I do think that there may be a need for re-evaluation of tactics and strategies in the present and in the imperial core but I don’t think this is it.

That is to say, if the wealth of Communist Parties in the West were a substantial percentage of total privately held wealth, Communist Parties could employ the exact same means bourgeois individuals and entities use to influence the levers of power.

This would allow Communist Parties to gradually manipulate the political system to favor their own firms, allowing further expansion of the co-op / party-owned enterprise model, with a goal of eventually just buying out some of the remaining capitalists and abolishing the rest.

This kind of reminds me of that meme of the academic standing in front of a blackboard with mathematical theorems and for step 2 it has “then a miracle happens” and the other guy standing next to him saying he should elaborate more on what happens there.

Why would the capitalists, having the high-ground, having pre-existing access to power, having built a fortress in terms of superstructure, loyal dogs in the halls of power and violence and so on just allow this to happen instead of using violence, subversive tactics, laws, etc to simply crush the communist led businesses or subvert them in some way either overtly by seizing control or value or through subversion, infiltration, use of the CIA, FBI, etc to poison the movement and turn it against itself, to turn it into a compromised asset of sorts?

They’d murder the true proponents of such thinking and replace them with dishonest businessmen who’d promise the same but keep the keys in their pocket and then pull out the rug on their workers in 10 years time and pocket the value. Which would dispirit others from trying and convince most people it was all just a scam.

They can simply ban the communist parties. Simply ban businesses affiliated with them. Simply take all their assets under a communist control or anti-foreign agents law and then sell them cheaply to competitors at government auction.

Also how would we working within the system be able to out-compete them who have value extracted from the global south via imperialism/neo-colonialism as well as generationally hoarded wealth? By working harder? Exploiting ourselves harder than they can exploit their workers? Than they can exploit desperate climate migrants? I don’t think this is a good plan for privileged westerners under the thumb of a capitalist government. For peoples who’ve lived in absolute poverty, starvation, knowing want and suffering and backwardness for generations sure it’s an easy sell as it was in China when they began industrializing but people tend to want better conditions, not to voluntarily subject themselves to conditions much worse than those of their parents all in the hopes that in some decades not that they’ll be financially secure within capitalism because of work but that they’ll maybe buy it out or overthrow it if they’re not crushed and sabotaged in the meantime. (Hence why they will be sabotaged early and often to dispirit and discourage people)

I mean they could simply levy new huge, punishing taxes across the board then give tax breaks, special exemptions, bail-outs etc to the capitalist controlled enterprises while siphoning the value from the collective enterprises straight to the imperialist machine and handing some of it back to the capitalists while using the rest to continue to fund the global and domestic oppression.

I mean where is the capital for starting to do all this supposed to come from? To start up companies, means of production you need money. People lending a bit of labor and free-time on their weekends isn’t going to create machinery or produce the capital for buildings, staff, etc. When the people who actually have this capital are either PMC type workers who benefit from the continuation of capitalism and would rather not work harder to beat others for an ideological project or the capitalists themselves who’d only fund such a thing to subvert it, pull the rug out and take the profit from all the hard work I just don’t understand how this gets off the ground without foreign interference like China funding it which would get it instantly shut down for foreign communist subversion that’s a threat to national security. Will the liberal compromised unions give us the funds? I think not. The communist parties in the US are either compromised and full of liberals (CPUSA) or still struggling to grow and hardly have the capital and funds for such.

Also I’m pretty sure there’s a law on the books about communist parties owning businesses in the US or at least newspapers but it could be expanded.

Your examples:

Examples to learn from would be the Japanese Communist Party’s influential newspaper, which earns the JCP 110 million USD a year, Mondragon, a European industrial cooperative with more than 60,000 workers, Haier, a Chinese SOE known for its radical organizational structure and exceptional growth, and Huawei, technically a worker’s cooperative but generally so successful that the United States levied sanctions on it.

The JCP is awful, communist in name only. They follow the imperialist line, attack China, are revisionist, liberal, etc. They’re harmless and a false path which is why they’re allowed. They also as you note are powerless and losing steam. Let’s not say being trots is good, your idea is out-competing capitalists but they’re not competing in the communist newspaper market, trots have had that cornered for decades but have gone nowhere.

Mondragon is simply an exception not a rule, it’s allowed to exist and isn’t in any way working towards buying out and overthrowing capitalism and if it was it would probably have been crushed. Contradictions exist under capitalism and they exist under socialism, they are not proof of anything but that fact itself.

Haier and Huawei exist under the coat and wings of an in-power revolutionary communist party in a nation that’s been ideologically communist for over half a century now. And as you note one of them is being blockaded from the west essentially as part of a push to contain China.

On some level I kind of appreciate your exuberance, I guess. But this doesn’t have anything to do with Mao Zedong thought (“dengism”).

The purpose of the anti-imperialist geopolitics of contemporary China is to destroy the value chain system created by imperialism through crosslinking and peripheral development. This also has the side benefit of being the way you actually develop an economy without simply ramping up exploitation of the periphery or destroying and enclosing semi developed nations (like the former USSR experienced). If China followed the path that Demsuccs in the first world demand, they would be failing to develop their rural production and quality of life, competing to provide amenities to their workers while also walling themselves off from all capitalist economies, making it incredibly easy to isolate and famine siege China. MZT does not treat all areas of production, agriculture, the military, education, etc as a smorgasbord for capitalists.

“Bail communism out”? I assume you mean Eurocommunist shitheads, the “antiwar US left” that’s entirely supplanted Marxism-Leninism with new left French critical theory ideologies like anatchists and succdems, MLMs, trots, and libertarianism?

Yeah, 6/7ths of the population sure isn’t waiting for those shitheads to get it. Nobody cares if yhe CPUSA and PSL and whatnot take umbrage with Russians or Nicaraguans or the specifics of what Maduro is doing. Their audience is each other, certainly not the global south, unless they want to lecture. I’m sure they’re looking forward to your newfangled lecturing.

I appreciate the effort here. One major flaw I see in your argument is ignoring historical context. You point to the CPC being very wealthy and owning a large amount oy stock and businesses and use that to argue other parties should too, but you leave off the how and why the CPC owns so much. It wasn’t as you argue others should do, by out competing capitalists, but rather due to their actions after their successful revolution. I’d suggest elaborating more on this to see if you can reconcile some issues in your proposal. Additionally I’d consider how capitalists are trying currently to do what you suggest the communist parties do, to essentially buy out all competition.

This is fundamentaly a liberal conception of the world, that the solution to everything is to just have the right people in charge. The constant regeneration of capitalism is not born out of some individuals conscious will. It is ideological, structural, etc.

Conceptually you’ve jettisoned the very idea of class struggle, you’ve interalized defeat to such a degree that revolution is preemptively liquidated, and in its place put forward the same blathe utopianism that has been repudiated for hundreds of years. I will give you things though, you are correct to not tail this or that power, but by no means are you a Communist.

To think that millions of people of this world bled, toiled, and dedicated their lives under the sky of a Communist horizon, in the name of revolution, could be swept away in just a few sentences in an internet comment is not just a horror of its inadequacy to capture the experience of the world proletarian revolutions of the past, but it is pure arrogance!!

I can’t tell how much of this is a quote or whatever but I’ve noticed that US, Japan, and European leftists seem very averse to the Triad theory of empire, which I would also expand to Aus and South Korea, maybe not all the way to semi-imperialists like India, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, Somalia

Imperialism is not just being a mean country it is about how your country interacts with undeveloped nations and developed imperialist nations

I think this is an interesting post, and I look forward to seeing more, but also I don’t think this is as viable as you may think. If communists could find a benevolent billionaire maybe, but no billionaires get that way by benevolence

Even if the Chinese win, you are not guaranteed that the Chinese, seeing the wreck of the West, won’t behave in the same way as the Americans did to the fallen Soviet Union, and through malign neglect, allow the West to fester in fascism.

Honestly, by all means I think the west should be either left to fester in its own fascism and feces if that’s what they choose, or- if things get too appalling and/or they actually start a world war on the rest of humanity, they should be occupied when all is said and done and thoroughly decolonized/etc. Even as someone who lives in the west- why should the nations which are responsible for such atrocities and deprivation across the globe get a special treatment, or get theirs before their victims (those decent peoples, those friendly nations or non-imperialist nations at least across the global south)?

Fuck the west. China and what is developing in BRICS presents a model of prosperity and development- the formula is right there, and the only thing that is preventing the west from emulating it, and joining in (and being welcomed to join in on it) and contributing to it is their own racist, imperialist, capitalist contradictions, contradictions that are such that their system as it exists would literally rather burn the world to the ground than see this prosperity and equality develop. The west has had every advantage and has and will continue to squander it, right up until they demonstrate the humanity necessary to overthrow their inhumane, imperialist system (and yes, it will almost certainly require revolution). Any aid, any support to the west till then, should be done as “good business” and nothing else if you ask me- and even then it should be done with caution, because whatever is built within these regimes will certainly be used against you (against the proletarian cause within the west, against the cause across the global south, etc) if it can; this poisonous nature of the system can only be fixed through establishing a proletarian, anti-imperialist state.

The rest of the world won’t do anything remotely like what the west did to Russia and the post-Soviet bloc (the carving up, destabilization, shock therapy/blatant looting of everything of value, etc), despite the fact I don’t think anyone could blame the rest of the world for doing so to those who are responsible for 500 years of unparalleled barbarism and destruction and the genocide of most of three continents’ worth of indigenous peoples… but there is no reason that the west should get a hand up, unless they first get their heads out of their collective asses (which they won’t, not anytime soon I expect though I hope otherwise). Till then, any such aid would be no different from feeding and breeding rabid dogs, and it will have entirely predictable results…

As for the schtick of usurping capital within the capitalist state… no offense, but it sounds incredibly- idealistic. Even most capitalists can recognize how the game is played in the west, and it’s not some “free market” where worker cooperatives can magically usurp established monopolies and oligopolies (cartels) without immense interference, complications, and being usurped themselves in their own right. Idealist capitalists (the “traditional liberals”) will say that it’s how it should be, but the facts simply are that it just- isn’t, and presumably we’re all here due to the understanding of just why that is the case and is the inevitable reality of capitalism, and part of why the dictatorship of the proletariat is necessary.

Within capitalism, and particularly within the imperial cores of capital, you’re not dealing with an honest system nor one that will even bother to play by their own established rules, and they can and will usurp you long before you get to doing anything meaningful within their system. Western capital did not get to where they are now by simply being the “most competitive-” they got to where they are through being the most murderous, thieving, conniving SOBs around and that reality has never changed, one way or another within their system that’s how it works, and comparatively “honest” business has no place in such an environment, as anything more than a (constantly shrinking) niche if even that.

If you ask me, any communists (or any sensible people, period) with the assets or skills to do so, if they want to actually enrich themselves and through doing so perhaps aid the cause of their fellow proletariat- should head to China, or elsewhere. Maybe eventually you can return and do something meaningful then once the capitalist regimes of the west have crumbled in on themselves (or maybe you can come to the conclusion that the west should be left to fend for themselves, even as someone living within it that’s definitely my take on it), but needless to say, you can actually build something meaningful and substantial there without being usurped by the capitalist system, which is what would inevitably occur should it be tried and reach anywhere near such levels of success as you imagine in the west.

Interesting post, I can’t say I personally agree with it, but it poses interesting questions and hypotheses.

I think unions could actually be useful in this hypothetical scenario. They could increase the amount of funding for the working class, as well as make competitors less competitive against the cooperative conglomerate, which in turn would offer jobs to workers to give them a better bargaining position in unions. Hope this helps your line of thought.

I have nothing but good words to say for the effort and enthusiasm comrade. But there are some issues in that way of thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to outcompete the captalist companies, just look at popular Korea or Cuba, they could have something in the line of that zaibatsu that you describe, but the capitalist forces did not stood still, they did a blockade. Since they can do that to a whole nation imagine what they can do with a company. Furthermore it pressuposes something we do not have, the numbers to do such thing and to my eyes that’s where our focus should be, to keep a strong revolutionary Leninist line and to manage it to spread it, and that is done by mingling with the poorest parts of society learning with them being among the people, and figuring out how to apply the Marxist teachings to their reality and show them that we are for them. But few people are willing to do that, Marxism especially in the west is much more of an academic endeavour than a popular workforce one, and the further away we get from the masses more we leave the field open for facist ideas to take root. I think the best example of strategy we have in recent memory is the black panthers under Fred Hampton and the rainbow coalition, we cannot mimic that step by step but I think that the future revolutions in the west must learn from their actions of how to resonate within the masses.