Red Patch

“Let them eat tokens.”

Haiti's odious “independence debt” — a 150-million-franc penalty compensating France for its lost slave “property” — was held by the Crédit Industriel et Commercial bank, which financed the construction of the Eiffel Tower. “Every monument to civilization is a monument to barbarism.” ~Walter Benjamin

“The Economist, that optimist conjuror of all things menacing the tranquil minds of the mercantile community…” ~Marx

“The ideology and program of fascism ... are merely an intensification of attitudes which have already been shown to be characteristic of imperialism. ...Foreigners and racial minorities are blamed for misfortunes the nature of which is not understood. So far as internal economic and social problems are concerned the program of fascism is a mass of ill-digested and often mutually contradictory proposals which are notable chiefly for their unmistakably demagogic character. ... What gives to fascism coherence and vitality is its stress on nationalism, its demand for the restoration of a strong state power, and its call for a war of revenge and foreign conquest. It is this which provides a firm foundation for rapprochement between fascism and the capitalist class.” ~Paul M. Sweezy

One of the greatest achievements in bourgeois gaslighting (or greatest failure of Marxist pedagogy; take your pick) has been this massive conflation in our political imaginary between personal property (individual claims on use values) and capitalist property relations: persuading normies that the (faceless, sinister, hivelike, foreign) “Reds” are itching to bust down their door and confiscate/collectivize their dog, their coffeemaker, their potted plants, their picket fence, their Playstation, or their favourite pair of slippers. The only form of property which revolutionary socialism seeks to “abolish” is the kind (over productive apparatuses or “fixed capital”) that dispenses its owners from having to perform labour, while allowing its owners to claim a share of the value produced by other people's labour. Put in these terms, it’s obvious that 99% of us have absolutely nothing to fear from “the abolition of private property,” and as for the 1%, well, they can be dealt with by other means than persuasion. 😏

I sometimes wonder if the Chinese learn “too much” from history (in the way that we in the West are said to learn too little). Bethune’s idealism, the 250 million bushels on credit during the famine, or Pierre Trudeau’s principled gesture of recognition are dangerous forms of “knowledge” when dealing with the hyena-headed raptor Canada has become.

“On one side a worn-out engine [i.e. the election cycle] which, turning incessantly in its vicious circle, is never able to move a single step forward, and the impotent process of friction by which all the official parties gradually grind each other into dust; on the other, the advancing mass of the nation, threatening to blow up the vicious circle and to destroy the official engine.” ~Marx

Bourgeois hot take: “I refuse to study the cosmos, because chaining yourself to ‘theories from the early 20th century’ is a lazy way of dealing with reality.” 🤡

Has the sordid history of colonialism ever produced a more disgraceful scene? Defeated African chiefs, forced to prostrate themselves before their pith-helmeted conquerors, retained more humanity and dignity than this insufferable handmaiden of empire.

“Finance capital does not want freedom, but domination… It needs a politically powerful state which … will ensure respect for the interests of finance capital abroad, and use its political power to extort advantageous supply contracts and trade agreements from smaller states; a state which can intervene in every corner of the globe and transform the whole world into a sphere of investment for its own finance capital. Finally, finance capital needs a state which is strong enough to pursue an expansionist policy and the annexation of new colonies… The old free traders believed in free trade not only as the best economic policy but also as the beginning of an era of peace. Finance capital abandoned this belief long ago. … The ideal now is to secure for one's own nation the domination of the world, an aspiration which is as unbounded as the capitalist lust for profit from which it springs. Capital becomes the conqueror of the world, and with every new country that it conquers there are new frontiers to be crossed. These efforts become an economic necessity, because every failure to advance reduces the profit and the competitiveness of finance capital, and may finally turn the smaller economic territory into a mere tributary of a larger one. They have an economic basis, but are then justified ideologically by an extraordinary perversion of the national idea, which no longer recognizes the right of every nation to political self-determination and independence... Instead the economic privileges of monopoly are mirrored in the privileged position claimed for one's own nation, which is represented as a 'chosen nation'. … An oligarchic ideal of domination has replaced the democratic ideal of equality.” ~Rudolf Hilferding