#“it is in the interest of the communists to help the bourgeoisie to power...in order the sooner to be able to overthrow it” sounds silly

[greatwyrmgold]

It's always interesting to read what people in the past thought the future would look like and try to figure out why they were wrong.

For instance: In The Principles of Communism, Frederick Engels speculates that division of labor will disappear as industrial technology continues to develop. And it makes sense that he thought that; the history he knew saw highly specialized craftsmen replaced by less-specialized factory workers.

But it sounds absurd to us, because we've seen that advancement in industrial technology went in a different direction. The unspecialized factory work proved to be precisely the work which was easiest to automate, and struggled to significantly reduce the specialized education required to be (for instance) a doctor or handyman.

Who knows what the future will bring? Perhaps automation will continue on that path, eliminating all jobs which require less than four years of higher education. Or perhaps someone will make actual AI, capable of providing the specialized knowledge that anyone with two hands can use to perform specialist labor. Or perhaps some new development will render this analytical lens obsolete.

The only thing we know for certain about the future, is that most people who try to predict it will look pretty foolish in hindsight.

...this probably isn't what Engels wanted people reading his stuff to take away from it.

#if I had something interesting to say about the Marxist theory bits I would have written a different post #“it is in the interest of the communists to help the bourgeoisie to power...in order the sooner to be able to overthrow it” sounds silly #but in context he DOES have a point #future #speculation #technology #culture #random thoughts

[hazardous-waste-containment]

Since the German bourgeoisie was basically interested in the liquidation of the Weimar democracy, and this could be accomplished only with the help of the Nazis, our first question dealing with whether the bourgeoisie saw any other way out of the crisis may be answered in the negative. Because of this, the German bourgeoisie chose this way out more or less consciously and “voluntarily”. Consequently, our answer to the second question concerning whether the bourgeoisie consciously decided in favor of Nazism is in the affirmative. It does not follow, however, that everything which happened afterwards in the course of Nazi rule corresponded to the intentions of the German bourgeoisie. But once the bourgeoisie allowed Hitler to gain power, it no longer had any choice.

The problem, however, has by no means been exhausted yet. Why did the National Socialist movement evolve in the years of crisis with such a sweeping force so to become such a determining factor in German political life that the bourgeoisie could solve its problems only by relying on it?

This question cannot be dismissed by saying that the German bourgeoisie itself helped Fascism to evolve in order to help it to power, thereby extricating itself from the economic and political crisis. The German bourgeoisie assisted Hitler in two ways. First, some influential capitalist circles (though by no means all leading bourgeois power groups) provided financial support to the movement. Second, they never took a firm stand against the Nazi use of violence, whereas they took the most resolute steps against the Communists’ generally less significant and violent “unconstitutional actions”. But these often exaggerated factors do not provide a full explanation. If the bourgeoisie was so powerful that it was able to develop a very small movement (in 1928 the Nazis still had only 800,000 voters!) into the largest mass party in the country, then why did it not use its power to bring about a rule more in accord with its “taste” and objectives? The masses behind the Nazis (before the seizure of power they numbered thirteen million) were not created by the bourgeoisie which, incidentally, voted for the center and the non-Nazi right. In Germany there were considerable strata who were not big capitalists but who nevertheless favored the Nazi solution.

Mihály Vajda, “Crisis and the Way Out: The Rise of the Fascism in Italy and Germany” (my emphasis)

#reading #vajda #the people's lobby #crony corporatism

[jaijaicontextualstudies2001]

The Uprising of Proletariats during Different Modernities, and How They Influence Filmography.

The term 'proletariat' is most known for getting recognition in the Communist Manifesto written by Marx and Engels (1884) (Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1963), Beilharz, P. (2016), Zedian (2020)), however upon my research I discovered that the term 'proletariat' has dated back to ancient Rome (Zedian (2020), Beilharz, P. (2016)) and was not the invention of Marx as I initially believed.

Beilharz (2016) says that 'proletariat' is of Latin origin, to which it was revived by Marx in his manifesto. It comes from the word "proletarius", and was a word in the Roman census designated to citizens who had nothing to offer the state (Beilharz, P. (2016), Zedian (2020)). These poor and landless freemen (Zedian (2020)) were also known individually as "proletarii" (Beilharz, P. (2016)), and were seen as the lowest rank among Roman citizens (Zedian (2020)). The Marxist proletariats were having political struggles between the bourgeoisie (Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1963), Beilharz, P. (2016), Longhurst, S. (2017), Zedian (2020)) was no different in ancient Rome, where there was a political struggle between the proletariats and the plebeians (Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1963), Zedian (2020)). The same struggle between the rich and poor, centuries apart, helped legitimise Marx's claims that class struggle has always existed and, was when he wrote the manifesto, a present one (Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1963), Beilharz, P. (2016)): a constant cycle of struggle that motors the world.

Another similarity of the economic category of Roman proletariats and Marxist proletariats were the people that were placed in such category. Yes, the majority of them lived in poverty and were "working-class", and also a sub-category known as "lumpenproletariat" (Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1963), Beilharz, P. (2016)). These were individuals who had irregular work, and were often criminals (Beilharz, P. (2016)). Now, I worded 'lived in poverty' and not poor as it is a misconception that everyone labelled, particularly Marxist proletariats, were not all poor; some were from an entrepreneurial class and were not wealthy for their class bracket, or were of labour aristocracy (Zedian (2020)). Either way, the proletariat struggled with new oppressions from new oppressors of different modernities. This is expressed in Longhurst's 'Introducing Cultural Studies' (2017) who writes class inequality as being in all societies (except from primitive communist societies). It has "always been the basic and fundamental contradiction that some members of society have owned and controlled the means of production, a characteristic that has given them power over the remaining members of society, who, in order to make a livelihood, participate in production on terms and conditions set by these owners" (Longhurst, S. (2017) p.95).

What is interesting about the proletariats in both modernities is how there was a significant uprising or revolution of the poorer class against the wealthier one. In ancient Rome, the slave revolution - or just slave revolt - lead by the infamous Spartacus; a slave turned gladiator who lead a revolt of escaped slave rebels against the Roman Republic (Mckenna (2023)). In the modern world of visual technology, the story of Spartacus and the Gladiatorial War (Mckenna (2023)) against the Roman Republic has be retold through filmography. Arguably the famous depiction of the story is Stanley Kubrick's 'Spartacus' (1960). Uniformly, near the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, a groups of rebels known as the Luddites collectively destroyed the loom machines that displaced them in the industry (Brain (2018)). Lead by King Ludd, they operated at night and were usually masked (Brain (2018)). This has been made into re-dramatisations within TV shows and documentaries like 'Luddites' (1988) by Richard Broad. The retelling of working class rebellion has infiltrated into fictitious film and tv show plots, usually in a form of a dystopian world.

Snowpiercer (2013) directed by Bong Joon-Ho, CJ Entertainment

One well known film that depicts a lower class revolt is 'Snowpiercer' (Bong, (2013)). After an ice-age caused by humans trying to combat global warming, the remaining population who have not frozen to death board a train called 'Snowpiercer'. However, the wealthy are placed in the front carriages, living in spacious quarters and being able to experience life's pleasures as they did before living on the train. Their children were also able to have an education with a carriage set at a classroom (Bong, (2013)). In the tail end of the train, the poorest of the population are crammed in one carriage, unwashed, and their clothes ragged. They are giving protein jelly bars as the only form of food by the soldiers that guard their carriage, whereas the wealthy have fresh food and sushi (Bong, (2013)). The 'proletariats' in this situation form a revolt, lead by Curtis, to get to the front of the train, and demand a more equal quality of life (Bong, (2013)). Throughout their revolt they combat soldiers and the rich to get to the engine, unfortunately most of them died in the process; died fighting for a better life. This proved in vein as the train got destroyed, and the only survivors being two children from the back end of the train (Bong, (2013)).

High Rise (2015), directed by Ben Wheatley, StudioCanal

'High Rise' (Wheatley, (2015)) is another excellent portrayal of class struggle, and a lower class revolution. The whole film is set in a newly built apartment block, the working-class population live in the lower floors, again like in 'Snowpiercer', more crowded than the rich that live in the highest apartments. A grocery store that is the whole of the 15th floor is the only thing that separates the two classes (Wheatley, (2015)). There is a constant tension between the classes, and the tension erupts into an aggravated break out between them. The wealthy killing the poor and the poor killing the wealthy. Similar to the ending of 'Snowpiercer', it causes a mass destruction of the apartment block they all lived in. It sends survivors into a post-apocalyptic setting: trapped in a destroyed building, not being able to get in or out, unable to have access to food or water, and in some cases having to eat their pets (Wheatley, (2015)).

Joker (2019), directed by Todd Phillips, Warner Bros Pictures

The last film I am using as an example of uprising of the proletariat influencing filmography is Joker (Phillips (2019)). Set in 1981, the working citizens of Gotham demand for change and the elite wealthy class looks down on them, and sees them as a burden to society (Robinson, J (2019)). The anger of the working class is symbolised in the broken character of Arthur - Joker - until it reaches a breaking point, and the working class retaliate. This becomes prevalent after the deaths of three wealthy men the state pins on the working class, labelling them as criminals. As Arthur was the murderer he is seen so by law and by the elitists, The working class sees him as a liberator for their people (Phillips (2019)). By the end of the film, the streets are filled with exploited citizens in clown masks rioting in the streets, destroying property, and even murdering wealthy people such as Bruce Wayne's parents (Phillips (2019)).

In conclusion, the uprising of a form of a proletariat class is evidently as old as time: a constant cycle that never seems to go anywhere and somehow ending up at square one again. Whether it is heroic or foolish, it is a reality that has been translated into modern filmography, and usually set in a dystopian reality in films. This then raises questions: are we actually living in a form of dystopia? Does the exploitative nature of capitalism create a dystopian lifestyle that we are not aware of as we are used to this life? Will the proletariats of society ever successfully overrule the plebeians, the bourgeoisie, the wealthy classes of society? Another thing to note, especially regarding filmography, is how the uprising of the working class leads to a very violent mass destruction of society. So, then, does that implicate that the 'proletariats' are destined to fail when fighting for a more equal living, or are these capitalistic films produced in a capitalistic society stating the potential dangers of a more socialist society?

Bibliography: Books, Reviews, Articles

Brain, J. (2018) The Luddites, Historic UK, The History and Heritage Accommodation Guide

Beilharz, P. (2016) ‘Proletariat’, The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Sociology. Oxford, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Jimenez Gonzalez, A. (2022) ‘Law, Code and Exploitation: How Corporations Regulate the Working Conditions of the Digital Proletariat’, Critical sociology, 48(2), pp. 361–373.

Longhurst, S. (2017) Introducing Cultural Studies, Introducing Cultural Studies. Routledge.

Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1963) The Communist manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Edited by D.B. Ri︠a︡zanov. New York: Russell & Russell.

Mckenna, A. (2023) Spartacus, Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc.

Robinson, C. (2019), ‘Joker’ Exposes the Broken Class System That Creates its Own Monsters, www.peoplesworld.org

Savage, M. (2015) ‘Introduction to elites From the “problematic of the proletariat” to a class analysis of “wealth elites”’, The Sociological review (Keele), 63(2), pp. 223–239.

Zedian, A (2020) ‘Proletariat’,  Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc.

Bibliography: Film

High Rise (2015), directed by Ben Wheatley, StudioCanal

Joker (2019), directed by Todd Phillips, Warner Bros Pictures

Luddites (1998), directed by Richard Broad, Thames Television

Snowpiercer (2013) directed by Bong Joon-Ho, CJ Entertainment

Spartacus (1960), directed by Stanley Kubrick, Universal Pictures

[thaimun-x-hsoc]

From a concerned whistleblowing citizen of the USSR

The Soviets’ ruthless aggression has proven them time and again to be violent and barbaric. The recent attack on Czechoslovakia is clearly a result of the actions of the authoritarian Communist regime, a group which is relentlessly expansionist and imperialist. The Comintern and Cominform have consistently shown the world that they are not interested in peace. Since their inception, these destabilizing forces have pushed their philosophy of “international revolution,” a concept that will inevitably lead to the ruin of governments the world over. Under the so-called egalitarian communists who supposedly fight for the proletariat and “suppresses counter-revolutionary forces”, this oppressive system continues to push their tyranny after 4 decades of the suppression of basic rights and autonomy all for the “suppression of the bourgeoisie”, which has led to mass authoritarianism and the creation of an all-encompassing totalitarian regime with the main aims of suppressing basic autonomy in order to satisfy Brezhnev’s cravings for sheer power. I, as a concerned Soviet member of the Proletariat, calls for the workers of the world to Unite and join forces against the tyrannical Soviet regime continuing to spread misery all around us. The Soviet government takes away my rights and creates a cult of personality around the CCCP. The Soviets are recklessly wasting our public funds on a war that benefits nobody other than the most elite amongst the bourgeoisie. As a result of their careless invasion of Czechoslovakia, our public infrastructure is crumbling, and despite its outwardly powerful image, the USSR has never been weaker. Dissidence is at an all-time high, and political insurgency is rife – there have been multiple gulag uprisings in Omsk, Novosibirsk, and Yekaterinburg, all of which have been brutally and messily silenced by the Soviets. Even so, it is clearly a matter of time before the people cast off the ineffective and brutal rule of the current regime. The Allied nations are rapidly losing confidence in the ability of the USSR to exist as a major and successful world power. This is not the revolution we were promised; we seek liberalization and more decentralization in the economy in order for us to gain back the rights and power of the people. All countries of the world, from the East to the West, I beg you to unite together to help the citizens of the Soviet Union and in the Eastern Bloc gain our autonomy from the tyrannical regime of Brezhnev and the Communist Party. If we are to live in a world of terror and relentless fear for lives with every passing day, what then, is the purpose of enduring?

[nabilla3]

My Response to The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx

Modern society is a consumer society. Marx believed that modernity was brought upon by the new relationship between the rich and poor, and “the rise of the new class on top of society.” (Marx and Engels, 1849) The rich are the bourgeoisie who are those who own the means of production. The poor are the proletariat who are the labourers. The bourgeoisie exploits the proletariat to boost production and increase capital. In Marx’s Manifesto he seems to praise the rich, while despising them. He emphasises on the aggression of the cyclical system that is in place. Marx believes that there would be a revolution that turns the exploitative capitalist sosicety into a socialist one and theen eventually a communist society. I think that he used hyperbole to almost inspire the reader and persuade them into believing his text.

The advancement in technology has meant that companies can work on a global scale. Coca-cola is in every country, (except North Korea) this gives them more potential to invest and increase profit.

Society is built by the bourgeoisie in order to benefit the bourgeoisie. For example in education, school is built to teach students values that would make them the perfect worker, like following the rules, and teaching them to be docile. This system helps the cycle to repeat and for the bourgeoisie to stay in power. Although we are taught that school is meritocratic, there are many factors that can influence an individual's success, like the community in which they have been raised. Studies show that lower-class households prioritise instant gratification over delayed gratification, which means that they are more likely to drop out and get a job. Even if an individual who is not in the upper class succeeds, it is unlikely for them to gain so much wealth that they gain any political power. 

I think that one of the main differences between the change in the relationship between the exploiter and exploited is that the exploitation was more explicit and obvious however now the drastic difference in power is overlooked. Although we are taught in school about marxism, people are still passive and do not have enough power to make any difference.

An example of this is the media. Most major media sites in the US are owned by Rupert Murdoch but having many companies that go by different names, gives off the illusion of choice but in the end, people are consuming the same media over and over. Ex-workers of some of these companies have come forward about how the writers and editors had to have the mindset of “would Murdoch write this.”  

One of the criticisms that I have of the ideas put forward in the manifesto is that due to the increase of globalisation and global culture, society has become so fragmented that people are harder to generalise and control. The concept of fragmentation really interests me and I would like to look further into how I can explore this visually. Furthermore, another criticism that I thought of while reading the text was that with rise of the internet, there is an easier access to social media platforms that allows individuals to voice their honest opinions and engage in communities that think the same. Although there is censorship, in general people are free to say what they want online (in the west).

Marx, K. and Engel, F., 1848. Communist Manifesto.  Moscow: Progress Publishers,

[bustedbernie]

A great read about Social-Fascism. Very apt to our current political situation. I’ll include an opening excerpt below as well as some quotes that are very apt and could very much have been written by a “Bernie or Bust” supporter in their “Biden and Trump is the same” mantra or their just as concerning “Trump will accelerate the drive toward a proletariat revolution.” 

But I would be less than candid if I did not confess that I was moved to look back at social-fascism because it is no longer of merely historical interest. In its original incarnation, it helped to bring about such a vast and shattering catastrophe that it once seemed such ideas could never again be revived on a large and dangerous scale. Yet this is exactly what has been happening. The term itself has not come back into general use, but the thinking behind it again has its devotees.

A new revolutionary generation has raised questions that are not altogether new. Who is the “main enemy”? Are “reformists” more dangerous than “reactionaries”? Is liberal democracy nothing but a “mask” for bourgeois dictatorship or even some form of totalitarianism? Is it necessary to provoke violent confrontations in order to unmask this type of liberalism? If a revolutionary minority strives to destroy a democratic, even a “bourgeois-democratic,” order, is it necessarily going to be the main beneficiary—or even avoid the fate of the democratic order it has helped to pull down?

Answers to such questions made the difference between life and death for millions of people a few decades ago. In what follows, I have tried to restudy and reconstruct the earlier experience as a historical phenomenon that deserves to be better known for its own sake and that presents us with some large and difficult problems of special interest today.

[...]

The lesson would seem to be that it is dangerous to use the term “fascism”—or today “totalitarianism”—too lightly and too indiscriminately. The problem is how to preserve a very sizable margin of difference in order to make room for the full enormity and horror of fascism in power. To reduce this margin is to make fascism more familiar, more tolerable, more domesticated. By making fascism cover all the ground from Müller to Hitler, the Communists demonized the inoffensive Müller and humanized the demonic Hitler.

[...]

Soon the Communists had their wish. Two elections were held in 1932, on July 31 and on November 6. In the latter, the Social-Democrats lost ground, from 133 Reichstag seats to 121, and from a total vote of 7,959,700 to 7,248,000. The Communists gained almost as much, from 89 seats to 100, and from 5,282,600 votes to 5,980,200. For the first time in four years, the Nazis fell back, from 230 seats to 196, and from 13,745,800 votes to 11,737,000. Between them, the Social-Democrats and Communists still managed to hold well over one-third of the total vote. The Nazis were slipping, and a real Social-Democratic-Communist united front might conceivably have blocked the way to Hitler's power.

But the theory of social-fascism held firm. In its post-election statement, the Central Committee of the Communist party of Germany declared: “The decline of the Social-Democratic party in no way reduces its role as the main social buttress of the bourgeoisie, but on the contrary, precisely because the Hitler party is at present losing followers from the ranks of the workers, instead of penetrating still more deeply into the proletariat, the importance of the Social-Democratic party for the fascist policy of finance capital increases.”39

Ten weeks later, on January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler gained power.

Twenty-one years later, Walter Ulbricht, the present master of East Germany, admitted that the Communists had concentrated their main fire on the Social-Democrats, not on Hitler, Brüning, Papen, or Schleicher, “without sufficiently distinguishing between the Social-Democratic leadership and the Social-Democratic membership.”40 In all those years, Ulbricht could think of nothing else that had been wrong with the theory of social-fascism.

[...]

For this purpose, I have made up a little anthology that takes the subject into 1934. The various items require little comment, and I have merely grouped them under appropriate subject headings. All of these quotations have been taken from the most authoritative Communist sources and spokesmen for a period of over a year after January 1933.

_____________

The Revolutionary Upsurge

“The fact of the Hitler government coming into power enormously accelerates the maturing of the revolutionary crisis in Germany. Germany is on the threshold of a revolutionary crisis (italics in original).”41

“The fascist dictatorship is not only incapable of solving the social and national conflicts, but it is also incapable of really consolidating its political rule.”42

“In spite of the most ruthless and bloody terror, a revolutionary upsurge is growing among the working class, which is completely deprived of all rights by fascism.”43

“After the establishment of the fascist dictatorship, the revolutionary mass movement is experiencing a fresh upsurge.”44

“The revolutionary uprising of the German working class—that is the perspective in Germany.”45

“The present stage in Germany, in Austria, is no longer simply a period of struggle to win over the majority of the working class, but a period of the formation of a revolutionary army for decisive class battles for power, a period of the mobilization of such cadres as are prepared to make any sacrifice in order to destroy the existing regime, in order to lead the proletariat to victory.”46

The Usefulness of Fascism

“The establishment of an open fascist dictatorship, by destroying all the democratic illusions among the masses and liberating them from the influence of Social-Democracy, accelerates the rate of Germany's development toward proletarian revolution.”47

“The bourgeoisie is compelled to abandon the democratic façade and to put the naked dictatorship of violence in the foreground. This development makes it easier for those carrying out a correct, united front, anti-fascist policy to overcome the illusions, which have been fostered by Social-Democracy for decades, with regard to the role of the State, and with regard to economic democracy and the policy of the ‘lesser evil.’”48

“Even fascist demagogy can now have a twofold effect. It can, in spite of the fascists, help us to free the masses of the toilers from the illusions of parliamentary democracy and peaceful evolution . . . ,”49

“The rapid fascisation of the capitalist governments naturally confronts us with added difficulties, but the bitterness of class antagonisms and the complete bankruptcy of the Second and Amsterdam [trade union] Internationals offer us tremendous new possibilities” (italics in original).50

“The present wave of fascism is not a sign of the strength, but a sign of the weakness and instability of the whole capitalist system. . . . Germany was and remains the weakest link in the chain of imperialist states. . . . That is why the proletarian revolution is nearer in Germany than in any other country.”51

“Fascism does not only make the struggle of the working class more difficult; it also accelerates the processes of the maturing of the revolutionary crisis.”52

The Main Enemy

“The Social-Democracy proves once again that it is inseparably allied with capitalism, that it still remains the chief buttress of the bourgeoisie, even when the latter go over to measures of open violence, including repressive measures against Social-Democracy.”53

“If the fascists are persecuting Social-Democracy as a party, they are beating it as a faithful dog that has fallen sick. They are beating it because they know that it is incapable of resistance, that, when it is beaten, it will come forward all the quicker to the service of the bourgeois dictatorship, even in the open fascist form.”54

“The complete exclusion of the social-fascists from the state apparatus, and the brutal suppression even of Social-Democratic organizations and their press, does not in any way alter the fact that Social-Democracy is now, as before, the chief support of the capitalist dictatorship.”55

“History now offers a real possibility of liquidating the mass influence of the Social-Democratic party, which is responsible for the victory of fascism and which is the main support of the bourgeoisie, and the possibility of establishing the unity of the labor movement.”56

“Social-Democracy continues to play the role of the main social prop of the bourgeoisie also in the countries of open fascist dictatorship.”57

“In spite of all their disagreements, the fascists and social-fascists are, and remain, twins, as Comrade Stalin remarked. . . . There are no disagreements between the fascists and the social-fascists as far as the necessity for the further fascisation of the bourgeois dictatorship is concerned. The Social-Democrats are in favor of fascisation, provided the parliamentary form is preserved.”58

“Even after the prohibition of its organization, Social-Democracy remains the main social prop of the bourgeoisie. . . . The present situation [December 1933] in the German labor movement offers us the possibility of destroying the mass influence of the SPG [Social-Democratic party of Germany] and of reestablishing the unity of the labor movement on a revolutionary basis.”59

“Every revolutionary must know that the path toward the annihilation of fascism, the path to the proletarian revolution and to its victory can only be the path that leads via the organizational and ideological abolition of the influence of Social-Democracy.”60

“It is, therefore, necessary above all to make a clear stand in regard to Social-Democracy, and first and foremost in regard to ‘Left’ Social-Democracy, this most dangerous foe of Communism” (italics in original).”61

“We must destroy the Social-Democratic influence on the working masses and we must not tolerate any vacillations in our ranks in the struggle against the Social-Democracy as the chief social support of the bourgeoisie.”62

_____________

I hope the reader has not skipped too quickly over this collection of seemingly quaint, musty quotations. Not so long ago, men paid for them with their lives, Communists and Social-Democrats alike. In March 1933, the “mask” was finally torn from the Weimar constitution. A newly elected Reichstag voted, 441 to 94, to give Hitler dictatorial powers. All 94 negative votes were cast by Social-Democrats (the remaining 27 Social-Democratic deputies and all 81 Communists could not vote, being already in exile, in hiding, or under arrest). The Communist party was officially outlawed on March 31; the trade unions were smashed in May; the Social-Democratic party was banned on June 22. Thereafter, Hitler made no distinction between Communists and Social-Democrats; he took their lives, cast them into concentration camps or, if they were lucky, drove them into exile, impartially.

Don’t let Bernie or Bust type folks lead you into this dangerous and toxic form of thinking. Don’t let them divide us at this moment when we must come together to protect ourselves and our liberties. Take a page from history and learn from it. 

#bernie or bust #bernieorbust #bernie #berniesanders #fascism #socialism #communism #long #longpost #long post

[dailytrotsky]

hey what exactly is troskyism? does it differ from marxism-leninism? sorry i promise i tried to google this but i couldn't find a good answer that made sense

Hey anon, thanks for the question. You don’t have to apologize for asking, I’m always happy to help.

“Marxist-Leninist” sadly is the term Stalinists use to refer to themselves. It’s sad because the theory of Stalinists is a departure from what Marx and Lenin wrote and did. They use the name “Marxist-Leninist” to cloak themselves in legitimacy.  

The definition of Trotskyism from the Encyclopedia of Trotskyism Online is this: 

Here is a summary introduction to the basic concepts of what has been historically known as “orthodox” Trotskyism, but which its supporters would define as “mainstream” Trotskyism.

Individuals and organisations holding a wide range of political positions and theories identify themselves as Trotskyist. What follows is an outline of positions that derive directly from Trotsky’s writings. There are Trotskyists who reject some or even most of the positions outlined below.

Fundamentally, Trotskyism is Marxist/revolutionary/working-class socialism in the imperialist era of wars, revolutions and the transition to socialism.

It fights for leadership of the working class against Stalinism and Social-Democracy, tendencies grounded in a program of accomodation to continued capitalist rule that seeks to preserve and enhance the privileged position of bureaucratic strata that came to dominate not only the mass labor movements of the imperialist countries but also all those states that emerged as direct and indirect successors of the workers’ republic established by the proletarian revolution of November 1917 in the Russian Empire. Parties bound by and expressing these tendencies have dominated the leadership of the workers movement in most of the world since the mid-1920s.

In some countries, such as the USA (the Democratic Party) and Argentina (Peronism), this struggle is directed against openly bourgeois leaderships of the working class.

Trotskyism sees the best possibility of developing a revolutionary socialist leadership in turning to the struggles of the working masses and fusing theory and practice in the class struggle.

It criticizes the degeneration of the Stalinist regime in the USSR from a revolutionary Marxist perspective. It sees it as a counter-revolutionary regime that had nothing to do with socialism and foresaw that it would lead to the restoration of capitalism if not swept away by the working class.

The Nazi take-over in Germany could have been stopped and Nazism smashed if Trotsky’s policies had been followed. The Left Opposition led by Trotsky urged both Social Democratic and Communist German workers to form a proletarian United Front for the express and limited purpose of defense of class interests (workers’ organizations and democratic rights) against the Nazis and capitalist reaction. The approach to such a united front would be “March separately, strike together!” Instead the Stalinists aimed all their hostility at the Social Democrats as “Social Fascists,” thus splitting the workers’ movement and allowing the Nazis into power.

Trotskyism is also against class collaboration as manifested in the Popular Fronts of the late 1930s in France and Spain, where allegedly “progressive” bourgeois forces were unabashedly supported by Communist Party policies, de facto aiding in the disarming of the working class in the face of the fascist threat. Similar policies by Stalin towards the bourgeois nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek in China in the mid-twenties had led directly to the massacre of huge numbers of unprepared workers in Shanghai in 1927, setting the Chinese revolution back by decades.

The tragic defeats of these years showed the price paid by the working class for surrendering its class independence.

In the face of the distortions of Marxism and Bolshevism by the Stalinist bureaucracy, a small minority of revolutionaries upheld the red banner and formed the Fourth International in 1938 to carry on the traditions of October and the early years of the Comintern (up to the death of Lenin).

The writings, policies and actions of Trotsky and his comrades remain an inspiration today, as they represent the continuity from Marx through the October revolution (led by the Bolshevik party under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky) and through the revolutionary resistance of the Stalinist era to the battles of the present in defense of Marxism and for a strong Fourth International.

The central features of Trotskyist politics are:

PERMANENT REVOLUTION

On the basis of Trotsky’s analysis of the inability of the national bourgeoisie in the colonial and semi-colonial countries to carry forward the tasks of the bourgeois revolution (national liberation, democratic rights, women, health, education, etc), the fight against imperialism and colonialism requires a permanent revolution. This means the working class of those countries must win the leadership of the popular masses in the movement of national liberation and bring it to a Socialist revolution if there is to be any chance of getting a real solution to the oppression the people are rebelling against. This is opposed to the Stalinist theories of Socialism in One Country and Two-Stage Revolution (first bourgeois, then socialist).

POLITICAL REVOLUTION

On the basis of Trotsky’s analysis of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers state, the fight against Stalinism posed the need for a *political* revolution to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy and restore genuine soviet power, that is the power of councils of workers and peasants delegates in government. In imperialist countries *social* revolution against capitalism is necessary to expropriate the bourgeoisie, something that workers’ states such as the ex-Soviet Union had already accomplished.

TRANSITIONAL DEMANDS

In order to seize power in the imperialist countries, the working class must fight for a program capable of bridging the gap between its daily struggles and the socialist revolution. The methodology expressed by Trotsky in the 1938 founding document of the Fourth International, best known as the Transitional Program, remains fundamental to this day, even though some of the tasks formulated in that document are no longer applicable. By fighting for transitional demands – making immediately understandable demands that will have far-reaching effects if they are actually satisfied – the workers are helped to see the link between getting real solutions to their everyday problems and getting rid of capitalism.

INTERNATIONAL PARTY

The workers of the world need their own political organization, a world-wide revolutionary party, whose national sections contribute to and are guided by an international leadership that is greater than the sum of its national parts. In the absence of an international organization, and one Trotsky insisted should be run on Bolshevik-Leninist lines, international solidarity and proletarian internationalism remain little more than empty phrases.

You may also be interested in this article, The Life and Ideas of Leon Trotsky.

This FAQ from Socialist Revolution is also a good resource for clarifying these questions. 

Let me know if you have any follow-up questions :)

#anon #anonymous #ask #trotskyism

[workersolidarity]

Statement in En Marche, the official organ of the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of Ecuador:

(original link above. English translation below)

The contradictions of imperialist capitalism are sharpening, the struggle of the working class and peoples grows

The CIPOML plenary met in October at a time when the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America rose one after another.

The international bourgeoisie and capitalism do nothing but increase social problems, always adding new ones and making them insurmountable.

Let us remember how they promised peace and well-being for all with the New World Order, and how exploitation and social classes would end globalization when it transformed the world into "a small village" and freed humanity from its problems!

The working class and the oppressed peoples of the world have been experiencing the opposite of these claims through the unbearable deterioration of their living and working conditions. The workers' own experience in increasing unemployment, decreasing wages, increasing poverty due to cuts in social services and rising prices and taxes, and deteriorating conditions for needs Basics leads them to accept that capitalism has nothing to offer them. The source of all these problems lies in the fact that capitalist production is carried out to increase the profits of monopolies.

This deterioration is manifested in the crisis to which many dependent countries have already been dragged, and in the capitalist world as a whole it has caused a slowdown in economic growth, especially in industrial production, accompanied by a decrease in capacity utilization. , factory closures and layoffs. There are indications that the next crisis of the capitalist world economy will be much more serious than that of 2008. And this time, since the main imperialist states do not have the opportunity to implement centralized interventions, the crisis will have more destructive consequences.

The sharpening of inter-imperialist and inter-monopolist contradictions and the increase in conflicts of interest have already led to "trade wars." These contradictions and conflicts are the result of the push of imperialist monopolies to obtain maximum benefit and without a doubt have a negative impact on the world economy.

The uneven development of monopolies and imperialist countries, as well as of companies and sectors, leads to differentiations in the level of power of monopoly groups of financial capital and imperialist countries, which in turn leads to demands of a new appropriation of the world. The United States, China, Russia and the German-French imperialists who dominate the EU, which is plagued by contradictions, are the main imperialists, and among them the conflict between the United States and China appears in the foreground.

The United States is the largest hegemonic imperialist power for its industrial and financial base, the size of the countries and regions that depend on it, the "weapon" of the dollar, its military bases throughout the world, its continuing capacity to impose its will also about Western powers through NATO despite the differences in interest between them and their military spending that exceeds the total of the rest. Hysteria to protect what it has makes the United States aggressive and warmongering, which makes it more reckless. China, on the other hand, with the completely modern technical base of its capitalism and the resulting rapid industrial and economic growth, with the level of capital accumulation and the resulting economic expansion and its potential to surpass the United States, It is a rising imperialist power that cannot refrain from including on the agenda the redivision of the world, and is underway to improve its military apparatus accordingly. The conflict between the US UU. and China, as well as the struggles between others to protect what they have and expand at the expense of the other, has already spread across all continents, including wars of power.

Inter-imperialist contradictions and conflicts have a negative effect on the world economy and lead to the deterioration of the living and working conditions of the exploited masses, since the imperialists aspire to exploit the working class and the oppressed and expelled peoples.

In conflict with each other in all parts of the world, and concentrated in some regions, no imperialist power is friendly to workers and peoples. Their promises to help people economically or politically, to bring independence and democracy, for example, are nothing but big lies. All of them are thugs, exploiters and looters monopolists, no matter what they promise, they only care for profit at the expense of the people and to expand their hegemonic spheres by making the people depend on them.

While no imperialist hesitates to seize the slightest opportunity to plunder the wealth of the people and expand their economic and political influence by expanding dependency relations, American imperialism, in particular, is on the offensive against the peoples through a series of sanctions, embargoes and occupations using its more than 800 military bases, Israeli Zionism and regional reactionary powers such as Saudi Arabia and Colombia. It still maintains occupation forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. It continues with the intervention in Syria and embargoes against Cuba, Venezuela and Iran. It has been a while since he moved his embassy from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem.

CIPOML condemns all these attacks.

Defending unconditionally the right of all peoples and nations to self-determination, including also the right to the foundation of separate states, the CIPOML also declares its solidarity with all oppressed peoples and liberation struggles, mainly with those of Venezuela, Iran. Palestine, Kurds, Cuba, Kashmir.

The fact that the contradictions between labor and capital are intensified, between the imperialists and the peoples and among the imperialists themselves mean that capitalist-imperialist aggression is increasing, as is the danger of fascism and war. Unless this course of events is avoided, the working class and the oppressed peoples will surely be in a worse situation.

Unless the ruling class cannot overcome the crisis of capitalism, whose decline and stagnation is deepening, and suppress the demands of the working class and peoples, then it will be so natural that they resort to fascism, which is the most intense form of the reactionary monopolistic tendency. And inter-imperialist dog fights lead to a new imperialist war.

However, it is also true that all the negative consequences of capitalism lead to mobilizations of the working class and oppressed peoples.

In India, not so long ago, 200 million workers went on a general strike. In Iran, strikes and mobilizations last year, in which tens of thousands of workers participated, were also witnessed this year. While strikes have been increasing in Europe, we have seen several strike actions in the US. in the last two years; The strike of metal workers is the latest example. After a long period of stagnation, the working class is in a state of new mobilizations, and this can be observed in several strikes and other actions of all sizes, although they are not yet united at the national level.

We also witness the outbreak of many popular movements in October, as a result of the destructive effects of capitalism and the repression of reactionary forces. In many countries, these movements have shown a tendency to become uprisings and began to have a political character. In Burkina Faso, the town had thwarted the military coup 4 years ago. In Sudan, Omar al Bashir was overthrown. In Algeria, Bouteflika had to resign and then withdrew his candidacy. In Lebanon, Prime Minister Hariri resigned. The Iraqi prime minister announces that he would resign. In Chile, President Sebastián Piñera, had to step back on the economic measures adopted. In Ecuador, President Moreno had to cancel his austerity package. In Haiti, Iraq, Honduras, Guinea, etc., the struggle of the peoples that rose could not be contained. The number of popular uprisings with great participation of the working class is increasing.

The uprising of the working class and peoples against looting and oppression by monopolies and imperialism is the only way to stop the aggression of capital, avoid the danger of fascism and war, as well as for social emancipation and national.

Social reform is falling into a vacuum since it is not able to contain the rebellion of the working class and peoples. It is natural that the reassuring effect of reformism that suggests nothing but the reconciliation between objectively revolutionary popular struggles and reactionary forces is broken.

Our Conference calls workers from all countries who:

The only way for our emancipation is to fight against capitalism without expectations in any bourgeois faction or imperialist power and abolish the hegemony of capital and exploitation relations. We must end bourgeois dominance and organize ourselves as the hegemonic class, which only depends on our own power.

However, we cannot achieve it if we are disjointed and disorganized. Therefore, we must organize ourselves in our independent parties of the working class in our countries, if there is one, and if there is not, found it, and carry out our class struggle regardless of the bourgeoisie.

With this in mind, we must not only participate in the popular struggles that develop outside our initiative, but lead them, organizing the struggles of city and country workers and directing these struggles against capitalism.

Our Conference also calls for the expansion of the struggle of the oppressed peoples and nations of the world.

The only way to get rid of looting and imperialist and monopolist oppression is to carry out an uncompromising struggle against imperialist powers and monopolies. We must follow the example of the struggles that take place in other countries, helping to develop them in our own country and expand them. The people have no other friend but themselves. We can depend on ourselves and the workers who are part of the villages.

We need to unite, organize and lift the fight against imperialism and monopolies. The united and organized struggle of the working class and the oppressed peoples is invincible.

International Conference of Parties and Organizations

Marxist Leninists - CIPOML

October 2019

#cipoml #marxist leninist communist party of ecuador #ml communist party of ecuador #ecuador news #international news #internationalism #socialist politics #socialism #socialist #communist #communism #marxism #marxism leninism #marxist leninists #marxist leninist #marxist #marxists #ecuador #left politics #latin america #latin america news #socialism in latin america #statement #politics #latin american politics #latin american news #communism in latin america #proletarian news #proletariat news #working class

[study-lit]

how to edexcel a level lit: prose comparative essay

wow, back with another semi useful post! :) I’ll use my mock essay as an example of what I mean -- warning: this will be really wordy.

question: compare the ways in which the authors of your two chosen texts criticise human behaviour. you must relate your discussion to relevant contextual factors. (40 marks)

INTRODUCTION: In my view, the introduction is difficult to get right, but it pays off when done well. This is the first bit of your paper that the examiner will read; setting out your thesis well in your introduction lets them know what you’re about.

Human nature, according to Richard Dawkins, is dictated by an ‘unrivaled selfishness’, the internalised want which focuses humanity on its goal of personal success seeps into the functions of us, as humans.

In my opening sentence, I focus on the topic of the question. In this mock, I misinterpreted ‘human behaviour’ and replaced it with ‘human nature’, but really this didn’t impact my mark too badly. It’s good to show some sense of critical theory, but in terms of the assessment objectives, this isn’t imperative like it is in the drama exam.

This ‘selfishness’ is utilised in both Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ and Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ to, perhaps, demonstrate the innate failure of human nature in that its natural state, individualism, even when well meant, creates a catastrophic outcome for both the protagonist, and wider society.

Then, I relate the critical theory to the texts. How do the authors present human behaviour? As the topic title is ‘Science and Society’, I make sure to get in ‘wider society’ in order to demonstrate I am aware of what I was taught.

For an A/low A*, that’s all you need to do. I am going on my teacher’s marking, but for this essay I got 36/40, a low A* if an A* is 90%.

BODY:

I’m going to use one point from my essay, as I wrote two rather long points. I’d try for three or four points (a side and a half for each text per point), but three is probably the happy medium.

Thesis/Comparison:

I try to write a paragraph of direct comparison before I go into the individual texts and their relationship to my thesis. In this case, I break it into two parts:

Humanity’s selfishness directly contributes to the so-called ‘amity-enmity complex’, the social state which dictates individual societal positions.

My point is about the demonstration of the amity-enmity complex in both books, so I make this clear, and define what it means.

Both Shelley and Atwood commentate on the effect the utilisation of ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ has on the individual, perhaps products of their respective contexts: the Religious Right of 1980s America dictated collaboration of White Christians in order to rule over homosexuals or people of colour, whilst Victorian Britain’s main entertainment was the ever-popular ‘freak show’, where those predisposed were taunted for their bosses to make money quickly.

Here, I compare the texts and relate it to the books’ contexts in order to get those AO3 and AO4 marks. Plus, it shows the examiner that I’m clearly considering the methods used in both texts, not just one or the other.

Text One - Frankenstein:

This is long, so I’ll try and break it up...

In ‘Frankenstein’, Shelley utilises Victor’s monster in order to demonstrate the roots of the eventual downfall Victor’s family succumbs to, creating a societal outsider whom Victor shuns. “His hair was a lustrous black [...] teeth of a pearly white [...] these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes” -- Shelley juxtaposes the traits deemed attractive by society with the ‘watery eyes’, a trait common found when crying. The appearance of the Monster -- by which everyone treats him (’wretched daemon’) -- invokes Victor’s amity-enmity complex, which itself, in shunning his newly born Creature, begins the events -- as mirrored in The Handmaid’s Tale -- of the oppressed rising against the oppressor.

So, here, I make my main point: the amity-enmity complex pushes the Creature to revolt against his ruling class (Victor), and in turn sets in motion the events of the rest of the text. Pretty standard stuff (or at least I think so)!

For instance, later in Shelley’s work, the Monster laments that “even Satan has accomplices; fellow demons [...] I am abhorred by all,” a personal outlook imposed by Victor’s human nature to shun those who are different. In his own self interest -- hiding his ‘damned’ creation -- Victor contributes to the creation of the ‘beast’ who leaves Elizabeth, William and Clerval ‘lifeless’, just like the Creature began his lifetime.

Here, I’ve linked my main point to an example further on the text, and rounded it off. Shelley criticises Victor’s human behaviour of abandoning his ‘son’, and punishes him through the tragedy his family (and Clerval, who is totally his gay lover and you can’t tell me otherwise) succumb to.

Text Two - The Handmaid’s Tale:

This point is like 2 and 1/2 sides... your points don’t need to be this long, I just got a bit carried away.

As aforementioned, the amity-enmity complex makes an appearance in ‘The Handmaid’s Take’ where it, too, leads to an outsider rising against the ruling class. Whilst Offred is not an as explicitly an ‘outsider’ like the Creature, her use as a Handmaid creates the divide between those who rule and conform (the Commanders and their Wives) and those who serve (the Handmaids and Marthas). The room Offred resides in, and its contents, demonstrates a ‘return to traditonal (New Right Christian) values’: works of ‘folk art, archaic made by women’ out of things ‘that have no further use [...] waste not, want not.’ The proverb ‘waste not, want not’ and design of things from materials no longer used under the Gileadian regime reflects the commodity of the women used as Handmaids: they’re all ‘sisters dripped in blood’, pairs that ‘mirror’ one another, a group of people who are, by the amity-enmity complex, pulled from the fringes of society (Janine was raped, Offred married a divorcee) and forced into a collective for abuse by their superiors, who joined Gilead when it was little more than a segment of the Moral Majority of Reagan’s day.

If I’m honest, I still don’t quite understand why I got marks for this point, as my language analysis is not quite as developed as I feel it should be. In some ways, this could cover the ao1: I talk about my point - the amity enmity complex’s means of splitting society into groups, and back it up with some loosely relating quotes. I don’t get to the meat of my point until this bit:

Offred, by name, is a possession. Thus, the blatant societal divisions present in Atwood’s text helps assist in creating ‘Mayday’, a rebellion against Gilead’s bourgeoisie. It is Offred, like Shelley’s Creature, whose ostracisation is a catalyst for the events which culminate in the Historial Notes: ‘the past is a great darkness’ which no longer exists. As such, the means of reproduction, and creating a social hierarchy through the view that Handmaids are a commodity, due to human nature’s amity-emnity complex, leads to the felling of a successful society.

This makes more sense: jumping to conclusions and treating people as ‘lesser’ will result in a communist-esque revolution. In referencing the whole text, I can gain provide the examiner with proof that I’m considering all of the text.

Thus, both authors’ texts reflect on the existence of humanity’s prejudices as a direct cause of societal failure and familial tragedy, criticising the human nature of having powerful ‘insiders’, and ostracised ‘outsiders’.

I always culminate my points in explaining the explicit point I’m making.

CONCLUSION:

Here, you’re not just summing up your essay. If your teacher has told you that’s the case, then by all means listen to them, but maybe try this format once. My conclusions come as ‘why should you care, then?’

Human behaviour is, ultimately, criticised in both Shelley and Atwood’s texts as detrimental to the surivival of the individual, but also creates change in the world around them. Both Victor and Offred succumb to the demise often ascribed to Machiavellian villains who practise self-preservation at all costs. Their fates do, arguably, come as a direct result of the actions they take due to their human nature.

I don’t actually mention Machiavelli elsewhere in the essay; I saw this opportunity to leave the examiner (in this case my teacher) with a potential reading. Are Victor and Offred Machiavellian due to their determination to survive over everyone else? Possibly.

I like to make the fact that the authors are telling us, the reader, why we should/shouldn’t be like their characters the final sentence of my conclusion.

As such, through a demonstration of key human attributes such as desrire and the amity-enmity complex, Shelley and Atwood criticise the actions of their own creations whilst giving their readers their own warning: we, too, are prediposed with these traits, and thus have the ability to destroy as well as create.

well, there you go! a breakdown of my essay with “helpful” tips. I hope this assists you guys in your a level or even gives you some new ideas!

#a level lit #prose #essay how to

[theculturedmarxist]

Is there a doctor in the house?

“How do you expect anyone to do anything in Communism? If a doctor is paid as much as a janitor, why would I do all the work to be a doctor? Checkmate, commies.”

Trying to talk to people about Communism, and the general conception of what that entails, can be a tricky sort of process. Generally speaking, communist thought is contingent on at least passing knowledge of the principles derived from the broad and numerous bodies of socialist thought in the 19th and 20th centuries. There are innumerable books, pamphlets, essays, and so on full of rigorous thought and speculation about the circumstances of today and what they entail for our future, and how we as communists should go about ordering that future.

One of the greatest difficulties though when introducing someone to Communist thought is trying to coax them out of the bourgeois conception of society that most people have been ingrained with more or less from birth. The above is a tiresome refrain of those believing they’ve btfo Communism. It frequently jockeys with the whole ridiculous mudpie “argument” for the most popular brainlet thought-ending cliche.

If you look back to the media of the previous century, with the advent of the Space Age and then the Computer/Information Age, you can see a variety of imaginations trying to conceive of what all these radical changes will mean for society. Disease would be banished. Poverty would be impossible. Racial and religious differences would be treated as irrelevant, just as they truly are. Humanity would have bases on the Moon and Mars, toeholds that set the stage for mankind embracing its spacial destiny. There would be plenty for all, onerous work would be obviated, and the potential of the individuals of the world would finally be enabled to expand to its fullest.

In short, people were imagining a world beyond what they had then. What of now? Popular media, especially in the realm of science fiction, is emaciated. There is no future, no daring or imaginative alternatives. “Now” stretches on and on into forever, even when it would make no sense for such an arcane system as Capitalism. This isn’t because people are content with things as they are, but because their conception of what is possible has been carefully curated so that any alternative is branded as “utopian,” and anyone with a burning need or passion for change is only a single step away from the ever-lurking Liberal geist of “fanaticism.” Robespierre did his job only too well, apparently.

The soil of the imagination has been salted by the bourgeois enamoration with things as they currently are, and in seeking to maintain the status quo, anything as dangerous as an alternative to Capitalism has to be either excluded from public thought to the greatest degree possible, or else slandered and lampooned until all that’s left is a ridiculous straw man of anything or one that could endanger the unmitigated flow of profit.This is why in popular media, Capital is an omnipresent force, whether in fantasy, historical or contemporary drama, or projections into the future. “We’ve reached the end of history,” blah blah blah.

It’s difficult then for people to understand what Communists want, and how Communism is conceived. There are innumerable dogmatic conventions on what Communism should look like and how, which to describe them all in an exhaustive sense would be beyond this post, so for now I suffice with an unspecific, generic meaning when I’m speaking of “Communism.”

As Capitalism is the absolute, when non-Communists listen to Communists describing the things they want and the changes they make, they don’t consider what any of these alterations would mean, or what would need to happen in order to make them possible. For whatever reason, they can only conceive of now, but different, as if such a thing were possible.

Inevitably the question gets asked, “why would I be a doctor instead of a janitor?” It immediately gives away how deeply subsumed they are by their ideology. Health isn’t an interest of the individual or community, it’s not something to be cultivated, or even a fundamental human need; to them, it’s a service or commodity to be dispensed by a “professional.” Their class character is exposed, along with their ignorance of life outside of their comfortable cell. The suffering or need of others is dispensed with, and human life is devalued to whatever baubles this person believes they should be showered with for all of “their effort.”

Do they imagine that people would simply do without? Just lie down and die if people refused this tyrant’s “expertise?” It flies in the face of reason and precedent. Previous to modern times, educated medical professionals (to the standards of their time) were vanishingly rare. Most ailments were treated with a variety of home and traditional remedies. Do they really imagine then that a parent would sit idly by as their child wastes away due to lack of a doctor? As reckless as it might be, if the likely ultimate result either way is death, then WebMD and a prayer is certainly preferable to looking on in impotence. 

This hypothetical would-be doctor imagines that society as it would exist then would be society as it exists now, only with a mandatory minimum wage. “No one would become doctors if they didn’t get rich doing it.” Again, reason and evidence shows them definitively to be in error.

I am not a fan of Cuba’s interpretation of Socialism, but I can’t help but admire their resourcefulness in such extreme deprivation. In retribution, the criminal blockade by the United States starves and isolates the island, but examining the circumstances of life there and the accomplishments they’ve managed despite that are quite remarkable. It isn’t much talked about, how Cuba, immiserated by poverty as it is, has an astonishingly small ratio of doctors to patients. They export their medical expertise to other countries, trading doctors for necessary resources. They’ve managed to eliminate mother-to-infant HIV transmission, and have even developed a cure for a certain cancer. Doctors are well respected, but they aren’t nearly as privileged in Cuba as they are elsewhere in the world.

I doubt every last one chooses their profession out of simple altruism, but to my understanding they aren’t made rich, either.

One of the most remarkable manifestations of Cuba’s adaptations to their radically changing circumstances was its reaction to the disappearance of the Soviet Union. The USSR provided most of Cuba’s industrial needs, and their sudden collapse meant not only the disappearance of Cuba’s most significant trading partner, but also the immediate evaporation of the means to maintain their existing industry and produce new goods.

Unable to provide for their people, they took the radical step of providing the people with the knowledge and expertise they needed to provide for themselves. Technical and engineering manuals and textbooks were distributed. Everything was recycled as needed. Motors from broken washing machines were cannibalized to motorize bicycles.

As the crisis grew more severe, people’s creativity grew more powerful, and everywhere you looked you saw solutions. Ernesto Oroza

In Trotsky’s 1934 article, If America Should Go Communist, he makes a very salient point.

At present most Americans regard communism solely in the light of the experience of the Soviet Union. They fear lest Sovietism in America would produce the same material result as it has brought for the culturally backward peoples of the Soviet Union.

American and Russian circumstances were and are worlds apart. Russia’s expression of Communism resulted from the dire situation it was left in after the first World War. Its industry was smashed. Its people were starving. The interim Liberal government that came to power after the abdication of the Tsar continued to fight the ruinous war against the Central Powers, pouring millions of men into the theater of industrial murder. No sooner do the Bolsheviks take power and end the war than every industrial power on the planet invades. On top of years of misery under the Tsar, are compounded years of civil war the most vast country on the planet. After this, it is scarcely another decade before another World War washes over the CCCP, killing tens of millions of people and leaving Russia’s industrial and agricultural heartlands in devastated ruin. Despite all of this, the CCCP managed not only to industrialize, expand education and literacy to its large population of impoverished, illiterate peasants, but managed to make it the number 2 power, and eventual superpower, on the planet, and the first space-faring nation to boot.

America would not have such problems, Trotsky says. Is he wrong? The US is majority literate (more or less). They have already a sprawling (if crumbling) infrastructure, the benefits of the Internet, already existing industrial and technological capacity, to say nothing of the country’s rich farmland and abundance of natural resources, much of it mapped and explored and exploitable at need. They have over 200 years of democratic experience and tradition, and one of the most educated populations on the planet.

Believing that the United States, were it to adopt communism, would look anything like Soviet Russia in form or function, is nothing but ridiculous. It’s an immature bogeyman, a ghost story the bourgeois use to convince workers that, like children, they should be afraid of the things they imagine lurking under their bed.

Adopting Communism would mean dispelling the bourgeois fiction of private and intellectual property (as opposed to one’s personal property). It would mean an end to the dictatorship of capital, and the social controls that the bourgeoisie have erected to constrict human activity in order to farm us for profit.

Instead of educating our children to prepare them for “a career,” they could be educated in the skills of living. Our health and physical education classes could indeed return to teaching health and physical education. The whole population could be given the basics of medical care and the rudiments of identifying and treating disease.

Freed from the anxieties and pressures of Capitalist society--no longer having to worry about where one will live, or how one will eat, or where all the other necessities of life will come from--at a stroke much of society’s afflictions would be eliminated, improving health dramatically without a single pill or incision. With no profits to sustain it, the sugar industry would wither and die, severely impacting national obesity rates. Imagine the impact the elimination of the automobile industry would have as well, reducing the number of wastefully produced luxury vehicles and their billions of tons of emissions, clearing our air and skies. The ridiculous regime of mandatory testing, and the poisonous “education” that has evolved to support it, would vanish. With access to higher education a guarantee, and no private property to starve such “unproductive” members of society, our children could enjoy the simple pleasures of recess again. No longer cooped up in jobs that they loathe and indeed make them ill, Americans would have uncountable hours instead to spend in recreation with their friends and family, enjoying among other things their country’s wealth of natural beauty.

Technology changes more and more day by day, and we’re rapidly approaching the point where even the most rural areas have access to the sum of medical knowledge on the internet. Where infrastructure or remoteness limit the availability of medical care, an internet connection to sophisticated medical AI can provide millions with immediate and accurate medical advise. Consider technology like the epipen or asthma inhaler. While I don’t imagine it’s possible to simplify all medical devices to such pick-up-and-use types of equipment, with the medical education they receive in school and access to reliable medical information via the internet, it would be possible to make equipment and techniques that any able individual could use to treat themselves for common and mundane afflictions. Medical care need not be the exclusive province, or entitlement, of some wealthy elite class of privileged gatekeepers.

Yet, still, what about the doctors? There would still be a need, however improved living conditions and education become. Some things cannot be left to amateurs, however enthusiastic or skilled, and specialized training will remain a necessity to one degree or another for some time. Would we need then to elevate doctors above the mean of hoi polloi, just to ensure that these necessary skills exist in our society?

I believe that assumption to be fundamentally false, and indeed another unconscious betrayal of the pervasiveness of bourgeois ideology. The popular belief that money is the primary, if not only, motivating factor for people. Despite the use of money being the exception rather than the rule throughout history, the fantasy that people are indigent and lazy without cash in their pocket or a knife at their back has been relentlessly cultivated in the popular mind, and yet we know that this simply isn’t true. Most people aren’t motivated by money, and compulsion only breeds misery.

Without the constant population shuffling caused by the modern market economy, I believe that people would begin to settle as they did in bygone decades. Individuals would no longer need to leave home to “find a job.” Friends and family and other social connections would congregate, and the community could rebuild itself. This would be the source of your doctors and surgeons, the natural human instinct toward community participation and effort, and those remarkable people that feel this most strongly. Those individuals who become physicians only to grow rich would be excluded--and rightfully so--from the profession, and the quality and abundance of medical care would rise. That’s aside from the salutatory effects of the diminishing alienation resulting from strengthening communal ties. Happy people, surrounded by friends and family, secure in their bodies, homes, and livelihood, are fundamentally healthier people. This would be the most major contributing factor in expanding the availability, access, and quality of medicine: to begin with, there would be fewer sick people. There would be fewer sick doctors, too, no longer burdened by the insane costs of medical school and the large debts accrued from long years of study.

This is a rather rosy estimation, but I think it is the correct one. Communism doesn’t mean poverty; it doesn’t mean now, but different; nor does it mean Capitalism, everyone makes the same wage. Communism is the complete transformation of society, by our own hands, by our own rational actions to satisfy our own needs and those of our community, in the absence of all the coercive and exploitative forces by which we’ve been imprisoned and to which we’ve been conditioned. Just the thought makes me feel better already.

#medicine #medical care #Communism #Socialism #Communist Society #CCCP #Cuba #a different world is possible #and we can make it

[gendercity]

MASS WORK

[By the Communist Party of the Philippines]

This is a 27-page chapter from what is apparently a manual for cadres or members of the Communist Party of the Philippines. (We have not seen anything but this one chapter.) It appears that it was written in the mid-1990s as part of a rectification campaign within the Party. If anyone has further information about this document, please let us know! This chapter is quite an important statement of the line of the CPP toward mass work and the mass line, and will be of considerable interest to revolutionaries everywhere. It is scanned in and posted here unchanged from a xeroxed copy. —S. H.

**i did some slight reformatting in an effort to make it easier to read, but try as i might this is still made up of massive blocks of text and theres not much i can do about that. any advice on improving the formatting is greatly appreciated. --@gendercity**

~~

MASS WORK

[By the Communist Party of the Philippines]

Foreword

In our mass work, we arouse, organize and mobilize the masses of workers, peasants, semi-proletarians and particular sections of the petty bourgeoisie for the people’s national-democratic revolution. We also pay attention to distinct social groups, such as women, youth, fisherfolk and national minorities who form the indigenous peoples and minority nationalities.

Mass work is so important for the party’s successful leadership of the revolution. The foundation of the revolutionary strength of the Party and the revolutionary movement is laid down through this work. The essential work is carried out in the three principal tasks—the formation of the Party, the waging of the armed struggle, and the formation of the national united front. The effective leadership of a proletarian party can be gleaned from the effectiveness of its mass work.

Our present study of mass work is the product of the development of revolutionary practice through the years. Embodied in this study are the summing-up of the Central Committee in the document, “Our Urgent Tasks,” and the summing-up of the Tenth Plenum of the Central Committee of the Party.

This chapter is divided into five parts:

Line and Orientation of Mass Work

Propaganda and Education Work

Organizing the Masses

Mobilizing the Masses

Consolidation and Expansion

A. Line and Orientation of Mass Work

1. What are the principal objectives of mass work?

Our mass work has three principal objectives. The first is to form, consolidate and broaden the revolutionary unity and strength of the people through the establishment of the organs of democratic political power in accordance with the class line of the united front in the countryside, people’s committees in the cities, and mass organizations and mass movements in the countryside and the cities.

The second is to establish and consolidate the broadest and deepest foundations among the masses for the protracted people’s war. The people’s war cannot be advanced firmly without the strong support of the broad masses of the people.

The third is to establish the broadest and deepest foundation for the formation of the Party among the ranks of the people.

The Party’s implementation of mass work accords with the carrying out of its central task of seizing political power. In this work, the broadest foundations of the united front, the people’s army and armed struggle, and the formation of the Party among the masses, are prepared.

2. What is the mass line?

The mass line is the basic Marxist-Leninist principle which guides mass work and other tasks of the Party in advancing the revolution. It is based and conforms thoroughly to the historical materialist outlook on society and revolution.

The fundamental teaching of mass line is for us to have complete trust and reliance on the masses. It emphasizes that the revolution must depend on the masses of the people and on the mobilization of the majority. It opposes pinning one’s hope on a handful of leaders, geniuses, heroes or saviors. It upholds the view that the masses, and only the masses, are the makers of history.

At all times and places, the Party must ensure that all comrades in whatever position of responsibility are linked firmly with the masses. Each conirade must be taught to love the people and to listen to the voice of the masses; to unite with them wherever they are and to mingle with them instead of hovering above them; and to rouse them, or else, raise their political consciousness based on their level; to help them to organize themselves; and to help them launch all the important struggles which can be launched at a given time and place.

Commandism and tailism both run counter to the aspirations of the masses. We will certainly be divorced from the masses if we force them to do things which are against their wishes, or if we do not like to advance whenever they demand that we advance. These errors bring about certain failure and harm.

Commandism is not an issue of style in giving orders to the masses. Even if we employ mild-mannered speech, we become commandist whenever we exceed the level of political consciousness of the masses and we go against the volition of the masses; this only shows the sickness of impetuosity. Commandists do not take the pains to teach and encourage the masses, and instead set tasks which exceed the capability and preparedness of the masses through alternating directive and coercive means in order to carry out the work.

Tailism in any kind of work is also wrong, because it trails behind the level of political consciousness of the masses and goes against the need to provide leadership to the masses; this only shows the sickness of sluggishness. It happens frequently that the masses overtake us, and they are anxious to take actions, but the tailists are unable to provide leadership in these situations. As a result of a lack of analysis, they set policies and tasks which trail behind the capacity and preparedness of the masses and that which conditions call for. They are unable to lead because they often doubt and hesitate. They express only the opinions of certain backward elements, and they even mistake those to be the beliefs of the masses.

In order to avoid commandism and tailism, comrades must mingle among the masses and investigate. In practicing mass line, the correct political line is key, because it expresses the objective aspirations and interests of the masses.

In practicing mass line in the concrete conditions of Philippine society, the firm adherence to the general line of the people’s democratic revolution is key. It is necessary to arouse, organize and mobilize the broad masses of the people in order to advance the revolutionary anti-fascist, anti-feudal and anti-imperialist movement. It is necessary to make them understand the line of the Party, and to put into practice in their actions the policies and struggles which the Party launches in accordance with this line. The political line is the basic standard which decides whether or not we err in our work.

Both “Left” and Right opportunist lines subjectively desire the rapid and early decisive victory of the revolution beyond the actual level of strength of the revolutionary forces. The balance of forces is wrongly calculated, exceeding the analysis of the actual conditions and preparedness of the masses and the revolutionary movement.

The “Left” opportunist line of launching confrontational people’s strikes (welgang bayan), with the attendant putschist partisan actions of bus-burning, bombing of certain foreign capitalist and government establishments in order to incite urban insurrection, places the revolutionary mass movement in the city in a state of political isolation, if not a passive position. The urban mass movement loses its legal and defensive character, and is separated from the spontaneous masses. The deceit of excessive prospecting is certainly followed in quick succession by frustration and dejection.

The Right opportunist line of untimely peasant uprisings to upstage urban insurrection precipitated as reformism and putschism in the peasant movement. The peasant movement was drawn towards a principally legal and open form of struggle. Armed struggle was depreciated into a position that is secondary and only supportive of the principally legal mass movement. The victories of two decades of agrarian struggle will be rendered meaningless, and the landlords will be exalted.

As a result of “Left” and Right opportunism, grave disorientation and retreats developed in the conduct of our mass work in the countryside and cities. Many places were abandoned, and numerous mass organizations, organs of political power and Party units were dissolved. Old and more oppressive feudal and semi-feudal arrangements returned, along with criminality. The development of mass work in the cities lost vigor as a result of campaigns and mass actions which tended to wear down the people, in combination with putschist partisan actions a la agent provocateur meant to incite insurrection.

In order to regain strength, it is necessary to repudiate thoroughly the “Left” opportunist line of military adventurism and urban insurrectionism and the other Right opportunist error of capitulationism, parliamentarism and reformism.

3. How do we follow the revolutionary class line in mass work?

The revolutionary class line distinguishes the true friends of the revolution from the real enemies. It establishes the reliance on the most basic classes and forces while persuading and uniting with the middle forces in order to isolate the diehard enemies. This principle is in accord with the mass line and the political line of the Party.

According to the revolutionary class line, we give stress in our mass work as a whole to the toiling masses. The line of the people’s democratic revolution, on the other hand, establishes that the principal preoccupation of the Party is the mass work in the countryside, particularly among the ranks of the poor peasants, rural workers and lower-middle peasants.

In every place, it is necessary to know the class composition of the population; to determine the revolutionary and progressive classes, the middle forces, and the reactionaries; and based on this, to attempt mass work which gives emphasis to the most basic and most numerous mass forces at any given scope.

In order to strengthen further the movement of the toiling masses, it is necessary to advance the movement of women and youth. In the cities, it is necessary to give particular attention to the work among the ranks of the youth-students, teachers and government employees, which are the most concentrated and most active sectors of the petty bourgeoisie.

4. Why is social investigation and class analysis important in mass work?

Social investigation means the investigation of the conditions of society. The analysis of classes is the correct means of investigating society.

In Marxist social investigation, the classes which comprise society are differentiated and studied in their relations in the economy, politics and culture. The aim of our study and analysis is the condition of the people as a whole and the masses with whom we work in particular, because they are the source of our concrete data and information—their condition is the particular object of our study and analysis. Here, we apply the principle, “concrete analysis of concrete conditions.”

By means of social investigation and class analysis, we are able to grasp the concrete class outline of society, the condition of the classes, and their real relations with each other. Thus, we are able to set the correct orientation for our mass work. We are also able to determine the appropriate forms and means of propaganda, organizing and mobilization of the masses. Without a correct, thorough and comprehensive social investigation and class analysis, mass work will not become effective. The correct and sound direction and the tactics of the mass movement will also not be ensured.

Mao Zedong once said, “no investigation, no right to speak.” Let us implement and develop our mass work according to this standard.

By means of social investigation and class analysis, we are able to determine who are ones we must rely upon principally and mobilize, who are those we must win over, and who are those we must isolate and make the targets of the mass movement. Especially at the basic levels, it is necessary to have clarification of these matters, and to have a living identification with the classes with whom individuals, families and groups belong. It is necessary that we learn to distinguish the classes in real life and not just in books.

Social investigation and class analysis clarifies the principal and secondary matters, the long-term and immediate problems that the mass movement will face. Clarifying these matters is part of the orientation of the mass movement in a given place, and ensures the correct direction of the mass movement. In the countryside, for example, the forms of feudal and semi-feudal exploitation vary from place to place, and their intensity, likewise, varies from place to place. It is necessary to understand this in order to lead the peasant movement effectively.

In order for our work in propaganda, organization and mass mobilization to be effective and vigorous, their content, form and means must suit the conditions of the masses, especially their objective interests and level of experience and consciousness. The knowledge of the condition of the masses can only be derived by means of social investigation and class analysis.

However, a comprehensive and deep-going social investigation cannot be done in only a day. It is a continuous and long-drawn process. Thus, we set the level of social investigation according to the level of the mass movement and the need to arouse, organize and mobilize the masses at every stage.

For example, there is a depth and breadth of social investigation that is necessary for the stage of confiscation and distribution of land of the landlords in the countryside. There is a big difference between this and the depth and breadth of social investigation necessary to begin mass work in the barrios. In the cities as well, the data necessary for the various levels of development of the mass movement vary.

At every stage, it is necessary to accumulate knowledge of concrete conditions in order to plan and to carry out the immediate tasks of the mass movement, while social investigation continues to widen and deepen.

5. What is the key link of mass work in the countryside?

The anti-feudal class struggle—meaning to say, agrarian revolution—is the key link of mass work in the countryside. We must grasp this firmly, and uphold the poor peasants, rural workers and lower-middle peasants as the most basic and sturdiest revolutionary forces in the barrios.

However, the anti-feudal struggle will not reach far if it is not linked firmly with the anti-fascist and anti-imperialist struggle. Thus, it is necessary to give the basic anti-feudal forces the most comprehensive political outlook. Furthermore, we must mobilize actively all the different positive forces in the countryside for the revolution.

The strength of the peasant masses and rural workers will be formed from the advance of the anti-feudal struggle. It lays the foundation for winning over the middle forces in the countryside and for crushing effectively the politico-economic power of the landlord class. Thus, the anti-feudal struggle is decisive in forming democratic political power in the countryside and establishing the revolutionary base.

Wherever there are masses of workers, fisherfolk and indigenous peoples, it is necessary to set up and develop their organizations whenever there is basis in order to address their problems. In any situation, they must be part of forming the organs of political power and the united front being built in the countryside.

In order to launch and advance the anti-feudal struggle, we must establish and develop continuously the organizations of the peasants, women, youth and cultural activists in the barrios, until full-fledged mass organizations and organs of democratic political power emerge.

Mass work and the anti-feudal struggle are linked firmly to the armed struggle which is the principal form of revolutionary struggle.

The advance of the armed struggle is decisive in advancing the anti-feudal struggle in an ever-widening scope and to an ever higher level. Meanwhile, the principal objective of mass work and the anti-feudal movement in the countryside is the formation and the strengthening of the mass base foundation of the people’s war.

The minimum program of agrarian revolution (with certain select cases of confiscation and censure or punishment of despotic landlords and landgrabbers) is what must still be carried out as the general line of the anti-feudal struggle. It contains the lowering of land rent, the elimination of usury, increasing the wages of the rural workers, raising the prices of rural products, increasing agricultural production and other increases in livelihood, the establishment of simple cooperatives and cooperative labor, etc.

The premature elevation towards the maximum program (confiscation and free distribution of land) will drive the entire landlord class to unite and concentrate their strength against the revolutionary movement. This will frustrate our anti-feudal line in the united front to take advantage of the divisions between the enlightened gentry and despotic landlords. This requires a higher level of capacity, readiness, depth and breadth of the mass base and the Party and people’s army.

Let us combat the reformism and economism being peddled by the opportunist traitors and the organizations and the bureaucratic “NGOs” they lead in practices such as goading the masses into confrontational land confiscations, raiding and burning of warehouses and other property, rural strikes, so-called “macro and micro intervention,” and “claim making, claim taking.”

They ride roughshod over the smooth flow of mass work, destroy the unity of the masses and demolish the mass organizations and the Party branches in the areas where these projects are launched. Let us oppose actively and contend ideologically and politically with these opportunist traitors, revisionists, popdems and socdems, and let us not allow them to enter the territories within our reach. Let us eject immediately those who have entered for various reasons and launched these projects when their continued operations become a clear obstruction to our mass work.

At present, the mass work in the countryside is linked directly with the recovery, expansion and consolidation of the guerrilla bases and zones, the launching of successful tactical offensives of the people’s army, and the preparation for the anti-feudal uprising in the countryside.

6. What mass movement do we develop in the cities?

The mass movement that we develop in the cities is the broad democratic movement which is principally anti-fascist and anti-imperialist. It supports the movement in the countryside which is principally anti-feudal, and supports the armed struggle.

In the cities, the masses of workers and other poor, and likewise, the petty bourgeoisie (especially the students and the teachers), are aroused, organized and mobilized for the anti-fascist and anti-imperialist struggles, and in order to support the anti-feudal struggle in the countryside and the armed struggle.

The proletariat and the semi-proletariat is the most basic and the sturdiest revolutionary forces in the cities. Therefore, we must give them our principal attention.

Organizing and mobilizing them will form the foundation of the revolutionary strength in the cities. We must also win over and mobilize the lower strata of the urban petty bourgeoisie, especially the students and the teachers and skilled workers, in order to draw the whole urban petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie to the side of the revolution.

In order to launch and advance the mass movement in the cities, it is necessary to form and develop on a wide scale the unions of the workers and the organizations in the community, schools and others. It is necessary to advance the struggles of the workers, semi-proletarians, students and teachers, and other progressive classes and sectors, step by step, against fascism, imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism. The workers’ strike movement, which targets the foreign monopoly capitalists and the local comprador-big bourgeois, is a prominent feature of the revolutionary mass movement in the cities. We must also strive to form associations and unions among the employees and workers of the government at the national and local levels, institutions and corporations, in order to shatter and paralyze them from within. Likewise, we must give the proper emphasis to the formation of unions of workers and employees in the factories and enterprises of the national bourgeoisie and the upper petty bourgeoisie, according to the class line of the united front. In this manner, we are able to attain the sharpness and breadth of the work and struggle in the cities.

It is necessary to propagate among those in the mass movement in the cities the call for the anti-feudal struggle in the countryside and the armed struggle as the principal tasks of the whole revolutionary movement. Growing numbers of revolutionary people in the cities are being encouraged to participate directly in the anti-feudal struggle in the countryside and in the armed struggle, and to extend various forms of support for them. All of the mass work of the Party must be linked consciously to the armed struggle, directly or otherwise.

The revolutionary mass movement in the cities is a militant and open mass movement which has the backbone of an extensive and intensive clandestine movement. In this open movement, we employ the reactionary state’s own laws in order to relate to the broad masses. The secret movement is formed among them, while the legal organizations are being transformed, or while new militant but legal organizations are being set up, in order to advance the national-democratic line step by step. We employ a combination of legal and illegal means in order to advance the revolutionary movement in the cities. The Party is the force at the core, guiding and nurturing the movement at every step, and seeing to it that subsequent steps are taken when conditions are ripe.

We must renounce insurrectionism and grasp firmly the correct orientation to urban struggle: it is principally legal and defensive and supportive of the armed struggle and the anti-feudal movement in the countryside. The success of the movement and struggle in the cities is measured by the growing numbers of people who participate in the mass actions, growing numbers of people who join the revolutionary mass organizations, the worsening political crisis of reaction, and the growing support for the movement in the countryside.

The thinking that we can hasten the explosion of an urban uprising through artificial military and agent provocateur means, and through general paralyzation and grand confrontations in excess of capabilities, combined with populist politics and an excessive emphasis on tactical coalitions in an effort to draw in ordinary people towards an insurrectionary position, is utterly wrong.

7. Why is mass work important in forming the Party?

Mass work and the revolutionary mass movement establishes the conditions for broadening and strengthening the Party among the masses.

The biggest source of members of the Party are the most advanced individuals who are produced and tempered in the revolutionary mass movement in the cities and the countryside. The roots of the Party grow deeper and more extensively while the revolutionary movement develops in the factories, barrios, communities and schools. The cadres and members of the Party must be conscious in their task to recruit new members and to establish the basic units of the Party among the ranks of the broad masses.

The Party is only an instrument that participates in, but does not dominate, the dialectical process of continuous revolution. It does not stand outside the revolutionary process with a foreknowledge of its laws. The masses are the sole creators of history, and it is from them that the Communist Party must learn. It is only by integrating with them that the Party can lead the revolution.

The broadening and the strengthening of the Party organization among the masses ensures that their revolutionary actions will persevere and advance along the correct direction. The overall Party leadership of the mass movement becomes firmer and sturdier. The line and policies of the Party are given a more concrete life in the struggles and actions of the masses. The consolidation of the Party results in the expansion and the advance of the mass movement, and the consolidation of the mass movement results in the growth and development of the Party.

The Party is composed of the most advanced elements of the class which possesses advanced revolutionary theory, knowledge of the laws of class struggle, and experience in revolutionary movement. Therefore, it has the capacity to guide all the organizations of the working class and other sectors of the people.

B. Propaganda and Education Work

1. Why is propaganda work important to our mass work?

Propaganda work is important because through propaganda we are able to reach the broad masses—organized and unorganized—in order to express, clarify and animate the revolutionary analysis, objectives and tasks at every period, stage and place. In this manner, the Party is able to unify the thinking, sentiments and actions of the masses.

Propaganda work is not reserved for a few specialists. This is conducted by every Party unit and member at every opportunity that they are able to mingle with the masses. Conducting propaganda is important in order to draw the Party closer to the masses, and for the masses to be able to perform well their role in the revolution.

In order for the content of our propaganda to be correct, it is necessary for every one to understand the line, program and policies of the Party, because these will guide our analysis of the facts. In order for our propaganda to be appropriate, it is necessary to be close to the masses. We will be able to draw from them the information which will provide freshness, scope and relevance to our analyses. The content and style of propaganda must suit only the present level and tasks of the masses with whom we are collaborating.

It is only by associating and integrating with the masses that the units of the Party and army are able to provide comprehensive and timely studies and analyses of the conditions of the masses and the places in which we operate. It is only in this manner that we are able to give our propaganda correct content, that our propaganda carries and reflects the conditions, aspirations and ideals of the masses and the people. It is also only in this way that we are able to ensure that the calls, policies and program of action, which we are propagating, are correct and have a firm basis.

Our propaganda work has three interrelated tasks: one, to expose the enemies of the revolution and to oppose their anti-people schemes; two, to clarify the line, program policies and the means of revolutionary action; and, three, to analyze and to illustrate the life and struggle of the masses.

We expose to the masses the root causes of their problems, and we show them who their real enemies are. Based on social investigation, we identify the principal representatives of the basic problems of every class, sector, place and period. We analyze and oppose every scheme of the enemy to assert its reactionary rule and to suppress or derail the advance of the revolution. We also repudiate reformism, terrorism and other counterrevolutionary ideas and schemes.

It is also the role of propaganda to popularize the calls of the Party in order for the masses to understand them, unify around them and carry them out in their own actions. We expound on the basis of the calls, and we also teach the means for carrying them out.

Our propaganda illustrates the life and struggle of the masses in order to heighten their revolutionary qualities, and to share their experiences in order to form a broad and deep unity amongst themselves and to develop confidence in their own strength.

2. What are the means and forms of revolutionary propaganda?

The basic means of revolutionary propaganda are determined by the mass line and the relationship of the general and particular analyses and calls.

From the masses, we gather the concrete, particular and fresh data and events which we analyze and bring back to the masses in a synthesized form in order to be useful for the practical struggle. Apart from the information derived from social investigation, it is also important to derive data from research and readings.

Propaganda relates the general objectives, tasks and direction with the particular objectives, tasks and means. The general line and calls may be the emphasis, but these are particularized according to the masses with whom we are addressing. The particular analysis and calls may be the emphasis, but these are related to the general line and tasks.

It is necessary to attend to both secret and open propaganda work. In clandestine propaganda, we are able to conduct the broadest and deepest discussion and express the most advanced calls. According to what conditions allow, we give this an open form. In open propaganda, it is necessary to become creative in striving to balance the legal limitations with our task to reach the biggest number of people with the revolutionary line.

There are many forms of propaganda which may be utilized and developed. Mass publications, handbills, mass meetings, group discussions, slogan painting, posters, comics, house meetings, play, song and poetry productions, dance, broadcast, video and films and many others are commonplace. We must also create and utilize spaces within the mass media controlled by the enemy, such as newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations.

In addition to being correct and appropriate, our propaganda must also be effective. Effective propaganda is live, clear and sharp, because it is rooted in the actual life of the masses and uses their language. The combination of various forms also gives an exceeding effectiveness, so does the regular, frequent and rapid addressing of issues which crop up in the course of mass work.

All revolutionaries must use every opportunity to conduct propaganda among the masses in order to clarify the objectives, plans, policies and the tasks of the revolution and the masses. We must not allow any revolutionary to be separated from the masses. Every one must participate in the practical movement, organize the masses, lead their struggle, participate in production, and take part in the joys and sorrows of the masses. Not to carry this out is a form of liberalism.

3. Why is education work important to our mass work?

Basically, the objective of propaganda and education work is the same: raise the level of revolutionary consciousness of the masses in order for them to participate actively and wholeheartedly in the revolutionary movement.

Education is the formal, concentrated and systematic study of the revolution by the organized masses. Education work places their participation in the revolutionary struggle on a sturdy theoretical foundation. Education also develops the capacity and skill of the masses in order for them to carry out their revolutionary work and tasks more effectively.

Providing education cannot be separated from the establishment and consolidation of mass organizations. If the masses are able to study systematically and regularly, the ideological and political outlook takes root among them which will guide their every action and their long-term development in the revolution. Their capacity and skill to carry out and complete more numerous and more complex revolutionary work will continue to develop and broaden.

It is also necessary to propagate among the masses the results of the summing-up of the work of the revolutionary movement, especially the positive and negative lessons, strengths and weaknesses, successes and setbacks. The masses must conduct a detailed study of the lessons from their own revolutionary experience in order to persevere along the correct path, and to correct the errors as a result of the “Left” and Right opportunist lines. This will serve as a guide and a firm footing for the further strengthening and development of the revolutionary mass movement. The content of mass education is comprehended better by the masses when it is linked to their own revolutionary experience.

4. What are the types of mass education that we provide?

The principal types of mass education that we provide are the study of the special courses and the study of the general course.

The special mass courses clarify the history, character and revolutionary solution to the principal problems of the particular classes or sectors that we organize and mobilize.

The special mass course for the peasant movement discusses the problem of feudalism and the agrarian revolution. The special mass course for the workers’ movement discusses the union movement and the strike movement. The special mass course for the women’s movement discusses their problems and their liberation. And the special mass course for the youth movement discusses the problems of youth and the correct orientation of their movement. Other special mass courses may also be outlined based on need, for example, for the fisherfolk movement or for the middle forces.

On the other hand, the general mass course studies the history of the Philippines, the three basic problems of the country at the present time, and the basic principles and task of the people’s national-democratic revolution.

After the special and general mass courses, it is necessary for the masses to begin immediately the study of Marxist-Leninist principles. For example, we may discuss the basic attitude of a proletarian revolutionary in relation to serving the people, to criticism and self-criticism, to tasks and sacrifice, the basic principles of democratic centralism, collective leadership and mass line; social investigation and class analysis; and certain principles of dialectical and historical materialism.

The mass courses, and especially the introductory study of Marxism-Leninism, prepares the advanced individuals to become candidate-members of the Party.

Together with this, the masses are given education in developing their capacity and skill in leading mass organizations, propaganda work, developing production, health and medicine, culture, literacy, livelihood supplements, introductory defense training and security, and others.

It is important for our mass education work to have a program for systematically developing the consciousness and capacity of the masses, mass activists and those targeted for recruitment as members of the Party. We must make sure we allot some time for carrying out these education plans. This is one essential revolutionary work and task which we must not neglect.

C. Organizing the Masses

1. What are the two most important principles we must remember in organizing the masses?

The first is to base oneself and to trust the masses. This is the basic principle, the mass line, that clarifies the correct style in organizing the masses.

It is necessary to allow the masses to learn to take actions based on their own initiative and willingness to assume tasks. What the cadres of the Party must do is guide the masses and not to assume all the work. It is necessary to base oneself and to trust the masses in order to allow for the emergence of the greatest number of people ready for various tasks of the revolution. We must always remember that when the masses understand and embrace the objectives of the revolution and the formation of their own strength, they will become creative and persistent in their own actions, and leaders and activists will emerge from their own ranks. Let us not presume that only a few people can lead. Let us combat commandism and tailism in organizing the masses.

The second principle is the solid organization of the masses for revolutionary struggle. What this means is the establishment of broad, sturdy and closely knit organizations with a leadership that is unified and healthy and rooted in the mass membership.

It is not enough to have only influence among the masses in order to advance the revolution steadily. It is necessary to organize the masses solidly in order to unify them sturdily and prepare them for all-rounded struggle against their class enemies. If the masses are not organized solidly, their struggle will advance only up to a limited extent, and they will persist only in certain conditions. Our objective is for the masses to become a sturdy bastion of the revolution.

The leadership of the mass organizations must be composed of the most reliable, most vibrant, and most respected leaders, meaning to say, those who hail from the basic classes and strata, who have an excellent record of humanity, who can be trusted and who have a genuine concern for fellow human beings. It is necessary to unify them through collective study of the correct line and policies, and to educate them in collective leadership of the mass organizations. The leadership will always remain healthy as long as erstwhile leaders who do not develop, are backward or are rotten, are replaced by fresh, progressive individuals from the membership. This leadership must be linked firmly with the mass membership, must consult them on important problems and decision-making, and must rely on the unified will and action of the membership principally to carry out its tasks. Solid organizations can be formed only in the midst of mass struggles.

2. What are the preliminary steps in organizing the masses?

The first step in organizing the masses in the barrios, factories, communities, schools or offices, is to locate reliable contacts.

Preliminary contacts may be products of mass work in other places, relatives, our friends or acquaintances, or those of other comrades, or those of the family of a comrade.

Preliminary contacts may be formed into coordinating groups in order to carry out tasks collectively.

As much as possible, the preliminary contacts must hail from the class or sector to which we are giving principal stress. They must be honest, have an excellent record of humanity, know a lot of people, and [be] enthusiastic in carrying out tasks. When in a barrio, strive to find contacts from the exploited peasants or rural workers. If there are none, the preliminary contacts may also hail from the middle forces. But at the earliest opportunity, we must allow those contacts who hail from the basic classes to emerge. Before we give them work, it is necessary to conduct a detailed investigation of the preliminary contacts, especially those who do not hail from the basic forces of the revolution.

It is the task of the preliminary contacts to link us up with other individuals from the class or sector that we would like to mobilize. They can assist in the preliminary social investigation, class analysis and preliminary propaganda among the masses. It is also their task to provide us with information on the movements of the enemy as well as the unreliable elements in the area. In the countryside, it is also their task to safeguard the security of comrades while inside as well as while leaving the barrio.

We must not divulge to the preliminary contacts the overall plan for the area and the progress of the mass organizing. Although some or all of them may become part of organizations that will be formed in the succeeding stage, it is not yet certain and will still be based on their future actions.

3. Why must we establish organizing groups and organizing committees? When do we form them?

We must establish the organizing groups and organizing committees step by step in order to select and train the mass leaders, to form the backbone and foundation of the mass organizations, and to launch the actions and struggles that the masses are capable of doing.

We set up the groups and committees in the various classes and sectors that we want to organize. In the barrios, we form the organizing groups and organizing committees of the peasants, women, youth, cultural activists, and wherever there is a basis, fisherfolk and workers. In the cities, we form the organizing groups and organizing committees of the workers in the factories, of the community in the urban poor communities, organizing groups and organizing committees in the schools.

We form the organizing groups based on division of the class and sector, and division of the various parts of the territory. In the countryside, we form the organizing groups of the various classes and sectors in the sitios and various parts of the barrio. In the factory, we form them in every department or section; in the communities, in every street or important segment; and, in the schools, in every college or important part of it.

In organizing the masses, we must follow the revolutionary class line strictly. In a typical farming barrio, those who may join the organizing group of the peasants must hail from the ranks of poor peasants, rural workers, and the lower-middle peasants. In a fishing barrio, those who may join the organizing group must hail from the ranks of poor and middle fisherfolk, fishing workers, and from the ranks of the exploited peasants and rural workers, if there are any. In setting up the organizing groups of the youth in the countryside, we may allow those who hail from the upper strata of the peasantry, but the emphasis remains on those who hail from the ranks of the exploited peasant youth. In the communities of the urban poor, we must rely principally on the workers and semi-proletarians, and secondarily on the youth-students. In the schools, the organizing groups must be formed by the students, teachers and lower-level school employees.

The organizing groups begin to set up the organized strength of the people in the most important parts of the place that we are organizing. They link us up with the broad masses. They propagate among the masses the objectives of the revolutionary movement through propaganda and study. They lead the preliminary actions of the masses. Their principal task is to arouse and unify the oppressed and exploited classes, to recruit new members, and to begin the transformation of the legal organizations or the formation of new organizations within their scope.

We form the organizing committees in the sectors which already have standing organizing groups in the various important parts of a given scope, and where advanced individuals capable of leading mass organizations have already emerged.

In the factories, communities and schools in the cities, we may first form the organizing committee and subsequently form the organizing groups, if we are able to gather the mass activists who have proven themselves to be reliable in other places.

The organizing committees will lead the organizing groups, mobilize them on the basis of set tasks, and will continue to develop them. Under the leadership of the committee, the work of deepening the social investigation will continue; the transformation of open organizations or the setting up of new ones will go on; so will the invigoration of mass actions and struggles; and so will the study of the political line and Marxist-Leninist principles.

In the countryside, the organizing committees will form the committees for organization, education, economy, health and defense. In the beginning, the committees and organizing groups of peasants will mobilize as leagues of poor peasants, rural workers and lower-middle peasants. Once they have developed, advanced individuals from the other levels of middle peasants will slowly be brought into the organizing groups. The principal basis for accepting them is their support for the anti-feudal struggle.

The committees and organizing groups are secret organizations. They must excel in clandestine tactics and means of mobilization while leading and participating in the open organizations and mass mobilizations.

4. How do the full-fledged mass organizations, revolutionary committees, and units of the people’s militia emerge in the barrio?

Full-fledged mass organizations are set up in the barrio if there are already strong and sturdy committees and organizing groups; if the influence and leadership of the committees and organizing groups is already widespread and rooted among the masses; and if there are already proven leaders who are capable of leading, and who are reliable, and who have a sufficient grasp of the line and policies of the Party and revolution, especially with regards the anti-feudal struggle and the armed struggle.

The full-fledged mass organization will be formed by means of listing the members and the election of its leadership. When conditions demand it, we may digress from this procedure as long as we can assure the participation and approval of the masses in the formation of the organization and its leadership. Once the full-fledged mass organizations of the revolutionary classes and sectors are formed, and there are already Party branches that are capable of leading the revolutionary movement in the barrio, and there are already local units of the New People’s Army (NPA) that cover the scope of the locality and local people’s militia, we may now form the revolutionary committee. This will stand as the local organ of democratic political power under the leadership of the Party. This will be formed by gathering representatives of the Party, the basic masses, the people’s army and allies.

Even at the level of the barrio organizing committee, we must already begin to provide politico-military training to men and women who are ready and are capable of conducting military work, and to form units of the people’s militia. In every typical sitio or barrio center, we may form a squad or a half-squad of the people’s militia armed with indigenous weapons or weapons provided for their disposition.

It is the task of the people’s militia to lead in providing revolutionary peace and order, and in providing security to the revolutionary forces in the barrio. It also carries out tasks assigned to it by the Party or by a higher command of the people’s army in relation to the plans and military operations of full-time and regular forces of the people’s army. Although they have military tasks, members of the people’s militia still attend to their day-to-day livelihood duties. They comprise the core of the armed strength of the people in the barrio, together with the defense groups of mass organizations.

As enforcers of revolutionary laws and justice, the NPA, the people’s militia, and the defense units, must study the basic democratic rights of the people and individuals; and they must understand the correct principles and methods in carrying out their appropriate tasks in civil and criminal cases.

5. How are the basic units of the Party formed among the masses?

Even at the level of the organizing groups and organizing committees, we must already begin to provide Marxist-Leninist education to the advanced individuals. We can already tell who are enthusiastic in accepting the ideological line of the Party. We continue to analyze the actions and participation of the active individuals and whoever else displays honesty, enthusiasm and skill in organizing. We ensure that the mass activists are given systematic political education in preparation for their study of the basic Party course. After a certain period of time has lapsed, based on their record of actions and participation in study, we can recruit the most advanced among them and set up a basic unit of the Party.

At the basic level, Party branches will be formed, and likewise, Party groups in the mass organizations. The branches and groups ensure the Party’s leadership of the mass movement, and welds the sturdiest link between the Party and the masses. The Party branches and groups continue to temper and strengthen themselves by continuing the study of the line and policies of the Party, by leading the mass movement, and by recruiting new members. In the factories, we dissolve the organizing groups and organizing committees once we have set up the Party branches and Party groups inside the union and important parts of the enterprise, and all of the activists have already entered the union.

We also dissolve the organizing groups and organizing committees of the community and the school in the cities, once we have set up the Party branch and the Party groups in the mass organizations and other important parts of a given scope. In large schools, Party organizations may be developed until the section committee and the branches in the colleges are formed. In developing the work in the communities, Party branches may be formed based on street blocks.

6. How do mass activists emerge?

Mass activists are individuals among the ranks of the masses who are active in revolutionary work and in advancing the mass movement. Numerous mass activists will emerge if the masses with whom we link and mobilize are encouraged to take initiative, are assisted in raising their political consciousness, are given concrete guidance, are aided in summing up their own experience, and are supported in resolving their personal problems.

An important objective of mass work is the emergence and training of numerous activists in the countryside and in the cities. In order to carry out the numerous and heavy tasks of the revolution, we need to learn how to combine a few experienced cadres with numerous mass activists. This is a concrete expression of trusting and basing ourselves among the masses. Even at the stage of preliminary contacts and forming coordinating groups, the emergence and training of mass activists already begins. Even at this stage, we already select those who have initiative, have a good record of humanity, relate well with others, are responsible, are disciplined and have dedication. We train and provide them with preliminary studies in order for them to carry out the tasks they face. We continue to raise their capacity by continuously providing studies, by assessing and summing up their work, and by helping them in their problems with the work, in their studies or personal problems. We test them in more important undertakings, and we elevate their tasks and responsibilities in the work or organization.

As our mass work and revolutionary activities develop and become more complex, the need for more leaders/ mass activists who can manage different lines of work becomes more important. We need a program for the emergence of mass activists that can ensure that there will always be those who can attend continuously to the different lines of work. This program includes the criteria for selection, education and training programs, and assistance in work problems as well as personal problems. We must ensure that the mass activists have sufficient skill and readiness, because it is not enough to have only good intentions in the practical movement.

7. Why is the combination of legal and illegal forms of organization necessary?

In the countryside or in the cities, the illegal Party and the secret or illegal mass organizations form the backbone of the mass movement. This is where we find in concentration—and where we can develop to the hilt—the most active, the most basic leaders and individuals of the mass movement. The illegal Party is the leading force at the core, guiding the advance of the revolutionary mass movement step by step. Without a broad and sturdy secret movement, the mass movement will not be able to persevere in the correct direction, especially in the face of enemy attack or difficulty.

In the countryside, even though the illegal organizations can lead the broad masses directly, it is still necessary to form the open and legal organizations. Because clandestine organizations are organizations which must be secret in the eyes of the enemy and people who cannot be trusted, it is also necessary to have open organizations. The open organizations serve as the channel of our legal mobilizations, a shelter for our secret organizations, a means for reaching and linking up with other classes and sectors we can draw closer, and a tool for the masses to take advantage of all the possibilities in order to advance their own revolutionary actions. In forming the open and legal mass organizations in the countryside, we must always bear in mind linking its actions with the tasks of the armed struggle and the agrarian revolution. At all times, the legal organizations must not be the channel for the illegal anti-feudal demands. We must be on guard against allowing the illegal and the secret to drag in the legal.

In the cities, the need to set up open and legal mass organizations is more acute. These open and legal formations serve as the channel to reach, mobilize and for the Party to lead the broad masses in the cities.

D. Mobilizing the Masses

1. What are mass actions and mass campaigns?

A mass action is any planned collective mobilization of the masses for a definite objective. The most important mass action is the mass struggle or the planned collective confrontation of the masses against their enemies. Examples of such actions and mass struggles are workers’ strikes, confrontations of peasant masses against their landlords to lower the land rent, the organized support of the masses for the military operations of the people’s army, collective protests against their abusers, collective work in the field, and others.

Mass campaigns are planned, organized and persevering series of mass actions of a broad scope in order to achieve a set objective. There are different types of mass campaigns according to objective: there are mass political campaigns, military, organizational, education, economy and health campaigns.

Whatever mass campaign is launched, we need to ensure that its content and direction is in accordance with the line and orientation clarified in the first part of this study on mass work.

In the countryside, what we must launch first and foremost are the mass campaigns which have an anti-feudal character and which advance the armed struggle. In the cities what we must launch first and foremost are the mass campaigns which assert the democratic rights of the basic masses against fascism and bureaucrat capitalism, which advance the struggle of the working class against foreign imperialists and comprador- big bourgeois, and which support the anti-feudal movement in the countryside and the armed struggle.

There are mass campaigns which have a character of struggle for reforms. We recognize the importance of these mass campaigns in forming the unity of the masses. However, these campaigns must be launched in such a way as to highlight the revolutionary initiative of the masses, and to draw them closer to supporting and participating in the revolutionary armed struggle.

Likewise, it is important to mobilize the masses in contributing their different technical and material skills to the revolution, such as logistics and finance, technical know-how in livelihood, culture, personal skills, communications and transportation, health and other facilities.

Mass mobilizations—the actions, struggles and campaigns that the masses participate in—are important. In reality, the advance of the revolutionary mass movement is centered on the mobilization. Efforts to arouse and organize the masses have the objective of preparing them to launch and advance the mass mobilizations. By having the masses participate in these actions, we develop them and they are able to achieve the following:

> they are given political experience and their political consciousness is raised in conftontations with their enemies; > their unity is tempered, and confidence in their own strength and ability to resolve problems develops; and, > they achieve concrete development in their political, economic and cultural conditions.

2. What must be done before launching mass actions and mass campaigns?

Investigate well the problem that we would like to address or solve. Understand its nuances and the forces involved, and in relation to this, be clear about its objectives, draw up a concrete plan, set the appropriate means of mobilization and struggle, and prepare the organization. Ensure that the three principles guiding our actions are followed: One, there is a just basis; two, we have the upperhand; and three, act with self-restraint.

Ensure that there is sufficient preparation for the participation of the greatest number. The masses must understand and agree with the need of the planned action or struggle. In order for any action or struggle to be successful, the thinking of the masses must be prepared and their determination formed.

Prepare the organization of the masses. It is difficult to succeed if this is loose or weak. Whether the plan is successful or suffers a setback, the organization of the masses must be prepared to persevere in unity and collective action. Prepare for retaliation from the enemy.

Form and prepare the group that leads and sets the pace. This group takes the lead in conducting propaganda among the masses about the objectives and the means of mobilization or struggle. They take the lead in unifying the masses and preparing them and getting support from the middle forces. They observe the actual course of the mobilization or struggle and take the necessary steps in order to resolve the problems that arise. They will lead the advance of the mobilization until it is successfull, or they will lead the organized retreat if unsuccessful.

3. What are the tasks after every mass action and mass struggle?

After any mass action or mass struggle, whether it is successful or a failure, whether the results are positive or negative, it is necessary to sum up experiences together with the masses—analyze the experiences of the masses and draw lessons from them for the Party—and afterwards, propagate the summed-up experiences among the masses. In this manner, the meaning of their experience becomes clear to the Party and the masses. They are able to grasp its lessons, to raise their political consciousness, and to develop their capacity to advance the revolutionary movement.

The mass leaders are tested in these mass actions and mass struggles, and those who are enthusiastic and advanced among the masses emerge. After the mass actions and mass struggles, we must help those in leadership to sum up their experience and analyze their performance of the tasks. We must also pay attention to the newly-emergent forces who are enthusiastic and advanced in carrying out the actions. We must encourage them to take further initiative and to participate more in the work. If necessary, those in leadership who have proven to be unreliable or not capable must be replaced by those who are more developed.

4. Why do we need a combination of legal and illegal forms of mobilization and struggle?

In the countryside and in the cities, the effective combination of legal and illegal forms of mobilization and mass struggles is necessary. The revolutionary mass movement is able to advance most rapidly, most vigorously and most comprehensively in utilizing all forms appropriate to the conditions.

In the present strategic defensive stage of the people’s war, when the revolutionary forces are gathering strength step by step, the people’s army is not yet big and strong. The fighting fronts are only small guerrilla bases and zones that the big and strong enemy forces can still venture into. Thus, while we advance the armed form of our struggle, it is necessary to invigorate the open and legal forms of mobilization and struggle, in order to advance the revolutionary mass movement in the most rapid way.

In the cities, the principal form of struggle is open and legal in recognition of the concentration and strength of the enemy here. In order to advance the revolutionary mass movement in the cities, it is necessary to advance the open and militant mass struggles.

Legal mobilizations and struggles must serve the illegal struggle. Meaning to say, they must be in accordance with and serve the central task to seize political power, and in particular, serve the advance of the armed struggle.

On the other side of our correct and successful use of a combination of armed and legal forms of struggle, there were also deviations and a disorientation brought about by “Left” and Right opportunist lines, which resulted in damage and setbacks.

The armed and legal or unarmed forms of struggle are both forms of political struggle. It is often said correctly that war is a continuation of politics by other means. The New People’s Army and the people’s war have a revolutionary political character, and are the political weapons of the people.

Relative to armed struggle, the legal forms of struggle are secondary because, by themselves or if considered principal, they are unable to seize the political power for the proletariat and the people. The social revolution necessitates the total victory of the armed struggle. However, the legal forms of struggle are important and are indispensable for the advance of the armed revolution. Each form has its unique characteristics, and each has its role to play. Legal forms are defensive in the face of the overwhelmingly large police and military forces of the enemy, but are intended to win over the largest number of the people to fight the enemy.

The Party needs to coordinate the armed and the unarmed, the legal and the illegal, the secret and the open forces and forms of struggle in the cities and the countryside. The advance of all forces and forms of struggle must become the product of this coordination. We must repudiate the Right opportunist lie that the Party neglected the legal struggle by launching the revolutionary armed struggle. The Right opportunists would like the Party to put a stop or tone down the emphasis on the principal form of revolutionary struggle. The truth is the Party continues to stand as the leading force in the legal democratic movement. In order to make the legal democratic movement in the cities more effective, the Party needs to lessen the proportion of cadres confined to offices, institutions and coalitions, and to assign and develop more cadres in the factories, urban poor communities, and schools. Instead of stopping or lessening the emphasis on armed struggle, the Party needs to correct the reverse flow of cadres from the countryside to the cities, and to start sending more cadres and mass activists to the countryside.

Legal struggles have already assumed concrete forms. The most important of these are the mass education efforts, mass organizing, and mass mobilizations which are always carried out in accordance with the national-democratic program. These can be gleaned dramatically in the strikes, demonstrations, marches and other forms of coordinated mass actions of the class, sectoral and multisectoral issues.

The preliminary peace talks between the Ramos regime and the NDFP is yet another form of legal struggle. Through these negotiations, an illegal force such as the NDFP is allowed to propagate through legal means its national-democratic line as a line for a just and lasting peace and to attain international recognition of its status of belligerency. However, we must be alert to the danger of sending the wrong signal to the revolutionary forces, that the enemy is easy to talk to, and of creating illusions among the people. The revolutionary forces must always be ready to break off from preliminary or bilateral peace talks when they serve only to weaken instead of strengthening the revolutionary forces.

The progressive organizations must give highest priority to their own political education, to strengthening their organization and to the mass campaigns. They may propagate the national-democratic line in any legal field. However, this program must not be exclusive or principally devoted to any bourgeois electoral contest; influencing any institution or branch of the reactionary government; or even the framework of the peace negotiations between the NDFP and the reactionary government; or even all of these. All revolutionary cadres in the legal democratic movement must grasp the correct relation and coordination between the armed and legal forms of struggle, as well as between the various forms of legal struggle.

The Right opportunists exaggerate the importance of all legal forms of struggle, or else, they select one of them and blow up their importance and place the legal struggle on a higher plane than armed struggle. One way of distinguishing revolutionaries from reformists is how they regard the importance of armed struggle and how they correlate the armed and legal forms of struggle.

Reformism is exposed whenever it denies the necessity of armed revolution in the Philippines today. On the other hand, “Left” opportunism denies the necessity and importance of the legal democratic movement, and confines itself to armed struggle until it reaches the point where it can no longer see the correct relation and coordination of armed struggle and the legal democratic movement.

Those who do not recognize or understand the big importance of the organs of political power and mass organizations established in the countryside in the course of the people’s war may feel disillusioned by the protractedness of the armed revolution. These people usually exhibit the petty-bourgeois thinking that the success of the armed revolution can be measured only by how much political power we have already attained in the cities. Of course, the final part of the armed revolution is the seizure of the cities. However, we might be drawn farther away from attaining this objective if we are to wallow in “Left” opportunism or if we are to allow Right opportunism to obstruct the armed revolution.

E. Consolidation and Expansion

1. What is meant by consolidation?

Consolidation means the mobilization and the development of the consciousness and organization of the masses at each stage.

In the countryside, this means the formation of the guerrilla bases and zones; the establishment of basic mass organizations and organs of political power; the formation of units of the Party and the NPA; the launching of anti-feudal mass campaigns; the convening of mass education courses, etc.

In the cities, consolidation means advancing the democratic movement of the workers, other urban poor, and lower levels of the petty bourgeoisie (especially the students and teachers) in the factories, communities and schools; the formation of unions of workers and mass organizations in the communities and schools; the establishment of Party branches and groups; the formation of alliances based on the principles of united front; the formation of secret mass organizations; and the convening of mass education courses, etc.

The ongoing mass education campaigns are an important tool of consolidation in order to raise the level of consciousness, capacity and experience of the masses. These education campaigns always prepare them to face new problems which are a result of the heightened level of struggle or a retreat from the previous level.

2. What is meant by expansion?

Expansion means adding more places or groups to the scope of mass work. It means opening up new places, sectors and groups that we are able to reach and mobilize. In the countryside, we open up barrios and localities and we begin mass work in them. In the cities, we increase the factories, communities and schools that we are able to reach and we begin mass work in them.

First and foremost, we expand by means of forming coordinating groups and organizing groups of the people in the places where we are starting mass work.

3. What is the relation of consolidation and expansion?

We conduct expansion based on consolidation, and we consolidate while conducting expansion. Expansion with consolidation is the effective way of rooting the revolutionary movement on a wide scale. Even though we are already mobilizing in new places, we must ensure the continuous development of previous areas of mobilization.

On the other hand, we must be on guard as well of the danger of being dragged into consolidation to the neglect of expansion. We would like the revolutionary movement to spread out on the broadest scope possible. It is wrong to be satisfied with a narrow place.

In the countryside, the units of the people’s army need sufficient expanse, depth and sturdiness in order to maneuver. In the cities, it is necessary to reach the broad masses and people continuously in order to make them participate in the political struggle, principally the anti-fascist and anti-imperialist struggle. It is necessary to cast the net of the secret movement on the widest scale possible.

In order to combine consolidation and expansion correctly, it is necessary to plan all of the work, taking into account the needs, targets and capabilities. At every period, we must determine which of the two we must give principal attention to, without neglecting the other. The basic principle we must bear in mind is, “expand based on consolidation, and consolidate while expanding.”

Our overall guide to expansion work and consolidation is the wave upon wave advance according to the present line of waging extensive and intensive guerrilla warfare based on an ever widening and ever deepening mass base.

We must rectify and combat the “Left” opportunist line of military adventurism and urban insurrectionism which took away units directed at the expansion work and consolidation of the mass base and the guerrilla zones. Likewise, we must also rectify and combat the Right opportunist line of capitulationism, parliamentarism and reformism which surrenders to the enemy the proletarian class leadership of the people’s national-democratic revolution.

Rectification must continue to reinvigorate and to sharpen the quality of mass work and the formation of the mass base in the countryside. There is an immediate big need to expand the guerrilla fronts and to recover lost territories, together with immediately facing the problems of consolidation which are now relegated to the secondary position. What is needed is grasping and carrying out solid organizing; and the correct balance of expansion and consolidation, the anti-feudal class line, ongoing education and propaganda work, and advancing various types of mass campaigns.

We must take advantage of the enemy’s loosening up over a large part of the countryside in order to concentrate the bulk of its forces and resources in attacking a few priority targets. We must learn to adjust and persevere and develop our mass work even in situations and scopes where jostling with the enemy is more intense. We must not abandon or just neglect populated areas, those along transportation, communications and supply lines, and those important to the links and support of the movement in the cities, just because of enemy surveillance. We must learn to excel in combining according to the changing military situation and the particularities of the places (secluded and mountainous, lower elevation and plain, or along the town and highway); of organization and secret and open struggle; illegal, semi-legal and legal forms; of traditional and non-traditional forms; likewise, armed and non-armed struggle—in order to maintain as much as possible the links, the guidance and the development of the movement and the mass base. In organizing the masses, we must avoid the premature verticalization, and emphasize instead the widescale strengthening at the level of the barrios and municipalities.

Recovery work is much more complicated and more difficult than the expansion work of the past. In order to advance our mass work and mass movement, we must conduct surveillance and clean up the informers planted by the enemy in places where they stayed for a long time or still controlled by the military. If necessary, we must go around those places “hardened” by the military and first go after those “softer” places.

There is also the various remnant baggage of previous errors and shortcomings and the disruption of traitorous and rotten elements. The summing-up of experiences, criticism and self criticism, and study with the participation of the masses, are important in order to draw the correct lessons from experiences, to put in proper perspective the negative experiences, to place the active and militant thought over adversity, and to rouse the masses for a resurgence of the struggle.

Expansion and recovery work can be done only with the guidance of the line and principles of the rectification movement. Reorientation and retraining is necessary, so is a firm grasp of the mass line and holding up solid organizing in greater importance. We need education work and training to catch up with a large number of those who were recruited and subsequently elevated but whose knowledge and experience of many aspects is sorely lacking. We need to educate them with the principles and means of social investigation, mass organizing, step by step advancing of the anti-feudal movement, and the formation of the basic Party units, and the launching of the anti-feudal and other mass struggles.

We must support the all-sided and diligent gathering of revolutionary strength of the movement in the cities in order to raise the spiral of interaction of the armed movement in the countryside—for a non-stop but step-by-step strengthening of the revolution and weakening of reaction.

The work of consolidation and solid organizing must not lag behind expansion and work. We will be able to launch various types of legal struggle if we have conducted solid organizing of the masses at the basic level beforehand. Through the mass organizations, we will be able to mobilize a large number of people, and launch all types of democratic actions in their work places, communities, foyers, streets, and even the backyards of reactionary government offices.

We need to launch propaganda-agitation, education campaigns and mass struggles of the sectoral or multisectoral issues in relation to the worsening socio-economic crisis, against the anti-people and counterrevolutionary policies, programs and schemes of the ruling regime, and against US imperialism. From time to time, we must set at the national and regional levels of the appropriate organs letting loose big mobilizations, depending on the prevailing socio-political situation of the country.

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Reposted from http://massline.info/Philippines/masswork.htm

#cpp #communist party of the philippines #communism #readings

[maren-lesta-blog]

Star Wars, from a Marxist point of view

This post contains spoilers of The Last Jedi. I live in mainland China and the film won’t hit theatres until January 5, so what I say about the plot is only derived from the reviews I read, not the film itself. The TLJ spoilers about Rey are at the end, part 4 of this post. This post is recommended for Marxists who happen to enjoy SW series or SW fans that are not intimidated by the concept of communism. If your understanding of communism are ‘OMG Gulag!’, ‘BUT famines’ or ‘Jesus Christ it’s totalitarianism!’ then I suggest you ignore me and move on. Also this is not a formal analysis, just me mumbling jumbling to myself because none of my friends in real life watch Star Wars.

1.Jedi the Space Brahmins The whole thing about Jedi is blatantly and shamelessly Orientalist, like Disney’s Mulan level of Orientalist. The Jedi robes, the padawan hairstyle, the pseudo Taoist-Buddhist-Bushido-whateveritisyouwhitepeoplecanttellthedifferenceanyway hybrid philosophy, the ridiculously unscientific and ahistorical sword fights, and even the word Jedi itself - an American’s absurd misunderstanding of Japanese syllables… Every element is screaming ‘middle class shitheads jerking off by the bizarre delight taken from ancient mysterious Oriental otherness’. And jerk off happily they did, as every single SW film has miraculous box office. The capitalists who own the series are loaded. (Though, to be precise, only the Jedi masters are Space Brahmins, while the average Jedi knights are Space Kshatriya. The Jedi’s faith and morals and Yoda's 'enjoy every shit fate throws at you' attitude are basically Space Neo-Confucianism. Anakin was forcefully pulled up from Space Dalits, breaking the age-old norms. No wonder he later turned his back to Space Confucianism.) 2. Republic the Space Ancien Regime Orientalism aside, the Jedis are set up to be the good guys - the light side - during the entire Star Wars saga, while Sith, their opponents, are set up to be some sort of fascist-ish bad guys. This seems to be trendy among Hollywood blockbusters these days : the good guys are always some vague neo-liberal-ish (sometimes it’s even openly feudal, like Thor) individualist heroes trying to hold up the flawed but ultimately good status quo, while some vague ruthless fascist-ish villains trying to break the status quo so that hesheit could rule the world or get famous or get avenged or something. e.g. the recent Kingsman sequel and Thor sequel. As for the third route, coughrevolutioncough, well, it doesn’t exist. There could be Resistance and Rebel, but no revolution. There is no Galactic Internationale, only the rebels led by the literal aristocrats ( princess leia everyone) of the old republic, and the Empire led by the relatively new (compared with the centuries old Jedis) oligarchs. 3. Princess Leia the Space Hilary and Emperor Palpatine the Space Trump So, in contrast to the black and white version - the Star Wars ideology - which the filmmakers and fans try to present, the whole story of Star Wars actually goes like this: Jedi knights are the essential components of the State Apparatus, functioning as a violent force of repressive execution and intervention in the interests of the ruling classes in the class struggle conducted by the space bourgeoisie and its allies against the space proletariat. A proof for this would be that haunting scene in the Phantom Menace in which slave boy Anakin asked an armed Jedi knight if the Jedis are gonna free the slaves. The answer is no. And throughout the whole SW series no one mentions the abolition of slavery ever again. Why is it so? Because the ‘peace and order’ that the Jedis protect with lightsabres is precisely the societal system which is built on the labour of slaves - be it the feudal-ish serfs on the third worldly planets like Tattoine or the hired slaves on the first worldly planets like Coruscant. Padme teared up when she thought democracy died in thunderous applause, but the truth is there never was democracy in the first place.The Senators and Queens and Princes and Counts and Capitalists may meet in their air-conditioned council chamber while the actual labourer, the working people who produce every single thing in the Galaxy, have no say in anything, as they don’t even appear in the story. The fate of the Galaxy is decided by a very small group of people, usually force-sensitive, while the majority of the Galaxy is not even qualified to have a presence on screen. When oppressed nations(planets) want to free themselves from this fake democracy, the Republic shows its true nature by branding them seperatists and sending Jedis to repress them with violence, which resulted in fancy lightsabre fights. Well, the thing is, lightsabres are cool, and lightsabres are also weapons. The function of sabres is to cut people, not to cut fruit. By lightsabres alone we should be able to discern that Jedis are the instruments of State Violence, just like cops. They are Superpowered Space Cops. It is also very worth noting that the major seperatists are aliens instead of humans, and are located in the financially worse off outer rims instead of the loaded developed central planets. Still their highest leader is Count Dooku, white male aristocrat Sith opportunist who uses the righteous dissatisfaction of alien peoples to gain more power. And failed. Because white male aristocrat Sith opportunist Space Trump. (so dooku’s romney then) After the Jedi and the Ancien Regime were overthrown and replaced by the (i must resist the urge to say louis bonaparte)Sith, Space Obama Organa and his adopted daughter Space Hilary Leia came into the picture. Just like the Sith, they used the righteous dissatisfaction of the galactic people to mobolise rebels to work for their class. Thus, the plot of Rogue One goes like this: Space Aristocrat recruited Space Lumpenproletariat to do their bidding. Suicide squad was formed. The squad also contained two former minor Space Brahmins who were now overthrown and homeless. They were smashed, along with Space Julian Sorel Krennic, by Space Thiers Tarkin. Space Aristocrat continued to recruit Space Lumpenproletariat, the kind of rascals who shot first. This time also including third world farmer Luke. Fast forward to the Return of the Jedi, a fitting title for the film, as Jedi, the symbol of the rotten old world, is restored, just like the English monarchy was restored after Cromwell died, and continued to exist to this very moment. What a happy end for conservatives. 4.Rey the proletariat The self proclaimed progressive youth often complain about the lack of feminism/LGBT representation in Hollywood movies, yet they are perfectly fine with the lack of working class representation. Though this time there is one actual proletarian protagonist in the new Star Wars, at least by definition. Rey is nobody’s daughter, a natural phenomena among proles. As Marx famously stated in the Communist Manifesto, ‘all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.’ Rey, sold by her parents, owns nothing but herself, her labour force. On Jakku she has no access to the outside world, the only way for her to survive is to sell the products of her labour to the landlord, who owns means of production, in exchange of means of living. Rey has no power over her wages, and could only accept what the landlord distributes to her, while the landlord could sell the junk she picked to outside buyers ten times her wage. And, like her predecessors, Rey is recruited by the galactic Aristocrat. Brainwashed by Bourgeoisie Ideology, she mistakes Space Ford for her father and Space Hilary for her mother, in a manner not unlike K in Blade Runner 2049. Old Luke, the Space Diogenes, laughed at her naive mindset, but did not correct her. It was only when she forceskyped with Space Snape that the illusion got debunked. Space Snape, like Wizard Snape, is a misguided young fascist. I say misguided, because communist revolution is a thought crime and the only acceptable outlet for anger at the Capitalist status quo is fascism. Better Nazi than Red. So Wizard Snape who suffered bitter poverty in his youth did not recognize his true enemy being unequal distribution of wealth, and turned his loyalty to fascism instead. Later, he went back to the vague neoliberal-ish good guys, because of personal romantic reasons. On the other hand, Space Snape, whose fate is yet to be set in stone, is neither a full blown fascist nor a penitent confessor kneeling at the feet of neoliberal justice. Yet. According to the spoilers, between Space Snape and Space Diogenes, the former actually has the moral high ground, despite the latter being the biggest Tom Sue self-insert in the history of filmmaking. Which is probably why the Last Jedi pissed so many old SW fans off, cuz it deconstructs their narcissism reflected in Luke. Personally I’d love to see Ren’s outcome in the next film. All in all, although Star Wars doesn’t play into historical materialism at all, but since no film is produced in a vacuum and is always made by real people living in the real world, it couldn’t help but shows some distorted mirror image of the politics of the Capitalist society we live in. It’s fun to do mental gymnastics with it.

#star wars #the force awakens #the last jedi #star wars trilogy #rey #leia organa #kylo ren #han solo #marxism #reylo meta #in a sense #rogue one #musings #star wars meta

[thesparkjournal]

THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION & THE NATIONAL QUESTION

By Pierre Fontaine 

[Detail from “Long live unity and friendship among all nationalities of the USSR!” (Public Domain)]

Consisting of fifteen national republics, comprising dozens of national groups, the USSR yields many insights for Communists in responding to the national concerns of the oppressed nations and peoples in Canada.

This year we celebrate the centenary of the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia. This is probably the most significant event in the history of humankind. This event was a major turning point in human evolution. For the first time, an exploited class seized political power. It was the Russian working class that, in alliance with the peasantry, placed itself at the forefront and set an example for all the working class throughout the world. It will be the beginning of the socialist revolution which, as it ripens towards communism, is called on to put an end to the exploitation humans by other humans.

But if the socialist revolution is international in nature, because socialism is the result of capitalism, it remains national in form. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was based on the former czarist empire and consisted of fifteen national republics, comprising dozens of national groups, and could never have existed without a program responding to the national concerns of the oppressed peoples.

It was up to Lenin, the leader of the Soviet revolution, to develop and elaborate the fundamental principles on which the Communist parties still today base their programs and actions concerning the national question. It was he who, particularly through his polemic against Rosa Luxemburg, elaborated the fundamental principle of “the right of nations to self-determination”.

It emerges from this that the Communists in considering national matters place above all else the interest of the working class, not only of the oppressed nation, but of the entire international working class in its struggle against the bourgeoisie and for socialism. To this end, the Communists seek, above all, national peace and the most favourable context for the unity which is indispensable to the working class in order to carry out its class struggle and the struggle for socialism. This peace between nations can only be ensured by the broadest democracy and the equality of nations in law.

By contrast, national inequality and oppression aim precisely at dividing the working class into national detachments which support the interests of their respective national bourgeoisies, rather than defending their own class interests, thus seriously hindering the struggle for socialism. This is precisely what can happen, for example, when we see Spain categorically denying Catalonia’s right to self-determination, while right-wing governments, both Spanish and Catalan – that have attacked workers harshly with their neoliberal policies – manage to rally them under their national banners.

The Communists of the dominant nations must counter this division and allow the unity of the working class to unconditionally defend the right of the oppressed nations to separate. The Communists of the oppressed nations, for their part, must

“attach prime significance to the unity and alliance of the workers of the oppressed nations with those of the oppressor nations; otherwise these Communists will involuntarily become the allies of their own national bourgeoisie, which always betrays the interests of the people and of democracy, and is always ready, in its turn, to annex territory and oppress other nations”. (Lenin, The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination, in Collected Works, Volume 21, pages 407-414)

These principles applied to the situation in Canada imply that Communists must strive to unite the working class throughout the country to achieve socialism and end national oppression. To realize the unity of the working class, they must fight for recognition of the right to self-determination of the oppressed nations, including the right to separate and to constitute an independent state. And that is precisely the current program of the Communist Party of Canada.

“To realize the unity of the working class, [Communists] must fight for recognition of the right to self-determination of the oppressed nations, including the right to separate and to constitute an independent state.”

The Communists are fully aware that only socialism can lay the foundations for the complete abolition of national oppression, like all other types of oppression:

“It is impossible to abolish national (or any other political) oppression under capitalism, since this requires the abolition of classes, i.e., the introduction of socialism… By transforming capitalism into socialism the proletariat creates the possibility of abolishing national oppression.” (Lenin, “The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up”, CW, Volume 22, pages 320-360)

The Communists, however, are struggling to win immediate reforms.

The Communists cannot be content in the meantime with asserting that only socialism will resolve the question, which amounts to waiting and doing nothing on this front. This would almost be the same mistake that Lenin criticized Rosa Luxemburg for making. Communists must fight immediately for maximum democracy in order to ensure the best political environment for the socialist revolution, helping to bring down the mistrust between the oppressing and oppressed nations’ workers and demonstrate to them all the seriousness of the policies of the Party:

“The more democratic the system of government, the clearer will the workers see that the root evil is capitalism, not lack of rights. The fuller national equality (and it is not complete without freedom of secession), the clearer will the workers of the oppressed nations see that the cause of their oppression is capitalism, not lack of rights, etc..” (Lenin, “A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism”, CW, Volume 23, pages 28-76)

The CPC therefore proposes democratic reform that is now feasible under capitalism: a new constitution in Canada based on an equal and voluntary association of nations, guaranteeing their full equality in law, and their right to self-determination, up to the point of constituting themselves, if they so desire, as sovereign states.

However, the acknowledged intent of the CPC’s proposal is to avoid the separation of Quebec, as well as the other nations of Canada. This

“democratic solution to the national question will create conditions to preserve the unity of Canada and to revalue the common struggle of the working class of Canada against the domination of monopoly capital. It is precisely the democratic solution to the national question which will create the conditions necessary for the strengthening of the unity of the workers and the realization by the working class of its historical mission, socialism.” (William Kashtan, For the Self-Determination of Quebec, The Marxist Case, Éditions Nouvelles Frontières, 1978, page 24)

The recognition of the right to self-determination of nations, including the right to separate, does not mean that the Communists are obliged to support the separation:

“…it is not the business of the proletariat to advance such demands, which inevitably amount to a demand for the establishment of an autonomous class state. It is the business of the proletariat to rally the greatest possible masses of workers of each and every nationality more closely, to rally them for struggle in the broadest possible arena for a democratic republic and for socialism. And since the state arena in which we are working today was created and is being maintained and extended by means of a series of outrageous acts of violence, then, to make the struggle against all forms of exploitation and oppression successful, we must not disperse but unite the forces of the working class, which is the most oppressed and the most capable of fighting.” (Lenin, “On the Manifesto of the Armenian Social-Democrats”, CW, Volume 6, page 326-329)

This does not mean that the Communists can never support the call for separation, but it is only under certain conditions and in exceptional circumstances that they can do so:

“We must always and unreservedly work for the very closest unity of the proletariat of all nationalities, and it is only in isolated and exceptional cases that we can advance and actively support demands conducive to the establishment of a new class state or to the substitution of a looser federal unity, etc., for the complete political unity of a state.” (Lenin, “The National Question in Our Programme”, CW, Volume 6, pages 454-463)

The CPC’s position has an advantage over the cry for independence for this or that nation, and in particular the independence of Québec, because it makes possible the creation of a broad multinational united front of the oppressed nations of Canada to win a sweeping reform which would truly end national oppression, rather than seek advantages or privileges for one of them in particular.

“The bourgeoisie always places its national demands in the forefront, and does so in categorical fashion. With the proletariat, however, these demands are subordinated to the interests of the class struggle. Theoretically, you cannot say in advance whether the bourgeois democratic revolution will end in a given nation seceding from another nation, or in its equality with the latter; in either case, the important thing for the proletariat is to ensure the development of its class. For the bourgeoisie it is important to hamper this development by pushing the aims of its ‘own’ nation before those of the proletariat. That is why the proletariat confines itself, so to speak, to the negative demand for recognition of the right to self-determination, without giving guarantees to any nation, and without undertaking to give anything at the expense of another nation.                                                                                  

“This may not be ‘practical’, but it is in effect the best guarantee for the achievement of the most democratic of all possible solutions. The proletariat needs only such guarantees, whereas the bourgeoisie of every nation requires guarantees for its own interest, regardless of the position of (or the possible disadvantages to) other nations.” (Lenin, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, cw, Volume 20, pages 393-454)

***

Pierre Fontaine is the leader of the PARTI COMMUNISTE DU QUÉBEC, a distinct entity within the COMMUNIST PARTY OF CANADA.

#Marxism #Leninism #October Revolution #Socialism #Canada #Quebec #National Sovereignty

[drapeau-rouge]

The New Communists of the Commons: 21st Century Proudhonists

by Radhika Desai

     If Proudhonism in the 19th century was, as Marx argued, a petty bourgeois ideology, this paper argues that the new communism of the commons propounded by Badiou, Hardt and Negri and Žižek is a 21st century avatar of it. It speaks not for what Poulantzas called the ‘traditional petty bourgeoisie’, as Proudhon did, but for the ‘new petty bourgeoisie’ of ‘non-productive wage-earners’, which has also lately styled itself the ‘creative class.’ A failure to comprehend the dynamics of capitalist accumulation and a general antipathy to any general organization of labour in society, and thus to any serious politics, are common to both. In addition, the paper shows that the protection of the cultural commons, the core of the project, is but a programme aiming for the continued reproduction of the creative class within capitalism. It is also prey to a series of misunderstandings - of the concept of the commons itself, of contemporary capitalism whose dynamics forms the backdrop of their project and key economic and political ideas of Marx whose authority they seek to attach to their project. 

     The Great Recession and the financial crisis that broke in its midst appeared at first to have prompted a major break with the neoliberal orthodoxy that was so instrumental in causing them. Governments around the world called for fiscal stimulus, easy monetary policies and massive state intervention, and many were forced to nationalize, support and regulate failing financial institutions. Keynes, whom neoliberalism had so mightily struggled to displace was back, and nowhere with more vengeance than in neoliberalism’s anglo-american heartlands. President Obama confirmed the massive bailouts undertaken by the outgoing Bush Jr administration and announced the heftiest stimulus package in the advanced industrial world while Gordon Brown ‘saved the world’ with his economic diplomacy in favour of fiscal stimuli. But as the crisis wore on, the contingency of the new commitment to Keynesianism (Patnaik 2009a) and a deeper political continuity – of the unbroken power of financial capital over government, particularly in the US and the UK – became clear. The bailouts for banks and austerity for working people further confirmed that neoliberalism, while doctrinally about the free markets and ‘rolling back the state,’ had practically always effected state action in favour of capital, particularly financial capital. It remains less widely appreciated that these continuities are dangerous and contradictory for the very forces they benefitted in the past: the combination of austerity and bailouts is prolonging the Great Recession and is almost certain to lead to further financial crises. When they occur, the financial institutions that were too big to fail the last time around will have become too big to bail out by states too indebted to do so.

Why recall all this in a paper about the new communism of the commons? Quite simply because that phenomenon, wherein a group of prominent Western intellectuals on the left has boldly announced an apparently radical return to Communism committed to ‘de-demonizing’ it, is akin to the apparently radical return to Keynesianism by governments and intellectuals who remain committed to the interests of finance.

The publication of Alain Badiou’s The Communist Hypothesis (2010), Michael Hardt and Tony Negri’s Commonwealth (2009), the conference volume The Idea of Communism (2010) and associated publications has been hailed – by the authors themselves – as a major political departure. In the words of Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek, their conference, originally planned for a modest audience of about 180 and then forced to expand to accommodate about 1200,

... opened the way for a reactivation of the strong link between radical philosophy and politics. The massive participation, the amazing buzz that propelled the conference (strangers greeting each other like old friends), the good humoured and non-sectarian question and answer sessions (something rather rare for the left), all indicated that the period of guilt [over Actually Existing Communism, one presumes] was over. If this conference was a major intellectual encounter, it was an even greater political event. (Douzinas and Žižek 2010, ix)

Not to be outdone in self-importance Alain Badiou claimed of the same conference that ‘in addition to the two people behind it (Slavoj Žižek and myself), the great names of the true philosophy of our times (by which I mean a philosophy that is not reducible to academic exercises or support for the ruling order) were strongly represented’ (Badiou 2010, 36).

Prima facie, Badiou’s proposition that the left end the ‘end of ideologies’ (Badiou 2010a, 99) and return to the ‘idea of communism’ after decades of distancing, Hardt and Negri’s proposal that it be associated with the defense of the ‘commons’ – the natural and the cultural worlds we inhabit (Hardt and Negri 2009, vii) – and Slavoj Žižek’s extension of these ideas to include ‘the commons of internal nature’ (e.g. Žižek 2010) as well as the ‘Excluded’, such as slum-dwellers, add up to a very tall political order.

Creative Class Member

This paper argues, however, that on closer scrutiny this new communism of the commons turns out to be little more than a 21st century avatar of the Proudhonism of the 19th, which Marx exposed as a petty bourgeois ideology, but with one historical difference. 19th century Proudhonism was the ideology of what Poulantzas called the ‘traditional petty bourgeoisie’ of ‘small scale production and ownership, independent craftsmen and traders’ (Poulantzas 1975, 204). The 21st century avatar is the ideology of what he called the new petty bourgeoisie, ‘non- productive wage-earners’ (Poulantzas 1975, 206). This class has since come to be dubbed variously as ‘knowledge workers’, ‘the professional managerial class’, ‘symbolic analysts’ or ‘cognitive workers’ and, last but not least, the ‘creative class’, people ‘who add economic value through their creativity’ (Florida 2002, 68). If, speaking for the 19th century traditional petty bourgeoisie, Proudhon’s socialism tragicomically sought revolution (Proudhonists dominated the International Working Mens’ Association element in the Paris Commune) if only to protect their class against its particular enemy, large scale capitalism, and proposed measures which assumed its continued existence, the new petty bourgeois new communism is, if anything, worse: an harum-scarum manifesto, whose apparently radical fingering of large corporations who try to ‘privatise the general intellect’ (of which, needless to say, the ‘creative class’ is the embodiment), is not only based on new-fangled and badly tangled ideas about the nature of contemporary capitalism. It stops far short of socialism. Like the reaction of the governing right to the crisis, the new communism of the left is more a symptom of the tension between the crisis- induced realization that the old grooves of thought and practice must be abandoned, and be seen to be abandoned, to retain credibility and relevance, and the inability of these intellectually and politically enervated representatives to actually do so. For all the incantations and intonations about Marx and Marxism, the new communists continue, as they have over the past many decades, to skirt the core of Marx’s work, his critique of political economy. While it is unclear whether they accept the verdict of the majority of those who call themselves ‘Marxist economists’ that Marx’s account of capitalism is plagued by the so-called ‘transformation problem’ and inconsistent and hence mistaken about the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (But see Elson 1979, Kliman 2007, Freeman et al 2004, Desai 2010), the new communists’ ability to treat it as an inexhaustible source of apparently profound but actually disjointed and mangled ideas is certainly helped by this sort of ‘Marxism without Marx’ (Freeman 2010). The new communists also falsely pin on classical Marxism a deficiency of political understanding which they profess to make good (for a critique of an earlier attempt at this see Desai 2001). And they fundamentally mis-read the history of communism in the 20th century, largely accepting questionable mainstream, indeed neoliberal accounts of its problems and demise (for a critique and an alternative account see Kotz 1997). Just as the reaction of the right to the crisis betrayed its class character more clearly than was revealed in the free market rhetoric of the past three decades, so the reaction of these new communist intellectuals to the crisis betrays the extent to which the left of the past decades, including many self-proclaimed Marxists, have read into Marx and Communism their own new petty bourgeois concerns. Finally, just as the right’s reaction, rather than resolving the crisis and laying a new foundation for growth has, instead, laid one for the next crisis, so the new communists’ new found communism is little more than an express train headed for irrelevance. This is already becoming clear in that they have little of import to say to the wave of protest and liberation struggles that are sweeping over the Middle-East, not to mention London or Wisconsin. For though framed by much seemingly radical rhetoric about returning, now unabashedly, to Communism, the new communism embodies little more than the left’s failed empty oppositionism, neatly cleft from any politics, of the past several decades. It has been, in effect, the left’s capitulation to neoliberalism. As Badiou, brazenly or inadvertently as the case may be, reveals, this was the real legacy of May ’68, as the new communist intellectuals so Eurocentrically interpret it. For, barring the honourable exceptions, and net of the increases in strictly liberal freedoms for some women and minorities, the chief political results of their May ’68, which left out of account the powerful anti-imperialist struggles and wars of so many millions in the third world and fondly privileged only their own youthful rebellion, were that as that generation matured and occupied positions of political and economic power, the right moved farther to the right under the banner of the New Right and the left also moved to the right under ‘Third Way’ banners both on the pretext of increasing liberal freedoms, but actually undermining them too, for most people in the world. In what follows, I first identify what I consider the main components of the new communism. The critique that follows is but a preliminary, and necessarily compressed, outline. It is founded on a reading of Marx, Marxism and its history that contests the new communists’ deeply problematic and selective appropriation of these. Like the increased demand for Capital so widely reported since the crisis began, the hundreds who flocked to the new communists’ conference represent a perfectly understandable intellectual hunger for radical ideas in the midst of crisis. However, the adulterated fare offered up by the new communists can hardly satisfy it. It can, however, so long as it is successfully marketed, prevent that hunger from being satiated by the real article. The critique of the new communism begins with a review of the main terms of Marx’s criticism of Proudhon: his rejection of the ‘general organization of labour in society’ which would be indispensable to any communism. It goes on to discuss common Proudhonist and new communist misunderstanding of the state. The rest of the critique of the new communism concentrates on the new features of the new communists’ thinking which specifically expresses the interests and self-image of the new petty bourgeoisie or the ‘creative class’. They include the confusions surrounding their central category, the commons, the ideas of ‘cognitive workers’ as ‘fixed capital’, of rent replacing profit and, finally, Žižek’s questionable ideas about the relationship between capitalism and democracy. The paper ends with some reflections on the form of value in communism, the centrality of the state in struggles to achieve it and their likely nature.

The new communism

The proposal with which, it appears, Badiou kicked off the construction of the new communism was that the left should once gain ‘subjectivise’ itself, not to Communism as such but to the ‘Idea’ – a ‘synthesis of politics, history and ideology’ – of Communism (Badiou 2010b, 3, 4). If ‘[t]he Communist Idea exists only at the border between the individual and the political procedure, as that element of subjectivation that is based on a historical projection of politics’, the historical projection of politics on which Badiou’s subjectivation is based is revealed in his discussions of May ’68, the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Paris Commune. For all the differences between these three events, Badiou extracts two common themes from his discussions: a rejection of ‘statism’ and an associated rejection of the party as a revolutionary vehicle. Indeed, Badiou dismisses all ‘democratic politics’ as ‘nothing more than an eager willingness to service the needs of banks’. Rejecting such ‘capitalo-parliamentarism’, he calls for a politics that ‘is far removed from state power’ and surmises that it will ‘probably remain so for a long time to come’. But what looks like a deferral of engagement with state power turns out to be a rejection. The ‘obligatory refusal of any direct inclusion in the State, of any request for funding from the State, of any participation in elections, etc., is also an infinite task, since the creation of new political truths will always shift the dividing line between Statist, hence historical, facts and the eternal consequences of an event’ (Badiou 2010b, 13). Representing ‘the new proletarians who have come from Africa and elsewhere and the intellectuals who are the heirs to the political battles of recent decades’ (such, one must presume, as himself), such a politics will ‘not have any organic relationship with existing parties or the electoral and institutional system that sustains them’ (Badiou 2010a, 99). This rejection of state, politics and democracy claims kinship with the Marxist concept of the ‘withering away of the state’ and rejects ‘communism as a goal to be attained through the work of a new State’ (Badiou 2010b, 13). Against such a conception of politics, Badiou finds Marx’s account of the Paris Commune ‘ambiguous’:

On the one hand, he [Marx] praises everything that appears to lead to a dissolution of the state and, more sporadically, of the nation-state. In this vein he notes: the Commune’s abolition of a professional army in favour of directly arming the people; all the measures it took concerning the election and revocability of civil servants; the end it put to the separation of powers in favour of a decisive and executive function; and of its internationalism (the financial delegate of the Commune was German, the military leaders, Polish, etc.). But on the other hand, he deplores incapacities that are actually statist incapacities [incapacités étatiques]: its weak military centralization; its inability to define financial priorities; and, its shortcomings concerning the national question, its address to other cities, what it did and did not say about the war with Prussia and its rallying of provincial masses. (Badiou 2010a, 179)

Badiou notes with satisfaction that ‘Engels formalises the Commune’s contradictions in the same way’ when he showed that the two main political tendencies in the Commune, the Blanquists and the Proudhonists, ‘ended up doing exactly the opposite of their manifest ideology’ – the Blanquist partisans of centralised and conspiratorial politics had to destroy the state bureaucracy while the Proudhonist opponents of associations had to support large scale workers’ associations. To this, Badiou poses the question of ‘how would the current that Marx and Engels represented in 1871, and even much later, [would] have been more adequate to the situation’ and ‘with what extra means would its presumed hegemony have endowed the situation’. Badiou leaves us to imagine the answer, noting only that ‘the ambiguity of Marx’s account will be carried [sera levee] both by the social-democratic disposition and its Leninist radicalization, that is in the fundamental motif of the party, over a century’ (Badiou 2010a, 181).

This motif too must be discarded. For Badiou, the Paris Commune ‘for the first and to this day only time, broke with the parliamentary destiny of popular and workers’ political movements’ (Badiou 2010a, 196-7). Though the Cultural Revolution ‘bears witness to the impossibility truly and globally to free politics from the framework of the party-state that imprisons it’, ‘all emancipatory politics’ must nevertheless ‘put an end to the model of the party, or of multiple parties, in order to affirm a politics “without party”’, though without lapsing into anarchism (Badiou 2010a, 155). If the left is ‘a set of parliamentary political personnel that proclaim that they are the only ones equipped to bear the general consequences of a singular political movement’, it is time to break with it (Badiou 2010a, 198). Indeed, ‘a rupture with the representative form of politics’ is necessary, even a ‘rupture with “democracy”’ (Badiou 2010a, 227).

More than ever, political power, as the current economic crisis with its single slogan of ‘rescue the banks’ clearly proves, is merely an agent of capitalism. Revolutionaries are divided and only weakly organized, broad sectors of working class youth have fallen prey to nihilistic despair, the vast majority of intellectuals are servile. In contrast to all this, though just as isolated as Marx and his friends were at the time when the retrospectively famous Manifesto of the Communist Party came out in 1848, there are nonetheless more and more of us involved in organizing new types of political processes among the poor and working masses and in trying to find every possible way to support re-emergent forms of the communist Idea in reality. (Badiou 2010b, 14)

To Badiou’s Idea of communism, which claims kinship with Marx and Marxism even as it rejects the principal elements of their politics, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri add the proposal that Communism be conceived as a resistance to the privatization of the ‘commons’. They agree with Badiou that the project requires a non-statist and non-party approach. Rejecting both the ‘collapse theories’ which ‘envision the end of capitalist rule resulting from catastrophic crises, followed by a new economic order that somehow rises whole out of its ashes’ and ‘the notion of socialist transition that foresees a transfer of wealth and control from the private to the public, increasing state regulation, control and management of social production’, Hardt and Negri explain that ‘The kind of transition we are working with ... requires the growing autonomy of the multitude from both private and public control; the metamorphosis of social subjects through education and training in cooperation, communication and organizing social encounters; and thus a progressive accumulation of the common’ (Hardt and Negri 2009, 311). The resistance to the neoliberal privatization of the commons must not assume ‘that the only alternative to the private is the public, that is what is managed and regulated by states and other governmental authorities’ (Hardt and Negri 2009, viii).

For Hardt and Negri, the commons include on the one hand ‘the commonwealth of the material world – the air, the water, the fruits of the soil, and all nature’s bounty – which in classic European political texts is often claimed to be the inheritance of humanity as a whole, to be shared together’ and ‘those results of social production that are necessary for social interaction and further production, such as knowledges, languages, codes, information, affects and so forth’ (Hardt and Negri 2009, viii). Hardt justifies this new vision of Communism through a re-reading of two passages from Marx’s work, the section on ‘Private Property and Communism’ in the 1844 Paris Manuscripts and one from the final part of Capital, volume 1. In the former, Hardt points out, Marx equates Communism with the abolition of private property. For Marx this does not mean extending and generalizing private property to the whole community but rather ‘the abolition of .... property as such’ (Hardt 2010, 139). Hardt quotes Marx saying ‘Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it’ (Marx 1975, 351) and goes on to ask:

What would it mean for something to be ours when we do not possess it? What would it mean to regard ourselves and our world not as property? Has private property made us so stupid that we cannot see that? Marx is searching here for the common. The open access and sharing that characterise use of the common are outside and inimical to property relations. We have been made so stupid that we can only recognize the world as private or public. We have become blind to the common. (Hardt 2010, 139) [Emphasis added]

This search ends, Hardt avers, in Capital where Marx speaks of how ‘capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of nature, its own negation... [which] does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e. on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production’ (Marx 1867/1977, 929). For Hardt this means that

Capitalist development inevitably results in the increasingly central role of cooperation and the common, which in turn provides the tools for overthrowing the capitalist mode of production and constitutes the bases for an alternative society and mode of production, a communism of the common. (Hardt 2010, 140)

Important as this is, Hardt argues, this conception ‘grasps primarily the material elements in question’ and these are not ‘the dominant forms of capitalist production today’ (Hardt 2010, 140). But here, the passages from the Paris Manuscripts come to the rescue, highlighting ‘the immaterial, really biopolitical aspects’. Here, Hardt argues, Marx conceives communism as the ‘supersession of private property as human self-estrangement’, as the ‘true appropriation of the human essence through and for man’ and ‘the complete restoration of man to himself as a social, i.e. human, being’. Here appropriation is

... no longer appropriation of the object in the form of private property but appropriation of our own subjectivity, our human, social relations. Marx explains this communist appropriation ... in terms of the human sensorium and the full range of creative and productive powers. ‘Man appropriates his integral essence in an integral way’, which he explains in terms of ‘all his human relations to the world – seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, contemplating, sensing, wanting, acting, loving’. I think the term ‘appropriation’ here is misleading because Marx is not talking about capturing something that already exists, but rather creating something new. .... the positive content of communism, which corresponds to the abolition of private property, is the autonomous human production of subjectivity, the human production of humanity... (Hardt 2010, 141)

When Hardt proposes that in such appropriation, ‘paradoxically the object of production is really a subject’ and ‘the ultimate object of capitalist production is not commodities but social relations or forms of life’ (Hardt 2010, 142), he is subscribing to a view of contemporary capitalist production (shared by Žižek and Negri, as we see below) based on conceptions of ‘cognitive capitalism’, one of a family of diagnoses of contemporary capitalism cognate with ‘knowledge economy’, ‘information society’ etc., which claim that capitalism increasingly involves cultural rather than material production. In it, ‘the increasing centrality of the common on capitalist production – the production of ideas, affects, social relations and forms of life – are emerging as the conditions and weapons for a communist project’ (Hardt 2010, 143). Hardt also subscribes, again in common with Žižek and Negri, that such appropriation puts ‘[l]iving beings as fixed capital ...at the centre’ and involves ‘the production of forms of life [which is] becoming the basis of added value’ thanks to ‘human faculties, competences, knowledges, and affects – those acquired on the job but more importantly those accumulated outside work’ which ‘are directly productive of value’ (Hardt 2010, 141).

Slavoj Žižek stations himself farther to the left of the other new communists, though this turns out to be a largely rhetorical location. He endorses the need to revive the communist Idea because liberal democratic capitalism ‘contains antagonisms powerful enough to prevent its indefinite reproduction’. These antagonisms include the corporate invasion of the two commons indentified by Hardt and Negri as well as two more: our genetic heritage, which also needs to be protected against neoliberal privatization and that between the included and the ‘Excluded’. The last is particularly important because, Žižek argues, without the ‘Excluded’, ‘the global capitalist system’ can ‘survive its long term antagonism and simultaneously ... avoid the communist solution’ by reinventing ‘some kind of socialism – in the guise of communitarianism, populism, capitalism with Asian values, or whatever’ and so ‘only the reference to the “Excluded” justifies the term communism’ (Žižek 2010, 214). Žižek aligns the idea of the ‘Excluded’ with Badiou’s reference to the new proletarians, and proposes a radicalization of the concept of the proletariat ‘to an existential level well beyond Marx’s imagination’, well beyond ‘the classic image of proletarians having “nothing to lose but their chains”’ to one in which ‘we are in danger of losing everything’. However, he detracts from Badiou in insisting on the continuing importance of a politics focused on the state, even arguing for a reinstatement of the concept of a dictatorship of the proletariat in which ‘the State itself is radically transformed, relying on new forms of popular participation’ (Žižek 2010, 220). He also endorses a democratic conception of struggle, Žižek argues that whereas ‘till now, capitalism seemed inextricably linked with democracy’, ‘[n]ow ... the link ... has been broken’ (Žižek 2010, 221).

The reason lies in the emergence of ‘cognitive capitalism’ (Vercellone 2008) in which ‘exploitation in the classic Marxist sense is no longer possible – which is why it has to be enforced more and more by direct legal measures, i.e. by non-economic force’ (Žižek 2010, 224). In making this case, Žižek refers to an argument of Negri’s in which the latter interprets certain passages in the Grundrisse to argue that the increasing role of fixed capital in capitalist production, which reflects ‘the development of general social knowledge,’ leads to a situation in which the fixed capital becomes ‘man himself’ because the ‘productive power of labour’ is ‘itself the greatest productive power’ (Žižek 2010, 222). Once this happens, 

... the moment the key component of fixed capital is ‘man himself’, its ‘general social knowledge’, the very social foundation of capitalist exploitation is undermined, and the role of capital becomes purely parasitic; with today’s global interactive media, creative inventiveness is no longer individual, it is immediately collectivised, part of ‘common’, such that any attempt to privatise it through copyrighting become problematic – more and more literally, ‘property is theft’ here. (Žižek 2010, 222)

Žižek agrees with Negri when the latter says that ‘the wage epoch is over’ and that rather than ‘the confrontation between work and capital concerning wages’ we are witness to ‘the confrontation between the multitude and the state concerning the instauration of the citizen’s income’ (Žižek 2010, 222). Žižek notes Negri’s conclusion from this that the task is ‘not [to] abolish capital, but to compel it to recognise the common good, i.e. one remains within capitalism’ (Žižek 2010, 222, Emphasis added). Žižek, as is his style, also demurs a little, positioning his interlocutor, Negri, as the supplier of merely a ‘standard’ (dare we say Fordist?) ‘post-Hegelian matrix of the productive flux which is always in excess with regard to the totality which tries to subdue and control it’. Against this, Žižek claims to provide something altogether more enticing – post-Fordist, flexibly produced and custom-made, one presumes – a ‘parallax shift’ in which ‘we perceive the capitalist network itself as the true excess over the flow of the productive multitude’ (Žižek 2010, 223). However, this appears more an exercise in brand placement than any registration of serious scholarly or intellectual difference. For he has rejoined Negri by the next page in subscribing to Carlo Vercellone’s idea that contemporary capitalism is no longer about profit but rent.

The increasing role of the ‘general intellect’ results, for Žižek, not ‘as Marx seems to have expected, [in] the self-dissolution of capitalism, but the transformation of profit into rent on the privatized general intellect’ (Žižek 2010, 224-5). As the example of Bill Gates ‘who became the richest man on earth within a couple of decades by appropriating the rent received from allowing millions of intellectual workers to participate in that particular form of the “general intellect” that he privatizes and controls’, shows workers ‘are no longer separated from the objective conditions of their labour’ since they own their own computers, for instance, but ‘remain cut off from the social field of their work, for the “general intellect” – because the latter is mediated by private capital’ (Žižek 2010, 225). What is true of the ‘commons of culture’ is also true of the ‘commons of external nature’: contemporary high prices of oil are, according to Žižek, due to the ‘rent we pay the owners for this resource because of its scarcity and limited supply’ (Žižek 2010, 225). Žižek reads these changes as requiring an emphasis on the state and democratic politics and appears to part company with the other new communists. He argues that there is a

fundamental ‘contradiction’ of today’s ‘postmodern’ capitalism: while its logic is deregulatory, ‘anti-statal’, nomadic/deterritorializing, etc., its key tendency towards the ‘becoming-rent-of-profit’ signals the strengthening role of the State whose (not only) regulatory function is ever more omnipresent. Dynamic de-territorialization coexists with and relies on increasingly authoritarian interventions of the state and its legal and other apparatuses. What can be discerned at the horizon of our historical becoming is thus a society in which personal libertarianism and hedonism coexist with (and are sustained by) a complex web of regulatory state mechanisms. Far from disappearing, the State is today gaining in strength. (Žižek 2010, 224)

Though Žižek envisages a predominantly political fight against this rent-seeking predatory capitalism, its content belies this. In Žižek’s view, the world’s working class consists of three groups – those involved in intellectual planning and marketing, material production and the provision of material resources, i.e. intellectual labourers, the old manual working class and the outcastes. Unfortunately they are divided by their adherence to ‘enlightened hedonism and liberal multiculturalism, populist fundamentalism and more extreme singular forms’. Overcoming these divisions in a unity ‘is already their victory’ (Žižek 2010, 226).

The Proudhonism of the New Communists

Marx’s critique of Proudhon in The Poverty of Philosophy of 1847 and in scattered references throughout his later economic works reveals Proudhon’s ideas to be a compendium of the characteristic errors of vulgar political economy arising out of the fetishism of commodities (‘He wants to be the synthesis – he is a composite error.’ Marx 1847, 107). Unable, in particular, to differentiate between use value and value (or exchange value), he equated utility and value though they were in fact opposed (Marx 1847, 32), assumed that commodity production could be reconciled with ‘labour money’ (Marx 1947, 172-5 and Marx 1867/1977, 188-9) and took the direct exchangeability of all commodities for granted (Marx 1867/1977, 161). Proudhon’s proposals attempted to articulate small producers’ interests. However, given that the petty bourgeois have no consistent interests, since they are contradicted on the one hand by those of the capitalists and on the other by any potential socialism, they can only constitute wishful thinking on the part of the petty bourgeois. As Poulantzas was to point out,

The petty bourgeoisie has, in the long run, no autonomous class position of its own. This simply means that, in a capitalist social formation, there is only the bourgeois way and the proletarian way (the socialist way): there is no such thing as the ‘third way’, which various theories of the ‘middle class’ insist on. ... This means, among other things, that the petty bourgeoisie has nowhere ever been the politically dominant class. ... [T]he class positions taken by the petty bourgeoisie must necessarily be located in the balance of forces between the bourgeoisies and the working class and thus link up (by acting for or against) either with the class positions of the bourgeoisie or with those of the working class. ... [in the latter case] they do so even while they are still marked by petty bourgeois ideological features. (Poulantzas 1975, 297-8)

Below we see first how Marx criticised Proudhon for rejecting statism, in effect, any ‘general organization of labour in society’, because of a misunderstanding of the relationship between large scale capitalism and petty commodity production and go on to show that the new communists not only suffer from the same affliction but one made worse by their anti- communism. A critique of a number of new features of the new communists thinking and how it reflects their interests as a self-styled ‘creative class’ follows.

Divisions of Labour: Society and Factory

In their rejection of state and party, not only are the new communists simply preaching a new Third Way, even as they reject that of parliamentarist social democracy, they are, like Proudhon, refusing what Marx calls below, ‘a general organization of labour in society’. Instead, they affirm their faith in the market organization of society, and the order of property, private property, it presupposes. Marx exposed the logic of this position as follows:

The same bourgeois consciousness which celebrates the division of labour in the workshop, the livelong annexation of the worker to a partial operation, and his complete subjection to capital, as an organization of labour that increases its productive power, denounces with equal vigour every conscious attempt to control and regulate the process of production socially, as an inroad upon such sacred things as the rights of property, freedom and the self-determining ‘genius’ of the individual capitalist. It is very characteristic that the enthusiastic apologists of the factory system have nothing more damning to urge against a general organization of labour in society than that it would turn the whole of society into a factory. (Marx 1867/1977, 477)

In effect not only does the petty bourgeoisie fear proletarianization precisely because it knows, as only practioners can, what is involved in proletarian exploitation and oppression, but also because they can only think of socialism as the generalization of their current autonomy which rests on the radical heteronomy of others rather than as a socialised, collective, autonomy of all. Marx was to remark ironically in Capital how ‘[t]he sphere of circulation or commodity exchange ... is in fact the very Eden of the innate rights of man. It is the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham’ (Marx 1867/1977, 280). This fictional idea formed the basis of the ‘socialism’ of petty bourgeois ‘socialists’ like Proudhon: ‘Proudhon creates his ideal of justice, of “justice éternelle”, from the juridical relations that correspond to the production of commodities: he thereby proves, to the consolation of all good petty bourgeois, that the production of commodities is a form as eternal as justice’ (Marx 1867/1977, 178n). Since such utopias rest on a narrowly one-sided view of capitalist society, ignoring the extraction of surplus labour in production, their proponents necessarily fail to appreciate how capitalism, and the wage labour which is its necessary foundation, alone generalises commodity production and the market, and does so necessarily at the expense of a ‘dialectical inversion’ of the laws of commodity production:

Only where wage-labour is its basis does commodity production impose itself upon society as a whole; but it is also true that only there does it unfold all its hidden potentialities. To say that the intervention of wage labour adulterates commodity production is to say that commodity production must not develop if it is to remain unadulterated. To the extent that commodity production, in accordance with its own immanent laws, undergoes a further development into capitalist production, the property laws of commodity production must undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become the laws of capitalist appropriation. (Marx 1867/1977, 733-4)

Engels in his introduction to German edition of The Poverty of Philosophy put his finger on the contradictory political kernel of Proudhonism – its desire to abolish large scale industry and the proletariat which are the conditions of existence of petty commodity production.

And the petty bourgeois especially, whose honest labour – even if it is only that of his workmen and apprentices – is daily more and more depreciated in value by the competition of large-scale production and machinery, this small-scale producer especially must long for a society in which the exchange of products according to their labour value is at last a complete and invariable truth. In other words, he must long for a society in which a single law of commodity production prevails exclusively and in full, but in which the conditions are abolished in which it can prevail at all, viz., the other laws of commodity production and, later, of capitalist production. (Marx 1847, 12)

To this inability to understand that petty commodity production only exits on the basis of the generalization of commodity production which capitalism effects through large scale industry and wage labour, which formed the basis of Proudhon’s anti-statism, the new communists add their own political baggage, a product of later history.

The Withering State of Proletarian Dictatorship

When Badiou alleges that Marx’s account of the Paris Commune is ambiguous, marshals Engels’ elaboration on it to testify further to this alleged ambiguity and rests his case against the statism of Actually Existing Communism in the east and ‘capitalo-parliamentarism’ in the West on Marx and Engels’ writing on the Paris Commune, he pins on them a conception of the state they never had. This is the straightforward liberal and neoliberal conception of the state as the realm of coercion and the market as the realm of freedom. Not only does it overlook the mutual interdependence of the two in capitalist society but, much more seriously, allows the conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat to be opposed to that of the ‘withering away of the state’. But in what Marx and Engels meant by the state, the former was the necessary instrument of the latter. For the state was not the administrative apparatus dreaded by liberals and neoliberals but an instrument of class domination. In this sense Marx and Engels’ assessment of the Paris Commune as an exemplary dictatorship of the proletariat – ‘do you want to know what the dictatorship of the proletariat looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ (Engels 1891) – was anything but ambiguous:

Its [the Paris Commune’s] true secret was this. It was essentially a working-class government, the produce of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour. (Marx 1871/1974, 212)

In The Civil War in France, Marx records first the full extent of the force and fraud the counter-revolution headed by Thiers had mustered against the popular cause. It was what gave the Commune that character Marx and Engels would later recognise as the dictatorship of the proletariat, the necessary instrument of the ‘withering away’ of the state as class domination and its replacement by freely associated producers which is communism. ‘Armed Paris was the only serious obstacle in the way of the counter-revolutionary conspiracy’ (Marx 1871/174, 198). He then emphasised the scrupulously defensive character of the Commune’s fight against counter- revolution. In a few compressed paragraphs he traced the transformation of the feudal absolutist state into an instrument of capitalist class domination (Marx 1871/1974, 206-8) before going on to describe the measures through which the Commune, during its all-too-short life, began converting it into an instrument of workers’ power: ‘the suppression of the standing army, and the substitution for it of the armed people’; the merging executive and legislative power; the enforcement of accountability on the police; public service at workmen’s wages; education and science freed from state and Church influence and provided free; among others. Contrary to the fashionable portrayal of Marx as the ur-globalist through the repeated quotation of the same passages from The Communist Manifesto (for a fuller critique of this tendency see Desai forthcoming), Marx also saw the Commune as reorganising ‘that unity of great nations which, if originally brought about by political force, has now become a powerful coefficient of social production’ (Marx 1871/1974, 211) and doing so in a spirit of inter-nationalism.

Of course, ‘the old world writhed in convulsions of rage at the sight of the red flag, the symbol of the republic of labour, floating over the Hôtel de Ville’ (Marx 1871/1974, 214) and the Commune was brutally overpowered after a mere two months by the joint forces of Thiers and Bismarck,

And this unparalleled breach of the law of nations, even as understood by the old-world lawyers, instead of arousing the ‘civilized’ governments of Europe to declare the felonious Prussian government ... an outlaw amongst nations, only incites them to consider whether the few victims who escape the double cordon around Paris are not to be given up to the hangman at Versailles! (Marx 1871/1974, 231)

The Commune, the dictatorship of the proletariat was, Marx noted in the First Draft of the Civil War in France, ‘the reabsorption of state power by society’ (Marx 1871/1974, 250). It dispelled

the delusion as if administration and political governing were mysteries, transcendent functions only to be trusted to the hands of a trained caste – state parasites, richly paid sycophants and sinecurists, in the higher posts, absorbing the intelligence of the masses and turning them against themselves in the lower places of the hierarchy. (Marx 1871/1974, 251)

And the Commune embodied the consciousness that

the superseding of the economical conditions of the slavery of labour by the conditions of free and associated labour can only be the progressive work of time (that economical transformation), that they require not only a change of distribution, but a new organization of production, or rather the delivery (setting free) of the social forms of production in present organized labour (engendered by present industry), of the trammels of slavery, of their present class character and their harmonious national and international coordination. (Marx 1871/1974, 253). [Emphasis added]

It is such ‘general organization of labour in society’ Badiou and the new communists would reject. They are, of course, free to do so. What they are not free to do is assert that any ‘ambiguity’ in Marx’s or Engels’ accounts warrants it. Nor are they free to assert that Marx or Engels criticised any ‘statist incapacities’ of the Commune – certainly not in The Civil War in France, or its first draft, or yet Engels’ 1891 Introduction.

It was not out of any love for centralization or authority but because it was historically necessary in a society whose productive capacity had come to rest on large scale production that Marx and Engels so resolutely opposed anarchist tendencies and so scathingly criticised petty bourgeois fantasies about doing away with any overall coordination of the economy, fantasies that also rested, in effect, on accepting market coordination. But the reality that capitalism, necessarily large scale and based on wage labour alone generalised market relations and commodity production was bound to undermine the implementation of such fantasies. Engels’ remarks on the fate of the Proudhonists and the Blanquists in his 1891 Introduction highlight this contradiction. Proudhonists, despite their ‘positive hatred’ for association, found that ‘large scale industry had so much ceased to be an exceptional case that by far the most important decrees of the Commune instituted an organization of large scale industry and even of manufacture which was not based only on the association of workers in each factory, but also aimed at combining all these associations into one great union; in short an organization which, as Marx quite rightly says in The Civil War, must necessarily have led in the end to Communism, that is to say, the direct antithesis of the Proudhon doctrine’. For their part, the centralizing and conspiratorial Blanquists, a majority in the Commune, found themselves party to the fall of centralized and oppressive state power (Engels 1891). One may note in concluding this part that while Žižek explicitly supports the importance of both party and state, in practice the unity of his three components of the working class appears to be the horizon of his conception of politics.

Everybody’s Property versus Common Property

The new communists’ incantation of Marx and Communism may signify a genuine desire to make their understanding of capitalism compatible with Marx’s powerful critique, but in the case of all the main points on which they seek Marx’s authority, they only end up proving that incantation never did require understanding. Take their conception of that centrepiece of their project, the commons. As a very early critique (Ciriacy-Wantrup and Bishop 1975) of the Garret Hardin’s (1968) understanding of ‘the commons’, which appears to underlie the new communists’ vision of communism, pointed out, the commons were never ‘everybody’s property’. Rather the commons were defined by complex institutional arrangements which provided rights to some sets of users and explicitly excluded others. This implies two things. First, the earth, culture and language or even our genetic inheritance are only open to corporate predation to the extent that they are not protected by regimes of property rights, or when the regimes which do protect them are too weak. Second, protecting them requires creating rules of access and use which have to be made and enforced by states. While under feudalism, with its dispersal of political power, such regimes were necessarily local, they are not under modern capitalist conditions and are unlikely to be at least in early socialist or communist ones. There is no alternative to state enforcement.

But there is a question of whose interests such arrangements and their enforcement will protect. Given Marx’s complex chronicling of the use of political power to usurp common property and replace the rules governing them by private property (Marx 1867/1977, 873-941), and his account of the manner in which the Paris Commune sought to transform the state into an instrument of workers power, including extending collective ownership over the means of production discussed above, he would have understood this point which appears to have evaded our new communists entirely.

Indeed, contrary to Hardt, Marx never spoke of communism as the abolition of property per se, only of private property (Marx 1975, 348). When he quoted Marx saying that ‘Private Property has made us so stupid that an object is only ours when we have it’, Hardt did not tell us that Marx continued thus: ‘when it exists for us as capital or when we directly possess, eat, drink, wear, inhabit it, etc., in short when we use it’. Marx was, therefore, criticising private property, and capitalist private property, not property as such. As he saw it, under communism capitalist private property would be replaced with forms of collective property appropriate to the structures of production, those inherited from capitalism and those created anew. The abolition of property as such which Hardt and Negri appear to desire, would only lead to the sort of free-for-all that Hardin, not to mention Hobbes, feared, a sort of state of nature in which the powerful would be able to appropriate at the expense of the weak. No amount of poetry about sensuous human appropriation of the world can hide the fact that the new communists of the commons not only misunderstand their central category – the commons – but also Marx’s position on it, even as they seek to licence so much of their discourse through it. Marx was not ‘searching’ for any ‘common’ Hardt would recognise. Marx’s understanding of property, evinced not least in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts to which Hardt refers, was too grounded, not to mention historically sophisticated, to make that mistake.

Vampire capitalism or zombie workers

Another critical and, prima facie, disingenuous, misunderstanding concerns the new communists’ account of capitalism and the place of their own ‘creative class’ in it. Negri and Žižek attempt to found Carlo Vercellone’s trendy account of ‘cognitive capitalism’ (see e.g. Vercellone 2008; for a critique see Camfield 2007) in Marx’s own work. Correctly quoting Negri who was, in turn, quoting Marx from the Grundrisse on how the development of fixed capital expresses the extent to which ‘social knowledge has become a direct force of production’ (Marx 1973, 706), Žižek (2010, 222) goes on to claim, incorrectly, that

With the development of general social knowledge, the ‘productive power of labour’ is thus ‘itself the greatest productive power. From the standpoint of the direct production process it can be regarded as the production of fixed capital. This fixed capital is man himself’.

Marx certainly speaks of social knowledge becoming a direct force of production in many places. However, the matter of the worker, intellectual or otherwise, becoming ‘fixed capital’ is another matter altogether. For those conversant with Capital, it is simply inconceivable that Marx could have said such a thing. He distinguished clearly between the worker as living labour in contrast to constant (fixed and circulating) capital as dead labour, between the worker who adds value and the capital which only transfers all or part of its value (depending on whether it is used up entirely or only partially in a given production process). A closer look at the passages in question, and at the Grundrisse where they occur, shows that Marx does not, in fact, give up on this distinction, the keystone of his theory of value. Martin Nicolaus points out in his foreword to the Grundrisse that in this work Marx’s terminology, particularly relating to value, and money, ‘is not quite untangled from and clear of the Ricardian lexicon’. This means that these questions are best studied from works Marx prepared for publication after the Grundrisse’ (Nicolaus 1973, 16–17). But on the particular point at issue, Žižek and Negri’s argument cannot even be given the benefit of any doubts this might create. The phrase ‘this fixed capital being man himself’ occurs in a critique of the bourgeois conception of economy or saving which Marx contrasts with ‘real economy.’ By that he means how economy or saving should be viewed, and would be, in a communist society: as the saving of labour time, the development of the human capacity to produce. Whereas in capitalist society such saving takes the form of the accumulation of fixed capital, in a socialist society it would take the form of the development of human capacities. He adds that in a communist society, the development of human capacities, this sort of ‘saving,’ would be also inseparable from the human capacity to consume, completely upending the everyday bourgeois conception of saving as abstinence from consumption (Marx 1973, 711–12). It is true that in this passage Marx moves between using categories that apply to capitalist society alone, which form the focus of his discussion in Capital, and those that emerge from the conception of ‘production in general’ which abstracts the common features of all social forms of production (Marx 1973, 85) and which occur in Capital only briefly, as for instance in the profound ruminations on labour and its history which serve to point up the specificity, not to mention absurdity and monstrosity, of capitalist conditions and categories (Marx 1867/1977, 283–92). But he sets out the distinction between these two sets of categories at the outset of the Grundrisse. While there are elements common to all forms of production, precisely those elements

. . .which are not general and common, must be separated out from the determinations valid for production as such, so that in their unity – which arises already fromt he identity of the subject, humanity, and of the object, nature – their essential difference is not forgotten. The whole profundity of those modern economists who demonstrate the eternity and harmoniousness of the existing social relations lies in this forgetting. For example, no production is possible without an instrument of production, even if this instrument is only the hand. No production without stored-up, past labour, even if it is only the facility gathered together and concentrated in the hand of the savage by repeated practice. Capital is, among other things, also an instrument of production, also objectified, past labour. Therefore capital is a general, eternal relation of nature; that is if I leave out just the specific quality which alone makes ‘instrument of production’ and ‘stored-up labour’ into capital (Marx 1973, 85–6; emphasis added).

So not only are we clear that for Marx capital, fixed or otherwise, can occur only under capitalist conditions but also that it is precisely a characteristic of ‘modern economists’ and their apologia for capital that they confound the difference between stored-up past labour and capital. Žižek and Negri are welcome to agree with the modern economists, just not welcome to take Marx’s authority for doing so.

The weight of the distinction Marx makes repeatedly in Capital between the worker as living, value producing and value-transferring labour in contrast to constant (fixed and circulating) capital as dead labour simply crushes any attempt to argue that workers are, under any capitalist circumstances, ‘fixed capital’. Marx often and appropriately spoke of capital as a vampire, dead labour subsisting and growing by extracting the blood, the labour, of living workers, but the conversion of workers under capitalism into another category of the ‘undead’ deserves a place in the annals of solecism. The knowledge producer cannot be fixed capital for two further reasons. On the one hand knowledge production is unproductive labour. That is to say, that while it is very useful, and thus productive of piles of use values, it is unproductive of value or surplus value. And those knowledge workers who resent this insinuation, as it were, simply fail to understand, or do not know, that according to Marx the production of value is the basis only of the extraction of surplus value and that uniquely capitalist form of surplus labour, profit. By contrast, communism would be a system for the production of use values exclusively. If one understood this there would be no ground to disdain unproductive labour or resent being called an unproductive worker. Secondly, Žižek and Negri also appear to be victims of the neoclassical and, in Marx’s time, vulgar economic, illusion that capital is ‘productive’, an illusion that conveniently justifies profit which is, according to Marx, rooted in the extraction of surplus value, and therefore exploitation. Marx ridicules the ‘vulgar economists’ who speak of the ‘productivity of capital’ (e.g. Marx 1867/1977, 426). Thus, while Žižek and Negri see intellectual workers as fixed capital, Marx would never make such a conflation. Therefore, whatever the merit of the following claim, that ‘since capital organizes its exploitation by appearing as “fixed capital” against living labour, the moment the key component of fixed capital is “man himself”, its “general social knowledge”, the very social foundation of capitalist exploitation is undermined, and the role of capital becomes purely parasitic’ (Žižek 2010, 222), it has no foundation in Marx.

The Value of Knowledge and the Knowledge of Value

Indeed, it is only their general ignorance of Marx’s critique of political economy, not to mention its hopeless conflation with the categories of bourgeois political economy which permits the new communists to announce the demise of some such as ‘profit’ and the emergence of other such as ‘profit-as-becoming-rent’. Not only do the new communists rely on questionable ideas about the emergence of some sort of knowledge/information/cognitive capitalism (Huws 1999), nothing could be farther from the truth than that ‘cognitive capitalism’, ‘information society’ and ‘knowledge economy’ and their attendant production processes are qualitatively different from the commodity production analysed by Marx. As Marx pointed out, all labour processes involve knowledge (Marx 1867/1977, 284) and in this the so-called information commodities are no different except in degree. All such knowledge is social and is embodied in the collective worker and this, while making the working class as a whole more productive, in part by embodying more knowledge in some parts of it than others, by no means turns it, or any part of it, into fixed capital. Knowledge does not create value. Though it may generate ever greater heaps of use values and make labour more productive, it is not itself an intermediate good. The value of any intermediate good is only transferred to the product in being destroyed in the intermediate form and knowledge which is embodied in the collective worker is never destroyed but can be used repeatedly and for many different purposes. Nor does knowledge have value – though it may have incomparable use value, it does not have value because it is the product of a long human history and not of capitalist production: as Marx said, things are useful in many ways and ‘The discovery of these ways and hence of the manifold uses of things is the work of history’ (Marx 1867/977, 126). Just as, for Marx, nature has use value but no value, so ‘Science, generally speaking, costs the capitalist nothing, a fact that by no means prevents him from exploiting it’ (Marx 1867/1977, 508n).

Even today, the further development of knowledge takes place within systems – whether public schools or universities, not to mention extra-institutional locations – which produce only use values. As Fred Block (2008) has recently recorded, this is especially true of the avowedly free market US in the past several decades where the attempt to create property rights over certain elements of knowledge has rested, nevertheless, on a ‘hidden developmental state’. Thus, there has been no ‘privatization of the general intellect itself’ (Žižek 2010, 224) and when Žižek claims that Marx overlooked it he is engaging in a double effrontery: falsely attributing the idea of the worker turned into fixed capital to Marx and then accusing him of not anticipating the alleged ‘privatization of the general intellect’.

Rent Versus Profit?

To speak of profit being replaced by rent is simply absurd. As Marx and the classical political economy of his time clearly saw, rent is, like interest, an unearned deduction from profit and can never exist independently of, let alone replace, the latter in a commodity producing society. The idea could only have occurred to those unfamiliar with Marx’s economic analysis: his labour theory of value which clearly states that the value of things is determined by the socially necessary labour embodied in it; his clear recognition that while things which do not have value can still have a price, payment of which represents deductions from wages and profits; his analysis of productive and unproductive labour; and his analysis of the distribution of profit to the owners of land and money capital. The general unfamiliarity with these ideas is licensed by Marxist economists long inured to adapting Marx’s critique of political economy to neoclassical or marginalist economics even though it differed on the central idea of value, rejecting classical political economy’s conception of objective value in favor of a subjective idea of value, based on utility and individual preferences (Clarke, 1991; Desai 2010). This ‘Marxism without Marx’, as Freeman (2010) calls it, habituates our new communists to think in neoclassical or vulgar economic terms such as factor endowments and incomes in which ‘land’ and ‘capital’, not to mention ‘knowledge’, are regarded as productive of value.

As for the idea that the principal source of surplus in contemporary society is not profit extracted from workers but rent from the privatization of the ‘general intellect’ of the ‘creative class’, one can only admire the size of the creative class’s collective ego which assumes that the only ‘value’ these commodities embody is that of ‘millions of intellectual workers’ who are ‘no longer separated from the objective conditions of their labour since they own their own computers’ (Žižek 2010, 225). Quite apart from there being a big question whether the ‘general intellect’ has been privatized at all (Archibugi and Filipetti 2010), there is the small matter of the surplus value, and consequently profit, extracted from labour of those who produce the material objects which the products of ‘cognitive capitalism’ still are, not to mention those on which the ‘creative class’ must still subsist.

The Democracy of Profit and the Authoritarianism of Rent?

Žižek’s associated argument that the turn towards authoritarianism is rooted in this transition from profit to rent is independently problematic. The idea that ‘till now, capitalism seemed inextricably linked with democracy’ betrays such a profoundly a-historical and unmarxist understanding as to take one’s breath away. Capitalism’s relationship to liberal democracy was always profoundly conflicted. While the past thirty years of neoliberalism – with its rising inequality, attacks on unions, denaturing of democracy by money and the media and even the very idea of democracy – may have made this relationship even more antagonistic, it was hardly idyllic before that. That liberal democracy accompanied capitalism should surely be considered a tautology: it was hardly going to accompany feudalism. But it took generations of workers’, women’s, minorities and colonial peoples’ struggles to realise universal suffrage and democratise the liberal order of capitalist private property in country after country (a very partial and subjective list of key works on these themes: Therborn 1977; Cammack 1997; Eley 2002; MacPherson 1979; Leys 1999; Mair 2006). This should be familiar to any leftist. Sadly, it is not.

The New Communists and Marxism without Marx

Perry Anderson remarked long ago that Western Marxism, a product of defeat, ‘inverted the trajectory of Marx’s own development....Where the founder of historical materialism moved progressively from philosophy to politics and then economics, as the central terrain of this thought, the successors of the tradition that emerged after 1920 increasingly turned back from economics and politics to philosophy’, that they ‘concentrate[d] overwhelmingly on the study of superstructures’ and left ‘the central economic and political realities that have dominated world history’ out of account (Anderson 1976, 52, 75, 103). However, even this judgement seems on reflection too lenient. For Marx’s philosophy could hardly be separated from his economic and political analyses and not surprisingly the chief deficiencies of today’s new communist philosophers lie precisely in their economic and political analyses and their misapprehensions of the very Marxist ideas they wish to rely on. One may also note the historical incongruity of a conference of avowedly left intellectuals in the midst of the greatest economic crisis of capitalism for 70 years not only devoid of economic analysis but seeking to revive communism as an ‘Idea’, rather than attempting, through economic and political analyses, to discern ‘the elements of the new society with which the old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant’ indeed, worse, of discerning only themselves – the ‘creative class’ as fixed capital (!).

It is this class which now becomes so central to capital that its income now is no longer profit from the extraction of surplus labour but rent from the ‘privatization of the general intellect’, namely themselves. Even after making their own labour the fount of all value in contemporary society, their emancipatory vision can aspire to no more than the freedom of this class to acquire those ‘human faculties, competences, knowledges, and affects – those acquired on the job but more importantly those accumulated outside work’ which ‘are directly productive of value’ (Hardt 2010, 141) through a liberation of the conditions of their social reproduction from neoliberal privatization. This is the stunted utopia of the class that stands to ‘lose everything’. As for those who do indeed have nothing to lose, corralled into the categories of ‘new proletarians’ and the ‘Excluded’, they turn out to be little more than a phantom class, a product of a radicalization of the concept of the proletariat ‘to an existential level well beyond Marx’s imagination’.

Indeed, for all its confusions, 19th century Proudhonism cuts a rather more radical figure than its 21st century epigones. Whereas Proudhonism represented the independent commodity production, the new communists represent a ‘creative class’ whose leading edge are employees of big capital. Whereas Proudhonism proclaimed the abolition of capital, albeit equating it with big capital and the evil of wage labour, as their goal, the new communists appear at best confused and at worst disingenuous when they take the name of a movement which aimed at the revolutionary transformation of capitalism but aimed explicitly at its preservation. At best the new communists seek to prevent the abolition of their own conditions of labour through neoliberal privatization, though here too they are inconsistent, saying on the one hand that ‘any attempt to privatize [intellect] becomes problematic’ thanks to its social character and, on the other, launching their philippics against the possibility. In fact, they need not have bothered. In reality the intellectual property rights regime which the West and particularly the United States have attempted to impose on the world ‘has not and could not change the nature of knowledge and the ways in which this can be transferred [or not] among economic agents’ (Archibugi and Filipetti 2010, 146).

The new communism of the commons is, moreover, unlikely to have emancipatory consequences for the vast masses whose name they conveniently invoke. Their account of ‘cognitive capitalism’ not only does not criticise but in fact rests on the division of intellectual and manual labour whose consequences not only Marx but also Smith criticised so powerfully. Indeed, so far it is also unclear how the interests of the poor might be affected if this relatively privileged class seeks, NIMBY-style, to protect nature, which it considers ‘the inheritance of humanity as a whole’, conveniently ignoring not only the division of humanity into nations but its division into rich and poor nations and their own location in the former, from ‘corporate control’, while explicitly rejecting any state role in doing so. Such anti-statism forgets the reality of powerful state protections in the first world and would leave third world populations defenceless against the predations of foreign and domestic capital (for another critique of this see Desai 2009). Truly the new communists treat Marxist and communist ideas as a grab-bag of accessories with which to trick out their absurd imaginings as communism.

Use Values, the State and Revolution

In conclusion, I would like to reflect on three themes: Why produce value? What’s exactly wrong with ‘statism’? What might revolution look like?

The first point is easily dealt with: the flawed idea that the labour of the creative class has become ‘value’ rests on an all-too-common illusion that the production of value in capitalism was, according to Marx, a good thing. While he necessarily focused on it in his critique of the logic of capital, the reality is that communism would, in Marxist terms, require the cessation of the production of value and a vast expansion of the production of use-values and the welfare state, the great gain of the western working class and nothing if not the result of parliamentary and state-focused politics, and the mitigation of oppression it represents is, precisely, an expansion of the production of use values. That our new communists do not understand this is the result of a problem they share with the Proudhonism of the 19th century: an inability to distinguish between value and use value. The expansion of all means of producing use values – whether home/autonomous production or through common/state production would, in any transition from capitalism, be part of a broader strategy of reducing the production of value and increasing the production of use-values.

This brings us to our second point: just as the new communists conflate use values and exchange values, so they conflate regulation and the state. As I have already pointed out, deluded individualism of the new petty bourgeois concept of itself as a creative class leads them to defer and deny any possibility of ‘a general organization of labour in society’ and in this it is of little consequence that emancipation for most will involve precisely such a general organization of labour in society. For Marx and Engels, as we saw above, the state was above all an instrument of class domination. It is this stateness of the state that would wither away as soon as there was no need for class domination. By the same token, the need to administer the complex division of labour – in factories and in society – would remain at least in the transition period and, though later democratic decisions in favour of decentralization may diminish central authority, it is unlikely to be entirely eliminated.

While as one side of the division between mental and manual labour the conditions of work of the ‘creative class’ who the new communists seem primarily to represent might resemble small scale workplaces, their very output enables ever more large scale and complex forms of divisions of labour within and between firms. And this is where most people work, or hope to work, and this productive apparatus would still have to be administered, and transformed. But the organization – the self-organization of producers – would no longer be a state in so far as there was no class (or gender or other, Marx and Engels would hardly have disagreed) domination and any revolution would have to be immediately consolidated by a dictatorship of the proletariat in so far as there was counter-revolutionary activity.

Finally, we come to revolution. Revolutionary politics is widely and rightly contrasted with reformism, the belief that capitalism’s problems are limited and can be resolved without questioning its fundamental basis in private property in the means of production, is not the same as reforms. The latter may or may not be part of fundamental critiques of capitalism (or patriarchy, racism or imperialism) but that would not, and historically has not, prevented a wide range of political perspectives and forces from cooperating in them. Moreover, what makes a  demand a reform or revolutionary depends on the historical conjuncture. A modest demand for, say, cheap bread, might turn out to be revolutionary if the ruling order was unable or unwilling to fulfill it and the political energy and organization existed behind it to inspire people to believe that if it is not going to be fulfilled it was time for people to remove the ruling order and fulfill it for themselves, and enable them to do so. Nor is the achievement of reforms in itself to be disdained. The capitalist class opposes reforms for good reason: they strengthen the capacity and will of working classes to pursue more ambitious goals. Kalecki (1943) had identified much the same logic in his analysis of the political implication of full employment – it was because full employment as a reform would have this effect that he recognized that it would be politically difficult for the bourgeoisie to accept. How reforms and revolution can be linked dialectically (Patnaik 2009b) was illustrated in the case of Sweden where a long history of working class gains led, at its culmination, in ‘reforms’ which entailed the gradual transfer of the ownership of the means of production to workers (Korpi, 1983), though it failed thanks to a capitalist counter- offensive.

This complex relationship between reform and revolution is especially important to understand because no one, not even the citizens of the most advanced capitalist country, lives in a ‘pure’ capitalism. Actually existing capitalism everywhere necessarily (and not least because they are not abstract, universal capitalisms, no matter how universalizing the operation of the law of value, but national ones) rely on a number of political, social, and cultural structures and practices – both traditional and modern. While some of these serve to intensify oppression and exploitation, and reforms would ease but not eliminate them, others are precisely the result of reforms. They furnish the second aspect of Karl Polanyi’s (1944/1985) ‘double movement’ – the movement of social protection against the incursion of capitalism or what he called ‘market society’. These measures constitute, especially in the advanced capitalist world, a dense network of structures and practices – from city zoning restrictions to national regulatory and welfare structures – that modify the dynamics of capitalism quite substantially (Elson, 1988, 2000). Indeed, as critical legal scholars are reminding us, even in the most highly developed capitalist states, and even after three decades of neoliberalism, ‘the public-private, state-market dichotomies and the notions of “natural”, market-based laws of distribution which underlie much contemporary social, economic and legal analyses’ remain highly questionable. The ‘[d]istribution of the social product’ is ‘a phenomenon shaped by law’ and that ‘choice of law and policy remains pervasive’ (Ireland 2003). Making these legal and policy choices, rather than assuming they do not exist as the ‘myth of deregulation’ encourages us to do as much as the new communist mantra of a politics distanced from states and even democracies, is seamless with what Elson calls ‘socializing the market’, in effect expanding non-capitalist production of use values in ways that favor working people and strengthen their organizations while limiting the prerogatives of capital and private property. All these are reforms worthy of achievement in their own right.

Their pursuit would be a more concrete form of revolutionary politics than the, in effect, magical conception of the new communists who cannot tell us how exactly the ‘instauration of the citizen’s income’ is to be achieved through a mere unity of the working classes, and apart from a politics focused on the state. If undertaken with sufficient organization, seriousness of purpose and political will to take on the inevitable opposition to them, there is no telling at what point determined struggles to extend the sphere of common services, use value production and reform in favour of working people will involve the replacement of the capitalist ruling classes and their order. The problem will certainly not be the reforms themselves, nor will it be engagement with parliamentary politics. It need not be, and is not, all ‘capitalo-parliamentarism’, depressing though recent decades have been on this front. The ‘parliamentary destiny’ of the left is not only to be lamented. The decisive factor will be how ambitious we are in conceiving the reforms, how active we are in organizing for them, how capable we are of achieving them and how seriously we mean to achieve them. As a new cycle of protest begins around the world – from Cairo to Madison, clearly showing that the citizens of the former are as little subject to ‘populist fundamentalism’ as those of the latter are to ‘enlightened hedonism or liberal multiculturalism’ – it is perhaps time to treat the ‘legacy of May ’68’ less reverentially and reach further back to the real legacy of the Spring of 1871: the first embodiment of popular power.

#Radhika Desai #alain badiou #hardt and negri #Communism #Proudhon

[valis-prochazka-blog]

Political Report on Chapter One of The Manifesto of The Communist Party by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848)

The Bourgeois and Proletarians.

Chapter One gives an explanation that serves to clarify the Materialist Conception of History, stating that "The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles."

Since antiquity, social relations to the means of production have developed in the form of an oppressed majority, which is exploited by an oppressive and privileged minority. Examples given are those of early slave societies, the social relations in ancient Rome, medieval feudal relations, and the early flowering of the bourgeois class from within the framework of medieval feudal society, demonstrating that during each historical epoch, these social antagonisms either bring about a revolutionary restructuring of society, or both sides are mutually wiped out and defeated.

We see that, although the ascension of the bourgeoisie is in itself a revolutionary ascension, abolishing the social dominance of feudal nobility during a long historical epoch of revolutionary conflict, the bourgeoisie does not do away with social division, hierarchy and a system of classes, but instead introduces new systems of class, new types of oppression, bringing about new forms of struggle. It is shown that the bourgeoisie has simplified class antagonisms, splitting society into two great hostile camps: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

We are shown that the bourgeoisie originates as a social class from within serfdom. These are the burghers, a political, property-owning, administrative class, who dwelled within medieval towns. From this emerging social class we see the beginnings of the bourgeoisie. This new epoch sees the exploration and colonial development of the New World (and the trafficking of human slaves). The new system of markets starts to expand rapidly, leading to the demise of the guild societies and the global expansion of industry. We see that, through the division of labor, political and economic power is centralized into the hands of the bourgeoisie.

The bourgeoisie has developed politically over long historical phases and cycles, seeing continual revolutionary eruptions, in constant conflict with the lingering feudal lords and monarchies, until the bourgeoisie itself finally seized control of the State, awarding itself social primacy over all aspects of social life and social relations to the means of production.

It is demonstrated that the bourgeoisie, through sequences of social revolution, has destroyed antique social relations such as spiritual faith, and the acquiescence of common people to their leaders. These relations are replaced by simple self-interest in the form of cash payment. The bourgeoisie transforms all professions into wage labor.

The bourgeoisie must constantly revolutionize industry in order to survive, and thus it constantly revolutionizes social relations to production. There is never equilibrium under the rule of capital. Life is always precarious. Human beings, moved on currents by constant change in their material conditions, are slapped awake into a state of conscious awareness of their material conditions. Abstract ideals such as national identity are shattered by the realization that capitalism is a global power structure. Wealth is accumulated, and power is concentrated into the hands of an ever smaller minority.  

The process of the ascension of the bourgeoisie is built on the contradicting restraint that it subsists on the exploitation of a vast and powerful opposing class - the proletariat. The globalization of the rule of the bourgeoisie assures the development of the largest productive forces seen in any previous society in history. The bourgeoisie has created such a massive system of production and exchange that it can do little to control the cycles of crises inherent to capitalism. The development of capitalist relations of exchange and production which destroyed feudalism have brought into being the means to destroy capitalism. The proletarians are defined in that they must sell their labor power for a wage, human beings turned into commodities, who are affected in direct proportion to the bourgeoisie by cycles of crises and fluctuations in the market.

Proletarians, because of division of labor and constant technical development of the instruments of production, are forced to do simplified tasks and find themselves alienated from their work, each other, and their sense of who they are. The simplification of their work restricts how much money they can make. The more unpalatable and monotonous the job is, the lower the wage. Small business is replaced by massive, centralized industry. The constant shift of social relations to the means of production sees a continuous proletarianization of the middle classes. Masses of workers first battle competitively with each other, then in a blind rage they turn their destructive power towards the means of production, then they become conscious of the real source of their misery and exploitation - the bourgeoisie. Thus begins a new change from one historical epoch to the next, which will take place through a series of protracted conflicts. The bourgeoisie finds itself in constant conflict with the productive forces it exploits. The proletariat will win a battle here, lose a war there, but will gradually develop conscious unity and organize itself as a class. The continual fight against the ruling classes will help the proletariat become stronger as a class. The lumpenproletariat, the criminal class, are a socially de-classed layer of the proletariat with a tendency to act in the interests of the bourgeoisie.

Unlike preceding classes who became socially dominant by forcing society to adapt to their means of appropriation, the proletariat cannot benefit itself by its own means of appropriation, because the proletariat owns nothing and has no political power, and has not built itself on the exploitation of others. It can only benefit itself by abolishing the previous means of appropriation. Each previous class raised itself up in its own social framework, but the proletarian sinks lower in society until he becomes a pauper. The bourgeoisie shows itself to be unfit to rule society, and the proletariat has no recourse but to abolish the bourgeoisie. The continued dominance of the bourgeoisie depends on the accumulation of capital, which precludes the exploitation of wage labor. Wage labor requires competition between workers. The bourgeoisie promotes the advance of industry, and thus involuntarily creates the class force, the proletariat,  which will bring about the end of bourgeoisie itself.        

Valis Prochazka (2019)

#marxist theory #revolutionary marxism #anti capitalism #class struggle #historical materialism

[the-merricatherine]

OPEN LETTER TO THE WHITE LEFT IN THE U.S.

[This letter by the Black Liberation Army, the revolutionary cadre Assata Shakur once belonged to, expresses the concern and discontent with the White Left and their ability to organize functionally against Imperialism and white supremacy.]

OPEN LETTER TO THE WHITE LEFT IN THE U.S.

The White Left in the U.S, is bankrupt;. This comes as news only to those in the White Left who absurdly believe otherwise, or who somehow confuse their sincerity with revolutionary politics. The White Left (New and Old) has become a necessary adjunct to the entire process of White bourgeois socialization in the U.S. It can be honestly said that the Leftist parties and associations of theU.S. are as necessary to the perpetuation of racism and White class domination as the middle class institutions of the status quo.

In the U.S., the White Left in general and the large communist and socialist parties in particular have long since relinquished any revolutionary claim hysterically directed at them by the reactionary, major political parties of the status quo. No longer does the White Left support the ultimate cause of the working class and its historical revolutionary role. Instead, the White Left subsumes its hunger for White bourgeois legitimacy behind marxist rhetoric and intellectual lip masturbation. The White Left and its major organizations support only "safe," tame, reformist struggles,labelling all who would go further in developing revolutionary contradictions as "adventurists."

The racist character of the White Left is concealed behind a progressive pretense only one step- removed from White bourgeois liberalism. Seldom, if ever, does the White Left support the right of Black people to national self-determination, and their right to organize an armed capacity to resist the aggression of the European Amerikan Capitalist State. Instead, the White Left supports individual cases of perceived "racism," "injustice," or "sexism,"therein paying their obligatory dues. We are counselled that Black peoples' struggle must await conscious development of the Whiteworking class, and even further: that Black Nationalist divides the U.S. working class,movement. The implication of this line is clear: "N**gers need White folks' approval " in order to proceed along their own historical road, begun with the introduction of the first African slaves into colonial america. The historical continuum of Blacks and Whites in the U.S. in conveniently butchered to conform with contemporary White left cowardice and racism,effectively absolving them of revolutionary responsibility during the present epoch.

The socialist and communist intellectual Black bourgeoisie are no better than their White counterparts, especially when these blacks are members of the bourgeois white leftist parties. These slick punks of the left view with contempt and fear all political Black activists that do not conveniently fit into the mass line of their respective organizations, organizations dominated by political gradualism, opportunism, and "time is not rightism." These Blacks wax very intellectual in their contempt for the extremism of the Black Nationalist left. How dare a lower class Black show more dedication to an ideal than they — by putting their lives on the line for their beliefs? The urgency felt by revolutionary Blacks Nationalists under the jackboot of the repressive capitalist state, while a catalyst for revolutionary action for some, is a reason for cowardice in others who do not share the same sense of urgency.The White Left does not share our sense of urgency because they do not share our reality and perceive the historical destiny of Blacks as identical to their own, instead of as related. Such false notions would be quickly dispelled with a materialist analysis of american history.

Yet the bankruptcy of the White Left in the U.S. is not unique to these shores. Nor does it only apply to Black/White relationships of the Left. It (White Left bankruptcy) is a symptom of the socio-economic development in the capitalist West, where the power and control of capital have looted the western communist parties of their revolutionary vitality by effectively arresting the self-identity of the industrial working classes.

Consequently, the bankruptcy fo the White Left has internal implications and affects the White Left's relationship to itself and to the very working classes they would lead. This contradiction is manifested in the position of most western communist parties to the younger, more militant european "New Left" groupings. The concept^ of euro-communism is its most putrid feature. Almost a hundred years ago, Marx asserted: a working class "at rest" has no identity. He did not mean objectively it was not a working class, but that subjectively, revolutionary consciousness for itself as a revolutionary class for itself was precluded without active struggle against its class enemy. Because the communist parties of Western Europe and in most Latin American countries view bourgeois legitimacy as primary instead of secondary, these parties actively collaborated with the forces of reaction and capital.. They do so in order to secure a legitimacy that only the entrenched bourgeoisie and capita-list can bestow, for even the most revisionist communist must agree that capitalism is a dictatorship of the capitalist class,regardless of the political organization such a dictatorship may assume. Accordingly, a communist party unwilling to push the contradictions of working class struggle beyond the legality of bourgeois reformism and unionism will itself be determined by that reformism, Hence, the working class such a party would pretend to lead will be led down the path of its natural class enemy. Chile is a case in point of such folly.

When it comes to colonialism, international and domestic,the bankruptcy of the left is just as evident. In each ex-colonial european western capitalist nation, the traditional White left has acted as a moderating voice against the colonial policies of their bourgeoisie. This, while good in itself, masks the class collaborationist nature of the White European Left. Never did the European left ascend to the principled level of unconditional revolutionary support for the national liberation movements themselves. Why?Was it because in each ex-colonial, capitalist nation the White left still identified with the narrow, racial and national interests of their own country, and hence, with the interests of their own^national bourgeoisie? Or was it because identification with, and full support of, Third World liberation movements would erode white left "legitimacy" at home? apparently the answer is both class-national collaboration and political expediency. So much for theories of unity between international working classes, especially when they apply to under-developed peoples of color-with little or no modern working class to speak of.

It should come as no surprise then, that the White left in modern western nations is inhibited by their own urge for bourgeois legitimacy, by their own cultural racism, and by the very process of western, working class co optation. The sum of these parts add up to the revolutionary bankruptcy of the traditional White left in the modern capitalist nations.

Rather than grasp this concept and the revolutionary obligations that flow from it, the White left and white communists fall into the pits of over-intellectualism and endless debate over who has the locks on the ultimate truth -- who retains the undistilled pure ideology of marxism. Subjectively, most White leftists do not want to deal with the funky, unvarnished, stomped down in the gutter truth. So they devise all types of subjective reasoning for such avoidance of reality. This manifests itself in the attitudes of some White leftists. When a Black man, hard pressed by the very realities that "would-be" leftists conveniently avoid, is less than humble, reasonable, and convenient, he is immediately branded arrogant and prideful, and hence worthy of being politically ignored.Other defensive attitudes then follow: A Black man who espouses the truth as the conditions of combat and struggle dictate is considered "bitter" or hateful towards all Whites, or in the very least,resentful. This is not only comic, it's pathetic, because many Whites mistake intelligence for stupidity and cannot distinguish one from the other. This equals out to covert racism masquerading as quasi-ego analysis, which more often than not is an analysis of the White psychic instead of a Black man's ego. For this and other reasons, not a few White leftists find it easier to work with or support Black women who are not as "threatening" to their delicate White 'consciences. A Black person however, that has a full-blown(or over-blown) appreciation of his/her self-worth is the antithesis of a slave, for former Black slaves do not presume to be more qualified than their former slave masters; when they do, they are indeed arrogant. White leftists consistently fail to understand that respect and understanding pursue a different cultural and social pattern,one that cannot be erased by political discussion. And the requirements of survival are the ultimate political issues.

The human factor is the most dynamic factor in struggle and revolution. It is a conscious, living thing. We cannot engage in revolution and combat of a protracted nature and remain forgiving of the vacillation of others not so inclined. Revolution makes one intolerant because every day we are reminded that we must do what is of value, not for others, but because of our own self value. The failure of the White left to support the Black Liberation Movement is a failure of the White Left to support itself. It is not a question of helping us, but of manifesting what one is about — and the White Left is obviously about bullshit.

> R. Dhoruba Moore,

Frank Khali Abney

B.L.A.

PDF:

https://archive.org/details/B.L.A.DhorubaBinWahadOpenLetterToTheWhiteLeftInTheUS

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