Stalin in Ukraine: A Critical Examination of the Holodomor

By Anton

Republished from the author’s blog.

In this piece, I will examine the situation in the Soviet Union, particularly in Ukraine, 1932–1933, of what is commonly referred to as “Holodomor”.

“Holodomor” refers to the claim of an “intentional man-made famine-genocide in Ukraine caused by Communist collectivization of the Soviet Union” or often times more specifically, of Stalin himself.

To begin, I will start with its origins. Its origins are widely credited to a Welsh man named Gareth Jones. Who was he? Jones before arriving in the Soviet Union in March of 1933, he was in nazi Germany. In an article entitled, “WITH HITLER ACROSS GERMANY” which was published on February 23rd of 1933, he outlines his experience flying on Hitler’s private plane along with other high ranking nazi officials such as Goebbels. In the piece he says of the nazi leaders, “There is nothing hard and Prussian about my fellow-passengers. They could not be more friendly and polite, even if I were a red-hot nazi myself.” Continuing, after fawning over the nazis, he says regarding Hitler: “There are two Hitlers — the natural boyish Hitler, and the Hitler who is inspired by tremendous national force, a great Hitler. It is the second Hitler who has stirred Germany to an awakening.” In a following article by Jones, he states regarding Goebbels that “He has a remarkably appealing personality, with a sense of humour and a keen brain. One feels at home with him immediately, for he is amusing and likeable.”

After leaving nazi Germany, he arrived in the Soviet Union. After arriving, Gareth Jones reported that “millions are dying of hunger”. In the article he gives multiple anecdotes of unidentified and nameless persons — devoid of any information of any backgrounds, of their class interests, etc — making claims such as “we are waiting for death”, while presenting the entirety of not only Ukraine but the entire Soviet Union, as a monolith.

Following this, on the 13th of April of 1933, Jones expands in this article his claim regarding the cause of the situation. He states “the main reason for the catastrophe in Russian agriculture is the Soviet policy of collectivisation.”

Today, by the “holodomor-genocide” campaigners, collectivization is pushed as being the sole cause of the situation. Despite this, Gareth Jones of all people, even admitted the following factors played a role: natural droughts in some areas, landowning kulaks who he says their “incentive to work disappeared”, “massacre of cattle by peasants not wishing to sacrifice their property for nothing to the collective farm”, and that “prices have dropped most in precisely those products, wheat, timber, oil, butter, & co., which the Soviet Union exports, and least in those products, such as machinery, which the Soviet Union imports”.

In the previously attached article from April 13th of 1933, Jones also predicted that the next harvest will likely be worse and stated, “The outlook for the next harvest is, therefore, black. It is dangerous to make any prophecy, for the miracle of perfect climatic conditions can always make good a part of the unfavourable factors.”

Jones placed the blame mainly on the Soviet policies of collectivization, but still admitted — unlike the “holodomor-genocide” campaigners of today — the previously stated factors. Today if you mention these factors, you are demonized by certain people as being just as bad as the people who deny the holocaust, that you are a genocide denier equal to a holocaust denier.

Here we have the following factors by Jones, aside from collectivization:

1. Drought

2. Exporting grain & co. for industry machinery

3. “Disincentives” among ex-landowners

4. Slaughter of cattle by disgruntled ex-landowners

Before moving forward, it is important to take into account the location and the era of which this situation had occurred. For centuries prior, the entire region had regularly struggled against famines and droughts, including in Ukraine. Due to the economic backwardness of the feudal era, the entire region was largely ill-prepared to overcome these situations. As Jones mentioned, the Soviet Union was importing machinery. This was true. The reason for this was that it was that industrialization, as part of the first five-year plan, was a key to improving the agricultural system and overcoming the famines which had been inherited from the pre-revolutionary era. In a sense, the decision was as follows: “Do not industrialize, save some food, and allow the famines to continue anyway, or do industrialize, sell some food, and try to overcome the famines as quickly as possible”.

According to anti-Communist Nicholas V. Riasanovsky in “A History of Russia”, he states that the Soviet Union went from being the 5th in terms of industrial power, to second, only behind the United States, within the span of the first five-year plan. This bares out in many ways that industrial production was rapidly expanding. The first of which is that after industrialization and the end of the second world war, the famines which had plagued the regions for centuries, had stopped. They did not worsen, or even continue. It is also made clear through the fact that the industry of the Soviet Union was capable of repelling nazi Germany to the point of pushing the Germans not only out of Moscow, but all the way back to Berlin and the Reichstag. Finally, it is also shown by official statistical data of the Soviet Union. Granted that many will claim statistics from the Soviet Union cannot be trusted at all or are entirely fabricated, the fact still remains that even the western capitalist governments such as the United Kingdom will begrudgingly admit that during the era “almost all heavy industries [in the Soviet Union] enjoyed substantial increases in production”.

From “Fraud, Famine and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard” by Douglas Tottle

Regarding the issue of kulaks having no “incentives” to work, Isaac Mazepa, a hardline nationalist who had nothing but hatred of the Soviet Union & Communism, admitted the same as Gareth. He notes in the excerpt that kulaks and nationalists had first began murdering collective farm workers and Communist officials then eventually adopted a “passive” form of resistance. He openly admits that kulaks and anti-Communists had intentionally and knowingly left ‘whole tracts unsown’ and left “20, 40, and even 50 per cent” of crops to rot in the fields. To reiterate, this is not being claimed by a Soviet government official or a Communist, but by a leader of the Ukrainian nationalists and anti-Communists.

The Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance has stated that “Starting in February 1933, in order to ensure the spring sowing campaign, assistance began to arrive in Ukrainian regions. It was designated for local party leaders and activists as well as for those who worked at the collective farms.” It is in this that we begin to realize the class character of the situation and understand a little more of the truth of the situation. Above, Jones noted that the ex-landowning class refused to work in collectives saying they had ‘no incentive’, then we have Mazepa stating that many refused to sow land and harvest grain in the collectives out of spite, then the Institute claims that the aid was given to what largely amounted to those who worked. In essence, the picture painted by these admissions is exactly what Louis Fischer had stated when he was in Ukraine in 1932, as shown below.

From “Fraud, Famine and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard” by Douglas Tottle

This begins to paint a picture of exactly who, largely but not exclusively, starved and suffered. Though “the kulaks starved themselves” is regarded as “Stalinist propaganda”, that is effectively something that the “holodomor-genocide” campaign itself has inadvertently through this admitted to be true.

According to the infamous anti-Communist Robert Conquest, he reaffirms that kulaks did in fact slaughter their own cattle out of spite.

“The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine” by Robert Conquest

Though some will undoubtedly claim that since these statistics come from the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934 that it must be fake, despite Conquest even saying that the numbers are “supposedly lower than the reality”, it is shown to be evident due to the fact that Soviet documents report that the Soviet Union had to and did import cattle to attempt to replace some of that what the kulaks destroyed.

To summarize this far, it has been well-documented, even among anti-Communists of the early “holodomor-genocide” campaign, that in fact kulaks did refuse to work and actively acted to harm the production of the harvest, kulaks did slaughter their cattle out of spite for the collective farms, natural drought did impact the harvest’s quantity, and industrialization was crucial to stop the famines.

According to Gareth Jones, collectivization was supposedly the main reason for the situation of 1932–1933 and he said that famines would likely continue due to it. By the end of the year of 1931, according to official statistics, the percentage of farms that were collectivized was only at 52.7%. By the end of the year of 1933, the percentage of farms that had been collectivized rose to 65.6%. Had collectivization as a policy, in and of itself, been responsible for the situation, then it would only be inevitable that the situation would not only continue, but intensify and worsen. But it did not. Given that by the end of year of 1937 some 93% of farms had been collectivized, it would only make sense that if the situation from 1932–1933 had been caused by collectivization with only 52.7% of farms being collectives that in 1938 there would be a situation much, much, much worse and intense. But it wasn’t. Unfortunately, Jones was unable to witness this fact to prove his theory wrong for himself as he had passed away in 1935.

In addition, and despite some people (i.e., Norman Naimark) saying “The Soviet Union made no efforts to provide relief”, reports show that the Central Soviet Authorities sent hundreds of thousands of tonnes of food aid to Ukraine. In early February of 1933, Odessa and Dnepropetrovsk regions each received 3,300 tonnes of food aid. By the end of February, the Dnipropetrovsk region received 20,000 tonnes of food aid, Odessa received around 13,000 tonnes, and Kharkiv received almost 5,000 tonnes. Reports document that from February to June in the year of 1933, over 500,000 tonnes of food aid was sent to Ukraine.

According to archived documents, Joseph Stalin himself, along with Molotov, personally took it upon themselves to scold Joseph Vareikis, First Secretary of the Voronezh Regional Committee of the CPSU, on March 31st of 1933 for his objection to sending 26,000 pounds of potatoes to the Donbass region of Ukraine. These behaviors including, but not limited to, sending food aid and at that personally intervening to ensure food aid is being given, is fairly odd or strange behavior for, as the “holodomor-genocide” campaigners would say, a “genocidal maniac who wanted to kill Ukrainians”. Truly, there was no reason for Stalin to go as far as personally intervening in that situation as he did to ensure food aid was sent to Ukraine if he was genuinely trying to create a famine to crush Ukraine.

Regarding the issue of “intent”, on March 16th of 1932 the Politburo stated that “The Political Bureau believes that shortage of seed grain in Ukraine is many times worse than what was described in comrade Kosior’s telegram; therefore, the Political Bureau recommends the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine to take all measures within its reach to prevent the threat of failing to sow in Ukraine.”

This is one piece of conflicting evidence among many that was presented to Stalin and others of the Central Soviet Authorities. Conflicting reports of whether or not there was an issue, and if so to what degree or totality, by regional members and others in Ukraine casts doubt on the claim that Stalin was aware of the situation or that he was orchestrating it. Though the Central Soviet Authorities and Stalin were suspicious of it being worse than some had claimed, they still pushed for them to be careful and cautious.

Following that, Stalin wrote on the 2nd of July of 1932 to Lazar Kaganovich and to Molotov regarding Kosior and Vlas Chubar stating “Give the most serious attention to the Ukraine. Chubar’s corruptness and opportunistic essence and Kosior’s rotten diplomacy…and criminally frivolous attitude toward his job will eventually ruin Ukraine. These comrades are not up to the challenge of leading the Ukraine today.” By this point, it is without a doubt that Stalin is aware of the situation and automatically began to critically evaluate the situation and isolate the problems.

Shortly after this, Stalin sent another letter to Kaganovich on July 17th and mentions to Mr. Lazar that “These shortcomings are a great economic (and political!) danger to us”. The claim that this situation had been an intentional and man-made situation on behalf of Stalin & co. does not square up with this. For if it was, Stalin would not be concerned of these “shortcomings” and would certainly not be viewing them as ‘dangerous’ to them.

It is at this point that it is also worth noting the distinction between squarely blaming Communism & collectivization for the situation and between identifying elements or persons within the government as being responsible in part for the situation, in the way that Stalin identified specifically Kosior and Chubar and specific failures produced by them that in part led to this situation being able to develop under their watch.

By August 1st of 1932, Stalin wrote, and quite poignantly & savagely, regarding Kosior that “Instead of leading the raions, Kosior keeps maneuvering between the directives of the CC CPSU and the demands of the raikoms — and now he has maneuvered himself into a total mess”. Stalin continues, ripping into Chubar, stating that “Chubar is no leader. Things are bad with the GPU […] Unless we begin to straighten out the situation in Ukraine, we may well lose Ukraine.”

At this point, it becomes beyond evident that Stalin is now aware of the situation, is actively concerned about the situation and worried, is actively identifying the problems that have allowed this situation to unfold as it did, and began taking steps to begin to rectify the situation.

The situation 1932–1933 being viewed as a “genocide to crush Ukrainian nationalist resistance” is further undercut by the fact that the situation encompassed the entire union in varying levels and degrees. Nevertheless of the varying intensities, it included but was not limited to, Siberia, the Volga, the Kazakh ASSR, etc. With that being said, it was then not a man-made famine from the start, as some pretend, to “crush Ukraine” nor was it manipulated and weaponized to do the same. We’ve seen the true cause of the situation, that the food aid sent from other regions less impacted to more impacted regions such as Ukraine, and that the Georgian leader Stalin, the “evil Russian chauvinist who wanted to crush Ukraine”, personally intervened to make sure food aid was being sent when a regional official within the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic objected to sending aid to Ukrainians in Donbass.

The situation in 1932–1933 did lead to suffering and some death. But the level of which has been grossly inflated and exaggerated, disrespecting the people who actually did suffer and perish — it belittles the truth of the situation. The estimated range of the “holodomor-genocide” campaigners ranges from 3 million to as high as 12 million, some even higher, like Conquest alleging 14 million. Regarding these tolls, “starved to death” is not always accurate or truthful — intentionally or not. At the same time, there was a record outbreak of over a million cases of typhus and typhoid fever, a dramatic spike from the prior years and higher than in the rest of the Soviet Union. This resulted in a number of people dying due to the diseases, but not from hunger. However among certain historians, it is not differentiated, or even often noted — intentionally or not. That in fact many of the people who “starved to death” were not all people who did.

In 2010, in the same ruling that the Court of Appeals of Kiev decided to qualify the situation as a ‘genocide against Ukraine, to crush Ukraine’, they also made some noteworthy admissions. In it they claimed that 10,063,000 people had “died”. However, their qualification for a “death” is rather unusual. They note that 6,122,000 of the “deaths” are unborn people. Not even unborn babies that did not make it, but a person never born, a fetus never even conceived. Approximately 60% of the “deaths” were not even people that were even born! This is unimaginably childish logic, equivalent to saying one person being murdered is actually 10 people being murdered because that one person being murdered may have had kids and they may have had kids too, etc. According with the ruling, that leaves slightly under 4,000,000 people they claim were actually alive. Of the usual death toll claimed by the campaigners, the Ukrainian court’s is only a third. Meanwhile the Soviet archives estimate that around 1,800,000 people died.

The death toll alleged by the Ukrainian court was approximately 4,000,000 and the Soviet archives estimated 1,800,000 deaths during this period, which includes from the typhus outbreak, typhoid fever, etc. The number of deaths during this period being so significantly lower than what today’s “holodomor-genocide” campaigners claim may be relevant to the fact that Jones himself had admitted on May 13th of 1933 that he never actually saw any dead people. Jones stated that “Mr. Duranty says that I saw in the villages no dead human beings nor animals. That is true…” continuing, he implies that the reason he didn’t see anybody who had died during his entire trip that all of the people who had died were buried before he had the chance to witness a single person who had died.

For whatever reasons, since the 1930’s, and even to this day, the “holodomor-genocide” campaigners repeatedly and constantly use photos from regions and eras which are not 1932–1933 Ukraine. Beyond simply ordinary people who falsely attribute a photo, whether it is intentional or not, it is also “journalists” and other so-called “experts” such as Anne Applebaum.

Anne Applebaum fraudulently using a photo of Russian children in the 1920’s as an example of “holodomor” in Ukraine in an article she wrote for the British tabloid called “The Times”

Unfortunately, and for some reason, this is a reoccurrence throughout the campaign.

Anne Reid fraudulently using a photo of Russian children in the 1920’s as an example of “holodomor” in an article she wrote for the American rag “The Wall Street Journal”

Above all, the misusing of photos is truly horrific and reckless. In the carelessness, or even in cases of intentional deceitfulness, the “holodomor-genocide” campaign citing photos from the Volga in the 1920’s or using photos from other famines disrespects the people who had actually perished or suffered in the photos we see.

From the anti-Communist “Black Book of Communism” where it openly admits that Ukrainian nationalists conducted pogroms and sought to create an ethno-state and purge ethnic minorities

Before moving forward, we must address what and who the “Ukrainian nationalists” were, that the Central Soviet Authorities and Stalin wanted to allegedly “genocide”. One major manifestation of Ukrainian nationalism existed in form of the fascistic Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) — which eventually extended itself into the “Ukrainian Insurgent Army”, of which both collaborated with nazi Germany and actively participated in atrocities of the holocaust such as the massacre of Babi Yar. Before and during the Soviet revolution, before the OUN was formed, the Ukrainian nationalists perpetuated some of the most horrific pogroms of the early 20th century.

Website of the oun-upa.national.org.ua with bios of various leading members. In this bio, it states that Mykhailo Kolodzinsky was trained in fascist Italy — in 1932 through 1933 — along with the fascist Croatian Ustaše. This was in fact at the will of the National Executive of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.

The Ukrainian nationalists had connections and ties to among other fascist organizations and leaders, the Italian fascist regime.

From the book “Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist: Fascism, Genocide, and Cult” by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe

The exact nature, the characteristic of what this rabid nationalism entails is fairly easy to understand — a similar variant of the nationalism by the nazi Germans.

From the book “Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist: Fascism, Genocide, and Cult” by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe

This becomes much more clear and visible after 1932–1933 in which the Ukrainian nationalists are emboldened by the rise of Hitler in 1933 and become more violent and destructive. As a matter of fact, through analyzing “Ukrainian nationalism” and what ideology came with it (fascism, pursuing an ethno-state, etc) and the acts of the Ukrainian nationalists themselves (i.e., violent pogroms against ethnic minorities, aiding nazi Germany in committing crimes in the holocaust, etc) further bares out the truth of what “Ukrainian nationalism” exactly entails and means and what the people who bore that identity did and believed in.

Prominent Ukrainian nationalist, Eugene Onatskyi, regarding what “Ukrainian nationalism” actually means. From “Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist : Fascism, Genocide, and Cult” By Grzegorz Rossolinsk

Though the disdain for this nationalist movement by the Soviet authorities is brought up by “holodomor-genocide” campaigners, it is presented as if it was only the Ukrainian nationalists who received disdain. In fact, all sectarian ethnic nationalisms were treated in kind. German nazi collaborator Russian nationalist General Vlasov, in a similar sense to the Ukrainian nationalists, viewed Stalin and in fact Communism as being evil and the greatest threat to “his people”. In the civil war, the White Armies were largely a rabid Russian nationalist movement that the Red Army obliterated. When the White Armies failed, younger nationalists turned to German-style fascism; in Konstantin Rodzaevsky and the Russian Fascist Party were extremely nationalistic. Rodzaevsky was executed in August of 1946 after he voluntarily handed himself over to Soviet authorities after he had previously “fled” to land occupied by imperial Japan. Stalin, who was Georgian, also maintained an equal hostility to the rabid Georgian nationalist movement. It was Georgian Stalin who led the Soviet forces against the Georgian nationalist “August uprising” in 1924 and it was under Stalin that the rabid Georgian nationalist leaders were executed for their nationalistic treason.

The Black Book of Communism (page 231) counts executed and gulaged Russian nationalist nazi collaborators as ‘victims of Communism’

The idea that Stalin was uniquely hostile to bourgeois Ukrainian nationalism becomes less and less plausible as you examine Stalin’s hostility to the rest of the sectarian bourgeois nationalist movements, including the Georgian bourgeois nationalist movement.

Regarding the issue of “genocide”, we must first define it. According to the Genocide Convention of the U.N., it states “genocide” as being “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. In order for something to be qualified as a “genocide”, it must be that there was intent to kill or otherwise destroy said groups. That is more like the European colonialists invading the Americas and telling the Native people, such as through the Spanish requirement of 1513, that they must “submit, or we will kill everybody”, as they did. As noted above, the situation had been created through various factors, none of which were intentional by means of the Soviet Union, but of which a couple included intentional acts by the Ukrainian landowning class & Ukrainian nationalists — again, even admitted by Jones himself. It’s also been established that the Central Soviet Authorities had sent massive amounts of food aid to Ukraine, and that Joseph Stalin himself intervened against regional authorities of the Russian region in order to ensure food was taken from Russians and being given to Ukrainians.

The issue of “genocide” specifically, as a qualifying term, the vast majority of countries on this planet have rejected it. Of the nearly 200 countries on this planet, the vast majority reject the “holodomor-genocide” claim. Of the ones that do, let’s examine a few of them briefly. You have the U.S. which genocided millions of Native peoples in the Americas, Australia which genocided hundreds of thousands of Native peoples, Belgium which committed a genocide in the “Congo Free State”, Canada which genocided Native people, Israel which is currently genociding Palestinians, etc. Regardless, even with these genocidal countries accepting the “holodomor-genocide” campaign, it remains that the vast majority of the countries of the planet do not.

Upon analyzing and breaking down the “holodomor-genocide” campaign’s theory and the implications, it becomes much more visible as a violent and dangerous campaign. The campaign claims that Stalin fighting bourgeois-minded Ukrainian nationalism was tantamount to genocide. However, when you break down this logic and apply it elsewhere, it becomes more visible as the foolish logic that it is. If Stalin destroying rabid bourgeois nationalism that sought to create an ethno-state in Ukraine, which was part of the Ukrainian society, was “genocide”, then what would that mean for the crushing of bourgeois German nazi nationalism, when that was part of German society and resulted “in part” the destruction of some Germans? This logic would then also foolishly and wrongly interpret, for instance, the Haitian revolution as “white genocide” since it targeted and destroyed the French colonialists. And so forth. The notion that any of these can be considered “genocide” is far from being logical or sensible.

The Central Soviet Authorities had stated on December 14th of 1932 that Ukrainization policy had inadvertently given legal cover to rabid bourgeois nationalist elements to organize anti-Soviet agitation, treason. In the decree which is cited by the campaigners as proof of a secret conspiracy to crush Ukraine, if you actually read it, it states that they recommend them “expel petliurites” (the rabid Ukrainian nationalists who had conducted pogroms under Symon Petliura) and others, and for them to carefully supervise the implementation of Ukrainization as to not embolden the rabid elements. It also states the following: “…instead of the correct Bolshevik implementation of nationality policy, “ukrainization” was carried out mechanically in a number of raions of Ukraine, failing to take into consideration the peculiarities of every raion and without the meticulous selection of Bolshevik cadres. This made it easier for bourgeois nationalist elements, petliurites and others to create their legal facades and counterrevolutionary cells and organizations.”

The Black Book of Communism openly portraying the OUN/UPA terrorists who participated in murdering Jews with the nazis such as in Babi Yar, where they set up the syrets concentration camp as heroic victims who fought against the “Communists and Jews”

This was evidently true as the fascist OUN had formed and began to rise under this policy which bourgeois-minded Ukrainian nationalists had exploited. These elements of Ukrainian society, the bourgeois-nationalist elements, that eventually collaborated with nazi Germany and sought to create an ethno-state had themselves proven in retrospect that Stalin was correct to be critical of them and their nationalist movement. They were not going to be happy until an ethno-state was created. This is the so-called “national liberation” movement of the Ukrainian nationalists which Stalin allegedly crushed, though the Ukrainian nationalists and the OUN persisted. This further demonstrates, in retrospect, that the so-called “national liberation” of the rabid Ukrainian nationalists who are portrayed as victims of “Stalinist repression” are less like a legitimate national liberation movement such as that of the Haitian national liberation and more like the bourgeois-nationalist nazi German movement which sought a distorted and truly fucked concept of “national liberation”, to create an ethno-state and remove ethnic minorities.

The “holodomor-genocide” claim of today is even more detached from reality than the campaigners of decades prior. The ethnic interpretation of the situation 1932–1933, and especially of the magnitude they claim and in claiming that it was an intentional genocide to crush Ukrainians, is far from the truth. The conception that a famine was created as a weapon to “stop Ukrainian national liberation”, above all, makes the assertion that the rabid Ukrainian nationalists of the OUN & co. were in fact “liberators”, good people, not evil like the German nazis. OUN-B leader Yaroslav Stetsko stated in July of 1941 that he supports “the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine”.

The rehabilitation of the rabid Ukrainian nationalists such as the OUN & UPA is an inevitable consequence and implication of accepting the “holodomor-genocide” claim. This rehabilitation should be rejected, forcefully. The perception of the Ukrainian nationalists as being “heroes” rather than, as they actually were, pogromists and nazi collaborators who committed some of the most horrific crimes in the holocaust and sought to create an ethno-state, is highly objectionable. The “holodomor-genocide” claim, de facto, asserts that these people are “victims”. It’s at this moment that we begin to see exactly why the comparison between the “holodomor-genocide” and the holocaust is so incredibly insidious. The holocaust was the large-scale systematic killing of ethnic minorities and other groups of peoples, especially Jewish people, by the German nazis and their collaborators, of which included the Ukrainian nationalist movement. Meanwhile the “holodomor-genocide” campaign claims that the Ukrainian nationalists who perpetuated pogroms before the 1930’s and the crimes of the holocaust in the 1940’s are the same as their victims who they massacred in the holocaust.

In summary, we have established the following facts regarding the situation 1932–1933:

1. Natural drought played a role in creating the situation

2. Ex-landowning kulaks and Ukrainian nationalists did in fact refuse to work, murder collective workers, slaughter their own cattle, and otherwise actively sabotage the sowing and harvesting campaigns

3. Importing industrial machinery was the reason for exporting amounts of food in order to increase production as fast as possible

4. The cycle of famines which had existed for centuries prior and inherited by the Soviet authorities ended after the industrialization and collectivization policies had been fully implemented and the nazi invasion had ended

5. Under Stalin, the Ukrainization policy went into effect for over a decade before being changed due to rabid bourgeois Ukrainian nationalist elements exploiting it for treasonous activities

6. Stalin did not harbor any unique hostility to the Ukrainian nationalists anymore than he did the Russian nationalists who he fought in the civil war or even the Georgian nationalists who he fought in the August uprising

7. The Ukrainian nationalist movement in question was heavily tied to anti-semitism & fascistic beliefs before the 1930’s and exposed themselves in their true goals by aligning with nazi Germany in their hopes to create an ethno-state

8. Central Soviet Authorities sent hundreds of thousands of tonnes of food to the Ukrainians from other regions and Stalin himself personally intervened to scold a regional Russian official objecting to sending aid and made him send food

9. The situation of hunger encompassed the entire union to varying degrees, including impacting ethnic Russians

10. The situation in Ukraine during 1932–1933 was not intentional or man-made by Joseph Stalin or the Central Soviet Authorities

11. The overwhelming and vast majority of countries on this planet do not recognize this situation as being a “genocide”

The idea of “holodomor” as an intentional or man-made genocide which specifically targeted Ukrainians and was used to crush Ukrainian nationalists fails on multiple fronts. Due to the nature of this perspective, I am without a doubt positive that words will be placed in my mouth alluding to me claiming it was utopian or something of that nature, but I would just like to categorically say that during this period some people did die. Though we’ve established that a large portion of the people who did die were people from the ex-landowning class who refused to work or actively pursued actions to sabotage the harvest and lessen the production of food, which was unfortunately largely successful, as it played a major role in creating this situation, that did result in some innocent people suffering and dying. In my view, the situation of 1932–1933 was tragic, but the false claims, notions, and the ensuing logic of the “holodomor-genocide” campaign should be vehemently rejected.

Paulo Freire’s Centennial: Political Pedagogy for Revolutionary Organizations

By Derek Ford

Republished from Liberation School.

All revolutionary processes are educational. From organizing meetings and study groups to writing protest speeches and propaganda before the revolutionary moment to creating new revolutionary educational and cultural institutions and training teachers and specialists after the seizure of power, revolution is educational through and through. Yet exactly what kind of educational operations does revolution entail, and how can we understand and practice them?

It is precisely these questions that Paulo Freire addressed in his classic work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

One hundred years after his birth in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco, Freire’s name is widely recognized and, relatively speaking, so too is his canonical text. Yet the book is referenced or discussed more than it is deeply engaged. This is particularly evident when Freire’s work is severed from its revolutionary Marxist orientation [1].

While it’s often taken as an abstract guide-book for how to teach, Pedagogy of the Oppressed is really a theoretical reflection on his own experiences teaching peasants how to read and write, a theory he extends to revolutionary movements, leadership, and organization. After spending 70 days in prison for “treachery” [teaching poor peasants to read and write], he was exiled from Brazil following the military junta in 1964. He eventually settled in Chile, which is where he wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The book has been targeted by the right wing in the U.S. (it is currently banned from public schools in Arizona). It addresses the educational components of revolutionary movements and, as such, it is littered with references to Marx, Lenin, Fanon, and others. Specifically, the book is concerned with how the revolutionary leadership pushes the struggle forward, or how it teaches and learns from the masses in struggle.

The pedagogies of oppression and liberation

The pedagogy of the oppressed has two stages. During the first stage, “the oppressed unveil the world of oppression and through praxis commit themselves to its transformation.” During the second stage, which is after the world of oppression has been transformed, “this pedagogy ceases to belong to the oppressed and becomes a pedagogy of all people in the process of permanent liberation” [2].

The first stage addresses how the oppressed view and relate to the world. It begins by acknowledging that the oppressed possess both an oppressed consciousness and an oppressor consciousness. The oppressor consciousness is the enemy that needs to be liquidated: “The oppressor consciousness tends to transform everything surrounding it into an object of its domination. The earth, property, production, the creations of people, people themselves, time—everything is reduced to the status of objects at its disposal” [3].

This is what capitalism does: it takes everything and makes it into private property, including our ability to labor. This has a profound impact on the world, even instilling the oppressor consciousness in the oppressed. Thus, we have to distinguish an oppressor consciousness from the oppressed person, and we have to transform that consciousness.

The way that we engage in that transformation is absolutely crucial, and this is where the question of pedagogy comes into play. Freire calls the traditional form of pedagogy “banking pedagogy.” In banking pedagogy, the teacher is the one who possesses knowledge and the students are empty containers in which the teacher must deposit knowledge. The more the teacher fills the receptacle, the better teacher she is. The content remains abstract to the student, disconnected from the world, and external to the student’s life. Banking pedagogy—which is what most of us in the U.S. experience—assumes that the oppressed are ignorant and naïve. Further, it treats the oppressed as objects in the same way that capitalism does.

For Freire, education must be rooted in the daily lives and experiences of students, who are subjects rather than objects. The correct educational method for revolutionaries is dialogue, which means something very specific. To truly engage in dialogue means becoming partners with the people. In this situation, “the teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow” [4]. This process is referred to as conscientização, or coming-to-critical-consciousness.

A decisive element to the location and direction of conscientização is the pedagogical relationship. This relates to Freire’s critique of the banking model of education and to his reconception of the teacher-student relationship. The dialogic model is a relationship between teacher and student, one which is more—but, and this is absolutely crucial, not completely—horizontal. In this schema, “people teach each other, mediated by the world, by the cognizable objects which in banking education are “owned” by the teacher [5]. The teacher does not relinquish authority or power, as if that was even possible. Instead, the teacher takes responsibility for producing new critical knowledge of reality with the student.

While the pedagogical relationship and process are important parts of Freire’s thought, they have tended to be isolated from Freire’s ideological commitments and have come to stand in for Freire’s entire work. As a graduate student in a fairly critical school of education, I was only assigned the first two chapters of the book, and I’m convinced this is common practice. These chapters are rich; they’re where he denounces banking pedagogy and formulates dialogical pedagogy in response. When we stop here, however, we don’t discover the reason why he bothered writing the book in the first place.

By selectively reading the book, Freire’s dialogic pedagogy is substituted wholesale for his broader conceptual and political work, his vocabularies and theories that generated new understandings of education and revolution. There is nothing inherent in dialogue or dialogic pedagogy that necessarily leads to progressive, critical understandings. For this to happen the content must be placed in a particular context by a teacher. Peter McLaren, one of the few U.S. educational theorists to insist on Freire’s revolutionary commitments (and a comrade of Freire’s), goes so far as to say that “political choices and ideological paths chosen by teachers are the fundamental stuff of Freirean pedagogy” [6]. We can’t divorce the methodology from the ideology, the theory from the method, or the critical from the pedagogy in Freire’s work.

The dangerous fourth chapter

Freire begins the last chapter of Pedagogy of the Oppressed with “Lenin’s famous statement: ‘Without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement,’” which Freire rewords to insist that revolutions are achieved neither by verbalism nor by activism “but rather with praxis, that is, with reflection and action directed at the structures to be transformed” [7]. It would be just as wrong to claim that reflecting on and helping name oppression is enough for revolution as to claim that activism is enough for revolution. The task of revolutionaries is to engage with our class and our people in true, authentic dialogue, reflection, and action. If we have dialogue and reflection without action, then we are little more than armchair revolutionaries. On the other hand, if we have only action without dialogue and reflection, we have mere activism.

Reflection and action are not divisions of labor between revolutionary leaders and the people, whereby the leaders think and direct and the people are only able to act on their orders. “Revolutionary leaders,” he writes, “do bear the responsibility for coordination and, at times, direction—but leaders who deny praxis to the oppressed thereby invalidate their own praxis” [8]. People and revolutionary leaders act together, building and acting in unity before, during, and after the revolution.

The prerequisite for such leadership is the rejection of the “myth of the ignorance of the people” [9]. Freire acknowledges that revolutionary leaders, “due to their revolutionary consciousness,” have “a level of revolutionary knowledge different from the level of empirical knowledge held by the people” [10].

The act of dialogue unites lived experience with revolutionary theory so that people understand what causes their lived experience to be as it is. This is a restatement of Lenin’s conviction that spontaneous knowledge of exploitation and oppression must be transformed through the Party into revolutionary consciousness of the relationship of our experience to the relationship of broader social, economic, and political forces at differing scales: within the factory, the city, the state, and the world.

This is a Marxist philosophy of education in that it rests on the presumption of competence. We can see it, for example, when Engels writes that he and Marx “cannot co-operate with men who say openly that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves, and must first be emancipated from above by philanthropic members of the upper and lower middle classes” [11]. We can also see it in What is to be Done? as Lenin argues against economist Marxists, who hold that the working class develops its own revolutionary consciousness spontaneously as a result of daily struggles with the bosses. Lenin argued that spontaneity was only consciousness “in an embryonic form,” and that something more was needed. Spontaneity is necessary but is ultimately limited to “what is ‘at the present time’” [12]. In other words, spontaneity by itself isn’t able to look beyond isolated daily struggles and forward to a new society. Lenin called the spontaneously generated mindset “trade union consciousness.”

Lenin believed that workers were capable of more than trade union consciousness. He actually derided those who insisted on appealing to the “average worker:” “You gentlemen, who are so much concerned about the ‘average worker,’ as a matter of fact, rather insult the workers by your desire to talk down to them when discussing labor politics and labor organization” (p. 153). He wrote that organizers had actually held workers “back by our silly speeches about what ‘can be understood’ by the masses of the workers” [13]. The economist organizers treated workers as objects rather than subjects. They didn’t believe in the people or their potential.

Freire actually calls on Lenin when he insists revolutionary leadership is open and trusting of the people. “As Lenin pointed out,” he writes, “the more a revolution requires theory, the more its leaders must be with the people in order to stand against the power of oppression” [14]. This isn’t a naïve acquiesce but a belief in the power of the masses to become not only agents of revolutionary movements but creators of revolutionary theory through the Party. As Lenin also observed, that the Party creates a particular group of theoreticians: In the Party “all distinctions as between workers and intellectuals… must be obliterated” [15].

There is no abstract celebration of “horizontalism” within such a pedagogy. The form of the revolution and its leadership isn’t accorded abstractly; it can be more horizontal or more vertical and triangular, depending on the circumstances. Here, Freire turns to Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution to argue that their historical conditions compelled them to revolt without building widely with the people. Yet the leadership pursued this task immediately after taking power through organization, specifically the party. Tyson Lewis is one of the few to observe that “Freire himself clearly saw his pedagogy as a tool to be used within revolutionary organization to mediate the various relationships between the oppressed and the leaders of resistance” [16]. This is why Freire looked so favorably upon Amílcar Cabral [17].

Uniting politics and pedagogy for revolution

Revolutionary organizers, therefore, are defined not just by the revolutionary ideals they hold or actions they take, but by their humility, patience, and willingness to engage with all exploited and oppressed people. It is not possible for us to “implant” the conviction to fight and struggle in others. Coming-to-critical-consciousness is a delicate and contingent process that can’t be scripted in advance. Still, there are a few general components to it.

First, we have to truly get to know our people, their problems, and their aspirations. This means that we have to actually learn from people, acknowledging that, even if this is their first demonstration, or even if they voted for a democrat in the last election, they actually have something to teach us. The more experiences we learn from the people the richer our theories are and the more connection they can have to the daily realities of workers and oppressed people today. Our class is bursting with creative and intellectual powers that capitalist society doesn’t allow us to express or develop. The revolutionary party is stronger the more it cultivates these powers.

Second, we have to provide opportunities for others to understand their problems in a deeper and wider context, and to push their aspirations forward. Freire gives a concrete and relatable example of this:

“…if at a given historical moment the basic aspiration of the people goes no further than a demand for salary increases, the leaders can commit one of two errors. They can limit their action to stimulating this one demand or they can overrule this popular aspiration and substitute something more far-reaching—but something which has not yet come to the forefront of the people’s attention… The solution lies in synthesis: the leaders must on the one hand identify with the people’s demand for higher salaries, while on the other they must pose the meaning of that very demand as a problem. By doing this, the leaders pose as a problem a real, concrete, historical situation of which the salary demand is one dimension. It will thereby become clear that salary demands alone cannot comprise a definitive solution” [18].

Through this process, both the people and the revolutionary leadership act together and collectively name the world. Genuine knowledge is produced, and authentic action is taken, and real conviction for the struggle is strengthened.

Freire’s popularity presents an opening to draw many into the struggle and, in particular, the communist struggle. By re-establishing the link between his pedagogy and politics, we can draw those who admire his work into the movement. At the same time, we can better understand, adapt, and practice his pedagogical principles in our day-to-day organizing. “Only in the encounter of the people with the revolutionary leaders,” Freire writes in the book’s last sentence, “can this [revolutionary] theory be built” [19].

References

[1] This process started with the advent of U.S. “critical pedagogy” in the early 1980s, and Freire’s later work might have played a role in it as well. See Malott, Curry S. (2015).History and education: Engaging the global class war(New York: Peter Lang), 63.
[2] Freire, Paulo. (1970/2011).Pedagogy of the oppressed(New York: Continuum), 54.
[3] Ibid., 58.
[4] Ibid., 80.
[5] Ibid.
[6] McLaren, Peter. (2015).Life in schools: An introduction to critical pedagogy in the foundations of education, 6thed. (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers), 241.
[7] Freire,Pedagogy of the oppressed, 125-126.
[8] Ibid., 126.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid., 134.
[11] Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. (1991). “Marx and Engels to August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Wilhelm Bracke and others (circular letter),” trans. P. Ross & B. Ross, inMarx and Engels collected works (vol. 45), ed. S. Gerasimenko, Y.Kalinina, and A. Vladimirova (New York: International Publishers), 408, emphasis added.
[12] Lenin, V.I. (1902/1987). “What is to be done?” inEssential works of Lenin, ed. H.M. Christman (New York: Dover Publications), 67.
[13] Ibid., 156.
[14] Freire,Pedagogy of the oppressed, 138.
[15] Lenin, “What is to be done?”, 137.
[16] Lewis, Tyson E. (2012). “Mapping the constellation of educational Marxism(s),”Educational Philosophy and Theory44, no. S1: 98-114.
[17] Malott, Curry. (2021). Amílcar Cabral: Liberator, theorist, and educator,”Liberation School, 20 January. Availablehere.
[18] Freire,Pedagogy of the oppressed, 183.
[19] Ibid.

The Relevance and Failures of Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man

By Carlos Garrido

This year marks the 57th anniversary of Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964). This text, although plagued with a pessimistic spirit, was a great source of inspiration for the development of the New Left and the May 68 uprisings. The question we must ask ourselves is whether a text that predates the last 50 years of neoliberalism has any pertinent take-aways for today’s revolutionary struggles. Before we examine this, let us first review the context and central observations in Marcuse’s famed work.

Review

Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man[i] (ODM) describes a world in which human rationality is uncritically used to perpetuate the irrational conditions whereby human instrumental ingenuity stifles human freedom and development. In the height of the cold war and potential atomic devastation, Marcuse observes that humanity submitted to the “peaceful production of the means of destruction” (HM, ix). Society developed its productive forces and technology to a scale never before seen. In doing so, it has created the conditions for the possibility of emancipating humanity from all forms of necessity and meaningless toil. The problem is, this development has not served humanity, it has been humanity that has been forced to serve this development. The instruments humans once made to serve them, are now the masters of their creators. The means have kidnapped the ends in a forced swap, the man now serves the hammer, not the other way around.

The observation that our society has developed its productive forces and technologies in a manner that creates the conditions for more human freedom, while simultaneously using the development itself to serve the conditions for our un-freedom, is not a new one. The Marxist tradition has long emphasized this paradox in the development of capitalism. Marcuse’s ODM’s novel contribution is in the elucidation of the depth of this paradox’s submersion, as well as how this paradox has extended beyond capitalism into industrialized socialist societies as well. Let us now examine how Marcuse unfolds the effects of modern capitalist instrumental rationality’s closing of the political universe.

Whereas the capitalism Marx would deal with in the mid-19th century demonstrated that along with clearly antagonistic relations to production, the working and owning class also shared vastly different cultures, modern one-dimensional society homogenizes the cultural differences between classes. Marcuse observes that one of the novelties of one-dimensional society is in its capacity to ‘flatten out’ the “antagonisms between culture and social reality through the obliteration of the oppositional, alien, and transcendent elements in higher culture” (HM, 57). This process liquidates two-dimensional culture and creates the conditions for social cohesion through the commodification, repressive desublimation, and wholesale incorporation and reproduction of these cultural elements into society by mass communication. In essence, the cultural differences the working and owning class had have dissipated, both are integrated in the same cultural logic. This does not mean there is no cultural opposition, but that the cultural opposition is itself “reduced” and “absorbed” into the society. Today, this absorption of the opposition is more visible than ever. Companies that donate millions to police departments post #BLM on their social medias, repressive state apparatuses who assaulted homosexuals in the 60s lavender scares now wave the LGBTQ+ flag, billion-dollar companies like Netflix who take loopholes to not pay taxes make a show on ‘democratic socialist’ Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, etc. All throughout our one-dimensional culture we experience the absorption of an ‘opposition’ whom in being absorbed fails to substantially oppose. This could be reformulated as, ‘all throughout our one-dimensional culture we experience the absorptions of any attempts at a great refusal, whom in being absorbed fail to substantially refuse.’

How did this happen? Well, in a way that paradoxically provides the material confirmation of Marxism as a science (according at least to Popper’s falsifiability requirement), while disconfirming one of its central theses, modern capitalism seems to have mended one of its central grave digging contradictions, the antagonistic contradiction between the proletariat and the owning class. According to Marcuse, modern industrial society has been able to do this because it provided the working masses (and society in general) a “comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom” (HM, 1). It superimposed on the working masses false needs which “perpetuate [their] toil, aggressiveness, misery,” and alienation for the sake of continuing the never-ending hamster wheel of consumption (HM, 5). In modern industrial society people are sold a false liberty which actively sustains them in a condition of enslavement. As Marcuse states,

Free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear – that is, if they sustain alienation (HM, 8).

 In essence, that which has unnecessarily sustained their working life long, exploitative, and alienating, has made their life at home more ‘comfortable.’ This consumerist, Brave New World-like hellish heaven has perpetuated the prevalent ‘happy consciousness’ present in modern industrial society, where your distraction, comfort, and self-identification with your newly bought gadgets has removed the rebellious tendencies that arise, in a Jeffersonian-like manner, when the accumulation of your degradation reaches a certain limit where revolution becomes your panacea. The phenomenon of happy consciousness, says Marcuse, even forces us to question the status of a worker’s alienation, for although at work alienation might continue, he reappropriates a relation to the products through his excessive identification with it when purchased as a consumer. In this manner, the ‘reappropriation’ of the worker’s alienation to the product manifests itself like Feuerbach’s man reappropriating his species-being now that it has passed through the medium (alienated objectification) of God – the commodity here serving the mediational role of God.

The working mass, as we previously mentioned, is not the only one affected by the effects of one-dimensional society. Marcuse shows that the theorists are themselves participatory and promotional agents of this epoch. Whether in sociology or in philosophy, the general theoretical trends in academia are the same; the dominance of positivist thinking, and the repression and exclusion of negative (or dialectical) thinking. This hegemonized positivist thought presents itself as objective and neutral, caring only for the investigation of facts and the ridding of ‘wrongful thought’ that deals with transcendental “obscurities, illusions, and oddities” (HM, 170). What these one-dimensional theorists do is look at ‘facts’ how they stand dismembered from any of the factors that allowed the fact to be. In doing so, while they present their task as ‘positive’ and against abstractions, they are forced to abstract and reify the fact to engage with it separated from its context. By doing this these theorists limit themselves to engaging with this false concreteness they have conjured up from their abstracting of the ‘fact’ away from its general spatial-temporal context. Doing this not only proves to be futile in understanding phenomena – for it would be like trying to judge a fight after only having seen the last round – but reinforces the status quo of descriptive thinking at the expense of critical and hypothetical thought. As Marcuse states,

This radical acceptance of the empirical violates the empirical, for in it speaks the mutilated, “abstract” individual who experiences (and expresses) only that which is given to him, who has only the facts and not the factors, whose behavior is one-dimensional and manipulated. By virtue of the factual repression, the experienced world is the result of a restricted experience, and the positivist cleaning of the mind brings the mind in line with restricted experience (HM, 182).

Given that “operationalism,” this positivist one-dimensional thought, which in “theory and practice, becomes the theory and practice of containment,” has penetrated the thought and language of all aspects of society, is there an escape to this seemingly closed universe (HM, 17)? As a modest dialectician, Marcuse denies while leaving a slight ‘chance’ for an affirmation. On one end, the text is haunted by a spirit of pessimistic entrapment – not only has the logic of instrumental rationality that sustains one-dimensional society infiltrated all levels of society and human interaction, but the resources are vast enough to quickly absorb or militarily “take care of emergency situations”, viz., when a threat to one-dimensional society arises.

On the other end, he says that “it is nothing but a chance,” but a chance nonetheless, that the conditions for a great refusal might arise (HM, 257). Although he argues dialectical thinking is important to challenge capitalist positivism, he recognizes dialectical thinking alone “cannot offer the remedy,” it knows on empirical and conceptual grounds “its own hopelessness,” i.e., it knows “contradictions do not explode by themselves,” that human agency through an “essentially new historical subject” is the only way out (HM, 253, 252). The contingency of this ‘chance’ is dependent on the contingency of the great encounter between the “most advanced consciousness of humanity” and the “most exploited force,” i.e., it is the ‘barbarians’ of the third world to whom this position of possible historical subjectivity is ascribed to (HM, 257). Nonetheless, Marcuse is doing a theoretical diagnosis, not giving us a prescriptive normative approach. The slight moment where a glimpse of prescriptive normativity is invoked, he encourages the continual struggle for the great refusal. This is how I read the final reference to Walter Benjamin, “[critical theory] wants to remain loyal to those who, without hope, have given and give their life to the Great Refusal” (Ibid.). Even if we are hopeless, we must give our life to the great refusal. We must be committed, in Huey Newton’s terms, to “revolutionary suicide”, to foolishly struggling even when no glimpse of hope is to be found, for only in struggling when there is no hope, can the conditions for the possibility of hope arise.

Analysis

There are very few observations in this text to which we can point to as relevant in our context. The central thesis of a comfortable ‘happy consciousness’ which commensurates all classes under a common consumerist culture is a hard sell in a world in which labor has seen its century long fought for gains drawn back over the last 50 years.[ii] Neoliberalism has effectively normalized what William L. Robinson calls the “Wal-Martization of labor,”[iii] i.e., conditions in which work is less unionized, less secure, lower paid, and given less benefits. These conditions, along with the growing polarization of wealth and income, render Marcuse’s analysis of the post-WW2 welfare state impertinent. I lament to say that the most valuable take-away of ODM for revolutionaries today is where it failed, for this failure continues to be quite prevalent amongst many self-proclaimed socialist in the west. This failure, I argue, consist of Marcuse’s equating of capitalist states with socialist experiments.

 Marcuse’s ODM unites the socialist and capitalist parts of the world as two interdependent systems existing within the one-dimensional logic that prioritizes “the means over the end” (HM, 53). For Marcuse, the socialist part of the world has been unable to administer in praxis what it claims to be in theory; there is effectively a “contradiction between theory and facts” (HM, 189). Although this contradiction does not, according to him, “falsify the former,” it nonetheless creates the conditions for a socialism that is not qualitatively different to capitalism (Ibid.). The socialist camp, like capitalism, “exploits the productivity of labor and capital without structural resistance, while considerably reducing working hours and augmenting the comforts of life” (HM, 43). In essence, his argument boils down to 20th century socialism being unable to create a qualitatively new alternative to capitalism, and in this failure, it has replicated, sometimes in forms unique to it, the mechanisms of exploitation and opposition-absorption (through happy consciousness, false needs, military resistance, etc.), that are prevalent in the capitalist system.

There are a few fundamental problems in Marcuse’s equalization, which all stem, I will argue, from his inability to carry dialectical thinking onto his analysis of the socialist camp. In not doing so, Marcuse himself reproduces the positivistic forms of thought which dismember “facts” from the factors which brought them about. Because of this, even if the ‘facts’ in both camps appear the same, claiming that they are so ignores the contextual and historical relations that led to those ‘facts’ appearing similar.

For Marcuse to say that the socialist camp, like the capitalist, was able to recreate the distractingly comfortable forms of life that make for a smoother exploitation of workers, he must ignore the conditions, both present and historical, that allowed this fact to arise. Capitalism was able to achieve this ‘comfortable’ life for its working masses because it spent the last three centuries colonizing the world to ensure that the resources of foreign lands would be disposable to western capital. This process of western capitalist enrichment required the genocide of the native (for its lands), and the enslavement of the African (for its labor) and created the conditions for the 20th century struggle between western capital for dividing up the conquered lands and bodies of the third world. But even with this historical and contextual process of expropriation and exploitation, the fruits of this were not going to the working classes of the western nations because of the generosity of the owning class, regardless of how much they benefited from creating this ‘labor aristocracy.’ Rather, the only reason why this process slightly came to benefit the popular classes in the US was a result of century long labor struggles in the country, most frequently led by communists, socialists, and anarchist within labor unions.

The socialist camp, on the other hand, industrialized their backwards countries in a fraction of the time it took the west, without having to colonize lands, genocide natives, or enslave blacks. On the contrary, regardless of the mistakes that were made, and the unfortunate effects of these, the industrialization process in the socialist camp was inextricably linked to the empowering of the peripheral subjects, whether African, Asian, Middle-Eastern, or Indo-American, that had been under the boot of western colonialism and imperialism for centuries. The ‘third-world’ Marcuse leaves the potential role of historical subjectivity to, was only able to sustain autonomy because of the solidarity and aid – political, military, or economic in kind, it received from the socialist camp. Those who were unable, for various reasons, to establish relations with the socialist camp, replicated, in a neo-colonial fashion, the relations they had with their ‘previous’ metropoles. In fact, history showed that the ‘fall’ of this camp led the countries in the third world that sustained an autonomous position (thanks to the comradely relations they established with the socialist world), to be quickly overturned into subjected servitude to western capital.

By stating that the socialist camp was unable to affect a materialization in praxis of its theory, and as such, that it was not qualitatively different from capitalism (making the equating of the two possible), Marcuse effectively demonstrates his ignorance, willful or not, of the geopolitical situation of the time. Socialism in the 20th century could not create its ideal qualitatively new society while simultaneously defending its revolution from military, economic, and biowarfare attacks coming from the largest imperial powers in the history of humanity. Liberation cannot fully express itself under these conditions, for, the liberation of one is connected to the liberation of all. The communist ideal whereby human relations are based “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” is only realizable under the global totalizing disappearance of all forms of exploitation and oppression. It is idealist and infantile to expect this reality to arise in a world where capitalism exists even at the farthest corner of the earth, even less in a world where the hegemonized form of global relations is capitalistic.

Nonetheless, even Marcuse is forced to admit that the socialist camp was able to create a comfortable life for its working masses. But, unlike Marcuse argues, this comfort in the socialist camp cannot be equated with comfort in the capitalist camp. Not only are the conditions that led to the comfort in each fundamentally different (as just previously examined), but the comfort itself, as a fact, was also radically different. In terms of job security, housing, healthcare, education, childcare, and other forms of government provided social securities, the comfort in the socialist camp was significantly higher than the comfort experienced by the working masses in the welfare social democracies in Europe, and tenfold that of the comfort experienced by the working masses in the US. When to this you add the ability for political participation through worker councils and the party, the prevalent spirit of solidarity that reigned, and the general absence of racism and crime, the foolishness of the equalization is further highlighted. Nonetheless, the comparison must not be made just between the capitalist and socialist camp, but between the conditions before and after the socialist camp achieved socialism. Doing so allows one to historically contextualize the achievements of the socialist camp in terms of creating dignified and freer lives for hundreds of millions of people. For these people, Marcuse’s comments are somewhere between laughable and symbolic of the usual disrespect of western intelligentsia.

Although Marcuse was unable to live long enough to see this, the fall of the socialist camp, and the subsequent ‘shock therapy’ that went with it, not only devastated the countries of the previous socialist camp – drastically rising the rates of poverty, crime, prostitution, inequality, while lowering the standard of living, life expectancy, and the opportunities for political participation – but also the countries of the third world and those of the capitalist camp themselves! With the threat of communism gone, the third world was up for grabs again, and the first world, no longer under the pressure of the alternative that a comfortable working mass in the socialist camp presented, was free to extend the wrath of capital back into its own national popular classes, eroding century long victories in the labor movement and creating the conditions for precarious, unregulated, and more exploitative work.

Works like One-Dimensional Man, which take upon the task of criticizing and equating ‘both sides,’ do the work of one side, i.e., of capitalism, in creating a ‘left’ campaign of de-legitimizing socialist experiments. This process of creating a ‘left’ de-legitimation campaign is central for the legitimation of capital. This text (ODM) is the quintessential example of one of the ways capitalism absorbs its opposition by placing it as a midpoint between it and the real threat of a truly socialist alternative. It is because the idealistic and non-dialectical logic of capital infiltrates these ‘left’ anti-communist theorists that they can condemn and equate socialist experiments with capitalism. If there is a central takeaway from Marcuse’s text, it is to guard ourselves against participating in this left-anticommunism theorizing that prostitutes itself for capital to create the conditions whereby the accidental ‘faults’ of pressured socialist experiments are equated with the systematic contradictions in capitalist countries. In a world racing towards a new cold war, it is the task of socialists in the heart of the empire to fiercely reject and deconstruct the state-department narratives of socialist and non-socialist experiments attempting to establish themselves autonomously outside of the dominion of US imperialism. Acknowledging how Marcuse failed to do this in ODM helps us prevent his mistake.

Carlos L. Garrido is a philosophy graduate student and assistant at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. His specialization is in Marxist philosophy and the history of American socialist thought (esp. early 19th century). He is an editorial board member and co-founder of Midwestern Marx  and the Journal of American Socialist Studies. 

Notes

[i] Reference will be to the following edition: Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. (Beacon Press, 1966).

[ii] Perhaps even longer, for The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 had already began these drawbacks. Nonetheless, 1964 is a bit too early to begin to see its effects, especially for an academic observing from outside the labor movement.

[iii] Robinson, L. William. Latin America and Global Capitalism. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008)., p. 23.

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

By Youssef Shawky Magdy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First: Historicism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Second: Humanism

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

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

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

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

Words are possibilities!

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

References 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flirting with Liberals: A Critical Examination of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)

By Andrew Dobbs

Should revolutionary Leftists join Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)? The group has added tens of thousands of members and become one of the fastest growing political organizations in the country since Bernie Sanders' historic campaign. Lenin said that we must go where the "millions" are, following the masses. Does that mean Leftists should join DSA?

No, we should not. Any such move is premature at best and doomed at worst, and all of the Left maneuvering in its midst amounts to opportunism, a choice that will lead to political compromise and ultimately either irrelevance or betrayal of our cause and class. The purpose of this essay is to dispel the confusion leading US revolutionaries to miss these clear facts.

DSA's Strategy and Left Idealism

DSA's politics are a material thing, and they are rooted in the shared pursuits of the organization's vanguard. DSA held its largest ever national convention in Chicago in August of 2017, open to any members that wished to attend. No one suggests that there was a large number of members that wanted to go but couldn't and whose votes would have changed the convention's outcomes. This convention represents the voice of DSA's most committed and influential leaders, its vanguard.

By an overwhelming margin--roughly three-to-one--this convention decided to focus on a national campaign for Medicare for All, to be won by electing pro-single payer Democrats to Congress, the White House, and other offices. DSA's vanguard chose a path that commits them to working within a bourgeois, imperialist political party.

This is no accident; it reflects DSA's class character. R.L. Stephens has said that 89% of DSA members are white , and in an colonialist country this indicates that DSA membership is either predominantly drawn from classes other than the proletariat or appealing disproportionately to white proletarians. Whether middle class or unconsciously white supremacist, it does not represent the politics of the US proletariat, and mere argument or good example will not shift that.

On the contrary, social democrats throughout history have, as a result of similar class politics, been quick to collaborate with the bourgeoisie on programs destructive to the lowest productive class, the proletariat. Harold Wilson deployed troops to Northern Ireland; Mitterrand took up an "austerity turn;" SYRIZA immediately capitulated to the central bankers; Ebert and the SPD helped the Freikorps kill Luxemburg and Liebknecht. The examples could, tragically, go for days.

Communists like those in DSA Refoundation or the DSA Communist Caucus--who may be consolidating at some point--should not ignore this history. DSA entry advocates should instead explain whether they believe DSA has a proletarian class character, and if so where the break with historical social democracy has occurred, particularly in light of their commitment to the Democratic Party. If they accept that it is not proletarian they should answer how they expect to overturn its class basis without destroying the organization altogether.

This impossible idealist task is precisely what social democrats claim to be able to do with the bourgeois state. If they are mistaken in that task, then how are the DSA Left factions possibly correct?

The Praxis of Actually Existing DSA

DSA supporters, nonetheless, are quick to point to the Serve the People-style programs they have undertaken in low income working class communities and communities of color, most famously their brake light campaigns. In actual practice DSA is far more diverse in its tactics than its formal goals and strategies would suggest, they argue. These efforts are then openings into which proletarian politics can enter the organization.

These efforts are indeed creative and worth commending, but as long as they are attempting to win proletarian workers over to a social democratic program they are doomed to failure, either by failing to attract any dispossessed workers to the program or by capturing some element of this class and then neutralizing them for an actual proletarian politics. This is the repeated history of social democracy around the world.

Also, how will DSA relate to these projects when election season comes and their stated strategic priorities are on the line? Will they co-opt these projects for their effort to elect pro-single payer Democrats? If so, then the Left factionalists that have joined on those grounds will find themselves campaigning for a bourgeois, imperialist political party--collaborating with the class enemies of the working class.

This question is even more urgent for "base-building" elements such as DSA Refoundation. They put forward excellent proposals around organizing worker centers, solidarity networks, and tenants unions. When elections come and DSA needs all hands on deck to elect Democrats for the sake of their broadly agreed-to and popular strategic goals do these projects become appendages of the Democratic Party or do they undermine DSA's strategy? They will become the enemies either of their class or their organization.

And make no mistake, withholding resources from the Democrat electoral push will be nearly impossible for DSA's rank-and-file to tolerate. The organization's vanguard, the vast majority of its membership, and its mass base will be focused on an electoral push. Do Left faction leaders hope that the organization's leading elements don't need those resources in taking on the entire US corporate establishment?

The only thing that would prevent the Democrat majority from going over the Left's heads and appropriating the resources for themselves would be their goodwill. The factions entering DSA right now will end up either shilling for Democrats or forced out of their own campaigns.

To the extent that these projects are good uses of revolutionaries' time, it seems that most DSA chapters are happy to bring in coalition partners from independent Left organizations, and such engagement seems to have all the benefits of working within DSA with none of the risks outlined above. When they bail to elect a Democrat to the White House we can keep projects alive and maintain a much stronger position from which to resist co-optation.

Four Basic Permutations of DSA's Future

Such a position of independence and tactical cooperation seems to be the best strategy in general when one considers the likely outcomes of DSA's project at hand. The Democratic Party is both out of power and largely hostile to DSA's politics at this time. To succeed at its project, DSA must gain a position of leading influence within the Democratic Party and the Democrats must take power in a way that lets them enact this vision.

The four basic permutations for DSA's future are therefore: they take power within the Democratic Party and the Democrats win, they take this power and the Democrats lose, they are kept marginal in the party and the Democrats win, or they are marginal in the party and the Democrats lose.

By "take power" in the party we have to acknowledge, of course, that the Democratic Party is liable to remain a very eclectic and diverse institution, but in this instance we mean that the party publicly campaigns on DSA's agenda--at least the Medicare for All piece--and actually makes plans to pursue it as policy. Knowing this, what are the likely outcome for DSA's historic undertaking?

Taking Power in the Party and Losing Anyways

One of these permutations has actually happened in the past--social democrats taking control of the party and then losing to a hated Republican reactionary criminal. In 1972 elements of the New Left won over the Democratic Party, nominating Left liberal George McGovern for president (McGovern went on to coin the phrase "Medicare for everyone") and even in a brief moment of levity entertaining Mao Tse-Tung as the nominee for Vice President.

Immediately following this takeover the party's key electoral elements--labor unions and big city political machines--sabotaged the campaign, deciding that even four more years (ultimately it was only about two-and-a-half) of the hated Richard Nixon would be better than giving the Left a foothold in the party. For 45 years since then McGovern's name has been a shorthand among Democrats reminding them that if they let themselves get too progressive they'll get embarrassed.

DSA and its allies are miles short of where the New Left was at that time, but even Bernie's upstart, not-that-radical campaign with all its approval of imperialism and disapproval of its global critics prompted concerted Democrat sabotage. Whether this costs them a future election or they overcome it and fuck things up anyways an electoral loss to the GOP will make their politics anathema for a generation or more. DSA's mass membership will flee, and whatever work is being done to try and capture this "fastest growing" Left formation right now will have been a waste.

Taking Over the Empire

But what if DSA members and Bernie Sanders supporters take over the Democratic Party and then win the Presidency? This is the claim that Bernie-ites have made since last November: if we were on the ballot, we'd win. If they did, however, DSA and its candidate and party will be forced to ask themselves: what do they do with the US empire?

The most likely answer is that they will go along to get along and betray all the working people of the world repressed by the US death machine. Their official Priorities Resolution had no mention of US foreign policy whatsoever. This is perfectly in keeping with social democracy's historic experience, and US social democrats have little choice, as the resources they need to pay for their proposed welfare state can only be generated through accumulation of super profits extracted from the Third World.

If, however, Left factions were able to convince DSA--now ascendant in the Democratic Party and in actual elected power--to reject US imperialism and to use that position to secure liberation for those under the yoke of North American repression, then all of the Left would need to rally to their side and THAT would be the precise time for revolutionaries to potentially join up with DSA. The deep state and their monopoly capitalist base will have knives out for the socialists at that point, and we will need to defend them by any means necessary.

But that actually recommends working to build political support and a mass base outside of DSA at this time. The regime will need capacity over and on top of what it took to take power. We will be able to do more good with organizations distinct from DSA built up between now and then than we would liquidating into a movement incredibly unlikely to take this course anyways.

When the Democrats Don't Need You

The next possible permutation is by far the most likely -- that the Democratic nominee owes little or nothing to DSA, disdains their values, and wins anyways. Should DSA then support the nominee as a "lesser evil" or because of some half-assed lip service to Medicare for All, or do they refuse to go along with a class enemy of the socialist movement?

In either case the left liberal petit bourgeois elements in the group are likely to shift their primary loyalty from DSA to the Democrats and the nominee themselves. This is precisely what these elements did with Barack Obama, and they were in fact one of the pillars of his campaign and governing coalition. This nominee will represent their class interests far more faithfully than DSA. The more effective the Left revolutionary tendencies in DSA are in the meantime, the more likely this abandonment will be then.

If DSA decides instead to play the "lesser evil" game it is hard to imagine many of the earnest young workers drawn to them today sticking around for very long. They may help beat Trump, but whether DSA quietly pushes irrelevant policies or begs pathetically for things they know they'll never get from a president and Congress that doesn't like them these young workers will have little reason to stick around. Whatever work Leftists are doing in DSA now will have been wasted as DSA returns to being a tiny faction for weak-tea labor aristocrat radicals.

Yet if DSA does decide to fight against the Democrat they will have the chance to form a substantial Left pole of opposition to the ruling administration and perhaps even a useful foundation for a Left party. The young workers--at least their most advanced and conscientious numbers--will have a good reason to stick around.

Revolutionaries should be preparing to reinforce whatever truly progressive forces come to bear in the future, and such a formation may amount to that. This would be a point to consider joining forces with DSA more formally, and again bringing our independent bases to bear at a moment when they will be sorely needed. As we will see, though, it may not be as revolutionary as we have been led to believe after all.

DSA as Double Losers

The final permutation is an extension of the status quo: DSA is kept out of power within the Democratic Party and the Democrats lose. If DSA's failure is by way of active suppression by party leaders (as badly as they treated Bernie or worse), then DSA will have a strong argument that the Democrats' failure was caused by the suppression, and will have a real shot at catapulting ahead of existing liberal leadership. At that point--again--the reinforcements from the revolutionary wing of the Left will be especially valuable and powerful if it makes sense to join.

It's also very possible that Leftists look at the fact that this outcome was able to happen at least twice as a sign that DSA and social democracy are incapable of overcoming this fate and unfit for the political needs of the moment, thus wiping out whatever work revolutionaries do in their midst until then.

If instead they are given a fair and square shot--at least arguably so--and they are simply rejected by a majority of the Democrat base, then they will be a marginal faction of a losing party. This is the definition of political irrelevance and whatever "explosive growth" they have experienced in the Bernie aftermath will likely evaporate. Yet again any Left efforts within the organization will have been wasted.

What Should We Do Instead?

After all of this there are three scenarios in which work within DSA will not have been wasted or profoundly compromised: if they take over the Democratic Party, win, and begin to dismantle US imperialism; if they don't take power within the party, the party wins, but they buck the Democrats and become an independent Left force contesting the administration; or if they are suppressed within the Democratic Party and the Democrats lose, and they stand and fight in the aftermath.

Each of the three would benefit from well-developed independent Left forces that can arrive as backup to support their efforts when those crucial moments are attained. But if we are being honest with ourselves we will have to acknowledge the present US revolutionary Left's total failure to build these very sorts of forces. Unless we have an answer to the failure we have nothing to lose in following the factions into DSA.

We will not solve this failure on paper. We will come to the solution through practice, but we can examine extant experiments and practices in the light of scientific socialist analysis to gain some ideas on where to start. In particular, we should consider practices outside of DSA's politics and perspective, opportunities we will miss if we all fall into their lines.

The Proletarian Subject and the Workers' Party Error

First things first, if their politics are wrong because of their class character, then we should instead seek out the politics of the proletariat. The problem with this is that in the United States the proletariat has no politics at this point, which should make it pretty easy to determine the revolutionary task at hand: building proletarian subjectivity.

The revolutionary Left errs on this question -- and thus ends up tailing DSA or other non-revolutionary elements -- because it believes that developing proletarian subjectivity is synonymous with founding a "workers party" or an even less specific "Left" alternative party. DSA Refoundation does this explicitly, calling their proposed network of organizations "the skeleton of a Workers Party." Some of the more left-wing veterans of the Bernie Sanders' campaign organized under the banner of the Movement for a People's Party announced in late January that they are now working in solidarity with DSA Refoundation.

Together they reflect a predominant idea in contemporary left politics, that a new leftist party is what we really need, despite the global failure of such parties to even so much as slow capitalism's advance in the last half century at least.

This yearning for a workers' party reflects an awareness of the need for a revolutionary subject that can confront capitalism, but it makes two important mistakes. First, it conflates the proletariat with the working class. In the United States in particular, however, capitalism and its historic expressions in settler colonialism and imperialism have created a productive class with widely varying levels of social and material assets, many of which distort their interests and political positions.

Engels observed this same phenomenon in England as far back as 1858, "The English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent justifiable." White US workers' role in exploiting this country's internal colonies only amplifies this effect.

It is true still that over time "society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other - Bourgeoisie and Proletariat." It is for this very reason that the proletariat--the dialectical synthesis between absolute dispossession and absolute productivity--can represent the entire working class, as their emancipation will require the liberation of all workers and humanity at large. But rooting a political subject in any other fraction of the broader working class--those privileged by race or nationality or various sources of social capital, etc.--will ultimately favor maintaining those privileges at the expense of those exploited to produce them. In short, it will favor the pursuit of a merely gentler or more "progressive" class society, not the abolition of all class distinctions, the basic necessity of the proletariat and the essence of communist politics.

The second error giving rise to the "workers' party" hypothesis is the assumption that the subject here must necessarily take the party form. What we know is that the initial formations embodying proletarian subjectivity are likely to be too small and too narrowly focused to take on the tasks and responsibilities of a party, and so determining today that they must ultimately become that party is to supplant our judgment--divorced from real conditions--for the assessments of the organized proletariat themselves. This is another idealist error, and it may be the key error of Left organizing in this country, period.

The Mass Line and Its Obstacles

We will develop such proletarian subjectivity with skillful application of the mass line, and so the basic task at hand is to train and educate a core communist cadre that can then undertake mass line investigation, developing programs that proletarians can adopt as their own. It really is as simple as this, but there is a major obstacle standing between our existing small group Left and this seemingly simple outcome: we too are predominantly non-proletarian in our class character.

The proletariat in this country may not have a subjective program, but to survive each proletarian -- particularly the very advanced elements that will form the vanguard of any subject drawn from this class -- knows explicitly not to trust the classes and categories from which the typical US Leftist hails. These Leftists are well-versed in proletarian political analysis arrived at through sound scientific reasoning, but dropping into these dispossessed, colonized, disenfranchised, and exploited communities and waving the correct ideas for their liberation is guaranteed to fail.

Unfortunately many US Leftists have stopped there, unsure of where to move forward. They double down on that ideological development, forming study groups, or they form political groups and boutique parties with random, ineffective practices. DSA Refoundation's base-building document includes an uncanny description of this very sort of sectarian "vanguardism."

It is no wonder they see DSA's growth, strategic confidence, and creativity as very attractive compared to this -- indeed, it is probably better to join DSA than almost any other present US Left revolutionary formation. The question is whether their opportunism is better than struggling for something more difficult, but truly new.

Connecting to Social Movements

The resolution to this contradiction between existing revolutionaries and the revolutionary class-to-be can be found, I would argue, in the Third World. It is here that social democrats like those in DSA are unlikely to turn, but we should presume that proletarian revolution is unlikely to arise among the beneficiaries of global imperialism. When we look to the more advanced Left revolutionary forces around the world--in the Philippines, in Venezuela and the other Latin American Left experiments, formerly in Haiti under Fanmi Lavalas, in Morocco's Rif uprising and in South Africa -- we see that Left parties and revolutionary subjects have arisen amidst larger social movements.

We would be wise to follow that model, bringing our capacity to social movements working in proletarian communities in the US and engaging in a deliberate and patient mass line investigation there. The obstacle here is that the deepest reaches of the US proletariat have few authentic social movements engaging them, instead they are beset by parasitic or patronizing NGOs. NGOism captures social movements, drawing them into the foundation-driven, professionally-directed non-profit industrial complex. DSA Refoundation in particular calls this out, but then suggests that they will carry out a praxis guaranteed to draw them into these very orbits. How we should instead avoid these class enemies while engaging our potential allies is another key question for our work.

And it is here that we reach the boundaries of present knowledge; moving beyond which will require further social practice. Still, we can answer the question of what we should be doing instead of joining DSA: identifying social movements and material struggles in our communities with authentic entry points into the proletariat, serving them as we can and using the mass line to investigate unspoken demands that we can develop into real proletarian political programs.

Cases of Possible Success

This is an incredibly complicated task, but some apparently correct examples have already been undertaken. Philly Socialists have built one of the largest, most resilient non-DSA socialist organizations in the country, with roots first in Serve the People programs widely respected among some of the lowest-income, most dispossessed elements of that city -- especially their free ESL classes. They also established a Tenant's Union that has confronted landlords and forced eviction reforms at City Hall that should materially slow gentrification and displacement.

Regarding housing struggles, New York City's Maoist Communist Group (MCG) has demonstrated an entirely different set of tactics, eschewing any "policy" work. They have established some initial roots in low income housing complexes in Brooklyn where they have developed a theory and strategy they summarize in the slogan "Struggle Committees Everywhere!"

These committees arose out of their efforts to fight displacement in aggressively gentrifying neighborhoods, and are a pre-party vehicle for proletarian subjectivity that could be adopted elsewhere. Every Left group hoping to build towards revolution in this country must engage with their theoretical documents and summations .

In Austin, our work as Austin Socialist Collective has been much more uneven, and we are not yet prepared to sum up these experiences. We have, however, seen that shop-to-shop outreach done initially through the Fight for 15 campaign has been a quick way to immediately touch our local proletariat. Some specific direct actions confronting wage thief management have impressed these workers and very effectively demonstrated the class struggle for everybody on the shop floor. How we deploy these tactics and to what ends in the future remains to be seen.

Conclusion

Regardless of the firm judgments here, none of this should be read as calling for unnecessary hostility or animosity towards DSA. There are a number of earnest potential revolutionaries there that will either be strong allies in the unlikely event we need to rush in or strong recruits when they join the much more likely exodus to come. In the meantime we should sincerely explore all opportunities for effective united front work with DSA in our communities.

If all our best Left elements have liquidated into the organization we can't add to their capacity, and if they do fail we will be starting out from scratch at that point, even worse off than we are today. The notion that whatever work is being done under its auspices now can be carried forward unchanged even if DSA changes for the worse is an idealist mistake. As an institution it will act upon and move the people and organizations working within it, and it will move them in a direction away from proletarian politics.

Honest Leftists must, nonetheless, acknowledge that accomplishing our tasks is a far less clear path than DSA factional entryism, and we are probably no more likely to succeed than DSA is. The best way to guarantee our failure, however, is to fail to act at all, defaulting instead to the less threatening path offered by social democracy. If we do that we will get what the Left around the world has had for decades at least--a politics that claims a great deal and delivers only ruin.

In the short run, we can build outside of DSA to catch our comrades when they fall out from it, or perhaps to rush in when they really need our help. In either case we must build outside its boundaries. Their future is uncertain at best, and the opportunities too many are hastily seeking really are opportunistic. The true revolutionary path is one of patience; a lonely one in comparison for sure, but our true friends can only be found among those too low for opportunists to wait upon. Let's find one another in their midst.

Rethinking the Marxist Conception of Revolution

By Chris Wright

In the twenty-first century, as capitalism enters an epoch of unprecedented crisis, it is time to reconsider the Marxist theory of proletarian revolution. More precisely, it is time to critically reconsider it, to determine if it has to be revised in order to speak more directly to our own time and our own struggles. It was, after all, conceived in the mid-nineteenth century, in a political and social context very different from the present. Given the 160-year span from then to now, one might expect it to require a bit of updating. In this article I'll argue that it does need to be revised, both for a priori reasons of consistency with the body of Marx's thought and in order to make it more relevant to the contemporary scene. That is, I'll argue that when Marx conceptualized revolution in terms of a fettering of the productive forces by production relations, as well as in terms of a "dictatorship of the proletariat," he was the victim of both intellectual sloppiness and a misunderstanding of his own system. Accordingly, I will purify Marx's conception of revolution of his and his followers' mistakes. What we'll find is that the purification not only makes the theory more cogent but updates it for our own time, in such a way that it can teach activists strategic lessons.

In brief, I'll conclude that in order to make Marxism consistent with itself it is necessary to abandon the statist perspective to which Marx and Engels arguably were committed, and which they transmitted to most of their successors. It is necessary to conceive of revolution in a gradualist way, not as a sudden historical "rupture" in which the working class or its representatives take over the national state and organize social reconstruction on the basis of a unitary political will (the proletarian dictatorship). According to a properly understood Marxism, even the early stages of the transition from capitalism to post-capitalism must take place over generations, and not in a planned way but unconsciously and rather "spontaneously," in a process slightly comparable to the transition from feudalism to capitalism. I will also argue that my revision can be the basis, finally, for a rapprochement between Marxists and anarchists. [1]

*

Marx has, in effect, two theories of revolution, one that applies only to the transition from capitalism to socialism and another that is more transhistorical, applying, for instance, also to the earlier transition between feudalism and capitalism. The former emerges from his analysis of capitalist economic dynamics, according to which a strong tendency toward class polarization divides society, in the long run, between a small elite of big capitalists and a huge majority of relatively immiserated workers, who finally succeed in overthrowing the capitalist state and organizing a socialist one. It is the transhistorical theory, however, that I will focus on here. Its locus classicus is the last four sentences of the following paragraph from the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859):

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of th ese relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or-this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms-with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

This paragraph has inspired reams of commentary and criticism, but for our purposes a few critical remarks will suffice. First of all, it is clearly the barest of outlines, desperately in need of elaboration. Unfortunately, nowhere in Marx's writings does he elaborate it in a rigorous way. Second, it is stated in functionalist terms. Revolution happens supposedly because the productive forces-i.e., technology, scientific knowledge, and the skills of the labor force-have evolved to such a point that production relations are no longer compatible with their socially efficient use and development. But what are the causal mechanisms that connect this functionalist concept of "fettering of the productive forces" to social revolution? As far as I know, nowhere does Marx express his theory in causal, as opposed to functionalist, terms.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that, as it is stated above, the theory verges on meaninglessness. How does one determine when production relations have started to impede the use and development of productive forces? It would seem that to some extent they are always doing so. In capitalism, for example, one can point to the following facts: (1) recurring recessions and depressions periodically make useless much of society's productive capacity; (2) enormous amounts of resources are wasted on socially useless advertising and marketing campaigns; (3) there is a lack of incentives for capital to invest in public goods such mass transit, the provision of free education, and public parks; (4) the recent financialization of the Western economy has entailed investment not in the improvement of infrastructure but in glorified gambling that doesn't benefit society; (5) artificial obstacles such as intellectual copyright laws hinder the development and diffusion of knowledge and technology; (6) a colossal level of expenditures is devoted to war and destructive military technology; (7) in general, capitalism distributes resources in a profoundly irrational way, such that, for example, hundreds of millions of people starve while a few become multi-billionaires. Despite all this, however, no transition to a new society has happened.

Indeed, in other respects capitalism continues to develop productive forces, as shown by recent momentous advances in information technology. It's true that most of this technology was originally developed in the state sector;[2] nevertheless, the broader economic and social context was and is that of capitalism. It is therefore clear that a mode of production can "fetter" and "develop" productive forces at the same time, a fact Marx did not acknowledge.

In order to salvage his hypothesis quoted above, and in fact to make it quite useful, a subtle revision is necessary. We have to replace his idea of a conflict between productive forces and production relations with that of a conflict between two sets of production relations, one of which uses productive forces in a more socially rational and "un-fettering" way than the other. This change, slight as it might seem, has major consequences for the Marxist conception of revolution. It is no exaggeration to say that, in addition to making the theory logically and empirically cogent, it changes its entire orientation, from advocating a "dictatorship of the proletariat" that directs social and economic reconstruction to advocating a more grassroots-centered long-term evolution of social movements that remake the economy and society from the ground up.

My revision of the theory, then, is simply that at certain moments in history, new forces and relations of production evolve in an older economic, social, political, and cultural framework, undermining it from within. The gradual process of social revolution begins to happen when the old set of production relations fetters, or irrationally uses, productive forces in relation to the new set of widely emerging production relations . The "in relation to…" that I have added saves the Marxian theory from meaninglessness, for it indicates a definite point at which the "old" society really begins to yield to the "new" one, namely when an emergent economy has evolved to the point that it commands substantial resources and is clearly more "effective" or "powerful" in some sense than the old economy. The first time such a radical transformation ever happened was with the Neolithic Revolution (or Agricultural Revolution), which started around 12,000 years ago. As knowledge and techniques of agriculture developed that made possible sedentary populations, the hunter-gatherer mode of production withered away, as did the ways of life appropriate to it.

Similarly, starting around the thirteenth century in parts of Europe, an economy and society organized around manorialism and feudalism began to transform into an economy centered in the accumulation of capital. Several factors contributed to this process, among them (1) the revival of long-distance trade (after centuries of Europe's relative isolation from the rest of the world), which stimulated the growth of merchant capitalism in the urban interstices of the feudal order; (2) mercantile support for the growth of the nation-state with a strong central authority that could dismantle feudal restrictions to trade and integrated markets; (3) the rise, particularly in England, of a class of agrarian capitalists who took advantage of new national and international markets (e.g., for wool) by investing in improved cultivation methods and enclosing formerly communal lands to use them for pasturage; (4) the partly resultant migration of masses of the peasantry to cities, where, during the centuries from the sixteenth to the nineteenth, they added greatly to the class of laborers who could be used in manufacturing; (5) the discovery of the Americas, which further stimulated commerce and the accumulation of wealth.

In short, from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries, capitalist classes-agrarian, mercantile, financial, and industrial-emerged in Europe, aided by technological innovations such as the printing press and then, later on, by all the technologies that were made possible by the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. All this is just to say that in the womb of the old society, new productive forces and production relations evolved that were more dynamic and wealth-generating than earlier ones. Moreover, on the foundation of these new technologies, economic relations, and scientific discourses arose new social, political, and cultural relations and ideologies that were propagated by the most dynamic groups with the most resources, i.e., the bourgeoisie and its intellectual hangers-on. [3]

My correction of Marx's formulation of his hypothesis in the abovementioned Preface has another advantage besides making the theory more meaningful: it also supplies a causal mechanism by which a particular mode of production's "fettering of the productive forces" leads to revolution-indeed, to successful revolution. The mechanism is that the emergent mode of production, in being less dysfunctional or more socially rational than the dominant mode, eventually (after reaching a certain visibility in the society) attracts vast numbers of adherents who participate in it and propagandize for it-especially if the social context is one of general economic stagnation and class polarization, due to the dominant mode of production's dysfunctionality.

Moreover, this latter condition means that, after a long evolution, the emergent economic relations and their institutional partisans will have access to so many resources that they will be able to triumph economically and politically over the reactionary partisans of the old, deteriorating economy. This, of course, is what ultimately ensured the political success of the bourgeoisie in its confrontations with the feudal aristocracy. Likewise, one can predict that if capitalism continues to stagnate and experience massive crisis over the next century, a new, more cooperative mode of production that has developed in the interstices of capitalist society may eventually mount the summits of political power.

In short, my seemingly minor revision provides a condition for the success of anti-capitalist revolution, and thus helps explain why no such revolution has so far been successful in the long run (namely because the condition has been absent). Another way of seeing the implications and advantages of the revision is by contrasting it with the views of orthodox Marxists. A single sentence from Friedrich Engels sums up these views: "The proletariat seizes state power, and then transforms the means of production into state property." [4] This statement, approved by Lenin and apparently also by Marx, encapsulates the mistaken statist perspective of the orthodox Marxist conception of proletarian revolution.

This perspective is briefly described in the Communist Manifesto, where Marx writes, "The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class," and then lays out a ten-point plan of social reconstruction by means of state decrees. By the 1870s Marx had abandoned the specifics of his earlier plan, but his (qualified) statism remained, and transmitted itself to his followers. [5] It is true that orthodox Marxists expect the state, "as a state," to somehow (inexplicably) wither away eventually, but they do have a statist point of view in relation to the early stages of revolution.

This statist vision emerges naturally from Marx's famous passage quoted above, in that the idea of a conflict between the rational use and development of productive forces and the fettering nature of current production relations suggests that at some point a social "explosion" will occur whereby the productive forces are finally liberated from the chains of the irrational mode of production. Pressure builds up, so to speak, over many years, as the mode of production keeps fettering the socially rational use of technology and scientific knowledge; through the agency of the working class, the productive forces struggle against the shackles of economic relations; at long last they burst free, when the working class takes over the state and reorganizes the economy. These are the metaphors naturally conjured by the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.

But there are logical and empirical problems with the statist view, the view according to which the substance of social revolution occurs after the seizure of state power. First of all, it is in tension with the Marxian conception of social dynamics. Briefly stated, Marx sees the economy-rightly-as the relative foundation of the rest of society, including politics, which suggests that a post-capitalist social revolution cannot be politically willed and imposed. This would seem to reverse the order of "dominant causality," from politics to the economy rather than vice versa. Moreover, such extreme statism exalts will as determining human affairs, a notion that is quite incompatible with the dialectical spirit of Marxism.

According to "dialectics," history really happens "behind the backs" of actors: it evolves "unconsciously," so to speak, as Hegel understood. Social and institutional conflicts work themselves out, slowly, through the actions of large numbers of people who generally have little idea of the true historical significance of their acts. As Marx said, we should never trust the self-interpretations of historical actors. And yet apparently he suspends this injunction, and his whole dialectical method, when it comes to the so-called proletarian revolution. These historical actors are somehow supposed to have perfect understanding of themselves and their place in history, and their historical designs are supposed to work out perfectly and straightforwardly-despite the massive complexity and "dialectical contradictions" of society.

The reality is that if "the working class" or its ostensible representatives seize control of the state in a predominantly capitalist society-and if, miraculously, they are not crushed by the forces of reaction-they can expect to face overwhelming obstacles to the realization of their revolutionary plans. Some of these obstacles are straightforward: for example, divisions among the new ruling elite, divisions within the working class itself (which is not a unitary entity), popular resistance to plans to remake the economy, the necessity for brutal authoritarian methods of rule in order to force people to accept the new government's plans, the inevitable creation of a large bureaucracy to carry out so-called reconstruction, etc. Fundamental to all these obstacles is the fact that the revolutionaries have to contend with the institutional legacies of capitalism: relations of coercion and domination condition everything the government does, and there is no way to break free of them. They cannot be magically transcended through political will. In particular, it is impossible through top-down directives to transform production relations from authoritarian to democratic: Marxism itself suggests that the state is not socially creative in this way. The hope to reorganize exploitative relations of production into liberatory, democratic relations by means of bureaucracy and the exercise of a unitary political will is utterly utopian and un-Marxist.

The record of so-called Communist revolutions in the twentieth century is instructive. While some Marxists may deny that lessons should be drawn from these revolutions, since they happened in relatively "primitive" rather than advanced capitalist countries, the experiences are at least suggestive. For what they created in their respective societies was not socialism (workers' democratic control of production) or communism (a classless, stateless, moneyless society of anarchistic democracy) but a kind of ultra-statist state capitalism. To quote the economist Richard Wolff, "the internal organization of the vast majority of industrial enterprises [in Communist countries] remained capitalist. The productive workers continued in all cases to produce surpluses: they added more in value by their labor than what they received in return for that labor. Their surpluses were in all cases appropriated and distributed by others." [6] Workers continued to be viciously exploited and oppressed, as in capitalism; the accumulation of capital continued to be the overriding systemic imperative, to which human needs were subordinated. While there are specific historical reasons for the way these economies developed, the general underlying condition was that it was and is impossible to transcend the capitalist framework if the political revolution takes place in a capitalist world, ultimately because the economy dominates politics more than political will can dominate the economy.

In any case, it was and is breathtakingly utopian to think that an attempted seizing of the state in an advanced and still overwhelmingly capitalist country, however crisis-ridden its economy, could ever succeed, because the ruling class has a monopoly over the most sophisticated and destructive means of violence available in the world. Even rebellions in relatively primitive countries have almost always been crushed, first because the ruling classes there had disproportionate access to means of violence, and second because the ruling classes in more advanced countries could send their even more sophisticated instruments of warfare to these countries in order to put down the revolution. But if a mass rebellion came close to overthrowing the regime of one of the core capitalist nations, as opposed to a peripheral one, the reaction of ruling classes worldwide would be nearly apocalyptic. They would likely prefer the nuclear destruction of civilization to permitting the working class or some subsection of it to take over a central capitalist state.

Thus, the only possible way-and the only Marxist way-for a transition out of capitalism to occur is that it be grounded in, and organized on the basis of, the new, gradually and widely emerging production relations themselves. This is the condition that has been absent in all attempts at revolution so far, and it explains why, aside from a few isolated pockets of momentary socialism (such as Catalonia in 1936), [7] they never managed to transcend a kind of state capitalism. They existed in a capitalist world, so they were constrained by the institutional limits of that world.

Ironically, Marx understood that this would be the case unless the revolution was international. He understood that "socialism in one country" is impossible. He knew that unless a revolution in Russia triggered or coincided with revolutions elsewhere, which on an international scale worked together, so to speak, to build a socialist mode of production, it was doomed to failure. What he did not understand was that the only way a revolution can be international is that it happen in a vaguely similar way to the centuries-long "bourgeois revolution" in Europe and North America, namely by sprouting first on the local level, the municipal level, the regional level, and expanding on that "grassroots" basis. The hope that the states and ruling classes of many nations can fall at approximately the same time to a succession of national uprisings of workers-which is the only way that Marx's conception of revolution can come to pass-was always wildly unrealistic, again because of the nature of capitalist power relations that Marxism itself clarifies.

The alternative paradigm of revolution sketched here is not only more logically consistent and realistic; it is also the only one appropriate to the twenty-first century. For we are beginning to see the glimmers of new production relations on which a future society will have to be erected. This article is primarily theoretical, not empirical, so I will not discuss recent developments in depth. It will suffice to mention that such ideas as public banking, municipal enterprise, worker cooperatives, and participatory budgeting are becoming ever more popular, as scholar-activists like Gar Alperovitz, Richard Wolff, and Ellen Brown, and magazines such as Yes! Magazine and In These Times, publicize them.

Incipient popular movements are coalescing around anti-capitalist institutions associated with the "solidarity economy," as this cooperative political economy has been called. For many years the World Social Forum has served as a venue to promote such non-capitalist initiatives, where activists from around the world can propose new ideas, publicize their work, connect with one another, and birth new regional or transnational organizations to spread the ethos of "cooperativism." One can predict that as society descends into prolonged crisis-economic, political, social, and environmental crisis-worldwide activism on behalf of a more cooperative, democratic economy and politics will grow in influence, ultimately making possible, perhaps, a gradual transformation of the corporatist political economy of the present into something more socialistic, i.e., economically democratic.

It will certainly not be a peaceful process, as innumerable political clashes with oligarchical authorities will have to occur. And it will not be consummated in the short term, likely requiring well over a century to carve out even the basic infrastructure of a post-capitalist society. Nevertheless, given the unsustainability of the global corporate-capitalist regime, it would seem that the only alternative to complete social collapse and an ensuing Hobbesian state of nature is this slow transformation-proceeding on the foundation of slowly emerging anti-capitalist production relations-to a more democratic political economy.[8]

Another advantage of the revision I have made to Marx's conception of revolution-besides providing an analytical framework to interpret the emerging solidarity economy-is that it shows a way out of the sectarian conflicts between Marxists and anarchists that have afflicted the left since Marx's bitter fight with Bakunin. The way to transcend these old divisions is to recognize that, in its prescriptions and ideals, Marxism is not so different from certain strains of anarchism, such as anarcho-syndicalism. Indeed, properly understood, Leninist vanguardism and elitism-or any other statist version of Marxism-is less Marxian than anarcho-syndicalism, or any school of thought committed to building the new society within the shell of the old.

"Every new social structure makes organs for itself in the body of the old organism," the anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker writes. "Without this preliminary any social evolution is unthinkable. Even revolutions can only develop and mature the germs which already exist and have made their way into the consciousness of men; they cannot themselves create these germs or generate new worlds out of nothing." [9] The institutions around which anarcho-syndicalists hope to construct a new society are labor unions and labor councils-organized in federations and possessing somewhat different functions than they have in capitalist society-but whatever one thinks of these specific institutions as germs of the future, one can agree with the basic premise of prefigurative politics (or economics). And it is this that is, or should be seen as, quintessentially Marxist.

We may recall, in addition, that the "economism" of anarcho-syndicalism that Gramsci so deplored is reminiscent of Marxism's materialism and economism. Both schools of thought privilege economics over politics and culture, focusing on economic struggles and such tools of working-class agency as unions and labor councils (though Marxists have generally acknowledged the potential utility of political parties as well). For both, the class struggle is paramount. For both, workers' self-organization is the means to triumph over capitalism. James P. Cannon has a telling remark in the context of a discussion of the anarcho-syndicalist IWW: "The IWW borrowed something from Marxism; quite a bit, in fact. Its two principal weapons-the doctrine of the class struggle and the idea that the workers must accomplish their own emancipation through their own organized power-came from this mighty arsenal." [10] The very life and work of Marx evince an unshakeable commitment to the idea of working-class initiative, "self-activity" (Selbsttätigkeit ), self-organization. The word "self-activity" evolved into the even more anarchist concept of "spontaneity" under the pen of Marx's disciple Rosa Luxemburg, who devoted herself to elaborating and acting on the Marxist belief in workers' dignity, rationality, and creativity. [11]

Traditionally, anarchists and Marxists had another conviction in common (aside from their shared moral critique of capitalism and vision of an ideal, stateless society)-a mistaken one, however. Namely, they both thought that a revolutionary rupture was possible and desirable. They had a millennial faith in the coming of a redemptive moment that would, so to speak, wash away humanity's sins. By concerted action, the working class would with one fell blow, or a series of blows, overturn capitalist relations and establish socialist ones. This is the basic utopian mistake that Marxism (if purified) can prove wrong but anarchism cannot, because it lacks the theoretical equipment to do so. Even anarcho-syndicalists, despite their verbal recognition that the seeds of the new society had to be planted in the old, shared the utopian belief in a possible historical rupture, not understanding that the only feasible way to realize their "prefigurative politics" was to build up a new mode or modes of production over generations in the womb of the old regime. And the only way that would be possible is in the context of the gradual, self-inflicted deterioration of corporate capitalism, such as we are beginning to see now, in the neoliberal era.

It is neoliberalism that has carried to their global consummation the destructive tendencies of capitalism, viz., privatization, marketization, the commodification of everything, suppression of workers' power, class polarization, integration of the world under the aegis of capitalist relations of production, ever-increasing capital mobility, and consequent despoliation of the natural environment. It is neoliberalism, therefore, that, in bringing about the climax of the capitalist era-sharpening the system's contradictions to the breaking point-will end up precipitating its demise and making possible the rise of something new.

All these speculations and conceptual revisions require a more extended treatment, which I have attempted in my above-cited book Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States . Much more, for example, needs to be said about the relation between anarchism and a purified, updated Marxism. Much more can be said about the historical logic of how a gradualist global revolution will proceed, and why progressive sectors of the ruling class-not understanding the long-term revolutionary potential of local experiments in cooperativism and new types of socialism-will support it and sponsor it (as, indeed, they are already doing in the U.S. with respect to worker cooperatives). [12] Hopefully the foregoing has at least suggested fruitful avenues of research and activism, and has shown how Marxism may be made relevant-rather than antagonistic-to cooperativism, interstitial/decentralized socialism, and the solidarity economy in general. Whatever logical and political mistakes Marxists have made in the past, these (for now) "interstitial" phenomena-which of course must be supported by popular movements and constant pressure on political authorities, including all forms of "direct action"-should be seen as quintessentially Marxist, and in fact as being a key component of any viable path to a post-capitalist order.

Chris Wright has a Ph.D. in U.S. history from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and is the author of Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States and Notes of an Underground Humanist. His website is www.wrightswriting.com.

Notes

[1] This essay is a distillation of some of the ideas in Chris Wright, Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States (Bradenton, FL: Booklocker, 2014).

[2] See, for example, Arthur L. Norberg and Judy E. O'Neill, Transforming Computer Technology: Information Processing for the Pentagon, 1962-1986 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).

[3] Among many others, see Phyllis Deane, The First Industrial Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Robert Brenner, "The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism," New Left Review I/104, July-August 1977, 25-92; Rodney Hilton, ed., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1976); T. S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986); Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (New York: Verso, 1994); and Robert Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

[4] Quoted in Lenin, State and Revolution (New York: International Publishers, 1969), 15.

[5] See, e.g., ibid., 51, 52. Marx's pamphlet The Civil War in France, written in 1871, expresses an attitude close to anarchism, but it is not clear that this essay is a direct statement of his considered views. To a great extent it had to be a eulogy for the Commune and a defense of it against its bourgeois critics, not just a neutral discussion of what it did right and wrong. Elsewhere, Marx is critical of the Commune.

[6] Richard Wolff, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012), 109.

[7] See Sam Dolgoff, The Anarchist Collectives: Workers' Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, 1936-1939 (New York: Black Rose Books, 1974).

[8] On the social and political logic of such a gradual transformation, see chapter four of my Worker Cooperatives and Revolution. On the anti-capitalist institutions and initiatives mentioned above, see Gar Alperovitz, What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution (White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2013); John Restakis, Humanizing the Economy: Co-operatives in the Age of Capital (British Columbia: New Society Publishers, 2010); José Corrêa Leite, The World Social Forum: Strategies of Resistance (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005); Carmen Diana Deere and Frederick S. Royce, eds., Rural Social Movements in Latin America: Organizing for Sustainable Livelihoods (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2009); Erik Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias (New York: Verso, 2010); Ellen Brown, "Banking for California's Future," Yes! Magazine, September 14, 2011; David Dayen, "A Bank Even a Socialist Could Love," In These Times, April 17, 2017.

[9] Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice (Oakland: AK Press, 2004), 58.

[10] James P. Cannon, "The I.W.W." (1955), available at http://www.marxists.org.

[11] See, e.g., Rosa Luxemburg, "The Russian Revolution" and "Leninism or Marxism?" (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961/2000).

[12] See Wright, Worker Cooperatives and Revolution, 68, 69, 115.

Drawing Class Lines Through Critical Education: History, Education, and the Global Class War

By Derek R. Ford

The following is the foreword to Curry S. Malott's new book, History and Education: Engaging the Global Class War , just published through Peter Lang.

There is a common belief out there that capitalism is so totalizing, so all-subsuming, that even the most radical scholarship can be accommodated with its circuits of production and consumption. Curry Malott, in his newest book, History and Education: Engaging the Global Class War, seems to be out to disprove that belief. He succeeds, and in his success, he demonstrates that this belief reveals nothing about contemporary capitalism, and everything about what passes as radical scholarship today. At the base of this book, then, is a critique of-and corrective to-the deep-seated anti-communism that permeates much of the western and academic Left, especially within the U.S. Thus, it isn't just the global bourgeoisie and its representatives who will despise the contents of this book; it's likely to upset quite a few self-proclaimed and celebrated "critical scholars" inside and outside of education. One thing is for sure: after reading this book it's hard to look at the field of critical education-especially critical pedagogy-the same way. With biting critique and careful historical and theoretical analysis, Malott lays bare what he, following Sam Marcy, calls the "crossing of class lines" that characterizes so much critical scholarship. The crossing of class lines is, simply, when one finds oneself shoulder to shoulder with imperialism, shouting the same slogans ("down with authoritarianism!") and attacking the same enemy (communism).

Bringing communist theoreticians and revolutionaries into the educational conversation, Malott begins to develop a "communist pedagogy" in this book, and this pedagogy offers the field needed clarifications, historical contexts, conceptual frameworks, organizational imperatives, and future possibilities. Malott begins by tackling a question that is, for any organizer, presently absent in academia writ large today: the state. He clarifies for us what the state is and what role it plays in the revolutionary process, reminding us along the way that revolutions are, by definition "one of the most authoritarian human actions possible." Revolutions take place when one segment of society imposes its will absolutely on another segment; there is no revolution without repression. As Marx (1867/1967) put it in Capital, "Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one" (p. 703). It is only through utilizing the state and its repressive and productive powers that a new society can arise, for the bourgeoisie, as history has shown, doesn't go without a fight.

Once deposed they count their losses, regroup, find new allies, and launch campaigns of terror. The history of the communist movement has proved this without exception. Thus, to forfeit or bypass the state "is to surrender before the final battle has even begun." Just months after the exploited masses of Russia took power in 1917 they were under attack from 14 imperialist armies, each of which was in coordination with the White Army that served Russia's former capitalists and landlords. When Cuban guerrillas overthrew the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship in their country, it wasn't long before the U.S. invaded the island. The CIA's forces were repelled by the armed Cuban masses, but the campaign against Cuba continued with assassinations and terrorist attacks. There were plans for another U.S. military intervention, and these plans were changed only when the Soviet Union sent medium-range ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads to the country. There is a reason that imperialist politicians constantly denounce any attempt by an independent government to acquire a nuclear weapon-and it isn't because they hate bombs. They don't care that Israel has a nuclear weapons arsenal and that it has never allowed international inspection of its nuclear capabilities, and they aren't dismantling their own nuclear weapons. Instead, they are attacking the DPRK for its nuclear capability, and they are denouncing Iran's alleged attempts at a nuclear weapons program (which isn't documented). They bully countries into dismantling nuclear weapons programs, imposing deathly sanctions and threatening more war. It is interesting to note that the two governments who have complied with U.S. dictates to abandon nuclear weapons development were Iraq and Libya. Both governments were overthrown after they complied. What is the lesson here?

The establishment of the Soviet Union in 1917 and the Communist International in 1919 provided a new hope for the world's oppressed. This hope wasn't merely ideological, but was also material. As Malott shows, the Soviet Union was the center of gravity in the proletarian struggle for much of the 20th century. It was the armory from which the world's oppressed drew their weapons to overthrow their oppressors and it fertilized a counter-hegemonic bloc to imperialism, allowing the class war against the bourgeoisie to take on a truly global character for the first time in history. On the one side of the war stood the imperialist states and their puppet governments, and on the other side stood the socialist states and the anti-colonial states.

This was a beautiful period of struggle for humanity, although it wasn't without its setbacks and its errors. Yet Malott argues that there is a crucial difference between critiquing the leadership or policy of a socialist state and critiquing that state's social system. And here is where his criticism of critical pedagogy is most severe: critical pedagogy turned its weapons of critique against the social systems of the proletarian class camp, thereby crossing class lines. Malott provides several historical and contemporary examples of pedagogues such as Henry Giroux who not only denounce the proletarian camp, but even go so far as to equate the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany-its literal opposite. Democracy is opposed to totalitarianism in critical pedagogy, which is exactly how Winston Churchill framed the world struggle in his famous "Iron Curtain" speech in Missouri on March 5, 1946. Talk about crossing class lines!

There is a material basis for such class collaboration, and a history of it that stretches back over 100 years with the betrayal of the Socialist International, which was the grouping of mass socialist parties. In 1912, the Socialist International met in Basel, Switzerland for an emergency meeting. The outbreak of an inter-imperialist war was imminent, and the socialist movement needed an orientation. The outcome of the meeting was clear: in the outbreak of inter-imperialist war all socialists should oppose the war and refuse to fire on workers of other countries. For those parties with representatives in parliament this meant that they had to vote against any war credits. When push came to shove, however, the overwhelming majority of the socialist parties capitulated to imperialism, and united with their national ruling classes. The Socialist International collapsed.

Why did this happen? How was it that the parties of working class revolution united with their class enemies? Lenin answered these questions in his work on imperialism. Monopoly profits extracted by imperialist powers, those profits "obtained over and above the profits which capitalists squeeze out of the workers of their 'own' country" made it "possible to bribe the labour leaders and the upper stratum of the labour aristocracy" (p. 9). These monopoly profits provided the material basis for national chauvinism and reformism, the latter of which can be defined as sacrificing the gains of the entire working class for the short-term gains of a particular section of the working class. The socialist parties that betrayed the working class, like the German Social Democratic Party, were able to keep their offices, their newspapers, their positions in parliament, and so on. The Bolsheviks, who stayed loyal to the proletarian revolution, were driven underground and their parliamentary representatives were arrested.

It's not too hard to see, then, why what Malott calls "anti-socialist socialism" is so prevalent in the academy. We are back at the limits of what counts as radical today. There are limits. You can be a socialist in the academy, but only after you denounce every socialist country and the history of the communist movement. All you need to do is add a few quick lines dismissing the Soviet Union as "totalitarian" and you will be all set, no need to worry about your tenure and promotion. It will help, too, if you stick to teaching and writing about this critical stuff, and refrain from organizing and agitating.

We should hope that these critical scholars will engage with Malott's ideas and arguments, and do the only logical thing: repudiate their previous writings and actions. This is what Malott has done in and with this book, which is an honest political self-critique. He writes of his "long journey of self-reflection and de-indoctrination." Malott's work has been heavily influenced by the revolutionary critical pedagogy of Peter McLaren. More than anyone else, McLaren has been instrumental in bringing Marx into the field of education, and this book is certainly situated within the opening at McLaren's work has created. McLaren turned to Marx at the height of the post-al era, and it was an uphill battle all the way. But, as Malott notes, the "fog and bigotry of anti-communism in the U.S. slowly dissipating." Indeed, the crises of capitalism and imperialism have aroused new mass movements in the U.S., from Occupy in 2011 to Black Lives Matter today. The campaign of Bernie Sanders has both capitalized on and furthered the acceptance of the word "socialism." It's now safe(r) for communists to come out of the shadows and boldly organize, and that is precisely what this manuscript represents.

Malott doesn't just formulate his program through critique, however, for he also points to several examples of organizations in the U.S. that have refused to cross class lines. Chief among these is the Black Panther Party, which clearly located itself within the context of the global class war. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was explicitly a Marxist-Leninist Party that saw itself as part of an international communist movement. Panthers distributed Mao's little red book at rallies, travelled to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, and aligned themselves with all foreign anti-imperialist governments. They developed their own application of Marxism-Leninism particular to the contours of U.S. capitalism, and they did not follow orders from any foreign communist Party, but they militantly defended all socialist formations and all people's governments. A modern day example that he gives is the Party for Socialism and Liberation, which has unflinchingly stood against imperialism.

While it is common to hear dismissals of the Soviet Union as "authoritarian" or "totalitarian," there are also the quite puzzling designations, "state socialist," or "state capitalist," or "deformed workers' state" that pop up. They are labels that intellectuals in capitalist countries put on socialist governments, because they know better. The way that one arrives at these designations is by drawing up what an ideal socialist society would look like and then comparing that to actually-existing socialism. As Malott carefully shows us, however, this is idealism pure and simple. A materialist analysis acknowledges that "the tension within the co-existence of the past, present, and future represents an unavoidable, dialectical reality that carries with it the contested curriculum of struggle." The Soviet Union, for example, erected socialism not out of advanced capitalism but out of feudalism. But socialism was constructed. It wasn't perfect, there were ebbs and flows, but capitalism was never restored. There were income differentials, sure, but there was no bourgeoisie in the Soviet Union, labor-power wasn't a commodity to be bought and sold, and the relations of production were not relations of exploitation (see Szymanski, 1979 for empirical proof of this).

When the wave of counterrevolutions in 1989-1991 overthrew socialist governments throughout Europe it was celebrated as an advance for democracy and freedom. And for the world's bourgeoisie, it was: they moved in and gobbled up the countries, making private all that was held publicly before. Isn't odd that, whenever privatization happens in the U.S. critical intellectuals decry it as "neoliberalism," but when it happens in formerly socialist states it is seen as "democratization?" Malott's analysis here cuts through this mystification, helping us see that these are just two sides of the same coin, two of global capital's strategies for accumulation. We have to resolutely oppose both.

The global proletariat today is more fragmented and dispersed as a result of this freedom and democracy. With the framework of the global class war that Malott provides we can more deeply appreciate the transformations that have taken place since 1991. There are two primary phases here. The first is an all-out imperialist offensive against all socialist and independent states and peoples. Without an effective counterweight against imperialism many independent and socialist states found themselves under the immediate threat of military and economic attack. The economic blockades on Cuba and the DPRK were immediately expanded and intensified. A new war was started against Iraq-first by military means, then by economic means, and then again by military means. Thousands of bombs were dropped on Yugoslavia, Bosnia, and Kosovo to break up the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, sending the different nations within the federation into turmoil and chaos. Panama was invaded and its President was kidnapped and taken hostage in a U.S. prison. This is the context in which the recent wars on Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Yemen must be seen (in fact, the war on Afghanistan was the first step in a new war against independent states in the Middle East). It is similar with the U.S.'s policies toward states such as Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Iran, Sudan, China, Ukraine, Zimbabwe, and Russia.

But we are in a new historical moment, and it is a vulnerable and exciting one. The U.S.-led imperialist offensive has waned; the era of uni-polar imperialism seems to be over and new counter-hegemonic blocs are forming. While the war on Iraq did overthrow the nationalist Ba'athist government, it wasn't as easy as the imperialists had imagined it. The Iraqi people waged a heroic insurgency against occupation forces, and the project of installing a new puppet government ultimately failed. In 2007-2008 the capitalist economic crisis shook the world. With the U.S. bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, a socialist tide gathered in Latin America, bringing socialist and anti-imperialist governments into power, most notably with the election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. At the same time, independent powers like China and Brazil have emerged as real economic forces. True, these states are characterized by capitalist relations of production (although that's not 100 percent true in China's case), but they are not imperialist. China, in particular, has opened up an avenue for anti-imperialist and independent governments to emerge. Chinese economic relations with the Bolivarian revolution, for example, have been critical in Venezuela's independence from U.S. imperialism.

The emergence of a counter-hegemonic bloc has thrown imperialism into crisis. The strategy of installing puppet governments is no longer feasible, for these governments can easily abandon the U.S., as happened in Iraq. In the face of this reality, Dan Glazebrook (2013) argues that the strategy of imperialism today is to generate failed and weakened states. This is a compelling way in which to understand imperialist strategy in Syria since 2011. When protests against the Syrian government began that year, imperialism seized the opportunity to initiate regime change. The West had been funding opposition groups in Syria for some time, and these groups as well as radical Islamists quickly emerged as the opposition leadership (all progressive opposition groups quickly sided with the government, as they were satisfied with the reforms instituted-including a new constitution-and aware of the threat of imperialist intervention). But Russia and China vetoed a UN Security Council resolution to wage war on the country. So for five years now the West has been waging a proxy war against Syria, and in the process has created the material basis for the emergence of Daesh-or the Islamic State in the Levant-and has facilitated weapons and money transfers to them and the al-Nusra Front, which is affiliated with al-Qaeda. Russian military intervention in Syria, which began on Sept. 30, 2015, has been essential in turning the tide of the war, allowing the Syrian Arab Army to liberate key cities from the terrorist forces. Of course, the U.S. doesn't want Daesh to get too powerful, and it can't have Daesh threatening U.S. geopolitical interests. The U.S. is flailing around trying to stay balanced on a tightrope it strung across the Middle East. If the U.S. were really interested in ending terrorism, it would immediately fall back and join in an alliance with Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah, the three groups that have actually been fighting Daesh and the terrorist groups for five years.

This is the state in which we find ourselves: imperialism is in crisis, a new counter-hegemonic bloc has formed, and social movements in the United States are gaining ground and becoming more and more militant. The veil of anti-communism is lifting. What are we to do? The question, as Malott puts it, is: "will education support the basic structures of capitalist hegemony and its domination over the Earth, or will it strive to uproot them?" This book provides us with an essential framework for understanding our history our present and, thus, for formulating the tasks ahead for critical educators. By drawing a clear class line through critical pedagogy he has offered up a new space in which to theorize and enact the possibilities of critical education.

References

Glazebrook, D. (2013). Divide and ruin: The West's imperial strategy in an age of crisis. San Francisco: Liberation Media.

Lenin, V.I. (1920/1965). Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism: A popular outline. Peking: Foreign Languages Press.

Malott, C.S. (2016). History and education: Engaging the global class war. New York: Peter Lang.

Marx, K. (1867/1967). Capital: A critical analysis of capitalist production (vol. 1). New York: International Publishers.

Syzmanski, A. (1979). Is the red flag flying? The political economy of the Soviet Union today. London: Zed Press.

Rediscovering Dialogue: An Interview with Son of Baldwin

By Devon Bowers

The following is an interview with the founder and facilitator of Son of Baldwin: "The literary, socio-political, sexual, pop culture blog. Live from Bedford-Stuyvesant."

Why have you named the page Son of Baldwin? What kind of impact has James Baldwin had on you personally?

James Baldwin was the first black gay male intellectual I had ever encountered. His work was really the first time I had seen myself, my identity (as a black gay male), and my point of view represented in art and public discourse in a way that was not meant to be mocked, dismissed, minimized, or dehumanized. His was the first work that started me on the path to thinking critically about myself, the world around me, and my place in it. In tribute to that consciousness raising (which may have come much later, if at all, had it not been for him) and in an effort to answer his final call to dig through the wreckage and use what he left behind to continue the work of trying to make the world a more just, livable, peaceful place, I named the blog "Son of Baldwin." I have been told by friends of Baldwin's family that the family is quite pleased by the work being done and they believe that I am indeed honoring his legacy. That is overwhelming and I am overjoyed.

What made you want to make a Facebook page in the first place?

Son of Baldwin originally started out as a blog via blogspot. But that space wasn't really conducive to conversation. Facebook allows for a kind of direct and extended interaction and dialogue that many other sites, including other social media, don't. And for me, the conversation is the most important part. Despite how I may sometimes come across, this isn't about me. This isn't about being able to proselytize from on high and have everyone applaud the pronouncement. This is about starting conversations and engaging other people in various communities about these causes and concerns in the effort of finding solutions to some of our most pressing social justice issues.

You talk about a number of topics, from LGBTQ rights to racism, through a critical progressive lens. How did you come to this political awakening of sorts?

I think this awakening started in my childhood. I grew up during the 70s, 80s, and 90s-a child of both Black Southern Baptist and Nation of Islam traditions-in a section of Brooklyn called Bensonhurst (infamous for the racist attack against and murder of Yousef Hawkins in 1989).

Bensonhurst, at least at that time I grew up there, was a neighborhood of primarily Italian and Irish first- and second-generation immigrants. In this neighborhood, I lived in a housing project of mostly black and Latin@ peoples right in the middle of things. We were thus surrounded, if you will, in hostile enemy territory. This made everything tenuous.

As a child and a teen, I had to plot routes home from school that would help me avoid running into the mobs of white children, teens, and adults who--with bats in hand, violence in heart, and death in mind--made a regular ritual of chasing kids of color back to the projects.

What was different for me when I got back to the projects, having often but not always escaped the battering from racists, is that the battle didn't end there. I had to then contend with the other black and Latin@ peoples who wanted to pound on my head because they perceived me as gay.

When you are not safe in any of the worlds you inhabit, you sort of don't have a choice but to become politicized. You kind of don't have a choice but to "wake up" because if you don't, you'll be murdered. Reading the works of authors like Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde, and others helped to direct these concerns and grievances, and made me feel less alone and more empowered to do something about my circumstances.

Something that I have noticed about you is that you actively allow yourself to be called out by others and acknowledge when you messed up and allow yourself to be corrected. Why do you think that this does not exist in larger political circles, especially liberal or progressive spheres?

My opinion is that this willingness to be wrong and be corrected doesn't happen in larger political circles and spheres because many of the people working within those areas actually think this work is about them. They believe that in order to be trusted and effective, they have to feign perfection and position themselves as above reproach. Can you imagine?

Many people doing this work think that in order to be trusted they have to lie. The truly sad thing about this contradiction of a strategy is how often it works, and how often complicit audiences are willing to believe the lie if it confirms their system of reality. I guess what I'm saying is that many people doing this work are politicians in the most cynical sense of the word, and that occupation is not something I have any interest in whatsoever. I'm a writer by purpose, training, and profession, and I've never pretended to be anything other than that.

In short, I think ego is at the center of this unwillingness to be incorrect.

You recently made it a requirement that people who post photos on the page to provide a written description. What prompted this?

This comes from a desire to ensure that as many people as possible are able to participate, as fully as they can, in the conversations and discourses happening in the space. Blind and Deaf/Hard of Hearing people are active members of the Son of Baldwin community and this policy makes it possible for them to be even more vibrant participants in discussions. This is one of the ways I'm trying to address my own collusion in institutionalized ableism/disableism.

What are your thoughts on online social justice work? Do you think that it can make a serious difference in people's lives and on a larger scale? (I often hear people saying that tweeting or writing doesn't really do anything.)

For starters, I think online social justice work has been a blessing in the sense that it has given a voice to many peoples and communities whose voices were often missing, excluded, or silenced in sociopolitical discussions. Additionally, the Internet has made it possible for many more people to have access to these debates and discussions, such as disabled people/people with disabilities who are often unable to access on-the-ground events because many organizers are unwilling to make accommodations, or poor peoples who simply cannot afford to travel to these events.

There are many absolutely amazing and brilliant online social justice activists doing work that honestly, truly matters, and are, despite narratives to the contrary, affecting the discourse and changing minds.

But like everything else, there is a deeply disturbing dark side to online social justice work.

One of the things I deeply dislike about much of the social justice activism and social justice spaces I've encountered is how intentionally vicious they are. And I'm not talking about viciousness between social justice activists and trolls. I'm talking about the viciousness between peoples with the same goals, but who might have different strategies for obtaining those goals. I've seen some really hateful, ugly, deeply dishonest and self-serving stuff happening in conversations in these spaces-including my own. I'm not talking about disagreements or even heated disagreements. I'm talking about full-on attempts at destroying each other-from credibility to personhood. I'm talking about people who truly get off on making others feel as small as possible so they can feel big.

I'm talking about intentionally committing violence against and silencing other people. I'm talking about people lying and slandering others with the intent of spiritually murdering them as though they were opposing a concept rather than a person. The Internet often helps with the depersonalization of people.

When you think you're arguing with, and trying to obliterate, digitized images and typed words instead of a living being, it's easier to be joyfully inhumane, spiritually toxic, and intellectually genocidal, then reward yourself by calling it "social justice." It's easy to be gleeful about shitting on an opponent (an opponent that you, yourself, manufactured for your own dubious purposes, by the way) and high-five each other about the havoc you wreaked when you can treat the carnage as a concept rather than reality.

I'm talking about people who wear the cloak of victimhood like a Trojan horse in order to sneak into the village, get close to you and- surprise- become the victimizers you never expected. There are people who use their marginalized identities and communities not for the purposes of liberation, but as a hustle, as masturbation, as a way to elevate themselves to a place where they are above reproach. I'm talking about the people who have the audacity to use "trigger" not as a real expression and sign post of lived trauma, but as a strategic pretense to silence any opinions they don't like.

It's like they play this game where the more marginalized identity boxes they can check off, the more they can't be criticized for any behavior they engage in, no matter how abusive and counterrevolutionary. Therefore, the goal is to check off as many marginalized identity boxes as they can-even if they have to invent them or pretend to belong to them. Whoever has the most, wins.

To me, that's the original pimp strategy and I guess what I'm saying is that I don't like pimps. But I have discovered that there are so many of them in this arena. Some folks are out here big pimpin' and calling it "radical" of all things.

I don't know why, but that shocked me. I did some research to determine whether this was a new phenomenon brought on by the anonymity of the Internet. What I discovered is this behavior pre-dates the Internet. Shirley Chisholm, for example, was the target of disgusting attacks by people who should have been in solidarity with her. Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison said such despicable things about James Baldwin that it would make your skin crawl. Much to my dismay, I learned this in-fighting and hostility isn't novel in any respect.

Sometimes, I've been accused of being egotistical, which, okay, fine if that's your opinion. But the truth of the matter is that I'm not trying to be a pimp at this stuff. Part of why I don't do public speaking gigs, etc. is because I'm not trying to become some kind of object of celebrity or fame. I'm not trying to become some kind of some kind of commercial figure or commodity.

I'm not trying to be that person who maneuvers themselves closer to the president in group photo opportunities because they are trying to climb some political ladder. Those people want to be "The One." Not me, though. I'm not trying to be the "go-to" expert. I'm not trying to be in the spotlight. I'm not trying to be anyone's leader. I'm not trying to make money off of this work. I'm not trying to play like I'm perfect and have all the answers. I'm learning right alongside everyone else. I'm not here to be worshiped like some god-thing, but regarded as a human being who is growing and evolving, falling down and getting back up again with increased knowledge. I'm a participant in this conversation.

But increasingly, these aren't conversations anymore. Increasingly, these are encounters with people with not-always-legit agendas trying to push those agendas as liberation strategies. These people are about switching places with the oppressor and will use whichever of the"master's tools" (as Audre Lorde called them) is necessary to do so. However, I'm not interested in being chained and I'm not interested in chaining anyone else. That, for me, is the politics of inertia and I'm interested in progress. I want everyone to be liberated.

Part of the genius of this violence-strategy that some people who call themselves marginalized employ is that it's difficult for the victim of the violence to discern whether the violence is legitimate or illegitimate. Because many of the people in this work are so committed to justice, they err on the side of it being legitimate even when it isn't. So they endure the emotional, psychic, psychological, spiritual, and sometimes even physical abuse because they're afraid if they don't, they will be labeled as a part of the problem. Speaking for myself, I've allowed people to abuse me, even flat-out lie about me on an ongoing basis, just so I wouldn't be perceived as an oppressor and anti-justice (because of the ways in which my identities intersect, in and out, with privilege and oppression and marginalization). To save my "reputation" among the social justice crowd, I've been a masochist. It's so incredibly complicated. And I do not have the answers for it. But I do have the bruises.

So, I'm no longer engaging the brutality. I'm moving away, not from the difficult and needed conversations, but from the egotistical violence. If your concept of social justice is about amassing power at the expense of other victims of hegemonic abuse, I cannot be down for your cause. And if that makes me "bad" at doing this social justice stuff, then so be it. If you need me to be the villain so you can feel like the hero in your own story, play on playa. But you'll be playing sans me. I won't give you the attention you're seeking. I will absolutely refuse to see you no matter what tricks you employ. I've got other work to do.

You are quite critical of the race and class politics of the mainstream LGBT community. Due to this split on multiple levels, from racism to ignoring transgender people, would you say that there is even a real LGBT community? How can people work towards having more inclusive spaces for marginalized LGBT members?

I would say, currently, that there may be LGTBQIA communities, plural. But the singular community that is commonly addressed in media and conversations is one that is actually serving the needs of one particular subset of the communities-namely, white, middle-to-upper class, cisgender, non-disabled, gender conforming men.

James Baldwin said back in 1984 that the gay movement was really about white people who lost their white privilege struggling and petitioning to get it back. I see no lies in that statement if the national platforms and conversations, if the faces of the movement are any indication.

I witness tons of conversations about why "black people are so homophobic" (which we can actually trace, ironically, to white colonial intervention) but relatively few to none about why "why white gay people are so racist." The answer, as Baldwin surmised, was because white gay people are still, at heart, white and Whiteness, which is inextricably linked to the idea of racial superiority, is at the root of most of our problems.

To get to a more inclusive space, people (of all races and creeds) have to give up their addiction to Whiteness and white supremacy. People (or all genders and sexualities) have to give up their addiction to patriarchy and narrow-minded views of masculinity, femininity, gender identity, and sexuality. People of all physical realities have to give up capitalism and incessant materialism, which are commodifications of humanity, and stop treating human bodies as machines that are valuable only for what they can produce for the State-a deeply ableist point of view.

The problem is convincing people to give up the things that define their current comforts. We have to get people to be willing to be uncomfortable, at least for a while, until we can figure all of this out. This may be a continuous journey, rather than a destination.

At the end of the day, what do you want people to get out of your Facebook page?

My dream for Son of Baldwin is that it serves as a place where we can have uncomfortable conversations about social justice issues without dehumanizing one another. We might occasionally yell at one another. We might occasionally have to be corrected for our errors and apologize for them. But I hope out of the consternation come viable solutions and a greater respect for each other's humanity.

Visit Son of Baldwin and get in the conversation.

Education as Pedagogy of Possibility: Shedding Dogma Through Reciprocal Learning

By Colin Jenkins and David Fields

Like a snake that sheds its skin periodically throughout its lifecycle, the human mind must develop and shed itself of intellectual skin. Its evolution is characterized by cyclical bouts of learning, reflecting and reconsidering; however, unlike the snake, which is genetically inclined to molting, the mind may not mature and regenerate without being subjected to antagonistic curiosity. This may only be accomplished through frequent and consistent mental cultivation, whereas knowledge is acquired, ideas are processed, and intellectual fruit is born. This process is cyclical in its need for reflection, but most importantly, it is evolutionary in its wanting to refine itself; and it is this constant pursuit of knowledge and validation that drives the mind to absorb substantial information and secrete insignificant data.

Human intellectualism is inherently anti-dogmatic in its need for constant reflection. This is not to say that substantive beliefs can't stand the test of time, but only that they cannot do so without being incessantly validated along the way. In spite of this, and throughout the course of history, humans have shown a tendency to submit to the crude nature of indoctrination in order to appease their subconscious desire for simplicity. And herein lies the fundamental paradox of the human race: intellectualism is naturally fluid, yet human nature is innately simplistic. We are all blessed with a mind that is essentially limitless, yet we are at the same time limited by our instinctive nature to simplify matters of complexity. And without adequate motivation, the means to confront complex issues become nothing more than a tragedy of unrealized potential.

The process of learning, whether in a formal setting or through private exploration of curiosities, is a key motivator and major catalyst in the development of intellectualism.

Critical Pedagogy and Collaborative Inquiry

Society is an immensely complex entity, the broad functioning of which cannot be captured by obscure models of positive and normative simplification. As such, it is pertinent to recognize that the art of teaching should informed by Aristotle's conviction humans, by nature, have a desire to have a complex canonical knowledge of the social world. In this sense, the social practice of education is to both encourage and equip learners with the requisite tools to express and satisfy this desire. Although this desire to know is innate, it is more-or-less shaped by social structure, which suggests that satisfying it cannot happen in isolation. With this in mind, the classroom should be a place of collaborative inquiry requiring the full participation of both students and the instructor.

The intention is to construct pedagogy of possibility, a philosophy of praxis that that attempts to build the social conditions for a reconstruction and reconstitution of social imagination. This requires an approach to teaching that does not incorporate a 'knowledge from above' perspective, which establishes a pernicious division between 'expert' and 'novice". Rather, through what C. Wright Mills defined as the sociological imagination (i.e. the linking of individual biographies to great historical events) it is necessary to instill a critical macro-structural historical orientation such that students are enabled to question what is take for granted in society, so that underlying barriers which stifle human potential are broken down.

How is this to be accomplished? Cognition requires a shift in perception such that the understanding of a concept moves beyond initial appearances. In order to concretize what might initially appear as vague and indistinct, it is quite crucial to place classroom inquiry on a foundational basis that is infused with shared understandings, wherein the "teacher" learns a bit about the background of the student body, but also brings them to the same point of entry. In this sense, any real and perceived social relations of domination and inferiority between the teacher and student, which oftentimes undermine the capacity for knowledge absorption, is systematically negated. It can be said that ideas are learned when students have rescued it from a haze of abstraction and made it concretely his or her own.

In this process of taking ownership of not only the product of knowledge, but also the process of learning, the student's former subservient state is transformed into a partnership with the instructor. "In this way," explains Paulo Freire, "the problem-posing educator constantly re-forms his reflections in the reflection of the students. The students - no longer docile listeners - are now critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher. The teacher presents the material to the students for their consideration, and re-considers her earlier considerations as the students express their own." [1] This reciprocal process is the essence of critical pedagogy.

Rejecting Authoritative Learning and Standardization

It is contended that the simplicity of relative assessments. e.g. testing, does not allow for the opportunity to learn what a student does or does not know, but, in the final instance, fosters rankism, which inevitably undermines the positive social welfare outcomes of collective learning. It is of much greater significance, thus, to enable students to own ideas with which they become familiar, such that they are encouraged to collectively share their thoughts in a way that intellectual conversation and critical examination is encouraged and maximized; this is the process by which new ideas and discoveries about the social world are engineered. Hence, the objective is to assure that misunderstandings are revealed and thus resolved, which otherwise would not be possible in a traditional classroom where collective student participation is neither promoted nor embraced. This approach is vital because it helps students develop the social consciousness necessary to understand and effectively participate in what we often colloquially define as the "real world", despite the consequences of inequality derived from the social locations of class, race, gender, etc.

The purpose of education is to strive to resolve the inherent problem of the relationship between abstract phenomena and concrete realization, not via a top-down general form of logic, but through a dialectical mechanism of motion and contradiction that elucidates the philosophical, metaphysical, epistemological, ephemeral, and ontological qualities that altogether condition the human lived experience. What is necessary is pedagogy of possibility that inculcates into the minds of students the necessary methodological lens and working concepts needed to construct critical assessments and arguments with respect to subject matter, which may, in the end, ideally, provide the effective solutions that challenge the nature of current world dynamics. The strategic goal is to transform the classroom into an arena that delves deep beneath surface meaning and received wisdom, such that percipience of the conditions that shape manifest social phenomena is holistically cultivated.

This pedagogical approach "enables teachers and students to become Subjects of the educational process by overcoming authoritarianism and an alienating intellectualism; it also enables people to overcome their false perception of reality." "No longer something to be described with deceptive words," the world "becomes the object of that transforming action by men and women which results in their humanization." [2]

Cultivating Ideas and Unlocking Potential

Even with a predisposition that governs mental potency, human intellectualism has spawned many wondrous ideas in an effort to broaden the scope of existentialism, societal living and human interaction. Throughout history, these ideas have been pushed and prodded in every direction, constantly changing and evolving through a series of metaphysical connections that flawlessly pass from one generation to the next. Those who are bold enough to push the envelope of ideology beyond accepted norms are the ultimate drivers of human civilization; for regardless of how such ideas may be embraced by the dominant culture, they are at the very least invaluable catalysts for the constant development of the human mind. And while these ideas may be abused or misinterpreted at times, they are ultimately defined by their transcendent immortality - always readily available and accessible for reconsideration through an ongoing process of learning.

The suppleness that creates such durability also leads to a vulnerability that is characterized by our subjective nature, which is limiting in its penchant for simplifying complex matters. Since the human mind is built for the fundamental purpose of troubleshooting problems that, in the most basic sense, threaten our survival, analytical skills often become secondary to the primary function of simplification. The brain confronts matters in the most efficient manner possible; so much so that it often becomes counterintuitive to undergo analysis which extends beyond the simplest explanation, even if that explanation is suspect. It is in this inherent method where dogma is born. However, the process of edification has the power to overcome innate tendencies towards reductionism. If we are to present education as a "humanist and liberating praxis" which "posits as fundamental that the people subjected to domination must fight for their emancipation," then this predisposition towards apathy - which is intensified through systems of coercive, disconnected, and hierarchical instruction - must be challenged with pedagogy that is cooperative, critical, and collaborative. The shedding of dogma is a key development in this application.

John Dewey once warned that, "Any movement that acts in terms of an 'ism becomes so involved in reaction against other 'isms that it is unwittingly controlled by them." The result of this hyper-focus on opposing views creates ideas that are formed in reaction to other 'isms "instead of by a comprehensive, constructive survey of actual needs, problems and possibilities." Our "banking" system of education which focuses on the memorization of narratives and which "achieves neither true knowledge nor true culture," consequently shapes minds that are susceptible to such reactionary thought. Because of this, the broad stigmatization of "Socratic questioning" that stems from our utilitarian nature has made the simple act of thinking quasi-revolutionary in itself.

The most obvious deterioration is related to an abandonment of critical thinking. Ironically, the arrival of a technologically-advanced, information-based society has paralleled a pedagogical culture that is enamored with the mundane nature and meaningless pursuit of encyclopedic knowledge. This corollary development is the result of a neoliberalized trifecta of corporate education models, standardization, and a total reliance on the narrative/lecture-based "banking" approach to schooling. Freire tells us:

"A careful analysis of the teacher-student relationship at any level, inside or outside the school, reveals its fundamentally narrative character. This relationship involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient listening objects (the students). The contents, whether values or empirical dimensions of reality, tend in the process of being narrated to become lifeless and petrified. Education is suffering from narration sickness." [3]

In a corporate-dominated society where human beings are only valuable in a dehumanized state (as workers and consumers), intellectualism has given way to task-mastering. Responsible thought has been replaced by a demand for quick and unrelenting decision-making. Critical thinking and thorough analysis are relegated as a sign of weakness in a society that rewards those who develop speedy conclusions, regardless of accuracy, truth or consequences. The state of our education system -increased privatization, the implementation of standardization and "common core" models, and a gradual rejection of humanities - reflects this. If education is to realize its fundamental role as "pedagogy of possibility," we must not only redirect our current path, but also steer it towards an increasingly critical and collaborative nature which empowers students through reciprocal interactions and ownership of the learning process.

Work Cited

[1] Paulo Freire. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum Books, 1993. Accessed on http://www2.webster.edu/~corbetre/philosophy/education/freire/freire-2.html

[2] Ibid

[3] Ibid