Mu Garden

“using the workers regimented into the bureaucratic parties of the Third International as a backup force for Russian diplomacy, sabotaging the entire revolutionary movement and supporting bourgeois governments whose support it in turn hoped to secure in the sphere of international politics (the Kuomintang regime in the China of 1925–1927, the Popular Fronts in Spain and France, etc.). The Russian bureaucracy then carried this consolidation of power to the next stage by subjecting the peasantry to a reign of terror, implementing the most brutal primitive accumulation of capital in history. The industrialization of the Stalin era ... demonstrated the independence of the economy: the economy has come to dominate society so completely that it has proved capable of recreating the class domination it needs for its own continued operation; that is, the bourgeoisie has created an independent power that is capable of maintaining itself even without a bourgeoisie. The totalitarian bureaucracy was ... a substitute ruling class for the commodity economy. A faltering capitalist property system was replaced by a cruder version of itself—simplified, less diversified, and concentrated as the collective property of the bureaucratic class. The hierarchical and statist framework for this crude remake of the capitalist ruling class was provided by the working-class party, which was itself modeled on the hierarchical separations of bourgeois organizations.” (Thesis 104, p 51)

Third International (a.k.a. Communist International or Comintern): “The Third International, ostensibly created by the Bolsheviks to counteract the degenerate social-democratic reformism of the Second International and to unite the vanguard of the proletariat in 'revolutionary communist parties,' was too closely linked to the interests of its founders to ever bring about a genuine socialist revolution anywhere. In reality the Third International was essentially a continuation of the Second. The Russian model was rapidly imposed on the Western workers' organizations and their evolutions were thenceforth one and the same. The totalitarian dictatorship of the bureaucracy, the new ruling class, over the Russian proletariat found its echo in the subjection of the great mass of workers in other countries to a stratum of political and labor-union bureaucrats whose interests had become clearly contradictory to those of their rank-and-file constituents” (SI Anthology, p. 332; Expanded Edition, p. 423).

Note 104, p 133

“Kuomintang regime in the China of 1925–1927: At the very moment when radical workers were attaining significant victories in the major cities of China, Stalin insisted that the Chinese Communist Party subordinate itself to the Kuomintang, the nationalist party led by General Chiang Kai-shek. When the workers of Shanghai had taken over the city in April 1927, the Communist leaders thus urged them to welcome Chiang Kai-shek's army and to turn in all their weapons. Once they did so, Chiang's army entered the city and massacred the radical workers by the thousands. See Harold Isaacs's The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution.” (Note 104, pp 133–134)

“Popular Fronts in Spain and France: The Russian alliance with the French Popular Front government led to the betrayal of the anticolonial struggle in French Indochina (see Ngo Van's In the Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary, AK Press, 2010, translated by Ken Knabb et al.).” (Note 104, p 134)

'subjecting the peasantry to a reign of terror: i.e. through the forced collectivizations and “Five Year Plans” of 1928–1941.' (ibid)

'The Bureaucratization of the World (1939) ... includes what can be considered the first in-depth analysis of the class nature of the “Soviet” Union.' (ibid)

The spectacle is the stage at which the commodity has succeeded in totally colonizing social life. we no longer see anything else; the world we see is the world of the commodity.

The commodity’s independence has spread to the entire economy it now dominates. This economy has transformed the world... into a world dominated by the economy.

So this is how the “commodity” is “independent”. We don’t even know whom to blame anymore because everywhere in the world, the problem is an anonymous market that requires selling oneself on the corresponding labor market.

The pseudo-nature within which human labor has become alienated demands that such labor remain forever in its service....

That’s one thing I was always taught: to choose how I would serve the economy.

since this demand is formulated by and answerable only to itself, it in fact ends up channeling all socially permitted projects and endeavors into its own reinforcement.

“the world of the commodity dominating all living experience. its development is identical to people's estrangement from each other and from everything they produce.” (14)

“The spectacle was born from the world’s loss of unity…. In the spectacle, a part of the world represents itself to the world and is superior to it. The spectacle is simply the common language of this separation. Spectators are linked solely by their one-way relationship to the very center that keeps them isolated from each other. The spectacle thus reunites the separated, but it reunites them only in their separateness.” (10)

“Workers do not produce themselves, they produce a power independent of themselves. The success of this production, the abundance it generates, is experienced by the producers as an abundance of dispossession. As their alienated products accumulate, all time and space become foreign to them. The spectacle is the map of this new world, a map that is identical to the territory it represents. The forces that have escaped us display themselves to us in all their power.” (11)