Crows: The Myth of Rebellion in a Conformist Age

Modern popular culture has an extraordinary capacity to simulate rebellion while draining it of content. The Japanese “Crows” film series is a perfect case in point. At first glance, it promises a narrative of insurgency—youth in revolt, gangs fighting against authority. Yet what we are watching is not a challenge to the order of things, but a ritual that reaffirms them.

Historically, genuine rebellion arises from a clash between established power and those excluded from it—peasants against landlords, workers against capital, colonised against empire. The rebellion in Crows has no such anchor. There is no ruling power to overthrow, no social injustice to confront, not even an aspiration to change the conditions of existence. The gangs fight not for emancipation, but for succession. One leader replaces another, just as kings and emperors once did, while the structure itself remains untouched.

This is a distinctly late-capitalist vision of "revolt": violence, stripped of political content, becomes a spectacle. Like the commodification of counterculture in the 20th century—think of how rock music or punk fashion, born in defiance, were swiftly absorbed by the very markets they opposed—Crows reduces rebellion to a style, something to be consumed.

We must also note the series’ masculine ideal—a world of young men who achieve authority through physical strength and charisma, without questioning why such hierarchies exist in the first place. In that sense, Crows is a story of initiation, not liberation. The fighters are merely passing through a liminal phase, a sort of gladiatorial adolescence, before inevitably joining the structures of power and respectability. They are rebels only in form; in substance, they are future patriarchs, future enforcers of the very status quo they appear to defy.

This pattern is not new. Across history, ruling classes have often tolerated a certain space for "ritualised rebellion"—festivals, carnivals, and spectacles where the normal order is inverted for a brief time, only to return reinforced. Crows belongs to this tradition. Its characters may look like outlaws, but they are ultimately disciples of hierarchy, and the audience’s admiration is carefully channeled toward those who succeed in becoming the new "boss."

The danger of such narratives is not that they glorify violence, but that they normalize the absence of real alternatives. In a society where young people are taught that "to rebel" means nothing more than to fight harder, win bigger, and dominate others, the very possibility of collective change is erased.

In the end, Crows tells us nothing about rebellion. It tells us about how capitalist modernity has mastered the art of selling defiance while ensuring its harmlessness. It is less a story of revolt than of order, repackaged as chaos, and therein lies its historical significance.

 

Trotskyism’s Time Warp: Why “Revolution Betrayed” Can No Longer Explain the Soviet Union

There was a time when Trotsky’s analysis of the Soviet Union stood as the most advanced critique of the system. In the 1930s, as Stalin consolidated power and the Communist International degenerated into an instrument of Soviet foreign policy, Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed was a pioneering work. He alone among the major Marxist thinkers of his generation dared to say plainly: the Soviet state had become a bureaucratic dictatorship ruling over the working class.

This was not a trivial insight. Against both capitalist ideologues and Stalinist apologists, Trotsky maintained that the USSR’s degeneration was political, not economic: property remained nationalized, but the proletariat had lost control. In his view, the bureaucracy was a usurping caste, not a new ruling class. The implication was clear: with a political revolution, planning could be democratized and the socialist project renewed.

Yet it is precisely this once-radical perspective that has now become an obstacle to thinking seriously about the Soviet experience.

The Problem of the “Old Line”

After 1991, when the USSR finally collapsed, Stalinist theories simply fell apart. Having built their entire legitimacy on the inevitability and superiority of Soviet socialism, Stalinists had nothing to say about the empire’s sudden dissolution except mutterings about capitalist conspiracies.

Trotskyism, by contrast, seemed vindicated. After all, Trotsky had long argued that bureaucratic rule was a fatal weakness. But this apparent advantage has turned into a trap. Because Trotsky’s framework was preserved in aspic—unchanged since the 1930s—it has become a kind of dogma. If you have spent decades treating Revolution Betrayed as the definitive, all-encompassing explanation, it becomes almost impossible to consider any other perspective on the USSR.

Meanwhile, others have moved on.

Hobsbawm, Patnaik, Wright: Beyond the Trotskyist Frame

Eric Hobsbawm, for instance, took a century-wide view. He argued that the October Revolution was not just a matter of strategy or betrayal but a product of a unique historical crisis: the conditions of birth themselves imposed fatal constraints on the experiment. The backwardness of Russian society, the devastation of civil war, the isolation from the industrialized West—these factors shaped the Soviet project from the start. Degeneration, in this reading, was not just a political deviation but an inescapable historical dilemma.

Prabhat Patnaik adds another layer with his idea of the “Leninist conjuncture”—a phase of global capitalism whose crisis made ruptural revolutions possible. Once that conjuncture ended, the era of such revolutions was over. The problem wasn’t only that the Soviet Union decayed—it was that the specific historical conditions that produced October could not be reproduced.

Erik Olin Wright, in turn, analyzed the structural challenges of “ruptural transformation.” Smashing the old state overnight created power vacuums that bred bureaucracy, shortages, and repression almost by necessity. What Trotsky called degeneration, Wright saw as the unintended result of attempting to centrally plan an entire society with no experience or feedback mechanisms.

In other words: even the most heroic political leadership could not transcend the limits of that moment in history.

Enter Alec Nove: The Inescapable Logic of the Command Economy

Perhaps the most devastating critique of all came from Alec Nove. In The Economics of Feasible Socialism, Nove argued that the problem wasn’t simply political usurpation. It was economic impossibility.

Trotsky assumed that if workers’ democracy were restored, rational planning would flourish. But Nove demonstrated that any non-market, command economy inevitably produces a vast bureaucratic apparatus just to function. Without markets, central planners face insurmountable information overload:

• No accurate way to gauge local needs and capacities

• No genuine feedback loops

• No incentive to innovate or economize

• A constant tendency to game targets, hoard resources, and falsify results

This was not a matter of bad faith or betrayal. It was the structural consequence of abolishing markets in a complex society.

Even the sincerest Bolsheviks could not have avoided the rise of the nomenklatura. Bureaucracy was not an accident—it was baked into the system’s design.

Why Trotskyists Can’t Accept This

This insight is fatal to classical Trotskyism. If the degeneration wasn’t just a superstructural problem of “who rules” but a systemic consequence of abolishing markets, then no political revolution could have permanently fixed it.

This is why so many Trotskyist groups remain stuck in the past, endlessly citing Revolution Betrayed as though it were the last word. They simply cannot integrate the idea that planning itself—without market mechanisms—was structurally unsustainable.

A New Synthesis

If we want to understand the Soviet Union seriously today, we have to:

• Recognize Trotsky’s brilliance as an early diagnostician of bureaucratic power.

• Acknowledge that Hobsbawm, Patnaik, and Wright are right: historical context and structural dynamics mattered as much as political agency.

• Accept that Nove’s critique of command economies is indispensable.

• Stop treating the 1930s as a frozen benchmark and begin to think historically again.

Conclusion

Trotskyism was once the most advanced form of Marxist critique. But today, it often functions as a time warp—trapping otherwise serious thinkers inside categories that cannot explain why the Soviet system unfolded as it did.

If the left wants to reclaim its capacity for analysis, it must stop venerating old certainties and start grappling with the hard questions:

• What makes socialism economically viable?

• What institutional forms can combine democracy, efficiency, and innovation?

• How can we avoid repeating the tragedies of the 20th century?

Trotsky did us all a service by refusing to lie about the Stalinist nightmare. But refusing to lie also means acknowledging the limits of his framework.

It is time to move on.

When Efficiency Meets the Party

In the mid-20th century Soviet Union, the economy was planned from the top down. Prices, outputs, and resource flows were determined not by markets but by administrative targets. Yet behind the scenes, some Soviet thinkers were asking a dangerous question: Could the plan itself be made more rational?

One of them was Leonid Kantorovich, a brilliant mathematician who pioneered linear programming—a method to optimise resource allocation. His models calculated “shadow prices”: not market prices, but mathematical indicators of how valuable a resource was to the plan. These could have made planning more efficient. But to use them would mean acknowledging scarcity, inequality in performance, and trade-offs—things the official narrative tried to suppress.

What follows is a fictional scene, based on real ideas and real tensions, imagining what a conversation between Kantorovich and a Party official might have sounded like.

GOSPLAN BUILDING, ROOM 47 – LATE EVENING

A half-lit office with cracked walls, radio static humming in the background. Rain taps the window. A black Bakelite phone rests beside a stack of resource allocation charts. Leonid Kantorovich, lean and serious, sits across from Comrade Petrov, a Party liaison with the Ministry of Food Supply.

Petrov flips through a folder labeled: “Optimisation Plan No. 32 — Leningrad District Mills.”

PETROV
(reading)
“Reduce flour allocation to Mill No. 3 by 20%... reallocate to Mill No. 5, gain of 14,000 additional loaves weekly.”

(pauses, looks up)
Why? Mill No. 3 meets its quota. On time. Clean books.

KANTOROVICH
Because Mill No. 5 converts each ton of wheat into 3% more usable output. It’s better designed. Less mechanical loss. The model shows we lose efficiency by treating both mills equally.

PETROV
(suspicious)
But we don’t ration flour based on equations. We assign it based on political quotas, production reliability, and regional balance.

This…
(taps the paper)
...this makes it look like Mill No. 3 is “less valuable.” That’s a price signal. Not a plan.

KANTOROVICH
It’s a shadow price, not a market price. The model assigns value based on opportunity cost, not ideology. If we shift resources according to this data, we get more output. Fewer shortages.

PETROV
And next week the bakery workers in District 3 riot because they didn’t get their flour. “Sorry, comrades, we ran a shadow model.” Is that the line?

KANTOROVICH
No. We plan better. We explain better. But we stop pretending that inefficiency is egalitarian.

(pulls out another sheet)

Here—look. Steel allocation. Factory 47 makes bolts with a 6% material loss. Factory 92, only 2%. But they both get the same input because... why? Political favour?

PETROV
Factory 47 is in Magnitogorsk. Loyal managers. Excellent Komsomol record.

KANTOROVICH
And Factory 92 is in Perm. No press coverage. Fewer medals. But the bolts are better.

(sharply)
Comrade, math does not care who got a Hero of Labour badge.

PETROV
But the system does.

(leans back)
If we implement your model... prices shift. Resources flow unevenly. You’ve created a logic that overrides Party instinct. And that, Leonid, is politics.

KANTOROVICH
And pretending those instincts are efficient is not politics—it’s ritual. You want results, or symbols?

PETROV
We want stability. You offer turbulence in the name of truth.

(silence)
You’ll get your pilot trial. Quietly. In Perm. No publication. No public pricing reform. And if the bread queues shorten, we’ll say it was the Five-Year Plan. Not the math.

Kantorovich nods, defeated but composed. He knows this is the only way forward—for now.

No Easy Roads: Strategy in a Post-Revolutionary Time

Is armed struggle still a viable path for social transformation? In countries where some form of electoral democracy exists, however flawed, this is a question that deserves serious thought. Even Che Guevara, often seen as the symbol of armed insurrection, warned against violence where peaceful avenues remained. In Guerrilla Warfare, he wrote:

"Where a government has come into power through some form of popular vote, fraudulent or not, and maintains at least an appearance of constitutional legality, the guerrilla outbreak cannot be promoted, since the possibilities of peaceful struggle have not yet been exhausted."

Terror tends to beget terror. It rarely inspires collective courage. More often, it breeds silence, surveillance, and stagnation. Social life becomes narrower. Political organisation, harder.

We also live in a time where revolutions of the classical kind—ruptural, decisive, and transformative—have become rare. What lies ahead instead may be long, uneven, often demoralising periods of institutional struggle and slow change. This isn’t to dismiss militancy or organisation. But it is to admit that revolutions today may need different strategies.

Historical lessons underline this complexity. The Allende government in Chile tried to build working-class institutions through the state. It was overwhelmed—first by a strike of the petty bourgeoisie, then by a military coup. Venezuela appeared to solve the military question by electing a former soldier. But it couldn’t build enduring institutions of mass participation or diversify its economy. Cooperative experiments remained shallow. The state relied increasingly on repression as oil revenues declined. Maduro now seeks accommodation with capital.

In South Asia, the picture is mixed. Maoism in India spread across regions where the state was seen as extractive and external, especially in the Adivasi belt. But these zones were too isolated to shape a national strategy. Worse, they became militarised spaces, locked in cycles of insurgency and counterinsurgency, making any peaceful political work nearly impossible. In Nepal, Maoists won office—but not a revolution. They were effective in mobilising against the monarchy, but once the king was overthrown, they struggled to articulate a clear roadmap for the future. The movement, so focused on resisting royal power, lacked a cohesive strategy for post-monarchy governance and transformation.

So, what strategic alternatives exist? One idea is to work in the "cracks" of the system—building democratic institutions like cooperatives, community councils, or unions that can slowly expand and challenge capitalist dominance. These institutions may lack the power to confront the state directly, but they build capacity, confidence, and solidarity among the oppressed.

Yet this approach is not without limits. Such efforts may hit walls—legal, economic, political—that they just cannot overcome. Which is why another track might be equally, if not more, necessary: organising among workers in strategic sectors of the economy. These workers hold leverage. Their ability to disrupt essential flows—transport, energy, logistics—can compel the state to concede. Without this kind of strategic pressure, institution-building alone may remain contained and marginal.

In the end, no strategy is sufficient on its own. What’s needed is a political ecosystem: institutions that endure over time, rooted in everyday life; movements that can mobilise at scale; and workers with the leverage to shift state priorities. Not just bold ideas, but durable structures.

Perhaps the real uncertainty is not whether a path exists, but how to navigate between competing strategies—building local institutions within the system’s gaps, and applying pressure through organised leverage in strategic sectors. Each has its role, and each has its limits. The real work may lie in finding the balance, and staying with the difficulty of that task, even when no clear victory is in sight. The challenge is to build something that can survive the long haul—and be ready, when the moment arrives, to push history forward.

Why I (Strangely) Enjoy Reading American Neo-Cons

Mayur Chetia

I’ve been reading a lot of American neo-conservatives lately. I know—it sounds odd, even self-incriminating. After all, these are the architects of imperial wars, the cheerleaders of endless occupation, the ones who saw nation-building as a side hustle to military conquest.

And yet, I can’t help but find something intellectually engaging in their writing.

Not their politics, obviously. Their ends—control, domination, resource capture—are antithetical to everything I stand for. But their means—their obsession with state-building, institutional design, legitimacy—overlap with concerns that anyone thinking seriously about socialism, post-capitalist futures, or democratic planning must eventually confront.

Here’s what I think is worth learning from them:

 1. Institutional Engineering: A Weird Obsession That Pays Off

Neo-cons obsessively dissect how institutions work—or fail. They study judiciaries, armies, bureaucracies, tribal networks, patronage systems. Sure, it's often in service of maintaining power over others. But the detail they offer is real. Their work reads like grim statecraft manuals: how to co-opt local elites, how to rebuild a judiciary, how to avoid insurgencies inside police forces.

This kind of granular analysis is rare even among some left-wing thinkers, who sometimes treat “the state” as a black box. Neo-cons open that box and start labeling wires.

 2. They Take Chaos Seriously

 Say what you will about their motives, but neo-cons don't walk away from the mess they create. They are obsessed with filling vacuums. That means confronting the hard problems of post-conflict governance: how to manufacture legitimacy, how to hold elections that don’t collapse the next day, how to balance civil-military relations.

 It’s in these debates that they say things I find surprisingly useful—even if I want to apply them in a totally different context.

 3. Long-Term Thinking (Delusional but Structured)

Unlike liberals, who often want clean narratives, fast exits, and symbolic victories, neo-cons think in decades. They’re delusional, yes. But they also ask long-horizon questions:

How do we shape institutional inheritances? What compromises are necessary early on? How do we build a state that lasts beyond the next funding cycle?

These are also the questions that revolutionaries—real ones—must ask. Market socialists too.

 4. Their Failure Analysis Is Brutally Honest

Ironically, some of the best critiques of U.S. policy in Iraq or Afghanistan come from within neo-con circles. They dissect their own disasters in painful detail—why local elites turned against them, how corruption hollowed out institutions, how militia integration failed.

Ideology blinds them to deeper truths, but their post-mortems are analytically rich. There's a lot to steal here.

 5. Read with Caution

 Of course, it goes without saying: their normative framework is a mess. They treat people as clay, states as machines, order as an end in itself. Justice, autonomy, popular sovereignty—these are afterthoughts in their world.

 But that’s exactly why they’re useful to read. You’re not buying what they’re selling. You’re learning from how they build—even when their structures collapse.

 6. A Socialist Parallel?

 I’m interested in how to build a post-capitalist state that actually works. That integrates informal labour. That redistributes land without administrative collapse. That retools bureaucracies without elite sabotage. That regulates markets while ensuring service delivery. That earns legitimacy from below.

The technical challenges are similar—tax systems, local governance, institutional trust. And so I find myself strangely drawn to those who, for all the wrong reasons, have thought deeply about how to make states function after a rupture.

So yes—read the neo-cons.

Just reverse the moral polarity.

You're not looking for blueprints. You're looking for the reasons their blueprints failed.

 

Mourning the USSR: A Market Socialist's Reflection

Mayur Chetia

I became a communist long after the USSR had collapsed. The red flags had been lowered, the hammer and sickle replaced by new symbols, and the Cold War had ended in triumph for capitalism. And yet, even as someone who now identifies more with market socialism—grounded in feasibility, and committed to democratic institutions—I still feel the pinch. The loss of the USSR is something I carry. And I’m sure I’m not alone.

Why does the fall of a state I never lived under, one I never truly idealised, feel so personal? Because the USSR was more than just a state. It was a symbol—a flawed, battered, often tragic symbol, but a symbol nonetheless—of a world that dared to be different. A world not governed by capital.

A First Attempt at the Impossible

The Soviet Union was the first serious attempt to build socialism in history. That matters. The Bolsheviks had no playbook, no template. They improvised under siege—civil war, famine, international isolation. They made grave mistakes, sometimes monstrous ones. But they tried. The sheer ambition of creating a new mode of production—industrialising a peasant country, eliminating private ownership of the means of production, creating universal healthcare and education—cannot be dismissed as merely authoritarian folly.

Even if we now argue, rightly, for decentralisation, worker cooperatives, democratic planning, or hybrid models with markets—everything we debate is built on a terrain first opened up by the USSR.

A Different Moral Battlefield

The USSR shaped the entire 20th century. Without it, there would have been no postwar welfare state in the West—social democracy was capitalism’s answer to the Soviet threat. Anti-colonial movements across the global South drew inspiration, funding, and diplomatic support from Moscow. Even when we reject Stalinism or bureaucratism, we have to acknowledge the fact: the USSR made the idea of socialism real, not just theoretical.

That’s why today’s so-called socialist states—China, Vietnam—don’t feel the same. They are successful in their own way, but within the framework of global capitalism. They compete in markets, attract foreign capital, rely on wage labour and inequality. Their communist parties preside over capitalist development. The USSR, by contrast, never accepted capitalism’s rules, even when it failed to replace them.

The Death of an Idea

When the USSR collapsed in 1991, it wasn’t just a geopolitical shift. It was a historical defeat. Not just for one model, but for the belief that the world could be fundamentally reorganised. That human relations could be governed not by profit, but by planning, solidarity, and need.

As a market socialist, I do not want to resurrect the USSR. But I mourn it nonetheless. I mourn the audacity, the seriousness, the scale of its ambition. I mourn what its death made more difficult: the legitimacy of the socialist project itself. The space to imagine alternatives shrank overnight. Our ideas became tentative, marginal, riddled with disclaimers.

Still Thinking, Still Trying

But here we are. We read Alec Nove and Erik Olin Wright. We learn from Kornai and Kantorovich. We study failures not to mock them but to avoid repeating them. We build models not for utopia, but for real, achievable transitions. And we do this even when the world laughs, forgets, or demonises.

That pinch we feel? It’s the price of holding on to hope, without illusion. Of remaining a socialist—when there are no clear blueprints, no global momentum, no triumphal certainty. Only the long road ahead, and the refusal to give up.