About labor motivation
Spontaneous discussions about the motivation for work and the necessity of certain types of work are increasingly common among proletarians. According to the British statistics center YouGov, in 2024 in Britain alone, 53% of workers in the “financial services” sector said that their field of work makes no contribution to social development.
Liberal propagandists spread the image of a successful and motivated person by market standards. A person who is motivated above all by money, by the "good life". But it would be fair to note that in essence, the majority of popular leftist organizations with "revolutionarily loud", communist names have not gone far in their agitation. They have not yet managed to raise the consciousness of at least the most advanced proletarians of market countries to a qualitatively new level, other than the struggle for higher wages, increased income and consumer criticism of capitalism. That is, the majority of these organizations are fighting for higher wages and increased income under the market system, so that the proletarian can "work, live well and not deny himself anything", thereby reducing the motivation for labor activity to the level of interest in "having money".
It is impossible to gain scientific authority without setting the task of qualitatively increasing the level of consciousness of the proletarians of mental and physical labor, but only by constantly denouncing capitalism due to the decline in income levels. Therefore, high-quality propaganda of the scientific worldview (Marxism) is relevant. Only proletarians who have raised their consciousness to the level of Marxists, and then communists, are capable of ensuring the connection of the mass proletarian movement with Marxism. Efforts must be aimed at developing a scientific worldview in individuals! Including, in the long term, a whole motivation at the level of the need to change the social system, the liberation of productive forces . As Marx wrote, the point is to change the world, not to explain it.
Motivation of labor activity under capitalism
Since the absolute economic law of capitalism is the thirst for maximum profits, society does not develop according to scientifically substantiated necessity. Human labor activity, mediated by hiring, is subordinated to and serves the economic law of maximum profit. The motive in this case is generated by the circumstances of a market society - this is money, which provides access to the means and joys of life.
What is motivation?
"The word motive is accepted in literature to designate a particular subjective motivating attitude formed in the psyche of individuals under the influence of both natural factors, physiology, conditions of social existence, and the ideological superstructure. The content of these motives depends mainly on the ratio of ideologically formulated postulates and scientifically obtained truths, on the ratio of church and secular education, on the ratio of public and private mass media and the education systems of the population and the "elites" (Podguzov " On the Motives of Human Activity ").
The development of human motivation should be considered historically, that is, how it was formed during different periods of human development. The motivation for labor activity under capitalism, as in previous exploitative formations, is based on reflexes, instincts, interests, faith and incentives. This motivation mainly consists of simple messages that arise without the participation of analytical abilities, at the level of everyday thinking. Such motives, as a rule, are hunger, cold, poverty and the interest in earning more. Labor in exploitative societies is, if not a curse, then a heavy burden.
The motivation of labor under capitalism is in most cases a combination of motives at the unconscious and everyday levels. But how will things stand after the working class takes power?
Motivation of labor activity under communism, development of motivation of exploitative formation to motivation under the highest phase of communism
Under socialism (the lower phase of communism), labor activity is aimed at producing social wealth, at satisfying the ever-growing material and cultural needs of the entire society. Since the higher phase of communism cannot be introduced at the snap of a finger, the role of the subjective factor is very important, namely the party, which leads the people to communism, and not to "developed socialism". After the working class takes power and socialization, state policy will be aimed at organizing production and distribution scientifically, within the framework of the objective needs of society and its development (priority of production of means of production, energy, infrastructure to ensure expanded reproduction and the creation of conditions for the development of each individual). At first, due to the inevitable class struggle, the fight against remnants and commodity production, people will still be stimulated to work by the same methods, i.e., through material stimulation. But it must be taken into account that it will be associated with enhanced EDUCATION OF ALL MEMBERS OF SOCIETY , a cultural revolution. Only the growth of Marxist education will allow us to recognize the necessity of the transition to mature communism.
"...The current motivation is sufficient to carry out for some time what is commonly called the construction of socialism. But, as historical practice has shown, these motives are absolutely insufficient for a real and guaranteed movement toward communism to occur" (ibid.).
The expanded participation of society in the upbringing of a person from an early age will be aimed at his comprehensive development. After all, the acquisition by the majority of members of society of all the valuable knowledge that humanity has developed is one of the most important prerequisites for the transition to communism.
"When we often hear attacks on the old school, both among representatives of the youth and among some defenders of the new education, that the old school was a school of cramming, we tell them that we must take what was good in the old school. We must not take from the old school that which burdened the memory of a young person with an immeasurable amount of knowledge, nine-tenths unnecessary and one-tenth distorted, but this does not mean that we can limit ourselves to communist conclusions and learn only communist slogans. Communism cannot be created this way. One can become a communist only when one has enriched one's memory with knowledge of all the riches that humanity has produced" (Lenin).
The organization of labor itself at the highest stage of communism will correspond to the needs of the development of society. A balance will be achieved between rest, work and education. Under the condition of automation (and somewhere even liquidation due to uselessness) of dull and monotonous labor, a planned retraining of workers in a particular industry will be carried out with the simultaneous possibility of realizing their talents in practice. An individual will voluntarily work and realize himself for the benefit of society, mastering two or three professions in his life.
“In the second phase of communist society, the amount of labor expended on the production of products will be measured not in a roundabout way, not through the medium of value and its forms, as is the case with commodity production, but directly and immediately – by the amount of time, the number of hours spent on the production of products” (Stalin, “Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR”).
"Law dies away completely when society implements the rule: "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," i.e. when people become so accustomed to observing the basic rules of community life and when their labor is so productive that they voluntarily work according to their abilities. "The narrow horizon of bourgeois law," which forces one to calculate, with the callousness of Shylock, not to work an extra half hour more than another, not to receive less pay than another - this narrow horizon will then be crossed. The distribution of products will then not require society to standardize the amount of products received by each; everyone will freely take according to his needs" (Lenin, "State and Revolution").
"As for the distribution of labor, the distribution of labor between the branches of production will be regulated not by the law of value, which will lose its force by that time, but by the growth of society's needs for products. This will be a society where production will be regulated by the needs of society, and taking into account the needs of society will acquire primary significance for planning bodies" (Stalin).
The principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" will also be implemented and the antagonism of the division of labor will be eliminated. Under communism, a person will finally stop being chained to one profession his entire life.
The systematic construction of communism, the saturation of people's consciousness with a scientific worldview will inevitably eradicate in them the instincts and habits that caused disgust for work and the motivation to grab more. As was written earlier, human motivation develops depending on certain historical conditions. As society moves toward the highest phase of communism, the motivation for work will necessarily develop from the level of interest, incentive to the level of awareness of necessity (through the training of each member of society, the development of his skills and the disclosure of talents). The upbringing of a person will play a decisive role. Under communism, a person's psychological need for work will be associated with social necessity, for example, the need to explore the ocean, space, solve environmental, medical, and production problems.
Thus, the transition from the spontaneity of social development to conscious scientific development, the final separation from the animal world, occurs.
"Like any living matter, society develops through interaction with nature, but in addition to this, being the highest form of matter, it is fighting for its separation from the animal world. The interaction with the external environment in society has developed to a controlled and goal-oriented exchange of substances and energies with nature for the purpose of its transformation, that is, to collective labor" (Yan Dubov).
The motivation for work under communism will be developed to the level of awareness of necessity, and will become a denial of those incentives and instincts that have developed in class society. The basis of such motivation will be the acquisition of a scientific worldview. After overcoming the exploitation of man by man and private property relations, but not only. And in its full form, it is possible as the motivation of real communists.
Jane V.
02/19/2025
https://prorivists.org/102_mot/
Google Translator
Ideology
Re: Ideology
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Ideology
On the main reasons for the emergence and some ways of overcoming disagreements in the systems of scientific centralism
Among the supporters of democratic centralism, there is an opinion that disagreements are normal and even good. They supposedly flow into a discussion, a debate, in which truth is born. This is not so. No truth was born in a debate. Truth is achieved as a result of painstaking scientific research . Contrasting opinions, hypotheses, concepts, assumptions is only an element of scientific research. If truth is born in a debate, then only in a debate with oneself.
So, if disagreement develops, it only proves the scientific immaturity of the team . If disagreements flow into disputes, then organizational immaturity .
Moreover, disagreements are inevitable in themselves, the question is how to deal with them. And most importantly: why does disagreement develop into an argument, a squabble, a conflict? There can only be one reason - organizational opportunism .
What is organizational opportunism? In rare cases, it is a conscious diversion. Usually, it is an unconscious adaptation of views, actions, and activities in a group to suit some convenience. And convenience is dictated by two things. First, by petty-bourgeois psychology, which everyone under capitalism is inevitably infected with to one degree or another. Or, one could say, by counterrevolutionary character traits that arise if one does not control oneself, does not retrain, does not re-educate. Second, by the objective conditions of bourgeois society in which the opportunist exists, or, to put it more simply, by the benefit, interests, and passions of a person.
This is how the class essence of organizational opportunism manifests itself in most cases.
This can be easily observed in numerous leftist communities. The organizational opportunism of typical leftists who group together does not allow them to stop being a product of capitalist society. At each steep political turn, capitalism seems to bear fruit with young leftists. They gather in groups, study something, discuss, try to play at class struggle, but at the same time do not want to take communism seriously. All their activity looks more like a hobby. Then their enthusiasm fades, and most of them run away. If something more or less stable, organizationally significant is formed, then bourgeois forces mediate such groups. Then a new wave and everything repeats itself again. Even the strongest and most consistent leftists are unable to form at least the rudiments of a Bolshevik-type party. Mainly because of organizational opportunism.
It is necessary to understand the following. Despite the fact that some aspects of community life even under capitalism contain the rudiments of communism, the spontaneously arising forms of relations between people in any class society do not fully meet the requirements of a communist party organization . Even the best of them have birthmarks, traditions and habits of slavery and hucksterism. That is why after Marx's scientific discovery of the inevitability of communism, the organizational question objectively became the main one in Marxism . Class struggle only becomes victorious when people are properly organized, first of all in a party. This is a clear manifestation of the law of human activity, understandable to everyone: first it is necessary to set a goal (communism), then develop methods and means of achieving it (the proletariat organized by the party into the working class, its dictatorship).
Lenin and Stalin, the geniuses of the revolution, initially used the forms of relations developed under tsarism by the revolutionary, democratic movement both within the proletariat and within the party. In the first case, this was the spontaneously formed form of the Soviets, in the second, democratic centralism (elected leadership, decision-making by voting, statutory discipline with the rights and obligations of members). However, as they defeated opportunism, they filled these forms with other content.
It is obvious that already in the 1930s the Bolshevik Party was not a democratic organization whose policies were determined by elections and voting, but a single disciplined organism headed by a leader .
In fact, the principles of that very Stalinization of the party, which allowed the Soviet people to solve the most incredible historical problems, were developed by Lenin within the framework of his faction and party team. Stalin, being Lenin's student, worked in the Leninist way. As a result of the victory over the revisionists and opportunists, who naturally degenerated into enemies of communism, he spread Lenin's principles of scientific centralism to the entire party. And, by the way, all these Trotskys, Zinovievs, Bukharins, Rykovs, as well as the Khrushchevs and Gorbachevs later, were inveterate organizational opportunists, squealing about leaderism and the suppression of party democracy.
Of course, one can preach elfism and believe, as yet another prominent left-wing blogger writes, that under Stalin, workers governed the country, and the General Secretary himself only signed papers:
"Stalin participated in the discussion of economic, political, administrative issues. He signed the most important documents. But it is important to understand that decisions were made democratically in the interests of the workers."
But with such false historiography, not only is it impossible to create a party or take power, any person with life experience will laugh at it.
If the most common cause of organizational opportunism is petty-bourgeois psychology, then the main reason preventing its overcoming is false ideas about the order of relationships in a collective of communists, in a communist organization. This is where disagreements become a problem.
At the dawn of the formation of Bolshevism, a formalistic, statutory approach prevailed. Party work was perceived by the majority as a type of official duty. The rights and obligations of a party member generally formulated the way of life in the collective.
Let me remind you that the Mensheviks were against considering only those who worked in the party as members. Today it sounds strange, but that was the reality of the democratic, revolutionary movement of that time. Back then, even seasoned revolutionaries had to prove the obvious truths. Probably, the Mensheviks of 1903 would have fainted if they were shown what the party of victorious communism had become, for example, by the 19th Congress. And those who lived in exile until the 1950s did nothing but denounce Stalinism, leaderism, centralization, and the like.
Consequently, the history of Bolshevism is the history of the decline of the dynamics of discussions, factionalism, disagreements and the increase of scientific unanimity, discipline, centralism . Is it necessary to remind about the role of pluralism, glasnost, democracy in the destruction of the CPSU?
Few would argue that relations within the party must be a prototype of communist relations. It cannot be otherwise, because communists are fighting to build communism, and communism is, first of all, a new quality of relations between people, and not only production relations (although this is the main thing). Naturally, the most important relations for the cause of communism are party relations, relations between revolutionaries must be even more progressive than the production relations of the communism of the future.
Therefore, we take the definition of communist labor and apply it to party work.
Communist labor is free, voluntary work for the benefit of society, not regulated by coercion or authority; free labor, widely organized for the needs of the entire country .
"We call communism such a system when people get used to fulfilling social duties without special apparatuses of coercion, when free work for the common good becomes a universal phenomenon... But there is nothing communist in our economic system yet. The "communist" begins only when subbotniks appear, i.e. free labor of individuals for the common good on a large scale, not standardized by any authority, any state. This is not help to a neighbor, which has always existed in the village, but labor that produces for the needs of the state, organized on a large scale and free of charge" (Lenin).
The party work of a communist, therefore, is the free, voluntary work of a revolutionary, aimed at realizing the goals of the communist struggle . Here everything is clear: sincerity, conscientiousness, responsibility, self-sacrifice are the main qualitative criteria of a person's attitude to party work. Only such work can become a matter of honor, glory, valor and heroism.
It is not about party members having to eat the sun and be absolute ascetics. Especially in the current market conditions or in the conditions of the first phase of communism. The point is different: a communist works in the party, fights for the construction of a communist society not for money, but because such are his convictions, according to his conscience.
In other words, party work for a communist is not just a hobby or service, but a life’s work, a calling .
Not only supporters of Breakthrough, but also many leftists will generally agree with this.
The question now is how the relations between communists in an organization, a party, should look. As is well known, the theory of scientific centralism, which is a generalization of the organizational experience of Bolshevism, taking into account the degradation of the CPSU and the realities of the modern communist movement, answers this question.
Since we are talking about disagreements in scientific centralism, which become a means of disintegration of the collective and the organization, the essence of this problem comes down to unanimity. It is the central element of the most important principle of scientific centralism of decision-making:
“Develop solutions exclusively through scientific research, by achieving scientific unanimity, first of all, in the party’s governing bodies” ( Brief Theses of the Scientific Center ).
And further regarding achieving unanimity:
“There is no doubt that, in its ideal form, unanimity is achieved through the independent, fruitful development by each dialectically versed comrade of a system of objective truths that form the party’s worldview” (“ On Some Aspects of Achieving Unanimity ”).
Practice has shown that some supporters of scientific centralism in their understanding of unanimity get stuck on such an “ideal view”. They believe that every scientific centralist is a ready-made theorist on the level of Marx. Such a “romantic” position exists until the first serious disagreement. First with comrades, and then with the leadership.
For some reason, some people think that scientific centralism is about a community of equally great freethinking dialectical mathematicians. They supposedly each, independently of each other, come to absolutely identical conclusions on all issues because they are guided by scientific methodology. In reality, this does not happen.
It would be a good idea to choose the model of friendly relations between Marx and Engels as a model for the party. If all members of the PNC treated each other the same way as Marx and Engels (given the circumstances, of course), such a union would be invincible for centuries. But even in the pair of two geniuses, Marx and Engels, there was no equality. Engels, despite the division of labor between them, recognized Marx's intellectual authority.
And there is nothing shameful about this, since there can be no competition, rivalry or envy between real communists. If you are gnawed by such feelings, you are not yet a communist.
The relationship between Lenin and Stalin was generally that of a teacher and a student, that is, a priori unequal.
Consequently, the recipes for overcoming disagreements proposed in the article "On Some Aspects of Achieving Unanimity" also suffer from a shortcoming in this sense: as if the comradely collective of scientific centralists is a collective of equal subjects. And with such a premise, in the event of persistent disagreement, opportunistic, it has no adequate resolution.
There is also a popular conception according to which equal parties to a disagreement present their arguments and convince the collective. This may work one time out of a hundred. Such ideas are divorced from reality, from the circumstances and conditions of class struggle. In essence, it is an echo of the same democracy, since it assumes something like a vote ("I support / I do not support").
I have a completely different understanding of the role and place of disagreement and the procedure for ensuring scientific unanimity.
Firstly , disagreements can be of two types. Either it is disagreement between ordinary employees, or it is disagreement with the management.
By the way, if there are disagreements in the leadership, then we are not dealing with scientific centralism.
Secondly , disagreements between ordinary employees should not be ignored by management, which is obliged to resolve them. Such disagreements should be discussed with more experienced comrades at the stage of initial disagreement. That is, to put it simply, if someone notices mistakes and opportunism in a comrade, it is necessary not to rush to argue with him, but to bring the problem up for discussion with management.
Therefore, there is no need to indulge in illusions based on a groundless sense of personal exclusivity. The most competent comrades, and not a group or individual theorists equal to each other, develop solutions through scientific research.
The most competent comrades are engaged in organizational work, including the elimination of disagreements. Namely: they point out mistakes, explain, control and draw organizational conclusions up to and including expulsion.
The most competent comrades represent the leadership, the core personnel, the leaders.
In our particular case, it is the founder and chief theorist of the journal "Proryv" - V. A. Podguzov. It was around his figure that the collective of breakthroughs was formed, it was he who illuminated the path to scientific centralism for us. It is simply absurd to deny this.
And the problem of "achieving scientific unanimity" does not lie at all in the plane of communication between Marxists. It lies exclusively in the plane of working on oneself to study the problematic and correctly understand in a specific case the scientific research that has been done by the leaders.
The problem of unanimity in any conflict of disagreement, discord is the problem of understanding the position of the management by those who disagree, and nothing else. If someone believes that the management is insolvent, then what kind of scientific centralism is this? Such a person should immediately break ties with the team, the organization, and express their disagreement outside.
Further. Persuasion as a method has two sides. The productive side of persuasion is re- persuading a person. The counterproductive side of persuasion is the transition to polemics, discussion, debate and conflict. It is almost impossible to return from a dispute to persuasion. Therefore, persuasion should be practiced in moderation. The ground of persuasion is especially shaky when the matter is already heading towards a conflict. Therefore, it is much more productive and reliable to force yourself to abandon your opinion at least for a while and accept the position of an authoritative comrade, and then think it over again in order to correctly understand and grasp all the subtleties .
Some will say: we are being offered the principle of the infallibility of leaders. Someone will definitely shout from behind the stove about sectarianism and fanaticism.
In reality, we have united around the ideas of "Proriv", the ideas of Podguzov, and we are following this path not academically, following bare theory, but collectively, as an organization. Who should guide us if not Podguzov? What can we achieve without relying on the leadership and opinions of the most experienced and competent comrades?
The thing is that disagreements, disagreements and, in general, the subject of any minor polemics in a group of Marxists, especially scientific centralists, arise far from the sphere of the main question of philosophy or everything that worries typical leftists. This is either the sphere of tactical decisions and approaches, or organizational and personnel issues. These things will always be determined by the leadership in any case. There is no point in doing anything other than expressing your thoughts on a specific issue, discussing it, doing it. Gain authority, lead people, become a leader, take responsibility and decide.
A democratic organization disguises the struggle of different forces and opinions within itself through voting. A scientifically centralist organization initially follows the path of the dictatorship of truth and disguises nothing. If the truth is not established, then it is not scientific centralism.
I am sure that the following thought may seem unpleasant to someone, but adequate initiative, expressing your opinion that differs from the management should not develop into persistent attempts to impose your position . It is enough to speak out once and, if you are still pointed out that you are wrong, work on correctly and deeply understanding the management's position, or... break with it.
So, the thesis below should be understood in this light, in my opinion.
"To recognize as the internal law of the party's life the strictest discipline based on the mobilization of party conscience, on comradeship, excluding competition and careerism in any form. The norm of behavior of a party member should be initiative, born of the comrade's inner conviction of his scientific maturity, competence, and readiness to bear personal responsibility for his suitability for the post he occupies. The main criterion for the nomination of a comrade for leadership work by the party collective should be his competence, confirmed by the practical results of his personal propaganda, agitation, and organization" (Brief Theses of the NC).
Independence and initiative must be demonstrated in education without any restrictions.
And on the other hand. You should insist on your own until the management conducts a reasonable, calm study of the problem. As soon as administrative measures follow, you need to leave.
As you can see, such an understanding of scientific centralism does not exclude taking into account the opinions and positions of all comrades. That is, it is, of course, necessary to convey your thoughts and considerations freely and honestly, and first of all to the leadership.
Can we say that scientific centralism is a leaderism? In the liberal-democratic and Trotskyist-Khrushchev-Gorbachev understanding, of course, it is a terrible, terrible leaderism. You can call it whatever you want, but the task of communists is to ensure that the party acts as a single whole, as a single organism, is held together by a common will and unity of action. It is clear that leaderism, when everyone is as one, when “We say Lenin, we mean the party, we say the party, we mean Lenin” and so on, is the ideal, most effective option.
Generally speaking, this is how any organization works. It's just that in a democratic organization there are several such small leaderisms, and it goes with difficulty in the direction of the strongest group at the moment or some hastily put together coalition. Although voting, the will of the majority taking into account the opinion of the minority and all that sort of thing are formally observed.
Can we say that the scientific nature of a position is replaced by subordination in this case? Only in appearance. The fact is that the scientific nature of a position is objective , it is tested by practice and in practice it gives either a positive, victorious result or a negative one. Some have the power of logic to establish the scientific nature of a position, others do not. But everyone is equal before practice.
So the fundamental question here is whether the leaders you followed are right in general. If they are right, then you will have to obey regardless of what it seems like in particular matters. If they are wrong, then you need to break off relations.
“ A friendly dialogue that excludes competition and duplicity, instead of the traditional stimulation of discussions ” is something that is supported and managed from above, with recognition of the discipline and authority of the leadership.
All of the above is not just intellectualism. The position is based on my personal experience of being under the leadership of V. A. Podguzov. I always sincerely express my point of view (or say that I do not have one on the issue), I always carefully think through and listen to the position of my comrades, I always accept for implementation what V. A. Podguzov says. And it always turns out that the initial doubts or even disagreements are shattered by practice. It turns out that a smarter person produces more adequate solutions.
Intellectuals in the bad sense will exclaim: "But what if Podguzov is wrong and leads us in the wrong direction?" Everything is simple. Firstly , we can only go somewhere together, so everyone is free to lead or follow someone else. Secondly , if you go in the wrong direction, then suddenly you will arrive in the wrong direction. The question is not in identifying the wrong course, but in saving the collective from the corrupting idiocy and the practice of democracy. In order to move towards communism, we need not only the theory of Marxism-Leninism, but also leaders and discipline to connect it with the movement of the proletarian masses. This is an axiom of communist revolution.
Redin
02/20/2025
https://prorivists.org/102_disagreement/
Google Translator
Among the supporters of democratic centralism, there is an opinion that disagreements are normal and even good. They supposedly flow into a discussion, a debate, in which truth is born. This is not so. No truth was born in a debate. Truth is achieved as a result of painstaking scientific research . Contrasting opinions, hypotheses, concepts, assumptions is only an element of scientific research. If truth is born in a debate, then only in a debate with oneself.
So, if disagreement develops, it only proves the scientific immaturity of the team . If disagreements flow into disputes, then organizational immaturity .
Moreover, disagreements are inevitable in themselves, the question is how to deal with them. And most importantly: why does disagreement develop into an argument, a squabble, a conflict? There can only be one reason - organizational opportunism .
What is organizational opportunism? In rare cases, it is a conscious diversion. Usually, it is an unconscious adaptation of views, actions, and activities in a group to suit some convenience. And convenience is dictated by two things. First, by petty-bourgeois psychology, which everyone under capitalism is inevitably infected with to one degree or another. Or, one could say, by counterrevolutionary character traits that arise if one does not control oneself, does not retrain, does not re-educate. Second, by the objective conditions of bourgeois society in which the opportunist exists, or, to put it more simply, by the benefit, interests, and passions of a person.
This is how the class essence of organizational opportunism manifests itself in most cases.
This can be easily observed in numerous leftist communities. The organizational opportunism of typical leftists who group together does not allow them to stop being a product of capitalist society. At each steep political turn, capitalism seems to bear fruit with young leftists. They gather in groups, study something, discuss, try to play at class struggle, but at the same time do not want to take communism seriously. All their activity looks more like a hobby. Then their enthusiasm fades, and most of them run away. If something more or less stable, organizationally significant is formed, then bourgeois forces mediate such groups. Then a new wave and everything repeats itself again. Even the strongest and most consistent leftists are unable to form at least the rudiments of a Bolshevik-type party. Mainly because of organizational opportunism.
It is necessary to understand the following. Despite the fact that some aspects of community life even under capitalism contain the rudiments of communism, the spontaneously arising forms of relations between people in any class society do not fully meet the requirements of a communist party organization . Even the best of them have birthmarks, traditions and habits of slavery and hucksterism. That is why after Marx's scientific discovery of the inevitability of communism, the organizational question objectively became the main one in Marxism . Class struggle only becomes victorious when people are properly organized, first of all in a party. This is a clear manifestation of the law of human activity, understandable to everyone: first it is necessary to set a goal (communism), then develop methods and means of achieving it (the proletariat organized by the party into the working class, its dictatorship).
Lenin and Stalin, the geniuses of the revolution, initially used the forms of relations developed under tsarism by the revolutionary, democratic movement both within the proletariat and within the party. In the first case, this was the spontaneously formed form of the Soviets, in the second, democratic centralism (elected leadership, decision-making by voting, statutory discipline with the rights and obligations of members). However, as they defeated opportunism, they filled these forms with other content.
It is obvious that already in the 1930s the Bolshevik Party was not a democratic organization whose policies were determined by elections and voting, but a single disciplined organism headed by a leader .
In fact, the principles of that very Stalinization of the party, which allowed the Soviet people to solve the most incredible historical problems, were developed by Lenin within the framework of his faction and party team. Stalin, being Lenin's student, worked in the Leninist way. As a result of the victory over the revisionists and opportunists, who naturally degenerated into enemies of communism, he spread Lenin's principles of scientific centralism to the entire party. And, by the way, all these Trotskys, Zinovievs, Bukharins, Rykovs, as well as the Khrushchevs and Gorbachevs later, were inveterate organizational opportunists, squealing about leaderism and the suppression of party democracy.
Of course, one can preach elfism and believe, as yet another prominent left-wing blogger writes, that under Stalin, workers governed the country, and the General Secretary himself only signed papers:
"Stalin participated in the discussion of economic, political, administrative issues. He signed the most important documents. But it is important to understand that decisions were made democratically in the interests of the workers."
But with such false historiography, not only is it impossible to create a party or take power, any person with life experience will laugh at it.
If the most common cause of organizational opportunism is petty-bourgeois psychology, then the main reason preventing its overcoming is false ideas about the order of relationships in a collective of communists, in a communist organization. This is where disagreements become a problem.
At the dawn of the formation of Bolshevism, a formalistic, statutory approach prevailed. Party work was perceived by the majority as a type of official duty. The rights and obligations of a party member generally formulated the way of life in the collective.
Let me remind you that the Mensheviks were against considering only those who worked in the party as members. Today it sounds strange, but that was the reality of the democratic, revolutionary movement of that time. Back then, even seasoned revolutionaries had to prove the obvious truths. Probably, the Mensheviks of 1903 would have fainted if they were shown what the party of victorious communism had become, for example, by the 19th Congress. And those who lived in exile until the 1950s did nothing but denounce Stalinism, leaderism, centralization, and the like.
Consequently, the history of Bolshevism is the history of the decline of the dynamics of discussions, factionalism, disagreements and the increase of scientific unanimity, discipline, centralism . Is it necessary to remind about the role of pluralism, glasnost, democracy in the destruction of the CPSU?
Few would argue that relations within the party must be a prototype of communist relations. It cannot be otherwise, because communists are fighting to build communism, and communism is, first of all, a new quality of relations between people, and not only production relations (although this is the main thing). Naturally, the most important relations for the cause of communism are party relations, relations between revolutionaries must be even more progressive than the production relations of the communism of the future.
Therefore, we take the definition of communist labor and apply it to party work.
Communist labor is free, voluntary work for the benefit of society, not regulated by coercion or authority; free labor, widely organized for the needs of the entire country .
"We call communism such a system when people get used to fulfilling social duties without special apparatuses of coercion, when free work for the common good becomes a universal phenomenon... But there is nothing communist in our economic system yet. The "communist" begins only when subbotniks appear, i.e. free labor of individuals for the common good on a large scale, not standardized by any authority, any state. This is not help to a neighbor, which has always existed in the village, but labor that produces for the needs of the state, organized on a large scale and free of charge" (Lenin).
The party work of a communist, therefore, is the free, voluntary work of a revolutionary, aimed at realizing the goals of the communist struggle . Here everything is clear: sincerity, conscientiousness, responsibility, self-sacrifice are the main qualitative criteria of a person's attitude to party work. Only such work can become a matter of honor, glory, valor and heroism.
It is not about party members having to eat the sun and be absolute ascetics. Especially in the current market conditions or in the conditions of the first phase of communism. The point is different: a communist works in the party, fights for the construction of a communist society not for money, but because such are his convictions, according to his conscience.
In other words, party work for a communist is not just a hobby or service, but a life’s work, a calling .
Not only supporters of Breakthrough, but also many leftists will generally agree with this.
The question now is how the relations between communists in an organization, a party, should look. As is well known, the theory of scientific centralism, which is a generalization of the organizational experience of Bolshevism, taking into account the degradation of the CPSU and the realities of the modern communist movement, answers this question.
Since we are talking about disagreements in scientific centralism, which become a means of disintegration of the collective and the organization, the essence of this problem comes down to unanimity. It is the central element of the most important principle of scientific centralism of decision-making:
“Develop solutions exclusively through scientific research, by achieving scientific unanimity, first of all, in the party’s governing bodies” ( Brief Theses of the Scientific Center ).
And further regarding achieving unanimity:
“There is no doubt that, in its ideal form, unanimity is achieved through the independent, fruitful development by each dialectically versed comrade of a system of objective truths that form the party’s worldview” (“ On Some Aspects of Achieving Unanimity ”).
Practice has shown that some supporters of scientific centralism in their understanding of unanimity get stuck on such an “ideal view”. They believe that every scientific centralist is a ready-made theorist on the level of Marx. Such a “romantic” position exists until the first serious disagreement. First with comrades, and then with the leadership.
For some reason, some people think that scientific centralism is about a community of equally great freethinking dialectical mathematicians. They supposedly each, independently of each other, come to absolutely identical conclusions on all issues because they are guided by scientific methodology. In reality, this does not happen.
It would be a good idea to choose the model of friendly relations between Marx and Engels as a model for the party. If all members of the PNC treated each other the same way as Marx and Engels (given the circumstances, of course), such a union would be invincible for centuries. But even in the pair of two geniuses, Marx and Engels, there was no equality. Engels, despite the division of labor between them, recognized Marx's intellectual authority.
And there is nothing shameful about this, since there can be no competition, rivalry or envy between real communists. If you are gnawed by such feelings, you are not yet a communist.
The relationship between Lenin and Stalin was generally that of a teacher and a student, that is, a priori unequal.
Consequently, the recipes for overcoming disagreements proposed in the article "On Some Aspects of Achieving Unanimity" also suffer from a shortcoming in this sense: as if the comradely collective of scientific centralists is a collective of equal subjects. And with such a premise, in the event of persistent disagreement, opportunistic, it has no adequate resolution.
There is also a popular conception according to which equal parties to a disagreement present their arguments and convince the collective. This may work one time out of a hundred. Such ideas are divorced from reality, from the circumstances and conditions of class struggle. In essence, it is an echo of the same democracy, since it assumes something like a vote ("I support / I do not support").
I have a completely different understanding of the role and place of disagreement and the procedure for ensuring scientific unanimity.
Firstly , disagreements can be of two types. Either it is disagreement between ordinary employees, or it is disagreement with the management.
By the way, if there are disagreements in the leadership, then we are not dealing with scientific centralism.
Secondly , disagreements between ordinary employees should not be ignored by management, which is obliged to resolve them. Such disagreements should be discussed with more experienced comrades at the stage of initial disagreement. That is, to put it simply, if someone notices mistakes and opportunism in a comrade, it is necessary not to rush to argue with him, but to bring the problem up for discussion with management.
Therefore, there is no need to indulge in illusions based on a groundless sense of personal exclusivity. The most competent comrades, and not a group or individual theorists equal to each other, develop solutions through scientific research.
The most competent comrades are engaged in organizational work, including the elimination of disagreements. Namely: they point out mistakes, explain, control and draw organizational conclusions up to and including expulsion.
The most competent comrades represent the leadership, the core personnel, the leaders.
In our particular case, it is the founder and chief theorist of the journal "Proryv" - V. A. Podguzov. It was around his figure that the collective of breakthroughs was formed, it was he who illuminated the path to scientific centralism for us. It is simply absurd to deny this.
And the problem of "achieving scientific unanimity" does not lie at all in the plane of communication between Marxists. It lies exclusively in the plane of working on oneself to study the problematic and correctly understand in a specific case the scientific research that has been done by the leaders.
The problem of unanimity in any conflict of disagreement, discord is the problem of understanding the position of the management by those who disagree, and nothing else. If someone believes that the management is insolvent, then what kind of scientific centralism is this? Such a person should immediately break ties with the team, the organization, and express their disagreement outside.
Further. Persuasion as a method has two sides. The productive side of persuasion is re- persuading a person. The counterproductive side of persuasion is the transition to polemics, discussion, debate and conflict. It is almost impossible to return from a dispute to persuasion. Therefore, persuasion should be practiced in moderation. The ground of persuasion is especially shaky when the matter is already heading towards a conflict. Therefore, it is much more productive and reliable to force yourself to abandon your opinion at least for a while and accept the position of an authoritative comrade, and then think it over again in order to correctly understand and grasp all the subtleties .
Some will say: we are being offered the principle of the infallibility of leaders. Someone will definitely shout from behind the stove about sectarianism and fanaticism.
In reality, we have united around the ideas of "Proriv", the ideas of Podguzov, and we are following this path not academically, following bare theory, but collectively, as an organization. Who should guide us if not Podguzov? What can we achieve without relying on the leadership and opinions of the most experienced and competent comrades?
The thing is that disagreements, disagreements and, in general, the subject of any minor polemics in a group of Marxists, especially scientific centralists, arise far from the sphere of the main question of philosophy or everything that worries typical leftists. This is either the sphere of tactical decisions and approaches, or organizational and personnel issues. These things will always be determined by the leadership in any case. There is no point in doing anything other than expressing your thoughts on a specific issue, discussing it, doing it. Gain authority, lead people, become a leader, take responsibility and decide.
A democratic organization disguises the struggle of different forces and opinions within itself through voting. A scientifically centralist organization initially follows the path of the dictatorship of truth and disguises nothing. If the truth is not established, then it is not scientific centralism.
I am sure that the following thought may seem unpleasant to someone, but adequate initiative, expressing your opinion that differs from the management should not develop into persistent attempts to impose your position . It is enough to speak out once and, if you are still pointed out that you are wrong, work on correctly and deeply understanding the management's position, or... break with it.
So, the thesis below should be understood in this light, in my opinion.
"To recognize as the internal law of the party's life the strictest discipline based on the mobilization of party conscience, on comradeship, excluding competition and careerism in any form. The norm of behavior of a party member should be initiative, born of the comrade's inner conviction of his scientific maturity, competence, and readiness to bear personal responsibility for his suitability for the post he occupies. The main criterion for the nomination of a comrade for leadership work by the party collective should be his competence, confirmed by the practical results of his personal propaganda, agitation, and organization" (Brief Theses of the NC).
Independence and initiative must be demonstrated in education without any restrictions.
And on the other hand. You should insist on your own until the management conducts a reasonable, calm study of the problem. As soon as administrative measures follow, you need to leave.
As you can see, such an understanding of scientific centralism does not exclude taking into account the opinions and positions of all comrades. That is, it is, of course, necessary to convey your thoughts and considerations freely and honestly, and first of all to the leadership.
Can we say that scientific centralism is a leaderism? In the liberal-democratic and Trotskyist-Khrushchev-Gorbachev understanding, of course, it is a terrible, terrible leaderism. You can call it whatever you want, but the task of communists is to ensure that the party acts as a single whole, as a single organism, is held together by a common will and unity of action. It is clear that leaderism, when everyone is as one, when “We say Lenin, we mean the party, we say the party, we mean Lenin” and so on, is the ideal, most effective option.
Generally speaking, this is how any organization works. It's just that in a democratic organization there are several such small leaderisms, and it goes with difficulty in the direction of the strongest group at the moment or some hastily put together coalition. Although voting, the will of the majority taking into account the opinion of the minority and all that sort of thing are formally observed.
Can we say that the scientific nature of a position is replaced by subordination in this case? Only in appearance. The fact is that the scientific nature of a position is objective , it is tested by practice and in practice it gives either a positive, victorious result or a negative one. Some have the power of logic to establish the scientific nature of a position, others do not. But everyone is equal before practice.
So the fundamental question here is whether the leaders you followed are right in general. If they are right, then you will have to obey regardless of what it seems like in particular matters. If they are wrong, then you need to break off relations.
“ A friendly dialogue that excludes competition and duplicity, instead of the traditional stimulation of discussions ” is something that is supported and managed from above, with recognition of the discipline and authority of the leadership.
All of the above is not just intellectualism. The position is based on my personal experience of being under the leadership of V. A. Podguzov. I always sincerely express my point of view (or say that I do not have one on the issue), I always carefully think through and listen to the position of my comrades, I always accept for implementation what V. A. Podguzov says. And it always turns out that the initial doubts or even disagreements are shattered by practice. It turns out that a smarter person produces more adequate solutions.
Intellectuals in the bad sense will exclaim: "But what if Podguzov is wrong and leads us in the wrong direction?" Everything is simple. Firstly , we can only go somewhere together, so everyone is free to lead or follow someone else. Secondly , if you go in the wrong direction, then suddenly you will arrive in the wrong direction. The question is not in identifying the wrong course, but in saving the collective from the corrupting idiocy and the practice of democracy. In order to move towards communism, we need not only the theory of Marxism-Leninism, but also leaders and discipline to connect it with the movement of the proletarian masses. This is an axiom of communist revolution.
Redin
02/20/2025
https://prorivists.org/102_disagreement/
Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Ideology
How Influencer Leftists Failed On Covid
Nate Bear
Feb 20, 2025
Covid was the biggest transfer of power from bosses to workers in 75 years. Billionaires were so angry at this they demanded governments inflict pain on the economy to punish arrogant workers. Yet so little left wing analysis of the last 5 years makes this point. It’s amazing.
I’m not just saying things.
A real estate magnate called Tim Gurner said these things, and then more. He said this:
"The problem we had during covid is that people decided they didn’t want to work as much. People were paid a lot to do not too much and that needs to change. We need to see pain in the economy, unemployment has to rise 40 or 50 percent. We need to remind people they work for the employer not the other way around. There’s been a systematic change where the employee feels the employers is lucky to have them. We have to kill that attitude. We have to do that by hurting the economy and get back to some sort of normality. And governments are now doing that. We’re seeing less arrogance in the employment market.”
You can see the full video of this creep saying this here in a tweet I posted about it.
Open, naked, balls-out capitalist chat. The kind of thing I’m sure they were and are all saying privately.
I’ve covered these issues before but the response to the tweet made me realise it’s time for a refresher.
I read popular leftist media, listen to popular leftist podcasts, and in nearly five years none of them have ever articulated a covid story for their followers that positions the backlash to covid policies as a coordinated attack by the capitalist ruling class against broadly redistributive policies.
Worse than that, some of them push reactionary lines about covid, that it was exclusively an attack on civil liberties, that it was a period of tyrannical rule we must never fall for again. Fake fool leftists like Jimmy Dore are the worst, full covid reactionaries who sprinkle on antivax shite to boot.
It’s not just him. Most leftists with a big platform show a total inability, unwillingness, I don’t know what, to apply critical theory about class and capital to the biggest global crisis of our lifetimes.
If there’s any reason why the left is cooked, it’s this.
Cooked.
Much of what we’re seeing now in the US and more broadly in the west is because the liberal centre and the left, together, ceded the ground to right wing reactionaries in the critical period during early covid when the story was not yet written, when the future was still up for grabs.
And in that critical period, whether they were openly spouting reactionary sentiment like Dore, dribbling covid out of their mouths only in reference to how bad stay-at-home was for the kids, or staying silent as the brief expansion of the social safety net was unwound, influencer leftists and liberals largely conspired with the billionaire class to agree on a cultural story about covid which led us to where we are.
Here’s some of the objectively very good things that happened during early covid, things in many cases without precedent.
Direct cash transfers to citizens.
Evictions banned in the US, UK, EU.
Debt collection banned.
Homeless people provided shelter. (The UK ended homelessness).
Child poverty halved to record lows.
Food poverty eradicated. The US government was giving out free food boxes for fucks sake.
Plummeting suicide rates, adult and child.
Wildlife without the boot of industrial capitalism on its neck flourished.
Remote work was normalised.
These policies happened broadly across the west, regardless of the government type. From the right in the UK to the centre in Canada to the left in Spain. The US did redistribution and social protection under Trump and then Biden and at the state level, red and blue.
The crisis provoked a pro-social response independent of government ideology.
There was also a true sense of the collective, a true understanding that we lived in a society for the first time in my life. From mutual aid efforts to clapping for workers to wearing masks in healthcare as a basic courtesy to disabled and vulnerable people.
As well as this, the biggest anti-racism protests in decades erupted in the US and UK because for the first time ever, many people had time. They were educating and organising. George Floyd was the spark in the US. But previous sparks had not ignited protests like we saw in 2020. People just had time. It wasn't a coincidence. And they burned down police stations and tore down slaver statues with that time.
(Incidentally in the covid story that has metastasized into the bones of the culture these things couldn’t have happened because we were locked down under threat of arrest).
These were very good things. Things without precedent. Things that many on the left had been fighting to achieve for decades, happened. The veil was pulled back. We saw what was a choice and not an inevitability. They happened and then they disappeared and these big libs and leftists together, from Pod Save America to Chapo to Novara in the UK, failed to explain why. They didn’t fight for them. They just let it all quietly turn to dust.
And into this vacuum slunk the likes of Joe Rogan, Elon Musk and Jimmy Dore with their stories about ‘scamdemics',’ and freedom and liberty and government overreach.
Dore and others occasionally throw some crumbs down: Pfizer made a lot of money. Rich people got richer. Wow, well done, thanks for this penetrating capitalist critique. Definitely wasn’t happening before. Definitely needed a pandemic for this to happen. Galaxy brains illuminating the conditions. No wonder they earn the big Patreon bucks.
And now America has a government almost perfectly crafted in the image of this reactionary covid story.
With the Faragists leading the polls in the UK, that cursed place might be next.
And the conditions are back to where they were or worse. Homelessness above pre-covid levels in Britain, child poverty in America doubled.
We had a glimpse of what could be and most people failed to defend it because, truthfully, they wanted normal back too. Normal in this telling not being any kind of civic-minded freedom, but consumptive freedom. Freedom to restaurant and bar and comedy store.
And we have to understand that a return to normal was contingent on erasing covid from the collective consciousness.
Normal being poverty, hunger, homelessness. The necessity for a permanent and visible underclass to keep the working and middle classes on their toes. The elites making sure we have visible examples of who we could be should bad luck strike or we stop grafting for the man. Homelessness and poverty is capitalism’s live stream, broadcast everywhere to ensure we can never fully escape the sense of precarity about what might be.
Clearly we couldn’t have lived under crisis conditions permanently. But the good things could have stayed while we went back to a better version of normal.
And fine, the fact this didn’t happen is not primarily on liberal and leftist influencers. It’s on the people with power, the capitalists, billionaires, political elites and central bankers who needed to shut the pandora’s box they’d opened before we all started getting ideas above our station, as Gurner so eloquently revealed. But the influencers could have resisted the reactionary freedom narrative and said something into their big furry microphones once for an hour among the thousands?
The attack on government functions in America now underway cannot be divorced from this context. Musk, a regular booster of the online ‘scamdemic’ blob complex, saw the cultural triumph of the freedom narrative that blamed the administrative state for the hardships of covid and has seized the opening. Billionaires saw what the government was capable of during early covid, it freaked them out and now they’re dismantling the functions that made those things possible. They saw how the administrative state proved it could, in the right hands, challenge capitalist hegemony.
It is being made dead because of it.
And letting the virus itself rip has been a boon for those like Musk and Doge going after social spending in the name of financial efficiency. It was just reported that the 1.7 million excess deaths of Americans 25 and older to 2023 have saved the US government $294 billion in social security retirement payments that no longer need to be made.
Eugenics ~handshake~ capitalism.
The fact that the story of covid is not this and is instead a story that doesn’t threaten billionaire interests in the least (and in many ways aids those interests) is another one of those not coincidences.
I don’t suppose any of the leftist or liberal influencers with big platforms will read this.
But if any of you do, maybe give your heads a little wobble and start telling a better story.
(p.s. shoutout to the smaller leftist podcasts who do get it discourse pod and punchup pod)
https://www.donotpanic.news/p/how-influ ... -failed-on
Nate Bear
Feb 20, 2025
Covid was the biggest transfer of power from bosses to workers in 75 years. Billionaires were so angry at this they demanded governments inflict pain on the economy to punish arrogant workers. Yet so little left wing analysis of the last 5 years makes this point. It’s amazing.
I’m not just saying things.
A real estate magnate called Tim Gurner said these things, and then more. He said this:
"The problem we had during covid is that people decided they didn’t want to work as much. People were paid a lot to do not too much and that needs to change. We need to see pain in the economy, unemployment has to rise 40 or 50 percent. We need to remind people they work for the employer not the other way around. There’s been a systematic change where the employee feels the employers is lucky to have them. We have to kill that attitude. We have to do that by hurting the economy and get back to some sort of normality. And governments are now doing that. We’re seeing less arrogance in the employment market.”
You can see the full video of this creep saying this here in a tweet I posted about it.
Open, naked, balls-out capitalist chat. The kind of thing I’m sure they were and are all saying privately.
I’ve covered these issues before but the response to the tweet made me realise it’s time for a refresher.
I read popular leftist media, listen to popular leftist podcasts, and in nearly five years none of them have ever articulated a covid story for their followers that positions the backlash to covid policies as a coordinated attack by the capitalist ruling class against broadly redistributive policies.
Worse than that, some of them push reactionary lines about covid, that it was exclusively an attack on civil liberties, that it was a period of tyrannical rule we must never fall for again. Fake fool leftists like Jimmy Dore are the worst, full covid reactionaries who sprinkle on antivax shite to boot.
It’s not just him. Most leftists with a big platform show a total inability, unwillingness, I don’t know what, to apply critical theory about class and capital to the biggest global crisis of our lifetimes.
If there’s any reason why the left is cooked, it’s this.
Cooked.
Much of what we’re seeing now in the US and more broadly in the west is because the liberal centre and the left, together, ceded the ground to right wing reactionaries in the critical period during early covid when the story was not yet written, when the future was still up for grabs.
And in that critical period, whether they were openly spouting reactionary sentiment like Dore, dribbling covid out of their mouths only in reference to how bad stay-at-home was for the kids, or staying silent as the brief expansion of the social safety net was unwound, influencer leftists and liberals largely conspired with the billionaire class to agree on a cultural story about covid which led us to where we are.
Here’s some of the objectively very good things that happened during early covid, things in many cases without precedent.
Direct cash transfers to citizens.
Evictions banned in the US, UK, EU.
Debt collection banned.
Homeless people provided shelter. (The UK ended homelessness).
Child poverty halved to record lows.
Food poverty eradicated. The US government was giving out free food boxes for fucks sake.
Plummeting suicide rates, adult and child.
Wildlife without the boot of industrial capitalism on its neck flourished.
Remote work was normalised.
These policies happened broadly across the west, regardless of the government type. From the right in the UK to the centre in Canada to the left in Spain. The US did redistribution and social protection under Trump and then Biden and at the state level, red and blue.
The crisis provoked a pro-social response independent of government ideology.
There was also a true sense of the collective, a true understanding that we lived in a society for the first time in my life. From mutual aid efforts to clapping for workers to wearing masks in healthcare as a basic courtesy to disabled and vulnerable people.
As well as this, the biggest anti-racism protests in decades erupted in the US and UK because for the first time ever, many people had time. They were educating and organising. George Floyd was the spark in the US. But previous sparks had not ignited protests like we saw in 2020. People just had time. It wasn't a coincidence. And they burned down police stations and tore down slaver statues with that time.
(Incidentally in the covid story that has metastasized into the bones of the culture these things couldn’t have happened because we were locked down under threat of arrest).
These were very good things. Things without precedent. Things that many on the left had been fighting to achieve for decades, happened. The veil was pulled back. We saw what was a choice and not an inevitability. They happened and then they disappeared and these big libs and leftists together, from Pod Save America to Chapo to Novara in the UK, failed to explain why. They didn’t fight for them. They just let it all quietly turn to dust.
And into this vacuum slunk the likes of Joe Rogan, Elon Musk and Jimmy Dore with their stories about ‘scamdemics',’ and freedom and liberty and government overreach.
Dore and others occasionally throw some crumbs down: Pfizer made a lot of money. Rich people got richer. Wow, well done, thanks for this penetrating capitalist critique. Definitely wasn’t happening before. Definitely needed a pandemic for this to happen. Galaxy brains illuminating the conditions. No wonder they earn the big Patreon bucks.
And now America has a government almost perfectly crafted in the image of this reactionary covid story.
With the Faragists leading the polls in the UK, that cursed place might be next.
And the conditions are back to where they were or worse. Homelessness above pre-covid levels in Britain, child poverty in America doubled.
We had a glimpse of what could be and most people failed to defend it because, truthfully, they wanted normal back too. Normal in this telling not being any kind of civic-minded freedom, but consumptive freedom. Freedom to restaurant and bar and comedy store.
And we have to understand that a return to normal was contingent on erasing covid from the collective consciousness.
Normal being poverty, hunger, homelessness. The necessity for a permanent and visible underclass to keep the working and middle classes on their toes. The elites making sure we have visible examples of who we could be should bad luck strike or we stop grafting for the man. Homelessness and poverty is capitalism’s live stream, broadcast everywhere to ensure we can never fully escape the sense of precarity about what might be.
Clearly we couldn’t have lived under crisis conditions permanently. But the good things could have stayed while we went back to a better version of normal.
And fine, the fact this didn’t happen is not primarily on liberal and leftist influencers. It’s on the people with power, the capitalists, billionaires, political elites and central bankers who needed to shut the pandora’s box they’d opened before we all started getting ideas above our station, as Gurner so eloquently revealed. But the influencers could have resisted the reactionary freedom narrative and said something into their big furry microphones once for an hour among the thousands?
The attack on government functions in America now underway cannot be divorced from this context. Musk, a regular booster of the online ‘scamdemic’ blob complex, saw the cultural triumph of the freedom narrative that blamed the administrative state for the hardships of covid and has seized the opening. Billionaires saw what the government was capable of during early covid, it freaked them out and now they’re dismantling the functions that made those things possible. They saw how the administrative state proved it could, in the right hands, challenge capitalist hegemony.
It is being made dead because of it.
And letting the virus itself rip has been a boon for those like Musk and Doge going after social spending in the name of financial efficiency. It was just reported that the 1.7 million excess deaths of Americans 25 and older to 2023 have saved the US government $294 billion in social security retirement payments that no longer need to be made.
Eugenics ~handshake~ capitalism.
The fact that the story of covid is not this and is instead a story that doesn’t threaten billionaire interests in the least (and in many ways aids those interests) is another one of those not coincidences.
I don’t suppose any of the leftist or liberal influencers with big platforms will read this.
But if any of you do, maybe give your heads a little wobble and start telling a better story.
(p.s. shoutout to the smaller leftist podcasts who do get it discourse pod and punchup pod)
https://www.donotpanic.news/p/how-influ ... -failed-on
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Ideology
The 'New Left' was the worst thing to happen to the Western working class in the late 20th century.
Beneath the pavement, disappointment
How the 1968 French uprising sparked a radical blaze and opened the doors of possibility—then slammed them shut.
Antonio Melonio
Mar 23, 2025
At least for one luminous, hallucinogenic instant in May of 1968, France was on the verge of burning capitalism to the ground. Students and workers filled the streets. The usual friction—between bourgeois kids in protest chic and hardened, unionized laborers—melted into a hard-core stew of rebellion. From the Latin Quarter to the factories of Renault, a seismic jolt of solidarity rippled across the country. The scale was unprecedented: eleven million students and workers rose up against the status quo (that's 22% of the entire population—absolutely insane).
It was a moment of raw fury, a crossroads that could have birthed a radical new world in the West. And then, in a blink, it was over. Capitalism spat out the bones, clinked champagne glasses, and continued its unstoppable march. Just like it always does. Just like it always fucking does.
What the hell happened?
“Sous les pavés, la plage!”
It all started with an avant-garde swirl of demands from students at the University of Nanterre, just outside Paris. They were pissed off by what they perceived as archaic teaching structures and social repression—gloomy professors, bullshit hierarchies, paternalistic administration. These kids, though privileged by birth, discovered that reading Marx, Kropotkin, and Debord can do weird things to the mind. They realized they lived in a cage, even if it was a golden one. So they decided to do shit.
Within days, the campus was locked down. The battles spilled over to the Sorbonne in central Paris. Students tore up cobblestones, hurled them at the riot police, and awakened that feral spirit of French insurrection.
“Sous les pavés, la plage!” roared from graffiti-splattered walls. Beneath the pavement, the beach. A beach of possibility, transformable, a new world. Name giver of this Substack publication.
Beneath the rigid, soulless order, there might be something else, they thought—something like freedom.
Students alone can’t do shit
Well, it’s one thing for a group of half-broke philosophy students to barricade streets. It’s another when the factories shut down. And that’s exactly what happened in mid-May. The proletariat, weighed down by stagnant wages and oppressive working conditions, decided enough was enough. Unions rallied. Overnight, the entire economy ground to a halt. Industry. Transport. Public services. Even the fricking garbage collection.
This was the raw power Karl Marx wrote about: when those who actually produce for society stop the wheels from turning, society halts. For once, the romantic fantasies of unity became reality. Arm in arm, students and workers forced the system’s hand. A beautiful, improbable coalition—brief though it was.
But let’s not romanticize it too much. There was tension. Class distinctions remained. The gulf between theory-addled students who might one day rejoin the bourgeois and hardened workers who’d been exploited for decades didn’t just evaporate overnight. Yet in that crucial moment, they were united in revolt. And when you get that many people out in the streets, the government starts to sweat.
Revolution! …cancelled
This French insurrection was the pièce de résistance of a broader global wave of uprisings in 1968. Students occupied campuses in the United States to protest the Vietnam War. German activists staged massive demonstrations (Westdeutsche Studentenbewegung). In Mexico, the Tlatelolco massacre showed the lethal edge of state power. Czechoslovakia’s Prague Spring attempted to carve out a democratic socialism only to be crushed by Soviet tanks. Every corner of the world seemed to roil with revolt. Hope flickered, illusions soared… and then, system by system, it all got shut down or beaten into submission.
France, ironically the birthplace of the modern revolution mythos, became the stage for the biggest near-miss of them all. In late May, President Charles de Gaulle briefly fled the country—he actually fled!—seeking assurance from the French army in Germany that he still had the loyalty of the troops. He came back, dissolved the National Assembly, called elections, and somehow maintained power. Georges Pompidou, his prime minister and eventual successor, negotiated directly with the unions, offering wage increases and improved working conditions. That pacified enough of the labor force to coax them back into the factories. Voilà. Movement defanged. The wheels started turning again.
Many of the students, exhausted, disillusioned, or co-opted into political parties, drifted off to do what every rebellious generation eventually does: settle. Years passed, they got jobs, had children, paid mortgages, became “respectable.” The baton of resistance was never fully passed on. The generation that almost changed the world went on to sell it to the highest bidder.
Leave a comment
Then came neoliberalism
Yet it wasn’t all entirely for nothing. University reforms were enacted, though modestly. Workplace conditions improved somewhat. The old patriarchal structures of French society got a shake-up. A vibrant counterculture blossomed, fueling art, film, philosophy, you name it.
But if you measure success by, oh, I don’t know, actual systemic change or class emancipation, then, yeah: it failed completely. The state survived without significant reform. Capitalism survived. Shit, it thrived. By the 1970s, the neoliberal tide was creeping in, and by the ’80s, Reagan and Thatcher were partying on the grave of any real socialist alternative.
Were the protestors naive idiots? Probably. Not entirely. The truth is that, for a moment, capitalism’s unstoppable train actually wobbled. The French economy was paralyzed to a degree unthinkable today. And that glimpse of possibility—that ephemeral sense that things do not have to be this way—might be the essential gift and curse of May ’68.
Failure (& lessons)
May 1968 has become fetishized, repackaged as cheap iconography—a Che Guevara T-shirt phenomenon (yeah, I have one). Every year, you get the glossy magazine retrospectives: “Anniversary of May ’68,” trotted out with nostalgic photos of kids ripping up cobblestones. Meanwhile, the current “Left,” such as it is, is practically non-existent. We share memes on social media. We talk about solidarity, but we rarely cross lines from our digital filter bubbles into real-world disruption. I discussed this recently:
Let us be honest: The Left has failed the world
Antonio Melonio
·
Feb 28
Read full story https://beneaththepavement.substack.com ... -the-world
The biggest takeaway from ’68 might be how fleeting real unity is. For a heartbeat, there was synergy between students and workers. Then it fractured under the very real weight of material needs and manipulation. Humans are selfish creatures. Satisfy the material needs of crucial protest groups and the revolution dies.
Also, if you don’t push for radical new structures—real alternatives—someone else will eventually come along and cut a deal, temper the revolution, lock you back into normalcy. Alternatives have to be tangible and materially attractive. The Right invests in institutions, media, and power-building. The Left invests in reading groups and moral superiority. The Right, unfortunately, keeps winning.
What is there beneath the pavement? That slogan might be the best summary of both the delirious hope and the cruel letdown. Yes, beneath the oppressive architecture of modern life is a wide-open beach of possibility. But guess what? A beach is easy to conquer. Capital just plops a luxury resort on it and moves on.
May ’68 was a door cracked open just wide enough for us to see through. Behind that door, entire worlds of possibility shimmered. Then, so very fucking fast, the door slammed shut in our faces. The real tragedy is that once you’ve glimpsed that other side—where workers and students unite, where everyday life halts the whole capitalist juggernaut if it wants to—you can never quite forget it. It haunts you. Reminds you how close we came to being something more than wage slaves in a consumer carnival.
It was the moment the Western world stood at a crossroads, and we took the wrong turn. Such a moment might never come again.
But ghosts linger. Eventually, they become T-shirt slogans and museum exhibits, while the rest of us keep working our bullshit jobs, flirting with AI doomsday fantasies, and waiting for the next spark that might (but probably won’t) burn the entire rotting edifice to cinders. Because that’s the cycle, isn’t it? Revolt, fail, get co-opted, wait for the next rebellion.
Some interesting words scrawled on Paris walls in 1968:
“We don’t want a world where the guarantee of not dying of starvation brings the risk of dying of boredom.”
Well, they gave it a good shot. They glimpsed the beach under the pavement. Then, in classic fashion, capitalism set up a damn souvenir stand on that beach and started selling useless shit.
Beneath the pavement, yeah.
Antonio
Some sources
Images are all from Wikipedia.
May 1968: A Month of Revolution Pushed France Into the Modern World — The New York Times (nytimes.com)
Beneath the Pavement, the Beach: Paris in 1968 | Department of History (utk.edu)
May 68 — Wikipedia
Bourg, Julian. From Revolution to Ethics May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007, 25.
Ross, Kristin. May ’68 and Its Afterlives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, 3.
Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World (Ballantine Books, 2004).
Donald Reid, “Politics, Police, and Pickets: France’s Largest Strike, May–June 1968,” in 1968: The World Transformed, eds. Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert, and Detlef Junker (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Frédéric Joignot, “La ‘chienlit’, une histoire d’un mot de Rabelais à Sarkozy” Le Monde (10 October 2015). https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/articl ... 23448.html
https://beneaththepavement.substack.com ... dium=email
(Images at link.)
Splat jobs and color revolutions are well and good but the New Left was by far the Spooks most effective action. The Vietnam War kept things going for a few years then Nixon abolished the draft and serious politics were abandoned for hedonism and 'self-improvement'...
The massacre of the Black Panther Party was indeed effective but overt, not covert.
Beneath the pavement, disappointment
How the 1968 French uprising sparked a radical blaze and opened the doors of possibility—then slammed them shut.
Antonio Melonio
Mar 23, 2025
At least for one luminous, hallucinogenic instant in May of 1968, France was on the verge of burning capitalism to the ground. Students and workers filled the streets. The usual friction—between bourgeois kids in protest chic and hardened, unionized laborers—melted into a hard-core stew of rebellion. From the Latin Quarter to the factories of Renault, a seismic jolt of solidarity rippled across the country. The scale was unprecedented: eleven million students and workers rose up against the status quo (that's 22% of the entire population—absolutely insane).
It was a moment of raw fury, a crossroads that could have birthed a radical new world in the West. And then, in a blink, it was over. Capitalism spat out the bones, clinked champagne glasses, and continued its unstoppable march. Just like it always does. Just like it always fucking does.
What the hell happened?
“Sous les pavés, la plage!”
It all started with an avant-garde swirl of demands from students at the University of Nanterre, just outside Paris. They were pissed off by what they perceived as archaic teaching structures and social repression—gloomy professors, bullshit hierarchies, paternalistic administration. These kids, though privileged by birth, discovered that reading Marx, Kropotkin, and Debord can do weird things to the mind. They realized they lived in a cage, even if it was a golden one. So they decided to do shit.
Within days, the campus was locked down. The battles spilled over to the Sorbonne in central Paris. Students tore up cobblestones, hurled them at the riot police, and awakened that feral spirit of French insurrection.
“Sous les pavés, la plage!” roared from graffiti-splattered walls. Beneath the pavement, the beach. A beach of possibility, transformable, a new world. Name giver of this Substack publication.
Beneath the rigid, soulless order, there might be something else, they thought—something like freedom.
Students alone can’t do shit
Well, it’s one thing for a group of half-broke philosophy students to barricade streets. It’s another when the factories shut down. And that’s exactly what happened in mid-May. The proletariat, weighed down by stagnant wages and oppressive working conditions, decided enough was enough. Unions rallied. Overnight, the entire economy ground to a halt. Industry. Transport. Public services. Even the fricking garbage collection.
This was the raw power Karl Marx wrote about: when those who actually produce for society stop the wheels from turning, society halts. For once, the romantic fantasies of unity became reality. Arm in arm, students and workers forced the system’s hand. A beautiful, improbable coalition—brief though it was.
But let’s not romanticize it too much. There was tension. Class distinctions remained. The gulf between theory-addled students who might one day rejoin the bourgeois and hardened workers who’d been exploited for decades didn’t just evaporate overnight. Yet in that crucial moment, they were united in revolt. And when you get that many people out in the streets, the government starts to sweat.
Revolution! …cancelled
This French insurrection was the pièce de résistance of a broader global wave of uprisings in 1968. Students occupied campuses in the United States to protest the Vietnam War. German activists staged massive demonstrations (Westdeutsche Studentenbewegung). In Mexico, the Tlatelolco massacre showed the lethal edge of state power. Czechoslovakia’s Prague Spring attempted to carve out a democratic socialism only to be crushed by Soviet tanks. Every corner of the world seemed to roil with revolt. Hope flickered, illusions soared… and then, system by system, it all got shut down or beaten into submission.
France, ironically the birthplace of the modern revolution mythos, became the stage for the biggest near-miss of them all. In late May, President Charles de Gaulle briefly fled the country—he actually fled!—seeking assurance from the French army in Germany that he still had the loyalty of the troops. He came back, dissolved the National Assembly, called elections, and somehow maintained power. Georges Pompidou, his prime minister and eventual successor, negotiated directly with the unions, offering wage increases and improved working conditions. That pacified enough of the labor force to coax them back into the factories. Voilà. Movement defanged. The wheels started turning again.
Many of the students, exhausted, disillusioned, or co-opted into political parties, drifted off to do what every rebellious generation eventually does: settle. Years passed, they got jobs, had children, paid mortgages, became “respectable.” The baton of resistance was never fully passed on. The generation that almost changed the world went on to sell it to the highest bidder.
Leave a comment
Then came neoliberalism
Yet it wasn’t all entirely for nothing. University reforms were enacted, though modestly. Workplace conditions improved somewhat. The old patriarchal structures of French society got a shake-up. A vibrant counterculture blossomed, fueling art, film, philosophy, you name it.
But if you measure success by, oh, I don’t know, actual systemic change or class emancipation, then, yeah: it failed completely. The state survived without significant reform. Capitalism survived. Shit, it thrived. By the 1970s, the neoliberal tide was creeping in, and by the ’80s, Reagan and Thatcher were partying on the grave of any real socialist alternative.
Were the protestors naive idiots? Probably. Not entirely. The truth is that, for a moment, capitalism’s unstoppable train actually wobbled. The French economy was paralyzed to a degree unthinkable today. And that glimpse of possibility—that ephemeral sense that things do not have to be this way—might be the essential gift and curse of May ’68.
Failure (& lessons)
May 1968 has become fetishized, repackaged as cheap iconography—a Che Guevara T-shirt phenomenon (yeah, I have one). Every year, you get the glossy magazine retrospectives: “Anniversary of May ’68,” trotted out with nostalgic photos of kids ripping up cobblestones. Meanwhile, the current “Left,” such as it is, is practically non-existent. We share memes on social media. We talk about solidarity, but we rarely cross lines from our digital filter bubbles into real-world disruption. I discussed this recently:
Let us be honest: The Left has failed the world
Antonio Melonio
·
Feb 28
Read full story https://beneaththepavement.substack.com ... -the-world
The biggest takeaway from ’68 might be how fleeting real unity is. For a heartbeat, there was synergy between students and workers. Then it fractured under the very real weight of material needs and manipulation. Humans are selfish creatures. Satisfy the material needs of crucial protest groups and the revolution dies.
Also, if you don’t push for radical new structures—real alternatives—someone else will eventually come along and cut a deal, temper the revolution, lock you back into normalcy. Alternatives have to be tangible and materially attractive. The Right invests in institutions, media, and power-building. The Left invests in reading groups and moral superiority. The Right, unfortunately, keeps winning.
What is there beneath the pavement? That slogan might be the best summary of both the delirious hope and the cruel letdown. Yes, beneath the oppressive architecture of modern life is a wide-open beach of possibility. But guess what? A beach is easy to conquer. Capital just plops a luxury resort on it and moves on.
May ’68 was a door cracked open just wide enough for us to see through. Behind that door, entire worlds of possibility shimmered. Then, so very fucking fast, the door slammed shut in our faces. The real tragedy is that once you’ve glimpsed that other side—where workers and students unite, where everyday life halts the whole capitalist juggernaut if it wants to—you can never quite forget it. It haunts you. Reminds you how close we came to being something more than wage slaves in a consumer carnival.
It was the moment the Western world stood at a crossroads, and we took the wrong turn. Such a moment might never come again.
But ghosts linger. Eventually, they become T-shirt slogans and museum exhibits, while the rest of us keep working our bullshit jobs, flirting with AI doomsday fantasies, and waiting for the next spark that might (but probably won’t) burn the entire rotting edifice to cinders. Because that’s the cycle, isn’t it? Revolt, fail, get co-opted, wait for the next rebellion.
Some interesting words scrawled on Paris walls in 1968:
“We don’t want a world where the guarantee of not dying of starvation brings the risk of dying of boredom.”
Well, they gave it a good shot. They glimpsed the beach under the pavement. Then, in classic fashion, capitalism set up a damn souvenir stand on that beach and started selling useless shit.
Beneath the pavement, yeah.
Antonio
Some sources
Images are all from Wikipedia.
May 1968: A Month of Revolution Pushed France Into the Modern World — The New York Times (nytimes.com)
Beneath the Pavement, the Beach: Paris in 1968 | Department of History (utk.edu)
May 68 — Wikipedia
Bourg, Julian. From Revolution to Ethics May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007, 25.
Ross, Kristin. May ’68 and Its Afterlives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, 3.
Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World (Ballantine Books, 2004).
Donald Reid, “Politics, Police, and Pickets: France’s Largest Strike, May–June 1968,” in 1968: The World Transformed, eds. Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert, and Detlef Junker (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Frédéric Joignot, “La ‘chienlit’, une histoire d’un mot de Rabelais à Sarkozy” Le Monde (10 October 2015). https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/articl ... 23448.html
https://beneaththepavement.substack.com ... dium=email
(Images at link.)
Splat jobs and color revolutions are well and good but the New Left was by far the Spooks most effective action. The Vietnam War kept things going for a few years then Nixon abolished the draft and serious politics were abandoned for hedonism and 'self-improvement'...
The massacre of the Black Panther Party was indeed effective but overt, not covert.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Ideology
About Messianism
When an inquisitive mind first encounters the comprehension of objective truth, there arises a unique feeling of joy, which one immediately wants to share. The theory of Marxism-Leninism provides many such moments, and especially strong ones, since the truths of social structure are the most significant. When a person comprehends in the most general terms how society is structured and comes to the idea of the need to fight for communism, he concentrates almost all his attention on what benefit he can bring. After a while, not being able to quickly achieve any result, some begin to agitate others in the most active way.
Moreover, this often takes on caricatured forms of messianism. It turns out like this. A person has become familiar with Marxism and has become a prophet of communism, running around and pestering everyone in this spirit: " Oh, fools, you live under capitalism, all your lives are worthless and useless, only the struggle for communism makes sense! Drop everything and run after me with iron battalions ."
Another type of messianism is formed on the basis of a more or less competent mastery of theoretical foundations. The fact is that the propagandist of Marxism is superior to his audience in terms of knowledge, understanding, he must teach, instruct. And this is normal and understandable. It is abnormal when this turns into conceit, when the propagandist begins to think that he is better because he is smarter, that they should curry favor with him and be grateful to him.
Both of these forms of unacceptable behavior and attitude are not only disgusting and incompatible with being a communist, but they also stem from the false premise of a natural interest in communism.
The drowning man must save himself . And nothing else. "Neither God, nor the Tsar, nor the hero..." Until the masses of the proletariat themselves come to the understanding that it is impossible to live as before, until they experience this on their own skin, until they come to the point of asking the question of communism with their own minds, no spark will fan the flames of revolution.
We, in this sense, are the same drowning people, but we have embarked on the path to salvation.
The task of the communists is, firstly , to increase their ranks, to strengthen the organization, working hard to develop the theory; secondly , to have an authoritative Party of Scientific Centralism at the turning point of history. This does not mean that we must wait. Quite the contrary, we must work most persistently to educate cadres, increasing the ranks of communists. Not to run after "stupid philistines" and "wrong workers", not to descend from the scientific Olympus to explain "elementary truths to the stupid masses", but to engage in self-education and development of theory. To do at our level the same thing as Valery Alekseevich . Then the quality that will ensure victory in the future will grow in our activities.
Those who don’t like this approach, who know how to “force”, should study outside the breakthrough team.
All ideas to stir up the masses, find approaches to the youth, keys to the hearts of the proletarians, to be in trends and the like have nothing to do with the real process of growth of the organization. All this is ultimately an imitation of vigorous activity for the sake of substituting self-education.
Those who enjoy at least a little bit the "elevation" above the masses and rudeness, which is justified by high education, should think seriously, because this is a sign of an opportunistic personality. Back in 2018, a note was published about the intelligentsia spirit and laxity. It is a pity that it did not receive due attention in the left environment. Valery Alekseevich's article about conceit is also not often studied .
We often receive approximately the same message. Here is an example of the latest letter:
"I have been reading Redin's articles for almost ten years now, they are really very high quality, as well as the materials of other authors on this site. I analyzed the site's visitor statistics by year - the growth of visitors is falling every year, which seems rather strange, since the events happening in the world should, in my opinion, push people to develop. I will assume that the bulk of readers are people born in the USSR, whose number is decreasing every year. If you draw a trend line, the picture will be depressing. What can change this trend in the next ten years, except for a miracle or an error in my calculations? No one in my circle of friends can stand even ten minutes of conversation on the topic of Marxism, if we go from the particular to the general, then in a decade I have not been able to force myself to read "The Science of Logic."
If the cause of communism depends on people born in the USSR, then I have bad news. People born in the USSR have already lost their country. I wouldn't count on them. But each new generation is significantly smarter than the previous one. Today's teenagers demonstrate enviable abilities and talents, as well as a general intellectual level. The future belongs to them, they will live under communism. Therefore, if there is a factor of natural statistical decline of those born in the USSR, then it does not mean anything terrible.
A reader complains about why the number of visitors to the site is falling. Personally, I have no idea why. People's attention on the Internet is subject to its own laws, which do not affect anything at all in terms of the tasks that we face. There is no such pattern: the higher the popularity on the Internet, the more influential the organization.
If we are to judge by such standards, then the number of sympathizers and supporters is determined by the scale of subscriptions, orders for brochures and other financial assistance to the publication. In my opinion, they are not falling.
Much more disturbing is another question: why is it so difficult to train new personnel? And it intersects with another reader's complaint that in ten years he could not force himself to read Hegel.
I have a complaint to those who consider themselves Marxists: why can’t you force yourself to read both the classic Marxist literature and the key materials of “Breakthrough”? Really read it, study it properly.
If we look at other countries, where the level of Marxism has always been significantly lower than in Russia, then here, most likely, the low demands on oneself are due to the low demands on the part of the proletariat. Or rather, Marxists believe that they must meet the expectations of the masses, and not the objective demands of history.
So why hasn't the reader mastered Hegel in ten years? In ten years, if desired, one could have gnawed through the "Science of Logic" lengthwise and crosswise. There is no desire and no need.
It is necessary to understand and accept a simple thing - no element will make anyone a Marxist . In our piecemeal personnel work, without a person's desire, nothing can be achieved. In the same way, without desire on the part of the proletariat, communism cannot be built.
The second simple thing that needs to be understood and accepted is that we are not sectarians, we are not engaged in network marketing, so we should not lure people into communism . Our task is to engage in science and organization, scientific centralism. We must do everything for those who sincerely, without sparing themselves, will take the path of struggle for communism. We must have a plan, competent personnel, the highest level of discipline, so as not to disgrace ourselves before the masses.
If our teaching is scientific, it will somehow find its way to the masses.
Redin
4/04/2025
https://prorivists.org/104_mess/
Google Translator
When an inquisitive mind first encounters the comprehension of objective truth, there arises a unique feeling of joy, which one immediately wants to share. The theory of Marxism-Leninism provides many such moments, and especially strong ones, since the truths of social structure are the most significant. When a person comprehends in the most general terms how society is structured and comes to the idea of the need to fight for communism, he concentrates almost all his attention on what benefit he can bring. After a while, not being able to quickly achieve any result, some begin to agitate others in the most active way.
Moreover, this often takes on caricatured forms of messianism. It turns out like this. A person has become familiar with Marxism and has become a prophet of communism, running around and pestering everyone in this spirit: " Oh, fools, you live under capitalism, all your lives are worthless and useless, only the struggle for communism makes sense! Drop everything and run after me with iron battalions ."
Another type of messianism is formed on the basis of a more or less competent mastery of theoretical foundations. The fact is that the propagandist of Marxism is superior to his audience in terms of knowledge, understanding, he must teach, instruct. And this is normal and understandable. It is abnormal when this turns into conceit, when the propagandist begins to think that he is better because he is smarter, that they should curry favor with him and be grateful to him.
Both of these forms of unacceptable behavior and attitude are not only disgusting and incompatible with being a communist, but they also stem from the false premise of a natural interest in communism.
The drowning man must save himself . And nothing else. "Neither God, nor the Tsar, nor the hero..." Until the masses of the proletariat themselves come to the understanding that it is impossible to live as before, until they experience this on their own skin, until they come to the point of asking the question of communism with their own minds, no spark will fan the flames of revolution.
We, in this sense, are the same drowning people, but we have embarked on the path to salvation.
The task of the communists is, firstly , to increase their ranks, to strengthen the organization, working hard to develop the theory; secondly , to have an authoritative Party of Scientific Centralism at the turning point of history. This does not mean that we must wait. Quite the contrary, we must work most persistently to educate cadres, increasing the ranks of communists. Not to run after "stupid philistines" and "wrong workers", not to descend from the scientific Olympus to explain "elementary truths to the stupid masses", but to engage in self-education and development of theory. To do at our level the same thing as Valery Alekseevich . Then the quality that will ensure victory in the future will grow in our activities.
Those who don’t like this approach, who know how to “force”, should study outside the breakthrough team.
All ideas to stir up the masses, find approaches to the youth, keys to the hearts of the proletarians, to be in trends and the like have nothing to do with the real process of growth of the organization. All this is ultimately an imitation of vigorous activity for the sake of substituting self-education.
Those who enjoy at least a little bit the "elevation" above the masses and rudeness, which is justified by high education, should think seriously, because this is a sign of an opportunistic personality. Back in 2018, a note was published about the intelligentsia spirit and laxity. It is a pity that it did not receive due attention in the left environment. Valery Alekseevich's article about conceit is also not often studied .
We often receive approximately the same message. Here is an example of the latest letter:
"I have been reading Redin's articles for almost ten years now, they are really very high quality, as well as the materials of other authors on this site. I analyzed the site's visitor statistics by year - the growth of visitors is falling every year, which seems rather strange, since the events happening in the world should, in my opinion, push people to develop. I will assume that the bulk of readers are people born in the USSR, whose number is decreasing every year. If you draw a trend line, the picture will be depressing. What can change this trend in the next ten years, except for a miracle or an error in my calculations? No one in my circle of friends can stand even ten minutes of conversation on the topic of Marxism, if we go from the particular to the general, then in a decade I have not been able to force myself to read "The Science of Logic."
If the cause of communism depends on people born in the USSR, then I have bad news. People born in the USSR have already lost their country. I wouldn't count on them. But each new generation is significantly smarter than the previous one. Today's teenagers demonstrate enviable abilities and talents, as well as a general intellectual level. The future belongs to them, they will live under communism. Therefore, if there is a factor of natural statistical decline of those born in the USSR, then it does not mean anything terrible.
A reader complains about why the number of visitors to the site is falling. Personally, I have no idea why. People's attention on the Internet is subject to its own laws, which do not affect anything at all in terms of the tasks that we face. There is no such pattern: the higher the popularity on the Internet, the more influential the organization.
If we are to judge by such standards, then the number of sympathizers and supporters is determined by the scale of subscriptions, orders for brochures and other financial assistance to the publication. In my opinion, they are not falling.
Much more disturbing is another question: why is it so difficult to train new personnel? And it intersects with another reader's complaint that in ten years he could not force himself to read Hegel.
I have a complaint to those who consider themselves Marxists: why can’t you force yourself to read both the classic Marxist literature and the key materials of “Breakthrough”? Really read it, study it properly.
If we look at other countries, where the level of Marxism has always been significantly lower than in Russia, then here, most likely, the low demands on oneself are due to the low demands on the part of the proletariat. Or rather, Marxists believe that they must meet the expectations of the masses, and not the objective demands of history.
So why hasn't the reader mastered Hegel in ten years? In ten years, if desired, one could have gnawed through the "Science of Logic" lengthwise and crosswise. There is no desire and no need.
It is necessary to understand and accept a simple thing - no element will make anyone a Marxist . In our piecemeal personnel work, without a person's desire, nothing can be achieved. In the same way, without desire on the part of the proletariat, communism cannot be built.
The second simple thing that needs to be understood and accepted is that we are not sectarians, we are not engaged in network marketing, so we should not lure people into communism . Our task is to engage in science and organization, scientific centralism. We must do everything for those who sincerely, without sparing themselves, will take the path of struggle for communism. We must have a plan, competent personnel, the highest level of discipline, so as not to disgrace ourselves before the masses.
If our teaching is scientific, it will somehow find its way to the masses.
Redin
4/04/2025
https://prorivists.org/104_mess/
Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Ideology
The Book That Changed the World
Even the most picky critic, the most suspicious skeptic, cannot, without lying to himself, fail to acknowledge the power of the human mind when Geniuses appear who divide the history of science and culture into "before and after". However, if in the field of private sciences and all kinds of art nature is generous with genius, then in the field of social thought and especially philosophy, its stinginess can be envied by the most cunning of "Shylocks". The consequence of such disproportion is the fact that humanity, rich in natural scientific and technical discoveries, masterpieces of painting and literature, for thousands of years "groped" towards a bright future, hidden from intellectual "eyes" by a veil of innate ignorance and acquired-inherited meanness, stumbling over bloody wars and revolutions, not understanding how to replace periodic catastrophicity with permanent harmony, how to create the most favorable conditions for the qualitative development of innate creative and creative inclinations. Making its way through the dense thickets of barbarism, spontaneously overcoming cannibalism, forced to study individual, private laws of nature, society and thinking, humanity in the era of the rapid development of European capitalism gave birth to two Geniuses in its depths, whose significance for the successful reign of goodness and happiness on the planet cannot be overestimated. Operating under the conditions of feudal-capitalist slavery, they did not immediately, but rather quickly (by historical standards) discover a method that allowed them to remove the prevailing stupidity with a consistently scientific worldview, allowing them to recognize the objective necessity of social development - knowledge that was previously unknown. Vague, spontaneous guesses of materialists and dialecticians of the past turned into a strict system of scientific truths, a system that challenged all existing misanthropic foundations and concepts. Despite the sometimes unbearable conditions of existence, the intrigues of enemies and the betrayal of friends, they quickly conquered the intellectual Olympus, conscientiously systematizing the achievements of all mankind and revealing to people the Truth, the path to real salvation, and not one invented by shameless shamans and priests. The truth of this was the scientific worldview that we, their followers, call dialectical mathematics, or the methodology of correct thinking that accurately reflects reality. The main book in which the dialectical method was set out and applied is still the well-known, but still little understood, Capital. As Lenin wrote:
“If Marx did not leave “Logic” (with a capital letter), then he left the logic of “Capital”… In “Capital” logic, dialectics and the theory of knowledge… of materialism are applied to one science…” [1]
The appearance and distribution of this book marked the achievement of a qualitatively new stage in the field of human cognition of objective reality. Subsequently, it was precisely Marxist scientific and theoretical principles that prepared the way for the onset of the communist era and were applied in the practice of the first communist state in history, the Lenin-Stalin Soviet Union. Marx was the first in history to scientifically set forth the foundations of a non-political, non-violent path of expanded reproduction of the entire society, the reproduction of happiness, goodness, love, beauty, truth... and the concomitant destruction of the prerequisites and consequences of evil, meanness, ignorance. Having studied the dialectical material of production relations and productive forces on the basis of extensive specific material, having discovered the essence of class society, he formulated the foundations of a classless society, organized according to the objective necessity of its expanded reproduction. Having answered the general question, he was able to answer specific questions as well. Thus, Marx's book provided a scientific foundation for the categorical apparatus of philosophy and social science, turning pleasant-to-the-ear words into strict scientific categories: it was thanks to him that such long-known concepts as progress, equality, happiness, wealth and, of course, communism, acquired a scientific, the only correct interpretation.
Solving the great riddle of humanity, "Are people capable of building an ideal society?", Marx, with the help of Lenin, Stalin and the great Soviet people, answered this question in the affirmative. Bacon's anti-scholastic, but mostly abstract statement, "Knowledge is power," acquired a concrete and uniquely correct content in the example of the Lenin-Stalin USSR. The naive hypotheses of the utopians of the past, all sorts of Atlantis and phalanxes, Icarias and Solarias were replaced by very real Moscow and Leningrad, Obninsk and Magnitogorsk. The dream became reality, but only thanks to a responsible, fundamental approach, superbly demonstrated first and foremost in "Capital." This book, which became, in Marx's own apt expression, "the most terrible projectile launched at the head of the bourgeoisie", marked an era in the history of the struggle of the rational with the irrational, the human with the animal, the creative with the destructive, order with chaos, monism with pluralism, centralism with democracy. It was this book that actually established a new, previously unattainable stage in the development of the qualities of reflection by human thought of the ever-changing forms of existence of matter, allowing us to speak of the end of the pre-Marxist era of humanity and thought.
Traits of genius can already be seen in the prefaces and afterwords to various editions of Capital, where first Marx and then (after the death of his friend) Engels introduce the reader to the situation. Unfortunately, among many modern pedants there is an unspoken rule according to which a preface to a book is nothing more than a writer's tribute to a certain literary tradition. The impression is formed that the cognitive losses from ignoring a preface are eventually more than compensated for by the time saved by its thoughtful study. It is worth acknowledging, however, that in many cases such disrespectful behavior is natural, since the development of book printing and the emergence of easier tools for distributing literary material have not led to an increase in the quality of books. On the contrary, in many areas of human knowledge the opposite processes are observed: the increase in the number of accessible methods of writing and disseminating material, coupled with the increase in the number of writers, leads to a decline in the relative number of quality products of human scientific and artistic literary creativity, to a decline in the quality of the printed word: prefaces begin to have a formal character. Partly the blame for such an unspoken rule lies on the shoulders of the authors themselves, who enjoy the trust of readers for banal formalism and doctrinaire thinking; the laziness and illiteracy of authors leads to the fact that the good tradition of a competent preface as a form of introducing the reader to the context of the problematic being studied is replaced by pure formality. And if such ignoring is justified with regard to individual fiction and pseudoscientific metaphysics, then when an inquisitive reader becomes acquainted with Marxist literature, this established stereotype of behavior can play a cruel joke in the process of familiarizing himself with the prefaces of the classics of Marxism, who used the preface format not only for corrective editorial remarks indicating, say, editorial intervention on individual pages of the book, but also for the presentation of scientific ideas that make it easier to enter the context of the issue being studied, intensify the process of “intellectual assimilation”, prepare for working with the text, or even learn interesting facts that accompanied the writing and publication of the book. So the prefaces to “Capital” contain in places no less, and sometimes even more scientific significance than individual fragments of “Capital” itself. In the prefaces, Marx (and after his death, Engels) set out his individual thoughts on issues not always related to the criticism of political economy, but always related to the peculiarities of scientific knowledge of the world.
At the same time, Marx's Capital (especially the first volume) is a standard of unity of scientific content and highly artistic form. It is not surprising that another talented scientist from a literary point of view is able to delight the reader not only with the content and depth of his discovery, but also with the beauty of its presentation. High artistic quality of the text, of course, does not directly guarantee the scientific nature of its content, but without high artistic form it is difficult to talk about the growth of accessibility of scientific content, about the increase of reader involvement in the problem under study. After all, the degree of accessibility of scientific knowledge for those interested is determined not only by their cognitive abilities, intellectual potential and perseverance, but often also by the literary skills of the scientist himself, who is able to hold the attention of as many readers as possible. A significant share of responsibility for the quality of education lies with the educators themselves, with those who, on their own initiative, shouldered the responsibilities of updating and disseminating scientific knowledge . This is precisely why modern Marxists should pay the utmost attention not only to the knowledge of the truths set forth by Marx and the analysis of the method of their discovery, but also to the “artistic experience” of “Capital” [2]. At the same time, of course, one must not forget about the secondary nature of form in relation to content: a true communist is obliged to care about the artistic form of his scientific work only when the substantive side of the issue is understood by him and includes truths of different orders. For example, Marx, trying, on the one hand, to write clearly and beautifully, on the other, did not primitivize scientific content, did not stoop to the level of “agitation in the gateway”, did not vulgarize Marxism, like some modern citizens who call themselves communists [3].
Moreover, even with a superficial acquaintance with Capital, the volume of the work is striking: three volumes in five books with an added fourth volume in three books compiled by Kautsky (“Theories of Surplus Value”). But Marx planned to write as many as six volumes! Such a responsible approach is a consequence of the application of the dialectical methodology of thinking to the analysis of changes in the various forms of existence of matter, in particular, to the study of the essence of commodity-money relations, but in no way a sign of empty graphomania, as various lackeys of capitalism sometimes try (unsuccessfully, though) to present it [4]. It was precisely the dialectical approach to the study of society and its features that allowed Marx to study the essence of goods, value, money, profit, capital, wages, etc. so deeply, so concretely and fundamentally. Of course, Marx’s scientific conscientiousness also played a role, not allowing him to publish the first volume of his work before it had reached the highest possible quality, that is, after Marx himself was convinced that his work would be able to convince thinking leftists throughout the world of the correctness of his scientific and theoretical conclusions. It remains to be regretted that the health of the Genius, existing within the framework of the disgusting capitalism that corrupts the soul and body, did not allow him to complete the planned six volumes. However, fortunately, Marx’s work was continued by his close friend and comrade-in-arms Friedrich Engels [5], who compiled and published the second and third volumes of Capital. Lenin wrote:
“Marx died without having finished working on his enormous work on capital. However, the rough draft was already ready, and so Engels, after the death of his friend, set about the difficult task of editing and publishing Volumes II and III of Capital. In 1885 he published Volume II, and in 1894 Volume III (he did not have time to edit Volume IV). A great deal of work was required on these two volumes. The Austrian Social Democrat Adler rightly noted that by publishing Volumes II and III of Capital, Engels erected a majestic monument to his brilliant friend, on which he involuntarily carved his own name in indelible lines. Indeed, these two volumes of Capital are the work of two: Marx and Engels” [6].
By the way, looking at the cover of the book, it is difficult not to notice exclusively the name of Karl Marx on it, but it is impossible not to emphasize, following Vladimir Ilyich, the role in the creation and publication of Capital that Marx’s closest friend and comrade, Friedrich Engels, played. Even people far removed from Marxism are well aware that Engels provided his brilliant friend not only moral and psychological, but also financial support [7]. Therefore, it is not surprising that, addressing his friend immediately after finishing work on the first volume, Marx wrote the following words: “So, this volume is ready. I owe it only to you that this has become possible!” But Marx did not limit himself to such a form of gratitude, resorting to more substantial methods to say thank you to his friend. This is confirmed, for example, by Marx’s proposal to write Engels an article on the military, or, as he put it, “human-killing” industry, in order to place it in the book as an appendix:
"Our theory of the determination of the organization of labor by the means of production is nowhere so brilliantly confirmed as in the human-slaughter industry [Menschenabschlachtungsindustry]. It would really be worthwhile for you to write something about this (I lack the knowledge for this), which I could include in my book as an appendix under your signature. Think about it. But if this is to be done, it must be done for the first volume, where I am investigating this subject ex professo [specially]. Do you understand what a great joy it would be for me if in my main work (until now I have written only small things) you figured directly as a co-author, and were not merely quoted! "
How much friendly love and gratitude there is in these beautiful words of the German Genius! And what formal reason for an informal expression of gratitude!? And even though Marx's plan was not realized, the direction of his thought clearly shows how trusting and warm the relations between the two friends were. Engels, as already indicated above, after the death of his friend continued the work of popularizing Marxism, a work that was later taken over by other outstanding followers of Marx, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin.
It is also worth noting that in the first period after the publication of Capital, bourgeois scholars attempted to hush up the book, but for the classics of Marxism such a confluence of circumstances was not surprising: the fact is that they assumed that the bourgeois professors, who were terrified of revolutionary ideas like fire, would do everything possible to ensure that the publication of a book that threatened capitalism, the market and private property would go unnoticed by the general public. In an effort to destroy the vile plans of the anti-communists, Engels proposed to deal them a preemptive blow [8], attacking the book “from a bourgeois point of view” [9]. Subsequently, Marx and Engels asked their comrades to write and/or distribute reviews of Capital so that the anti-communist “scholars” would not be able to hush up the publication of the first edition. Thus, in a letter to one of his closest supporters, Ludwig Kugelmann, in the autumn of 1967, after the book had already been published, Engels wrote:
"The main thing is not what and how to write, but that people talk about the book and that the Fauchers, Michaelises, Roschers and Rau are forced to speak out about it. It must be published in all possible newspapers - both political and other, wherever possible - publish both long and short notes, the main thing is to publish more often. It is necessary to make it impossible for them - and moreover, as quickly as possible - that policy of complete silence that these gentlemen will certainly try to carry out" [10].
A couple of weeks later, in a new letter to the same Kugelman, he wrote:
"The German press is still silent about Capital, and yet it is of the utmost importance that something be said... The main thing is that the book in general be reviewed all the time. And since Marx's hands are tied in this case and he is as shy as a girl, it is precisely we, the rest of us, who must do this" [11].
It was precisely for this purpose that Engels wrote a number of anonymous reviews from various positions (depending on the ideological orientation of the publication to which the reviews were sent), pursuing the goal of attracting the attention of the reading public to the book [12]. Engels also wrote a summary of Capital, most likely intended to popularize the provisions of the book and undoubtedly allowing Engels himself to more deeply and thoroughly assimilate the content of the great work [13]. In any case, the task that the classics of Marxism set for themselves was partially accomplished: the publication of Capital did not go unnoticed by a large number of not only the intelligentsia, but also ordinary workers. Marx wrote in his afterword to the second edition:
“The understanding that Capital quickly met with in wide circles of the German working class is the best reward for my work” [14].
The "conspiracy of silence" was broken by the infamous Eugen Dühring, who wrote a special critical review of Capital. In his letter to Ludwig Kugelmann, Marx wrote:
“I must be grateful to this man for the fact that he was the first specialist to even talk about my book” [15].
The methodological weakness of Marx's opponents, which did not allow them to counter Marx's discoveries with anything worthy, sometimes forced them to resort to base methods of polemics [16]. Thus, some time after the publication of the first volume, a story became famous in which an anonymous author accused Marx of falsifying quotations from official English sources. It later turned out, firstly, that this anonymous author was none other than Lujo Brentano, and, secondly, that all the accusations against Marx were false [17]. But in addition to envy and slander, there were also positive, even enthusiastic reviews. Here is what Arnold Ruge, who spent most of his life opposing Marx from a petty-bourgeois position, wrote after the publication of the book:
“Dear Mr. Steinthal! Along with this letter I am sending you by parcel post Marx’s book on capital. I offer you my profound gratitude! All this time I have worked tirelessly on the book, although I have had to do all sorts of other work at the same time. This work makes an epoch; it sheds a bright, often harsh light on the development, destruction, birth pangs and terrible days of suffering of society in various periods. <…> Marx has a vast erudition and a magnificent dialectical talent. The book goes beyond the horizons of many people and newspaper scribblers, but it will undoubtedly make its way and, despite the breadth of the research, even precisely because of it, will have a powerful influence” [18].
A similar assessment of Capital was given by the already mentioned Ludwig Kugelmann, who wrote the following to Meissner, who published the first volume of the book:
"Marx's Capital can be placed alongside the celebrated works of thinkers of all ages. The day will come when this date [of the book's publication] will become the threshold of a new era" [19].
The first print run of 1,000 copies was sold out within five years [20]. Translations of the book into Russian [21] and French were prepared in a relatively short time. However, the so-called "conspiracy of silence" was truly "exposed" only in the 1920s-50s, when theoretical calculations became a "guide to action", when Russian workers, guided by the Bolshevik Party, began to very successfully implement the ideas of "Capital" on domestic soil. Well aware of the losses that "Capital" brings with it, having come face to face with the red threat after the grand victory first in the civil and then in the Second World War, the bourgeoisie began to actively and centrally finance all sorts of Russian centers and institutes, on the one hand, studying the Soviet experience, on the other - falsifying the foundations of Marxist theory and the results of their implementation in the USSR. The majority of Western intelligentsia, due to historically formed inertia and lack of conscience, turned out to be unprepared to understand Marxism, limiting themselves either to bashful and empty criticism, or to open and pretentious denial of Marxism as a science; but even they were unable to ignore the universal significance of Marx's discovery. Thus, practically no one managed to pass by, but only a few were able to comprehend the essence of Marxism's teaching, competently developing it in theory and successfully applying it in practice.
The secret of the greatness of Capital is also hidden in the full title of the book. The fact is that not only left-wing philistines, but also many of those who really carefully studied Marx's legacy, often overlooked the fact that the full title of the book is Capital. Critique of Political Economy . But why did Marx call the book that? The answer is given in Capital itself, especially in the last two chapters, which summarize the research conducted in the previous chapters: individual classics of political economy, primarily Montchretien and Petty, studying economic relations out of selfish rather than scientific interests, came to the correct conclusion that economic domination is impossible outside of relations of political violence, that the existence of contemporary economic relations is possible only on the basis of a developed state-formal and private-informal apparatus for suppressing the will of dissenters. This is precisely why the young science was given the name POLITICAL ECONOMY. By the way, the same Petty, being one of the conductors of the POLITICAL power of England on the territory of Ireland, did not hesitate to give the following advice on the more effective implementation of colonial policy in the interests of economic expediency:
"Ireland is a country which requires the maintenance of such a large army as may compel the Irish to desist from hurting themselves and the English by further rebellions . And this large army must necessitate the imposition of great and heavy taxes on a poor people and a ruined country. It will therefore be of no use to Ireland to know the nature and extent of the taxes and duties. <…> The great abundance which Ireland has will only ruin it, unless a way be found to establish a profitable exportation; and this will depend on the proper amount of duties and excises, of which we shall speak. "As Ireland is generally under-populated, and as the government here can never be secure without expensive armies , until the greater part of the people be English, either by importation or expulsion of Irishmen, I think the best encouragement to the English to settle thither would be to know that the king's revenue is above one-tenth of all the wealth, rents, and revenue of the country; that the public charges will not be felt more heavily in Ireland for the next century than the tithes in England; and that as the king's revenue increases, the causes of his expenses will be proportionately diminished; and this is a double advantage." [22]
Being a conscientious researcher, Marx came to the conclusion that both the political and the economic (in fact, the egoistic) are only historically formed and fixed (by interested parties) manifestations of human stupidity. The history of the development of class society is the history of mutually directed and permanent political violence of economic competitors regardless of skin color, religion, language, gender, class, tastes, etc. Ownership of private property forced its owners to seek political, i.e. violent, instruments for its protection and/or increase. Economic domination was possible only thanks to the vile ingenuity of those who saw in political violence an instrument for the conquest and retention of real, and not formal-institutional power. Unfortunately, the modern leftists, breaking spears over "Marxist political economy" and calculating the degree of marketability of the Soviet economy, play by the rules of the bourgeoisie, losing sight of the fundamental difference between bourgeois, POLITICAL economic theories and the communist theory of expanded reproduction of society, which presupposes the removal of external SUPPRESSION by a dialectically understood SELF -government. The majority of modern novice Marxists study not "Capital" itself, but how it was understood by the Dzarasovs, Buzgalins, Popovs, Komolovs and other representatives of modern opportunism, who have proven with their entire party-political career, with all their actions and works, that they did not understand Marx, that they mimic Marxists, while being latent representatives of the modern bourgeois intelligentsia, modern Mensheviks and "economists". The consequence of this confluence of circumstances has been a whole series of defeats suffered by the domestic communist movement since Stalin's death. In addition to this, we are forced to admit that the Bolshevik tradition of conscientious, hard-working journalistic work with Marxist theory has been practically lost on the territory of the former USSR. At the present time, the only Marxist publications [23] that point out to their authors, supporters and readers the fundamental importance of studying and reviewing the classic works of Marxism, and especially Capital, are the magazine Proryv and the newspaper Proryvist:
"The journal "Proryv" is holding a scientific and theoretical conference on the book by K. Marx "Critique of Political Economy. Capital". The topic of the conference: "Marx's Book as a Diamatic System of Scientific and Theoretical Formulations of the Objective Laws of Building Communism". Abstracts covering this topic should be sent to the editorial board of the journal "Proryv" (petrova@proriv.ru) in electronic form, starting from February 1 and up to and including May 5, 2025. The publication of the collection and mailing of the paper version to the authors will take place on November 7, 2025. Editorial Board of the journal "Proryv".
Therefore, without wishing to go against the truth, everyone who wants to repeat the feat of their communist ancestors must, to the best of their ability and time, without fear of fatigue, conscientiously, attentively, diligently, "with a pencil" study all the volumes of "Capital", reviewing and/or taking notes on important and interesting fragments, because the conquest of the "rocky paths" of Marxism is impossible without studying its main book. The classics forged Leaders out of themselves with their own hands, becoming the greatest people in history, and therefore, until modern followers of Marx begin to study independently, as the classics did, until they clearly realize and understand that the only instrument of victory is the repetition of theoretical and practical feats on a qualitatively new level, until then capitalism will continue to degenerate, threatening humanity with complete destruction. In other words, it is impossible to talk about the FUTURE change of the world without a preliminary conscientious study and review of the book that has ALREADY changed the world .
To be continued…
Bronislav
04/13/2025
________________
[1] Lenin V. I. Complete Works. Vol. 29. P. 301.
[2] See, for example, Orleansky A.I. Artistic images in K. Marx’s Capital, 1968.
[3] Prorivist newspaper, “The desire to get fried hazel grouse straight into your mouth” ( https://prorivists.org/doc_lenin-lengnik-1903/ ).
[4] Nikita Krichevsky: Marx is a graphomaniac of economics! ( https://www.kp.ru/daily/26826.7/3864796/ ).
[5] “Ancient legends tell of various touching examples of friendship. The European proletariat can say that its science was created by two scientists and fighters whose relationship surpasses all the most touching tales of the ancients about human friendship. Engels always – and, in general, quite rightly – placed himself behind Marx. “Under Marx,” he wrote to an old friend, “I played second fiddle.” His love for the living Marx and his reverence for the memory of the deceased were boundless. This stern fighter and strict thinker had a deeply loving soul” (Lenin V. I. Complete Works. Vol. 2. P. 12).
[6] Lenin V. I. Complete Works. Vol. 2. P. 12.
[7] “Poverty was simply strangling Marx and his family; without the constant, selfless financial support of Engels, Marx not only could not have finished Capital, but would also have inevitably perished under the yoke of poverty” (Lenin V. I. Complete Works. Vol. 26. P. 49).
[8] Earlier, after the publication of “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,” Engels had already tried this method by writing a couple of reviews of Marx’s work.
[9] Collected Works of Marx and Engels. 2nd and last editions. Vol. 31. P. 293.
[10] Collected Works of Marx and Engels. 2nd and last editions. Vol. 31. P. 471.
[11] Collected Works of Marx and Engels. 2nd and last editions. Vol. 31. P. 475.
[12] Collected Works of Marx and Engels. 2nd and last editions. Vol. 16. Pp. 211-223, 231-248, 299-322.
[13] Collected Works of Marx and Engels. 2nd and last editions. Vol. 16. Pp. 249-298.
[14] Collected Works of Marx and Engels. 2nd and last editions. Vol. 23. P. 13.
[15] Collected Works of Marx and Engels. 2nd and last editions. Vol. 32. P. 448.
[16] For more details see Uroeva A. V. The Book Living Through the Centuries. Pp. 45-48.
[17] See: Engels F., Brentano contra Marx, Marx K. and Engels F. 2nd ed. Vol. 22; ditto. Preface to the fourth edition, ibid. Vol. 23. Pp. 35-40.
[18] Collected Works of Marx and Engels. 2nd and last editions. Vol. 32. Pp. 582, 583.
[19] Uroeva A. V. A book that lives through the centuries. P. 49.
[20] Questions of History. 1953. No. 5. P. 125.
[21] As is well known, the first foreign language into which Capital was translated was Russian. It is symbolic that it was in Russia at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century that the conclusions from Marx's book were drawn most consistently and scientifically, that it was Russia that became the first country to touch the future, that it was Russia that became the outpost of the communist revolution for decades. It was the Russian-speaking followers of Marx who achieved the greatest success in the construction of communism, which their Korean, Cuban, Chinese, and Vietnamese comrades still follow with varying degrees of success.
[22] Petty V. Economic and statistical works. Vol. 1. P. 4-5.
[23] There are other publications that study Capital and position themselves as Marxist, but are in fact anti-communist and Trotskyist. See, for example, Lenin Crew.
https://prorivists.org/104_capital/
Even the most picky critic, the most suspicious skeptic, cannot, without lying to himself, fail to acknowledge the power of the human mind when Geniuses appear who divide the history of science and culture into "before and after". However, if in the field of private sciences and all kinds of art nature is generous with genius, then in the field of social thought and especially philosophy, its stinginess can be envied by the most cunning of "Shylocks". The consequence of such disproportion is the fact that humanity, rich in natural scientific and technical discoveries, masterpieces of painting and literature, for thousands of years "groped" towards a bright future, hidden from intellectual "eyes" by a veil of innate ignorance and acquired-inherited meanness, stumbling over bloody wars and revolutions, not understanding how to replace periodic catastrophicity with permanent harmony, how to create the most favorable conditions for the qualitative development of innate creative and creative inclinations. Making its way through the dense thickets of barbarism, spontaneously overcoming cannibalism, forced to study individual, private laws of nature, society and thinking, humanity in the era of the rapid development of European capitalism gave birth to two Geniuses in its depths, whose significance for the successful reign of goodness and happiness on the planet cannot be overestimated. Operating under the conditions of feudal-capitalist slavery, they did not immediately, but rather quickly (by historical standards) discover a method that allowed them to remove the prevailing stupidity with a consistently scientific worldview, allowing them to recognize the objective necessity of social development - knowledge that was previously unknown. Vague, spontaneous guesses of materialists and dialecticians of the past turned into a strict system of scientific truths, a system that challenged all existing misanthropic foundations and concepts. Despite the sometimes unbearable conditions of existence, the intrigues of enemies and the betrayal of friends, they quickly conquered the intellectual Olympus, conscientiously systematizing the achievements of all mankind and revealing to people the Truth, the path to real salvation, and not one invented by shameless shamans and priests. The truth of this was the scientific worldview that we, their followers, call dialectical mathematics, or the methodology of correct thinking that accurately reflects reality. The main book in which the dialectical method was set out and applied is still the well-known, but still little understood, Capital. As Lenin wrote:
“If Marx did not leave “Logic” (with a capital letter), then he left the logic of “Capital”… In “Capital” logic, dialectics and the theory of knowledge… of materialism are applied to one science…” [1]
The appearance and distribution of this book marked the achievement of a qualitatively new stage in the field of human cognition of objective reality. Subsequently, it was precisely Marxist scientific and theoretical principles that prepared the way for the onset of the communist era and were applied in the practice of the first communist state in history, the Lenin-Stalin Soviet Union. Marx was the first in history to scientifically set forth the foundations of a non-political, non-violent path of expanded reproduction of the entire society, the reproduction of happiness, goodness, love, beauty, truth... and the concomitant destruction of the prerequisites and consequences of evil, meanness, ignorance. Having studied the dialectical material of production relations and productive forces on the basis of extensive specific material, having discovered the essence of class society, he formulated the foundations of a classless society, organized according to the objective necessity of its expanded reproduction. Having answered the general question, he was able to answer specific questions as well. Thus, Marx's book provided a scientific foundation for the categorical apparatus of philosophy and social science, turning pleasant-to-the-ear words into strict scientific categories: it was thanks to him that such long-known concepts as progress, equality, happiness, wealth and, of course, communism, acquired a scientific, the only correct interpretation.
Solving the great riddle of humanity, "Are people capable of building an ideal society?", Marx, with the help of Lenin, Stalin and the great Soviet people, answered this question in the affirmative. Bacon's anti-scholastic, but mostly abstract statement, "Knowledge is power," acquired a concrete and uniquely correct content in the example of the Lenin-Stalin USSR. The naive hypotheses of the utopians of the past, all sorts of Atlantis and phalanxes, Icarias and Solarias were replaced by very real Moscow and Leningrad, Obninsk and Magnitogorsk. The dream became reality, but only thanks to a responsible, fundamental approach, superbly demonstrated first and foremost in "Capital." This book, which became, in Marx's own apt expression, "the most terrible projectile launched at the head of the bourgeoisie", marked an era in the history of the struggle of the rational with the irrational, the human with the animal, the creative with the destructive, order with chaos, monism with pluralism, centralism with democracy. It was this book that actually established a new, previously unattainable stage in the development of the qualities of reflection by human thought of the ever-changing forms of existence of matter, allowing us to speak of the end of the pre-Marxist era of humanity and thought.
Traits of genius can already be seen in the prefaces and afterwords to various editions of Capital, where first Marx and then (after the death of his friend) Engels introduce the reader to the situation. Unfortunately, among many modern pedants there is an unspoken rule according to which a preface to a book is nothing more than a writer's tribute to a certain literary tradition. The impression is formed that the cognitive losses from ignoring a preface are eventually more than compensated for by the time saved by its thoughtful study. It is worth acknowledging, however, that in many cases such disrespectful behavior is natural, since the development of book printing and the emergence of easier tools for distributing literary material have not led to an increase in the quality of books. On the contrary, in many areas of human knowledge the opposite processes are observed: the increase in the number of accessible methods of writing and disseminating material, coupled with the increase in the number of writers, leads to a decline in the relative number of quality products of human scientific and artistic literary creativity, to a decline in the quality of the printed word: prefaces begin to have a formal character. Partly the blame for such an unspoken rule lies on the shoulders of the authors themselves, who enjoy the trust of readers for banal formalism and doctrinaire thinking; the laziness and illiteracy of authors leads to the fact that the good tradition of a competent preface as a form of introducing the reader to the context of the problematic being studied is replaced by pure formality. And if such ignoring is justified with regard to individual fiction and pseudoscientific metaphysics, then when an inquisitive reader becomes acquainted with Marxist literature, this established stereotype of behavior can play a cruel joke in the process of familiarizing himself with the prefaces of the classics of Marxism, who used the preface format not only for corrective editorial remarks indicating, say, editorial intervention on individual pages of the book, but also for the presentation of scientific ideas that make it easier to enter the context of the issue being studied, intensify the process of “intellectual assimilation”, prepare for working with the text, or even learn interesting facts that accompanied the writing and publication of the book. So the prefaces to “Capital” contain in places no less, and sometimes even more scientific significance than individual fragments of “Capital” itself. In the prefaces, Marx (and after his death, Engels) set out his individual thoughts on issues not always related to the criticism of political economy, but always related to the peculiarities of scientific knowledge of the world.
At the same time, Marx's Capital (especially the first volume) is a standard of unity of scientific content and highly artistic form. It is not surprising that another talented scientist from a literary point of view is able to delight the reader not only with the content and depth of his discovery, but also with the beauty of its presentation. High artistic quality of the text, of course, does not directly guarantee the scientific nature of its content, but without high artistic form it is difficult to talk about the growth of accessibility of scientific content, about the increase of reader involvement in the problem under study. After all, the degree of accessibility of scientific knowledge for those interested is determined not only by their cognitive abilities, intellectual potential and perseverance, but often also by the literary skills of the scientist himself, who is able to hold the attention of as many readers as possible. A significant share of responsibility for the quality of education lies with the educators themselves, with those who, on their own initiative, shouldered the responsibilities of updating and disseminating scientific knowledge . This is precisely why modern Marxists should pay the utmost attention not only to the knowledge of the truths set forth by Marx and the analysis of the method of their discovery, but also to the “artistic experience” of “Capital” [2]. At the same time, of course, one must not forget about the secondary nature of form in relation to content: a true communist is obliged to care about the artistic form of his scientific work only when the substantive side of the issue is understood by him and includes truths of different orders. For example, Marx, trying, on the one hand, to write clearly and beautifully, on the other, did not primitivize scientific content, did not stoop to the level of “agitation in the gateway”, did not vulgarize Marxism, like some modern citizens who call themselves communists [3].
Moreover, even with a superficial acquaintance with Capital, the volume of the work is striking: three volumes in five books with an added fourth volume in three books compiled by Kautsky (“Theories of Surplus Value”). But Marx planned to write as many as six volumes! Such a responsible approach is a consequence of the application of the dialectical methodology of thinking to the analysis of changes in the various forms of existence of matter, in particular, to the study of the essence of commodity-money relations, but in no way a sign of empty graphomania, as various lackeys of capitalism sometimes try (unsuccessfully, though) to present it [4]. It was precisely the dialectical approach to the study of society and its features that allowed Marx to study the essence of goods, value, money, profit, capital, wages, etc. so deeply, so concretely and fundamentally. Of course, Marx’s scientific conscientiousness also played a role, not allowing him to publish the first volume of his work before it had reached the highest possible quality, that is, after Marx himself was convinced that his work would be able to convince thinking leftists throughout the world of the correctness of his scientific and theoretical conclusions. It remains to be regretted that the health of the Genius, existing within the framework of the disgusting capitalism that corrupts the soul and body, did not allow him to complete the planned six volumes. However, fortunately, Marx’s work was continued by his close friend and comrade-in-arms Friedrich Engels [5], who compiled and published the second and third volumes of Capital. Lenin wrote:
“Marx died without having finished working on his enormous work on capital. However, the rough draft was already ready, and so Engels, after the death of his friend, set about the difficult task of editing and publishing Volumes II and III of Capital. In 1885 he published Volume II, and in 1894 Volume III (he did not have time to edit Volume IV). A great deal of work was required on these two volumes. The Austrian Social Democrat Adler rightly noted that by publishing Volumes II and III of Capital, Engels erected a majestic monument to his brilliant friend, on which he involuntarily carved his own name in indelible lines. Indeed, these two volumes of Capital are the work of two: Marx and Engels” [6].
By the way, looking at the cover of the book, it is difficult not to notice exclusively the name of Karl Marx on it, but it is impossible not to emphasize, following Vladimir Ilyich, the role in the creation and publication of Capital that Marx’s closest friend and comrade, Friedrich Engels, played. Even people far removed from Marxism are well aware that Engels provided his brilliant friend not only moral and psychological, but also financial support [7]. Therefore, it is not surprising that, addressing his friend immediately after finishing work on the first volume, Marx wrote the following words: “So, this volume is ready. I owe it only to you that this has become possible!” But Marx did not limit himself to such a form of gratitude, resorting to more substantial methods to say thank you to his friend. This is confirmed, for example, by Marx’s proposal to write Engels an article on the military, or, as he put it, “human-killing” industry, in order to place it in the book as an appendix:
"Our theory of the determination of the organization of labor by the means of production is nowhere so brilliantly confirmed as in the human-slaughter industry [Menschenabschlachtungsindustry]. It would really be worthwhile for you to write something about this (I lack the knowledge for this), which I could include in my book as an appendix under your signature. Think about it. But if this is to be done, it must be done for the first volume, where I am investigating this subject ex professo [specially]. Do you understand what a great joy it would be for me if in my main work (until now I have written only small things) you figured directly as a co-author, and were not merely quoted! "
How much friendly love and gratitude there is in these beautiful words of the German Genius! And what formal reason for an informal expression of gratitude!? And even though Marx's plan was not realized, the direction of his thought clearly shows how trusting and warm the relations between the two friends were. Engels, as already indicated above, after the death of his friend continued the work of popularizing Marxism, a work that was later taken over by other outstanding followers of Marx, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin.
It is also worth noting that in the first period after the publication of Capital, bourgeois scholars attempted to hush up the book, but for the classics of Marxism such a confluence of circumstances was not surprising: the fact is that they assumed that the bourgeois professors, who were terrified of revolutionary ideas like fire, would do everything possible to ensure that the publication of a book that threatened capitalism, the market and private property would go unnoticed by the general public. In an effort to destroy the vile plans of the anti-communists, Engels proposed to deal them a preemptive blow [8], attacking the book “from a bourgeois point of view” [9]. Subsequently, Marx and Engels asked their comrades to write and/or distribute reviews of Capital so that the anti-communist “scholars” would not be able to hush up the publication of the first edition. Thus, in a letter to one of his closest supporters, Ludwig Kugelmann, in the autumn of 1967, after the book had already been published, Engels wrote:
"The main thing is not what and how to write, but that people talk about the book and that the Fauchers, Michaelises, Roschers and Rau are forced to speak out about it. It must be published in all possible newspapers - both political and other, wherever possible - publish both long and short notes, the main thing is to publish more often. It is necessary to make it impossible for them - and moreover, as quickly as possible - that policy of complete silence that these gentlemen will certainly try to carry out" [10].
A couple of weeks later, in a new letter to the same Kugelman, he wrote:
"The German press is still silent about Capital, and yet it is of the utmost importance that something be said... The main thing is that the book in general be reviewed all the time. And since Marx's hands are tied in this case and he is as shy as a girl, it is precisely we, the rest of us, who must do this" [11].
It was precisely for this purpose that Engels wrote a number of anonymous reviews from various positions (depending on the ideological orientation of the publication to which the reviews were sent), pursuing the goal of attracting the attention of the reading public to the book [12]. Engels also wrote a summary of Capital, most likely intended to popularize the provisions of the book and undoubtedly allowing Engels himself to more deeply and thoroughly assimilate the content of the great work [13]. In any case, the task that the classics of Marxism set for themselves was partially accomplished: the publication of Capital did not go unnoticed by a large number of not only the intelligentsia, but also ordinary workers. Marx wrote in his afterword to the second edition:
“The understanding that Capital quickly met with in wide circles of the German working class is the best reward for my work” [14].
The "conspiracy of silence" was broken by the infamous Eugen Dühring, who wrote a special critical review of Capital. In his letter to Ludwig Kugelmann, Marx wrote:
“I must be grateful to this man for the fact that he was the first specialist to even talk about my book” [15].
The methodological weakness of Marx's opponents, which did not allow them to counter Marx's discoveries with anything worthy, sometimes forced them to resort to base methods of polemics [16]. Thus, some time after the publication of the first volume, a story became famous in which an anonymous author accused Marx of falsifying quotations from official English sources. It later turned out, firstly, that this anonymous author was none other than Lujo Brentano, and, secondly, that all the accusations against Marx were false [17]. But in addition to envy and slander, there were also positive, even enthusiastic reviews. Here is what Arnold Ruge, who spent most of his life opposing Marx from a petty-bourgeois position, wrote after the publication of the book:
“Dear Mr. Steinthal! Along with this letter I am sending you by parcel post Marx’s book on capital. I offer you my profound gratitude! All this time I have worked tirelessly on the book, although I have had to do all sorts of other work at the same time. This work makes an epoch; it sheds a bright, often harsh light on the development, destruction, birth pangs and terrible days of suffering of society in various periods. <…> Marx has a vast erudition and a magnificent dialectical talent. The book goes beyond the horizons of many people and newspaper scribblers, but it will undoubtedly make its way and, despite the breadth of the research, even precisely because of it, will have a powerful influence” [18].
A similar assessment of Capital was given by the already mentioned Ludwig Kugelmann, who wrote the following to Meissner, who published the first volume of the book:
"Marx's Capital can be placed alongside the celebrated works of thinkers of all ages. The day will come when this date [of the book's publication] will become the threshold of a new era" [19].
The first print run of 1,000 copies was sold out within five years [20]. Translations of the book into Russian [21] and French were prepared in a relatively short time. However, the so-called "conspiracy of silence" was truly "exposed" only in the 1920s-50s, when theoretical calculations became a "guide to action", when Russian workers, guided by the Bolshevik Party, began to very successfully implement the ideas of "Capital" on domestic soil. Well aware of the losses that "Capital" brings with it, having come face to face with the red threat after the grand victory first in the civil and then in the Second World War, the bourgeoisie began to actively and centrally finance all sorts of Russian centers and institutes, on the one hand, studying the Soviet experience, on the other - falsifying the foundations of Marxist theory and the results of their implementation in the USSR. The majority of Western intelligentsia, due to historically formed inertia and lack of conscience, turned out to be unprepared to understand Marxism, limiting themselves either to bashful and empty criticism, or to open and pretentious denial of Marxism as a science; but even they were unable to ignore the universal significance of Marx's discovery. Thus, practically no one managed to pass by, but only a few were able to comprehend the essence of Marxism's teaching, competently developing it in theory and successfully applying it in practice.
The secret of the greatness of Capital is also hidden in the full title of the book. The fact is that not only left-wing philistines, but also many of those who really carefully studied Marx's legacy, often overlooked the fact that the full title of the book is Capital. Critique of Political Economy . But why did Marx call the book that? The answer is given in Capital itself, especially in the last two chapters, which summarize the research conducted in the previous chapters: individual classics of political economy, primarily Montchretien and Petty, studying economic relations out of selfish rather than scientific interests, came to the correct conclusion that economic domination is impossible outside of relations of political violence, that the existence of contemporary economic relations is possible only on the basis of a developed state-formal and private-informal apparatus for suppressing the will of dissenters. This is precisely why the young science was given the name POLITICAL ECONOMY. By the way, the same Petty, being one of the conductors of the POLITICAL power of England on the territory of Ireland, did not hesitate to give the following advice on the more effective implementation of colonial policy in the interests of economic expediency:
"Ireland is a country which requires the maintenance of such a large army as may compel the Irish to desist from hurting themselves and the English by further rebellions . And this large army must necessitate the imposition of great and heavy taxes on a poor people and a ruined country. It will therefore be of no use to Ireland to know the nature and extent of the taxes and duties. <…> The great abundance which Ireland has will only ruin it, unless a way be found to establish a profitable exportation; and this will depend on the proper amount of duties and excises, of which we shall speak. "As Ireland is generally under-populated, and as the government here can never be secure without expensive armies , until the greater part of the people be English, either by importation or expulsion of Irishmen, I think the best encouragement to the English to settle thither would be to know that the king's revenue is above one-tenth of all the wealth, rents, and revenue of the country; that the public charges will not be felt more heavily in Ireland for the next century than the tithes in England; and that as the king's revenue increases, the causes of his expenses will be proportionately diminished; and this is a double advantage." [22]
Being a conscientious researcher, Marx came to the conclusion that both the political and the economic (in fact, the egoistic) are only historically formed and fixed (by interested parties) manifestations of human stupidity. The history of the development of class society is the history of mutually directed and permanent political violence of economic competitors regardless of skin color, religion, language, gender, class, tastes, etc. Ownership of private property forced its owners to seek political, i.e. violent, instruments for its protection and/or increase. Economic domination was possible only thanks to the vile ingenuity of those who saw in political violence an instrument for the conquest and retention of real, and not formal-institutional power. Unfortunately, the modern leftists, breaking spears over "Marxist political economy" and calculating the degree of marketability of the Soviet economy, play by the rules of the bourgeoisie, losing sight of the fundamental difference between bourgeois, POLITICAL economic theories and the communist theory of expanded reproduction of society, which presupposes the removal of external SUPPRESSION by a dialectically understood SELF -government. The majority of modern novice Marxists study not "Capital" itself, but how it was understood by the Dzarasovs, Buzgalins, Popovs, Komolovs and other representatives of modern opportunism, who have proven with their entire party-political career, with all their actions and works, that they did not understand Marx, that they mimic Marxists, while being latent representatives of the modern bourgeois intelligentsia, modern Mensheviks and "economists". The consequence of this confluence of circumstances has been a whole series of defeats suffered by the domestic communist movement since Stalin's death. In addition to this, we are forced to admit that the Bolshevik tradition of conscientious, hard-working journalistic work with Marxist theory has been practically lost on the territory of the former USSR. At the present time, the only Marxist publications [23] that point out to their authors, supporters and readers the fundamental importance of studying and reviewing the classic works of Marxism, and especially Capital, are the magazine Proryv and the newspaper Proryvist:
"The journal "Proryv" is holding a scientific and theoretical conference on the book by K. Marx "Critique of Political Economy. Capital". The topic of the conference: "Marx's Book as a Diamatic System of Scientific and Theoretical Formulations of the Objective Laws of Building Communism". Abstracts covering this topic should be sent to the editorial board of the journal "Proryv" (petrova@proriv.ru) in electronic form, starting from February 1 and up to and including May 5, 2025. The publication of the collection and mailing of the paper version to the authors will take place on November 7, 2025. Editorial Board of the journal "Proryv".
Therefore, without wishing to go against the truth, everyone who wants to repeat the feat of their communist ancestors must, to the best of their ability and time, without fear of fatigue, conscientiously, attentively, diligently, "with a pencil" study all the volumes of "Capital", reviewing and/or taking notes on important and interesting fragments, because the conquest of the "rocky paths" of Marxism is impossible without studying its main book. The classics forged Leaders out of themselves with their own hands, becoming the greatest people in history, and therefore, until modern followers of Marx begin to study independently, as the classics did, until they clearly realize and understand that the only instrument of victory is the repetition of theoretical and practical feats on a qualitatively new level, until then capitalism will continue to degenerate, threatening humanity with complete destruction. In other words, it is impossible to talk about the FUTURE change of the world without a preliminary conscientious study and review of the book that has ALREADY changed the world .
To be continued…
Bronislav
04/13/2025
________________
[1] Lenin V. I. Complete Works. Vol. 29. P. 301.
[2] See, for example, Orleansky A.I. Artistic images in K. Marx’s Capital, 1968.
[3] Prorivist newspaper, “The desire to get fried hazel grouse straight into your mouth” ( https://prorivists.org/doc_lenin-lengnik-1903/ ).
[4] Nikita Krichevsky: Marx is a graphomaniac of economics! ( https://www.kp.ru/daily/26826.7/3864796/ ).
[5] “Ancient legends tell of various touching examples of friendship. The European proletariat can say that its science was created by two scientists and fighters whose relationship surpasses all the most touching tales of the ancients about human friendship. Engels always – and, in general, quite rightly – placed himself behind Marx. “Under Marx,” he wrote to an old friend, “I played second fiddle.” His love for the living Marx and his reverence for the memory of the deceased were boundless. This stern fighter and strict thinker had a deeply loving soul” (Lenin V. I. Complete Works. Vol. 2. P. 12).
[6] Lenin V. I. Complete Works. Vol. 2. P. 12.
[7] “Poverty was simply strangling Marx and his family; without the constant, selfless financial support of Engels, Marx not only could not have finished Capital, but would also have inevitably perished under the yoke of poverty” (Lenin V. I. Complete Works. Vol. 26. P. 49).
[8] Earlier, after the publication of “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,” Engels had already tried this method by writing a couple of reviews of Marx’s work.
[9] Collected Works of Marx and Engels. 2nd and last editions. Vol. 31. P. 293.
[10] Collected Works of Marx and Engels. 2nd and last editions. Vol. 31. P. 471.
[11] Collected Works of Marx and Engels. 2nd and last editions. Vol. 31. P. 475.
[12] Collected Works of Marx and Engels. 2nd and last editions. Vol. 16. Pp. 211-223, 231-248, 299-322.
[13] Collected Works of Marx and Engels. 2nd and last editions. Vol. 16. Pp. 249-298.
[14] Collected Works of Marx and Engels. 2nd and last editions. Vol. 23. P. 13.
[15] Collected Works of Marx and Engels. 2nd and last editions. Vol. 32. P. 448.
[16] For more details see Uroeva A. V. The Book Living Through the Centuries. Pp. 45-48.
[17] See: Engels F., Brentano contra Marx, Marx K. and Engels F. 2nd ed. Vol. 22; ditto. Preface to the fourth edition, ibid. Vol. 23. Pp. 35-40.
[18] Collected Works of Marx and Engels. 2nd and last editions. Vol. 32. Pp. 582, 583.
[19] Uroeva A. V. A book that lives through the centuries. P. 49.
[20] Questions of History. 1953. No. 5. P. 125.
[21] As is well known, the first foreign language into which Capital was translated was Russian. It is symbolic that it was in Russia at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century that the conclusions from Marx's book were drawn most consistently and scientifically, that it was Russia that became the first country to touch the future, that it was Russia that became the outpost of the communist revolution for decades. It was the Russian-speaking followers of Marx who achieved the greatest success in the construction of communism, which their Korean, Cuban, Chinese, and Vietnamese comrades still follow with varying degrees of success.
[22] Petty V. Economic and statistical works. Vol. 1. P. 4-5.
[23] There are other publications that study Capital and position themselves as Marxist, but are in fact anti-communist and Trotskyist. See, for example, Lenin Crew.
https://prorivists.org/104_capital/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Ideology
Bootleg Rehab: Still Laundering Black Rage
Too Black 16 Apr 2025
DEI isn’t dead—it was never alive to begin with. A corporate pacification project dressed as progress, it launders Black rage into diversity statements while police budgets grow and material conditions collapse. As the right attacks this hollow facade, we must reject both the bootleg rehab of DEI and the strip-club austerity of Anti-DEI to organize for real power beyond the spectacle of representation.
Figure 1. An image of an “Equality in Diversity” sign at an assumed protest. The date and location is unknown but this has not prevented the image from being appropriated and memed in 416 websites (yes, we counted), ranging from news sources (The Hill Times, Christian Science Monitor, and Forbes) to discussions (inclusive training in the military, campus statements, and executive orders in the present and past). It appears to have been in usage in predominantly English-speaking countries (U.S., U.K., and Canada) but also in German, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Ukrainian, and Hindi), from 5 years ago to minutes to the time in which we completed this essay. At this point, we would need @georainbolt (Trevor Rainbolt) level of skills to geo-locate the place and possible year of the image. The memefication of the sign and its supposed message works within the context of the discussion that follows.
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” - Antonio Gramsci, Selections From the Prison Notebooks
“As I see it, history moves from one conjuncture to another rather than being an evolutionary flow. And what drives it forward is usually a crisis, when the contradictions that are always at play in any historical moment are condensed” - Stuart Hall, “Interpreting the Crisis” with Doreen Massey (2010)
“To muzzle the roar, the State dispossesses the labor of Black Rage, and harnesses it into a commodity that can be consumed harmlessly as if its original potency is retained.” - Laundering Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Profits
“DEI is under attack”, says the news of the day. “DEI must be protected”, says the peeved influencer as we scroll through the posts on social media. “DEI is dead ”, says a new presidential regime, according to the Associated Press. We hear news like this, and we expect to see Swastikas falling from the sky, but then we look around us and see everyday people doing everyday things, some for the good of it, and some for the bad of it, but all for the everyday. Their day, the day that affects them.
There has been no rush to stockpile the nearly 50 TEDTalk videos on diversity (and inclusion) that are bound to be deleted, at some point, from the TED site or from YouTube since the “attack” has been launched. The knowledge from those speakers is seemingly not at the top of our mind, to preserve the record, to have for future generations, all of the minutes of speeches of motivation and inspiration. There has been no rush to build barricades on the streets , the in-real-life streets, to protect diversity since it has always existed as much as vapor in the everyday experiences of everyday people. The public school system created because of diversity, the housing projects built by diversity, and the food program instituted by diversity need no protection, because diversity never built them. Each of those necessary infrastructures to life was never a feature or aim of diversity. There has been no rush to formulate farewell songs, plan funeral marches, hire professional criers, find the best black drip to wear, or prepare a NOLA-style jazz funeral complete with a second line since the end is nigh. Why? Because everyday people are dealing with everyday things. And those everyday things have never been about the aims and activities of diversity and its subsequent iterations.
In the 1980s, diversity (D), then inclusion (I); diversity and inclusion (DI); equity (E); diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); valuing diversity; implicit bias; unconscious bias; equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) ; inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility (IDEA) ; social justice (SJ); diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) ; justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) ; diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) , diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and belonging (DEIBJ ); and any other configuration and ordering of these words (as well as, some subtle mention of one of the following: anti-racism, “abolition”, and “decolonization”) highlights the ever-changing evolution of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), the boogie-man of the Right and the savior of a purported Left.
For the purposes of our essay DEI is the catch-all for the phraseology that is the stir of the moment in the United States (US). DEI was crafted to be a counter to the rebellions and power movements of the 1960s and 1970s. A counter-measure .[1] A counter-movement .[2] An empty ideological lens to guide employment practices, advertisement representations, and programmatic offerings that were sure to rarely threaten capitalist pursuits but instead compliment a global neo-colonial front. And despite this historical reality, we are placed in a situation to argue for a front that has little impact on our material conditions, especially over an extended or sustainable period of time.
DEI, at its foundation, has always been guaranteed diminishing returns with each generation. A proclivity to low grade dreams and low grade results that advance a few at the suffering of the whole. Yet, under Anti-DEI, the advancement of a few becomes a rationalization to increasingly attack the whole. All while White Capital advances its dispossession of our planet at our expense. But an analogy is needed to contextualize our points.
Rehabilitating Empire
Say a poor Black neighborhood is rapidly flooded by a deluge of life-threatening drugs. To calm the outrage to their suffering, the kingpin dealing the deadly products finances a (short-staffed) neighborhood rehabilitation center. The center boldly pledges to end the systemic trafficking of drugs. They hold community conversations chronicling addiction and put out ad nauseam statements about how drug addicts matter. Yet, while establishing the center, they simultaneously harness it to launder their drug money. Then years after its construction, a buffoonish but competing kingpin threatens to destroy said rehab center because they say it discriminates against drug dealers. Now enraged at the cruelty of the competing kingpin, the leaders of the poor Black community launch a campaign to defend the bootleg rehab center as if it were their own. Nonetheless, the drugs keep flowing.
To appease some in the community, the competing kingpin offers to build exclusive strip clubs in place of the bootleg rehab—in which they also intend to launder their drug money. They promise to deliver more jobs than the bootleg rehab and make a pledge to hire Black people directly from the neighborhood, not the immigrants who migrated there as of late. They go as far as to claim the migrants are responsible for bringing in drugs, not the known dealers, so the neighborhood should be thankful for the strip clubs. Nonetheless, the drugs keep flowing.
Under either regime, the kingpins are the cause of the drug epidemic in the neighborhood, yet each offers faux remedies (fronts) that are only meant to appear to address the problem, either by surface reform or delusional escape. Neither protesting nor boycotting the fronts would end the scourge of drugs in the community. Thus, if the debate is limited to bootleg rehab or strip club laundries, then the root problem, drug abuse, is never seriously addressed.
Within the analogy, the problem may seem obvious, but that underestimates the extent in which some fronts go to appear as something else. If the rehab center becomes a source of income for social media influencers, academics, community activists, artists, local non-profits, and politicians, then the interests of the neighborhood will likely become buried right beside the bodies taken by the assault of deadly drugs. From this vantage point, the campaign to #SaveTheRehabCenter employs too many careers for drug abuse to ever truly end. Having the problem is far more profitable than solving it.
This is a window into the current discourse surrounding DEI in the US—only worse. In response to police murders in 2020 and the subsequent Black Rage that followed, milquetoast DEI initiatives were offered by the State as a means to appear caring about the issue of police violence. Yet, police killings have continually gone up since 2020, police have gotten more money to kill, and poor Black communities—where most police killings transpire—are still suffering . Unfortunately, DEI initiatives—no matter how well-intentioned—do not stop the cops from pulling the triggers that kill us, nor do they bring us back from the dead. They do not end the occupation of police in poor black neighborhoods either, but they may train cops with the “sensitivity ” necessary to occupy them. They may also service an ecosystem of aspiring professionals who look like the folks being murdered by police but oddly benefit from their deaths.
In this sense, DEI is bootleg rehab. A rehab center that may liberate a few everyday people from drugs, send a few bright students to medical school on scholarship, or even hire them when they graduate but is deeply unserious in eradicating drug abuse. When a sincere everyday worker makes the eradication of drug abuse a priority, they usually find themselves under siege from their careerist colleagues and the kingpin who funds them. If a competing kingpin exploits this fraudulence for their own cruel political gain, there is no need to defend the fraud as if it is rehab. The front's job is to launder our desire for rehabilitation into our complicity against it. These are the contradictions that DEI has wrought. Nonetheless, the drugs keep flowing.
A Foundation for Pacification
The Long Civil Rights Movement, the (Black) Labor Movement, and the Black Liberation Movement fought, truly fought, against segregation and discrimination. During a moment when all three movements overlapped, the 1960s, the pressure on the State to respond was great. Black Rage, White Fear, is one way to see the basis of what was to come. The rebellions on the streets, which would not yield, were complemented by incessant marches, the irritating demands from organization representatives in closed-door meetings. And the embarrassing viciousness of vigilante counterviolence made the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 necessary to quell the Black Rage that was building up. “Affirmative Action” policies trickled down into companies and institutions slowly, particularly after a 1965 pandering commencement speech at Howard University by the President Lyndon B Johnson in which he exclaimed,
"FREEDOM IS NOT ENOUGH But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.”
Here, Johnson framed what would become his affirmative action policy as a remedy to the damage done by White supremacy. Officially, affirmative action was a 1965 Executive Order issued by Johnson (revised in 1967) to combat discrimination in federal contracting and hiring regarding "race, color, religion, sex" and to compel federal contractors to take affirmative action to increase representation of minorities and women. By the next administration, affirmative action was being reframed from its reparative form into a more market friendly policy.
President Richard Nixon, a Republican, implemented the most robust affirmative action policies via the Revised Philadelphia Plan in 1969 following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King a year prior. He claimed most Black “militants” were far from anti-colonial freedom fighters but undercover integrationists who wanted inclusion “ in‑not as supplicants, but as owners, as entrepreneurs‑to have a share of the wealth and a piece of the action.”
On the judicial front, the courts ultimately agreed with Nixon's interpretation of affirmative action. This rationale became more crystalized with the Burger Court and the Regents of the University of California v Bakke 5-4 ruling in 1978. This decision rejected the “racial quotas” that emerged from the Johnson administration. Technically, affirmative action remained legal but the proclaimed spirit of it was dead. In his court opinion, Justice Lewis Powell Jr. argued racial diversity demonstrated a compelling interest to the government in fostering harmonious learning. Thus, diversity became a public good for admissions consideration to reflect a balanced classroom, not a remedy for past oppression. This market friendly alteration of affirmative action—an already inadequate solution— paved the way for what we now know as DEI. If only DEI was simply a public good, making things a “public good” or preventing the privatization of the “public good”. But we digress. Universities and colleges scrambled to reap federal support by being compliant with law and legislation, but these institutions scrambled to perform their duty to influence the minds of future rebels to not rebel. A 1962 Duke University admissions committee report stated ,
“We believe that a policy should be established to enable the admissions officers to seek out students from socioeconomic levels not presently very well-represented in the student bodies of the colleges. The sharp minds and determined spirits of such students should help leaven our mass of upper middle-class, suburban, well-to-do groups.”
Pacification of Rage and rebellion, in the 1960s, was the earliest foundation of DEI.
Reinforcing Hierarchies of Labor
Lip service would not do; programmatic action was now, more than ever, necessary. As the 1978 movie National Lampoon’s Animal House depicted the yesteryear of a 1962 all-White college campus, the Black children of the fictional band, Otis Day and The Knights, were now populating predominantly White Universities and Colleges throughout the United States at a rate unrivaled by other countries with a similar-multi-ethnic society (Brazil, Canada, France, the Republic of South Africa, Turkey, and the United Kingdom). Universities and colleges began allocating space for cultural centers, offices for federally funded TRIO Programs, and TRIO-like programs. Upward Bound, Talent Search, Student Support Services, and Educational Opportunity Centers, on college campuses were complemented by the expansion of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which finally made relatively good on the promises of the Johnson's War on Poverty, that was evoked nearly 10 years before. Hunger in the US, at least childhood hunger, was nearly vanquished . Every program was prescriptive and every sign of growth was measured.
Organizations instituted official and unofficial quotas to aid that measurement, to let in just enough to not disrupt the order. The willingness to comply was also influenced by the bludgeon of discriminatory lawsuits aided by the newly enforced Equal Employment Opportunity Commission . Race made way for gender in workspace discrimination complaints, setting up the game of oppression Olympics between selective representations of Race and gender. But the two-pronged diversification of education and employment placed the United States far ahead in the global arms race to brain drain the global labor force. Here, highly skilled continental Africans of all genders were lured from their newly emancipated countries and put in competition with Africans in the US for positions initiated by DEI-type efforts by the State asserting piecemeal identity as central to individual success, Pan-African solidarity as an alternative was gradually undermined. Yet, the language of inclusion and the need to recognize people with disabilities were inserted into the aims and infrastructure. The violent suppression of movements through assassinations and the making of a political prisoner population in prisons was the price to pay for removing glass ceilings. Reinforcing the divisions of labor in the newly adapted social hierarchy of neo-colonialism in the 1970s and 1980s, were the ingredients to affirmative action, equal opportunity, and the morphing of DEI.
Globalizing the Product of Cultural Representation
Those hallmarks were bearing significant fruits with the second wave of Black mayors (instituting austerity measures in their cities) with Black congresspersons and a sprinkling of Black governors. The junkyard of Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids made way for the luxuries of middle-class life of the Cosby Show and the educational excellence of A Different World, with one pill a day served to us, figuratively and literally, that made us forget that Black History: [was] Lost, Stolen or Strayed. Achievement trumped all wrongs, and this triumph needed to be celebrated. Multiculturalism was the party. Not to be confused with the bottom-up British Multiculturalism , the political movement that involved a coalition of Black Britons from the Caribbean and the continent of Africa along with Pakistani, Indian, Sikh, Bangladesh, Arab, and radical White victims and subjects of empire from Ireland and the British Isles that was challenging immigration and assimilation policies alongside. No, US multiculturalism was a party, perhaps the party. Because diversity was about “who was invited ” and inclusion was about “who was being asked to dance”.
So, dance we did. People needed to learn how to “dance” through employee resource groups, DEI training programs, and multicultural teams. But this thrust, once again, was not ably righting wrongs. As the “right” people were selectively snatched from ‘hoods for degrees at universities and colleges, a select few of those graduates were plucked from their ranks and were inserted into key industries looking for global market expansion. Looking and sounding different could make millions for a firm. Chief Diversity Officers sat at the same table as CEOs and CFOs. Vice Presidents of Diversity were on the same picture-framed walls as Presidents. The diversification of the increasing prison population was the price for the diversification in middle-class professions. Reagan and Thatcher were kissing cousins in the closing of factories and the deindustrialization of cities, destroying the Black working class that had long since diversified the factory floor and assembly line in order to thrust the United States and the United Kingdom as early adopters of a new form of governance. The low-wage service jobs that replaced the factory floor remained diverse in color, religion, ability, and gender, but the diversity of poor people’s jobs needed no stated DEI initiative. Capitalism would do.
Thus, globalization was the principal aim in the 1990s of the emergence of (formal) DEI. The first installment of neo-colonial leaders across emerging nation-states and internal colonies in the US had successfully been achieved, so now the neo-liberal policies of plunder were set to reach unforeseen scales. For example, the multinational corporate exploitation of material resources in Africa could be overseen by executives who looked like the poor children digging the blood diamonds.
Diversifying Dominion
Representation at a table was not enough; one’s voice needed to reflect a diversity of people. “Speaking truth to power” was the catchphrase within supposed progressive and radical circles. “Giving voice” was the intent in non-profits, because some unknown wise African elder in some unknown country (since Africa is a country) said, “It takes a village to raise a child”. Full participation and integration into workspaces were paramount. With the advent of the 1990 training, DEI strategies were now important to include in every type of organization. Such important decision-making like dress code, hairstyles, and holiday recognition necessitated it. These were the stuff of inclusive policies, the being asked to dance. All employees had to show a level of cultural competence, meaning that saying “nigger” or displaying centerfolds in the workplace were not appropriate. Such actions could hinder the ideal interactions necessary for wealth accumulation. The prevention of work stoppage was a secondary priority to the primary priority of money tricking in.
Factory floors were once the focus in the 1970s, but in the 2000s, the boardrooms and executive administration offices were the only focus. As equity initiatives, the appropriation of intersectionality and bias-based research used the rhetoric of systemic inequalities to advance itself into the public consciousness as those inequalities only deepened, it is ironic. State bullets now killed a diversity of individuals across racialized and gendered populations. And those killings could be compensated as easily as slavery could be apologized for. A single election of a single person could produce the allusion and illusion of a post-racial United States. The diversification of dominion, in the 2000s and 2010s, was the entrenchment of a structure of DEI that is now being rebuked.
With identity trumping anything else (the collective benefit, the most vulnerable, the material conditions, the public good), justice of any type was never tenable and would never be tenable. And this was/is the quandary of Anti-DEI efforts: we are forced into situations to argue and fight for identity representations that are more likely to harm rather than engage in any meaningful action to change the material conditions in which we live. We are summoned to organize boycotts against drug dealers to keep their substandard rehab initiatives in our neighborhoods, instead of removing the flow of drugs entirely.
Inevitably, organizing around rehab centers that also sell drugs causes backlash. When liberal advocates falsely push DEI as a “remedy to the racial institutionalized bigotry ,” it morphs DEI into a suitable front for “the far right of a special type ” to launder their racial grievance politics of resentment and White replacement fear-mongering. Thus, DEI is now a booming dog whistle for the far right to weaponize against any populations they intend to mute. Black history , college professors , pro-Palestine protesters , transgender youth , and apparently even the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) are all subject to the tongue tie. This silencing feeds their fattening base the surplus enjoyment of stripping the groups they deem “undeserving”, as techno-feudalist lords and Zionist oligarchs clean their tax dollars through the State. Concurrently, DEI allows liberals to herd vulnerable populations into “safe spaces” only to abandon them when in need, thereby passing the ammunition to right-wing firing squads as they feign “shock” at the horror they enable. Malcolm X warned us against this form of counterinsurgency,
“the wolf and the fox both belong to the (same) family. Both are canines; and no matter which one of them the Negro places his trust in, he never ends up in the White House, but always in the dog house.”
A Low Grade Front
Malcolm's crucial warning was never heeded. We (some of us) found sanctuary under the front of the liberal canine, thinking the other feigned canid would never trespass our proverbial “seat at the table.” This short-sighted strategy steadily lowered our defenses and consequently produced some of our worst offspring. With each generation of first (Black), was a neo-colonial class less incentivized to sacrifice for the collective. Instead, low-grade versions of the intent actualized as a sort of social change exchanged for home luxuries and trips to safari Africa. For every first in the executive, legislative, and judiciary branch like Judge James B. Parsons, upholding the tenants’ bill of rights and sending corporate executives to jail in the 1960s, there are now Black Mayors exclusively using $26k in city funds for a single personal trip (South Fulton), being away from the office on a trip in the midst of a disaster (Los Angeles), taking 64 trips over the span of 42 months (St. Louis), amassing and using city purchased gift cards for personal use (Baltimore), taking bribes from other countries in exchange for real estate deals (New York), building a $90 million police warfare training city while denying the democratic will of the people (Atlanta) and closing 34 public schools and cutting $560 million from a public school system (Detroit). The diminishing and low-grade returns of DEI, with each subsequent generation and with each subsequent new “hire”.
But this is nothing new. The gloss, the shine, and the luster of the Congressional Black Caucus, the National Conference of Black Mayors, and the Conference of National Black Churches endorsed the 1994 Crime Bill. And founding members of what would become the Congressional Black Caucus stood in the way of eliminating the United States Electoral College in 1969 and 1970.
Labor, actual labor, never seemed to have been a hallmark of DEI, as Black workers remain the least likely to be hired and the most likely to be fired, thereby contributing to our strong representation in unemployment percentages and rates. And labor, actual labor, will never likely be a hallmark of any material condition change, especially after Amazon gifted the Congressional Black Caucus with a $1.8 million donation (Target being among other donors that have contributed over $1 million to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation coffers). An internal class struggle, led/facilitated/enabled by a Black class of governing elites and managers, has captured collective Black interests. Under the 119th United States Congress, with 62 Black legislators, at least, poverty and unemployment are diverse.
And these are the fruits, not the bad fruits, of DEI. Our desire for identity representation paid little attention to political and ideological representation. All the gains of DEI have been representative and linguistic, only. The acceptance of holidays, selective cultural figures, appropriated speeches and quotes, books on shelves, legal victories of looks in workplaces, dictionary inclusions, honorary street names, etc. The allowance for its existence by capitalism is a product of capitalist realism, the notion that there is no alternative to the reality in which we live. Thus, any solution to our conditions is only poised to alleviate certain effects of the harm of those conditions, but never rid ourselves of it. DEI rids us of nothing. It calls out, cancels, claps back, and informs others that they are speaking, but ending anything…no. Words, terms, clothes, and styles are absorbed in a greater culture, the dominant culture, the culture of the empire in order to fortify the empire, not rid ourselves of it or to create another reality somewhere else. DEI stabilizes it, lends it credence, and gives it “soul”, but the barbarity and lethality continues. It always continues.
Bootleg Anti-DEI
Nevertheless, our contempt for DEI should not be confused as an endorsement for the current Anti-DEI attack by the far right of a special type. Anti-DEI is no more about merit than DEI is about racial justice since capitalism has never organized around either principle—more like monopoly and greed. Anti-DEI fronts for a larger ruling class agenda to raid the remains of the public good by making Black people—along with fellow racialized and gendered “others”—the face of the “undeserving” workforce. If most of the administrative state is just a bunch of “undeserving” DEI hires, then it's an easy seizure to sell.
As we hinted earlier, for portions of the White working and petit bourgeoisie classes, the seizure of the public good, via Anti-DEI, binges as their bootleg rehab. Capitalism teaches them that their rehab is achieved through the suffering of “others”, not the dope (austerity, capital flight, and literal dope) ravaging their own communities. Anti-DEI launders the White Rage aimed at globalization, which presumed a more diverse middle class to proceed at their perceived expense, into further cross-class collaboration with White Capital. Anti-DEI is also White capital acknowledging their hegemony on the international stage is in decline as globalization has inadvertently created poles of power beyond their grasp. Anti-DEI is an admission that certain tools used to expand US imperialism (DEI, deindustrialization) have now backfired .
To reduce this shift to an oversimplified “White backlash” where White people are simply hateful for hate's sake fails to adhere to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s anti-capitalist analysis of the concept . Historically, a White backlash has usually required Black material progress. Yet, collectively, Black people have experienced no recent material progress to lash. DEI, a technocratic construct based on voluntary HR projections, is far from delivering the material impacts of prior concessions such as Reconstruction or a Civil Rights Act. Thus, to call the elimination of DEI a “White backlash” would be to admit that Black people are being lashed for the mere window dressing of our own oppression.
Moreover, backlash is inherent to capitalism when its power and rate of profits are jeopardized. A decline in profits dilutes the racial hierarchy of capitalism, thus jolting a violent response. DEI liberalism never requires we confront this fascist tendency, so it remains dormant until White capital is ready to mobilize it. Since DEI was never meant to be more than a stabilizing agent for capital, it cannot rise to the occasion. Therefore, riding and dying for it, above every other substantive issue we face, will not protect us.
Both DEI and Anti-DEI are bootleg fronts that place us in a battle we are ill-equipped to win. Neither address the problems they contend to pacify. DEI liberalism —no matter how well intended—cannot overcome the bigotry Anti-DEI inspires with more of the same tired appeals to power to just be “nice.” Perhaps had the last half century not been wasted neutralizing the Black radical tradition, we would be better positioned to exact a consequence. We must move beyond discourse that privileges sentimental vibes over organized action or face the global contraction of our daily lives. Put differently, we cannot effectively defeat white supremacy with…vibes
A New Regime, The Same Struggle
Everybody Black wore it better on the runway, said it better in that acceptance speech, and acted better in that movie, are the victories of DEI. It, the reboot of Soul Plane and The Murder of Fred Hampton: The Musical. It looked better, it felt better, and it sounded better with someone Black. As if through some increased nonwhite representation, redistributing the power dynamics would not result in a new set of actors of color engaging in the same life-threatening and non-life-sustaining endeavors as the previous White actors. It is the ordering of drone strikes. It is the representation of drone-strike operators. It is the representation of the companies that provided the software or hardware of the drone and striking mechanisms. It will likely be the representation of the targets that will eventually appear as blacked-out blotches through infrared camera lenses in the sand or in the rubble after a drone strike.
These are the victories of DEI, or these are the lies we have grown to tell ourselves are the victories.
We want our Best Actress Oscar, our Album of the Year winner, our campus officer, our institutional statement, our end zone message, our No H8 painted on our cheek, our slavery apologies, our one more, our first, and our in-charge. But we need our 25,000 homes, 50,000 books, and 100,000 plates of food. We need to stop dying. We need to stop being killed. We need to be able to live. We need to be able to grow. Representation matters, except in a warm home and off the streets, a neighborhood with unclosed public schools, soup kitchens, food pantries, and other meal programs.
We (some of us) prospered in the feel of DEI. We (some of us) celebrated by breaking glass ceilings and walls, one magical Black person at a time. And we were just 100,000 more magical Black person placements to go for the real change to begin. For the drug abuse to end. We left the streets, the meeting rooms, and the planning tables and started having cookouts. We electric slid our way to bus stops, shuffles, and Cha-Cha slides. We made it, we made something. What? We do not know. And we were so delighted to celebrate each and every time for other firsts and each and every time for another group photo of lab coats or suit-wearing graduates. Nonetheless, the drugs kept flowing.
But…
There were no cookouts in the 1860s, but there was the New York Draft Riots.
There were no cookouts in the 1870s, but there was the betrayal of the end of Reconstruction.
There were no cookouts in the 1880s, but there was the expansion of Jim Crow.
There were no cookouts in the 1890s, but there was the Wilmington Coup.
There were no cookouts in the 1900s, but there was the Atlanta Race Riot.
There were no cookouts in the 1910s, but there was Red Summer.
There were no cookouts in the 1920s, but there was the Tulsa Massacre.
There were no cookouts in the 1930s, but there were the Olympics hosted by the Third Reich.
There were no cookouts in the 1940s, but there was the Detroit Race Riot of 1943.
There were no cookouts in the 1950s, but there were the taunts against the Little Rock Nine.
There were no cookouts in the 1960s, but there was the slapping Rena Frye and the beating of her son.
There were no cookouts in the 1970s, but there was the assassination of Fred Hampton.
There were no cookouts in the 1980s, but there was the Central Park Five.
There were no cookouts in the 1990s, but there was the Crime Bill.
Forget the cookouts and all of the freely given invitations; we’ll be in the basement planning and building.
Science is real
Figure 2. The popularized “In this house, we believe” yard sign. The creation of them have been attributed to Kristin Garvey, a librarian from Madison, Wisconsin, as a response to the victory of the 45th President (now 47th President) in the 2016 United States presidential election. The signs have been discussed as containing a “curious power” , battle for “White womanhood”, and liberal resistance against a presidency. Or, perhaps they are just signs to prevent vandalism or looting in the event of another riot in response to the police killing of a Black civilian. But just like any other sign in a yard (announcing the need to vote for a candidate, a scheduled townhall meeting, availability for tax work, and used products on sale), it is just a yard sign. It is not a light in the window for freedom (from slavery) and for shelter, it is just a yard sign. (Lorie Shaull, 2017, Wikicommons)
Too Black is a poet, scholar, filmmaker, and organizer. He is the host of the Black Myths Podcast, co-director of the documentary film The Pendleton 2: They Stood Up, and co-author of the book Laundering Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Profits. He is based in Indianapolis, IN.
Rasul Mowatt, Critical Geographer and Researcher. He is the author of the book The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence: The State and the City Between Us, and the co-author of The City of Hip-Hop: New York City, The Bronx, and a Peace Meeting and Laundering Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Profits.
[1] Skrentny argued that “fear of black violence was the original rationale for affirmative admissions” during the time of urban rebellions, riots, and campus disorders that swept across the U.S. in the 1960s. In response, university administrators quickly strategized ways to “develop other rationales” for diversifying its student body. 1. John David Skrentny, The Minority Rights Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022), 166.
[2] Schuck argued that an “optimistic, unifying vision” of American identity specifically, assimilationism of the “melting pot” variety prevailed in the latter part of the 1960s. This was during the height in which “Black separatism gained greater influence over the civil rights movement” during “urban riots and the Nixon administration’s accession to power” 1. Peter H. Schuck, Diversity in America: Keeping Government at a Safe Distance (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 46.
https://blackagendareport.com/bootleg-r ... black-rage
Too Black 16 Apr 2025
DEI isn’t dead—it was never alive to begin with. A corporate pacification project dressed as progress, it launders Black rage into diversity statements while police budgets grow and material conditions collapse. As the right attacks this hollow facade, we must reject both the bootleg rehab of DEI and the strip-club austerity of Anti-DEI to organize for real power beyond the spectacle of representation.
Figure 1. An image of an “Equality in Diversity” sign at an assumed protest. The date and location is unknown but this has not prevented the image from being appropriated and memed in 416 websites (yes, we counted), ranging from news sources (The Hill Times, Christian Science Monitor, and Forbes) to discussions (inclusive training in the military, campus statements, and executive orders in the present and past). It appears to have been in usage in predominantly English-speaking countries (U.S., U.K., and Canada) but also in German, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Ukrainian, and Hindi), from 5 years ago to minutes to the time in which we completed this essay. At this point, we would need @georainbolt (Trevor Rainbolt) level of skills to geo-locate the place and possible year of the image. The memefication of the sign and its supposed message works within the context of the discussion that follows.
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” - Antonio Gramsci, Selections From the Prison Notebooks
“As I see it, history moves from one conjuncture to another rather than being an evolutionary flow. And what drives it forward is usually a crisis, when the contradictions that are always at play in any historical moment are condensed” - Stuart Hall, “Interpreting the Crisis” with Doreen Massey (2010)
“To muzzle the roar, the State dispossesses the labor of Black Rage, and harnesses it into a commodity that can be consumed harmlessly as if its original potency is retained.” - Laundering Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Profits
“DEI is under attack”, says the news of the day. “DEI must be protected”, says the peeved influencer as we scroll through the posts on social media. “DEI is dead ”, says a new presidential regime, according to the Associated Press. We hear news like this, and we expect to see Swastikas falling from the sky, but then we look around us and see everyday people doing everyday things, some for the good of it, and some for the bad of it, but all for the everyday. Their day, the day that affects them.
There has been no rush to stockpile the nearly 50 TEDTalk videos on diversity (and inclusion) that are bound to be deleted, at some point, from the TED site or from YouTube since the “attack” has been launched. The knowledge from those speakers is seemingly not at the top of our mind, to preserve the record, to have for future generations, all of the minutes of speeches of motivation and inspiration. There has been no rush to build barricades on the streets , the in-real-life streets, to protect diversity since it has always existed as much as vapor in the everyday experiences of everyday people. The public school system created because of diversity, the housing projects built by diversity, and the food program instituted by diversity need no protection, because diversity never built them. Each of those necessary infrastructures to life was never a feature or aim of diversity. There has been no rush to formulate farewell songs, plan funeral marches, hire professional criers, find the best black drip to wear, or prepare a NOLA-style jazz funeral complete with a second line since the end is nigh. Why? Because everyday people are dealing with everyday things. And those everyday things have never been about the aims and activities of diversity and its subsequent iterations.
In the 1980s, diversity (D), then inclusion (I); diversity and inclusion (DI); equity (E); diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); valuing diversity; implicit bias; unconscious bias; equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) ; inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility (IDEA) ; social justice (SJ); diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) ; justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) ; diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) , diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and belonging (DEIBJ ); and any other configuration and ordering of these words (as well as, some subtle mention of one of the following: anti-racism, “abolition”, and “decolonization”) highlights the ever-changing evolution of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), the boogie-man of the Right and the savior of a purported Left.
For the purposes of our essay DEI is the catch-all for the phraseology that is the stir of the moment in the United States (US). DEI was crafted to be a counter to the rebellions and power movements of the 1960s and 1970s. A counter-measure .[1] A counter-movement .[2] An empty ideological lens to guide employment practices, advertisement representations, and programmatic offerings that were sure to rarely threaten capitalist pursuits but instead compliment a global neo-colonial front. And despite this historical reality, we are placed in a situation to argue for a front that has little impact on our material conditions, especially over an extended or sustainable period of time.
DEI, at its foundation, has always been guaranteed diminishing returns with each generation. A proclivity to low grade dreams and low grade results that advance a few at the suffering of the whole. Yet, under Anti-DEI, the advancement of a few becomes a rationalization to increasingly attack the whole. All while White Capital advances its dispossession of our planet at our expense. But an analogy is needed to contextualize our points.
Rehabilitating Empire
Say a poor Black neighborhood is rapidly flooded by a deluge of life-threatening drugs. To calm the outrage to their suffering, the kingpin dealing the deadly products finances a (short-staffed) neighborhood rehabilitation center. The center boldly pledges to end the systemic trafficking of drugs. They hold community conversations chronicling addiction and put out ad nauseam statements about how drug addicts matter. Yet, while establishing the center, they simultaneously harness it to launder their drug money. Then years after its construction, a buffoonish but competing kingpin threatens to destroy said rehab center because they say it discriminates against drug dealers. Now enraged at the cruelty of the competing kingpin, the leaders of the poor Black community launch a campaign to defend the bootleg rehab center as if it were their own. Nonetheless, the drugs keep flowing.
To appease some in the community, the competing kingpin offers to build exclusive strip clubs in place of the bootleg rehab—in which they also intend to launder their drug money. They promise to deliver more jobs than the bootleg rehab and make a pledge to hire Black people directly from the neighborhood, not the immigrants who migrated there as of late. They go as far as to claim the migrants are responsible for bringing in drugs, not the known dealers, so the neighborhood should be thankful for the strip clubs. Nonetheless, the drugs keep flowing.
Under either regime, the kingpins are the cause of the drug epidemic in the neighborhood, yet each offers faux remedies (fronts) that are only meant to appear to address the problem, either by surface reform or delusional escape. Neither protesting nor boycotting the fronts would end the scourge of drugs in the community. Thus, if the debate is limited to bootleg rehab or strip club laundries, then the root problem, drug abuse, is never seriously addressed.
Within the analogy, the problem may seem obvious, but that underestimates the extent in which some fronts go to appear as something else. If the rehab center becomes a source of income for social media influencers, academics, community activists, artists, local non-profits, and politicians, then the interests of the neighborhood will likely become buried right beside the bodies taken by the assault of deadly drugs. From this vantage point, the campaign to #SaveTheRehabCenter employs too many careers for drug abuse to ever truly end. Having the problem is far more profitable than solving it.
This is a window into the current discourse surrounding DEI in the US—only worse. In response to police murders in 2020 and the subsequent Black Rage that followed, milquetoast DEI initiatives were offered by the State as a means to appear caring about the issue of police violence. Yet, police killings have continually gone up since 2020, police have gotten more money to kill, and poor Black communities—where most police killings transpire—are still suffering . Unfortunately, DEI initiatives—no matter how well-intentioned—do not stop the cops from pulling the triggers that kill us, nor do they bring us back from the dead. They do not end the occupation of police in poor black neighborhoods either, but they may train cops with the “sensitivity ” necessary to occupy them. They may also service an ecosystem of aspiring professionals who look like the folks being murdered by police but oddly benefit from their deaths.
In this sense, DEI is bootleg rehab. A rehab center that may liberate a few everyday people from drugs, send a few bright students to medical school on scholarship, or even hire them when they graduate but is deeply unserious in eradicating drug abuse. When a sincere everyday worker makes the eradication of drug abuse a priority, they usually find themselves under siege from their careerist colleagues and the kingpin who funds them. If a competing kingpin exploits this fraudulence for their own cruel political gain, there is no need to defend the fraud as if it is rehab. The front's job is to launder our desire for rehabilitation into our complicity against it. These are the contradictions that DEI has wrought. Nonetheless, the drugs keep flowing.
A Foundation for Pacification
The Long Civil Rights Movement, the (Black) Labor Movement, and the Black Liberation Movement fought, truly fought, against segregation and discrimination. During a moment when all three movements overlapped, the 1960s, the pressure on the State to respond was great. Black Rage, White Fear, is one way to see the basis of what was to come. The rebellions on the streets, which would not yield, were complemented by incessant marches, the irritating demands from organization representatives in closed-door meetings. And the embarrassing viciousness of vigilante counterviolence made the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 necessary to quell the Black Rage that was building up. “Affirmative Action” policies trickled down into companies and institutions slowly, particularly after a 1965 pandering commencement speech at Howard University by the President Lyndon B Johnson in which he exclaimed,
"FREEDOM IS NOT ENOUGH But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.”
Here, Johnson framed what would become his affirmative action policy as a remedy to the damage done by White supremacy. Officially, affirmative action was a 1965 Executive Order issued by Johnson (revised in 1967) to combat discrimination in federal contracting and hiring regarding "race, color, religion, sex" and to compel federal contractors to take affirmative action to increase representation of minorities and women. By the next administration, affirmative action was being reframed from its reparative form into a more market friendly policy.
President Richard Nixon, a Republican, implemented the most robust affirmative action policies via the Revised Philadelphia Plan in 1969 following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King a year prior. He claimed most Black “militants” were far from anti-colonial freedom fighters but undercover integrationists who wanted inclusion “ in‑not as supplicants, but as owners, as entrepreneurs‑to have a share of the wealth and a piece of the action.”
On the judicial front, the courts ultimately agreed with Nixon's interpretation of affirmative action. This rationale became more crystalized with the Burger Court and the Regents of the University of California v Bakke 5-4 ruling in 1978. This decision rejected the “racial quotas” that emerged from the Johnson administration. Technically, affirmative action remained legal but the proclaimed spirit of it was dead. In his court opinion, Justice Lewis Powell Jr. argued racial diversity demonstrated a compelling interest to the government in fostering harmonious learning. Thus, diversity became a public good for admissions consideration to reflect a balanced classroom, not a remedy for past oppression. This market friendly alteration of affirmative action—an already inadequate solution— paved the way for what we now know as DEI. If only DEI was simply a public good, making things a “public good” or preventing the privatization of the “public good”. But we digress. Universities and colleges scrambled to reap federal support by being compliant with law and legislation, but these institutions scrambled to perform their duty to influence the minds of future rebels to not rebel. A 1962 Duke University admissions committee report stated ,
“We believe that a policy should be established to enable the admissions officers to seek out students from socioeconomic levels not presently very well-represented in the student bodies of the colleges. The sharp minds and determined spirits of such students should help leaven our mass of upper middle-class, suburban, well-to-do groups.”
Pacification of Rage and rebellion, in the 1960s, was the earliest foundation of DEI.
Reinforcing Hierarchies of Labor
Lip service would not do; programmatic action was now, more than ever, necessary. As the 1978 movie National Lampoon’s Animal House depicted the yesteryear of a 1962 all-White college campus, the Black children of the fictional band, Otis Day and The Knights, were now populating predominantly White Universities and Colleges throughout the United States at a rate unrivaled by other countries with a similar-multi-ethnic society (Brazil, Canada, France, the Republic of South Africa, Turkey, and the United Kingdom). Universities and colleges began allocating space for cultural centers, offices for federally funded TRIO Programs, and TRIO-like programs. Upward Bound, Talent Search, Student Support Services, and Educational Opportunity Centers, on college campuses were complemented by the expansion of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which finally made relatively good on the promises of the Johnson's War on Poverty, that was evoked nearly 10 years before. Hunger in the US, at least childhood hunger, was nearly vanquished . Every program was prescriptive and every sign of growth was measured.
Organizations instituted official and unofficial quotas to aid that measurement, to let in just enough to not disrupt the order. The willingness to comply was also influenced by the bludgeon of discriminatory lawsuits aided by the newly enforced Equal Employment Opportunity Commission . Race made way for gender in workspace discrimination complaints, setting up the game of oppression Olympics between selective representations of Race and gender. But the two-pronged diversification of education and employment placed the United States far ahead in the global arms race to brain drain the global labor force. Here, highly skilled continental Africans of all genders were lured from their newly emancipated countries and put in competition with Africans in the US for positions initiated by DEI-type efforts by the State asserting piecemeal identity as central to individual success, Pan-African solidarity as an alternative was gradually undermined. Yet, the language of inclusion and the need to recognize people with disabilities were inserted into the aims and infrastructure. The violent suppression of movements through assassinations and the making of a political prisoner population in prisons was the price to pay for removing glass ceilings. Reinforcing the divisions of labor in the newly adapted social hierarchy of neo-colonialism in the 1970s and 1980s, were the ingredients to affirmative action, equal opportunity, and the morphing of DEI.
Globalizing the Product of Cultural Representation
Those hallmarks were bearing significant fruits with the second wave of Black mayors (instituting austerity measures in their cities) with Black congresspersons and a sprinkling of Black governors. The junkyard of Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids made way for the luxuries of middle-class life of the Cosby Show and the educational excellence of A Different World, with one pill a day served to us, figuratively and literally, that made us forget that Black History: [was] Lost, Stolen or Strayed. Achievement trumped all wrongs, and this triumph needed to be celebrated. Multiculturalism was the party. Not to be confused with the bottom-up British Multiculturalism , the political movement that involved a coalition of Black Britons from the Caribbean and the continent of Africa along with Pakistani, Indian, Sikh, Bangladesh, Arab, and radical White victims and subjects of empire from Ireland and the British Isles that was challenging immigration and assimilation policies alongside. No, US multiculturalism was a party, perhaps the party. Because diversity was about “who was invited ” and inclusion was about “who was being asked to dance”.
So, dance we did. People needed to learn how to “dance” through employee resource groups, DEI training programs, and multicultural teams. But this thrust, once again, was not ably righting wrongs. As the “right” people were selectively snatched from ‘hoods for degrees at universities and colleges, a select few of those graduates were plucked from their ranks and were inserted into key industries looking for global market expansion. Looking and sounding different could make millions for a firm. Chief Diversity Officers sat at the same table as CEOs and CFOs. Vice Presidents of Diversity were on the same picture-framed walls as Presidents. The diversification of the increasing prison population was the price for the diversification in middle-class professions. Reagan and Thatcher were kissing cousins in the closing of factories and the deindustrialization of cities, destroying the Black working class that had long since diversified the factory floor and assembly line in order to thrust the United States and the United Kingdom as early adopters of a new form of governance. The low-wage service jobs that replaced the factory floor remained diverse in color, religion, ability, and gender, but the diversity of poor people’s jobs needed no stated DEI initiative. Capitalism would do.
Thus, globalization was the principal aim in the 1990s of the emergence of (formal) DEI. The first installment of neo-colonial leaders across emerging nation-states and internal colonies in the US had successfully been achieved, so now the neo-liberal policies of plunder were set to reach unforeseen scales. For example, the multinational corporate exploitation of material resources in Africa could be overseen by executives who looked like the poor children digging the blood diamonds.
Diversifying Dominion
Representation at a table was not enough; one’s voice needed to reflect a diversity of people. “Speaking truth to power” was the catchphrase within supposed progressive and radical circles. “Giving voice” was the intent in non-profits, because some unknown wise African elder in some unknown country (since Africa is a country) said, “It takes a village to raise a child”. Full participation and integration into workspaces were paramount. With the advent of the 1990 training, DEI strategies were now important to include in every type of organization. Such important decision-making like dress code, hairstyles, and holiday recognition necessitated it. These were the stuff of inclusive policies, the being asked to dance. All employees had to show a level of cultural competence, meaning that saying “nigger” or displaying centerfolds in the workplace were not appropriate. Such actions could hinder the ideal interactions necessary for wealth accumulation. The prevention of work stoppage was a secondary priority to the primary priority of money tricking in.
Factory floors were once the focus in the 1970s, but in the 2000s, the boardrooms and executive administration offices were the only focus. As equity initiatives, the appropriation of intersectionality and bias-based research used the rhetoric of systemic inequalities to advance itself into the public consciousness as those inequalities only deepened, it is ironic. State bullets now killed a diversity of individuals across racialized and gendered populations. And those killings could be compensated as easily as slavery could be apologized for. A single election of a single person could produce the allusion and illusion of a post-racial United States. The diversification of dominion, in the 2000s and 2010s, was the entrenchment of a structure of DEI that is now being rebuked.
With identity trumping anything else (the collective benefit, the most vulnerable, the material conditions, the public good), justice of any type was never tenable and would never be tenable. And this was/is the quandary of Anti-DEI efforts: we are forced into situations to argue and fight for identity representations that are more likely to harm rather than engage in any meaningful action to change the material conditions in which we live. We are summoned to organize boycotts against drug dealers to keep their substandard rehab initiatives in our neighborhoods, instead of removing the flow of drugs entirely.
Inevitably, organizing around rehab centers that also sell drugs causes backlash. When liberal advocates falsely push DEI as a “remedy to the racial institutionalized bigotry ,” it morphs DEI into a suitable front for “the far right of a special type ” to launder their racial grievance politics of resentment and White replacement fear-mongering. Thus, DEI is now a booming dog whistle for the far right to weaponize against any populations they intend to mute. Black history , college professors , pro-Palestine protesters , transgender youth , and apparently even the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) are all subject to the tongue tie. This silencing feeds their fattening base the surplus enjoyment of stripping the groups they deem “undeserving”, as techno-feudalist lords and Zionist oligarchs clean their tax dollars through the State. Concurrently, DEI allows liberals to herd vulnerable populations into “safe spaces” only to abandon them when in need, thereby passing the ammunition to right-wing firing squads as they feign “shock” at the horror they enable. Malcolm X warned us against this form of counterinsurgency,
“the wolf and the fox both belong to the (same) family. Both are canines; and no matter which one of them the Negro places his trust in, he never ends up in the White House, but always in the dog house.”
A Low Grade Front
Malcolm's crucial warning was never heeded. We (some of us) found sanctuary under the front of the liberal canine, thinking the other feigned canid would never trespass our proverbial “seat at the table.” This short-sighted strategy steadily lowered our defenses and consequently produced some of our worst offspring. With each generation of first (Black), was a neo-colonial class less incentivized to sacrifice for the collective. Instead, low-grade versions of the intent actualized as a sort of social change exchanged for home luxuries and trips to safari Africa. For every first in the executive, legislative, and judiciary branch like Judge James B. Parsons, upholding the tenants’ bill of rights and sending corporate executives to jail in the 1960s, there are now Black Mayors exclusively using $26k in city funds for a single personal trip (South Fulton), being away from the office on a trip in the midst of a disaster (Los Angeles), taking 64 trips over the span of 42 months (St. Louis), amassing and using city purchased gift cards for personal use (Baltimore), taking bribes from other countries in exchange for real estate deals (New York), building a $90 million police warfare training city while denying the democratic will of the people (Atlanta) and closing 34 public schools and cutting $560 million from a public school system (Detroit). The diminishing and low-grade returns of DEI, with each subsequent generation and with each subsequent new “hire”.
But this is nothing new. The gloss, the shine, and the luster of the Congressional Black Caucus, the National Conference of Black Mayors, and the Conference of National Black Churches endorsed the 1994 Crime Bill. And founding members of what would become the Congressional Black Caucus stood in the way of eliminating the United States Electoral College in 1969 and 1970.
Labor, actual labor, never seemed to have been a hallmark of DEI, as Black workers remain the least likely to be hired and the most likely to be fired, thereby contributing to our strong representation in unemployment percentages and rates. And labor, actual labor, will never likely be a hallmark of any material condition change, especially after Amazon gifted the Congressional Black Caucus with a $1.8 million donation (Target being among other donors that have contributed over $1 million to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation coffers). An internal class struggle, led/facilitated/enabled by a Black class of governing elites and managers, has captured collective Black interests. Under the 119th United States Congress, with 62 Black legislators, at least, poverty and unemployment are diverse.
And these are the fruits, not the bad fruits, of DEI. Our desire for identity representation paid little attention to political and ideological representation. All the gains of DEI have been representative and linguistic, only. The acceptance of holidays, selective cultural figures, appropriated speeches and quotes, books on shelves, legal victories of looks in workplaces, dictionary inclusions, honorary street names, etc. The allowance for its existence by capitalism is a product of capitalist realism, the notion that there is no alternative to the reality in which we live. Thus, any solution to our conditions is only poised to alleviate certain effects of the harm of those conditions, but never rid ourselves of it. DEI rids us of nothing. It calls out, cancels, claps back, and informs others that they are speaking, but ending anything…no. Words, terms, clothes, and styles are absorbed in a greater culture, the dominant culture, the culture of the empire in order to fortify the empire, not rid ourselves of it or to create another reality somewhere else. DEI stabilizes it, lends it credence, and gives it “soul”, but the barbarity and lethality continues. It always continues.
Bootleg Anti-DEI
Nevertheless, our contempt for DEI should not be confused as an endorsement for the current Anti-DEI attack by the far right of a special type. Anti-DEI is no more about merit than DEI is about racial justice since capitalism has never organized around either principle—more like monopoly and greed. Anti-DEI fronts for a larger ruling class agenda to raid the remains of the public good by making Black people—along with fellow racialized and gendered “others”—the face of the “undeserving” workforce. If most of the administrative state is just a bunch of “undeserving” DEI hires, then it's an easy seizure to sell.
As we hinted earlier, for portions of the White working and petit bourgeoisie classes, the seizure of the public good, via Anti-DEI, binges as their bootleg rehab. Capitalism teaches them that their rehab is achieved through the suffering of “others”, not the dope (austerity, capital flight, and literal dope) ravaging their own communities. Anti-DEI launders the White Rage aimed at globalization, which presumed a more diverse middle class to proceed at their perceived expense, into further cross-class collaboration with White Capital. Anti-DEI is also White capital acknowledging their hegemony on the international stage is in decline as globalization has inadvertently created poles of power beyond their grasp. Anti-DEI is an admission that certain tools used to expand US imperialism (DEI, deindustrialization) have now backfired .
To reduce this shift to an oversimplified “White backlash” where White people are simply hateful for hate's sake fails to adhere to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s anti-capitalist analysis of the concept . Historically, a White backlash has usually required Black material progress. Yet, collectively, Black people have experienced no recent material progress to lash. DEI, a technocratic construct based on voluntary HR projections, is far from delivering the material impacts of prior concessions such as Reconstruction or a Civil Rights Act. Thus, to call the elimination of DEI a “White backlash” would be to admit that Black people are being lashed for the mere window dressing of our own oppression.
Moreover, backlash is inherent to capitalism when its power and rate of profits are jeopardized. A decline in profits dilutes the racial hierarchy of capitalism, thus jolting a violent response. DEI liberalism never requires we confront this fascist tendency, so it remains dormant until White capital is ready to mobilize it. Since DEI was never meant to be more than a stabilizing agent for capital, it cannot rise to the occasion. Therefore, riding and dying for it, above every other substantive issue we face, will not protect us.
Both DEI and Anti-DEI are bootleg fronts that place us in a battle we are ill-equipped to win. Neither address the problems they contend to pacify. DEI liberalism —no matter how well intended—cannot overcome the bigotry Anti-DEI inspires with more of the same tired appeals to power to just be “nice.” Perhaps had the last half century not been wasted neutralizing the Black radical tradition, we would be better positioned to exact a consequence. We must move beyond discourse that privileges sentimental vibes over organized action or face the global contraction of our daily lives. Put differently, we cannot effectively defeat white supremacy with…vibes
A New Regime, The Same Struggle
Everybody Black wore it better on the runway, said it better in that acceptance speech, and acted better in that movie, are the victories of DEI. It, the reboot of Soul Plane and The Murder of Fred Hampton: The Musical. It looked better, it felt better, and it sounded better with someone Black. As if through some increased nonwhite representation, redistributing the power dynamics would not result in a new set of actors of color engaging in the same life-threatening and non-life-sustaining endeavors as the previous White actors. It is the ordering of drone strikes. It is the representation of drone-strike operators. It is the representation of the companies that provided the software or hardware of the drone and striking mechanisms. It will likely be the representation of the targets that will eventually appear as blacked-out blotches through infrared camera lenses in the sand or in the rubble after a drone strike.
These are the victories of DEI, or these are the lies we have grown to tell ourselves are the victories.
We want our Best Actress Oscar, our Album of the Year winner, our campus officer, our institutional statement, our end zone message, our No H8 painted on our cheek, our slavery apologies, our one more, our first, and our in-charge. But we need our 25,000 homes, 50,000 books, and 100,000 plates of food. We need to stop dying. We need to stop being killed. We need to be able to live. We need to be able to grow. Representation matters, except in a warm home and off the streets, a neighborhood with unclosed public schools, soup kitchens, food pantries, and other meal programs.
We (some of us) prospered in the feel of DEI. We (some of us) celebrated by breaking glass ceilings and walls, one magical Black person at a time. And we were just 100,000 more magical Black person placements to go for the real change to begin. For the drug abuse to end. We left the streets, the meeting rooms, and the planning tables and started having cookouts. We electric slid our way to bus stops, shuffles, and Cha-Cha slides. We made it, we made something. What? We do not know. And we were so delighted to celebrate each and every time for other firsts and each and every time for another group photo of lab coats or suit-wearing graduates. Nonetheless, the drugs kept flowing.
But…
There were no cookouts in the 1860s, but there was the New York Draft Riots.
There were no cookouts in the 1870s, but there was the betrayal of the end of Reconstruction.
There were no cookouts in the 1880s, but there was the expansion of Jim Crow.
There were no cookouts in the 1890s, but there was the Wilmington Coup.
There were no cookouts in the 1900s, but there was the Atlanta Race Riot.
There were no cookouts in the 1910s, but there was Red Summer.
There were no cookouts in the 1920s, but there was the Tulsa Massacre.
There were no cookouts in the 1930s, but there were the Olympics hosted by the Third Reich.
There were no cookouts in the 1940s, but there was the Detroit Race Riot of 1943.
There were no cookouts in the 1950s, but there were the taunts against the Little Rock Nine.
There were no cookouts in the 1960s, but there was the slapping Rena Frye and the beating of her son.
There were no cookouts in the 1970s, but there was the assassination of Fred Hampton.
There were no cookouts in the 1980s, but there was the Central Park Five.
There were no cookouts in the 1990s, but there was the Crime Bill.
Forget the cookouts and all of the freely given invitations; we’ll be in the basement planning and building.
Science is real
Figure 2. The popularized “In this house, we believe” yard sign. The creation of them have been attributed to Kristin Garvey, a librarian from Madison, Wisconsin, as a response to the victory of the 45th President (now 47th President) in the 2016 United States presidential election. The signs have been discussed as containing a “curious power” , battle for “White womanhood”, and liberal resistance against a presidency. Or, perhaps they are just signs to prevent vandalism or looting in the event of another riot in response to the police killing of a Black civilian. But just like any other sign in a yard (announcing the need to vote for a candidate, a scheduled townhall meeting, availability for tax work, and used products on sale), it is just a yard sign. It is not a light in the window for freedom (from slavery) and for shelter, it is just a yard sign. (Lorie Shaull, 2017, Wikicommons)
Too Black is a poet, scholar, filmmaker, and organizer. He is the host of the Black Myths Podcast, co-director of the documentary film The Pendleton 2: They Stood Up, and co-author of the book Laundering Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Profits. He is based in Indianapolis, IN.
Rasul Mowatt, Critical Geographer and Researcher. He is the author of the book The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence: The State and the City Between Us, and the co-author of The City of Hip-Hop: New York City, The Bronx, and a Peace Meeting and Laundering Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Profits.
[1] Skrentny argued that “fear of black violence was the original rationale for affirmative admissions” during the time of urban rebellions, riots, and campus disorders that swept across the U.S. in the 1960s. In response, university administrators quickly strategized ways to “develop other rationales” for diversifying its student body. 1. John David Skrentny, The Minority Rights Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022), 166.
[2] Schuck argued that an “optimistic, unifying vision” of American identity specifically, assimilationism of the “melting pot” variety prevailed in the latter part of the 1960s. This was during the height in which “Black separatism gained greater influence over the civil rights movement” during “urban riots and the Nixon administration’s accession to power” 1. Peter H. Schuck, Diversity in America: Keeping Government at a Safe Distance (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 46.
https://blackagendareport.com/bootleg-r ... black-rage
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Ideology
What’s Next?
There is a growing sense among many that we may be on the verge of a new world order or-- to be more accurate-- at the end of an old one. Opinion polls show very low confidence in the familiar institutions of governance and high uncertainty about the economy. Voters are rejecting traditional centrists parties, with new alternative parties and movements growing in popularity. There is little or no popular consensus on the path forward and an abiding sense that matters are, in general, going badly.
The global economy is variously afflicted with inflation, stagnation, or both, and growing insecurity. Political leaders are rigidly defending the old consensus or unsuccessfully advancing “new” wrinkles on the old that go nowhere. Inequality of wealth, income, power, and outcomes grow dramatically.
Few are satisfied that we can continue in the old way, but even fewer know of a way forward.
So, it should come with little surprise that intellectuals have taken on the daunting task of describing where we are and where we might be going.
Within the broad left, two characterizations of the current “international order” have been popularized: a policy, “neoliberalism” and a process, “globalization.” Much nonsense has been written and spoken about both. As the terms grew in popularity and usage, their meaning became fuzzier and fuzzier.
There have been useful accounts of neoliberalism that place it both in an historical context and within the evolution of modern capitalism (see my discussion of Gary Gerstle’s book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order). Gerstle, notably, gives a credible account of neoliberalism’s origins in the late 1970s and strong reasons for its fragility today.
Similarly, Branko Milanović has offered a credible account of globalization in an article that I recently reviewed. However, he dates it from 1989, when, in fact, the expansion of trade has been consistent from the establishment of the post-war global trade architecture, with qualitative leaps coming from the 1978 “opening” to China, the 1991 demise of the European socialist states, and again with China’s entry into the WTO, but followed more recently by globalization’s wane after the Great Recession of 2007-09.
It is important not to confuse the two: neoliberalism is a political initiative that gained traction from the failings of New Deal Keynesian policy and became policy with the establishment of centrist consensus and its subscription by mainstream political parties, spreading throughout the world as dogma; globalization is an expansive process accelerated with new technologies and the migration of capital to new and expanded labor markets. While they overlap in many ways, they are different phenomena.
An even more recent participant in this discussion is Perry Anderson, writing in The London Review of Books. Contra Gerstle, Anderson sees a still-resilient neoliberalism locked in a political struggle with populism-- “The political deadlock between the two is not over: how long it will last is anyone’s guess.”
Within the various fora of left-wing intellectuals, Anderson is a well-known, important, but controversial figure. His writing, his editorship of New Left Review, and his hand in Verso books placed him in the center of UK left intellectual life-- independent of Communist and socialist parties-- in a role similar to that played by Monthly Review in the US. Wherever Marxism rose in fashion in student and professorial circles, Anderson’s influence could be found.
The publication of Domenico Losurdo’s book, Western Marxism, in 2017 (2024 in English) placed Perry Anderson at the center of Losurdo’s critique of Euro-American trends, a critique generating much attention with the anti-imperialist left. There was certainly some merit to Losurdo’s charge that some of the “Marxism” exercised in Europe and the US was stained by Eurocentrism. Certainly, Losurdo was on to something.
Anderson’s leftism was decidedly hostile to, real-existing-socialism-- both East and West-- and the various Communist Parties. He opted, instead, for some pure vision of socialism, a version that Marx would have scoffed at as utopian. Moreover, Anderson encouraged a left scholasticism that took young activists further and further from changing the world and more and more toward an academic career.
But the failings of the Western left lie less in any “geographical” disposition, but more centrally in the virus of anti-Communism and the disillusionment after the demise of the USSR. Gary Gerstle-- no friend of Communism-- captures it:
The collapse of communism… shrank the imaginative and ideological space in which opposition to capitalist thought and practices might incubate, and impelled those who remained leftists to redefine their radicalism in alternative terms, which turned out to be those that capitalist systems could more, rather than less, easily manage. This was the moment when neoliberalism in the United States went from being a political movement to a political order.
Ironically, Anderson concedes as much:
[Behind] neoliberalism’s apparent immunity to disgrace-- lay the disappearance of any significant political movement calling robustly either for the abolition or the radical transformation of capitalism. By the turn of the century, socialism in both of its historical variants, revolutionary and reformist, had been swept clear of the stage in the Atlantic zone.
But notice the difference. Gerstle-- the liberal-- identifies the socialist left as in retreat from socialism, with not a little suggestion that the “redefinition” was based on opportunism. There really was an alternative, despite what elites wanted us to believe.
Anderson-- the Western Marxist intellectual-- describes the retreat in the passive voice, as though there was no agency in the retreat, merely a “disappearance.” Who or what caused the “disappearance”? Who or what swept socialism clear from the stage? Did it fall from the sky?
There are no regrets of the setbacks to the socialist world. There is no remorse over the sponsorship of student rebellion over worker actions. There is no reflection on the dalliance with the renegades, malcontents, and dreamers on the margins of the left.
Anderson writes of “the widely differing set of revolts… united in their rejection of the international regime in place in the West since the 1980s.” “What they oppose,” he asserts “is not capitalism as such, but the current socio-economic version of it, neoliberalism.” And what was the role of New Left Review in taking socialism off the table?
Like so much of the academic left, Anderson and his colleagues were fully compliant with the post-war Western intellectual catechism: ABC – “Anything But Communism.”
Not surprisingly, Anderson sees a bleak future: either a continuing neoliberal nightmare or an ineffective populism, possibly offering worse outcomes.
In the last few weeks, the discussion of the next international order further develops with an intervention by Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs, an establishment figure who has taken the rare enlightened position on Ukraine and Palestine. In Giving Birth to the New International Order, Sachs argues that:
The multipolar world will be born when the geopolitical weight of Asia, Africa, and Latin America matches their rising economic weight. This needed shift in geopolitics has been delayed as the US and Europe cling to outdated prerogatives built into international institutions and to their outdated mindsets.
Sachs endorses a view widespread on the left, a utopian view that a diverse and multi-interested group of states organized around diverse and often contradictory grievances against the reigning US-centered international order-- the BRICS alliance-- can produce “a new multilateral order that can keep the peace and the path to sustainable development.”
Almost instantly, Sachs article was met with a critical response from Dr. Asoka Bandarage, who challenges the BRICS commitment to social justice for the smaller, weaker, less powerful nations:
Unfortunately, BRICS appears to be replicating the same patterns of domination and subordination in its relations with smaller nations that characterize traditional imperial powers. Whether the world is unipolar or multipolar, the continuation of a dominant global economic and financial system based on competitive technological and capitalist growth and environmental, social and cultural destruction will fundamentally not change the world and the disastrous trajectory we are on.
Through her intimate knowledge of Indian-Sri Lankan relations, Bandarage shows how decidedly unequal power relations function even with the BRICS founders, questioning: “...would this truly represent a move towards a ‘New International Order,’ or would it simply be a mutation of the existing paradigm of domination and subordination and geopolitical weight being equated with economic weight, i.e., ‘might is right’?”
A welcome voice joins the conversation with the April 16 issue of the Morning Star. Andrew Murray-- Marxist trade union and anti-war leader-- affirms that “[t]his is a moment of transition, so we should hold firmly in our heads that the destination is not foreordained.”
Indeed.
Murray, like the others, sees neoliberalism as the current order: “a prolonged assault on working-class institutions, on the social wage and on the sovereignty of the countries of the global South, with the state receding from some of the obligations it had assumed after 1945-- the maintenance of full employment for example.”
Unlike the others, he sees 2008 as the apogee of neoliberalism’s ascendance:
Neoliberalism met its own Waterloo in the crash of 2008. The stagnation in living standards since has been paralleled by an intellectual stagnation of the ruling classes, unable to easily preserve the old systemic assumptions yet equally incapable of transitioning to new ones.
Murray reminds us that the previous transitions always included the socialist options, noting a fascinating quote from former French socialist president François Mitterrand-- frustrated by difficulties around the Programme commun of the Communists and Socialists-- reportedly saying “in economics there are two solutions-- either you are a Leninist or you won’t change anything.”
Until Murray’s contribution, no one even hints at a Leninist solution.
The leading oppositional candidate for a “solution” today is right populism. And we must take note of Murray’s warning: “Previous transitions have been accompanied by war, or at least violent social convulsions.”
If elites continue to cling to neoliberal dogma, “that hands the initiative to the Trumps, Le Pens and Weidels who embrace a lot of Hayek and a little of Hitler, a rhetorical dash of Roosevelt and nothing of Lenin,” concludes Murray.
Conclusion
The growing sense that neoliberalism is a spent force, both popularly and in practice, leads to the question: “What comes next?”
Ruling circles offer only two choices:
Clinging to a nearly 50-year consensus of deregulation, privatization, public/private partnership (socialism for the capitalists), dismantling of social safety nets, austerity, growing inequality, and money-democracy.
A right-populism that postures as anti-establishment, but maintains existing unequal relations of power and wealth, employs bully-democracy, while dismantling the institutions and organizations of their opposition, and scattering their forces.
Neither choice challenges the socio-economic system that spawned both options: capitalism. Neither option serves the interest of the people.
The liberal Gerstle, the social democrat Milanović, the academic Marxist Anderson, and the multipolarista Sachs offer us a return to a disastrous neoliberalism or blind faith and hope in a yet-to-be-discovered solution.
Only Murray offers an approach with historical antecedents and the prospect of a sharp break with capitalist malignancy.
We must remember that those who have been swayed toward right-wing populism were despairing for better alternatives. Blaming their votes when they are offered no real choice is arrogant foolishness. Better we find a real alternative.
Without another alternative emerging, the neo-nationalism of right populism-- expressed today as tariffs, sanctions, barriers (protectionism)-- will inevitably lead to war.
The only answer to an obscenely inhuman capitalism hell bent on a catastrophic path is the “Lenin” answer: socialism.
Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com
http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/2025/04/whats-next.html
There is a growing sense among many that we may be on the verge of a new world order or-- to be more accurate-- at the end of an old one. Opinion polls show very low confidence in the familiar institutions of governance and high uncertainty about the economy. Voters are rejecting traditional centrists parties, with new alternative parties and movements growing in popularity. There is little or no popular consensus on the path forward and an abiding sense that matters are, in general, going badly.
The global economy is variously afflicted with inflation, stagnation, or both, and growing insecurity. Political leaders are rigidly defending the old consensus or unsuccessfully advancing “new” wrinkles on the old that go nowhere. Inequality of wealth, income, power, and outcomes grow dramatically.
Few are satisfied that we can continue in the old way, but even fewer know of a way forward.
So, it should come with little surprise that intellectuals have taken on the daunting task of describing where we are and where we might be going.
Within the broad left, two characterizations of the current “international order” have been popularized: a policy, “neoliberalism” and a process, “globalization.” Much nonsense has been written and spoken about both. As the terms grew in popularity and usage, their meaning became fuzzier and fuzzier.
There have been useful accounts of neoliberalism that place it both in an historical context and within the evolution of modern capitalism (see my discussion of Gary Gerstle’s book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order). Gerstle, notably, gives a credible account of neoliberalism’s origins in the late 1970s and strong reasons for its fragility today.
Similarly, Branko Milanović has offered a credible account of globalization in an article that I recently reviewed. However, he dates it from 1989, when, in fact, the expansion of trade has been consistent from the establishment of the post-war global trade architecture, with qualitative leaps coming from the 1978 “opening” to China, the 1991 demise of the European socialist states, and again with China’s entry into the WTO, but followed more recently by globalization’s wane after the Great Recession of 2007-09.
It is important not to confuse the two: neoliberalism is a political initiative that gained traction from the failings of New Deal Keynesian policy and became policy with the establishment of centrist consensus and its subscription by mainstream political parties, spreading throughout the world as dogma; globalization is an expansive process accelerated with new technologies and the migration of capital to new and expanded labor markets. While they overlap in many ways, they are different phenomena.
An even more recent participant in this discussion is Perry Anderson, writing in The London Review of Books. Contra Gerstle, Anderson sees a still-resilient neoliberalism locked in a political struggle with populism-- “The political deadlock between the two is not over: how long it will last is anyone’s guess.”
Within the various fora of left-wing intellectuals, Anderson is a well-known, important, but controversial figure. His writing, his editorship of New Left Review, and his hand in Verso books placed him in the center of UK left intellectual life-- independent of Communist and socialist parties-- in a role similar to that played by Monthly Review in the US. Wherever Marxism rose in fashion in student and professorial circles, Anderson’s influence could be found.
The publication of Domenico Losurdo’s book, Western Marxism, in 2017 (2024 in English) placed Perry Anderson at the center of Losurdo’s critique of Euro-American trends, a critique generating much attention with the anti-imperialist left. There was certainly some merit to Losurdo’s charge that some of the “Marxism” exercised in Europe and the US was stained by Eurocentrism. Certainly, Losurdo was on to something.
Anderson’s leftism was decidedly hostile to, real-existing-socialism-- both East and West-- and the various Communist Parties. He opted, instead, for some pure vision of socialism, a version that Marx would have scoffed at as utopian. Moreover, Anderson encouraged a left scholasticism that took young activists further and further from changing the world and more and more toward an academic career.
But the failings of the Western left lie less in any “geographical” disposition, but more centrally in the virus of anti-Communism and the disillusionment after the demise of the USSR. Gary Gerstle-- no friend of Communism-- captures it:
The collapse of communism… shrank the imaginative and ideological space in which opposition to capitalist thought and practices might incubate, and impelled those who remained leftists to redefine their radicalism in alternative terms, which turned out to be those that capitalist systems could more, rather than less, easily manage. This was the moment when neoliberalism in the United States went from being a political movement to a political order.
Ironically, Anderson concedes as much:
[Behind] neoliberalism’s apparent immunity to disgrace-- lay the disappearance of any significant political movement calling robustly either for the abolition or the radical transformation of capitalism. By the turn of the century, socialism in both of its historical variants, revolutionary and reformist, had been swept clear of the stage in the Atlantic zone.
But notice the difference. Gerstle-- the liberal-- identifies the socialist left as in retreat from socialism, with not a little suggestion that the “redefinition” was based on opportunism. There really was an alternative, despite what elites wanted us to believe.
Anderson-- the Western Marxist intellectual-- describes the retreat in the passive voice, as though there was no agency in the retreat, merely a “disappearance.” Who or what caused the “disappearance”? Who or what swept socialism clear from the stage? Did it fall from the sky?
There are no regrets of the setbacks to the socialist world. There is no remorse over the sponsorship of student rebellion over worker actions. There is no reflection on the dalliance with the renegades, malcontents, and dreamers on the margins of the left.
Anderson writes of “the widely differing set of revolts… united in their rejection of the international regime in place in the West since the 1980s.” “What they oppose,” he asserts “is not capitalism as such, but the current socio-economic version of it, neoliberalism.” And what was the role of New Left Review in taking socialism off the table?
Like so much of the academic left, Anderson and his colleagues were fully compliant with the post-war Western intellectual catechism: ABC – “Anything But Communism.”
Not surprisingly, Anderson sees a bleak future: either a continuing neoliberal nightmare or an ineffective populism, possibly offering worse outcomes.
In the last few weeks, the discussion of the next international order further develops with an intervention by Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs, an establishment figure who has taken the rare enlightened position on Ukraine and Palestine. In Giving Birth to the New International Order, Sachs argues that:
The multipolar world will be born when the geopolitical weight of Asia, Africa, and Latin America matches their rising economic weight. This needed shift in geopolitics has been delayed as the US and Europe cling to outdated prerogatives built into international institutions and to their outdated mindsets.
Sachs endorses a view widespread on the left, a utopian view that a diverse and multi-interested group of states organized around diverse and often contradictory grievances against the reigning US-centered international order-- the BRICS alliance-- can produce “a new multilateral order that can keep the peace and the path to sustainable development.”
Almost instantly, Sachs article was met with a critical response from Dr. Asoka Bandarage, who challenges the BRICS commitment to social justice for the smaller, weaker, less powerful nations:
Unfortunately, BRICS appears to be replicating the same patterns of domination and subordination in its relations with smaller nations that characterize traditional imperial powers. Whether the world is unipolar or multipolar, the continuation of a dominant global economic and financial system based on competitive technological and capitalist growth and environmental, social and cultural destruction will fundamentally not change the world and the disastrous trajectory we are on.
Through her intimate knowledge of Indian-Sri Lankan relations, Bandarage shows how decidedly unequal power relations function even with the BRICS founders, questioning: “...would this truly represent a move towards a ‘New International Order,’ or would it simply be a mutation of the existing paradigm of domination and subordination and geopolitical weight being equated with economic weight, i.e., ‘might is right’?”
A welcome voice joins the conversation with the April 16 issue of the Morning Star. Andrew Murray-- Marxist trade union and anti-war leader-- affirms that “[t]his is a moment of transition, so we should hold firmly in our heads that the destination is not foreordained.”
Indeed.
Murray, like the others, sees neoliberalism as the current order: “a prolonged assault on working-class institutions, on the social wage and on the sovereignty of the countries of the global South, with the state receding from some of the obligations it had assumed after 1945-- the maintenance of full employment for example.”
Unlike the others, he sees 2008 as the apogee of neoliberalism’s ascendance:
Neoliberalism met its own Waterloo in the crash of 2008. The stagnation in living standards since has been paralleled by an intellectual stagnation of the ruling classes, unable to easily preserve the old systemic assumptions yet equally incapable of transitioning to new ones.
Murray reminds us that the previous transitions always included the socialist options, noting a fascinating quote from former French socialist president François Mitterrand-- frustrated by difficulties around the Programme commun of the Communists and Socialists-- reportedly saying “in economics there are two solutions-- either you are a Leninist or you won’t change anything.”
Until Murray’s contribution, no one even hints at a Leninist solution.
The leading oppositional candidate for a “solution” today is right populism. And we must take note of Murray’s warning: “Previous transitions have been accompanied by war, or at least violent social convulsions.”
If elites continue to cling to neoliberal dogma, “that hands the initiative to the Trumps, Le Pens and Weidels who embrace a lot of Hayek and a little of Hitler, a rhetorical dash of Roosevelt and nothing of Lenin,” concludes Murray.
Conclusion
The growing sense that neoliberalism is a spent force, both popularly and in practice, leads to the question: “What comes next?”
Ruling circles offer only two choices:
Clinging to a nearly 50-year consensus of deregulation, privatization, public/private partnership (socialism for the capitalists), dismantling of social safety nets, austerity, growing inequality, and money-democracy.
A right-populism that postures as anti-establishment, but maintains existing unequal relations of power and wealth, employs bully-democracy, while dismantling the institutions and organizations of their opposition, and scattering their forces.
Neither choice challenges the socio-economic system that spawned both options: capitalism. Neither option serves the interest of the people.
The liberal Gerstle, the social democrat Milanović, the academic Marxist Anderson, and the multipolarista Sachs offer us a return to a disastrous neoliberalism or blind faith and hope in a yet-to-be-discovered solution.
Only Murray offers an approach with historical antecedents and the prospect of a sharp break with capitalist malignancy.
We must remember that those who have been swayed toward right-wing populism were despairing for better alternatives. Blaming their votes when they are offered no real choice is arrogant foolishness. Better we find a real alternative.
Without another alternative emerging, the neo-nationalism of right populism-- expressed today as tariffs, sanctions, barriers (protectionism)-- will inevitably lead to war.
The only answer to an obscenely inhuman capitalism hell bent on a catastrophic path is the “Lenin” answer: socialism.
Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com
http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/2025/04/whats-next.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Ideology
Deepening party work in the cultural sphere
The struggle for socialism is not only a political and economic struggle but also a cultural and educational one.
Proletarian writers
Sunday 27 April 2025
Through schools, media, art and entertainment, the capitalist system reinforces individualism, consumerism and passivity, obscuring the collective power of the working class. But culture is also a space where the working class can challenge bourgeois ideology and assert its own worldview.
The following resolution was passed unanimously by the tenth party congress of the CPGB-ML.
*****
Congress notes that the ruling class uses culture and education to maintain its hegemony, promoting ideologies that justify exploitation, competition, inequality and oppression. Through schools, media, art and entertainment, the capitalist system reinforces individualism, consumerism and passivity, obscuring the collective power of the working class.
However, culture is also a space where the working class can challenge bourgeois ideology and assert its own worldview. From the folk traditions of oppressed peoples to the revolutionary art of socialist movements, the working class has always produced culture that reflects its struggles, solidarity, and vision for a better world. The party must actively engage in this cultural struggle, supporting and amplifying the voices of working-class artists, writers and creators from socialist and anti-imperialist nations.
In defence of socialist realism
Congress notes that socialist realism is the working class’s heritage to defend. Its condemnation is tied to the condemnation of victorious socialism, and in particular of Josef Stalin, by the bourgeoisie. The ruling class seeks either to transform it into a commoditised trophy or to reduce it to empty aestheticism. But socialist realism holds historical significance for the emancipation of women, egalitarianism, the confidence and pride of the peoples in socialist construction, and the preservation of national cultures.
Moreover, socialist realism has been a method of introducing new artistic forms and conceptions in the oppressed nations and it has been enriched by the arts of those nations. It has been a common ground and basis of dialogue and fraternity for the peoples of the USSR and the people’s republics, and for the anticolonial and anti-imperialist movement.
Nowadays, through state-sponsored exchange programmes, countries still share the language of socialist realism, influence one other and share classical and traditional art vocabularies. There are still continuities in socialist and anti-imperialist states that we must study, both for inspiration and as reference points. We must evaluate the transformations that socialist realism takes in these countries, which reveal how the national and international spheres are interconnected in influencing it, as well as the contradictions in the economy and its impact upon culture.
Furthermore, it is essential to emphasise the importance of culture for national independence – as seen, for instance, in the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of Cuba – and to strengthen our party’s cultural connections with those nations.
Congress understands that, as in Lenin’s time, cinema remains the most influential artform for socialist and anti-imperialist countries, serving as an alternative to the entertainment industry dominated by imperialism. Cultural institutions in these nations (such as the DPRK’s Mansudae art school) contribute internationally through cultural exports, reinforcing their national economies through commissioned monuments. As a result, all such efforts are sanctioned by imperialism. The British movement and people have been deprived of the achievements of socialist realism.
Congress recognises that just as socialism has not been totally defeated, despite the claim of the “end of history”, but has merely suffered a temporary setback, in the same way socialist realism is not dead but endures as the aesthetic expression of the consciousness that socialism develops about society itself. Despite changes in socialist and anti-imperialist states, socialist realism remains alive, albeit under different names. To the degree that a country has developed socialist relationships of production, socialist realism is accepted and adopted there.
Internationalism is facilitated by the use of a common artistic idiom such as socialist realism, which is shared and commonly understood among socialist countries, providing a shared style and a common understanding of the relationship between content and form.
Congress asserts that socialist realism is not a ‘Russian’ invention; it is the culmination of socialist art. It is not a ‘national’ art that stands in superiority over others; it is an art for all humanity.
Congress notes that the decline of US imperialism, the call for a multipolar world and the democratisation of international relations, and the demand for respect for national cultures in the countries that resist imperialism, all require communists to work towards making these cultures coherent and cohesive on the foundational principles of socialism and internationalism, despite their cultural differences.
Congress asserts that, in its formation, socialist realism has absorbed the trajectory of so-called ‘western art’, positioning itself as a truly revolutionary and modern movement. It is the most comprehensive artistic conception developed by the communist movement. Investigating the ways that national cultures integrate into socialist realism and the forms it takes today in socialist and anti-imperialist countries is of paramount importance for cultural workers.
Congress emphasises that to fully understand socialist realism, we must review Britain’s realist and popular traditions, so that socialist realism and its development can be interpreted dialectically, in line with the development of each society. Those who engage with it purely in aesthetic terms – either accepting or rejecting it based on personal preferences – perpetuate the dominance of the ‘art for art’s sake’ doctrine in the present capitalist system.
This aestheticisation ignores socialist realism’s social agency, particularly its participatory nature, in which the working class is the subject of history. It fails to grasp the dynamism and inner world of the working class, and its consciousness. Socialist realism is a pedagogy of social relations that aligns with the achievement of socialism.
Counter-revolutionary attitudes to socialist culture
Congress notes that critics often dismiss socialist realism as mere ‘propaganda’, branding the very notion of propaganda with hypocritical liberal scepticism. Others decry it as ‘moralistic’, even as they turn a blind eye to the complete moral degradation of imperialism. Postmodernism, the dominant narrative of imperialism today, even attempts ‘Marxist’ interpretations of culture that simultaneously reject socialist realism, which has developed alongside the history of the socialist movement and consciously serves Marxism and scientific socialism. For this reason, the bourgeoisie condemns it as ‘conservative’ and a repressive throwback as compared with whatever it deems ‘avant-garde’ at a given moment.
Congress recognises that the undermining of socialist realism began with Khrushchevite revisionism and the communist parties that followed this trajectory, especially in the west. Over the years, it has been ‘re-evaluated’ and exploited, initially suppressed by postwar capitalism, then stigmatised as ‘totalitarian’ art during the cultural cold war. It was equated to fascist imagery, ridiculed and degraded by neoliberalism. In late-stage capitalism, Russian culture is now being crudely excluded and cancelled as a result of Nato’s war in Ukraine, with the west striking at the very foundations of its adversary – and, ultimately, of humanity itself.
Congress deplores the destruction of Soviet monuments and everything Russian, and understands that the decommunisation process is a coordinated Nato operation. In other countries, the deliberate degradation and vandalism, and the removal from public space of Soviet and socialist monuments echoes the European parliament’s resolution on “totalitarianism”. This is a war on the memory of these peoples in order to break historical relations and cultural ties with Russia, to strengthen fascist forces and historical revisionism in public life, education and universities, and thus consolidate the expansion of Nato.
The imperialists aim to revise the history of WW2 and to rehabilitate Wehrmacht collaborators. These actions are presented to eastern European peoples as a prerequisite for EU membership; that funding will flow if they get rid of their socialist past. Controlled opposition, NGOs and colour revolutions complete the picture. Yet the legacy of socialist culture persists through the collective memory of the heroic peoples of Donbass and in the activities of persecuted communist groups in many former Soviet republics.
Congress asserts that imperialist institutions meticulously curate art exhibitions and universities promote anticommunist propaganda in so-called ‘Soviet studies’ programmes, while think tanks depoliticise art and anything that can offer perspective to the people and mobilise them. Even the student press reinforces these narratives, bombarding young minds from an early age.
The destruction of national cultures in nations resisting imperialism – such as Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Palestine, and Iran, which is also targeted for its cultural status in the middle east – demonstrates how cultural heritage is destroyed, plundered and appropriated. The intellectuals of the movement remain silent, complicit in these cultural genocides, reducing them to ‘humanitarian issues’ while liberal outlets like the Guardian sanitise their erasure.
Congress believes that it is crucial to expose the role of cultural institutions and their intellectual enablers since the time of Tony Blair, particularly in academia. The ‘inclusion’ of comprador individuals from these oppressed nations in academic positions or as award recipients often serves as a tokenistic alibi to cover the crimes of imperialism, advancing ideas that are ultimately counter-revolutionary and anti-worker.
The duty to our youth
Congress recognises that for the Red Youth of our party, it is essential to deeply appreciate the culture that the anti-imperialist and anticolonial movements have developed under the harshest conditions. The poetry and music that celebrate these struggles are not merely artistic expressions; they are vital conditions for the survival of struggling peoples. Artforms such as political cartoons remain an important weapon for the peoples who resist, and also for communists. Our youth should draw inspiration and courage from these traditions.
As a party, we must highlight the role of the talented comrades and fellow travellers that we have – poets, writers, musicians, visual artists, architects, directors, designers, photographers and dancers – and ensure that our party takes its rightful place in the movement for revolutionary culture. We need a presence in working-class communities and the organisation of cultural events that will bring in new comrades, reflecting the true diversity of the British working class at a time when our rights are under attack, attempts are made to crush the Palestinian movement, and few British artists have dared to take a stand.
Congress notes that socialist culture faces relentless attacks, distortions and misappropriations. Reactionary forces attempt to strip it of its revolutionary content and integrate it into bourgeois culture. In Britain, the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) and other Trotskyist groups systematically engage in this process, exploiting ignorance and the lies perpetuated by the ruling class. The bourgeoisie seeks to monopolise culture, leaving no reference point for communists. Meanwhile, Labour obscures its anti-worker policies with cultural posturing, leading to the indifference or outright hostility of the working class toward intellectuals and cultural labour.
Congress asserts that the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) revisionists have hijacked what was positive about the cultural heritage of the old CPGB, presenting it as a museum piece, harmless and devoid of revolutionary content. It is also necessary to reclaim the traditions of the Artists’ International Association (AIA) from the CPB. The Artists International Association was linked to CPGB and had as its aim “The unity of artists for peace, democracy and cultural development”. It held a series of large group exhibitions on political and social themes, beginning in 1935 with the exhibition Artists Against Fascism and War, and it supported the republican cause in Spain.
We should also examine the postwar attitudes of many British communist intellectuals after the publication of the British Road to Socialism party programme or the 1956 crisis – Francis Klingender, George D Thompson and others – so that we can draw the correct conclusions.
Usurpers
People who have been exposed to the ideological and political crisis that broke up the CPGB are now the ‘intellectuals’ of the CPB who romanticise ‘their’ past. Claiming ownership through family lineage and professional academic credentials, they organise seminars and publish articles in the Morning Star while integrating themselves into the Labour ‘left’ and seeking votes for the imperialist Labour party. True opportunists, they use identity politics especially to appeal to the youth, sowing further confusion.
As communists, we have the main say in the evaluation of socialist culture, which is our inheritance as a whole, despite the fact that the bourgeoisie and its agents periodise categorise and interpret it arbitrarily in academia and according to their class interests, seeking to influence the perception of progressive people. Thus, well-meaning people end up accepting bourgeois propaganda regarding the reception of socialist realism and socialist culture in general. Congress emphasises that it is our duty to cultivate the aesthetic education of our comrades and inspire a people-centred culture.
Congress recognises that our party has always understood that culture is a crucial arena of class struggle. Over the years, our publications have exposed both the crude anticommunist propaganda of the ruling class and the more refined manipulations of social democracy, which seek to mislead progressive individuals in this country. It is our duty to educate the working class in a culture that is rightfully theirs – a culture that fosters the liberation of the working class and promotes fraternity with the working peoples of the world.
Congress recognises that, as Lenin emphasised, education must not be limited to the absorption of abstract knowledge but must be deeply connected to the practical tasks of the class struggle. The party therefore resolves to:
1.Promote critical thinking: Education must teach the youth to critically analyse society, question bourgeois ideology, and understand the historical and material roots of exploitation and oppression.
2.Integrate education with labour: Education must be combined with productive labour, ensuring that young people develop both intellectual and practical skills. This approach will break down the division between mental and manual labour, a hallmark of class society.
3.Foster communist morality: Education must instil a sense of collective responsibility, solidarity and dedication to the revolutionary cause. The youth must be educated to serve the people and contribute to the struggle for socialism.
Congress asserts that the party has a responsibility to foster a culture of resistance and liberation and to ensure that education serves the interests of the working class. This means:
1.Critiquing bourgeois culture and education: The party will expose the reactionary and exploitative nature of mainstream cultural production and education, challenging the commodification of art and the glorification of individualism, consumerism and bourgeois nationalism.
2.Promoting internationalism: The party will champion cultural and educational initiatives that highlight the proletarian internationalist nature of the class struggle, fostering solidarity with workers and oppressed peoples around the world.
3.Preserving and invigorating traditions: The party will engage with the cultural and educational heritage of the working class, preserving its progressive elements while challenging reactionary (such as unhealthy attachment to drinking culture that belittles the working class) and divisive aspects (such as football hooliganism or identity politics that seek to patronise and manipulate young people in particular).
Congress resolves that to advance the cultural and educational struggle, the party will:
1.Establish a cultural committee to coordinate efforts in the fields of art, literature, media and education.
2.Organise cultural and educational events, film screenings and seminars that showcase working-class creativity and deepen our understanding of socialist realism.
3.Develop educational materials and curricula based on Marxist theory, equipping members with the tools to analyse and critique cultural production and bourgeois education.
4.Build alliances with socialist and anti-imperialist cultural and educational institutions from China, the DPRK, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Russia and Belarus in particular.
5.Utilise digital platforms to disseminate revolutionary culture and counter bourgeois propaganda. (by publishing examples from the art of the USSR and China, for example).
Congress asserts that the struggle for socialism is not only a political and economic struggle but also a cultural and educational one; reclaiming culture and education from the hands of the ruling class and transforming them into tools of liberation. The CPGB-ML commits itself to this vital task, recognising that a socialist future depends not only on the overthrow of capitalism but also on the creation of a new culture and educational system that reflects the values of solidarity, equality and human dignity.
https://thecommunists.org/2025/04/27/ne ... al-sphere/
The struggle for socialism is not only a political and economic struggle but also a cultural and educational one.
Proletarian writers
Sunday 27 April 2025
Through schools, media, art and entertainment, the capitalist system reinforces individualism, consumerism and passivity, obscuring the collective power of the working class. But culture is also a space where the working class can challenge bourgeois ideology and assert its own worldview.
The following resolution was passed unanimously by the tenth party congress of the CPGB-ML.
*****
Congress notes that the ruling class uses culture and education to maintain its hegemony, promoting ideologies that justify exploitation, competition, inequality and oppression. Through schools, media, art and entertainment, the capitalist system reinforces individualism, consumerism and passivity, obscuring the collective power of the working class.
However, culture is also a space where the working class can challenge bourgeois ideology and assert its own worldview. From the folk traditions of oppressed peoples to the revolutionary art of socialist movements, the working class has always produced culture that reflects its struggles, solidarity, and vision for a better world. The party must actively engage in this cultural struggle, supporting and amplifying the voices of working-class artists, writers and creators from socialist and anti-imperialist nations.
In defence of socialist realism
Congress notes that socialist realism is the working class’s heritage to defend. Its condemnation is tied to the condemnation of victorious socialism, and in particular of Josef Stalin, by the bourgeoisie. The ruling class seeks either to transform it into a commoditised trophy or to reduce it to empty aestheticism. But socialist realism holds historical significance for the emancipation of women, egalitarianism, the confidence and pride of the peoples in socialist construction, and the preservation of national cultures.
Moreover, socialist realism has been a method of introducing new artistic forms and conceptions in the oppressed nations and it has been enriched by the arts of those nations. It has been a common ground and basis of dialogue and fraternity for the peoples of the USSR and the people’s republics, and for the anticolonial and anti-imperialist movement.
Nowadays, through state-sponsored exchange programmes, countries still share the language of socialist realism, influence one other and share classical and traditional art vocabularies. There are still continuities in socialist and anti-imperialist states that we must study, both for inspiration and as reference points. We must evaluate the transformations that socialist realism takes in these countries, which reveal how the national and international spheres are interconnected in influencing it, as well as the contradictions in the economy and its impact upon culture.
Furthermore, it is essential to emphasise the importance of culture for national independence – as seen, for instance, in the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of Cuba – and to strengthen our party’s cultural connections with those nations.
Congress understands that, as in Lenin’s time, cinema remains the most influential artform for socialist and anti-imperialist countries, serving as an alternative to the entertainment industry dominated by imperialism. Cultural institutions in these nations (such as the DPRK’s Mansudae art school) contribute internationally through cultural exports, reinforcing their national economies through commissioned monuments. As a result, all such efforts are sanctioned by imperialism. The British movement and people have been deprived of the achievements of socialist realism.
Congress recognises that just as socialism has not been totally defeated, despite the claim of the “end of history”, but has merely suffered a temporary setback, in the same way socialist realism is not dead but endures as the aesthetic expression of the consciousness that socialism develops about society itself. Despite changes in socialist and anti-imperialist states, socialist realism remains alive, albeit under different names. To the degree that a country has developed socialist relationships of production, socialist realism is accepted and adopted there.
Internationalism is facilitated by the use of a common artistic idiom such as socialist realism, which is shared and commonly understood among socialist countries, providing a shared style and a common understanding of the relationship between content and form.
Congress asserts that socialist realism is not a ‘Russian’ invention; it is the culmination of socialist art. It is not a ‘national’ art that stands in superiority over others; it is an art for all humanity.
Congress notes that the decline of US imperialism, the call for a multipolar world and the democratisation of international relations, and the demand for respect for national cultures in the countries that resist imperialism, all require communists to work towards making these cultures coherent and cohesive on the foundational principles of socialism and internationalism, despite their cultural differences.
Congress asserts that, in its formation, socialist realism has absorbed the trajectory of so-called ‘western art’, positioning itself as a truly revolutionary and modern movement. It is the most comprehensive artistic conception developed by the communist movement. Investigating the ways that national cultures integrate into socialist realism and the forms it takes today in socialist and anti-imperialist countries is of paramount importance for cultural workers.
Congress emphasises that to fully understand socialist realism, we must review Britain’s realist and popular traditions, so that socialist realism and its development can be interpreted dialectically, in line with the development of each society. Those who engage with it purely in aesthetic terms – either accepting or rejecting it based on personal preferences – perpetuate the dominance of the ‘art for art’s sake’ doctrine in the present capitalist system.
This aestheticisation ignores socialist realism’s social agency, particularly its participatory nature, in which the working class is the subject of history. It fails to grasp the dynamism and inner world of the working class, and its consciousness. Socialist realism is a pedagogy of social relations that aligns with the achievement of socialism.
Counter-revolutionary attitudes to socialist culture
Congress notes that critics often dismiss socialist realism as mere ‘propaganda’, branding the very notion of propaganda with hypocritical liberal scepticism. Others decry it as ‘moralistic’, even as they turn a blind eye to the complete moral degradation of imperialism. Postmodernism, the dominant narrative of imperialism today, even attempts ‘Marxist’ interpretations of culture that simultaneously reject socialist realism, which has developed alongside the history of the socialist movement and consciously serves Marxism and scientific socialism. For this reason, the bourgeoisie condemns it as ‘conservative’ and a repressive throwback as compared with whatever it deems ‘avant-garde’ at a given moment.
Congress recognises that the undermining of socialist realism began with Khrushchevite revisionism and the communist parties that followed this trajectory, especially in the west. Over the years, it has been ‘re-evaluated’ and exploited, initially suppressed by postwar capitalism, then stigmatised as ‘totalitarian’ art during the cultural cold war. It was equated to fascist imagery, ridiculed and degraded by neoliberalism. In late-stage capitalism, Russian culture is now being crudely excluded and cancelled as a result of Nato’s war in Ukraine, with the west striking at the very foundations of its adversary – and, ultimately, of humanity itself.
Congress deplores the destruction of Soviet monuments and everything Russian, and understands that the decommunisation process is a coordinated Nato operation. In other countries, the deliberate degradation and vandalism, and the removal from public space of Soviet and socialist monuments echoes the European parliament’s resolution on “totalitarianism”. This is a war on the memory of these peoples in order to break historical relations and cultural ties with Russia, to strengthen fascist forces and historical revisionism in public life, education and universities, and thus consolidate the expansion of Nato.
The imperialists aim to revise the history of WW2 and to rehabilitate Wehrmacht collaborators. These actions are presented to eastern European peoples as a prerequisite for EU membership; that funding will flow if they get rid of their socialist past. Controlled opposition, NGOs and colour revolutions complete the picture. Yet the legacy of socialist culture persists through the collective memory of the heroic peoples of Donbass and in the activities of persecuted communist groups in many former Soviet republics.
Congress asserts that imperialist institutions meticulously curate art exhibitions and universities promote anticommunist propaganda in so-called ‘Soviet studies’ programmes, while think tanks depoliticise art and anything that can offer perspective to the people and mobilise them. Even the student press reinforces these narratives, bombarding young minds from an early age.
The destruction of national cultures in nations resisting imperialism – such as Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Palestine, and Iran, which is also targeted for its cultural status in the middle east – demonstrates how cultural heritage is destroyed, plundered and appropriated. The intellectuals of the movement remain silent, complicit in these cultural genocides, reducing them to ‘humanitarian issues’ while liberal outlets like the Guardian sanitise their erasure.
Congress believes that it is crucial to expose the role of cultural institutions and their intellectual enablers since the time of Tony Blair, particularly in academia. The ‘inclusion’ of comprador individuals from these oppressed nations in academic positions or as award recipients often serves as a tokenistic alibi to cover the crimes of imperialism, advancing ideas that are ultimately counter-revolutionary and anti-worker.
The duty to our youth
Congress recognises that for the Red Youth of our party, it is essential to deeply appreciate the culture that the anti-imperialist and anticolonial movements have developed under the harshest conditions. The poetry and music that celebrate these struggles are not merely artistic expressions; they are vital conditions for the survival of struggling peoples. Artforms such as political cartoons remain an important weapon for the peoples who resist, and also for communists. Our youth should draw inspiration and courage from these traditions.
As a party, we must highlight the role of the talented comrades and fellow travellers that we have – poets, writers, musicians, visual artists, architects, directors, designers, photographers and dancers – and ensure that our party takes its rightful place in the movement for revolutionary culture. We need a presence in working-class communities and the organisation of cultural events that will bring in new comrades, reflecting the true diversity of the British working class at a time when our rights are under attack, attempts are made to crush the Palestinian movement, and few British artists have dared to take a stand.
Congress notes that socialist culture faces relentless attacks, distortions and misappropriations. Reactionary forces attempt to strip it of its revolutionary content and integrate it into bourgeois culture. In Britain, the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) and other Trotskyist groups systematically engage in this process, exploiting ignorance and the lies perpetuated by the ruling class. The bourgeoisie seeks to monopolise culture, leaving no reference point for communists. Meanwhile, Labour obscures its anti-worker policies with cultural posturing, leading to the indifference or outright hostility of the working class toward intellectuals and cultural labour.
Congress asserts that the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) revisionists have hijacked what was positive about the cultural heritage of the old CPGB, presenting it as a museum piece, harmless and devoid of revolutionary content. It is also necessary to reclaim the traditions of the Artists’ International Association (AIA) from the CPB. The Artists International Association was linked to CPGB and had as its aim “The unity of artists for peace, democracy and cultural development”. It held a series of large group exhibitions on political and social themes, beginning in 1935 with the exhibition Artists Against Fascism and War, and it supported the republican cause in Spain.
We should also examine the postwar attitudes of many British communist intellectuals after the publication of the British Road to Socialism party programme or the 1956 crisis – Francis Klingender, George D Thompson and others – so that we can draw the correct conclusions.
Usurpers
People who have been exposed to the ideological and political crisis that broke up the CPGB are now the ‘intellectuals’ of the CPB who romanticise ‘their’ past. Claiming ownership through family lineage and professional academic credentials, they organise seminars and publish articles in the Morning Star while integrating themselves into the Labour ‘left’ and seeking votes for the imperialist Labour party. True opportunists, they use identity politics especially to appeal to the youth, sowing further confusion.
As communists, we have the main say in the evaluation of socialist culture, which is our inheritance as a whole, despite the fact that the bourgeoisie and its agents periodise categorise and interpret it arbitrarily in academia and according to their class interests, seeking to influence the perception of progressive people. Thus, well-meaning people end up accepting bourgeois propaganda regarding the reception of socialist realism and socialist culture in general. Congress emphasises that it is our duty to cultivate the aesthetic education of our comrades and inspire a people-centred culture.
Congress recognises that our party has always understood that culture is a crucial arena of class struggle. Over the years, our publications have exposed both the crude anticommunist propaganda of the ruling class and the more refined manipulations of social democracy, which seek to mislead progressive individuals in this country. It is our duty to educate the working class in a culture that is rightfully theirs – a culture that fosters the liberation of the working class and promotes fraternity with the working peoples of the world.
Congress recognises that, as Lenin emphasised, education must not be limited to the absorption of abstract knowledge but must be deeply connected to the practical tasks of the class struggle. The party therefore resolves to:
1.Promote critical thinking: Education must teach the youth to critically analyse society, question bourgeois ideology, and understand the historical and material roots of exploitation and oppression.
2.Integrate education with labour: Education must be combined with productive labour, ensuring that young people develop both intellectual and practical skills. This approach will break down the division between mental and manual labour, a hallmark of class society.
3.Foster communist morality: Education must instil a sense of collective responsibility, solidarity and dedication to the revolutionary cause. The youth must be educated to serve the people and contribute to the struggle for socialism.
Congress asserts that the party has a responsibility to foster a culture of resistance and liberation and to ensure that education serves the interests of the working class. This means:
1.Critiquing bourgeois culture and education: The party will expose the reactionary and exploitative nature of mainstream cultural production and education, challenging the commodification of art and the glorification of individualism, consumerism and bourgeois nationalism.
2.Promoting internationalism: The party will champion cultural and educational initiatives that highlight the proletarian internationalist nature of the class struggle, fostering solidarity with workers and oppressed peoples around the world.
3.Preserving and invigorating traditions: The party will engage with the cultural and educational heritage of the working class, preserving its progressive elements while challenging reactionary (such as unhealthy attachment to drinking culture that belittles the working class) and divisive aspects (such as football hooliganism or identity politics that seek to patronise and manipulate young people in particular).
Congress resolves that to advance the cultural and educational struggle, the party will:
1.Establish a cultural committee to coordinate efforts in the fields of art, literature, media and education.
2.Organise cultural and educational events, film screenings and seminars that showcase working-class creativity and deepen our understanding of socialist realism.
3.Develop educational materials and curricula based on Marxist theory, equipping members with the tools to analyse and critique cultural production and bourgeois education.
4.Build alliances with socialist and anti-imperialist cultural and educational institutions from China, the DPRK, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Russia and Belarus in particular.
5.Utilise digital platforms to disseminate revolutionary culture and counter bourgeois propaganda. (by publishing examples from the art of the USSR and China, for example).
Congress asserts that the struggle for socialism is not only a political and economic struggle but also a cultural and educational one; reclaiming culture and education from the hands of the ruling class and transforming them into tools of liberation. The CPGB-ML commits itself to this vital task, recognising that a socialist future depends not only on the overthrow of capitalism but also on the creation of a new culture and educational system that reflects the values of solidarity, equality and human dignity.
https://thecommunists.org/2025/04/27/ne ... al-sphere/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Ideology
Antonio Gramsci: Theirs and Ours
It has been forty-eight years since Eric Hobsbawm delivered a paper, Gramsci and Political Theory, before the Gramsci Conference held on March 5-6, 1977 (Reprinted as an article in Marxism Today, July, 1977).
Hobsbawm, contemplatively, reviews the forty years that had transpired since Antonio Gramsci’s death in 1937 after over a decade in a fascist prison. For the first ten years (1937-1947) Gramsci was virtually unknown outside of Italy, where Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti sought to integrate Gramsci-thought into the PCI’s work.
The next decade (1947-1957) found Gramsci’s influence in Italy expanding even beyond Communist circles, establishing him as an important national cultural figure.
It is with the third decade (1957-1967) that Gramsci became familiar to many people outside of Italy, with interest especially strong in the English-speaking world as noted by Hobsbawm. The recent strong critique of Stalin in the world Communist movement and the post-war strength and independence of the Gramsci-influenced PCI played a role in expanding the influence of Gramsci. Though not mentioned by Hobsbawm, the first (1957) limited US publication of Gramsci’s works was a brief (64 page) translation/commentary by Carl Marzani, Man and Society, published by the indomitable, Cold War-defiant publisher Cameron Associates. Marzani’s admiration and view of Gramsci as a model and contrast to Soviet practices is readily apparent.
With the fourth decade (1967-1977), Hobsbawm maintains that “Gramsci has become part of our intellectual universe. His stature as an original Marxist thinker-- in my view the most original such thinker produced in the west since 1917-- is pretty generally admitted… Such typically Gramscian terms as ‘hegemony’ occur in Marxist and even in non-Marxist, discussions of politics and history as casually, and sometimes as loosely, as Freudian terms did between the wars”.
By 1977, Hobsbawm’s thinking was converging with the emergent school of Eurocommunism, perhaps helping to explain his estimation of Gramsci’s importance.
Would Hobsbawm-- if he were alive today-- be surprised that, nearly a half century after he made his address in London, Antonio Gramsci’s most influential admirers were thinkers on the Trump right? Would he be shocked to see an article in The Wall Street Journal entitled Meet MAGA’s Favorite Communist?
The WSJ reports:
Christopher Rufo is perhaps the most potent conservative activist in the U.S… For the past year, Rufo has been working on a book called “How the Regime Rules,” which he describes as a “manifesto for the New Right.” At its core is a surprising inspiration: the Italian Communist thinker Antonio Gramsci, a longtime boogeyman of American conservatives. “Gramsci, in a sense, provides the diagram of how politics works and the relationship between all of the various component parts: intellectuals, institutions, laws, culture, folklore,” said Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Author Kevin T. Dugan notes that many international right-populist leaders pay homage to Gramsci, including Georgia Meloni, Marine Le Pen, and Jair Bolsonaro, while Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, told Tucker Carlson that “he had to wage a culture war every single day” against opponents who “have no problem with getting inside the state and employing Gramsci’s techniques; seducing the artists, seducing the culture, seducing the media or meddling in educational content.”
Other right-wing intellectuals have adopted Gramsci, according to the WSJ:
Gramsci’s name appears in the writing of paleoconservative thinkers Paul Gottfried, Thomas Fleming and Sam Francis, who influenced Pat Buchanan’s Republican presidential bids in the 1990s. One of Gramsci’s biggest proponents in the pre-Trump era was Andrew Breitbart, the founder of Breitbart News, who quoted his axiom that “politics is downstream of culture.”
More recently, far-right writers like Curtis Yarvin, who’s influenced Vice President JD Vance, have talked about how to capture power through a culture war.
Regardless of how selectively MAGA appropriates Gramsci-thought, however differently right-populists interpret Gramsci from his original intent, the mere fact that Gramsci is taken far more seriously by the right than by all but the Marxist left is cause for deep reflection.
The right sees politics as a contest-- even a war-- over how people interpret the world. They borrow this notion from how Gramsci writes about ideology. They intend to conduct that war with fervor.
Conversely, the center-left and even some “Marxists” embrace a market-model that imagines a forum of idea-sellers, who fairly exchange and value ideas. In this fantasy, everyone has an equal voice. They imagine that institutions like universities and media forms are neutral social and political instruments that objectively pursue, project, and protect the unvarnished truth.
Like Gramsci, the populist-right recognizes that the ideological superstructure-- what the right broadly and cynically calls “culture” -- is always captured by social forces. For Gramsci, following Marx, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness” (Gramsci roughly quotes this from memory often, throughout The Prison Notebooks). Unlike the populist-right, Gramsci sees the forces shaping ideas as those constructed and maintained by the ruling capitalists.
When “Reaganism” arrived on the scene decades ago, astute left observers noted that “class war had broken out, with only one side fighting,” a commentary on the ineffectual labor movement.
Today, with the Trump-right attacking the universities, public media, school books, publishers, law firms, and other aspects of the superstructure, it can be said that “cultural” war has broken out, with only one side fighting, a commentary on the ineffectual center-left.
Quite obvious, the populist-right has-- crudely appropriating Gramsci-- launched a cultural war on hollow, complacent institutions blind to their own vulnerability.
Lessons for the Left
As Hobsbawm points out, by 1977 Gramsci-thought was becoming as popular and used “as loosely, as Freudian terms did between the wars.” Subsequently, Gramsci quote-mongering became fashionable and academic hipness was often assured by grounding discourse in the more enigmatic writings of Gramsci. “Hegemony” became one of the most used and misused words in the academic lexicon. Since most of Gramsci’s prison writings were necessarily cast in coded language, his thought lent itself to broad interpretation and misinterpretation.
Too often “hegemony” was understood as a writer’s personal interpretation of ruling-class dominance: something richer and more extensive than the simple statement in the Manifesto that “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” Gramsci is explicit in exposing “the hegemony of a social group [‘beyond the dictatorship of coercive apparatus’] over the entire national society exercised through the so-called private organizations such as the church, the trade unions, the schools, etc.” -- not exactly an earth-shaking conclusion for Leninists in his time, but well worth endorsing.
As Hobsbawm points out: “What is new in Gramsci is the observation that even bourgeois hegemony is not automatic but achieved through conscious political action and organization.” That is the lesson that the MAGA right draws, even if Gramsci’s left acolytes miss it.
In addition, hegemony is not merely an analytic tool for understanding capitalist-class rule, but, in Hobsbawm’s words, it is a “struggle to turn the working class into a potential ruling class” that “must be waged before the transition to power, as well as during and after it.” Liberals and social democrats who pay homage to Gramsci’s grasp of the mechanisms of class power, show no interest in Gramsci’s primary interest in establishing competitive, alternative mechanisms: media, entertainment, schools, activities, recreation, governance, and social life. He saw a need for preserving and protecting what was good and useful in existing working-class ethos and culture, while constructing what was even better for the future. Togliatti and the PCI sought to establish that hegemony in Italy’s Red Belt with different degrees of success. Italian Communist--influenced cinema, from Giuseppe De Santis’ 1949 Bitter Rice to Bernardo Bertolucci's 1976 Novecento, represent that attempt made available to international audiences.
Nothing like this conscious collective attempt to nourish and promote working-class cultural life has been attempted on any scale in the US since the demise of the pre-neutered Congress of Industrial Organizations. Even the days of an independent radio station (WCFL, in Chicago) are past.
As Hobsbawm explains, “The basic problem of hegemony, considered strategically, is not how revolutionaries come to power, though that question is very important. It is how they come to be accepted, not only as the politically existing or unavoidable rulers, but as guide and rulers.” Two examples from Hobsbawm are telling: “The Polish communists in 1945 were probably not accepted as a hegemonic force, though they were ready to be one… The German social-democrats in 1918 would probably have been accepted as a hegemonic force, but they did not act as one.”
Marxist-Leninists in many, but not all, capitalist countries are cut off today from working-class life-- they are led by intellectuals, but not organic intellectuals, paraphrasing Gramsci-- with no vital connection to working-class life.
Apart from the Communist Parties, leftists have willfully or from ignorance failed to acknowledge that Gramsci wrote as a Leninist, accepting the critical importance of a vanguard party (The Prince), though he had ideas about party organization that reflected conditions peculiar to Italy in his time (e.g., the Turin movement). Without a party, no sense can be made of an “organic” connection to the working class.
John Womack reminds us that Gramsci’s “original” thoughts are often elaborations on ongoing debates in the Marxist movement. For example, the military-sounding contrast between wars of position and wars of maneuver predate Gramsci’s argument, with the Kautsky-Luxemburg dispute over the strategy of attrition versus the strategy of overthrow. These debates were carried forward into the early Comintern and played an important role in shaping Communist strategy.
It is commonplace on the left to view Gramsci’s idea of a “war of position” as a passive interregnum between the “wars of maneuver” where the working class and its allies can directly challenge the capitalist class from a position of relative strength. Too often this idea of positional warfare has been interpreted to be a period of defensive treading water. In the US, Gramsci’s war of position has often been used as a justification for supporting the Democratic Party in its turf war with the other bourgeois party or as grounds for taking a back seat to other organizations in an unnegotiated united front.
Hobsbawm addresses this misreading of Gramsci:
[T]he failure of revolution in the West might produce a much more dangerous long-term weakening of the forces of progress by means of what he called “passive revolution.” On the one hand, the ruling class might grant certain demands to forestall and ward off revolution, on the other, the revolutionary movement might find itself in practice (though not necessarily in theory) accepting its impotence and might be eroded and politically integrated into the system… In short, the “war of position” had to be systematically thought out as a fighting strategy rather than something to do for revolutionaries when there is no prospect of building barricades. (my emphasis)
Today’s left often neglects the essential questions of place and time in evaluating Gramsci’s thinking. Hobsbawm is careful to point out that Gramsci was writing about specifically Italian conditions and lessons for the Italian left: “Italy in Gramsci’s day had a number of historical peculiarities which encouraged original departures in Marxist thinking.” Hobsbawm discusses six “peculiarities” in great detail.
In addition, it is necessary to note when Gramsci was writing, as well as when Hobsbawm was commenting on Gramsci.
Writing from prison with Italian fascism securing its hold over Italy, Gramsci was understandably motivated to take a critical eye toward the tactics and strategy of the PCI, as much forward looking as retrospectively. Hence, his revisiting the Southern question. It would be ill-advised to generalize his conclusions to every revolutionary project under different conditions.
Further, Hobsbawm writes at a time (1977) when the PCI’s electoral share was growing (34%, up 7%, 1976), when the PCI committed to a Gramsci-inspired historical compromise, and Eurocommunism was on the rise. At the same time, the Portuguese revolution-- met with great expectations by the socialist left-- appeared to be dashing those expectations and heading toward conciliation with the mainstream European community. Hobsbawm, like others favoring the Eurocommunist road, turned to Gramsci for an explanation: “...we see in countries in which there has been a revolutionary overthrow of the old rulers, such as Portugal, in the absence of hegemonic force even revolutions can run into sand.” History was not kind to Eurocommunism and the PCI project.
Perhaps the most cited Gramsci quote is: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
The great blacklisted, expatriate director, Joseph Losey, used the Gramsci quote, to good effect, as the preamble to his film version of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Others have used it to introduce the many crises that have afflicted the capitalist system.
One could argue that we are in just such an interregnum today, with the capitalist system struggling to continue ruling in the “old way.”
Therefore, there may be much that we can learn from Gramsci. But we must remember that he remained a Leninist. If he were alive today, he would be searching for the party capable of giving birth to the new.
Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com
http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/2025/05/ant ... -ours.html
Hobsbawm came to me highly recommended but I read some of his latter work and found it terribly disappointing, in fact I trashed one book so no one else would read it.
It has been forty-eight years since Eric Hobsbawm delivered a paper, Gramsci and Political Theory, before the Gramsci Conference held on March 5-6, 1977 (Reprinted as an article in Marxism Today, July, 1977).
Hobsbawm, contemplatively, reviews the forty years that had transpired since Antonio Gramsci’s death in 1937 after over a decade in a fascist prison. For the first ten years (1937-1947) Gramsci was virtually unknown outside of Italy, where Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti sought to integrate Gramsci-thought into the PCI’s work.
The next decade (1947-1957) found Gramsci’s influence in Italy expanding even beyond Communist circles, establishing him as an important national cultural figure.
It is with the third decade (1957-1967) that Gramsci became familiar to many people outside of Italy, with interest especially strong in the English-speaking world as noted by Hobsbawm. The recent strong critique of Stalin in the world Communist movement and the post-war strength and independence of the Gramsci-influenced PCI played a role in expanding the influence of Gramsci. Though not mentioned by Hobsbawm, the first (1957) limited US publication of Gramsci’s works was a brief (64 page) translation/commentary by Carl Marzani, Man and Society, published by the indomitable, Cold War-defiant publisher Cameron Associates. Marzani’s admiration and view of Gramsci as a model and contrast to Soviet practices is readily apparent.
With the fourth decade (1967-1977), Hobsbawm maintains that “Gramsci has become part of our intellectual universe. His stature as an original Marxist thinker-- in my view the most original such thinker produced in the west since 1917-- is pretty generally admitted… Such typically Gramscian terms as ‘hegemony’ occur in Marxist and even in non-Marxist, discussions of politics and history as casually, and sometimes as loosely, as Freudian terms did between the wars”.
By 1977, Hobsbawm’s thinking was converging with the emergent school of Eurocommunism, perhaps helping to explain his estimation of Gramsci’s importance.
Would Hobsbawm-- if he were alive today-- be surprised that, nearly a half century after he made his address in London, Antonio Gramsci’s most influential admirers were thinkers on the Trump right? Would he be shocked to see an article in The Wall Street Journal entitled Meet MAGA’s Favorite Communist?
The WSJ reports:
Christopher Rufo is perhaps the most potent conservative activist in the U.S… For the past year, Rufo has been working on a book called “How the Regime Rules,” which he describes as a “manifesto for the New Right.” At its core is a surprising inspiration: the Italian Communist thinker Antonio Gramsci, a longtime boogeyman of American conservatives. “Gramsci, in a sense, provides the diagram of how politics works and the relationship between all of the various component parts: intellectuals, institutions, laws, culture, folklore,” said Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Author Kevin T. Dugan notes that many international right-populist leaders pay homage to Gramsci, including Georgia Meloni, Marine Le Pen, and Jair Bolsonaro, while Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, told Tucker Carlson that “he had to wage a culture war every single day” against opponents who “have no problem with getting inside the state and employing Gramsci’s techniques; seducing the artists, seducing the culture, seducing the media or meddling in educational content.”
Other right-wing intellectuals have adopted Gramsci, according to the WSJ:
Gramsci’s name appears in the writing of paleoconservative thinkers Paul Gottfried, Thomas Fleming and Sam Francis, who influenced Pat Buchanan’s Republican presidential bids in the 1990s. One of Gramsci’s biggest proponents in the pre-Trump era was Andrew Breitbart, the founder of Breitbart News, who quoted his axiom that “politics is downstream of culture.”
More recently, far-right writers like Curtis Yarvin, who’s influenced Vice President JD Vance, have talked about how to capture power through a culture war.
Regardless of how selectively MAGA appropriates Gramsci-thought, however differently right-populists interpret Gramsci from his original intent, the mere fact that Gramsci is taken far more seriously by the right than by all but the Marxist left is cause for deep reflection.
The right sees politics as a contest-- even a war-- over how people interpret the world. They borrow this notion from how Gramsci writes about ideology. They intend to conduct that war with fervor.
Conversely, the center-left and even some “Marxists” embrace a market-model that imagines a forum of idea-sellers, who fairly exchange and value ideas. In this fantasy, everyone has an equal voice. They imagine that institutions like universities and media forms are neutral social and political instruments that objectively pursue, project, and protect the unvarnished truth.
Like Gramsci, the populist-right recognizes that the ideological superstructure-- what the right broadly and cynically calls “culture” -- is always captured by social forces. For Gramsci, following Marx, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness” (Gramsci roughly quotes this from memory often, throughout The Prison Notebooks). Unlike the populist-right, Gramsci sees the forces shaping ideas as those constructed and maintained by the ruling capitalists.
When “Reaganism” arrived on the scene decades ago, astute left observers noted that “class war had broken out, with only one side fighting,” a commentary on the ineffectual labor movement.
Today, with the Trump-right attacking the universities, public media, school books, publishers, law firms, and other aspects of the superstructure, it can be said that “cultural” war has broken out, with only one side fighting, a commentary on the ineffectual center-left.
Quite obvious, the populist-right has-- crudely appropriating Gramsci-- launched a cultural war on hollow, complacent institutions blind to their own vulnerability.
Lessons for the Left
As Hobsbawm points out, by 1977 Gramsci-thought was becoming as popular and used “as loosely, as Freudian terms did between the wars.” Subsequently, Gramsci quote-mongering became fashionable and academic hipness was often assured by grounding discourse in the more enigmatic writings of Gramsci. “Hegemony” became one of the most used and misused words in the academic lexicon. Since most of Gramsci’s prison writings were necessarily cast in coded language, his thought lent itself to broad interpretation and misinterpretation.
Too often “hegemony” was understood as a writer’s personal interpretation of ruling-class dominance: something richer and more extensive than the simple statement in the Manifesto that “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” Gramsci is explicit in exposing “the hegemony of a social group [‘beyond the dictatorship of coercive apparatus’] over the entire national society exercised through the so-called private organizations such as the church, the trade unions, the schools, etc.” -- not exactly an earth-shaking conclusion for Leninists in his time, but well worth endorsing.
As Hobsbawm points out: “What is new in Gramsci is the observation that even bourgeois hegemony is not automatic but achieved through conscious political action and organization.” That is the lesson that the MAGA right draws, even if Gramsci’s left acolytes miss it.
In addition, hegemony is not merely an analytic tool for understanding capitalist-class rule, but, in Hobsbawm’s words, it is a “struggle to turn the working class into a potential ruling class” that “must be waged before the transition to power, as well as during and after it.” Liberals and social democrats who pay homage to Gramsci’s grasp of the mechanisms of class power, show no interest in Gramsci’s primary interest in establishing competitive, alternative mechanisms: media, entertainment, schools, activities, recreation, governance, and social life. He saw a need for preserving and protecting what was good and useful in existing working-class ethos and culture, while constructing what was even better for the future. Togliatti and the PCI sought to establish that hegemony in Italy’s Red Belt with different degrees of success. Italian Communist--influenced cinema, from Giuseppe De Santis’ 1949 Bitter Rice to Bernardo Bertolucci's 1976 Novecento, represent that attempt made available to international audiences.
Nothing like this conscious collective attempt to nourish and promote working-class cultural life has been attempted on any scale in the US since the demise of the pre-neutered Congress of Industrial Organizations. Even the days of an independent radio station (WCFL, in Chicago) are past.
As Hobsbawm explains, “The basic problem of hegemony, considered strategically, is not how revolutionaries come to power, though that question is very important. It is how they come to be accepted, not only as the politically existing or unavoidable rulers, but as guide and rulers.” Two examples from Hobsbawm are telling: “The Polish communists in 1945 were probably not accepted as a hegemonic force, though they were ready to be one… The German social-democrats in 1918 would probably have been accepted as a hegemonic force, but they did not act as one.”
Marxist-Leninists in many, but not all, capitalist countries are cut off today from working-class life-- they are led by intellectuals, but not organic intellectuals, paraphrasing Gramsci-- with no vital connection to working-class life.
Apart from the Communist Parties, leftists have willfully or from ignorance failed to acknowledge that Gramsci wrote as a Leninist, accepting the critical importance of a vanguard party (The Prince), though he had ideas about party organization that reflected conditions peculiar to Italy in his time (e.g., the Turin movement). Without a party, no sense can be made of an “organic” connection to the working class.
John Womack reminds us that Gramsci’s “original” thoughts are often elaborations on ongoing debates in the Marxist movement. For example, the military-sounding contrast between wars of position and wars of maneuver predate Gramsci’s argument, with the Kautsky-Luxemburg dispute over the strategy of attrition versus the strategy of overthrow. These debates were carried forward into the early Comintern and played an important role in shaping Communist strategy.
It is commonplace on the left to view Gramsci’s idea of a “war of position” as a passive interregnum between the “wars of maneuver” where the working class and its allies can directly challenge the capitalist class from a position of relative strength. Too often this idea of positional warfare has been interpreted to be a period of defensive treading water. In the US, Gramsci’s war of position has often been used as a justification for supporting the Democratic Party in its turf war with the other bourgeois party or as grounds for taking a back seat to other organizations in an unnegotiated united front.
Hobsbawm addresses this misreading of Gramsci:
[T]he failure of revolution in the West might produce a much more dangerous long-term weakening of the forces of progress by means of what he called “passive revolution.” On the one hand, the ruling class might grant certain demands to forestall and ward off revolution, on the other, the revolutionary movement might find itself in practice (though not necessarily in theory) accepting its impotence and might be eroded and politically integrated into the system… In short, the “war of position” had to be systematically thought out as a fighting strategy rather than something to do for revolutionaries when there is no prospect of building barricades. (my emphasis)
Today’s left often neglects the essential questions of place and time in evaluating Gramsci’s thinking. Hobsbawm is careful to point out that Gramsci was writing about specifically Italian conditions and lessons for the Italian left: “Italy in Gramsci’s day had a number of historical peculiarities which encouraged original departures in Marxist thinking.” Hobsbawm discusses six “peculiarities” in great detail.
In addition, it is necessary to note when Gramsci was writing, as well as when Hobsbawm was commenting on Gramsci.
Writing from prison with Italian fascism securing its hold over Italy, Gramsci was understandably motivated to take a critical eye toward the tactics and strategy of the PCI, as much forward looking as retrospectively. Hence, his revisiting the Southern question. It would be ill-advised to generalize his conclusions to every revolutionary project under different conditions.
Further, Hobsbawm writes at a time (1977) when the PCI’s electoral share was growing (34%, up 7%, 1976), when the PCI committed to a Gramsci-inspired historical compromise, and Eurocommunism was on the rise. At the same time, the Portuguese revolution-- met with great expectations by the socialist left-- appeared to be dashing those expectations and heading toward conciliation with the mainstream European community. Hobsbawm, like others favoring the Eurocommunist road, turned to Gramsci for an explanation: “...we see in countries in which there has been a revolutionary overthrow of the old rulers, such as Portugal, in the absence of hegemonic force even revolutions can run into sand.” History was not kind to Eurocommunism and the PCI project.
Perhaps the most cited Gramsci quote is: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
The great blacklisted, expatriate director, Joseph Losey, used the Gramsci quote, to good effect, as the preamble to his film version of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Others have used it to introduce the many crises that have afflicted the capitalist system.
One could argue that we are in just such an interregnum today, with the capitalist system struggling to continue ruling in the “old way.”
Therefore, there may be much that we can learn from Gramsci. But we must remember that he remained a Leninist. If he were alive today, he would be searching for the party capable of giving birth to the new.
Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com
http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/2025/05/ant ... -ours.html
Hobsbawm came to me highly recommended but I read some of his latter work and found it terribly disappointing, in fact I trashed one book so no one else would read it.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."