Ideology

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Tue Jun 14, 2022 2:04 pm

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‘Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation’ by: Marcello Musto, reviewed by: Carlos L. Garrido
Originally published: Midwestern Marx on June 9, 2022 by Carlos L. Garrido (more by Midwestern Marx) | (Posted Jun 11, 2022)

Marcello Musto’s anthology of Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation [1] is both comprehensive and concise, containing within the span of 100 pages the three decades long development of the theory through more than a dozen published works and posthumously published manuscripts. Additionally, Musto’s introduction to the anthology exceptionally captures: 1) the deviations the concept suffered in its 20th century popularization (both by friends and foes of Marxism); and 2) the bifurcation in Marxism which was depicted in the 1960s debate around the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (EPM), which created what Musto rightly depicts as “one of the principal misunderstandings in the history of Marxism: the myth of the ’Young Marx’” (20).[2]​

The concept of alienation can be traced back to G.W.F. Hegel’s 1807 text, The Phenomenology of Spirit, where the terms entäusserung (self-externalization) and entfremdung (estrangement) are used to describe the moments wherein spirit’s “essential being is present to it in the form of an ‘other.’”[3] After Hegel’s death, the concept retained vitality through the Young Hegelians, who shifted its focus to the realm of religious alienation.[4] A leading text in this tradition is Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841), where alienation depicts the process through which the human species essence is projected onto God.[5] While shifting the focus from religion to political economy, it is from this tradition from which Marx and Engels would blossom in the early to mid-1840s.[6]

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However, since the concept rarely saw the light of day in their published work, it was “entirely absent from the Marxism of the Second International,” and from general philosophical reflection in the second half of the 19th century (4). In this time, concepts that would later be associated with alienation were developed by Émile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber, but in each instance they “thought they were describing unstoppable tendencies, and their reflections were often guided by a wish to improve the existing social and political order–certainly not to replace it with a different one” (4).[7]

Stemming primarily from Marx’s analysis of the fetishism of commodities in Capital Vol I, Georg Lükacs’ 1923 text, History and Class Consciousness, reintroduces the theory of alienation into Marxism through his concept of ‘reification’ (verdinglichung, versachlichung). For Lükacs, reification described the “phenomenon whereby labour activity confronts human beings as something objective and independent, dominating them through external autonomous laws” (4-5). However, as Musto notes, and as Lükacs rectifies in the preface to the 1967 French republication of his text, “History and Class Consciousness follows Hegel in that it too equates alienation with objectification” (5).

The equation of alienation and objectification is the central philosophical error which creates the grounds for the ontologizing of alienation. For Marx, objectification is simply “labor’s realization,” the process wherein labor gets “congealed in an object.”[8] When human labor produces an object, we have objectification. Only under certain historically determined conditions does objectification become alienating. As Marx writes in the EPM,

The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object [i.e., objectification] an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him; it means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.[9]

​​This distinction between objectification and alienation is retouched more thoroughly in the Grundrisse, where Marx says that

Social wealth confronts labour in more powerful portions as an alien and dominant power. The emphasis comes to be placed not on the state of being objectified, but on the state of being alienated, dispossessed, sold; on the condition that the monstrous objective power which social labour itself erected opposite itself as one of its moments belongs not to the worker, but to the personified conditions of production, i.e. to capital.[10]
The bourgeois economists are so much cooped up within the notions belonging to a specific historic stage of social development that the necessity of the objectification of the powers of social labour appears to them as inseparable from the necessity of their alienation vis-à-vis living labour… [But] the conditions which allow them to exist in this way in the reproduction of their life, in their productive life’s process, have been posited only by the historic economic process itself… [These] are fundamental conditions of the bourgeois mode of production, in no way accidents irrelevant to it. [11]


As I have argued in relation to the fetishism of commodities, alienation is also not simply a subjective illusion which one can overcome through becoming conscious of it. It isn’t merely a problem of how one observes the world. Instead, in a mode of life wherein the relations of production are necessarily governed by this condition of estrangement, alienation sustains an objective, albeit historically bound, existence. The o ntologizing and/or subjectivizing of the theory of alienation purport key philosophical and political deviations from how Marx conceived of the phenomenon. These deviations naturalize the phenomenon and blunt the revolutionary edge in the Marxist analysis of how it can be overcome.

Musto wonderfully shows how the 20th centuries’ popularization of the term resulted in Marxist (Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer, Fromm, Sartre, Debord, etc.) and Non-Marxist (Baudrillard, Arendt, Melman, Nettler, Seeman, Blauner, etc.) deviations along the lines of an ontologizing or subjectivizing of the phenomenon of alienation. In some instances (e.g., U.S. sociologists), even the critical spirit with which the theory of alienation was formulated was removed and “skillfully dressed up… by defenders of the very social classes against which it had for so long been directed” (28). In the case of the ‘Marxist’ deviations of the theory, these often ended up in a pessimism and utopianism foreign and at times antagonistic to the writings of Marx and Engels. As Adam Schaff argued in Marxism and the Human Individual, these classical forms of revisionism “lead in fact to an elimination of everything known as scientific socialism.”[12]

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Young Karl Marx

From this historical and objective understanding of alienation, Marx formulates in the EPM four ways in which alienation occurs in the capitalist form of life: 1) alienation of the product, wherein the object of labor confronts the laborer as something hostile and alien; 2) alienation in the process of production, i.e., in the social relations through which the work takes place; 3) alienation from the ‘species-being’ of man as an animal with the unique ability to consciously, creatively, and socially exert mental and physical labor (as a homo faber and sapien) upon nature to create objects of need and aesthetic enjoyment; and 4) alienation from other humans and their objects of labor. Apart from the Feuerbachian essentialism in the language of number 3 (e.g., species-being, species-essence), the pith of this 1844 formulation of the theory will be enriched in his later work, especially in the Grundrisse, where it is given its most systematic consideration.

Along with what Kaan Kangal has called the ‘Engels debate,’ the 1960s debate around the EPM depicted the great bifurcation that existed in Marxism.[13] On the one hand, the Western humanist tradition “stress[ed] the theoretical pre-eminence” of Marx’s early work. On the other, the Eastern socialist (and Althusserian) tradition downplayed it as the writing of a pre-Marxist Marx, still entrapped by Hegelian idealism or a Feuerbachian problematic (18).[14] Both of these traditions create an “arbitrary and artificial opposition” between an “early Marx” and a “mature Marx” (15). Those who held on to the early writings as containing the ‘key’ to Marxism were, as Musto rightly argues, “so obviously wrong that it demonstrated no more than ignorance of his work” (16). However, those who dismissed these early writings often landed in a “decidedly anti-humanist conception” (e.g., Althusser’s theoretical anti-humanism) (ibid). These two sides mirror one another on the basis of an artificial and arbitrary division of a ‘young’ and ‘mature’ Marx.

Musto rejects this dichotomy, and in line with the Polish Marxist Adam Schaff (along with Iring Fetscher, István Mészáros, and others), provides a third interpretation which identifies a “substantive continuity in Marx’s work” (20). This continuity, however, is not based on a “collection of quotations” pulled indiscriminately from works three decades apart, “as if Marx’s work were a single timeless and undifferentiated text” (ibid). This tendency, which dominated the discourse around the continuum interpretation, is grounded on a metaphysical (in the traditional Marxist sense) and fixated understanding of Marx’s life’s work. It finds itself unable to tarry with a difference mediated understanding of identity, that is, with the understanding that the unity of Marx’s corpus is based on its continuous development, not an artificially foisted textual uniformity. It would be a Quixotic delusion to read the youthful Manuscripts of 44 as identical to the works which were produced as fruits of Marx’s laborious studies of political economy in the 1850-60s. The comprehensive, concrete, and scientific character of Marx’s understanding of political economy and the capitalist mode of life achieved by the 1860s makes the indiscriminate treatment of these works seem all the more foolish.

Instead, the continuity interpretation sees what a careful reading of Musto’s anthology shows, namely, that the theory of alienation constantly develops, sharpens, and concretizes beyond the limitations inherent in the ”vagueness and eclecticism” of its initial stages (21). As Schaff and Musto argued, “if Marx had stopped writing in 1845-46, he would not–in spite of those who hold the young Marx to be the only ‘true’ one–have found a place in history,” and if he did, it would probably be in a demoted “place alongside Bruno Bauer and Feuerbach in the sections of philosophy manuals devoted to the Hegelian Left” (ibid).[15]

It is impossible to stamp out hard and fast ‘stages’ or ‘epistemological breaks’ in Marx’s thought; he was constantly evolving his thinking according to new research and new concrete experiences.[16] Such a stagist approach can only lead to a confused nominalist reading of Marx, for every time he read or wrote something new, a ‘new’ Marx would have to be postulated. Marx’s life work must be understood as a dynamic, evolving unity, wherein, as Schaff argued, “the first period is genetically linked to the later ones.”[17] The same could be said, in my view, of his theory of alienation. As his understanding of political economy and the capitalist mode of life concretizes, his understanding of the phenomenon of alienation does as well.

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Young Evald Ilyenkov

Concerning the global split in Marxism manifested through these debates on alienation, I would like to add that although some prominent ‘orthodox’ or ‘official’ Soviet thinkers dismissed the theory of alienation, we cannot synecdochally apply the flaws of these on all Marxist thinkers in the Soviet Union, or on Marxism-Leninism in general. For instance, in the Soviet tradition of creative Marxism, the theme of alienation is not so easily dismissed as in Althusser or the more orthodox Soviet Marxists. Evald Ilyenkov, one of the prominent thinkers in this tradition, says in 1966 that he “personally approves” of the EPM’s theory of alienation and sees it as “a healthy and fruitful tendency in Marxist theoretical thought.”[18] In addition, his reading of the EPM and the theory of alienation with respect to the rest of Marx’s life’s work falls in line with Musto’s and Schaff’s continuum interpretation. As Ilyenkov argues,​

If anything has been lost in this process, it is only that some parts of the specifically philosophical phraseology of the Manuscripts have been replaced by a more concrete phraseology, and in this sense, a more exact and stronger one. What occurs here is not a loss of concepts but only the loss of a few terms connected with these concepts. For me this is so unquestionable that all the problems of the early works are actually rendered more fully later, and moreover, in a more definitive form. It is quite obvious that the process of the “human alienation” under the conditions of an unhindered development of “private property” (in the course of its becoming private-capitalistic) is viewed here more concretely and in more detail.[19]

Concerning the relation of EPM to Capital Vol I Ilyenkov adds that

The Manuscripts can be a help in the text of Das Kapital itself in scrutinizing those passages that could otherwise be overlooked. If such passages are overlooked, Das Kapital easily appears as an “economic work” only, and in a very narrow meaning of the term. Das Kapital is then seen as a dryly objective economic scheme free from any trace of “humanism”–but this is not Das Kapital, it is only a coarsely shallow interpretation.[20]

​This tendency, however, is not limited to the tradition of Soviet creative Marxism. Even in famous manuals such as the Konstantinov edited Fundamentals of Marxist-Leninist Philosophy, the theory of alienation is treated with great care, and critiques akin to Musto’s and Schaff’s are provided for the 20th century revisionist formulations of the theory.

It is also important to note that Schaff himself was largely aligned politically with Marxism-Leninism, and when criticizing the Soviet dismissals of the theory of alienation he emphasizes his political proximity to those Marxist-Leninists he is arguing against.[21] Additionally, he openly criticizes those in the West which have weaponized the theory of alienation to attack socialism, and which have reduced Marxism, through their interpretation of alienation, to moralistic discourse devoid of its scientific core.[22] There is nothing, in my view, incompatible about a non-dogmatic Marxism-Leninism and the militant humanism of the early Marx’s theory of alienation, or of this theories’ further concretization throughout his life.
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​To return to the continuity thesis, Musto’s selection of Marx’s writings eloquently demonstrates the theoretical superiority of this third interpretation. Musto classifies the writings into three key generations: 1) from 1844 to 1856; 2) from 1857 to 1863; and 3) from 1863 to 1875. What becomes clear in these selections, especially in the transition from the first to the second generation, is the immense development in the categories of political economy which would ground Marx’s discourse of the phenomenon of alienation (which, as occurs throughout his work, sometimes takes place without using the term ‘alienation’ itself). By the time the Grundrisse is written (1857-58), it is as if the 1844 EPM’s theory of alienation returned with theoretical steroids, “enriched by a greater understanding of economic categories and by a more rigorous social analysis” (30). In this second generation, the two manuscripts Marx writes after he publishes A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), namely, On the Critique of Political Economy (1861-63) and Theories of Surplus Value (1862-63), will also elaborate and sharpen the understanding of the categories developed in the Grundrisse, subsequently enrichening the theory of alienation as well.

The third generation consists of Capital Vol I, its preparatory manuscripts, and the manuscripts of Capital Vol III which Engels would edit and publish after Marx’s death. Of specific importance here is the famous “Results on the Immediate Process of Production,” also known as the “Unpublished Chapter VI.” This 1863-4 manuscript was omitted from Capital Vol I for largely unknown reasons. Ernest Mandel, who wrote the introduction to the 1976 English publication of Volume one, which included this manuscript as an appendix, said that

​For the time being, it is impossible to give a definitive answer to that question… Possibly the reason lay in Marx’s wish to present Capital as a ‘ dialectically articulated artistic whole’. He may have felt that, in such a totality,’ ‘Chapter Six’ would be out of place, since it had a double didactic function: as a summary of Volume 1 and as a bridge between Volumes 1 and 2.[23]

​​Nonetheless, as Musto notes, this manuscript enhances the theory of alienation by “linking [Marx’s] economic and political analysis more closely to each other” (126). Beyond this manuscript, the theory of alienation takes on a new shape in the formulation of the fetishism of commodities in section four of Capital Vol I’s first chapter. The fetishism of commodities is a new term, but not a new concept, it describes a phenomenon which the theory of alienation already explained . For instance, as stated in Capital, the fetishism of commodities describes the conditions wherein “definite social relations between men” assume “ the fantastic form of a relation between things.”[24] This same wording is used in one of the Grundrisse’s formulation of alienation:

The general exchange of activities and products, which has become a vital condition for each individual–their mutual interconnection–here appears as something alien to them, autonomous, as a thing. In exchange value, the social connection between persons is transformed into a social relation between things.[25]

​Besides section four of chapter one, Capital Vol I is scattered with commentary on the inversion of dead and living labor (especially in chapter 11 and 15), a theme which is central to the theory of alienation. These themes are also present in various passages from Capital Vol. III (1864-75), which is the last text Musto pulls from for the third generation of writings on alienation.

Lastly, the theory of alienation has always been inextricably linked with how Marx conceived of communism. As the theory concretizes, the idea of communism does as well. Under a communist mode of life, the conditions which perpetuated an alienated form of objectification would be overcome. Here, the “social character of production is presupposed” and makes the product of labor “not an exchange value,” but “a specific share of the communal production.”[26] The mediational character of commodity production and the exchange value dominated mode of life would be destroyed. Production and the mode of life in general will be aimed at creating the conditions for qualitative human flourishing. As Marx writes in Capital Vol. III,

The realm of freedom really begins only where labour determined by necessity and external expediency ends; it lies by its very nature beyond the sphere of material production proper. Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his needs, to maintain and reproduce his life, so must civilized man, and he must do so in all forms of society and under all possible modes of production. This realm of natural necessity expands with his development, because his needs do too; but the productive forces to satisfy these expand at the same time. Freedom, in this sphere, can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature. But this always remains a realm of necessity. The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis. The reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite.[27]

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If I may add something to Marcello’s superb analysis in the introduction, it would be the ecological dimension the theory of alienation acquires in Marx’s analysis of the metabolism between human society and nature, and subsequently, of the alienating ‘rifts’ capitalist production creates in this metabolic relation. The quote referenced above shows how a rational governance of the human metabolism with nature is central to Marx’s idea of communism.

As John Bellamy Foster has argued, “the concept of metabolism provided Marx with a concrete way of expressing the notion of alienation of nature (and its relation to the alienation of labor) that was central to his critique from his earliest writings on,” and in so doing, it “allowed him to give a more solid and scientific expression of this fundamental relation.”[28] Hence, if the alienation of labor is tied to the alienation of nature, a non-alienated communist mode of life must necessarily seek to overcome this alienation of nature through the aforementioned rational governance of human society’s metabolism with nature.

Although grounded scientifically on Justus von Liebig’s work on the depletion of the soil, this ecological dimension can be traced philosophically to the EPM and the central role nature has in the alienation of labor. Faced with the existential crisis of climate change, this ecological dimension in Marx’s theory of alienation and critique of capitalist production acquires a heightened sense of immediacy.Additionally, if we consider Marx’s concept of the metabolic rift within the theory of alienation, then its rediscovery did not have to wait until Lükacs’ 1923 History and Class Consciousness, for a part of it could be seen in the ecological dimension of August Bebel’s 1884 text Women Under Socialism, in Karl Kautsky’s 1899 text on The Agrarian Question, in Lenin’s 1901 The Agrarian Question and the “Critics of Marx,” and more directly in the work of Bukharin, Vernadsky, and others in the 1920/30s tradition of Soviet ecology.[29] In sum, Musto’s anthology is an essential requirement for all interested in Marx’s theory of alienation, and his introduction to the selection displays that great erudition of Marxist history and theory which those that are familiar with his work hold in the highest esteem.

​​Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American PhD student and instructor in philosophy at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale (with an M.A. in philosophy from the same institution). His research focuses include Marxism, Hegel, and early 19th century American socialism. His academic work has appeared in Critical Sociolog y, The Journal of American Socialist Studies, and Peace, Land, and Bread. Along with various editors from The Journal of American Socialist Studies, Carlos is currently working on a serial anthology of American socialism. His popular theoretical and political work has appeared in dozens of magazines around the world and in various languages, including Monthly Review Online, CovertAction Magazine, The International Magazine, The Marx-Engels Institute of Peru, Countercurrents, Janata Weekly, Hampton Institute, Orinoco Tribune, Workers Today, Delinking, Friends of Socialist China, Associazione Svizerra-Cuba, Arkansas Worker, Intervención y Coyuntura, Marxism-Leninism Today, and in Midwestern Marx, which he co-founded and where he serves as an editorial board member. As a political analyst with a focus on Latin America (esp. Cuba), he has appeared in dozens of radio and video interviews in the U.S. and around the world.

Notes and References:
1.↩ The parenthetical numbers which appear throughout this review refer to pages from Musto’s book.
2.↩ For a more detailed assessment of this ‘myth’ see: Marcello Musto, “The Myth of the ‘Young Marx’ in the Interpretation of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,” Critique 43, no 2 (2015)., pp. 233-60.
3.↩ G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford University Press, 1977., pp. 114.
4.↩ For more on the Young Hegelians see: Lawrence S. Stepenlevich, The Young Hegelians: An Anthology, Humanity Books, 1999.
5.↩ My video for Midwestern Marx, “Alienation–Feuerbach to Marx,” describes the concept’s transition from Feuerbach to Marx’s Manuscripts of 44.
6.↩ The Feuerbachian influence which the younger Engels was under is usually understated. I would direct the reader to Engels’ 1843 review of Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present (written before The Conditions of the Working Class in England), where this influence is as, or if not more, evident then than in the writings of the younger Marx.
7.↩ I would add to the list Max Scheler’s 1913 book Ressentiment and Edmund Husserl’s 1936 book, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, which expands on the arguments of his 1935 lectures on “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man.”
8.↩ Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Great Books in Philosophy, 1988., pp. 71.
9.↩ Ibid., 72.
10.↩ The Grundrisse is an unfinished manuscript not intended for publication, in passages like these, where editing could’ve improved what was said, its manuscript character shines forth.
11.↩ Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Penguin Books, 1973., pp. 831-2.
12.↩ Adam Schaff, Marxism and the Human Individual, McGraw-Hill, 1970., pp. 16. I was excited to see Musto’s frequent usage of Schaff, a thinker far too undervalued in our tradition.
13.↩ I use ‘depicted’ instead of ‘produced’ because the split originated well before the 1960s debate, the debate simply manifested what was already a previous split. For more on this split see Domenico Losurdo, El Marxismo Occidental, Editorial Trotta, 2019.
14.↩ ‘Feuerbachian problematic’ is how Althusser describes it in his essay “On the Young Marx.” For more see Louis Althusser, For Marx, Verso, 1979., pp. 66-70.
15.↩ Schaff, Marxism and the Human Individual., pp. 28.
16.↩ To see how this was done in his later years see: Marcello Musto, The Last Years of Karl Marx, Stanford, 2020. For a shortened version of some of the points made in this text, my review article might be helpful.
17.↩ Ibid., pp. 24.
18.↩ Evald Ilyenkov, “From the Marxist-Leninist Point of View,” In Marx and the Western World, ed. Nicholas Lobkowicz , University of Notre Dame Press, 1967., pp. 401.
19.↩ Ibid., pp. 402.
20.↩ Ibid., pp. 404.
21.↩ Schaff, Marxism and the Human Individual., pp. 21.
22.↩> Ibid., pp. 15-16.
23.↩ Marx, Capital Vol 1, Penguin Books, 1982., pp. 944.
24.↩ Ibid., pp. 165.
25.↩ Marx, Grundrisse., pp. 157.
26.↩ Marx, Grundrisse., pp. 172.
27.↩ Karl Marx, Capital Vol III, Penguin Books, 1981., pp. 958-9.
28.↩ John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology, Monthly Review, 2000., pp. 158.
29.↩ For all the flaws Bukharin’s Historical Materialism textbook has, chapter five on “The Equilibrium between Society and Nature” provides a laudable reintroduction of Marx’s concept of metabolism and metabolic rifts.

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Wed Jun 29, 2022 5:45 pm

The CIA & the Frankfurt School’s Anti-Communism
JUNE 28, 2022

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Image of Karl Marx with an overlap "X." Photo: The Philosophical Salon.

By Gabriel Rockhill – Jun 27, 2022

Foundations of the Global Theory Industry

Frankfurt School critical theory has been—along with French theory—one of the hottest commodities of the global theory industry. Together, they serve as the common source for so many of the trend-setting forms of theoretical critique that currently dominate the academic market in the capitalist world, from postcolonial and decolonial theory to queer theory, Afro-pessimism and beyond. The Frankfurt School’s political orientation has therefore had a foundational effect on the globalized Western intelligentsia.

The luminaries of the first generation of the Institute for Social Research—particularly Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who will be the focus of this essay—are towering figures in what is referred to as Western or cultural Marxism. For those familiar with Jürgen Habermas’s reorientation away from historical materialism in the second and then third generations of the Frankfurt School, this early work often represents a veritable golden age of critical theory, when it was still—though perhaps passive or pessimistic—dedicated in some capacity to radical politics. If there is a grain of truth in this assumption, it is only insofar as the early Frankfurt School is compared to later generations that refashioned critical theory as radical liberal—or even just blatantly liberal—ideology.[1] However, this point of comparison is setting the bar much too low, as is the case whenever one reduces politics to academic politics. After all, the first generation of the Frankfurt School lived through some of the most cataclysmic clashes in global class struggle of the 20th century, when a veritable intellectual world war was being fought over the meaning and significance of communism.

In order to avoid being the dupes of history, or of the parochialism of the Western academy, it is therefore important to re-contextualize the Institute for Social Research’s work in relationship to international class struggle. One of the most significant features of this context was the desperate attempt, on the part of the capitalist ruling class, its state managers and ideologues, to redefine the Left—in the words of cold warrior CIA agent Thomas Braden—as the “compatible,” meaning non-communist, Left.[2] As Braden and others involved have explained in detail, one important facet of this struggle consisted in the use of foundation money and Agency front groups like the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) to promote anti-communism and lure Leftists into taking positions against actually existing socialism.

Horkheimer participated in at least one junket organized by the CCF in Hamburg.[3] Adorno published in the CIA-funded journal Der Monat, the largest review of its kind in Europe and the model for many of the Agency’s other publications. His articles appeared, as well, in two other CIA magazines: Encounter and Tempo presente. He also hosted in his home, corresponded and collaborated with the CIA operative who was arguably the leading figure in the German anticommunist Kulturkampf: Melvin Lasky.[4] Founder and chief editor of Der Monat, as well as a member of the original steering committee for the CIA’s CCF, Lasky told Adorno that he was open to every form of collaboration with the Institute for Social Research, including publishing their articles and any other declaration as quickly as possible in his pages.[5] Adorno took him up on the offer and sent him four unpublished manuscripts, including Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason, in 1949.[6]

Horkheimer’s lifelong collaborator was thus closely connected to the CCF networks in West Germany, and his name appears on a document, likely from 1958/59, that outlined plans for an all-German committee of the CCF.[7] What is more, even after it was revealed in 1966 that this international propaganda organization was a CIA front, Adorno continued to be “included in the expansion plans of the Paris headquarters [of the CCF],” as it was “business as usual” in the part of Germany overseen by the U.S.[8] This is only the tip of the iceberg, as we shall see, and it is nowise surprising since Adorno and Horkheimer rose to global prominence within the elite networks of the anti-communist Left.

A Dialectical Analysis of Theoretical Production

The analysis that follows is based on a dialectical account of the social totality that situates the subjective theoretical practices of these two founding fathers of critical theory within the objective world of international class struggle. It does not accept the arbitrary dividing line that many petty-bourgeois academics desperately try to erect between intellectual production and the broader socioeconomic world, as if someone’s “thought” could—and should—be separated from their “life,” as well as from the material system of theoretical production, circulation and reception that I will here refer to as the intellectual apparatus. Such a non-dialectical assumption, after all, is little more than a symptom of an idealist approach to theoretical work, which presumes that there is a spiritual and conceptual realm that functions completely independently of material reality and the political economy of knowledge.

This presupposition perpetuates intellectual commodity fetishism, meaning the idolization of the sacred products of the theory industry that prohibits us from situating them within the overall social relations of production and class struggle. It also serves the interests of those who have or aspire to part of a particular franchise within the global theory industry, if it be “Frankfurt School critical theory” or any other, because it protects the brand image of the franchise itself (which remains unsullied by the actual social relations of production). Whereas intellectual commodity fetishism is a principal feature of consumption within the theory industry, brand image management is the hallmark of production.

For such a dialectical analysis, it is important to acknowledge that Adorno and Horkheimer did indeed mobilize their subjective agency in formulating significant critiques of capitalism, consumer society and the culture industry. Far from denying this, I would merely like to situate these criticisms within the objective social world, which entails asking a very simple and practical question that is rarely raised within academic circles: if capitalism is recognized as having negative effects, what is to be done about it? The deeper one mines down into their life and work, sifting through the deliberate obscurantism of their discourse, the more obvious their response becomes, and the easier it is to understand the primary social function of their shared intellectual project. For as critical as they sometimes are of capitalism, they regularly affirm that there is no alternative, and nothing can or should ultimately be done about it. What is more, as we shall see, their criticisms of capitalism pale in comparison to their uncompromising condemnation of socialism. Their brand of critical theory ultimately leads to an acceptance of the capitalist order since socialism is judged to be far worse. Not unlike most of the other fashionable discourses in the capitalist academy, they proffer a critical theory that we might call ABS Theory: Anything But Socialism.

It is not the least bit surprising, in this regard, that Adorno and Horkheimer have been so widely supported and promoted within the capitalist world. In order to shore up the compatible, non-communist Left over and against the threat of actually existing socialism, what better tactic than to champion scholars like these as some of the most important, and even most radical, Marxist thinkers of the 20th century? “Marxism” can thereby be redefined as a kind of anti-communist critical theory that is not directly connected to class struggle from below but rather freely criticizes all forms of “domination,” and which ultimately sides with capitalist control societies over and against the purported “fascist” horrors of powerful socialist states.

Since benighted anti-communism has been so widely promoted within capitalist culture, this attempted redefinition of Marxism might not be immediately recognizable to some readers as reactionary and social chauvinist (in the sense that it ultimately elevates bourgeois society over any alternative). Unfortunately, major swaths of the population in the capitalist world have been inculcated into the knee-jerk response of uninformed calumny, rather than rigorous analysis, when it comes to actually existing socialism. Since the material history of these projects, with all of their ups and downs—rather than mythological horror stories propagandistically constructed around a communist bogeyman—will be essential to understanding the argument that follows, I take the liberty of referring the reader to the deep and rich work of rigorous historians like Annie Lacroix-Riz, Domenico Losurdo, Carlos Martinez, Michael Parenti, Albert Szymanski, Jacques Pauwels, and Walter Rodney, amongst others. I also encourage the reader to examine the important quantitative comparisons between capitalism and socialism undertaken by exacting analysts like Minqi Li, Vicente Navarro and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.[9] Such work is anathema to the dominant ideology, and for good reason: it scientifically examines the evidence, rather than relying on hoary tropes and uninformed ideological reflexes. It is the type of historical and materialist work, moreover, that has largely been overshadowed by the speculative forms of critical theory promoted by the global theory industry.

Intellectuals in the Age of Revolution and Global Class War

Although their early lives were marked by the world-historical events of the Russian Revolution and the attempted revolution in Germany, Adorno and Horkheimer were esthetes wary of the supposed morass of mass politics. While their interest in Marxism was piqued by these incidents, it was primarily of an intellectual nature. Horkheimer did become marginally involved in activities around the Munich council republic after WWI, particularly by providing support for some of those involved after the council had been brutally suppressed. However, he—the same is true a fortiori of Adorno—“continued to maintain his distance from the explosive political events of the time and to devote himself primarily to his own personal concerns.”[10]

Their class standing was far from insignificant in this regard, for it positions them and their political outlook within the larger, objective world of the social relations of production. Both Frankfurt School theorists were from affluent families. Adorno’s father was a “wealthy wine merchant” and Horkheimer’s was a “millionaire” who “owned several textile factories.”[11] Adorno “had no personal ties at all to socialist political life” and maintained throughout his life “a deep aversion to formal membership of any party organization.”[12] Similarly, Horkheimer was never “an overt member of any working-class party.”[13] The same is generally true of the other figures involved in the early years of the Frankfurt School: “none of those belonging to the Horkheimer circle was politically active; none of them had his origins either in the labor movement or in Marxism.”[14]

In the words of John Abromeit, Horkheimer sought to preserve the supposed independence of theory and “rejected the position of Lenin, Lukács, and the Bolsheviks that critical theory must be ‘rooted’” in the working class, or more specifically working-class parties.[15] He encouraged critical theorists to operate as intellectual free agents rather than grounding their research in the proletariat, which was a type of work that he disparaged as “totalitarian propaganda.”[16] Adorno’s overall position, like Herbert Marcuse’s, was summarized by Marie-Josée Levallée in the following terms: “the Bolshevik party, which Lenin made the vanguard of the October Revolution, was a centralizing and repressive institution which would shape the Soviet State in its image and turn the dictatorship of the proletariat into its own dictatorship.”[17]

When Horkheimer took over the directorship of the Institute for Social Research in 1930, his stewardship was characterized by speculative concerns with culture and authority rather than rigorous historical materialist analyses of capitalism, class struggle and imperialism. In the words of Gillian Rose, “instead of politicizing academia,” the Institute under Horkheimer “academized politics.”[18] This was perhaps seen nowhere more clearly than in “the constant policy of the Institute under Horkheimer’s direction,” which “continued to be abstinence, not only from every activity which was even remotely political, but also from any collective or organized effort to publicize the situation in Germany or to support émigrés.”[19] With the rise of Nazism, Adorno attempted to go into hibernation, assuming that the regime would only target “the orthodox pro-Soviet Bolshevists and communists who had drawn attention to themselves politically” (they would indeed be the first to be put in the concentration camps).[20] He “refrained from public criticism of any kind of the Nazis and their ‘great power’ policies.”[21]

Critical Theory American Style

This refusal to overtly participate in progressive politics was intensified when the leaders of the Institute moved it to the United States in the early 1930s. The Frankfurt School adapted itself “to the local bourgeois order, censoring its own past and present work to suit local academic or corporate susceptibilities.”[22] Horkheimer had words like Marxism, revolution and communism expunged from its publications in order to avoid offending its U.S. sponsors.[23] Furthermore, any type of political activity was strictly forbidden, as Herbert Marcuse later explained.[24] Horkheimer put his energy into securing corporate and state funding for the Institute, and he even hired a public relations firm to promote its work in the U.S. Another émigré from Germany, Bertolt Brecht, was thus not fully unjustified when he critically described the Frankfurt scholars as—in the words of Stuart Jeffries—“prostitutes in their quest for foundation support during their American exile, selling their skills and opinions as commodities in order to support the dominant ideology of oppressive U.S. society.”[25] They were indeed intellectual free agents unrestrained by any working-class organizations in their pursuit of corporate and state sponsorship for their brand of market-savvy critical theory.

Brecht’s close friend, Walter Benjamin, was one of the Frankfurt scholars’ most important Marxist interlocutors at the time. He was not able to join them in the United States because he tragically committed suicide in 1940 at the border between France and Spain, the night before he faced near certain apprehension by the Nazis. According to Adorno, he “killed himself after he had already been saved” because he had “been made a permanent member of the Institute and knew it.”[26] He was “flush with funds” for his trip, in the words of the famous philosopher, and knew “that he could rely completely on us materially.”[27] This version of history, which presents Benjamin’s suicide as an incomprehensible personal decision given the circumstances, was an exercise in mendacity for the sake of personal and institutional exoneration, according to a detailed analysis recently published by Ulrich Fries. Not only were the leading figures of the Frankfurt School unwilling to assist Benjamin financially for his flight from the Nazis, Fries argues, but they also ran an extensive cover-up campaign to disingenuously present themselves as his benevolent benefactors.

Prior to his suicide, Benjamin was financially dependent on the Institute for a monthly stipend. However, the Frankfurt scholars despised the influence of Brecht and revolutionary Marxism on his work. Adorno had no compunction about describing Brecht with the anticommunist epithet “savage” when explaining to Horkheimer that Benjamin needed to be “definitively” liberated from his influence.[28] It is not surprising, then, that Benjamin feared losing his stipend due, in part, to Adorno’s critiques of his work and refusal to publish a section of his Baudelaire study in 1938.[29] Horkheimer explicitly told Benjamin around the same time, as fascist forces were closing in around him, that he should prepare for the discontinuation of his sole source of income since 1934. He claimed, moreover, that his hands were “unfortunately tied” when he refused to fund Benjamin’s journey to safety by paying for a steamship ticket to the U.S. that would have cost under $200.[30] This was literally “a month after transferring an extra $50,000 to an account at his exclusive disposal,” which was the “second time in eight months” that he had secured an additional $50,000 (the equivalent of just over 1 million dollars in 2022).[31] In July 1939, Friedrich Pollock also obtained an additional $130,000 for the Institute from Felix Weil, the wealthy son of a capitalist millionaire whose profits from a grain enterprise in Argentina, property speculation and meat trading funded the Frankfurt School.

It was political will, not money, that was lacking. Indeed, Fries concurs with Rolf Wiggershaus that Horkheimer’s cruel decision to abandon Benjamin was part of a broader pattern according to which the directors “systematically placed the realization of their private life goals above the interests of everyone else,” while propagating the false appearance of “outstanding commitment to those persecuted by the Nazi regime.”[32] As if to put the last nail in Benjamin’s coffin, his literary estate was later purged of its more explicit Marxist elements according to Helmut Heißenbüttel: “In everything Adorno did for Benjamin’s work, the Marxist-materialist side remains erased. […] The work appears in a reinterpretation in which the surviving controversial correspondent imposes his view.”[33]

Todd Cronan has argued that there was a palpable shift in the Frankfurt School’s overall political orientation around 1940—the year Pollock wrote “State Capitalism”—as it increasingly turned its back on class analysis in favor of privileging race, culture and identity. “It often seems to me,” Adorno wrote to Horkheimer that year, “that everything that we used to see from the point of view of the proletariat has been concentrated today with frightful force upon the Jews.”[34] According to Cronan, Adorno and Horkheimer “opened up the possibility from within Marxism of seeing class as a matter of power, of domination, rather than economics (the Jews were not a category defined by economic exploitation). And once that possibility was raised, it became the dominant mode of analysis on the left at large.”[35] In other words, the Frankfurt theorists helped set the stage for a more general shift away from historical materialist analysis grounded in political economy toward culturalism and identity politics, which would become consolidated in the neoliberal era.

It is highly revealing in this regard that the Institute undertook a massive study of “Anti-Semitism in American Labor” in 1944-45, under Pollock’s stewardship. Fascism had risen to power with extensive financial backing by the capitalist ruling class, and it was still on the war path around the world. Yet, the Frankfurt scholars were hired to focus on the purported anti-Semitism of U.S. workers rather than on the capitalist funders of fascism or the actual Nazis who were fighting a war against the Soviets. They reached the remarkable conclusion that the “communist-run” unions were the worst of all, and that they thus had “fascist” tendencies: “The members of these unions are less communist than fascist-minded.”[36] The study in question was commissioned by the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC). One of the JLC’s leaders, David Dubinsky, had numerous ties to the Central Intelligence Agency and was involved, along with the likes of CIA operatives Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown, in the Company’s expansive campaign to take over organized labor and purge it of communists.[37] By identifying the communist unions as the most anti-Semitic, and even “fascist,” the Frankfurt School appears to have provided some of the ideological justification for destroying the communist labor movement.

Some might consider the Institute for Social Research’s collaboration with U.S. authorities and self-censorship justified due to the anti-communist, and sometimes philofascist, attitudes of the U.S. power elite, not to mention the enemy alien acts and decrees.[38] Indeed, based on a detailed overview of the Institute’s history and activities on January 21, 1944, the Federal Bureau of Investigation mobilized numerous stool pigeons to spy on the scholars for about ten years due to the concern that the Institute might be serving as a communist front.[39] The informants included close associates of the Institute like Karl Wittfogel, other professional colleagues and even neighbors. The Bureau found little to no evidence of suspicious behavior, however, and its officers appear to have been reassured when some of their snitches, who were personally close to the Frankfurt scholars, explained to them that the critical theorists “believe there is no difference between Hitler and Stalin as to purpose and tactics.”[40] Indeed, as we will see below, they would claim as much in some of their writings, including when they had settled in West Germany and were no longer under the direct threat of FBI surveillance and potential detainment or deportation.

Malign the East, Defend—While in the Pay of—the West

In 1949-50, the intellectual front men of the Frankfurt School moved the Institute back to West Germany, one of the epicenters for the intellectual world war against communism. “In this milieu,” writes Perry Anderson, “in which the KPD [Communist Party of Germany] was to be banned and the SPD [Social Democratic Party of Germany] formally abandoned any connection with Marxism, the depoliticization of the Institute was completed.”[41] No less than Jürgen Habermas—who occasionally outflanked Adorno and Horkheimer to the left in the early years—accused the latter of “opportunist conformity which was at odds with the critical tradition.”[42] Indeed, Horkheimer had continued his censorship of the Institute’s work, refusing to publish two articles by Habermas that were critical of liberal democracy and spoke of “revolution,” daring to suggest the possibility of an emancipation from “the shackles of bourgeois society.”[43] In his private correspondence, Horkheimer candidly submitted to Adorno that “it is simply not possible to have admissions of this sort in the research report of an Institute that exists on the public funds of this shackling society.”[44] This appears to be a forthright admission that the economic base of the Frankfurt School was the driving force behind its ideology, or at least its public discourse.

It is important to recall, in this regard, that five of the eight members of the Horkheimer circle had worked as analysts and propagandists for the U.S. government and national security state, which “had a vested interest in the continuing loyalty of the Frankfurt School because a number of its members were working on sensitive government research projects.”[45] While Horkheimer and Adorno were not amongst them, since they received more support from the Institute, the latter of the two originally emigrated to the United States to work for Paul Lazarsfeld’s Office of Radio Research, one of the “de facto adjuncts of government psychological warfare programs.”[46] This center for communication studies received a substantial grant of $67,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation and worked very closely with the U.S. national security state (government money made up over 75 percent of its annual budget). The Rockefeller Foundation also funded Horkheimer’s first return to Germany in April 1948, when he took up a guest professorship at Frankfurt University.

Lest we forget, the Rockefellers are one of the greatest gangster families in the history of U.S. capitalism, and they use their foundation as a tax shelter that allows them to mobilize a portion of their stolen wealth “in the corruption of intellectual activity and culture.”[47] They were, moreover, directly involved in the national security state during the time of the Frankfurt School’s sponsorship. After serving as the director of the Office of Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (a federal propaganda agency whose work resembled that of the Office of Strategic Services and the CIA), Nelson Rockefeller became, in 1954, the “‘super-coordinator’ for clandestine intelligence operations, with the title of Special Assistant to the President for Cold War Strategy.”[48] He also allowed the Rockefeller Fund to be used as a conduit for CIA money, very much like a large number of other capitalist foundations that have an extensive history of working hand-in-glove with the Company (as revealed by the Church Committee report and other sources).

With all of these ties to the capitalist ruling class and the U.S. empire, it is nowise surprising that the U.S. government supported the Institute’s move back to West Germany with a very significant grant in 1950 of 435,000 DM ($103,695, or the equivalent of $1,195,926 dollars in 2022).[49] These funds were administered by John McCloy, the US High Commissioner of Germany. McCloy was a core member of the U.S. power elite, who had worked as a jurist and banker for big oil and IG Farben, and who granted extensive pardons and commutations to Nazi war criminals. He went on to become not only the chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, of the Council of Foreign Relations, and of the Ford Foundation, but also—in a career move indicative of the intimate relationship between the capitalist ruling class and the national security state—the Director of the CIA. In addition to the funds provided by McCloy, the Institute also received support from private donors, the Society of Social Research, and the city of Frankfurt. In 1954, it even signed a research contract with the Mannesmann corporation, which “had been a founding member of the Anti-Bolshevik League and had financed the Nazi Party.”[50] During WWII, Mannesmann used slave labor, and its Chairman of the Board was the Nazi Wilhelm Zangen, the War Economy Leader of the Third Reich.[51] The Frankfurt School’s postwar contract with this company was for a sociological study of worker’s opinions, with the implicit implication that such a study would help management stall or prevent socialist organizing.

Perhaps the clearest explanation of why capitalist governments and the corporatocracy would support the Institute for Social Research is to be found in the words of Shepard Stone. The latter, we should note, had a background in journalism and military intelligence before going on to serve as the Director of International Affairs at the Ford Foundation, where he worked closely with the CIA in funding cultural projects around the world (Stone even became the President of the International Association for Cultural Freedom, which was the new name given to the Congress for Cultural Freedom in a rebranding effort after its CIA origins had been revealed). When Stone was the director of public affairs for the High Commission for Occupied Germany in the 1940s, he sent a personal note to the U.S. State Department to encourage it to extend Adorno’s passport: “The Institute of Frankfurt is helping to train German leaders who will know something of democratic techniques. I believe it is important for our over-all democratic objectives in Germany that such men as Professor Adorno have an opportunity to work in that country.”[52] The Institute was doing the kind of ideological work that the U.S. state and capitalist ruling class wanted to—and did—support.

Meeting, and even surpassing, the dictates of ideological conformity to the “shackling society” that funded the Institute, Horkheimer openly expressed his fulsome support for the U.S.’s anti-communist puppet government in West Germany, whose intelligence services had been stocked with former Nazis, as well as its imperial project in Vietnam (which he judged necessary to stop the Chinese).[53] Speaking at one of the Amerika-Häuser in Germany, which were propaganda outposts in the anti-communist Kulturkampf, he solemnly declared in May 1967 that “In America, when it is necessary to conduct a war, – and now listen to me […] 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.”[54] The high priest of critical theory is here describing a country that was founded as a settler colony, whose genocidal elimination of the indigenous population seamlessly merged with a project of imperialist expansion that has arguably left the bloodiest footprint—as MLK Jr. argued in April 1967—on the history of the modern world (including some 37 military and CIA interventions between the end of WWII and 1967, when Horkheimer broadcast this ignominious claim via a U.S. propaganda platform).[55]

Although Adorno often indulged in the petty-bourgeois politics of complicit passivity, avoiding public pronouncements on major political events, the few statements he did make were strikingly reactionary. For instance, in 1956, he co-authored an article with Horkheimer in defense of the imperialist invasion of Egypt by Israel, Britain and France, which aimed at seizing the Suez Canal and overthrowing Nasser (an action condemned by the United Nations). Referring to Nasser, one of the prominent anti-colonial leaders of the non-aligned movement, as “a fascist chieftain […] who conspires with Moscow,” they exclaimed: “No one even ventures to point out that these Arab robber states have been on the lookout for years for an opportunity to fall upon Israel and to slaughter the Jews who have found refuge there.”[56] According to this pseudo-dialectical inversion, it is the Arab states that are “robbers,” not the settler colony working with core imperialist countries to infringe upon the self-determination of Arabs. We would be well served to recall Lenin’s trenchant rejection of such sophistry, which is characteristic of much of what counts for “dialectics” in the global theory industry: “Not infrequently have dialectics served […] as a bridge to sophistry. But we remain dialecticians and we combat sophistry not by denying the possibility of all transformations in general, but by analyzing the given phenomenon in its concrete setting and development.”[57] Such concrete, materialist analysis is precisely what is lacking in idealist inversions à la Adorno and Horkheimer.

The front men of the Frankfurt School published one of their most overtly political texts the same year. Rather than supporting the global movement for anticolonial liberation and the building of a socialist world, they celebrate—with only a few minor exceptions—the superiority of the West, while repeatedly disparaging the Soviet Union and China. Invoking stock racist descriptions of the “barbarians” in the East, whom they describe using the overtly sub-humanizing vocabulary of “beasts” and “hordes,” they flatly proclaim that they are “fascists” who have chosen “slavery.”[58] Adorno even chastises Germans who mistakenly think that “the Russians stand for socialism,” reminding them that the Russians are actually “fascists,” adding that the “industrialists and bankers”—with whom he here identifies—already know this.[59]

“Everything the Russians write slips into ideology, into crude, stupid twaddle,” Adorno brazenly asserts in this text, as if he had read everything they wrote, even though, per usual, he does not cite a single source (nor did he even read Russian, as far as I know).[60] Claiming that there is “an element of re-barbarization” in their thinking, which is also to be found in Marx and Engels according to him, he unabashedly asserts that it is “more reified than in the most advanced bourgeois thought.”[61] As if this was not enough disingenuous grandstanding, Adorno has the chutzpah to describe this writing project with Horkheimer as a “strictly Leninist manifesto.”[62] This is in a discussion in which they affirm that they “are not calling on anyone to take action,” and Adorno explicitly elevates bourgeois thought and what he refers to as “culture at its most advanced” above the supposed barbarism of socialist thinking.[63] Moreover, it is in this context that Horkheimer doubled down on their social chauvinism by averring, in a world-historical conclusion that provoked no rebuttal on the part of his “Leninist” collaborator: “I believe that Europe and America are probably the best civilizations that history has produced up to now as far as prosperity and justice are concerned. The key point now is to ensure the preservation of these gains.”[64] This was in 1956, when the U.S. was still largely racially segregated, was involved in anti-communist witch hunts and destabilization campaigns around the world, and had recently extended its imperial reach by overthrowing democratically elected governments in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954), while the European powers were waging violent struggles to hold onto their colonies or convert them into neo-colonies.

“Fascism and Communism Are the Same”

One of the most consistent political claims advanced by Adorno and Horkheimer is that there is a “totalitarian” equivalence between fascism and communism, if it manifests itself in socialist state-building projects, anticolonial movements of the “Third World,” or even New Left mobilizations in the Western world. In all three cases, those who think they are breaking out of the “shackling society,” are only making things worse. The patent fact that Western capitalist countries offered no significant bulwark against fascism, which arose within the capitalist world, and that it was precisely the Soviet Union that ultimately defeated it, does not seem to have caused them to reflect on the viability of this benighted and simplistic thesis (which is to say nothing of the importance of socialism to anti-colonial movements and the uprisings of the 1960s). In fact, for all of his moral opining on the horrors of Auschwitz, Adorno appears to have forgotten who actually liberated the infamous concentration camp (the Red Army).

Horkheimer had formulated his version of horseshoe theory with particular clarity in a limited circulation pamphlet published in 1942, which broke with the Aesopian language of many of the Institute’s other publications. Directly accusing Friedrich Engels of utopianism, he averred that the socialization of the means of production had led to an increase in repression, and ultimately to an authoritarian state. “The bourgeoisie earlier held the government in check through its property,” according to this millionaire’s son, whereas in new societies socialism simply “did not function,” except to produce the mistaken belief that one was—through the party, honored leader, or the supposed march of history—“acting in the name of something greater than oneself.”[65] Horkheimer’s position in this piece is perfectly in line with anarcho-anti-communism, which is a very widespread ideology within the Western Left: a “classless democracy” is supposed to emerge spontaneously from the people through “free agreement,” without the supposedly pernicious influence of parties or states. As Domenico Losurdo has insightfully pointed out, the Nazi war machine was ravaging the USSR in the early 1940s, and Horkheimer’s call for socialists to abandon the state and party centralization therefore amounted to nothing less than a demand that they capitulate before the Nazis’s genocidal rampage.[66]

Whereas there are vague suggestions at the end of Horkheimer’s 1942 pamphlet that there might be something desirable in socialism, later texts would bring into full relief their unequivocal rejection of it. For instance, when Adorno and Horkheimer were considering making a public statement on their relationship to the Soviet Union, the former sent the following draft of a planned co-authored piece to the latter: “Our philosophy, as a dialectical critique of the overall social tendency of the age, stands in the sharpest opposition to the politics and doctrine that emanates from the Soviet Union. We are unable to see anything in the practice of the military dictatorships disguised as people’s democracies other than a new form of repression.”[67] It is worth noting in this regard, given the overwhelming lack of materialist analysis of actually existing socialism on the part of Adorno and Horkheimer, that even the CIA recognized that the Soviet Union was not a dictatorship. In a report dated March 2, 1955, the Agency clearly stated: “Even in Stalin’s time there was collective leadership. The Western idea of a dictator within the Communist setup is exaggerated. Misunderstandings on that subject are caused by lack of comprehension of the real nature and organization of the Communist power structure.”[68]

In 1959, Adorno published a text entitled “The Meaning of Working through the Past” in which he recycled the “shameful truth” of “philistine wisdom” referenced in this earlier draft, namely that—in complete conformity with the dominant Cold War ideology in the West—fascism and communism are the same because they are two forms of “totalitarianism.” Openly rejecting the vantage point of “political-economic ideology,” which obviously distinguishes these two warring camps, Adorno claimed to have privileged access to a deeper social-psychological dynamic that unites them.[69] As “authoritarian personalities,” he asserted ex cathedra, fascists and communists “possess weak egos” and compensate by identifying themselves with “real-existing power” and “great collectives.”[70] The very notion of an “authoritarian personality” is thus a deceitful crotchet aimed at synthesizing opposites via psychologizing pseudo-dialectics. It begs the question, moreover, of why psychology and particular ways of thinking appear, at least here, to be more central to historical explanation than material forces and class struggle.

In spite of this attempt to psychologically identify fascists and communists, Adorno nonetheless suggested, in the same text, that the Nazi assault on the Soviet Union could be retrospectively justified due to the fact that the Bolsheviks were—like Hitler himself had said—a menace to Western civilization. “The threat that the East will engulf the foothills of Western Europe is obvious,” Adorno claimed, “and whoever fails to resist it is literally guilty of repeating Chamberlain’s appeasement.”[71] The analogy is revealing because, in this case, it would mean appeasing the “fascist” communists if one did not directly fight against them. In other words, as obscure and convoluted as his phraseology is, this appears to be a clarion call for military opposition to the spread of communism (which is perfectly in line with Horkheimer’s support for the U.S.’s imperialist war in Vietnam).

Adorno’s fierce rejection of actually existing socialism was also on full display in his exchange with Alfred Sohn-Rethel. The latter asked him if Negative Dialectics had anything to say about changing the world, and if the Chinese Cultural Revolution was part of the ‘affirmative tradition’ he condemned. Adorno replied that he rejected the “moral pressure” from “official Marxism” to put philosophy into practice.[72] “Nothing but despair can save us,” he asserted with his signature panache of petty-bourgeois melancholia.[73] Adding, for good measure, that the events in communist China were no cause for hope, he explained with memorable insistence that his entire thinking life had been resolutely pitted against this form—and presumably others—of socialism: “I would have to deny everything I have thought my whole life long if I were to admit to feeling anything but horror at the sight of it.”[74] Adorno’s open indulgence in despair and simultaneous abhorrence of actually existing socialism are not simply idiosyncratic, personal reactions but are affects arising from a class position. “The representatives of the modern labor movement,” Lenin wrote in 1910, “find that they have plenty to protest against but nothing to despair about.”[75] In a description that anticipated Adorno’s petty-bourgeois gloom, the leader of the world’s first successful socialist revolution then proceeded to explain that “despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle.”[76]

Adorno also pursued this line of thinking, or rather feeling, in his criticisms of anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist student activism of the 1960s. He agreed with Habermas—who had himself been a member of the Hitler Youth and studied for four years under the “Nazi philosopher” (his description of Heidegger)—that this activism amounted to “Left fascism.” He defended West Germany as a functioning democracy rather than a “fascist” state, as some of the students argued.[77] At the same time, he quarreled with Marcuse over what he judged to be the latter’s misguided support for the students and the antiwar movement, explicitly claiming that the answer to the question ‘what is to be done?’, for good dialecticians, is nothing at all: “the goal of real praxis would be its own abolition.”[78] He thereby inverted, through dialectical sophistry, one of the central tenets of Marxism, notably the primacy of practice. It is in this context of turning Marx on his head that he repeated, once again, the ideological mantra of the capitalist world: “fascism and communism are the same.”[79] Even though he referred to this slogan as a “petit bourgeois truism,” apparently acknowledging its ideological status, he unabashedly embraced it.[80]

Idealism is the hallmark of Adorno and Horkheimer’s reflections on actually existing socialism and, more generally, progressive social movements. Rather than studying the projects that they denigrate with any of the rigor and earnestness with which they sometimes approach other topics, they rely on stock representations and anti-communist canards devoid of concrete analysis (although they occasionally reference a few of the anti-communist publications, like those by the rabid cold warrior Arthur Koestler, that were amply funded and supported by imperialist states and their intelligence services).[81] This is particularly true in the case of their vilification of socialist state building projects. Their writings on the topic are not only remarkably devoid of references to any rigorous scholarship on the matter, but they proceed as if such serious engagement was not even necessary. These texts genuflect to the dominant ideology, stalwartly insisting on the anti-Stalinist bona fides of their authors, without being concerned with any of the details, nuances or complexities.

One cannot help but wonder, then, if the students were not correct when, in the late 1960s, they circulated leaflets asserting that these Frankfurt scholars were “left idiots of the authoritarian state” who were “critical in theory, conformist in practice.”[82] Hans-Jürgen Krahl, one of Theodor Adorno’s doctoral students, went so far as to publicly besmirch his mentor and the other Frankfurt professors as “Scheißkritische Theoretiker [shit-critical theorists].”[83] He voiced this lapidary critique of these stalwart defenders of ABS Theory when he was being arrested, at the behest of Adorno, for a university occupation related to his involvement in the Socialist German Students’ League. The fact that the author of Negative Dialectics called the police to have his own students arrested is a standard reference point amongst his political critics. As we have seen, however, it is only the very tip of the iceberg. Far from being a bizarre anomaly, it is consistent with his politics, his social function within the intellectual apparatus, his class standing, and his overall orientation within global class struggle.

The Tuis of Western “Marxism”
Brecht proposed the neologism “Tuis” to refer to intellectuals (Intellektuellen) who, as subjects of a commodified culture, get everything backwards (hence Tellekt-uellen-in). He had shared his ideas for a Tui-Novel with Benjamin in the 1930s, and he later wrote a play that emerged out of his earlier notes, entitled Turandot or The Whitewashers’ Congress. Having returned to the German Democratic Republic after WWII to contribute to the socialist state building project, unlike the Frankfurt scholars who settled in West Germany with funding from the capitalist ruling class, Turandot was in part written as a satirical critique of these Western “Marxists.”

In the play, the Tuis are presented as professional whitewashers who receive a handsome salary for making things appear the opposite of what they are. “The whole country is governed by injustice,” Sen states in Turandot, before providing a concise summary of ABS Theory: “and in the Tui Academy all you get to learn is why it has to be that way.”[84] Tui training, like the work of the Institute for Social Research, teaches us that there is no alternative to the dominant order, and it thereby forecloses the possibility of system change. In one of the most striking scenes, the Tuis are shown preparing for the whitewashers’ congress. Nu Shan, one of the teachers in the Academy, operates a pulley system that can raise or lower a basket of bread in front of the speaker’s face. In training a young man named Shi Me to become a Tui, he tells him to speak on the topic “Why Kai Ho’s position is false” (Kai Ho is a revolutionary resembling Mao Zedong). Nu Shan explains that he will raise the bread basket above his head when Shi Me says something wrong and lower it in front of his face when it’s correct. After much raising and lowering in relation to Shi Me’s ability to conform to the dominant ideology, his arguments crescendo to the point of shrill anti-communist slander devoid of rational argumentation: “Kai Ho isn’t a philosopher at all, but just a loudmouth – the basket sinks – a troublemaker, a power-hungry good-for-nothing, an irresponsible gambler, a muckraker, a rapist, an unbeliever, a bandit and a criminal. The basket is hovering just in front of the speaker’s mouth. A tyrant!”[85] This scene presents, in microcosm, the relationship between professional intellectuals and their financial backers within class societies: the former earn their bread as academic free agents by providing the best possible ideology for the latter. It is a matter of food for thought.

What the Frankfurt School had to offer the bread givers of “the shackling society” was nowise insignificant. Mobilizing pseudo-dialectical sophistry, they defended in highfalutin academic language the State Department line that communism is indistinguishable from fascism, even though 27 million Soviets had given their lives to defeat the Nazi war machine in WWII (to mention but one of the most blatant forms of opposition between communism and fascism, although there are of course many others since they are mortal enemies). Moreover, by displacing class struggle in favor of an idealist critical theory severed from practical political engagements, they shifted the very foundations of analysis away from historical materialism toward a generalized theoretical critique of domination, power, and identity thinking.

Adorno and Horkheimer thus ultimately played the role of radical recuperators. Cultivating an appearance of radicality, they recuperated the very activity of critique within a pro-Western, anti-communist ideology. Like other members of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia in Europe and the United States, which formed the basis of Western Marxism, they publicly expressed their social-chauvinistic disgust with what they described as the savage barbarians in the East, who dared to take up the weapon of Marxist theory à la Lenin and use it to act on the principle that they could rule themselves. From the relative comforts of their capitalist-funded professorial citadel in the West, they defended the superiority of the Euro-American world that promoted them against what they referred to as the levelling project of the bolshevized barbarians in the uncivilized periphery.

Furthermore, their generalized critique of domination is part of a larger embrace of an anti-party and anti-state ideology, which ultimately leaves the Left bereft of the tools of disciplined organization necessary to wage successful struggles against the well-funded political, military and cultural apparatus of the capitalist ruling class. This is perfectly in line with their overall politics of defeat, which Adorno explicitly embraced through his anti-Marxist defense of inaction as the highest form of praxis. The leaders of the Tui Academy in Frankfurt, amply funded and supported by the capitalist ruling class and imperialist states, including the U.S. national security state, were thus ultimately global spokesmen for an anti-communist politics of capitalist accommodation. Wringing their hands at the infelicities of consumer society, which they sometimes described in remarkable detail, they nonetheless refused to do anything practical about them because of the bedrock assumption that the socialist cure to such misfortunes is much worse than the disease itself.

https://orinocotribune.com/the-cia-the- ... communism/

The 85 notes can be found at the link.
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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Thu Jun 30, 2022 3:12 pm

A Lemming Leading the Lemmings: Slavoj Žižek and the Terminal Collapse of the Anti-War Left
JUNE 29, 2022

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Graphic with Slavoj Žižek sitting on a chair, and three soldiers with rifles in hand, with the Ukrainian flag as the background, representing Žižek's pro-war and anti-pacifist stance on Ukraine. Photo: MintPress News.

By Jonathan Cook – Jun 23, 2022

Have you noticed how every major foreign policy crisis since the US and UK’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 has peeled off another layer of the left into joining the pro-NATO, pro-war camp?

It is now hard to remember that many millions marched in the US and Europe against the attack on Iraq. It sometimes feels like there is no one left who is not cheerleading the next wave of profits for the West’s military-industrial complex (usually referred to as the “defense industry” by those very same profiteers).

Washington learned a hard lesson from the unpopularity of its 2003 attack on Iraq aimed at controlling more of the Middle East’s oil reserves. Ordinary people do not like seeing the public coffers ransacked or suffering years of austerity, simply to line the pockets of Blackwater, Halliburton, and Raytheon. And all the more so when such a war is sold to them on the basis of a huge deception.

So since then, the US has been repackaging its neocolonialism via proxy wars that are a much easier sell. There have been a succession of them: Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Venezuela, and now Ukraine. Each time, a few more leftists are lured into the camp of the war hawks by the West’s selfless, humanitarian instincts—promoted, of course, through the barrel of a Western-supplied arsenal. That process has reached its nadir with Ukraine.


Greenwald on the interests of the west's military-industrial complex: 'Right at the moment when the market for these weapons disappeared, when the US finally got out of Iraq and Afghanistan, lo and behold there's this new market in Ukraine' https://t.co/s3wVNbkOJN

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) June 6, 2022


Nuclear face-off

I recently wrote about the paranoid ravings of celebrity “left-wing” journalist Paul Mason, who now sees the Kremlin’s hand behind any dissension from a full-throttle charge towards a nuclear face-off with Russia.

Behind the scenes, he has been sounding out Western intelligence agencies in a bid to covertly deplatform and demonetize any independent journalists who still dare to wonder whether arming Ukraine to the hilt or recruiting it into NATO—even though it shares a border that Russia views as existentially important—might not be an entirely wise use of taxpayers’ money.

It is not hard to imagine that Mason is representative of the wider thinking of establishment journalists, even those who claim to be on the left.

But I want to take on here a more serious proponent of this kind of ideology than the increasingly preposterous Mason. Because swelling kneejerk support for US imperial wars—as long, of course, as Washington’s role is thinly disguised—is becoming ever more common among leftwing academics too.


Absolutely withering, must-read stuff from mighty @Jonathan_K_Cook on the willing prostration of Carole Cadwalladr and Paul Mason to intelligence services, and abetting of power in targeting independent anti-war journalists Can't wait for part two. https://t.co/XSmcexwChx

— Kit Klarenberg (@KitKlarenberg) June 21, 2022


The latest cheerleader for the military-industrial complex is Slavoj Žižek, the famed Slovenian philosopher and public intellectual whose work has gained him international prominence. His latest piece—published where else but The Guardian—is a morass of sloppy thinking, moral evasion and double speak. Which is why I think it is worth deconstructing. It encapsulates all the worst geostrategic misconceptions of Western intellectuals at the moment.

Žižek, who is supposedly an expert on ideology and propaganda, and has even written and starred in a couple of documentaries on the subject, seems now to be utterly blind to his own susceptibility to propaganda.

Cod Psychology

He starts, naturally enough, with a straw man: that those opposed to the West’s focus on arming Ukraine rather than using its considerable muscle to force Kyiv and Moscow to the negotiating table are in the wrong. Opposition to dragging out the war for as long as possible, however many Ukrainians and Russians die, with the aim of “weakening Russia”, as US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin wants; and opposition to leaving millions of people in poorer parts of the world to be plunged deeper into poverty or to starve is equated by Žižek to “pacifism.”


Playing games with the lives of Ukrainians – and risking nuclear war – simply to 'weaken' Russia is, Chomsky notes, 'morally horrendous. And the people who are standing on a high horse about how we’re upholding principle are moral imbeciles when you think about what’s involved'

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) June 17, 2022


“Those who cling to pacifism in the face of the Russian attack on Ukraine remain caught in their own version of [John Lennon’s song] ‘Imagine’,” writes Žižek. But the only one dwelling in the world of the imaginary is Žižek and those who think like him.

The left’s mantra of “Stop the war!” can’t be reduced to kneejerk pacifism. It derives from a political and moral worldview. It opposes the militarism of competitive, resource-hungry nation-states. It opposes the war industries that not only destroy whole countries but risk global nuclear annihilation in advancing their interests. It opposes the profit motive for a war that has incentivised a global elite to continue investing in planet-wide rape and pillage rather than addressing a looming ecological catastrophe. All of that context is ignored in Žižek’s lengthy essay.

Instead, he prefers to take a detour into cod psychology, telling us that Russian president Vladimir Putin sees himself as Peter the Great. Putin will not be satisfied simply with regaining the parts of Ukraine that historically belonged to Russia and have always provided its navy with its only access to the Black Sea. No, the Russian president is hell-bent on global conquest. And Europe is next—or so Žižek argues.

Even if we naively take the rhetoric of embattled leaders at face value (remember those weapons of mass destruction Iraq’s Saddam Hussein supposedly had?), it is still a major stretch for Žižek to cite one speech by Putin as proof that the Russian leader wants his own version of the Third Reich.

Not least, we must address the glaring cognitive dissonance at the heart of the Western, NATO-inspired discourse on Ukraine, something Žižek refuses to do. How can Russia be so weak that it has managed only to subdue small parts of Ukraine at great military cost, while it is at the same time a military superpower poised to take over the whole of Europe?


Žižek is horrified by Putin’s conceptual division of the world into those states that are sovereign and those that are colonized. Or as he quotes Putin observing: “Any country, any people, any ethnic group should ensure their sovereignty. Because there is no in-between, no intermediate state: either a country is sovereign, or it is a colony, no matter what the colonies are called.”

Sovereign or colonized?

The famed philosopher reads this as proof that Russia wants as its colonies: “Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Finland, the Baltic states … and ultimately Europe itself”. But if he weren’t so blinded by NATO ideology, he might read Putin’s words in a quite different way. Isn’t Putin simply restating Washington realpolitik? The US, through NATO, is the real sovereign in Europe and is pushing its sovereignty ever closer to Russia’s borders.


Putin’s concern about Ukraine being colonized by the US military-industrial complex is essentially the same as US concerns in the 1960s about the Soviet Union filling Cuba with its nuclear missiles. Washington’s concern justified a confrontation that moved the world possibly the closest it has ever come to nuclear annihilation.

Both Russia and the US are wedded to the idea of their own “spheres of influence.” It is just that the US sphere now encircles the globe through many hundreds of overseas military bases. By contrast, the West cries to the heavens when Russia secures a single military base in Crimea.


We may not like the sentiments Putin is espousing, but they are not especially his. They are the reality of the framework of modern military power the West was intimately involved in creating. It was our centuries of colonialism—our greed and theft—that divided the world into the sovereign and the colonized. Putin is simply stating that Russia needs to act in ways that ensure it remains sovereign, rather than joining the colonized.

We may disagree with Putin’s perception of the threat posed by NATO, and the need to annex eastern Ukraine, but to pretend his speech means that he aims for world domination is nothing more than the regurgitation of a CIA talking point.

Žižek, of course, intersperses this silliness with more valid observations, like this one: “To insist on full sovereignty in the face of global warming is sheer madness since our very survival hinges on tight global cooperation.” Of course, it is madness. But why is this relevant to Putin and his supposed “imperial ambition”? Is there any major state on the planet—those in Europe, the United States, China, Brazil, Australia—that has avoided this madness, that is seeking genuine “tight global cooperation” to end the threat of climate breakdown?


No, our world is in the grip of terminal delusion, propelled ever closer to the precipice by capitalism’s requirement of endless economic growth on a finite planet. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is causing great ecological damage, but so are lots of other things—including NATO’s rationalization of ever-expanding military budgets.

Ukrainian heroism

But Žižek has the bit between his teeth. He now singles out Russia because it is maneuvering to exploit the consequences of global warming, such as new trade routes opened up by a thawing Arctic.

“Russia’s strategic plan is to profit from global warming: control the world’s main transport route, plus develop Siberia and control Ukraine,” he writes. “In this way, Russia will dominate so much food production that it will be able to blackmail the whole world.”

But what does he imagine? As we transform the world’s climate and its trade routes, as new parts of the world turn into deserts, as whole populations are forced to make migrations to different regions, does he think only Putin and Russia are jostling to avoid sinking below the rising sea waters? Does he presume the policy hawks in Washington, or their satraps in Europe, have missed all this and are simply putting their feet up? In reality, maneuvering on the international stage—what I have called elsewhere a brutal nation-state version of the children’s party game musical chairs—has been going on for decades.

Ukraine is the latest front in a long-running war for resource control on a dying planet. It is another battleground in the renewed great power game that the US revived by expanding NATO across Eastern Europe in one pincer movement and then bolstered it with its wars and proxy wars across the Middle East. Where was the urge for “tight global cooperation” then? To perceive Ukraine as simply the victim of Putin’s “imperialism” requires turning a blind eye to everything that has occurred since the fall of the Soviet Union three decades ago.

Žižek gets to the heart of what should matter in his next, throw-away line: “Those who advocate less support for Ukraine and more pressure on it to negotiate, inclusive of accepting painful territorial renunciations, like to repeat that Ukraine simply cannot win the war against Russia. True, but I see exactly in this the greatness of Ukrainian resistance.”

Žižek briefly recognises the reality of Ukraine’s situation—that it cannot win, that Russia has a bigger, better-equipped army—but then deflects to the “greatness” of Ukraine’s defiance. Yes, it is glorious that Ukrainians are ready to die to defend their country’s sovereignty. But that is not the issue we in the West need to consider when Kyiv demands we arm its resistance.

The question of whether Ukrainians can win, or whether they will be slaughtered, is highly pertinent to deciding whether we in the West should help drag out the war, using Ukrainians as cannon fodder, to no purpose other than our being able to marvel as spectators at their heroism. Whether Ukrainians can win is also pertinent to the matter of how urgent it is to draw the war to a close so that millions don’t starve in Africa because of the loss of crops, the fall in exports and rocketing fuel prices. And arming a futile, if valiant, Ukrainian struggle against Russia to weaken Moscow must be judged in the context that we risk backing Russia into a geostrategic corner—as we have been doing for more than two decades—from which, we may surmise, Moscow could ultimately decide to extricate itself by resorting to nuclear weapons.

Intellectual cul-de-sac

Having propelled himself into an intellectual cul de sac, Žižek switches tack. He suddenly changes the terms of the debate entirely. Having completely ignored the US role in bringing us to this point, he now observes: “Not just Ukraine, Europe itself is becoming the place of the proxy war between [the] US and Russia, which may well end up by a compromise between the two at Europe’s expense. There are only two ways for Europe to step out of this place: to play the game of neutrality—a short-cut to catastrophe—or to become an autonomous agent.”

So, we are in a US proxy war—one played out under the bogus auspices of NATO and its “defensive” expansion—but the solution to this problem for Europe is to gain its “autonomy” by…

Well, from everything Žižek has previously asserted in the piece, it seems such autonomy must be expressed by silently agreeing to the US pumping Ukraine full of weapons to fight Russia in a proxy war that is really about weakening Russia rather than saving Ukraine. Only a world-renowned philosopher could bring us to such an intellectually and morally barren place.

The biggest problem for Žižek, it seems, isn’t the US proxy war or Russian “imperialism”, it is the left’s disillusionment with the military industrial complex: “Their true message to Ukraine is: OK, you are victims of a brutal aggression, but do not rely on our arms because in this way you play into the hands of the industrial-military complex,” he writes.

But the concern here is not that Ukraine is playing into the arms of the war industries. It is that Western populations are being played by their leaders—and intellectuals like Žižek—so that they can be delivered, once again, into the arms of the military-industrial complex. The West’s war industries have precisely no interest in negotiations, which is why they are not taking place. It is also the reason why events over three decades have led us to a Russian invasion of Ukraine that most of Washington’s policy makers warned would happen if the US continued to encroach on Russia’s “sphere of influence.”


The left’s message is that we are being conned yet again and that it is long past the time to start a debate. Those debates should have taken place when the US broke its promise not to expand “one inch” beyond Germany. Or when NATO flirted with offering Ukraine membership 14 years ago. Or when the US meddled in the ousting of the elected government of Ukraine in 2014. Or when Kyiv integrated neo-Nazi groups into the Ukrainian army and engaged in a civil war against the Russian parts of its own populace. Or when the US and NATO allowed Kyiv—on the best interpretation—to ignore its obligations under the Minsk agreements with Russia.

None of those debates happened. Which is why a debate in the West is still needed now, at this terribly late stage. Only then might there be a hope that genuine negotiations can take place—before Ukraine is obliterated.

Cannon fodder

Having exhausted all his hollow preliminary arguments, we get to Žižek’s main beef. With the world polarizing around a sole military superpower, the US, and a sole economic superpower, China, Europe and Russia may be forced into each other’s arms in a “Eurasian” block that would swamp European values. For Žižek, that would lead to “fascism.” He writes: “At that point, the European legacy will be lost, and Europe will be de facto divided between an American and a Russian sphere of influence. In short, Europe itself will become the place of a war that seems to have no end.”

Let us set aside whether Europe—all of it, parts of it?—is really a bulwark against fascism, as Žižek assumes. How exactly is Europe to find its power, its sovereignty, in this battle between superpowers? What vehicle is Žižek proposing to guarantee Europe’s autonomy, and how does it differ from the NATO one that is—even Žižek now seems to be conceding—actually just a vassal of the US, there to enforce Washington’s global-spanning “sphere of influence” against Russia and China.

Faced with this problem, Žižek quickly retreats into mindless sloganeering: “One cannot be a leftist if one does not unequivocally stand behind Ukraine.” This Bushism—“You are either with us or with the terrorists”—really is as foolish as it sounds.

What does “unequivocal” mean here? Must we “unequivocally stand behind” all of Ukraine’s actions—even should, say, neo-Nazi elements of the Ukrainian military like the Azov Brigade carry out pogroms against the ethnic Russian communities living in Ukraine?

But even more seriously, what does it mean for Europeans to stand “unequivocally” behind Ukraine? Must we approve the supply of US weapons, even though, as Žižek also concedes, Ukraine cannot win the war and is serving primarily as a proxy battleground?

Would “unequivocal support” not require us to pretend that Europe, rather than the US, is in charge of NATO policy? Would it not require too that we pretend NATO’s actions are defensive rather intimately tied to advancing the US “sphere of influence” designed to weaken Russia?

And how can our participation in the US ambition to weaken Russia not provoke greater fear in Russia for its future, greater militarism in Moscow, and ensure Europe becomes more of a battleground rather than less of one?

What does “unequivocal” support for Ukraine mean given that Žižek has agreed that the US and Russia are fighting a proxy war, and that Europe is caught in the middle of it? Žižek’s answer is no answer at all. It is nothing more than evasion. It is the rationalization of unprincipled European inaction, of acting as a spectator while the US continues to use Ukrainians as cannon fodder.

Muddying the waters

After thoroughly muddying the waters on Ukraine, Žižek briefly seeks safer territory as he winds down his argument. He points out, two decades on, that George W. Bush was similarly a war criminal in invading Iraq, and notes the irony that Julian Assange is being extradited to the US because Wikileaks helped expose those war crimes. To even things up, he makes a counter-demand on “those who oppose Russian invasion” that they fight for Assange’s release—and in doing so implicitly accuses the anti-war movement of supporting Russia’s invasion.

He then plunges straight back into sloganeering in his concluding paragraph: “Ukraine fights for global freedom, inclusive of the freedom of Russians themselves. That’s why the heart of every true Russian patriot beats for Ukraine.” Maybe he should try telling that to the thousands of ethnic Russian families mourning their loved ones killed by the civil war that began raging in eastern Ukraine long before Putin launched his invasion and supposedly initiated his campaign for world domination. Those kinds of Ukrainians may beg to differ, as may Russians worried about the safety and future of their ethnic kin in Ukraine.

As with most things in life, there are no easy answers for Ukraine. But Žižek’s warmongering dressed up as European enlightenment and humanitarianism is a particularly wretched example of the current climate of intellectual and moral vacuity. What we need from public thinkers like Žižek is a clear-sighted roadmap for how we move back from the precipice we are rushing, lemming-like, towards. Instead he is urging us on. A lemming leading the lemmings.

(Mint Press)

https://orinocotribune.com/a-lemming-le ... -war-left/

If you find yourself agreeing with Zizek, reread, if still, hand in your 'party card'...
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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Mon Jul 04, 2022 2:22 pm

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Second International Labor Conference 1905 (Photo: Harris & Ewing / Library of Congress)

The Second International’s Conflicted Legacy
By Mike Taber (Posted Jun 28, 2022)

History, Ideology, SocialismCommentaryFeatured, Second International, Socialist History
Virtually all socialists today are direct descendants of the Second International of 1889 to 1914. Also known as the Socialist International, this movement grouped the greater part of the world’s organized working class under the banner of socialist revolution, and was viewed by capitalists everywhere as a threat to their existence. Yet relatively few twenty-first-century socialists know much about this organization’s history or what it represented.

For left-wing socialists in particular, the Second International is often associated almost exclusively with its betrayal of internationalism in 1914 at the start of the First World War. At that time the Second International suffered an ignominious collapse, as its leading parties abandoned socialist principles and gave open support to their respective governments’ war efforts.

The fact that the Second International was re-created in 1919 as a formation committed to maintaining the capitalist order, with a few reforms, has contributed to such an image. Not only did the post-1919 Second International oppose the Bolshevik-led revolution in Russia, but it worked energetically to suppress the revolutionary wave that engulfed much of Europe and Asia following the end of the war. Its social-democratic successors have largely continued along these lines up to the present day.

This image of the pre-1914 Second International helps explain the fact that prior to the publication of my book, Under the Socialist Banner, the resolutions of its nine congresses had never before been assembled and published in English. Some of these resolutions were virtually unknown. Many had been exceedingly difficult to even find.

While there are good reasons to reject what the Second International became after 1914, ignoring or downplaying its legacy is nevertheless a mistake. Doing so means turning one’s back on an important part of the socialist movement’s history and traditions. Moreover, it means ceding this legacy to social-democratic currents that have betrayed or distorted socialism’s message for over a century. The best of this legacy, however, legitimately belongs to revolutionary socialists. Understanding the Second International’s strengths, weaknesses, and contradictions can be of major benefit for the movement today.

Revolutionary origins and program

Through reading all the resolutions adopted by Second International congresses between 1889 and 1912, one conclusion is inescapable: these documents were guided, as a whole, by revolutionary Marxism.

While Second International congresses championed the fight for reforms in the interests of working people—the eight-hour day, state-sponsored insurance and pensions, public education, votes for women, the right to asylum, and other reform measures—they rejected the idea that capitalism as a system could be reformed. They called for the working class to take political power and expropriate the capitalist owners of the major industries. They insisted that the working class itself was the agent of its own emancipation.

Such a perspective was firmly established at the Second International’s founding congress in 1889 held in Paris by the Marxist wing of the workers’ movement. A rival congress was organized by reformist forces in France—the “Possibilists,” who held that working people should restrict themselves to fighting for what they considered possible under capitalism. From the very beginning the Second International therefore needed to counterpose a revolutionary program to a reformist one.

One resolution adopted by the 1889 congress summarized the revolutionary goal of the new movement—known at the time as Social Democracy—declaring “that the emancipation of labor and humanity cannot occur without the international action of the proletariat—organized in class-based parties—which seizes political power through the expropriation of the capitalist class and the social appropriation of the means of production.”1

One generally overlooked fact is the key role played by Frederick Engels in the Second International’s birth. As the lifelong collaborator of Karl Marx, Engels worked tirelessly on the organization and preparation of the Second International’s founding congress. He gave special attention to ensuring that it not compromise on programmatic questions with the Possibilists. While not opposed in principle to a united congress with them, he insisted that only a clear revolutionary program could lay the foundations for a successful international movement. Engels’s extensive correspondence with the congress organizers would fill a small volume.2

Through his work, Engels helped link the Second International back to the Communist Manifesto that he had co-authored with Marx forty years earlier. Until his death in 1895, Engels played an important advisory role in the world movement, helping to ensure that it maintained its perspective as an irreconcilable revolutionary opponent of capitalism.

Strengths and weaknesses

In the quarter century of its existence prior to World War I, the Second International had a number of important accomplishments to its credit. Among these were its efforts to unify the global working-class movement under the banner of Marxism and to popularize the movement’s strategic aim: the revolutionary overturn of the capitalist class and its replacement by the rule of the proletariat, as a first step toward the establishment of socialism.

Two dates on the calendar today owe their existence to the Second International: May Day, established at the movement’s founding congress in 1889 as a demonstration of working-class power around the world; and International Women’s Day, initiated in 1910 as a worldwide day of action for working women in the fight for full social and political rights.

The Second International showed the potential power of the organized working class and its capacity to remake society. By winning millions of working people to socialism and organizing them into the fight against capitalism, the Second International helped create the preconditions for successful revolutionary struggle.

But behind this real and potential power were significant weaknesses and contradictions.

One such weakness involved its geographic axis. Even though the Second International’s reach extended to many countries, it still remained predominantly a European and North American organization, and never became a truly world movement. While congress resolutions gave support to anticolonial struggles in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, most sections of the Second International still possessed an underappreciation of them.

Similarly, the International’s resolutions often lacked an adequate appreciation of the strategic allies the working class would need in its struggle—from toilers in the colonial world to working farmers and peasants, small shopkeepers, victims of national oppression, and others.

More importantly, even though congress resolutions formally called for the revolutionary replacement of capitalism, the Second International as a whole lacked a clear perspective on the role of revolutionary action in such a transformation. The relationship between reform and revolution was a constant point of friction and debate.

Gap between word and deed

Perhaps the biggest weakness of the Second International, however, was the gap that developed between word and deed.

During the early twentieth century, the day-to-day practice of most Social Democratic parties became increasingly dominated by a reformist and nonrevolutionary perspective, focused around winning incremental reforms and putting the perspective of socialist transformation off to the distant future. Within the trade unions—most of which were led by socialist parties—bureaucracies developed with a class-collaborationist outlook.

The consequences of this evolution were fully seen in 1914. In clear violation of numerous the Second International resolutions, the main parties of the Second International renounced their past pledges and lined up, one by one, behind their governments’ efforts in World War I. Millions of workers and others were sent to their deaths with the support of these parties.

It was precisely this gap between word and deed that revolutionary socialists at the time pointed to as the central problem of the Second International. The biggest critics of the betrayal of 1914, such as V. I. Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, spoke of this gap in the sharpest terms.

In making these criticisms, however, Lenin and Luxemburg never renounced the resolutions the Second International had adopted. Quite the contrary. During the years of the First World War, they constantly referred to the best of these resolutions as a way of illustrating the extent to which the Second International’s majority leaders were violating these resolutions in practice.

When the Communist International was organized in 1919, it openly stated that its intention was to bridge the gap between word and deed. The manifesto of the Comintern’s First Congress, in fact, openly described itself as “the International of the deed.”3

Issues of relevance today
Most of the major questions facing socialists at the present time are not new, having come up previously in different forms and in other contexts. Many of the issues in the fight today nevertheless bear a similarity to what the Second International took up over a century ago:

Political power: Probably the single biggest thread running through the resolutions adopted at Second International congresses was that every major issue facing working people was inextricably tied to the question of political power, and the need to replace domination by capitalists and landlords with the rule of working people. A revolutionary transformation of the entire social order was necessary.

War and militarism: Workers need to oppose all imperialist wars, Second International resolutions asserted. Not an ounce of support should be extended to these ventures, they insisted. The fight against militarism and war, together with the entire war machine, is a key task, part of the overall working-class struggle.

Democratic rights: Resolutions adopted at international congresses stressed the centrality of political and democratic rights. They viewed these rights as tools in the revolutionary struggle, and pointed to why the working class has the biggest stake in the fight to win them.

Trade unions: Central importance was placed on unions, seeing them as the most basic organization to defend workers’ interests. The right to unionization needs to be defended, along with eliminating all restrictions on the exercise of union power.

Imperialism and colonialism: Colonial conquest and plunder of the Third World was seen as simply an extension of capitalist exploitation, according to the Second International’s adopted resolutions. Workers therefore need to actively support and champion the struggle for freedom by oppressed peoples fighting imperialist and colonialist domination, along with its racist justifications and rationalizations.

Immigration: The Second International’s resolution of 1907 pointed to the need to oppose all restrictions on the free immigration and emigration of workers, as well as to combat all forms of racist scapegoating. Immigrant workers should be viewed not as helpless victims but as allies and reinforcements in the struggle against capitalism.

Labor legislation: The fight for laws limiting working hours, regulating working conditions, banning child labor, mandating equal pay for equal work, and guaranteeing workers the right to organize was central to socialists in the Second International.

Public education and cultural advancement: As socialists recognized over a century ago, the right of public education is a conquest of the working class in the fight to advance society. Access to education—including higher education—must be available to all, free of charge.

Women’s emancipation: Multiple resolutions of the Second International addressed the oppression of women and how it is built into the very structure of capitalism. The fight against this oppression will play a central part in the overall revolutionary struggle, they pointed out.

As can be seen, adopted Second International resolutions from the pre-1914 period presented arevolutionary perspective on a number of questions that still remain before us today. While much has changed in the world, the Second International’s resolutions on these questions nevertheless retain their value and indicate an approach that twenty-first century socialists can learn from.

Why continuity matters

In today’s world, working people and youth confront numerous issues that will require intense struggle in the years ahead—battles over the consequences of climate change, over imperialist wars and war moves, abortion and women’s rights, racist police killings, the health care crisis, assaults on the rights of working people and unions, the threat from ultrarightist and fascist forces, and numerous other issues.

These struggles will pose both opportunities and challenges for socialists and all fighters for social change: How can we fight most effectively? What must be done to maximize our chances of success?

To answer these questions, a study of socialist legacy and continuity can be of major benefit. Doing so is not merely of interest to scholars and specialists. Rather, it relates to the most pressing day-to-day tasks of activists in the struggle.

Obviously the Second International of 1889 to 1912 cannot offer a guidebook for today. Nevertheless, by properly examining this movement in context, it can help point us in the right direction on many questions. The goal should be not to re-create the pre-1914 Second International, but rather to understand its strengths and its weaknesses, its accomplishments and its failings.

Today a new generation of young people and others are being won to socialism, having seen the dead end of capitalism and its threat to human existence. A challenge before these activists is to help situate themselves within the socialist tradition going back to the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels, through the major revolutions of the twentieth century, and continuing right up to the social movements of recent years.

By seriously studying the Second International’s tradition and legacy—without overlooking its contradictions and weaknesses—those coming to the socialist movement today can help find their place within the socialist movement’s proud history, and its fight for a revolutionary transformation of society.

Notes:
1.↩ Mike Taber, ed., Under the Socialist Banner: Resolutions of the Second International 1889-1912 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021), p. 22.
2.↩ Engels’s letters on plans, preparations, and strategic considerations in organizing the 1889 congress can be found in volume 48 of Marx Engels Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 2001).
3.↩ Drafted by Leon Trotsky, the “Manifesto of the Communist International to the Proletariat of the Entire World” can be found in John Riddell, ed., Founding the Communist International: Proceedings and Documents of the First Congress: March 1919 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1987).

https://mronline.org/2022/06/28/the-sec ... ed-legacy/
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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Wed Jul 20, 2022 5:06 pm

OUT OF THE WILDERNESS
Posted by Greg Godels | Jul 17, 2022

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As the Soviet Union and our historical memory of it disappear in the rear-view mirror, ideological clarity about socialism disappears with it. It is not that the Soviet Union had a monopoly on socialist thinking– there were certainly contributors from within and without the then-existing socialist world who reflected different times, different circumstances, and different traditions– but the Soviet Union represented a historical constant, an evolving constant that connected the rise of revolutionary Marxism in the early twentieth century to later socialist thought.

One didn’t have to agree with Soviet socialist theory in the late twentieth century, but one had to reckon with it; one had to locate one’s thinking longitudinally and latitudinally from that pole.

Because it served as a frame of reference for other leftist movements– purported Communist, non-Communist, and anti-Communist leftism– there was a certain logic to the politics of the global left, best expressed by the division between the Communist, revolutionary left and the social-democratic, reformist left. These two trends captured left politics, with various wrinkles and departures playing a lesser role.

Subsequent to the demise of the Soviet Union, left ideology became unhinged. Social democracy retreated to applying a modest, slightly more human face to capitalist triumphalism, reaching full-expression with the self-described Third Way of Clinton, Blair, and Hollande. Without competition from the historical legacy of revolutionary Marxism (Marxism-Leninism), a rightward swing was inevitable.

Within the Marxist-Leninist movement, frustration and disappointment led to bitter fights, splits, and retreat to what Lenin described so well as “the years of reaction” after the defeat of the 1905 Russian revolution:

All the revolutionary and opposition parties were smashed. Depression, demoralisation, splits, discord, defection, and pornography took the place of politics. There was an ever greater drift towards philosophical idealism; mysticism became the garb of counter-revolutionary sentiments… It is at moments of need that one learns who one’s friends are. “

-Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder


Many academic Marxists– theorists whose ideas never took root in the working class, but who commanded much influence, nonetheless– abandoned revolutionary socialism for social criticism, spurred on by a shiny new intellectual toy, postmodernism. The ideology that coalesced around the idea of class was shattered into the politics of individual identities and varied interests. Too often this thinking seeped into left-wing politics, confusing younger comrades, by nature, enthralled with the new.

Other academics believed that they had found a more rigorous foundation for Marxism in the neo-positivism of optimized choice, self-interest, and individualism, the growing intellectual consensus of bourgeois social science. After sterile debates– often couched in formal language– proponents concluded that the most interesting, most original ideas in Marxism could not be reduced to statements about isolated individuals maximizing their self-perceived, narrow, immediate interests. So Marxism must be abandoned to preserve the beloved method, a patent absurdity!

In the last decade of the 20th century, a process of soul searching had begun in major sections of the left, especially in the West. Both the centrality of class politics and the legacy goal of constructing socialism receded in the newly minted approaches of the broad left.

In the wake of the 2007-2009 global economic crisis, the idea of class reemerged, albeit in a simplistic, primitive way. In 2011, activists, organizing around the slogan “Occupy!”, introduced the dichotomy of the 1% and the 99% as an expression of the great and growing inequalities of wealth and income in the US. Lacking any grasp of the complexities of class and strata, the slogan “the 99%” was bound to conjure an illusory unity of the supposed have-nots that was naive and unattainable. And the idea of “the 1%” reduced the historically evolved power and rule of the capitalist class to a mere actuarial number.

The retreat from class (as Ellen Meiksins Wood so aptly characterized it) continued unabated. And the retreat from any real advocacy of socialism accompanied it.

Dissatisfaction with a soulless Democratic Party increasingly catering to a more affluent, petty bourgeois base, revived an interest in social democracy in the US. This new interest grew from the campaign of independent Democrat Bernie Sanders who refused to renounce the moniker “socialist.” Young people, in particular, were drawn in great numbers to a ‘legitimized’ socialism, energizing a number of leftist organizations and electoral campaigns.

Ironically, this new social democratic moment occurred in the US when social democracy in Europe– its traditional address– was discredited and marginalized.

While acceptance of the word “socialism” in the US was welcome, it was attached to a tepid, incremental socialism deeply embedded in the Democratic Party and virtually indistinguishable from its 1930s New Deal precedent.

Certainly, this leftish turn was welcome, and the freeing of the word “socialism” from its Red Scare chains marked progress.

But so-called democratic “socialism” was not socialism by any measure, but a brand associated with the left-wing of the Democratic Party.

The retreat from the real– real-existing and real-theoretical– socialism and the abandonment of the tool of class analysis disables and disarms the left in every way, leaving it vacillating between accommodating capitalism with patchwork reforms and surrendering the socialist project all together until a time off in the distant future.

My own advocacy of socialism has often been met with the patronizing dismissal: “Sure, but tell us how we get there from here.”

But we can’t get anywhere unless we settle on where we want to go. And surely, we must choose our route collectively.

The signs that our left has abandoned the goal of socialism, along with class partisanship abound… unfortunately.

The contradiction– and the Marxist term is most appropriate– between surging inflation and shrinking growth has capitalist policy makers in a bind. Their consensus– and their consensus follows from bourgeois theory– is that spending must be retarded. The conventional way to do this is through restraining economic activity, exactly what the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate increases are meant to do.

Given that a hard braking of the economy will inevitably produce widespread and deep pain on an already struggling working class, one would think that this would be a powerful, unassailable argument for socialism. Given that this moment in US history presents a seemingly intractable problem for the ruling class with only two possible and disastrous outcomes– escalating inflation or a deep recession– that the left would lay the portended disaster at the doorstep of capitalism.

But, no, that is not happening.

Instead, the left is blaming the Federal Reserve or searching vainly for ways to save capitalism from its dilemma.

● A headline in Jacobin— a journal of “socialism”– and reposted in Portside states ominously: To Fight Inflation, The Fed is Declaring a War on Workers. No, it is not the Federal Reserve declaring war on workers. The Federal Reserve is a capitalist institution. It is always at war with workers– that’s its job. It is– as it always is– capitalism that is at war with workers. Say it! C-a-p-i-t-a-l-i-s-m…

The article ends by suggesting how capitalism could “forge” an alternative path to reducing inflation– a brief suggestion unrelated to the dilemma that capitalism finds itself facing, but having the merit of evading the elephant in the room.

● Then there is Michael Hudson’s response to the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate action, The Fed’s Austerity Program to Reduce Wages, found on numerous websites from Counterpunch to TeleSur. Hudson commands a huge following, despite having no history or connection with the organized left aside from apparent youthful happenstance with Trotskyism. His long history as a financial industry insider and his loquaciousness seem, somehow, to bolster his popularity.

Again, it is not capitalism that is responsible for the mess facing working people, but “neoliberalism,” “the tunnel vision of corporate managers and the One Percent,” and “Biden’s Cold War.” Hudson punches the explanation up by invoking his two favorite bêtes noires: debt and the rentier-class. But not capitalism.

I have no quarrel with the term “neoliberalism” if it is shorthand for the socio-politico-economic adjustment made by and for capitalism during the 1970s stagflation crisis and after the failure of Keynesian solutions. But today it is used far too often and with zeal to conjure an evil malignancy that attacks otherwise stable and enduring capitalism and imposes onerous conditions on a disgruntled, but somewhat-satisfied-with-capitalism working class.

This is sheer nonsense, of course, but it is the latent assumption behind the obsession with neoliberalism held by most left punditry. If only we could expel neoliberalism… Again, capitalism as an all-determining socio-economic formation gets a free pass.

● Professor Richard Wolff is an impressive expositor of many Marxist ideas. He is the go-to interview when center-left media, like Democracy Now!, wants to hear from Marxism. But Professor Wolf is no Marxist. Nor is he a socialist, though he might challenge this claim. While he is unquestionably dedicated and earnest, it is not to socialism that he is dedicated. Instead, he advocates for a snail’s-pace assault on capitalism through small-business-like consumer and producer cooperatives, a persisting utopian strategy of nipping away at the edges of capital. That strategy has no answer for monopoly capitalism, the capitalism of our ages.

Like so many others, Wolff demonstrates an aversion to locating capitalism as the material, formal, efficient, and final cause of today’s crises, preferring to find the reparable flaws in capitalism and to search for a fix.

In his Three Anti-Inflation Alternatives to Raising Interest Rates appearing in Economy for All, In These Times, Popular Resistance, and other places, Wolff signals more interest in finding a way to manage the inflation-stagnation crisis than attacking its cause.

Wolff proposes not one, but three alternatives available to capitalism to escape the clutches of inflation.

First, he proposes a wartime solution: ration cards. One can only imagine how that would be received by a citizenry already divided by masks, vaccines, and lockdowns, not to mention guns. Indeed, this proposal might unwittingly be a stealth spark for further misunderstanding and mindless conflict.

Second, Wolff revives the Nixon-era tactic of the wage-price freeze. Like rationing, a freeze– including Nixon’s brief wage-price freeze– freezes injustices as well and merely temporarily bottles up the growing, deep-seated inflationary pressures. In Nixon, Ford, and Carter’s case, those pressures exploded for the rest of the decade to no relief or benefit to working people. Like rationing, price freezes give the impression of action, while leaving the cause of economic distress– capitalism– untouched and unspoken.

While not mentioning socialism, Wolff’s third “alternative” invokes its spirit with the possibility of “[t]the socialization of private capitalist enterprises…” But before one can anticipate Marx’s call in The Communist Manifesto for “the abolition of bourgeois property,” Wolff dashes our hopes. He is not calling for the end of “the exploitation of the many by the few” but something else entirely. Instead, he says, let’s borrow from the history of public utility commissions that have failed so miserably to protect consumers from fraud, unjustifiable price increases, and other abuses:

Across the United States, insurance, utility, and other public commissions limit private capitalist enterprises’ freedom to raise their prices in the markets they regulate. Private capitalists in such markets cannot raise prices without the permission of those commissions to do so. A government could establish all sorts of commissions in all sorts of markets with criteria for granting or refusing such permissions. Suppose, for example, that some or all food items were socially (democratically) deemed to be basic goods, such that no producer or seller could raise its prices without approval by a federal food commission. Fighting inflation could be among the approval criteria in this case (just as that is a criterion now for the Fed’s monetary policies).

Is this less utopian, less fabulist, less unrealistic, more promising than the call to abolish bourgeois property? Is championing socialism a more remotely possible solution than establishing “commissions” that would regulate capitalist prices and, accordingly, profits? Wolff simply issues a fanciful wishlist to address an impending disaster.

A survey of the various “solutions” to the contradiction of exploding capitalist prices and slowing economic activity offered by prominent left thinkers shows that they have no solution at all. Moreover, the offered “solutions” all portend to manage capitalism better than its bourgeois managers. They all seek to improve capitalism, to make it friendlier, to tame its “excesses” while guiding it through its internally generated crises.

If today’s left refuses to seriously discuss socialism, deferring it to another time and place, it consigns the people to eternal wandering in the biblical wilderness.

It is not another half-hearted attempt at reformist or utopian change (after centuries of disappointing attempts), but a commitment to revolutionary socialism that will deliver the working class “out of the hands of the [capitalists], and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey…” (with apologies to Exodus 3:8).

The working class deserves better than another thirty years of wandering through the wilderness of misdirection, muddled ideas, and fear of socialism.

https://mltoday.com/out-of-the-wilderness/

Well, I think that" left ideology became unhinged" long before the demise of the Soviet Union, Trotsky and the adoption of his views by so many on the left is a good starting place. And we should consider 1956, which spawned the New Left of the petite bourgeois, an intellectual misdirection still unsurmounted. There was the retreat from class.

I did repost a Hudson piece recently, mostly because of his linking of usury with the ancient Romans. A bit of a broad brush but never underestimate that specter which has haunted the West since the Renaissance, the Roman 'Republic,' as the gold standard of social development. Edward Gibbon wrote a really long book implying that the extant arrangement of bourgeois rule approached that ruling class nirvana. The bosses loved it and made a a mandatory part of education for their class.

Any pre-fixed, compound or other descriptor is a disservice to understanding. 'Neo' this&that 'disaster' and so forth must be understood dialectically, as moments of historical development. To say that 'disaster capitalism' is really bad implies that 'regular' capitalism ain't that bad and it just ain't so.

Always thought Wolff was mealy-mouthed and couldn't understand the attraction. A Keynesian at best.

First thing to be done is the wholesale abandonment of the Democratic Party, the first line of defense of the ruling class.
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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Tue Jul 26, 2022 4:04 pm

Biology as ideology

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Biology at another crossroads
Originally published: Science for the People on July 18, 2022 by Nafis Hasan (more by Science for the People) | (Posted Jul 25, 2022)

[What] is amazing is the similarity in the thinking of naturalists and dialectical materialists. The so-called dialectical world view is by and large also the world view of the naturalists, as opposed to that of the physicalists.

— Ernst Mayr, Roots of Dialectical Materialism (1997)


Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin’s publication of The Dialectical Biologist in 1985 provided a gestalt moment which remains just as valid and applicable decades after the book’s publication, if not even more so. Despite such relevance, it would appear that the ideas presented have remained sidelined in mainstream philosophy of biology, thanks to decades of genetic determinism and the continued neoliberalization of science. But a survey of nascent ideas across different fields in biology negates such an assumption, and reinforces the importance of a dialectical framework for biological research—the legacy of Richard Lewontin.

A Brief History of Dialectical Biology

The origins of dialectical biology as proposed by Levins and Lewontin can be traced back to Marx and Engels. Influenced by Darwin and his exchanges with Marx, Engels proposed the three laws of dialectics of nature:

1.The law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa: e.g., changes in chemical composition or energy can result in qualitative changes for a substance.
2.The law of the interpenetration of the opposites: this law is meant to indicate that change comes from the interaction between opposing forces, whether physical or of other nature.
3.The law of the negation of the negation: indicates that nature is undergoing constant change (e.g. evolution, erosion, etc.).

Using these three laws to describe natural phenomena, Engels concluded that, “in nature nothing takes place in isolation. Everything affects and is affected by every other thing.” Engels’s natural worldview was one of constant motion, where equilibrium arose from contradictions and not as a steady state.1

How does Engels’s laws of dialectics translate to a framework for biology? Ernst Mayr, in his essay Roots of Dialectical Materialism, attempted to provide an answer: “the first law is a principle of non-reductionism, the second is an explanation for the presence of energy in nature that removes any sort of divine, vitalist, or external requirement and the third describes continuous changes in nature, i.e., evolution.”2 Therefore, dialectical materialism provides a theoretical bulwark against reductionism in biology as well as a framework to understand the changes underlying natural phenomena.

Engels’s laws of dialectics were taken up by Soviet scientists in various forms; a detailed analysis of such work can be found in Loren Graham’s Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union (1972). But Soviet scientists were not the only ones adopting a dialectical framework to make sense of their findings. As Helena Sheehan describes in Marxism and the Philosophy of Science, in the West, biologists such as J. D. Bernal, J. B. S. Haldane, Joseph Needham, and Marcel Prennant, to name a few, were deeply influenced by Soviet philosophy of science, and applied the dialectical framework to biological phenomena and the practice of science to varying degrees.

According to Haldane, Marxism could be applied to understanding the development of science and the history of science as a human activity. Needham, while unconvinced of the value of Marxism in ethics and politics, still believed dialectical materialism to be “the quintessence of scientific method,” as “the natural methodology of science itself.”3 Both Bernal and Needham insisted that dialectical materialism would be of great service to biologists by pointing the way towards the most promising hypotheses and by indicating which questions were meaningful and answerable.

In 1931, at the International Congress of the History of Science and Technology conference, BM Zavadovsky, a Soviet biologist, noted that the path to resolving the vitalism vs mechanism and reductionism vs mysticism debates lay in dialectical materialism, which went beyond the “attempts to embrace all the complexity and multiformity of the world through either a single mathematical formula of the mechanical movement of molecules or through the vitalist idea of a single ‘principle of perfection.’”4 Similarly, on the question of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, as geneticists grouped themselves into Lamarckists vs Morganists, it was a dialectical understanding of genetics that Zavadovsky argued pointed towards Mendel and Morgan’s ideas.5
However, the adoption of the Soviet interpretation by Western biologists presented a unique problem: the Soviet interpretation placed mechanistic materialism at the core of the dialectical framework. Mechanistic materialism is inherently reductionist, while under the dialectical framework, “biological phenomena, although historically connected with physicochemical phenomena, were not reducible to physicochemical laws.”6 In an effort to resolve this internal contradiction, Levins and Lewontin presented a variant of dialectical materialism that they believed was a “simultaneous negation of both mechanistic materialism and dialectical idealism.”7

Dialectical Biology in Practice: Levins and Lewontin
Levins and Lewontin applied dialectical materialism to biology, especially ecology and evolutionary biology, in an attempt to break away from the grip of Cartesian reductionism, which they deemed inadequate to explain the complexities underlying large-scale biological phenomena such as population ecology or evolutionary genetics. They argued that the reductionism inherent in such philosophies undercut the importance of interactions between the parts that made up the whole, ignored emergent properties, and forced science to choose separate causes for the same phenomenon.

Particularly, instead of studying genes, environment, and the organism as separate entities, they argued that the proper object of scientific investigation should be the interaction between the three. This interaction results in the development of the organism, and can be quantified as the “norm of reaction.”

For Levins and Lewontin, the organism constitutes both the subject and the object of evolution, since the organism actively constructs its environment that in turn actively affects the development of the organism:

… an organism does not compute itself from its DNA. The organism is the consequence of a historical process that goes on from the moment of conception until the moment of death; at every moment gene, environment, chance, and the organism as a whole are all participating… Natural selection is not a consequence of how well the organism solves a set of fixed problems posed by the environment; on the contrary, the environment and the organism actively codetermine each other.8

Further, if natural selection resulted in the differential reproduction of variants, eventually there would not be any more variation to continue to drive evolution as a population achieved uniform fitness. To resolve this contradiction, Levins and Lewontin proposed that Darwin’s ideas can only reach full maturity when the organism is integrated with the “inner” and “outer” forces of evolution, as in the genotype and the environment, and viewed as both the subject and the object of evolution, as it is under dialectical materialism.

Lewontin went on to further solidify the necessity of using a dialectical approach to studying evolution and development. In his book The Triple Helix (2002), he writes that, “the ontogeny [development] of an organism is the consequence of a unique interaction between the genes it carries, the temporal sequence of external environments through which it passes during its life, and random events of molecular interactions within individual cells. It is these interactions that must be incorporated into any proper account of how an organism is formed,” thus establishing the organism as a site of interaction between the environment and genes. Therefore, under dialectical materialism, the long-running Nature vs. Nurture debate is replaced by how Nature and Nurture interact during development of an organism.

Dialectical Biology Redux

A confluence of several sociopolitical factors contributed to the marginalization of dialectical biology—the rise of molecular biology, the Cold War politics, the failures of Lysenkoism, the increasing commodification of science. However, as the introductory quote by Ernst Mayr shows, any non-reductionist approach (e.g., systems biology) to studying biology will advertently end up using a dialectical approach; recent developments in the fields of immunology, cancer, theoretical and evolutionary biology lend credence to such a conclusion.

The Organism as the Holobiont

While Levins and Lewontin had largely applied the dialectical framework to biology at the collective level, developmental biologist Scott Gilbert and immunologist Alfred Tauber did the same at the organismal level to question what constituted biological individuality.9 Historically, an individual organism has been delineated by anatomical borders, functional integration through division of labor and communication between its parts, and a hierarchical system of control. However, using a host of scientific evidence that proves the ubiquity of symbiosis, Gilbert and Tauber argue that modern biology negates this notion of the individual organism; rather, organisms are “holobionts”—multi-genomic, composite beings “whose physiology is a co-metabolism between the host and its microbiome, whose development is predicated upon signals derived from these commensal microorganisms, whose phenotype is predicated on microbial as well as host genes, and whose immune system recognizes these particular microbes as part of its “self.””

Gilbert and Tauber went on to show how dialectics exist at all levels of development of the holobiont—from fertilization (two cells fuse to become one), to organogenesis (stromal-epithelial interactions), the development of the immune system, symbiotic interactions between microbial and host cells, the construction of the ecological niche for the holobiont, and even down to the molecular level where stereo-specificity is determined by a set of interactions (induced fit model) rather than the deterministic “lock and key” model. Taking all these together, Gilbert and Tauber questioned the current conception of immunity as a defense mechanism, arguing that immunology should be brought under the larger umbrella of ecology and proposing the field of “eco-immunology”.

Eco-immunology is then used to understand the role of the immune system in the physiological and functional integration of the organism with its environment and dispels the binary notion of immunity being a defense mechanism. This is exemplified in the need for specific microbes for proper development of the brain, gut, and reproductive tissues across a host of animals. This idea then posits that the organism “was not a given, but rather a ‘work-in-progress’ that underwent lifelong development in dialectical exchange with other potentially competing intra-organismal elements.” The holobiont theory is therefore the fruition of the application of a dialectical materialist framework to modern biology, and its success helps guide future dialectical materialist approaches to unraveling the complexities of natural phenomena.

Neo-Lamarckism

With the increased study of developmental plasticity, it would appear that certain Lamarckian concepts of heritability are regaining some traction in modern science. While fetishism of the centrality of the gene has been the key ideology of the neo-Darwinians such as Richard Dawkins, and has propagated the “DNA as the blueprint of life” idea, neo-Lamarckian systems of transmission of inheritance, as proposed in 1995 by biologists Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb, push back against this reductionist view of evolution.10

Jablonka and Lamb argue that short-term evolution does not depend on new mutations in the DNA, but rather on epigenetic modifications that uncover genetic variants already present in the population. Additionally, genes undergo “shuffling” through recombination during cell division, thus giving rise to further variation within the population. They also argue that the structure of the chromatin affects changes in the DNA sequence, which therefore, “highlights the complexity of the role of the environment in evolutionary change, the environment is not just the agent of selection. Through its effects on genes’ phenotype, it also biases the direction, rate and type of DNA changes at the locus,” echoing Levins and Lewontin. Jablonka and Lamb also propose group selection rather than individual selection, which counters the neo-Darwinian idea of the gene as the unit of selection by proposing groups of cells or individuals as units of selection instead (similar to Gilbert’s holobiont concept).

Cognizant of the fact that inheritance at the social and behavioral level are different compared to the genetic and epigenetic level, Jablonka and Lamb argue against the neo-Darwinian idea that genes can explain social behaviors and their evolution. They point out that behavioral traits are not inherited due to changes at the genetic level, but through a fusion of collective and individual activities. Put simply, complex social groupings such as families, professional groups, religion, etc. affect the way we behave and what behaviors are inherited and propagated.

In his analysis of evolutionary theory using dialectics, biologist and philosopher Julio Munõz-Rubio further argues that this mechanism of inheritance is essentially a dialectical one: Jablonka and Lamb’s work implies the evolutionary process to be a synthesis between genetic factors and environmental influences, which Levins and Lewontin had described as “two opposed, active, and mutually selective elements,” thus forming “a dialectical Aufhebung of the organism-environment.”11

Principles for a Theory of Organisms

Since the molecular biology revolution in the 1950s starting with Watson, Crick, and Franklin’s discovery of the structure of DNA, and the consequent establishment of the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology, experimental biology has been steadily alienated from its counterpart: theory. This is not to say that biological theories didn’t exist, but were rather abandoned as a source from which to generate hypotheses. Increasingly, in the frenzy of data-driven science, aided by a genetic deterministic outlook and advanced sequencing techniques, a reductionist science has emerged, in which experiments are designed to validate presuppositions and hypotheses rather than test a theory. A simpler version of this can be found in large genetic screen studies for complex diseases, with follow-up experiments being carried out on only a handful of chosen genes, while at the same time the experiment is already biased by establishing hypotheses a priori without a proper theoretical framework.

The ORGANISM group recognized the lack of a proper biological theory of the organism, one which would be a complement to evolutionary theory but would describe the life cycle of the organism from conception to death.12 In an attempt to fulfill that absence, the group established three major principles that would serve as the basis for a theory of the organisms that would refute the dominant reductionist understanding. These principles were established on the basis of two important realizations—(1) there exist differences between inert and living that require separate theoretical development, and (2) in biology, “ontogenesis and evolution are about relentless changes of symmetries, and the phase-space is being created along rather than set a priori.” These realizations are also attempts to dispel the thoughtless borrowing of theories from other fields, mainly physics, to explain biological phenomena. This exchange has, for example, resulted in the adoption of vernacular from information theory to describe biological interactions, such as “program” and “signaling,” with the implicit, but often unrecognized, implication that organisms are machines.13

The principles established by the ORGANISM group for a theory of organisms are:14

1.A principle of biological inertia—the “default state” of proliferation with variation and motility: cells are not meant to be quiescent, but actively moving and proliferating, with new traits evolving.
2.A principle of variation that accounts for the emergence of novelty through development and evolution: compared to physical objects, biological objects are undergoing constant change–from one cell division to organ development to reproduction.
3.A principle of organization that accounts for the stability of organisms: organization stems from constraints, environmental or internal, acting on the biological unit, whether cells or tissues.

These principles present a radical transformation for experimental biology. Allowing the organism the ability to create their own “norms” shifts the view away from the organism as a passive agent of change; as both theoretical and experimental studies show, organisms act on their environments to create constraints on their own mobility and proliferation.14

In fact, these principles are able to resolve long-standing confusions within the cancer research field. For example, the Tissue Organization Field Theory (TOFT), proposed by ORGANISM group members Ana Soto and Carlos Sonnenschein, posits the default state of a cell as proliferation with variation and motility, and views cancer as a tissue-based disease. Combined with the principle of organization, TOFT shows that carcinogenesis arises from the disruption of interactions between the stromal and epithelial compartments of the tissue.16 Simply put, cancer does not result from resting cells suddenly growing out of control, but rather because the constraints that kept the cells out of their default state (proliferation and motility) were removed. In doing so, TOFT provides an explanation for emergent properties observed within carcinogenesis, which the dominant reductionist Somatic Mutation Theory (SMT) is unable to.17

At first glance, it is obvious that these principles and dialectics both share an anti-reductionist nature, and stress the importance of interactions between the organism and its environment, and between the multiple levels of biological organization. Engels’s dialectics of nature, à la Levins and Lewontin and Gilbert and Tauber, is also observed within the applications of these principles to biological phenomena—the first law is exemplified by a developing organism that undergoes phase changes (akin to those of physical objects), the second law is manifested in TOFT (where the epithelial-stromal dynamic is central to carcinogenesis) and the third law in the default proliferative state of cells that produce variation.18


Beyond Theory and Towards Praxis

It is important to emphasize that the way science is is not how it has to be, that its present structure is not imposed by nature but by capitalism, and that it is not necessary to emulate this system of doing science.

—Richard Levins & Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (1985)


Current science is predominantly considered to be apolitical and rational, free of value judgment. This illusion, created by decades of entrenchment of bourgeois philosophy, has quietly transformed scientists and trainees into the “biomedical workforce”–a proletarianization of scientists, so to speak.19 The consequences of such a phenomenon have been described elsewhere and much more eloquently, but it is necessary to ask, then, what does it mean to practice Marxist science today?

In writing for the revitalized Science for the People magazine, Helen Zhao discusses how science, both theory and praxis, can be radicalized and what the movement’s goals should be.20 Reviewing comments from a host of scientists-activists, she asks “where do the ‘experts’ and ‘expertise’ belong—if anywhere—in a science emancipated, a science for the people?” For the answer, we can look towards Caudwell’s formulation of proletarian science:

Caudwell said quite firmly that it was not a matter of imposing the dictatorship of the proletariat on science. It was not a matter of the honest worker telling the scientist what was what in his laboratory or in his theory. Nothing was to be imposed on science. Nothing was to be imposed on the scientist, not even by himself. It was a matter of assimilation of the scientist to the cause of the proletariat, to the construction of a new society in which he played his full part within the process and as a scientist. Science was to be developed by scientists, but a new type of scientist, with his feet more firmly on the ground, with his mind more opened to the whole, with his life and work more organically connected to the society of which he formed a part.21

The recent wave of graduate student organizing can be seen as a precursor to the development of such a consciousness, one of a scientist assimilated to the cause of the proletariat—one that Richard Lewontin certainly would have approved of. It is now up to us to carry on his legacy and construct a new society and a new science.

Nafis Hasan received his PhD in 2019 from Tufts University in Cell, Molecular & Developmental Biology. He currently works in the labor movement and is an Associate Faculty at Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. He is also a climate organizer with the Democratic Socialists of America and an editor at Science for the People and Jamhoor.

Notes:
1.↩ Frederick Engels, Dialectics of Nature (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1940).
2.↩ Ernst Mayr, “Roots of Dialectical Materialism,” 2005, ihst.ru
3.↩ Helena Sheehan, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History (London: Verso, 2018), 207.
4.↩ Nikolai Bukharin et al., Science at the Crossroads (London: Bush House, 1931).
5.↩ Lamarckism refers to the idea that environmental changes lead to alterations in behavior and organ usage, thus affecting how traits evolve and are inherited (also known as inheritance of acquired characteristics). Morganism advocated for mutations as the only determining factor for evolution, by pointing out that only inherited characters could affect evolution. See Sheehan, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science, 207.
6.↩ Mechanistic materialism is a rigid and deterministic materialism in which the world is governed by natural laws that can be described in mathematical terms, and in turn, all natural phenomena can be reduced to physics and chemistry. See Sheehan, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science, 207.
7.↩ Dialectical idealism is the idea that all changes in the natural world can be described to a supernatural being and favors ideas over matter as ontological forces. See Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (Harvard University Press, 1985), 132–160.
8.↩ Levins and Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, 85–106.
9.↩ Scott F. Gilbert and Alfred I. Tauber, “Rethinking Individuality: The Dialectics of the Holobiont.” Biology and Philosophy 31 (2016), 839–853, doi.org
10.↩ Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb, Epigenetic Inheritance and Evolution: The Lamarckian Dimension (Oxford University Press, 1995).
11.↩ Julio Munoz-Rubio, “Dialectics and Neo-Lamarckianism Against the Fetishism of Genes,” in The Truth is the Whole: Essays in Honor of Richard Levins, ed. Maynard S. Clark, Peter J. Taylor, and Tamara Awerbuch (Cambridge, MA: Pumping Station, 2018), 34–55.
12.↩ The ORGANISM group was formed by Ana Soto, as part of her Blaise Pascal Chair position at Ecole Normale Superieure (Paris), and includes theoretical and experimental biologists, mathematicians and philosophers (more details here). See also Ana M. Soto, Giuseppe Longo, and Denis Noble, “Preface to ‘From the Century of the Genome to the Century of the Organism: New Theoretical Approaches’,” Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 122, no. 1 (October 2016): 1–3, doi.org
13.↩ Daniel J. Nicholson, “Organisms ≠ Machines,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44, no. 4-B (December 2013): 669–678, doi.org
14.↩ Ana M. Soto et al., “Toward a Theory of Organisms: Three Founding Principles in Search of a Useful Integration,” Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 122, no. 1 (October 2016): 77–82, doi.org
15.↩ Clifford Barnes et al., “From Single Cells to Tissues: Interactions between the Matrix and Human Breast Cells in Real Time,” PLoS One 9, no. 4 (2014): e93325, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0093325; Maël Montévil et al., “Modeling Mammary Organogenesis from Biological First Principles: Cells and Their Physical Constraints,” Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 122, no. 1 (October 2016): 58–69, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2016.08.004; Leonardo Bich, Matteo Mossio, and Ana M. Soto, “Glycemia Regulation: From Feedback Loops to Organizational Closure,” Frontiers in Physiology 11 (February 18, 2020): 69, doi.org
16.↩ Carlos Sonnenschein and Ana M. Soto, “Carcinogenesis Explained within the Context of a Theory of Organisms,” Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 122, no. 1 (October 2016): 70–76, doi.org
17.↩ SMT posits that cancer is a cell-based disease, and mutations cause quiescent cells to proliferate. Several factors confound such premises, namely the presence of similar “oncogenic” mutations in normal tissue, the varying numbers of mutations observed across tumor types, cancers arising from non-mutational events (e.g., foreign-body carcinogenesis), etc. See Ana M. Soto and Carlos Sonnenschein, “Emergentism as a Default: Cancer as a Problem of Tissue Organization,” Journal of Biosciences 30, no. 1 (February 2005): 103–18, https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02705155; see also Ana M. Soto and Carlos Sonnenschein, “The Tissue Organization Field Theory of Cancer: A Testable Replacement for the Somatic Mutation Theory,” BioEssays: News and Reviews in Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology 33, no. 5 (May 2011): 332–40, https://doi.org/10.1002/bies.201100025; Carlos Sonnenschein and Ana M. Soto, “The Death of the Cancer Cell,” Cancer Research 71, no. 13 (2011): 4334–4337, doi.org
18.↩ Giuseppe Longo and Ana M. Soto, “Why Do We Need Theories?,” Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 122, no. 1 (October 2016): 4–10, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2016.06.005; Ana M. Soto et al., “The Biological Default State of Cell Proliferation with Variation and Motility, a Fundamental Principle for a Theory of Organisms,” Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 122, no. 1 (October 2016): 16–23, doi.org
19.↩ Yuri Lazebnik, “Are Scientists a Workforce?–Or, How Dr. Frankenstein Made Biomedical Research Sick: A Proposed Plan to Rescue U.S. Biomedical Research from Its Current ‘Malaise’ Will Not Be Effective as It Misdiagnoses the Root Cause of the Disease,” EMBO Reports 16, no. 12 (December 2015): 1592–1600, doi.org
20.↩ Helen Zhao, “What is a Radical Analysis of Science?,” Science for the People 22, no. 1 (2019), magazine.scienceforthepeople.org
21.↩ Sheehan, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science, 382.

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Fri Jul 29, 2022 4:25 pm

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An American Marxist from Hong Kong talks about how he came to Marxism and the current state of Marxism in the United States.

<snip>

The state of Marxism in the USA

I must admit that at the moment I do not have an overall picture of Marxism in the United States that would fully satisfy my conscience. However, I can share what I know.

Americans avoid Marxism like the devil avoids holy water. Yes, sometimes scientists and students oppose capitalism in impassioned speeches. On the whole, however, there is as yet no broad recognition of Marxism as the most important proletarian scientific theory, as well as a broad recognition of the need for a Marxist political party. Even collective action at the union level is fraught with difficulties. As you would expect under capitalism, the bourgeoisie and bourgeois ideas completely dominate all walks of life. The American bourgeoisie has spent decades painstakingly "educating" people about individualism and capitalism. Many cannot even recognize the possibility of an alternative. American popular culture and politics are so toxic that no one but "educated" people in universities believes that anyone is really working for the good of society.

Marxists will have to be creative and persistent to convince the proletarians. I have come across several self-proclaimed Marxist scholars, but I don't know if they are revisionists, what the scope of their activities is, whether they are ignored or opposed by the bourgeoisie. Perhaps people are trying their best. I don't want to discount them without even knowing about them or talking to them first. In any case, it is safe to say that the overall spread of Marxism in the US is practically nil, and that Marxists, myself included, are too timid, ignorant, lazy, and weak to lead the masses at this time. The solution is obvious: a correct understanding of Marxism and tempering of the personality are necessary.

On the other hand, in the United States we have an overwhelming and upside-down bourgeois historiography that slings mud at Lenin, Stalin and the USSR as a whole. In practice, to move forward, Marxists in the West simply have to learn how to defend the Soviet experience against the dishonest, anachronistic, banal, ill-founded, and unrealistic "analyses" of bourgeois academics and the bourgeois media. Marxists must always be ready to explain to the masses the reasons for the destruction of the USSR—the opportunist degeneration of the Party as a consequence of the activity of opportunist elements openly hostile to communism. For me, coming to Marxism became possible only after studying some Marxist texts and understanding their correctness, scientific perfection. In practice, coming to Marxism also requires a reassessment of Soviet history, a study of how what is Marxism in general terms, and familiarization with some first-hand accounts of the October Revolution and the era of Stalin. The American media and academia are anti-communist through and through. It takes a certain level of intellectual militancy, economic deprivation, and independent learning to rise up against bourgeois domination.

The Social Democrats in the United States are much stronger than the Marxist-Leninists because Social Democracy is more acceptable to middle-class Americans who are addicted to gadgets and comic book fantasies. Recently, the Social Democrats have attempted to create a People's Party to represent the people (what is meant by "the people"?) in American elections. Again, there is simply no recognition of the need to create a working-class Marxist party. Marxism is not seen as a guiding theory. Eclecticism reigns in the minds. It doesn't fit in my head how a proletarian can call himself a social democrat after the opportunism of the Second International and their outright betrayal of the interests of the working class and communism.

The question no one asks in the United States is: What class does the People's Party even represent? A proletarian whose life can only be improved by abolishing private property relations, or a middle-class liberal humanist who never even seriously considered ending capitalism? My readers know that these two groups have very different aspirations! Americans still talk about majorities versus minorities and political persuasion rather than specific social classes. This kind of political brainlessness is the result of decades of liberalism and capitalism. Many American leftists have positive feelings about the Roosevelt era. Some bourgeois professors call this period the Golden Age of Capitalism. Even today we hear leftists talking about how Roosevelt and his economists regulated the economy and taxed the rich, as if the same political situation did not exist today, as if these solutions also apply to today, and as if Roosevelt himself was not an ardent imperialist. They will never be able to admit that it was the USSR that forced the Western countries to appease their own proletarians through various forms of bribing the proletariat. This idea is another factor that distracts a person from Marxism. Instead of learning why a revolution is necessary, man is now learning how to regulate capitalism. In this logic, if any society can be perfected through research and regulation, why aren't we still living in a slave society? If we accept that there are relations of production,

As far as American "communism" is concerned, some people go to the RCP (Revolutionary Communist Party), whose members behave like fans of their leader. These people set fire to garbage cans and yelled at the workers for not being as revolutionary as they are (because, in their opinion, driving the workers away with hysterics is revolutionary). These crazy individuals are one of the best gifts from the bourgeoisie to discredit the cause of communism. Their behavior very effectively denigrates communism as something not well thought out and studied enough. Communism becomes something unscientific and impulsive. Apart from the RCP, Trotskyism dominates the field of American "Marxism" in general. At almost every strike I participated in, Trotskyists were present to hand out their materials.

In practice, the Trotskyists have complete freedom of action in this regard. There is not a single genuine Marxist or Marxist party who would offer any material to expose the Trotskyists in their crimes: careerism, empty verbiage, unscrupulousness, opportunism, adventurism, counter-revolutionary actions, murders and sabotage in collaboration with the Nazis. Many American students, workers and intellectuals are petty-bourgeois through and through, concerned only with their careers, conservative and dismissive of the history of the USSR under Lenin and Stalin, so, naturally, Trotskyism appeals to these Americans. Young intellectuals are often unable to completely break with their bourgeois upbringing in American universities and break with the worldview of their parents. The dominance of Trotskyism is a consequence of the historiography of the USSR turned on its head under Stalin, caused by decades of Trotskyist and bourgeois fury. Like a virus, Trotskyism mutates quickly, which is why there are many Trotskyist groups in the United States. Trotskyist groups need to be calculated, it is quite easy to do this by their praise of Trotsky and the putrefactive poison they pour on Stalin. Once they are found, we must either ignore them or expose them if they are of great influence. Some time ago I learned from some communists abroad that the CPUSA was revisionist through and through. I recently learned about the Marxist-Leninist parties: PCUSA and PSL. I don't yet know the theories or practices of these parties, so I keep an open mind. However, it is clear that the fact that that these parties do not fight the Trotskyists at all and do not carry out theoretical work. To be fair, I would subject myself to the same criticism.

On the other hand, there are admittedly no recognized Marxist political leaders in the United States. I would argue that one of the reasons Americans are so reactionary is simply that there are not (or not enough) worthy and competent Marxist leaders who would go to the masses to listen to them and put their collective struggle on a scientific Marxist track. . A person's understanding of genuine Marxist theory is necessary in order to be able to attract other people to Marxism. When there are no such people, how can a party or a movement exist?

Finally, something must be said about cowardice. Americans are not blind. We know that income inequality exists and is getting worse. We intuitively know that many are poor because few are rich. We intuitively know that the capitalist system is unjust and that it works against the proletariat. Moreover, I cannot be the only person who thinks that bourgeois professors are misleading the public in the interests of the bourgeoisie. Why don't we turn to the experience of the Russian Revolution of 1917 for an outlet? Why don't we give Marxism at least a fair shake-up? The answer must also include an acknowledgment of laziness and cowardice. Yes, theories are extremely important, but behind the theory is the fact that we are too lazy and too spineless to do the right thing. Comrades must first of all encourage and convince the masses, but we must sometimes honestly criticize ourselves and the proletariat in order to move forward. I will be the first to criticize myself: yes, I can do better, and I promise to do better. I believe that Molotov said well:

“The working class can break out of capitalist conditions only at the cost of sacrifice, and if anyone wants without sacrifice, then it is worth signing up for another party - the party of pacifists, idlers, talkers and hopeless bourgeois ideologists. The only way. Because the working class can break out of these capitalist conditions only with the greatest sacrifices. You don’t want to, well, then sit in slavery. There is no other way."

Capitalism will only decay further. It does not have the capacity to deal with all the pressing problems of the day that the proletariat faces. Only under communism can we begin to consider and solve the problems created by capitalism, from which the proletariat suffers. However, our complaints about inequality do not abolish private property relations. Only revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat can destroy the relations of private property. Now every proletarian has a choice: fight or complain. Every proletarian has complete freedom of choice. If we choose the path of struggle, many proletarians will have to sacrifice themselves, and the position of many will temporarily even become worse than under capitalism. However, if the proletarian chooses inaction, blind obedience to the bourgeois class, then the fate of him, his children and grandchildren, as well as the whole of human society will undoubtedly be tragic. The sacrifices that the proletariat will have to make in this case will be many times greater. Moreover, they will be sacrificed to the interests of the parasitic capitalist class.

The success of our struggle will depend not only on our theory and practice (which in itself already requires titanic efforts), but also on the strength of our opponents and on objective conditions that are beyond our control. The choice and the consequences are known. No lies. No fantasy. Don't know what choice to make? On a bad day, I sometimes have doubts too! My advice to novice Marxists is to keep reading classic Marxist texts and articles by scientific centralists, think things through with the utmost conscience, subject yourself to self-criticism, get rid of bourgeois patterns in thinking. My choice only became easier for me as I read more. In addition, Soviet novels, Soviet art, Soviet stories about the October Revolution, Soviet biographies of Lenin, Stalin, etc.,

In conclusion, the basic structure of Marxist political practice can be summarized as follows:

1) The recognition of Marxist-Leninist theory as the guiding scientific theory for the proletariat. Active study and assimilation of Marxist-Leninist theory by the proletariat, especially its leaders.
2) Recognition of the Marxist political party as the leading force of the proletarian movement; active organization and scientific and theoretical education of the members who form such a party.
3) Recognition of the need and active practice of uniting the broad masses with the Party; also recognition of the leading role of the Marxist party among the proletarian masses.
4) Ideological and political destruction of all forms of opportunism practiced by self-serving and/or ignorant people (opportunists) who represent all non-Marxist and non-scientific tendencies both outside and inside the party: careerism, social democracy, liberal democracy, conservatism, libertarianism, revisionism , utopianism, nationalism, reformism, parliamentarianism, idealism, ultra-leftism, Trotskyism, tailism, economism, petty-bourgeois romanticism, trade unionism, identity politics, and so on.
5) Continuous efforts to raise the class consciousness of the masses in order to turn the masses into a revolutionary force capable of overthrowing capitalism. When a revolutionary situation arises, the party will lead a political struggle to wrest power from the bourgeoisie, blow up the bourgeois dictatorial state and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. After that, the proletariat will begin to break down the relations of private property and will enter the next stage of social development, which will finally begin to make possible the all-round happiness and all-round development of all people.

This is my plan for the US Marxists. It is fair to say that Marxist theory and practice are practically not recognized (Nos. 1-3) because of the extremely low theoretical level. My assessment of the state of Marxism in the USA is 2! What a shame for all of us American communists!

Conclusion
When I was younger, there was always a question I wanted adults to answer. However, I never asked this question because I knew they didn't have an answer. The question was: why is the world in such a mess? Suppose a child asks me the same question. If I could honestly tell him that I tried my best, even though we weren't successful yet, then I would consider that my life was not wasted.

Now I can say that I joined the trade union because I realized that the proletariat must fight for its rights. I can say that, despite my personal economic hardships and humiliation at the hands of the bourgeoisie, I was able to move beyond the trade union movement and move towards Marxism, even when virtually all of my teachers considered it immoral and unscientific. I hope to say that I helped create a non-revisionist and non-Trotskyist Marxist party. Finally, I must be able to honestly and unequivocally tell my children that they themselves must continue this historic struggle for universal happiness.

(c) Volume

https://prorivists.org/71_marxism-in-usa/ - link in full

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7766091.html

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Originally published at a Russian Marxist site.
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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Mon Aug 01, 2022 4:14 pm

Democratic centralism as a source of opportunism in the Communist Party
Translated by Ekaterina Smirnova

Part I
The problem is still not solved
As you know, since the collapse of the First International, all created communist parties declined after a while and left the historical stage. However, one fallen party was replaced by new ones and, in spite of repressions, terror and persecution, the parties with communist names exist today all over the world, except those countries where European colonialism and religion do their best to stop the cultural development of people. The European experience of the last decade shows that the expansion of red flags at demonstrations of European workers is caused only by capitalism itself, and, especially, for a wonder, by American one.

Anticommunists do not understand a simple thing. The complete destruction of the communist movement needs liquidation of its cause: the institute of hired mental and manual labor, i.e., the exploitation of a man by a businessman.

Actually it would be great if communism directly comes from capitalism as capitalism directly comes from slavery and feudalism, being another advanced form of parasitism. Communism is a product and dialectic negation of capitalism and all types of exploitative, parasitic social orders. Historical originality of communism, its fundamental difference even with primitive communism makes the fight for communism quite complicated in theory and in practice, destined to the intense resistance of all parasitic forces.

The classics of Marxism, in due time, made a lot of research work, specified some historical reasons of the Internationals collapse. Certainly, decisions and organizational arrangements were made, but none of it led to the desired result. Collapse of the communist parties occurred long before accomplishment of its historical mission.

Each following collapse proves that the main “antidote” is still not found, and the question remains: what will happen first — the worldwide victory of communism or the destruction of human civilization in the third World War, started by the oligarchs for redistribution of already divided world. Anyway, the oligarchs do not waste time and do their best to start a world war being fully prepared.

You have to be completely unscrupulous person to think that the classics of Marxism had to give future communists all answers concerning the theory of party construction, so that there will be nothing for future generations of party members but to be proud of their leaders, to quote them and to use blindly CENTURY-OLD methods of the party building. The classics seriously hoped that the next generation of the communists will develop the theory deeply and particularly. But the theory development is inexcusably ignored by the existing communist movement.

The constitution stands in a way of some “communists”
Not long ago, First Secretary of the RCWP (Russian Communist Workers’ Party, http://www.rkrp.ru) V. Tyulkin and President of the Labor Academy Fund M. Popov have issued a common paper, 40% of which consists of randomly selected quotations from Marxism-Leninism classics and… Bukharin. And since 30% of the text, on the average, belongs to Tyulkin, and 30% belongs to Popov, the paper is quite eclectic. If we do not take into account such formal phrases, as “Lenin learned… said… specified… wrote…” or “as stated in the USSR Constitution of 1936…”, it turns out that no more than 25% of meaningful phrases belong to the authors.

The meaning of the paper of Tyulkin and Popov lies in the following thesis. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the CPSU [the Communist Party of the Soviet Union] in 1991 was caused by… the USSR Constitution of 1936, which, supposedly, abolished the dictatorship of the proletariat [this refers to the fact that the elections by production districts were replaced by the elections by territorial districts. In fact, cancellation of production principle changed nothing, as the overwhelming majority of deputies continued to be nominated by the industrial proletariat, or particularly, by the enterprises workers — translator’s note].

The authors pretend they do not understand that the “guilt” of the USSR Constitution of 1936 could be proven only if all the following general secretaries of the CPSU led the party according to the Stalin Constitution. During 55 years after Stalin’s death, five general secretaries of the CPSU, replacing and blaming each other one by one, changing the party program and the USSR Constitution, however, if we believe Tyulkin and Popov, blindly and strictly, especially Khrushchev, followed the Stalin Constitution till August 19, 1991 and therefore led to the collapse of the party, to a big surprise for CIA and the United States.

Of course, the authors may say they meant only that Stalin’s refusal of proletariat dictatorship in the Soviet Union was premature. But if there was the abolition of the dictatorship of the proletariat in 1936, it would mean the restoration of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. However, even the official economist Popov would never say that the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie was restored in the Soviet Union in 1936. This way it turns out: the dictatorship of the proletariat is liquidated, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is not restored, then, it is to assume that the authors, as Trotsky, blame the CPSU in establishing its own dictatorship.

Therefore, we have to admit that, firstly, the leaders of the RCWP and the Labor Academy Fund, stand on the Trotsky-Khrushchev’s position in the estimation of the CPSU history, and secondly, they think that dictatorship of the proletariat and the election of deputies to the Soviets by production districts are the same. And this is an absolute khvostism [following in the tail] and misunderstanding of dialectic essence of the working class dictatorship [we recommend to read about the dictatorship of the proletariat “The Foundations of Leninism”, “The Questions of Leninism”, “Questions and Answers” by Joseph Stalin — translator’s note].

Before that only dissidents used such logic in the description of the CPSU history. It may be enough to Popov and Tyulkin, instead of covering the issue in a hurry, to reflect on the question, for example, why the Communists need a constitution, if there is a scientific theory and based on it party program. But the leaders of the RCWP and many of today’s Left fall in truisms: “How come? All civilized countries have a constitution, and why can’t we be as good as them?” Many members of the Communist parties who fight for classless society, do not notice the absurd in their own actions when admire constitutionalism born by the defects of the class society. These comrades collect signatures required by the bourgeois constitution, bring the lists to the Ministry of Justice, beg for the registration to participate in the bourgeois parliament, mourn, if the officials do not give them registration documents, which breaks the democratic principles, as many members of the party think.

The members of the left parties, admiring the constitution, have to understand that the constitution, both in form and in content was created by slave owners, not the Bolsheviks. Originally it is detailed indulgence for the force institutions to maintain the order beneficial for the oligarchs only.

It is known that the earliest constitutions and bills were always ratified by the minority of the population, ignoring opinions and interests of the majority, for example, slaves, children, women, population of the colonies, aborigines, illiterate segment of society, infidels, etc.

Historically, the constitution is a document maintaining by coercion the existing class order, and the maximum benefit of this order always goes to the oligarchs. In particular, even a bright representative of American oligarchs Zbigniew Brzezinski was shocked by the effects that covered America after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1990 — he said in his interview for Komsomolskaya Pravda, — the salary of American companies top-management was only 70 times more than the salary of the average American. Now, this difference increased to 325 times.

What can we say about the intellectual and moral qualities of Brzezinski, if he knew that the difference in payment between higher and lower positions in the Soviet Union did not exceed three times, and the difference in the US was 70 times even at that time? Apparently it was not too difficult to guess that US oligarchs were fighting against the Soviet Union exactly to get rid of all upper limits of income.

But the income gap is not all. The Left must understand that the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights did not stop the practice of Lynch courts or scalping white invaders by the Indians and did not prohibit white men to bury thousands of killed Indians in the ditches. The Bill of Rights, as century-old history of the US shows, did not mind the crucifixion of Obama’s countrymen. This constitution was conceived and stated in such a way that, finally, most of the Indians were buried, and the rest were herded into reservations, the Negros were burned on crosses for a hundred years, and no one was invited to Nuremberg or The Hague to be in charge for that, but the US prisons are still the world leaders in capacity, amount and degree of isolation of prisoners, full of mostly “colored” youth and representatives of the poor. And the oligarchs continue to pay off by money and lawyers. Therefore, only the naive person can see the power of constitution to guarantee someone something democratic.

The constitution is a documentary proof of antagonism in pre-communist social orders based on private property. The constitutions are legal allusions on the fact that eating each other antagonistic classes, clans, nations and religions are restrained only by the power of police, army and prisons, that in the civil, legal society based on the private property, EVERYBODY is ready to destroy EVERYONE, but the rules of the game and the power institutions stated by the constitution, slightly slow down and regulate this process.

But why do the communists have to write the constitutions?
As for the Soviet Union in 1936, it is necessary to take into account that the consciousness of the USSR population just began to come out of age-old traditions of aggressive class relations. At least, an excellent Kremlin dreamer [expression of Herbert Wells, which is considered in Russia to be ironic to the writer, because it shows a very bad understanding of Lenin and his plans of building of socialism, which have been successfully completed — translator’s note] and an optimist, Lenin, supposed that elimination of petty bourgeois anachronism in people minds will take decades, and perhaps a century. Many facts showed that in the mind of some Soviet people of those years remained parasitic “values” of exploiting society. Nothing else can explain Ukrainian SS divisions or “Vlasov Army” [Army of the traitor General Vlasov], which mainly consisted of ethnic Russians — supporters of kulaks [bourgeois peasants] revival in Russia.

That is why the Bolshevik version of the USSR Constitution contains Marxist provisions about destruction of society division into classes and, therefore, for the first time in human history, Marxism as a science has become a settled law, which sooner or later makes constitution unnecessary. The same as professional doctor does not follow the rules of law, but relies entirely on the scientific truth, communist society members interact with each other on the basis of scientific knowledge of the objective laws of these interactions.

According to objective laws, liquidation of class society, first of all, requires EVERY born child to perceive the heights of contemporary culture. That is why it was the USSR (not England, for example), that liquidated the centuries-old mass illiteracy and established a tradition, according to which, for example, Timiryazev, Tsiolkovsky, Pavlov, Zhukovsky, Kapitsa periodically gave academic lectures to representatives of a completely non-academic circles of the Soviet workers, competently involving them into the highest science achievements.

The Bolshevik Party had to develop their own constitutions, i.e. to resolve LEGAL problem, specific only to the class society, not because of the communism building, and not even because of the massive class of small peasant bourgeoisie, but because of the fact that a large mass of peasants, proletarians and intellectuals were not ready to thoroughly investigate Marxism.

In Tsarist Russia, as in all civilized countries of that time, uneducated or far from science philistine was the majority of the population. He did not understand scientific language of communism, and therefore perceived the science-based rules of community life mostly by coercion.

The feudal-bourgeois rulers of Russia even more than their European blood relatives, always tried hard to get rid of peasants, proletarians, foreigners and women in the higher educational institutions of Russia. And the order in the country was maintained, if not by the Inquisition, but by the church, the oprichnina, the Secret Offices, the gendarmerie, the deportation, the hard labor in exile, the mass floggings, the hanging and the executions. It is difficult to find among the Russian tsars the one, who was not trying to prove that he is able to exploit his servants better than his European crowned relatives. There has always been the competition in tyranny between the monarchs.

Five peasant wars and three Russian revolutions convincingly proved that the Russian tsars tyrannized peoples of Russia harder than their relatives, England Queens and German emperors. Moreover, exactly tsarist Russia, not the United States, played the role of European gendarme in the 19th century. That is why before Lomonosov Russia did not have its own scientists in the field of mathematics, physics, chemistry, philosophy, political economy, and was famous only by generals, wooden architecture, icons and fairy tales.

It is a small surprise that in the world culture the tsarist Russia for a long time was known by people of art (from Rublev to Petipa), not by scientists and engineers. This way Russian public conscience before the Bolsheviks had a rich artistic tradition, but low, according to its influence, technical and scientific tradition. The philosophical tradition vegetated for centuries in theology.

One of the objective reasons that most of the intellectuals become just artistic, lies in the fact that scientific and theoretical type of consciousness is more complicated to learn, and artistic type of consciousness is mostly based on natural instincts, on emotions, it easily creates in a person the illusion of his exclusiveness. Those who had inborn artistic potential usually started early to be thirsty for glory and popularity. Among these glory hunters were Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn, Nureyev, Rostropovich, Rasputin, Astafyev, Zhvanetsky, Khazanov, Bykovs, Belovs, Baklanov, Nagibin, Granin, Iskander, Yerofeyev, and many other anti-Soviets and anti-communists.

Solzhenitsyn’s book Russia under Avalanche is the best literary monument to a man and all dissidents, whose conscience was strangled by vanity and ignorance. This literary “Moses” who had been leading the dissidents for forty years and led them into market democracy and, demonstrating unprecedented dishonesty, asks indignantly: “Is there in the world history such a massive betrayal of its sons by Motherland, how instantly we left the sixth of the Russian people beyond the borders of Russia without any protection and care?” For real, the history does not know the betrayal on this scale. But the name of the Nobel Laureate, who made more than anyone else for these betrayers formation, she knows exactly. Solzhenitsyn.

But when the lack of scientific consciousness is compensated by good conscience, society gets Lermontov, Pushkin, Nekrasov, Chernyshevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, Andreev, Mayakovsky, Sholokhov, Jalil, Rozhdestvensky, Gamzatov, Karpov, Prokhanov. But in the current market conditions, artistic talent hardly ever combines with moral and political purity.

Therefore, taking into account the gap in the scientific level of public conscious, the party had to include middle peasants and artistic intellectuals into building non-exploiting society by more familiar to them, legally enforceable standards of conduct. Even today, there is no evidence in the information space that even one member of intelligentsia have studied Science of Logic by Hegel and, therefore, got rid of disordered, chaotic “way of thinking”. The Communist Party had to appeal to legal tools because of the dissident spirit of intellectuals, which extremely gets in the way of a new man, who is free of political show-off, self-obsession, who is passionate about creating new, non-antagonistic society.

Reading books and memoirs of many writers of that time — Bunin, Oseev and Aleksey Tolstoy, even Bulgakov or Platonov — it was easy to saw how much they suffered from the absence of bourgeois charms of life, such as oysters, champagne with pineapples, “rooms” with prostitutes, opportunity to overspend while millions of workers and peasants were in giant material austerity, among backwardness and destruction left by the tsarism, the imperialistic war, the white band and 14 civilized countries-interventionists.

If you took any repentance of White Guard ex-supporter, which changed sides and became a simple representative of the Soviet artistic intelligentsia, if you got acquainted with the current self-assessment of his behavior under socialism, you would see that, on the one hand, he “created” socialist realism, and on the other hand, he needed up-to-the-minute popularity and recognition from the party leaders. Under socialism they accepted awards from Stalin and Brezhnev, under capitalism — from Yeltsin, “crying with joy” every time. In one of his recent books, defector V. Aksenov mockingly quotes enthusiastic poem of young Yevtushenko about… Stalin, demonstrating by that lick-spittling of his rival.

But those who under socialism did not have a chance to gain popularity because of absolutely mean abilities, now say that they proudly and bravely did not make a deal with the “regime” and as if it was the reason they could not publish their works. Although, after fall of the regime most of them did not create anything worthwhile or anything at all.

Many artistic intellectuals, talking about “the state of law”, the popular phrase during Perestroika, have not understood that every provision of law is a form of personality averaging. Therefore, while each citizen is an individual (sometimes microscopic), at the same time, this individual is free in civil society only within the constitution, not his potential in science and art.

Is Charlie Chaplin, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs were not crushed by the US Constitution? Is the tragic end of Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston not bright demonstration of “civil society” nature, that can not guarantee to a talented man right to life in the market constitutional state.

They may say that the Soviet model of socialism also dealt with intellectuals hardly and cruelly. Yes, but the fact is that all representatives of the Soviet punitive authorities and the party leaders of NKVD era were born and educated not in communism, but in a religious, feudal and bourgeois-democratic Russia, and for them a prison, hard labor, gallows, firing squad and a war were absolutely everyday occurrence. In his memoirs, Kerensky specified that the first officers of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (the Cheka), until the mid-30s, consisted of ex-nobles, gendarme officers, “professionals” who joined the Bolsheviks after Kerensky dispersed the gendarmerie. And it is hard to wait for sentiments of these gendarmes, taking to account their mentality. It was necessary to control them and to punish. Many people complain about the informing against others, supposedly prevailed in the Soviet society. And who reported on whom? There is even no need to delve in archives of the KGB. Until 1937 only one category of people in the USSR could fluently and convincingly write reports to the authorities — pre-revolutionary intellectuals. Why ALL Bolsheviks went through the prison and hard labor? Because all of them were systematically informed against. Could the informant be rectified for ten years after the revolution? No.

The constitution and science, philistines and communists
“Dulles’ Plan”, and born by this plan the Fulbright Program, the works of Gene Sharp, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Krieble Institute, whose work during “perestroika” in USSR was so fruitful that the brain of a modern Russian intellectual still perceives anything related to communist science and practice as something meaningless in general, although the decisions and actions of democratically elected presidents prone to alcohol, whether it’s Nixon, Yeltsin or Bush, and verdicts of randomly selected jury, or the laws passes by the lobbyists in the parliament, like a lamb accepts as legal, regardless of its irrational and criminal character. They think that the solution, found in the fight at the Duma tribune, more lawful, civilized, democratic, than the solution, found by the genius near the lake Razliv [a reference to the fundamental work of Lenin “The State and Revolution”].

Democratic journalists, for example from Novaya Gazeta [the voice of Russian liberals], seem inadequate when systematically scream about the widespread corruption, about catastrophic moral decadence, about organized crime and police atrocities, at the same time, do not want to understand that all these deformities are the result of market constitutional democracy, which they protect from the communists. These deformities are caused by the market constitutionality as the darkness is caused by the sunset. Many intellectuals do not understand that everything that they face today and call the most abusive epithets is a product of their free choice, the inevitable consequence of the constitutional system of any class society. Because of these and many other objective reasons, the constitution can not be the basic document for the formation of the communist behavior. The constitution is a palliative, whose existence caused by the ignorance of the exploited.

Strictly speaking, the 1936 Constitution was written not for the communists but by the communist for the undereducated segment of the population. The constitution just certifies the fact that there is a long way to communism, and that it is necessary to build current social relations taking into account the heterogeneity of society, including the use of violence to persons resistant to the implementation of scientifically verified program of communism building.

Therefore, under socialism it takes place the opposite construction of value system, which requires the power protection. The bourgeois constitution declares private property to be sacred and inviolable. The socialist constitution declares public property to be science-based and priority protected. And then, according to the experience of many international interventions against the Soviet Union, the principle “who wins” works, both domestically and in international relations. Marxists have never concealed or hidden this inevitable necessity of the first phase of communism.

Tyulkin and Popov never wondered if the Russian proletariat could build socialism before 1936 without the theory of Marxism-Leninism. It is a pity. The answer is obvious. NO, he could not! Therefore, what should the communists be guided by first of all? By the theory of Marxism or the constitution? It is clear that, without the development of the theory, the communist can not adequately improve the constitution and life at the local level, especially considering the rapidly changing situation and conditions of communism building. Only philistine can be satisfied by the constitution. But the communist can and should be guided ENTIRELY by scientific ideology.

For example, Trotsky’s attitude to scientific theory and its role in the authority of the party, was clearly demonstrated in his article in the newspaper Pravda dated April 23, 1920:

“Lenin, — Trotsky wrote, — is all in revolutionary action. His scientific work is only a preparation for action”.

And then we see absolutely Trotskyist ideological sabotage. “If he [Lenin] did not published in the past a single book, he would forever go down in history as the leader of the proletarian revolution, the founder of the III International”. It is hard to think up bigger nonsense.

Or is it possible? At least while reading the paper of Tyulkin and Popov, you start to doubt.

It is obvious that exactly the books of Lenin proved to young revolutionaries, that there was a real candidate for a leader among them. Stalin finally won Trotsky because he was definitely more qualified Leninist, creative thinker, who left behind all his opportunistic enemies, especially in theoretical form of the class struggle. As history showed, without Stalin neither Beria or Molotov or Kaganovich could stand against even a liberal-primitivist Khrushchev. And Khrushchev himself could oppose Stalin only a few years after his death.

It is anti-scientific to address the problems of the “proletarian dictatorship” without asking such questions as: were the USSR Constitutions of 1918 and 1924 and production principle in the Soviets elections the key factors in Stalin’s victory over all forms of Trotskyism and imperialism until 1936 or vice versa, only the rational application of Marxism theory by Stalin in the changing historical situation made it possible to develop the legal conditions when the working class dictatorship in the USSR practically eliminated the system of big bourgeois tyranny and let the party neutralize the opportunist leaders who used terroristic and diversionary methods of defending their “point of view”? What did Stalin address to in difficult situation? The text of the constitution or the works of the classics of Marxism? Where did he find victorious answers to current problems — in the constitution or in Marxism?

Even the simple fact that for the first seven years of socialism building in the USSR two constitutions were adopted, shows how quickly legal norms became obsolete, how often they should have been changed for bringing the law into accordance with the political achievements. But being adopted, the constitution turns into a thing of the past, it is ossified, and life goes forward rapidly.

Certainly, the question arises, why are the constitutions of many developed capitalist countries so stable? Only because conservatism is a critical need of the oligarchs turned into uncrowned emperors who found a successful constitutional way to preserve their inherited power for centuries, declaring that the cause of all troubles is publicly elected presidents and prime ministers. Philistines and all today’s left do not understand it.

In the years of perestroika they shouted “Down with Gorbachev!”, then ten years screamed “Yeltsin’s gang on trial!”, now ten years struggling with Putin “regime”, to the delight of the oligarchs, who only occasionally and pointlessly are mentioned in the left-wing press. And voting of deceived investors and depositors for oligarch Prokhorov is not treatable.

It follows from the content of the paper that Tyulkin and especially Popov never asked the question: is it possible to consider communism as the sum of communisms built at all enterprises of the country under the guidance of the Soviets, elected by production principle? Or, can the proletariat hope for long dictatorship, questioning the leading role of the scientific vanguard — the Communist Party? Irrationality of these suggestions could help the authors to move to the science direction. But most of today’s left do not understand that dialectic materialism is, first of all, the method, which requires the ability to ask YOURSELF important questions, the method of competent dispute… with your own STUPIDITY, which much easier than wisdom is born by immature consciousness.

Marxism assumes that the building of communism is a matter of all working people of the USSR under the dictatorship of the WORKING CLASS of the whole country, ignoring any of their professional, national or religious interests and accepting the leading role of the communist vanguard only, if, of course, it is as such.

The proletariat, the party leadership, the constitution and the counter-revolution
It is strange that Popov and Tyulkin, trying to investigate the problem of the dictatorship of the proletariat, ignore the thing that almost all the works of Lenin start with a profound analysis of the HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE. And concerning this issue, the international practice shows that the proletariat weakness in all countries of the socialist block appeared when and where the communist parties were weak. Strictly speaking, they were communist in name only. I.e. at first the party had degraded or failed to become the Communist Party, and after that the dictatorship of the proletariat disappeared. That is why socialism in Eastern Europe was established later, but fell earlier than in the USSR.

We must not forget that the proletarian class, objectively, as the most revolutionary class in the epoch of capitalism domination, at the same time, consists of the most uneducated sellers of “labor power”. Quite close to the proletarians of physical labor are all kinds of deceived sharers, investors and depositors of mental labor.

Without real communist vanguard, as shown by the centuries-old practice, the proletariat is able only to compromise with the bourgeoisie. Moreover, the proletarians of mental labor, more than the proletarians of physical labor, see only advantage in their vendibility and do not even blush when they sell themselves. And the more expensive they are sold, the more they love themselves.

The facts proves the reactionary character of the proletarian struggle without communist component. Strikes of the trade unions helped Pinochet to come to power in Chile. Strikes directed by the trade union “Solidarity” led to the fall of socialism in Poland. Strikes in 1990 led to the collapse of the USSR and proved destruction character of trade unions when party influence weakens. And all this happened in spite of the fact that the trade union committees and the Soviets of labor collectives were formed by the labor collectives themselves. Today low political efficiency of the proletarians, left without the leadership of communists, is brightly illustrated by the behavior of the proletarian masses in Arab countries, whose “victory” is already used by clericals and American oligarchs.

But Tyulkin and Popov do not mention these history lessons. Also they do not say that the reason of wage SLAVERY of proletarians during several centuries is their absolute non-ability to win by themselves the constitution of exploitative society. Unfortunately they still do not know how to do it, as well as the leaders of the RCWP.

In a strange way, these authors do not try to explain to yourself and to others dialectically contradictory essence of the dictatorship of the working class. Because the loss of the bourgeoisie its exploiting potentials is proportional only to the decrease of proletarian qualities of the proletariat. Only those people become and remain proletarians, who are not allowed by the capitalist system to develop to something more than cheap appendix of a machine. The key to the victory of communism is not to make impossible for bourgeoisie to exploit proletarians but the hard work of the communists to erase from the proletarians the reason of their plight — ignorance. Lenin in theory and Stalin in practice raised the most of the factory workers in the USSR at the unprecedented social height. It is enough to say that all large factories in the USSR had institutions on fundamental training of engineers from workers in a particular industry. It can be considered as a mistake, that these factory institutions did not have Marxism-Leninism departments.

If we take into account the international importance of communism building in the USSR by 1936, against domination of colonial democracy and fascism in the world, then, in the triumphal conditions of the second five-year plan, when for the first time in human history, more than one-third of the state budget was spent on science, culture and education, and defense spending went to the last place in the budget, when the education of peasantry class was accomplished, in these conditions, the adoption of another USSR Constitution and changes in the electoral law played a role of effective act of propaganda in foreign policy, to complicate the work of West propaganda machine, presenting the fight against the bourgeoisie in the Soviet Union as something that does not correspond to the legal norms of civilized society, as something lawless.

According to the laws of the distribution and acquisition of information, even the rumor that the Soviet Union adopted a new constitution caused criticism in the bourgeois press and led to the increased interest of really progressive and thinking part of bourgeois society. No doubt that this political act, against fascist aggression in Spain, increased the pro-Soviet sentiment in the world and influenced positively on the position of the masses in some imperialist countries of market democracy after the attack of Nazi Europe on the Soviet Union.

The use of legal and, in fact, bourgeois procedures in the USSR, familiar to the mentality of the Western philistine, led to the fact, that, for example, a talented, bourgeois writer Lion Feuchtwanger, who personally attended the public trial in 1937, was forced to admit that, not only logic and facts of the case, not only dozens of personal confessions of the accused, but also from the point of view of the bourgeois legal procedure, the trial of the Trotskyists left no doubts in its legitimacy, i.e. in the guilt of the accused. Feuchtwanger carefully looked for the signs of beatings or tortures or effects of psychotropic drugs in the behavior of the defendants, but found no evidences and this way complicated a lot his further life in the West. But today only few intellectuals can boast that they have read the book of Lion Feuchtwanger.

So, tactical maneuvers in law made by the party and the real changes in class characteristics of the Soviet population had not only internal, but also some positive international importance. Today, it seems to be completely idiotic to represent SCIENTIFIC, absolutely innovative, unprecedented work of communism building in the 30s — i.e., creating objective conditions for the WITHERING AWAY of the classes, the state and the law — not as the exclusive competence of the Communist Party, but as the achievement of the deputies elected in the factories. Flirtation with the proletarian masses has nothing in common with the fundamental party policy in working environment.

Of course, Marxism has always insisted on the necessity to develop mass political initiative of the population, but this requirement denies leaving it “to their own fate”, i.e. diminishing the role of the Communist party in this development. In his work A Great Beginning Lenin wrote about the most important goal of the PARTY, of the full support of labor collectives initiatives, focusing on the fact that the point was not in Subbotniks popularization, but in the development of the science-based initiative of workers. But only absolutely qualified communists can bring scientific character to the workers initiative.

There are the opportunists who try to separate the proletariat and the communists. For this purpose they can use the constitution, which places Roman slave law above the science. But the Stalin Constitution legislatively placed the science above the law and proclaimed the scientific worldview the only criterion of morality and the law itself.

The party, the constitution and the first phase of communism
From the internal point of view, the 1936 Constitution was adopted in the year when the big bourgeoisie in Russia had already been entirely liquidated as a class and had to leave the country or to make living by mental or physical labor as all regular people. The ex-bourgeoisie in the USSR had nothing left but defected by money mentality and natural for that uncovered greed. In the new situation the party was out of the routine legal work, giving it to the hands of the institutions set by the constitution, but which finally got socialist features and content, practically free from traditions of feudal-market corruption. Members of the party were in the minority in every Soviet institution, but it was exactly the thirties when the personal responsibility of the Communists was more than ever, and the trials of 1937 and 1938 made the party for a while, really consolidated and authoritative.

The Great Patriotic War showed that ALL soviet socialist science-based party institutions, examined in detail by the CPSU long before the adoption of the 1936 Constitution, were enshrined in 1936 ONLY legally, as already established forms, demonstrated an unprecedented survivability and efficiency in the tragic 1941.

By 1936 the population of the USSR, of course, became a socially consolidated, not perfect yet, but it was almost completely free of absolute power of the parasitic elements. Then the whole nation became the Soviet workers, and not just the industrial workers. Endemic illiteracy, kulaks, organized gangs, profiteers in grain surpluses, private traders, unemployed and homeless were eliminated. Socialist-minded engineering and scientific intellectuals were educated. As the result, conscious industrial and scientific-technical sabotage of the intellectuals, raised by the market relations, not completely, but seriously decreased.

Nevertheless, the character of economic development was determined, first of all, by the level of competency of the USSR Academy of Sciences and giant, according to global standards, scientific and design institutions in all sectors of the social production. In power industry, engineering, aviation, the country reached the necessary production level, that was competitive enough to determine the victory of the USSR in the war against the whole Nazi Europe.

The majority of urban and rural workers, after living for a while under socialism, understood the material and nonmaterial benefits, which building of communism leads to. Neither in Tambov region, nor in Kuban region, nor in Central Asia no one had to be persuaded to lay down arms, to join collective farms or to use the machine and tractor stations. As it turned out on the trial of 1938, the right-wing opposition already in 1936 lost the hope for anti-Soviet mass protests, and hoped only for a plot.

Most of the young people had no more doubts in the simple Communist truth. From now, the development of each individual will depend, first of all, on the development of the productive forces of the entire society, on the development of labor productivity, rather than on the intensity of his personal labor. Welfare of citizens will grow under steady reduction of the working day and the working week, under stable wages, free accommodation, education, medicine and sport, under steady decrease of all prices and reduction of the retirement age. The workers saw plainly this perspective. Now everybody knows which expired products of mass poisoning under rising prices are fed to today’s voters.

In this condition, as historical practice showed, the counter-revolution in the USSR remained only in the form of conspiracy: in the Central Committee of the CPSU and in some Central Committees of the union republics, in the NKVD, among leaders of trade unions, senior military commanders and staff of People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs.

Perhaps the most exact explanation of such conspirators nature was made by Dostoevsky in his Demons by demonstrating a gallery of mentally defective and morally damaged middle class, literate, but obsessed by political devilry, primarily because they never had a chance for even temporary self-affirmation or public recognition in any field. Maria Spiridonova, Trotsky, Bukharin, Yagoda, Tukhachevsky, Yezhov, Khrushchev, Gorbachev and Yeltsin… were such “demons”. Conceit, misanthropy, lack of conscience and creative principles — these are the main features of character of the party opponents.

Nevertheless, we can say that the building of communism, the authority of the CPSU among industrial workers, students and schoolchildren was so real in 1936 that allowed socialism resist to betrayal of “demons” among the leaders of the CPSU and military commanders, to mass harmful repressions of Yagoda and Yezhov, to invasion of fascist Europe.

As it is known, a little earlier, market democracy in Italy and Germany fell under the attack of internal fascism. Bourgeois democracy in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, France, Greece, Yugoslavia rapidly fell under the attack of external fascism and fascizated themselves. British colonial democracy was hanging by a thread. The Soviet system, facing the cruel attack of the entire world fascism, defeated.

Basis of the dictatorship of the working class
Each USSR Constitution is a document, which only fix the party experience in the development of the rights, duties and freedoms of citizens under objective and consistent weakening of the exploiting class, but an insufficient level of development of productive forces to switch the whole society from legal to a scientific basis. It is easy to note that, due to the organizational principles developed by the Party in the Stalin era and reflected in the Constitution of the USSR, the country, up to the Kosygin reform [pro-market reform of Khrushchev-Brezhnev — translator’s note], showed the highest in human history rate of development, especially in the field of culture, science and technology.

Seems like it is enough to read The Communist Manifesto, to understand finally that the dictatorship of the proletariat is simply impossible without LEADING role of its vanguard, or the real communist party. As shown by two hundred year history, no matter how intensive the economic struggle of the proletariat is, it CAN NOT lead the proletariat to the dictatorship. The dictatorship of the working class is possible as soon as the proletariat is guided by its vanguard, possessing uncompromisingly scientific knowledge. That is why, while fighting for the purge of the Party, for scientific uncompromising of the party, Lenin at the same time demanded of the Communists to learn “to merge with the masses to a certain degree”.

While reading the works of Tyulkin and Popov it turns out that the place of the Soviets formation, but not the role of communists, forms the communist qualities of the Soviets. As if a deputy is elected at a macaroni factory, it is reliable, and if he is elected according to the place of residence, it is vague. It is a strange “logic”. As if a badly working deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, for example, of defense, could be easily recalled by the workers of macaroni factory, but the tenants of the house № 8 can not do this, especially if, for example, the chief of the General Staff lives in this house.

Lenin conclusively proved in the theory and the practice confirmed that the Soviets organized by the production principle, but led by the Mensheviks and supporters of the “socialist market”, will necessarily become an appendix of the bourgeois regime, that the Bolshevist direction of the Soviets is the most important. At the same time it was a period when the concentration of the communists at factories was higher than at the place of residence, and mobilization of workers for the fight against the Whiteguards and interventionists took place directly on the plants. It was natural that the Soviets were formed according to this principle. But in 1936, legally, there was no bourgeoisie at the place of residence or at the place of work. Most of the population did not put into question the role of the CPSU in the organization of election campaigns, in the control of deputies qualities and their activities. Never, no country of the market world took overeating deputies, peculators and “party bastards” to court with the same severity and inevitability, as in the USSR in the 30s.

Who should today’s proletarians follow?

It may be asked, why masses do not follow Proriv? [“Proriv” in Russian means “breakthrough”, http://www.proriv.ru — translator’s note]. First of all, we are not a party, but a small solid team of litterateurs. However, as soon as we release the journal regularly, for a decade already, more and more people read us, and less and less people abuse, then we can be identified as active workers, and not meaningless protesters. Secondly, we will immediately transform into a party as soon as the number of solid and tried Marxists, working with us will reach the desired, planned level. But we will never compromise on the quality. And if we do not achieve this minimum, it means, objectively, that we have not yet matured as Marxists, to the delight of the enemies. But, in any case, we will not mistake the wish for the reality and run to the Ministry of Justice to register.

Our principle: at first, there should be few dozens of educated Marxist-Leninists, unafraid to rough work, proven in long-term, daily, effective WORK with people, and only then we can start talking about the building of the party.

The experience of all parties, created after the CPSU, showed that the principle — “at first — the party with the communist name, and then, somehow, we will form the complete Communist Party” — does not work. That is why, Proriv chooses the other way. At first we will make all necessary and possible efforts to create a strong, scientifically-based, many times proven basis, and only then we will lead the building of the working class party. Just parties of “elephants” and “donkeys” are created easily and at once.

In spite of the obviously positive attitude towards Stalin and Lenin, demonstrated today by most Russians in the opinion polls, they understand that the leaders are physically dead, and people, quoting them, of course, are good, but by their lengthy quotations they just show the lack in today’s communist parties of qualified professionals in dialectic materialism, who are able to go forward and aim for something bigger, as Lenin demanded.

Will any practical conscious worker, any conscience developed intellectual join the party, which is led by people who are not able to prove the truth creatively, independently, based on the up-to-date material without quotation on each occasion? They do not join and will not join. Even Peter I in the 18th century, required his contemporaries to speak without notes.

Dogmatism and economism, propagated by the leaders of the RCWP and President of the Labor Academy Fund, led to the predictable results. The existing working-class movement in Russia is infected not only by economism, but its natural consequence — rabid anarcho-syndicalism. The proof of separation of some proletarians from Marxism in general, and from the RCWP in particular, is the ultimatum, made by the electrician, some S.T., addressed to the RCWP.

“Good afternoon! — S.T. writes — I am an electrician of high qualification. Will your party transfer plants and factories into the ownership of the working class? Not into the ownership of nation, because nation is not only workers, not into the ownership of the state because the state is a bourgeois machine of oppression and humiliation.

Today’s workers, especially workers of mineral resources and energy sectors are high-level professionals, who are able to operate without parasitic oligarchs and we do not need the party bureaucracy of the Khrushchev type. DOES THE PROGRAM OF YOUR PARTY PRESCRIBE TO GIVE FACTORIES TO WORKERS? S.T.”

The worker put a silly, but point-blank question. And the RCWP replies on this anarcho-syndicalism of politically immature proletarian, first of all, by proletarian trade-unionism. It turns out that the RCWP encourage “all working people to unite behind the working class and its party”, although in the line above the author of the response, Solovyov Oleg, Secretary of the Central Committee of the RCWP on the workers’ movement, tells the worker that the party is only fighting for the proletariat to become a struggling class, i.e. in fact, the class, which could unite “struggling workers”, DO NOT EXIST. It is a very distinct invitation, like in a joke: “Come to the party. Thank you, I will come and what is the address? Let’s dispense with formalities, come just like that, without any address”.

As a result this policy of the RCWP, its flirtation with the trade unions, the propaganda of economism led to bad consequences. And it’s not a matter of the selfish worker or the fact that among today’s proletarians he is not alone. The trouble is that today’s communist parties for the last twenty years have not prepared the propagandists, who could honestly, competently, clearly explain to the workers the essence of the communist doctrine.

If Proriv received such letter, we would not flirt with the author. We would honestly explain to the worker, and to the readers that, firstly, he is today at the position of a traitor to the working class interests, and secondly, that he demonstrates his ignorance, i.e. he does not know that the experience of proletariat ownership of factories was negative and ineffective in many developed market countries and especially in the former socialist Yugoslavia, which now is totally worthless, with no sovereignty and any meaning in the life of Europe. Not just once nor twice in the history the factories fell into the hands of the assured proletarians and quickly went bankrupt.

If you read carefully the letter of the worker, it is clear that the author is a little bit greedy and coward. It is also clear that the author is indifferent to suffering of others, that only personal satiety and personal material wealth is interesting for him. But he gets right that there are no oligarchs who will give the factories to the “fighters” like him. Not today, not tomorrow. But this worker sees the way the oligarch Prokhorov, who owns such factories, lives. He wants the same.

Moreover the worker have heard somewhere that the Communists are going to take enterprises from the oligarchs. What if it works? The worker does not know how the communists are going to do that, and according to the letter, he is not going to participate. But as the communists succeeded at once, he realizes that they will do it again. And if so, he can try to take their word and as soon as the communists expropriate oligarchs, they immediately will give the enterprises to workers. The communists themselves will step aside, passively watching how workers bankrupt their enterprise. And the most important — no one has the right to ask for food from the workers. Neither the children, nor the disabled, nor the elderly.

Over the last twenty years the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and the RCWP did nothing for the theoretical form of the class struggle, but played parliamentarism, economism, Labourism and signatures collection. They still have no time for communism and formation of the working class from existing proletarians.

That is why, unfortunately, current anarcho-syndicalists do not understand that if workers can not take plants from the oligarchs themselves, the communists, who know how and why private ownership of the principal means of production is nationalized, they have no reason to give national wealth in the hands of politically illiterate speculators. And there is no need to cast pearls before the petty bourgeoisie, who do not dream of workers brotherhood in the struggle for universal happiness, i.e. Communism, but dream of personal wealth only. Before uniting with someone, at first, it is necessary to give scientific explanations.

So is there a guarantee against degeneration and collapse of the Communist Party
Therefore, we can say that, Marxism managed to prove that progressive development of communist organizations and the dictatorship of the working class are unavoidable, and at the same time, this theoretical concept and objective laws were not enough for individuals raised and educated in the centuries-old feudal-bourgeois traditions. It’s unfortunate that, for the same reason, the pedagogical community of the USSR rejected achievements of pedagogical systems of Makarenko and Frunze on the communist education of the youth. Almost the entire system of education in the USSR was built by bourgeois teachers of secondary and high schools on the basis of the most primitive elements of Ushinsky pedagogical system.

Nevertheless, there is no doubt, that the most important practical and theoretical contribution to the development of the world communist movement in the 20th century made the CPSU of Leninist-Stalinist period. In the 1950-s the USSR was closer than any other nation of the world to the practice of Communism building. This experience was the most representative, the most substantive, the most dynamic, the most useful. As the example of a “classical British capitalism” was enough to discover the absolute economic laws of motion of the capitalist system in general, this experience was enough to specify the absolute laws of the Communist Party and communist society development. The strength of Stalin’s socialism in the USSR was enough to get through a decade of Khrushchev’s primitivism and twenty years of Brezhnev’s stagnation, and at the same time to hold the status of a superpower, having military-strategic parity with NATO.

The analysis of the CPSU history leads to the conclusion that the history has two branches — ascending and descending.

The existence of the ASCENDING branch in the history of the CPSU is proved by the constant growth of the authority and influence of the Bolsheviks among the working class and the peasantry, by the failures of many force action efforts taken by the oligarchs all over the world to defeat the Soviet Union. It turned out that even the joint military power of the Entente and Germany with Poland, all Russian nobility and the bourgeoisie, was not enough to overthrow the power of the Bolshevist Soviets at the beginning of its formation. During this period, neither economic blockade nor sabotage of the nobles, intellectuals, Western experts nor corruptive effect of the New Economic Policy (NEP) did not bring the results desired by the international anti-communism.

The existence of the ASCENDING branch in the history of the CPSU is also proved by the victory of the USSR in the war against European fascism, while democratic colonial countries of the West condoned fascism for years.

Until the mid-60s, i.e. until Kosygin reform, nobody in the world could say about the scientific, educational and technological backwardness of the Soviet Union. Research in near-Earth space still use Soviet technologies of the 50s, while the American lunar and near-Earth programs collapsed, burying 16 astronauts, i.e. four died American astronauts versus one died Soviet cosmonaut. Today, all countries deliver the astronauts on the ISS, using, practically, the Soviet space rockets, although, the number of the satellites, crashed into the ocean naturally grows as far as Russia turns into the market country.

However, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the CPSU prove the existence of the DESCENDING branch in the history of the party. And if we focus on the “economic” indicators, we will have to admit that its systematic decline began with Khrushchev’s seven-year plan, became stable with the beginning of the Kosygin reform and crashed after Andropov’s election as General Secretary of the CPSU, i.e. since initiated by him the transit of the USSR economy to the principle of cost accounting, which meant the full restoration of capitalism and the market in the USSR with all the following destructive consequences.

Therefore, it is necessary to clarify the main aspect, specific to the CPSU on the ascending phase, but for some reason had no influence on the organizational strategy within the party. However, it is clear that the weakening of a certain factor, which played a role of political immunity against opportunism on the ascending phase, led to the growth of opportunism, that turn into the party content.

It stands to reason that by 1938 the CPSU was the only party, that was able to keep for a whole decade the highest degree of centralism, based on the scientific approach to all problems solution. There were almost no people in the leading bodies of the party, who consciously and purposefully were fighting for another organizational policy. Speaking about structure, the party really began to get rid of any organized forms of the rightism and leftism. This fact played a crucial role in the victory of the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic War, in the organization of the fast recovery of socialist production and the systematic reduction of prices. Without the real centralism in the control of complex social systems there could be no effective results.

But the practice has proved that this unity was temporary and, as soon as Stalin died, the leading bodies of the party again turned into the battle arena for, in simple words, the two main approaches in the party. Formally it looked like a confrontation between pro-Stalinist and anti-Stalinist approaches. In fact, it was a conflict of insufficiently competent and completely incompetent elements in the party. Ironically, but in the process of this confrontation the most incompetent wing within the party defeated.

Continued on following post.
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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Mon Aug 01, 2022 4:28 pm

(Continued from Previous post.)

Part II
In brief the communist society means the society, organized in strict accordance with the requirements of the objective laws of development. Therefore, when we say the communist world outlook we mean, first of all, the scientific world understanding and when we say the scientific world understanding, we mean only the communist world outlook, not the ideology appeared out of thin air like many religious, nationalist and racial ideologies. The communist world outlook is not an ideology in its original meaning, although this particular word was used in the CPSU and democratic literature.

The communist world outlook, or the scientific world understanding, is as WIDE as possible, not limited by any dogmas and prejudices, opened to the steady development, the system of scientific TRUTHS, formulated theoretically, proven and used in practice.

The communist world outlook has not been spread over the planet yet because of a subjective historical fact. From slavery till modern democratic and oligarchic capitalism, the main concern of the ruling clans has been cultivation of total mass illiteracy and cretinism of narrow specialization among so-called intellectuals caused by the Bologna process, which creates the audience of stupid TV shows.

But the scientific world outlook does not depend on the Communist Party membership. It is scrupulous study of the objective universe that will inevitably lead a person to the conclusion of an idiotic organization of modern society and of the objective conditions which already allow to build a society with absolutely harmonious relations between people, i.e. the communist society.

Therefore, in spite of the fact that today any member of the Communist Party is called a communist, unfortunately, not every member of the Communist Party is a communist in fact. It is easy to become a member of the existing Communist Party, but it is very difficult to become a real communist with scientific world understanding.

Many ambitious young people, who are mentally lazy from childhood, do not master the theory of Marxism-Leninism, which is the cornerstone of scientific world outlook. They hurry to join the Revolutionary Communist Youth League (Mother Party is the Russian Communist Workers’ Party, http://www.rkrp.ru), and feed their ego by becoming a member of its Central Committee, or even funnier, the chairman of the ideological commission. These young communists do not understand that if the world understanding is not scientific enough, it is always the anti-communist one. It explains, for example, the mass participation of the Soviet miners, metallurgists, transport workers (many of them were members of the Young Communist League) in strikes in 1990, i.e. in the destruction of socialism in the USSR.

The world understanding cannot be at the same time scientific and non-communist. If an individual says that he is an anti-communist, it is caused, first of all, by unscientific character of his consciousness. There are as many anti-scientific ideologies as fairy tales. It is proved by a lot of political parties, religious confessions, ufologic “discoveries” and contradictory economic doctrines. It is well-known, that there is only one scientific truth, in any field of knowledge and activity.

The brain,which knows the multiplication table, cannot give false answers in multiplication unless it is forced to mistake.

There is no political party in the world except the communist one, which declares the intention to conduct its activity on the scientific basis. The leaders of non-communist parties, on the contrary, do not even mention this, because bringing a scientific point of view in the mass consciousness will inevitably lead the society to reasonable renunciation of the bourgeois parliamentary system, the oligarchs and the religious hierarchy. So, it is obvious why today’s parties are called, for example, the party of Grigory Yavlinsky, the party of Zhirinovsky, the party of Zyuganov, the party of Putin. Only a party, which consists of under-educated members and led by agnostics becomes the party of its leader’s name.

Lenin and Stalin also could not avoid it, when theoretically unprepared members of the Communist Party (and Lenin many times wrote about this) called themselves the Leninists, then the Stalinists, then the Trotskyites. They did not have the required level of knowledge and, therefore, in each historical sharp turn they moved several times from one leader to another, demonstrating their duplicity. Herculean efforts of Lenin and Stalin were required to prove proletarians that every political step was scientifically reasoned.

Stalin honestly and self-critically wrote in some of his writings that sometimes he also misunderstood some Lenin’s proposals, which later proved its genius. One of the reasons why Stalin understood the teachings of Lenin better than his competitors, was the fact that, even in extremely hard conditions of exile in Turukhansk region, Stalin, unlike Bukharin and other future opponents, intensively studied and this let him realize the changes, unprecedented in the human history, and make the international position of the USSR strong, like never before.

It looks more sensible when the party members call themselves the Bolsheviks or the Mensheviks, the Otzovists or the Centrists, the Left Communists or the Right-wing Opposition, indicating this way the loyalty to the leader and understanding the content of their position. However, factionalism in the party is always caused by illiteracy of the party members. Now, when some comrades, advertising themselves, say that exactly they are “the party of Lenin and Stalin”, they prove their scientific and theoretical organizational weakness, use the great names, hoping by cheap citation to win authority in the eyes of the workers.

Of course, the names of Lenin and Stalin worth everyday praises, but not in the case of self-styled appropriation.

Strictly speaking, there is no party in the world today, which has the right to call itself the communist and especially the Leninist-Stalinist one, because in today’s world information space, there are, first of all, no periodical, no theoretical center, no person, which scientific authority could be acknowledged by most participants of the left movement, and secondly, none of the modern communist parties has the necessary influence on the real proletarian movement in any country in the world. There are some positive facts in this direction, but extremely insignificant.

Some cases looks like an absurd. For example. Not long ago, one of the youth organization, the Revolutionary Communist Youth League (the RCYL), has published a draft of their so-called program, which, according to the authors’ point of view, should become the basis for the registration of one more communist party. The authors inform that “the Revolutionary Communist Youth League would greatly appreciate the feedback and criticisms, that we ask you to leave in the comments on the website…”.

So they say: we are not very sure that what we write is correct, and we are too lazy to prepare scientific cadres, moreover we do not even know how to do it, so the RCYL would greatly appreciate the comments and criticisms, especially, if they are sent by liberals, democrats or showmen. Give us some ideas. We will show you how democratic, flexible and attractive we are.

Many of today’s young communists do not understand that the Communist Party is not a debating club, but an organization of the vanguard type. It should have nothing in common with khvostism (following in the tail) because the communists MUST KNOW the objective laws of social development better than members of any other proletarian parties, and must be ready to act as a qualified “pilots”, “navigators” and skilled “captains” in any political “storm”, instead of asking God knows whom for help to prepare good program.

But once the ideologists of the RCYL ask for advice, why not to suggest them to study scrupulously the theory of Marxism.

Can members of the RCYL write an adequate communist program if they have not yet SUCCESSFULLY MASTERED Capital by Marx? No, they can’t. And can they understand completely Capital without scrutinizing Science of Logic by Hegel? Lenin have said that it is definitely impossible. Is there any evidence that the RCYL members follow the precept of Lenin to youth: to learn communism? There are no such evidences. But they, who deny this Lenin’s precept and cannot create any serious newspaper or a website uniting proletarians of mental and physical labor, they are trying to write the program of the Communist Party, after Lenin developed the primary orientations of two implemented party programs. It is enough to take a close look at the work of Lenin “Left-Wing Communism”, An Infantile Disorder to rely on Lenin’s experience, develop it, and not to engage in political babble.

Those who have studied the history of the formation of the Bolshevik program of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (the RSDLP) remember that Lenin actively stood for the creation of a daily newspaper and on the basis of its publications to organize a united Marxist party in Russia. Lenin proposed to make a common Program of action, because it was obvious that The Communist Manifesto was not enough for the productive communist movement in Russia. Being a modest person, Lenin proposed to comrades, already known for their great experience in political activity, to write a draft of a Program. However, after reading these drafts, Lenin had to write on his own the scientifically based Program, which he did not change with the help of accidental advisors and reviewers, and defended it at the Second Congress of the RSDLP as the only correct and substantiated Marxist Program.

Every writer and politician, if he really attends to the problem of creating a party based on the scientific world understanding, MUST work on his own with the text and edit it until, like Marx and Lenin, he is satisfied with its scientific perfection.

It is one thing to offer the subject for public discussion, for example, the economic problems of socialism in the USSR, but the party, which presents its program for the public discussion, looks idiotic.

However, the CPSU of Khrushchev period and other democratic parties, due to the lack of intellect and conscience, repeatedly introduced for public discussion its ill-considered projects. Failed experience of the CPSU teaches that after “collective mind” prevailed in the party under the leadership of illiterate Khrushchev, the new program of the CPSU and all decisions of the party in that period had deeply eclectic character and opportunistic content. After Khrushchev, the most significant documents systematically became the subject of “public discussion”, and therefore lost its vanguard scientific content and strategic importance, being overwhelmed with high-sounding slogans, good intentions and opportunistic “truths”.

Consultations, or voting, or public opinion do not make a document scientific if the author of the text and voters do not have uncompromising scientific world understanding.

It may be argued that the decision will be correct if this is the discussion of SPECIALISTS, whose competence has no doubts among them. However, it does not GUARANTEE that officially acknowledged experts, who respect the competence of each other, are real experts. For example, how can a modern filmmaker determine the degree of competence of an engineer and how can a lawyer determine the competence of a technologist?

The presidents and the prime ministers, participating today in the G8 (Group of Eight) and the G20 (Group of Twenty), are elected by democratic procedures, and their “competence”, firstly, is approved by the majority of votes according to the constitution, and secondly, nevertheless, it requires a lot of advisers and referents in all spheres. It is hard to imagine Reagan, Bush and Yeltsin without their advisers. Perhaps, these elected state leaders respect each other’s opinions, but, as we see, year after year, their exchange of views and trivial resolutions do not lead to the improvement of the economic situation in the world. They always reach a consensus and demonstrate their competence in only one thing, in the organization of coups, economic blockades and bombardments in their former colonies. It is much easier to be competent in the field of destruction.

The editors of Proriv are sure that if, as an experiment, there are all the living Nobel laureates in economics at the negotiating table for unlimited time, and they get all necessary information at their request, then, even following carefully the democratic procedure of decision making, whatever the majority of the laureates vote for, the resolution will not be, firstly, obligatory for anyone, and secondly, will not have any positive results. It is mainly because all modern Nobel laureates in economics are litterateurs, who match their solutions to the “answer at the end of the textbook” and receive the prize only for that.

It may be argued that experts in the field of economics exist, and large firms headhunt and hire these experts in the field of management, famous for the practical results and theoretical writings. Is not ALL companies in pursuit of success do that?

But is there in the world the companies and the countries that have not been in pre-bankruptcy or bankruptcy situation?

Does ALL companies have funds to buy the best managers? Does not buying managers and specialists by one company mean a conscious reduction in the effectiveness of the other parts of social production?

Therefore, such practice leads to ineffective, certainly uncompetitive, low quality of management in the significant part of the market system, which is the second important condition for crises. French and German oligarchs got such one-sided preference, when they created the euro zone, planning to strangle Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and other their competitors, according to the cannibalistic theories of absolute and relative trade advantages.

The successful companies have always been aimed to DESTROY competitors on a global scale, to cause their losses and turn their multi-billion expenses into wasted money. And if some companies win, then there are no reasons to suggest that the losing company had the competent economists.

But the strangulation of the economic environment is the core of the market democracy, because it is only death throe of a competitor where the winner, the real market democrat, finds the animal satisfaction. “Better a belly will burst” – this market joke is all true. Transnational corporations stand for the same ideological position. This market world outlook is the basis of Dulles’ Plan, the Fulbright Program, the concept of Gene Sharp and activity of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the theory of Golden Billion and cannibalistic concept of “sustainable development”, strategies of nuclear war, color revolutions and the Arab spring.

Scientific world understanding as an important criterion for humanization of an individual
Animals behave like animals just because of their psyche. Rare animal does not foul where he eats. Taming changes the animal psyche so that a man can use them. For example, training dumb submission. Animals as well as many types of employees, of course, do not understand this and, therefore, slave all their lives till they turn into beefsteaks or unemployed.

The widespread increase of the retirement age in the countries of developed market democracy is the result of dumb submission of wage working class of the West, who were watching with interest in due times the struggle of the American monopolists against the Soviet Union and, in particular, against the Soviet pension system, which forced the western businessmen set up in the developed market countries the retirement ages, similar to the Soviet ones.

It is known that the brains of different animals are developed differently. But even the brains of a dolphin and a monkey are not able to form the world outlook. These animals react adequately on music, take actions with the buttons of Japanese electronics, but they are not able for scientific world understanding.

Having scientific world view is the potential privilege of every man, but that is not used by the majority of individuals due to the defects of modern social order, education according to the Bologna process and, consequently, chronic mental laziness of most people.

All physiologically healthy people, unlike animals, have a wide or narrow world outlook, i.e. the ability to keep in consciousness much more than just biological needs, looking forward up to infinity and consciously building new social models, at first, in the mind, then, in the practice or… unscrupulously adapting to up-to-the-minute requirements of the Parliament or the Church.

Depending on the degree of adequacy of the world concept and its depth, people are divided into the conservatives, the innovators and the philistines. The harmonious social order let the last two categories of people successfully realize their big and small models of happiness. But the market economy force the philistines, as well as many creative people, to work under the tyranny of the conservatives, or the persons with very primitive, narrow, commodity-money world outlook. Therefore, the philistines and the innovators in the market democracy are doomed to tragic turns of fate caused by the unpredictable miscounts of the conservatives, i.e. representatives of big business.

The existence of anti-communists, including those with university degrees, only shows their ideological disability, hypertrophy of one and atrophy of other zones of memory and logic in the brain.

It is easy to understand the social reasons of poor world outlook of most businessmen. Not only small and medium entrepreneurs, especially in Asia, Africa and Latin America, the drug lords and their heirs do not have any scientific education (including the economic one), but also the business leaders of developed countries, especially the children of oligarchs, who inherited large business of their parents. Their parasitic existence since childhood determined narrow horizon of their minds. Harvard and Stanford just make these children conceited, rather than give them scientific knowledge.

Some modern physicists, who have mastered the mathematical tools, but disregard the achievements of the Hegelian dialectic, and who are satisfied, at best, with the philosophy of Machism, completely forget about scientific scrupulosity, creative and objective logical thinking. Therefore, mostly, they cannot clearly explain the essence of physical phenomena, turning science into some kind of faith, which the majority can master only in the form of memorization.

There are no examples in the history when an individual would have scientific world understanding and at the same time would be one-sided, passive, anti-social, reactionary and non-productive person. Activity of such people at all times formed new scientific tendencies and the concepts of a better social order. Religious bishops and the Nazis burned at the stake many people with scientific world understanding and their books to slow down the progress of mankind in their own self-interest.

The most significant marks in the history of mankind were left by well-rounded people with wide and deep scientific world understanding: Leonardo da Vinci, Newton, Descartes, Marx, Mendeleev, Lenin, Stalin, Kurchatov, Korolev.

While the construction of communism in the USSR was led by the people with a wide scientific world understanding, like Lenin, Stalin, Frunze and Kirov, Kuibyshev, Dzerzhinsky, Ordzhonikidze, Beria, Molotov, Kalinin — the USSR developed toward communism, accompanied by the victories in the political struggle and in the wars, by successes in education and employment of population, by achievements in ballet, chess, space and peaceful use of the atom.

But, after the party was headed by the people with petty-bourgeois world outlook, like Khrushchev, Andropov, Gorbachev, Yakovlev and Yeltsin, the Communist Party was becoming more and more bourgeois, although after Stalin’s death, his socialist model withstood more than 35 years of travesty of science.

It is necessary to understand that a member of the Communist Party does not get the scientific world understanding together with the party card. It is the result of the selfless, intense, creative, intellectual work. Without it a member of the party is no more than just a member, regardless of the post, which he managed to get, using defects and loopholes typical for democratic centralism. Such a member of the party can play only the role of Herostratus.

The communist world outlook does not oppose itself to any particular science as some kind of a special science. Vice versa, having the communist world outlook means, first of all, to possess all the intellectual wealth created by MANKIND during its existence, and to estimate adequately even those discoveries, which slowed the progress of mankind, and, moreover, all those discoveries which in fact were the parts of social progress.

For example, the discovery of atomic energy was certainly a progressive moment in the history of mankind, but thanks to the philosophical and ideological weakness of Bohr, Fermi, Einstein, Oppenheimer, Roosevelt and Truman, atomic energy in the hands of the American imperialists, who surpassed in their cynicism Roman, Spanish, Portuguese, French, British and Dutch colonialists and slavers, became, of course, the weapon of momentary destruction of thousands of Japanese WOMEN AND CHILDREN.

From the communist point of view this issue does not differ from those which lies in the fields of engineering, computer science or medicine. Implementation of the scientific approach in any field of human activity, i.e. using the system of knowledge of mankind, brings wonderful, progressive results.

So why is it impossible to combine economics and politics with science as it happens, for example, in aircraft or in electronics? It would be useful to find out why the oligarchs all over the world, together with the fascists, the liberal and ordinary democrats, the leaders of all religious denominations oppose this simple issue so hysterically, mostly in arms.

Why doctors, air traffic controllers must and businessmen absolutely must not (by law!) follow the requirements of science, unless they are forced to by the tax policy and criminal prosecution. Why Keynes, Marshall, Samuelson or Leontief did not say any good words about the pyramid schemes, but undereducated entrepreneurs continue to build insane pyramid schemes.

Certainly, this is an “open secret”.

The market economy is drifting on “the big Kondratiev waves” just because the businessmen all over the world, as well as the feudal lords, had and still have the right not to know, and not to take into account the requirements of science. Moreover, they actively fight against science-based economy, and want to keep it the market one forever.

And unfortunately it is not only magnates and bishops, who fight against the scientific organization of all society, but also illiterate proletarians of mental and physical labor, who defend the market democracy on the Bolotnaya square, although exactly this mass suffer most of all from the fact that the current world market community, together with ALL its political and financial institutions, operates on the basis of faith in luck.

All market theory glorifies the right of entrepreneurs for this faith, calling their IGNORANCE “the risks”.

Shakespeare would have envied the scenarists of the play, which is played for many years in front of billion “viewers”, who continue to believe that there is honor in taking risks. They cannot understand that risk is a result of BUSINESSMEN ignorance, combined with their sadism.

Private ownership of the basic means of existence as a consequence of the animal world perception
For billion years the life on Earth was primarily the struggle of individuals and their associations for existence, which was first of all the struggle for food. Only by eating, i.e. by POSSESSING something completely and entirely, by making the eaten INACCESSIBLE for others, this being could keep living, enjoying the feel of fullness. For thousand years satiety was fixing in the psyche of living beings as a basis for confidence in the near future. Human beings inherited this sense as the system of instincts, reflexes, emotions, which are much stronger than thirst for knowledge or libido, and which do not fade away but strengthen in the market-type individuals and become the only joy for them after curiosity and libido are gone.

Centuries passed. The feudal lords replaced the slave owners, the financiers replaced the feudal lords, only their animal motivation to turn into private property more and more means of existence, lands and water (to feel full for awhile) did not change at all. No wonder Soros in one of his books The Crisis of Global Capitalism calls himself a stomach without size. He fights for the open society only to satisfy his personal need for global financial domination. It looks schizoid, but it is true.

Since the Egyptian Pharaohs, the idea of world domination changed persons and methods, but never left the class of secular and religious magnates. Today in business and religious spheres it is impossible to find anyone who would refuse to portion the global “pie”. Generally, only the unexpected bankruptcy during the crisis or a bullet of competitor can stop a businessman on the way to this goal. And before that none of them sets any limits for growth. They never suffer from the lack of appetite.

Collecting money, like a dog in the manger, businessmen all over the world by their ignorance and obtuseness, by their collapses and defaults, doom hundred millions of children and adults to suffer from DAILY HUNGER, forcing them to choose between starvation and extreme forms of humiliation. Private property in ALL major means of production every year leave hundred millions of people without a job in the market world and therefore without means of living.

Stealing bread by proletarians, who yesterday were quite hard-working, and today are fired out because of businessmen failures, makes necessary to increase constantly the police force, the means of control over people’s behavior, the number of lawyers and prisons. However, the modern society, due to the catastrophic scientific and theoretical decay, pays on its own for this gigantic political structure, including the police and the army, keeping wage workers and liberal philistines in the current system of economic and legal relations of private property. Naive search of market justice in parliamentarism leads this blockheads to the beating on the Bolotnaya square by the police, which they paid for, with the help of clubs, made special for this purpose.

Only communist, or science-based system of material production, by excluding the feeling of HUNGER from social life, and especially from CHILDREN’S life, can create the objective CONDITIONS to liquidate the dictatorship of instincts in the psyche of the billions of people, caused by millennial hunger. The world wars, tectonic, technological disasters and market democratic reforms showed that it is hunger that awakens and intensifies animal instincts in people.

Certainly, the theory and practice of communism are not limited to a victory over hunger, but the mental and intellectual revival of a Man is impossible without this victory and the abolition of all known historical systems of private property.

Someone may say — But what about the Holodomor under the communists?

Firstly, it was under the communists, and many strong anti-communists among them, but not under communism. Only BUILT communism can exclude hunger from people’s life. It has been built nowhere yet. That is why millions of people in all civilized countries are condemned to permanent hunger. Secondly, even during the trial of Bukharin in 1938, it became clear to everyone, including the enemies of communism, that the Holodomor in the thirties in the USSR was a diversion (as well as the explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station in 1986), organized by the opponents of Stalin and communism. Thirdly, and this is the most important, mass hunger and hunger pandemics synchronizing with the droughts, the floods, the wars, then with the Great Depression, happen DAILY in ALL civilized countries based on the private property and, in particular, on the neo-colonial private property, i.e. on the neo-slaveowning property. This property is the reason why the oligarchs sponsor the Arab springs.

It is the society based on the private property, which generated such military strategy as complete blockade of cities and entire countries, whose inhabitants, to the delight of the invaders, gradually died and today are dying of hunger. Children and the elderly have always been the first victims of such strategy.

The history of mankind would not turn into the history of class struggle, if the class of private owners did not compel multi-million class of direct producers to the painful and humiliating hunger in terms of goods abundance.

The high labor intensity in the civilized countries is based only on the fear of hunger. Everyday hunger of million inhabitants of developed market democracies results in mass individual theft and massive citywide riots lasting many days. Therefore, the bourgeois countries are not here to shout about three-year episode in the history of the USSR, associated with hunger in some regions of the USSR, organized by supporters of the reconstruction of private ownership of land in the USSR and foreign special services agents … It is tragicomic, when the former European colonialists, slavers and modern neo-Nazis blame communism in the Holodomor during collectivization in the USSR.

It seems that the law of population growth under the capitalist form of PRIVATE PROPERTY, discovered by Malthus (although he failed to explain the REASONS of this law) is decisively confirmed many times: the more CAPITALISM develops, the less chances there are to rescue society from growing mass famine, the more the contrast is between gluttony of the world’s population minority and growing forced asceticism of the majority. However, the stories about the famine under socialism are trying to mask the reality of daily mass holodomor in the developed countries of the West against the overflowing shops.

In brief the ultimate goal of the ECONOMIC part of the Communist Party program is the destruction of ATAVISTIC form of the RELATIONS between people concerning the appropriation of material and intellectual living conditions of an individual and society as a whole. Or, in other words, the aim of the communist transforming activity in the field of reproduction of the material conditions of human existence is the destruction of relations between people as the owners of the means of society existence and individual development. Or in short, the aim of the communist practice is the destruction of private property as the animal form of RELATIONS between people.

Without destruction of relations between people based on private property, it is impossible to say that the history of upright mammals has ended and the real history of mankind has began.

This simple, long revealed truth has not yet become a guideline only because thousand years of slavery, feudalism, and, especially, market capitalism, did so much for dumbing down and dehumanizing the entire nations of upright mammals that if they know there is nothing human in them, but they have the power of a lion, the vigilance of an eagle, the appetite of a shark, the quickness of a lizard, the stomach of an elephant and the sting of a cobra – it would be quite enough for the deep self-esteem of many today’s market nations.

Therefore, to destroy private property as a form of relations between people, it is necessary, as a MINIMUM, to achieve the abundance of material goods, so that human consciousness is free from psychopathic expectations of a “rainy day”, always caused by an acute shortage of basic material goods, especially food, necessary for the normal existence of human beings.

However, the idea of an ABUNDANCE of material goods should not be like it appears in the mind of philistines. It is necessary to develop the scientific and theoretical consciousness of a capable part of the world’s population so that the manufacturing of the planet’s natural resources could optimally guarantee the material basis for a happy life of every person, but not the GDP growth rate or the average rate of oligarchs profits. Getting rid of market capitalism does not mean to outstrip its gluttony.

Of course, it is not possible to turn at once the idea of a rational lifestyle into the strong belief of all people. Today many individuals dream of the aggressive SURFEIT in everything: from shopping addiction to alcohol, from overeating to drug dependence, from domestic sadism to religious terrorism.

Science must set an optimum in opposition to animal norms and today’s consumption, and it is impossible to achieve this optimum by the blind market mechanisms and relations. In other words, the standards of the intellectual and material consumption corresponding to the objective laws of a happy people’s life, cannot become the guiding standards before they are scrupulously developed by science and implemented into educational programs, into the work of educational institutions at all levels.

The age-long practice has proved that even massive narrow-specialized polytechnic education does not help to build the society of global harmony. Society, as a socially organized form of matter, is worth to be the subject of a prioritized scientific research, without any opposition of natural and social sciences.

But the complexity of this task also lies in the fact that the economics, except for religion, is the last area of human activity, where agnostics still prevail. These agnostics consciously fight against the scientific approach, because the victory of the scientific approach to the organization of the economy will make obvious that the oligarchs are completely useless and harmful in material production as well as the patriarchs in the spiritual life.

Because of these and many others consequences of the domination of private property relations, the economic program of the party of scientific world outlook must include the evidences of reactionary nature of private property relations and the maturity of the factors that allow to replace private ownership by more progressive, scientifically organized system of economic relations between people on the production and consumption of the social labor products and natural resources.

Lenin wrote in due time, that state monopoly capitalism is a complete material preparation for socialism. At present time, state monopoly capitalism is accompanied with the dominance of transnational and multinational corporations, the IMF, the WTO, the FRS, the EBRD, the rating agencies and audit firms, which prove the insufficiency of free market relations and the necessity and inevitability of supramarket and supranational systems assuring minimum stability of the world economy, which outgrew the classic market relations of Adam Smith period. It is necessary only to force these supramarket international systems not to work for the United States oligarchs only, but to realize its potential in the interest of harmonious and peaceful development of the entire earth community.

Violence as an essential condition of private property existence
It is known that Duhring explained the origin of private property as a result of violence. Marx and Engels convincingly proved the falsity of this assumption and explained the reasons of private ownership origin as the development of the society basis. It means the changes in the essence of the relations of production between people on the basis of the increased facilities of the means of production, that helped people to produce the products, quantity and quality of which significantly exceeded reasonable personal material and spiritual needs of a thinking man. For example, the pyramids of Egypt and Mexico, the Great Wall of China, religious temples, aircraft carriers.

Those who read Capital, Volume I by Marx to the end, know the specific role which relations of violence played in the development and in the millennial domination of exploitative forms of private property.

Differences in education and intellectual development of people led to their relative isolation in the form of two basic classes of society: the class of owners of the means of existence and the class of poor who have nothing but their body, ability to work and their children, or the class of future slaves.

Many hundred thousand years the institution of large private property did not arise, because no matter how much you violate a person, how much you beat him, a man was not able to make any food surplus or even a simple Chinese porcelain vase, anything that would cause thirst for stealing, grabbing and meaningless accumulation. But once a man had learned to make pretentious comfort things — immediately surfeit, the usurpation of the means of production, and the expropriation of the manufactured products became widespread.

Soon the class, which concentrated in his hands all the basic means of production and existence of society, understood that this favorable situation may last for a long time, if on the one hand, to keep the direct producers illiterate and religious, and on the other hand, to create a special apparatus, the state, which will hold by the FORCE of arms uneducated direct producers from the actions in favor of more fair and more rational distribution of material and spiritual values, produced by all working people.

And because the slave-owning, feudal and especially the capitalist forms of private property remain only because of advanced VIOLENCE institutions, it is clear that the theory and practice of the communist movement must have a scientific view on the role of the violence system in the protection of the global market capitalist economy, and must outline existing objective and subjective conditions, which development will free humanity from political oppression, tyranny of gendarmerie and wars.

Institutions, authorities and religious and secular relations, which by force compel people to carry out the functions imposed on them, without taking into account the physiological and spiritual needs of the individuals, against their will, are called POWER. Modern dictionaries and textbooks do not pay a lot of attention to the meaning of this term and the essence of this phenomenon, even though all history of the politics consists of the use of power, i.e. the machinery of people coercion for reaching, first of all, the personal mercantile and other misanthropic aims of oligarchs.

In the full sense of the word, POWER is unlimited VIOLENCE against the person. But the fact that modern power in all civilized countries is limited a little in its ability to fill the ditches by Indians bodies, to build Auschwitz and Salaspils, to exercise the right of the seignior, to burn publicly heretics and thousands of “witches” at the stake, it is the victory of the working people, their fight against the tyranny of the authorities, against the permissiveness of oligarchs and religious elite.

Communist world outlook is the only scientific ideology of complete liquidation of power and, therefore, violence from the social being.

Institution of power, i.e. real and potential use of FORCE to make people execute the will of others, appeared only in the places where primitive society was divided into mostly physical and mostly mental work and, therefore, where the institution of private ownership of the basic means of existing and production was formed. As far as the secular and religious nobility became more enlightened, all their intellectual potential was aimed at the consolidation of their power to retain and increase the economic inequality in society.

In some places, for example, in central Africa, in the central part of South America, in central Australia, where millions of people for million years did not expand the institution of private ownership of the basic means of society existence, first of all, of land and water, where people continue to live with vulgar, but adequate, communal and materialistic views, i.e. without detailed myths of official religion, there are still no institutions of political power, no prisons, no corrupt police or tyranny in the form of democracy.

However there were places where the non-labor form of private property and the principle of unlimited concentration of material resources in the hands of few individuals were declared inviolable. In that places, very soon, owners of such form of property, i.e. holders of higher economic and political power, had to be treated as holy, sacred and untouchable.

Everywhere, where the institution of private property was developed better, where personal mystical beliefs were suppressed by religious “teachings”, there was slavery and people were used as instruments of labor in the production process, often without any compensation for their physiological losses without giving them any rights, for example, as Negroes in the United States.

These were the slave owners, who for obvious reasons, for the first time in the history of mankind, stated religious and secular “reasons” and legal norms of power, in the end, calling them democratic. According to these norms and democratic LAWS, the certain part of population had to bear their cross, to chisel the stone, to fight in wars, to be executed for the fear in a battle, to be quartered, impaled, eaten by predators, to be killed in a fight of gladiators, poisoned, burned for disbelieving in a collection of articles under the title “gospel”, to be hanged, shot, convicted for a stolen cheeseburger, to get the electric chair for an uncommitted crime, finally, to be “hit”, sometimes by the POWER itself.

According to the laws of logic, it is impossible to prove that there is a BIG private ownership of the means of production, which deprives the rest of society of the access not only to the subjects of labor, but even to a simple bread, that in spite of functioning institutions and organizations of political POWER, i.e. giant enforcement apparatus, at the same time, there is supposed to be freedom…

The meaning of the word FREEDOM is opposite to the word POWER and used to define a position of EVERY person in society, where nobody cannot force this person to do anything, as this person cannot force any other individual to do anything, especially against the will. Freedom is such a position of EVERY individual in society, when a person takes any obligations, restrictions, up to complete self-sacrifice, but only on his OWN, science-based decisions. Such self-sacrifice differs from the religious one, because it is not dedicated to absolutely false aims.

Therefore, the most important direction of the communist activity, which will lead to FREEDOM of every individual from abuse of any other individual, according to the requirement of science consists in dissolution of all organizations and institutions of POWER over the individual. Nobody, except the communists, do not raise such a question and cannot raise.

A degree of human freedom is directly proportional to the development level of conditions for self-realization of EVERY individual, and is inversely proportional to the development level of institutions of violence.

As a result of successful completion of the transition from capitalism to socialism, as a result of reduction of private ownership of the means of production and circulation to totally insignificant size (shoe repair, production of nesting dolls, basketry), it was enough to have in the Soviet Union until 1953 a ridiculously small and economical, practical, incorruptible (in comparison with the FBI, the DHS, the CIA of the USA) apparatus of Ministry of Internal Affairs and Ministry of State Security to identify and neutralize thieves, provocateurs, foreign agents, without paying for giant, market, corrupt and hungry for money apparatus of the MIA and the FSS of Russia today, and the system of total surveillance of all citizens, as well as the huge production of clubs, kilometers of barbed wire, cisterns of tear gas and other means of society democratization.

It is enough to compare the number of people involved to maintain order at demonstrations in the USSR with the number of people and the cost of their equipment, involved by democratic Russian Federation to ensure the police order at the demonstration of ten thousand people, to understand where humanity is moving towards complete freedom and where the police is the only and the last condition for the existence of oligarchs and the capitalist “order”.

Private property of the oligarchs exists as long as there are legions of police, who for the average wage and risking their lives, protect great treasures of others, from time to time, being caught on extortion and drug trade, protection racket, etc. In this sense, only the profession of a cash-in-transit guard is funnier than the profession of a policeman. They also deliver hundred millions of other people’s money for ridiculous wage, and often lose their lives to save the money, stolen by others.

The practice of the Soviet Union has convincingly proved that as reasonable material welfare and wide range of leisure activities became available for an ever-growing number of workers, the organized crime decreased and therefore the Soviet socialist, of course totalitarian, police worked without clubs, weapons, bulletproof vests, tear gas or water cannons.

And vice-versa, when the Democrats and entrepreneurs (or black-marketeers, false-coiners, currency profiteers) revived in the USSR and senseless values (diamonds, gold jewelry, ancient icons) accumulated in their hands, the organized crime (which hunted for these values) revived exactly to the same degree, the police became stronger, and idlers, sadists, and bribe-takers rushed there.

Only the communist transforming activity can lead society to the complete abolition of the institution of political POWER because many necessary objective historical conditions are already established for this. Everything necessary for FREEDOM of individual, which may be explained and understood according to the laws of logic, is already created.

Even in America, stratification of “free” American society into the Forbes list and stupid plebs began to cause strong irritation even of Brzezinski, and as for Murdoch and Madoff, who were non-triable before, they were brought to responsibility for trying to do everything that came into their ignorant heads.

The work on achievement of really free life for ALL people will go faster after people begin to understand that the existence of all ills of modern society, namely economic bankruptcy, crime and prostitution all over the world, have three reasons.

Firstly, the existence of the class of private property owners.

Secondly, the existence of force institutions, protecting them, i.e. power, which supports permissiveness of incompetent entrepreneurs.

Thirdly, the existence of population, which altruistically creates private property for oligarchs and mindlessly votes in elections for the guarantors of the Constitution, who foredoom people to self-destruction.

Why cannot millions of people still gain absolute freedom, if even a police officer does not like authority over him?
Power in its absolute form appears as open tyranny. Power in its civilized form, or tyranny, comfortably exists under the name of democracy. Until recently, ALL laws enacted in the democratic society PROFICIENTLY served the tyranny of entrepreneurs, providing stability for the Morgans, the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Fords, the Vickers, the Krupps, the Wallenbergs clans, and allowing despots like Caesar, Mussolini, Hitler, Roosevelt, Churchill, Truman, Yeltsin, Bush to come to power by legal procedure. After dissolution of the Soviet Union there were no election campaigns in just democratized Russia where billionaires did not stand for to make their capital not only on the hundred thousands of their wage slaves, but on all the Russians and guest workers.

The word democracy is translated as government of people. But only oligarchs clearly understand the role, that institutions of democracy and its procedures play in consolidation of BIG CAPITAL power, and the role of ordinary people, who like flock of sheep every morning, overcoming fatigue, sickness, hatred of their profession, hurry to their workplace and fall into a terrible depression from the words about forthcoming recession, i.e. the weakening of the business activity of their employers.

One has only to think about the trial over the general manager of France Telecom in the summer of 2012 and his highly paid service to the interests of his owners, which forced scores of people to commit suicide. Moreover, this sadist turned these employees into silent lambs, threatening them with future bankruptcy of the owner. And this happened in the country, where these employees once a year sing Marseillaise together with the oligarchs.

There are strange people that will rebel against the way the question is put, and will demonstrate their respect for the demos. And this is not only about oligarchs, police and prison guard officials. A modern intellectual cannot imagine a society without pastors, where the science-based laws of community life are fulfilled by people because they KNOW, UNDERSTAND AND ACCEPT them as absolutely rational NECESSITY.

A modern intellectual strongly believes that market democracy, and its institutions and relations of power, is the only possible and perfect form of social life organization, all other forms compared to this one are reactionary and utopian.

Many modern citizens adore their right to put the bulletin into the box every few years for a presidential candidate. Just a few days later the majority of voters understand that this time they have also made a mistake, but keep being sure that next time, or six years later, they will hit it right, and vote for the one who, for unknown reason, will faithfully serve his voters.

Tremble, presidential candidates! The demos is going to… vote.

Many people do not understand that market democracy is the most cynical, but subtly propagated and therefore, not causing conscious disgust among the masses, the form of POWER organization aimed at supremacy of the class of oligarchs, first of all, financial capital representatives, i.e. the moral and professional freaks, over billions of deceived people, who, for some reason, are inspired by the possibility to vote.

People have not still realized that their “power” lasts just few seconds, while they put the bulletin for their candidate into the box with a sense of contempt for the other candidate.

That makes sense when democracy does not seem suspicious for most people. But when democracy is idealized by the people who call themselves the communists, spend decades on signatures collection and litigate the right to be registered in the Ministry of Justice, it is clear that diamatic [hereinafter, diamatics means the method of dialectical materialism — translator’s note] method of thinking is totally absent in the minds of most today’s left.

Democracy was invented by SLAVE OWNERS in the golden age of slavery and ensured for CENTURIES the stability of oligarchs POWER of that era. Democracy was used in the elections of emperors, kings, czars, doges, feudal authorities, bishops of all denominations and presidents under capitalism. Only these historical facts could make left intellectuals more skeptic about democracy as a basis of liberty, equality and fraternity. But there is no understanding of this issue in the leftist circles.

If a significant part of the intellectuals, along with the ability to memorize formulas and anecdotes, had the ability to think independently, they would wonder WHY the oligarchs of the world prone to tyrannical, hereditary and clannish types of their property (or billions of their wage slaves) management, AT THE SAME TIME, spread democracy in politics all over the world so hard, even with the help of weapons? But most of the today’s intellectuals do not ask such questions because they used to only memorize and repeat after Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister of the colonial empire, characterized by more than 300 years of colonialism, slave trade and piracy, that —

“Democracy is the worst form of government unless you compare it to all the rest“.

There is another version of his statement:

“Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time” (Speech in the House of Commons. November 11, 1947).

Today’s intellectuals do not want to see in these phrases three things. The first thing is that democracy is the worst form of government. The second one is WHO (?) governs, and the third one is that this comparison is made by the lord and convinced feudal, a cynic with true English sense of humor, who, for obvious reasons, does not specify whom he means, when he says: “unless YOU compare”. Whom does he mean? The House of Lords or the British miners, the unemployed or the Ulster Protestants? For whom, and in comparison with what, is democracy better?

The reader may ask himself: “When did the English lords begin to get the biggest profits in the world? Before enclosure and creation of unemployment, before the mass expulsion of peasants from their lands or after all lords at once recognized democracy and parliamentarism instead of feudal absolutism, and quickly formed the irremovable House of Lords?”

And then everything in the statement of Churchill will fit together.

Continued on following post
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Mon Aug 01, 2022 4:40 pm

(Continued from previous post.)

The essence of democracy
In his paper What is democracy? professor Nisnevich writes that, although —

“…in political science there is even such an independent direction as the theory of democracy, there is still no unified acknowledged definition or understanding of democracy and the essence of this political category. So L. Diamond notes that “theoretical and empirical literature on democracy (and its amount increases very fast) contains so much conceptual confusion and disorder that D. Koller and St. Lewicki managed to detect more than 550 “subspecies” of democracy”. Such a situation is objectively determined by the fact that democracy, as any social phenomenon, continuously transforms with the political and historical development of civilization. Moreover, democracy is multifaceted and can be viewed and interpreted in such diverse aspects as the political-institutional, procedural, cultural and axiological ones”.

Theorists of the RCYL using just Machist methodology could list more, if they pay attention not only to the subspecies, but also to the “families”, “kinds”, “types”, “groups” and “subgroups” of democracies. But it is hard to believe that the variety of these subspecies is determined by the objective reasons, and not by subjective guile of the minority and subjective ignorance of the majority.

If the today’s left used the Marxist methodology, they would know without a historical journey that any social phenomenon arises and exists primarily as the unity of opposites, and that this unity causes their struggle and the development of the phenomenon through the negation of the negation. They would know that the general dominates the particular and specific differences do not cancel the ESSENCE of the phenomenon, which does not change until there is the phenomenon itself.

There is no doubt for diamatically-read people that democracy, as a form of political organization of society, according to the laws of diamatics, will disappear. But this belief caused by confidence in the genius of Marx, does not excuse the Marxists from the duty to KNOW and UNDERSTAND the “mechanism” and the reasons of the objective process.

The unity of which opposites do cause democracy?

Why are there still thimble-riggers and their successors, financial magnates like Morgan, Rothschild, Rockefeller and Madoff? Just because mentally underdeveloped individuals, like investors and depositors, trust them and act according to their suggestions. Dealing with thimble-riggers (as well as with bankers), they are absolutely sure (with money as yet) that by CHOOSING one of three thimbles, even with their eyes closed, they have at least a 33% chance to guess where the ball is.

However, only the thimble-rigger knows exactly that there is no ball under any of the thimbles. It is the secret and the essence of his craft. A today’s voter again and again, to the last penny, choose the empty cup of three empty cups and for thousand years do not understand why he cannot win, although at the university he had the highest mark at probability theory.

It is the same with banks, investment companies, pyramid schemes, real estate offices, etc. They also offer all simpletons to CHOOSE a bank or a fund and to give their money for the PROMISE to return the money with interest.

At the beginning of the 1990s banks offered up to 1200% per annum. Certainly, there were depositors who believed these banks. They chose the bank and were very surprised to find out next day that this good bank “suddenly”… disappeared.

Oligarchs of slavery era were awfully inventive because they, first of all, correctly estimated intellectual weakness of population and, secondly, realized that giving people the right of choice (from branches of power to usurers) is safe for them, because the basis of ordinary voter’s logic is his incompetence, which excludes rational choice in his interests.

Since then, the right to choose the best of the worst options replaced for masses the NEED for thinking, understanding the difference between the essence and the phenomenon and developing a strategy to achieve their OWN goals, rather than being a mindless tool in the hands of egoists.

Thus, from the point of view of dialectical materialism, democracy arose, in general, as a result of the unity of opposites, in this particular case, the literate meanness of oligarchs, i.e. smaller part of the population, and terrible ignorance of overwhelming masses.

Centuries after the origin of democracy showed that the unity of opposites is a condition for the existence of the slave-owning, feudal, capitalist republics, which lead to splendid rights of ruling minority and self-destructive responsibilities of ignorant majority.

It follows that democracy will not die until the ignorance of majority is liquidated.

System of representative government elections demonstrates incompetence, mental incapacity and political blindness of everyone who chooses a powerful guide.

The degree of democratic institutions development and the level of democratic performances, better than mass behavior at football matches show the extent and the depth of the ignorance of the masses. The more active and bright an election campaign in the given country is, the more obvious that the voters of the country are very suggestible, and the organizers of the election campaigns see this clearly. And who will win, for example, Obama or Clinton, Gates or McCain, this small detail is completely insignificant for the oligarchs. After the election it is clear that these irreconcilable “opponents” work well together and execute one program in the interests of the American oligarchs. If the oligarchs are disappointed with their proteges, they just shoot them, as for example Kennedy brothers and five more American presidents in the US.

From time to time, in those countries where the masses, on the one hand, begin to understand that the elected person, at best, acts in his own self-interest, and on the other hand, begin to realize their own interests, they make “revolutions”, for example, the color ones, and acknowledge as leaders those who do not demonstratively fight for political power and look like a decent and talented leaders in the struggle for the overthrow of the previous regime. Moreover, these “elections” are held without any democratic procedures but, by direct mass activity of citizens, taking arms against the old regime. However, because of the ineradicable ignorance, the masses which has proven their absolute power, agree again to representative democracy and false promises. This is the scenario of most color revolutions, including the Arab Spring, which escalates into civil wars and fragmentation of countries.

Therefore, the democratic choice is a procedure, where some slightly educated competitors, necessarily devoid of conscience, offer to elect THEMSELVES as herders of people. Yeltsin, Navalny, Prokhorov were ready to guide people for forty years like Moses, without disclosing details of the route, without any guarantees, basing just on the compulsory blind trust. This is the essence of democracy.

Hundreds of years all electoral systems are organized so that people have to choose from suggested, and not what they need or what promises them a GUARANTEED benefit.

However, even this is not the most important thing. The majority of the demos still does not understand that if you are educated and smart, you DO NOT HAVE TO elect, you can be elected, even in the market democracy, as a leader, may be a temporary one, but still. But if you are not educated or intellectually developed, then your destiny is just to choose from suggested candidates, and deceive yourself that you also mean something.

In other words, modern democracy exists when and where the little group of quite educated people opposes undeveloped masses, objectively unable to understand the intricacies of civilized, law-based society, and therefore forced to believe the promises of silver-tongue orators and choose the best of the worst. Experience has taught the ruling class that the most important thing in democracy is to create in the minds of the masses the illusion that they are also power, although it is necessary to hide from them, that the voters are not a legislative, executive or judiciary powers, but dictators for a moment, the MOMENT of the “secret” ballot. That’s all.

But the democratic illusion turned out to be stronger than alcoholic or drug delirium, that needs a lot of intellectual strengths to give it up forever. But people are not SMART enough to see beyond the illusion of democracy the tyranny of oligarchs.

The reactionary nature of the election procedure at all times lies not in the fact that not competent enough citizens elect brilliant and honest politicians who have proved their unique ability to manage, but in the fact that incompetent masses again and again participate in maintaining the institution of POWER over them, by changing political “scapegoats” one after another.

Today, for a wonder, most philistines do not see the connection between constant increase of their living costs and the right of entrepreneurs to raise prices, but blame the “scapegoats”, like governments and presidents. Mass media shows this nonsense during each rise in prices. They say, what is this worthless government doing? Even the endless trials in all democratic countries of presidents, prime ministers and governors on the corruption charges do not let the masses understand that a bribe is a payment to the democratically elected top politicians for staying away of oligarchs affairs. For example, what will Medvedev get if land privatization starts? Nothing. And is there a personal interest of the oligarchs in the land privatization? Yes! And it is huge. Is it hard for Medvedev to form in the near future his election fund? No.

Our philistines, who read nothing except cheap novels, both among liberals and patriots, do not know that prices in market economy are set only by sellers, and buyers are free to choose: to buy or not to buy. This is the only “freedom” of modern mass consumers. If you ask them who fuels inflation, they will blame the government, without understanding that inflation is the rise in prices and nothing more, and lead to reduce the purchasing power of wages, which is explained, for simpletons, as a mythical decline in the purchasing power of a note.

The demos and mass media do not connect any fluctuations in stock indexes with poverty of intellect and meanness of key speculators and entrepreneurs, but connect it with the government’s machinations and demand to change it. They do not even guess that only calculating entrepreneurs are behind all voters tragedies.

Private mass media and free journalists, paid by the oligarchs, professionally enough create the feeling of the demos that publications reflect people’s opinion. The demos feels a sense of revengeful satisfaction from the fact that he says without restraints the worst words, either in kitchens or at meetings, about worthless prime ministers, presidents, ministers of economy and finance, and mass media just echo the voice of the demos. Only PR-specialists and political strategists, such as Gene Sharp, know exactly, how they, puppet masters, by propaganda technologies form an opinion of the demos, and decide how and what to broadcast through mass media, including the Internet, so that the demos could think that his opinion was born in his own “free” mind.

Therefore, the editorial board of Proriv has no reason to say anything good about democracy, because, throughout its history, it has served only to strengthen the POWER of minority over the demos and reduce tension, caused by the tyranny of oligarchs. Democratic procedure has no other content, except legalization and legitimation of POWER institution. A politician is replaced by another one only to keep the illusion that generations of the demos influence on power, so that updated political machine of coercion could defend the main provision of all market democracy constitutions: “Private property is sacred and inviolable”. It can be deprived by competitors, gambled away and drunk away, but it remains sacred and unavailable for the demos only, or oligarchs will loose their milch cow.

As already noted, the most necessary condition for democracy in any field and in any era is to maintain ignorance of the demos and to give him rights and possibility to choose one of three empty… “thimbles”.

If, for any historical reason, every person receives a harmonious development and education, such society will no longer need a guide, especially the political one, and the class of thimble-riggers will disappear, the prehistory of humanity will end and the history of rational mankind will begin.

Certainly, adherents of the democratic theater of the absurd understand that and will continue to build educational and legal institutions, to create new mystical “teachings” of cosmology so that this triumph of incompetence, i.e. elections, could continue for many hundreds of years.

That is why the absolute economic law of communism is all-round and comprehensive development of EVERY individual, so that EVERYONE, from the cradle, could develop his creative abilities and have ALL necessary conditions to put into practice all his talents, so that the NECESSITY of EVERY individual to serve the society could be based on the necessity of the WHOLE of society to guarantee the development of EVERY individual. And it should be clearly specified in the program of the party of scientific world outlook.

Therefore, today’s missile and nuclear society faces a dilemma: to develop the society through the development of EVERY person and thus to develop the needs, leading to further self-improvement of EVERY individual, or spread oligarchic sick standards of gastronomic, material, financial, sexual, power excesses, which create states of outsiders and haters, hordes of shopaholics, losers, homeless, thieves, millions of policeman and the army, i.e. the modern demos, who have almost chosen… a new world war.

What is inner-party democracy?
What is still misunderstood by many members of the communist movement in the teachings of Lenin and the practice of democratic centralism?

It remains misunderstood, first of all, that democratic centralism was a form of necessary compromise between science and ignorance and immorality, dictated by the specific objective and subjective historical circumstances of Tsarist Russia and its wild imperialism, militarism, mass poverty and Social-Democratic circles. Like any compromise, democratic centralism should not be and cannot be considered as a fundamental, long-term principle of the party building. Strictly speaking, Lenin and Stalin did not consider democratic centralism as the guiding principle of the party building. It was acceptable only at the stage of creating a new party of scientific and materialistic type, but the essence of this party type did not need anything democratic at all.

But why do the party, proclaiming the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat and fighting for being the vanguard of the working class, need DEMOCRATIC centralism in the inner-party life? Only low moral character of the party members may let them submit to the majority, or primitive brutal force, as well as businessmen and oligarchs, as well as members of any criminal group, as well as the Greek demos.

Those who have studied the history of the Athenian and Roman democracies know that the institution of submission of the majority to the minority is the most savage way of being vanquished, when the key factor in winning civil wars of that era was a simple majority. After dozens of civil wars and untold losses ancient society finally realized this law and, from time to time, calculated the supporters of one or another group of aristocrats to clarify in advance who had more supporters and therefore, had a certain chance of victory in the civil war or in the brawl as in the Ukrainian parliament.

Today’s party bureaucrats got their leading positions in the party not by their theoretical level, not by the quality of the work done, not by real achievements in propaganda and organizational activity, but by unscrupulous using of the democratic majority of masses, allowing opportunists promote each other to the directing bodies of the party and, like a cancer, time after time, to destroy one by one the Internationals and emerging everywhere the communist parties.

Most current members of the parties with communist names do not realize that the real Communist Party do NOT decide any issues on the basis of formal procedures. According to diamatics the truth is always concrete, and solving the problem by a majority vote is practical, but primitive.

The world historical practice demonstrated that imperialism never managed to ruin communism in the USSR in open conflict, but opportunism easily made this “work” after Stalin’s death, because to become an opportunist, it is necessary, first of all, to know nothing, except the left phrases. Ignorance of party members is the destructive power serving imperialism, which makes the communist (in name) party the anti-communist one by the mechanism of democratic centralism.

Ignorance, or militant opportunism, which gets the party leadership through the mechanism of democratic centralism, is the main organizational reason of ALL collapses of ALL Internationals and the communist parties.

By the beginning of the 20th century, to the time of the RSDLP, Russia was overflown with petty-bourgeois ignorance, narrow-minded revolutionism, ineffective terrorism of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and venal economism. However, these Russian “features” were not unique. They are typical for all countries and nations with market economies. As evidenced by the regular strikes, confrontations of demonstrators with the police and the Nazis, periodic pogroms, turning into mass vandalism and looting, acts of terrorism and mass shootings, taking place in schools, offices, cinemas and temples of all civilized countries of the West.

But at the end of 19th century in Russia, thanks to the great personal success of some intellectuals in learning the Marxist theory, it was possible to direct the struggle of Russian proletarians to the victorious way. But such persons like Lenin, Stalin, Dzerzhinsky, Frunze do not appear in the political arena in every country, every year… Mass actions of the proletariat in 1917 led to the appropriate result only in one country, in Russia (rather than in France or England) just because of coincidence of objective and subjective factors.

Proletarian protests after 1991, for example, in Europe, cannot give anything to workers, because in the “Western countries”, after the death of Engels, the market competition in science extremely reduced the number of scientists, who are able to think “not for sale”.

Of course, a social revolution does not happen at the will of an individual. A revolution under objective factors is possible only as a result of creative subjective activity of the masses. But, at the same time, a revolution cannot happen without strategic leadership of outstanding personality. There are no social revolutions among baboons, or ants, primarily because of the absolute absence of enlightened individuals, although there are masses of humiliated “bottoms” and small number of “tops” [reference to the Lenin’s phrase“the bottoms don’t want and the tops cannot live in the old way” – translator’s note].

Vladimir Ulyanov became Lenin with his political skills and abilities as a result of the personal targeted, intense, very honest, unprecedented, especially by volume, theoretical, organizational and propagandist PRACTICE. Quite literally, after Lenin and Stalin, unfortunately, there was no person in Russia who could make a comparable intellectual and altruistic feat. For decades, all orators honored deceased Lenin, but none of them was going to do their best in science as Lenin did.

It is to be explained why people who claimed leadership in the communist movement, especially after Stalin, did not have enough CONSCIENCE to understand WHOM they replace in the labor and communist movement and what duties this “place” imposes upon them. Many leaders today think that vote counting is enough to take the top positions in the party and to lead in the manner of Gorbachev: “We need to start doing something, and then increase it more and more”.

Members of the parties with communist names are not confused by the fact that elections of presidents in bourgeois states and today’s elections of General Secretary of the Communist Party have no fundamental differences. Are these figures so similar to use the same procedures to elect them?

A member of the Communist Party, supposed to be its leader, HAS NO MORAL RIGHT to have lower theoretical level than Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin had, or to be less hard-working than they were.

Any revolution is, first of all, a qualitative change in the character of RELATIONS between people. Without improving the quality of thinking, it is impossible to improve the quality of social relations between people. Without cultural revolution in thinking, communism is impossible. Practice has shown that even multiple increase in productivity of the means of production does not automatically lead to radical improvement of social relations. Capitalist social being corresponds only to capitalist mass consciousness. The growth of material welfare under the market economy and unscientific consciousness leads only to the growth of philistines with overweight. Skinny philistines have something to strive for, obese philistines have something to fight against.

Therefore, only communists, who have ALREADY made the cultural revolution in THEIR mind can lead the cultural revolution of the proletarians of mental and physical labor. Today it is the main slogan for communists, but unknown or forgotten by the members of the parties with communist names.

According to modern ethnography and archeology people of primitive communal communism had very low and therefore very steady level of abilities and skills development, so ties of blood brotherhood and minimum of rivalry or hostility prevailed in their relations for thousand years.

But developed class society consciously does everything to REDUCE the level of intellectual development of most demos, or to keep it at the level of the TV show characters. As a result, the class of the poor and the indigent becomes the class of upright bipedals, almost incapable of thinking exceeding the school tests. The vast majority of the market demos, and much less the proletariat of developed countries, are not able to work out by themselves the science-based strategy to achieve their own interests. That is why throughout the history of class society, the educated classes, in a democratic or theocratic way, lead the deceived demos.

Under the objective factor of social revolution in one country or another, from time to time, the subjective factor appears, i.e. authoritative, educated enough personality with a high level of conscience, outstanding organizational skills to create the political party of the exploited class, i.e. the party of the proletariat, and, with its help to organize the working class, that can remove the class of entrepreneurs from political power.

But revolutions are not made by the masses, who can only trust their leaders, but by the class, that UNDERSTANDS his leaders, because in particular these leaders sincerely want it and work on it.

Because there is no mechanical synchrony in objective and subjective factors of the revolution in market economy, because capitalism faces uneven development of everything, the communist theory already in 1847 announced the ERA (but not one-act impulse) of revolutions and counter-revolutions, which started by the Paris Commune in 1871, continued in 1905 and 1917 in Russia, but which, according to Lenin, “may last for centuries”, first of all, due to the stable ignorance and the petty-bourgeois views in the mass consciousness.

In this era, each move on the way to communism was associated with the activity of the INTELLECTUALS: Lenin, Stalin, Dzerzhinsky, Kalinin, Kirov and Frunze in Russia; Mao Zedong in China; Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam; Kim Il Sung in Korea; Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru in India; Jose Marti, Fidel Castro in Cuba; Nelson Mandela in South Africa; Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, etc.

Today many people do not realize that one-act worldwide social revolution is just preferred theoretical model of the most desirable scenario. But even in The Manifesto, after scrupulous reading, it is easy to find a statement about the possibility of revolution not in all, but only in the developed capitalist countries. Lenin’s theory and practice proved that the communist revolution is able to go forward in the way of social progress even “in one country, taken singly”, having great influence on the course of human history.

However, every counter-revolution of this epoch is also connected with the name of one or another well-read “Herostratus”: Mussolini in Italy; Franco in Spain; Hitler in Germany; Pinochet in Chile; Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, Likhachev, Andropov, Gorbachev, Yakovlev, Yeltsin, Gaidar, Chubais, Nemtsov, Sobchak … in Russia.

In other words, counter-revolution is not made by a person, but every counter-revolution is provoked by well-known moral monsters with well-known names.

Actually oligarchs are very uncharismatic individuals. As a rule, they are like Midas with donkey’s ears, eaten up by greed, megalomania and misanthropy. This cause their thirst for self-affirmation by buying yachts, which are ten meters longer than the royal one, or ten-ton cars with tank engines, etc. Like all insignificant, despised, talentless people, they have to act in politics underhandedly, with the help of corrupted persons, puppet presidents and prime ministers. To implement their plans they need someone servile, but spectacular, who is obsessed with fame and attributes of power, and can raise to riots Munich beer lovers, Manezh Square, Maidan, Tahrir and Bolotnaya Square…

But, despite the fact that to become a servant of an oligarch, i.e. anti-communist, is much easier than to become a communist, dissidents for decades unsuccessfully tried to raise USSR people to the counter-revolution, earning a huge number of dollars, including through the Nobel Committee. But everything was in vain. Meanness of dissidents (like Solzhenitsyn, Bonner, Alexeyeva, Sharansky) caused disgust among the majority of thinking people, until Yeltsin appeared, who impressed by his charisma. Yeltsin’s charm lasted for several days of August 1991, but soon EVERYONE saw that he was just a buffoon, more ridiculous than all buffoons who ever entered the Kremlin. And it was possible to do anything behind his back.

To accomplish the communist revolution, both charisma and buffoon skills are contraindicated. Moreover, even sincere readiness of the leader for self-sacrifice is not enough for it. The masses today are flocking to the squares, driven by their own, individual interests, to a certain extent provoked by mass media, by their own personal hatred of the regime, but after listening to the modern leaders, they conclude: “We will not follow them. They are not the leaders we will risk our lives for”.

That is why over the past decade, none of parties, including the RCWP (the Russian Communist Workers’ Party), could collect even 50,000 signatures. The regime turned out to be so compassionate to losers, that allowed everyone to create parties of 500 members.

Mass movement, their attack on capital, is absolutely not enough for the communist revolution. Creative, enlightened, conscious participation of proletarians of mental and physical labor is the key for accomplishing the communist-type revolution.

There are no compromises in scientific world outlook: either the provisions of the strategy fully correspond to the objective reality, and are confirmed by all social practice, or it is not science and not the strategy.

It should be noted that the community of educated people is not equal to the term “scientific world”. A real scientist, who confirms his knowledge in practice, absolutely does not need either a bureaucratic (Nobel) or a democratic procedure, including secret ballot, for approving his discovery. He also does not need to find out what incompetent outside observers or journalists think about this.

Gaining an insight into more and more complicated notions and absolute truths, those who have scientific world understanding become more and more categorical, and their conclusions become invariant and therefore uncompromising.

However, the uncompromising and doubtless nature of scientific truths does not exclude compromises between INDIVIDUALS, most of whom do not have any scientific knowledge, but are guided by honest misbeliefs. In this case, it will take some TIME, probably an EPOCH, to re-educate the majority of those who are honestly-mistaken, to bring scientifically grounded truths into their minds.

But in order to educate the masses, the educator must be educated himself.

Learned scientific truths become a cause of action for the leaders and the masses, who turn, by the power of knowledge, into irresistible and CONSTRUCTIVE political force, because organized, convinced proletarian masses from the very beginning know what they fight for.

In all the colored and Arab revolutions of our time, the masses have no science-based idea of the nightmare, which the “victory” on the Maidan and Tahrir, in Tbilisi, Baghdad, Tripoli, Benghazi and Damascus will bring for them and their children.

In most historical cases, the ruling classes used the honest misbeliefs of the masses and directed their energy to the wrong way. Therefore, as in the case of the Dutch, English, French, the first and the second Russian bourgeois democratic revolutions, during perestroika in the USSR, organizers of these “revolutions” filled the conscience of mistaken masses with false slogans, which did not contain any ULTIMATE AIMS of these organizers. Only slogans of overthrow, but no constructive strategic proposals, were offered to the masses. The masses overthrew kings, tsars, the Central Committee of the CPSU and … turned into easy prey of oligarchs and various thimble-riggers.

Any democratic or market revolution can be accomplished by the most ignorant masses, without any science and contrary to its prescriptions.

The communist revolution is a synonym for science-based and organized progress, similar to development of the periodic table by Mendeleev. Without being occurred in the consciousness of an individual and the masses, revolution cannot happen in practice. Any human practice is a product of consciousness, completeness of reality reflection.

Therefore, ideally, the party of the scientific world outlook cannot rely on the principles of democracy, even the centralist one, since the truth in science is established not by voting, but by conscientiousness, i.e. by accurate and uncompromising scientific research and the ability of the masses to learn, creatively revise, and not just memorize the truths.

However, at the beginning of the 20th century, the situation with the quality of cadres in the Social-Democratic movement of Russia, did not allow, at first, to include in the Charter of the RSDLP strict requirements to the members of the party, which had just been established. As practice showed, firstly, most of the participants in the Social-Democratic movement did not understand the meaning, and therefore, feared the word “communism”, preferring not to use it, and secondly, as it became clear during the split of the Russian Social-Democracy into the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, all leaders of the Mensheviks, even Plekhanov, did not fully learn diamatics, or, in other words, they did not know the methodology of scientific thinking in general, although they could retell something from Hegel without understanding its meaning. That is why Lenin also had to scrutinize dialectics twice. At first, when he was young, he studied the works of Plekhanov, and later, once again, he read the original works of Hegel and Marx to avoid Plekhanov’s mistakes and inexcusable simplifications in the practical realization of revolutionary tasks.

Strictly speaking, the Mensheviks suffered from the lack of education and double-dealing, and they went to the proletarian revolution, as further practice showed, first of all for a career, because in estates Russia a political career was an elusive dream for them, and secondly, for the democratic market socialism, without thinking seriously about communism.

Lenin saw this historical disadvantage of the Social-Democratic movement, and having undisputed and unprecedented authority among some activists of the Russian working-class movement, developed a compromise version of the Party Rules, where science-based discipline of centralism satisfied the need of the future Mensheviks for leadership and empty talks, i.e. for democracy. This trick was called democratic centralism.

Lenin hoped that with the help of centralism, he would be able to neutralize the influence of market democracy procedures used in the inner-party life. This method worked at the moment of the party creation, but later led to a lot of difficulties in inner-Party life, up to the complete collapse of the CPSU.

If Lenin had told all the leaders of the Social-Democratic organizations in Russia before the congress that he would, for a long time, rule the whole party SOLELY, and therefore the whole proletarian movement of Russia, then neither Polish, nor Lithuanian, nor Jewish, nor Georgian Social-Democrats would have gone to the congress. But vanity, self-confidence and primitive thinking of the democracy followers in the party, that were adequately estimated by Lenin’s diamatic thinking in their contradictions, played simultaneously its positive historical role. Separate circles united “de jure” by the fact of arrival at the congress.

Today no one denies that Lenin was the leader objectively, and he held this position throughout his political life not by voting but by wisdom, and ensured the grandiose success of the Bolshevik Party in Russia and huge influence on the whole world. If some of his contemporaries knew diamatics better and had less nationalistic survivals and conceit, they would easily notice how deep and informative Iskra was, how wisely it covered all the most difficult issues of the day, how much more this newspaper could give under Lenin’s leadership to the working-class movement of Russia. But no, the Mensheviks by voting removed Lenin from the post of editor-in-chief and appointed instead of Lenin another editor-in-chief. This is the anecdotal force of democratic centralism!

There have already been such a curious situation, when the publisher threatened Marx that if he did not pass for press Capital in time, the publisher would entrust this work to another author.

What happened to Iskra with the new editor? It became meaningless, and therefore quickly lost any influence on readers. And only those newspapers, where Lenin worked, acquired real authority among proletarians and intellectuals with developed conscience.

In response to Lenin’s articles and actions aimed at unconditional centralism in the party for the achievement of program goals, Plekhanov wrote the article What is not to be done? with very ridiculous final.

“We are obliged, — writes Plekhanov, — to avoid everything that could cause new splits in our midst …Now we must strongly protect our unity. Our party must keep it on pain of a complete loss of political trust. If we have new splits, the workers, who, as everyone knows, were quite confused by our previous conflicts, will not understand us any more, and we will show the world the sad and ridiculous scene of a staff left by the army and demoralized by internal struggle”.

It is easy to see that instead of intensifying the explanatory work among the proletarians, Plekhanov declares the artificial unity of the party, or the unity of fools and wise, the economists, the revisionists and the Marxists. Plekhanov was sure that political trust of proletarians could be won by illusive well-being in the party, and not by guarantees of the real science-based unity of the party.

“Don’t be afraid… some optimistic comrades say, — Plekhanov sneered at Lenin, — the future still belongs to us, and our party will cope with all difficulties. We reply to this that we are also sure in the future triumph of Russian Social-Democracy, but this certainty does not release us from self-criticism. The triumph of our party will be based on the complex of conditions, some of which will have positive meaning and some of them will have negative one. It would be extremely bad if the algebraic sum of our practical activity had a minus as a result…There is another type of optimists between us who have not clearly understood the present state of affairs. These optimists are convinced that new splits would be more useful than harmful for our party. There are no arguments in support of this strange opinion, except that the Russian Social-Democracy has strongly developed in recent years, when it was riven by differences and disputes. At the same time, they do not take into account that this disputes did not accelerate the growth of Social-Democracy, but slowed it. They forget, besides, that the less significant differences between the members of the party are, the more harmful the splits, caused by such differences, are. When we fought against the “economists”, every intelligent person could easily understand what caused this struggle. And now our unity is so strong that a new split would not have any serious reason and would seem understandable only for silly people. That is why it would damage the trust in our party much stronger than the previous, also very harmful, splits. Everything flows, everything changes. Our methods of activity also cannot remain unchanged… and it would be ridiculous and very bad if we do not meet the requirements of political weather. Consistent Marxists cannot be and, of course, will not be the utopians of centralism”.

In this expression, the “utopians of centralism”, we can clearly see Plekhanov the renegade. Superficial knowledge of dialectical materialism led Plekhanov to an absolutely distorted understanding of the party’s growth problem. For Plekhanov, as for all today’s leaders of the parties with communist names, the number of members, their formal unity, is much more important than the QUALITY of the party. Plekhanov opposed the “utopianism” of centralism, first of all because he was not the first figure at the center of the party structure. It was enough for him if there was a pluralism of opinions in the party, like under Gorbachev in the CPSU, but if he, Plekhanov, would be acknowledged by all the factions as a “secretary general”. And everything would be fine.

Thus, as we see, Plekhanov accuses Lenin of the “utopianism” of centralism and tries to fight against it, but if we judge by the content of the Lenin’s works (What Is To Be Done and One Step Forward, Two Steps Back), we will have to admit that Lenin, when it comes to the building of the party, is a science-based centralist.

The stereotypes of class society, learned by the future Social-Democrats during their religious education, in churches and synagogues, and historical examples of the long stay of crowned nobody at the tops of Russian political system, made social democrats unreasonably claim leading positions in the party.

Trotsky, Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev, as well as Plekhanov, systematically fought against Lenin. They wrote many idiotic articles trying to convince workers of the failure of Lenin’s strategy and tactics, many times they tried to use the mechanism of democratic centralism to overthrow Lenin from the official positions posts, but could not understand a simple thing: Lenin was the objective leader of the working-class movement of Russia and the whole world.

Seems like they should be glad, that the greatest intellect of their time considers them to be the comrades. But no. Consumed with envy, with desire to get the highest posts in the editorial board, in the party, or perhaps in the state, these comrades turned into scoundrels through the voting procedure, and Bukharin, who once prepared an attempt on Lenin, colorfully told this in the court in 1938.

As it is known, Kamenev and Zinoviev fought against Lenin in the most important, October period of his activity in 1917. They also carried on the struggle against him during the Peace of Brest-Litovsk and the NEP periods. But when Lenin became seriously ill and could not attend the Twelfth Party Congress, when, therefore, Kamenev and Zinoviev no longer consider him as a rival, they were first who praised Lenin to the skies, realizing that now their shameless flattery towards Lenin would strengthen their personal power in the party.

Lenin knew the true value of such “comrades”. He saw, more clearly than many of them, the tendency of the capitalism development in Russia and the tendency of the contradictory development of Social-Democracy. The inevitability of a close social upheaval required, instead of separate circles, building of the united vanguard party of the proletarian class, ready for the coordination of its future actions. It was necessary to explain to the proletarian movement the action plan. Only united party could do this awareness-raising and organizational work.

The forthcoming bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia, strong chance of overthrowing tsarism, the inevitable involvement of the proletarians by the capitalists in the fulfillment of THIS task, made it necessary and possible to mobilize the proletarian masses to solve not only the bourgeois tasks of the coming anti-monarchist revolution (which also worked for the communists), but to change the vector of the proletarian struggle to the struggle against the victorious bourgeoisie, and the establishment of the dictatorship of the working class.

Therefore, despite the uneven scientific qualification of the Russian Social-Democracy, and the varying degree of their sincerity, Lenin saw the possibility, through concessions to their democratic cretinism, to focus the work of the separate groups of Social-Democracy into one propaganda and organizational direction. The content of the articles and books of that period shows that Lenin considered his personal scientific qualification, the level of education of his associates, enough to neutralize the most opportunist-minded Social-Democrats, to take them under kind of centralized, personal control, and to direct vacillating Russian Social-Democrats. In this case, propaganda and agitation among proletarians, for some time, could be conducted in a unified direction, without disagreements in the proletarian movement.

But the Mensheviks also felt that Lenin objectively had no equal among the Social-Democrats in the quality of scientific and propaganda work, and therefore they did everything possible to reduce the productivity of Lenin’s work by making him resign from the Iskra editorial board through the method of democratic centralism. They accused Lenin of “Bonapartism”, pretending that they did not see, that the reason for the growth of Lenin’s authority was sincerity, literacy, productivity and quality of his mental labor, but not his elective intrigues.

Nevertheless, Lenin understood, that under current tense and dynamic historical conditions his personal moral difficulties did not matter, and it was necessary to form in the proletarian movement skills of coordination and awareness of strategic goals and actions, so that the proletariat of Russia had united vanguard, which could set goals for the all-Russian proletarian movement, and guarantee its victory due to the highly scientific character of the Program of the one and united proletarian party in Russia.

And in order to achieve this goal, it was necessary, for a while, to restrict the “pluralism” of opinions and stop the propagandistic disagreement at least in the Russian Social-Democratic movement. Lenin believed that, in spite of the versatility of the Mensheviks in the polemic, they were BOUND to be defeated in the eyes of the proletarians. It was important not to re-educate the Mensheviks, but to generate controversy with the Mensheviks before the eyes of the proletarians, to attract progressive workers, to CONVINCE them that the Menshevik’s position was wrong and to lead them to the only one scientifically based conclusion.

It may be comical, but polemic and participation in the election of the governing bodies of the congress, the opportunity to talk and to be elected, turned out to be very attractive for typical Social-Democrats. They took this democratic bait and arrived at the Second Congress of the RSDLP, trying to lobby the principle of autonomy for the circles, unlimited democracy in the party, in order to draw more “economists”, revisionists and other stupid philistines, lovers of endless debates and fans of spontaneity in the proletarian movement.

The objective diamatics, applied by Lenin in the conception of the congress, also gave birth to a genial paradox. Opponents of centralism gathered at… the JOINT Congress, which thereby became the center of attention of everyone engaged in politics and, therefore, unwillingly, they made a rod for themselves, playing into the hands of centralism.

Social-Democratic movement in Russia made a giant step forward in the centralization of the proletarian movement. Henceforth, even an illiterate worker had a clearer idea of the directions of “leaders” and factions vacillations about the strategic line of Bolshevism.

But at the congress the tradition of irresponsible rhetoric in the Russian Social-Democracy was so strong that, in the voting on the first paragraph of the Party Rules, Lenin lost to Martov and his supporters. This defeat confirmed the absolute accuracy of characteristics given by Lenin to the Russian Social-Democracy. Voting against the obligatory work of party members in one of its organizations, the Mensheviks consciously fought for raising the degree of anarchism in the RSDLP.

But, in the voting on the Party Program, the Lenin’s version was approved and, most importantly, despite the following staggering of the Mensheviks, despite all the inner-party splits and vacillations, Lenin’s scientific, organizational and tactical genius let the ONE, discussed and democratically voted, Party Program, appear in Russia, which turned for the proletarian movement into a guide, into a criterion for other leaders and parties evaluation.

And, as is well-known, before that Social-Democrats could only create countless separate circles and organizations, national sects, issue leaflets, manifestos, which EXCLUDED the scientific enlightenment and uniting the Russian proletariat, and doomed it to an useless waste of time and efforts.

However, the history proved that the Program, voted and approved by the Congress, is a necessary, but absolutely insufficient success factor in the real working, communist movement.

People who have not creatively learned Marxism-Leninism in full are NOT ABLE to implement such a Program, which is a concise, concentrated summary of DIAMATICS of social progress. The program of the party is written for the party, and it is necessary to know the diamatics completely in order to convincingly and in detail get the meaning of the program provisions across to the workers’ mind. In other words, without knowing the diamatics, it is impossible to understand anything in brief schematic formulations of a really communist program.

A person without diamatic thinking, who writes the communist program, is even more comical. This diamatic ignorance of the authors, reflected in the content of the “post-Leninist” programs, led the CPSU, the CPRF (the Communist Party of the Russian Federation), the RCWP, the RCYL… either to collapse or to a disgraceful state.

Despite the fact that at the Third Congress of the RSDLP Lenin’s formulation was approved in the Party Rules, the Mensheviks and other opportunists always used democracy only to the detriment of centralism, forcing stupid discussions in the most inappropriate time for disputes in history. It was at the time of the October uprising and during the signing of the Peace of Brest-Litovsk with Germany. It was at the time of the Civil War, when Trotsky and his team forced a party discussion on … the trade unions. Therefore, as it turned out, it was much easier to adopt the united program, than to make the party really united.

The communist movement can grow only by scientific knowledge, and no compromises in this direction are possible. Either the communists will be the scientific vanguard of proletarians, or the party members will be mental idlers.

The desire of illiterate babblers to get into the Central Committee, the Central Control Commission, the central organs, and boundless chatter typical for the period of the RSDLP formation and for Khrushchev and Gorbachev periods were even more destructive under creation of the RCWP and at all stages of its decay. Sessionism, endless discussions and empty statements reduced to zero the effectiveness of this party activity in real proletarian ranks, leading to numerous and irretrievable splits and atrophy of all its organizations and authorities.

If for the first 14 years of existence the Bolsheviks managed to carry out the October political upheaval, if for the next 20 years after the revolution the Bolshevik Party managed to almost completely realize the provisions of the Leninist program and ensure the formation of the dictatorship of the working class in Soviet Russia, by 1937 to turn the USSR into a powerful technological power, it is quite obvious that for the same 20 years, the CPRF and the RCWP, in conditions of incredible for capitalism freedom of speech, have fulfilled NO program goals.

One may ask, what is the reason of this tragic difference?

First of all, the fact that democratic centralism dominated in the post-Stalin CPSU, the CPRF, the RCWP and, therefore, there was absolutely no chance of leading the party in the direction of science-based centralism.

Why is the core group of the magazine Proriv still small? Because most articles sent to the editorial board contain catastrophic theoretical mistakes. Why the small editorial board of the magazine Proriv and its technical staff keep integrity, unity and issued more scientific-theoretical and journalistic publications than Sovetsky Soyuz (tr. Soviet Union), the magazine of the Central Committee of the RCWP? Because every activist of Proriv constantly improves his scientific level and, consequently, we argue more with our own gaps in education than with each other. Moreover, the stronger the activists of Proriv progress in learning diamatics, the less internal disputes we have and more unitedly solve all external problems. To everyone who does not agree with the position of the magazine Proriv, formulated in its first issue, we immediately give a free rein.

The Prorivists have realized long ago that truth is born not in an argument with whoever, but only in the intense search for truth by the competent persons, i.e. by those who know accurately the subject and the METHOD. Another approach to the search for truth leads to logical mistakes only.

Mental laziness, and therefore the lack of diamatic education of the members of today’s left parties members, inevitably result in their Machist “methodology” (they do not even know this, hoping that they are intuitive, mentally lazy, ill-read, but dialecticians). And so they, instead of the specific historical approach, only rewrite for the hundredth time what was written at the end of the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th centuries, never asking themselves the question: why more than a hundred years ago a pioneer said, wrote and did just like that, and no other way. Or, at least they could ask themselves, why Lenin needed this stratagem: to form in the party not just democracy or centralism, but democratic centralism. What kind of diamatic contradictions were resolved in the mind of a genius, leading him precisely to this formulation?

From the scientific point of view, it is ridiculous to talk about the need for democracy and even democratic centralism in the party of the scientific world outlook. At least they could ask why the oligarchs around the world, who hated the CPSU and the USSR, applauded Gorbachev for his efforts to democratize the CPSU and the USSR? Why was the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee welcomed with open arms by all the most reactionary presidents, prime ministers and chancellors of the world, including Reagan, Thatcher and Kohl? Why was only Gorbachev so popular among these servants of imperialism, and not Yeltsin or even Gaidar with Chubais?

Only because the imperialists knew that democracy led only to the destruction of the system of scientific government of society. The struggle of Khrushchev for the “collective mind of the party”, the struggle of Andropov for democracy in planning, i.e. for self-financing in economics, the struggle of Gorbachev for the democratization of inner-party life, as a consequence of the ignorance of these General Secretaries of the CPSU Central Committee, was a grandiose gift to the imperialists of the whole world. Imperialists liked Gorbachev because he was predictable and governed in his actions on breaking up the CPSU and the USSR. And Yeltsin, Gaidar and Chubais were disliked for being incompetent, i.е. for the fact that they did not succeed in complete destroying their rival, the bourgeois market Russia, although this could happen.

One may say, that is it, since everything was concentrated in the arms of the general secretaries of the CPSU, then their stupidity led to devastating consequences. Our opponents do not see that Gorbachev’s voluntary refusal from centralism in the party showed that the party mass, like in the days of Lenin, was not able to hold the victorious line in politics independently, without real leaders. It would seem that everyone realized the meanness, the insignificance of Gorbachev. But how poor the preparation of the other party members was, that when everything became possible, only a few thousand communists tried to organize the Movement of the Communist Initiative (the MCI). Giving more freedom to the party masses only led to the victory of petty-bourgeoisness in politics, especially in the national republics. Remember, at the 28th Congress of the CPSU, two-thirds of stupid congress delegates voted for market reform in the USSR.

Thus proletarians cease to be wage slaves, illiterates, prostitutes and Nazis only when they are united with their vanguard, and the vanguard is armed with the KNOWLEDGE of science-based and tested laws of social development.

Therefore, there is advice to all young leftists: if you want to fight forever and in vain, then follow the principles of democracy, like Plekhanov, Trotsky, Bukharin, Khrushchev, Andropov, Gorbachev, Zyuganov, Anpilov, Tyulkin, Udaltsov and Batov did, to the delight of the oligarchs of the whole world.

If you want to win in the struggle for a long, happy, dignified life, in a period optimally conditioned by the objective factors — then stand for science-based centralism. It is difficult, time-consuming, but guaranteed.

(Continued on following post. )
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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