by Andrew Korybko for the Russian Institute of Strategic Studies
The nationwide protests that have rocked Poland over the past couple of months have been completely misrepresented in the international media, even among outlets that are editorially sympathetic to one side or the other.
The outside understanding is that this is a stereotypical struggle between the government and the opposition, represented in this case by the right and left wings, respectively. This is factually true on the surface of things, and that misleadingly makes Poland’s problems seem like nothing out of the ordinary when placed in a global perspective. Those that proceed from the superficial starting point of assessing the Polish protests as just another incident of the aforementioned dichotomies so common all across the world nowadays are completely missing the point.
Whether Poles themselves are consciously aware of it or not, their country is experiencing one of its greatest-ever identity crises, the resolution of which will determine Poland’s future trajectory for decades to come, although to the US’ ultimate strategic benefit in either case.
PiS Makes History
Prior to diving into the identity-specific aspects of Poland’s present troubles, it should first be reminded that the ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS) was the first since 1989 to win a parliamentary majority, and it also controls the country’s presidency and premiership. Whether one supports PiS’ platform or not, it’s a fact that no party has ever been more democratically popular in Poland’s post-Cold War history than they have at this current moment. It’s also worthy to mention that Polish voters were well aware in advance that voting for PiS would essentially be signaling their support for the party’s leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, and that he would become the most powerful, albeit unelected, person in the country if his party won, as it historically did by a huge margin. That being said, for better or for worse, PiS represents the aspirations of the majority of the Polish people, and this fact needs to be understood before moving further with the analysis.
Poland’s Number One Issue: The EU
Kaczynski, the “Gray Cardinal” that’s really running Poland nowadays, has a vision for Poland that’s dramatically at odds with that of the now-oppositionist Civic Platform (PO), of whom Donald Tusk is the most notable former representative. PiS is known to represent what are popularly labeled “Eurosceptics”, but which the author less scurrilously terms “EuroCautionaries”, while PO is gung-ho about full-scale EU-“integration”. Both parties, it must be said, are anti-Russian and pro-American, with PiS being the more radical of the two. Therefore, the apple of discord between them comes down to their relationship with the EU, seeing as how the aforementioned positions vis-à-vis Russia and the US are agreed to in principle but differ only in intensity. Although something similar can be said of their stances towards Brussels, it will soon be revealed that the divide between them on this pressing issue is not only much more pronounced, but given the distrustful inter-Union atmosphere that’s presently prevailing, has the ability to impact much more significantly on continental geopolitics than their similarly aligned attitudes towards Russia and the US.
Consolidating EuroCautionary Control
Not only that, but the issue of PiS and PO’s largely differing and equally radical positions concerning the EU is the only one of the aforementioned three which most strongly affects Poland’s domestic and international situation, thus making it a magnet for civic activism and voter turnout. As was witnessed during the latest elections, the Polish people overwhelmingly support the national vision articulated by PiS, so much so that they handed them an historically unprecedented governing majority. In accordance with their popular mandate, PiS sought to consolidate its position over the country and expand its reach to the point of being able to irreversibly transform it into the type of state that it and its supporters envision. For these reasons, they initiated the controversial judicial and media reforms, an obvious power grab over the existing establishment, albeit one which they assumed the majority of the population would support. Concerning the judiciary, PiS proposed that the most contentious cases in the country be decided by a 13/15 supermajority in the Constitutional Court (whereas before it had been 9/15), whereas for the media, they stipulated that senior figures in publicly financed radio and television stations were to be appointed or fired by the Treasury Minister from now on.
The Long Haul
The reason that these moves have elicited such an outcry is that the opposition knows that they essentially give PiS a carte blanche to reshape Polish society as they see fit. It’s highly unlikely that the Constitutional Court would ever reach the 13/15 supermajority that would be needed to reverse whatever highly contentious actions PiS puts into place, such as the media reform legislation. This particular power grab for the nation’s publicly funded information platforms is predicated on granting PiS the means to further institutionalize its vision into the mindset of average Poles, clearly indicating that it has a long-term plan for the country’s future. Recalling that PiS’ major political difference with PO comes down to its EuroCautionary ideology, it can logically be inferred that the new ruling authorities want to precondition more of the mases into accepting that Warsaw will become relatively more sovereign from the centralized decision making that’s being dictated by Brussels. PiS doesn’t want to abandon the EU project by any measure, but what it wants to do is employ Poland’s economic and demographic potential (mixed with its geostrategic position) as leverage in modifying the existing balance of power within the EU.
“Orbanization” Expands
For the most part, this is a larger-scale continuation of what Viktor Orban has been endeavoring to achieve, except that Poland actually has the means to make a difference in the EU via its considerably more impressive ‘blackmail’ factors. For all of its leader’s rhetoric, Hungary isn’t in a position to enact concessions from Brussels on any issue other than the “refugee”/migrant one, which in any case is due less to the country’s overall political leverage and more to its happenstance geography along the ‘new arrivals’’ most commonly traversed access routes. What PiS’ unparalleled victory has demonstrated is that EuroCautionary ideology has gained popular appeal and electoral acceptance in a much larger and more politically significant state than Hungary, signifying that the movement might finally be able to enact tangible changes in EU-wide policy for the first time since its inception.
From the vantage point of the stereotypical Brussels bureaucrat, “Orbanism” is a subversive ideology that’s proven to be much more geographically inclusive than its detractors had initially thought. Early critics naively assumed that the blending of EuroCautionary policies under a centralizing leadership (panned as an “illiberal democracy”) was specific to Hungary due to the country’s historic and cultural peculiarities, but Poland’s elections proved that such a conception was totally wrong. As Slovakia gears up for parliamentary elections on 5 March, the unspoken fear is that incumbent Prime Minister Robert Fico’s EuroCautionary Smer-SD party will smash the polls and represent the next frontier for “Orbanism”, thus creating a contiguous bloc of reform-minded states smack dab in the heart of EU. Altogether, this grouping would be able to assert considerable influence and pressure on Brussels, thus raising the prospect that their shared vision for Europe could become a partial reality, at least in the central part of the continent.
The Other Option
Resurrecting the historic Polish-Hungarian friendship in the present geopolitical environment would be a major step forward in achieving Kaczynski’s vision, but it’s not the only path that Poland has recently pursued. PO, which had previously run the country for the past 8 years, worked hard to streamline the state’s subservient position to Brussels-based bureaucracy, believing that Poland’s future rested in being a ‘loyal’ ‘European’ state. One of the main reasons that now-opposition PO is protesting against the current government is because they want to defend the achievements that they made during their prior tenure, knowing how badly and quickly PiS wants to reverse them. Don’t forget that PiS does not want to destroy the EU, but rather, that it and other EuroCautionary “Orbanist” parties sincerely believe that the organization’s existing framework excruciatingly hinders its general effectiveness and engenders a plethora of unnecessary problems. Their policy is to reform the EU from within, and this undoubtedly presents an existential threat to the establishment pro-EU parties like PO, which don’t see much wrong with the present arrangement and would prefer for it to remain largely intact. For a variety of reasons, this attitude is not shared by the majority of the electorate in Hungary, Poland, and perhaps soon, in Slovakia and elsewhere in the region.
Control The Information, Control The Identity
Being aware of the dramatically separate visions that PiS and PO have for Poland’s relationship with the EU, one can more easily come to grips with why the government’s media reforms are so important in terms of the larger picture. Both sides know how influential of a role the media plays in shaping national identity, and up until PiS’ recent victory, the state information organs had been used to promote a radical pro-EU agenda. It clearly didn’t’ succeed as well as the ruling PO authorities would have hoped for it to, hence their stunning loss in the latest elections, but that doesn’t erase the fact that such instruments can be critically effective if applied in the proper way. What PiS wants to do is usurp total control over these bodies and install likeminded ideological adherents who would reverse the pro-EU broadcasting on these platforms and work towards promoting EuroCautionary ideals.
PO and its establishment EU allies know that this represents the death knell of their mission in Poland, and it’s for this reason why they’re so fiercely protesting against it. The Soros Foundation also agrees, which is why it’s been so actively involved in organizing some of the protests as well. The reason that so many people have turned out into the streets is because there’s still a significant minority of the populace that firmly believes that the present EU-Polish relationship should be retained without adjustments. They’re under the purposefully misguided impression supported by PO, its establishment EU allies including Germany (which many Poles still resent), and the Soros Foundation that PiS wants to take Poland completely out of the EU, which isn’t the case at all, but makes for a convenient fear mongering campaign that facilitates street action. Without control over the government’s media platforms, PO and their ilk believe that they won’t stand any foreseeable chance for a comeback and that they’d all thus be forced to accept PiS’ EuroCautionary policies and leadership over the international “Orbanist” movement, as Kaczynski would then have the economic and demographic resources to affect much more change in the EU than Orban and Hungary themselves could ever conceivably carry out.
There are of course other ways to disseminate an ideology throughout a state than using publicly financed internal media platforms like the ones that PiS wants to control, but considering that the ruling government has also implemented a judicial reform that all but nullifies the possibility that it will ever be found to be in breach of the constitution, it’s predicted that they’ll take other “illiberal” sovereignty-supporting measures as well. It’s not known whether this would ever extend into a Polonized version of Russia’s NGO legislation, but realistically speaking, Warsaw could easily call upon the phantom of Russophobia to justify such measures, even if they’re actually in fact aimed against Brussels or Berlin. They wouldn’t, however, target US-controlled NGOs because Washington is actually a firm proponent of the present Polish government, notwithstanding that it went through the face-saving motion of voicing ‘concern’ about recent developments in the country. This will be discussed soon enough, but to conclude the point being made, the most stable lever of influence that pro-EU advocates can employ in desperately trying to stave off their growing irrelevancy in Poland is to retain control over the state’s publicly financed media platforms, applying agitprop and false “dictatorship” fear mongering in order to enact sub-Color Revolutionary pressure in blackmailing the EuroCautionary government.
Impassioned Poles
Prior to looking at the US’ strategic interests in this situation, it’s relevant to offer some words about why Poles are so overly impassioned about this issue in the first place. As was initially mentioned, the cusp of the crisis comes down to Poland’s identity, whether as a Brussels-dominated “European” state (PO) or a semi-sovereign traditionally “Polish” one (PiS). The EU elites’ unofficial ideology is Cultural Marxism, which to briefly summarize as per its relevancy to the research, essentially holds that traditional identities are unnecessary obstacles to ‘integration’ and should be steamrolled over in place of an amorphous ‘compromise’ identity that culls the most blasé elements from each of its constituencies.
As can be imagined, this attitude is interpreted as a major threat to a country that’s 98% ethnically and religiously homogenous and has a rigidly defined historical narrative, but the EU wasn’t forthcoming in its true intentions and instead obscured them through the distracting and much more appealing veneer of economic growth and unrestricted freedom of interstate movement. Poles were ultra-receptive to these ideas because they had been preconditioned by their diaspora community into believing that the communist period stifled their development. They not only wanted to enjoy the expected benefits of what they believed would be no-strings-attached externally funded development for their homeland, but they also wanted the ability to freely work in stronger nearby economies, either with the intent of permanently living there or saving money to send back as remittances and/or reinvest in starting a Polish business one day. Because the EU’s promises perfectly correlated with the ambitions and expectations that most of the Polish population held dear after 1989, many people either overlooked or didn’t even notice the socio-political agenda that the Cultural Marxist EU elite were pushing on their country.
In fact, large segments of the population had their culturally embedded suspicions soothed into submission by the EU’s tantalizing dreams of foreign money and hassle-free movement, with the West and its NGO network wildly succeeding in convincing many Poles that post-modern “Europeanization” is much more preferable (and trendy) than traditional “Polonization”. This explains the popularity of PO and the existence of many pro-EU Poles, which it must be underscored are largely concentrated among the youth and young adult demographics. These individuals sincerely took on the identity of “Europeans”, while the rest of the country remained “Poles”, or at the very least, insincerely adapted select aspects of “Europeanization” while still retaining certain elements of “Polishness” that would later return to the forefront of their identity. The Great Recession that began in 2008 dispelled many of the false dreams that the EU had promised to the Poles, and certain variables came together to create a situation where “Polishness” became fashionable again, both in the cultural and political (PiS) sense. From that point onwards, an acute self-awareness spread over Polish society, whereby people began to notice there were two types of Poles – those who embraced European norms and those who preserved their traditional Polish identity. No matter which side of the aisle one fell, each group had a deeply rooted conception of what their identity was and the trajectory that they envisioned their country should proceed along.
At this moment it’s timely to touch upon Poles’ hyper-sensitivity towards any issues whatsoever dealing with their identity, especially when it’s perceived that (and/or manufactured to seem like) their said identity is under threat by some external force. Owing to their subjective and nationalist-inspired historical narrative, just about all Poles are extremely touchy when it comes to their self-conception and that of their country, indicating a centuries-rooted inferiority complex. No matter how the individual chooses to identity, they are mostly incapable of holding such beliefs in moderation and typically go to obsessive extremes in their manifestation. When the majority of society implicitly agrees on a said precept of their collective identity (e.g. nationalist anti-communism during the 1980s), then the entire country musters it’s combined energy to promote that given ideal, but when there’s a deep and externally influenced rift over what this should be (e.g. Europeanization vs. Polonization, especially in the identity-confusing post-Cold War years), that’s when serious cracks begin to emerge in the country’s superficial cohesiveness and historically outward-directed tensions begin to redirect themselves towards domestic targets. The main factor in this, it should be repeated, is Poles’ centuries-established inferiority complex in obsessing over their identities, and this unique cultural trait is the driving factor in the present political crisis.
A Family Feud Taken Too Far
Returning to the present, Poles are once more overreacting about their identity, albeit this time mostly against one another as opposed to some tangible foreign ‘adversary’. The 2015 elections dealt a crushing defeat to PO and all that it stands for, yet the unsportsmanlike losers didn’t want to accept what had happened and instead sought to spoil the country’s stability for everyone. Undoubtedly, they were likely given advance assurances by their EU establishment partners that they’d enjoy full support in their forthcoming campaign, reassured by the fact that their former party leader Donald Tusk is now President of the European Council. What should have otherwise been a solely civil affair quickly grew to international proportions as Brussels threw its weight behind the protesters and international NGOs also volunteered their services. PiS, on the other hand, sought the public approval of Orban, the man who has now become their ideological “role model/predecessor”, having been able to rhetorically stand up to Brussels during the interim period between Lech Kaczynski’s 2005-2010 PiS Presidency and his brother Jaroslaw’s “Gray Cardinal” leadership over the present one. Had it not been for these two diverging international factors – PO running to Brussels and PiS seeking out Orban in response – then it’s unlikely that the Polish protests would have garnered much attention.
The Quota Catalyst
The Poles’ general penchant for drama and stereotypical overreaction about anything concerning their identity politics, especially when it’s suspected that there may be a foreign element at play (in this case, perceived Brussels- and Berlin-imposed “Europeanization” and Hungarian-influenced “Orbanization-Polonization”), turned an otherwise unremarkable domestic spat into a continental-wide scandal. The entire episode unwittingly increased the polarization between the Integrationist and EuroCautionary camps, already sky-high over the EU’s proposed plan to enforce mandatory refugee/economic migrant quotas for each of the member states. In fact, it can be convincingly argued that PiS performed so well during the October elections precisely because of its opposition to this policy, which came to occupy untold heights in the Polish consciousness due to the country’s almost completely homogenous nature. The mandatory relocation of unknown numbers of civilizationally dissimilar individuals to Polish soil was enough to turn on-the-fence “Europeans” into firm proponents of PiS’ “Polonization”, hence the trouncing that PO later received.
PiS has been very successful in convincing the electorate that only they are capable of safeguarding Polish identity as it is traditionally understood in socio-cultural terms, standing in start opposition to the European-emulating PO. Seeing how many refugees and economic migrants EU-leader Germany has openly welcomed, voters were undoubtedly fearful that PO would have followed a similar policy. This sentiment is so strong that even PiS supporters who might feel uncomfortable with their party’s judicial and media power grabs are still largely standing by the newly elected government’s side, having concluded that it’s better to sacrifice a few ‘democratic principles’ than to sell out the entire country’s identity (as they perceive it) in accepting potentially tens of thousands of North African and Middle Eastern refugees and economic migrants. It can conclusively be observed that even though the elections are over, the refugee/economic migrant issue still hangs heavily over the heads of many Poles, which to emphasize the underlying theme once more, is because this relates to the identity obsession that Polish people uniquely embody.
The American Agenda
What’s happening in Poland isn’t inconsequential to American strategists, and they actually have a preferred outcome in mind that would most assuredly promote their unipolar objectives. Truth being said, the US wins in either case, no matter whether the “Europeanized” PO and its supporters topple the government (which is unlikely) or blackmail it into concessions, or if PiS succeeds in its “Orbanization-Polonization” vision. To explain how each of these scenarios benefits the US, it’s necessary to call to mind how both parties are favorable to the US and against Russia, albeit to differing intensities. If PO were to usurp power somehow, then it wouldn’t affect American strategic objectives in any shape or manner, and so long as the EU as a whole remains firmly in the US’ grasp, then Washington has nothing to worry about. However, in the event that Russia and/or China were to make significant inroads in continental geopolitics via their multipolar infrastructure projects (Balkan Stream, Nord Stream II, and the Balkan Silk Road) and diplomacy (the Normandy Four framework excluding the US, air space coordination over Syria, etc.), then the US would be scrambling for a backup plan to maintain its unipolarity there.
This possible course of events helps explain why PiS and Kaczynski’s “Polonization” are so strategically attractive to the US. First off, faux-Resistance ideologies such as “Orbanism” misleadingly give off the impression of being anti-establishment with their loud pro-sovereignty rhetoric and limited actions, despite hypocritically supporting their given countries’ EU and NATO memberships. Structurally speaking, their existence and wild popularity helps to divert legitimate resistance to both of these institutions by presenting what is conventionally perceived as a form of “in-system opposition” that never structurally threatens the US’ unipolar status quo. If anything, it allows the US to stay ahead of the curve by hijacking the trajectory of emerging political trends and manipulating them in the direction where they can best be used to serve unipolarity, if not outright becoming future vanguards on its behalf.
On the geopolitical front, the US is already supporting the nascent creation of the Intermarum “cordon sanitaire” between Russia and a potentially one day pragmatic Germany and France, and expanding Poland’s Neo-Commonwealth into contiguous contact with Hungary’s St. Stephen’s Space via the shared satellite state of Slovakia would be a major win for the American “Lead From Behind” strategy. PiS is diehard pro-American, so it would use the leadership position that it would undoubtedly exert over the new geopolitical construction to invite as much of a strategic (e.g. “missile defense”) and physical US military presence as possible in order to maximize the collective anti-Russian capability of the new bloc. A self-confident and “Polish” identity-espousing Warsaw would essentially be anti-Russian in its core vision (barring some unforeseen and majorly radical change of events), so it would naturally gravitate towards actualizing the Intermarum ‘containment’ strategy that the US is pushing it towards. Without the seemingly pressing domestic imperatives most fully embodied by PiS’ overall vision, Poland is not as likely to move so rapidly in fulfilling its role as the geopolitical junction point linking together the Viking Bloc, St. Stephen’s Space, and the Black Sea Bloc, and without the frontline ‘glue’ that Poland provides through its Neo-Commonwealth, the overall strategy would be much less cohesive and effective (such as under a “Europeanized” PO leadership).
Concluding Thoughts
The core of Poland’s political conflict is over which trajectory the country and its people should ultimately continue along. The “Europeanized” PO opposition party and its foreign state (i.e. German) and non-state (Soros) supporters want to protect the institutionalized advances that Donald Tusk had made during his 8-year premiership, even going as far as provoking dangerous sub-Color Revolution destabilizations to do so (and possibly even launching an all-out one in the near future). On the other hand, the “Polonized” PiS ruling party wants to “Orbanize” its power and then use its concentrated leadership apparatus to push forward its EuroCautionary reforms within the EU. No matter who comes out on top in this struggle (with PiS having a very high likelihood of remaining in power), it’s useful to remember that the US still wins in some way or another since neither party advocates a rejection of Euro-Atlanticism.
Both of the feuding sides are overdramatically impassionate about their respective positions due to the deep-seated inferiority complex prevalent in Polish society, whereby the population is hyper-sensitive to any sorts of issues even remotely perceived as affecting their identity, whether it be as “Europeanized” or “Polonized” Poles. This feeling is heightened even further by the suspicions that each side’s supporters level against the other, namely that PO is a pro-EU German-controlled front and that PiS has been disproportionately influenced by Hungary’s “illiberal democratic” ideology of “Orbanization”. What in any other context would have remained a ‘family affair’ inside of Polish society has exploded as a major issue in the EU’s continental affairs, driven to this point because of PO’s unsportsmanlike behavior after being trounced at the latest polls and its solicitation of outside support in trying to usurp power.
At the present moment, it doesn’t seem likely that PO will succeed in its goals to overthrow the government or blackmail it to the point of submission, but at the same time, it has regularly ended up bringing thousands of people to the street all across the country, demonstrating that there’s definitely a groundswell of domestic support for its anti-government agitation. Comparatively, however, PiS did manage to win an unprecedented election that handed it full control of all levels of government, from the parliament to the presidency to the premiership, with Jaroslaw Kaczynski finally reaching the position where he can control the entire state by proxy. The controversial judicial and media reform actions were undertaken precisely as a form of institutionalizing PiS’ power over all members of society, and it’s for the existential threat that this poses to PO’s “Europeanization” ideology that it and its supporters have commenced their destabilization program.
The protests likely won’t end anytime soon, but nor will they reach an uncontrollable level unless there’s a serious forthcoming scandal or violent (false-flag?) provocation, meaning that anti-government street action might become the ‘new normal’ in Poland just as it’s been in Spain, Portugal, and Greece for the past couple of years. Either way, the US isn’t too concerned about what happens in Poland right now, since at the rate that everything’s going, it’ll be the ultimate strategic winner no matter what.
” The EU elites’ unofficial ideology is Cultural Marxism'”
EU has no ideology and certainly it is not marxist in any sense. EU is a long term creation of the western capitalist elites and all EU policies are in line with the promotion of neoliberal global capitalism.
It is a fact though that many cultural “marxists” , pseudo-leftists/greens, and ex-(euro)communist party members are part of the EU establishment and are highly supportive of the expansion of EU (such as “Comrade” Barroso, greek puppet prime minister Alexis Tsipras and Syriza party, all the so-called Green and social democratic parties etc).
But ideology is nonsense. What matters is the economic system. Even if you disagree with what is going on, a country that remains part of EU-EURO etc (and the US dominated global neoliberal market economy) is forced to implement neoliberalism and “multiculturalism” (which is a political correct term for the mass importation of cheap foreign workers).
The millions of third world illegal immigrants that enter EU, the mass migration of skilled eastern european people into UK and Germany (to work in bars, washing dishes in restaurants, taking care of elderly people etc), the exploitation of low-wage workers in the east and south by transnational corporations, the high unemployment in western countries with the transfer of western industries into cheaper third world destinations, are all side effects of neoliberal globalisation and it is impossible to stop it unless a country breaks up with the western economic and geopolitical system and adopts alternative policies that will lead to a more self sufficient and social economic development path.
As for Poland, it didn’t have any problems with unemployment, emigration, poverty and muslim illegal immigration during the socialist years (despite the problems that existed then).
But polish people hated “godless” communism. Now let them eat the fruits of western “civilisation”. Their youth will wash dishes in Uk to make a living, their women will work in bars and brothels, and their country will remain underdeveloped and de-industrialised…..
Despite what political charlatans preach, nothing positive will come in Poland (or Hungary, Greece, Spain, Portugal, France etc) .
Cultural marxism is a form of Marxist ideology that arose in Western Europe (mostly West Germany) and then spread to North America after WW2. Its proponents tried to explain why there had been no proletarian revolution in the advanced capitalist countries and the conclusion that they basically came to was that too many “archaic” features remained in the cultures of those countries. Basically, the proletarians did not yet have “nothing to lose but their chains” because they still had the attachments of patriarchal family structure, national identity, religion, etc, etc. Cultural marxists thought that one had to focus on ideological combat in the superstructure of the society to eliminate these attachments to speed along the revolutionary process.
The consequence is that the more advanced forms of capitalism and the cultural marxists ended up with the same goals. Both wanted to create rootless individuals shorn of past organic links. The former because such individuals are ever more pliant consumers and the latter because they thought that they were speeding the revolution along.
Thus cultural marxism helped marginalize the capitalism of the post-WW2 period with its somewhat lower debt levels and somewhat patriarchal culture and has become a major part of the dominant ideology of contemporary capitalism with its much higher debt levels and feminized culture.
Many leftists do not like the term “cultural marxism” because they think that they are still fighting the same capitalism that existed in the 1950s. They do not realize that that capitalism has since absorbed them into itself and moved on.
I dunno. It certainly seems to be the case that at one point in time there were a group of marxists who drew the conclusions you describe. But to then say things like “the European elites are cultural marxists” as the article does, or “has become a major part of the dominant ideology of contemporary capitalism”, seems unwarranted.
I mean, I’ve read a fair amount about the history of the left in North America and I never, ever saw a “cultural marxist” mentioned in any of it. And I’ve read quite a lot about the history of capitalism in North America, and ditto, no cultural marxists ever mentioned. They must have been pretty goddamn marginal. I’m guessing, a few obscure university professors, basically.
Just because these people existed doesn’t mean they had a profound impact on postwar capitalism or remain signficantly represented among European elites. Certainly in North America the entirety of the left whether marxist, socialist, anarchist, new left, black panther . . . all put together, didn’t become a significant part of the dominant ideology of contemporary capitalism. Why would this marginal group have done so?
Near as I can make out, what people seem to mean when they say in the present tense that X “are cultural marxists” is something like, “X aren’t marxists of any sort, have no connections with historical cultural marxists or their writings or ideologies, and probably have never heard of cultural marxism, but they back certain social policies which are (a) negative and (b) vaguely reminiscent of some things the actual cultural marxist johnnies said, and if you need an insult for people with bad policies it’s always nice to be able to use the word ‘marxist’ in it because red-baiting is something many audiences respond well to.”
Find a better term.
The summary of the fate of radical leftism in the West since WW2 is the following:
1. Economic socialism (of the reformist variety) reached a high point in the 1960s and then receded and was finally abandoned by the 1990s by most social democratic parties/movements.
2. Cultural leftism was championed more and more as the economic socialism receded as a subsitute for economic socialism.
A certain level of the economic socialism could work with capitalism in the immediate postwar period. Those were the years of the West European economic miracle. By the 1970s, the big capitalists no longer wanted those limits and Western socialism was rolled back. During the same time, the left took a “cultural turn” that was ultimately congenial to the way capitalism was developing because that cultural turn helped break down cultural barriers that otherwise inhibited consumption. That “cultural turn” came from the cultural marxists. Of course, that thinking did not stay exactly same over the decades but its basic trajectory was set.
I dunno. I sort of thought cultural Marxism was a product of identity politics.
Yeah, see, I’ve seen a couple of people make this assertion, mostly just on this particular blog actually. But I’ve never seen anyone advance any evidence for it. Like any actual North American people who were cultural marxists and could be seen to have any influence on anyone or any thing. Plus the actual project described seems very vague, and as near as I can make out equates some quite different things. Frankly, I don’t believe that the marketing-and-imperialism driven push to homogenize cultures, which has existed since the heyday of the British empire or earlier, has much to do with the supposed cultural marxist idea of changing culture to remove cultural barriers to notions of equality, and neither have much relationship to the “politically correct” idea that everyone is equal (which I agree with) and therefore anyone who feels themselves remotely marginalized or different should be treated with special kid gloves (which I don’t agree with).
Further, I would say that the main source of the “political correctness” which has so many cultural conservatives’ knickers in a twist comes largely out of feminist theory and to some extent anti-racist civil rights movements. It’s an easy and natural extension from “women are equal” and “coloured people are equal” to “all people are equal”–barely even an extension, really, because that was the basic position of most feminist and anti-racist leaders and theorists. Add in the basic feminist idea of patriarchy, of a social structure designed to reinforce certain ideas and roles and which the people in it tend to be unaware of and therefore conscious efforts need to be made to compensate for this problem (eg affirmative action and so on), and the civil rights perspective that someone who’s been pushed down and stolen from for generations should gain some recompense and may need it in order to catch up. You have a structure of theory and proposed action that any other minority which is or feels themselves to be marginalized and suffering from prejudice can access, and increasingly does. “Cultural marxism” is unnecessary to this picture, and as I say in all my reading I’ve pretty much never seen evidence it existed, much less was influential on any of this. I’m willing to believe it existed, but I’d need some decent evidence that it was secretly behind all this stuff that I know a good deal about the evolution of and it never seems to come up. “Political correctness” and related stuff is in any case not nearly as important a phenomenon as the people who are upset about it seem to think.
@xcvv and @ purplelibraryguy
The “cultural marxism” that was referenced by Andrew and Song can be found in the work of what is called the “Frankfort School” of political philosophy. It is also referred to as “Critical Theory” and “Deconstructionism.”
If you two were to conduct serious research, and that includes not the simple wiki or encyclopedia britannica versions but in depth critical exposures into what political & ideological school it originated in (eastern European bolshevik Marxism), how it relocated to the west, what it perceived to be the cause of the failure of Marxism in western capitalist nations (family, religion, religious and cultural traditions, patriotism, etc., those things you may think of as positive that they abhorred), you will find the basis of cultural marxism that pervades entire fields of study, and therefore society, in the western world, from philosophy to political science to sociology to psychology etc. Indeed, the application of their cultural Marxism across academic lines was intentional – they wanted it to be “interdisciplinary” in order to inculcate their deconstruction and infect all sectors of society in order to change it from within at a basic, foundational level (from college grads down to lower grades and then into society) that spread their philosophical perspective, a philosophical virus that the unwitting targets of their deconstructionism, i.e. western Judeo-Christian civilization, did not know that they were being destroyed (i.e. the boiling frog analogy).
The effort of the proponents of the school has meet with great success since its commencement in the 1920’s and 30’s. Today adherents to the Frankfort School predominate in western academia, whether as avowed Marxists or just plain old lefties or socialists (they are “yuuuuuge” on campuses right now!), and their generations worth of graduates who were infected with the virus, also known as “Political Correctness”, have taken it into society at large.
It is from this ideology that the “isms”, factionalism and divisiveness that help tear apart our societies emanate. The reason is because that is the goal of the Frankfort School – to deconstruct society into a chaotic mass so that it can be reconstructed into the ideal state – to the founders of the school, Marxism.
Of course, like may ideologies and plans, it is susceptible to being, and indeed has been, hijacked, or perhaps most appropriately co-opted, by the very capitalists that they ostensibly wanted to destroy. Our ruling elites find its concepts useful in the application of the traditional “divide and conquer” strategy they have used for milleniums to either destroy their enemies to loot them, or to divide their populace so that the ruling elites maintain their positions of power. Which is why George Soros, for example, is using Open Democracy to support “Black Lives Matter”, which divisively fragments the victims of our neo-fascist police state (1,204 killed in 2015) and prevents a unified citizens opposition combining all victims whether black-white-brown-yellow (or purple) to the growth of our police state, because that police state serves the interests of the ruling elites like Mr. Soros. Likewise, as purplelibraryguy recognized, the importation of Muslims in the EU is an intentional device of deconstruction on many levels as well (social, political, economic), again used as a tool of the ruling elites that is in accord with their policies of greed (drive down cost of labor) and divide and conquer strategies, courtesy of the foundation of deconstructionism laid by the cultural marxists of the Frankfort School.
I hope that research into the product of the Frankfort School of Critical Theory and Deconstructionism helps you understand what Andrew Korybko and Soong meant with their reference to cultural marxism, and helps tie together an understanding of the actual interrelationship between seemingly unrelated results that is actually interdisciplinary workproduct of the Cultural Marxists of the Frankfort School.
There is an interesting abput cultural marxism here.
I never use this term, because I thing that it has little to do with real Marxism and its politics (which was an ideology of working class and not of middle class, and ideology of struggle and power, not an ideology of “desires”), and in a part is used by the anti-Marxists to discredit whole Marxism (like a “conspiracy” theory kinking Capitalism and Communism).
But I will use in this post as “convention with the other”:
The cirticism maded to the so-called “Cultural Marxism” is, in my opinion, right. After May of 1968th, European Left begun focusing, more in nthe “aspirations” of middle-class and their “liberation from sociaty conventions” than to achieve power for woorking class, or focusing in wrking class necessities.
So called cultural marxism is an ideology taht focuses more on “desires” and in the “Imaginations” than on real politics. That’s way they hate the traditional Mrxism’s “dialectical materialism”. For example, in every conflict they go more for the “perfect (so non-eistent) aldetrnative”, that leads themto paralization, and utterly, for siding with the power (for example, in internaiotnal politics “No NATO, no Miosevic world revolution” result: NATO bombs Yugolsavia and no one opposes it), their approach to politics (the aetrenal assamblearism, with no strategy, and no discourse to gather the real masses) and in their naivité.
Really the so-called Cultural Marxism is the degradation of Marxist Socialism to bare “Anti-capitalism”. If capitalism has brought industry we are against it, if capitalism has brought family we are against it, if capitalism has brought authority we are against all authority (against paternal or maternal authority, against teacher authority… that’s why all Cultural Marxists are students or young eople, or they think that “youth” or “studentry” are the subject of revoluction instead of proletariat… so really is a non-useful tool. Excet in one thing: in their “culturalism”. The cultural marxist is in the 95% of the cases a strong “cultural imperialist” which opposes those “nationalist” or “authoritarian” states (even when they oppose liberalism and are in the siege of the Empire, so those “authoritarianism” is in much of the cases a tool to protect collective rights), the “ideocratic” States, and thinks that they have to be “Europeanized” or “Westernized”, because, the West and his ideology of (Individual) Human Rights is the sole legit actor of social change. That is because in Russia there is an alliance of Cultural Marxist (Russians or their supporters), with liberals and radical nationalists against the Russian State, for example.
I think that “Cultural Marxism” has been the weapon of the stablishment to destroy Marxism, not to promote it (as Right-wingers think).
Excellent comment. Let me add one more twist:
Marxist intellectuals were very disappointed when they found it the working class was not revolutionary but indeed very conservative. Instead of going for international revolution, the workers would love their country and their family and their local culture. Heck, they would even take a rifle to defend their country!
Those workers were a total failure in the eyes of these leftie intellectuals. So they tried a different angle: destroy the cultural basis of this inhibiting conservatism. Over the decades, this became an end in itself. Marxist revolution was not relevant any more.
In Germany, there’s a useful distinction to be made between Arbeiterbewegung (workers’ movement: better education, better wages, social security) and Marxism (revolution). One good, the other not so good.
Lumi, I think you have not got my point. I have seen tht the so-called cultural Marxism is a distortion of Marxism, not the evolution from it.
By the way Marxxism has also spoused patriotism… not expanssionist patriotism, but anti-Colonial or resistant patriotism: USSR, Cuba, Vietnam, Yugoslavia…
The differentiation between worker movement and Marxxism is in all coountries, because not all worker movements are or have been Marxists.
Marxism espoused patriotism? How so?
Wasn’t a “withering away of the (nation) state” one of the pillars of Marxism?
Didn’t he advocate a “union” of workers to replace the state?
In this context, Korybko’s use of the word “marxist” to describe the EU ideology is justified.
The new feature in the EU is that the “worker” has been replaced by a “debt-serf” so the economic system is a form of neo-feudalism with the bankers replacing the lords.
Cultural Marxism is rather different from classical Marxism that is certain but that does not mean its lineage is irrelevant. Marxism-Leninism was pretty different from Marx’s own ideas, or at least a lot of Marxist radicals like Rosa Luxembourg thought so.
As for the issue of nationalistic Marxist-Leninist regimes,that came with Stalin and, outside of the USSR, mostly came from the Third World (and Albania…). Asian Communists came to Marxism not through the Marxist theory itself but through the example set by the rapid industrialization of Stalin’s Soviet Union so they adopted the ideology because they thought that it was the quickest way to national renewal.
Serbian girl; there are a lot of patriotic (not nationalist, because Marxism does no spouse the inter-class solidarity) Marxist regimes. Cuba’s oficial motto is “Fatherland or Deat” is not it? Stalin’s USSR was pretty patriotic, was not it? Belarus that is a “USSR ideology” State is quite patriotic,is not it? Marxists in Syria (Syrian Resistence armed group and Syrian Communist Party) stand with Baath party against Imperialism, do not them?
The so-called “Cultural Marxism” (which is a bourgeois ideology, not a proletarian one) has been absorbed ti the system, because the system itslef made it to destroy Marxism from inself. If you visit a Western university and speak to dthe medium “Cultural Marxist” professor or student, and he/she despises Marxism (the real Marxism) in a 90% of the cases. The development of productive forces, the plusvalue, the Worker conscience… are strange terms for them.
EU project is a élite-project, not an anti-élite project, like Marxism is/was.
Another point: for oligarchic EU “Cultural Marxism” (which is bare liberalism in the 90% of cases) is a ideology, but not the ONLY ideology. Pretty much “patriotic-conservative” parties are also part of EU stablishment.
» … an anti-élite project, like Marxism is/was. «
Some people think that Marxism was the Big Bankers’ project to pit (a) workers against “capitalists” (= factory owners, industrialists – not the bankers, of course) and (b) marxist countries against capitalist countries. Due to (a), the industrialists could be threatened with revolution and thus held in check, and (b) provided one more reason for war.
Personally, I think Marx wasn’t a worker and Marxism is Jewish intellectual theoretical nonsense.
@Oxandabaratz: You wrote very interesting research. And you are correct [T.M.]
Lumi is wrong with his statements about communism.
S.G.: Too young. Only knows it from textbooks.
East-Germany was btw. also patriotic and even a small bit nationalist.
We had the NationalPeople’sArmy, the National Front, the People’s Solidarity and many such things which would be unthinkable under the new AZ regime.
The West always blamed East-Germany for destroying national heritage, but in reality it is the West who is doing this with all nations.
In the early 1990ties I began to wonder.
For example in East-Berlin the “Museum for German History” has been renamed by the new masters to “german historic museum”.
There are a million such small puzzle pieces. But now 27 years later I see the pattern.
Many don’t.
@Oxandabaratz
I completely agree.
Marx was a political economist, not a post-modernist. The latter maintains there is no objective reality, only subjective perception. (The po-mo brigade never explain how to account for the primary object of perception in the first place.)
This is why the academic arena has been so fruitful in advancing plutocratic agendas – no claim has to withstand objective scrutiny.
The most obvious example is the
championing of people marginalized by their desires (gays) and delusions (transmen who think they are women.)
The heavy promotion of these groups – especially through media and academia – advances the eugenics agenda.
The ‘transgender’ ideology aadvances the agenda through corrupting the meaning (and consequences) of sex differences which are fundamentally reproductive. ( It also co-opts the issue as identity politics, so deflecting attention from endocrine disruptors – the FDA keeps the environmental polluting threshold too high for investigation.)
Gay ‘marriage’ functions to normalize gestational surrogacy, i.e. stealth eugenics.
Through appropriation of the female identity. the natural rights of mothers are ‘disappeared’, while the material advantage that allows men to rape women – the penis – is relegated to oblivion: rape is consequently no longer a crime distinct from sexual assault, and pregnancy is no longer admissible as evidence. Now, despite not having the actual physical equipment to rape, women are ‘equal opportunity rapists’ .
Childbirth no longer means you are a mother.
That the most vocal opponents of the patriarchy
on the grounds of authoritarianism have actually midwifed a male supremacist cult – the gaytriarchy – is an irony apparently lost on them.
But who better to promote the Big Lie than those who refuse to acknowledge reality in the first place?
Call them anything – ‘Destructors’ is most apt in my view – but don’t slander Marx by association.
While economic forces probably do play a bigger role than ideology in history, the latter still matters a lot. One of the main reasons why the Soviet bloc collapsed whereas the US-led bloc did not during the late 1980s-early 1990s is because the Soviet bloc’s elites no longer had an ideology capable of justifying how their societies were being run. Ordinary people in the Soviet bloc could see that they were poorer than their social counterparts in the Western bloc and could not get any good answer from the official Marxist-Leninist ideology about why that continued to be the case. Soviet bloc elites saw that their counterparts in the Western bloc were much richer than they were and their ideology could not tell them why that was so. The Stalinist model, either in its more conservative (Albania) or liberal (Poland) forms, despite its positive points, was plainly not going to evolve towards Communism. It was stuck as a so-so militarized socialism that felt increasingly crappy compared to the West.
In the West at that time, despite the economic problems of the 1970s, the capitalist ideology was able to generate a convincing narrative for its masses and its elites to buy into it. The masses saw that the manufacturing jobs were gone and suffered for it but were mostly convinced by the ideology that the new world of finance and cheaper consumer goods produced overseas would be an adequate substitute. Those parts of the masses whose daily lives did not allow them to buy into this new narrative (the people in the “rust belt”) became increasingly marginalized culturally so that their experiences could be dismissed by the wider public. The narrative appeal for the elites was more obvious and needed less work.
It is only in recent years that the Western capitalist ideology’s narrative is running into significant problems. This is part of the reason why Western politicians sound more and more stupid and media discourse more and more absurd.
Song ” Ordinary people in the Soviet bloc could see that they were poorer than their social counterparts in the Western bloc and could not get any good answer from the official Marxist-Leninist ideology about why that continued to be the case. Soviet bloc elites saw that their counterparts in the Western bloc were much richer than they were and their ideology could not tell them why that was so. The Stalinist model, either in its more conservative (Albania) or liberal (Poland) forms, despite its positive points, was plainly not going to evolve towards Communism. It was stuck as a so-so militarized socialism that felt increasingly crappy compared to the West.”
1) When we compare countries of similar economic development, the countries that followed the
soviet- style socialist economic model achieved a lot more compared to the capitalist countries. The satisfaction of basic needs (health care, education, housing, full employment and job security etc) was superior on socialist countries.
2) It is a fact that the soviet bloc countries failed to advance their consumer production as much as the more advanced capitalist countries and the wages were lower. The socialist countries not only started with a lower level of economic development but a lot of resources and capital had to be invested in the military production and in the creation of heavy industry. But they had no other choice because all these countries were under the military pressure of NATO/USA, and they had to rebuild their economies with minimal foreign capital.
3) In addition, Eastern Europe and Russia were devastated during WW2 and neither got military reparations from Germany nor any economic help from USA. USSR asked for $100 billion reparation from Germany but because of the Western actions and the creation of Western Germany, they just got $5 billion from Eastern Germany. Then, the Soviet Union gave billions in foreign aid to Eastern bloc countries and many other third world countries (such as Egypt which later broke its alliance with USSR and followed friendly relations with US).
4) As for the german and Japanese economic “miracle”, it happened only because the USA invested hundreds of billions of dollars in these countries and opened their markets to German and Japanese imports. All this happened because of the American strategy and actions, not because of the “superiority” of German and Japanese capitalist system.
5) The countries that adopted soviet style socialism (Central planning, nationalised economy etc) were stable and never experience recessions such as the capitalist countries. The propaganda that central planning and state ownership caused problems is a western myth. After 30 years of capitalism, all former socialist countries have failed miserably and their quality of life is lower in comparison to the levels during the last years of socialism. And they will never be able to catch up with the advanced western countries. Even capitalist countries such as Greece/Portugal failed to catch up and declined significantly after their full integration into the neoliberal free trade global economy.
6) It is also true that during the 1980s several eastern bloc countries (Yugoslavia, Poland, Hungary, Romania etc) implemented harsh austerity measures in order to repay the western loans that they took during the 1970s (in order to import consumer products and invest in infrastructure projects). The interest rate rises in the late 1970s increase the debt burden of eastern bloc and caused the bankruptcy of numerous third world countries in Africa and elsewhere. All this led to significant public discontent in eastern Bloc.
7) As anyone can see from the graphs, all former socialist countries are far worse now than during socialism. The severe 1990s economic decline happened after the abolition of central planning and state ownership, not because of those.
http://bruegel.org/2015/01/the-convergence-dream-25-years-on/
8)
Even FORTUNE magazine admits that Eastern Germany will never recover under the current capitalist system.
“The futility of communism has been overblown. It actually was quite successful at helping a war-torn Russia catch up with the west in the early days of the Soviet Union. If you compare, for instance, the development of Mexico and the Soviet Union from 1913 until the year the Berlin Wall fell, “the Soviet Union’s growth over the period of communism put Mexico’s to shame,” according to Charles Kenney, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. He points out that Soviet income per capita was 46% greater than Mexico’s in 1989, compared to just 1% larger in 1913.”
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, formerly communist eastern German companies and factories suddenly had to compete with their much more efficient western counterparts. Capitalism came too fast. Many eastern German companies went bankrupt and some regions never recovered from the shock. Until today, income levels are much lower in the east than in the west.
It’s impossible to know how East Germany would have developed absent the influence of communism (or how Western Europe would have generally recovered from World War II if the U.S. didn’t invest so much there in an effort to contain the spread of communism), but the idea that a history of communism taints an economy’s ability to modernise isn’t quite supported by the facts.”
“As long as talented and motivated young people in Germany are allowed to freely leave the East for better opportunities in the West, regional differences in economic development will persist.” (that was also the reason why East Germany built the Wall in order to stop the flow of skilled people)
http://fortune.com/2014/11/09/germany-east-west-economy/
9)
According to Stephen Cohen, “Why Did the Soviet Union End?” http://www.gorby.ru/en/presscenter/news/show_28867/
….the nomenklatura is responsible to the destruction of USSR because they wanted to become businessmen and seize the state property (which they did during the 1990s).
“Why did the top Soviet state (not party) nomenklatura permit Yeltsin to abolish its own state, which had given it so much power and privilege for so long?
The answer is. those elites, in Russia and in other republics, were already seizing the great wealth of the Soviet state. They were now motivated by a will to property ownership.
For this, of course, they no longer needed the old state or its salvation,
Thus ended the Soviet state. And thus began the corrupt history of its Russian successor.”
Finally, according to Cohen USSR did not suffer from a crisis of production but of distribution. But the so called soviet economic crisis is exaggerated for political reasons and did not played a role in the USSR dissolution (Cohen: “No modern state has perished due to economic crisis. For example, both the American state in the 1930s and the post-Soviet Russian state in the 1990s survived much worse economic crises.”)
10) In conclusion, as there was no true democracy in socialist countries (there is no democracy either in western countries), the people’s will to improve the socialist system (and not destroy it) was ignored. The party nomenklatura in all these countries decided to switch to capitalism and to get its hands on the state property and for this reason they had to get rid of the socialist state institutions that prohibit private property. The consequences are all known today……
I do not think that people in the Warsaw Pact countries were still willing to accept their lower standard of living by the 1970s-1980s based on the notion that they were still recovering from WW2 and that they had a lower starting point than the West. After all, they were told that they would “bury capitalism” despite those handicaps.
Yes, the Soviet bloc system had more economic stability but the Soviet ideology claimed that it would also exceed the West in prosperity which did not happen. The Western ideology claimed that it had mastered or at least strongly mitigated the problem of recessions via fiscal/monetary policy and until about 2008, most people in the world who paid attention to these issues probably believed that to be true. Consequently, when Warsaw Pact people looked at the West in the 1980s, they thought that if they accepted capitalism, that they would still largely keep the economic security that they already had while also getting the benefits that capitalism seemed to offer. The Western ideology told them that that was true and the Soviet ideology basically had to tell them that they were lucky to have the economic security that they did and that at some point the Westerners would crumble. Problem is, public and elite opinion in the Warsaw Pact gave out before the capitalist system’s contradictions really came into play and it gave out earlier because the ideology had failed, not because of the economic situation in the Warsaw Pact itself, but because it could not explain to people why their continued sacrifices were worthwhile.
The end of USSR and Eastern bloc socialist countries was not inevitable.
The soviet union and some or all of the eastern european socialist states could easily have survived to this day as a coherent geopolitical bloc (with the continuation of the soviet style economic model, a mixed economy, or with an adaptation of a Chinese style economic model).
The example of the less developed Cuban and North Korean states that managed to survive for more than 25 years and function as planning state owned economies (despite the loss of trade partners, embargo, and other systemic problems etc) is an example.
But the soviet nomenklatura elites took a decision to end with socialism and to become “businessmen” by adopting a capitalist economy. And not only they let each eastern bloc country to leave (and to become NATO puppet states), but they caused USSR to collapse even though the soviet people voted for the preservation of the union.
Thanks, XCVV
Everything you wrote here it’s absolutely true.
Asian and Latin American Communist regimes were nationalist communist regimes whereas East European ones really were not (except Albania…). Third World Communist revolutionaries became Communists insofar as they wanted to emulate the rapid industrialization that they saw in Stalin’s USSR, not because they read Das Kapital front to back (if they did…). Consequently, in the interests of national renewal, they could be more flexible in adjusting their policies and re-inventing their ideology than their European counterparts for whose regimes were an imposition by the USSR.
The GDR probably would have had a better chance of hanging on if it had declared itself the heir of Prussia and its conservative socialist traditions and put a giant equestrian statute of Frederick the Great in the middle of East Berlin…
Song; although your comment is partially right, I have to make a pair of observations.
1) Western countris main legit reason is not the “materail prospeity”, but “illusion of material properity”. They are connected, but there are not the same thing. For example, in the place I live, in the past decades (1990s, for example) house-buying was cheaper, and the relational wages were higher than now. But contestation was more harsh (there were not only students or “precariy citizzen” concentrations, but real clashes in the streets, worker strugle and so on). What has happened? Now consumption-possibilities are wider than then. Then, if I had gone to a chothes shop, I could only choose between three brands of trousers. Now, I can choose between a lot of them. I can download films, or see football (soccer, for US people) matches in TV. Then to see a football match was impossible if you could not get into the stadium, and the films were “sometimes” broadcasted on TV, and only one per week in the cinema (I do not kive in a big city).
Sn in the West, that illusion of consumptions was much higher than in the Socialist countries. In East Germany, to get fruit “out of season” was imporssible, the State said that that was not a priority. In West Germany you could get any fruit in every month of the year. This of course is a big waste of resources and in the exporting countries causes disorders in their production, but Euro-citizens are happy much happier tahn in the East.
Of course, Socialist propaganda was much worse than capitalist propaganda; because the latter was focusing in their “wonderful rdinary life” (the car, the garden in the house), whereas the earlier was still hammering in over-ideologized concepts as “world revolution” that do not attract to generations born in the latter 50es or 60es).
(By the way, many anticapitalist or antermondialist thinkers or organizations are now asking for the “food sovereignty”, this is, to consume fruit in season, to foster a suitable production, is being one of their main claims, whereas this was invented in Eastern Germany).
2) The minimum rights of the workers in the West, the insurances for illness, the retirement, the public health ssytem, public transportation and so on, they were an aporttion f the Socialist thought and the Socialist realty in the East of Europe. So capitalism atttracted some leftist to her own to help her to reforme herself, whereas that way provided their own working classes a “suitable alternative” to “real socialism”; “old capitalism” was unable provicde such an alternative.
@ Song on February 04, 2016 · at 8:50 am UTC
> Yes, the Soviet bloc system had more economic stability but the Soviet ideology
> claimed that it would also exceed the West in prosperity which did not happen.
You are wrong: If you consider it in its entirety, it _did_ happen for the majority.
Did you live in the East? I guess, no.
And don’t forget who is really paying for your West’s so called “higher standard of living”: The slaves of Africa or Bangladesh style regions dying at 35 while looking like 98 …
Those slaves are paying for the higher profit margins of the Western upper class. The trickle down effect to the rest of the Western populace is rather small and getting smaller.
» 1) When we compare countries of similar economic development, the countries that followed the
soviet- style socialist economic model achieved a lot more compared to the capitalist countries. «
Not true for Germany. I’m not saying this is only to do with the economic model, but it is a factor, and while communism might be cool for Cuba it has turned out to be a bad model for Germany. Another factor is that the Americans were (are?!) much better and more efficient occupiers than the Russians.
» 4) As for the german and Japanese economic “miracle”, it happened only because the USA invested hundreds of billions of dollars in these countries and opened their markets to German and Japanese imports. «
Now this is completely wrong, at least for Germany. The USA only gave credit and everything had to be paid back. They knew full well that “if we lend those krauts money they’ll work hard to rebuild their country and we’ll get it back with a profit”. And I guess the same applies for Japan. The decade-long sustained economic and technological boom that has made DE and JP into the world’s industrial leaders was not based on Uncle Sam’s dollars, but on the hard work and excellent education of the post-war generations in those countries, which was the logical continuation of their rise throughout the first half of the 20th century.
While communism was around capitalism, in order to compare favorably, had to offer some goodies to the people. At least in Germany. I’d say the old FRG model was extremely successful. It was much more socialist than England or the U.S. but maybe not as socialist as France or Italy, which were also very successful. (Any such kind of socialism as in DE/FR/IT is, to my knowledge, totally absent and literally unheard-of in the U.S.)
With the fall of the fall, goodies started to be gradually dismantled and globalized away. That’s where we are now. We’re fighting to retain labour and goodies. But due to overall technological progress and the hard work and excellent education of China, Korea and others, the standard of living has risen nonetheless. And, like it or not, that’s what people care about most.
It’s a nice idea that people should share everything and behave as communists (in the original sense of the word, mindful of the common good), but in reality, I think, people in many cultures fall short of these ideals and work better if they can be a bit more selfish.
It is because of America’s post war plans, actions and investments, that W. Germany and Japan became main industrial powers allied with United States.
USA opened its markets to Japanese products at the expense of American industries. USA flooded with Japanese products and Japan became the 3rd strongest economy in the world.
Nowadays, Japan is in severe decline and investment from TNC’s is heading to China which opened up its markets and abandoned socialist policies. It is no coincidence that China is now the 2nd largest economy, an economic “miracle” created not by China’s industriousness but by massive foreign investment. The Western countries de-industrialised because the factories of TNC’s moved into China to get advantage of the very low wages of the local work force.
@Lumi:
WTF??
You wrote:
“””””Not true for Germany. I’m not saying this is only to do with the economic model, but it is a factor, and while communism might be cool for Cuba it has turned out to be a bad model for Germany. Another factor is that the Americans were (are?!) much better and more efficient occupiers than the Russians.”””””
What’s your definition of “efficient”?
And how do you back up the rest of your unbacked _claims_ ???
Wessi stays Wessi , no pills will help…
» What’s your definition of “efficient”? «
BRD => Volkswagen, Audi, Mercedes, BMW, Porsche
DDR => Trabant, Wartburg
» And how do you back up the rest of your unbacked _claims_ ??? «
I have no idea what unbacked claims you’re referring to.
Also, I find it odd and weird that you seem to be displaying some kind of pride in the fact that Berlin was occupied by the Soviets. To me, it’s the same kind of nonsense as “American Munich” or “British Hamburg”. No one ever says that either. And there must be very few people who have fond memories of the Soviet occupation. The Soviets are gone and that’s the best they ever did in Germany.
By the way, last time I was in Berlin, in December, I noticed another symbol prominently displayed right in front of the Brandenburg Gate. Take a look:
http://haolam.de/images/artikel/281113062408-b1-.jpg
The above photo is from 2013, I saw it in 2015, so it seems they’ve made a habit of it. And if people don’t protest in a couple years they’re going to plant the damn thing on top of the Quadriga.
I am sorry XCVV but what you write is a complete lie. There was literally nothing in the shops during communism. Like nothing. Empty shelves.
http://bi.gazeta.pl/im/3/5275/z5275403Q,Puste_polki_w_sklepie_miesnym__Warszawa.jpg
Well you could have oranges and bananas. For Christmas. One per head. Children only…
And yes that is true everyone had a job. There was a time you would get fined or imprisoned if you were not employed (that is the very definition of slavery in fact). Still you had to wait hours in line to even hope to buy something even if you had money. And amounts you could buy were limited by the state.
http://www.pigout.pl/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/2665-ii-kolejka.jpg
And still often you would get home empty handed. It is still kind of funny to look at vouchers for a car with a waiting time of 15 years. And you still had to pay for it. The quality of products was disastrous. Till this day most of the buildings from this times are cheaper to demolish then repair properly. Maybe apart from food as it was the only thing that I can think of that could have in fact been better. People had to save for a year to buy a good pair of jeans.
You could not go for vacation oversees. Maybe apart from Bulgaria or Crimea if you were well positioned. There were some summer camps for children, but you had to be able to afford the transportation, clothes etc. You could get great “souvenirs” from travel to NRD though, like eg. wool spool. Yes that is correct people were smuggling wool spools to make sweaters because they could not buy one ( to be clear thy could buy neither the sweater nor the wool).
And of course you forgot to mention the state terror that was necessary to achieve this paradise. Like sending people to Siberia, beatings in police station basements, curfews, spying on citizens and monitoring phone calls and mail (at least they had the balls to warn you in the beginning of the call that this conversation is controlled – there was literally someone saying “this call is being monitored”).
Unless of course you were a commie party apparatchik, higher police or security apparatus staff, military or had dollars – there were special shops for these people and they could get almost everything they wanted.
We really like the new western way you know. Like you go to the shop and can buy 5kg of pork chops. Man literally 5kg of pork chops. Straight away you go to the shop and say 5kg of pork chops please and it is there. No bloody waiting line. No limits. No vouchers. And you can buy a crate of bananas and a crate of oranges. And you no longer have to use newspaper as toilet paper. Or I could buy like literally 20 pairs of jeans for minimum wage. And the jeans are in the shop so it is not only theoretical. And wait for it… you can choose different ones and a matching size instead of taking anything you can before someone else snaps it and you will be left with nothing.
Just a small real history lesson. So please next time do not try to push commie propaganda down our throats.
Xcvv, cultural marxism is real and very bad and Song explained it very well, including its importance in the Euro nonsense, which is not only about economics.
One minor tidbit he didn’t mention is that practically all the proponents of cultural marxism (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Fromm, Pollock, etc) are Jews. Just one of these strange coincidences … ;)
I found this 12 minute video to be quite informative – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2qHQudLwJQ
One cannot discuss this topic and it’s influence on North America [they were effectively booted from Europe during the 30’s] without mentioning Jewish owned and ran media. This was the final piece of the successful sabotage. Jewish TV shows and films glamorize multiculturalism [Jewish porn industry], homosexuality, feminism….. but when do you encounter these ideals in Jewish-American communities? Who controls American Sports from the owners, commisionars and agents, who are the music producers pushing Rap? How often do you encounter a gay jewish character on television or one involved in multicultural dating? The media can’t stop talking about molestation in the Catholic Church but how bout the spread of STDs thru circumcision or better yet the underground molestation in Hollywood? If not for social media, most North Americans and possibly Westeners in general would be completely un-aware of the ‘Racist Israeli’. In Israel, book involving multicultural dating was banned from High Schools.
Anyhow I just found it rather comical how you guys debated for so long on this topic (I read every post) and yet I encountered 1 single reference to Jews. The whole irony to me is how their goal of European (rather White) destruction went over-board and now Jews are being harassed out of Europe by their Islamic trojan horse. Israel is more than happy to bring them in. Been a while since Gaza went up in flames, surely the de-stabilization of most of Israeli’s neighbors surely had no affect.
The Frankfurt School were Jews
Modern Marxisim was and continues to be puppet mastered by Jews
I do not begrudge Muslims for hating Western Civilization. They might lock their women indoors but Western-Whites are the biggest collection of degenerates on this Planet. Puppet master is loving in.
While I doubt it makes much difference to Russia either way, I still think a PiS victory would be best, despite their (even more rabid) hatred of Russia. The advantage being in that they also hate everyone else, especially Germany. And the more divisions within the EU the better. Also, Poland *should* fight for its independence from Brussels.
Ironic how Russia could be PiS’ best ally but they are too stubborn to realize it.
Timely this, with poland rumored to be on the Baltic.
http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2016/02/03/448607/Russia-US-NATO-RAND
Russian military forces will swiftly defeat the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the US in less than three days should a war break out in the Baltic region, says a US military think tank.
The RAND Corporation, comprised of American military officers and civilian officials, made the projection Tuesday, in an analysis of NATO’s war games in Eastern Europe.
“The games’ findings are unambiguous: As currently postured, NATO cannot successfully defend the territory of its most exposed members,” the report read.
The RAND organisation is one of the sickest in the world.
Come on, let’s end the polite pretense. There are real reasons behind those famous Polish jokes.
You are absolutely correct. But some new “heroes” emerged – western ukrainians who dethroned Poles.
I had been an enthusiastic reader of Andrew’s articles that appear in Saker’s site and Oriental Review. Always appreciated analytical depth in each of his articles.
However in this article i found two sentences which are far from truth and objectionable:
” The EU elites’ unofficial ideology is Cultural Marxism, which to briefly summarize as per its relevancy to the research, essentially holds that traditional identities are unnecessary obstacles to ‘integration’ and should be steamrolled over in place of an amorphous ‘compromise’ identity that culls the most blasé elements from each of its constituencies. ”
” Because the EU’s promises perfectly correlated with the ambitions and expectations that most of the Polish population held dear after 1989, many people either overlooked or didn’t even notice socio-political agenda that the Cultural Marxist EU elite were pushing on their country. ”
My observations:
(1) “Cultural Marxism” itself is meaningless. Marxism is in the realm of “political economy” that relates to primarily, economic thought, and related political thoughts. Marx has nothing to do with ‘Frankfurt school’ of sociological thoughts !
It is like stating that Pope leads “Roman Catholics”. As we know, Papal Catholicism has nothing to do with Romans !
There is one factor common to these seemingly unconnected phrases: “Cultural Marxism” and “Roman Catholics”. Both are inventions of AngloZionist historians-academicians-propagandists.
(2) EU has been always the ‘project’ of AngloZionist plutocracy whose stated fascination with Fascist Imperialist Corporatist Capitalism. And only after dissolution of USSR and Warsaw Pact, this AZ project made rapid progress.
How come a keen analyst like Andrew misses these key historical and geopolitical points ?
What is Saker’s view on this ?
This is once again an analysis that makes sense. Now I understand what the fuss in German media about the allegedly evil and “anti-democratic” Polish government is about. Thank you!
http://southfront.org/the-us-uses-poland-as-provocateurs-against-russia/
as it says
Unfortunately, only 5 of 39 commentaries deal with the subject of Korybko’s article, Poland. But how…
The most interesting is from vot kak: “Come on, let’s end the polite pretense. There are real reasons behind those famous Polish jokes.” Why don’t you serve us the best you know? “Kurica ne ptica…”? I assume they are a variant of the judenwitze from back then, but perhaps I am wrong and those you know and enjoy are impregnated with truth and wisdom. Share them with us!
In my humble understanding, Lumi’s “This is once again an analysis that makes sense” seems nonsense to me, although it is nice that Lumi learned at least something from it. Lack of the slightest minimum of information about Poland and Polish history is the norm – which is even understandable: if we EUropeans wanted to know at least a minimum about our 27 other member states, we’d have a lot to do and would never come to an end. However some are more equal, for various reasons: to say “I don’t know anything about Germany, it’s probably not necessary” would be not enough. One does not need to know about meteorology, because we can’t influence it, but we should know some basic facts about electricity, which is soo helpful, but can be soo deadly, when handled the wrong way. Poland and the Poles are somewhat like electricity, but those idiots that grab both poles (!) at once or connect both poles (!) with one another will experience an unwelcome surprise which they could have easily avoided.
Korybko is one of those uninformed – his idea that Poles suffer from a historical inferiority complex is simply idiotic. One might accuse (if one is a member of the Volk der Richter und Henker,, who always accuse others) the Poles of suffering from a historical superiority complex (“which is unwarranted”, the uninformed would add), which nicely clashes with the Russian superiority complex for pure mass (“Nas mnogo!”), and namely towards Poland for some later episodes in mutual relations which went better for Russia than some earlier ones and make Russians triumph that this superiority will last forever, ecpressed in this polenwitz: “Kurica ne ptica, a Polsha ne zagranica!” (A chicken is no bird, and Poland is not foreign territory). A historian who does not know about what Poles may be so proud of that they are feeling superior even when they are – “temporarily” – inferior should go back to university before writing about what he knows not.
The main fault of Korybko’s analysis is not to mention the elephant in the room: the mass murder of president Lech Kaczynski and 95 other top functionaries on 2010-4-10 in Smolensk, which was a plane destruction by bomb exactly like MH17 and the RU A321 over Sinai but was hidden under tons of western-eastern propaganda, saying /*vnimanie, start-of-polenwitz: “this was because of badweather&drunkpilots” end-of-polenwitz*/. The Sinai mystery that seemed to bother Vladimir Putin is not yet solved? But, Vlad, you said it yourself in your “MAK-Report” of 2011-1-12: “Badweather&drunkpilots” is obviously the only needed explanation for all plane “accidents” that had the same structure. MH17 is still a riddle? Because ThePutinCommission did not research it – they would have recognized at once, before even looking at it, that the factor that destroyed it was, as always, “badweather&drunkpilots”. I did my best to stop Vlad from writing such nonsense, in April 2010 already, but my opinion seems not to be valued by him, and the result is that those Polish electricians will be coming to take him away, ha ha.. I hope they won’t succeed, as this mass-murder was demonstrably masterminded and executed by the Freewest, with the Russkies adding “only” false leads (“the incompetent folks at the tower”) and the 200% rigged “investigation” by the “Putin commission”. Chief prosecutor Chajka “knew” before his first glance at anything that “it was whatever, but definitely no attempt”, and because it wasn’t, his “factfinders” did not look for proofs for an attempt, and because they did not search for them they did not find any. Instead they instantly started liquidating traces of explosives etc. When some weeks ago Chajka came under accusation himself, I hoped our hero of unique wisdom, Vlad, would grasp the occasion for declaring “I am outraged! He fooled us! He falsified the Smolensk investigation! We need a new one!” But probably Vlad slept well in his superiority trance: “Nas mnogo, and Poles, who are known everywhere to be nothing but ridiculous, have no chance against us.” The tricky thing is that suppression results in graveyard’s silence only when one kicks cowards, e.g. Germans, but in growing resistance when one deals with heros (or, vot kak, those who only think they are, and therefore will resist, even if their self-esteem is ridiculous for you): Yes, the new government started a new investigation of the Smolensk mass murder, and the first thing they found is that the Poles who helped performing it, the Tusk nazis, destroyed the existing Polish investrigation protocols: cowards in panick! By the way, when Sikorski yelled “I want my wreck back!” at Lavrov, ca two years ago, Lavrov answered “our investigation is still underway” – another good move which, however, must be followed upon.
Korybko is also wrong in saying that PO and PiS are similar in their likes and dislikes – the contrary is the case. First, one has to say that the most relevant factor in the rise of the right wing parties in the West is that the electorate has the correct impression that “these people at least mean what they say and say what they mean”, while everybody else are not at all “cultural marxists”, but nothing at all, only paid liars who utter whatever is the agenda of the day. Tusk, for instance, is not known in Poland for being (nearly as) pro-American and anti-Russian as PiS, but attired the hatred of PiS by playing “Pro-Russian” in the Smolensk case, agreeing with everything Russia did, absolutely no questions asked. He is not a “westerner” but a prostitute, a traitor and a mass-murderer, for cash available to everybody – THIS, Sir Korybko, explains why he and his gang were this time wiped out so completely in Poland where up to the Tusk/Smolensk sham several weak parties coexisted. In Poland PO was “the Left”, while in the EU parliament they are part of the “Right” fraction – so, they are liars without spine who don’t even know themselves, because there is nothing to know about them. Such liars are the usual puppets of America, and America uses and pays them (so they are in a way “pro-American”, yes), but in changing roles. While nazi America and its nazi allies wanted to wipe out Polish “Polishism” (as absolutely every other genuine movement on earth) completely in Smolensk (Jaroslaw Kaczynski stayed alive just by chance, the mother of the twins was ill, and he remained in Warsaw to look after her), they do it, like always, from several sides at once: first by killing as many as before, then making Poles look stupid (“the whole world knows Smolensk was just an accident, only these morons pretend otherwise”), then stirring Poles up against Russia (“it is obvious, Putin did it!”), then telling the Poles that Russia is suddenly a new threat so that they need american soldiers and american rockets on their soil… which, in case of war, will be first strike targets, meant to kill many more Poles etc. The current restructuration of Polish institutions… yawn: we Germans can only laugh at the “German” “concern” over Polish democracy – who appoints our media bosses and supreme judges (out of a pool of candidates that has first been 100% checked and approved by the SS/BND, today’s Reichsschrifttumskammer and Reichsjustizkammer)?
Korybko’s article fits in with the new media war of the western nazis against
Poland – the tone is much better but the understanding just as deficient.
What an intelligent observer should not overlook is that someone tells us all how stupid we are: things are done to us ridiculously similar to the last time – and we are so stupid that instead of fighting these attacks we now know well, we “analyze” them, centimetre for centimetre, as they happen as something “completely new”. No, it is not. World wars are “necessary” every 25 years, and they are always started on bogus Sudden Simulated “Legitimate Outrage” (SSLOUT), like Sarajevo 1914, Gliwice 1939, Tonkin 1964, Tiananmen 1989 and Grabovo 2014: “Putin did it!” In 1939 our führer was a male Hitler and the target was Russia (Poland had only to provide the Rollbanen nach Osten, so it had to be fought, too, and antipolish propaganda was necessary and was delivered) – and in 2014 our führeress was again a Hitler, the target was Russia and the propaganda was anti-Russian (the SSLOUT over MH17 had to propulse 2000 hollandish elite troops to Moscow who had to “take it by surprise” – the western superiority complex fantasized), and since MH17 misfired, now the Polish option is on the agenda again: Poles are untermenshens (aren’t they, vot kak?), we caught them at building up a bloody dictatorship like these, uh, hitlerites once had: “We have to go there and make order!”, and once Poland is again ours, the Rollbahnen nach Osten are once again open…
If Poles and Russians knew what is good for them, they would talk, explain what happened, and then cooperate and laugh at this most ridicoulus hitler puppet that is führing us.
bp