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Dialectical materialism considers that one thing can turn into its opposite. However, it is essential not to consider this to be some sort of displacement. Thus, the following diagram is wrong.

This diagram is wrong, because it implies that a thing is different from its opposite and that thus, turning into its opposite, there would be a transformation, a modification, a displacement.

According to dialectical materialism, what happens is that the opposite of a thing is, at the same time, that thing. Thus, there is no “transformation” when one thing becomes its opposite.

This is obviously tricky to grasp. It was not until Mao Zedong that dialectical materialism understood this process sufficiently. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is the fruit of this understanding: given that there is no “barrier” between a socialist China and a revisionist China, one should not imagine that revisionism would be based on a transformation, a modification, a displacement. The struggle was actually internal to Chinese society.

Hence the multiple aspects of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

Stalin, in the USSR, considered that revisionism would pass through points of fixation, which would initiate a displacement, a modification, a transformation. This was not the case and his mistake was his insufficient understanding, due to historical reasons, of the process of causing one thing to turn into its opposite.

In the diagram showing the flawed approach, the arrows symbolize the problem. If we say, when something turns into its opposite, that there is a modification, then we say that a thing is absolutely separate from its opposite. To become its opposite, a phenomenon would have to know a whole operation, a whole movement.

We are so led to value the place of “passage”, we are obliged to consider that, for something to be able to change, there would need a “place”, an airlock, a point of connection.

And this is foreign to dialectical materialism. It is even quite precisely, from a historical point of view, the theoretical justification of God.

Before dialectical materialism, the hypothesis of God was unavoidable for mankind. Incapable of grasping the movement of matter, of grasping the contradiction (especially between quantity and quality), of grasping unequal development… mankind idealistically founded its reflection on the principle of creation, action and reaction.

For something to exist, for something to happen, in this conception, there needs to be an “ideal” moment, a pure situation, a momentum (and indeed an outcome).

Hence the notion of the “divine” inspiration of the artistic or scientific “genius”, proceeding by “creation”, from nothing. This notion of creation implies that there is a “beginning” and an “end” to things that would be logically separated, isolated, different, unique, since “created.

Everything being what it is, and nothing else, for it to be able to change into its opposite (even admitting that it is possible), there needs to be a ground for it, an action. The conditions must be created.

In reality, one thing is also its opposite. This is true of socialism, which will be the same, even if reversed, of capitalism for a while, then of communism afterwards.

Socialism is indeed an overtaking of capitalism, that is to say its prolongation and its negation; at the same time, socialism is contrary to communism as it represents a more developed stage, towards which it naturally tends.

Communism itself will undergo transformations, becoming ever more complex with a series of internal oppositions. This is quite clear if we see the relationship with Nature, humanity having experienced an unequal development, leading it to be the opposite of Nature, and being at the same time this opposite, and becoming it again entirely again, in a more developed way.

Everything is always the opposite of something, being this opposite as well. The child has the adolescent he becomes as an opposite, the adolescent obtaining the fact of being an adult as the opposite, and so on. The adolescent is not the adult but at the same time he is it too, despite being his opposite.

We can see here that a multitude of derailments in human behavior stem from a misunderstanding of these qualitative differences and from a confusion aabout reality. Desires are directed towards a thing which is the opposite of a thing, with an assimilation of both, when in reality it is and is not this thing.

The adult man who turns to an adolescent derails because he confuses the adolescent with the woman, being in complete confusion about the thing and its opposite; the contradiction between man and woman can also be misunderstood and lead to disorientation where the thing is confused with its opposite.

There is of course also, even above all, a fetishistic attention to the notion of center, point of reference, reference frame. There is an inordinate value to the consideration that any phenomenon would have a “peak” corresponding to the transition from a one-sided rise to a unilateral descent.

There is an obsession with the search for a center, as in the Cartesian representation of a function (with values 0 and 0 on both axes). This is reproduced socially with the fascination for the one-sided leader, in the negation of the dialectical movement between the center and the base, but above all in the rejection of the universality of each thought which, ultimatelyreflects matter in motion.

This whole approach in terms of center, point of reference, frame of reference… is in fact used to reduce the complexity of phenomena, not to study their substance, to skirt the fact that any process, in its internal movement, obeys its own particular features, in a universal process of contradiction.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, with its multiple aspects, was precisely in China an operation to understand the modalities of the process of the transformation of red China into black China, in order to launch a counter-restoration to capitalist restoration. Its failure at the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 is a reminder that a counter-restoration can itself turn into its opposite, a counter-counter-restoration.

That this happened when Mao Zedong died may indicate that the error consisted in making him a center, a point of reference, a reference frame in the revolutionary apparatus, by failing to consider that it is a question of grasping all aspects of the transformation.

This question of changing from one thing to its opposite, of the absence of a place where to “move”, will require great attention in the future; it will make it possible to grasp essential aspects that are still not understood, such as viruses which are at the “crossroads” of living and dead by virtue of their qualities, forming a sort of nexus between life and death, without being able to be a center, a point of reference, a reference frame.

We have here the expression of a contradiction between the particular and the universal, but also the question of a deeper understanding of the fundamental interrelation of all the things which form, concretely, one and the same reality, an infinite and eternal universe composed of multiple layers like an onion, with movements like echoing waves.

[Published in Communism #14, July 2021.]

The formidable capitalist expansion of 1989-2020

Capitalism has experienced a tremendous development during the period 1989-2020; the standard of living of the masses has greatly increased, and this at the global level. There are of course pockets, sometimes very large, which have relatively avoided this. Nevertheless, both imperialist capitalism and bureaucratic capitalism gained such momentum that they succeeded in stifling the revolution.

Many data clearly show how there was a capitalist expansion, each time very specific, with new or enlarged markets. The development of meat consumption is quite emblematic here. The consumption of meat in the world was 145.3 million tonnes in 1983, 323 million tonnes in 2017 (we are talking about more than sixty billion animals per year). It involves planetary transformation. 30% of the land surface is used for intensive cattle breeding. Dairy animals linked to milk and meat represent 20% of all animal biomass. Would capitalism have been capable of such a transformation at the level of the Biosphere, if it had not grown? Obviously not.

Concrete is in this respect emblematic, since concretisation is an essential phenomenon of capitalist expansion. 6 billion m³ of concrete are produced each year; in three years (from 2011 to 2013), China consumed as much concrete as the United States during the whole of the twentieth century.

We can put this in relation to sand, which goes into the composition of the concrete. The extraction of sand from the seabed, mines and lakes amounts to forty billion tons per year. The same goes for cement, another element of concrete. In the early 1990s, non-Western countries consumed 65% of the world’s cement, now it is 90%. The main producers of the world’s 4.6 billion tonnes of cement are China (57.5%), India, the United States, Iran, Brazil, Turkey.

We note the presence of India and Brazil, which we find also for steel. Humanity produces each year as much steel as during the decade 1945-1955. The main producers of the 1.8 billion tonnes of steel are China (almost 50%), India, Japan, the United States, South Korea, Russia, Turkey and Brazil. Similarly, if we take the world production of sugar cane, which was 448 million tonnes in 1961 and 1,907 million tonnes in 2018, we have Brazil in first place, having taken the place of India, now second.

Even if it is in a distorted or incomplete way in bureaucratic capitalist countries, capitalist expansion is general, systematic and aggressive, as evidenced by urban sprawl, which implies as a “model” the Western way of life.

Of course, it is absolutely impossible to generalize such a way of life, totally destructive for the planet: it would take several planets, serving only as resources, for this capitalist “utopia” to exist for the now 7.7 billion human beings (2.5 billion in 1950), who also now live mainly in an urban environment.

Anyway, without wanting to look too far, we just need to see that people in western countries use computers, smartphones and the internet, things that did not exist before the development of 1989-2020. Even in non-western countries there is a trend in this direction and black metal is listened to in Indonesia as in Bolivia, Instagram is used in Lagos as in Tehran.

The phenomenon of global migration, which has grown to immense proportions, illustrates this. There is a real wave of brain drain and of young men seeking to live in the capitalist El Dorado. Such a phenomenon would not exist if there was a real class struggle at the national level counterbalancing misery, if capitalism was dying. Migration is a direct expression of capitalist growth all over the world, but with a far too low growth locally “in comparison” to the Western countries.

Trotsky’s insane conception of the productive forces

The ultra-left has the following conception: the world has been frozen since the Russian revolution, which is part of the world revolution; it failed but the process is still ongoing. So the only thing possible is that everything is frozen while waiting for the final success of the world revolution.

This conception stems from a totally erroneous reading of the first general crisis of capitalism at the beginning of the 20th century. The Communist International has never spoken of a “final” crisis of capitalism, but of a “general” crisis, with therefore relative counter-tendencies.

And if indeed the productive forces have remained similar in Europe, it has always been stressed that this was not the case neither in Japan nor in the United States, and that capitalist restructuring was aimed at relaunching capitalism in Europe itself (especially in Germany). The Communist International has been perfectly dialectical and certainly not one-sided.

Leon Trotsky was totally one-sided and in no way dialectical. In April 1939, in “Marxism in Our Time”, he asserts completely erroneously that the productive forces have ceased to grow. Here’s how he presents this wacky design:

“The Decay of Capitalism

However expensive the control of the market has been to society, mankind up to a certain stage, approximately until the World War, grew, developed and enriched itself through partial and general crises.

The private ownership of the means of production continued to be in that epoch a comparatively progressive factor.

But now the blind control by the law of value refuses to render further service. Human progress is stuck in a blind alley.

Notwithstanding the latest triumphs of technical thought, the material productive forces are no longer growing.

The clearest and most faultless symptom of the decline is the world stagnation of the building industry, in consequence of the stoppage of new investments in the basic branches of economy.

Capitalists are simply no longer able to believe in the future of their own system.

Construction stimulated by the government means a rise in taxation and the contraction of the “untrammelled” national income, especially since the main part of the new government construction is directly designed for war purposes.

The marasmus has acquired a particularly malignant and degrading character in the most ancient sphere of human activity, the one most closely connected with the basic vital needs of man – in agriculture.

No longer satisfied with the obstacles which private ownership in its most reactionary form, that of small land holdings, places before the development of agriculture, capitalist governments see themselves not infrequently called upon to limit production artificially with the aid of statutory and administrative measures which would have frightened artisans in the guilds at the time of their decline.

It will be recorded in history that the government of the most powerful capitalist country granted premiums to farmers for cutting down on their planting, i.e., for artificially diminishing the already falling national income.

The results are self-evident: despite grandiose productive possibilities, secured by experience and science, agrarian economy does not emerge from a putrescent crisis, while the number of the hungry, the preponderant majority of mankind, continues to increase faster than the population of our planet.

Conservatives consider it sensible politics to defend a social order which has descended to such destructive madness and they condemn the socialist fight against such madness as destructive Utopianism.”

Leon Trotsky had nothing understood of restructuration and imperialist war as a “way out” of the capitalist crisis.

The question of the situation between 1945-1975: the two Maoisms

This essential truth must be said and repeated. In the 1960s, when opposition to revisionism arose in Western countries, there was a complete split between two Maoisms. The first, who defines himself as Maoist, has a critique of everyday life, it notes that capitalism is expanding in the 1950s and 1960s, that there is a new way of life. It is thus sometimes linked to or stemming from the hippie movement, like the Weather Underground in the United States, the Red Army Fraction in Germany, or it is in any case extremely attentive to the same questions as the hippies, like the Red Brigades in Italy. Likewise, the French UJCML and the Gauche Prolétarienne raised the question of culture.

In any case, there has been a great deal of attention to the unions, as they were integrated into expanding capitalism; there was a fundamental reflection on the growing weight of subjectivity in the imperialist metropolises.

There was none of this in the second “Maoism”, the false Maoism, carried by people calling themselves “Marxist-Leninists” and imagining themselves living in the 1930s.

The horizon of these false anti-rebels revisionists never went beyond revolutionary syndicalism, they understood nothing of the social transformations underway, due to a cosmopolitan reading.

The “Maoist Communist Party” currently existing in Italy comes directly from a small “ML” group of the 1960s and 1970s: it maintained the “revolutionary trade unionist” course through an era marked by dozens of armed organizations and thousands of political prisoners …

The first Maoism, the only truly authentic one, failed in its assertion, yet it represents the historical heritage of the Communists in the imperialist metropolises.

The “MLs”, even disguised as “Maoists”, continued to exist, more or less painfully, imagining that the world had not changed since 1930, and by anyway understand it like in a caricature…

2020 and the second general crisis of capitalism

The opening of the second general crisis of capitalism, through the intermediary of COVID-19, complicates matters even more, since it is necessary not only to understand the meaning of the capitalist expansion of 1945-1975, but also that of 1989-2020.

In fact, the second one was directly enabled by the collapse of Soviet social-imperialism and the integration of capitalist China into the world market. The crisis of the 1970s was thus postponed. Capitalism then experienced a new expansion, a new impetus, which runs up against the wall of reality.

If the first general crisis of capitalism was powerfully marked by the contradiction between manual labor and intellectual labor, the second crisis of capitalism has as its main aspect the contradiction between town and country.

There are basically only two points of view: the erroneous one imagining that capitalism has become imperialist at the beginning of the 21st century and that it has been “frozen”.

Since it has “maintained itself”, one must then fall into the ideology of imagining that capitalism is “organized”. This was what the Social Democrats said in the 1920s-1930s, this is what the revisionists said in the 1960s-1980s with the theory of “state monopoly capitalism”.

And there is the authentic communist point of view, which seeks to understand the tendencies and counter-tendencies of capitalism, in its historical dialectic.

[Published in Communism #14, July 2021.]

The Communist Party of India (Maoist) has made public a series of documents on different questions. These documents have the Central Committee as redaction and were published in January 2021, sometimes after a correction from a previous document. We speak here of the documents called:

(1) Changes in Relations of Production in India — Our Political Program (272 pages)

(2) Caste Question in India—Our Perspective (97 pages, first edition in May 2017)

(3) Nationality Question in India — The Stand of Our Party (97 pages, first edition in May 2019)

(4) China – a new Social-Imperialist power! It is integral to the World Capitalist-Imperialist system! (84 pages, first edition in July 2017)

What is of special interest is the question of the definition of capitalism, imperialism and crisis. We find here indeed a real problem, as the CPI(M) is developing a non-dialectical analysis of it. Because of the special importance of India in the world revolution, it is necessary to see what this weakness historically means.

In fact, the reason behind the problem is that India is a major spot of the contradiction between town and country. The development of the urban areas is particularly distorted there, in an area where the animal question was raised a long time ago already.

And it is an area where lives an significant part of the world masses, it is a country totally split through religious comunalism and castes.

The CPI(M) just doesn’t confront itself to all of these questions. It takes a road opposed to the question of universality as historical necessity, as communism affirming the unity of the masses, of the world, of the Biosphere, of the universe, all of this being the key of the Indian Revolution.

The conception of the CPI(M)

The conception of the CPI(M) is the following. Capitalism would be in crisis since the 1970’s, but as it is solely “imperialist” and furthermore “organized”, it would have answered through neo-liberal policies at all levels in the 1980’s.

The direct consequence would have been poverty all over the world and also the final domination of financial capitalism through “globalization”.

This conception is not new; it is the one of the Indian Maoists since the 1990’s, in a common point of view of all the different organizations (the Maoist Communist Center, the Maoist Communist Center of India, the CPI(ML) People’s War, etc.). At the beginning of the 1990’s, such an understanding of capitalism was for example deeply explained by the CPI(ML) People’s War at conferences in Brussels organized by the Workers Party of Belgium, a post-Maoist revisionist structure.

This should be no surprise: the Indian Maoists have a trend to use the revisionist concepts of neo-liberalism, depending countries, globalization. This is the key to the problem of the Indian Maoists.

The documents of 2021 are an attempt to justify this approach and, in fact, it is also the first time they openly preach such an “alterglobalization” vision of the world, as usually, it is quite masked, even if readable for who takes attention.

One of the main point here is that the wrong conception of the CPI(M) leads to miserabilism: capitalism would be paralyzed since the 1990’s, the world masses would have been always poorer since the 1990’s, and so on.

This is a fairy tale, which totally misses the incredible development of the productive forces by capitalism in the 1989-2020 period, the impact on the Biosphere, the aggravation of the contradiction between town and country.

And, therefore, it comes to a non-understanding of the second general crisis of capitalism appearing in 2020 through the pandemic.

This justifies the criticism of the conception of the CPI(M), one of the most important revolutionary organization of the world, which is prisoner of its own Indian experience and missing the general transformation.

1. The definition of imperialism

a) what the CPI(M) says

The CPI(M) defines imperialism as follows :

“As the great Marxist teacher Lenin said, emergence of monopoly organisations and export of capital are the characters of imperialism.” “A century passed since the world capitalist system transformed into imperialism.”

“With the beginning of the imperialist era the phase of ‘peaceful’ development of capitalism ended. The series of imperialist wars began for colonies and for re-division of the world.”

“According to the report published by the Swiss Federal Institution of Technology of Zurich a few monopoly organisations are controlling the economy of the whole world. Six super rich persons of the world own property equal to half of the population, i.e., to that of 360 crore people.”

“In the overall imperialist era, especially in the neo-colonial period and especially during the period of globalisation, several considerable changes took place at a fast pace in various sectors in the international and domestic level. These changes led to transformations and polarizations in class relations all over the world in varied levels.

Since the global economic/financial order is more centralized in the hands of a few imperialist institutions/countries and wealth and political power is centralized in the hands of their big compradors, the number of oppressed nationalities, classes and sections rose very high.”

b) an unilateral understanding of imperialism

The CPI(M) has an unilateral understanding of imperialism, which is reduced to financial capital, which would be centralized and organized.

Moreover, imperialism would be a new system of production : there would be a capitalist industrial production which would produce capital, this capital would come to an overproduction and imperialism consists in the overproduction of capital.

This is wrong. Imperialism is not a base, it is a superstructure of capitalism. Even when capitalism comes to imperialism, its base is merely capitalist, with concurrency and competition among capitalists, in the shadow of the big monopolies.

The bank apparatus doesn’t make disappear the basis, but emerges as a parasitic form it. So, the capitalist basis is not modified in itself an if there is an overproduction of capital, it can’t be separated from the overproduction of commodities.

Lenin, when defining imperialism in “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism”, is very clear about both double aspects : base/superstructure on one side, industrial/financial on the other (here the important parts are underlined).

“We must give a definition of imperialism that will include the following five of its basic features: (1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life;

(2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this “finance capital”, of a financial oligarchy;

(3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance;

(4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves, and

(5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed.

Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.”

The dominance of monopolies and finance capital doesn’t mean there are only monopolies and finance capital. This is the error of the CPI(M), which leads to another one: the conception of a “pure” organized capitalism i.e. imperialism.

2. The conception of organized imperialism

a) what the CPI(M) says

The CPI(M) defines a kind of organized imperialism as follows :

“Imperialists and revisionists create tales and put the people in illusion about the changing conditions in order to protect the imperialist system and to deceive the people of the world.”

“When the public sector of China was being restructured, the crisis in East Asia in the end of 1990s was destroying Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. With their class interests the imperialist forces of the US, Europe and Japan experimentally introduced capitalism in early 1990s to put up a wall against ‘Communism’ in the countries came to be known as East Asian Tigers.”

“Neo-colonialism gave new opportunities for every imperialist force to exploit. Moreover, it made possible collective colonialism to ‘collectively exploit’ the backward countries that is expressed through WB, IMF, WTO and other such imperialist organisations. This is a distinct character of neo-colonialism.”

“1991 – Second stage of Globalisation begins While the Keynesian theory was formulated to solve the imperialist crisis of the 1930s the Monetarist theory came forth to solve the crisis that broke in 1970.

The Monetarists suggested decrease in expenditure and cut in subsidies but not to print currency in order to reduce budget deficit. They sermonized the ‘invisible hand’ principle of Adam Smith that states that market forces itself regularize economy.

This was what Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in the US brought forth. The policies of ‘free market’ and ‘free trade’ said to be introduced by them in fact reflect the monopoly of trade and the control of monopolies over the market.

The jargon of free trade and free market is merely a mask of the monopoly of International Monetary organisations and Multi-National Companies.

To say that they apply the Adam Smith principle of the capitalist stage of free competition is only to delude the people all over the world.” “Firstly imperialists re-structuralized capitalism in their countries through implementing Reaganomics and Thatcherism.

They created an unprecedented surge of Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) to establish giant Conglomerates.

They turned finance capital into a decisive force and a major specter dictating the economies of the countries all over the world. They brought all the forms of social production in the world into their control and made all the countries of the world surrender to the policies of imperialist globalization.

They thus intensified the onslaught on the working class of their own countries and increased the rate of surplus value (profits) being extracted from them.

Secondly, with a new offensive on the backward countries they could further expand their markets and seize cheap raw materials of those countries. They intensified exploitation of the toilers manifold. Both of these are closely related and mutually dependent.

The objective of globalization strategy is to re-structuralize the economies of the entire countries of the world as per the exploitive interests of the international monopoly finance enterprises and Multi-National enterprises, lift all the sanctions and all the tariff obstacles for imports-exports and for shifting profits to their native country, in a way to create a ‘borderless’ world where goods, technology, capital and labor can ‘move around freely’, to facilitate the exploitation of any country as per its wish according to their international monopoly.”

b) an erroneous conception of an “organized” capitalism

It is simply amazing that the CPI(M) really says that the Keynesian and Monetarist theories are the expression of a capitalism that understands its own crisis and try to overcome it, or that imperialism “experimentally introduced capitalism” in South Asia.

This is absolutely not conform to the communist ideology; this corresponds to the social-democratic (in the 1920’s) and revisionist (in the 1960’s) understanding of an “organized capitalism”, of a state monopoly capitalism.

The conception of the CPI(M) is clearly is that “international monopoly finance enterprises and Multi-National enterprises” leads the world, choosing the developments in an objective manner in accordance to their interests.

And the immediate consequence of this is the negation of the bureaucratic bourgeoisie. There would be a total domination of the financial capital over the world, with governments as mere puppets.

There would be no bureaucratic capitalism in India, which would be a kind of neo-colony.

3. The comprador and the bureaucratic bourgeoisies

a) what the CPI(M) says

“With the transfer of power in 1947 (nominal independence) colonial, semi-feudal India turned to semi-colonial, semi-feudal country.

The comprador big bourgeois class of our country that served the British imperialists from the beginning became comprador ‘bureaucratic’ big bourgeois class with the transfer of power.

The comprador bureaucratic big bourgeois class and the big feudal class together became the main hurdle of the development of various nationalities. In semi-colonial India the comprador bureaucratic big bourgeois class is playing the main role on one hand in serving the interests of several imperialist countries and on the other in preserving the caste based feudal society of the country.”

“To put it briefly, the planned onslaught of international finance capital all over the world through globalization reached a severe level in the backward countries in the past three decades.

Since the Indian comprador bureaucratic bourgeois, feudal classes are dependent on imperialist finance capital and its interests entwined with their interests, the collaboration reached unprecedented level.”

“Today, the comprador bureaucratic bourgeois class is working as an instrument to slave imperialism in our country. It makes use of the broad semi-feudal social basis to keep the people in bondage and unleashes its hegemony. They are traitors, disrupters and cruel enemies of the people.

They are deceivers, liars and corrupt. They massacre the people, they are rapists and are absolutely useless. But they have the power and the instruments of production. They are ruling the country.”

“The TATAs is the biggest industrial comprador big bourgeois enterprise. Their turnover had the 2 nd place by 2001 with 37,197 crore rupees. At the time, the TATAs had 84 companies out of which 34 companies were joint ventures with TNCs.

They own the most ancient and biggest private sector power company in the country. They own mining, oil fields, steel factories, car and truck manufacturing companies, telephone, cable TV and broadband networks.

They own Taj hotels, Jaguar, Land Rover, Dewan, Tetley tea, a publication house, a chain of book shops, the biggest brand of iodised salt, the Lakme empire of cosmetics and the TATA-Honeywell factory of Poona.”

b) the non-understanding of the bureaucratic bourgeoisie

When we read this, it is logical that the CPI(M) considers the islamist movements as “anti-imperialist” and can’t understand the nature of people like Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey or even Narendra Modi in India.

Normally, Maoism considers that there is four forms of bourgeoisie in the non-imperialist countries: the petty-bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie (both oppressed), the comprador bourgeoisie which exists only as intermediate with imperialist structures, the bureaucratic bourgeoisie which develops itself in the distorted capitalism existing in the oppressed country.

The CPI(M) negates the existence of the bureaucratic bourgeoisie. There would be only a comprador (bureaucratic) bourgeoisie totally submitted to imperialism. But then, how can the CPI(M) explains that a simple lackey like TATA is able to possess Jaguar and Tetley, two main symbols of British imperialism ?

The only explanation for TATA and all the big Indian capitalists is that they are bureaucratic capitalists. They have been comprador and they turn over a rather independent bureaucratic capitalism, with Indian features.

So, the CPI(M) tells here something incorrect.

And it practices a headlong flight in saying that its is globalization itself which is solely responsible for all the evolution in India.

4. a change by above only?

a) what the CPI(M) says

“It means, in the specificities of India we have to study the feudal society, the later colonial (colonial, semi-feudal) and neo-colonial (semi-colonial, semi-feudal) societies, the attack of imperialist globalization (finance capital), the changes that it caused in the entire country and in the respective areas and the role of class struggle that contributed to the change in relations of production in the respective areas.”

“On the whole imperialism is unleashing control on social, economic, political, cultural and all the sectors on the semi-feudal base in the country historically and in the present phase of globalization. The main intention of imperialism is to develop the country industrially but not to change it into another capitalist contender.

It wants to sustain it as the supplier of raw material and as a market for imperialist products. The comprador rulers brought forth several laws, rules, regulations, directives and other policy measures to bring changes in rural India favorable to the imperialist MNCs, comprador bureaucratic bourgeois and feudal classes.”

“During the globalization period, the old and the new feudal forces of the dominant castes in the rural areas were the social prop in every step that the state took up in the interests of imperialism and comprador bureaucratic bourgeoisie.

Along with the foreign corporate companies and domestic comprador companies, the new feudal forces, parliamentary party leaders and several kinds of mafias benefited through the agrarian, rural exploitive policies.

The collaboration of global finance capital enterprises, the several networks of government and non-government networks, parliamentary political parties and several kinds of mafias increased much more and semi-feudal relations led by the old and new feudal forces continued in new forms.”

“National bourgeois class This class invests in wholesale business, transport of goods, public transport, education, health sector, hotels, tendu leaf business and other such business and service sectors along with small and medium scale industries.

This is oppressed by imperialism and comprador bureaucratic capitalist policies and is tied by feudalism. Due to this reason, its market is constantly suffering from their offensive. Growth of their industries is limited. Lakhs of industries are becoming bankrupt.”

b) a wrong understanding of changing by above and not internal

The CPI(M) is very clear. As the country would be totally dependent (and the national bourgeoisie and local capitalism would die each day more), as the ruling class would be a comprador bourgeoisie totally dependent from imperialism, when the semi-feudal aspect of the country knows a change, it is by above only.

This is clearly unacceptable, as the CPI(M) presents the nationalist movement in India as a foreign abstraction, in negation the bureaucratic bourgeoisie.

5. The nature of the BJP

a) what the CPI(M) says

“The hunt of global finance capital for super profits is destroying the lives of the entire proletariat, peasant, middle class and national bourgeoisie and other oppressed classes, sections and nationalities and is making a cruel attack on them.

For this purpose it is bringing fascist parties to power in the backward countries. In this background the Narendra Modi government under the leadership of the fascist BJP with Brahmanic Hindutwa ideology took up power in the centre in our country and is unleashing severe fascist offensive on the people for the past six years.”

“Brahmanic Hindutwa communalism spread in a big way in the country in the past seven decades. Starting from the massacre of lakhs of Muslim people during partition in 1947, it unleashed several massacres, atrocities, putting in flames, destruction of properties and loot (…).

The Hindutwa forces went much ahead with the objective to transform the country into a Hindutwa state. We have to remember that all this is dictated by the global finance capital.

The aim of finance capital is to facilitate the way to its exploitation by strengthening fascism in the country and by establishing fascist ideology and its hegemony in all the sectors of the country.

10. The hierarchical caste system based on the Brahmanic Hindutwa ideology is integral to the semi-feudal relations in India.”

b) the question of the BJP

The CPI(M) tells us here something inconsistent. Why would imperialism promotes Hinduism and Indian expansionsim through the Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian’s people party)?

Why would or should imperialism need an Indian intercontinental missile with atomic weapon called Agni, from the Hinduistic god of fire ?

The Hindutva anticapitalist romanticism is absolutely no conform to the values of imperialist consumerism. The policy of nationalist unification of the country by the BJP is not conform to the line of divide and conquer of imperialism.

In fact, it is easy to understand that it represents the Indian bureaucratic bourgeoisie, trying to play its own card, in a relative manner only of course. It is the same all over the world, semi-feudal semi-colonial countries becoming expansionist, like Turkey.

In negating the bureaucratic bourgeoisie character of the BJP, the CPI(M) negates (in a theoretical manner) the expansionist character of India, and this is an error on the ideological level and of course collides with the internationalist practice of the CPI(M) itself.

The problem is that the CPI(M), with its conception of a systemic imperialism, doesn’t see the amazing growth of the productive forces since the 1990’s.

6. The crisis since 1973?

a) what the CPI(M) says

“In fact globalisation is the offensive of finance capital on the backward countries of the world. It is entwined with the restructuring of capital in monopolies. Since capital fell into permanent crisis since 1973, this is part of its strategy to overcome the crisis. At present it fell into further crisis since 2008.”

“Since the beginning of the 1970s, imperialism fell in general crisis all over the world, in 1980s more intense globalization policies were taken up and it put the burden of its crisis on semi-colonial, semi-feudal countries like India.”

“The economies of those countries very speedily spread for nearly two decades and led to partial stability of capitalism. But it could not sustain permanently. With the crisis falling into prolonged depression from 1973, the illusion of constant spread of world economy was shattered.”

“Worldwide financial crisis since 1973 led to a decline in the demand for capital goods in the imperialist countries. As a part of internationalization of production imperialism adopted Globalisation policies since the 1980s and 1990s. This is part of the neo-colonial policy of imperialism since post-World War II.

However, there is a difference in the policies that imperialism adopted as a part of neo-colonialism in 1946-80 and the globalisation policies since the 1980s, especially since the beginning of 1990s when Russia declined as a superpower. The imperialists that adopted Keynesian economic policies until then introduced free trade market policies since the beginning of the 1990s.”

b) the question of the productive forces

The CPI(M), in its documents, give a lot of data about poverty. The problem is that this is made with the same statistic approach like Eugen Varga at the beginning of the Third International. The dialectics of economy is not understood.

Saying that capitalism is in crisis since 1973 is simply amazing. From the 1989 to 2020, capitalist growth was huge, using China as the factory of the world.

The quality of life of the people in the imperialist countries never stopped to improve, be it in the fields of medicine, education, sport, leisure, food, etc.

Of course, these fields were defined by imperialism. But if we take the quantitative level, life became much easier in the imperialist countries. This also explains why there was no revolt, why the revolutionary sector nearly died, etc.

But this is not only true for the imperialist country. Also the countries oppressed by imperialism knew an elevation of the quality of life during the same period.

Not all, of course, and India in particular is a weak point, making it one of the center of the World Revolution.

Nevertheless, a look at Mumbai, Kolkata or Delhi shows how India changed, with an urbanization corresponding to the development of the productive forces. And the BJP is the expression of such a trend, with a bureaucratic bourgeoisie.

And the CPI(M) knows it, in fact – because it understood the changes that knew China. How could have China become social-imperialist if not by a bureaucratic bourgeoisie?

7. Social-imperialist China

a) what the CPI(M) says

“China – a new Social-Imperialist power! It is integral to the World Capitalist-Imperialist system!”

“Unlike the opinion of a few Maoists, China is neither dependent on the imperialist countries nor is it a country exploited by those imperialist countries. On the contrary, it undoubtedly became a new Social-Imperialist country by 2014. It emerged as an imperialist power only because it is super-exploiting the working class of the country. It is beyond doubt that the speedy industrialization led to this change.

The emergence of China as a global factory is strengthening the economic restructuring of the world and is changing the dynamics of the supply demand chain of the world economic system.”

“To summarise, Chinese monopoly organisations are the most powerful in the world. ‘Monopoly is the strong economic basis for imperialism,’ said Lenin. This is an index to say that China has developed into a Social-Imperialist country.”

b) China and the bureaucratic bourgeoisie

If there was in China only a comprador bourgeoisie, then this country would still be dependent. The CPI(M) understands well that it is not dependent, that it is even social-imperialist, noting that the monopolies are very well organized, at a high level.

But from where can it come, if not from the bureaucratic bourgeoisie? The bureaucratic bourgeoisie grows normally in the shadow of the comprador bourgeoisie, from which it is also a part of it, dialectically. But as capitalism, in a distorted manner, develops itself, the bureaucratic bourgeoisie grows and absorb the state.

The Peruvian communists describe as follows this process.

“Following Chairman Mao’s thesis, he [i.e. Gonzalo] specifies five characteristics:

– that bureaucratic capitalism is the capitalism that imperialism develops in the backward countries, which is comprised of the capital of large landowners, the big bankers, and the magnates of the big bourgeoisie;

– it exploits the proletariat, the peasantry, and the petty bourgeoisie and places constraints upon the middle bourgeoisie;

– it is passing through a process by which bureaucratic capitalism is combined with the power of the State and evolves into state monopoly capitalism, comprador and feudal, from which can be derived that in a first moment it unfolds as a non-state big monopoly capitalism and in a second moment, when is combined with the power of the state, it unfolds as state monopoly capitalism;

– it ripens the conditions for the democratic revolution as it reaches the apex of its development;

– and, confiscating bureaucratic capital is key to reach the pinnacle of the democratic revolution and it is decisive to pass over to the socialist revolution.

In applying the above, he conceives that bureaucratic capitalism is the capitalism that imperialism generates in the backward countries, which is linked to a decrepit feudalism and in submission to imperialism which is the last phase of capitalism.

This system does not serve the majority of the people but rather the imperialists, the big bourgeoisie, and the landowners.

All of this merely proves the political aspect of bureaucratic capitalism that is rarely emphasized, but which President Gonzalo considers as a key issue: bureaucratic capitalism ripens the conditions for revolution, and today as it enters into its final phase, it ripens the conditions for the development and victory of the revolution.

It is also very important to see how bureaucratic capitalism is shaped by non-state monopoly capitalism and by state monopoly capitalism, that is the reason why he differentiates between the two factions of the big bourgeoisie, the bureaucratic one and the comprador, so as to avoid tailing one or the other, a problem that led our Party to 30 years of wrong tactics. It is important to conceive it this way, since the confiscation of bureaucratic capitalism by the New Power will facilitate the completion of the democratic revolution and to advance into the socialist revolution.

If only the state monopoly capitalism is targeted, the other part would remain free, the non-state monopoly capital, and the big comprador bourgeoisie would remain economically able to lift its head to snatch away the leadership of the revolution and to prevent its passage to the socialist revolution.” (Communist Party of Peru, The Democratic Revolution)

7. The national liberation

a) what the CPI(M) says

“A self-reliable economy must be developed. But imperialism, comprador bureaucratic bourgeois and feudal classes are obstructing this path. Four ally classes – workers, peasants, middle class and national bourgeois classes, oppressed social sections – Dalits, tribals, women and religious minorities must integrate in the leadership of the proletariat and eliminate them and New Democratic Revolution must be accomplished with the ultimate objective of establishing Socialism-Communism.

Only thus it is possible to establish New Democratic and self-reliant economy. Only thus genuine development is possible.”

b)a movement of national liberation

It is very clear that the CPI(M) has a line corresponding to a movement of national liberation. This is positive. But this is not conform to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. The CPI(M) is not interested in the internal questions of India, it considers that the confrontation with imperialism is the sole key.

From there comes the fascination for the Tribals at the margins of development and a disdain for all the Indian cultural questions, like the nature of Islam in India or the relationship to animals. What is fascinating the world about India is out of sight for the CPI(M).

From there comes also the non-understanding of the crisis appearing in 2020. Not seeing the development of the period 1989-2020, the CPI(M) imagines that capitalism, now imperialism as a world system, would be in crisis since 1973…

This is a huge error and it shows that the CPI(M) must choose: or being the armed branch of “another development” against globalization, or assume Indian history.

The crisis will require a quick and decisive choice.

[Published in Communism #14, July 2021.]

The irruption of the COVID-19 pandemics in 2020 was a crash test for all the revolutionaries in the world. Would they be able to face a global crisis, to understand it and give the keys to face it adequately? Or was it only possible for them to accompany the events?

It depended of course of what has been done in the period before the crisis. If the revolutionaries understood how the productive forces grew since 1989, how nature was under attack, how the animals were enslaved at industrial levels all over the world… then they were able to understand how it came to the crisis and which sense it carries.

If the revolutionaries were in the fiction that capitalism was in crisis since ten, twenty, fifty, hundred years… then they would be not able to understand that something new happened, something with a qualitative leap.

A good example for it is expressed by the Brazilian review A Nova Democracia. It is even absolutely typical, in the sense that such a point of view was the one of most of the movements defining themselves as marxist-leninists or even maoists. They just failed to understand what happened.

A Nova Democracia’s article “World Economy towards Recession: CORONAVIRUS CONCEALS THE IMPERIALISM CRISIS”, published in March 2020, expresses quite purely this deep misunderstanding. Here is what it says:

“The industrial production and the stock exchange of the financial market have collapsed at the beginning of March in the whole world. The trigger, according to the worldwide press monopoly, is the coronavirus expansion.

However, it is actually the crisis of relative overproduction of capital.

The coronavirus itself could not cause such an impact in the world economy. The reason of stoppage of the capital reproduction is the capital itself.

The portal Crítica da Economia, quoting a newspaper of the reaction, has observed that the coronavirus nowadays is less lethal than the flu: “Internal data of the World Health Organization (WHO) show that, in 2020, the simple seasonal flu has already caused more casualties (76.537 deaths) than the new coronavirus (2.812 deaths); that is, our well-known and familiar flu has already killed 2.720% more people than the misterious new coronavirus”.”

In July 2021, such a discourse is of course easily appearing as pathetic. Nevertheless, it was quite common at the time or even a rule for ultra-leftists. The pandemics would be overestimated by the states to put strict laws, it would be nearly a hoax of counter-revolutionary nature.

It is not even a misjudgment of the crisis, it is a negation of it, even at the sanitary level. And the reason for that is a belief considering that the world economy is organized by some monopolies and world finance, that capitalism “thinks”, is able to “act” in a calculated manner, etc.

A Nova Democracia expresses perfectly this conception, where the crisis consists in the overproduction of capital, which would choke the economy and the world. The article says :

“The occurrence of the coronavirus is just a fact that aggravates the economy. However, behind this fact there is already a relative overproduction of the latent capital.

The crisis of overproduction of relative capital occurs when the capital production extrapolates the consumption capacity of the society defined, ultimately, by the contradiction between the social character of production and the capitalist appropriation of the product.

To get an idea of it, the unemployment rate in the USA reached, on October, 2019, a low record of 3,5%. It amounts practically to “full employment”. It was the lowest rate for the last 50 years, resulting  of the interest rate that propels the credit for the production.

However, in October, the creation of new workstations in the industry has decreased for the first time in six months, although the production has increased 1,1% in November. It is a huge increase of the global production that grows disproportionately to the addition of the capacity of worldwide consumption.

The overproduction crisis is the inevitable consequence. Proof of this is that all Yankee economists foresee that the economy will slow down in the short run, i. e., it will not find markets to continue the expansion.”

It is of course totally wrong to understand capitalism in terms of bookkeeping, with inputs and outputs. If what says A Nova Democracia is true, than capitalism would never grow or even never exist, because there is always a discrepancy between production and consumption… Especially at the beginning of capitalism, with primitive accumulation, a key topic.

Of course, concerning the sanitary aspect, A Nova Democracia totally changed its point of view afterwards, saying for example in April 2020 in the article “THE 21st CENTURY AND THE MEDIOEVO [middle age]: The historical and political failure of the imperialist system”:

“It is a sinister revival of almost ancient times of the Humankind history as, in the middle of the 15th century, the “Black Death” occurred, sweeping across Europe and Asia, killing 200 million people; or even with the Spanish flu epidemic and the deaths of tens of millions persons.”

But the same article explains also, in a rather shocking manner:

“As a result either of a natural biological evolution or a machination of the Yankee imperialism ( a hypothesis that one cannot ignore at all since it fits the criminal Pentagon “war games”, a fervent believer of Malthusianism *), the coronavirus acts as an invisible small atomic bombs in another form of a world war.

One cannot forget the atomic artifacts that the imperialist States and some of their lackeys possess, in large scale and great quantity in their arsenals, aiming at intimidating permanently the Earth peoples.

The issue is, with the pandemic the governments negligence they will eliminate populations considered by them  as surplus populations, especially the aging and sick people.

On the whole, it means to destroy productive forces to justify new and miraculous “Marshall plans” to recover the economy for a new expansion.

The negligence is intentional, resulting of the imperialism nature but twisted with adjustable doses of dramatization by the press monopolies – Globo Network, a leader in Brasil – to mitigate the masses uprising.

It is the imperialism law: the crisis in the system is only partially eradicated with the destruction of the productive forces, killing of workers and “surplus” populations, concentration/ centralization of capital and the conquering of new markets ( war with weapons arsenal).”

We have a double problem, which is typical. The first one is to consider that capitalism has an overview on itself. The second one is to affirm that capitalism can “choose” to destroy the “surplus” of commodities and workers. Nothing about it is true, of course.

And to understand that, only a small aspect has to be see: the question of the aging and the sick people. If we take the imperialist countries, it is a long time now that these aging and sick people a integrated in capitalism. Since 1945, and now in a very important way, they are an element of capitalism, as consumers of products directly aimed at them.

To take two examples pretty clear, we can see that Germany import proletarians from the Eastern countries in order to use them as cheap particular help for old people, and that Portugal has made low taxes for the French pensioners.

Of course, A Nova Democracia can’t see that. In its vision, world capitalism consists in finance, and finance only. There is no capitalist mode of production any more, but world masses against a small bunch of super rich people. A Nova Democracia so just can’t see the evolution of everyday of life, the progress of capitalism, its systematization at all levels of life.

And this is the key. Either there is the understanding that capitalism developed itself since 1989, bringing the world to a new step, with a new general crisis. Or there is the following of events, in the belief that there was no evolution of the productive forces since the 1930’s.