In societies fractured by class antagonisms, the ruling elite who control the means of production, and hence, the politics, judicature, education, etc. of society, requires that those whom they extract value from, indebt, and oppress, split themselves into as many groups as possible. For the ruling classes, the principle of divide et impera, divide and rule/conquer, has always been necessary. In factionalizing the propertyless masses they win. This is why Marx calls racism “the secret through which the ruling class maintains its power.”[1] A similar sentiment is admitted to in James Madison’s Federalist 10. When writing to the owners of capital in his time, he promises that a faction across the lines of the property question could be avoided only insofar as more factionalism is promoted amongst those without property.[2]
​
It is clear that to challenge this division of the people imposed by the elites, unity of the people is necessary. Kwame Nkrumah emphasizes that since balkanization is a pivotal tool in the imperialist’s struggle to keep Africa divided, weak, and subjugated, African unity is the only way to combat it.[3] Likewise, the anti-colonial Cuban philosopher and poet, José Martí, urges that for Latin America to defend itself from U.S. imperialism, it must be united. Divided they will fall. Using the European folklore of the giant of the Seven-league boots to represent U.S. imperialism, Martí writes that “The trees must form ranks to keep the giant with seven-league boots from passing! It is the time of mobilization, of marching together, and we must go forward in close ranks, like silver in the veins of the Andes.”[4]  
But not all unity is of the same character. Not all unity serves to undermine the division imposed upon the people by the ruling class. The unity of working people artificially divided by the ruling class is one thing; unity of various “leftists” is a whole different affair. The former undermines the division the ruling class imposes on the masses, the latter often intensifies it under the auspices of uniting. We must recall what Lenin long ago taught us: “Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers’ cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists, and opponents and distorters of Marxism.”[5] Lenin urged us to always ask: “unity with whom?”[6] One undermines the cause of uniting the people when unity includes those who, in their very political practice, promote division. Unity with a purity fetish left, which consistently treads in petty-bourgeois moralizing, identity politics, and cancel culture, can only serve the cause of division and factionalism.[7] A left for whom large swaths of workers are far too ‘impure’ to organize will only ever undermine the class struggle and serve the interests of the ruling elite.

It is sufficient to look at the million ‘new’ organizations and parties that pop up left and right, seemingly out of nowhere, to conclude that something about this so-called “left” is rotten. Irrespective of whatever “radical” veneer they might put on their politics, they are not only fully compatible with the dominant order, but an indispensable component of it. A left that requires a checklist of positions workers must hold with regards to issues of gender, sexuality, national history, or whatever else, will only ever end up preaching to the choir… a choir that will get smaller and smaller as the people in those spaces who are more serious about the class struggle leave.

Unity, therefore, cannot be accepted as an abstraction. It must always be examined concretely. Unity of whom? Towards what ends? With what results? In what context? These are the questions we must ask. Class collaborationist unity with the imperialist bourgeoisie, clearly, is not the unity that will advance the class struggle. Unity with “leftists” who base their politics on a monastery-like purity of ideas, and who shun all those who don’t measure up to such purity, can likewise only hinder the class struggle. As the young Karl Liebknecht wrote,

"Not all unity means strength. Unity between fire and water puts the fire out and causes the water to disappear as steam; unity between a wolf and a lamb results in the lamb finding itself inside the wolf; unity between the proletariat and the ruling class is to sacrifice the proletariat; unity with traitors means defeat."[8]

Unity between the fire of the intensifying class struggles of the 2020s, driven by the necessity of such struggles in our period of decaying capitalist-imperialism, with the water of the old leftist dogmatists and purity fetishists, can only serve the cause of exterminating the fire, or at best preventing its spreading.

If in the past, because of our inexperience and youth, we urged such unity, we were wrong.[9] Concrete experience has taught us that no unity can be achieved with those who, while calling themselves “leftists,” “socialists,” or “communists,” produce only division in their actual political practice. Unity with a fake, compatible, purity fetish “left” only serves the cause of division and social insularity. Clear lines must be drawn between those who are serious about the class struggle, and those who are only committed to sustaining the purity of their abstract ideas. Unity with this middle-class left, fabricated historically by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA, and major capitalist foundations, is akin to unity with the imperialist bourgeoisie – a hindrance at best, and betrayal at worst, of the class struggle. The unity we must secure, and which the American Communist Party has accomplished in its very act of launching, is unity between serious, actual Marxists, who propose for themselves not the task of developing the loftiest pure ideas, but of concretely advancing the class struggle.

In the dialectic of unity and division, we have found, therefore, that certain forms of unity serve the cause of division, and certain forms of division serve the cause of unity. Abstractly, “unity” and “division” are devoid of content; empty causes in whose ambiguity can serve both sides of the class struggle. Dividing serious Marxists from the ruling class and their “leftist” agents is indispensable for the task of united working people and fighting for socialism.

This does not mean, however, that there is something ontologically wrong with the individuals that find themselves in these divisive “leftist” spaces. For many, these are the only areas they have found “dissident” politics to be present. This is not unintentional; the ruling order needs this to be the areas where dissenting young people go to. What we condemn, therefore, are not individuals. Many of them, if they’re serious about the class struggle, will in time end up on the right side. It is the fundamentally divisive politics of the middle class “left,” a politics indispensable for the ruling system keeping working people away from socialism with a ten-foot pole, that we condemn. As my colleague, Eddie Liger Smith, recently said: “for those people who do nothing but deride, attack, and smear us, guess what? The door will always be open. We’ll be here building when you get over your purity fetish and decide to come help us change this social system into one that actually serves the people.”[10]

Citations

[1] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), 407-408.

[2] James Madison, “The Federalist Number 10, [22 November] 1787,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-0178. [Original source: The Papers of James Madison, vol. 10, 27 May 1787–3 March 1788, ed. Robert A. Rutland, Charles F. Hobson, William M. E. Rachal, and Frederika J. Teute. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977, pp. 263–270.]

[3] Kwame Nkrumah, Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (London: Panal Books, 2004), xiii.

[4] José Martí J, “Tres Héroes,” In Páginas Escogidas, ed. Óscar Montoya (Bogotá: Editorial Norma, 1994), 41.

[5] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 20 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 232.

[6] Ibid.

[7] See Carlos L. Garrido, The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (Dubuque: Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2023).

[8] Karl Liebknecht, “The New ‘Civil Peace,’” In The German Revolution and the Debate on Soviet Power (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1986), 84.

[9] I am here being self-critical of my younger writings, when I was still too naïve about the effectiveness of “leftist” unity in the U.S., although I nonetheless still emphasized, rightly, the centrality of class unity and economic organization. See, for instance, this passage from 2020: “The American left focuses the majority of its efforts in pursuit of electoral victories without the prior existence of organization among class lines. Until the irrational divisions of socialist parties and organizations in the US unite and focus their energies on workplace organization as the necessary predecessor to the electoral struggle, we will continue to face futility in the political sphere.” Carlos L. Garrido, “Revolutionizing in America the Hope Bolivia Has Given Us,” Midwestern Marx Institute (October 20, 2020):
https://www.midwesternmarx.com/articles/revolutionizing-in-america-the-hope-bolivia-has-given-us-by-carlos-l-garrido  

[10] Edward Liger Smith, “Speech at the Institute for a Free America,” Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube (May 28, 2024): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOT1HwOwZ-I

​He’s the name on everyone’s lips. Whatever you think of him, at just 24 years old, Jackson Hinkle is a bonafide political force. Host of The Dive and co-founder of the Institute for a Free America, the California native boasts an impressive following.
 
Late last year, Hinkle — thanks mostly to his pro-Palestine content — became the world’s most viral Twitter personality. The self-described communist garnered a whopping 3.5 billion impressions in just one month. Elon Musk, Twitter’s megabillionaire owner, only managed 3.1 billion despite rigging the algorithm to promote his posts.
 
When not posting about Palestine, Hinkle tweets in support of other anti-imperialist struggles. Most recently, Hinkle has emerged as a prominent opponent of American efforts to coup Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. Hinkle even visited the coastal nation to monitor the latest presidential election and interviewed its besieged executive.
 
While international commitments send him to far-flung corners of the globe, Hinkle remains committed to building the American Communist Party. As a member of its Executive Committee, Hinkle has been central to the launch of this budding political organization. While still in its infancy, the American Communist Party has already begun cleaning and clothing communities. It has even started developing relationships with other anti-imperialists throughout the world.
 
The Party’s International Secretary Chris Helali recently met with Nicaraguan ambassador Mauricio Lautaro Sandino Montes at the World Anti-Imperialist Platform. And the Party’s Secretary of Education, Carlos Garrido, met with the vice president of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela last month. Given Hinkle’s centrality in the party, his contacts in Yemen, Russia, and elsewhere may also develop connections with it. The American Communist Party has 13 chapters in the United States and Canada with more soon to come.
 
Hinkle is not just a social media presence but does anti-imperialist work on the ground too. Given that, you might expect the Left to uniformly embrace him. But opinions are divided. Detractors see Hinkle as more enemy than friend. Socialism Done Left, a popular creator of political explainer videos, has called him a “conservative [grifter]” for his attempts to court Republican voters. Progressive YouTube streamer Vaush even went so far as to compare Hinkle to neo-Nazis.
 
Hinkle’s defenders are no less forceful. They see him as a principled and savvy media operator, and a standard bearer for their foreign policy aims. For example, The Midwestern Marx Institute said those opposing Hinkle “side with the forces of empire.” Similarly, RTSG — a leftist research collective — considers Hinkle authentic, committed, and willing to sacrifice for righteous causes.
 
Now, Hinkle is of course far from perfect. Given the accelerating climate catastrophe, his environmental views — for example — are sometimes wildly errant. Hinkle calls himself “pro-fossil fuel” despite the need to “keep it in the ground” to avoid apocalyptic global temperature rises.
 
Yet this doesn’t justify abandoning him. The campsite rule provides a useful guide to assess whether Hinkle’s environmental views should be disqualifying. It asks if the person’s influence is a net positive. The rule gets its name from campsite signs that urge campers to leave the grounds better than they found them.
 
Undoubtedly, we’re all flawed. But the campsite rule counsels that, if the figure left the world better than they found it, you should support them. It’s a fundamentally utilitarian but fairly ironclad premise.
 
Despite erroneously promoting fossil fuels and calling environmentalism “anti-human,” Hinkle passes the campsite test. Hinkle’s ecological views are a vanishingly small part of his public presence. The bulk of his advocacy is anti-imperialist, exposing American empire and promoting those fighting to dismantle it. Hinkle’s fans know and love him for that, and may not even be aware of his environmental stances. Just as many leftists revere Joseph Stalin despite his affinity for oil drilling, they should support Hinkle.
 
Yet much of the Western Left seems content to purity test and summarily discard Hinkle for his least savory views. That is misguided as it risks letting perfect be the enemy of the good. Even if you grant that Hinkle has some bad takes, most are good. That’s especially true of the ones about he’s most vocal about — supporting economic independence and opposing exploitative neocolonial powers.
 
While those are the perspective he foregrounds, critics often fixate on Hinkle’s supposed social conservatism. Yes, he seemingly isn’t a rigid adherent of Western gender or sexuality theory. In fact, he appears to tolerate if not celebrate governments that endorse more traditional cultural values like Russia and China.
 
It’s understandable why leftist critics might reject what they see as Hinkle’s traditionalist streak. But it’s telling that they focus on Hinkle’s social views and not his foreign policy. The reason is simple. An unnerving number of Western leftists either don’t care enough about imperialism or, worse, believe State Department lies.
 
Too many professed socialists in the imperial core have drank the proverbial Kool-Aid. On issues from the Russo-Ukrainian conflict to airstrikes in Yemen, they sound just like John Bolton and Victoria Nuland. Vaush and his ilk seemingly take pride in being NATO’s biggest cheerleaders. Somehow the communists of the West cheerlead the world’s foremost anti-communist alliance. It’s no wonder they don’t credit Hinkle for his anti-imperialism; they’re on the opposite side of the struggle.
 
That’s no accident. For decades, elites have sought to sow within the Left the seeds of its own demise. In 1950, the CIA created the Congress for Cultural Freedom — a covert anti-communist civic organization. The Congress for Cultural Freedom operated in a smattering of countries throughout the West, and 35 globally.
 
It pushed intelligentsia — including ostensible progressives — to denounce socialist experiments, pulling the public away from Marxism and toward colonial capitalism. The Congress for Cultural Freedom dissolved in 1979. But an unfortunate number of Western leftists still follow its playbook.
 
Jackson Hinkle is not one of them. He’s an unabashed anti-imperialist stalwart, and even shines a light on the clandestine actors who seek to thwart his movement. Because Hinkle’s advocacy is comprised of overwhelmingly constructive positions, his impact is — on the whole — positive. He’s moving things in the right direction. Therefore trying to cancel Hinkle is actually anti-progressive. Western leftists harm their political ends Hinkle is helping advance by preferring to sacrifice that progress for purity’s sake.
 
Other critiques are more targeted and specific to Hinkle’s tone of commentary. Some contend that he jettisons nuance, painting the world in a Schmittian black and white of good versus evil. They see Hinkle’s adoption of conservative buzzwords like “deep state” and “cabal” as regressive and divisive — unbecoming of a political analyst. But there are a few points here.
 
First, Hinkle is still quite young. He hasn’t been on the far Left for very long. Like many young radicals, he began as a garden variety progressive before his recent political maturation. In other words, Hinkle is just 24. Give his skills of political analysis time to develop. They are already far beyond his years. Greater nuance will come and early signs are apparent to anyone who listens to his Rumble show The Dive.
 
But perhaps Hinkle isn’t a conventional political analyst. Maybe he’s better thought of as an agitative propagandist. Hinkle’s Twitter feed is one of forceful and repetitive political slogans that unambiguously express where his followers should stand. That is the essence of agitative propaganda. And the numbers don’t lie: Hinkle is one of the most effective digital propagandists on Earth. The movement needs people like him as revolutionaries of old recognized.
 
Yet by far the biggest problem Hinkle’s leftist critics have with him is his promotion of “MAGA communism.” Founded by fellow American Communist Party Executive Chairman and content creator Haz Al-Din, the apparent oxymoron consists of two basic premises. First, MAGA communists believe the irreverent movement behind Donald Trump held the potential to radicalize the American Left and Right. Second, they observe that many Trump fans detest the status quo and therefore might be open to communist ideas. MAGA communism was fundamentally an attempt to court Trump’s working-class base, rather than writing them off as a “basket of deplorables.” To that end, MAGA communists used patriotic imagery typically monopolized by the Right to woo Trump’s nationalistic base.
 
And that elicited the ire of many. Progressive author and academic Alexander Reid Ross dubbed MAGA communism “a deranged fringe movement.” Sam Seder, host of the left-wing Majority Report radio show, called it “word salad.” Others are even harsher. Ana Kasparian of The Young Turks suggested MAGA communism is akin to Nazism, coopting socialist rhetoric for fascist aims.
 
The criticism seems a bit hysterical when you consider that MAGA communism largely just synthesizes longstanding, formerly uncontroversial leftist ideas. Start with the idea that the Trump movement could create space for a more radical Left. Hinkle and his ilk were hardly the first to say this. It was the primary reason cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek, to many’s surprise, endorsed Trump in 2016. Even the late socialist commentator Michael Brooks, who ultimately endorsed Hillary Clinton, echoed the view. He said the rise of Trump and Bernie Sanders strengthened his conviction that the status quo could be broken. While Žižek faced backlash for endorsing Trump, his belief that MAGA could help catalyze a radical Left was widely shared. Yet Hinkle’s fellow leftists attack him for believing the same thing.
 
Similarly, Hinkle caught heat for believing the Left should try flipping Trump voters instead of dismissing them. But those same critics lauded Sanders for entering the lion’s den of Fox News to present his case to conservatives. In 2019, Jacobin magazine — America’s largest socialist publication — denounced the idea that most Trump voters are “an irredeemable monolith.” And it stressed the need for leftists to try reaching them. Hinkle merely shares this view. Unlike Jacobin, however, he has gotten seemingly endless flack for it — unjustifiably so.
 
MAGA communism isn’t a flavor of fascism, as Kasparian suggests. It’s merely a mode of outreach to anti-establishment conservatives. Hinkle is pulling people toward leftism — not Trump. Proof of this is that — especially as of late — Hinkle relentlessly criticizes the former commander in chief. Hinkle calls him “Zion Don” and “disgusting” for his pro-Israel exploits and has likened Trump’s genocide support to Nazi apologia.
 
But that doesn’t stop critics from attacking Hinkle’s use of patriotic symbols like the flag and other mainstays of Americana. This practice too was not just historically uncontroversial but a strategically obvious way for the Left to broaden its appeal. For example, renowned social scientists Karen Stenner has long called for leftists to adopt unifying symbology. In The Authoritarian Dynamic, Stenner advocates championing the pledge of allegiance and other patriotic practices to keep reactionaries at bay. What felt like common sense from the ivory tower suddenly became toxic when Hinkle said it.
 
Perhaps that’s unsurprising. After all, it’s easy to hate Hinkle, who’s a confessed provocateur. He admits to phrasing things in inflammatory ways for clicks. But he’s far from the only one doing that. Controversy and intrigue are the keys to survival in this saturated media market. Hinkle’s simply doing what it takes to elevate his message, which is a generally positive one. In that respect, he’s hardly unique.
 
Yet, in other respects, he absolutely is. Hinkle’s aesthetic isn’t that of the typical Western leftist. Between his movie star headshots and shirtless gym selfies, Hinkle doesn’t look especially bookish. He doesn’t wear flannels or don spectacles. Nor does he have the sort of beard that is oddly ubiquitous among white men on the American Left.
 
Hinkle’s leftism is virile and manly. Andrew Tate and his acolytes tell men to reclaim their masculinity by being sexist, materialistic degenerates. Hinkle is an antidote to this toxicity, telling men to instead reclaim their masculinity by being fiercely anti-imperialist. In other words, Hinkle speaks to disaffected young men and channels their frustration into productive causes.
 
For a long time, leftists have urged their side to do just that. Vaush and Kasparian did an entire segment condemning the leftist folly of ceding alienated young men to the Right. Hinkle doesn’t fall into that trap. Rather, he couples traditional masculinity with a compassionate politics — thus demonstrating that you can simultaneously be tough and kindhearted. Hinkle is precisely the sort of positive masculine influence the Left sorely needs. Yet the musclebound, cigar-smoking commentator who dates models seldom if ever gets credit for that.
 
Just looking at Hinkle, you’d probably guess he’s a conservative. He looks like your high school bully, and was himself homecoming king. That Hinkle superficially resembles the out group might reflexively bias some leftists against him, at least partly explaining their disdain.
 
But it’s incumbent upon them to overcome that base instinct. The popular criticisms of Hinkle lack teeth, and his impact is overwhelmingly positive. Hinkle achieved fame promoting exactly the sort of anti-imperialist positions necessary to overturn capitalist hegemony and build a better world. It’s an inspiring story — a dose of optimism in a political context that provides no shortage of reasons to despair. We should celebrate — not hate — Hinkle’s rise, and hope that more Hinkles will soon emerge.

Author

Youhanna Haddad is a North American Marxist of the Arab diaspora. Through his writing, he seeks to combat the Western liberal dogmas that uphold racial capitalism. You can contact him at [email protected].

Like rotary phones, typewriters, and VHS tapes, capitalism has outlived its usefulness.
​
If at certain moments in its historical development it served an important role in unleashing the productive forces from the shackles set on it by feudal relations of production, today in our highly financialized, ultra-parasitical decaying capitalist-imperialism, it is as evident as ever that social utility has long ago stopped being an unintended side-effect of capital accumulation. Well past are the times of capitalism’s vitality, when Marx and Engels could confidently proclaim that the form of life had “accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals.”[1] Today these wonders are erected in China, Russia, and the flowering multipolar world.

Western Imperialist Financialization and the Global South’s Economic Development

Faced with the culmination of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and of the unwillingness to return to the government intervention which dominated most capitalist economies in the Second World War, the crisis of the 1970s forced capitalists in the West to choose primarily two lifelines to recover worthwhile profit margins and prolong the life of the system. On the one hand, it could export productive capital abroad, increasing the rate of profit through buying labor power cheaper (and hence, lowering the cost of what Marx calls “variable capital”).[2] On the other hand, it could seek to make profits in more financialized and parasitic forms, through, for instance, interest rates, rents, and stock buy backs. Both led to general deindustrialization in the West and the gutting of any semblance of a productive economy.

The American capitalist class took both routes; it exported productive capital to the global south and deviated investments towards profiting from rents, interest rates, and stock buybacks. Today, as the economist Michael Hudson has shown, 92% of the profits of the Fortune 500 companies have been used to buy stocks – their own stock buyback programs – or to pay out as dividends. Only 8% is used on new investment.”[3] As Radhika Desai argues, the U.S. and Britain, therefore “led [most of] the world down the path that could only weaken productive economies and expand predatory and speculative finance.”[4] 

Faced with the fact that most profits in the Western capitalist states, especially its imperial heartland in America, are coming from activities which produce absolutely no real economic growth, the capitalist class has had to abandon the promethean attitude to growth that characterized its position on economic development in the 20th century. Today, faced with the objective devastation produced by capitalist growth on the environment, it has resuscitated Malthusianism with an environmentalist garb. I’ve called this Environmental Neo-Malthusianism (ENM).[5]

Instead of seeing the ecological crisis as rooted in capitalist production, which is fundamentally uncapable to develop ways to grow in harmony with nature, it has blamed growth itself. Both economic and populational growth are pinned as responsible for the product of Western capitalist-imperialism. How convenient that at a stage when productive development occurs primarily in the BRICS+ countries, especially in a China that outpaces U.S. production by two, that bourgeois ideology turns to ENM and paints real economic growth as the villain.

This is, of course, an abstract view of growth. It is exactly what should be expected from bourgeois ideology, which is fundamentally unable to ascend to the concrete, i.e., to understand the concrete concretely. Everything for them is reified, disconnected from the processes and webs of interconnections in which things are located. Growth in general is then blamed for the effects of a particular, historically and geographically situated, capitalist growth.

The intention here is clear. As the Western capitalist class shows itself incapable of any real economic growth, it condemns growth itself. Of course, the growth it condemns is of the kind that occurs in the global South and East, where productive development often outpaces even the U.S. It has no problem praising the growth obtained by parasitic Western finance capital. This is nothing but the form imperialist ideology has to take today to sustain a position that promotes the impoverishing of the global South.

Imperialism, as Lenin taught us, aims to fundamentally suffocate the ability of the colonized and imperialized to grow. Amilcar Cabral echoes Lenin when he tells us that “We have seen that violent usurpation of the freedom of the process of development of the productive forces of the dominated socio-economic whole constitutes the principal and permanent characteristic of imperialist domination, whatever its form.”[6] This is why leaders of the socialist and anti-colonial struggles in the 20th and 21st centuries have so fiercely pronounced the importance of economic, scientific, and technological development.

For Mao, central to the project of Chinese sovereignty was socialism, because “only socialism can save China.”[7] This is because, as Mao writes, “the socialist system has promoted the rapid development of the productive forces of our country, a fact even our enemies abroad have had to acknowledge.”[8] Writing in the early 1960s, Mao would say that their “main accomplishment has been to clear the way for the development of the productive forces.”[9]

Deng Xiaoping would write that “A Communist society is one in which there is no exploitation of man by man, there is great material abundance and the principle of from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs is applied. It is impossible to apply that principle without overwhelming material wealth. In order to realize communism, we have to accomplish the tasks set in the socialist stage. They are legion, but the fundamental one is to develop the productive forces so as to demonstrate the superiority of socialism over capitalism and provide the material basis for communism.”[10]

Cabral himself emphasized the futility of the comprador bourgeoisie in “direct[ing] the development of the productive forces,” urging us to remember that “the productive forces are the motive force of history, and total freedom of the process of their development is an indispensable condition for their proper functioning.”[11]

Kim Il Sung emphasized that “without building an independent national economy [i.e., economic self-sufficiency], it is impossible to guarantee the firm political independence of a country, develop the productive forces and improve the people’s standard of living.”[12] To be “in conformity with socialist society,” Il Sung urged the need to “develop the productive forces [and] place all sectors of the national economy on the basis of modern technology.”[13]

Writing out of Cuba, Che Guevara would say that “The struggle against imperialism, for liberation from colonial or neocolonial shackles, which is being carried out by means of politi­cal weapons, arms, or a combination of the two, is not separate from the struggle against backwardness and poverty. Both are stages on the same road leading toward the creation of a new society of justice and plenty.”[14] This requires the unleashing of the productive forces currently being suffocated by Western imperialism.

“Degrowth Communism” Contra the Classics of Marxism

Today, however, the new fad in the so-called bourgeois academy is ‘degrowth communism’. Thinkers like Jason Hickel, Kohei Saito, and others, who uphold a distorted caricature of Marxism which condemns economic growth and urges economic ‘degrowth,’ are propped up as a ‘radical’ form of Environmental Neo-Malthusianism.[15] Matt Huber is right to point out, in his critique of the degrowth “communists,” that “it would be quite sad to build a socialist movement capable of seizing the means of production only to prohibit from the outset the further development of the productive forces. Socialism is not stasis. What about fusion power? Curing cancer? We still have so much left to accomplish as a species that capitalism might be holding us back from.”[16]

Seeking to always confuse the mass of people into thinking that theories which are fundamentally anti-Marxist and anti-communist are actually their opposite, the bourgeoisie has set the stage for these characters to present the public with a Frankenstein Marxism, a Marxism put together by an eclectic mix of liberalism, abstracted quotes from random unpublished manuscripts (Saito), and a general hodgepodge of decades of CIA-MI6 funded anti-communist ‘leftism,’ aimed at creating a compatible, imperialism friendly “left.” At a time when most of the American people are living paycheck to paycheck, drowning in debt-slavery, and living lives plagued by desperation and material insecurity, to pitch communism as ‘degrowth’ is to confirm the McCarthyite lie that socialism will make everyone poor. Instead of debunking this ruling class lie and showing how communists seek to create the sort of material abundance that allows for universal human flourishing, these so-called “socialists” embrace it. Perhaps their socialism has Klaus Schwab and World Economic Forum characteristics, because it sure sounds a whole lot like telling poor working class people that they’ll “own nothing and be happy.”

We must be clear, this ‘degrowth communism’ is nothing more than the ‘radical’ form environmental neo-Malthusianism has to take to win over the middle-class leftists to their side. These are the priestly class that ensures, through the iron triangle of the media, NGO’s, and the academy, that this junk is fed into wrongly self-proclaimed popular, grassroots, or even ‘socialist’ organizations. It is, however, anti-Marxist and anti-communist through and through.

The Marxist tradition has always understood that only in the development of the forces of production can socialism flourish. In Capital Vol. I, for instance, Marx writes that:

"The development of society's productive forces… [create the] material conditions of production which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle."[17]

It is the development of “the material conditions and the social combination of the process of production” which “ripens,” in the capitalist mode of life, “both the elements for forming a new society and the forces tending towards the overthrow of the old one.”[18] As with other modes of life, Marxist have long understood that capitalist relations of production, while at one point being “forms of development [for] the productive forces,” have in time “turn[ed] into their fetters.”[19] Socialist relations of production have always been understood to have the capacity of breaking through these fetters and helping unleash the forces of production. As Marx famously writes in Capital Vol. I.,

"The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated."[20]

A similar argument is made by Engels in his celebrated Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:

"The expansive force of the means of production bursts asunder the bonds imposed upon them by the capitalist mode of production. Their release from these bonds is the sole prerequisite for an unbroken, ever more rapidly advancing development of the productive forces, and thus of a practically unlimited growth of production itself."[21]

In his “Critique of the Gotha Program,” while elaborating on some general characteristics and preconditions for the highest phase of communist society, Marx would say that,

"In the highest phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banner: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"[22]

Capitalist relations of production in time become a barrier for human progress, as it is evident in today’s fully financialized Western capitalist-imperialism. But the fetters are not just for the forces of production, i.e., the economic base of society, but also for culture, politics, arts, philosophy i.e., the superstructure of society. The decadent and degenerate culture of today’s Western capitalism should itself demonstrate how profoundly fettering it is to the cultural development of humanity.

Overcoming the “System of Waste”

While more progressive than the feudal orders which preceded it in Europe, capitalism also produces enormous waste. It is in this wastefulness and inefficiency, this anarchy of production, that capitalism has been able to produce an environmental crisis it is unfit to deal with. Capitalism wastes labor, human potential, nature, and everything in between. As British socialist William Morris eloquently stated, “The truth is that our system of Society is essentially a system of waste.”[23]

Not only would socialist relations of production remove the artificial fetters created by a society wherein production is aimed at profit, but also the extreme wastefulness in labor, life, and things created by such anarchic production for-profit. As Engels argues,

"The social appropriation of the means of production puts an end not only to the current artificial restrictions on production [i.e., capitalist fetters], but also to the positive waste and devastation of productive forces and products… It sets free for the community at large a mass of means of production and products by putting an end to the senseless luxury and extravagance of the present ruling classes and their political representatives. [This affords] the possibility of securing for every member of society, through social production, an existence which is not only perfectly adequate materially and which becomes daily richer, but also guarantees him the completely free development and exercise of his physical and mental faculties."[24]

The emphasis on the development of the forces of production has led critics of Marxism to argue that socialism would reproduce the same ‘productivism’ as capitalist society. This depicts a fundamental poverty of dialectical thinking. Yes, socialism seeks to unleash the productive forces and create the sort of abundance wherein the human community can “leap from the kingdom of necessity into the kingdom of freedom.”[25] However, this growth is people-centered, not capital-centered. The aim of the development of the forces of production is not the accumulation of endless profit in a small group of hands. Far from this capitalist telos, which grows without regard for nature and human life, socialist growth is centered on creating conditions for the greatest amount of human flourishing – something which necessarily implies de-alienating humans from nature and overcoming the metabolic rifts anarchic capitalist production creates.[26]

Instead of carrying out production in environmentally unsustainable ways – as capitalism does – socialist production allows for both developments in the productive forces and – because of its efficiency and elimination of superfluous waste – for this development to be carried out in a metabolic harmony with nature. As Marx argues in Capital Vol. III., communist production would

"Govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under 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."[27]

China, Sustainable Development, and Socialist Ecological Civilization

This harmonious metabolism, or balance, can be seen most clearly in China’s efforts to build a socialist ecological civilization – a task it proposed for itself at the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 2007. As it reads in the latest update to the CPC’s constitution, following the 20th National Congress of the CPC in 2022, the Party must “work to balance … relations between humankind and nature.”[28] “Harmony between humankind and nature,” as the constitution argues, is a fundamental component “in building a socialist ecological civilization” capable of creating “a positive path to development that ensures increased production, higher living standards, and healthy ecosystems.”[29]

This dialectic of sustainable development, central to Marx and Engels’s understanding of socialism, finds its highest concrete form to date in China’s efforts to construct a socialist ecological civilization. As John Bellamy Foster, who has spearheaded the movement towards emphasizing the ecological dimensions of Marx and Engels’s thought, argued in one of his older works: China’s “developments reflect the recognition of a dialectic in this area that has long been part of Marxist theory.”[30] In so doing, Foster argues, “China’s role in promoting ecological civilization as a stage in the development of socialism can be seen as its greatest gift to the world at present in terms of environmental governance.”[31]

Far from accepting the false binary of growth with ecological devastation or degrowth, we must (as China has done) sublate this spurious dialectic by positing the necessity of sustainable growth, a reality that can only be actualized through planned control of the economy to serve peoples needs. Only socialism can both provide the abundance necessary for all to live fulfilling, flourishing lives, and do so in a manner that doesn’t destroy the nature upon which human existence is premised.

"China will stay committed to promoting ecological conservation. As I have said many times, we should never grow the economy at the cost of resource depletion and environmental degradation, which is like draining a pond to get fish; nor should we sacrifice growth to protect the environment, which is like climbing a tree to catch fish. Guided by our philosophy that clean waters and green mountains are just as valuable as gold and silver, China has carried out holistic conservation and systematic governance of its mountains, rivers, forests, farmlands, lakes, grasslands and deserts." – Xi Jinping

Citations

[1] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works Vol. 6 (Moscow: Progress Publishers), 487.

[2] Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1 (New York: Penguin, 1982), Ch. 8.

[3] Michael Hudson, “Debt, Empires, Oligarchs and a More Perfect State,” DSPod (July 2023): https://demystifysci.com/transcripts/2023/7/22/michael-hudson-on-debt-empires-oligarchs-and-a-more-perfect-state

[4] Radhika Desia, Capitalism, Coronavirus, and War (London: Routledge, 2022), 85.

[5] Carlos L. Garrido, “Overcoming the Dangers of Environmental Neo-Malthusianism and the Errors of Degrowth Ideology,” Philosophy in Crisis (January 2024): https://carlosgarrido.substack.com/p/overcoming-the-dangers-of-environmental

[6] Amilcar Cabral, “The Weapon of Theory,” (January 1966), Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/cabral/1966/weapon-theory.htm

[7] Mao Tse-Tung, Selected Works Vol. 5 (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1977), 394.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Mao Tse-Tung, “Reading Notes On The Soviet Text Political Economy,” (1961-2) Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-8/mswv8_64.htm

[10] Deng Xiaoping, “Reform is the Only Way for China to Develop Its Productive Forces,” (August 1985) The Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping: https://dengxiaopingworks.wordpress.com/2013/03/18/reform-is-the-only-way-for-china-to-developed-its-productive-forces/

[11] Cabral, “The Weapon of Theory.”

[12] Kim Il Sung, Works Vol. 19 (Pyongyang: Foreign Language Press, 1984), 266.

[13] Kim Il Sung, Works Vol. 13 (Pyongyang: Foreign Language Press, 1983), 229.

[14] Ernesto Che Guevara, Che Guevara Reader: Writings on Politics & Revolution, ed. David Deutschmann and María del Carmen Ariet (Havana: Ocean Press, 2013), 340.

[15] See, for instance, Jason Hickel, Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the Planet (New York: Penguin, 2020); Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023); Michael Löwy, “Nine Theses on Ecosocialist Degrowth,” Monthly Review 75(3)  (July 2023): https://monthlyreview.org/2023/07/01/nine-theses-on-ecosocialist-degrowth/ (It is unfortunate that the great American Marxist journal and editorial, Monthly Review, has accepted ‘degrowth.’ While most of the other work is still great, the turn from sustainable development rooted in Marxist ecology to degrowth has been disheartening).

[16] Matt Huber, “The Problem with Degrowth,” Jacobin (July 2023): https://jacobin.com/2023/07/degrowth-climate-change-economic-planning-production-austerity

[17] Karl Marx, Capital Vol I., (London: Penguin, 1982), 739.

[18] Marx, Capital Vol I., 635.

[19] Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (New York: International Publishers, 1999), 21.

[20] Marx, Capital Vol. I., 929.

[21] Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Chicago: Revolutionary Classics, 1993), 109.

[22] Marx and Engels, MECW Vol. 24, 87.

[23] William Morris, “As to Bribing Excellence,” William Morris Archive: http://morrisarchive.lib.uiowa.edu/items/show/2322. 

[24] Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 109.

[25] Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 110.

[26] Capitalism “produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.” Karl Marx, Capital Vol. III (London: Penguin, 1991), 949. For more see John Bellamy Foster’s older works, especially Marx’s Capital and The Return of Nature, and Ian Agnus’s work, especially Facing the Anthropocene. While the theory of metabolic rifts is today used to defend a notion of ‘planetary limits and ecological overshoots’ which is foundational for the degrowthers, this is itself rooted in an abstract and static understanding of nature’s metabolisms. Metabolisms are dynamic, they can speed up or slow down. When rationally planned and subjected to more advanced technologies and instruments of production, nature’s metabolisms can be adapted to the ever-growing needs of humanity. The rift occurs when, thanks to the capitalist profit motive, no consideration is given to how a certain form of growth could have detrimental effects for the nature upon which that growth itself is premised. When human needs and nature are operative and central factors in the considerations behind economic development, one could still have their development and prevent the rifts capitalism creates.

[27] Karl Marx, Capital Vol III, 958-9.

[28] “Constitution Of The Communist Party Of China (Revised and adopted at the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China on October 22, 2022),” Qiushi (October 2022): http://en.qstheory.cn/2022-10/27/c_824864.htm 8.

[29] “Constitution of the Communist Party of China,” 10.

[30] John Bellamy Foster et. al., “Why is the great project of Ecological Civilization specific to China?,” Monthly Review (October 2022): https://mronline.org/2022/10/01/why-is-the-great-project-of-ecological-civilization-specific-to-china/

[31] Foster et. al., “Why is the great project of Ecological Civilization specific to China?”

T​he last few days have seen the U.S. ramping up its war on domestic political dissent in multiple ways, with U.S. lawmakers petitioning the Biden administration to crack down on anti-genocide protesters it suspects of foreign influence, and a journalist critical of U.S. foreign policy coming under the crosshairs of Washington’s increasingly weaponized Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

The FBI has raided the home of former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, a vocal critic of U.S. foreign policy toward Russia.

Consortium News reports:

• Federal agents removed Ritter’s electronic equipment and numerous boxes of paper files from his Albany, N.Y. area home Thursday on suspicion that the former U.N. weapons inspector is violating the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act.
• In a video posted to his Substack page, Ritter said that normally in alleged FARA violation cases the authorities send a letter to the subject of the inquiry informing them of the investigation. They do not send numerous F.B.I. agents to the door with a warrant to search and remove potential evidence.
• The warrant, a copy of which Ritter posted, only called for electronic devices to be removed, but the agents, whom Ritter said acted professionally, also removed boxes of paper United Nations files from his days as a U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq in the 1990s. As Ritter says in the video, U.N. documents are never classified and could have nothing to do with the alleged FARA case against him.
• ‘So the idea that, this is normal procedure is absurd in the extreme. I’m not a foreign agent. What I am is a journalist. And this is how we need to couch this entire thing. What the F.B.I. did yesterday, what the United States government did yesterday, was a frontal assault not only on free speech, but a free press,’ Ritter said in the video.

​The U.S. has been getting increasingly aggressive in using FARA to suppress political speech that is critical of U.S. foreign policy, with dissident voices being increasingly targeted by the Department of Justice on accusation of circulating unauthorized ideas in collaboration with governments like China and Russia.

This coincides with a report from Ken Klippenstein about a letter sent to the White House by 22 members of Congress demanding that protesters against the U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza be investigated for any unauthorized affiliation with foreign governments, and severely penalized if any ties are found to “the Iranian regime”.

Klippenstein writes:

• Last Thursday, 22 members of Congress sent a letter to the Biden administration demanding the investigation and criminal prosecution as well as financial ruin of Gaza war protesters, whom they claim have received funding from Iran. ‘We write today regarding recent revelations that certain anti-Israel organizations in the United States have received funding from the Iranian regime,’ the letter begins. The revelation originated in a recent statement by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, on top of statements by FBI director Christopher Wray and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco that Iran is trying to influence public opinion.
• The letter goes on to call for the Justice Department ‘to criminally prosecute and pursue civil forfeiture actions against any individual or entity that violates the law by receiving funding from the Iranian regime.’ It ends by urging ‘the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and Treasury to make public all available information, without compromising sources and methods, regarding Iran’s funding of these pro-Hamas organizations so that the American people can see who these groups truly are.’

​Klippenstein notes that the letter demands a list of individuals and organizations that have received direct or indirect support from Iran or any of its “affiliates”, copies of banking information on “anti-Israel groups” believed to have received sanctioned funding, and information regarding what “severe monetary penalties” will be imposed on those found to be in violation.

The U.S. empire has been doing everything it can to restrict the flow of inconvenient information as public opposition to its criminality swells at home and abroad. Propaganda, censorship, the war on the press, banning TikTok, consolidating the collaboration of Silicon Valley with U.S. government agencies, police crackdowns on campus demonstrators, and quashing political dissent are all outward manifestations of the agenda to manipulate the way the public thinks about what’s happening in the world.
​
The leaders of the U.S.-centralized empire understand that real power lies in the ability to control not just what happens in the world but what people think about what happens, because doing so allows them to act however they want to act without the risk of revolution. Our task as ordinary members of the public is to weaken their control of the dominant narratives in our civilization, and wake the public up to the truth of what’s really happening under the rule of this tyrannical power structure.

Author

Caitlin A. Johnstone is a rogue journalist; bogan socialist; anarcho-psychonaut; guerilla poet; utopia prepper. You can read Caitlin’s articles on Medium, Steemit and at her website. Caitlin is proudly 100 percent reader-funded through Patreon and Paypal. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook, and subscribe to her mailing list.

Originally published: Caitlin A Johnstone Blog

​There has been much discourse on the position of the recently-launched American Communist Party on the unity of both Canada and the United States in one organizational field. There has been no shortage of terms used by both rightists and leftists to describe the ACP; Politsturm International has used the term “social-chauvinists” (albeit in a completely incorrect fashion), while Maoists have usually referred to the ACP in similar terms. Canadian “leftists” are quick to denounce the ACP’s reconstitution “as the official Communist Party of the current territory of both the United States and Canada” as a renewed version of Manifest Destiny, which will be shown to be an exaggeration.[1]
 
Unsurprisingly, these critiques are usually unfounded, restricted to very limited evidence, and based on a limited understanding of Canada’s place within both the class struggle and Marxist history. The objective of this concise article is not to present a comprehensive political history of Canadian-US Marxism, but to elaborate on the undeniable correctness of the current position of the ACP: that the most advanced form of American Marxism will indeed be an organization that encompasses both Canada and the United States.
 
Through an analysis of early Canadian socialism, we find a situation which developed nearly identically to that of the United States. Utopian socialists—Owenite experiments—which can be traced back as early as 1829 in Canada, emerged in the United States just years prior, primarily in the form of the Nashoba Community and Frances Wright.[2] Wright would incidentally be one of the figures who “took a leading part in the early anti slavery agitation,” which often took the form of the Underground Railroad, an escape avenue for slaves from the South to the Northern states and the Canadian border, where slavery was phased out by the 1830s.[3]
 
As the Civil War neared, an early introduction of scientific socialism to the United States appeared, which laid the foundations for an American understanding of the postbellum labor movement which engulfed both Canada and the United States. German immigrants in New York City, usually political refugees from the 1848 Revolutions, first studied Marx in the North American context within the Central Committee of United Trades, with a later Communist Club being formed in 1857.[4] Following the efforts of Joseph Weydeymeyer in the Civil War, who was a contemporary of Marx, socialism further emerged with F.A. Sorge’s management of the First International in New York, and later the formation of the Workingmen’s Party of the United States, which later became the Socialist Labor Party of America by 1878.[5] The Great Strike of 1877 is generally regarded as a turning point in American labor history, as it was the first time in which labor organized at the ‘national’ level; it is of no coincidence that the mobilization of the Canadian working-class occurred in the 1870s at the same time, particularly in the form of the strike of the Typographical Union in Toronto.[6] Indeed, just prior to the Great Strikes of 1877, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers—an American trade union—had won a strike on Canada’s Grand Trunk Railway.[7]
 
The labor movement which emerged in Canada during the 1880s scarcely distinguished between Canadian and American workers. The Knights of Labor organized in Canada and were particularly active in Ontario, while the American Federation of Labor’s predecessor (1881-1886) was named during its founding 1881 convention as the “Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada.”[8] Although many major strikes in the United States—such as the Pullman Strike of 1894—were often limited to the United States, it is equally true to make to argue that said strikes were not present in the U.S. South, and therefore cannot be used as evidence to state that the situation of Canadian labor was isolated along ‘national’ lines. Carlos Garrido has excellently made the observation that American Marxism was not fully developed until the 1930s when W.E.B. Du Bois synthesized the class struggle of African-Americans with the American struggle; perhaps we should go one step further: American Marxism cannot reach its full theoretical insights until the Canadian Question is properly understood.[9] To do this, one must first be introduced to the historical development of scientific socialism in Canada proper.
 
Indeed, Marx and Engels themselves had discussed the Canadian Question. In a 1867 letter from Marx to Engels, discovered by Professor Mark Leier in 2017, Marx referred to the birth of the formal—but not independent—Canadian state in 1867 as a bourgeois project, therefore mirroring the impact of the Civil War on the United States:

“This centralization will of course give the capitalists the organized state power they require to expand across the entire territory of British North America. We will doubtless see in Canada the same process of primitive accumulation we have seen wherever the capitalist mode of production asserts itself.”[10]

Twenty-one years later, Engels, while visiting Montreal, observed that Canada, through its growing industrialization in the 1880s, was not developing into a national economy, and was instead converging towards its incorporation into America:

“Here one sees how necessary the feverish speculative spirit of the Americans is for the rapid development of a new country (if capitalist production is taken as a basis); and in ten years this sleepy Canada will be ripe for annexation — the farmers in Manitoba, etc., will demand it themselves. Besides, the country is half-annexed already socially — hotels, newspapers, advertising, etc., all on the American pattern. And they may tug and resist as much as they like; the economic necessity of an infusion of Yankee blood will have its way and abolish this ridiculous boundary line.”[11]

The insistence that “the farmers in Manitoba, etc., will demand it themselves” lends credence to the argument that the incorporation of Canada into the American class struggle will indeed be a struggle from below, rather than merely a forced annexation (i.e. through invasion).
 
The first organization to lay claim to both the United States and Canada was the North American Federation of the International Working-Men’s Association, though this organization quickly split up, especially in light of the dissolution of the First International in 1876.[12] The Socialist Labor Party did not spread to Canada immediately following the 1877 Strike, though that is of no surprise when considering the fact that the SLP was mostly limited to recent German immigrants; in fact, by 1883, the SLP only recorded 1,500 members in the U.S., and were unable to seriously influence American politics.[13] As the SLP grew in strength during the 1890s, and even endorsed a brief period of activity within the American Federation of Labor, Philips Thompson, who was introduced to Marxism by the American socialist Henry George, established the Labor Advocate newspaper in Toronto.[14] The Labor Advocate’s message spread American scientific socialism among Canadian intellectuals, and eventually led to the introduction of the first socialist organization to run in Canadian elections, which was also U.S.-based: “The U.S.-based Socialist Labor Party (SLP) established the first general network of socialist organizations in Canada, ran the first socialist candidates at  the municipal and provincial levels in Ontario, and even in 1901 adopted a Canadian constitution.”[15]
 
By the late 1890s, the dual unionism of the SLP and its sectarian attitude towards politics resulted in the formation of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) at a Unity Convention in 1901; the main benefit of the SPA was its attitude towards trade unions, with Eugene V. Debs, often at the head of the SPA, having contributed to the American Railway Union in 1894.[16] Although the Industrial Workers of the World, founded by segments of the SPA and SPL, also engaged in dual unionism, it was not merely a sectarian trade union center as it engaged in the organization of previously unorganized industries in the West such as the influential Western Federation of Miners. During the first decade of the 19th century, Canada also experienced the birth of its “evolutionary Marxist” party, the Socialist Party of Canada (SPC). The SPC emerged in 1904—just three years after the formation of the SPA—from similar circumstances; just months prior to the formation of the SPC in December, 1904, the Western Clarion—Canada’s main socialist newspaper at the time—emphasized that Canadian Marxists were taking influence from the development of the American class struggle and system:

“To study the development of this system no better field can be found than this western continent, more especially the United States. With next to no feudal bonds to break, and with a virgin continent possessed with unlimited resources at its disposal this system has grown up through all the stages from tottering infancy to doddering senility almost within the memory of men now living.”[17]

The Industrial Workers of the World, formed at a 1905 convention where Bill Haywood and Eugene Debs were present (multiple Canadians were also at the convention), contributed to the unionization of both American and Canadian unskilled workers on the basis of American working-class solidarity. The “Free Speech Fights,” waged by the IWW against censorship, were conducted not only in Spokane, Washington, but also notably in Vancouver, British Columbia, where IWW organizers would often cross the border while engaging in their work.[18] A renowned and lifelong Canadian Communist, Tom McEwen, later recounted: “In these key industries, each in the process of tremendous expansion, the anarcho-syndicalist ideology was carried widely among the workers first by the IWW and later the OBU.”[19]
 
The revolutionary impact of the end of the First World War served as an enormous impetus for the formation of a working-class movement and Party on a continental scale. Although both the SPA and SPC opposed the First World War, they denied its revolutionary implications, and instead chose to take a far more conciliatory path. Jack Ross has made a serious attempt to defend the mainstream SPA line during the war, though he admits that SPA leaders such as Victor L. Berger were merely the “loyal opposition” to the AFL leadership, including Samuel Gompers. Ross only brushes off the 1914 Colorado Coal Strike, where mainstream unions affiliated to the AFL practically engaged in open battles with the Colorado National Guard, as having “played out tragically for the [right-wing section of the] Socialist Party in Montana,” despite the fact that the strike effectively disproves his position on the implications of “revolution.”[20] In Canada, the situation for Marxists developed in a similar manner: while the Socialist Party of Canada opposed the war,—with the exception of J.H. Burroughs and E.T. Kingsley—they did not accept the implications of the October Revolution, despite having a majority of SPC members vote in favor of affiliation to the Third International.[21] The Communist breakaways from the socialists occurred consecutively; in America, the break occurred at an Emergency Convention of the SPA, where John Reed and his associates formed the Communist Labor Party, while Louis Fraina and his associates—the two parties would later merge—had founded the Communist Party of America.[22] The original section of self-proclaimed Canadian Communists formed a Central Committee in Toronto in 1919, and were in close contact with the main center of American Communist activity in Detroit, where Agnew Swigach had discussed the implementation of Bolshevism in North America.[23]
 
Interestingly, the main leaders of the trade union sections of both the Canadian and U.S. Communist Parties throughout the 1920s were both later the long-time leaders of these parties: namely Tim Buck of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) and William Z. Foster of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Born in England and having moved to Canada in 1910, Tim Buck had early conversations with Foster, who convinced him that the ‘North American Syndicalism’ of the IWW was limited as it did not understand the political struggle.[24] As a machinist, Tim Buck had temporarily moved to Detroit, and later recalled that his experiences working in the U.S. were quite formative in his thought:

“I attended two AFL conferences, one in Detroit, and one in Chicago. [...] they did open my eyes to trade unionism as a great social movement rather than just as a movement of tradesmen or a movement that belonged only to the people who belonged to unions.”[25]

In Canada, although there was an early “Central Committee” of Bolshevik sympathizers, the vast majority of Canadian Communists, including Tim Buck, joined the United Communist Party or the Communist Party of America: “we decided to join the Communist Party of America, to set up a Canadian section.”[26] William Z. Foster, a former member of the SPA, IWW, and even a Syndicalist League of North America founder, finally settled with the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL), where he would play a fundamental role in massive industrial union organizing campaigns by 1919, especially the 1919 Steel Strike.[27] As the TUEL organized within both the U.S. and Canada, Foster frequently dealt with subjects of the Canadian labor movement, such as the syndicalist One Big Union which sweeped the Canadian West during the time of the 1919 labor upheavals.[28] In 1922, when Foster sent a report to Grigorii Zinoviev who was high up in the Communist International at the time, the report dealt with both the activities of left-wing trade unionists in the U.S. and Canada; in fact, Foster directly referred to both the U.S. and Canadian working-class as “American”:

“The present situation offers a wonderful opportunity for the growth of sentiment in favor of the policies of the Red International of Labor Unions, which in the United States and Canada is represented by our organization, the Trade Union Educational League [...]  If such wonderful headway has been made with such meagre resources it is only a striking evidence of the extreme readiness of the American workingmen for many policies of the Red International of Labor Unions. [...] The winning of such a commanding position in the American labor movement is a goal well worth accomplishing.”[29]

Even the struggle against Trotskyism and the Right-Opposition took on a wider North American dimension. Jack Macdonald, who was the formal leader of the CPC throughout most of the 1920s, conspired with Jay Lovestone (a prominent CPUSA member) and the theory of American Exceptionalism, and arranged a plan to dissolve the CPC into a reformist organization.[30] The fact that Macdonald had accepted the theory of “American Exceptionalism” in the first place signifies the approach of the CPC at the time. It is well known that the Trotskyists, composed primarily of Maurice Spector in Canada, the editor of the Party newspaper, The Worker, were also engaging in a simultaneous campaign across North America. C.E. Ruthenberg, the Secretary of the CPUSA in 1926, traveled to Toronto that year to report on the dangers of Trotskyism, whereafter Tim Buck took the leading role in the expulsion of Maurice Spector.[31]
           
By the late 1930s, the activities of the CPC and CPUSA took on increasingly ‘national’ forms, although the two parties remained heavily intertwined through the organs of the Third International. From 1928 to 1935, revolutionary industrial unions were launched in the United States and Canada; in the U.S., the Trade Union Unity League led the charge in industries abandoned by the corrupt labor bureaucracy of the American Federation of Labor.[32] In Canada, the Workers’ Unity League led the CPC to the greatest heights that the Party had ever experienced; from 1935-1939, both the U.S. and Canadian communist parties merged their union organizations into the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the AFL in some cases—both multinational, rather than national, trade union centers. Stephen L. Endicott regards the main accomplishment of the Canadian revolutionary industrial unionism of the Third Period as having been the contribution of the foundations of the CIO in Canada, as an extension of the American trade union movement.[33] As is evident, even by the 1930s with the advent of the CIO, the U.S. and Canadian working-class movement was largely unified in one American struggle. But what changed this, and what has contributed to the current nationalism found within the Canadian left?
 
World War Two forced the Canadian Party into significant compromises with the Canadian state. In 1940, before the Invasion of the USSR, Communists were arrested en masse across Canada under the War Measures Act. Later, once released, the Communist Party of Canada had been officially banned as an organization, and was instead reformed into the Labor-Progressive Party in 1943. Just as Earl Browder had advocated for the liquidation of the CPUSA, many who were pursuing a nationalist line within the Canadian Party—which was heavily pushed by the state in the post-war period—were retained within the Party organizations. Tim Buck himself became convinced of the necessity for a nationalist position in opposition to what they identified as U.S. imperialism; this line was particularly damaging as it led the Party to problematic political stances, such as collaboration with the Liberal Party of Canada, even when in opposition to the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, Canada’s main social-democratic party until the 1961. Ironically, this was a position similar to that pushed by Trotskyist Maurice Spector and Jack Macdonald in the 1920s, which advocated for a national liberation struggle against British imperialism:

“Was Canada still a colony of British imperialism with its ‘made-in-England’ constitution, the British North America Act (BNA) and many other symbols of colonialism, then and now, still intact? If so, argued the MacDonald-Spector leadership, then the co-ordinated struggles of the Canadian working people should be directed against British imperialism per se and not against a subordinated Canadian capitalist class.”[34]

Despite the defeat of a liquidator faction at the 1957 Party Convention under J.B. Salsberg, Tim Buck and the Party never reversed their Canadian nationalist line which had been adopted since the 1940s.[35] One must only look to the publication titles of Tim Buck’s most popular books published after 1945: Lenin and Canada, Canada and Her People, Our Fight for Canada, New Horizons for Young Canada, etc. Another factor which must be considered is the enormous rise of public-sector trade unionism in Canada, at least since the 1970s. Public sector unions tend to be Canadian-only unions, while many blue-collar unions are still organized under the international system (see United Steelworkers, Teamsters etc.)
 
The Declaration of the American Communist Party asserts that the “American nation has objectively entered into contradiction with the form of the United States of America itself.” This is a theoretical development which has consistently been implied through struggle (as has been shown here, through the fact that America transcends the U.S. state boundary), but is only being theoreticized on now. If anything, it’s clear that now, more than ever, theory and history must meet the needs of these new projects, and that discussions of the U.S. and Canadian working-class must be united into one through new research.
​
Citations


[1] “Summary of the American Communist Party,” American Communist Party, July 21, 2024, https://acp.us/info;

[2] Ian Mckay, Rebels, Reds, Radicals: Rethinking Canada’s Left History, (Toronto, Canada: Between the Lines, 2005): 145-146.

[3] Morris Hillquit, History of Socialism in the United States, (New York, United States: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1903): 69.

[4] Hillquit, History of Socialism in the United States, 160-170.

[5] Sean Cronin, “The Rise and Fall of the Socialist Labor Party of North America,” Saothar 3, (1977): 21.

[6] Philip S. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877, (New York, United States: Pathfinder, 1977): 10-11.

[7] Philip S. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877, 24.

[8] Sean Cronin, “The Rise and Fall of the Socialist Labor Party of North America,” 23.

[9] Carlos L. Garrido, Why We Need American Marxism, (Carbondale, Illinois: Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2024): 2, 7, 39, 40, 44.

[10] Karl Marx to Engels, London, England, July 21, 1867, in Karl Marx reflects on the subject of Confederation, ed. Mark Leier, https://activehistory.ca/blog/2016/09/09/karl-marx-reflects-the-subject-of-confederation/

[11] Engels to Sorge, Montreal, Canada, September 10, 1888, in Marx-Engels Correspondence 1888: Engels to Sorge, ed. Leonard E. Mins, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1888/letters/88_09_10.htm

[12] Hillquit, History of Socialism in the United States, 199.

[13] Hillquit, History of Socialism in the United States, 214; Sean Cronin, “The Rise and Fall of the Socialist Labor Party of North America,” 22.

[14] Ian Mckay, Rebels, Reds, Radicals, 148.

[15] Ian Mckay, Rebels, Reds, Radicals, 150.

[16] Jack Ross, The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History, (Lincoln, United States: University of Nebraska Press, 2015): 49-59.

[17] “Modern Industrial and Political Institutions,” The Western Clarion, June 18, 1904.

[18] Mark Leier, Where the Fraser River Flows: The Industrial Workers of the World in British Columbia, (Vancouver, Canada: New Star Books, 1990).

[19] Tom McEwen, He Wrote For Us: The Story of Bill Bennett, Pioneer Socialist Journalist, (Vancouver, Canada: Tribune Publishing Company, 1951): 105.

[20] Jack Ross, The Socialist Party of America, 152.

[21] Ian Angus, Canadian Bolsheviks: The Early Years of the Communist Party of Canada, (Trafford Publishing, 2004): 1-24.

[22] Jack Ross, The Socialist Party of America, 225-229.

[23] Ian Angus, Canadian Bolsheviks, 40.

[24] Tim Buck, Yours in the Struggle: Reminiscences of Tim Buck, (Toronto, Canada: NC Press Limited, 1977), 38-39.

[25] Tim Buck, Yours in the Struggle, 50-52.

[26] Tim Buck, Yours in the Struggle, 91.

[27] William Z. Foster, American Trade Unionism: Principles, Organization, Strategy, Tactics, (New York, United States: International Publishers, 1947), 33-50.

[28] William Z. Foster, American Trade Unionism, 68.

[29]William Z. Foster to Zinoviev, Unknown location, December 16, 1922, in Report on the Labor Situation in the United States and Canada, ed. Tim Davenport, https://www.marxists.org/archive/foster/1922/1216-foster-reporttoci.pdf

[30] Tim Buck, Yours in the Struggle, 131.

[31] Ian Angus, Canadian Bolsheviks, 178-179.

[32] William Z. Foster, American Trade Unionism, 174-180.

[33] Stephen L. Endicott, Raising the Workers’ Flag: The Workers’ Unity League of Canada, 1930-1936, (Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2012): 300-327.

[34] Tom McEwen, The Forge Glows Red: From Blacksmith to Revolutionary, (Toronto, Canada: Progress Books, 1974).

[35] Karen Levine, “The Labor-Progressive Party in Crisis, 1956–1957,” Labour/Le Travail 87, (2021): 161-184.

Author

Jude Gamache is a History student attending the University of British Columbia. He is not a member of any political organization, and specializes in the study of both the American and Canadian working-class and political left in history. He is always looking for peers to engage in new projects, specifically areas of labor and left history. Contact: [email protected]

Fans of capitalism like to say it is democratic or that it supports democracy. Some have stretched language so far as to literally equate capitalism with democracy, using the terms interchangeably. No matter how many times that is repeated, it is simply not true and never was. Indeed, it is much more accurate to say that capitalism and democracy are opposites. To see why, you have only to look at capitalism as a production system where employees enter into a relationship with employers, where a few people are the boss, and most people simply work doing what they are told to do. That relationship is not democratic; it is autocratic.
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When you cross the threshold into a workplace (e.g., a factory, an office, or a store), you leave whatever democracy might exist outside. You enter a workplace from which democracy is excluded. Are the majority—the employees—making the decisions that affect their lives? The answer is an unambiguous no. Whoever runs the enterprise in a capitalist system (owner[s] or a board of directors) makes all the key decisions: what the enterprise produces, what technology it uses, where production takes place, and what to do with enterprise profits. The employees are excluded from making those decisions but must live with the consequences, which affect them deeply. The employees must either accept the effects of their employers’ decisions or quit their jobs to work somewhere else (most likely organized in the same undemocratic way).

The employer is an autocrat within a capitalist enterprise, like a king in a monarchy. Over the past few centuries, monarchies were largely “overthrown” and replaced by representative, electoral “democracies.” But kings remained. They merely changed their location and their titles. They moved from political positions in government to economic positions inside capitalist enterprises. Instead of kings, they are called bosses or owners or CEOs. There they sit, atop the capitalist enterprise, exercising many king-like powers, unaccountable to those over whom they reign.

Democracy has been kept out of capitalist enterprise for centuries. Many other institutions in societies where capitalist enterprises prevail—government agencies, universities and colleges, religions, and charities—are equally autocratic. Their internal relationships often copy or mirror the employer/employee relationship inside capitalist enterprises. Those institutions try thereby to “function in a businesslike manner.”

The anti-democratic organization of capitalist firms also conveys to employees that their input is not genuinely welcomed or sought by their bosses. Employees thus mostly resign themselves to their powerless position relative to the CEO at their workplace. They also expect the same in their relationships with political leaders, the CEOs’ counterparts in government. Their inability to participate in running their workplaces trains citizens to presume and accept the same in relation to running their residential communities. Employers become top political officials (and vice versa) in part because they are used to being “in charge.” Political parties and government bureaucracies mirror capitalist enterprises by being run autocratically while constantly describing themselves as democratic.

Most adults experience working at least eight hours for five or more days per week in capitalist workplaces, under the power and authority of their employer. The undemocratic reality of the capitalist workplace leaves its complex, multilayered impacts on all who collaborate there, part time and full time. Capitalism’s problem with democracy--that the two basically contradict one another—shapes many people’s lives. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Walton family (descendants of Walmart’s founder), along with a handful of other major shareholders, decide how to spend hundreds of billions. The decisions of a few hundred billionaires bring economic development, industries, and enterprises to some regions and lead to the economic decline of other regions. The many billions of people affected by those spending decisions are excluded from participating in making them. Those countless people lack the economic and social power wielded by a tiny, unelected, obscenely wealthy minority of people. That is the opposite of democracy.

Employers as a class, often led by major shareholders and the CEOs they enrich, also use their wealth to buy (they would prefer to say “donate” to) political parties, candidates, and campaigns. The rich have always understood that universal or even widespread suffrage risks a nonwealthy majority voting to undo society’s wealth inequality. So, the rich seek control of existing forms of democracy to make sure they do not become a real democracy in the sense of enabling the employee majority to outvote the employer minority.

The enormous surpluses appropriated by “big business” employers—usually corporations—allow them to reward their upper-level executives lavishly. These executives, technically also “employees,” use corporate wealth and power to influence politics. Their goals are to reproduce the capitalist system and thus the favors and rewards it gives them. Capitalists and their top employees make the political system depend on their money more than it depends on the people’s votes.

How does capitalism make the major political parties and candidates dependent on donations from employers and the rich? Politicians need vast sums of money to win by dominating the media as part of costly campaigns. They find willing donors by supporting policies that benefit capitalism as a whole, or else particular industries, regions, and enterprises. Sometimes, the donors find the politicians. Employers hire lobbyists—people who work full time, all year round, to influence the candidates that get elected. Employers fund “think tanks” to produce and spread reports on every current social issue. The purpose of those reports is to build general support for what the funders want. In these and other ways, employers and those they enrich shape the political system to work for them.

Most employees have no comparable wealth or power. To exert real political power requires massive organization to activate, combine, and mobilize employees so their numbers can add up to real strength. That happens rarely and with great difficulty. Moreover, in the U.S., the political system has been shaped over the decades to leave only two major parties. Both of them loudly and proudly endorse and support capitalism. They collaborate to make it very difficult for any third party to gain a foothold, and for any anti-capitalist political party to emerge. The U.S. endlessly repeats its commitment to maximum freedom of choice for its citizens, but it excludes political parties from that commitment.

Democracy is about “one person, one vote”—the notion that we all have an equal say in the decisions that affect us. That is not what we have now. Going into a voting booth once or twice a year and picking a candidate is a very different level of influence than that of the Rockefeller family or George Soros. When they want to influence people, they use their money. That’s not democracy.

In capitalism, democracy is unacceptable because it threatens the unequally distributed wealth of the minority with a majority vote. With or without formal institutions of democracy (such as elections with universal suffrage), capitalism undermines genuine democracy because employers control production, surplus value, and that surplus value’s distributions. For capitalism’s leaders, democracy is what they say, not what they do.

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro called the current post-electoral situation in Venezuela a “cyber coup.”

“We are facing a cyber-fascist and criminal coup attempt,” President Maduro said at the start of the main event celebrating the 87th anniversary of the creation of the Bolivarian National Guard (GNB) on Sunday, August 4, at the headquarters of the Ministry of Defense.

“An imperialist coup d’état, with fascist characteristics, filled with hatred against institutions,” added the president, and praised the exemplary conduct displayed by the GNB when it took to the streets to defend the people and their right to peace.

President Maduro explained that he called the coup attempt “cyber-fascist” “because we are experiencing cyberattacks from all social media platforms to fill Venezuela with hatred and divide it.” As for the fascist label, he said that “its main characteristics are hatred, violence, irrationality, and it is criminal because it is being carried out by a significant group of criminals trained abroad, paid and brought here to attack hospitals, schools, universities, and police stations.”

The president also expressed his condolences to the families of the two GNB agents killed in the violence that occurred after the far-right refused to recognize the results of the presidential election announced by the CNE in the early hours of July 29.

In his opening remarks, President Maduro congratulated the GNB “because you have been and you are the backbone of peace and the defense of the constitutional rights of the people.”

The Venezuelan president said that we are going through a time when the struggle is for peace. “To say peace is to say future, to say peace is to say the right to independence, to self-determination,” he said. He referred to what he said on June 24 at the Carabobo Field on the occasion of the anniversary of the Battle of Carabobo. “This baton of command that I have in my hands will remain in the hands of patriots; this baton of command will never fall into the hands of traitors, oligarchs, fascists, never, I swear to you,” said the commander-in-chief of the Bolivarian National Armed Force at that time.
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He added that it was President Hugo Chávez who gave constitutional status to the GNB and gave it a Bolivarian character. “It was no longer just going to be the National Guard, but the National Guard of Bolívar, for Bolívar, with Bolívar. A National Guard at the service of a people, of a country,” he said.

​Medals for the wounded

During the ceremony, the president awarded medals to several GNB service-people who were injured during the violence carried out by hooded individuals, allegedly members of the violent cells organized by Vente Venezuela, the political party headed by María Corina Machado.

​One of those who received a medal was Sergeant Major Anderson José Duque Lucena, assigned to Detachment 122 GNB-Lara. Interviewed by Últimas Noticias, he said that his group went on Monday, July 29 to contain a violent protest in the vicinity of the GNB-Carora where about 300 individuals attacked them with fireworks, blunt objects and stones, among other things. “I have a fracture in my right ankle and complicated polytrauma in my right shoulder,” he said.

First Sergeant Carlos Olivero Machado, assigned to the 43rd District Capital Command, also recounted how he was injured. “We were injured while defending kilometer zero of the Pan-American Caracas-Los Teques highway. I have a wound in my fibula and a fracture,” he said.
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At the GNB anniversary event, several GNB officials were promoted, including Ministers Ramón Velásquez Araguayan (Transport) and Jorge Eliezer Márquez Monsalve (Electric Energy).

This article was produced by Orinoco Tribune.

BANGLADESHI Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned and fled the country today as thousands of protesters stormed her official residence.

Ms Hasina, who has been prime minister since 2009 and held the office previously from 1996-2001, was seen boarding a military helicopter with her sister as weeks of protests came to a climax. She reportedly landed in India.

Head of the army General Waker uz-Zaman addressed the nation, saying he had met opposition politicians and civil society leaders and would seek guidance from the president on forming an interim government.

He also said the military would investigate the deadly crackdown on student protesters of recent weeks, with an estimated 95 people killed on Sunday, 14 of them police officers, as violence reached a crescendo, and that he had ordered troops not to fire on crowds.

“Keep faith in the military, we will investigate all the killings and punish the responsible,” he said.

But crowds continued to ransack the palace, many seen removing furniture and fridge-loads of food. Her family’s ancestral home — her father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman led the independence struggle against Pakistan and was Bangladesh’s first leader until his assassination in 1975 — was also ransacked, as was her own house in the capital and that of the chief justice.

Two offices of her ruling Awami League party were torched.

Protests against a quota system for government jobs, that reserved a proportion of Civil Service roles for relatives of independence war veterans, swelled week after week after being met with violence and mass arrests, with over 11,000 people detained in the last month.

The government insisted it was seeking to end the quota system, and Ms Hasina was offering as recently as yesterday morning to meet protest leaders, but they insisted her resignation was now their key demand.

The Communist Party of Bangladesh praised the student movement which had continued to mobilise in the face of lethal repression.

“The students have given courage to the people to revolt against the reign of fear by standing up with their blood,” said a party statement.
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The party, together with most of the opposition, had boycotted January’s general election in which Ms Hasina won re-election, advising voters to stay at home rather than take part in a “joke” with a predetermined outcome.

And so I went to Sardinia, searching for Gramsci’s phantom. An hour’s fight from Rome’s Ciampino took me to Cagliari, Sardinia’s principal city, to its small airport on the island’s southernmost tip. Then I drove a little Mitsubishi rental one-and-a-half hours northwest, chugging along a largely empty central E25 highway, battling a stiff cross wind, onward toward the twelfth century town of Santu Lussurgiu. Santu Lussurgiu is a labyrinth of narrow cobbled streets, many scarcely wider than my tiny car. With a couple of modest supermarkets, a butcher’s store, a few sad, lonely cafés, a population of around 2,500, it felt more like a large village, the sort of place where any strange car, unfamiliar to locals, provoked incredulous stares, as if an alien had landed from another planet.
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I’d come excitedly to Santu Lussurgiu. I’d found inexpensive bed and breakfast accommodation in the same building, Sa Murighessa, where a teenage Gramsci lodged during his junior high school years. With its thick stone walls, wooden beamed ceilings, and granite staircase, Sa Murighessa today is one of a group of beautifully renovated buildings belonging to the Antica Dimora de Gruccione, a so-called “albergo diffuso,” a special kind of traditional inn. Room and board are provided in assorted historic buildings scattered around one another (hence diffuse); an old family house typically forms the heart of the albergo’s hospitality, for guests’ meals and collective conviviality.

Sa Murighessa has a plaque on its outside wall, memorializing Gramsci. He himself, though, remembers it as a “miserable pensione.” “When I attended junior high school at Santu Lussurgiu,” he told Tatiana (September 12, 1932), “where three professors quite brazenly made short shrift of Instruction in all five grades, I used to live in a peasant woman’s house (I paid five lira a month for lodgings, bed linen, and the cooking of the very frugal board) whose old mother was a little stupid and forgetful but not crazy and was in fact my housekeeper and who every morning when she saw me again asked me who I was and how it was that I had slept in their house.”
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The actual school, Ginnasio Carta-Meloni, at via Giovanni Maria Angioi 109, was a few minutes’ walk away. It no longer exists. These days, it’s a private residence, smartly maintained with an ochre-colored façade, with another brown plaque on the outside wall, announcing “I passi di Gramsci Santu Lussurgiu” [the steps of Antonio Gramsci Santu Lussurgiu], which, in three languages (Italian, Sard, and English), says: “Here was located the Gymnasium Carta-Meloni during Antonio Gramsci’s Studies, 1905-1907.” Underneath is a citation from Prison Notebooks: “culture isn’t having a well-stocked warehouse of news but is the ability that our mind has to understand life, the place we hold there, our relationship with other people. Those who are aware of themselves and of everything, who feel the relationship with all other beings, have culture…So anyone can be cultured, can be a philosopher.”

Gramsci hated his junior high school; they were wretched years, he said. Even as a young lad he could see through his teachers, didn’t respect them, knew their inadequacies. A precocious intelligence was already manifest. In another letter to Tatiana (June 2, 1930), he writes: “one day I saw a strange little animal, like a green grass snake yet with four tiny legs. Locally, the small reptile was known as a scurzone, and in Sardinian dialect curzu means short.” At school, he asked his natural history teacher what the animal was called in Italian and the teacher laughed, saying it was a basilico, a term used for an imaginary animal, something not real. Young Antonio must be mistaken because what he described doesn’t exist. His school chums later made fun of him, too. “You know how angry a boy can get,” he tells Tatiana, “being told he is wrong when he knows instead that he is right when a question of reality is at stake; I think that it is due to this reaction against authority put to the service of self-assured ignorance that I still remember the episode.” He’d already from an early age developed a nose for sniffing out authority put to the service of self-assured ignorance.

Nino had a set routine in those school years, leaving Ghilarza early Monday morning, on a horse-drawn cart, traveling the twelve-miles over the tanca (pastureland) on a dirt track, returning either Friday afternoon or Saturday morning, often on foot. The area could be hairy, bandit and cattle-thief country. Years later he remembered an incident walking with a friend, coming back from school one Saturday morning, plodding along a deserted spot when, all of a sudden, they heard gun shots and stray bullets whistling by. Quickly they realized it was they who were being shot at! The duo scrambled into a ditch for cover, hugging the ground for a long while, until they were sure the coast was clear. “Obviously,” he tells Tatiana, “it was a bunch of fellows out for a laugh, who enjoyed scaring us—some joke, eh! It was pitch dark when we got home, very tired and muddy, and we told nobody what had happened.”
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Back then, getting to and from school on foot would have taken Gramsci most of the day, even without being fired upon, and several hours by horse-drawn cart. In more modern times, on Sardinia’s surprisingly smooth, well-maintained country roads, you can zip along the SP15 in a shade over twenty-minutes. Though if you motor too fast, you’ll miss much of what’s noteworthy about the island’s landscape. Not least its stones. John Berger is right when he says that “in the hinterland around Ghilarza, as in many parts of the island, the thing you feel most strongly is the presence of stones.” “Sardinia is first and foremost a place of stones.” “Endless and ageless dry-stone walls separate the tancas,” Berger says, “border the gravel roads, enclose pens for the sheep, or, having fallen apart after centuries of use, suggest ruined labyrinths. Everywhere a stone is touching a stone.” Berger reckons that stones “gave Gramsci or inspired in him his special sense of time and his special patience.” Stones are silently there, stoic and solid, resistant to time, enduring the passage of time, unmoved, knowing that life on earth goes on over the long durée. This notion was surely not lost on its native radical son.

Like most nuraghi, Zuras has a single entrance, low and narrow, with an interior staircase. Zuras looked so forlorn that I was reluctant to crouch and enter the pitched darkness. What lay inside? An animal’s lair? A bees’ nest? Masses of cobwebs? Snakes? I didn’t fancy finding out. Nobody knows the precise function of nuraghi, excepting that they weren’t, like ancient Egyptian pyramids, burial grounds, places of the dead: nuraghi were very much structures for the living. Most likely they mixed protective and defensive activities, offering shelter to shepherds during inclement weather, and lookout posts for military surveillance; once ascended, they afford dramatic vistas across the whole countryside.

Stones figure prominently in Sardinian imagination and meant a lot to Gramsci; he’d touched many, collected many scattered around the surrounding tanca. At home, he spent hours with a chisel smoothing those stones down, shaping them into pairs of spheres of commensurate sizes, as big as grapefruits and melons, hollowing out little grooves inside each rock. Once ready, he’d insert into the holes pieces of a broom handle he’d cut up, foot-long lengths. He’d then join the spherical stones together, forming homemade, makeshift dumbbells. Gramsci used six stones to make three sets of dumbbells of varying weights, and with them, every morning, as hard as he could, as disciplined as he was, he did exercises to strengthen his weak body—his arms, shoulders, and back muscles, making himself more robust to confront the great and terrible world he knew lay beyond.

***

The Gramscis lived in the center of Ghilarza, at number 57 Corso Umberto I, still the town’s main drag. The house was built in the early nineteenth century, with two floors, divided into six rooms: three on the ground floor, with an inner courtyard, and three on the upper floor. From the age of seven until twenty, Gramsci shared the abode with his mother, father, and six siblings—Gennaro, Grazietta, Emma, Mario, Teresina, and Carlo. In what would become a life of lodgings, hotel rooms, clinics, and prison cells, the Ghilarza house was the only place he’d ever call home, always remember affectionally; a haven he’d return to nostalgically in his prison letters, cherishing it as a site of Gramscian collective memory. The plain, white-walled stone building, with a little upper-floor iron-grilled balcony, is today fittingly preserved as Casa Museo Antonio Gramsci, exhibiting a small yet significant array of Gramsci memorabilia for public viewing.

Months prior, I’d corresponded with the museum to arrange a visit. They’d welcomed me yet said: “the Casa Museo Antonio Gramsci is closed for major restauration works. But you can visit a temporary exhibition in the premises of Piazza Gramsci, right in front of the museum house. The temporary exhibition contains a chronological journey through the life of Gramsci and preserves a large part of the objects, photos, and documents present within the museum itinerary. The exhibition is accompanied by captions in Italian and English…We await your e-mail to plan your visit. See you soon!”
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And now I was parking my car along Corso Umberto I, headed for Piazza Gramsci. To the left, looking spick and span, I recognized from photographs Gramsci’s old house; the adjoining properties, at numbers 59 and 61, were covered in plastic sheeting, concealing the building works going on within, the said renovation of the museum complex. Almost opposite, on the other side of the street, I noticed something that would have doubtless thrilled Gramsci: the offices of a small, independent publishing house, a radical Sardinian press whose name sets the tone of its politics: Iskra Edizioni, after Lenin’s fortnightly socialist newspaper, produced in exile in London then smuggled back into Russia where it became an influential underground paper. Iskra Edizioni, founded in Ghilarza in 2000, tries to keep alive Sardinian folk traditions and dialect, and deals with translations of academic books and reissuing of militant texts “that can no longer be found on the market.”

Around the corner is Piazza Gramsci. Two young women welcomed me into the museum’s makeshift store, full of everything Gramsci: tote bags and tee-shirts, posters and notebooks, magazines and books, modestly for sale, all tastefully displayed. Then I was led into two temporary exhibition spaces where, left to myself, I was alone with Gramsci, overwhelmed because he was everywhere. What initially struck was his bed, a little single divan—a very little iron-framed divan, with two walnut wood panels serving as the head and end boards. It was its size, its smallness, that most affected me. If Gramsci slept here until the age of twenty, you get a sense of his diminutive stature—it was like a kid’s bed, not much bigger than a cot.

Nearby, a pewter washbasin and a glass cabinet containing a red and blue plaid shirt, worn by Gramsci in prison, together with toothbrush, comb, shoehorn, and shaving blade. Another glass cabinet had two grapefruit-sized stones, with two little grooves, the remains of Gramsci’s dumbbells, overlaying a series of family photos, Gramsci’s birth certificate, and a telegram Tatiana sent Piero Sraffa, dated April 26, 1937: “GRAMSCI COLPO APOPLETICO GRAVISSIMO, TATIANA.” [“GRAMSCI SUFFERED SERIOUS STROKE, TATIANA”] Above it something even more disturbing: dressed in a dark suit, a photo of Gramsci on his deathbed, taken by Tatiana.

Tatiana did several things for her dead brother-in-law: besides taking care of his notebooks and arranging his burial, she had two-bronze casts made, one of his right hand, his writing hand, the other a death mask, the most haunting object of all the museum’s exhibits. Gramsci looks unrecognizable—bloated, with puffed up round cheeks, far removed from the youthful images of him with flowing locks of curly black hair and those famous rimless spectacles. It was a far cry indeed from how he was remembered at High School: “he may have been deformed,” old school chum Renato Figari recalled, “but he wasn’t ugly. He had a high forehead, with a mass of wavy hair, and behind his prince-nez I remember the bright blue of his eyes, that shining, metallic gaze, which struck you so forcibly.”

Why bloated? It’s hard to say. Poor prison food? Medication for his illnesses? Sedentary life in a cell? Before incarceration, Gramsci was a great walker, covering vast distances on a foot, as a child and adolescent in Sardinia, and as a student in Turin, where he seemed to know old backstreets intimately; and even immediately prior to his arrest, he’d take long strolls around Rome, encountering comrades in cafés, hoofing around town to attend one meeting or another. Yet now I was looking at the cast of a man who’d aged dramatically, gained weight, and looked well beyond his forty-six years. Maybe Tatiana wanted to retain the image of her brother-in-law, whose metallic, piercing gaze was no more. Maybe she wanted to demonstrate to the world what the fascists had done to him. Lest we forget.
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It was difficult not to be stirred by the exhibit, not to be affected; but I knew I had one other thing to do in Ghilarza: I had to go and see his mother, whose remains lay on the edge of town in the municipal cemetery. An attractive arched stone entrance led you into a magnificent Cypress tree paradise, aglow in gorgeous late afternoon light. Giuseppina Marcias Gramsci’s grave has a prime site in the cemetery, with little around it, marked by a horizonal marble headstone, still bearing the flowers of the small commemoration of a few weeks earlier, on April 27. A Gramsci citation is chiseled into the foot of the marble, words taken from a letter he’d written his sister Grazietta (December 29, 1930), expressing concern about his mother’s health: “Ha lavorato per noi tutta la vita, sacrificandosi in modo inaudito.” [“She had worked for us all her life, sacrificing herself in unimaginable ways.”] Gramsci’s actual letter continues: “if she had been a different woman who knows what disastrous end we would have come to even as children; perhaps none of us would be alive today.”

Over dinner that evening, back at my albergo, I leafed through a publication I’d picked up during my museum visit, “Mandami tante notizie di Ghilarza.” Its title is a quote from another Gramsci letter to his mother (April 25, 1927): “Send me lots of news about Ghilarza”; a glossy magazine produced by the Fondazione Casa Gramsci Onlus, centering on “Paesaggi gramsciani: il santuario campestre di San Serafino”—“Gramscian Landscapes: The Rural Sanctuary of San Serafino.” San Serafino was one of his favorite boyhood stomping grounds, in a childhood much more adventurous out of school than in, a little village four miles from home, a journey Antonio would have doubtless made on foot.
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The village and its chapel overlook Lake Omodeo. The lake runs into River Tirso at the Tirso River Dam and the magazine reproduces a facsimile of a postcard of the “Diga del Tirso” not long after its construction, one Tatiana had sent Gramsci on August 2, 1935, presumably when she was visiting his family in Ghilarza. Three other large-sized facsimiles feature in the magazine, letters Gramsci sent to his mother. One, from October 19, 1931, is worth citing at length:

I went on foot. Crossing a main road bereft of any traffic, the signage reminded me, if I ever needed reminding, that I was in Gramsci country. I took a photo. At the roadside, an old hand-painted sign indicated, in yellow, “Lago,” with an arrow pointing its direction. I followed it, descending a little gravel path. Not a sole in sight. Soon the lake came into view, Lago Omodeo, and finding a rock to sit on at the water’s edge, I wondered whether perhaps I’d discovered Gramsci’s actual rock, where he’d sat for hour upon hour. It was May and baking hot, 100 degrees, without shade. So I knew my visit needed to be brief, imbibing the atmosphere, getting some sense of what Gramsci experienced, of what he’d loved, and what he might have loved again.

***

In truth, I had no real idea what I was searching for, here or anywhere else in Sardinia. I was embarked on a peculiar research project, very unmethodological, impossible to conceive in advance, having little inkling what I’d expect to find, let alone how I would go about trying to find it. And what was this it I sought anyway? I knew that part of it was wanting to see Gramsci’s family house and museum, that I wanted to see some of the more tangible remnants of Gramsci’s Sardinian world, artefacts and documents; but there were other things I was after, too, less tangible aspects of this world, more experiential aspects, things subjective rather than objective, sensory rather than strictly empirical. Or, at least, the sort of empirical that’s hard to qualify and impossible to quantify: a smell, a texturing of the cultural and natural landscape, of Gramsci’s environment, the look on people’s faces, the region’s light and warmth, its dusty aridness, the sun beating down, the sun setting, the sun rising, the faint ripple of the lake below San Serafino, the buzzing of insects, the sound of silence, the presence of stones.
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I suppose I was accumulating impressions, and what impressions I’d accumulated I was now trying to recapture on the page back in Rome, where I write, reconstructing my trip from memory, realizing how much of it seemed to pass in a haze. I remember the day after San Serafino, going to Ales—I had to go to Ales (pronounced “Alice”): it was Gramsci’s birthplace, after all, an hour’s south of Ghilarza, a town of 1,500 people that never lets you forget it is his paese natale; it was home only for a matter of months (the family upped sticks shortly after Antonio’s birth to Sorgono, before permanently moving to Ghilarza). Another scorchingly hot afternoon, a fierce sun beating down. God knows how it’s possible that the thermometer could rise even more in July and August. Little wonder Gramsci always felt cold in prison.

There was no shade in Ales, nowhere open, no place to eat, to buy food, to drink anything—and hot, hot, hot. Yet I was there for Gramsci, and it was endearing how much due care and attention Ales devoted to him. His actual birthplace—a two-story, yellow-façade house at Corso Cattedrale, 14—is now a cultural center hosting talks, book launches, and movie-showings, and still keeps the Gramscian red flag flying: one poster in the window read: “STOP ALL EMBARGO CONTRO CUBA.” Gramsci’s life and thought crops up everywhere in Ales, almost on every street corner, by way of a novel series of plaque-posters detailing his lifeline and different aspects of his work. It had all been lovingly curated and presented, and proclaimed Ales as a “laboratorio di idee,” a laboratory of ideas, inviting visitors “conoscere Antonio Gramsci camminando nel suo paese natale”—“to know Antonio Gramsci by walking in his hometown.”

And I did walk, headed for another landmark, another Piazza Gramsci, with its modern stone sculpture garden that looked weather beaten, worn away by the sun, nicely done but utterly deserted by day because of so little shade. As I strolled, by chance I spotted one of the most interesting signs of Gramsci, an impromptu sign, unprogrammed, indicating that the man isn’t only remembered but that he’s also somehow alive in people: graffiti on a rusty old door of an abandoned building, which piqued my attention and brought a smile to my face: “SONO PESSIMISTA CON INTELLIGENZA,” all of which presumably implies that the daubers were somehow optimists of the will—“ottimista per la volontà,” as Gramsci said, summing up my own sentiment about our post-truth world.

Not far from the graffiti was the loveliest Gramsci homage I’d ever seen, the loveliest and cleverest: a giant mural painted on the side of a whole building, in bright color, huge and stunning, without any trace of desecration, sparklingly clean and vivid. What was so interesting and clever was its blending of reality and fantasy; illustrating some of Gramsci’s childhood adventures with hedgehogs, apples, and snakes; yet also showing him older, smiling, reunited with his two sons, a family portrait, a what might’ve been image if he’d returned to Sardinia, if Delio and Giuliano had somehow made it out of the USSR, come back to Italy to see dad—big ifs. Where was mom Giulia? The mural was so vast that I had a hard time properly capturing it on camera.

To the uninitiated, the hedgehog-apple imagery might be perplexing. For insight let’s invoke a letter (February 22, 1932) from father to son Delio:

Ales’ mural offered a beautiful pictorial rendering of Gramsci’s beautiful narrative tale of hedgehogs carrying apples on their backs, gathered together, about to chomp away on their harvested feast. The stars twinkle overhead and a glowing moon gives the whole scene a magical milky charm. Gramsci, aged and portly as he was toward the end, is here radiantly alive, neatly attired in suit and tie, a proud father, arms around his two sons either side of him--a what might have been prospect, a Gramsci family romance, a happier epilogue to the tragic story we know really ensued.

That happy image of Gramsci disturbed me for some time. I remember passing a morning in Santu Lussurgiu, strolling around its old center and then around what’s a sort of small outer suburb, a ring of houses built sometime over the past fifty-years, well after Gramsci’s day. I was deep in thought about Gramsci—not about Gramsci the young lad but Gramsci the older man, the person who might have returned to walk the streets where I was walking. In olden times, Santu Lussurgiu was the site of Sa Carrela è Nanti, a folkloric horse race, a tradition held every Mardi Gras. Horses used to gallop through audience-flocked streets at breakneck speeds, with pairs of riders dressed in flamboyant traditional costumes, donned in obligatory Zoro-like masks. The old town’s walls are still adorned with framed photos of this crazy equine event, now defunct, I looked at some showing the spectacle and its crowds as late as the 1980s.
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Perched up on high in Santu Lussurgiu, where you get a sweeping vista of the whole town, is a massive white granite statue of Christ, with placating arms stretched out, and a bright red heart that looks slightly ridiculous, like it’s pulsating, beating for the salvation of the town’s residents. (It resembles Jim Carrey’s heart in The Mask, beating for Cameron Diaz.) I negotiated Santu Lussurgiu’s streets, climbed upward to get a close up of Christ, and witness that panorama before Him. All the while, I tried to visualize Gramsci back here, living in Santu Lussurgiu, imagining his niece Edmea finding Uncle Nino a room, probably near to where he used to lodge, in the old quarter, in a little stone house where various relatives could come and go, cater for his needs, help him recover, regain his strength, his zest for life.

He might have taken short walks in the fresh air, got himself some false teeth, eaten healthily again, found peace and quiet and maybe resumed his work, his letter writing, reconnecting with the outside world, with all the people and places he’d formerly known. Maybe he would have taken the odd aperitivo in town, with his father Francesco, who might have lived himself had his son also lived. Gramsci Sr. and Jr. might have tippled with the town folk; son would have enjoyed speaking their language, their dialect. It could have been right out of the leaves of Machiavelli, of Gramsci’s hero’s life in exile. For downtime, while working on The Prince, Machiavelli loved to sneak through the secret underground passageway of his Chianti wine cellar and pop-up next door at a raucous tavern (L’Albergaccio). He’d guzzle wine, chinwag with peasants and wayfarers, play cards and exchange vulgarities with the butcher, miller, and innkeeper. “Involved in these trifles,” Machiavelli said, “I kept my brain from growing moldy.”

Gramsci’s post-prison life might have been no less bawdy, a homecoming dramatic and heart wrenching, like a scene from Cinema Paradiso—when, after a thirty-year absence, Salvatore, the famous film director, finally returns to his Sicilian native village, attending the funeral of the old cinema projectionist, Alfredo, whom he’d adored as a kid. But maybe Gramsci’s return would’ve been less mawkish; he wasn’t one for fainthearted nostalgia, would have probably been harder, followed the words of the island’s poet laureate, Sebastiano Satta: “His bitter heart lurches./ He does not cry:/ Sardinians should never cry.”

On the other hand, we might wonder how long Gramsci’s convalescence may have lasted before he’d gotten itchy feet, yearned for contact with the wider world again—for engaging politically again. Could he really accept, as he’d hinted to wife Giulia in 1936, “a whole cycle of his life definitively closing”? He’d spent a decade of sedentary life, cut-off from life within four narrow walls; it would be hard to imagine, as a free man, him wanting to sit around all day, behind a desk or in a bar, leading a quiet, mediative and contemplative existence. He’d surely have gotten bored after a while, a country boy who’d tasted the forbidden fruits of cosmopolitanism—in Turin and Vienna, in Moscow and Rome—a roving journalist, activist, and intellectual, a man who’d met Lenin and Victor Serge, who read in different languages, who’d prided himself on his internationalist outlook. Wouldn’t village life have soon become too stifling, too parochial?

Another question we might pose about Gramsci’s return to Sardinia is: did he really plan on staying long? Or was it just easier for him to flee Sardinia than mainland Italy—as he’d apparently told Tatiana, and as she’d written to her sister Eugenia in Moscow? A month prior to Gramsci’s passing, Tatiana told Eugenia (March 25, 1937): “Antonio believes it would be a lot easier to escape from Sardinia than from Italy. We can’t mention it, or rumors will start.” From what would he be fleeing? The Italian fascist authorities? The Russian Communist Party and its apparatchik, suspecting Gramsci as a closet Trotskyite? The Nazis, who’d soon be jack-booting across Europe? And where else might he go?

Gramsci never knew anything about the German bombardment of the Basque town of Guernica; it took place after he’d had his stroke, on April 26, 1937, the day prior to his death. And yet, maybe Gramsci had anticipated a darkening of Europe, was fearing the worst, knew something was brewing, that fascism was not only alive and well but would soon brazenly expand its reach, morph into Nazism? Maybe he feared what was in store for his beloved island should war break out. Mussolini saw Sardinia as a stepping-stone for enlarging his Mediterranean empire. Because of its strategic positioning—only 8 miles from French Corsica—and the importance of Cagliari for launching attacks on Allied shipping in the Mediterranean, Sardinia suffered heavy bombing.

At the same time, the island also had a strong anti-fascist resistance movement, which supported the Allies, and played a significant role in eventual Italian liberation in 1943. If he’d stayed in Sardinia, what role would Gramsci have assumed? A leader of the underground resistance movement? A free man yet a communist enemy of the Nazis, a man who would need to battle on three fronts—against the German Nazis, the Italian fascists, and the Russian Stalinists. Whatever the case, it’s clear his Sardinia peace would have been short-lived, lasting a couple of years only.

On the other hand, would he have opted to join the dissident exodus from mainland Europe? It’s fascinating to consider that the northern Sardinian port of Porto Torres had a direct ferry line to Marseille; from Porto Torres Gramsci could have eloped to the southern French city. Although under German occupation, Marseille’s shady underworld of crime and opportunism, its rowdy bars and back alleys around the Vieux Port, its seafaring and immigrant culture, meant it slipped through the tightening grip of the Gestapo. The city’s cracks offered elicit protection for assorted refugees, dissidents, and Jews, while becoming a wartime waystation for the passage out to the new world. (One of Gramsci’s contemporaries, Walter Benjamin, born 1892, famously didn’t make it out, crossing the Pyrenees from Marseille in September 1940 only to find the Spanish border closed. Stranded, without the right exit visa, he preferred suicide to being sent back, overdosing on morphine in a cheap Portbou hotel.)

Might Gramsci have shacked up with the celebrated artists and intellectuals on the outskirts of Marseille, at the Villa Air Bel, before setting sail in March 1941 on Le Capitaine Paul Lemerle, a converted cargo boat, for Martinique? What a mesmerizing proposition that would have been. Onboard were 350 refugees, as well as a glitterati of creative dissents, castaways of old Europe, including anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, photographer Germaine Krull, surrealist painter Wifredo Lam, the “Pope” of Surrealism himself, André Breton, his wife, the painter-dancer Jacqueline Lamba, together with their six-year-old daughter Aube. The anarcho-Bolshevik revolutionary Victor Serge, himself no stranger to political persecution and imprisonment, was another passenger, accompanied by his twenty-year-old son, Vlady, a budding artist.
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Serge and Gramsci were kindred spirits, contemporaries who knew each other in Vienna in the mid-1920s. (There’s a touching photograph of them together, a group shot on a Viennese street, with optimism in the air and a grinning Gramsci.) Serge was remorselessly scathing about people he didn’t like or rate—his Notebooks, 1936-1947 are full of selected character assassinations—yet was generous about those he knew and/or admired, like Gramsci.

A few years after his arrival in Mexico, Serge wrote in his Memoirs of a Revolutionary perhaps the nicest portrait of Gramsci ever written:

Amid an atmosphere of fugitive uncertainty and fear—fear of being torpedoed or detained by Vichy-controlled Martinique—Serge and Gramsci would’ve had plenty to talk about aboard Le Capitaine Paul Lemerle, plenty of time to argue, to agree and disagree, to agree about disagreeing. Both had the capacity of conviction, believing in the unity of thought, energy, and life, yet were critical of all forms of fanatism. Both knew every idea is subject to revision in the face of new realities. Both would have agreed that the old world was dying and little was left of what they’d known, of what they’d struggled for (Serge’s own title for his memoirs was originally Memories of Vanished Worlds); both knew the new world had yet to be born and monsters lurked in the interregnum, in the darkness at dawn, in the unforgiving years they were each living out. Both would have shared prison tales of hardship and disappointment, told jokes with an inmate gallows humor they knew firsthand.

They’d have likely discussed the relative merits of anarchism and Marxism, agreed about the disasters of Stalinism, found common ground on the need to rebuild socialism through a Constituent Assembly. (In his Notebooks, Serge said socialists “ought to seek influence on the terrain of democracy, in the Constituent Assemblies and elsewhere, accepting compromise in an intransigent spirit.”) They’d have converged and diverged in their views about Georges Sorel, the French political theorist, agreeing about aspects of his anarcho-syndicalism, particularly on the general strike, about its “mythical” nature, that it was a “concrete fantasy” (as Gramsci called it) for arousing and organizing a collective will; yet would have disagreed about Sorel’s ethical repugnance to Jacobinism, which Gramsci recognized as “the categorical embodiment of Machiavelli’s Prince.” The jury would have been out on Gramsci’s feelings about Sorel’s “moral elite,” which Serge liked, the idea that history depends on the caliber of individuals, on how fit and capable they are for making revolution. Maybe Gramsci might have agreed; perhaps this was just another notion of an “organic intellectual”?

After landing in Martinique, where might Gramsci have gone? Followed comrade Serge to Mexico? Taken André Breton’s route, found refuge in New York? They never let Serge into America; no Communist Party member, existant or previous, was ever granted entry; Gramsci would have experienced a similar fate. Mexico would have been the more likely bet. Serge’s weak heart didn’t last long in high-altitude Mexico City: a cardiac arrest struck him down in the back of a cab in 1947. It took several hours before his body was identified. Vlady recalls finding his father on a police station slab. Son noticed the sorry state of dad’s shoes, his soles full of holes, which shocked Vlady because his father had always been so careful about his appearance, even during times of worst deprivation. A few days on, Vlady sketched dad’s hands, which were, as Serge had described Gramsci’s, very beautiful. Not long after, Serge’s final poem was discovered, drafted the day before he’d died, called “Mains”—”Hands”: “What astonishing contact, old man, joins your hands with ours!”

I know, I know–all of this is idle conjecture about Gramsci, maybe even pointless wish-imaging. It didn’t happen. What really happened happened: Gramsci died, never made it out, was never reunited with Serge. While we can act and should speculate on the future, we can’t change the past, the course of a history already done. That past can be falsified, erased and denied, of course, as people in power frequently do—remember Gramsci’s youthful article from Avanti!, penned in 1917, documenting a common bourgeois trait, prevalent today, of renaming old city streets, of coining new names for neighborhoods where a working class past was vivid. “Armed with an encyclopedia and an ax, they proceed to demolish old Turin,” Gramsci wrote of his adopted city. Streets are the common heritage of people,” he said, “of their affections, which united individuals more closely with the bonds of a solidarity of memory.”
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So we can’t reinvent Gramsci’s past, shouldn’t reinvent that past. But we might keep his memory alive, find solidarity in that memory, keep him free from any renaming, from the encyclopedia and the ax. His phantom, his death mask, can haunt our present and our future. To remember what happened to him is never to forget his dark times, the dark times that might well threaten us again. Victor Serge recognized this, somehow knew it was his friend’s powerfullest weapon. Twelve-years after their Viennese encounter, “when I emerged from a period of deportation in Russia and arrived in Paris,” Serge writes in Memoirs of a Revolutionary, “I was following a Popular Front demonstration when someone pushed a communist pamphlet into my hand: it contained a picture of Antonio Gramsci, who had died on April 27 of that year.” What should we do with this picture in our own hands? Remember it and pass it on.

All around the country normal working-class Americans are asking themselves one question: why? Why is it that I am struggling to make ends meet at the end of the month? Why is the price I paid for the same groceries a couple years ago doubled today, while my wage or salary has stagnated? Why is it that I was forced to go into drowning debt for getting sick, daring to get an education, wanting a home for my family? Why are the politicians on my screens so keen on waging war on half the world with our tax dollars, but so averse to investing any money on the people and the country’s decaying infrastructure? Why is my day pervaded by stress when I drop my children off at school, not knowing whether they can be the next victim of the horrendous shootings all too common in our country? Why do none of the people who govern the country seem to care about the desperate and deteriorating conditions of those like my family, neighbors, and co-workers?
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Poor, indebted, and desperate, the American working class has begun to organically question the assumptions of the ruling capitalist order. While they have been generationally fed the idea that America is the greatest country on earth, where freedom, democracy, and equality reign, today the desperation they experience in their everyday lives has made critical reflection necessary, spontaneous though it might still be. Can there be any real equality between those in their class and those that benefit from their toil, indebtedness, and instability? Can there be any freedom for the men and women enchained for life to a debt they owe a major bank? Can there be freedom and equality for the millions of children going to sleep hungry every night in America, or the 600 thousand homeless wandering around in a country with 33 times more empty homes than homeless people? Can there be any democracy in a system where the people who control the major corporations, banks, and investment firms hold power over the state, using it to enforce their will, I.e., the accumulation of capital, as the bottom line and most supreme value in all social relations?

What has emerged, then, is a serious crisis of legitimacy. Faith in the ruling institutions of the capitalist class is rapidly diminishing. Only 11 percent of the American public trusts the mainstream media, the main ideological institutions of the capitalist ruling class. The politicians which enforce the interests of the owners of big capital aren’t doing much better, with just 19 percent of Americans holding that their elected representatives actually represent them. It is clear to the American people, albeit in a form that is still abstract and embryonic, that the media is simply there to manipulate them into consenting to the agenda of the ruling class — twisting facts, lying, and removing context to invert reality on ongoing world events. It is evident to them that their so-called representatives are in reality the representatives of their exploiters, oppressors, and parasitic creditors.

Out of this general and spontaneous rejection of the current state of affairs has arisen various different forms of dissent in the American working class. Some were mobilized by the Bernie Sanders movement in 2016 and 2020, seeing in it the potential for a genuine political, although not social, revolution which could guarantee the basic rights afforded in social democracies but absent in our country. In the same years, some were captivated by Donald Trump and his call to Make America Great Again (MAGA), which for many working-class folks in the country signified a striving to return to an age long gone, where their parents and grandparents could secure comfort in life and a high standard of living with a normal working-class job. Others have taken various apolitical routes, showing antipathy in the face of a political arena where they rightly observe that, as of right now, they have no ability to change anything.

While others are certainly present, these three have been the major channels for working people to express their discontent in the ruling order. Many, many flaws are evidently present in each route. But they all share a common rational kernel — the rejection of the status quo, and in the first two, the faith and willingness to work towards changing it. As it currently exists, however, one route leads to paralysis in the face of the task of constructing something new, while the other two have led to fake prophets being elevated as embodying the interests of the people, while they, in reality, have merely expressed more novel and disguised ways of upholding the same ruling order. We are in the period where it becomes evident that the hopes of 8 years ago are hollow, that a new way of framing and articulating discontent must be sought.

For us, only a communist party can live up to this task. A communist party is, after all, fundamentally the vehicle for the most advanced detachment of the working class to win the faith of the critical mass and guide their struggles to the finish line — the conquest of political power. It is a communist party which has the potential of giving these different forms of dissent some coherence, unity, and direction. Coherence arises out of the systematic understanding of the ills individuals face — ills which are not individual moral failings but systemic in character. Unity is premised on this coherence, on the understanding of our commonality of interests and our shared source of discontent. And direction arises out of the previous two — only when we can coherently understand the social order upon which our troubles are based can we see that in its own contradictions there’s a way forward. In the correct understanding of the problem, we find the premises through which the solution can be sought. When the decaying capitalist system we have before us is comprehended so too is the fact that working people — the producers of all value in society — have it within their power, as a class, to build a world anew in their own image. Once this recognition of our shared fundamental reality is achieved and the varied forms of dissent unified, then the steps forward will show themselves in the process of a struggle clear about its direction.

Lamentably, the historical communist party in our nation has shown itself incapable of living up to the task of the organization which bears that name. It has sought class collaboration in the era where class struggle is an imminent reality. It has sided, under the cynical auspices of ‘fighting fascism,’ with the Democratic Party whilst such organization has sent hundreds of billions in U.S. taxpayer money to neo-Nazis in Ukraine for a proxy war against Russia. It has supported this party through its murderous funding and equipping of the Zionist entity’s genocide in Palestine. It is a “communist” party which objectively has supported fascism and class collaboration under the justification of fighting that which they precisely support. Fascism, for them, is simply the social conservatives who disagree with the more liberal social values recently accepted by the forces of hegemony. For them the fascist threat emanates from our conservative co-workers and not the capitalist state that uses both parties to fund war and genocide. But what can be more fascist than supporting, financing, and equipping a genocide carried out by a white supremacist apartheid state?

The “communist” party USA spits on the legacy of Stalin, Dimitrov, and the great anti-fascist fighters of the world communist movement when it cites them tongue in cheek to support the fascistic American state. It forgets that, as Michael Parenti wrote “the fascist threat comes not from the Christian right or the militias or this or that grouplet of skinheads but from the national security state itself, the police state within the state.”[1] These are the forces which enforce the “open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital,” central to the Marxist understanding of fascism, elaborated in the brilliant work of Georgi Dimitrov.[2] The “communist” party USA operates, therefore, with an idealist and anti-Marxist understanding of fascism when it ignores the role of fascism as a form of capitalist governance in periods of crisis. It reduces fascism to a problem of ideas in the mind, and it’s unable to see how, as a form of capitalist governance in crisis, it’s been present here in both parties all along. The basic understanding of the spurious dialectic of Democrats and Republicans, of the unending and performative back-and-forth used to mask the continuity of the imperialist state and serve its continual reproduction, is completely lost on these “communists.” They side with one side of the capitalists, imperialists, and fascists. In doing so they don’t actually fight against the ‘fascist threat’ they so often invoke but reinforce it. They feed into the spectacle of American politicking; they become complicit in its operations.

But errors in party lines are amendable when the operational method of a communist party is upheld. Democratic centralism, when actually present, gives the party the potential to rectify — to improve its understanding of the situation and its failings. It allows the slippages into social chauvinism, opportunism, and ultraleftism (so evident in the cpUSA) to be reeled in and corrected. But here too, the “Communist” Party USA has completely violated its obligations. Ample evidence has shown that at the 32nd National Convention party democracy was thwarted, and democratic centralism tossed out the window.[3] And when those courageous cadres sought to rectify this usurping of the party — this coup of the American working class’s historic organization by a small clique of lifelong bureaucrats — through constitutional means stood up to share a petition requesting the democratic consultation thwarted at the convention, all real communists were purged, often expelling whole clubs themselves. The evidence has been documented and made public. As was made evident, the ruling clique of the cpUSA, then, has completely destroyed party democracy in order to defend its support for class collaboration with a party that supports Nazis and carries out genocidal wars on native peoples.

But no amount of fettering the class struggle would achieve their desired stoppage of the movement of history. An organization of the working class, grounded not in middle class professionals and bureaucrats but in the working class itself, guided by Marxism-Leninism and not the purity fetish, was bound to arise. On July 7th of 2024 this organization was born. It’s birth, as Executive Chairman Haz Al-Din noted, was itself a triumph in deed, not merely in word.[4] It brought together a broad group of different communist forces, stemming from those which were unconstitutionally purged by the cpUSA, to carry forth the struggle together, to reconstitute the American Communist Party our people so desperately need. It is bounded not by abstract and pure doctrines, but by the living science of Marxism-Leninism, which sees truth in the deed, in practical results and organizational achievements. Our standard of success will not be the construction of theory built off of the purest abstract ideas. Our standard of success will be our capacity to fulfill the role history has assigned to the American Communist Party, namely, to provide the coherence, unity, and direction that can get our people out of the perpetual crises which have pervaded our decaying capitalist mode of life, and establish in its place a society of, by, and for working people — Socialism.

Notes

[1] Michael Parenti, America Besieged (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1998), 119.

[2] Georgi Dimitrov, Against Fascism and War (New York: International Publishers, 1986), 2.

[3] Our Institute has a whole playlist discussing the 32nd National Convention and interviewing around a dozen purged members. You can watch the six videos in that playlist here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wk7JuLxXsW8&list=PLxhlh6ux6zSnGUbwuHGusdJTTyYkNie_C&pp=gAQBiAQB

[4] First address to the public from Executive Chairman Haz Al-Din:
https://x.com/ACPMain/status/1815807197806248215