Why PSL’s Brian Becker is wrong to oppose multipolarity: it’s an essential step in ending the USA’s global reign of terror
Why PSL’s Brian Becker is wrong to oppose multipolarity: it’s an essential step in ending the USA’s global reign of terror
Rainer is a shill. Anyone who's been listening to the PSL and to Becker's analyses knows that Becker is not against multipolarity. Becker's position is summed it quite well in the quotations Rainer pulls out of context - multipolarity is not a solution, only socialism is a solution.
The interpretation Rainer applies to the words of Becker are bald-faced bad faith interpretation. Becker is being quoted literally as saying that China and Russia are not looking to replace the US as the new global hegemon. Becker doesn't disavow multipolarity, nor does he state it should be resisted. Martin's quotation, which echoes Becker's analyses from other contexts, is that Russia isn't communist and in fact may even be anti-communist, and there are other countries in BRICS that are also anti-communist domestically. We must be vigilant there. Becker's position on Russia is measured - the US is at fault and also war is hell. We don't need to revel in bloodshed to have a multipolar analysis, nor do we need to defend Russia as a pure beacon of hope in order to understand the historical context that led to the now-escalating conflict nor to understand a Russian victory as the only outcome that will support socialism, a position that Becker has reiterated for years.
Rainer selects quottations from Becker and Becker's work that demonstrate Becker's position and instead of using them to establish a consistent reading of the PSL's position uses them to make a contradiction where none exists. First, Rainer assumes that the measured and nuanced position on Russia means Becker/PSL is anti-multipolarity, believes Russia and China are imperialist, and that the PSL is PatSoc. Then, Rainer selects quotations from the PSL and from Becker that disprove his own assumptions, but he frames that as "see how inconsistent these people are, they are disproving their own thesis".
I don't know what game Rainer is playing and who's paying him, but he's completely lost my trust in every single substack article I've ever read from him. He completely misrepresents the PSL and Becker and uses modern "journalistic" techniques like a strong propagandist does. Reports some facts, misinterprets those facts but frames the interpretation as fact not opinion, then reasons from there to a conclusion that is completely and obviously untenable, with the only goal of leaving the reader with an impression about the ideology of a third party.
If you read this particular piece, the only logical conclusion from the perspective of the author is that 100% of what has been said by the Russian government must be taken as pure unadulterated fact and that any attempt at interpreting the situation beyond that is equivalent to opposition of Russia. Every single serious communist treats the words of any government as propaganda, and as such, always takes a nuanced approach to interpretation. Rainer does not seem to even acknowledge this as a possibility, yet clearly demonstrates the capability by applying a nuanced interpretation of Becker and the PSL.
AFAIK, Rainer is a wrecker and a spoiler. He may be an op. He may just be a PatSoc looking to undermine the PSL so that something more vile can fill the void. My money is on him being an op.
I highly recommend you all listen to Becker's podcast (The Socialist Program) and listen specifically to the episodes on Ukraine and on Multipolarity and come to your own conclusions. And if you find that my assessment of Becker is a reasonable one, I would highly recommend putting up shields whenever Rainer's work comes through. From my perspective it's getting bad enough that I think we need to really consider as a community where we are going to limit how Rainer's work comes through here. I fear that amplifying and propagating his work is dangerously anti-communist.
Shea is such a bad faith op, I'm not even sure why people take him seriously. Another funny thing that I saw in the article was that he quoted Becker saying "what we need is the multipolar world.’…as a Leninist" when Becker says in the full interview "as a marxist leninist". It's literally ONE WORD that he chose to editorialize out. Why would he do this? I don't know...
Is there something we can do on Lemmygrad to limit Shea's impact? It feels like we moved the reactionary memes into a single community to stop their spread, but now we have this brain rot coming in elsewhere. Maybe we can ping @yogthos@lemmygrad.ml to opine?
Hard agree, we should also remember his bad faith readings of Gerald Horne. There are a lot of people (online) who take Rainer's portrayal of certain writers at face value. His bad faith quotes continue into his preferred writers in the form of book worship as well.
All of these attacks to defend coat tailing libertarians and PatSocs. 🤷🏾
Rainer Shea is a patriotic socialist who made a hard turn to condemning the PSL at every opportunity after they failed to support his "anti-war" rally with Tulsi Gabbard, Jackson Hinckle, and the Libertarian Party USA.
Brian Becker is one of the most principled communist leaders in the west, and is so frequently portrayed as a "Russian asset" by liberals that the underlap with Rainer's claim here is just funny.
That sounds like some red brown shit
liberals call donald trump a russia asset. just because he is called that doesn't mean he meaningfully support's russia's anti imperialism
Actions speak louder than words, but imo its disingenuous to say that the PSL failing to support RATWM is because of PSL disliking those lolbertarians.
I've spoken with Rainer about this, and while I don't agree or like with everything he says, his point was that RATWM would expand the core message out to a broader populance, and that he doesn't like associating with the Lolberts and likened this to the Bolsheviks working with reactionary trade unions and groups. Obviously not the same situation, but the general message is the same.
We didn't fail to support the event. We rejected the event emphatically. It was a right-wing event.
The general message is not remotely the same. There is a difference between organizing workers in an imperial country where all non-explicitly-communist institutions are reactionary to some degree, and organizing with the fascists self-consciously responsible for making it that way. If you're genuinely confused about that, you have a lot of reading to do, because even the democrats are better at recognizing their enemies.
The libertarian party is both fringe, and the most ideologically anti-worker organization in the US. It's impossible to be further away from union organizing. You think they want to end the war and spend that money on healthcare for workers? They are literally repealing child labor laws. Some of them think slavery should be legalized.
I appreciate your input.
It is so utterly incorrect as to be nigh unfalsifiable, but appreciated.
Rainer once "decolonized" a government building by raising a PRC flag over it.
His understanding got better, and then obviously far worse. What you say about Becker and PSL are simply untrue, and you can listen to any Socialist Program episode where they discuss Ukraine/Russia or read any liberationnews article about the subject as proof of that.
So this is just another one of those "sit down shut up and toe the line" paternalist screeds, then? One of those "I don't care if these people we're working with are known to agitate for the 'destruction' of your kind" sorta things? You're sounding mighty settler-like there, homie; you know I don't fuck with that. While I back the special operation, there is not a-- I don't give a damn if Kwame Ture himself came back to life to up these Mises Caucus crackers, there will never be a day where I trust anyone repping RAWM to do anything more than get subjects-of-empire killed.
It must suck to be so unpopular that you have to talk about yourself in the 3rd person
Multipolarity is definitely something that communists should support. Of course, it's not the end goal, but it is a necessary step to take in order to dismantle USD hegemony and allow all nations to liberate themselves from debt traps.
The point Becker was making is that multipolarity in and of itself isn't going to end capitalism. Only socialism can do that. Multipolarity between capitalist countries gave us two world wars.
Multipolarity is coming simply as a part of the historical process of our development - just like feudalism emerged, then capitalism, then imperialism, etc. Empires also come and go and in their wake other countries rise - we have seen this numerous times throughout history. Yet it seems like these socialist anti-multipolarity people think we can stop these processes just by the actions of a few individuals or small groups. Not to mention the straw man argument presented where we apparently just want multipolar capitalism as an end goal and nothing else. Yes, all of us would prefer if every state just turned socialist right away, but that is not physically possible. We have to work with what we are given, and currently that's multipolarity.
He took an exchange that probably took 2-3 minutes out of a nearly two hour long interview, and then I guess mind read the rest of his article out of that. Not worth taking seriously.
Hard pass. I 100% support Brian Becker more than this doofus
Rhainer Shea (rightfully) gets a lot of shit here, but I don't expect this particular take to cause a lot of infighting.
This particular take is dog shit. Shea is writing in bad faith
I made this comment before you made your breakdown, and at that I had only skimmed the article. Now that I've seen what you wrote in another thread, I can see that his wrecking goes beyond bad takes on settler colonialism.
Substack hustlers playing armchair general since their early pandemic radicalization. Now writing about grand chessboard geopolitical multipolar line struggle.
we had a multipolar world all the way up until world war II, what did it bring us? The multipolar world brought us World War I, the multipolar world brought us World War II
I cannot believe PSL's cofounder is equating competition between colonial empires to USA trying to subjugate Russia and China.
Or that he's trying to push this narrative that the post WWII world was not multipolar. The only reason a US middle class was ever even allowed to exist.
Go to the 1 hour and 24 minute mark of the interview, that's NOT what he's saying. View my other comment.
Tbh this is on me. I should have known that a Rage Against the War Machine guy will never have a normal and good faith take.
I don't keep up with American left political developments so it never occurred to me that people use multipolarity was a springboard for Putin worshipping.
I mean, he is still kind of saying that, no? He answers the question "is it good that unipolarity has been challenged?" and his answer is in essence no because it just seems like he argues against some multipolarity in general without considering the material reality of today's world split into the west and the rest (with China on top). His answer implies that today's multipolarity is like that of pre-WW1 which is in contradiction with his stance in general.
as many others have said in this thread, you aren't getting what he is saying. multipolarity alone is not the answer.
Based on the contradictory positions Becker takes on Russia compared to China, he's probably just trying to appeal to liberals to grow the PSL. Saying 'Russia not good' is kinda necessary to prevent liberals from losing their minds right now. Does this stance temporarily screw up their real MLtheory? Yes. Does this stance attract more new members? Maybe.
Don't take Rainer Shea's words as fact. Nearly every position he ascribes to Becker and the PSL are incorrect. He's writing in bad faith.
This is exactly the problem. It is possible that this erroneous position was taken out of opportunism, a misguided impulse to try to appeal to liberals by capitulating to the imperialist narrative on Russia. I had a lot of respect for B.B. and the PSL before this, but sadly this has undermined a lot of that. I just don't think you can build a principled socialist movement this way. You are much better off trying to appeal to the apolitical and even the more backwards sections of the working class than to the middle class liberals who have fully bought into the demonization of Russia. More and more i am convinced that no progress will ever be made by any "radical" group in the US until and unless they have completely severed themselves from the Democratic Party.
Becker and the PSL need to read this
The part about the world wars is such a blatantly false analogy that i really didn't want to believe it came from someone like Becker. Not only is the situation today nothing like the situation prior to WWI, when there was no single global imperialist hegemony and more importantly no socialist pole existed, but to claim that it was multipolarity that led to WWII really almost sounds like Nazi apologetics. If he truly thinks this way then he also thinks that the existence of the USSR itself - which represented an alternative pole of power to that of the western imperialists - was a bad thing. Also, he seems to forget that after both world wars socialism came out stronger, both resulted in the creation of more socialist states than had previously existed, and in a significant retreat of capitalism.
There is a fundamental difference between a multipolarity of competing imperialist powers and one of imperialism vs anti-imperialism. The US today simply will not allow the existence of any other imperialist poles of power, we see this clearly in how it has tightened the leash of its various vassals and made sure to subordinate Europe to its will so that it cannot ever become the independent pole of global power that the EU not too long ago dreamed of being. As such all those that are left outside of the hegemon's control are anti-imperialist, if not through ideology then by simple necessity and circumstance. And it is only outside of the suffocating grasp of the US's neoliberal hegemony that socialism can arise, let alone survive and flourish. It seems virtually everyone in the global south can see this, but for some reason many western leftists cannot.
I don't want to jump straight to accusations of chauvinism but there is definitely something wrong here.
Bruh, you don't wanna jump into accusations of chauvinism but accuse him of borderline nazi-apologetics? C'mon dude. Read my longer comment, Rainer is completely misrepresenting Becker.
Rainer Shea is misrepresenting Becker and the PSL. He's been doing this for awhile now. Don't read him unless you're doing oppo research and prepared to spend hours digging into sources and proving Shea is acting in bad faith
Your actions are literally indistinguishable from those of a federal agent, except that feds are less visibly incompetent.
I've read this guy's articles on stuff for a while but never seen anything too bad, what exactly are people's criticisms of him?
Edit: this downvoting shit is so stupid, it's a genuine fucking question
From everything I've seen, he has a strong tendency to play "leftier than all your organizations", every other article, specifically going after the likes of Black Agenda Report, the Black Alliance for Peace, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and at least a half dozen others; especially after the majority of them said 'lmao fuck that' to the prospect of aligning with the Mises Caucus. He's petty, and he only seems to get pettier with each article.
I don't think he's a paid for federal opp, but he absolutely is still some flavor of opp from where I stand regardless.
Thanks for the explanation, I'm always wary of white people when they try to criticize colonized people's work. Not that there aren't criticisms to be made, but too many times it comes off as thinly veiled chauvinism.
yup, 100% right. these orgs are failing people by trying to appeal to democrats by staying meaninglessly "anti Putin". you don't have to get any false ideas about him to ACCEPT he is acting against u.s. imperialism and that's good.
It seems to me that multipolarism is all well and good.
But campism ain't it.
Define campism.
For anyone whose really interested in what Becker said, go to the 1 hour and 24 minute mark and watch the whole section. Becker never says that he's opposed to multipolarity, but that multipolarity as an end all be all is not what socialists should strive for. He asks the question "How can we make radical change in America by saying 'Vladimir Putin is our leader?', which is a very salient point. He goes on to say that we should strive for socialist leadership in all of our countries. What is so off about that? Seriously?
The point about the WW1 and multipolarity is making the point that multipolarity alone doesn't end war. Multipolarity between capitalist powers is still destructive.
Rainer Shead is really good at finding convenient quotes from revolutionaries and diluting it to hell and back. He cites Kim il Sung saying “The differences of state socio-political systems, political views or religious beliefs can by no means be an obstacle in the way of joint struggle against U.S. imperialism”, but just thinking about it for like 20 seconds, this obviously wouldn't mean supporting reactionary states against the US for the pure sake of it. Would Kim il Sung have supported Hitler? Obviously not.
This dude misses so often.
Becker: has a based take on multipolarity
\ Z-posters: durrrr russia good
Nothing is wrong with that in general, but who is he saying it to? Who are these people that only want multipolarity and simp for Putin? His call for socialism is good, but ignores the material reality of today's world in which new socialist construction is not possible without first the decline of US hegemony.
I don't like Shea and think he's quite problematic, but your comment about what Kim is saying is, I think, not a good portrayal.
The USSR and China did ally with other capitalist and imperialist forces against Japan and Germany in WW2. And today's world is largely split into two camps - the US and China. Critical support given to Russia (which while being reactionary still currently plays a progressive role globally in the struggle against US hegemony and is allied to the world's socialist countries, though only out of necessity) is not the same as "supporting Hitler". Putin and Russia today are not equivalent to Hitler and Nazi Germany.
As Losurdo puts it:
Brian Becker and the PSL critically support Russia. Shea takes the critical part and makes it seem like Becker is a "Russia bad" commentator. He's not. Don't listen to Shea talk about Becker. Listen to Becker directly and form your own opinion. When you do, you'll see Shea is dangerous.
I'm currently on the move so I can't currently give more lengthy response, but these are the people. There's a growing right wing opposition to NATO, which now, might seem insignificant, but as the war drags longer and longer?
The US knows it can't drag the war on in perpetuity, and if support falls come time for the next election, this puts Democrats in a dangerous and weakened position.
I'd be interested to see what instances you're referring to in terms of the SU and China allying with other imperialist forces. The instances I can think, such as the Molotov Ribbentrop pact we'rent so much allying as it was a stalemate that allowed the SU to gather up it's arms. Even then, the SU ended up going to war against those same forces, which points to the reality points to how alliances with reactionary forces is ultimately short lived and can be dangerous.
I do think that Russia plays a progressive tole in today's landscape, but that's different than expecting Putin to liberate us from NATO.
So Putin is Hitler now? Have we fallen so far that we are now using the same vulgar propaganda language that the liberals use? Nazi Germany was an imperialist power and when it attacked the Soviet Union it had the backing of most of the western capitalists. Russia is NOT imperialist and it is currently one of the two biggest enemies of the western imperialist hegemony, and they are allied with the other which is a socialist state.
Of course multipolarity is not the end goal, no communist has ever said that. It is however a necessary prerequisite. All the rest of what Becker said is just waffling to obscure the main point: he refuses to support what Russia is doing because it's a bad look in the west right now to "support Putin". But which communist supports Putin? Fuck Putin. Every time that fucker opens his mouth to talk about Lenin he says nothing but bullshit. Of course we all wish that the communists were back in power.
But the point is that a communist should have the geopolitical understanding to grasp the fact that regardless who leads Russia what they are doing on the global stage is objectively beneficial for advancing the anti-imperialist cause and thereby the socialist cause in ALL nations - and yes, including the imperial core itself because when imperialism is dealt a crushing defeat that will open up opportunities for revolutionary action that are currently simply not there.
Unless Russia wins you will not get any kind of socialist leadership in your country, and in fact socialist leadership in the countries where it still exists may be strangled and crushed if imperialism is victorious in this conflict. After Russia China is next. And how long do you think states like Cuba or Vietnam or the DPRK can survive isolated and alone in a unipolar world?
I don’t think they’re not saying Putin is just like Hitler. They’re saying Rainer’s out of context quote implies Kim Il Sung would have supported Nazis as a power fighting US imperialism. It goes along with the logic that led the Trotskyists to support ISIS. Obviously we need to have some sort of line of reaction that cannot be supported. If there were an actual imperialist like Germany fighting the US we wouldn’t support them, but Russia is not at all imperialist so that doesn’t apply.
I really take seriously anyone who believes or pretends that Russia is communist or even remotely close to becoming communist.
Not
Communist Russia ended 32 years ago, please to be living in current century.