“Comrades, come rally! The last fight let us face! The Internationale unites the human race!”
Comrades, after a bit of digestion, I think this should be promulgated and publicized, if at least for discussion purposes.
The international Communist movement is not in good shape. We are facing the combined crisis of failed revolutions, liberal subversion, aging parties, and mounting fascism, and traditional Communist praxis no longer offers a solution to the need for a global socialist revolution.
To solve these crises, I introduce the notion of Dengist revolution and Communist Zaibatsu as a solution, using Party-owned industrial cooperatives as a mechanism for global Communist subversion, with the end goal of abolishing capitalism simply by out-competing the capitalists and ultimately buying them out.
As for replacement Praxis, I suggest embracing Stakhanovitism, looking to encourage existing Communist parties to go into business, as well as for new start-ups to seek a worker cooperative model and aim to be party-owned.
Examples to learn from would be the Japanese Communist Party’s influential newspaper, which earns the JCP 110 million USD a year, Mondragon, a European industrial cooperative with more than 60,000 workers, Haier, a Chinese SOE known for its radical organizational structure and exceptional growth, and Huawei, technically a worker’s cooperative but generally so successful that the United States levied sanctions on it.
Here are the problems of existing Communist praxis.
The Soviet Union has fallen, and the Chinese have gone Dengist. There is no longer a serious and viable base of Actually Existing Socialism to support, nor can the Soviets continue to fund foreign Communist Parties.
Consequently, Communist parties are no longer vibrant and powerful in much of the world. Worker’s revolution simply does not succeed; most parties are in incipient stages globally, and are essentially doomed to stillbirth.
Illegal action, as with the Japanese Red Army, or the Japanese Red Army faction may make the news for a couple of years, but the forces of reaction generally track down the members, then jail or kill them.
Unionizing action, in much of the world, simply does not get that far, and it can easily be subverted by social democracy increasing government subsidies and protections to workers.
The electoral strategy does not work. The actual Communist Parties with electoral dominance got their way through an insurgency (the Nepalese), or simply by being there after the fall of the Soviet Union (the Mongolians).
The Japanese Communist Party, as an example, is graying and aging, and its representation in the Japanese Diet is on a long-term decline.
The remaining two options are either to wait for the downfall of capitalism on its own accord (late-stage capitalism theory), or to hope the Chinese somehow bail Communism out.
The problem with the former option is that due to bourgeois control of bourgeois democracy, the degeneration of capitalism sees the rise of far-right parties (as in France, Germany, Italy), right-wing populists (the United States), and the terminal stage of capitalism is fascism, which often does a good job of suppressing Communist movements.
Praying to the Communist Party of China is fraught with its own risks. First, the Communist Party of China may not succeed. There are Western rumors that they managed to subvert the Chinese defense minister, there is strong Sinophobia in the West, the Chinese state and corporate sector is saddled with high levels of debt (around 120% of GDP in each, whereas 100% usually sets off alarm bells in capitalist democracies), and the Chinese are threatened by the most powerful and advanced military force on the planet.
Second, there is no guarantee that the CPC will bail you out. While the CPC claims to be Marxist, it has already embraced capitalism in the sense of Dengist reforms, and it’s always had nationalist memetics.
Even if the Chinese win, you are not guaranteed that the Chinese, seeing the wreck of the West, won’t behave in the same way as the Americans did to the fallen Soviet Union, and through malign neglect, allow the West to fester in fascism.
If the Chinese aren’t guaranteed to save us from capitalism, what options do we still have?
Here is where I introduce the concept of Communist Zaibatsu and the Dengist Revolution, exhorting Western and international Communist parties to follow the CPC’s lead in developing a modern, competitive, and powerful Communist nation-state.
The incredible thing is, you don’t even need to seize the means of production, whether electorally or through other means.
To begin with, one oft-overlooked fact is how ridiculously rich the CPC is. The total level of assets managed by the Chinese central government and the localities is around the level of 40 trillion USD.
You heard right, the Communist Party of China owns 40 trillion dollars worth of stocks and companies.
The richest Communist Party in the West, the Japanese Communist Party, owns only 1.1 billion worth of companies, mainly its newspaper.
The total market capitalization of the New York Stock Exchange is only about 45 trillion. The total net wealth of all of America, haute bourgeoisie, petites, and workers alike, comes up to 120 trillion.
What I am exhorting you to do, then, is to make your own Communist parties rich. The essence of Dengist revolution, as opposed to Maoist (Protracted People’s War) and Leninist (a coup against a weakened moderate state), is to control the means of production through capitalist mechanisms.
That is to say, if the wealth of Communist Parties in the West were a substantial percentage of total privately held wealth, Communist Parties could employ the exact same means bourgeois individuals and entities use to influence the levers of power.
This would allow Communist Parties to gradually manipulate the political system to favor their own firms, allowing further expansion of the co-op / party-owned enterprise model, with a goal of eventually just buying out some of the remaining capitalists and abolishing the rest.
The goal is that in 20 years, the POE sector of various Western countries comprises 1% of total production, in 30 years, 10%, and in 40 years, we will have abolished capitalism from the inside.
What then, are the means?
partial post (will get back to this later, but:
-Generate worker cooperatives that are substantially party owned to outcompete existing capitalist firms
-Most of the details would be in how to obtain market advantage and start outcompeting Porky
-As well as keeping the firms Marxist, where “unfair labor practices” are acceptable, where they are not
-How to design a socialist economy inside of a capitalist one
-How much it would cost for Communist parties to attempt such a project, what potential funding sources may be, etc
-Actual praxis of existing Communist workers)
I do think that there may be a need for re-evaluation of tactics and strategies in the present and in the imperial core but I don’t think this is it.
This kind of reminds me of that meme of the academic standing in front of a blackboard with mathematical theorems and for step 2 it has “then a miracle happens” and the other guy standing next to him saying he should elaborate more on what happens there.
Why would the capitalists, having the high-ground, having pre-existing access to power, having built a fortress in terms of superstructure, loyal dogs in the halls of power and violence and so on just allow this to happen instead of using violence, subversive tactics, laws, etc to simply crush the communist led businesses or subvert them in some way either overtly by seizing control or value or through subversion, infiltration, use of the CIA, FBI, etc to poison the movement and turn it against itself, to turn it into a compromised asset of sorts?
They’d murder the true proponents of such thinking and replace them with dishonest businessmen who’d promise the same but keep the keys in their pocket and then pull out the rug on their workers in 10 years time and pocket the value. Which would dispirit others from trying and convince most people it was all just a scam.
They can simply ban the communist parties. Simply ban businesses affiliated with them. Simply take all their assets under a communist control or anti-foreign agents law and then sell them cheaply to competitors at government auction.
Also how would we working within the system be able to out-compete them who have value extracted from the global south via imperialism/neo-colonialism as well as generationally hoarded wealth? By working harder? Exploiting ourselves harder than they can exploit their workers? Than they can exploit desperate climate migrants? I don’t think this is a good plan for privileged westerners under the thumb of a capitalist government. For peoples who’ve lived in absolute poverty, starvation, knowing want and suffering and backwardness for generations sure it’s an easy sell as it was in China when they began industrializing but people tend to want better conditions, not to voluntarily subject themselves to conditions much worse than those of their parents all in the hopes that in some decades not that they’ll be financially secure within capitalism because of work but that they’ll maybe buy it out or overthrow it if they’re not crushed and sabotaged in the meantime. (Hence why they will be sabotaged early and often to dispirit and discourage people)
I mean they could simply levy new huge, punishing taxes across the board then give tax breaks, special exemptions, bail-outs etc to the capitalist controlled enterprises while siphoning the value from the collective enterprises straight to the imperialist machine and handing some of it back to the capitalists while using the rest to continue to fund the global and domestic oppression.
I mean where is the capital for starting to do all this supposed to come from? To start up companies, means of production you need money. People lending a bit of labor and free-time on their weekends isn’t going to create machinery or produce the capital for buildings, staff, etc. When the people who actually have this capital are either PMC type workers who benefit from the continuation of capitalism and would rather not work harder to beat others for an ideological project or the capitalists themselves who’d only fund such a thing to subvert it, pull the rug out and take the profit from all the hard work I just don’t understand how this gets off the ground without foreign interference like China funding it which would get it instantly shut down for foreign communist subversion that’s a threat to national security. Will the liberal compromised unions give us the funds? I think not. The communist parties in the US are either compromised and full of liberals (CPUSA) or still struggling to grow and hardly have the capital and funds for such.
Also I’m pretty sure there’s a law on the books about communist parties owning businesses in the US or at least newspapers but it could be expanded.
Your examples:
The JCP is awful, communist in name only. They follow the imperialist line, attack China, are revisionist, liberal, etc. They’re harmless and a false path which is why they’re allowed. They also as you note are powerless and losing steam. Let’s not say being trots is good, your idea is out-competing capitalists but they’re not competing in the communist newspaper market, trots have had that cornered for decades but have gone nowhere.
Mondragon is simply an exception not a rule, it’s allowed to exist and isn’t in any way working towards buying out and overthrowing capitalism and if it was it would probably have been crushed. Contradictions exist under capitalism and they exist under socialism, they are not proof of anything but that fact itself.
Haier and Huawei exist under the coat and wings of an in-power revolutionary communist party in a nation that’s been ideologically communist for over half a century now. And as you note one of them is being blockaded from the west essentially as part of a push to contain China.
I’d like to put out a fuller response, but I’d rather have fully posted the OP.
I think Hazan put out a similar idea for how he’d want to build the ACP, but I think he’s oversimplified things and hasn’t identified the flaws, even at a minimum stage. I think the ACP, in general, is not qualified for his business plan of having party cells operate as enterprises, and it’ll rapidly go down the sink for that reason.
As for your criticism concerning capitalist opposition, the simple way to do it is simply to publicly list the POE / industrial cooperatives (but not the party itself) once the business is viable, taking care to maintain worker / party control, but allow the bourgeoisie to buy stakes.
It’s Dengist insofar as that’s how Deng and China succeeded; capitalists will sell you the rope that will hang them, if they think it’ll make them a quick buck. If, say, Blackrock and/or Goldman own a 30% stake, you essentially have cover from elements of the capitalist system, because they want to protect their investment.
As an addendum, part of the idea is simply to have a lopsided incentives structure (in at least some of the firms within Red Zaibatsu) such that the business HAS to be Marxist in order to function. To cut to the chase, the level of labor discipline and pay is such that you won’t work at a Red Zaibatsu-held firm unless you were ideologically committed, and if these firms somehow lose their Marxist character, it simply no longer makes sense to work at such a company.
It’s what I’d bring up as to how Huawei works (Huawei is abusive insofar as its prospective long-term employees are expected to sign a strivers’ contract pledging dedication to the firm, which includes being assignable across the planet as the company sees fit, and working extremely long hours. Note that Huawei is still a worker’s cooperative with profit sharing).
The ideological commitment to socialism, in my view, is the competitive advantage that allows “vanguard-type” (not all Party-held firms are vanguard-type) firms to defeat their capitalist competitors, and if you destroy the system of worker and party ownership while capitalists are invested, well, you just forced Goldman / Blackrock to take a huge haircut on their investment, because the company is no longer competitive. That protects the Party-owned economy from the wider capitalist system.