(Part 2) Best products from r/Marxism

> Surely you aren't suggesting his entire bibliography is rotten through and through and nothing of use can be salvaged?

No, but it is so riddled with corrosive antirealism, subjectivism, and Nietzsche's aristocratic power plays that salvaging it involves amputating the rotten arms and legs in order to save the productive fingers and toes.

Catherine MacKinnon put it best:

>"The postmodern version of the relation between theory and practice is discourse unto death. Theory begets no practice, only more text. It proceeds as if you can deconstruct power relations by shifting their markers around in your head. Like all formal idealism, this approach to theory tends unselfconsciously to reproduce existing relations of dominance, in part because it is an utterly removed elite activity. On this level, all theory is a form of practice, because it either subverts or shores up existing deployments of power, in their martial metaphor. As an approach to change, it is the same as the conventional approach to the theory/practice relation: head driven, not world driven. Social change is first thought about, then acted out. Books relate to books, heads talk to heads. Bodies do not crunch bodies or people move people. As theory, it is the de-realization of the world.

It's not an accident that Foucault overtly embraced neoliberlism, or that his epigones are typically utterly removed elites who are hostile to the working class -it is the cultural logic of late-capitalism and trapped in a prison-house of language as far past its expiration date as a linguistic and semantic theory date as hylomorphism is as a theory of matter.

While Foucault asked some interesting questions we might be able to salvage by providing better answers, his own answers and framework ("discourse") has been a cancer on the left which needs to go.

I would recommend "Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century" by John Smith.

Note that the thesis is that capitalism does not require wars as much as it used to. But the central argument is that attempts by capital to sustain its reproduction are starting to reach their limits which is setting off new kinds of geopolitical competition; the war on Iraq being as much an attempt to intimidate China as it was to secure oil supplies.

• Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (2004)
  
• Lineages of Revolt: Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East (2013)
  
• Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States (2011)
  
• America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (2006)
  
• Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (2011)
  
• The Battle for Saudi Arabia: Royalty, Fundamentalism, and Global Power (2003)
  
  You can find some more citations for articles and journal papers too from the bibliography of this essay on US imperialism and Saudi Arabia

Seek mental help. At one level the answer is that Marxists are right: the revolution was supposed to happen in a highly developed country and the socialist system was dependent on the plenty that an industrial economy could bring. ("Red Plenty" is good on this. take a good peak at it on your kindle if you don't mind spending the change: https://www.amazon.com/Red-Plenty-Francis-Spufford/dp/1555976042)

Neither Tsarist Russia nor China were the right place according to Marx's theory. But somehow many Marxists seemed to forget the theory and the iron laws of history once the USSR was established.

Stalin's war crimes, human rights violations, purges, little bizarre anti-semitic campaign disguised as going after the "rootless cosmopolitan" https://www.rbth.com/history/327399-stalin-versus-soviet-jews (hypocritical given his claims supposedly bashing the ideology, and the historical Jewish presence among leftist groups leading up to the Revolution) are well documented. I don't need to explain that to you or drag it out here, if you wish to willingly ignore it and assume it's all "western bullshit" then have fun in the asylum. All you have is ignorance and blindness to the facts. http://blogs.bu.edu/guidedhistory/moderneurope/laura-hill/

China wasn't much better.

https://www.ft.com/content/762ad992-1be0-11e6-b286-cddde55ca122

China under Mao and the USSR (the same can be applied to the kim cult state today) weren't “true socialist” countries but rather “countries striving to build socialism”. This was their own claim until Khrushchev announced that the first part of socialism had been attained in the 1950s.

However, soviet (and, even more so, Chinese) “socialism” lacked the core feature that is meant to characterize the system; democratic control.

The command economy had a very unsocialist effect on society and disenfranchised ordinary people leading to an odd kind of bureaucratic, inefficient blend of state capitalism and feudalism.

In the end, the leaders in the USSR and China started to redefine socialism to justify their system but any real analysis of the way things worked in these societies feeds the conclusion that they were not socialist in the sense meant by Marx or even most of Marx’ rivals in the socialist movement.

The same thing happened in Cambodia under Pol Pot
http://endgenocide.org/learn/past-genocides/the-cambodian-genocide/
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/04/khmer-rouge-cambodian-genocide-united-states/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnVn2YzXypo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-SI8RF6wDE

Also in Ethiopia under the Derg . And I know many Ethiopians and Cambodians' parents that would testify to this firsthand. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX-I6HK_FSw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opqIf3dZ3xs

Not to mention the shit-show of the North Vietnamese so called "communists". BTW fuck the US, they were a bunch of corrupt imperialist genocidal maniacs during the war murdering and raping plenty of civilians, but war crimes were a plenty by the vietcong 'comrade's. Plus the Hmong were literally being genocided by other similar "comrades". https://www.metrotimes.com/detroit/laos-forgotten-killing-fieldsandquot/Content?oid=2174619

This was just a continuation of generations of anti-Hmong prejudice that already existed in Laos. The Pathet Lao killed dozens of people. https://sites.google.com/a/umn.edu/historpedia/home/politics-and-government/the-secret-war-and-hmong-genocide-fall-2012

And in countless other shit-shows masquerading as 'marxist thought'. Fake communists who were just either genocidal psychopaths or power-hungry despots. There was no intention of a true democratic worker's paradise or a stateless society in which the workers controlled the means of production. This was only terror.

You don't have to be a Marxist-Leninist to be credible in any way, shape or form. Lose that sectarian bullshit.