Ideology

[blindpig]

Notes in the Margins: "Critique of the Gotha Program"
No. 7/95.VII.2024

To the history of publication
After the defeat of the Paris Commune, "the center of gravity of the European labor movement shifted from France to Germany" [1], on whose territory (in the first half of the 1870s ) two major labor organizations operated: the Lassallean General German Workers' Union [2] and the recently split-off Eisenach Social Democratic Party [3] (close to Marx and Engels). The unification of these two organizations took place at the famous congress held in the German city of Gotha in 1875.

The tendencies that emerged on the eve of the congress, according to Marx and Engels, favored temporary unity of tactical actions against the common enemy, against the exploiters, a unity that excluded the need for immediate unification into a party and the drafting of a single program. Marx wrote:

“…If it was impossible – and circumstances did not allow it – to go beyond the Eisenach program, then it would have been necessary to simply conclude an agreement on actions against the common enemy.

<…>

"The Lassallean leaders came to us because circumstances forced them to do so. If they had been told from the very beginning that [the Eisenachians] would not agree to any bargaining over principles, then they [the Lassalleans] would have had to be satisfied with a program of action or an organizational plan for the purpose of joint action" [4].

Marx and Engels believed that the circumstances of the class struggle of that period (the balance of power between the Lassallean League and the Eisenachites) required a wait-and-see attitude, a gradual attack on Lassalleanism, and a patient exposure of its (Lassalleanism's) opportunistic essence. In such a situation, there was no need to rush to unite into a single party and draw up a new program. These were precisely the views that were set forth at the Coburg Congress of the Eisenach Party in the summer of 1874. Liebknecht, who spoke at the congress, said:

“At first the slogan was ‘unity, but not unification’, and until the conditions for a complete merger have not been created, one can rightfully speak of ‘unification fever’” [5].

However, during the negotiations between the leaders of the two organizations, the slogan "unity, but not unification" was forgotten by the leaders of the Eisenachians, as a result of which the thesis on tactical unity was replaced by the thesis on the need for a speedy unification into a single party [6]. This premature unification largely influenced the fact that the program adopted in Gotha contained even more errors than the Eisenach program of 1869 that preceded it.

At the same time, Wilhelm Liebknecht, who in 1874 proclaimed the already mentioned slogan “unity, but not unification,” changed his mind after such a short period of time, becoming one of the main supporters of unification on the part of the Eisenachians [7]. Here is what he stated in his letter to Engels:

"The shortcomings of the program to which you draw attention undoubtedly exist, and they were clear to us from the very beginning, but it was impossible to avoid them at the conference if they did not want to disrupt the negotiations on unification... In any case, the situation was this: either this program, or no unification . Now the question arises: is unification a goal to strive for, and is it worth the sacrifices made? Decidedly: Yes!"[8].

As can be seen, this position directly contradicted the position of Marx and Engels, who, on the contrary, believed that the Lassalleans would be ready to act together even without actually uniting into a single party.

Therefore, the resulting draft of the Gotha Program, which was so rich in the above-mentioned “bargaining of principles,” plunged the classics into “no small amazement.” Usually, the unification of two (or more) movements, parties, organizations, factions occurs on the basis of a single platform, on the basis of common views on a number of issues, which temporarily leaves aside disagreements and contradictions. However, the Gotha Program violated this unspoken rule, since it consisted mainly of Lassallean ideology, which contradicted the principles of Marxism. Thus, what occurred was not so much a unification of two organizations as an absorption of the Eisenachian Social Democratic Party by the Lassallean General German Workers’ Union [9].

The response to the program was, on the one hand, Engels' letters to the leaders of the Eisenachists (Bebel, Liebknecht and Ramm [10]), and on the other, Marx's "Remarks on the Program of the German Workers' Party" ("Critique of the Gotha Program"), with an attached cover letter to another leader of the Eisenachists, Wilhelm Bracke (the letter was addressed to the party leadership). All these texts, in different words, said one thing - the Gotha Program was an unjustified retreat from Marxist principles, an unjustified surrender of one's positions under the pressure of Lassallean opportunism.

At the same time, in his later letter to Bebel, Engels says that he and Marx did not delude themselves with the hope that their criticism would somehow influence the compromise solution that was adopted:

“Marx… wrote this criticism only to clear his conscience, without the slightest hope of success, as the final line shows: dixi et salvavi animam meam [Latin: I said and saved my soul].”

It should not be forgotten that the "Critique of the Gotha Programme" did not see the light of day. Initially, Marx and Engels planned to publicly oppose the Gotha Programme, but their plans were changed by the reaction to the congress from the workers and bourgeoisie, who managed to interpret the opportunist, predominantly Lassallean programme in a communist way. Here is what Engels wrote about this in his letter to Bracke on October 11, 1875:

"Fortunately, the programme has had more luck than it deserves. The workers, the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie have read into it what it should have contained but what it does not, and it has not occurred to anyone in any camp to publicly examine the real content of any of these astonishing provisions. This has enabled us to remain silent about this programme. Moreover, these phrases cannot be translated into any foreign language without being forced either to write obvious nonsense or to invest them with a communist meaning, and this is what everyone does, both friends and enemies" (Letter from Engels to Bracke, 11 October 1875) [11].

And in a letter to Bebel dated October 12:

"...The donkeys from the bourgeois newspapers took this program quite seriously, read from it what was not there, and interpreted it in a communist sense. The workers are apparently doing the same. Only this circumstance allowed Marx and me not to publicly distance ourselves from such a program. As long as our opponents, as well as the workers, put our views into this program, we have the right to remain silent about it" [12].

Time passed, and the compromise Gotha Programme was not subject to any changes. The influence of the “Exceptional Law against Socialists” [13] was also felt, under the conditions of which loud party discussions would have attracted unnecessary attention to the workers’ party. Engels noted:

"The program is bad, but no one talks about it anymore. The program must be changed in such a way that there is nothing to find fault with. Therefore, as long as delegates cannot be elected openly and, therefore, as long as any mandate can be contested, it would be better not to touch the program unless absolutely necessary. Changing the program would give the right wing an excuse to play the true guardians of party principles, faithful to the old, tried and tested program, etc. Think carefully before you throw this apple of discord into a party that is bound hand and foot " [14].

However, in 1890 the law against socialists was repealed. The changes within Germany could not but be reflected in the changes within the German workers' party, in particular in the change of the party program. In October 1890, the Gallic Congress of the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany took place, which instructed the Party Board to draw up a new program for the next congress in the city of Erfurt. In addition, at the Gallic Congress itself, Wilhelm Liebknecht spoke about the program, commenting on and criticizing a certain document that suspiciously resembled Marx's "Critique of the Gotha Program". And since the author of the "Critique..." by that time did not have the opportunity to respond to these attacks (Marx died in 1883), the honor of defending the theory of Marxism from opportunism fell to his closest comrade Engels [15]. In the preface to the publication of the critique of the Gotha Program, he wrote:

“Since the Party Congress in Halle placed the discussion of the Gotha Programme on the Party’s agenda, I believe that it would be a crime on my part if I continued to delay the publication of this important document, perhaps the most important of all those relating to this discussion” [16].

Even the difficulties of a party nature that Engels encountered did not prevent him from insisting on the publication of Marx's pamphlet. Engels responded to the attacks of the dissatisfied and dissenting as follows:

“…I cannot at all agree that – after fifteen years of the most patient waiting – historical truth in such matters should recede into the background for reasons of decency and possible discontent within the party” [17].

The publication of the Critique of the Gotha Program was positively received by the majority of not only German but also world social democracy [18].

The story surrounding the creation and publication of the Critique of the Gotha Program shows, firstly, how difficult it was for the classics to defend the teachings of Marxism in the conditions of mass social science illiteracy among party cadres (even despite the declared agreement with the criticism of the majority of party members), and secondly, how conscientiously and diligently Engels defended the scientific legacy of his teacher and comrade.

The "Critique of the Gotha Program" had a significant influence on the subsequent history of the class struggle: the new party program adopted at the Erfurt Congress (1891) had a more Marxist content precisely due to the activities of Engels. The significance of the "Critique..." is also indicated by the content of, for example, Lenin's notes, which he kept in preparation for the book "State and Revolution" [19].

Marx's work and the circumstances in which it was written and published were also actively studied in Soviet times. Despite certain shortcomings in these studies, associated, for example, with late Soviet dogmatism and opportunism, they contain a large amount of valuable factual material devoted to the history of the class struggle of that time [20].

Things are different these days. Modern leftists, who do not have the habit of conscientiously studying the legacy of the classics, often pass by the Critique of the Gotha Program, preferring to limit themselves to the Three Sources… or, without waiting for intellectual maturity, immediately join a party with a communist name. At the same time, it would be wrong to claim that the Critique of the Gotha Program is completely unknown to modern leftists. On the contrary, this work is studied in some modern Marxist circles. However, the content of video lectures on the Critique of the Gotha Program posted on the Internet proves the low literacy of modern leftists, the inability not only to understand Marx’s criticism, but also to connect it with subsequent communist practice, to actualize its provisions in relation to the Soviet and modern eras. For example, one of the conclusions made by participants in the latest circle is the thesis on the need for modern Marxists to participate in the trade union struggle [21]. If things are so bad for those who study the classics, then what is going on in the minds of the “practitioners,” the left-wing activists and fighters against the Putin, Ukrainian or American regimes, who call self-education “sitting on the couch”?

Unfortunately, to this day a great number of representatives of the left movement adhere to the erroneous positions criticized by Marx and Engels. The current moment, of course, is not directly connected with either 1875 or 1891. However, it never hurts to reread (thoughtfully, with a pencil) a classic work of Marxism and share with comrades the thoughts that arise during the reading.

I. "Labor Income" and its Distribution
The program says:

"The emancipation of labor requires the elevation of the means of labor to the property of the whole of society and the collective regulation of total labor with a fair distribution of labor income" (Text of the program of the German Workers' Party).

The official bourgeois ideology maintains that the existing capitalist distribution is entirely fair, and this can be confirmed by the legislation of any bourgeois state. Isn't the fairness of exploitation, formalized in legal law, a consequence of the dominance of capitalist production relations, asks Marx? Who defines the boundaries of fairness? Who formulates the laws called fair? The rich or the poor?

However, the question of the degree of fairness of labor income remains, which is resolved in the program of the German Workers' Party as follows:

“…Income from labor belongs undiminished and on equal terms to all members of society” (Text of the program of the German Workers’ Party).

Firstly, Marx criticizes this approach, arguing that the conditions of production do not allow us to speak of “undiminsured labor income” after the revolution [22], since the need to reduce “labor income” is, in his words, “an economic necessity.” Secondly, he is not satisfied with the terminology used, so he suggests that instead of “labor income,” we should speak of “products of labor,” which, within the framework of the entire society, appear before us as the “aggregate social product” [23]. From this aggregate social product, Marx suggests subtracting:

“Firstly, what is required to compensate for the consumed means of production.

Secondly, an additional part for expansion of production.

Thirdly, a reserve or insurance fund for insurance against accidents, natural disasters, and so on.”

But that's not all:

“There remains another part of the total product, destined to serve as articles of consumption.

Before it comes to the individual division of this remaining portion, the following are subtracted from it again:

Firstly, general management costs that are not directly related to production.

This share will immediately be significantly reduced compared to what it is in modern society, and will continue to decrease as the new society develops.

Secondly, what is intended to meet common needs, such as schools, health care facilities, and so on.

This share will immediately increase significantly compared to what it is in modern society, and will continue to increase as the new society develops.

“Thirdly, funds for the disabled, etc...” (“Critique of the Gotha Program”).

And only after the above-mentioned cuts have been made, according to Marx, will we be able to talk about real “labor income”. However, if within the framework of capitalism we talk about cuts in the interests of the capitalist state, in the interests of the oligarchs, in the interests of the economic and political war with competitors, then “communist cuts” are an instrument for the gradual improvement of the material and spiritual conditions of people’s life, the harmonization of social relations (excluding in the long term war and other integral attributes of the “civilization” of private property), movement towards abundance, which in a society of universal Marxist literacy will exist according to the principle of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” (which will be written about below). In other words, public consumption funds will have to be replenished by withdrawing part of the total social product (“cuts in labor income”), which will subsequently be distributed by the communist state among citizens according to their needs. The greater the number of reserves, the closer to communist abundance (provided that the Marxist literacy of the population is constantly growing), which is opposed to capitalist excess and ensures the expanded reproduction of society [24].

Continuing the theme of distribution relations under capitalism and communism, Marx distinguishes between two principles of distribution: the bourgeois principle – according to work – and the communist principle – according to needs [25]. Here it is worth citing Marx’s full quote, which exhaustively describes the bourgeois character of the principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his work”:

“We are not dealing here with a communist society which has developed on its own basis, but, on the contrary, with one which is just emerging from capitalist society and which therefore in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still bears the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerged! Accordingly, each individual producer receives back from society, after all deductions, exactly as much as he gives to it. What he has given to society constitutes his individual labor share . For example, the social working day is the sum of individual working hours; the individual working time of each individual producer is the part of the social working day which he has delivered, his share in it. He receives from society a receipt that he has delivered such and such a quantity of labor (after deducting his labor for the benefit of social funds), and according to this receipt he receives from the social stocks such a quantity of consumer goods on which the same amount of labor was expended. The same quantity of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another form .

Here, obviously, the same principle prevails which regulates the exchange of commodities, in so far as the latter is an exchange of equal values. The content and form have changed here, because under the changed circumstances no one can give anything but his labor, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass into the ownership of individuals except individual consumer goods. But as regards the distribution of the latter among individual producers, the same principle prevails here as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a certain quantity of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal quantity of labor in another .

Therefore, equal rights here, in principle, are still bourgeois rights …” (“Critique of the Gotha Program”).

Distribution according to work is a bourgeois distribution, which was forced to be extended to the era of communism under construction, bearing the "birthmarks of the old society". Under capitalism, man is not interested in work, the proletarian is forced to sell his labor power and the most important thing for him is money, which is needed for survival. Under capitalism, work is not a need. This attitude to work is preserved by some workers even after the revolution, which gives rise to not only the principle of distribution according to work, but also the so-called socialist methods of material stimulation of work, which (with poorly organized Marxist propaganda) are capable of educating not so much a collectivist as an individualist, a philistine, covering up his egoism with empty talk about social justice, about the importance of socialist competition, about the need to follow the "precepts of Ilyich" and other conditionally socialist phraseology. To perceive distribution according to work, competition, and bonuses as an end in themselves, and not temporary tools of motivation in the conditions of a lack of Marxist literacy among the population, is a mistake that is repeated by many modern leftists, who are confident that the advantage of communism over capitalism consists in a fairer distribution, in higher wages for workers, and not in the fact that communism is a society of abundance, populated by reasonable creators, Marxist creators.

In addition, real equality in the division of labor is actually absent, because all people are different, everyone has their own advantages and disadvantages, their own strengths and weaknesses, which make people unequal in abilities. Marx gives the example of two workers: one of them has a large family, the other lives alone. With the same amount of labor and, therefore, the same payment for it, the first actually turns out to be poorer than the second, because his expenses and needs exceed the expenses and needs of a bachelor. Thus, the apparent equality of distribution according to labor turns into actual inequality.

Such inequality, as has already been written above, is a forced necessity of the communist society being built, gradually destroying the birthmarks of the private property civilization in the form of the mass spread of an egoistic and individualistic attitude to labor. As communism is built, the proprietary, petty-bourgeois consciousness of people will be removed by a scientific, Marxist worldview, realizing that labor is not a duty imposed by society that brings in money, but a need that makes a person a Human:

"In the highest phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of man to the division of labor has disappeared; when the antithesis between mental and physical labor has disappeared along with it; when labor has ceased to be merely a means of life, but has itself become the first need of life; when, together with the all-round development of individuals, the productive forces have also grown and all sources of social wealth have flowed in full flow, only then will it be possible to completely overcome the narrow horizon of bourgeois law, and society will be able to inscribe on its banner: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!" (Critique of the Gotha Program).

In this context, it is worth noting that the question of the relationship between production and distribution is greatly confused by various unscrupulous leftists. In particular, Marx does not agree with the fact that many opportunists focus exclusively on issues of fair distribution, omitting the question of who owns the property, the question of the nature of production relations. In their apologetic concepts, they proceed from the false notions that distribution is in no way connected with production, that the solution to the social question is connected with a fairer distribution, and not with the destruction of private property in the means of production. Marx wrote:

" Any distribution of consumer goods is always only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves . The distribution of the latter expresses the character of the mode of production itself.

<…>

“Vulgar socialism (and from it a certain part of democracy) has adopted from bourgeois economists the manner of considering and treating distribution as something independent of the mode of production, and from this to portray the matter as if socialism revolves primarily around questions of distribution” (Critique of the Gotha Program).

It would seem that Marx proved back in the 19th century that justice is not the same as justice (especially in the absence of a detailed theoretical development of the categorical apparatus used). However, many leftists continue to suffer from the disease of loud populist phrases to this day. A careful analysis of modern political reality reveals that modern politicians skillfully use the legacy of opportunists, redistributing public wealth within the framework of the doctrine of the social state, in other words, to maintain stability in capitalist society.

Thus, recently in Russia it has become fashionable again to talk about a more equitable distribution by, for example, introducing a progressive tax on the rich and super-rich [26]. The populism of such demands is obvious to anyone who has conscientiously studied Marxism-Leninism. The fact is that various types of social policy pursue the goals of increasing social and class stability, strengthening the general faith in the exclusivity of capitalism, in its superiority over communism, in its lack of alternative. All measures aimed at improving the living conditions of the proletarian masses are nothing more than an instrument of spiritual and material suppression of workers. Social benefits or a progressive tax are forms of calming the proletarian rebellious spirit, misleading it about the essence of capitalism. The bourgeoisie understands that the guarantee of capitalist stability depends largely on how successfully it will be possible to “caress” the exploited, “making just” the society around them [27].

Another example of an egoistic interpretation of "fair distribution" can be called the protest activity of workers [28]. The following questions can be asked of yet another leftist who accuses "Proryv" of "worker phobia" and hatred of workers. How many of these protesters are communists who have read and understood the "Critique of the Gotha Program" and other works of the classics of Marxism? And how many are ordinary workers dissatisfied with handouts, or small businessmen dissatisfied with the monopoly of imperialism, which promises these businessmen a quick economic death? How many protesters are in favor of public ownership of the means of production, a planned economy, the construction of communism? And how many are in favor of simply raising wages and lowering utility rates? How many protesters believe that the problems in the country are caused by capitalism and private property? And how many are convinced that the "tyrant on the throne" or the bad boyars surrounding this throne are to blame for everything? As they say, questions that don't require answers.

Practice shows that such protests and rallies in themselves are an appeal from dissatisfied slaves to their slave owners regarding the insufficiency of the handouts thrown to the proletarian and petty-bourgeois crowd. This has nothing to do with communistically understood justice. The task of communists is to bring scientific consciousness to protest activity, to combine the mass movement with Marxism.

II. Reactionary classes
“The emancipation of labor must be the work of the working class, in relation to which all other classes constitute only one reactionary mass” (Text of the program of the German Workers' Party).

When defining the composition of the "reactionary mass", it is important to understand the following: the revolutionary and reactionary nature of certain classes and intermediate social groups is historically specific, relative, it depends on the position that these classes and groups occupy in society at a certain point in time. For example, the relative progressiveness, the revolutionary nature of the bourgeoisie, according to Marx, lies in its desire to replace feudal relations with bourgeois ones. The fact that this desire is dictated by an egoistic craving for profit fades into the background. The emphasis is placed on the fact that, in addition to ruin and wars, capitalism brings with it the growth of productive forces, the concentration of production, the internationalization of urban and rural industry. Yes, this happens unconsciously, but it does happen:

“The bourgeoisie, as the bearer of large-scale industry, is considered here as a revolutionary class in relation to the feudal lords and the middle classes, who strive to retain for themselves all those social positions that were created by obsolete methods of production” (“Critique of the Gotha Program”).

The only exception is the revolutionary working class (under the leadership of the scientific Marxist vanguard), whose historical mission is to destroy class society in general. At the same time, the intermediate petty-bourgeois social strata are gradually destroyed by capitalism, ruining and depriving most of their representatives of access to the means of production, placing them in the ranks of the proletarian masses, that is, potentially in the ranks of the revolutionary working class. This process of polarization of social classes proves the correctness of Marx's conclusions, according to which

“…the ‘middle classes’ become revolutionary ‘insofar as they are faced with the transition to the ranks of the proletariat’.”

From this point of view, therefore, it is again nonsense that in relation to the working class they [the middle classes] “together with the bourgeoisie” and in addition with the feudal lords “constitute only one reactionary mass” (Critique of the Gotha Program).

The absolutization of the opposition of interests between the working class and the petty-bourgeois strata is criticized by Marx and Engels as incorrect, because they recognized the possibility of a tactical alliance between classes, especially in the context of bourgeois-democratic revolutions. Lenin, decades later, defended the same position, for example, in the context of a discussion of the question of the legitimacy of an alliance between the working class and the peasantry, the question of the working class as the hegemon of the revolution, uniting the other classes under its leadership: the Bolsheviks, unlike the opportunists, saw in the non-proletarian strata not only a reactionary mass, but also potential allies, thereby proving their commitment to the principles of Marxism.

The confusion with defining allies and enemies remains with opportunists to this day. For example, modern Trotskyists actively cooperate with liberals, seeing them as real allies against the "red patriots" and "social chauvinists" [29]. In reality, the so-called liberals are agents of Western imperialism, pursuing the goal of destroying a united Russian Federation as one of the main foreign policy competitors of Western imperialist states. Thus, alliances with liberals along the line of "even with the devil, but against Putin" is opportunism, a betrayal of the cause of communism.

Opposite in form, but identical in anti-Marxist essence, is the activity of the already mentioned "red patriots" who support the official government course and receive state awards for it. The most striking example of such cooperation is, of course, the story of the multiple state prizes and awards awarded to Gennady Zyuganov: here is the Order of Alexander Nevsky for labor achievements, and the title of Hero of Labor, and two orders "For Services to the Fatherland" of the 3rd and 2nd degree, respectively, etc.

Tell me who your friend is…

III. Salary
“…The German Workers’ Party strives by all legal means… for the abolition of the wage system…” (Text of the program of the German Workers’ Party).

According to bourgeois theories (with which part of the German Social Democracy also agreed), wages are the price of all labor. In opposition to the apologetic concepts of the bourgeoisie, Marx put forward and scientifically substantiated the following proposition: wages are a “disguised form of value” of a specific commodity, labor power, which a person who does not own private property in any means of production (or owns it in insufficient quantities) is forced to bring to the market in order to avoid starvation. Simply put, Marx refuted the existence of wages, convincingly proving that we should be talking about the PRICE OF LABOR POWER [30]. In accordance with this, it becomes clear that the amount of “wages” depends mainly not on the diligence and quality of the proletarian’s labor, but on the amount of the subsistence minimum, specially calculated by bourgeois economists. Here is how Marx himself wrote about this:

"...Wages are not what they seem, not the value - or price - of labor, but only the disguised form of the value - or price - of labor power . This overturned once and for all both the bourgeois conception of wages and all the criticism hitherto directed against this conception, and it was clearly established that the wage-worker is allowed to work for his own maintenance, i.e., is allowed to live only insofar as he works for a certain amount of time gratuitously for the benefit of the capitalist (and consequently also of his accomplices in devouring surplus value); that the axis around which the entire system of capitalist production revolves is the effort to increase this gratuitous labor by lengthening the working day or by raising the productivity of labor, respectively - by greater exertion of labor power, etc.; that, consequently, the system of wage labor is a system of slavery, and, moreover, slavery that is all the more severe the more the social productive forces of labor develop, regardless of whether the worker’s labor is better or worse paid” (“Critique of the Gotha Program”).

Based on this, it turns out that it is not the labor that is paid for, but the proletarian's supposed expenses for life and reproduction of his kind. All the value produced by the worker falls into the hands of the bourgeoisie, which is free to dispose of it as it pleases. True, in most cases it is still forced to pay at least some kind of handout , equal to the so-called "living wage", because, firstly, the bourgeoisie itself is a hostage to the biological laws of life, which do not allow the exploitation of a dead person, and secondly, some representatives of the proletarian masses, most often represented by trade union organizations (less often represented by a group of the most courageous, but still illiterate in social science enthusiasts), demand "salaries" (or their increase) with the help of various forms of economic resistance (strikes, walkouts, protests, rallies, etc.). Sometimes these forms can take on a general shop, general industry, general state character, turning into mass protest marches or uprisings, which negatively affects the profit indicators of both the individual capitalist and the entire capitalist class.

Naturally, the capitalist will try to avoid both scenarios (biological death of slaves and social instability), balancing on the edge and paying workers a handout , which obliging graduates of economics departments call a "living wage". Therefore, "salary" in some sense is not only a sum of money equivalent to the price of resources necessary for survival, but also a tool for bribing the proletarian, gratitude to the proletarian for peace and for the kindly raised offspring, the heir to the "proletarian share". It is important to note that a stable situation in society is needed by capitalists not for general happiness, but for comfortable conditions of exploitation. Communist society, as has been repeatedly written above, removes the capitalist "salary" first by distributing it according to labor, and then gradually by distributing it according to needs, thereby destroying egoism, the desire for excesses, replacing them with reasonable consumption (provided that the Marxist literacy of the population is constantly growing).

Modern "fighters for the people's happiness" in a fit of emotional defense of the "interests of the people" refer to the beggarly wages of the proletariat, often limiting themselves to demanding an increase. Sometimes, in order to ridicule their own bosses and prove their opposition to them, they cite Western countries as an example, saying that capitalism there is fairer, more humane, there the salaries are higher and there are taxes on the super-rich. They say that we in Russia need the same thing, more justice, and therefore more stability... for capitalism.

IV. Production partnerships
"In order to pave the way for the solution of the social question, the German Workers' Party demands the establishment of producers' associations with state assistance under the democratic control of the working people. Producers' associations in both industry and agriculture must be brought into being to such a degree that a socialist organization of collective labor will emerge from them" (Text of the Program of the German Workers' Party).

First of all, it is worth paying attention to the abstract bourgeois character of the formulation about "paving the way to solving the social question." Engels, for example, calls such demagogy "helpless words." It should be noted, quite deservedly so. However, let us return to the productive partnerships.

Marx considered it a mistake to see the path to the "solution of the social question" in the establishment of productive partnerships, especially with the help of the state. Marx calls the communist revolution the real and only possible path "to the solution of the social question", during which a revolutionary dictatorship of the working class must be established, removing capitalism with communism. The solution of the social question by the establishment of productive partnerships (and with the help of the bourgeois state) is a deeply erroneous position. Indeed, the successful functioning of individual partnerships played a positive role as an example of the possibility of workers' self-government, self-government that does not require the figure of a capitalist supervising slaves; thanks to this, people saw the advantages of collective forms of management. However, the spread of cooperatives could have cemented in the minds of the proletarians the illusion of the possibility of a transition to a new society through these partnerships. It was precisely this illusion (about cooperative societies) that the Lassalleans tried to speculate on, selling this point into the party program with the consent of some Eisenachians. It is worth noting, however, that not all members of the Social Democratic Party agreed with such a concession. Here is what Wilhelm Bracke, one of the leaders of the Eisenachians, wrote about this:

“The point on the introduction of industrial cooperatives with state aid in its present version is nothing other than the Lassalle proposal in its most extreme form, i.e., it is the most extreme nonsense, and what is more, it is presented in the most shameless manner: with a claim to absolute significance. Not only is the party systematically poisoned with this nonsense; not only is the agitation of the party thereby rendered unreasonable; no, according to this version, everything else seems unimportant, the Lassalle proposal is presented as the true point of view of the socialists, agreement with it becomes a condition of membership in the party, every objection is expelled from the party, and anyone who contradicts it is ultimately regarded as an enemy and an opponent…” [31].

In fact, the idea of ​​creating partnerships was aimed at pushing the revolutionary class struggle into the background, replacing it with reformism and solidarity. In an effort to debunk the Lassallean mythology about the allegedly communist nature of such partnerships, Marx wrote:

“When workers strive to create conditions for collective production on a social scale, and above all on a national scale, this only means that they are fighting for a revolution in the present conditions of production, and this has nothing in common with the establishment of cooperative societies with state assistance” (Critique of the Gotha Program).

Ignoring Marx's teachings and the changed conditions of class struggle, some modern opportunists are creating cooperatives (though without state assistance). For example:

"In Voronezh, OVM activists together with Vasily Sadonin traveled to wholesale zones as part of the Socialist Cooperation project. Test purchases were made and delivered, the work of helping the working population of Russia continues.

“Face-to-face meetings and other regular work from now on are planned with comrade Sadonin, which will be directed by joint efforts towards the well-being of 95% of the country’s population ,” said… the chairman of the OVM, Nikita Lopatin” [32].

And this is not a typo, not an emotional slip of the tongue. This is the ideology of "SotsKoop", which is confirmed by the goal formulated on the organization's website as follows:

"Members of the Socialist Cooperative want to break the monopoly of corporations on the supply of food and essential products to our families" [33].

Another leftist adventure involving Vasily Sadonin [34], who is ready to do anything – take leftist bloggers out of Russia to avoid their arrest for “revolutionary activity,” expose dialectics in 12 minutes, film dozens of other useless videos – anything but self-education in the field of Marxism. That’s what they are, leftist opinion leaders.

V. The Communist State
The next point of the program of the united workers' party is the demand for a "free state":

“First of all, according to Section II, the German Workers’ Party strives for a ‘free state’” (Text of the program of the German Workers’ Party).

Is this a Marxist demand? Marx answers this question in the negative:

“To make the state ‘free’ is by no means the aim of workers who have freed themselves from the limited, loyal way of thinking. <…> Freedom consists in transforming the state from an organ standing above society into an organ entirely subordinate to this society… ” (“Critique of the Gotha Program”).

As is well known, the state is an apparatus of class domination. There is no abstract state, freely floating above social contradictions. True, the state, represented by the highest officials, can rise above not only the exploited, but also the ruling class, which it serves. However, this rise occurs within the framework of the existing system and in the interests of its stability. It (the rise) is necessary, since power cannot be distributed equally among all representatives of the ruling class; power is concentrated in the hands of the governing body, which works in the interests of this class, in the interests of maintaining its domination. If the governing body fails to cope with the duties assigned to it, then it is removed from service in various ways, either by assigning a pension or a couple of grams of lead to the head - depending on how well or poorly the assigned work was performed.

As is well known, communists are also forced to use the state apparatus of violence to defend the revolution. Marx, for example, describing the fate of statehood in the process of building a communist society (in the so-called transitional period from capitalism to communism of the lower phase), formulates the following well-known position:

" Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the former into the latter. This period corresponds to a political transition period, and the state of this period can be nothing other than a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat " ("Critique of the Gotha Program").

In other words, communist society does not arise instantly. On the contrary, the construction of communism is a very difficult, very complex process. It should not be forgotten that the main difficulty that communists may encounter will not be to carry out a coup d'etat, but to be able to cope with the events that follow it, to consolidate power and carry out a gradual communist transformation of society. This is why communists are obliged to use the time and opportunities provided by the peaceful era in order to qualitatively prepare for the era of social upheavals through self-education and self-training.

It is true that it is worth noting that the state in the hands of communists is not identical to the state in the hands of exploiters. Everything political, violent, “state” (in the bourgeois sense of the word), of which the state consists in the era of the dominance of private property, under the leadership of communists gradually fades into the background. The state as an instrument of suppression is dying out. Which, in turn, poses the question to modern Marxists about the legitimacy of using the concept of “state” in relation to the transitional and especially the first phase of communism. Indeed, how appropriate, from a scientific point of view, is the categorical identification of capitalist and communist states? Shouldn’t modern Marxists think in the direction of an alternative, updated Marxist terminology, as Stalin bequeathed to us?

It is also noteworthy how Marx's critical remarks echo the demands to abandon faith in democratic miracles, faith in the "healing power" of a democratic republican state. Already here we can see the opposition between the communists and the future social democracy, between Bolshevism and Menshevism, between revolutionary Marxism and bourgeois parliamentarism. It is not surprising that many of the critical remarks made by Marx towards the German social democrats would be made decades later by Lenin towards the Mensheviks and European social democrats, who shamefully surrendered the revolution to the "legitimate methods of class struggle."

Thus, it turns out that Marx criticizes the abstract views of not only the German Social Democrats of the 19th century, but also many of their followers from the 20th and 21st centuries, who think about the state not in a Marxist way, but from the point of view of liberalism and bourgeois legality. As an example, we can cite modern sympathizers of the theory of the “legitimate change of formations” (“socialism from above”, “left turn”), which assumes the possibility of building “socialism” by the modern ruling class of the Russian Federation, disappointed in capitalism and “Western partners”. These lovers of using reaction for revolutionary transformation can easily find in the words of Marx (whom they verbally follow) criticism of their own treacherous positions. In fact, left bourgeois-patriotic organizations, believing in revolution from above and professing a reformist-opportunist approach, are very reminiscent of the Lassalleans of the 19th century, striving to build a bright future with the hands of counterrevolution.

The other extreme is the Western-oriented left-liberals (although on many issues related to communism, Marxism, and the history of the USSR, the positions of the "liberals" and "patriots" are quite similar). Let us recall at least their claims against the Leninist-Stalinist USSR. Are they not rich in accusations of totalitarianism? Of the absence of freedom of discussion? Of censorship and the prohibition of pluralism of opinions? Modern liberal "Marxists" are stepping on the same old opportunist rake. They have no understanding of real freedom, freedom in a communist way, possible by taking power and removing from it the least free elements, the elements that most resist the construction of communism, such as the White Guards, landowners, liberals, kulaks, Trotskyists, Bukharinists, etc. at various times. They criticize the Bolsheviks for their principled and tough position on the class struggle in the conditions of building communism. They are not satisfied with the fact that the communist state is an instrument for suppressing the will of the exploiting classes, whose agents were not only open enemies of the people, but also secret ones [35]. They do not understand and do not want to understand that the desire for freedom (in the bourgeois-legal meaning of this word) for the enemies of freedom (in the Marxist meaning of this word) is an example of rotten liberalism. Instead of self-education and self-training, they “play politics”, using in their rhetoric the same liberal slogans demanding freedom for political prisoners, freedom of the media, freedom of speech and opinion, free elections and other variations of the bourgeois understanding of “freedom”. With empty assurances about the revolutionary spirit of their protest, they try unsuccessfully to hide their hatred, nurtured by Western intelligence services and the media, towards the specific Putin regime and Russian imperialism [36]. While they verbally rebel against capitalism in general, they take the side of Western imperialism in its struggle against competitors (including countries that continue to “follow a non-capitalist path of development with a communist bias” [37]) [38]. By popularizing anti-Leninist and anti-Stalinist myths, they objectively work in the interests of capitalism, regardless of how often and loudly they shout about their devotion to the interests of the proletariat.

VI. Freedom of conscience
But even this does not diminish the desire for freedom in the workers' party program. "Freedom of conscience!" the German Social Democrats hasten to proclaim. On this subject, Marx makes the following critical remarks:

“…Bourgeois “freedom of conscience” does not represent anything more than tolerance for all possible forms of religious freedom of conscience, while it, the workers’ party, on the contrary, strives to free the conscience from religious intoxication ” (“Critique of the Gotha Program”).

Marx's claim is that the German Social Democrats, true to their conciliation with the bourgeois level of their political program, are incapable of going beyond the limits of bourgeois-limited demands. The slogan in question is wrong not because the Communists oppose freedom of conscience, but because free conscience is possible only outside the framework of all types of religious ideology, because religious worldview is incompatible with conscience. The abstract absolutization of the "freedom" of conscience is an instrument of bourgeois, pluralistic, unprincipled policy towards religious obscurantism. The Communists do not get by with a simple assurance of freedom of religion (or the rejection of religion in general); the Communists openly proclaim war on both religious obscurantism and tolerance towards it. The communist revolution does not prohibit being a supporter of this or that religious doctrine, it only prohibits religious propaganda and proclaims a merciless war on religious obscurantism by, firstly, rapidly improving the material conditions of people's lives and worsening the material conditions of the church, and secondly, raising the level of Marxist education, enlightenment in the field of dialectical materialism, the theory of communism, history (including the history of religion), natural science, etc. Taking into account the Soviet experience, the primary focus should be on the propaganda not of "scientific atheism", but of Marxism as a whole, knowledge of which is guaranteed to protect a person from the "heresies" of positivism, Einsteinism, opportunism, which are a much more dangerous intellectual infection than classical religions.

It is important to remember that the apparent peacefulness and carefulness of the Communist Party's tactics in relation to religious prejudices is a consequence not of abstract bourgeois humanism (which the program of the German Social Democrats was so rich in), but of competent work with religious psychology, taking into account the influence of religion and faith on the psyche and thinking of people. The opportunists of the past did not understand this, and the opportunists of the present do not understand this either, accusing, for example, Stalin of an alleged religious turn from above, of rehabilitating the Russian Orthodox Church [39]. Rejecting the policy of temporary concessions, the policy of tactical retreats, they rush headlong into communism, not noticing the objectively existing material and spiritual barriers that prevent them from realizing such grandiose plans in one fell swoop.

It is also worth remembering that the scientific understanding of "freedom of conscience" is impossible outside the dialectical understanding of "conscience" itself. All non-Marxist definitions of the concept of "conscience" are guilty of superficiality, which is a consequence of the anti-scientific nature of bourgeois methodological approaches. Diamatically understood conscience presupposes a constant process of critical analysis of one's own statements/conclusions within consciousness for their correspondence to objective reality, which is fundamentally impossible outside the framework of dialectical thinking. Therefore, only a communist can have a truly free conscience.

conclusions
The Critique of the Gotha Program is an important work of Marxism, which is an example not only of the struggle against opportunism in the revolutionary movement, but also of the use of this struggle for the purpose of developing a theory of revolution and building a communist society. Marx understood that it was important not only to criticize capitalism, but also to formulate the principles of building and existence of a communist society . Therefore, in addition to the criticism of the points of the program itself, the text of Marx's pamphlet contains provisions that represent a further deepening of the theory of communism and revolution. Lenin, seeking to emphasize Marx's attention to the problematic of the features of communism , wrote:

"The whole theory of Marx is an application of the theory of development - in its most consistent, complete, thoughtful and content-rich form - to contemporary capitalism. Naturally, for Marx the question arose of applying this theory both to the coming collapse of capitalism and to the future development of future communism " (State and Revolution).

Marx offered in return not just more precise formulations, but a high-quality analysis of errors and an equally high-quality positive exposition of Marxist theory. Truly: conscientious criticism is a form of scientific creativity .

It is also important to note one of the key ideas of the "Critique..." (in addition to the principles already discussed above): vague formulations (especially in the program of the Communist Party) are, in many ways, a consequence of the illiteracy of party members. It is no coincidence that Engels wrote in his letter to Bebel:

“He [Liebknecht, one of the main supporters of immediate unification] never had clarity on theoretical issues…” [40].

Such great attention to the party program on the part of Marx and Engels was caused by their attitude to the quality of party documents. They were sure that the party program is a scientific document, which should succinctly reflect the demands that have come to light as a result of long and conscientious scientific creativity [41]; a scientific document, in the writing of which it is necessary to observe the precision of the wording, to avoid populism and demagogy (as Engels wrote, "loud phrases that can mean everything or nothing at the same time" [42]), irrelevant to the matter, and to consistently pursue the only correct, Marxist-Leninist party line. A different approach to the drafting of party programs was assessed by the classics and should be assessed now as harmful and opportunistic. However, one should not forget the main thing: the communist and revolutionary nature of practice depends not on the program, but on the actions of the people themselves. Even a competently drafted program will be an adventure if it does not express the real needs of the communist revolution.

Bronislav
07/24/2024

(Notes at link.)

https://prorivists.org/95_gotha-programme/

[blindpig]

The dialectic and why it matters to Marxists
Originally published: Socialist Worker on July 9, 2024 by Eric Ruder (more by Socialist Worker) | (Posted Jul 24, 2024)

CAPITALISM IS like gravity: it envelops our world so completely that it’s easy to forget about it entirely. The laws of both operate inexorably, and attempts to disregard them can result in serious injury or death. So we become accustomed as a habit of mind to treating them as unchangeable features of the world around us.

No one would stand at the top of the staircase and think they could avoid the reality of descending it. Similarly, in capitalist society, someone headed home after spending the day working in a factory or at a bank doesn’t believe they can simply take with them the value of what they produced—at least not without the risk of losing their job and facing incarceration.

The power of capitalist society to structure the social world—like gravity’s pull on everything around us, including ourselves—is so all-encompassing, in fact, that many people never become aware of it as a force with its own laws.

Other than physicists, few people could state Newton’s law of universal gravitation: that the gravitational force of two bodies of mass is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.

Likewise, many people go through their daily life without understanding how capitalist society powerfully shapes their world—without asking the question of why what they produced with their hands and brains during a day on the job should belong, by law, to someone else. Or without understanding the connection between capitalism’s economic laws and the rest of the social world, including art, the family, sexuality, the environment and so on.

But capitalism is unlike gravity in at least one crucial respect. It’s a historically specific social structure. Capitalism may be the product of thousands of years of prior human civilizations, but that means it hasn’t existed from the start of human society. It’s a product of human activity and emerged out of a process of historical development. It came after something—and that means it comes before whatever comes next.

The dialectical method is a way of thinking about reality that can be a crucial tool for revealing the passing and transitory nature of a social system that at times—perhaps most of the time—appears to be a fact as real and unmovable as the floor at the bottom of the staircase.

By contrast, dialectics takes as its starting point that the social world is in a constant state of change and flux—and that capitalism, while it powerfully structures human relationships, is itself the product of human activity that emerges out of the material world, including the natural world.

FOR THIS reason alone, it should be obvious why the people who run our society despise the very idea of dialectics. As Karl Marx put it in an afterword to a German edition of the first volume of his masterwork of dialectical analysis Capital:

In its rational form it is a scandal and an abomination to the bourgeoisie and its doctrinaire spokesmen, because it includes in its positive understanding of what exists a simultaneous recognition of its negation, its inevitable destruction; because it regards every historically developed form as being in a fluid state, in motion, and therefore grasps its transient aspect as well; and because it does not let itself be impressed by anything, being in its very essence critical and revolutionary.

Even at those moments in history when society appears stable and impervious to change, the truth is that it is changing—all the time, though often in imperceptibly small ways. These “molecular” changes eventually pile up and give way to sudden ruptures and transformations—which can take the form of upheavals, wars and revolutions. Writing in 1939, the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky summed up the dialectical method, which was first given systematic expression by the German philosopher Georg Hegel in the early 19th century:

Hegel’s logic is the logic of evolution. Only one must not forget that the concept of “evolution” itself has been completely corrupted and emasculated by university professors and liberal writers to mean peaceful “progress.” Whoever has come to understand that evolution proceeds through the struggle of antagonistic forces; that a slow accumulation of changes at a certain moment explodes the old shell and brings about a catastrophe, revolution; whoever has learned finally to apply the general laws of evolution to thinking itself, he is a dialectician, as distinguished from vulgar evolutionists. Dialectic training of the mind, as necessary to a revolutionary fighter as finger exercises to a pianist, demands approaching all problems as processes and not as motionless categories. Whereas vulgar evolutionists, who limit themselves generally to recognizing evolution in only certain spheres, content themselves in all other questions with the banalities of “common sense.”

The late great biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who drew on the dialectical method in several of his most important contributions to the study of evolution, put it this way:

When presented as guidelines for a philosophy of change, not as dogmatic precepts true by fiat, the three classical laws of dialectics [formulated by Frederick Engels] embody a holistic vision that views change as interaction among components of complete systems, and sees the components themselves…as both products of and inputs to the system. Thus the law of “interpenetrating opposites” records the inextricable interdependence of components; the “transformation of quantity to quality” defends a systems-based view of change that translates incremental inputs into alterations of state; and the “negation of negation” describes the direction given to history because complex systems cannot revert exactly to previous states.

FOR MARXISTS, therefore, the dialectical method consists in going beyond the recognition of this or that instance of inequality and injustice in capitalism. Cataloguing and describing the multitude of different kinds of oppression and injustice in our world is important, but it’s not necessary to be a Marxist or a dialectician to do so.

A dialectical approach to oppression explains how such oppression is part and parcel of a larger social whole, rather than a static and unchanging fact independent of other social factors. A dialectical inquiry into oppression reveals how systems of oppression are connected to the antagonistic and opposed interests of competing social forces—and are both built up and resisted, in a contest between those who try to impose oppression and those who challenge it.

And the dialectical method describes how oppression and the ideas that sustain it interact in turn with the rest of the moving parts of capitalist society as a whole, including not just the economy, but also the media, the family, the criminal justice system and so on.

Yet as this example illustrates, a dialectical approach is not necessarily a Marxist one. Many mainstream social scientists working in the fields of sociology, philosophy, anthropology and so on attempt to analyze the world as a social whole. But most social science doesn’t have any notion of how the parts of the social whole stand in relation to the others—beyond a nondescript notion that “a multiplicity of historical factors” are at work simultaneously. Put another way, everything affects everything.

Karl Marx brought together dialectics and materialism to understand the world as a totality—but as a totality driven by inherent change, conflict and contradictions rooted in the material world, where human activity, including the ideas generated by humans about the world, can also react back on and in turn transform the material underpinnings of society.

TO UNDERSTAND what a profound insight Marx pioneered, it’s useful to begin with Hegel’s conception of the dialectic—in order to show what was distinctive in the way that Marx refined and then deployed dialectics.

“Contradiction is at the root of all movement and life, and it is only in so far as it contains a contradiction that anything moves and has impulse and activity,” Hegel wrote in The Science of Logic, which first appeared in print in 1812. Hegel’s point—that antagonism, conflict and contest are not a secondary aspect of reality, but central to it—represented a dramatic leap forward compared to what had come before in the realm of philosophy.

For centuries stretching back to the ancient Greeks and culminating in the scientific revolution of the Enlightenment era, the development of scientific knowledge about the world had largely consisted in breaking up everything in the world into discrete parts, defining what’s essential to each part, and making a record of these properties.

The aim was to separate the objects under investigation into ever-more specific classifications. One good example is the way of defining biological organisms on the basis of shared characteristics and assigning them to ever more specific categories—domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and finally species.

The philosophical underpinning of this pursuit of knowledge was grounded in the empirical method, which guided the scientific inquiry into the interactions conceived of as external to these discrete and now well-defined entities. The law of identity was critical to the project: A thing is always equal to or identical with itself. Or stated in algebraic terms: A equals A. One corollary of the idea that A is always identical to A is that A can never equal not-A.

But the law of identity troubled Hegel. When he surveyed modern philosophy, culture and society, he was struck by the contradictions—the tension between the subject and object, freedom and authority, knowledge and faith. Hegel’s main philosophical aim was to interpret these contradictions and tensions as part of a comprehensive, evolving and ultimately rational unity, which he called “the absolute idea” or the Absolute Spirit.

In this sense, Hegel’s method sought to reveal the contradictions and change internal to discrete “species” of philosophical inquiry—and to reveal the processes of transformation that connected them to one another.

It’s important to point out that Hegel didn’t reject outright the usefulness of non-dialectical classifications of the world. As British Marxist John Rees explains in his book about the dialectic The Algebra of Revolution:

Hegel thought that the standard empirical procedure of breaking things down into their constituent parts, classifying them, and recording their properties was a vital part of the dialectic. This is the first stage of the process…It is only through this process of trying to capture things with “static” terms that contradictions emerge which oblige us to define something by its relations with the totality, rather than simply by its inherent properties. To show their transitory nature, Hegel called these stable points in the process of change “moments.” Hegel said that the whole was “mediated” by its parts. So empirical definitions were not irrelevant. But they were an inadequate way of looking at the world and so in need of a dialectical logic which could account for change.

BUT AS innovative, even revolutionary, as Hegel’s dialectical method was, it was also limited by Hegel’s idealism. Idealism means that the ideas of society—the sum total of its concepts and knowledge—drive the process of change in the social world.

Enter Karl Marx and his materialist account of human society. Marx drew on Hegel’s understanding of dialectics in his insistence that society be conceived of as a totality—as a whole made up of interconnected parts that are in constant change and flux. And he agreed with Hegel that the source of this change wasn’t some external force, such as God, but that change is a feature intrinsic to each part of the whole.

But Marx provided a material basis for identifying the source of this internal change. Where Hegel saw ideas as the motor force of history, Marx looked at the forces of production—the way humans collectively produce their means of subsistence and reproduce themselves—as the source of internal change, contradiction and conflict.

In a speech delivered at Marx’s funeral in 1883, Frederick Engels summarized the Marxist version of the dialectic:

Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.

Hegel’s idealism led him to believe that the social conflicts and economic crises of his times could be resolved through the bourgeois state and humanity’s pursuit of the Absolute Spirit. For Hegel, the modern representative state could guarantee the individual rights necessary for general freedom and rationality, which would make it possible for humanity to eventually comprehend the Absolute Spirit.

For Marx, the contradictions were based in the material world—at root, a conflict between the main contending classes of capitalist society, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Therefore, they could only be resolved through social transformation, a revolution that would abolish the antagonistic and the mutually interdependent relation of capitalist and worker.

Engels described Marx’s materialist dialectic as standing Hegel’s dialectic on its head—or rather lifting it off its head and setting it on its feet. According to Marx, his materialist approach rescued Hegel’s dialectic from idealism in order to discover “the rational kernel within the mystical shell.”

OF COURSE, the insights pioneered by both Hegel and Marx can also be explained in terms of a historical materialist analysis of their own time and place in history.

Hegel lived from 1770 to 1831, and his greatest works were written in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, the period of social upheaval that spanned the years 1789 to 1799, when France’s feudal monarchy was swept away and replaced, albeit temporarily, with a republic. The rule of kings by divine right was tossed into the dustbin of history and replaced it with “liberté, egalité and fraternité”—the principles of individual rights.

It’s easy to see why Hegel’s philosophical insights stressed process over classification, conflict and contradiction over stasis and stagnation. At the same time, his distance from events in France and his sweeping knowledge of history, philosophy, aesthetics and logic allowed him to step back from the crush of living through the historically path-breaking events, and to place them in a longer historical sweep.

Karl Marx’s life spanned the years 1818 to 1883. He was witness to the first working class movement in world history: the Chartists of the 1840s and ’50s. While Hegel lived in Germany at some distance from the political earthquake that shook France in the late 18th century, Marx was born in Prussia, but also lived in Paris and London. He lived through the revolutions of 1848 that spread across Europe, including Prussia. But he was also a witness to the factories and other products of the Industrial Revolution, allowing him to absorb the dramatic and massive economic forces being called into existence by the growth of capitalist industry.

In Marx’s time, capitalism represented a leap forward from the stagnation of feudal society, with its train of religious authority, superstition and tradition. Compared to the feudal economy, capitalism was highly dynamic, innovative and efficient.

But Marx also showed how capitalist relations of production would eventually come to frustrate the further development of human society. So even as capitalism conjured tremendous economic growth, efficiency and technological innovation, it also resulted in an ever-greater concentration and centralization of the means of production in private hands, the immiseration of the working class, and more destructive and convulsive economic crises.

DIALECTICAL THEORIES about the social world aren’t necessarily materialist, as mentioned above. Many social scientists conceive of the world as a totality made up of interacting parts undergoing various transformations, but without giving any special explanatory role to the material world. Instead, they opt for the view that everything affects everything.

As George Novack explained in an essay about Trotsky and dialectics in his book Polemics in Marxist Philosophy, this was once Trotsky’s attitude as well:

Trotsky tells in [his autobiography] My Life how he at first resisted the unified outlook of historical materialism. He adopted in its stead the theory of “the multiplicity of historical factors,” which even today is the most widely accepted theory in social science…His reading of two essays by the Italian Hegelian-Marxist Antonio Labriola convinced him of the correctness of the views of the historical materialists. They conceived of the various aspects of social activity as an integrated whole, historically evolving in accord with the development of the productive forces and interacting with one another in a living process where the material conditions of life were ultimately decisive. The eclectics of the liberal school, on the other hand, split the diverse aspects of social life into many independent factors, endowed these with superhistorical character, and then “superstitiously interpreted their own activity as the result of the interactions of these independent forces.”

This eclectic view of how the social world changes is the product of a dialectical method, but without Marx’s materialist underpinnings.

On the other extreme, there are any number of theories about the social world that are materialist, but reject the dialectical method. Such approaches lead to what Marxists call a mechanical materialism, which is at best one-sided, suggesting that human beings and their behavior are a mostly reflexive reaction to their surroundings. For example, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology seek out biological explanations for various social problems and inequalities.

In the fields of sociology and economics, a number of theorists insist on the approach of methodological individualism, which requires that all social phenomena, including structure and change, be explained in terms of individual properties, goals, beliefs and actions. Methodological individualism is the underlying assumption of social theories that rely on game theory to explain how the rational choices of individual actors can explain all the key elements of societies and social change.

These mechanical materialist theories end up stressing in a one-sided way how human biology (sociobiology) or the human drive to maximize material gain and minimize loss or risk (methodological individualism) are the only way to generate valid insights about the social world.

By contrast, the dialectical method—with its stress on the internal contradictions and interpenetrating linkages of the material and the social world—rescues historical materialism from a vulgar economic determinism, which tends to understate the role of history and politics in human societies, instead seeing humans as reacting reflexively to their surroundings, as “naked apes” or inexorably guided by the drive for material gain.

IN RESPONDING to both critics and “defenders” of Marx’s materialist method who misunderstood it, Engels wrote in an 1890 letter to a friend:

According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure—political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas—also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form.

This same point was stated the other way around by Marx earlier, in his The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

The materialist component of the Marxist method grounds explanation of the social world in the economic underpinnings of society—in the fact that we “must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before [we] can pursue politics, science, art, religion.” The dialectical component stresses that the social world itself is the product of multiple interpenetrating parts that are undergoing constant change, and that human activity itself, including our attempts to comprehend the social world, also plays a role in the process of change. This is true even when society appears at its most stable and unchanging.

This is crucial for understanding how Marxism provides both an explanation of how society works and an understanding of the ways that, under certain circumstances, conscious human activity can transform that society. As Trotsky put it in his autobiography:

Marxism considers itself the conscious expression of the unconscious historical process. But the “unconscious” process, in the historico-philosophical sense of the term, not in the psychological, coincides with its conscious expression only at its highest point, when the masses, by sheer elemental pressure, break through the social routine and give victorious expression to the deepest needs of historical development. And at such moments the highest theoretical consciousness of the epoch merges with the immediate action of those oppressed masses who are farthest away from theory. The creative union of the conscious with the unconscious is what one usually calls “inspiration.” Revolution is the inspired frenzy of history.

https://mronline.org/2024/07/24/the-dia ... -marxists/

" this was once Trotsky’s attitude", well, mebbe for a minute, while he was writing his alibi(memoir).

[blindpig]

About the subjective factor
No. 7/95.VII.2024

One of the manipulations of anti-communist propaganda is the thesis about the alleged objective unviability of communism. They appeal to the history of the USSR. Since production is formally socialized, it means that, "based on theory," the construction of communism is guaranteed. One can go with the flow of history, because the objective conditions are such that with socialized means of production, communist production relations will form between workers, "regardless of their consciousness." But if the boat was washed ashore or sank, and it does not matter that the oars were long ago thrown and a storm began, it means that communism is objectively impossible. So, they say, you see - the "socialist experiment" failed.

One of the key issues of the modern communist movement is to determine the CAUSES of the degradation of parties with communist names, in particular the CPSU. And again, attention should be paid to the question of the relationship between the objective and the subjective in society, which has already been raised more than once on the pages of the newspaper and magazine.

Representatives of the left movement endlessly quote the classics, adding a couple of stock phrases in the spirit of "the current situation also matches the quote." And they have no intention of understanding the theory and developing it further. To achieve any goal, you need to choose the appropriate means. And if the goal is the seizure of power by the working class and the construction of communism, you need to understand the role of the subjective factor, which is certainly inextricably linked with the objective, but which is undeservedly ignored.

In the question of the development of society, in order to clarify the truth, which, from a materialistic point of view, is always concrete, the researcher has no right to arbitrarily assign the influence of the subjective and objective factors. It is impossible to either underestimate or exaggerate the significance of the subjective factor, but since the objective factor of building communism has matured long ago, and the state of the Russian communist movement is deplorable, the emphasis at the moment must be placed on the subjective factor.

***
Bourgeois ideologists construct their interpretations of the structure of society solely to demoralize and deceive workers, because they keep them in a state of ignorance regarding the laws that blindly act upon them.

***
Nature and its laws are objective for society and for each individual, and a person can learn about them and use them for his own benefit, but cannot “cancel” them. Even hardened liberals will probably not argue with this. However, difficulties arise when society becomes the object of consideration.

Where does the subjective begin? It is impossible to separate the objective from the subjective with an insurmountable wall. It makes sense to talk about the objective and subjective only in the context of society and it can be considered at different levels. The view of a researcher of society, based on knowledge of the historical development of production, culture and the ability to discern the struggle of large groups of people as the engine of development, differs significantly from the view of the average person who sees in the behavior of those around him a set of relatively random actions and does not understand that all his contemplations are refracted in the ideology of the ruling class.

This can be compared with the view of the sky of an astronomer who knows the laws of the movement of celestial bodies, and a child who directly contemplates only the movement of the sun during the day, and the moon and stars at night.

Or another example familiar to everyone. A person (whose aesthetic sense has not yet atrophied, of course, due to contemplation and listening to the products of modern mass “culture”) enjoys real music, he admires the skill of the performer. The perception of music will leave a melody in the memory of the “ordinary” listener, perhaps the emotions experienced. A person with a musical education knows musical notation and, due to this knowledge, can, for example, reproduce a melody heard, because he knows the rules by which chords pleasant to the human ear are constructed. A listener familiar with the theory of waves and oscillations knows that some intervals are harmonious due to a certain ratio of frequencies. The music will sound to all listeners, but the depth of perception will be different due to the different fullness of consciousness.

There are a lot of similar examples. Any professional in his field knows the object of his work much better than an outside observer. For example, many test results mean nothing to a patient, but a doctor can use them to determine certain processes occurring in his patient's body, or make a diagnosis even in the absence of any symptoms.

Subjective activity is understood as activity involving consciousness, even if ordinary. In the process of evolution, tissues and organs became increasingly differentiated, in particular, at a certain stage the nervous system was formed, and at a much later stage - the brain, with the participation of which alone subjective activity can be carried out.

Man as a species appeared as a result of a long development of living nature, and not by a divine snap of a finger. If we think metaphysically, we will have to make unsuccessful attempts to determine the moment: look, yesterday man was still developing, obeying only the objective conditions of the elements, and today we can consider his activity at least to some extent conscious.

Engels in his article "The Role of Labor in the Transformation of the Ape into Man" identified several key stages of this transformation. First, the transition to upright walking due to the peculiarities of a lifestyle that corresponded to natural conditions, and the development of the hand as a necessary condition for the improvement of tool making. Second, this is the emergence of speech as a necessary condition for collective labor activity. The development of hands and speech led to the development of the brain, much more advanced than that of highly developed animals. The development of thinking led to the improvement of labor and the transition to a productive economy.

Thus, Marxism considers collective labor activity as a measure of the subjective, that is, that which distinguishes man from the rest of the animal world.

Marxism singles out production relations as the basis for all other social relations. At each stage of historical development, society has a certain set of technologies, and most importantly, people who create and work with increasingly complex tools of production. According to what and how they produce, the organization of people in the production process is determined. Different stages of production development correspond to people with different levels of education, different types of their organization. And, conversely, according to the degree to which people have developed, they unite in a certain way in collective labor (production activity) and produce public goods.

With the development of production, technologies are improving. People owe architectural and engineering masterpieces to both the physical abilities of their bodies, especially the skill of their hands, and their intellect. Moreover, the further humanity moves away from its animal state, the more noticeable the leading role of mental abilities becomes. Although human sense organs are very sensitive, modern devices are still much more accurate, not to mention the fact that the human body perceives only a small part of the various types of matter compared to the capabilities of existing scientific instruments (Philosophy of Science, edited by A.K. Timiryazev: O. Wiener, “Expansion of the Field of Our Sensory Perceptions”). And objects of modern electronics cannot be created by hand at all: unlike clay pots, they could only appear at a high level of production development.

It is known that many technologies were discovered by chance. Representatives of ancient civilizations might not have had knowledge of physics and chemistry, but they could use a working technology that was discovered by long-term use of the "trial and error method." A person could know how to make something work and be able to do it perfectly, but at the same time have no idea why it works that way. Nowadays, in most areas of technology, theoretical research (even if it still resembles the same "trial and error method") precedes implementation in production. People use nuclear technologies in medicine, developing highly selective medical drugs, creating artificial materials with predetermined properties, etc.

One way or another, science becomes a decisive productive force. But who will argue with the fact that science is an activity of people? The laws of nature existed and exist without human participation and awareness of their existence. Every new discovery, invention, work of art undoubtedly appears as a result of the activity of specific individuals. Every political act is committed by people, not by scientific abstractions. But these individuals live at a certain time in a certain society. Each person has certain inclinations and talents, and the social structure has a significant influence on their embodiment in real creative activity.

The influence of the subjective factor is growing. At a minimum, each generation needs to master the technologies that society already has, and also improve them. Modern production needs people who will conscientiously master the knowledge about it. It was possible to force a slave to row a galley by violent coercion. It is impossible to force a person to study creatively and conscientiously, to force him to understand something.

***
With the objectivity of natural conditions, everything is, in general, clear.

In society, although each individual has his own will, freedom of decision-making (still within certain limits), up to and including his own destruction, there are also objective factors, that is, those that an individual is not able to overcome.

Let's consider this example. The invention of writing is undoubtedly a product of social development. At first, the privilege of reading was enjoyed mainly by clergy or wealthy people who had the opportunity to get an education. Now, every child is taught reading and writing skills, because all social activities are built on the assumption that all adults have them. This has become an objective reality for people, but at the same time, no one will deny the subjective role of each individual and his teachers in mastering these necessary skills. A child will not learn to read independently without the participation of an adult member of society, even with an ABC book.

In the Middle Ages, the secrets of the craft were passed down from father to son. When society, in connection with the increased complexity of the technologies used, faced the issue of targeted and mass training of personnel for participation in increasingly developed production, the development of engineering education began.

The productive forces develop not only as improving means of production, but above all as people who penetrate ever more deeply into the essence of the laws of nature. The mastery of the heritage of previous generations and its development have as a necessary condition and consequence the assimilation of an ever greater amount of knowledge and the improvement of the intellectual abilities of people, and not only of each individual, but of humanity as a whole:

"Modern natural science has extended the thesis of the empirical origin of all thought content in such a sense that its old metaphysical limitations and formulation have been completely overturned. Modern natural science recognizes the heredity of acquired properties and thereby expands the subject of experience, extending it from the individual to the race: it is no longer considered necessary for each individual to personally experience everything; his individual experience can be replaced to a certain extent by the results of the experience of a number of his ancestors. If, for example, mathematical axioms seem to every eight-year-old child to be something self-evident, not requiring any empirical proof, then this is only the result of " accumulated heredity . " But they can hardly be explained to a Bushman or an Australian Negro by means of proof" (F. Engels, "Dialectics of Nature").

But, it should be repeated, one cannot absolutize human capabilities. Yes, some creations of the mind and hands of man are very surprising and delightful, but man is not an imaginary divine being and cannot “cancel” objective laws:

“And so, at every step, the facts remind us that we do not rule over nature in the same way that a conqueror rules over a foreign people, we do not rule over it in the same way as someone who is outside of nature, but that, on the contrary, we belong to it with our flesh, blood and brain and are within it, that our entire dominion over it consists in the fact that we, unlike all other creatures, are able to know its laws and apply them correctly” (F. Engels, “The Role of Labor in the Transformation of the Ape into Man”).

***
The 19th century, rich in scientific discoveries in many branches of knowledge, gave workers the theory of Marxism, the laws of development of society and history. History ceased to be perceived as a chronicle of the activities of heroes or as a dump of accidents that historians arranged in chronological order (on the category of "law", see the article by V. Podguzov " Absolute and Basic Economic Laws of Communism ", the article by A. Ivanov " On the Laws of Society and History ").

Before Marx's research, utopian socialists and bourgeois economists had established the fact of the growth of the proletariat, but they saw in it only the tragedy of modern society, which they were unable to resolve theoretically. And only the subjective genius and many years of subjective work of Marx and Engels objectively gave the proletariat an invincible weapon - the science of its liberation. Marx and Engels critically reworked world history, political economy, philosophy, and also analyzed the labor movement.

However, mastering the theory by the entire working class, and especially by the working masses, under capitalism does not seem possible. Just as the management of modern high-tech production requires a minimum number of highly qualified engineers, so too, in order to transform the proletariat into the working class, that is, from an object of exploitation into a subject of politics, it must be led by its party.

I will stipulate that this analogy is appropriate only for the first phase of communism. Specialization of labor under communism will not disappear, but the opposition of physical and mental labor will be destroyed, that is, the level of education of each "simple performer" will be raised to the level of understanding the process as a whole, but in any case, a specialist in his field will understand more than a non-specialist. While knowledge about man, the science of the development of society directly concerns each person, since society is the natural environment of existence of each individual. Communism can be considered built when each person is guided not by passions and interests, but by conscious necessity. And it is possible to subordinate oneself to necessity only after understanding it. Thus, if each individual is a conscious member of society, the need for a party will disappear.

The knowledge of thousands of generations is objectively present on material carriers, but as long as it is a set of symbols applied with printing ink to paper and billions of open and closed transistors in memory chips, these sources of information have no power. And they begin to influence human activity when they are studied and understood by people who practice on their basis. "Theory becomes a material force when it takes hold of the masses."

How was the power of the working class expressed in Stalin's USSR? In cases of sabotage, forceful measures were used against the remnants of the exploiting classes, including execution. Cultural work was carried out against the unconscious masses. The subjective factor of the consciousness of the members of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) turned into class consciousness, into public control. Liberal ideologists shout about totalitarian control, the absence of freedom (to exploit and harm the cause of building communism). Conscious Soviet workers defended their power, which publicly condemned slovenliness, philistinism, etc., and used public institutions to put pressure on those who were particularly indignant. In fact, this had already become an objective factor in the circumstances in which the individual found himself. The field of class struggle became the petty-bourgeois, proletarian consciousness of the bulk of the population.

The Great Victory of the Soviet people over the fascist monsters fattened by the imperialists is a consequence of both the objective superiority of planned economic management and the talent of commanders, the influence of commissars, the communist education of youth and other efforts of the party and the working class.

On the contrary, in pre-war Europe, despite the objective growth of the labor movement, the communist parties were not up to their tasks and were unable to dislodge the entire proletariat from the influence of the Social Democrats, i.e. the accomplices of the bourgeoisie.

The "argument" in favor of democratic centralism that scientific centralism is vulnerable and impossible, because much depends on the personal efforts of the leader and leading members of the party, sounds funny in the context of the role of the party and the leader. And if for some reason they are unable to lead, for example, if they are destroyed by enemies, society will not be able to move forward. And the voting method of decision-making supposedly protects against this, because there will always be someone to vote, and some decision will be made.

The closer a society is to communism, the greater the influence of the subjective factor, because communism is a society of conscious creators, in which production is carried out for the sake of revealing the potential of man, and not the time of a single life is exchanged for the meaningless profit of the owner.

The worldview of each person is formed under the influence of the dominant ideology. Accordingly, if a person goes with the flow, the production relations of capitalism will form in him a philistine, petty-bourgeois consciousness, and the dominant "philosophy" and "culture" will mercilessly extinguish the spontaneous youthful desire for justice, make him forget that "Man - it sounds proud." However, if everything were exclusively spontaneous, there would be no brilliant and courageous scientists and revolutionaries.

Society can continue to exist without any theory, learning its own lessons and wasting its strength, reducing all its combined efforts to zero. However, even this position is now debatable. The possession of military resources, the use of which is fatal, makes it necessary to question the long-term existence of humanity without the victory of science, i.e., communism.

In short, leftists who like to use the word "science" in their texts need to remember that science was created by people and generally exists thanks to specific people. Natural sciences were created by people, but the objects of physics and biology are neither cold nor hot from the fact that the laws of their movement and development are known to man, they existed and exist without his participation. The object of science is human society, and it is impossible to study it without taking into account the subjective side.

***
Understanding the incessant ideological bombardment of lies carried out by bourgeois propagandists, understanding that in order for the proletariat to act as a subject of politics, i.e. the working class, in the sooner or later inevitable revolutionary situation, “Breakthrough” and “Breakthroughist” call on everyone to actively study Marxism and the history of the communist movement.

History at this stage of development of productive forces places an iron necessity on obtaining a sufficient number of literate Marxists, and, although the political situation is constantly heating up, it is impossible not to take advantage of the relatively calm conditions.

M. Severova
07/28/2024

https://prorivists.org/95_sub/

Google Translator

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Why study communism?
No. 7/95.VII.2024

There are two interrelated reasons why it is necessary to study communism.

Firstly , a person is a manifestation of society, but at the same time a person is the driving force, the soul of society. Therefore, any person by his nature is obliged to strive not only to correspond to the level of development of society, but also to move it forward. A person must correspond to the height of the tasks of his era. This is expressed in the natural need to be useful to society (not to family and loved ones, but to the people and humanity). People deprived of such a need - egoists, narcissists, individualists, and so on - are moral and ethical invalids doomed to misfortune.

The most important factor of a person's social usefulness is the general level of his worldview. A person thinks first and then acts. The results of his actions depend on how well he thinks. Society is the most complex and highly organized type of matter, without understanding the structure of which, even an extremely experienced and talented person in some craft cannot be guaranteed to be useful. History knows many examples of talents that villainously harmed society, slowed down its development and became scum. In order not to be a scumbag against your will, out of ignorance, you need to know society, to navigate it. Only Marxism-Leninism allows you to know society scientifically, only communist theory is an adequate reflection of the essence of society.

Communism allows one to be a scientific optimist, to see the nearest and most distant prospects of development of society and progress. Communism is irreplaceable in the system of human motivation, pedagogy, ethics.

Thus, it is necessary to study communism in order to correspond to the level of development of society, to move it forward, correctly orienting ourselves in society, understanding how it is structured and what awaits us in the future . Communism opens the way to happiness not only for society, but also for the individual, for happiness is the struggle for communism.

Secondly , society is extremely contradictory, confrontational, competitive and even at first glance absurd and stupid. To understand it, again, only communism will help. It is the theory of communism that reveals the decisive significance of class struggle in the development of society at this historical stage.

Therefore, in order to carry out the struggle for the transformation of society, it is necessary not only to participate in the class struggle, but also to direct and organize it. Communism is, among other things, the theory and practice of class struggle, that is, the science of liberating humanity from semi-animal instincts .

A. Redin
07/30/2024

https://prorivists.org/95_why/

Googlen Translator

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‘Karl Marx and the Negro’ by W.E.B. Du Bois from The Crisis. Vol. 40 No. 3. March, 1933.
Originally published: Revolution's Newsstand on August 2024 by The Crisis A Record of the Darker Races (more by Revolution's Newsstand) (Posted Aug 05, 2024)

WITHOUT doubt the greatest figure in the science of modern industry is Karl Marx. He has been a center of violent controversy for three-quarters of a century, and for that reason there are some people who are so afraid of his doctrines that they dare not study the man and his work. This attitude is impossible, and particularly today when the world is so largely turning toward the Marxian philosophy, it is necessary to understand the man and his thought. This little article seeks merely to bring before American Negroes the fact that Karl Marx knew and sympathized with their problem.

Heinrich Karl Marx was a German Jew, born in 1818 and died in 1883. His adult life, therefore, reached from the panic of 1837 through the administration of President Hayes. The thing about him which must be emphasized now was his encyclopedic knowledge. No modern student of industry probably ever equalled his almost unlimited reading and study.

He knew something about American Negroes from his German comrades who migrated to the United States; but these emigrants were of little help so far as his final conclusions were concerned. Kriege, a German radical, who came to the United States, said frankly in 1846, that “We feel constrained to oppose abolition with all our might.” Weitling, a Communist, paid scant attention to the slavery question. The German Labor Convention at Philadelphia in 1850 was dumb on slavery. Even Weydemeyer, Marx’s personal friend, said nothing about slavery in his Workingmen’s League, which was founded in 1853, although the next year he opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. When the League was re-organized in 1857, it still said nothing about slavery, and a powerful branch of the League which seceded in 1857 advocated widespread serfdom of blacks and Chinese. Then came the war and Marx began to give the situation attention.

“The present struggle between the South and the North,” he wrote in 1861, “is…nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labor. Because the two systems can no longer live peaceably side by side on the North American continent, the struggle has broken out.”

He was well acquainted with those splendid leaders of the English workers who kept England from recognizing the South and perhaps entering the Civil War, who employed Frederick Douglass to arouse anti-slavery sentiment, and who organized those monster mass meetings in London and Manchester late in 1862 and early in 1863. It is possible that Marx had some hand in framing the addresses sent to President Lincoln in which they congratulated the Republic and found nothing to condemn except “The Slavery and degradation of men guilty only of a colored skin or African parentage.” The Manchester address congratulated the President on liberating the slaves in the District of Columbia, putting down the slave trade, and recognizing the Republics of Haiti and Liberia, and concluded that “You cannot now stop short of a complete uprooting of slavery.”

It was after this, in September, 1864, that the International Workingmen’s Association was formed in which Marx was a leading spirit, and his was the pen that wrote the address to Abraham Lincoln in November, 1864. “To Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America.

“Sir: We congratulate the American people upon your reelection by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the watchword of your first election, the triumphal war-cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.

“From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt distinctively that the Star Spangled Banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epogée, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the immigrant or be prostituted by the tramp of the slave-driver?

“When an oligarchy of 300,000 slave-holders dared to inscribe for the first time in the annals of the world ‘Slavery’ on the banner of armed revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European Revolution of the eighteenth century, when on those very spots counter-revolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding ‘the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old constitution’ and maintained ‘slavery to be a beneficial institution.’ indeed, the only solution of the great problem of the ‘relation of capital to labor,’ and cynically proclaimed property in man ‘the cornerstone of the new edifice, then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes, for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders’ rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy war of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the pro-slavery intervention-importunities of their betters–and from most parts of Europe contributed their quota of blood to the good of the cause.

“While the workingmen, the true political power of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.

“The workingmen of Europe felt sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendency for the middle class, so the American Anti-slavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest sign of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of the enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.”

To this the American Ambassador to London replied sympathetically. After Lincoln’s assassination, Marx again drafted a letter, May 13, 1865, in behalf of the International Association.

“The demon of the ‘peculiar institution,’ for whose preservation the South rose in arms, did not permit its devotees to suffer honorable defeat on the open battlefield. What had been conceived in treason, must necessarily end in infamy. As Philip II’s war in behalf of the Inquisition produced a Gérard, so Jefferson Davis’s rebellion a Booth.

“After a gigantic Civil War which, if we consider its colossal extension and its vast scene of action, seems in comparison with the Hundred Years’ War and the Thirty Years’ War and the Twenty-three Years’ War of the Old World scarcely to have lasted ninety days, the task, Sir, devolves upon you to uproot by law what the sword has felled, and to preside over the more difficult work of political reconstruction and social regeneration. The profound consciousness of your great mission will preserve you from all weakness in the execution of your stern duties. You will never forget that the American people at the inauguration of the new era of the emancipation of labor placed the burden of leadership on the shoulders of two men of labor-Abraham Lincoln the one, and the other Andrew Johnson.”

After the war had closed, in September, 1865, still another letter went to the people of the United States from the same source.

“Again we felicitate you upon the removal of the cause of these years of affliction-upon the abolition of slavery. This stain upon your otherwise so shining escutcheon is forever wiped out. Never again shall the hammer of the auctioneer announce in your market-places sales of human flesh and blood and make mankind shudder at the cruel barbarism.

“Your noblest blood was shed in washing away these stains, and desolation has spread its black shroud over your country in penance for the past.

“Today you are free, purified through your sufferings. A brighter future is dawning upon your republic, proclaiming to the old world that a government of the people and by the people is a government for the people and not for a privileged minority.

“We had the honor to express to you our sympathy in your affliction, to send you a word of encouragement in your struggles, and to congratulate you upon your success. Permit us to add a word of counsel for the future.

“Injustice against a fraction of your people having been followed by such dire consequences, put an end to it. Declare your fellow citizens from this day forth free and equal, without any reserve. If you refuse them citizens’ rights while you exact from them citizens’ duties, you will sooner or later face a new struggle which will once more drench your country in blood.

“The eyes of Europe and of the whole world are on your attempts at reconstruction, and foes are ever ready to sound the death knell of republican institutions as soon as they see their opportunity.

“We therefore admonish you, as brothers in a common cause, to sunder all the chains of freedom, and your own victory will be complete.”

In June of that year, a few months after Johnson had become President, Marx, writing to Engels, senses the beginnings of reaction:

“I naturally see what is repulsive in the form of the Yankee movement, but I find the reason for it in the nature of a bourgeois democracy…where swindle has been on the sovereign throne for so long. Nevertheless, the events are world-upheaving…”

Naturally, Marx stood with the Abolitionist democracy, led by Sumner and Stevens.

“Mr. Wade declared in public meetings that after the abolition of slavery, a radical change in the relation of capital and of property in land is next upon the order of the day.”

He was suspicious of Johnson and wrote Engels in 1865:

“Johnson’s policy disturbs me. Ridiculous affectation of severity against individual persons; up to now highly vacillating and weak in the thing itself. The reaction has already begun in America and will soon be strengthened if this spinelessness is not put an end to.”

And finally, in 1877, after the Negroes had been betrayed by the Northern industrial oligarchy, he wrote:

“The policy of the new president (Hayes) will make the Negroes, and the great exploitation of land in favor of the railways, mining companies, etc. will make the already dissatisfied farmers, into allies of the working class.”

It was a great loss to American Negroes that the great mind of Marx and his extraordinary insight into industrial conditions could not have been brought to bear at first hand upon the history of the American Negro between 1876 and the World War. Whatever he said and did concerning the uplift of the working class must, therefore, be modified so far as Negroes are concerned by the fact that he had not studied at first hand their peculiar race problem here in America. Nevertheless, he,did know the plight of the working class in England, France and Germany, and American Negroes must understand what his panacea was for those folk if they would see their way clearly in the future.

The Crisis A Record of the Darker Races was founded by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1910 as the magazine of the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. By the end of the decade circulation had reached 100,000. The Crisis’s hosted writers such as William Stanley Braithwaite, Charles Chesnutt, Countee Cullen, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Angelina W. Grimke, Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, Arthur Schomburg, Jean Toomer, and Walter White.

PDF of full issue: https://archive.org/download/sim_crisis ... 3_40_3.pdf

https://mronline.org/2024/08/05/karl-ma ... arch-1933/

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Karl Marx: More than an economist
Originally published: Red Flag on July 31, 2024 by Belle Gibson (more by Red Flag) | (Posted Aug 06, 2024)

In his lifetime, Karl Marx witnessed the establishment of capitalism as an all-encompassing, global system, and with it the international working class—a force capable of radical social transformation. As this system of exploitation and ruthless competition developed, Marx studied it closely, becoming well known for his theories of class, exploitation and value.

The power of Marx’s economic writing means that frequently, and sometimes deliberately, his political insights are overlooked. But Marx was, first and foremost, a revolutionary, an activist and a radical. Coupled with an understanding of his economic insights, the evolution of his political writings demonstrates most clearly how Marx became a Marxist, and founded a movement that continues to fight for radical social change more than 140 years after his death.

In February 1848, Marx published The Communist Manifesto with collaborator Frederick Engels for the Communist League, a recently formed revolutionary party based in London that both were part of. The manifesto was a bold call to revolution and an assertion that it was the working class that must lead it. Immediately, historical events provided a test and, ultimately, vindication for the manifesto.

The 1840s were racked with mass hunger and poverty for those at the bottom of society. At the top, rifts and ruptures were emerging between the rulers—the old nobility and the conservative bourgeois states—and the liberal bourgeois reformers who were challenging them.

In 1848 a wave of popular uprisings and revolutions crashed over Europe. Beginning in France, upheavals went on to rock the Habsburg, Russian and Prussian empires. It was the last radical gasp of the emerging bourgeoisie.

The uprising in France began in February 1848. Initially successful, it toppled the unpopular regime of Louis Philippe through an alliance of the liberal reformers and radical workers in the cities. It ended only a few months later when the capitalist forces turned on the workers and drowned their struggle in blood. The capitalists installed a military dictatorship with a liberal veneer, and in so doing laid the basis for the brutal dictatorship of Louis Napoleon that followed. The workers, although outnumbered and outgunned, erected barricades and fought heroically in the streets of Paris.

In the German principalities, the bourgeoisie were far more acquiescent to the old nobility. They undermined their own nationalist project of uniting Germany into a modern capitalist state by refusing to confront the German kings and princes. They abandoned the working-class forces, leaving them vulnerable to brutal defeat.

Marx and Engels were keen observers of these developments and were closely involved in the German uprisings. Engels fought to the bitter end in south-west Germany, while Marx participated in the Rhineland with the Communist League.

Marx was engaged in debates about strategy and organisation within the league at this time, and emerged from these heady days with two key insights: first, that the bourgeoisie was no longer a revolutionary class and could not be relied upon to confront the old feudal ruling classes; and second, that the working class must organise independently as a class.

After experiencing the brutal backlash of the old order in alliance with the new capitalist ruling classes, he concluded that the liberal bourgeoisie was not willing to pursue democratic reforms, including those they themselves would benefit from as a class, like political freedoms. He compared the approaches of the French and German bourgeoisies in an article written in November 1848:

In France it [the bourgeoisie] played the part of a tyrant and made its own counter-revolution. In Germany it acts like a slave and carries out the counter-revolution for its own tyrants.

Following from these revelations were organisational implications, namely, the urgent need for working-class independence. He argued that the working class must act in its own interests and needed independent organisation to do so. He was beginning to see what this could look like as he took inspiration from nascent forms of working-class organisation, from the Silesian weavers’ strike to the Chartists in Britain and the workers’ clubs in Paris.

He outlined these arguments most clearly in his Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League in March 1850, known as the March Address. He explains,

[T]he workers, and above all the League, must work for the creation of an independent organization of the workers’ party… the League must aim to make every one of its communes a centre and nucleus of workers’ associations in which the position and interests of the proletariat can be discussed free from bourgeois influence.

As the 1848 upheavals were crushed, Marx and Engels were exiled to London. There, they found themselves at the heart of the British Empire—the centre of industrial capitalism—and surrounded by the most developed working class in the world at the time. This working class was, by the 1860s, rallying for abolition of slavery in response to the U.S. Civil War and in support of Irish independence. Much of Marx’s political life was preoccupied with how the working class could develop the political consciousness necessary to take power, and the 1860s provided an opportunity to better understand this through close observation of the workers’ movement happening around him.

Civil war broke out in America in 1861. On one side was the Confederacy, fighting to secede in order to maintain slavery in the interests of the southern landowning elite. On the other side was the northern bourgeoisie, the Union, for whom industrial development was key and slavery dispensable.

The British ruling class came down on the side of the Confederacy, certain sections pushing for Britain to intervene. Slavery provided Britain and Europe with cheap cotton and was an integral part of industrialisation and world trade. It’s estimated that the livelihood of one quarter of Britain was based on the cotton industry. On the other hand, European and English workers by and large supported the Union, even those in Lancashire, who were devastated by the cotton famine.

The Civil War signalled new political possibilities after a decade or so of retreat following 1848. Meetings of workers in support of the Union were called by the London Trade Union Council. This renewed internationalism became the precursor to the International Working Men’s Association, better known as the First International, which Marx helped found in 1864. The International brought together unions and radical political currents from across Europe.

Unlike many other radicals at the time, Marx landed firmly on the side of the Union. He understood that slavery needed to be opposed because the presence of slavery anywhere undermines the conditions of labour everywhere. In his words, “Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded”. Although Abraham Lincoln and other conservative Union leaders initially denied the war was about slavery and refused to promise abolition, Marx identified that a Confederate victory would mean an expansion of slavery. He could see that the war was a contest between two economic systems, and only one side could win out.

In a similar vein, the Irish struggle for independence from the yoke of British occupation gave Marx an opportunity to deepen his understanding of how political questions were central to working class self-emancipation. In the 1860s, Fenianism, a radical expression of Irish nationalism, emerged, inspiring many Irish workers and English workers to take up the cause.

A high point of this was the campaign to save the Manchester Martyrs in 1867. Three Irish nationalists were put on trial and publicly hanged for the death of a police officer. The ruling class whipped up a hysterical campaign to inspire anti-Irish sentiment. A campaign for the release of all Irish political prisoners was then spurred on.

Although Marx and Engels criticised Fenian terrorist tactics in private letters to one another, they championed the Irish cause and pushed for the International to take up the fight. Marx fought the more conservative union leaders to his right and the ultra-lefts around Bakunin, who were hesitant to support Irish independence. He argued that the impoverishment of Ireland was a great source of wealth for the British Empire, and that anti-Irish sentiment amongst English workers undermined working conditions and their ability to fight the English ruling class. He urged,

It is the task of the International everywhere to put the conflict between England and Ireland in the foreground, and everywhere to side openly with Ireland… to make the English workers realise that for them the national emancipation of Ireland is not a question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment but the first condition of their own social emancipation.
Marx and Engels’ enthusiasm for and affinity with working-class struggle is captured in Engels’ words to Marx in a letter the day after the execution of the Manchester Martyrs in 1867:

To my knowledge, the only time that anyone has been executed for anything similar in a civilized state was the case of John Brown at Harpers Ferry. The Fenians could not wish for a better precedent.

Marx first articulated a theory of working-class self-emancipation in the 1840s. Decades later, in 1871, this theoretical assertion became a reality. For 71 days, Paris was under workers’ control, a heroic experiment in radical democracy and the first of its kind.

In The Civil War in France, a pamphlet Marx wrote in June on behalf of the International, Marx describes it as a “glorious harbinger of a new society”, one of many emotive descriptions throughout.

The backdrop to this uprising was the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. France was losing, and Adolphe Thiers, the head of the new French republic, refused to defend Paris if it meant arming the working class. He sent soldiers into the working-class neighbourhood of Belleville at dawn on 18 March to disarm the National Guard, a workers’ militia. By midday, the soldiers had fraternised with the guardsmen, barricades were erected, General Vinoy—who was leading the operation—had fled Paris, and crowds of men, women and children were taking to the streets in anger and building barricades. The Paris Commune had begun.

Over the subsequent months, workers constructed a new state out of radically democratic institutions, with recallable, elected delegates of the working class. Workers envisioned and enacted radical change in every aspect of society, from the family to the workplace. Everything was up for debate, from political strategy and defence of the commune to science, the church and even the arts. Marx got to see, if only briefly, humanity flourishing under workers’ control. He wrote:

For the first time since the days of February 1848, the streets of Paris were safe, and… without any police of any kind.

In order to re-establish bourgeois rule, the ruling class carried out a brutal massacre. Thirty thousand Communards were killed within a week. The privileged classes and their newspapers delighted in the torture and imprisonment of countless more.

Marx responded to the counter-revolution with equal parts rage and theoretical clarity about the need to smash the capitalist state in order for workers to take power and create a socialist society. He explained that the working class in power naturally meant the abolition of exploitation. The Commune was “the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour”.

The Paris Commune showed, Marx argued, that workers couldn’t simply take hold of the existing state. There needed to be new radical forms of democracy. And the capitalist state must be confronted—his only criticism of the Commune was that they took up arms too late; they needed to defend their fragile, embryonic institutions of self-government against the might of the bourgeois state.

Marx’s political legacy offers invaluable lessons for us today. He developed and refined his theory of social revolution by engaging in the debates of his time and by taking part in the most important struggles of the day. This approach—learning and developing theory through the practical experience of the working-class movement—remains the guiding principle of the Marxist movement today.

https://mronline.org/2024/08/06/karl-marx/

[blindpig]

Lenin’s contributions to political economy
By Raju J Das (Posted Aug 07, 2024)

Originally published: Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal on August 1, 2024 (more by Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal) |

Vladimir Lenin made many valuable contributions to Marxist political economy.1 His 1899 book, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, is a model of Karl Marx’s Capital for the 20th century and an exemplar of the class approach to political economy. His writings on imperialism, including his book, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, innovatively develop some of the themes from Marx’s general law of accumulation presented in Chapter 25 of Capital Vol 1. They demonstrate the power of Marxist political economy when conducted at the global scale, as opposed to local and national scales. Lenin remained wedded to the labour theory of value, the theory of surplus value and the doctrine of class struggle. An avowed internationalist, he was deeply sensitive to the specificities of the Global South.

There is good political economy and bad political economy. The current political economy discourse on Lenin suffers from a series of problems. It offers many problematic revisionist claims, including denial of, or underemphasis on, a series of facts/processes in capitalist society, such as: the tendency towards class differentiation, the impoverishment of workers, the inevitability of periodic crises, the significance of value relations, the importance of capitalist imperialism as a concept, limits to the power of capitalism and its state to solve problems caused by capitalism, the priority of class relations over spatial/geographical relations, and so on. Lenin’s political economy responds to these problems and advances a Marxist alternative on many themes.

My commentary is divided into three parts: general comments on Lenin’s view of political economy as a field of knowledge; his substantive claims on the political economy of capitalism; and a comradely critique.

General comments
What is political economy and what is its importance?

Following Marx’s economic doctrine, Lenin said political economy is a science of society that studies not production as such but the social relations of production and distribution as they change over time. “[P]olitical economy is the science of the historically developing systems of social production [and distribution]” (Lenin, 1898). “[T]he most important problems of contemporary social life are intimately bound up with problems of economic science.”

Political economy must examine “the connection between, and interdependence of, the various aspects of the process taking place in all spheres of the social economy” (Lenin, 1899a). In particular, political economy must deal with the “question [of]…the relation of economics to politics” (Lenin, 1916a). A 1911 plan for a lecture on fundamentals of political economy (Lenin, 1911) includes the following topics: “The essence of the capitalist mode of production as compared with the other modes of production historically preceding it”; “Similarity in the existence of class oppression and distinction in the forms and conditions of the class struggle”; “Conditions for the sale of the commodity ‘labour-power’”; “The production of absolute and relative surplus-value”; “How ‘normal’ conditions for the consumption of the commodity ‘labour-power’ are determined by the worker’s struggle against the capitalist”; and “The strike struggle, trade unions and factory legislation in the history of the struggle for shorter working hours” (Lenin, 1911).

How to study political economy?

Political economy must be based on a materialist and dialectical philosophy. “Only the materialist conception of history can bring light into this chaos and open up the possibility for a broad, coherent, and intelligent view of a specific system of social economy as the foundation of a specific system of man’s entire social life” (Lenin, 1898).

Political economy must be both theoretical and empirical. For example, in his The Development of Capitalism in Russia, Lenin first deals with “the basic theoretical propositions of abstract political economy on the subject of the home market for capitalism” which then serve “as a sort of introduction to …the factual part of” his book, and “relieve us of the need to make repeated references to theory in our further exposition” (Lenin, 1899b). One must, however, refrain from “superficial generalisations based on facts selected one-sidedly and without reference to the system of capitalism as a whole” (Lenin, 1908). In using statistical data from surveys produced by the state, one has to be mindful of the fact these surveys are inaccurate, in part because of their class biases (Lenin, 1912a).

Political economy must also produce ideas about what is to be done. Lenin’s famous dictum of “Without Revolutionary theory, there can be no Revolutionary Movement” (Lenin, 1901a) applies to theory in political economy.

Like philosophy, political economy is partisan. Class relations broadly informed his political economy. In a class society, there cannot be epistemic or political neutrality. “To expect science to be impartial in a wage-slave society is as foolishly naïve as to expect impartiality from manufacturers on the question of whether workers’ wages ought not to be increased by decreasing the profits of capital” (Lenin, 1913a). “[A]ll official and liberal science”, i.e. bourgeois professorial political economy, “defends wage-slavery, whereas Marxism has declared relentless war on that slavery.” As Lenin says in What Is To Be Done?, ideas and thinkers are either bourgeois or socialist: “There is no middle course … in a society torn by class antagonisms” (Lenin, 1901b). An idea/“ideologist” that is in between must choose sides, although petty bourgeois political economy vacillates between the two. Thus there are three kinds of political economy.

Given his class approach to political economy, which meant economic matters must be seen from the standpoint of the different classes, Lenin is unsurprisingly very critical not only of petty bourgeois, populist or Proudhonist political economy, but also of what he called “bourgeois and professorial political economy”(Lenin, 1899a), including the social democratic type. He said: “the personal qualities of present-day professors are such that we may find among them even exceptionally stupid people… But the social status of professors in bourgeois society is such that only those are allowed to hold such posts who sell science to serve the interests of capital, and agree to utter the most fatuous nonsense, the most unscrupulous drivel and twaddle against the socialists. The bourgeoisie will forgive the professors all this as long as they go on ‘abolishing’ socialism [through their lectures]” (Lenin, 1914).

Lenin’s specific substantive political economic claims were about: class relations and class differentiation, including in rural areas; forms and stages of uneven development of capitalism; obstacles to democratic politics caused by the capitalist economy; dynamics of capitalism, imperialism and war; conditions of workers and peasants, including women and children; and impoverishment and inequality. I will present some of his claims in the form of theses.

Lenin’s substantive claims in political economy
Thesis 1: A society based on commodity economy must experience class differentiation. When petty producers, including peasants, buy inputs and sell outputs, gradually most of them will lose their means of production and become propertyless or property-poor wage workers, while some of them will turn into proto-capitalists (rich peasants) or capitalists (capitalist farmers).

While both petty producers and wage workers perform labour, that does not mean they belong in the same category. “It is not labour that is a definite category of political economy, but only the social form of labour, the social organisation of labour, or, in other words, the mutual relations of people arising out of the part they play in social labour” (Lenin, 1902).

Thesis 2: Petty production is not viable. Petty bourgeois strata are constantly produced, pauperized and proletarianized. Its continued existence is at great costs to petty producers.

Petty producers cannot normally compete with large scale commercial producers. “The technical and commercial superiority of large-scale production over small-scale production not only in industry, but also in agriculture, is proved by irrefutable facts” (Lenin, 1908).

To the extent that small-scale production exists, it “maintains itself … by constant worsening of diet, by chronic starvation, by lengthening the working day, by deterioration in the quality [of its means of production, including cattle].”

Thesis 3: Capitalist development takes many forms at different points in times and in different countries.

“Infinitely diverse combinations of elements of this or that type of capitalist evolution are possible” (Lenin, 1899b:33). Capitalism can develop when feudal-type property owners turn capitalists or when petty producers are differentiated into capitalists and wage workers. While capitalism requires property-less workers, it can make use of workers with small amounts of property that subsidize the value of labour power. Capitalism develops from commodity production through manufacture to machine-based large-scale production to imperialism.

Thesis 4: Capital exists in different forms such as industrial/productive, financial/usurer, mercantile, etc. They are united by the drive to invest money to make more money, as indicated by Marx’s general formula of capital.

Thesis 5: Capitalist development results in absolute and relative impoverishment, rising inequality and worsening health conditions for workers (and petty producers). Decentralisation of capital in the form of people’s savings is an illusion.

“The worker is becoming impoverished absolutely… But the relative impoverishment of the workers, i.e., the diminution of their share in the national income, is still more striking.”

Capital, which throws the whole of its crushing weight upon the ruined small producers and the proletariat, constantly threatens to force the conditions of the workers down to starvation level and condemn them to death from starvation.

On the other hand: “the wealth of the capitalists is increasing at a dizzy rate”. “Big capital, gathering around itself small sums of shareholders’ capital from all over the world, has become more powerful still. Through the joint-stock company, the millionaire now has at his disposal not only his own million, but additional capital gathered from petty proprietors” (Lenin, 1913).

Thesis 6: Capitalism subjects women and child labour to special exploitation, both in the petty production sector and large-scale industry. They suffer the consequences of competition between the petty production and capitalist sector, and from competition within the latter sector.

Thesis 7: Workers’ struggle makes a difference to their living conditions, but within narrow limits.

“Only as a result of this resistance, despite the tremendous sacrifices the workers have to make in the struggle, are they able to maintain anything like a tolerable standard of living” (ibid.). Yet, capital not only makes workers’ economic conditions difficult. It also makes their resistance difficult in the same process: “capital is becoming more and more concentrated”, and its “associations are growing”, while “the number of destitute and unemployed people is increasing, and so also is want among the proletariat”, as a result of which “it is becoming harder than ever to fight for a decent standard of living” (ibid.). Secondly, even if wages rise, wages do not rise much, “even with the most stubborn and most successful strike movement” (Lenin, 1912b).

Thesis 8: Capitalism produces new forms of uneven spatial and sectoral development in part because not all areas in a country are equally connected to the world market. Capitalism also produces urbanization and ruralization of capitalist accumulation resulting in a landscape that contains industrial towns, suburbs, rural industrial centers, etc. Uneven development causes migration across and inside countries. Migration in turn undermines social and spatial seclusion and causes intermingling of workers of different parts of the world, elevating them culturally and making them parts of one united world working class, even though the ruling class tries to divide them on the basis of nationalism, etc.

“The bourgeoisie incites the workers of one nation against those of another in the endeavour to keep them disunited” (ibid.).

Thesis 9: Capitalism has a tendency to be a global system.

Echoing the Communist Manifesto, Lenin said: “Capitalism cannot exist and develop without constantly expanding the sphere of its domination, without colonising new countries and drawing old non-capitalist countries into the whirlpool of world economy” (ibid.).

Thesis 10: Capitalism at its highest stage develops into imperialism, which necessarily promotes wars, warmongering and political reaction. There is an economic essence of imperialism, which cannot be reduced to mere government policies of annexation or militarism (Lenin, 1916a, b).

Thesis 11: Capitalism was progressive relative to pre-capitalist society in that it created conditions for socialist society, but it has now turned into a reactionary social form, at least since the early part of the 20th century. It turned reactionary because it feared “the growth and increasing strength of the proletariat” (Lenin, 1913c). So, it “comes out in support of everything backward, moribund and medieval”, it joins “with all obsolete and obsolescent forces in an attempt to preserve tottering wage-slavery”, and it “is prepared to go to any length of savagery, brutality and crime in order to uphold dying capitalist slavery” (ibid.).

Thesis 12: Lenin’s political economy produces ideas about what is to be done: it points to the significant reforms under capitalism that workers must fight for and to the transitional measures that a proletarian party must take following the overthrow of capitalism (for example, a new economic policy where the state may have to temporarily allow a degree of capitalist development under strict supervision), as part of a more or less uninterrupted struggle to establish communism. Lenin rejected the idea that successful socialist construction could happen in a single country, although revolutionary measures could be undertaken in a single country.

A comradely critique of Lenin
There are several problems with Lenin’s political economy.

Lenin rightly thinks crises are “not a thing of the past” and that prosperity is followed by a crisis. Also that while “the forms, the sequence, the picture of particular crises change”, crises remain “an inevitable component of the capitalist system”. But his crisis theory is inadequate. His is often an overproduction or even under-consumptionist theory: “Industry could produce hundreds of thousands of motor vehicles but the poverty of the masses hampers development and brings about crashes after a few years of ‘brilliant’ growth” (Lenin, 1913). He abstracts from Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as a result of the organic composition rising faster than the rate of exploitation.

Lenin also says little about how capitalism at the national scale is itself a barrier to the development of productive forces. There is little recognition of ecological problems or of the role of the state in economic management of capitalism (except in terms of his comments on regressive taxes). In spite of these problems, Lenin’s contributions to political economy are priceless.

References:
Lenin, V. 1898. Book Review: A. Bogdanov. A Short Course of Economic Science. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ ... gdanov.htm

Lenin, V. 1899a. Review of Hobson’s Imperialism. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ ... hobson.htm

Lenin, V. 1899b. Development of capitalism in Russia. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ ... vol-03.pdf

Lenin, V. 1901a. What Is to Be Done? https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ ... itbd/i.htm

Lenin, V. 1901b. What Is to Be Done? II. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ ... tbd/ii.htm

Lenin, V. 1902. The Union of the Russian Social-Democrats Abroad. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ ... nov/01.htm

Lenin, V 1908. Marxism and revisionism. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ ... apr/03.htm

Lenin, V. 1911. Plan for a Lecture in a Course on “Fundamentals of Political Economy” https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ ... jan/27.htm

Lenin, V. 1912a. Workers’ Earnings and Capitalist Profits in Russia. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ ... ug/08b.htm

Lenin, V. 1912b. Impoverishment in Capitalist Society https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ ... nov/30.htm

Lenin, V. 1913a. The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ ... ar/x01.htm

Lenin, V. 1913b. The Growth of Capitalist Wealth. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ ... un/09b.htm

Lenin, V. 1913c. Backward Europe and Advanced Asia. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ ... may/18.htm

Lenin, V. 1913d. A “Fashionable” Branch of Industry https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ ... jul/21.htm

Lenin, V. 1914. A Liberal Professor on Equality https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ ... mar/11.htm

Lenin, V. 1916a. Karl Marx. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ ... marx/3.htm.

Lenin, V. 1916b. Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ ... 6/imp-hsc/

Notes:
(1)↩ This is a version of my text for the plenary on ‘100 years after, Lenin’s contribution in political economy’ at the World Association of Political Economy conference held in Athens, Greece on August 2-4, 2024. This text has been extracted from a much longer paper.

https://mronline.org/2024/08/07/lenins- ... l-economy/

The "comradely criticism" was a waste of effort. 'Ecology' wasn't even invented(Leaving aside Marx's astute criticisms) and Lenin had other fish to fry. Without gaining, holding and using political power nothing can be accomplished at the scale necessary.

[blindpig]

Critical thoughts on the "Workers' Front of Ukraine"
No. 9/97.IX.2024

In Ukraine, propaganda leaflets are being pasted up in the streets by the self-proclaimed Marxist organization "Workers' Front of Ukraine" (hereinafter - RFU). The main contingent of this organization generally recognizes the victoriousness of the Stalinist USSR, recognizes the importance of studying theory, and recognizes the perniciousness of Khrushchevism. However, recognizing the victoriousness of the Stalinist period of the USSR and the perniciousness of Khrushchevism will not fill you up, because semi-Trotskyists do this too. About themselves (you can read it at the link) they write the following:

"We stand for social and economic equality, for the interests of wage workers and a progressive society. We educate the masses on the Internet with the help of our social networks and clubs, and we practice street activities."

A deliberately vague formulation. The fighters for a progressive society, social and economic equality, and the interests of hired workers may not only be social democrats, but even a part of the right may verbally insist on their loyalty to these ideals. The goal of communists is not "the fight for the interests of hired workers and a progressive society, as well as for social and economic equality," but the fight for communism - a society organized on a scientific basis. Podguzov's definition from the " Proryvtsa Dictionary ":

“Communism is the next natural stage in the development of society, in which, for the first time in the history of mankind, relations between people are built not on instincts and selfish interests, as has been the case for all previous millennia, but in accordance with the requirements of the system of known objective laws of the development of nature and society, and therefore are characterized by the absence of prerequisites for the emergence of antagonisms between individuals, and even more so for the emergence of wars.

A communist society is one that recognizes itself as a vital element of the human environment, as necessary as oxygen, water, etc. Therefore, concern for the suitability of society for individuals to live in it will not be opposed to concern for the environment, for the conditions for the production of material goods. For the first time, the triad: man - society - natural conditions of existence, will be free of antagonistic contradictions and the objective dialectic of their interrelations will be consciously used by man.

In the near future, it will become clear to everyone that there is a direct and immediate connection between the mass and set of satisfied needs, on the one hand, and the number of highly developed people in society, on the other hand. The fewer highly developed people there are in society, the fewer highly contented needs are satisfied, the more irrational needs and destructive ways of satisfying them are generated in society, the more often Mussolinis and Hitlers, Gorbachevs and Yeltsins come to power.

"Caring for society will become a form of manifestation of the personal egoism of each person, since everyone without exception will realize that living in a constantly improving society is not only comfortable, but also infinitely interesting. Caring for each individual will turn into the most important function of the entire society. Society will finally become truly suitable for a happy life for all people without exception... Under communism, humanity will selfishly strive for the development of all individuals, realizing that each individual is the center of many talents and, only by creating social conditions for the comprehensive and complete realization of each personality, will humanity have at its disposal material and spiritual goods with extremely high consumer properties, in inexhaustible quantities, and the social relations of highly developed people will be characterized by extremely benevolent rationalism."

And what is meant by the concept of the RFU "social and economic equality"? The primary material interests of hired workers under capitalism are an increase in wages and the presence of stable work. Under capitalism, an ordinary proletarian has a chance to knock a salary increase out of the capitalist and even the opportunity to "not work for the man" himself. And what is this formulation "the interests of hired workers and a progressive society"?

Sometimes, hired workers even benefit from the poverty of their seemingly class brothers. For example, strikebreakers save capitalists in the event of a workers' strike. It also happens quite often that some workers retain their salary thanks to the "cutback" of their colleagues.

With the same motives, by the way, some workers also went on strike against Soviet power, against the dictatorship of their working class. They considered themselves hired workers and put their interests above class tasks.

In general, it is not at all necessary that “defending the interests of employees” and “struggling for economic and social equality” will be compatible.

The RFU Manifesto states:

"In general, nothing proves the correctness of Marxism more convincingly than the fate of the Soviet Union, the center of the revolution of the last century. It managed to go through the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat and even cross the threshold of socialism, but it did not manage to move much deeper towards communism itself, and the matter here is obviously in the degree of development of the productive forces of those times, which was only enough to ensure this level. And even then, production relations and social relations in general throughout the history of the USSR simply oozed with flaws and deformities of the remnants of the class social structure, because you can’t jump higher than your head. As a result, as has already been said, progress reached a dead end and was turned back. However, over the past few decades, the same technologies have stepped forward so impressively, especially in the field of communication between people, that they will become more than natural for a new type of society. Therefore, the mistakes of the past century cannot be repeated even if one wanted to, and today there are good reasons to think about the possibility, given a favorable situation, of getting by with minimal violence during the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and of socialism relatively quickly slipping through to full communism.”

That is, according to the RFU, the reason for the collapse of the USSR was the prematureness of the revolution, the construction of communism due to the underdevelopment of productive forces. Moreover, by the underdevelopment of productive forces, the ideologists of the RFU understand, first of all, the underdevelopment of technologies.

Finding out the reason for the restoration of capitalism in the USSR, the reason for the defeat of communism in the USSR is a key question for any leftist organization. The ideologists of the RFU resolved it like seasoned opportunists of the Menshevik type. You can read in detail about the reasons for the restoration of capitalism in the USSR, as well as the role of technological development in the construction of communism in the following work .

I would also like to recommend watching a video about OGAS and provide a fragment from the article “ Kudrin and the planned economy ”:

"Our leftists think that it is enough to build a supercomputer, load data into it - and the job is done! But the problem of building communism is not at all in the technical aspects of organizing planning or production. No OGAS system is capable of destroying private property relations or creating communist production relations, because all these ideas with computers are just tools, and private property, exchange, value, etc. are relations between people. That's the thing. Under Stalin, by the way, the role of value relations was greatly reduced without any computers, although it is clear that their presence would have simplified a number of technical issues, would have made departments more compact and efficient. Crooks in any system are capable of finding an opportunity to cheat, slackers - an opportunity to " dodge " work, and careerists - to crawl to the top. Relying on OGAS and other projects is an attempt to replace Marxist science with technocracy."

The RFU Manifesto also contains the following:

"The ideology of the proletariat is tightly linked to its class, and all the subtleties of its position are immediately reflected in it. For example, side by side for a long time (although the picture is slowly beginning to improve) the socialist movement has been persecuted by, on the one hand, the disunity of hired workers and the sluggishness of their struggle for their own interests, on the other hand, the weakness of the influence of Marxism and problems with its improvement. As a result, we have an almost complete absence of militant communist parties and a single international field of theoretical and practical work. This is the general situation in the world, but in individual cases things are sometimes either better or even worse, as in our region. Here it may easily arise the thought that the Ukrainian socialist movement is dead, and the date of death is carved on the tombstone in 2014 or 2015, when it was destroyed by nationalist terror in fact and soon finished off legally by known laws. It would seem that the loss is obvious, resistance is useless. But surrender is not for true communists, and recently a new generation of them has taken up the task of acting from scratch, acting in a situation that is very contradictory for its fate. In a way, each subsequent year of the current regime's rule, leading to a hopeless decline in the standard of living of ordinary citizens, pushes people who are disappointed in it, and there are more and more of them, to accept forbidden, but perfectly consistent with reality, leftist ideas, and immediately in their most radical form, which ensures a constant influx of personnel. However, the ruling elite is not asleep either, ready at the slightest danger of an explosion of social discontent to instantly transfer the state to the rails of openly outrageous capitalism - to establish fascism. And Ukraine is not far from it anyway, separated only by the preservation of the procedures of bourgeois democracy and the not yet widespread practice of ultra-right violence against workers making economic demands. How the coming battle will most likely go and how it will end is a good question. One thing is clear: in order for the Motherland to have a chance to remain free and not fade into the abyss of tyranny, socialist forces must thoughtfully, boldly and decisively advance on all fronts.”

What is meant by the ideology of the proletariat? Marxism? Marxism is not the ideology of the proletariat, since Marxism is not an ideology in principle. However, Marxism is a scientific worldview, the core of which is the struggle for communism. The connection between Marxism and the proletariat is as follows. Proletarians find in Marxism a truly scientific explanation of the social structure, class struggle and their own situation. Thanks to the combination of Marxist theory and the proletarian movement, the best, most organized and literate representatives of the proletariat form a working class capable of wresting power from the hands of the bourgeoisie and beginning the construction of communism - a classless society.

Consequently, the scientific basis of Marxism cannot change to suit the “subtleties of the situation of workers.”

Valery Alekseevich Podguzov wrote:

"A communist society, if we briefly formulate the meaning of this phrase, means a society organized in strict accordance with the requirements of the objective laws of development. Therefore, when we say " communist worldview " , we mean, first of all, a scientific worldview, and when we say " scientific worldview " , we mean only a communist worldview, but in no way an ideology constructed " out of thin air " , similar to numerous religious, nationalistic and racial ideologies. THE COMMUNIST WORLDVIEW IS NOT AN IDEOLOGY in its original sense, although this is precisely the word that has taken root in both the "KhSS" and democratic literature. The most BROAD system of scientific TRUTHS , not limited by any dogmas or prejudices, open to continuous development , formulated theoretically, tested and used in practical activities, this is the communist worldview, i.e. scientific understanding of the world."

While the content of the RFU manifesto is just an example of tailist left ideology, nothing more. It is based not on scientific knowledge, not on establishing the truth, but on the authors' approximate ideas about ideas that might interest young people and politicized layers of the proletariat.

It is also not entirely clear what uncreated strong communist parties are we talking about? Only about Ukraine or about the whole world? I think it is clear that there cannot be several real communist parties in one country. However, if we meant about the world, then it is a lie that there is no strong communist party in the world. The Communist Party of China, the Workers' Party of Korea, the Communist Party of Cuba, the Communist Party of Vietnam, the People's Democratic Party of Laos are in power, that is, they are at least not weak. The Communist Party of China controls 20% of the world's population and the largest economy in the world.

I am not going to write in this article why these particular parties are communist, since this has already been done on the pages of Proryvchi and elsewhere.

The manifesto also states:

"In terms of ideology, one branch is the development of various agitation, both bypassing the markers of anti-communist and anti-Soviet propaganda and directly attacking them with revealing criticism, while the other sphere is the work itself on studying, applying and improving the theory. Priority here should be given to a correct analysis of the current state of things in our country and the world before considering the most pressing problems now, to the creation of an intellectual weapon for revolutionary struggle. Therefore, by the way, real communists are not at all on the same path with the public like the self-proclaimed social democrats and left-liberals who sometimes try to attach themselves to Marxism from the side, and with those comrades from the category of Trotskyists, Stalinists, Maoists, Jucheists and so on, who together resemble sectarian fan clubs that prefer to play reenactors instead of solving the pressing problems of the socialist movement. In general, its characteristic feature at the current stage is the blatant illiteracy of many participants in relation to Marxism. In particular, this article was written to contribute to the correction of this state of affairs, containing the minimum of knowledge that a worthy modern Marxist-Leninist must possess, and, due to its focus, it leaves out many interesting questions, and the positions reflected in it are outlined to some extent in a simplified manner. Of course, the text could have been made even more primitive, but that would have been to the detriment of either the information presented or the volume, however, any more or less educated person, if desired, will be able to master it with thoughtful reading."

Judging by the activities of the RFU, "analysis of the current order in our country and in the world" implies analysis of Ukrainian and foreign news. However, news analysis is not at all included in the main task of Marxists. As the practice of the magazine "Proryv" and the newspaper "Proryvist" has shown, the priority task of Marxists is the development and development of theory, the solution of theoretical and practical questions about the principles of building a communist party, criticism of the methodology of bourgeois sciences and revisionism, the theory of building communism. Analyzing world news at the level of organization is a waste of time.

It is not entirely clear what kind of clubs "Stalinists, Maoists, Trotskyists, Jucheists" are. And it is even more unclear why after this the RFU members did not decide to write about the importance of opposition to Trotskyism by practitioners of Marxism-Leninism, as the RFU members called them - Stalinists, Maoists, Jucheists. This issue is described in more detail in the article.

In the article “On the Question of Communist Revolution and Counterrevolution in the USSR,” Alexander Bolotny writes:

"Then the question of the survival of the Soviet Union arose. Victory had to be snatched by any means necessary. For the sake of victory, many compromises had to be made: agreements with the church, appeals to patriotism, a partial revival of the old order in the army, and the dissolution of the Comintern in connection with agreements with the Anglo-American allies... The Comintern, which was supposed to serve as an international platform for organizing the proletarian struggle, could not be replaced by anything of a corresponding scale after its dissolution."

It is not entirely clear what the problem is with appealing to patriotism. There is nothing reactionary in calling for the defense of the Motherland from imperialists and citing examples of Russian and Ukrainian heroes of pre-Soviet times. And it is wrong to talk about the dissolution of the Comintern in connection with some agreements with Anglo-American allies. You can read about the real reasons for the dissolution of the Comintern with references to documents in Lbov. After the dissolution of the Comintern, the Cominform was created for the tasks that were relevant at that time.

Bolotny also wrote the following lines in his article:

"We think that this was not caused by the fact that the corn-grower and his company were consciously anti-communists who wanted to come to power and ruin everything to spite the late Lenin and Stalin. The evil will of individuals is not enough. If the actions of individuals cause decisive discontent among the conscious masses, then such actions will be doomed to failure. And it cannot be ruled out that Khrushchev's numerous supporters were guided by entirely good intentions, but good intentions are not enough to build communism."

Oh, these good intentions of the Khrushchevites with their slander against the Stalin period, the execution of Beria, the exclusion of the members of the so-called “anti-party group”, the attempt at reconciliation with world imperialism, the renewal of relations with Tito’s fascist clique, the Soviet-Chinese and Soviet-Albanian split, the process of destruction of the unified centralized planning system through the economic reform of 1957, etc.

Naturally, all subjective moments work only when there is a set of objective factors for them. But the problem is that the class struggle for the construction of communism and the society of the first phase of communism in a single country or several countries in themselves contain all the prerequisites for temporary defeat. Thus, the "evil will of individuals", i.e. subjective actions, betrayal, conspiracy, coup, etc., under certain conditions can completely destroy the state and temporarily roll back society to capitalism.

But who or what, according to Bolotny, is to blame for the collapse of the USSR? We read and find the following words:

“The reader may ask: are we not exaggerating the role of those unpleasant, but nevertheless individual personalities in the history of the Soviet counterrevolution? No, we are not exaggerating, since history is made by the masses, and when we speak of the subjective factor as decisive, we have in mind first of all the Soviet working class, and only then the individuals as its leaders. The working class under capitalism is dual. It is progressive as the gravedigger of capitalism, but reactionary as a class of bourgeois society. The course of history depends largely on which of its sides the working class will show to a greater degree. The working class under socialism is far from the same thing. It is a working class without a bourgeoisie, which is not exploited by anyone and exploits no one except itself. But in it, insofar as it exists under socialism, in the first phase of communism, the old contradictions are preserved with corresponding changes. Here it is divided in itself as follows: as the gravedigger of the entire exploitative, that is, class formation on the one hand, and as the working CLASS, that is, as a representative of the remnants of the class era on the other. Thus, we assert that the socialist working class as a subjective factor is primarily to blame for the collapse of socialism. At a certain stage, it showed itself not as a socialist (=building communism), but precisely as a class."

Bolotny's reasoning about the duality of the proletariat is, in principle, made in the right way. True, it is better to rely on the terms and definitions proposed by the breakthroughs of the difference between the disunited, proletarian masses as an exploited object and the organized working class under the leadership of the Communist Party as a political subject. Workers become a class only when they gain POLITICAL independence. A useful remark by Comrade Bortnik on the topic:

"Those who are superficially interested in leftist ideas do not realize that the classics of Marxism have a terminological confusion caused by the fact that class theory, in fact, was only being created on a scientific basis. Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin wrote for people who had only just moved away from historical idealism, and for them it was necessary to use the concepts of their " cultural code " . In addition, in the context of the rise of the class struggle, the active politicization of the proletariat, the terminological difference was insignificant, expressing one essence - the revolutionary proletariat under the leadership of the party, i.e. the concepts merged with each other. But this was a HISTORICALLY SHORT period. The defeat of socialism in the USSR posed the task of finding out why the proletarian acts counter-revolutionarily. And the most logical thing is to divide the revolutionary and non-revolutionary proletarians in essence and, accordingly, terminology. And then things fall into place: the proletariat itself does not carry any essentially revolutionary features, it is simply a mass of exploited people, whose essence lies in the sale of labor power. The proletariat is not a political subject, because it does not have its own party, it follows the bourgeoisie. The working class is a political subject, having all the class attributes : organization, political headquarters, an independent scientifically substantiated ideology, it acts exclusively in its own general class interests and is ready not only to participate in the struggle for power, but to take it and rule society. That is, among the mass of hired workers at any given time there are two classes: the economic class and the political class. They intersect, but do not coincide, and even more - they are mutually negating entities. Their intersection is transient, while the negation is absolute. It is impossible to fight for power by accepting hired labor, wages, market relations, commodity production, exchange, money, etc. as the norm, which is precisely why the proletariat is not the working class, and the working class is no longer the proletariat.”

Despite the successful direction of his reasoning, Bolotny incorrectly understands the relationship between the subjective and the objective within the proletariat itself. It seems to him that the problem was in the so-called "average level." Like, if the "average level" of class consciousness, understanding of Marxism, etc. were higher, then no opportunism and revisionism would have corrupted the CPSU or penetrated its leadership.

Naturally, if all workers in the USSR were Marxists, the task of building communism would be solved. Then there would not even be a need for a party, and the state would be transformed into a border service. However, if we do not fall into illusions, then objectively, the historically conditioned intellectual and spiritual state of people in a class society, the conditions of their life and work, the nature of their thinking are such that for the effective direction of activity, the maintenance of collectivity, their correct organization is necessary. Such a correct organization of the proletariat was developed by communists, first of all Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. And this is a communist party of the appropriate type, its authority, influence among the masses, which allows them to be led.

Thus, the "working class as a subjective factor" in its quality is the level, degree, adequacy of its organization, that is, the role and place of the Communist Party as its vanguard. But in no case is it the "average level" of workers. The average level will grow the more intensively, the more authoritative and literate the party and its leaders are. And vice versa. This has been proven, by the way, by the history of our country.

Considering the references to Pikhorovich in the RFU articles, I recommend reading the criticism of Pikhorovich on the pages of Proryvtsy.

In a report to the "Communist Congress" in Berlin on January 13, 2024, the RFU wrote:

"The RFU's activities in the area of ​​trade union movement development are less extensive. We are hampered by the activation of Ukrainian special services after the start of the imperialist war and the legislative ban on any strikes or walkouts during martial law. Here, the key issue we are addressing is studying the theory and experience of the international labor movement, cooperation with foreign colleagues, and training trade union leaders through organizing circles. Limited trade union work is being carried out locally, but we cannot provide more details about it due to secrecy considerations. The RFU also has certain contacts with workers through worker correspondents."

The RFU considers the economic resistance of the proletariat as a stage of class struggle, setting the goal of participation in trade union activities in the interests of the proletariat. The RFU has not yet understood that workers go on strike without Marxists and even without trade unions. Ogienko wrote about trade union activities:

"As for trade union activity, the left is hopelessly mired in economism. They do not know the theory of Marxism, do not know the history of Bolshevism and do not want to see things as they are. The idea that participants in a strike automatically become more receptive to Marxist propaganda has no serious basis. In the EU countries, especially in France, trade unions are very strong, strikes occur regularly, including general ones - so what about the influence of the communists on the masses? The question is, of course, rhetorical. Nevertheless, trade unionism is deeply rooted in the minds of some leftists, and they are convinced that all efforts should be thrown into "igniting" the economic struggle. Allegedly, mass strikes will help "awaken" the class consciousness of the proletariat, overcome the disunity and apoliticality of the masses. And since the current regime, they say, with its repressive activities does not allow trade unions to be organized and, in general, “tightens the screws everywhere,” then such leftists consider it necessary to fight for “democratic freedoms” and see their allies as liberal Navalny supporters, who “are also for democracy.”

…Returning to the topic of trade unions, the hopes of the left that a party will be born from a strong trade union movement is the position of tailism, not Marxism… Our leftists, referring to certain statements by Lenin about the need to participate in strikes, are guided by the following “logic”: 1) the success of Bolshevism occurred against the background of open forms of economic struggle, 2) today workers are not becoming Marxists, 3) today workers do not strike, the conclusion is that we must do everything possible to “kindle” the economic struggle and then we will be able to repeat the success of the Bolsheviks. Opportunists ignore the fact that the economic strike from the works of V.I. Lenin is a fact of real life at that time. It arose and took place spontaneously, without any participation of any political forces. The beginning of the 20th century was a period of spontaneous upsurge of the proletarian movement throughout the world, caused by merciless exploitation and the disenfranchised position of workers. Today the situation is radically different. The bourgeoisie has learned lessons from socialist revolutions and has learned to effectively "quench" waves of mass discontent with monetary handouts and the resignation of politicians. The proletarians themselves are infected with bourgeois-democratic illusions, they believe that the source of their misfortunes are specific politicians, neighboring nations, etc., and they see nothing shameful in the institution of wage slavery itself ("if you work well, the boss will pay well") or they believe that they can "open their own business", become small-medium owners.

Trade unions under capitalism cannot be revolutionary subjects and are themselves exclusively peddlers of trade unionism - the bourgeois worldview among the proletarians. Therefore, the leaders of trade unions, contrary to the convictions of the left, are not only not allies of communists, but opponents: a communist considers a union member a person who needs to be convinced to join the party and fight for communism, and a union boss believes that joining the Communist Party is unnecessary and generally extremist, hindering the fight for workers' rights. The union needs high salaries, and the communists need the formation of a revolutionary class. To expect that without a party, without mass propaganda, the communists will be able to "intercept" influence from the bourgeoisie in the trade unions is the height of naivety. And to expect that the proletarians themselves, in the frenzy of strikes, will create a Communist Party - this is no longer naivety, but idiocy."

As for studying theory, the Russian Federal University has a problem with this. Instead of relying on self-education, they rely on clubs. What is the problem with clubs? The problem is that not all people can fit into the club schedule. And considering that the Russian Federal University does not even offer self-education as an alternative to clubs, people may not engage in self-education at all.

In addition, going to clubs in Ukraine smacks of provocation. At the Russian Ukrainian University, clubs are held in the form of online meetings, and although this is safer than face-to-face meetings, nevertheless... does the Russian Ukrainian University not think that the special services are listening to the Internet? And even if we assume that the Ukrainian special services are not particularly interested in looking for some leftists, it may well be that all sorts of online meetings are being eavesdropped on by relatives in the house or roommates in the dorm. And they may not always have a positive attitude towards this. I know from my own experience what it is like to be condemned for my views and have my parents try to block my ability to use the Internet to study Marxism and communicate with supporters of Marxism.

The literature studied in the RFU circles is a real devil, so classes begin with reading Ilyenkov. Certain aspects of Ilyenkov's philosophy have already been analyzed on the pages of the Proryvists. I would like to add the following to what has been said. Ilyenkov was a "critic" of Mao Zedong. And although some comrades may say that Mao Zedong's philosophy had some shortcomings, it should be noted that the very direction of Ilyenkov's criticism of Mao Zedong was in line with the struggle of Khrushchev's revisionism against Mao.

The concept of the RFU circles is similar to that of other leftists. In the section "About circles" Ogienko in the article " Against the VECTOR group " wrote about why the organization of circles is wrong for creating personnel.

At one time, when I was in the RFU circle and told Ivan Mayak (he was a teacher in the circle) that consciousness is a highly organized form of matter, Mayak said that this is not quite so and sent Ilyenkov to read. Ilyenkovshchina deeply penetrated the RFU, as well as the entire left movement in Ukraine.

It is therefore not surprising that the RFU denies socialism in the PRC, while socialism in the DPRK is recognized by only a part of the organization's members. The RFU's position on the armed conflict in Ukraine does not stand up to criticism:

"The war is yet another local conflict between two imperialist blocs. One has its center in Washington, the other in Beijing."

You can read more about the breakthrough position here.

Odesskiy Komsomolets
09/30/2024

https://prorivists.org/97_rfu/

[blindpig]

A Message to the Western Left
October 7, 2024


Coca Cola (red), Great Criticism series. Poster: Wang Guangyi.

By Saheli Chowdhury – Oct 6, 2024

Starting to write this, the first question that I ask myself is, who am I addressing? While the divisions among the left in general are notorious anywhere in the world, they are at another level when it comes to the so-called West, which is ironic given the almost non-existent success of the left in that part of the world. Nevertheless, taking into consideration the current dominant iterations, I suppose that the left in the West includes anything from liberalism to anarchism to Trotskyism to what is called Maoism – everything except solidarity – real solidarity without footnotes or parenthesis – with the anti-imperialist struggles in the “uncivilised” and “politically incorrect” rest of the world, whatever form such struggle may assume.

Maoists of West Bengal, India: my experience
I would like to start with my own experience of the effects of “Maoism” in my natal state of West Bengal, India, given the importance of “lived experience” in today’s activism scene. Although Mao himself had dismissed the notion of “Maoism,” a lot of leftists in the West hold the so-called Maoists of India in high respect, although the Maoists represent a fringe within the Indian left, or better to say outside of it. I feel I have some authority on this, given the way the Maoists, who call themselves the “only real left of India,” colluded with a tinpot fascist party to destroy the longest-running left government in India. This might seem counterintuitive, but this is effectively what has happened with several Maoist formations around the world. The “Communist” Party of India (Maoist) is banned in India as a terrorist organisation, and there is every reason for it.

As far as I can remember, starting from around 2007-08 there was an uptick in “Maoist insurgency” in the western plateau region of West Bengal. Although there existed an armed insurgency in eastern India since a few years before that, especially in the mining areas, and there were reasons for the origin of the insurgency – very similar reasons for the existence of insurgents in Colombia – in West Bengal, it was never a huge problem. Since 1977, the state has had a Left Front government, formed by a coalition of several parties from the left, with the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)) as the largest integrant of the bloc. By the 2000s, the state recorded better human and social development indicators than most of the country; tremendous strides had been made in women’s social, political and economic rights – Westerners may not realise the effort that went into it, especially because the Indian society is deeply conservative; the unemployment rate was low despite neoliberalism having been ushered in in India by the central government in 1991; and there was no “silent famine” in Bengal, unlike in the neighbouring states where armed insurgency had received some popular support precisely because of widespread hunger. All this is not to say that everything was rosy, but for a state in a quasi-centralised country (very unlike the US), the left government of West Bengal had achievements to boast (though the government never boasted about them, and that was a huge shortcoming in the media battlefield, but those were early days of the media warfare), achievements that had been recognised at international instances including the United Nations. Therefore, it came as a surprise when the Maoist insurgency exploded in the western forest lands of the state where resided a significant tribal population.

The Maoists declared the Communists of West Bengal as the culprit and the target of the insurgency. Their announced project was to overthrow the government of West Bengal because it was “capitalist” and was allegedly repressing the tribal population and taking away their lands. It was an absurd accusation, since it was precisely the left government of West Bengal that was the first in the country to carry out a total land reform and granting land rights to the traditional forest-dwellers, despite the reform costing the government and the people in blood and in image. The land reform laws of the left were especially focused on uplifting historically marginalised groups, including the tribal people, the religious minorities, the lower castes of Hinduism, and women. Still, the outlandish accusation coming from a fringe organisation was picked up, broadcast, and blown up by the media. Around the same time, there was an explosion of private media outlets churning out new “newspapers” every day, and new media channels – all right wing but wearing a costume of social justice – were coming up faster than one could realise.

In this scenario, a decision of the West Bengal government added fuel to the fire. In 2008, the government gave the green light to a car manufacturing project – a “public-private partnership” (PPP) between the government of West Bengal and the Tata Group, one of the largest business groups in India. The PPP model was nothing new either in the country or in the state, but unlike in most cases in India, the left government of West Bengal used to be the majority partner in such partnerships. Yet, after this project was greenlighted, the “Communist” Party of India (Maoist) claimed that the “fake Communist government” planned to take away all lands from farmers and give them away to big business-owners. It was a lie, but by repeating it a million times, Goebbels-style, through the new mouthpieces of social justice, it was turned into a truth. Thereafter, CPI(Maoist) joined hands with the tinpot fascist opposition party of West Bengal, the Trinamool Congress (TMC), or rather with its land rights movement façade, “Movement to Protect Land,” with the declared aim of ending the “social capitalist Left Front.”

During the reign of terror that followed until the Left Front was out of power in May 2011 (and until a bit afterwards), the only targets of the Maoist “revolution” were communists, trade unionists, farmers rights activists, teachers, students, nurses – basically, working-class people. The “Maoists” – the only real communists, according to their own claims – shot teachers inside schools, in front of students. They pulled men out of their homes and shot them in front of their elderly parents and then maintained armed pickets so that the family members could not go outside their homes to recover the bodies. Women were raped, girls were disappeared, nurses working house-to-house in rural areas were attacked. There was also forced recruitment of teenagers, a feature of all such “movements” around the world. The “communist revolutionaries” shared movement and media spaces with the tinpot fascists; they committed all these crimes hand-in-hand.

Then there were crimes that achieved greater “fame” – the bomb attack on the chief minister’s convoy while he was visiting a site for a proposed steel plant and the terrorist attack on the Gyaneshwari Express train that resulted in over 150 deaths being the most infamous examples. The intellectual author of the last one was a Maoist leader (Chatradhar Mahato) who is serving a life sentence for terrorism and crimes against humanity. More interestingly, after the tinpot fascist TMC came to power riding on the Maoists’ shoulders, said Maoist leader was made a state secretary of TMC by the party’s leader (Mamata Banerjee), who is currently the chief minister of West Bengal. Many other Maoist leaders became TMC members overnight. One of the most wanted leaders (Suchitra Mahato) visited the new chief minister in her office (in Kolkata, the state capital, which is far from the place of the Maoist insurgency – how she made the journey without being arrested on the way is anybody’s guess) to turn herself in, and later, she quietly married a TMC leader, and all her past was forgotten. The only Maoist leader who was killed – by the new chief minister’s order – was alias Kishenji (who hailed from the state of Andhra Pradesh), which was ironic because he had declared publicly that he wanted to see her as the chief minister of West Bengal. The Maoists had even branded her and her fascist party the “real left” of Bengal.

Meanwhile, at least 499 people remain disappeared from that time. The number of displaced people would be several times more. Many even left the state, scarred for life by the events. But that was not all. The effects of the “revolution” that the Maoists conducted in Bengal remain to this day. TMC has done all the things that the Maoists had claimed that the Left Front was doing. The state’s development has been set back by at least half a century. The state’s public debt (from the World Bank, as well as vulture funds) is reaching astronomical levels. Corruption, extortion, migration and brain drain have reached unsustainable proportions. As for land rights, just search “Sandeshkhali” on the internet and you might gain some interesting insight.

The leader of TMC had claimed that she would solve the “Maoist problem” if she came to power. She has solved it alright – she has solved it by absorbing the Maoists into a proto-fascist party. And it was possible only because the Maoists were so much to the left that they reached the far right.

Some Western leftists confuse the Indian Maoists with the Naxalites, and although the two insurgencies have many similarities, there are important differences as well. The Naxalites were more similar to the Peruvian Maoist armed movement Sendero Luminoso: both originated because of legitimate grievances of the people, both were quickly and widely infiltrated by the very forces that they were supposed to combat, and both ended up committing atrocities against poor and marginalised people, against the working class itself. Finally, none of the two movements won. Sendero Luminoso was destroyed by the Peruvian military. The Naxalite movement was also mostly destroyed by the Indian State, but the movement reformed itself into a political party (Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)) and joined the electoral route, realising that in India, at least for now, it is the only viable way to make changes for a better and more just and inclusive society. Perhaps many in the Western left do not know this.

At this point, I would like to make a small but necessary digression. According to the CPI(Maoist), the infrequent adoption of the PPP model, the industrialisation plan, electoral participation, etc., were evidence that the CPI(M) and its associates and sympathisers are “social capitalists.” As far as I understand, and I am being generous, by “social capitalism” they refer to a system where a government – of somewhat socialist nature – coexists with capitalists and does not start off with expropriating everything. They present China as an example of this, but I will treat the China question in a separate place. What I will say now is that either the Maoists do not understand dialectics, or they purposefully distort it. The entire economy does not need to be “planned.” Small business-owners and small landowners are not the enemies of socialism. Teachers, workers, and nurses working within the “establishment” are not the enemies of socialism. And a government cannot give the middle finger to all rules and norms and international law (unless it is the US government) and let anarchy reign; it has duties and responsibilities and has to work within many boundaries, including some that may go against a governing party’s ideological position. And most importantly, socialists, or those who want to build socialism or transition towards a more just and equal world, have to adapt their actions to existing conditions. The world is not homogeneous; attempts to make it better cannot be homogeneous either.



China: socialist, capitalist, social capitalist?
Recently, I came across an interview of an Indian Maoist politician-scholar done by a Western leftist media outlet. Paraphrasing, the interviewee called China a danger as great as the US, or perhaps even greater, because China is “social capitalist.”

I already mentioned what I understand when Maoists say “social capitalism,” though I may be mistaken. However, what I do understand is that I cannot consider a person any kind of leftist when s/he calls a real existing system working to build socialism a greater danger to humanity than real existing imperialism. Yet, China is considered social capitalist/social imperialist by many on the Western left.

I will not go into the question of what China is or is not; there are numerous articles, pamphlets, and books on the subject all over the place. However, what I would like to emphasize is that the construction of socialism in China is a dynamic process, as it should be anywhere in the world. It is a new model, there is hardly any road, the road has to be built while walking that road, paraphrasing the great Antonio Machado. The move towards socialism in China is a complex process that has been described by many (within and outside China) as two steps forward, one step back. The Chinese socialist mantra is that socialism should generate wealth, a socialist state should not be poor nor backward. While a socialist system is under construction, it may be pragmatic to take advantage of the capitalists’ resources and technology. One need not start with expropriating everything.

Nevertheless, it is the State in China that has the controls over the means of production, the strategic natural resources, the heavy and strategic industries, as well as education and health. The Chinese State has taken advantage of the existing global capitalist market system to cement its place in the global production and supply chains; now it would be impossible to imagine a global economy without China. Is this not the necessary force that is precisely required by the Global South as it is being obliged more and more to confront the hegemonic empire? And there is only one empire in the world now, the United States. China, on the other hand, is simply a nation that suffered horribly at the hands of the Western empires of the day and has now gained the power and the ability to stand up to the modern-day inheritor of those empires. China does not have 800 military bases around the world. China does not overthrow foreign governments, create colour revolutions, or impose unilateral coercive measures. China does not steal other countries’ resources, irrespective of what your preferred “leftist” media tells you.

While we are at this, I would like to mention a few other countries trying to build socialism that are also demonised to various extents in the Western leftist spheres: Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua. Of these, perhaps Cuba receives the highest amount of support from across the left “spectrum” in the West, including from the anarchists who dislike the concept of State or consider it useless or even acting against the interests of the people. Perhaps this arises from their own experiences with their own States and State institutions, but it is wrong on their part to project their belief systems on to other peoples for whom their States are their shields against the imperialist onslaught. The common thread that runs through the three aforementioned countries is that all of them are trying to develop socialist projects that correspond to their own conditions, and all of them are on the receiving end of economic-financial-trade blockades imposed by the United States and its vassals. These unilateral coercive measures, euphemistically called “sanctions,” have gravely impacted all walks of life in said countries, not just the economic sphere, and this obliges their governments and State institutions to innovate and adopt measures and programmes that on first sight might seem like a “return to neoliberalism.” It is due to this reason that the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, is routinely condemned by the Western Left as a “traitor” who has “abandoned Chavismo” and adopted “neoliberalism.” Venezuela, according to these ideologues, is no longer a “socialist” country but a capitalist one. For one, Venezuela was never a “socialist” country; both President Chávez and President Maduro have described the Venezuelan process as transition towards Socialism of the 21st Century. Chávez famously said that the Socialism of the 21st Century has to learn from the mistakes of the socialism of the 20th century in order not to repeat them. Again there is no unique model, no road to follow, the road has to be built while walking it. A comprehensive understanding of dialectics is essential to understand the processes in these countries, and reading a little bit of Mao may come in handy.

To close this section, I would repeat what a Syrian friend told me: the CPI(Maoist)’s position on China echoes the United States and Zionism.

‘Hamas conservative right wing’: to support or not to support the Palestinian independence struggle
Now that I have uttered “Zionism,” I must comment a bit about Palestine, a cause that is dear to my heart. It makes me glad to see the immense outpouring of support for Palestine in the West in the wake of the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, carried out by the Zionist regime that is a cancer in the heart of west Asia. However, there are a few points that I would like to clarify here before closing this piece.

Almost all of the people in the West expressing solidarity and support for the Palestinians – irrespective of their political position – start with a vague condemnation of “conflict” or “war,” and many add a condemnation of the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas. Many also express some sort of support for the creation of a Palestinian State, without clarifying what it may actually mean, and for most such a state is supposed to exist in conjunction with the Jewish state of “Israel” (the so-called two-state solution). These pro-Palestine people support the “unarmed, defenceless Palestinians” but not the armed resistance factions that originate from the same population, thus creating a distinction between the “people” and the “terrorists.” While this position on the part of apolitical people, who express their solidarity with Palestine because of the slaughtered children or the generalised genocide, can be overlooked, such ignorance of the Palestinian socio-political reality on part of those who identify as the “left” cannot be forgiven.

There is another worrying trend among parts of the Western left – not supporting the Palestinian Islamic resistance factions, that is, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or their associates in neighbouring countries such as Iran, Hezbollah (Lebanon), Ansarallah (Yemen) or the Iraqi Popular Mobilisation Units (PMU) because of their alleged conservative and hence right-wing characteristics. Apart from exposing an immense lack of understanding of the reality on the ground, this position also exposes the Western left faction’s lack of knowledge that the Palestinian left parties like PFLP and DFLP work hand-in-hand with these allegedly conservative groups. According to my friend, the Palestinian socialist activist Khaled Barakat, when people find themselves between a rock and a hard place, they turn to God. The Arab socialist blocs understand that after their attempts at liberation failed and they were disoriented and largely destroyed, their religious colleagues filled in the void. “The people should not have to wait for the left to regroup itself; the people will carry on the task of liberation in whichever way they can,” he told me. I would request the Western leftists who support Palestine to try to comprehend the Palestinian left’s pragmatism.

I would also request my Western leftist friends, wherever on the left spectrum they may be, to recognise the Palestinian cause as a struggle for independence, as has been highlighted by the Palestinian left for decades. Wars of independence are complicated; they are bloody and messy; they do not follow clean lines; they are not homogeneous. If you really want to support Palestine, support the Palestinians’ war of independence without conditions, without ifs and buts, without judgement. Solidarity is support, not judgement.

By way of conclusion, I would urge Western leftists not to fall for and repeat imperialist propaganda about our countries and their movements, and definitely not to do something even worse — calling for imperialist invasions, branded as “humanitarian interventions,” against our peoples. If, for whatever reason, you cannot support our movements or the few governments that do try to work for the betterment of the people, it is comprehensible. But please do not be part of the imperialist battering ram against us; that would not be forgiven.

https://orinocotribune.com/a-message-to ... tern-left/

******



Five Theses on Actually Existing Marxism
By Fredric Jameson (Posted Sep 26, 2024)

This essay was originally published in Monthly Review 47, no. 11 (April 1996).

~

(Dedicated to the memory of William Pomerance)

First Thesis
“Postmarxisms” regularly emerge at those moments in which capitalism itself undergoes a structural metamorphosis.

Marxism is the science of capitalism, or better still, in order to give depth at once to both terms, it is the science of the inherent contradictions of capitalism. This means on the one hand that it is incoherent to celebrate the “death of Marxism” in the same breath with which one announces the definitive triumph of capitalism and the market. The latter would rather seem to augur a secure future for the former, leaving aside the matter of how “definitive” its triumph could possibly be. On the other hand, the “contradictions” of capitalism are not some formless internal dissolution, but relatively lawful and regular, and subject at least to theorization after the fact. For example, for any given moment of capitalism, the space it controls will eventually become oversaturated with the commodities it is technically capable of producing. This crisis is then systemic.

Capitalism is however not merely a system or mode of production, it is the most elastic and adaptable mode of production that has appeared thus far in human history, and has previously overcome such cyclic crises. It has achieved this by means of two basic strategies: the expansion of the system, and the production of radically new types of commodities.

The expansion of the system. Capitalism has always had a center, recently the hegemony of the United States and previously that of England. Each new center is spatially larger and more inclusive than preceding centers, and thus opens up a wider territory for commodification in general, and for new markets and new products alike. According to a somewhat different version of the historical narrative, we can speak of a national moment of capitalism that emerged from the eighteenth century industrial revolution. This first moment is that which Marx himself experienced and theorized, albeit prophetically. It was followed at the end of the nineteenth century by the moment of imperialism, in which the limits of the national markets were burst and a kind of world-wide colonial system established. Finally, after the Second World War and in our own time, the older imperial system was dismantled and a new “world system” set in its place, dominated by the so-called multinational corporations. This current moment of a “multinational” capitalism is uneasily balanced (after the disappearance of the Soviet Union) between the three centers of Europe, the United States, and Japan, each with its immense hinterland of satellite states. This third moment, whose convulsive stages of emergence were not really complete until the end of the Cold War (if then), is clearly far more “global” than the preceding age of imperialism. With the “deregulation” (so to speak) of the immense areas of India, Brazil, and Eastern Europe, there is a scope for the penetration of capital and the market qualitatively greater than in earlier stages of capitalism. Is this then to be considered the definitive achievement of what Marx prophesied as the world market, and thereby the final stage of capitalism—including, among other things, “the universal commodification of labor power”? It is to be doubted. The inner class dynamics of the new moment have scarcely had time to work themselves out, in particular the emergence of new forms of labor organization and political struggle appropriate to the scale at which “globalization” has transformed the world of business.

The production of radically new types of commodities. There is a second requirement for overcoming systemic crises: that is, the recourse to innovations and even “revolutions” in technology. Ernest Mandel makes these changes coincident with the stages just described: steam technology for the moment of national capitalism; electricity and the combustion engine for the moment of imperialism; atomic energy and the cybernetic for our own moment of multinational capitalism and globalization, which has come to be labeled by some as postmodernity. These technologies are both productive of new types of commodities and instrumental in opening up new world spaces, thus “shrinking” the globe and reorganizing capitalism according to a new scale. This is the sense in which characterizations of late capitalism in terms of information or cybernetics are appropriate (and very revealing culturally), but need to be recoupled with the economic dynamics from which they tend rather easily to be severed, rhetorically, intellectually, and ideologically.

If the overall lines of this periodization of capital are accepted, it becomes at once clear that the various “post-Marxisms” of, in particular, Bernstein at the turn of the last century or of poststructuralism in the 1980s, along with their posited “crisis” or “death” of Marxism, have been simultaneous with precisely those moments in which capitalism is restructured and prodigiously enlarged. And these in turn have been followed by various theoretical projects of more modern—or indeed in our time postmodern—Marxism attempting to theorize the new and unexpected dimensions taken on by its traditional object of study, capitalism as such.

Second Thesis
Socialism as a vision of freedom—freedom from unwanted and avoidable economic and material constraints, freedom for collective praxis—is in our time threatened on two ideological levels at once: that of “discursive struggle” (in the words of Stuart Hall) in an argument with worldwide Thatcherism about the market system; and that which plays on even deeper anti-Utopian anxieties and fears of change. The two levels clearly imply one another, insofar as the market argument presupposes a set of views about human nature which the anti-Utopian vision then rehearses in more apocalyptic and libidinal ways.

Discursive struggle (as opposed to outright ideological conflict) succeeds by way of discrediting its alternatives and rendering unmentionable a whole series of thematic topics. It appeals to trivialization, naiveté, material interest, “experience,” political fear, and historical lessons, as the “grounds” for decisively delegitimizing such formerly serious possibilities as nationalization, regulation, deficit spending, Keynesianism, planning, protection of national industries, the security net, and ultimately the welfare state itself. Identifying this last with socialism then allows market rhetoric to win a double victory, over liberals (in the U.S. usage, as in “New Deal liberals”) as well as the Left. The Left is thus today placed in the position of having to defend big government and the welfare state, something its elaborate and sophisticated traditions of the critique of social democracy make it embarrassing to do without a more dialectical understanding of history than much of that Left possesses. In particular, it is desirable to regain some sense of the way historical situations change, and the appropriate political and strategic responses along with them. But this also demands an engagement with the so-called end of history, that is, the fundamental ahistoricality of the postmodern in general.

Meanwhile, the anxieties associated with Utopia, which spring from the fear that everything that makes up our current identity and our current habits and forms of libidinal gratification would disappear under some new social dispensation, some radical change in the societal order, are now far more easily mobilizable than at other moments in the recent past. Evidently, at least in the richer half of the world and not only in the dominant strata, the hope for change of destitute people in the modern period has been replaced by the terror of loss. These anti-Utopian anxieties need to be addressed head on, in a kind of cultural diagnosis and therapy, and not evaded by way of consent to this or that feature of the general market argument and rhetoric. All arguments about human nature—that it is basically good and cooperative, or that it is evil and aggressive and requires the taming of the market, if not Leviathan—are “humanistic” and ideological (as Althusser taught us), and should be replaced by the perspective of radical change and the collective project. In the meantime, the left needs aggressively to defend big government and the welfare state, and to continuously attack market rhetoric on the basis of the historical record of the destructiveness of the free market (as Polyani theorized it and Eastern Europe demonstrates).

Third Thesis
But such arguments in their turn presuppose the taking of a position on what is surely the central concept in any Marxian “unity-of-theory-and-practice,” namely Revolution itself. This is the case because it is the untenability of that concept that is the principal exhibit in the post- or anti-Marxian arsenal. The defense of this concept, however, requires a number of preliminary preparations: in particular, we need to abandon to iconology everything that suggests that revolution is a punctual moment rather than an elaborate and complex process. For example, many of our most cherished iconic images of the various historical revolutions, such as the taking of the Winter Palace and the Tennis Court Oath, need to be set aside.

Social revolution is not a moment in time, but it can be affirmed in terms of the necessity of change in what is a synchronic system, in which everything holds together and is interrelated with everything else. Such a system then demands a kind of absolute systemic change, rather than piecemeal “reform,” which turns out to be what is in the pejorative sense “Utopian,” that is, illusory, not feasible. That is to say that the system demands the ideological vision of a radical social alternative to the existing social order, something which can no longer be taken for granted or inherited, under the state of current discursive struggle, but which demands reinvention. Religious fundamentalism (whether Islamic, Christian, or Hindu), that claims to offer a radical alternative to consumerism and “the American way of life,” only comes into significant being when the traditional Left alternatives, and in particular the great revolutionary traditions of Marxism and communism, have suddenly seemed unavailable.

We must imagine revolution—as something which is both a process and the undoing of a synchronic system—as a set of demands which can be triggered by a punctual or political event such as a Left victory in an electoral struggle or the dismantling of colonial authority, but which then take the form of wider and wider popular diffusion and radicalization. These waves of new popular demands, which emerge from ever deeper layers of the hitherto silenced and deprived population, then radicalize even an ostensibly left government and force ever more decisive transformations on the state. The nation (but in our time the world, as well) is then polarized in the classical dichotomous fashion in which everyone, however reluctantly, must take sides. The question of violence is then necessarily posed: if the process is not really a social revolution it does not necessarily have to be accompanied by violence. But if it is, then the previously dominant side of the dichotomy will of necessity have recourse to violent resistance, and in that sense alone, then, violence (however undesirable) is the outward sign or visible symptom that a a genuinely social revolutionary process is in course.

The more basic issue raised here is thus not whether the concept of revolution is still viable, but rather that of national autonomy. We must ask whether, in the world system today, it is possible for any segment of integrated sections to uncouple and delink (to use Samir Amin’s term) and then to pursue a different kind of social development and a radically different type of collective project.

Fourth Thesis
The collapse of the Soviet Union was not due to the failure of communism but rather to the success of communism, provided one understands this last, as the West generally does, as a mere strategy of modernization. For it is by way of rapid modernization that the Soviet Union was thought, even fifteen years ago, virtually to have caught up with the West (an officially anxiety-provoking perspective we can scarcely remember any longer).

Three further propositions need to be affirmed in connection with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The first is that internal social and political disintegration is part of a larger world-wide pattern in the 1980s which has enveloped in a structural corruption both the West (Reaganism and Thatcherism, other parallel forms in Italy and France) and the Arab countries (what Hisham Sharabi calls “neopatriarchy”). It would be misleading to explain causally this structural corruption in moral terms as it springs from the quite material social process of the accumulation of wealth unproductively in the very top layers of these societies. It has become clear that this stagnation is intimately related to what has been known as finance capital as it distances itself and diverges from its origin in production. Giovanni Arrighi has shown that the various moments of capital all seem to know a final stage in which production passes over into speculation, in which value parts from its origin in production and is exchanged more abstractly (something not without its cultural consequences as well).

It must also be stressed that categories like those of efficiency, productivity, and fiscal solvency are comparative ones, that is to say, their consequences come into play only in a field in which several unequal phenomena are competing. More efficient and productive technique drives out older machinery and older plant only when the latter enters its forcefield and thereby offers or is challenged to compete.

This leads us to the third point, namely that the Soviet Union “became” inefficient and collapsed when it attempted to integrate itself into a world system that was passing from its modernizing to its postmodern stage, a system that by its new rules of operation was therefore running at an incomparably higher rate of “productivity” than anything inside the Soviet sphere. Driven by cultural motives (consumerism, the newer information technologies, etc.), drawn in by calculated military-technological competition, by the bait of the debt, and intensifying forms of commercial coexistence, Soviet society entered an element in which it could not survive. It may be claimed that the Soviet Union and its satellites, hitherto isolated in their own specific pressure area as under some ideological and socioeconomic geodesic dome, now began imprudently to open the airlocks without spacesuits prepared and thus to allow themselves and their institutions to be subjected to the infinitely more intense pressures characteristic of the world outside. The result can be imagined as comparable to what the sheer blast pressures did to the flimsy structures in the immediate vicinity of the first atomic bomb; or to the grotesque and deforming weight of water pressure at the bottom of the sea on unprotected organisms evolved for the upper air. Indeed, this result confirms Wallerstein’s prescient warning that the Soviet bloc, despite its importance, did not constitute an alternative system to that of capitalism, but merely an antisystemic space or zone within it, one now evidently blown away, with only a few surviving pockets in which various socialist experiments are still able to continue.

Fifth Thesis
The Marxisms (the political movements as well as the forms of intellectual and theoretical resistance) that emerge from the present system of late capitalism, from postmodernity, from Mandel’s third stage of informational or multinational capitalism, will necessarily be distinct from those that developed during the modern period, the second stage, the age of imperialism. They will have a radically different relationship to globalization and will also, by contrast to earlier Marxisms, appear to be more cultural in character, turning fundamentally on those phenomena hitherto known as commodity reification and consumerism.

The increasing significance of culture for both the political and the economic is not a consequence of the tendential separation or differentiation of these realms, but rather of the more universal saturation and penetration of commodification itself, which has now been able to colonize large zones of that cultural area hitherto sheltered from it and indeed for the most part hostile to and inconsistent with its logic. The fact that culture has today largely become business has as a consequence that most of what used to be considered specifically economic and commercial has also become cultural, a characterization under which the various diagnoses of so-called image society or consumerism need to be subsumed.

And in a more general way Marxism enjoys a theoretical advantage in such analysis, namely that its conception of commodification is a structural and a non-moralizing one. Moral passion generates political action, but only of the most ephemeral kind, quickly absorbed and recontained and little inclined to share its specific issues and topics with other movements. But it is only by way of such amalgamation and construction that political movements can develop and grow more extensive. Indeed, I am tempted to make the point the other way around, that a moralizing politics tends to develop where a structural cognition and mapping of society is blocked. The influence of the religious and the ethnic today is to be grasped as a rage at the perception of the failure of socialism, and a desperate blind attempt to fill that vacuum with new motivations.

As for consumerism, it may well be hoped that it will turn out to have been as historically significant as it was necessary for human society to pass through the experience of consumerism as a way of life, if only in order more consciously to choose something radically different in its place. But for most of the world the addictions of consumerism will not be objectively available; it then seems possible that the prescient diagnosis of the radical theory of the 1960s—that capitalism was itself a revolutionary force in the way in which it produced new needs and desires that the system could not satisfy—will now find its realization on the global scale of the new world system.

On a theoretical level, it may be suggested that the currently urgent issues of permanent structural unemployment, of financial speculation and ungovernable capital movements, of the image society, are all profoundly interrelated on the level of what might be called their lack of content, their abstraction (as opposed to what another age might have termed their “alienation”). The more paradoxical level of the dialectic is met when we rejoin issues of globalization and informatization. There is a seemingly intransigent dilemma when the political and ideological possibilities of the new world networks (on the left as well as in business or on the right) are then coupled with the loss of autonomy in the world system today and the impossibility for any national or regional area to achieve its own autonomy and subsistence or to delink or uncouple itself from the world market. Intellectuals cannot find a way through this passage by the mere taking of a thought. It is the ripening of structural contradictions in reality that produce the dawning anticipation of new possibilities: yet we can at least keep this very dilemma alive by “cleaving to the negative” as Hegel might have said, by keeping alive that place from which the new can be expected, unexpectedly, to emerge.

https://mronline.org/2024/09/26/five-th ... g-marxism/

[blindpig]

Global Marxism: Decolonisation and revolutionary politics
Originally published: Marxist Sociology on September 17, 2024 by Simin Fadaee (more by Marxist Sociology) | (Posted Oct 09, 2024)

For much of the twentieth century, Marx’s ideas inspired anti-colonialism and other movements for social justice worldwide. Although Marx did not theorise revolution in non-European contexts, the application of his methods by southern revolutionaries in various contexts led to the development of Global Marxism, an indigenised Marxism adapted to local contexts.

This indigenised Marxism has helped southern revolutionaries topple states and reorder social life after victorious revolutions or national liberation struggles. Alternatively, it has significantly influenced the political and intellectual history of countries in the global South. Yet, Marx has been repeatedly accused of Eurocentrism, and some have referred to Marxism as a white European model for social transformation and emancipation, which does not resonate with the majority world outside Europe and North America.

In Global Marxism: Decolonisation and Revolutionary Politics, I show that Marxism has never been Eurocentric. In the introduction, I demonstrate that Marx himself had a global outlook in his analysis and critique of the political economy. However, critiques fail to account for the scope of Marx’s work and tend to reduce him to a certain period, publication, or even a few lines of text. More importantly, they ignore global Marxism and its enduring influence on the global South.

In the main chapters of the book, I discuss nine revolutionary figures: Jawaharlal Nehru, Hồ Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, Kwame Nkrumah, Amílcar Cabral, Franz Fanon, Ernesto Che Guevara, Ali Shariati, and Subcomandante Marcos. These figures cover various regions of the Global South: Asia (China, India, and Vietnam), Africa (Algeria, Guinea-Bissau, Ghana), Latin America (Cuba and Mexico), and the Middle East (Iran).

I underline the place of Marxism in the accounts of these revolutionaries and the outstanding anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist struggles that swept across the global South in the twentieth century. I discuss various ways in which their engagement with Marxism helped them mobilise support and ultimately succeed in hard-fought struggles. I also show how and to what extent these figures contributed to Marxism. Their creative engagement not only localised and indigenised Marxism but also globalised it. Importantly, the impact of each revolutionary extends beyond a single country to a region, continent, and to the world.

Moreover, I have illustrated that despite local adaptations, Marxism has remained a coherent set of ideas as it developed historically and spread geographically. None of the figures failed to emphasize the importance of economic relations in underpinning structures of dominance, inequality, and exploitation. In each context, Marxism offered a methodology that enabled the revolutionaries to link the local and national to the global. Some of the figures focused on practical aspects of building socialism. A clear circulation of ideas and practices is apparent in global Marxism while internationalism has been its cornerstone.

There are unlimited examples of Marxism’s impact on the world and social struggles. Nevertheless, this book shows that a very substantial and continuous engagement with Marxism has come from the global South and by people involved in actual political struggles, who found in Marxism a powerful framework that helped understand and change the world. The task is up to us to engage with the ideas of these revolutionaries to determine their contemporary relevance as theoretical and practical blueprints of emancipation and liberation. Ultimately, the challenges of our times are not discontinuous from the pressures and hurdles faced by Nehru, Mao, and Guevara.

The issues addressed by the revolutionaries discussed in the book remain extremely relevant today: combating imperialism, inequality, poverty, hunger, violence, and injustice. Moreover, through their views and work emerged a noble vision for the future of different nations and regions, a vision that is still cherished by many and has laid the foundations on which present politics and struggle have acted. This point is very significant in that it addresses the most challenging question of our time: creating a viable alternative to capitalism. This does not mean that the works and ideas presented here can immediately provide an answer for an alternative vision, but they can inspire and energize those of us in search of an alternative vision.

The past two decades have seen an enormous number of mass protests around economic issues and, more recently, an escalation in labour disputes. Meanwhile, we have witnessed the rise of right-wing nationalist movements, which at times, in a terrifying manner, resemble fascism. In addition, the unprecedented climate crisis and its horrifying impact on humans and non-humans have made the limits and contradictions of global capitalism more apparent than ever. The violence in Palestine has convinced millions of people around the world that an urgent response is required. This unsettling conjuncture provides a possibility for the revival of Marxian thought and practice.

This book adds to the growing call to reconnect with Marxism as a framework for analysing global capitalism’s multiple crises and the prospects for revolutionary change, but also as the basis for reimagining a different world beyond capitalism.

https://mronline.org/2024/10/09/global-marxism/