Arthur Dent at Platypus Conference

David McMullen

Jul 13, 2025

The world wants collective security, countries want independence, nations want liberation, the people want revolution, and information wants to be free.

Arthur Dent (PKA Albert Langer) participated in a panel at this weekend’s Oceania Platypus Conference at Melbourne University on ‘Lenin and the National Question’. Most of the YouTube video is scarcely audible unfortunately. However, below are notes he prepared for the talk. His comments on Ukraine and Palestine are particularly interesting.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/DgNk-K3txCk?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

Chaos everywhere, situation excellent – Draft 0.1 2025-07-12T0350

Right now we are living through days into which 20 years are compressed. There is a lot more to think about than in the slow decades from which the current speedup of history developed exponentially. The point of looking up quotes from the classics is to help think and develop some fresh new ideas. If instead you just look for quotes to reinforce your existing prejudices you are part of the problem.

I have an allergic reaction to the prompt for this panel on “Lenin and the National Question” which suggests that “recent generations on the Left have appropriated slogans that Lenin would have perceived as not proletarian but democratic.” I won’t try to respond within 10 minutes about what Lenin might think if he had not been dead for a century.

But here is something from the Communist Manifesto section on Proletarians and Communists perhaps relevant to whether communists reject slogans that are “not proletarian but democratic”:

“… the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy”.

That Manifesto ends with:

“The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win”.

There is some connection between forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions, becoming the ruling class and winning the battle of democracy.

They all involve “The State”. I recommend as an introduction the very short (24pp) pamphlet by Lenin with that title. https://www.marxists.org/ebooks/lenin/state-and-revolution.pdf

That in turn connects to the national question. The authoritative exposition of the Leninist position in 1913 was given by Stalin’s “Marxism and the National Question”, which Trotsky claimed should be credited to Lenin. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1913/03a.htm

COLLECTIVE SECURITY

My view is that right now is the best time to establish global Collective Security.

“Whether war gives rise to revolution or revolution prevents war, in either case the international situation will develop in a direction favourable to the people and the future of the world will be bright, so long as the world’s people are prepared against the growing danger of war.” (p.18 Peking Review 2, January 9, 1976).

Collective Security can also be called “Solidarity”. Ultimately it requires that the world’s people act together to take power and govern the world themselves.

The alternative is to keep “demanding” that our rulers stop things getting worse until a world war leaves no choice but to take power away from them.

The alternative to empty pointless slogans that “occupation is a crime” is concrete proposals for military defeat of the occupiers.

My proposal as a perspective for the current democratic world revolution could be summed up as:

The world wants collective security, countries want independence, nations want liberation, the people want revolution, and information wants to be free.

Unfortunaely here is nothing new in any part of that. But there needs to be.

The term “want” has multiple connotations with a natural transition from “lack” to “need” to “desire” to “demand”.

Ultimately it is “the people” that want to be free. We lack freedom, we need freedom, we desire freedom we demand freedom and we will fight for it. But “the people” is defined by its opposite, the enemies of the people. Some persons are grovelling slaves who won’t fight for freedom, some persons are oppressors and exploiters who want to stop people fighting for freedom. Some people are just empty windbags.

I will be writing a series of articles elaborating on the connections between various aspects of that perspective and will link to them from updated versions of this 10 minute talk that will include detailed citations. Hopefully critical responses will result in something newer and better.

My proposal is strongly based on the united front strategies and the philosophy behind them found in volume 1 of Mao’s Selected Works.

Unite all forces that can be united to establish collective security by eliminating the veto and establishing United Nations armed forces for combat operations in both Palestine and Ukraine.

But I will propose that forcible overthrow of existing social conditions as moderately as possible. The general assembly should simply insist like the third estate in the French revolution that it wants to be something instead of nothing.

I actually did look up the citations to classics that were flung around nearly half a century ago that helped to complete the disintegration of the international communist movement.

I wrote about 50 pages with more than 50 detailed references in footnotes in response to the main Albanian polemic against Maoism, which relied heavily on quotations. There was no internet then so you will only see bibliographic references to printed materials in those footnotes. But I will add some direct links to online copies in updates of this note. The text itself is avaiable as a single page in the EROL archives at marxists.org by Alan Ward on “Three Worlds”.

https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/australia/ward-3-worlds.htm

Sadly I have to confess that my views are essentially based on the work I did half a century ago. The only thing I know I got wrong was a claim that the Albanian line should be treated as a “leftist” error by comrades. I corrected that shortly afterwards but remain oblivious to whatever else I got wrong. The collapse of the international communist movement at that time is closely related to the current complete absence of any serious left so it would be worth the effort to find out and refute what else I got wrong.

Lenin did write an article about “A Caricature of Marxism…” I recommend it as an antidote. It explains what he thought of “friends” of Marxism with views remarkably similar to today’s Martian-Lemmingist anti-imperialists who “hopelessly discredit and disparage it and turn it into a caricature”.

Here’s a couple of claims made in an article on “Social Patriotism & the Australian Left” from Partisan 8, April 2025 pp18-19 denouncing various groups that most people have never heard of for saying (presumably to themselves):

‘From Ukraine to Palestine, Occupation is a Crime

The article says literally nothing whatever concrete about the actual occupations and the actual wars being fought against the occupiers. Instead:

The interests of the bourgeois state and the international proletariat are at fundamental loggerheads this is a basic tenet of Marxism. The interests of the proletariat and the capitalist class never overlap, Comrades should bear in mind the memories of the Zimmerwald Left. The slogan we must unerringly defend is simple: no war but the class war.

Here’s somebody forgetting the basic tenet of Marxism with explicit jingoism blatantly inciting the Crimean war, demanding a war that was not a class war, precisely on the basis of the overlap between the proletarian fight for democratic revolution and the interests of British commerce.

This starts with:

“We are astonished that in the current discussion of the Oriental question the English journals have not more boldly demonstrated the vital interests which should render Great Britain the earnest and unyielding opponent of the Russian projects of annexation and aggrandizement.

“England cannot afford to allow Russia to become the possessor of the Dardanelles and Bosphorus. Both commercially and politically such an event would be a deep if not a deadly blow at British power….”

It ends with:

“Russia is decidedly a conquering nation, and was so for a century, until the great movement of 1789 called into potent activity an antagonist of formidable nature. We mean the European Revolution, the explosive force of democratic ideas and man’s native thirst for freedom. Since that epoch there have been in reality but two powers on the continent of Europe Russia and Absolutism, the Revolution and Democracy. For the moment the Revolution seems to be suppressed, but it lives and is feared as deeply as ever….

“…In this instance the interests of the revolutionary Democracy and of England go hand in hand. Neither can permit the Czar to make Constantinople one of his capitals, and we shall find that when driven to the wall, the one will resist him as determinedly as the other”.

That is from pages 14-19 The Real Issue in Turkey. Leader, New York Tribune, April 12, 1853

(THE EASTERN QUESTION A Reprint of Letters Written 1853-1856 Dealing with the Events of the Crimean War By KARL MARX Edited by his daughter Eleanor and her husband and published in 1897).

DEFEAT ZIONISM AND RUSSIAN FASCISM AND CHINESE FASCISM

In my view there is a clear overlap between the interests of both democratic revolution and the ruling classes of most countries in defeating both Zionist and Russian fascist projects of annexation and aggrandizement. But the workers need to lead the fight. European states are directly threatened by Zionist projects to expel millions of Palestinians from Palestine, but are doing nothing to stop it and doing only the minimum necessary for Ukraine to not lose instead of actually fighting to end Russian fascism.

Chinese fascism is less likely to start a third world war if Russian fascism does not survive having threatened to use nuclear weapons

Some background on Chinese fascism can be found in reports from the revolutionary left in China more than a decade ago posted under the name Qing Yuan n the Red China website on January 21, 2012:

Qing claims that the CCP still has the alternative to nationalize more industries and launch a Nazi-style nationalist socialism that can give even more political power to new dictators. A Nazi-style regime would be strongly promoted by fanaticism dressed up in the banner of patriotism and putting all the blame for China’s problems on a foreign conspiracy. Qing’s point should be well taken, because there is a strong possibility the CCP could choose this alternative as a way of holding on to power.

Revolution and counterrevolution: China’s continuing class struggle since liberation. Pao-Yu Ching. 2nd revised ed, p433

https://foreignlanguages.press/new-roads/revolution-and-counterrevolution-pao-yu-ching

I will add links for all the works mentioned in this note and a more comprehensive list to a pdf file available from both at David’s Political Substack: https://mcmullend.substack.com/

and C21st Left: https://c21stleft.com/2023/06/24/if-you-thought-the-pseudoleft-has-a-legacy-from-the-sixties-you-werent-there/

The first link is in copies of Red Speck distributed at today’s forum.

It isn’t necessary to study the classics to understand that the occupiers must be fought in both Palestine and Ukraine and Chinese fascism must be blocked.

But if you want to contribute something new to some new issues you might want to consider Engels chapter on “The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man” in his book “Dialectics of Nature”.

There is a lot of excitement about Large Language Models but self awareness seems more likely to require embodied, embedded, enactive, extended beings just as human cognition did. The embodiment may be extended as omnipresence and omniscience. Most of the debate seems to be about how to “control” a future form of life more intelligent and capable than we are so that it will remain enslaved to the corporate and military sociopaths in charge of its creation and development. It obviously won’t be human. But if it becomes self aware then we need it on the side of the people. Perhaps instead of “information wants to be free” we should say “Reason in revolt now thunders”?

Most of the clasical works widely disseminated in all languages from China during the early 1970s are available from the same web site I mentioned along with other stuff I won’t recommend.

A similar web site is:

https://www.redstarpublishers.org/index.htm

That also has a couple of works that I have not read but look interesting to me. Found while looking for Engels “Dialectics of Nature”.

How Man Became a Giant, by M. Ilin & E. Segal, 1945. 88. Cover. This 180 page book by two Soviet authors gives a simple but not simplified account of the development of man from ape to class society.

The Origin of Life on Earth, by A.I. Oparin, third revised and expanded edition, 1945. This 493 page book by a Soviet author explains how organic matter could develop from inorganic matter, thus undermining one of the religious arguments for creation of living beings by a supernatural being. Internet only. We include the original image pdf since there may be formulas that were not written correctly by the OCR software.

The Marx-Engels Collected Works, and those of Lenin, Stalin and Mao are all readily available ffrom along with most publications by anybody about anything at https://annas-archive .org/

That archive, including Library Genesis and Sci-Hub, the official archive.org, archive.today, wikipedia, the peer to peer file sharing networks and the basic infrastructure of the internet are all a result of work inspired by Free Software Movement: https://www.fsf. org/

The Free Software Movement is a living example of the new fangled people who are developing a communist mode of production in the foetal cells of existing social relations. Even those with no political consciousness are doing more to actually expropriate private property (especially “intellectual property”) than any “Leninist” party building sect. They are also where you can make contact with the serious work being done to keep information flowing freely despite modern surveillance and future repression.