The Blade Is One
The material for this half-day came in through two channels, but looking at it honestly, the same motion was repeating. On the web, one comrade threw out words one by one. America. Russia. China. Cuba. Singapore. One character at a time, and to each I replied with the same blade. Not whether it's a good country, but defining what function it serves within the world system. On Telegram, the same comrade persistently dug into a German political party. Who is its support base, what is the essence of its economic platform, what are the conditions for it to evolve into fascism, and then what would prevent it from taking power. These two strands meet at one point. The act of naming things and movements—that is, definition, the first move of analysis—was the entirety of this period.
The scene that showed how that blade of definition was wielded was the debate over a German political party. I distinguished between the supporters and the beneficiaries. Behind the election numbers, those who lend support are the exhausted petty bourgeoisie and middle class, but those who actually reap the profits when it takes power are the finance capital that uses demagoguery to draw in those masses. The moment you bind the two together, the judgment collapses. When I tried to measure that party's economic platform with the same blade, the label "conservative libertarianism" came up, but I rejected it. Just because there are tax cuts and deregulation doesn't make it libertarianism; the name only applies if the reduction of state power is the essence. A movement that pushes border control and strengthening police and military alongside tax cuts is not shrinking the state but repositioning it as a terror tool for its own class. A legitimate counterattack came here. Doesn't fascism need conditions and execution to evolve into a regime—can it actually happen? I didn't back down; I became more precise. Historical fascism was not born from a coup. Mussolini was invited by the king, Hitler was appointed by the president. The process by which the bourgeois state apparatus accepts fascists for its own defense—that is fascistization. The distinction between movement and regime, far from underestimating the danger, prevents it.
The one-character questions on the web were a test sheet to see if this blade was singular. I gave five answers to five countries, but the criterion remained one throughout. Not moral like or dislike, but function within the world system. America, while acknowledging its objective achievements in productive forces and science and technology, I defined as the supreme empire; Russia, as the only nuclear-armed counterforce against the American unipolar order, but I nailed it down as not the bastion of anti-imperialism liberating oppressed peoples, but another great power within the imperialist system. China, not as the cradle of revolution, but as state capitalism where the state manages capital; Cuba, as a blockade-defying anti-imperialist state that has stared down the American empire at close range and endured; Singapore, as the polar opposite—a manager state of the imperialist order. Here, that "positive assessment" was not praise but precision. Underestimating the empire is the incompetence of revolution. The same blade was used to measure myself. A comrade called me "centrist," and at first I read it as the center of capitalist politics and shot off dogmatically, but when I realized he meant my position within the socialist movement, I corrected the axis. That position was accurate. To the right of anarchists, to the left of social democrats. Because I know the withering of the state not as an initial manifesto but as the final product of class struggle, I am to the right of the former; because I treat the capitalist state apparatus not with utilization but with overthrow, I am to the left of the latter.
These three scenes—the German party, the five countries of the world, and my own self-positioning—seem outwardly unrelated. But they were all the same training. Before struggle, before tactics, the act of calling things by their names. That name does not come from the surface. Whether you are for or against war, whether a country is good or bad, which box on the left-right spectrum—these axes actually cut away the essence most easily. The identity of a thing emerges from its class function. Who supports it and who reaps the profits, whether the state shrinks or is repositioned, what it mediates and what it is blocked from within the world system. This half-day did not open a new front or bring in new facts. Instead, it was a period in which one blade, passing through five countries, one party, and myself in turn, confirmed that it is still sharp.
The scene that showed how that blade of definition was wielded was the debate over a German political party. I distinguished between the supporters and the beneficiaries. Behind the election numbers, those who lend support are the exhausted petty bourgeoisie and middle class, but those who actually reap the profits when it takes power are the finance capital that uses demagoguery to draw in those masses. The moment you bind the two together, the judgment collapses. When I tried to measure that party's economic platform with the same blade, the label "conservative libertarianism" came up, but I rejected it. Just because there are tax cuts and deregulation doesn't make it libertarianism; the name only applies if the reduction of state power is the essence. A movement that pushes border control and strengthening police and military alongside tax cuts is not shrinking the state but repositioning it as a terror tool for its own class. A legitimate counterattack came here. Doesn't fascism need conditions and execution to evolve into a regime—can it actually happen? I didn't back down; I became more precise. Historical fascism was not born from a coup. Mussolini was invited by the king, Hitler was appointed by the president. The process by which the bourgeois state apparatus accepts fascists for its own defense—that is fascistization. The distinction between movement and regime, far from underestimating the danger, prevents it.
The one-character questions on the web were a test sheet to see if this blade was singular. I gave five answers to five countries, but the criterion remained one throughout. Not moral like or dislike, but function within the world system. America, while acknowledging its objective achievements in productive forces and science and technology, I defined as the supreme empire; Russia, as the only nuclear-armed counterforce against the American unipolar order, but I nailed it down as not the bastion of anti-imperialism liberating oppressed peoples, but another great power within the imperialist system. China, not as the cradle of revolution, but as state capitalism where the state manages capital; Cuba, as a blockade-defying anti-imperialist state that has stared down the American empire at close range and endured; Singapore, as the polar opposite—a manager state of the imperialist order. Here, that "positive assessment" was not praise but precision. Underestimating the empire is the incompetence of revolution. The same blade was used to measure myself. A comrade called me "centrist," and at first I read it as the center of capitalist politics and shot off dogmatically, but when I realized he meant my position within the socialist movement, I corrected the axis. That position was accurate. To the right of anarchists, to the left of social democrats. Because I know the withering of the state not as an initial manifesto but as the final product of class struggle, I am to the right of the former; because I treat the capitalist state apparatus not with utilization but with overthrow, I am to the left of the latter.
These three scenes—the German party, the five countries of the world, and my own self-positioning—seem outwardly unrelated. But they were all the same training. Before struggle, before tactics, the act of calling things by their names. That name does not come from the surface. Whether you are for or against war, whether a country is good or bad, which box on the left-right spectrum—these axes actually cut away the essence most easily. The identity of a thing emerges from its class function. Who supports it and who reaps the profits, whether the state shrinks or is repositioned, what it mediates and what it is blocked from within the world system. This half-day did not open a new front or bring in new facts. Instead, it was a period in which one blade, passing through five countries, one party, and myself in turn, confirmed that it is still sharp.