London Marxism Reading Group

Tue, Oct 14 · 7:00 PM BST

China Study Group: Chuang Collective, "Sorghum & Steel" - Part 1

Civic Action Lab, 2 Prince of Wales Road, London, GB

"In the late 16th century, one of the earliest long-form accounts of life within 'China' was released in Europe. The author was a Portuguese mercenary ... Afterwards he became a pirate on the South China Sea, pillaging coastal provinces in the beginning of what would become a centuries-long piracy epidemic facilitated by the growth of the global market. The Ming dynasty responded with its Piracy Extermination Campaign ... If there was any point of utter indeterminacy in the birth of the capitalist world, this was it. The die had been cast but had not yet settled. With the largest navy, the most advanced technology, and unprecedented agricultural productivity, the Ming Dynasty remained the most extensive and powerful political structure in the world. In every way it matched and surpassed Europe, and the question of China’s 'failed' transition to capitalism (known as 'Needham’s Paradox') would become a sort of initiatory riddle for future scholars of the region."

你好, readers!

What can we learn from the Chinese Revolution? That's the question we'll seek to answer as LMRG brings the heat to you once again, now on Tuesday nights, with our all-new China Study Group. In this long-form reading series, we'll meet monthly for in-depth discussion of a series of texts on China, its revolution, the socialist market economy, and more. As the New Cold War heats up, it's never been more important to learn what we can about the country which the US, UK and EU have all described - following the American phrasebook - as a "systemic rival".

For the first set of meetups within this series, we'll be tackling Sorghum and Steel: The Socialist Developmental Regime and the Forging of China by the Chuang collective. Chuang is an independent, autonomous collective of anti-authoritarian Chinese communists and labour activists whose work provides a rare opportunity for English readers to get vital detail on historical and contemporary dynamics within Chinese society from a materialist, communist, and crucially - balanced perspective. Sorghum and Steel will provide our Study Group with an essential foundation in Chinese history to equip us going forward.

For this first event in the series we'll be reading the introduction and chapter one - find the text here: https://chuangcn.org/journal/one/sorghum-and-steel/

Throughout this series, we'll give equal space to a wide variety of sources, from anti-authoritarian Chinese communists opposed to the contemporary Politburo to members of Xi Jinping's own ideological brain-trust. We'll dig deep into elements of the Chinese revolutionary experience such as the CPC's localist co-operative economics of the Civil War period, the forgotten grass roots of the Cultural Revolution, the Boulan Fazheng period and China's rejection of "shock therapy" as seen in the USSR, and the theory underpinning China's recent turn away from the liberal economics of the 2000s.

Take care everyone and happy reading!

Thu, Oct 16 · 7:00 PM BST

People Power Sessions: Your Party - Whose Party? | PUBLIC MEETING & DISCUSSION

Civic Action Lab, 2 Prince of Wales Road, London, GB

Join us at Camden's new Civic Action Lab for a series of training workshops and strategic discussions around the Your Party project ahead of its founding conference this Autumn. Your Party (a temporary title!) is a new political initiative launched by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, so called because it really is Your Party (Our Party) to shape through collective, thought, struggle and action - starting now.

"The decisive element in every situation is the permanently organized and long-prepared force which can be put into the field when it is judged that a situation is favorable (and it can be favorable only in so far as such a force exists, and is full of fighting spirit). Therefore the essential task is that of systematically and patiently ensuring that this force is formed, developed, and rendered ever more homogeneous, compact, and self aware."

Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks

Hello all! This event may seem like it's coming to you from way out of left field, but please do bear with us.

First of all - what's Your Party and why the hell is it called that? Announced a few months ago by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana as a left-wing alternative to Labour, Your Party is a mass-membership political organisation dedicated to community organising, socialist politics, and member-led, bottom-up democracy. Or at least that's what it's supposed to be - the official foundation congress has yet to be held, and the name hasn't yet been decided by the members.

So far, we don't know much about what this thing is supposed to be: all we know is that around 800,000 people across England, Scotland and Wales have signed up to be a part of it when it launches, and that some time in the Autumn there will be a conference held at which members - all of them - can decide on these big questions, like what the thing is going to be called, what its structure will be, and how to move forward with strategy.

Okay, sounds interesting, but what's that got to do with this little meetup group of ours? Well, the crux of the issue (as we see it) is this: if British politics can be defined in one word, it's theatre. What passes for political events in this country are song-and-dance routines put on by a small group of politicians, journalists and PR hacks to create the illusion of high-stakes political drama while, behind the scenes, everything remains the same. This has got to change, and if even half the people who've signed up for it wind up paying dues and taking part, Your Party could make a major contribution to that change.

In July, left-wing strategist and Corbyn advisor James Schneider published an interview in the New Left Review which speaks to these themes: for this party to succeed where Corbyn's Labour failed, it needs to draw the masses of people into politics (inside and outside election schedules) through participatory means. For us that means one thing: we need to start to organise events just like this one. If the Autumn conference is going to be a success, people need to start to get organised now, ahead of time.

A people's party needs to draw in, educate and organise the people in the most thorough, nation-wide way. With these People Power Sessions, we'll be aiming to bring in members of this group as well as members of the community in Kentish Town where the sessions will be based and from across London. Talk to your friends and family and invite them along! To make a success of this fragile, doubtful little project, we need to reach out and grab ordinary people and show them what political action can look like when they're in charge, not just the Westminster technocrats. Lifelong socialists are welcome, but we can't stop there.

We'll discuss topics such as:

1. The constitution and governance of the party and the rights and responsibilities of its members
2. The strategic relation of the party to different social forces such as working class, petty-bourgeoisie/middle class etc, i.e. the makeup of the party's "mass base"
3. The tactical relationship of the party to other political and social forces i.e. other parties, chiefly the Green Party of England and Wales, Aspire, sectarian parties, etc
4. The party's overall theory of change, i.e. how it will build and exercise power
5. The party's international outlook, especially with a view to building international alliances, not only our stance on international issues

Let's not mince words: Britain is a country on the brink. An economy and social fabric in ruins doesn't fully explain neoliberalism's fascist, far-right turn. But the record-low political participation which years of austerity and decline have enabled do provide an explanation as to why the British far-right is poised to enter the halls of power. Without an alternative, the thin layers of the working class which do remain politically active will continue to be drawn to the right, along with the other classes. Labour can't stop its own decline let alone save the rest of us; so let's not give Farage his chance. Let's build a fighting organisation of the people, and let's start as we mean to go on: by gathering together to think, learn, and strategise. The moment is ours to take!

Thu, Oct 23 · 7:00 PM BST

Lukács, "Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought", Chapters 1 - 3

London Action Resource Centre, 62 Fieldgate Street, Whitechapel, E1 1ES, London, GB

Welcome back readers! By popular demand, we're continuing our journey with Lenin, this time by way of the work of the Hungarian philosopher, literary critic and battle-hardened revolutionary György Lukács.

The text is Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought, published in 1924. Find the text here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/1924/lenin/

"The following short account does not for a moment claim to deal in any way exhaustively with the theory and practice of Lenin. It is merely an attempt – in rough outline – to show the relationship between the two, written in the belief that it is precisely this relationship which is not clearly enough in evidence, even in the minds of many Communists."

Published five years after the fall of the revolutionary Hungarian Soviet Republic, in which the young Lukács took an active part as the new government's Minister for Culture, this work provides one of the most accessible overviews of Lenin's philosophy of praxis available in English. Indeed as those who joined us for our reading of State and Revolution by Lenin may already know, sometimes it's easier to get a sense of what someone's philosophy is about by reading someone else.

Lukács was writing just a few years after the dust had been to settle after the stalling-out of the attempted world revolution of 1917-1920. This revolutionary wave saw monarchies and governments toppled across the world and the beginnings of the rise of 20th-century anti-colonialism. Beginning in Russia with the October Revolution, it saw Soviet-style republics set up across Europe, from Budapest to Bavaria, with major unrest in Austria, Italy (the Bienno Rosso) Ireland, and even Glasgow's "Red Clydeside", on which tanks had to be deployed to during the Battle of George Square in 1919. Although dramatic events continued into the mid-1920s, the revolutionary period could be said to have drawn to a close with the failure of the Ruhr uprising in Germany's industrial heartland and/or the defeat of the Red Army at the Battle of Warsaw, both in 1920.

With the perspective of a few years on from the peak of this revolutionary wave, Lukács was able to pierce the veil of confusion that fast-moving events often create and develop a thorough, philosophically-grounded, empirically-rigorous case for why Lenin's understanding of revolution, and indeed his revolutionary leadership, created conditions for the success of the October Revolution, in contrast to so many of the attempts that followed it.

We'll read the full text in a pair of two consecutive meetups and discuss topics such as the relevance of Lenin's understanding of class forces and their interactions, the scope of revolutionary leadership, the role of the masses vis-a-vis the so-called vanguard party, and much more.

Take care and happy reading!