With the beginning of the reform and opening-up policy, the People’s Republic of China entered a new historical period in its development. Starting in 1978, the country began to prioritize a development model with characteristics quite distinct from those prevailing during the previous period (1949–78). From then on, China began to emphasize the growth of the private economy and gradually dismantled the system of people’s communes, which had been established during the first thirty years of socialist construction (1949–76).

A new economic structure soon took shape, in which the state and public sector progressively lost their dominant position, especially in quantitative terms, while “multiple forms of ownership” were promoted and encouraged. This new political orientation led to the emergence of private capitalist property and the formation of a market economy under the control of the Communist Party of China (CPC), a situation that contributed to intensifying class contradictions, the loss of social status for workers, and a range of problems characteristic of capitalist societies. The Chinese then began to theorize about “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

Even in this context, some local experiences of development and strengthening of public and collective economy survived—and many even prospered to the point of becoming genuine models that significantly influence the national debate on building new socialist rural areas. In an era where much is said about achieving “common prosperity,” it is of utmost importance to pay attention to these experiences. Among the collective villages still existing in China, the most emblematic and relevant example is that of Nanjie.

The Historical Context of the Economic Construction of Nanjie Village

Launched in 1978, the reform and opening-up policy had its initial landmark in rural areas. Officially, the CPC considers that these rural reforms began in Xiaogang village, located in Anhui province. At the time, a group of eighteen peasants signed a “secret agreement” in which they agreed to violate the existing laws, clandestinely implementing a model of production and distribution based on the division of land into family plots, which could be cultivated individually by peasant households. This model was later implemented elsewhere, becoming the basic model for rural reforms in the early phase of the new policy. This episode illustrates the difficulties and challenges in establishing socialist relations of production in the face of the spontaneous petty-bourgeois tendencies of peasants in a large rural country like China.

Nanjie is a village located in Luohe City, Henan Province. It houses about 3,000 permanent residents, with a total population of around 13,000 (including migrant workers and employees of local enterprises). It is one of the rare cases of rural development that followed a path diametrically opposed to Xiaogang. Nanjie’s experience is often portrayed by the bourgeois press as the “last Maoist village in China.” This is due to the fact that Nanjie preserved and promoted rural collective ownership and centered its development on the defense and advancement of public ownership.

It is a fact that in present-day China, as the private economy gains ever more strength and influence, examples like Nanjie represent exceptions to the rule, although it is not the only village that still adopts a model based on collective economy.

At the beginning of the reform period, Nanjie also sought to adopt the household responsibility system, following the example then being implemented throughout China. Especially after the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, Nanjie also began to encourage the growth of individual and private property.[1] However, such incentives and measures soon showed concerning results: a drop in production indices, deterioration of living conditions, and the emergence of social polarization.

Living in a village located near the city, Nanjie’s peasants had historically developed a certain commercial tradition. With the dismantling of the old collective system of people’s communes, the peasants quickly abandoned their rural activities to engage in various commercial activities. At that time, after these changes began, street vendors, food and cigarette merchants, migrant workers, and individuals eager to open private factories reemerged. Many peasants also began leasing land to relatives and friends; in some cases, they even completely abandoned their land. According to data provided by the Party committee in Nanjie, in 1985, annual grain production dropped to just over 3.75 tons per hectare, with agriculture “entering a general decline.”[2]

In response to these problems, the village and the people of Nanjie reacted quite differently from what common sense might suggest. Rather than deepening reforms in favor of private property, the local Party committee chose to resume collectivization. In 1986, the Communist Party committee in Nanjie published a document addressed to the population that expressed the following:

1. Those capable of farming their land must, above all, take good care of their fields. Only then may they engage in trade or outside work. Otherwise, the village would have the right to intervene. It was forbidden to lease contracted land to outsiders or abandon it.

2. Those who, for special reasons, could no longer take care of their land could submit a formal request to the village committee. Upon evaluation and approval, their land would be returned to the collective, and the village mill would ensure the supply of flour for these families.[3]

After publishing the notice, three hundred residents requested the return of their land, which once again came under the collective administration of Nanjie village.

During the brief period when Nanjie experimented with the “Xiaogang path,” in addition to decollectivization, the village also handed over its two small factories (brick and flour) to private management, which resulted in intensified class contradictions and the deterioration of the Party’s leadership position. As revealed in the book The Light of the Ideal, prepared under the supervision of the CPC committee in Nanjie:

The result of the experience was the opposite of what residents had expected: instead of benefits, what came was a hard lesson. Workers were deceived. Besides not receiving regular wages, many went the entire year without any payment, working in vain. Meanwhile, individual contractors visibly enriched themselves, with food, clothing, housing, and possessions far superior to those of ordinary residents. The Party’s authority in the village plummeted; complaints spread. Letters of denunciation reached the Provincial Party Committee and the municipal government, protest posters were placed from the county office to the door of Secretary Wang Hongbin. Leaders at all levels also expressed dissatisfaction with the village’s cadres.[4]

The eventual positive results that reforms brought to Xiaogang and other rural areas did not occur in Nanjie. This shows in practice that, for a reform to succeed, it must consider not only top-down orders or successful experiences from other places, but above all the concrete conditions of each region.

Collectivization as a Prerequisite for the Development of the Productive Forces

The peasants of Nanjie felt firsthand the negative effects of returning to individual production. Under the leadership of the Communist Party, they gradually found a new path to development. Wang Hongbin, secretary of the Communist Party in Nanjie, played a central role in this new endeavor in the small village in Henan. Elected secretary of the Communist Party committee in 1977, Wang Hongbin began to stand out in village politics during the final years of the Mao Zedong era. At the time, he received honorary titles such as “promoter of the limitation of bourgeois right” and “promoter of the reduction of the three great inequalities.”[5] According to his own reflections, the main reason for the political and economic deterioration in Nanjie was that the Party, instead of properly using its leading role to mobilize the masses in their struggle to overcome poverty, had adopted the path of private individual economy, which ended up “hurting the residents’ feelings and tarnishing the reputation of Party organizations.”[6]

With Wang Hongbin at the helm, the Communist Party committee in Nanjie mobilized to find an answer to the village’s new problems. By holding mass meetings with the residents of Nanjie, the decision was made to resume the collective economy, undertaking economic and ideological construction simultaneously, putting “politics in command.” Successfully carrying out both economic and ideological work was what the Communist Party of China historically called “acting with both hands and with equal strength.”[7]

After resuming the path of collectivization, Nanjie once again recorded high levels of economic growth. From 1984,the year it returned to the collective economy—until 1998, the village’s collective enterprises grew from two to twenty-six, including four joint ventures. Fixed assets increased from just over 500,000 yuan to 460 million yuan. The total output value of the village’s collective enterprises jumped from 700,000 to 802 million yuan, and taxes paid gradually rose to over 17 million yuan.[8] These are figures that completely refute the entrenched view that equates collective economy with backwardness and stagnation.

The Communist Party established a method of ideological education based on “red culture” and Mao Zedong Thought. Contrary to what happened in the rest of China after the beginning of the reform and opening-up policy—where Mao Zedong Thought was often declared “outdated”—in Nanjie, the Communist Party committee placed the ideological formation of Party cadres and members, as well as villagers, at the center of its agenda, based on the principles of communist ideology. The classical works of Marxism-Leninism and the writings of Mao Zedong were widely printed and made available to villagers. In terms of Party propaganda, references to China’s revolutionary history, Marxism-Leninism, political speeches, orientations, and revolutionary songs became part of daily life in Nanjie.

Higher Forms of Cadre-Mass Relations: The ‘Spirit of 250’

Once the collectivization of the village’s basic means of production was consolidated, the Communist Party in Nanjie began developing new forms of relations between cadres and the masses. One of the major problems and challenges brought about by the reform and opening-up policy was the loss of prestige of Party organizations. With the reintroduction of the market economy at the national level, the idea that the Communist Party could serve as a springboard for social ascent became widespread. As a result, bureaucratism across China became an extremely serious issue, contributing to the growing public discontent that would culminate in the protests of the 1980s. This had negative consequences for the cause of socialism and communism in China. Nanjie was not immune to this phenomenon.

In the early period of the reforms, when Nanjie also decided to follow the “Xiaogang path,” relations between cadres and the masses quickly deteriorated. According to Marxism-Leninism, cadres play a decisive role in the construction of socialism. The way they perform their duties and relate to the people is a factor that can determine the success or failure of a given endeavor. If cadres engage in economic activities for personal profit and gain, the masses will inevitably begin to view the Party and its representatives with distrust. If such behavior is allowed to flourish, the character of the Party is diluted, and it runs the risk of degenerating into something hostile to the people. Considering these issues, Wang Hongbin correctly observed that the policy initiated by the CPC Central Committee—encouraging people to become rich (remember the slogan “to get rich is glorious”)—should not mean that “Party members should be the first to get rich.” The Party in Nanjie gradually established a cadre management system that took the principle of “serving the people” seriously, implementing the mass line in practice and promoting the so-called “250 spirit” (èr bǎi wǔ, 二百五).

Wang Hongbin, secretary of the Communist Party committee in Nanjie, was the main advocate of adopting the so-called “250 spirit.” In Chinese, the term “250” carries a derogatory connotation, often used to describe someone as a “fool,” “idiot,” or “naive.” However, in Nanjie, this expression took on a completely different meaning, representing “courage,” “boldness,” and a spirit of dedication to the collective. The initiative to use the term “250” as a political and ideological slogan came from Wang Hongbin himself, based on his personal experiences. In the late 1970s, before being elected Party secretary in Nanjie, Wang was offered a transfer to work in a city factory, where he would serve in the warehouse department. Given China’s conditions at the time, working in the city was seen as a real opportunity for social advancement for a peasant. However, Wang Hongbin did not adapt to the new position, feeling that the work he was doing lacked meaning. For him, life alongside his comrades in the countryside was far more valuable—that was where he wanted to be, contributing to the collective construction of socialism.

Upon returning to Nanjie, he was criticized by relatives and ridiculed by friends. Many called him a “250,” that is, a fool. But to Wang, it was precisely this kind of spirit that communists should cultivate and promote. After all, in class societies—and under socialism there are still classes and class struggle—aren’t those who devote themselves to a common cause often labeled as “naïve”? By giving new meaning to the term “250,” the Party began promoting the “250 spirit,” encouraging and fostering the spirit of sacrifice and dedication to the collective cause. Doing “foolish” things became a requirement and a model for Party members.[9]

Among the “foolish” things done by the Party leadership in Nanjie was the establishment of a salary regime for local Party officials that did not exceed 250 yuan per month—a rule that also applied to Wang Hongbin. The justification for such a measure lies not only in the Party’s own experience in Nanjie but also in the historical experience of the workers’ movement and socialist construction on an international scale. Some Chinese commentators and scholars even compare this measure with the example of the Paris Commune. As we know, during the short-lived Paris Commune in 1871, one of the adopted measures was to equalize the salaries of Commune officials with those of workers. As Marx pointed out: “First, it [the Commune] filled all positions—administrative, judicial, and educational—by election, with the right of recall at any time by the voters. Second, it paid all functionaries, high or low, only the wages of other workers. The highest salary was 6,000 francs.”[10]

The comparison between this measure applied in Nanjiecun and the example of the Paris Commune is quite valid—with the difference that in Nanjiecun’s case, the Communist Party leadership receives not the same salary as workers, but a lower one.[11] Evidently, this measure is frequently ridiculed and discredited by many analysts, both inside and outside China, but it helps explain, to some extent, the high degree of influence, prestige, and trust the Party leadership enjoys among Nanjiecun residents. It is one of the ways the Communist Party found to keep its top cadres “grounded” and strengthen their integration with the masses.

Strengthening the Collective Economy and the Socialist Distribution Model at the Village Level

In 1986, Nanjie established a new type of distribution system based on the collective provision of basic benefits to the population. Even with a weak economic base at the time, the village began to guarantee a wide range of social services to its residents: “From 1986 to 1994, the welfare items expanded from the free provision of water and electricity to 14 items, including gas, cooking oil, flour, special holiday foods, free education through university, collectively funded cultural activities, personal insurance, vaccinations, medical expenses, family planning, agricultural taxes, etc.”[12]

These measures were also very important in consolidating the prestige of the Party leadership in Nanjie among the local population. They represented enormous progress compared to what was happening in other regions of China, where the implementation of reforms was often accompanied by cuts or reductions in benefits previously provided by the State and work units. The Party leadership in Nanjie viewed the distribution system based on collective provision as an effective measure to combat inequality and poverty, as well as a means of alleviating social tensions and conflicts. As the village developed its productive forces, the Party sought to strengthen the supply-based distribution mechanism, expanding its scope of action. From 1993 onward, Nanjie began to build modern residential buildings, with apartments and houses of up to 92 square meters, fully furnished (sofa, bed, wardrobe, air conditioner, television, etc.), distributed free of charge to the local population. In the area of food, the village also began to provide it for free through its collective restaurants, where village residents can take their daily meals, although use of these facilities is not mandatory.[13]

This distribution model applied in Nanjie has only grown stronger over the years. Today, in addition to all the benefits listed above, the village also provides free healthcare and education. The hospital and local health clinics provide basic health services to the population; when specialized treatment is required in more advanced facilities—regardless of which city in China—the expenses are fully covered by Nanjiecun, even for surgeries or expensive procedures. In education, residents who are accepted into Chinese universities can study with all expenses paid by the village, along with a monthly subsidy. The same applies if they need to study abroad.

It is important to note that the current distribution system in the village does not reject the wage system. The Party leadership in Nanjie understands that, because the village’s productive forces are not yet highly developed, it is still necessary to maintain wages, applying the distribution method based on the principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his work.” In this regard, the village established a system that combines wage payments with the collective provision of services and social benefits by the State, placing greater emphasis on the latter, in a 30 percent to 70 percent ratio.[14]

According to Secretary Wang Hongbin, the adoption of the “wage + collective provision” system stems from two main factors:

1. Because China is in the socialist stage, residents’ ideological awareness still has many limitations. Therefore, it is important to establish a social environment that rewards those who contribute more to the collective through the principle of “those who work more, earn more,” while also exerting pressure on ideologically backward elements;

2. Through collective provision, people have the opportunity to experience concretely what the communist mode of distribution would look like (even if only in embryonic form), which has an important ideological impact and encourages workers to dedicate themselves more actively to the collective cause, reducing the influence of selfish ideas. This greatly aids the work of building the “socialist spiritual civilization.”

In this sense, the existence of wages corresponds to the fact that Chinese society—including Nanjiecun itself—is still in the primary stage of socialism; the collective provision system, then, aligns with the communist character of society, pointing to the direction in which economic and social development should move. The success of the distribution model based on “wage + collective provision” is one of the distinctive features of Nanjiecun. Its success, even in a small village, demonstrates to all of China the feasibility and superiority of a distribution model based on public ownership of the means of production, as well as presenting a creative way of applying the principle of “limiting bourgeois right” in the new era. It can serve as an important reference for achieving common prosperity.

Nanjie and the Reform and Opening-Up Policy: Building a ‘Communist Community’ in the New Era

It is quite evident that the path taken by Nanjie in its economic development process has characteristics that are very distinct from those applied in the rest of China since 1978. While in other areas the trend of decollectivization prevailed, Nanjie opted to promote its development through the strengthening of the collective economy and, consequently, the public sector. The Party committee in Nanjie set out on a mission to build what they call a “communist community”: a small rural community that lays the foundations of socialism and communism at the local level.

In the early 1990s, China’s political and economic debate was in full swing. The international context was marked by the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries; in China, following the protests of the late 1980s, the debate over which path the reforms should take deepened, while neoliberal ideology gained increasing influence within society. In 1992, with Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour, the political conditions were created for a new wave of reforms, which led to the interruption of the debate about the “nature of the reforms”—whether they were capitalist or socialist—a debate that had been largely promoted by what many considered the “left” within the Communist Party of China at the time.[15] Nationally, the Communist Party of China set as its main goal the creation of a “socialist market economy” and allowed the private sector to expand more rapidly.

In the opposite direction, the Communist Party committee in Nanjie—without denying the reality of the market economy—openly defends the need to build a village with an economic base rooted in public ownership of the means of production.

As Wang Hongbin stated:

Especially today, upholding and defending the line of public ownership has become a central point and focus of attention for all of society. Public ownership is the core of socialism, the direction and lifeline of socialist society’s development. It expresses the essence of the socialist system and is the principal economic form in the victorious march of socialist society. If we do not understand the superiority of public ownership, if we do not understand its origin and development, nor its distinction from private ownership, we will not be able to recognize the correctness and value of the path followed by Nanjie.[16]

In September 1997, the Communist Party in Nanjie launched the “great debate on public ownership,” a major political mobilization process that involved not only Party cadres but also workers and village residents. In August of that same year, during a leadership meeting in Nanjie, Wang Hongbin read a letter written by a young researcher from Beijing who had visited the village to conduct fieldwork. In the letter, the young researcher stated that the principal contradiction in Nanjie was the struggle between capitalism and socialism; between collectivist and selfish worldviews; between the idea of serving the people and the pursuit of wealth, pleasure, and fame. The letter also pointed out some political and social problems emerging in the village as it overcame its condition of poverty.

​Among them: bureaucratism; resistance among youth to revolutionary ideological education; criticisms of the existing distribution system in the village; individualism, etc. All these manifestations demanded that the village better systematize a correct ideological line, which would help solidify among Party cadres a clear understanding of the superiority of public ownership. It also concretely showed that building a “communist village” must not rely solely on economic development.

The defense of public ownership of the means of production is considered a basic premise for the ideological construction of Nanjie. The Communist Party committee in Nanjie actively promotes the study of the works of Mao Zedong, texts by Deng Xiaoping, and Party documents in which the defense of public ownership is explicitly mentioned. Deng Xiaoping, on several occasions, also pointed out that the socialist system is based on public ownership of the means of production, meaning that Nanjie never needed to “deviate” from the Party’s official line to defend its project of building a “communist village.” Even so, the Communist Party in Nanjie openly criticizes the pro-privatization tendencies seen in other regions, as well as the cadres and intellectuals who promote the demonization of public ownership.

According to Wang Hongbin:

Currently, there are people in our village who still have a vague understanding of public ownership, showing mistaken attitudes. They do not perceive its superiority nor understand the dangers of private property. We said years ago that ‘privatization’ is the source of all evils. When selfish desires grow and individualism acts, phenomena such as ‘eating, drinking, prostitution, gambling, smoking, extortion, deceit, kidnapping, fraud, and theft’ emerge—and such situations in society are alarming. Those who do not understand the superiority of public ownership end up losing faith in it.[17]

Nanjie began promoting ideological campaigns aimed at clarifying the superiority of the public and collective economy, exposing the evils produced by private ownership. In the context of the “great debate” taking place in the village, Professor Xing Guosen, a veteran cadre and member of the Party committee in the village, gave a public lecture in which he explained to residents the essence of private property:

In all societies based on exploitation—whether in slavery, feudalism, or capitalism—the majority of wealth belongs to individuals who hold economic power. In slave society, even the life and death of slaves were completely controlled by the masters. During feudalism, the State itself was considered the property of a dynasty, concentrating power and resources in the hands of a hereditary aristocracy. In capitalism, the political system is manipulated by the bourgeoisie, which defends private ownership, while most social wealth remains concentrated in the hands of capitalists. Workers’ wages barely guarantee the minimum for survival—and sometimes not even that. The relationship between capitalists and workers remains one of exploitation. To transform this reality and achieve the true liberation of the working masses, private property must be eliminated.[18]

In terms of property relations, with the re-collectivization and the development of local enterprises controlled by the Party committee, the individual economy gradually lost its economic influence, so that the ownership of the means of production and commerce quickly returned to State control. The issue of eliminating private property was placed by the village committee as a present task, not something for a distant, unreachable future. In this way, socialist relations of production were preserved and consolidated, which brought enormous benefits to the village.

Nanjie’s leaders are aware that they cannot deny the reality that today the village is a “small island” of public economy surrounded by a vast sea of market economy. Therefore, Nanjie was forced to develop a commercial and entrepreneurial vision as a means of advancing its local enterprises, adopting a policy known as “externally flexible, internally strict.” This policy aligns with the measures of reform and opening-up, but introduces them in a highly original way.

On the “external” level, Nanjie’s economy needs to operate in accordance with the practice of the “socialist market economy,” following market competition laws and the national and international standards established therein. For instance, regarding foreign investment and partnerships with foreign enterprises, Nanjie established a few companies with foreign capital participation, which helped modernize local production.[19]

On the “internal” level, however, Nanjie’s policies must align with the socialist and communist character of the village, ensuring that business management obeys socialist principles and remains under the firm control of the Party committee. Even in joint ventures, this guarantees that the negative aspects of dealing with capitalist firms and actors do not contaminate or negatively influence the village’s internal development. Nanjie is not immune to the “entry of mosquitoes”—hence the Party committee’s constant emphasis on “placing politics in command” and persisting in the construction of “socialist spiritual civilization.” All profits generated by the village’s enterprises are funneled into a collective social fund, which is later reinvested in infrastructure projects and expansion of social benefits. The path taken by Nanjie allowed the village, already in the 1990s, to become a “billionaire village.” According to available data, between 1984 and 1997, the village’s economy grew more than 2,200 times, with output value rising from 700,000 to 1.6 billion yuan.[20]

Conclusion

The existence of Nanjie is not without controversy. In China, openly right-wing intellectuals view the village’s successful experience with suspicion and proclaim that sooner or later the path it has chosen will fail. Among the Chinese left, opinions are also divided. Some enthusiastically support the village’s experience, arguing that it can serve as a viable model for rural revitalization and the resumption of socialist construction in the country. There are also those who argue that what exists in Nanjie is a kind of “collective capitalism,” making comparisons with the socialist period of Mao Zedong’s era impossible. The fact that the village still accepts foreign capital participation for financing, and that it employs peasant labor from other regions (in which case the workers do not enjoy all the benefits granted to original villagers—although it must be acknowledged that even in these cases, working and living conditions are generally much better than those of most Chinese peasants and migrant workers), seems to support this argument.

However, while it is correct to take into account all the concrete limitations imposed on Nanjie’s development and its project of building a “communist village,” it is equally mistaken to underestimate its existence or to fail to recognize the highly positive value this experience holds in demonstrating the feasibility and superiority of development centered on public ownership of the means of production—even while acknowledging the inherent contradictions of having to adapt and integrate into the broader context of the market economy. The existence of a village with Nanjie’s characteristics demonstrates in practice that the collective economy can play a positive role in China’s overall economic development, and that its strengthening is a necessary condition for achieving “common prosperity” and expanding socialist relations of production on a national level.

From the perspective of Party “governance” within the village, the “Nanjie model” can also serve as a reference for more concretely visualizing the Communist Party of China’s role as an active force in socialist construction at its best. In Nanjie, the Party’s role as educator and organizer of the masses is evident—but it is more than that. The Party acts in a manner consistent with its proletarian character, placing Marxism-Leninism at the forefront and seeking to educate and mobilize the masses in the spirit of that ideology.

Author

Gabriel Gonçalves Martinez holds a master’s degree in Marxist Philosophy from Beijing Normal University.

Notes

[1] The Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China was held from December 18 to 22, 1978. It was at this session that the CPC officially announced the beginning of the reform and opening-up policy, focusing on the promotion of “socialist modernization.”
[2] Nanjiecun Bianxiezu 南街村编写组, 理想之光 (The Light of the Ideal), vol. 1 (Beijing: Central Party School Press, 1998), 3.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid., 4.
[5] In Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx presented the idea that in the lower phase of communism (socialism), the principle of distribution based on the amount of labor contributed prevails. However, Marx noted that this labor-based distribution was still a form of “bourgeois right,” as it presupposes real differences between individuals. In China, Mao Zedong warned that under socialism, bourgeois right still exists and is a major source of revisionism and capitalist restoration. Therefore, its influence must be restricted by proletarian power, through mass mobilization and popular political measures. See Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme. The information that Wang Hongbin was named a model promoter of “limiting bourgeois right” can be found in: 王宏斌. 南街村党委书记王宏斌汇报材料 (Report by the Secretary of the Communist Party of China in Nanjiecun), 2004. Video available at: https://www.szhgh.com/Article/red-china/redman/513.html
[6] Nanjiecun, 理想之光 (The Light of the Ideal), vol. 1, p. 4.
[7] The term “act with both hands and with equal strength” (两手抓，两手都要硬) was coined by 邓小平 (Deng Xiaoping) and refers to the idea that in order to successfully modernize socialism, it is necessary to simultaneously promote the development of material civilization (productive forces) and spiritual civilization.
[8] Nanjiecun, 理想之光 (The Light of the Ideal), vol. 1, 2.
[9] 陈先义 (Chen Xianyi), “南街村的党员干部为什么都甘愿做“二百五”？” [“Why Are All the Party Cadres in Nanjiecun Willing to Be ‘250’?”], 红色文化网 (Red Culture Net), June 11, 2024. https://www.hswh.org.cn/wzzx/sdjl/nm/2024-06-11/88465.html
[10] Karl Marx, The Civil War in France.
[11] In Nanjiecun, the salaries of Party cadres and leaders do not exceed 250 yuan—a symbolic reference to the “250 spirit” (二百五精神). Nanjiecun, 理想之光 (The Light of the Ideal), vol. 1, p. 35.
[12] Ibid., 12.
[13] Ibid.
[14] “南街村体质” [The Nanjiecun System], 南街村村委办公室 (Nanjiecun Village Committee Office). Accessed at: http://www.nanjiecun.cn/about.asp?id=5
[15] In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a significant faction within the Communist Party of China promoted a discussion about the nature of the reforms. Without denying the need for changes to the economic system, the debate aimed to systematize the problems arising in the early phase of reform, emphasizing that reform and opening-up should be understood as a way to “self-perfect” socialism’s political and economic system. During his “Southern Tour” (南巡讲话), 邓小平 (Deng Xiaoping) criticized the debate on the nature of reforms, saying it was useless to discuss whether something was “socialist” or “capitalist.” He also stated that the CPC should primarily guard against “leftist deviations,” which he considered more dangerous than rightist ones. See Deng Xiaoping, “Excerpts From Talks Given in Wuchang, Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Shanghai,” in Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, vol. 3 (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1994), 37–387.
[16] Nanjiecun Bianxiezu (南街村编写组), 理想之光 (The Light of the Ideal), vol. 3 (Beijing: Central Party School Press, 1998), 1.
[17] Ibid., 3.
[18] Ibid., 26–27.
[19] With the development and modernization of the village, Nanjie established a corporate group named “河南南街村集团有限公司” (Henan Nanjiecun Group Co., LTD). This is a large collective conglomerate that currently includes twenty-eight subsidiary companies. Of these, eight are joint ventures—five with foreign capital and three through domestic cooperation. All companies are managed by the Party committee, and all profits go into the village’s collective social fund, which finances the continuous development and expanded reproduction of the collective economy.
[20] Ibid., summarized.

“A child’s gotta eat their share of dirt” — Old southern saying
​
Famines and periods of mass starvation have been manufactured for as long as civilization has existed. To starve one’s enemy or even one’s own populace is a powerful strategy, despite its revolting nature. Gaza’s imposed famine however, is unique. Images of starving children have been almost literally uploaded into our collective consciousness. Malnourished bodies, already ravaged by years of bullets, bombs, fire, and sickness, creep into our insular worlds on various social medias. One year ago The Lancet, a respected independent medical journal, estimated that 186,000 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza at that stage of the genocide. It is a year later and there are estimations that 434,000 Gazans have likely been killed now. For four months we have seen day in and day out “hunger games”, mass shooting executions at supposed food aid sites run by the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation”, a stooge organization for the U.S and Israel. These executions of food starved concentration camp prisoners, along with the mounting globalized images of bony Palestinian corpses, has led many to start applying the term “famine” to the Gaza genocide. Given the increased use of this term, which I may add is correctly applied, I think it is important to put this term in context historically, not only by comparing the Gaza famine to its precedents, but in exploring this brief history of famines elucidate what a famine is definitionally.

Victorian Famines

Mike Davis’ book Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World explores this definitional and historical issue with the term famine. Davis’ case study of famines in 19th century India, Brazil, and China reveals that although climate events primarily caused by ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation) had significant impacts on agriculture, food distribution, and general living conditions; it was the colonial administrations that ruled over these areas that caused the famine and mass starvations. In India, the ENSO related droughts were devastating, especially in the interior Deccan Plateau region, but not nearly as devastating as the colonial British and their many sick machinations. Machinations ranging from diverting life saving grain from the exterior regions of India to England rather than the Deccan, to enslaving famine stricken Indians in work death camps with pitiful food subsistence. In Brazil, this was mirrored with the Portuguese decision to divert and withhold food aid to the Sertanejos fleeing from intense droughts in the Sertão, killing around 500,000 in what the Brazilians call the Grande Seca or “Great Drought”. In Northern China, Davis exposes once more how the British left millions hungry and without food aid of any kind. The famine was so horrifying that many turned to eating dirt, the hay and grass thatching of their house roofs, and eventually other people.

Famously the British also imposed famine onto the Irish, killing one million and forcing two million more to flee, representing a 1/3 population decrease in only a decade. Somehow, the memory of this starvation has grown to rightfully blame the British for their murderous policy. Yet the baggage laden word famine still remains when discussing the “Great Famine”. Besides the brutality of the British and the Portuguese, other European powers committed their share of manufactured food massacres. Numerically, the Spanish conquests of the New World are the greatest of these food deprivations.

“The main islands were thickly populated with a peaceful folk when Christ-over found them. But the orgy of blood which followed, no man has written. We are the slaughterers. It is the tortured soul of our world.” — William Carlos Williams

In David Stannard’s book American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World, he gives a conservative estimate that 75,000,000 indigenous people’s of the Americas were exterminated primarily by the Spanish. Nearly every tribe, civilization, people’s lost 95+ percent of their populations within just a few hundred years. Mass murder, hangings, shootings, stabbings, immolations, live burials, and death by dogs were all commonly used by the Spanish. Introduced diseases that natives had no immunity to killed most, but starvation tactics were often used too. Native crops were destroyed, food reserves plundered, and hunting grounds hunted to extinction.

Further, many were pushed onto barren reservations completely removed from their ancestral homelands. This undoubtedly caused millions to die of starvation and millions more who were already weakened by sickness and injury to die also. The crime of starving all these innocent peoples is doubled given the known history that nearly all New World peoples were extremely hospitable to the European colonizers and on many occasions fed them and taught them how to live and navigate about the land. The famine catastrophe the Spanish created was continued by the British and eventually the Americans, both of whom waged ecological war against the remnants of Native Americans.

​Modern Massacres

The New World murderous conquests, the Victorian era starvations of Malthusian calculation, and the exodus of the Irish may lead one to believe that famines are not only clearly defined as periods of mass starvation enforced deliberately as an act of policy, but also have ceased to exist to the same degree. After all, there have been significant technological improvements in agriculture, weather prediction, and the ability to distribute goods of all manner. This is a disastrous assumption. If anything the 20th and 21st centuries have revealed that famines not only continue to exist, but also that our new found technological advancements enable new sickening methods to carry out genocide by hunger.

In Guatemala, for nearly 40 years the U.S government backed right wing death squads that not only “disappeared” hundreds of thousands of primarily indigenous Mayans, but also carried out a scorched earth doctrine that left thousands more starving and destitute. Internationally Illegal bombing and blockades in Yemen for nearly a decade now have been carried out by Saudi Arabia with the backing of the United States. Prior to Gaza’s unfolding genocide, Yemen was the worlds greatest humanitarian famine crises, a crises deliberately made.

​Tragically, Gaza is just the latest (albeit one of the most sickening) in a long and continuing history of state imposed starvations and imposed colonial famines. Understanding that famines are inherently created purposely by genocidal colonial projects is a crucial step in exposing the underlying framework that makes these famines possible in the first place.

​On July 27, Fox News aired a national segment attacking my party, the American Communist Party (ACP), my speech, and the Subversion Summer Camp that hosted it in Bridgeport, Chicago.

I was asked for a press release a couple of days prior, but no part of the statement that I gave was featured on the segment, nor was any of the actual speech I gave, which was titled after my recent book, Why We Need American Marxism.

Instead, Fox News decided to clip a segment from my lecture at our Party’s national convention in October 2024, where I discussed, as Secretary of Education, the importance of free, creative, and critical thinking.

By mocking a clip where I emphasize these themes, the Fox News anchors, as political analyst Eddie Smith argued, are admitting that they do not want people to think critically and beyond the boundaries of the established political horizon. They want people to think what the mainstream media, 95% of which is owned by a handful of major media monopolies, tells them to think. Anything which encourages a form of thinking that breaks through the dogmatic narratives they craft to justify war, poverty, and our people’s debt-enslavement must be ridiculed, attacked, and censored.  

Most interesting was their sophistical intertwining of my speech and the ACP with the activities done by the rest of the ten-day camp, failing, of course, to note that we had no control over the rest of it. We were simply guests, graciously allowed to speak in an environment foreign to us, a context of liberal activism we have notoriously been at odds with. This is the activism that they ridiculed and tried to link to our party, an activism that says that we fight fascism with “pool noodles” and “queer magic".

In fact, my speech was introduced as being “controversial” precisely because we are communists, people whose patriotism is second to none. Our organization does not seek to impose liberal wokeism on an American working class that is overwhelmingly socially conservative.

But alas, the narrative-spinners at the Rupert Murdoch-owned cesspool, which is Fox News, had to ignore all the facts to connect us to a Congress for Cultural Freedom style compatible “left” that is completely alienating to working-class Americans.
​

This fact alone forces me to ask the following question: what are they afraid of? Why must they distort the facts to craft their narratives? Could it be, perhaps, that somewhere deep down they know that had their viewers listened to what I said, they would’ve found someone expressing sentiments which they agree with? A political line that comprehends the everyday grievances they live with, those which the political class ignores?

Ridicule is the tribute paid by those threatened to admit the truth of that which becomes the object of scorn. In such a predicament, constructing a caricature vulgar enough to knock down is the only resort. The paradox is that even the spectacle they spun made them, not those promoting critical, free, and creative thinking, look bad.
​
Had they shown the American people the actual speech, or even the statement they omitted, they wouldn’t have been able to otherize and mock us as quickly as they did. The essence of my talk, which is available online, is that the most fundamental values the American people hold are intimately tied to a conception of government of, by, and for the people. But this notion, first uttered by Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address, is fundamentally incompatible with the society we have today in America, where we have a government of, by, and for big business, banks, and the military-industrial complex.

By identifying with the notion of government of, by, and for the people, Americans are identifying with socialism, whose fundamental essence is nothing more than a society that has as its ultimate principle serving the people, not the interests of capital. As the legendary American communist Fred Hampton said, “Socialism is the people, if you’re afraid of socialism, you are afraid of yourself.”

Based on the ideals of 1776 and those of the refined democratic creed, the American people already align with a socialist social vision; they just do not know it yet. Their anti-communism, artificially inscribed through McCarthyite propaganda, is nothing more than a form of self-estrangement, a fear of facing the predicament of themselves in the mirror and realizing that how they think society should work is already communist, in essence.
It is like when in old cartoons the roadrunner runs off a cliff but only falls when they notice they are hanging in midair, likewise, the American people are already socialists, in a freefall away from the parasitic capitalist system they live under, they just do not know it yet.

Had Fox aired the segment and not ridiculed it by highlighting the antics of US “leftism", its audience would’ve received the truth, namely, that there is nothing fundamentally at odds between being a patriotic American and a communist. In fact, they would’ve found a scholarly, elaborated account of why you could only be a consistent and genuine American patriot through being a communist.

They would’ve been able to see that we could only escape the crisis we are in, where Americans are poorer, more indebted, and more desperate than past generations, by fighting, as our ancestors did in 1776, for a government that is truly of, by, and for the American people. Such a fight is already being waged, in an organized manner, by the American Communist Party that they sought to ridicule.

Had Fox aired my statement in the segment, the viewers would’ve been able to see that our ideas and struggle are rooted not in “queer magic", but in faithfully developing the ideals of 1776 to their logical and practical conclusion – socialism! It is only under American socialism that Americans could have a government that actually upholds the interests of the people, instead of one that sends our taxes abroad to fund genocide and imperialist plunder.

Sankarist politics have returned to the Sahel, bringing with it the wrath of empire. Burkina Faso, a country led by Captain Ibrahim Traoré and formerly known as the Land of Upright People in a statement of moral independence, is currently at the epicenter of a geopolitical storm. In addition to a domestic reordering, what is happening in Ouagadougou is a clear rejection of the disciplinary framework that Western powers have used to police the postcolonial world for many years.
 
It is no coincidence that as soon as Traoré nationalized gold mines, drove out French troops, and made an anti-imperialist agreement with Mali and Niger, the wheels of discredit started turning: think-tank briefings portraying him as "Russia's proxy in Africa," campaigns highlighting human rights issues in Western media, and reports characterizing his government as "military authoritarianism." These observations are not made out of disinterest. From a Marxian perspective, they are the ideological arm of imperialism, creating support for the notion that sovereignty that deviates from Western norms is inherently illegitimate.
 
 
The Political Economy of Anti-Colonialism
 
Burkina Faso's recent shift can best be interpreted from a Marxian standpoint as a rejection of its historically assigned place in the global division of labour. The postcolonial state was expected to import finished goods and export raw materials (such as gold, cotton, and manganese) as part of an imperialist extraction-based global economy. This system drained surplus value overseas, promoted dependency, and gave foreign capital precedence over domestic accumulation.
 
The operational logic of that dependency is undermined by Traoré's policies, which include nationalizing gold mines, building a refinery domestically, driving out French troops, and strengthening ties within the Alliance of Sahel States (AES). He opposes the "comprador" model of African political economy, in which local elites mediate the dominance of foreign capital in exchange for rents, by claiming state ownership over primary resources. Here, Ouagadougou attempts to reroute surplus value toward domestic social investment by wresting the means of production, or at least their most lucrative sectors, from the hands of transnational capital.
 
In the age of financialization, when capital is not only found in mines and plantations but also flows through debt instruments, exchange rates, and trade imbalances, this is no easy task. Traoré's position is Sankarist in spirit here as well: debt cancellation, fiscal sovereignty, and opposition to austerity measures imposed by the outside world are all components of a larger fight for independence within an imperialist global order.
 
Delegitimization as an anti-insurgency tactic
 
Traoré encounters epistemic as well as material hostility from Western capitals. The narrative framing, "cult of personality," "populist strongman," and "authoritarian nationalist" is a tool of power rather than a neutral description. It portrays any departure from neoliberal orthodoxy as a step toward tyranny and frames African self-determination as inherently dangerous.
 
Delegitimizing anti-imperialist initiatives before they have a chance to solidify, splintering their internal base of support, and making them ideologically poisonous for possible allies overseas are all part of the hegemonic role of the global media and policy discourse. The same strategy was used against Sankara in the 1980s, against Nkrumah before him, and against all leaders who have attempted to change the unfair conditions of the global political economy.
 
 
Pan-Africanism in Opposition to the Core
 
ECOWAS, the long-favored regional tool of Western economic governance in West Africa, has been directly insulted by the formation of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), a compact of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger. The AES is a break from the regional circuits of security supervision and policy discipline that link African economies to Western strategic priorities, but it is not yet a socialist bloc.
 
In this context, pan-Africanism serves as an alternative form of class conflict. Traoré's Burkina Faso aims to increase its bargaining power not only against former colonial powers but also against the entire capitalist core by allying with nations that face comparable security threats and economic limitations. It is a bet that regional independence will protect the periphery from the punitive tactics used by metropoles to subdue rebellious states, such as sanctions, aid suspensions, and currency destabilization.
 
 
The Sovereignty and Survival Dialectics
 
Critics cite the consolidation of executive power, the arrest of journalists, and the postponement of elections until 2029 as evidence of authoritarian drift. These are significant and actual developments. However, the Marxian perspective demands that they be historicized: sovereignty in the periphery is never exercised in a vacuum but rather under siege, both economically and discursively as well as militarily. The revolutionary state frequently turns inward during such a siege, consolidating power to protect itself from external dismantling.
 
This dialectic is dangerous. It is easy for extraordinary actions taken to defend revolution to solidify into long-lasting systems of dominance. Making military centralization a transitional rather than a final state is the difficulty facing Traoré and any anti-imperialist state. While the revolutionary project resists from the outside, it runs the risk of being eroded from the inside if public participation is not increased in tandem.
 
 
The War of Position in the Global South
 
The current conflict in Burkina Faso is a part of a larger struggle for dominance that is taking place throughout the Global South. The neoliberal consensus is increasingly being rejected, as seen in the Pink Tide governments of Latin America. However, the core of capitalism still has a great deal of ideological and coercive power. Fiscal autonomy can be stifled by financial markets. Leaders may be stigmatized by media conglomerates before their initiatives gain traction. Aid programs have the potential to be weaponized into compliance tools.
 
Traoré's Sankarist renaissance is brave and vulnerable in this context. Though it must also innovate beyond the weaknesses that made those previous revolutions vulnerable to both internal and external sabotage, it finds strength in its symbolic continuity with an uninterrupted lineage of African resistance, from Nkrumah to Sankara.
 
 
The Moral Geography of the Struggle
 
The West portrays Traoré's Burkina Faso as an issue that needs to be handled, deviating from the "rules-based order." The moral geometry is reversed from Ouagadougou: the accused is the so-called order itself, with its enforced underdevelopment, debt peonage, and military interventions. In this story, the "upright man" is not one who acquiesces to imperial respectability but rather one who defies kneeling, even if it means becoming isolated.
 
Here, the deep conflict is not between democracy and authoritarianism in the abstract, but rather between two opposing conceptions of sovereignty: one that seeks to restructure the global order so that the Land of the Upright People can stand upright in reality rather than just in name, and one that accepts the subordination of the periphery as the price of "stability."
 
 
Conclusion
 
The imperial core's eyes are on Ouagadougou, waiting for Traoré to falter, fail, and be reintegrated into the system of obedient government. In this way, the global political economy is not a neutral arena but rather a dynamic arena of conflict, where narrative, legitimacy, and reputation serve as just as many weapons as trade restrictions and sanctions.
 
Whether Traoré accurately captures Sankara's fleeting but brilliant revolution is not the crucial question. It is whether he can make room for a truly emancipatory order to emerge on an ideological, political, and economic level despite the tremendous pressure of imperial disapproval. The prospect that the Land of the Upright People might encourage others to stand upright as well is ultimately what the West fears most, not a captain who is "authoritarian" in a tiny Sahelian state.
 

Author 
Harsh Yadav is from India and has just recently graduated from Banaras Hindu University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry. Harsh is a Marxist Leninist who is intrigued by different Marxist Schools of Thought, Political Philosophies, Feminism, Foreign Policy and International Relations, and History. He also maintains a bookstagram account (https://www.instagram.com/epigrammatic_bibliophile/) where he posts book reviews, writes about historical impact, socialism, and social and political issues. ​​

Western imperialists are attempting to systematically dismantle Burkina Faso through a multi-front war designed by imperialist intelligence services. The Western fairy tale — that a spontaneous wave of jihadism and “bad governance” explains the crisis — is cover fire for a real operation: proxy warfare synchronized with fifth-generation information ops to fracture national unity and pry open resource corridors.
​
Terrorist insurgencies in the Sahel did not sprout from the soil; they were shaped, trained, and supplied through long-standing counterinsurgency doctrine repackaged as “counter-terror.” France, the U.S., and their junior partners embedded “security cooperation” infrastructure across the region while cultivating irregulars to function as forward agents of chaos. These units move strategically, not spiritually — always toward gold, phosphate, and transit nodes; always where sovereignty and socialist construction begin to take root.

Phase One is the feed. In the Sahel, disinformation is not an afterthought — it is Phase One. Fake accounts and bot swarms flood WhatsApp and Telegram with anti-Pan-African propaganda, recycled atrocity tales, and manufactured ethnic narratives timed to coincide with army reconsolidation. When the Burkina Faso Armed Forces stabilize an area, the feeds light up: “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” “dictatorship” — all unverified, all designed to split the people from the state and open a lane for armed proxies to re-enter.

The state names it plainly. Burkina Faso’s Information Ministry has repeatedly warned of “psychological warfare” targeting the population: deepfake images, falsified massacre reports, fabricated anti-government audio — often traced to IPs outside West Africa — deployed to demoralize, delegitimize, and divide.

The so-called Islamist factions — kitted with NATO-pattern rifles and trained in tactics mirror­ing U.S. SOF instruction in Niger and Mali — reappear precisely where foreign “counter-terror” teams previously scouted. As Kémi Séba of Urgences Panafricanistes has put it: every French or U.S. “anti-terror” intervention multiplies the very instability it claims to fight. The more they intervene, the more Burkina Faso burns.

What regional analysts and Pan-African media describe as “Afrancaux News” is now standard kit: user-generated propaganda pipelines that launder imperial talking points through sockpuppets, meme farms, and NGO-aligned “fact-checkers.” The content mix is deliberate: deepfakes, staged “massacre” clips, AI-composited anti-government videos, and even absurd celebrity-style fluff to personalize and distract, all calibrated to mask real territorial losses as mere incompetence or internal rot. The goal is constant: isolate anti-imperialist leadership, inflame suspicion along identity lines, and pre-justify external “stabilization.”

From feed to field. What’s lost in the info war isn’t just clarity — it’s ground. As disinformation splinters the popular base and blurs the chain of command, armed formations trained by foreign special forces step through the vacuum. This is not “terrorism” in any organic sense. It is counterinsurgency by other means — counterrevolution in insurgent dress.

The blueprint, spelled out by practice:

• Train irregulars in neighboring destabilized zones (Libya, Mali) and cycle them back across porous borders.
• Seed disinformation to fracture national unity and discredit self-defense efforts at the moment of reconsolidation.
• Fabricate ethnic violence and humanitarian crises to invite “international concern” and intervention.
• Weaponize NGO and “civil society” logos as operational cover for counterrevolutionary narratives and logistics.
• Let proxies hold strategic zones to exhaust the state economically, militarily, and politically — especially around mineral belts and corridors.

This isn’t chaos; it’s command. It’s not insurgency; it’s occupation — managed at arm’s length.
Every time Burkina Faso asserts autonomy — closing foreign bases, proposing state enterprises, coordinating with anti-imperialist partners — a wave of violence follows like clockwork. The enemy is not “tribal” or “spiritual”—it is geopolitical and class: monopoly finance capital and its state instruments, operating through mercenaries, bots, and hashtags.

And here's the punchline: you're likely helping imperialism. Every story that breaks about Traoré attacking the LGBTQ you react to, every culture war report that baits you into outrage at the liberation government of Burkina Faso is a concession to imperialism which is not only engineered to destabilize their sovereignty and national security, but to manufacture consent or disinterest in the freedoms Burkina Faso reclaimed in their war for independence from the U.S., France and the entire Western imperial bloc.

Author
Wade T. Paton is a U.S. Army veteran and former intelligence analyst who became a dedicated anti-imperialist upon leaving military service. A qualified paralegal specialist, he has applied his legal training in direct support of labor struggles, offering both legal assistance and strategic coordination to working-class campaigns. His activism spans multiple sectors, with a particular focus on organizing logistics and transportation workers, and he has contributed significantly to unionization efforts and the formation of worker-led cooperatives. As an entrepreneur, he's led multiple disaster relief efforts to the victims of Hurricane Katrina and most recently helped deliver critical aid to the areas of North Carolina hardest hit by Hurricane Helene.
Wade was elected to the Central Committee of the American Communist Party (ACP), where he helps shape national political strategy and contributes to the development of dual power initiatives. As both a cadre organizer and theoretician, he bridges practical struggle with revolutionary discipline, rooted in Marxist-Leninist principles. Prior to joining the ACP he was a minor contributing author to Midwestern Marx. He is a proud husband, a father of two, and an unwavering advocate for working-class internationalism.

Carlos L. Garrido, in an insightful commentary published in his Substack column “Philosophy in Crisis” on August 1, emphasizes the need to develop in theory and practice a US form of Marxism and socialism. The commentary is a transcript of a speech given at the Subversion Summer Camp in the Bridgeport community of Chicago. The Camp was criticized in a national segment on Fox News, which highlighted the presence of Garrido and the American Communist Party. Garrido is a professor of philosophy, the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute, and the Secretary of Education of the American Communist Party. The Midwestern Marx Institute is an American Marxist-Leninist thinktank founded in 2020, which has become the largest Marxist thinktank in the United States, with a following of over half a million and with hundreds of millions of views annually.

Philosopher that he is, Garrido defines commonly used terms and addresses the question of how we arrive to insight or correct understanding. He defines a leftist as someone who is committed to moving the arc of history forward to social justice. And he maintains that most leftists are not reared with a leftist orientation. Rather, they come to the Left through an event that ruptures their everyday assumptions and forces then to think, in order to make sense out of something that has happened, something that appeared to be impossible. Leftists, he maintains, do not evade the significance of the event, as most people do by forcing it back into the rationality of their established worldview. Leftists possess the courage to accept what has happened and to pursue with fidelity the significance of the event, until they arrive at the truth that the event reveals.
​
Garrido reports that the event in his case was the unanimous recommendation by his Cuban-American extended family that his mother ought to go to Cuba for free surgery, inasmuch as the necessary medical procedure was available in the United States only at a prohibitively expensive price. This recommendation ruptured Garrido’s everyday reality, because these were the very same folks who always were maligning Cuba and socialism as catastrophic, and characterizing the Cuban government as authoritarian.

Garrido was only ten at the time, but the event planted a seed in his developing understanding, which the Bernie Sanders campaign nourished, inasmuch as Sanders explained that profits were central to the healthcare system of the United States, unlike other advanced countries that placed people over profits. When the Sanders campaign failed and revealed that it was not a true political revolution, Garrido ended his alignment with social democratic politics. But he continued with the will to fight for social justice that had been nourished by the Sanders campaign, driving him on a road toward communism.

Garrido here is speaking, of course, of true leftism, and not the toxic and superficial leftism that has emerged during the last decade or two. I would suspect that many of today’s superficial leftists have arrived at their current beliefs through everyday processes of socialization in academic and online environments that are infected by leftist ideological distortions and incivility.

I like Garrido’s emphasis on mind-blowing experiences. In my case, such an event occurred in 1966, when I was twenty years of age. It involved the careful reading of an assigned 100-page book on Vietnam, which explained the colonialist character of US military involvement in Vietnam, debunking the official narrative. This led me to a center for black nationalist studies, which had nothing in common with today’s anti-racist ideology, where I learned a colonial analysis of the world. I was well on my way in my quest for understanding social justice when I arrived in Cuba in 1993, and I discovered to my great surprise that there are elections in Cuba and that the Communist Party does not participate in them. Events in my personal experiences were prompting me to ask questions about the worldwide phenomenon of US and Western imperialism, the structures and functions of colonialism and neocolonialism, and the alternative political process of people’s democracy. Increased understanding emerges from addressing relevant questions that have been discovered in life’s experiences, especially mind-blowing events.

§

In the Subversion Summer Camp speech, Garrido presents the key ideas of his recent book, The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism, which describes the obsession of Western Marxists with the need for Marxist organizations that are “pure,” that is, that live up to an abstract ideal of socialism, an ideal that unfortunately is not based in observation of existing socialist projects in nations of the real world, which unavoidably are developing in the context of political and economic contradictions. The idealist obsession with purity leads to simplistic condemnation of States that are constructing socialism, which Garrido identifies as the first of three manifestations of the purity fetish. With unusual insight, Garrido further observed that the abstract ideal fetish is “rooted in an American exceptionalism, since it says that the whole global south has failed at socialism, but we, the virtuous Americans, are the ones that will succeed.”

I recently came across an example of the abstract ideal purity fetish in an article on the London-based website, In Defence of Marxism, which is the organ of the Revolutionary Communist International. I wrote about it in my commentary of June 13, 2025, “Western Marxism against Cuban socialism.”

Garrido rejects the negative attitude of many leftists toward working-class supporters of MAGA, which is the second manifestation of the purity fetish. He maintains that he was able to move beyond caricatures and develop a more accurate understanding of working-class supporters of MAGA, as a result of his having lived in Iowa and Southern Illinois for ten years. He arrived to understand “that some of these people have a righteous anger toward the system—the deep state, as they call it—and a general mistrust of all established institutions.”

Accordingly, the working-class sector of the MAGA movement should be seen as fertile ground for recruitment to socialism. Garrido maintains that the task of socialism is to show the working class that America can be made great again only through socialism. The task is to show that Trump’s rhetoric against endless war in distant lands, against the autonomous bureaucracy known as the deep state, and in support of the revitalization of American industry cannot be realized under Trump or in the system of two-party duopoly. Garrido argues that socialists must work to delink the MAGA working-class sector from Trump.

Although I am in agreement with Garrido’s positive evaluation of the working-class sector of the MAGA movement, I submit that he appears to underestimate the historical significance of Trump. In the Republican presidential primaries of 2016, Trump called the MAGA political movement into being, with a conversational style discourse that improvised on the headlines and that identified the key concerns of the working class and middle America, who already had developed a deep sense of estrangement from mainstream American institutions. Trump marshalled this negative energy, initially toward voting for and supporting one person, which evolved to a phenomenon that includes a MAGA brand of conservative thinktanks and a second Trump administration with a well-defined program that is obtaining the support of the other branches of government.

In said political context, a delinking of Trump from the MAGA movement is impossible to imagine, except for a situation in which the second Trump administration is widely perceived as a failure by its social base. On the other hand, if the MAGA movement is consolidated during the second Trump administration on the basis of a successful implementation of its economic and political project, it would be possible that Trump will retire from the scene while the MAGA movement continues to evolve with strength on the political landscape. In this scenario, the delinking of Trump from the MAGA movement would occur in a natural form.

With awareness of the ultimate delinking of Trump from the MAGA movement in one way or another, new questions emerge. Will the MAGA movement continue to maintain control of the Republican Party? Will the post-Trump Republican Party continue its evolution toward a Party opposed to the premises of the American political establishment from 1948 to 2024? Will it continue to be a Party strongly supported by the industrial working class, small towns, and rural America? If such questions are ultimately answered in the affirmative in practice, then this would imply that the two-party duopoly is being transformed by Trump into a genuine two-party system, with partisans of the people in one party, and lackeys of the corporate elite in the other. If this possibility were to become a reality, then socialists and all those committed to making social justice the arc of history would confront an option between a people’s Republican Party and an alternative political party, with the American Communist Party having much to recommend it.

Garrido’s speech makes a strong concluding statement in defense of a personal decision for the American Communist Party. He maintains that the Party collectively is able to develop an advanced form of American Marxism, necessary for understanding the form of class struggle in the nation; that the Party offers an organized collective of disciplined individuals, turning people away from shallow and hedonistic individualism; and that the Party provides a collective group of support with respect to local union and unionizing activities and service to the people in response to natural disasters and other types of community service.

Of course, the option need not be reduced to an either-or proposition. The Party could form an alliance with a people’s-controlled Republican Party, with clearly defined and politically intelligent strategies.

The need for socialism with a national form
​
A third manifestation of the purity fetish, Garrido maintains, is “the attitude of condemning your country wholeheartedly because of its past evils.” He cites Georgi Dimitrov, the Hungarian anti-fascist leader of the Communist International, who called the phenomenon “national nihilism.” Dimotrov maintained that socialist content has to be given a national form, by appropriating the concepts and proposals that have been put forth by progressive leaders in national history, seeing them as the foundation for the building of socialism in the nation. He argued that it would be political folly for the socialist movement in the United States to turn against George Washington and the values of the revolution of 1776 or against Abraham Lincoln and the concept of government of, by, and for the people. The correct strategy involves putting forth the argument that socialism is the way to make real the dreams of the American experiment in democracy.

Garrido notes in this vein an irony, which I also have commented upon in previous commentaries. The US Left seeks to erase from the people’s consciousness the progressive elements of the American Revolution, by portraying the nation as having been founded on racist and patriarchal assumptions. On the other hand, the greatest revolutionaries of the Global South, including Ho Chi Minh and Fidel, were inspired by the American Revolution and appropriated its principal concepts.

​Consciousness of the need for socialism to take national forms, Garrido maintains, has especially emerged with importance in the neocolonized region of the world, which has confronted various forms of imperialism. The movements in said region emphasize, as they must, national liberation and the achievement of true sovereignty. Therefore, the struggle for the attainment of sovereignty is “one of the central forms of the class struggle in the age of imperialism,” a struggle, I would note, in which formally independent States are the principal actors.
Garrido mentions important examples of socialist projects taking national forms, including Cuba, Bolivia, China, and Venezuela. These socialist projects of the Global South and East are included in the scope of Garrido’s empirical investigations, functioning as the political practice that grounds his theoretical reflections with respect to the necessary characteristics of socialism in the USA.
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Garrido, therefore, wants to rewrite American history from a perspective that sees the progressive unfolding of the promise of democracy put forth by the American Revolution, culminating in socialism. His article mentions a number of progressive intellectuals and leaders integral to this project, many of whom are not presently included in our consciousness. Especially important are Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who expressed support for a democratic form of socialism in 1966 and 1967; and WEB DuBois, whom Garrido considers to be the father of American Marxism, inasmuch as DuBois viewed the struggle against racism to be the form that the class struggle took in the United States in the period following abolition and Reconstruction. A stage that was ended, I would add, by the great reforms in civil and political rights in 1964 and 1965.

The concept that socialism must take a national form in each nation, forged by the leaders and intellectuals of each nation, is consistent with common-sense and political intelligence. It sets aside dysfunctional abstract assertions that are not based on empirical observations, whether they be assertions for or against socialism. It calls upon those who have decided for socialism in a general sense to develop the form of socialism appropriate for their particular nation.

In identifying the progressive foundations of socialism in the United States, I would emphasize the African-American movement from 1917 to 1972 as well as the women’s movement from 1848 to the 1970s. The black movement stressed full political and civil rights for all and equality of opportunity in education and employment, regardless of race; and it called upon the State to take decisive measures in defense of these rights. The movement proclaimed these principles as the fulfillment of the founding principles of the American Republic; it thus constituted itself as a social movement within the ongoing and evolving American Revolution.

Similarly, the first two waves of the women’s movement emerged as a revolution within the American Revolution. The first wave was initiated with the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, which declared the self-evident inalienable rights of men and women, thus basing the movement on the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence. The second wave erupted during the social turmoil of the late 1960s and continued for two decades. Going beyond the legal equality demanded by the first wave, the second wave of the women’s movement envisioned broader social and political equality, including a rethinking of women’s roles in the home and in the workforce.

However, during the 1990s, in the context of the fall of American capitalism into decadence, and the historic failure of the various strains of the Left to attain maturity, both the black and women’s movements lost their way. Black intellectuals and “activists” began to construct non-empirical theoretical concepts like systemic racism and white privilege, which functioned to defend the interests of the black middle class as against the interests of the black proletariat and lumpenproletariat. I have written about this phenomenon in previous posts. See, for example, “Postmodern wokism destroys the foundations: Provoking confusion and division among the people, to the benefit of a few,” September 5. 2023; “The rise and eclipse of black power: The abandonment of the black community by the black middle class,” November 26, 2024; and “The ideology of anti-racism: The negation of black empowerment,” November 29, 2024.

A similar phenomenon occurred with respect to the women’s movement. A third wave emerged in the 1990s, which, among other characteristics, rejected the American Revolution, because of its patriarchal assumptions. It turned to French post-modern assumptions, which led, in the fourth wave that began about 2012, to a separation of “woman” from biology, such that “woman” is no longer a sex, but a gender, and as such, it is a cultural construction, which can be claimed by biological men on a basis of a subjective sense of identification. These notions stood against the philosophical conceptions of the American Revolution as well as various Western philosophical and religious currents of thought, which continued to have resonance among significant numbers of the American people. Thus, beginning in the 1990s, the women’s movement divorced itself from the previous political practice of a revolution within the American Revolution.

These recent tendencies in the principal progressive movements have divided the people and have served the interests of the corporate elite. Therefore, in developing American socialism with national characteristics, we must return to the sources of these progressive movements, appropriating their principles, and formulating a national narrative that discerns the progressive movement of the American Republic, initiated at its founding and progressively moving toward and culminating in socialism.

Author 
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Charles McKelvey ​is influenced by black nationalism, the Catholic philosopher Lonergan, Marx, Wallerstein, anti-imperialism, and the Cuban Revolution. Since his retirement from college teaching in 2011, he has devoted himself to reading and writing on world affairs.

Below is the speech I gave about my book, Why We Need American Communism, and the American Communist Party at the Subversion Summer Camp in Bridgeport, Chicago. The camp was the subject of criticism in a recent national segment on Fox News, where the presence of the party and me in the event was highlighted. 

America is not a hub for red diaper babies. Most people on the American left come to that position, they’re not thrown into it at birth. Coming to the left as Americans usually requires what philosophers call an “event,” an often-traumatizing rupture of our everydayness. We are navigating through our normal life and something happens that breaks the routine, that forces us to think. It is an experience that grips us, keeps us up at night, chipping at it to try to make sense of what it was.

The philosopher Alain Badiou says that it is in these events that truth hits us. What we are forced to tarry with isn’t just a chaotic and contingent predicament – it is the rupture of the symbolic order of everyday life. It shows us the impossible Real – the truth – which everydayness attempts to hide and obscure from sight. This reality always presents itself as impossible precisely because it cannot be made sense of within the coordinate system of our dominant understanding, even though it is the conditions for the possibility of it. It shatters even the basic categories through which we have come to know the world – the categories that condition our subjectivity, our desires, our fantasies, and even our aesthetic appreciation. It forces us to reckon with the fact that the world we live in is constituted through such impossibility – that it is that which presents itself as an external obstacle which – in reality – constitutes what it is an obstacle for.

Everyone has these events occur at various moments of their life. Most people try to evade their significance, to distort and force their meaning back into the very coordinate system it shattered. This is how most people cope with it. Their worldviews never actually recover; they remain as fractured as Simon Berger’s broken glass art.
Historically, leftists are the people who accept that something has happened, and who have fidelity to the process of figuring out exactly what has occurred.

This is a frightening process, considering that what is implied in it is a loss of self – of your old self, which understood itself in light of the pre-event predicament. It requires courage to pursue the significance of the event, to inquire into the truth it reveals. All of us know that such a quest will only lead to a rebirth of the self, a spiritual baptism.

For me, this occurred around the age of ten. My mother had just given birth to my sister. The birth caused tremendous difficulties – my dad was asked that question which no father would like to ever be asked: ‘if worst comes to worst, which one would you like us to save’? Thankfully, both survived.
But in the aftermath of this traumatic event, we discovered that my mother had been growing internal tumors. The doctors said she must be operated on to guarantee survival. The options seemed obvious. Get the operation and guarantee survival, or roll on with it.

I was perplexed to find out at this youthful age that the options were not as simple as I thought. Operating came with a cost, a great financial strain on the family, which would have surely led to crippling medical debts – like so many Americans today face.

While ten years old, I still found it odd that having a life-saving procedure in the wealthiest country on earth could immerse you in unpayable debt, as if one had committed some sort of heinous crime.
Little did I know that it would get much more confusing.

With such a predicament on the table, my parents did what most families would – consult their friends and family for advice. I remember listening to the conversations in our old home. Maybe twenty people were in the house. All of us Cuban.

This was when the real event occurred. When consulted for their advice, these friends and family said something I simply could not understand. It was outside of the cognitive map my young mind had.
The friends and family told my mother that she should go to Cuba, that the operation there would be free.
How could it be, I thought, that the same people who I’ve only ever heard malign Cuba, socialism, the Cuban government, while simultaneously accepting the most fervently American exceptionalist ideas and narratives, how could they sit there with a straight face and tell this hard working woman to leave the wealthiest country on earth – a country she’s a citizen in – to get an operation in a dirt poor island, an island they’ve only ever described as authoritarian and catastrophic?
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You can see, my friends, why such a predicament was world-shattering for me. All the assumptions I held about Cuba, the U.S., and the values aligned with both were now up in the air. I didn’t become the communist I am today right then and there, but the seed of doubt of the narratives I held as true and of the values I considered superior, was planted.

It was in 2015 when I began to find answers for this enigma. The campaign of Bernie Sanders was central for me. Here was this adorable old man explaining lucidly the role of profits in our healthcare system, and how different it was in other advanced countries. I came to understand that the experience I had at ten years old was rooted in the fact that we have a system that puts profit over people, and that Cuba, irrespective of its limitations, had one that puts people over profits. On this basis I was able to remap myself in the world. To develop new categories through which to engage in everyday life. And, most importantly, to develop a new sense of purpose – tied to a new system of values – that could give my life meaning.
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While the failure of the Sanders ‘political revolution’ brought to an end my alignment with the social democratic politics that politicized me, it left me with a bug to fight for social justice that I could not shake. This might sound silly, but I knew very early on that my life’s purpose was tied to sacrificing whatever necessary to fight for change.
I am sure that just like I have my story, all of you have many stories of what brought you here, of what traumatic break in your everydayness caused you to consider yourself as part of the left – as part of those committed to moving history forward, those whose agency is tied to ensuring that the arc of history, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used to say, continues to bend toward justice.

It is in this light, on the basis of this recognition of the fundamental unity we all have, as people who came to realize – at different points, in different ways, and for different reasons – that something fundamentally has to change in America, that I would like to propose some ideas from my recent book Why We Need American Marxism – where the title for this talk was taken from.
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I felt the need to write the book shortly after a trip to Mexico, where I gave a conference on my previous book, The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism. In this book I argued that the U.S. left had to overcome its incessant obsession with only supporting or working with those entities which they considered pure, that is, which they felt lived up to the ideal they had in their head. With this framework, I critically interrogated three forms I thought were most harmful for the American left.

First was the outright condemnation of what’s often called actually existing socialism. I felt that such a rejection was premised on these real states not living up to the ideal of what they thought socialism would be like in their heads. This was a completely faulty approach, since it starts with an abstract ideal and not reality itself. Instead, I argued that we must remember the difficult conditions socialism is forced to develop in – conditions of siege, as Michael Parenti would say. No socialist project has ever been allowed to develop peacefully, without hybrid war waged on it by US imperialism and its proxies. Whatever imperfections and contradictions these states might have, they must be understood in this context.

They must also be understood, not as reified entities, existing the same across time, but dialectically, that is, in a constant process of contradiction-ridden development. As Samir Amin used to say, we could not blame a state like China for not looking like the socialism of the year 3000 – when the Jonas Brothers tell us we’ll be living under water (that was a millennial joke).

In any case, this was a position I considered to be rooted in an American exceptionalism, since it says that the whole global south has failed at socialism, but we, the virtuous Americans, are the ones that will succeed.
The second form of the purity fetish I explored in the book was rooted in the attitude many leftists took to the working-class part of MAGA.

While hardly ever saying it explicitly, many accepted the Clinton categorization of them as a basket of deplorables. I was one of them before I moved to Iowa, and then Southern Illinois, for ten years to work on my bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees. But in the MAGA heartland I very soon realized that the conception I had of them was a caricature – that some of these people have a righteous anger toward the system – the deep state, as they call it – and a general mistrust of all established institutions. It is on that basis that dissidence starts, and such a pool of workers were primed for organizing toward socialism. The task was, in my view, one of delinking them from Trump, and showing them that America could only ever be great if it is socialist - that the stuff they like in Trump (the rhetoric of being anti-war, pro-reindustrialization, anti-deep state, etc.) will never be realized under Trump nor the two-party duopoly.
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The left’s condemnation of them, I felt, was rooted in a caricature of who they are crafted by the hegemonic liberal media. But nonetheless, even if they were as problematic as the media said they were, the task of communists and socialists had always been to organize people – not on the basis of their ideas – but on the basis of their objective class positions. Condemning a large chunk of the working class because they don’t share the more liberal and cosmopolitan social values that many leftists have was – in my view – archetypical of the purity fetish. They were not deemed pure enough and hence considered not organizable. This was not a mentality, I felt, that was in line with the history of how dissidents from the capitalist system organized. And to be clear, when I say MAGA here I am speaking of our working-class neighbors and coworkers, not the deep state monsters at the head of the movement, who have fooled our brothers and sisters into thinking they’re actual political outsiders.

The last form of the purity fetish I felt was harming the American left was rooted in what Georgi Dimitrov, the great Hungarian anti-fascist leader of the Communist International called national nihilism – the attitude of condemning your country wholeheartedly because of its past evils and imperfections. Dimitrov argued that socialism was a content that needed to be given a national form. This was a position which was standard for the 20th century communist movement. It was rooted in the recognition that socialists around the world needed to position themselves as those who will actualize the most progressive elements of the national traditions their country’s people identify with. He urged Americans to not give up figures like Washington and Lincoln to the right – to utilize them for the purposes of the left, showing our countrymen and women that the values of the 1776 revolution, that the conception of government of, by, and for the people, cannot be fully actualized under the capitalist dictatorships in which we exist – that only socialism could make real the democratic dreams of the American experiment.

This perspective felt so foreign to how most of the American left conceived of the U.S. Many of the leftists I saw would write America with three K’s, burn the flag, or describe socialism as the process of destroying America itself.
I considered this to be not only factually incorrect – since for me America had a rich history of struggle not reducible to genocide, slavery, and imperialism, but also politically futile – how are you going to organize the American people on the basis of telling them you want to abolish all of the traditions they have been socialized in? To destroy all of the symbols and values they have grown up with?
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To my surprise, this last form of the purity fetish was the one that perplexed the audience in Mexico the most. I remember some Cuban comrades coming up to me and asking how could leftists reject American revolutionary heroes from 1776 onwards when people from across the global south, from Ho Chi Minh, Mao, Lenin, and Fidel and Che themselves, were tremendously inspired by the revolution against Britain, and then the revolution against the planter class in the U.S. south? They told me – and this was something I was already aware of – that even in his defense after the assault on the Moncada barracks, his famous ‘History will absolve me’ speech, that Fidel was citing the right to revolution in the American declaration of independence.

And thus, after such engagements, I decided to write a book which teased out a bit further the third form of the purity fetish, and which charted a course for overcoming it.

Marx and Engels had already written in the Manifesto of the Communist Party that although not in substance, but in form, the working-class struggle against capitalists is national. This quote has been completely misread by the national nihilist left. They treat form and content in the traditional philosophical medium, where the goal is to pierce through the form (a distortion of sorts) to arrive at what is truly important – the content. But this whole understanding of form and content is critiqued by both Hegel and Marxism. For these traditions of dialectical thought, form is not simply a distortion of the content, it is the particular manner through which the content manifests itself. The goal is not to pierce through the form to get to the content, but to understand – as Marx says of the commodity – the secret of the form itself – that is, why did the content need this form?

So, when Marx and Engels talk about the struggle being national in form – this doesn’t mean, as most leftists today interpret it, that it is only superficially national, or that it is in reality not national and something else – something deeper. Instead, for Marx and Engels, as well as for the traditional communist movement of the 20th century, socialism needed to take on a national form primarily because it was the social context – that of modern nation states – in which the class struggle was situated. This becomes even more the case when imperialism develops, and wars of national liberation – aiming to achieve sovereignty – are shown as one of the central forms of the class struggle in the age of imperialism.

To understand that every socialist country has had to give the content of socialism a particular national form (as a concrete universal), and then to say that we cannot do this because America is uniquely evil – is to participate in the utmost form of American exceptionalism – it is like saying that ‘everyone can root their socialism in their national context but we, the uniquely evil Americans, will not – we will have the pure content of socialism devoid of a national form.’

But to remember this important lesson about socialism taking a national form is not enough. After all, the book is titled Why We Need American Marxism – not why we need American socialism. I pose the following question at the beginning of the text – if socialism must take on a national form, then, does Marxist analysis need to also take on a national form, that is, do we need something like ‘American Marxism,’ which understands the specific and particular form and history of the class struggle in our country through the Marxist framework? The answer I provide in this book is yes!

Basing myself on the research I’ve done into Chinese, Latin American, and other socialist experiments, what I found was that conjoined with a unique path and development of socialism, was also a unique framework of Marxism that could account for those particular differences in histories and traditions, all which shape and are also shaped by the class struggle.

In Cuba, Marxism was integrated as the most advanced stage of their leading revolutionary thinkers – Martí especially.

In Bolivia, Marxism is combined with the unique conditions of indigenous communities, and with the historical insights which have arisen from such communal realities.

In China they have developed, from very early on, a Sinified Marxism which includes not only the explicitly Marxist thinkers in China’s history, but also progressive thinkers from its pre-Marxist past, and also – and here is the most controversial one – the most progressive aspects of thinkers which have been central to its civilizational reality, like Confucius.

In Venezuela, the same is true with the figure of Bolivar and others. The rational kernels of these world-historic individuals are captured and integrated into the framework of the National form their Marxism takes.
In the U.S., therefore, how would this look? While I don’t seek to get into the nitty gritty here, I think it is clear that American Marxism needs to integrate into its understanding of the specificity of class struggles in the U.S. not just the Marxists of the past, but also all of the traditions that have stood on the side of progress in American history, starting perhaps even before 1776 and going up to our current day.

We can start, for instance, with the many first nations tribes (e.g., Iroquois) which were existing under conditions of what is called primary communism. The American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan (very influential for Marx and Engels) would describe their form of life as “communism in living.” Their influence would go well beyond just first nations. As the historian Mitchell K. Jones has argued, “by the 18th century, their primary communist system inspired settlers from Europe who came to the New World seeking refuge from religious persecution.”

Or we can perhaps turn to thinkers like Roger Williams, the mid-17th century theologian who rejected African slavery and the genocide of the indigenous on the basis of his Christianity, which he felt compelled us to accept all as equal and dignified under god’s eyes.

It also forces us to tarry with 1776 as a progressive event in world history, a revolution against the British empire – the first anti colonial revolution in the hemisphere, as Herbert Aptheker put it. This revolution was described by none other than Lenin in the following form, as, I quote:

“One of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few compared to the vast number of wars of conquest… That was the war the American people waged against the British robbers who oppressed America and held her in colonial slavery.”
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The Declaration of Independence was such a radical document for its time that teachers all across Europe could be barred from their post for teaching it. This was a country borne out of a call of people to have not only a right – but the duty – to overthrow oppressive conditions. It is not lost on history the great paradox of the country which was founded on the right to revolution turning into the empire that prevented and squashed others trying to exert such a right for themselves.

But, nonetheless, the spirit of the democratic creed of 1776 provides fertile ground for development into a socialist sentiment. Jefferson himself distinguished between the democratic and aristocratic man. The democratic man is for the people; he is the man of the revolution. The aristocratic man is the man who prioritizes profit, wealth, and privilege – such a man, Jefferson argued, could be fatal to the implementation of the ideals of the revolution if they came to power. Historical hindsight has shown he was correct.

Many of these figures, perhaps excluding Paine, are not free of contradictions. The opposite is true – they could say the most liberating words, push forth the most emancipatory ideals, while in practice being oppressors themselves – as, of course, was the case with Jefferson, Washington, and others. But the ideals they develop – or better yet, how the form they developed it in reached people, cannot be lost sight of.
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Very few people know this, but an attempt to develop scientific socialism (basically what we would later call Marxism) was already underway in the mid-1820s in America! Two decades before any prominent writings from Marx and Engels! In figures like Langdon Byllesby, Cornelius Blatchley, William Maclure, Thomas Skidmore and others, the utopian experiments in communism that arose all across the U.S. were studied and critiqued. All of these thinkers held that a socialist society – which they conceived of as the society that expanded the democratic creed of 1776 to the sphere of economics and social life – could only arise by going through capitalism, not by trying to step out of it – as the utopian communities hoped. Through their scientific studies of the political economy of capitalism, these thinkers held that on the basis of the very contradictions of the system itself, a new communist society was possible.

While, of course, none of them outline this with the clarity and refinement of Marx decades after – how absurd is it that Americans were developing scientific socialism before Marx and none of us know who they are? There are perhaps 2-3 people, besides myself, whom I know have written about these individuals. Isn’t this a sad state of affairs?

How absurd is it that today we hear socialism being spoken of as uniquely anti-American (both by the right and by the national nihilist on the left), when we have such an advanced – but yet ignored and forgotten- homegrown tradition of socialism?

Even the two main philosophical currents that arise out of America – transcendentalism and pragmatism, have been leftist in orientation, and thoroughly critical of capitalism.

The Harvard scholar F. O. Matthiessen, describes the founder of transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, “as an ancestor of American Communism.” It is also well known that other transcendentalists like Henry David Thoreau frequently wrote for the New York Daily Tribune, the same leftist paper Marx and Engels were publishing articles at the time. The leftist historian Staughton Lynd, in his Origins of American Radicalism book, takes a few pages to cite Marx and Thoreau, and forces the reader to guess who is who. The critiques of capitalist alienation in each are virtually impossible to tell apart when put together in such a manner.

American pragmatism, on the other hand, has always stood on the side of socialism, a homegrown American variety of it. Charles Sanders Peirce developed a logic that was intimately social, critical of capitalist individualism (which he called the gospel of greed), and promotive of agapism (a communal Christian love), upon which he felt society and the quest for truth should be based.
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The other two major pragmatists were also on the left. William James identified with socialist anarchism and John Dewey considered himself a democratic socialist – one more radical than most who call themselves that today considering he actively participated in movements to create a third party outside of what he saw as the two capitalist parties – a third party that united the working class, socialist, and radical liberal sectors of the American political horizon. In this way, John Dewey, who is literally called Americas philosopher of democracy, is far, far to the left of someone like Bernie Sanders, which is considered the utmost left point in the acceptable American political spectrum today.

Few people’s thought has shaped contemporary America more than Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the head of the civil rights political revolution of the 1960s. Dr. King, as is well known now, was a socialist! For him the question of racism, war, and poverty were intertwined, and rooted in the capitalist system itself.
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I can go on and on showing how some of the most prominent and influential thinkers in America’s past have been socialists or general critics of capitalism.

In general, I would like to make the bold claim that all Americans are already socialists, they just do not know it yet.
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You can’t tell me that someone believes in government of, by, and for the people, and that they don’t believe in socialism. At its most basic level – this is precisely what socialism is. It is, as Fred Hampton used to say, the people. If you are afraid of socialism, you are afraid of yourself.

In this way, much of the lingering anti-communism our compatriots have is nothing more than an unrecognized form of self-estrangement. They have been convinced to hate that which they already agree with, just because they do not know that they agree with it yet!

There was a dream Trotsky wrote about in his memoirs where Lenin visited him, well after Lenin had already died, and in the dream the conversation gets to a point where Trotsky almost blurts out ‘and that was shortly after you had died.’ He omitted it out of fear that Lenin was alive in his dream only because he didn’t know he was already dead. Likewise, most Americans are anti-communist only because they don’t know that they’re already communists.

To propose the development of an American Marxism, then, is to uphold the historical recapturing of the progressive elements of our past – it is to give voice to the unique form the class struggle has taken in our country’s history, and how that struggle has been thought of by the most progressive minds of their time. It is to give historical legs to those of us fighting for a new world today. Our fight is for the future, but it is also for the past. It is a struggle which prevents previous struggles from having died in vain.

The most important thinker to have given expression – in Marxist terms – to the unique form of the class struggle in the U.S. was WEB Dubois – which is why I call him the father of American Marxism. He was the first to see that, for most of U.S. history, the struggle against the color line – against the racism which Marx called the secret through which the capitalist class sustains its power – that this struggle was not just a race struggle, it was the form the class struggle took. And no event in this struggle is more significant than the civil war, which he saw as the second American revolution, an event he equated in significance to the Russian and Chinese revolution. Here, he argued, 4 million enslaved proletarians – he also calls them the black proletariat – freed themselves from the chains of chattel slavery through a general strike that won the war. By fleeing from the south to the north, the black proletariat effectively waged a ‘strike’ against the southern economy, which produced a dual blow when they joined the north as workers, spies, and soldiers who knew the terrain better than anyone else.
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Out of this struggle arose the period of reconstruction, which Dubois categorizes as a dictatorship of the working class. Here the freedman’s bureau would govern in defeated southern states, backed by the military might of the north. This was an experiment, then, in modern socialism which is neither talked about in such terms, nor celebrated anywhere near as much as the Paris commune, which occurred years after, and which lasted a tenth of the time as reconstruction. It was a socialism not inspired from abroad, but immanently arising from within the soil of the country’s foundation. As Dubois said, there are no truer believers in the spirit of 1776 than the black proletariat that freed itself in the civil war, and which led a dictatorship of the working class for a decade in the U.S. south before the counterrevolution of property in 1876. With such a Duboisian, American Marxist understanding in mind, isn’t it silly to talk about how essentially “anti-socialist” America is?

At a time when less than 20 percent of Americans think their representatives actually represent them, and when less than a dozen percent of Americans trust the mainstream media – that is, the dominant ideological apparatus of the ruling capitalist class, we find ourselves in the midst of a comprehensive crisis of legitimacy. Neoliberalism has hit American workers hard, forcing most people to live paycheck to paycheck, to be drowned in unpayable debts, and live in utter desperation. We are the first generation of Americans to not be guaranteed a better living standard than our parents. For most of us fighting today is not even an option, it is a necessity.
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As a Marxist, I think that half of the fun of trying to understand the world is ruined if we don’t try to change it. Developing an advanced American Marxism, in my view, is essential. We need to know how the class struggle has brought us here, and how we can utilize the progressive elements embedded in our people’s common sense to move them to socialism. But this requires a lot more than writing a book or theoretically trying to make sense of something.

It requires getting your hands dirty with actual work. It requires building an organized collective of disciplined individuals who can put the struggle, the principle we all operate under, above petty self-interest. It requires turning people from the shallow and hedonistic individualism our society promotes to tried-and-true communists. You don’t do this through debates. You don’t do this through nice words and sophistic discourse. You win people through actions, through consistent deeds.

Americans will only come to recognize socialism as a real alternative when they see the communists are the most upstanding people in their workplace and community. We need to try our best to be the men and women of the future society we are striving for. To lead by example in work. To win the trust and sympathy of our people by serving them. After all, once again, socialism is nothing if not putting working people, the masses, as the highest principle.
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This is what my party, the American Communist Party, fights for. All around the country the cadre of the ACP are doing works of community service to integrate themselves into pre-existing American communities, to show them what communists are actually like, and debunk the myths our people have been spoon fed since birth about communism.

All around the country our cadre are organizing workers, helping workers unionize, and joining in on picket lines with them. In New Jersey we have spearheaded the effort of organizing the drayage truckers – these are thousands of essential workers, workers who can shut down a whole regional economy, being organized into the Teamsters by the American Communist Party. This is work we are doing in virtually every state, helping unorganized workers combine and win a voice for themselves. Work of this kind is going on in many other industries around the country, where our party’s cadre is helping to lead unionization efforts.

After every natural disaster, when the local and federal government fail communities, our party has been there – with what little resources we have – to help our people. The work we have done in central Texas after the floods has impacted the lives of many Americans who were left behind by a government that is always ready to spend money for war, but never for American communities.

It is high time that we put whatever secondary or tertiary differences aside for a second and focus on the fact that our people keep getting squeezed to their last pennies by a class that continues to grow richer and richer… a class whose puppets are sending us to war around the world to die or lose limbs fighting against people whom he have more in common with than the parasites who sent us there. To paraphrase MLK, every bomb thrown on Gaza lands in Chicago. The empire feeds off the republic, as Parenti used to say.
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You can either sit on the sidelines and let things get worse, all because you won’t join a fighting organization over mean tweets one or another member posted before the party’s founding, or you can join us, judge us through our work, and be a part of fighting for the construction of a new, socialist America.
I hope you choose the latter. Thank you.

Author
Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy professor. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the Secretary of Education of the American Communist Party. He has authored many books, including The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Why We Need American Marxism (2024), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming On Losurdo's Western Marxism (2025) and Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2025). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE. Carlos’ just made a public Instagram, which you can follow HERE.

The question of religion is one that continues to engage the minds of many, particularly within the Communist Party of Kenya (CPK). This article seeks to explore the attitude that a political party, rooted in the principles of Marxism, should adopt towards religion. While the likes of Marx and Engels have offered their perspectives on religion, it is essential for revolutionaries to develop further a theory that effectively addresses this complex and sensitive issue. Maybe I should take this early opportunity to say that Communism is not at War with God or such abstract notions, communism is concerned with the knowable world in the Natural order.

Karl Marx famously stated, "Religion is the opium of the people." This phrase has been central to the Marxist perspective on religion. But, what did Marx mean by this analogy? To fully grasp his point, it's essential to delve into the historical context.

In the 1840s, opium was not an illegal substance in Europe, and it was considered a respectable indulgence, particularly among the affluent. However, for the common people, opium was expensive and inaccessible. In this context, Marx likened religion to opium in the sense that it provided solace to the oppressed. Religion offered hope and comfort, serving as "the heart of a heartless world" and "the sigh of the oppressed creature." Just as opium could provide relief from physical pain, religion provided emotional and spiritual relief for those burdened by social and economic hardship.

To further illustrate this analogy, we can consider the effects of opium on the central nervous system and the brain. Opium, with its narcotic, soporific, and analgesic properties, induces a sense of tranquillity and emotional relief. In much the same way, religion can soothe the emotional distress of the downtrodden, offering hope and solace in difficult times.

To effectively counter the influence of religion, we must offer a materialist explanation for the origins of faith and religious beliefs among the masses. In contemporary capitalist societies, the primary sources of these beliefs are deeply rooted in social conditions. The fundamental basis for religious faith today can be found in the socio-economic oppression experienced by the working masses. These individuals often feel utterly powerless when confronted with the seemingly unpredictable and unrelenting forces of capitalism. These forces subject ordinary workers to immense suffering and brutal hardships on a daily basis, far surpassing the occasional catastrophes like wars or natural disasters.

Lenin’s phrase "fear made the gods" aptly describes the situation. It signifies the fear that stems from the capricious and inscrutable power of capital, which, to the average person, appears as an uncontrollable force. This force poses a constant threat to the lives of the proletariat and small property owners. In his writings, Lenin affirms how forces of capitalism, though hidden, bring about "sudden," "unexpected," and "accidental" calamities such as financial ruin, devastation, destitution, moral decay, and even death due to starvation. This fear of capital's destructive potential is the very foundation of modern religion.

For CPK to be effective in countering religious beliefs, it is imperative to acknowledge and understand this primary source. By addressing the profound impact of capitalism on people's lives, we can engage in a more meaningful and relevant critique of religion and provide a more compelling alternative, the scientific way. 

Communism is firmly anchored in the materialist philosophy, which asserts that the world is tangible, devoid of supernatural elements. However, it is crucial to clarify that communism is not inherently antagonistic to religious people or political organising among religious communities. Instead, its focus is on the material realities of exploitation and social injustice, rather than engaging in abstract or contemplative philosophical debates.  Our teacher Karl Marx observed that philosophers already interpreted the world and the point is to change it. The true enemies of communism are those who exploit the underprivileged, regardless of their religious affiliations or lack thereof. We hold the irreconcilability of class interests of the working-class majority and the owning-class minority. 

Religion is not static; it evolves and transforms over time. Throughout history, religious movements and figures, like Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli, have initiated significant changes within the church. The communists must always be where the masses are, Most Kenyans hold to some religious notion and any attempt to attack religion mechanically can only radicalise the clerics and turn the masses away from our organisation

What is the danger of a mechanical attack on religion? These are the ultra-left who failed to learn from the mistake of Bismarck, his mechanical attacks on the German Catholic Party only radicalised the clerics and turned the majority away from the working-class movement. Such mistakes must be avoided by the communist party of Kenya. In fact, Lenin, along with Engels, criticized those who sought to introduce explicit atheism and declare war on religion as part of the Workers' Party program. 

The proclamations of war on religion could actually revive interest in religion and prevent it from naturally declining. It must be seen as counterproductive because it may make religion more appealing to some who feel attacked or threatened based on their beliefs. Religion must never be viewed only as a superficial and ideological approach that doesn’t address the core issues of the working-class struggle. To focus on fighting religion could divert attention from the urgent tasks of class and revolutionary struggle. It could lead some sections of the working class and other democratic elements away from genuine political and social issues.

The party must always take a patient and educational approach. Organizing and educating the proletariat would naturally lead to the waning of religion, especially when the objective material realities are also suitable. When doing mass work religion must be seen as a private matter, and the primary focus was on the class struggle, not a direct confrontation with religious beliefs. This perspective became a fundamental aspect of the party, emphasising the importance of organising and educating the working class over engaging in political warfare against religion. However, when doing cadre work, one must remember that Marxism philosophy is materialism, that which is inherently atheistic and hostile to all religions and superstitions. 

It goes beyond merely distributing educational materials; to eliminate religious beliefs from the consciousness of the working masses, who bear the brunt of relentless capitalist exploitation and are subjected to the unpredictable havoc wreaked by capitalist forces, they must, through their own efforts, engage in a concerted, organized, strategic, and enlightened struggle against the very foundation of religious beliefs. This entails confronting the pervasive influence of capital in all its manifestations.

Let us now look into some of the confusions that have emerged when dealing with this question, for example, whether religion should be treated as a private affair, Lenin underscores that the answer is not a simple "yes" or "no," but rather a matter of context and perspective.

Lenin emphasizes that "religion must be declared a private affair" in the context of the state. In this sense, it means that the government should not interfere with or establish a state religion. The state should be neutral in matters of religion, ensuring that individuals have the freedom to practice their faith without government interference. In this regard, religion is a private affair, and the state should not concern itself with religious beliefs and practices.

However, Lenin's statement also highlights that, from the perspective of the Party, religion cannot be considered a private affair. This means that the Party should engage with and address religious beliefs and practices when necessary. Lenin's intent was to clarify that while the state should not meddle in religion, the Party, as a political entity with its own ideology and goals, must be willing to confront religious influences or institutions that may be contrary to its objectives. For the Party, religion is not a private matter as it may affect the political and social landscape.

In essence, Lenin's words emphasize the separation of church and state, allowing individuals the freedom to practice their religion privately without government interference, while at the same time acknowledging that for a political party, religious influences may be a subject of scrutiny and consideration, especially if they impact the party's goals and principles. This nuanced approach recognizes the complexity of religion in society and politics. In short, the party of the proletariat demands that the state should declare religion a private matter, but does not regard the fight against the opium of the people, the fight against religious superstitions, etc., as a “private matter.

The question of whether a priest or a religious person can be a member of the Communist Party of Kenya is a complex one, and the answer lies in the nuances of the situation. In the wake of the 19th century, in Western Europe, historical conditions and the application of Marxist doctrine to the workers' movement allowed for priests to join communist parties without significant conflict. However, these specific historical circumstances did not necessarily apply to Russia, or China and may be non-existent even now in our current Kenyan situation.

In general, an unqualified "yes" or "no" answer to this question would be incorrect. It is possible for a priest to be a member of the Party if they are willing to participate in common political work, fulfil Party duties, and do not actively oppose the Party's program. In such a case, the contradiction between the priest's religious convictions and the Party's principles would be considered a private matter, affecting the priest alone.

However, this situation is likely to be a rare exception, especially in Kenya today. If a priest were to actively promote religious views within the Party, to the extent that it became their primary and overriding objective, the Party would have to expel them. While the Party allows freedom of opinion, there are limits, determined by freedom of grouping, within which members must operate.

The Party is open to workers who maintain their belief in God, and it actively recruits them, with the aim of educating them in the spirit of the Party's program. The Party respects their religious convictions and does not intend to cause unprincipled offence. However, the Party's goal is not to permit an active struggle against its program. Therefore, while the Party allows for diverse beliefs and opinions within its ranks, it does not endorse active promotion of views that conflict with the majority of the Party's principles.

In summary, a member of the Communist Party of Kenya should embrace materialism, which opposes religious beliefs. However, this opposition should be approached as dialectical materialism. In other words, one should not merely engage in abstract or purely theoretical arguments against religion. Instead, the fight against religion should be grounded in the practical, ongoing class struggle. Through this real-world struggle, the masses are educated, which is far more effective than theoretical preaching that doesn't adapt to changing circumstances.

Author
Booker Ngesa Omole, General Secretary of the Communist Party Marxist Kenya (CPM-K), is a Communist, publisher, amateur film maker, and mechanical engineer.