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▲ 14 r/communism

I’m Looking for Advice on Distributing Literature

As I learn more I realize I would like to do more. I am currently busy with working and school making it difficult to form or partake in group activism and activities. I do however have a very large E-library. I would like to make this material available to my community. I was thinking of creating a Mega folder and sharing it via web link. Another issue I’m having is: I’m not sure what I should be including as I don’t want the options to be so plentiful that it overwhelms people with choices. If anyone has experience with this sort of thing or advice on how to organize the library. I have lots of theory Marx, Engles, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Gramsci, Mao, Sankara, etc lots of books on imperialism, economics, you name it I got it.

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u/WEtulsa — 1 day ago
▲ 4 r/communism

Marx and allusions

Maybe this is a dumb question but I’m curious if there’s any source that lists every literary allusion in Marx’s writings or at least in Capital?

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u/Screwdriversandchil — 1 day ago
▲ 39 r/communism+1 crossposts

Feudal Nationalism and the Commercial Bourgeoisie: The Class Roots of Kurdish Communist Bankruptcy

In order to understand the class basis of Kurdish communist movements, it is first necessary to know when Kurdish classes became politically active. In my examples, I will focus mainly on Kurds in Iraq and Kurds in Iran, since that is what I know best.

The political scene in Iran begins with the Anglo-Soviet invasion of the country in 1941. This period created an administrative and political vacuum, which was soon filled by an organization of urban intellectuals called Komalay Jiyanaway Kurdistan (KJK). Emerging from the collapse of Reza Shah's state, the KJK represented the first modern Kurdish political party in Iran, drawing its strength not from tribal or landed elites but from the educated urban petty bourgeoisie.

A brief description from Abbas Vali's The Kurds and the State in Iran:

>The founders of the Komalay Jiyanaway Kurdistan came from the ranks of the Kurdish urban petty bourgeoisie, both traditional and modern, though predominantly the latter. The majority of the founding members were engaged in occupations which were either created by or associated with the development of the political, economic and administrative functions of the modern state in Kurdistan, and the organization included no landlord or mercantile bourgeois representation of any significance.25 The formation of the Komalay Jiyanaway Kurdistan signified the revival of civil society in Kurdistan following the abdication of Reza Shah and the collapse of the absolutist regime in September 1941. Writing in Kurdish, which soon dominated the intellectual scene, was the major indicator of this revival. Kurdish became the language of political and cultural discourse among a small band of Kurdish intelligentsia, whose presence in the political field signified the development of commodity relations, secular education and modern administrative processes in Iranian Kurdistan. The Komalay Jiyanaway Kurdistan insisted on an ethnic qualification for membership: Kurds from all parts of Kurdistan were eligible to join. Although the Christian inhabitants of Kurdistan, especially the Assyrians, could also become members, the constitution of the Komala regarded Islam as the official religion of Kurdistan, and a Quranic verse was inscribed in the emblem of Nishtiman, its official organ.26 But the discourse of Nishtiman remained primarily secular, and its appeal to religion was mostly populist and functional. The Islamic credentials of the organization were often invoked to counteract the charges of atheism and communism increasingly levelled at it from within traditional sectors of Kurdish society, in particular the landowning class, the mercantile community and the clergy, who were made insecure by its radical populist-nationalist rhetoric.

But the KJK did not have a long life. It soon transformed into the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI), and this shift had major implications for the class character of the Kurdish movement. One peculiar feature of the KJK was its refusal to take up armed struggle as a means to achieve its nationalist goals. The KJK leadership understood that an armed strategy would have required relying on Kurdish landlords and tribal chiefs, who controlled the means of violence in the countryside. To refuse armed struggle, however, meant political exclusion from the broader anti‑state movement that was gaining ground in post‑invasion Iran. The KDPI that emerged from this transformation was dominated instead by the Kurdish mercantile bourgeoisie, landlords, tribal chiefs, and clerics—precisely the classes the KJK had initially excluded.

So a question arises: why did the urban radicals decide to work with these classes, given that cooperation went against their own nationalist and agrarian populist political position?

>By mid April 1943, barely six months after its formation, the association had already managed to consolidate its basis in Mahabad and extend its influence south and westward to major urban centres such as Bokan, Baneh, Saqqiz and Sardasht, enlisting some new members and considerable popular support in the area north of the British controlled zone.25 However, the increase in membership and the development of popular support posed the intractable problem of administration. The Komalay JK, like any other political organization aspiring to democratic politics, mass base and popular support, had to face this crucial issue. It was unavoidable. It could no longer remain as a parochial political association of free individuals. But administration meant formal authority and a set of rules and regulations specifying its conditions and means within the association. The introduction of formal authority had grave consequences for the subsequent development of the Komalay JK politically and organizationally. It was, therefore, the institutional requirements of modern mass politics which led the core members of the Komalay JK to elect a central leadership committee in April 1943. This committee, widely believed to have been led by Abdulrahman Zabihi, signified the emergence of political authority and institutional hierarchy within the association. Informal political relations and personal and familial ties and associations to a considerable extent had to give way or succumb to the emergent hierarchy of command and obedience characteristic of modern political organizations.

In short, the urban radicals were forced into alliance with the mercantile bourgeoisie, landlords, and tribal chiefs not because they abandoned their ideology, but because the very logic of building a mass-based political organization required administrative structures and territorial reach that they could not achieve on their own. The traditional power holders controlled the countryside, the armed men, and the local networks of patronage. To administer, the KJK had to incorporate them—and in doing so, the organization's class character shifted irreversibly toward the KDPI. A major difference between the KDPI and its predecessor was the KDPI's rejection of Kurdish unification in favor of a model of regional autonomy within Iranian borders and the Iranian political body. Why did the KDPI take such a position? The answer lies in the class composition of the new party. Unlike the KJK's urban petty-bourgeois base, the KDPI was dominated by tribal landlords, mercantile bourgeoisie, and clerics—whose material interests were tied not to a Kurdish state but to their position within Iran's existing political and economic structures.

>The large landlords, predominantly tribal, had been the primary target of Reza Shah's territorial centralism in Kurdistan in the 1930s, and many had suffered major political and military setbacks. They were able to rearm, regroup and reassert their political authority in their traditional areas of influence soon after the collapse of his centralized rule in September 1941. The tribal landlords were thus once again in possession of the military contingents and paid for their upkeep, which traditionally exempted them from paying taxes to the central political authority. The nature and extent of their political and financial support for the Republic varied considerably according to the strength of their nationalist feelings and convictions, which were mediated in turn through a complex network of political and economic relations with the Iranian state. There was also another factor influencing the attitude of the large landlords, particularly the tribal chiefs, towards the Republic and its predominantly urban leadership. The tribal leadership was the locus of traditional political authority in the Kurdish community at large, but especially in the countryside, stemming from their pivotal position in both economic structure and military organization of the Kurdish community. This gave them a sense of legitimacy and superiority in their conduct with the urban dwellers, who were mostly engaged in trade and commerce or worked as minor or middle-ranking officials in government bureaucracies. This 'tribal bias' proved significant in the relationship between the Kurdish tribal chiefs and the Republican leaders and administrators, who with a few notable exceptions originated from the ranks of the urban petty-bourgeoisie and the bazaar merchants. on the significance of this 'tribal bias', and especially the tribal leaders' resentment of the modern means of domination and rule which ensured Ghazi Muhammad's rise to power, Jwaideh comments: 'Many Kurdish tribal leaders resented the rise of Qazi Muhammad to a position of supreme power by the rather unusual means of party machinery and support of the urban population.' (1965, p. 753) The middle and small landowners were mostly non-tribal in origin, and on the whole possessed stronger nationalist convictions than the tribal landlords.

From Marouf Cabi's The formation of modern Kurdish society in Iran

>The integration of the economies of the region into the world market by the end of the century resulted in an unequal trading balance with the effect that it made these economies exporters of raw materials and importers of manufactured goods.2 Consequently, as Masoud Karshenas argues in the case of Iran, free trade led to the peripheralization of these economies in a world economy,3 which by the end of the century, as Eric Hobsbawm explains, had been effectively and permanently divided into 'advanced' and 'underdeveloped' as the result of political and industrial revolutions.4 Consequently, structural reforms in the regional states to modernize and strengthen the economy and society followed. As regards the Kurds, this subsequently transformed the pre-modern power relations based on Empire-Emirate with the effect that the rule of the 'autonomous' Emirates ended and the direct authority of the central state over the Kurdish regions through its representatives followed.The integration of the Ottoman and Qajar Empires in the world market had undoubtedly engaged the Kurds in a wider regional trade. Mrs Bishop, a missionary, observed in her journey in Kurdistan around 1890: Long before reaching Sujbulak [modern Mahabad] there were indications of the vicinity of a place of some importance, caravans going both ways, asses loaded with perishable produce, horsemen and foot passengers, including many fine-looking Kurdish women unveiled, and walking with a firm masculine stride, even when carrying children on their backs.5 Sujbulak, the capital of Northern Persian Kurdistan, and the residence of a governor, is quite an important entrepôt for furs, in which it carries on a large trade with Russia, and a French firm, it is said, buys up fur rugs to the value of several hundred thousand francs annually.6

So the tribes used nationalism to compensate for the loss of their once-autonomous emirates (explanation down below), while the merchants wielded it to secure a more favorable position vis-à-vis the Iranian state. This made both classes vacillating and extremely opportunistic—willing to support Kurdish autonomy when it served their narrow interests, but just as ready to abandon it when the central state offered better terms. Thus we see in the tribal case that this sort of nationalism perfectly mirrors the definition of feudal nationalism that Stalin used to analyze Georgia and that Giap used to analyze Vietnam before the 19th century. But why did the bourgeoisie decide to side with the feudalists? An important characteristic of the Kurdish national movement was the alignment of the political positions of these two classes, despite their differences. Several factors intensified and sustained this alignment: the continuation of the feudal system in Kurdistan, the extreme weakness of the bourgeoisie, and the confrontation of both classes with the central states. Ignoring the simultaneous existence of feudal nationalism and bourgeois nationalism—and the longer historical trajectory of feudal nationalism—leads one to equate the KDP of the 1940s and 1950s with the KDP of the second, third, and fourth congresses, and to mistakenly place all of these under the single category of bourgeois nationalism.

The Kurdish bourgeoisie emerged in the form of a commercial bourgeoisie in some of the larger cities of Ottoman Kurdistan and Qajar-era Iran. Trade with Tsarist Russia and major Ottoman commercial centers contributed to the growth of this bourgeoisie. However, this bourgeoisie suffered heavy blows with the fall of the Tsarist regime and the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. The first time a bourgeois-democratic position became somewhat distinct from the feudal issue was in the poems of Haji Qadir Koyi, but this was still an early dawn. Until the anti-fascist war—specifically from 1941 onward, during the Second Imperialist War—the feudal class and the commercial bourgeoisie remained united both politically and organizationally.

This opportunism came at a heavy cost. The same vacillating classes that had temporarily aligned with the nationalist project were never reliable allies, and when the balance of power shifted, they abandoned the Republic without hesitation.

>For tribal landlordism was historically replete with opportunism, and sailing with the wind was the modus operandi of tribal politics. Lineage, primordial loyalty and parochial mentality, which are the stuff of tribal politics, could not by definition accommodate the processes and practices associated with modern political identities such as the people and the nation. Nor did this quick shift in allegiance by the tribal leadership take Ghazi Muhammad and his nationalist associates in the government and the party by surprise. They had long realized at their own peril that the power and status of tribal landlordism in Kurdistan was the product of the very same historical processes and practices which had defined their opposition to the modern state and official nationalism in Iran. This historical relationship between the power and status of tribal landlordism in Kurdistan and the development of the modern state in Iran meant that the so-called paradox of modernity was grounded not only in the economic structure and political organization of Pahlavi absolutism but also in the very core of political power in the Republic. Iranian modernity, and more specifically the political and cultural processes and practices of the construction of a uniform nation and national identity by an absolutist state, had made landlordism indispensable to the persistence of the structures of power and domination in both the Iranian state and the Kurdish Republic. The pre-capitalist agrarian relations in Iran and the logistics of military power in the Kurdish Republic both required and ensured, though in different ways, the active representation of the landowning class in the organization of political power. The position of the landowning class was unassailable for as long as this paradox continued to define the relationship between the economic and political forces and relations in the complex structures of power and domination in both entities. The republican administration, the nationalists in the leadership of the party and the government were aware of this paradox, but perhaps never realized its real significance before the news of the re-conquest of Tabriz reached Mahabad on 13 December. Now the tribal soldiery, the sword which was meant to defend the Kurdish Republic, was being held by the state; and its cutting edge was directed menacingly at Ghazi and his comrades in Mahabad.

So up to now, it has been established that the base of Kurdish nationalism has historically been merchants and feudalists. This class composition has made these movements vacillate constantly between collaboration with central governments and a desire to break from them—although the latter has usually been used to achieve the former on better terms. Thus we see movements like the PKK and its offshoots pursue a period of mobilizing workers, because their own class basis is the petty bourgeoisie, which cannot act independently for long. But they are willing to abandon this phase and work with Kurdish reactionary landlords and merchants as soon as the opportunity arises. That is why the PKK has felt so comfortable taking a cozy position in parliament, or why it is willing to integrate with Jolani's fascist army—the very same force that initiated a campaign of terror against Alawites and Druze populations.

Kurdish merchants and feudal lords have always been willing to work with imperialism. Just look at how the Barzanis were willing to work with MIT and SAVAK to hunt down Kurdish revolutionaries. In the 1970s, and especially after the Kissinger‑Barzani conspiracy, Iraqi Kurdistan became a base for American imperialism, for the regime occupying Palestine, and a base against the revolutions of Iraq, Iran, and other peoples of the Middle East. Iraqi Kurdistan was liberated from the domination of the Baghdad regime (the first Ba'ath reaction, the two Arifs, the second Ba'ath) through the sacrifice of the masses and the Peshmergas, but it came under the complete domination of imperial (Pahlavi) reaction and its imperialist and Zionist masters. Barzani explicitly told Kissinger—and also journalists of the imperialist press—that he wanted to place Kurdistan at America's disposal. This move by Barzani was precisely a continuation of the move by Sharif Pasha and Sheikh Taha, who at the beginning of the 20th century wanted to create an "independent" feudal state under the protectorate of imperialist powers. The suppression of the national movement of Iran's Kurds by Barzani (through Ahmad Tawfiq) and the suppression of the Kurdish movement in Turkey (by order of Iranian, Turkish, and American reaction) were also in line with the amirs of the 17th and 18th centuries. In fact, the intelligence branch of the KDP in Iraq (Parastin) was basically a SAVAK front inside Iraq. Or consider how the KDPI was willing to work with the Ba'ath—which had no intention of hiding its plan to ethnically cleanse Kurds, Assyrians, and Turkmens—as well as with Soviet social imperialism.

The opportunism inherent to the petty bourgeoisie makes it structurally unable to serve as a workers’ vanguard. It cannot unite Kurds across four countries because its class interests are tied to specific state frameworks. It cannot lead a socialist revolution because it refuses to overthrow feudalism and imperialism, preferring instead to negotiate with them. As long as Kurdish communist movements remain rooted in the petty bourgeoisie, they will oscillate, collaborate, and ultimately betray every goal they claim to hold. No national liberation, no workers’ state, no united Kurdistan can be built on such a foundation.

During the 15th and 16th centuries CE, the process of the emergence of Kurdish principalities (Emirates) began and continued, so that by the 17th century nearly 40 large and small feudal amirates had been established. This socio-economic development took shape as Kurdish tribes settled down and increasingly engaged in agriculture. Sometimes it also occurred through the domination of a Kurdish tribe over a non-Kurdish agricultural population in order to subjugate them. Of course, it should be noted that agriculture and sedentarization did not completely eliminate the pastoral economy of the tribes, and the coexistence of the two has continued even to our time.

The Emirates

  1. The rule was hereditary, passed from father to son;
  2. Each emirate had a defined territory that included a certain number of villages, with peasants and tribes subject to the emir;
  3. The emirates exercised political sovereignty to varying degrees; some were independent, others were subordinate to other rulers or kings;
  4. In each emirate, the emir, khan, beg, or agha was the supreme feudal lord and the main ruler, and the chiefs of smaller tribes were subordinate to him;
  5. Each emirate had a feudal army to confront external enemies, as well as to attack surrounding lands and expand its territory;
  6. The larger emirates had their own flag and coinage, and the Friday sermon (khutbah) was recited in the name of the amir; and
  7. Feudal dispersion was prevalent throughout Kurdistan.

Economic Policies

The logical outcome of socio-economic evolution could have been for a great emirate to dominate the rest and create a centralized feudal state. But this did not happen. In the west and east of Kurdistan, two great feudal powers arose, namely the Safavid feudal empire and the Ottoman feudal empire. The Safavid kings, in implementing their policy of feudal centralization, threatened the independence of the amirates. They carried out the overthrow of the emirs' rule and the dispatch of governors from Isfahan. The emirs strongly resisted the Safavid policy of feudal centralization. The Ottoman sultans, who themselves were pursuing the same policy of centralization, tried to exploit the emirs' struggle against their Safavid rival. The Ottomans, through one of their high-ranking officials, Idris Bitlisi (who was a Kurd), promised the emirs that if they supported the Ottomans in the war against the Safavids, the Ottomans would recognize their independence. The Safavid kings repeatedly attempted to overthrow the rule of the Safavid and Ottoman empires.

As a result of these wars, which lasted more than a century, firstly, the socio-economic development of society was halted. The growth of the emirates was accompanied by the development of agriculture, the emergence of feudal villages and towns, and even trade within the confines of the feudal economy. The involvement of the emirs in the wars of one of the two empires, or their engaging in resistance wars under feudal leadership, led to the waste of productive forces. Human resources were destroyed as a result of widespread massacres, forced displacement, starvation and disease; bridges, settlements, fields, gardens, qanats (underground canals), and the like were destroyed; or horse breeding and the production of weapons replaced livestock and agricultural tools.

The second consequence of these wars was that the conditions created by the war gave rise to a political awakening within the context of feudal society, which took the form of "national" resistance against the "foreigner".

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u/Falcao_Hermanos — 4 days ago
▲ 14 r/communism

Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (May 17)

We made this because Reddit's algorithm prioritises headlines and current events and doesn't allow for deeper, extended discussion - depending on how it goes for the first four or five times it'll be dropped or continued.

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u/AutoModerator — 5 days ago
▲ 19 r/communism

What were the material conditions that led to the stagnation of central economies in the 60s-70s?

Furthermore, how did this stagnation affect day to day life? Could the perestroika and Dengist reforms have been avoided entirely? How can a future central economy maintain its course based on what we learned from history? Hope this doesn’t count as a “basic question”. Thank you in advance

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u/thelordsburningrain — 6 days ago
▲ 18 r/communism

Booker Ngesa Omole speaks at ACP-endorsed international conference of social-chauvinist orgs

Wanted to post this here because I could not find a complete transcript.

"Thank you very much, the founders of the Sovintern. I just have a few remarks. And maybe my message to the founding members of the Sovintern is that the future is red. That is why we are here.

And, in my visit to Moscow, we must therefore remind ourselves that we do not conduct our revolution in the circumstances we choose, but in the circumstances that is given to us. And for today, when I was reflecting in the car - and we are on winter - the Great Patriotic War was fought and won during winter. And yesterday, when we were laying the wreath at the General Zhukov, on the great Red Square, all these ideas that we've only met in books came to us. So we want to say today, we are grateful to the founders of the Sovintern. But to the Just Russia, the socialist party of the Russian Federation: the Kenyan workers, the African workers, and the Communist Party (Marxist) of Kenya says "hurrah!"

Sovintern was the international department of the party of Lenin. It was the international department of the party of Stalin. That which supported the national liberation movement in the African continent. This is the nostalgia that the African people have today when we talk about Sovintern. It is out of necessity that the triumph of imperialism in the African continent will weaken the global socialism movement. Today we stand and say that the entire global south cannot fight and win and build the most urgent project - which is socialism - until they achieve the most immediate task, which is the fight for sovereignty. Every sovereign country on Earth today is under United States attack. Look at Iran - being bombed. Look at Russia - is being encircled. And then we are told that Russia has expansionist tendencies. Who has expansionist tendencies more than United States imperialism and the Washington war consensus? Who took the Baltic States? Who is supporting the fascist dictatorship in Ukraine?

So we are saying today that, as I left Nairobi, every publication is telling us that Russia wants to recolonize the Sahel region. But today, we reminded the Sovintern congress today, that without the hardware of Russia, the Sahel region would have been bombed to the stone age. This is important for us to acknowledge. And the French imperialists: Next month, on 11th and 12th, there is African French Summit in Nairobi. The French is moving all his military hardware - after being humiliated in West Africa - to East Africa. For what reason? They are preparing for war in Africa after the west of Asia. We ask for solidarity in this Sovintern that the French imperialism that has been humiliated in the west of Africa must now be humiliated in Nairobi. And that's why we are organizing the counter-summit against French imperialism.

What about military encirclement? China is being encircled. Look at the war in South China Sea. Look at Taiwan. Today, the classic British has one military base in our country. For what purpose are they occupying our country? The United States has two military bases, the biggest unmanned drone [force] used to fight Africans - African people fighting for sovereignty - is in Nairobi. The entire coast is being built to check this China Belt and Road initiative. So we want to say that for us to achieve the most urgent task - to start building socialism - we must start fighting for sovereignty, and that is why the Communist Party (Marxist) stands high, without humiliation, in solidarity with the sanctity of the Russian state. Because Russia is a sovereign country. Russia does not have a puppet of United States imperialism. We wish that after the fight for sovereignty, then we can start the immediate task - what we called the National Democratic Revolution. After the National Democratic Revolution, we can start the most urgent task of socialist construction.

For those who have delusions about wishes about pleading with Donald Trump and his war consensus in Washington: You are doomed. They dont understand any logic other than plunder. The United States is a settler colonialism, built upon the blood of red indians. Look at Palestine. What are they doing to Palestine? Only cutting the necks, and bombing people. This is the culture of the United States: To kill people, murder people, rob people. They must be humiliated.

Comrades, I will say that, in respect to the United States imperialism, and in the contradictions that have been outlined by Lenin, there is hierarchy of imperialism. Today, the United States is like a wounded lion. They must choose their death. Do they want to die with the entire planet? Or do they want to die not with humiliation, but with dignity, to save the entire planet?

Thank you very much."

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cdiz6xrNyDI . transcribed from this video to the best of my ability.

The occasion was the "congress of the Sovintern", 27 April 2026, organized by Russian political party A Just Russia. The event was attended by a star-studded cast of social chauvinists from around the world including George Galloway (Workers' Party of Britain), Jackson Hinkle (ACP), Christopher Helali (ACP), Héctor Béjar (ex-ELN Peru), Evo Morales (ex-MAS), Haz al-Din (ACP), Pawan Karki (Nepali Communist Party), and Mohamed Yeslem Beissat (of the Polisario Front).

Would be interested to hear others' criticisms.

u/chaos2002_ — 7 days ago
▲ 39 r/communism

Romantic Anti-Capitalism and Asian Racialization in Settler Colonial Capitalism

I’ve been meaning to write something on Iyko Day’s book Alien Capital for several years. At a whim I decided to stop procrastinating, go back over my old notes and write out this summary of part of the introduction and Chapter 1. At the least, I believe it’ll be helpful for understanding not just the relationship between settler-colonialism and Asian exclusion, but also between aesthetics, settlerism, and commodity fetishism/ideology. Forgive me if my writing veers too much into Day’s more esoteric verbiage or even worse, unclear translations of Day’s language into my own idiom.

Romantic Anti-Capitalism

What Day means by romantic anti-capitalism is basically a development of commodity-fetishism. As presented in Capital Chapters 1-3, the development of the commodity-form externalizes the contradiction between use-value and value into commodities and money. This is how the contradiction appears on the surface of bourgeois society. The antinomy between use-value and value is thus perceived by romantic anti-capitalism as an external opposition, rather than a necessary unity. This worldview glorifies the qualitative aspect of the commodity, in use-value and the concrete labor that produces the commodity. By this romantic view, the qualitative aspect is sundered from the quantitative aspect of the commodity, from the value-form, money, and abstract labor. The realm of concrete and natural forms—for example, trees in a backyard, work boots by the door, a pick-up truck in the driveway, the hardworking laborer, the steam train—is opposed to the abstract, intangible, unnatural realm of money, surplus-value, and accumulation. Romantic anti-capitalism thus identifies capitalism and the destruction it wreaks solely with this latter abstract realm, and glorifies the former, concrete realm as thingly and real. Money (and finance, and so on) is perceived as a cause of capitalist oppression, rather than as a necessary universal equivalent externalized by the commodity-form itself. On the flip side, it goes unrecognised that value is objectified by the commodity's natural form in its circulation. So, abstract labor is separated from its relationship with concrete labor.

> A globalist, rootless, parasitic, financial capitalism… is separated from a racial, national, industrial capitalism [Sea & Earth]

Romantic anti-capitalism attempts to solve an aesthetic problem: how to represent a real abstraction, abstract labor, in order to identify it, destroy it and restore an unalienated world. In this ideology, nature personifies unalienated, human relations against the traumatic domination of abstract labor, which becomes personified in the constantly shifting figure of the Jew (abstract, intrusive, foreign, disruptive, transnationally mobile, universal, flexible, etc).

Day traces this back to the early bourgeois revolutions, which in revolutionizing the political superstructure on the basis of the capitalist mode of production, carved atomized individuals and abstract citizens out of the old feudal bodies (as Marx discusses in On the Jewish Question). With their political emancipation, the French Revolution transformed Jewishness from a community of believers into a racial category, indiscernable but inscribed in the individual. As moribund bourgeois nationalisms retreated from the revolutionary bourgeoisie’s universalist mission in the face of the proletariat, these nationalisms instead identified culture, tradition, and race as the basis for the nation. Jews in Europe fulfilled the prescriptions for citizenship as a purely political abstraction, but not as members of these increasingly exclusionary nations (“They were German or French citizens, but they were not really Germans or Frenchmen”). This created the basis for the personification of abstract labor as Jews.

Romantic Anti-Capitalism in Amerikan Settler-Colonialism

In the nineteenth century Amerikan settler-colonial context, where an expanding concept of whiteness became the normative basis of citizenship, migrant Chinese labor took on this role. Asians became identified with abstract labor through the mediating role of labor time. There developed an opposition between a white, heterosexual model of normative labor and leisure-time and an ‘unnatural’ Asian model of labor and leisure-time. As Engels puts it, crudely:

> Jews, Italians, Bohemians, etc., against Germans and Irish, and each one against the other, so that differences in the standard of life of different workers exist, I believe, in New York to an extent unheard-of elsewhere. And added to this is the total indifference of a society which has grown up on a purely capitalist basis, without any comfortable feudal background, towards the human beings who succumb in the competitive struggle: “there will be plenty more, and more than we want, of these damned Dutchmen, Irishmen, Italians, Jews and Hungarians”; and, to cap it all, John Chinaman stands in the background who far surpasses them all in his ability to live on next to nothing.

White labor became identified with concrete labor, and Asian labor came to personify abstract labor, taking on the appearance of amorphous, universal equivalence. The concrete labor-time of the latter became a stand-in for the excessive temporality of socially necessary labor time, with the construction of the railroads connecting coast to coast across Amerika and Klanada. By excessive, Day means the revolutionizing of the general conception of time by capitalism, into homogenous discrete units, increasingly accelerated and independent of events of religious significance, etc. Time was secularized, and externalized as an alien entity which dominates us. By the railroads Asian labor had built:

> The time-distance across the continent was now cut to two weeks, and cheap railroad tickets brought a flood of European workers to the West. [Sakai]

Asian labor appeared alien and bestial, representing the excessive speeding-up of turnover time and the degrading social effects of the intrusion of abstract labor on the Euro-Amerikan ‘standard of life’, or what Marx calls the ‘moral and historical elements’ which enter into the determination of the value of labor-power.

That’s to say, through the operation of the law of value by competition, Asian labor and its ‘moral and historical elements’ substituted for white, Euro-Amerikan labor and its attendant elements in the determination of the value of labor-power by social necessity. Day runs with the theme of substitution in her readings of Asian Amerikan works on the time period, where Asian difference inside and outside of the labor process is sexualized in its homosociality and racialized as perverse and unnatural against a normative, concrete white model of heterosexual social reproduction:

> What unites [Kingston and Fung’s] distinct texts is a recurring theme of substitutions—ventriloquism for “real” speech, of masturbation for “real” sex, of gay sex for straight sex, of Chinese alien labor for white labor, of maternalism for paternalism, and so on—which function collectively to expose how racial, sexual, and gender difference operates as a degraded substitute within the capitalist logics of white settler colonialism. These substitutions interrupt the accelerating capitalist temporality of railroad labor, which reorganizes the social necessity of a linear, rational, normative time of family, nation, and capital. [Day 45]

By identifying the substitutions represented in the texts analyzed, Day argues that these texts “expose the aesthetic function of romantic anti-capitalism”. If this sounds rather abstract (lol) now, I’ll move on to summarise some insights from Day’s readings of Asian-American Maxine Hong Kingston’s short-story collection China Men and Asian-Canadian Richard Fung’s multimedia film Dirty Laundry: A History of Heroes. I want to point out that this is also Sakai’s point: once arrived in the West, annexationist Euro-Amerikan workers demanded “white man’s wages” and a monopoly over the labor market. This was really a competitive struggle over the constituents of social necessity that retroactively clothed itself in terms of race and sexuality.

Day’s argument is that the theme of substitution exposes the logic of equivalence, or the process by which capitalism homogenizes various concrete labor processes into abstract labor. These texts allegorize the process of fetishism, where white labor is aligned with concrete labor and alien, Asian labor exits the world of concrete labor and becomes “symbolically aligned with the fluctuating duration embedded in abstract labor”. As time became increasingly secularized and abstracted from any particular event over the development of capitalism, abstract time is represented in these texts in racial and sexual terms. The work of fetishism, after all, is an allegorical process. (An example I liked from my Korean cinema professor: think of when Ben in Burning flutters his fingers in the air and cheerfully quips that Hae-mi disappeared “into thin air”, like the smoke from the greenhouses he supposedly sets on fire, as if Hae-mi was disappeared by the device of metaphor itself. Jong-su spends the second half of the movie in anxious search for her, but only discovers artifacts of her existence: a pink sportswatch in Ben’s bathroom similar to the one Jong-su gifted Hae-mi, a cat in Ben’s garage which responds to Hae-mi’s cat’s name, though earlier the cat never actually appears when Hae-mi’s around. The point is not whether Hae-mi was murdered by Ben or something else, but that Hae-mi has been disappeared by the failure of the narrative to represent her (as her co-worker morosely remarks, this is “no country for women”). The last part was my reading, I digress.) These summaries might seem a bit stilted, since Day employs a bunch of concepts (History 1 and History 2, Derrida’s notion of supplement, reproductive futurity, etc) which are a bit much to have out here.

China Men (1980)

Day reads the story “The Grandfather of the Sierra Nevada Mountains” in particular here. The story recollects the life of Ah Goong, a Chinese migrant miner, and the “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” of abstract labor which afflict his experience of the labor process and of his social reproduction.

  1. The work of tunneling through a granite mountain for the laying of railroad tracks severely disorients Ah Goong, and renders him unable to tell between what is concrete and what is abstract: “His eyes couldn’t see, his nose couldn’t smell; and now his ears were filled with the noise of hammering… This rock is what real is, not clouds or mist [53]”. At once embodying abstract labor time and disembodied by it, Ah Goong’s perception of the world is further disoriented by the revolutions in productivity and pace of production time introduced by the replacement of pickaxes by dynamite. His previous, cosmological sense of time, defined by the movement of the stars, is disenchanted and becomes irrelevant to the demands of a new earthly labor temporality. Abstract time itself becomes an animate, external form confronting him: “‘I felt time… I saw what’s real. I saw time, and it doesn’t move.’ [Day 50]”. When the dynamite explodes his countrymen into viscera, a manic Ah Goong perceives them as “puppets”, disembodied forms made inhuman by abstract labor (“The demons don’t believe this is a human body. This is a chinaman’s body.”).

  2. Ah Goong’s dislocation by abstract time finds a mirror in the disjunction between his sense of sexuality and gender. He questions the purpose of his penis, expresses maternal and matrilineal desires, and pleasures himself on the clock while being lowered in a basket of dynamite and fuses, declaring, “I am fucking the world!” Day argues that this autoerotic act represents a challenge to the normative frame of heterosexual reproduction, which “ventriloquizes the dynamite’s literal “fucking” of the world”, and in doing so, instead disrupts the distinction between work and play and “corrupts the logic of equivalence that capitalism extracts as abstract labor [55]”. In the temporal revolution wrought by abstract labor of production and social reproduction, Asian labor clashes against the “temporality of the home, which schedules gendered activity, moral education, heterosexual reproduction… a crucial regulator of the labor process [Day 52]”, and in this case, embodied in whiteness.

  3. With Ah Goong and his countrymen’s work completed, the vulgar, perverse presence of Asian labor is erased from the historical record and the national mythology (“Ah Goong does not appear in railroad photographs”). At the railroad completion ceremony, a white man drives in the commemorative last spike, made of gold. Then the gold spike is pulled out, and Chinese laborers hammer in the real spike, made of steel. Thus Kingston reverses the substitutions performed by Asian labor, staging the golden spike and white labor as abstract symbols and the steel spike and Asian labor as concrete and sensuous.

As such, while Ah Goong suffers from the abject abstraction of his labor time, the text exposes the process by which he becomes objectified and exchange-value becomes personified. In exposing the contradiction between concrete and abstract labor, Kingston opens a space whereby the social necessity of a normative ‘standard of life’ and its corresponding racial and sexual relations can be challenged by “imagining relations that do not contribute to capital’s self reproduction [at least, until a new accumulation regime subsumes them] [Day 66].”

Dirty Laundry: A History of Heroes (1996)

Fung’s work is a multimedia documentary which “presents a montage of narrative layers”, interwoven with interviews, archival films and photographs, historical scenes, and a fictional travelogue that follows Roger Kwong, a Chinese Canadian journalist, on his current-day trip from Toronto to Vancouver onboard a Klanadian Pacific Railroad (CPR) train. Here, Fung wants to trouble the neutrality associated with archives and the documentary form by interpolating archival and fictional scenes. The focus is less on the transformation of the labor process than on the aftereffects on social reproduction of the construction of the transcontinental railroads.

  1. During his ride, Kwong engages in a queer tryst with the train’s Chinese-Canadian steward. The sex scene is interspersed with cuts to historical archival footage from the CPR, where the viewer is hurtled by the train into a dark tunnel. The slow, indeterminate tempo of the sex scene contrasts with the predetermined tempo of the train footage, and suggests that this homosexual encounter is both made possible by capitalist time but is yet out of sync with it. Day argues this is a queer replay of a similar amorous encounter onboard a train between two strangers from Hitchcock’s 1959 North by Northwest. There, the train symbolizes the violent, phallic penetration and domestication of a feminine, natural body. But in Fung’s scene, the white strangers are replaced by Asians, and heterosexuality is substituted with homosexuality. Day writes “Through this substitution, the video suggests that disrupting the train’s symbolism with an Asian “anal” tunnel is one reason that the Canadian railway may be “a symbol under threat” [Day 49]”. Fung thus reverses the official chronology and suggests that normative white heterosexuality is a byproduct of the struggle against a racial and sexual otherness.

  2. The beginning of the video starts off with a Chinese couple in a domestic space: a woman braids her husband’s queue as he prepares to depart for Klanada, and a female voice asks: “Who will braid your hair? Who will cook your rice? Who will wash your clothes? Who will warm your bed?” This scene is restaged across the movie with multiple substitutions: a man substitutes for the wife, a male voice substitutes for the female one, a current-day lesbian couple substitutes for the original Qing-era couple. What’s reinforced is that substitution is “redefined not as interchangeability [as with commodity determined labor] but as repetition with difference”, or as negation of negation, as I understand it. That’s to say that the supposedly normative temporality of domestic life and social reproduction, from which Asians were excluded, is framed as continually in change in accord with the fluctuating of social necessity.

  3. One scene depicts a white miner monologuing about the effects of Chinese competition on his standard of life, his duties to his family, and his domestic comforts. “He explains that in terms of labor, all is equivalent, but the costs of reproducing their respective labors puts the white miner at a distinct disadvantage [Day 60]”. Over the course of the oration, the white miner gradually transforms into Senator Jones of Nevada, played by the same actor but clad now in bourgeois dress, visualizing the supra-class and national unity of whiteness. The inhuman intrusion of abstract labor in the “temporal sanctity of the domestic realm” is represented as the apparently degraded conditions of Chinese existence:

> I have hopes to bring up my daughters to be good wives and faithful mothers, and offer my son better opportunities than I had myself. I cheerfully contribute to the support of schools, churches, charitable institutions, and other objects that enter into our daily life. But after I’ve maintained my family and performed these duties, not much is left of my wages when the week is ended. How is it with the Chinese? The Chinaman can do as much work underground as I can. He has no wife or family. He performs none of these duties. Forty or fifty of his kind can live in a house no larger than mine. He craves no variety of food. He has inherited no taste for comfort or for social enjoyment. Conditions that satisfy him and make him contented would make my life not worth living. [Day 61]

Ergo, the life of the “Chinaman” was not worth living. Asian labor and its standard of living was inhuman, and thus unfair competition, parasitic on concrete white toil and industry. Disembodied from concrete existence, the abstract Chinese male laborer became subject to further association with sexual perversity. The homosociality of segregated Chinese bachelor communities (formed due to the ratio of male to female immigration and reinforced by the Page Act in 1875) was used to mark Asian labor and its reproduction as bestial.

As they waged progroms against Chinese labor on settler society’s behalf and proved their loyalty to Amerikan empire, the wildly differentiated mass of European labor that Engels refers to forged themselves as white (thus, “John Chinaman stood in the background”). The conception of the amorphous racial and sexual perversity of Asian labor produced its opposite, the concrete normativity of whiteness and a white heterosexuality.

Some Notes on Lowe and Sakai

Day criticizes Lisa Lowe for dismissing the concept of abstract labor (since she doesn’t understand it). In Lowe’s case, her lack of understanding of abstract labor leads to a somewhat tortured ‘Marxist’ explanation of Asian exclusion. With a scarcity of wage-labor at hand in the newly-conquered territories, Asian labor was imported into agriculture, textile and services, and railroad construction, and:

> Capital in the 1880s utilized racialized divisions among laborers to maximize its profits; it needed the exclusion of further Chinese immigration to prevent a superabundance of cheap labor, and the disenfranchisement of the existing Chinese immigrant labor force, to prevent capital accumulation by these wage laborers. Theoretically, in a racially homogenous nation, the needs of capital and the needs of the state complement each other. Yet in a racially differentiated nation such as the United States, capital and state imperatives may be contradictory: capital, with its supposed [??] needs for “abstract labor”, is said by Marx to be unconcerned by the “origins” of its labor force, whereas the nation-state, with its need for “abstract citizens” formed by a unified culture to participate in its political sphere, is precisely concerned to maintain a national citizenry bound by race, language, and culture. In late-nineteenth-century America, as the state sought to serve capital, this contradiction between the economic and the political spheres was sublated through the legal exclusion and disenfranchisement of Chinese immigrant laborers. [Lowe 12-13]

We know from Sakai that Asian exclusion was really a grassroots struggle of settler workers to annex the economy that Asian workers had built on the coast, fought as well against those sectors of the settler bourgeoisie ambivalent to exclusion as opposed to capitalizing on a higher rate of exploitation.

> In their frenzy of petty plundering, European labor was being permitted to do the dirty work of the bourgeoisie. The Empire needed to promote and support this flood of European reinforcements to help take hold of the newly conquered territories. … The national bourgeoisie used the "Anti-Coolie" movement and the resulting legislation to force individual capitalists to follow Empire policy and discharge Chinese in favor of Europeans. Now that the Chinese had built the economy of the Pacific Northwest, it was time for them to be stripped and driven out…. At times even their bourgeois masters wished that their dogs were on a shorter leash. Many capitalists saw, even as we were being cut down, that it would be useful to preserve us as a colonial labor force to be exploited whenever needed; but the immigrant white worker had no use for us whatsoever. Therefore, in the altered geometry of forces within the Empire [the new arrival of European reinforcements], the new Euro-Amerikan working masses became willing pawns of the most vicious elements in the settler bourgeoisie, seeing only advantages in every possibility of our genocidal disappearance. And in this scramble upwards those wretched immigrants shed, like an old suit of clothes, the proletarian identity and honor of their Old European past. Now they were true Amerikans, real settlers who had done their share of the killing, annexing and looting.

Lowe’s correct that disenfranchisement/exclusion was meant to prevent a demographic shift and capital accumulation by Asian immigrants, but her framing this as the sublation of the contradiction between capital and state mystifies the struggles at hand. Lowe misses that settler workers — in their strikes, massacres, lootings — had just as much a determining stake in this struggle as the factured settler bourgeoisie. What clinched exclusion was the alliance between the most vicious elements of the settler bourgeoisie and these new reinforcements of settler labor rabidly against any exploitation of Asian labor. She ends up regressing into a explanation of the process as a top-down attempt by capital to profit off “dividing the working class”, i.e. capital profited by producing racial and gendered difference in concrete labor and not by abstract labor. This is obviously nonsense (and IMO, Day is way too nice to Lowe for literally dismissing a basic tenet of political economy). What Day demonstrates above is how surplus-value was produced by abstracting racial and gendered concrete labor. The concept of romantic anti-capitalism emphasizes that the ideology of white labor was an organic and necessary misperception, with its settler, petty bourgeois class basis and its material interest in disciplining and eventually excluding Asian labor.

Contra Lowe, the capitalist state attempts to reconcile class struggles in the service of preserving bourgeois society as a whole (as with the legal restriction of the working day in nineteenth century England). In Amerikan westward expansion, this meant throwing the bones of the Chinese to the garrison forces of white labor standing guard over Amerikan conquered territory. In the interests of preserving settler social harmony, the Euro-Amerikan state threw Chinese labor out of production and Amerikan society altogether with the 1882 Exclusion Act—a world-historical victory for democratic socialists.

This occurred in other settler colonies around the same time, as in the 1885 Klanadian Head Tax (instituted after the CPR was completed) and the White Australia and New Zealand Policies. What’s worth noting here is that there were several pockets of Chinese communities in the Jim Crow South that did not experience the scale of the violent, annexationist progroms in the West (former slavers had attempted to import Chinese labor from California, Cuba, and China for plantation work but this experiment ended due to costliness and the defeat of Reconstruction.) As opposed to racialization in the west where Chineseness was aligned with an impoverished and perverse domestic and civic life, these communities moved closer to white society over time, attending white churches, supporting white community organizations, discouraging association and intermarriage with Black people, etc. There’s a lot of discussion in the book on racial triangulation and logics of elimination and exclusion, but this is out of the scope of this post for now. I’ve not watched Sinners yet but perhaps someone here can discuss how it represents that particular system of racial triangulation and its corresponding ideological forms.

Conclusion

As Day demonstrates, value is the central, but disappearing, motor which animates these aesthetic and racial commodity fetishes. Romantic anti-capitalism was* the ideological weapon of white petty-bourgeois annexationism, the way in which settler labor made sense of the genocidal struggle it waged to annex Asian labor’s place in the economy of the west coast. Once Asian labor had outlived its usefulness to the settler bourgeoisie as a whole, romantic anti-capitalism gave the temporal, abstract domination of capitalism an Asian shape, as a foreign intruder disrupting the harmonious petty-bourgeois community. Of course, the domination of abstract labor originated internally from petty-bourgeois commodity production itself. Someone here recently brought up Beverly Best’s book on Capital Volume III and I did like how she put things here:

> The base/superstructure figure is sometimes dismissed, either as part of or in response to the charge of economic determinism. The formulation in the preface, cited above, is certainly emphatic and unequivocal: ‘The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.’ Rather than read this passage as an early iteration of an analysis that will become more nuanced as it develops, more open to a model of mutual determination or ‘conditioning’ of relative constituents (or, at least, open to reconstruction along these lines), Capital III is the protracted demonstration of these same social physics, just as described in the preface. In other words, Marx means exactly what he says […] As we will see, the movement of value, which takes form as productivity, pre-empts any real relativism between the differentiated parts of the capital machine, even if that is the working appearance of things. The derivation of capital’s forms (i.e., the function of abstraction) moves in one direction only. Social substance and its forms of expression (base and superstructure, if you like) are not mutually determining or conditioning. Since the 1970s, the configuration of capital has told a story about the dissolution of the performative boundaries that once demarcated the economy from the zones of politics, culture, science, art, and so on. This surface story is real; it is the outward, always-changing face of the particular, historical stage of development of capitalist accumulation (i.e., of global productivity, as we will see) that emerges in the second half of the twentieth century. It does not, however, signal the obsolescence of value and its determining operation.

I hope this was helpful for understanding the aesthetics of abstract labor from one point of view, especially today when the distinction between base and superstructure is not so easily discernable in the circulation of aesthetic commodities (some simple examples of this ideology: a few months ago, Qiao Collective reposted an insane reel of some moron explaining that China would win and the West would fall because China invests in productive capital and the decadent West gorges itself on financial and speculative capital. Oh the irony. There is also a relatively infamous "Marxist" Asian-Amerikan incel podcaster who believes that socialist revolutions took place in the East historically because Asians are better at math and thus can understand Capital better than Westerners. Last time I checked he was on the ACP hype-train.) If this encourages anyone to read the book or write more about texts that they read or watched that would also be a great success. While I focused on Chapter 1 here since there's a more political analogous chapter in Settlers, if I find the time I will try to post about the rest of the book as well, particularly the chapters on Japanese internment in Amerika and Klanada and post-Hart-Cellar Act Asian racialization.

*edit: and still is, as we might recall from recent Covid times (https://monthlyreview.org/articles/the-yellow-plague-and-romantic-anticapitalism/). I have no clue of the overlap between current-day "Chinamaxxers" and Covid-era anti-Asian racists, but clearly the pendulum continues to swing on the axis of civic ostracism and relative valorization. I'm interesting how Dengism and Sanderism-Third Worldism's entrance into mainstream culture and 'grass-touching' relates to this earlier ideological formation (and perhaps Chinese soft power projection). Many of the popular attempts to explain the phenomenon on tiktok et al seem to have no idea that the post-Trump 1.0 Dengist subculture even existed. And who can blame them? Here's a quote I saved many years back for how much it astounded me: > but it’s not like people in China are stupid they read Marx Lenin and Stalin too, why is it that they all think they live in a socialist state, albeit rife with contradictions and facing unique challenges due to their uses of markets you know.

Smoke is right that "Chinamaxxing" is much better sutured to our cultural logic of ironic detachment and playfulness, without these strained fidelities to "ML" or actual Chinese people. In any case, we should find it very heartbreaking that r/ Sino, Chapotraphouse, MoreTankieChapo, GenZedong, Deprogram, etc will never get their rightful dues. They should take as consolation the fact that their glorious annals will be preserved through references in the archives of this sub.

edit 2: some more on Lowe, since I went back to my notes and Immigrant Acts and realized I was pretty unfair to her argument besides the abstract labor bit.

u/Turtle_Green — 14 days ago
▲ 3 r/communism

what dose marx mean when he says barbarians?

i’m new to this, and i’m reading the manifesto, but his use of the phrase “barbarian country’s” is turning me off.

am i just soft? or is he saying it from the pov of the “civilized country’s”?

i’m confused

reddit.com
u/TacoBellTerrasque — 13 days ago