“Red China again – Xi Jinping brings back Marxism”. That was the title of an article in the American magazine Foreign Affairs (we will talk more about its author). For now we should note that his scary accusations are standard: only lazybones there (or even us) do not report that Xi is Mao Tse Tung today.
Is it really Marxism? This is where I want to make a desperate plea: guys, don’t start, it has already happened. There were two powers that almost came to a brawl about whose Marxism was correct and who was a shameful revisionist distortionist of the bright ideas of Marx, Lenin and others. This, understandably, was the USSR and China in the 60s and later. The street on which our embassy stands was renamed Revisionist by the Chinese and so on. And while the conflict was in fact quite tangible – for domination in the Soviet bloc, it was in the spirit of the times clothed in a tedious clarification of how many reds could fit on the tip of a needle.
And if there was no argument back then, then why should we be interested in the story from an American magazine publication today? First of all for the fact that one can understand a lot about America (or rather the West in general) rather than China, since the author Kevin Rudd, although living in the US today, used to be Prime Minister of Australia (2007-2010 and a brief stint in 2013). What’s interesting is that he is by degree a Chinese scholar, though he clearly did not graduate from the University of Marxism-Leninism.
And, as befits a Chinese scholar, he says that Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 report to the Fourteenth Congress contained the word “economy” 195 times, while Xi Jinping mentioned it only 60 times at the current Congress, although “national security” came up once before and now 27 times.
So much for the turn back to the red past. The understandable argument: if the party is called communist, as in China, then it is communist. If the national flag is red, then… There is a well-known story here, however, that while in the West the red flag stood for rebellion and bloodshed, in ancient Chinese civilization it was (and still is) the colour of celebration, so one should not look at outward signs or names, but at the essence.
And this is how Kevin Rudd defines the essence of Beijing’s current turnaround: “the return of party control over politics and society, with less and less room for private dissent and individual freedoms.” Plus “a state-centric approach to economic governance, with an increasingly assertive foreign and security policy aimed at changing the status quo” (in the world). Finally, Beijing “calls for a detachment of economic renewal from Western social norms and underlying cultural beliefs” and “proposes an international order rooted in Chinese rather than American geopolitical power.”
At the risk of being accused of revisionism, but surely this is Marxism with Leninism or something else familiar? There is at least one other state where the ideology of the ruling party increasingly implies the control of that party over society, where there are fewer and fewer individual freedoms. In addition, a “state” – aka ideological – approach to economic governance is being imposed, rather than a market-driven one. How else to call the sanctions against China or Russia, which are imposed despite the quiet and loud protests of major corporations. And what about the biological rejection of any norms, other than Western ones, for the sake of imposing their geopolitical power – everything is clear there. In general, we are talking about the United States.
And there is another publication. Its author, Wayne Elin Root, has never been a prime minister, he is a Republican blogger, of which there are more and more in the USA. In my files he goes by the nickname “grandfather inadequate” – we shall see why.
Here’s how he describes the essence of the changes steadily happening to his country. The goal of the bad people is “to destroy America, turn it into a socialist nation, make everyone poor and dependent on the government and turn our system into a one-party system, led by the Democratic Party, without opposition or dissent.”
There is something painfully obvious in this thought. And really, where are the beautiful anti-Marxist ideas like that everyone should have a chance to become a millionaire, believe whatever they want and exercise the right to free speech? Recall the developing story in the country with the purchase of the Twitter corporation by Ilon Musk, for which Democrats are now closing their accounts there in droves. Because Musk is a man of the wrong views. He, for example, believes that everyone – any American, and everyone on Earth in general – can share his thoughts on the platform he bought, as it was once intended to do. And that is what the Democrats are pummelling him for.
It makes for a very interesting free world: you are the richest man in the world, but you cannot say a word. You are the most powerful politician in the world (that’s what they think of their president), but if you are Donald Trump, you can’t say a word either. Your account gets shut down. Now that’s a dictatorship.
As for Wayne Elin Root, we told you that this man’s nickname is Grandfather Inadequate. He explains that he studied at Columbia University (class of 1983) with the main villain, Barack Obama, and knows full well: Obama really runs the country now, he is a protege of the UN, the World Economic Forum and George Soros, and the boss of all bosses, the Chinese Communist Party, runs them. This is its conspiracy, which it has been successfully implementing for more than a decade.
This is where we turn out the lights and quietly walk away. Remembering, though, that we are actually facing a way of thinking that is widely popular on the right wing.
But the overall picture couldn’t be clearer: there is a Marxist-Marxist bickering. It is a scary word, which frightens Westerners and other ordinary people. And when Xi Jinping, like leaders before him, really uses socialist and other terminology, as if China is still in the 70’s – what more could you ask for.
But it is interesting to distinguish the shades of red here. In China it is about mobilising the system of government to counter the rising onslaught of those same US and other allies. And that is a perfectly logical policy, and you don’t have to be a Marxist to carry it out – any country, Russia for example, does the same thing in such a situation.
And what the right wing of US society calls a communist takeover of the US is, oddly enough, much closer to the truth. Another thing is that we should distinguish the nuances again, and it turns out that the total ideological brainwashing of the society with establishment of one-party dictatorship is something close to Trotsky’s ideas. But here again one must restrain oneself with the call, “Just don’t start.”
Dmitry Kosyrev, RIA