicated to using its leadership position to implement reforms that ensure they serve American interests.” [my emphasis] Thus, the document reveals the carrot to the US stick.

Almost in passing, by merely observing the European Union’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities, the Trump administration demonstrates that it considers the EU to be another rival, albeit a rival retaining some important historical ties-- neither a protectorate, nor currently a competitor of great concern.

The US National Security Strategy paper offers the latest insight into the thinking now directing the still-greatest power in the imperialist system. It is a blue print for the security of US business interests and not of the security and well-being of the people.

The KKE Theses of the Central Committee 

How does the Greek Communist Party view the current state of the world?

The KKE is one of the few Marxist organizations relatively untarnished by the collapse of the Soviet Union. It conceded little to the mass retreat from Leninist principles. It refused to flirt with the widespread ideological marriage of markets and socialism. It held fast to the centrality of class in the analysis of the contemporary world. Where much of today’s left rails against an ever-changing, seemingly unrelated basket of grievances, the KKE defends the classical Marxist understanding that the central, determinative contradiction remains the contradiction between capital and labor, nationally and internationally.

Certainly, that should make Greek Communist thinking of interest to all those who question the strategic aims of the leaders of the most powerful state in the capitalist system.

KKE sees a class-divided world moving toward relative and absolute impoverishment of working people, long-term unemployment, and an unfavorable balance of power between capital and labor. Technological innovation is skewed dramatically in support of the interests of capital. Pursuit of profit continues to dangerously degrade the environment. 

As a result of the weakness of labor in confronting capital, the capitalist system is suffering from an overaccumulation of capital. Hyper-exploitation has produced a mass of capital, seeking-- with greater and greater difficulty-- to find (safe) profitable investment opportunities (one might well view the orgy of investment in AI as an attempt to create such an opportunity). 

KKE understands the recessionary pressures experienced in Europe, Japan, and Asia as the effects of this crisis of the return on investment. Efforts to manage this crisis-- Keynesian or otherwise-- have failed. Specifically, the liberal project of green technology (e.g., the Green New Deal) and the Central Bank project (e.g., interest-rate manipulation, qualitative easing) were unsuccessful in restoring a solid foundation for the rate of profit.

Further, the capitalist powers have invested in the war economy, both in response to inter-imperialist contradictions and to absorb capital.

Militarism serves to destroy and devalue capital through the never-ending conflicts arising from imperialist rivalries. They caution that this military buildup increases sharply the risk of even larger wars, possibly world wars.

The KKE stresses competition between existing nations-- great powers, alliances, and emerging blocs--- fueling the existing wars, flashpoints, and severe clashes endangering our world. They contend that:

The USA, which still holds the leading position, is trying to halt the shift in the balance of power in China’s favour. International financial institutions have already downgraded the US credit rating. This trend is reflected in the decline of the US share and the significant increase of China’s share in Gross World Product (global GDP) between 2000 and 2025, in the significant difference in growth rates between the USA and China, the large US trade deficit in bilateral trade with China and the EU, and the sharp rise in US public debt. 

Within the global imperialist system, both the PRC and Russia present challenges to US hegemony, and US nationalist, protectionist policies are also “... sharpening contradictions within the Euro-Atlantic camp and causing a deterioration in relations between the USA and the EU, Canada and Australia. They are exacerbating intra-bourgeois contradictions within the USA, which are also reflected in developments within the bourgeois political system. They are increasing the likelihood of the decline of the dollar as an international currency. They have a negative impact on international trade and reinforce the downward trend in the international capitalist economy.”

Of the major powers, the KKE sees the European Union as losing ground “relative to the USA and China”, which is feeding the existing turn to the right in many Eurozone countries.

The war in Ukraine is the result of today’s Great Power rivalries-- it is an imperialist war. The KKE asserts:

In the three-and-a-half years of this war, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians have lost their lives, mainly young people of the working class and the poor popular strata. Approximately twenty-five million people have fled their homes. Homes and public infrastructure have been destroyed on a massive scale. Amidst the ruins, capitalist states and monopolies are competing for the “reconstruction” of Ukraine, viewing it as an “investment opportunity.” This will cost hundreds of billions of euros, a burden that the people will be made to bear… The outbreak of contradictions and realignments within imperialist alliances as imperialist conflict and competition unfold is neither paradoxical nor unprecedented, but a typical feature of imperialist wars. It can lead to former adversaries becoming allies, and former allies becoming adversaries.

Similarly, the KKE views the war in the Middle East as an imperialist war: 

The Israeli war machine supported by the USA and the EU, launched a massive operation in the Gaza Strip, using the Hamas attack as a pretext. This operation resulted in the deaths and injuries of tens of thousands of innocent people, including unarmed civilians, young children, women and elderly people….The imperialist nature of the war in the Middle East and the bourgeois character of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority do not invalidate the just struggle of the Palestinian people and other peoples in the region, who resist and fight against foreign occupation and other imperialist plans. Through this struggle, they can create the conditions necessary to free themselves once and for all from the system of exploitation and war.

For those who may be interested, the current assessment bears remarkable consistency and continuity with the Theses for the 20th Congress developed nearly a decade ago.

Serious-minded people seeking an understanding of the perilous, contentious, and confusing world in which we are living should welcome the revealing contrast between the two perspectives outlined here. One outlook only recognizes the interests of a minority of advantage-seeking, privileged individuals and soulless corporations, while the other recognizes the common fate and pressing needs of the majority of the world’s people who are found within a well-defined social class.

One doesn’t have to agree with all of the conclusions shared by the Greek Communists, but one must acknowledge that they are drawn from an effort to create a world far distant from the one arrogantly defended in the 2025 National Security Strategy of the United States of America. Moreover, the KKE unabashedly supports a class line-- on the working peoples’ side of the barricades. It argues that exploitation is the crucial social relation that decides whether employment, equality, living standards, health care, education, security, or peace are won or lost. Moreover, KKE unequivocally sides with the exploited.

Finding our way free from the Trumpian world and those conditions that produced it will require a clear and deep analysis. The KKE Theses provide a solid foundation of both clarity and depth. 

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

“Settling Accounts” on the Question of Imperialism

Writing in 1908-- six years before the first great inter-imperialist war and eight years before writing his landmark text on imperialism-- Lenin reminded us of the many ideological roadblocks that Marxism had to overcome before consolidating its position in the working-class movement.

First, Marx had to “settle accounts” with the Young Hegelians, then with Proudhonism, Bakuninism, and so on until scientific socialism became the dominant left factor in the workers’ movement in the late 1800s. 

Subsequently, the danger to ideological unity came from left and right-- largely right-- revisions of the revolutionary kernel that Marx and Engels had left us. “And the second half-century of the existence of Marxism began (in the nineties) with the struggle of a trend hostile to Marxism within Marxism itself.”

Today, all of those misguiding tendencies have become unsettled both outside and inside the Marxist movement. Ironically, as interest in Communism has become more acceptable with young people in reaction’s heartland-- the US-- confusion over once-settled matters grows more widely; the legacy of those hard-fought ideological struggles becomes lost to the dim past. 

It is a formidable task to rebuild the Marxist tradition that dominated the anti-capitalist workers’ movement in the twentieth century, but one necessitated by the inequality, the chaos, and the destruction wrought by unbridled capitalism and its champions.

Essential to that project is ideological clarity.

One critical issue facing the left today is the nature and behavior of contemporary capitalism on the international level-- what Lenin characterized as imperialism.

Over the recent period, I have offered several interventions on the question, primarily to shed light on the two most recent and dangerous wars-- the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza. Understanding these wars is impossible without understanding imperialism today and understanding contemporary imperialism is not possible without subjecting that understanding to the practical test of explaining these two brutal wars.

My most recent intervention on this question has been challenged by Rainer Shea via Rainer’s Newsletter posted on Substack and X. His article, The KKE/Trotskyist effort to redefine imperialism, and how it undermines the global workers struggle, is largely a defensive rehash of the position taken by Carlos Garrido and addressed in my article. While it offers little new, it does provide an opportunity to clarify further.

Shea faults my article for failing “to find alleged examples of Russia or China engaging in imperialist actions.” But that is not what I promised to do, since I chose instead to clarify imperialism, to reject multipolarity as anti-imperialism, and to suggest that action in defense of Palestinians was a good litmus test of anti-imperialism.

I have consistently argued that imperialism is a system and capitalist-oriented nation-states participate in that system in various ways, as perpetrators, victims, and many times, both. What fundamentally determines imperialism is the maturation of capitalism into monopoly capitalism, along with the merging of bank capital with industrial capital. Marxists like Eugen Varga in the Soviet Union elaborated on these developments in the 1920s and 1930s. US Marxists like Anna Rochester and Victor Perlo carefully and thoroughly tracked the merging of industrial and bank capital through intermarriage, membership on interlocking boards of directors, stock purchases, mergers, etc. They tracked the various groups in the US organized around affinitive financial institutions, industries, and monopolies. 

The hyperaccumulation of capital generated by both industrial and financial monopoly corporations necessitates the export of capital, as well as risky financial schemes that promise new investment horizons or, almost inevitably, great crashes. 

The agents of this process are predatory monopoly corporations-- both industrial and financial-- and their action inevitably leads to spheres of interest (what Lenin calls “the division of the world among the international trusts”). It is the most powerful nation states that enforce this division of the entire world to the advantage of the favored monopoly corporations through occupation, force, threat, or other schemes.

This, in essence, is Lenin’s theory of imperialism. It is an explanation of how a global capitalist system operates under specific, evolving conditions. It is not a criterion for which nation-state is or is not imperialist or anti-imperialist. Imperialism is capitalism beyond its infancy operating on the international stage and not merely a club of exclusive members. That is why today, as in Lenin’s time, it will not disappear as long as capitalism exists. 

Lenin can shed further light on the flawed “new imperialism” embraced by Shea and Garrido. Writing late in 1916 in Imperialism and the Split in Socialism, Lenin scorns Kautsky’s claim that, with an anticipated weakened England (the overwhelmingly dominant global capitalist power of the time, like the US today), ‘there is nothing to fight about’.

On the contrary, not only have the capitalists something to fight about now, but they cannot help fighting if they want to preserve capitalism, for without a forcible redivision of colonies the new imperialist countries cannot obtain the privileges enjoyed by the older (and weaker) imperialist powers. [Lenin’s emphasis]

Lenin was right and Kautsky was wrong. After World War I, England continued to descend as the dominant power in the imperialist system, to be supplanted by the US within decades. And the US behaved with an even more overbearing global swagger than its predecessor.

Is there any compelling reason-- contra Lenin--- to believe that “In this era, one of our foremost missions is to defeat U.S. dominance in particular, which would thereby cause the imperial system as a whole to unravel” [my emphasis], as Shea contends? Like Kautsky, Shea believes that with the US knocked off the system’s pedestal, there would be nothing to fight about…

Our best efforts to defeat imperialism is not to applaud rivals to US domination, but to fight capitalism at home, the engine of both US domination abroad and the imperialist system. 

Both Garrido and Shea-- in their determination to cast Russia and the PRC as bulwarks against imperialism-- distract from the fight against capitalism. While we all --that is, all peace-loving people-- must stand against US aggression against Russia, the PRC, or any other country; we should not confuse that stance with the struggle against imperialism which is, in its essence, a fight against capitalism.

For those of us who profess Marxism, socialism, or Communism, nothing is gained by detaching imperialism from capitalism; nothing is gained by imagining that there can be a capitalist world without imperialism, if only the US were brought to its knees. 

Exploitation of labor and the appropriation of profit are still the engine of the capitalist mode of production, including in its current stage: imperialism. We are not, as Garrido contends, in a new stage, with imperialism based upon “debt and interest.” The workers in the so-called “Global South” are primarily exploited by their bourgeoisie and/or multi-national corporations (Lenin’s cartels), not by banks issuing credit cards or mortgages or by greedy insurance companies. The national debt and costly interest payments that plague less developed nations are akin to the personal debt of workers insofar as their subjugation will not be resolved by reforming banks or international institutions. The idea that debt, onerous interest payments, or labor exploitation will disappear under any restructuring of the global capitalist order is naïve, at best. Does anyone believe that debt, interest, or exploitation would dissolve if banks were reformed on the national level? If Goldman Sachs were dissolved?

It was a dream of post-World War II social democrats and many “popular-fronters” to construct a global trade architecture that would be “fair” to large and small, powerful and weak. They imagined institutions that would guarantee a fair playing field, while retaining capitalist exchange relations. Of course, those institutions have failed as they did with the earlier post-World War I project, the League of Nations. In both cases, the big and powerful came to dominate the institutions and continued to dominate the small and the weak. Why would anyone-- including Garrido-- expect a different result if the US would vacate its current position of dominance? Does history teach us nothing? 

Garrido has fallen under the sway of bourgeois economists like Michael Hudson, who dream of a debt jubilee under existing national and international conditions, thought to be attainable with the dethroning of the US as imperialism’s hegemon. Such memories of an ancient practice are distractions from today’s most urgent struggles.

It would be unconscionable to leave this question without noting Shea’s gratuitous slander of the Greek Communist Party (KKE). Shea’s identification of KKE with Trotskyism shows that he has little understanding of either. 

While the KKE is certainly more than capable of defending its position on issues that are critical for the left without my help, I must remind tweet-Communists of the long, principled, and illustrious history of Greek Communism, the Party’s role in defeating German, Italian, and Greek fascism, its sacrifices for national liberation and socialism, its ideological steadfastness, and-- most recently-- its determined effort to build Communist unity.

One can be critical of KKE without associating it with Trotskyism, without resorting to an anti-Communist slur. It diminishes the discussion and diminishes a participant with little or no experience or knowledge of the Communist movement.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com