Marxism, Western vs. Eastern

Karl Marx was disproven back in the 19^th Century. Attempts to correct all those errors while saving the sacrosanct conclusion quickly divided into a “Western” way and an “Eastern” way, as James Lindsay explains, which is quoted in full below due to the limitations of Twitter/X embeds:

Here’s a complicated explanation of some big currents that are happening in the world according to Marxist theory put into practice.

Understanding what’s happening in the People’s Republic of China and BRICS as well as throughout the Western democratic republics requires understanding how Marxists view the dialectical progression of history from one stage to another and what they’ve learned about that progression through the 20th century’s experiments with Marxism.

Marx believed he had a comprehensive and systematic science of history, which he called “dialectical materialism.” There are a number of places and ways he characterized it, but for our purposes, it’s enough to start with his famous first chapter of the Manifesto of the Communist Party (Communist Manifesto) where he and Engels wrote this:

“The history of all hitherto existing society† is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master‡ and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”

The idea is that all of human history is in fact defined by the conflict of classes, and the nature of that conflict changes over time through a series of revolutions in how (mostly material/economic) structures manifest. A simplistic rendering of Marx’s and Engel’s view goes like this:

(Estranged, local) tribal communal (communist, lowercase c) societies give way through conquest to

Slaveholding societies, which through eventual slave revolts become

Feudal/aristocratic (and mercantilist) societies, which through liberal revolutions in private property rights and industrial revolution become

Capitalistic/bourgeois societies, which “socialize” production and therefore eventually face a high-drama, violent revolution where the “expropriators are expropriated” to be forced into a

Socialist economy/society, which eventually withers away of its own accord because it has no ambition to maintain the class distinctions and conflict that maintain class society and that necessitate a state, thus eventually arriving (back) at

Communism: a transcendent, stateless, classless society of ultimate plenty.

Marx described this final state (a full sublation of the original tribal communism) elsewhere (in his 1844 Manuscripts) this way:

“Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to him self as a social (i.e., human) being—a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development.”

Marx believed this model is a true science of history (in the Hegelian sense of a “system of science”) that must play out. The only question was how to awaken the workers to bring about the necessary violent revolution that would push capitalism into socialism, which literally no one ever figured out.

In the 1910s, everything in the world changed with regard to this model. Marx was technically already falsified, but Marxists don’t care about that and don’t stop. Two schools of thought emerged: Eastern Marxism (Soviet Communism) and Western Marxism (Cultural Marxism). Neither matched Marx’s predictions or the “immortal science of Marxism,” which is not only not science, but is also evil, wrong, and a twisted, Luciferian faith system.

And thus the divide:

Eastern Marxism (“Industrial Marxism”) took root in Soviet Union, then the Eastern Bloc and other Satellites, and in the People’s Republic of China and other satellites and defined “Communism” as we think of it today as a twisted 20th century Modernist totalitarian ideology. Western Marxism (“Cultural Marxism”) developed in Europe with Antonio Gramsci, Gyorgy Lukacs, and the Frankfurt School (feat. Fabian Society) and started infiltrating everything in parallel to (eventual) KGB infiltration and subversion.

Eastern Marxism failed Marx’s “immortal science” because in the stagist taxonomy above, it skipped stage 4 (capitalism/liberalism). The only places that Communism was able to take over were profoundly pre-industrial feudal societies where the Bolsheviks in charge (Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao, e.g.) were able to leverage peasant and feudal angst against the existing system (the Tzar in Russia; the KMT in China; both of which had major problems, were oppressive, and were corrupt).

What’s the problem? How are you going to move forward into a plentiful socialism (stage 5) without ever having “unleashed the productive forces” of capitalism (stage 4)? Feudalism hadn’t successfully produced, but it was amenable to Communist takeover.

On the other hand, Western Marxism developed because liberal “capitalist” societies refused to give in to Marxism, even under pretty bad working and social conditions. When pressed, they’d lean into nationalism and even ultranationalism (Fascism), as demonstrated before and through WWI, the Interwar period, and WWII. Antonio Gramsci developed Western (Cultural) Marxism specifically because the Italian Workers Parties wouldn’t get on board properly with Internationalist Socialism. Workers of the world would not, in fact, unite, and worsening conditions made that matter worse, not better, from the Marxist perspective.

Meanwhile, “advanced capitalism” or “late-stage capitalism” was developing through the actions of the Labor Movement, etc., through the late 19th and early-to-mid 20th centuries in the Western democratic republics. These societies were figuring out how to deal with the ravages of unchecked industrialism, corporatism, cronyism, and monopoly (and monopoly-trust) such that a burgeoning middle class could emerge and stabilize. This was curtains for Marxism in the Western democratic republics unless they could be subverted from within.

This left Communists with two failed branches and no good third option: in the East, production couldn’t proceed; in the West, revolution was completely neutralized. How on Earth could they possibly continue to advance the “immortal science of Marxism” anywhere in the world with these two failed models.

It goes too far afield of my purposes to get into the details, but this is where the Liberationist movement took off as the mover of Western Marxism, and Woke Leftism is the derivative form of that we deal with today. Just wanted to mention it, but my purposes are otherwise because I want to talk about the issue in terms of the six-stage model. It has some relevance, but not enough to develop it fully.

What the Western theorists figured out (taking inspiration and lessons from the East) by the late 1960s, was essentially that the stages 4 and 5 above miss the point. Ultimately, what led them to this understanding was, almost ironically, Fascism. Capitalism doesn’t give way to socialism because it’s too good at stabilizing itself. The stepping stone is Fascism. Meanwhile, Industrial (or Soviet) Communism cannot unleash the productive forces on its own or by risking a capitalist phase from which it will never come back. The answer there as well is an integration of Fascism.

The name for this model is actually “Stakeholderism,” at least in some circles, but the general idea is heavy central control of the economy with access to the profit motive (which unleashes the productive forces) after the state’s basic needs and ambitions are fulfilled. Property isn’t owned but given on privilege from the state. Corporations aren’t directly owned or managed by the state, but the state operates as the primary “stakeholder” as representative of all “the people” or “the Volk,” replacing shareholder primacy.

What this represents is a shift away from the six-stage model pictured by Marx to a five-stage model where there are two parts in dialectical pairing between Feudalism and Communism: (egalitarian) socialism and Fascism (not capitalism).

What’s happening now in the West, aside from legacy KGB and Western Marxist subversion, is a move to push Western conditions back toward feudal conditions because those conditions are necessary to get on the socialist train. Free-enterprise systems don’t willingly go there, but feudal-type economies and systems will. Therefore, there’s a partial refeudalization of the West that will make revolution possible.

What about in the East?

This thinking made its way fully into the East after Mao died (and with him dogmatism to Mao Zedong Thought, as it was called), really blossoming in the 1980s and into the 1990s. Soviet Union collapsed and was replaced by a corporatist oligarchy before it had the opportunity to take this road, but Deng Xiaoping pioneered it (with the help of certain Western interests, notably Kissinger and Schwab) after Mao’s religious devotion to Marxism-Leninism (“Industrial Communism”) was out of the way.

Deng’s “two countries, one system” model (“Deng Xiaoping Thought”) represents the integration of a Fascist stakeholderist model into the People’s Republic of China where the primary stakeholder representative of the entire system and economy is the CCP and its leadership. That’s the system, with some modifications, that runs the PRC to this day. It is not capitalism (free market) integrated into their socialist program; it is explicitly economic Fascist doctrine.

What this represents in our model is adopting a Fascist approach to the economic problem of production to “unleash the productive forces” that would have been unleashed, in theory, by capitalism had their society ever experienced it. Instead, the new thinking is that an economically Fascist system will unleash the productive forces not only just as well but also better than a capitalist one because it is more dialectical and more in line with the underlying socialist thinking.

The “Communofascism” of Deng Xiaoping Thought in the People’s Republic of China today is in fact the dialectical sublation of socialism and Fascism, which, according to the original overarching “immortal science of Marxism,” is a superior model to free enterprise because of its alignment with socialism, totalitarianism, and dialectical materialism. Marx wasn’t wrong about the “science,” just about the details of how it plays out.

The goal is to implement the same system in the Western democratic republics but in reverse. We have to be backed out of free enterprise both by pushing us back into a semi-feudal state in our living conditions and by morphing our free-enterprise economy into a stakeholderist Fascistic model. Our productive forces have to be broken and restrained (feudal part) and channeled into the “right” program (stakeholderist/Fascist) part to get us “back on track” with the long arc of dialectical materialism.

When both East and West are progressing along the dialectical materialist track again (“immortal science of Marxism”), the two can be sublated into a single global system, where the two sides, East and West, are seen as “same in kind but different in degree” until they’re merged into a single global system.

That system will be believed to be the long-dreamed-of highly productive socialist semi-state that can begin withering away of its own accord, as predicted by the “immortal science of Marxism.” It will just have to operate as a Reich in the meantime so productive forces remain high while people are ideologically remolded to accept the socialist nature of the whole program and to see that we all, as global citizens, are ultimately doing it the same.

I don’t know if this makes sense to you or not, but it’s the big picture of what’s happening in the globe. Even Aleksandr Dugin’s (supremely stupid) “Fourth Political Theory” reflects this idea by insisting that Liberalism, Fascism, and Marxism have to be dialectically sublated into a new system that retains the best of all of them without the bad parts, allegedly. That demonic and crackpot theory is driving much of what is being done to subvert the Classically Liberal Right in the West, which is the only real bulwark to this program proceeding to its intended goals.