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Lenin's "The Defeat of One's Own Government in the Imperialist War" | GZD Reading Group | Week 12, 2024 (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 2 days ago by GrainEater@lemmygrad.ml to c/genzedong@lemmygrad.ml

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We're starting off with a very short one for the first week. This text was published in 1915, two years before the October revolution, and is sadly still highly relevant in the imperial core.

This reading group is meant to educate, and people from any instances federated with Lemmygrad are welcome. Any comments not engaging in good faith will be removed (don't respond to hostile comments, just report them).

You can post questions or share your thoughts at any time. We'll be moving on to a new text next week, but this thread won't be locked.

You can read the text here.

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[–] sunbleachedfly@lemmygrad.ml 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The phrase-bandying Trotsky has completely lost his bearings on a simple issue. It seems to him that to desire Russia’s defeat means desiring the victory of Germany.

This makes me think of Russia-Ukraine right now, or even "Israel"-Palestine. Maybe it's just the general way that war is framed in the US. It has been used to an even greater degree in Palestine imo, where they've bent the word Hamas to mean "anything vaguely against the genocide". Even if the working class doesn't actually carry out treasonous acts, they'll end up being criminalized anyways.

On closer examination, this slogan will be found to mean a "class truce", the renunciation of the class struggle by the oppressed classes in all belligerent countries, since the class struggle is impossible without dealing blows at one’s "own" bourgeoisie, one’s "own" government, whereas dealing a blow at one’s own government in wartime is (for Bukvoyed’s information) high treason, means contributing to the defeat of one’s own country.

I like this, as it expands on the previous quote. I see this logic a lot when it comes to criticizing the gov or demanding anything at all from them, like our class is supposed to deprive ourselves in support of some war instead of seeing it as a time where our gov's grasp on authority is weaker & more vulnerable.

[–] Red_Scare@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 18 minutes ago

Just to note that Palestine is different because Palestinians are not waging an imperialist war but an anti-colonial war. This text doesn't apply to the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and Palestinian communists are correct in supporting their government even if it is not progressive or communist:

The struggle that the Emir of Afghanistan is waging for the independence of Afghanistan is objectively a revolutionary struggle, despite the monarchist views of the Emir and his associates, for it weakens, disintegrates and undermines imperialism; whereas the struggle waged by such “desperate” democrats and “Socialists,” “revolutionaries” and republicans as, for example, Kerensky and Tsereteli, Renaudel and Scheidemann, Chernov and Dan, Henderson and Clynes, during the imperialist war was a reactionary struggle, for its results was the embellishment, the strengthening, the victory, of imperialism. For the same reasons, the struggle that the Egyptians merchants and bourgeois intellectuals are waging for the independence of Egypt is objectively a revolutionary struggle, despite the bourgeois origin and bourgeois title of the leaders of Egyptian national movement, despite the fact that they are opposed to socialism; whereas the struggle that the British “Labour” Government is waging to preserve Egypt’s dependent position is for the same reason a reactionary struggle, despite the proletarian origin and the proletarian title of the members of the government, despite the fact that they are “for” socialism. There is no need to mention the national movement in other, larger, colonial and dependent countries, such as India and China, every step of which along the road to liberation, even if it runs counter to the demands of formal democracy, is a steam-hammer blow at imperialism, i.e., is undoubtedly a revolutionary step.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1924/foundations-leninism/ch06.htm