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I have no idea what the video is trying to say. It starts with Fanon:

Wretched of the Earth is a capitulation to Black Nationalism, Third Worldism. He's acknowledging the further degeneration of the global situation. Fanon was the eminent dialectical critic, or the negative dialectical critic, of the Third World Revolution.

Anti-Imperialism, the affirmation of decolonization, was one-sided. It became a way for the Western Left to avoid the task of rebooting mass working class movement for socialism in the core of capitalism.

That question was posed circa. 1956, that's what we mean by the New Left. The task of creating a New Left was glimpsed, and it was bound up with race. The single biggest trigger of the global New Left was not Khrushchev's 20th Party Congress Speech, it's Civil Rights in the United States.

By the end of the 1970s, it's clear that there's no New Left, the New Left failed to create the New Left, and it's uncritical affirmation of decolonization results in the complete degeneration of decolonization. What does the anti-colonial movement look like? It looks like the Iranian Revolution. It's openly right-wing.

What Stalinism means, it's not like an authoritarian movement, or Russian domination or whatever, what it means is liquidation of historical consciousness. And the way that you do that is by calling defeat, victory. You can't learn anything from a defeat if you call it victory. The most relevant form of that is the Stalinists claming that they defeating Fascism in 1945 as part of the upward and onward global development of communism. That's a lie. That is calling a defeat, victory. That is a liquidation of historical consciousness of what had happened since the crisis of the Revolution of 1917.

I really don't understand what he's trying to say.

  • Hmm [none/use name]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Okay, so having seen Spencer Leonard, who by profession is a historian of India, speak a few times I think this is his general idea (don't take this as me necessarily agreeing with it):

    The left has been trapped in focusing on national liberation movements since the aftermath of Russian Revolution. Basically, after the failure of the global socialist revolution that they were hoping to bring about, the answer that Lenin et al. arrived at to the question of "Where do we go from here?" was supporting national liberation movements, which were on the upswing at the time.

    Since then, this doctrine has becone dogma to the point of undermining the ability of doing organizing at centers of capitalism without critical reflection on what strategy for the left would actually be effective at reaching the goal of the proletariat carrying out world socialist revolution. Instead of organizing the proletariat in the US, the American left has resorted to supporting decolonization in ineffective ways, even if it's taking a reactionary form without it actually bringing proletarian revolution any closer and the seeming victories are undermined at best. The 50 Year Counterrevolution after the Civil Rights Era is one example of an undermined victory that This Is Revolution talks about quite a bit. Another example might be Vietnam, where some argue the US didn't lose given the global position, economic structure, etc. of Vietnam today (iirc Chomsky is one of the people that takes this position).

    With respect to what Stalinism is, I've also heard this definition also from Chris Cutrone (another polemicist in the Platypus Affiliated Society and its former president). Basically, they identify the core of Stalinism as portraying defeats in the revolution as victories. For example, saying "It's great that we have this strong NKVD!" when this is actually a defeat since needing such a powerful secret police undermines the democratic character of proletarian revolution. (Now, this is certainly a more coherent definition of Stalinism than we normally see, although personally I'd say they need to make sure to bring up this definition whenever they use the term Stalinism with a more general audience because not doing so leads to confusion.)