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A CRITIQUE OF FEMINISM AS IDEOLOGY


At a pro-revolutionary summer camp last August and a subsequent meeting we were confronted with a kind of feminist ideology which, in our view, is a real obstacle to free discussion. We think a debate on feminism is necessary. The following text is an in-depth contribution to it. It is a slightly abridged translation of an essay by the Argentina-based group Cuadernos de Negación. It is part of its issue # 15, which is entirely dedicated to issues surrounding sex and gender. The original text can be found HERE.

A CRITIQUE OF FEMINISM AS IDEOLOGY

Feminism is inevitable, not because of a sudden widespread awakening of consciousness, but because of the increasing prominence of women in the workplace, as well as in the academic, political, and legal spheres. That is, it gains astonishing momentum at a particular moment in the history of capitalist society, based on new working and living conditions that particularly affected women, and the struggles that arose in response over decades. These struggles were both reformist and disruptive, even revolutionary. However, since there has been no revolution, it is the dominant, official feminism that also represents the legacy of revolutionaries. The same is true for other expressions of workers struggles, the unemployed, racialized groups, and sexual minorities.  

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Venezuela, Greenland, Minneapolis….


IS HE JUST MAD OR IS THERE A STRATEGY?


More and more people think that the winner of the FIFA Peace Prize is suffering from serious mental degradation. They call him crazy, insane, nuts, flipped, deranged, disturbed, bonkers, lunatic, utterly mad and much more. But could it be that his rantings and obsessions hide a rational strategy?

Lately, the owner of Maria Machado’s Nobel Prize medal has shown even more symptoms of dementia than usual. No need to list examples: you’ve undoubtedly seen plenty of them on different media, moments that made you shake your head and wonder how such an idiot could become the most powerful person in the world.

But whatever you may think about the mental health of the self-proclaimed “acting president of Venezuela”, he is not an absolute monarch, even though he would like to be one. His power is not simply the result of his election victory in 2024; he owes it to the continued support of the majority in Congress and, above all, the capital markets. If they considered him a dangerous madman, his throne would quickly falter. When the stock and bond markets feel he’s sowing too much uncertainty and show their disapproval Trump tends to listen immediately.  

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“VIVA LA MUERTE!”

About the US military intervention in Venezuela

If we had to find a slogan to illustrate what characterizes the policies of the world’s major countries today, it would be “Viva la muerte!” Their goal is to develop all the means, both material and ideological, to cause more human carnage. To make things clear, the government with the largest military-industrial complex on the planet is changing the name of its Department of Defense to Department of War, while demanding that its 31 allied countries immediately increase their military spending to 5% of their GDP, which often means an increase of 100% or more. And they agree with applause… and plans to cut spending on health and education, for example. “Viva la muerte! Muera la inteligencia!” (1)

The same destructive madness is developing in the sick minds of governments on the other side of the planet, in China, Russia, Japan, and both Koreas.

“Capitalism carries within itself war the way clouds carry a thunderstorm”, Jean Jaurès rightly said in 1914.

The recent intervention of the US military in Venezuela, as well as the installation of enormous military forces in the Caribbean, are part of the ongoing disaster. What motivates the US government is not the fight against drug trafficking or a desire for democracy and freedom, but an effort to combat the decline of its economic dominance in the world and the spectacular development of China’s presence and influence in Latin America and the rest of the world.  

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ANOTHER SPECIAL MILITARY OPERATION ON THE ROAD TO GLOBAL WAR

Why did the US launch a “special military operation” in Venezuela? To get their greedy hands on the oil and other resources in that country? To get its imperialist rival China and its allies (Russia, Cuba, Iran) out of the region and warn other Latin American countries of the price they might have to pay for their presence? To score an easy ‘glorious’ victory in order to shore up Trump’s sagging poll numbers? The correct answer is “all of the above”. What is certain is that it was not done because of drugs smuggling – that pretext was as transparant a lie as Putin’s claim that the purpose of his invasion of Ukraine was denazification – nor was it done for the defense of democracy – the US prefers Maduro’s vice-president in command because she has the support of the army, rather than the opposition which won the elections – and least of all because of hostility to Venezuela’s socialism, since there neither is nor was any socialism there, only a corrupt and brutal leftwing capitalism, a sworn enemy of the working class. 1

What this tells us is that different capitalist states, the big powers but smaller ones too, are openly discarting their own hypocrital ‘values’ and rules (‘international law’, ‘human rights’, the Geneva convention, etc.)  

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TEN QUESTIONS ON THE POLICIES OF THE TRUMP GOVERNMENT

The German language blog Communaut asked IP’s Sanderr to answer ten questions about the Trump administration’s policies. He did, with some help of other US-based IP members.

1. One of the more controversial questions of the day is how to read the Trump administration: A bunch of ideological lunatics in bed with self-serving billionaires and hence doomed to create nothing but chaos – or a team serving the long-term interests of US capitalism, even though at the price of some disruption in the here and now? You tend to take the second view, linking it closely to the question of war. Could you briefly explain that perspective?

It’s not either or, one does not exclude the other. It is obvious that Trump’s government (and family) contains “ideological lunatics in bed with self-serving billionaires” but that doesn’t mean that it has no geopolitical and domestic long-term strategy. To the contrary, there is a unity between both aspects which is expressed in a kind of shamelessness, a willingness to use raw power without excuses, an arrogance and a contempt that permeates all that they do and say. Not only are the conventional pretenses dropped, they are actively despised: anger against “wokism”, “political correctness” is what binds all factions of the MAGA movement.  

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REFLECTIONS ON A SUMMER CAMP

Since quite a few years pro-revolutionary internationalists have been organizing summer meetings, including week-long “summer camps”, to inform each other, to discuss and establish contacts. We reported earlier on some of those gatherings that took place last year in Europe. This year we welcomed the return of one of the oldest of these initiatives, which had taken a break during the covid years. Unfortunately, none of us was able to attend but from what we heard of friends who were there, it must have been quite interesting, with participants from many countries, reports on class struggles from around the world and discussions on theoretical issues, all in a friendly atmosphere of solidarity.

While we had to skip that summer camp, we were able to participate in another, organized by the so-called “Beach Communists” in the south of France, also attended by comrades from many (mostly European) countries. What distinguished this camp from the other one was, among other things, that it situated its discussions within a perspective of organizing and participating in class struggles and did not shy away from affirming political positions. Indeed, earlier it adopted a common platform which, after some debate, was unambiguous in its defense of ‘revolutionary defeatism’, the rejection of supporting either side in the wars of capitalism, including those in Ukraine and the Middle East.  

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CAPITALISM, CRISIS AND WAR


This text was written for discussion at an international “revolutionary defeatist” meeting in Minerve, France, in August. A report on this gathering will be posted later.

Otto Dix: Wounded Soldier, 1916

0. Why this text?

Because the instinctive reaction of most people who are worried and repulsed by the growing number of wars and the atrocities they lead to, is to assume that they are caused by bad leaders, aggressive politics, unjust ideologies, and to support the side that seems less bad, more peaceful and less unjust. It is not self-evident to grasp that these bad leaders and aggressive politics are themselves a product of the social relation that is capital, and that this social relation will continue to produce such leaders and politics and ever more catastrophic destruction, as it sinks deeper into its self-created crisis. Slogans or simplistic tales are not enough to convince many who are genuinely determined to fight war that, in order to do so, they must fight capitalism. We must be able to demonstrate to them that we live in a global social order that brutally clashes with the needs of humanity. That it is a system at war with the planet, at war with life itself.  

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ON THE ‘LESSER OF TWO EVILS’ LOGIC OF ANTIFASCISM

 
We re-publish in English an article, released by the Argentina-based group Cuadernos de Negacion that deals with the rise of the extreme right. More specifically, it deals critically with the use of the term “fascist” to describe this tendency. We agree with them that the danger of fascism today is not necessarily to lead us into war, but to portray liberal democracy as the only possible horizon, thus expunging any class perspective in the name of “anti-fascism”. Moreover, we agree that democracy itself, which has become the order of organized exploitation of class society, has integrated and perfected “fascist” repression and ideologically benefits from its appearance by the possibility of portraying a common enemy by which all sorts of inter-classist coalitions may form. The logic of the “lesser of two evils” is one that captures the working-class on a bourgeois ideological terrain. Pro-revolutionaries must understand this mechanism with a view to counter its perspective. We consider this text to be a good contribution to that discussion.

IP

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FASCISM AND ANTIFASCISM

Cuadernos de Negación, 2024

This article was originally published in Fascism / Antifascism (Lazo Ediciones, 2024). This book also contains: Cuando mueren las insurrecciones (When Insurrections Die ) and Fascismo / Antifascismo (Fascism/Anti-Fascism ) by Gilles Dauvé, the debates it sparked with the magazine Aufheben and the excerpt of an interview with Troploin.  

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The Revolution and Beyond

We publish here a text on the period of transition; it was written for the conference held in Arezzo in June, 2024 by a member and a sympathiser of Internationalist Perspective.   The subject of the period of transition has not been given the attention it is due by the revolutionary milieu in recent years and we hope to receive further contributions.  

THE REVOLUTION AND BEYOND

1. Is the idea of a ‘period of transition’ to be jettisoned?

The great transformation of social relations all over the world during the revolutionary period will take a certain amount of time – how much time remains to be seen. But the notion of a distinct “period of transition,” characterized by a lower and higher stage of communism as Marx described in the Critique of the Gotha Program, is a concept that is now an impediment to revolutionary understanding.

According to Marx, the law of value would persist in the lower stage of communism, and only in the higher stage of communism would “society wholly cross the narrow horizon of bourgeois right and inscribe on its banner, ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’” The German-Dutch left tried to theorize a way to supposedly circumvent the law of value in the lower stage by using labor-time accounting with individual labor vouchers, but without success.  

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THE TRUMP OFFENSIVE

Trump has been back in office for less than a hundred days, and while the charge he is leading is unmistakable, its destination remains uncertain. The two texts that follow are attempts to make sense of what is being set in motion, and what that reveals about the current configuration of political and economic power.

Both reject the idea that Trump marks a rupture in American priorities. Instead, they trace how long-standing tendencies in U.S. statecraft — toward authoritarianism, militarization, and social demolition — are being sharpened and accelerated. Chaos is deliberately being created for the purpose of reorganizing governance and geopolitical alignment around the shifting needs of capital.

The texts differ in how they understand the nature of the project, and disagree on the coherence, or lack thereof, of the Trump administration’s policies. The first sees the administration as a vehicle for multiple, often competing factions — held together by Trump’s personal authority but lacking a stable ideological core. The second views the administration’s actions as part of a coherent effort to prepare for inter-imperialist war.

The two texts offer views from different perspectives on the unfolding of events. Both were written and discussed before the Trump administration raised the stakes on April 2 by imposing hefty global tariffs.  

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