comrades I come from an alternative universe. How revisionist is this?
German Ideology emphasises the German nation as an entity that is of its time, one that was misled by militarists who led it into a destructive war and was then taken over by international financiers who ran the country into ruin. The “German” essence of the belief, then, equates more to the communists positioning themselves as the only truly German party. The fact that Marx and Engels were both Germans was given extra emphasis in this regard.
This is not to say that German Ideology is overtly anti-internationalist, when prompted most adherents will argue that Germany was the foremost example of the international capitalist control that most industrialised countries suffer under. German Ideology, they would argue, is not only applicable to non-German countries but necessary to their development and there is more than lip service paid to this idea. Time and time again in European countries “liberated” by Comintern it is stressed that they must follow a similar path to Germany if they are to truly throw off the shackles of capitalist control. One fault in the ideology that even adherents will usually admit to is its Eurocentrism as a philosophy. German Ideology does not have much to say about imperialism other than that it hinders the development of socialist nation states both in the coloniser country and in the colonised. Imperialism, it argues, is a deliberate function of the international capitalist, to export the surplus of labour as far away from the worker as possible, leaving them at the point of starvation whilst the international financiers develop new means of recreation and resource exploitation in the developing world. There is no distinction made between the urban labourer in Berlin and the field worker in Matabeleland, both have the same enemy and as such the urban labourer, being as a more “advanced” state of consciousness, must take the lead in the fight.
Who is this enemy? German Ideology is vague in proving an international plot against the international proletariat and against Germany in particular, but remains repeatedly adamant that it does exist. Unlike the old feudal monarchies, Hitler and Goebbels have argued, the international financier does not have one concentrated power base but instead has a web of power and control across the globe from which it governs, in a non-linear fashion, the entire capitalist world. This overt des
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