maskfutures

maskfutures OP wrote

Freedom Socialist, Vol. 28, No. 1 and “Why has no anticapitalist revolution been fully completed? What holds the working class back? Trotsky says a major factor to be the treachery of its own opportunist leadership, the middle caste.

“In 1982, in a political resolution written for the Freedom Socialist Party, Murry Weiss, Sam Deaderick, and Clara Fraser expand[ed] on Trotsky's analysis about the nature of this misleadership, and how it retarts, derails, and deflects workers' revolt. Entitled ‘The Precarious '80s, Crisis and Opportunity,’ their work provides invaluable insight for activists today. Below are excerpts[:]

“Trotsky used the phrase ‘middle caste’ in The History of the Russian Revolution to describe the social stratum which seized and held power between the February 1917 revolution and the October 1917 Bolshevik victory. This caste, he wrote, was a ‘petty bourgeois partition-wall between the revolutionary masses and the capitalist bourgeoisie.’...

“The middle caste diffuses, derails, and when pressured, violently combats any substantive confrontation between capital and labor. This caste claims to represent labor or women or gays or people of color or war resisters or consumers, but actually acts as a transmission belt that carries the interests and ideology of the ruling class back into the very mass movements it pretends to lead. “The maintenance of peaceful coexistence is the middle caste's business, all the way from international politics to the shop floor. The middle caste is not a class; it does not have a precise relationship to the means of production. The term describes a social layer whose members may span class lines but who play an identical political role: pacification of the class struggle. Its interests and program are petty bourgeois, middleclass, not proletarian.

“In fact, the equilibrium between the ruling class and the middle caste is the critical social glue which has maintained capitalist rule long after capitalism as a system has become outdated and retrogressive. But for middle-caste treachery and betrayal, world revolution would have long since triumphed.

“The class interest of the bourgeoisie lies in its need to subdue, defeat, and exploit the working class for profit...In the USA, the middle caste is that vast and obnoxious layer of opportunist professionals, technocrats, labor bureaucrats, mass movement reformist leaders, and slightly left-of-center politicians...They channel the radical impulses of others into reformist directions. They foster the illusion that humane capitalism is a possibility, that we can reform our way to equality and utopia. Their function is to conciliate and compromise, make deals and keep the peace.

“U.S. capitalism faces a working class growing, by necessity, more militant. Inflation, unemployment, speed-up, and loss of benefits proceed apace, and racism, sexism, homophobia, and ageism are on the rise. The traditionally high-paid aristocrats of labor are themselves facing the specter of layoff and contract concessions. And as the working class turns to militant struggle tactics for sheer survival, the labor bureaucracy is forced into left-sounding phrases to prevent real labor radicals from gaining adherents and leadership...The old equilibriums are crumbling. Direct, naked, and unmediated class confrontations are on the new agenda.

“The traditional mechanism of equilibrium between the rulers and the middle caste is the Democratic Party. There the bourgeoisie, reformists, bureaucrats, and social-patriot social democrats run an ugly game on the U.S. working class. But the game is being recognized in wider and wider circles as a con game...Labor's face is changing color and changing gender, and as it does, labor sees more clearly into the sham and shuck of the ruling class and the middle caste.”

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maskfutures wrote

Today, more than 400 American military bases encircle China with missiles, bombers, warships and, above all, nuclear weapons. From Australia north through the Pacific to Japan, Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India, the bases form, as one U.S. strategist puts it, ‘the perfect noose.’

Do you know how dangerous it is for China when it is surrounded on all sides by murderous imperialists? Read this several times until it sinks in if you have to.

China drew the line in 40s, before other countries made their own claims, also before the UNCLOS existed... Think about this for a minute (or an hour, if you have to). China was the first to lay claim. China put its flag down and called the territory for its people while the other powers had no interest....

If you believe China's claims to be overzealous, well, if you think a line that encloses 80% of the South China Sea isn't fair, do you think Vietnam's claim of 60% of South China Sea or capitalist Philippines 50% claim is best?

Who do you think leftists should trust with the territories? An actually socialist state like CPC or a fascist state like Duterte? Or Vietnam?

If you say Vietnam with its weak USD2082.20 per capita GDP, then you are ignorant. Look at China's strong USD8254.30 per capita compared to Vietnam. Which party do you think is in the position to hold onto the territory in the imperialist world? Would Vietnam even exist still if China didn't protect it? No, comrade, the USA would have destroyed Vietnam in the 80s.

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maskfutures wrote

Why do you use blonde blue eyed white folk in your propaganda? We should do better than this, try to be inclusive, international.

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