The Leninist Theory of Imperialism and Misconceptions of the "Imperialist Pyramid" Theory

[Photo: Paolo Gasparini/PHotoESPAÑA Press]

By Gabriel Gonçalves Martinez

Currently, one of the great debates going on within the international communist movement is the debate about how to characterize contemporary imperialism . In order to have a correct understanding of the subject, it is necessary that we demarcate the field with “leftist” and rightist interpretations that, unfortunately, enjoy a certain popularity. Having a correct understanding of what contemporary imperialism is will help us to fight US imperialism, the main enemy of the people, more correctly. In this article, in addition to presenting in general terms the central elements of the Leninist theory of imperialism, I will also present a brief critique of the conceptions that are being developed by the Communist Party of Greece about the existence of a call “imperialist pyramid”. This article is a modified and expanded version of an article originally written in 2014 and published in the Brazilian marxist magazine Nova Cultura.

Imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism

The Leninist theory of imperialism, distorted by revisionists of the most varied shades, constitutes a great contribution by Vladimir Ilich Lenin to the development of scientific socialism. The main work in which the Russian revolutionary addresses the problem is the book Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism. Making extensive use of general data provided by bourgeois statistics and statements by bourgeois intellectuals from the main capitalist countries, Lenin presents an “overall picture” of the capitalist world economy on the eve of the first world war. In this book, Lenin demonstrates how the world conflict of 1914-1918 was an imperialist war, which would be the wars of conquest, plunder and robbery. A “ warfor the partition of the world, for the division and redistribution of colonies, of the “spheres of influence of financial capital, etc”.

According to Lenin, capitalism has become a universal system of colonial subjugation and financial strangulation of the immense majority of the planet's population by a handful of 'advanced' countries. The world is shared by “ three rapacious powers, armed to the teeth”, which at the time would be the United States, England and Japan. This movement on the part of these three imperialist powers would drag the entire planet into their war for the sharing of their loot. In economic terms, the old competitive phase of capitalism gave way to monopoly. The growth of industry and the concentration of production become one of the most characteristic features of capitalism. Big monopoly capital exercises its dominion in the economic, political and ideological spheres. The concentration of capital rises to a gigantic level, giving rise to monopolies. Imperialism is seen by Lenin as the “last stage of capitalism”; it is dying, decaying capitalism and the threshold of the socialist revolution.

In Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, Lenin determines the main economic traits of imperialism. They are: 1st ) Concentration of production and capital reach such a high level that they give rise to monopolies, which play a decisive role in economic life. 2nd ) The fusion of banking and industrial capital gives rise to finance capital and the financial oligarchy. 3 ) The export of capital, unlike the export of goods, acquires special importance. 4th) International monopoly groups are formed that divide up the world among themselves. 5th ) It culminates the process of territorial distribution of the world among the capitalist powers.

Contrary to what some theorists said, imperialism is not a system apart from capitalism, but preserves all the foundations of such a regime. The general bases of the capitalist economy continue to exist. The means of production belong to a handful of capitalists, and the working masses continue to be exploited and oppressed. Profit is still the main objective of the capitalists and the anarchy of production continues to exist under the influence of spontaneous economic laws. The law of surplus value continues to operate under imperialism. As the title of the Lenin’s book in question suggests, imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism. Lenin also characterizes imperialism as parasitic capitalism or decaying capitalism. In imperialism, where the monopolies that pursue high monopoly profits dominate, there is a tendency towards the stagnation and decay of capitalism. Monopolies are no longer interested in the application of technical innovations in production, keeping important scientific discoveries secret by controlling the patents of such inventions. Even though this is a tendency of imperialism, it does not mean that in certain periods and sectors of the economy there is no type of development and growth of technology. Thus, in imperialism two opposite tendencies inevitably prevail: the tendency towards the growth of production and technical progress and the tendency towards the putrefaction of the economy and the containment of technical progress. According to Lenin: “ It would be a mistake to think that this tendency to putrefaction precludes the rapid growth of imperialism; in certain branches of industry, certain strata of the bourgeoisie, certain countries manifest, in the epoch of imperialism, with greater or lesser force, now one, now another, of these tendencies ”. Under imperialism, the development of technique and capitalist production proceed in an uneven and contradictory manner, causing an ever greater delay in relation to the possibilities generated by modern science. A clear militarist orientation develops in the imperialist states.

Parasitism, rentiers and militarism

In imperialism, capitalism acquires a clear parasitic character . Parasitism is one of the greatest expressions of the decomposition of the capitalist system. Under imperialism, capitalists increasingly lose ties with the production process. The vast majority of the bourgeoisie and landowners become rentiers, who are nothing more than capitalists who live off the income generated by share securities. The growth of parasitic consumption by the exploiting classes grows exponentially. The export of capital becomes an ever-increasing part of the national wealth of imperialist countries and of the profits made by the ruling classes. In the imperialist phase, the bourgeois countries become rentier states, which, through leonine loans, extort the enormous income of the debtor countries, which end up submitting themselves economically and politically to the imperialist countries. The exploitation of dominated and dependent countries is one of the main sources of obtaining high monopoly profit. A handful of capitalist countries parasitize the bodies of oppressed peoples.

Imperialist countries allocate an ever increasing part of their national income to support huge armies whose objective is to conduct imperialist wars. Militarism is a clear expression of the parasitic nature of capitalism. Imperialist wars are one of the main means that imperialist countries use to continue maintaining their high monopoly profits. The exponential growth of gigantic masses of men, who separate themselves from socially useful work to engage in the service of the exploiting classes, in the state apparatus and in the inflated sphere of circulation, is also a great demonstration of the parasitism. In imperialist countries, the dominant classes use the profits obtained by exploiting dependent countries, they systematically use bribery and the payment of high wages to corrupt a small layer of workers, qualified workers, giving rise to a bourgeoisie working aristocracy, the support base of opportunism within the working- class movement.

The division of the world in the age of imperialism

We cannot understand the Leninist theory of imperialism without understanding that at this stage of development, the world inevitably divides into a handful of oppressive nations and the vast majority of nations remain under the reins of dependence on these oppressors imperialist countries. Lenin asserted that imperialism meant the overcoming, by capital, of the milestones of national States, as well as an expansion and aggravation of the national yoke on a new historical basis. It is true that the Great October Socialist Revolution spurred a huge wave of anti-colonial struggle. Under the influence of the October ideas, millions of men and women in the dominated countries rose up to overthrow imperialist oppression. This bloody struggle for the freedom of the popular masses culminated in the emergence of popular democratic regimes in Eastern Europe and Asia , which later moved towards socialism, the Chinese Revolution being the most emblematic case. The disintegration of the colonial system also occurs and several national liberation movements, especially in Africa, had a Marxist -Leninist orientation.

Even with the end of the colonial system and the advance of the anti-imperialist struggle, at no time did the dominant capitalist countries stop attacking the people. They used all possible means in order to defeat the socialist countries, promoting the counterrevolution. Finally, they achieved an enormous victory with the dissolution of the USSR and the disappearance of the socialist regimes in Eastern Europe, which were eroded and destroyed thanks to the sabotage activity carried out by the revisionists who led the communist parties of such countries. The world would enter a new period of imperialist struggle for the partition of the world. The African countries that had gained independence fell into the clutches of neocolonialism and imperialism also intensified its offensive against Latin America and even against Russia after the dissolution of the USSR.

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It is good to remember that the countries of Latin America, with the honorable exception of Cuba, never obtained genuine national independence, even though they were no longer colonies, as was the case of African countries. After the emergence of imperialism, Latin American countries were subjected to the domination of imperialist monopolies and lost their precarious national independence. The dominance of imperialism deformed the development of dependent countries, making the emergence of an “autonomous capitalism ” unfeasible. For example, American imperialism, from 1930 onwards, intensifies its action in Brazil; it came to control – and still controls today – the main branches of the country's economy . Even if there are still some sectors that are free from its total control, given the reactionary and pro - imperialist character of the State and the ruling classes, as well as the influence of neoliberalism, little by little, such sectors being definitively controlled by the imperialist monopolies. In general terms, even though the country has recently experienced government experiences that tried to break with this trend, Brazil continues to be a dependent country.

Some misconceptions about imperialism

There is a very popular misconception about imperialism, which identifies it as something different from capitalism. Imperialism would be a “new” system that distorts the foundations of “ true capitalism”, putting the economy at the service of banks and businessmen and promoting wars. It is true that these are also characteristics of imperialism, but we can by no means claim that imperialism is something different from capitalism. All the disastrous phenomena that manifest themselves in our days and give rise to economic crises, wars, etc., are consequences of the very development of the capitalist system. The forces that defend such conceptions generally tend to deceive people by boasting about the possibility of building a “humanized capitalism” or a “ popular capitalism”. At the present time, a party that represents this trend is the Podemos of Spain and Syriza in Greece. In Brazil, there are also leftist political forces that defend similar concepts, among them, the ruling tendencies of the Workers Party of Brazil (PT) and the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL).

On the opposite side, there are those misconceptions that refuse to recognize that the main representative of imperialism in our time is US imperialism. I will use more space in the text to address this type of deviation. The parties that defend this conception argue that imperialism is a world system – an assertion that is not wrong – but reach the conclusion that all countries are imperialist, since they form part of the “imperialist pyramid”. The world chain of imperialism, which inevitably engenders the existence of oppressive and oppressed nations, is interpreted as just an opposition between “ strong capitalisms ” and “weak capitalisms”. Among those who defend such a conception are the comrades of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE). The KKE is a party with combative revolutionary traditions, which even after the counterrevolution that overthrew the socialist countries, continued to affirm Marxism-Leninism. It is one of the largest Communist Parties in Europe and one of the only European communist organizations that play a prominent role in the country in which it operates. While not the only communist and Marxist-Leninist organization in Greece, it is certainly the largest and most significant.

Let us take as a starting point for our analysis the text The KKE's Leninist Approach to Imperialism and the Imperialist Pyramid , published originally on the official website of the party, written by the International Relations Section of the Central Committee of the KKE. The KKE criticizes the mistaken use of the term “imperialism” by some right-wing opportunist organizations of European social democracy. KKE draw attention to the ability of these social-democratic parties to feed illusions among workers and other groups of the popular masses. When we make an objective analysis of the theses and conceptions of the European social-democratic parties of their most different tendencies - and here we also include parties and groups that emerged in a more recent period, initially promoting a discourse "anti-capitalist ” and “ anti-neoliberal” - we cannot but agree with certain aspects of the KKE theses. The big problem is that, despite making a more or less correct diagnosis of the erroneous nature of the positions of these parties, the conclusions reached by the Greek communists are also wrong. For the KKE, opportunism, by repeating outdated positions, “identifies imperialism as military aggression against another country, with the policy of military interventions, blockades, with the effort to revive the old colonial policy”. It is true that reducing imperialism to these positions is something too one-sided, which can engender certain misunderstandings. However, the KKE's criticism is extremely superficial, since the party forgets to point out that the opposite is also true, that is, failing to recognize that wars of aggression are intrinsic to the imperialism is also an opportunistic and dangerous position. To briefly illustrate, the KKE criticizes opportunist parties that consider Germany a danger, while labeling the Obama administration as “progressive ”. The KKE, at first, is not wrong to criticize parties that think in this way. The problem is that from this position, the KKE seems to set aside and completely abandon the problem of the existence of imperialist control by Germany in other European countries, underestimating the problem of the intensification of imperialist control about various countries , including Greece itself. Here, it is natural that the attacks of the Greek communists are aimed at the new social democracy, represented by the petty-bourgeois party, Syriza. According to KKE:

“The troika of representatives of the EU, ECB and IMF, which oversees and determines the management of internal and external debt and fiscal deficits, is seen as the main enemy, in addition to Germany itself (…) They accuse the country's bourgeois class and governing parties of being traitors, unpatriotic, subordinate and subservient to Germany, creditors and bankers. Of course, now that SYRIZA, as the new social-democratic force, has taken over the government, there is no problem in negotiating with the troika, Germany and signing new anti-people agreements.”

The problem with the above conception is not that it condemns SYRIZA 's social democracy, but rather the arguments used to condemn the reformist organization. Now, it is clear that the troika (European Commission , ECB and IMF) supervises and determines debt management. It is also evident that the Greek big bourgeoisie, allied with imperialism, as well as its parties, are traitors, not patriots and subservient to Germany, creditors and bankers. Although Germany itself is an imperialist country in a subordinate position to the United States, in the European context it is not entirely wrong to emphasize the critique of the role played by German imperialism within the European Union, although it is necessary to point out that US imperialism is the leader of the imperialist coalition that dominates not only Europe, but the entire world. Communists, by making this kind of agitation, can present themselves to the popular masses of their own countries as the true defenders of independence and national sovereignty. It is worth remembering that the consequent forces of the International Communist Movement have long recognized that the bourgeoisie has thrown away the banner of independence and national sovereignty. Stalin spoke about this in his famous speech to the XIX Congress of the CPSU already in the distant year of 1952:

“Before, the bourgeoisie believed itself to be the leader of nations , whose rights and independence it defended and placed “ above all ” . Today not even a trace of this “ national principle ” remains : the bourgeoisie sells the rights and independence of nations for dollars . The banner of independence and national sovereignty was thrown away. There is no doubt that it is up to you , representatives of the communist and democratic parties , to collect it and carry it forward, if you want to appear as the patriots of your countries and make become the leading force of nations . There is nobody else who can do it.”

By not finding necessary mediations - and there the national question could be an important vector in this direction - that put the seizure of political power by the working class and the consequent construction of socialism, the KKE ends up transforming the problem of the struggle for socialism into something merely abstract.Therefore, we can conclude that denying the national question will not help the KKE to fight the opportunist parties. It is not because the revisionists manipulate around this concept that it is necessarily wrong. In countries that suffer more intensely from the pressure of imperialism, the national question is something totally present, being an important flag to be raised by the party of the proletariat .

SYRIZA's problem is not in acknowledging these concepts – formal recognition, by the way – but in accepting to be a mere administrator of the bourgeois order, which in Greek conditions, inevitably, will be an order built so that things are exactly the way they are today, that is, so that imperialism continues to exercise its control and domination. As a petty-bourgeois force, SYRIZA does not make any criticism of the Greek bourgeois state and sowed the illusion that it would be possible to break with the condition of dependence on Greece by electoral and orderly means, respecting the norms of the European Union, without a true democratic and popular revolution led by the Greek proletariat together with its fundamental allies. For SYRIZA, it would be enough to reach the management of the bourgeois state for things to be straightened out. Unfortunately, things are not as simple as these incorrigible reformists think. Such are the correct criticisms that must be made of SYRIZA.

The KKE continues its analysis by talking about the forces that “arbitrily” use the correct Leninist thesis that in imperialism a small number of States plunder a large majority of States throughout the world. According to the Greek communists, this “arbitrary” (actually this is a Leninist definition) interpretation would make such forces identify imperialism as a reduced number of countries, while all others are subordinate, oppressed, colonies , etc. In fact, the recognition of this correct Leninist thesis has as a consequence the identification of imperialism as a world system where there are oppressor, dominant countries and dependent countries. The number of dependent and imperialist countries may change according to the development of the class struggle on a world level, but fundamentally this is exactly how things look. The countries that are “victims of powerful capitalist states ” (terms used by the KKE in it’s article) are precisely the dependent countries, while the countries that are not victims of these states these are the countries that managed to sustain some kind of sovereign position.

The Greek communists continue their article arguing that the opportunist forces present Brazil and Argentina as countries that are a positive example for overcoming the crisis. Now, any study of the general state of the economy of these countries, mainly Brazil, would easily verify that both are countries dependent on imperialism. If the opportunists, in Greece or elsewhere, use them as an example, it only demonstrates that they propose to their peoples the continuation of imperialist domination. Once again, the KKE make a mistake in the arguments used to criticize the opportunist forces. The KKE could very well point to this fundamental error of the opportunists, while demonstrating its solidarity with the people of these two Latin American nations that have suffered under imperialist rule for years .

In the same way as the right-wing opportunists of social democracy and revisionist parties, the KKE also believes that the countries of Latin America are countries that have already overcome their condition of dependence on imperialism, however, contrary to what the revisionist and social-democratic parties preach, for the Greek communists these nations would have already reached the stage of imperialist development. The KKE even puts regional economic blocs such as UNASUR, ALBA and the European Union in the same boat, even though it recognizes that the capitalist countries that form the latter are “stronger” . 

It is common knowledge that, from the mid- 1990s onwards, with the election of Hugo Chávez as president of Venezuela, several countries in Latin America began to elect leaders of nationalist and leftist parties and organizations, in a political and social phenomenon that developed as a result of various anti -neoliberal struggles that were being conducted on the continent. Countries like Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua , etc., also started to have governments that, in levels of radicalism and different transformations, expressed in a contradictory way the demands progressives of the popular masses of the region. The KKE, by denouncing the social-democratic and reformist character of many political forces that direct these transformations, loses its hand and starts to condemn en bloc the whole movement of an objectively transforming and progressive character that followed and still follows the struggles that are waged by different types of left organizations in Latin America, in their different levels of depth and radicalism. More than that, for the KKE, the Latin American countries, by reinforcing initiatives of mutual coordination, would be shaping a new imperialist economic bloc, so that it would be wrong for the communists to try to dispute and influence the course of progressive transformations initiated by nationalist and left-wing governments (even if we are still talking about a bourgeois left). 

To justify such a position, the KKE put forward its concept of “imperialist pyramid”. The conception of the “ imperialist pyramid ” , as it is presented by the KKE, is a anti-leninist and false conception, which is in contradiction with Leninism. As already stated, it denies the fundamental fact that in the world chain of imperialism there are oppressor nations and oppressed nations, as well as in practice it ends up generalizing all countries as imperialists (since they are part of of the world system of imperialism) sustaining that the contradictions would only be between the “strong and weak ” capitalist States. The KKE asserts that the strong capitalist countries divided not only the colonies, but also the non-colonized countries, hiding the fundamental fact that, from the moment these countries were divided among the strong capitalist countries (imperialist countries) they also became dependent nations. And it is precisely because they are deeply dependent, oppressed countries that their capitalism is “ weak ” compared to the capitalism of imperialist countries; not to mention that the overwhelming majority of dependent countries , especially in Latin America, Africa and Asia, still coexist with strong remnants of modes of production prior to capitalism.

Lenin stated, under imperialism the division of nations into oppressors and oppressed is inevitable.This is one of the characteristics of contemporary imperialism, although after the disintegration of the imperialist colonial system, this division has acquired new contours and configurations derived from the disintegration of the old colonial system and the emergence of the neocolonial type of domination. Evidently, since the time when Lenin formulated his theses on imperialism, this system has undergone important transformations. Obviously, such changes and transformations, far from denying and being a counterpoint to the positions developed by Lenin, actually confirm and deepen several of the trends and characteristics presented in his time by the great leader of the October Revolution. However, it would be completely wrong to recognize that the imperialist system has no undergone transformations. One of the most evident transformations is that, especially after the end of the Second World War, the previous situation marked by the parallel coexistence of several imperialist countries (USA, Japan, Germany, etc. .), was replaced by the sole hegemonic dominance of the United States as the lead country of the imperialist coalition. Countries like Germany, Japan and England, at the end of the Second World War, left fragile positions thanks to the blows that their economies suffered due to the consequences of the international conflict. The United States, on the other hand, rises by taking advantage of the fragility of its former adversaries, placing them under its tutelage through the reconfiguration of the imperialist exploitation system. Such a system is based on US financial control through the imposition of the dollar as the main reference currency in the capitalist world and the creation of a military bloc controlled by US imperialism. The KKE, stuck in the situation prevailing in the period prior to the outbreak of the First World War, is incapable of seeing such changes, oscillating, at the same time, in a merely formal defense of Lenin's reading of that time, with the misrepresentation of the essential and basic characteristics of imperialism presented by him.

Finally, we know that phenomena in the world advance and are constantly changing. A country, which is independent today, may tomorrow become a country oppressed by imperialism, just as a country oppressed by imperialism, when carrying out its anti -imperialist national democratic revolution, it can become an independent country and even move towards socialism. The KKE make a serious mistake by adopting certain views which that are diametrically opposed to the imperialist theory of Leninism.

"Bourgeois Democracy": What Do Marxists Mean By This Term?

By Scott Cooper

Republished from Left Voice.

In 1947, Winston Churchill famously said that “democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Since he wasn’t talking about a democracy based on the organized power and rule of the great majority, perhaps he was correct. He meant what Marxists call bourgeois democracy.

Liberals have always been aligned with Churchill’s endorsement of the ruling-class version of “democracy,” but for more than a hundred years, many in the workers’ movement — including some who falsely claim the Marxist mantle — have insisted that reforming bourgeois democracy can be a way to achieve “socialism.” They are dead wrong, and the main reason is their refusal to acknowledge what genuine Marxism has always taught: all forms of government have a class character. When you look at the bourgeois form of democracy through the class lens, it’s clear that it is no pathway to overcoming the fundamental class antagonisms rooted in the capitalism system. To think otherwise is to fall into a trap.

On January 20, the U.S. government again conducted it ritual of transferring power from one president to another — each successive leader beholden to and serving the interests of capital and its bourgeois regime. Joe Biden has begun his presidency with a promise to restore bourgeois democracy and rebuild faith in its institutions. All manner of people on the Left, viewing democracy in the abstract, have already bought into Biden’s electoral victory as a counterbalance to right-wing “authoritarianism” and even incipient fascism. Like the reformists of old, they too ignore the fundamental class character of bourgeois democracy, which guides every action of those who run the system on which it is based.

The class character of a form of government is precisely why we differentiate bourgeois democracy from genuine rule by the majority that constitutes the working class. By “deceiving the people and concealing from them the bourgeois character of present-day democracy,” wrote Vladimir Lenin in late 1918, those deceivers end up doing the bidding of the ruling class — our class enemy.

Bourgeois Democracy and the Aims It Serves

In combination, the institutions of bourgeois rule the Biden administration aims to “restore” constitute a bourgeois state that exists as the governmental branch of an overall system that is predicated on capital’s exploitation of the great majority of people, who must sell their labor power to survive. As Friedrich Engels wrote in 1891, “The state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy.”

We saw this just a few days ago, when police beat striking workers at the Hunts Point produce market in New York City. As if he were writing in 2021, Lenin had suggested, in another 1918 pamphlet, that if we want to understand the true role of a bourgeois democratic state, we should pay attention to “how the most democratic and republican bourgeoisie in America or Switzerland deal with workers on strike.”

Even the laws — indeed, the very concept of the “rule of law” in a bourgeois democracy — puts the lie to what the reformists would have us believe. Biden wants us to trust in those laws, but Lenin’s description of laws in a bourgeois democracy — which fits the United States to a tee — reveals again the trap of not seeing their class character:

Take the fundamental laws of modern states, take their administration, take freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, or “equality of all citizens before the law,” and you will see at every turn evidence of the hypocrisy of bourgeois democracy with which every honest and class-conscious worker is familiar. There is not a single state, however democratic, which has no loopholes or reservations in its constitution guaranteeing the bourgeoisie the possibility of dispatching troops against the workers, of proclaiming martial law, and so forth, in case of a “violation of public order,” and actually in case the exploited class “violates” its position of slavery and tries to behave in a non-slavish manner.

As the great German revolutionary communist Rosa Luxemburg made clear in 1902, “What presents itself to us as bourgeois legality is nothing but the violence of the ruling class, a violence raised to an obligatory norm from the outset.” [1]

In a bourgeois democracy, the operative principle is protecting the state and the bourgeois order. Everything is subordinated to that objective. We’ve had an opportunity to watch this principle unfold in the aftermath of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Some Republican members of Congress, representing one wing of the U.S. ruling class, incited and abetted what the other wing has called an “insurrection.” And yet, on Inauguration Day only two weeks later, we saw a number of them — presumably “seditionists” against the bourgeois regime — being normalized as the traditions of the day were played out. They made speeches, presented gifts, bumped elbows, and generally reveled with Democrats. After all, they are all members of a “bourgeois party” — and thus worthy of “protection,” as Lenin wrote:

The ruling party in a bourgeois democracy extends the protection of the minority only to another bourgeois party, while the proletariat, on all serious, profound and fundamental issues, gets martial law or pogroms, instead of the “protection of the minority.” The more highly developed a democracy is, the more imminent are pogroms or civil war in connection with any profound political divergence which is dangerous to the bourgeoisie.

Every sign points to these two wings of bourgeois democracy uniting to enact a new “anti-terrorist law” that will be used to go after the “profound political divergence” they most fear: the political organization of the working class against capitalist rule.

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Contrast with Workers’ Democracy

There is an alternative to bourgeois democracy. Marxists call it proletarian or workers’ democracy. History gives us a few examples.

A year after the Russian Revolution of 1917, what the great American writer John Reed described as a “highly complex political structure” had emerged in “all the cities and towns of the Russian land, which is upheld by the vast majority of the people and which is functioning as well as any newborn popular government ever functioned.” It was the Soviet state, based on councils (the word soviet means “councils” in Russian) of workers, soldiers, and peasants. They were elected by all those who “acquired the means of living through labor that is productive and useful to society” — in other words, by the very people a bourgeois state exists to exploit — and no one else, including employers, those in private business, and cops, all excluded.

These councils existed at both the workplace and municipal levels. Their decision-making was truly democratic, genuinely representing the majority — not the minority bourgeoisie, as in the United States. They decided, for instance, on what their factories would produce, based on human needs. And they were subject to popular recall at any time.

These local soviets elected representatives to a national assembly that helped guide the Bolshevik leadership as it wrestled with decisions for all of Russia, including foreign policy.

“No political body more sensitive and responsive to the popular will was ever invented,” wrote Reed of the soviets. His essay “Soviets in Action,” in which he gives examples of how they functioned, is well worth a close look.

Nearly a half century earlier, the Paris Commune had organized similar organs of workers’ self-rule. Like the Russian soviets, they were what Lenin described as “the direct organization of the working and exploited people themselves, which helps them to organize and administer their own state in every possible way.”

When workers have their own genuine democracy, the subordination of the working class to the bourgeoisie is smashed. Lenin gave a great example, drawing on one of the “rights” enshrined in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution: “Freedom of the press ceases to be hypocrisy, because the printing-plants and stocks of paper are taken away from the bourgeoisie.” And he described how even conducting foreign policy becomes transformed.

In no bourgeois state, not even in the most democratic, is it conducted openly. The people are deceived everywhere, and in democratic France, Switzerland, America and Britain this is done on an incomparably wider scale and in an incomparably subtler manner than in other countries. The Soviet government has torn the veil of mystery from foreign policy in a revolutionary manner [because] in the era of predatory wars and secret treaties for the “division of spheres of influence” (i.e., for the partition of the world among the capitalist bandits) this is of cardinal importance, for on it depends the question of peace, the life and death of tens of millions of people.

To revolutionary Russia’s soviets and the Paris Commune’s organs of workers’ self-rule can be added more contemporary examples. While certainly not at the state level, there are, for instance, the workers’ cooperatives that emerged in Argentina in the aftermath of a cataclysmic financial crisis in 2001, such as at the Zanon ceramic tile factory. And in Chile, during the time of the Popular Unity government, there were the cordones industriales, a grassroots movement formed by workers who occupied factories and other enterprises and ran them in the interest of the working class.

An even more recent example comes from the Mexican city of Oaxaca in 2006. When a teachers’ union went on strike, police fired on a peaceful protest and workers fought back — driving the cops out of the city. For several months, the working class and community groups, including the teachers’ union, ran the city through large, democratic assemblies as part of a broad movement known as the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO).

The general assemblies being held by striking workers at the Grandpuits refinery in France today, where the trade unionists are making the daily decisions about how to wage their struggle against the multinational oil and gas company Total that is trying to destroy their jobs, are the direct descendants of these earlier examples — and point the way forward for rank-and-file democracy and assemblies in unions and social movements throughout the world. 

“Proletarian democracy is a million times more democratic than any bourgeois democracy,” wrote Lenin. He continued,

Soviet power is a million times more democratic than the most democratic bourgeois republic. To fail to see this one must either deliberately serve the bourgeoisie, or be politically as dead as a doornail, unable to see real life from behind the dusty pages of bourgeois books, be thoroughly imbued with bourgeois-democratic prejudices, and thereby objectively convert oneself into a lackey of the bourgeoisie.

What Can Our Class Do with Bourgeois Democracy?

As in most other countries with such a system, the manifestation of bourgeois democracy in the United States is a tapestry of rights won through struggle — always subject to being denied by force or being taken away altogether — and explicitly undemocratic laws and conventions. These are “always hemmed in by the narrow limits set by capitalist exploitation,” as Lenin wrote. Socialists, and the working class more broadly, have a responsibility to protect those rights and seek to expand them, while at the same time advancing democracy — even in its bourgeois context — by fighting those narrow limits.

In this country, many of those limits are most explicit in the electoral sphere — and they provide a list of what we ought to be fighting for locally and nationally. This includes abolishing the racist Electoral College and the U.S. Senate, which gives disproportionate power to a small minority of the U.S. population. It includes demanding the end to the atrocious restrictions on the ability to vote (a right not even enshrined in the U.S. Constitution) and outright voter suppression. It includes fighting to dismantle all the obstacles to ballot access that make it nearly impossible for any party other than those of the bourgeoisie to run candidates. Together, these limits reveal the truly undemocratic nature of the U.S. bourgeois regime. It all adds up, as Marx is said to have noted, to a “democracy” in which “the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament!”

Today, living in a bourgeois-democratic country is the backdrop to all of our struggles. That is no less a fact in our daily fights against the ongoing social and economic assault of capitalism than it is when the bourgeois regime unleashes police brutality or helps throw us out of our jobs to protect the profits of the minority class. But that doesn’t mean we cannot use bourgeois democracy to our advantage, not only in the immediate sense but even to build a revolutionary movement. It depends on clarity and on not buying into the notion that reforming bourgeois democracy is the path to our liberation from capitalist oppression. As Leon Trotsky wrote in 1932:

In the course of many decades, the workers have built up within the bourgeois democracy, by utilizing it, by fighting against it, their own strongholds and bases of proletarian democracy: the trade unions, the political parties, the educational and sport clubs, the co-operatives, etc. The proletariat cannot attain power within the formal limits of bourgeois democracy, but can do so only by taking the road of revolution: this has been proved both by theory and experience. And these bulwarks of workers’ democracy within the bourgeois state are absolutely essential for the taking of the revolutionary road.

Lenin wrote in 1918 that bourgeois democracy “always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor.” Anyone who tells you otherwise is, as Lenin noted, is “in practice” abandoning the proletariat and standing on the side of the bourgeoisie. Here, in the pages of Left Voice, we do our best to draw the distinction every time and stand firmly on the side of workers’ democracy. It is part of taking up the task that Trotsky spelled out for our time: take the road of revolution.

Notes

[1] Rosa Luxemburg, “Yet a Third Time on the Belgian Experiment,” Die Neue Zeit, May 14, 1902.

Internationalism Today: An Interview with Paweł Wargan

By Daniel Benson

Republished from Monthly Review.

What does a progressive foreign policy look like today? How should we understand imperialism? What is at stake in reclaiming an internationalist political horizon for the left? What forms of organization are best adapted for a new international? Given the many contemporary global challenges—such as climate change, far-right extremism, pandemics, and the increasing threat of nuclear war—it is urgent to develop a strategic, organizational, and theoretical perspective for the international left. Paweł Wargan discusses these and other questions in the interview that follows. Researcher, activist, and coordinator of the secretariat of the Progressive International, Wargan is well suited to highlight the prospects for a new internationalism today. The interview is conducted by Daniel Benson, assistant professor of French and Global Studies at St. Francis College and the editor of Domination and Emancipation: Remaking Critique (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2021).

Daniel Benson: I’d like to begin with a discussion of your overall political perspective and development. What are some of the main events or intellectual influences that have impacted your current writing and activism?

Paweł Wargan: I worked in public policy when the last great wave of climate activism emerged. Every Friday, I would make my way through crowds of protesting schoolkids to get to work. Occasionally, some would block the roads. What struck me was that the ideas expressed in these spaces carried a clarity, a creativity, and an urgency that I never saw at work—where ideas were staid, unambitious, never coming close to addressing the urgency of the moment. So, I took to the streets.

You learn through struggle. You build confidence through struggle. You begin to articulate the reasons for your struggle and develop a feel for the possibilities it opens. The great challenge, I learned over time, is that it’s not enough to have good ideas. In large parts of our movements, demands for “system change” resolve into a politics of advocacy that focuses on appealing to existing institutions rather than building new ones. The very form of these protests—they are often held outside government buildings—speaks to that relationship of supplication. We entreat our ruling classes to deliver something that is not in their power to deliver. And we become despondent when we fail. This reflects a poverty of imagination, which has been carefully cultivated by the ideological machinery of capitalism.

Not long after, I had what you might call a eureka moment. I was working on a long report that envisioned what a green transition might look like in Europe. One day, I was editing a section submitted by an Italian architect. In it, he argued that to build sustainable cities Europe needed to shift to prefabricated, high-rise apartment blocks surrounded by parks and public amenities. I was living in Moscow at the time, on the fourteenth floor of a prefabricated high-rise apartment block surrounded by parks and public amenities. I looked out the kitchen window and wondered: What was this society that, many decades ago, began to build the future we are only now envisioning? That led me to study processes of socialist construction.

Fidel Castro once said that when he first read The Communist Manifesto, he began to find explanations for phenomena that are typically explained in terms of individual human failings—moral failings. He began to understand, he said, the historical processes and social processes that produce both great wealth and terrible immiseration. You don’t need a map or microscope to see class divisions, he said. I think about that often. What Castro meant—and what you learn from reading revolutionaries like Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, V. I. Lenin, Walter Rodney, and others—is that there are observable processes of contradiction and class antagonism that shape the world. The job of the left is not to hover above these processes and preach progressive ideas. This is the domain of idealism, of liberalism. You can’t build the future with ideas. You can’t repair the environment with ideas. You can’t feed the hungry with ideas. Our job is to build power through struggle, at every step seeking to institutionalize that power, building structures that can realize the aspirations of the people. That is what the great processes of socialist construction—past and present—teach us.

DB: I agree that building institutions on the left is vital. I think there is an increasing consciousness among left-leaning thinkers, activists, and scholars of the need to focus on organizational issues, on strategy, on building power, and not merely on symbolic gestures or purely theoretical problems. But recent history has shown the difficulty of creating lasting institutional change: from the anti-World Trade Organization protests of 1999 in Seattle to the Iraq War protests of 2003 to the Occupy movements of 2011. Moreover, even when leftist parties can organize and achieve political power at the national level (for instance, Syriza in 2015), they have proven incapable of challenging dominant global institutions. Or, turning to the Global South, progressive projects have struggled to freely develop (Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, among others) in large part due to U.S. imperialism.

I’d like to turn, then, to the question of internationalism and how it relates to building power on the left. I feel that many individuals, students, and even progressive activists see international politics as distant from their everyday life or local struggles. This is very different from, say, the long 1960s, where resistance to the Vietnam War, decolonization, and socialist construction were seen as interrelated and part of the same struggle. Could you explain, first, why internationalism is important to building progressive, leftist institutions? And, second, why you propose the Third International, or Communist International, as an important resource to rebuild internationalism in the contemporary moment?

PW: There is a story I have heard repeatedly—the cast changes, the setting changes, but the story stays roughly the same. Moved by the exploits of Che Guevara, an enthusiastic U.S. socialist travels to Nicaragua. He visits the encampments of the Sandinista movement, which is waging armed struggle against the U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship. “I want to join your struggle,” they say. “What can I do to help you?” The response is blunt: “Go home and make a revolution in the United States.”

The answer tells us two important things about internationalism.

First, the struggle of the Sandinista movement does not occur in isolation. It takes place against the backdrop of overwhelming U.S. imperial violence, which is the international extension of its oppressive, racist, and colonial politics at home. In the 1980s, Nicaragua was subjected to an economic and military blockade. Its harbors were mined. The Contras—a fascist force that massacred hundreds of thousands of people across Latin America—were covertly armed and trained to destroy the aspirations of the people. There was a very real need to sever the threads that bound Nicaragua’s brutal immiseration with the prosperity of the U.S. ruling classes—and that necessitated building a revolution in the United States.

Second, the construction of a revolutionary process is in itself an internationalist act. What can you do for the people of Haiti, or the people of Cuba, or the people of Western Sahara, or the people of Palestine, or the people of Venezuela as an individual, without first building power? Can you send them a tanker of oil? Can you send them a container of medical supplies? Can you help them build modern industrial capacities—or support their green transition? The degree of our collective power at home, and the political orientation of our movements, dictates the shape of our commitments abroad.

In 1918, Lenin wrote a piece railing against those who sided with their governments in the First World War. In privileging the “defense” of their countries over the overthrow of those responsible for the war, he wrote, these forces substituted internationalism with a petty nationalism—backing a predatory capitalist and imperialist leadership against the imperative of peace and social revolution. In the end, Lenin said, the position of the Bolsheviks was vindicated. The October Revolution generated the ideas, strategies, and theories that came to power a global revolutionary movement. Like messengers from the future, the Russian people pierced through the terrors of capitalism, and revealed a path forward.

Turning that path into a highway was, to a great degree, the mission of the Third International. Through it, Lenin said, the nascent USSR would lend a “helping hand” to peoples seeking emancipation from colonialism. That mission was born from a thesis that echoes in our story from Nicaragua. The thesis is that European capitalism draws its strength not from its industrial prowess, but from the systematic looting of its colonies. That same process both feeds and clothes the European working class, suppressing their revolutionary aspirations, and generates the material power that sustains their exploitation. The police forces, prisons, weapons, and tactics tested and honed in the colonies are always, after all, readily turned against workers back home. The primary duty of internationalism, then, is to strike at capitalism’s foundations: colonialism and imperialism.

These ideas carry great weight in our time. Whenever we—ensconced in the comforts of the imperial world—advance ideas for the reform of the capitalist system, we are effectively saying: “We don’t care that over two billion people go to bed hungry. We don’t care that hundreds of millions already live in a wrecked climate. We don’t care for the people who suffocate under the weight of our sanctions. Their plight doesn’t concern us.” The theories of the Third International teach us that the power of our ruling classes is the mirror image of the immiseration of the great planetary majority. Now, as countries and peoples begin to assert themselves against U.S. hegemony and its drive towards nuclear and environmental exterminism, our task is to build power with the grain of that historical process—not against it. Now, more than at any point in human history, is the time to build a revolutionary struggle grounded in clear anti-imperialist politics.

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DB: Let’s turn to concrete organizational questions of how to build such a revolutionary movement. The late Marxist scholar and activist Samir Amin was an active participate in organizing across borders and bridging the divide between the Global North and Global South. Amin called for launching a “Fifth International” in 2006 or a “New International” just before his death in 2018. The latter call generated important discussion among scholars, theorists, and activists about how best to “do” politics in the context of neoliberal globalization. Much of the debate revolves around two issues: (1) the longstanding debate on the left of finding the right balance between a “horizontalist” perspective (democratic, pluralist, non-hierarchical, open to various ideological tendencies) and a “verticalist” one (strict criteria of membership, centralized decision-making); and (2) what is the right or appropriate level (local, national, international, global) at which to organize.

What are some of the organizational challenges and successes you’ve encountered in your own experience building left internationalism today?

PW: Organization is simply the way in which we store and instantiate our collective capacity to act—coming into contact with others, forming communities, building confidence, and making the strategic and programmatic decisions about the future that we want to build.

How helpful is the distinction between the “horizontal” and the “vertical”? In my mind, those who reflexively privilege the “horizontal” over the “vertical” cling to the view—cultivated to a great extent in the anti-communist project—that the outcomes we want can spontaneously materialize without us actively pursuing them. That when things become bad enough, the anger of the masses will translate into change. Instead, as movements have repeatedly learned, a commitment to extreme “horizontalism” operates as an obstacle to unity and provides fertile ground for the emergence of invisible hierarchies that immobilize and breed discontent. Equally, organizations that are sometimes derided as “vertical” made tremendous leaps in what we might now call inclusivity. For the first time in history, Lenin’s Comintern brought the demands of women, anticolonial movements, national liberation movements, Black liberation movements, and others under its banner—translating diversity into collective power grounded in a shared analysis of the political situation.

We need to build institutions prepared to address the profound challenges that confront humanity. What are these challenges? In his proposal for a new international, Amin described the U.S.-led imperialist system as totalitarian. I side with Domenico Losurdo in questioning the integrity of that concept, but in this case it is perhaps uniquely appropriate. Capitalism and imperialism sever our connection to the productive process, to nature, to other human beings, and to our own imaginations. We become trapped in a world of imposed ideas, imposed structures. The history we learn, the clothes we wear, the possibilities that we ascribe to the future—these are not ours. They form through the operation of capital accumulation at the global scale, a process that we sometimes euphemistically describe as “globalization,” but which is more accurately understood as imperialism. Extreme violence has been wielded—and continues to be wielded—to preserve this system. Its primary function, as Amin reminds us, is to preserve the “historical privilege” of the colonizers to pillage the resources and exploit the workers of the Global South. But the system is not inevitable.

Marx and Engels devoted their lives to showing that historical processes are not arbitrary. They have motor forces that can be studied and whose movements can be charted. The interaction of these forces generates tensions, or contradictions, that manifest in different ways at different times in our history. Revolutionary processes that ended the enslavement of human beings gave way to a new system of economic organization in which the primary contradiction was between workers and factory owners, or, elsewhere, peasants and landlords. History has shown that these contradictions can be overcome, but only through the collective efforts of the people. This cannot happen spontaneously, and it cannot happen if we cling to the false belief that the previous system can be redeemed or reformed—that a fairer slavery is possible, or that a fairer imperialism is possible. So, one of the primary tasks—and challenges—of the internationalist is to break through the structures of alienation that imprison our minds, our bodies, and our societies.

What does that mean in practice? It means creating the conditions by which peoples and movements from disparate parts of the world can learn from one another and become aware of one another’s fundamental interconnection—overcoming, for example, the idea that the struggle of the Amazon warehouse worker in the United States is separate from the struggle of the garment worker in Bangladesh. When we buy a pair of jeans on Amazon, we wear the labor of the textile weaver in Dhaka. And in that labor, we find the sources both of our collective power and of Amazon’s monopoly power. Our power exists in the socialization of production, in the fact that manufacturing is a collective process and a set of social relations that can be disrupted or captured by the organized working class. Amazon’s power is born of the surplus value generated by its capacity to exploit, dispossess, and plunder, both at home and abroad—a “historical privilege” currently protected by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the 800 U.S. military bases that circle the globe, a sanctions regime that suffocates states seeking to embark on paths of sovereign development, and other infrastructures of economic and military coercion.

But understanding is one part of the puzzle. Sloganeering, however radical, can only take us so far. How can we help build the trade unions in Bangladesh, who are resisting international capital and its agents in government? And how do we politicize the popular movements in the United States that hold the capacity to sever imperialism’s grip on the rest of the world, but largely eschew anti-imperialism as a political horizon? There is a dynamic interplay here between the local sites of organization and action, the transnational networks that seek to unite and coordinate that action in a programmatically coherent way, and the global horizon, where the framework of imperialist globalization reveals to us the threads by which our struggles are connected. The geographic scale of action must dynamically respond to the conditions it confronts. That is why, to me, an International must be a laboratory of political action—grounded in a comprehensive theory of the political and economic conjuncture, faithful to the historical tradition it builds upon, but not dogmatically wedded to this or that organizational template.

DB: I’d like to ask you a question about language and terminology. Specifically, the difficultly in effectively framing and articulating a left internationalist laboratory you describe. Since the rise of neoliberal globalization, which kicked into high gear after the dismantling of the Soviet Union, the very vocabulary of internationalism itself has given way to terms like global justice, global citizenship, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism. These terms are all palatable to a world in which nation-states have become subordinate to global finance. Such terms have seeped into progressive social movements, NGOs, institutions of higher education, and United Nations entities, at least in part to disengage and disassociate from, or simply reject, an entire history of internationalist struggle that you touched on earlier. What is at stake in reclaiming internationalism as a political horizon today?

PW: The Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński—among my earliest political influences— compared history to a river. On the surface, he said, the water moves quickly. Beneath the surface, the flow is steadier. Similarly, events pass us by quickly, but in their multitude we can observe stable structures and patterns of thought, which change over long historical epochs. I start here because internationalism carries within it concrete traditions of thought and action that we derive from Marxism, which contain within them a view of the river’s slow undercurrent.

The most important of these is dialectical and historical materialism, an analytical method that teaches us to train our eye not on individual events, but on the movement of history. The dominant philosophy of our time compels us to see only the surface of the river, only the quick succession of events. But these events pass us by with astonishing speed. We struggle to discern patterns, we become overwhelmed. Unable to situate developments in the world within their proper context, we begin to suffer from amnesia. We forget our history. Our creativity is imprisoned because we lose the ability to relate our actions to reality. And our politics resolve into idealism: we believe that a just world can be imagined into being; that our system can be transformed by gradual reform; or that nothing can really be done. Rodney outlined three features of this bourgeois perspective. First, it purports to speak for all of humanity rather than a particular class—the logic that says, “we are all in this together.” Second, it is highly subjective, claiming universal truths while concealing its ideological commitments—just look at the entire field of economics! Third, it refuses to acknowledge contradictions.

Marxism repudiates these notions. It teaches us that historical movement is a product of contradictions between and within things. You cannot have poverty without wealth, a proletariat without a bourgeoisie. The position of these classes reflects their relationship with the material world, with the means of production. The ideas that each group subscribes to also relate to their material environment, to their class position. Idealism is the philosophy of the bourgeoisie, while communism is the philosophy of the workers and oppressed peoples. And central to the communist tradition is the idea that collective human effort can resolve contradictions in favor of the oppressed. In his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, Marx wrote that “philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.” Marx was not just a thinker. He founded the International Workingmen’s Association, the First International, which emerged in part from textile workers’ opposition to British involvement in the U.S. Civil War. At the time, Lord Palmerston’s government was plotting to intervene on the side of the Confederacy. The workers of Britain saved Western Europe, Marx said in his inaugural speech to the First International, from plunging into “an infamous crusade for the propagation of slavery on the other side of the Atlantic.” The conviction that we have the capacity to change the world—that it is our duty to change the world—is inseparable from the tradition of internationalism, which is a communist tradition.

Today, with their imaginations stymied by old, unchanging ways of thought, many organizations do not set out to change the world, because they do not exist in the world. They do not exist among children who struggle to eat, or the workers who struggle to make ends meet, or the peasants dispossessed from their land. They are bourgeois in their makeup. So, they subscribe to categories of thought that hold little relevance for the hungry, the poor, or the dispossessed—and the institutions they build do not serve the interests of those for whom the world must change. The language they use is a product of their class commitment, and one that has been carefully cultivated: the substitution of movements for liberation with NGOified sloganeers is an instrument of demobilization. It shields the status quo by institutionalizing bourgeois ideology.

In a sense, then, everything is at stake in reclaiming internationalism as a political tradition—and I have a very optimistic view of our prospects. Liberalism has not, cannot, and will not find answers to the complex crises facing humanity. But, from the violent, ceaseless flow of events that confront us, internationalism helps us recover sight of history’s laws of motion, and of the peoples and movements that are its engines. It reveals to us the ways in which our struggles and experiences are connected across borders, and the class dynamics that shape them. Even if they have yet to take hold, the ideas of internationalism, of socialism, are alluring to many precisely because the prevailing ideology is not ours. But, where bourgeois thought fails us, socialism shines a light through capitalism’s darkness, reclaims the past from its amnesia, and recovers hope from its futurelessness. These are our traditions, and we have nothing to fear in proclaiming them.

DB: My last question is on how to formulate a progressive, anti-imperialist foreign policy. At the end of Marx’s inaugural address you mentioned, Marx affirms that the working classes recognize “the duty to master themselves the mysteries of international politics; to watch the diplomatic acts of their respective governments; to counteract them, if necessary, by all means in their power.” Today, a lot of mystery, or deliberate mystification, swirls around international politics, not least the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Among the anti-imperialist left, the debate tends to turn on how to understand imperialism. Should imperialism be seen in the singular, as predominately U.S.-led; or are there multiple, competing imperialisms, such that Russia, China, and the United States would all be equally imperialist powers? How does this debate impact the development of a coherent foreign policy for the internationalist left today?

PW: What is imperialism? In the intellectual tradition of the left, it refers to a situation in which capitalist economies mature, the rate of profit falls, and corporations begin to look abroad for resources to extract and labor to exploit. This is the same dynamic that sees small “Main Street” businesses grow into chains, then regional conglomerates, and then into national and ultimately international monopolies. The laws of capitalism demand that expansion. Companies that fail to grow are pushed out of business or bought up by others. Then, state power is wielded to turn sovereign nations into export markets, sources of cheap resources and labor, and outlets for investment for these corporations.

Today, the United States has a degree of power that is incomparable to any empire in human history. This is a product of a particular historical moment that I situate at the end of the Second World War. Having lost 27 million lives to defeat Nazism, the Soviet Union was in tatters. Europe was ruined. China, having faced an even longer war at the heel of a century of colonial subjugation, faced a desperate situation. But the United States emerged not only unscathed, it emerged economically and militarily strengthened, cloaked beneath the terrible aura of the atomic bomb, giving it something resembling omnipotence in the international arena.

How has it wielded that power? From the very beginning, it has wielded it to suffocate humanity’s aspirations for sovereignty and democracy. In the late 1940s, the people of Korea rose up against feudalism and the brutal U.S.-backed dictatorship of Syngman Rhee, which operated death camps for suspected communists. In response, the United States destroyed the north of Korea, killing roughly a quarter of its population and destroying 85 percent of its buildings. It threatened to use nuclear weapons on several occasions. This holocaust has largely been written out of history—and its victims are now the subject of vicious and routine derision by those who sought to erase them. If you ever wondered what the world might look like had fascism prevailed, look no further than the U.S. destruction of Korea.

Then came Iran in 1953, Vietnam in 1961, Guatemala in 1954, Congo in 1956, Vietnam in 1961, Brazil in 1964, Indonesia in 1965, Chile in 1973, Nicaragua in the 1980s—the list goes on and on. Wherever the United States arrived, its parasitic capitalist model of globalization followed like a cancer, suffocating states’ capacities to respond to the needs of their people. Tens of millions of lives have been claimed by direct or proxy violence instigated by the United States, and many more from the effects of being subordinated to the U.S.-led imperial system. Roughly five million people die each year because they do not have access to adequate healthcare—a problem that socialist projects have largely eliminated. But socialism is not allowed in the U.S. template for humanity.

We may ask a counterfactual, then: How might the world look if the United States had not picked up imperialism’s mantle after the Second World War? The defeat of Japanese imperialism and the German colonial project in Eastern Europe—and we must insist on its recognition as a colonial project—severely weakened the colonial powers. It set off a process that saw the British and French empires shrink dramatically. It inaugurated a new, modern consensus for humanity, with the adoption of the UN Charter and the pursuit of decolonization. It gave great prestige to the project of state socialism. The United States pushed against these currents—against the movement of history—and built a global system through which it exerts, at the barrel of a gun, near-total financial, cultural, and political power over the vast majority of humanity. No country in history has a comparable military footprint or proven capacity for destruction.

Attempts to downplay or relativize this violence are an insidious form of apologia. More often than not, accusations of, say, “Chinese imperialism” are rooted entirely in the hypothetical: “China is building infrastructure that could allow it to become a new imperial power.” In this case, the “twin imperialisms” thesis serves to put on equal footing an unsubstantiated conjecture with the actual violence of imperialism—it puts a moral claim on equal footing with an empirical fact. As the historian Vijay Prashad has remarked, we are afraid of Huawei’s 5G towers because we are told they could be used to spy on us, but we are unconcerned by the actual spying that is carried out by the U.S. government, which Edward Snowden and others have revealed. What is this but another red scare, scaffolded in our culture by the increasingly virulent Sinophobia manufactured by the United States and its allies? There are also more surreptitious forms of this on the left: attempts to “redefine” imperialism and cleave it from its analytical tradition to make it more suitable to the particular moral commitments of the day.

This phenomenon—the denial of imperialism—is infantilizing. It confuses left strategy, because it severs our ability to relate to the actual processes of history. It immobilizes, because in a world where everything is bad, nothing is possible. And it risks producing a moment in which, as U.S. violence against China escalates, forces on the western left will side with their own blood-soaked ruling classes rather than build power against them. Guarding against these impulses is among the most important tasks of the day. The moment has arrived for us to heed Lenin’s call to turn the imperialist war into a war on the bourgeoisie that suffocates us.

Note: A French version of this interview was published by the Association Nationale des Communistes on September 18, 2023.

Theoretical and Practical Self-Determination of Indigenous Nations in the Soviet Union

By Nolan Long

Introduction: Indigeneity in the Soviet Union

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was home to huge swaths of nationalities, including numerous Indigenous nations, many of which were located in Siberia. The Russian Empire, which preceded the Soviet Union, engaged in the systematic oppression of all minority nationalities, while promoting Great Russian nationalism. [1] As a result, it was a prime issue for the Bolsheviks to address national woes and relations. The Leninist approach to nationalities enshrined the equality of nations, opposed nationalism, and supported the unconditional right to self-determination. This right bore a special class character; in essence, the working and exploited classes of Indigenous nations gained the right to self-determination, not the ruling classes. The practical policies of the Soviets largely lined up with their theoretical outlaying, suggesting good faith on the part of the state towards the Indigenous peoples of the USSR.

One aspect of the Soviet approach to nationalities is that indigeneity, as such, was not expressly considered. While Indigenous nations were, in some cases, afforded special privileges, [2] Indigenous groups were firstly seen as minority nationalities, not as Indigenous nationalities. But it was because of the positive Soviet policy toward minority nationalities that Indigenous rights were, in some sense inadvertently, protected. The Soviet approach to national self-determination allowed Indigenous groups in the Soviet Union to flourish and experience a relatively high quality of living and independence, despite the lack of direct recognition of that indigeneity.

Indigenous groups in the Russian SFSR existed primarily in the North and the Far East. [3] Under the policy of the Russian Empire, the Indigenous peoples of these lands were negatively affected by the tsarist government. They were subjected to European diseases, resource extraction, settler colonialism, and induced alcoholism. [4] Contrastingly, the Soviet policy towards Indigenous groups was based on development, socialism, and the right of nations to self-determination.  This essay deals with Soviet Indigenous groups generally while occasionally looking at the Yakut for specificity. The Sakha/Yakut are an Indigenous group in Siberia who, during the Soviet era, maintained their ancient cultural practices (such as reindeer breeding) while also industrially developing under Soviet policy. [5] The Yakut had their own autonomous region, which allowed them to maintain their own culture. [6] Soviet policy stated that Indigenous groups with a population over 50,000 were to be recognized as ethnic minorities, rather than Indigenous as such. [7] However, the Indigenous groups with populations over this threshold (including the Yakut) were allowed to assemble into ASSRs with the right to self-determination. [8] The Soviet approach was complex due to this mutual recognition of the right of nations to self-determination, and the lack of recognition of the status of certain Indigenous groups. This dichotomy necessitates a study into the theoretical policy of the Bolsheviks.

The Theoretical Marxist-Leninist Approach to Nationalities and Self-Determination

In 1914, V.I. Lenin wrote, “self-determination of nations means the political separation of these nations from alien national bodies, and the formation of an independent national state.” [9] It is undeniable that the Soviet conceptions of nations and self-determination differed significantly from the Western ones. [10] J.V. Stalin added to this definition: “the right to self-determination means that only the nation itself has the right to determine its destiny, that no one has the right forcibly to interfere in the life of that nation, to destroy its schools and other institutions, to violate its habits and customs, to repress its language, or curtail its rights.” [11] This conception mapped out the later Soviet practice, which allowed for the political independence of Finland and the Baltic states shortly after the Russian Revolution, even while the Western nations opposed Soviet support for self-determination. [12]

Western opposition to the self-determination of nations, in the Soviet sense, was opposition to the emancipation of Indigenous and minority nations from tsarist rule, as well as opposition to socialist sovereignty. Gerald Taiaiake Alfred argues that the Western model of sovereignty is incompatible with Indigenous governance methods/structures. Indigenous governance is traditionally without absolute authority, hierarchy, or classism. [13] In comparison, the Soviet model of sovereignty, derived from its theory of nations and the right to self-determination, seems to be more compatible with Indigenous society and governance, given its tendency towards class abolition.

But while Finland, the Baltic states, and others gained their independence on the basis of Soviet support for self-determination, none of the many Indigenous nations did. Whether this is because the Bolsheviks opposed the rights of Indigenous nations to secession, or because these nations did not want to secede, is undeniably a debated topic. However, the evidence seems to show that Indigenous groups (at least their previously exploited classes) supported the new government. For example, communists were at work in the Yakutia working-class and peasantry. [14] So, while they did not become independent, the Indigenous nations generally seem to have been in support of the new Russian Soviet Socialist state nonetheless.

The Leninist approach recognized the necessity of nations to be able to pursue their own paths of development and to protect their own cultures.  This doctrine was derived from two related sources: fighting Great Russian nationalism [15] and adhering to proletarian internationalism. [16] Great Russian nationalism was that of the dominating nationality, of the ruling class of the Russian Empire. As the Bolsheviks believed in the equality of nations, [17] they believed in the necessity of fighting this nationalism in tandem with their struggle against Russian tsarism and capitalism. Proletarian internationalism is the belief that the working classes of all nations should share a sense of brotherhood in their mutual struggles against their respective ruling classes. Resultingly, Lenin believed it was in the interests of the Great Russian proletariat to struggle against the oppression that their bourgeoisie imposed upon minority nations. [18] “The Leninist position is made up of two intersecting tendencies: an internationalist outlook, and a support for the right to self-determination.” [19]

The Bolshevik leaders said relatively little about indigeneity. Rather, they focused on the ‘national question,’ and thus viewed Indigenous nations as minority nationalities in most cases. Consequently, the Soviet Indigenous policy was bound up in the national policy. Lenin did not say whether Indigenous groups should receive special status, but he “asserted the absolute, unconditional right of peoples to self-determination, including secession from a future socialist state.” [20] Stalin did not say whether Indigenous groups should receive political independence, but said that all minority nationalities (thus inclusive of Indigenous groups) have the right “to arrange its life on the basis of autonomy…[and] the right to complete secession.” [21] This silence on the question of Indigeneity is at least partially attributable to the fact that the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik Party existed well before the modern centrality of Indigenous rights and politics on national and global stages. Nonetheless, the Soviet approach to national self-determination allowed indigenous groups in the Soviet Union to experience cultural development and protection, and levels of independence unparalleled in the Western world.

The Question of Class

Both Lenin and Stalin made it clear that the right to self-determination had a class character. Lenin wrote that the proletarian approach to self-determination “supports the bourgeoisie only in a certain direction, but never coincides with the bourgeoisie’s policy.” [22] The Russian proletariat, he said, should support the right of the oppressed nationalities to form their own state, as this right opposes Great Russian nationalism. [23] Stalin also made it clear that the right to self-determination does not mean that the socialist state should support every aspect of that national independence, at least when its independence puts it under bourgeois rule. [24] Bedford offers a concise summation: “whether support for the cultural aspirations of an ethnic group is in effect supporting the Indigenous bourgeoisie against the proletariat, or is serving to further the revolutionary struggle is the definitive question.” [25]

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The Indigenous nations of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union did, of course, have class relations, though they were quite different from those of the rest of the country. “Soviet authorities admit that the working class in Yakutia was few in numbers and contained almost no industrial proletariat.” [26] The Soviets, thus, had to consider the question of class differently in the Indigenous nations than in the non-Indigenous ones. Firstly, the principle of self-determination had to be analyzed; it was found that the workers and other exploited classes of Indigenous Yakuts were in support of the Russian Revolution. [27] However, the ruling classes of Yakutia, including the kulaks, were “stronger in Yakutia than elsewhere in the Soviet Union.” [28] Given these class conditions, the Bolsheviks found that self-determination belonged to the proletariat rather than the bourgeoisie, and aided the exploited Yakut classes in throwing off their ruling classes over a long period of time. Soviet intervention in Yakutia was not based on a policy of eliminating the Indigenous culture, but on removing the bourgeoisie from their culture.

Stalin addressed the question of culture and nationality: “the unity of a nation diminishes…owing to the growing acuteness of class struggle.” [29] The common culture between the proletariat and bourgeoisie of a nation is weakened by the development of capitalism. This evidences the Bolshevik claim to eliminating bourgeois cultural elements from Indigenous nations while not attacking the culture or people as a whole. For example, Shamans in Yakutia, identified as part of the ruling classes of that nation, were “chastised” as “being responsible for the ‘backwardness and ignorance’ of Indigenous communities.” [30] As such, given the material conditions of the Indigenous nations of the Soviet Union, self-determination took a proletarian character rather than a bourgeois one.

The Reality of Indigenous Self-Determination in the Soviet Union

As previously mentioned, the Soviet government put certain structures in place to ensure the special rights of Indigenous nations/individuals. “For example, if there were regions for hunting or fishing, those territories went to the Indigenous people right away on a natural basis without any constraints.” [31] The Committee of the North was a Bolshevik Party organ that “persuaded the Soviet government to extend certain special privileges to northern peoples,” including exemption from taxation and conscription. [32] Indeed, while Indigenous groups underwent some degree of change, [33] such as a ‘proletarianization,’ they were largely allowed to maintain their cultures and regular ways of life. “In the northlands, the indigenous people continued to be nomadic, everywhere the peasants depended largely on hunting and fur-trapping.” [34] The Indigenous Dargin people of the Caucasus “preserved their traditional Sufi-influenced Islamic practices and endured less government pressure [to adhere to atheism].” [35]

While the Soviet government attempted to include Indigenous nations in the worker culture of the USSR, their relatively lax approach to Indigenous culture demonstrates some level of good faith. Furthermore, Davis and Alice Bartels argue that “all national and ethnic groups were radically changed as a result of Soviet state policy,” [36] not just Indigenous groups. Industrialization, collectivization, educational opening, and the liberation of women were new and radical concepts for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups. [37] As such, these policies were not aimed at otherizing one group, or anything alike. Rather, such policies were aimed at national development and socialist construction.

The Soviets outwardly supported the cultural development and autonomy of Indigenous nations in more explicit ways. “Soviet policy [was] to encourage the development of national cultures and preservation of the native languages.” [38] Samir Amin writes that “the Soviet system brought changes for the better. It gave…autonomous districts, established over huge territories, the right to their cultural and linguistic expression.” [39] This cultural and linguistic expression included “the creation of written forms of [Indigenous] languages and educational programs in northern languages.” [40] The Soviet policy towards Indigenous groups was not one of assimilation, but allowance for autonomy (derived from self-determination) in the realm of culture.

Indigenous groups also had political rights which were reflective of their right to self-determination. “Stalin specified that each nationality should man its own courts, administrative bodies, economic agencies and government by its own local native peoples and conduct them in its own language.” [41] Lenin likewise argued that it was of great importance to create autonomous regions in Russia. [42] Soviet practice largely lined up with Leninist theory. Directly after the October Revolution, the Bolshevik Party released the Declaration on the Rights of Peoples of Russia, “which guaranteed the right to self-determination and the abolition of religious and ethnic discrimination.” [43] Skachko, an academic expert on Siberian Indigenous groups, wrote in 1930 that the Soviet state did not intend to keep Indigenous peoples “as helpless charges of the state in special areas reserved for them and isolated from the rest of the world…On the contrary, the government’s goal is their all-around cultural and national development and their participation as equals.” [44]

Conditions were not perfect for Indigenous nations in the Soviet Union; they experienced some drawbacks as a result of Soviet policies, sometimes due to the lack of recognition of indigeneity. “In 1917, the Yakut/Sakha people constituted 87.1% of the province’s total population.” [45] However, by the end of the Soviet era, the Indigenous people made up only 33% of the population. [46] Beyond the settlement of Indigenous land by non-Indigenous peoples, another drawback was that traditional Indigenous occupations had been “disrupted by industrial and resource development” by the late 1980s. [47] This is, however, at least partially attributable to the fact that Mikhail Gorbachev was not a Leninist, meaning he did not follow the preceding Soviet approach to nationalities.

The Soviet government “established a system to transfer capital from the rich regions of the Union (western Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, later the Baltic countries) to the developing regions of the east and south.” [48] By providing aid for the newly autonomous Indigenous republics, the Soviets were expressly supporting their development. Beyond this aid, Indigenous political systems were manned by members of the nation itself. The Soviet policy of korenization (nativization) “sought to fill key management positions with Indigenous representatives.” [49] This policy was implemented because “leaders of the governing Bolshevik Party considered Great Russian chauvinism as a major impediment to economic and social development because it turned a blind eye to the national/social aspiration of the many peoples and nationalities in the Soviet Union.” [50] This policy allowed Indigenous nations to develop on their own terms while remaining within the Union, allowing them to express their self-determination without needing to exercise their right to secession.

While it is true that the Indigenous nations did not secede from the Soviet Union, two facts remain that prove that the Soviet state supported the independence of these nations; firstly, these nations were allowed to organize into Autonomous Republics which exercised a large amount of self-governing, even relative to the Soviet state and the Republic states. [51] Second, these nations still (at least theoretically) had the right to self-determination. [52] It is arguable, then, that the Indigenous nations of the USSR merely never exercised the right to cessation due to their support for the Soviet system/government.

Conclusion

In the capitalist Russian Federation, Indigenous peoples are significantly worse off than under the USSR. Russia has not yet adopted the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, [53] nor the ILO Convention 169. [54] Contrastingly, the Soviet Union was often at the forefront of international efforts to recognize Indigenous-centred issues, including the push to recognize cultural genocide in UN documents. [55] While Indigenous groups are formally protected by the Russian Constitution, the enforcement of these protections is often inadequate, leaving these groups in a precarious position where unemployment and poverty rates are high. [56] Whereas the Soviets funded the education of Indigenous languages, the Russian Federation now funds Russian-language schools in these regions, seriously threatening Indigenous languages. [57] Especially in view of the experiences of Indigenous peoples in the modern Russian Federation, the Soviet policies towards Indigenous nations continue to be vindicated.

In their theoretical and practical approaches, the Soviet state was relatively open, egalitarian, and accommodating to the Indigenous groups that lived within its borders. Relative at least to the Western nations, the Soviet Union, existing only until 1991, was consistently measures ahead in its policies towards indigeneity. [58] While not explicitly recognizing the concept of indigeneity in all Soviet Indigenous groups, the state nonetheless provided them with sufficient autonomy for their cultures to be preserved and developed. While imperfect, the Soviet approach was admirable in its own time, to say the very least.

Endnotes 

[1] Sidorova, Evgeniia, and Rice, Roberta. “Being Indigenous in an Unlikely Place: Self-Determination in the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (1920-1991).” p. 5.

[2] Sulyandziga, Pavel. “We Need Two Keys.”

[3] Bartels, Davis A., and Bartels, Alice L. When the North was Red: Aboriginal Education in Soviet Siberia. p. ix.

[4] Ibid., p. 16-22.

[5] Ibid., p. x.

[6] Ibid., p. 1.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Lenin, V.I. The Right of Nations to Self-Determination. p. 4.

[10] Goshulak, Glenn. “Soviet and Post-Soviet Challenges to the Study of Nation and State Building.” p. 494.

[11] Stalin, J.V. Marxism and the National and Colonial Question. p. 18.

[12] Anderson, Edgar. “Finnish-Baltic Relations, 1918-1940.” p. 52.

[13] Alfred, Gerald Taiaiake. “‘Sovereignty’: An Inappropriate Concept.” p. 323.

[14] Kirby, Stuart E. “Communism in Yakutia – The First Decade.” p. 29.

[15] Lenin, V.I. The Right of Nations to Self-Determination. p. 48.

[16] Ibid., p. 91.

[17] Stalin, J.V. Marxism and the National and Colonial Question. p. 18.

[18] Lenin, V.I. The Right of Nations to Self-Determination. p. 31.

[19] Bedford, David. “Marxism and the Aboriginal Question: The Tragedy of Progress.” p. 108.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Stalin, J.V. Marxism and the National and Colonial Question. p. 18.

[22] Lenin, V.I. The Right of Nations to Self-Determination. p. 25-26.

[23] Lenin, V.I. The Right of Nations to Self-Determination. p. 29-30.

[24] Stalin, J.V. Marxism and the National and Colonial Question. p. 18.

[25] Bedford, David. “Marxism and the Aboriginal Question: The Tragedy of Progress.” p. 109.

[26] Kirby, Stuart E. “Communism in Yakutia – The First Decade.” p. 29.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Ibid., p. 39.

[29] Stalin, J.V. Marxism and the National and Colonial Question. p. 35.

[30] Sidorova, Evgeniia, and Rice, Roberta. “Being Indigenous in an Unlikely Place: Self-Determination in the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (1920-1991).” p. 5.

[31] Sulyandziga, Pavel. “We Need Two Keys.”

[32] Bartels, Davis A., and Bartels, Alice L. When the North was Red: Aboriginal Education in Soviet Siberia. p. 30-31.

[33] First Peoples Worldwide. “Who are the Indigenous Peoples of Russia?”

[34] Kirby, Stuart E. “Communism in Yakutia – The First Decade.” p. 36.

[35] Eden, Jeff. God Save the USSR: Soviet Muslims and the Second World War.

[36] Bartels, Davis A., and Bartels, Alice L. When the North was Red: Aboriginal Education in Soviet Siberia. p. 4.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Szymanski, Albert. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. p. 51.

[39] Amin, Samir. Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism. p. 29.

[40] Bartels, Davis A., and Bartels, Alice L. When the North was Red: Aboriginal Education in Soviet Siberia. p. 5.

[41] Ibid., p. 8.

[42] Bedford, David. “Marxism and the Aboriginal Question: The Tragedy of Progress.” p. 108.

[43] Bartels, Davis A., and Bartels, Alice L. When the North was Red: Aboriginal Education in Soviet Siberia. p. 29.

[44] Ibid., 30-31.

[45] Sidorova, Evgeniia, and Rice, Roberta. “Being Indigenous in an Unlikely Place: Self-Determination in the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (1920-1991).” p. 7.

[46] Ibid., 8.

[47] Bartels, Davis A., and Bartels, Alice L. When the North was Red: Aboriginal Education in Soviet Siberia. p. xii.

[48] Amin, Samir. Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism. p. 29.

[49] Sidorova, Evgeniia, and Rice, Roberta. “Being Indigenous in an Unlikely Place: Self-Determination in the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (1920-1991).” p. 6.

[50] Kovalevich, Dmitri. “Ukrainian Nationalists Have a Long History of Anti-Semitism which the Soviet Union Tried to Combat.”

[51] Russian Federation’s Constitution of 1918. Art. 11.

[52] Russian Federation’s Constitution of 1918. Art. 6.

[53] Representatives of the Republic of Sakha. “An Appeal from the Representatives of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).”

[54] First Peoples Worldwide. “Who are the Indigenous Peoples of Russia?”

[55] Mako, Shramiran. “Cultural Genocide and Key International Instruments: Framing the Indigenous Experience.” p. 183.

[56] First Peoples Worldwide. “Who are the Indigenous Peoples of Russia?”

[57] First Peoples Worldwide. “Who are the Indigenous Peoples of Russia?”

[58] Szymanski, Albert. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. p. 295-296.

Bibliography

Alfred, Gerald Taiaiake. “‘Sovereignty’: An Inappropriate Concept.” In C. A. Maaka and C. Andersen (Ed.), The Indigenous Experience: Global Perspectives. Canadian Scholars Press, 2006.

Amin, Samir. Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism. Monthly Review Press, 2016.

Anderson, Edgar. “Finnish-Baltic Relations, 1918-1940: An Appraisal.” Scandinavian Studies, Vol. 54, No. 1, 1982, pp. 51-72. jstor.org/stable/40918186?seq=2

Bartels, Davis A., and Alice L. Bartels. When the North was Red: Aboriginal Education in Soviet Siberia. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995.

Bedford, David. “Marxism and the Aboriginal Question: The Tragedy of Progress.” Canadian Journal of Native Studies, Vol. 14, No. 1, 1994, pp. 101-117. cjns.brandonu.ca/wp-content/uploads/14-1-bedford.pdf

Eden, Jeff. God Save the USSR: Soviet Muslims and the Second World War (eBook). Oxford University Press, 2021. doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190076276.003.0001

First Peoples Worldwide. “Who Are the Indigenous Peoples of Russia?” Cultural Survival, 2014. culturalsurvival.org/news/who-are-indigenous-peoples-russia

Goshulak, Glenn. “Soviet and Post-Soviet Challenges to the Study of Nation and State Building.” Ethnicities, Vol. 3, No. 4, 2003, pp. 491-507. jstor.org/stable/23889868

Kirby, E. Stuart. “Communism in Yakutia – the First Decade.” Slavic Studies, Vol. 25, 1980, pp. 27-42. eprints.lib.hokudai.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2115/5096/1/KJ00000113076.pdf

Kovalevich, Dmitri. “Ukrainian Nationalists Have a Long History of Anti-Semitism which the Soviet Union Tried to Combat.” Monthly Review, 2022. mronline.org/2022/10/21/ukrainian-nationalists-have-long-history-of-anti-semitism-which-the-soviet-union-tried-to-combat/

Lenin, V.I. The Right of Nations to Self-Determination. Red Prints Publishing, 2022.

Mako, Shamiran. “Cultural Genocide and Key International Instruments: Framing the Indigenous Experience.” International Journal on Minority and Group Rights, Vol. 19, No. 2, 2012, pp. 175-94. jstor.org/stable/24675651

Representatives of the Republic of Sakha. “An Appeal from Representatives of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).” Cultural Survival, 2022. culturalsurvival.org/news/appeal-representatives-republic-sakha-yakutia-united-nations-office-high-commissioner-human

“Russian Federation’s Constitution of 1918.” Constitute Project, 2022. constituteproject.org/constitution/Russia_1918.pdf?lang=en

Sidorova, Evgeniia, and Roberta Rice. “Being Indigenous in an Unlikely Place: Self-Determination in the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (1920-1991).” The International Indigenous Policy Journal, Vol. 11, No. 3, 2020, pp. 1-18. DOI:10.18584/iipj.2020.11.3.8269

Stalin, J.V. Marxism and the National and Colonial Question. Foreign Languages Press, 2021.

Sulyandziga, Pavel. “We Need Two Keys.” Cultural Survival, 2017. culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/we-need-two-keys

Szymanski, Albert. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. Zed Books, 1984.

Study, Fast, Train, Fight: The Roots of Black August

By Joe Tache

Republished from Liberation School.

In August 1619, enslaved Africans touched foot in the first permanent English settlement in what is now the United States. The centuries since witnessed the development of a racial system more violent, extractive, and deeply entrenched than any other in human history. Yet where there is oppression, there is resistance. Since 1619, Black radicals and revolutionaries have taken bold collective action in pursuit of their freedom, threatening the fragile foundations of exploitation upon which the United States is built. These heroic struggles have won tremendous victories, but they have also produced martyrs—heroes who have been imprisoned and killed because of their efforts to transform society.

“Black August” is honored every year to commemorate the fallen freedom fighters of the Black Liberation Movement, to call for the release of political prisoners in the United States, to condemn the oppressive conditions of U.S. prisons, and to emphasize the continued importance of the Black Liberation struggle. Observers of Black August commit to higher levels of discipline throughout the month. This can include fasting from food and drink, frequent physical exercise and political study, and engagement in political struggle. In short, the principles of Black August are: “study, fast, train, fight.”

George Jackson and the origins of Black August

George Jackson was a Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party while he was incarcerated in San Quentin Prison in California. Jackson was an influential revolutionary and his assassination at the hands of a San Quentin prison guard was one of the primary catalysts for the inception of Black August.

A 19-year-old convicted of armed robbery, in 1961 George Jackson was sentenced to a prison term of “1-to-life,” meaning prison administrators had complete and arbitrary control over the length of his sentence. He never lived outside of a prison again, spending the next 11 years locked up (seven and a half years of those in solitary confinement). In those 11 years—despite living in an environment of extreme racism, repression, and state control—George Jackson’s political fire was ignited, and he became an inspiration to the other revolutionaries of his generation.

Jackson was first exposed to radical politics by fellow inmate W.L. Nolen. With Nolen’s guidance, Jackson studied the works of many revolutionaries, including Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin, Mao Tse-Tung, and Frantz Fanon. Nolen, Jackson, and other  prisoners dedicated themselves to raising political consciousness among the prisoners and to organizing their peers in the California prison system. They led study sessions on radical philosophy and convened groups like the Third World Coalition and started the San Quentin Prison chapter of the Black Panther Party. Jackson even published two widely read books while incarcerated: Soledad Brother and Blood in My Eye.

Unfortunately, if predictably, these radical organizers soon found themselves in the cross-hairs of the California prison establishment. In 1970, W.L. Nolen—who had been transferred to Soledad prison and planned to file a lawsuit against its superintendent—was assassinated by a prison guard. Days later, George Jackson (also now in Soledad Prison) and fellow radical prisoners Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchette were accused of killing a different prison guard in retaliation for Nolen’s death. The three were put on trial and became known as the Soledad Brothers.

That year, when it was clear that George Jackson would likely never be released from prison, his 17-year-old brother Jonathan Jackson staged an armed attack on the Marin County Courthouse to demand the Soledad Brothers’ immediate release. Jonathan Jackson enlisted the help of three additional prisoners—James McClain, William Christmas, and Ruchell Magee—during the offensive. Jonathan Jackson, McClain, and Christmas were all killed, while Magee was shot and re-arrested. Ruchell Magee, now 80 years old, is currently one of the longest held political prisoners in the world.

On August 21, 1971, just over a year after the courthouse incident, a prison guard assassinated George Jackson. The facts regarding his death are disputed. Prison authorities alleged that Jackson smuggled a gun into the prison and was killed while attempting to escape. On the other hand, literary giant James Baldwin wrote, “no Black person will ever believe that George Jackson died the way they tell us he did.”

While the particular circumstances of Jackson’s death will likely forever remain contested, two facts are clear: his death was ultimately a political assassination, and his revolutionary imprint can’t be extinguished. Through the efforts and sacrifice of George and Jonathan Jackson, Nolen, McClain, Christmas, Magee and countless other revolutionaries, the 1970s became a decade of widespread organizing and political struggle within prisons. Prisoners demanded an end to racist and violent treatment at the hands of prison guards, better living conditions, and increased access to education and adequate medical care. Tactics in these campaigns included lawsuits, strikes, and mass rebellions. The most notable example may be the Attica Prison rebellion, which occurred in New York State just weeks after George Jackson was murdered. In protest of the dehumanizing conditions they were subjected to, about 1,500 Attica Prison inmates released a manifesto with their demands and seized control of the prison for four days, beginning on September 9, 1971. Under orders from Governor Nelson Rockefeller, law enforcement authorities stormed Attica on September 12 and killed at least 29 incarcerated individuals. None of the prisoners had guns.

This is the context out of which Black August was born in 1979. It was first celebrated in California’s San Quentin prison, where George Jackson, W.L. Nolen, James McClain, Willam Christmas and Ruchell Magee were all once held. The first Black August commemorated the previous decade of courageous prison struggle, as well as the centuries of Black resistance that preceded and accompanied it.

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Political prisoners and the prison struggle

Observers of Black August call for the immediate release of all political prisoners in the United States. That the US government even holds political prisoners is a fact they attempt to obscure and deny. In reality, dozens of radicals from organizations such as the Black Panther Party, the Black Liberation Army, the American Indian Movement, and MOVE have been imprisoned for decades as a result of their political activity. As Angela Davis, who was at one time the most high profile political prisoner in the US, explains:

“There is a distinct and qualitative difference between one breaking a law for one’s own individual self-interest and violating it in the interests of a class of people whose oppression is expressed either directly or indirectly through that particular law. The former might be called criminal (though in many instances he is a victim), but the latter, as a reformist or revolutionary, is interested in universal social change. Captured, he or she is a political prisoner… In this country, however, where the special category of political prisoners is not officially acknowledged, the political prisoner inevitably stands trial for a specific criminal offense, not for a political act… In all instances, however, the political prisoner has violated the unwritten law which prohibits disturbances and upheavals in the status quo of exploitation and racism.”

Prisons in the United States are a form of social control which serve to maintain the status quo of oppression. Over the last few decades, prisons have become an increasingly important tool for the US ruling class. Prisons not only quarantine revolutionaries, but also those segments of the population who have become increasingly expendable to the capitalist system as globalized production, deindustrialization, and technological automation decrease the overall need for labor-power. These shifts, which began in earnest in the 1970s, have hit Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities the hardest, as exemplified by the sky high unemployment and incarceration rates those communities face. These groups are also historically the most prone to rebellion. Angela Davis noted in 1971 that as a result of these trends, “prisoners—especially Blacks, Chicanos and Puerto Ricans—are increasingly advancing the proposition that they are political prisoners. They contend that they are political prisoners in the sense that they are largely the victims of an oppressive politico-economic order.”

Though that definition of political prisoner is unorthodox, it illustrates the political and economic nature of criminalization. This is why observers of Black August connect the fight to free “revolutionary” political prisoners to the broader struggle against US prisons. Mass incarceration is a symptom of the same system that political prisoners have dedicated their lives towards fighting.

As increasing numbers of the US working class are “lumpenized,” or pushed out of the formal economy and stable employment, the potential significance of political struggle among the unemployed and incarcerated increases. George Jackson wrote in Blood in My Eye that “prisoners must be reached and made to understand that they are victims of social injustice. This is my task working from within. The sheer numbers of the prisoner class and the terms of their existence make them a mighty reservoir of revolutionary potential.”

George Jackson’s own journey is a perfect example of that revolutionary potential. Jackson didn’t arrive in prison a ready-made revolutionary. He had a history of petty crime and was apolitical during his first years in prison. He would have been dismissed by many people in our society as a “thug.” But comrades who knew that he held the potential inherent in every human being found him and took him in. They helped him understand his personal experiences within the context of capitalism and white supremacy. In turn, George Jackson dedicated his life to doing the same for others incarcerated individuals.

Black August today

August, more than any other month, has historically carried the weight of the Black Liberation struggle. Of course, enslaved Africans were first brought to British North America in August 1619. Just over 200 years later, in August 1831, Nat Turner led the most well-known rebellion of enslaved people in US history. This historical significance carried into the 20th century, when both the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and the Watts Rebellion—an explosive uprising against racist policing in Los Angeles—occurred in August during the 1960s.

Even today, the month remains significant in the struggle. John Crawford, Michael Brown, and Korryn Gaines were three Black Americans who were murdered in high-profile cases of police brutality; Crawford and Brown in August 2014, and Gaines in August 2016. Their deaths have been part of the impetus for a revived national movement against racist police brutality. Finally, on August 21, 2018, the 47 year anniversary of George Jackson’s death, thousands of U.S. prisoners launched a national prison strike. They engaged in work stoppages, hunger strikes, and other forms of protests. The strike lasted until September 9, 47 years after the Attica Prison Uprising began. Like the Attica prisoners, the 2018 prison strike organizers put forth a comprehensive list of demands that exposed the oppression inherent to the U.S. prison system, and laid out a framework to improve their conditions.

Each of these historical and contemporary events reveal a truth that the Black radical tradition has always recognized: there can be no freedom for the masses of Black people within the white supremacist capitalist system. The fight for liberation is just that: a fight. Since its inception in San Quentin, Black August has been an indispensable part of that fight.

In the current political moment, when some misleaders would have us bury the radical nature of Black resistance and instead prop up reformist politics that glorify celebrity, wealth, and assimilation into the capitalist system, Black August is as important as ever. It connects Black people to our history and serves as a reminder that our liberation doesn’t lie in the hands of Black billionaires, Black police officers, or Black Democratic Party officials. Those “Black faces in high places” simply place a friendly face on the system that oppresses the masses of Black people in the United States and around the world, often distorting symbols of Black resistance along the way. Black liberation lies, as it always has, in the hands of the conscious and organized masses. Study, train, fight, and in the words of George Jackson, “discover your humanity and your love of revolution.”

What is Socialist Revolution?

[Pictured: Thomas Sankara meets with Fidel Castro in the early 1980s]

By Nino Brown

Republished from Liberation School.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. and other imperialist countries have repeatedly declared that history is over, meaning that humanity cannot transcend the capitalist system, which is elevated as the pinnacle of human development. As Margaret Thatcher claimed “there is no alternative” to capitalism, and the best we can hope for is a kinder, gentler, and more “humane” form of it. According to the capitalist class, the fall of the Soviet Union demonstrated that “socialism doesn’t work” and socialist revolution is foolhardy, so we shouldn’t preoccupy ourselves with fighting for it.

Despite this prognosis, socialist revolution is very much on the table in the U.S. and all over the world. As we are facing multiple existential crises for humanity and the planet, socialist revolution is not just possible, but an absolute necessity to ensure our collective future.

Wherever there’s exploitation and oppression, there’s resistance, and the capitalist system generates the conditions for this continued resistance. However, while resistance ebbs and flows, there are particular moments when, as Marx and Engels put it, the broad masses are “sprung into the air” [2]. Today, resistance to capitalism, imperialism, and all systems of oppression is increasing. However, to make a socialist revolution, resistance is not enough. Socialist revolution requires the class-conscious intervention of the working and oppressed classes to dislodge the political power of the bourgeoisie, collectivize and plan production, and create a new state in which the masses of people are in control.

This article introduces what a socialist revolution is—in contrast to anti-communist and bourgeois mythologies that caricature it as an impossible and hopeless project. Socialist revolution anywhere cannot be prescribed and certainly is not an automatic development of any single or foundational contradiction; it requires explicit mass socialist consciousness and organizing.

Further, a socialist revolution cannot take place without society entering into a profound crisis. The Russian leader V.I. Lenin, whose Bolshevik Party led the first successful socialist revolution in 1917, put it this way:

“A revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation; furthermore, it is not every revolutionary situation that leads to revolution. What, generally speaking, are the symptoms of a revolutionary situation? We shall certainly not be mistaken if we indicate the following three major symptoms: (1) when it is impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their rule without any change; when there is a crisis, in one form or another, among the ‘upper classes’, a crisis in the policy of the ruling class, leading to a fissure through which the discontent and indignation of the oppressed classes burst forth. For a revolution to take place, it is usually insufficient for ‘the lower classes not to want’ to live in the old way; it is also necessary that ‘the upper classes should be unable’ to live in the old way; (2) when the suffering and want of the oppressed classes have grown more acute than usual; (3) when, as a consequence of the above causes, there is a considerable increase in the activity of the masses” [3].

Revolutionary opportunities arise neither as a result of the objective conditions of society nor the class consciousness of the masses alone. Instead, revolutionary situations open when the cascading contradictions of capitalism, imperialism, and oppression force the current order to a standstill. Such objective conditions can emerge from economic, political, social, military, or ecological crises: such as the cascading crises of automation and the resulting job losses, the delegitimation of basic institutions of U.S. bourgeois democracy like presidential elections, the climate catastrophe, and the U.S. war drive against Russia and China. But by themselves the contradictions of capitalism, which inevitably lead to crisis, do not make a revolution.

There are many revolutionary situations but fewer revolutions. This is because revolutions require the combination of the above-mentioned objective conditions as well as the subjective forces capable of seizing on the revolutionary opening. The Party for Socialism and Liberation is dedicated to building a party that can seize these revolutionary openings when they appear in the United States.

When society enters into a revolutionary crisis, it presents the opportunity for socialist revolution but, as Lenin points out, there have been many revolutionary crises that did not become successful socialist revolutions. What was missing in virtually all those cases was “the ability of the revolutionary class to take revolutionary mass action strong enough to break or dislocate the old government, which never, not even in a period of crisis, ‘falls’, if it is not toppled over” [4]. This for example, is what happened in Egypt in the wake of the popular uprising that overthrew the U.S.-backed dictator Hosni Mubarak in early 2011. The revolution was led by working and poor people—especially young people—who created new organizational forms during the course of the uprising. Because of the systematic repression of the Left, however, there was no working-class party capable of transforming the revolutionary opportunity into a revolution. In the absence of such a party, the most well-organized forces assumed leadership.

Political and social revolutions

When Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders first declared his run for presidency in 2014-15, he announced that his campaign would spark a “political revolution to transform our country economically, politically, socially and environmentally” [5]. His campaign resonated with a broad progressive base of the working class and some elements of the middle class.

Sanders was calling for major changes in society, many of which would have benefited the working masses, but was this really calling for a “revolution”? From a Marxist point of view, what Sanders proposed was actually a series of major reforms. Reform movements are often large and powerful, pulling vast numbers of people into struggle against the ruling class for basic democratic rights. The movements for health care, affirmative action, better wages, union representation, expanded marriage rights, and abortion rights are examples of powerful reform movements that have won important victories. All of these movements led to progressive changes to the political and legal superstructure of society; while progressive reform movements can change how society is run and operated, they do not fundamentally alter the economic system as a whole and are always resisted by the ruling class.

In order for us to realize such popular and necessary democratic and progressive reforms we need an entirely new social system, a socialist system, in which the working class has political, social, and economic power. To do this, a social revolution must dislodge the bourgeois ruling class from power.

Marxists use the term “social revolution” in a very precise way. Whereas political revolutions change the form of social rule and can bring important gains for the oppressed, they leave the fabric of the capitalist mode of production intact: private ownership of the means of production and capitalist control over the state apparatus. Political revolutions are significant shifts in political leadership, such as those that took place during the Reconstruction Era and the Civil Rights and Black Liberation movements of the 1950s-70s. Each brought about substantial changes in the political and social order but stopped short of changing the underlying structure of the economy [6].

Distinguishing between political and social revolutions doesn’t mean that we view them as separate and unrelated. In fact, historically, socialist revolutions have combined struggles for political and social transformation. Think, for example, of how central the struggle for a legally-regulated working day was to the Bolshevik’s line of march toward socialist revolution.

A socialist revolution in the U.S. would end the private ownership of the means of production, factories and mines, transportation systems and communication networks, banks and agriculture, etc., by a tiny clique of capitalists. Such a change in the mode of production would also have far-reaching consequences for the social hierarchies of exploitation, altering—and providing the material basis for eliminating—the social subjugation of all oppressed groups.

A socialist revolution, a radical rupture with the capitalist system, would mean many things, but principally it would mean that working class and oppressed peoples would, among other tasks:

1. Dismantle the old bourgeois state machinery and replace it with a new type of state, a workers’ state where working class people would govern society at every level.

2. Collectivize the means of producing and sustaining life. These would be controlled by the working class and its organizations, making them public property to be administered in the interests of the many and not just a tiny clique of unelected capitalists.

3. Implement a planned economy where production would be geared towards meeting people’s needs and sustaining the planet’s ecosystem, not for maximizing profit.

Socialist revolution and the question of violence

Capitalist politicians, media, and educational institutions portray socialist revolutionaries as bloodthirsty idealists, and revolutions are popularly described as incidents of mass violence. The capitalist ruling class, which itself came to power through violent revolutions and state-sanctioned and individual acts of conquest and dispossession, aims to foreclose the revolutionary path of the proletariat by presenting it as blood-soaked and misguided.

It is true that figures like Marx, Engels, and Lenin sometimes foregrounded the inevitability of violence in social revolutions. However, this is not because socialist revolutions necessitate violence in an abstract way.

In fact, Marx once suggested that, compared to the immense violence that brought the capitalist class to power, the socialist revolution would be relatively peaceful. The reason is that the capitalist revolution entailed “the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers,” whereas the socialist revolution entails “the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people” [7].

If violence is often a feature of social revolutions it is not due to the preference of the workers. On the contrary, it is because the capitalist ruling class will resort—and, in fact, already does resort—to the most extreme forms of violence as a means of protecting its property interests.

Lessons from history

No successful socialist revolution occurred during Marx and Engels’ lifetimes. However, they did witness and support the Paris Commune of 1871, when workers seized control of Paris and established, for a limited time, a revolutionary government based on workers’ self-rule. The bourgeoisie allied with the aristocracy against the rising revolutionary class—the proletariat—in order to brutally crush the Commune, killing tens of thousands of workers. This led Marx and Engels to reconsider the revolutionary proposals included in The Communist Manifesto. In the preface to the 1872 German edition, they wrote that they would formulate these differently because of “the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months.” “One thing especially was proved by the Commune,” they continue, which is “that ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes’” [8]. This lesson would be vital in the success of the Russian Revolution and the subsequent socialist revolutions across the colonial world.

The inter-imperialist rivalry of WWI created a unique opportunity for the Bolsheviks to break the weakest link in the imperial chain, seizing state power in Russia and establishing the world’s first sustained workers’ state. “Revolution,” Lenin put it in 1917, “consists in the proletariat destroying the ‘administrative apparatus’ and the whole state machine, replacing it by a new one consisting of the armed workers” [9]. In order to do so, the working and toiling masses need to be organized to successfully combat the highly disciplined armies of the ruling class. A vanguard party of revolutionary cadres provides the leadership necessary to guide the organized workers to a successful revolution.

The Russian Revolution was a social revolution in the sense that it changed the social relations of production and the overall class order of society. It is essential to recognize, however, that this project was not simply economic, in a reductive sense, as some of its uninformed detractors have proclaimed. In order to begin building an egalitarian society, the Bolsheviks pursued the project of socializing the means of production and redistributing land, slowly but surely building up a society in which everyone had the right to housing, education, healthcare, and employment, and more. At the same time, they directly confronted the legacies of social chauvinism, nationalism and racism by introducing a substantive democracy in which all nations had the right to self-determination and the plethora of cultures and languages within the USSR was celebrated [10].

In addition to directly combating dehumanizing practices, which are so integral to capitalism, the Soviet leadership undertook to dismantle the system of domestic slavery that subjugated women. “Under Alexandra Kollantai, people’s commissar for social welfare,” Valentine Moghadam explains, women were granted “an eight-hour day, social insurance, pregnancy leave for two months before and after childbirth, and time at work to breast-feed,” in addition to the legal codification of marital equality, the right to divorce, and more [11].

A socialist revolution is a total transformation that reorganizes, in the name of equality, the entire socioeconomic system, which includes—among other elements—its class, racial, gender, and national orders. It is significant, in this regard, that the successful socialist revolutions that occurred in the wake of the Russian Revolution took place in the colonial world rather than in the capitalist core.

Lenin himself had anticipated that the revolutionary storm would move eastward as colonized peoples rose up against imperialist domination. Vietnamese revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh was among them. He described how he yelled out with joy as he read aloud and slowly came to understand Lenin’s message to the colonies. “Lenin,” he wrote, “was the first to realize and assess the full importance of drawing the colonial peoples into the revolutionary movement. He was the first to point out that, without the participation of the colonial peoples, the socialist revolution could not come about” [12].

Making a socialist revolution in the U.S.

We should take inspiration from the history of the struggles for socialist revolution, knowing that our party is situated squarely within this lineage. The tradition that we are part of is the one that has practically demonstrated its ability to make real, substantive gains for the working class, and notably for the most oppressed and exploited members of the international proletariat. In spite of what the capitalist ruling class would like us to believe, decay in the advanced capitalist countries is daily on display, and the socialist movement continues to grow around the world.

We find ourselves, however, in a unique situation since we in the belly of the beast, the U.S. Empire, which has over time built up a political system and broader culture that is profoundly reactionary. All of our creativity, insight, and revolutionary enthusiasm will be necessary to find effective ways of bringing the working class into the struggle for socialism. While there is no road map to revolution, there is a deep, international tradition of revolutionary organizing from which we need to learn, while also adapting it to our unique circumstances. In doing so, we can take hope and inspiration from the fact that, as we each do our own part, we are contributing to a collective struggle for the future of humanity and planet Earth.

“The socialist revolution is not one single act, not one single battle on a single front,” Lenin wrote, “but a whole epoch of intensified class conflicts, a long series of battles on all fronts, i.e., battles around all the problems of economics and politics, which can culminate only in the expropriation of the bourgeoisie” [13]. As we contribute to these battles, developing new tactics to edge out our opponents, let us never lose sight of the global class war that will decide the future of us all. For this is what is ultimately at stake in the question of revolution: shall we continue to live under an exploitative and oppressive system that is destroying humanity and the biosphere, or should we reorganize society to satisfy the needs and aspirations of the overwhelming majority?

Building mass socialist consciousness

There is no formula, blueprint, or silver bullet to get us to socialism. We know that the class struggle is a school for the working class in organizing itself to do battle with the bourgeoisie and win social gains here or there, but the class struggle in and of itself does not automatically lead to socialism. We can study and learn from socialist revolutions in history, but the conditions under which those revolutions were won are fundamentally different from the conditions that face us today in the U.S. No serious Marxist would argue that the socialist revolution develops the same way in every country. Lenin reminds us that “in different countries, the revolution develops differently. It always proceeds over a long time and with difficulty. Bad is the Socialist who thinks that the capitalists will abdicate their rights at once” [14].

So how do we get from here to there? From capitalist society to socialist society? For starters, economic, political, and social struggles are schools through which we can build the subjective forces necessary for revolution. Socialism can only develop out of the class struggle against the capitalists; it will not fall from the sky or come from the minds of some “ingenious” individuals. But, as we stated before, just recognition of and even appreciation for the class struggle does not end up with socialism or even socialist consciousness. The ruling class owns and operates an immense state apparatus and has access to tremendous resources to crush the resistance of the working class and hold back revolutionary consciousness. In order to overcome this, the working class and oppressed need their own political instrument(s) to fight the bourgeoisie. This means mass organizations of our class, in various forms from labor unions tenant associations to broad-based coalitions and single-issue organizations. Ultimately, the key instrument in socialist revolutions is a revolutionary Marxist party that’s able to unite the different mass organizations together under a coherent political program and strategic outlook.

The historical task of the working class is not just to emancipate itself, but all of humanity, from the shackles of capitalist exploitation and oppression. However, the path to victory inevitably goes through setbacks, defeats, and retreats, materially and ideologically. Conceiving of revolution today requires acknowledging this reality, but also proposing an organizational form that can readily assist the class and guide the struggle towards victory: the capture of state power by the working class. It is here where Leninism provides a battle-tested theory and practice to help revolutionaries battle with the capitalist class and build the revolutionary power and unity vital for defeating the capitalists and building socialism. For revolutionaries in the Leninist tradition, history has demonstrated with numerous examples that it is not the task of the revolutionary party to “make” the revolution with independent action divorced from the masses. In order to overcome the political and ideological indoctrination by the capitalist class, which has only strengthened over time with the rise of mass media and communications, it is necessary for revolutionaries today to embed themselves within workers’ struggles so as to help workers connect the concrete and specific contradictions of capitalism (police brutality, housing struggles, workplace fights) to its general functioning and motion.

As capitalism continues generating compounding crises affecting both the ruling class and the ruled, as spontaneous rebellions and revolts emerge, it is vitally necessary to continue building class consciousness of workers’ struggles. The organizational independence of the working class, through its own political party, is indispensable. For after all, a revolutionary crisis, while invoking chaos and confusion among the ruling class and oppressed classes, does not automatically lead to socialism. Reactionary elements, for example, may seize the time during a crisis; the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol to overturn the election results, the first phase of a coup attempt, are an indication of this possibility [15].

To make a socialist revolution requires more than spontaneous rebellions, more than idly waiting for the objective conditions to ripen; it requires working-class mass organization, discipline, unity of the oppressed, and a political party that can provide theoretical, strategic, and tactical clarity throughout the course of our various struggles. Socialism does not arrive ready-made: it is a result of the class struggle for state power, and thus requires socialists, but most importantly of all a revolutionary socialist party to guide, learn from, and organize the working class and its allies on the path to victory.

The time to build the revolutionary party is now. There is no time to waste. The extreme problems and contradictions of U.S. society mean that a deep crisis is inevitable, though neither revolutionaries nor the ruling class can determine when a revolutionary situation will develop. As many historical experiences have shown, it is difficult but not impossible to create the party needed to turn a revolutionary opportunity into a revolutionary victory once the crisis is underway. For all those who hope for revolution and a new socialist society, building the party is the key task.

References

[1] V.I. Lenin, “Letters on Tactics,” in V.I. Lenin,Lenin Collected Works (Vol. 24): April-June 1917, ed. B. Isaacs (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1918/1980), 44.
[2] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,The Communist Manifesto, trans. S. Moore (New York: Penguin Books, 1888/1967), 232.
[3] V.I. Lenin, “The Collapse of the Second International,” in V.I Lenin,Lenin Collected Works (Vol. 21): August 1914-1915, trans. J. Katzer (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1915/1980), 213-214.
[4] Ibid., 214.
[5] Andrew Prokop, “Bernie Sanders’s Political Revolution, Explained,”Vox, 28 January 2016. Availablehere.
[6] Social revolutions make a sharp break from one social system to another, although not all social revolutions aresocialistrevolutions. The 1979 Iranian Revolution, for example, overthrew the U.S.-backed Shah, installed in a 1953 coup that overthrew the democratically-elected Mossadegh government. In the period before the revolution, millions of people took to the streets and eventually won much of the armed forces to their side. Again, however, because of the intense repression of trade unions and the communists under the Shah’s brutal rule, socialist forces were unable to turn the revolutionary opportunity into a socialist revolution. At the same time, by overthrowing the U.S.’s primary colonial outpost in the region and establishing an independent and anti-colonial government, the Iranian Revolution did significantly change the makeup of the social system.
[7] Karl Marx,Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Vol. 1): The Process of Capitalist Production, trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1867/1967), 715.
[8] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Preface to the German Edition of 1872,” in Marx and Engels,The Communist Manifesto, 194.
[9] V.I. Lenin, “The State and Revolution,” in V.I. Lenin,Lenin Collected Works (Vol. 25): June-September 1917, ed. S. Presyan and J. Riordan (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1917/1980), 491.
[10] See Eugene Puryear, “Nations and Soviets: The National Question in the USSR,”Liberation News, 06 June 2022. Availablehere.
[11] Valentine Moghadam,Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East(Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1993), 78-79.
[12] Ho Chi Minh,Selected Writings (1920-1969)(Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2001), 37.
[13] V.I. Lenin, “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” in V.I. Lenin,Lenin Collected Works (Vol. 22): December 1915-July 1916), ed. G. Hanna, trans. Y. Sdobnikov (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1916/1977), 144.
[14] V.I. Lenin, “Speech at a Presnya District Workers’ Conference,” in Lenin,Lenin Collected Works (Vol. 28), 361.
[15] See Party for Socialism and Liberation, “The Paralysis Ends: Trump, Fascism, and the Capitalist State,”Liberation News, 13 January 2021. Available here.

Imperialism is the Arsonist: Marxism's Contribution to Ecological Literatures and Struggles

By Derek Wall

Republished from Abstrakt.

Marxism’s contributions to ecological literature and struggles is a rich and contradictory field of discussion. Marxism in diverse ways has fed into environmental struggles and broader ecological politics. Broadly, I would argue that there has been a deepening appreciation of the ecological themes in the work of Marx and Engels in recent decades. Most significantly, and recently, there has been a shift towards debates around Eco-Leninism, with several different attempts to read the climate crisis through the insights of Lenin. However, specifically Green Party politics, in some states, has seen a movement of former Marxist-Leninists towards a revisionist understanding of politics, with revolutionary objectives being discarded. The way that Marxism’s contribution to ecological literatures and struggles has played out is also internationally diverse, my understanding is strongest when it comes to West European examples but the growth of militant environmental movements across the globe must be acknowledged.

One starting point is the example of the German Green Party. I heard an interesting story; I cannot comment as to whether it is true! An intern worked for a prominent elected German Green Party politician, I forget whether the politician sat in the Bundestag, the European Parliament or a Lander (regional parliament). The intern had been asked to go to the politician’s home while he was away on political business. Watering the plants, the intern was surprised to find a huge, in fact life size, poster of the Great Helmsman himself Chairman Mao, on the wall.

This anecdote has a serious side and illustrates a number of ways in which Marxism has informed ecological literatures and struggles. Most empirically and least significantly the German Greens can be seen as partly a product of anti-revisionist politics. It is also interesting to note how ecological movements and struggles have acted as a movement from Red to Green, a movement from Marxist-Leninist commitment to centre-ground revisionist reform politics. It also reminds us to examine in an open way a range of key Marxists, including Mao, Lenin, Marx, Engels, Trotsky, and Luxemburg in terms of their attitudes to nature.

Marx’s Ecology

A variety of academics and green political writers argued bluntly that Marxism had little to contribute to ecological struggles. Marx and Engels were defined as Prometheans concerned to use nature as an instrument to promote human progress. Communism was based in Marx’s work on rapid industrialisation with little thought for the consequences for the environment. Thus green or ecological political ideology provided a break from existing ideologies. Jonathon Porritt, a leading member of the British Ecology Party made such claims in Seeing Green in the early 1980s, arguing bluntly that communism and capitalism were two facets of a wider anti-ecological ideology, 

“dedicated to industrial growth, to the expansion of the means of production, to a materialist ethic as the best means of meeting people’s needs, and to unimpeded technological development. Both rely on increasing centralization and large-scale bureaucratic control and co-ordination. From a viewpoint of narrow scientific rationalism, both insist that the planet is there to be conquered, that big is self-evidently beautiful, and that what cannot be measured is of no importance.” (Porritt, 1984: 44)

In turn the environmental record of socialist countries such the USSR was seen as both environmentally destructive and entirely consistent with such a Marxist anti-ecology based on the foundation of classic texts by Marx and Engels (Cole, 1993). 

An alternative approach from the editors the academic journal Capitalism Nature Socialism (CNS) was to emphasise that Marx’s work is vital to ecological politics. This was based on an understanding that capitalism drives environmental destruction and thus green political economy inevitably demanded an articulation with anti-capitalism, if it was to provide a realistic chance of overcoming ecological problems. James O’ Connor developed this approach with his description of the ecological contradictions of capitalism, arguing that capitalism tended to degrade its possibility of existence by destroying nature. Without nature, capitalism could not survive, but the continued drive for accumulation, exploitation and profit tended to destroy nature (O’Connor, 1988). In turn, Joel Kovel, also associated with CNS, argued that economic growth tended to degrade the environment and that economic growth is functional to capitalism. In his book title The Enemy of Nature, he found the answer in capitalism. Kovel noted the distinction between ‘use values’ and ‘exchange values’, discussed by Marx in the first chapter of the first volume of Capital, was essential to creating an ecologically sustainable society. Thus by making goods to last longer and providing communal products for use, human prosperity could grow without the waste of capitalism. However, like Porritt and other green critics of Marx, Kovel argued that while Marx provided a necessary analysis to capitalism, Marxism was resistant to ecological themes, 

Forged at the moment of industrialization, its [i.e. socialism’s] transformative impulse tended to remain within the terms of the industrialized domination of nature. Thus it continued to manifest the technological optimism of the industrial world-view, and its associated logic of productivism — all of which feed into the mania for growth. The belief in unlimited technical progress has been beaten back in certain quarters by a host of disasters, from nuclear waste to resistant bacteria, but these setbacks barely touch the core of socialist optimism, that its historical mission is to perfect the industrial system and not overcome it. The productivist logic is grounded in a view of nature that regards the natural world […] from the standpoint of its utility as a force of production. It is at that point that socialism all-too-often shares with capitalism a reduction of nature to resources — and, consequently, a sluggishness in recognizing ourselves in nature and nature in ourselves. (Kovel, 2007: 229)

Such perspectives from Kovel and O’Connor might be linked politically to the birth of popularisation of the term ecosocialism. Existing socialism and communism were anti-ecological, key texts might advocate a disregard for nature, so while socialism and/or communism were essential to ecological struggles, they need a prefix ‘eco’ to be distinguished from existing anti-ecological left alternatives.

I would argue that we have seen a sharp break from such perspectives, since the publication of US sociologist John Bellamy Foster’s book Marx’s Ecology. Foster argues, convincingly to my mind, that ecology is core to Marx and Engels’ project (Foster, 2000). Indeed an examination of Marx and Engels’ texts suggests an overwhelming concern with environmental issues. In turn their philosophy based on relationships derived from Hegel and perhaps Spinoza, is akin to ecology defined as a science of relationships. For example, in Capital vol 3 Marx notes,

“Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations as boni patres familias [good heads of the household].” (Marx, 1959 [1894]: 530)

Discussion of such seemingly contemporary themes of deforestation, pollution and food additives can be found in Capital.

Engels also focussed on ecological questions,

“Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human conquest over nature. For each such conquest takes its revenge on us. Each of them, it is true, has in the first place the consequences on which we counted, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor, and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that they were laying the basis for the present devastated condition of these countries, by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture. […] Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature – but that we, with flesh, blood, and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other beings of being able to know and correctly apply its laws.” (Engels, 1972)

Marx and Engels’ sustained meditations on the sciences including biology, brought them to consider environmental issues. The exploitation of labour was to them also allied to environmental threats to health and safety. Engels’s Condition of the English Working Class looked at how a poor work place environment contributed to the degradation of workers.

John Bellamy Foster argues that ecological considerations were central to Marx’s construction of historical materialism. In turn, Marx’s notion of a metabolic rift between humanity and the rest of nature, has been used by Foster to conceptualise ecological crisis. Healing the rift is the answer to problems such as climate change, to the extent that humans master nature, we are mastering an element of ourselves rather than something alien. Thus while Marxists and other socialists might self-criticise their approach to ecological questions, the description of Marx and Engels as anti-environmental thinkers has been exposed as a myth. How, though, have Marxists engaged with green movements, and to what extent have Marx and Engels’ ecological assumptions informed practical struggles? Certainly since the 1970s Marxists have sometimes joined Green or Ecological political parties.

German Greens roots in Maoism

Specifically ecological political parties emerged in the 1970s. Broadly this was a result of the globalisation of environmental problems, reflected in scientific reports such as MIT’s Limits to Growth. The first Ecology Parties were found in the UK and New Zealand/ Aotearoa (Parkin, 1989). These to some extent were conservative institutions without a critique of capitalism or human exploitation. However, the emergence of broader and more radical social movements can be seen as leading a transformation from purely environmental parties to Green Parties. The anti-nuclear power and anti-nuclear weapons movements during the 1970s and 1980s helped create green political parties, the most significant being the German Green Party. The German Greens originated partly from the activism of anti-revisionists to seek a new source of intervention (Hülsberg, 1988: 51-53).

I am not sure if there was a distinct reason for anti-revisionists to get involved with the German Greens. It seems more that this was part of a general engagement of the German left. The story of the German Greens has been told many times: briefly, those on the left, involved in social movements, joined a platform to fight elections. Those who had been involved in the student movement, and some sympathetic to the Baader-Meinhof gang, joined environmentalists. At first the Greens were, in the words of an early leader figure Petra Kelly, ‘the anti-party party’ (Emerson, 2011: 55). Given the openness of the German electoral system, co-option was perhaps close to inevitable. Greens were elected on radical platforms but eventually joined coalition regional governments with the SPD, and the party over the decades has moved broadly to the centre right.

A number of prominent German Green politicians, for example, Ralf Fücks, a former mayor of Bremen; and Winfried Kretschmann, Minister-President Baden-Württemberg were originally active in Kommunistischer Bund West Deutschland. Perhaps the largest Maoist political party in what was at the time West Germany it took a decision to join the Greens en masse in 1982. Other anti-revisionists joined the Greens along with those closer to autonomist networks such as Joschka Fischer and Daniel Cohn-Bendit (Kühn, 2005).

The relationship of green parties and ecological movements to Marxism has demonstrated contradictory tendencies. One has been a move from a more conservative environmentalism to great radicalism and commitment. For example, the British Ecology Party was founded by members of the right wing Conservative Party, however while Marxism has never been strong in the organisation’s history, it has broadly moved to the left (Wall, 1994). Typically in one recent leadership contest hustings, all the candidates insisted that they opposed capitalism (Jarvis, 2021). On the other hand, in the words of the East German eco-Marxist Rudolf Bahro, there has been a shift From Red to Green (Bahro, 1984). The German Greens are perhaps the best known example, as briefly discussed, but there are many others. For example, the Green Left in Holland are now a standard European Green Party, like the Germans, in the political centre, but they were created originally out of the dissolution of four Dutch left wing political parties including the Communist Party (Voerman, 2006: 80). This trend isn’t of course restricted to Greens, one thinks of the movement of the Dutch Socialist Party from Marxism to fairly standard social democracy. And as we know from Lenin, most socialist parties of Europe at the start of the first world war including the SPD ditched communism and supported their contending nation states. Certainly the German members of anti-revisionist organisations who joined the Greens have generally moved dramatically from Mao and Hoxha to accommodation with the Christian Democrats.

At times these contradictory movements are reflected in the work of a single individual. André Gorz, the French ecological theorist, acted paradoxically to promote a movement from red to green, and conversely from environmentalism to anti-capitalist commitment. Best known for his book Farewell to the Working Class, the former Marxist argued that class conflict was largely redundant and new social movements, including environmentalists, represented a force for potential change (Gorz, 1987). Thus he can be seen as giving textual support to the movement from anti-revisionism into social movements, into Green Parties and within the Greens moving apparently ever to the political right. Conversely his text Ecology as Politics, identified the economic drive to accumulate as the key source of ecological risk. Prefiguring Joel Kovel’s arguments by two decades, he argued that capitalism is the cause of environmental destruction. ‘’This is the nature of consumption in affluent societies; it ensures the growth of capital without increasing either the general level of satisfaction or the number of genuinely useful goods (‘use values’) which people have at any given point in time.’ (Gorz, 1980: 23) Gorz thus, amongst other authors, helped promote an anti-capitalist critique amongst some greens, which pointed back to Marx’s broad analysis of capitalism in Capital vol one.

Green Trotskyism?

One approach has been to argue that while Marx was green, the failure of much 20th century socialism to promote environmentalism could be placed at the door of Stalin and Stalinism. This seems to my mind a superficial approach, blaming an individual rather than engaging in sustained analysis. Equally it is difficult to find an environmental core in the work of Trotsky, who might be seen as Stalin’s main critic. Trotsky typically argued that communism was a project of perhaps rather brutally and crudely mastering nature.

“Through the machine, man in Socialist society will command nature in its entirety, with its grouse and its sturgeons. He will point out places for mountains and for passes. He will change the course of the rivers, and he will lay down rules for the oceans. The idealist simpletons may say that this will be a bore, but that is why they are simpletons. Of course this does not mean that the entire globe will be marked off into boxes, that the forests will be turned into parks and gardens. Most likely, thickets and forests and grouse and tigers will remain, but only where man commands them to remain.” (Trotsky, 1941: 5)

Having said this Trotsky did argue that ‘man will do it so well that the tiger won’t even notice the machine, or feel the change, but will live as he lived in primeval times. The machine is not in opposition to the earth. In turn there have been some manifestations of environmentally aware Trotskyism. The present Fourth International, from Ernest Mandel’s line, is explicitly ecosocialist in nature. Its various national sections are highly engaged in ecological work. In Britain, Alan Thornett of Socialist Resistance, which is associated with this Fourth International, produced a detailed account of an ecosocialist approach to climate change (Thornett, 2019). Polemics from others in the Fourth International have explicitly criticised Trotsky for failing to address ecological issues, unlike Marx and Engels (Tanuro, 2015)

The existence of numerous Trotskyist internationals can be confusing, although of course this is a feature of other forms of Marxism. It is possible that the Mandelite Fourth International was influenced by Pabloite strands of thought. The Greek Trotskyist Michel Pablo split the Fourth International in the 1960s but his comrades re-joined in the 1990s (Coates, nd). During the 1970s they were strong advocates of what might be seen as an ecosocialist approach. Strongest perhaps in Australia, a leading Pabloite, the physicist Alan Roberts, published The Self-Managing Environment in 1979 (Roberts, 1979). Drawing on both Marx and Freud it criticised the kind of consumer capitalism theorised by Marcuse and other Western Marxists. Roberts’ argument was that a lack of democratic involvement including an absence of workers’ control, led to a frustrated demand for consumer goods. The less we participate and have the ability to shape our life experience, the more we compensate by consuming wasteful goods. The ecological crisis is seen as a product of capitalist growth, growth in consumer capitalism is environmentally destructive. A self-managed socialist society is thus an ecosocialist alternative. Roberts also produced a strong critique of neo-Malthusian environmentalists who blamed ecological problems on over population rather than capitalism. Other chapters in The Self-Managing Environment covered the so-called ‘tragedy of the commons’ arguing that rather than acting as a metaphor for environmental destruction as suggested by the right wing biologist Garrett Hardin, commons had been seized by force and enclosed.

Nick Origlass, a leading Pabloite, engaged in local government ecosocialism, creating his own independent Labour Party in Leichhardt Municipal Council in Sydney to win local power and challenge toxic waste dumping in his community (Greenland, 1988). Australia also saw the creation of the green ban movement, where trade unionists in the Building Workers Union refused to work on construction projects that damaged the environment (Koffman, 2021).

Another Trotskyist figure passionately involved with ecosocialist politics is the Peruvian revolutionary Hugo Blanco. While Blanco retains fraternal links with the Fourth International, his present politics is closer to that of the Mexican Zapatistas. He publishes the newspaper Lucha Indigena and is also an active support of the Rojava Revolution. Originally an agronomy student, he studied in Argentina, he led a peasant uprising in the early 1960s which successfully gained land reform. During his many decades of activism he has become increasingly engaged in ecological and indigenous struggles (Wall, 2018). As I write, he is in his 80s but remains a leading ecosocialist thinker and activist.

Green Cuba

While Socialist states have been criticised on their ecological policies during the 20th century, Cuba has proved a sharp exception. Since the early 1990s, Cuba has pursued policies to drastically reduced climate change emissions and to protect the environment in a variety of ways. The reason for Cuba’s overt and strong turn towards environmental protection is twofold. The collapse of the Soviet Union meant that Cuba was no longer supplied with cheap oil after 1990. This led to a severe crisis, in the context of a continuing US blockade, resulting in what has been termed the ‘Special Period’. Thus a sharp reduction in the consumption of oil was vital so as to ensure the survival of Cuban society (Plonska and Saramifar, 2019). In turn, and apparently irrespective of this necessity, Fidel Castro became deeply engaged in ecological concerns and debates. At the 1992 UN Rio conference on the international environment he made the case for green policies, noting:

“An important biological species – humankind – is at risk of disappearing due to the rapid and progressive elimination of its natural habitat. We are becoming aware of this problem when it is almost too late to prevent it. It must be said that consumer societies are chiefly responsible for this appalling environmental destruction. 

With only 20 percent of the world’s population, they consume two thirds of all metals and three fourths of the energy produced worldwide. They have poisoned the seas and the rivers. They have polluted the air. They have weakened and perforated the ozone layer. They have saturated the atmosphere with gases, altering climatic conditions with the catastrophic effects we are already beginning to suffer.” (Castro, 2016)

Cuba has been so successful at introducing environmentally friendly policies that it has regularly been cited as the world’s best example of sustainable development. Agriculture has been partially decarbonised, with a push to grow using organic farming. There has been significant investment in renewable energy including wind turbines. Buses have been promoted as a means of reducing dependence on oil to power cars. In 2019, Cuba topped the Sustainable development index promoting economic activity that was ecologically sustainable (Trinder, 2020).

Indeed the supposedly anti-ecological record of the Soviet Union and other socialist states has recently been challenged in a detailed comparative study (Engel-Di Mauro 2021). While Cuba’s environmental policies are increasingly well know, it is perhaps often forgotten that the Soviet Union in its earliest years was also lauded as an environmental model. Under Lenin, National parks were opened and animal conservation was promoted (Stahnke, 2021). In recent years the notion of eco Leninism has become noted by diverse writers. Andreas Malm the Swedish academic has argued that to overcome the climate crisis we need to return to Lenin. He has argued that the urgency of the climate crisis might mean embracing an approach similar to the war communism of the early years of the Soviet Union (Malm, 2020). 

Marxism as a guide to ecological alternatives

So how do we draw this all together, moving from cataloguing various manifestations of ecological Marxism to constructing a political alternative? I have briefly sketched some articulations of Marxism and ecological movements/literatures but this is a vast field and I have left much out. There are four themes I would like, in conclusion, to at least note 1) The commons 2) Working class productivity 3) Anti-imperialism, and finally 4) the role of Leninism in promoting transition. 

The commons, a notion of collective ownership, most extensively explored in recent years by the Nobel Prize winning political economist Elinor Ostrom is essential to tackling ecological problems (Ostrom 2019). It is also a recurring concept in the work of Marx and Engels. Capitalism is a driver of ecological destruction, the notion of collective ownership of resources in contrast creates the possibility of shared prosperity and sustainability. Marx’s observation that we are not the owners of the Earth and should leave it in a better state for future generations, noted above, is a useful starting point for a green political economy. The Marxist aspiration for a society based upon the ensemble, the collective and creative interaction of all of us, for example, promoted by the British musician and revolutionary Cornelius Cardew is pertinent (Norman, 2019). 

Climate change and other severe environmental problems demand working class solutions. The productivity and creativity of workers is vital to ecological alternatives. The often forgotten history of working class environmental politics demands study. I noted above the example of the Australian Green Ban movement in halting environmentally damaging building projects. Workers produce and can produce alternative sustainable futures, the concept of workers’ plans for ecological production is important (Hampton, 2015). 

Anti-imperialism is another important dimension. Thomas Sankara (2018) reminds us that imperialism is the arsonist that burns the forests .There are numerous movements that link anti-imperialism with ecological politics, stretching from indigenous social movements in Latin America to the Rojava Revolution. Another useful contribution from Andreas Malm is his insight into how fossil fuels were the historical product of colonial exploitation and capitalist accumulation (Malm, 2016). The Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui argued that land was at the heart of struggles for autonomy in the face of colonial domination (1971). This is a theme taken up by Max Ajl who argues ‘Eco-socialists have to start from the basic demands of colonised peoples: namely national liberation. The Palestinian liberation struggle is one of the few, but not the only, remaining ‘classical’ national liberation struggles, which aims to break foreign settler control over the land.’ (Hancock, 2021).

In a wide ranging survey of ecology and Leninism, Lenin’s significance to ecological movement can be seen as ranging from an analysis of imperialism to an embrace of base building and dual power strategies (Woody, 2020). Lenin’s strategic analysis might be of value in theorising how to build political organisations that can overcome the ecological crisis (Wall, 2020). Leninism is, out of a number of important Marxist contributions to ecological debates, to my mind potentially the most important. Lenin’s contribution was to investigate how in a specific context we make revolution. There is a growing awareness that capitalism is the key driver of climate change and other ecological ills. Transforming society and transcending capitalism can be seen as essential to human survival, the critical investigation of how we do so can be advanced by an open reading of Lenin’s words and work. Lenin helped make history in a very different world to ours, so his insights cannot be crudely cut and pasted on to contemporary reality but re-reading his texts is vital. The French philosopher Alain Badiou notes that, ‘We must conceive of Marxism as the accumulated wisdom of popular revolutions, the reason they engender, and the fixation and precision of their target’ (Bostells, 2011: 280). We need precision in tackling an accelerating and many sided ecological crisis, Marxism, read with care and acted upon materially, will guide us.

Derek Wall teaches political economy at Goldsmiths, University of London, is a former international coordinator of the Green Party of England and Wales, and is active in the Marxist Centre.

Sources

Bahro, Rudolf (1984) From Red to Green: Interviews with New Left Review. London: Verso.

Bostells, Bruno (2011) Badiou and Politics. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.

Castro, F. (2016) “Fight the ecological destruction threatening the planet!” Climate and Capitalism, accessed: October 9, 2021.

Coates, Andrew (nd) “The British Pabloites“, accessed: October 9, 2021.

Cole, Daniel H., (1993).  “Marxism and the Failure of Environmental Protection in Eastern Europe and the U.S.S.R.” Indiana University Maurer School of Law 

Emerson, Peter (2011) Defining Democracy Voting Procedures in Decision-Making, Elections and Governance. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg

Engel-Di Mauro, Salvatore (2021) Socialist States and the Environment: Lessons for Eco–Socialist Futures. London: Pluto Press. 

Engels, Frederick, (1972 [1883]) Dialectics of Nature. Moscow: Progress., accessed: October 9, 2021.

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

Gorz, André (1980) Ecology as Politics. Boston: Southend Press.

________ (1987) Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism. London: Pluto.

Greenland, Hall. (1998). Red Hot: The Life & Times of Nick Origlass, 1908–1996, Wellington Lane Press.

Hampton, Paul (2015) Workers and Trade Unions for Climate Solidarity: Tackling Climate Change in a Neoliberal World. London: Routledge.

Hancock, Alfie (2021) “A People’s Green New Deal: An interview with Max Ajl” Ebb., accessed: October 9, 2021.

Hülsberg, Werner (1988) The German Greens: A Social and Political Profile. London: Verso.

Jarvis, Chris (2021) “6 things we learnt from the first Green Party leadership hustings” Bright Green, accessed: October 9, 2021.

Koffman, Chloe (2021) “Remembering Australia’s Green Bans” Tribune, accessed: October 9, 2021.

Kovel, Joel (2007) The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? London and New York: Zed Press.

Kühn, Andreas (2005) Stalins Enkel, Maos Söhne: die Lebenswelt der K-Gruppen in der Bundesrepublik der 70er Jahre. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag. 

Malm, Andreas (2016) Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. London: Verso.

________ (2020) Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century. London: Verso.

Mariátegui, José Carlos (1971 [1928]) Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality.  University of Texas Press., accessed: October 9, 2021.

Marx, Karl  (1959 [1894]) Capital. The process of capitalist production as a whole. Volume III. New York: International Publishers.

Norman, Fiona (2019) “Who Killed Cornelius Cardew?” Ebb, accessed: October 9, 2021.

O’Connor, James (1988) Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism. New York: Guilford Press.

Ostrom, Elinor (2019) Governing the Common: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Actions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Parkin, Sara (1989) Green Parties: An International Guide. London: Heretic Books.

Plonska, Ola and Saramifar, Younes (2019) The Urban Gardens of Havana: Seeking Revolutionary Plants in Ideologized. London: Palgrave.

Porritt, Jonathan (1984) Seeing Green: The Politics of Ecology Explained. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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Sankara, Thomas (2018 [1985]) “Imperialism is the arsonist of our forests and savannas”, accessed: October 9, 2021.

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Thornett, Alan (2019) Facing the Apocalypse: Arguments for Ecosocialism. London: Resistance Books.

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Voerman, Gerrit (2006) “Losing colours, turning green” Richardson, Dick and Rootes, Christopher (eds) The Green Challenge. London: Routledge.

Wall, Derek (1994) Weaving a Bower Against Endless Night. An Illustrated History of the Green Party. London: Green Party of England and Wales.

________ (2018) Hugo Blanco: A revolutionary for life. London: Merlin Press.

________ (2020) Climate Strike: The Practical Politics of the Climate Crisis. London: Merlin Press.

Woody, Gus (2020) “Revolutionary Reflections | Moving towards an ecological Leninism”. RS21, accessed: October 9, 2021.

Why Western Marxism Misunderstands China’s Usage of Markets

By Carlos Garrido

I have elsewhere argued that at the core of Western Marxism’s[1] flawed analysis of socialist states lies a “purity fetish” which is grounded in a Parmenidean fixation of the ‘true’ as the one, pure, and unchanging. For this disorder, so I have contended, the only cure is dialectics. With the aid of Roland Boer’s prodigious new text Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, I wish to show how this purity fetish, or, in its negative formulation, how this lack of dialectical thinking, emerges in Western Marxists’ analysis of China’s usage of markets.

In V.I. Lenin’s ‘Conspectus to Hegel’s Science of logic’ he states that,

It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx![2]

For anyone familiar with G.W.F. Hegel’s 700+ page arguably impenetrable monster this daunting task alone seems harder than making a revolution. However, the central message in Lenin’s audacious statement is this: without a proper understanding of the dialectical method, Marxism is bound to be misunderstood. A century later and still, Western Marxists struggle to understand Marx. The paradox is this: “Western Marxists, although claiming to be the ones who rekindle the spirit of Hegel into Marxism, are the least bit dialectical when it comes to analysis of the concrete world.” This is lucidly seen in their treatment of China’s usage of markets, where they dogmatically accept Ludwig von Mises’ stale binary which states  – “the alternative is still either Socialism or a market economy.”[3]

As Boer highlights, already in Capital Vol 3 (specifically chapter 36 on “Pre-Capitalist Relations”) Marx shows how markets existed in the slave economies of the ancient world, e.g., Rome and Greece, and in the feudal economies of the Middle Ages. Were the markets in each of these historical periods the same? Were they commensurable to how markets exist under capitalism? No, as Boer states “market economies may appear to be similar, but it is both the arrangement of the parts in relation to each other and the overall purpose or function of the market economy in question that indicates significant differences between them.”[4] As Boer points out, Chinese scholars, following the analysis of Marx’s Capital Vol 3, understand that “market economies have existed throughout human history and constitute one of the significant creations by human societies.”[5][6] If markets, then, predate the capitalist mode of production, why would a socialist mode of production not be able to utilize them?

Chinese Marxism, following upon the tradition of Eastern European socialism, was able to ‘de-link’ markets from capitalism and utilize them as a method (fangfa) and means (shouduan) to serve (fuwu) the ends of socialism, that is, to liberate the forces of production and guarantee collective flourishing.[7] If the last four decades – wherein China has drastically raised its population’s living standards and lifted 800 million out of poverty – has taught us anything, it is that China’s usage of markets as a shouduan to fuwu socialism works.

Considering the plethora of advances China has been able to make for its population and the global movement for socialism, why have Western Marxist continuously insisted that China’s market reforms are a betrayal of socialism and a deviation down the ‘capitalist road’? Unlike some of the other Western misunderstandings of China, this one isn’t merely a case of yixi jiezhong, of “using Western frameworks or categories to understand China,”[8] for, if the dialectical framework and categories the Marxist tradition inherits from Hegel were properly applied, there would be no misunderstanding here. Instead, it is precisely the absence of this dialectical framework which leads to the categorical mistakes.

In Hegel, but formulated clearer in Engels and Lenin, we come to know that universals are empty if not immanently negated by its particular (and individual) determinate form.[9] Since markets have existed throughout various modes of production, within the dialectic of universal, particular, and singular, markets stand as the universal term. Markets, Boer argues, as a “specific building block or component of a larger system” are a “universal institutional form” (tizhi), which can only be brought into concrete existence via a particular socio-economic system (zhidu).[10] When the particular zhidu through which the universal institutional form of a market comes into existence is a “basic socialist system” (shehuizhuyi jiben zhidu), the fundamental nature of how the tizhi functions will be different to how that tizhi functioned under the particular zhidu of slave, feudal, and capitalist modes of production. In short, as Huang Nansen said, “there is no market economy institutional form that is independent of the basic economic system of society.”[11]

As was the case with the planned institutional form in the first few decades of the revolution, the market institutional form has been able to play its part in liberating the productive forces and drastically raising the living standards of the Chinese people. However, because 1) China took this creative leap of grounding the market institutional form in socialism, and because 2) Western Marxists retain an anti-dialectical purity fetish for the planned institutional form, 3) the usage of markets in China is taken as a desecration of their Western Marxist pseudo-Platonic socialist ideal. It is ultimately a categorical mistake to see the usage of markets as ‘taking the capitalist road’ or as a ‘betrayal of the revolution.’ It is, in essence, a bemusing of the universal for the particular, of the institutional form for the socio-economic system. As Boer asserts, “to confuse a market economy with a capitalist system entails a confusion between commonality and particularity.”[12]

At a time when US aggression against China is moving the world into a new cold war,[13] these theoretical lapses carry an existential weight. The world cannot afford any more categorical mistakes which set the ground for an imperialist centered ‘left-wing’ critique of China. These, as has been seen in the past, merely give the state department’s imperialist narrative a socialist gloss.

Instead, it is time for the global left, and specifically the hesitant western left, to get behind China and its efforts to promote peace and international cooperation. The western left must stop being duped by propaganda aimed at weaponizing their sentiments to manufacture consent for a war that will only bring havoc and an unaffordable delay to the ingenious forms of global collaboration necessary to deal with the environmental crisis. It is the duty of every peace-loving individual to counter the US’ and former western colonial countries’ increasingly pugnacious discourse and actions against China. We must not allow the defense of their imperialist unipolarity to bring about any more death and suffering than what it already has.

Notes

[1] By Western Marxism I am referring specifically to a broad current in Marxism that comes about a quarter into the last century as a rejection of the Soviet Union and Marxism-Leninism. It is today, the dominant form of ‘Marxism’ in western academia. It encapsulates everything from the Frankfurt school, the French Marxists of the 60s-70s, the New Left, and the forms of Marxism Humanism that arise alongside these. Often, they phrase their projects as a Marxism that ‘returns to its Hegelian roots’, centering the Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and reading the mature Marx only in light of the projects of the younger Marx. Some of the main theorists today include Jürgen Habermas, Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Kevin Anderson etc. Although it might be tempting to just refer to this block as ‘Non-Marxist-Leninist Marxists’, I would urge against doing so, for there are many Marxist currents in the global south which, although drinking from the fountain of Marxism-Leninism, do not explicitly consider themselves Marxist-Leninists and yet do not fall into the same “purity fetish” Western Marxists do. It is important to note that a critique of their “purity fetish” does not mean I think their work is useless and shouldn’t be read. On the contrary, they have been able to make great theoretical advancements in the Marxists tradition. However, their consistent failure to support socialist projects must be critiqued and rectified.

[2] V.I. Lenin. Collected Works Vol 38. (Progress Publishers, 1976)., pp. 180.

[3] Ludwig von Mises. Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis. (Jonathan Cape, 1936)., pp. 142.

[4] Roland Boer. Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. (Springer, 2021)., pp. 119.

[5] Ibid.

[6] It is also important to note that this realization is common knowledge in economic anthropology since the 1944 publication of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, where, while holding that “there is hardly an anthropological or sociological assumption contained in the philosophy of economic liberalism that has not been refuted,” nonetheless argues markets have predated the capitalist mode of production, albeit usually existing inter, as opposed to intra, communally. Karl Polanyi. The Great Transformation. (Beacon Press, 1957)., pp. 269-277.

[7] Boer. Socialism with Chinese Characteristics., pp. 118.

[8] Ibid., pp. 13.

[9] For Hegel the individual is also a determinate universal – “the particular, because it is only the determinate universal, is also an individual, and conversely the individual, because it is the determinate universal, is just as much a particular.” G.W.F. Hegel. The Science of Logic. § 1343.

[10] Boer. Socialism with Chinese Characteristics., pp. 122-3.

[11] Ibid., pp. 124. Quoted from: Huang, Nansen. 1994. Shehuizhuyi shichang jingji lilun de zhexue jichu. Makesizhuyi yu xianshi 1994 (11): 1–6.

[12] Ibid., pp. 124.

[13] Although with the emergence of AUKUS a warm one does not seem unlikely.

Walter Rodney on Marxism in Africa (1975)

By Walter Rodney

Republished from Red Sails.

Walter Rodney was born in Guyana in 1942, acquired his doctorate in England at the age of 24, and then traveled widely in the Caribbean and Africa. In 1972 he published his legendary work How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. He was assassinated via a car-bomb in Georgetown in 1980, and the crime is widely believed to have been orchestrated by Forbes Burnham, the president of Guyana at the time. Rodney gave this speech at Queen’s College in New York, USA in 1975. [1]

First of all, we must understand the background for this kind of debate. When one is asked to speak of the relevance of Marxism to Africa at this particular point in time one is being asked to involve oneself in a historical debate, an ongoing debate in this country, particularly among the Black population. It is a debate which has heightened over the last year and, from my own personal observations, is being waged in a large number of places across this country. Sometimes it appears in the guise of the so-called Nationalist versus the Marxist; sometimes it appears in the guise of those who claim to espouse a class position as opposed to those who claim to espouse a race position. Thus it would not be possible for us in a single session to enter into all the ramifications of that debate, but it does form the background for our discussions.

It is an important debate. It is an important fact that such issues are being debated in this country today, just as they’re being debated in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America, and in many parts of the metropolitan world — in Western Europe and in Japan — because the widespread nature of the debate and its intensity at this time is a reflection of the crisis in the capitalist-imperialist mode of production. Ideas and discussion do not simply drop from the sky. It is not simply a plot on the part of certain individuals to engage others in a meaningless debate. Whatever the outcome of the debate, whatever the posture the different participants adopt, the very fact of the debate is representative of the crisis in capitalism and imperialism today and, as the crisis deepens, people find it more and more difficult to accept the old modes of thought which rationalize the system which is collapsing. Hence the need to search for new directions and, quite clearly, Marxism and Scientific Socialism pose themselves as one of the most obvious of the available options.

The question is not new to Africa or to the Black people as a whole — that is perhaps essential to understand. Many of us have before raised the question of the relevance of Marxism to this or that. Its relevance to Europe; many European intellectuals debated its relevance to their own society. Its relevance to Asia was debated by Asians; and, to look at it geographically, its relevance to Latin America was debated by Latin Americans. Individuals have debated the relevance to Marxism to their own time. Was it relevant to the 19th century? If so, was it still relevant to the 20th century? One can debate its relevance to a given facet of the culture of a society, or to its law or culture as a whole. These are all issues that have been debated before, and we should have some sense of history when we approach the question today, because with that sense of history we can ask, “Why is it that the question of the relevance of Marxism to society always crops up?” And — a very brief answer — I would suggest that what is common to the application of the question is, first of all, a condition of crisis, a condition of struggle, a condition in which people are dissatisfied with the dominant mode of perceiving reality. At that point they ask about the relevance of Marxism.

More than that, the second condition is people do ask the question because of their own bourgeois framework. Because one starts out located within the dominant mode of reasoning, which is the mode of reasoning that supports capitalism, and which we will call a bourgeois framework of perception. Because one starts out that way, it becomes necessary to raise the question about the relevance of Marxism. After one is advanced, it is probably more accurate to raise the question of the relevance of bourgeois thought, because the shoe would be on the other foot! But initially it is true that however much the bourgeoisie disagree, there is one common uniting strand to all bourgeois thought: they make common cause in questioning the relevance, the logic and so on, of Marxist thought. And therefore, in a sense, unfortunately, when we ask that question, we are also fitting into that framework and pattern. We are also, in some way, still embedded to a greater or lesser extent in the framework of bourgeois thought, and from that framework we ask with a great degree of hesitancy and uncertainty, “What is the relevance of Marxism?”

It is particularly true in our parts of the world — that is, the English-speaking parts of the world — because the Anglo-American tradition is one of intense hostility, philosophically speaking, towards Marxism. A hostility that manifests itself by trying to dissociate itself even from the study of Marxism. If you were to check on the continental tradition in Europe, you would find it is not the same. French, German, and Belgian intellectuals, whatever their perspective, understand the importance of Marxism. They study it, they relate to it, they understand the body of thought which is called Marxism, and they take a position vis-à-vis that body of thought. In the English tradition — which was also handed down to this part of the world, to the Caribbean, to many parts of Africa — it is fashionable to disavow any knowledge of Marxism. It is fashionable to glory in one’s ignorance, to say that we are against Marxism. When pressed about it one says “But why bother to read it? It is obviously absurd.” So one knows it is absurd without reading it, and one doesn’t read it because one knows it is absurd. And therefore one, as I said, glories in one’s ignorance of the position. It is rather difficult to seriously address the question about the relevance of Marxism unless one does the basic minimum of accepting that one should attempt to enter into this full body of thought — because it is a tremendous body of literature and analysis. And from the outside as it were, addressing the question is extremely difficult. Indeed, I would say it is pointless. Strictly from the outside, without ever having moved towards trying to grapple with what it is, to ask “What is its relevance?” is almost an unanswerable question. And I think in all modesty, those of us who come from a certain background — and we all come from that background — one of the first things we have to do is establish a basis of familiarity with the different intellectual traditions, and, as we become familiar with them, we can then be in a better position to evaluate Marxism’s relevance or irrelevance, as the case might be.

Now I will proceed on the assumption that what we are trying to discern in this discussion is whether the variants of time and place are relevant. Or, let me put it another way: whether the variants of time and place make a difference to whether Marxism is relevant or not. In a sense, we would almost have to assume its validity for the place in which it originated, Western Europe. We don’t have the time to deal with that in detail. But we can then ask, assuming that Marxism has a relevance, has a meaning, has an applicability to Western Europe — or had, in the 19th century — to what extent does its validity extend geographically? To what extent does its validity extend across time? These are the two variables: time and place. And those can be translated to mean historical circumstances — time — and culture, which means the place, and what social and cultural conditions exist in each particular place. For us — to make it more precise: Black people — no doubt well-meaning Black people will ask the question whether an ideology which was historically generated within the culture of Western Europe in the 19th century is today, in the third quarter of the 20th century, still valid for another part of the world — namely Africa, or the Caribbean, or Black people in this country [United States]. Whether it is valid to other societies at other times. And this is the kind of formulation which I wish to present [for discussion].

The Methodology of Marxism

I would suggest two basic reasons why I believe that Marxist thought — scientific socialist thought — would exist at different levels, at different times, in different places, and retain its potential as a tool, as a set of conceptions which people should grasp. And the first is to look at Marxism as a methodology, because a methodology would virtually, by definition, be independent of time and place. You will use the methodology at any given time, at any given place. You may get different results, of course, but the methodology itself would be independent of time and place. And essentially, to engage in some rather truncated presentation of Marxism, inevitably oversimplifying, but nevertheless necessary in the context of limited time, I would suggest as one of the real bases of Marxist thought that it starts from a prespective of man’s relationship to the material world; and that Marxism, when it arose historically, consciously dissociated itself from and pitted itself against all other modes of perception which started with ideas, with concepts and with words, [and adapted itself] to the material conditions and the social relations in society. This is the difference with which I will start: a methodology which begins its analysis of any society, of any situation, by seeking the relations which arise in production between men. There are a whole variety of things which flow from that: man’s consciousness is formed in the intervention in nature; nature itself is humanized through its interaction with man’s labour, and man’s labour produces a constant stream of technology which in turn creates other social changes. So this is the crux of the scientific socialist perception. A methodology that addresses itself to man’s relationship in the process of production on the assumption — which I think is a valid assumption — that production is not merely the basis of man’s existence, but the basis for defining man as a special kind of being with a certain consciousness. It is only through production that the human race differentiates itself from the rest of the primates and the rest of life.

What does it [Marxism] pose itself against? It poses itself against a number of hypotheses, a number of views of the world which start with words and concepts. For those who are familiar with Marx’s own evolution, it is well known that he started by looking first at Hegel, a very plausible and perceptive analyst of the 19th century who was guilty, in Marx’s own estimation, of putting forward an entirely idealist position, one that placed ideas in the centre of the universe and saw the material world virtually deriving from those ideas. In thinking about this, I felt that I wouldn’t go into Hegel, I would go further than Hegel for a classic exposition of the idealist world view. I take it from the New Testament, the Book of John, where he stated:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. And the Word was God.”

That is the classic exposition of the idealist position. You take every other thing from there: the Word was God! But we are suggesting that the word is itself an emanation from people’s activity as they attempt to communicate with each other, as they develop social relations out of production, and that we shouldn’t be mystified with words. Naturally enough we will have to deal with concepts and with the force of consciousness, which is a very powerful force, which even some Marxists have been tempted to underestimate.

Now Marx, taking that broad framework of methodology, tried to apply it to Western Europe. He applied it to a range of societies in different places and at different times, but he concentrated his attention to Western Europe. If you examine the body of literature produced by Marx and Engels you will find that they speak about slavery, about communal society, about feudalism, but by and large they concentrate on capitalism. They hardly even talk about socialism. Marx’s great contribution was his fantastic critique of an existing society, capitalist society. How did it come into being in a particular part of the world? The vast proportion of their literature concerns this question.

But, as I said when I talked about pre-capitalist society, especially feudalism, they talked about some other parts of the world. Occasionally Marx mentions the “Asiatic mode of production.” Occasionally he came across to look at the data concerning the United States. So he had something of a geographical span and a long time span. But it was so minimal in comparison with the bulk of his work that it is true that a lot of people have taken Marx’s method and his conclusions and have seen them as one and the same thing, that Marxism is not merely a certain methodology applied to Western Europe, but that Marxism is itself an ideology about Western Europe, about capitalism in the 19th century, and it cannot transcend those boundaries. When, clearly, Marx was doing the job he had to do: he was looking at his own society, he was doing it under some of the most adverse conditions, he was doing it by mastering bourgeois knowledge and putting it to the service of change and revolution. I would suggest, then, that the method was independent of time and place. It is implicit in Marx and it becomes explicit in post-Marxian development, using Marxian in the literal sense of the life of Marx himself. After Marx’s death you will get the evolution or the development of scientific socialist thought with other individuals recognizing that the methodology can be applied — must be applied — to a different time, must be applied to a different place.

Again, presenting our history in a very abbreviated form, we can look at Lenin, at his application of Marxist theory to Russian society. That is one of his principal contributions. The young Lenin, the first major thesis which he wrote, was the Development of Capitalism in Russia. He had to deal with his own society. He had to take those formulations out of the specific cultural and historical context of Western Europe and look at Eastern Europe, at Russia which was evolving differently, and to apply it to his own society. This he did. He had at the same time to consider the time dimension. That in the 19th century Marx was writing about what has now come to be called the classic period of capitalism, the entrepreneurial version of capitalism, and by the latter 19th century this had given way to monopoly capitalism. It had given way to imperialism.

So Lenin had to deal with method by applying it to a new dimension in time. So he wrote about capitalism in its imperialist stage. So those are the two variants operating: the ideology, the methodology of it (we’ll stick to the methodology for the time being) being applied to different societies at different times. Having made the point for Lenin, I hope it becomes clear for a number of people: Mao Zedong applying it to Chinese society, which was a different society from Russian society. Understanding the inner dynamics of Chinese society, relating to the question of the peasantry in a different and more profound way than any previous writer, because that was the nature of Chinese society, and he had addressed himself to that. And finally, for our purposes the most important example, the example of Amilcar Cabral. Because he was dealing with Africa. Cabral, in one of his essays, the one entitled The Weapon of Theory, if I recall correctly, one of his most important essays, began by making it clear that the best he could do was to return to the basic methodology of Marx and Engels. But it was not possible for Cabral to begin the analysis of the history of Guinea-Bissau by saying: “I am going to look for classes,” for example. He said, “If I say this I will be denying that my people have any history, because I do not perceive classes for a long period in the genesis of my own people.” Then he referred back to Marx and Engels’ classic statement that “the history of all existing societies is the history of class struggle.” To which Engels had appended a note saying that “by all history we mean all previously recorded history.” It so happens that the history of the people of Guinea-Bissau has not been recorded, and Cabral says: “I want to record that history. We will use the Marxian method. We will not be tied by the concept which arose historically in Western Europe when Marx was studying that society.”

Marx uses the method, and he discerned the evolution of classes and of the phenomemon of classes itself as being a major determinant — the major determinant — in western European history at a particular point in time. Cabral says, “We will begin at the beginning. We will not even concern ourselves initially with classes. We will simply look at men in the process of production. We will look at modes of production in the history of Guinea, and we will see how our society evolved.” So, without much of a fanfare, he was showing the relevance of that methodology to African society. If and when in the history of Guinea-Bissau the aspect of class appears to have historical importance, then Cabral dealt with it. Until such time, he simply stuck to the basis of Marxian methodology which was to look at Guinean people in the process of production, social formations, cultural formations which arose historically, and the direction in which the society was tending.

In many respects, when we today ask the question about the relevance of Marxism to Black people, we have already reached a minority position, as it were. Many of those engaged in the debate present the debate as though Marxism is a European phenomenon and Black people responding to it must of necessity be alienated because the alienation of race must enter into the discussion. They seem not to take into account that already that methodology and that ideology have been utilized, internalized, domesticated in large parts of the world that are not European. That it is already the ideology of eight hundred million Chinese people; that it is already the ideology which guided the Vietnamese people to successful struggle and defeat of imperialism. That it is already the ideology which allows North Korea to transform itself from a backward quasi-feudal, quasi-colonial terrain into an independent industrial power. That it is already the ideology which has been adopted on the Latin American continent and that serves as the basis for development in the Republic of Cuba. That it is already the ideology which was used by Cabral, which was used by Samora Machel, which is in use in the African continent itself to underline and underscore struggle and the construction of a new society.

It cannot therefore be termed a European phenomenon, and the onus will certainly be on those who argue that this phenomenon which has already universalized itself somehow is inapplicable to some Black people. The onus will be on those individuals, I suggest, to show some reason, perhaps genetic, why the genes of Black people reject this ideological position.

When we investigate and try to concentrate or keep central the concept of relevance, we must ask ourselves questions abut the present. What kind of society do we live in today? What kind of societies do Black people live in today in different parts of the world? And while of course we as Black people in this country, in the Caribbean and in different parts of Africa, have our own independent historical experience, one of the central facts is that we are all, in one way or another, located within the capitalist system of production. The society about which Marx wrote, through a process of outgrowth, dominated Africa and the Americas in the era of mercantilism, which was the period that capitalism was growing to maturity. It dominated these parts of the world. It created slave society in the Americas. Subsequent to the slave era, capitalism, even more powerful, was able to incorporate the whole world into a global network of production which derived from Western Europe and North America, a system which had a metropolitan centre or set of metropolitan centres, and a separate set of peripheries, colonies, and semi-colonies. So that we have all, historically, been incorporated within the capitalist system of production, and that is another dimension of the relevance of Marxism.

Even without the translation in terms of time and place, it seems to me that if we have become part of the capitalist-imperialist world, then we owe it to ourselves to relate to, to follow, to understand, and to hopefully adopt and adapt a critique of that capitalist system, because that is essentially what Marx’s writing is about. He was criticising that capitalist system. He did it more effectively than any bourgeois writer, and if we want to understand the world in which we live, which is a world dominated by capitalism, then we must understand the centre of that system, the motor within that system, types of exploitation which are to be found within the capitalist mode of production. So that is yet another factor.

Marxism as Revolutionary Ideology

I had originally suggested there were two basic things, and one was the methodology. My second consideration after methodology is to look at Marxism as a revolutionary ideology and as a class ideology. In class societies all ideologies are class ideologies. All ideologies derive from and support some particular class. So for all practical purposes we have grown up in capitalist society, and bourgeois ideology is dominant in our society. These institutions in which we function were created to serve the creation of ideas as commodities, ideas which will buttress the capitalist system. Now I would suggest historically, as Marx suggested himself, that the set of ideas we call “scientific socialism” arose within capitalist society to speak to the interest of the producers in that society, to speak to the interest of those who are exploited and expropriated, to speak to the interest of the oppressed, of the culturally alienated, and we must understand that, of the two major sets of ideas before us — idealism and materialism, bourgeois philosophy and Marxist philosophy — that each of the two is representative of a particular class. I don’t have the time to go into all the historical roots of the formation of socialism but, briefly, in the 19th century it was with the rise of capitalist society that conditions were created for the development of socialist ideas.

Out of the diverse and unsystematized socialist ideas, Marx was able to formulate a clear and systematic theory: scientific socialism. It had a particular class base and because it had this particular class base, it was revolutionary. It sought to transform and upend the relations in society. Bourgeois ideology is of necessity status quo preserving. It seeks to conserve, it seeks to buttress the given system of production, the relations which flow, the relations which flow from a certain system of production. A scientific socialist position remains revolutionary because it aims — consciously aims — at undermining that system of production and the political relations which flow from it. This is what I mean by revolutionary.

From time to time there are Marxists who have arisen who have attempted to deny or denude Marxism of its revolutionary content. That is true. There are Marxists who have become legal or armchair Marxists, who would like to see Marxism as merely another variant of philosophy, and who treat it in a very eclectic fashion as though one is free to draw from Marxism as one draws from Greek thought and its equivalents, without looking at the class base and without looking whether an ideology is supportive of the status quo or not.

Nevertheless, by and large, we can see Marxism and scientific socialism as subversive of and antithetical to the maintenance of the system of production in which we live. Because ideas, let me repeat, do not float in the sky, they do not float in the atmosphere, they are related to concrete relations of production. Bourgeois ideas derive from bourgeois relations of production. They are intended to conserve and maintain those relations of production. Socialist ideas derive from the same production, but they derive from a different class interest, and their aim is to overthrow that system of production.

Africa and Scientific Socialism

There again I will suggest that African people, like other Third World people, have virtually a vested interest in scientific socialism, because it offers itself to them as a weapon of theory. It offers itself to them as that tool, at the level of ideas, which will be utilized for dismantling the capitalist imperialist structure. This is its concern.

What I will attempt to deal with, as best I can, are certain questions arising from individuals who might say “yes” to most of what I’ve said, and then will ask the question, “Is there no other alternative? Is there no other ideological system which is neither capitalist not socialist, but is anti-capitalist, but addresses itself more humanely, if you like, to the interest of African people wherever they are?” These questions are worth looking into because there are Black people asking these questions, and we have to try and resolve them. My own formulation will be to suggest that we look at concrete examples of African or Black people who have attempted to devise systems which they consider to be non-capitalist and non-socialist. Systems they consider are valid alternatives to scientific socialism for the emancipation of African people.

In this regard we have a number of Pan-Africanists, a number of African nationalists in Africa, in the Caribbean and in this country, who have taken that road. George Padmore did this at the end of his life, and made a sort of distinction — not a sort, he made a distinction between scientific socialism and Pan-Africanism. He said this is the road we will follow: Pan-Africanism. We do not want to go that road which is capitalist; we do not want to go the socialist road; we will derive for ourselves something that is Pan-African.

In a sense Nkrumah followed up upon this and, although at one time he called himself a Marxist, he always was careful to qualify this by saying that he was also a Protestant. He believed in Protestantism at the same time. So simultaneously he was trying to straddle two worlds; the world which says in the beginning was matter and the world which says in the beginning there was the word. And inevitably he fell between these two. It’s impossible to straddle these two. But there he was, and we must grant his honesty and we must grant the honesty of many people who have attempted to do this impossible task and follow them to find out why they failed. They failed because their conception of what a variant different from bourgeois thought and different from socialist thought inevitably turned out to be merely another branch of bourgeois thought. And this was the problem: that bourgeois thought — and indeed socialist thought, when we get down to it — can have a variety of developments or roads and aspects or paths. Bourgeois thought, because of its whimsical nature and because of the way in which it promotes eccentrics, can have any road. Because, after all, when you are not going any place, you can choose any road!

So for bourgeois thought it was possible for these individuals to make what I consider to be a genuine attempt to break with the dominance of bourgeois thought, and yet find in the final analysis that they have merely embraced another manifestation of that which they themselves at the outset had suggested that they were confronting.

There are a number of examples, some more apt than others. Some of the examples actually are Africans who I think, were blatantly dishonest from the beginning. I do think that most of the ideologues of African socialism claiming to find a third path are actually just cheap tricksters who are attempting to hoodwink the majority of the population. I don’t think they’re out to develop anything that addresses itself to the interests of the African people. But, nevertheless, it is part of the necessity of our times that our people no longer are willing to accept anything that is not put to them in the guise of socialism.

And therefore I shan’t in fact go on to African socialism. What I’ll do is take examples of those who were, in my opinion, being serious, being honest. And certainly Kwame Nkrumah was one of these. Nkrumah spent a number of years during the fifties and right up to when he was overthrown — that would cover at least ten years — in which he was searching for an ideology. He started out with this mixture of Marxism and Protestantism, he talked about Pan-Africanism, he went to consciencism and then Nkrumahism, and, there was everything other than a straight understanding of socialism.

What were the actual consequences of this perception? That is what matters to us. Let us assume that he was searching for something African and that he was trying to avoid the trap of adopting something alien. What were the practical consequences of his attempt to dissociate himself from an international socialist tradition? We saw in Ghana that Nkrumah steadfastly refused to accept that there were classes, that there were class contradictions in Ghana, that these class contraditions were fundamental. For years Nkrumah went along with this mish-mash of philosophy, which took some socialist premises but in which he refused to pursue it to its logical conclusion, in which he would accept that one either had a capitalist system based upon the private ownership of the means of production and the alienation of the product of people’s labour, or one had an alternative system which was completely different and that there was no way of juxtaposing and mixing these two to create anything that was new and viable.

A most significant test of this position was when Nkrumah himself was overthrown! After he was overthrown, he lived in Guinea-Konakry and before he died he wrote a small text, Class Struggle in Africa. It is not the greatest philosophical treatise but it is historically important, because it is there Nkrumah himself in effect admits the consequences, the misleading consequences, of an ideology which espoused an African cause, but which felt, for reasons which he did not understand, a historical necessity to separate itself from scientific socialism. It indicated quite clearly the disastrous consequences of that position. Because Nkrumah denied the existence of classes in Ghana until the petty bourgeoisie as a class overthrew him. And then, in Guinea, he said it was a terrible mistake. Yes, the petty bourgeoisie is a class with interests fundamentally opposed to workers and peasants in Africa. Yes, the class interests of the petty bourgeoisie are the same or at least are tied in with the class interests of international monopoly capital and therefore we have in Africa a class struggle within the African continent and a struggle against imperialism. And if we are to aim at transcending these contradictions, of bringing victory and emancipation to the working peoples, the producers of Africa, we will have to grapple with that ideology, which first of all recognizes and, challenges the existence of exploiting and oppressing classes.

It’s a very important historical document. It is the closest that Nkrumah comes to a self-critique. It is the record of a genuine nationalist, African nationalist, who wandered for years with this assumption and feeling that somehow he must dissociate himself in one way or another from scientific socialism because it originated outside the boundaries of his own society and he was afraid of its cultural implications. That is putting it in the most charitable way. But the fear is due, in fact, to aspects of bourgeois ideology. Due to the fact that he made a distinction between social theory and scientific theory, which is not a necessary distinction. That is the distinction which comes out of the history of bourgeois thought.

People seem to have no difficulty in deciding that they are going to use facets of the material culture that originated in the West, whether it originated in capitalist or socialist society. People have no difficulty relating to electricity but they say: “Marx and Engels, that’s European!” They don’t ask the question, “Was Edison a racist?” but they ask the question, “Was Marx a racist?” They genuinely believe that they are making a fundamental distinction, whereas, in fact, this is obscuring the totality of social development. And the natural sciences are not to be separated from the social sciences. Our interpretation of the social reality can similarly derive a certain historical law and hence scientific law of society which can be applied irrespective of its origin or its originators. Of course, it is true, and this is the most appropriate note on which to end, that any ideology, when applied, must applied with a thorough grasp of the internal realities of a given African society.

Marxism comes to the world as a historical fact, and it comes in a cultural nexus. If, for instance, Africans or — let us go back to Asians; when the Chinese first picked up the Marxist texts, they were European texts. They came loaded with conceptions of the historical development of Europe itself. So that method and factual data were interwoven obviously and the conclusions were in fact in a specific historical and cultural setting. It was the task of the Chinese to deal with that, and to adapt it, and to scrutinize it, and see how it was applicable to their society. First and foremost to be scientific it meant having due regard for the specifics of Chinese historical and social development.

I have already cited Cabral in another context, and he reappears in this context. The way in which he is at all times looking at the particularities of class development in contemporary Guinea-Bissau, looking at the potential of classes in Guinea-Bissau at this point in time. And therefore he is, of course, making sure that Marxism does not simply appear as the summation of other people’s history, but appears as a living force within one’s history, and this is a difficult transformation. This is the task of anybody who considers himself or herself a Marxist. However, because it is fraught with so many difficulties and obstacles, many people take the easy route, which is to take it as a finished product rather than an ongoing special product which has to be adapted to their own society.

One finds that in looking at this Marxist theory, at its relevance to race, looking at the relevance of Marxist theory to national emancipation, we come up with a very important paradox, and it is this: that the nationalist, in the strict sense of the word, that is the petty bourgeois nationalist, who aims merely at the recovery of national independence in our epoch, is incapable of giving the peoples of the Caribbean any participation in liberal democracy. The petty-bourgeoisie cannot fulfill these historical tasks, for national liberation requires a socialist ideology. We cannot separate the two. Even for national liberation in Africa, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique very clearly demonstrated the necessity for an ideological development — for consciencization, as they say in Latin America — and, the nationalist struggle was won because it came under the rubric of a scientific socialist perspective.

As Cabral said, “There may be revolutions which have had a revolutionary theory and which have failed, but there have certainly been no revolutions which have succeeded without a revolutionary theory.”

Notes

Walter Rodney, 1975. Marxism and African Liberation. [web] ↩

Critique of the Misunderstanding Concerning Marx’s Base-Superstructure Spatial Metaphor

By Carlos Garrido

Karl Marx’s 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy [i] represents one of the clearest reflections of the development of his and Engels’ thought. In what amounts to a short four and a half pages, Marx concisely exhibits the resulting conclusions of more than two decades worth of studies – from his first encounter with the economic question in 1842-3 via the polemic over landed property and forest theft, to the latest decade and a half painfully spent in the British Museum in London (except for the short interruption of the 48 revolutions) divided between the political writings for the New York Tribune and his economic studies for this text and for Capital, which this text is a dress rehearsal for. Although endless work can be done on these four and a half pages, I would like to limit myself to a clarification of the famed and famously misinterpreted spatial metaphor of the economic foundation and the political-legal superstructure. 

The most common misunderstanding of this metaphor posits that the economic foundation absolutely determines the ideological superstructure. In this view, all legal, political, philosophical, and religious structures and forms of consciousness are reducible to a reflection of the present economic situation. This perspective, held primarily by various vulgar Marxists of the second international and by critics of Marx (esp. the Weberian conception of Marxism), has come to be labeled as economically reductive and subsequently critiqued by dozens of 20th century Marxist, e.g., Althusser, Gramsci, Lukács, Lenin.

On the other hand, as a reaction to this economic reductionism, some Marxists have rejected the conception that the economic foundation influences the superstructure any more than the superstructure influences the economic. This perspective holds that there is a mutual conditioning of the two spheres, a dialectical interpenetrative relation between the opposing poles of the economic foundation and the ideological superstructure, where, as Marcuse states, “ideology comes to be embodied in the process of production itself.”[ii] The various reactions to economic determinism may take different forms, generally, what they share is a refusal to describe the influence of the economic realm on the ideological as ‘determinist’ – unless couched within a framework that equalizes the determination of the superstructure on the economic in a dialectical fancy of interpenetrative determination.   

Funny enough, Marx’s preface presents the relation between the economic and the superstructural with an ambiguity which seems to foreshadow both misinterpretations. First, he states that “the mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life,” then that “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness” (KM, 20-21). These two sentences chronologically follow each other but refer to two different (albeit synonymous) concepts for describing the relationship between material life and the ideological superstructure, viz., conditions and determines.

Although synonymous, ‘conditions’ carries conceptually an openness for a less rigid affecting relationship. To say that something conditions can range from meaning that it influences to determines. Given the conceptual ambiguity, it would seem that the economic reductionist group would read conditions qua determines while the group which reacts to the reductionists would read conditions qua influences. Between this binary of blue and red pill, can we ask for another color?

I think Marx offers us blue and red for us to make purple, indubitably the most beautiful color keeping with Plato. In essence, both misunderstandings are partly correct – the economic foundation determines the superstructure, but the superstructure can also influence the economic foundation.

As Althusser noted,[iii] in a seemingly contradictory manner the superstructure is determined by the economic base while nonetheless sustaining a “relative autonomy” in relation to it, effectively allowing it to have “reciprocal action” upon it. It is important to note that this Althusserian formulation is actually a reconceptualization of how Engels dealt with the issue in a 1890 letter response to Conrad Schmidt. In this letter from an aged Engels, we find an elucidation for this often-misunderstood spatial metaphor, and consequently, a clarification of the scope of rigidity the concept of determination carries in his and Marx’s works.

This letter, along with the others with which it was jointly published as Engels on Historical Materialism, gives a fascinating insight into how determination ought to be read in the Marxist tradition. Before Engels deals with the question of the economic foundation’s determination of the superstructure, he examines production’s (as in the moment, the “point of departure,”[iv] not the whole) determinative relation to the moment of exchange, and the moment of exchange’s determinative relation to the newly separated money market. He says,

Production is in the last instance the decisive factor. However, as soon as the commercial exchange of commodities separates itself from actual production it follows a movement which, although as a whole still dominated by production, in turn obeys in its particular details and within the sphere of its general dependence, its own laws.

The same is true for the money market. Just as soon as dealing in money is separated from commodity exchange, it acquires a development of its own, special laws determined by its particular nature, and its own phases. Yet they all take place within the given limits and conditions of production and commodity exchange

The same relational function of determination/conditioning is sustained with the economic foundation and the political superstructure (and afterwards with the legal, philosophical, and scientific aspects of the superstructure):

While the new independent power must, on the whole, submit to the movement of production, in turn it also reacts, by virtue of its immanent, i.e., its once transmitted but gradually developed relative independence, upon the conditions and course of production. There is a reciprocity between two unequal forces; on the one side, the economic movement; on the other, the new political power which strives for the greatest possible independence and which having once arisen is endowed with its own movement. The economic movement, upon the whole, asserts itself but it is affected by the reaction of the relatively independent political movement which it itself had set up. This political movement is on the one hand the state power, on the other, the opposition which comes to life at the same time with it.

These passages not only demonstrate with utmost clarity how a determinative relation can sustain within it a relative independence (what Althusser later calls ‘relative autonomy’) which allows the determined variable a capacity to react and influence that which determines it, but in demonstrating the translatability into various spheres of how this relationship functions, Engels is providing a general formulative understanding of the question on determination. In essence, the variable which determines (or conditions) sets the parameters for the determined variable, such that the determined variable presupposes the other’s boundaries for its activity. Concretely, the superstructure presupposes a specific economic foundation which has set a historical boundary on it. Within this determined space, the superstructure is relatively autonomous, enough so that it becomes capable of emergent qualities which can have a reactive or “counter-active influence” upon that which determines it.

Philosophically, the position can be labeled as compatibilist, i.e., there is a soft determination which allows for the conditioned autonomous expression of that which is determined. Therefore, although the determination of the economic foundation on the superstructure is not absolute (hard determinism), neither is it nonexistent. Engels critiques both positions: he argues it is “altogether pedantic to seek economic causes for all” things, asserting that in doing so Paul Barth is “contending against windmills,” while also criticizing the position which altogether either denies determination or places the primary source of determination on the wrong variable as participating in “ideological conceptions” whereby the real relationship is inverted and placed on its head, making one take the “effect for the cause.”

Why do these misunderstandings arise? As the conclusion in Engels’ letter states,

What all these gentlemen lack is dialectics. All they ever see is cause here, effect there. They do not at all see that this is a bare abstraction; that in the real world such metaphysical polar opposites exist only in crises; that the whole great process develops itself in the form of reciprocal action, to be sure of very unequal forces, in which the economic movement is far and away the strongest, most primary and decisive. They do not see that here nothing is absolute and everything relative. For them Hegel has never existed. Yours, etc.

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] All subsequent quotes from this text will be from this edition: Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. (International Publishers, 1999).

[ii] Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. (Beacon Press, 1966), p. 189.

[iii] In his essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses

[iv] In the appendix to the above edition of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, a drafted introduction called ‘Production, Consumption, Distribution, Exchange (Circulation)’ provides an analysis of the relation each of the four moments has with the other. Here he calls production the “moment of departure.” This draft is included in the introduction of a series of manuscripts now known as Grundrisse.