With the recent victory of Mamdani, I thought about sharing this video by Marxist-Leninist content creator Jones Manoel.
The whole video is in portuguese, but the automatic subtitles from youtube are pretty good here, with a few exceptions like getting a few names wrong and confusing “Hollywood” with “Dutch” for some reason.
Still, comrade Jones take seems pretty solid to me. He’s skeptical of Zohran’s actual power to enact any meaning change in NY, while also acknowledging the historical significance of his win as a Muslim and Palestine supporter, specially because it happened in the heart of the empire.
He also throws shade and criticism towards China and Vietnam in regards to the Palestinian genocide, which I think are well deserved, and since he is someone that constantly studies Brasil, and talks primarily to a Brasilian audience, he also talks about it in the context of the video.
What do y’all think about his take?
You mean Mamdani or Jones? That wasn’t clear to me. I will guess you mean Mamdani since you linked your comment about him. And mostly what you talked there is the exact same opinion from Jones in this video actually. Maybe I didn’t do a good job in the text body to present that, but he has no illusions with Mamdani, knowing full well that he’s a socdem and talks specifically about that, about how western “socialists”, specially those in the US, like Bernie and AOC, are not anti-imperialist and basically only care about the well-being of those living in the empire, which from that comment is your exact take too.
For your second linked comment. I haven’t watched the video linked there yet, but I have read your comment before, and I cannot fully agree with it. You are dismissing actual criticism by calling the people that do it “armchair dictats”. Going by that, Jones himself is then more than qualified to make that criticism he is doing here since he is a very prominent figure that constantly go to and help organize protests, doing multiple activities weekly all over Brasil, and constantly having Marxism reaching more people here, specially by destroying right-wingers in debates that tend to have a shit ton of views, while also writing theory and analysis himself.
Still, we can acknowledge that countries like the PRC are not inactive in the Palestinian cause, while also acknowledge that they are not doing enough. Personally I don’t think saying the US will simply drop nukes is a good excuse at all, it’s not like countries opposed to the US doesn’t have nukes too which deter them from doing such thing.
(Edited to add: yes about Mamdani being right of Kautsky and regarding the second issue please see below)
Has he / his organising won power, though, ie a dictatorship against capital? He may be a good person, potentially better than most of us, but marxism is a science.
I’ll put it a different way. To liberals if they ask about the state of underdevelopment of Cuba a marxist can easily explain from the lens of anti-imperialism and seige against socialism. However, amomgst marxists the above is a given so the question then becomes despite the above geopolitical onslaught how can Cuba accelerate their development (there is no easy answer here, I am positing this as a way of thinking about marxism as a science and taking a dialectical approach to difficult problems).
This is not a defence of the PRC, though it may sound like it, it is an attack on the lack of a scientific approach here. Essentially, one must ask, for example, why China should not do an economic blockade against the US if it is to do with Israel; and if we are to say should go ahead with the former then what are the lessons learned from the USSR that cautions against isolationism in a capitalist world order?
There aren’t neat answers to the above. But that is where one must consider what it takes to build socialism and what strategic concessions are made for scientific non-utopian socialism to survive (from China’s perspective).
From our perspective, we have to consider what have we done beyond debates and raising awareness to stop the genocide and ethnic cleansing from our respective countries and to scold China without acknowledging our own failures, and what we are going to do about those failures, is a way of scapegoating our lack of success whether intended or not.
Capital does not care if do not succeed against it due to submission or incompetence.
Marxism is a science. It does not matter how good our intentions are or how powerful the enemy is, when we fail we must understand why and how, and then re-strategise with a dialectical and scientifc lens on how to succeed.
I have to ask, have you watched the video to see what exactly he has said about China and Vietnam? It is not like his criticism is any less scientific than your analysis. I get what you’re saying, but I fail to see how that can justify China’s position on the issue right now.
And sure, China could technically go directly to blockading the US since they are the source of the genocide, but that’s asking for direct confrontation from a country that does not do this kind of confrontation. Yet, doing something against Israel is a completely different story. This is not about going all in or not, and I don’t think anyone expects them to do that.
But here’s the thing. Like comrade Jones has said in the video, Palestine cannot wait for China to turn internationalist again. We are talking about a literal genocide here, that the whole world is watching and letting happen, and China is not a poor country anymore still figuring things out, they are the second largest economy on the planet and constantly rising by all metrics. The same way that you question this criticism of China from the perspective of what it might take to run such a state, we can question how can they let this genocide happen when they have the power to do more, specially when they know very well what is like to be on the receiving end of colonization. Your arguments are important and completely valid, but there’s a bigger issue at hand, the erasure and ethnic cleansing of a whole nation.
If we were talking about why don’t Cuba or the DPRK help Palestine, that would be a completely different issue and I would agree with you here, but it is China we are talking about.
I also think you are not factoring in what the US can actually do against China. They can’t tariff China, they can’t blockade China, they can’t wage open war against China, to do so would just be a colossal bullet to their own foot, they don’t have the industrialization needed to fuck around with China, and they are not gonna reindustrialize anytime soon. Not only that but the US is already heavily involved in two armed conflicts at the moment (Ukraine-Russia War, Palestine genocide) and aiming for a third one (Venezuela invasion), all while also facing internal turmoil and increased polarization with the Trump administration.
Brasil is still capitalist, so no, but I don’t get how that is relevant to the issue at hand. His work or criticism does not become lesser just because he’s not in a position of power or burdened by such difficult decisions. I don’t expect anyone that is not Brasilian to be knowledgeable on his work, nor do I need to run defense for him, but if I’m not misunderstanding your intention with this question, this doesn’t seem fair, as it would mean only those in such positions can do this type of criticism. Like I said, he has done and is still doing a lot of work as a Marxist in Brasil. For reference, you can even find him quoted in this very site’s tagline sometimes:
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I agree completely with that. I think the issue here is that the Palestine cause is also a failure that needs to be factored in, after all, we are internationalists.
I think this sentiment may be partly what is wrong with the analysis. Later it is mentioned the ways the US cannot defeat China but we have to consider capital’s penchant for war is not beholden to such rationalisations. Put it this way: one is asking China and its peoples to burden the risk of war and escalation of aggression because Brazilians (in this context) have not managed to out organise the US to stop the genocide.
People like Manoel have helped more people become marxist than most people, and has done obviously significant amount of real world organising, and some of his writings have helped me too significantly and ironically (from a liberal sense, dialectical from a marxist perspective) may have contributed to the criticisms presented here. I hold him to very high regard so I don’t say what I do lightly.
Yes, but the US has already tried some of the things I mentioned and ended up backpedaling once the consequences of such actions hit their economy and their dominant class. I’m not saying they won’t do it because of these rationalizations. What I’m saying is that if they do it, the scales are not in their favor, they will suffer the consequences heavily of their own actions. They are an empire in decline.
What? We don’t have the power to do so. I wish we could just pressure our government to do something, but that’s materially impossible. We are a neoliberal country with a well spoken president, a vastly unprepared and unequipped heavily reactionary military and a heavily far right congress, all while having the Zionist Bolsonarismo ideology still being well alive in the population even if Bolsonaro himself has fell out of grace.
Yes, we are still extremely small as Marxists in Brasil. Yes we could be doing much better, but you can’t possible compare us and our situation to the US or China.
Even if we managed to do just what you’re saying. The moment us, a country with no nuclear weapons and a heavily unprepared army start doing anything against Israel on the ground, the US will immediately bomb our door to shreds. This is in no way comparable at all with what China can do and is actively failing to do.
Besides, you can use this argument for every single country on earth right now.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying we are also not responsible for letting the genocide happen. Like I said, no one is doing anything, everyone is complicit. We have been pressuring our government to stop trade with Israel, unfortunately with no success, even when Israel kidnaps Brasilians like it happened in the flotilla.
Yes, exactly. Why isn’t every marxist that blames China, for doing not enough against the genocide, managed not to organise sufficiently in their own country to stop the genocide themselves? It is why I brought up the Cuba as an example; against liberals it is easy to explain underdevelopment as a product of a siege against socialism but for marxist-leninists the point is to succeed despite that - the genocidal nature of capital is a given so how do we beat that?
Philosophers have interpreted the world, the point is to change it
I think we are talking past each other at this point.
The failure of Marxist movements elsewhere is not an excuse for China’s lack of action on Palestine. You can use my example of the conditions of why Brasil can’t meaningfully enact change on Palestine to other countries around the world and it would fit just as well because basically no country other than China right now have the material conditions to enact such change.
So, in this specific case, it doesn’t matter that we are failing, because even if we were not, and let’s say Brasil turns socialist tomorrow, it would still not be able to help Palestine in any meaningful way, because to reach such a stage it would take much more time than Palestine have left. Yet, China is at such stage right now.
So that idealism is the mistake.
If, for example, it is posited that certain deemed actions by China would consitute more than symbolism if China were to act upon them, then it is the duty of said non-chinese self-claimed marxist-leninists who believe in those paradigms then to organise so China can act. So go on then, do so.
If one isn’t going to do that, and instead throw their hands up in the air then one is admitting there is no praxis here:
Like I said in that second link there’s only a few groups of people in the whole world that could potentially hold the geopolitical high ground against China and each one of them come with caveats.
No matter how exasperating the situation we musn’t fall into liberal paradigms and have a dialectical approach. No matter how big the enemy feel it must be understood that capital contains its own seeds of destruction because it by definition has dependancies on those who resist it; it is this weakness that must be exploited, rather than resorting to supposed idealisms (powerful socialist country over there is not doing something that one thinks is important but for which as an ML one chooses nothing effectively to do aboutit) for which one chooses not to organise against because it is not in your material interests (yeah think what an anti-China rally by supposed communists saying that the PRC are not doing enough against the genocide will be effectively supporting in a global western hegemony for which the Global South is only collectively recently slowly turning against, only then because of their own capital interests). MLs should not have the luxury to hold on to idealisms devoid of dialectical praxis.
Socialism is not utopian; one must consider what the strategic concessions are needed to survive. I am reminded by Western Marxists who are aghast that McDonalds exists in China but that is what socialism looks like in that place in this timeline (there’s a lot to unpack in that last sentence for some).
Comrade, what idealism?
You are the one that claimed Marxists in the capitalist global south are at fault for not stopping the genocide, and now that I explained how that is materially impossible, you’re shifting the goalpost to say that these same Marxist are at fault because we can’t pressure China into doing something, while ignoring the material reality of China’s lack of Internationalism which they themselves set goals to return to by 2049. You are uncritically excusing China and labeling anyone that does the most tame criticism of them an idealist. By your logic we can’t criticize them at all since our country here is not socialist, how is that a Marxist position? Just because China is a DOTP doesn’t excuse them of making mistakes. It doesn’t guarantee they aren’t gonna miss or do wrong.
Expecting that a Marxist-Leninist state would do the bare minimum when faced with the option to do something against a genocide is not idealism. The Soviet Union materially supported struggles all over the world and when faced with the reality of their mistake in supporting Israel, turned around and corrected their failure. Meanwhile, China admits Israel is doing a genocide, condemns it, but won’t even stop trading with it.
No one is throwing their hands in the air, we can do more than one thing at a time, we can criticize China while doing agitprop in our country and while pressuring our government to do something, these are not mutually exclusive actions.
Ah yes, we criticize China because we are failures, not because they are the most powerful ML state in existence right now and one of the only states capable of doing something against a literal genocide. How is that not the idealism you accuse me of?
Like you’re doing right now by not even taking into consideration the material reality of countries worldwide in their capacity of doing something against the genocide and just saying we are a failure? Come on now.
If I’m not misinterpreting you here, I don’t think you’re aiming this at me and just putting it out there for other people that might read it. But I’ll use it as a disclaimer that I’m not a Western Marxist nor a Trot.
I support China and will continue to do so, but I’ll also criticize them when it is appropriate, they are not marbled gods incapable of mistake.