🔹 So in Mao's (early) time. One contradiction is China's feudalist society, where the masses, the farmers, are opposed to the bourgeois class, the landowners. However, after losing the first Sino-Japanese war, there is also a contradiction between Chinese nationalism and Japanese imperialism. In this case, Mao argues that the principle contradiction is "against imperialism", and that the feudalist contradiction becomes secondary. Hence, Mao said that the communist party should form a coalition with the Kuomintang (Chinese nationalist party), against the Japanese (during the second Sino-Japanese war).

🔹So to recap: the Chinese communists are against the Kuomintang, but this contradiction becomes secondary when Japan invades China, then the communists and the Kuomintang are united in the principle contradiction against imperialism.

#mao #maoism #DialecticalMaterialism #kmt #kuomintang #ccp #communism #china #imperialism #antiimperialism

Ali Kadri then builds on this and says that militarism creates a cycle to reinforce capitalism. When the whole world is colonised, one part will be destroyed in war, to create new opportunities for capitalism to restart the cycle.

For Marx, past labour is stored in commodities, for example a knitted scarf. (The difference between a scarf and a ball of yarn is labour, the act of knitting. So the past labour is "in" the scarf.)
Kadri introduces the concept of "dead labour". This is when the end product is not for consumption (like the scarf), but it's death itself (like the war machinery).

The system absorbs labour power and destroys human bodies for profit.

Violence is not a symptom of capitalism, but an inherent component.

#RosaLuxemburg #AliKadri #militarism #capitalism #colonialism #antiimperialism #violence

Rosa Luxemburg:
🔹 Imperialism is not the final stage of capitalism, it is a cycle, an ongoing feature.
🔹 Capitalism inherently needs imperialism, war and violence.
🔹 In the context of the early 20th century there was a "crisis" of underconsumption: workers were too exploited to keep buying things, the bourgeois class was saturated.
🔹 Colonialism: capitalism destroys societies to create a new exploitable labour force.
🔹 A part of the destruction of these societies is to install a class state!
🔹 Militarism is an inherent component of capitalism.

#RosaLuxemburg #antiimperialism #capitalism #colonialism

Today I attended a collective learning event on anti-imperialism.

We discussed the final part of Marx, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Mao, Samir Amin and a practical example.

#antiimperialism #Marx #Marxism #communism #Lenin #Mao #SamirAmin #RosaLuxemburg