Even if a communist can colloquially describe themselves as being on the left, there’s a distinction between communism and “the left.” This is implied right in the title of Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder. Whereas the left, a big tent term for a myriad of incompatible ideologies, aims merely to act as an opposition towards the present order for the sake of it, communists have a coherent vision for how to defeat the system: by advancing history’s development to the next stage. The left, because of its lack of commitment to that central Marxist goal, naturally takes on an opportunistic role. Because when you want only to build a movement as an end in itself, rather than use this movement as a means for defeating the system, you become nothing more than an actor who benefits from discontent without helping solve the problems behind that discontent.
Just gonna be candid here. This is not true. We have no coherent vision for decisively challenging the US. Our comrades in the PRC might have something close to a coherent vision that is being developed through cooperation with others in other countries. But us in the US are pretty lost.
Also, and hopefully this isnt too out of left field, but imo these writers gotta think more criticality about these ideas about progressive linear history. It must be pretty convenient to be a prophet of the coming age but it basically serves as apologetics for genocide, not to mention it can serve to actually advance capital by effectively enforcing primative accumulation. This is how the US Empire was built and its how global capitalism reproduces.
I don’t see how it’s a way forward to building solidarity between proletarians, peasants, Indigenous peoples etc. - which I think is absolutely and fundamentally necessary - by forcing a eurocentric veiw of progress that has destroyed so much already. If we treat this as a zero sum game of proletarian purity and supremacy just to justify our own proletarianization then we alienate other sections of the masses, needlessly make other class enemies, and even strengthen capital.
Big agree with you. Rainer is stuck in a thinking of every action must be “progressive”, but fails to see the dialectic of political and economic emancipation in a settler society.
He thinks the American War of Independence was progressive because it broke more feudal systems holding Capital back. Like Marx, he considers it progress on “political emancipation”, but disregards the collapse in political emancipation for enslaved Africans and indigenous people. How can the revolution have caused both political emancipation and de-emancipation? Because the emancipation of the settler was at the expense of the emancipation of the slaves and the occupants of desired territories for settlement.
He and the types of this mindset are ready to force “progress” upon the colonized groups. This comes in the form of projects that benefit the settlers at the expense of the indigenous. Like the dams in the PNW that killed off salmon and drowned native foraging land, as well as cultural sites.
The destination of this trend is emancipating the settler nation and doling out “emancipation” to the colonized in the form of us assimilating into their society.