[Marxism] Moral Effluvia Over China/Taiwan - or Boardgame Marxism

["M. Junaid Alam" <mjunaidalam@xxxxxxxxxx>]

There has been a rather silly series of postings, probably like 15 over
3 days, mostly by Comrade Feldman, in wihch he makes these half-baked
assertions based on one or two articles, and then re-posts 5 minutes
later to clarify this or that sentence's meaning. The whole thing is
poor theatre - imagine, sitting behind a computer screen in the US
trying to play boardgame geopolitics and "determine" which countries
have the right to exist and which are merely "artificial", from
thousands of miles away. I know Marxists are an ambitious bunch, but
maybe we American ones should get our shit together here in America
before worrying about whether some other country is "real" enough to
respect the fact that it exists.

Feldman's approach is not Marxist analysis, or really any analysis at
all. Rather,  it is working one's way backward from a set of predefined
political slogans and *conclusions* made my Marxists a long time ago
about oppressor vs. oppressed nations based on a balance of forces and
political *realities* that no longer exist. That is a highly mechanistic
approach. China is not some beleagured socialist nation fighting off
"imperialism". China aspires to imperialist status. It is nonsense to
talk about the whole of China as if we are talking about a monolithic
proletarian force - just as it is nonsense to talk about America as a
monilithic bourgeois force. There is no socialist bloc, not that it was
ever really a unified bloc when it even existed. China's leadership is
committed to capitalism because it is committed to the preservation of
its own power.

All this talk of shooting people in the head if they don't support
anti-colonial struggles is very dashing, and much preferable to that
wing of Marxism which now calls itself   post-modernism/neo-Marxism, but
we are not talking about a colony here in the first place. Sure, Taiwan
may have been *used* as a proxy against Chinese socialism, but that does
not mean that *defines* Taiwan. And the Chinese power brokers have done
much more to destroy socialism in China than anyone over in Taiwan.

Now whether you support or applaud China's rise to power out of a desire
to see US unipolarity challenged is one thing, but let's not have any
illusion about what that entails: an inter-imperial rivalry (which at
this point is far more cooperation than rivalry), not some grand
resurrection of capitalism v. socialism subsumed across national lines.
That phase of history is over.

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