The Internationalist Lenin: Self-Determination and Anti-Colonialism

By Vijay Prashad

Republished from Monthly Review.

In 1913, Lenin published an article in Pravda with a curious title, ‘Backward Europe and Advanced Asia’.(1) The opening of the article accepts the paradoxical nature of the title, for it is Europe–after all–that has advanced it forces of production and it is Asia that has had its forces of production stifled. The character of advancement and backwardness for Lenin does not only rest on the question of technological and economic development; it rests, essentially, on the nature of the mass struggle.

In Europe, Lenin wrote, the bourgeoisie was exhausted. It no longer had any of the revolutionary capacity with which it once fought off the feudal order; although even here, the bourgeoisie was pushed along reluctantly by the rising of the masses–as in the French Revolution of 1789–and it was the bourgeoisie that betrayed the mass struggle and opted for the return of authoritarian power as long as its class interests were upheld. By 1913, the European bourgeoisie had been corrupted by the gains of imperialism; the rule of the European bourgeoisie had to be overthrown by the workers.

In Asia, meanwhile, Lenin identified the dynamism of the national liberation movements. ‘Everywhere in Asia’, he wrote, ‘a mighty democratic movement is growing, spreading, and gaining in strength…Hundreds of millions of people are awakening to life, light, and freedom’. Until this period, Lenin had focused his attention on the revolutionary developments in Russia, with a detailed study of agrarian conditions and capitalism in his country and with debates over the nature of organisation in the revolutionary camp. The breakthroughs in 1911 that took place in China, Iran, and Mexico with their variegated and complex revolutionary processes, nonetheless struck him. In 1912, Lenin would write on numerous occasions of the peoples of Asia–such as Persia and Mongolia–who ‘are waging a revolutionary struggle for freedom’, and he would push his party to condemn Tsarist imperialist attacks on Persia and the ‘revolutionary struggle of the Chinese people, which is bringing emancipation to Asia and is undermining the rule of the European bourgeoisie’.(2)

Lenin had tracked developed in eastern Asia ever since the Tsarist empire opened hostilities against China by invading Manchuria in 1900 and then against Japan in 1904-05 in Manchuria and Korea. In 1900, Lenin took a strong anti-war position, arguing that even though the Tsar had not declared war in 1900, ‘war is being waged nonetheless’.(3) ‘The autocratic tsarist government’, Lenin wrote, ‘has proved itself to be a government of irresponsible bureaucrats serviley cringing before the capitalist magnates and nobles’; meanwhile, the war resulted in ‘thousands of ruined families, whose breadwinners have been sent to war; an enormous increase in the national debt and the national expenditure; mounting taxation; greater power for the capitalists, the exploiters of the workers; worse conditions for the workers; still greater mortality among the peasantry; famine in Siberia’. ‘The Chinese people suffer from the same evils as those from which the Russian people suffer’, argued Lenin in an early demonstration of his internationalism.

The Tsarist empire, along with the European imperialists, had developed a ‘counterrevolutionary coalition’, Lenin wrote in 1908 in his reflection on the Balkans, Turkey, and Persia. How should the socialists react to this policy of imperialism? ‘The very essence of proletarian policy at this stage’, he wrote in Proletary, ‘should be to tear the mask from these bourgeois hypocrites and to reveal to the broadest masses of the people the reactionary character of the European governments who, out of fear of the proletarian struggle at home, are playing, and helping others play, the part of gendarme in relation to the revolution in Asia’.(4)
Within Europe, the oppressed nationalities–such as the Polish and the Irish–demonstrated the important spirit of democracy that Lenin had detected from Mexico to China. Unlike many other Marxists–such as Karl Radek and Leon Trotsky–Lenin fully supported the Easter Rising in English-occupied Ireland in 1916. It was in this context that Lenin wrote in July 1916, ‘The dialectics of history are such that small nations, powerless as an independent factor in the struggle against imperialism, play a part as one of the ferments, one of the bacilli, which help the real anti-imperialist force, the socialist proletariat, to make its appearance on the scene.’(5) As he studied these movements with more care, the national liberation struggles no longer were seen as mere ‘bacilli’ and not ‘real’, but these movements were themselves partners in a global struggle. Lenin began to conceptualise a strategic unity between the nationalism of the oppressed and the proletariat in the imperialist states. ‘The social revolution’, he wrote in October 1916, ‘can come only in the form of an epoch in which are combined civil war by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie in the advanced countries and a whole series of democratic and revolutionary movements, including the national liberation movements in the underdeveloped, backward, oppressed nations’.(6)

Lenin’s great advance over Second International Marxism is clarified by the centrality he placed of anti-colonial national liberation, of the struggles of oppressed nationalities by the jackboot of imperialism. For Lenin, the democratic struggles of anti-colonialism were lifted to parity with the proletariat struggles inside the advanced industrial states; it was the international cognate of his theory of the worker-peasant alliance.(7)

In 1914, Lenin published a long series of articles on the theme of ‘national self-determination’ in the journal Prosveshcheniye (Enlightenment).(8) These were his longest statements on the topic, even though Lenin was to return to the idea over the next decade. Like much of Lenin’s work, this essay was not written to elaborate on the idea of national self-determination in itself; Lenin wrote the article to answer a position initially taken by the Rosa Luxemburg in 1908-09. In that article, ‘The National Question and Autonomy’, published in Przeglad Sozialdemokratyczny (Panorama Social Democracy), Luxemburg argued against the right of self-determination for the Polish people.(9) Initially, Stalin responded to Luxemburg (in Prosveshcheniye, March-May 1913), but Stalin’s essay did not directly confront Luxemburg’s theses (he was more content to take on Karl Renner and Otto Bauer).(10) It was left to Lenin, the following year, to offer a full critique of Luxemburg.

Lenin argued that an oppressed nation must be allowed its freedom to secede from an oppressor state. Tsarism and colonialism not only crushed the ability of the people of its peripheral states and its colonial dominions to live full lives, but it also contorted the lives of those who seemed to benefit from colonial rule (including workers at the core of the empire). Secession, for Lenin, was a democratic right. If later, because of economic pressures, the proletariat of an independent state would like to freely unite with the proletariat of their previous colonial state that would be acceptable; their unity would now be premised upon freedom not oppression. Over the course of the next decade, Lenin would develop this argument in a series of short essays. Most of the essays, written in German, were translated into Russian in the 1920s by N. K. Krupskaya and published in the Lenin Miscellany volumes, later in the Collected Works. In 1967, Moscow’s Progress Publishers put these essays into a small book under the title, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination (it is available in volume 20 of Lenin’s Collected Works). Their appearance in a book, then, was not intentional since Lenin had never written a book on the subject. This was a collection of interventions and articles that had the gist of his analysis on the question.(11) It is these interventions, however, that allow us to see the richness of Lenin’s argument about anti-colonialism and self-determination.(12)

Bourgeois Nationalism

The question of self-determination came to the fore because of the social forces unleashed by the 1905 Russian Revolution and because of Tsarist expansion into Manchuria and Korea. Different social groups within the Tsarist Empire began to make their own claims for freedom, which had to be represented in the new political parties that emerged on the partly freed up civil arena. The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) had to, therefore, address the question of national self-determination frontally: how should the various people within the Tsarist empire struggle for their freedom? Must they remain under the yoke of the State, even as this State would be at some point be free from Tsarism? Luxemburg was specially involved in this debate because of her roots in the Polish Social Democratic movement, which had since the 19th century been involved in questions of freedom for Poland from the tentacles of Tsarist power. In the world of international socialism, it was often the Polish parties that made the strongest application of the idea of the right to self-determination. That was the case in 1896, when it was the Polish Socialist Party that called for the independence of Poland at the International Socialist Congress in London. At that Congress, the delegates passed a resolution in favor of ‘the complete right of all nations to self-determination and expresses its sympathy for the workers of every country now suffering under the yoke of military, national, or other despotism’.(13)

Polish social democrats at their own Congress (1903) and at the Congress of the RSDLP (1906) agitated to sharpen Social Democracy’s view on self-determination. Little seemed to divide the position of Luxemburg from Lenin at this time, except that in the hallways of the meetings the Poles did express their reservations against the idea of a right to self-determination. It was the working-class that had rights, Luxemburg wrote in her 1908 pamphlet, not nations. The nub of Luxemburg’s unease with the theory of the ‘right to self-determination’ is captured in a long quotation from her 1908 pamphlet,

The formula of the ‘right of nations’ is inadequate to justify the position of socialists on the nationality question, not only because it fails to take into account the wide range of historical conditions (place and time) existing in each given case and does not reckon with the general current of the development of global conditions, but also because it ignores completely the fundamental theory of modern socialists – the theory of social classes.

When we speak of the ‘right of nations to self-determination,’ we are using the concept of the ‘nation’ as a homogeneous social and political entity. But actually, such a concept of the ‘nation’ is one of those categories of bourgeois ideology which Marxist theory submitted to a radical re-vision, showing how that misty veil, like the concepts of the ‘freedom of citizens,’ ‘equality before the law,’ etc., conceals in every case a definite historical content.

In a class society, ‘the nation’ as a homogeneous socio-political entity does not exist. Rather, there exist within each nation, classes with antagonistic interests and ‘rights.’ There literally is not one social area, from the coarsest material relationships to the most subtle moral ones, in which the possessing class and the class-conscious proletariat hold the same attitude, and in which they appear as a consolidated ‘national’ entity. In the sphere of economic relations, the bourgeois classes represent the interests of exploitation–the proletariat the interests of work. In the sphere of legal relations, the cornerstone of bourgeois society is private property; the interest of the proletariat demands the emancipation of the propertyless man from the domination of property. In the area of the judiciary, bourgeois society represents class ‘justice,’ the justice of the well fed and the rulers; the proletariat defends the principle of taking into account social influences on the individual, of humaneness. In international relations, the bourgeoisie represent the politics of war and partition, and at the present stage, a system of trade war; the proletariat demands a politics of universal peace and free trade. In the sphere of the social sciences and philosophy, bourgeois schools of thought and the school representing the proletariat stand in diametric opposition to each other.

The possessing classes have their worldview; it is represented by idealism, metaphysics, mysticism, eclecticism; the modern proletariat has its theory–dialectic materialism. Even in the sphere of so-called ‘universal’ conditions–in ethics, views on art, on behavior–the interests, world view, and ideals of the bourgeoisie and those of the enlightened proletariat represent two camps, separated from each other by an abyss. And whenever the formal strivings and the interests of the proletariat and those of the bourgeoisie (as a whole or in its most progressive part) seem identical–for example, in the field of democratic aspirations – there, under the identity of forms and slogans, is hidden the most complete divergence of contents and essential politics.

There can be no talk of a collective and uniform will, of the self-determination of the ‘nation’ in a society formed in such a manner. If we find in the history of modern societies ‘national’ movements, and struggles for ‘national interests,’ these are usually class movements of the ruling strata of the bourgeoisie, which can in any given case represent the interest of the other strata of the population only insofar as under the form of ‘national interests’ it defends progressive forms of historical development, and insofar as the working class has not yet distinguished itself from the mass of the ‘nation’ (led by the bourgeoisie) into an independent, enlightened political class.(14)

For Luxemburg, the idea of the nation is an ideological smokescreen utilised by the bourgeoisie to create horizontal linkages against the vertical hierarchies of social life. It is a useful mechanism to build national economies and national polities that benefit the class rule of the bourgeoisie. That is the reason why the idea of the right to national self-determination had to be defeated.

Lenin did not disagree with the spirit of Luxemburg’s analysis. He agreed with her that the bourgeoisie’s own class power is most efficiently wielded through the national container. ‘The economic basis of [nationalist] movements’, he wrote in his 1914 reply, ‘is the fact that in order to achieve complete victory for commodity production the bourgeoisie must capture the home market, must have politically united territories with a population speaking the same language, and all obstacles to the development of this language and to its consolidation in literature must be removed’.(15) Therefore, Lenin notes, ‘the tendency of every national movement is towards the formation of national states, under which these requirements of modern capitalism are best satisfied. The profoundest economic factors drive towards this goal, and therefore, for the whole of Western Europe, nay, for the entire civilised world, the typical, normal state for the capitalist period is the national state’. Here there is no difference between Lenin and Luxemburg, with both in agreement that national movements are along the grain of capitalist development, and that the advantages of nationalism in the European experience are first garnered by the bourgeoisie.

Equal Rights of Nations and International Solidarity of Workers

If this analysis is all that there is to it, and if it is correct, then Luxemburg’s antipathy to nationalism seems more coherent than Lenin’s ambivalence. But this is not all there is to it, at least as far as Lenin is concerned. Luxemburg’s approach to the idea of nationalism, Lenin suggested, reduced the national question to economics and to economic independence. It was not interested in the political question, in the hunger for freedom among people who had been colonised. Capitalism’s tendency to expansion out of the national container contained the seeds of imperialism; at a certain stage of its economic development, the national bourgeoisie sought the advantages of the nation-state; but as its dynamism pushed outwards, this bourgeoisie’s ambitions mimicked the imperial exertions of its aristocratic ancestors. It is to this end that Lenin made a distinction between the nationalism of the oppressors (the Great Russians and the English) and the nationalism of the oppressed (the Poles and the Irish). This distinction, Lenin wrote in 1915, ‘is the essence of imperialism’.(16) The nationalism of the oppressor, of the Great Russians and the English for example, is always to be fought against. There is nothing in the character of its nationalism that is worthy of support. Its chauvinism leads it to world conquest, a dynamic that not only shatters the well being of the oppressed but also corrupts its own citizenry.

On December 10, 1869, Marx wrote to Engels on the Irish question. ‘The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland. The lever must be applied in Ireland’, he wrote. ‘English reaction in England has its roots in the subjugation of Ireland’ (Lenin quotes part of this in his 1914 pamphlet).(17) Drawing from Marx, Lenin wrote in his 1915 essay on self-determination, ‘The freedom of [the English] was cramped and mutilated by the fact that it oppressed another nation. The internationalism of the English proletariat would have remained a hypothetical phrase were it not to demand the separation of Ireland’.(18) Much the same kind of logic applied to Russia, whose Social Democrats were urged by Lenin to demand freedom for its oppressed nations. ‘Carried away by the struggle against nationalism in Poland’, Lenin wrote, ‘Rosa Luxemburg has forgotten the nationalism of the Great Russians, although this nationalism is the most formidable at the present time, it is the nationalism that is less bourgeois and more feudal, and it is the principle obstacle to democracy and to the proletarian struggle’.(19) It had to be confronted. Neither Lenin nor Luxemburg thought otherwise.

Their difference was sharp in the second half of Lenin’s distinction. The Great powers not only annex the economies of their subjects, but they also drain their political power. National self-determination of the oppressed contains both the oppressed bourgeoisie’s plans to suborn the economic to their own ends, but also that of the oppressed proletariat’s hope to fight their bourgeoisie over how to organize their nation. ‘The bourgeois nationalism of every oppressed nation’, Lenin argued, ‘has a general democratic content which is directed against oppression, and it is this content that we support unconditionally, while strictly distinguishing it from the tendency towards national exceptionalism, while fighting against the tendency of the Polish bourgeoisie to oppress the Jews, etc., etc’. Lenin carefully worked out the formula for this unconditional support. If the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation ‘fights against the oppressing one’, then the Social Democrats would support them wholeheartedly. If, however, ‘the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation stands for its own bourgeois nationalism’, then the Social Democrats stand opposed to them. ‘We fight against the privileges and violence of the oppressing nation, but we do not condone the strivings for the privileges on the part of the oppressed nation’.(20)

To ‘not condone the strivings’ of the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations sets the Social Democrats and their class allies the crucial task that separates them from the liberals and their class allies. The Social Democrats both stand against the nationalism of the oppressed nation and against the strivings of the bourgeoisie of the oppressor nation to supplant that of the oppressor nation. Workers in the oppressed nation are not to submit to the rule of the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation, but to confront it with as much determination as they would fight against the imperial bourgeoisie. The fight for national self-determination must not divide workers in the imperial core and in the imperial periphery. Those in the core must fight against imperial nationalism, and those in the periphery must fight against both imperial nationalism and the nationalism of their bourgeoisie. The latter have a double task, formidable for the complexity of strategy and tactics demanded of them. They are to fight both for ‘the absolutely direct, unequivocal recognition of the full right of all nations to self-determination’, and for ‘the equally unambiguous appeal to the workers for international unity in their class struggle’.(21) In other words, Social Democrats are not invested in nationalism as an end in itself. The final goal is internationalism of the proletariat, but it must go through the nationalism of the oppressed. The twin tasks of Social Democracy are then to fight for ‘the equal rights of nations and international solidarity of the workers’.(22)

A Free Union

What are the practical means by which this nationalism of the oppressed manifests itself? Lenin argued that the oppressed regions should secede from the oppressor nations, or, in other words, they need to win their independence. If Social Democracy does not call for the right to secession, its politics would ‘empty phrase-mongering, sheer hypocrisy’.(23) Plainly, the ‘self-determination of nations means the political separation of these nations from alien national bodies, the formation of an independent national state’. But an independent national state is not the end of the process. It is here that Lenin carved out new terrain in the Marxist theory of nationalities and self-determination (although once more drawing from insights in Marx’s letters to Engels on the Irish question). Marxists and Social Democracy recognize the economic and political advantages of bigger geographical entities: they are both able to command more resources and larger markets, and they are less vulnerable to military conquest. The end goal is to form vibrant and genuine unions of large, non-homogenous areas,

We demand freedom of self-determination, i.e., independence, i.e., freedom of secession for the oppressed nations, not because we have dreamt of splitting up the country economically, or of the ideal of small states, but, on the contrary, because we want large states and the closer unity and even fusion of nations, only on a truly democratic, truly internationalist basis, which is inconceivable without the freedom to secede.(24)

In his March 1916, Nine Theses on Self-Determination, Lenin wrote, ‘a free union is a false phrase without right to secession’.(25) Drawing from Marx on Ireland, Lenin wrote, ‘the demand for the right of secession for the sake of splitting and isolated countries’ is not an end in itself; it is towards a process ‘to create more durable and democratic ties’.(26) Further, Lenin wrote, ‘only in this way could Marx maintain—in contradiction to the apologists of capital who shout that the freedom of small nations to secede is utopian and impracticable and that not only economic but also political concentration is progressive—that this concentration is progressive when it is non-imperialist, and that nations should not be brought together by force, but by a free union of the proletarians of all countries.’(27)

To defend this right to secession, Lenin wrote in August 1915, ‘does in no way mean to encourage the formation of small states, but on the contrary it leads to a freer, more fearless and therefore wider and more universal formation of larger governments and unions of governments–a phenomenon more advantageous for the masses and more in accord with economic development’.(28) Capitalism dynamically grew to encompass the planet, and it sought out larger and larger areas of operation. This is the tendency not only for firms to agglomerate toward monopoly control over markets, but also for states to enlarge through imperial or colonial policies (this is the general dynamic identified by Lenin in his 1916 pamphlet Imperialism). ‘Imperialism means that capital has outgrown the framework of national states’, Lenin wrote in 1915; ‘it means that national oppression has been extended and heightened on a new historical foundation’.(29) Monopoly capital flourished in large, imperial states. Imperialism was rooted in the political economy of the time. It had to be confronted not by morality but by the growth of political movements that undermined its power, in other words, by a combination of proletarian movements and movements of the oppressed nationalities. ‘It follows from this’, Lenin argued, ‘that we must connect the revolutionary struggle for socialism with a revolutionary program on the national question’.

Luxemburg fought for the ‘freedom from national oppression’ and not for ‘the right of self-determination of nations’. For her, national oppression was just another form of oppression, and it should be confronted as just another oppressive force. For Lenin, national oppression played a specific role in the operation of imperialism, and it had to be confronted in a specific way, by encouragement of secession of the oppressed nationalities in order not to petrify their national culture as separate from that of other cultures, but to work toward a proletarian internationalist unity of the future. Lenin’s approach was not a moral approach, therefore, but one that emerged out of his analysis of imperialism and the national movements that had emerged in opposition to it. His endorsement of nationalism was not premised on the assumption that the small states would somehow undermine imperialism; it was understood that democratic states, with the proletariat in each making links with each other, would be able to take advantage of the new economic scale to forge a genuine unity.

Nationalism would not, as Luxemburg acidly put it, mean ‘the right to eat off gold plates’.(30) But it would mean, as Lenin noted, part of a three-point agenda:

• Complete equality for all nations.

• The right of nations to self-determination.

• The amalgamation of the workers of all nations.

This is ‘the national program that Marxism…teaches the workers’.

Karl Radek, the Austrian Marxist, waded into the debate in 1915 to argue that the struggle for national self-determination is ‘illusionary’ (‘Annexations and Social Democracy’, Berner Tagwacht, October 28-29).(31) One of Radek’s objections that rankled Lenin was that a truly class project would abjure democratic political demands that do not threaten capitalism. There are some democratic demands that can be won in the era of capitalism and there are others that must be struggled with even in a socialist society, Lenin argued. ‘We must combine the revolutionary struggle against capitalism with a revolutionary program and revolutionary tactics relative to all democratic demands: a republic, a militia, official elected by the people, equal rights for women, self-determination of nations, etc. While capitalism exists, all these demands are realizable only as an exception, and in an incomplete, distorted form’.(32) Social Democracy has to ‘formulate in a consistently revolutionary manner every one of our democratic demands’ because the proletariat must be ‘educated in the spirit of the most consistent and determined revolutionary democracy’. To contest the right of national self-determination for oppressed nations is to deny them their democratic rights and to undermined revolutionary democracy.

In the USSR and in the Comintern

Lenin’s formulation from 1914-1916 enabled a clear position in practice after the Soviet revolution (1917). Two tasks presented themselves along the grain of national self-determination.

• How should the new Soviet state deal with the question of its own nationalities?

• How should the newly created Communist International (1919) confront the nationalist movements in the colonies?

On January 3, 1918, Lenin, as part of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee drafted the Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People. It was subsequently adopted by the Third All-Russia Congress of Soviets as the 1918 Constitution (the essence remained in the 1924 Constitution). The second article establishes that the Soviet Republic is based ‘on the principle of a free union of free nations, as a federation of Soviet national republics’. The Council of People’s Commissars had already proclaimed the independence of Finland, removed Russian troops from Persia and committed itself to self-determination for Armenia. On paper, this was unassailable. The problem is that counter-revolutionary forces in its border states, the very states that had been promised the right to secession, attacked the new Soviet state. The Soviets hastily sought alliances with these states (Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia for instance), in which pro-Bolshevik forces were supported by the Soviets and counterrevolutionaries were defeated. Self-determination of the nation was a formula by which the states were afforded nominal independence if they were not hostile to the Soviets. When Bolsheviks (such as Georgy Pyatakov) in these states did argue for full dissolution into Russia, Lenin called them Great Russians and opposed them. The principle of self-determination was sacrosanct, even when the counter-revolution threatened the new Soviet state (Luxemburg, in her essay on the Russian Revolution identified this weakness, ‘While Lenin and his comrades clearly expected that, as champions of national freedom even to the extent of ‘separation’, they would turn Finland, the Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, the Baltic countries, the Caucasus, etc., into so many faithful allies of the Russian revolution, we have witnessed the opposite spectacle. One after another, these ‘nations’ used their freshly granted freedom to ally themselves with German imperialism against the Russian revolution as its mortal enemy, and under German protection, to carry the banner of counter-revolution into Russia itself’).(33) In 1922, Stalin wished to curtail the rights of the new border-states through a policy called ‘autonomisation’, namely that these states would dissolve themselves into the USSR by gaining nominal autonomy. Lenin was adamantly opposed to this policy. ‘We consider ourselves, the Ukrainian SSR and others, equal, and enter with them, on an equal basis, into a new union, a new federation’.(34) This federation was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR. This principle was already there in the 1918 draft, and in the first Soviet Constitution,

At the same time, endeavoring to create a really free and voluntary, and therefore all the more firm and stable, union of the working classes of all the nations of Russia, the Constituent Assembly confines its own task to setting up the fundamental principles of a federation of Soviet Republics of Russia, while leaving it to the workers and peasants of each nation to decide independently at their own authoritative Congress of Soviets whether they wish to participate in the federal government and in the other federal Soviet institutions, and on what terms.(35)

The logic of the federation within the USSR applied similarly to the colonial question. In the 1918 declaration, Lenin had written that the new state must have a ‘complete break with the barbarous policy of bourgeois civilization, which has built the prosperity of the exploiters belonging to a few chosen nations on the enslavement of hundreds of millions of working people in Asia, in the colonies in general, and in the small countries’.(36)

When the Communist International (Comintern) met for its first meeting in 1919, the jubilation of the Soviet experience combined with the potential revolution in Europe (particularly Germany) and the emergence of working-class and peasant movements in Asia defined its outcome. The Comintern addressed the ‘proletariat of the entire world’, telling them,

‘The emancipation of the colonies is possible only in conjunction with the emancipation of the metropolitan working class. The workers and peasants not only of Annam, Algiers and Bengal, but also of Persia and Armenia, will gain their opportunity of independent existence only when the workers of England and France have overthrown Lloyd George and Clemenceau and taken state power into their own hands’.(37) Nationalism of the oppressed nations barely earned a mention. The defeat of the German revolution and the setbacks in the colonies provoked a more sober tone at the second Comintern meeting (1920). Lenin’s views on the colonial (Eastern) question drew from his more capacious attitude toward nationalisms of the oppressed. It was the presence of the Indian Marxist M. N. Roy that stayed Lenin’s hand and curtailed his more ebullient support for anti-colonial nationalism. The second thesis of the Comintern emerged out of a compromise formulation between Lenin’s own draft and Roy’s emendations (with the Dutch Marxist Henk Sneevliet holding their hands to the same pen),

As the conscious express of the proletarian class struggle to throw off the yoke of the bourgeoisie, and in accordance with its main task, which is the fight against bourgeois democracy and the unmasking of its lies and hypocrisy, the Communist Party should not place the main emphasis in the national question on abstract and formal principles, but in the first place on an exact evaluation of the historically given and above all economic milieu. Secondly it should emphasize the explicit separation of the interests of the oppressed classes, of the toilers, of the exploited, from the general concept of the national interest, which means the interests of the ruling class. Thirdly it must emphasize the equally clear division of the oppressed, dependent nations which do not enjoy equal rights from the oppressing, privileged nations, as a counter to the bourgeois democratic lie which covers over the colonial and financial enslavement of the vast majority of the world’s total population, by a tiny minority of the richest and most advanced capitalist countries, that is characteristic of the epoch of finance capital and imperialism.(38)

Nothing in this thesis contradictions the spirit of Lenin’s own view on self-determination, expect in so far as this makes explicit Lenin’s hesitancy over the character of the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations. The 9th thesis said that the Comintern ‘must directly support the revolutionary movement among the nations that are dependent and do not have equal rights (for example Ireland, the Blacks in America, and so forth) and in the colonies’.(39) At the same time, the Comintern, in the 11th Thesis noted that it must engaged in a ‘resolute struggle’ against the attempt to ‘portray as communist the revolutionary liberation movements in the backward countries that are not truly communist’.(40) The Comintern supports the revolutionary movements in the colonies ‘only on condition that the components are gathered in all backward countries for future proletarian parties–communist in fact and not only in name–and that they are educated to be conscious of their particular tasks, that is, the tasks of struggling against the bourgeois-democratic movement in their own nation’. What the Comintern ‘must unconditionally maintain the independent character of the proletarian movement, be it only in embryo’.(41) Lenin’s general principles articulated in his essays from 1914 onwards were enshrined in the Soviet Constitution and in the Comintern, with some alterations to fit the new situations and the new class configurations.

No surprise that radicals from the colonised world–such as Ho Chi Minh and José Carlos Mariategui–found Leninism to be the heart and soul of their political outlook. It was this anti-colonial Marxism that drew radical nationalists from the Dutch colonies of Indonesia to the French colonies of West Africa, and it was this strong theory of anti-colonial national self-determination that forged ties for the Marxist left across these worlds.(42) Little wonder then that the tradition of ‘Western Marxism’ tends to ignore Lenin, to jump from Marx to Lukacs and Gramsci, evading the fact that Lukacs wrote a book on Lenin and that Gramsci developed his own thought with Lenin in mind; the leap over Lenin is a leap not only over the experience of the October Revolution but it is a leap past the Marxism that then develops in the Third World, a leap into abstract philosophy with little engagement with praxis and with the socialism that develops–not in the advanced industrial states–but in the realm of necessity, in the former colonised world from China to Cuba. In those outer reaches, where revolutions have been successful, it is the anti-colonial Lenin that guides the way.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than twenty books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (The New Press, 2007), The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (Verso, 2013), The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution (University of California Press, 2016) and Red Star Over the Third World (LeftWord, 2017). He writes regularly for Frontline, the Hindu, Newsclick, AlterNet and BirGün.

Notes

1. Lenin, ‘Backward Europe and Advanced Asia’, Pravda, 18 May 1913, Collected Works, vol. 19, pp. 99-100.

2. Lenin, ‘Draft Resolution of the Tasks of the Party in the Present Situation’, January 1912, Collected Works, vol. 17, p. 456 and ‘Resolutions of the Conference. The Russian Organising Commission for Convening the Conference’, January 1912, Collected Works, vol. 17, p. 485.

3. Lenin, ‘The War on China’, Iskra, no. 1, December 1900, Collected Works, vol. 4, pp. 372-77.

4. Lenin, ‘Events in the Balkans and in Persia’, Proletary, no. 37, 16 October 1908, Collected Works, vol. 15, p. 221.

5. Lenin, ‘The Discussion of Self-Determination Summed Up’, July 1916, Collected Works, vol. 22, p. 357.

6. Lenin, ‘A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism’, Zvezda, October 1916, Collected Works, vol. 23, p. 60.

7. Vijay Prashad, ‘For Comrade Lenin on his 150th Birth Anniversary’, Lenin 150, New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2020.

8. All these articles are in Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 20.

9. Horace B. Davis collected the five articles by Luxemburg from her Kraków journal Przeglad Sozialdemokratyczny in The National Question. Selected Writings, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976.

10. J. V. Stalin, ‘Marxism and the National Question’, Collected Works, vol. 2, Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1953.

11. V. I. Lenin, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1967.

12. Vijay Prashad, ‘Vladimir Ílyiç Lenin/Uluslarin Kaderlerini Tayin Hakki’, Marksist Klasikleri Okuma Kilavuzu, Istanbul: Yordam Kitap, 2013.

13. Luxemburg, The National Question, p. 107. For a critical appraisal of Polish Social Democracy, see Eric Blanc, ‘The Rosa Luxemburg Myth: A Critique of Luxemburg’s Politics in Poland (1893–1919)’, Historical Materialism, vol. 25, issue 4, 2017.

14. Luxemburg, The National Question, pp. 133-135.

15. Lenin, ‘The Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 20, p. 396.

16. Lenin, ‘The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 21, p. 409.

17. On 24 October 1869, Engels wrote to Marx, ‘Irish history shows what a misfortune it is for one nation to subjugate another. All English abominations have their origin in the Irish pale. I still have to bone up on the Cromwellian period, but it appears clear to me that things in England would have taken another turn but for the necessity of military rule in Ireland and creating a new aristocracy’. Marx/Engels, Collected Works, vol. 43, p. 362.

18. Lenin, ‘The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 21, p. 410.

19. Lenin, ‘The Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 20, p. 412.

20. Lenin, ‘The Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 20, p. 412.

21. Lenin, ‘The Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 20, p. 432.

22. In an early formulation, Lenin argued not for the ‘self-determination of nations’ but for the ‘self-determination of the proletariat’. ‘We on our part concern ourselves with the self-determination of the proletariat in each nationality rather than with the self-determination of peoples or nations’. (‘On the Manifesto of the Armenian Social Democrats’, Iskra, 1 February 1903, Collected Works, vol. 6, p. 327). It appears that this position is close to that of Luxemburg, that nationalism of the bourgeoisie had to be opposed in all respects, and that the Social Democrats must take a class view over a national view. Over the course of the decade, Lenin changed his position–no longer was there the emphasis on the ‘self-determination of the proletariat in each nationality’. Lenin now saw the difference between the oppressor nationality and the oppressed nationality, which nuanced his stand a great deal.

23. Lenin, ‘The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 21, p. 409.

24. Lenin, ‘The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 21, pp. 412-413.

25. Lenin, ‘The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination: Theses’, Collected Works, January-February 1916, vol. 22, p. 143.

26. Lenin, ‘The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination: Theses’, Collected Works, January-February 1916, vol. 22, p. 165.

27. Lenin, ‘The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination: Theses’, Collected Works, January-February 1916, vol. 22, p. 150.

28. Lenin, ‘Socialism and War. The Attitude of the RSDLP Towards the War’, Sotsial-Demokrat, 1 November 1914, Collected Works, vol. 21, p. 316.

29. Lenin, ‘The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 21, p. 408.

30. Luxemburg, The National Question, p. 123.

31. Warren Lerner, Karl Radek, the last internationalist, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1970.

32. Lenin, ‘The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 21, p. 408.

33. Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, and Leninism or Marxism?, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961, pp. 49-50.

34. Lenin, ‘On the Establishment of the USSR’, 26 September 1922, Collected Works, vol. 42, pp. 421-422.

35. Lenin, ‘Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People’, 3 January 1918, Collected Works, vol. 26, p. 425.

36. Lenin, ‘Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People’, 3 January 1918, Collected Works, vol. 26, p. 424.

37. ‘Manifesto of the Communist International to the Workers of the World’, 6 March 1919, Liberate the Colonies. Communism and Colonial Freedom, 1917-1924, ed. John Riddell, Vijay Prashad, and Nazeef Mollah, New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2019, p. 33.

38. ‘Theses on the National and Colonial Question’, 1920, Liberate the Colonies, p. 94.

39. ‘Theses on the National and Colonial Question’, 1920, Liberate the Colonies, p. 97.

40. ‘Theses on the National and Colonial Question’, 1920, Liberate the Colonies, p. 98.

41. ‘Theses on the National and Colonial Question’, 1920, Liberate the Colonies, p. 98.

42. Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World, New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2017.

COVID-19, Marxism, and the Metabolic Rift

By Sagar Sanyal

Originally published at Red Flag.

The COVID-19 pandemic is far from a purely natural occurrence. Respiratory viruses like SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) that exist in populations of birds and various mammals such as pigs, horses, cows and humans, are nothing new. But the circulation of these viruses between species, and the frequency of viruses spreading from animals to humans, has increased in recent decades, and changes in the relationship between human society and nature have been the main driver of this.

The origin of COVID-19 and the vector for its spread to humans are still under investigation by scientists. The closest variant of the virus has been identified in bats, and it’s possible it was transmitted to humans through wild meat or bush meat markets, perhaps via pangolins. Whatever the exact origin and vector, however, the jump from animals to humans fits a familiar pattern, one long understood by epidemiologists.

The destruction of nature by capitalist industry plays a big part. As forests and other areas untouched by human development are destroyed, wild species like bats are forced out to forage for food in urban centers. Those wild species carry diseases that previously remained confined to forests and only rarely infected humans – never enough to cause an epidemic. But now this migrating wildlife comes into more frequent contact with large human populations. Sneezes and droppings from wild animals spread the virus to other animals that humans handle more often – like pigs, chickens or, as with the MERS outbreak in the Middle East a decade ago, camels.

Evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace, author of Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Influenza, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science, is among the writers who for years have warned of the increasing likelihood of such epidemics. On COVID-19 specifically, Wallace and his collaborators emphasize how the wild meat sector fits into the broader context of industrial food production. “How did the exotic food sector arrive”, he asks, “at a standing where it could sell its wares alongside more traditional livestock in the largest market in Wuhan? The animals were not being sold off the back of a truck or in an alleyway”.

Increasingly, according to Wallace, wild food is being integrated into the mainstream of the capitalist food market. “The overlapping economic geography”, he writes, “extends back from the Wuhan market to the hinterlands where exotic and traditional foods are raised by operations bordering the edge of a contracting wilderness. As industrial production encroaches on the last of the forest, wild food operations must cut farther in to raise their delicacies or raid the last stands”.

Right wing news outlets more interested in racist scapegoating than in facts made a big deal of the wild meat issue, as if the world would have been spared the virus if only Chinese consumers had stuck to eating chicken or pork. But that is a false narrative. Since the 1990s, several deadly strains of bird flu and swine flu have developed and spread from industrial farms of chickens or pigs, including in North America and Europe, as well as in China.  

It has long been understood why these places breed disease. The animals are crowded into feedlots under conditions that run down their immune systems. The genetic monoculture of these populations takes away the natural diversity that reduces the prevalence of diseases. As farmers try to minimize time from birth to slaughter, this has the perverse consequence of acting as a natural selection pressure for pathogens that can survive more robust immune systems. All these things mean diseases can spread very fast within industrial herds and flocks. The cost cutting imperative means that work conditions (like protective equipment) are so poor that farm laborers are highly vulnerable to catching viruses from these animals.

The danger to humanity from such practices was reinforced in June, when scientists discovered a number of new strains of swine flu with pandemic potential circulating among pigs on farms in China. Although the strains, collectively referred to as G4 viruses, don’t appear currently to be able to spread between humans, around 10 percent of blood samples taken from farm laborers showed evidence of prior infection. All it would take is a small mutation and one or other of these viruses could start jumping from human to human and spread rapidly through the broader population, just as has occurred with SARS-CoV-2.

Marx and Engels’ groundbreaking work on the relationship between human society and nature in the context of the emergence of capitalism as a global system in the 19th century can help us understand the destructive dynamics underlying these developments. Central to their work in this area was the idea of the “metabolic rift”. All living things have a metabolic relation with their ecological surroundings, taking in certain things and putting out waste. When it comes to humans, Marx and Engels noted that our metabolism with the rest of nature is not due to our biology alone, but also to the kind of society we’ve built. To understand human metabolism with nature, we thus need social science in addition to natural science.

The metabolic rift has both historical and theoretical aspects. On the historical side is the displacement of peasants and peasant farming methods from the countryside, and their corralling into towns to create the modern working class. Workers, unlike the peasantry, had no means of livelihood of their own, and therefore had to move around to find waged work, crowding into the cities where that work was concentrated. One consequence of this was that, instead of being reabsorbed back into the local environment, human waste now collected in vast pools in the cities.

This process was the main driver of the soil fertility crisis that struck Europe in the late 19th century. By displacing the peasantry, and forcing more and more people into the cities, capitalism, Marx wrote, “disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil”.

What about the theoretical aspect? The rift isn’t just about the natural effects they observed, but also their social cause. It is a rift in social relations: the forcible conversion of a peasantry into the modern working class.

Peasants farmed a plot of land to which they had customary right over generations. They controlled their own labor process, and this meant there was a feedback mechanism between their labor and its effects on the land. If they depleted the soil and thus threatened their livelihood, they could adjust their methods of work accordingly. Peasant farmers had, over many generations, developed practices to maintain soil fertility through crop rotation, cycling between crops and pasture to ensure manuring, and returning human excrement to the fields. Peasant methods of labor were the main factor in the metabolism between feudal society and the rest of nature. Feudal lords would leave peasants to farm as they wished, then take a portion of the produce.

By contrast, the capitalist mode of production involves the capitalist dictating the labor process, and then just hiring laborers to do what they are told. As capitalist farmers emerged, they realized more money was to be made by cutting out the aspects of peasant farming practices that had no immediate pay-off (even though they maintained soil fertility) and focusing just on the highest earning aspects.

Around the same time the first factories were bmetabloismeing established in towns, and the emerging capitalist class and the state that served them realized that wages could be forced down if large masses of former peasants were concentrated in a handful of industrial areas rather than scattered across a large number of small population centers. During the 18th and 19th centuries, vast numbers of peasants were driven from the land by a combination of brute force and legal changes (such as the Enclosure Acts). Out of this uprooted peasantry, the modern working class was born.

A new dynamic began to shape social metabolism with nature. Unlike the peasants who worked the land directly, capitalist farmers and the new captains of industry were far removed from the destructive consequences of their activities. So long as they had workers prepared to exchange their labor for a wage (and the desperate poverty in which most people lived ensured that there was no shortage), they could turn a profit, even if their actions were detrimental to the natural world on which their business ultimately depended. If they destroyed the land, they could use the profits they had made to buy more land elsewhere. More often, however, the destructive consequences of their activities were simply externalized – the poisoning of the air and water in factory districts, which had a major impact on the lives of workers in this period, provides a clear example.

From this point on, what was produced in society and through which methods was determined by the profit motive and competition among rival capitalists and nation-states. The impact of production on the natural world became, at best, an afterthought. A new dynamic was driving society’s metabolism with nature – one that would create environmental disasters on an ever widening scale.

Scientists who study the origins of diseases have been telling us for decades that we will continue to have outbreaks of novel viruses that hop from other animals to humans because of how we farm animals and how we destroy wilderness. This advice is ignored, just as the advice of climate scientists is ignored, because acting on it would require breaking from the profit-driven logic of capitalism.

Where it’s a choice between booking short-term profits and taking a hit to profit to address potentially destructive consequences in the longer term, capitalists will always put profit first. They, after all, can escape the consequences of their actions. They spend their days in air conditioned offices, unlike the farm laborers who spend their days surrounded by hundreds of pigs riddled with swine flu. In a pandemic, capitalists can hide away in their country mansions and, in the event that they fall ill, can pay for the very best of medical care.

For workers it’s a different story. We’re the ones on the front lines of the battle against COVID-19, not through our own free choice, but through economic necessity. For the vast majority of workers around the world, stopping work isn’t an option. We must work to survive, even if in doing so we are actually putting our lives at risk. This suits the capitalists very nicely. The COVID-19 pandemic arrived at a moment when the world economy was already struggling. The ruling class, whether in Australia, the US or any other country, is desperate to limit the economic damage from the crisis, even if that means many more people will die.

If workers ran the world, it would be very different. It would make no sense for us to ignore the warnings of scientists about how industrial agriculture and environmental destruction are fueling the emergence of new diseases, for the simple reason that we’re the ones who will suffer when they appear. We don’t have a stake in the relentless scramble for short-term profit that defines capitalism today. We can organize production – both what we produce and how we produce – with human health and environmental sustainability in mind.

In the current pandemic, that might mean shutting down all but the most essential parts of the economy to slow the spread of the virus, while ensuring other workers are paid to stay home. In the longer term, it would mean reshaping animal agriculture to limit the potential for it to function as a petri dish for the emergence of deadly diseases.

This is how Marx envisaged the metabolic rift being healed. “Freedom in this field”, he wrote in volume 3 of Capital, “can only consist in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favorable to, and worthy of, their human nature”.

Such freedom will never exist under a capitalist system in which the drive to profit rules. The first step in fixing the metabolic rift is to make our labor our own again. That means taking it back from the ruling class.

Childhood and Exodus

By Richard Allen

Originally published at Theology Corner.

…Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

Matthew 18:3 (NRSV)

The praxis of the linguistic animal does not have a definite script, nor does it produce a final outcome, precisely because it continuously retraces anthropogenesis.

Paolo Virno, When the Word Becomes Flesh: Language and Human Nature (2015)

By any reasonable metric, I am a bad Marxist. I never finished reading the first volume of Capital. Moreover, my entrance to the Marxist ecosystem came through a circuitous route, beginning with Christian appropriators of Derrida, slowly working through assorted figureheads within twentieth-century critical theory, and settling on the Italian autonomia movement as my base framework. Clearly, orthodoxy is not my strong suit. Likewise, one might also say that I am a bad Christian. I tend to bristle at vehement defenses of objectivity and static truth within Christian discourse. Certainly, it would be unfair to label oneself as “Christian” without basic affirmation of specific theological assumptions. However, suffice it to say, I find inventiveness a far more enticing approach than mere acquiescence to “the way things are.” Truth, at least the sort of truth necessary for spiritual or political liberation, needs more emphasis on radical potential compared to aged rigidity.

One of the underlying questions common to any version of Marxist thought and practice is: how does one exit an oppressive environment? What tools, paths, and ideas aid the quest for liberation? How do we actualize liberation? Furthermore, we see that this question assumes any oppressive environment exists within tangible, fleshly materiality. In other words, even in spiritual or religious contexts, oppression always takes material form, despite any connection to metaphysical or revelatory ideas. It affects our bodies and consciousness. We sense this cognitively and feel it physically. It changes the material nature of our existence. Put simply, if oppression always takes a material form and alters our tangible experience of the world, then liberation will always respond in like kind. If oppression is material, so too is liberation.

Returning to the initial question—how does one exit an oppressive environment?—it seems clear that a turn toward static truth is not necessarily the wisest decision. How can we solely rely upon elements and ideas of old in order to actualize the liberation we seek for oppressed peoples? In my view, a turn toward inventiveness, the process of creating “new” truth by “resting” within the expansive field of pure potentiality (more on this later), carries within it greater capacity for liberation. This is not to say what passes for orthodoxy in any tradition, spiritual or otherwise, holds no value. Rather, at some point we must return to a new understanding of subjectivity and being in our way of analyzing the world so that we can more easily see through the structures which sustain oppression. We must recognize that as conditioned subjects within the ecosystem of late capitalism we learn to make basic assumptions which arguably sustain the very structures that sustain oppression, even if our intention resists that assumption (I’ve written more about this here).

In his latest piece for Cultural Politics entitled “The Aesthetics of Exodus: Virno and Lyotard on Art, Timbre, and the General Intellect” educator and activist Derek R. Ford uses Virno’s analysis of potential, performance, and the “general intellect” in conjunction with Lyotard’s treatment of art and music to describe an “exodus” from subjectivity as such toward a “de-individualized,” fugitive retreat from capitalism. Ford offers an erudite reading of both Virno and Lyotard, and his use of aesthetic theory to ground this fugitive act toward exodus carries great potential for liberative politics. My goal in this response is to expand upon Ford and Virno’s work. As an (informal) student of Virno and the Italian autonomia movement more broadly, I share similar conclusions to what Ford suggests. Say what you will about the sometimes fraught relationship between postmodern thought and Marxism (in this case, represented by Lyotard) or autonomia and Marxism (represented by Virno) there is certainly no shortage of radical, liberative possibilities when these respective traditions encounter each other.

More specifically, Virno’s treatment of infancy and the radical potential inherent to language should be a necessary component of any radical politic. Ford describes Virno’s reinterpretation of the “general intellect” in Marx’s writings as “indeterminate,” preferring instead to read the general intellect as pure potential rather than “particular knowledges and thoughts.” As I’ve written elsewhere, Virno’s understanding of “potential” as an unlimited field of productive praxis—since the linguistic animal speaks but does not exhaust the potential of the speech-act—represents a helpful corrective to aged assumptions common to the most militantly orthodox Marxists among us. In short, by recognizing a space wherein praxis finds its potential before actualization allows for a renewed understanding of how much power we have in the pursuit of liberation or “exodus” (both for the individual and the multitude). If I consciously remain aware that my speech does not ever touch the boundary lines of pure potential, which lies in wait before the utterance, then I can find new ways of living and being through the field of potential, boundless and unformed as it is. However, in order to more clearly see the usefulness of said potential, we must all undergo “desubjectification.”

In Virno’s text When the Word Becomes Flesh: Language and Human Nature, he describes the speech-act as ritualistic. “The ceremony of the voice, the occurrence of speech, makes the speaker visible as the bearer of the power to speak” (p. 56). Language is performative, similar to the virtuosity of a musician playing an instrument or an actor transforming into another character. There is something ethereal to the act of speaking, where we enact cultural and environmental rituals unconsciously, expressed through the declarative utterance (“egocentric”) “I speak.” We bring to presence the power of language’s potential as we speak. Additionally, Virno brings the “egocentric” language of children into play just a few pages over, “The child, when verbally announcing what he or she is doing, is not describing an action, but completes a secondary, auxiliary action (the production of an enunciation), whose goal is the visibility of its subject” (p. 63). When one speaks, they perform two tasks: first, they consciously emit vocalized sounds; second, they unconsciously enact “anthropogenesis,” or the production of the subject. This second task, which Virno describes as an “auxiliary action,” is where we find the liberative potential of human language. It is how the subject presents themselves as a subject, or how they “individualize” themselves, which means that behind any form of language (intelligible or otherwise) there lies a space of limitless potential, the potential for speech, which cannot be exhausted. If the multitude understands the power of potential then they can more easily engender new speech to actualize liberation.

Likewise, Ford is correct when, in tandem with Virno, he writes:

Through the acquisition of language, the child is separated from their surroundings through individuation, hence the significance of “I speak.” By learning language, we encounter the disjuncture between the world and ourselves because we discover that we can change the world and that the world can change us.”

Through childhood and the development of our linguistic faculties, we undergo conscious and unconscious individualization, a gradual understanding of our distinction from the world even as we recognize our place within it and its effects upon our life. The problem lies in the ways capitalism forms our respective identities or individualization as we practice the act of speech. This conditioning teaches us prescriptive or authoritative ways of speech which only serve to reify existing structures and assumptions. Thus, while in a general sense, despite these oppressive restrictions upon the way in which the individual speaks under capitalism the individual never truly loses access to pure potential behind the utterance, exodus allows us to retreat from the confines of capital in order to learn new ways of speaking. Because the capacity for speech is limitless, the potential for new language to unlock liberation awaits us, so long as we make an exodus from capitalism. The way out is through a regression of sorts or a “de-individualization,” a return to childhood. In Ford’s words, “As a recursive state, childhood…is the return to potentiality in order to actualize differently.”

Turning our attention toward the biblical text cited above, when asked who deserves recognition as the “greatest” in the kingdom of heaven, Jesus responds with a seemingly odd analogy. Bringing a child to his side, Jesus instructs his followers that “unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (emphasis added). At first glance, Jesus’ words seem to refer to obvious differences in societal status (the child being one of the “lowest” members of society) as a way to highlight the necessity of humility when responding to the divine. However, in light of what Ford and Virno suggest in reference to childhood, we see an expanded, materialist vision of the spiritual insight Jesus offers. Childhood is not merely a state of simple humility, although it includes this dimension. Instead, childhood is the closest any of us come to understanding and accessing the pure potential of language. Put another way, childhood is the closest we come to the innocence of simply being human in the world, unburdened by the demands we experience later in our life through capitalist individualization. If childhood is where we learn language, then the only way we can actualize liberation under the confines of the world is to learn to speak differently. In the same way that the only way one can “enter” the kingdom of heaven is to become like a child, the only way we can “enter” liberation is to, in some sense, leave “adulthood” or what passes for our being as we age. I must emphasize that all of this takes place within material form. None of this regression is possible in the abstract. It relies upon the physical and biological capacity to speak.

Thus, I contend, in what I believe to be a shared pursuit of both Ford and Virno, that the only way to liberation is through an exodus of being, leaving behind and stripping away the linguistic assumptions of late capitalism. By returning to a state of being closest to the often untapped potential of speech, we can more easily learn new words, new phrases, and new public utterances which aid the quest for liberation. This process de-individualizes from the world in order to fashion a radical understanding of subjectivity over and against the assumptions made toward subjectivity through capitalism. As Ford states:

Exodus subverts the dominant ideology of individuality by posing childhood as a project that connects the individual back to the general intellect in its potentiality rather than its potential actualizations.

In short, in order to progress, we must first regress and mine the fields of potential we have long forgotten; we must become like children in order to retrace our steps in the pursuit of justice and liberation for all. As mentioned earlier, what passes for orthodoxy tends to reify existing structures and assumptions. Orthodoxy will not save us. We must remake the world entirely, and the only path toward this vision is through childlike inventiveness.

Let us all make the exodus from subjectivity, individualization, and being toward the horizon of pure potentiality, where like children, we have the chance to form ourselves.

The Quest For a Revolutionary Theory: Gramsci in Althusser's Eyes

By Youssef Shawky Magdy

"There is no revolutionary movement, without a revolutionary theory"

-V.I. Lenin ("What is to be done?")

In order to continue to be a theory that interests in Reality and at the same time provides critical concepts and theoretical tools to interpret this reality, Marxist theory should not fold upon itself in a dogmatic manner, as this self closure is contradicting the theory itself and its alluding to reality, as well as its finite formulation; as the importance of Marxist theory (especially, Marxist critique to capitalism) will diminish upon changing conditions and Realities, this changing what the theory is all about.

On the other hand, we find many revisionist approaches and the harmonizing tendency with the spirit of the era: as the mechanistic and economistic views of Marxism, Neo-kantian formulations, humanistic interpretations, postmodern Marxism...Etc. All these discourses, regardless of their different forms and the conditions in which they are produced, have the tendency to minimize or cut the critical distance between Marxism and other philosophies and Ideologies.

But as we know, Marxist theory contains a critical philosophy, as it tries to absorb or enclose other philosophies within the Marxist framework; this closure means simply interpreting these ideologies from an objective materialistic stance by relating them to the social formation with its interwoven complex structures. This implies that in order to do this job, Marxist theory should not subordinate theoretically to the problematics of these philosophies which means fleeing their magic and "laying bare" what is consolidated under colorful rhetoric. What makes this clearer is the discovery of struggle between Idealism and Materialism in every ideological or philosophical system. In this context we may refer to how Lenin read Hegel, as Lenin had discovered that the Hegelian "absolute idea" is Materialistic rather than idealistic. This discovery or laying bare was done through Hegel's system itself, as Hegel had asserted that: "Logic" is a process without a subject or a center, even Logic negates itself and with that, negating the center or the beginning. This negation corresponds to scientific objectivity that Marx adopted in Das Kapital (Althusser 1971, 123).

The pioneers of this Marxist critical stance are Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser, as they had gone beyond the return and rereading of Marx and emancipation of Marxism from prevalent ideologies, drawing great attention to more or less successful revolutionary practices which happened around them and extracting from their critique very important theoretical conclusions.

From this stance, it is important to make up an imaginary discussion between the two figures, and that’s what Althusser did. But from the point of view of justice is it right to hold this discussion when one of the two figures didn't reply to the other? It is not that simple, as there is no winner and loser here, rather what should concern us is the struggle over the interpretation of Gramsci and currents of thoughts that try to absorb him. This struggle has originated partially because of special conditions related to the life and thought of Gramsci as can be discussed in few points:

1. Althusserian theses were directed partially to prevalent Humanistic Marxism in France, so in case of Gramsci we can't separate between theoretical abstract theses of Gramsci and what happened in Italy in the period that preceded the rise of Fascism when the labor movements had lost many decisive battles. According to Gramsci, this loss was linked to the economistic view that was adopted by Italian socialist party, this stance implies that the economic struggle (strikes and so on)  is sufficient for the workers to win their battles against capitalism , so accordingly the party was not interested in the formation of coalitions between different factions of popular classes (Simon 1999, 15) as peasants, Agricultural laborers, low middle class employees and so forth, these coalitions which would have taken a political color. And from this point we can understand Gramsci's assertion about the importance of both political and ideological moments in the struggle for Hegemony. These moments which need a kind of human volunteerism or agency.

2. In some cases we may find a difficulty to fully understand some of Gramsci's theses but of course that isn't related to the difficulty of Gramsci's style of writing or thought, but to the circumstances in which Prison Notebooks had been written as it included a severe watchful periodical inspection from the guards, this dictated a self censorship carried by Gramsci through a distracting style of writing and choosing of words. This in addition to his illness and great difficulty to have books in prison.

3. When Gramsci wrote about Marx, he warned us from oeuvres that were published posthumously, as they are far from being complete and distinct but they contain ideas which are in development and adjustment, and if the author had an opportunity to complete or adjust his works, he might denounce them or regard them as insufficient (Gramsci 1999, 715-716), this short story says a lot about what Gramsci had thought about the notebooks he was writing.

And now we can tell that the struggle about Gramsci is related to two points:

Firstly: interpretation of Gramsci, as Humanistic Marxism in France, had given a humanistic interpretation to Gramsci supported by some obvious texts, as well as the Neo-Marxist interpretation that exploits the notion of historical bloc to take in theoretically the new type of protests which can be designated as liberal, for example: 3rd wave feminism and environmentalism. The direct obvious content of these protests didn't change considerably but what changed is the social relationship that this content has kept with the whole social struggle, especially class struggle. What is obvious today is detachment of the content from the whole social framework and harmonization of these movements with late capitalist context.  

Secondly: does Gramsci represent a self-sufficient (Adequate) intellectual system? Does he provide concepts and theoretical tools (which as any tools need to be improved continuously) wich make up a system that doesn't contain any central or fundamental  problems within the structure of the theory itself (regardless of regular problems that face any intellectual system and get resolved with time)?

Roughly, we can say that Althusser was interested in the second point, which means that he didn't think that Gramsci's intellectual project can form a complete or self-sufficient theoretical system. But this didn't stop Althusser from appreciating what Gramsci asserted about the state, which can't be reduced to a coercive apparatus but also includes the civil society with its different organizations, even if Gramsci didn't indicate systematically the effect of each apparatus and its relatively different role (Althusser 2014, 242, note 7). And in other places, Althusser appreciated the welding nature of ideology that was discovered by Gramsci (Althusser 2014, 227), who said that ideology resembles cement because it connects different elements of the hegemonic/ruling bloc.

This doesn't mean that Gramsci's system doesn't contain crucial flaws that, according to Althusser, can have serious outcomes in relation to theoretical and political practice.  For example, Gramsci's failure to formulate an obvious relationship between philosophy and science (Althusser 2016, a letter) as we will discuss shortly.

Althusser's critique, which is somehow scattered in various texts, culminated into an article which then became a chapter in Reading Capital. This article will be our main source besides Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks.

The distinct trait in Gramsci's texts is "humanistic historicism," which means that every social phenomena is in an ongoing state of change and historical development as successive historical eras, thus there is no kind of knowledge that supersedes history. To make it simple: historical era dictates any kind of knowledge. That's the historical part; the other part indicates that people or "Human" is responsible for this historical process by taking part through her free will in various practices that change history.  And of course these practices are participated in the "present" (a moment in history) which humans want to change.  

There is a distinction between historicism and humanism but, according to Althusser, this difference is superficial and they share the same problems.

First: Historicism

Gramsci puts history above everything, including philosophy, science, and politics. That, of course, includes Marxism. He went further to say that Marxism is an "absolute Historicism" (Gramsci 1999, 836) which means that he views Marxism as a methodology which interprets various phenomena in the light of history, historical eras, and its peculiarities — even Marxism itself is part of this history. Thus, all different forms of human knowledge and practice occur in a specific moment in history called "present.” This occurrence makes these forms of knowledge carry the present within it and express the present.  And there is also an expressive relationship between forms of knowledge (scientific, political…etc.) so everything expresses everything with the same structural degree because they are exposed to the same "present.” This is what what Althusser called "direct expression." (Althusser 2015, 211) This leads to the idea of contemporaneity, which will be discussed shortly.

Accordingly, we can then understand Gramsci telling that philosophy can't be separated from the history of philosophy and also culture from the history of culture (Gramsci 1999, 628). Thus philosophy can't break with its history as new philosophy will enclose the old within itself considering it as history. But what about Science? Science also behaves like philosophy in this historical path, based on this, Gramsci wrote that electricity for example has its historical significance only when it has become an essential element in production process, and here manifests the instrumental tendency Gramsci had about science (Althusser 2016, a letter). According to that, by inclusion in history (its peculiarities and specific eras) science has the same epistemological value as philosophy and may be as  politics also, as the result of "direct expressionism", so at the end we find that peculiarity of science is lost. But science is the peculiar element of Marxism and it is what separates it from other ideologies (Althusser 2015, 211); what is important about science is its formulation and concepts which try to catch up with  objective reality which is separated from subject's experience; this reality Gramsci views as metaphysical as it related to human existence, and if a human is a historical being, then this reality and knowledge related to it and resulted from it are also historical beings (Gramsci 1999, 807). This asserts the Gramsci's devaluation of science and objectivity which is a theoretical tendency that is adopted by material philosophy as Linen indicated in "Materialism and empirio-criticism" (Althusser 1971, 48-49) this materialism is what Gramsci called metaphysical (Gramsci 1999, 836 ).

So according to what preceded, we find that the distance separating Marxist philosophy (Dialectical materialism) and science (Historical materialism) disappeared in Gramscian thought where Historicism swallows everything and then the material science of history becomes a mere organic ideology incorporated in the historical bloc and included in the superstructure of society (Althusser 2016, a letter).

And here comes the idea of "contemporaneity" that we referred to earlier. "Direct Expressionism" makes all instances; scientific, philosophical, political…etc, are exposed by the same degree to the historical present (Althusser 2015, 212) and also exposed to themselves by an equal extent. That manifests a Hegelian influence especially Hegelian Totality that designates everything as the reflection of the internal dialectic of the absolute idea. But the Marxist totality is different in the sense that it separates between different instances and provides each instance with a degree of "Relative Autonomy". So Superstructure is relatively autonomous from "the Base", and the ideological apparatuses is relatively autonomous from coercive ones and the components of the ideological apparatus each has a degree of independence and so on, not to mention the political structure and its great degree of independency and determining power. Here we find that different instances are not the same in effect and we can't reduce them to be mere reflections of history.

We can conclude from what previously stated that different practices related to distinct instances can also be reduced to one practice which is historical practice. Althusser refused this concept in the light of his own theoretical concept of practice, as every practice is an activity that transforms a raw material (not only material one but also intellectual as the raw materials are more or less the products of other practices; empirical, ideological…etc.) through definitive methods, means and conditions to obtain a specific product (Althusser 1969, 166-167)

And so the unification of practices and their processes in maxim of history can be considered a dissociation of the uniqueness of each practice and its break with other practices in the specificity of production process, i.e. adopting this notion, the ideological practice is then homogenizes with scientific one without a break. So the specific traits of each practice can be designated to other practices, and this appears in Gramscian thought as a general methodological trend (Althusser 2015, 217) as for example, Gramsci sometimes attributes to political practice a deterministic power or ability equivalent to that of economic social relations.

Althusser attributes all these ideas to the theoretical play of Gramscian thought discovered by the analysis of the internal logic of this thought, but we can find the origin in Gramsci's text itself, as he thought that, considering philosophy, politics, and economy, if the three elements adopted the same notion about the world, then they should hold within themselves an ability to transfer the theoretical fundamentals from element to another and to conduct a mutual translation between them (Gramsci 1999, 745 )

Second: Humanism

Man can understand history because s/he who made it. Thus spoke Vico. Here we can distinguish between two roles:

firstly, the making of history or the actor role, that's the role we all familiar with in which man is the obvious actor who leads revolutions, declares war, discovers, Etc. in fact that's the ideological role by which we perceive history.

Secondly, the author of history which is the non-human conditions (and yet not natural) that make history. These are the relations of productions that constitute the economic structure and also the political and ideological relations and structures. these determinants are not human in the sense that although humans are the smallest elements of that system, what should be counted for are the relations between these elements, these relations have a non-human nature because they sublime above  humans as they control and coerce them materially and symbolically. So the relations with their complicated intercalation, are structuring structural positions which humans fit in. we can say that, This role is the real role in history.

According to Althusser, Gramsci wants to make human both the actor and the author of history by his stress on human agency and consciousness as we referred earlier. This should be accompanied by substitution of relations of production with human relations (Althusser 2015, 218), these new relations expand to include knowledge, objectivity, and science, the latter is considered as the human relation with history and nature (the concept of nature presents in history), and so history returns again but this time, it revolves around human and its different relations, and human becomes the inducer of human nature change by his role in making history, accordingly the real conditions that constitute human are eliminated.

Words are possibilities!

We can't doubt the growing importance of Gramsci and Althusser with the development of international and national statuses, the recognition of this importance must be fortified by the discussion between the two in addition to other thinkers. No doubt that Althusser had caught up with Gramsci's literal words, but we shouldn't forget that although theory isn't mere words and language, it is represented by these tools. And we should remember also that theory although it doesn't make the world, it reveals how it is constructed, and accordingly what are the possible strategies to change this construction, so we can say that words have an important weight in determining the scope of potential and our capability.

References 

Althusser, Louis, For Marx, Translated by Ben Brewster, (Paris:  Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1969).

Althusser, Louis, Lenin and philosophy and other essays, translated by Ben Brewster, ( NY and London: Monthly review press, 1971). 

Althusser, Louis, On the reproduction of capitalism: ideology and ideological state apparatuses, preface by Etienne balibar, translated by G.M. Goshgarian (NY and London: verso, 2014).

Althusser, Louis, Reading capital : the complete edition /; introduction by Etienne Balibar ; contributions by Roger Establet ; contributions by Jacques Ranciere ; contributions by Pierre Macherey ; translated by Ben Brewster and David Fernbach, ( NY and London: verso, 2015).

Althusser, Louis, "A Letter from Louis Althusser on Gramsci's thought", Decalages, 2016, Vol.2, iss 1.

 Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from the prison notebooks, Edited and translated by Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, (London: Lawrence & wishart, 1999).   

Simon, Roger, Gramsci's political thought, an introduction (London: Lawrence & wishart, 1999).  

Late-Stage Capitalism and the Pedagogical Resurgence of Anti-Fascism

By Colin Jenkins

This essay originally appeared in Keywords in Radical Philosophy and Education: Common Concepts for Contemporary Movements (2019, BRILL)

Social unrest is a daily part of American life. Between the alarming regularity of mass killings and school shootings and the violent street clashes between right-wing fascists and left-wing anti-fascists, it seems as though America’s chickens are finally coming home to roost. Despite its uniqueness, the United States is heading down the same path as so many hegemonic empires of the past, quickly approaching its demise through a combination of exhaustive military campaigns abroad and chronic neglect of a majority of its citizenry at home. Mainstream American culture is inadvertently responding to its empire’s demise. Dystopian-based “entertainment” is on the rise again, millennials are abandoning the traditional American lifestyle en masse, virtual lives based in gaming culture and social media have seemingly grabbed a hold of many wishing to escape and withdraw from the drudgery of real life, and political poles are becoming more polarized as extremist centrism intensifies to protect the status quo.

While many recognize that something is wrong, most have difficulties pinpointing what it is, let alone what is causing it. The pronounced social unrest and emergence of mainstream nihilism have sparked a cavalcade of typical, cutesy, click-bait articles online, claiming “millennials are killing [insert here]” and pushing for “minimalist lifestyles” while hawking shipping-container homes, and superficial corporate news analysis which resembles more of tabloid “journalism” than anything approaching substance. Even so-called “progressive” movements that have formed within this climate, such as Black Lives Matter, the Poor People’s Campaign, and the Women’s March, have failed to reach a substantive level of resistance by ignoring the roots of the people’s problems while insisting on operating within the narrow confines of the mainstream political arena.

The good news is that these social phenomena are not mysterious forces rising out of thin air. They have roots. They have causes. And with multiple political forces coming to a head, many are starting to not only search for these causes, but are starting to identify them. The sudden resurgence of socialism in the United States – after laying dormant since the counterinsurgency of the US government during the 1960s, which resulted in violent state repression against radical resistance groups, the subsequent “Reagan revolution” and rise of the neoliberal era, and Francis Fukuyama’s infamous suggestion that “history had ended” — signifies a much-needed counter to capitalist culture. The wave of counter-hegemony that has come with it defies capitalism’s insistence that we are nothing but commodities — laborers and consumers born to serve as conduits to the rapid upward flow of profit — and has begun to construct a wall against the spread of fascism that is inevitable with late-stage capitalism, as well as a battering ram that seeks to bring this system to its knees once and for all.

Capitalism’s Destructive Path

Humanity has been on a collision course with the capitalist system since its inception. While Marx’s famous prediction that capitalists would eventually serve as their own gravediggers has been delayed by a multitude of unforeseen forces, most notably the overwhelming power and adaptability of the imperialist and capitalist state, it is nonetheless charging toward fruition. As the term “late-stage capitalism” has become widely used among the American Left, it is important to understand what it is referring to. This understanding may only come through systemic and historical analysis, and especially that of the basic mechanisms of capitalism, the social and economic conditions that birthed capitalism, and the subsequent stages of capitalism over the past few centuries.

Referring to capitalism as being in a “late stage” is based on the understanding that the system – with all of its internal contradictions, its tendency to concentrate wealth and power into the hands of a few, and its increased reliance on imperialism and domestic control – is nearing an inevitable implosion. However, the implication that capitalism naturally develops on a path toward fascism is both accurate and potentially misleading. On one hand, this idea suggests that capitalism, in its most basic state of operating, does not already possess inherent fascistic qualities. This is incorrect, and it’s important to understand this. Capitalism, in its orthodoxy, is a system that relies on authoritative, controlling, and exploitative relationships, most notably between that of capitalists and workers. The latter, in its need to survive, must submit itself to wage labor. The former, in its wanting to accumulate a constant flow of profit, uses wage labor as a way to steal productivity from the worker in a perpetual cycle that moves wealth upwards into a relatively tiny sector of the population, while simultaneously impoverishing the masses below. Scientific socialists have always known this to be true, and now that the trickery of “trickle-down economics” has been exposed, many others are beginning to realize it.

Capitalism’s authoritative tendencies are far-reaching throughout a society’s development. Because of this, the system has relied upon and reproduced social inequities that fortify its economic woes. Friedrich Engels touched on its effects for the family unit in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Silvia Federici brilliantly illustrated its reliance on patriarchy in Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, the emergence of social reproduction theory has provided insight on the layers of exploitation that effect women in the home, and many have written about the cozy relationship between capitalism and white supremacy, most importantly noting that the system’s birth in the Americas relied heavily upon the racialized chattel slave system. In fact, it is impossible to accurately discuss the inherent problems of capitalism without discussing its propensity to drive social oppression in a variety of forms. If oppression can be defined as “the absence of choices,” as bell hooks once said, then our default status as members of the proletariat is oppression. And when compounded with other social constructs such as patriarchy, white supremacy, heteronormativity, and able-bodiedness, this oppression becomes even more pronounced and marginalizing.

The inherent fascism built into capitalism is rooted in wage labor, which is maintained through coercive means. This coercion that drives capitalism comes from the dispossession of the masses of people from not only the means of production, but also from the means to sustenance and land. The Enclosure Acts tell us all we need to know about this foundation. The fact that feudal peasants had to be forced to participate in wage labor through a legislative destruction of the commons, which kicked them off the land and immediately transformed human needs from basic rights to commodities, says a lot about the requisite landscape of a capitalist system. As such, feudal peasants in Europe viewed capitalism as a downgrade. They were consequently prodded into factories and mills like cattle. In many other parts of the world, stripping entire populations of sustenance for the sake of private property was unheard of. Yet capitalism required this mass dispossession in order to proceed on its desired path. Thus, “between 1604 and 1914, over 5,200 individual enclosure acts were passed, covering 6.8 million acres of land,” all designed to systematically erase the idea of common land. (Parliament of UK)

Understanding that capitalism is a system built on a foundation of oppression, and that it operates on natural internal mechanisms of coercion and exploitation, allows us to also understand that its development has not created these qualities, but rather intensified them. Therefore, the idea of “late-stage capitalism” makes sense from an analytical point of view, as it simply refers to an evolutionary path that has brought its nature to the forefront and, most importantly, in doing so, has resulted in severe consequences for the majority of the global population. And whether we’re talking about late-stage capitalism, or monopoly capitalism, or corporate capitalism, or “crony capitalism,” it all refers to the same thing: capitalism’s natural conclusion. A natural conclusion that is a breeding ground for fascism.

Realizing Fascism

“When the bourgeoisie sees that power is slipping out of its hands, it brings up fascism to hold onto its privileges.” - Buenaventura Durruti

There are many definitions and aspects of and to fascism, but perhaps the best way to identify it is as an effect. In terms of capitalism, the development and strengthening of fascistic tendencies are tied directly to the sociopolitical structures that form in its defense. Or as Samir Amin puts it, “Fascism is a particular political response to the challenges with which the management of capitalist society may be confronted in specific circumstances.” (Amin, 2014) But this only describes one of the major aspects of fascism – that being the systemic and structural; or more specifically, the capitalist system and the capitalist state that naturally forms to protect and promote it. There is also a cultural aspect to fascism that forms from within the populace. It is shaped by structural operations, being the main force of culture, and it manifests as an emotional and defensive response from individuals within this system that naturally coerces, exploits, and dispossesses them from their ability to sustain. In other words, the mass insecurity that stems from capitalism naturally produces reactionary responses of misdirected angst from the people it serves, or rather disserves.  

During these late stages of capitalism, “fascism has returned to the West, East, and South; and this return is naturally connected with the spread of the systemic crisis of generalized, financialized, and globalized monopoly capitalism.” (Amin,2014) The reactionary, right-wing response to the capitalist degradation of society is to target the most vulnerable of that society, viewing them as “drains” on public resources without realizing that such resources have been depleted by the pursuit for profit from those above, and most intensely during the era of neoliberalism, which opened the door for rampant greed to extract nearly everything of value from society in the name of privatization. In this structural sense, fascism comes to its complete fruition through a blindness that develops under capitalist culture, whether intentional or subconscious; a blindness that seeks every type of remedy imaginable for the problems created by the system without ever questioning the system itself.

The fascist regimes that surface during these times of crisis “are willing to manage the government and society in such a way as not to call the fundamental principles of capitalism into question, specifically private capitalist property, including that of modern monopoly capitalism.” (Amin, 2014) And that is why fascism intensifies under this pretense of “managing capitalism” and not simply in “political forms that challenge the latter’s legitimacy, even if ‘capitalism’ or ‘plutocracies’ [are] subject to long diatribes in the rhetoric of fascist speeches.” (Amin, 2014) This shows how the fascist tide is fundamentally structural; and the cultural developments that parallel it do so as a byproduct of capitalism’s systemic failures. Because of this, analyses “must focus on these crises.” And any focus on these systemic crises must also focus on the fundamental coercion inherent in the system’s productive mechanisms — that which former slave and American abolitionist Frederick Douglass once referred to as “a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery,” and “a slavery of wages that must go down with the other.”

The notion of wage slavery has been all but lost over the course of the last century. Once understood among the masses as a common-sense recognition of capitalist coercion, it has given way to the insidious nature of capitalist propaganda, which intensified in a very deliberate way after the cultural revolution of the 1960s, culminating in a neoliberal wave that has dominated since. While the originators of anti-capitalist theory and scientific socialism had exposed this form of slavery inherent in the system – with Marx referring to workers as “mere appendages to machines,” and Bakunin illustrating its ever-shifting nomenclature, from “slavery” to “serfdom” to “wage earners” – there was a brief resurgence of this analysis in the 1960s and 70s, from a variety of leftist radicals. One of the most under-appreciated of these analyses was the one provided by the imprisoned Black Panther, George Jackson, who in his extensive works made reference to the condition of “neo-slavery” that plagued the working-class masses. In a rather lengthy excerpt from Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, Jackson uncovered the forgotten importance of this coercive element that drives capitalism:

“Slavery is an economic condition. Today’s neo-slavery must be defined in terms of economics… [in the days of chattel slavery], the slaveowner, in order to ‘keep it (the slave) and enjoy all of the benefits that property of this kind can render, he must feed it sometimes, he must clothe it against the elements, he must provide a modicum of shelter.’ The ‘new slavery (capitalism), the modern variety of chattel slavery updated to disguise itself, places the victim in a factory or in the case of most blacks in support roles inside and around the factory system (service trades), working for a wage. However (in contrast to chattel slavery), if work cannot be found in or around the factory complex, today’s neo-slavery does not allow even for a modicum of food and shelter. You are free – to starve.

…The sense and meaning of slavery comes through as a result of our ties to the wage. You must have it, without it you would starve or expose yourself to the elements. One’s entire day centers around the acquisition of the wage. The control of your eight or ten hours on the job is determined by others. You are left with fourteen to sixteen hours. But since you don’t live at the factory you have to subtract at least another hour for transportation. Then you are left with thirteen to fifteen hours to yourself. If you can afford three meals you are left with ten to twelve hours. Rest is also a factor in efficiency so we have to take eight hours away for sleeping, leaving two to four hours. But – one must bathe, comb, clean teeth, shave, dress – there is no point in protracting this. I think it should be generally accepted that if a man or woman works for a wage at a job that they don’t enjoy, and I am convinced that no one could enjoy any type of assembly-line work, or plumbing or hod carrying, or any job in the service trades, then they qualify for this definition of neo-slave.

…The man who owns the [business] runs your life; you are dependent on this owner. He organizes your work, the work upon which your whole life source and style depends. He indirectly determines your whole day, in organizing you for work. If you don’t make any more in wages than you need to live (or even enough to live for that matter), you are a neo-slave.” And most of us who find ourselves in this precarious position as a working-class person under capitalism have no mobility, whether in a literal or figurative sense. We are “held in one spot on this earth because of our economic status, it is just the same as being held in one spot because you are the owner’s property.” (Jackson, 1994)

The era of neoliberalism, with its insistence of re-imagining laissez-faire economics, has revved up the authoritarian and oppressive underpinnings of the capitalist system by loosening historical constraints stemming from the age-old social contract — the idea that bourgeois governments had a minimal degree of responsibility for the well-being of their citizenries. In the United States, this has amounted to private entities (individuals, corporations, conglomerates) accumulating unprecedented amounts of wealth and power over the course of a few decades, while the majority of people have been thrown to the wolves. During this process, the structural basis of fascism – the merger of corporate and governmental power – has been fully realized, buoyed by the internal coercion of the capitalist system.

The Pedagogical Resurgence of Anti-Fascism

As capitalism’s internal contradictions continue to drive us deeper into a fascist reality, counter-hegemonic movements have aptly pivoted into anti-fascist forces. The most visible of these forces has been the anarchist-led “antifa,” which cracked into the mainstream-US consciousness during its numerous street clashes with reactionary groups during and after Donald Trump’s electoral rise. By heeding to a strategic tactic known as “no-platforming,” these black-clad resistance fighters deploy offensive attacks against both fascist speakers/leaders and marches to prevent them from gaining a public platform and, thus, legitimacy and momentum.

In a 2017 piece for In These Times, Natasha Lennard explained the philosophy behind no-platforming, how it extends from an all-encompassing radical abolitionist movement, and how it differs from liberalism:

“While I don’t believe we can or should establish an unbendable set of rules, I submit that a best practice is to deny fascist, racist speech a platform. It should not be recognized as a legitimate strand of public discourse, to be heard, spread and gain traction. And we must recognize that when the far Right speaks, the stage becomes an organizing platform, where followers meet and multiply. For this, we should have no tolerance.

No-platforming is only useful if it is contextualized in a broader abolitionist struggle, which recognizes that white supremacy will not do away with itself by virtue of being ‘wrong.’ Surely by now liberals have realized the folly in assuming justice is delivered by ‘speaking truth to power’? Power knows the truth, and determines what gets to be the regime of truth. The ‘truth’ of racial justice will not be discovered, proved or argued into lived actuality, but fought for and established.” (Lennard, 2017)

The physical tactics carried out under “no-platforming” are only a small part of a broader movement. While anti-fascists continue to confront fascists in the streets, a pedagogical resurgence of anti-fascism must continue to guide the movement as a whole by providing an intellectual, philosophical, and strategic battle plan. This plan must include: (1) a deep understanding of systemic forces generating from capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy; (2) an understanding of power dynamics and the need to form and deploy power effectively; (3) an understanding of the two major fronts of the anti-fascist war, which include the systemic and upward-focused class war and the anti-reactionary, horizontally-focused culture war; (4)an understanding of anti-capitalist ideology, including but not limited to Marxism, socialism, and anarchism; and, most importantly, (5) a mass push for class consciousness.

Class Consciousness

Building class consciousness is the most crucial task of our time, being citizens within the capitalist and imperialist empire that is the United States, facing down the impending fascist tide, and attempting to confront and defeat this tide along with the capitalist and imperialist systems as a whole. Recalibrating a working class that has been deliberately detached from its role is imperative. Regardless of how one prefers carrying out this task, whether through the formation of a vanguard of trained cadre or a direct engagement toward mass consciousness, it must be carried out within the proletariat itself, where much of capitalist and reactionary culture has become blindingly influential. This must be done not by rejecting theory and deeming it “too elite and alien for the masses,” but rather by embracing the organic intellectualism that is inherent within the masses and serving as facilitators to awaken this abundance of untapped potential. This must be done by realizing the working class is more than capable of thinking, understanding, and comprehending our position in society, if only given the chance to do so, free from the capitalist propaganda that drowns and consumes us.

In creating a working-class culture that not only embraces its inherent intellectualism, but does so in a way that explicitly challenges the dominant intellectual orthodoxy that fortifies capitalist relations, we may look to Gramsci, the Italian Marxist who provided a clear and convincing relationship between counter-hegemony and working-class, or organic, intellectualism that is rooted in “spontaneous philosophy”:

“It is essential to destroy the widespread prejudice that philosophy is a strange and difficult thing just because it is the specific intellectual activity of a particular category of specialists or of professional and systematic philosophers. It must first be shown that all [people] are ‘philosophers,’ by defining the limits and characteristics of the ‘spontaneous philosophy’ which is proper to everybody. This philosophy is contained in:  (1) language itself, which is a totality of determined notions and concepts and not just of words grammatically devoid of content; (2) ‘common sense’ and ‘good sense’; and (3) popular religion and, therefore, also in the entire system of beliefs, superstitions, opinions, ways of seeing things and of acting, which are collectively bundled together under the name of ‘folklore.’” (Gramsci, 1971)

The formation of class consciousness, therefore, rests on this notion, sprouts from the lived experience of proletarian life in the capitalist system, and may essentially replace Gramsci’s already-existing third parameter of “popular religion,” by simply substituting “folklore” with a materialist perspective. This process reminds us of Fred Hampton’s insistence that we proceed in “plain, proletarian English,” which is not to say that revolutionaries must “dumb down” their message in order to appeal to the masses, but rather return revolutionary theory to where it belongs: within working-class culture. Prior to Gramsci and Hampton, Marx had already gone through this process of realizing the existence of organic intellectualism. This process, the subsequent views that developed within Marxist circles throughout the 20th century, and the sometimes-regressive ideology that formed from such is effectively illustrated by Raya Dunayevskaya’s critique of Jean-Paul Sartre in her book, Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre, and from Marx to Mao:

“Methodologically, Sartre’s organic petty-bourgeois inability to understand what it is that Marx meant by praxis has nothing whatever to do with the Ego, much less with not being able ‘to read’ Marx. It has everything to do with his isolation from the proletariat.

The very point at which Sartre thinks that Marx, because he had to turn to ‘clarifying’ practice, stopped developing theory is when Marx broke with the bourgeois concept of theory and created his most original concept of theory out of ‘history and its process,’ not only in the class struggles outside the factory but in it, at the very point of production, faced with the ‘automation’ which was dominating the worker transforming him into a mere ‘appendage.’ Marx’s whole point what that the worker was thinking his own thoughts, expressing his total opposition to the mode of labor instinctually and by creating new forms of struggle and new human relations with his fellow workers. Where, in Marx, history comes alive because the masses have been prepared by the daily struggle at the point of production to burst out spontaneously, ‘to storm the heavens’ creatively as they had done in the Paris Commune, in Sartre practice appears as inert practicality bereft of all historic sense and any consciousness of consequences. Where, in Marx, Individuality itself arises through history, in Sartre History means subordination of individual to group-in-fusion who alone know where the action is. Sartre the Existentialist rightly used to laugh at Communists for thinking man was born on his first payday; Sartre ‘the Marxist’ sees even as world-shaking an event as the Russian Revolution, not at its self-emancipatory moment of birth with its creation of totally new forms of workers’ rule – soviets – but rather at the moment when it was transformed into its opposite with Stalin’s victory, the totalitarian initiation of the Five-Year Plans with the Moscow Frame-Up Trials and forced-labor camps.” (Dunayevskaya, 2003)

Organic Intellectualism and Political Consciousness

The process of tapping organic intellectualism is perhaps best described by Paulo Freire in his crucial text, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. To Freire, revolutionary class consciousness can only be realized through an embrace of radicalism, or as Angela Davis once phrased it, “simply grasping things at the root.” Applying our intellectualism and relating it to our lived experiences is only a partial awakening on the revolutionary path. To complete the transition, understanding the roots, or systems, that represent the foundational causes of our problems is crucial, not only for identifying the magnitude of the ultimate solution, and thus avoiding spending time and energy on inconsequential activities, but also for understanding that there is a solution. “The more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can transform it,” Freire tells us. “This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into a dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side.” (Freire, 2014)

With this realization in mind, we can better understand the four levels of consciousness and identify the pedagogical route, or remedies, that can be applied to ourselves and others. From the “magical consciousness,” where political impotence is maintained by inconceivable forces like gods and mythology, through the “naive consciousness,” where the material world becomes realized, and our interactions with others, with nature, within society, begin to take on some semblance of control, to “critical consciousness,” which introduces four distinct qualities that may be applied to this material reality: power awareness, or knowing and recognizing the existence of power and who possesses power in society; critical literacy, which leads to the development of analysis, writing, thinking, reading, discussing, and understanding deeper meaning; de-socialization, which allows one to recognize and challenge forms of power; and self-organization/self-education, which amounts to taking initiative to overcome the anti-intellectualism and indoctrination of capitalist “education.” (Wheeler, 2016; Daily Struggles, 2018) And, finally, the realization of a “political consciousness,” or class consciousness, which brings us to the understanding of a shared reality with most others, as well as the need for collective struggle to break our interlocking chains of oppression.

Ultimately, the path through these levels of consciousness are about power; moving from an impotent position to a powerful position — a powerful position that can only be forged through the realization of collective struggle. Freire describes this transition as a break from the “banking concept of education” that is designed to perpetuate ignorance to a critical pedagogy that is designed to empower the oppressed; a pedagogical process that, again, can only be carried out in a proletarian environment:

“In their political activity, the dominant elites utilize the banking concept to encourage passivity in the oppressed, corresponding with the latter's ‘submerged’ state of consciousness, and take advantage of that passivity to ‘fill’ that consciousness with slogans which create even more fear of freedom. This practice is incompatible with a truly liberating course of action, which, by presenting the oppressors slogans as a problem, helps the oppressed to ‘eject’ those slogans from within themselves. After all, the task of the humanists is surely not that of pitting their slogans against the slogans of the oppressors, with the oppressed as the testing ground, ‘housing’ the slogans of first one group and then the other. On the contrary, the task of the humanists is to see that the oppressed become aware of the fact that as dual beings, ‘housing’ the oppressors within themselves, they cannot be truly human.

This task implies that revolutionary leaders do not go to the people in order to bring them a message of ‘salvation,’ but in order to come to know through dialogue with them both their objective situation and their awareness of that situation—the various levels of perception of themselves and of the world in which and with which they exist. One cannot expect positive results from an educational or political action program which fails to respect the particular view of the world held by the people. Such a program constitutes cultural invasion, good intentions notwithstanding.” (Freire, 2014)

And this task must be done in a collective manner, with the clear intention of not only challenging power, but creating our own collective, working-class power that has the potential to destroy the existing power structure emanating from authoritative systems like capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. After all, “freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift,” and “nobody liberates themselves alone; human beings liberate themselves in communion.” (Freire, 2014)

Understanding Collective Power, Separating Radical from Liberal, and Exposing Centrist Extremism and Horseshoe Theory

“There is a whole apparatus that controls the presidency that is absolutely resistant to change. Which isn’t to excuse Obama from taking bolder steps. I think there are steps that he could have taken had he insisted. But if one looks at the history of struggles against racism in the US, no change has ever happened simply because the president chose to move in a more progressive direction. Every change that has happened has come as a result of mass movements – from the era of slavery, the Civil War, and the involvement of Black people in the Civil War, which really determined the outcome. Many people are under the impression that it was Abraham Lincoln who played the major role, and he did as a matter of fact help to accelerate the move toward abolition, but it was the decision on the part of slaves to emancipate themselves and to join the Union Army – both women and men – that was primarily responsible for the victory over slavery. It was the slaves themselves and of course the abolitionist movement that led to the dismantling of slavery. When one looks at the civil rights era, it was those mass movements – anchored by women, incidentally – that pushed the government to bring about change.” (Davis, 2016)

This excerpt is from an interview with Angela Davis, where she shares some knowledge on how to deal with power. Davis’s point is that people create and force change, collectively and from the bottom. This is an inherently radical perspective that comes from a development of political consciousness and the realization that representative democracy, in all of its supposed glory, is a reactionary system that has rarely if ever carried through on its “democratic” advertisement. It is a radical perspective that comes from a place of understanding why and how the founding fathers, in all of their land-owning, slave-owning elitism, chose this system of governing: “to protect,” as James Madison put it, “the opulent of the minority against the majority.” (Madison, 1787)

Davis’s point is reiterated by Noam Chomsky, in his peculiar declaration that Richard Nixon was “the last liberal President” of the United States — a statement that also comes from a radical perspective which realizes the systemic influence of capitalism and, more specifically, of the intensified capitalist period known as neoliberalism. And it comes from an understanding that Nixon the man, cantankerously racist and temperamentally conservative, did not create the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), set employment quotas on affirmative action programs, propose employer-funded healthcare, sign the Fair Labor Standards Act, and approve a series of regulations on big business because he personally championed these causes, or even believed in them. (Conetta, 2014; Fund, 2013) Rather, he was pressured from below, in the same way that Reagan, the Bushs, Clinton, and Obama have been pressured from above to enact and maintain the corporate stranglehold on politics ever since.

Systemic pressure always supplants personal philosophies, beliefs, ideologies, and preferences; and our systemic default, which is predetermined by the capitalist order, will always prevail over electoral and representative politics. Political consciousness exposes this fact, separating radical from liberal. The cases of Lincoln and Nixon, while signifying how pressure from below can force change, are outliers. They were chinks in the system. And since Nixon, these chinks have seemingly been fortified by the “whole apparatus that controls the presidency that is absolutely resistant to change.” The legislation passed by Nixon, as well as the legislation that came about through the New Deal era, the “Great Society,” and Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, have all been tamed by this apparatus. Our environmental crisis has intensified, white-supremacist terror remains prevalent in American streets, economic inequality has reached unprecedented levels, and our racialized prison industrial complex has grown by a rate of over 600 percent since the Civil Rights movement – all realities suggesting that “progressive” legislation is ultimately toothless. Thus, any reforms that develop through the electoral system, as a result of pressure from the bottom, are ultimately curtailed and circumvented by capitalism’s economic base, which always seeks to undermine a common good in the pursuit of never-ending growth and profit. The so-called “liberal reforms” that occurred during the Nixon years were largely rendered useless during the proceeding neoliberal era, which represents a deliberate plan to unleash the capitalist system.

This fact does not render grassroots power useless; it merely suggests that it needs to be redirected. Returning to Davis’s comments, the case of Abraham Lincoln is perhaps one of the best examples of the impotence built into the political system. Lincoln the individual had vacillated on his stance regarding slavery, expressing personal “dislike” for the institution and even displaying empathy for slaves (Lincoln, 1855) during a time when such empathy was often lost on many Americans. At the same time, Lincoln the president recognized his duty to protect the rights of slaveowners as the executive administrator of the United States and its constitution, and ultimately admitted that his institutional duty, which was to “save the Union” and maintain the power structures as created by the founders, even if it meant that slavery would stay intact, far outweighed any personal misgivings he may have had toward slavery. The same logic, when coming from cogs within the power structure, can be applied to capitalism and imperialism, and has been for centuries.

Both Nixon’s and Lincoln’s yield to external pressure illustrates two important points: (1) the personality, ideological leanings, and personal beliefs of a politician, even if the most powerful politician, have no real consequence within the US political system; and (2) the foundation of US politics and government, as arranged by the founders of the country, will never allow for genuine democratic elements to materialize. The first point often represents the most telling demarcation between radical and liberal, with the former realizing this fact, and the latter unable to realize and thus placing focus on individual identity. Because of the liberal’s inability to understand this systemic reality, damaging electoral strategies such as “lesser-evilism” have established a firm place in the American political arena, inevitably causing a gradual deterioration toward more reactionary political platforms designed to protect the decaying capitalist system, which in modern times translates to a very real fascistic slide. Hence, we now have modern Democratic Party politicians that resemble 1970s/80s conservatives, and Republicans that continue to push the envelope of fascism.

Since Nixon, the flock of modern presidents who have bent the knee to multinational corporate and banking power further illustrate the utter insignificance of identity; ironically, during a political era where “marketing personalities” is usually the only determinate for “success.” This contradiction cannot be understated, and it is an accurate barometer that can be used to measure class/political consciousness in the United States, or the lack thereof. Ironically, the fact that voter turnout throughout the country has maintained such low levels during the tail-end of the neoliberal era and late-stage capitalism is a sign that class and political consciousness are actually rising. For when the working class realizes en masse that there is no change coming through electoral politics, and thus have shed the capitalist elite’s “banking concept,” we know that revolutionary change is on the horizon. And any such period must include mass education and a mass movement toward political consciousness – an understanding once echoed by Lucy Parsons: “[radicals] know that a long period of education must precede any great fundamental change in society, hence they do not believe in vote begging, nor political campaigns, but rather in the development of self-thinking individuals.” (Lewis, 2017) Self-thinking, in this case, simply means realizing our inherent political consciousness that is based in our material position in the socioeconomic system beyond the construction and obstruction of capitalist ideology and culture.

As we collectively separate ourselves from a mainstream political arena that has been established to ensure our continued demise as working-class people, we also must be wary of blowback from the system. The most common response to a delegitimizing of the power structure is an appeal to authority, safety, and stability. This defensive posture forms from within the power structure, with corporate-political unity between both major political parties, in an attempt to construct an extremist center. At this stage, the extremist center has one task at hand — to protect the status quo at all costs. In the US, this means keeping the white-supremacist capitalist/imperialist system intact, as well as the bourgeois class that both maintains these systems and benefits from them. To do so, this extremist center exploits the fear of instability in order to build mass support, labels both fascist and anti-fascist ground movements as enemies of the state (although does not necessarily respond to them in the same ways), indecipherable from one another in their mutual “extremism,” and proceeds with an all-out attack on civil liberties in order to suppress popular movements that may challenge the embedded systems.

We have seen this response materialize over the past decade. In the aftermath of 9/11, civil liberties have been systematically removed from members of both political parties. During the street clashes between white nationalists and anti-fascists, we witnessed politicians from both parties as well as media denounce “both sides” as extremists, creating a convenient false dichotomy that completely ignores the most common-sense discussion – what the two sides actually believe in or are trying to accomplish.  And we have seen “horseshoe theory” enter into the mainstream arena as “philosophical justification” for this false dichotomy.  “In the current state of things, the electoral successes of the extreme right stem from contemporary capitalism itself. These successes allow the media to throw together, with the same opprobrium, the ‘populists of the extreme right and those of the extreme left,’ obscuring the fact that the former are pro-capitalist (as the term ‘extreme right’ demonstrates) and thus possible allies for capital, while the latter are the only potentially dangerous opponents of capital’s system of power.” (Amin, 2014) The result of this has been a strengthening of the system as we know it, a virtual circling of the wagons around our reality of corporate politics, inequality, joblessness, homelessness, racism, misogyny, and all of the oppressive social phobias that accompany them.  Still, the resistance looms, it is radical in nature, and it is growing.

Conclusion

The current state of the world — socially, politically, economically, and environmentally — indicates that we have entered the late stages of the global capitalist system. In the heart of the capitalist empire, the United States, social unrest has become the norm. Capitalism’s systemic contradictions, as well as its coercive and authoritarian core, have become increasingly uncontrollable for the country’s capitalist political parties. Social inequities are becoming more pronounced, the political arena is showing irregularities like never before, and an overtly fascist tide is starting to rear its ugly head.

The American working class has responded in various ways. On one side, reactionary mentalities have intensified among hordes of newly-dispossessed whites, thus leading them into the arms of the state’s fascist slide. On another side, a mass awakening has developed among many who have decided instead to tap into our organic intellectualism, turn to radical analysis, and return to anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist class politics. In response to the fascist tide, a formidable wave of anti-fascist action has sprung to life. To bolster this, a pedagogical resurgence of anti-fascism has formed both organically and through the forging of this new collective political and class consciousness. Rosa Luxemburg’s 1916 ultimatum has suddenly reached the ears of many within the American working class – will we transition away from capitalism and toward socialism, or will we regress further into barbarism?

Capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy know where they stand. Politicians from both capitalist parties have regrouped to form and extreme center. Corporate executives, bankers, bosses, business owners, arms manufacturers, hedge-fund operators, landlords, military officials, police, and the prison industry have all placed their bets on barbarism. The ball is now in our court. The time is ripe for the people to seize power, but the process of a political awakening, anchored by a mass shaping of class consciousness, must gear up. And, most importantly, our army must be built from the ground-up, from within the proletariat, with the understanding that we are all leaders in this struggle.

A war for consciousness must continue, and must be won, while we proceed in building mass political power. And this must be done with an all-out rejection of capitalist culture and the conditioned mentality that comes with it, because the people’s struggle is doomed to fail if it does not develop “a consciousness of the insidious promotion of capitalist individualism.” In doing so, “it is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals in order for people today to recognize our potential agency as a part of an ever-expanding community of struggle.” (Barat, 2014) We are on the precipice. The world and its future literally rest on our collective shoulders.

All power to the people.

Bibliography

Amin, Samir (2014) The Return of Fascism in Contemporary Capitalism, Monthly Review, September 1, 2014. Accessed at https://monthlyreview.org/2014/09/01/the-return-of-fascism-in-contemporary-capitalism/

Barat, Frank (2014) Progressive Struggles against Insidious Capitalist Individualism: An Interview with Angela Davis, Hampton Institute. Accessed at http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/angela-davis-interview.html

Conetta, Christine (2014) Noam Chomsky: Richard Nixon Was Last Liberal President, Huffington Post, 2/21/14. Accessed at https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/21/noam-chomsky-richard-nixon_n_4832847.html

Daily Struggles Blog (2018) Paulo Freire and the Role of Critical Pedagogy. Accessed at http://daily-struggles.tumblr.com/post/18785753110/paulo-freire-and-the-role-of-critical-pedagogy

Davis, Angela (2016) Freedom is a Constant Struggle (Haymarket Books)

Dunayevskaya, Daya (2003) Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre, and from Marx to Mao (Lexington Books)

Freire, Paulo (2014) Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary edition (Bloomsbury)

Fund, John (2013) Nixon at 100: Was He America’s Last Liberal? (National Review online, January 11, 2013) Accessed at https://www.nationalreview.com/2013/01/nixon-100-was-he-americas-last-liberal-john-fund/

Gramsci, Antonio (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (International Publishers)

Hampton, Fred (1968) Speech at Northern Illinois Unversity. Accessed at http://www.lfks.net/en/content/fred-hampton-its-class-struggle-goddammit-november-1969

Jackson, George (1994) Soledad Brothers: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (Chicago Review Press)

Lennard, Natasha (2017) Don’t Give Fascism An Inch, In These Times, August 23, 2017. Accessed at http://inthesetimes.com/article/20449/no-platform-milo-free-speech-charlottesville-white-supremacy

Lewis, Jone Johnson (2017) Lucy Parsons: Labor Radical and Anarchist, IWW Founder (ThoughtCo. Online) Accessed at https://www.thoughtco.com/lucy-parsons-biography-3530417

Lincoln, Abraham (1855) Letter to Joshua Speed (Abraham Lincoln Online) Accessed at http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/speed.htm

Luxemburg, Rosa (1915) The Junius Pamphlet. Accessed at https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1915/junius/ch01.htm

Madison, James (1787) Federalist Papers, No. 10 (The Avalon Project) Accessed at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp

Parliament of UK. Managing and owning the landscape. https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/towncountry/landscape/overview/enclosingland/

Wheeler, Lauren (2016) Freire’s Three Levels of Consciousness, Participatory Performance Practices. Accessed at https://laurenppp.wordpress.com/2016/01/25/freires-3-levels-of-consciousness-25-1-16/

Socialist Revolution, Women’s Liberation, and the Withering Away of the Family

By Tatiana Cozzarelli

Originally published at Left Voice.

In college, I read a lot of theorists who called Marxism “class reductionist.” They claimed that socialism only attacks economic problems and ignores oppression. But, as I began to study Marxism, I found these oft-repeated tropes about Marx only addressing class are far from the truth. 

From the very beginning, Marxists have taken up the question of gender oppression — sometimes with more clarity, sometimes with less, but always discussing it. A brief overview: In 1879, August Bebel wrote Woman and Socialism. In 1884, Friedrich Engels wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in which he traces the roots of gender oppression to the creation of private property. He argues that there is nothing biological about patriarchy, monogamy, or the two-parent family unit. Later, Clara Zetkin was the editor of the German Social Democratic Party’s women’s newspaper Equality. She fought for women to become subjects of the struggle against capitalism and patriarchy. 

But for me, it is the Russian Revolution that best illustrates Marxist ideas made reality in relation to the fight against sexism and for women’s rights. It demonstrates that for leading Marxist thinkers such as Lenin and Trotsky, revolution alone was insufficient to rid society of patriarchy. Rather, revolution was just the beginning of a profound social transformation of women’s role in society, as well as a transformation of all social values and culture. This is demonstrated by the laws enacted by the Bolshevik Party that led the revolution, as well as the broad debates about women’s rights within the party. 

Yet, as Lenin put it, equality in law does not mean equality in life. As a result of the civil war that followed the revolution, and the international isolation of the first workers’ state, the economic conditions for women’s equality did not exist. Under these dire circumstances, Stalinism took hold, erasing workers’ victories and especially women’s victories won in the Russian Revolution. The emergence of Stalinism created the false idea that Marxism, and socialism more broadly, are unconcerned with sexism and patriarchy. 

Women as the Spark for the Russian Revolution

The context of the Russian Revolution of 1917 is one of complete misery for the country and its people. Russia had gone through a series of wars: with Japan in 1904-05, a failed revolution in 1905, and World War I in 1914. During the World War, prices went up 131% in Moscow and women spent hours waiting in the biting cold for basic necessities like wheat and sugar. 

Marx believed that the socialist revolution would begin in advanced industrialized nations. Russia, however, lagged far behind the economic and productive power of countries such as Germany. Peasants made up 80% of the population — mostly illiterate and isolated from the political debates in the cities. Peasant life was based on a strict division of labor and women were taught to be obedient to their father and later their husband. It was only after 1914 that women were allowed to separate from their husband, but only with a man’s permission; likewise, women could only get a passport or a job with a man’s permission. 

There was a small but strong proletariat in Russia’s cities. World War I played an important role in increasing the weight of women workers in the Russian proletariat: as men went off to war, more and more women joined the workforce. Women made up 26.6 percent of the workforce in 1914, but nearly half (43.4 percent) by 1917. On top of the miserable working conditions, women industrial workers also faced gendered inequality. They earned lower wages and were not allowed to organize in the same unions as their male colleagues.

However, women were the spark that ignited the Russian Revolution which would topple the Tsar and create the conditions for the Bolsheviks to take power. In late February 1917, the women in Petrograd factories left their workplaces, going to neighboring factories calling on the men to also leave their jobs and join the strike. The Bolshevik newspaper Pravda stated, “The first day of the revolution — that is the Women’s Day, the day of the Women’s Workers International! All honor to the International! The women were the first to tread the streets of Petrograd on that day!”

After the February Revolution, workers organized delegate assemblies, called soviets, to make decisions about the burgeoning movement. Women participated in the soviets, although to a lesser degree than men. The Bolshevik paper Rabotnitsa (The Woman Worker) was relaunched in May 1917 and discussed equality of the sexes, as well as the need for the state to provide communal facilities for taking care of household chores, traditionally imposed on women. 

The stage for the October Revolution, which ended the provisional government and brought about the world’s first workers’ state, was prepared by women’s radical activism. It was the tireless organizing work of Bolshevik women such as Alexandra Kollontai that allowed the Bolsheviks to win over the majority in the soviets and take power in the October Revolution. Women also participated in the October Revolution by providing medical help and even joining the Red Guard. 

What Did the Bolsheviks Think About Women’s Issues? 

The Bolsheviks saw women’s role in a given society as a measure of the society as a whole; it wouldn’t be until women had achieved full equality that they could consider the socialist revolution ultimately successful. After the revolution, immediate measures for women’s liberation were taken. The Bolsheviks put forward four primary means to support women’s equality: free love, women’s participation in the workforce, the socialization of domestic work, and the withering away of the family.

The Bolsheviks believed that women should not be coerced to marry or to remain in a marriage as a result of family obligations or economic pressures. Relationships should be based exclusively on love, not social coercion. The Bolsheviks did not believe that they could immediately take up the task of building new types of relationships, recognizing that the revolution alone would not do away with centuries of patriarchal traditions, beliefs, and morals. Rather, they sought to destroy the  social basis of the bourgeois family and the inherited beliefs that keep women oppressed. Furthermore, they believed that women should have complete equality with men in the workplace and encouraged women to organize, vote, and run for positions of leadership in unions and soviets. 

Long before the Wages for Housework campaign, a global feminist movement that grew out of the International Feminist Collective in Italy in 1972, the Bolsheviks argued that there was nothing natural or biological about women doing domestic work or even raising children. This was an ideology perpetuated by capitalism that had no place in a socialist society. Liberating women from “domestic slavery” was a central discussion within the party. Trotsky writes,

The revolution made a heroic effort to destroy the so-called “family hearth” — that archaic, stuffy and stagnant institution in which the woman of the toiling classes performs galley labor from childhood to death. The place of the family as a shut-in petty enterprise was to be occupied, according to the plans, by a finished system of social care and accommodation: maternity houses, creches, kindergartens, schools, social dining rooms, social laundries, first-aid stations, hospitals, sanatoria, athletic organizations, moving-picture theaters, etc. The complete absorption of the housekeeping functions of the family by institutions of the socialist society, uniting all generations in solidarity and mutual aid, was to bring to woman, and thereby to the loving couple, a real liberation from the thousand-year-old fetters. 

Unlike the Wages for Housework campaign, the Bolsheviks sought to take housework out of the hands of individuals and put it in the hands of the workers state. The Bolsheviks did not want to maintain domestic work in the realm of the household, equally dividing those banal tasks between men and women. Rather, they wanted to divorce these tasks from the family unit and socialize domestic labor. In this way, the family and women in particular would shed much of their “reproductive” role. 

Equality in Law

The Bolsheviks put ideas into practice. In 1918, less than a year after the revolution, the Family Code was passed, which historian Wendy Goldman calls the “most progressive family legislation ever seen in the world.” It took the church out of the business of marriage and made matrimony a civil affair. It not only legalized divorce, but made it accessible to every married person without requiring a reason. The code ended centuries-old laws that assigned all property to men and provided equal rights to children born outside of a registered marriage. If a woman did not know who the father of her child was, all of her sexual partners would share responsibilities for child support. Importantly, it made women equal to men in law. A law as progressive as this has not been won to this day in the United States, as the Equal Rights Amendment was not confirmed by enough states. The author of the family code, Alexander Goikhbarg saw this law as transitory —it was not meant to strengthen either the state or the family, but to be a step towards the extinction of the family. 

In 1920, abortion was legalized, making the Soviet Union the first country in the world to do so. Prostitution and homosexuality were no longer banned in the USSR either. Additionally, the Bolsheviks opened public cafeterias, laundromats, schools, and day care centers as a step towards the abolition of women’s double shift at the workplace and at home. It was a step towards socializing domestic work, liberating individual women from the responsibility. 

Furthermore, the Bolsheviks saw women’s political participation as central to the advancement of the Soviet Union. They organized Zhenotdel, the women’s section of the party, made up of workers, peasants, and housewives who organized women at the local level. Delegates from Zhenotdel were elected for internships in the government as well. As Wendy Goldman argues, it was an important way for thousands of women to get involved in the party, as well as in politics more broadly. 

Equality in Life

Although the Bolsheviks made major advances by passing laws, they were very conscious that this was insufficient to guarantee true equality. Lenin says,

Where there are no landlords, capitalists and merchants, where the government of the toilers is building a new life without these exploiters, there equality between women and men exists in law. But that is not enough. It is a far cry from equality in law to equality in life. We want women workers to achieve equality with men workers not only in law, but in life as well. For this, it is essential that women workers take an ever increasing part in the administration of public enterprises and in the administration of the state… The proletariat cannot achieve complete freedom, unless it achieves complete freedom for women.

Although the Bolsheviks stressed the material basis for inequality, they also knew that a profound personal change would have to occur in members of the new Soviet society. However, this change in people’s ideas was not divorced from the changes in the organization of society — a social reorganization won by proletarian revolution. In this sense, it is a reminder to us that simply changing people’s ideas is insufficient to create true equality. Sexism does not only exist in people’s minds, but in institutions and the organization of society. 

The Struggles of a Young Worker’s State

The young workers’ state faced considerable challenges in its first years. It was attacked by 14 imperialist armies and survived because of sacrifices made by workers and peasants in the Red Army. After a world war and then a civil war, the people of the Soviet Union faced starvation and high unemployment. 

Women suffered the most under these conditions. Although under explicit orders not to do so, women were laid off before their male colleagues. The 13th Congress of the Bolshevik Party discussed this problem explicitly, making new regulations to protect women’s employment. They said, “that the preservation of women workers in production has political significance.” 

A tenet of communism — to each according to his need and from each according to his ability — can only work in a society of plenty. Advanced capitalist mass production provides such a basis. However, when there isn’t enough, a select group will decide who has and who does not — a bureaucracy. This is why Lenin and so many other Bolsheviks placed their hopes in a German revolution, which would ensure that the USSR would not remain isolated. It would put German industry and the goods it produced under the control of the working class. However, the German revolution was squashed, leaving the Soviet Union to fend for itself. It is from the conditions of scarcity that the counter revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy emerged, reversing the advances made during the early years after the Russian Revolution. Stalinism went on to play a counterrevolutionary role around the world, based on the theory of “socialism in one country.”

Stalinist Counterrevolution and Women’s Rights

The Stalinist bureaucracy staged a counterrevolution which murdered the Left Opposition inside the Bolshevik Party, locking up, exiling, or killing those who attempted to carry on the legacy of the 1917 revolution. Theorists who wrote about the withering away of the family such as Nikolai Krylenko were arrested and murdered, while the author of the 1918 Family Code was imprisoned in an asylum. 

At the same time that Stalin began to put forth the idea of socialism in one country, he also re-criminalized homosexuality and prostitution. In 1936, Stalin ended women’s right to an abortion, with Stalinist leaders arguing that women had the “honorable duty” to be mothers.

In order to put forward such reactionary ideas about gender, Stalin squashed the women’s department within the Central Committee of the Communist Party, as well as all women’s organizing on the local level. His government campaigned to bring back traditional gender roles, the very gender roles that the Bolsheviks had worked to break with. By 1944, Stalin had organized awards for women based on how many children they had. The “Order of Maternal Glory” was created for women with seven to nine children, and the title “Mother Heroine” for those with ten or more. 

The Left Opposition and the Bolshevik Legacy

As Stalin continued to play a counterrevolutionary role around the world, Trotsky created the Fourth International, a grouping of communists dedicated to the legacy of the Bolsheviks. The Fourth International was against the Soviet bureaucracy and for power to the working class, not just in one country — as Stalin wanted — but around the world. 

The Transitional Program, which laid out the tasks for the Fourth International, argues that women’s rights are central for the socialist revolution. Trotsky says, 

Opportunist organizations by their very nature concentrate their chief attention on the top layers of the working class and therefore ignore both the youth and the women workers. The decay of capitalism, however, deals its heaviest blows to the woman as a wage earner and as a housewife. The sections of the Fourth International should seek bases of support among the most exploited layers of the working class; consequently, among the women workers.

Far from any class reductionism, Trotsky sees the organization of women in a revolutionary party as a central task for communists.

What Can We Learn?

One hundred years have passed since the Russian Revolution and it has been decades since a revolution has been able to shake capitalism. Some believe that revolution is impossible. Others believe that a workers’ revolution will create laws based on the racist, sexist, or homophobic attitudes that some workers hold today. Many equate Marxism with the struggle against exploitation, not the struggle against oppression. 

Yet when the Bolsheviks took power and immediately made laws supporting women’s rights, they knew the revolution did not and should not stop there. They had no illusions about even the most progressive gender legislation in the history of the world, on its own, ending patriarchy. The Bolsheviks knew that these laws created the foundation for liberation, but were not libration in itself. Instead, they had lively debates about how to organize the material conditions of the new society to root out oppression against women. They wanted to make sure women had full participation in work, education and politics— but not by taking on a double or triple burden of housework, childcare and paid work. They discussed socialized childcare and domestic work, as well as the withering away of the family as an organizing unit of society. Even the young workers’ state did not yet have the material conditions to realize this dream, but they took real and substantive steps in that direction. Stalinism put an end to all these dreams, reverting the Soviet Union to patriarchal norms. 

It’s been a long time since the Russian Revolution. There are a lot of thinkers who have made key contributions to socialist feminist thought since then, especially in the realm of sex, sexuality and queer theory. Social reproduction theory builds on key Marxist ideas, and there have been huge developments in a discussion of desire, sexuality and queer theory. These are all important to thinking about a socialist revolution in the 21st century, which would create the material foundations for the liberation of gender and sexuality. 

But we cannot leave the legacy of Marxism to those who pervert its meaning to crude class reductionism. We cannot allow Marx’s legacy to be mired by Stalinism and the patriarchal, counterrevolutionary view of gender and society that it upheld. We should draw lessons from the Bolshevik’s revolutionary tradition for women’s liberation. 

Revolution in the Twenty-First Century: A Reconsideration of Marxism

By Chris Wright

In the age of COVID-19, it’s even more obvious than it’s been for at least ten or twenty years that capitalism is entering a long, drawn-out period of unprecedented global crisis. The Great Depression and World War II will likely, in retrospect, seem rather minor—and temporally condensed—compared to the many decades of ecological, economic, social, and political crises humanity is embarking on now. In fact, it’s probable that we’re in the early stages of the protracted collapse of a civilization, which is to say of a particular set of economic relations underpinning certain social, political, and cultural relations. One can predict that the mass popular resistance, worldwide, engendered by cascading crises will gradually transform a decrepit ancien régime, although in what direction it is too early to tell. But left-wing resistance is already spreading and even gaining the glimmers of momentum in certain regions of the world, including—despite the ending of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign—the reactionary United States. Over decades, the international left will grow in strength, even as the right, in all likelihood, does as well.

Activism of various practical and ideological orientations is increasingly in a state of ferment—and yet, compared to the scale it will surely attain in a couple of decades, it is still in its infancy. In the U.S., for example, “democratic socialism” has many adherents, notably in the DSA and in the circles around Jacobin magazine. There are also organizations, and networks of organizations, that consciously repudiate the “reformism” of social democracy, such as the Marxist Center, which disavows the strategy of electing progressive Democratic politicians as abject “class collaboration.” Actually, many democratic socialists would agree that it’s necessary, sooner or later, to construct a workers’ party, that the Democratic Party is ineluctably and permanently fused with the capitalist class. But the Marxist Center rejects the very idea of prioritizing electoral work, emphasizing instead “base-building” and other modes of non-electoral activism.

Meanwhile, there are activists in the solidarity economy, who are convinced it’s necessary to plant the institutional seeds of the new world in the fertile soil of the old, as the old slowly decays and collapses. These activists take their inspiration from the recognition, as Rudolf Rocker put it in his classic Anarcho-Syndicalism, that “every new social structure makes organs for itself in the body of the old organism. Without this preliminary any social evolution is unthinkable. Even revolutions can only develop and mature the germs which already exist and have made their way into the consciousness of men; they cannot themselves create these germs or generate new worlds out of nothing.” The Libertarian Socialist Caucus of the DSA is one group that identifies with this type of thinking, but there are many others, including the Democracy Collaborative, the Democracy at Work Institute (also this one), Shareable, and more broadly the New Economy Coalition. Cooperation Jackson has had some success building a solidarity economy in Jackson, Mississippi.

The numbers and varieties of activists struggling to build a new society are uncountable, from Leninists to anarchists to left-liberals and organizers not committed to ideological labels. Amidst all this ferment, however, one thing seems lacking: a compelling theoretical framework to explain how corporate capitalism can possibly give way to an economically democratic, ecologically sustainable society. How, precisely, is that supposed to happen? Which strategies are better and which worse for achieving this end—an end that may well, indeed, seem utopian, given the miserable state of the world? What role, for instance, does the venerable tradition of Marxism play in understanding how we might realize our goals? Marx, after all, had a conception of revolution, which he bequeathed to subsequent generations. Should it be embraced, rejected, or modified?

Where, in short, can we look for some strategic and theoretical guidance?

In this article I’ll address these questions, drawing on some of the arguments in my book Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States (specifically chapters 4 and 6).[1] As I’ve argued elsewhere, historical materialism is an essential tool to understand society and how a transition to some sort of post-capitalism may occur. Social relations are grounded in production relations, and so to make a revolution it is production relations that have to be transformed. But the way to do so isn’t the way proposed by Marx in the Communist Manifesto, or by Engels and Lenin and innumerable other Marxists later: that, to quote Engels’ Anti-Dühring, “The proletariat seizes state power, and then transforms the means of production into state property.” Or, as the Manifesto states, “The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class.”

Instead, the revolution has to be a gradual and partially “unconscious” process, as social contradictions are tortuously resolved “dialectically,” not through a unitary political will that seizes the state (every state!) and then consciously, semi-omnisciently reconstructs the economy from the top down, magically transforming authoritarian relations into democratic ones through the exercise of state bureaucracy. In retrospect, this idea that a “dictatorship of the proletariat” will plan and direct the social revolution, and that the latter will, in effect, happen after the political revolution, seems incredibly idealistic, unrealistic, and thus un-Marxist.

I can’t rehearse here all the arguments in my book, but I’ve sketched some of them in this article. In the following I’ll briefly restate a few of the main points, after which I’ll argue that on the basis of my revision of Marxism we can see there is value in all the varieties of activism leftists are currently pursuing. No school of thought has a monopoly on the truth, and all have limitations. Leftists must tolerate disagreements and work together—must even work with left-liberals—because a worldwide transition between modes of production takes an inordinately long time and takes place on many different levels.

I’ll also offer some criticisms of each of the three broad “schools of thought” I mentioned above, namely the Jacobin social democratic one, the more self-consciously far-left one that rejects every hint of “reformism,” and the anarchistic one that places its faith in things like cooperatives, community land trusts, mutual aid, “libertarian municipalism,” all sorts of decentralized participatory democracy. At the end I’ll briefly consider the overwhelming challenge of ecological collapse, which is so urgent it would seem to render absurd, or utterly defeatist, my insistence that “the revolution” will take at least a hundred years to wend its way across the globe and unseat all the old social relations.

Correcting Marx

Karl Marx was a genius, but even geniuses are products of their environment and are fallible. We can hardly expect Marx to have gotten absolutely everything right. He couldn’t foresee the welfare state or Keynesian stimulation of demand, which is to say he got the timeline for revolution wrong. One might even say he mistook the birth pangs of industrial capitalism for its death throes: a global transition to socialism never could have happened in the nineteenth century, nor even in the twentieth, which was the era of “monopoly capitalism,” state capitalism, entrenched imperialism, the mature capitalist nation-state. It wasn’t even until the last thirty years that capitalist relations of production fully conquered vast swathes of the world, including the so-called Communist bloc and much of the Global South. And Marx argued, at least in the Manifesto, that capitalist globalization was a prerequisite to socialism (or communism).

All of which is to say that only now are we finally entering the era when socialist revolution is possible. The earlier victories, in 1917, 1949, 1959, and so on, did not achieve socialism—workers’ democratic control of the economy—and, in the long run, could not have. They occurred in a predominantly capitalist world—capitalism was in the ascendancy—and were constrained by the limits of that world, the restricted range of possibilities. Which is doubtless why all those popular victories ended up in one or another form of oppressive statism (or else were soon crushed by imperialist powers).

If Marx was wrong about the timeline, he was also wrong about his abstract conceptualization of how the socialist revolution would transpire. As he put it in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, “At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production… From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution.” The notion of fettering, despite its criticism by exponents of Analytical Marxism, is useful, but not in the form it’s presented here. For to say that relations of production fetter productive forces (or, more precisely, fetter their socially rational use and development) is not to say very much. How much fettering is required for a revolution to happen? Surely capitalism has placed substantial fetters on the productive forces for a long time—and yet here we all are, still stuck in this old, fettered world.

To salvage Marx’s intuition, and in fact to make it quite useful, it’s necessary to tweak his formulation. Rather than some sort of “absolute” fettering of productive forces by capitalist relations, there is a relative fettering—relative to an emergent mode of production, a more democratic and socialized mode, that is producing and distributing resources more equitably and rationally than the capitalist.

A parallel (albeit an imperfect one) is the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Feudal relations certainly obstructed economic growth, but it wasn’t until a “competing” economy—of commercial, financial, agrarian, and finally industrial capitalism—had made great progress in Western Europe that the classical epoch of revolution between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries burst onto the scene. Relative to capitalism, feudalism was hopelessly stagnant, and therefore, once capitalism had reached a certain level of development, doomed.

Crucially, the bourgeoisie’s conquest of political power wasn’t possible until capitalist economic relations had already, over centuries, spread across much of Europe. There had to be a material foundation for the capitalist class’s ultimate political victories: without economic power—the accumulation of material resources through institutions they controlled—capitalists could never have achieved political power. That is to say, much of the enormously protracted social revolution occurred before the final “seizure of the state.”

If historical materialism is right, as it surely is, the same paradigm must apply to the transition from capitalism to socialism. The working class can never complete its conquest of the state until it commands considerable economic power—not only the power to go on strike and shut down the economy but actual command over resources, resources sufficient to compete with the ruling class. The power to strike, while an important tool, is not enough. Nor are mere numbers, however many millions, enough, as history has shown. The working class needs its own institutional bases from which to wage a very prolonged struggle, and these institutions have to be directly involved in the production and accumulation of resources. Only after some such “alternative economy,” or socialized economy, has emerged throughout much of the world alongside the rotting capitalist economy will the popular classes be in a position to finally complete their takeover of states. For they will have the resources to politically defeat the—by then—weak, attenuated remnants of the capitalist class.

Marx, in short, was wrong to think there would be a radical disanalogy between the transition to capitalism and the transition to socialism. Doubtless the latter process (if it happens) will take far less time than the earlier did, and will be significantly different in many other respects. But social revolutions on the scale we’re discussing—between vastly different modes of production—are always very gradual, never a product of a single great moment (or several moments) of historical “rupture” but rather of many decades of continual ruptures.[2] Why? Simply because ruling classes are incredibly tenacious, they have incredible powers of repression, and it requires colossal material resources to defeat them—especially in the age of globalized capitalism.

Building a new mode of production

What we must do, then, is to laboriously construct new relations of production as the old capitalist relations fall victim to their contradictions. But how is this to be done? At this early date, it is, admittedly, hard to imagine how it can be accomplished. Famously, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

But two things are clear. First, a significant amount of grassroots initiative is necessary. The long transition will not take place only on one plane, the plane of the state; there will be a tumult of creative energy on sub-state levels, as there was during Europe’s transition into capitalism. (Of course, in the latter case it was typically to establish predatory and exploitative relations, not democratic or communal ones, but the point holds.) The many forms of such energy can hardly be anticipated, but they will certainly involve practices that have come to be called the “solidarity economy,” including the formation of cooperatives of all types, public banks, municipal enterprises, participatory budgeting, mutual aid networks, and so on. In a capitalist context it is inconceivable that states will respond to crisis by dramatically improving the circumstances of entire populations; as a result, large numbers of people will be compelled to build new institutions to survive and to share and accumulate resources. Again, this process, which will occur all over the world and to some degree will be organized and coordinated internationally, will play out over generations, not just two or three decades.

In the long run, moreover, this solidarity economy will not prove to be some sort of innocuous, apolitical, compatible-with-capitalism development; it will foster anti-capitalist ways of thinking and acting, anti-capitalist institutions, and anti-capitalist resistance. It will facilitate the accumulation of resources among organizations committed to cooperative, democratic, socialized production and distribution, a rebuilding of “the commons,” a democratization of the state. It will amount to an entire sphere of what has been called “dual power” opposed to a still-capitalist state, a working-class base of power to complement the power of workers and unions to strike.

The second point is that, contrary to anarchism, it will be necessary to use the state to help construct a new mode of production. Governments are instruments of massive social power and they cannot simply be ignored or overthrown in a general strike. However unpleasant or morally odious it may be to participate in hierarchical structures of political power, it has to be a part of any strategy to combat the ruling class.

Activists and organizations will pressure the state at all levels, from municipal to national, to increase funding for the solidarity economy. In fact, they already are, and have had success in many countries and municipalities, including in the U.S. The election of more socialists to office will encourage these trends and ensure greater successes. Pressure will also build to fund larger worker cooperatives, to convert corporations to worker-owned businesses, and to nationalize sectors of the economy. And sooner or later, many states will start to give in.

Why? One possible state response to crisis, after all, is fascism. And fascism of some form or other is indeed being pursued by many countries right now, from Brazil to Hungary to India to the U.S. But there’s a problem with fascism: by its murderous and ultra-nationalistic nature, it can be neither permanent nor continuously enforced worldwide. Even just in the United States, the governmental structure is too vast and federated, there are too many thousands of relatively independent political jurisdictions, for a fascist regime to be consolidated in every region of the country. Fascism is only a temporary and partial solution for the ruling class. It doesn’t last.

The other solution, which doubtless will always be accompanied by repression, is to grant concessions to the masses. Here, it’s necessary to observe that the state isn’t monolithically an instrument of capital. While capital dominates it, it is a terrain of struggle, “contestations,” “negotiations,” of different groups—classes, class subgroups, interest groups, even individual entities—advocating for their interests. Marxists from Engels, Kautsky, and Lenin to Miliband and Poulantzas to more recent writers have felled forests writing about the nature of the capitalist state, but for the purposes of revolutionary strategy all you need is some critical common sense (as Noam Chomsky, dismissive of self-indulgent “theorizing,” likes to point out). It is possible for popular movements to exert such pressure on the state that they slowly change its character, thereby helping to change the character of capitalist society.

In particular, popular organizations and activists can take advantage of splits within the ruling class to push agendas that benefit the populace. The political scientist Thomas Ferguson, among others, has shown how the New Deal, including the epoch-making Wagner Act and Social Security Act, was made possible by just such divisions in the ranks of business. On a grander scale, Western Europe’s long transition from feudalism to capitalism was accompanied by divisions within the ruling class, between more forward-thinking and more hidebound elements. (As is well known, a number of landed aristocrats and clergymen even supported the French Revolution, at least in its early phases.) Marx was therefore wrong to imply that it’s the working class vs. the capitalist class, monolithically. This totally Manichean thinking suggested that the only way to make a revolution is for the proletariat to overthrow the ruling class in one blow, so to speak, to smash a united reactionary opposition that, moreover, is in complete control of the state (so the state has to be seized all at once).

On the contrary, we can expect the past to repeat itself: as crises intensify and popular resistance escalates, liberal factions of the ruling class will split off from the more reactionary elements in order to grant concessions. In our epoch of growing social fragmentation, environmental crisis, and an increasingly dysfunctional nation-state, many of these concessions will have the character not of resurrecting the centralized welfare state but of encouraging phenomena that seem rather “interstitial” and less challenging to capitalist power than full-fledged social democracy is. But, however innocent it might seem to support new “decentralized” solutions to problems of unemployment, housing, consumption, and general economic dysfunction, in the long run, as I’ve said, these sorts of reforms will facilitate the rise of a more democratic and socialized political economy within the shell of the decadent capitalist one.

At the same time, to tackle the immense crises of ecological destruction and economic dysfunction, more dramatic and visible state interventions will be necessary. They may involve nationalizations of the fossil fuel industry, enforced changes to the polluting practices of many industries, partial reintroductions of social-democratic policies, pro-worker reforms of the sort that Bernie Sanders’ campaign categorized under “workplace democracy,” etc. Pure, unending repression will simply not be sustainable. These more “centralized,” “statist” reforms, just like the promotion of the solidarity economy, will in the long run only add to the momentum for continued change, because the political, economic, and ecological context will remain that of severe worldwide crisis.

Much of the ruling class will of course oppose and undermine progressive policies—especially of the more statist variety—every step of the way, thus deepening the crisis and doing its own part to accelerate the momentum for change. But by the time it becomes clear to even the liberal sectors of the business class that its reforms are undermining the long-term viability and hegemony of capitalism, it will be too late. They won’t be able to turn back the clock: there will be too many worker-owned businesses, too many public banks, too many state-subsidized networks of mutual aid, altogether too many reforms to the old type of neoliberal capitalism (reforms that will have been granted, as always, for the sake of maintaining social order). The slow-moving revolution will feed on itself and will prove unstoppable, however much the more reactionary states try to clamp down, murder dissidents, prohibit protests, and bust unions. Besides, as Marx predicted, the revolutionary project will be facilitated by the thinning of the ranks of the capitalist elite due to repeated economic collapses and the consequent destruction of wealth.

Just as the European absolutist state of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries was compelled to empower—for the sake of accumulating wealth—the capitalist classes that created the conditions of its demise, so the late-capitalist state will be compelled, for the purposes of internal order, to acquiesce in the construction of non-capitalist institutions that correct some of the “market failures” of the capitalist mode of production. The capitalist state will, of necessity, be a participant in its own demise. Its highly reluctant sponsorship of new practices of production, distribution, and social life as a whole—many of them “interstitial” at first—will be undertaken on the belief that it’s the lesser of two evils, the greater evil being the complete dissolution of capitalist power resulting from the dissolution of society.

It is impossible to predict this long process in detail, or to say how and when the working class’s gradual takeover of the state (through socialist representatives and the construction of new institutions on local and eventually national levels) will be consummated. Nor can we predict what the nation-state itself will look like then, what political forms it will have, how many of its powers will have devolved to municipal and regional levels and how many will have been lost to supra-national bodies of world governance. Needless to say, it is also hopeless to speculate on the future of the market, or whether various kinds of economic planning will, after generations, mostly take the place of the market.

As for “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” this entity, like the previous “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie,” won’t exist until the end of the long process of transformation. Marxists, victims of impatience as well as the statist precedents of twentieth-century “Communist” countries, have traditionally gotten the order wrong, forgetting the lesson of Marxism itself that the state is a function of existing social relations and can’t simply be taken over by workers in the context of a still-wholly-capitalist economy. Nor is it at all “dialectical” to think that a group of workers’ representatives can will a new economy into existence, overcoming the authoritarian, bureaucratic, inefficient, exploitative institutional legacies of capitalism by a few acts of statist will. Historical materialism makes clear the state isn’t so radically socially creative![3]

Instead, the contrast that will appear between the stagnant, “fettering” old forms of capitalism and the more rational and democratic forms of the emergent economy is what will guarantee, in the end, the victory of the latter.

An ecumenical activism

In a necessarily speculative and highly abstract way I’ve tried to sketch the logic of how a new economy might emerge from the wreckage of capitalism, and how activists with an eye toward the distant future might orient their thinking. It should be evident from what I’ve said that there isn’t only one way to make a revolution; rather, in a time of world-historic crisis, simply fighting to humanize society will generate anti-capitalist momentum. And there are many ways to make society more humane.

Consider the social democratic path, the path of electing socialists and pressuring government to expand “welfare state” measures. Far-leftists often deride this approach as merely reformist; in the U.S., it’s also common to dismiss the idea of electing progressive Democrats such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez because supposedly the Democratic Party is hopelessly capitalist and corrupt. It can’t be moved left, and it will certainly never be a socialist party.

According to Regeneration Magazine, for instance, a voice of the Marxist Center network, “Reformism accepts as a given the necessity of class collaboration, and attempts to spin class compromise as a necessary good. One of the more popular strategic proposals of the reformist camp is the promotion of candidates for elected office running in a capitalist party; a clear instance of encouraging class collaboration.”

There are a number of possible responses to such objections. One might observe that if the left insists on absolute purity and refuses to work with anyone who can be seen as somehow “compromised,” it’s doomed to irrelevance—or, worse, it ends up fracturing the forces of opposition and thus benefits the reactionaries. It is a commonplace of historiography on fascism that the refusal of Communist parties in the early 1930s to cooperate with socialists and social democrats only empowered the Nazis and other such elements—which is why the Stalinist line changed in 1934, when the period of the Popular Front began. Then, in the U.S., began Communist efforts to build the Democrat-supported CIO (among other instances of “collaboration” with Democrats), which was highly beneficial to the working class. Leftists, more than anyone else, should be willing and able to learn from history.

Or one might state the truism that social democracy helps people, and so if you care about helping people, you shouldn’t be opposed to social democracy. It may be true that the Democratic Party is irredeemably corrupt and capitalist, but the more left-wing policymakers we have, the better. Democrats have moved to the left in the past, e.g. during the New Deal and the Great Society, and they may be able to move to the left in the future. One of the goals of socialists should be to fracture the ruling class, to provoke splits that provide opportunities for socialist organizing and policymaking.

At the same time, the strategy of electing left-wing Democrats or “reformists” should be complemented by an effort to build a working-class party, not only for the sake of having such a party but also to put pressure on the mainstream “left.” Anyway, the broader point is just that the state is an essential terrain of struggle, and all ways of getting leftists elected have to be pursued.

Personally, I’m skeptical that full-fledged social democracy, including an expansion of it compared to its traditional form, is possible any longer, least of all on an international or global scale. Thus, I don’t have much hope for a realization of the Jacobin vision, that societies can pass straight into socialism by resurrecting and continuously broadening and deepening social democracy. Surely Marxism teaches us that we can’t resuscitate previous social formations after they have passed from the scene, particularly not institutional forms that have succumbed (or are in the process of succumbing) to the atomizing, disintegrating logic of capital. The expansive welfare state was appropriate to an age of industrial unionism and limited mobility of capital. Given the monumental crises that will afflict civilization in the near future, the social stability and coherence required to sustain genuine social democracy will not exist.

But that doesn’t mean limited social-democratic victories aren’t still possible. They certainly are. And in the long run, they may facilitate the emergence of new democratic, cooperative, ecologically viable modes of production, insofar as they empower the left. Even something like a Green New Deal, or at least a partial realization of it, isn’t out of the question.

On the other hand, while mass politics is necessary, that doesn’t mean we should completely reject non-electoral “movementism.” As I’ve argued, the project of building a new society doesn’t happen only on the level of the state; it also involves other types of popular organizing and mobilizing, including in the solidarity economy. The latter will likely, indeed, be a necessity for people’s survival in the coming era of state incapacity to deal with catastrophe.

Not all types of anarchist activism are fruitful or even truly leftist, but the anarchist intuition to organize at the grassroots and create horizontal networks of popular power is sound. Even in the ultra-left contempt for reformism there is the sound intuition that reforms are not enough, and we must always press forward towards greater radicalism and revolution.

An ecological apocalypse?

An obvious objection to the conception and timeframe of revolution I’ve proposed is that it disregards the distinct possibility that civilization will have disappeared a hundred years from now if we don’t take decisive action immediately. For one thing, nuclear war remains a dire threat. But even more ominously, capitalism is turbocharged to destroy the natural bases of human life.

There’s no need to run through the litany of crimes capitalism is committing against nature. Humanity is obviously teetering on the edge of a precipice, peering down into a black hole below. Our most urgent task is to, at the very least, take a few steps back from the precipice.

The unfortunate fact, however, is that global capitalism will not be overcome within the next few decades. It isn’t “defeatist” to say this; it’s realistic. The inveterate over-optimism of many leftists, even in the face of a dismal history, is quite remarkable. Transitions between modes of production aren’t accomplished in a couple of decades: they take generations, and involve many setbacks, then further victories, then more defeats, etc. The long march of reactionaries to their current power in the U.S. took fifty years, and they existed in a sympathetic political economy and had enormous resources. It’s hard to believe socialists will be able to revolutionize the West and even the entire world in less time.

Fortunately, it is possible to combat ecological collapse even in the framework of capitalism. One way to do so, which, sadly, is deeply unpopular on the left, is for governments to subsidize the massive expansion of nuclear power, a very clean and effective source of energy despite the conventional wisdom. The rollout of renewable energy is important too, despite its many costs. Meanwhile, it is far from hopeless to try to force governments to impose burdensome regulations and taxes on polluting industries or even, ideally, to shut down the fossil fuel industry altogether. Capitalism itself is indeed, ultimately, the culprit, but reforms can have a major effect, at the very least buying us some time.

Climate change and other environmental disasters may, nevertheless, prove to be the undoing of civilization, in which case the social logic of a post-capitalist revolution that I’ve outlined here won’t have time to unfold. Nothing certain can be said at this point—except that the left has to stop squabbling and get its act together. And it has to be prepared for things to get worse before they get better. As Marx understood, that’s how systemic change tends to work: the worse things get—the more unstable the system becomes—the more people organize to demand change, and in the end the likelier it is that such change will happen.

The old apothegm “socialism or barbarism” has to be updated: it’s now socialism or apocalypse.

But the strategic lesson of the “purifications” I’ve suggested of Marxist theory remains: the path to socialism is not doctrinaire, not sectarian, not wedded to a single narrow ideological strain; it is catholic, inclusive, open-ended—both “reformist” and non-reformist, statist and non-statist, Marxist and anarchist, Democrat-cooperating and -non-cooperating. Loath as we might be to admit it, it is even important that we support lesser-evil voting, for instance electing Biden rather than Trump. Not only does it change people’s lives to have a centrist instead of a fascist in power; it also gives the left more room to operate, to influence policy, to advocate “radical reforms” that help lay the groundwork for new economic relations.

It’s time for creative and flexible thinking. The urgency of our situation demands it.

Notes

[1] Being an outgrowth of my Master’s thesis, the book over-emphasizes worker cooperatives. It does, however, answer the usual Marxist objections to cooperatives as a component of social revolution.

[2] If someone will counterpose here the example of Russia, which didn’t require “many decades” to go from capitalism and late-feudalism to a “Stalinist mode of production,” I’d reply that the latter was in fact like a kind of state capitalism, and therefore wasn’t so very different after all from the authoritarian, exploitative, surplus-extracting, capital-accumulating economy that dominated in the West.

[3] This is why I claim in the above-linked book that my “revisions” of Marxism are really purifications of it, eliminations of mistakes that finally make the properly understood Marxist conception of revolution consistent with the premises of historical materialism.

Sanders Supporters: It’s Time to get Disillusioned

By J.E. Karla

The word ‘disillusioned” has a negative connotation in our society, implying that illusions are good for us. In a life-or-death situation, however, illusions are fatal, and the fantasy that capitalism will give us the tools we need to destroy it threatens billions of lives. The oppressed of the world need actually radical Bernie Sanders supporters to snap out of it, right now. The rest of this essay is addressed directly to these earnest, disappointed supporters.

Your greatest illusion is probably the belief that Bernie Sanders somehow advanced the left over the last five years. He did not. Mass political energy rising up in the Occupy, Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock and other mass movements got pushed into this campaign, now with nothing to show for it. This is an empirical fact, with vote counts and delegate totals to prove it. Even after tens of thousands of dedicated volunteers and hundreds of millions of dollars raised, Bernie regressed badly since his last failure in 2016. 

Yes, the coronavirus wreaked unforeseen havoc, but why should a crisis of capitalism work against an allegedly anti-capitalist campaign? It’s because Bernie’s style of opportunism is an open compromise between the ruling system and mass demand for change. When this contradiction erupts, the opportunists have to choose between either their imagined aims or their concrete collaborations with the class enemy. 

Bernie chose the latter, standing down in order to protect the system. The ruling class needs immediate unity behind the state in the broadest sense — not just the government, but the entire apparatus of capitalist power — if it is to survive this crisis. Bernie immediately fell in line, just like a US Senator is supposed to. Now his supporters can choose to follow this lead or to denounce this surrender. Which will you choose? 

If you believe that the exploited masses have the power to rise up and set ourselves free — i.e the basic idea of all revolutionary politics — then the question becomes which choice validates that concept: advancing Joe Biden’s ambitions, or refusing to further play the capitalist game? Bernie’s primary political objective is now the election of Joe Biden as president. Sticking with him out of a sense of reflexive loyalty is a clear betrayal of the masses.   

This is also the answer to the “lesser of two evils” logic Bernie and his allies in the Democratic Party are trotting out, now for the umpteenth time. For a child in a Palestinian refugee camp, a woman working in a Sri Lankan sweatshop, someone toiling in a coltan mine in Central Africa, or a Yemeni family praying that the drones miss them again today, the US elections change nothing. Not only is there no difference between Biden and Trump, there was no hope even in Bernie Sanders after all. 

Indeed, when it comes to key questions like the struggle against NATO, the IMF, WTO, and the US dollar, Biden may actually be to the right of Trump. This looks topsy turvy until you get good and disillusioned. Marx and Engels say in The Communist Manifesto that communists “are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only… in the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality.” We either take this materialist perspective, or fall into the same opportunist trap over and over again. 

If you’ve spent any time over the last five years enthralled by the Bernie campaign, you’ve seen the consequences of this error. All of your work and money has been handed over to a befuddled rapist hack for the credit card companies and military industrial complex. The only way out of this hole is to stop digging. It’s time for you to give up on this illusion, once and for all.

The good news — kinda — is that we’re in great collective shape for a period of study. Start with the great dissector of opportunism — Vladimir Lenin. Read State and Revolution, and then Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism. For a great look at how those dynamics have developed into our present age give John Smith’s Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century a read, followed by Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik’s A Theory of Imperialism. Get some disillusioned former Bernie supporters together and study as a group — it will help you stay accountable. 

It may feel less “active” than what you were up to with Bernie, but remember that you would have done much less harm if you’d done nothing at all. If there’s any hope of a silver lining in this experience it will be folks like you turning this heartbreak into a spirit of real resistance. Follow that spirit the next time a mass movement is urged to go electoral, and remind them of your one-time folly.  

We know that this will come up again sooner or later because no one comes out of this system without thinking a lot of very destructive things. Bernie supporters often point out the isolation and self-absorption of much of the left. You’re right; we have our own illusions we need to snap out of too. But the same system that worries about you being “disillusioned” tells you that it’ll help you slit its throat if only you play by its rules. Remember what you’ve learned, and don’t believe it again.

Engels on Nature and Humanity

(Pictured: A painting by English artist LS Lowry (1887 - 1976) entitled 'Going To Work')

By Michael Roberts

Republished from the author’s blog.

In the light of the current pandemic, here is a rough excerpt from my upcoming short book on Engels’ contribution to Marxian political economy on the 200th anniversary of his birth.

Marx and Engels are often accused of what has been called a Promethean vision of human social organisation, namely that human beings, using their superior brains, knowledge and technical prowess, can and should impose their will on the rest of the planet or what is called ‘nature’ – for better or worse.

The charge is that other living species are merely playthings for the use of human beings.  There are humans and there is nature – in contradiction.  This charge is particularly aimed at Friedrich Engels, who it is claimed, took a bourgeois ‘positivist’ view of science: scientific knowledge was always progressive and neutral in ideology; and so was the relationship between man and nature.

This charge against Marx and Engels was promoted in the post-war period by the so-called Frankfurt School of Marxism, which reckoned that everything went wrong with Marxism after 1844, when Marx and Engels supposedly dumped “humanism”.  Later, followers of the French Marxist Althusser put the blame on Fred himself.  For them, everything went to hell in a hand basket a little later, when Engels dumped ‘historical materialism’ and replaced it with ‘dialectical materialism’, in order to promote Engels’ ‘silly belief’ that Marxism and the physical sciences had some relationship.

Indeed, the ‘green’ critique of Marx and Engels is that they were unaware that homo sapiens were destroying the planet and thus themselves.  Instead, Marx and Engels had a touching Promethean faith in capitalism’s ability to develop the productive forces and technology to overcome any risks to the planet and nature.

That Marx and Engels paid no attention to the impact on nature of human social activity has been debunked recently in particular by the ground-breaking work of Marxist authors like John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett.  They have reminded us that throughout Marx’s Capital, Marx was very aware of capitalism’s degrading impact on nature and the resources of the planet.  Marx wrote that 

“the capitalist mode of production collects the population together in great centres and causes the urban population to achieve an ever-growing preponderance…. [It] disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e., it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil. Thus it destroys at the same time the physical health of the urban worker, and the intellectual life of the rural worker.” 

As Paul Burkett says: “it is difficult to argue that there is something fundamentally anti-ecological about Marx’s analysis of capitalism and his projections of communism.”

To back this up, Kohei Saito’s prize-winning book has drawn on Marx’s previously unpublished ‘excerpt’ notebooks from the ongoing MEGA research project to reveal Marx’s extensive study of scientific works of the time on agriculture, soil, forestry, to expand his concept of the connection between capitalism and its destruction of natural resources. (I have a review pending on Saito’s book).

But Engels too must be saved from the same charge.  Actually, Engels was well ahead of Marx (yet again) in connecting the destruction and damage to the environment that industrialisation was causing.  While still living in his home town of Barmen (now Wuppertal), he wrote several diary notes about the inequality of rich and poor, the pious hypocrisy of the church preachers and also the pollution of the rivers.

Just 18 years old, he writes: 

“the two towns of Elberfeld and Barmen, which stretch along the valley for a distance of nearly three hours’ travel. The purple waves of the narrow river flow sometimes swiftly, sometimes sluggishly between smoky factory buildings and yarn-strewn bleaching-yards. Its bright red colour, however, is due not to some bloody battle, for the fighting here is waged only by theological pens and garrulous old women, usually over trifles, nor to shame for men’s actions, although there is indeed enough cause for that, but simply and solely to the numerous dye-works using Turkey red. Coming from Düsseldorf, one enters the sacred region at Sonnborn; the muddy Wupper flows slowly by and, compared with the Rhine just left behind, its miserable appearance is very disappointing.”

He goes on:

“First and foremost, factory work is largely responsible. Work in low rooms where people breathe more coal fumes and dust than oxygen — and in the majority of cases beginning already at the age of six — is bound to deprive them of all strength and joy in life. “

He connected the social degradation of working families with the degradation of nature alongside the hypocritical piety of the manufacturers.

“Terrible poverty prevails among the lower classes, particularly the factory workers in Wuppertal; syphilis and lung diseases are so widespread as to be barely credible; in Elberfeld alone, out of 2,500 children of school age 1,200 are deprived of education and grow up in the factories — merely so that the manufacturer need not pay the adults, whose place they take, twice the wage he pays a child. But the wealthy manufacturers have a flexible conscience and causing the death of one child more or one less does not doom a pietist’s soul to hell, especially if he goes to church twice every Sunday. For it is a fact that the pietists among the factory owners treat their workers worst of all; they use every possible means to reduce the workers’ wages on the pretext of depriving them of the opportunity to get drunk, yet at the election of preachers they are always the first to bribe their people.”

Sure, these observations by Engels are just that, observations, without any theoretical development, but they show the sensitivity that Engels already had to the relationship between industrialisation, the owners and the workers, their poverty and the environmental impact of factory production.

In his first major work, Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, again well before Marx looked at political economy, Engels notes how the private ownership of the land, the drive for profit and the degradation of nature go hand in hand. 

“To make earth an object of huckstering — the earth which is our one and all, the first condition of our existence — was the last step towards making oneself an object of huckstering. It was and is to this very day an immorality surpassed only by the immorality of self-alienation. And the original appropriation — the monopolization of the earth by a few, the exclusion of the rest from that which is the condition of their life — yields nothing in immorality to the subsequent huckstering of the earth.” 

Once the earth becomes commodified by capital, it is subject to just as much exploitation as labour.

Engels’ major work (written with Marx’s help), The Dialectics of Nature, written in the years up to 1883, just after Marx’s death, is often subject to attack as extending Marx’s materialist conception of history as applied to humans, into nature in a non-Marxist way.  And yet, in his book, Engels could not be clearer on the dialectical relation between humans and nature.

In a famous chapter “The Role of Work in Transforming Ape into Man.”, he writes: 

“Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human conquest over nature. For each such conquest takes its revenge on us. Each of them, it is true, has in the first place the consequences on which we counted, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor, and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that they were laying the basis for the present devastated condition of these countries, by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture. When, on the southern slopes of the mountains, the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were … thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, with the effect that these would be able to pour still more furious flood torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons. Those who spread the potato in Europe were not aware that they were at the same time spreading the disease of scrofula. Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature — but that we, with flesh, blood, and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other beings of being able to know and correctly apply its laws.” (my emphasis)

Engels goes on: 

“in fact, with every day that passes we are learning to understand these laws more correctly and getting to know both the more immediate and the more remote consequences of our interference with the traditional course of nature. … But the more this happens, the more will men not only feel, but also know, their unity with nature, and thus the more impossible will become the senseless and antinatural idea of a contradiction between mind and matter, man and nature, soul and body. …”

Engels explains the social consequences of the drive to expand the productive forces.  

“But if it has already required the labour of thousands of years for us to learn to some extent to calculate the more remote natural consequences of our actions aiming at production, it has been still more difficult in regard to the more remote social consequences of these actions. … When afterwards Columbus discovered America, he did not know that by doing so he was giving new life to slavery, which in Europe had long ago been done away with, and laying the basis for the Negro slave traffic. …”

The people of the Americas were driven into slavery, but also nature was enslaved. As Engels put it:

“What cared the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertilizer for one generation of very highly profitable coffee trees–what cared they that the heavy tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of the soil, leaving behind only bare rock!”

Now we know that it was not just slavery that the Europeans brought to the Americas, but also disease, which in its many forms exterminated 90% of native Americans and was the main reason for their subjugation by colonialism.

As we experience yet another pandemic, we know that it was capitalism’s drive to industrialise agriculture and usurp the remaining wilderness that has led to nature ‘striking back’, as humans come into contact with more pathogens to which they have no immunity, just as the native Americans in the 16th century.

Engels attacked the view that ‘human nature’ is inherently selfish and will just destroy nature.  In his Outline, Engels described that argument as a “repulsive blasphemy against man and nature.”  Humans can work in harmony with and as part of nature.  It requires greater knowledge of the consequences of human action.  Engels said in his Dialectics:

“But even in this sphere, by long and often cruel experience and by collecting and analyzing the historical material, we are gradually learning to get a clear view of the indirect, more remote, social effects of our productive activity, and so the possibility is afforded us of mastering and controlling these effects as well.”

But better knowledge and scientific progress is not enough. For Marx and Engels, the possibility of ending the dialectical contradiction between man and nature and bringing about some level of harmony and ecological balance would only be possible with the abolition of the capitalist mode of production. As Engels said: “To carry out this control requires something more than mere knowledge.”  Science is not enough. “It requires a complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production, and with it of our whole contemporary social order.”  The ‘positivist’ Engels, it seems, supported Marx’s materialist conception of history after all.

Marx, Nature, and Political Morality

By Ben Stahnke

Republished from Peace, Land, and Bread: A Scholarly Journal of Revolutionary Theory and Practice

“It is singular that all of the political economists of England have overlooked the fact that man is a mere borrower from the earth, and that when he does not pay his debts, she does as do all other creditors, that is, she expels him from his holding.” [1]

It is not trope, nor is it particularly controversial, to assert that global environmental change and climate change are among the most pressing issues for the earth and its biotic communities. Climate change—inclusive of its present anthropogenic drivers—is, by no small stretch, not only the most important environmental issue facing human communities to date, it is overwhelmingly accepted as fact by international ecological, geological, and climatological experts. The primary anthropogenic drivers of such change, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are demographic, economic, sociopolitical, and technological in nature. Such drivers can only be intimately connected to the ways in which extant societies produce and reproduce their material existences.

As the climate continues to warm, negative impacts not only reach towards biodiversity loss, habitat fragmentation, sea-level rise, glacier-mass balance, sea-ice thickness, and snow cover, but towards the behaviors of biological systems as well. On the human scale—exacerbated by violent conflicts—climate change negatively impacts agricultural production, development processes, health, wellness, and water resources; often affecting poor and subaltern communities in disproportionately impactful ways.

As the climate continues to warm—a warming which now may be measured during the span of a single human lifetime [2]—ideas regarding the degree to which human impact has affected natural climate variability have become increasingly politicized. When environmental regulations have the ability to both impact and curtail human industrial activities, and where industrial activities—under the capitalist mode of production—largely control political policymaking processes through extensive lobbying, regressive politicking, and the appointment of partisan industry heads into regulatory positions, the hope for effective policies diminishes to a hopelessness.

Under capitalism, and especially in the United States, business enjoys a “special relationship with government.” [3] And, according to Yale political scientist Charles Lindblom: “government officials know this. They know that widespread failure of business […] will bring down the government. […] Consequently, government policy makers show constant concern about business performance.” [4] As such, under U.S. capitalism, ad hoc regulations not only fall sway to the back-and-forth of the two-party structure; regulation remains, ultimately, subservient to business itself.

If one presidential administration can simply retract and withdraw the environmental protections set in place by prior administrations, the policymaking processes of U.S. federalism as such appear in a futile and circular—if not regressive—light. Lacking a central vision, and without the effective extra-partisan regulatory mechanisms in place to enact progressive, long-term, and sustainable environmental protections, U.S. capitalism as a mode of production thus sets itself against the earth.

However, capitalist production, as Karl Marx observed in Capital, also “creates the material conditions for a new and higher synthesis, a union of agriculture and industry on the basis of the forms that have developed during the period of their antagonistic isolation.” [5] In other words, capitalism, for its failings, is not only an historical, social, and evolutionary improvement upon the feudal-manorial socio-economy which it replaced, it also contains within itself—as a mode of production—the seeds of a future, socialized mode of production; waiting only for an historical actualization. As Antonio Gramsci noted, “it contains in itself the principle through which [it] can be superseded.” [6]

The failings, as well as the dangers, of the present mode of production lie bound up not only within its endemic social exploitation, nor within its environmental exploitation; but within the rift which has occurred between human society and the earth at large. Well known for his insightful work on Marx’s theory of the metabolic rift, political scientist and sociologist John Bellamy Foster observed that:

“Marx employed the concept of a ‘rift’ in the metabolic relation between human beings and the earth to capture the material estrangement of human beings within capitalist society from the natural conditions which formed the basis for their existence—what he called ‘the everlasting nature-imposed condition[s] of human existence.’” [7]

Such a rift in the relationship between the human species and the earth has not only led to a capitalist mode of production which—following directly on the heels of the plundering of the Americas and of Africa by European imperial powers—continues to destroy ecosystems and human populations in the quest for profit; it continues to drive regressive environmental policymaking in ways which only act to reproduce extant social relationships of production and power, as well as the economic means of production and distribution.

Following the waves of Inclosure and Commons Acts which dispossessed peoples from common lands towards the coasts and towards increasingly populated city centers, and driven by changing economic and social pressures, capitalist production has, as Marx observed, done two things:

1. it has “concentrated the historical motive power of society” [8] away from the manors to the towns, thus creating the sociopolitical conditions for a new hierarchical stratification, with the emergent bourgeoisies on top; and

2. it “disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing.” [9]

On a finite world, with essentially finite material resources, and in light of a productive mode predicated upon a logic of profit and growth at all costs, Marx saw the rift in the metabolism between human organism and land—as well as the endemic alienation from the productive activities entailed by mankind’s species nature upon the earth—as not only a primary failing of the capitalist productive mode, but also the mechanism through which capitalism may be superseded.

Such a rift, for Marx, was not biologically nor economically sustainable and as such would lead to its own demise, as well as to its transcendence—towards a new ecological and economic sustainability. Such a sustainability was, for Marx, possible only through a socialization of polity, policymaking, and governance. On this, Marx noted that:

“Freedom, in this sphere, can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature.” [10]

Such a socialized governance not only entails materially oriented policies and political structures, but also necessitates an ideological structure focused upon such goals as ecological sustainability, human harmony with the Earth System, and a deconstruction of the logic of profit which presently guides human political interest.

That the earth itself is “a single system within which the biosphere is an active, essential component” [11] should be a primary focus for political and environmental policymaking. The variegated and numerous communities of the earth’s species interact via biotic, abiotic, chemical, physical, and climatological factors within and with the biosphere and, as such, operate metabolically with the earth itself, where metabolism—in both the Aristotelian and the contemporary sense—denotes both change and a circulation of matter. For Karl Marx, the metabolic interdependence and interconnectivity of the human organism and the earth was, as noted in Capital:

“a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates, and controls the metabolism between himself and nature … Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature.” [12]

Such a metabolism—the circulation of matter for the production and reproduction of human species-existence—was, for Marx, not an abstract idea but one which was grounded in a material conception of the identity between organism and environment. For example, “The German word ‘Stoffwechsel,’” Foster noted, “directly sets out in its elements the notion of ‘material exchange’ that underlies the notion of structured processes of biological growth and decay captured in the term ‘metabolism.’” [13] Such a conception, for Marx, was implicitly dialectical: a “unity and struggle of opposites.” [14]

The striving towards a positive-dialectical and sustainable metabolism between the human species and the earth was thus, for Marx, a central focus of the entire theory of political communism—a theory which “differs from all previous movements in that it overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production … [and which] turns existing conditions into conditions of unity.” [15]

Such conditions are inherently communitarian, for only a community-oriented humanity can collectively respond to the dangers and impacts of a rapidly changing world; guided, as they are, by direct, lived knowledge of community needs and requirements. Effective policy creation thus requires community involvement; further, it requires not only socialized command and control (CAC) regulation guided by a singular vision of sustainability, but a dialectic of CAC thus unified with (and struggling for) bottom-up community input.

A changing world evolves not in the presence of a static humanity; rather, a changing world both impacts and modifies its inhabitor-species. The Holocene Extinction, presently underway, evidences that in light of a changing world, species either adapt progressively or perish en masse. With regard to environmental policy, political inquiry, and socialized governance, theorists and policymakers should turn their attention towards the articulation of policy built upon a conception of the world which is radically different from the present, capitalist conception of the world as both separated and static; a world which, for the capitalist, exists as naught but a collection of resources exploitable for the profit of a dominant class.

However, policy makers and political theorists cannot make progress through a changing of ideas and conceptions alone; such change must coexist with a radical political-economic restructuring:

“by the action of individuals in again subjecting these material powers to themselves and abolishing the division of labour. This is not possible without the community. Only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible.” [16]

Policy makers and political theorists inside of the U.S. should seek to look towards extra-national polities who successfully deal, and who have dealt, with rapid changes in climate; polities who have successfully utilized CAC to confront climate change, such as China and Cuba. In the midst of not only a rapidly changing world, but a world with a great extinction underway, national rivalries and ideological patriotisms in the political-environmental fields only work to undo and to thwart progress.

We must—as philosophers, scientists, and researchers of politics, economics, and policy—work towards a greater goal; indeed, no less than the greatest goal—the adaptation and progressive response to a world undergoing quick change, so that we might secure a sustainable existence for the children of humanity for as long as the earth will have us.

To end with the words of the late Marxist political philosopher Scott Warren, “We must be involved in nothing less than the discovery and creation of a world worthy of the human spirit to inhabit, as well as the discovery and creation of a human spirit worthy of the world.” [17]

NOTES

[1] Henry Carey, The Slave Trade Domestic and Foreign (1853), quoted in John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 152.

[2] Lee Hannah, Thomas Lovejoy, and Stephen Schneider, “Biodiversity and Climate Change in Context,” in Climate Change and Biodiversity, eds. Thomas Lovejoy and Lee Hannah (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 4.

[3] Charles Lindblom and Edward Woodhouse, The Policy-Making Process: 3rd Edition (Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall, 1993), 90.

[4] Charles Lindblom, The Policy-Making Process: 2nd Edition, (Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall, 1993), 73.

[5] Karl Marx, Capital: Volume I , 637.

[6] Antonio Gramsci, Selections From the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1999), 371.

[7] John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 163.

[8] Karl Marx, Capital: Volume I, 637.

[9] Ibid., 637.

[10] Karl Marx, Capital: Volume III (London: Penguin Classics, 1991), 959.

[11] Will Steffen, et al., Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure, (Berlin: Springer, 2005), 1.

[12] Karl Marx, Capital: Volume I, 283.

[13] John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology, 157.

[14] Eftichios Bitsakis, “Complementarity: Dialectics or Formal Logic,” in Nature, Society, and Thought: A Journal of Dialectical and Historical Materialism, (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis, 2002), 276.

[15] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology: Parts I and III, (Mansfield Centre: Martino Publishing, 2011), 70.

[16] Ibid., 74.

[17] Scott Warren, The Emergence of Dialectical Theory: Philosophy and Political Inquiry, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 198.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Beaud, Michel. A History of Capitalism: 1500-2000. Translated by Tom Dickman and Any Lefebvre. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001.

Foster, John Bellamy. Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.

Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Translated and edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1999.

Warren, Scott. The Emergence of Dialectical Theory: Philosophy and Political Inquiry. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1984.