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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.

  • Chapo_is_Red [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Second paragraph: focusing on national liberation movements abroad led to leftist in the imperial core not organizing the working class.

    Commentary: I think there's something to this. Arguing about overseas conflicts or voicing solidarity with them when we have no power domestically is a way of seeming radical without actually engaging in politics.

    Third paragraph: main claim here is the "new left" was centered in race, not a rejection of "Stalinism" (originating from Kruschev).

    Commentary: this might be true for the western or US left, I don't know enough history to comment.

    Fourth paragraph: supporting any national liberation movement leads to supporting right wing movements.

    Commentary: I think the author is stating this is a move away from a principled position (like the domestic move away from class struggle).

    Final paragraph: I think the point here is the "victory" of WWII was pyrrhic.

    Commentary: I think the paragraph is gesturing that the USSR was on the winning side but at tremendous cost. Not just in resources but the end of the comintern, the beginning of the cold war (despite Stalin's hopes of detente w/ the US), and the definitive end of the radical experimentation of the earlier years of the USSR (this is the so called bureaucratization that Mao launched th cultural revolution to prevent in China).

    Ultimately, the paragraph is at least right in the sense that the USSR was arguably subject to revisionism immediately following Stalin's death. So despite everything Stalin did to shore up the party-state's power, he failed. And obviously the USSR eventually coup'd itself. This is not a victory despite whatever other accomplishments we might point to.

    Overall point: the left has been on its back foot for most of the last century. Capital has been winning whether we look at the western left or the Soviets.