Ideology

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blindpig
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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Fri Jan 25, 2019 5:03 pm

Building an active party
Capitalism creates its own gravediggers. We must organise them into a mighty liberating army.
Party statement

Wednesday 5 December 2018

This text is an excerpt from the cadre development committee report given to the party’s eighth congress in September.

The growth and development of the CPGB-ML is noticed by all the small political groups that exist in Britain and collectively refer to themselves as ‘the left’. In this small pond, overpopulated by an exotic array of politically toxic specimens, we are the ‘left group’ that causes the most anxiety and fear amongst the others.

Whilst the blind remnants of the revisionist and Trotskyite movement of the 20th century continue to tie their fortunes ever more closely to social democracy, the conditions for the seeding of the roots of a Marxist-Leninist party present themselves in abundance in Britain.

On Brexit, on imperialist war, on the causes of terrorism, on the question of immigration, on the basic question of how the working class needs to wage economic struggle unshackled from the disastrous influence of social democracy, we are the only political party in the country to have answers to the most pressing issues facing British workers.

Whilst our ideas are certainly not immediately popular with vast swathes of politically ignorant workers, they do have increasing currency amongst those workers who find themselves in struggle, and are causing mounting anxiety, revulsion and annoyance amongst our political opponents.

The divide between us sharpens and we can expect greater hostility and opposition to our work in all fields, whether it be on the picket lines, at anti-war meetings, or on May Day and other labour movement events and rallies.

Our organisational challenges are acute. We must reassess the viability of our present methods of work, reflect on the political activity we carry out and its usefulness in a concrete historical context. Making a critique of our work and then assessing our capacity for new forms of work is a difficult task for a small party of volunteers with limited resources, both physical and financial.

A basic principle of dialectics is that there is no such thing as abstract truth; truth is always concrete. Forms of organisation, alongside forms of political work, must be suited to concrete reality.

As the party grows, no matter how small that growth is, new opportunities for work present themselves – work which ten years ago would have seemed an impossibility.

An important factor contributing towards our growth since 2014 has been that we are building an active party and have not allowed a situation to develop where significant sections of the party have become inactive.

It is inevitable in any party there will be churn – that some bad people will join and some good people will leave. What destroys a party is allowing the vitality of the healthy part to be polluted by the unhealthy.

Developing strong cadres
The party that purges itself strengthens itself. Our party is a voluntary union – those who cannot stay the course, even if we wish that they could, must not be allowed to sow division, despondency and negativity, but must be assisted in leaving the party in an orderly and respectful manner.

Those who demand that the majority must follow the desires of the minority; those who cannot learn to work in a collective manner, must understand that we welcome all support but will not be held to ransom over any single issue.

In an organised party, a split is inevitable if the minority cannot subordinate itself to the majority. Scandalmongering must be resisted and overcome; it is essential to create a political situation in which there is both centralism and democracy, both discipline and freedom, both unity of will and personal ease of mind and liveliness. We do not need, nor can we accommodate individualism or pessimism.

Our congress is a place where the active members of the party make decisions about the future direction of the organisation; it is not a place for all and sundry; it is not a mass political rally to which we invite everyone.

Similarly, the desire to grow and to be big must not develop into a trend where politically and socially unstable individuals are allowed to join our ranks without the necessary training, supervision and oversight. Not everybody who wanted to be at this congress is here today, and that is a sign of our strength and our growth.

Collective and individual study is paramount to ensure members are able to understand and communicate the party’s positions on various issues, especially in these politically confusing times, and furthermore to develop into worker-theoreticians capable of producing analysis and propaganda for the party.

Study classes and individual members should ensure that they are following the party’s educational programme and that they are in this way acquiring a sound and broad fundamental knowledge of Marxism Leninism.

Building a revolutionary party
Lenin observed that “the character of any organisation is naturally and inevitably determined by the content of its activity”. Our party, despite its relatively small size, carries out important political work. (VI Lenin, What is To Be Done?, 1901, Chapter 4)

What form does this take? Are we able to lead strikes or to organise demonstrations that challenge state power? At the present moment, clearly not. But it is our duty to develop a strategy capable of moving our organisation from its current level of development to that point.

Our scope of work has until now been largely restricted to theoretical and propaganda work. This represents one of our greatest strengths. An all-round understanding of Marxism Leninism and its application to the contemporary political problems faced by British workers and the wider toiling masses worldwide, languishing as humanity is under the wage-slavery imposed by monopoly capitalism, is what marks us out from so many groups, larger in size but impotent in the face of their pressing tasks.

But we cannot allow this great strength – which has made our small organisation a bastion of the revolutionary movement today – to blind us to our own significant shortcomings. We must not be content with resting on our ‘laurels’. We must relentlessly pursue the path that will lead to higher and broader development of working-class consciousness and set the British workers on the path to an understanding of their true task: to take power.

Our propaganda seeks to explain a multitude of ideas to our audience, and the best method for this has been our newspapers, our excellent new website (rightly regarded as the ‘best on the left’) and, increasingly, our YouTube channel and other social media.

Agitational work differs from propaganda work in that it attempts to communicate our ideas creatively and powerfully, but centred around a single issue that is of great significance to the masses at that particular moment, so winning support and sympathy for the party from a broad group of workers.

Any comrade who has attempted to give a message of greeting to striking workers at the gates or expose the crimes of imperialism in an anti-war meeting will understand the pitfalls of trying to say too much. Agitational work, like agitational slogans, must be pithy, accessible, and clear.

Our output of agitational material has greatly increased in recent years and this can be observed in our huge increase in production and distribution of leaflets, and the accompanying frustrations of branches that have too few and the growing task of our print workers, who have been run ragged by an increasingly hungry party machine.

The topic, the subject, the matter at hand in these materials varies greatly, but increasingly the practical work of most of our groups boils down to distribution of socialist literature amongst as broad a section of British society as we are able to reach. The trend is that our branches demand leaflets. It is influenced by many factors but it in no way diminishes the role of the newspapers; they each play vastly different roles.

How could any party member or advanced worker hope to be politically educated on the basis of party leaflets alone? How could the party hope to provide ample literature, giving the widest possible political exposures for the broadest sections of British society through the production of Proletarian and Lalkar alone?

Because of our commitment to Marxist-Leninist analysis, we have inherited, and continue to develop, our press and publications work. This work is now capable of unfolding on a greater scale on its present basis, and should comrades step forward who are determined to learn and master the print technique, there is no reason that we cannot double our output.

With the correct attitude and leadership, every party group is capable of contributing towards a mighty distribution of socialist literature – outside schools and workplaces, shops and transport hubs, on picket lines and during elections.

Of course, we understand the limitations of leafleting and aspire to much greater work, but taken in the context of the current political climate and soberly assessing the forces at our disposal, we should aim to carry out such work on the largest possible scale.

It is inconceivable that without this mass agitational activity British workers, currently dominated by bourgeois ideology and lacking even the rudiments of class consciousness in many instances, would be capable of raising themselves to participating in a revolutionary movement against the bourgeois state.

Our agitational work has been most successful when it has focused on issues that affect the broad masses. Highlighting the ongoing NHS privatisation, campaigning around the EU referendum, and creating support leaflets for striking workers that also expose social-democratic treachery during industrial disputes have all been political exposures carried out on a broad basis.

The continuing improvement of such targeted leaflets and political exposures gives our party the opportunity to communicate to huge numbers of people.

The coming period, with the possibility of a Corbyn government, the ever-present threat of war and mutual annihilation, the continuing deterioration (no matter how slowly) of living standards in the imperialist countries, present avenues of huge opportunity for a Marxist-Leninist political party.

The global financial crisis rolls on, and if it is the contention of the Thatcherite libertarians that “the rising tide (of capitalist economy) raises all boats”, benefiting rich and poor alike, then it is our duty to point out to the masses that the tsunami of monopoly capitalist crisis of overproduction will in fact sink rich and poor alike – bringing billions of our fellow workers poverty, insecurity, starvation, disease, misery, environmental catastrophe and death.

Wealthy nations like Britain cannot escape this crisis, any more than can wealthy individuals (much as they delude themselves) or any other nation, except through collective solutions – and that means putting power in the hands of working people, whose interest it is to solve them.

Mobilising disenfranchised youth
Britain’s youth face a future in which jobs are scarce, insecure and underpaid.

The Blairite mantra ‘Education, education, education’ and universal university education has been shown up as a hollow phrase under capitalist economic conditions, with £27,000-£54,000 the cost of fees for three to six-year university courses. Add on living expenses, and university students now walk away with £100,000 of debt – money that, given the depressed state of wages – they will have great difficulty recouping in the workplace.

Unemployment, rising house prices and rents mean even the children of formerly reasonably well-off so-called ‘middle-class’ workers are unable to reproduce the lifestyle of their parents’ generation. There is an increasingly large pool of disenfranchised and angry working-class youth who have no stake in the system.

Our capitalist masters wish to promote the idea that the system’s failings are in fact the individual failings of each worker who is struggling. It is our duty to enlighten and recruit these working-class youth, rather than letting them fall prey to depression, despondency and despair, or be led down the right-wing blind alley of sectarian or supremacist ideology.

Our young comrades must organise effectively and contribute to the production of material that brings this message home to their fellow working-class youth. Our unmatched Marxist analysis must continue, and cannot be dependent upon older comrades for its production.

Marxist dialectics subjects all phenomena to the power of human reason, including the realms of human history and contemporary society. No problem is insoluble to the rising class armed with Marxist understanding and organised by a Leninist party.

All comrades must take responsibility for advancing their education and bringing on their family, friends, comrades and contacts. Young comrades should aim to organise, to lead, to speak, to recruit, to write and to teach. There is no better way of learning than applying your knowledge.

We have increasingly seen that workers who take our literature and study our message return to the party as supporters and can progress to become members and cadres. A great mass of agitational material will therefore supplement this process, ensuring that which we all desire – a professional, organised, disciplined party, trusted by the broadest possible section of the working class, and ready to use the inevitable unfolding crisis of capitalism to fuel the development of a militant working-class movement.

We must position ourselves to be the trusted voice of workers in struggle, wherever that struggle is taking place.

Capitalism creates its own gravediggers. We must organise them into a mighty liberating army.

https://www.cpgb-ml.org/2018/12/05/news ... ive-party/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Ideology

Post by kidoftheblackhole » Wed Feb 06, 2019 9:31 pm

Here is one of the few pieces on Gramsci that I've ever thought were worth reading (and unlike you guys I don't sweat the "perspective" all that much..do I agree with every single word? No (but then he quotes Sartre so..) but that isn't the bar for whether something is worth thinking over.

https://mltoday.com/ideology-and-social-reproduction/

One of the reasons (emphasis: one, of many) is that they don't want to talk about ideology or actively disparage not only the discussion but ideology itself. BIG mistake.

EDIT: somehow this post got a bit garbled. I was talking about the reasons I don't care for twitter

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Wed Feb 06, 2019 9:43 pm

kidoftheblackhole wrote:
Wed Feb 06, 2019 9:31 pm
Here is one of the few pieces on Gramsci that I've ever thought were worth reading (and unlike you guys I don't sweat the "perspective" all that much..do I agree with every single word? No (but then he quotes Sartre so..) but that isn't the bar for whether something is worth thinking over.

https://mltoday.com/ideology-and-social-reproduction/

One of the reasons (emphasis: one, of many) is that they don't want to talk about ideology or actively disparage not only the discussion but ideology itself. BIG mistake.
"You guys'? Me & the mouse in my pocket?

Gramsci is alright, it's them shrinks & philosophers ya gotta watch out for.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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kidoftheblackhole
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Re: Ideology

Post by kidoftheblackhole » Thu Feb 07, 2019 12:09 am

blindpig wrote:
Wed Feb 06, 2019 9:43 pm
kidoftheblackhole wrote:
Wed Feb 06, 2019 9:31 pm
Here is one of the few pieces on Gramsci that I've ever thought were worth reading (and unlike you guys I don't sweat the "perspective" all that much..do I agree with every single word? No (but then he quotes Sartre so..) but that isn't the bar for whether something is worth thinking over.

https://mltoday.com/ideology-and-social-reproduction/

One of the reasons (emphasis: one, of many) is that they don't want to talk about ideology or actively disparage not only the discussion but ideology itself. BIG mistake.
"You guys'? Me & the mouse in my pocket?

Gramsci is alright, it's them shrinks & philosophers ya gotta watch out for.
chlamor too, right? And its "transitive"..once one person says it/does it, everybody starts to hope onboard the train

chlamor
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Re: Ideology

Post by chlamor » Thu Feb 07, 2019 2:09 am

We are first biological animals. Our intellectual creations are exactly that, they are our creations.

We act like our creations are organic, like they fell from the sky, like we didn't make them. We put our creations above material reality, believing that what we create has natural laws like the rest of reality does, like our made up definitions of things like "economies" are forces in and of themselves. And then we force measurable reality through that lens. It becomes more than analysis; it becomes ideology; it becomes a worldview of how things work. It's the economy.

If it's the economy, then it's something that some human decided someplace, and the analysis of reality isn't radical enough to understand what is occurring.

And humanity is much, much older than "capitalism." By almost 300,000 years. So, whatever "capitalism" does, it must be understood in light of what occurred in human societies prior to capitalism as well as during its extremely recent existence. Capitalism didn't fall from the sky like a meteor. We made it up. We made up economics.

For the rest of our existence, like for very close to all of the 300,000 years for most people who have existed, we went out and gathered food (biological). I suppose you can call that an "economy," but I wouldn't. That would be gibberish. Even the animals do as much.


===========

I wish to add, because I say that life is a biological construct , you interpret that as me stating that all human behavior is determined by biology. That is not what I mean.

Did it ever occur to you that your interpretation, your opinion, your understanding, and your values are all your creation, made out of your abilities.

Words are symbolic models of reality. They aren't reality itself. Reality cannot be captured or contained in words, and human behavior and experience cannot adequately be understood by any simplistic, abstract, bumper-sticker statement.

We intellectualize and wallow in humanism when other animals do the same things we often believe are solely our purview, like have communications and social organization and problem solving. We don't usually know enough about the other animals to understand this, however. Instead, we have centuries of "great thinkers" who have fed us a bunch of narcissistic delusions about our "greatness" in general, how above and separate we are from all the other living beings. It's like we're always surprised that we're intelligent. We can't appreciate anything about the rest of the living world, because we have to keep focusing on our separation and specialness. That is freakin' whacked, and it's not real.

Western, Euro-cultures aren't living in reality. If they were, we would not be experiencing the environmental catastrophes we are experiencing. We fed reality - our environment - to our own creations, to artificial constructs, to our "economies" and other creative but disassociated human beliefs. And it's been an abject failure.

Marx describes stratified societies and the inherent injustice they create by analyzing the dynamics, and brilliantly, the absolute best at it. But our problem is not how these unjust societies work. It is that they work, century after century after century. In a multitude of manifestations, under the cloak of changing definitions and jargon and justification that never ends, the behaviors of exploitation and harm persist. And really, all we really want to know is, why are some humans such violent assholes, and why are they willing to exterminate life itself for their superficial and selfish values?

And for that we need to look at human behavior and choice in more radical ways than even the great Marx.

As for "solutions," if I decide that my problem or my clan's problem is a specific person, and I kill that person, my "solution" is a biological "solution."


How do you even begin to address this hodgepodge?

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Re: Ideology

Post by kidoftheblackhole » Thu Feb 07, 2019 2:45 am

Marx describes stratified societies and the inherent injustice they create by analyzing the dynamics, and brilliantly, the absolute best at it. But our problem is not how these unjust societies work. It is that they work, century after century after century.
If we throw out everything else written (and we should..) we get this nut: the Apple explanation of capitalism/class society (it just works). The way to stop it is not to figure out HOW it works but rather to ask people who bought one WHY they did so. So, all in all, I think he's calling for marketing research into the problem.

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Sun Feb 09, 2020 12:43 pm

May '68 and spontaneity
Luca Wright

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May 1968, Paris. Photo: Bruno Barbey

On the 23rd of March 1968, 150 students occupied the administrative tower of Nanterre University in Paris and events soon escalated. On the 6th of May, there were regular battles between police and students in the Latin Quarter after 13 students were convicted for the occupation, and 422 people were arrested. On the 10th of May barricades were erected in the Latin Quarter and cars were burned in conflict with police, and 367 people were hospitalised. Unions called for a general strike on the 13th, and it is here that workers begin to join the students. The 15th of May saw the Theatre de l’Odéon occupied by 2,500 students and workers occupied a Renault factory, and on the 16th strikes began to spread across France. A censure motion from the left-wing parties was defeated in the National Assembly on the 22nd and on the 24th de Gaulle announced an election to be held the next month. In June, workers received raises and the minimum wage increased by 30%. But later in the month the election saw de Gaulle remain president with a larger mandate than when he was first elected.

In spite of its outcome, the May ‘68 protests are often viewed as passing a threshold in the history of leftist and socialist insurrections and – rather than looking to the October Revolution and other successful revolutions – students and intellectuals still view May ‘68 as they did during the protests: as an insurrection which would overturn the old order of society around them, where intellectuals and student organisations could be looked to to counter the retrogressive and repressive institutions that lagged behind class consciousness.

Kristin Ross writes that 'the rapid expansion of the general strike, both geographically and professionally, outstripped all frames of analysis', that May ’68 was ‘the largest mass movement in French history, the biggest strike in the history of the French workers' movement and the only "general" insurrection the overdeveloped world has known since World War II’, that included not only the industrial proletariat but workers in the service, culture, and communication industries. Maurice Brinton, who was in Paris during May ’68, wrote that it was the beginning of another epoch, one ‘in which people know that revolution is possible under the conditions of modern bureaucratic capitalism.’ These sentiments are found throughout literature and histories of May '68: the unique and singular existence of the insurrection. However, rather than the event being so singular that theory could not interpret it, the inverse is in fact true; May '68 was seen as singular and unprecedented through the poverty of its theory.

The driving line of the theory that grew out of May ‘68 was the antagonism between bureaucracy and spontaneity. Ross notes that there was a ‘convergence’ of political uprisings in the ‘60s between the national liberation movements of Cuba and Indochina (ignoring the Marxist-Leninist character of these movements), the anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian struggles in the Europe and North America, and the ‘anti-bureaucratic struggles’ of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. May ’68 embodied these struggles, and, in coming to rebel against the existing order, this in turn meant rejecting the USSR. The ‘anti-bureaucratic’ uprisings of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, however, were far more complication than the students and intellectuals of May '68 reduction of them to ‘anti-bureaucratic’ struggles - yet this was only possible through the indeterminacy of their theory and by ignoring their essential class character. Nevertheless, anticipating critiques of the nature of May '68 and the ease with which students and intellectuals dismissed Lenin's writing and even the October Revolution itself, Ross writes that the events were too multiplicitous, too overwhelming, for an individual to have comprehended them. ‘To reduce a mass movement to the individual itineraries of a few so-called leaders, spokesmen or representatives ... is an old and, tried and true tactic for confiscation.' The spontaneity and energy of the movement was too intense for it to be led; a vanguard would have 'defanged' revolutionary consciousness, inhibiting the spontaneity of the protests, the strikes, and the revolution. Inevitably, then, historians of May '68 willingly fall into the same habits and pitfalls that the intellectuals and students found themselves in June, when universities granted concessions – and 'radical’ universities were even created – and unions turned against their workers. While Ross notes that 1968 saw protests across the US, Mexico, Germany, and Italy, in France there was a ‘synchronicity’ between the workers and intellectuals, but this synchronicity was the praising of spontaneity. Intellectuals and philosophers such as Debord, Derrida, and Deleuze even built philosophical methods around spontaneity as a principle. Brinton continues, ‘what can be said now is that if honestly carried out, such an analysis will compel many orthodox revolutionaries to discard a mass of outdated slogans and myths to reassess contemporary reality.’ Yet these indeterminate attempts to recapture daily life did not reflect the realities of workers’ lives and had little impact outside of the universities themselves.

May '68 then has come to represent the reinvigoration of spontaneity in Marxism that Lenin wrote against in What is to be Done? in 1902. This spontaneity hopes to allow the entirety of the working class to gain revolutionary consciousness and merely push over the already crumbling bourgeoisie, and the necessary organisation of communist parties become superfluous and even patronising. ’68 was supposed to be the death knell of this type of organisation, and Brinton writes that, ‘for Stalinism, too, a whole period is ending: the period during which Communist Parties in Western Europe could claim (admittedly with dwindling credibility) that they remained revolutionary organisations, but that revolutionary opportunities never really presented themselves.’ The opposite was in fact proven to be the case. Mitchell Abidor spoke to many people who were students in Paris at the time of May ’68, he recalls that ‘nobody could tell me what they were aiming for.’ He went on to say that students and intellectuals occupied schools and universities – and separately workers occupied factories – came up with imaginative slogans that are still popular today: ‘Be realistic, demand the impossible‘, ‘Beneath the street, the beach!’, ‘In a society that has abolished all adventure, the only adventure left is to abolish society’, yet assemblies of students and workers weren’t formed and they were so separated that whenever a worker entered the Sorbonne students would chant with delight. Today we might read of the Situationists’ role in May ‘68, or the revolution in philosophy that saw the anti-Hegelian movements of Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze, but in rejecting the USSR, the Bolsheviks, and Lenin, intellectuals turned their backs on organisation itself.

Charges of ‘orthodox Marxism’ were revived against communists and communist parties, as they are today, but this was little more than the sublimation of bourgeois propaganda into philosophy itself. French philosophy took on the nascent criticism of the USSR as totalitarian and authoritarian and sought to purify Marx of whatever superficially resembled these false elements, and soon there was an image of Marx for whom the essential concepts of totality and dialectics – and even materialism – were alien. And it is in this image that we find the enduring appeal of May '68: it is a Marxism without content, that looks to failed revolutions and insurrections rather than actually existing communism, that it followed the bourgeois line against the USSR, and today the DPRK and Cuba. The students and intellectuals of May ‘68 thought ‘if it can happen here, it can happen anywhere’, and in championing the slogans and non-methods of May ’68 without having to broach the question of their own lack of organisation, socialists will only continue to hope that it is still possible, that capitalism will be soon be confronted by a mass of workers, that it will fight in the streets and overcome. Spontaneously, and without their contribution.

Luca Wright writes on Marx and historical communist movements and from time to time helps out at Ebb Magazine.

https://www.ebb-magazine.com/essays/may ... pontaneity
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Thu May 20, 2021 1:20 pm

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Decolonization and Communism
May 19, 2021 Editor2 Australia, Canada, Colonialism, communism, decolonization, Indigenous, Israel, New Zealand, settler-colonialism, United States
By Nodrada – May 18, 2021

“We have to give life to Indo-American socialism with our own reality, in our own language. Here is a mission worthy of a new generation.”

— José Carlos Mariátegui, “Anniversary and Balance,” José Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology¹

While the turn towards analyzing ongoing settler-colonialism has finally reached the mainstream of North American political discussions, there is still a lack of popular understanding of the issues involved. Settler-colonialism is, ironically, understood within the framework of the ways of thinking brought by the European ruling classes to the Americas. By extension, the conceptions of decolonization are similarly limited. Although the transition from analyzing psychological or “discursive” decolonization to analyzing literal, concrete colonization has been extremely important, it requires some clarifications.

Settler–colonialism is a form of colonialism distinct from franchise colonialism.The colonizers seek primarily to eliminate the indigenous population rather than exploit them, as in the latter form of colonialism. Decolonization is the struggle to abolish colonial conditions, though approaches to it may vary. Societies formed on a settler-colonial basis include the United States, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and Australia. For our purposes, we will focus on the United States in analyzing local ideas of settler-colonialism and decolonization.

Among North American radicals, there are two frequent errors in approaching decolonization.

On the one hand, there are the opponents of decolonization who argue that settler-colonialism no longer exists. In their view, to identify specific concerns for Indigenous peoples and to identify the ongoing presence of settler-colonial social positions is divisive and stuck in the past. They believe that settlers no longer exist, and Euro-Americans have fully become indigenous to North America through a few centuries of residency.

On the other hand, there are proponents of decolonization who believe that Euro-Americans are eternally damned as settlers, and cannot be involved in any radical change whatsoever. The most extreme of these argue for the exclusion of Euro-Americans from radical politics entirely.

Settler-colonialism is not over, contrary to the first view. Rather, Indigenous peoples still struggle for their rights to sovereignty within and outside reservations, especially ecological-spiritual rights. Their ostensibly legally recognized rights are not respected, either. The examples of the struggles of the Wet’suwet’en, Standing Rock Lakota, Mi’kmaq, and other peoples in recent memory are testimony to this. Indigenous peoples are still here, and they are still fighting to thrive as Indigenous peoples. Capitalists drive to exploit the earth, destroying ecology and throwing society into what John Bellamy Foster calls a metabolic rift.² This means that the demands of capital for expansion are incompatible with the ‘rhythm’ of ecology, destroying concrete life for abstract aims as a result.

An atomistic, individualist worldview is what undergirds the view of settler-colonialism as over and of contemporary Euro-Americans as being just as indigenous as Indigenous peoples. When settler-colonialism is seen as an individual responsibility or guilt, we are left with a very crude concept of it.

The denialists of settler-colonialism assume that it must be over, because the colonization of the Americas is apparently over. Thus, they think that modern Euro-Americans cannot be blamed for the sins of their forefathers, since individuals shouldn’t be held responsible for things which happened outside of their lifetimes. Guilt in this conception is an assessment of whether an atomistic individual is responsible for extremely specific crimes, such as participating in something like the Paxton Boys’ ethnic cleansing campaign in 1763 Pennsylvania.

The same ideological approach characterizes the other side, which obsesses over the individual status of “settler” and micro-categorizing the contemporary residents of North America within an abstract concept of settler-colonialism. They argue that having the individual status of “settler” means one is eternally damned, one is marked as a specific person by the crimes of a social system always and forever. This hefty sentence has high stakes, thus the obsession with categorizing every unique case within a specific box.

Neither of these approaches offers a successful insight into settler-colonialism. Instead, they project the thinking of European bourgeois liberalism. The individual is defined in an atomistic way, in their characteristics, rights, crimes, and so on. The individual as a node on a web of social relations is totally out of the question here. Yet, that is how we must think if we wish to understand settler-colonialism and, therefore, abolish it.

To focus primarily on categorizing atomistic individuals, instead of focusing on social relations, loses sight of the true engine of settler-colonialism. It is not that individuals choose one day to behave brutally, or that it is simply the nature of a specific people. Instead, it has very concrete historical motivations in the global system and the rise of settler-colonialism within it. For example, North American settler-colonialism was motivated significantly by the land hunger of capitalists who grew cash crops like tobacco and cotton, which were sold on the world market. Thinking in broad, structural terms is important in order to avoid reductive analyses and approaches.

While the side which focuses on damning individual Euro-Americans certainly have land in mind while thinking about this subject, they have a static and simple concept of land. In their minds, settlers are settlers because they are present in a certain place, to which a specific Indigenous group has an abstract, moral right to exclusive habitation in. To put it simply, their thought process is “if X person is in Y place, which belongs to Z people, then they are a settler.”

They do not understand the social relation of Indigenous peoples to their homelands, which extends into the aspects of ecology, history, spirituality, etc. That is, Indigeneity as itself a social relation. Indigenous peoples explicitly refer to their nations and homelands as relations. Their relation to land is not to land as an abstract thing, but to specific spaces that are inseparable from their specific communal lives.

In the context of describing his people’s history, Nick Estes (Lower Brulé Lakota) said in Our History is the Future:

“Next to the maintenance of good relations within the nation, an individual’s second duty was the protection of communal territory. In the east, the vast wild rice patties and seasonal farms that grew corn, beans, and squash demarcated Dakota territory. In the west, Lakota territory extended as far as the buffalo herds that traveled in the fertile Powder River country. For Dakotas, Lakotas, and Nakotas, territory was defined as any place where they cultivated relations with plant and animal life; this often overlaid, and was sometimes in conflict, with other Indigenous nations.”³

Identity and mode of life in communalist societies is specific to spaces, because keeping in the ‘rhythm’ of these spaces is a basic guiding logic of life. Because land is a relative, there was and is significant resistance among Indigenous peoples to the settler seizure of land and commodification of their non-human relative. The European bourgeoisie, meanwhile, was more concerned with what value could be extracted from the land, their worldview being based in abstract concepts of Right, Justice, Liberty and so on.

The faction in question does not understand settler-colonists as part of social relations which seek to negate that communal land social relation for concrete aims. They lack broad perspective, they only see society as a collection of atoms, falling into micro-categories, bundled together.

Having critiqued these two views, we can now give a better idea of how to properly approach the category groupings involved in analysis of settler-colonialism.

Indigeneity is defined by continuity of long-standing communal relations and identities indigenous to a certain region. Relation to a specific homeland or region is important to this, but the loss of direct ties to land does not necessarily negate Indigeneity. Rather, the continuity of belonging to a certain ‘mode of life’ and community is key.

A settler is one who is outside of these relations, and plays an active role in the negation of these Indigenous relations. A settler is not merely a settler because they are foreign. Rather, they are a settler because of this active negating role.

To play an active negating role does not necessarily mean one personally enforces colonial laws. Instead, it means that one directly benefits from their participation in the destruction of these relations, such as by gaining residencies or employment at the expense of those land-relations. An important aspect of being a settler is being a socio-political citizen of a settler-colonial society. This means that, in law and in social practice, one has the full rights of belonging to the settler-colonial nation, and is recognized as such in ideology.

Many analysts of settler-colonialism, such as Jodi Byrd (Chickasaw), use a third category in their analysis: arrivants.⁴ Arrivants are those who are part of social structures which dissolve those land-relations, but lack the citizenship and agency of settlers. An example of this would be Filipino debt peons. They cannot fully belong to the settler structures, in practice or in ideology, but they are still part of those structures. In North American history, these groups have at various times been explicitly excluded from the potential to own property or obtain full legal citizenship. Said citizenship was directly defined around whiteness, first de jure, and later de facto.

These categories should be treated in a nuanced way, as tools to understand a concrete society and history. We should avoid trying to bend reality to fit abstract categories. Otherwise, one assumes these categories are destiny. One assumes that Indigenous peoples cannot be part of settler-colonial structures, or that all settlers are eternally damned and cannot overcome their social role.

In history, there are many examples of Indigenous peoples participating in settler-colonial processes, such as with Tohono O’odham warriors participating in the Camp Grant Massacre against Apaches, or the Indigenous Vice President Charles Curtis sponsoring assimilation and allotment of communal lands. There are also examples of people without full socio-political citizenship participating in these processes, such as with Black Buffalo Soldiers fighting on the front lines of Manifest Destiny.

There are also examples of Euro-Americans defecting to Indigenous societies in order to escape bourgeois “civilization.” Cynthia Ann Parker was abducted and adopted as a child by a Comanche war band. Texas Rangers, who had massacred her adopted relatives, had to force her to return to Euro-American society. While adopted Euro-Americans remained Euro-Americans, inclusion in those communal relations transformed them. Instead of playing a negating influence on the part of bourgeois society, they became participants in Indigenous relations. To be a settler is not destiny, but is a status which can be negated through a revolutionary transformation of society. In a word, through decolonization.

To obsess over policing micro-categories is not helpful for understanding or fighting settler-colonialism. Being conscious of it is important, but the key is to focus on broad social structures. The way we alter individuals is by altering social relations, and the way we fight for Indigenous sovereignty is by abolishing the negating forces in society. To successfully treat a disease, one must keep in mind the body as a system rather than a simple collection of parts. The same applies to society.

Settler-colonialism in North America is the conflict of two social forms, one fighting to negate the other. The capitalist system: private, individualist, focused on expanding an abstract ‘god’ (capital). The Indigenous communal modes of life: premised on relationality, collectivist, focused on viewing the individual as a part of a whole.

The bourgeoisie seek exclusive, private ownership of land as property to be bought and sold as a commodity. They do not recognize communal land rights, or anything like having a social relation with a place. Instead, they seek to cut off the nerves connecting every aspect of communal life in order to box things in as commodities, so that they can be abstracted into an exchange-value.

The 1887 Dawes Act, which dissolved Indigenous communal landholdings in the United States, was aimed at forcing this system on Indigenous peoples.⁵ In the eyes of the ruling class, this was simply “civilization.” The bourgeoisie had to go to war with these communal ways of life to construct a capitalist system in its place. In the communal systems, unlike capitalism: land itself has rights as a relative instead of being merely a vehicle for value, people live off the land as a community instead of being landless wage-laborers, and exploitation is heavily frowned upon.

The first Red Scare in the United States was not during the 1919–1920 assault on organized labor and anti-war activists, but during the struggle of the government and capitalists against Indigenous communal modes of life.⁶

This war of generalized commodity production, capitalism, against alternative ways of being extended to ways of knowing. When forcing Indigenous children into boarding schools, the colonizers worked hard to destroy languages, religious practices, and cultural practices.⁷ In their place, they promoted individualism, bourgeois values, and a future as wage-laborers.

The liberal view of individuals is quite representative of typical bourgeois thinking. Liberalism posits individuals in an atomistic way, without considering them as concrete beings with concrete relationships in a real world. It sees individuals as simply bundles of rights, obligations, and so on. It premises meaning on extremely abstract, albeit universalizing concepts, such as “justice.” The rights of the liberal citizen are rights they have apart from society. Their freedom is a space separate from society, since they see others as fundamentally competitors.

This abstract thinking, individualism, and competitive view makes plenty of sense for a bourgeois. Their well-off conditions and obsession with preserving their private property against others reflect in their lack of concern for positive rights (rights to things, like food or shelter). What they want is to realize their capital, defeat their competitors, and pay as little as they have to for the working class’s living.

They only concern themselves with concrete things as far as they relate to their mission to realize abstract, congealed labor: capital. Capital commands them. If they do not expand their capital through exploitation and investment, they fall behind and decay in the rat race. Thus, the bourgeois is shrewd, atomistic, and anti-social.

By contrast, the communal view of individuals which is characteristic of Indigenous nations is focused on very concrete things. Individuals are part of specific communities with specific histories, who are relatives with specific land-spaces. To preserve balance in one’s real relations is an important value, contrasting sharply to the obsession with satisfying the god of abstract capital by feeding it concrete sacrifices. The key to this worldview is keeping in the ‘rhythm’ of life: the rhythm of one’s human relatives, non-human relatives, the ecology, the spirits, etc.

The latter view has a sibling in the views of Karl Marx. In the sixth thesis from Theses On Feuerbach, Marx said:

[…]the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations.⁸

Further, Marx was very concerned with the metabolic rift wrought by capitalism. In his view, while capitalism had for the first time linked up the whole world and all people into one global social system of production, it had also unleashed forces it could not control. While everyone in capitalism depends on everyone else, the system is controlled by self-interested bourgeoisie, who have no concern for humans, animals, or ecology.

Therefore, there is a need for a working class revolution, where the people who produce what the world runs on establish social control of this social production. Through that social control, they must restore the balance of humanity and nature, using the planning of production to end the chaos and blindness characteristic of capital. Once they have fully developed this system of social control and planning and brought about a world where all people contribute to the social product instead of anyone exploiting anyone else, they will have established a communist society.

The basis for Pan-Indigenism in North America was laid by the proletarianization of Indigenous peoples during and after World War II.⁹ The Federal government explicitly hoped to use this to assimilate Indigenous peoples by removing them from communal life on reservations. Instead, the contact of many distinct peoples in urban workforces and communities led to the development of a new, broad concept of Indigeneity. These proletarians thought of themselves not only as, for example, Standing Rock Lakota or Chiricahua Apache, but also as “Indigenous.”

This had precedence with people such as Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee leaders of a Pan-Indigenous resistance to settler-colonialism in late 18th and early 19th century Ohio, or Wovoka, the Paiute founder of the Ghost Dance movement in the late 19th century. However, it had never reached this scale before. The same forces which sought to destroy Indigenous identity created means of establishing a new political movement in defense of it.

This universalization of identity from particular to general, without necessarily negating the particular, is something which must be done by social revolution as well. Proletarianization unites many distinct peoples into one class, leading to radical contacts between worlds. It lays the basis for a revolution which for the first time establishes a real community of all of humanity.

Decolonization ties directly into this project of social revolution. Capital attacks communal relations to establish and reproduce itself, yet by doing this it lays the foundation for a more universal form of communal life: communism. To decolonize is not to merely undo history and return to the past. We cannot undo centuries of change, of destruction.

Instead, as advocated by anti-colonial theorists like Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, we must assert indigenous aims on the basis of the world colonialism has brought. This must take the form of the social revolution, because capital leaves intact the negating force against communalism and the relations of domination between groups of people.

In our theorizing of communism, we must avoid the thought patterns of the bourgeoisie. We must not only avoid individualism, but avoid the denigration of communalist ways of life. Indigenous peoples are at the forefront of the defense of bio-diversity. They are staunch protectors of the earth, of their ways of life and of their relation with the earth. They resist capitalist primitive accumulation, defending their sovereignty, daily. Communism cannot be some form of universalized bourgeois society, nor can it carry over the denigrated view the bourgeoisie have of life. Instead, it must be communalism reasserted on a universal scale.

Decolonization does not mean one throws out settlers. It does not mean we send Euro-Americans back to Europe. This belief is premised on a bourgeois, colonial thinking about life. It assumes that behavior is ahistoric, inscribed into the DNA of people. Rather, it is social relations that we must expel, transforming people through incorporation into new ones.

In the past, the adoption of Euro-Americans served as an alternative to their behavior as settlers. A decolonized society can follow this model on a broader scale, while preserving the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples over their homelands. Indigenous conceptions of land are not based on bourgeois exclusive right, but the right of specific people to have an ongoing relation with specific spaces. Abolishing the negating force, capitalism, and asserting these ways of life while working to establish the universalist form, communism, must be our program.

To put it simply, decolonization should be understood as the indigenization of settlers. This necessitates a social revolution in all aspects of life. It does not mean settlers must immediately “play Native.” Within the context of bourgeois settler-colonialism, that is part of a process of dissolving Indigenous communities, destroying their ability to remain sovereign. Rather, it means that we must destroy the capitalist society which drives these antagonisms.

This decolonization also necessitates a conscious revolution in ideology as part and parcel of social transformation. As discussed, communalist societies have a strong sense of concrete locality, of specificity according to a space and the relations of that space. Capitalism seeks to negate that in favor of universalist abstractions. Communism must take the universalizing capitalism has engaged in and place it on a concrete, conscious basis.

We ought to oppose the negation of local life capitalism engages in, while having the universal goal of revolution. That is, unite the particular with the universal, establish the particular as the basis of the universal. The old, European bourgeois ways of thinking, lacking metabolism or relationality with other humans and with ecology, must be overcome.

Communism is the abolition of the present state of things on the basis of existing premises. The emancipatory project of communism should not be hostile to, but a student of Indigenous peoples. When all people are one kin, when they are not divided by class or other social antagonisms, then we will all be free. That is the relation of decolonization to communism.

https://orinocotribune.com/decolonizati ... communism/

Just for clarification, if 'land' has rights it is because the human society has decided so. Likewise with plant and animal life. And it is a good way to regulate 'the commons' for the benefit of the human community(and I'm sorry all you 'nature-lovers' like myself, that's really the best we can do at this time). If you want 'rights' to be god-given then go find god for me and we'ii talk...Nature 'knows' nothing of rights.
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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Mon May 31, 2021 4:28 pm

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PC Centenary: The “End of History” and the Struggle Against Liquidation
May 30, 2021 Editor2 Communist Party of Canada, CPC 100, socialism, Soviet Union
By People’s Voice – May 28, 2021

History was proclaimed “ended” when, between 1989 and 1991, socialism was overthrown in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. It was a historic setback for the working class around the world, dismembering the socialist community and tilting the world balance of forces sharply in favour of imperialism.

Almost immediately, the most powerful capitalist states began the process of redividing the world’s territory amongst themselves, starting with the former socialist states. This global imperialist reconfiguration also included the tightening and internationalization of the US blockade against Cuba, the 1991 Gulf War and subsequent decade of sanctions against Iraq and the massive NATO bombardment of the former Yugoslavia in 1999.

Furthermore, unencumbered by real, existing socialism, capitalist governments around the world adopted neoliberal policies to roll back all of the economic, social and political gains achieved by the working class and its democratic allies over the previous half century. Mass privatizations, deep cuts to social programs and sweeping rollbacks to labour and democratic rights were the order of the day in virtually every capitalist country.

The overthrow of socialism and the capitalist counterattack had a staggering ideological impact on the working class globally. Many socialist-minded people began to question the possibility of winning working-class power and constructing socialism in these new conditions.

In Canada, these international developments sparked a profound crisis inside the ranks of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC). In the period between 1988 and 1992, a small group within the highest leadership abandoned Marxism-Leninism as the basis of the Party’s revolutionary perspective and eventually moved to liquidate the CPC itself, seeking to replace it with a left social-democratic formation. In the process, they shut down the Party press (The Tribune) and publishing operations, laid off Party organizers across the country, dissolved the Young Communist League, dismissed elected committees and expelled dozens of members including two founding members of the CPC.

Most of the membership however actively resisted this rightward, revisionist and liquidationist policy and ultimately prevailed in saving the Communist Party of Canada. But the costs of this protracted ideological and political crisis were high – the Party’s independent and mass work was paralyzed for over two years, its membership was reduced and many of its organizational structures were lost.

What emerged within the CPC in this period was not an isolated phenomenon, but part of a pattern that developed worldwide – inside and outside of the system of socialist states. This pattern represented not just opportunism but an attack on working-class politics – it was a counter-revolutionary development. In the European socialist states, that meant a defeat of the socialist state itself. While the socialist state was overthrown in some cases, officials announced its demise and proceeded to dismantle social ownership and working-class hegemony of the state in others.

In the non-socialist world, these developments meant various forms of what is referred to as liquidationism – activities within a communist party that would bring about its destruction as a revolutionary party. This includes turning it into a social-democratic or broad-left party or a collection of like-minded people in some amorphous grouping without real structure or direction. In Canada, it became clear that if those who wished to transform the Communist Party were successful, there would be nothing left. Certainly, if there had been some remnant of a party or other formation, it would not have carried the banner of revolutionary working-class politics, a banner that had been carried by the CPC.

In both the socialist and non-socialist world, this growth of counter-revolutionary ideas reflected the success of bourgeois ideology combined as it was with enormous economic power, cultural domination and military might. The use of these weapons was both overt and covert and the international capitalist class was able to turn back the forces of working-class political power in the European states where it had achieved considerable success, surviving a civil war in the USSR, defeating fascism, addressing the social needs of their societies and building a modern industrial state. While that reversal is temporary, in its historical context, it was monumental at the time that it was happening, and it continues to shape the character of international politics.

The consequences of this defeat were most destructive for the working classes of those socialist states who saw their living standards collapse and the social services which they had created, the social capital which they had produced, destroyed in a matter of years. Social inequality on a scale and magnitude inconceivable within socialism emerged as if already fully formed.

In the non-socialist world, capitalist ideology was able to strengthen and extend its hold, including among those who saw themselves as anti-capitalist. The demise of the European system of socialist states had a devastating impact on the strength and development of progressive forces and this impact was magnified within some communist parties where the defeat spurred the growth of anti-Leninist attitudes and ideas. It raised questions about how best to achieve change. In a number of those parties, the answer was to move towards a reformist approach and to embrace the flawed idea that fundamental change could be accomplished with incremental improvements over time without ever having to break the foundation of the rule of the capitalist class.

That is in essence the character of the struggle that developed within the Communist Party of Canada. A number of those who had declared themselves anti-capitalist either were or became advocates of bourgeois values and ideas. They accepted the bourgeois definitions of democracy which defined socialist societies as anti-democratic. They agreed with bourgeois ideologues that rather than a higher form of democracy, democratic centralism was anti-democratic, serving to stifle debate and individual integrity. They revised their previously professed opinions of Marxism-Leninism and capitulated to the notion that these were dogmatic concepts and expressions of elitism and ideological rigidity.

In the particular case of the CPC, they claimed that a new, more vital, broad, dynamic and more democratic formation was in the offing. They argued that masses of people were eager and willing to participate in such a venture if only the existing Party could rid itself of all those qualities which they now disavowed and disparaged. Those within the Party who sought to bring about this “revitalization” planned to turn the CPC into a loose association of some existing Party members along with a collection of left intellectuals and academics who were committed to social justice, but hostile to the basic concepts of not only Leninism but often to Marxism as well.

No one would suggest that individuals who join the Communist Party must never change their opinions, political beliefs or adherence to a particular set of principles. The problem was that the particular small group in the leadership who had changed their minds did not just leave the Party as many had done in the past but decided to take the Party with them. They sought to utilize the considerable assets garnered through years of commitment and sacrifice on the part of thousands of Party members, dead and alive, by transferring those funds to this new “creation.” They believed this new formation was achievable, but it proved in reality to be a mirage – a miasma of false hopes and faulty analysis.

That it was a false hope and a faulty analysis there can be no doubt. No such formation appeared. No new grouping of non-Leninist leftists emerged. The landscape of the left in Canada was not enhanced or expanded by their efforts. In fact, it was diminished. This utter failure was despite the financial resources which they took with them.

As one combatant in this struggle put it, “those whose goal is liquidation do not announce that they are trying to liquidate the Party, they do it by challenging its precepts and principles – Marxism and Leninism.” This challenge was done by calling into question the value of those ideas by suggesting that they are outdated, irrelevant, inapplicable or elitist. The proponents of liquidation argued that the destruction of the socialist states was proof that the ideas were fatally flawed.

It doesn’t matter whether or not they consciously sought to liquidate the Party, although the documents indicate that some if not all of them were seeking precisely that outcome. It doesn’t matter if they thought that they were going to transform it into something more “modern” or “relevant.” The best of motivations, justifications and intentions – everyone knows what is paved with those. What matters is what would have been the consequences of their actions and the results of their proposals for change. The result would have been the destruction of the Communist Party, the destruction of a party based on historical materialism and Leninist principles of organization.

But the success of the liquidationist “project” was doomed from the outset. There can be no other explanation for their failure to create what was said to be not just possible, but so certain as to be worth their efforts to destroy what existed. They presented the case that such a new formation would emerge if only they could rid themselves of the strictures of a Marxist-Leninist party.

And it did not.

Instead, the Party survived, recovered and grew. Working-class revolutionaries met the challenge of liquidation just as they have met every other challenge over the past 100 years – from a consistent and principled Marxist-Leninist perspective – and defeated it.

Striding into its second century, the CPC continues to hold its red banner high and proclaim that Canada’s future is socialism.



Featured image: File Photo

(People’s Voice)

https://orinocotribune.com/cpc-centenar ... quidation/
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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Mon Jun 14, 2021 5:09 pm

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Lefebvre and Althusser: reinterpreting Marxist humanism and anti-humanism
Posted Jun 13, 2021 by Andy Merrifield

Since the October Revolution, Marxism has experienced almost as many crises as capitalism itself. Crises are Marxism’s bread and butter, if not its chalk and cheese. Meltdowns of capitalism usually come as little surprise to savvy Marxist theorists, who’d seen it all coming long ago, even while those capitalist economies basked in booming glory. But economic crises are one thing; economic crisis plus a global pandemic is something else again, beyond an everyday capitalist norm, more akin to the political-economy of wartime. And for a thought that fuses theory and praxis, pandemic, like war, threatens not only life and limb, but also solidarity and tender acts of human togetherness.

But there’s another aspect to pandemic as well as to a Marxism of pandemic: the delicate balance between the individual and society is disrupted, between a liberty at the personal level and the needs of a society at the population level—the scale of much epidemiological enquiry. Pandemics necessitate that public health exigencies assume priority, even at the expense of the liberty of the person. Willy-nilly, collective rights find themselves clashing with individual rights, and not always to everyone’s liking—especially in lands where personal freedom is touted as sacrosanct. We’ve seen this most starkly expressed in the conflict over face-mask wearing, where protecting other people is seen by some as a downshifting of the self, as an assault on individual liberty.

For the theoretically-minded, this strikes as another way to frame debates about agency versus structure, about freedom versus necessity, about which is the more important, the determinant rather than determined. Marxists might recognise such a dialectic as a rerun of debates that raged throughout the sixties and seventies about humanist versus anti-humanist Marxism, about whether subjectivity ought to prevail over objectivity; or whether Marxist history is really objective, a process without a subject, a theory more amenable to the affirmation of collective necessity.

Humanists like Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) suggest Marxism should celebrate what Hegel called a “freedom of subjectivity,” that it should prioritise the free will aspect of Marx’s vision, his yearning for “an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” The young, romantic Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts are particularly dear to the humanist Marxist’s heart. Here, in 1844, still smitten by Hegelian idealism, the concept of alienation dominates—or rather dis-alienation—the transcending of alienation, the freeing of human beings from capitalist enslavement, from wage labour. Marx posits a “total man” as the liberated person, as subject and object finding unity, rediscovering inner human essence, the ability for people to realise a limitless variety of possible individualities.1

For anti-humanists like Louis Althusser (1918-1990) this reasoning rings out bogus, as something ideological, problematic for any socialist ambition. Socialism needs a “scientific” concept, says Althusser. “Humanism” here presupposes an “empiricism of the subject,” a kind of “essence” to human beings, which, Althusser reckons, the mature Marx—the Marx from the mid-1850s onwards—rejects. Humanism throws a “universal” veil over society, whereas revolutionary struggle isn’t a struggle to liberate “humankind” as such, but a struggle between classes. So, if we should ever talk about humanism, says Althusser, we might at least talk about “class humanism,” or “proletarian humanism.” Marxist liberation isn’t about releasing any transcendental human essence, nor expressive of personal freedom; it’s a historical phase that ends class exploitation, that builds democracy for the working classes.2

Humanist Marxists accuse anti-humanists of dogmatism—of endorsing an “official” Marxism, under Stalin’s watch, with its programme of “the dialectics of nature.” Class struggle therein is seen as objective and deterministic, unfolding without conscious human agency, almost behind the backs of real people, like waves eroding the shoreline. Dogmatic Marxists, Lefebvre says, are happy to move people aside, being especially leery of Marx’s early writings. After all, they might give Soviet workers dangerous ideas about alienation in their own society. But if world communism is inevitable, an inexorable act of nature, as Stalin insists, people can be readily expunged from making history; Marxism elides into economism. Everything else—sociology, psychology, speculative philosophy, etc.—is reformist, irredeemably bourgeois.

Anti-humanists reckon the problem with dogmatism is too much humanism, not too little. Humanism encourages “the cult of personality,” says Althusser, the agency accorded to glorious leaders who supposedly make history all by themselves, like Stalin—or Hitler and Mussolini, or like a few of our own contemporary despots. This is divine worship of the individual, subjective humanism sneaking in through the back door, ideologically poisoning the rest of the house. The cult of personality has no place in Marxist theory, Althusser says, which is why he posits the provocative thesis that Marxists should break with the idealist category of “subject.” History has a “motor,” according to Althusser, but no subject. “Individuals aren’t ‘free’ and ‘constitutive’ subjects in the philosophical sense of these terms,” he says. “They work in and through the determinations of the forms of historical existence of the social relations of production and reproduction.” It’s another way of repeating Marx’s oft-cited dictum, that the masses make their own history, but not under circumstances chosen by individuals themselves.

***

Lefebvre and Althusser, as budding opposites, joined the French Communist Party (PCF) as young men. The former, scared by the Great War, in 1925; the latter, inspired by militant Resistants, in 1948. Lefebvre would, for “ideological deviations,” get expelled in 1958, though he’d reembrace the Party in the 1970s; Althusser would never leave, yet remained an outspoken critic. As dissident Party members, Lefebvre’s Marxism bathed in sunlight, was energised by what Ernst Bloch called a utopian “warm stream”; Althusser’s assumed a darker, colder, more melancholy cast. Lefebvre’s sixty-odd books overflow with the loose spontaneity and passion his Marxism advocates; Althusser’s writings, by contrast, are essays, tight and concise, shorn of frills.

Althusser’s anti-humanism insists that Marxism beds itself down in “the concrete analysis of a concrete situation.”3 But Lefebvre’s humanism doesn’t want to give up the ghost—geist—of alienation. If progressives jettison it, he says, won’t the living baby disappear with the stagnant bathwater? And yet, maybe twenty-first-century Marxism needs to loosen alienation from its subjective moorings, where it can degenerate into subjectivism, into an expression of bourgeois individuality and freedom. Maybe we need to see alienation not as undermining some abstract human essence, but posit it concretely, as a historical category, at work and in life. The traits of Marx’s factory system have entered into the generic traits of our society writ large. Life itself nowadays assumes a kind of industrial logic, with speed-ups and intensity drives, drills and efficiency targets, audits and assessments. As workers lean in, as they fill in those leaky non-workday pores, alienation is concrete. It moves with the times and so should we. It takes on meaning in different epochs, changes as we change, as our needs and aspirations change, as they change us, as we change them.

Decades ago, witnessing many German and European workers opt for fascism, vote against their class interests, Lefebvre spoke of alienation as mystified consciousness, recognising how propaganda transformed people’s minds en masse. He never saw this morph into social media, into misinformation and fake news, into twenty-first century estrangement, whose ideological channels never switch off and span the entire planet. Our alienation is different now, more cunning, less evident. And our consciousness is different, too, reshaped and re-mystified by a culture deliberately intent on undermining people’s capacity to think critically, to analyse broadly and deeply. Bombarded with banal messages and commercial stimuli, our brain cells have been pulverised by informational overload. Differentiating truth from falsity becomes increasingly difficult, fertile terrain for cults of personality to prosper, for demagogues to make promises they’ll never keep. But no matter.

Here, Althusser’s analysis still shines light on the murky zones of ideology. Ideology is never just free-floating, says Althusser, never simply (or complexly) a system of ideas innocent in life. Rather, ideology gets “materially” constituted, is embedded in particular capitalist “apparatuses” that manufacture it, that transmit it. They stalk the public, statist sector—in education and law, in the police and army, in religious institutions and political parties—as well as civil society—in business and advertising, on TV and radio, in newspapers, in social media and information technology. In fact, everywhere, we are enveloped in ideology. State ideological apparatuses can act repressively, through force (sending in the police and military), or else engineer compliance via consent, via more subtle modes of domination.

Althusser says ideological apparatuses “interpellate” people, “hail” us as concrete class subjects. It all happens, he says, along the lines of the most commonplace everyday scene—a hailing from across the street: “Hey, you there!” Conscious we’ve done something wrong, we look over, get taken in, believe the caller. Somehow, instinctively, we listen, accept it is us being called. This is how reality takes place through ideology, Althusser says, even if it seems to take place outside of ideology, beyond it. This is how we get “recruited” as class subjects and why Marx says life conditions consciousness—and not the other way around. What Lefebvre calls mystified consciousness, Althusser terms “an imaginary representation of our real conditions of existence.”

Ideology isn’t false consciousness: it’s real, has real anchoring to reality, real material existence. The bluster of Trump or Boris Johnson interpellates large numbers of people because their calls have what Althusser labels “a recognition function,” something a person needs to believe, wants to believe, recognises. It hits a reality buzzer somewhere inside them, becomes the necessary mood music for dissatisfied and alienated people. They want to hear this music, are open to it, feel the need to believe it. It’s on the level of feeling that messages get through, stoke up visceral emotions. Yet recognition functions through illusory representations, through imaginary distortions of actual reality (like the notion the Presidential election was rigged). “Experience shows,” says Althusser, “that the practical telecommunications of hailing is such that they hardly ever miss their man.” Verbal calls, messages popping up on screens, entering inboxes or dropping through mailboxes, getting bawled out at political campaigns, tweeted on social media—“the one hailed always recognises that it is really them who is being hailed.”

Althusser labels the drama of interpellation his “little theoretical theatre,” and the notion of theatre here is suggestive, full of dialectical resonance. Theatre stage plays involving actors with scripts. These actors assume roles and know how to learn their lines. They memorise them, act these lines out in character. Before them lie audiences, gatherings of people looking on, perhaps innocently, perhaps dangerously—dangerously in the sense that they are identifying with the actors. In interpellation, actors and audience become one, get bundled together; you can’t differentiate one from the other—at least in audiences’ heads—because the latter begin to live out the roles they’re watching. They come to the theatre, Althusser says, really to see themselves, and that’s why it’s dangerous: it’s precisely how interpellation hails you in life.

Althusser took a keen interest in theatre. While he plainly sees bourgeois theatre like bourgeois life, as a paradigm of interpellation, laden with ideology, he nonetheless understands theatre as part of the solution, too, as educational for not getting taken in by ideology. In this respect, misrecognition becomes a vital arm of political resistance, something Althusser tries to highlight in his articles on Bertolt Brecht.4 Althusser says Brecht revolutionised bourgeois theatre the same way Marx revolutionised bourgeois philosophy. Marx says philosophy shouldn’t be contemplative and neither should theatre says Brecht.

It shouldn’t be “culinary,” he says, mere entertainment for audiences to drool over the play’s “hero.” In Brechtian “epic” theatre, there are no heroes, not even in plays like The Life of Galileo and Mother Courage, two of Althusser’s favourites. This is “materialist” theatre. There, the masses make history, not heroes. Brecht wants no object of identification—either positive or negative—between spectators and the spectacle, no complicity between the two, no pity or sentimentality, no anger or disgust. It’s the only sort of alienation that kindled Althusser’s political imaginary: the famous “alienation-effect,” Brecht’s Verfremdungeffekt—or V-effekt—the distancing that avoids reifying inter-subjectivity, that counteracts any possible emotional empathy audiences develop with the characters.

Brecht demands cool thinking responses from his audiences, not hot feeling outbursts. He wants to foster critical interpretation, a thought that provokes action. Overthrown are classical ideals of Greek theatre, where the repressed energy of the drama erupts into what Aristotle called catharsis—a stirring emotional release, usually at the play’s finale. It sounds like the din of a Trump rally, its demagogic rage. Brecht wants to snub any fictional triumph, any fear and misery of the Second Term. He interrogates context rather than panders to confabulation. “The public ought to cease to identify with what they’re watching,” says Althusser. “They ought to find a critical position,” take a stand on the outside, not be taken in on the inside. It’s precisely this critical distance that needs to be carried over into real life, into our diseased life. Like with all viruses, prevention is always better than cure.

***

As Althusser drifted away from the PCF in the late 1970s, Lefebvre drifted back into it. The decade pushed and pulled socialists and communists everywhere, ushering in as much a meltdown of the post-war Left as of post-war capitalism. Gramsci might have called this an interregnum, between a dying past and a new era yet to be born, haunted in the meantime by monsters. For awhile, the Left in France called for unity, for a “Union of the Left”; a popular unity to ward off monsters, between the PCF and the Socialist Party (PS), in solidarity with other Left factions and forces—avoiding, on the one side, dogmatism and sectarianism within its own ranks, and striving, on the other, to forge an electoral pact, a ballot box socialism.

The European Left was distancing itself from Moscow, abandoning commitment to “dictatorship of the proletariat,” embracing instead so-called “Eurocommunism”—“the democratic road to socialism.” The workers’ movement needed to fight for structural reforms, transform the capitalist system by stages, eventually altering it wholesale. Head on confrontation between bourgeoisie and proletariat ought to be avoided; socialism without the consensus of a large majority of the “progressive” population would be impossible. Rather than take the enemy’s fortress by assault, in one fell swoop, Eurocommunists needed to encircle this fortress, undermine it gradually, vote it out, erode its power. Later on, they could seize control, democratise the state.

Althusser thought this a grave tactical error, a betrayal of the working classes, and said so after the Union’s electoral defeat in 1978; Lefebvre seemed more open, more curious about its exploration, more ready to face reality. Althusser wrote a series of blistering articles in April, 1978, serialised in the newspaper Le monde, about why he thought the Left union had collapsed and “What Must Change in the Party.”5 He said the Party had to step out of its own “fortress,” embrace the popular movement, have more faith in the rank and file. “Democratic centralism” could only work, Althusser said, if the PCF loosened its absolutist grip on the workers’ movement. Party bigwigs, alas, had been more concerned with defending their institutional privileges against the PS than in allying to combat a national bourgeoisie.

Lefebvre also released a text in 1978—a crucial year in the demise of European Left—a book with a revealing title: La révolution n’est plus ce qu’elle était [The Revolution Isn’t What it Was], a dialogical exchange with Catherine Regulier, Lefebvre’s newly-wed and young PCF militant. Althusser is frequently pilloried by Lefebvre; Regulier usually sides with her Party comrade in opposition to her husband, making the conversation particularly fascinating because of its tangled loyalties. Like Althusser, Lefebvre disagrees with Gramsci: the Party isn’t a Modern Prince; Stalin put paid to such imagery. Yet rather than orchestrate “democratic centralism,” Lefebvre wants to develop and generalise “autogestion,” a worker self-management, pushing the Party to accept more decentralisation; power needed devolving to local communes; more coordinated direct action required fostering at ground level. Lefebvre, in effect, sought a democratic line between Party and state, wishing both would wither away.

Étienne Balibar, a former student and confidant of Althusser, and co-author with his teacher of Reading Capital, told me via email that Lefebvre and Althusser actually encountered each other during this fraught period. They met along with other Marxist theoreticians (like Christine Buci-Glucksmann and Jean-Marie Vincent) at Lefebvre’s apartment on rue Rambuteau (overlooking the Pompidou Centre). Balibar says they were “private meetings” [réunions privées], organised by another ex-Althusser student Nicos Poulantzas, whose idea was “to try and reunite Marxist intellectuals and relaunch, if possible, Leftist debate and the Union of the Left in distress [L’Union de la gauche en perdition].”6

“Lefebvre was old,” recalls Balibar, “but very alert and a charming conversationalist.” He wanted the Left “to bury the old hatchets,” to overcome its internal differences and disagreements, have everyone make peace with one another. Maybe he was recalling what Lenin said about Marxists and anarchists? That there was nine-tenths similarity and one-tenth difference. Didn’t the same go for humanists and anti-humanists? “Althusser was often ill and absent in those days,” Balibar remembers. “He came a few times to the meetings without saying much, sometimes saying nothing at all.” “Lefebvre,” says Balibar, “told me that the Presses Universitaires de France had commissioned him to do a book on ‘Marx Today’. ‘Why don’t we do it together?’ he asked me. Like an idiot I refused, under the pretext that the deadline was too short for me, and that I write much slower than he does. To this day, I regret not doing it.”7

Lefebvre’s and Althusser’s work over that decade, from differing perspectives, tried to valorise for the Left a capitalist state in crisis. Could a unified Left leverage state power away from a disgruntled Right? Could it do so in the streets, in the factories, and through the ballot box? Could forces within the state be modified by organised pressure from the outside? Could pressure from the outside not only transform the inside but actually become that inside? “On s’engage,” Althusser used to say, “et puis on voit.” And yet, after engaging, after jumping into the fray, what one saw was a dramatic power shift, a transition and renewal in the reverse direction. It was the Right who got its act together, who closed ranks, whose class power “condensed,” just as the Left’s fell apart, as its unity fractured into disunity.

By the mid-1980s, a lot of ideas about popular unity and democratising the state, about Eurocommunism triumphing, collapsed, got rejected—almost before the votes were cast. Somehow its programme had overly compromised; or else hadn’t compromised enough. It was as if the Left didn’t know whether it was coming or going, having no more legs to stand on. It had kicked away both the Party and the People, hobbled lame. Still, unlike Britain and the US, “the Left” did nonetheless triumph in France, in 1981, under François Mitterrand’s Socialist Party; yet victory soon turned Pyrrhic, as its “leftist” policies began drawing straight from the Right’s playbook. By then, too, in a gentrifying Paris, an octogenarian Lefebvre had been evicted from his rental on rue Rambuteau and a depressed Althusser had strangled his beloved wife, Hélène, in a moment of “temporary insanity,” ending his days as a public figure. Poulantzas, meanwhile, had freaked out at a friend’s apartment, throwing himself out of the window in an impulsive suicidal defenestration.

Suddenly, the “New Right” set off on its long march, telling us there is no such thing as society anymore, only individuals and families. From struggling to ensure a providential state, now there was apparently no more state, not a public state for people anyway, only one preparing the political terrain for free market entrepreneurialism. Thus arose an awkward predicament for progressive people, especially for Marxist theoreticians: those items of “collective consumption” so vital for reproduction of the relations of production, so indispensable for propping up demand in the economy and for satisfying working class needs—public housing and infrastructure, hospitals and collectively consumed goods and services—were getting cast aside. How could this be? What once appeared essential ingredients for capitalism’s continued reproduction, for its long term survival, now turned out to be only contingent after all.

The Left has never really come to terms with a seismic tremor that registered big digits on the neoliberal Richter Scale. The 1980s bid adieu to social democratic reformism, to an age when the public sector was the solution to capitalism’s woes and the private sector the problem. Henceforth the former needed negating, Right ideologues argued; the private sector was the solution and a shot and bloated public sector the problem. State bureaucrats dishing out items of collective consumption through some principle of redistributive justice gave way to reality in which the market ruled. Writ large was the beginning of the privatisation of everything, of an ideology of possessive individualism. “Freedom” became its tagline: free markets, free trade, free choice, freedom to consume, freedom to do one’s own thing, freedom not to care about other people’s freedom.

Successive generations have been force-fed this ideology of freedom, treating anything public, any realm of necessity, with suspicion, as shoddy and inefficient, as something symbolising unfreedom. Now, it’s no longer an ideological category: it’s embedded in people’s brains, a belief system that teaches us how to forget, how to turn our backs on the public realm and ergo on any social contract. Maybe for good reason: the public state has been hollowed out to such a degree that it is shoddy. Its core functions—the planning and organisation of public services—have been outsourced to private consultants and contractors who’ve delivered little yet raked in much.

And as pandemic raged, countries who’d hollowed out their states most of all fast discovered they had neither the hardware capacity nor the software know-how to deal with a massive societal problem. So they doled out millions to private consultant “experts” like McKinsey who apparently did. When, in Britain, the latter instigated a National Health Service (NHS) test and trace system that hardly worked, we realised these “experts,” too, were clueless. COVID-19 has exposed the shortcomings of the privatised state, of the incompetence of private enterprise addressing public health—and of how public health challenges aren’t resolvable by individuals and families alone.

There’s plenty of collective necessity, of course, dealing with a global pandemic. But collective necessity can only work if people recognise the state as “democratic,” know good government from bad. These days, in populist nations, democracy seems like a vision from another planet. We might call these uncivil states because people there have lost their sense of duty to one another. We’ve been kidded by demagogues into thinking we’re all free agents capable of doing what we like, and if we can’t then it’s someone else’s fault. The European Union’s? Big government’s? Rarely big business’s. Private inclinations have run roughshod over public interests, cults of personality have gone viral. Maybe intelligent people, inspired by some Brechtian V-effekt, might one day acknowledge society again, might distance themselves from ruling class lures and lies. Perhaps then we’ll see how we can be freer if each of us admits that we are part of a public culture in desperate need of collective repair, that the goal of socialist democracy is to fight to reclaim public power.

En route, we might also remember Marx, who insisted that real freedom came though addressing necessity. “Freedom can only consist in socialised man,” Marx said, “when associated producers rationally regulate their metabolism with Nature.” “A shortening of working day is the basic prerequisite for freedom,” he thought. Life blossoms forth on such a basis, he said. Freedom without necessity is yet more bourgeois claptrap, another ideological ruse to perpetuate its class dominance. “The bourgeoisie lives in the ideology of freedom,” Althusser tell us, and makes us live in it, too, forces its concept down our throats. But real freedom is hard when you have to worry about making the next rent check, when you wonder if your job will be there tomorrow, or what happens if you get sick. Free choice means practically nothing when you’re financially enslaved. Freedom here isn’t very humanist. Indeed, when it comes to anti-humanism, capitalism has got Marxism licked any day.

Notes
↩ See, especially, Dialectical Materialism (1939), Lefebvre’s humanist rejoinder to Stalin’s Historical and Dialectical Materialism, published in Moscow a year earlier.
↩ See Althusser’s For Marx (1965), the best introduction to his anti-humanist Marxism.
↩ We might remember that even Marx’s abstract reasoning is concrete. Marx is weary of abstract abstractions, calling them in the Grundrisse “chaotic conceptions.” In a way, Marx would have been sceptical of epidemiologists’ scale of “population.” “Population,” Marx says, is an abstract abstraction, “if I leave out the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest. E.g. wage labour, capital, etc. These latter presuppose exchange, division of labour, prices, etc.” When we follow Marx’s concrete logic, we can see more clearly how the COVID pandemic doesn’t just affect the population, but strikes different populations, strikes them unevenly and unequally, subject to positioning in the wage-relation and division of labour. Here we might add different races, too, and different classes of those races.
↩ Two instances are “The Piccolo Teatro,” a discussion of Bertolazzi alongside Brecht, which Althusser included in For Marx; and another, “Sur Brecht et Marx,” in Écrits philosophiques et politiques — tome II (1997).
↩ New Left Review translated and republished Althusser’s missives as a standalone essay (see NLR, No.109, May-June 1978).
↩ Even if little of practicality emerged from these meetings, protagonists did help pioneer a very interesting, if short-lived, theoretical journal called Dialectiques; between 1973 and 1981, 33 issues appeared, full of wonderful material that still inspires. Both Lefebvre and Althusser feature within its now-yellowing leaves, yin and yang opposites of a truly dialectical Marxism for what were truly dialectical times.
↩ Ironically, the book, Être Marxiste Aujourd’hui [To be a Marxist Today], would only materialise years later, in 1986, co-written with Patrick Tort, a strange homage to Georg Lukács. The focus was a conference at Paris’s Hungarian Institute from 1955, celebrating Lukács’s 70th birthday, an opportunity for Lefebvre to critique as well as champion his old Hegelian-Marxist colleague. If Balibar regrets passing up on joint-authorship, we can only regret not reading what might have been.

https://mronline.org/2021/06/13/lefebvr ... -humanism/

Even though I have been helped by Stalin's 'Dialectal and Historical Materialism' I have never been convinced of socialism's 'inevitability', which so many Marxists insist upon. Therefore I find favor with Althusser by this article, which surprises me. There are many well-worn channels in history but there is always contingency too, which we ignore at out peril. And it seems to me that many would ignore or forget Marx's admonishment that the alternative to working class triumph is "the mutual destruction of both classes" , but I cannot.

And that's what will happen if we do not take the ruling class by the throat and throw them and their madness on the ash-heap of history. Soon.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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