Kelly Sears
2 min readMar 1, 2024

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NB:

A topic I should have gone into here, but didn't, because I understood it less when writing this than I do now: the distinction between bureaucrat and comprador bourgeoisie.

The bureaucrat and comprador bourgeoisie are the class of local capitalists in a colonized country that foreign imperialist capital, imported into that country to dominant and exploit it, subsidize and support as the facilitators of (semi)colonial bourgeois rule.

The two aspects within this stratum, bureaucrat (BC) and comprador (CC) are essentially united as facilitators of the antagonistic contradiction of the foreign imperialist big bourgeoisie against the working class; they are also, though, in contradiction with each other, and these contradictions can at times become even antagonistic and bloody.

The BB embed themselves in the semicolonial bourgeois state, expanding it to use its ministries as exploitative capitalist firms in which they hold capital and gain profit, together with their foreign backers. The CB favor a minimum state apparatus of the semicolony, to allow direct investment of foreign capital to exploit the country's workers, without state mediation, in which they hold their own parasitic share, proportionally smaller than that of the foreign big imperialist bourgeoisie but equally noxious.

I will quote the wonderful artist and translator Comrade Lucas, who greatly helped me understand this concept: "When the BB is in power, State control over industry is expanded... to enable "agrarian reform" [and other phony "reforms" that are in reality simply profit-serving capitalist enterprises, from which local BB get rich on "pork barrel" profits and foreign imperialist capitalists on their parasitic loans and investment-subsidizations of the state]. When the CB comes to power, State control is reduced... the CB sees State functionaries as a drain on its budgetary expenses..." (from instagram.com/guerra_popular)

The puppet rulers of semicolonial countries tend to fall into one camp or the other. Javier Milei, in Argentina, represents certainly the CB. Marcos and Duterte in the Philippines, with policies like "Build Build Build!" and "Build Better More"- policies that claim to represent government reform for the good of the people, but are really government-facilitated investments of capital by the BB and foreign capitalists to profit off of the cheap labour-power and the deprivation of Metro Manila and the rest of the country's failing infrastructure- represent principally the BB.

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Kelly Sears

Revolutionary philosophical commentary. My editorial stance is independent, guided by Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, following Chairman Gonzalo. ig @queer.bolshevik2