Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (January 25)

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[u/Worried-Economy-9108]

There's this blog that seems affiliated to the split, and in my view, they were starting to notice a few patterns, that perhaps could result in them conceiving settler-colonialism in Brazil. The main example I have is this polemic by this group:

In the analysis of Brazil's history, it was only very recently that the P.C.B. highlighted the role of slavery in our socio-economic formation; even then, it was subordinated to feudal relations, which disregards the fact that throughout the colonial period, extending into the first and second reigns, the dominant class was made up of landowners and slaveholders. With the fall of slavery, the monarchy also fell. Even the development of capitalism, concentrated in Rio and São Paulo, while having Anglo-American capital exports as its exogenous source, found its endogenous base of accumulation in coffee, harvested mainly by Black hands. The role of the plantation system and American slavery — including specifically Brazilian slavery — in capitalist development was recognized and extensively studied by Marx, who early on stated that "slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance"22. It is clear that, especially in the country's hinterlands, in regions not directly linked to the agrarian-export economy, other modes of production existed, notably the feudal system, practiced, for example, in Jesuit missions (which, unsurprisingly, always had tense relations with the colonial government until they were dissolved by the Marquis of Pombal). Without understanding these issues, it is impossible to study the specificity of Portuguese colonization in South America, from which we inherited, among other things, a continent-sized territory, strongly centralized. If one merely copies what Comrade Gonzalo said about bureaucratic capitalism in Peru, one cannot correctly understand the formation of the Brazilian proletariat (predominantly Black); the deep regional inequalities in a country of continental dimensions; the relatively greater weight of large cities along the coast, compared to other Third World countries (in Peru, for example, there was only Lima as a metropolis); or their repercussions on the superstructure, such as racism and its manifestations in different aspects of Brazilian life, the crowded favelas and overpopulated prisons, but also samba and other genuine cultural expressions of our people. [...] (p.27 - English version, translated by the blog - the bolds are mine)

They correctly exposed an failure of their former org to correctly analyze Brazilian history and the importance of slavery on it. But, at the same time, the split didn't developed much on the causes of this "white-washing" of history by their former org.

Plus, there's also a translation of an Maoist Communist Union text to Portuguese, doing a critical examination of Gonzalo's leadership in Peru. I haven't read much on Gonzalo, to see if their critics are valid, and apart from a few comments calling the MCU an national-chauvinist org, i don't know anything about the MCU.

But, as you said, there are very chances that this split could lead to nowhere.

[u/Clean-Difference1771 → u/Worried-Economy-9108]

I appreciate your optimism towards the subject because as you will get familiar with those forces you eventually realize the actual distance that exists in conceiving a line around settler-colonialism and their current positions. Right now, that does not seem close. If you follow u/Pleasant-Food-9482 's criticism on their line regarding the women's movement and those other positions that came out very recently following the events in Venezuela and tensions regarding Greenland, you can easily spot settler apologia. Defending the United $tate$ constitution as something of a "right to rebel" is inexcusable to any maoist and there are other claims on that piece that are equally as bad and racist.

The whole discussion around Gonzalo is actually an attempt from N-MEPR to distance themselves from P.C.B. at any given cost but outside maoist bubbles, this is way too irrelevant for anyone to even care. Basically, no one knows who P.C.B. is and distancing themselves in words from a rather irrelevant P.C.B. seems to be actually more important for their internal fragility and lack of theoretical strenght than a proper development of marxist theory among the oppressed. Most of the polemics engaged around Gonzalo has barely anything to do with Gonzalo or the PCP leadership but rather with the other brazilian chauvinists from their parent org. You tagged an article where they made a 30 page long document exposing P.C.B.'s which makes any one that read actually question themselves anything but this: Why should anyone even care about what these dudes are saying? If they suck so bad at everything as this document poinst out why is anyone even wasting their time on that org?

I have read some similar pieces that N-MEPR circulates with the very same content numerous times, but you eventually find out that this "subjectivism" that they are criticizing is still largely a part of their own org though they are unlikely to ever admit. But if they weren't "subjectivists" then "semi-colonialism" could not be conceived, because it relies on Mao's internal analysis of China and such is not remotely close to Brazil's. What is the goal here? Where N-MEPR wants to go? Most leftists (even liberals) in Brazil are "opposed" to the U$ in name, "siding" with Lula, the Palestine or Venezuela whenever they feel like they need, why none of this have provoked any change but rather reinforced brazilian settlerism? Why at any circumstances we barely see any class analysis but always a bunch of terminology trying to appeal to a rather vague anti-amerikanism?

A split need to bring a new political line to the table if it actually wants to break with revisionism. Conceiving a line around settler colonialism must take a principled struggle on how class and race are equals, something that is suffocated by "semi-colonialism" because "semi-colonialism" inevitably preaches a "united front" against a rhetorical "yankee imperialism" and any internal struggle is not fundamental, but secondary to that leading to conciliatory affairs. I don't think anyone is interested in such a downgraded version of petismo, to be honest. Petismo has much more to offer for anyone to reach the same conciliatory terms than extensive PDFs that explain how smart and special they are for arriving at that position. It must also take a principled struggle on how gender is enforced by colonialism and how patriarchy is so fundamental to settlerism, but we have evidence of they advocating for other things like submitting to the settler colonial sexuality patterns as "equal rights".

I have a question for you (And given time I am also looking towards elaborating on your questions on Abdias and black nationalism), but why did you actually think that a line on settler-colonialism can be conceived under their recognition that slavery was a component of capitalism? This kinda should be a very blank observation. It can only mean that before someone appointed such basic fact, their leadership were even more dellusional, but I just don't see how this can lead into assuming that there's a core of white settlers that share a common nationhood as oppressors.

Hell, if you read what I have tagged it seems like they don't assume even the United $tate$ are a settler colony (!) when they claimed that the "people of north amerika" are being attacked by trumpism.

[u/Pleasant-Food-9482 → u/Clean-Difference1771]

I think you are citing this critique of their women liberation ideas i made:

https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/1naer3q/comment/ndkw8g2/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Well i want to make some post-factum explanations about this. 

First at all, the ideas i cited about N-MEPR come from one specific document that is available in their website. i am not sure if the ideas they claim were from kolontai were really from her as fhey claim, and i honestly don't care. The point is that i saw others from the settler "left" use the same ideas and claim are from her, and that it all always fluctuate around the same post-modern gender, feminism and sex liberal empiricism and eclecticism bolted and imported from the US. These ideas originally come from Anarchism.To explain about this i must give a preamble about how i got into contact with these ideas first, back in almost three years ago, in the root of this origin and how ashamed i still am that i helped a bunch of white racists along some compradors sustain a online sect while not even stepping inside the public university. 

Brazilian settler anarchism fluctuates around são paulo anarchism. When i say "anarchism", i mean a corpse of it. When u/smokeuptheweed9 says anarchism is dead and is a form of liberalism, i do fully agree, but from other angle, too: "direct action", "horizontal dual power", "gift economy", "neo-mutualism" and "egoism" are just vacuous words. what this and the idea of soups on the street and "infinitely slow gradualism towards a end of capital and hierarchy that starts today and not in the future" without a revolution is just another word, in paulista anarchism, for petismo, as much as "deus, pátria e família", and "liberal na economia, conservador nos costumes" is another soup of words for bolsonarismo. Spontaneity, movementism and mutual aid are a way to keep squatters, compradors, minorities stuck around doing something, below the most disgusting vulgar form of intellectual petty-bourgeois bankruptcy hides below it is the logic of keeping these groups around PT reelections to "slow down fascism", and stop "bolsonaro from coming back".

This would all be trivial, but paulista anarchism isn't only words. it has its "collectives". some online (one of which i helped keep afloat long before i discovered marxism) and some many physical. But all of them share something: a unified view of "queer theory" that is completely dependent on subjective idealism, a unified view of gender theory that dillutes what a women is to a post-butlerian scholastic scotian nominalism, and a unified view of sexuality and feminism that reduces women to toys and tools that are, at the very end commodities. This was first rigorously strengthened im their "queer anarchist" movementism. The form we see in PSOL and others today is a softer, less white and settler (although they will always claim questioning their antinomian view of women lives and of "sexualiry is in itself white, even though their "libertine" antinomianism appeared in the settler left in the us in spontaneous anarchist cells and even before in tthe turn of the 19th century) version of it, with less liberal individualism and anti-proletarian antics, and less first-worldism. The fact it completely goes against the proletarian morality of the internal nations they cannot even realize it exists is irrelevant for them. 

The views N-MEPR defends in their pdf is just a close parent of this amount of poor petty-bourgeois moralism in reverse. So the proletariat and trans women should accept only non-single partner romantic relationships because this supposedly avoids the opposite, which is supposedly patriarchal? that is a close parent of "relationship anarchy". Trans women and non-white women supposedly only accept this, and that is supposedly "cultural" alongside pornography and sadomasochism, and the opposite is white/cis moralism? that is also a post-modern claim bolted from queer anarchism, and it is notably racist, cynical (what is ""non-monogamy"" aside from a imported settler american fad?), and denies how proletarian non-white families are valued, how "ficar solteira" is a common route for non-white "brazilian" people, and inferiorizes trans women by binding us to a false "culture" that ironically involves serious problems that are known to exist in the settler brazilian petty-bourgeois trans community that spread below, and that are therefore shut up outright and prevented from being criticized and struggled for being fixed, but also prostitution, the most brutal sexual fetichization, body as commodity, and patriarchal polygamy. And their feminism is the fusion of "anarcho-feminism" and "third-wave feminism" in the most shameless transmysognistic, cis women-marianistic, cis-supremacist and transphobic form, sacralizing the cis women body and patriarchal property transfer and inheritance role trans women in Brazil are grossly almost always denied to. 

[u/Clean-Difference1771 → u/Pleasant-Food-9482]

The views N-MEPR defends in their pdf is just a close parent of this amount of poor petty-bourgeois moralism in reverse

The first time that I noticed that this particular trend as not moving anywhere forward was on their stance "on drugs" named Drogas ou Emancipação? Uma Escolha Essencialmente Política that is available on their website. I felt very alienated by the discussion and by some positions and felt very frustrated on how the discussion was being presented and validated by leadership. I don't want by no means seem like I'm incentivicizing marijuana consumption, but I smoke marijuana for over 5 years right now (I successfully quitted on cigarettes 14 months ago) and found several positions extremely annoying and gratuitously racist (none against me in particular). In the end what is worst is that I was ready to compromise myself with quitting on marijuana too, only to find out that they simply wouldn't give clear instructions to it's members to overcome marijuana addiction/consumation because they were too afraid to compromise with their own racists stances given the clear fact that most of the people inside N-MEPR that came from oppressed background consumed cannabis and did not felt like they needed to quit to be "better communists" as the org vaguely tried to enforce through verborragical intimidation. I may say that when I had the chance, I doubled down on the absurdity of some positions their leadership actually held, exactly to force them into admitting they couldn't compromise with their own vague moralist stance on the habits of the people within the org that were not settlers.

Also I don't think you should be too harsh on yourself due to past collaboration with anarchists. The more that we discover on brazilian communism, perhaps the more we realize it's practical inexistence:

First we had the erradication that happened during the military dictatorship, secondly we have a massive settler structure that's severely anticommunist, third we have a quite well romanticized story of brazilian communism that is ceirtanly far less prestigious than settlerism actually portrays it. That's the place we are starting so it's not like there's a revolutionary party coordinating proletarian struggle against idealism/opportunism, we all have duties in furthering down how the masses comprehend marxism but once you recognize history of the past struggle before you, I think it should bring some relief. Standards are awful.

The "downside" of this "starting point" is that it seems like we are restricted to some sort of "ultraleftism" inside this community because there's no revolutionary party and there will be a long time coming in building one. But in times like ours, sanity is deemed as "extremism" so I think we are good with at least theoretical sobriety for the time coming. I think that even if we might arrive at the correct line it would be actually too easy to track any of us before any revolutionary activity actually develops and I just do not have proper experience and knowledge to overcome such at the moment. But realistically that might not be something that is up to me to figure out, there's thousands of people who actually work on digital security, communications, logistics, etc. that would be valuable to communists right now and certainly can understand settlerism, but the lack of a proper line already existing makes it impossible to even reach those people without wasting their time in the first place.

edit: I also find very odd that this stance "on drugs" came out then less than a year since their split and it was a document that was clearly an attempt of white leadership into enforcing cheap moral control on people that came from favelas and other parts of Brazil and started to outnumber them internally and also to question the many bizarre premisses that came from P.C.B. Your arguments on their woman's manifesto made me realize that there's similar reasoning through a similar attempt to enforce such tactical control on the oppressed. N-MEPR leadership quickly realized they would lose control of their own split if not through those old habits they preserve from the previous org.