Interesting to use China as an example, the Principal Contradiction in the World at that time, was Axis versus Allies, China's fight against the aggressors was also fighting the Axis. The Communists' in Japan, the aggressor nation, task was to fight their nation's aggression (which was in fact their line) and end the war. Today, The USA is the aggressor nation- disrupting and destabilizing for decades and now sponsoring genocide. The worldwide contradiction is between the vicious global capitalist class centered in the USA and their worldwide allies and the bulk of the world's people. Both parties have pledged to continue the pro-war, active war policies. Our main task is to oppose the aggression. The architects of the Iraq war are not our allies in that attempt. The US Communists fell into a similar error in the 50's. Then they also feared a impending national fascism and did not build a strong antiwar movement against the Korean War, despite polls consistently showing that many American people did not support or understand the war. Do we want to share this legacy ?
Thanks Danielle and Stephen for engaging so substantively with my argument. I agree with you both that it is important to situate US contradictions within the broader context of the capitalist world system as a whole, and that this is a complex conversation that merits more discussion in a spirit of unity>struggle>unity. I offer the below comments in that spirit.
Our International Work Team has had some conversations about whether the concept of principal contradiction is useful or applicable at the global level. I've read with interest Torkil Lauesen's book "The Principal Contradiction," which among other things tries to do just that. But while I'm open to the idea, I'm not fully convinced that the notion of a global principal contradiction helps sharpen socialist strategy. Let me share a bit about why.
First, it's worth noting that Mao did *not* frame his case for a tactical alliance with the Kuomintang in relation to a global contradiction between Axis and Allies. It's not that the China-Japan contradiction was a sub-component of an identical, generalized contradiction at the global level; quite the opposite, Mao developed the concept as a way of understanding how struggle and development may played out *differently* in the course of struggle in semi-colonial China, as compared to how the global socialist struggle was playing out elsewhere.
If Mao's concept of principal contradiction represents an advance for Marxism, in other words, it's precisely that it allows us to move beyond abstract, general contradictions (e.g. "capital vs labor") to more specific contradictions that play a central role under any given time, place and conditions. My worry about trying to subsume these latter into one general, global contradiction is that it would actually eliminate the very thing that's most useful about the concept—putting us back at a level of generality and abstraction that is not helpful for determining strategy.
Mao does say that the notion of principal contradiction applies to "the process of development of a[ny] complex thing." (We could talk about the principal contradiction of an organization, for instance, at a given stage of its development, or a social movement, or what have you.) If that's the case, then it should at least in principle be possible to name a principal contradiction at the level of "the world." There are many contradictions at the global level, for instance between capitalism's need for relentless expansion and the ecological limits of the planet; between a deterritorializing and increasingly transnational mode of production and the territorial logic of the nation-state; between overdeveloped capitalist core countries and formerly colonized countries; between national bourgeoisies and the transnational capitalist class.
Theoretically, I can see ways that debating which of these is the principal contradiction at the global level could help sharpen our thinking and clarify our strategy. (In practice, however, I find it usually does the opposite). But even if we agreed upon a principal global contradiction, I think we would have to avoid the error of assuming this global principal contradiction was the decisive one for determining the principal contradiction inside a different entity or social organization, at a different level of analysis. In practice, I too often see the argument "US imperialism is the main global contradiction" used in unhelpful ways. For instance, to deny the calls of socialists in Rojava for US aid, when their autonomous socialist feminist project was being attacked by the Assad regime, because the Assad regime opposes US imperialism and thus must be on the side of "the world's people." I think those kind of over-general applications of one set or level of contradictions to a different particular context is actually exactly the kind of thing Mao's thinking on contradiction sets out to avoid.
Danielle, I don't fundamentally disagree that the greatest contradiction today may be that "between the vicious global capitalist class centered in the USA and the bulk of the world's people." But while that vicious capitalist class may still have its largest concentration in the US, it is indeed global, and increasingly so; it includes (for instance) the capitalist classes of countries with which the US in in political tension, such as Russia. And while that global capitalist class indeed harms the "bulk of the world's people," the "world's people," alas, currently lack forms of collectivity or representation. So I think where we might disagree is, for instance, in mapping "the bulk of the world's people" onto, say "the current political regimes of all countries in tension with US foreign policy." (I do not think the Iranian regime, for instance, is on the side of the world's people, even as it *is* opposed to the US state in terms of geopolitics.)
I totally agree the US left has a duty to do everything we can to oppose US imperialism. And also agree that the latter has been baked into federal-level politics on both sides of the aisle for the past century. Yet when thinking through how to engage with electoral struggles inside the US, I think we still need to ask: which victories, by which sets of forces, will put us on better terrain to advance the peoples' struggles—including the struggle against US imperialism? For all our struggles, I think a MAGA victory unquestionably puts us on worse terrain.
Given the current state of the election process it appears that the results will be very close in battleground states. Regardless of the outcome, the transition between Nov. 5 and January 20th is likely to be extremely contentious. For many however, the most significant event of this autumn is not the US elections but rather the expanded BRICS meeting occurring against the backdrop of the threat of a regional war in W. Asia. Political chaos in the USA and fragmentation of the Atlantic bloc/NATO would advance the interests of those who identify US hegemony and dominance of the West against the pluralistic rest as the principal contradiction at the global scale. Cooperation and interdependent development are.the appropriate response to conflict, not military confrontation when we are a "community of a shared future". President Xi, chair of the central military commission, and general secretary of the CPC noted we are witnessing "changes unseen in a century" and its time to discard out modeled cold war thinking. An expanded war in W. Asia would drive gas prices over the roof and doom the Harris campaign as well as undermining whatever legitimacy post-war transnational institutions like the UN, the WTO retain. We will see.
I certainly agree we must oppose US militarism and expanded war in West Asia. But I completely disagree with the idea that a contested US election—much less a Trump victory—would decrease that likelihood or improve conditions in Gaza, Lebanon, etc. Quite the contrary.
Meanwhile "BRICS" contains a quite divergent set of forces. The Modi and Putin regimes are deeply repressive—the Indian and Russian variants of a global trend towards right-wing authoritarianism. To consider them an attractive alternative to the US power block seems to me an example of "outmoded cold war thinking" that fails to acknowledge how the collapse of soviet socialism, the eclipse of revolutionary nationalisms, and the partial but intensifying integration of various national bourgeoisies into a transnational capitalist class has altered the conjuncture.
That's not to say there aren't very real contradictions between Global North and Global South, the US and BRICs, etc. But rather that we need a sharper framework for understanding these (and situating them in relation to other intensifying contradictions) than a totalizing "the west vs the rest" allows for. Indeed, the latter indicates precisely my concerns about the limitations of applying the "central contradiction" framework at the global level.
The point of the BRICS was to create a framework to manage contradictions constructively though economic inter-dependencies as the uni-polar order self-destructs. The SCO is another platform for regional cooperation and is currently meeting in Islamabad.
"Apart from boosting economic cooperation, interconnectivity and integration, as well as security cooperation, the SCO is a platform for members to solve problems among them via diplomacy. This means that disputes or frictions among members will not weaken the organization but will make the organization more valuable for countries to seek solutions and mediation for complicated issues.
For example, in the case of India's border disputes with both China and Pakistan, the SCO meeting provides opportunities for countries to communicate and manage frictions, preventing escalation and seeking chances to ease tensions".
Our elections will likely be close. The three critical states are in the old industrial core ( PA, MI, and WI) . Current state level polling suggests that Harris will win the electoral votes necessary to take the White House, assuming the block and build united front strategy effectively energizes GOTV work.
What happens between election day and January 20th, 2025, and going forward might be more contentious since there are more GOP/MAGA trifecta states than Dem trifectas with the population almost evenly split between them.
Thank you for your detailed response. We do understand the world very differently. My point was we are not a semi colonial country we are the big bad of our time. Our responsibility to the world's people is immense. It is a responsibility I believe the hard left flubbed after WW2. I responded to your 3 point strategy back in August. https://violetsinthegrass.wordpress.com/2024/08/04/notes-from-a-post-duopoly-double-hater/
My views have clarified a bit since then as i believe our country is a kleptocracy and the debate between the 2 parties is what form of authoritarianism will uphold it. My personal issues are the criminalization of poverty which is happening now under Democrat control on fed. state, and local levels while homelessness explodes, the criminalization of dissent and the attack on whistleblowers and journalists (happening now) and the unwillingness of the government to address environmental calamities that are becoming ubiquitous. The Harris Walz campaign promise that nothing will change while hooking up with the Republicans that actually overturned an election (2000) then in office lied us into war and let New Orleans drown is enough for me to say no, although the genocide is already a large no. Worse terrain? The terrain is the terrain- who are we? Where do we stand? We can't continue rightward.
Interesting comment. I was wondering how the principal contradiction as identified in this essay at the national scale ties into the principal contradiction at the global scale. Identifying a principal contradiction seems to me a subjective judgement call, with spatial and temporal dimensions. It is all too easy to fall into an ecological fallacy trap and generalize the contradiction between MAGA and the democratic majority upwards to the global scale as in democracy vs. authoritarianism worldwide.
International affairs has not been a top item on the electoral agenda for a very long time, although every single US House district benefits to some extent on military spending. Militarism is seamlessly integrated into almost every aspect of American life that it becomes an invisible part of the background noise.
I hope somewhere, someplace people are deepening a conversation about the nested sets of contradictions we face, expanding social investigation, and seeking truth from facts regarding the current period at all scales. Such a theoretical conversation based on the principle of unity>struggle>unity would move our understandings to a higher level, revealing opportunities and openings for action.
Interesting to use China as an example, the Principal Contradiction in the World at that time, was Axis versus Allies, China's fight against the aggressors was also fighting the Axis. The Communists' in Japan, the aggressor nation, task was to fight their nation's aggression (which was in fact their line) and end the war. Today, The USA is the aggressor nation- disrupting and destabilizing for decades and now sponsoring genocide. The worldwide contradiction is between the vicious global capitalist class centered in the USA and their worldwide allies and the bulk of the world's people. Both parties have pledged to continue the pro-war, active war policies. Our main task is to oppose the aggression. The architects of the Iraq war are not our allies in that attempt. The US Communists fell into a similar error in the 50's. Then they also feared a impending national fascism and did not build a strong antiwar movement against the Korean War, despite polls consistently showing that many American people did not support or understand the war. Do we want to share this legacy ?
Thanks Danielle and Stephen for engaging so substantively with my argument. I agree with you both that it is important to situate US contradictions within the broader context of the capitalist world system as a whole, and that this is a complex conversation that merits more discussion in a spirit of unity>struggle>unity. I offer the below comments in that spirit.
Our International Work Team has had some conversations about whether the concept of principal contradiction is useful or applicable at the global level. I've read with interest Torkil Lauesen's book "The Principal Contradiction," which among other things tries to do just that. But while I'm open to the idea, I'm not fully convinced that the notion of a global principal contradiction helps sharpen socialist strategy. Let me share a bit about why.
First, it's worth noting that Mao did *not* frame his case for a tactical alliance with the Kuomintang in relation to a global contradiction between Axis and Allies. It's not that the China-Japan contradiction was a sub-component of an identical, generalized contradiction at the global level; quite the opposite, Mao developed the concept as a way of understanding how struggle and development may played out *differently* in the course of struggle in semi-colonial China, as compared to how the global socialist struggle was playing out elsewhere.
If Mao's concept of principal contradiction represents an advance for Marxism, in other words, it's precisely that it allows us to move beyond abstract, general contradictions (e.g. "capital vs labor") to more specific contradictions that play a central role under any given time, place and conditions. My worry about trying to subsume these latter into one general, global contradiction is that it would actually eliminate the very thing that's most useful about the concept—putting us back at a level of generality and abstraction that is not helpful for determining strategy.
Mao does say that the notion of principal contradiction applies to "the process of development of a[ny] complex thing." (We could talk about the principal contradiction of an organization, for instance, at a given stage of its development, or a social movement, or what have you.) If that's the case, then it should at least in principle be possible to name a principal contradiction at the level of "the world." There are many contradictions at the global level, for instance between capitalism's need for relentless expansion and the ecological limits of the planet; between a deterritorializing and increasingly transnational mode of production and the territorial logic of the nation-state; between overdeveloped capitalist core countries and formerly colonized countries; between national bourgeoisies and the transnational capitalist class.
Theoretically, I can see ways that debating which of these is the principal contradiction at the global level could help sharpen our thinking and clarify our strategy. (In practice, however, I find it usually does the opposite). But even if we agreed upon a principal global contradiction, I think we would have to avoid the error of assuming this global principal contradiction was the decisive one for determining the principal contradiction inside a different entity or social organization, at a different level of analysis. In practice, I too often see the argument "US imperialism is the main global contradiction" used in unhelpful ways. For instance, to deny the calls of socialists in Rojava for US aid, when their autonomous socialist feminist project was being attacked by the Assad regime, because the Assad regime opposes US imperialism and thus must be on the side of "the world's people." I think those kind of over-general applications of one set or level of contradictions to a different particular context is actually exactly the kind of thing Mao's thinking on contradiction sets out to avoid.
Danielle, I don't fundamentally disagree that the greatest contradiction today may be that "between the vicious global capitalist class centered in the USA and the bulk of the world's people." But while that vicious capitalist class may still have its largest concentration in the US, it is indeed global, and increasingly so; it includes (for instance) the capitalist classes of countries with which the US in in political tension, such as Russia. And while that global capitalist class indeed harms the "bulk of the world's people," the "world's people," alas, currently lack forms of collectivity or representation. So I think where we might disagree is, for instance, in mapping "the bulk of the world's people" onto, say "the current political regimes of all countries in tension with US foreign policy." (I do not think the Iranian regime, for instance, is on the side of the world's people, even as it *is* opposed to the US state in terms of geopolitics.)
I totally agree the US left has a duty to do everything we can to oppose US imperialism. And also agree that the latter has been baked into federal-level politics on both sides of the aisle for the past century. Yet when thinking through how to engage with electoral struggles inside the US, I think we still need to ask: which victories, by which sets of forces, will put us on better terrain to advance the peoples' struggles—including the struggle against US imperialism? For all our struggles, I think a MAGA victory unquestionably puts us on worse terrain.
Given the current state of the election process it appears that the results will be very close in battleground states. Regardless of the outcome, the transition between Nov. 5 and January 20th is likely to be extremely contentious. For many however, the most significant event of this autumn is not the US elections but rather the expanded BRICS meeting occurring against the backdrop of the threat of a regional war in W. Asia. Political chaos in the USA and fragmentation of the Atlantic bloc/NATO would advance the interests of those who identify US hegemony and dominance of the West against the pluralistic rest as the principal contradiction at the global scale. Cooperation and interdependent development are.the appropriate response to conflict, not military confrontation when we are a "community of a shared future". President Xi, chair of the central military commission, and general secretary of the CPC noted we are witnessing "changes unseen in a century" and its time to discard out modeled cold war thinking. An expanded war in W. Asia would drive gas prices over the roof and doom the Harris campaign as well as undermining whatever legitimacy post-war transnational institutions like the UN, the WTO retain. We will see.
I certainly agree we must oppose US militarism and expanded war in West Asia. But I completely disagree with the idea that a contested US election—much less a Trump victory—would decrease that likelihood or improve conditions in Gaza, Lebanon, etc. Quite the contrary.
Meanwhile "BRICS" contains a quite divergent set of forces. The Modi and Putin regimes are deeply repressive—the Indian and Russian variants of a global trend towards right-wing authoritarianism. To consider them an attractive alternative to the US power block seems to me an example of "outmoded cold war thinking" that fails to acknowledge how the collapse of soviet socialism, the eclipse of revolutionary nationalisms, and the partial but intensifying integration of various national bourgeoisies into a transnational capitalist class has altered the conjuncture.
That's not to say there aren't very real contradictions between Global North and Global South, the US and BRICs, etc. But rather that we need a sharper framework for understanding these (and situating them in relation to other intensifying contradictions) than a totalizing "the west vs the rest" allows for. Indeed, the latter indicates precisely my concerns about the limitations of applying the "central contradiction" framework at the global level.
The point of the BRICS was to create a framework to manage contradictions constructively though economic inter-dependencies as the uni-polar order self-destructs. The SCO is another platform for regional cooperation and is currently meeting in Islamabad.
"Apart from boosting economic cooperation, interconnectivity and integration, as well as security cooperation, the SCO is a platform for members to solve problems among them via diplomacy. This means that disputes or frictions among members will not weaken the organization but will make the organization more valuable for countries to seek solutions and mediation for complicated issues.
For example, in the case of India's border disputes with both China and Pakistan, the SCO meeting provides opportunities for countries to communicate and manage frictions, preventing escalation and seeking chances to ease tensions".
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202410/1321270.shtml
Our elections will likely be close. The three critical states are in the old industrial core ( PA, MI, and WI) . Current state level polling suggests that Harris will win the electoral votes necessary to take the White House, assuming the block and build united front strategy effectively energizes GOTV work.
https://electoral-vote.com/.
What happens between election day and January 20th, 2025, and going forward might be more contentious since there are more GOP/MAGA trifecta states than Dem trifectas with the population almost evenly split between them.
The chickens might be coming home to roost.
Thank you for your detailed response. We do understand the world very differently. My point was we are not a semi colonial country we are the big bad of our time. Our responsibility to the world's people is immense. It is a responsibility I believe the hard left flubbed after WW2. I responded to your 3 point strategy back in August. https://violetsinthegrass.wordpress.com/2024/08/04/notes-from-a-post-duopoly-double-hater/
My views have clarified a bit since then as i believe our country is a kleptocracy and the debate between the 2 parties is what form of authoritarianism will uphold it. My personal issues are the criminalization of poverty which is happening now under Democrat control on fed. state, and local levels while homelessness explodes, the criminalization of dissent and the attack on whistleblowers and journalists (happening now) and the unwillingness of the government to address environmental calamities that are becoming ubiquitous. The Harris Walz campaign promise that nothing will change while hooking up with the Republicans that actually overturned an election (2000) then in office lied us into war and let New Orleans drown is enough for me to say no, although the genocide is already a large no. Worse terrain? The terrain is the terrain- who are we? Where do we stand? We can't continue rightward.
Interesting comment. I was wondering how the principal contradiction as identified in this essay at the national scale ties into the principal contradiction at the global scale. Identifying a principal contradiction seems to me a subjective judgement call, with spatial and temporal dimensions. It is all too easy to fall into an ecological fallacy trap and generalize the contradiction between MAGA and the democratic majority upwards to the global scale as in democracy vs. authoritarianism worldwide.
International affairs has not been a top item on the electoral agenda for a very long time, although every single US House district benefits to some extent on military spending. Militarism is seamlessly integrated into almost every aspect of American life that it becomes an invisible part of the background noise.
I hope somewhere, someplace people are deepening a conversation about the nested sets of contradictions we face, expanding social investigation, and seeking truth from facts regarding the current period at all scales. Such a theoretical conversation based on the principle of unity>struggle>unity would move our understandings to a higher level, revealing opportunities and openings for action.