#like apart from the campism

[metamatar]

blogger with bad politics made a good post on historical materialism

[theculturedmarxist]

Pure Camp

The essay "Is the enemy of my enemy my friend?" was shared with me by one of my followers, who also asked for my thoughts on it. I thought I'd share them here, since the interview makes a number of points that are too much to comment on in the space of a DM.

In the interview, Barnaby Raine talks broadly about Campism, or what can be described as politics divested from international popular struggle and instead centered on the interests of states.

Campist politics makes a certain kind of claim about deflection: it reads class struggles, the bread and butter of Marxist politics, as overwhelmingly deflected into struggles between states.

So if you want to understand the world of class struggle in the 20th century, the older style campists basically said, “the real class struggles are actually deflected away from being worker vs boss in New York or London, and into the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. Geopolitics is the real terrain of struggle.” The United States led the “imperialist camp”; the Soviet Union led the “anti-imperalist camp.”

It's a sort of politics in which even Leftists, well meaning as they may be, end up supporting imperialist, capitalist regimes, or other reactionary movements for one reason or another, though typically because they're not the United States. I agree with Raine's assessment that Leftists aren't throwing in with them because they really believe they're building a better world, but

they look to these states for some small crumbs of opportunity in the possibility of resisting the global tide of American dominance.

There is a pessimism at work here. To be honest, there's a lot to be pessimistic about. Need I give an example? Throw a stone in any direction and you'll hit some ongoing disaster. The circumstances are made all the worse by the fact that there isn't even the semblance of an international movement to deal with them, by which I don't mean the bourgeois constellations of Non-Governmental Organizations or Country Clubs like the Kyoto Protocols or whatever, but an international organization of the working class. Without an international movement aiming to put real power into the working class to put a stop to these crises, campism is all but inevitable.

[...] I think those people who don’t believe we can do any better than the defense of states like China, Syria, Cuba, and sometimes even North Korea, as building blocks in a feeble global antagonism against the overwhelming dominance of American power.

Every success of countries pushed to the fringe, whether in Libya or Cuba or North Korea, is clung to like flotsam by a drowning man. Capitalist power seems so vast and indisputable that the only hope is for some foreign power to be able to oppose it. Even the pro-indigenous sentiments here on tumblr are a manifestation of this, as though the governments that have been successfully crushing them for the past several hundred years are going to finally be stopped this time if the natives are given enough "support." It's a manifestation of hopeless desperation.

It's difficult to imagine any sort of alternative to the status quo, so people are desperate for something, anything, anyone, to crack things apart enough to get just a gasp of fresh air. People on twitter joke about Uncle Xi sending jets to liberate the American people from their oppressive oligarchs, but there's a kernel of truth in it. When people rush to defend the regimes in Syria or North Korea, it isn't because in their hearts they love Assad or Kim, but because they want to protect the notion that things can be different and new ways of doing things can succeed, even in the face of the entire weight of the imperialist apparatus.

I think Raine has a definite point in coupling these feelings with a nostalgic desire among Leftists to reclaim the legacy and accomplishments of 20th century socialism, and to be a powerful force in the world again. Governments around the world definitely fear the specter of Communism, but for them it's a well settled and managed fear. Workers' movements are only just beginning to re-emerge in the US, but even in light of recent successes, the share of unionized workers is lower than ever.

I think it’s important to name a problem of imperialist realism, an inability to think well beyond imperialism so that all you can do if you’re opposed to American imperialism is take a different side in the inter-imperialist conflicts.

This is something I've been trying to develop in my mind recently. The Ukraine conflict is just the most recent example where so much of the online argument is centered around who to support, who is worthy of support, whether or not you're evil for not supporting this or that, or not supporting it hard enough. I've been doing what I can to point out instances of propaganda when I come across them, particularly Western propaganda, but whether or not you buy into the propaganda, buying into this framing brings about the same result. We on the Left have to move beyond the Capitalist framing of Capitalist conflicts. We have to develop our own method of analyzing events and our own language of communicating about them that necessarily excludes the sort of reasoning and conclusions inherent to Capitalist ideology.

And so I think, contemporary campism reflects this tension between an extreme kind of pessimism, and a desperation to feel a certain kind of optimism, to just allow yourself to believe in something and to give doubt a rest for a moment, and to believe that there might be a better world out there somewhere.

I think that language has to be unapologetically and unflinchingly optimistic. We have to start speaking with confidence, not just in our theory, but in ourselves, not just in the possibility of a new world, but in the certainty that we can build it--that it will be built, regardless of what roadblocks the Capitalists try to build in its path.

We have to recognize that pessimism and cynicism at this stage are counterproductive and counterrevolutionary, and that it's time to start dreaming again.