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Is the enemy of my enemy my friend?
Barnaby Raine on the resurgence of "tankie" and "campist" politics.
http://breachmedia.ca/is-the-enemy-of-my-enemy-my-friend/
Publisher: The Breach
Date Written: 22/10/2021
Year Published: 2021
Resource Type: Article
Barnaby Raine claims that there is a trend among some on the left to sympathizing with authoritariam states like China or Russia. According to Raine, this is part of a seeming comeback of "tankie" or "campist" politics -- a tendency that, once upon a time, uncritically aligned with the Soviet Union and other enemies of the United States, in the name of the struggle against imperialism. However, Raine offers no evidence for this 'resurgence.'
Abstract:
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Excerpt:
If you want to understand the world of class struggle in the 20th century, the older style campists basically said, "the real class struggles are actually deflected away from being worker vs boss in New York or London, and into the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. Geopolitics is the real terrain of struggle." The United States led the "imperialist camp"; the Soviet Union led the "anti-imperalist camp."
Born in the communist parties, you can already begin to imagine how this develops -- where the interests of socialism are identified with the interest of the Soviet Union -- because this is the kind of worker's paradise that enthralls you if you're a socialist in 1917 or 1920 who watches the birth of the first workers' state. And so the interests of the Soviet Union come to be synonymous with the interests of socialism, and the defense of the Soviet Union comes to be synonymous with the defense of socialism.
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