About authority
No. 12/100.XII.2024
Authority in revolution, politics and life plays a key role. It is not just a phenomenon that can be reduced to the power of power over others or power in the political sense. Authority is not only influence, but also the ability to lead, to ensure stability and victories in the struggle for communism.
In a revolution, authority is the energy that moves the masses, it is the party's ability to find a common language with the people, formulate goals and direct them on the path to liberation. Authority is the result of practical activity, proof that the organization acts in the interests of progress, not profit.
In any revolution, be it the Great October Revolution, the revolutions in China, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, the authority of the leader, who is the embodiment of the ideals of the movement, was of great importance. The leader becomes not just a leader, but a symbol of hope, strength and knowledge. Without authority, the masses cannot rise above resistance and rebellion, because the vanguard force that directs and organizes the masses is always based on authority.
As history has shown, revolutions that lacked an authoritative leader quickly lost their energy and came to naught. In politics, it is not always the one who has more power, the one who has more soldiers, who wins. In a revolution, the one who managed to win the minds and hearts of people, who became a symbol of their struggle, wins .
Authority is built on the basis of trust and practical experience. It is important that leaders not only have wisdom and determination, but also be able to effectively manage the party, the country, solve pressing problems, and maintain high morale. If authority is a tool for realizing political goals, then the more stable it is, the more people support it, the stronger and more stable the revolutionary movement will be.
For example, Stalin was not only a political leader, but also the embodiment of the idea of communism. His authority was not ensured by "hard power", but above all by the fact that he knew how to apply Marxist theory to changing conditions, inspiring people to work and struggle. It is important to understand that Stalin's authority was the result not only of his personal qualities, but also of the Marxist approach, a whole system of ideas about cognition, organization, laws of revolution and politics, which ensured and made it stable.
The authority of a communist is built on an ideological basis, on spiritual closeness with the masses, on the competence of the leader. This fundamentally distinguishes it from other types of authority. For example, the leaders of the North Korean revolution, Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un, show how important this kind of authority of a leader is for the unity of a class, a nation, for the creation of a strong and independent state in very difficult and resource-limited conditions.
The authority of a communist is not personal attractiveness or high-flown moral force, but a key element in the revolutionary movement and in building a viable organization. In the history of socialist countries we see how important this component is and how critical its absence or weakening is.
It is clear that the highest manifestation of authority is the leader . When we speak of a leader, we are not talking about a simple manager, but about a person who combines the qualities of a theoretician and a practical figure, who is capable of not only leading an organization, but also setting the direction of the entire revolution. This is the essence of authority, which must be unconditional in the Communist Party, especially in moments of revolutionary storms.
On the contrary, the debunking of the "personality cult" and anti-leaderism were the result of revisionism and Trotskyism, which were clearly evident in the post-Stalin period. As a result, the world communist movement found itself in crisis. The process of so-called "de-Stalinization" in the Soviet Union, initiated by Khrushchev, was far from a "positive step" or "correction of mistakes", as opportunists say. When Khrushchev took the path of "debunking the personality cult" and accused Stalin of creating a dictatorship of one man, he dealt an irreparable blow to the authority of the party and the theory of Marxism. Khrushchev, accusing Stalin of terrorism and tyranny, not only condemned the personality, but actually claimed that the victories and achievements of communism in the USSR had no objective basis and reasons. He reduced the greatness of the revolution and communist construction to the tyranny of one man, devaluing the entire experience of decades of struggle and labor of millions of people. In this interpretation, the party in the eyes of workers all over the world turned into something completely opposite to what it actually was: from the vanguard of the revolution, leading the people, into a usurper and rapist, ruled by one man.
In reality, this was the destruction of the party's authority, the undermining of the foundations of socialist power and the compromise of the entire revolutionary path taken under the leadership of Lenin and Stalin. These events, as well as the same process in other countries of the socialist camp later, are not an attempt at improvement or purification, but a victory of Trotskyism, the desire to restore capitalism. Trotskyism, which denies Stalin's legacy and practical leadership during the period of building communism, has become an ideology of anti-leaderism, which has nothing in common with true Marxism.
Trotskyism is the denial of Stalin's theoretical and practical experience of building communism . It leads to the undermining of the authority of the party and its leader, the rejection of discipline and organization, which are the basis for the victory of the revolution. Trotskyists insisted that the leader should not have such great and strong authority, that the party itself should be deprived of leaderism, and decisions in it should be made democratically. But this rotten approach does not take into account the objective reality in which the revolutionary movement develops, and the scientific essence of communism itself as such.
It is impossible to talk about a revolution without a leader who has theoretical knowledge and practical experience. A leader is truly great if he has become a theoretician at the head of practice, capable of organizing the party and the people to solve specific problems. Such a leader is not only an intelligent person, but also a person with spiritual strength that inspires the masses to action. His decisions embody the work of the entire party.
In the examples of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin we see that their authority was not accidental. A careful study of the history of the communist movement shows that the authority of revolutionary leaders in different countries is not accidental at all. And the North Korean leaders Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il made a significant theoretical contribution to the theory of leaders.
Thus, Stalin was a leader not only because he managed to defeat the internal and external enemies of Bolshevism and the Soviet Union, but also because the party under his leadership managed to build a system within the country that was capable of not only surviving in the face of external aggression, but also ensuring communist development in the most difficult conditions. He managed to raise the people, organize the work of the party and the state apparatus, ensure scientific and technical progress, education and culture, and increase the industrial power of the country. This was the result of political will, a deep knowledge of Marxist theory and a wise personnel approach. And the main instrument in Stalin's hands was not violence and terror, as liberals and nationalists say, but scientific centralism .
Scientific centralism is a method in which centralized leadership is organically combined with a scientific approach to decision-making. It assumes that decisions are made at the center and should be based solely on objective data, scientific analysis, and theoretical research. This means the following. First, the centralization of power and unity of leadership are necessary for the effective functioning of the revolutionary party and the state. Central power is a guarantee of unity of action and the absence of fragmentation, which is especially important in the context of political struggle and revolutionary transformations. Second, a scientific approach to organizing and solving problems, which includes the use of Marxist theory, as well as specific knowledge and analysis of current conditions. In this context, the party must make decisions based not on guesswork or idealistic considerations, but on a rigorous study of the real situation, on the basis of which strategic and tactical steps are developed. Thirdly, a critical approach to past experience and a willingness to adjust actions and strategy based on objective realities, without rejecting the ideas of Marxism-Leninism, but on the contrary, developing them in accordance with the conditions of the current moment.
Scientific centralism does not mean the dictatorship of one person or authoritarianism without or with regard to the opinions of others. It generally excludes any opinions, interests, passions, discussions, compromises and decision-making by any formal procedures. Scientific centralism is the dictatorship of objective truths . It is a centralized, but theoretically grounded leadership, where decisions are made on the basis of deep scientific and theoretical analysis and an empirical approach. It is this kind of organization that allows the party to be flexible and effective.
Marxism-Leninism has always affirmed the necessity of centralized leadership, since only in this way can the fragmentation of party and popular forces be avoided and their coherence in the struggle for communism be ensured. Just as the most probable way of attaining objective truth is its discovery by the most conscientious, consistent and persistent researcher, so the most probable way of scientific-centralist organization is the formation of a leader or leaders who will stand at the head of the party and the revolution . Moreover, the authority of the leader (leaders) and the authority of the party coincide and constitute a single whole .
A striking example of the application of scientific centralism is the Soviet Union during the Stalin era, when centralized leadership made it possible to effectively organize industrialization, collectivization, and the fight against external and internal enemies. As stated above, despite the mythical "rigidity and authoritarianism" of the Stalinist model, the main decisions were made based on Marxist theory and took into account the objective economic and social (class) conditions of that time.
Of course, scientific centralism is opposed to anarchist and decentralized approaches, which are characterized by dispersion of forces and weakness of organization. Without centralized leadership, a party or revolutionary movement risks losing focus, coherence of action, and organizational integrity. Likewise, without a scientific aspect (and therefore without theoretical depth, analysis, and consideration of objective conditions), actions can become superficial and disorderly, which inevitably leads to defeat in the class struggle.
In the context of post-Stalinist developments in the Soviet Union, the debunking of the personality cult and the rejection of scientific centralism, as happened during the Khrushchev period, led to ideological disorientation, the weakening of centralized leadership, and ultimately to the crisis of communism and then to restoration.
When a party organization lacks authority, a leader, the party ceases to be a guiding force and turns into a disorganized collective, incapable of leading the masses. Modern examples of parties such as the Communist Party of the Russian Federation clearly demonstrate this. This is a party that cannot offer either theoretical leadership or practical steps for socialist construction, and its leader, despite being a formal leader, does not have the authority that Stalin and Lenin had. Such a party is incapable of leading the masses; it simply serves as an intermediary between the bourgeois government and the electorate, adjusting to the mood of the public.
And this is not obvious, because the Communist Party of the Russian Federation supports the concept of Stalin’s “cult of personality”.
A party that loses the authority of its leader, that does not strive to form "second-tier leaders", inevitably degrades. Poor party cadres, the absence of theoretical leadership and practical solutions lead to the fact that even the most experienced and honest leader cannot find support in the party and his efforts are fruitless. This is the path of degeneration that follows any anti-leader movements and revisionism.
Ultimately, the role of the leader in a revolutionary movement cannot be overestimated. The leader is the person who not only leads, but also sets the goals and directions of the movement, unites the masses into a single force and directs their actions, ensuring victory. Without this authority and without this leader, the revolution loses its strength and comes to naught. It is for this reason that anti-Stalinism and the "debunking of the Stalin personality cult" became a disaster for the communist movement.
The figure of the leader is made up of the "bricks" of authority in the field of victories in the class struggle. In our situation - so far victories in the theoretical (most important) and organizational planes. Every communist must fight with full dedication, achieve victories, work on himself and thus try to forge a leader out of himself. Every communist who follows a more authoritative communist must, without thinking about competition, strive to match the latter and surpass him as a greater master. The ideal relations between communists are the comradely unions of Marx and Engels, Lenin and Stalin. Of certain interest are also the relations of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un as examples of ensuring the continuity of generations.
P. Gubelman
12/18/2024
https://prorivists.org/100_authority/
Ideology
Re: Ideology
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Ideology
Some Clarity on Imperialism Today
Imperialism is not the creation of any one or of any group of states. It is the product of a particular stage of ripeness in the world development of capital, an innately international condition, an indivisible whole, that is recognizable only in all its relations, and from which no nation can hold aloof at will… Rosa Luxemburg, The Crisis of German Social Democracy (1916)
The arguments embroiling the left on the nature of imperialism, over whether Peoples’ China or Russia is capitalist or imperialist, whether the pink tide in Latin America is a socialist trend, whether the BRICS development is an anti-imperialist movement, and so forth, are becoming more and more heated as they proceed further and further into the academic weeds.
There is a host of issues and positions entangled in these debates, as well as numerous vested interests: deeply felt, long held theories, research platforms, and networks of intellectual allies.
Moreover, these arguments are decidedly one-sided: long on academic opinion, short on working-class or activist participation.
That said, they are important and deserve discussion.
A recent interview of Steve Ellner by Federico Fuentes in LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal is a place to begin to unravel some of these disputes. Now Steve Ellner is neither a surrogate in nor a straw man for this discussion. Ellner is a thoughtful, analytical academic with a long-committed history in the Latin American solidarity movement and with a background on the left. He is more likely to say “X may mean…” rather than “X must mean…” than many of his academic colleagues. That is to say, he is no enemy of nuance.
Ellner begins with Lenin, as he should, and asserts that Lenin’s theory is both “political-military” and “economic.” This, of course, is correct. In Chapter seven of Imperialism, Lenin specifies five characteristics of the imperialist system. Four are economic: the decisive role of monopoly capital, the merging of financial and industrial capital, the export of capital, and the internationalization of monopoly capital. One is political-military: the division of the world between the greatest capitalist powers.
Lenin gives no weight to these characteristics because they are together necessary and sufficient for defining imperialism as a system emerging in the late nineteenth century. Imperialism, for Lenin, is a stage and not a club.
Following John Bellamy Foster, the editor of Monthly Review, Ellner posits that there are two interpretations of imperialism that some believe follow from the two aspects of imperialism. Indeed, there may well be two interpretations, but given Lenin’s unitary interpretation of imperialism in Chapter seven, they are misinterpretations of Lenin’s thought. Recognizing that Lenin explicitly says that he offers a definition “that will embrace the following five essential features…,” there is, perhaps to the dismay of some, only one valid interpretation-- an interpretation that combines the economic with the political-military.
That said, Foster and Ellner are correct in critically appraising those who do misinterpret imperialism as solely political-military (contestation of territories among great powers) or as solely economic (capitalist exploitation). Truly, most of the misunderstandings about imperialism since Lenin’s time come from advocating one misinterpretation rather than the other, while failing to perceive imperialism as a system.
Ellner gently rejects one political-military interpretation that he associates with Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin: equating “imperialism with the political domination of the US empire, backed of course by military power…” Ellner rejects that thesis, “given declining US prestige and global economic instability.” An interpretation that separates and privileges the political-military from the economic necessarily decouples imperialism from capitalism-- something that Lenin explicitly denies. Accordingly, it follows that modern-day imperialism-- including US imperialism-- would be akin to the adventures of Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan, leaving exploitation as, at best, a contingent feature.
A solely political-military explanation of imperialism is a step removed from the more robust Leninist explanation.
Ellner considers the economic interpretation: “At the other extreme are those left theorists who focus on the dominance of global capital and minimize the importance of the nation-state.” Ellner has in mind as his immediate target the position staked out by William I Robinson, Jerry Harris, and others in the late 1990s, a position that rides the then-dramatic wave of globalization to posit a supremely powerful Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC) that overshadows, even renders obsolete, the nation-state.
At the time, others pointed out that the substantial quantitative changes in trade and investment and their global sweep had been seen before and were simply a repeat of the past, most telling in the decades before the first world war. Were these changes not a continuation of the qualitative changes addressed in Lenin’s Imperialism?
Like many speculations that overshoot the evidence, the projected decline or death of the nation-state was made irrelevant by the march of history. The many endless and expanding wars of the twenty-first century underscored the vitality of the nation-state as an historical actor. And the intense economic nationalism spawned by the economic crises of recent decades signals the demise of globalization-- a phenomenon that proved to be a phase and not a new stage of capitalism. Sanctions and tariffs are the mark of robust, aggressive nation-states.
The tempest in an academic teapot stirred by the artificial separation of the economic and the political-military in Lenin’s theory of imperialism is enabled by lack of clarity about the nature of the state. Left thinkers, especially in the Anglophone world, have neglected or derided the Leninist concept of State-Monopoly Capitalism-- the process of fusion between the state and the influence and interests of monopoly capitalism-- which explains exactly how and why the nation-state functions today in the energy wars between Russia and the US and the technology wars between Peoples’ China (e.g., Huawei) and the US. Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran’s casual dismissal of the concept of State-Monopoly Capitalism in Monopoly Capital (1966) is representative of the utter contempt shown for Communist research projects by many so-called “Western Marxists.” While the theory of State-Monopoly Capitalism gets no hearing among Marxist academics, the slippery, but ominous-sounding concept of “deep state” has achieved wide-spread acceptance, while not taxing the comfort of Western intellectuals.
Nonetheless, Robinson’s stress on the political economy of imperialism cannot easily be dismissed. His reliance on the key concepts of class and exploitation are certainly essential to Lenin’s theory.
In fact, the greatest challenge to the political-military aspect of Lenin’s theory was not the alleged decline of the nation-state, but the demise of the colonial system, especially with the wide-spread independence movements after World War II. The crude and totalizing domination of weaker nations favored by the Spanish, French, Portuguese, and British Empires-- the division of the world into administered colonies-- was, with nominal independence, replaced by a system of more benign economic domination. Kwame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian revolutionary, designated this system “neo-colonialism” in his book, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Nkrumah’s elaboration of Lenin’s theory preserved the integrity of Lenin’s “political-military” aspect by reconstituting the colonial division of the world by the great powers into a neo-colonial division of the world into spheres of interest and of prevailing economic influence.
Since Ellner correctly acknowledges that Lenin’s economic and political-military aspects are essential to his theory of imperialism, he must contend with an awkward, vexing question that continually divides the left: how does the People’s Republic of China (PRC) fit into the world imperialist system? What does its deep and broad participation in the global market mean?
Ellner appeals to the facts that the PRC does not have bases throughout the world, does not use sanctions (not true!), and does not exploit the excuse of human rights to intervene in the affairs of other countries.
But surely this side steps Nkrumah’s powerful thesis that imperialism in the post-World War II era is not simply the vulgar exercise of administrative and military power and the exhibition of national chauvinism. It is, rather, the division of the world into spheres of interest that both benefit the great powers through exploitation and the competition with other great powers for shares of the bounty.
Certainly, the PRC does not avow a policy of imperial predation, but neither does the US or any other great power from the past. Indeed, imperialism has always been presented-- sincerely or not-- as beneficial to all parties, whether it is a civilizing function, a paternalistic boost, or protection from other powers. The Chinese leadership may well truthfully believe that their trade, investment, and partnership with other countries is a victory for all-- a “win-win” as some like to say.
But that is always the answer that great powers give that are using their capital, their know-how, and their trade to profit their corporations. Perhaps, the most notorious of these “win-win” projects was the Marshall Plan. Sold to Europe as a “win-win” based on Europe’s impoverishment and the US’s generosity, billions were allocated for loans, grants, and investments in Europe. History shows that billions in new business for US corporations were thus created, Cold War political dependency and loyalty were achieved, and the US retained new markets for decades. The big winners, of course, were US corporations and their capital-starved European counterparts.
Other US investment and “aid” projects, like The Alliance for Progress, were more blatantly guided by US interests and even less a “win” for their targets.
This was the era of the development theories of W. W. Rostow that offered a blueprint and a justification for the investment of capital in and the corporate penetration of poorer countries. It was, in fact, a justification for neo-colonialism. Yet Rostow’s stage theory of lifting countries from poverty can appear surprisingly consonant with the logic of the PRC’s foreign investment strategies.
It is hard to resist the temptation to ask: How is this different from the PRC Belt and Road Initiative? How is the BRI different from the Marshall Plan? Or, to use an example from Lenin’s time, the Berlin-Baghdad railroad project?
It is beyond dispute that Peoples’ China-- whatever the goals of its ruling Communist Party-- has a massive capitalist sector, with many corporations arguably of monopoly concentration rivaling their US and European counterparts, that similarly seek investment opportunities for their accumulated capital. That is, after all, the motion of capitalism.
What is baffling and frustrating for those sympathetic to the Communist Party of China is the failure for the CPC’s leaders to frame their economic policies towards other states in the language of class or employ the concept of exploitation. In Comrade Xi’s recent speeches at the Kazan meeting of BRICS+, there are many references to “multilateralism,” “equitable global development,” “security,” “cooperation,” “advancing global governance reform,” “innovation,” “green development,” “harmonious coexistence,” “common prosperity,” and “modernization,” -- all ideas that would resonate with the audience of the G7. How would these values change the class relations of the BRICS+ nations? What does this thinking do to alleviate the exploitation of capitalist corporations?
These are the questions Ellner and others should be asking of the PRC’s leaders and the advocates of BRICS+. These are the questions that probe how today’s nation-states participate in the imperialist system and how that participation affects working people.
The problem is that many on the left would like to believe that there is a form of anti-imperialism that is not anti-capitalist. They find in the BRI and BRICS+ a model that competes with United States imperialism and could be said to be therefore anti-US imperialist, but leaves capitalism intact. Of course, it is impossible to embrace this view and retain Lenin’s theory of imperialism. Every page in the pamphlet, Imperialism, affirms the intimate relation between imperialism and capitalism. The very subtitle-- The Final Stage of Capitalism-- is testimony to that connection.
Ellner suggests that a political case can be made in the US for singling out US imperialism over imperialism, in general. He wants us to believe, through an example of Bernie Sanders’ strategic thinking, that criticizing US foreign policy is far more threatening to the ruling class than Sanders’ “socialism.” That may be true of Sanders’ tepid social democratic posture, but not of any serious “socialist” stance against capitalism and its international face.
We get a taste of Ellner’s vision of the role of BRICS-style anti-imperialism when he conjectures that “Anti-imperialism is one effective way to drive a wedge between the Democratic Party machine and large sectors of the party who are progressive but vote for Democratic candidates as a lesser of two evils.” Rather than take the failed “lesser-of-two-evils” policy head on, rather than contesting the idea of always voting for candidates who are bad, but maybe not as bad as an opponent, the left might instead wean Democrats away from slavish support for the Democratic Party agenda by standing against US foreign policy (which is largely bipartisan!). If trickery and parlor games count as a left strategy within the Democratic Party orbit, maybe it's time to leave that orbit and look to building a third party.
Ellner’s interrogator, Federico Fuentes, correctly questions how making US imperialism the immediate target of the Western left might possibly overshadow or even conflict with the class struggle, the fight for socialism. He opines: “There can be a problem when prioritising US imperialism leads to a kind of ‘lesser evil’ politics in which genuine democratic and worker struggles are not just underrated, but directly opposed on the basis that they weaken the struggle against US imperialism…”
Fuentes and Ellner, in this regard, are fully aware of the recent dispute between the Maduro government and the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV) over the direction of the Bolivarian process, a dispute that resulted in an attempt to eviscerate the PCV on the part of Maduro’s governing party. Because the PCV was opposing the Maduro party in the July, 2024 election, Maduro maneuvered to have the PCV stripped of its identity, securing an endorsement from a bogus PCV constructed of whole cloth by Venezuelan courts.
From the PCV’s perspective, the Maduro government had abandoned the struggle for socialism in deed, if not word, and turned on the working class, compromising Chavismo in order to hold on to power. As a Leninist party, PCV held fast to the view that there is no anti-imperialism without anti-capitalism. Thus, the government’s reversal of many working-class gains had lost working-class support and, therefore, the support of the PCV.
Some Western leftists uncritically support the Maduro government and deny or ignore the facts of the matter. They are delusional. The facts are indisputable. Ellner is not among those denying them.
Still others argue that defense of the Bolivarian process against the machinations of US imperialism should be an unconditional obligation of all progressive Venezuelans, including the Communists. Therefore, the Communists were wrong to not support the government.
But surely this thinking calls for Venezuelan workers to set aside their interests to serve some bourgeois notion of national sovereignty. It is one thing to defend the interests of the workers against the enslavement or exploitation of a foreign power. It is quite another to defend the bourgeois state and its own exploiters without taking exception.
This was the question that workers and their political parties faced on many occasions in the twentieth century: whether they would rally around a flag of national sovereignty when they essentially had little to gain but a fleeting national pride.
As Lenin, Luxemburg, Liebknecht, and their contemporaries argued during the brutal bloodletting of the First World War, workers should refuse to participate in the “anti-imperialism” of national chauvinism, the clash of capitalist states.
The road to defeating imperial aggression-- US or any other-- is to win the working class to the fight, with a class-oriented program that attacks the roots of imperialism: capitalism. Unity around the goal of defeating the imperialist enemy-- in Russia, China, Vietnam, or anywhere else-- was won by siding with workers against capital, not accommodating or compromising with it. That was the message that the Communist Party tried to deliver to the Maduro government.
Restraining, containing, or deflecting US imperialism will not defeat the system of imperialism, anymore than restraining, containing, deflecting, or even overwhelming British imperialism, as occurred in the past, defeated imperialism. Only replacing capitalism with socialism will end imperialism.
That in no way diminishes the day-to-day struggle against US domination. It does, however, mean that the countries participating in the global capitalist market will reinforce the existing imperialist system until they exit capitalism. While there can be an anti-US imperialist coalition among capitalist-based countries, there can be no anti-imperialist coalition made up of countries committed to the capitalist road.
The left must be clear: a multipolar capitalist world has no more chance of escaping the ravages of imperialism than a unipolar capitalist world. If anything, multipolarity multiples and intensifies inter-imperialist rivalry.
Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com
http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/2024/12/som ... today.html
I must disagree with 'zz' on the matter of sovereignty. Sovereignty is a condition in the world on nation states, you have it or you don't. If you don't have it then you are subject to bourgeois masters and real progress is impossible. If you have it then it is possible to progress, not that this is guaranteed. Were US puppets to regain power in Venezuela what progress that has been made, and there's no denying that some has, would be smashed in no time flat. To be sure Maduro was out of line and high handed in his treatment of the PCV. The PCV was I think too harsh in their criticism of the Bolivarian government for it's admitted lack of progress towards socialism. I have voiced the same criticism in the past but have come to realize that such criticism is a bit idealistic given Venezuela's situation with the US. Expropriation, as much as I'd like to see it, would incite overt military intervention by Uncle Satan. And it's one thing for me sitting here to voice criticism, it's another when you are affecting the politics of the country. So Venezuela must walk a tightrope until it has the strength to resist or the danger resides with the power of US imperialism.
It was and to a lesser degree is much the same situation with China. Had China engaged in revolutionary promotion they would have been nuked shortly after the demise of the Soviet Union, which they foresaw decades before. They had no strength to resist but now they do. So they kept the revolution within the country and harnessed capitalism as both horse and shield and that has served them very well. Taming the tiger and then dismounting it are no small challenges and there are no guarantees. The battle against corruption, an inevitable feature of capitalism, is ongoing and requires iron discipline on the part of the Party, which we are seeing, so far. Nonetheless, you got any better ideas that have a ghost's chance of working?
Imperialism is not the creation of any one or of any group of states. It is the product of a particular stage of ripeness in the world development of capital, an innately international condition, an indivisible whole, that is recognizable only in all its relations, and from which no nation can hold aloof at will… Rosa Luxemburg, The Crisis of German Social Democracy (1916)
The arguments embroiling the left on the nature of imperialism, over whether Peoples’ China or Russia is capitalist or imperialist, whether the pink tide in Latin America is a socialist trend, whether the BRICS development is an anti-imperialist movement, and so forth, are becoming more and more heated as they proceed further and further into the academic weeds.
There is a host of issues and positions entangled in these debates, as well as numerous vested interests: deeply felt, long held theories, research platforms, and networks of intellectual allies.
Moreover, these arguments are decidedly one-sided: long on academic opinion, short on working-class or activist participation.
That said, they are important and deserve discussion.
A recent interview of Steve Ellner by Federico Fuentes in LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal is a place to begin to unravel some of these disputes. Now Steve Ellner is neither a surrogate in nor a straw man for this discussion. Ellner is a thoughtful, analytical academic with a long-committed history in the Latin American solidarity movement and with a background on the left. He is more likely to say “X may mean…” rather than “X must mean…” than many of his academic colleagues. That is to say, he is no enemy of nuance.
Ellner begins with Lenin, as he should, and asserts that Lenin’s theory is both “political-military” and “economic.” This, of course, is correct. In Chapter seven of Imperialism, Lenin specifies five characteristics of the imperialist system. Four are economic: the decisive role of monopoly capital, the merging of financial and industrial capital, the export of capital, and the internationalization of monopoly capital. One is political-military: the division of the world between the greatest capitalist powers.
Lenin gives no weight to these characteristics because they are together necessary and sufficient for defining imperialism as a system emerging in the late nineteenth century. Imperialism, for Lenin, is a stage and not a club.
Following John Bellamy Foster, the editor of Monthly Review, Ellner posits that there are two interpretations of imperialism that some believe follow from the two aspects of imperialism. Indeed, there may well be two interpretations, but given Lenin’s unitary interpretation of imperialism in Chapter seven, they are misinterpretations of Lenin’s thought. Recognizing that Lenin explicitly says that he offers a definition “that will embrace the following five essential features…,” there is, perhaps to the dismay of some, only one valid interpretation-- an interpretation that combines the economic with the political-military.
That said, Foster and Ellner are correct in critically appraising those who do misinterpret imperialism as solely political-military (contestation of territories among great powers) or as solely economic (capitalist exploitation). Truly, most of the misunderstandings about imperialism since Lenin’s time come from advocating one misinterpretation rather than the other, while failing to perceive imperialism as a system.
Ellner gently rejects one political-military interpretation that he associates with Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin: equating “imperialism with the political domination of the US empire, backed of course by military power…” Ellner rejects that thesis, “given declining US prestige and global economic instability.” An interpretation that separates and privileges the political-military from the economic necessarily decouples imperialism from capitalism-- something that Lenin explicitly denies. Accordingly, it follows that modern-day imperialism-- including US imperialism-- would be akin to the adventures of Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan, leaving exploitation as, at best, a contingent feature.
A solely political-military explanation of imperialism is a step removed from the more robust Leninist explanation.
Ellner considers the economic interpretation: “At the other extreme are those left theorists who focus on the dominance of global capital and minimize the importance of the nation-state.” Ellner has in mind as his immediate target the position staked out by William I Robinson, Jerry Harris, and others in the late 1990s, a position that rides the then-dramatic wave of globalization to posit a supremely powerful Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC) that overshadows, even renders obsolete, the nation-state.
At the time, others pointed out that the substantial quantitative changes in trade and investment and their global sweep had been seen before and were simply a repeat of the past, most telling in the decades before the first world war. Were these changes not a continuation of the qualitative changes addressed in Lenin’s Imperialism?
Like many speculations that overshoot the evidence, the projected decline or death of the nation-state was made irrelevant by the march of history. The many endless and expanding wars of the twenty-first century underscored the vitality of the nation-state as an historical actor. And the intense economic nationalism spawned by the economic crises of recent decades signals the demise of globalization-- a phenomenon that proved to be a phase and not a new stage of capitalism. Sanctions and tariffs are the mark of robust, aggressive nation-states.
The tempest in an academic teapot stirred by the artificial separation of the economic and the political-military in Lenin’s theory of imperialism is enabled by lack of clarity about the nature of the state. Left thinkers, especially in the Anglophone world, have neglected or derided the Leninist concept of State-Monopoly Capitalism-- the process of fusion between the state and the influence and interests of monopoly capitalism-- which explains exactly how and why the nation-state functions today in the energy wars between Russia and the US and the technology wars between Peoples’ China (e.g., Huawei) and the US. Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran’s casual dismissal of the concept of State-Monopoly Capitalism in Monopoly Capital (1966) is representative of the utter contempt shown for Communist research projects by many so-called “Western Marxists.” While the theory of State-Monopoly Capitalism gets no hearing among Marxist academics, the slippery, but ominous-sounding concept of “deep state” has achieved wide-spread acceptance, while not taxing the comfort of Western intellectuals.
Nonetheless, Robinson’s stress on the political economy of imperialism cannot easily be dismissed. His reliance on the key concepts of class and exploitation are certainly essential to Lenin’s theory.
In fact, the greatest challenge to the political-military aspect of Lenin’s theory was not the alleged decline of the nation-state, but the demise of the colonial system, especially with the wide-spread independence movements after World War II. The crude and totalizing domination of weaker nations favored by the Spanish, French, Portuguese, and British Empires-- the division of the world into administered colonies-- was, with nominal independence, replaced by a system of more benign economic domination. Kwame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian revolutionary, designated this system “neo-colonialism” in his book, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Nkrumah’s elaboration of Lenin’s theory preserved the integrity of Lenin’s “political-military” aspect by reconstituting the colonial division of the world by the great powers into a neo-colonial division of the world into spheres of interest and of prevailing economic influence.
Since Ellner correctly acknowledges that Lenin’s economic and political-military aspects are essential to his theory of imperialism, he must contend with an awkward, vexing question that continually divides the left: how does the People’s Republic of China (PRC) fit into the world imperialist system? What does its deep and broad participation in the global market mean?
Ellner appeals to the facts that the PRC does not have bases throughout the world, does not use sanctions (not true!), and does not exploit the excuse of human rights to intervene in the affairs of other countries.
But surely this side steps Nkrumah’s powerful thesis that imperialism in the post-World War II era is not simply the vulgar exercise of administrative and military power and the exhibition of national chauvinism. It is, rather, the division of the world into spheres of interest that both benefit the great powers through exploitation and the competition with other great powers for shares of the bounty.
Certainly, the PRC does not avow a policy of imperial predation, but neither does the US or any other great power from the past. Indeed, imperialism has always been presented-- sincerely or not-- as beneficial to all parties, whether it is a civilizing function, a paternalistic boost, or protection from other powers. The Chinese leadership may well truthfully believe that their trade, investment, and partnership with other countries is a victory for all-- a “win-win” as some like to say.
But that is always the answer that great powers give that are using their capital, their know-how, and their trade to profit their corporations. Perhaps, the most notorious of these “win-win” projects was the Marshall Plan. Sold to Europe as a “win-win” based on Europe’s impoverishment and the US’s generosity, billions were allocated for loans, grants, and investments in Europe. History shows that billions in new business for US corporations were thus created, Cold War political dependency and loyalty were achieved, and the US retained new markets for decades. The big winners, of course, were US corporations and their capital-starved European counterparts.
Other US investment and “aid” projects, like The Alliance for Progress, were more blatantly guided by US interests and even less a “win” for their targets.
This was the era of the development theories of W. W. Rostow that offered a blueprint and a justification for the investment of capital in and the corporate penetration of poorer countries. It was, in fact, a justification for neo-colonialism. Yet Rostow’s stage theory of lifting countries from poverty can appear surprisingly consonant with the logic of the PRC’s foreign investment strategies.
It is hard to resist the temptation to ask: How is this different from the PRC Belt and Road Initiative? How is the BRI different from the Marshall Plan? Or, to use an example from Lenin’s time, the Berlin-Baghdad railroad project?
It is beyond dispute that Peoples’ China-- whatever the goals of its ruling Communist Party-- has a massive capitalist sector, with many corporations arguably of monopoly concentration rivaling their US and European counterparts, that similarly seek investment opportunities for their accumulated capital. That is, after all, the motion of capitalism.
What is baffling and frustrating for those sympathetic to the Communist Party of China is the failure for the CPC’s leaders to frame their economic policies towards other states in the language of class or employ the concept of exploitation. In Comrade Xi’s recent speeches at the Kazan meeting of BRICS+, there are many references to “multilateralism,” “equitable global development,” “security,” “cooperation,” “advancing global governance reform,” “innovation,” “green development,” “harmonious coexistence,” “common prosperity,” and “modernization,” -- all ideas that would resonate with the audience of the G7. How would these values change the class relations of the BRICS+ nations? What does this thinking do to alleviate the exploitation of capitalist corporations?
These are the questions Ellner and others should be asking of the PRC’s leaders and the advocates of BRICS+. These are the questions that probe how today’s nation-states participate in the imperialist system and how that participation affects working people.
The problem is that many on the left would like to believe that there is a form of anti-imperialism that is not anti-capitalist. They find in the BRI and BRICS+ a model that competes with United States imperialism and could be said to be therefore anti-US imperialist, but leaves capitalism intact. Of course, it is impossible to embrace this view and retain Lenin’s theory of imperialism. Every page in the pamphlet, Imperialism, affirms the intimate relation between imperialism and capitalism. The very subtitle-- The Final Stage of Capitalism-- is testimony to that connection.
Ellner suggests that a political case can be made in the US for singling out US imperialism over imperialism, in general. He wants us to believe, through an example of Bernie Sanders’ strategic thinking, that criticizing US foreign policy is far more threatening to the ruling class than Sanders’ “socialism.” That may be true of Sanders’ tepid social democratic posture, but not of any serious “socialist” stance against capitalism and its international face.
We get a taste of Ellner’s vision of the role of BRICS-style anti-imperialism when he conjectures that “Anti-imperialism is one effective way to drive a wedge between the Democratic Party machine and large sectors of the party who are progressive but vote for Democratic candidates as a lesser of two evils.” Rather than take the failed “lesser-of-two-evils” policy head on, rather than contesting the idea of always voting for candidates who are bad, but maybe not as bad as an opponent, the left might instead wean Democrats away from slavish support for the Democratic Party agenda by standing against US foreign policy (which is largely bipartisan!). If trickery and parlor games count as a left strategy within the Democratic Party orbit, maybe it's time to leave that orbit and look to building a third party.
Ellner’s interrogator, Federico Fuentes, correctly questions how making US imperialism the immediate target of the Western left might possibly overshadow or even conflict with the class struggle, the fight for socialism. He opines: “There can be a problem when prioritising US imperialism leads to a kind of ‘lesser evil’ politics in which genuine democratic and worker struggles are not just underrated, but directly opposed on the basis that they weaken the struggle against US imperialism…”
Fuentes and Ellner, in this regard, are fully aware of the recent dispute between the Maduro government and the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV) over the direction of the Bolivarian process, a dispute that resulted in an attempt to eviscerate the PCV on the part of Maduro’s governing party. Because the PCV was opposing the Maduro party in the July, 2024 election, Maduro maneuvered to have the PCV stripped of its identity, securing an endorsement from a bogus PCV constructed of whole cloth by Venezuelan courts.
From the PCV’s perspective, the Maduro government had abandoned the struggle for socialism in deed, if not word, and turned on the working class, compromising Chavismo in order to hold on to power. As a Leninist party, PCV held fast to the view that there is no anti-imperialism without anti-capitalism. Thus, the government’s reversal of many working-class gains had lost working-class support and, therefore, the support of the PCV.
Some Western leftists uncritically support the Maduro government and deny or ignore the facts of the matter. They are delusional. The facts are indisputable. Ellner is not among those denying them.
Still others argue that defense of the Bolivarian process against the machinations of US imperialism should be an unconditional obligation of all progressive Venezuelans, including the Communists. Therefore, the Communists were wrong to not support the government.
But surely this thinking calls for Venezuelan workers to set aside their interests to serve some bourgeois notion of national sovereignty. It is one thing to defend the interests of the workers against the enslavement or exploitation of a foreign power. It is quite another to defend the bourgeois state and its own exploiters without taking exception.
This was the question that workers and their political parties faced on many occasions in the twentieth century: whether they would rally around a flag of national sovereignty when they essentially had little to gain but a fleeting national pride.
As Lenin, Luxemburg, Liebknecht, and their contemporaries argued during the brutal bloodletting of the First World War, workers should refuse to participate in the “anti-imperialism” of national chauvinism, the clash of capitalist states.
The road to defeating imperial aggression-- US or any other-- is to win the working class to the fight, with a class-oriented program that attacks the roots of imperialism: capitalism. Unity around the goal of defeating the imperialist enemy-- in Russia, China, Vietnam, or anywhere else-- was won by siding with workers against capital, not accommodating or compromising with it. That was the message that the Communist Party tried to deliver to the Maduro government.
Restraining, containing, or deflecting US imperialism will not defeat the system of imperialism, anymore than restraining, containing, deflecting, or even overwhelming British imperialism, as occurred in the past, defeated imperialism. Only replacing capitalism with socialism will end imperialism.
That in no way diminishes the day-to-day struggle against US domination. It does, however, mean that the countries participating in the global capitalist market will reinforce the existing imperialist system until they exit capitalism. While there can be an anti-US imperialist coalition among capitalist-based countries, there can be no anti-imperialist coalition made up of countries committed to the capitalist road.
The left must be clear: a multipolar capitalist world has no more chance of escaping the ravages of imperialism than a unipolar capitalist world. If anything, multipolarity multiples and intensifies inter-imperialist rivalry.
Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com
http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/2024/12/som ... today.html
I must disagree with 'zz' on the matter of sovereignty. Sovereignty is a condition in the world on nation states, you have it or you don't. If you don't have it then you are subject to bourgeois masters and real progress is impossible. If you have it then it is possible to progress, not that this is guaranteed. Were US puppets to regain power in Venezuela what progress that has been made, and there's no denying that some has, would be smashed in no time flat. To be sure Maduro was out of line and high handed in his treatment of the PCV. The PCV was I think too harsh in their criticism of the Bolivarian government for it's admitted lack of progress towards socialism. I have voiced the same criticism in the past but have come to realize that such criticism is a bit idealistic given Venezuela's situation with the US. Expropriation, as much as I'd like to see it, would incite overt military intervention by Uncle Satan. And it's one thing for me sitting here to voice criticism, it's another when you are affecting the politics of the country. So Venezuela must walk a tightrope until it has the strength to resist or the danger resides with the power of US imperialism.
It was and to a lesser degree is much the same situation with China. Had China engaged in revolutionary promotion they would have been nuked shortly after the demise of the Soviet Union, which they foresaw decades before. They had no strength to resist but now they do. So they kept the revolution within the country and harnessed capitalism as both horse and shield and that has served them very well. Taming the tiger and then dismounting it are no small challenges and there are no guarantees. The battle against corruption, an inevitable feature of capitalism, is ongoing and requires iron discipline on the part of the Party, which we are seeing, so far. Nonetheless, you got any better ideas that have a ghost's chance of working?
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Ideology
Communists and the struggle against imperialism
In the present era of crisis and war, our movement must return to and unite around the profound truths contained within the works of our movement's founders.
Proletarian writers
Saturday 1 October 2011
Chinese poster from the 1960s reads: 'Long live the victory of the people's war!'
The most cursory glance at the contemporary international situation shows that imperialism’s inherent tendency to wage wars of aggression has not in any way disappeared. If anything it has become enhanced, notably after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist countries of central and eastern Europe, since when we have seen numerous wars of colonial reconquest, such as those against Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and, most recently, Libya.
Moreover, faced with what is emerging as the gravest economic crisis in the history of capitalism, the pace and intensity of imperialism’s inexorable drive to war is increasing yet further. The imperialist powers are presently at war in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. They are also waging unofficial and proxy wars in Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen and other countries. They are abetting and bankrolling the Israeli zionists’ war against the Palestinian people. This year they have also waged war against the Ivory Coast. And the list continues.
Even with war already raging on so many fronts, a further war is now being prepared against Syria, the danger of which grows with each passing day. Syria, in turn, is seen as a stepping stone to an attack on Iran … and so on. Just as the wars of the 1930s, waged by the fascist powers against Spain, China, Korea, Albania and Ethiopia, paved the way for an attack on the socialist Soviet Union and an all-out world war, so today the imperialists’ ultimate target is the People’s Republic of China, a conflict which, if it came, would once again plunge the whole of humanity into the abyss of war.
Response of the communist movement to imperialist expansionism
Our party, the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), has taken a consistent position on all this warmongering activity of the imperialist powers – a position of absolute and implacable opposition to every aspect of all the wars prepared, instigated and waged by imperialism. And we have called for the victory of all those fighting against imperialism, irrespective of who they are, their social composition or the nature of their programme.
Sadly, this clear and straightforward position is far from universally accepted in the working-class or antiwar movements, whether in this country or elsewhere. Indeed, the scoundrels who dominate the leadership of the Stop the War Coalition have attempted to bureaucratically expel us for daring to express our unequivocal support for the government of Libya, whose overthrow was the objective of the vicious and predatory war waged by Nato and our own ruling class against the Libyan people. Such people are incorrigible counter-revolutionaries, heirs, in the main, to a bankrupt ideology, Trotskyism, which has betrayed and sabotaged every revolutionary movement to which it has come within sniffing distance since it first emerged as a discernible political trend in the 1920s.
However, the job of extirpating this counter-revolutionary filth from whatever toehold they might gain within the working-class movement would be made immeasurably easier if the whole communist movement was united around a clear and principled line. Sadly, this, too, is far from the case.
Around the world, there are a number of basically decent communist parties, some of them with deep roots amongst the working people, many of which are leading and waging principled and courageous struggles for socialism, yet who nevertheless fail to take a consistent anti-imperialist stand. Such parties have, for example, prevaricated in the face of the war against Libya, just as they did in the case of Iraq before, claiming that they could not give unequivocal support to such national-revolutionary leaders as Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, as they were not communists.
Moreover, they have followed the imperialist media’s lead in maligning these leaders as ‘brutal dictators’ when in fact imperialism’s objection to them is that they directed their countries’ resources to developing infrastructure and industry, to lifting their peoples out of poverty, and also supported anti-imperialist struggles in all parts of the world. They died as heroes and martyrs leading their peoples’ struggles against imperialism for sovereignty, independence and control of their national resources for the benefit of ordinary people. Indeed, in these respects, they set examples that many communists could do well to emulate.
Some communist parties, in both Latin America and Europe, have also striven to find fault with and to slight the revolutionary governments of Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, which are presently seeking ways to open a road to socialism in their countries.
Such mistakes and incorrect stands on the part of those who should be guiding the masses have served to weaken both the anti-imperialist struggle and the struggle for socialism, whose essential unity is encapsulated in the slogan advanced by Lenin and the Communist International (Comintern) long ago: “Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!”
And, since they weaken the struggle of the working and oppressed people, these positions run counter to Marxism-Leninism.
Marxism-Leninism contains a rich body of theory concerning the anti-imperialist national struggles of oppressed peoples, and the attitude that the proletariat should take towards them. This rich body of theory has been derived from the struggles of working and oppressed people around the world, and has been enriched and developed with their blood, making it a sacred and priceless inheritance of our movement.
With imperialism’s drive to war becoming ever more frenzied, the international communist movement needs to reaffirm and hold fast to these teachings. If such a vital outcome can be secured then both the anti-imperialist struggles of the oppressed nations and peoples and the proletariat’s struggle for socialism will surely take a great leap forward.
The purpose of this article, therefore, is to make a modest contribution to that understanding and rectification by highlighting what is the principled revolutionary position on a number of related questions where presently sections of the communist movement are confused and disoriented, based on some key writings of the five greatest leaders and teachers of the working and oppressed people of the whole world: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, VI Lenin, JV Stalin and Mao Zedong.
Tenets of Marxist-Leninist science
Our starting point is that the communist movement is, and has been from its inception, an international one. In the founding document of our movement, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx and Engels wrote:
“The communists are distinguished from the other working class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.” (1848)
As we have noted above, there are still some comrades and parties in the communist ranks who pull back from unequivocal support for the anti-imperialist struggle on the grounds that some leaders of that struggle are ‘bourgeois’. Such a position runs completely counter to that of Lenin, one for which the founder of the first workers’ state in history fought with all his might.
Lenin insisted that “all communist parties must assist the bourgeois-democratic liberation movement in these [oppressed] countries, and that the duty of rendering the most active assistance rests primarily with the workers of the country the backward nation is colonially or financially dependent on”. (Draft theses on national and colonial questions for the Second Congress of the Communist International, 5 June 1920)
In the ensuing debate at that congress, Lenin further explained:
“What is the most important, the fundamental idea of our theses? It is the difference between the oppressed and the oppressor nations … Imperialism is characterised by the fact that the whole world is now divided into a large number of oppressed nations and a very small number of oppressor nations that are enormously rich and strong in the military sense.
“The enormous mass, more than 1,000 million, most probably 1,250 million, and thus if we estimate the population of the world at 1,750 million some 70 percent of the world population belong to the oppressed nations, which are either in direct colonial dependence, or appear as semi-colonial states like, for example, Persia, Turkey and China, or which, defeated by a great imperialist army, have fallen into marked dependency after the peace treaties.
“This idea of the difference between nations, their division into the oppressed and the oppressors runs through all the theses.” (Minutes of the Second Congress of the Communist International, Fourth Session, 25 July 1920)
This approach was further spelled out in the Theses on the eastern question adopted by the Comintern’s fourth congress in December 1922. Here, the Bolsheviks explained: “The refusal of communists … to take part in the fight against imperialist tyranny, on the pretext of their supposed ‘defence’ of independent class interests, is the worst kind of opportunism and can only discredit the proletarian revolution in the east.”
But to listen to some communist parties today, one could be forgiven for thinking that the working-class position is only to support those uprisings and rebellions against imperialism that are clear in their goals and composition, and free of contradictions. Such a view was ridiculed by Lenin, who rounded on the ‘socialist’ critics of Dublin’s Easter Rising of 1916 as follows:
“To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices, without a movement of the politically non-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against oppression by the landowners, the church, and the monarchy, against national oppression, etc – to imagine all this is to repudiate social revolution.
“So one army lines up in one place and says, ‘We are for socialism,’ and another, somewhere else and says, ‘We are for imperialism,’ and that will be a social revolution! Only those who hold such a ridiculously pedantic view could vilify the Irish rebellion by calling it a ‘putsch’.
“Whoever expects a ‘pure’ social revolution will never live to see it. Such a person pays lip service to revolution without understanding what revolution is.” (The discussion on self-determination summed up, July 1916)
Nor did Lenin subscribe to the view that the anti-imperialist struggle of the oppressed occupied a secondary, subordinate position to that waged by the proletariat in the imperialist heartlands. On the contrary, he stated:
“The socialist revolution will not be solely, or chiefly, a struggle of the revolutionary proletarians in each country against their bourgeoisie – no, it will be a struggle of all the imperialist-oppressed colonies and countries, of all dependent countries, against international imperialism. Characterising the approach of the world social revolution in the party programme we adopted last March, we said that the civil war of the working people against the imperialists and exploiters in all the advanced countries is beginning to be combined with national wars against international imperialism. That is confirmed by the course of the revolution, and will be more and more confirmed as time goes on.” (Address to the second all-Russia congress of communist organisations of the peoples of the east, 22 November 1919)
In one of his last articles, Lenin went so far as to state:
“In the last analysis, the outcome of the struggle will be determined by the fact that Russia, India, China, etc, account for the overwhelming majority of the population of the globe. And during the past few years it is this majority that has been drawn into the struggle for emancipation with extraordinary rapidity, so that in this respect there cannot be the slightest doubt what the final outcome of the world struggle will be. In this sense, the complete victory of socialism is fully and absolutely assured.” (Better fewer, but better, 2 March 1923)
As with so many aspects of his work, these teachings of Lenin’s were based on, and developed, the pioneering work of the founders of our movement, Marx and Engels. In The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, Lenin wrote:
“The policy of Marx and Engels on the Irish question serves as a splendid example of the attitude the proletariat of the oppressor nations should adopt towards national movements, an example which has lost none of its immense practical importance.” (May 1914)
Indeed, a brief review of Marx and Engels’ policy on the Irish question demonstrates that this observation of Lenin’s remains as true today as when he wrote it in 1914.
For Marx and Engels, resolute support for the struggle of the Irish people was not only a matter of justice for Ireland, but also something that was in the absolute and essential interest of the British working class.
On 9 April 1870, Marx wrote to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt as follows:
“After studying the Irish question for many years, I have come to the conclusion that the decisive blow against the English ruling classes (and it will be decisive for the workers’ movement all over the world) cannot be delivered in England but only in Ireland.”
On 11 December 1869, Marx wrote to Engels that his paper on the Irish question, to be read at the council of the First International, would be couched as follows:
“Quite apart from all phrases about ‘international’ and ‘humane’ justice for Ireland – which are taken for granted in the International Council – it is in the direct and absolute interest of the English working class to get rid of their present connection with Ireland. And this is my fullest conviction … For a long time I believed that it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working-class ascendancy … Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never accomplish anything until it has got rid of Ireland … English reaction in England had its roots in the subjugation of Ireland.” (Cited in The right of nations to self-determination by VI Lenin, op cit)
Marx therefore held to his view of the importance and necessity of supporting the Irish people’s fight against British rule, irrespective of the forms of struggle adopted or the character of the leadership at any particular time. Yet in contrast to some of his latter-day would-be followers, he did not look at the movement seeking to find what was backward or reactionary but rather to identify its essentially progressive nature. Thus, on 30 November 1867, Marx wrote to Engels that:
“Fenianism is characterised by socialist (in the negative sense, as directed against the appropriation of the soil) leanings and as a lower orders movement.”
This profound characterisation by Marx finds its broad analogy in many contemporary national-revolutionary movements, including those that held state power in Libya and Iraq until they were destroyed in genocidal imperialist wars of aggression.
But, even though too many communists fail to support anti-imperialist movements that have a clearly progressive social character and content, as was the case with the former governments of Iraq and Libya, along with a host of national-liberation movements from the Sandinistas in Nicaragua to the Irish republican movement, it is essential to grasp that the sole deciding question is not whether the movement in question has such a character, but whether a country, a party, a movement, or a leader is fighting against imperialism.
Everything else is subordinate to that overriding principle, including other democratic questions and rights, which again, too many communists raise (and not just where such problems exist but even where they do not) as a pretext for failing to support the anti-imperialist struggle. The genuine communist standpoint on this question was articulated with absolute clarity by J V Stalin as follows:
“The revolutionary character of a national movement under the conditions of imperialist oppression does not necessarily presuppose the existence of proletarian elements in the movement, the existence of a revolutionary or a republican programme of the movement, the existence of a democratic basis of the movement. The struggle that the Emir of Afghanistan is waging for the independence of Afghanistan is objectively a revolutionary struggle, despite the monarchist views of the Emir and his associates, for it weakens, disintegrates and undermines imperialism; whereas the struggle waged by such ‘desperate’ democrats and ‘socialists’, ‘revolutionaries’ and republicans as, for example, Kerensky and Tsereteli, Renaudel and Scheidemann, Chernov and Dan, Henderson and Clynes, during the imperialist war was a reactionary struggle, for its results were the embellishment, the strengthening, the victory, of imperialism.
“For the same reasons, the struggle that the Egyptian merchants and bourgeois intellectuals are waging for the independence of Egypt is objectively a revolutionary struggle, despite the bourgeois origin and bourgeois title of the leaders of the Egyptian national movement, despite the fact that they are opposed to socialism; whereas the struggle that the British ‘Labour’ government is waging to preserve Egypt’s dependent position is for the same reason a reactionary struggle, despite the proletarian origin and the proletarian title of the members of the government, despite the fact that they are ‘for’ socialism.
“There is no need to mention the national movement in other, larger, colonial and dependent countries, such as India and China, every step of which along the road to liberation, even if it runs counter to the demands of formal democracy, is a steam-hammer blow at imperialism, ie, is undoubtedly a revolutionary step.” (Foundations of Leninism, 1924)
This Marxist-Leninist understanding was brilliantly applied and further developed by Mao Zedong, who, on this basis, led the Chinese revolution to victory – the second greatest victory of the working class after the October revolution. Writing in January 1940, in the midst of the bitter war against Japanese imperialism, in which he had skilfully constructed a united front with Chiang Kai-shek, despite the fact that Chiang really was a butcher of communists, workers and peasants, Mao stated:
“In this era, any revolution in a colony or semi-colony that is directed against imperialism, ie, against the international bourgeoisie or international capitalism, no longer comes within the old category of the bourgeois-democratic world revolution, but within the new category. It is no longer part of the old bourgeois, or capitalist, world revolution, but is part of the new world revolution, the proletarian-socialist world revolution. Such revolutionary colonies and semi-colonies can no longer be regarded as allies of the counter-revolutionary front of world capitalism; they have become allies of the revolutionary front of world socialism.
“Although such a revolution in a colonial and semi-colonial country is still fundamentally bourgeois-democratic in its social character during its first stage or first step, and although its objective mission is to clear the path for the development of capitalism, it is no longer a revolution of the old type led by the bourgeoisie with the aim of establishing a capitalist society and a state under bourgeois dictatorship. It belongs to the new type of revolution led by the proletariat with the aim, in the first stage, of establishing a new democratic society and a state under the joint dictatorship of all the revolutionary classes.
“Thus this revolution actually serves the purpose of clearing a still wider path for the development of socialism. In the course of its progress, there may be a number of further sub-stages, because of changes on the enemy’s side and within the ranks of our allies, but the fundamental character of the revolution remains unchanged.
“Such a revolution attacks imperialism at its very roots, and is therefore not tolerated but opposed by imperialism. However, it is favoured by socialism and supported by the land of socialism and the socialist international proletariat …
“No matter what classes, parties or individuals in an oppressed nation join the revolution, and no matter whether they themselves are conscious of the point or understand it, so long as they oppose imperialism, their revolution becomes part of the proletarian socialist world revolution and they become its allies.”(On New Democracy, emphasis added)
Comrade Mao Zedong had no time for those who rejected the united front against imperialism. In On tactics against Japanese imperialism, he wrote, in words that apply equally to today’s anti-imperialist struggles:
“Comrades, which is right, the united front or closed-doorism? Which indeed is approved by Marxism-Leninism? I answer without the slightest hesitation – the united front and not closed-doorism. Three-year-olds have many ideas that are right, but they cannot be entrusted with serious national or world affairs because they do not understand them yet. Marxism-Leninism is opposed to the ‘infantile disorder’ found in the revolutionary ranks. This infantile disorder is just what the confirmed exponents of closed-doorism advocate.
“Like every other activity in the world, revolution always follows a tortuous road and never a straight one. The alignment of forces in the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary camps can change, just as everything else in the world changes. The party’s new tactics of a broad united front start from the two fundamental facts that Japanese imperialism is bent on reducing all China to a colony and that China’s revolutionary forces still have serious weaknesses. In order to attack the forces of the counter-revolution, what the revolutionary forces need today is to organise millions upon millions of the masses and move a mighty revolutionary army into action.
“The plain truth is that only a force of such magnitude can crush the Japanese imperialists and the traitors and collaborators. Therefore, united-front tactics are the only Marxist-Leninist tactics. The tactics of closed-doorism are, on the contrary, the tactics of the regal isolationist. Closed-doorism just ‘drives the fish into deep waters and the sparrows into the thickets’, and it will drive the millions upon millions of the masses, this mighty army, over to the enemy’s side, which will certainly win his acclaim.
“In practice, closed-doorism is the faithful servant of the Japanese imperialists and the traitors and collaborators. Its adherents’ talk of the ‘pure’ and the ‘straight’ will be condemned by Marxist-Leninists and commended by the Japanese imperialists. We definitely want no closed-doorism; what we want is the revolutionary national united front, which will spell death to the Japanese imperialists and the traitors and collaborators.” (27 December 1935)
Revolutionary and counter-revolutionary patriotism
Yet another mistake made by some communists is to excoriate the leaders of the anti-imperialist movement for their patriotism and national standpoint as though this were some sort of crime against the supposed purity of the revolution, rather than a basis of their struggle and a prerequisite of their victory. Marxism-Leninism holds that there are, in fact, two types of patriotism, two types of nationalism, that of an oppressor nation, which is reactionary and unjust and that of an oppressed nation, which is progressive, just and revolutionary.
In The role of the Chinese Communist party in the national war, Mao Zedong addressed this question as follows:
“Can a communist, who is an internationalist, at the same time be a patriot? We hold that he not only can be but must be. The specific content of patriotism is determined by historical conditions. There is the ‘patriotism’ of the Japanese aggressors and of Hitler, and there is our patriotism.
“Communists must resolutely oppose the ‘patriotism’ of the Japanese aggressors and of Hitler. The communists of Japan and Germany are defeatists with regard to the wars being waged by their countries. To bring about the defeat of the Japanese aggressors and of Hitler by every possible means is in the interests of the Japanese and the German people, and the more complete the defeat the better. This is what the Japanese and German communists should be doing and what they are doing. For the wars launched by the Japanese aggressors and Hitler are harming their own people as well as the people of the world.
“China’s case is different, because she is the victim of aggression. Chinese communists must therefore combine patriotism with internationalism. We are at once internationalists and patriots, and our slogan is, ‘Fight to defend the motherland against the aggressors’. For us, defeatism is a crime and to strive for victory in the War of Resistance is an inescapable duty. For only by fighting in defence of the motherland can we defeat the aggressors and achieve national liberation. And only by achieving national liberation will it be possible for the proletariat and other working people to achieve their own emancipation.
“The victory of China and the defeat of the invading imperialists will help the people of other countries. Thus in wars of national liberation patriotism is applied internationalism.” (October 1938, emphasis added)
Mao’s standpoint here is identical with that of Engels, who in 1882, wrote to Karl Kautsky that:
“I therefore hold the view that two nations in Europe have not only the right but even the duty to be nationalistic before they become internationalistic: the Irish and the Poles. They are most internationalistic when they are genuinely nationalistic.” (Letter to Karl Kautsky by F Engels, 7 February 1882)
Marxism-Leninism is not a dogma but a guide to action. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao, the great revolutionary teachers, laid out with complete clarity the attitude of the revolutionary proletariat to the struggle against imperialism and towards the national movements of the oppressed. With imperialism convulsed with crisis and hurtling towards new and ever more dangerous wars of aggression, the work of reuniting and reinvigorating the entire international communist movement on this principled and revolutionary basis is one which will brook no further delay.
Uphold the revolutionary teachings and example of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao!
Victory to the resistance in Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq!
Victory to all oppressed peoples fighting against imperialism!
Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!
https://thecommunists.org/2011/10/01/ne ... perialism/
In the present era of crisis and war, our movement must return to and unite around the profound truths contained within the works of our movement's founders.
Proletarian writers
Saturday 1 October 2011
Chinese poster from the 1960s reads: 'Long live the victory of the people's war!'
The most cursory glance at the contemporary international situation shows that imperialism’s inherent tendency to wage wars of aggression has not in any way disappeared. If anything it has become enhanced, notably after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist countries of central and eastern Europe, since when we have seen numerous wars of colonial reconquest, such as those against Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and, most recently, Libya.
Moreover, faced with what is emerging as the gravest economic crisis in the history of capitalism, the pace and intensity of imperialism’s inexorable drive to war is increasing yet further. The imperialist powers are presently at war in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. They are also waging unofficial and proxy wars in Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen and other countries. They are abetting and bankrolling the Israeli zionists’ war against the Palestinian people. This year they have also waged war against the Ivory Coast. And the list continues.
Even with war already raging on so many fronts, a further war is now being prepared against Syria, the danger of which grows with each passing day. Syria, in turn, is seen as a stepping stone to an attack on Iran … and so on. Just as the wars of the 1930s, waged by the fascist powers against Spain, China, Korea, Albania and Ethiopia, paved the way for an attack on the socialist Soviet Union and an all-out world war, so today the imperialists’ ultimate target is the People’s Republic of China, a conflict which, if it came, would once again plunge the whole of humanity into the abyss of war.
Response of the communist movement to imperialist expansionism
Our party, the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), has taken a consistent position on all this warmongering activity of the imperialist powers – a position of absolute and implacable opposition to every aspect of all the wars prepared, instigated and waged by imperialism. And we have called for the victory of all those fighting against imperialism, irrespective of who they are, their social composition or the nature of their programme.
Sadly, this clear and straightforward position is far from universally accepted in the working-class or antiwar movements, whether in this country or elsewhere. Indeed, the scoundrels who dominate the leadership of the Stop the War Coalition have attempted to bureaucratically expel us for daring to express our unequivocal support for the government of Libya, whose overthrow was the objective of the vicious and predatory war waged by Nato and our own ruling class against the Libyan people. Such people are incorrigible counter-revolutionaries, heirs, in the main, to a bankrupt ideology, Trotskyism, which has betrayed and sabotaged every revolutionary movement to which it has come within sniffing distance since it first emerged as a discernible political trend in the 1920s.
However, the job of extirpating this counter-revolutionary filth from whatever toehold they might gain within the working-class movement would be made immeasurably easier if the whole communist movement was united around a clear and principled line. Sadly, this, too, is far from the case.
Around the world, there are a number of basically decent communist parties, some of them with deep roots amongst the working people, many of which are leading and waging principled and courageous struggles for socialism, yet who nevertheless fail to take a consistent anti-imperialist stand. Such parties have, for example, prevaricated in the face of the war against Libya, just as they did in the case of Iraq before, claiming that they could not give unequivocal support to such national-revolutionary leaders as Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, as they were not communists.
Moreover, they have followed the imperialist media’s lead in maligning these leaders as ‘brutal dictators’ when in fact imperialism’s objection to them is that they directed their countries’ resources to developing infrastructure and industry, to lifting their peoples out of poverty, and also supported anti-imperialist struggles in all parts of the world. They died as heroes and martyrs leading their peoples’ struggles against imperialism for sovereignty, independence and control of their national resources for the benefit of ordinary people. Indeed, in these respects, they set examples that many communists could do well to emulate.
Some communist parties, in both Latin America and Europe, have also striven to find fault with and to slight the revolutionary governments of Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, which are presently seeking ways to open a road to socialism in their countries.
Such mistakes and incorrect stands on the part of those who should be guiding the masses have served to weaken both the anti-imperialist struggle and the struggle for socialism, whose essential unity is encapsulated in the slogan advanced by Lenin and the Communist International (Comintern) long ago: “Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!”
And, since they weaken the struggle of the working and oppressed people, these positions run counter to Marxism-Leninism.
Marxism-Leninism contains a rich body of theory concerning the anti-imperialist national struggles of oppressed peoples, and the attitude that the proletariat should take towards them. This rich body of theory has been derived from the struggles of working and oppressed people around the world, and has been enriched and developed with their blood, making it a sacred and priceless inheritance of our movement.
With imperialism’s drive to war becoming ever more frenzied, the international communist movement needs to reaffirm and hold fast to these teachings. If such a vital outcome can be secured then both the anti-imperialist struggles of the oppressed nations and peoples and the proletariat’s struggle for socialism will surely take a great leap forward.
The purpose of this article, therefore, is to make a modest contribution to that understanding and rectification by highlighting what is the principled revolutionary position on a number of related questions where presently sections of the communist movement are confused and disoriented, based on some key writings of the five greatest leaders and teachers of the working and oppressed people of the whole world: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, VI Lenin, JV Stalin and Mao Zedong.
Tenets of Marxist-Leninist science
Our starting point is that the communist movement is, and has been from its inception, an international one. In the founding document of our movement, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx and Engels wrote:
“The communists are distinguished from the other working class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.” (1848)
As we have noted above, there are still some comrades and parties in the communist ranks who pull back from unequivocal support for the anti-imperialist struggle on the grounds that some leaders of that struggle are ‘bourgeois’. Such a position runs completely counter to that of Lenin, one for which the founder of the first workers’ state in history fought with all his might.
Lenin insisted that “all communist parties must assist the bourgeois-democratic liberation movement in these [oppressed] countries, and that the duty of rendering the most active assistance rests primarily with the workers of the country the backward nation is colonially or financially dependent on”. (Draft theses on national and colonial questions for the Second Congress of the Communist International, 5 June 1920)
In the ensuing debate at that congress, Lenin further explained:
“What is the most important, the fundamental idea of our theses? It is the difference between the oppressed and the oppressor nations … Imperialism is characterised by the fact that the whole world is now divided into a large number of oppressed nations and a very small number of oppressor nations that are enormously rich and strong in the military sense.
“The enormous mass, more than 1,000 million, most probably 1,250 million, and thus if we estimate the population of the world at 1,750 million some 70 percent of the world population belong to the oppressed nations, which are either in direct colonial dependence, or appear as semi-colonial states like, for example, Persia, Turkey and China, or which, defeated by a great imperialist army, have fallen into marked dependency after the peace treaties.
“This idea of the difference between nations, their division into the oppressed and the oppressors runs through all the theses.” (Minutes of the Second Congress of the Communist International, Fourth Session, 25 July 1920)
This approach was further spelled out in the Theses on the eastern question adopted by the Comintern’s fourth congress in December 1922. Here, the Bolsheviks explained: “The refusal of communists … to take part in the fight against imperialist tyranny, on the pretext of their supposed ‘defence’ of independent class interests, is the worst kind of opportunism and can only discredit the proletarian revolution in the east.”
But to listen to some communist parties today, one could be forgiven for thinking that the working-class position is only to support those uprisings and rebellions against imperialism that are clear in their goals and composition, and free of contradictions. Such a view was ridiculed by Lenin, who rounded on the ‘socialist’ critics of Dublin’s Easter Rising of 1916 as follows:
“To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices, without a movement of the politically non-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against oppression by the landowners, the church, and the monarchy, against national oppression, etc – to imagine all this is to repudiate social revolution.
“So one army lines up in one place and says, ‘We are for socialism,’ and another, somewhere else and says, ‘We are for imperialism,’ and that will be a social revolution! Only those who hold such a ridiculously pedantic view could vilify the Irish rebellion by calling it a ‘putsch’.
“Whoever expects a ‘pure’ social revolution will never live to see it. Such a person pays lip service to revolution without understanding what revolution is.” (The discussion on self-determination summed up, July 1916)
Nor did Lenin subscribe to the view that the anti-imperialist struggle of the oppressed occupied a secondary, subordinate position to that waged by the proletariat in the imperialist heartlands. On the contrary, he stated:
“The socialist revolution will not be solely, or chiefly, a struggle of the revolutionary proletarians in each country against their bourgeoisie – no, it will be a struggle of all the imperialist-oppressed colonies and countries, of all dependent countries, against international imperialism. Characterising the approach of the world social revolution in the party programme we adopted last March, we said that the civil war of the working people against the imperialists and exploiters in all the advanced countries is beginning to be combined with national wars against international imperialism. That is confirmed by the course of the revolution, and will be more and more confirmed as time goes on.” (Address to the second all-Russia congress of communist organisations of the peoples of the east, 22 November 1919)
In one of his last articles, Lenin went so far as to state:
“In the last analysis, the outcome of the struggle will be determined by the fact that Russia, India, China, etc, account for the overwhelming majority of the population of the globe. And during the past few years it is this majority that has been drawn into the struggle for emancipation with extraordinary rapidity, so that in this respect there cannot be the slightest doubt what the final outcome of the world struggle will be. In this sense, the complete victory of socialism is fully and absolutely assured.” (Better fewer, but better, 2 March 1923)
As with so many aspects of his work, these teachings of Lenin’s were based on, and developed, the pioneering work of the founders of our movement, Marx and Engels. In The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, Lenin wrote:
“The policy of Marx and Engels on the Irish question serves as a splendid example of the attitude the proletariat of the oppressor nations should adopt towards national movements, an example which has lost none of its immense practical importance.” (May 1914)
Indeed, a brief review of Marx and Engels’ policy on the Irish question demonstrates that this observation of Lenin’s remains as true today as when he wrote it in 1914.
For Marx and Engels, resolute support for the struggle of the Irish people was not only a matter of justice for Ireland, but also something that was in the absolute and essential interest of the British working class.
On 9 April 1870, Marx wrote to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt as follows:
“After studying the Irish question for many years, I have come to the conclusion that the decisive blow against the English ruling classes (and it will be decisive for the workers’ movement all over the world) cannot be delivered in England but only in Ireland.”
On 11 December 1869, Marx wrote to Engels that his paper on the Irish question, to be read at the council of the First International, would be couched as follows:
“Quite apart from all phrases about ‘international’ and ‘humane’ justice for Ireland – which are taken for granted in the International Council – it is in the direct and absolute interest of the English working class to get rid of their present connection with Ireland. And this is my fullest conviction … For a long time I believed that it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working-class ascendancy … Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never accomplish anything until it has got rid of Ireland … English reaction in England had its roots in the subjugation of Ireland.” (Cited in The right of nations to self-determination by VI Lenin, op cit)
Marx therefore held to his view of the importance and necessity of supporting the Irish people’s fight against British rule, irrespective of the forms of struggle adopted or the character of the leadership at any particular time. Yet in contrast to some of his latter-day would-be followers, he did not look at the movement seeking to find what was backward or reactionary but rather to identify its essentially progressive nature. Thus, on 30 November 1867, Marx wrote to Engels that:
“Fenianism is characterised by socialist (in the negative sense, as directed against the appropriation of the soil) leanings and as a lower orders movement.”
This profound characterisation by Marx finds its broad analogy in many contemporary national-revolutionary movements, including those that held state power in Libya and Iraq until they were destroyed in genocidal imperialist wars of aggression.
But, even though too many communists fail to support anti-imperialist movements that have a clearly progressive social character and content, as was the case with the former governments of Iraq and Libya, along with a host of national-liberation movements from the Sandinistas in Nicaragua to the Irish republican movement, it is essential to grasp that the sole deciding question is not whether the movement in question has such a character, but whether a country, a party, a movement, or a leader is fighting against imperialism.
Everything else is subordinate to that overriding principle, including other democratic questions and rights, which again, too many communists raise (and not just where such problems exist but even where they do not) as a pretext for failing to support the anti-imperialist struggle. The genuine communist standpoint on this question was articulated with absolute clarity by J V Stalin as follows:
“The revolutionary character of a national movement under the conditions of imperialist oppression does not necessarily presuppose the existence of proletarian elements in the movement, the existence of a revolutionary or a republican programme of the movement, the existence of a democratic basis of the movement. The struggle that the Emir of Afghanistan is waging for the independence of Afghanistan is objectively a revolutionary struggle, despite the monarchist views of the Emir and his associates, for it weakens, disintegrates and undermines imperialism; whereas the struggle waged by such ‘desperate’ democrats and ‘socialists’, ‘revolutionaries’ and republicans as, for example, Kerensky and Tsereteli, Renaudel and Scheidemann, Chernov and Dan, Henderson and Clynes, during the imperialist war was a reactionary struggle, for its results were the embellishment, the strengthening, the victory, of imperialism.
“For the same reasons, the struggle that the Egyptian merchants and bourgeois intellectuals are waging for the independence of Egypt is objectively a revolutionary struggle, despite the bourgeois origin and bourgeois title of the leaders of the Egyptian national movement, despite the fact that they are opposed to socialism; whereas the struggle that the British ‘Labour’ government is waging to preserve Egypt’s dependent position is for the same reason a reactionary struggle, despite the proletarian origin and the proletarian title of the members of the government, despite the fact that they are ‘for’ socialism.
“There is no need to mention the national movement in other, larger, colonial and dependent countries, such as India and China, every step of which along the road to liberation, even if it runs counter to the demands of formal democracy, is a steam-hammer blow at imperialism, ie, is undoubtedly a revolutionary step.” (Foundations of Leninism, 1924)
This Marxist-Leninist understanding was brilliantly applied and further developed by Mao Zedong, who, on this basis, led the Chinese revolution to victory – the second greatest victory of the working class after the October revolution. Writing in January 1940, in the midst of the bitter war against Japanese imperialism, in which he had skilfully constructed a united front with Chiang Kai-shek, despite the fact that Chiang really was a butcher of communists, workers and peasants, Mao stated:
“In this era, any revolution in a colony or semi-colony that is directed against imperialism, ie, against the international bourgeoisie or international capitalism, no longer comes within the old category of the bourgeois-democratic world revolution, but within the new category. It is no longer part of the old bourgeois, or capitalist, world revolution, but is part of the new world revolution, the proletarian-socialist world revolution. Such revolutionary colonies and semi-colonies can no longer be regarded as allies of the counter-revolutionary front of world capitalism; they have become allies of the revolutionary front of world socialism.
“Although such a revolution in a colonial and semi-colonial country is still fundamentally bourgeois-democratic in its social character during its first stage or first step, and although its objective mission is to clear the path for the development of capitalism, it is no longer a revolution of the old type led by the bourgeoisie with the aim of establishing a capitalist society and a state under bourgeois dictatorship. It belongs to the new type of revolution led by the proletariat with the aim, in the first stage, of establishing a new democratic society and a state under the joint dictatorship of all the revolutionary classes.
“Thus this revolution actually serves the purpose of clearing a still wider path for the development of socialism. In the course of its progress, there may be a number of further sub-stages, because of changes on the enemy’s side and within the ranks of our allies, but the fundamental character of the revolution remains unchanged.
“Such a revolution attacks imperialism at its very roots, and is therefore not tolerated but opposed by imperialism. However, it is favoured by socialism and supported by the land of socialism and the socialist international proletariat …
“No matter what classes, parties or individuals in an oppressed nation join the revolution, and no matter whether they themselves are conscious of the point or understand it, so long as they oppose imperialism, their revolution becomes part of the proletarian socialist world revolution and they become its allies.”(On New Democracy, emphasis added)
Comrade Mao Zedong had no time for those who rejected the united front against imperialism. In On tactics against Japanese imperialism, he wrote, in words that apply equally to today’s anti-imperialist struggles:
“Comrades, which is right, the united front or closed-doorism? Which indeed is approved by Marxism-Leninism? I answer without the slightest hesitation – the united front and not closed-doorism. Three-year-olds have many ideas that are right, but they cannot be entrusted with serious national or world affairs because they do not understand them yet. Marxism-Leninism is opposed to the ‘infantile disorder’ found in the revolutionary ranks. This infantile disorder is just what the confirmed exponents of closed-doorism advocate.
“Like every other activity in the world, revolution always follows a tortuous road and never a straight one. The alignment of forces in the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary camps can change, just as everything else in the world changes. The party’s new tactics of a broad united front start from the two fundamental facts that Japanese imperialism is bent on reducing all China to a colony and that China’s revolutionary forces still have serious weaknesses. In order to attack the forces of the counter-revolution, what the revolutionary forces need today is to organise millions upon millions of the masses and move a mighty revolutionary army into action.
“The plain truth is that only a force of such magnitude can crush the Japanese imperialists and the traitors and collaborators. Therefore, united-front tactics are the only Marxist-Leninist tactics. The tactics of closed-doorism are, on the contrary, the tactics of the regal isolationist. Closed-doorism just ‘drives the fish into deep waters and the sparrows into the thickets’, and it will drive the millions upon millions of the masses, this mighty army, over to the enemy’s side, which will certainly win his acclaim.
“In practice, closed-doorism is the faithful servant of the Japanese imperialists and the traitors and collaborators. Its adherents’ talk of the ‘pure’ and the ‘straight’ will be condemned by Marxist-Leninists and commended by the Japanese imperialists. We definitely want no closed-doorism; what we want is the revolutionary national united front, which will spell death to the Japanese imperialists and the traitors and collaborators.” (27 December 1935)
Revolutionary and counter-revolutionary patriotism
Yet another mistake made by some communists is to excoriate the leaders of the anti-imperialist movement for their patriotism and national standpoint as though this were some sort of crime against the supposed purity of the revolution, rather than a basis of their struggle and a prerequisite of their victory. Marxism-Leninism holds that there are, in fact, two types of patriotism, two types of nationalism, that of an oppressor nation, which is reactionary and unjust and that of an oppressed nation, which is progressive, just and revolutionary.
In The role of the Chinese Communist party in the national war, Mao Zedong addressed this question as follows:
“Can a communist, who is an internationalist, at the same time be a patriot? We hold that he not only can be but must be. The specific content of patriotism is determined by historical conditions. There is the ‘patriotism’ of the Japanese aggressors and of Hitler, and there is our patriotism.
“Communists must resolutely oppose the ‘patriotism’ of the Japanese aggressors and of Hitler. The communists of Japan and Germany are defeatists with regard to the wars being waged by their countries. To bring about the defeat of the Japanese aggressors and of Hitler by every possible means is in the interests of the Japanese and the German people, and the more complete the defeat the better. This is what the Japanese and German communists should be doing and what they are doing. For the wars launched by the Japanese aggressors and Hitler are harming their own people as well as the people of the world.
“China’s case is different, because she is the victim of aggression. Chinese communists must therefore combine patriotism with internationalism. We are at once internationalists and patriots, and our slogan is, ‘Fight to defend the motherland against the aggressors’. For us, defeatism is a crime and to strive for victory in the War of Resistance is an inescapable duty. For only by fighting in defence of the motherland can we defeat the aggressors and achieve national liberation. And only by achieving national liberation will it be possible for the proletariat and other working people to achieve their own emancipation.
“The victory of China and the defeat of the invading imperialists will help the people of other countries. Thus in wars of national liberation patriotism is applied internationalism.” (October 1938, emphasis added)
Mao’s standpoint here is identical with that of Engels, who in 1882, wrote to Karl Kautsky that:
“I therefore hold the view that two nations in Europe have not only the right but even the duty to be nationalistic before they become internationalistic: the Irish and the Poles. They are most internationalistic when they are genuinely nationalistic.” (Letter to Karl Kautsky by F Engels, 7 February 1882)
Marxism-Leninism is not a dogma but a guide to action. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao, the great revolutionary teachers, laid out with complete clarity the attitude of the revolutionary proletariat to the struggle against imperialism and towards the national movements of the oppressed. With imperialism convulsed with crisis and hurtling towards new and ever more dangerous wars of aggression, the work of reuniting and reinvigorating the entire international communist movement on this principled and revolutionary basis is one which will brook no further delay.
Uphold the revolutionary teachings and example of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao!
Victory to the resistance in Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq!
Victory to all oppressed peoples fighting against imperialism!
Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!
https://thecommunists.org/2011/10/01/ne ... perialism/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Ideology
Western Marxism: How it Was Born, How it Died, How it Can be Reborn
Posted by Internationalist 360° on December 26, 2024
Domenico Losurdo and Gabriel Rockhill
Western Marxism: How It Was Born, How It Died, How It Can Be Reborn is a paradigm-shifting book that provides a trenchant critique of the Western left intelligentsia. It reveals how its dominant ideological orientation—characterized by defeatism, utopianism, and anti-communism—is rooted in the political economy of imperialism. Internationally acclaimed theorist Domenico Losurdo thus provides a fresh and challenging perspective on purportedly radical thinkers who have been widely promoted in the imperial core, including those affiliated with the Frankfurt School, French Theory, and operaismo, as well as Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt, and Slavoj Žižek, among others. His critique also has wide-reaching implications for trend-setting discourses inspired by this coterie of intellectuals, from postcolonial and decolonial theory to subaltern studies and beyond. Far from being a negative undertaking, however, this book is grounded in the positive project of reigniting anti-imperialist Marxism.
As a complement to the Italian edition of Western Marxism, this first-ever English translation also features the unprecedented publication of a major lecture that demystifies “Western Marxism” and its role in imperialists’ efforts to denigrate the achievements of actually existing socialism. Raising the stakes of what it means to produce critical theory, Western Marxism will surely provoke wide debate and a reevaluation of hallowed canons.
Domenico Losurdo (1941–2018) was an Italian philosopher and militant who published over fifty books on Marxism, capitalism, Western philosophy, and the history of the communist movement.
Gabriel Rockhill is a philosopher and activist who has published nine books. He is the Founding Director of the Critical Theory Workshop and Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University.
You can find an excerpt, here and watch the book launch with John Bellamy Foster below:
You can also watch an earlier book launch at the Marxist Library, here and follow a study group led by Daniel Tutt, here.
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2024/12/ ... be-reborn/
Imperialist Propaganda and the Ideology of the Western Left Intelligentsia: From Anticommunism and Identity Politics to Democratic Illusions and Fascism
Posted by Internationalist 360° on December 1, 2023
Gabriel Rockhill and Zhao Dingqi
Portrait of the Bourgeoisie
Zhao Dingqi: During the Cold War, how did the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) conduct the “Cultural Cold War”? What activities did the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom carry out, and what impact did it have?
Gabriel Rockhill: The CIA undertook, along with other state agencies and the foundations of major capitalist enterprises, a multifaceted cultural cold war aimed at containing—and ultimately rolling back and destroying—communism. This propaganda war was international in scope and had many different aspects, only a few of which I touch on below. It is important to note at the outset, however, that in spite of its extensive reach and the ample resources dedicated to it, many battles have been lost throughout this war. To take but one recent example that demonstrates how this conflict continues today, Raúl Antonio Capote revealed in his 2015 book that he worked for the CIA for years in its destabilization campaigns in Cuba targeting intellectuals, writers, artists, and students. Unbeknownst to the governmental agency known as “the Company,” however, the Cuban university professor it had slyly honey-potted into promoting its dirty tricks was actually pulling one over on the cocksure master spies: he was working undercover for Cuban intelligence.1 This is but one sign among many others that the CIA, in spite of its various victories, is ultimately fighting a war that proves hard to win: it is attempting to impose a world order that is inimical to the overwhelming majority of the globe’s population.
One of the centerpieces of the cultural cold war was the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which was revealed in 1966 to be a CIA front.2 Hugh Wilford, who has researched the topic extensively, described the CCF as nothing short of one of the largest patrons of art and culture in the history of the world.3 Established in 1950, it promoted on the international scene the work of collaborationist academics such as Raymond Aron and Hannah Arendt over and against their Marxian rivals, including the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The CCF had offices in thirty-five countries, mobilized an army of around 280 employees, published or supported some fifty prestigious journals around the world, and organized numerous art and cultural exhibitions, as well as international concerts and festivals. During its lifetime, it also planned or sponsored some 135 international conferences and seminars, working with a minimum of 38 institutions, and it published at least 170 books. Its press service, Forum Service, broadcast, free of charge and all over the world, reports from its venal intellectuals in twelve languages, which reached six hundred newspapers and five million readers. This vast global network was what its director, Michael Josselson, called—in an expression reminiscent of the Mafia—“our big family.” From its Paris headquarters, the CCF had at its disposal an international echo chamber to amplify the voice of anticommunist intellectuals, artists, and writers. Its budget in 1966 was $2,070,500, which corresponds to $19.5 million in 2023.
Josselson’s “big family” was, however, just a small part of what Frank Wisner of the CIA called his “mighty Wurlitzer”: the international jukebox of media and cultural programming controlled by the Company. To take but a few examples of this gargantuan framework for psychological warfare, Carl Bernstein marshaled ample evidence to demonstrate that at least four hundred U.S. journalists worked surreptitiously for the CIA between 1952 and 1977.4 Following these revelations, the New York Times undertook a three-month investigation and concluded that the CIA “embraced more than eight hundred news and public information organizations and individuals.”5 These two exposés were published in establishment venues by journalists who themselves operated in the same networks they were analyzing, so these estimates were likely low.
Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the director of the New York Times from 1935 to 1961, worked so closely with the Agency that he signed a confidentiality agreement (the highest level of collaboration). William S. Paley’s Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) was unquestionably the CIA’s greatest asset in the field of audiovisual broadcasting. It worked so intimately with the Company that it installed a direct phone line to CIA headquarters that was not routed through its central operator. Henry Luce’s Time Inc. was its most powerful collaborator in the weekly and monthly arena (including Time—where Bernstein later published—Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated). Luce agreed to hire CIA operatives as journalists, which became a very common cover. As we know from the Task Force on Greater CIA Openness, convened by CIA Director Robert Gates in 1991, these types of practices continued unabated after the revelations mentioned above: “PAO (Public Affairs Office) [of the CIA] now has relationships with reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly, and television network in the nation.… In many instances, we have persuaded reporters to postpone, change, hold, or even scrap stories.”6
The CIA also gained control of the American Newspaper Guild, and it became the owner of press services, magazines, and newspapers that it used as cover for its agents.7 It has placed officers in other press services, such as LATIN, Reuters, the Associated Press, and United Press International. William Schaap, an expert on governmental disinformation, testified that the CIA “owned or controlled some 2,500 media entities all over the world. In addition, it had its people, ranging from stringers to highly visible journalists and editors, in virtually every major media organization.”8 “We ‘had’ at least one newspaper in every foreign capital at any given time,” one CIA man told journalist John Crewdson. Furthermore, the source related, “those that the agency did not own outright or subsidize heavily it infiltrated with paid agents or staff officers who could have stories printed that were useful to the agency and not print those it found detrimental.”9 In the digital age, this process has of course continued. Yasha Levine, Alan MacLeod, and other scholars and journalists have detailed the extensive involvement of the U.S. national security state in the realms of big tech and social media. They have demonstrated, among other things, that major intelligence operators occupy key positions at Facebook, X (Twitter), TikTok, Reddit, and Google.10
The CIA has also deeply infiltrated the professional intelligentsia. When the Church Committee released its 1975 report on the U.S. intelligence community, the Agency admitted that it was in contact with “many thousands” of academics in “hundreds” of institutions (and no reform since has prevented it from pursuing or expanding this practice, as confirmed by the 1991 Gates Memo mentioned above).11 The Russian Institutes at Harvard and Columbia, like the Hoover Institute at Stanford and the Center for International Studies at MIT, were developed with direct support and oversight by the CIA.12 A researcher at the New School for Social Research recently brought to my attention a series of documents confirming that the CIA’s heinous MKULTRA project engaged in research at forty-four colleges and universities (at least), and we know that a minimum of fourteen universities participated in the infamous Operation Paperclip, which brought some 1,600 Nazi scientists, engineers, and technicians to the United States.13 MKULTRA, for those unfamiliar with it, was one of the Agency’s programs that engaged in sadistic brainwashing and torture experiments in which subjects were administered—without their consent—high doses of psychoactive drugs and other chemicals in combination with electroshocks, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, verbal and sexual abuse, and other forms of torture.
The CIA has also been deeply involved in the art world. For instance, it promoted U.S. American art, particularly Abstract Expressionism and the New York art scene, over and against Socialist Realism.14 It funded art exhibits, musical and theatrical performances, international art festivals, and more in a bid to disseminate what was touted as the free art of the West. The Company has worked closely with major art institutions in these endeavors. To take but a single telling example, one of the major CIA officers involved in the cultural cold war, Thomas W. Braden, was the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) executive secretary before joining the Agency. MoMA’s presidents have included Nelson Rockefeller, who became the super-coordinator for clandestine intelligence operations and allowed the Rockefeller Fund to be used as a conduit for CIA money. Among MoMA’s directors, we find René d’Harnoncourt, who had worked for Rockefeller’s wartime intelligence agency for Latin America. John Hay Whitney of the eponymous museum and Julius Fleischmann sat on MoMA’s board of trustees. The former had worked for the CIA’s predecessor organization, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and allowed his charity to be used as a conduit for CIA money. The latter served as the president of the CIA’s Farfield Foundation. William S. Paley, the president of CBS and one of the major figures in U.S. psychological warfare programs, including those of the CIA, was on the members’ board of MoMA’s International Program. As this web of relations indicates, the capitalist ruling class works closely with the U.S. national security state in order to tightly control the cultural apparatus.
Many books have been written on the U.S. state’s involvement with the entertainment industry. Matthew Alford and Tom Secker have documented that the Department of Defense has been involved in supporting—with complete and absolute censorship rights—a minimum of 814 movies, with the CIA clocking in at a minimum of 37 and the FBI 22.15 Regarding TV shows, some of which have been very long running, the Department of Defense totals 1,133, the CIA 22, and the FBI 10. Above and beyond these quantifiable cases, there is, of course, the qualitative relationship between the national security state and Tinseltown. John Rizzo explained as much in 2014: “The CIA has long had a special relationship with the entertainment industry, devoting considerable attention to fostering relationships with Hollywood movers and shakers—studio executives, producers, directors, big-name actors.”16 Having served as the Deputy Counsel or Acting General Counsel of the CIA for the first nine years of the war on terror, during which time he was intimately involved in overseeing the global rendition, torture, and drone-assassination programs, Rizzo was well placed to understand how the culture industry could provide cover for imperial butchery.
These activities and many more reveal one of the primary features of the U.S. empire: it is a veritable empire of spectacles. One of its principal focal points has been the war for hearts and minds. To this end, it has established an expansive global infrastructure in order to engage in international psychological warfare. The near absolute control it exercises over mainstream media has been clearly visible in the recent drive to garner support for the U.S. proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. The same is true for its virulent 24/7 anti-China propaganda. Nevertheless, thanks to the work of so many valiant activists and the fact that it is working against reality itself, the empire of spectacles is incapable of completely controlling the narrative.17
ZD: You mention in one of your articles that CIA agents were keen on reading the French critical theories of Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Pierre Bourdieu, and others. What is the reason for this phenomenon? How would you rate French Critical Theory?
GR: One important front in the cultural war on communism has been the intellectual world war, which is the topic of a book that I am currently completing for Monthly Review Press. The CIA has played a very significant role, but so have other governmental agencies and the foundations of the capitalist ruling class. The overall objective has been to discredit Marxism and undermine support for anti-imperialist struggles, as well as actually existing socialism.
Western Europe has been a particularly important battleground. The United States had emerged from the Second World War as the dominant imperial power. In order to try and exercise global hegemony, it was intent on enrolling the former leading imperialist powers in Western Europe as junior partners (as well as Japan in the East). However, this proved to be particularly difficult in countries like France and Italy, which had robust and vibrant communist parties. The U.S. national security state therefore launched a multipronged assault to infiltrate political parties, unions, organizations of civil society, and major news and information outlets.18 It even set up secret stay-behind armies, which it stocked with fascists, and made plans for military coups if the communists ever came to power through the ballot box (these armies were later activated in the post-1968 strategy of tension: they committed terrorist attacks against the civilian population that were blamed on communists).19
On the more explicitly intellectual front, the U.S. power elite supported the establishment of new educational institutions and international networks of knowledge production that were decidedly anticommunist in the hopes of discrediting Marxism. It provided uplift—meaning promotion and visibility—to intellectuals who were openly hostile to historical and dialectical materialism, while simultaneously running heinous slander campaigns against figures like Sartre and Beauvoir.20
It is within this precise context that French theory needs to be understood, at least partially, as a product of U.S. cultural imperialism. The thinkers affiliated with this label—Foucault, Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and many more—were associated in various ways with the structuralist movement, which largely defined itself in opposition to the most prominent philosopher of the preceding generation: Sartre.21 The latter’s Marxian orientation from the mid-1940s onward was generally rejected, and anti-Hegelianism—a shibboleth for anti-Marxism—became the order of the day. Foucault, to take but one telling example, condemned Sartre as “the last Marxist” and claimed that he was a man of the nineteenth century who was out of step with the (anti-Marxist) times, represented by Foucault and other theorists of his ilk.22
While some of these thinkers gained significant notoriety within France, it was their promotion in the United States that catapulted them into the international limelight and made them into required reading for the global intelligentsia. In a recent article in Monthly Review, I detailed some of the political and economic forces at work behind the event that is widely recognized as having inaugurated the era of French theory: the 1966 conference at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, which brought together many of these thinkers for the first time.23 The Ford Foundation, which had been cofunding the CCF with the CIA and had many intimate ties to the Agency’s propaganda endeavors, funded the conference and other subsequent activities to the tune of $36,000 ($339,000 today). This is a truly extraordinary amount of money for a university conference, not to mention the fact that press coverage of the event was assured by Time and Newsweek, which is virtually unheard of in academic settings like these.24
The capitalist foundations, the CIA, and other governmental agencies were interested in promoting radically chic work that could serve as an ersatz for Marxism. Since they could not simply destroy the latter, they sought to foster new forms of theory that could be marketed as cutting edge and critical—though devoid of any revolutionary substance—in order to bury Marxism as passé. As we now know from a 1985 CIA research paper on the topic, the Agency was delighted with the contributions of French structuralism, as well as the Annales School and the group known as the Nouveaux Philosophes (New Philosophers). Citing in particular the structuralism affiliated with Foucault and Claude Lévi-Strauss, as well as the methodology of the Annales School, the paper draws the following conclusion: “we believe their critical demolition of Marxist influence in the social sciences is likely to endure as a profound contribution to modern scholarship.”25
Regarding my own evaluation of French theory, I would say that it is important to recognize it for what it is: a product—at least in part—of U.S. cultural imperialism, which seeks to displace Marxism by an anticommunist theoretical practice that indulges in bourgeois cultural eclecticism and mobilizes discursive pyrotechnics in order to create imagined revolutions in discourse that change nothing in reality. French theory rehabilitates and promotes, moreover, the work of anticommunists like Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, thereby attempting discreetly to redefine radical as radically reactionary. When French theorists do engage with Marxism, they transform it into one discourse among others, which can—and even should—be mixed with non-Marxist and antidialectical discourses like Nietzschean genealogy, Heideggerian Destruktion, Freudian psychoanalysis, and so forth. It is for this reason that many of these thinkers make a proprietary claim to “their own Marx,” which sometimes produces the illusion that they are somehow Marxist or Marxian. However, the overwhelming tendency is to extract arbitrarily from Marx’s work very specific elements that they presume resonate with their own philosophic brand. This is the case, for instance, with Derrida’s ghostly literary Marx of undecidability, Deleuze’s nomadic deterritorializing Marx, Jean-François Lyotard’s antidialectical Marx of the differend, and other such examples. Marx’s discourse thereby functions, for them, as fodder within the bourgeois canon that can be eclectically drawn upon to develop their own brand and give it an aura of capaciousness and radicality. Walter Rodney summed up the true nature of this theoretical practice when he explained that “with bourgeois thought, because of its whimsical nature, and because of the way in which it prompts eccentrics, you can have any road, because, after all, when you are not going any place, you can choose any road!”26
ZD: The Frankfurt School also has a wide influence in contemporary China. How would you rate the theories of the Frankfurt School? What kind of connection does it have with the CIA?
GR: The Institute for Social Research, colloquially known as the “Frankfurt School,” originally emerged as a Marxian research center at the University of Frankfurt that was bankrolled by a wealthy capitalist. When Max Horkheimer took over the directorship of the Institute in 1930, he oversaw a decisive shift toward speculative and cultural concerns that were increasingly distant from historical materialism and class struggle.
In this regard, the Frankfurt School under Horkheimer played a foundational role in the establishment of what is known as Western Marxism, and more specifically Cultural Marxism. Figures like Horkheimer and his lifelong collaborator Theodor Adorno not only rejected actually existing socialism, but they directly identified it with fascism by benightedly relying—very much like French theory—on the ideological category of totalitarianism.27 Embracing a highly intellectualized and melodramatic version of what would later become known as TINA (“There Is No Alternative”), they focused on the realm of bourgeois art and culture as perhaps the only potential site of salvation. This is because thinkers like Adorno and Horkheimer, with a few exceptions, were largely idealist in their theoretical practice: if meaningful social change was foreclosed in the practical world, deliverance was to be sought in the geistig—meaning intellectual and spiritual—realm of novel thought-forms and innovative bourgeois culture.
These high priests of Western Marxism not only embraced the capitalist ideological mantra that “fascism and communism are the same,” they also publicly backed imperialism. Horkheimer, for instance, supported the U.S. war in Vietnam, proclaiming in May 1967 that “In America, when it is necessary to conduct a war…it is not so much a question of the defense of the homeland, but it is essentially a matter of the defense of the constitution, the defense of the rights of man.”28 Although Adorno often preferred a professorial politics of quiet complicity over such bellicose statements, he did line up with Horkheimer in supporting the 1956 imperialist invasion of Egypt by Israel, Britain, and France, which sought to overthrow Gamal Abdel Nasser and seize the Suez Canal.29 Calling Nasser “a fascist chieftain…who conspires with Moscow,” they openly condemned the countries bordering Israel as “Arab robber states.”30
The Frankfurt School’s leaders benefited handsomely from the support of the U.S. capitalist ruling class and national security state. Horkheimer participated in at least one of the major CCF conferences, and Adorno published articles in CIA-backed journals. Adorno also corresponded and collaborated with the leading figure in the German anticommunist Kulturkampf, the CIA’s Melvin Lasky, and he was included in CCF expansion plans even after it was revealed that it was a front organization. The Frankfurt front men also received extensive funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and the U.S. government, including to support the Institute’s return to West Germany after the war (Rockefeller contributed $103,695 in 1950, the equivalent of $1.3 million in 2023). They were, like the French theorists, doing the type of intellectual work that the leaders of the U.S. empire wanted to—and did—support.
It is also worth noting in passing that five of the eight members of Horkheimer’s inner circle at the Frankfurt School worked as analysts and propagandists for the U.S. government and national security state. Herbert Marcuse, Franz Neumann, and Otto Kirchheimer were all employed by the Office of War Information (OWI) before moving on to the Research and Analysis Branch of the OSS.* Leo Löwenthal too worked for the OWI, and Friedrich Pollock was hired by the Anti-Trust Division of the Department of Justice. This was a rather complex situation due to the fact that certain sectors of the U.S. state were keen on enlisting Marxian analysts in the fight against fascism and communism. At the same time, some of them took political positions that were compatible with U.S. imperial interests. This chapter of the history of the Frankfurt School therefore deserves much more scrutiny.31
Finally, the evolution of the Frankfurt School into its second (Jürgen Habermas) and third generations (Axel Honneth, Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib, and so on) did not alter in the least its anticommunist orientation. On the contrary, Habermas explicitly claimed that state socialism was bankrupt and argued for creating space within the capitalist system and its purportedly democratic institutions for the ideal of an inclusive “procedure of discursive will-formation.”32 The neo-Habermasians of the third generation have continued this orientation. Honneth, as I have argued in a detailed article that also engages with the other thinkers under discussion, has erected bourgeois ideology itself into the very normative framework for critical theory.33 Fraser indefatigably presents herself as the most left-wing of the critical theorists by positioning herself as a social democrat. However, she often remains rather vague when it comes to clarifying what this means in concrete terms, openly admitting that she has “a hard time defining a positive program.”34 The negative program is clear, however: “We know that it [democratic socialism] doesn’t mean anything like the authoritarian command economy, single-party model of Communism.”35
ZD: How do you understand the role and function of identity politics and multiculturalism, which are currently prevalent in the Western left?
GR: Identity politics, like the multiculturalism affiliated with it, is a contemporary manifestation of the culturalism and essentialism that have long characterized bourgeois ideology. The latter seeks to naturalize social and economic relations that are the consequence of the material history of capitalism. Rather than recognizing, for instance, that racial, national, ethnic, gender, sexual, and other forms of identity are historical constructs that have varied over time and result from specific material forces, these are naturalized and treated as an unquestionable foundation for political constituencies. Such essentialism serves to obscure the material forces operative behind these identities, as well as the class struggles that have been waged around them. This has been particularly useful to the ruling class and its managers as they have been forced to react to the demands of decolonization and of materialist antiracist and antipatriarchal struggles. How better to respond than with an essentializing identity politics that proposes false solutions to very real problems because it never addresses the material basis of colonization, racism, and gender oppression?
The self-proclaimed anti-essentialist versions of identity politics operative in the work of theorists like Judith Butler do not fundamentally break with this ideology.36 In purporting to deconstruct some of these categories by revealing them as discursive constructs that individuals or groups of individuals can question, play with, and re-perform, theorists working within the idealist parameters of deconstruction never provide a materialist and dialectical analysis of the history of the capitalist social relations that have produced these categories as major sites of collective class struggle. They also do not engage in the deep history of actually existing socialism’s fight collectively to transform these relations. Instead, they tend to draw on deconstruction and a practically dehistoricized version of Foucauldian genealogy to think about gender and sexual relations discursively, and they are at best oriented toward a liberal pluralism in which class struggle is replaced by interest-group advocacy.
By contrast, the Marxist tradition—as Domenico Losurdo has demonstrated in his magisterial work Class Struggle—has a profound and rich history of understanding class struggle in the plural. This means that it includes battles over the relationship between genders, nations, races, and economic classes (and, we could add, sexualities). Since these categories have taken on very specific hierarchical forms under capitalism, the best elements of the Marxist heritage have sought to both understand their historical provenance and radically transform them. This can be seen in the longstanding struggle against the domestic slavery imposed upon women, as well as the battle to overcome the imperialist subordination of nations and their racialized peoples. This history has played itself out in fits and starts, of course, and there is still much work to be done, in part because certain strains of Marxism—such as that of the Second International—have been tainted by elements of bourgeois ideology. Nevertheless, as scholars like Losurdo and others have demonstrated with remarkable erudition, the communists have been at the vanguard of these class struggles to overcome patriarchal domination, imperialist subordination, and racism by going to the very roots of these problems: capitalist social relations.
Identity politics, as it has developed in the leading imperialist countries and particularly the United States, has sought to bury this history in order to present itself as a radically new form of consciousness, as if communists had not so much as thought of the woman question or the national/racial question. Theorists of identity politics thus tend to assert arrogantly and benightedly that they are the first ones to address these issues, thereby overcoming an imagined economic determinism on the part of the so-called vulgar reductionist Marxists.37 Instead of recognizing these issues as sites of class struggle, moreover, they tend to use identity politics as a wedge against class politics. If they do make any gesture toward integrating class into their analysis, they generally reduce it to a question of personal identity, rather than a structural property relation. The solutions that they put forth therefore tend to be epiphenomenal, meaning that they focus on issues of representation and symbolism, rather than, for instance, overcoming the labor relations of domestic slavery and racialized superexploitation through a socialist transformation of the socioeconomic order. They are thereby incapable of leading to significant and sustainable change because they do not go to the root of the problem. As Adolph Reed Jr. has often argued with his signature biting wit, identitarians are perfectly happy to maintain extant class relations—including imperialist relations between nations, I would add—on the condition that there is the requisite ratio of representation of oppressed groups within the ruling class and the professional managerial stratum.
In addition to helping displace class politics and analysis within the Western left, identity politics has made a major contribution to dividing the left itself into siloed debates around specific identity issues. Instead of class unity against a common enemy, it divides—and conquers—working and oppressed people by encouraging them to identify first and foremost as members of specific genders, sexualities, races, nations, ethnicities, religious groups, and so forth. In this regard, the ideology of identity politics actually is, at a much deeper level, a class politics. It is the politics of a bourgeoisie aimed at dividing the working and oppressed peoples of the world in order to more easily rule over them. It should come as no surprise, then, that it is the governing politics of the professional managerial class stratum in the imperial core. It dominates its institutions and informational outlets, and it is one of the primary mechanisms for career advancement within what Reed insightfully calls “the diversity industry.” It encourages everyone involved to identify with their specific group and advance their own individual interests by posing as its privileged representative. We should note, moreover, that wokeism also has the effect of driving some people into the arms of the right. If the dominant political culture encourages a clan mentality combined with competitive individualism, then it is unsurprising that white people and men have also—as a partial response to their perceived disenfranchisement by the diversity industry—advanced their particular agendas as “victims” of the system. Identity politics devoid of a class analysis is thus absolutely amenable to right-wing and even fascist permutations.
Finally, I would be remiss not to mention that identity politics, which has its recent ideological roots in the New Left and the social chauvinism V. I. Lenin had earlier diagnosed in the European left, is one of the principal ideological tools of imperialism. The divide-and-conquer strategy has been used to splinter targeted countries by fostering religious, ethnic, national, racial, or gender conflicts.38 Identity politics has also served as a direct justification for imperialist intervention and meddling, as well as destabilization campaigns, if it be the purported causes of liberating women in Afghanistan, supporting Black rappers “discriminated” against in Cuba, backing purportedly “ecosocialist” Indigenous candidates in Latin America, “protecting” ethnic minorities in China, or other such well-known propaganda operations in which the U.S. empire presents itself as the benevolent benefactor of oppressed identities. Here we can clearly see the complete disconnect between the purely symbolic politics of identity and the material reality of class struggles insofar as the former can—and does—provide thin cover for imperialism. At this level as well, then, identity politics is ultimately a class politics: a politics of the imperialist ruling class.
ZD: Slavoj Žižek is a scholar who has had a wide influence in current global left-wing academic circles, and, of course, there are many controversies. Why do you see him as a “capitalist court jester”?39
GR: Žižek is a product of the imperial theory industry. As Michael Parenti has pointed out, reality is radical, meaning that working people in the capitalist world are faced with very real, material struggles for employment, housing, health care, education, a sustainable environment, and so forth. All of this tends to radicalize people, and many gravitate toward Marxism because it actually explains the world they are living in, the struggles they are facing, and it puts forth clear and actionable solutions. It is for this reason that the capitalist cultural apparatus has to deal with a very real interest in Marxism on the part of the working and oppressed masses. One tactic that it has developed, particularly for the target audiences of young people and members of the professional managerial class stratum, is to promote a highly commodified version of Marxism that perverts its fundamental substance. It thereby attempts to transform Marxism into a fashionable brand to be sold like any other commodity, rather than a collective theoretical and practical framework for emancipation from commodity-driven society.
Žižek is perfect for this project in many ways. He is an anticommunist native informant who grew up in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). He regularly claims that his subjective experience as a petty-bourgeois intellectual who sought uplift for his career in the West somehow gives him a special right to testify to the true nature of socialism. Personal anecdotes regarding his experience in the SFRY thereby take the place of objective analysis. Unsurprisingly, for an opportunist looking for pelf and glory, Žižek experienced his socialist homeland as inferior to the Western capitalist countries that provided him with such uplift that he is now recognized as one of the top global thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine (a virtual arm of the U.S. State Department).
Žižek openly brags about the role that he personally played in dismantling socialism in the SFRY. He was the primary political columnist for a prominent dissident publication, Mladina, which the Yugoslav Communist Party accused of being backed by the CIA. He also cofounded the Liberal Democratic Party and ran as its presidential candidate in the first breakaway republic of Slovenia, promising that he would “substantially assist in the decomposition of ideologic Real-socialist apparatus of the state [sic].”40 Although he lost by a narrow margin, he openly supported the Slovenian state and its ruling party after the restoration of capitalism, and thus throughout the brutal process of capitalist shock therapy that led to a catastrophic decline in living standards for the majority of the population (but not for him—haha!). The pro-privatization party he cofounded was also clearly oriented toward integration into the imperialist camp, since it was the leading advocate for accession to the European Union and NATO.
I see this Eastern European liberal as capitalism’s court jester because he makes a laughingstock out of Marxism, and this is precisely why he has been so widely promoted by the dominant forces within capitalist society. Rather than a collective science of emancipation rooted in real material struggles, Marxism as he understands it is, above all, a provocative discourse of intellectual chicanery that boils down to the petty-bourgeois political posturing of an opportunist enfant terrible. His puckish antics and commie cosplay delight the bourgeoisie and capture the short attention spans of the uneducated. He is—like a jester—gifted at getting a rise or a laugh out of people, which easily translates into likes and hits in the digital age. He is also particularly good at hawking the wares of Hollywood and the bourgeois cultural apparatus in general. King capital obviously loves this trickster, who has lined his pockets in the process. Like any good jester, he knows the limits of courtly decorum and ultimately respects them by denigrating actually existing socialism, promoting capitalist accommodation, and often even directly supporting imperialism. If he is indeed the world’s “most dangerous intellectual,” as he is sometimes described by the bourgeois press, it is because he endangers the Marxist project of fighting imperialism and building a socialist world.
Confirming the well-established ratio between objective uplift and subjective rightward drift, Žižek has arguably become increasingly reactionary in his anticommunist support for imperialism. Consider his peremptory judgment regarding current efforts to challenge neocolonialism in Africa: “it is clear that the ‘anti-colonial’ uprisings in Central Africa are even worse than French neocolonialism.”41 In another recent public intervention, he provided a remarkably clear illustration of the type of revolution that he supports. Discussing the summer 2023 revolts in France in the wake of the police slaying of Nahel Merzouk, he drew on the important Marxist insight—as he often does for anything coherent that he claims—that uprisings will fail if there is not an organizational strategy that can bring them to victory. He then provided an example of a successful revolution: “Public protests and uprisings can play a positive role if they are sustained by an emancipatory vision, such as the 2013–14 Maidan uprising in Ukraine.”42 As has been widely documented, the Maidan uprising was a fascist coup d’état that was fomented and supported by the U.S. national security state.43 This means that he considers an imperialist-backed fascist coup, which Samir Amin referred to as a “Euro/Nazi putsch,” to be a “positive” example of an “emancipatory vision” that led to a successful revolution.44 This position, as well as his stalwart support for the U.S.-NATO proxy war in Ukraine, clarifies what it means to be the world’s “most dangerous intellectual”: he is a philo-fascist masquerading as a communist.
ZD: The United States has long been regarded by the West as a model of liberal democracy. But you think America was never a democracy.45 Can you explain your point of view?
GR: Objectively speaking, the United States was never a democracy. It was founded as a republic, and the so-called founding fathers were openly hostile to democracy. This is obvious from The Federalist Papers, the notes taken at the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and the founding documents of the United States, as well as the material practice of governance that was originally established in the settler colony. As everyone knows, the Indigenous population of the United States, referred to as the “merciless Indian Savages” in the Declaration of Independence, was not given democratic power in the freshly minted republic, nor were enslaved people from Africa or women.46 The same is very much true of average white workers. As scholars like Terry Bouton have documented in detail: “most ordinary white men…did not think the [so-called American] Revolution ended with governments that made their ideals and interests the primary goal. To the contrary, they were convinced that the revolutionary elite had remade government to benefit themselves and to undermine the independence of ordinary folk.”47 After all, the Constitutional Convention did not establish direct popular elections for the president, the Supreme Court, or senators. The only exception was the House of Representatives. However, the qualifications were set by state legislatures, which almost always required property-holding as a basis for the right to vote. It is unsurprising, then, that progressive critics at the time pointed this out. Patrick Henry flatly stated regarding the United States: “It is not a democracy.”48 George Mason described the new constitution as the “most daring attempt to establish a despotic aristocracy among freeman, that the world has ever witnessed.”49
Although the term republic was widely used to describe the United States at the time, this began to shift in the late 1820s, when Andrew Jackson—also known as “Indian Killer” for his genocidal policies—ran a populist presidential campaign. He presented himself as a democrat, in the sense of an average U.S. American who would put an end to the rule of patricians from Massachusetts and Virginia. In spite of the fact that no structural changes were made to the mode of governance, politicians like Jackson and other members of the elite and their managers began using the term democracy to describe the republic, thereby insinuating that it served the interests of the people.50 This tradition has, of course, continued: democracy is a euphemism for oligarchic bourgeois rule.
At the same time, there have been two and a half centuries of class struggle in the United States, and democratic forces have often won very significant concessions from the ruling class. The realm of popular elections has been expanded to include senators and the president, even though the electoral college has yet to be abolished and Supreme Court justices are still appointed for life. The franchise has been extended to women, African Americans, and Native Americans. These are major gains that should, of course, be defended, expanded, and rendered more substantial through deep democratic reforms of the entire electoral and campaign process. However, as important as these democratic advances are, they have not altered the overall system of plutocratic dominion.
In a very important study based on multivariable statistical analysis, Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page demonstrated that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”51 This plutocratic form of rule is not only operative domestically, of course, but also internationally. The United States has attempted to impose its antidemocratic form of business rule wherever it can. Between the end of the Second World War and 2014, according to William Blum’s sedulous research, it endeavored to overthrow more than fifty foreign governments, the majority of which had been democratically elected.52 The United States is a plutocratic empire, not a democracy in any meaningful or substantive sense of the term.
I do recognize, of course, that expressions like bourgeois democracy, formal democracy, and liberal democracy are often used, for various reasons, to index this form of plutocracy. It is also true, and worth emphasizing, that the existence of certain formal democratic rights under plutocratic rule is a major victory for working people, whose importance should nowise be minimized. What we ultimately need is a dialectical assessment that accounts for the complexity of modes of governance, which include in the United States oligarchic control of the state and important rights that have been won through class struggle.
ZD: How do you evaluate the “free speech” advocated by the bourgeoisie? Does “free speech” really exist in the bourgeois world today?
GR: Bourgeois ideology seeks to isolate the question of free speech from that of power and property, thereby transforming it into an abstract principle governing the actions of isolated individuals. Such an approach endeavors to foreclose any materialist analysis of the means of communication and the all-important question of who owns and controls them. This ideology thereby shifts the entire field of analysis from the social totality to the abstract relationship between theoretical principles and isolated acts of individual speech.
One of the advantages of this approach is that someone can be given the abstract right to free speech precisely because they are devoid of the power to be heard. This is the condition of most people living within the capitalist world. In principle, they can express their individual views in any way that they would like. However, in reality, these opinions will be rendered largely irrelevant if they do not correspond to the vantage points that the owners of the means of communication would like to broadcast. They will simply not be given a platform. Since the ruling class has such awesome power over the means of communication that they have convinced many people that censorship does not exist, these views can even be openly suppressed or shadow banned without the general public taking much notice.
If vantage points outside of the capitalist mainstream are able to gain a wide audience and begin building real power, then we know what the ownership class and the bourgeois state are capable of doing. They have a long history of scrapping any and all appeals to free speech in the name of destroying their class enemies and any infrastructure that supports the free circulation of their ideas. We could cite the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Palmer Raids, the Smith Act, the McCarran Act, the McCarthy era, or the “new” Cold War as examples. Since the beginning of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine, the world has been given an object lesson in the bourgeoisie’s near-total control of the means of communication within the United States. In addition to extensive censorship on YouTube and social media, particularly of Russia Today and Sputnik, all of the major media have marched in lockstep with their anti-Russia and anti-China propaganda, as well as the drumbeat for unquestioning support for the U.S. proxy war (though more recently some conservatives have come to see this as an opportunity to present themselves as somehow antiwar). The right to free speech advocated for by the bourgeoisie amounts to the freedom of the ruling class to own the means of communication so that they can freely decide whose views are worthy of amplification and wide dissemination, and whose can be marginalized or blanketed in silence.
(More at link, wouldn't fit.)
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/12/ ... d-fascism/
Posted by Internationalist 360° on December 26, 2024
Domenico Losurdo and Gabriel Rockhill
Western Marxism: How It Was Born, How It Died, How It Can Be Reborn is a paradigm-shifting book that provides a trenchant critique of the Western left intelligentsia. It reveals how its dominant ideological orientation—characterized by defeatism, utopianism, and anti-communism—is rooted in the political economy of imperialism. Internationally acclaimed theorist Domenico Losurdo thus provides a fresh and challenging perspective on purportedly radical thinkers who have been widely promoted in the imperial core, including those affiliated with the Frankfurt School, French Theory, and operaismo, as well as Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt, and Slavoj Žižek, among others. His critique also has wide-reaching implications for trend-setting discourses inspired by this coterie of intellectuals, from postcolonial and decolonial theory to subaltern studies and beyond. Far from being a negative undertaking, however, this book is grounded in the positive project of reigniting anti-imperialist Marxism.
As a complement to the Italian edition of Western Marxism, this first-ever English translation also features the unprecedented publication of a major lecture that demystifies “Western Marxism” and its role in imperialists’ efforts to denigrate the achievements of actually existing socialism. Raising the stakes of what it means to produce critical theory, Western Marxism will surely provoke wide debate and a reevaluation of hallowed canons.
Domenico Losurdo (1941–2018) was an Italian philosopher and militant who published over fifty books on Marxism, capitalism, Western philosophy, and the history of the communist movement.
Gabriel Rockhill is a philosopher and activist who has published nine books. He is the Founding Director of the Critical Theory Workshop and Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University.
You can find an excerpt, here and watch the book launch with John Bellamy Foster below:
You can also watch an earlier book launch at the Marxist Library, here and follow a study group led by Daniel Tutt, here.
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2024/12/ ... be-reborn/
Imperialist Propaganda and the Ideology of the Western Left Intelligentsia: From Anticommunism and Identity Politics to Democratic Illusions and Fascism
Posted by Internationalist 360° on December 1, 2023
Gabriel Rockhill and Zhao Dingqi
Portrait of the Bourgeoisie
Zhao Dingqi: During the Cold War, how did the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) conduct the “Cultural Cold War”? What activities did the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom carry out, and what impact did it have?
Gabriel Rockhill: The CIA undertook, along with other state agencies and the foundations of major capitalist enterprises, a multifaceted cultural cold war aimed at containing—and ultimately rolling back and destroying—communism. This propaganda war was international in scope and had many different aspects, only a few of which I touch on below. It is important to note at the outset, however, that in spite of its extensive reach and the ample resources dedicated to it, many battles have been lost throughout this war. To take but one recent example that demonstrates how this conflict continues today, Raúl Antonio Capote revealed in his 2015 book that he worked for the CIA for years in its destabilization campaigns in Cuba targeting intellectuals, writers, artists, and students. Unbeknownst to the governmental agency known as “the Company,” however, the Cuban university professor it had slyly honey-potted into promoting its dirty tricks was actually pulling one over on the cocksure master spies: he was working undercover for Cuban intelligence.1 This is but one sign among many others that the CIA, in spite of its various victories, is ultimately fighting a war that proves hard to win: it is attempting to impose a world order that is inimical to the overwhelming majority of the globe’s population.
One of the centerpieces of the cultural cold war was the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which was revealed in 1966 to be a CIA front.2 Hugh Wilford, who has researched the topic extensively, described the CCF as nothing short of one of the largest patrons of art and culture in the history of the world.3 Established in 1950, it promoted on the international scene the work of collaborationist academics such as Raymond Aron and Hannah Arendt over and against their Marxian rivals, including the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The CCF had offices in thirty-five countries, mobilized an army of around 280 employees, published or supported some fifty prestigious journals around the world, and organized numerous art and cultural exhibitions, as well as international concerts and festivals. During its lifetime, it also planned or sponsored some 135 international conferences and seminars, working with a minimum of 38 institutions, and it published at least 170 books. Its press service, Forum Service, broadcast, free of charge and all over the world, reports from its venal intellectuals in twelve languages, which reached six hundred newspapers and five million readers. This vast global network was what its director, Michael Josselson, called—in an expression reminiscent of the Mafia—“our big family.” From its Paris headquarters, the CCF had at its disposal an international echo chamber to amplify the voice of anticommunist intellectuals, artists, and writers. Its budget in 1966 was $2,070,500, which corresponds to $19.5 million in 2023.
Josselson’s “big family” was, however, just a small part of what Frank Wisner of the CIA called his “mighty Wurlitzer”: the international jukebox of media and cultural programming controlled by the Company. To take but a few examples of this gargantuan framework for psychological warfare, Carl Bernstein marshaled ample evidence to demonstrate that at least four hundred U.S. journalists worked surreptitiously for the CIA between 1952 and 1977.4 Following these revelations, the New York Times undertook a three-month investigation and concluded that the CIA “embraced more than eight hundred news and public information organizations and individuals.”5 These two exposés were published in establishment venues by journalists who themselves operated in the same networks they were analyzing, so these estimates were likely low.
Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the director of the New York Times from 1935 to 1961, worked so closely with the Agency that he signed a confidentiality agreement (the highest level of collaboration). William S. Paley’s Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) was unquestionably the CIA’s greatest asset in the field of audiovisual broadcasting. It worked so intimately with the Company that it installed a direct phone line to CIA headquarters that was not routed through its central operator. Henry Luce’s Time Inc. was its most powerful collaborator in the weekly and monthly arena (including Time—where Bernstein later published—Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated). Luce agreed to hire CIA operatives as journalists, which became a very common cover. As we know from the Task Force on Greater CIA Openness, convened by CIA Director Robert Gates in 1991, these types of practices continued unabated after the revelations mentioned above: “PAO (Public Affairs Office) [of the CIA] now has relationships with reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly, and television network in the nation.… In many instances, we have persuaded reporters to postpone, change, hold, or even scrap stories.”6
The CIA also gained control of the American Newspaper Guild, and it became the owner of press services, magazines, and newspapers that it used as cover for its agents.7 It has placed officers in other press services, such as LATIN, Reuters, the Associated Press, and United Press International. William Schaap, an expert on governmental disinformation, testified that the CIA “owned or controlled some 2,500 media entities all over the world. In addition, it had its people, ranging from stringers to highly visible journalists and editors, in virtually every major media organization.”8 “We ‘had’ at least one newspaper in every foreign capital at any given time,” one CIA man told journalist John Crewdson. Furthermore, the source related, “those that the agency did not own outright or subsidize heavily it infiltrated with paid agents or staff officers who could have stories printed that were useful to the agency and not print those it found detrimental.”9 In the digital age, this process has of course continued. Yasha Levine, Alan MacLeod, and other scholars and journalists have detailed the extensive involvement of the U.S. national security state in the realms of big tech and social media. They have demonstrated, among other things, that major intelligence operators occupy key positions at Facebook, X (Twitter), TikTok, Reddit, and Google.10
The CIA has also deeply infiltrated the professional intelligentsia. When the Church Committee released its 1975 report on the U.S. intelligence community, the Agency admitted that it was in contact with “many thousands” of academics in “hundreds” of institutions (and no reform since has prevented it from pursuing or expanding this practice, as confirmed by the 1991 Gates Memo mentioned above).11 The Russian Institutes at Harvard and Columbia, like the Hoover Institute at Stanford and the Center for International Studies at MIT, were developed with direct support and oversight by the CIA.12 A researcher at the New School for Social Research recently brought to my attention a series of documents confirming that the CIA’s heinous MKULTRA project engaged in research at forty-four colleges and universities (at least), and we know that a minimum of fourteen universities participated in the infamous Operation Paperclip, which brought some 1,600 Nazi scientists, engineers, and technicians to the United States.13 MKULTRA, for those unfamiliar with it, was one of the Agency’s programs that engaged in sadistic brainwashing and torture experiments in which subjects were administered—without their consent—high doses of psychoactive drugs and other chemicals in combination with electroshocks, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, verbal and sexual abuse, and other forms of torture.
The CIA has also been deeply involved in the art world. For instance, it promoted U.S. American art, particularly Abstract Expressionism and the New York art scene, over and against Socialist Realism.14 It funded art exhibits, musical and theatrical performances, international art festivals, and more in a bid to disseminate what was touted as the free art of the West. The Company has worked closely with major art institutions in these endeavors. To take but a single telling example, one of the major CIA officers involved in the cultural cold war, Thomas W. Braden, was the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) executive secretary before joining the Agency. MoMA’s presidents have included Nelson Rockefeller, who became the super-coordinator for clandestine intelligence operations and allowed the Rockefeller Fund to be used as a conduit for CIA money. Among MoMA’s directors, we find René d’Harnoncourt, who had worked for Rockefeller’s wartime intelligence agency for Latin America. John Hay Whitney of the eponymous museum and Julius Fleischmann sat on MoMA’s board of trustees. The former had worked for the CIA’s predecessor organization, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and allowed his charity to be used as a conduit for CIA money. The latter served as the president of the CIA’s Farfield Foundation. William S. Paley, the president of CBS and one of the major figures in U.S. psychological warfare programs, including those of the CIA, was on the members’ board of MoMA’s International Program. As this web of relations indicates, the capitalist ruling class works closely with the U.S. national security state in order to tightly control the cultural apparatus.
Many books have been written on the U.S. state’s involvement with the entertainment industry. Matthew Alford and Tom Secker have documented that the Department of Defense has been involved in supporting—with complete and absolute censorship rights—a minimum of 814 movies, with the CIA clocking in at a minimum of 37 and the FBI 22.15 Regarding TV shows, some of which have been very long running, the Department of Defense totals 1,133, the CIA 22, and the FBI 10. Above and beyond these quantifiable cases, there is, of course, the qualitative relationship between the national security state and Tinseltown. John Rizzo explained as much in 2014: “The CIA has long had a special relationship with the entertainment industry, devoting considerable attention to fostering relationships with Hollywood movers and shakers—studio executives, producers, directors, big-name actors.”16 Having served as the Deputy Counsel or Acting General Counsel of the CIA for the first nine years of the war on terror, during which time he was intimately involved in overseeing the global rendition, torture, and drone-assassination programs, Rizzo was well placed to understand how the culture industry could provide cover for imperial butchery.
These activities and many more reveal one of the primary features of the U.S. empire: it is a veritable empire of spectacles. One of its principal focal points has been the war for hearts and minds. To this end, it has established an expansive global infrastructure in order to engage in international psychological warfare. The near absolute control it exercises over mainstream media has been clearly visible in the recent drive to garner support for the U.S. proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. The same is true for its virulent 24/7 anti-China propaganda. Nevertheless, thanks to the work of so many valiant activists and the fact that it is working against reality itself, the empire of spectacles is incapable of completely controlling the narrative.17
ZD: You mention in one of your articles that CIA agents were keen on reading the French critical theories of Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Pierre Bourdieu, and others. What is the reason for this phenomenon? How would you rate French Critical Theory?
GR: One important front in the cultural war on communism has been the intellectual world war, which is the topic of a book that I am currently completing for Monthly Review Press. The CIA has played a very significant role, but so have other governmental agencies and the foundations of the capitalist ruling class. The overall objective has been to discredit Marxism and undermine support for anti-imperialist struggles, as well as actually existing socialism.
Western Europe has been a particularly important battleground. The United States had emerged from the Second World War as the dominant imperial power. In order to try and exercise global hegemony, it was intent on enrolling the former leading imperialist powers in Western Europe as junior partners (as well as Japan in the East). However, this proved to be particularly difficult in countries like France and Italy, which had robust and vibrant communist parties. The U.S. national security state therefore launched a multipronged assault to infiltrate political parties, unions, organizations of civil society, and major news and information outlets.18 It even set up secret stay-behind armies, which it stocked with fascists, and made plans for military coups if the communists ever came to power through the ballot box (these armies were later activated in the post-1968 strategy of tension: they committed terrorist attacks against the civilian population that were blamed on communists).19
On the more explicitly intellectual front, the U.S. power elite supported the establishment of new educational institutions and international networks of knowledge production that were decidedly anticommunist in the hopes of discrediting Marxism. It provided uplift—meaning promotion and visibility—to intellectuals who were openly hostile to historical and dialectical materialism, while simultaneously running heinous slander campaigns against figures like Sartre and Beauvoir.20
It is within this precise context that French theory needs to be understood, at least partially, as a product of U.S. cultural imperialism. The thinkers affiliated with this label—Foucault, Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and many more—were associated in various ways with the structuralist movement, which largely defined itself in opposition to the most prominent philosopher of the preceding generation: Sartre.21 The latter’s Marxian orientation from the mid-1940s onward was generally rejected, and anti-Hegelianism—a shibboleth for anti-Marxism—became the order of the day. Foucault, to take but one telling example, condemned Sartre as “the last Marxist” and claimed that he was a man of the nineteenth century who was out of step with the (anti-Marxist) times, represented by Foucault and other theorists of his ilk.22
While some of these thinkers gained significant notoriety within France, it was their promotion in the United States that catapulted them into the international limelight and made them into required reading for the global intelligentsia. In a recent article in Monthly Review, I detailed some of the political and economic forces at work behind the event that is widely recognized as having inaugurated the era of French theory: the 1966 conference at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, which brought together many of these thinkers for the first time.23 The Ford Foundation, which had been cofunding the CCF with the CIA and had many intimate ties to the Agency’s propaganda endeavors, funded the conference and other subsequent activities to the tune of $36,000 ($339,000 today). This is a truly extraordinary amount of money for a university conference, not to mention the fact that press coverage of the event was assured by Time and Newsweek, which is virtually unheard of in academic settings like these.24
The capitalist foundations, the CIA, and other governmental agencies were interested in promoting radically chic work that could serve as an ersatz for Marxism. Since they could not simply destroy the latter, they sought to foster new forms of theory that could be marketed as cutting edge and critical—though devoid of any revolutionary substance—in order to bury Marxism as passé. As we now know from a 1985 CIA research paper on the topic, the Agency was delighted with the contributions of French structuralism, as well as the Annales School and the group known as the Nouveaux Philosophes (New Philosophers). Citing in particular the structuralism affiliated with Foucault and Claude Lévi-Strauss, as well as the methodology of the Annales School, the paper draws the following conclusion: “we believe their critical demolition of Marxist influence in the social sciences is likely to endure as a profound contribution to modern scholarship.”25
Regarding my own evaluation of French theory, I would say that it is important to recognize it for what it is: a product—at least in part—of U.S. cultural imperialism, which seeks to displace Marxism by an anticommunist theoretical practice that indulges in bourgeois cultural eclecticism and mobilizes discursive pyrotechnics in order to create imagined revolutions in discourse that change nothing in reality. French theory rehabilitates and promotes, moreover, the work of anticommunists like Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, thereby attempting discreetly to redefine radical as radically reactionary. When French theorists do engage with Marxism, they transform it into one discourse among others, which can—and even should—be mixed with non-Marxist and antidialectical discourses like Nietzschean genealogy, Heideggerian Destruktion, Freudian psychoanalysis, and so forth. It is for this reason that many of these thinkers make a proprietary claim to “their own Marx,” which sometimes produces the illusion that they are somehow Marxist or Marxian. However, the overwhelming tendency is to extract arbitrarily from Marx’s work very specific elements that they presume resonate with their own philosophic brand. This is the case, for instance, with Derrida’s ghostly literary Marx of undecidability, Deleuze’s nomadic deterritorializing Marx, Jean-François Lyotard’s antidialectical Marx of the differend, and other such examples. Marx’s discourse thereby functions, for them, as fodder within the bourgeois canon that can be eclectically drawn upon to develop their own brand and give it an aura of capaciousness and radicality. Walter Rodney summed up the true nature of this theoretical practice when he explained that “with bourgeois thought, because of its whimsical nature, and because of the way in which it prompts eccentrics, you can have any road, because, after all, when you are not going any place, you can choose any road!”26
ZD: The Frankfurt School also has a wide influence in contemporary China. How would you rate the theories of the Frankfurt School? What kind of connection does it have with the CIA?
GR: The Institute for Social Research, colloquially known as the “Frankfurt School,” originally emerged as a Marxian research center at the University of Frankfurt that was bankrolled by a wealthy capitalist. When Max Horkheimer took over the directorship of the Institute in 1930, he oversaw a decisive shift toward speculative and cultural concerns that were increasingly distant from historical materialism and class struggle.
In this regard, the Frankfurt School under Horkheimer played a foundational role in the establishment of what is known as Western Marxism, and more specifically Cultural Marxism. Figures like Horkheimer and his lifelong collaborator Theodor Adorno not only rejected actually existing socialism, but they directly identified it with fascism by benightedly relying—very much like French theory—on the ideological category of totalitarianism.27 Embracing a highly intellectualized and melodramatic version of what would later become known as TINA (“There Is No Alternative”), they focused on the realm of bourgeois art and culture as perhaps the only potential site of salvation. This is because thinkers like Adorno and Horkheimer, with a few exceptions, were largely idealist in their theoretical practice: if meaningful social change was foreclosed in the practical world, deliverance was to be sought in the geistig—meaning intellectual and spiritual—realm of novel thought-forms and innovative bourgeois culture.
These high priests of Western Marxism not only embraced the capitalist ideological mantra that “fascism and communism are the same,” they also publicly backed imperialism. Horkheimer, for instance, supported the U.S. war in Vietnam, proclaiming in May 1967 that “In America, when it is necessary to conduct a war…it is not so much a question of the defense of the homeland, but it is essentially a matter of the defense of the constitution, the defense of the rights of man.”28 Although Adorno often preferred a professorial politics of quiet complicity over such bellicose statements, he did line up with Horkheimer in supporting the 1956 imperialist invasion of Egypt by Israel, Britain, and France, which sought to overthrow Gamal Abdel Nasser and seize the Suez Canal.29 Calling Nasser “a fascist chieftain…who conspires with Moscow,” they openly condemned the countries bordering Israel as “Arab robber states.”30
The Frankfurt School’s leaders benefited handsomely from the support of the U.S. capitalist ruling class and national security state. Horkheimer participated in at least one of the major CCF conferences, and Adorno published articles in CIA-backed journals. Adorno also corresponded and collaborated with the leading figure in the German anticommunist Kulturkampf, the CIA’s Melvin Lasky, and he was included in CCF expansion plans even after it was revealed that it was a front organization. The Frankfurt front men also received extensive funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and the U.S. government, including to support the Institute’s return to West Germany after the war (Rockefeller contributed $103,695 in 1950, the equivalent of $1.3 million in 2023). They were, like the French theorists, doing the type of intellectual work that the leaders of the U.S. empire wanted to—and did—support.
It is also worth noting in passing that five of the eight members of Horkheimer’s inner circle at the Frankfurt School worked as analysts and propagandists for the U.S. government and national security state. Herbert Marcuse, Franz Neumann, and Otto Kirchheimer were all employed by the Office of War Information (OWI) before moving on to the Research and Analysis Branch of the OSS.* Leo Löwenthal too worked for the OWI, and Friedrich Pollock was hired by the Anti-Trust Division of the Department of Justice. This was a rather complex situation due to the fact that certain sectors of the U.S. state were keen on enlisting Marxian analysts in the fight against fascism and communism. At the same time, some of them took political positions that were compatible with U.S. imperial interests. This chapter of the history of the Frankfurt School therefore deserves much more scrutiny.31
Finally, the evolution of the Frankfurt School into its second (Jürgen Habermas) and third generations (Axel Honneth, Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib, and so on) did not alter in the least its anticommunist orientation. On the contrary, Habermas explicitly claimed that state socialism was bankrupt and argued for creating space within the capitalist system and its purportedly democratic institutions for the ideal of an inclusive “procedure of discursive will-formation.”32 The neo-Habermasians of the third generation have continued this orientation. Honneth, as I have argued in a detailed article that also engages with the other thinkers under discussion, has erected bourgeois ideology itself into the very normative framework for critical theory.33 Fraser indefatigably presents herself as the most left-wing of the critical theorists by positioning herself as a social democrat. However, she often remains rather vague when it comes to clarifying what this means in concrete terms, openly admitting that she has “a hard time defining a positive program.”34 The negative program is clear, however: “We know that it [democratic socialism] doesn’t mean anything like the authoritarian command economy, single-party model of Communism.”35
ZD: How do you understand the role and function of identity politics and multiculturalism, which are currently prevalent in the Western left?
GR: Identity politics, like the multiculturalism affiliated with it, is a contemporary manifestation of the culturalism and essentialism that have long characterized bourgeois ideology. The latter seeks to naturalize social and economic relations that are the consequence of the material history of capitalism. Rather than recognizing, for instance, that racial, national, ethnic, gender, sexual, and other forms of identity are historical constructs that have varied over time and result from specific material forces, these are naturalized and treated as an unquestionable foundation for political constituencies. Such essentialism serves to obscure the material forces operative behind these identities, as well as the class struggles that have been waged around them. This has been particularly useful to the ruling class and its managers as they have been forced to react to the demands of decolonization and of materialist antiracist and antipatriarchal struggles. How better to respond than with an essentializing identity politics that proposes false solutions to very real problems because it never addresses the material basis of colonization, racism, and gender oppression?
The self-proclaimed anti-essentialist versions of identity politics operative in the work of theorists like Judith Butler do not fundamentally break with this ideology.36 In purporting to deconstruct some of these categories by revealing them as discursive constructs that individuals or groups of individuals can question, play with, and re-perform, theorists working within the idealist parameters of deconstruction never provide a materialist and dialectical analysis of the history of the capitalist social relations that have produced these categories as major sites of collective class struggle. They also do not engage in the deep history of actually existing socialism’s fight collectively to transform these relations. Instead, they tend to draw on deconstruction and a practically dehistoricized version of Foucauldian genealogy to think about gender and sexual relations discursively, and they are at best oriented toward a liberal pluralism in which class struggle is replaced by interest-group advocacy.
By contrast, the Marxist tradition—as Domenico Losurdo has demonstrated in his magisterial work Class Struggle—has a profound and rich history of understanding class struggle in the plural. This means that it includes battles over the relationship between genders, nations, races, and economic classes (and, we could add, sexualities). Since these categories have taken on very specific hierarchical forms under capitalism, the best elements of the Marxist heritage have sought to both understand their historical provenance and radically transform them. This can be seen in the longstanding struggle against the domestic slavery imposed upon women, as well as the battle to overcome the imperialist subordination of nations and their racialized peoples. This history has played itself out in fits and starts, of course, and there is still much work to be done, in part because certain strains of Marxism—such as that of the Second International—have been tainted by elements of bourgeois ideology. Nevertheless, as scholars like Losurdo and others have demonstrated with remarkable erudition, the communists have been at the vanguard of these class struggles to overcome patriarchal domination, imperialist subordination, and racism by going to the very roots of these problems: capitalist social relations.
Identity politics, as it has developed in the leading imperialist countries and particularly the United States, has sought to bury this history in order to present itself as a radically new form of consciousness, as if communists had not so much as thought of the woman question or the national/racial question. Theorists of identity politics thus tend to assert arrogantly and benightedly that they are the first ones to address these issues, thereby overcoming an imagined economic determinism on the part of the so-called vulgar reductionist Marxists.37 Instead of recognizing these issues as sites of class struggle, moreover, they tend to use identity politics as a wedge against class politics. If they do make any gesture toward integrating class into their analysis, they generally reduce it to a question of personal identity, rather than a structural property relation. The solutions that they put forth therefore tend to be epiphenomenal, meaning that they focus on issues of representation and symbolism, rather than, for instance, overcoming the labor relations of domestic slavery and racialized superexploitation through a socialist transformation of the socioeconomic order. They are thereby incapable of leading to significant and sustainable change because they do not go to the root of the problem. As Adolph Reed Jr. has often argued with his signature biting wit, identitarians are perfectly happy to maintain extant class relations—including imperialist relations between nations, I would add—on the condition that there is the requisite ratio of representation of oppressed groups within the ruling class and the professional managerial stratum.
In addition to helping displace class politics and analysis within the Western left, identity politics has made a major contribution to dividing the left itself into siloed debates around specific identity issues. Instead of class unity against a common enemy, it divides—and conquers—working and oppressed people by encouraging them to identify first and foremost as members of specific genders, sexualities, races, nations, ethnicities, religious groups, and so forth. In this regard, the ideology of identity politics actually is, at a much deeper level, a class politics. It is the politics of a bourgeoisie aimed at dividing the working and oppressed peoples of the world in order to more easily rule over them. It should come as no surprise, then, that it is the governing politics of the professional managerial class stratum in the imperial core. It dominates its institutions and informational outlets, and it is one of the primary mechanisms for career advancement within what Reed insightfully calls “the diversity industry.” It encourages everyone involved to identify with their specific group and advance their own individual interests by posing as its privileged representative. We should note, moreover, that wokeism also has the effect of driving some people into the arms of the right. If the dominant political culture encourages a clan mentality combined with competitive individualism, then it is unsurprising that white people and men have also—as a partial response to their perceived disenfranchisement by the diversity industry—advanced their particular agendas as “victims” of the system. Identity politics devoid of a class analysis is thus absolutely amenable to right-wing and even fascist permutations.
Finally, I would be remiss not to mention that identity politics, which has its recent ideological roots in the New Left and the social chauvinism V. I. Lenin had earlier diagnosed in the European left, is one of the principal ideological tools of imperialism. The divide-and-conquer strategy has been used to splinter targeted countries by fostering religious, ethnic, national, racial, or gender conflicts.38 Identity politics has also served as a direct justification for imperialist intervention and meddling, as well as destabilization campaigns, if it be the purported causes of liberating women in Afghanistan, supporting Black rappers “discriminated” against in Cuba, backing purportedly “ecosocialist” Indigenous candidates in Latin America, “protecting” ethnic minorities in China, or other such well-known propaganda operations in which the U.S. empire presents itself as the benevolent benefactor of oppressed identities. Here we can clearly see the complete disconnect between the purely symbolic politics of identity and the material reality of class struggles insofar as the former can—and does—provide thin cover for imperialism. At this level as well, then, identity politics is ultimately a class politics: a politics of the imperialist ruling class.
ZD: Slavoj Žižek is a scholar who has had a wide influence in current global left-wing academic circles, and, of course, there are many controversies. Why do you see him as a “capitalist court jester”?39
GR: Žižek is a product of the imperial theory industry. As Michael Parenti has pointed out, reality is radical, meaning that working people in the capitalist world are faced with very real, material struggles for employment, housing, health care, education, a sustainable environment, and so forth. All of this tends to radicalize people, and many gravitate toward Marxism because it actually explains the world they are living in, the struggles they are facing, and it puts forth clear and actionable solutions. It is for this reason that the capitalist cultural apparatus has to deal with a very real interest in Marxism on the part of the working and oppressed masses. One tactic that it has developed, particularly for the target audiences of young people and members of the professional managerial class stratum, is to promote a highly commodified version of Marxism that perverts its fundamental substance. It thereby attempts to transform Marxism into a fashionable brand to be sold like any other commodity, rather than a collective theoretical and practical framework for emancipation from commodity-driven society.
Žižek is perfect for this project in many ways. He is an anticommunist native informant who grew up in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). He regularly claims that his subjective experience as a petty-bourgeois intellectual who sought uplift for his career in the West somehow gives him a special right to testify to the true nature of socialism. Personal anecdotes regarding his experience in the SFRY thereby take the place of objective analysis. Unsurprisingly, for an opportunist looking for pelf and glory, Žižek experienced his socialist homeland as inferior to the Western capitalist countries that provided him with such uplift that he is now recognized as one of the top global thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine (a virtual arm of the U.S. State Department).
Žižek openly brags about the role that he personally played in dismantling socialism in the SFRY. He was the primary political columnist for a prominent dissident publication, Mladina, which the Yugoslav Communist Party accused of being backed by the CIA. He also cofounded the Liberal Democratic Party and ran as its presidential candidate in the first breakaway republic of Slovenia, promising that he would “substantially assist in the decomposition of ideologic Real-socialist apparatus of the state [sic].”40 Although he lost by a narrow margin, he openly supported the Slovenian state and its ruling party after the restoration of capitalism, and thus throughout the brutal process of capitalist shock therapy that led to a catastrophic decline in living standards for the majority of the population (but not for him—haha!). The pro-privatization party he cofounded was also clearly oriented toward integration into the imperialist camp, since it was the leading advocate for accession to the European Union and NATO.
I see this Eastern European liberal as capitalism’s court jester because he makes a laughingstock out of Marxism, and this is precisely why he has been so widely promoted by the dominant forces within capitalist society. Rather than a collective science of emancipation rooted in real material struggles, Marxism as he understands it is, above all, a provocative discourse of intellectual chicanery that boils down to the petty-bourgeois political posturing of an opportunist enfant terrible. His puckish antics and commie cosplay delight the bourgeoisie and capture the short attention spans of the uneducated. He is—like a jester—gifted at getting a rise or a laugh out of people, which easily translates into likes and hits in the digital age. He is also particularly good at hawking the wares of Hollywood and the bourgeois cultural apparatus in general. King capital obviously loves this trickster, who has lined his pockets in the process. Like any good jester, he knows the limits of courtly decorum and ultimately respects them by denigrating actually existing socialism, promoting capitalist accommodation, and often even directly supporting imperialism. If he is indeed the world’s “most dangerous intellectual,” as he is sometimes described by the bourgeois press, it is because he endangers the Marxist project of fighting imperialism and building a socialist world.
Confirming the well-established ratio between objective uplift and subjective rightward drift, Žižek has arguably become increasingly reactionary in his anticommunist support for imperialism. Consider his peremptory judgment regarding current efforts to challenge neocolonialism in Africa: “it is clear that the ‘anti-colonial’ uprisings in Central Africa are even worse than French neocolonialism.”41 In another recent public intervention, he provided a remarkably clear illustration of the type of revolution that he supports. Discussing the summer 2023 revolts in France in the wake of the police slaying of Nahel Merzouk, he drew on the important Marxist insight—as he often does for anything coherent that he claims—that uprisings will fail if there is not an organizational strategy that can bring them to victory. He then provided an example of a successful revolution: “Public protests and uprisings can play a positive role if they are sustained by an emancipatory vision, such as the 2013–14 Maidan uprising in Ukraine.”42 As has been widely documented, the Maidan uprising was a fascist coup d’état that was fomented and supported by the U.S. national security state.43 This means that he considers an imperialist-backed fascist coup, which Samir Amin referred to as a “Euro/Nazi putsch,” to be a “positive” example of an “emancipatory vision” that led to a successful revolution.44 This position, as well as his stalwart support for the U.S.-NATO proxy war in Ukraine, clarifies what it means to be the world’s “most dangerous intellectual”: he is a philo-fascist masquerading as a communist.
ZD: The United States has long been regarded by the West as a model of liberal democracy. But you think America was never a democracy.45 Can you explain your point of view?
GR: Objectively speaking, the United States was never a democracy. It was founded as a republic, and the so-called founding fathers were openly hostile to democracy. This is obvious from The Federalist Papers, the notes taken at the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and the founding documents of the United States, as well as the material practice of governance that was originally established in the settler colony. As everyone knows, the Indigenous population of the United States, referred to as the “merciless Indian Savages” in the Declaration of Independence, was not given democratic power in the freshly minted republic, nor were enslaved people from Africa or women.46 The same is very much true of average white workers. As scholars like Terry Bouton have documented in detail: “most ordinary white men…did not think the [so-called American] Revolution ended with governments that made their ideals and interests the primary goal. To the contrary, they were convinced that the revolutionary elite had remade government to benefit themselves and to undermine the independence of ordinary folk.”47 After all, the Constitutional Convention did not establish direct popular elections for the president, the Supreme Court, or senators. The only exception was the House of Representatives. However, the qualifications were set by state legislatures, which almost always required property-holding as a basis for the right to vote. It is unsurprising, then, that progressive critics at the time pointed this out. Patrick Henry flatly stated regarding the United States: “It is not a democracy.”48 George Mason described the new constitution as the “most daring attempt to establish a despotic aristocracy among freeman, that the world has ever witnessed.”49
Although the term republic was widely used to describe the United States at the time, this began to shift in the late 1820s, when Andrew Jackson—also known as “Indian Killer” for his genocidal policies—ran a populist presidential campaign. He presented himself as a democrat, in the sense of an average U.S. American who would put an end to the rule of patricians from Massachusetts and Virginia. In spite of the fact that no structural changes were made to the mode of governance, politicians like Jackson and other members of the elite and their managers began using the term democracy to describe the republic, thereby insinuating that it served the interests of the people.50 This tradition has, of course, continued: democracy is a euphemism for oligarchic bourgeois rule.
At the same time, there have been two and a half centuries of class struggle in the United States, and democratic forces have often won very significant concessions from the ruling class. The realm of popular elections has been expanded to include senators and the president, even though the electoral college has yet to be abolished and Supreme Court justices are still appointed for life. The franchise has been extended to women, African Americans, and Native Americans. These are major gains that should, of course, be defended, expanded, and rendered more substantial through deep democratic reforms of the entire electoral and campaign process. However, as important as these democratic advances are, they have not altered the overall system of plutocratic dominion.
In a very important study based on multivariable statistical analysis, Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page demonstrated that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”51 This plutocratic form of rule is not only operative domestically, of course, but also internationally. The United States has attempted to impose its antidemocratic form of business rule wherever it can. Between the end of the Second World War and 2014, according to William Blum’s sedulous research, it endeavored to overthrow more than fifty foreign governments, the majority of which had been democratically elected.52 The United States is a plutocratic empire, not a democracy in any meaningful or substantive sense of the term.
I do recognize, of course, that expressions like bourgeois democracy, formal democracy, and liberal democracy are often used, for various reasons, to index this form of plutocracy. It is also true, and worth emphasizing, that the existence of certain formal democratic rights under plutocratic rule is a major victory for working people, whose importance should nowise be minimized. What we ultimately need is a dialectical assessment that accounts for the complexity of modes of governance, which include in the United States oligarchic control of the state and important rights that have been won through class struggle.
ZD: How do you evaluate the “free speech” advocated by the bourgeoisie? Does “free speech” really exist in the bourgeois world today?
GR: Bourgeois ideology seeks to isolate the question of free speech from that of power and property, thereby transforming it into an abstract principle governing the actions of isolated individuals. Such an approach endeavors to foreclose any materialist analysis of the means of communication and the all-important question of who owns and controls them. This ideology thereby shifts the entire field of analysis from the social totality to the abstract relationship between theoretical principles and isolated acts of individual speech.
One of the advantages of this approach is that someone can be given the abstract right to free speech precisely because they are devoid of the power to be heard. This is the condition of most people living within the capitalist world. In principle, they can express their individual views in any way that they would like. However, in reality, these opinions will be rendered largely irrelevant if they do not correspond to the vantage points that the owners of the means of communication would like to broadcast. They will simply not be given a platform. Since the ruling class has such awesome power over the means of communication that they have convinced many people that censorship does not exist, these views can even be openly suppressed or shadow banned without the general public taking much notice.
If vantage points outside of the capitalist mainstream are able to gain a wide audience and begin building real power, then we know what the ownership class and the bourgeois state are capable of doing. They have a long history of scrapping any and all appeals to free speech in the name of destroying their class enemies and any infrastructure that supports the free circulation of their ideas. We could cite the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Palmer Raids, the Smith Act, the McCarran Act, the McCarthy era, or the “new” Cold War as examples. Since the beginning of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine, the world has been given an object lesson in the bourgeoisie’s near-total control of the means of communication within the United States. In addition to extensive censorship on YouTube and social media, particularly of Russia Today and Sputnik, all of the major media have marched in lockstep with their anti-Russia and anti-China propaganda, as well as the drumbeat for unquestioning support for the U.S. proxy war (though more recently some conservatives have come to see this as an opportunity to present themselves as somehow antiwar). The right to free speech advocated for by the bourgeoisie amounts to the freedom of the ruling class to own the means of communication so that they can freely decide whose views are worthy of amplification and wide dissemination, and whose can be marginalized or blanketed in silence.
(More at link, wouldn't fit.)
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/12/ ... d-fascism/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Ideology
Fromm's anti-Marxism
Recently I have read several works by Erich Fromm, a representative of the "Frankfurt school", a bourgeois sociologist and part-time psychoanalyst, a "Freudo-Marxist". Fromm tried to confuse me with his drawn-out reasoning, so, although this will be a repetition of the ABC truths, I will still figure out where and why he is wrong.
In his works, E. Fromm criticizes capitalism, rightly considering society to be sick. But it is not very clear why he is considered a great thinker of the 20th century, because when you get acquainted with his plans for the "treatment" of society, it becomes clear that this is nothing but moralizing. Fromm is also alien to the principle of partisanship in literature: many of the phenomena he criticizes are presented as "above-class", inherent in modern society "in general".
A significant part of Fromm's teaching is his theory of personality. If we briefly characterize it, we will get the following. Fromm categorically rejects behaviorism (in the sense that personality is formed only under the influence of factors that act directly on it: in general, individual experience completely forms character, and the social environment plays little part in this), but at the same time he does not deny the plasticity of human nature and its adaptability in the presence of some stable core - the essence of man. And one of the fundamental traits of man, E. Fromm believes, is the need for unification and a sense of belonging to something. In accordance with this, he focuses on the problem of alienation in its various forms.
Fromm is generally rather vague, but a summary of everything that concerns alienation can be taken from the following quote:
“Alienation, as we see it in modern society, is almost universal; it permeates man’s attitude to his work, to the things he consumes, to the state, to his fellow men, and to himself. Man has created a world of man-made things such as never existed before. He has devised a complex social structure in order to control the technical mechanism he has created. But everything he has created rises above him and dominates him. He feels himself not as the creator and supreme authority, but as the servant of the Golem made by his own hands. The more powerful and grandiose the forces he releases, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is opposed to himself and to his own forces, embodied in the things he has created and alienated from him. He no longer belongs to himself, but is at the mercy of his own creation. He has built a golden calf and says: ‘These are your gods who brought you out of Egypt’” (The Sane Society, ch. 5).
Marx has a work from his youth: "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844", which was published only in the 1930s in the USSR. It still has the influence of Hegelianism, but the idea that Marx wanted to convey is quite clear. He shows that man in the era of capitalism has ceased to be a man, in the sense that he has completely lost contact with nature and with other people.
Man has translated everything into the language of money, into the principle of efficiency "in a capitalistic way" (that is, the maximum benefit of a private business). He unconsciously transfers it into personal relationships, keeping an account of the services that he provides to others and that are provided to him. He understands little about the enjoyment of art, the joy of knowledge, emotions are reduced to drowning out boredom or hatred of hired labor with primitive pleasures for a short time.
Fromm describes in detail all the abominations of modern society, causing panic, escalating the situation around the increase in the number of nuclear weapons. All his criticism is, in general, fair, one must be blind not to see it. But, firstly, it is one-sided, he sees only the bad, ignores the shoots of communism, the beginnings of the new in the old. In this sense, all opportunists uniformly spread pessimism and uncertainty about the victory of communism. Secondly, the solutions proposed by Fromm are a naive fantasy without a trace of scientificity. Fromm believes that without a change in psychology, people will perish, that is, he is an idealist.
Fromm does not understand the nature of fascism and the nature of power. He proposes stupidity in the spirit of "civil society": supposedly universal democracy should solve all problems. In addition, Fromm in a plaintive tone condemns bureaucracy and "the system that crushes man", proposes decentralization of production. And of course, Fromm rejects revolutions and preaches the gradual development of society according to his plans (apparently due to the enthusiasm of readers inspired by his books).
Fromm refers to Marx's "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844" [1]. In his later works, Marx developed what he thought in his youth, only on the basis of criticism of history, the economic teachings of past thinkers, and a generalization of the experience of the labor movement. And Lenin in practice implemented the construction of a party of the working class; a party that led people, not fluffy pacifists and reformists, but those ready to fight for a society in which there would be no private property, classes, and therefore no wars. And to fight not only literally, but in all spheres of human activity to replace reactionary forms, traditions, and remnants with scientifically developed, truly human ones. And yes, this is a struggle not without forced violence, power in the form of a dictatorship of the working class will exist until the complete destruction of classes, until the construction of mature communism.
Fromm writes as if he does not know about the Bolsheviks' achievements, about their practical victories of communism. He says in passing that at first the communists sought to change man himself and human relations, but then "for some reason" they stopped. What exactly he wanted to convey with this is unclear ("To Have or to Be?", Introduction, Ch. 7). Or rather, it is clear - he deliberately ignored and distorted the victorious experience of communism, being an intellectual lackey of the bourgeoisie.
Alienation from nature
“Another circumstance is of no small importance: the relationship with nature has gradually become deeply hostile. Initially, the contradiction was rooted in being itself: man is part of nature and at the same time, thanks to his reason, rises above it. For centuries, we have tried to solve the existential problem facing humanity by changing nature in accordance with our goals and tasks. But over time, not a trace remained of the messianic vision of harmony; we moved on to exploiting and conquering it, until this conquest became more and more like destruction. The passion for conquest and hostility blinded us and did not allow us to see that natural resources are not limitless and can be depleted, and then nature will take revenge on man for his barbaric, predatory treatment of it.
"Industrial society despises nature; as well as everything that is not the product of machine production - including all people who are not engaged in the production of machines. Today we see in people a craving for everything mechanical, lifeless, as if they were seized by the magic of technical progress and an ever-increasing thirst for destruction" (To Have or to Be?, Introduction).
All this is nothing more than demagogy. What does alienation have to do with it? The development of material and spiritual culture is in itself opposed to the natural basis of man, that is, strictly speaking, it alienates him from nature.
The relationship between man and nature can be neither friendly nor hostile. Human society itself is a force of nature. The problems of ecology are the problems of social relations, the organization of society, the relationship between the benefits and harms to society of this or that activity, the form and specificity of everyday life [2].
For example, in the 1930s, the party raised the issue of reorganizing industrial centers, scientifically planning their development, and improving communal and living conditions [3]. This was a real practical step toward improving the ecology, that is, the human habitat.
Regarding "contempt for nature", in my opinion, the following comment would not be superfluous. Society has already reached a sufficiently high level of development of productive forces and is able to provide each person with more than just the means of subsistence without the use of slave labor. Therefore, setting production goals is important here. The goal of capitalist production is to maximize profits, not to satisfy the needs of society.
Scientific, communist production aims to satisfy the needs of society.
For example, during the discussion of the results of the first five-year plan at the joint plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) on 07.01.1933, Stalin raised the issue of the profitability of certain industries.
“They say that collective and state farms are not entirely profitable, that they absorb a huge amount of resources, that there is no point in maintaining such enterprises, that it would be more expedient to disband them, leaving only the profitable ones. More than half of the textile enterprises were unprofitable several years ago. <…> We waited for over a year and achieved that the entire textile industry became profitable. And our automobile plant in the city of Gorky? It is also unprofitable for now. Would you order it to be closed? Or our ferrous metallurgy, which is also unprofitable for now? Shouldn’t we close it down, comrades? <…> Profitability cannot be viewed in a hucksterish manner, from the point of view of the present moment. Profitability must be taken from the point of view of the national economy over several years. Only such a point of view can be called truly Leninist, truly Marxist.”
In short, if market efficiency is assessed mainly in the monetary equivalent of profit and does not take into account what is being produced and why, then communist efficiency presupposes high-quality planning in the interests of the expanded reproduction of society.
"Alienation" from technology and things. Division of labor
Another form of alienation according to Fromm is alienation from technology, or, in a broad sense, from consumable things.
“Today, the pragmatic view of technocrats is quite popular, who recommend forgetting about emotions, immersing ourselves in work and entertainment, and, without thinking about the future, accepting the dictatorship of technocracy as something completely natural and inevitable, which should not be feared at all. I do not see any particular wisdom in these views and I believe that thinking in this way means wishful thinking. After all, such a dictatorship is nothing other than technocratic fascism, which will inevitably lead to catastrophe. Because a dehumanized person very soon loses not only feelings, but also reason, and in his madness - even the instinct for self-preservation. And ultimately, he will be unable to maintain a viable society, since he will hardly be able to refrain from the suicidal use of nuclear or biological weapons” (To Have or to Be?, Ch. 9).
What kind of person can't resist using nuclear weapons? It seems that a random person off the street doesn't have access to them.
The fact that imperialist governments can take such a step does not even sound fantastic. If Fromm had this in mind, he should have expressed himself accordingly. The fact that proletarians are becoming puppets in the hands of their own and foreign imperialist governments, that fascism is an invariable companion of imperialism, is no secret. Of course, the fact that previously it was necessary to carry out mobilization, to force the proletariat and peasantry to fight for the next imposed goals, and now it is enough to press a button to start the end of human history adds pathos, but the social essence does not change from this. This is a typical example of an attempt to bypass the issue of the partisanship of literature. Why does Fromm never clearly speak about the essence of the power of the states that he describes? This is a rhetorical question, because he himself has no idea either about the essence of power or about the essence of fascism.
“We are surrounded by things whose nature and origin are completely unknown to us. The telephone, the radio, the phonograph, and other complex machines are almost as incomprehensible to us as they would be to a person of primitive culture; we know how to use them, i.e., we know which button to press, but we do not know the principle of their operation, having only the vaguest ideas about their structure, acquired some time ago at school. But simpler and more everyday things are almost as alien to us. We do not know how bread is baked, fabric is woven, how a table is made, or glass is manufactured. We consume - as we produce - without any concrete connection with the objects with which we deal. We live in a world of things, and the only thing that connects us with them is that we know how to handle these things or how to consume them” (The Sane Society, ch. 5).
If we translate this into human language, we must admit that such a phenomenon is a consequence of the division of labor, the one-sidedness of the development of individuals. In order to increase efficiency in a purely utilitarian sense, specialties are increasingly fragmented, and the modern school education system does not contribute to the fact that upon leaving school, a person with multi-faceted basic knowledge is obtained. The Soviet government took steps to overcome the opposition of mental and physical labor. This is the gradual introduction of polytechnic education, the publication of literature on the current state of technology in understandable language for the mass reader [4]. This is the leadership of the Stakhanovite movement and support for rationalization (the creation of rationalization commissions at enterprises) as forms of communist competition, i.e., a competition of creative and organizational abilities in increasing labor productivity between enterprises and individual workers. This is also the discussion of the production plan at meetings so that everyone understands not their narrow task, but the production process as a whole [5].
Elsewhere, Fromm approaches the question of the division of labor:
“Since no one ever does all the work and each does only a part of it, since the dimensions of things and the organization of people are too large to be realized as a whole, it turns out to be impossible to imagine anything as a whole” (The Sane Society, ch. 5).
This is again just a phrase. The question of how to organize social production is purely managerial. This concerns not only the resources themselves, production capacities, but also the training of personnel. Yes, to run an economy on such a scale, it is necessary to specially train engineering and economic personnel. All these tasks can be solved, but the main thing in them is goal-setting. A correctly set task, taking into account the current conditions, is already the beginning of the matter. The bourgeois economy is simply moving somewhere, in an indefinite direction, and efforts are reduced to compensating for the imbalances of industries.
The division of labor cannot be destroyed or erased. However, it is necessary to destroy the opposition between physical and mental labor. The material base in the form of a high percentage of automation is helpful here, but the social structure determines how the time freed up from some production operations is used. The productive forces are, first of all, the people themselves. And the faster labor productivity grows, the smaller the share of routine labor and the greater the share of creative labor. The more prerequisites there are for each person to acquire multifaceted knowledge.
"Alienation" of labor
“The peculiarity of capitalist production is the degree to which the division of labor reaches. Although in the medieval economy it existed, say, between agricultural production and handicraft work, it was insignificant within each type of production. The carpenter who made a table or a chair made the entire table or the entire chair, and even if some of the preparatory work was done by his apprentices, he supervised the product, checking it in its finished form. In a modern industrial enterprise, the worker never comes into contact with the completely finished product. He is engaged in performing one specialized operation and, although in time he may transfer from one operation to another, he still does not deal with the concrete product as a whole. <…> The only person who deals with the whole product is the manager, but for him the product is an abstraction, the essence of which lies in exchange value, whereas the worker, for whom the product is concrete, never deals with it as a whole” (The Sane Society, Ch. 5).
That is, if the worker dealt with the product as a whole, the alienation relationship would disappear? That is, a worker under socialism who participated in a production meeting and clarified the planned tasks, and most importantly, is politically literate and knows why it is necessary to overfulfill the plan, will be alienated from the product of labor, but a worker in a small capitalist firm, who performs all the operations for the manufacture of a product for sale, will not be alienated from the product of his labor? Interesting logic. A technological criterion instead of a social one.
Fromm offers “solutions” in the spirit of utopian socialism.
“Decentralization in industry should lead to the division of giant concerns into smaller associations, and individual enterprises and even workshops should be given greater independence in decision-making” (“To Have or to Be?”, Chapter 9).
He seems unfamiliar with the modern organization of industry. He is not embarrassed by the science-intensive nature of a large number of industries, for which a high degree of centralization is a necessity, not a disadvantage. The development of productive forces does not stop. And to demand the above solutions means to take steps backwards.
The task of communism is not to destroy large-scale industry, but to ensure that its capacities work for the benefit of the workers, and not drive them prematurely into the grave.
Bureaucratization
Also, one of the “forms of alienation” according to Fromm is bureaucratization.
"The people to be managed are objects for bureaucrats, to whom they relate neither love nor hate - absolutely impersonally; the bureaucratic administrator has no right to feelings when it comes to his professional activity; he must manipulate people as if they were figures or things. Bureaucratic managers are necessary because of the enormous scale of the organization and the high degree of division of labor, which does not allow the individual to see the whole, and also because there is no organic, spontaneous cooperation between individuals or groups engaged in industry" (The Sane Society, ch. 5).
Firstly, I would like to ask again: what are the prerequisites for a bureaucrat to love or hate other workers, if he is exactly the same hired worker and his salary interests him more than the result and progress of his work? How does a bureaucrat differ in this sense from a typical proletarian? Is a proletarian obliged to love what he does and be concerned about the result? Formalism is a serious problem of class society and especially the transition to a communist society.
Secondly, Fromm takes the issue of bureaucracy into the sphere of purely moral problems. Why does a “bureaucratic” attitude to management work arise? First of all, because there may be a lack of factual knowledge from the relevant area and a person is not able to perform management functions. In addition, the negative phenomena that Fromm describes often arise due to the class tasks that a bureaucrat faces. For example, if the bourgeois state punished social security officials for underpayment of benefits, and not as it does now - for issuing without due grounds, then there would be far fewer complaints about heartlessness. That is, a lot depends on the organization of work and the tasks that are set for bureaucrats.
Thirdly, the main thing is not to miss the issue of production relations. Thus, under Stalin, bureaucracy was fought in practice [6]. In the case of established socio-political work, everyone - both the ordinary performer and the manager - will work in their place to fulfill the plan. There would only be an understanding of why.
Conclusions
Fromm creates confusion on all the issues he examines. Concerning the development of productive forces in isolation from the development of needs, naive phrases in the spirit of "listening to human nature" are proposed. Concerning the division of labor, known facts are simply stated, but no conclusions are drawn about the need to change the social system. In the area of politics, Fromm presents himself as a fan of "true democracy", proposing decentralization of management, a return to city assemblies and other measures that do not correspond to the current level of development of society. In the area of production management, decentralization and the involvement of everyone in "true democratic" management are also proposed.
Fromm was a member of the Socialist Party of the United States, and his plans for improving society are presented in his essay "Humanistic Socialism," which is a reworking of the party's program.
In general, it can be said that Fromm very colorfully describes the abominations of bourgeois existence, but his proposals are based not on an analysis of the material prerequisites for the transition to a new mode of production and a new social order, but on the hope that people themselves will understand the reasons for this state of affairs, and social relations will somehow change by themselves, the dominance of the state and technology (in Fromm's understanding) will collapse by itself.
Fromm lacks an adequate assessment of the experience of countries that have begun to build communism, so it is impossible to base any practice on his “classless” theories, which means they are reactionary.
M. Severova
12/30/2024
https://prorivists.org/100_fromm/
Google Translator
While Fromm's views on nature are simplistic and idealistic(I'd have agreed with him 20 years ago but have grown up...) the author's view lack current scientific analysis. The view of nature as to be disregarded if it is not directly utilized will take us to the same dead-end as capitalism though more slowly. The author properly states that humans are part of nature but shallowly ignores the implications.
Recently I have read several works by Erich Fromm, a representative of the "Frankfurt school", a bourgeois sociologist and part-time psychoanalyst, a "Freudo-Marxist". Fromm tried to confuse me with his drawn-out reasoning, so, although this will be a repetition of the ABC truths, I will still figure out where and why he is wrong.
In his works, E. Fromm criticizes capitalism, rightly considering society to be sick. But it is not very clear why he is considered a great thinker of the 20th century, because when you get acquainted with his plans for the "treatment" of society, it becomes clear that this is nothing but moralizing. Fromm is also alien to the principle of partisanship in literature: many of the phenomena he criticizes are presented as "above-class", inherent in modern society "in general".
A significant part of Fromm's teaching is his theory of personality. If we briefly characterize it, we will get the following. Fromm categorically rejects behaviorism (in the sense that personality is formed only under the influence of factors that act directly on it: in general, individual experience completely forms character, and the social environment plays little part in this), but at the same time he does not deny the plasticity of human nature and its adaptability in the presence of some stable core - the essence of man. And one of the fundamental traits of man, E. Fromm believes, is the need for unification and a sense of belonging to something. In accordance with this, he focuses on the problem of alienation in its various forms.
Fromm is generally rather vague, but a summary of everything that concerns alienation can be taken from the following quote:
“Alienation, as we see it in modern society, is almost universal; it permeates man’s attitude to his work, to the things he consumes, to the state, to his fellow men, and to himself. Man has created a world of man-made things such as never existed before. He has devised a complex social structure in order to control the technical mechanism he has created. But everything he has created rises above him and dominates him. He feels himself not as the creator and supreme authority, but as the servant of the Golem made by his own hands. The more powerful and grandiose the forces he releases, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is opposed to himself and to his own forces, embodied in the things he has created and alienated from him. He no longer belongs to himself, but is at the mercy of his own creation. He has built a golden calf and says: ‘These are your gods who brought you out of Egypt’” (The Sane Society, ch. 5).
Marx has a work from his youth: "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844", which was published only in the 1930s in the USSR. It still has the influence of Hegelianism, but the idea that Marx wanted to convey is quite clear. He shows that man in the era of capitalism has ceased to be a man, in the sense that he has completely lost contact with nature and with other people.
Man has translated everything into the language of money, into the principle of efficiency "in a capitalistic way" (that is, the maximum benefit of a private business). He unconsciously transfers it into personal relationships, keeping an account of the services that he provides to others and that are provided to him. He understands little about the enjoyment of art, the joy of knowledge, emotions are reduced to drowning out boredom or hatred of hired labor with primitive pleasures for a short time.
Fromm describes in detail all the abominations of modern society, causing panic, escalating the situation around the increase in the number of nuclear weapons. All his criticism is, in general, fair, one must be blind not to see it. But, firstly, it is one-sided, he sees only the bad, ignores the shoots of communism, the beginnings of the new in the old. In this sense, all opportunists uniformly spread pessimism and uncertainty about the victory of communism. Secondly, the solutions proposed by Fromm are a naive fantasy without a trace of scientificity. Fromm believes that without a change in psychology, people will perish, that is, he is an idealist.
Fromm does not understand the nature of fascism and the nature of power. He proposes stupidity in the spirit of "civil society": supposedly universal democracy should solve all problems. In addition, Fromm in a plaintive tone condemns bureaucracy and "the system that crushes man", proposes decentralization of production. And of course, Fromm rejects revolutions and preaches the gradual development of society according to his plans (apparently due to the enthusiasm of readers inspired by his books).
Fromm refers to Marx's "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844" [1]. In his later works, Marx developed what he thought in his youth, only on the basis of criticism of history, the economic teachings of past thinkers, and a generalization of the experience of the labor movement. And Lenin in practice implemented the construction of a party of the working class; a party that led people, not fluffy pacifists and reformists, but those ready to fight for a society in which there would be no private property, classes, and therefore no wars. And to fight not only literally, but in all spheres of human activity to replace reactionary forms, traditions, and remnants with scientifically developed, truly human ones. And yes, this is a struggle not without forced violence, power in the form of a dictatorship of the working class will exist until the complete destruction of classes, until the construction of mature communism.
Fromm writes as if he does not know about the Bolsheviks' achievements, about their practical victories of communism. He says in passing that at first the communists sought to change man himself and human relations, but then "for some reason" they stopped. What exactly he wanted to convey with this is unclear ("To Have or to Be?", Introduction, Ch. 7). Or rather, it is clear - he deliberately ignored and distorted the victorious experience of communism, being an intellectual lackey of the bourgeoisie.
Alienation from nature
“Another circumstance is of no small importance: the relationship with nature has gradually become deeply hostile. Initially, the contradiction was rooted in being itself: man is part of nature and at the same time, thanks to his reason, rises above it. For centuries, we have tried to solve the existential problem facing humanity by changing nature in accordance with our goals and tasks. But over time, not a trace remained of the messianic vision of harmony; we moved on to exploiting and conquering it, until this conquest became more and more like destruction. The passion for conquest and hostility blinded us and did not allow us to see that natural resources are not limitless and can be depleted, and then nature will take revenge on man for his barbaric, predatory treatment of it.
"Industrial society despises nature; as well as everything that is not the product of machine production - including all people who are not engaged in the production of machines. Today we see in people a craving for everything mechanical, lifeless, as if they were seized by the magic of technical progress and an ever-increasing thirst for destruction" (To Have or to Be?, Introduction).
All this is nothing more than demagogy. What does alienation have to do with it? The development of material and spiritual culture is in itself opposed to the natural basis of man, that is, strictly speaking, it alienates him from nature.
The relationship between man and nature can be neither friendly nor hostile. Human society itself is a force of nature. The problems of ecology are the problems of social relations, the organization of society, the relationship between the benefits and harms to society of this or that activity, the form and specificity of everyday life [2].
For example, in the 1930s, the party raised the issue of reorganizing industrial centers, scientifically planning their development, and improving communal and living conditions [3]. This was a real practical step toward improving the ecology, that is, the human habitat.
Regarding "contempt for nature", in my opinion, the following comment would not be superfluous. Society has already reached a sufficiently high level of development of productive forces and is able to provide each person with more than just the means of subsistence without the use of slave labor. Therefore, setting production goals is important here. The goal of capitalist production is to maximize profits, not to satisfy the needs of society.
Scientific, communist production aims to satisfy the needs of society.
For example, during the discussion of the results of the first five-year plan at the joint plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) on 07.01.1933, Stalin raised the issue of the profitability of certain industries.
“They say that collective and state farms are not entirely profitable, that they absorb a huge amount of resources, that there is no point in maintaining such enterprises, that it would be more expedient to disband them, leaving only the profitable ones. More than half of the textile enterprises were unprofitable several years ago. <…> We waited for over a year and achieved that the entire textile industry became profitable. And our automobile plant in the city of Gorky? It is also unprofitable for now. Would you order it to be closed? Or our ferrous metallurgy, which is also unprofitable for now? Shouldn’t we close it down, comrades? <…> Profitability cannot be viewed in a hucksterish manner, from the point of view of the present moment. Profitability must be taken from the point of view of the national economy over several years. Only such a point of view can be called truly Leninist, truly Marxist.”
In short, if market efficiency is assessed mainly in the monetary equivalent of profit and does not take into account what is being produced and why, then communist efficiency presupposes high-quality planning in the interests of the expanded reproduction of society.
"Alienation" from technology and things. Division of labor
Another form of alienation according to Fromm is alienation from technology, or, in a broad sense, from consumable things.
“Today, the pragmatic view of technocrats is quite popular, who recommend forgetting about emotions, immersing ourselves in work and entertainment, and, without thinking about the future, accepting the dictatorship of technocracy as something completely natural and inevitable, which should not be feared at all. I do not see any particular wisdom in these views and I believe that thinking in this way means wishful thinking. After all, such a dictatorship is nothing other than technocratic fascism, which will inevitably lead to catastrophe. Because a dehumanized person very soon loses not only feelings, but also reason, and in his madness - even the instinct for self-preservation. And ultimately, he will be unable to maintain a viable society, since he will hardly be able to refrain from the suicidal use of nuclear or biological weapons” (To Have or to Be?, Ch. 9).
What kind of person can't resist using nuclear weapons? It seems that a random person off the street doesn't have access to them.
The fact that imperialist governments can take such a step does not even sound fantastic. If Fromm had this in mind, he should have expressed himself accordingly. The fact that proletarians are becoming puppets in the hands of their own and foreign imperialist governments, that fascism is an invariable companion of imperialism, is no secret. Of course, the fact that previously it was necessary to carry out mobilization, to force the proletariat and peasantry to fight for the next imposed goals, and now it is enough to press a button to start the end of human history adds pathos, but the social essence does not change from this. This is a typical example of an attempt to bypass the issue of the partisanship of literature. Why does Fromm never clearly speak about the essence of the power of the states that he describes? This is a rhetorical question, because he himself has no idea either about the essence of power or about the essence of fascism.
“We are surrounded by things whose nature and origin are completely unknown to us. The telephone, the radio, the phonograph, and other complex machines are almost as incomprehensible to us as they would be to a person of primitive culture; we know how to use them, i.e., we know which button to press, but we do not know the principle of their operation, having only the vaguest ideas about their structure, acquired some time ago at school. But simpler and more everyday things are almost as alien to us. We do not know how bread is baked, fabric is woven, how a table is made, or glass is manufactured. We consume - as we produce - without any concrete connection with the objects with which we deal. We live in a world of things, and the only thing that connects us with them is that we know how to handle these things or how to consume them” (The Sane Society, ch. 5).
If we translate this into human language, we must admit that such a phenomenon is a consequence of the division of labor, the one-sidedness of the development of individuals. In order to increase efficiency in a purely utilitarian sense, specialties are increasingly fragmented, and the modern school education system does not contribute to the fact that upon leaving school, a person with multi-faceted basic knowledge is obtained. The Soviet government took steps to overcome the opposition of mental and physical labor. This is the gradual introduction of polytechnic education, the publication of literature on the current state of technology in understandable language for the mass reader [4]. This is the leadership of the Stakhanovite movement and support for rationalization (the creation of rationalization commissions at enterprises) as forms of communist competition, i.e., a competition of creative and organizational abilities in increasing labor productivity between enterprises and individual workers. This is also the discussion of the production plan at meetings so that everyone understands not their narrow task, but the production process as a whole [5].
Elsewhere, Fromm approaches the question of the division of labor:
“Since no one ever does all the work and each does only a part of it, since the dimensions of things and the organization of people are too large to be realized as a whole, it turns out to be impossible to imagine anything as a whole” (The Sane Society, ch. 5).
This is again just a phrase. The question of how to organize social production is purely managerial. This concerns not only the resources themselves, production capacities, but also the training of personnel. Yes, to run an economy on such a scale, it is necessary to specially train engineering and economic personnel. All these tasks can be solved, but the main thing in them is goal-setting. A correctly set task, taking into account the current conditions, is already the beginning of the matter. The bourgeois economy is simply moving somewhere, in an indefinite direction, and efforts are reduced to compensating for the imbalances of industries.
The division of labor cannot be destroyed or erased. However, it is necessary to destroy the opposition between physical and mental labor. The material base in the form of a high percentage of automation is helpful here, but the social structure determines how the time freed up from some production operations is used. The productive forces are, first of all, the people themselves. And the faster labor productivity grows, the smaller the share of routine labor and the greater the share of creative labor. The more prerequisites there are for each person to acquire multifaceted knowledge.
"Alienation" of labor
“The peculiarity of capitalist production is the degree to which the division of labor reaches. Although in the medieval economy it existed, say, between agricultural production and handicraft work, it was insignificant within each type of production. The carpenter who made a table or a chair made the entire table or the entire chair, and even if some of the preparatory work was done by his apprentices, he supervised the product, checking it in its finished form. In a modern industrial enterprise, the worker never comes into contact with the completely finished product. He is engaged in performing one specialized operation and, although in time he may transfer from one operation to another, he still does not deal with the concrete product as a whole. <…> The only person who deals with the whole product is the manager, but for him the product is an abstraction, the essence of which lies in exchange value, whereas the worker, for whom the product is concrete, never deals with it as a whole” (The Sane Society, Ch. 5).
That is, if the worker dealt with the product as a whole, the alienation relationship would disappear? That is, a worker under socialism who participated in a production meeting and clarified the planned tasks, and most importantly, is politically literate and knows why it is necessary to overfulfill the plan, will be alienated from the product of labor, but a worker in a small capitalist firm, who performs all the operations for the manufacture of a product for sale, will not be alienated from the product of his labor? Interesting logic. A technological criterion instead of a social one.
Fromm offers “solutions” in the spirit of utopian socialism.
“Decentralization in industry should lead to the division of giant concerns into smaller associations, and individual enterprises and even workshops should be given greater independence in decision-making” (“To Have or to Be?”, Chapter 9).
He seems unfamiliar with the modern organization of industry. He is not embarrassed by the science-intensive nature of a large number of industries, for which a high degree of centralization is a necessity, not a disadvantage. The development of productive forces does not stop. And to demand the above solutions means to take steps backwards.
The task of communism is not to destroy large-scale industry, but to ensure that its capacities work for the benefit of the workers, and not drive them prematurely into the grave.
Bureaucratization
Also, one of the “forms of alienation” according to Fromm is bureaucratization.
"The people to be managed are objects for bureaucrats, to whom they relate neither love nor hate - absolutely impersonally; the bureaucratic administrator has no right to feelings when it comes to his professional activity; he must manipulate people as if they were figures or things. Bureaucratic managers are necessary because of the enormous scale of the organization and the high degree of division of labor, which does not allow the individual to see the whole, and also because there is no organic, spontaneous cooperation between individuals or groups engaged in industry" (The Sane Society, ch. 5).
Firstly, I would like to ask again: what are the prerequisites for a bureaucrat to love or hate other workers, if he is exactly the same hired worker and his salary interests him more than the result and progress of his work? How does a bureaucrat differ in this sense from a typical proletarian? Is a proletarian obliged to love what he does and be concerned about the result? Formalism is a serious problem of class society and especially the transition to a communist society.
Secondly, Fromm takes the issue of bureaucracy into the sphere of purely moral problems. Why does a “bureaucratic” attitude to management work arise? First of all, because there may be a lack of factual knowledge from the relevant area and a person is not able to perform management functions. In addition, the negative phenomena that Fromm describes often arise due to the class tasks that a bureaucrat faces. For example, if the bourgeois state punished social security officials for underpayment of benefits, and not as it does now - for issuing without due grounds, then there would be far fewer complaints about heartlessness. That is, a lot depends on the organization of work and the tasks that are set for bureaucrats.
Thirdly, the main thing is not to miss the issue of production relations. Thus, under Stalin, bureaucracy was fought in practice [6]. In the case of established socio-political work, everyone - both the ordinary performer and the manager - will work in their place to fulfill the plan. There would only be an understanding of why.
Conclusions
Fromm creates confusion on all the issues he examines. Concerning the development of productive forces in isolation from the development of needs, naive phrases in the spirit of "listening to human nature" are proposed. Concerning the division of labor, known facts are simply stated, but no conclusions are drawn about the need to change the social system. In the area of politics, Fromm presents himself as a fan of "true democracy", proposing decentralization of management, a return to city assemblies and other measures that do not correspond to the current level of development of society. In the area of production management, decentralization and the involvement of everyone in "true democratic" management are also proposed.
Fromm was a member of the Socialist Party of the United States, and his plans for improving society are presented in his essay "Humanistic Socialism," which is a reworking of the party's program.
In general, it can be said that Fromm very colorfully describes the abominations of bourgeois existence, but his proposals are based not on an analysis of the material prerequisites for the transition to a new mode of production and a new social order, but on the hope that people themselves will understand the reasons for this state of affairs, and social relations will somehow change by themselves, the dominance of the state and technology (in Fromm's understanding) will collapse by itself.
Fromm lacks an adequate assessment of the experience of countries that have begun to build communism, so it is impossible to base any practice on his “classless” theories, which means they are reactionary.
M. Severova
12/30/2024
https://prorivists.org/100_fromm/
Google Translator
While Fromm's views on nature are simplistic and idealistic(I'd have agreed with him 20 years ago but have grown up...) the author's view lack current scientific analysis. The view of nature as to be disregarded if it is not directly utilized will take us to the same dead-end as capitalism though more slowly. The author properly states that humans are part of nature but shallowly ignores the implications.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Ideology
Red youth: Why I joined the CPGB-ML
Any communist party that is serious must succeed in harnessing, training and directing the energy of our revolutionary youth.
Proletarian TV
Monday 6 January 2025
This speech was delivered at the CPGB-ML’s 20th anniversary celebration in July 2024.
*****
Comrades. What a pleasure it is for all of us to be gathered to celebrate this momentous occasion – 20 years of the Communist Party Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) (CPGB-ML).
It was a little under three years ago that I joined the party, and I don’t think I could have imagined at that time giving a speech on behalf of Red Youth, our youth wing.
Yet such is the energy and vigour in the party, the commitment to Marxist study that not only helps us understand the world around us and how we can go about changing it, but crucially, gives us the confidence to do so.
To have around us people who are not only like-minded, but committed, capable, revolutionary cadres; this is invaluable in a country such as our own where class-consciousness is so very low compared with the rest of the world. It is the revolutionary energy of our party, as reinforced by our political study, which I would like to touch on today.
I joined the party a few months after starting my first full-time job. I was eager to impress the employer and accepted long hours and little sleep in order to prove I could do the job. It took just a few months to realise that, despite the great amount of work I put into the role, with the job occupying my mind most moments of the day due to the strange hours I was working, I wasn’t really getting anything out of it. I didn’t feel fulfilled.
In Marxist terms, I had quickly became alienated from my labour. I didn’t feel a part of the service the company was providing. Further, the service was not doing anything good for the world; it was yet another cog in capitalist economy that didn’t really seem to produce anything meaningful.
The division of labour under capitalism that under socialism would produce great wealth for the working class by rationally divvying up work instead removes all pleasure one should get from work.
Without Marxism I could never have put all this into words. Certainly, without the encouragement of the party, the work it’s given me to use Marxism in practice and hone my skills not only on the streets, but actually learn new ones in aid of any work the party needs doing, I wouldn’t be the person I am today.
The revolutionary energy of the party does not come from nowhere. It is the result of decades of arduous work and faithful study by the founding members of the party even before it was formed. This culture of work was astonishing to me when I first joined. I am still in awe of it, and I do my utmost to emulate it. Whenever I talk about party work I’ve been doing, a friend of mine often laughs: “Why would you do it if you’re not being paid for it?”
Why? Because it’s right. Because I couldn’t go forward, having studied Marx and Lenin, without doing something about the wretched world the bourgeoisie has created – especially not when we know for a concrete fact that we can change it – the Great October Socialist Revolution in Russia did change it. No matter how hard the bourgeoisie try to make the workers of Britain and the world forget this fact, we will never let them. We will never forget the achievements of the Soviet Union.
It is this fact that lead me to the CPGB-ML. I didn’t really know much about the Soviet Union growing up. I accepted as fact, as many of us did, that Stalin was some sort of dictator-mastermind-manipulator-micromanager, with evil on par with Hitler. That the Soviet Union was an oppressive country full of miserable people, half of whom were in labour camps – all of whom personally placed there by Josef Stalin himself, of course.
Yet the more I learned in bourgeois history, the more contradictions I found. Turning to left-wing sources, penned by various anarchists, revisionists and Trotskyites alike, I left further confused. It was only the courageous stance taken in Proletarian and Lalkar that engaged me. Here was a confident stance in defence of the Soviet Union, and one that added up no less. I was instantly hooked, all of my ideas being challenged at once.
I’ve never looked back since. Even on my lowest days, studying a little Marx, or doing a little party work, brings everything back into perspective.
Here’s to many more years of the CPGB-ML.
https://thecommunists.org/2025/01/06/tv ... e-cpgb-ml/
Any communist party that is serious must succeed in harnessing, training and directing the energy of our revolutionary youth.
Proletarian TV
Monday 6 January 2025
This speech was delivered at the CPGB-ML’s 20th anniversary celebration in July 2024.
*****
Comrades. What a pleasure it is for all of us to be gathered to celebrate this momentous occasion – 20 years of the Communist Party Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) (CPGB-ML).
It was a little under three years ago that I joined the party, and I don’t think I could have imagined at that time giving a speech on behalf of Red Youth, our youth wing.
Yet such is the energy and vigour in the party, the commitment to Marxist study that not only helps us understand the world around us and how we can go about changing it, but crucially, gives us the confidence to do so.
To have around us people who are not only like-minded, but committed, capable, revolutionary cadres; this is invaluable in a country such as our own where class-consciousness is so very low compared with the rest of the world. It is the revolutionary energy of our party, as reinforced by our political study, which I would like to touch on today.
I joined the party a few months after starting my first full-time job. I was eager to impress the employer and accepted long hours and little sleep in order to prove I could do the job. It took just a few months to realise that, despite the great amount of work I put into the role, with the job occupying my mind most moments of the day due to the strange hours I was working, I wasn’t really getting anything out of it. I didn’t feel fulfilled.
In Marxist terms, I had quickly became alienated from my labour. I didn’t feel a part of the service the company was providing. Further, the service was not doing anything good for the world; it was yet another cog in capitalist economy that didn’t really seem to produce anything meaningful.
The division of labour under capitalism that under socialism would produce great wealth for the working class by rationally divvying up work instead removes all pleasure one should get from work.
Without Marxism I could never have put all this into words. Certainly, without the encouragement of the party, the work it’s given me to use Marxism in practice and hone my skills not only on the streets, but actually learn new ones in aid of any work the party needs doing, I wouldn’t be the person I am today.
The revolutionary energy of the party does not come from nowhere. It is the result of decades of arduous work and faithful study by the founding members of the party even before it was formed. This culture of work was astonishing to me when I first joined. I am still in awe of it, and I do my utmost to emulate it. Whenever I talk about party work I’ve been doing, a friend of mine often laughs: “Why would you do it if you’re not being paid for it?”
Why? Because it’s right. Because I couldn’t go forward, having studied Marx and Lenin, without doing something about the wretched world the bourgeoisie has created – especially not when we know for a concrete fact that we can change it – the Great October Socialist Revolution in Russia did change it. No matter how hard the bourgeoisie try to make the workers of Britain and the world forget this fact, we will never let them. We will never forget the achievements of the Soviet Union.
It is this fact that lead me to the CPGB-ML. I didn’t really know much about the Soviet Union growing up. I accepted as fact, as many of us did, that Stalin was some sort of dictator-mastermind-manipulator-micromanager, with evil on par with Hitler. That the Soviet Union was an oppressive country full of miserable people, half of whom were in labour camps – all of whom personally placed there by Josef Stalin himself, of course.
Yet the more I learned in bourgeois history, the more contradictions I found. Turning to left-wing sources, penned by various anarchists, revisionists and Trotskyites alike, I left further confused. It was only the courageous stance taken in Proletarian and Lalkar that engaged me. Here was a confident stance in defence of the Soviet Union, and one that added up no less. I was instantly hooked, all of my ideas being challenged at once.
I’ve never looked back since. Even on my lowest days, studying a little Marx, or doing a little party work, brings everything back into perspective.
Here’s to many more years of the CPGB-ML.
https://thecommunists.org/2025/01/06/tv ... e-cpgb-ml/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Ideology
Results of 2024 of the newspaper "Proryvist"
Dear authors and readers!
The political events of 2024 have fully confirmed the correctness of our assessments of the international situation, which coincide with the position of the WPK.
2024 was the year of the new newspaper format, the year of correcting the resulting imbalances in the work.
“We must strive to ensure that the physiognomy and main value of the newspaper is represented by a collection of articles that are useful from the point of view of self-education on the most important issues of methodology, applied theory and social practice of Marxism-Leninism” (from the requirements for 2024).
Therefore, in 2024, there were fewer so-called passing articles, and theoretical work was deepened. First of all, I started writing a popular manual for young people on dialectical mathematics (" Conversations about the important "). Comrade Dubov did important work on substantiating the need for self-education.
The main organizational and political conclusion at the end of the year is that only strict adherence to the thesis on the priority of the theoretical form of class struggle guarantees the construction of the Party of Scientific Centralism . In our newspaper business, this means an absolute focus on the quality of personnel and other work.
It is not a question of publishing only first-class, flawless materials, although this is something we should strive for. It is a question of everything that is done necessarily serving the scientific and theoretical growth of our personnel potential. Moreover, self-education is the basis of everything: research, propaganda, agitation, and organizational work. Self-education should be understood in the broadest sense, but its core is the continuous mastering of the theory of Marxism-Leninism, the continuous verification of conclusions and ideas with dialectical materialism.
"Many have not yet understood that the solution of these problems requires the presence of personnel who have mastered Marxism-Leninism even in a broader range than Lenin and Stalin had. Scientific centralism is unrealizable, and therefore victories are unattainable, if the new generation of communists does not set itself the task of growing to the scientific-theoretical level of the classics and, without laziness, timidity, or false modesty, continuing the process of discovering and propagating the objective laws of social progress" (Podguzov).
One can think as much as one wants that the moment has come when it is necessary to act at all costs, to “grow flesh”, focusing on the quantitative growth of agitation first and foremost. That the weak development of programmatic guidelines about the present and future of society, personnel and organizational weaknesses are not so important. But until there are a sufficient number of people who, without chasing false relevance, the brightness of forecasts and originality, embody a reliable stronghold of communist work, there will be no party. Or rather, the party may appear... on paper.
A letter arrived the other day with a statement: why, they say, is the list of authors excluded from "Proriv" and those who left "Proriv" so impressive. And sarcastically: V. A. Podguzov firmly adheres to the principles of scientific centralism, and half of his supporters turn out to be opportunists. The answer is simple in its layout. Out of fifty people who claim or want to form a party of scientific centralism, one is suitable, at best, several people. Such is the reality of capitalism, the theoretical, political and moral-volitional preparation of the left, even the supporters of "Proriv".
Taking this opportunity, in the context of Bolshevik historiography, we should recall how it is necessary to build an organization in our conditions and where such requirements for personnel come from.
From general to specific and top to bottom
In Lenin's theses on issues of party building at the 10th Congress of the RCP(b) it is stated that
"the party of revolutionary Marxism fundamentally rejects the search for an absolutely correct form of party organization suitable for all stages of the revolutionary process, as well as for its methods of work. On the contrary, the form of organization and methods of work are entirely determined by the peculiarities of a given concrete historical situation and the tasks that directly follow from this area... Any organizational form and corresponding methods of work can, with a change in the objective conditions for the development of the revolution, turn from forms of development of the party organization into fetters of this development; and conversely, an organizational form that has become unsuitable can again become necessary and the only expedient one with the revival of the corresponding objective conditions."
The principle of scientific centralism is not the result of a search for an absolutely correct form of party organization suitable for all stages of the revolutionary process. Moreover, the principle of scientific centralism presupposes the development of the most appropriate format of work at a specific historical moment for specific historical tasks, that is, the most flexible organizational forms of the party, completely subordinated to the relationship of the potential of the personnel, the complexity of external conditions, the strategy and tactics of realizing program goals and tasks.
The principle of scientific centralism is the resolution of all organizational issues in an uncompromising scientific manner, the denial of any formalism and inertia of the formal-bureaucratic structure of the party.
The justification of the principle of scientific centralism begins with the recognition of the failure of the widely spread principle of democratic centralism.
Practice has shown that there is no more difficult task than to teach a typical modern leftist the theory of scientific centralism due to widespread methodological ignorance, misunderstanding of the materialistic theory of knowledge and ingrained pedantry.
The Bolshevik Party was built in accordance with special historical conditions, on the one hand, the immaturity of communism, on the other hand, the rise of the proletarian movement throughout the world. Lenin proposed to the many disparate revolutionaries who spontaneously stirred up protest and strike activity, a scientific plan for the formation of the vanguard of the working class. He began to persuade them to act according to his plan, and thus, gradually, a certain number of the most conscious fighters came under his leadership, who, despite critics and circumstances, rallied around the leader.
Lenin comprehensively outlined his revolutionary plan in his works “What is to be done?” (1901) and “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back” (1904), in which the main political content concerned the overthrow of the autocracy through the political organization of the masses, and the main theoretical content revealed what the party should be like in those historical realities.
Despite the colossal theoretical depth and political charge of Lenin's earlier work "What are the 'Friends of the People' and How Do They Fight the Social Democrats?" , he highlighted the questions of methodology later, in 1906 in his work "Materialism and Empirio-Criticism" and in 1913 in the article "Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism". In other words, Lenin first, at least for the bulk of party members , proposed a revolutionary plan as the most visual and understandable expression of the theory of Marxism , and only in the course of unification around this Bolshevik program did he lay out on the shelves the most fundamental methodological basis of the entire dialectical-matist worldview.
These were the conditions. That is why Lenin defended elementary things in his theory of party building - iron discipline, centralism, high organization, vanguardism. For a person who had "passed through himself" the Marxist theory of knowledge and the basic philosophical concepts, that is, at least "Materialism and Empiriocriticism" and "The Three Sources and Three Components of Marxism", these organizational moments would have seemed self-evident.
Thus, Lenin built the party from the bottom up in form, and theoretically from the political plan to the fundamental theoretical education of party members as communists.
The magazine "Proryv", in accordance with historical conditions, arose and developed as a top-down organization. The order of theoretical work was also the opposite of Lenin's.
In the 1990s, V. A. Podguzov wrote and published several large brochures of general methodological, general philosophical and general political directions in the development of the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist doctrine, and around this essentially preliminary program the journal itself arose, which continued to develop the theory of Marxism from the general to the particular, as if unfolding the provisions of these works and applying them to individual issues. Thus, the reasons for the decay of the CPSU and the restoration of capitalism in the USSR were gradually investigated, all the main types of opportunism were rebuffed, and thus the process of scientific research and propaganda work logically approached the most important questions for political practice: how to build an organization and what it should specifically do in modern conditions, taking into account the experience of the CPSU and the communist parties of other countries.
Taking into account the laws of development of class struggle within the party, including historical experience, the application of the principles of the communist attitude to labor and communist comradeship, the disclosure of the laws of the genesis of opportunism, and so on - all this made it possible to formulate the concept of scientific centralism.
Absolutely all left theorists and propagandists in the place of "Proriv", not understanding the specifics of the situation, would have long ago announced the establishment of another party. But it was Lenin and the Leninists who went to the masses of people who were already in an active raging protest movement and strike struggle. In our country, the proletariat is still taking a more wait-and-see position, communism has been defeated primarily ideologically and theoretically, the communist struggle has been reduced to its surrogate - the left movement.
We, the breakthroughists, as a tight-knit group, are steadily explaining fundamental issues, developing a methodology, thereby propagating Marxism from A to Z, and not from the middle - "one step forward, two steps back." Figuratively speaking, "Breakthrough" is pouring the foundation of the Communist revolution.
Therefore, thoughtful readers, especially those whose heads are not cluttered with leftist dogmatism, having mastered even the most general outlines of the methodology and theory of knowledge from the journal's articles and the works of the classics, which the journal actively encourages reading, react in a friendly manner to scientific centralism, perceiving it as a natural principle of work for people competent in Marxism, engaged in a common cause and sincerely concerned about its outcome.
That is why opportunists infected with conceit hiss at our magazine, repeating the same mistakes in their "practice" year after year. Hence, in the left environment, such a high personnel rotation, lack of continuity and apology for fruitless activity.
Redin
01/07/2025
https://prorivists.org/here-now2025/
Google Translator
Dear authors and readers!
The political events of 2024 have fully confirmed the correctness of our assessments of the international situation, which coincide with the position of the WPK.
2024 was the year of the new newspaper format, the year of correcting the resulting imbalances in the work.
“We must strive to ensure that the physiognomy and main value of the newspaper is represented by a collection of articles that are useful from the point of view of self-education on the most important issues of methodology, applied theory and social practice of Marxism-Leninism” (from the requirements for 2024).
Therefore, in 2024, there were fewer so-called passing articles, and theoretical work was deepened. First of all, I started writing a popular manual for young people on dialectical mathematics (" Conversations about the important "). Comrade Dubov did important work on substantiating the need for self-education.
The main organizational and political conclusion at the end of the year is that only strict adherence to the thesis on the priority of the theoretical form of class struggle guarantees the construction of the Party of Scientific Centralism . In our newspaper business, this means an absolute focus on the quality of personnel and other work.
It is not a question of publishing only first-class, flawless materials, although this is something we should strive for. It is a question of everything that is done necessarily serving the scientific and theoretical growth of our personnel potential. Moreover, self-education is the basis of everything: research, propaganda, agitation, and organizational work. Self-education should be understood in the broadest sense, but its core is the continuous mastering of the theory of Marxism-Leninism, the continuous verification of conclusions and ideas with dialectical materialism.
"Many have not yet understood that the solution of these problems requires the presence of personnel who have mastered Marxism-Leninism even in a broader range than Lenin and Stalin had. Scientific centralism is unrealizable, and therefore victories are unattainable, if the new generation of communists does not set itself the task of growing to the scientific-theoretical level of the classics and, without laziness, timidity, or false modesty, continuing the process of discovering and propagating the objective laws of social progress" (Podguzov).
One can think as much as one wants that the moment has come when it is necessary to act at all costs, to “grow flesh”, focusing on the quantitative growth of agitation first and foremost. That the weak development of programmatic guidelines about the present and future of society, personnel and organizational weaknesses are not so important. But until there are a sufficient number of people who, without chasing false relevance, the brightness of forecasts and originality, embody a reliable stronghold of communist work, there will be no party. Or rather, the party may appear... on paper.
A letter arrived the other day with a statement: why, they say, is the list of authors excluded from "Proriv" and those who left "Proriv" so impressive. And sarcastically: V. A. Podguzov firmly adheres to the principles of scientific centralism, and half of his supporters turn out to be opportunists. The answer is simple in its layout. Out of fifty people who claim or want to form a party of scientific centralism, one is suitable, at best, several people. Such is the reality of capitalism, the theoretical, political and moral-volitional preparation of the left, even the supporters of "Proriv".
Taking this opportunity, in the context of Bolshevik historiography, we should recall how it is necessary to build an organization in our conditions and where such requirements for personnel come from.
From general to specific and top to bottom
In Lenin's theses on issues of party building at the 10th Congress of the RCP(b) it is stated that
"the party of revolutionary Marxism fundamentally rejects the search for an absolutely correct form of party organization suitable for all stages of the revolutionary process, as well as for its methods of work. On the contrary, the form of organization and methods of work are entirely determined by the peculiarities of a given concrete historical situation and the tasks that directly follow from this area... Any organizational form and corresponding methods of work can, with a change in the objective conditions for the development of the revolution, turn from forms of development of the party organization into fetters of this development; and conversely, an organizational form that has become unsuitable can again become necessary and the only expedient one with the revival of the corresponding objective conditions."
The principle of scientific centralism is not the result of a search for an absolutely correct form of party organization suitable for all stages of the revolutionary process. Moreover, the principle of scientific centralism presupposes the development of the most appropriate format of work at a specific historical moment for specific historical tasks, that is, the most flexible organizational forms of the party, completely subordinated to the relationship of the potential of the personnel, the complexity of external conditions, the strategy and tactics of realizing program goals and tasks.
The principle of scientific centralism is the resolution of all organizational issues in an uncompromising scientific manner, the denial of any formalism and inertia of the formal-bureaucratic structure of the party.
The justification of the principle of scientific centralism begins with the recognition of the failure of the widely spread principle of democratic centralism.
Practice has shown that there is no more difficult task than to teach a typical modern leftist the theory of scientific centralism due to widespread methodological ignorance, misunderstanding of the materialistic theory of knowledge and ingrained pedantry.
The Bolshevik Party was built in accordance with special historical conditions, on the one hand, the immaturity of communism, on the other hand, the rise of the proletarian movement throughout the world. Lenin proposed to the many disparate revolutionaries who spontaneously stirred up protest and strike activity, a scientific plan for the formation of the vanguard of the working class. He began to persuade them to act according to his plan, and thus, gradually, a certain number of the most conscious fighters came under his leadership, who, despite critics and circumstances, rallied around the leader.
Lenin comprehensively outlined his revolutionary plan in his works “What is to be done?” (1901) and “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back” (1904), in which the main political content concerned the overthrow of the autocracy through the political organization of the masses, and the main theoretical content revealed what the party should be like in those historical realities.
Despite the colossal theoretical depth and political charge of Lenin's earlier work "What are the 'Friends of the People' and How Do They Fight the Social Democrats?" , he highlighted the questions of methodology later, in 1906 in his work "Materialism and Empirio-Criticism" and in 1913 in the article "Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism". In other words, Lenin first, at least for the bulk of party members , proposed a revolutionary plan as the most visual and understandable expression of the theory of Marxism , and only in the course of unification around this Bolshevik program did he lay out on the shelves the most fundamental methodological basis of the entire dialectical-matist worldview.
These were the conditions. That is why Lenin defended elementary things in his theory of party building - iron discipline, centralism, high organization, vanguardism. For a person who had "passed through himself" the Marxist theory of knowledge and the basic philosophical concepts, that is, at least "Materialism and Empiriocriticism" and "The Three Sources and Three Components of Marxism", these organizational moments would have seemed self-evident.
Thus, Lenin built the party from the bottom up in form, and theoretically from the political plan to the fundamental theoretical education of party members as communists.
The magazine "Proryv", in accordance with historical conditions, arose and developed as a top-down organization. The order of theoretical work was also the opposite of Lenin's.
In the 1990s, V. A. Podguzov wrote and published several large brochures of general methodological, general philosophical and general political directions in the development of the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist doctrine, and around this essentially preliminary program the journal itself arose, which continued to develop the theory of Marxism from the general to the particular, as if unfolding the provisions of these works and applying them to individual issues. Thus, the reasons for the decay of the CPSU and the restoration of capitalism in the USSR were gradually investigated, all the main types of opportunism were rebuffed, and thus the process of scientific research and propaganda work logically approached the most important questions for political practice: how to build an organization and what it should specifically do in modern conditions, taking into account the experience of the CPSU and the communist parties of other countries.
Taking into account the laws of development of class struggle within the party, including historical experience, the application of the principles of the communist attitude to labor and communist comradeship, the disclosure of the laws of the genesis of opportunism, and so on - all this made it possible to formulate the concept of scientific centralism.
Absolutely all left theorists and propagandists in the place of "Proriv", not understanding the specifics of the situation, would have long ago announced the establishment of another party. But it was Lenin and the Leninists who went to the masses of people who were already in an active raging protest movement and strike struggle. In our country, the proletariat is still taking a more wait-and-see position, communism has been defeated primarily ideologically and theoretically, the communist struggle has been reduced to its surrogate - the left movement.
We, the breakthroughists, as a tight-knit group, are steadily explaining fundamental issues, developing a methodology, thereby propagating Marxism from A to Z, and not from the middle - "one step forward, two steps back." Figuratively speaking, "Breakthrough" is pouring the foundation of the Communist revolution.
Therefore, thoughtful readers, especially those whose heads are not cluttered with leftist dogmatism, having mastered even the most general outlines of the methodology and theory of knowledge from the journal's articles and the works of the classics, which the journal actively encourages reading, react in a friendly manner to scientific centralism, perceiving it as a natural principle of work for people competent in Marxism, engaged in a common cause and sincerely concerned about its outcome.
That is why opportunists infected with conceit hiss at our magazine, repeating the same mistakes in their "practice" year after year. Hence, in the left environment, such a high personnel rotation, lack of continuity and apology for fruitless activity.
Redin
01/07/2025
https://prorivists.org/here-now2025/
Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Ideology
Against Bourgeois Pacifism in the Face of Genocide
Posted by Internationalist 360° on January 9, 2025
Juanlu González
The supposed moral superiority of pacifism is little more than a “liberal pathology” – as they have called it – it is the tacit acceptance of political defeat, which, in this case, amounts to becoming a de facto accomplice of Israel, the United States and NATO.
These are hard times for lyric poetry. After the unconditional surrender of social democracy and many so-called communist parties to capitalism; after the renunciation of the practice of democracy with minimum quality standards that would allow it to be worthy of the name, it was the turn of “alternative” social movements and many once transformative NGOs. These are not isolated events, but concatenated.
Many civil society organizations in Spain (ecologists, pacifists, feminists, internationalists…) were controlled in a more or less planned way by an influx of individuals belonging to the more systemic Trostkism after the dissolution of their organizations in the 1990s. The drift towards uncritical acceptance of the fundamental bases of the status quo was more than served. The gap that is now opening up between the ranks of the transformers and revolutionaries and those it is difficult to call reformists is growing ever wider. Only the inclusive spirit of tactical confluence in the trenches, on the streets and on the barricades, at certain times, allows for some common work, from time to time, under some shared minimum principles, on which it is not worth scratching too hard, lest insurmountable differences emerge.
One of the most recent points of friction has to do with the criticism of the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance organizations and their consideration as terrorist groups by some factions under the aegis of pacifism.
Apart from the disrespect for international law on the part of their defenders, what is worse and more serious is the intrinsic acceptance of the discourse of the Western imperialist elites and NATO, since only the owners of NATO countries maintain a similar narrative.
Because bourgeois pacifism is, in essence, an ideology that seeks to maintain the status quo of the ruling classes under the façade of a desire for global peace, but it is little more than a pretext used by the elites to disarm any revolutionary struggle that challenges the power structure, making those who suffer oppression resign themselves to their situation in the name of a false morality.
Pacifism is beatifically presented as an ethically unquestionable stance, but in reality it ignores the fact that peace without justice leads to the perpetuation of structural violence. While the wealthy classes can afford to adopt non-violent stances, the most oppressed sectors don’t have that option. For peoples driven from their ancestral lands, exploited workers, peasants without possessions, marginalized communities… struggle is a vital necessity, not a moral choice; to resist is to exist.
Faced with colonial occupation, which is violent and murderous; faced with abandonment by the world powers, there is no alternative but to resist by any means possible, including the much-criticized armed struggle.
This declassified, messianic pacifism also tries to evangelize and moralize the masses, accusing them of being “violent” if they resort to self-defence or insurrection, while ignoring or minimizing the systemic violence of capitalism that generates poverty, hunger and war.
It is a hypocritical ideology that justifies their inaction and passivity in the face of exploitation, while condemning the forms of active resistance that are necessary to change the material conditions of life.
In short, bourgeois pacifism is an instrument for deactivating class consciousness, making the oppressed believe that submission is a virtue.
By criticizing resistance, bourgeois pacifism perpetuates the cycle of domination and inequality, defending – even if its defenders don’t recognize it – the interests of the powerful classes under the rhetoric of non-violence. Where were the Dombas pacifists while Ukraine and the US massacred their people with impunity? They are just zombies following NATO’s lead.
Their favorite slogan is resilience, a notion that, just like what is understood, masks submission under a cloak of virtue, of resignation disguised as fortitude. Resilience, extolled today in political, business, psychological and media discourses, is presented as the individual’s ability to adapt and resist in the face of adversity, but in reality it is a new opium, yet another, for the masses, an ideological tool that leads the oppressed to patiently endure the conditions of exploitation and precariousness without questioning them. It has exactly the same alienating effect as the religious promise of eternal life.
Resilience, like bourgeois pacifism, shifts the responsibility for social suffering onto individuals. It praises the ability to “endure” or “survive” in the face of hardship, as if adversity, the vale of tears, were an inevitable and permanent condition, and as if passive resistance were the only possible response. This discourse not only diverts attention from the structural causes of crises, exploitation and inequality, but also perpetuates the idea that the solutions lie at a personal level and not in collective action and the radical transformation of the system.
Faced with this hegemonic discourse, it is essential to recover active resistance and collective organization. It is not enough to “resist” oppression; we must confront it and transform it.
True strength lies not in resisting without protesting, but in recognizing the structural causes of suffering and organizing to combat them, if necessary with violence, as the United Nations and international law recognize. It is the peoples who, in their sovereignty, must decide the times and methods of their emancipatory struggles. That’s why there can be no “buts” against the Palestinian, Lebanese, Yemeni, Syrian, Iranian or Iraqi resistance.
We internationalists can only close ranks, take off our hats and modestly place ourselves at their service.
If being a pacifist means being a supporter of peace, this author is and always has been. But not a supporter of unjust peace, or the peace of graveyards, or the peace of the submissive oppressed… I could even say that, for a time, I was an Irenicist, so I know the terrain first hand. Gandhi is considered an icon of the absolute rejection of violence, both on a personal, religious and political level. He was one of the main defenders of ahimsa, an ethical principle of non-violence derived from the Hindu religious tradition.
For Gandhi, non-violence was not just a political tactic, but a way of life and an unshakeable moral principle that should guide all human actions. But despite his firm position, Gandhi recognized that, in certain cases, violence is preferable to cowardice. He considered cowardice – the inability to confront injustice out of fear of the oppressor – to be worse than violence, since violence implies the renunciation of personal dignity.
Palestinians have tried everything during more than 75 years of occupation: political strikes, fasts, non-cooperation with the occupier, civil disobedience, demonstrations, marches, passive resistance, negotiations… Yet we have seen prisoners die on hunger strike, we have seen peaceful marches back to Gaza massacred. Zionist snipers fire at will at nurses, journalists or unarmed demonstrators, without international condemnation, sanctions or the death of innocents making headlines. Non-violence as a strategy has its limits, especially in these times of brutal social control and with so many enemies.
Nonviolence necessarily requires high social visibility in order to be useful. Unlike violence, which is often visible on its own and has an immediate impact, non-violent actions don’t generate the same kind of attention. For these tactics to have a transformative effect, they have to be seen by the general public, otherwise they can be ignored, underestimated or manipulated by the authorities or by a mediatized or polarized society. Without the media on the revolutionary side, nonviolent actions run the risk of going unnoticed or being minimized.
The effectiveness of nonviolence lies largely in its ability to shock the public conscience and highlight the injustice of the oppressive system. When acts of repression are committed against peaceful protesters, the media has the power to expose this disproportionate violence, which generates sympathy, empathy and support for the nonviolent cause. Without a platform to amplify these images and narratives, the repression can continue without significant social or political consequences. To make matters worse, governments and ruling elites control the mainstream media and can easily manipulate or distort the public perception of a nonviolent movement. Without access to independent media, the official version can crush a non-violent movement, labeling it at will as radical, illegal or even violent. All of us who have been behind banners or barricades for years have experienced this on numerous occasions.
Nonviolence, while useful and powerful in many contexts, also faces serious limitations when confronted with an amoral and murderous enemy like the Israeli Zionazi regime, an adversary who has no qualms about using lethal force and who is not subject to moral, legal or ethical constraints.
Non-violence is largely based on the ability to appeal to the moral conscience of the oppressor or the general public, seeking to provoke a reaction of empathy, guilt or compassion for the suffering of the victims. However, an enemy who does not recognize these ethical principles or who does not respond to public condemnation is not affected by these tactics.
A brutal regime or force that has no remorse can continue to repress without being moved or stopped by peaceful actions. If more than 80% of the population of Israel’s colonial lands approves of the massacre of children as a military tactic, who can stop Netanyahu and his genocidal gang? Arguably, only the United Nations and the Security Council, but the US veto power prevents condemnations that would force the application of resolutions, so in practice they will never be implemented.
Without fear of legal repercussions, international sanctions or political pressure, a regime can simply permanently eliminate demonstrators or a defenseless population without facing any consequences. This is what is happening in West Asia.
Counter-revolutionary wolves in pacifist sheep’s clothing
Whether you believe it or not, where the techniques of nonviolence and Popular Nonviolent Defense are succeeding is in the counterrevolutionary field.
In recent years, they have been used above all to organize pro-US uprisings. Yes, color revolutions, Arab Springs and the like. This is the case with the Albert Einstein Institute, run and financed by the CIA. A sad end for an ideal of purely anti-colonial origin.
In short, denying the right or legitimacy of resistance is tantamount to condemning the Palestinian people to total disappearance. Fortunately, within the Palestine solidarity movement, the bourgeois pacifists are an increasingly small minority.
The supposed moral superiority of pacifism is little more than a “liberal pathology” – as they have called it – it is the tacit acceptance of political defeat, which, in this case, amounts to becoming a de facto accomplice of Israel, the United States and NATO.
Let them take a good look at themselves.
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/01/ ... -genocide/
Posted by Internationalist 360° on January 9, 2025
Juanlu González
The supposed moral superiority of pacifism is little more than a “liberal pathology” – as they have called it – it is the tacit acceptance of political defeat, which, in this case, amounts to becoming a de facto accomplice of Israel, the United States and NATO.
These are hard times for lyric poetry. After the unconditional surrender of social democracy and many so-called communist parties to capitalism; after the renunciation of the practice of democracy with minimum quality standards that would allow it to be worthy of the name, it was the turn of “alternative” social movements and many once transformative NGOs. These are not isolated events, but concatenated.
Many civil society organizations in Spain (ecologists, pacifists, feminists, internationalists…) were controlled in a more or less planned way by an influx of individuals belonging to the more systemic Trostkism after the dissolution of their organizations in the 1990s. The drift towards uncritical acceptance of the fundamental bases of the status quo was more than served. The gap that is now opening up between the ranks of the transformers and revolutionaries and those it is difficult to call reformists is growing ever wider. Only the inclusive spirit of tactical confluence in the trenches, on the streets and on the barricades, at certain times, allows for some common work, from time to time, under some shared minimum principles, on which it is not worth scratching too hard, lest insurmountable differences emerge.
One of the most recent points of friction has to do with the criticism of the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance organizations and their consideration as terrorist groups by some factions under the aegis of pacifism.
Apart from the disrespect for international law on the part of their defenders, what is worse and more serious is the intrinsic acceptance of the discourse of the Western imperialist elites and NATO, since only the owners of NATO countries maintain a similar narrative.
Because bourgeois pacifism is, in essence, an ideology that seeks to maintain the status quo of the ruling classes under the façade of a desire for global peace, but it is little more than a pretext used by the elites to disarm any revolutionary struggle that challenges the power structure, making those who suffer oppression resign themselves to their situation in the name of a false morality.
Pacifism is beatifically presented as an ethically unquestionable stance, but in reality it ignores the fact that peace without justice leads to the perpetuation of structural violence. While the wealthy classes can afford to adopt non-violent stances, the most oppressed sectors don’t have that option. For peoples driven from their ancestral lands, exploited workers, peasants without possessions, marginalized communities… struggle is a vital necessity, not a moral choice; to resist is to exist.
Faced with colonial occupation, which is violent and murderous; faced with abandonment by the world powers, there is no alternative but to resist by any means possible, including the much-criticized armed struggle.
This declassified, messianic pacifism also tries to evangelize and moralize the masses, accusing them of being “violent” if they resort to self-defence or insurrection, while ignoring or minimizing the systemic violence of capitalism that generates poverty, hunger and war.
It is a hypocritical ideology that justifies their inaction and passivity in the face of exploitation, while condemning the forms of active resistance that are necessary to change the material conditions of life.
In short, bourgeois pacifism is an instrument for deactivating class consciousness, making the oppressed believe that submission is a virtue.
By criticizing resistance, bourgeois pacifism perpetuates the cycle of domination and inequality, defending – even if its defenders don’t recognize it – the interests of the powerful classes under the rhetoric of non-violence. Where were the Dombas pacifists while Ukraine and the US massacred their people with impunity? They are just zombies following NATO’s lead.
Their favorite slogan is resilience, a notion that, just like what is understood, masks submission under a cloak of virtue, of resignation disguised as fortitude. Resilience, extolled today in political, business, psychological and media discourses, is presented as the individual’s ability to adapt and resist in the face of adversity, but in reality it is a new opium, yet another, for the masses, an ideological tool that leads the oppressed to patiently endure the conditions of exploitation and precariousness without questioning them. It has exactly the same alienating effect as the religious promise of eternal life.
Resilience, like bourgeois pacifism, shifts the responsibility for social suffering onto individuals. It praises the ability to “endure” or “survive” in the face of hardship, as if adversity, the vale of tears, were an inevitable and permanent condition, and as if passive resistance were the only possible response. This discourse not only diverts attention from the structural causes of crises, exploitation and inequality, but also perpetuates the idea that the solutions lie at a personal level and not in collective action and the radical transformation of the system.
Faced with this hegemonic discourse, it is essential to recover active resistance and collective organization. It is not enough to “resist” oppression; we must confront it and transform it.
True strength lies not in resisting without protesting, but in recognizing the structural causes of suffering and organizing to combat them, if necessary with violence, as the United Nations and international law recognize. It is the peoples who, in their sovereignty, must decide the times and methods of their emancipatory struggles. That’s why there can be no “buts” against the Palestinian, Lebanese, Yemeni, Syrian, Iranian or Iraqi resistance.
We internationalists can only close ranks, take off our hats and modestly place ourselves at their service.
If being a pacifist means being a supporter of peace, this author is and always has been. But not a supporter of unjust peace, or the peace of graveyards, or the peace of the submissive oppressed… I could even say that, for a time, I was an Irenicist, so I know the terrain first hand. Gandhi is considered an icon of the absolute rejection of violence, both on a personal, religious and political level. He was one of the main defenders of ahimsa, an ethical principle of non-violence derived from the Hindu religious tradition.
For Gandhi, non-violence was not just a political tactic, but a way of life and an unshakeable moral principle that should guide all human actions. But despite his firm position, Gandhi recognized that, in certain cases, violence is preferable to cowardice. He considered cowardice – the inability to confront injustice out of fear of the oppressor – to be worse than violence, since violence implies the renunciation of personal dignity.
Palestinians have tried everything during more than 75 years of occupation: political strikes, fasts, non-cooperation with the occupier, civil disobedience, demonstrations, marches, passive resistance, negotiations… Yet we have seen prisoners die on hunger strike, we have seen peaceful marches back to Gaza massacred. Zionist snipers fire at will at nurses, journalists or unarmed demonstrators, without international condemnation, sanctions or the death of innocents making headlines. Non-violence as a strategy has its limits, especially in these times of brutal social control and with so many enemies.
Nonviolence necessarily requires high social visibility in order to be useful. Unlike violence, which is often visible on its own and has an immediate impact, non-violent actions don’t generate the same kind of attention. For these tactics to have a transformative effect, they have to be seen by the general public, otherwise they can be ignored, underestimated or manipulated by the authorities or by a mediatized or polarized society. Without the media on the revolutionary side, nonviolent actions run the risk of going unnoticed or being minimized.
The effectiveness of nonviolence lies largely in its ability to shock the public conscience and highlight the injustice of the oppressive system. When acts of repression are committed against peaceful protesters, the media has the power to expose this disproportionate violence, which generates sympathy, empathy and support for the nonviolent cause. Without a platform to amplify these images and narratives, the repression can continue without significant social or political consequences. To make matters worse, governments and ruling elites control the mainstream media and can easily manipulate or distort the public perception of a nonviolent movement. Without access to independent media, the official version can crush a non-violent movement, labeling it at will as radical, illegal or even violent. All of us who have been behind banners or barricades for years have experienced this on numerous occasions.
Nonviolence, while useful and powerful in many contexts, also faces serious limitations when confronted with an amoral and murderous enemy like the Israeli Zionazi regime, an adversary who has no qualms about using lethal force and who is not subject to moral, legal or ethical constraints.
Non-violence is largely based on the ability to appeal to the moral conscience of the oppressor or the general public, seeking to provoke a reaction of empathy, guilt or compassion for the suffering of the victims. However, an enemy who does not recognize these ethical principles or who does not respond to public condemnation is not affected by these tactics.
A brutal regime or force that has no remorse can continue to repress without being moved or stopped by peaceful actions. If more than 80% of the population of Israel’s colonial lands approves of the massacre of children as a military tactic, who can stop Netanyahu and his genocidal gang? Arguably, only the United Nations and the Security Council, but the US veto power prevents condemnations that would force the application of resolutions, so in practice they will never be implemented.
Without fear of legal repercussions, international sanctions or political pressure, a regime can simply permanently eliminate demonstrators or a defenseless population without facing any consequences. This is what is happening in West Asia.
Counter-revolutionary wolves in pacifist sheep’s clothing
Whether you believe it or not, where the techniques of nonviolence and Popular Nonviolent Defense are succeeding is in the counterrevolutionary field.
In recent years, they have been used above all to organize pro-US uprisings. Yes, color revolutions, Arab Springs and the like. This is the case with the Albert Einstein Institute, run and financed by the CIA. A sad end for an ideal of purely anti-colonial origin.
In short, denying the right or legitimacy of resistance is tantamount to condemning the Palestinian people to total disappearance. Fortunately, within the Palestine solidarity movement, the bourgeois pacifists are an increasingly small minority.
The supposed moral superiority of pacifism is little more than a “liberal pathology” – as they have called it – it is the tacit acceptance of political defeat, which, in this case, amounts to becoming a de facto accomplice of Israel, the United States and NATO.
Let them take a good look at themselves.
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/01/ ... -genocide/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Ideology
The Myth of 1968 Thought and the French Intelligentsia: Historical Commodity Fetishism and Ideological Rollback
Posted by Internationalist 360° on January 24, 2025
Gabriel Rockhill
Workers and students demonstrate in Paris’s 11th arrondissement on 13 May 1968. Photograph: Bruno Barbey/Magnum Photos
“The petty bourgeois is afraid of the class struggle, and does not carry it to its logical conclusion, to its main object.”
– V. I. Lenin1
A Dialectical Analysis of 1968
“Events are the real dialectics of history.”
–Antonio Gramsci2
Like any major social and political movement, the events referred to as those of May 1968 have multiple different aspects and internal contradictions. They cannot be easily summed up in terms of a single significance, and they were themselves the site of class struggles, with various groups vying for power, pushing and pulling in different directions. This is as true of the past as it is of the present, in the sense that the battle over historical meaning continues long after the event itself has passed.
A dialectical approach to ’68 begins with the recognition of the infinite complexity of the events, while also concretely abstracting from them in order to establish a heuristic framework that makes sense of some of their fundamental traits. This frame can be situated at a greater or lesser level of abstraction, allowing for a multiscalar analysis, meaning one that can either cast the event at its most macro level, or hone in on microdevelopments. For such an analysis to function, of course, it requires a coherent relationship between the different scales, so that they can be nested within one another.
For the purposes of this study, I will briefly outline the general framework before turning to one particular element: the role of the French intelligentsia and, more specifically, what is referred to as French theory. There were at least two major forces at work in the ’68 uprisings in France. On the one hand, there was the youth and student movement of the baby-boom generation, driven in part by the expanding postwar middle-class stratum and the rapidly rising student population. It was largely characterized by an anti-establishment ethos and rife with what Michel Clouscard referred to as a “transgressive libertarianism” (which sometimes seamlessly merged with explicit anticommunism, à la Daniel Cohn-Bendit). On the other hand, there was a massive mobilization of workers that led to the largest strike in the history of Europe and palpable gains for the working class.3 While the former was largely affiliated with the New Left, including its libertarian and culturalist orientations, the latter has sometimes been described as engaging in the so-called Old Left politics of the struggle of labor against capital.4
Bourgeois history has primarily retained from ’68 the spectacle of the student-led revolts in the heart of Paris: the barricades in the Latin Quarter, the occupation of the Sorbonne, the libertarian sloganeering, and so forth. A significant segment of the intelligentsia, particularly anarchist, Maoist, Trotskyist, libertarian socialist, and Marxian currents, wrote in support of these revolts and often joined them in the streets and the various occupations. Marxist-Leninist intellectuals generally questioned the strategic clarity of the unorganized petty-bourgeois and anticommunist politics of many of the more vocal students, which they criticized for being gauchistes and beholden to the illusory belief in a revolutionary situation.5 At the same time, many of these intellectuals also recognized the youth uprising as an important catalyst for a new phase of class struggle, and they stalwartly supported the mobilization of workers.
These different segments of the intelligentsia, as we shall see, were not those that rose to global prominence as major contributors to the phenomenon known as French theory.6 On the contrary, those marketed as the ’68 thinkers—Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Pierre Bourdieu, and others—were disconnected from and often dismissive of the historic workers’ mobilization. They were also hostile to, or at least highly skeptical of, the student movement. In both senses, they were anti-’68 thinkers, or at a minimum, theorists who were highly suspicious of the demonstrations. Their promotion by the global theory industry, which has marketed them as the radical theorists of ’68, has largely obliterated this historical fact.
The Idealist Analogy
“Structures do not descend into the street [Les structures ne descendent pas dans la rue].”
-Phrase written on a blackboard during the occupation of the Sorbonne
In the dominant historical ideology, there is such a close affiliation between what is known as French theory and the uprisings of 1968 that there is often no need to demonstrate the existence of any concrete material connections between them. Given the rising prominence, through the course of the mid- to late 1960s, of the intellectuals affiliated with the problematic but predominant labels of structuralism and poststructuralism—including the major market successes of books like Foucault’s The Order of Things (1966) and Lacan’s Écrits (1966)—it is frequently presumed, moreover, that there is a causal relationship between these theoretical developments and the practical contestation of the status quo. This correlation has undoubtedly been fostered by the fact that the grand arrival of these intellectual trends in the United States, and their subsequent global promotion under the label of French theory, is commonly dated to 1966, which meant that much of their initial international reception was bound up with the historical conjuncture of 1968. Discussing “the perceived connection between fashionable philosophers such as Louis Althusser, Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida, and the student revolts of 1968,” Gary Gutting writes, for instance: “it was tempting to see their philosophical radicalism as somehow of a piece with the students’ political radicalism.”7
More often than not, however, the association between French theory and ’68 is a free association devoid of any concrete evidence, as when authors make claims like the following: “In 1968, a year of insurrection and manifestos…Roland Barthes coincidentally proclaimed, in an essay which had just appeared in French for the first time, what he called ‘The Death of the Author.’”8 Lacking any substance, such statements are not, strictly speaking, false, because they are not really asserting anything more than a chronological proximity. Instead, they rely on connotation and proof by association to suggest that there must be some kind of connection, as in Jason Demers’s claim that “the context for much of the thought that constituted post-structuralist philosophy was May ’68.”9 Some of the celebrated French theorists have, moreover, done much the same, as in Derrida’s oft-cited reference to the events of May in the opening lines of his October 1968 lecture on “The Ends of Man.” After briefly evoking them, he immediately bracketed all analysis, claiming that it would require a lengthy investigation, and he bluntly concluded: “I have simply found it necessary to mark, date, and make known…the historical circumstances in which I prepared this presentation. They appear to me to belong, by all rights, to the field and to the problematic of our conference.”10 He then proceeded to present a lecture that had no clear relationship to the events of ’68, and which focused primarily on a close reading of a philosopher known more for his support of Nazism than any interest in anticapitalist or anti-imperialist activism (Martin Heidegger).11
At times, these connotative free associations morph into denotative statements, as in Gutting’s claim that “in contrast to most other French philosophers, including Foucault and Deleuze, he [Derrida] maintained a certain discrete distance from the student revolt of May 1968.”12 In extreme cases, the semblance of an argument is actually formulated, as in the book by Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut brazenly entitled La pensée 68 (translated as French Philosophy of the Sixties). Although their primary objective in writing the book was obviously to promote their own work in defense of liberalism over and against what they perceived as the “anti-humanism” of “68 thought,” the slapdash historical methodology they relied upon has also been deployed by those who venerate French theory and its purported political or ethical radicality. Rather than engaging in the hard labor of a materialist history of actually existing social relations and practices, they indulged in an unaccountable idealist history based on conceptual abstractions, freewheeling correlations, and the extensive use of modal verbs, all of which were purportedly justified by some nebulous generational “spirit of the sixties.” They therefore focused almost exclusively on what had been said about ’68, instead of on what had actually been done, and they purported to distill from French theory and the activism of May through June of 1968 a common essence or “logic.”13
Let us consider, in this light, the authors attacked as ’68 thinkers by Ferry and Renaut: Foucault, Bourdieu, Derrida, and Lacan. Foucault, to start with, was in France for only a few days during the uprisings, and he did not participate in them, nor did he partake in acts of solidarity or express public support for the movement.14 This is for good reason: he had personally participated in the Gaullist academic counter-reform undertaken by the Minister of Education, Christian Fouchet, which aimed at making the university better serve the interests of a modernized techno-scientific capitalist economy. The Fouchet reform, as it was called, has been widely recognized as one of the principal triggers for the ’68 movement. The students mobilized to reject what they argued was a limitation of student curricular choices, imposed financial hardship, a disguised form of selection, and an overall streamlining of the process of turning them into cogs in the capitalist machine.15 Judging from the minutes of the meetings of the commission on literary and scientific teaching on which he served, Foucault did not show any signs of opposing this counter-reform, and he even wrote several preparatory reports for the commission’s work.16
As Didier Eribon rightly reminds us, we must be careful not to project the image of the politicized Foucault of the early 1970s back onto the classical academic and dutiful administrator who was deeply enmeshed and invested in the power networks of les normaliens (the students of the elite École Normale Supérieure, or ENS).17 Indeed, Foucault was commonly described before ’68 as a “dandy” who was “violently anti-communist.”18 Although he discreetly expressed his solidarity with certain aspects of the student struggles in Tunisia in 1967–68, and in spite of the fact that he later acknowledged the importance of May for the re-orientation of his work, it is equally clear that he was on the other side of the French barricades in 1968.19 This is one of the reasons why Foucault was viewed with suspicion by left intellectuals when he returned to France in late ’68. “He had the reputation,” according to Bernard Gendron, “of being condescendingly apolitical, a ferocious critic of the French Communist Party…a Gaullist technocrat, and a denier of the power of human agency.”20 Cornelius Castoriadis provided a similar assessment: “Foucault did not hide from his reactionary positions until 1968.”21
Jean-Claude Passeron has described, in an interview on the radio channel France Culture, how Bourdieu was correcting exams with him in Parisian cafés during the uprisings, paying scant attention to the social struggles. “His remarkable absence was noted during the events of May 1968,” writes Pierre Mounier, “his activism being limited to specialized interventions on higher education, unlike many of his sociologist colleagues.”22 “The romanticism of the student protesters,” Craig Calhoun explains, “did not seduce him any more than the dominant versions of Marxism at the time, opposed as he was in particular to the leftist tendency [tout particulièrement à la tendance gauchiste] to abolish the separation between science and politics.”23 Bourdieu’s research center was the only one at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique that continued to function in May. According to Christine Delphy, who was a research assistant at his center in 1968 and was actively engaged in the movement, Bourdieu called her in May and asked if he should participate. She responded that he should because it was important and the students had been inspired by his theses in The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relations to Culture (1964 in French). However, he remained “absent from the streets” and was not “with ‘the left,’” according to his biographer Marie-Anne Lescourret, with the exception of his participation in a protest march on May 13.24 “Later,” Delphy explained, “I discovered what it meant, for him, to be involved: he asked his researchers to stay in their offices photocopying his works and distributing them to the protesters.”25
It is worth recalling that Bourdieu directed this research center for the anti-’68er par excellence, Raymond Aron. The latter had direct access to considerable U.S. funds for anti-Marxist social-scientific research, and he was the major intellectual spokesperson in France for the Congress for Cultural Freedom (an anticommunist propaganda organization that was revealed to be a front for the Central Intelligence Agency).26 Bourdieu had developed his early work under Aron’s supervision, served as his assistant at the Sorbonne, and became such a close friend that they used the informal tu form in conversation. Although their relationship had been strained by Bourdieu’s publication of The Inheritors and they had a falling out around 1968, it was not until the 1990s that Bourdieu would acquire the reputation of being a committed intellectual for his defense of the welfare state against neoliberalism.27 In Sketch for a Self-Analysis (2004 in French, 2008 in English), where he further developed an argument begun in the final chapter of Science of Science and Reflexivity (2001 in French, 2004 in English), Bourdieu clearly distanced himself from the philosophers who he claimed had responded providentially to the expectations of the ’68 revolts. According to his internal analysis of institutional and private power games, these thinkers had shown every sign of “a conservative reaction to the threat that the rise of the social sciences, especially through linguistics and ‘structuralist’ anthropology, represented for the philosophers.”28 Following in the tradition of his mentor, Aron, Bourdieu preferred so-called empirical evidence to what he dismissed as the “revolutionary posturing” of leftism. The following statement, which testifies to the widespread but faulty historical amalgamation between “postmodernism” and “radicalism,” is worth citing in full:
This apparently tepid, prudent position [of mine] no doubt also owes a lot to the dispositions of a habitus that inclines me towards a refusal of the “heroic,” “revolutionary,” “radical,” or better yet, “radical chic” posture, in short of the postmodern radicalism identified with philosophical profundity—as well as, in politics, a rejection of “leftism [gauchisme]” (unlike Foucault and Deleuze), but also of the Communist Party or Mao (in contrast to Althusser). Likewise it is no doubt the dispositions of the habitus that explain the antipathy inspired in me by sayers [phraseurs] and doers [faiseurs], and the respect I feel for the “toilers of proof [travailleurs de la preuve].”29
Bourdieu thus positioned himself as a social scientist rigorously pursuing Aron’s line, pretentiously situating himself above the petty fray of politics and class struggle (as if Aron’s orientation was not political through and through, as should be clear from his financial backers and his rabid anticommunism).
Unlike his friend, Maurice Blanchot, who “was at all the demonstrations, all the general assemblies, and took part in composing pamphlets and motions,” Derrida was “somewhat withdrawn or even reserved about some aspects of the May ’68 movement.”30 He did march with the students on May 13 and organized a general assembly at the ENS. However, he described his reaction to the movement in the following terms: “I was on my guard, even worried in the face of a certain cult of spontaneity, a fusionist, anti-unionist euphoria, in the face of the enthusiasm of a finally ‘freed’ speech, of restored ‘transparence,’ and so forth. I never believed in those things.”31 Derrida was not, as he himself explained, a ’68er, and his “heart was not ‘on the barricades.’” Bothered by what he labeled “the call for transparency, for communication without relay or delay, the liberation from every sort of apparatus, party or union,” he admonished that one should be wary of “spontaneism” as much as “of workerism, of pauperism.”32
In a revealing interview in 1989, in which he discussed the period around ’68 and his aversion to Althusserian Marxism and the French Communist Party (PCF), Derrida flatly proclaimed that the concept of class, as it had been inherited, is meaningless: “I cannot construct finished or plausible sentences using the expression social class. I don’t really know what social class means.”33 It should not be lost on us that his guiding assumption is that his subjective inability—as a petty-bourgeois intellectual—simply reveals objective reality: class is meaningless (that is, if I cannot formulate plausible sentences using the term, then it cannot possibly mean anything to anyone else). Relying on a strawperson version of “the economist dogma of Marxism,” which completely ignores innumerable texts in the actually existing tradition of Marxism, Derrida went on in the same interview to berate this very same tradition for its supposed lack of conceptual and discursive refinement, recommending that “some engagement with Heidegger, or a problematic of the Heideggerian type should have been mandatory.”34 His rejection of the category of class thereby went hand in hand with an attempt to impose the philosophy of an unrepentant Nazi as a theoretical requirement for those engaging with Marxism in any way. Regarding the mobilizations in ’68, it is thus in no way surprising that he expressed disdain for what he perceived as a manifestation of collective ignorance since some of those involved appealed to “social class” and had not been studying Heidegger. He also chided the student movement for being “unrealistic” and potentially leading “to dangerous consequences, as in fact it did two months later with the election of the most right-wing Chamber of Deputies we had ever had in France.”35 While some naïvely continued the struggle over the summer, Derrida sagely retired from Paris to settle at his parents’ home to write.
Lacan also remained on the sidelines of the movement, showing signs of curiosity and mild support, while also playing the role of the “stern father” who summarily invoked, according to Elisabeth Roudinesco, “the inability of any revolution to free the subject from his servitude.”36 He did ask to meet Cohn-Bendit and other leaders of the student movement in the spring of 1968, when he signed petitions and provided “effective and discreet” financial support for certain actions.37 He also cosigned, on May 10, a letter of support for the students published in Le Monde. However, Jacques Sédat and other scholars have emphasized Lacan’s irritation, mixed with disappointment, during the events of May and in the following months, especially in the face of the rising Maoist current.38 Lacan’s daughter and son-in-law were committed Maoists involved with the Lacanian group connected to Les Cahiers pour l’analyse at the ENS. In Roudinesco’s opinion, the Maoist commitment of this Lacanian group “was a disaster for Lacan” because the cohort of students on whom he had founded his hopes deserted him for their political commitments.39 When Alain Geismar approached Lacan for financial support for the Gauche prolétérienne, Lacan apparently responded, “The revolution, c’est moi . I don’t see why I should subsidize you. You are making my revolution impossible and taking away my disciples.”40
Lacan was heckled by the movement when he made his appearance on the Vincennes campus in December 1969, and students pressed him to perform a self-critique.41 Referring to himself as a “liberal” who is “antiprogressive,” he mocked the students for playing “the role of helots [ilotes] of this regime [presumably the Pompidou regime],” and he exclaimed: “always, the revolutionary aspiration has only a single possible outcome—of ending up as the master’s discourse [L’aspiration révolutionnaire, ça n’a qu’une chance, d’aboutir, toujours au discours du maître]. This is what experience has proved. What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will get one.”42 By externalizing “the revolutionaries” as a group to which he did not belong, Lacan situated himself on the side of the master, or, at the very least, on the side of the sovereign intellectual who masters the situation of the failed revolutionaries.43
Castoriadis, whose work with the libertarian socialist organization Socialism or Barbarism is widely recognized as a precursor to the ’68 student and youth movement, provided a lapidary corrective to Renaut and Ferry’s slipshod analysis. He described it as totally nonsensical because, for them, “‘68 thought’ is anti-68 thought, the thought that built its mass success on the ruins of the ’68 movement and in function of its failure.”44 Indeed, although there was sometimes tepid and circumspect support for the students, the workers’ movement was generally met by silence, skeptical withdrawal, criticism, opposition, and sometimes flight on the part of the prominent professors associated with French theory. “May 68,” wrote Daniel Bensaïd, “is certainly not the microcosm of the Parisian intelligentsia, which ascended from the street to the living room [l’intelligentsia parisienne, remontée de la rue au salon].”45 Dominique Lecourt, who was a politically active student at the ENS from 1965 to 1975, recalls that: “In reality, the events of May ’68 left the thinkers ‘of the sixties’ speechless at the time. And their disciples were thrown into enormous confusion. I recall some discreet retreats to the countryside, some hasty departures to Mom and Dad’s when gas began to run out at the pumps.”46
Claude Lévi-Strauss, who was working in May in the heart of the Latin Quarter, where the Parisian student mobilization was concentrated, simply withdrew from his research center at the Collège de France and sought refuge in the posh sixteenth arrondissement. He found May 1968 “repugnant” and decried it as yet another step in the degradation of the university.47 Barthes also withdrew, reacting to the events with what his biographer, Tiphane Samoyault, refers to as “relative indifference.”48 He did wander around the Sorbonne on May 14, and he took part in a heated discussion on May 16, when “very critical remarks were directed to him.”49 However, he otherwise kept his distance from the protests, neither signing the “Revolution, Here and Now” manifesto in issue 34 of Tel Quel, nor joining in the creation of the Comité d’action étudiants-écrivains révolutionnaires (founded by Jean-Pierre Faye, with Michel Butor, Jacques Roubaud, Marguerite Duras, Maurice Nadeau, Blanchot, and Nathalie Sarraute). Formulating both direct and indirect criticisms of the disruptive theatricality of the events in his public and private writings, Barthes referred in his correspondence to May–June as “painful times” riddled with anxiety, and admitted that he could not find his place in what was happening.50
Hélène Cixous was at the University of Paris in Nanterre, where the student movement began, and she watched the events, apparently astonished by the desire for a total uprising.51 Emmanuel Lévinas was at the same university, where he was teaching in the philosophy department, alongside supporters of the movement such as Mikel Dufrenne. However, in the words of his biographer, Lévinas “respected authority, order, and hierarchies, and he did not appreciate that young people wanted to dictate their law to the elders.”52 “If he did not condemn them openly,” she writes, “he nowhere participated in the events; he seems to have fled them, if one believes one of his students.”53 Gilles Deleuze was far from being a militant in the style of his future friend Félix Guattari (whom he would meet in 1969), but he remained receptive to the student movement in Lyon, publicly displaying his support, and participating in some of the student-organized activities.54 He then spent the summer at his family’s property in Limousin to finish his dissertation, which he defended at the Sorbonne in early 1969, in one of the first dissertation defenses after the occupation. His dissertation committee apparently feared that gangs of students might interrupt the proceedings, but they did not. Later in life, Deleuze consolidated a number of his reactionary views by taking a historically uninformed position, peremptorily proclaiming: “All revolutions fail [foirent]. Everyone knows it: we pretend to rediscover it here [with the anticommunist writings of Glucksmann and Furet]. You have to be a complete idiot [débile] [not to know that]!”55
Althusser had been ill since April 1968, and he withdrew from the events, aligning himself, though at a distance, on the position taken by the PCF, namely that this was not a revolutionary situation.56 This provoked the students’ slogan “Althusser à rien” or “Useless Althusser.” It is worth noting that on March 15, 1969, Althusser published an article on the events of May in which he recognized the world-historical contribution of the “profoundly progressive” student revolt to “the global class struggle against Imperialism.”57 At the same time, he criticized the media’s extensive focus on the students and highlighted the fact that the workers’ general strike was much more decisive. Moreover, he called for a systematic analysis and positive critique of the ideological limits of the students and of the PCF. His manuscript from 1969–70, published as On Reproduction, claims that the events of May ’68 and those that followed provided a kind of empirical verification of his thesis that class struggle has always existed in ideological state apparatuses like the school, the family, the Church, and so on.58
For Althusser’s disciples, who had written Reading Capital with him in 1965, the situation was rather complicated.59 According to François Dosse, Pierre Macherey continued his classes at the Sorbonne but in difficult conditions. Étienne Balibar would remain only a few months in 1969 at the University of Paris in Vincennes, as his classes were apparently disrupted by André Glucksmann and Maoist activists shouting “Balibar-toi!” or “Bali-beat it!” Jacques Rancière was not involved in the movement and “had no links with any militant group,” but he would quickly distance himself from his maître, due to what he perceived as a lack of support for the movement of revolt against the bourgeois order. In 1974, he then published a harsh critique of Althusserian Marxism.60 Alain Badiou also ran in the Althusser circles, though he was not one of the authors of Reading Capital. He was a social democrat at the time, and involved in the Unified Socialist Party.61 He became radicalized and moved toward Maoism in what he calls the “fourth May ’68,” or the supposed search for a new conception of politics in the decade or so following ’68.62
A number of participants and commentators have remarked that there was at least partial support for the uprising on the part of the professoriate.63 However, with few exceptions, the students—and especially the workers—involved in the struggle were met with suspicion by the most prominent French theorists. They were not invested in practically challenging the apparatus of knowledge in capitalist society, from which they benefited materially, nor were they keen on taking up the fight of labor against capital. They therefore stood on the sidelines of the revolt and waited for “the emotion (l’émoi)” to pass, when they did not directly criticize or repudiate it (l’émoi was Lacan’s preferred term for May ’68, since he rejected the idea that it was an event, and this allowed him to make a sardonic play on words with the homophonic et moi?, apparently in order to reference the narcissistic question of the ’68ers: “and me?” or “what about me?!”).64 Those involved in the struggle were the real thinkers and actors of ’68, while the major French theoreticians reacting to them were the anti-’68 thinkers or, at the very least, the theoretical skeptics of ’68. It is worth noting in conclusion that when Castoriadis imagined, as a counterfactual, the response of the protesters on the barricades to the circulation of an anthology of writings by Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, and Bourdieu, he exclaimed: “it would have, at best, provoked uncontrollable laughter, at worst, made the movement and the participants lose their erections and disperse.”65
Historical Commodity Fetishism
A perverse inversion has occurred over time. The so-called structuralist and poststructuralist thinkers associated with French theory have come to be identified with the ’68 movement by a muddled historical amalgamation that serves very clear political ends. For some, like Ferry and Renaut, its purpose is to bury French theory with the legacy of ’68 by relying on a nebulous correlation between a political failure and the bankruptcy of a particular theoretical tradition. For others, particularly within the larger Anglophone world, it is a matter of promoting a radical image of a group of thinkers by establishing a vague but persistent analogy between alleged intellectual rebels and actual political militants. The only thing that remains of the historical event itself is its symbolic value, which is detached from material practice in order to function as a free-floating signifier that can be used to promote—or denigrate—a product of the global theory industry.66 This is an exemplary case of what I propose to call historical commodity fetishism: the actual social relations operative in political struggles disappear behind the enchantment—or the enchanted disgust—with an intellectual commodity.67
Although there were certain gains for workers and some university reforms, the ’68 uprising failed to topple the government and significantly alter the overall power dynamic or economic system. It did succeed, however, in reorganizing French society to some degree by creating more space for the emergence of the petty-bourgeois class stratum and its consumerist aspirations, as well as its attendant ideology of “libertarian liberalism,” to use Clouscard’s vocabulary. The latter foregrounded the important role played by the Marshall Plan in fostering the development of this new middle-class layer of consumers prone to ideologically support the capitalist system because it allows them to indulge in a U.S.-inspired market of desire, with its requisite French twists. The injection of over $13 billion (the equivalent of $161 billion in 2023) into Western Europe, approximately 18 percent of which was directed to France, was aimed at bolstering this class stratum and keeping this entire region within the procapitalist, anticommunist fold.
This project of U.S. financial and cultural imperialism helped create an economic situation characterized by a high level of exploitation in production and a libertarian consumerist model for the new petty-bourgeois class layer, which included the intelligentsia in the broad sense of the term (professors, researchers, journalists, pundits, and so on). This contributed to developing a society in which, in Clouscard’s well-chosen words, “everything is allowed, but nothing is possible [tout est permis, mais rien n’est possible].”68 The libertarian explosion in consumerism for one class fraction, which promised the end of taboos and prohibitions, was thereby conjoined with an increasingly repressive productive sphere (to which we will return at the end of this study). May ’68 for Clouscard, as Aymeric Monville has explained, benefited above all the postwar educated middle classes, which sought to become dominant without changing the material foundation of society. It announced the decline of “the two great forces of Resistance [communism and Gaullism] and the return to favor of Atlanticism, from Giscard to Mitterrand.”69
French theory is a consumer product that rose to global prominence in this context. Many historians date its explosive appearance on the world market to October 1966, when the Ford Foundation lavishly funded, to the tune of $36,000 ($332,000 today), an international conference at the Johns Hopkins Humanities Center in Baltimore, as well as a series of follow-up events.70 It brought together an impressive array of rising stars, including the likes of Derrida, Lacan, and Barthes. The few who could not attend in person, such as Deleuze and Gérard Genette, sent in papers. No Marxists were invited, with the possible exception of Lucien Goldmann. The absence of Althusser, a towering figure in French structuralism at the time, was particularly notable. His membership in the PCF surely raised some major concerns since this was not the intellectual tradition the Ford Foundation was interested in promoting. That said, Althusser is in many ways a pivotal figure whose work, while powerfully anchored in certain ways in the Marxist tradition, opened up paths of research that led rather far afield. It is not surprising, then, that beginning in the 1970s, his version of structuralist Marxism would come to be marketed in the Anglophone world by New Left Books (later Verso).71 Characterized by a lack of historical-materialist analysis, an academic fetishization of the close reading of canonical texts, and a highly problematic dilution of Marxism with Lacanianism, this type of Marxism—and particularly that of Althusser’s students or acolytes (Badiou, Rancière, Balibar, and so on)—proved itself over time to be compatible with the consumer product of the global theory industry known as French theory.
(Much more at link. Required reading for one like myself who was a youth at the time and superficially absorbed some of the tenets of 'French Theory', to my mature regret.)
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/01/ ... -rollback/
Posted by Internationalist 360° on January 24, 2025
Gabriel Rockhill
Workers and students demonstrate in Paris’s 11th arrondissement on 13 May 1968. Photograph: Bruno Barbey/Magnum Photos
“The petty bourgeois is afraid of the class struggle, and does not carry it to its logical conclusion, to its main object.”
– V. I. Lenin1
A Dialectical Analysis of 1968
“Events are the real dialectics of history.”
–Antonio Gramsci2
Like any major social and political movement, the events referred to as those of May 1968 have multiple different aspects and internal contradictions. They cannot be easily summed up in terms of a single significance, and they were themselves the site of class struggles, with various groups vying for power, pushing and pulling in different directions. This is as true of the past as it is of the present, in the sense that the battle over historical meaning continues long after the event itself has passed.
A dialectical approach to ’68 begins with the recognition of the infinite complexity of the events, while also concretely abstracting from them in order to establish a heuristic framework that makes sense of some of their fundamental traits. This frame can be situated at a greater or lesser level of abstraction, allowing for a multiscalar analysis, meaning one that can either cast the event at its most macro level, or hone in on microdevelopments. For such an analysis to function, of course, it requires a coherent relationship between the different scales, so that they can be nested within one another.
For the purposes of this study, I will briefly outline the general framework before turning to one particular element: the role of the French intelligentsia and, more specifically, what is referred to as French theory. There were at least two major forces at work in the ’68 uprisings in France. On the one hand, there was the youth and student movement of the baby-boom generation, driven in part by the expanding postwar middle-class stratum and the rapidly rising student population. It was largely characterized by an anti-establishment ethos and rife with what Michel Clouscard referred to as a “transgressive libertarianism” (which sometimes seamlessly merged with explicit anticommunism, à la Daniel Cohn-Bendit). On the other hand, there was a massive mobilization of workers that led to the largest strike in the history of Europe and palpable gains for the working class.3 While the former was largely affiliated with the New Left, including its libertarian and culturalist orientations, the latter has sometimes been described as engaging in the so-called Old Left politics of the struggle of labor against capital.4
Bourgeois history has primarily retained from ’68 the spectacle of the student-led revolts in the heart of Paris: the barricades in the Latin Quarter, the occupation of the Sorbonne, the libertarian sloganeering, and so forth. A significant segment of the intelligentsia, particularly anarchist, Maoist, Trotskyist, libertarian socialist, and Marxian currents, wrote in support of these revolts and often joined them in the streets and the various occupations. Marxist-Leninist intellectuals generally questioned the strategic clarity of the unorganized petty-bourgeois and anticommunist politics of many of the more vocal students, which they criticized for being gauchistes and beholden to the illusory belief in a revolutionary situation.5 At the same time, many of these intellectuals also recognized the youth uprising as an important catalyst for a new phase of class struggle, and they stalwartly supported the mobilization of workers.
These different segments of the intelligentsia, as we shall see, were not those that rose to global prominence as major contributors to the phenomenon known as French theory.6 On the contrary, those marketed as the ’68 thinkers—Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Pierre Bourdieu, and others—were disconnected from and often dismissive of the historic workers’ mobilization. They were also hostile to, or at least highly skeptical of, the student movement. In both senses, they were anti-’68 thinkers, or at a minimum, theorists who were highly suspicious of the demonstrations. Their promotion by the global theory industry, which has marketed them as the radical theorists of ’68, has largely obliterated this historical fact.
The Idealist Analogy
“Structures do not descend into the street [Les structures ne descendent pas dans la rue].”
-Phrase written on a blackboard during the occupation of the Sorbonne
In the dominant historical ideology, there is such a close affiliation between what is known as French theory and the uprisings of 1968 that there is often no need to demonstrate the existence of any concrete material connections between them. Given the rising prominence, through the course of the mid- to late 1960s, of the intellectuals affiliated with the problematic but predominant labels of structuralism and poststructuralism—including the major market successes of books like Foucault’s The Order of Things (1966) and Lacan’s Écrits (1966)—it is frequently presumed, moreover, that there is a causal relationship between these theoretical developments and the practical contestation of the status quo. This correlation has undoubtedly been fostered by the fact that the grand arrival of these intellectual trends in the United States, and their subsequent global promotion under the label of French theory, is commonly dated to 1966, which meant that much of their initial international reception was bound up with the historical conjuncture of 1968. Discussing “the perceived connection between fashionable philosophers such as Louis Althusser, Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida, and the student revolts of 1968,” Gary Gutting writes, for instance: “it was tempting to see their philosophical radicalism as somehow of a piece with the students’ political radicalism.”7
More often than not, however, the association between French theory and ’68 is a free association devoid of any concrete evidence, as when authors make claims like the following: “In 1968, a year of insurrection and manifestos…Roland Barthes coincidentally proclaimed, in an essay which had just appeared in French for the first time, what he called ‘The Death of the Author.’”8 Lacking any substance, such statements are not, strictly speaking, false, because they are not really asserting anything more than a chronological proximity. Instead, they rely on connotation and proof by association to suggest that there must be some kind of connection, as in Jason Demers’s claim that “the context for much of the thought that constituted post-structuralist philosophy was May ’68.”9 Some of the celebrated French theorists have, moreover, done much the same, as in Derrida’s oft-cited reference to the events of May in the opening lines of his October 1968 lecture on “The Ends of Man.” After briefly evoking them, he immediately bracketed all analysis, claiming that it would require a lengthy investigation, and he bluntly concluded: “I have simply found it necessary to mark, date, and make known…the historical circumstances in which I prepared this presentation. They appear to me to belong, by all rights, to the field and to the problematic of our conference.”10 He then proceeded to present a lecture that had no clear relationship to the events of ’68, and which focused primarily on a close reading of a philosopher known more for his support of Nazism than any interest in anticapitalist or anti-imperialist activism (Martin Heidegger).11
At times, these connotative free associations morph into denotative statements, as in Gutting’s claim that “in contrast to most other French philosophers, including Foucault and Deleuze, he [Derrida] maintained a certain discrete distance from the student revolt of May 1968.”12 In extreme cases, the semblance of an argument is actually formulated, as in the book by Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut brazenly entitled La pensée 68 (translated as French Philosophy of the Sixties). Although their primary objective in writing the book was obviously to promote their own work in defense of liberalism over and against what they perceived as the “anti-humanism” of “68 thought,” the slapdash historical methodology they relied upon has also been deployed by those who venerate French theory and its purported political or ethical radicality. Rather than engaging in the hard labor of a materialist history of actually existing social relations and practices, they indulged in an unaccountable idealist history based on conceptual abstractions, freewheeling correlations, and the extensive use of modal verbs, all of which were purportedly justified by some nebulous generational “spirit of the sixties.” They therefore focused almost exclusively on what had been said about ’68, instead of on what had actually been done, and they purported to distill from French theory and the activism of May through June of 1968 a common essence or “logic.”13
Let us consider, in this light, the authors attacked as ’68 thinkers by Ferry and Renaut: Foucault, Bourdieu, Derrida, and Lacan. Foucault, to start with, was in France for only a few days during the uprisings, and he did not participate in them, nor did he partake in acts of solidarity or express public support for the movement.14 This is for good reason: he had personally participated in the Gaullist academic counter-reform undertaken by the Minister of Education, Christian Fouchet, which aimed at making the university better serve the interests of a modernized techno-scientific capitalist economy. The Fouchet reform, as it was called, has been widely recognized as one of the principal triggers for the ’68 movement. The students mobilized to reject what they argued was a limitation of student curricular choices, imposed financial hardship, a disguised form of selection, and an overall streamlining of the process of turning them into cogs in the capitalist machine.15 Judging from the minutes of the meetings of the commission on literary and scientific teaching on which he served, Foucault did not show any signs of opposing this counter-reform, and he even wrote several preparatory reports for the commission’s work.16
As Didier Eribon rightly reminds us, we must be careful not to project the image of the politicized Foucault of the early 1970s back onto the classical academic and dutiful administrator who was deeply enmeshed and invested in the power networks of les normaliens (the students of the elite École Normale Supérieure, or ENS).17 Indeed, Foucault was commonly described before ’68 as a “dandy” who was “violently anti-communist.”18 Although he discreetly expressed his solidarity with certain aspects of the student struggles in Tunisia in 1967–68, and in spite of the fact that he later acknowledged the importance of May for the re-orientation of his work, it is equally clear that he was on the other side of the French barricades in 1968.19 This is one of the reasons why Foucault was viewed with suspicion by left intellectuals when he returned to France in late ’68. “He had the reputation,” according to Bernard Gendron, “of being condescendingly apolitical, a ferocious critic of the French Communist Party…a Gaullist technocrat, and a denier of the power of human agency.”20 Cornelius Castoriadis provided a similar assessment: “Foucault did not hide from his reactionary positions until 1968.”21
Jean-Claude Passeron has described, in an interview on the radio channel France Culture, how Bourdieu was correcting exams with him in Parisian cafés during the uprisings, paying scant attention to the social struggles. “His remarkable absence was noted during the events of May 1968,” writes Pierre Mounier, “his activism being limited to specialized interventions on higher education, unlike many of his sociologist colleagues.”22 “The romanticism of the student protesters,” Craig Calhoun explains, “did not seduce him any more than the dominant versions of Marxism at the time, opposed as he was in particular to the leftist tendency [tout particulièrement à la tendance gauchiste] to abolish the separation between science and politics.”23 Bourdieu’s research center was the only one at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique that continued to function in May. According to Christine Delphy, who was a research assistant at his center in 1968 and was actively engaged in the movement, Bourdieu called her in May and asked if he should participate. She responded that he should because it was important and the students had been inspired by his theses in The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relations to Culture (1964 in French). However, he remained “absent from the streets” and was not “with ‘the left,’” according to his biographer Marie-Anne Lescourret, with the exception of his participation in a protest march on May 13.24 “Later,” Delphy explained, “I discovered what it meant, for him, to be involved: he asked his researchers to stay in their offices photocopying his works and distributing them to the protesters.”25
It is worth recalling that Bourdieu directed this research center for the anti-’68er par excellence, Raymond Aron. The latter had direct access to considerable U.S. funds for anti-Marxist social-scientific research, and he was the major intellectual spokesperson in France for the Congress for Cultural Freedom (an anticommunist propaganda organization that was revealed to be a front for the Central Intelligence Agency).26 Bourdieu had developed his early work under Aron’s supervision, served as his assistant at the Sorbonne, and became such a close friend that they used the informal tu form in conversation. Although their relationship had been strained by Bourdieu’s publication of The Inheritors and they had a falling out around 1968, it was not until the 1990s that Bourdieu would acquire the reputation of being a committed intellectual for his defense of the welfare state against neoliberalism.27 In Sketch for a Self-Analysis (2004 in French, 2008 in English), where he further developed an argument begun in the final chapter of Science of Science and Reflexivity (2001 in French, 2004 in English), Bourdieu clearly distanced himself from the philosophers who he claimed had responded providentially to the expectations of the ’68 revolts. According to his internal analysis of institutional and private power games, these thinkers had shown every sign of “a conservative reaction to the threat that the rise of the social sciences, especially through linguistics and ‘structuralist’ anthropology, represented for the philosophers.”28 Following in the tradition of his mentor, Aron, Bourdieu preferred so-called empirical evidence to what he dismissed as the “revolutionary posturing” of leftism. The following statement, which testifies to the widespread but faulty historical amalgamation between “postmodernism” and “radicalism,” is worth citing in full:
This apparently tepid, prudent position [of mine] no doubt also owes a lot to the dispositions of a habitus that inclines me towards a refusal of the “heroic,” “revolutionary,” “radical,” or better yet, “radical chic” posture, in short of the postmodern radicalism identified with philosophical profundity—as well as, in politics, a rejection of “leftism [gauchisme]” (unlike Foucault and Deleuze), but also of the Communist Party or Mao (in contrast to Althusser). Likewise it is no doubt the dispositions of the habitus that explain the antipathy inspired in me by sayers [phraseurs] and doers [faiseurs], and the respect I feel for the “toilers of proof [travailleurs de la preuve].”29
Bourdieu thus positioned himself as a social scientist rigorously pursuing Aron’s line, pretentiously situating himself above the petty fray of politics and class struggle (as if Aron’s orientation was not political through and through, as should be clear from his financial backers and his rabid anticommunism).
Unlike his friend, Maurice Blanchot, who “was at all the demonstrations, all the general assemblies, and took part in composing pamphlets and motions,” Derrida was “somewhat withdrawn or even reserved about some aspects of the May ’68 movement.”30 He did march with the students on May 13 and organized a general assembly at the ENS. However, he described his reaction to the movement in the following terms: “I was on my guard, even worried in the face of a certain cult of spontaneity, a fusionist, anti-unionist euphoria, in the face of the enthusiasm of a finally ‘freed’ speech, of restored ‘transparence,’ and so forth. I never believed in those things.”31 Derrida was not, as he himself explained, a ’68er, and his “heart was not ‘on the barricades.’” Bothered by what he labeled “the call for transparency, for communication without relay or delay, the liberation from every sort of apparatus, party or union,” he admonished that one should be wary of “spontaneism” as much as “of workerism, of pauperism.”32
In a revealing interview in 1989, in which he discussed the period around ’68 and his aversion to Althusserian Marxism and the French Communist Party (PCF), Derrida flatly proclaimed that the concept of class, as it had been inherited, is meaningless: “I cannot construct finished or plausible sentences using the expression social class. I don’t really know what social class means.”33 It should not be lost on us that his guiding assumption is that his subjective inability—as a petty-bourgeois intellectual—simply reveals objective reality: class is meaningless (that is, if I cannot formulate plausible sentences using the term, then it cannot possibly mean anything to anyone else). Relying on a strawperson version of “the economist dogma of Marxism,” which completely ignores innumerable texts in the actually existing tradition of Marxism, Derrida went on in the same interview to berate this very same tradition for its supposed lack of conceptual and discursive refinement, recommending that “some engagement with Heidegger, or a problematic of the Heideggerian type should have been mandatory.”34 His rejection of the category of class thereby went hand in hand with an attempt to impose the philosophy of an unrepentant Nazi as a theoretical requirement for those engaging with Marxism in any way. Regarding the mobilizations in ’68, it is thus in no way surprising that he expressed disdain for what he perceived as a manifestation of collective ignorance since some of those involved appealed to “social class” and had not been studying Heidegger. He also chided the student movement for being “unrealistic” and potentially leading “to dangerous consequences, as in fact it did two months later with the election of the most right-wing Chamber of Deputies we had ever had in France.”35 While some naïvely continued the struggle over the summer, Derrida sagely retired from Paris to settle at his parents’ home to write.
Lacan also remained on the sidelines of the movement, showing signs of curiosity and mild support, while also playing the role of the “stern father” who summarily invoked, according to Elisabeth Roudinesco, “the inability of any revolution to free the subject from his servitude.”36 He did ask to meet Cohn-Bendit and other leaders of the student movement in the spring of 1968, when he signed petitions and provided “effective and discreet” financial support for certain actions.37 He also cosigned, on May 10, a letter of support for the students published in Le Monde. However, Jacques Sédat and other scholars have emphasized Lacan’s irritation, mixed with disappointment, during the events of May and in the following months, especially in the face of the rising Maoist current.38 Lacan’s daughter and son-in-law were committed Maoists involved with the Lacanian group connected to Les Cahiers pour l’analyse at the ENS. In Roudinesco’s opinion, the Maoist commitment of this Lacanian group “was a disaster for Lacan” because the cohort of students on whom he had founded his hopes deserted him for their political commitments.39 When Alain Geismar approached Lacan for financial support for the Gauche prolétérienne, Lacan apparently responded, “The revolution, c’est moi . I don’t see why I should subsidize you. You are making my revolution impossible and taking away my disciples.”40
Lacan was heckled by the movement when he made his appearance on the Vincennes campus in December 1969, and students pressed him to perform a self-critique.41 Referring to himself as a “liberal” who is “antiprogressive,” he mocked the students for playing “the role of helots [ilotes] of this regime [presumably the Pompidou regime],” and he exclaimed: “always, the revolutionary aspiration has only a single possible outcome—of ending up as the master’s discourse [L’aspiration révolutionnaire, ça n’a qu’une chance, d’aboutir, toujours au discours du maître]. This is what experience has proved. What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will get one.”42 By externalizing “the revolutionaries” as a group to which he did not belong, Lacan situated himself on the side of the master, or, at the very least, on the side of the sovereign intellectual who masters the situation of the failed revolutionaries.43
Castoriadis, whose work with the libertarian socialist organization Socialism or Barbarism is widely recognized as a precursor to the ’68 student and youth movement, provided a lapidary corrective to Renaut and Ferry’s slipshod analysis. He described it as totally nonsensical because, for them, “‘68 thought’ is anti-68 thought, the thought that built its mass success on the ruins of the ’68 movement and in function of its failure.”44 Indeed, although there was sometimes tepid and circumspect support for the students, the workers’ movement was generally met by silence, skeptical withdrawal, criticism, opposition, and sometimes flight on the part of the prominent professors associated with French theory. “May 68,” wrote Daniel Bensaïd, “is certainly not the microcosm of the Parisian intelligentsia, which ascended from the street to the living room [l’intelligentsia parisienne, remontée de la rue au salon].”45 Dominique Lecourt, who was a politically active student at the ENS from 1965 to 1975, recalls that: “In reality, the events of May ’68 left the thinkers ‘of the sixties’ speechless at the time. And their disciples were thrown into enormous confusion. I recall some discreet retreats to the countryside, some hasty departures to Mom and Dad’s when gas began to run out at the pumps.”46
Claude Lévi-Strauss, who was working in May in the heart of the Latin Quarter, where the Parisian student mobilization was concentrated, simply withdrew from his research center at the Collège de France and sought refuge in the posh sixteenth arrondissement. He found May 1968 “repugnant” and decried it as yet another step in the degradation of the university.47 Barthes also withdrew, reacting to the events with what his biographer, Tiphane Samoyault, refers to as “relative indifference.”48 He did wander around the Sorbonne on May 14, and he took part in a heated discussion on May 16, when “very critical remarks were directed to him.”49 However, he otherwise kept his distance from the protests, neither signing the “Revolution, Here and Now” manifesto in issue 34 of Tel Quel, nor joining in the creation of the Comité d’action étudiants-écrivains révolutionnaires (founded by Jean-Pierre Faye, with Michel Butor, Jacques Roubaud, Marguerite Duras, Maurice Nadeau, Blanchot, and Nathalie Sarraute). Formulating both direct and indirect criticisms of the disruptive theatricality of the events in his public and private writings, Barthes referred in his correspondence to May–June as “painful times” riddled with anxiety, and admitted that he could not find his place in what was happening.50
Hélène Cixous was at the University of Paris in Nanterre, where the student movement began, and she watched the events, apparently astonished by the desire for a total uprising.51 Emmanuel Lévinas was at the same university, where he was teaching in the philosophy department, alongside supporters of the movement such as Mikel Dufrenne. However, in the words of his biographer, Lévinas “respected authority, order, and hierarchies, and he did not appreciate that young people wanted to dictate their law to the elders.”52 “If he did not condemn them openly,” she writes, “he nowhere participated in the events; he seems to have fled them, if one believes one of his students.”53 Gilles Deleuze was far from being a militant in the style of his future friend Félix Guattari (whom he would meet in 1969), but he remained receptive to the student movement in Lyon, publicly displaying his support, and participating in some of the student-organized activities.54 He then spent the summer at his family’s property in Limousin to finish his dissertation, which he defended at the Sorbonne in early 1969, in one of the first dissertation defenses after the occupation. His dissertation committee apparently feared that gangs of students might interrupt the proceedings, but they did not. Later in life, Deleuze consolidated a number of his reactionary views by taking a historically uninformed position, peremptorily proclaiming: “All revolutions fail [foirent]. Everyone knows it: we pretend to rediscover it here [with the anticommunist writings of Glucksmann and Furet]. You have to be a complete idiot [débile] [not to know that]!”55
Althusser had been ill since April 1968, and he withdrew from the events, aligning himself, though at a distance, on the position taken by the PCF, namely that this was not a revolutionary situation.56 This provoked the students’ slogan “Althusser à rien” or “Useless Althusser.” It is worth noting that on March 15, 1969, Althusser published an article on the events of May in which he recognized the world-historical contribution of the “profoundly progressive” student revolt to “the global class struggle against Imperialism.”57 At the same time, he criticized the media’s extensive focus on the students and highlighted the fact that the workers’ general strike was much more decisive. Moreover, he called for a systematic analysis and positive critique of the ideological limits of the students and of the PCF. His manuscript from 1969–70, published as On Reproduction, claims that the events of May ’68 and those that followed provided a kind of empirical verification of his thesis that class struggle has always existed in ideological state apparatuses like the school, the family, the Church, and so on.58
For Althusser’s disciples, who had written Reading Capital with him in 1965, the situation was rather complicated.59 According to François Dosse, Pierre Macherey continued his classes at the Sorbonne but in difficult conditions. Étienne Balibar would remain only a few months in 1969 at the University of Paris in Vincennes, as his classes were apparently disrupted by André Glucksmann and Maoist activists shouting “Balibar-toi!” or “Bali-beat it!” Jacques Rancière was not involved in the movement and “had no links with any militant group,” but he would quickly distance himself from his maître, due to what he perceived as a lack of support for the movement of revolt against the bourgeois order. In 1974, he then published a harsh critique of Althusserian Marxism.60 Alain Badiou also ran in the Althusser circles, though he was not one of the authors of Reading Capital. He was a social democrat at the time, and involved in the Unified Socialist Party.61 He became radicalized and moved toward Maoism in what he calls the “fourth May ’68,” or the supposed search for a new conception of politics in the decade or so following ’68.62
A number of participants and commentators have remarked that there was at least partial support for the uprising on the part of the professoriate.63 However, with few exceptions, the students—and especially the workers—involved in the struggle were met with suspicion by the most prominent French theorists. They were not invested in practically challenging the apparatus of knowledge in capitalist society, from which they benefited materially, nor were they keen on taking up the fight of labor against capital. They therefore stood on the sidelines of the revolt and waited for “the emotion (l’émoi)” to pass, when they did not directly criticize or repudiate it (l’émoi was Lacan’s preferred term for May ’68, since he rejected the idea that it was an event, and this allowed him to make a sardonic play on words with the homophonic et moi?, apparently in order to reference the narcissistic question of the ’68ers: “and me?” or “what about me?!”).64 Those involved in the struggle were the real thinkers and actors of ’68, while the major French theoreticians reacting to them were the anti-’68 thinkers or, at the very least, the theoretical skeptics of ’68. It is worth noting in conclusion that when Castoriadis imagined, as a counterfactual, the response of the protesters on the barricades to the circulation of an anthology of writings by Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, and Bourdieu, he exclaimed: “it would have, at best, provoked uncontrollable laughter, at worst, made the movement and the participants lose their erections and disperse.”65
Historical Commodity Fetishism
A perverse inversion has occurred over time. The so-called structuralist and poststructuralist thinkers associated with French theory have come to be identified with the ’68 movement by a muddled historical amalgamation that serves very clear political ends. For some, like Ferry and Renaut, its purpose is to bury French theory with the legacy of ’68 by relying on a nebulous correlation between a political failure and the bankruptcy of a particular theoretical tradition. For others, particularly within the larger Anglophone world, it is a matter of promoting a radical image of a group of thinkers by establishing a vague but persistent analogy between alleged intellectual rebels and actual political militants. The only thing that remains of the historical event itself is its symbolic value, which is detached from material practice in order to function as a free-floating signifier that can be used to promote—or denigrate—a product of the global theory industry.66 This is an exemplary case of what I propose to call historical commodity fetishism: the actual social relations operative in political struggles disappear behind the enchantment—or the enchanted disgust—with an intellectual commodity.67
Although there were certain gains for workers and some university reforms, the ’68 uprising failed to topple the government and significantly alter the overall power dynamic or economic system. It did succeed, however, in reorganizing French society to some degree by creating more space for the emergence of the petty-bourgeois class stratum and its consumerist aspirations, as well as its attendant ideology of “libertarian liberalism,” to use Clouscard’s vocabulary. The latter foregrounded the important role played by the Marshall Plan in fostering the development of this new middle-class layer of consumers prone to ideologically support the capitalist system because it allows them to indulge in a U.S.-inspired market of desire, with its requisite French twists. The injection of over $13 billion (the equivalent of $161 billion in 2023) into Western Europe, approximately 18 percent of which was directed to France, was aimed at bolstering this class stratum and keeping this entire region within the procapitalist, anticommunist fold.
This project of U.S. financial and cultural imperialism helped create an economic situation characterized by a high level of exploitation in production and a libertarian consumerist model for the new petty-bourgeois class layer, which included the intelligentsia in the broad sense of the term (professors, researchers, journalists, pundits, and so on). This contributed to developing a society in which, in Clouscard’s well-chosen words, “everything is allowed, but nothing is possible [tout est permis, mais rien n’est possible].”68 The libertarian explosion in consumerism for one class fraction, which promised the end of taboos and prohibitions, was thereby conjoined with an increasingly repressive productive sphere (to which we will return at the end of this study). May ’68 for Clouscard, as Aymeric Monville has explained, benefited above all the postwar educated middle classes, which sought to become dominant without changing the material foundation of society. It announced the decline of “the two great forces of Resistance [communism and Gaullism] and the return to favor of Atlanticism, from Giscard to Mitterrand.”69
French theory is a consumer product that rose to global prominence in this context. Many historians date its explosive appearance on the world market to October 1966, when the Ford Foundation lavishly funded, to the tune of $36,000 ($332,000 today), an international conference at the Johns Hopkins Humanities Center in Baltimore, as well as a series of follow-up events.70 It brought together an impressive array of rising stars, including the likes of Derrida, Lacan, and Barthes. The few who could not attend in person, such as Deleuze and Gérard Genette, sent in papers. No Marxists were invited, with the possible exception of Lucien Goldmann. The absence of Althusser, a towering figure in French structuralism at the time, was particularly notable. His membership in the PCF surely raised some major concerns since this was not the intellectual tradition the Ford Foundation was interested in promoting. That said, Althusser is in many ways a pivotal figure whose work, while powerfully anchored in certain ways in the Marxist tradition, opened up paths of research that led rather far afield. It is not surprising, then, that beginning in the 1970s, his version of structuralist Marxism would come to be marketed in the Anglophone world by New Left Books (later Verso).71 Characterized by a lack of historical-materialist analysis, an academic fetishization of the close reading of canonical texts, and a highly problematic dilution of Marxism with Lacanianism, this type of Marxism—and particularly that of Althusser’s students or acolytes (Badiou, Rancière, Balibar, and so on)—proved itself over time to be compatible with the consumer product of the global theory industry known as French theory.
(Much more at link. Required reading for one like myself who was a youth at the time and superficially absorbed some of the tenets of 'French Theory', to my mature regret.)
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/01/ ... -rollback/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Ideology
A brief history of British Trotskyism
A plethora of groups with one real purpose: to confuse and disgust the working masses and keep them away from genuinely revolutionary politics.
Harpal Brar
Wednesday 1 January 2025
Despite their apparent differences, what every Trotskyite organisation has in common is the role it plays in bolstering British imperialist rule by fracturing and diverting the resistance of the masses. Moreover, by presenting a ridiculous caricature of Bolshevik organisation and analysis, they successfully repel large numbers who would otherwise be drawn into revolutionary politics.
We reproduce an article published in Lalkar in 1986 in order to enlighten our readers about the history of the various Trotskyite counter-revolutionary outfits, some of which have changed their names, the latest incarnation being the so-called Revolutionary Communist party (RCP), which is being promoted by the ruling circles in opposition to the CPGB-ML.
*****
With news of the expulsion from the Labour party of members of the so-called Militant Tendency on an almost regular basis, it is timely to look at just what the history of Trotskyism has been in Britain since 1932. It was then that Reg Groves was expelled from the Communist Party of Great Britain and went off to form the ‘Balham Group’, Britain’s first Trotskyist organisation.
After about five years this Trotskyist ‘movement’ had managed to muster up about a dozen members. By 1938, there were a few other small groups, and from the mid-1930s they fought against the formation of a People’s Anti-fascist Front.
It could already be seen that these Trotskyites, who professed to support socialist revolution and the labour movement as a whole, were a severe hindrance to both. It is hardly surprising that the recipients of Trotskyite ‘support’ are often less than grateful.
It was in 1938 that Trotsky sent JP Cannon of the US Socialist Workers’ party to Britain to set up a section of the ‘Fourth International’ (Trotskyist). He found a number of small sectarian groups mainly occupied in fighting each other. Things had started as they were to go on.
The groups included the Militant Group (not to be confused with the Militant Tendency), the Workers’ International League (formed by G Healy and J Haston when they split from the Militant Group), the Marxist League led by CLR James (whose views on cricket were far better than his views on politics), and a group round H Sara and H Wicks who were in the Labour party.
Cannon managed to unite most of the groups, briefly, and to form the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP).
During the second world war, these people, who had opposed the Popular Anti-fascist Front on the basis that it was alleged to be a sell-out to the bourgeoisie – a line that could help nobody other than the Nazis – had the gall to denounce the USSR as a ‘collaborator with Nazism’ for having entered into the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. They deliberately failed to see that this pact represented a diplomatic coup for the forces of international socialism, having deflected the blows of fascist Germany away from the socialist USSR towards Germany’s rival imperialists.
With the victory of the Labour party in the elections of 1945, and as no one would take any notice of them in their own right, most Trotskyites decided to jump on the Labour party bandwagon and become members of it.
However, in 1953 the RCP split. Ted Grant went off to form a group called ‘International Socialist’ (not to be confused with the International Socialists, who later became the Socialist Workers’ party. He then went on to form the Revolutionary Socialist League – generally known as the Militant Group (yes, this is the Militant Tendency). Another group at that time well hidden inside the Labour party formed the International Marxist Group, as it was to be known when it surfaced 15 years later.
If this short history begins to get a little confused, then that is because those involved were more than a little confused. Meanwhile, in 1951, the International Socialists (the ones who became the Socialist Workers’ party) were born of M Kidron and T Cliff, who, like all ‘good’ Trotskyites of the day, were hiding inside the Labour party.
In 1972, the SWP was ripe for a split – and off went a group to form the Revolutionary Communist Group. The RCG itself soon split, and some of them became the Revolutionary Communist Tendency which, having recruited about a dozen members, decided it was large enough to call itself the Revolutionary Communist party.
The SWP had also expelled a group called Workers’ Fight, which became the International Communist League, and in 1975 they expelled Workers’ Power, which fused with the ICL, but left again within a year.
Meanwhile, back on the Labour party funny farm, we had the Revolutionary Socialist League (alias the Militant group – now the Militant Tendency) and the International Marxist Group. Just to confuse things, IMG left the Labour party only to re-enter it in 1982, renaming itself the Socialist Labour Group, by which name it is still known.
Now, the original Revolutionary Communist party (the one led by Gerry Healy, which was originally the Workers’ International League, not the one that used to be the Revolutionary Communist Tendency) changed its name, first to the Socialist Labour League and then to the Workers’ Revolutionary Party (WRP).
A small splinter left the WRP in 1971 to form the Socialist Labour Group. The WRP expelled A Thornett in 1974: he formed the Workers’ Socialist League, which later joined forces with the International Communist League to form the Socialist Organiser Alliance in 1982.
About two years ago, the SOA expelled some of its members, who in turn formed Socialist Viewpoint.
Last year [1985] the WRP split and both factions still insist that they are the true WRP.
For completeness, one more group should be mentioned: the Spartacists. They did not emerge from a split with anyone because they are an American import whose main activity is going on demonstrations with banners bearing catchy slogan like ‘Drive out SDP fifth column Labour party can betray without CIA connections! Smash NATO, Defend USSR’. In case you are wondering why Trotskyites call for the defence of the USSR, this ‘defence’ is of the usual Trotskyite kind in that the Spartacists also call for “political revolution to overthrow the Kremlin bureaucracy”.
All in all, it is ironic that these groups, who have a long history of expelling everyone, regularly find themselves being expelled from the Labour party, in which they should not have been in the first place if, as their names suggest, they are Revolutionary, Marxist, Internationalists, etc.
Are they in a strong position to accuse others of conducting a witch hunt against them? Let he who is without sin cast the first stone!
https://thecommunists.org/2025/01/01/ne ... rotskyism/
A plethora of groups with one real purpose: to confuse and disgust the working masses and keep them away from genuinely revolutionary politics.
Harpal Brar
Wednesday 1 January 2025
Despite their apparent differences, what every Trotskyite organisation has in common is the role it plays in bolstering British imperialist rule by fracturing and diverting the resistance of the masses. Moreover, by presenting a ridiculous caricature of Bolshevik organisation and analysis, they successfully repel large numbers who would otherwise be drawn into revolutionary politics.
We reproduce an article published in Lalkar in 1986 in order to enlighten our readers about the history of the various Trotskyite counter-revolutionary outfits, some of which have changed their names, the latest incarnation being the so-called Revolutionary Communist party (RCP), which is being promoted by the ruling circles in opposition to the CPGB-ML.
*****
With news of the expulsion from the Labour party of members of the so-called Militant Tendency on an almost regular basis, it is timely to look at just what the history of Trotskyism has been in Britain since 1932. It was then that Reg Groves was expelled from the Communist Party of Great Britain and went off to form the ‘Balham Group’, Britain’s first Trotskyist organisation.
After about five years this Trotskyist ‘movement’ had managed to muster up about a dozen members. By 1938, there were a few other small groups, and from the mid-1930s they fought against the formation of a People’s Anti-fascist Front.
It could already be seen that these Trotskyites, who professed to support socialist revolution and the labour movement as a whole, were a severe hindrance to both. It is hardly surprising that the recipients of Trotskyite ‘support’ are often less than grateful.
It was in 1938 that Trotsky sent JP Cannon of the US Socialist Workers’ party to Britain to set up a section of the ‘Fourth International’ (Trotskyist). He found a number of small sectarian groups mainly occupied in fighting each other. Things had started as they were to go on.
The groups included the Militant Group (not to be confused with the Militant Tendency), the Workers’ International League (formed by G Healy and J Haston when they split from the Militant Group), the Marxist League led by CLR James (whose views on cricket were far better than his views on politics), and a group round H Sara and H Wicks who were in the Labour party.
Cannon managed to unite most of the groups, briefly, and to form the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP).
During the second world war, these people, who had opposed the Popular Anti-fascist Front on the basis that it was alleged to be a sell-out to the bourgeoisie – a line that could help nobody other than the Nazis – had the gall to denounce the USSR as a ‘collaborator with Nazism’ for having entered into the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. They deliberately failed to see that this pact represented a diplomatic coup for the forces of international socialism, having deflected the blows of fascist Germany away from the socialist USSR towards Germany’s rival imperialists.
With the victory of the Labour party in the elections of 1945, and as no one would take any notice of them in their own right, most Trotskyites decided to jump on the Labour party bandwagon and become members of it.
However, in 1953 the RCP split. Ted Grant went off to form a group called ‘International Socialist’ (not to be confused with the International Socialists, who later became the Socialist Workers’ party. He then went on to form the Revolutionary Socialist League – generally known as the Militant Group (yes, this is the Militant Tendency). Another group at that time well hidden inside the Labour party formed the International Marxist Group, as it was to be known when it surfaced 15 years later.
If this short history begins to get a little confused, then that is because those involved were more than a little confused. Meanwhile, in 1951, the International Socialists (the ones who became the Socialist Workers’ party) were born of M Kidron and T Cliff, who, like all ‘good’ Trotskyites of the day, were hiding inside the Labour party.
In 1972, the SWP was ripe for a split – and off went a group to form the Revolutionary Communist Group. The RCG itself soon split, and some of them became the Revolutionary Communist Tendency which, having recruited about a dozen members, decided it was large enough to call itself the Revolutionary Communist party.
The SWP had also expelled a group called Workers’ Fight, which became the International Communist League, and in 1975 they expelled Workers’ Power, which fused with the ICL, but left again within a year.
Meanwhile, back on the Labour party funny farm, we had the Revolutionary Socialist League (alias the Militant group – now the Militant Tendency) and the International Marxist Group. Just to confuse things, IMG left the Labour party only to re-enter it in 1982, renaming itself the Socialist Labour Group, by which name it is still known.
Now, the original Revolutionary Communist party (the one led by Gerry Healy, which was originally the Workers’ International League, not the one that used to be the Revolutionary Communist Tendency) changed its name, first to the Socialist Labour League and then to the Workers’ Revolutionary Party (WRP).
A small splinter left the WRP in 1971 to form the Socialist Labour Group. The WRP expelled A Thornett in 1974: he formed the Workers’ Socialist League, which later joined forces with the International Communist League to form the Socialist Organiser Alliance in 1982.
About two years ago, the SOA expelled some of its members, who in turn formed Socialist Viewpoint.
Last year [1985] the WRP split and both factions still insist that they are the true WRP.
For completeness, one more group should be mentioned: the Spartacists. They did not emerge from a split with anyone because they are an American import whose main activity is going on demonstrations with banners bearing catchy slogan like ‘Drive out SDP fifth column Labour party can betray without CIA connections! Smash NATO, Defend USSR’. In case you are wondering why Trotskyites call for the defence of the USSR, this ‘defence’ is of the usual Trotskyite kind in that the Spartacists also call for “political revolution to overthrow the Kremlin bureaucracy”.
All in all, it is ironic that these groups, who have a long history of expelling everyone, regularly find themselves being expelled from the Labour party, in which they should not have been in the first place if, as their names suggest, they are Revolutionary, Marxist, Internationalists, etc.
Are they in a strong position to accuse others of conducting a witch hunt against them? Let he who is without sin cast the first stone!
https://thecommunists.org/2025/01/01/ne ... rotskyism/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."