The Parasite State Theory

[Red Fist]

The Parasitic state theory Is made by a danish marxist named Gotfred Appel
who was active in the communist party of denmark from 1945 to his death in 1992.

The Parasitic state theory is a theoretical analysis - with two factors - Of the Western community working class according to the working class in the developed Western Europe and North America occupies a dual position.

The first factor is all about it on the one hand, the yield, because it produces value, and on the
other hand, are bribed (2nd factor) because its standard of living and thus its economic and cultural needs and its technical requirements are based on decades of involvement in the imperialist world colonial and neo-colonial spoils.The Bribes factor was the dominant of the two.
The wokeraristocracy - as working class in Western countries were called - had no objective interest in implementing a socialist revolution. It was according to Godfrey Appeal reason for the lack of revolutionary movement in Western Europe. Only when the Third World had freed itself from imperialist yoke and cut the rich countries from the super-profits, there would be a crisis in the Western capitalist economy, which in turn would create the ground for a socialist revolution in Western Europe.

The consequence of this theory was that work had to focus on political and practical support to people and organizations actively fought the West's pillage of the Third World and thereby helped to undermine the parasite State foundation.

This theory inspired The Leftist group the media called "The Blekinge Street Gang" (in danish Blekingegadebanden) Who made several highly professional Million robberies in Denmark and sent the money to the PFLP. The group started first with collecting money and clothes to liberation movements in The Third World but began to disscus the illegal work to support the movements with large money amounts. Its here the robberies began, until they got arrested in 1989, where
the Danish intelligence services found a apartment with several weapons, uniforms, bombs and a
list wich the group called The Z-files, about many zionists in the west who supported Israel economic.


You can read more about The Parasite State Theory and The Blekinge Street Gang on this site, but it is on Danish (try google translate)

www DOT snylterstaten DOT dk(Danish)



So The questions here is.
What do you think about The Parasite State Theory?
And, What do you think about The Blekinge Street Gang?,

is it okay to perform political crime if the money goes to
liberation movements or is this something you dont support?

[Dimentio]

Was an appelian group in Sweden. "The Rebel Movement". Basically MIMx20.

I think that certainly it is possible that segments of the working class in western countries are benefitting from the exploitation of the working class in third world nations. But that doesn't mean that we should ignore the working class in the west or treat them with contempt.

[red cat]

Isn't this a Leninist conclusion? But I think the word "bribe" is not appropriate because although they are as a whole far better off than the third-world working class, they are still empoverished on the absolute scale. The real bribes are restricted to a minority who ensure the failure of any subjective political development.

[Red Fist]

Isn't this a Leninist conclusion?


Lenin wrote about The Parasite state in
The State and Revolution
Chapter III: Experience of the Paris Commune of 1871. Marx's Analysis
Number 5:Aboloition of the Parasite State



We have already quoted Marx's words on the subject, and we must now supplement them.
"It is generally the fate of new historical creations," he wrote, "to be mistaken for the counterpart of older and even defunct forms of social life, to which they may bear a certain likeness. Thus, this new Commune, which breaks [bricht, smashes] the modern state power, has been regarded as a revival of the medieval communes... as a federation of small states (as Montesquieu and the Girondins visualized it)... as an exaggerated form of the old struggle against overcentralization....
"... The Communal Constitution would have restored to the social body all the forces hitherto absorbed by that parasitic excrescence, the 'state', feeding upon and hampering the free movement of society. By this one act it would have initiated the regeneration of France....
"... The Communal Constitution would have brought the rural producers under the intellectual lead of the central towns of their districts, and there secured to them, in the town working men, the natural trustees of their interests. The very existence of the Commune involved, as a matter of course, local self-government, but no longer as a counterpoise to state power, now become superfluous."
"Breaking state power", which as a "parasitic excrescence"; its “amputation”, its “smashing”; "state power, now become superfluous"--these are the expressions Marx used in regard to the state when appraising and analyzing the experience of the Commune.
All this was written a little less than half a century ago; and now one has to engage in excavations, as it were, in order to bring undistorted Marxism to the knowledge of the mass of the people. The conclusions drawn from the observation of the last great revolution which Marx lived through were forgotten just when the time for the next great proletarian revolution has arrived.
"... The multiplicity of interpretations to which the Commune has been subjected, and the multiplicity of interests which expressed themselves in it show that it was a thoroughly flexible political form, while all previous forms of government had been essentially repressive. Its true secret was this: it was essentially a working-class government, the result of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which the economic emancipation of labor could be accomplished....
"Except on this last condition, the Communal Constitution would have been an impossibility and a delusion...."
The utopians busied themselves with “discovering” political forms under which the socialist transformation of society was to take place. The anarchists dismissed the question of political forms altogether. The opportunists of present-day Social-Democracy accepted the bourgeois political forms of the parliamentary democratic state as the limit which should not be overstepped; they battered their foreheads praying before this “model”, and denounced as anarchism every desire to break these forms.
Marx deduced from the whole history of socialism and the political struggle that the state was bound to disappear, and that the transitional form of its disappearance (the transition from state to non-state) would be the "proletariat organized as the ruling class". Marx, however, did not set out to discover the political forms of this future stage. He limited himself to carefully observing French history, to analyzing it, and to drawing the conclusion to which the year 1851 had led, namely, that matters were moving towards destruction of the bourgeois state machine.
And when the mass revolutionary movement of the proletariat burst forth, Marx, in spite of its failure, in spite of its short life and patent weakness, began to study the forms it had discovered.
The Commune is the form "at last discovered" by the proletarian revolution, under which the economic emancipation of labor can take place.
The Commune is the first attempt by a proletarian revolution to smash the bourgeois state machine; and it is the political form "at last discovered", by which the smashed state machine can and must be replaced.
We shall see further on that the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, in different circumstances and under different conditions, continue the work of the Commune and confirm Marx's brilliant historical analysis.

[MarxSchmarx]

The problems with these "imperialism supports the high standard of living" of the working class of the global north is that it utterly fails to explain why workers in relatively non-imperialistic countries like Finland, New Zealand and (ahem) Denmark still enjoy a comparatively high standard of living - higher, in fact, than other flagrantly imperialist countries like the USA, Britain or France. One could argue that the proximity, of, say, Ireland to imperialist England or France explains this, but this too doesn't explain why the workers in neighbors of Australia or America are not well off despite comparable colonial histories.

Nor do I think this analysis was particulary persuasive when it first came out in the early 20th century. While it applied to some degree to Africa and parts of Asia to explain their economic stagnation, it didn't uniformly explain the high standard of living across the globe. For example, many south American countries boasted a relatively high standard of living compared to the imperialist countries of Europe.

The truth of the matter is that every country has its own complications and unique histories that all explain the differential standard of living in different ways. To be sure imperialism has had a horrific legacy on the third world, but it doesn't explain, uniformly, the high standard of living of many first world countries.

[Yehuda Stern]

MarxSchmarx,
I don't agree with the theory, but I also don't agree with your counter-argument. We can argue about Finland, but New Zealand and Denmark are definitely imperialist. What does "relatively non-imperialistic" mean? Either a given country is imperialist or it isn't.

[red cat]

MarxSchmarx,
I don't agree with the theory, but I also don't agree with your counter-argument. We can argue about Finland, but New Zealand and Denmark are definitely imperialist. What does "relatively non-imperialistic" mean? Either a given country is imperialist or it isn't.I think it refers to an imperialist country with relatively few colonies.

[MarxSchmarx]

MarxSchmarx,
I don't agree with the theory, but I also don't agree with your counter-argument. We can argue about Finland, but New Zealand and Denmark are definitely imperialist. What does "relatively non-imperialistic" mean? Either a given country is imperialist or it isn't.

Imperialism is a complex phenomenon, so insisting on a categorical distinction does not due it justice. It runs the gamut from outright conquest and colonialism to the bourgeois state backing the agenda of influential companies abroad. To be sure, the Finnish gov't for instance looks the other way at Nokia's cobalt supply, and this is in a very real sense imperialist. But this is not of the same scale as, for example, the Americans invading Iraq and giving no-bid contracts to American oil companies to profit off of Iraqi oil.


I think it refers to an imperialist country with relatively few colonies.


That as well. After all, Denmark was "imperialist" esp. viz the native peoples of Greenland, but it was hardly "as imperialist" as, say, France or Great Britain. A more apt, modern analogy might be Taiwan's "imperialism" that consists of promoting the regional interests of Taiwanese companese, as compared to the more bellicose regional imperialism of Libya.

Thus there are gradations of imperialist policies. It is incumbent upon those advocating the theory of imperialism bribing the workers of the global north to explain why the more flagrant imperialism of, say, the United States, does not lead to higher standards of living for American workers.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Comrade, the political reason for "buying out the working class" is also flawed, as discussed in a CPGB video discussion by Mike Macnair. In it, he said that the original premise was an attempt to discover the emergence of reformist parties in imperialist powers (there being no worker movements in the colonies at the time). Of course, with reformist parties like the CPI and CPI-M, the reasoning is further flawed.

Please do check out my Saudi Arabia thread for an interesting spin on Three Worlds Theory, though.

[MarxSchmarx]

Comrade, the political reason for "buying out the working class" is also flawed, as discussed in a CPGB video discussion by Mike Macnair. In it, he said that the original premise was an attempt to discover the emergence of reformist parties in imperialist powers (there being no worker movements in the colonies at the time). Of course, with reformist parties like the CPI and CPI-M, the reasoning is further flawed.


Good point. Yet another nail in the coffin.


Please do check out my Saudi Arabia thread for an interesting spin on Three Worlds Theory, though.


I saw that thread earlier, and it struck me at the time as more of a critique of the Marxist national liberation movements failing to distinguish the class struggle within developing countries. I concur with this criticism.

Further, the example of Saudi Arabia (and other oil-sultanates like Brunei and Libya - let's be honest that's what it is) highlights how even so-called developing countries cannot be readily characterized as "imperialist" or "colonized". They are often both (e.g., also, Mexico and Indonesia), and out of these contradictions arise many issues of their internal class struggle. Ultimately, this helps demonstrate the reason why the "global north is bought off by imperialism" analysis does not work.