Class, Gender, Race & Colonialism: The ‘Intersectionality’ of Marx

By Kevin B. Anderson

Republished from Monthly Review.

Publisher’s Preface

Marx’s writings have sometimes been misrepresented. Many consider them to be no longer relevant for the 21st century on the mistaken assumption that he was obsessed only with class and had little appreciation of how issues of gender, racism and colonialism inter-related with class and the struggle for human emancipation. But as Kevin Anderson explains in this pamphlet:

It is important to see both [Marx’s] brilliant generalisations about capitalist society and the very concrete ways in which he examined not only class, but also gender, race, and colonialism, and what today would be called the intersectionality of all of these. His underlying revolutionary humanism was the enemy of all forms of abstraction that denied the variety and multiplicity of human experience, especially as his vision extended outward from Western Europe. For these reasons, no thinker speaks to us today with such force and clarity.

The pamphlet is part of a series published by Daraja Press entitled Thinking Freedom. We will be publishing other short, pamphlet-sized publications that address key topics / issues related to current struggles for emancipation, justice, dignity and self-determination targeted at the growing generations of activists, members social movements, and unions. Our aim is to produce short, easy to read, jargon free, pamphlets as print, pdf, ebook and, in some cases, audiobook formats. The pamphlets will aim to stimulate reflection and debate. In some instances, the publications will be accompanied by webinars and podcasts. The  idea is to make popular materials that encourage deeper reflection on the meaning and possibilities for emancipatory politics that does not blindly follow established dogma, but reviews the ‘classics’ and international experiences critically.We have published a series of interviews / podcasts in relation to Organising in the time of Covid-19 that can be accessed at darajapress.com.

If you have suggestions about topics that you think should be included in this series, please get in touch at info [at] darajapress.com.

For a PDF version of this pamphlet, please visit Daraja Press.

—Firoze Manji
Publisher, Daraja Press

Class, Gender, Race & Colonialism: The ‘Intersectionality’ of Marx

It is clear today that the emancipation of labour from capitalist alienation and exploitation is a task that still confronts us. Marx’s concept of the worker is not limited to European white males, but includes Irish and Black super-exploited and therefore doubly revolutionary workers, as well as women of all races and nations. But, his research and his concept of revolution go further, incorporating a wide range of agrarian non-capitalist societies of his time, from India to Russia and from Algeria to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, often emphasising their gender relations. In his last, still partially unpublished writings, he turns his gaze Eastward and Southward. In these regions outside Western Europe, he finds important revolutionary possibilities among peasants and their ancient communistic social structures, even as these are being undermined by their formal subsumption under the rule of capital. In his last published text, he envisions an alliance between these non-working-class strata and the Western European working class.

“Proletarians [Proletarier] of all countries, unite!” It is with these ringing words that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels famously conclude their Communist Manifesto in 1848.[1] This suggests a broad class struggle involving millions of workers across national and regional boundaries against their collective enemies, capital and landed property. In that same Manifesto, Marx and Engels also write, in another well-known passage, that “the workers have no country,” and further that “national differences and antagonisms between peoples [Völker] are shrinking more and more” with the development of the capitalist world market.[2]

An Abstract, General Theory of Capital and Labour

In the Manifesto, we are presented with large social forces, the proletariat or working class and its opponents, contending with each other on an international scale, where differences of culture, nationality, and geography have been overturned, or are being overturned, as capital is coming to rule the world and the workers are organising their resistance to it. Marx and Engels are writing here at a very high level of generality, abstracting from the specificities of the life experience of Western European and North American workers, and predicting that their lot will soon become that of the world’s working people, at that time mainly peasants labouring in predominantly agrarian societies.

It is in this sense that Marx and Engels also write that capitalism has “through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.” They add: “National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible.”[3] Capital creates a world culture alongside its world market, forcing itself into every corner of the globe. They go so far as to applaud, in terms imbued with Eurocentric condescension, how capitalism “draws even the most barbarian nations into civilisation” as it “batters down all Chinese walls” and forces these “barbarians … to adopt the bourgeois mode of production.”[4]  While pain is produced as old societies are destroyed, capital is carrying out its historic mission, the creation of “more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations put together.”[5]

Two decades later, in the 1867 preface to Capital, Marx writes, with a similar logic emphasising abstraction, that the “value form” that is at the core of capitalist production cannot be studied only empirically with regard to specific commodities produced. He adds: “Why? Because the complete body is easier to study than its cells.” Therefore, to analyse capitalism and its value form properly and fully, one must resort to “the power of abstraction” in order to examine commodity production as a whole.[6]

There is clearly a universalising pull under capitalism, a globalising system whose extension homogenises, regularises, and flattens the world, uprooting and changing it as needed to maximise value production, a quest that forms the soul of a soulless system. That same universalising pull creates a deep contradiction, the revolutionary opposition of the modern working class, “united and organised by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production.”[7]

The experience of the working class is similarly homogenised. Shorn of its means of production (land, tools, etc) and reduced to a group of propertyless wage labourers, prototypically in giant factories, Marx’s working class is both alienated and exploited in ways specific to capitalism. As early as 1844 Manuscripts, he wrote of alienated labour, a concept deepened in Capital in the section of commodity fetishism. In the capitalist production process, human relations are fetishised because the products of labour come to dominate their producers, the workers, in a jarring subject–object reversal. These workers then experience that domination as the impersonal power of capital, which is itself produced by their labour. Capital lords it over them, turning human relations into “relations between things,” with the working class objectified to the extreme.[8]

Raya Dunayevskaya is among the few to emphasise Marx’s additional statement to the effect that these relations “appear [erscheinen] as what they are”.[9] The German verb erscheinen [like the word apparaissent he uses at this point in the French edition] is not a false or “mere” appearance and it differs from scheinen [French: paraissent], which means “appear” in the sense of semblance or even false appearance. Thus, we are not dealing with a false appearance that conceals “true” and humanistic human relations, but a new and unprecedented reality based upon “the necessity of that appearance because, that is, in truth, what relations among people are at the point of production” in a capitalist system.[10] In the long run, of course, such a thing-like human relationship is false in the sense that it will be rejected and uprooted by the working class, which seeks a society controlled not by capital but by free and associated labour. But, it remains utterly real while we are under the sway of the capitalist mode of production.

At the same time, the workers suffer harsh material exploitation, as the surplus value they create in the production process is appropriated by capital, in a system characterised by the greatest gulf in history between the material lot of the dominant classes and those of the working people. This exploitation grows in both absolute and relative terms as capital centralises and develops further technologically, in the process of the greatest quantitative increase in the development of the productive forces in human history.[11]

Marx pulls together these two concepts, exploitation and alienation, in his discussion of capital accumulation, wherein the “capitalist system” turns the labour of the workers into stultifying “torment,” serving to “alienate” from the workers “the intellectual potentialities of the labor process,” while at the same time, the rate of exploitation increases: “the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse” relative to the vertiginous accumulation of surplus value by capital.[12]

Marx’s Concrete Dialectic

The kind of analysis presented above shows Marx as our contemporary, not least his grasp of the limitless quest for surplus value by capital, and the concomitant deep alienation and exploitation that it visits upon the working people, from factories to modern call centres.

At the same time, these kinds of statements, especially when read out of context, have been used for decades by Marx’s critics, both conservative and left-wing, to portray him as a thinker whose abstract model of capital and labour occludes national differences, race, ethnicity, gender, and other crucially important aspects of human society and culture.

On the one hand, these critics are wrong because capitalism is in fact a unique social system that overturns and homogenises all previous social relations, tending towards the reduction of all human relations to that of capital versus labour. Thus, one cannot understand contemporary family and gender relations, ethno-racial and communal conflict, or ecological crisis fully without examining the underlying relationships described above. For the family, the ethnic tableau, and the natural environment are all conditioned by the underlying fact of a capitalist mode of production.

But, on the other hand, these critics pose questions that make us look more carefully at Marx’s theoretical categories. It is very important in this regard to realise, if one truly wants to appreciate Marx’s originality, that his concept of capital and labour was posed not only at a high level of abstraction, but that, at other levels, it encompasses a far wider variety of human experience and culture. As Bertell Ollman[13] has emphasised, Marx operated at varying levels of abstraction.

The present article centres on three related points.

• First, Marx’s working class was not only Western European, white, and male, since from his earliest to his latest writings, he took up the working class in all its human variety.

• Second, Marx was not an economic or class reductionist, for throughout his career, he considered deeply various forms of oppression and resistance to capital and the state that were not based entirely upon class, but also upon nationality, race and ethnicity, and gender.

• Third, by the time of Marx’s later writings, long after the Communist Manifesto, the Western European pathway of industrial capitalist development out of feudalism was no longer a global universal. Alternate pathways of development were indeed possible, and these connected to types of revolutions that did not always fit the model of industrial labour overthrowing capital.

In terms of a concrete dialectic, Marx follows in the wake of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. This is true from his earliest writings to Capital, where he writes of “the Hegelian ‘contradiction,’ which is the source of all dialectics.”[14] One striking feature of Hegel’s dialectical framework, despite its overall universalising thrust, is its rejection of abstract universals, while also avoiding a mere empiricism. No previous philosopher had drawn history and social existence into philosophy in this way, as seen especially in the Phenomenology of Spirit, a book so crucial to our understanding of the present moment that two new translations of it have appeared in 2018. Again and again in this work, Hegel rejects the abstract universal as “the night in which, as the saying goes, all cows are black.”[15] The concreteness of his universals is also seen in the ascending concrete forms of consciousness that develop along the universal pathway towards the freedom of the human spirit, from ancient Rome to the Reformation and the French Revolution of his own time, each of them limited by their historical, social, and cultural context. Of course, Marx also rejects aspects of Hegel’s idealism, especially his stress on the growth of human consciousness as the most important result of the dialectics of history, as opposed to the actuality of human freedom and healthy development in a society that has been revolutionised from below. In short, Hegel’s dialectic, while social and historical, remains somewhat dehumanised.

Such stress on the concrete universal in no way negates my earlier citation, where Marx writes that one needs the “power of abstraction” to get at what is really crucial about capitalism, its value form and the dehumanised, fetishised existence experienced by those who live under its domination. No, the solution has to be approached from both directions. The abstract rests upon the concrete, but at the same time, the abstract concept has to concretise itself, to become determinate. However, Marx equally rejects what Karel Kosík called the “pseudoconcrete,” a type of concrete that cannot think beyond the immediately given under capitalism. As against such false or distorted forms of consciousness, dialectics “dissolves fetishised artefacts both of the world of things and the world of ideas, in order to penetrate to their reality.”[16]

Thus, Marx is hostile to mere empiricism, embracing a dialectical form of totality. He at the same time castigates, as did Hegel, the abstract universals of traditional idealist philosophy and of modern liberalism, with its human and civil rights that are so often little more than formulaic to those at the bottom of society. Yet, at the same time, he embraces what he and Hegel called the concrete universal, a form of universality that was rooted in social life, and yet pointed beyond the given world of the “pseudoconcrete.”

One example of the concrete universal can be glimpsed in how Marx argues that we cannot adequately measure the world of capitalist exploitation and alienation either in its own terms (the “pseudoconcrete”) or by comparing it to past forms of domination like Western European feudalism, the ancient Greco–Roman world, or the “Asiatic” mode of production. Instead, he measures capitalist society against a different yardstick, the unrealised but potentially realisable horizon of a communist future of free and associated labour, as has been emphasised in two recent studies.[17] But, this is not merely an imagined republic, as Niccolò Machiavelli characterised the abstract and schematic models of the good society found in ancient Greco–Roman thinkers like Socrates. Marx’s vision of the future was based upon the aspirations and struggles of a really existing social class, the proletariat, to which his writings sought to give a more universal and concrete form.

The Working Class in All Its Human Variety

From the outset, Marx saw Britain as the country where the capitalist mode of production was most developed, far ahead of any other country. This can be seen especially in Capital, where British examples of both capital and labour predominate. But the British working class was by no means homogenous. As the industrial revolution surged in Manchester, the cutting-edge city of 19th-century capitalism, it did so by exploiting a working class with deep ethnic divisions between English and Irish workers. Engels discusses this issue at length in his 1845 book, The Condition of the Working Class in England published just after he and Marx began to collaborate. Marx regarded this book as one of Engels’s greatest contributions, citing it more than any other of his friend’s writings in Capital.

Marx himself took up the Irish potato famine of the 1840s as a tragedy rooted in the process of capital accumulation, especially in Capital. He wrote as well about Irish workers in Britain, especially in 1869–70, at a time when the First International was substantially engaged with supporting Irish revolutionaries. While he was able to convince the International to support the Irish, it was a difficult battle. At the same time, this was a battle that needed to be fought and won, because it got to the heart of why, despite its large-scale industrialisation and organised working class, Britain had not seen the level of class struggle predicted in texts written at an abstract level like the Communist Manifesto. He offered an explanation in a “Confidential Communication” of the International issued in early 1870:

[T]he English bourgeoisie has not only exploited Irish poverty to keep down the working class in England by forced immigration of poor Irishmen, but it has also divided the proletariat into two hostile camps … The common English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers wages and the standard of life. He feels national and religious antipathies for him. He views him similarly to how the poor whites of the Southern states of North America viewed black slaves. This antagonism among the proletarians of England is artificially nourished and kept up by the bourgeoisie. It knows that this split is the true secret of the preservation of its power.[18]

Marx also saw this antagonism based upon the double oppression of the Irish workers, as both proletarians and as members of an oppressed minority in dialectical terms. He viewed the Irish as sources of revolutionary ferment that could help spark a British revolution. Thus, we have here the analysis of a really existing working class at a specific point in time, Britain in 1870, as opposed to the more general and abstract manner in which he and Engels conceptualised the working class in the Manifesto.

Marx viewed the racially divided working class of the United States (US) in similar terms. He strongly opposed slavery and advocated abolitionism within the working-class movement, attacking those like Pierre Joseph Proudhon who were more ambiguous on the subject of slavery.

He conceptualised African slavery as central to capitalist development, writing as early as Poverty of Philosophy (1847):

Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry.[19]

During the 1861–65 Civil War in the US, Marx strongly, albeit critically, supported the North against the slave South. He regarded the war as a second American revolution that had created some real possibilities for the working class. He intoned in Capital:

In the US, every independent workers’ movement was paralysed as long as slavery disfigured a part of the republic. Labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin. However, a new life immediately arose from the death of slavery. The first fruit of the American Civil War was the eight hours agitation, which ran from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California, with the seven-league boots of a locomotive.[20]

At this point, he noted that a large national labour congress took place in 1866, one year after the end of the Civil War, where the demand for the eight-hour day was put forward.

Here, the abolition of slavery is seen as the precondition for a real working-class movement in the racialised capitalism of the US.

If Marx’s working class was not exclusively white, nor was it exclusively male. In her study of Marx and gender, Heather Brown concludes that in the parts of Capital devoted to the life experience of the workers, “Marx not only traces out the changing conditions of the male worker, but also gives significant emphasis to the role of women in this process.” While he sometimes lapsed into “echoing paternalistic or patriarchal assumptions” in his descriptions of female workers, it is hard to argue, as some have, that he ignored working women in his most important book.[21]

This can also be seen in his dialectical discussion of changes to the family and gender relations brought about by capitalist industrialisation, which has “dissolved the old family relationships” among the workers, as women and children were forced into horribly exploitative paid employment outside the home:

However terrible and disgusting the dissolution of the old family ties within the capitalist system may appear, large-scale industry, by assigning an important part in socially organised processes of production, outside the sphere of the domestic economy, to women, young persons, and children of both sexes, does nevertheless create a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of relations between the sexes.[22]

Marx returned to gender and the family as a research topic at the end of his life, as seen in his Ethnological Notebooks of 1880–82[23] and other notebooks from that period. In these notebooks, he explored gender relations across a number of societies, from preliterate Native Americans and Homeric Greeks, to precolonial Ireland and contemporary Australian aborigines. Some of these notes became the basis for Engels’s Origin of the Family. Although that work contains many important insights, it treats the rise of gender oppression in an economic and class reductionist manner that was far less subtle than the notes Marx left behind and which Engels used as source material.[24] These notebooks are also concerned deeply with colonialism, an issue discussed below with which Engels did not engage.

Revolutionary Subjectivity Outside the Working Class

It is important to note that Marx’s interest in gender issues was not limited to the study of working class women. From his earliest writings, he pointed to gender oppression as a crucial, foundational form of social hierarchy and domination. In the 1844 Manuscripts, he wrote:

The direct, natural, necessary relationship of human being [Mensch] to human being is the relationship of man [Mann] to woman [Weib]. … Therefore, on the basis of this relationship, we can judge the whole stage of development of the human being. From the character of this relationship it follows to what degree the human being has become and recognised himself or herself as a species being; a human being; the relationship of man to woman is the most natural relationship of human being to human being. Therefore, in it is revealed the degree to which the natural behaviour of the human being has become human.[25]

Here, Marx is concerned not only with working-class women, as discussed above, but with other strata of women as well, and across the full trajectory of human society and culture, not just capitalism. He takes up the oppression of modern women outside the working class in his 1846 text, “Peuchet on Suicide,” where he focuses on middle- and upper-class French women driven to suicide by gender-based oppression from husbands or parents, writing at one point of “social conditions … which permit the jealous husband to fetter his wife in chains, like a miser with his hoard of gold, for she is but part of his inventory.”[26] These concerns did not end with Marx’s youth. In 1858, he wrote movingly in the New York Tribune about Lady Rosina Bulwer Lytton, who had been confined to a mental institution by her politician husband for having attempted to speak out on political issues.[27]

Nor did Marx focus on the industrial working class to the exclusion of the peasantry, which he saw as an oppressed and potentially revolutionary class. Considerable attention has been paid to his characterisation of the French peasantry as somewhat conservative in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). In other contexts, though, he discussed the revolutionary potential of peasants, for example, during the 16th-century Anabaptist uprising in Germany. Concerning his own time, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), he castigated Ferdinand Lassalle for labelling the “peasants” as inherently conservative, since Lassalle’s organisation had written off “all other classes” besides the working class as “one reactionary mass”.[28]

And, while condemning racist and imperialist forms of nationalism, Marx also strongly supported nationalist movements that exhibited a clear emancipatory content. Long before Vladimir Ilich Lenin articulated a concept of national liberation, in an 1848 speech on Poland, Marx drew a distinction between what he termed “narrowly national [étroitement national]” movements and national revolutions that were “reforming and democratic,” that is, ones that put forth issues like land reform even when it targeted the indigenous upper classes rather than just a foreign enemy or occupying power.[29]

Even in the Communist Manifesto, where, as discussed above, he and Engels had written that national differences were disappearing, this was at a general, abstract level. For, when it came down to concretising the principles in terms of a set of immediate goals and slogans in a final section, “Position of the Communists in Relation to the Existing Opposition Parties,” Polish national emancipation from under Russian, Austrian, and Prussian occupation was nonetheless singled out: “In Poland, they support the party that insists on an agrarian revolution as the prime condition for national emancipation, that party which fomented the insurrection of Cracow in 1846”.[30] Marx continued to support a Polish national revolution until the end of his life. He greeted the Polish uprising of 1863 with enthusiasm and in his writings celebrating the Paris Commune of 1871; he singled out the important contribution of Polish exiles in the military defence of revolutionary Paris. Fittingly, in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, the graves of the Communards include that of Polish General Walery Wróblewski, only steps away from those of Marx’s French descendants.

In the 1870 Confidential Communication on Ireland, the peasantry and the national movement were also intertwined as revolutionary elements. An equally prominent point in this text is Marx’s defence of the International’s public support of Irish national emancipation, including appeals to the Queen to stop the execution of Irish militants. On this issue, Marx and the International’s General Council in London had come under attack by the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin’s faction, which took a class-reductionist position, rejecting “any political action that does not have as its immediate and direct aim the triumph of the workers’ cause against capital”.[31] In response, Marx wrote in the Communication:

In the first place, Ireland is the bulwark of English landlordism. If it fell in Ireland, it would fall in England. In Ireland this is a hundred times easier because the economic struggle there is concentrated exclusively on landed property, because this struggle is at the same time national, and because the people there are more revolutionary and angrier than in England. Landlordism in Ireland is maintained solely by the English army. The moment the forced Union between the two countries ends, a social revolution will immediately break out in Ireland.[32]

Moreover, he hinted that such a process could also break the impasse in which British workers were stuck:

Although revolutionary initiative will probably come from France, England alone can serve as the lever for a serious economic Revolution … It is the only country where the vast majority of the population consists of wage laborers … The English have all the material conditions [matière nécessaire] for social revolution. What they lack is a sense of generalisation and revolutionary passion. It is only the General Council that can provide them with this, that can thus accelerate the truly revolutionary movement in this country, and consequently everywhere … If England is the bulwark of landlordism and European capitalism, the only point where official England can be struck a great blow is Ireland.[33]

He conceptualised more explicitly this notion of the Irish struggle for independence as a detonator for a wider British and European working-class revolution in a letter to Engels of 10 December 1869:

For a long time I believed that it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working-class ascendancy. I always expressed this point of view in the New York Tribune. Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland. The lever must be applied in Ireland. That is why the Irish question is so important for the social movement in general.[34]

Here, Marx also acknowledges explicitly a change of position, from an earlier one, where he saw proletarian revolution spreading from the core industrial nations to the periphery. At this point, he is beginning to develop the notion of a transnational communist revolution beginning in the more agrarian, colonised peripheries of capitalism, and then spreading into the core nations. During the last years before his death in 1883, this was to become a major concern with respect to societies outside Western Europe and North America.

Late Marx: India, Russia, and Beyond

In The German Ideology of 1846, Marx and Engels conceptualised several successive stages of historical development in Eurocentric terms, later called modes of production: (i) clan or tribal, (ii) slave-based ancient Greco–Roman, (iii) serf-based feudal, (iv) formally free wage-labour-based bourgeois or capitalist, and, it was implied, (v) freely-associated-labour-based socialist. A decade later, in the Grundrisse of 1857–58, Marx discussed modes of production originating in Asia, especially India (the “Asiatic” mode of production) as a type of pre-capitalist system that did not fall easily under either (ii) or (iii). It represented something qualitatively different, without as much formal slavery, and with communal or collective property and social relations continuing in the villages for a very long time.

For Marx, this constituted a more global and multilinear theory of history, with premodern Asian societies on a somewhat different pathway of development than Western Europe, especially ancient Rome. In Capital, Vol I, he referred to “the ancient Asiatic, Classical-antique, and other such modes of production,” where commodity production “plays a subordinate role” as compared to the modern capitalist mode of production.[35] Marx’s distinction between Asian and European pre-capitalist societies was banned in Stalinist ideology, which clung to the slavery–feudal–bourgeois model of successive modes of production, something that required mental gymnastics to fit societies like Mughal India or Confucian China into the “feudal” or “slave” modes of production. Even as late as the 1970s, the noted anthropologist and Marx scholar Norair Ter-Akopian was dismissed from the Marx–Engels–Lenin Institute in Moscow for having published a book on the Asiatic mode of production.

In notes from his last years not published until after Stalin’s death, Marx summarised and commented upon his young anthropologist friend Maxim Kovalevsky’s Communal Property (1879), especially its treatment of precolonial India. Although appreciative of much of Kovalevsky’s analysis, Marx inveighed against his attempts to treat Mughal India, with its highly centralised state system, as feudal: “Kovalevsky here finds feudalism in the Western European sense. Kovalevsky forgets, among other things, serfdom, which is not in India, and which is an essential moment.” Marx concludes that concerning “feudalism,” “as little is found in India as in Rome”.[36]  These notes, available in English since 1975, did not find their way into the Collected Works of Marx and Engels. Nor can any of the notes on Kovalevsky or other late texts on India be found in the most recent collection of Marx’s India writings.[37] However, Irfan Habib’s comprehensive introduction to this volume does mention briefly the late Marx’s notebooks on India his “objection to any designation of the Indian communities as ‘feudal’.”[38]

All this would be only an academic topic had Marx not tied these issues to the contemporary issues of colonialism and world revolution. In the years 1848–53, Marx tended toward an implicit support of colonialism, whether in forcing a traditionalist China into the world market, as quoted above from the Communist Manifesto, or in his 1853 articles on India, which celebrated what he saw as modernising and progressive aspects of British rule. In 1853, he portrays India as backward in socio-economic terms, incapable of real change from within, and unable to mount serious resistance to foreign invasion due to its social divisions. Therefore, he could write that year in his Tribune article, “British Rule in India,” that British colonialism was carrying in its wake “the greatest, and to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.”[39]To be sure, Edward Said and others have caricatured his 1853 India articles as completely pro-colonialist, ignoring another major one a few weeks later, “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” which attacks the “barbarism” of British colonialism and applauds the possibility of India being able one day “to throw off the English yoke altogether”.[40] Nonetheless, some of Said’s criticisms are on target with regard to the Eurocentrism and ethnocentrism of the 1853 writings.

By the time of the Grundrisse of 1857–58, with its discussion of precolonial India being on a different historical trajectory than ancient Rome, Marx was also coming out publicly, again in the Tribune, in support of both the anti-British sepoy uprising in India and Chinese resistance to the British in the Second Opium War. But, his support for this anti-colonial resistance remained at a rather general level. Marx did not embrace the overall political aims or perspectives of the Chinese or Indians resisting imperialism, which seemed to be neither democratic nor communist.[41] This differs from his late writings on Russia, which saw emancipatory communist movements emerging from that country’s communal villages. Thus, Marx’s thinking on these issues seems to have evolved further after 1858.

Multilinear Pathways of Development and Revolution

During his last years, Marx never finished Volumes 2 and 3 of Capital, although he reworked Vol I painstakingly for the French edition of 1872–75, altering several passages that were seen to imply that societies outside the narrow band of industrialising capitalism would inevitably have to modernise in the Western industrial sense. In the original 1867 edition, he had written: “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future”.[42] Even the usually careful scholar Teodor Shanin viewed this passage as an example of “unilinear determinism”.[43] He, therefore, drew a sharp distinction between Capital (determinist) and Marx’s late writings on Russia (open-ended and multilinear). But, Shanin and other scholars who taxed Marx for this passage did not notice that in the subsequent 1872–75 French edition, the last version of the book he himself saw to publication, he recast this passage: “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to those that follow it up the industrial ladder [le suivent sur l’échelle industrielle], the image of its own future.”[44] In this way, he removed any hint of unilinear determinism and, more importantly, suggested that the future of societies outside Western Europe might follow a different pathway.

Marx made a much more explicit statement concerning his multilinear approach to the historical possibilities of agrarian societies outside Western Europe in the draft of an 1877 letter, where he criticised strongly any idea of “transforming my historical sketch [in the “Primitive Accumulation” section of Capital—KA] of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historico-philosophical theory of the general course fatally imposed on all peoples, whatever the historical circumstances in which they find themselves placed,” a letter in which he also quoted the French edition of Capital.[45]

Marx also returned at length to the subject of India in his above-cited 1879 notes on Kovalevsky[46], his Notes on Indian History[47], and his 1880–82 Ethnological Notebooks.[48] During these last years, he wrote of Russian peasant “primitive communism” as a locus of resistance to capital and of possible linkages to the revolutionary working-class communist movement in the West. This is seen in a famous passage from his last published text, the 1882 preface he and Engels contributed to a new Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto:

If the Russian revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that the two complement each other, then the present Russian common ownership [Gemeineigentum] may serve as the point of departure [Ausgungspunkt] for a communist development.[49]

In his late writings on Russia and notebooks on South Asia, North Africa, Latin America, and a number of other agrarian, pastoral, or hunter-gatherer societies, Marx is deeply concerned with the rise of gender and social hierarchy during the decline of communal social formations.[50] It is also very likely that he was interested in South Asian, North African, Latin American villages, like the Russian ones, as possible loci of resistance to capital and therefore potential allies of the working classes of Western Europe and North America.

For example, in Marx’s notes on Kovalevsky’s lengthy discussion of India, he traces in great detail the shift from kin-based communal village organisation to one grounded more in mere residency. At this stage, he has clearly rejected his earlier notion of an unchanging India until the arrival of capitalism via the British. However, as against his writings on Ireland, he never acknowledges this change explicitly, as in his 1869 letter to Engels on Ireland cited above. (Of course, we have less information on Marx’s thinking in his last years. By 1879, Engels, his most regular intellectual interlocutor, was no longer in faraway Manchester receiving Marx’s letters, but a neighbour who visited almost daily but without leaving much of paper trail of their conversations. Marx’s letters to Kovalevsky were also burned by his friends in Russia, who went to his house to do so, out of fear of them falling into the hands the police, which could have endangered the young anthropologist.)

As seen above, as early as the 1857 sepoy uprising, Marx seems to have moved away from his earlier notion of India as a passive civilisation that did not offer much resistance to foreign conquest. He recorded detailed data on Indian resistance in another set of notes taken around 1879, on British colonial official Robert Sewell’s Analytical History of India (1870), published in Moscow as Marx’s Notes on Indian History[51] without awareness that this volume consisted mainly of passages excerpted from Sewell’s book. In these notes, Marx records dozens of examples of Indian resistance to foreign invaders and domestic rulers, from the earliest historical records right up through the sepoy uprising. Moreover, Marx’s notes now view Mughal, British, and other conquests of India as contingent rather than the product of ineluctable social forces.

But, Marx’s main focus in these late notebooks on South Asia, North Africa, and Latin America is the structure and history of communal social relations and property in these regions, and on how colonialism uprooted these earlier social relations. At the same time, as a dialectical thinker, Marx also notes the persistence of remnants of these communal social forms even after they had been greatly undermined by colonialism. Did he come to believe that the Indian, Algerian, or Latin American village could become a locus of resistance to capital, as he had theorised in 1882 concerning the Russian village? That is what I have concluded after years of study of these notebooks.

To be sure, he never said such a thing explicitly. Moreover, in his late writings on Russia, in the drafts of his 1881 letter to Vera Zasulich, he even noted a key difference with India, that Russia had not “fallen prey, like the East Indies, to a conquering foreign power”. [52]

Still, I find it hard to believe that Marx engaged in such a deep and extended study of the communal social formations in precolonial and even colonial South Asia, North Africa, and Latin America without an aim beyond purely historical research. As the Italian Marx scholar Luca Basso notes, Marx was in his late writings on Russia and other non-Western societies, operating on “two planes,” that of “historical-theoretical interpretation” and that of “the feasibility or otherwise of a revolutionary movement” in the context of what he was studying.[53] The fact that he undertook this research in the years just before his clarion call in the 1882 preface to the Manifesto about an uprising in Russia’s communal villages that would link up with the Western proletariat as the “starting point for a communist revolution” suggests the connectedness of all of this research on primitive communism. As Dunayevskaya argued in the first work that linked these notebooks to modern concerns with revolution and women’s liberation: “Marx returns to probe the origin of humanity, not for purposes of discovering new origins, but for perceiving new revolutionary forces, their reason.”[54]

It is important to see both his brilliant generalisations about capitalist society and the very concrete ways in which he examined not only class, but also gender, race, and colonialism, and what today would be called the intersectionality of all of these. His underlying revolutionary humanism was the enemy of all forms of abstraction that denied the variety and multiplicity of human experience, especially as his vision extended outward from Western Europe. For these reasons, no thinker speaks to us today with such force and clarity.

Kevin B. Anderson’s authored books include Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies and Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism. Among his edited books are The Power of Negativity by Raya Dunayevskaya (with Peter Hudis), Karl Marx (with Bertell Ollman), The Rosa Luxemburg Reader (with P. Hudis), and The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence (with Russell Rockwell).

Notes

See Bibliography below.

1. MECW 6: 519; MEW 4: 493, sometimes my translation) ↵

   1. MECW 6: 502–03; MEW 4: 479 ↵

   2. MECW 6: 488 ↵

   3. MECW 6: 488 ↵

   4. MECW 6: 489 ↵

   5. Marx 1976: 90 ↵

   6. Marx 1976: 929 ↵

   7. Marx 1976: 166 ↵

   8. Marx 1976: 166; MEW 23: 86; Marx 1994: 607 ↵

   9. (Dunayevskaya 1958: 100, emphasis in the original) ↵

   10. Marx 1976: 929 ↵

   11. Marx 1976: 799 ↵

   12. Ollman 1993 ↵

   13. Marx 1976: 744 ↵

   14. Hegel 2018: 10 ↵

   15. Kosík 1976: 7 ↵

   16. Hudis 2012; Chattopadhyay 2016 ↵

   17. MECW 21: 120, emphasis in original ↵

   18. MECW 6: 167 ↵

   19. Marx 1976: 414, emphasis added ↵

   20. Brown 2012: 91 ↵

   21. Marx 1976: 620–21 ↵

   22. Krader 1974 ↵

   23. Dunayevskaya 1982; Anderson 2014; Brown 2012 ↵

   24. Quoted in Plaut and Anderson 1999: 6, emphasis in original; see also MECW 3: 295–96 for an earlier translation) ↵

   25. Plaut and Anderson 1999: 58 ↵

   26. Dunayevskaya 1982; Brown 2012 ↵

   27. MECW 24: 88–89 ↵

   28. Marx 1994: 1001, my translation from the French original; see also MECW 6: 549 ↵

   29. MECW 6: 518 ↵

   30. Quoted in MECW 21: 208 ↵

   31. MECW 21: 119–120, translation slightly altered on basis of French original in Marx 1966: 358–59 ↵

   32. MECW 21: 118–19, translation slightly altered on basis of French original in Marx 1966: 356–57 ↵

   33. MECW 43: 398, emphasis in original ↵

   34. Marx 1976: 172 ↵

   35. Krader 1975: 383 ↵

   36. Husain 2006 ↵

   37. Husain 2006: xxxv ↵

   38. MECW 12: 132 ↵

   39. (MECW 12: 221). ↵

   40. Benner 2018 ↵

   41. Marx 1976: 91 ↵

   42. Shanin 1983: 4 ↵

   43. Marx 1976: 91, my translation, see also Anderson 2014 ↵

   44. Shanin 1983: 136. ↵

   45. Krader 1975 ↵

   46. Marx 1960 ↵

   47. Krader 1974 ↵

   48. Shanin 1983: 139, see also MECW 24: 426 and MEW 19: 296, translation slightly altered ↵

   49. Some of these notebooks are still unpublished and will appear in the Marx–Engels Gesamtausgabe or MEGA, but their aspects have been discussed in Brown 2012; Pradella 2015 and Anderson 2016. ↵

   50. Marx 1960 ↵

   51. Shanin 1983: 106 ↵

   52. Basso 2015: 90 ↵

   53. Dunayevskaya 1982: 187 ↵

Bibliography

• Anderson, Kevin B (2014): Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies, New Delhi: Pinnacle Learning.

• — (2016): Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies, Expanded edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

• Basso, Luca (2015): Marx and the Common: From Capital to the Late Writings, Trans David Broder, Leiden: Brill.

• Benner, Erica (2018): Really Existing Nationalisms: A Post-Communist View from Marx and Engels, Reprint edition, New York: Oxford University Press.

• Brown, Heather (2012): Marx on Gender and the Family, Leiden: Brill.

• Chattopadhyay, Paresh (2016): Marx’s Associated Mode of Production, New York: Palgrave.

• Dunayevskaya, Raya (1958): Marxism and Freedom, New York: Bookman Associates.

• — (1982): Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, Sussex: Harvester Press.

• Hegel, G W F (2018): Phenomenology of Spirit, Trans Michael Inwood, New York: Oxford University Press.

• Hudis, Peter (2012): Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism, Leiden: Brill.

• Husain, Iqbal (ed) (2006): Karl Marx on India, New Delhi: Tulika Books.

• Kosík, Karel (1976): Dialectics of the Concrete, Trans Karel Kovanda and James Schmidt, Boston: D Reidel.

• Krader, Lawrence (ed) (1974): The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx, Second Edition, Assen: Van Gorcum.

• — (1975): The Asiatic Mode of Production, Assen: Van Gorcum.

• Marx, Karl (1960): Notes on Indian History (664–1858), Moscow: Progress Publishers.

• — (1966): “Le conseil générale au conseil fédérale de la Suisse romande,” General Council of the First International 1868–1870, Minutes, Moscow: Progress Publishers.

• — (1976): Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol 1, Trans Ben Fowkes, New York: Penguin.

• — (1994): Oeuvres IV, Edited by Maximilien Rubel, Paris: Éditions Gallimard.

• [MECW] Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels (1975–2004): Collected Works, Fifty Volumes, New York: International Publishers.

• [MEW] Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels (1968): Werke, Berlin: Dietz Verlag.

• Ollman, Bertell (1993): Dialectical Investigations, New York: Routledge.

• Plaut, Eric A and Kevin B Anderson (1999): Marx on Suicide, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

• Pradella, Lucia (2015): Globalisation and the Critique of Political Economy: New Insights from Marx’s Writings, Milton Park: Routledge.

• Shanin, Teodor (1983): Late Marx and the Russian Road, New York: Monthly Review Press.

Notes on Revolutionary Hope

By Yanis Iqbal

Humanity stands at a dangerous crossroads: a conflict between making profits and saving human life is clearly emerging, with the latter being sacrificed by the ruling class for the former. Even during a pandemic, the cogs of capitalism have not stopped working in their ruthless rhythm; hunger, wretched poverty, wealth concentration and vaccine imperialism have all moved in a frighteningly unified way, ripping apart the remaining semblances of a dignified existence. While earlier the political architecture carved by capitalists functioned as a democratic fig-leaf, it has become completely unresponsive today. The exigencies of an extremely monopolistic form of capitalism have corresponded to a centralized mode of authoritarian control aimed at containing class struggle. The political structures we currently have are aimed at invisibilizing the empty bellies of countless children and repressing the turmoil in the tin-shack settlements of the global poor.

Capitalism’s progressive putrefaction into a nakedly brutal system of pure oppression demands the discovery of new theoretical tools. Theory can’t maintain a sense of immunity from the cadences of changing conjunctures; it needs to be firmly tied to the specific concreteness of the existing period. Today’s situation calls for a powerful resurrection of revolutionary hope. One of the many functions of the bourgeoisie’s established order is to douse the dialectical fire of hope. Revolutionary hope threatens the fatalism and deterministic thinking so prevalent today. It foregrounds the inherent ability of the working class to vehemently destroy the zones of sheer exploitation built by capitalism. By showing to the subjugated subalterns the possibilities available to them, revolutionary hope binds them to the slogan raised by the Italian socialist weekly The New Order: “Educate yourselves because we will need all your intelligence. Rouse yourselves because we will need all your enthusiasm. Organize yourselves because we will need all your strength”.

Discarding Determinism

For revolutionary hope to come into being, we need to discard determinism. Instead of dialectically locating an individual in the interconnected economic, political and cultural systems, institutions and structures, determinism considers him/her to be unilaterally influenced by it. A determinist conception is based on the dichotomous division of existence into an “external world” and “human consciousness”. In this conception, the external world and consciousness are two different components of human existence. They come in contact with each other only through causal and mechanical means. Both of them are individually isolated from one another, having been transformed into object in the technical sense G.W.F Hegel depicted as “rounded in itself as a formal totality and indifferent to determination by another.”

In response to the parcelized and static interpretation of existence offered by determinism, historical materialism offers us a framework where neither consciousness, nor the “exterior” world, has priority; we have no way of describing either of them prior to the moment of their encounter. The world is not “external” and distinct from human beings; the individual understood as “being-there” (to use Martin Heidegger’s terminology) belongs in the world by the very nature of its existence. Insofar as the world is integral to human existence, human beings can’t be understood apart from as a “being-in-the-world”. They are ensembles of social relations, closely intermeshed in their environment. Antonio Gramsci puts the point in the following way: “all hitherto existing philosophies [before Marxism]…conceive of man as an individual…It is on this point that it is necessary to reform the concept of man. It means that one must conceive of man as a series of active relationships (a process) in which individuality…is not…the only element to be taken into account. The humanity which is reflected in each individual is composed of…1. the individual; 2. other men; 3. the natural world.”

The composite constitution of an individual implies the interiorization of social determinations: interiorization of the relations of production, family background, the historical past, and the contemporary institutions. All these internalizations are then exteriorized in acts and options which necessarily refer us back to them. This means that economic structures do not cause human actions but become interiorized by humans as they act. Social relations are both the medium and the outcome of human interaction. Humans produce and reproduce social structures through their actions and these structures condition, enable and constrain human behavior and social action in society. Thus, abstract societal relations are instantiated, lived, enacted, reproduced and potentially challenged through processes of communication in everyday life.

The dynamic of interiorization-exteriorization highlights the fundamental fact that although human beings are affected by their circumstances, they are also the propelling force of history. As Jean Paul Sartre said, “Men make their history on the basis of real, prior conditions (among which we would include acquired characteristics, distortions imposed by the mode of work and of life, alienation, etc.), but it is the men who make it and not the prior conditions. Otherwise men would be merely the vehicles of inhuman forces which through them would govern the social world.” Since history has a subject (human beings), there always exists the possibility of breaking free from the shackles of contradictory forces. While structures do exist, EP Thompson states that their impact upon us can’t be understood “as pre-determined programming or the implantation of necessity, but as the ‘setting of limits’ and the 'exerting of pressures.’”

The tangible manifestations of the complex interaction between structure and agency are reflected in the base-superstructure metaphor deployed by Karl Marx in his book “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy”. Widely misinterpreted as an instance of deterministic thinking, it is in fact a sophisticated conception of history, sensitive to the manifold movements of a societal totality. In a nuanced analysis of Marx’s topographical metaphor, Alasdair MacIntyre writes that the economic base of a society provides “a framework within which superstructures arise, a set of relations around which the human relations can entwine themselves, a kernel of human relationships from which all else grows…[in]creating the basis, you create the superstructure. These are not two activities but one.” In Marx’s view “the crucial character of the transition to socialism is not that it is a change in the economic base but that it is a revolutionary change in the relation of base to superstructure”.

A New Aim

Sartre defined a human being as “the totality of that he does not yet have, of all that he could have.” This definition emphasizes the centrality of the goal-directed life-activity of living individuals. A human being exists in the future, in the sense that it relates to itself in terms of the possibilities that it projects for itself. Sartre understands this to mean that human reality is limited by the aim it sets itself. It is by freely projecting the possibilities of one's existence that one determines how one sees things, what function they have, and their place in the world. This means that consciousness towards objects is made possible by consciousness’ transcendence, its power to see objects in the light of its own possibilities that it projects into the future. In other words, consciousness sees things in a particular light because of its project which surpasses current reality and, in so doing, approaches it through negation. I see the world in terms of what it could be because I see it not in terms of what I am but in terms of what I could be.

 In the current conjuncture, Marxism needs to intensively engage with the human being’s ability to engage in a conscious alteration (negation) and projection of that which is not yet real. Neoliberal capitalism has seeped into these spaces of an individual’s future-orientedness, ossifying it with its logic of fatalistic thinking. However, this does not signify a permanent closure of a radical future - in the words of Gramsci, “fatalism is nothing other than the clothing worn by real and active will when in a weak position.” Socialism needs to remove every iota of fatalism from the spaces of future so that a new aim can be constructed. This can happen only if the reality of revolutionary hope is fully recognized.

Remembering the Original Black Panther Party

By Aneesh Gogineni

In 1966, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, two students attending Merritt Community College in Oakland, founded what would be one of the most infamous organizations in US history, The Black Panthers. In fact, the FBI director at the time, J. Edgar Hoover regarded the Black Panthers’ breakfast program, not their guns, as the greatest threat to the nation’s internal security. Separating themselves from other black liberation groups at the time, the BPP was fighting the underlying evil that shapes and supplies racism — classism.

The Black Panthers were a Marxist group based on the ideology of revolutionary intercommunalism, a theory formed by Huey Newton that recharacterized imperialism and its relation to black subjugation. The theory rejected Western and neoliberal systemic issues in favor of Leninist style resistance to the neoliberal world order through means of a vanguard party to achieve socialist dictatorship of the proletariat. The Black Panthers were one of the largest domestic left-wing groups in the US that revolted against police brutality, systemic racism, racial capitalism, and worldwide imperialist efforts by the US empire. Running on what they called the Ten-Point Program, they believed in Black freedom and liberation at the same time as the abolition of capitalist systems of oppression and exploitation. At the height of the BPP, there were 68 chapters within the US from Chicago to Oakland to Louisiana. The BPP extended farther than just the United States as it had connections with similar organizations in Algeria, India, South Vietnam, and many other countries. Comprised of predominantly young, black members, very prominent activists were originally BPP members. Fred Hampton, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakur are a few of the activists that were either a part of the BPP or influenced heavily by its core beliefs.

The Black Panthers engaged in various modes of Black resistance. This included violent and peaceful means of resistance. Some of the violent methods included community protection and surveillance in which many Black Panthers armed themselves and patrolled black communities to prevent police brutality and anti-black crime. This resulted in lots of violence between the group and the cops as the cops were very brutal towards black people within black communities. On the other end of the stick, the party also engaged in peaceful, radical action. Some of this action included educating children with non-whitewashed history rather than public school learning. They also created community food programs that had free breakfast for children in school. In fact, this program founded by the BPP is what has led to free lunch and breakfast in nationwide public schools. Through these violent and peaceful programs, they were able to establish a radical commune predicated on fulfilling material needs for everyone in the community rather than profiting off of exploitation of workers and POC within the community.

As the Black Panthers became more prominent around the world, they ascended the FBI’s list of threats to the nation’s internal security. In 1956, COINTELPRO was an FBI operation founded to disrupt the activity of socialist entities such as the Communist Party of the USA or the Socialist Workers Party. As the Black Panther Party gained power, COINTELPRO placed them at the top of the list and sent agents to begin infiltration. In December 1969, the FBI shot and killed multiple leaders around the US. They staged police raids in neighborhoods in order to assassinate leaders. This resulted in the deaths of multiple black panthers including young leader Fred Hampton. However, the Black Panthers were able to remain intact throughout the 70’s and 80’s and continue to spread radical ideas. The demise of the Black Panthers can be attributed to dissolution of leadership as leaders either moved away from the party or were killed. In 1989, Huey Newton was killed and the party came to an official end.

The Black Panthers had a very large domestic and international reach. Multiple chapters throughout the nation replicated the communist praxis of the BPP with pioneers like Fred Hampton leading it in different areas. However, the reach of it extended farther than the US borders into the international spector. By establishing ties with other black liberation movements around the world, they were able to spread revolutionary intercommunalism and influence other areas of the world. An example of how strong their influence was can be seen in the Dalit Panther Party. In India, there is a hierarchal caste system based on what family one is born into. The Dalits were the lower caste that were constantly dehumanized, killed, subjugated and legally oppressed. Thus, the Dalit Panther Party was formed as a method of resistance and rejecting the caste system. Mentioned in the BPP magazines, the Dalit Panthers were a wonderful example of the original party’s reach.

Similarly, in Dallas, the group known as Guerilla Mainframe participates in community aid programs as a method of resistance. They also engage in militant protests to police brutality within their community, which is very reminiscent of the Black Panthers. The legacy of the BPP has been carried on around the world with the Yellow Panthers in Vietnam, the Vanguard Party of the Bahamas, and many more groups that studied and copied the Black Panthers’ model of organizing resistance. Thus, we should remember The Black Panther Party not as a terrorist group but rather as an inspirational Party that was key in the fight for black liberation and abolition of class. Thus, in the name of the Black Panthers and the millions of other deaths resulting from capitalism, we must endorse alternative methods of communing.

Sources

https://viewpointmag.com/2018/06/11/intercommunalism-the-late-theorizations-of-huey-p-newton-chief-theoretician-of-the-black-panther-party/

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Black-Panther-Party/Legacy

Joe Biden and the ‘Passive Revolution’

[Artwork from the Tempest Collective]

By Ashton Rome

Though it appears that Biden has pulled off a revival of centrism amid an 'organic crisis', his honeymoon period will be short-lived as there is a crisis of legitimacy of the ideas, institutions, and coalitions that undergird U.S. neoliberal capitalism. During moments like this, the ruling class may attempt what Gramsci called a 'passive revolution' — implementing symbolic or limited change from above without fundamentally transforming social relations — in order to restore its hegemony and stave off challenges to its position within society. A key part of this process is the co-optation of demands from below, paying lip service to the goals of leading figures of the underclasses (organic intellectuals) while keeping the underclasses in a subordinate position. Passive revolutions have successfully been implemented many times throughout U.S. history. Learning to recognize the features of the strategy will help the left determine tactics to circumvent it and build our forces.

For some figures and groups on the left, Biden's victory and the Democrats' tenuous control of both houses provide the socialist movement with unique opportunities. According to journalist Zeeshan Aleem, socialists could ride into office on the coattails of Biden and the anti-Trump mood and be positioned to enact “policies that protect the poor and communities of color.”

Others believe that there is an ongoing "civil war" in the Party between its insurgent progressive wing and the neoliberal establishment and that the expansion of the Squad may open divisions further. Since the Democrats hold the Presidency and both Houses, the Party may have little excuse in the eyes of their social movement allies and working-class base not to implement a progressive agenda like universal health care. If they fail to deliver, so the argument goes, they will face their wrath. These socialists believe that the contradiction between the ‘Wall Street’ and social movement and working class of the Democratic Party base will also be on full display and play themselves out for ordinary people and be amiable conditions for winning people to independent politics.

Passive Revolution

But these optimistic scenarios are simplistic – all too similar to previous certainties about the collapse of capitalism. Within the socialist tradition, this optimism was embodied in the 1st and 2nd Internationals. Both saw socialist revolution as the inevitable consequence of capitalism's economic structure and the unfolding of contradictions at the heart of the system. For them, the unfolding of these contradictions would result in left political consciousness leading to socialist political power. Though decades of capitalist crisis and revival since the early 20th century have tempered these beliefs, they still exist for some on the left who, fail to take into account how even during periods of organic crisis, the ruling class can resist or prevent opposition.

During this period of organic crisis, the key challenge for the elites is to address parts of the crisis that constrain their ability to reap profit while containing popular demands and counter-hegemonic movements. Whether cyclical or organic, crises have a resetting characteristic to them, often spurring innovation and reducing the tendency towards overaccumulation. They can also lead to the development of more ‘appropriate’ ruling coalitions and forms of social control and governance. Organic crises, which occur at all levels of society – economic, social, political and ideological – demand the construction of new practices and ‘norms.’

This was the case in the crisis periods of 1929 and 1945, and in the transition from Fordism and Keynesianism to neoliberalism beginning in the late 60’s and early 1970s. The crisis of representation and morbid symptoms caused by organic crises cannot be sufficiently managed through different modes of regulation. Though the capitalist class retains its leading position in society, it does not have the underclass's active consent, leading to a long interregnum.

Organic Intellectuals and Civil Society

In the United States today, the ruling class precisely sees Biden as the last hope for neoliberalism because of his decades in office and because of the support he has from the leadership of labor and social movements leadership who will attempt to negotiate bargains and discipline their constituencies to stay within the constraints imposed by the crisis.

But how does the ruling class legitimize Biden, who represents a system in crisis? Gramsci argued that hegemony needs the active support of civil society actors, or what Gramsci called “organic intellectuals," for the ruling conditions to be seen as natural and the ideas connected to them to be diffused throughout society. Organic intellectuals are the members of society that defend and promote the ruling class's interests within civil society.

A passive revolution involves a temporary dominance of political society (legislatures, the judicial system, coercive apparatuses) over civil society (NGOs, trade unions, chambers of commerce, etc.). Because of the trust that ordinary people have in some nominally reformist nonprofits, union leaders, and liberal politicians, civil society is an essential part of the ruling class strategy for keeping power while its hegemony is in tatters.

Gramsci used the term trasformismo—“transformism”—to describe the scenario where the subaltern's leadership is co-opted. This occurs while the movement is kept in a subordinate position and the ruling elite attempts to forge a resolution without popular challenges from below. Therefore, a passive revolution is a restoration of class power which new forms of governance and representation done in a more or less ‘peaceful’ way. Significantly, passive revolutions recognize that the subaltern does not have the organization and leadership to resolve the crisis on the basis of a transformation of the system. It is mainly preventative in effect.

Nationalism (with a 'woke' redemptive script) is essential in this period because it allows the elite to identify its own interests as the interests of the whole and depoliticize questions of economic and political aims. Organic intellectuals can help popularize these narratives. The seeming ‘popular frontism’ against Trump, fascism and the far right is an example of this. The anti-fascism of Biden consists of forces nominally against Trump - from George W. Bush era establishment Republicans to social democratic politicians, tasked with ‘restoring American values.' Most importantly, its discourse leaves untouched questions of the conditions that brought Trumpism in the first place. Or when questions do come up about those conditions, organic intellectuals argue that they are meant for a later day -  after the right is defeated.

A History of Passive Revolutions in the U.S.

The ruling class has responded to various crises through passive revolutions: the Great Depression, the end of the Golden Age of Capitalism and after the 2007/8 crisis.

In response to the Great Depression, the existence of the Soviet Union, and the organizing efforts by socialist and communist activists, FDR and a section of the ruling class attempted a ‘revolution from above.’ The Democratic Party opened its ranks and built what came to be known as the “New Deal Coalition” - a coalition primarily of northern and midwestern industrial workers and their unions and white southern farmers. As the Democratic Party took up some of the demands from the left, labor dramatically increased donations to them and bolstered affinity to the Party. This ended up curtailing a serious attempt to push forward the organization of the working class by building a labor party like those were developing in Europe. For example, FDR took up demands to regulate child labor, and grant pension benefits and legal union rights from the Socialist and Progressive Party platforms. The result were new practices in management like Fordism, welfare systems and a more regulated capitalism.

The passive revolution helped bring about the ‘Golden Era of Capitalism’ from 1945 to the early 1970s, which was challenged significantly by the Black Power movements. The Black Power movements, which linked themselves to the national liberation movements in the peripheries, helped discredit U.S. capitalism and shift the balance of forces to the left during the late 1960s and early 70s. The U.S. ruling class initiated a two-part response: COINTELPRO, the War on Drugs, and mass incarceration (the stick) and black capitalism and integralist policies to appease the aspiration of the black middle class of the movement (the carrot). The latter resulted in more “black faces in high places” and funding for nonprofits below. The liberal, middle-class elements of the movement popularized a framework for analyzing ‘progressive’ attitudes towards racial justice that linked demographic representation in media, television and politics with social justice and political parity. Systemic critiques like socialism that sought to address class, race, and gender inequality were replaced by representative politics and diversity practices.

As Mario Candeias demonstrated in “Organic Crisis and Capitalist Transformation,” the transition to neoliberalism included the integration of trade unions and their political representatives into the project while keeping the subaltern in a subordinate position: “The first transnational wave of the neoliberal transformations weakened the power of workers, trade unions, social movements and Social Democracy; the second wave integrated their representatives into a social-democratic-neoliberal power bloc…; the third wave was an authoritarian turn, both with regard to international and to internal relations. The consensus faded away, but yet there is no visible alternative.”

The 2007/8 Crisis, the second crisis of the 21st Century, brought with it a period of polarization and radicalization through which we are still living. It also brought an end to a decades-long passive revolution that utilized politics of representation and funding for nonprofits to quell social movements. The radicalization of this crisis period was expressed in Occupy and the Black Lives Matter movement of which the latter included wings that saw the link between neoliberalism and the prison industrial complex. Some saw the need for prison abolition, which was a demand given a wider hearing during the subsequent BLM wave last summer.

As Chris Harris and William Robinson showed, a section of the black community voted for Obama to help end the economic disfranchisement and mass incarceration politics pushed during the  neoliberal period. The liberal ruling class saw Obama as an opportunity to contain the popular anger at the political establishment after the economic crisis and someone who could restore faith in neoliberalism and U.S. hegemony abroad. This was important, as in Europe the anti-austerity protests were leading to splits in establishment parties and the development of new political parties like SYRIZA and Podemos. When challenges to his neoliberal politics emerged, he used the coercive state to disciple them but particularly with BLM opened the ranks of the Party to the movement as well as corporate foundation funding.

Some Thoughts on a Left Political Strategy

Gramsci's concept of the passive revolution is important because it shows how opportune conditions for the growth of the forces of revolutionary socialism can come to pass unfulfilled or how leaders of revolutionary movements can be co-opted into the project of restoration of capitalist rule. Passive revolutions and the reforms granted in the course of them don’t just imply a weak ruling hegemony but also a weak subaltern movement.

This is an important starting point for understanding the challenges socialists face today as they attempt to help to rebuild mass organizations and labor unions and help to increase the militancy and combativeness of the working class in order to challenge capitalist rule. Understanding the challenges socialists face as well as the opportunities and openings is integral to developing a political program, slogans, and strategy to guide a counterhegemonic movement from its current consciousness, militancy and levels of organization to the left’s ultimate goal and historic vision. In order for counter-hegemonic movements to succeed they need organization, ideology and action.

Though the left faces favorable circumstances in terms of a crisis of legitimacy, the uptick of class struggle from 2018-19 was short-lived; though we have seen dramatic increases in the membership of independent political organizations like Democratic Socialist of America (DSA), the electoral successes of left Democrats and the rightward drift of the Republican Party has popularized lesser-evilism and the realignment strategy within the Democratic Party. This does not mean that leftists outside of DSA should orient away from the organization. DSA after all is where a lot of the debates about independent politics and socialist strategy are happening on the left. We must acknowledge that there is an ongoing process to co-opt the 'Squad' and make DSA a trend within the Democratic Party. The continued leadership and lack of left challenges to Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer may suggest that the process is farther along.

An understanding of the ongoing Passive Revolution shows that we have to rebuild the working class's political organization and utilize united front style politics to expose ‘organic intellectuals’. The ability for the subaltern classes to successfully challenge the capitalist hegemony depend on their ability develop new political practices that challenge and don’t reproduce capitalist social relations. Institutions like an independent political party are crucial towards this end since they can help organize and unite the subaltern classes in common struggle.

It is crucial that socialists orient towards and join the spontaneous protests that will arise during this crisis, but our tasks within them cannot be restricted to merely attending protests and/or cheering them on. It is important that socialists help develop democratic spaces within them to allow ordinary people to determine its course and goals instead of by reformist leaders at the top. As well, socialists can find ways of adding to those debates by showing whether particular political tactics will help win the movement’s goals. This can be done by bringing to the movement lessons from historical counterhegemonic struggles and an assessment of the immediate impacts of tactics. Socialists can help radicalize them further by developing links between seemingly disparate issues like the environmental and housing crises by showing how capitalism is the root. Crucially socialists can warn movements of attempts by the ruling class to contain protests by taking up its demands and co-opting its leaders.

Challenging organic intellectuals are crucial because although the passive revolution has temporarily calmed a section of the subaltern classes, many are not won over. Organic crises necessarily involve a de-legitimacy of establishment figures and institutions (crisis of legitimacy). Though this can provide openings for the left it does allow right wing authoritarian populists like Trump to claim to speak for the interests of the “forgotten” against a “corrupt political establishment”.  Socialists have to acknowledge the ongoing threat of the populist right in this period, especially since the conditions that brought Trump and his ilk into prominence still exist.

The George Floyd protests in the summer and the siege at the capital in January presents an opportunity for the left that will be crucial as we enter a period of struggle once the ‘Biden Honeymoon’ ends. The siege reminded the masses of the threat posed by the far right and that racism is still a powerful organizing principle of which the police and other elements of the coercive state have a key role in upholding.

The radical wings of the George Floyd inspired protests re-popularized powerful anti-capitalist abolitionist critiques that can help provide the basis for a new ‘common sense’ and unite subaltern classes in common struggle in the coming period. Critiques that see mass incarceration and militarization of policing in neighborhoods and at national borders as a way for the ruling class to handle the increased surplus labor, inequality and political polarization that neoliberalism have a powerful explanatory and unifying quality.

But as we have seen, capitalism has proven to be an adaptive and resilient system and we have to aware of its successes at countering our movements if we are to be successful.

Marx’s Pedagogies Then and Now: Inquiry and Presentation

Pictured: The Cuban Literacy Brigades exemplify Marxist pedagogies as they play out inside and outside of classrooms.

By Derek R. Ford

Republished from Liberation School.

Ask any teacher in any setting, and they’ll tell you there’s no “formula” or “recipe” for education. Despite what corporate charter movements assert—like Teach for America’s “I do, you do, we do” rote learning—teaching is always dependent on relationships, trust, respect, and a host of other elements—and all of these can change day to day. Teaching on a Monday after a big fight broke out at a weekend party is different than teaching on a Wednesday when things have settled down a bit. Teaching in a pandemic is markedly different from teaching before one. These are just a few examples of the limitless and unpredictable forces that shape the educational experience.

As any communist organizer knows, Marxist pedagogy is not a matter of merely explaining or convincing, of coming up with the right wording, question, presentation, speech, or reading. These are educational tactics rather than pedagogies, which refer to specific ways, modes, or logics of education. Marxist pedagogy is contingent on a multitude of factors: the dominant political ideology at the time (is it intensely anti-communist or more open?), the consciousness of students as individuals or a collective (are they coming from a liberal issue-based organization or a strand of the movement?), the autonomy we’re allowed in particular settings (is it an after school club at a public/private school, community meeting, or a Party office?). And of course, there are other factors like different skills, personalities, time commitments, and relations between amongst teachers and students.

While teaching is unpredictable and contingent, for Marxist revolutionaries there’s a wealth of pedagogical content—theories that have been put into practice and whose practice has in turned informed the theories—to rely on. The previous installments of this series focused on Brazilian educator Paolo Freire and Lenin, on the use, misuse, and potential of “growth mindset,” and on the revolutionary educational theory of Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky. In this article, we look at Marx’s own pedagogical practice.

Prerequisite: Marxist pedagogy presumes competence

Before delving into Marx’s thoughts on pedagogy, it helps to dispel a dominant myth about Marx and Marxism: that it’s predicated on the “enlightened” revolutionary teaching the “ignorant” masses. Nowhere do Marx’s (or Engels’) texts even hint at this notion, and neither are their hints in the main documents of the Marxist tradition. For example, one of Lenin’s main gripes with the economists who focused on trade-union consciousness was that their assumption that workers could only understand their immediate situation. It was also one of Marx and Engels’ main critiques of the reformism of the Social Democratic Party in Germany. As Marx and (primarily or wholly) Engels wrote in an 1879 letter for internal circulation amongst some SDP leaders:

“As for ourselves, there is, considering all our antecedents, only one course open to us. For almost 40 years we have emphasised that the class struggle is the immediate motive force of history and, in particular, that the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat is the great lever of modern social revolution; hence we cannot possibly co-operate with men who seek to eliminate that class struggle from the movement. At the founding of the International we expressly formulated the battle cry: The emancipation of the working class must be achieved by the working class itself…. Hence we cannot co-operate with men who say openly that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves, and must first be emancipated from above by philanthropic members of the upper and lower middle classes” [1].

What Marx and Engels are saying here is that we should always presume competence (a point central to the field of critical disability studies). This doesn’t mean that we should presume that the capitalist system sets everyone up for success. Quite the contrary: the system sets the masses up for poverty. What presuming competence does mean, however, is that we should assume by default that everyone we come into contact with has the capacity and potential for transforming their consciousness and ideas, habits and actions, political beliefs and commitments.

Presuming competence also puts the onus on the educator, the revolutionary, the organizer, and the organization insofar as it means that if the student isn’t “getting it” then the problem lies with us. Too often educators displace our own incompetence onto students. For example, I’ve heard many teachers speak with pride about how many Cs, Ds, and Fs they give. When approached through the Marxist assumption, however, we see that “bad grades” are not due to any innate inability but to a complex of factors, including our own teaching.

Marx’s pedagogies: Inquiry and presentation

Although Marx considered education at various points, he didn’t write about pedagogy. He does, however, make an important remark that is pedagogical in nature in the afterword to the second German edition of the first volume of Capital. Here Marx distinguishes the Forschung from the Darstellung, or the process of research from the method of presentation. He is responding to an assessment of Capital that appeared in an 1872 edition of the European Messenger based in St. Petersburg. The assessment focuses on Marx’s method of presentation and commends Marx for showing the laws of capitalism and of social transformation.

Marx claims this the review is ultimately an affirmation of his anti-Hegelian dialectic, but before clarifying his dialectic, he briefly notes the necessary differences between inquiry and articulation, or research and presentation, a difference that is not just political or philosophical, but pedagogical in nature: “Of course,” Marx writes,

“the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development, to trace out their inner connexion. Only after this work is done, can the actual movement be adequately described. If this is done successfully, if the life of the subject-matter is ideally reflected as in a mirror, then it may appear as if we had before us a mere a priori [or self-evident] construction” [2].

Marx is describing two different pedagogies—or educational processes–here. The first, the method of inquiry or research, is one that examines material in all of its nuances and relationships, tracing out the different lineages, past, present, and future potential forms of development, and how they each are interdependent on others.  

Researching is a process that entails wandering around, looking for connections, thinking you’re onto something and then following it to a dead end, generating ideas, getting lost in the archives (whether they be in a library or on the internet), and so on. When researching, you have a goal in mind but the end doesn’t totally dictate everything you do. Marx researched to understand the inner logics and dynamics of capital, how these came to be, what impact they had and might have on the world, and how the contradictions can be seized during the class struggle. But this goal wasn’t always at the forefront of his mind. What we might read as “digressions” in his work are often the reality that the end goal had to be suspended at moments for research to continue. In fact, a lot of what we consider “distraction” or “procrastination” in schooling might actually be profound moments of researching.

Research, however, can’t last forever, especially for revolutionaries. At the same time, only once you’ve researched can you begin presenting your findings. Presentation takes a totally different pedagogical form. It begins with a pre-determined end in mind that guides the demonstration such that it begins with the most elementary conceptual building blocks and proceeds linearly in a developmental manner toward the end goal. Whereas researching is about means, presentation is about ends: the ends structure everything that comes before. This is why Marx, in Capital, often casts aside the historical beginnings of capitalism and leaves it to the very end, in the last part where we finally learn that it was through slavery, colonialism, legal and extralegal theft, individual and state violence, repression, and so on that capitalism came to be. But he doesn’t begin here because he doesn’t want us to 1) think this is the complete and global story of how capital came to me; 2) think it’s not going on today; and 3) because he simply wants us to understand the inner logic of capitalism and its intrinsic contradictions as it was most fully developed in England, all while giving the mainstream political-economists a fair reading.

Politics and examples of Marx’s pedagogies

While research and presentation are pedagogical ways of engaging with Marxist education, they are also political. Because presentation is guided by a pre-determined end, it tends to reinforce the world as it exists. It is only because I know what x looks like in advance that I can judge a student’s development toward knowing or becoming x. This is why research is a potentially oppositional logic: it’s impossible to grade or measure one’s progress researching. It might be that the next day after you watch some obscure YouTube video or find some odd social media page that you finally complete the research and produce something new. The problem is not with presentation per se, but rather its dominance today in capitalism. This is why Marx’s method of research is so crucial. It insists on both communist inquiry and communist presentation.

Again, even though Marx never wrote about pedagogy, his body of work provides us with potent examples of how he put them into practice. Two works in particular illuminate Marx’s pedagogies in action: the Grundrisse and volume one of Capital.

The Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (rough draft) consists of a series of notes written in the frantic days of 1857-1858. They’re a collection of 8 notebooks published first in 1939 in the Soviet Union and made available in Europe and the U.S. during the 1960s-1970s. Never intended for publication, they’re a series of research notes, or traces of Marx’s studying, which Eric Hobsbawm says, were “written in a sort of private intel­lectual shorthand which is sometimes impenetrable, in the form of rough notes interspersed with asides which, however clear they may have been to Marx, are often ambiguous to us.” As a result, “anyone who has tried to translate the manuscript or even to study and interpret it, will know that it is sometimes quite impossible to put the meaning of some sibylline passage beyond all reason­able doubt” [3].

The Grundrisse notebooks are quite different from the first volume of Capital, Marx’s real magnum opus, the only volume published (and translated and republished) during Marx’s lifetime. The Grundrisse is almost pure research (because they were notes Marx wasn’t trying to present to others), while Capital is almost pure presentation (because it was meant to articulate the inner workings of capital to others).

For two distinct positions on these works, consider Louis Althusser and Antonio Negri. The former wrote that Capital is the only book “by which Marx has to be judged” [4]. It’s the “mature” Marx, clearly broken from his Hegelian roots (which still inflect the Grundrisse) and any mention of humanism. Althusser, however, a lifelong member of the French Communist Party, was intervening in debates over “humanism” that he saw as diluting or abandoning the class struggle. Instead of proletarians versus the bourgeoisie, the colonizers versus the colonized, it was “humans;” a non-class category bereft of an enemy against which to struggle.

On the other side, Antonio Negri reads the Grundrisse as a political text, a more Marxist text than Capital because of its “incredible openness.” Capital, according to Negri, is not only fragmentary but closed, determinate, and objective, a book where antagonisms are resolved dialectically, foreclosing the forceful rupture that communist revolution requires. Interestingly, Althusser invited Negri to give a series of lectures on the Grundrisse in Paris in 1978, which served as the basis for his book, Marx beyond Marx. Negri doesn’t dismiss Capital, of course, but insists that the book only represents one aspect of Marxism. The Grundrisse is an endless unfolding of research and antagonism. Capital, on the contrary, is more limited precisely because of its “categorical presentation” [5]. In essence, the Grundrisse is more open because it’s a series of notebooks in which Marx discovers something and presents it, which brings forth a new antagonism, which then births a new determination of content to research. They were idiomatic writings in which Marx was wandering around, discovering new elements and presenting new hypotheses.

For Althusser, it’s precisely because Marx’s presentation is so elegant, clear, and compelling that Capital represents his highest work of thought. However, he recommends different ways of reading it, primarily by leaving the first three (and most difficult) chapters for the end. What you have in Capital is a pedagogy of presentation that begins with something simple and obvious (the commodity), and then goes deeper and deeper until we see that this “trivial” appearing thing is an active crystallization of a series of ongoing struggles, like those between and within classes and the state that play out differently over history, that assume different forms (like technology and machinery), and so on. But first we have to understand the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value, the role of money, and so on, before any of this makes sense.

Research and Presentation in Capital and the Grundrisse

Yet Marx’s distinction between research/presentation isn’t hard and fast; it’s not even as firmly delineated as Althusser and Negri insist. Marx sought to understand, articulate, learn, and relay the precise logics of capital, its contradictions, and how the working class has and can seize on these contradictions to institute the revolutionary transition to communism. At the same time, he knew he couldn’t complete this project because no one can fully delineate capitalism so long as it exists, as capital is by definition a dynamic social relation. This is one aspect of capital that Marx and Engels’ marveled at in the Manifesto of the Communist Party:

“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind” [6].

Indeed, when one reads the various outlines that Marx presented for Capital in the Grundrisse and elsewhere, it’s clear that Marx was taking on a project he knew he could never finish. He wanted to write volumes on the state, the world market, foreign trade, wages, the history of theory, and more. Even in the first volume of Capital, we see traces of Marx’s interminable studying in the various places he notes an absolutely crucial point—one we must understand—only to move on by acknowledging he can’t address it here and it will have to wait until later: until he’s studied some more. Sometimes, like when he brings up credit and rent in volume 1, he does return to them in volume 3. But other times he never does; he never found the time for more research.

The writings of Marx, Engels, and other Marxists still explain the workings of capitalism today because they get at the fundamental dynamics and contradictions and the tasks of revolution, the ones that remain the same as long as capital exists—even if they change their form here and there, or even if they take on different weight at different moments. And even though Marx couldn’t—and never claimed to—predict how capital would develop after his death, they remain fundamental cornerstones for not only revolutionary critique and analysis, but most importantly for revolutionary action. This is because, first, Marx’s exposition did get at the core unalterable dynamics of capital and, second, because Marxism develops by returning to research and studying, to inquiry, to tracing new lineages, discovering what Marx didn’t write about because of the research available to him, the moral or social standards at the time, the (many) times he was not in good health or financial circumstances, or the transformations he couldn’t totally foresee.

Marx’s own turns between inquiry and presentation were dictated not only by his health but by the ups and downs of the market and, most significantly, by the workers’ movement. After the failure of the 1848 bourgeois-democratic revolutions, after which Marx was exiled to England, he didn’t see the prospect of another revolutionary situation on the horizon and thus began his study of political-economy in earnest. With the capitalist crisis of the mid 1850s, he was forced to speed up his research. When the Paris Commune erupted on March 18, 1871, he left his work on Capital to write about that. After the first volume of Capital was published, the other two major works he wrote before he died were The Civil War in France (1871) on the Paris Commune and the Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875)–which wasn’t published until after Marx’s death but that circulated widely amongst the newly-formed Social Democratic Party. Marx even pushed the publication of the second volume of Capital back because he was waiting to see how the European and U.S. economic crisis of 1873 would turn out.

Research and presentation in Capital

Both books, however, represent different ways Marx engaged these distinct pedagogical processes. Consider, for example, the chapter in Capital on the working-day, where Marx announces that “between equal rights force decides” [7]. Up until this point, Marx has taken bourgeois political theory at face value, but here the reality of the struggle forces a leap so that the struggle for a “normal” working day is just that: a struggle between two antagonistic class forces. The chapter presents a narrative of the struggle in England throughout the 19th century, one that’s filled with contradictory alliances and betrayals, advances and defeats. It’s a struggle waged not by individuals but by collectives: capitalists and workers together through the mediation of the state. Moreover, in a footnote he acknowledges the role that Protestant ideology played in the process “by changing almost all the traditional holidays into workdays” and later the role of the anti-slavery struggle in the U.S. [8]. There’s nothing predictable or deterministic about any of this; and this is what we affirm when we say that class struggle is the motor of capitalism and the motor of revolutionary transformation.

Another example of the importance of research and inquiry within the largely linear presentation of Capital is the very last chapter, chapter 33. This chapter is concerned with Wakefield’s theory of colonialism. It’s a rather dry and short chapter. What’s interesting is that it follows from Marx’s most succinct narrative of revolutionary transformation in the previous chapter on the “historical tendency of capitalist accumulation.” In this penultimate chapter, Marx turns away from the historical empirical inquiry and presents a clear and concise dialectical and historical materialist analysis of the tendency of capitalist accumulation and how the contradictions of capitalism might result in particular revolutionary paths.

Marx begins chapter 32 with the scattered private property of individuals in petty manufacture, handicraft, and peasant labor. Together, these prevent the concentration of means of production, division of labor, and cooperation of labor (social labor), the formation of the collective laborer (the antagonistic subject), and so remains locked within the production and circulation of use-values.

Halfway through this first paragraph, Marx notes that “at a certain stage of development,” these property relations create “the material agencies for its own dissolution,” producing “new passions” that “the old social organization” prevents [9]. Individual private property is annihilated by capital and, through theft, colonialism, slavery, repression, and so on, centralized and concentrated by capital. At the same time, this produces the collective laborer and a social process of work that develops a universal (although not undifferentiated) social worker. As capital concentrates the means of production and the proletarian class, the latter’s rebellious nature grows. Capital is now a fetter on production:

The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated [10].

He ends the chapter with a speculation on the relative violence of both revolutionary processes. The centralization and concentration of capital was “incomparably more protracted, violent and difficult than the transformation of capitalistic private property… into socialized property” [11]. The former entailed the dispossession, theft, and exploitation of the many by the few, while the latter might entail the expropriation of the few by the many.

Rather than an empirical prophesy, however, it’s an articulation of contradictions; there’s nothing indicating a mechanical or deterministic prediction.

This is supported by the fact that, after this revolutionary clarion call to expropriate the expropriators, Marx then turns to a rather dull and uninspiring examination of Ebbon Wakefield’s theory of colonialism. Here he appreciates Wakefield’s theory for its honesty. Wakefield doesn’t try to hide the violence of colonialism or exploitation through notions of equal and free rights. He explicitly acknowledged the need for dispossession. Marx ends volume one by reminding us again that the capitalist mode of production and accumulation are based on expropriation, colonialism, genocide, and slavery. I read this as a return to research and to the antagonistic class forces that animate Marxist theory and practice. Ending with chapter 33, I think, implicitly tells us that the contradictions of capitalism—which can’t be solved within capitalism—can be pushed back and transformed through colonialism and imperialism. It’s an opening to return to studying, to inquiry.

The dialectic in chapter 32 may seem teleological and closed, but the brief exposition in chapter 33 undoes that. There are no guarantees, no objective determinants divorced from subjective differences or the class struggle.

Marx’s pedagogies in action

Marxist pedagogy is a never-ending alteration between inquiry and presentation. There’s no determinism, no mechanistic causality, no chronological and predictable unfolding of struggle. The entire project of Capital ends with a few dozen lines and then silence: an opening for study and inquiry. This opening, however, isn’t sufficient in itself, for the class struggle also needs to explain concepts, categories, tactics, strategies, and analysis. The key for Marx and for Marxist pedagogy is to keep these in tension, yet the tension will change depending on a host of circumstances.

Marx’s distinction between inquiry and presentation, are not irreconcilable opposites but dialectically related pedagogies. After all, one can’t study a text without first having learned to read. At the same time, learning to read is filled with moments of study. The first is clearer, so I’ll give an example of the latter from my own childhood. I remember learning that “rose” signaled not only a red and thorny flower but also the past tense of rise, and that a ruler referred not only to our main measuring device in school but also to a king, queen, or czar—and later to a state of class domination. I came to learn these are homonyms, or words that share the same spelling but different meanings. Even so, I’ve always found homonyms fascinating educational models that show how even within the developmental process of learning we can make room for inquiry.

An interesting historical example that highlights these divergent pedagogies and their implications for organizing comes from the split between the socialist and communist parties in the 1920s and how the Socialist and Communist Parties organized their youth groups. The Socialist Party believed that cadre had to present radical ideas to children so that children could join the struggle later, when they were older. The Communist Party, on the other hand, believed that children were political actors and agents in the here and now, and brought together inquiry and presentation. As Paul Mishler writes in Raising Reds:

“Rather than being simply educational institutions, controlled by parents and local party organizations, the Communist children’s groups were to be political organizations, fully integrated into the political structure of the party. Communist children’s groups would thus encourage children to engage in political as well as educational activity, and these groups would be separate from direct parental influence… ‘We are not only preparing the child for future participation in the class struggle;–we are leading the child in the class struggle now!” [12].

The Socialist Party maintained that children needed presentation before they could engage in their own action and inquiry, while the Communist Party, following Marx’s pedagogies, engaged children in presentation and inquiry through action. The learned and researched, not only in classrooms and study groups but in the streets as well.

We don’t need to turn to history to see the importance of keeping Marx’s distinct pedagogies in play, however, Consider how, in many organizing meetings, the logic of presentation dominates. I’m not referring to speeches or reading articles, but to the domination of the end goal and, more specifically, an end goal that has to be realizable and “winnable.” This shuts down the process of inquiry and, more specifically, revolutionary inquiry, by keeping us trapped in what we can win without overthrowing capitalism. It keeps us trapped within the present, unable to see beyond it.

As an alternative, we could start with the end goal of the total revolutionary transformation and restructuring of society. This isn’t winnable by any action, protest, campaign, etc., and so the end goal is there, but suspended; it’s not clear how exactly it unfolds. When we start here, with this goal in mind, we open ourselves up to the process of research that Marx held so dear and without which we wouldn’t have Marxism, let alone the Marxist theoretical and practical history on which we draw.

The key point is that Marx left us not only distinct yet dialectically related educational processes; he also offered us examples of navigating between the two, as well as the various factors that shape what ones we engage. It’s not that presentation or inquiry comes first or second, and it’s not that one is good and the other bad. The communist organizer, leader, or teacher has to deploy both depending on different external and class or site-specific contingencies. Sometimes learning must take precedence, and studying must be presented. At other times, studying must take precedence, we must be free to imagine alternatives, get lost in the possibilities, reach our dead ends, and open up inquiry to a new presentation and then to a new inquiry.

This might be what, in part, separates dogmatic Marxists from those who take it as a living, breathing document. The economists, for example, only learned Marx, while those who have made revolutions, or tried to, have engaged Marxism as an infinite well of studying.

Derek R. Ford is assistant professor of education studies at DePauw University and chair of the Education Department at the Hampton Institute. He’s written four monographs, the latest of which is Inhuman educations: Jean-François Lyotard, pedagogy, thought (Brill, 2021). More information can be found at www.derekrford.com

References

[1] Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1979). Marx and Engels to August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Wilhelm Bracke and others (circular letter), trans. P. Ross & B. Ross. In Gerasimenko, S., Kalinina, Y., & Vladimirova, A. (Eds.). (1991). Marx and Engels collected works (vol. 45), pp. 394-408. New York: International Publishers, p. 408, emphasis added.

[2] Marx, K. (1867/1967). Capital: A critique of political economy (vol. 1), trans. by Samuel Moore. New York: International Publishers, p. 28.

[3] Hobsbawm, E.J. (1964). Introduction, in K. Marx, Pre-capitalist economic foundations, ed. E.J. Hobsbawm, trans. Jack Cohen (pp. 9-65). New York: International Publishers, p. 10.

[4] Althusser, L. (1971). Lenin and philosophy and other essays, trans. B. Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, p. 70.

[5] Negri, A. (1991). Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, trans. H. Cleaver, M. Ryan, and M. Viano. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, p. 9; 12. Negri was a leading theoretician and organizer of the “autonomous” school that participated in the Italian Civil War in the 1960s-70s before being falsely arrested in 1979 for kidnapping the former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro of the Christian Democratic Party. He was later exonerated, but was still facing 30 years in prison. Yet in 1983, he was elected to Parliament and used Parliamentary immunity to escape to France to continue researching and organizing. He only returned to Italy in 1997 to serve out his remaining (and bargained-down) 13 years to raise awareness of the political prisoners still being held behind bars. While in prison, he co-wrote the (in)famous book Empire with Michael Hardt.

[6] Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1848). The manifesto of the Communist Party,  In R.C. Tucker (Ed.). (1978). The Marx-Engels reader, 2nd. ed. New York: W.W. Norton, p. 476.

[7] Marx, Capital, p. 225.

[8] Ibid., p. 262 f2.

[9] Ibid., p. 714.

[10] Ibid., p. 715

[11] Ibid.

[12] Mishler, P. (1999). Raising reds: The Young Pioneers, radical summer camps, and communist political culture in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 31.

No, We Are Not Going to Beat Capitalism on the Stock Market

By Nathaniel Flakin

Republished from Left Voice.

Given the news over the past week, you would be forgiven for thinking that Occupy Wall Street had come back with a vengeance. Back in 2011, activists occupied a small park in front of a Lower Manhattan bank — now they seem to be “occupying the stock market” itself. Ten years ago, the bankers and brokers could just get their cops to arrest the pesky occupiers — but now, with the loss of billions of dollars at stake, armed thugs in blue are not going to do the trick.

The stock surge for GameStop has rattled financial markets. A motley horde of Internet users have been giving hedge fund managers a run for their money. Those who bet that shares of the retail chain GameStop would lose value (short sellers) have been thrashed as the stock price surged higher and higher, thanks to the targeted actions of thousands of small investors.

The bankers, who for more than a generation have been praising deregulation and the “invisible hand of the market,” are now calling on the government to protect them from losses. So have “little guys” taken over the stock market? Will the revolution be organized on Reddit?

Of course not. This was never going to take down the hedge fund system. At best, its greatest “hope” was to do some short-term mischief and maybe kill one small fund. Melvin Capital Investment is losing billions and might collapse — but Reuters has reported that Blackrock, the biggest asset management in the world, stands to earn $2.4 billion from the rising stock price. As Derek Thompson has explained in The Atlantic, Melvin Capital Investment was betting on GameStop’s stock to fall — and that was always a risky bet:

[GameStop’s] stock had already fallen from $56 a share in 2013 to about $5 in 2019. GameStop’s short sellers were essentially betting that a company publicly valued as “horrendous” should really be valued at a level commensurate with the notion of “truly horrendous.” They risked billions of dollars on the financial equivalent of a qualifying adverb. It’s really risky to aggressively short a company whose stock, having fallen 95 percent, is floating around $5; there just aren’t a lot of numbers under five.

A Rigged System

The discussion around GameStop has shown that the system is hopelessly rigged: even when small investors manage to exploit the rules to their advantage, those rules are simply changed to prop up the big capitalists.

But that’s only the beginning of how it is rigged. Virtually all stocks are controlled by a tiny minority of capitalists. How are all the working people in the world, even if they invested all their savings into the stock market, supposed to compete with the gargantuan sums owned by the likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and their wealthy corporate cronies?

The rumblings have led Democratic Party “progressives” such as Elizabeth Warren to call for new regulations. She wants action to “ensure that markets reflect real value, rather than the highly leveraged bets of wealthy traders or those who seek to inflict financial damage on those traders.” Those “highly leveraged” traders,” by the way, are the hedge funds. Warren is worried about someone inflicting damage on them. 

How Capitalism Works

The entire episode is making lots of people wonder: Is this any way to organize an economic system? After all, as the back-and-forth trading has unfolded through these rather absurd machinations, who has been thinking about the effect on the livelihoods of tens of thousands of GameStop employees?

But this casino is how all decisions are made in the capitalist system. Where is housing built, and who gets to live in it? Which medical breakthroughs get funding? Which wars are waged? The same rules deciding the future of GameStop decide all these questions as well.

The stock market and its fictitious capital which condenses all the absurdities of the capitalist system into one small space. So much of the market is about “fictitious capital” — money lacking any material basis in actual commodities or productive activity. As the Marxist economist Rudolf Hilferding explained:

On the stock exchange, capitalist property appears in its pure form, as a title to the yield, and the relation of exploitation, the appropriation of surplus labour, upon which it rests, becomes conceptually lost. Property ceases to express any specific relation of production and becomes a claim to the yield, apparently unconnected with any particular activity. Property is divorced from any connection with production, with use value. The value of any property seems to be determined by its yield, a purely quantitative relationship. Number is everything; the thing itself is nothing! The number alone is real, and since what is real is not a number, the relationship is more mystical than the doctrine of the Pythagoreans.

A Way Forward

Within this absurd system, thousands of working-class people, investing their stimulus checks, might be able to steal a little something back from Wall Street — with the help of an app cynically named Robinhood. 

Yes, the ruling class is pissed that normal people are disrupting their casino. But the market remains their casino. The experience of this kind of “activism” will lead people to draw the wrong conclusions. We’re already seeing calls for more “democratic” and “fair” rules for the stock market, rather than for toppling the stock market itself.

And what happens if small investors are successful? Then some of them might become big investors. So, this kind of activism may create some new capitalists — but it’s no way to beat the capitalist class. In a fight over stocks, the rulers will always have an advantage.

But you’re in luck: Marxism is a 150-year-old science of how to eliminate the bourgeoisie and its exploitation and oppression. If we pool our money, we shouldn’t invest it in stocks; — we should use it to build up organizations that will fight for our interests —, not by trading stocks, but by organizing our strength in terms of material force.

A Problematic Ally

If you’re not convinced, consider one troubling figure who has been cheering on the small investors against the short sellers: pandemic profiteer and Internet troll Elon Musk. He understands the giant casino that passes for a global economy. After all, he has leveraged a small, almost completely unprofitable car company into a personal fortune of $180 billion. Musk is obviously not trying to bring down the system that is rewarding him with such vast wealth, nor does he have some personal vendetta against short sellers. Instead, Musk understands that this is capitalism at work.

Musk might have several hundreds of billions of dollars, but he’s a small part of the global capitalist system. We don’t need to buy him out, or beat his ilk at the stock market game. We can use our strength to take power and expropriate them. A workers’ government can put all those riches at the service of all humanity. Now that’s a project worth “investing” in.

Reclaiming Hope in a Neoliberal Age

[Photo credit: Joe Brusky]

By Yanis Iqbal

In the second declaration of Havana - delivered on February 4, 1962 - Fidel Castro said, “It is the duty of every revolutionary to make the revolution.” Piercingly clear and searingly sharp - this statement demystifies our coldly scholastic and meek attitude toward socialism. In a world where leftists submissively mold themselves to the contingencies of history, Castro invites us to collectively dare for a firmly definite objective: overthrowing the bourgeoisie state. Such lucidity and precision - apart from organically integrating the ultimate goal of socialism into the planning of concrete action - foregrounds the little explored territory of hope - hope that love and solidarity will survive in the face of barefaced barbarism; hope that the masses will indignantly demand what is theirs; hope that the spirit of revolution will seep through the cracks of hunger and poverty.

Hope

The globalization of capital, the move toward post-Fordist economic arrangements of flexible specialization, and the consolidation of hyper-individualized culture has resulted in a shift from a politics of hope to one of despair. The drastic weakening of the Left has heralded a new age of defeatist literature, absolutely incapable of battling with shifting conjunctural equations. In sum, a historically informed understanding of capitalism and the immense power possessed by the wretched of the earth has given way to theoretical abstractions devoid of any sense of class struggle. What is urgently needed, therefore, is a re-affirmation of the potentialities for liberation and the crystallization of hope as an important element in the entire panorama of endless efforts.

In his book Pedagogy of Freedom, the great Brazilian educator Paulo Freire noted, “our being in the world is far more than just “being.” It is a “presence”…that can reflect upon itself, that knows itself as presence, that can intervene, can transform, can speak of what it does, but that can also take stock of, compare, evaluate, give value to, decide, break with, and dream.” Insofar that we constitute a living “presence”, we are capable of understanding structural conditionedness in depth, in its essence, detaching it from its contingent factuality, from its sheer concrete “being there”.

As human beings, we are conditioned by social relations, not determined by them; the past influences us and our actions, but does not determine those actions or what the future will bring. As soon as we grasp this fact and emerge out of our submersion in reality, we start to treat obstacles as problems rather than as givens and thus, gain the ability to act to change them as well as reflect on the consequences of that action. When we reclaim human agency, our day-to-day interaction with the existential universe acquires an element of hope: since the future is open-ended rather than closed, what we want to create always exists as a true possibility within the womb of our present society. The tomorrow which we want to see has yet to be fashioned by the transformation of today, the present reality. It is something not yet here but a potential, something beyond the barriers we face now, which must be created by us beyond the limits we discover.

Hope acts as the bond between the utopia we desire and the obscenely harsh reality we live in. It is a response to an existential reality that pushes a person forward in anger, indignation and just rage, forcing him/her to negate the ugliness of everyday life. Without hope, there is no possibility for resistance, dissent, and dialogue. It is the prerequisite for all forms of critical agency which aim to radically reconstitute our society. Hope expands the space of the possible, and becomes a way of recognizing and naming the incomplete nature of the present while providing the foundation for informed action. While despair is passive - we are the objects, closed in on by time in a way that we see as inevitable, hope is active - we exercise agency, piercing through time by seeing the alternatives, the possibilities available to us in moving beyond a particular obstruction.  

In Pedagogy of Hope, Freire says, “We need critical hope the way a fish needs unpolluted water… After all, without hope there is little we can do. It will be hard to struggle on, and when we fight as hopeless or despairing persons, our struggle will be suicidal. We shall be beside ourselves, drop our weapons, and throw ourselves into sheer hand-to-hand, purely vindictive, combat.”

Hope can never be divorced from practice and action. It is effective only when undergirded by struggle. Freire writes: “Hope, as an ontological need, demands an anchoring in practice. As an ontological need, hope needs practice in order to become historical concreteness. That is why there is no hope in sheer hopefulness. The hoped-for is not attained by dint of raw hoping. Just to hope is to hope in vain.” Thus, hope, rigorous and intellectual, requires struggle and action. It is not naïve optimism; it is critical and reflective action.

Hope must be concrete, a spark that not only reaches out beyond the surrounding emptiness of capitalist relations, anticipating a better world in the future, but a spark that also speaks to us in the world we live in by presenting tasks based on the challenges of the present time. In The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, the German philosopher Ernst Bloch argues that hope cannot be removed from the world. Hope is not “something like nonsense or absolute fancy; rather it is not yet in the sense of a possibility; that it could be there if we could only do something for it.”

The inseparability of hope from concrete struggle necessitates that it always be social in nature, rather than individual. Hope is not about individual aims, desires, or ambitions; it is beyond simply dreaming of a better day and into consciously thinking about how to work toward a collective vision. Hoping is not tied to having hope-for something, a state of mind that is closer to desire. Hope is concerned with a collective act of hope-in something, rather than with an individual future. It must be capable of producing people willing and able to expand and deepen their sense of themselves, to think of their socio-economic environment critically, to imagine something beyond their own self interest and well-being, to serve the public good, and struggle for an egalitarian future.

Utopia

Without hope, humans would despair in the face of their unfinishedness and would become immobilized. It is hope that helps in leading the incessant pursuit of the oppressed towards humanization. It is hope, in other words, that drives us ever onwards as travelers, wayfarers, seekers, in pursuit of completeness. In this pursuit of completeness, in this hope-driven search for fully realized humanity, education is extremely important. For Bloch, hope left to itself is undisciplined and “easily led astray”, taking the form of wishful, magical “meaningless hope” or, when manipulated by the bourgeoisie, a domesticated, privatized and “fraudulent hope”.

Hope may also manifest itself as passive patience while on the other it may take the form of an unfocused rebelliousness. Since such impatient hope is at risk of turning into defeatism, it needs to be bolstered by careful attention to and analysis of material data. A reckless false hope, an over-zealous hope fails to consider counter-acting forces and ends up in a welter of immobilizing frustration.

Education is, therefore, required in order to provide “contact with the real forward tendency into what is better”. By means of utopian images, hope can be educated, taught, “trained unerringly, usefully, on what is right”. Freire, too, argued that undisciplined, naïve, spontaneous hope needed education in order to connect it tightly to the project of humanization - to sharpen, clarify and illuminate its objective. The need for utopian, humanizing education is rendered all the more important because of the continual operation of dehumanizing forces. As the dominators “have nothing to announce but the preservation of the status quo”, they invariably try to cage the future and make of it “a repetition of the present”. In this context, “the struggle for the restoration of utopia [is] all the more necessary. Educational practice itself, as an experience in humanization, must be impregnated with this ideal”.

In The Politics of Education, Freire outlined what such a utopia can look like: “Revolutionary utopia tends to be dynamic rather than static; tends to life rather than death; to the future as a challenge to man's creativity rather than as a repetition of the present; to love as liberation of subjects rather than as pathological possessiveness; to the emotion of life rather than as cold abstractions; to living together in harmony rather than mere gregariousness; to dialogue rather than silence; to praxis rather than ‘law and order’; to men who organize themselves reflectively for action rather than men who are organized for passivity; to creative and communicative language rather than empty verbosity; to reflective challenges rather than enslaving slogans; and values which can be lived rather than to myths which are imposed.”

Informed by utopia, the language of hope becomes a medium of struggle of those who refuse to lose their grip on reality. This is the language of sound and sober hope, an educated hope grounded in a careful study of material conditions. Educated hope demands that the fact in which it believes be abandoned the moment concrete experience is against it. This method requires continual alertness to indicators that call hope into question and entail a change in praxis.

Faith in Class Struggle

In his book Beyond US Hegemony: Assessing the Prospects for a Multipolar World, Samir Amin states: “There are no ‘laws of capitalist expansion’ that assert themselves as a quasi-supernatural force. There is no historical determinism prior to history itself. Tendencies inherent in the logic of capital encounter the resistance of forces that do not accept its effects. Real history is therefore the outcome of this conflict between the logic of capitalist expansion and other logics stemming from the resistance of social forces that suffer the effects of such expansion.”

As is evident from the quotation, capitalism is not an essentially closed and immutable phase of history, standing above the vagaries of class struggle. Rather, it is a hegemonic arena of constant push-and-pull, open to the possibility of hope. When that hope is recognized by socialists, there emerges a “weak teleological force of open possibilities” - the belief that the collective struggle of the masses will steer the undecidedness of the world process toward a better future. Today, we need to reclaim hope so that we can navigate through the indeterminacy of history and prepare the working class for a revolutionary upheaval.

Yanis Iqbal is an independent researcher and freelance writer based in Aligarh, India and can be contacted at yanisiqbal@gmail.com

From Neoliberalism to Nowhere

By Thomas McLamb

From 1932-1945, FDR responded to the Great Depression by way of the New Deal to temporarily put a bandage on the crises of capital. This creation of the American Welfare State served as the response to the occasional short-term downturns of capitalist expansion. From FDR’s term until the Oil Crisis in the early 70s, the United States capitalist system enjoyed a period of steady growth and a stable rate of profit, whose occasional declines were solved by way of a variety of government programs that sent one clear message; the government existed to serve the people.

When Nixon took office, the processes of persistent economic inflation became apparent, indicating that this long period of economic expansion and stability was changing. That said, Marxist analyses of economic patterns of expansion, contraction, and long-term growth should stray away from the use of inflation as an economic pattern. Inflation is merely the process by which bourgeois economists summarize the degeneration of working-class buying power and strengthening of capitalist class buying power. In one short phrase – the dollar is fundamentally worth less to the worker than it is to the capitalist. While the capitalist is able to purchase more money with less, an exponential process depending on how much capital has been accumulated, the worker is dependent on purchasing essential life commodities, healthcare, food, housing, etc. with their dollar; the worker does not enjoy the luxury of purchasing more money with less, a process that inevitably leads to the phenomenon neoclassical economists refer to as inflation. Regardless of the actual relationship of inflation and the working-class, the aforementioned cycle of profits and growth from the post-war periods came to an end with the ’73-75 recession. The long wave of capitalist expansion had begun to wane, signaling the forthcoming period of long-term stagnation of working-class wages still underway today.

The end of the doctrine of the Welfare State led directly into a new doctrine of economic policy. The dominant economists of the period suggested that government welfare was wasteful and inefficient, that the occasional patterns of economic recession could be solved by allowing the markets to regulate themselves. The general assumption of these economists, i.e. Friedman et. al., was that government welfare resulted in an exponential process of inflation that could be remedied by a revival of liberal economics. This renascent adoration of laissez-faire capitalism came to serve as the genesis and framework of neoliberalism – the doctrine of cutting government expenses by any means necessary. Following the birth of neoliberalism, austerity quickly set in. The government responded to crises by allowing the bottom to hit the bottom, and externalizing and outsourcing previously domestic forms of labor that had now suffered from a declining rate of profit.

Alongside the externalization and outsourcing of labor from the United States, a process that signaled the shift of the U.S. to a strictly service and information economy, came a renascent nationalism and patriotism within the United States. This renascent nationalism served as the popular justification for the endless oil wars in the middle east, the incessant and undemocratic CIA-backed military coups in Latin America, and the continuous starving acts of tariffs and embargoes against foreign governments who refused to kneel to the imperialist war cry of neoliberalism. In industries where the rate of profit waned in the United States, the government merely cut popular welfare programs to fund the imperialist war machine to appropriate resources, governments, and economies of foreign governments, continuing the accumulation of capital and comfortable seat of influence of America.

Away from the wars, coups, and starvation acts outside of American borders, American workers waded through an ever-changing industry of employment in the United States. The neoliberal response to the discovery of ‘inflation,’ better understood as another symptom of the declining rate of profit, resulted in the same outcome the neoliberal economists and politicians believed they would be avoiding – a period of long-term stagnation of working-class wages and the devaluation of the buying-power of the working-class by large-scale privatization and imperialist efforts to sustain the total economic growth of the U.S. economy. Of course, these solutions worked to create more wealth than ever and higher profitability that ever before in the United States, but the measure of the total economy and its exponential growth ignores the continuous struggle of the non-propertied class. Marx’s theories of surplus value provide us with the truth that all profit is derived solely from labor. With that understood, wherever labor costs can be reduced, they will be, and profits will increase. Additionally, the buying-power of those wages themselves have been structurally diminished long-term by the neoliberal doctrine. This process of the stagnation of working-class buying power can be observed in the history of wages since the beginning of the neoliberal period. Real per capita wealth in the U.S. has more than doubled since 1964 while average real wages have barely increased. From 1964 to 2018, the buying power of the average worker in the United States increased by only 11.7% while the actual average wages themselves have increased by 806%. This mass rate of inflation is not an aberration of capitalist market economies – it is precisely a function of the long and short waves of capitalist development; all of which is accelerated and exaggerated by neoliberal austerity.

Over the past 50 years, over 90% of all growth in income has gone directly to the top 5% of households in the United States. Just short of 3% of total economic growth went to the bottom 20% of households, while more than half went to the wealthiest 20%. Wealth inequality from the late sixties throughout the development of the neoliberal period can be described in one sentence – the rich got richer and the poor get poorer.

The bottom 95% of families have experienced within themselves disproportionate rates of economic growth relative to productivity. While workers are producing more than ever for their bosses, hikes in productivity in the neoliberal period haven’t resulted in higher wages at all. Drew DeSilver has pointed out in his work through the Pew Research Center that while productivity amongst workers has increased by 80% over the past 30 years, the data will show that the buying power of the wages those workers earned has moved up barely a percent and a half.  Despite this near doubling in productivity, neoliberal austerity and market purism have made more money than ever for those at the top, and stolen more than ever from those at the bottom. The general tendency of money to move upwards on the capitalist market has resulted in exponential gains for the ultra-rich, which as mentioned before, creates an exponential increase in the buying-power of the rich and a stagnating or decreasing buying-power of the poor.

Alongside the hikes in productivity and slow growth of wages, nearly 80:1 from 1987-2017, there has been a drastic shift in employment by major industry sector amongst the total workforce. From 1948-1975, the total employees in the United States increased by 65.67%, around 2.43% annually. From 1975-2017, total employees increased by 79.23%, or 1.89% annually. Even though productivity and total wealth increased exponentially over the neoliberal period, employment decreased in growth year after year.

Amongst the general change in total employment, specific industries saw drastic changes during the neoliberal period compared to the period of government intervention policy stemming from the FDR era. Manufacturing jobs have disappeared in mass numbers since the beginning of the neoliberal era. Manufacturing has been pushed abroad to keep up with the ‘cutting costs’ doctrine of neoliberalism, while more workers than ever are forced into low-paying service and information jobs, since these are the only jobs that exist anymore. Retail positions have increased proportionally with total employment, but many of these positions are occupied by formerly well-employed manufacturing jobs. The shift in employment by major industry sector can be observed as a primary vehicle for the slow-growth of working-class buying power, as well as an expression of ever-disappearing manufacturing jobs.

In terms of buying power of the working-class, the numbers represent a similar transformation of shares of economic expansion, though the buying-power can illuminate a more concrete examination that accounts for the bourgeois notion of inflation and market behaviors.

From 1967 to 2017, the buying power of the lowest 80% of families grew at a similar rate to the actual dollar amount in the previous data set. From a sliding scale of the least to most wealthy in terms of economic expansion, the buying-power of the poor increased by around half compared to their dollar-amount wages while the buying-power of the wealthiest percentile classes increased by around 2.1 times. Though these numbers from the census do adjust buying power to examine the market behaviors and adjust the wages to paint a more accurate picture using consumer price indexes, these numbers are not adjusted to account for factors that only affect growth amongst the ultra-rich, i.e., debt, investments, property, etc. Furthermore, the tendency of capital upwards results in exponential increases in the buying-power of those at the top, but commodities can only grow so expensive before those at the bottom can no longer pay for them, thus the tendency of the rate of profit to fall despite exponential levels of expansion for the most-high spheres of capital.

Of course, the most wealth 5% of households in the United States have enjoyed economic expansion that dwarfs that of those at the bottom, a near 60-40 split. This is largely due to the existing ownership of the means of production and investment spheres by the ultra-rich maintaining their positions through one of the largest hikes in productivity in the history of capital itself.  The bureau of labor statistics provides us with a catalogued measure of productivity increases by major industry sector, though some catalogs only go back as far as 1987. Despite this, the numbers are still useful to examine the production and profitability levels of economic industry relative to real wage increases.

There are data series on productivity in the manufacturing sector using the same measuring scale as the data set above, though the historical series only date back to 1987, presenting several problems, but the data itself is still very useful. The data is included in the above chart, though 1967-1986 are omitted for mentioned reasons.

Referring to the real average household incomes of the same time-set discussed above, we can build a relationship by percentile class of the wage-productivity increase from 1967-2017. Listed below are both the data from 1967-2017 as well as a smaller section from 1987-2017 to include manufacturing data relative to the other major industry sectors.

Regardless of year and industry, there is a general tendency both within the latent capitalist mode of production as well as the neoliberal tendency for exponentially disproportionate ratios of growth to productivity depending on income class. Since 1987, there has been a harsh stagnation of wages especially amongst the poorest 20% of households in the United States that was not shared in years prior. Following the tendency of the income-productivity relationship upwards can illuminate the fact that the neoliberal period has resulted in the richest few in the United States have received the overwhelming majority of money and buying-power from the bottom. The philosophy of trickle-down economics combined with the furthering development of the capitalist tendency towards class-monopoly has resulted in both the longest period of wage stagnation in the history of American capitalism as well as the largest wealth inequality in the history of this country. Hikes in productivity are useful for examining the rate at which working-class wages are outpaced by economic growth, but these productivity measures also help illuminate the mass-level of accumulation and theft that the billionaire class has taken part in over the past 50 some-odd years.

In all industries, sans manufacturing, the highest 20% of household incomes have reaped the rewards of the increased productivity of the bottom 80%. The outsourcing and evisceration of American manufacturing deals primarily with the need for a higher profitability from labor by those who own the manufacturing means, as well as the systemic decline in union membership and labor solidarity from Reagan to present. Furthermore, the top 5% of families have almost exclusively reaped the rewards of hikes in productivity, being the only percentile class in the country that has achieved a level of economic growth that is even barely comparable to the growth of productivity. Again, this wage-productivity relationship only grows more dramatic and exponential as you examine those higher and higher up on the wealth ladder. For those at the very top, their economic growth makes that of those of the bottom 99% seem like raindrops in the vast open ocean.

In the period of FDR, there were three solutions to the crisis of capitalism across the world – Bolshevism, fascism, and social-democratic government policy. If the policy of FDRs social-democratic platform was to sustain the rate of profit through bailing out the worker through mass government programs, the policy of neoliberalism was to simply allow the economy to bottom out, so that the rate of profit could be restored organically in the market. The neoliberal period which proceeded from the welfare state allowed for mass accumulation of capital by the ultra-rich at exponential levels. In the early 20th century, bailing out the ultra-rich would not allow for an organic recovery of the rate of profit since the raw inequality between the rich and poor paled in comparison to that of the 21st century. However, in 2020, the capitalist system has been able to sustain its profits by doing precisely what couldn’t be done 100 years ago – bailing out the 1% of the 1% time after time. The capital that has been accumulated in disproportionate amounts over the past 100 years has facilitated this very process of the reintroduction of mass government programs that serve the market, only this time, they serve those at the top instead of those at the bottom. The program of neoliberalism is the death knell of capital, whose only defense is to consume its very mechanism of its own creation and sustenance.

The rate of profit is in decline. There are two paths forward from neoliberalism. The first path is the possibility that capital can save itself through the false-promises of several decades of social-democratic reform, recreating the conditions that led to the development of neoliberalism. The second path is the dissolution of capital by its own hand. Capitalism has dug its own grave through the doctrine of neoliberalism, resulting in the greatest wealth inequality in the history of capital and the ever-growing contradictions of labor and productivity. The path forward from the death knells of capital cannot be understood as some sort of communist eventuality. Capital will certainly die, but what takes is place is certainly indeterminate.

Neoliberalism has wreaked havoc on the worker for half a century now. Corporate tax cuts, the starvation of the worker, and the greatest wealth inequality the country has ever seen – these are the legacies of neoliberalism. Its doctrine has been nothing but the largest heist in the history of capitalism, with the ultra-rich stealing more every day from the pockets of the worker. The path forward must address these concerns, lest we allow the economy to bottom out, and leave authoritarianism and failed bourgeois economics to dominate the world as it has for the past century.

Thomas McLamb is a Lebanese-American Marxist writer, historian, and graduate student residing in the so-called United States. Thomas has spent the last few years researching historic wages, economic expansion, recession, and the currents of capitalism both in the so-called United States as well as internationally.

Militant Anti-Imperialism and Liberal Anti-Imperialism: A Demarcation

By Will Griffin

The term “anti-imperialist” gets thrown around so much today that the very definition of it is muddled up. Does opposing the wars abroad make you anti-imperialist? What about the wars here at home? Are there different kinds of anti-imperialists? Can we oppose military/political interventions while supporting economic interventions? How would they be different and how can we draw lines of demarcation between these differences?

First, let’s make clear what demarcation means. J. Moufawad-Paul describes drawing clear and decisive lines of demarcation as a militant philosophical approach to distinguish between competing interpretations within “the zones of praxis through which it cuts (Demarcation and Demystification, 2019).” In a nutshell, to be as precise as possible in our understanding of our own praxis and theory, it behooves of us to draw clear and distinct lines of differences between particular strategies and interpretations. 

In the book, Philosophy of Antifascism: Punching Nazis and Fighting White Supremacy (2020), Devin Zane Shaw draws a clear line of demarcation of militant antifascism and liberal antifascism. This book provided a clear framework for me to apply the same to the anti-imperialist movement. 

The term “militant” is another word which has been thrown around a lot. Today, it often gets associated with some kind of unnecessary violence, an incorrect usage of the term due to liberal propaganda. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. practiced militant nonviolence. We can confidently say that a militant is someone who is willing to face antagonistic contradictions head on. Whether a militant uses the tactic of nonviolence or armed struggle to face an antagonistic enemy is not the question as both are militant. A labor strike can be militant. A sit-down protest can be militant. Anything can be militant as long as they are willing to face their oppressors. 

In order to understand anti-imperialism more clearly, we must demarcate a split within anti-imperialism itself. The two main trends within any anti-imperialist movement are militant anti-imperialism and liberal anti-imperialism. Both types of anti-imperialisms stand against imperialism, undoubtedly. Yes, I believe liberal anti-imperialists genuinely want to end imperialism; it is just their framework of understanding imperialism is incorrect and therefore their strategy to end imperialism is most certainly wonky. This wonky framework and strategy used by the liberal anti-imperialist could potentially lead down the road of capitulation to the imperialists, which is one reason we need to draw a distinct line of demarcation between liberal and militant anti-imperialism. Wherever liberal anti-imperialists fail, militant anti-imperialists can pick up the ball and continue pushing forward. 

Liberal anti-imperialism tends to funnel resistance back towards the institutions which are practicing imperialism, mainly the capitalist State. Essentially, they believe this State is neutral and can be won over to an anti-imperialist line. For those of us familiar with Marxist history, especially V.I. Lenin’s work in State and Revolution, understand the capitalism-imperialist state can never be won over as it is ultimately tied by a thousand threads to the capitalists and imperialists. So, liberal anti-imperialists are essentially begging a body of parasites to stop being parasitic. This is akin to requesting a human to stop drinking water or for the Earth to stop revolving around the Sun. 

The liberal anti-imperialists tend to denounce nearly all militant forms of resistance to imperialism, such as People's Wars in the Global South, when black and brown people destroy property or march with weapons or anything that they construe as "too far" or "too militant.". In the end, liberal anti-imperialists adhere to a faith in the institutions of government. Much of their faith relies on voting imperialism out of existence. The typical pattern for them is to not only denounce imperialism, but also stigmatize the militant anti-imperialists. How can one say no to the oppressor but also say no to the oppressed? Anyone who opposes liberal ways must be opposed against themselves; this is the liberal mentality.

A fundamental and detrimental mistake made by liberal anti-imperialist is taking the tactic of nonviolence and upholding it as a principle. This is the reason why liberals sit on the sideline as people are murdered in the street and bombed by drones from the sky. Kwame Ture taught us a valuable lesson in a speech where he said, 

“We must not confuse tactics with principles. This is an error that Dr. MLK made, and it also helps to confound the error. Dr. King took nonviolence, which is a tactic, and made it a principle. Being an honest man he came to compound his error because being an honest man he couldn’t compromise this principle, so he was forced to say ‘at all times, under all conditions, we must use nonviolence’. Malcolm X was correct. Malcolm said ‘nonviolence can only be a principle in a nonviolent world’, as MLK’s death came to prove.” (Kwame Ture speech at Florida International University, 1992)

Militant anti-imperialism uses direct action and does not rely on the capitalist State for any kind of policy change. We support movements who practice revolutionary militancy. We understand the necessity of fighting back physically in order to defend oneself from the horrors of imperialism. Militant anti-imperialists tend to realize that imperialism cannot be voted out of existence, it must be stepped on, forced out and overthrown. Militant anti-imperialists place their faith in the people, not the imperialist state; a huge fundamental difference from liberal anti-imperialists. 

The purpose of demarcation here is to force open the terrain of a radical, even revolutionary, militant left that goes beyond a parliamentary struggle. Also in doing so, we can mark the terrain for effective movement building. Despite having some gains in exposing the brutality of imperialism, liberal anti-imperialism will ultimately fail. When it does fail, a militant anti-imperialist movement will offer a new option for people to compete against this failure. 

We should not transform this non-antagonistic relationship between militant anti-imperialist and liberal anti-imperialists into an antagonistic contradiction. Many of the liberal anti-imperialists can, and should, be won over. We must oppose dogmatically applying this demarcation but hold true to it. Liberal anti-imperialists, at least some of them, can be shown the failures of their framework and strategy eventually winning them over to supporting militant anti-imperialist struggles. After all, were any of us born a militant anti-imperialist? No, we had to work our way up to this level of consciousness. 

I want to stress the importance in one of the differences in these trends. Liberal anti-imperialists deny the existence of militant struggles against imperialism, here and abroad. This fundamental outlook leads to the whitewashing of history and current movements around the world. It explains the limitations and failures of the mainstream “anti-imperialist” movement. They disconnect from the militant struggles and, therefore, are demarcating themselves from actual and effective anti-imperialist movements. In my experience, it’s often the pacifists who are the first to censure, and even condemn, movements which choose to pick up the gun, burn a facility down or even dress up in military fatigues. This is intrinsically tied to the idea of holding nonviolence as a principle. 

Is it really anti-imperialist? Anti-imperialism is just as much about opposing the Coca-Cola factory in Iraq as it is in opposing the bombs being dropped. Economic intervention is just as important as a military/political intervention. Imperialism is primarily an economic system, where the more powerful nations exploit, or super-exploit, the less powerful nations. Often, it is about stealing resources but also other reasons like geopolitics. Nonetheless, imperialism maintains an unequal economic, cultural and territorial relationships between nations and capitalist enterprises, often in the form of empire, based on domination and subordination. 

In our universities, the bourgeois academics develop the ideology for the imperialists. One method involves disassociating politics from economics. To understand more precisely and in a more holistic manner of our world, we require the more accurate term, political economy. Politics and economics are intrinsically tied to each other. The military intervention invades in order to protect the economic system of exploitation and super-exploitation. In our era, the Global North exploits the Global South for its resources and to play on the grand chessboard of hegemony. This is only made possible with a powerful capitalist state. 

Liberal anti-imperialists lack a clear idea of imperialism by limiting it to military/political interventions only, leaving out the possibility of economic interventions. When transnational corporations intervene in a poor and oppressed nation in order to plunder its resources, is this not a form of imperialism? The military/political intervention is dependent upon the economic intervention. In fact, the State intervenes in order to protect the economic interests of the ruthless and exploitative corporations. This fractured framework of the liberal anti-imperialists weakened their resolve in opposing imperialism. The clarity around the nature of imperialism can only strengthen the anti-imperialist movement. Drawing this line can help to offer clarity on where each one of us may stand. It helps us to develop a more effective strategy in order to defeat imperialism. Militant anti-imperialists hold true to the power of the people, to combat imperialism in an assertive yet principled manner, and to overcome the weaknesses in our strategies and tactics. 

Will Griffin is a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars who is now an anti-imperialist and a content creator at The Peace Report, a militant anti-imperialist media collective. 

Voting Doesn't Beat the Far Right

Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta

By Ezra Brain

Republished from Left Voice.

The Far Right, emboldened and egged on by Donald Trump, stormed the U.S. Capitol Building yesterday with little resistance from the police. Their occupation of the Capitol — which came while Congress was in session ratifying the electoral college vote — is a far cry from the tear gas, rubber bullets, and mass arrests which took place during the Black Lives Matter movement last summer. But, this isn’t too surprising: we’ve always known that the cops will treat the Right with kid gloves and even aid and abet them, just like we saw during last year’s anti-lockdown protests and in Charlottesville. What these mobilizations reveal is, once again, that voting and elections won’t defeat the Far Right — especially not when the alternative is the Democratic Party, a capitalist party that helped fuel its rise. 

During the 2020 presidential election, figures from Barack Obama to Noam Chomsky to Angela Davis were telling everyone who would listen that voting for Joe Biden was necessary because it would defeat the Far Right forces that Trump has been stoking for more than four years. Many members of the Left bought into this argument and voted for Biden against their better judgement because they wanted to put a stop to Trump’s authoritarian and right-wing tendencies. In some sense, this is understandable — after all, if Trump is the one emboldening this right-wing movement, why wouldn’t getting rid of him help kill it? The events that transpired over the last few days clearly show that this is mistaken thinking. Whether in the White House or out of it, Donald Trump and his far right-wing base will continue to mobilize and play a role on the political stage. In fact, a staggering 75 percent of Republicans believe that the elections were rigged, highlighting the widespread influence of Trumpism. It is naïve to believe that these folks will just go home on January 20th.

Further, the idea that elections can defeat Trumpism misses  that politicians can’t create movements in a vacuum — they tap into existing sentiments and give political expression to them. The global rise in right-wing extremism is a response to the dire conditions created by the economic crisis. The current spike is a more direct result of the decline in living conditions for ordinary Americans over the past few decades, culminating in the 2008 financial crisis, which the capitalists resolved by implementing devastating austerity that robbed millions of social services, education, job opportunities, and health care. This created a deep polarization which had left- and right-wing populist expressions. 

In this context, right-wing extremism emerged because it spoke to the despair of (typically) white men. By tapping into the racism that capitalism is built on, right-wing extremism channels anger at the establishment and converts material struggles into xenophobia, racism, and neo-fascism. And Donald Trump was the political expression of this right-wing polarization, strengthening, giving voice to it, and, now, mobilizing it on a larger scale. This movement rallied around Trump because it believed that he represented a challenge to the established order and, now that he has been defeated by yet another neoliberal, it is mobilizing to defend him. 

But we should be clear: this rise in right-wing radicalization is a product of the Obama years as well as the escalation in the Trump years. Given this, it is not only incorrect but deeply dangerous to think that Biden’s warmed-over neoliberalism in the midst of a devastating economic crisis will do anything but escalate the problem.

Indeed, the escalations from the right that we saw on Wednesday come less than 24 hours after the Democrats won both senate elections in Georgia and took control of Congress. Trump was defeated at the ballot box in November and then again in January, but the social base of Trumpism is emboldened, not diminished. With Trump out of office, it provides him with a bigger platform to speak to this right-wing base, not smaller, because he will no longer be held back by having to work within the established structures. The “adults in the room” are gone, and full-fledged right-wing populism can reign at Trump rallies, on Trump’s Twitter feed, and the vast network of right-wing media outlets. 

So if the solution to defeating the Right isn’t voting for the Democrats, what is? 

The way to defeat the organized Right is with an organized Left independent of all capitalist parties. There are no shortcuts, no substitutes for the organizing we need to do. We need to build powerful and militant worker organizations in our workplaces and in the streets that can resist the Far Right, all the politicians who cater to them, and the neoliberal austerity that creates them. This resistance will involve both openly confronting the Far Right in the streets but also using our power as workers to resist them. For example, workers in DC could go on strike to protest the Far Right occupation of the Capitol building, forcing the government to evict them from the streets.

Strong Left organizations are also important because they can fight back the ideological advance of the Right. Many young people are drawn to the Far Right because they believe that it offers solutions to their struggles. If there were Left organizations that were putting forward a strong message against both the Far Right and neoliberalism, it could help to prevent some of these people from being drawn into right-wing extremism, thus preventing these movements from growing. It is vital in the fight to defeat the Right that we provide a real and meaningful alternative. And for people who become fascists, we agree with Trotsky when he said, “If you cannot convince a Fascist, acquaint his head with the pavement.”

In this, the failure of leftist leaders like Chomsky and Davis becomes clear: not only were they wrong that defeating Trump at the polls would defeat the Far Right, but they also sewed false illusions in Biden. Chomsky and the other leftist leaders who asked us to support Biden told us that he could keep us safe from the Far Right. He can’t — and he won’t. By funneling the energy of the Black Lives Matter movement into support for Biden, these leaders intentionally or not worked to undermine what could have been the foundations of the type of mass social movement we need to protect against the Far Right. Voting for Biden got us further away from defeating the Right, not closer.

History is littered with examples of this. From Franco in Spain to Hitler in Germany, the liberals always choose to side with the fascists over the socialists because fascism is less of a threat to the capitalist order than socialism is. So we can’t be fooled when liberal politicians wring their hands about the rise of the Far Right — they aren’t on our side, and we cannot support them in their elections, even when they are running against a representative of the Far Right. Liberal victories at the voting booth will not defeat the Right — but class struggle and worker organizing will. And given the right-wing mobilization yesterday, it’s clear that we need independent organizing in the current moment.