Spicy question maybe, but I’m interested in your takes.
Personally, I think there’s some major issues with at least the terminology of the 2 phase model of lower/higher stage communism or socialism/communism as the terms are used in classical theory. Specifically the ‘lower stage’ or ‘socialism’ term is problematic.
In the age of revision and after the success of counterrevolution it has become clear that there is in fact a transitional phase leading up to the classical transitional phase. Societies did not jump from developed capitalism to socialism immediately and even the states that arguably did were forced to roll back some of the core tenets of ‘socialism’ as it is described in Marx, Engels and Lenin. Namely no private ownership of the means of production and no exploitation of man by man.
To ultras this just means countries following this path aren’t socialist. So then China isn’t, Cuba isn’t, no country still is really and those of us claiming they are then have to be revisionists. And to be fair, if you’re dogmatic you can make that point going from the source material. China itself recognizes this inconsistency, thus not seeing itself at the stage of socialism. Yet it’s a socialist state. But then what do we actually mean by ‘socialism’ when we use the term like this? Just a dictatorship of the proletariat? Any country in the process of building socialism?
That question comes up all the time and confuses the fuck out of people, because the term is either not applied consistently or as it’s defined is lacking. I think discourse in the communist movement and about AES would profit immensely if we had a more consistent definition or usage of the term or a better defined concept of what that transition to socialism is and how we should call it.
There is a lot of dogma from past socialist experiments. And while the successes of the USSR should be defended, many MLs get carried away with the defense and act as if Lenin and Stalin were omnipotent and their theories on organizing and revolution are able to be perfectly replicated anywhere. We must ultimately remember that the USSR had many failures, had material conditions and obstacles unique to them, and that Lenin – while a brilliant analyst of imperialism – was a human, not a god, and that he wrote from a particular insight with the intent of revolutionizing his particular society.
That’s not to say past theory should be discarded. We gotta continue to study and be the messengers of this knowledge. And it’s also not to say we have license to be eclectic and undisciplined in our takes and our praxis. But even though history is currently rhyming and all that, we live in a notably different world in terms of our technology, collective awareness, We need to forge NEW theory suited to OUR material conditions. Especially for us comrades in imperial core countries. Take our cue from the rest of the global south and ADAPT the theory. Stop treating it like dogma.
One example in my maybe-unpopular opinion, is that we can actually learn from current anarchist tactics of organizing rather than wholly dismissing them because they are anarchists. Yeah I know, a lot of them (as evidenced here recently) are annoying in their lack of proper geopolitical analysis and their idealism, but they’re also leading the struggle in plenty of areas of resistance (Cop City in Atlanta). We shouldn’t take that for granted and we can learn from them just as much as they should learn from us. In this day and age, with the unique opportunities and setbacks we are confronted with regarding online surveillance and social media, strong centralization of our movement might actually not be appropriate right now.
I agree about working with anarchists. I heard a leftcom podcast a while ago on the piece “neither vertical nor horizontal” (they said it was “too Leninist” so I’ll stand by it) and combined with the one of piece from c/analyticalunity I have come to the conclusion that while MLs often just focus on having a strict organizational structure, recruiting, and protesting, Anarchists seem to be focused on only small scale praxis. They counter-protest, make community farms, and do mutual aid. We can learn from each other, and have less strict “vanguard party” structure (while staying more organized than the anarchists) and increase the help we give to our communities to grow support. Something the Sungmanitou said on Marx Madness that stuck out to me is that “if you collect member dues and don’t give out free food at least once a week you’re doing something wrong.”
Precisely. I personally think we can still remain Leninists while reevaluating the relevance of vanguardism. If someone disagrees with that, I welcome the counterpoint.
Sure we need a communist party to lead the people to victory, but most parties just think if they are ideologically pure enough they can just call themselves the vanguard. What we need is multiple organizations organizing and supporting working people and they can eventually merge into a single vanguard if the conditions are right.
I’ve read recently that the vanguard structure of the Bolsheviks didn’t even emerge until a few years into the Civil War.
Too many self-described Communists today act like religious cultists who worship a few dead guys, and maintain a single-minded belief in some rapture-like “Revolution Day” where they can re-enact some dumbed-down of events that happened in 1917-1923. I believe this approach is misguided and counterproductive to the needs of the people here and now.
Why is looking towards the revolutionaries of the past a problem? That is a bit of an exaggeration, but why is it a problem to look towards those who have succeeded in the past and wish to emulate their efforts (loosely of course, as they themselves were all unique as the current situation is).
It’s not looking at them that’s the problem, it’s the obsessing and worshipping part.
That’s still extremely vague though. What does “worshipping” and obsessing mean to you? I’ve honestly never met anyone that calls themselves an ML (and not an ultra) who dogmatically worshipped or obsessed over revolutionary leaders.
Reading, discussing, pushing for, and standing by past revolutionary leaders and looking to them for inspiration or as role models is not obsessing.
Something that has been on my mind as I have been diving more into theory is what will happen to those that choose not to work “after the revolution.”
I feel like at the time of Marx or Lenin, it was understood that manual labor war paramount to a productive society and the automation of the time made production more efficient with less manpower needed. But there was still this emphasis on how everyone will be a productive member of society in order to “earn their keep.” The USSR, of course wasn’t able to be 100% automated. So, I get that.
But we are in the early stages of an era of automation where there are going to be a lot less jobs needs that not everyone will be employed. But I also think that is a good thing. It’s, imo, the obvious path our society needs to be striving for. Fewer people working, and less work needed due to fully or nearly fully automated systems of things like food or clothing. After all, we won’t be striving for that infinite growth factor anymore.
The only thing I think I have seen that is close to an answer is that we will be working less so we will have more time to create. But that suggests that we will all still work but only, say 16 hours a week instead of 40-60. I think this definitely opens the opportunity for those that choose not to work, but do we call those people “parasites” and shun them? I don’t think so. But I also don’t know if this idea is fully realized in any text. At least not in any I’ve read yet.
Maybe this whole thing is just naturally lumped in with the old state “withering away”? Sorry for the sort of stream of thought comment btw.
Lafargue’s “the right to be lazy” enlarges on this. I read it long time ago so don’t remember his suggestion but the whole book is about your questions. Lafargue was Marx’s son in law btw.
For me personally, and I don’t know if it is ML per se, it would be the focus on (physical) workers and a lack of focus on office workers. My own party does this as well.
I get where it comes from, but to act as if a lot of people working whatever kind of job in an office are somehow less beneficial to our cause is a bit weird. I always think we are missing out on a lot of potential members.
So, here’s the problem, I think. Labor union organizing never included middle management because middle management were, in effect, already class traitors. They executed the speed ups, they executed the union busting, etc. But that was long ago. Middle management has gotten HUGE since that time.
But you know what else happened during that time? The labor union movement got co-opted by the CIA with the advent of Business Unionism. Business unionism was the movement to win only mild economic victories, completely oppose revolutionary movements, and ultimately collaborate with the bourgeoisie.
How in the hell are you going to organize middle management, which has a pedigree of class traitorism, when you can’t even organize the workers who are the most oppressed by management structures?
Essentially, I think the problem is that Marxism has not found a way to actually organize the labor aristocracy, whether they are office workers OR physical laborers. That’s why the BPP created a theory of revolutionary potential in the lumpen. It’s why decolonization became a thing. There’s no workable theory at present that points towards the activating whatever revolutionary potential exists in office workers.
Actually just be an human peeve rather than a theory one, but I feel like a lot of MLs haven’t moved on from the fall of the Soviet Union and place disproportional emphasis on remembering a state that no longer exists compared to the support of current AES (except for China) and socialist movements. It’s very rare to see any discussion of either Cuba or new socialist movements in America or Africa for instance, and when they pop up it’s only when the Eye of the Washington Post sets its gaze upon them. In a sense, I think a lot of MLs (not educated enough to call myself one of them yet) fall a lot into the trap of talking about things libs care about more than what we should actually care about.
or new socialist movements in America or Africa for instance
Out of curiosity, what new Socialist movements should we be paying attention to, in your opinion?
I’m a bit of a “baby Marxist” as some might call it and I wouldn’t even dare to opine on African matters from my position of ignorance, but from my budding understanding there are some interesting struggles in the Caribbean happening right now that could use some attention. For instance, it has settled down a bit but the FRG9 in Haiti has some explicitly Marxist tendencies and advocates for a Haiti independent from foreign capitalist meddling and the expropriation of the bourgeois-owned land. Sadly it’s hard to get info on them as the press pays little attention, many don’t speak English, and them getting banned off of the popular social media like facebook or twitter. Also due to racism. So you often get a lot of “people talking about them” and no “them talking about themselves”. Additionally Peru’s Marxist-adjacent president is currently in jail after some really hard to parse political crisis. There are probably many more, and there may be many diverging opinions here about those, but those are the ones that came to mind. I’d say the Caribbean is really important geopolitically as uncontested US hegemony there could provide a even more hardship to Cuba.
I’d also love it if more people replied with their pet revolutionary movements, local or worldwide, or elaborating on the ones I mentioned if they know more about them.
I always felt as much as ML and other adjacent ideologies maintain that they are materialist, in effect they don’t act as such. This is partly informed by my experience online and in in-person organizing.
There’s a significant ignorance of the physical and natural sciences which do well to inform a materialist perspective. When I have brought up points from Biology, Physics, or some things which are more contemporary like Psychology (and the effectiveness of therapy) I have largely been brushed aside. I have some education in these areas, and I feel that many of the MLers I interact with have very little. Dialogue becomes nearly impossible as I am hitting heads against ideology as opposed to empirical evidence. This may be due to my background in the sciences as compared to the many individuals I interact with in-person (I don’t know about online) having humanities and arts backgrounds. Of course when I was in the space where the people who were well versed in the sciences or engineering were around, I’d hear similar ridicule against people who were less technical.
My hope would be at least among MLers that there would be space for critical thought and discussion but that has not been the case. In fact technical people who have a less coherent understanding or ideology, more or less piecemeal, at the very least seem more amenable to discussion relating to non-human materialist phenomena. Though there is often moral bankruptcy involved as well unfortunately.
I think there’s a lot of difficulty in MLism discussing social relations that are relevant to revolution and reaction but aren’t directly explicitly related to the means of production. Intersectionality does a good job of exposing those relations, but MLism struggles to incorporate these relations into a coherent framework that can easily be picked up.
Thus, we have confusion among MLs about how to express the division between the white labor aristocracy and the proles and lumpen of color. We have confusion about how to name oppressor and oppressed and discuss how oppression reproduces society. We struggle to incorporate the insights of Fanon and Freire without opening the door to revisionism. We do our best to do this, but MLism in my experience lacks the language and potential the concepts to handle these other relations gracefully.
If anyone has a good way of navigating what I am describing, I would be super grateful for some pointers.
As someone that just took class that utilized intersectionality as a framework, I heavily disagree. Intersectionality is confusing and lacking real foundational principles (i.e. it lacks a materialist perspective) that can interpret the world in real, actionable ways. It is basically like playing whack-a-mole, where each “intersection” requires its own individual investigation and understanding rather than belonging to an overarching understanding of the world. I interpret your critique as saying MLs generally lack a good understanding of class beyond Marx and Lenin (or maybe more generally, 19th and 20th century Europe) and how to incorporate decolonial ideas into class concepts, which I completely agree with. I am also part of the problem! But I don’t think this is something that other MLs haven’t analyzed. I think its a tendency of white labor aristocrats that are overrepresented in Western ML spaces (again, I am part of the problem). If anyone has good resources that bring class analysis into our modern world, I would also appreciate that!
I now realize I may be misinterpreting what you were saying about intersectionality, as I do think it is successful in at least bringing these topics into the forefront as worthy of serious analysis. I am just really frustrated with it right now since it caused me headaches lol
Intersectionality itself may not be explicitly materialist, the theory which supports it (which was done so through a marxist perspective) is standpoint theory which is completely materialist. The tokenization and other aspects occur in practice, which is unfortunate but not what the theory itself advocates.
To boil it down, do physical bodies which have a continuity in time and space have aspects or characteristics which are evident as a result of their environment and the effect of the environment on it?
In geology an example would be stratification. A large vertical column of earth has within it a novel set of characteristics corresponding to the effect of the environment around it. For example different geological epochs which can be determined through radiometric dating. Another could be a layer of a specific type of soot from the blast of a nearby volcano with compounds novel to the composition of the volcano. This continuous physical body is has information which is evident externally by observers or by other physical forces.
Similarly the person with an intersection has specific knowledge by virtue of themselves having experienced it. This may not be available to them readily, it may not manifest physically either. Perhaps even outside observers do not know and cannot know. None of that means it did not happen and was not potentially causally involved in the sequence or set of events they experienced.
EDIT: To add to what you said about ‘whack-a-mole’, it always seemed to me the general distaste towards some of the methods of intersectionality were founded in the relativism individuals engage in. I agree in this sense it becomes ‘whack-a-mole’ as what is kept at the forefront of individuals is their own material conditions and experiences to the consequence of others. Each intersection here becomes a unique identifier which is atomic and incommensurable which does not lead to productive engagement. I think the rational comes after the material conditions they face. However, I don’t think it is appropriate to shoot the messenger for the message, or rather the framework for consequences as a result of it being used by certain individuals in a certain space who are known to take advantage of whatever they can to gain whatever slight they may over others.
If these individuals had a better context with which to engage (e.g. Marxism, or any other developed school of thought) then I don’t believe the relativism nor the ‘whack-a-mole’ would be anywhere near as prominent. The breadth of human experiences and intricacies needs to still be dealt with, and in this case I think it acts as a bolster to Marxist-Leninism which is rather vague initially about how it organizes people.
Thanks for the detailed and thought-out response, I really appreciate it. My frustrations come purely from the mainstream application of intersectionality which decontextualizes everything for the sake of primacy of racial and social hierarchy, completely ignoring the basic question of why these hierarchies even exist in the first place (presumably because of typical western orthodoxy of “human nature”). I have definitely been rethinking it and seeing its value even in Marxist applications.
I think that’s the point I’m making. Intersectionality and decolonialism have demonstrated that they are required for sustainable revolution, but MLism can’t easily incorporate it.
I think various treatments of intersectionality fall to your critique, but I think perhaps your positions of privilege make intersectionality more difficult to feel the power of. There’s a ton of power in understanding that storytelling is valid form of historical evidence. There’s a ton of power in understanding that your privileges play a similar role to class interests in propagating and resisting ideologies and in determining aggregate behavior. It’s critical to see this when you read Fanon and you realize that there exist both proletariat and slaves in the same global world system and that the proletariat depends on the exploitation of slaves in maintaining their ability to reproduce their lives, and that these concepts interpermeate and the lines are terribly blurry. When you look into colonial America and you see indentured servants that are white and sharecroppers that are black, it’s insufficient to treat these two group identically due to ideology and superstructure. What do we call that using MLism? As far as I know, we can’t call them separate classes because they have the same relations to the means of production, but they have different relations to each other and to the state and to the bourgeoisie.
MLism can’t easily incorporate it.
Cuba has done a pretty good point about making strides for not only it’s Black population, but also Women and LGBT+ people as well. I think plenty of communist countries have implemented this more and more into their societies.
This seems mainly a Western ML issue if anything.
I think behaviorally and policy-wise it’s easy. I’m saying ML theory struggles to handle it.
I would say ML as a theory isn’t flexible to it, but rather that dogmatic settlers don’t understand that we have to study our own material conditions rather than copy-pasting China on.
100%
I am studying it and I’m struggling to find the linguistic and conceptual framings that work, hence why I posted this as my answer to the question about what I find lacking in MLism.
One example, the newly passed Families code in Cuba!
Please see my reply to the same comment. If you disagree I would be glad to hear why so so can foster a better understanding on my end.
I think your comment gets across a valid point by way of analogy. The analogy might not be the most rich and useful in a debate, but it establishes your position as a genuine attempt to show intersectionality is materialist
Indenture contracts most often guaranteed the servant land upon finishing their obligations. It was an upwardly mobile system that allowed settlers to enter debt for entrance into the colonial planter class. Indenture was basically dead for over 50 years by the time black sharecroppers became the dominant form of agricultural worker for black people.
Indentured servants were still part of the colonizer class, and were obligated to defend the colonies in militias alongside their masters. Indenture fell out of fashion after a series of servant revolts through which the servants won significant rights in the colonies. These revolts increased the planter class’ reliance on African slaves. By the time of the Revolution indenture was basically irrelevant.
Decolonial Marxism is perfectly compatible with MLism, in fact it is a reorientation of MLism, into the perspective of the colonized. Colonization is the subjugation of one nation by another. It is the purpose of Marxists in the colonizer nation to practice defeatism in solidarity with their nation’s colonized peoples. The Marxists of the colonized nations need to defeat the chains of Imperialism by fighting against their colonizers.
America being a settler state, a state by and for settlers where settlers exercise political supremacy (as seen in the Navajo water case just ruled by the SC), lives alongside its primary colonial subjects, the extant indigenous nations (most are still around) and the black nation. The secondary subjects being the migrant workers from colonized nations around the world (predominantly Latinos and Asians).
The Settlers as a nation are a colonizer class above the indigenous and black people. The contradiction between settlers of the bourgeoisie and property-less is secondary to the nation-state’s looting of indigenous land and super-exploiting black workers. The Pick-Sloan dams are a prime example of the white laborers working on genocidal projects that benefited white people overall. The condemnation of black and asian neighborhoods made way for downtown highways for white beneficiaries of the GI bill.
America has massive weaknesses in the production of Imperialism, namely in the necessity of the US to continue colonization of indigenous territory to maintain dollar imperialism. The DAPL and KXL protests blocked and delayed massive oil projects that the US and Canada need to control the price of oil. Biden has signed off on massive drilling projects in Alaska on indigenous land where the residents don’t have running water or electricity. This project is to replace the reliance on Saudi Arabia in maintaining a low price of oil. In response to unfavorable global conditions, the settler states dip into their own resources to replenish their empire. I think MLs in America should focus on attacking the US in its arteries, the production chain of imperialism. The dismantling of White Supremacy means removing White rule over the vast territories of North America and depriving the settlers of a state for themselves. The Dictatorship of the Colonized Nations is the necessary form of state that will replace the US, Canada, and Mexico.
I agree with you about what is to be done. But I haven’t heard of “Decolonial Marxism” as a body of theory. I am going to research it, but do you have any preferred sources?
It’s a retronym, Marxist theorists in this space never unified the theories and applications of ML utilized by Fanon, Rodney, Lushaba, Wynter, etc., under a specific title. However, the revolutions in Cuba, Vietnam, and China have been Decolonial in nature and should be studied in the way they took special attention to the society of the colonized masses when constructing Socialism that would go on to challenge and defeat Colonial rule.
The basis is the refusal to start history at the time of colonization, or from the reference point of the colonizers. The context of the settler states needs to start before the settlers arrived, how they arrived and came to dominate, and understand the protracted resistance against the settlers. When understanding the structure of a particular colonization, which is really how national resources are processed and consumed, we can see the relationship between the colonizer class and the colonized.
When I say Decolonization is a reorientation of ML I mean that ML was developed to explain the need for the proletariats of Imperial nations to understand the development of Imperialism in relation to class struggle. The American MLs know they need revolutionary defeatism but they do not understand what they need to defeat and where. The struggle for gender is one of deconstructing Colonialism, the struggle for race is one of deconstructing Colonialism, the struggle for the environment is one of deconstructing Colonialism. The struggle for class is one of deconstructing Colonialism. Decolonial Marxism is Scientific Socialism that builds a society that supplants the Colonial order.
we can see the relationship between the colonizer class and the colonized.
This is the language I struggle with when dealing with MLism. Is it possible to use class as the type of thing we refer to when we say colonizer and colonized? Is colonizer a class? How does that work with proletariat and bourgeoisie? Do the classes interpermeate or are they distinct?
Colonizer refers to anyone involved in the entire process of expropriation of the resources of another nation, this is a national distinction, not a racial one. Colonized, or indigenous in the settler form, refers to those who’s national property in land, resources, and labor is expropriated by a colonizing nation. The American nation owns, is hegemonic over, or exercises sovereignty over, the lands of Turtle Island. The nations that rely on those resources are being pushed off of them while the resources are expropriated for the entire Settler economy, the “free gifts of nature”. So colonizer vs colonized or settler vs indigenous relates to the definite relations between national (social) groups. Colonizers have exploitative positions in consumption of expropriated resources from the colonized groups in land and labor. As in when you have super exploited national groups within a country, it means that the colonial proletariat is exchanging less labor for the same returns in the distribution of resources in the economy. The state, superstructure turned back into material, allocates expropriated resources/property/consumption for members of the colonial nation, as if it were a bourgeoisie as a whole. So why isn’t the class differences within the colonial nation the primary contradiction (or the primary class contradiction, i.e. peasant vs prole) in a settler society? Because even if the settler proletariat defeated the settler bourgeoisie, it would still maintain national differences in the means of production and ownership of yet to be utilized resources. The settlers would have to voluntarily give up their position of expropriation over the other nations, that would have to be maintained by the decolonial state apparatus, the end of American supremacy.
Do the classes interpermeate or are they distinct?
Yes, distinct in the way of definite social relations to production, but like the bottom of the bougies and the top of the labor, the consumption by individuals varies beyond national bounds depending on the relationship to property within each nation. Colonialism once it has subjugated competing nations converts the structure of those nations into a model that provides the most expropriated resources with the least effort, in the case of the US the Americans can either totally expropriate territory from the indigenous, taking from bougie and prole alike, or in a neo-Colonial form where the indigenous bourgeoisie allows super exploitation of their proletariat and resources by a higher power in exchange for a share of the proceeds and reinforced rule by the colonizers. This form remains dominant as indigenous territory is used for meat, lumber, oil, and mineral production (especially Uranium), while indigenous workers rarely get those jobs from the American bourgeoisie as it is reserved for the American workers. Essentially any resources claimed by the colonial bourgeoisie are also claimed by colonial proletariat, this is the fuel of reactionary nationalism within the colonial nations.
Theres literally a book by Walter Rodney of that name (it focuses on Africa). For Turtle Island (US) specific books check out Custer Died for Your Sins, Fresh Banana Leaves, we do this til they free us, the rediscovery of America, playing Indian, the red deal, the prison writings of Leonard peltier, and more.
Thank you!
Yeah, I think I’m reacting to the capital I “Intersectionality” reproduced in the bowels of liberal academia that is designed to explicitly be incompatible with materialism. I totally hear what you are saying and appreciate the critique. I know I have blind spots, so if you know of any resources particularly about the necessity of intersectionality and decolonialism for sustainable revolution it would be much appreciated.
Honestly, just keep working with black and indigenous sources. Red Nation Podcast has really helped me understand the criticality of indigenous knowledge to the survival of society and the incommensurability of indigenous interests with settler interests. Read Settlers, Decolonization is not a Metaphor, and Wretched of the Earth. If you’ve read them already, read Fanon again, and read more Fanon.
What I found through engaging these texts is that not only do I have a blindspot as a white settler, these communities know I have a blind spot and they have stopped trying to convince us. They are talking with each other about what to do. So listening to it as a form of self crit really opened my eyes to the reality that the only way forward is national sovereignty, a la Lenin, applied to indigenous nations AND African diaspora as a nation, and that not only is this the only way forward but the global majority knows it and will force it on settler populations once hegemonic collapses.
Word, thanks comrade!
