MelianPretext
I wanted to make a joke about that, but in seriousness, I would guess that the term "Long March" in contemporary Chinese culture, through the legendary status of that heroic campaign, has become rhetorically synonymous with a personal journey of perseverance and struggle basically akin to how Western cultures use the term "odyssey" from "The Odyssey." It's (justifiably) become one of those culturally enmeshed figurative terms, like how TERF island likes to append Dunkirk to the end of everything: "financial Dunkirk, political Dunkirk, etc."
The title likely is an allusion to that or maybe laconically pointing out just that the protagonist absolutely gets their daily steps in because they've meandered all around Tang China.
Since this is being asked on Hexbear and not r/manga, I'd recommend "Sensou wa Onna no Kao wo Shiteinai," the manga adaptation of Alexievich's "The Unwomanly Face of War." That book is a collection of interviews with female soldiers of the Red Army that fought in the Eastern Front of WWII. As with all things USSR that see the light of day in the English speaking world, the author is an anti-communist, which is why she won the Nobel Prize for Literature for this book. However, the work is still worth reading because the interviewees are all Soviet war heroes and their deeply personal stories are the focus. Alexievich's "capital T Truth" fetishist shtick means that she doesn't often editorialize or interject, for example, every time Stalin is mentioned with "By the way, dear reader, remember that he ate all the grain" like Western accounts of socialist history do (though there are a billion footnotes crammed in the book version that "clarify" the interviewees' narratives with the anticommunist correct-think "fact checks"). The illustrations really bring to life the stories of the interviewees in a vivid way and so it's worth checking out.
Some great historical fiction include "A Bride's Story," set in 19th century Central and West Asia, with a great cultural anthropology-lite style narrative, and "Song of the Long March," which is set in Tang China and has a great portrayal of the deeply interwoven relationships between Han Chinese and Uyghurs in that historical period. I actually came across that work before all the Western atrocity propaganda started clogging the airwaves in the late 2010s and I'm personal grateful to it for pre-emptively being my first impression to the Uyghur Chinese people rather than having some shoddy copycat Holodomor 2.0 plagiarized slop become the introduction to that culture.
As a purely personal aside favorite, I'd also recommend "Fire Punch." It has a lot of the typical anime genre nonsense and really, the only reason I'd recommend it is that it has one of the best portrayals of an LGBT character in manga and anime. I was deeply struck by it personally and I've also seen heteronormative responses to the manga remark that the character humanized "LGBT individuals" as something beyond a "concept" for them.
If this doesn't end up as a typical memorandum nothing burger, this could potentially lead to levels of basedness in gaming unseen since Disco Elysium. There's already collaboration between the two industries, Atomic Heart apparently only secured funding through principally an investment from Tencent according to its devs.
China's biggest cultural export issue is the (understandable) restrictions against political and ideological products, especially in gaming where most historical settings then are only wuxia or classical literature-derived like ROTK games or Black Myth Wukong. This is understandable given the absolutely justifable concerns of loose restrictions causing historical nihilism and under the current conditions of siege socialism, treats like video game are frankly irrelevant in that context of the preservation of AES. Additionally, any "red" cultural product released for an international audience would be immediately cast as "communist propaganda" by the West, who are still desperately trying to plagiarize their old Cold War playbook and find a way to convince Global South capitalist ruling classes that China is "out to get them" just like the USSR "was." Incidentally, I saw a transcript of a Chinese MOFA press conference from a couple days ago where Reuters tried to entrap the spokesperson into saying that the recent wildly financially successful Wukong game was "supported by the government" so that likely they could immediately put out a press release framing the game as a "government-sponsored cultural invasion" like they've done with the Confucious Institutes. Instead, the spokesperson deftly deflected with "haven't heard of it but sounds neat."
Russia's biggest cultural export issue is that they have plenty of developers with leftist leanings, like the Atomic Heart team, but the current neoliberal governance in Russia is nervous of overly promoting Soviet and Communist nostalgia and the current Western cancellation frenzy on Russian works means that there is no significant infrastructure and financial support to promote and protect those leftist devs. Atomic Heart developer Mundfish had to relocate to Cyprus and if you read their interviews, they don't mention "Russia" even once. Isolated devs in the worst case end up as ZA/UM did.
I might be now completely on hopium, but if this can amount to genuine collaboration, both sides could have their cake and eat it too: we could finally get a proper game about Stalingrad without the "Enemy at the Gates" million man rush propaganda and a grand strategy game where the devs don't nerf Communism because it's too efficient (Victoria 3). Chinese devs could excuse the presence of socialist political themes on the Russian side and the Russians could vice versa blame shift to prevent Western media from effectively pinning it as "Chinese red propaganda" or "funding the Russian invasion."
Or this could be just a pretext to pumping out endless remakes of Tetris.
That period of the medieval Roman Empire would cover a great deal of epochs, going from the end of Iconoclasm and the long recovery from the 7th century, to regional hegemony under the Macedonian dynasty, to the arrival of the Seljuks, to the entire Crusades debacle and the rise of the Ottomans. There's a great deal of literature that focuses on each one of these specific periods which you can refer to once you've familiarized yourself with the overall chronology.
There's an in-depth narrative history of the 800-1100 period with an audiobook as well: Kaldellis, A. 2017. Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood: The Rise and Fall of Byzantine, 955 A.D. to the First Crusade. Oxford University Press. Kaldellis also recently published 2023. The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium which has become the latest authoritative survey history on the entire Eastern Roman period.
For a much more abridged pop history work, there's Brownsworth, L. 2010. Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization. Crown., which also has an audiobook version.
Some notable historical fiction includes "Baudolino," written by the Italian novellist Umberto Eco of "Ur-Fascism" fame, on an Italian man adopted as the son of Holy Roman/German Emperor Frederick II that set during the Fourth Crusade.
I would say that some part of the Russian experience comes from the Soviet campaign in the aid of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. You captured the major Afghan ring road and more or less all the major cities, but then what? The reactionary mujahideen simply retreated to the countryside in the same way the Taliban did following the later American invasion. Funded by American weapons in the same way that NATO now funds Ukraine, the entire strategic paradigm shifts towards an endless defensive slog against counter-insurgency. You can't abandon your own established holdings, the major cities and its peoples, to consolidate properly for both PR/morale and humanitarian reasons and so the conflict is a long bleed. Once an equilibrium is established, you cannot strike out against the mujahideen-occupied countryside without drawing resources used to defend your established urban holdings. The Soviet and US Afghan Wars are examples of how precisely a long war should not be conducted.
The only long war in contemporary history which brutal attrition was the intention is a war that most ML don't study because it's a miserable inter-fraternal conflict between socialist states, the Sino-Vietnamese War.
The primary literature I'll reference is from a Chinese gusano professor, Xiaoming Zhang, who worked for the US Air War College (and ironically was later recently targetted by the FBI China Initiative and subsequently lost his job): "Zhang, X. 2015. Deng Xiaoping's Long War: The Conflict between China and Vietnam, 1979-1991. University of North Carolina Press." As it was sponsored by the literal US DoD (the first book I've ever read where there's a disclaimer that says: "The views expressed in this book are mine and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Department of the Air Force, the U.S. Department of Defense, or the U.S. government."), it is obviously ideologically reactionary but because it is meant to provide for the US military an account of PLA strategic planning and thus largely focuses on military analysis, that part is therefore worth reading.
The Sino-Vietnamese War is actually the war in all with the most parallels to the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. Deng's intentions for the war with Vietnam was principally "attitude adjustment." Vietnam had sided with the USSR in the Sino-Soviet Split and this was seen as a betrayal of China's support in the Vietnam War. It started with an initial invasion that was then, by Vietnamese argumentation, repelled. This is what NATOpedia classifies as the "official" Sino-Vietnamese War and in the Vietnamese narrative, it repelled an invader that was planning to sweep their their way through Hanoi all the way down to the Mekong Delta. But then the conflict kept going on.
As the author writes:
The Vietnamese leadership never seemed to comprehend the PRC’s strategy and war objectives, persistently maintaining that the 1979 invasion simply constituted a prelude to Beijing’s long-term scheme of infringing on Vietnamese sovereignty and independence. After China announced its withdrawal on 5 March, Hanoi called for a nationwide general mobilization for the war and began constructing defensive positions in and around Hanoi. By the end of May, the PLA had reverted to its normal alert status. Vietnam, however, remained on guard, stationing a large number of PAVN troops (allegedly 300,000) along border with China at a time when the economy was “in a worse state than at any time since 1975.”
As a result, Hanoi’s attempts to fight simultaneously in Cambodia and on its northern border took a growing national economic and social toll, subsuming Hanoi’s effort to modernize its economy and, more important, undermining its geopolitical ambitions. According to Fred Charles Iklé, “Governments tend to lose sight of the ending of wars and the nation’s interests that lie beyond it,” and many are “blind in failing to perceive that it is the outcome of the war, not the outcome of the campaigns within it” that determines how well their policies serve the nation’s interests. The Vietnamese leadership clearly failed to grasp the gravity of the situation and continued depending on the Soviet Union until its collapse in 1991. If the Vietnamese should draw any lessons from the 1979 war with China, one is, as one Vietnamese general later remarked, “We must learn how to live with our big neighbor.
By the conclusion of the border war in 1991-93, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, liberated from the US occupation and unified for over 20 years had still been unable to properly focus on its Doi Moi economic reforms, announced in 1986, due to the ongoing conflict:
In the end, only in 1990, after Vietnam’s withdrawal from Cambodia, did the PLA pull its forces back from the occupied Vietnamese hills. Vietnam’s national pride and domestic politics made Hanoi’s leadership unable to tolerate Chinese occupation of any Vietnamese territory, even hills in the remote border region, and it therefore responded to Chinese military pressure with a tit-for-tat strategy. After 1984, Vietnam vigorously resisted Chinese military encroachments, initiating attacks and counterattacks with huge forces even when its economy was weak. Although the fighting took place far from Vietnam’s political and industrial heartland, the conflict encumbered the country’s economy for a long period of time. For China, battlefield costs were fractional at a time of economic prosperity. In this way, China strategically outmaneuvered Vietnam. Since the Hanoi leadership played into Beijing’s hands, China’s military pressure appears to have worked.
In June 1990, during his meeting with the Chinese ambassador in Hanoi, (General Secretary of the CPV) Nguyen Van Linh claimed to have been a student of Mao’s revolutionary theory and stated his great appreciation for China’s aid during Vietnam’s struggles against the French and Americans. He then admitted that Vietnam had wronged China and was willing to correct its mistakes. With respect to Cambodia, the Vietnamese leader expressed confidence that the situation would be resolved peacefully but urged both Vietnam and China to work together to prevent the West and the UN from meddling in Cambodia in the future. The exclusion of the Khmer Rouge from a future Cambodian government, Nguyen Van Linh admitted, was impractical.
The author also makes an allegation of an "agreement" between the two Communist Parties, which is rather interesting in light of the much hyped public Vietnamese antagonism towards China by the West:
A secret deal may have been made regarding how to address the unpleasant thirteen years so that the interlude would not imperil future Sino-Vietnamese relations. The two sides allegedly reached a tacit agreement that prohibited the media from publishing stories and scholars from conducting studies about the border conflict in hopes that the recent hostility would then fade from memory on both sides of the border. Both countries could then concentrate on rejuvenating their relationship. Once again, Vietnam looked to China for direction and guidance, and the relationship was described officially as “good neighbors, good friends, good comrades, good partners” (haolinju, haopengyou, haotongzhi, haohuoban).
The opening ceremony was mediocre though obviously not for the reasons the chuds gnash their teeth. I've binged all the ceremonies back during the pandemic. London 2012 was more of a spectacle even with its typical amnesia of the role of colonialism during its industrial revolution performance, Rio 2016 had much more soul and character, Beijing 2008 is still the unbeatable standard; all of them had a more organized structure than Paris' "tourism ad skit" of Haussmann's old buildings along the Seine. The Parade of Nations is typically meant to give full attention to the athletes and so the constant interruptions to splice in perfomances were obnoxious. I will say that the hot air balloon flame cauldron, reminiscent of those balloons in the old Paris World Fair posters, is a rather unique idea that was also executed fairly well, unlike the boat parade.
The LGBT representation was just one part of Macron's overall rebranding campaign of France's image as an "progressive nation boldly confronting its past" as a theme that permeated the entire ceremony. Seeing that Louise Michel statue description on how she was "exiled to New Caledonia and fought against French colonialism" was quite a satirical display of how superficial Macron's "Brand France" is given the current French colonial occupation and the military troops stationed to squash the still ongoing New Caledonian indigenous protests taking place since May.
The issue with studying the collapse of the USSR is that everyone has an opinion on it and very few are principled Marxist-Leninist assessments, as K&K describe in the first chapter.
I'd recommend Carlos Martinez's Why Doesn’t the Soviet Union Exist Anymore? for a brief but updated synthesis of K&K's work once you're finished, it helps in hammering in the main points.
Everything that has been said against suicide goes round and round in the same circle of ideas. People cite against it the decrees of Providence, but the existence of suicide is itself an open protest against her indecipherable decrees. They talk to us of our duties to this society without explaining or implementing our own claims on society, and finally they exalt the thousand times greater merit of overcoming pain rather than succumbing to it, a merit as sad as the prospects it opens up. In short, they make of suicide an act of cowardice, a crime against the law, [society] and honour.
“Why is it that in spite of so many anathemas people kill themselves? Because the blood of men in despair does not run through their veins in the same way as that of the cold beings who take the time to coin all those fruitless phrases. Man seems to be a mystery to man; he can only be blamed, he is not known. When we see how light-mindedly the institutions under whose domination Europe lives dispose of the blood and life of the nations, how civilised justice surrounds itself lavishly with prisons, chastisements and instruments of death so as to sanction its insecure decisions; when we see the numerical immensity of the classes which on all sides are left in misery, and the social pariahs who are battered by brutal contempt, meant to be preventive, perhaps to save the trouble of lifting them out of their squalor; when we see all this, we fail to understand what entitles us to command the individual to respect in himself an existence which our customs, our prejudices, our laws and our morals generally trample underfoot.
“It was thought that it would be possible to prevent suicide by degrading punishments and by branding the memory of the culprit with infamy. What can one say of the unworthiness of such branding of people who are no longer there to plead their case? The unfortunates, by the way, are little worried by that; and if suicide accuses anybody, it accuses above all the people who are left behind, because there is not one in this multitude who deserves that anyone should stay alive for him. Have the childish and cruel means devised been victorious against the whisperings of despair? What does he who wants to flee the world care about the insults which the world promises to his corpse? He only sees in them yet another act of cowardice on the part of the living. What kind of society is it, indeed, where one finds the profoundest solitude in the midst of millions; where one can be overwhelmed by an irrepressible desire to kill oneself wthout anybody being aware of it? This society is no society, it is as Rousseau says, a desert inhabited by wild animals. In the positions which I held in the police administration suicides were part of my responsibility; I wished to learn whether among the causes motivating them there were any whose effect could be obviated. I undertook extensive work on the subject.” I found that any attempts short of a total reform of the present order of society would be in vain.
- "On Suicide" by Jacques Peuchet; collated by Karl Marx, 1845.
You've posed a very pertinent question. Taken to its logical conclusion, this is the dilemma that encapsulates the entire project of "Western Marxism" in general and it's a fair question that deserves more than ridicule or dismissal.
We are long past the era of Eugene Debbs where the Western left had a sliver of actionable material power, so even beyond the question of what the Western left can do for AES states, what is the point to being a Marxist at all? In practical terms, if you consider the things you can materially accomplish in the midst of the imperial core, is there really a point to being a ML and not simply submitting yourself to the Democrats or Labour or the SPD where you can at least organize to defend those few select social progressive interests permissible in this bourgeoisie system?
When you're powerless, fragmented, isolated and sociopolitically ostracized, what's the point to all of this, holding all those "geopolitics understander" positions and these "principally correct" Marxist stances at all if you can't achieve anything real with them and, to most people looking at you from the outside, based on your accomplishable praxis inside the heartlands of anticommunism, you just look like a weird but generic liberal anyways?
Is the Western leftist doomed to be that soyjak meme, standing alone in the corner of a party, with that thought bubble thinking "Heh, they don't know that Stalin = actually good." Does it come down to that eternal philosophical question of "If a tree falls in the forest, but no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound at all?"
Marx lived during the apogee of imperialism, the cruelty of the American slave state and a bleak era where that meager revolutionary flicker within 1848 was subverted by the bourgeoisie and where the only successful proletariat uprising, the Paris Commune, was brutally squashed with ease. And yet, he persevered in his writings, which, of course, became the bedrock of what we stand for today. His writings where he railed against the hypocrisy of the Second Opium War against China and the British tyranny over India was meaningless in his own time, this was the height of European colonial despotism, after all, and the tirades of one lone individual was to scream against the void. Was there no point to his opposition towards imperialism and his solidarity, against his own class, with the oppressed then?
For someone in that time, in the midst of all the chauvinism and racism societally designed to socialize and induce the European individual to become a cheerleader for the imperialist cause, for him to reject all those narratives and to see things clear eyed for what they are, now means everything. That was an utterly hopeless time, yet he perserved in spite of it and gave so much to the cause of socialism in retrospect. This is the same with the likes of Michael Parenti, during the nihilism of the 1990s, where socialism was subverted everywhere and even the surviving socialist states like China, Vietnam and Cuba were eyed with paranoia. People like Parenti and Losurdo could have sold out like the rest of western "Marxism," got a cushy tenure and professorship chair at Oxbridge or the Ivys, but they continued to defend the legacies and memory of Stalin and Mao.
This is not to say that your average Hexbear user will become the next Parenti or that the sequel to Das Kapital will be penned by a News Megathread regular, but to emphasize the important point that those Marxist figures understood. They understood that the imperialist West is a culture obsessed with discourse control and narrative purity. To stand in front of its propaganda and to say "no" in its face is a powerful thing, in of itself. This is why the liberals get so upset when they encounter MLs, why there was two Red Scare campaigns, why Communist Parties in many countries are outright banned, why they've legislated criminal charges against those who support designated enemy nations. If it's all meaningless, the adversaries of the genuine Western left would have never put in so much effort to counter genuine leftist voices. If it's all pointless, they would not be so livid at seeing ML counter-argumentation and have banned communities like r/genzedong such that the Western left is ostracized to isolated places like Hexbear and Lemmygrad.
As such, yes, the Western left does not have the capacity for its own liberation, but upholding internationalist solidarity and maintaining principled Marxist-Leninist lines has meaning. It's true that this meaning is not as materially valuable as being the one who fired the October shot on the Aurora, or striding into the Chinese countryside to manage New China's land reform and this can be demoralizing to many who want more actionable and material gains.
Over the past century, many people on the Western left, not just ultra chauvinists or Trots or sellouts but well meaning people, have allowed themselves to suppress their own socialist beliefs in order to join liberal ranks and push for "change from within" or to achieve acceptable goals within the confines of the imperial core because the capabilities of the Western left, reduced to just providing internationalist solidarity, are such intangible things. This is understandable but one point that must be emphasized is that while the things the Western left can achieve are principally ideological rather than material, however, does not mean those things are meaningless.
Though it understandably can be demoralizing that this is the crux of what we can contribute, principled Western Marxist-Leninists who have a clear eye of how things are represent a slap in the face to the West and its self-image of whitewash and apologia, its modern narrative of LARPing moral sainthood while kicking its 500 years of imperialism under the bed, which I've talked about in a previous post. At this point in time, they earnestly believe they've gotten away with it and an ML's principled stance, refusing to play along, threatens that. There's a reason why Hitler personally ordered the execution of Ernst Thälmann, despite the latter having been imprisoned for eleven years, during the collapse of the fascist reich in 1944 while those like SPD collaborationists were left unscathed. Though western Marxism has almost always been utterly impotent, they nonetheless have a genuine fear of what we stand for.
Above all, our principled stance, though it might seem "immaterial" and feckless, is the continuation of the memory of those comrades of the past, those who built the planks in the house of western Marxism, ramshackle shack though it may be. Those like Thälmann were never able to achieve anything material either, does that mean he should have disbanded the KPD, joining the SPD in hopes of "changing things from within" or that his existence and martyrdom was meaningless? If that was true, then fascist written popular media has a better sense of duty to their predecessors than us western Marxists do.
Ultimately, I think there's a dialectical dialogue in Disco Elysium, of all things, that encapsulates all of the understandable nihilism inherent to western Marxism quite poignantly.
Rhetoric: The question you mean to ask is both very complicated and incredibly simple...
Endurance: Take a deep breath. Best to go one piece at a time.
You: If communism keeps failing every time we try it...
Steban: (he waits patiently for you to finish)
You: ...And the rest of the world keep killing us for our beliefs...
Steban: Yes?
Volition: Say it.
You: ...What's the point?
Steban: (he considers your words for a minute)
Composure: You're witnessing his ironic armour melt before you. This is his true self you're seeing now.
Empathy: He's thinking about someone...
You: Wait, who is he thinking about?
Empathy: Hard to say. Someone dear to him.
Visual Calculus: Track his gaze. He's looking out past the broken wall, toward the opposite side of the Bay...
You: Toward the skyscrapers of La Delta.
Visual Calculus: They rise like electric obelisks in the night.
Steban: The theorists Puncher and Wattmann — not infra-materialists, but theorists nonetheless — say that communism is a secular version of Perikarnassian theology, that it replaces faith in the divine with faith in humanity's future... I have to say, I've never entirely understood what they mean, but I think maybe the answer is in there, somewhere.
You: Wait, you're saying communism is some kind of religion?
Steban: Only in this very specific sense. Communism doesn't dangle any promises of eternal bliss or reward. The only promise it offers is that the future can be better than the past, if we're willing to work and fight and die for it.
You: But what if humanity keeps letting us down?
Steban: Nobody said fulfilling the proletariat's historic role would be easy. (he smiles a tight smile) It demands great faith with no promise of tangible reward. But that doesn't mean we can simply give up.
You: Even when they ignore us?
Steban: Even then.
Ulixes: Mazov says it's the arrogance of capital that will be its ultimate undoing. It does not believe it can fail, which is why it must fail.
Volition: So young. So unbearably young...
Half Light: Why do you see the two of them with their backs against a bullet-pocked wall, all of a sudden?
Inland Empire: Their faces, blurred yet frozen as though in ambrotype. You were never that young, were you?
Steban: I guess you could say we believe it because it's impossible. (he looks at the scattered matchboxes on the ground) It's our way of saying we refuse to accept that the world has to remain... like this...
Here's a translation of the actual statute, which I would rather sift through than read the Western coverage take on this:
Obviously, the 60-55 retirement age has been one of the policies the goons at places like The Economist have long crocodile teared China on and that tantrum had been greatly memed on by leftists. Most 20th century socialist states maintained a retirement age around 55-60. This is a fairly sizeable clawback of a major worker's concession, there's no really denying it. The age increases to numbers like 63 and 58 for men and women respectively seem to be anticipating a further second increase to 65 and 60, whereupon the statutory age for white and blue collar working women might be even equalized at that stage (i.e. 55 to 60 for the latter). That is the game played in the West, where they seem to be gradually working their way to establishing the full pension retirement age at 70 with current "stretch-goal" numbers like 67 (US, Germany), 68 (UK).
The immediate one-two punch is the basic pension contribution period increase from 15 to 20 years (5 years) when retirement age increased only 3 years. Beyond the policy measures themselves, I would say that the promulgation of this statute indicates that the CPC believes that the demographic issue, and specifically, the decline in the overall working age population are real and rather serious if they would adjust the retirement age like this, a policy that affects the entire population and thus will have inevitable knock-on effects.
Of course, it's arguable that this would merely be a bandage solution to artificially boost the working population numbers rather than addressing the root of the problem. If the CPC weren't currently undergoing through the planned demolition of the real estate sector bubble, I would be seriously concerned at a lack of willingness in addressing, or even identifying, the base causes of the contemporary Chinese demographic issue.