Roland Boer's Blog, page 27

Marx and Engels, Petrozavodsk, c. 1960

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The Anti-Fascist Trail (on a Brompton)

I have been focused for the last week or two on writing daily reports about the Anti-Fascist Trail – a bicycle ride for a month along the former ‘inner-German border’ between east and west Germany. Some call it the ‘Iron Curtain Trail’ or the ‘Green Band’, but a far better name is the Anti-Fascist Trail.

If you are interested, you can find the reports at Voyages on the Left. They say that the heart of Germany lies east of the Elbe River. If this is so, then East Germany was in the heart of Ge...

Fidel Castro: ‘Xi Jinping is one of the strongest and most capable revolutionary leaders I have met in my life’

Yes, Fidel Castro said this in 2014: ‘Xi Jinping is one of the strongest and most capable revolutionary leaders I have met in my life’.

This is noted in an article by Ajit Singh called ‘China: A Revolutionary Present’ (well worth a read).

A couple of decades earlier, Fidel also observed:

I think China is a socialist country, and Vietnam is a socialist nation as well. And they insist that they have introduced all the necessary reforms in order to motivate national development and to continue s...

An African perspective on FOCAC (Forum on China-Africa Cooperation)

You can read plenty of material on the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in Chinese newspapers, including Xi Jinping’s important speech outlining 8 initiatives and 5 ‘nos’:

We follow a “five-no” approach in our relations with Africa: no interference in African countries’ pursuit of development paths that fit their national conditions; no interference in African countries’ internal affairs; no imposition of our will on African countries; no attachment of political strings to assistance to Afri...

What if Africa became a global economic powerhouse?

Those accustomed to calling the shots in the world – many of them former colonial exploiters – may be struggling with the reality of China’s rejunevation. But what if Africa too became a global economic powerhouse? For many, this is imply unimaginable.

Guess what? The foundations are being laid, and have been laid now for almost two decades. Not that too many have been paying attention outside Africa and China, at least until now. Indeed, it has been primarily through Chinese involvement, esp...

What About the Chinese Workers?

A question I am asked from time to time when talking about Chinese Marxism is: what about the workers?

The short answer is that 700-800 million of them have been lifted out of poverty in the last 40 years – the time of ‘the reform and opening up’ initiated by Deng Xiaoping.

The long answer requires some more detail.

The question with which I began often implies a certain potted narrative: once upon a time, the workers were treated well, with the ‘Iron Rice Bowl’ (not originally a Chinese term...

The Resumption of the American Civil War

‘All of the post-war agreements and compromises are being torn up’, he said.

In reply to my puzzled look, he added: ‘Post-American Civil War’.

With that observation, a whole new angle opened up on what is happening in the ‘United’ States of America. Forget using a certain Mr Donald Trump as a scapegoat, for he is a symptom of a far deeper malaise. Forget the idea that things were going relatively well until the current anomaly in the system appeared.

Instead, the ‘United’ States has always be...

Voroshilovsky Shooter

As Engels had already made clear with his insights into military matters, and as Lenin and the Bolsheviks realised with a shock after the Potemkin incident (which drew them to Engels’s material), and as Mao was fully aware with his efforts to develop a revolutionary army, a communist revolution needs a well-trained Red Army. All of this is embodied in Alexander Sorokin’s ‘Voroshilovsky Shooter’, from the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, made during the immensely creative 1930s in the Sovi...

Riding the Anti-Fascist border route

Some like to call it the ‘Iron Curtain Trail’, a bicycle route running from the top of the Russian-Finnish border to the Black Sea.

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However, in the German parts there is a distinct reluctance to name the route in such a fashion. Every now and then, you may come across signs like this:

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But they are quite rare. Instead, you may find the ‘Green Belt Route’.

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Why the reluctance? German unity has always been a problem, as Engels analysed carefully in the 1880s. So no need to exacerbate differenc...

Second China Road conference: 1-2 December 2018

Preliminary conference notice: China Road, 2018

You are warmly invited to participate in the second China Road conference, to be held in Newcastle, Australia, on the weekend of 1-2 December, 2018. The conference will be primarily sponsored by the Academy of Marxism (within the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences – CASS) .

The focus of the conference is Marxism in its various fields, with relevance to China.

The main body of the conference will take place on 2 December, with an informal welcome...