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Short Note: John Bellamy Foster thinks mass murder is acceptable

Ecosocialism does not include mass murder, but it seems, John Bellamy Foster did not get the memo.

Here he is quoting Lenin with reverence:

In applying a historical materialist critique to the process of the destruction of reason, Lukács, periodised the growth of irrationalism in terms of the imperialist or monopoly stage of capitalism. Lenin said that ‘imperialism, in its briefest possible definition is the monopoly stage of capitalism’, and it was in this sense that Lukács was, of course, referring to it in his study.

Lukács’s thinking on imperialism is perhaps most explicit in his little book Lenin: A Study of the Unity of His Thought. Here, Lukács indicated that Lenin, in a way distinct from any other thinker at the time, envisioned imperialism ultimately in terms of what it meant for the transformation of class politics within the imperialist states themselves. Imperialism in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, as explained in Lenin’s analysis in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, was associated with the growth of the great capitalist monopolies of production and finance, and the struggle of the great powers to extend colonisation and imperial control to the entire world, each at the expense of the others. It was the conflict over the imperial division of the world that led to the First World War, out of which emerged the Russian Revolution, and then—after a brief interval, which included the Great Depression—the Second World War. In the First World War, the international socialism movement was split, as most of the socialist parties joined the war efforts of their respective states. From that point on, the questions of class and imperialism were hopelessly entwined, with class struggle in the advanced capitalist states understood as curtailed by the accommodation of parts of the working class and the left with the imperialist system. Monopoly capitalism, which was inseparable from imperialism, meant a new order of concentrated economic power, which generated tendencies toward corporatism and fascism, undermining the working-class movement, with the ruling class relying at critical moments on the mobilisation of the volatile lower-middle class as the rearguard of system.

There is nothing intellectual about mass murder. This really shouldn’t need to be said. Please don’t email me to tell me Foster is just elaborating on Georg Lukács. There is no way of getting around that John Bellamy Foster is elevating Lenin to a place of prominence and relevance.