Is Marxism "Leftist"?

By Kate Woolford

Republished from Challenge Magazine.

A Marxist approach to leftist moralism

Many self-styled communists view Marxism-Leninism more as a set of moral and ethical values than a science firmly grounded in material reality. To them, Marxism is the ultimate embodiment of liberal and ‘progressive’ values, while those with more conservative values are nothing more than ‘chauvinists’ who should be excluded from the cause. 

However, this moral interpretation of Marxism is inconsistent with Marx’s own understanding, which asserts that the driving force behind human society is contradictions between classes, rather than a moral dichotomy of ‘good’ versus ‘evil’. In this respect, Marx did not abstract capitalism outside of its historical context but instead showed that it could be both historically progressive and regressive depending on its stage of development. Within its early stages, the progressive nature of capitalism is tied up with its need to constantly revolutionise the instruments of production, the relations of production, and therefore also the whole relations of society. This, in turn, replaces the scattered, less-effective feudal mode of production with capitalist production and allows production to be carried out at an unprecedented scale. Nevertheless, as capitalism matures, and the proletariat grows into a fully developed class concentrated together in huge numbers, a contradiction arises between the social process of production and the private ownership of production. 

The contradictions inherent within capitalism are demonstrated through recurrent crises, during which huge amounts of goods and machinery are needlessly destroyed and wasted. Capitalism’s incompatibility with the future development of society can only result in a revolution led by the class capable of bringing about a higher mode of production, that is, the modern working class. Therefore, the inevitability of the socialist revolution is not tied up in capitalism’s moral shortcomings, but on the objective laws governing the development of human society. 

In a similar vein, Engels criticised, “every attempt to impose on us any moral dogma whatsoever as an eternal, ultimate, and forever immutable moral law on the pretext that the moral world too has its permanent principles which transcend history and the differences between nations”, and disapproved of a theory of morals “designed to suit all periods, all peoples, and all conditions” arguing that “precisely for that reason it is never and nowhere applicable.” Both Marx and Engels upheld that the communist movement unified workers based on the material conditions of their life; their nation, their workplace, and their commonly experienced exploitation as proletarians, not on the basis of a shared set of moral values.

Therefore, those within the communist movement who uphold their personal morals as eternally and indisputably correct, or, even worse, seek to elevate their personal morals to the position of communist morals in general, clearly do not view morals in a materialist way. Nor do they approach it in an anti-imperialist way, with notions of moral superiority giving way to imperialist interventions on the countries alleged to be morally inferior, often on the basis of their cultural and religious values.

What is Marxism?

Marx understood that changes in society, like changes in the natural world, are far from accidental and follow certain laws. This understanding made it possible to work out a scientific theory of human society; to study why it is the way it is, why it changes, and what changes are to come. The scientific method of Marxism, dialectical materialism, regards the world as both a living organism in a state of constant development and composed of matter existing beyond human perception. 

Like all sciences, Marxism is based on the material world around us. Therefore, it is not a finished theory or a dogma, but must be continuously applied to new conditions, new problems, and new discoveries to draw from them the correct conclusions. The value of Marxism lies in its ability to form conclusions capable of changing the world, just as all scientific discoveries can be used to change the world. 

Defining Left and Right 

While Marxism historically belongs to the definite left tradition, that is, it finds much of its origins in the Jacobin radical left of the French Revolution, today’s leftism is understood more as an indefinite set of moral values than a clearly defined ideology. 

Delineating what values belong to the left and what values belong to the right is a challenging task given that these terms mean different things within different contexts. One study found that conservatism can be associated with a left-wing or right-wing orientation depending on the cultural, political, and economic situation of the society in question. Another study found that, within the former Soviet republics, “traditionalism, rule-following, and needs for security are more strongly associated with the old (left-wing) ways of doing things than with right-wing preferences. It is also possible that openness would be associated with a right-wing political orientation in Eastern Europe, rather than with a left-wing orientation, as in the West.” In other words, in the former Soviet republics, the Soviet Union is often associated with values the West considers to be right-wing. 

In this respect, understandings of left and right are subjective and vary widely depending on time and place. Therefore, it is important to clarify that this article will be considering values associated with modern “leftism” in the West today. The cultural values considered in this article are liberation through love, openness, and equal rights, and the policy matters considered are equality, government intervention, and high taxes. 

Love and inclusivity

Notions of love as an all-liberating force find popularity among leftists, an outlook prevalent among 18th and 19th-century philosophers and revitalised during the counterculture movement of the 1960s and 70s. Engels, however, criticised the “religion of love” and, in the End of Classical German Philosophy, denounced Feuerbach’s idea that mankind could be liberated through love alone instead of the economic transformation of production. To Engels, the idea that love could function as a reconciling force for all differences “regardless of distinctions of sex or estate” had no plausibility. 

Despite what leftists proclaim, the act of loving one another, including beyond traditional boundaries, does not inherently constitute a revolutionary act. Engels reinforced this idea in On the History of Early Christianity, which disapproved of the pacification of Early Christianity and its transformation from a revolutionary, working-class religion of “undiluted revenge” into a petit-bourgeois religion of “love your enemies, bless them that curse you.”

SUPPORT OUR WORK BY MAKING A DONATION TODAY!

The same principles Engels applied to the “religion of love” can be applied to the leftist values of openness and inclusivity. The proponents of these ideas suggest that the working class should be accepting and accommodating to the ideas, values, traditions, and mindsets of everyone, including the class exploiting them. In the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx and Engels deemed this position as belonging to the “socialistic bourgeoisie,” and criticised the belief “that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.” Therefore, Marxism has little to do with absolute ‘inclusivity’ and notions of ‘liberation through love’, making it distinct from the leftist counterculture movement borne out of the 1960s and 70s. 

Equal rights

One of the most misunderstood aspects of Marxism is its stance on the concept of equal rights. Despite the prevalent use of ‘equal rights’ as a leftist buzzword, Marx’s work, the End of Classical German Philosophy, outlines that, within bourgeois society, equal rights are, in fact, formally recognised. However, social satisfaction does not depend upon equal rights but material rights – and “capitalist production takes care to ensure that the great majority of those with equal rights shall get only what is essential for bare existence.” In this respect, if the interests of classes in conflict are irreconcilable, the material rights of one class impede on the material rights of another. Therefore, better conditions are not brought about through platitudes of equal rights, but through material rights and the abolition of classes. In Anti-Dühring, Engels traced the origins of the demand for “equal rights” to the bourgeoisie’s struggle against feudalism. During this period, the bourgeoisie called for the abolition of “class privileges” and the proletariat demanded the abolition of classes themselves. 

Furthermore, while leftists uphold equal rights on the basis that all people, by virtue of being human, should be treated the same, Marxism recognises that, within class society, individuals do not relate to each other solely as humans but also as members of a class. In this respect, during the epoch of capitalism, the bourgeoisie uses the state apparatus to suppress the working class. Likewise, during the epoch of socialism, the new state apparatus is used by the working class to suppress the bourgeoisie. 

Moreover, socialism and communism does not seek to enforce complete equality in the everyday life of members of society regardless of how driven and hardworking one might be compared to another. As per Marx and Engels in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, “Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriations.” Thus, Communism allows for individuals to enrich themselves over others, so long as this enrichment does not come at anyone else’s expense. Therefore, it is a widespread misconception that hard works reaps no reward under socialism and communism – in fact, hard work can only truly be rewarded under socialism and communism.

The state and taxes

Another policy often associated with leftists is ‘big government’, that is, that the government should play a more active role within society. However, as Marx and Engels explained in the Communist Manifesto, as the proletariat raises itself to the position of ruling class, it sweeps away the conditions of class antagonisms and classes generally, abolishing its own supremacy as a class. At this stage, the state, which functions as an organ of class domination, becomes obsolete as classes do not exist. Consequently, communism does not necessarily involve government intervention into the personal lives of members of society. While the early stage of socialism requires a strong state to centralise production and defend the gains of the revolution, as socialism develops, the state is increasingly stripped back.

In practice, efforts to shift power away from the state into the hands of the people is reflected within Mao Zedong’s little red book, which was published and distributed with the aim of strengthening the peoples understand of Marxism, thus empowering them as the real movement in charge of building a communist society – bottom up, not top down.  

Leftists also often advocate for high taxation as the grand solution to all domestic problem without realising, however, that the scale and direction of taxation is determined first and foremost by the class characteristic of the state. 

Under capitalism, the state serves the interests of the bourgeoisie, and is parasitic in that it sustains a superfluous class of individuals who do not produce material value for society such as the bourgeois police; the military; the whole judicial apparatus; members of parliament, who get paid disproportionately high salaries; etc. Additionally, the state revenue necessary for war and overseas military bases is generated through taxing the working class, while monopolies pile up war profits. Only a fraction of revenue is allocated to production, and to things like the maintenance of roads, railways, buildings, hospitals, schools, etc. 

On the other hand, under socialism, the state serves the interests of the working class and functions mainly to administer economic life. The socialist state is concerned with the production and distribution of goods, the advancement of the wellbeing of working people, and the maintenance of a limited military apparatus to protect the gains of the revolution. 

In the Civil War in France, Marx described the Paris Commune as having made the “catchword of bourgeois revolutions – cheap government – a reality by destroying the two greatest sources of expenditure: the standing army and state functionalism.” The ‘cheap government’ of socialism is financed partly through state owned industry and trade, money which would overwise be retained as private profit under capitalism, and partly through taxation. However, as the state becomes stripped back to the minimum of its functions, taxation is still considerably low as there is no superfluous, parasitic class living off the state as there is under capitalism. 

Furthermore, in the Critique of the Gotha programme, Marx stated that “taxes are the economic basis of the government machinery and of nothing else.” Therefore, as socialist society progresses towards communism and the state, along with its government machinery, gradually withers away, high taxes cease to have an economic basis. For example, no great war machinery is necessary under communism as the international community has a shared future with common interests. In this respect, while a heavy income tax serves as a progressive demand within capitalist society, socialism and communism eventually leads to a society free from the burden of high taxes on working people. 

As the writings of Marx and Engels do not align with, or go beyond, many leftist cultural and economic values, the idea that Marxism is a leftist ideology in the popular understanding of the term should, at the very least, be questioned. Marxism should instead be upheld by communists as a scientific method of analysis existing outside of the political spectrum.

Kate Woolford is the editor of Challenge.

Why Are Intellectuals Divorced from Working People?

By Carlos Garrido

Republished in modified form from the Midwestern Marx Institute for Marxist Theory and Political Analysis.

The question we are exploring today — the divorce of intellectuals from the working class — is fundamental for assessing the crisis we face in the subjective conditions for revolution [1]. The first thing to interrogate is what is presupposed in formulating the problem in such a manner. When we say that there has been a split, a schism, between intellectuals and the working class, there is a specific type of intellectual we have in mind.

The grand majority of intellectuals, especially within the capitalist mode of life, have their lots tied to the dominant social system. They function as a necessary component of the dominant order, those who take the ideals of the bourgeoisie — the class enemy of most of humanity — and embellish them in language which opens the narrow interests of the ruling class to the consenting approval of their class enemies. In the same manner Karl Marx described the bourgeoisie as the personified agents of capital, the intellectuals have been the personified agents of capitalist ideology. They are tasked, as Antonio Gramsci taught us, with making these dispersed and unpopular bourgeois assumptions into a coherent and appealing outlook — one people are socialized into accepting as reality itself. Intellectuals have always, in a certain sense, been those who light the fire and move the statues which the slaves in the cave see as cave shadows embodying reality itself.

But these intellectuals — the traditional intellectuals — are not the ones we have in mind when we speak of a schism between intellectuals and workers. We are speaking, instead, of those who have been historically able to see the movement of history, to make slits within bourgeois worldviews, and who have subsequently thrown their lot in with the proletariat and popular classes — those forces which present the kernel for the next, more human and democratic, mode of life. Marx and Friedrich Engels noted that there is always a section of “bourgeois ideologists” who raise “themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole” and “cut [themselves] adrift [to] join the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands.” We are talking about the W. E. B. Du Boises, the Herbert Apthekers, the Juan Marinellos, the Michael Parentis, and others who, while coming out of the institutions of the bourgeois academy, aligned their interests with working and oppressed peoples. They would become the theoreticians, historians, and poets which gave the working-class movement various forms of clarity in their struggle for power. 

What has happened to this section of intellectuals and its relationship with working people? Have they lost their thirst for freedom? Has their capacity for trembling with indignation at the injustices waged on working and oppressed people dissipated? 

It is important to note that any attempt to answer this question in this short timespan will always, by necessity, omit important aspects of the conversation. I would love here to speak at length about the campaigns of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the formation of a fake anti-communist left, and the role imperialist state departments, bourgeois foundations, and other such outfits had in creating a left intelligentsia divorced from the real movements of working people, both within the imperial core and in the periphery [2]. I know my colleagues here will be paying due attention to such monumental components of answering the question we have before us. 

However, I’d like to instead focus on the practice of intellectuals; on the expectations and requirements set by the academy itself, which have already baked into its very structure the divorce of radical intellectuals from the struggles and movements of working and oppressed peoples. The first thing that must be noted is the following: We cannot simply treat this problem as one rooted in the intellectuals as a class, nor as one rooted in the subjective deficiencies of particular intellectuals. The Marxist worldview requires us to examine the system, the social totality, that produces such a split.

We are tasked with exploring the political economy of knowledge production, if you will, which structures the relations of its mental workers through forms which insularize them to the structures and needs of the academy. As Gabriel Rockhill would say, it is a political economy of knowledge that systematically reproduces radical recuperators, compatible Lefts, and pseudo-radical purity fetish outlooks that play an indispensable role in the reproduction of our moribund capitalist-imperialist system.

From the moment prospective radical scholars enter graduate school, they are integrated into this system. Their lofty hopes of being active participants as intellectuals in a class struggle are castrated by the demands the academy makes upon them qua scholars. They’re told that their writing should take a distinctively academic tone, that popular vernacular is frowned upon, that hyper-referentiality, the practice of citing all the intellectual gods in the cosmos who have commented on a topic, is a sign of good work, of proper scholarship.  

Truth and the struggle for human freedom are at best given a backseat, and that’s if they’re in the vehicle at all. Young scholars in the incubators of their careers are already indoctrinated in the aristocratic dogmas of writing for a select group of elite scholars, worshiping journal impact factors, and condescendingly dismissing those who use their intellectual capacities to work for the people, to actually, in proper Socratic fashion, engage in the radical quest for truth – those who seek to properly understand the world in order to work with the masses of humanity to change it.

Young scholars, burdened by tens of thousands of dollars accumulated in undergraduate studies debt, are told that — even with a PhD — they will have an extremely difficult time finding a job – at least one suitable for continued academic work that pays sufficiently enough to pay back the accumulated debt. They are told — specifically those with radical sensibilities — that they should focus on joining academic associations, network with people in their fields, familiarize themselves with the work published in leading journals so that they too, one day, can join the publication hamster wheel aimed at advancing these slaves through the tenure ladder. They are told they mustn’t waste their time writing for popular audiences, that doing broadcasts and media work — that reaches infinitely more people than the readers of ridiculously paywalled journals or university editorial books — is a waste of time. Every attempt at rooting their scholarship in the people, in the real movements of our day, is shot down. 

The gurus mediating their initiation into the academic capitalist cult ask:

“Do you know how this sort of work on your resume would look to hiring committees?”

“Do you think the scholars in charge of your tenure advancement will appreciate your popular articles for Countercurrents, your books from Monthly Review, your articles in low impact factor, or impact factor-less, journals?” 

At every turn, your attempts to commit yourself to the Socratic pursuit of truth, to playing a role in changing the world, is condemned as sinful to the gods of resume evaluations.

“Do you not want to finish your degree with the potential of obtaining gainful employment?”

“Do you want to be condemned to adjunct professorship, to teaching seven classes for half the pay of full professors who teach three?”

“Do you want to condemn your family to debt slavery for decades to come simply because you did not want to join our very special and elite hamster wheel? After all, who wouldn’t want to spend months writing an article to send it in to a journal that will reply in a year telling you, if you’re amongst the lucky ones, that it has been accepted with revisions rooted in the specific biases of the arbitrary reviewers? Doesn’t that sound fun? Isn’t this what philosophy, and the humanities in general, is all about?”

Eventually, material pressures themselves break the spirit of young visionary scholars. Re-proletarianized and unable to survive on teaching assistantships, they resign themselves to the hamster wheel, with hopes of one day living the comfortable lives of their professors. 

Their radical sensibilities, however, are still there. They need an outlet. They look around and find that the academic hamster wheel has a pocket of “radicals” writing edgy things for decently rated journals. They quickly find their kin, those who reduce radical politics to social transgressiveness, those who are concerned more with dissecting concepts like epistemic violence than with the violence of imperialism. 

Here it is!, the young scholar thinks. A place where I can pad my resume and absolve myself of the guilt weighing down on my shoulders — a guilt rooted in the recognition, deep down, that one has betrayed the struggles of humanity, that one has become an agent of the forces they originally sought to combat. 

Their existence, their lives, will always be rooted in what Jean-Paul Sartre called “bad faith.” Self-deception becomes their norm. They are now the radical ones, the ones enlightened in issues of language. The working class becomes a backward rabble they must educate — and that’s if they come near them at all. What hope could there ever be in the deplorables?

Sure, American capitalism could be criticized, but at least we’re enlightened, woke to LGBT and other issues. Those Russians, Chinese, Venezuelans, Iranians, etc., aren’t they backward? What are their thoughts on trans issues? Should we not, in the interests of our enlightened civilization, support our government’s efforts to civilize them? Let’s go deliver them some of our valued democracy and human rights. I’m sure their people will appreciate it very much. 

I have presented the stories which are all too familiar to those of us still working in the academy. It is evident, in my view at least, that the divorce of radical intellectuals from working-class people and their movements has been an institutionalized effort of the capitalist elite. This division is embedded, it is implied, in the process of intellectuals becoming what the system requires of them for their survival. The relations they occupy in the process of knowledge production presupposes their split with working people. 

This rigidity of academic life has intensified over the last century. Yes, we do have plenty of past cases of radical academics, those who have sided with the people, being kicked to the curb by their academic institutions. But where have they landed and why? A blackballed Du Bois got to teach at the Communist Party’s Jefferson School. Herbert Aptheker, following his expulsion from the academy, became the editor-in-chief of the Communist Party’s theoretical journal Political Affairs. Besides the aforementioned, what other factors make our day different from, say, the 1950s United States? 

The answer is simple: what counter-hegemonic popular institutions we had were destroyed, in part by the efforts of our government, in part by the collapse, or overthrow, of the Soviet bloc. Although some, like ourselves, are currently in the process of attempting to construct them, today we have nowhere near the material and financial conditions we had in the past. The funding and aid the Soviets provided American communists is, unfortunately, not something provided for us by the dominant socialist states of our era.

Ideology does not exist in a transcendental realm. It is embodied materially through people and institutions. Without the institutions that can ensure radical scholars are not forced to toe the line of the bourgeois academy, the material conditions for this split will persist. 

If I may, I would like to end with the following point. It is very easy to condemn the so-called radical academics we find in the bourgeois hamster wheel divorced from the people and their struggles. While condemnation might sometimes be justified, I think pity is the correct reaction. 

They are subjects of a tragedy. As G. W. F. Hegel notes, the essence of a tragedy is found in the contradictions at play between the various roles an individual occupies. Sophocles’ Antigone is perhaps the best example. Here, a sister (Antigone) is torn between the duty she has to bury her brother (Polyneices), and the duty she has as a citizen to follow King Creon’s decry, which considers Polyneices a traitor undeserving of a formal burial. This contradiction is depicted nicely in Hegel, who says that “both are in the wrong because they are one-sided, but both are also in the right.” 

Our so-called radical intelligentsia is, likewise, caught in the contradiction of the two roles they wish to occupy — revolutionary and academic. Within existing institutions, there can be no reconciliation of the duties implied in each role. This is the setup of a classical tragedy, one which takes various forms with each individual scholar. It is also, as Socrates reminds Aristophanes and Agathon at the end of Plato’s Symposium, a comedy, since “the true artist in tragedy is an artist in comedy also.” 

The tragic and simultaneously comedic position occupied by the radical intelligentsia can only be overcome with the development of popular counter-hegemonic institutions, such as parties and educational institutions like the Hampton and Midwestern Marx Institutes, the International Manifesto Group, the Critical Theory Workshop and others. It is only here where scholars can embed themselves in the people. However, scholars are humans living under capitalism. They, just like everyone else, have bills to pay. These institutions, therefore, must work to develop the capacity to financially support both the intellectual traitors to the traditional bourgeois academy, and the organic intellectuals emerging from the working class itself. That is, I think, one of the central tasks facing those attempting to bridge the divide we have examined today. 

Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban-American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). 

Footnotes

[1] For more on the indispensability of subjective conditions to social revolutions, see the last chapter of the author’s book, The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism.

[2] For more on imperialist efforts to create an inorganic left intelligentsia, see the author’s book, The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism, Frances Stonor Saunders’s The Cultural Cold War, and Gabriel Rockhill’s forthcoming book, The Intellectual World War.

[3] In the last couple of decades, scholars like Anthony Monteiro (fired from Temple University for not toing the bourgeois line of the African American Studies department) and Norman Finklestein (“unceremoniously kicked out” of Hunter College for his pro-Palestine work) have been blackballed from the academy for their anti-establishment views. 

[4] China here is undoubtedly the only one capable of filling the shoes of the Soviet Union. Yet it has failed to meet the Soviet standard of international proletarian solidarity

Santa Claus and the Contradictions of Bourgeois Ideology

By Carlos Garrido

Republished from Midwestern Marx.

A comrade recently pointed my attention to a comedy skit by Foil Arms and Hog called “Santa is Captured by the Russians,” where for two minutes Mr. Clauss is interrogated by the Soviet police. Below are some excerpts from the conversation: 

​Santa:  I think there has been some sort of a mistake. You see I have a very busy night tonight.
Soviet Police 1: He was found attempting to hide in a chimney.
Soviet Police 2: Chimney? What were you doing in Russian airspace?
Santa: I've already told you…
(Santa gets slapped): Ho, ho, ho... That was naughty.
Soviet Police: We found a list of names.
Santa: Ah my list.
Soviet Police: These are American spies?
Santa: No, no…
Soviet Police: There was also a second list.
Santa: Oh you don't want to be on that list.
Soviet Police: You plan to kill these people.
Santa: No, no, they just get a bad present… It used to be a bag of coal… but the whole climate change thing...
Soviet Police: We intercepted a communication from one of his assets.
“Dear Santa, I have been a good girl. I would like a Silvanian Family Cosy Cottage Starter Home.”
Soviet Police: This is clearly code.
Santa: No it's not code.
Soviet Police: Then who is Santa?
Santa: That's me.
Soviet Police: You said your name was Father Christmas.
Santa: Yes, I'm known by very many names.
Soviet Police: So you are spy?... How do you know my children's names?... What are you doing in Russia?
Santa: Presents, I deliver presents.
Soviet Police: Presents? For who?
Santa: Well, to all the children in the world.
Soviet Police: All the children in the world? In return for what?
Santa: Well, nothing.
Soviet Police: Nothing? So...You are communist?
Santa: Da (Yes)… Why do you think I wear red comrade?
Soviet Police: Signals to officer outside “Comrade, two vodka, one cookies and milk.”

This captures wonderfully the gap between reality and the values and narratives enunciated by the liberal capitalist world. Father Christmas is said to be this selfless gift-bringer, someone who enjoys seeing the smile on kids’ faces as they receive – assuming they weren’t naughty – their new toys. Santa Claus gives, in the traditional narrative, to all kids, irrespective of class (but especially the poor), race, nationality, and sex. He gives these gifts, most importantly, for free. He does not give in exchange for money. His purpose, telos, is not profit. He gives gifts to meet the playful needs of children. His goal is social good, not capital accumulation. He gives so that kids can play, so that they may fulfill what it means to be a kid. He does not give so that parents’ pockets are hollowed, and his North Pole bank account inflated.

PLEASE SUPPORT OUR WORK BY MAKING A DONATION TODAY!

Santa Claus’s logic is completely antithetical to the capitalist system. A system premised on producing for the sake of capital accumulation and not social and common good is in contradiction with Father Christmas’s telos. Both the real St. Nicholas (270 – 342 AD) and the Santa Claus we consume in popular culture gift-give without any attempt at obtaining recognition. Unlike the charities in the capitalist West, Santa’s giving does not afford him major tax deductions, and neither does it boost his ‘humanitarian philanthropist profile’ through large, broadcasted events. Saint Nicholas’s giving was not some big spectacle, quite the opposite. He climbs in through the chimney when everyone is sleeping to leave gifts and go. He stands on the side of the poor and does his part in attempting to bring about social justice.

While this is the dominant narrative we operate with, the reality of our commodified Christmas, and of Santa Claus as the personified agent of such commodification, is directly opposed to the narrative itself. As Valerie Panne notes, modern capitalist Christmas has turned Santa Claus into a “decorative marketing tool…for hysterical shopping.” Santa’s commodified image – first used by Coca-Cola in the 1930s – has become instrumental in helping the capitalists realize profit. He has become an instrument used to, as Marx notes in volumes two and three of Capital, “cut the turn over time of capital… The shorter the period of turnover, the smaller this idle portion of capital as compared with the whole, and the larger, therefore, the appropriated surplus-value, provided other conditions remain the same.”

Here we see a clear gap in the enunciated values and the reality of capitalist society. At the ideological level, that is, at the level of how we collectively think about the story and figure of Santa Claus, we find heartwarming values of empathy, selfless giving, and community. However, this ideological level is rooted in the reality of a Santa Claus used to promote conspicuous consumption (as Thorstein Veblen notes), the commodification of family time, traditions, and relations, and the accumulation of capital in the hands of the few.

The ideological reflection of the real world provides an upside-down, topsy-turvy image of itself. This is the essence of bourgeois ideology qua false consciousness. It is a social order that necessitates the general acceptance of an inverted understanding of itself. We come to erroneously understand the “capitalist” Santa through the narratives of the “communist” Santa. Reality is turned on its head. But this is not, as Vanessa Wills notes, a problem of “epistemic hygiene”. The root of the ‘error’ is not in our minds, that is, in our reflection of the objective phenomena at hand. As I’ve argued previously, “it is much deeper than this; the inversion or ‘mistake’ is in the world itself… This world reflects itself through an upside-down appearance, and it must necessarily do so to continuously reproduce itself.” As Marx and Engels noted long ago,

If in all ideology men and their relations appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.

To understand the gap between how Santa Claus (or Christmas) is understood and how it actually functions in modern capitalist society it is insufficient to see the problem simply as one of subjective ‘misunderstandings’ held by individuals, classes, or whole peoples. One must investigate the political economy which grounds, that is, which reflects that erroneous image of itself. The gap between the actual “capitalist” Santa and the ideological “communist” Santa is objective, it is required by the existing material relations of social production and reproduction. Capitalist ideology must disguise the cut-throat values of bourgeois individualism with the universalist values of Santa’s socialistic humanism.

But this is nothing new. Santa Claus is just another particular instant of a universal bourgeois phenomenon. The capitalist class has never been able to fully realize, to make actual, the values it enunciates with its appearance in the arena of universal history as a dominant force. Its universal appeals to liberty, equality, fraternity, etc. have always been limited within the confines of their class. As Marx had already noted in 1843, “the practical application of the right of liberty is the right of private property;” “the necessary condition for whose existence,” he and Engels write in 1848, “is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.” The phrasing of ‘all men’ used to formulate rights under capitalism is always with the understanding, as Marx notes, of “man as a bourgeois,” it is “the rights of the egotistic man, separated from his fellow men and from the community.” Its values, and their reflection in their judicature, always present their narrow class interests embellished by abstract language used to appeal to the masses and obtain their consenting approval for a form of social life which they’re in an objectively antagonistic relation with.

The ideologues of the bourgeoisie always provide the masses with a “bad check,” as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would say. But eventually, as King notes, the masses will come in to cash that check somehow. They’ll notice that within the confines of the existing order, the prosperity that checked promised is unrealizable. Capitalism has never, and will never, fulfill the universal values it pronounces as it breaks out of the bonds of feudal absolutism. Only socialism can.

The values embedded in the narrative surrounding Santa Claus, Father Christmas, Saint Nicholas, or whatever else you want to call him, will never be actual within capitalist society. Only socialism can universalize the form of selfless relationality we have come to associate with Santa. 


Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). 

Internationalism Today: An Interview with Paweł Wargan

By Daniel Benson

Republished from Monthly Review.

What does a progressive foreign policy look like today? How should we understand imperialism? What is at stake in reclaiming an internationalist political horizon for the left? What forms of organization are best adapted for a new international? Given the many contemporary global challenges—such as climate change, far-right extremism, pandemics, and the increasing threat of nuclear war—it is urgent to develop a strategic, organizational, and theoretical perspective for the international left. Paweł Wargan discusses these and other questions in the interview that follows. Researcher, activist, and coordinator of the secretariat of the Progressive International, Wargan is well suited to highlight the prospects for a new internationalism today. The interview is conducted by Daniel Benson, assistant professor of French and Global Studies at St. Francis College and the editor of Domination and Emancipation: Remaking Critique (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2021).

Daniel Benson: I’d like to begin with a discussion of your overall political perspective and development. What are some of the main events or intellectual influences that have impacted your current writing and activism?

Paweł Wargan: I worked in public policy when the last great wave of climate activism emerged. Every Friday, I would make my way through crowds of protesting schoolkids to get to work. Occasionally, some would block the roads. What struck me was that the ideas expressed in these spaces carried a clarity, a creativity, and an urgency that I never saw at work—where ideas were staid, unambitious, never coming close to addressing the urgency of the moment. So, I took to the streets.

You learn through struggle. You build confidence through struggle. You begin to articulate the reasons for your struggle and develop a feel for the possibilities it opens. The great challenge, I learned over time, is that it’s not enough to have good ideas. In large parts of our movements, demands for “system change” resolve into a politics of advocacy that focuses on appealing to existing institutions rather than building new ones. The very form of these protests—they are often held outside government buildings—speaks to that relationship of supplication. We entreat our ruling classes to deliver something that is not in their power to deliver. And we become despondent when we fail. This reflects a poverty of imagination, which has been carefully cultivated by the ideological machinery of capitalism.

Not long after, I had what you might call a eureka moment. I was working on a long report that envisioned what a green transition might look like in Europe. One day, I was editing a section submitted by an Italian architect. In it, he argued that to build sustainable cities Europe needed to shift to prefabricated, high-rise apartment blocks surrounded by parks and public amenities. I was living in Moscow at the time, on the fourteenth floor of a prefabricated high-rise apartment block surrounded by parks and public amenities. I looked out the kitchen window and wondered: What was this society that, many decades ago, began to build the future we are only now envisioning? That led me to study processes of socialist construction.

Fidel Castro once said that when he first read The Communist Manifesto, he began to find explanations for phenomena that are typically explained in terms of individual human failings—moral failings. He began to understand, he said, the historical processes and social processes that produce both great wealth and terrible immiseration. You don’t need a map or microscope to see class divisions, he said. I think about that often. What Castro meant—and what you learn from reading revolutionaries like Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, V. I. Lenin, Walter Rodney, and others—is that there are observable processes of contradiction and class antagonism that shape the world. The job of the left is not to hover above these processes and preach progressive ideas. This is the domain of idealism, of liberalism. You can’t build the future with ideas. You can’t repair the environment with ideas. You can’t feed the hungry with ideas. Our job is to build power through struggle, at every step seeking to institutionalize that power, building structures that can realize the aspirations of the people. That is what the great processes of socialist construction—past and present—teach us.

DB: I agree that building institutions on the left is vital. I think there is an increasing consciousness among left-leaning thinkers, activists, and scholars of the need to focus on organizational issues, on strategy, on building power, and not merely on symbolic gestures or purely theoretical problems. But recent history has shown the difficulty of creating lasting institutional change: from the anti-World Trade Organization protests of 1999 in Seattle to the Iraq War protests of 2003 to the Occupy movements of 2011. Moreover, even when leftist parties can organize and achieve political power at the national level (for instance, Syriza in 2015), they have proven incapable of challenging dominant global institutions. Or, turning to the Global South, progressive projects have struggled to freely develop (Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, among others) in large part due to U.S. imperialism.

I’d like to turn, then, to the question of internationalism and how it relates to building power on the left. I feel that many individuals, students, and even progressive activists see international politics as distant from their everyday life or local struggles. This is very different from, say, the long 1960s, where resistance to the Vietnam War, decolonization, and socialist construction were seen as interrelated and part of the same struggle. Could you explain, first, why internationalism is important to building progressive, leftist institutions? And, second, why you propose the Third International, or Communist International, as an important resource to rebuild internationalism in the contemporary moment?

PW: There is a story I have heard repeatedly—the cast changes, the setting changes, but the story stays roughly the same. Moved by the exploits of Che Guevara, an enthusiastic U.S. socialist travels to Nicaragua. He visits the encampments of the Sandinista movement, which is waging armed struggle against the U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship. “I want to join your struggle,” they say. “What can I do to help you?” The response is blunt: “Go home and make a revolution in the United States.”

The answer tells us two important things about internationalism.

First, the struggle of the Sandinista movement does not occur in isolation. It takes place against the backdrop of overwhelming U.S. imperial violence, which is the international extension of its oppressive, racist, and colonial politics at home. In the 1980s, Nicaragua was subjected to an economic and military blockade. Its harbors were mined. The Contras—a fascist force that massacred hundreds of thousands of people across Latin America—were covertly armed and trained to destroy the aspirations of the people. There was a very real need to sever the threads that bound Nicaragua’s brutal immiseration with the prosperity of the U.S. ruling classes—and that necessitated building a revolution in the United States.

Second, the construction of a revolutionary process is in itself an internationalist act. What can you do for the people of Haiti, or the people of Cuba, or the people of Western Sahara, or the people of Palestine, or the people of Venezuela as an individual, without first building power? Can you send them a tanker of oil? Can you send them a container of medical supplies? Can you help them build modern industrial capacities—or support their green transition? The degree of our collective power at home, and the political orientation of our movements, dictates the shape of our commitments abroad.

In 1918, Lenin wrote a piece railing against those who sided with their governments in the First World War. In privileging the “defense” of their countries over the overthrow of those responsible for the war, he wrote, these forces substituted internationalism with a petty nationalism—backing a predatory capitalist and imperialist leadership against the imperative of peace and social revolution. In the end, Lenin said, the position of the Bolsheviks was vindicated. The October Revolution generated the ideas, strategies, and theories that came to power a global revolutionary movement. Like messengers from the future, the Russian people pierced through the terrors of capitalism, and revealed a path forward.

Turning that path into a highway was, to a great degree, the mission of the Third International. Through it, Lenin said, the nascent USSR would lend a “helping hand” to peoples seeking emancipation from colonialism. That mission was born from a thesis that echoes in our story from Nicaragua. The thesis is that European capitalism draws its strength not from its industrial prowess, but from the systematic looting of its colonies. That same process both feeds and clothes the European working class, suppressing their revolutionary aspirations, and generates the material power that sustains their exploitation. The police forces, prisons, weapons, and tactics tested and honed in the colonies are always, after all, readily turned against workers back home. The primary duty of internationalism, then, is to strike at capitalism’s foundations: colonialism and imperialism.

These ideas carry great weight in our time. Whenever we—ensconced in the comforts of the imperial world—advance ideas for the reform of the capitalist system, we are effectively saying: “We don’t care that over two billion people go to bed hungry. We don’t care that hundreds of millions already live in a wrecked climate. We don’t care for the people who suffocate under the weight of our sanctions. Their plight doesn’t concern us.” The theories of the Third International teach us that the power of our ruling classes is the mirror image of the immiseration of the great planetary majority. Now, as countries and peoples begin to assert themselves against U.S. hegemony and its drive towards nuclear and environmental exterminism, our task is to build power with the grain of that historical process—not against it. Now, more than at any point in human history, is the time to build a revolutionary struggle grounded in clear anti-imperialist politics.

PLEASE SUPPORT OUR WORK BY MAKING A DONATION TODAY!

DB: Let’s turn to concrete organizational questions of how to build such a revolutionary movement. The late Marxist scholar and activist Samir Amin was an active participate in organizing across borders and bridging the divide between the Global North and Global South. Amin called for launching a “Fifth International” in 2006 or a “New International” just before his death in 2018. The latter call generated important discussion among scholars, theorists, and activists about how best to “do” politics in the context of neoliberal globalization. Much of the debate revolves around two issues: (1) the longstanding debate on the left of finding the right balance between a “horizontalist” perspective (democratic, pluralist, non-hierarchical, open to various ideological tendencies) and a “verticalist” one (strict criteria of membership, centralized decision-making); and (2) what is the right or appropriate level (local, national, international, global) at which to organize.

What are some of the organizational challenges and successes you’ve encountered in your own experience building left internationalism today?

PW: Organization is simply the way in which we store and instantiate our collective capacity to act—coming into contact with others, forming communities, building confidence, and making the strategic and programmatic decisions about the future that we want to build.

How helpful is the distinction between the “horizontal” and the “vertical”? In my mind, those who reflexively privilege the “horizontal” over the “vertical” cling to the view—cultivated to a great extent in the anti-communist project—that the outcomes we want can spontaneously materialize without us actively pursuing them. That when things become bad enough, the anger of the masses will translate into change. Instead, as movements have repeatedly learned, a commitment to extreme “horizontalism” operates as an obstacle to unity and provides fertile ground for the emergence of invisible hierarchies that immobilize and breed discontent. Equally, organizations that are sometimes derided as “vertical” made tremendous leaps in what we might now call inclusivity. For the first time in history, Lenin’s Comintern brought the demands of women, anticolonial movements, national liberation movements, Black liberation movements, and others under its banner—translating diversity into collective power grounded in a shared analysis of the political situation.

We need to build institutions prepared to address the profound challenges that confront humanity. What are these challenges? In his proposal for a new international, Amin described the U.S.-led imperialist system as totalitarian. I side with Domenico Losurdo in questioning the integrity of that concept, but in this case it is perhaps uniquely appropriate. Capitalism and imperialism sever our connection to the productive process, to nature, to other human beings, and to our own imaginations. We become trapped in a world of imposed ideas, imposed structures. The history we learn, the clothes we wear, the possibilities that we ascribe to the future—these are not ours. They form through the operation of capital accumulation at the global scale, a process that we sometimes euphemistically describe as “globalization,” but which is more accurately understood as imperialism. Extreme violence has been wielded—and continues to be wielded—to preserve this system. Its primary function, as Amin reminds us, is to preserve the “historical privilege” of the colonizers to pillage the resources and exploit the workers of the Global South. But the system is not inevitable.

Marx and Engels devoted their lives to showing that historical processes are not arbitrary. They have motor forces that can be studied and whose movements can be charted. The interaction of these forces generates tensions, or contradictions, that manifest in different ways at different times in our history. Revolutionary processes that ended the enslavement of human beings gave way to a new system of economic organization in which the primary contradiction was between workers and factory owners, or, elsewhere, peasants and landlords. History has shown that these contradictions can be overcome, but only through the collective efforts of the people. This cannot happen spontaneously, and it cannot happen if we cling to the false belief that the previous system can be redeemed or reformed—that a fairer slavery is possible, or that a fairer imperialism is possible. So, one of the primary tasks—and challenges—of the internationalist is to break through the structures of alienation that imprison our minds, our bodies, and our societies.

What does that mean in practice? It means creating the conditions by which peoples and movements from disparate parts of the world can learn from one another and become aware of one another’s fundamental interconnection—overcoming, for example, the idea that the struggle of the Amazon warehouse worker in the United States is separate from the struggle of the garment worker in Bangladesh. When we buy a pair of jeans on Amazon, we wear the labor of the textile weaver in Dhaka. And in that labor, we find the sources both of our collective power and of Amazon’s monopoly power. Our power exists in the socialization of production, in the fact that manufacturing is a collective process and a set of social relations that can be disrupted or captured by the organized working class. Amazon’s power is born of the surplus value generated by its capacity to exploit, dispossess, and plunder, both at home and abroad—a “historical privilege” currently protected by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the 800 U.S. military bases that circle the globe, a sanctions regime that suffocates states seeking to embark on paths of sovereign development, and other infrastructures of economic and military coercion.

But understanding is one part of the puzzle. Sloganeering, however radical, can only take us so far. How can we help build the trade unions in Bangladesh, who are resisting international capital and its agents in government? And how do we politicize the popular movements in the United States that hold the capacity to sever imperialism’s grip on the rest of the world, but largely eschew anti-imperialism as a political horizon? There is a dynamic interplay here between the local sites of organization and action, the transnational networks that seek to unite and coordinate that action in a programmatically coherent way, and the global horizon, where the framework of imperialist globalization reveals to us the threads by which our struggles are connected. The geographic scale of action must dynamically respond to the conditions it confronts. That is why, to me, an International must be a laboratory of political action—grounded in a comprehensive theory of the political and economic conjuncture, faithful to the historical tradition it builds upon, but not dogmatically wedded to this or that organizational template.

DB: I’d like to ask you a question about language and terminology. Specifically, the difficultly in effectively framing and articulating a left internationalist laboratory you describe. Since the rise of neoliberal globalization, which kicked into high gear after the dismantling of the Soviet Union, the very vocabulary of internationalism itself has given way to terms like global justice, global citizenship, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism. These terms are all palatable to a world in which nation-states have become subordinate to global finance. Such terms have seeped into progressive social movements, NGOs, institutions of higher education, and United Nations entities, at least in part to disengage and disassociate from, or simply reject, an entire history of internationalist struggle that you touched on earlier. What is at stake in reclaiming internationalism as a political horizon today?

PW: The Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński—among my earliest political influences— compared history to a river. On the surface, he said, the water moves quickly. Beneath the surface, the flow is steadier. Similarly, events pass us by quickly, but in their multitude we can observe stable structures and patterns of thought, which change over long historical epochs. I start here because internationalism carries within it concrete traditions of thought and action that we derive from Marxism, which contain within them a view of the river’s slow undercurrent.

The most important of these is dialectical and historical materialism, an analytical method that teaches us to train our eye not on individual events, but on the movement of history. The dominant philosophy of our time compels us to see only the surface of the river, only the quick succession of events. But these events pass us by with astonishing speed. We struggle to discern patterns, we become overwhelmed. Unable to situate developments in the world within their proper context, we begin to suffer from amnesia. We forget our history. Our creativity is imprisoned because we lose the ability to relate our actions to reality. And our politics resolve into idealism: we believe that a just world can be imagined into being; that our system can be transformed by gradual reform; or that nothing can really be done. Rodney outlined three features of this bourgeois perspective. First, it purports to speak for all of humanity rather than a particular class—the logic that says, “we are all in this together.” Second, it is highly subjective, claiming universal truths while concealing its ideological commitments—just look at the entire field of economics! Third, it refuses to acknowledge contradictions.

Marxism repudiates these notions. It teaches us that historical movement is a product of contradictions between and within things. You cannot have poverty without wealth, a proletariat without a bourgeoisie. The position of these classes reflects their relationship with the material world, with the means of production. The ideas that each group subscribes to also relate to their material environment, to their class position. Idealism is the philosophy of the bourgeoisie, while communism is the philosophy of the workers and oppressed peoples. And central to the communist tradition is the idea that collective human effort can resolve contradictions in favor of the oppressed. In his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, Marx wrote that “philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.” Marx was not just a thinker. He founded the International Workingmen’s Association, the First International, which emerged in part from textile workers’ opposition to British involvement in the U.S. Civil War. At the time, Lord Palmerston’s government was plotting to intervene on the side of the Confederacy. The workers of Britain saved Western Europe, Marx said in his inaugural speech to the First International, from plunging into “an infamous crusade for the propagation of slavery on the other side of the Atlantic.” The conviction that we have the capacity to change the world—that it is our duty to change the world—is inseparable from the tradition of internationalism, which is a communist tradition.

Today, with their imaginations stymied by old, unchanging ways of thought, many organizations do not set out to change the world, because they do not exist in the world. They do not exist among children who struggle to eat, or the workers who struggle to make ends meet, or the peasants dispossessed from their land. They are bourgeois in their makeup. So, they subscribe to categories of thought that hold little relevance for the hungry, the poor, or the dispossessed—and the institutions they build do not serve the interests of those for whom the world must change. The language they use is a product of their class commitment, and one that has been carefully cultivated: the substitution of movements for liberation with NGOified sloganeers is an instrument of demobilization. It shields the status quo by institutionalizing bourgeois ideology.

In a sense, then, everything is at stake in reclaiming internationalism as a political tradition—and I have a very optimistic view of our prospects. Liberalism has not, cannot, and will not find answers to the complex crises facing humanity. But, from the violent, ceaseless flow of events that confront us, internationalism helps us recover sight of history’s laws of motion, and of the peoples and movements that are its engines. It reveals to us the ways in which our struggles and experiences are connected across borders, and the class dynamics that shape them. Even if they have yet to take hold, the ideas of internationalism, of socialism, are alluring to many precisely because the prevailing ideology is not ours. But, where bourgeois thought fails us, socialism shines a light through capitalism’s darkness, reclaims the past from its amnesia, and recovers hope from its futurelessness. These are our traditions, and we have nothing to fear in proclaiming them.

DB: My last question is on how to formulate a progressive, anti-imperialist foreign policy. At the end of Marx’s inaugural address you mentioned, Marx affirms that the working classes recognize “the duty to master themselves the mysteries of international politics; to watch the diplomatic acts of their respective governments; to counteract them, if necessary, by all means in their power.” Today, a lot of mystery, or deliberate mystification, swirls around international politics, not least the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Among the anti-imperialist left, the debate tends to turn on how to understand imperialism. Should imperialism be seen in the singular, as predominately U.S.-led; or are there multiple, competing imperialisms, such that Russia, China, and the United States would all be equally imperialist powers? How does this debate impact the development of a coherent foreign policy for the internationalist left today?

PW: What is imperialism? In the intellectual tradition of the left, it refers to a situation in which capitalist economies mature, the rate of profit falls, and corporations begin to look abroad for resources to extract and labor to exploit. This is the same dynamic that sees small “Main Street” businesses grow into chains, then regional conglomerates, and then into national and ultimately international monopolies. The laws of capitalism demand that expansion. Companies that fail to grow are pushed out of business or bought up by others. Then, state power is wielded to turn sovereign nations into export markets, sources of cheap resources and labor, and outlets for investment for these corporations.

Today, the United States has a degree of power that is incomparable to any empire in human history. This is a product of a particular historical moment that I situate at the end of the Second World War. Having lost 27 million lives to defeat Nazism, the Soviet Union was in tatters. Europe was ruined. China, having faced an even longer war at the heel of a century of colonial subjugation, faced a desperate situation. But the United States emerged not only unscathed, it emerged economically and militarily strengthened, cloaked beneath the terrible aura of the atomic bomb, giving it something resembling omnipotence in the international arena.

How has it wielded that power? From the very beginning, it has wielded it to suffocate humanity’s aspirations for sovereignty and democracy. In the late 1940s, the people of Korea rose up against feudalism and the brutal U.S.-backed dictatorship of Syngman Rhee, which operated death camps for suspected communists. In response, the United States destroyed the north of Korea, killing roughly a quarter of its population and destroying 85 percent of its buildings. It threatened to use nuclear weapons on several occasions. This holocaust has largely been written out of history—and its victims are now the subject of vicious and routine derision by those who sought to erase them. If you ever wondered what the world might look like had fascism prevailed, look no further than the U.S. destruction of Korea.

Then came Iran in 1953, Vietnam in 1961, Guatemala in 1954, Congo in 1956, Vietnam in 1961, Brazil in 1964, Indonesia in 1965, Chile in 1973, Nicaragua in the 1980s—the list goes on and on. Wherever the United States arrived, its parasitic capitalist model of globalization followed like a cancer, suffocating states’ capacities to respond to the needs of their people. Tens of millions of lives have been claimed by direct or proxy violence instigated by the United States, and many more from the effects of being subordinated to the U.S.-led imperial system. Roughly five million people die each year because they do not have access to adequate healthcare—a problem that socialist projects have largely eliminated. But socialism is not allowed in the U.S. template for humanity.

We may ask a counterfactual, then: How might the world look if the United States had not picked up imperialism’s mantle after the Second World War? The defeat of Japanese imperialism and the German colonial project in Eastern Europe—and we must insist on its recognition as a colonial project—severely weakened the colonial powers. It set off a process that saw the British and French empires shrink dramatically. It inaugurated a new, modern consensus for humanity, with the adoption of the UN Charter and the pursuit of decolonization. It gave great prestige to the project of state socialism. The United States pushed against these currents—against the movement of history—and built a global system through which it exerts, at the barrel of a gun, near-total financial, cultural, and political power over the vast majority of humanity. No country in history has a comparable military footprint or proven capacity for destruction.

Attempts to downplay or relativize this violence are an insidious form of apologia. More often than not, accusations of, say, “Chinese imperialism” are rooted entirely in the hypothetical: “China is building infrastructure that could allow it to become a new imperial power.” In this case, the “twin imperialisms” thesis serves to put on equal footing an unsubstantiated conjecture with the actual violence of imperialism—it puts a moral claim on equal footing with an empirical fact. As the historian Vijay Prashad has remarked, we are afraid of Huawei’s 5G towers because we are told they could be used to spy on us, but we are unconcerned by the actual spying that is carried out by the U.S. government, which Edward Snowden and others have revealed. What is this but another red scare, scaffolded in our culture by the increasingly virulent Sinophobia manufactured by the United States and its allies? There are also more surreptitious forms of this on the left: attempts to “redefine” imperialism and cleave it from its analytical tradition to make it more suitable to the particular moral commitments of the day.

This phenomenon—the denial of imperialism—is infantilizing. It confuses left strategy, because it severs our ability to relate to the actual processes of history. It immobilizes, because in a world where everything is bad, nothing is possible. And it risks producing a moment in which, as U.S. violence against China escalates, forces on the western left will side with their own blood-soaked ruling classes rather than build power against them. Guarding against these impulses is among the most important tasks of the day. The moment has arrived for us to heed Lenin’s call to turn the imperialist war into a war on the bourgeoisie that suffocates us.

Note: A French version of this interview was published by the Association Nationale des Communistes on September 18, 2023.

Ideology and Hypocrisy Amid Slavery and Democracy - Strange Bedfellows from Time Immemorial

By Stephen Joseph Scott

The history of the existence of slavery as an institution in antiquity and beyond is one of the most common; and, at the same time, one of the most complex tales to be told. Virtually every society, touching almost all the continents of the world, has had its own form of enslavement. The implication being that, nearly, every group of humankind whether racially, ethnically, or culturally categorized as diverse, unattached, or essentially separate, has been marked by the legacy and tradition of human bondage geographically and/or ancestrally. This work will be focusing on the origins and culturally supportive underpinnings of ancient Greek identity, its philosophy, law, ideology, and ethnicity; and, those extant essentialist elements, such as class, that not only made slavery in the ancient Greek world possible but normalized its place within a societal hierarchy that helped define who and what an ancient Athenian was - pitched against a broader Mediterranean ethos. Beyond that, this work will address how ancient Greek thought, as to what essentially constituted a slave versus a free person, later ignites a heated counterpoint which asserts hypocrisy lies at the core of ancient Greek thinking when it comes to the fundamental differences: physical, psychological, and emotional, that inexorably lie between free-persons and human-beings in captivity – made evident by how that debate rages to this day in contemporary historiography….

It is best that we start at the beginning with Homer: ancient Greek storyteller and legendary poet, who lived as early as the 8th century BCE; and, is still considered one of the most celebrated and influential writers of antiquity - for good reason. Homer is brought to the fore because his illustration as evidenced below reveals the essential deleterious effect of human bondage, which, poignantly foreshadows the debate mentioned above by millennia, ‘For Zeus who views the wide world takes away half the manhood of a man, that day he goes into captivity and slavery’ (Homer, Odyssey 17.367-9). Homer is explicitly defining the enslavement of a man as the diminishment, in a purely ontological sense, of one’s inherent human dignity. Aristotle, on the other hand (ancient aristocratic Greek philosopher and polymath extraordinaire), who penned his work in the latter 4th century BCE, some four hundred years after Homer, sets a foundational opposition and enduring precedent of his very own when it comes to the quality, status, value, and condition of enslaved persons.

Aristotle, as is broadly known, defined an enslaved person (doulos), that is, a human-being held in bondage, as ‘a live article of property’ (Aristotle, Pol. 1253b33). The great thinker himself, speaking on behalf of his class interests, goes on to define the value he derived from such persons defined as property, ‘Of property, the first and most indispensable kind is that which is … most amenable to Housecraft; and this is the human chattel.’ He then goes on, with a decisively imperialist tone, ‘Our first step therefore must be to procure good slaves (doulous)’ (Arist. Oec. 1344a23-26). Aristotle makes clear his essentialist views which not only defined a slave as property, but goes further, stating that the value, status, utility, and material condition of persons classified as slaves is not only a useful one, but a natural one:

These considerations therefore make clear the nature of the slave and his essential quality; one who is a human being (anthrôpos) belonging by nature not to himself but to another is by nature a slave, and a human being belongs to another if, although a human being, he is a piece of property (ktêma) (Arist. Pol. 1254a14-18).

Aristotle’s proposition is an important one given this work’s purpose which is to bring forth these precise notions, or conflicting theories, that have significantly undergirded, influenced and/or reinforced conceptions of class, personhood, value, and status interwoven within western thought throughout the ages.

Which brings us inevitably to the longstanding property versus domination argument spearheaded, in modern scholarship, by Orlando Patterson in his 1982 book entitled Slavery and Social Death. Patterson delivers a scathing rebuke to Aristotle’s customary formulation of slavery in terms of property. He unequivocally argues that slavery, from his learned vantagepoint, is, in fact, ‘the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons’[i]. Which poignantly parallels Homer’s description that human beings, held in captivity against their will, are not only persons dominated physically, but are individuals essentially diminished morally, emotionally, and psychologically. The conventional view, as presented by Aristotle, is unsound, according to Patterson based on two distinct factors. Firstly, Patterson argues, ‘to define slavery … as property fails as a definition, since it does not really specify any distinct category of persons.’ Because everyone, whether ‘beggar or king, can be the object of a property relation.’ One can only construe that what Patterson is saying, when it comes specifically to slavery, is that the term ‘property’ obscures, diminishes or diverts one’s attention away from the overt and brutal nature of an enslaved person’s everyday lived experience. Secondly, Patterson contends that the term property is inconsistent in substance when it comes to diversity of culture - meaning many societies, however archaic, lacked the very concept of ownership. Denoting that slavery has accompanied mankind through time immemorial, from primitive village societies to ancient Mesopotamia and beyond, where, he argues, the laws and social mores of any given society didn’t precisely match that of Aristotle’s definition of property – therefore it generally fails as a classification of slavery [ii].

David M. Lewis counters Patterson’s argument on the ‘property point’ as stated above by proclaiming that during the Neo-Babylonian and Persian periods, the evidence clearly demonstrates in abundant detail, that the circumstance between slave and master, in legal terms, was ‘a relationship based on the fact that the slave was the property of his or her owner’-exhibiting all the elementary features necessary, per legal theory, to reach the standard of ‘property’ [iii]. Lewis challenges Patterson’s stance further by stating:

[The popular] view that esteems private property rights to be an advanced development of Roman legal theory ignores the findings of almost a century of legal anthropology, which has observed private property systems in a variety of tribal social systems that were far less advanced in terms of technological and social complexity than even the society imagined in Homer’s epics [iv].

While Lewis’ examination proves ‘slavery as a form of property’ in a legal context, there is still validity in Patterson’s position given the fact that persons in bondage (from a humanist perspective) reduced to the level of property in a solely ‘legal sense’ nullifies their individual agency and all that essentially makes them human.

In fact, slavery, and democracy, in ancient Athens and beyond is a multidimensional and multifaceted story of innate human capacity and agency, dignity, adaptability, fortitude, and resistance. Meaning, ‘…slaves were not passive objects, whose identity and existence was completely dominated by their masters.’[v]  As described by Xenophon (Greek military leader and philosopher), there were without a doubt slaves forced into strenuous domestic work: ‘baking, cooking, spinning’ and scrubbing under their owner’s will (Xen. Oec. 9.9). That said, we are also told of others that gained valuable skill-sets outside the home, coinciding with their inherent intelligence and creativity, from potters to builders to bankers and shoemakers (Hyperides, 3.1-9; and Aeschines, 1.97)[vi]. These slaves participated in communal undertakings (such as workshops and spiritual associations) together with other free and enslaved persons. Even Aristotle, who had little love (agape) for the underclasses, had to acknowledge, albeit cautiously, the inherent democratic nature (and/or threat thereof) made evident by the sheer numbers of this uniquely collective phenomenon - what the great theorist himself branded as koinônia, simply defined as fellowship of the masses. But the politikê koinônia (he warns) was specifically formed for the benefit of its members (Arist. Eth. Nic. 1160a4-6). Influenced by his celebrated teacher, renowned philosopher Plato, who argued that the limits of citizenship and its influence correlate with ‘the precise form of constitution and law’ in place (Plato, Laws 714c) - Aristotle’s well-known anti-democratic discourse on ‘mob-rule’ and the necessity for the ‘rule of law’ as fundamental to ‘the natural order of things’ thus becomes most evident. While in agreement with Pericles’ famed proclamation on the importance of the ‘rule of law’ in the ancient Greek city-state; when it came to what Pericles professed as the virtues of democracy defined, the two-men parted ways in dramatic fashion. In what is considered the ideal of a democratic philosophical vision, Pericles outlines demokratia (in his famed funeral speech of 431 BCE), as follows:

Its administration favors the many instead of the few…equal justice to all…class considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit; nor again does poverty bar the way. The freedom which we enjoy in our government…[teaches] us to obey the magistrates and the laws, particularly as regard [to] the protection of the injured (Thucydides, 2.37).

On the contrary, Aristotle’s depiction of a ‘democratic regime’ and/or constitution is one with an inherent propensity toward ‘license and lawlessness.’ He defines, ‘radical democracy,’ in that of Athens for example, as having two critical flaws: firstly, the influence of the demos can potentially supersede the law (Arist. Pol. 1292a4ff.); and secondly, the demos hold the power to impeach magistrates for wrongdoing (such as malfeasance) which Aristotle intimates are both a step too far (Arist. Pol. 1292a30, and cf.1298a29-35). That said, as threatening as he might have interpreted it, the concept of koinônia permits us to observe enslaved persons actively utilizing their intrinsic agency within a broader collective milieu.

SUPPORT OUR WORK BY MAKING A DONATION TODAY!

Returning to the question as stated at the outset of this work, Lewis’ focus on the laws of ancient societies, in lieu of the contention outlined above, is immensely valuable when it comes to understanding the conventions per Athenian slave society and their ramifications. Broadly viewed as a protection mechanism for slaves, given a singular example, the Greek law on ‘hybris,’ in ancient Athens, expressly defined as the negation of the deliberate implementation of violence to humiliate, demean, or degrade - is not as straightforward as it might appear. Yet again, hypocrisy abounds as evidenced: to presume that the Athenian law pertained to an owner’s mis-conduct toward his ‘property’ obliges us to disregard the ‘abundant proof’ of regular and generally habitual violence toward slaves by their masters.[vii] Beyond that, it is difficult to correlate the law as ‘protectionary’ given this evocative assertion by Plato, ‘[a slave] when wronged or insulted, is unable to protect himself or anyone else for whom he cares’ (Plato, Gorg. 483b). The following statement is as definitive as it gets when revealing the underlying deceit interwoven within Athenian law itself when it came to enslaved persons and their standing, ‘[the] law included slaves [simply] because the lawgiver wished to curtail the spread of hubristic [or anti-social] behaviour among the citizens tout court … the hubris law was designed to engender respect and orderly conduct among citizens not to protect slaves’ [viii] [ix]. Meaning, that the Athenian lawgivers were not overly concerned with the physical wellbeing of persons classified as slaves, but perhaps were more intent on curtailing their judicial workload.

The reality was that the right of masters to physically abuse their slaves in ancient Athens was, if not absolute, certainly extensive. Xenophon affirms the practical necessity on behalf of owners to punish their slaves, but simply asks for them not to do so in a state of rage (Xen. Hell. 5.3.7; cf. Hdt. 1.137). Demonstrating that, violence toward persons in bondage in ancient Athens was perfectly acceptable if it was executed in a manner of equanimity. According to Xenophon, however, slaves should never resist. He goes on to say, that masters could, or should, ‘clap fetters on them so that they can’t run away’ (Xen. Mem. 2.1.16). Hence, so it is argued, in summary, that what helps clarify, or defend, Aristotle’s assertion that ‘the slave [is] an article of property imbued with a soul’ (Arist. Pol. 1253b32), is justified due to the fact that ‘this view of the slave as an article of property’ was a generally held belief of society at large when it came to the status of enslaved persons within the ancient Greek ethos [x].

That said, when it comes to hypocrisy, the law and excessive abuse – domination, as defined by Patterson permeates the historical record.  A poignant example of the common acceptance in ancient Athens of emotional and physical abuse (or the threat thereof) cast upon slaves, and the like, is provided by Lysias, where he describes in detail the testimony of a plaintiff in an Athenian court recounting the brutal (and pervasive) threat of torture (and even death) that hung over the heads of enslaved mill workers - commonly known ‘as mill-roaches’ (Lysias 1. 18-22). In addition, owners of enslaved persons were generally granted legal leeway, under the authority of judges, to sexually abuse their slaves.[xi] Signifying that when a slave was purchased, they were in fact the owners’ possession to do with as they desired - which helps lend even more credence to Patterson’s analyses of domination as described.

A question of further importance is what defined, or signified, a slave and their station in ancient Athens? Was it one of ideology or innate difference that helped delineate the distinction between a Greek and a non-Greek? As understood in the broadest sense of the term, barbarian is the word used to describe not only a non-Greek speaking immigrant, but in fact, a definitional term which explicitly portrayed an enslaved person of foreign origin, as, ‘non-Greeks imported from foreign lands via the slave trade’[xii]. An Athenian essentialist view, as noted, between native slave and foreign slave, (that is, between natural born Greeks and outsiders) is underscored by Aristotle’s description of an enslaved Greek as ‘an accident contrary to nature’ (Arist. Pol. 1255a1). These Greek essentialist views, of one people’s ethnic superiority over another, are noteworthy because they significantly impact western thought and societal conditions throughout the ages – emphasizing race and class as inherent points of difference develop into a clear normative of class hierarchy.

Fast forwarding to the 18th century Anglo-world for example, Francis Hutcheson (elite 18th century British moral philosopher) proclaimed that permanent enslavement should be ‘the ordinary punishment of … idle vagrants.’ ‘Idle vagrants,’ being defined as most anyone with what Hutcheson considered, ‘slave like attributes,’ from the idle poor and indigent to confiscated and subjugated human cargo - principally Africans [xiii]. Conversely, in something of a confessional, Thomas Jefferson (slave owner, philosopher, and 18th century American statesman) recognized and voiced the odious elements of the dominion argument, as defined, some two hundred years prior to Orlando Patterson, ‘[the] commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of … the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.’ He then goes on in a revelatory tone, to inform just how these elite classes, throughout the millennia, bequeathed attitudes of dominion from one generation to the next. Stating that, the children of the elite were thus ‘nursed, educated and exercised in the daily art of tyranny.’ Virginia’s slave plantations as he describes, were by their very nature, ‘schools of iniquity and domination’[xiv]. Consequently, Aristotle’s, early, and pervasive, theory of the ‘natural order of things,’ when it comes to class and ethnicity, is made brazenly evident (Arist. Pol. 1252a-1253b).

Finally, how common place was slave society in the ancient Greek world and what was its magnitude? It is said that the importation of slaves was a lasting one, being that Greek slave society lasted enduringly throughout both the archaic and classical periods until its absorption by Rome in 146 BCE. Although the Roman slave trade surpassed that of the Greek numerically, given Rome’s imperial might over the Mediterranean world, it is said that ‘the Greek slave system was both the elder and the longer-lived.’ The Greeks had helped set a historic precedent by perfecting their own imperial prowess through the conquering of their neighbors [xv]. But, where in fact were these subjugated and enslaved persons extracted from and how common were they in ancient Greece? Ancient Greek inscriptions help make evident that enslaved peoples, represented a wide breadth of humanity throughout the known world at the time. These people included men, women, and children in a variety of hues, from such far-off places as Thrace, Phrygia, Syria, Caria in southwest Anatolia, Illyria on the western Balkan Isthmus, Scythians from eastern Iran; and, Colchians from the eastern Black Sea [xvi] - depicted by Herodotus, in the 5th century BCE, as a ‘dark-skinned and woolly haired’ people (Hdt. 2.104.2). What Herodotus’ quote helps to highlight for us is an ancient Athenian social construct. That being, the prevalent belief (when it came to the stature of imported slaves), of a clear and innate delineation based on race (and/or phenotype), accentuating a natural taxonomic classification or difference between indigenous Greeks and all others – especially slaves.

When it comes to how common slaves were, Josiah Ober estimates the slave population of fourth-century BCE Athens to be around 35 per cent of the total population of roughly 227,000 [xvii]. Which made slavery quite pervasive throughout ancient Athens and helps to explain the essentialist Greek/Other dichotomy as such. As Vincent Rosivach makes evident, ‘[When] Athenians thought about slaves, they habitually thought about barbaroi, and when they thought about barbaroi they habitually thought about slaves’[xviii]. Suggesting that this was commonplace in classical Athens - legislatively undergirded by the proposed law of Pericles of 451 BCE which confined citizenship solely to persons of Athenian birthparents on both sides. Ultimately defining in ethnocentric terms, an essentialist difference (between Greeks and others), based on birth lineage and cultural origin (Arist. Const. Ath. 26.3). In paralleling slave societies throughout the epochs, ‘the slave system of the fourth-century Greek world was of roughly the same numerical magnitude as that of the United States ca. 1800.’ By the early 19th century, in the South, ‘30-40 percent of the population’ was made up of chattel slavery under the brutal control of concentrated wealth and political power, land, and resources… [xix]. Both societies (separated by millennia) became indulgently rich and hegemonically powerful in their respective spheres of influence – primarily based on the wealth created by their slave societies thus implemented. As mentioned, due to the commonality of the everyday interaction between slave and non-slave, and its oblique dangers in ancient Athens, elite class interests reinforced ‘the construction of local and wider Hellenic ethnicities, as well as of non-Greek ethnicities, must have been fundamentally imbricated with the ideological needs of the slave trade…’[xx] [xxi]. The main point being that the possibility of a unifying or coming together of freeborn citizens, of lower-class status, and slaves, posed a direct structural (and numerical) threat to the established order of things. Ideology, woven within Greek identity, plays a key role in the hegemonic control of social norms, but not an absolute one.

The understanding by the masses (and a small number of elites alike) that extreme concentrations of wealth played a destabilizing role in the Athenian political and social realms, when it came to privilege, power and class, is made obvious by the following quote from Demosthenes, ‘for the demos to have nothing and for those who oppose the demos to have a superabundance of wealth is an amazing and terrifying (thaumaston kai phoberon) state of affairs’ (Ober, 1990, 214; Dem. Ex. 2.3). Which helps make evident an ancient Athens as not only the well-known paradigm of direct democracy (or rule by the many), but also its intrinsic contradictions (or threats thereof) when it came to status, class, and wealth – which has echoed, as argued, throughout the centuries. As presented, Lewis and Canevaro, bring to the fore, a carefully crafted top-down societal prejudice designed to sow division amongst the masses using class distinctions and/or differences as its exclusionary tool of choice:

Since it was in fact slaves who were more naturally associated with manual labor—they were the prototypical manual laborers— elitist writers and reformers found in this proximity a productive avenue for attacking their suitability for political participation—for having a voice. For elite Greeks and Romans this was a productive strategy for denigrating and dehumanizing ‘the poor’ in political as well as daily life [xxii].

Paradoxically, these notions of disdain toward the poor (or the slavish), defined (mostly) by the ancient Greek elite as, ‘anyone who had to work for living’ (Arist. Pol. 1277b5-7; 1255b23-38), were not limited to the Athenian upper classes. In fact, as Lucia Cecchet suggests, due to the sheer force of elite ideological thought and its pervasive influence (in the 4th and 5th centuries), even within the jury courts of democratic Athens, the repulsion of poverty (including slaves) became commonly offered as a widely conventional view, ‘a communis opinio that the rich and poor shared alike’ [xxiii]; attitudes that permeate western societies to this day, making evident, the powerful effects of elite capture through hegemonic cultural influence in ancient Athens and beyond.

In conclusion, throughout western history, ancient Athens has been viewed as the ultimate model of democracy in a political, ideological, philosophical, and ethical sense – as presented in this work. At the same time, hypocrisy, pertaining to these epitomes of democracy (demokratia – or rule by the many – as outlined by Pericles), adversely permeated its upper classes and beyond with lasting ramifications. Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle and Xenophon, for example, were all critical of democracy, focusing their ire upon the populous; the possibility of its bad decision making; and (what they believed to be), as ‘the [intrinsic] ignorance … of the demos, demagoguery and civil strife’ [xxiv]. Again, these great theorists thought of democracy not as the rule of the many (which was the general Athenian ideal of demokratia), but they portrayed it in a more threatening or hostile sense, such as, ‘the rule of the poor or the mob,’ which helps taint Athenian demokratia within recorded history with a prejudicial top-down class perspective throughout the millennia [xxv]. The proximity between, slave and poor within the democratic confines of ancient Athens, made them susceptible, in both high-level institutional deliberation and, sometimes, in daily collaborations, to manipulative stratagems which ‘aimed to denigrate and even disenfranchise them by stressing the “slavish” nature of their occupations, as incompatible with the virtue required for political participation’ [xxvi]. Furthermore, enslavement, as implemented in ancient Athens and across time, populations and locations could differ enormously or, in fact, possess significant similarities. As is inferred, by ancient Greek scholars throughout this work, the characteristics which helped mold Greek slave culture and its expansion comprised, but were in no way limited to, the amount of prosperity slavery added to the fundamental aspects of that society’s supposed wellbeing, especially its economic growth and military strength. In most instances, throughout the ancient world and beyond, the capturing and subjugation of persons classified as salves was meant to possess, chastise, and/or diminish an economic rival. Thus, as noted, chattel slavery was quite widespread throughout the ancient world and beyond. That said, the agency and humanity, as offered by Orlando Patterson, of subjugated persons, and their relentless struggle for freedom, permeates the historical record (from Athens to Virginia) - which cannot and should not be ignored. Enslaved human beings left behind a powerful legacy of opposition and struggle to free themselves and the family members they so loved. Through the common bond (of unrelenting misery) they forged powerful alliances of resistance and revolt, despite the cultural forces arrayed against them – their historical age or geographical setting.

Stephen Joseph Scott is an essayist associated with The University of Edinburgh, School of History; a singer/songwriter, humanist/activist – a self-taught musician, and performer. As a musician, he uses American Roots Music to illustrate the current American social and political landscape.

Notes

[i] Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Harvard University Press, 1982), 13.

[ii] Patterson, 20–21.

[iii] David M. Lewis, Greek Slave Systems in Their Eastern Mediterranean Context, c.800-146 BC, First edition. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018), 34.

[iv] Lewis, 39.

[v] Kostas Vlassopoulos, “Greek Slavery: From Domination to Property and Back Again,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 131 (2011): 195.

[vi] Edward E. Cohen, Athenian Economy and Society: A Banking Perspective (Princeton University Press, 1992), 61–109.

[vii] Lewis, Greek Slave Systems in Their Eastern Mediterranean Context, c.800-146 BC, 43.

[viii] Mirko Canevaro, “The Public Charge for Hubris Against Slaves: The Honour of the Victim and the Honour of the Hubristēs,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 138 (2018): 100–126.

[ix] Lewis, Greek Slave Systems in Their Eastern Mediterranean Context, c.800-146 BC, 42–43.

[x] Lewis, 54.

[xi] Lewis, 42.

[xii] David M. Lewis and Mirko Canevaro, “Poverty, Race, and Ethnicity,” in A Cultural History of Poverty in Antiquity (500 BCE – 800 AD), ed. Claire Taylor (Bloomsbury, 2022), 14.

[xiii] Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1995), 324.

[xiv] Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia: An Annotated Edition, Notes on the State of Virginia (Yale University Press, 2022), 249.

[xv] Lewis and Canevaro, “Poverty, Race, and Ethnicity,” 7.

[xvi] Lewis and Canevaro, 4.

[xvii] Josiah Ober, “Inequality in Late-Classical Democratic Athens: Evidence and Models,” in Democracy and an Open-Economy World Order, ed. George C. Bitros and Nicholas C. Kyriazis (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2017), 129–129.

[xviii] Vincent J. Rosivach, “Enslaving ‘Barbaroi’ and the Athenian Ideology of Slavery,” Historia: Zeitschrift Für Alte Geschichte 48, no. 2 (1999): 129.

[xix] Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619-1877 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 242.

[xx] Lewis and Canevaro, “Poverty, Race, and Ethnicity,” 15.

[xxi] Thomas Harrison, “Classical Greek Ethnography and the Slave Trade,” Classical Antiquity 38, no. 1 (2019): 36–57.

[xxii] Lewis and Canevaro, “Poverty, Race, and Ethnicity,” 29–30.

[xxiii] Lucia Cecchet, “Poverty as Argument in Athenian Forensic Speeches,” 2013, 61, https.

[xxiv] Ober quoted in Mirko Canevaro, “Democratic Deliberation in the Athenian Assembly: Procedures and Behaviours towards Legitimacy,” Annals HSS 73, 2019, 3.

[xxv] Mogens Herman Hansen, The Tradition of Ancient Greek Democracy and Its Importance for Modern Democracy, Historisk-Filosofiske Meddelelser 93 (Copenhagen: Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, 2005), 8.

[xxvi] Lewis and Canevaro, “Poverty, Race, and Ethnicity,” 29–30.

Bibliography 

Canevaro, Mirko. “Democratic Deliberation in the Athenian Assembly: Procedures and Behaviours towards Legitimacy.” Annals HSS 73, 2019.

———. “The Public Charge for Hubris Against Slaves: The Honour of the Victim and the Honour of the Hubristēs.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 138 (2018): 100–126.

Cecchet, Lucia. “Poverty as Argument in Athenian Forensic Speeches,” 2013.

Cohen, Edward E. Athenian Economy and Society: A Banking Perspective. Princeton University Press, 1992.

Hansen, Mogens Herman. The Tradition of Ancient Greek Democracy and Its Importance for Modern Democracy. Historisk-Filosofiske Meddelelser 93. Copenhagen: Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, 2005.

Harrison, Thomas. “Classical Greek Ethnography and the Slave Trade.” Classical Antiquity 38, no. 1 (2019): 36–57.

Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia: An Annotated Edition. Notes on the State of Virginia. Yale University Press, 2022.

Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery, 1619-1877. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.

Lewis, David M. Greek Slave Systems in Their Eastern Mediterranean Context, c.800-146 BC. First edition. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Lewis, David M., and Mirko Canevaro. “Poverty, Race, and Ethnicity.” In A Cultural History of Poverty in Antiquity (500 BCE – 800 AD), edited by Claire Taylor. Bloomsbury, 2022.

Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: Norton, 1995.

Ober, Josiah. “Inequality in Late-Classical Democratic Athens: Evidence and Models.” In Democracy and an Open-Economy World Order, edited by George C. Bitros and Nicholas C. Kyriazis, 125–46. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2017.

———. Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology and the Power of the People. Second print., with Corrections. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Harvard University Press, 1982.

Rosivach, Vincent J. “Enslaving ‘Barbaroi’ and the Athenian Ideology of Slavery.” Historia: Zeitschrift Für Alte Geschichte 48, no. 2 (1999): 129–57.

Vlassopoulos, Kostas. “Greek Slavery: From Domination to Property and Back Again.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 131 (2011): 115–30.

Cornel West, the Pitfalls of Bourgeois Politics, and Forging a New Future Among the Rubble

By Colin Jenkins

On Monday, June 5th, Dr. Cornel West announced his bid to run for the presidency of the United States in 2024. Coming on the heels of two such runs by Bernie Sanders, as well as current runs by Marianne Williamson and Robert Kennedy, Jr. West is seeking to fill what many view as a “progressive” void on the grandest electoral stage. However, in contrast to the other three, West, a longtime member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), will shun the Democratic Party and run on a third-party ticket under the People’s Party.

West’s announcement came via his Twitter account, where he has one million followers, and has amassed over 18 million views, 47k likes, and 18k shares in a few days. The announcement coincided with an interview on Russell Brand’s Rumble livestream, Stay Free, and sparked a flurry of mainstream news reports over the last few days.

As the buzz continues to gain momentum, we should ask ourselves a few questions. What does this candidacy mean for working-class politics? Considering the recent betrayals by Bernie Sanders, can we expect anything different from West? Can any significant change come from participating in bourgeois elections? And, finally, should working-class people invest our time, energy, and resources to support West?

What does this mean for working-class politics?

While West’s candidacy could properly be described as the most potentially-overt, working-class (aka anti-capitalist, left-wing) endeavor we have seen on this stage since perhaps the 1960s, it remains to be seen how far he is willing to go. Outside of the Green Party, which has made strides to fill this void in recent years by including explicitly anti-capitalist wording in its national platform and running candidates such as Ajamu Baraka, there is no actual, organized, mainstream left in the United States. Socialist parties that are grounded in working-class emancipation exist, but they are typically small, fragmented, at constant war with one another, and subjected to mainstream censorship. The Green Party itself falls into the same traps, is scattered and unorganized due to a lack of resources, and has been chronically hamstrung by the capitalist duopoly’s (Democrats and Republicans) increasingly difficult standards for getting on ballots.

A major problem for authentic working-class politics in the US is the widespread misconception that Democrats and liberals are, in fact, “left wing.” This is an ahistorical belief that is ignorant to the formation, and subsequent historical developments, of political ideology. It is also an issue that has been historically unique to the US, as an international powerhouse birthed from the fascistic wombs of Native Genocide and chattel slavery and maintained by fascist tendencies embedded within the utter dominance of capital (the wealthy minority) over labor (the working majority). It goes without saying that the US government, in serving global capital, has thrived on exploiting not only much of the world, especially the Global South, vis-à-vis colonialism and imperialism, but also much of its own population, especially working-class peoples from historically-marginalized demographics (black, brown, women, migrants).

Thus, the country’s proclaimed “democracy,” or “republic,” has never actually been democratic in any genuine manner because self-determination and self-governance do not, and cannot, exist under capitalist modes of production. A “common good” can also not exist, which means that a so-called “social contract” cannot exist. These are realities that were firmly understood by the founders of the country, all of whom were privileged men of wealth hell-bent on breaking free from the confines of a monarchy while simultaneously arranging their own elaborate system of class dominance for centuries to come. The masses have been led to believe that the two capitalist/imperialist political parties which run the US exist in vastly different ideological wings, and that we have civic empowerment through the act of voting. However, this could not be further from the truth. And a West candidacy has the potential to destroy this illusion simply by showing the people what a genuine working-class (aka left-wing) candidate looks like – something most have never seen.

However, before we decide on where to stand with West’s campaign, there are many questions that need to be pondered. Because West’s track record is a mixed bag. There are aspects of his politics that are promising, just as there are aspects that are problematic. In light of the last few elections, we can’t help but ask ourselves if he will choose the same path as Bernie Sanders by building potentially radical momentum among the masses, only to pull the plug and herd us back to the Democrats? Or will he understand the importance of truly breaking from not only the capitalist duopoly, but also the dominant bourgeois (capitalist) institutions, narratives, and psychological tactics that have us all trapped in a tightly-manicured ideological space, inundated with delusions, paranoia, and hysteria pushed by capitalist media? Will he use this campaign in an ironically-masterful manner to steer us away from the electoral arena? And, if so, can he leave us with at least a foundation of formidable working-class organizations that are prepared for both the fascist wave and the demise of both capitalism and the United States as we know it?

the bernie lesson, the good and the bad of west, and will we ultimately be sold out again?

So, will West and his campaign ultimately herd us back to the Democratic Party? Anyone who has been involved in working-class politics – most notably, the Bernie Sanders campaigns – would likely ponder this question with fear, and understandably so. Sanders has been the closest thing we have had as a representative of the working class on a national stage in decades. Sanders’ first run in 2016 was especially electric in this regard, as he railed against capitalist greed, did not shy away from the “socialist” label, and generally maintained a solid campaign in support of the working-class masses, at least by US political standards. In terms of tangible results, Sanders spearheaded a formidable organizational following and gave millions of young adults the courage to call themselves “socialists,” even if perhaps many still did not know what this meant.

However, as beneficial as Sanders was to many, some noticed warning signs early. In a 2015-piece at Black Agenda Report, as the Sanders phenomenon began to gain steam, the late Bruce Dixon published a scathing critique, and what would come to be a prophetic warning, about Sanders serving as a “sheepdog” for the Democratic Party and its anointed candidate, Hillary Clinton. Unfazed by the momentum, Dixon brilliantly noted,

“Spoiler alert: we have seen the Bernie Sanders show before, and we know exactly how it ends. Bernie has zero likelihood of winning the Democratic nomination for president over Hillary Clinton. Bernie will lose, Hillary will win. When Bernie folds his tent in the summer of 2016, the money, the hopes and prayers, the year of activist zeal that folks put behind Bernie Sanders' either vanishes into thin air, or directly benefits the Hillary Clinton campaign.”

Dixon’s article was labeled as unnecessarily cynical by many at the time. However, to those who had followed electoral politics from a working-class perspective for some time, it was an accurate reflection of a decades-old tactic used by Democrats:

“1984 and 88 the sheepdog candidate was Jesse Jackson. In 92 it was California governor Jerry Brown. In 2000 and 2004 the designated sheepdog was Al Sharpton, and in 2008 it was Dennis Kucinich. This year it's Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. The function of the sheepdog candidate is to give left activists and voters a reason, however illusory, to believe there's a place of influence for them inside the Democratic party, if and only if the eventual Democratic nominee can win in November.”

In the end, Dixon’s warnings and predictions came to fruition. Sanders did, in fact, throw in the towel, publicly lauded Clinton, and asked his army of loyal followers to support her in the general election against Trump.

A much greater degree of skepticism followed Sanders’ second run in 2020. In a 2019 piece for Left Voice, Doug Greene exposed Sanders as a consistent supporter of US imperialism, opening with the following breakdown:

“On February 19, 2019, Vermont Senator and “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders announced his plans to run for the Democratic Party nomination for President. The announcement was met with cheers from large swaths of the American left who identify with his support for expanded labor rights, Medicare for All, free college, and a litany of other progressive issues. Those appear to be very compelling reasons to back the Sanders’ campaign. However, when it comes to American imperialism and war, Sanders may offer slightly different rhetoric than other Democratic candidates or Donald Trump, but his record proves him to be no alternative at all.”

Greene went on to provide detailed examples of Sanders’ support of the US war machine as a battering ram for global capital, which included backing the arms industry during the Reagan years, supporting sanctions and bombings during the Clinton years, supporting Bush’s initial response to the 9/11 attacks on the world trade center, providing lukewarm responses to Israel’s brutalization of Palestinians while refusing to support the BDS movement, and finally “by voting in favor of the military budget in 2009, 2010, and 2013, and supporting Obama’s military actions against Libya, sanctions against Russia, providing a billion dollars in aid to the far right Ukrainian government in 2014, and supported arming the Saudi Arabian monarchy to fight ISIS.”

Ultimately, despite being slighted by the Democrats, which pulled every backdoor maneuver possible to push their corporate candidate, Joe Biden, to the forefront, Sanders once again willingly stepped back, publicly proclaimed Biden to be worthy of the office, and asked everyone to support Biden. While Sanders had already lost a significant amount of support after his first betrayal, this second act of treachery seemed to be the final nail in his coffin, and legacy. Now, in retrospect, it is difficult for many of even his loyalist followers to see Sanders as anything other than what Bruce Dixon labeled him – a sheepdog who stole the immense time, energy, and resources that he received from millions and handed it over to the capitalist/imperialist Democratic Party, with no strings attached.

Which now brings us to Cornel West, who happened to be a vocal supporter of Sanders. To be fair, Marianne Williamson or Robert Kennedy, Jr. fit the profile of “sheepdog candidate” much more so than West does. West offers us much greater potential in terms of constructing an authentic, working-class campaign. But, still, we must ask ourselves, is he any different than Sanders?

In many ways, he is. First and foremost, West is not a career Senator of the US imperialist state and a direct surrogate of the Democratic Party. While West supported Sanders during the runups to both presidential elections, he ultimately had the integrity to “disobey” him by endorsing Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, in the 2016 general election. And while West, like many others, threw all of his weight behind the political ascendency of Barack Obama in 2008, he showed bravery and consistency by reconsidering this support shortly after Obama took office, publicly criticizing the country’s first black president for his Wall Street appointments, rampant drone strikes, record deportations, and unwillingness to take action for the struggling working-class masses, including the millions of black USAmericans who experienced no tangible benefits from the administration. In doing so, West faced a harsh backlash from much of the black community, who were understandably high on the symbolic victory and immense significance of seeing a black man in the oval office. Many viewed West’s criticisms of Obama as “petty jealousy,” despite the fact that they were perfectly consistent with West’s track record and represented a level of intellectual honesty that is rare in these times.

West has also remained steadfast in his support of the Palestinian people against the apartheid regime in Israel, something that typically amounts to political suicide in the United States (see the recent example of Robert Kennedy, Jr. quickly changing his tune on this very matter when pressured). And perhaps the most important difference is West’s willingness to shun the Democratic Party and run as a third-party candidate under the People’s Party. There has been much to say about why West chose this relatively-unknown party over the seemingly obvious choice of the Green Party, and that may be worthy of investigation, but the importance of this decision is more so in the blatant rejection of the Democrats, who have maintained a decades-long stranglehold on progressives, much of the working class, a large majority of the black community, and even some socialists, despite ongoing militarism, pro-corporate policies, and covert racism.

West has openly pushed for internationalism and has provided a more nuanced opinion on the situation between Russia and Ukraine, ultimately placing much of the blame on the United States and NATO, while calling for the disbandment of NATO. It is difficult to imagine someone like Bernie Sanders, who is a career Senator of the very state responsible for much of the strife in that region, thinking such things, much less saying them out loud. In fact, Sanders notably hopped on the “Russiagate” train following the 2016 election and has toed the Democratic party line since then.

However, in many ways, West is not different. In 2020, West joined other public intellectuals in supporting Biden as the “anti-fascist choice” in the general election against Trump, essentially going against his consistent opposition of both capitalist parties under the impression that Trump represented the greater threat. West described the battle between the two parties as “catastrophe (Trump and Republicans)” versus “disaster (Biden and Democrats)” and, while noting that Biden was not his first choice, ultimately proclaimed that “catastrophes are worse than disasters” in his official endorsement of Biden:

“There is a difference in neofascist catastrophe and neoliberal disaster,” he said. “Catastrophes are worse than disasters. Disasters have less scope and range regarding certain kinds of issues. I never want to downplay the least vulnerable in our society — our gay brothers, lesbian sisters, trans, Black poor, brown poor, Indigenous poor. They are more viciously attacked by the neofascists than the neoliberals. But the neoliberals capitulate to the attack. I would never say they’re identical, but I would say poor and working people are still getting crushed over and over again.”

On a Facebook post made on September 4, 2020, West shared a video link of his speech along with the explanation that, “An anti-fascist vote for Biden is in no way an affirmation of Neoliberal politics. In this sense, I agree with my brothers and sisters like Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, Paul Street, and Bob Avakian.” Fifteen months earlier, however, in a Fox News appearance on The Ingraham Angle, West correctly referred to Biden as a “dye-in-the-wool, backward-looking neoliberal with little vision and even less courage” who “represents a past that hurt black people.”

West’s attempts to be a unifying force throughout his role as a public intellectual has led him to appear on platforms that many view as problematic, especially in a time when overt fascism is converging around various forms of bigotry, including Fox News, Joe Rogan’s podcast, Real Time with Bill Maher, and the former founder of the Proud Boys, Gavin McInnes’s, show, to name a few. There are also questions regarding the new People’s Party itself, which has faced criticisms about its ineffective organizing and willingness to include right-wing populists in a big-tent effort to focus on common struggles. This approach has led to some internal strife, rooted mainly in race dynamics, where some black members have felt understandably uneasy about the inclusion of working-class whites who exhibit racist and xenophobic undertones. It is unclear how substantial this problem is within the party but, at a time when identity politics has largely overshadowed and obstructed working-class unity, it is safe to assume it is potentially significant. Nevertheless, West has obviously embraced the party, being a founding member himself, enough to run as its presidential candidate.

West has openly supported the American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) movement, which may not seem problematic on the surface, as the call for reparations for black descendants of US slavery is a righteous and worthy cause. But, in doing so, West has ignored a perceived betrayal of Pan-African principles by the organization, which excludes most of the African diaspora throughout the world to embrace a peculiarly pro-US orientation. In a nuanced critique of the organization, Broderick Dunlap tells us,

“There is no question that Black folks in the United States are entitled to reparations for slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, and centuries of racist violence. There is also no question that the United States has caused insurmountable harm to Africans outside of the US. To deny that is to deny history and reality. Understanding that the demand for reparations is an attempt to hold America accountable for harm done to Black folks, excluding Black folks from the conversation contradicts what ADOS claims to be trying to achieve. Besides the impracticality of trying to distinguish between people who are deemed ADOS and other diasporic Africans and biracial Black folks, Africans are socialized and racialized the same as Black folks born in the US. This contradiction is the primary reason it would serve ADOS leaders to adopt Black internationalist principles, so they can build a movement ‘informed by and engaged with real-world struggles.’”

Perhaps the most problematic aspect of West’s politics, though, has been his willingness to express anti-communist talking points. This willingness stems from the red-scare era of US history, when anyone and everyone who merely “sympathized” with socialism and communism were ostracized, exiled, imprisoned, and even murdered by the US government. And while such fears have certainly dissipated since the end of the Cold War and disbandment of the USSR, public intellectuals with large platforms and tenures at major universities are seemingly still held to this standard, with Noam Chomsky being the most notable of this bunch.

Please Support Our Work By Donating Today!

West’s longtime association with Michael Harrington’s DSA also represents an in-between, anti-communist position between capitalism and socialism that is often indistinguishable from mid-20th century US liberals. From this standpoint, folks like West and Sanders can safely deliver vague socialist talking points while serving as social democrats, but are ultimately limited by their peculiar faith in US democracy and reformism, which becomes even more problematic by their anti-communism.

West’s constant yearning for unity among the people, while certainly commendable and needed, can and has led to extending an open hand to elements of the working class who are likely irredeemable, if not simply dangerous, due to their fierce bigotry, intense xenophobia, and blatant misogyny. And his unwillingness to commit to forceful politics over vague intellectualism has led him to make problematic assessments, one of which included a tweet from 2011, in which he oddly proclaimed Ronald Reagan as “a freedom fighter in terms of supporting our Jewish bros & sis in the Soviet Union & opposing vicious forms of communism.”

Granted, this tweet was made as part of a series of tweets that addressed Barack Obama’s public adoration of Reagan – ironically stating “this glorification of Ronald Reagan is really a sad commentary on our lack of historical consciousness” and concluding that Obama was “chasing the cheap fantasy of bipartisanship.” But, nonetheless, it provides a good example on how the weight of anti-communism, which seems to be holding West hostage, can be a potentially blinding force during a time when it, as a direct product of Nazism and fascism, needs to be snuffed out once and for all. In the end, such a blind spot is not only a massive liability, but also seemingly suggests the potential to drift back into the hands of the Democratic Party.

Can any significant change come from participating in bourgeois elections?

Oddly enough, if any significant change comes from this campaign, it will exist outside the realm of electoral politics. We would be foolish to believe that A) West can win, and B) even if he did win, he would have the power to single-handedly enact policies that would benefit the working-class masses. While this may sound defeatist, it is not. Because the reality is the US government and its entire political system are not only completely controlled by the will of capital, but were deliberately set up by the founders for this very reason: “to protect the opulent minority from the toiling majority,” to paraphrase James Madison.

Does this mean the working class has never won meaningful concessions from the government, via electoral politics? Of course not. Bourgeois democracy, despite its deliberate orientation as a force of capital, has represented a battleground between the class interests of the capitalist minority and the working-class majority in the past. In fact, during times of capitalist crises, the system has responded in ways that have resulted in very real concessions for the working class. In the US, the most notable period that included such concessions came during the 1930s, when “New Deal” policies were implemented in response to the Great Depression. Throughout the 20th century, Keynesianism represented the primary macroeconomic policy direction deployed by the government in its management of capital, using high tax rates on corporations and the wealthy to fund governmental programs designed to both supplement capitalist growth and soften the systemic parasitism of that growth. And, in the 1960s, coming on the heels of radical uprisings throughout the country — most notably, the antiwar and Civil Rights movements — “Great Society” policies were created to provide more assistance and opportunities to working people.

It should be noted, though, that the underlying reasons for many of these concessions were tactical, as they have been made to prevent a radical or revolutionary break from the dominant capitalist/imperialist system. In other words, they were just as much forms of appeasement issued by the capitalist class, for the sake of their own survival, as they were hard-fought gains won by the working class, for our betterment. Many gains were the direct result of organized labor struggles, but were also made possible by the US military’s brutalization and looting campaigns of the Global South via colonialism and imperialism. They were also products of the US’s advantageous post-world-war-two positioning, the Marshall Plan, and the fact that US infrastructure was virtually untouched by the ravages of the war. And much of these gains excluded black and brown members of the US working class, as well as women, all of whom continued to be relegated to hyper-exploited positions within the working class, often confined to internal colonies and subjected to compounded social and material forms of oppression. These inconsistencies, as well as the inability of these reforms to affect the modes of production, left such legislation vulnerable to both circumvention and rollbacks.

It is important to include context behind these concessions because we must understand, first and foremost, that all of capitalist society rests upon a fundamental class struggle between those who own and control the means of production (capitalists) and those of us whose only chance for survival is to sell our labor to those owners (workers). With this understanding, we can see that societal progression, or regression, is the result of this dialectical battle. The sobering reality for the working class is that capitalists always have the upper hand because they have claimed ownership of the means we use to function and survive. And, while capitalist governments like that of the United States have awarded us some rights, and have occasionally given us some concessions, they are ultimately tools that are wielded by the capitalist class to maintain their dominance over us.

Thus, bourgeois (capitalist) democracy is a brilliant scheme for the (capitalist) ruling class because it gives off the appearance of freedom via constitutional documents, legal systems, voting, and a variety of supposed civil/human rights. Beneath the facade are extremely strict power dynamics represented primarily by these class distinctions (again, the minority class who own/control property and the means of production overseeing the majority class whose only basis of survival is our labor). The working-class masses are repressed and controlled in nearly every way possible within this arrangement. Injustice is a daily part of our lives that we learn to accept to survive the drudgery. 

In some instances, where gross injustices occur, we are awarded the "right" to appeal to the systems that exist on the surface, but this "right" always places the burden of proof on us. Therefore, since we have no time, money, energy, and resources to dedicate to these processes (because we're all working our lives away while living paychecks to paychecks), it is incredibly rare for any sort of justice to materialize against a powerful state/class that has seemingly unlimited amounts of time, money, energy, and resources to oppose us. In this never-ending, losing scenario, the ruling class and all of their institutions (including schools and media) can simply say: "we gave you inalienable rights and encourage you to use them if you feel wronged," knowing very well these rights, and the systems put in place to exercise them, are nothing but manufactured dead ends hidden behind virtual freeways.

This systemic understanding brings us back to the question at hand: can significant change come from bourgeois elections? If we were to look at the history of the US, we would surely conclude that it can, as noted above. However, when looking at capitalism as the regressive system that it now is — due to its fascistic foundation of claiming “private property” as a social relationship for capital to employ (exploit) labor; its birth from trillions of dollars of “free capital” generated by chattel slavery; its tendency to centralize wealth and, thus, political/social/governmental power; its cancer-like need for never-ending growth; its bloodlust for expansion and theft via war; and its array of elements that are riddled with internal contradictions which only worsen over time due to perpetually falling rates of profit — we should understand that it has reached a very late stage. In other words, the concessions that were made in the past are, quite frankly, no longer possible. The formation of an industrialized — albeit, mostly white — “middle class” was an anomaly only made possible by the unique stages of historical development that existed in the 20th century.

The capitalist coup called “neoliberalism” put an end to all of that. And it did so during a period of time (1970s/80s) when falling rates of profit were decimating the Keynesian model, the gold standard was removed, monopoly capitalism became entrenched, corporate governance (what Mussolini himself referred to as “fascism”) was cemented, and globalization and financialization became prominent factors in wealth extraction. Pro-capitalists will claim all of these things are “artificial mutations” of “true, free-market” capitalism, caused by “too much government involvement,” but the truth is they are mature stages of capitalism that were inevitable, absent a socialist revolution. Clever terms like “cronyism” and “corporatism” merely refer to natural developments caused by capital accumulation (and, conversely, widespread dispossession) and the concentration of wealth and power that has allowed capitalists to gain control of all aspects of society, including the entirety of government.

The sobering lesson from all of this is that any meaningful concessions from the capitalist class (via the electoral arena) will likely never materialize during capitalism’s late stages. The system has become so cannibalistic and riddled with crises that it has been feeding on itself for at least the past forty years. The industrialized “middle class,” or aristocracy of labor, has been all but destroyed, small capitalists are being devoured by big capitalists, and the economic system has become fully intertwined with the government. Thus, we are already decades deep into a very real transition from covert fascism to overt fascism, as the system scrambles to shield itself from crises after crises.

During this process, capitalism has been propped up by so many tricks and tactics coming from the capitalist state — corporate subsidies, quantitative easing (“printing money”), constant meddling by the federal reserve, etc. — that it is too far gone to respond to the needs of the people. These tricks and tactics are necessary for the system’s survival; or, in more precise terms, necessary to protect and maintain the wealth of the capitalist minority, by further degrading the working-class majority and perpetually “kicking the can down the road.” But, this road comes to an end. And we are fast approaching that end.

The only thing that capitalists and their state are concerned with now is protecting themselves from the imminent collapse, which means we’re already well into a significant fascist transition. The fact that unfathomable amounts of money are being thrown at military and police during a time when tent cities, homelessness, and drug overdoses are taking over every major city, and working people everywhere cannot afford rent or food, tells us that the US government, which is a direct manifestation of the capitalist class, is unable to see past its own interests to avert this collapse. So, it has chosen to dig in and protect the increasingly wealthy minority from the increasingly desperate majority.

West will not have a chance to win the election, and will likely not even capture a miniscule percentage of the vote. He may not even make the ballots in most states. And, even worse yet, if he were to win the election in some dream scenario and assume “the highest office in the land,” nothing substantial would come from it. Because the system was set up to represent wealth (or capital), not people. And the days of meaningful capitalist concessions are long gone.

Despite this, West and his campaign should approach the election with the intent to win, because that is the way to build genuine momentum. But, in this process, the focus must be on building a new world from the ravages of the inevitable collapse. This is where our time, energy, and resources should be, and should have been for decades now, but we’ve been too enamored with bourgeois politics to begin that transition. However, it’s not too late to regroup and refocus. And West’s campaign, like Bernie’s campaigns, can be a catalyst for this shift. Bernie sold out, chose his career, and failed. West can succeed in serving as a launching pad, for us, if he chooses the correct path.

Should working-class people support West’s campaign?

Working-class people should support West’s campaign, if he chooses the right path. We need to divest from bourgeois politics and the capitalist system. A campaign like West’s, which will ironically occur in the bourgeois electoral arena, can be a major catalyst in this divestment. So, what do we need to understand, and what will he need to do, to stay on the right path?

1. We need to understand that electoral politics are both a time suck and a dead end if the goal is to win elections, assume office, and enact legislation. Therefore, campaigns should only be used to educate, agitate, and form counter-hegemonic and liberatory institutions and organizations.

2. We need to understand that building working-class consciousness is the primary need at this moment in time. Challenging capitalist propaganda from mainstream media, providing knowledge and historical context, and offering reality-based narratives as a counter to the extreme paranoia and delusion pushed by capitalist media is the way to do this.

3. We need to understand that authentic working-class politics (aka a left-wing) must be built from the ground-up in the United States. It must initially be anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and rooted in the working-class struggle against the capitalist ruling class. In this process, any remnants of anti-communism, which are almost always products of fear and/or ignorance, must be ironed out.

4. We need to understand that liberal identity politics and culture wars are being disseminated by the ruling class to whip up hysteria among the masses, cause widespread confusion and misdirected rage, and keep the working class not only further divided, but constantly at each other’s throats. We must challenge this head-on by keeping the focus on class struggle while, at the same time, not allowing for bigoted elements to fester, as they are mere remnants of capitalist culture and naturally anti-working-class.

5. We need to understand that fascism is already here in the US, and it has always been here for many of the hyper-marginalized members of the working class. This understanding includes the knowledge that the capitalist system has become fully intertwined with the capitalist government and is being protected by both capitalist political parties. In other words, Democrats are not anti-fascist; they are just as much a part of the transition to overt fascism as Republicans are.

6. We need to understand that formidable working-class institutions and organizations need to be built NOW, because time is running out. These organization and institutions must exist completely outside the realm of electoral politics, which means they must be organized, funded, and maintained by us, with no ties to, or relationships with, bourgeois politicians, the capitalist parties, or the US government.

What will West and his campaign need to do to make this happen?

1. West and his campaign must understand that the purpose of this run is not to win, assume office, and enact legislation. It is also not to build a political party to do these things moving forward. If those things happen to occur as a corollary development, then fine, but the primary goal should be to use this platform to radicalize (aka educate) and organize the US working class.

2. West and his campaign must use this platform to promote working-class consciousness. This can be done by attacking mainstream (capitalist) narratives head-on, offering counter narratives based in reality, and deconstructing the hysteria and paranoia being disseminated by media.

3. West and his campaign must show what a true left looks like. This means that he must be unapologetically radical by exposing the roots of our problems, which are not things like immigration, inflation, and “corruption,” but rather are capitalist modes and arrangements of production, imperialism, and the bourgeois state, which has been intentionally constructed to shield these roots. He should expect red baiting and take ownership of it without fear of being “unelectable,” which is easy to do if you are not ultimately concerned with winning an election. He should be openly socialist. He should be clear about what socialism actually is — the people owning and controlling the means that are used to sustain society. He should be clear that the welfare state is not socialism, but rather a necessity of capitalism. He should be clear that social democracy is merely a softer version of capitalism that simply cannot be maintained because of the predatory nature of the capitalist class in this late stage. Using very clear wording, even technical wording, goes against West’s oratory style, but he must make an effort to include such deliberate terminology along with his traditionally soulful approach.

4. West and his campaign need to keep the focus on class struggle by avoiding the inevitable pitfalls of liberal identity politics and culture wars. This does not mean ignoring the social realities of marginalized identities, which of course are naturally intertwined with class oppression, but rather by constantly keeping the focus on the basis of class. This is something West has done exceptionally well in the past and there is no reason why this should not continue moving forward on this particular stage.

5. West and his campaign need to express the reality that fascism is already here in the United States and is in a transitional period from being covert (in that it has always existed in the margins as well as in the foundation of both capitalism and the United States) to overt. He must explain that fascism is capitalism in decay. He must explain that the exponential funding of military and police by the capitalist class and its government will naturally come home to roost on the entirety of the US working class. And he must publicly rid himself of the belief that Democrats are allies in the fight against fascism.

6. West and his campaign must use this platform to build actual organizations and institutions, on the ground, throughout the country, funded and maintained by the people. These organizations and institutions must be constucted to last far beyond this campaign, and must be built with the understanding that they will never work with bourgeois institutions, including the government and political parties owned by the capitalist class. These organizations should exist to meet the most basic needs of the people: food programs, clinics, self-defense, political education, ideological development, etc. all rooted in a working-class culture formed in direct contrast to bourgeois culture.

A means to an end?

From a dialectical perspective, Dr. Cornel West’s announcement to run for president of the US is a seemingly positive development for the working-class masses, in our struggle against the forces of capital. This is not necessarily saying much, as we have had very little reason to pay attention to, let alone participate in, bourgeois elections for quite some time. Thus, this is not positive because West has any chance of winning or assuming office — he does not — but because it provides us the opportunity to finally break away from the stranglehold of bourgeois politics and the two capitalist/imperialist political parties. We should seek to use this campaign as a way to build our own proletariat infrastructure throughout the country — community centers, clinics, food programs, networks, schools, etc. — something that will be needed as both the capitalist system and US government continue their rapid descent into overt fascism.

As West throws down the gauntlet against what he, and many others, see(s) as systemic ills, he will find himself stuck between two vastly different worlds: one where the masses of people desperately need, and I believe are ready for, an unapologetically radical candidate from the left; and another where dominant society and its very real mechanisms of capitalist violence and oppression will simply not allow this need to be delivered. The best thing West can do in this moment is dedicate himself to serving this need. Whether or not he and his campaign choose to use this opportunity as such a catalyst remains to be seen.

By all signs, Cornel West is a social democrat. And, history tells us we should be very wary of the compromising nature of social democrats. So, we should be skeptical. We should continue working on our own efforts and projects to construct authentic, working-class organizations and institutions. We should pace ourselves and not throw too much energy, physical or emotional, behind West and his campaign. But we should also give this a chance to serve our needs — use it as a potential tool whose frequency can increase if we find it on the right path, or decrease and even discarded if it becomes clear that it will not be fruitful. We should attempt to steer it in the right direction because it is the best option we have been given on this type of platform, if only for the fact that it exists outside the Democratic Party.

Our present reality is dismal. Our immediate future is dystopian. Capitalism is rotting away and taking us with it. Fascism is here. The capitalist government and all of its institutions are clearly responding by choosing an increasingly-predatory and barbaric direction. We must forge our own way, dig ourselves in, and prepare for the absolute worst, while building our own institutions that show the promise of a better world. West and his campaign are a potential tool in starting to build this future.

Leftist Thought and Social Media in the Information Age

By Zoe Thomas

Republished in modified form from The Michigan Specter.

Fifty years ago, people encountered leftist thought primarily through activism, published works, and educators. In recent years, however, this has changed drastically. Today, for better or worse, the internet is the primary means through which leftism is disseminated and consumed. 

As a vehicle for spreading progressive ideas, the internet has largely been a democratizing force. Ideology is no longer solely the terrain of a relatively educated, elite vanguard. These days, you do not need to enroll in a class or even buy a book to learn about socialism. The information is freely available online and thus far more accessible to the average person.

Of course, more traditional, academic sources are available online, which does increase access to the scholarly writing of Marx and Marxists. However, this kind of literature can be intimidating and largely inaccessible to some people. Theory written centuries ago, or even modern theory written by academics, can even represent another language that enforces a kind of class divide along educational lines. To combat this and reach a broader audience, many modern leftist creators present similar ideas in a more entertaining, comprehensible way. 

Their efforts have gone a long way toward demystifying leftist ideas. This has allowed hisorically-obscured views to filter into the mainstream. But the new brand of leftist content isn’t just more accessible; it is also more relevant to the average person. Rather than just presenting centuries-old ideas, socialist creators are applying them to contemporary issues to foster practical social consciousness.

As leftist creators gain a foothold online, they are counterbalancing the conservative skew of platforms like Twitch and Reddit. And having such content in these spaces matters. It challenges the right-wing media monopoly head-on and obstructs dangerous pipelines that threaten to brainwash vulnerable young people with reactionary and regressive ideology.

But new leftist media is not without its flaws. While simplifying complex issues can be helpful, creators too often oversimplify them for marketing reasons. Moreover, some creators cultivate troubling cults of personality, touting their opinion as fact and punishing intracommunity dissent.

Indeed, many of the new left-wing personalities are of questionable moral character and frequently engage in blatant hypocrisy by clout-chasing. Of course, there are levels to their indiscretions, ranging from the purchase of expensive sports cars to using racial slurs in an attempt to win over the Right.

Perhaps the most worrying trend in new leftist media is that much of it falls prey to debate culture. Progressive commentators frequently engage with the arguments of their mainstream opponents, creating an industry of “responding to the Right.” But this approach mostly fails to win hearts and minds. Instead, it usually redounds to a battle of wits that leads nowhere.

When two career commentators debate online, it can give the appearance of real people having a conversation in which both parties listen and consider one another’s ideas. Yet, in these fabricated interactions, they both always come out on top, profiting off of important political issues that affect people’s lives. This is yet another area of politics where monetary incentives are a thoroughly corrupting force.

Although the benefits of exposing more people to leftist thought with social-media tactics are incredibly valuable and important, the manner in which it is being done leaves a lot to be desired. To be successful and remain true to its cause, online leftism must not just “fight the Right,” but exist independently from it, so as to promote the people and ideas that have given the movement its power.

Zoe Thomas is an undergraduate studying political science at the University of Michigan and a staff writer for The Michigan Specter.

What is Nkrumahism-Touréism?

By All African People’s Revolutionary Party (AAPRP)

Republished from Hood Communist.

The Africa which exists today, as well as the one we are struggling to build, is not the old Africa but a new emergent revolutionary society; a classless society in which a new harmony, a new cohesiveness, a new revolutionary African personality and a new dignity is forged out of the traditional African way of life which has been permanently changed by thousands of years of Euro-Christian and Islamic intrusions and by the historical development of the competing and conflicting slave, feudal, capitalistic and newly emergent socialist modes of production. A new emergent ideology is therefore required. That ideology is Nkrumahism-Touréism!

Nkrumahism-Touréism takes its name from the consistent, revolutionary, socialist and Pan-African principles, practices and policies followed, implemented and taught by Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah and Ahmed Seku Touré; two of the foremost proponents and practitioners of the scientific strategy to liberate and unify Africa under scientific socialism. These principles, practices and policies are recorded in their speeches, writings, actions, achievements and life. In a larger and more complete sense, Nkrumahism-Touréism is the synthesis of the accumulated practical and theoretical contributions and achievements of centuries and generations of mass, revolutionary Pan-African and larger socialist struggles. Nkrumahism-Touréism is the application of the universal laws of revolutionary growth and development of the particular conditions of Africa and her children. Its concrete living manifestation is to be found in the creative contributions of the present day African Revolution.

Nkrumahism-Touréism provides the masses of African People with a program of human transformation turning individual defects into qualities by living the ideology. It is a Pan-African ideology that breaks the web of complexes put on us by the dominant culture and enables us to reclaim our humanity, reassert our dignity, and develop a new Revolutionary African Personality. It provides a revolutionary view of Africa and the world applying the universal principles of scientific socialism in the context of African history, tradition, and aspirations. It gives us a set of analytical tools which enable the masses of Africa People to correctly interpret, understand, redeem African culture and reconstruct Africa by way of the Cultural Revolution. Nkrumahism-Touréism provides a complete social, political, philosophical and economic theory which constitute a comprehensive network of principles, beliefs, values, morals and rules which guide our behavior, determines the form which our institutions and organizations will take; and acts as a cohesive force to bind us together, guide and channel our revolutionary action towards the achievement of Pan-Africanism and the inevitable triumph of socialism worldwide. Nkrumahism-Touréism includes the following principles:

The Primacy and Unity of Africa

The concept of the primacy and unity of Africa has its origins in the emergence of the modern Pan African movement which was characterized by our Peoples resistance to foreign domination in the 15th century. This foreign domination was soon followed by the trans-Atlantic slave trade and full blown colonialism which culminated in the European partition of Africa agreed upon by the colonial powers at the Berlin Conference of 1884 – 1885. The primacy of Africa dictates that we reject these artificially imposed colonial borders. A united Africa, the concept of continental African unity is the source of our strength and the key to our liberation. As Nkrumah says:

“African Unity gives an indispensable continental dimension to the concept of the African nation…Unity is the first prerequisite for destroying neo-colonialism. Primary and basic is the need for a union government on the much divided continent of Africa.” (Neo-colonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism p.253) We cannot accept any other version of our land, to define Africa as anything less than the entire continent including its islands is to accept the neo-colonial strategy to divide and conquer. The primacy of Africa also speaks to our primary identity as African people. We are African. Rather than promoting our micro-national identities such as Nigerian, Ivorian, Kenyan, Ethiopian, Jamaican, Brazilian, African-American, etc. we must focus on the common denominator which is African. For us as Africans and Pan-Africanists as Nkrumah says, “the core of the black revolution is in Africa and until Africa is united under a socialist government, the black man throughout the world lacks a national home… All people of African decent, whether they live in North or South America, the Caribbean or in any other part of the world are Africans and belong to the African nation.” (Nkrumah, K Class Struggle in Africa)

The Integrity Of The Revolutionary African Personality

The African personality is the product of the evolution of African people’s conception of the world, way of life, their ethics and moral principles which are a particular reflection of African culture. This African cultural personality has been under attack by capitalism /colonialism and its extension neo-colonialism which have developed in diverse and sometimes subtle ways a moral, intellectual, and cultural superiority complex towards us as an oppressed people. Sekou Touré says, ”the science of depersonalizing the colonized people is sometimes so subtle in its methods that it progressively succeeds in falsifying our natural psychic behavior and devaluing our own original virtues and qualities with a view to our assimilation”. (Touré A. S.The Political Leader Considered As The Representative Of A Culture p.3) We are clear that the assertion of the cultural personality of an oppressed culture becomes the catalyst for its national liberation movement. Nkrumah and Touré both call for the revival and integrity of the African personality, it is this re-personalization, which constitutes the successful affirmation of the cultural personality of the oppressed culture. Re-personalization for Africans means re-Africanisation to be accomplished through the Cultural Revolution. Nkrumah says that the revolutionary African personality “expresses identification not only with Africa’s historical past, but with the struggle of the African people in the African Revolution to liberate and unify the continent and to build a just society.”(Nkrumah,K Revolutionary Path p 206). The Revolutionary African Personality is a pan-Africanist concept which identifies us not by our language, religion or geographical location but in terms of our goals which are dynamic, just and noble. Thus, the Revolutionary African Personality puts emphasis on our ideological identity over anything else. It is this ideological identity for which we must consistently struggle which can only be ultimately realized through the success of the Cultural Revolution.

Humanism, Egalitarianism and Collectivism

Humanism, Egalitarianism and Collectivism are the cluster of humanist principles which underlie traditional African society and define the African personality. Respect for human beings and social solidarity, coupled with a keen sense of fraternity, justice and cooperation between men and women are the very foundation of traditional African society.

However, Sekou Touré adds to this that “ society has been marked by the existence of two natures of life, two natures transposing themselves in thought, action, behavior and in the options of (wo)men, whether political, economic, social or cultural. In other words there are two human natures in mankind and in each People; we have the People [interests] itself and the anti-People [interests], with a permanent struggle being waged between the two, the class struggle.”…(Touré A.S. Women In Society p26)

The imperialist incursion into Africa has exacerbated these contradictions, and the battle against the anti-people’s class has dictated that we incorporate in addition to our class analysis the national and gender aspects of the struggle to include the full scope of our Pan African reality. Our ideology teaches us that the first principle of the Revolution is that everything we have earned in life is a reflection of the struggles and contributions of the People and that the masses of People are the makers of history. Included in this principle is the understanding that (wo)man is not merely treated as a means to an end but also as an end in themselves. This is the revolutionary operational principle that forms the basis for the egalitarian, humanist and collectivist character of our ideology.

In fact the (dialectical) relationship between (wo)man and the People shows that the Peoples interests are (wo)man’s interest because it is the People that generate (wo)man. Further more the value and level of the historical evolution of a People is faithfully measured by the condition of the women in society.

Dialectical and Historical Materialism

Revolutionaries want Revolution because it means a qualitative change in the oppressive conditions of the status- quo of capitalist society. In order to bring about this change, revolutionaries must study the science of Revolution. Dialectical and historical materialism is the essence of revolutionary science. Through the study and application of revolutionary ideology, which includes the scientific laws of dialectical and historical materialism, revolutionaries are able to understand the most general laws of the development of nature, human society, and thinking. It is therefore an indispensable instrument of scientific analysis and revolutionary transformation of the world. Sekou Touré says dialectical materialism “studies the general connections between the elements of nature, the laws of evolution of the objective world and the action that these laws exercise on human consciousness.”.(Touré, A.S.Strategy and Tactics of the Revolution, 52) “Dialectics is the method of scientific analysis which all [people] Christians, Muslims and atheist alike can use. Historical materialism is scientific. It objectively proves the rule of historical evolution from the production system. The changes society experienced, the succession of different regimes from the primitive community to socialism can scientifically be explained by historical materialism. Here dialectics deals with the method of analysis and explanation of facts of social and historical phenomena. Historical materialism made it possible to enlighten the process of changes recorded in every man’s life and characterized by the existence of production systems with properties and features different from one another.”(Touré, A.S. Africa On The Move vol xxiv chapterVI,Revolution and Religion p185) 

Historical materialism is the dialectical method applied to history. Historical materialism analyzes and explains the historical processes of evolutionary and revolutionary changes in society characterized by the changes in production systems with properties and features which differ from one to another. Historical materialism does not list the stages of the evolution of society, it analyzes society to show the specific origin of every stage of it’ s evolution, how every qualitative change originates and the specific characteristics of every stage.

The Harmony between Religion/Spirituality and Revolution

For Nkrumahism-Touréism, a revolutionary ideology coming from African culture there is and cannot be any contradiction between Revolution and Religion. In fact Revolution and Religion/spirituality are in harmony and are complementary aspects of culture. Religion and spirituality are dominant features of the African Personality. Nkrumah points out that “The traditional face of Africa includes an attitude towards man which can only be described, in its social manifestation, as being socialist. This arises from the fact that man is regarded in Africa as primarily a spiritual being, a being endowed originally with a certain inward dignity and value” ( Nkrumah,K. Consciencism p68).

For African people there is essential harmony in our faith in the Creator and the African Revolution. To fulfill our obligations to our religion or spirituality we have an obligation to properly serve one another, Gods’ highest creation. Man and Woman, the true servants of God and the People, have the duty to fight for the liberation of those deprived of liberty, whether an individual or a People.

Revolution is the collective action and struggle of an oppressed People guided and supported by a consciously planned process (ideology) and determination to qualitatively change an old, backward and oppressive political-economic condition (capitalism), into a new progressive and just system that will work for the People’s interests (Socialism).

Religion is a set of beliefs and principles that affirm the existence of one or more supreme beings or God(s) which govern us all. Religion influences and motivates social behavior in the sense that it serves as a moral guide and provides reassurance to People that in spite of what may seem to be an overwhelmingly negative situation, through the practice of religion and serving God, peace, justice and prosperity will prevail. Religion holds respect for human dignity and human virtue. Religion can also project man’s existence onto the next world, and reserves for a future world positive or negative existence according to their life conduct in this world. However as Sekou Touré, a revolutionary who practices Islam,  points out “The Revolution does not intend to deny this future world; it only wishes that the struggle against evil be not `deferred` or postponed, and this is actually what all sincere believers and the dispossessed, regardless of race, sex or nationality are pressing for.” (A. S. Touré, Revolution and Religion, Africa On The Move volxxiv).

Both Revolution and Religion share common values which they want people to reflect, and even more they want People to become the uncompromising and faithful advocates of. Some of these values are justice, peace and freedom for mankind, the nation and the laboring masses. Revolution and Religion proclaim, organize and conduct a permanent struggle, a universal struggle which, for the former is class struggle, the clash between antagonistic interests represented by classes that are opposed in the process of production, distribution and utilization of goods. While for the latter it is a struggle between good and evil, good embodying truth, justice and beauty, and evil embodying exploitation, lies, oppression, in essence all that is contrary to good.

Suffering, sweat and sacrifice are considered by both Revolution and Religion as necessary and ongoing on the long road to freedom. An important part of Religion and Revolution involves the unity of the philosophy and the behavior it advocates. In other words, not only is there is a constant struggle for the honest adherents of both Revolution and Religion to live up to the principles of each, but both Revolution and Religion have also been misused by corrupt men and women as a tool of exploitation and oppression.

Hence we should judge Revolution and Religion primarily by its principles not necessarily by its adherents. We know that our People’s faith and belief in righteousness and justice, which is upheld by their religious and spiritual faith must reinforce the need to engage in revolutionary political activity to defeat the enemies of God and the People on earth. The essential harmony of Revolution and Religion can only be affirmed in the struggle to build a just society.

The Necessity For Permanent, Mass, Revolutionary, Pan-African Political Education, Organization and Action

Following the 5th Pan-African Congress in 1945, the mass political party emerged within the mass political movements as a qualitative leap and superior form of organized mass struggle, although mass political movement remained the dominant form of struggle. Some of these political movements can and do topple neo-colonialism, as most puppet regimes are weak. But generally speaking only mass-based revolutionary parties unified by a monolithic ideology will be strong enough to seize and sustain state power when confronted with imperialism’s counter-offensive of political, economic, military and psychological terrorism. Only mass-based parties with revolutionary ideology will maintain class struggle as a strategic principle and properly organize the class struggle along clear-cut class lines to defeat the internal and external enemies of the People’s class. Only ideological monolithic mass parties of conscious cadre are capable of organizing socialist transformation. 

A dialectical relationship exists between mass political movements and mass revolutionary parties. Revolutionary mass parties are a product of mass political movements. The mass movements remain relentless in struggle against oppression and for a better way of life. They serve as a source of sustenance and bulwark of defense for revolutionary party building. The wider mass movements stand as an inexhaustible reservoir of revolutionary mass potential, which ultimately must be tapped to realize our mass party. Revolutionary party building is integrally connected with and seeks to be a catalytic force with respect to ideologically transforming the broader mass movements into one revolutionary mass Pan-African party. Through ideological education and struggle, the Party seeks to progressively raise the level of class-consciousness. This transformation largely depends on acquiring the special Competence of ideologically recruiting and training cadre on a mass scale.

Revolutionary Ideology as The Greatest Asset

Nkrumahism-Touréism puts emphasis on the fact that the fundamental task facing Africa is the ideological transformation of man and woman. This transformation begins in the realm of morals and values:

“Africa needs a new type of citizen, a dedicated, modest, honest, informed man [and woman] who submerges self in service to the nation and mankind. A man [and woman] who abhors greed and detests vanity. A new type of man [and woman] whose humility is his [her] strength and whose integrity is his [her] greatness.” (Nkrumah,K. 1975 Africa Must Unite p.130).

Both Nkrumah and Touré held ideology as the crucial element and the greatest asset in the African revolution. Touré teaches us that “Culture is the framework of ideology. Culture is the container, which carries ideology as its contents.” Africa has her own culture and thus must have her own ideology thereby conforming to the African personality. Nkrumah informs us that philosophy is an instrument of ideology and must derive it’s weapons from the living conditions of African people and that it is from those conditions that the intellectual content of our philosophy must be created. Nkrumah teaches us further that…. “a united people armed with an ideology which explains the status quo and illuminates our path of development is the greatest asset we posses for the total liberation and complete emancipation of Africa. And the emancipation of Africa completes the process of the emancipation of man.” (Nkrumah, K. 1964 Why The Spark p.2).

Touré echoes Nkrumah’s position that political freedom is a prerequisite for economic freedom and adds that political revolution is part and parcel of the ideological revolution. Hence ideological revolution is the fundamental requirement for political and economic revolutions. Likewise, political independence is incomplete unless it is followed by an economic revolution. Touré shows revolutionary ideology as the critical element in developing revolutionary consciousness as he teaches us the laws of developing consciousness. When he says,

“ Without revolutionary consciousness there is no Revolution! All those who have had to conduct revolution have been able to verify this. But where does this revolutionary consciousness come from, since it is certain that it is not basic datum, nor does it come into being and develop spontaneously? History teaches that it is created and developed through ideological education and revolutionary practice. We can equally affirm that without ideological training and without revolutionary action, there can be no revolutionary consciousness.”

Sekou Touré

To achieve a decisive impact on or recruit from mass movements the Party must have ideologically strong cadre and a program of ideological development. With the mass party our masses can bring forth and strengthen the best attributes of the mass movement into the qualified expressions of the mass revolutionary party characterized by mass revolutionary consciousness and mass ideological power as the guiding force to revolutionary practice.

The All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (AAPRP) is a permanent, independent, revolutionary, socialist, Pan-African Political Party based in Africa. Africa is the just homeland of African People all over the world. Our Party is an integral part of the Pan-African and World Socialist revolutionary movement. The A-APRP understands that “all people of African descent, whether they live in North or South America, the Caribbean, or in any other part of the world, are Africans and belong to the African Nation”. — (Kwame Nkrumah, Class Struggle in Africa, page 4)

The Decarceral Possibilities of Political Education

By John Kamaal Sunjata

We must confront the carceral structures mechanistically embedded in our methods of education. Unfortunately, school as a social formation reflects the deeper, carceral logics animating the racial capitalist state. Therefore, we must take an abolitionist approach to education that subverts its institutional patterning—the acquiescence of our collective will, the subordination of our critical faculties, and the total indoctrination of the masses for the purposes of status-quo reproduction. The current style of education (re)fabricates racial capitalist social relations and extends the racial-coloniality of white supremacy. Part of revolutionary political education then must cultivate an environment wherein educators are not mere fonts of carceral authority, but authoritative fulcrums in the invention of decarcerated learning. The student is not an object where “knowledge” is deposited, rather both the student and educator are subjects in the process of learning. Paulo Friere identified the banking model of education, the one we are most intimately familiar with, in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and advocated for what he called the “problem-posing method.” Learning is the process where we gather useful data and construct information in reflective participation and reflexive equilibrium with material reality. Knowledge is the result of this dynamic feedback, a culmination of exertions where we engage our critical faculties and weigh numerous rationales against material reality; material reality itself is an active participant in the process of knowledge-creation. The individualized struggle against the obstacles of intellectualism becomes a shared, collectivized struggle when all concerned parties are partnered together in pitched, dialectical motion as its functionaries.

Education must not be an exercise in the domination of the vulnerable, but an exercise in the liberation of the oppressed. We don’t want to reproduce carceral forms, we want learning environments where freedom flourishes edenistically. The dominant convention supports racial capitalism, racial-colonialism, and white supremacism; the dominant convention is ultimately the state of ordinary and extraordinary oppressions due to the machinations of political economy. If we endeavor to overturn the dominant convention, we must design the learning environments where revolutionaries are created. For education to be a force that produces revolutionaries, we must curate intellectual creativity, curiosity, and critique. Collapsing the relationship of carceral authority that educators hold over students is crucial to creating a shared struggle, and a shared struggle is crucial for mutual respect. As such, mutual respect only springs forth once unjustified hierarchies are directly confronted and vigorously resisted. The natural advantage the educator tends to hold above the student is intellectual experience in the form of crystalized and fluid knowledge. However, despite this, there is still space for shared struggle to occur.

Shared struggle is a necessary and sufficient condition for liberation for, as Chairman Fred Hampton once said, “If [we] dare to struggle, [we] dare to win. If [we] dare not struggle, then…[we] don't deserve to win.” Shared struggle is only possible in the presence of opposition. Opposition always presents a reactionary resistance inversely related to any new sociopolitical currents. Reactionary resistance cannot be overcome without a greater revolutionary opposition or an escalation in the level of shared struggle. So, shared struggle itself is necessary for dramatic ruptures from dominant convention. Protracted relationships of mutual respect transform into relationships of true solidarity. When an educator engages in an abolitionist politic, they will develop true solidarity with their students. When the educator is in true solidarity with their students, their institutional authorities will be utilized to protect the students from the carceral logics of schooling. The educator in democratic consultation with the students will develop ethical and sensible ways to solve interpersonal conflicts without soliciting any part of the carceral state.

An epistemic dialogue is the set of relations dialectically forged between educator–students and student–educators as subjects in learning through the shared struggle within an educational environment, inherited or developed. The communities within the sphere are affected by these dynamics as the subjects engage their material realities based upon new discoveries. True solidarity directly engages everyone with the epistemic dialogue required to collectively transform our material realities. The interactions that take place within the epistemic dialogue can be regarded as epistemic discourses. When we develop our capacities to critically approach epistemic discourses, we are equipping ourselves with tactics and strategies to subvert the dominant convention that defines our current epistemic dialogue. Our capacities are bolstered by sharpening our reflective participation and reflexive equilibrium.

Reflexive equilibrium requires we balance theory against intuitive convictions; develop general principles of ideas alongside their moral judgments, and balance ethical statements with opposing or antagonistic ethical concepts against the moral conceptions undergirding the general principles motivating so-called “common sense.” We must consider the logical corollaries of every decision and anticipate the decisions that our decisions may make. In short, we think, learn, and adjust accordingly through an interactive process.

We must also hone our reflective participation, or our investigation of phenomenon from our experiments and reflecting upon generated insights. Without an abundance of active reflection, in the presence of passive participation, people will default on the side of the dominant capitalist–imperialist paradigm. Counterrevolutionary forces will (re)create what we currently have: a society of pawns. Hence, it is the responsibility of educators and students to prefigure the ecosystem conducive for producing revolutionaries.

Power Systems, Propaganda, and the Maintenance of Exploitation

 By Marcus Kahn

In biology class, I was taught that structure determines function. The respiratory system has a lot of surface area (structure) to absorb and distribute oxygen (function). The lungs may be built of the same basic substance as other parts of the body (carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, etc.) but the structural arrangement at an atomic, molecular, and cellular level determines how the larger system behaves. A sword and a scalpel may be built of the same metal, but they are designed and structured to accomplish completely different tasks.

With this in mind, we should evaluate the function of our existing power system according to its structure and determine what it is designed to accomplish. This involves stripping away its rhetoric and self-image, looking at the distribution of decision-making power, and determining whether the system is capable of being reformed into something fair and equitable, or whether it’s a sword that needs to be melted down and transformed using the same basic substances, people and law.

A democratic power system seeks to give everyone an equal voice in collective decisions, rooted in the underlying assumption that such a system of governance would tend towards justice and prosperity. If the atoms are horizontally structured through laws that provide equal access to decision-making, this will lead to an equitable distribution of resources and opportunity. If the system is hierarchically structured and decision-making emanates from the top, the system will function exploitatively to the benefit of those in power. Democratic (bottom-up flow of decision-making) and authoritarian (top-down flow of decision-making) power systems may be built of the same basic substance (people and rules to govern their behavior), but their differing structures determine who they ultimately serve. When decision-making power is concentrated in the hands of a few, a small minority becomes capable of systematically defending their interests by creating law and enforcing it through legally sanctioned violence.

There are examples of concentrated power in monarchies and theocracies throughout history whereby the labor of the majority is exploited for the profit of the powerful few, at the cost of human life and the ability to control that life. The ‘special interests’ of the powerful minority not only differ from the interests of the vast majority of the population. Their achievement depends on popular submission to the will of those in power. But popular submission to an exploitative power system is no easy task. It is difficult to convince people to work for you and hand over the fruits of their labor, whether that’s years of unpaid childcare or ten hours a day behind a desk. Power systems require a parallel system of belief to accomplish what they can’t enforce physically. You need to convince a substantial portion of the population, as well as yourself, that you are justified in dictating their behavior and demanding their obedience.

The way exploitative power systems are justified can usefully be termed as the ‘dominant ideology’ in a given society. Dominant ideologies have varied across time and geopolitical situation. In 14th century England you might have someone holding up a bible to justify taxing landless peasants, meanwhile an Aztec priest is across the ocean telling everyone why his divine right to rule justifies economic inequality and social control. In the more secular modern age, the dominant ideology has taken on a global and comparatively homogenous character. The modern dominant ideology, (the belief system that justifies exploitation) can be conceptually divided into four interdependent categories based off their inherent properties and historical development; patriarchy (oppression justified by gender and sexuality), state-corporate capitalism (oppression justified by property rights), imperialism (oppression justified by nationality) and white supremacy (oppression justified by perceived race).

History rarely provides neat watersheds, but much of their development and form can be explained by the residual power of fundamentalist religion, the ‘discovery’ of the New World and corresponding racist-imperialist colonial systems that extended from western Europe beginning in the 16th century, and the crystallization of the state-corporate capitalist economic system through the growth of multinational corporations and massive financial institutions since the late 19th century, accelerated after WWII and enforced by powerful Western nations, primarily U.S. military and economic power.

These forms of oppression are deeply interlinked, backed by the threat and execution of lawful violence, and justified by information distributed from powerful institutions directed by men, billionaires, powerful nations, and white people, most potently all four wrapped into one person like Zuckerberg, Bloomberg, Jobs, Bezos, Murdoch, Gates, or Trump.

The means of reproducing and distributing the dominant ideology changes in tandem with technological advances. The modern development of mass information distribution systems (e.g. standardized education, corporate mass media, the public relations and advertising industries, and more recently the Internet) has given a tiny minority historically unprecedented influence over the information people receive, and therefore how they behave. If people clearly understand universal rights to freedom, health, safety, and sustenance they will resist laws, ideas, and people that oppose those rights. If they pledge allegiance to a nationalist symbol before absorbing thirteen years of revisionist history or read the same newspaper every day, they are much more likely to uphold the existing power system because they are convinced it’s the right thing to do. In its essence, what has developed over the past century is a highly sophisticated propaganda system whose ideological production is distributed among powerful institutions in the public and private sectors. These institutions are controlled by a class of individuals who share similar, though not always identical interests.

The label ‘propaganda system’ may seem counterintuitive. When we hear the word ‘propaganda’ we tend to picture a tightly coordinated and centralized government-run agency that distributes pamphlets, radio broadcasts, etc. Chomsky notes an inverse relationship between a state’s ability to use violence on its own population, and the sophistication of the propaganda system in place. The more authoritarian the power system is, the more rudimentary its propaganda, the more democratic the more sophisticated. Within so-called “free” societies like the U.K. and the U.S., violence is not always an easy option for maintaining power. Through popular struggles over the centuries, these societies have made some limited progress in securing legal protections against state-sanctioned violence, and those in power have had to find new ways to ensure obedience.

This sincere fear of public disobedience and interference in public policy has been referred to as the ‘threat of democracy’ or more recently the ‘crisis of democracy’. But the need to structurally marginalize public influence is a priority James Madison understood when designing a constitutional framework put in place to protect the interests of the ‘minority of the opulent’, and a phenomenon those in power in the 1960s and 70s understood when facing popular resistance in the form of the civil rights, anti-war, labor, and feminist movements. In response to this threat, and enabled by developments in communications technology, those with a vested interest in maintaining and furthering the existing power system established control over new means of mass information distribution to marshal public behavior without the use of force and ‘manufacture consent’ for exploitative public policy.

This system of ideological control is not centrally coordinated or even fully understood by those who participate. Executives at ABC (Disney) and NBC (General Electric) do not call each other to compare notes on how to oppress the working class. But those with ultimate decision-making power atop these rigidly structured and powerful institutions (mostly rich white men from powerful countries) share similar interests on a range of public policy issues and independently manufacture a limited range of debate that tries to ignore or vilify ideas and people that threaten their power. Though slight variations in tactics and opinion reflect the distribution of power amongst distinct institutions, the output of corporate mass media institutions is ideologically consistent due to hierarchical and undemocratic internal structures, and is also influenced by mutualistic relationships with other centers of concentrated power (e.g. a government that supplies fresh official information or the corporate advertisers who help pay the bills). These inherent structural pressures orient public discourse towards the interests of the powerful.

Corporate media institutions help to reframe critical issues that have attracted popular concern such as climate change, wealth distribution, military intervention, health care, and police power in ways that maintain the integrity of the power system and ensure the continued exploitation of the global population for private gain without meaningful public interference. By appealing to widespread dissatisfaction and perhaps themselves using the language of ‘reform’, those with power avoid addressing the need for transformative deconstruction and the institution of democratic structures of governance that are upheld by popular consent and dictated by collective decision-making rather than violence and ideological management.