The works of art in this dossier belong to Casa de las Américas’ Haydee Santamaría Art of Our America (Nuestra América) collection. Since its founding, Casa de las Américas has established close ties with a significant number of internationally renowned contemporary artists who have set visual arts trends in the region. Casa’s galleries have hosted temporary exhibitions including different artistic genres, expressions, and techniques by several generations of mainly Latin American and Caribbean artists. Many of these works, initially exhibited in Casa’s galleries, awarded prizes in its contests, and donated by the artists, have become part of the Haydee Santamaría Art of Our America collection, representing an exceptional artistic heritage.

The Cuban Revolution came about in a country subordinated to the US from all points of view. Although we had the façade of a republic, we were a perfect colony, exemplary in economic, commercial, diplomatic, and political terms, and almost in cultural terms.

Our bourgeoisie was constantly looking towards the North: from there, they imported dreams, hopes, fetishes, models of life. They sent their children to study in the North, hoping that they would assimilate the admirable competitive spirit of the Yankee ‘winners’, their style, their unique and superior way of settling in this world and subjugating the ‘losers’.

This ‘vice-bourgeoisie’, as Roberto Fernández Retamar baptised them, were not limited to avidly consuming whatever product of the US cultural industry fell into their hands. Not only that – at the same time, they collaborated in disseminating the ‘American way of life’ in the Ibero-American sphere and kept part of the profits for themselves. Cuba was an effective cultural laboratory at the service of the Empire, conceived to multiply the exaltation of the Chosen Nation and its world domination. Cuban actresses and actors dubbed the most popular American television series into Spanish, which would later flood the continent. In fact, we were among the first countries in the region to have television in 1950. It seemed like a leap forward, towards so-called ‘progress’, but it turned out to be poisoned. Very commercial Cuban television programming functioned as a replica of the ‘made in the USA’ pseudo-culture, with soap operas, Major League and National League baseball games, competition and participation programmes copied from American reality shows, and constant advertising. In 1940, the magazine Selections of the Reader’s Digest, published by a company of the same name, began to appear in Spanish in Havana with all of its poison. This symbol of the idealisation of the Yankee model and the demonisation of the USSR and of any idea close to emancipation was translated and printed on the island and distributed from here to all of Latin America and Spain.

The very image of Cuba that was spread internationally was reduced to a tropical ‘paradise’ manufactured by the Yankee mafia and its Cuban accomplices. Drugs, gambling, and prostitution were all put at the service of VIP tourism from the North. Remember that the Las Vegas project had been designed for our country and failed because of the revolution.
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Fanon spoke of the sad role of the ‘national bourgeoisie’ – already formally independent from colonialism – before the elites of the old metropolis, ‘who happen to be tour­ists enamoured of exoticism, hunting, and casinos’. He added:

Our bourgeoisie, submissive ‘party organisers’ of the Yankees, did everything possible for Cuba to be culturally absorbed by their masters during the neocolonial republic. However, there were three factors that slowed down this process: the work of intellectual minorities that defended, against all odds, the memory and values of the nation; the sowing of Martí’s principles and patriotism among teachers in Cuban public schools; and the resistance of our powerful, mestizo, haughty, and ungovernable popular culture, nurtured by the rich spiritual heritage of African origin.
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In his speech ‘History Will Absolve Me’, Fidel listed the six main problems facing Cuba. Among them, he highlighted ‘the problem of education’ and referred to ‘comprehensive education reform’ as one of the most urgent missions that the future liberated republic would have to undertake.2 Hence, the educational and cultural revolution began practically from the triumph of 1 January 1959. On the 29th of that same month, summoned by Fidel, a first detachment of three hundred teachers alongside one hundred doctors and other professionals left for the Sierra Maestra to bring education and health to the most remote areas. Around those same days, Camilo and Che launched a campaign to eradicate illiteracy among the Rebel Army troops since more than 80% of the combatants were illiterate.

On 14 September, the former Columbia Military Camp was handed over to the Ministry of Education so that it could build a large school complex there. The promise of turning barracks into schools was beginning to be fulfilled, and sixty-nine military fortresses became educational centres. On 18 September, Law No. 561 was enacted, creating ten thousand classrooms and accrediting four thousand new teachers. The same year, cultural institutions of great importance were created: the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC), the National Publishing House, the Casa de las Américas, and the National Theatre of Cuba, which has a department of folklore and an unprejudiced and anti-racist vision unprecedented in the country. All of these new revolutionary institutions were oriented towards a decolonised understanding of Cuban and universal culture.

But 1961 was the key year in which a profound educational and cultural revolution began in Cuba. This was the year when Eisenhower ruptured diplomatic relations with our country. This was the year when our foreign minister, Raúl Roa, condemned ‘the policy of harassment, retaliation, aggression, subversion, isolation, and imminent attack by the US against the Cuban government and people’ at the UN.3 This was the year of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the relentless fight against the armed gangs financed by the CIA. This was the year when the US government, with Kennedy already at the helm, intensified its offensive to suffocate Cuba economically and isolate it from Nuestra América – Our America – and from the entire Western world.4 1961 was also the year when Fidel proclaimed the socialist character of the revolution on 16 April, the eve of the Bay of Pigs invasion, as Roa exposed the plan that was set to play out the following day. This is something that – considering the influence of the Cold War climate and the McCarthyite, anti-Soviet, and anti-communist crusade on the island – showed that the young revolutionary process had been shaping, at incredible speed, cultural hegemony around anti-imperialism, sovereignty, social justice, and the struggle to build a radically different country. But it was also the year of the epic of the literacy campaign; of the creation of the National School of Art Instructors; of Fidel’s meetings with intellectuals and his founding speech on our cultural policy, ‘Words to the Intellectuals’; of the birth of the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC) and the National Institute of Ethnology and Folklore.5

In 1999 in Venezuela – almost four decades later – Fidel summed up his thinking regarding the cultural and educational component in any true revolutionary process: ‘A revolution can only be the child of culture and ideas’.6 Even if it makes radical changes, even if it hands over land to the peasants and eliminates large estates, even if it builds houses for those who survive in unhealthy neighbourhoods, even if it puts public health at the service of all, even if it nationalises the country’s resources and defends its sovereignty, a revolution will never be complete or lasting if it does not give a decisive role to education and culture. It is necessary to change human beings’ conditions of material life, and it is necessary to simultaneously change the human being, their conscience, paradigms, and values.

For Fidel, culture was never something ornamental or a propaganda tool – a mistake commonly made throughout history by leaders of the left. Rather, he saw culture as a transformative energy of exceptional scope, which is intimately linked to conduct, to ethics, and is capable of decisively contributing to the ‘human improvement’ in which Martí had so much faith. But Fidel saw culture, above all, as the only imaginable way to achieve the full emancipation of the people: it is what offers them the possibility of defending their freedom, their memory, their origins, and of undoing the vast web of manipulations that limit the steps they take every day. The educated and free citizen who is at the centre of Martí’s and Fidel’s utopia must be prepared to fully understand the national and international environment and to decipher and circumvent the traps of the machinery of cultural domination.

In 1998, at the 6th Congress of the UNEAC, Fidel focused on the topic ‘related to globalisation and culture’. So-called ‘neoliberal globalisation’, he said, is ‘the greatest threat to culture – not only ours, but the world’s’. He explained how we must defend our traditions, our heritage, our creation, against ‘imperialism’s most powerful instrument of domination’. And, he concluded, ‘everything is at stake here: national identity, homeland, social justice, revolution, everything is at stake. These are the battles we have to fight now’.7 This is, of course, about ‘battles’ against cultural colonisation, against what Frei Betto calls ‘globo-colonisation’, against a wave that can liquidate our identity and the revolution itself.

Fidel was already convinced that, in education, in culture, in ideology, there are advances and setbacks. No conquest can be considered definitive. That is why he returns to the subject of culture in his shocking speech on 17 November 2005 at the University of Havana.8 The media machinery, together with incessant commercial propaganda, Fidel warns us, come to generate ‘conditioned responses’. ‘The lie’, he says, ‘affects one’s knowledge’, but ‘the conditioned response affects the ability to think’.9 In this way, Fidel continued, if the Empire says ‘Cuba is bad’, then ‘all the exploited people around the world, all the illiterate people, and all those who don’t receive medical care or education or have any guarantee of a job or of anything’ repeat that ‘the Cuban Revolution is bad’.10 Hence, the diabolical sum of ignorance and manipulation engenders a pathetic creature: the poor right-winger, that unhappy person who gives his opinion and votes and supports his exploiters.
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‘Without culture’, Fidel repeated, ‘no freedom is possible’.11 We revolutionaries, according to him, are obliged to study, to inform ourselves, to nurture our critical thinking day by day. This cultural education, together with essential ethical values, will allow us to liberate ourselves definitively in a world where the enslavement of minds and consciences predominates. His call to ‘emancipat[e] ourselves by ourselves and with our own efforts’ is equivalent to saying that we must decolonise ourselves with our own efforts.12 And culture is, of course, the main instrument of that decolonising process of self-learning and self-emancipation.

In Cuba, we are currently more contaminated by the symbols and fetishes of ‘globo-colonisation’ than we have been at other times in our revolutionary history. We must combat the tendency to underestimate these processes, and we must work in two fundamental directions: intentionally promoting genuine cultural options and fostering a critical view of the products of the hegemonic entertainment industry. It is essential to strengthen the effective coordination of institutions and organisations, communicators, teachers, instructors, intellectuals, artists, and other actors who contribute directly or indirectly to the cultural education of our people. All revolutionary forces of culture must work together more coherently. We must turn the meaning of anti-colonial into an instinct.

In 1959, the Cuban revolutionary leader Haydee Santamaría (1923–1980) arrived at a cultural centre in the heart of Havana. This building, the revolutionaries decided, would be committed to promoting Latin American art and culture, eventually becoming a beacon for the progressive transformation of the hemisphere’s cultural world. Renamed Casa de las Américas (‘Home of the Americas’), it would become the heartbeat of cultural developments from Chile to Mexico. Art saturates the walls of the house, and in an adjacent building sits the massive archive of correspondence and drafts from the most significant writers of the past century. The art from Casa adorns this dossier. The current director of Casa, Abel Prieto – whose words open this dossier – is a novelist, a cultural critic, and a former minister of culture. His mandate is to stimulate discussion and debate in the country.

Over the course of the past decade, Cuba’s intellectuals have been gripped by the debate over decolonisation and culture. Since 1959, the Cuban revolutionary process has – at great cost – established the island’s political sovereignty and has struggled against centuries of poverty to cement its economic sovereignty. From 1959 onwards, under the leadership of the revolutionary forces, Cuba has sought to generate a cultural process that allows the island’s eleven million people to break with the cultural suffocation which is the legacy of both Spanish and US imperialism. Is Cuba, six decades since 1959, able to say that it is sovereign in cultural terms? The balance sheet suggests that the answer is complex since the onslaught of US cultural and intellectual production continues to hit the island like its annual hurricanes.

To that end, Casa de las Américas has been holding a series of encounters on the issue of decolonisation. In July 2022, Vijay Prashad, the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, delivered a lecture there that built upon the work being produced by the institute. Dossier no. 56, Ten Theses on Marxism and Decolonisation, draws from and expands upon the themes of that talk.

Thesis One: The End of History. The collapse of the USSR and the communist state system in Eastern Europe in 1991 came alongside a terrible debt crisis in the Global South that began with Mexico’s default in 1982. These two events – the demise of the USSR and the weakness of the Third World Project – were met with the onslaught of US imperialism and a US-driven globalisation project in the 1990s. For the left, this was a decade of weakness as our left-wing traditions and organisations experienced self-doubt and could not easily advance our clarities around the world. History had ended, said the ideologues of US imperialism, with the only possibility forward being the advance of the US project. The penalty inflicted upon the left by the surrender of Soviet leadership was heavy and led not only to the shutting down of many left parties, but also to the weakened confidence of millions of people with the clarities of Marxist thought.
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Thesis Two: The Battle of Ideas. During the 1990s, Cuban President Fidel Castro called upon his fellow Cubans to engage in a ‘battle of ideas’, a phrase borrowed from The German Ideology (1846) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.1 What Castro meant by this phrase is that people of the left must not cower before the rising tide of neoliberal ideology but must confidently engage with the fact that neoliberalism is incapable of solving the basic dilemmas of humanity. For instance, neoliberalism has no answer to the obstinate fact of hunger: 7.9 billion people live on a planet with food enough for 15 billion, and yet roughly 3 billion people struggle to eat. This fact can only be addressed by socialism and not by the charity industry.2 The Battle of Ideas refers to the struggle to prevent the conundrums of our time – and the solutions put forth to address them – from being defined by the bourgeoisie. Instead, the political forces for socialism must seek to offer an assessment and solutions far more realistic and credible. For instance, Castro spoke at the United Nations in 1979 with great feeling about the ideas of ‘human rights’ and ‘humanity’:

When Castro returned to the Battle of Ideas in the 1990s, the left was confronted by two related tendencies that continue to create ideological problems in our time:
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1. Post-Marxism. An idea flourished that Marxism was too focused on ‘grand narratives’ (such as the importance of transcending capitalism for socialism) and that fragmentary stories would be more precise for understanding the world. The struggles of the working class and peasantry to gain power in society and over state institutions were seen as just another false ‘grand narrative’, whereas the fragmented politics of the non-governmental organisations were seen as more feasible. The retreat from power into service delivery and into a politics of reform was made in the name of going beyond Marx. But this argument – to go beyond Marx – was really, as the late Aijaz Ahmad pointed out, an argument to return to the period before Marx, to neglect the facts of historical materialism and the zig-zag possibility of building socialism as the historical negation of capitalist brutality and decadence. Post-Marxism was a return to idealism and to perfectionism.
2.  Post-colonialism. Sections of the left began to argue that the impact of colonialism was so great that no amount of transformation would be possible, and that the only answer to what could come after colonialism was a return to the past. They treated the past, as the Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui argued in 1928 about the idea of indigenism, as a destination and not as a resource. Several strands of post-colonial theory developed, some of them offering genuine insights often drawn from the best texts of patriotic intellectuals of the new post-colonial nations and of the national liberation revolutionary tradition (anchored by writers such as Frantz Fanon). By the 1990s, the post-colonial tradition, which had previously been committed to revolutionary change in the Third World, was now swept up in North Atlantic university currents that favoured revolutionary impossibility. Afro-pessimism, one part of this new tradition, suggested – in its most extreme version – a desolate landscape of ‘social death’ for people of African descent, with no possibility of change. Decolonial thought or decolonialidad trapped itself by European thought, accepting the claim that many human concepts – such as democracy – are defined by the colonial ‘matrix of power’ or ‘matrix of modernity’. The texts of decolonial thought returned again and again to European thought, unable to produce a tradition that was rooted in the anti-colonial struggles of our time. The necessity of change was suspended in these variants of post-colonialism.

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The only real decolonisation is anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism. You cannot decolonise your mind unless you also decolonise the conditions of social production that reinforce the colonial mentality. Post-Marxism ignores the fact of social production as well as the need to build social wealth that must be socialised. Afro-pessimism suggests that such a task cannot be accomplished because of permanent racism. Decolonial thought goes beyond Afro-pessimism but cannot go beyond post-Marxism, failing to see the necessity of decolonising the conditions of social production.

Thesis Three: A Failure of Imagination. In the period from 1991 to the early 2000s, the broad tradition of national liberation Marxism felt flattened, unable to answer the doubts sown by post-Marxism and post-colonial theory. This tradition of Marxism no longer had the kind of institutional support provided in an earlier period, when revolutionary movements and Third World governments assisted each other and when even the United Nations’ institutions worked to advance some of these ideas. Platforms that developed to germinate left forms of internationalism – such as the World Social Forum – seemed to be unwilling to be clear about the intentions of peoples’ movements. The slogan of the World Social Forum, for instance, was ‘another world is possible’, which is a weak statement, since that other world could just as well be defined by fascism. There was little appetite to advance a slogan of precision, such as ‘socialism is necessary’.

One of the great maladies of post-Marxist thought – which derived much of its ammunition from forms of anarchism – has been the purist anxiety about state power. Instead of using the limitations of state power to argue for better management of the state, post-Marxist thought has argued against any attempt to secure power over the state. This is an argument made from privilege by those who do not have to suffer the obstinate facts of hunger and illiteracy, who claim that small-scale forms of mutual aid or charity are not ‘authoritarian’, like state projects to eradicate hunger. This is an argument of purity that ends up renouncing any possibility of abolishing the obstinate facts of hunger and other assaults on human dignity and well-being. In the poorer countries, where small-scale forms of charity and mutual aid have a negligible impact on the enormous challenges before society, nothing less than the seizure of state power and the use of that power to fundamentally eradicate the obstinate facts of inequality and wretchedness is warranted.

To approach the question of socialism requires close consideration of the political forces that must be amassed in order to contest the bourgeoisie for ideological hegemony and for control over the state. These forces experienced a pivotal setback when neoliberal globalisation reorganised production along a global assembly line beginning in the 1970s, fragmenting industrial production across the globe. This weakened trade unions in the most important, high-density sectors and invalidated nationalisation as a possible strategy to build proletarian power. Disorganised, without unions, and with long commute times and workdays, the entire international working class found itself in a situation of precariousness.4 The International Labour Organisation refers to this sector as the precariat – the precarious proletariat. Disorganised forces of the working class and the peasantry, of the unemployed and the barely employed, find it virtually impossible to build the kind of theory and confidence out of their struggles needed to directly confront the forces of capital.
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One of the key lessons for working-class and peasant movements comes from the struggles being incubated in India. For the past decade, there have been general strikes that have included up to 300 million workers annually. In 2020–2021, millions of farmers went on a year-long strike that forced the government to retreat from its new laws to uberise agricultural work. How were the farmers’ movement and the trade union movement able to do this in a context in which there is very low union density and over 90% of the workers are in the informal sector?5 Because of the fights led by informal workers – primarily women workers in the care sector – trade unions began to take up the issues of informal workers – again, mainly women workers – as issues of the entire trade union movement over the course of the past two decades. Fights for permanency of tenure, proper wage contracts, dignity for women workers, and so on produced a strong unity between all the different fractions of workers. The main struggles that we have seen in India are led by these informal workers, whose militancy is now channelled through the organised power of the trade union structures. More than half of the global workforce is made up of women – women who do not see issues that pertain to them as women’s issues, but as issues that all workers must fight for and win. This is much the same for issues pertaining to workers’ dignity along the lines of race, caste, and other social distinctions. Furthermore, unions have been taking up issues that impact social life and community welfare outside of the workplace, arguing for the right to water, sewage connections, education for children, and to be free from intolerance of all kinds. These ‘community’ struggles are an integral part of workers’ and peasants’ lives; by entering them, unions are rooting themselves in the project of rescuing collective life, building the social fabric necessary for the advance towards socialism.

Thesis Four: Return to the Source. It is time to recover and return to the best of the national liberation Marxist tradition. This tradition has its origins in Marxism-Leninism, one that was always widened and deepened by the struggles of hundreds of millions of workers and peasants in the poorer nations. The theories of these struggles were elaborated by people such as José Carlos Mariátegui, Ho Chi Minh, EMS Namboodiripad, Claudia Jones, and Fidel Castro. There are two core aspects to this tradition:

1. From the words ‘national liberation’, we get the key concept of sovereignty. The territory of a nation or a region must be sovereign against imperialist domination.
2. From the tradition of Marxism, we get the key concept of dignity. The fight for dignity implies a fight against the degradation of the wage system and against the old, wretched, inherited social hierarchies (including along the lines of race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on).

Thesis Five: ‘Slightly Stretched’ Marxism. Marxism entered the anti-colonial struggles not through Marx directly, but more accurately through the important developments that Vladimir Lenin and the Communist International made to the Marxist tradition. When Fanon said that Marxism was ‘slightly stretched’ when it went out of its European context, it was this stretching that he had in mind.6 Five key elements define the character of this ‘slightly stretched’ Marxism across a broad range of political forces:

1. It was clear to the early Marxists that liberalism would not solve the dilemmas of humanity, the obstinate facts of life under capitalism (such as hunger and ill-health). Not one capitalist state project put the solution to these dilemmas at the heart of its work, leaving it instead to the charity industry. The capitalist state projects pushed the idea of ‘human rights’ to abstraction; Marxists, on the other hand, recognised that only if these dilemmas are transcended can human rights be established in the world.
2. The modern form of industrial production is the precondition for this transcendence because only it can generate sufficient social wealth that can be socialised. Colonialism did not permit the development of productive forces in the colonised world, thereby making it impossible to create sufficient social wealth in the colonies to transcend these dilemmas.
3. The socialist project in the colonies had to fight against colonialism (and, therefore, for sovereignty) as well as capitalism and its social hierarchies (and, therefore, for dignity). These remain the two key aspects of national liberation Marxism.
4. Due to the lack of development of industrial capitalism in the colonies, and therefore of a large enough number of industrial workers (the proletariat), the peasantry and agricultural workers had to be a key part of the historical bloc of socialism.
5. It is important to register that socialist revolutions took place in the poorer parts of the world – Russia, Vietnam, China, Cuba – and not in the richer parts, where the productive forces had been better developed. The dual task of the revolutionary forces in poorer states that had won independence and instituted left governments was to build the productive forces and to socialise the means of production. The governments in these countries, shaped and supported by public action, had a historical mission far more complex than anything envisaged by the first generation of Marxists. A new, boundless Marxism emerged from these places, where an experimental attitude towards socialist construction emerged. However, many of these developments in socialist construction were not elaborated into theory, which meant that the theoretical tradition of national liberation Marxism was not fully available to contest both the post-Marxist and post-colonial assault on socialist praxis in the Third World.

Thesis Six: Dilemmas of Humanity. Reports come regularly about the terrible situation facing the world, from hunger and illiteracy to the ever more frequent outcomes of the climate catastrophe. Social wealth that could be spent to address these deep dilemmas of humanity is squandered on weapons and tax havens. The United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end hunger and promote peace would require an infusion of $4.2 trillion per year, but, as it stands, an infinitesimal fraction of this amount is spent to address these goals.7 With the pandemic and galloping inflation, even less money will go towards SDGs, and benchmarks measuring human well-being, sovereignty, and dignity will slip further and further away. Hunger, the greatest dilemma of humanity, is no longer within sight of being eradicated (except in China, where absolute poverty was ended in 2021).8 It is estimated that around 3 billion people now struggle with various forms of daily hunger.9
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Take the case of Zambia and the fourth SDG to eradicate illiteracy, for example. Approximately 60% of the children in classes 1 to 4 in the Copperbelt cannot read.10 This is a region that produces much of the world’s copper, which is essential to our electronics. The parents of these children bring the copper to the world market, but their children cannot read. Neither post-Marxism nor post-colonialism addresses the fact of illiteracy or these parents’ determination for their children to be able to read. The theory of national liberation Marxism, rooted in sovereignty and dignity, however, does address these questions: it demands that Zambia control copper production and receive higher royalty payments (sovereignty), and it demands that the Zambian working class take a greater share of the surplus value (dignity). Greater sovereignty and dignity are pathways to address the dilemmas facing humanity. But rather than spend social wealth on these elementary advances, those who own property and exercise privilege and power spend over $2 trillion per year on weapons and many trillions on security forces (from the military to the police).11

Thesis Seven: The Rationality of Racism and Patriarchy. It is important to note that, under the conditions of capitalism, the structures of racism and patriarchy remain rational. Why is this the case? In Capital (1867), Marx detailed two forms for the extraction of surplus value and hinted at a third form. The first two forms (absolute surplus value and relative surplus value) were described and analysed in detail, pointing out how the theft of time over the course of the working day extracts absolute surplus value from the waged worker and how productivity gains both shorten the time needed for workers to produce their wages and increase the amount of surplus produced by them (relative surplus value). Marx also suggested a third form of extraction, writing that, in some situations, workers are paid less than would be justified by any civilised understanding of wages at that historical juncture. He noted that capitalists try to push ‘the wage of the worker down below the value of his labour power’, but he did not discuss this form further because of the importance for his analysis that labour power must be bought and sold at full value.12
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This third consideration, which we call super-exploitation, is not immaterial for our analysis since it is central to the discussion of imperialism. How are the suppression of wages and the refusal to increase royalty payments for raw material extraction justified? By a colonial argument that, in certain parts of the world, people have lower expectations for life and therefore their social development can be neglected. This colonial argument applies equally to the theft of wages from women who perform care work, which is either unpaid or grossly underpaid on the grounds that it is ‘women’s work’.13 A socialist project is not trapped by the structures of racism and patriarchy since it does not require these structures to increase the capitalist’s share of surplus value. However, the existence of these structures over centuries, deepened by the capitalist system, has created habits that are difficult to overturn merely by legislation. For that reason, a political, cultural, and ideological struggle must be waged against the structures of racism and patriarchy and must be treated with as much importance as the class struggle.

Thesis Eight: Rescue Collective Life. Neoliberal globalisation vanquished the sense of collective life and deepened the despair of atomisation through two connected processes:

1. by weakening the trade union movement and the socialistic possibilities that come within the public action and workplace struggle rooted in trade unionism.
2. by substituting the idea of the citizen with the idea of the consumer – in other words, the idea that human beings are principally consumers of goods and services, and that human subjectivity can be best appreciated through a desire for things.

The breakdown of social collectivity and the rise of consumerism harden despair, which morphs into various kinds of retreat. Two examples of this are: a) a retreat into family networks that cannot sustain the pressures placed upon them by the withdrawal of social services, the increasing burden of care work on the family, and ever longer commute times and workdays; b) a move towards forms of social toxicity through avenues such as religion or xenophobia. Though these avenues provide opportunities to organise collective life, they are organised not for human advancement, but for the narrowing of social possibility.

How does one rescue collective life? Forms of public action rooted in social relief and cultural joy are an essential antidote to this bleakness. Imagine days of public action rooted in left traditions taking place each week and each month, drawing more and more people to carry out activities together that rescue collective life. One such activity is Red Books Day, which was inaugurated on 21 February 2020 by the International Union of Left Publishers, the same day that Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto in 1848. In 2020, the first Red Books Day, a few hundred thousand people around the world went into public places and read the manifesto in their different languages, from Korean to Spanish. In 2021, due to the pandemic, most of the events went online and we cannot really say how many people participated in Red Books Day, but, in 2022, nearly three-quarters of a million people joined in the various activities.
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Part of rescuing collective life was vividly displayed during the pandemic when trade unions, youth organisations, women’s organisations, and student unions took to the public domain in Kerala (India) to build sinks, sew masks, establish community kitchens, deliver food, and conduct house-to-house surveys so that each person’s needs could be taken into account.14

Thesis Nine: The Battle of Emotions. Fidel Castro provoked a debate in the 1990s around the concept of the Battle of Ideas, the class struggle in thought against the banalities of neoliberal conceptions of human life. A key part of Fidel’s speeches from this period was not just what he said but how he said it, each word suffused with the great compassion of a man committed to the liberation of humanity from the tentacles of property, privilege, and power. In fact, the Battle of Ideas was not merely about the ideas themselves, but also about a ‘battle of emotions’, an attempt to shift the palate of emotions from a fixation on greed to considerations of empathy and hope.

One of the true challenges of our time is the bourgeoisie’s use of the culture industries and the institutions of education and faith to divert attention away from any substantial discussion about real problems – and about finding common solutions to social dilemmas – and towards an obsession with fantasy problems. In 1935, the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch called this the ‘swindle of fulfilment’, the seeding of a range of fantasies to mask their impossible realisation. The benefit of social production, Bloch wrote, ‘is reaped by the big capitalist upper stratum, which employs gothic dreams against proletarian realities’.15 The entertainment industry erodes proletarian culture with the acid of aspirations that cannot be fulfilled under the capitalist system. But these aspirations are enough to weaken any working-class project.

A degraded society under capitalism produces a social life that is suffused with atomisation and alienation, desolation and fear, anger and hate, resentment and failure. These are ugly emotions that are shaped and promoted by the culture industries (‘you can have it too!’), educational establishments (‘greed is the prime mover’), and neo-fascists (‘hate immigrants, sexual minorities, and anyone else who denies you your dreams’). The grip of these emotions on society is almost absolute, and the rise of neo-fascists is premised upon this fact. Meaning feels emptied, perhaps the result of a society of spectacles that has now run its course.

From a Marxist perspective, culture is not seen as an isolated and timeless aspect of human reality, nor are emotions seen as a world of their own or as being outside of the developments of history. Since human experiences are defined by the conditions of material life, ideas of fate will linger on as long as poverty is a feature of human life. If poverty is transcended, then fatalism will have a less secure ideological foundation, but it does not automatically get displaced. Cultures are contradictory, bringing together a range of elements in uneven ways out of the social fabric of an unequal society that oscillates between reproducing class hierarchy and resisting elements of social hierarchy. Dominant ideologies suffuse culture through the tentacles of ideological apparatuses like a tidal wave, overwhelming the actual experiences of the working class and the peasantry. It is, after all, through class struggle and through the new social formations created by socialist projects that new cultures will be created – not merely by wishful thinking.

It is important to recall that, in the early years of each of the revolutionary processes – from Russia in 1917 to Cuba in 1959 – cultural efflorescence was saturated with the emotions of joy and possibility, of intense creativity and experimentation. It is this sensibility that offers a window into something other than the ghoulish emotions of greed and hatred.

Thesis Ten: Dare to Imagine the Future. One of the enduring myths of the post-Soviet era is that there is no possibility of a post-capitalist future. This myth came to us from within the triumphalist US intellectual class, whose ‘end of history’ sensibility helped to strengthen orthodoxy in such fields as economics and political theory, preventing open discussions about post-capitalism. Even when orthodox economics could not explain the prevalence of crises, including the total economic collapse in 2007–08, the field itself retained its legitimacy. These myths were made popular by Hollywood films and television shows, where disaster and dystopian films suggested planetary destruction rather than socialist transformation. It is easier to imagine the end of the earth than a socialist world.

During the economic collapse, the phrase ‘too big to fail’ settled on the public consciousness, reinforcing the eternal nature of capitalism and the dangers of even trying to shake its foundations. The system stood at a standstill. Austerity growled at the precarious. Small businesses crumpled for lack of credit. And yet, there was no mass consideration of going beyond capitalism. World revolution was not seen on the immediate horizon. This partial reality suffocated so much hope in the possibility of going beyond this system, a system – too big to fail – that now seems eternal. Our traditions argue against pessimism, making the point that hope must structure our interventions from start to finish. But what is the material basis for this hope? This basis can be found on three levels:

1. The obstinate facts of hunger and illiteracy, houselessness and indignity, cannot be made invisible. Neither will those who are denied their basic rights be silenced, nor will their material conditions disappear if these obstinate facts are not addressed. Desolation and anger are the products of this denial.
2. Massive advances in global production – both in agriculture and industry as well as in the service sector – have enabled us to imagine a world that transcends necessity and opens the door to freedom. One cannot be free simply by a legal edict. Freedom requires that the obstinate facts of life under capitalism be transcended. For decades, we have lived in a world with the capacity to meet the needs of humanity.
3. These massive advances in global production took place not only because of improvements in science and technology, but decisively because of the socialisation of labour. What is known as globalisation sees the entire process from the standpoint of capital and increased returns to scale. What it does not acknowledge is that these massive advances in global production took place because workers now labour with each other across oceans and that this socialisation of labour demonstrates the integration of the international working class. This socialisation of labour runs against the narrow, suffocating boundaries of private property, which hold back further advances for its own petty gains. The clash between the socialisation of labour and private property deepens the struggles to socialise property – the basis for modern socialism – as Marx predicted.

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Capitalism has already failed. It cannot address the basic questions of our times, these obstinate facts – such as hunger and illiteracy – that stare us in the face. It is not enough to be alive. One must be able to live and to flourish. That is the mood that demands a revolutionary transformation.

​We need to recover our tradition of national liberation Marxism but also elaborate the theory of our tradition from the work of our movements. We need to draw more attention to the theories of Ho Chi Minh and Fidel, EMS Namboodiripad and Claudia Jones. They did not only do, but they also produced innovative theories. These theories need to be developed and tested in our own contemporary reality, building our Marxism not out of the classics alone – which are useful – but out of the facts of our present. Lenin’s ‘concrete analysis of the concrete conditions’ requires close attention to the concrete, the real, the historical facts. We need more factual assessments of our times, a closer rendition of contemporary imperialism that is imposing its military and political might to prevent the necessity of a socialist world. This is precisely the agenda of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, of the almost thirty research institutes with which we work closely through the Network of Research Institute, and of the more than 200 political movements whose mass lines inform the development of Tricontinental’s research agenda through the International Peoples’ Assembly.
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Certainly, socialism is not going to appear magically. It must be fought for and built, our struggles deepened, our social connections tightened, our cultures enriched. Now is the time for a united front, to bring together the working class and the peasantry as well as allied classes, to increase the confidence of workers, and to clarify our theory. To unite the working class and the peasantry as well as allied classes requires the unity of all left and progressive forces. Our divides in this time of great danger must not be central; our unity is essential. Humanity demands it.

​Foreword
1 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 101.2 Fidel Castro, La historia me absolverá [History Will Absolve Me] (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2007).3 Raúl Roa, ‘Fundamentos, cargos y pruebas de la denuncia de Cuba’, In Raúl Roa: Canciller de la dignidad (La Habana: Ediciones Políticas, 1986 [1961]).
4 Translator’s note: Nuestra América is a concept stemming from Cuban national hero Jose Martí’s 1891 essay on Latin American nationalism calling for unity among nations to foment a Pan-Latin American identity opposed to the cultural values of Europe and the United States.
5 Fidel Castro, ‘Word to the Intellectuals’, Speech at the conclusion of meetings with Cuban intellectuals held at the National Library on 16, 23, and 30 June 1961, http://www.fidelcastro.cu/es/audio/palabras-los-intelectuales.
6 Fidel Castro, A Revolution Can Only Be the Child of Culture and Ideas (Havana: Editora Política, 1999), http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en/libros/revolution-can-only-be-child-culture-and-ideas.
7 Abel Prieto, ‘Sin cultura no hay libertad posible’. Notas sobre las ideas de Fidel en torno a la cultura’ [‘Without Culture There Is No Possible Freedom’: Notes on Fidel’s Ideas About Culture], La Ventana, 12 August 2021, http://laventana.casa.cult.cu/index.php/2022/08/12/sin-cultura-no-hay-libertad-posible-notas-sobre-las-ideas-de-fidel-en-torno-a-la-cultura/.
8 Fidel Castro, Speech delivered at the Commemoration of the 60th Anniversary of his admission to University of Havana, Aula Magna, University of Havana, 17 November 2005, http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en/discursos/speech-delivered-commemoration-60th-anniversary-his-admission-university-havana-aula-magna.
9 Today, with the use of social networks in electoral campaigns and in subversive projects, this very acute observation by Fidel about ‘conditioned responses’ carries significant weight.
10 Castro, Speech at the Commemoration of the 60th Anniversary of his admission to University of Havana.
11 Fidel Castro, ‘Without Culture There Is No Freedom Possible’, Key address at the opening ceremony of the 18th Havana International Ballet Festival, 19 October 2002, http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en/fragmento-portada/october-19-2002-0.
12 Fidel Castro, ‘Concept of Revolution’, Speech at the mass rally on International Workers’ Day at Revolution Square, 1 May 2000, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/2000/ing/f010500i.html.

​Ten Theses on Marxism and Decolonisation
1 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968), 38.2 Food and Agriculture Organisation, Building a Common Vision for Sustainable Food and Agriculture. Principles and Approaches (Rome: FAO, 2014); FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2022: Repurposing Food and Agricultural Policies To Make Healthy Diets More Affordable (Rome: FAO, 2022), vi.3 Fidel Castro, Statement at the UN General Assembly, in capacity of NAM President, 12 October 1979, https://misiones.cubaminrex.cu/en/articulo/fidel-castro-human-rights-statement-un-general-assembly-capacity-nam-president-12-october.
4 Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, In the Ruins of the Present, working document no. 1, 1 March 2018, https://thetricontinental.org/working-document-1/.
5 Govindan Raveendran and Joann Vanek, ‘Informal Workers in India: A Statistical Profile’, Statistical Brief 24 (Women in Informal Employment: Globalising and Organising, August 2020), 1; Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The Farmers’ Revolt in India, dossier 41, 14 June 2021, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-41-india-agriculture/.
6 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press), 5.
7 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, ‘Global Outlook on Financing for Sustainable Development 2021’, 9 November 2020, https://www.oecd.org/newsroom/covid-19-crisis-threatens-sustainable-development-goals-financing.htm.
8 Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China, 23 July 2021, https://thetricontinental.org/studies-1-socialist-construction/.
9 FAO et al., The State of Food Security, vi.
10 Lusaka Times, ‘Over 60% Copperbelt Province Lower Primary Pupils Can’t Read and Write – PEO’, Lusaka Times, 18 January 2018, https://www.lusakatimes.com/2018/01/27/60-copperbelt-province-lower-primary-pupils-cant-read-write-peo/.
11 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, ‘World Military Expenditure Passes $2 Trillion for First Time’, SIPRI, 25 April 2022, https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2022/world-military-expenditure-passes-2-trillion-first-time.
12 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy – Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 670.
13 Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Uncovering the Crisis: Care Work in the Time of Coronavirus, dossier no. 38, 7 March 2021, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-38-carework/.
14 Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, CoronaShock and Socialism, CoronaShock no. 3, https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/20200701_Coronashock-3_EN_Web.pdf.
15 Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, trans. Neville and Stephen Plaice (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 103.

In Part Eight of Capital, titled “So-called Primitive Accumulation,” Marx describes the brutal processes that separated working people from the means of subsistence, and concentrated wealth in the hands of landlords and capitalists. It’s one of the most dramatic and readable parts of the book.

It is also a continuing source of confusion and debate. Literally dozens of articles have tried to explain what “primitive accumulation” really meant. Did it occur only in the distant past, or does it continue today? Was “primitive” a mistranslation? Should the name be changed? What exactly was “Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation”?

In this article, written for my coming book on The War Against the Commons, I argue that Marx thought “primitive accumulation” was a misleading and erroneous concept. Understanding what he actually wrote shines light on two essential Marxist concepts: exploitation and expropriation.
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This is a draft, not my final word. I look forward to your comments, corrections and suggestions.

On June 20 and 27, 1865, Karl Marx gave a two-part lecture to members of the International Workingmen’s Association (the First International) in London. In clear and direct English, he drew on insights that would appear in the nearly-finished first volume of Capital, to explain the labor theory of value, surplus value, class struggle, and the importance of trade unions as “centres of resistance against the encroachments of capital.”[1] Since an English translation of Capital wasn’t published until after his death, those talks were the only opportunity that English-speaking workers had to learn those ideas directly from their author.
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While explaining how workers sell their ability to work, Marx asked rhetorically how it came about that there are two types of people in the market — capitalists who own the means of production, and workers who must sell their labor-power in order to survive.

A full answer was outside the scope of his lecture, he said, but “the inquiry into this question would be an inquiry into what the economists call ‘Previous, or Original Accumulation,’ but which ought to be called Original Expropriation.”

​Marx was always very careful in his use of words. He didn’t replace accumulation with expropriation lightly. The switch is particularly important because this was the only time he discussed the issue in English — it wasn’t filtered through a translation.

In Capital, the subject occupies eight chapters in the part titled Die sogenannte ursprüngliche Akkumulation — later rendered in English translations as “So-called Primitive Accumulation.” Once again, Marx’s careful use of words is important — he added “so-called” to make a point, that the historical processes were not primitive and not accumulation. Much of the confusion about Marx’s meaning reflects failure to understand his ironic intent, here and elsewhere.

In the first paragraph he tells us that ‘ursprüngliche’ Akkumulation is his translation of Adam Smith’s words previous accumulation. He put the word ursprüngliche (previous) in scare quotes, signaling that the word is inappropriate. For some reason the quote marks are omitted in the English translations, so his irony is lost.

In the 1800s, primitive was a synonym for original — for example, the Primitive Methodist Church claimed to follow the original teachings of Methodism. As a result, the French edition of Capital, which Marx edited in the 1870s, translated ursprüngliche as primitive; that carried over to the 1887 English translation, and we have been stuck with primitive accumulation ever since, even though the word’s meaning has changed.
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Marx explains why he used so-called and scare quotes by comparing the idea of previous accumulation to the Christian doctrine that we all suffer because Adam and Eve sinned in a distant mythical past. Proponents of previous accumulation tell an equivalent nursery tale:

“Such insipid childishness is every day preached to us in defense of property,” but when we consider actual history, “it is a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force, play the greatest part.” The chapters of So-called Primitive Accumulation describe the brutal processes by which “great masses of men [were] suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labor-market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians.”

Marx’s account focuses on expropriation in England, because the dispossession of working people was most complete there, but he also refers to the mass murder of indigenous people in the Americas, the plundering of India, and the trade in African slaves — “these idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation.” That sentence, and others like it, illustrate Marx’s consistently sarcastic take on primitive accumulation. He is not describing primitive accumulation, he is condemning those who use the concept to conceal the brutal reality of expropriation.

Failure to understand that Marx was polemicizing against the concept of “primitive accumulation” has led to another misconception — that Marx thought it occurred only in the distant past, when capitalism was being born. That was what Adam Smith and other pro-capitalist writers meant by previous accumulation, and as we’ve seen, Marx compared that view to the Garden of Eden myth. Marx’s chapters on so-called primitive accumulation emphasized the violent expropriations that laid the basis for early capitalism because he was responding to the claim that capitalism evolved peacefully. But his account also includes the Opium Wars of the 1840s and 1850s, the Highland Clearances in capitalist Scotland, the colonial-created famine that killed a million people in Orissa in India in 1866, and plans for enclosing and privatizing land in Australia. All of these took place during Marx’s lifetime and while he was writing Capital. None of them were part of capitalism’s prehistory.

The expropriations that occurred in capitalism’s first centuries were devastating, but far from complete. In Marx’s view, capital could not rest there — its ultimate goal was “to expropriate all individuals from the means of production.”[2] Elsewhere he wrote of big capitalists “dispossessing the smaller capitalists and expropriating the final residue of direct producers who still have something left to expropriate.”[3] In other words, expropriation continues well after capitalism matures.

We often use the word accumulation loosely, for gathering up or hoarding, but for Marx it had a specific meaning, the increase of capital by the addition of surplus value,[4] a continuous process that results from the exploitation of wage-labor. The examples he describes in “So-called Primitive Accumulation” all refer to robbery, dispossession, and expropriation — discrete appropriations without equivalent exchange. Expropriation, not accumulation.

In the history of capitalism, we see a constant, dialectical interplay between the two forms of class robbery that Peter Linebaugh has dubbed X2 — expropriation and exploitation. “Expropriation is prior to exploitation, yet the two are interdependent. Expropriation not only prepares the ground, so to speak, it intensifies exploitation.”[5]
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Expropriation is open robbery. It includes forced enclosure, dispossession, slavery and other forms of theft, without equivalent exchange. Exploitation is concealed robbery. Workers appear to receive full payment for their labor in the form of wages, but in fact the employer receives more value than he pays for.
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What Adam Smith and others described as a gradual build up of wealth by men who were more industrious and frugal than others was actually violent, forcible expropriation that created the original context for exploitation and has continued to expand it ever since. As John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark write in The Robbery of Nature:

In short, Marx did not have a “theory of primitive accumulation.” He devoted eight chapters of Capital to demonstrating that the political economists who promoted such a theory were wrong, that it was a “nursery tale” invented to whitewash capital’s real history.

Marx’s preference for “original expropriation” wasn’t just playing with words. That expression captured his view that “the expropriation from the land of the direct producers — private ownership for some, involving non-ownership of the land for others — is the basis of the capitalist mode of production.”[7]
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The continuing separation of humanity from our direct relationship with the earth was not and is not a peaceful process: it is written in letters of blood and fire.
That’s why he preceded the words “primitive accumulation” by “so-called.”

In the preface to the first edition of volume one of Capital, dated July 25, 1867, Marx introduces the book’s “ultimate aim”: “to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society” [1]. Looking back 155 years later, it’s clear the book not only accomplished that aim but continues to do so today.
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In a few short pages, Marx introduces the method he used to study and present his research into the dynamics of capitalism, explains the reasons why he focused on England, distinguishes between modes of production and social formations (and by doing so refutes any accusations of his theory of history as progressing linearly through successive stages), identifies the capacities he’s assuming of the reader, affirms he’s interested in critiquing the structures of capital and not the individuals within it, and explains that the main function of the book is to help our class intervene in the constantly changing capitalist system.

After a brief explanation about the first three chapters and how they differ from his previous work, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx briefly discusses his method and the difficulty it entails: “Every beginning is difficult, holds in all sciences” [2]. The value of science, after all, is to explain why things happen. Scientific analysis begins with something apparent in the world and abstracts from it particularly decisive elements that demonstrate why the phenomenon appears as it does, how and by what principles it functions, what impact it has on the world, etc.
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Because Marx is studying society, however, “neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use.” He has to develop another technique for studying the basic forms of capitalism, which he calls “the force of abstraction” [3]. While Marx’s method of abstraction is filled with nuances, it essentially entails breaking down the object of study into discrete elements or categories so we can have a more accurate–and politically powerful–understanding of it.

But beginning with the basic “cell form” of capital–value–is indisputably hard. Marx encourages us to press on, reminding us that, save these opening chapters, the book “cannot stand accused on the score of difficulty.” “I pre-suppose,” he continues, “a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself” [4]. Difficulty is a relative term, so if we’re willing to challenge our preconceived conceptions of the world and use our critical faculties, he’s saying, we won’t find it too difficult. Marx didn’t write Capital to impress the political economists of his day but to arm our class with the theoretical tools necessary to overthrow capitalism, which means that the reader he is pre-supposing is a member of our class, the working class.

Not only does Marx not have recourse to scientific technologies, he doesn’t have the ability to isolate capital and place it in a laboratory setting. His task is different from scientist who “makes experiments under conditions that assure the occurrence of its phenomenon in its normality.” Unable to separate capital from the world or his own position, Marx’s task is exceedingly difficult: he’s analyzing something that’s in constant motion and that determines the society in which he lives. This partly explains why, “to examine the capitalist mode of production, and the conditions of production and exchange corresponding to that mode,” he turns to where capitalism’s “classic ground” was at the time: England. “That is the reason why England is used as the chief illustration in the development of my theoretical ideas,” he explains [5].
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Yet there are other reasons for his focus on England. Not only was he living there at the time but, as he wrote in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, “the enormous material on the history of political economy which is accumulated in the British museum” and “the favorable view which London offers for the observation of bourgeois society” made it an ideal case study [6].

Finally, the recent class struggles in England forced the state to establish “commissions of inquiry into economic conditions” carried out by people “as competent, as free from partisanship and respect of persons as are the English factory-inspectors, her medical reporters on public health, her commissioners of inquiry into the exploitation of women and children, into housing and food” [7]. The text and concepts of Capital are filled with the damning testimony of such inspectors, and Leonard Horner was one of his favorites.

In the ninth chapter, Marx writes that Horner “rendered undying service to the English working-class. He carried on a life-long contest, not only with the embittered manufacturers, but also with the Cabinet” [8]. Horner used to be a capitalist businessperson himself, and wasn’t opposed to capitalism the way Marx was. He was distraught by the horrors produced by capitalism’s unchecked tendencies, but “was morally committed to the belief that profitability could arise from good working conditions and from educating the masses” [9].

Marx’s admiration of Horner and the factory inspectors, who were mostly civil servants or small capitalists, shows how struggles within the capitalist state can advance the socialist movement, and serves as a good reminder that we should draw on as many different sources in our own research as possible.

In England, as Marx says, the laws of capitalist production were most evident because it was there that, in the mid-19th Century, the system was most developed. And as he’ll show in the last part of volume one, English capital was developed because of, among other things, “conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder” as well as “slavery pure and simple” in the U.S. [10]. Despite being the most advanced manifestation of capitalism, however, Marx is clear that British society wasn’t completely defined by the capitalist mode of production. Although conditions in English factories were better than other European countries because of the Factory Acts, British workers

This is one of several places where Marx makes clear his understanding of history and social transformation, an understanding that in no way assumes neat and clean breaks between different stages of history, with the latest stage annihilating the previous one. In fact, the first half of the very first sentence of Capital makes the same point but in understated terms: “The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails…” [12].

It’s helpful to distinguish between modes of production and social formations not only because the distinction is decisive analytically, but more importantly because it accounts for the coexistence of different modes of production in capitalist societies. It further corrects the erroneous view that Marx didn’t account for the relationship between capitalism and slavery by “assigning slave labor to some ‘pre-capitalist’ stage of history” [13]. In his preparatory notebooks for Capital, written before the outbreak of the Civil War, Marx asserted that the U.S. represented “the most modern form of existence of bourgeois society” [14]. This comes shortly after his explicit acknowledgment that “a mode of production corresponding to the slave” had to be created in “the southern part of America” [15].
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That Marx expressly highlights how different modes of production exist together and foregrounds that, as large as capital was in England, it wasn’t the only game in town, demonstrates the seriousness with which he studies history. At the same time, he insists that workers in other countries “can and should learn from others” so they might “shorten and lessen the birth-pangs” of transformation [16].

For the last few paragraphs of this opening preface, Marx transitions into a more agitational style of writing. The first point, which crops up throughout the book, is that he refers to individual people “only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests.” He tells us he doesn’t romanticize the capitalist or landlord, but that the study of society can’t hold “the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them” [17]. In other words, the class struggle is a fight not to change individuals but to change the social systems that condition or determine our individual standing in society. As we saw with Horner, however, this doesn’t mean that Marx totally ignores individuals, but that classes–and not persons–have the political agency to transform social relations.
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Writing in London 155 years ago today, Marx saw evidence of transformation–even radical transformation–underway. He writes about “a radical change in the existing relations between capital and labour” on the European Continent before citing then-U.S. Vice President Benjamin Wade’s statement “that, after the abolition of slavery, a radical change of the relations of capital and of property in land is next.” Evidence, however, isn’t a guarantee of such change. They are only indications of radical possibilities:

Towards the end of the first chapter of Das Kapital, after having established the validity of the labor theory of value, Marx has a section on the “Fetishism of Commodities”. To understand this section is to understand the whole first chapter and also to see why socialism is necessary. This article is an attempt to explain the meaning of this section and to apply its lessons to our times.

A commodity looks simple enough, says the bourgeois economist. Most bourgeois economists say it is any object with a use value that somebody wants and is willing to pay for and its value is determined by supply and demand. Nothing drives such a common sense economist more to distraction than reading Karl Marx who says a commodity is "a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties." What can Marx mean? Economics is a science, even a mathematical science, what has it got to do with metaphysics and theology?

Take a wooden table, says Marx. It is just wood that human labor has turned into a table and taken to market. Wood + Labor = Table. Where is the mystery? When it gets to the market the table finds itself in the company of the stool and the chair. All three have use values, are made of the same wood, and may be in equal supply and equal demand-- yet each has its own different price.

Why these different prices? Same wood, same demand, same supply. They are all the products of human labor. What is the difference between them that justifies different prices? The prices are reflections of the underlying values of the products. Could the values be different? What does Marx say determines value? It is the different quantities of socially necessary labor time embodied in the commodities.

The table, the stool, and the chair are three "things" that are related to each other as the embodiment of the social relations and necessary labor of human beings that created them. Human social relations have been objectified as the relations between non human things. The chair is more valuable than the table but the reason is now hidden away from the perception of people.

"A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing," Marx writes, "simply because in it the social character of men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relations of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour."

To find an analogy Marx tells us we have to turn to the "mist-enveloped regions of the religious world." In that world the inventions of the human mind take on an independent existence and humans begin to interact with their own fantastical creations as if they were really independently existing objective things. This is similar to the Fetishism of Commodities. All the commodities we see about us are part of the sum total of all the socially produced objects and services created by human labor in our society. People all over the world are making things which are traded, shipped, sold, resold, etc. But their use values cannot be realized until they are sold--i.e., exchanged, especially exchanged for money. But why are some more expensive than others? Why do some have more value than others? Supply and demand has a role to play in setting price but it merely causes price to fluctuate around value.

The fact that we know that value results from the socially necessary labor time spent in making commodities "by no means," Marx says, "dissipates the mist through which the social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves."

This is because we are so use to how the market operates under capitalism, how prices fluctuate, commodities rise and fall in prices, the working people naturally just think the values (which they don't differentiate from prices) are products of the natural world, that is, are functions of the things for sale or barter themselves. This is why "supply and demand" seems to be the basis of the value of things. They don't see it's all really the result of the socially necessary labor time expended in the labor process that is the determining factor in value

This leads Marx to say , "The determination of the magnitude of value by labor time therefore is a secret, hidden under the apparent fluctuations in the relative values of commodities."

We are reminded that to understand the real nature of a social formation we have to reverse our knowledge of its historical development. We begin with the full fledged capitalist system and we try to figure why the prices of things are the way they are. Looking at the mature system we don't really see its primitive origins. In the same way a religious person looking at a human being fails to see an ape in the background.

This leads Marx to say of his own theory, "When I state that coats and boots stand in a relation to linen, because it is the universal incarnation of abstract human labor, the absurdity of the statement is self-evident." This has been remarked upon both by the most astute of thinkers (Bertrand Russell) and the most pedestrian (Ayn Rand).

The problem is that the bourgeoisie looks upon a historically transient economic formation, its own, as an eternally existing social order. Of course prices are set by supply and demand. What is that crazy Marx talking about? As the economist Brad Delong said, he had never known anyone who thought that way.

Well, let's look at something other than the full blown capitalist system at work. Marx says, "The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labor as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production."

Marx gives the example of Robinson Crusoe. He chose Robinson because he was a popular example used in the texts of the day. Robinson has to make everything for himself, obtain his own food, and provide his own shelter. It is pretty obvious that the things that are most important for his survival are those he expends most of his labor time upon and are consequently the most valuable to him.

Marx then says we should consider a community of free people working together cooperatively to make all things necessary for their society. Whereas Robinson was just making use values for himself, in this community a social product is being created. The people have to set aside part of the product for future production, but the rest they can consume. How would they divide it in a fair manner? They would divide the product in proportion to the labor time each individual had contributed to the joint production of the social product.

This is how barter went on in the Middle Ages. Peasants knew very well how much labor time was involved in making cheese, for example, and in making a pair of shoes . If it took twice as long to make a pound cheese that to make a pair of shoes, you can be sure that no one was going to trade more than a half pound of cheese for his shoes. It is only in the complicated processes of commodity production, especially in capitalism, that the Fetichism of Commodities begins to manifest itself and the true nature of the source of value is lost.

People have confused consciousness in our world. Our alienation from our own social product, the effects of commodity fetichism, and the continuing influence of religion all work together to keep us confused and off guard. But seeing what our condition is with respect to such mental blights also tells how far along the road to liberation we are (not far) and how far we have to go (quite a distance I fear).

The world, though in a distorted way, is reflected in these distorted forms of consciousness. "The religious world," Marx tells us, "is but the reflex of the real world." And, for our capitalist society where all human relations, and relations of humans with the things they create, are reducible to commodification based on the value of "homogeneous human labor" the best form of religion is Christianity and especially Protestantism (or alternatively, Deism) and maybe for our day we can toss in Secular Humanism.

Why is this? Marx says it is because the idea of "abstract man" is the basis of the religious outlook of these systems. A religion based on an abstract view of "human nature" is just the ticket for an economic system that the bourgeoisie says is also based on "human nature." The religion reinforces the basic presuppositions of the capitalist view of abstract man and since Catholicism represents a pre-bourgeois human abstraction more suitable to feudalism it is the Protestant form that is more congruent with bourgeois conceptions.

As long as humans are confused and alienated, and ignorant of how capitalism works and are mystified by their relation to the objects of their labor they will never be free, or free from the spell of religion, according to Marx. "The religious reflex of the real world," he writes, can only vanish "when the practical relations of every-day life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible relations with regard to his fellowmen and to Nature."

The next two sentences from Marx are extremely important as they explain, in very general terms, the failure of the Russian Revolution and the downfall of the socialist world system. The first sentence describes what the Bolsheviks set out to do in 1917. "The life processes of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan."

This is certainly what was attempted-- first by war communism, then the NEP, and then by the five year plans, forced collectivization and industrialization. But why the failure? Where were the "freely associated men?"

To pull off this great transformation, the goal of communism, Marx wrote "demands for society a certain material ground-work or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development."

In other words, the seizure of power was premature. The material ground-work had not been sufficiently developed. If Lenin represented the negation of the ancien regime, Gorbachev and Yeltsin represented the negation of the negation-- brought about by the failure of that long and painful process of development to properly develop production by freely associated human beings. For all its efforts the socialist world still belonged to that world in which the processes of production had the mastery over human beings and not the other way around. So we must still put up with the Fetichism of Commodities for a while longer.

The recent crisis (2008) gives us an opportunity to educate working people about this Fetichism and how to free themselves from it. GM became 70% owned by the government and the UAW will have a stake of about 17.5%. This leaves 12.5% in the hands of the capitalists. The commodities the workers make (cars) don't have a life of their own. Their value is determined by the socially necessary labor time it takes workers to make them. They are extensions of the being of the working people not the capitalists who have proved themselves totally incompetent.

The working people of this country far out number the number of monopoly capitalists-- both industrial and financial. The UAW and the AFL-CIO as well other Unions should have seen to it that the government represented the interests of the working class majority. The 87.5% joint Government-worker control of GM should not have been used to put the private interests back in control, but to rationalize the auto industry by means of worker control, eliminate the capitalists and the Fetichism that keeps people thinking private interests have a role to play in production, and lay the groundwork for further nationalizations in the future.

What do you think?

There is so much confusion these days. We are coming out of an era of confusion, of purposeful distortion, of the establishment and arms of the state using its sophisticated propaganda machine to mislead us in so many ways as to what our interests are, that even once we begin understanding that it is the system itself that is the problem, we are immediately confronted with more distortions designed to redirect any potential revolutionary energy away from ever being a threat to the ruling class. This includes confusing us over what basic terminology is. Recently, I’ve been clarifying old Marxist terms that have been distorted over the years on social media (search for the hashtag #MarxistTerminology if you’re interested!). And this phenomenon is why I wrote this essay. I mean, even the word Marxism is a mystery these days.
             
So let’s begin very simply: Marxism is a science.
           
That’s right. You read that correctly. The words haven’t melted into each other, and you aren’t having an aneurysm. Marxism is a science. Or, more precisely, Marxism is a social science. Or, even more precisely, Marxism is THE social science, the science that shows how unscientific liberal social sciences are, by genuinely explaining how things happen in society and why.

But how can this be, I hear you ask from across time and space. It seems so weird. Marxism can’t be a science. Science is when nerdy looking people in lab coats and goggles do experiments with test tubes, and then smoke comes out of the test tubes. And sometimes, when it’s really funny science, the science will blow up in their face and it’ll be all singed for a minute before it goes back to normal. Or, if it’s a duck doing the science, maybe his bill will get turned around. That’s science, right? And that’s certainly not what Marxism is.
           
Well, no. Just… just no. All science developed through analyzing what is, thinking about the world around us, and creating and adding to bodies of knowledge that can explain the operation of general laws. And, boy howdy. Marxism fits this description like a glove, despite all of the metrics various ideologically motivated intellectuals have come up with in order to try to dispel the notion. In fact, Marx himself viewed things this way. And it has only been added to and improved upon over time. Entire countries have been founded on the discoveries Marx made. And today, these discoveries are leading the world into a new era.
           
So, what makes it a science, then? It’s all well and good to make declarations about what is and isn’t science, but if we don’t explain why, how this science developed, well—then, it just isn’t very helpful. We need to know what the component parts of Marxism are and how they came to be in order to judge for ourselves what, exactly, it is. We wouldn’t call something a cheeseburger if we didn’t first open up the bun and make sure the components of a cheeseburger (1 burger, check; 1 cheese, check) were there first, would we? So, let’s give the same courtesy to Marxism that we give our various lunch and barbecue foods.
           
William Z Foster, founding member of the Communist Party USA and heroic labor leader of the early to mid-1900’s, wrote one of the best histories of Marxism and Marxists to date towards the end of his life, the “History of the Three Internationals”. In this seminal work, he opens by describing the history of the pre-Marxist labor movement, culminating in an essay that describes the real birth of socialism as we know it today, and what made Marxism so effective in the real world, so different from everything that came before it. Marxism is a large word, and it encompasses so much, but Foster identifies the eight core features of Marxism in his essay “Major Principles of Marxist Socialism”, taken from this section in one of the most concise essays on the topic to this very day. These core features of Marxism create a progressive increase in our body of knowledge on the study of society and its progress. You’ve probably guessed by now that we’re going to be detailing those eight features here, right? If so, give yourself a high-five. You nailed it. So, let’s get started, shall we?

​All science rests on the fundamental idea that the material world is primary, and that our ideas are a reflection of that objective reality. Materialism says that we do not pluck ideas out of the ether and shape the world as we see fit, operating on a proverbial blank slate, but instead, that the world shapes us, that our actions are based on the way we interpret this reality, and on what is possible within that reality.

​Karl Marx was the supreme philosopher of materialism in his day, the original taker of the red pill. He based himself fully in this understanding, and counter-posed it against what he considered the “idealist imaginings” of others, such as Hegel, Hume, Kant, and Berkeley, whose philosophical systems all led, though one route or another, to the acceptance of some type of world creation. For philosophical idealists, it is not the material world that is primary, but the idea. A great thinker or powerful leader would poof an idea out of the ether and then put this idea into practice. For Hegel, the entirety of world history was the formation of ultimate truth through the continual process of making more precise, the idea. Marx, instead, proposed a world ruled by definite laws, and showed us how understanding these laws would lead to a greater understanding of the world itself. Not only that, Marx also showed us, in his various works, how the idealist outlook on the world constitutes a shield for the capitalist class, and how materialism could be, as Foster called it, the “sharpest intellectual weapon of the proletariat in its fight against capitalism and for socialism”.

Dialectics is a scary-sounding word. Almost as scary as “Bigfoot”. But once we understand what it means, it turns out it isn’t that scary at all. Really, dialectics is the study of motion—the motion of all things and how that motion happens. Lenin once described it as, “the theory of evolution which is most comprehensive, rich in content, and profound”.
           
​But that’s a little jargony and dated. Let’s put it into ordinary human language (another great phrase from Lenin), so we can wrap our brains around it. What did Lenin mean when he said this? What is dialectics? What are the nuts and bolts?

When we study the motion of something, the first thing we usually want to understand is what causes that motion, right? If we want to know how a car moves, we need to understand that it has an engine and a gas pedal and all the other parts that work in interconnection that make it move. Dialectics is like learning how a car moves, but for the entire universe and everything in it. Every phenomenon has internal forces that produce its motion. When we “look under the hood”, so to speak, we discover that there are mutually interdependent forces that ‘struggle’ against each other inside any given phenomenon. The study of the molecules inside water that push against each other in order to create its evaporating or freezing point could be said to be a dialectical study of water. In this same manner, the study of the struggle between capitalists and workers is a dialectical study of society. Without dialectics, our materialist foundation is incomplete, since it is impossible to truly understand a phenomenon without understanding the core foundation of that phenomenon, its motion, the way it develops and deteriorates. The two form, one could say, an interdependent concept. Without understanding what’s under the surface, we have—well, only the surface. We can say that society is full of people who do work, but dialectics and materialism give us the tools that help us understand why those people do this work and why they do it the way they do.

It was Marx and Engels who first put the study of history on a scientific footing, tearing to shreds the old metaphysical and subjective ways of writing “history” in much the same manner as an electric shredder tears documents apart at the Citi-group offices. Through extensive, exhaustive, (and often exhausting) explanation, using their dialectical materialist methodology, Marx and Engels peel back coincidence, and trace all of the myriad phenomena in society to their source, to the one central root cause of why things in society happen the way they do. In Marxism, we often refer to this as the ‘economic factor’, or the way production is carried out within a given society. Or, simply, the way people make their living.
           
Marx said on this, “In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society—the real foundation on which rise legal and political superstructures to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political, and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness.”
           
This neatly sums up one of the major discoveries of Marxism, the economic factor as the basis of the motion of society, which we commonly refer to as the base. This puts all the rest of it into motion, and builds what we call the superstructure upon it, our political systems, laws, spirituality, and everything else. Let’s break that open and make sure we’re all on the same page before we move on, though, shall we? Since it is precisely the opposite way to look at it from the one we are taught by default.
           
What does it mean to say that people (Marx uses men, but this is 2022 here, okay?) enter into ‘definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will’? Well, people are forced to work with and create relationships with each other in order to engage in production, right? It really doesn’t matter what we want—what matters is that we are forced to do this in order to function in society. If you are a working class person, you must go out and sell your ability to perform work to someone who owns the property which makes production possible. If you’re a capitalist, you must buy that ability to perform work from workers. Without this relationship between worker and owner, capitalist production doesn’t happen. There are many levels of this, and sometimes these days, the capitalists themselves are mostly removed from the process, instead buying the labor power of some people in order to do that for them, but it still all boils down to this essential relationship.
           
Okay. That was easy. How about the next part? These relationships correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. Don’t worry; this one’s easy too. In order to analyze society’s motion, Marxism breaks the progress of history up into stages (I like to picture it like a timeline in my head, and each part can be divided up into stages as we see fit, in order to more easily analyze the motion). Each of these stages was created by a great leap in the technology related to production and served to advance society. The advent of the slave societies (sometimes called Antiquity in bourgeois universities), which came after what we often refer to as “primitive communism” or pre-class society, for example, was based on the invention of agriculture. Planting crops and domesticating animals rather than hunting and gathering was a completely new way human beings were engaged in production, a new form of society. We, as a species needed to eat, and as we grew, needed to eat more and more. So, we hunted and gathered more and more, and in better and better, more efficient ways, making the production of that era more efficient. This created a surplus, and then a need to own our new surplus. Likewise, the invention of factory assembly, coal and steam power represented the beginning of capitalism. Each of these class relationships (master and slave in the early era of class society, owner and worker in capitalism) correspond to the level of technological development of the human race.
           
All of that innovation based on what’s most economically efficient, that’s what comes first. It lays the basis from which everything else in society rises. The way we go about organizing our society, our legal and political structures, that all stems from how we look at the material conditions we find ourselves in. We don’t have class without some people owning and some people working, after all. Marx was pointing out the dialectical progression of phenomena in society, a heady concept for sure, but one we can break apart and learn, as we see here.
           
He ends the statement with a very good, quotable line that really just sums it all up:  The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political, and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness.
           
Marx is saying that the form our society takes has a material basis in the economic factor. Back into ordinary human language, he’s explaining that the way we go about producing, the ‘mode of production’ and the objective relationships this causes is what determines what our social, political, and spiritual lives look like. It isn’t good ideas producing good things or bad ideas producing bad things. It is the material reality that produces good ideas and bad ideas (and even how we look at those ideas); the social relationships we create in order to, well—create, those come first. That affects how we think about things, and as we get more advanced, new ideas manifest.
           
This quote has led a lot of people who don’t really take the time to understand what it means (a lot of them due to their class interests, as class is a large determining factor in the kind of social consciousness people have) to launch an accusation of “economic determinism” at Marx and Marxism, saying that Marxism states that only the economic factor is important, and dictates everything that happens, as if people don’t have free will or work against their own class interests. But this is a misunderstanding, and seems like it forgot to read the last part of Marx’s quote here.
Engels addressed these detractors directly, saying, “According to the materialist conception of history, the determining element in history is ultimately the production and reproduction in real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. If therefore somebody twists this into the statement that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms it into a meaningless, abstract and absurd phrase. The economic situation is the basis but the various factors of the superstructure – the political forms of the class struggles and its results – constitutions, etc., established by victorious classes after hard-won battles – legal forms, and even the reflexes of all these real struggles in the brain of the participants, political, jural, philosophical theories, religious conceptions and their further development into systematic dogmas – all these exercise an influence upon the course of historical struggles, and in many cases determine for the most part their form."
           
What he means is that the source of what happens is the economic factor, but the things it creates, these matter too, and affect the course of historical events. For example: because race and racism were created to serve capital does not mean that racism itself has not played a large role in the development of American society, or that it is not a large part of the general class struggle in this society.
           
When we engage with the study of history using Marxism, we see that the old, bourgeois way is simply not enough to genuinely understand the real cause of things. In fact, it tends to outright ignore the true cause of events throughout history, laying emphasis instead on all sorts of secondary or superficial elements, on great ideas of great men or evil ideas of evil men.  Overall, a bourgeois history lesson is often a random jumbling together of dates and deeds, battles and warriors, with very little (if ever) talk on the root cause of these battles and warriors, on the economic factor pushing these forces into motion. It can often pretend at this but fail in every respect. Case in point: the reason often given for the beginning of the first great imperialist world war is the assassination of Arch-Duke Franz Ferdinand. This is all well and good. It was a very early battle in this war, possibly the first skirmish. But why did it happen? What were the underlying factors that caused this event? These are the questions Marxism answers.

If bourgeois history has no real, clear understanding of the past, then how can they possibly understand what is happening in the present? Historical materialism, however (the term we give to the dialectical materialist methodology applied to history), and its emphasis on the economic factor, gives Marxism what Foster called a “decisive advantage in drawing the elementary lessons from past history, and for understanding the fundamental meaning of the complex economic and political processes of today.”
           
​It’s this study that leads Marxists to the conclusion that economic revolution (those leaps in technology we talked about) leads to social revolution (changing conditions create an inability to live in the old way, as well as new ideas), which leads to political organization and political revolution (people are thrust into motion to do what they must to continue society, and that is a complete transformation of the basic characteristics of society into a new form), which leads us to the conclusion that socialism, the stage of development after capitalism, is inevitable. This may sound very strange at first glance, but as we learn the scientific basis and understanding of this, it naturally becomes clearer and clearer, especially when we learn how this happens over and over again throughout history, in different forms corresponding to the material levels of production of society.

Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto:

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.  In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebians, slaves; in the middle ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all these classes, again, subordinate gradations. The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes… new forms of struggle in place of the old ones."

Marx’s description of this process, of class struggle, is a description of the processes happening throughout history, compelling the motion of society. He is applying the dialectical materialist methodology to society, putting the study of its motion, of the conflicting forces making history happen, onto a scientific footing. This helps us understand all of the internal laws of motion of society, but it is up to us to put them into practice. Without Marxism, this is a confusing jumble of events, but armed with our scientific method, we can understand the forces at work that produce different events throughout history. The economic factor, again, is the central root of everything. The direct relationships people must enter into in order for society to function separates us into mutually interdependent and contradictory classes. In order for one class to fulfill what is in its material interests, it needs to directly harm the material interests of the opposing class. If a corporation (a group of capitalists recognized by the state) decides to shut down its factories in one location and move them to another one where it is able to pay workers less, this directly harms the material interests of the workers there. Likewise, when a factory organizes into a union in order to win higher wages, this harms the material interests of the capitalists. Marxism gives us the tools we need to understand this on a systemic level, to understand what our material interests as a class are. We see the opposing class (what Marx called the ‘bourgeoisie’) everywhere trying to obscure this fact, to obscure class and blur even what the term means, which can easily result in us accidentally siding with its interests against our own. Marxism doesn’t just give us the tools we need to understand history properly, but also to fight against that obscuring, and to work towards what’s best for us, instead.

Marx was incredibly modest about this significant scientific discovery. In a letter to American Marxist Joseph Weydemeyer in 1852, he said that he deserved no real credit for discovering the existence of classes in modern society, or even the struggle between the opposing classes. Bourgeois academics had already begun pecking around the edges of class and production before Marx began his work. He explained the important parts of his work as having three essential parts: First, that the existence of classes corresponds to particular, historic phases in the development of production; Second, that the class struggle necessarily leads to what he referred to as the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, or the working class organized as the ruling class of society, and its interests dictating what happens in society (according to the laws of societal development); And third, that this new form of state only constitutes the transition to the abolition of class itself, and to a classless society, as the material interests of the working class necessitate working towards the end of classes altogether. There are many labels given to this, and many misrepresentations of it, based on not quite understanding the way Marx and Engels thought, what it was they were doing. In our modern society, we refer to this period after capitalism as “socialism”. Through all of this, if we look at this the way Marx did, we see that he was studying society’s motion, its progress, and discovering the forces that made that progress happen: class struggle, the dialectical “struggle” between the two opposing and interdependent forces within the phenomenon of society.

​As Foster took care to note, Marx was being incredibly modest in this letter. Marx and Engels created a methodology that would let us clearly see not just what is here now, but how we got to here, and in so doing, gave us the guide we need to continue progressing society and fight for a better world for the working class, for the masses. For us.

The word class has become rather murky in modern American society. What is a ‘class’? Our pundits and bourgeois academics talk of the “middle class” quite frequently, or of the ‘political class’ or ‘professional managerial class’. These can have some sort of merit in our Marxist analysis, but over-all, the establishment tells us to measure what we call ‘class’ in terms of income level. The more money one has, the higher their ‘class’.

This is not the terminology Marx and Engels used, and not how Marxists view ‘class’, how we separate groups of people when analyzing society and its motion. We do this, like all things, by our dialectical materialist methodology. We get to the root of things, to the economic factor, and discover that the best way to group people is according to their material interests, which lies in the social relationships created by how they relate to production. It is that relationship to production that defines what ‘class’ a given group is in Marxism. (Once we learn the fundamentals, it’s important to recognize how the distortions of the capitalist class serve their class interests, by distorting how people view themselves and production itself, individualizing it. But that’s a subject for another time.)

It’s common knowledge that Marxism focuses on the ‘working class’, a group of people whose relationship to the means of production, the way they go about living and being part of society, is their lack of ownership and ability to accumulate, forcing them to sell their capacity to perform labor (a special commodity Marx calls ‘labor power’) to those who own the means of production. But Marx and Engels did not study the working class arbitrarily, or because they suffered at the hands of the ruling class, or because they wanted everything to be fair for everyone and the working class were large and represented the masses. In fact, the peasantry was larger in many regions of the world in their day, and had a completely different relationship to the means of production, one left over from the feudal era, as capitalism was becoming the dominant force in society.

It was their special position as the developing class of society and material interests as the working class that made Marx and Engels focus on this class. It was (and is, to this day) in the material interests of the working class to overcome class altogether, to create the productive forces and relationships of production necessary for class itself to no longer have a reason for existing. Every dollar the workers get, the bosses see that as a dollar they lose, after all. This constant back and forth struggle would best serve the working class by overcoming it altogether and eliminating the capitalist from the equation, while the bosses, on the other hand, rely on the working class to actually produce value for them. Other classes faded with the passage of history and the development of capitalism. In Marx’s day, the small shopkeepers, artisans, and small manufacturers all stood opposed to the bourgeoisie, but for a different reason than the working class. Their class interests were in preserving their positions, making them “conservative” in the true sense of the word[1], and as capitalism progressed, became reactionary, meaning their class interests were better served in the previous stages of society. The working class, however, is produced and grows according to capitalism’s advance, and is therefore the class in the position to be the “nascent” or developing end of the contradiction at the heart of society’s progress, the only truly revolutionary class of the period of history in which capitalism is the dominant stage of development.

Due to its position and material interests (remember, the Marxist focus on the economic factor), the leading role of the working class, the constructive class to build our future, has been present in successful revolutions to get past capitalism all over the world, in Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc., and working classes all over the world take it upon themselves to organize and bring this about.

Lenin elaborated on this phenomenon very thoroughly, but it was Karl Marx who first began laying the groundwork for this addition. In the Communist Manifesto, he wrote of the type of, as Foster called it, “thinking-fighting-disciplined party necessary for the working class to win finally over the capitalist class.”
           
“The Communists… are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working class parties in every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.”
           
​So what did he mean by this? At first glance, it sounds a little egotistical, but that is not the way Marx viewed the world. He saw this as a scientist, and in order to understand what he meant, so must we. Marxism shows us that the dominant ideology and way of viewing things in any society is the ideology its ruling class. That ruling class was able to spread this way of thinking throughout that society, but it is important to look at this fact dialectically, to analyze it in its motion. Because it is dominant now does not mean it is invincible but precisely the opposite. It means it has developed already and is now undeveloping. The time this takes to happen and the way it happens are governed by the phenomena mentioned above, by class struggle and its own development.

​We often hear Karl Marx’s three volume work Capital referred to as his magnum opus. Before Marx, the great bourgeois economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo wrote on this period of history, and contributed greatly to our understanding of capitalism, value, and commodity production. They were operating in the time before Marxism, however, before the world outlook and methodology of Marxism was able to give greater clarity to the study of society and how it functions. These days, the bourgeois economists, in their increasing desperation to provide excuses, have degenerated into little more than con men, making apologies for capitalism, rather than genuinely examining its functions.

Capital was Marx’s great work on this subject. Taking his new world outlook and methodology, he was able to describe the process of society and its motion, and specifically capitalist society, in a way never before possible. He explained the process of what led to capitalism, which he deemed primitive accumulation, the causes of the crises, panics, recessions, crashes, capitalism experiences every four to ten years like clockwork, and the continual concentration of capital in the hands of fewer and fewer capitalists. One of the greatest discoveries elaborated in this book was what Marx spent decades studying. What is value? Where does it originate? Marx’s elaboration of what he deemed ‘surplus value’ [2]– the value that capitalists derive from commodity sales that is not paid to the workers for their creation or used to maintain their means of production. This discovery exposed the capitalists for what they were: parasites, and this surplus value being the property of the capitalist class is the central element of the opposing interests between worker and owner, why the working class is the truly revolutionary class, according to Marxism.

​Since then, countless bourgeois academics have tried to refute Marx’s great work on this subject. None have succeeded.

This is beginning to feel a little like a “Marx’s Greatest Hits” list, isn’t it? Coming in at number seven, it’s (drumroll) the role of the state! Give it a hand, everybody!

​Okay, bad jokes behind us. Let’s continue on. Marx and Engels dedicated quite a bit of study to the question of this thing called the state; what it is, how it developed, what its concrete manifestations are, things of that nature. While the bourgeois academics would hold that the phenomenon of the state developed spontaneously, due to the good ideas of good men (only men), and stood above society, concerning itself with the welfare of all of the people, Marx and Engels showed that The State, like all things, goes through a process of development and undevelopment due to the internal contradictions within it, based on the economic factor, that the state takes different forms according to which class is the dominant class in society, and is the tool of the dominant class of society for the repression of the other classes. They showed that, with the progress of the working class state, the continual advance of the productive forces, and motion of society, the state itself will eventually begin to wither away and un-develop, once the conditions for its existence (class struggle) are no longer a factor, replaced simply by the routine administration of things.

Marx and Engels did more than that, though. They also began understanding the forms of struggle and tactics the working class takes in its continual struggle against the bourgeoisie. William Z Foster details quite a lot of their correspondence and actions within the International Workingmen’s Association, or “First International” in his book History of the Three Internationals, which represented the first real organization of the working class in its own interests. (The letters between the two detail their original ideas on this issue, and are a fantastic read for Communist nerds, even to this day.) Before their work in showing the world the exploitative nature of capitalism or organizing workers themselves, they proved how the nascent class of society always organizes itself and overthrows the moribund class, showing how only the proletariat were in a position, once organized and educated, to lead the entire toiling masses towards socialism.

They did not, however, sit around dreaming up ideas for ideal worlds, as the utopian socialists that came before them did. Instead, they relied on cold, hard science to guide the way, instead developing what is often referred to as a “guide to action”. Of the many distortions and misconceptions about Marxism going around today, the idea that this was what Marx and Engels did is one of the most prevalent. If life were a football game, this distortion would have us believe that Marx and Engels wrote out a playbook, and their criticism is that we cannot expect some playbook written for a football team 200 years ago to work on our team now, with totally different players, rules, and conditions (or sometimes, they argue that we should follow this imaginary playbook they believe was written). But Marx and Engels and company did not write a playbook for us. Of course, they were interested in a playbook for their specific team, and created this, but their main discovery was the creation of the language playbooks are written in. They developed all the X’s and O’s and little arrows you see in football movies, when the coach is explaining the trick play to the team that’s had a rough first half, so they can win the game at the very end. This language is the essence of Marxism. And each socialism that arises develops its own playbook from this language, and each socialist project wins the game with their own, unique plays, written specifically for their own conditions, their own unique time and place.
           
​Learning dialectical materialism and historical materialism, learning how to “think like a Marxist” and then apply that to our actions in the real world, is the first step in building socialism.

The death of communism has been pronounced time and time again, but every day it is still fought against without respite or pity. There is no popular act or uprising which the bourgeoise does not see as a sign of communism, no nationalist or progressive opinion which is not branded as communist.

There is no doubt that since the publication of the Manifesto of the Communist Party in February of 1848 the bourgeoisie can no longer rest easy. The world has changed much since then, many references made that are since outdated, but its “general principles” remain valid, having been verified scientifically and confirmed by historical events.

The Communist Manifesto highlights the historical role of capitalism and how it has replaced relations based on patriarchy, the family, religion etc. with cold monetary interest, with “the icy water of egotistical calculation”. For the first time the trends of capitalism are laid out, from its birth in the European feudal system and its expansion all over the world, creating the global marketplace that we today call “globalisation”.

But the Communist Manifesto has highlighted not only economic trends, but also political, by pointing out that, “The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” (p.23).
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Without a doubt, there are many more contributions from the Communist Manifesto that we cannot stop to go over in this brief article, and so we will only touch on those that have been most attacked with the aim of removing its revolutionary edge.

Out of all the various social relations, relations of production are the main ones. Since the appearance of the social division of labour between manual and intellectual and the ownership of the social means of production, the division of men and women into two fundamental classes has emerged: the possessors of the means of production and the dispossessed. The group of people who took over the means of production dominate the dispossessed, making them work for their own enrichment.

For this reason, the Manifesto starts by saying that history “is the history of class struggles”. Masters and slaves, patricians and plebeians, lords and serfs, masters and tradesmen, that is to say exploiters and exploited, oppressors and oppressed have always clashed, sometimes subtly and other times frankly and openly.

Capitalism has not eliminated class contradictions; it has substituted the old classes for new ones; now everything revolves around the contradiction between capitalists and workers. Thousands of times it has been denied, and thousands of times it has been confirmed by reality. The bourgeoisie, unable to hide these contradictions, accepts them, but denies their origins as being in the possession or dispossession of the means of production, or in the position of people within the social relations of production.

​This situation of domination compels the exploited and oppressed classes to defend their rights, organising, mobilising, taking part in strikes etc. It cost the workers and the people of the 19th and 20th centuries great days of struggle for the legal recognition of their rights. For this reason, imperialist capital has counterattacked to shatter the workers’ organisations and defeat the Soviet Union and, having done this, has rolled out neoliberalism to take away democratic and workplace rights, neutralise the trade unions and the right to strike under the threat of being fired, etc. Thus, class struggle is exactly this bourgeois domination, and it exists even if the oppressed classes do not have the capacity to defend themselves and are not mobilising or going on strike.

Class struggle is not a style nor a method of doing politics, as the Ecuadorian ex-president Rafael Correa so candidly declared in his time. Class struggle exists in social reality and is a consequence of the division of society into owners and non-owners of the means of production.

​In the Communist Manifesto we read,

We arrive, therefore, at the most heavily criticised element of the Communist Manifesto and of the economic and social theory of Marxism. The working class, we are told, grows ever smaller.

It results that the bourgeoisie, in order to judge the Communist Manifesto, use the categories of bourgeois “science”, which is why they speak a different language to that of Marx. In ‘Capital’, wage-earning workers are always the working class, because within capitalism the principal relationship of production is between capital and waged work, and never the relationship between capital and worker, or between capital and employee. For this reason, the working class encompasses all employees and not the simplistic workplace category that the bourgeoisie use in their factories.
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Furthermore, Marx uses the word ‘worker’ in its full meaning, the worker is the person who has worked and produced ever since they appeared on the face of the earth. In this way, showing that human work is superior to that of animals, such as the spider or the bee, because before carrying out the work the worker first maps it out in his mind. Marx says:

​To be a worker is to be a producer; it is innate in human beings and present throughout history. With a society divided into social classes, the workers are the ones who commit themselves to working so that others; the owners of the social means of production; may live and grow rich off their labour. Under capitalism, workers are proletarians as defined by Friedrich Engels:

​However, labour-power has been understood as if one were only speaking of physical force, ignoring the display of knowledge, experience, and intelligence on the part of the worker. Marx defines it with some clarity,

We see, then, that labour-power and capacity for labour mean the same thing and include all the spiritual faculties present in the personality of the worker, such as free will, love or hate of work, emotions of anger and anguish, concentration, knowledge, intelligence, abilities, etc.

The capitalist buys these capacities for labour for them to carry out a collective work and produce the goods that he must sell on the market. This social work is a process in which different people, with different qualifications and skills, intervene.
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In this regard, Marx tells us,

​All the capacities of the workers merge in this collective labour, capacities which are sold in exchange for a salary, and which provide a surplus value for the capitalist. The proletarian class is not just those who directly manufacture a product, but rather all those workers who take part in its production. The capitalists cannot do away with the working class, and so their foremost resolution is to divide it and with this same objective carry out labour outsourcing, through which workers who are indispensable to the production process are recategorized as tertiary and without any labour rights. (“El Capital” hoy, Chapter II)
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This throws the bourgeois categorisation into disarray and shows that the working class maintains its power and its role within the capitalist system. However, there is still more to discuss: we have only spoken of the proletariat that has succeeded in selling its capacity for work, let us now see what happens to those who do not have such luck.

​In its advance over the world capitalism continually disintegrates or subordinates the past modes of production, uproots thousands upon thousands of peasants and artisans from their land and their means of production, creating a new social class: the proletariat. The proletarianization of the population of the population has always been greater than the capacity for employment of capital, generating a relative overpopulation which Marx called a “reserve army of labour” because it constituted a source of labour for the necessities of the expansion of capital and for maintaining low wages. Marx and Engels used the categories of working class and proletarian class interchangeably, because although a reserve army of labour was created, for proletarians who did not manage to sell their labour power, sooner or later they would do so, according to the empirical observations and the limits of the statistics from the time in which they lived.

In the 19th century and well into the 20th century this reserve army of labour became more stable in the developed capitalist countries of Europe, which one can attribute to a phenomenon exclusive to underdeveloped countries. This tendency towards the overgrowth of the reserve army of labour was undetectable in those times because there was a release valve of  excess European proletarians as they emigrated to Australia and the New World, where they found better sources of work and better opportunities in land, displacing the indigenous populations, often through blood and fire, which was known as the North American “conquest of the west”. What’s more, the first and second world wars, aside from dividing up the world, also served capitalism by destroying part of the excess workforce.
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Today, in the 21st century, the tendency towards the growth of proletarianization and the incapability of capitalism to provide employment has increased on the one hand and, on the other hand, there are no more indigenous populations with appealing lands to be displaced, or another world war to relieve the excess of the proletarian population. Under these circumstances we have millions of proletarianized people who cannot find a capitalist to whom they can sell their capacity for work, and this has produced a growth in freelance or gig workers and, to a lesser extent, in micro businesses, which represent some 93% of economic activities within the European Union (Círculo de Empresarios, p.81), mirroring underdeveloped countries.

These proletarians, when they are unable to find work, find themselves forced to take refuge in a business of subsistence, because under capitalism everything is bought and sold, and no one can live without an income. They find themselves forced, through various means, to make some small amount of capital for themselves and start a business that is the easiest and most accessible to their poverty, especially petty commerce and services.
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This situation is taken by the epigones of capital to organise their statistics and argue for the reduction of the proletariat because a large portion of the economically active population are dedicated to tertiary jobs. They deliberately hide that nearly the entirety of this sector are independent contractors who have no capacity for contracting labourers, are fundamentally self-employed, and their economy is a subsistence one with no capacity for accumulating capital. This reality makes them semi-proletarians, and all the political aid programmes do nothing for them because these are for the petty bourgeoisie; they don’t realise that they have their own interests which are very different from any other bourgeois splinter. (“El Capital” hoy, chapter 9)

Capitalism, seeking the greatest profits, has taken over the world and developed never before seen technological powers, with a sufficient productive capacity to solve world hunger. However, it does not do this because it is not prepared to give up the products it has available if it is not paid the price it demands.

Its eagerness for profit leads it to produce to earn more and more, in a race of producing capital for the sake of producing, until there is an excess of goods in relation to the buying capacity of the population. In this bottleneck financial capital gives out quick and easy loans, not just for production, but also for consumption, creating a fictitious demand and postponing crises.
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In this race economic bubbles grow until they pop, such as in the 2007-2008 crisis, from which capitalism has never recovered; a great relapse was announced in 2020 when the pandemic arrived. The only thing that COVID-19 has done is deepen the crisis to unforeseen levels.

The crisis that the world is living through has completely unmasked capitalism. By prioritising businesses and capitalist speculation not one developed capitalist country has been able to tackle the health crisis; compared to China, Cuba, Vietnam, even Venezuela, they are an absolute embarrassment.

Knowing their sanitary shortcomings for handing over health to the voracity of private profit, capitalist countries have had the necessary resources to counteract the epidemic, which has resulted in 2.5 million deaths from COVID-19 in just one year (Google news), which must be doubled if one considers all the deaths due to distraction from other illnesses[1].

It would seem that the bourgeoisie is taking advantage of the situation to do away with the excess of proletarians to whom it could never give employment; it is horrifying to learn that in Madrid and New York they have intentionally stopped checking in on retirement homes.

The economic and political situation of the world today seems to clash with what Marx and Engels said of the proletariat in 1847, “But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons – the modern working class – the proletarians.” (Communist Manifesto, p.29)

The suffering of the proletariat from the 2008 crisis and the global crisis that we are currently living through is tremendous. Even before the pandemic, the cutback and annulling of labour rights were unstoppable; millions of workers lost their jobs, their savings, and their houses in developed countries.
Such was the suffering that between 2007 and 2017 in Spain some 17,000 people took their own lives for economic reasons (HISPANTV). Add onto that the millions of deaths due to COVID-19 in the last year, the millions of workers who have lost their jobs and salaries, the millions of independent contractors who have lost their precarious businesses etc.

The responses of the workers are lacking in focus. Some have had global impact, such as the mobilisations in the United States, France, India, Belgium, and Spain among the more well known. Only the mobilisations of the Chilean people have had a political focus against neoliberalism. But not one of these examples questions the capitalist system.

This situation of the global proletariat is not down to the Communist Manifesto being wrong. After its publication the global proletariat carried out historic struggles which have changed the course of history in previous centuries.

​The 1872 Paris Commune was followed by the great 1917 proletarian revolution in Russia, which started the first attempt to build an alternative society to capitalism in the world, taking this immense country from underdevelopment to becoming the second greatest world power, capable of defeating Hitler’s powerful Nazi army. From then would come the revolutions in China, Korea, Cuba, Vietnam etc and an ample national liberation movement in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
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It would come to pass that the imperialist bourgeoisie also learned and carried out a counterattack on various fronts:

With the union and political organisations domesticated and the Soviet Union overthrown, all the banners of neoliberalism were unfurled, coming to cut yet more labour and union rights, but above all to impose work flexibility, giving legal capacities to the bourgeoisie to fire any who tried to organise unions. For these reasons, for example, in Peru only 5% of workers are in a union.

This situation explains why the proletariat cannot organise a meaningful response to the aggressions they receive from the bourgeoisie and why, lacking an ideology and revolutionary parties, they do not carry out their struggles to end this economic, social, and political system which threatens not just workers, but all of human civilisation.
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It is time then to learn the lessons of history, overcome this disorganisation, end the relaxation of work laws, etc. Above all, to organise ourselves into a revolutionary party as the Communist Manifesto demands and carry out a wide-ranging political and ideological struggle for the historical interests of the proletariat of Peru and the world, in an independent manner, banishing the copycat attitudes of bourgeois governments and politicians.

​Bibliography
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Alarcón, C. “El Capital” hoy: Capitalismo y crisis en el S. XXI
Círculo de Empresarios (2018). ‘La empresa mediana española’. Available at: https://circulodeempresarios.org/app/uploads/2019/01/Empresa-mediana-española-informe-anual-2018-Circulo-de-Empresarios.pdf (Accessed: 22/12/2021).
Google News. ‘Coronavirus (COVID-19)’. Available at: https://news.google.com/covid19/map?hl=es-419&gl=PE&ceid=PE%3Aes-419
HISPANTV (2018). ’17 mil españoles se suicidan desde 2007 por causas económicas’. Available at: https://www.hispantv.com/noticias/sociedad/380119/espana-problemas-economicos-crisis-suicidios (Accessed: 22/12/2021).
Marx, K. and Engels, F. (2015). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy: Volume I. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf (Accessed: 08/12/2021). (First published in 1867).
Marx, K. and Engels, F. (2004). The Communist Manifesto in The Communist Manifesto & Selected Writings. Pan Macmillan: London. (First published in 1848).

Western Marxism suffers largely from the same symptom as Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby – each’s fixation on perfection and purity leaves perpetually unfulfilled all that it claims to desire. On one hand, Jay seeks a return to the purity of his first encounter with Daisy, and in the impossibility of this return to purity, the actual potential for a relationship is lost. On the other hand, western Marxists seek a pure form of socialism, but in the impossibility of such a purity arising, they lose the potential to actuate or defend any socialist revolution. The purity of each is met with the reality that reality itself is never pure – it always contains mistakes, negations, breaks and splits.

Jay Gatsby cannot officially reestablish himself with Daisy insofar as she admits to having loved Tom Buchanan – her husband – during the intermediate time before she re-connects with Jay. This imperfection, this negation of purity, is unacceptable – Daisy must tell Tom she never loved him to reestablish the purity of their first encounter. With no purity, there can be no relationship.

Similarly, for Western Marxists the triumphant socialist experiments of the 20th and 21st century, in their mistakes and ‘totalitarianisms’, desecrate the purity in the holiness of their conception of socialism. The USSR must be rejected, the Spanish civil war upheld; Cuban socialism must be condemned, but the 1959 revolution praised; Allende and Sankara are idols, Fidel and Kim Il-Sung tyrants, etc. What has died in purity can be supported, what has had to grapple with the mistakes and pressures that arise out of the complexities and contradictions of building socialism in the imperialist phase of capitalism, that must be denied.

As was diagnosed by Brazilian communist Jones Manoel’s essay, ‘Western Marxism Loves Purity and Martyrdom, But Not Real Revolution’,  western Marxists’ fetishization of purity, failures, and resistance as an end in itself creates “a kind of narcissistic orgasm of defeat and purity”. Comrade Manoel rightly points out the fact that western “Marxism preserves the purity of theory to the detriment of the fact that it has never produced a revolution anywhere on the face of the Earth”. Western Marxists celebrate the emergence of a revolutionary movement; but, when this revolutionary movement is triumphant in taking power, and hence faced with making the difficult decisions the concrete reality of imperialism, a national bourgeoisie, economic backwardness, etc. force it into, the western Marxists flee with shouts of betrayal! For the western Marxists, all practical deviation from their purity is seen as a betrayal of the revolution, and thus, the cries of ‘state capitalism’ and ‘authoritarianism’ emerge.
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Manoel, reflecting on the work of the late Domenico Losurdo’s Western Marxism, does a superb job in providing the meat for this thesis. Nonetheless, he (as well as Losurdo) conceives of this theoretical lapse as being “smuggled in as contraband from Christianity”. I will argue that although Christian mysticism may be present here, the root of the rot is not Christian contraband, but western metaphysics (which precedes Christian mysticism itself). The root, in essence, is found in the fixated categories that have permeated western philosophy; in the general conception that Truth is in the unchanging, in the permanent, in substance; and only indirectly in the mystical forms these have taken under the Christian tradition. The diagnosis Engels gave reductive Marxists in 1890 applies to today’s western Marxists  – “what all these gentlemen lack is dialectics”.

Whereas Manoel and Losurdo see the root of this purity fixation in Christianity, it is in the classical Greek debates on the question of change – taking place 500 years or so before Christ – where this fixation emerges. It will be necessary to paint with a broad stroke the history of philosophy to explain this thesis.

The Heraclitan philosophy of universal flux, which posits that “everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed”, would lose its battle against the Parmenidean philosophy of permanence.[i] Parmenides, who held that foolish is the mind who thinks “that everything is in a state of movement and countermovement”, would dominate the conceptions of truth in the ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary world.[ii] Although various aspects of Heraclitus’ thought would become influential in scattered minds, the dialectical aspect of his thought would never be centered by any philosophical era.

Plato, as the next best dialectician of the ancient world, attempted a reconciliation of Parmenides and Heraclitus. In the realm of Forms, the Parmenidean philosophy of permanence would reign; in the physical realm, the Heraclitan philosophy of flux would. In his Phaedo, Plato would note that the realm of the physical world is changing and composed of concrete opposites in an interpenetrative, i.e., dialectical, relationship to one another. In the realm of the “unchanging forms”, however, “essential opposites will never… admit of generation into or out of one another”.[iii] Truth, ultimately, is in the realm of the Forms, where “purity, eternity, immortality, and unchangeableness” reign.[iv] Hence, although attempting to provide a synthesis of Parmenides’ and Heraclitus’ philosophy of permanence and change, the philosophy of purity and fixation found in Parmenides dominates Plato’s conception of the realm of the really real, that is, the realm of Forms or Idea.  

Aristotle, a student of Plato, would move a step further away from the Heraclitan philosophy of flux. In Aristotle we have a metaphysical system which considers the law of non-contradiction the most primary principle – “the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject and in the same respect”.[v] In addition, in Aristotle we have the development of the west's first logical system, an impressive feat, but nonetheless composed of abstract fixated categories completely indifferent to content. The fixation found in the logic would mirror the fixation and purity with which the eidos (essence) of things would be treated. Forms, although not existing in a separate realm as in Plato, nonetheless exist with the same rigidity. The thinking of essences, that is, the thinking of what makes a species, a type of thing, the type of thing it is, would remain in the realm of science within this fixated Aristotelian framework. Although the 16th century’s scientific revolution begins to tear away the Aristotelianism which dominated the prevalent scholastic philosophy, only with the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species would Aristotelian essentialism be dealt its decisive blow. This essentialism, undeniably, is an inheritance of the Parmenidean philosophy of permanence.

The philosophy of Plato, in the form of Neo-Platonists like Plotinus, would be incredibly influential in the formation of Christian thought – especially in Augustine of Hippo. Christianity would remain with a Platonic philosophical foundation up until the 12th-13th century’s rediscovery of Aristotle and the synthetization of his philosophy with Christian doctrine via Thomas Aquinas. Centuries later the protestant reformation’s rejection of Aristotelianism would mark the return of Plato to the Christian scene. All in all, the Christianity which Manoel and Losurdo see as the root of the fetishization of purity in every moment of its unfolding presupposes Greek philosophy. It is fair, then, to go beyond Christianity and ask the critical question – “what is presupposed here”? : what we find is that in every instance, whether mediated through Plato or Aristotle, there is a Parmenidean epistemic and ontological fixation which posits the eternal and unchanging as synonymous with truth, and the perishable and corporeal as synonymous with false.

​The spirit of the Heraclitan dialectic will be rekindled by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who argued philosophy came to finally see “land” with Heraclitus. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel says that “there is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my Logic”[vi]. It is in Heraclitus, Hegel argues, where we “see the perfection of knowledge so far as it has gone”; for, Heraclitus “understands the absolute as just this process of the dialectic”.[vii] Heraclitus’ dialectics understood, as Hegel notes, that “truth only is as the unity of distinct opposites and, indeed, of the pure opposition of being and non-being”.[viii] This unity of pure being and non-being is the starting point for Hegel’s Science of Logic. Here, he argues:

Insofar as being exists in a condition of purity, it is indistinguishable from nothingness. Being must take the risk of facing and tarrying with its opposite in order to be. Being only takes place within the impurity present in the oscillation and mediation from being and nothing, that is, being only takes place when sublated into becoming qua determinate being, as “coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be”.[x] This is why, in his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel understands that “Substance is being which is in truth Subject”.[xi] Substance, whose purity holds the crowning jewel of Truth for western philosophy, can be only insofar as it is “self-othering” itself.[xii] Like Spirit, Substance, must look the “negative in the face, and tarry with it”.[xiii] Only insofar as something can self-otherize itself, which is to say, only insofar as a thing can immanently provide a negation for itself and desecrate its purity by wrestling with the impure, can conditions for the possibility of it actually being arise. Hence, the “truth of being” is “characterized as Becoming”; truth is won “only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself”.[xiv] Purity, the “[shrinking] from death [to] keep itself untouched by devastation”, is lifeless.[xv] Jay cannot be with Daisy insofar as he wishes to retain the relationship in purity. Western Marxists will never build socialism, or find a socialism to support, insofar as they expect socialism to arise in the pure forms in which it exists in their heads. 

​Having shifted our focus from Christianity to the purity fixated epistemology-ontology of western philosophy, we can now see the fundamental paradox in Western Marxism: on the one hand, in hopes of differentiating themselves from the ‘positivistic’ and ‘mechanistic’ Marxism that arose in the Soviet Union it seeks to return to Hegel in their fight against ‘orthodox dogma’; on the other hand, although producing remarkable works on Hegel and dialectics, Western Marxist’s interpretive lens for looking at the world remains with a Parmenidean rigidity and Aristotelian form of binary thinking. Western Marxists, although claiming to be the ones who rekindle the spirit of Hegel into Marxism, are the least bit dialectical when it comes to analysis of the concrete world.

They are unable to understand, as Hegel did, the necessary role apparent ‘failures’ play as a moment in the unfolding of truth. For Hegel, that which is seen as ‘false’ is part of “the process of distinguishing in general” and constitutes an “essential moment” of Truth.[xvi] The bud (one of Hegel’s favorite examples which consistently reappears in his work) is not proven ‘false’ when the blossom arises. Instead, Hegel notes, each sustains a “mutual necessity” as “moments of an organic unity”.[xvii] Socialism is not ‘betrayed’ when it, encountering the external and internal pressures of imperialism and a national bourgeois class, is forced to take more so-called ‘authoritarian’ positions to protect the revolution. Socialism is not ‘betrayed’ or transformed into ‘state capitalism’ (in the derogatory, non-Leninist sense) when faced with a backwards economy it takes the risk of tarrying with its opposite and engages a process of opening up to foreign capital to develop its productive forces.

The ‘authoritarian’ moment, or the moment of ‘opening up to foreign capital’, are not the absolute negation[xviii]of socialism – as western Marxists would have you believe – but the partial negation, that is, the sublation of the idealistic conceptions of a socialist purity. These two moments present themselves where they appear as the historically necessary negations needed to develop socialism. A less ‘authoritarian’ treatment of the Batista goons after the Cuban revolution would have opened the window for imperialism and national counter-revolutionary forces to overthrow the popular revolution. A China which would not have taken the frightening risk of opening up would not have been able to lift 800 million out of poverty (eradicating extreme poverty) and be the beacon of socialist construction and anti-imperialist resistance in the world today.

Hegel understood that every leap towards a qualitatively new stage required a long process, consisting of various moments of ‘failures’ and ‘successes’, for this new stage to mature into its new shape. Using for Spirit the metaphor of a child he says,

Western Marxists ignore the necessity of the process. They expect socialism, as a qualitatively new stage of human history, to exist immediately in the pure form they conceived of in their minds. They expect a child to act like a grown up and find themselves angered when the child is unable to recite Shakespeare and solve algebraic equations. They forget to contextualize whatever deficiencies they might observe within the embryonic stage the global movement towards socialism is in. They forget the world is still dominated by capitalist imperialism and expect the pockets of socialist resistance to be purely cleansed from the corrupting influence of the old world. They forget, as Marx noted in his Critique of the Gotha Program, that socialist society exists “as it emerges from capitalist society which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges”.[xx]

Where is Hegel, in concrete analysis, for these Western Marxists? The answer is simple, he is dead. But Hegel does not die without a revenge, they too are dead in the eyes of Hegel. Their anti-dialectical lens of interpreting the material world in general, and the struggle for socialism in specific, leaves them in the lifeless position Hegel called Dogmatism. For Hegel,

Western Marxist dogmatist fetishize binaries, the immediate (either intuitive or empirical), and the pure. To them, something is either socialism (if it is pure) or not-socialism (if it is impure). They cannot grapple, in practice at least, with the concept of becoming, that is, with the reality of the construction of socialism. Socialism must be constructed, it is an active enterprise emersed necessarily in a world riddled by imperialist pressures, contradictions, and violence – both active and passive. Western Marxist will write splendid critiques of positivism’s fetish of the ‘fact’, but in their own practical analysis of socialist construction in the world they too castrate facts from the factors that allowed them to exist.
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Hence Žižek, the most prominent Hegelian Marxist today, couches his anti-dialectical bourgeois critiques of socialism in Cuba (as well as China and pretty much every other socialist experiment) within a reified analysis that strips the Cuban reality from its context. It ignores the historical pressures of being a small island 90 miles away from the world’s largest empire; an empire which has spent the last 60+ years using a plethora of techniques – from internationally condemned blockades, to chemical attacks, terrorist fundings, and 600+ CIA led attempts on Fidel’s life – to overthrow the Cuban revolution. Only in ignoring this context and how it emerges can Žižek come to the purist and anti-dialectical conclusion that the revolution failed and that the daily life of Cubans is reducible to “inertia, misery, escapism in drugs, in sex, [and] pleasures”.

In sum, expanding upon the analysis of comrade Manoel, it can be seen that the purity fetish, and the subsequent infatuation with failed experiments and struggles which, although never achieving the conquest of power, stayed ‘pure’, can be traced back to a Parmenidean conception of Truth as Unchanging Permanence which has permeated, in different forms, all throughout the various moments of western philosophy’s history.

This interpretive phenomenon may be referred to as an intellectual rot because; 1) at some point, it might have been a fresh fruit, a genuine truth in a particular moment; 2) like all fruits which are not consumed, they outlive their moment of ripeness and rot. Hence, the various forms the Parmenidean conception of Truth took throughout the various moments it permeated might have been justified for those moments, but today, after achieving a proper scientific understanding of the dialectical movement in nature, species, human social formation and thought, Parmenidean purity has been overthrown – it has spoiled, and this death fertilizes the soil for dialectical self-consciousness.
​
Although all theorists are still class subjects, bound to the material and ideological conditioning of their class and geographical standpoint (in relation to imperialism specifically) – the panacea for Western Marxists’ purity fetish is dialectics. Dialectics must not be limited simply to the theoretical realm in which they engage with it. If it stays in this pure realm, it will suffer the same fate socialism has for them – nothingness, absolute negation. Dialectical logic must be brought beyond the textbook and used as the interpretive framework with which we analyze the world in general, and the construction of socialism in specific. Only then will Western Marxism gain the possibility of being something more than a ‘radical’ niche of Western academia, focused only on aesthetics and other trivialities where purity can be sustained without risk of desecration.   

​In the Manifesto of the Communist Party the authors raised a list of 10 immediate objectives, the very first of which read’s:
 
‘1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.’
 
So the communists aimed to get rid of landed property, but what did they propose to replace it with?
 
They wanted land nationalisation. The state would own all land and insofar as land was cultivated by entities that were not state farms, these would pay rent to the state for its use.
 
Marx was quite adamant that it was not in the interest of the working class to allow land to pass into the ownership of rural associations. In his article The Nationalisation of Land [The International Herald No. 11, June 15, 1872;] he wrote:

​Marx in this article argued against a system of small peasant proprietorship, arguing that the experience of France indicated that it led to the gradual subdivision of land into smaller and smaller family plots and that these small farms could not sustain the large scale mechanised agriculture needed to adequately feed a large working class.
 
Why did Marx demand the allocation of rent to public purposes as part of the Nationalisation of land. Lenin explains this :

​The aim therefore is to ensure that the portion of surplus, that must under relations of commodity production take the form of rent, is centrally appropriated and used for the development of the nation as a whole.
 
The effectiveness of this policy is clearly born out by the comparative histories of China and India after independence. In China land was nationalised. The private appropriation of rent by a parasitic landlord class came to an end. In India that class survived, and continued to appropriate a large part of the surplus product. Without the drain imposed by landlords, China was able to develop rapidly, raise life expectancy and become the largest economy in the world.

In addition to agricultural rent, capitalist society generates rent for minerals and urban land. The owners of land under which oil lies are able to extort a huge rent revenue. This revenue arises from the difference between the labour time necessary to produce oil on the most marginal reserves - those that for example require extensive fracking or those offshore in deep water - and the labour time necessary to produce oil on easily exploited reserves like those in Saudi Arabia.
 
Similarly for urban land the rental that can be obtained relates to the differential labour costs of getting to work. A house 20 miles from the main employment center will command less rent than the same sized house 10 miles away. Workers must give up time and money to travel to work. Any saving they can make by living closer to work tends to end up in the hands of landlords who can charge more for a house close in to a great metropolis.
 
It is evident, if the two houses are the same size and quality, that the premium in the second case is due to the land on which the house rests.
 
Owner occupiers do not escape this. The price of property in a capitalist market is set by the price landlords are willing to bid to buy houses and flats as rental investment. A landlord will be willing to buy a house if the expected rent revenue is less than the interest he would pay on a bank loan used to purchase it.
 
As cities expand, areas which were once marginal suburbs become embedded within the metropolis. Houses in them which originally commanded low rents are now let for high rents. This reacts back on property prices as illustrated from the following figure from my book How The World Works

​So landowners not only gain from increased rent, but make additional profits from the appreciation of property prices. Such speculative unearned income becomes a major driving force for the upper classes.
 
I understand that slogans about ‘land back’ have started to be advanced in the USA, with the reference ‘back’ referring to the descendants of the indigenous or aboriginal peoples of the United States.
 
                        Consider some possible interpretations of this.

1. Existing family farms are transferred into the collective ownership of some collective body representing descendants of an indigenous group. This group then charges land rent on the farms and appropriates surplus labour from the farmers.
2. Existing farms owned by large agribusinesses are transferred to indigeous collective ownership. In this case the indigenous collective shares in some of the surplus value that the agribusiness extracts from its wage labourers.
3. Oil rents are transferred to an indigenous collective. In this case the surplus is extracted from all purchasers of petroleum products who pay more for oil than the average labour cost of producing it.
4. The indigenous group acquires ownership of all land in a metropolis and can thus charge house rents on all residences in the city. In that case the indigenous group is exploiting all urban tenants.

 
 
These are the typical scenarios that would play out in the USA. In all of which the effect is to transform the indigenous group into collective exploiters of one or more sections of the rest of the population.
 
That is because the mass of the direct producers in the USA are not from the indigenous population. Under these circumstances where they to acquire ownership of all land they would inevitably become and exploiting minority.
 
The situation is quite different in some Southern American countries where a class of landowners of European descent has historically exploited a peasantry of indigenous descent. In that case the indigenous comprise the majority of the direct producers and the transfer of private land to regional governments elected mainly by the indigenous farmers would correspond to the programme of land Nationalisation advocated by Marx.

​Karen Armstrong’s Buddha, published as a Penguin paperback is not only a bestseller but has been praised as "invaluable." Armstrong is well known as a popular writer on religious history and this book is one of many she has written for a lay audience. All of her books are well written and enjoyable to read but not always historically reliable. This is, unfortunately, the case with her book on the Buddha. I am afraid that people going away after a reading of this admittedly enjoyable book will have no real understanding of either the Buddha or his religion.

The problem is that she has somewhat indiscriminately mixed up primary and secondary sources as well as credited and discredited theories about religion in general and Buddhism in particular. As an example she gives equal weight to both forms of Buddhism – i.e., the original, or at least the older, Theravada tradition (Sri Lanka, Thailand, Cambodia) based on the Pali texts, [her book is, however, based mostly on the Pali texts] and the much later Mahayana tradition that developed in North India (written in Sanskrit rather than Pali) and spread to China, Korea, Tibet, Vietnam and Japan. This second tradition, influenced by contact with Persia and incorporating Zoroastrian elements, and seeing the Buddha as "an object of worship" is very different from the original teachings of Gotama who was himself inclined towards atheism and was more this worldly than other worldly.

Armstrong is well aware of the difficulties of writing a "biography" of the Buddha. The man Gotama died in the 5th century B.C. and all we know about him has been mixed up with legends and later traditions to such a degree that what we say concerning him "cannot satisfy the standards of modern scientific history." We have a similar problem with the life of Yeshua ben Yosef, the first century Jewish preacher who became “the Christ.” The Buddha that emerges in her book is, as she says, an "archetypal figure" that she has more or less constructed out of the Pali canon which is the earliest and most reliable source available on the life and teachings of the Buddha.

There are two annoying features of her interpretation that will not go down too well with Marxists. First she uses, as a framework for comparisons, the discredited notion of the "Axial Age" put forth by the German existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers. This is the notion that from around 800 to 200 B.C. the ancient world from Europe, thru Iran and India to China created the "ethos" that "has continued to nourish men and women to the present day." This fantastical "Axial Age" only works by selectively including and excluding, as well as misinterpreting the functions of the individuals who are supposedly the most important thinkers of this period.

She includes Socrates and Plato (but not Aristotle) as well as "the sixth-century Iranian sage Zoroaster." Zoroaster’s dates are notoriously difficult to determine, but the modern consensus places him four or five hundred years earlier than the sixth-century – this messes up the "Axial Age" because Iran drops out of the picture. It should also be noted that Confucius was a thoroughly secular teacher and was not involved in reforming "the religious traditions of China." "People," she writes, "who participated in this great transformation were convinced that they were on the brink of a new era and that nothing would ever be the same again." A period that lasted 600 hundred years can hardly be called a "brink", nor, not having read Jaspers, would people from Europe to China even be aware of a "great transformation" taking place, especially since it was artificially constructed only recently.

Second, she refers to the economic system in Buddha’s day as a "market economy." This is very confusing terminology with relation to the mode of production in ancient India. The ancient economy was based on the exploitation of village agriculturalists in a semi-feudal system that had recently developed in Buddha’s day (in northeast India where he lived) when state structures had evolved out of tribal systems into kingdoms and then empires. There was a large merchant class, as in Rome, but it is a stretch to say the cities and empires were "dominated by a market economy." Ancient India was not a capitalist state.

Buddha, as we know, saw life as a big drag – suffering, etc., and his new religion was based on the Four Noble Truths (all is suffering, suffering has a cause, suffering can be overcome, the sacred eightfold path is the way to do it.) To escape suffering you needed to follow Buddha’s new rules of life. He founded an order of monks who could follow his path and attain enlightenment and escape from rebirth, and thus another round of suffering, to "nirvana" – a state of being or nonbeing never really spelled out.

Armstrong gives an interesting account of all the trials and tribulations of the Buddha and the founding of his Order – but her explanations are almost exclusively in terms of inner struggles and spiritual development. This is all very well and good but will not satisfy Marxists who want to understand the rise of Buddhism in terms of class struggle and other Marxist categories. None of this is in Armstrong’s book. So Marxists will not get much out of her book. She lacks the necessary jaundiced eye when looking at religion which Marxists regard as an "illusion" and, as Marx said, brings the people only an "illusory happiness."

The question for Marxists is – what were the social and economic conditions prevailing in Buddha’s time that allowed his religion to survive and prosper? The answer to this question is to be found in the works of the great Bengali Marxist philosopher Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya. The short answer is that in Buddha’s time the old democratic tribal associations were being replaced by newly emergent military states. The tribes had been governed by councils who appointed the leaders by democratic methods. Buddha came from such a tribe, the Sakyas. He witnessed the destruction of these tribal organizations by the new states and the consequent enslavement and murder of the tribal peoples: the source of the suffering world.

In his Order he recreated the primitive democracy and interpersonal solidarity of the tribal ethos and thus presented, on a spiritual level, the illusion of freedom and meaning to life that had actually been lost in the real world.

This is the real story behind the rise and development of Buddhism but you won’t find it in Armstrong’s book.

​References 
​Karen Armstrong, Buddha, Penguin, New York, 2004
​
Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, Indian Philosophy: A Popular Introduction People’s Publishing House, Delhi, 1964

Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, Lokayata: A Study in Ancient Indian Materialism, People’s Publishing House, New Delhi, 1959 (7th ed. 1992)

​In this time he travelled to Mexico (his second choice after Cuba), learned Spanish, lived and learned among the urban and rural poor, radicalising him further and altering his perspective on the nature of capitalist imperialism in the global south and the struggles of human liberation. Writing on his experience he said “I have seen in four days more poverty, deprivation and practical deformatity of the human condition than  thought possible. The villagers of the Western coast are not indolent or inferior, but have been simply defiled to the point of becoming pitiful robots, mechanised to their expecting duties and roles.”
 
Robinson would eventually complete his degree and go on to complete an MA in Political Science and a PhD in Political Theory, challenging the basic concepts of the entire discipline so much so that some members of his PhD panel resigned. Later on in his career, Robinson became the director of the Center for Black Studies Research and joined the Political Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). He went on to create a life-long association with anti-racist organisations such as the London based Institute of Race Relations, writing for its journal Race and Class, and working with A. Sivanandan, Colin Prescod, Hazel Waters, Paul Gilroy, and C. L. R. James among others (Robin Kelley, 2016).
 
Always, however, Robinson’s focus was on the possibilities of human action and its ability to affect change so as to create alternatives to the ongoing oppressive social forces of racism, capitalism, imperialism and colonialism. Despite Robinson being closely associated with the concept and framework of Racial Capitalism, he only spent one chapter on this in his most famous book, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (although he investigated its structure and historiography in other works).
 
More profoundly, Robinson was interested in the practices of existence and liberation that existed outside the theorisations and imaginaries of European intellectual and political traditions (including in this attack Liberalism, Marxism, and Anarchism). Traditions and frameworks that he described as maintaining an “insistence [which] stemmed largely from their uncritical application and the unquestioned presumption that regardless of their historical origins they were universal” (Black Marxism, 1983, p. 167).

 

His first book, The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership (1980), was an extension of his PhD thesis, Leadership: A Mythic Paradigm. It is described by Robin Kelley as having “demolished the Western presumption that mass movements reflect social order and are maintained and rationalised by the authority of leadership. Critiquing both liberal and Marxist theories of political change, Robinson argued that leadership and political order are essentially fictions … [Concluding] that it is not enough to reshape or reformulate Marxism to fit the needs of Third World revolution, but that we must reject all universalist theories of political and social order” (Amarigilio et al, 2019, pp. 158-159). In other words, Robinson recognised that the total configuration of human experience required other forms of existence, resistance and therefore other forms of analysis and knowledge so as to comprehend their meaning and continuing importance for social and political liberation.

This was the ultimate intention of Black Marxism (1983) which is too often read as simply a critique of Marxism from a Black Radical perspective. Black Marxism’s deeper meaning worked to illuminate not only the existence of a Black Radical Tradition, both socially among mass movements and intellectually in its academic ideologues (such as W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Richard Wright, Angela Davis, Walter Rodney, Aime Cesaire), but the existence of a system of ideas, of knowledge, of culture, of resistance which emerged independently and organically of European society.

Stating “The social cauldron of Black radicalism is Western society. Western society, however, has been its location and its objective condition but not-except in a most perverse fashion-its specific inspiration. Black radicalism is a negation of Western civilisation, but not in the direct sense of a simple dialectical negation … Black radicalism, consequently, cannot be understood within the particular context of its genesis. It is not a variant of Western radicalism whose proponents happen to be Black. Rather, it is a specifically African response to an oppression emergent from the immediate determinants of European development in the modern era and framed by orders of human exploitation woven into the interstices of European social life from the inception of Western civilisation” (Black Marxism, 1983, pp. 72-73).

Despite criticisms of being Black-centric or essentialist, Robinson’s view of the ability of the masses of people to not only envision worlds beyond the material conditions of oppression but to actively make those worlds a reality extended to other traditions such as European Socialism. A tradition he saw as related to, but not dependent upon, the development of Marxism as an intellectual, ideological or political movement in 19th century Europe. In his 2001 book, An Anthropology of Marxism, Robinson criticises Marx and Engels for not including radical previous iterations of the Socialist tradition within Europe, which drew upon theological and ideological systems more so than material conditions, to overturn the oppressive structures of property and poverty.

Associating the impulse of the masses of people to create societies not dependent upon the exclusive structures of property and wealth not with a single European political tradition, but rather concluding “Western socialism had older and different roots. It radiated from the desperation, anguish and rage of the rural poor of the medieval era, assuming expressions as diverse as the politically secular, the mystical and the heretical. … Both in the West and the world beyond, the socialist impulse will survive Marxism’s conceits … The warrant for such an assertion, I have argued, is located in history and the persistence of the human spirit. As the past and our present demonstrate, domination and oppression inspire that spirit in ways we may never-fully understand. That a socialist discourse is an irrepressible response to social injustice has been repeatedly confirmed. On that score it has been immaterial whether it was generated by peasants or slaves, workers or intellectuals, or whether it took root in the metropole or the periphery” (An Anthropology of Marxism, 2001, p. 156-157).

Cedric Robinson’s work emerged out of his role as a life-long political organiser and he sought to expose to us the traditions of thought, of resistance and the alternatives of liberation which have been so long omitted, denied or obscured by the dominating frameworks of Eurocentric epistemologies and political theories. With a mind toward the destruction of a world-system dependent upon the brutal subjugations of human beings by racism, capitalism and imperialism, Robinson repeatedly reminds us that intellectual and theoretical work must be grounded in the ongoing resistance of the masses of people to oppression and the other configurations that human beings exist and resist through.

The last words of Black Marxism are some of his most relevant and prescient “It is not the province of one people to be the solution or the problem. But a civilisation maddened by its own perverse assumptions and contradictions is loose in the world. A Black radical tradition formed in opposition to that civilisation and conscious of itself is one part of the solution. Whether the other oppositions generated from within Western society and without will mature remains problematical. But for now we must be as one.” (Black Marxism, 1983, p. 318).

​Robinson, C. (1980 [2016]) The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press.
Robinson, C. (1983 [2021]) Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, London: Penguin.
Robinson, C. (2001 [2019]) An Anthropology of Marxism, London: Pluto Press.

​Kelley, R. (2021) Why Black Marxism Why Now? Boston Review
Kelley, R. (2019)  Solidarity is not a market exchange: An RM Interview with Robin D. G. Kelley, Part 2
Kelley, R. (2016) Cedric J. Robinson: the Making of a Black Radical Intellectual
Makalani, M. (2021). Cedric Robinson and the Origins of Race Boston Review
Myers, J. (2021) Cedric Robinson: Black Radicalism Beyond the Order of Time, Oxford: Polity Press [Forthcoming]
Robinson, C. (2007) Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film before World War II, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press.
Robinson, C. Quan, H.L.T. (2019) Cedric J. Robinson: On Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance, London: Pluto Press.

​What is the “Black Radical Tradition” and what is its nature?
What other traditions could exist as oppositions “from within … and without” to Western civilisation?
How does Robinson understand eurocentrism at its “epistemological substratum”?
How does Robinson understand the relationship between politics, knowledge and “the masses”?
What are the implications for Marxism, if a “Socialist impulse” exists independently of it?
What does it mean to say that “the total configuration of human experience required other forms” in relation to both the Black Radical Tradition, and other radical traditions?

Tony Benn was one of the most distinctive political figures of the past 70 years.

His views on the economy, The EU and foreign wars put him at odds with the political establishment and many within Labour, his own party.

Tony Benn often gave us almost sage-like comments on society and the politics surrounding it, his speeches and talks reflected the deep richness of well thought out arguments delivered by a master orator.

Tony Benn was a remarkable man with great gifts that he put at the service of his country. But just as importantly, and he would have emphasised this, he was in a tradition of radical socialists. He wanted his epitaph to be ‘He encouraged us’. It is from his works and reproduced speeches and writings many socialists find a little light and understanding.

In his own words, Benn explains the dangers and repercussions of the Labour Party moving away from its core values and its Left-wing political doctoring’s. This resulted as we well know, in the collapse of the Labour Party under Blair, until it re-established its Left-wing credentials under Corbyn.
Benn writes:​

On the Blairites, a centrist political ideology that now forms the foundations of Sir Keir Starmer’s hollow ideology of Starmirisim, Tony Benn pointed out the collapse of public support for Blairism, and why:

He also said, as is today within the Labour party: “To be embarrassed by socialism was very much a characteristic of New Labour.”

The Labour Party is once more heading down the road to nowhere, led by the centrists liberal elite, who have no real values or understanding of the working class and their aim to disassociate from the Labour Parties Marxist traditions is underway, we thought now would be a timely reminder of the Labour Parties association with Marxism and a little understanding of the Labour Parties roots, after all its founder Keir Hardie was a Marxist.

While Sir Keir Starmer openly attacks the Left within the Labour Party and is busy digging those foundations up, an act that very much looks like his true intent is to bring the entire house down. We bring to your attention the words of Tony Benn in his address in 1982 ‘Marxism Today,’ a theoretical magazine of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

Benn was articulating a theory very different from anything said by a leading politician before. It was also, clearly subversive.​

​Though I was not introduced to socialism through a study of Marx, and would not describe myself as a Marxist, I regard it as a privilege and an honour to have been invited to deliver this Lecture in memory of Karl Marx. The intellectual contribution made by Marx to the development of socialism was and remains absolutely unique.

But Marx was much more than a philosopher. His influence in moving people all over the world to social action ranks him with the founders of the world’s greatest faiths. And, like the founders of other faiths, what Marx and others inspired has given millions of people hope, as well as the courage to face persecution and imprisonment.

Since 1917, when the Bolsheviks came to power in the Soviet Union, we have had a great deal of experience of national power structures created in the name of Marxism, and of the achievements and failures of those systems. Some of the sternest critics of Soviet society also based themselves upon Marx, including Leon Trotsky, Mao Tse-Tung, Tito and a range of libertarian Marxist dissidents in Eastern Europe and Eurocommunists in the West.

​First, the challenge which Marxism presents to liberal capitalist societies which have achieved a form of political democracy based upon universal adult suffrage: and second, the challenge to those societies, which have based themselves on Marxism by the demands for political democracy.

It is, I believe, through a study of this mutual challenge that we can get to the heart of many of the problems now confronting the communist and the non-communist countries, and illuminate the conflicts within and between different economic systems and between the developed and the developing world.

Before I begin, let me make my own convictions clear.

​If an understanding of socialism begins — as it must — with a scientific study of our own experience, each country can best begin by examining its own history and the struggles of its people for social, economic and political progress.

British socialists can identify many sources from which our ideas have been drawn. The teachings of Jesus, calling upon us to ‘.Jove our neighbour as ourselves’ acquired a revolutionary character when preached as a guide to social action. For example, when, in the Peasants Revolt of 1381, the Reverend John Ball, with his liberation theology, allied himself to a popular uprising, both he, the preacher, and Wat Tyler, the peasant leader, were killed and their followers scattered and crushed by the King.

​The message of social justice, equality and democracy, is a very old one, and has been carried like a torch from generation to generation by a succession of popular and religious movements, by writers, philosophers, preachers, and poets, and has remained a focus of hope, that an alternative society could be constructed. The national political influences of these ideas was seen in 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, and in the revolutions in England, America, France and Russia, each of which provided an important impetus to these hopes. But it was the Industrial Revolution, and the emergence of modern trade unionism in the 19th century which provided a solid foundation of common interest upon which these Utopian dreams could be based, that gave the campaigns for political democracy and social advance their first real chance of success.

If British experience is unique — as it is — in the history of the working class movement, it lies in the fact that the Industrial Revolution began here, and gave birth to the three main economic philosophies which now dominate the thinking of the world.

The first was capitalism. Adam Smith, in his Wealth of Nations, developed the concept of modern capitalism as the best way to release the forces of technology from the dead hand of a declining and corrupted feudalism, substituting the invisible hand of the market and paving the way for industrial expansion and, later, imperialism. 

The Manchester School of liberal economists and the liberal view of an extended franchise combined to create a power structure which still commands wide support among the establishment today.

The second was socialism. Robert Owen, the first man specifically identified as a socialist, also developed his ideas of socialism, cooperation and industrial trade unionism out of his experience of the workings of British capitalism. And the third was Marxism. 

Marx and Engels also evolved many of their views of scientific socialism from a detailed examination of the nature of British capitalism and the conditions of the working class movement within it. Yet, despite the fact that capitalism, socialism and Marxism all first developed in this country, only one of these schools of thought is now accepted by the establishment as being legitimate. Capitalism, its mechanisms, values and institutions are now being preached with renewed vigour by the British establishment under the influence of Milton Friedman. Socialism is attacked as being, at best, romantic or, at worst, destructive. And Marxism is identified as the anti-Christ against which the full weight of official opinion is continually pitted in the propaganda war of ideas.

​The term Marxist is used by the establishment to prevent it being understood. Even serious writers and broadcasters in the British media use the word Marxist as if it were synonymous with terrorism, violence, espionage, thought control, Russian imperialism and every act of bureaucracy attributable to the state machine in any country, including Britain, which has adopted even the mildest left of centre political or social reforms. The effect of this is to isolate Britain from having an understanding of, or a real influence in, the rest of the world, where Marxism is seriously discussed and not drowned by propaganda, as it is in our so-called free press. This ideological insularity harms us all.

This continuing barrage of abuse is maintained at such a high level of intensity that it has obliterated — as is intended — any serious public debate in the mainstream media on what Marxism is about. This negative propaganda is comparable to the treatment accorded to Christianity in non-Christian societies. Any sustained challenge to the existing order that cannot be answered on its merits is dismissed as coming from a Marxist, Communist, Trotskyite, or extremist.

All those suspected of Marxist views run the risk of being listed in police files, having their phones tapped and their career prospects stunted by blacklisting, just as those who advocate liberal ideas will be harassed in the USSR. Those who openly declare their adherence to Marxism are pilloried as self confessed Marxists, as if they had pleaded guilty to a serious crime and were held in custody awaiting trial.

Even the Labour Party, in which Marxist ideas have had a minority influence, is now described as a Marxist party, as if such a statement of itself put the party beyond the pale of civilised conduct, its arguments required no further answer, and its policies are entitled to no proper presentation to the public on the media. One aspect of this propaganda assault which merits notice is that it is mainly waged by those who have never studied Marx, and do not understand what he was saying, or why, yet still regard themselves as highly educated because they have passed all the stages necessary to acquire a university degree. For virtually the whole British establishment has been, at least until recently, educated without any real knowledge of Marxism, and is determined to see that these ideas do not reach the public. This constitutes a major weakness for the British people as a whole.

​Why then is Marxism so widely abused? In seeking the answer to that question we shall find the nature of the Marxist challenge in the capitalist democracies. The danger of Marxism is seen by the establishment to lie in the following characteristics.

First, Marxism is feared because it contains an analysis of an inherent, ineradicable conflict between capital and labour — the theory of the class struggle. Until this theory was first propounded the idea of social class was widely understood and openly discussed by the upper and middle classes, as in England until Victorian times and later.

But when Marx launched the idea of working class solidarity, as a key to the mobilisation of the forces of social change and the inevitability of victory that that would secure, the term ‘class’ was conveniently dropped in favour of the idea of national unity around which there existed a supposed common interest in economic and social advance within our system of society, whether that common interest is real or not. Anyone today who speaks of class in the context of politics runs the risk of excommunication and outlawry. In short, they themselves become casualties in the class war which those who have fired on them claim does not exist.

Second, Marxism is feared because Marx’s analysis of capitalism led him to a study of the role of state power as offering a supportive structure of administration, justice and law enforcement which, far from being objective and impartial in its dealings with the people, was, he argued, in fact, an expression of the interests of the established order and the means by which it sustains itself. One recent example of this was Lord Denning’s 1980 Dimbleby Lecture. It unintentionally confirmed that interpretation in respect of the judiciary and is interesting mainly because few 20th century judges have been foolish enough to let that cat out of the bag, where it has been quietly hiding for so many years.

Third, Marxism is feared because it provides the trade union and labour movement with an analysis of society that inevitably arouses political consciousness, taking it beyond wage militancy within capitalism. The impotence of much American trade unionism and the weakness of past non-political trade unionism in Britain have borne witness to the strength of the argument for a labour movement with a conscious political perspective that campaigns for the reshaping of society, and does not just compete with its own people for a larger part of a fixed share of money allocated as wages by those who own capital, and who continue to decide what that share will be.

Fourth, Marxism is feared because it is international in outlook, appeals widely to working people everywhere, and contains within its internationalism a potential that is strong enough to defeat imperialism, neo-colonialism and multinational business and finance, which have always organised internationally. But international capital has fended off the power of international labour by resorting to cynical appeals to nationalism by stirring up suspicion and hatred against outside enemies. This fear of Marxism has been intensified since 1917 by the claim that all international Marxism stems from the Kremlin, whose interests all Marxists are alleged to serve slavishly, thus making them, according to capitalist establishment propaganda, the witting or unwitting agents of the national interest of the USSR.

Fifth, Marxism is feared because it is seen as a threat to the older organised religions, as expressed through their hierarchies and temporal power structures, and their close alliance with other manifestations of state and economic power. The political establishments of the West, which for centuries have openly worshipped money and profit and ignored the fundamental teachings of Jesus do, in fact, sense in Marxism a moral challenge to their shallow and corrupted values and it makes them very uncomfortable. Ritualised and mystical religious teachings, which offer advice to the rich to be good, and the poor to be patient, each seeking personal salvation in this world and eternal life in the next, are also liable to be unsuccessful in the face of such a strong moral challenge as socialism makes.

There have, over the centuries, always been some Christians who, remembering the teachings of Jesus, have espoused these ideas and today there are many radical Christians who have joined hands with working people in their struggles. The liberation theology of Latin America proves this and thus deepens the anxieties of church and state in the West.

Sixth, Marxism is feared in Britain precisely because it is believed by many in the establishment to be capable of winning consent for radical change through its influence in the trade union movement, and then in the election of socialist candidates through the ballot box. It is indeed therefore because the establishment believes in the real possibility of an advance of Marxist ideas by fully democratic means that they have had to devote so much time and effort to the

​misrepresentation of Marxism as a philosophy of violence and destruction, to scare people away from listening to what Marxists have to say.

These six fears, which are both expressed and fanned by those who defend a particular social order, actually pinpoint the wide appeal of Marxism, its durability and its strength more accurately than many advocates of Marxism may appreciate.

​The Communist Manifesto, and many other works of Marxist philosophy, have always profoundly influenced the British labour movement and the British Labour Party, and have strengthened our understanding and enriched our thinking.

It would be as unthinkable to try to construct the Labour Party without Marx as it would be to establish university faculties of astronomy, anthropology or psychology without permitting the study of Copernicus, Darwin or Freud, and still expect such faculties to be taken seriously.

There is also a practical reason for emphasising this point now. The attacks upon the so-called hard Left of the Labour Party by its opponents in the Conservative, Liberal and Social Democratic Parties and by the establishment, are not motivated by fear of the influence of Marxists alone. These attacks are really directed at all socialists and derive from the knowledge that democratic socialism in all its aspects does reflect the true interest of a majority of people in this country, and that what democratic socialists are saying is getting through to more and more people, despite the round-the-clock efforts of the media to fill the newspapers and the airwaves with a cacophony of distortion.

If the Labour Party could be bullied or persuaded to denounce its Marxists, the media having tasted blood would demand next that it expelled all its socialists and reunited the remaining Labour Party with the SDP to form a harmless alternative to the Conservatives, which could then be allowed to take office now and again when the Conservatives fell out of favour with the public. Thus, British capitalism, it is argued, would be made safe forever, and socialism would be squeezed off the national agenda. But if such a strategy were to succeed — which it will not — it would in fact profoundly endanger British society. For it would open up the danger of a swing to the far right, as we have seen in Europe over the last 50 years.

​But having said all that about the importance of the Marxist critique, let me turn to the Marxist remedies for the ills that Marx so accurately diagnosed. There are many schools of thought within the Marxist tradition, and it would be as foolish to lump them all together as to bundle every Christian denomination into one and then seek to generalise about the faith. Nevertheless, there are certain aspects of the central Marxist analysis which it is necessary to subject to special scrutiny if the relationship between Marxism and democracy is to be explored.

I have listed some of these aspects because of their relevance to this Lecture, and which explain in part why I would not think it correct to call myself a Marxist.

Marx seemed to identify all social and personal morality as being a product of economic forces, thus denying to that morality any objective existence over and above the interrelationship of social and economic forces at that moment in history. I cannot accept that analysis.

Of course, the laws, customs, administration, armed forces and received wisdom in any society will tend to reflect the interests and values of the dominant class, and if class relationships change by technology, evolution or revolution, this will be reflected in a change of the social and cultural superstructure. But to go beyond that and deny the inherent rights of men and women to live, to think, to act, to argue or to obey or resist in pursuit of some inner call of conscience — as pacifists do — or to codify their relationships with each other in terms of moral responsibility, seems to me to be throwing away the child of moral teaching with the dirty bathwater of feudalism, capitalism or clericalism.

In saying this I am consciously seeking to re-establish the relevance and legitimacy of the moral teachings of Jesus, whilst accepting that many manifestations of episcopal authority and ritualistic escapism have blanked out that essential message of human brotherhood and sisterhood. I say this for many reasons.

First, because without some concept of inherent human rights and moral values and obligations, derived by custom and practice out of the accumulated experience of our societies, I cannot see any valid reason why socialism should have any moral force behind it, or how socialism can relate directly to the human condition outside economic relationships; for example, as between women and men, black and white, or in the relationships within the home and in personal life.

Second, because I regard the moral pressures released by radical Christian teaching, and its humanistic offshoots as having played a major role in developing the ideas of solidarity, democracy, equality and peace, which have contributed to the development of socialist motivation.

Third, because without the acceptance of a strong moral code the ends always can be argued to justify the means, and this lies at the root of some of the oppression which has been practised in actually existing socialist societies.

Fourth, because the teachings of Marx, like the teachings of Jesus, can also become obscured, lost, and even reversed by civil power systems established in states that proclaim themselves to be Marxist, just as many Christian kings and governors destroyed, by their actions, the faith they asserted they were sworn to defend. And if Jesus is to be acquitted of any responsibility for the tortures and murders conducted by the Inquisition, so must Marx be exonerated from any charges arising from the imprisonment and executions that occurred in Stalin’s Russia.

Fifth, because without a real moral impulse and a warm human compassion, I cannot find any valid reason why Marx himself should have devoted so much of his time to works of scholarship and endless political activities, all of which were designed to achieve better conditions for his fellow creatures. That no doubt is why Marx is sometimes regarded as the last of the Old Testament prophets.

If I am asked where these moral imperatives come from it not from the interaction of economic forces, my answer would be that they spring from the wells of human genius interacting upon our experience of life, which were also the sources of inspiration for Marx in his work.

It is very important for many reasons that religion and politics should not be separated into watertight compartments, forever at war with each other. For centuries, the central social arguments and battles which we now see as political or economic, were conducted under the heading of religion. Many of the most important popular struggles were conceived by those who participated in them as being waged in pursuit of religious convictions. Similarly, some of the most oppressive political establishments exercised their power in the name of God.

Unless we are prepared to translate the religious vocabulary which context of politics runs the risk of excommunication and outlawry. served as a vehicle for political ideas for so many centuries into a modern vocabulary that recognises the validity of a scientific analysis both of nature, society, and its economic interests, we shall cut ourselves off from all those centuries of human struggle and experience and deny ourselves the richness of our own inheritance.

Marx and Marxist historians have, of course, consciously re-interpreted ancient history in the light of their own analysis, but no real dictionary can be restricted to a one-way translation based upon hindsight. We need a two-way translation to enable us to understand and utilise, if we wish to do so, the wisdom of earlier years to criticise contemporary society. It is in this context that I find some other aspects of Marxism unsatisfactory.

Marx made much of the difference between scientific socialism and Utopian socialism, which he believed suffered from its failure to root itself in a vigorous study of the economic and political relationships between the social classes. The painstaking scholarship which he and Engels brought to bear upon capitalism has left us with a formidable set of analytical tools without which socialists today would have a much poorer theoretical understanding of the tasks which they are undertaking.

But having recognised that priceless analytic legacy that we owe to Marx, in one sense Marx himself was a Utopian in that he appeared to believe that when capitalism had been replaced by socialism, and socialism by communism, a classless society, liberated by the final withering away of the state, would establish some sort of heaven on earth. Human experience does not, unfortunately, give us many grounds for sharing that optimism. For humanity cannot organise itself without some power structure of the state, and Marx seems to have underestimated the importance of Lord Acton’s warning that power ‘tends to corrupt’ mistakenly believing this danger would disappear under communism.

​It is here that both the moral argument referred to above, and the issue of democratic accountability, which have both played so large a part in the pre-Marxist and non-Marxist traditions of the British labour movement, can be seen to have such relevance.

For allowing for the weaknesses of Labourism, economism and the anti-theoretical pragmatism which have characterised the British working class movement at its worst, two of the beliefs to which our movement has clung most doggedly were the idea that some actions were ‘right’ and others were ‘wrong’; and to the obstinate determination to force those exercising political or economic power over us to accept the ultimate discipline of accountability, up to now seen mainly through the regular use of the ballot box, through which all adults would have their say in a universal suffrage to elect or dismiss governments.

The British working class movement has over the years clung passionately to these twin ideas of morality and accountability in politics and they constitute the backbone of our faith. Some Marxists might argue that these objectives are too limited, are not specifically socialist, and constitute little more than a cover for collaborationist strategies which underpin bourgeois capitalist liberal democracy, complete with its soothing religious tranquillisers.

I readily admit that a humanitarian morality and accountability are not enough, in themselves, to establish socialism, but they are essential if socialism is to be established, and if socialism is to be worth having at all. A socialist economic transformation may be achieved by force, but if so, it then cannot be sustained by agreement, and socialism may degenerate into the imposition of a regime administered by those whose attempts to maintain it can actually undermine it rather than develop it.

​Before we can do that we have to examine, in some detail, what is meant by the phrase parliamentary democracy, for it lends itself to many definitions. Seen from the viewpoint of the establishment, Britain has enjoyed parliamentary government since 1295. All that has happened in the intervening period is that the Queen-in-Parliament has agreed to exercise the Crown’s powers constitutionally.

This means accepting legislation passed ‘by and with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal in Parliament assembled’ and accepting that an elected majority in the House of Commons is entitled to expect that its leader will be asked to form an administration by the Crown; and that that administration will be composed of Her Majesty’s ministers, who in their capacity as Crown advisers will be free to use the Royal prerogatives to administer and control the civil and military services of the Crown.

​First, in practice by the actual problems confronting an elected Labour government in establishing democratic control over the highly secretive self-directing and hierarchical executive of state power.

Second, by the constitutional power of the Crown to dismiss a government and dissolve a parliament at any time.

Third, by the fact that a government so dismissed, and a parliament so dissolved, lose all legal rights over the state machine and all legislative powers.

Fourth, by the subordination of all United Kingdom legislation even when it has received the Royal Assent, to the superior authority of Common Market Law or Court judgements, which take precedence, under the European Communities Act, over domestic legislation, where the two conflict. It is worth noting that British accession to the EEC involved, in this sense, a major diminution of the powers of the Crown, in that Royal Assent to legislation rendered invalid by the EEC is itself invalid.

Set out baldly like that, it can be seen that in a formal sense Britain is far less democratic in its form of government than those countries whose peoples may elect a President, both Houses of their Legislature and have entrenched their rights in written constitutional safeguards. Why then does the British labour movement appear to be so satisfied with our democratic institutions?

In one sense, of course, it is not. The abolition of the House of Lords and the abrogation of British accession to the Treaty of Rome are amongst the items likely to feature high on the agenda for the next Labour manifesto.

​The Labour Party just assumes that the Crown will always act with scrupulous care within the constitutional conventions that govern the use of the prerogative, and for that reason have never put this issue on its political agenda. Beyond that Labour believes that the reality of power precludes the possibility that our democratic rights might be overturned by an abnormal use of those formal powers which still reside in the non-elected elements of our constitution. In sharp contrast to the establishment view, Labour’s broad interpretation of the parliamentary democracy we have secured is that by a succession of extra-parliamentary struggles over the centuries the Crown was made accountable to parliament, the Lords were made subordinate to the Commons and the Commons were, through regular election, subordinated to the will of the electorate, made up first of men and later of women too, who have won, in fact, if not yet in constitutional theory, the sovereign rights which belong to the people — which is what democracy is all about.

It is manifestly true that such an achievement, formidable as it is, falls short of a constitutional entrenchment of the sovereignty of the people, and that it secures no more than the right to dismiss governments and MPs and substitute new MPs and new governments. It certainly does not offer, of itself, any control over the extra-parliamentary centres of financial or economic power, which remain whichever government has been elected, or even guarantee ministerial or parliamentary power over the apparatus of the state. To that extent, democracy in Britain is still partial and political but not economic or social.

But if, as I believe, the real strength of parliamentary democracy lies in the fact that the power to remove governments without violent revolution is now vested in the people, that is a very significant gain which should not be dismissed as being of little account, a fraud to be exposed, by-passed and replaced.

One of the reasons why the British Labour Party and the British people are so suspicious of certain supposedly revolutionary schools of Marxist thought is that they believe that insufficient attention is paid by them to the importance of our democratic institutions, thus defined; and fear that if they were to be dismantled we should lose what we struggled so hard and so long to achieve. We would then be set back, perhaps with no gains to show for it. Parliamentary democracy is an evolving system, not yet fully developed, which enjoys wide support for what it has achieved so far.

​Given the fact that all our rights in parliament have been won by struggle, I must add that I have not observed any serious revolutionary movements pledged to destroy parliament anywhere across the whole spectrum of socialist parties of the Left in Britain today.

Those who call themselves revolutionary socialists and denounce the rest of us as nothing more than left-talking reformists, are not, in my judgment, real revolutionaries at all. They are nothing more than left-talking revolutionists, who, while pointing to the deficiencies in our parliamentary democracy, offer themselves as candidates for parliament, and none of them are planning an armed revolution or a general strike to secure power by a coup d’etat. If such people do exist I have not met them, heard of them, or become aware of any influence they have in any known political party or grouping of the Left.

Nor for that matter is there much hard evidence to suggest that there would be wide public support for a counter-revolution to topple an elected Labour government by force on the Chilean model.

I appreciate that in playing down some of the most cherished fears of both ultra-Left and ultra Right, I am laying myself open to a charge of naivete, and depriving the mass media of one of their favourite and most spine-chilling horror myths, which they use to undermine public support for socialism.

If there ever were to be a right wing coup in Britain it would not be carried out by paratroopers landing in central London, as it once seemed they would land in Paris just before de Gaulle came to power, but by an attempt to repeat what happened to Gough Whitlam when the Governor-General dismissed him as Prime Minister. And if the labour movement and the Left were ever to resort to force in Britain, it would not be to overthrow an elected government but to prevent the overthrow of an elected government, ie, in defence of, and not in defiance of, parliamentary democracy. It is, in this sense, and only in this sense, that the use of popular force would ever be contemplated by the labour and socialist movements.

​Though these may seem to be highly theoretical matters, it is necessary, to complete the analysis, to refer briefly to the varying circumstances in which popular action is legitimate.

There is clearly an inherent right to take up arms against tyranny or dictatorship, to establish or uphold democracy, on exactly the same basis, and for the same reasons, that the nation will respond to a call to arms to defeat a foreign invasion, or repel those who have successfully occupied a part of our territory.

In a different context, we accept certain more limited rights to defy the law on grounds of conscience, or to resist laws that threaten basic and long established liberties, as for example if parliament were to prolong its life, and remove the electoral rights of its citizens. The defence of ancient and inherent rights, as for example the rights of women, or of trade unionists, or of minority communities, could legitimately lead to some limited civil disobedience, accompanied by an assertion that the responsibility for it rested upon those who had removed these rights in the first place. And, at the very opposite end of this scale of legitimate opposition, lies the undoubted right to act directly to bring public pressure, from outside parliament, to bear upon parliament to secure a redress of legitimate grievances. Such extra-parliamentary activity has played a long and honourable part in the endless struggle to win basic rights.

To assert that extra-parliamentary activity is synonymous with anti-parliamentary conspiracies is to blur a distinction that it is essential to draw with scientific precision if we are to understand what is happening and not to mistake a democratic demonstration for an undemocratic riot; a democratic protest for an undemocratic uprising; or a democratic reformer for an undemocratic revolutionary.

The labour movement in Britain, egged on by a hostile media, is now engaged in a microscopic examination of its own attitude to the role of extra-parliamentary activity. Such an examination can only help to advance socialism. Perhaps the simplest way to understand these issues is to examine the attitude of the Conservative Party to the same issues. The Tory Party and its historical predecessors have never wasted a moment’s valuable time upon such constitutional niceties. Throughout our whole history, the owners of land, the banks and our industries, have been well aware that their power lay almost entirely outside parliament, and their interest in parliament was confined to a determination to maintain a majority there to

​safeguard their interests by legislating to protect them. Extra-parlia- mentary activity has been a way of life for the ruling classes, from the Restoration, through to the overthrow of the 1931 Labour government, and the election in 1979 of Mrs Thatcher.

In power they use parliament to protect their class interests and reward their friends. In opposition they use the Lords, where they always have a majority, to frustrate the Labour majority in the Commons, and supplement this with a sustained campaign of extra-parliamentary activity to undermine the power of Labour governments by investment strikes, attacks upon the pound sterling, granting or withholding business confidence, all using, when necessary, the power of the IMF, the multinationals and the media.

Labour has real power outside parliament, and the people we represent can only look to an advance of their interests and of the prospects of socialism if Labour MPs harness themselves to the movement outside and develop a strong partnership which alone can infuse fresh life into parliament as an agent of democratic change.

These matters and the associated issues of party democracy have received a great deal of attention within the labour movement over the last few years and it is not hard to see why. We want the Labour Party to practise the accountability it preaches. Seen in that light, the adherence of the labour movement to parliamentary democracy, and our determination to expand it, becomes a great deal more than a romantic attachment to liberal capitalist bourgeois institutions. By contrast, it can be seen to have a crucial role to play in achieving greater equality and economic democracy.

​Those who dismiss the role of parliamentary democracy, thus defined, can be seen to be engaged in weakening, rather than strengthening, the prospects of establishing a durable, democratic socialist society. In this context there are some within the Labour movement who have underestimated the potentiality of the democratic foothold which has been established in parliament. This misjudgment of what can be achieved is, in particular, associated with the school of thought inspired by Leon Trotsky, who rejected the Soviet system as it evolved after the death of Lenin, when Stalin imposed a rigid, centralised and ruthless tyranny in the name of socialism.

Trotsky has had an immense influence on the world socialist movement, so much so that many different Trotskyite groups have been established. Trotsky should be remembered as the first and most significant Soviet dissident, hunted and later murdered by Stalin. His critiques of Stalinism merit respectful study and his contemptuous expose of the milk-and-water socialism of some Labour leaders in the 1920s in his book Whither Britain, entitles him to a place in our history. He was the first man to identify and warn against the betrayal of Ramsay Macdonald and to prophesy the birth of the SDP 55 years before it was formed. Moreover, he did urge the German Left to unite against the Nazis. But having said all that, Trotsky’s profound ambivalence about the nature of parliamentary democracy led him into error, both of judgment and of prescription.

As I have said earlier, I do not believe that those socialists in Britain who claim to represent the views of Trotsky, are in any sense serious revolutionaries. They constitute schools of socialist thought whose ideas need to be discussed and argued over. In my view, the weakness of their argument lies in their underestimate of what has been and can be achieved, and the confusion which they perpetuate between the absence of actual reform and the inevitability that reform, if pressed, is bound to fail.

The constraints on capital and the gains achieved by the trade union and labour movement over the years have been formidable. It is, I believe, a major error to argue that the advocacy of reform, rather than of revolution, is synonymous with betrayal and capitulation, for it undermines the very working class confidence which is central to the success of the movement, spreading pessimism about the prospects of victory — which is what the establishment has been trying to do for centuries. Some followers of Trotsky appear to substitute a ritualistic and dogmatic recitation of slogans which cannot connect with the life experience of those they are hoping to reach, thus minimising their public influence. Moreover, by suggesting that parliamentary democracy has only a limited role to play, and by speaking vaguely of direct action to bypass it, they seem to imply that socialism can be introduced by some industrial coup. They are also unacceptably vague about what would follow such an event if it ever occurred.

​But we must never forget that a socialist government that came to power by the exercise of industrial muscle, rather than by election, would be compelled to retain itself in office by a similar exercise of industrial power. Even if such a government could retain its formal control of all the instruments of state power, attacks by the forces marshalled against it by capital would rapidly intensify. Such forces would also be able to claim that, in the circumstances, they were also the champions of democracy.

This combination of intense pressure from the dethroned domestic establishment, international capitalism and an angry electorate deprived of the traditional ballot box rights, would almost certainly overpower the new government and release counter-revolutionary forces on a massive scale, against which no effective democratic defence could be mounted, because all those who once believed in parliamentary democracy would have been demoralised by what had occurred.

​The main recruiting agents for Trotsky’s ideas in Britain have been those who have so cynically betrayed their faith in both socialism and democracy, while occupying high positions with the parliamentary Labour leadership, and then defected to the Social Democrats. These right-wing entryists used their positions as Labour MPs to obstruct the advance to socialism, and retain their seats in defiance of democracy.

But no comment on the role of revolution would be complete without adding that what applies in the context of Britain, does not necessarily apply in countries that have not won the rights we have.

The Russian people could never have won power through the Duma in Tsarist Russia, nor could the Zimbabwe Africans through Ian Smith’s rigged electoral system. The revolutionary route to democracy is almost certainly the only one open to the peoples of South Africa, Turkey, El Salvador and Chile, and many countries which the West so dishonestly classify as ‘our partners’ in the free world.

Here in Britain, we have acquired, by struggle, precious democratic rights which we must defend and extend. I believe that communist countries could best evolve their socialism by consent if they studied and applied our experience.

​In saying that, we also know that a Labour electoral victory, with a working majority on a socialist programme, could unleash tremendous opposition, including serious extra-parliamentary pressures.

These will be formidable obstacles to overcome. Yet overcome them we must. Our best prospect of doing so lies, not in abandoning democracy, but in deepening it and widening it to win the public support upon which we shall have to rely. If we are to do that we must, above all, have confidence in the democratic process, and anyone who spreads doubts about its efficacy is abandoning the battle before it has even begun.

At least we can comfort ourselves with the certain knowledge that however inadequate parliamentary democracy may seem to be to some in the labour movement, the establishment think otherwise. Socialist rhetoric they can live with easily, and revolutionary opportunism plays straight into their hands. But they know a real challenge when they see one and believe that parliamentary democracy, buttressed and sustained by a free, democratic and politically committed labour and trade union movement outside, can and will be strong enough to effect radical socialist reforms.

Let me sum up this section on democracy and Marxism in Britain in this way.

​Second, that the commitment of the British labour movement to parliamentary democracy, linked closely to the organisations of labour in the country, is not only right in principle but also offers the best way forward along the road to socialist transformation by consent. This is the process that the majority of the people of Britain have used, are using and must use to advance their interests.

I now want to turn to the experience of socialist societies founded by Marxist leaderships, and consider how they are responding to the pressure for democratic rights from their own people. It is an historical fact that such societies, almost without exception, emerged in countries which previously had no vehicle for peaceful transformation available.

​The Russian Revolution of 1917 against the Tsar took place against a background of war in a country without an established parliamentary democracy. The same was true of Yugoslavia, where the partisans liberated the country from the Germans and established a socialist state. In China the Communists fought against the Japanese invaders and the forces of Chiang Kai Shek who was backed by the USA. In Cuba socialism also emerged out of civil war against the dictator Batista. The socialist regimes in Eastern Europe came into being as a result of the war and were imposed by the USSR as part of its security policy to protect itself from attack after three invasions from the West — 1914, 1920 and 1941 — which had cost the lives of well over 20 million people.

All that is a matter of historical record and those who took power by force could lay claim to the same legitimacy as was asserted by the American colonists in 1776, or the French revolutionaries in 1789. And this is the route followed by colony after colony as they won that freedom from undemocratic imperialist control.

But the Stalinist distortion of Marxism created a political system that followed revolution based upon the theory of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. This followed on from a period under Lenin when Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were actually both represented in the Soviets. Under Stalin’s doctrine, the overthrow of capitalism by the working class had been undertaken by the Communist Party as the self-styled leadership of that class.

However, this historical explanation of how the revolutions were planned and executed at the time does not end the matter. For socialism achieved by revolution lacks the explicit endorsement of the people, which is what democracy is about, and the Communist Parties which control such countries by limiting or denying basic rights of political expression, assembly, organisation and debate, and the right of the people to remove their governments, are open to the abuses of civil rights which occured under Stalin and continue today. Governments ruling by force — whether socialist or not — are also permanently vulnerable to violent upheaval and the task of liberalisation is difficult. And in a world of rapid communications, undemocratic regimes will find it increasingly hard to survive.

​Events in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, where Soviet troops were sent in to restore order after expressions of popular discontent, revealed this vulnerability, and undermined the claim of the Communist Parties there to enjoy majority support. Similarly, the imposition of martial law in Poland, though it may, in practice, have averted a Soviet invasion, has also confirmed the public unacceptability in Poland of the Communist regime as it was. The Western media make much of this, whilst ignoring the dictatorships which exist under the protection of the West.

But above all, in the USSR itself, 65 years after the revolution, the maintenance of a government by state power — even when three generations have been born under communism, and only the very oldest people remember pre-revolutionary days — suggests, to outsiders, that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union does not itself believe that its leadership would receive popular endorsement. Yet the very refreshment of socialism must require at least a genuine public choice between alternative views as to how it should develop.

​Socialism as a system is greatly weakened, worldwide, if it is seen to rest anywhere upon state enforcement. The forces of capital in the West have concentrated their attack upon democratic socialism — to good effect — by suggesting, quite falsely, that what is being advocated in the West involves the imposition of a Soviet-style regime upon our society and that the first election won by socialists would also be the last. They know it is not true, and it is a sign of the strength of socialist ideas that they have to pretend that they believe it.

The British labour movement not only accepts the democratic process but claims, correctly, to have created it. We will never accept a socialism that is imposed.

​The Soviet Union’s control of Eastern Europe — entrenched in the Brezhnev doctrine — is in fact based on security considerations for the USSR. If the pressure for political freedom is denied in these countries, and there are popular uprisings, then the Soviet Union may believe its security depends upon an intervention to suppress them, with the most serious international consequences up to, and including, the risk of nuclear war.

Therefore, for practical reasons, a framework for the liberalisation of Eastern Europe should be developed which does not carry with it any threat to Soviet security. It is for this reason that the campaigns for European nuclear disarmament, a new pan-European security system to replace NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and for more economic cooperation between East and West, are so important. Liberalisation can only occur in an atmosphere of detente.

The emergence of Eurocommunism in Western Europe offers us fresh hope here.

The Italian Communist Party, for example, which accepts the need for a pluralistic political system, that guarantees the right of the electorate to replace communist governments in free elections, brings Eurocommunists back towards the mainstream of democratic socialism, and provides a direct link with the libertarian Marxists in the communist world.

Here too, the British Communist Party and its programme The British Road to Socialism can be seen as pointing in a similar direction, and differentiates the party from its earlier and uncritical pro-Soviet stance which isolated it from the democractic traditions of the British labour movement.

​In conclusion, may I make it clear that I believe a reconciliation of Marxism and political democracy is possible, necessary and urgent, if humanity is to solve the pressing problems which confront it and avoid the risk of war. But if we are to achieve that synthesis, there is much that needs to be done, and I suggest a draft agenda that we might use to guide us.

First, the acceptance in the West of the importance of the socialist analysis of society within which Marxism must be seen as playing a key role.

Second, the acceptance in the socialist societies of the principle of democratic accountability and full political rights as central to the practice of socialism.

Third, the beginning of a regular series of structured national and international dialogues between socialists, Eurocommunists and Marxists of all schools of thought, to explore the relationship between democracy and Marxism and the experience of actually existing socialist parties and socialist societies.

Fourth, the reunification of the world trade union movement, which was divided during the cold war when the ICFTU broke away from the WFTU, partly to permit a reunited world trade union movement to enter into the dialogue described above.

To attempt these tasks will meet with powerful opposition even though they represent a very modest start for a process that will need to continue over a long period.

For it is essential that an understanding of Marxism should become more widely available to strengthen the worldwide democratic movement, and that the practice of democracy be harnessed to protect the integrity of Marxism from the corruption of power which is inescapable under any system of government which seeks to impose itself without popular consent.

If the peoples of the world are to end exploitation, reduce the levels of violence, avoid nuclear war, and enter into their rightful inheritance at last, we must achieve a synthesis of socialism and freedom and work for it here and now.

​The collapse of the Labour vote has been a direct result of the party failing its founding principles, and the support of its traditional supporters. The seeds of decline were sown following Tony Blair as leader under the banner of New Labour, from which time the party lost its moral compass, the result of which only the Tories and the right-wing have ever benefited.

The current bloodletting within the party is part of a blame game in which Jeremy Corbyn has become a scapegoat for the failure of the party membership, who have prioritised remaining in a neoliberal EU over principles and economic ideology. The insidious politics of the far right is able to exploit a vacuum of electoral participation by a confused electorate.

It is against this background the Labour Party membership will have to assert with some urgency the revising of the principles on which it was founded in creating the politics of economic and social equality. Failure to do so will compound continued decline in electoral support. But to do this Labour members must carry out their own internal revolution and reclaim the Party or stay wedded to an authoritarian oligarchy in perpetuity. -Paul Knaggs.

Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism provides the key to understanding the environmental catastrophe we’re witnessing, and to gaining a clearer picture of what’s needed to repair our damaged relationship with the Earth.
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Marx’s concern with environmental questions grew from his understanding of how humanity is bound to the natural world by a thousand threads. “Man lives from nature”, he wrote in the 1844 Manuscripts, “and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man’s physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature”.
In the same passage, Marx describes nature as humanity’s “inorganic body”. What he means by this, is that when we’re thinking about the things comprised in our existence, we should include, alongside our own bodies, all the objects of nature to which we relate ourselves—those that sustain us in a directly physical, biological sense, and those that nourish us mentally, such as objects of beauty and so on.

If we don’t have access to healthy food, fresh air and water and so on, our physical health will suffer as a result. And the lack of any capacity to enjoy the beauty of nature—through our contact with it in either work or recreation—will affect our mental health.

Every individual must exist in a constant state of interaction with nature to survive, but the particular form this relationship takes can’t be understood in abstraction from the kind of society in which we live. The task for Marx, then, became to explain how and why human society had developed through the course of history, and in particular to understand the destructive dynamics of the capitalist system that was rapidly emerging at the time.

The key to this, for Marx, lay in an analysis of what he called the “social relations of production”—the way in which, in any society, people come together and labour to produce the things we need to survive. To the extent that there is a theory of human nature in Marx, it is this: our essence is to labour collectively to shape the world around us in a way that satisfies our needs.

For most of humanity’s 200-300,000-year history, we have maintained quite a balanced and sustainable relationship to nature. In Australia, for example, Indigenous societies employed sophisticated land management techniques to maintain a healthy and productive landscape for tens of thousands of years before the British invasion of 1788.

And although, wherever human societies have emerged, there has been some impact on the natural environment in which they are situated, it wasn’t really until a few hundred years ago that the scale of the destruction began to become a significant issue. As Marx put it in his notes for Capital, which were later published as the Grundrisse:

​“It isn’t the unity of living and active humanity with the natural, inorganic conditions of their metabolic exchange with nature, and hence their appropriation of nature, which requires explanation or is the result of a historic process, but rather the separation between these inorganic conditions of human existence and this active existence, a separation which is completely posited only in the relation of wage labour and capital.”

The term “metabolic rift” was coined by John Bellamy Foster in his book Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, published in 2000, as a way of bringing together the various elements of Marx’s account of the rupture in relations between human society and the natural world under capitalism.

Although Marx didn’t talk directly about a “metabolic rift”, he frequently used the German word Stoffwechsel, which translates as metabolism (literally “material exchange”). As today, the word in Marx’s time primarily was used in the context of biology and chemistry to describe the circulation and exchange of nutrients, waste and so on in the human body and other living things. But it was also, from the 1850s onwards, increasingly taken up by those, like Marx, trying to understand the functioning of society.

It’s easy to see how the idea of metabolism, or “material exchange”, can be applied in this context. Marx saw human labour as a kind of process of metabolism in which the raw materials of nature are worked up into forms that are useful for human beings. In Capital, Marx described human labour as:

“... first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces that belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs.”

Human labour acts on nature in a way that’s analogous with the action of the human body on the food that we eat. For instance, just like a tree that is transformed into a wooden shack, so, for example, an apple that we eat goes through a series of transformations until it is broken down into nutrients to be absorbed into our cells, along with waste to be excreted and so on.

Marx applied the idea of metabolism not only to the role of labour in shaping the natural world. As well as the metabolic interaction between human society and nature, there is a metabolism within society itself. So in the Grundrisse he writes that the circulation and exchange of commodities within capitalism can also be understood as a kind of metabolism. “Insofar as the process of exchange transfers commodities from hands in which they are non-use-values to hands in which they are use-values, it is a process of social metabolism”, he wrote.

The circulation of the products of labour within a society can be understood by analogy with the circulation of blood within the human body. In a healthy body, the blood transports oxygen, nutrients and so on to where they are needed—keeping the body functioning at full capacity. So too in a healthy society, the exchange of products should function to ensure that everyone is able to live a decent life.
What, then, is the metabolic rift? In the simplest terms, it is a breakdown in the healthy functioning of the metabolic process human society depends on, in both its external aspect—the exchange of material between human society and nature—and its internal aspect—the circulation of material within society.

In pre-class societies, the material exchange that occurs via our labour on the natural world happened in such a way that the two ends of the process—nature and the useful things we produce from it—were related in a more or less direct and transparent way. The raw materials required for the production of basic necessities like food, shelter and so on were mostly sourced from the immediate vicinity of settlements.

In this context, it would be very obvious if the metabolism had broken down in some way—say by an area of land being eroded due to the excessive clearing of trees. And it would be similarly clear if the process of exchange of goods within the community broke down, and the health of one section of the population began to suffer as a result.
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With the emergence of class society, when a minority of the population came to live off the surplus produced by others, the link between the natural basis of human society and the lives of those who made the important decisions became more tenuous.

As Marx sees it, however, it’s only with the emergence of capitalism from the seventeenth century onwards that the link is severed completely. Even the wealthiest of feudal lords still had some connection to the land. Their power was bound with a particular estate. As Marx himself put it in a note, “[T]here still exists [under feudalism] the semblance of a more intimate connection between the proprietor and the land than that of mere material wealth. The estate is individualised with its lord: it has his rank, is baronial or ducal with him, has his privileges, his jurisdiction, his political position etc. It appears as the inorganic body of its lord”.
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If the feudal lord failed to manage the land sustainably, if he logged all the forests, poisoned the waterways and so on, he would undermine not only the source of his material wealth, but his identity and being as a lord.

The alienation of the land—its reduction to the status of property that can be bought and sold—is what for Marx constitutes the foundation stone of the capitalist system. The wealth and power of the capitalist class doesn’t depend on their possession of this or that particular piece of property, but rather on their control over capital. Capital can include physical property, such as farmland, machinery, factories, offices and so on, but it is by its very nature fluid and transferable. If a capitalist buys up some land and then destroys it, they can simply take the profits they’ve made from it and move their money elsewhere.

At the same time as it completely severs any semblance of connection with the land among the ruling class, capitalism also severs it among workers. The peasants under feudalism had a direct and transparent dependence on the land for their subsistence. But with this came a degree of independence that isn’t afforded to workers under capitalism. The peasants had to give up a portion of their produce to the lord, but outside of that they were relatively free to labour as it best suited them. And no matter how unfree they were in a political sense, their capacity to sustain themselves was at least guaranteed by their direct access to the land and their possession of the tools necessary to work it.

For capitalism to be put on firm footing, this direct relationship of the peasants to the land had to be severed. They were, over a number of centuries, forcibly “freed” from the land in order that they could be “free” to be employed in the rapidly expanding capitalist industries. Workers, for Marx, are defined by their lack of ownership of the means of production. They are no longer dependent on the land for their subsistence, but rather on the preparedness of a capitalist to give them a job and pay them a wage.

Even if they might still maintain a more or less direct relationship with nature in their work, they have no control over or stake in this at all. Their dependence is on the wage they receive, rather than on, for example, the continuing productivity of the land on which they work.
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Many workers under capitalism are, of course, concerned with the destruction of the environment. But unlike with the peasantry under feudalism, whose need to maintain a sustainable relationship with the natural world is clear and immediate, the question of environmental protection under capitalism doesn’t appear, on the surface, to relate to our immediate material needs at all.

This combination of factors—the capitalist class not having any real incentive to protect the environment, and the working class having no control over it—lies at the heart of capitalism’s unique destructiveness. The “logic” of capitalism is one in which maintaining the health of society’s metabolism—either externally in its relationship with nature, or internally in its distribution of goods among the population—only features to the extent that it assists the accumulation of wealth by the ruling class.

The one thing the capitalist class cares about above all else is profit. No matter what the consequences, whether on the natural environment, human health or anything else, if business owners can continue to expand their pool of capital, they will see it as a success. And, due to their lack of means of production, and their dependence on selling their labouring capacities to a capitalist in exchange for a wage, workers have been harnessed to the same destructive wagon.

To understand the idea of the metabolic rift better, it will help to provide some examples. For Marx and Engels, writing when capitalism was still only in its infancy, the increasing split between the country and the rapidly growing cities illustrated the point most clearly. In volume 3 of Capital Marx explained that capitalism:
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“reduces the agricultural population to an ever-decreasing minimum and confronts it with an ever-growing industrial population crammed together in large towns; in this way it produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself. The result of this is the squandering of the vitality of the soil, which is carried by trade far beyond the bounds of a single country”.

Prior to the emergence of capitalism, the productive life of society was more dispersed through a patchwork of villages and towns. There was no clear divide between the city and the country as there is today. One of the consequences of this was that the nutrients that went into agricultural production could easily be recycled back into the soil from human, animal and plant waste.

Once capitalism’s drive to profit kicked in, however, the imperative was to centralise production to increase efficiency and reduce the costs of labour and so on. Industry became more and more concentrated in urban centres. The waste from this human mass, instead of being returned to the soil, was simply dumped into rivers or the sea. As well as making cities like London unbearably smelly and disease ridden, this dynamic also led to declining soil fertility, which worsened as the nineteenth century progressed.

Farmers became desperate to find alternative sources of nutrients to regenerate the soil. The first to go were the bones from historic battlefields like Waterloo. Then, following the discovery that guano—more commonly known as bird shit—contained high levels of nitrogen and phosphorus crucial for crop growth, there was a global scramble to secure supplies of this precious resource. In 1856, the US passed the Guano Island Act by which it annexed and occupied more than 100 islands known to be rich in guano.

So the disruption of one aspect of the metabolism between human society and nature led immediately to disruption in other areas. With the focus on short-term profits, the idea that you would build a system to recycle waste from the cities back into the agricultural areas didn’t even enter the frame. Why would you invest in a scheme like that when you could make money from importing guano from distant Pacific islands? Marx summed up the situation, again in the third volume of Capital, arguing that “the moral of history ... is that rational agriculture is incompatible with the capitalist system”.

Looking at the situation today, it’s hard to argue with this. Massive amounts of labour and resources are spent artificially maintaining the nutrient levels of soils, and more and more forests and other crucial ecosystems are swallowed up in the constant drive to expand agricultural production. Meanwhile most of the nutrient-rich waste produced in our cities continues to be thrown away.

Perhaps the best example of the metabolic rift is climate change. The centrality of fossil fuels to capitalism is, for a start, related to the drive to liberate capital accumulation entirely from any natural constraints. Fossil fuels had the advantage, over other nineteenth century sources of energy, of being easily transportable, and being able to be switched and used at will. This meant production could take place 24 hours a day, independently of climatic conditions or any other external factor, and could be geographically located wherever it was most advantageous to the factory owners.
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This is one of the main developments that drove the rapid expansion of cities. Instead of having to set up in regional areas, where local traditions of working-class solidarity could be hard to break, industry could be clustered together in one place, forcing masses of workers to relocate and creating huge pools of unorganised labour that could be exploited at will.

Even putting aside the question of global warming, which of course didn’t figure in Marx’s time, fossil fuels might, in a society with a healthy external and internal metabolism, have been rejected because of their many other damaging aspects. But with the emergence of capitalism, the only goal that came to matter was the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the bosses. And there has perhaps never been a commodity so profitable for the capitalist class as fossil fuels.

Today, the metabolic rift that underlies the climate crisis is even clearer. Scientists have known about the damaging consequences of the burning of fossil fuels for 50 years. And we have long had the technology to begin a transition to alternative sources of power such as wind and solar. Despite this, and despite the increasingly urgent warnings of scientists over the last decades, global emissions are higher than ever, and millions around the world are already suffering from an increasing frequency of extreme weather, droughts, bushfires and so on.

What explains the failure to act? A big part of it is that those with their hands on the levers of power are the people who are reaping all the benefits from the continued use of fossil fuels, while those who are feeling the most effects of climate change have the least power to do anything about it.

Never has there existed a class of people so cut off from nature as the capitalists and their political servants. Why would we expect them to care much about the damage they are causing when their immense wealth can act as a shield against many of the consequences of their actions?

There is perhaps no better expression of the physical and spiritual chasm that has opened up between today’s capitalists and the natural world on which their wealth ultimately depends, than the fad—personified in Elon Musk—for the colonisation of space. It’s telling that the idea of building a new civilisation on Mars is so popular with these people. They have so little sense of their connection to or care for the natural world that the idea of an interplanetary escape seems more realistic and attractive than any real effort to fix the problems we have on Earth.

​How did Marx foresee the healing of the rift between human society and nature? That this rift is grounded in the fundamental economic structure of society means, obviously, that a bit of tinkering here and there won’t be enough. Marx was unambiguous on this point: to heal our relationship with the Earth, we need revolution. At the heart of this revolution will be the destruction of the system of private property, in which the natural environment is reduced to the status of a commodity to be bought and sold. The healing of the metabolic rift begins with the return of the land, and the means of production required to work on it, into the hands of the working class.
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Marx’s vision of socialism was of a society centred on the collective, democratic control by workers of the process of production, and of the distribution of goods. Translating this into the language of metabolism, we might say: the conscious, democratic control over society’s internal and external metabolism, a control which would enable us quickly to identify problems and to adjust our practice accordingly.

In a socialist society, for example, the barriers to a global shift away from fossil fuels would disappear. There would be no entrenched economic interests fighting tooth and nail to protect their profits. We could have a genuine discussion and debate about the best way forward, informed by the latest science, instead of the mess of misinformation and corporate propaganda that we’re bombarded with today. And we would be able to mobilise immense new resources that in capitalism are tied to useless or destructive industries such as the military, advertising, policing, high-end housing and so on.

Instead of everything being geared towards the generation of ever greater profits, we would be thinking about what’s good for society. And for Marx, a healthy metabolism—which ensures both a sustainable exchange of material between human society and nature, and the circulation of goods to provide everyone with a decent life—was the key to a healthy society. Marx summed up his view of the relationship between human society and nature as follows:

“From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by another. Even an entire society, a nation or all simultaneously existing societies taken together are not owners of the Earth, they are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations, as good heads of households.”

In Marx’s time, the rift between human society and nature was still in its early stages. Today, it has deepened and widened to the point where it threatens global catastrophe. But there is nothing inevitable about the slide towards environmental collapse. Most people gain nothing from the capitalist status quo. Together, we can bring down this rotten system and build a socialist society in its place.

“Well, Fred, are you ready to begin with the Doctrine of the Mean?”

“Yes, but what is its background?”

“It is one of the Four Books (Analects, Mencius, Great Learning, Doctrine of the Mean) that Zhu Xi (1130-1200) selected as the basis of Confucianism and was used in all the ‘civil service’ tests in China up to modern times. Zhu was in the Song Dynasty [960-1279 AD]. Just as the Great Learning it was originally part of the Book of Rites which, before Zhu Xi’s time, was one of the Five Books which was the original canon of Confucianism (Spring and Autumn Annals, Book of Rites, Book of Changes, Book of History, Book of Odes.) Chenyang Li in Great Thinkers of the Eastern World, says the four main points in this work are 1) heaven and man are one; 2) following our heaven endowed nature constitutes virtue; 3) sincerity is the way of Heaven and of human morality; 4) the way to exemplify the Mean is to become a ‘superior person’ by following the moral ideal. I hope this agrees with what Chan, Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy, has to say!”

“Chan is basically in agreement with that. He says The Great Learning deals with social and political matters, while the Doctrine of the Mean is a discourse on psychology and metaphysics. The Great Learning discusses the mind but not human nature, whereas with the Doctrine of the Mean the opposite is true. The Great Learning emphasizes method and procedure, whereas the Doctrine of the Mean concentrates on reality. The Great Learning is generally rational in tone, but the Doctrine of the Mean is religious and mystical.’”

“From my point of view that makes it less important for our age since we must stress the rational at the expense of the religious and mystical. It is the religious and mystical that is at the root of all the present social upheaval associated with religious conflict and justifications for war. That is to say, the real economic factors responsible for the sad conditions of the present world order are obfuscated and hidden because so many people are under the darkness of religious and mystical beliefs. Therefore, I think Marxists would believe the Great Learning is a much more contemporary book.”

“Interesting comment Karl. Now back to Chan. This is how ‘human nature’ is portrayed in the Doctrine of the Mean : ‘Human nature, endowed by heaven, is revealed through the states of equilibrium and harmony, which are themselves the “condition of the world” and the “universal path.” The Way of Heaven transcends time, space, substance, and motion, and is at the same time unceasing, eternal, and evident.’ And maybe you should not be so critical of it as Chan also points out that it ‘is a philosophical work, perhaps the most philosophical in the whole body of ancient Confucian literature.’”

“You’re right. I spoke too soon. I should give my views after the discussion, not at the start!”

“Well, some modesty at last! Note the Chinese title of this work: zhong yong. Chan says it is translated as ‘mean’ and separately zhong means ‘central’ and yong means ‘universal harmony’. “

“So, this book could just as well be called the Central Universal Harmony . In fact, it has been given other names in translation. Chenyang Li mentions some of them such as The Golden Mean, The Golden Medium, The Mean-in-action, The Central Harmony, and my favorite, used by Ezra Pound, The Unwobbling Pivot.”

“Anyway, Chan says that these terms ‘taken together [mean] that there is harmony in human nature and that this harmony underlies our moral being and prevails throughout the universe. In short, man and Nature form a unity. Here is an early expression of the theory that was to dominate Chinese thought throughout its history.’”

“A big problem. It is true that humanity is a part of Nature so we are law governed as is everything else in Nature--that is the ‘harmony’--but our moral systems do not seem to be something in Nature in quite the same way. It remains to be seen how a moral system can base itself on the laws of Nature and use this for its justification.”

“Finally, Chan says, ‘It is obvious that the Doctrine of the Mean represents an advance over Confucius. It and the Great Learning seem to embody two different ancient Confucian tendencies, just as later Mencius and Xunzi represented two different schools of thought.’”

“Or at least two different styles of Confucianism, Fred. “

“We begin the book with a comment of Zhu Xi: ‘Master Cheng Yi (1033-1107) said, “By zhong (central) is meant what is not one-sided, and by yong (ordinary) is meant what is unchangeable. Zhong is the correct path of the world and yong is the definite principle of the world.” “This work represents the central way in which the doctrines of the Confucian school have been transmitted.”’

“This is the Neo-Confucian view at least. But I will still consult the Analects for what I think is the original Confucian view!”

“This is from Chapter One of the book: ‘What Heaven (Tien, Nature {vide Spinoza}) imparts to man is called human nature. To follow our nature is called the Way (Dao). Cultivating the Way is called education. The Way cannot be separated from us for a moment. What can be separated from us is not the Way. Therefore the superior man is cautious over what he does not see and apprehensive over what he does not hear. There is nothing more visible than what is hidden and nothing more manifest than what is subtle. Therefore the superior man is watchful over himself when he is alone. Before the feelings of pleasure, anger, sorrow, and joy are aroused it is called equilibrium (zhong, centrality, mean).’ Equilibrium is called the foundation of the world, and when the emotions are aroused they must be measured and kept in balance--this is called ‘harmony.’”

“This is just like Plato in the Republic, Fred. Only Plato calls it ‘justice’ rather than ‘harmony’, but the points are very similar.”
“The book goes on to show that these are the views of Confucius. ‘Zhòngní (Confucius) said, “The superior man [exemplifies] the Mean (zhong yong).”’ And, ‘the superior man maintains harmony [in his nature and conduct] and does not waver. How unflinching is his strength!’”

“This does not sound different from the Confucius we encountered in the Analects.” “Zisi, according to Zhu Xi, compared Heaven and the ‘superior man’ thusly, ‘Great as Heaven and earth are, men still find something in them with which to be dissatisfied. Thus with [the Way of] the superior man, if one speaks of its greatness, nothing in the world can contain it, and if one speaks of its smallness, nothing in the world can split it.’ This was from chapter 12, and Zhu Xi says this vein of thought (‘the Way cannot be departed from’) is the subject for the next eight chapters (through number 20).”

“So, read some of the highlights from these chapters and we will see if it is so!”

“OK, from 13: ‘If we take an axe handle to hew another axe handle and look askance from the one to the other, we may still think the pattern is far away. Therefore the superior man governs men as men, in accordance with human nature, and as soon as they change [what is wrong], he stops. Conscientiousness (Zhong) and altruism (shu) are not far from the Way. What you do not wish others to do to you, do not do to them.’”

“I guess that is ‘the Way.’ Confucius’ version of the ‘Golden Rule’ must be followed not to depart from it! The Negative Golden Rule.”

“This is said of the ‘superior man’ in chapter 14: ‘He rectifies himself and seeks nothing from others, hence he has no complaint to make. He does not complain against Heaven above or blame men below. Thus it is that the superior man lives peacefully and at ease and waits for his destiny (ming, Mandate of Heaven, fate), while the inferior man takes to dangerous courses and hopes for good luck.’”

“Actually, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Who is this speaker, anyway?”

“Zisi, the pupil of Confucius, also his grandson.”

“I thought so. He might be taking Confucius too literally. After all, Confucius did not live in Lu at peace and at ease but went off trekking all over China gathering students and teaching his doctrine!”

“A good point Karl. I would like to know what you say about this so called quote from Confucius given by Zisi.”

“Lets have it!”

“Its from chapter 17. Zisi quotes Confucius as saying, ‘he who possesses great virtue will certainly attain to corresponding position, to corresponding wealth, to corresponding fame, and to corresponding long life. For Heaven, in the production of things, is sure to be bountiful to them, according to their natural capacity.... Therefore he possesses great virtue will surely receive the appointment of Heaven.’” 

“You can be sure, Fred, that whoever wrote this was not Confucius but some boot licking functionary of the Court. After having been kicked around from feudal court to feudal court in his wanderings about China trying to find a position to put his social theories into practice, can you imagine his coming up with ‘great virtue’ leads to a ‘great position’? Or, after the premature death of his most beloved student, Yan Hui, would Confucius spout off about the rewards of ‘great virtue’ resulting in ‘long life?’ No! I am afraid that, as the Analects indicate, Confucius was all too familiar with the tragic sense of life to have come up with this fabrication attributed to him by Zisi. And it is no good reflection on Zhu Xi that he passed over this without comment!”

“If it is the case that Zisi is actually the compiler of the Doctrine of the Mean then I agree."

“That is true too. I don’t want to suggest that this passage was fabricated by the grandson of Confucius! This issue will crop up again when we get into discussions of philosophers in the Han Dynasty and the consequences of all that book burning we mentioned under the Qin Dynasty dictatorship.”

“Here is a quote from chapter 20. Confucius allegedly speaking: ‘government is comparable to a fast growing plant. Therefore the conduct of the government depends upon the men.... Humanity (ren) is [the distinguishing characteristic of] man, and the greatest application of it is in being affectionate towards relatives. Righteousness (yi) is the principle of setting things right and proper, and the greatest application of it is in honoring the worthy.’”

“I think if we refer back to Mozi we will see the problem with this concept of ren which should be a little more universal than indicated. Couldn’t this formulation be a justification for nepotism rather than merit? Again, I doubt it is really from Confucius.”

“Chan makes the following comment about this passage. ‘The sentence “Humanity is [the distinguishing characteristic of] man” is perhaps the most often quoted on the subject of humanity (ren). In Chinese it is ‘ren is ren,’ the first ren meaning humanity and the second referring to man. It is not just a pun, but an important definition of the basic Confucian concept of humanity, for to Confucianism, the virtue of humanity is meaningless unless it is involved in actual human relationships.’”

“I don’t get the difference between ‘humanity’ and ‘man’ in ‘humanity is man.’ That is like ‘a small step for man, a giant leap for mankind.’ It’s the same as A = A. But Chan’s comment is still useful. It at least points out how the Chinese think about the concept of ren.”

“There is more to this chapter Karl. Confucian formulae as it were. Here is one, ‘...the ruler must not fail to cultivate his personal life, he must not fail to serve his parents. Wishing to serve his parents, he must not fail to know man. Wishing to know man, he must not fail to know heaven.’ And: ‘There are five universal ways [in human relations], and the way by which they are practiced are three. The five are those governing the relationship between ruler and minister, between father and son, between husband and wife, between elder and younger brothers, and those on the intercourse between friends. These five are universal paths in the world. Wisdom, humanity, and courage, these three are the universal virtues. The way by which they are practiced is one.’ Nothing about sisters or daughters here. O tempora, o mores.”

“These are certainly dated and show how Confucianism is embedded in the old feudal order. If we updated the ‘five’ to the modern capitalist order we would have the relationship between the rulers and the ruled, between employers and employees, between men and women, between family members, and between friends and strangers. Something like that I suppose. The three universal virtues would remain unchanged.”

“Very good. Now for something called ‘the Nine Standards’: ‘There are nine standards by which to administer the empire, its states, and the families [feudal lords]. They are: cultivating the personal life, honoring the worthy, being affectionate to relatives, being respectful toward the great ministers, identifying oneself with the welfare of the whole body of officers, treating the common people as one’s own children, attracting the various artisans, showing tenderness to strangers from far countries, and extending kindly and awesome influence on the feudal lords.’ And this position is further emphasized a few passages later: ‘There are nine standards by which to govern the empire, its states, and the families, but the way by which they are followed is one. In all matters if there is preparation they will succeed; if there is no preparation they will fail. If what is to be said is determined beforehand, there will be no stumbling. If the business to be done is determined beforehand there will be no difficulty. If action to be taken is determined beforehand, there will be no trouble. And if the way to be pursued is determined beforehand, there will be no difficulties.’ This can be summed up in the following five steps which Chan says ‘could have come from John Dewey.’ “Study it (the way to be sincere) extensively, inquire into it accurately, think it over carefully, sift it clearly, and practice it earnestly.’”

“It is interesting that Chan mentions Dewey the American pragmatist. Dewey was very popular in China in the early 20th Century. Let me read this passage from Reese [Dictionary of Religion and Philosophy] about Dewey’s five steps of inquiry and judge for yourself how these would apply to the study of how to be ‘sincere.’ ‘Inquiry, properly speaking, begins in situations which are indeterminate, disturbed, troubled, ambiguous, obscure, or full of conflict. It is the object of inquiry to transform the indeterminate situation into one which is determinate. Given such a situation, and such an outcome, the intervening steps outlined by Dewey are: (a) locating and defining the problem of the situation; insight is as important in stating the problem as in any subsequent step; (b) setting out the relevant possible solutions to this problem, an “either-or” stage; (c) developing the consequences of the possible solutions, an “if-then” stage; (d) relating these developed alternatives to further observation and experiment; (e) concluding with the alternative which unifies the situation.’[p.128]

“I can see how Chan might think Confucianism could follow these five steps except, perhaps, for experiment which doesn’t play much of a role in the Doctrine of the Mean.”

What’s next Fred?”

“This, from chapter 22, where we have the following sequence--being absolutely sincere = fully developing your nature = fully developing the nature of others = the same for the nature of things = if you can do those things, then you can help in the transformation and nourishing of Heaven and Earth--thus, ‘If they [they = those who became absolutely sincere et. seq.] can assist in the transforming and nourishing process of Heaven and Earth, they can thus form a trinity with Heaven and Earth.’ All of this, Chan comments, is ‘another way of saying the unity of man and Heaven or Nature, a doctrine which eventually assumed the greatest importance in Neo-Confucianism.’”

“Well, Neo-Confucianism is still a way off in our discussions. But this points out the central importance of ‘sincerity’ (zheng). Again the equivalence of Heaven = Nature reminds me of Spinoza. “

“Now these next views I know you will not want to accept as genuinely Confucian, neither do I, because when we discussed the Analects we found no trace of popular superstition or unbridled mysticism.”

“What are these views?”

“In chapter 24 we find Zisi speaking of omens and divination and such which the ‘sincere’ man will be especially able to interpret. ‘When calamity or blessing is about to come [for nations and families], it can surely know beforehand if it is good, and it can surely know beforehand if it is evil. Therefore he who has absolute sincerity is like a spirit.’”

“A spirit! The very sort of thing Confucius refused to speculate about! This is further evidence that original Confucianism has been corrupted in this work. We have to be very careful in discussing a work like this so that we can discern the layers of bogus from authentic Confucianism.”

“Perhaps you will accept chapter 25 as more genuine. ‘Sincerity means the completion of the self, and the Way is self-directing. Sincerity is the beginning and the end of things. Without sincerity there would be nothing. Therefore the superior man values sincerity. Sincerity is not only the completion of one’s own self, it is that by which all things are completed. The completion of the self means humanity. The completion of all things means wisdom. These are the character of the nature, and they are the way in which the internal and the external are united. Therefore whenever it is employed, it is done right.’”

“I don’t see a problem with this. Except to note that Fung [p.176] wonders if, in the passage you read, the terms ‘humanity’ [ren] and ‘wisdom,’ ‘should not be interchanged.’”

“Here is Chan’s comment: ‘In no other Confucian work is the Way (Dao) given such a central position. This self-directing Way seems to be the same as the Dao in Daoism. But the difference is great. As Qian Mu has pointed out [in his Si-shu shi-yi (Explanation of the Meaning of the Four Books), 1953], when the Daoists talk about Dao as being natural, it means that Dao is void and empty, whereas when Confucianists talk about Dao as being natural, they describe it as sincerity. This, according to him, is a great contribution of the Doctrine of the Mean. It should be pointed out that with Confucianists, “The Way is not far from man.” Contrary to the Dao of Daoism, the Confucian Dao is strongly humanistic.’ And I will end this passage with the first sentence of chapter 26: ‘Therefore absolute sincerity is ceaseless. Being ceaseless, it is lasting.’”

“So then, let’s forge on to chapter 27.”

“That chapter goes thusly: ‘Great is the Way of the sage!... It waits for the proper man before it can be put into practice. Therefore it is said, “Unless there is perfect virtue, the perfect way cannot be materialized.” Therefore man honors the moral nature and follows the path of study and inquiry.... He is earnest and deep and highly respects all propriety. Therefore when occupying a high position, he is not proud, and when serving in a low position, he is not insubordinate.”’

“This is certainly pro-sage! But I think we can ignore the idea that ‘perfect virtue’ and the ‘perfect way’ are involved with real sages or there wouldn’t be any! Fawning second rate Confucianists may go around thinking of Confucius as a perfect sage but we know that he made errors and mistakes and would be the first to admit as much.”

“Your theory that the sayings of Confucius in this work are sometimes bogus, as you earlier mentioned, gets a big boost from Chan in a footnote to Chapter 28.”

“What do you mean Fred? Let’s hear it.”

“Well, Confucius is quoted as saying something to the effect that the world has standard measurements and standard characters for writing, etc. Chan points out that this was not true in Confucius’ time but happened as a result of the Qin Dynasty [221-206 B.C.]. This means that parts of the Doctrine of the Mean are not older than that time.”

“Yes, that backs up my view about the Confucius quote in Chapter 17 that we discussed. Once you get a ‘feel’ for the Analects you can tell when some so-called Confucian quote doesn’t sound right. Even the Analects has some problems of authenticity, but it is the oldest layer of Confucian thought and I think the ‘real’ Confucius is to be located within its pages in so far as that is possible.”

“In chapter 29 we are told that in order to get rules and regulations, ceremonies, etc. adopted, the person who puts them forth must not be of humble or common origin. ‘The position not being honored does not command credence, and not being credited, the people will not follow them. Therefore the Way of the true ruler is rooted in his own person-
al life and has its evidence [in the following] of the common people.’”

“That isn’t very clear Fred. If the Way is rooted in personal life then ‘low position’ doesn’t have anything to do with it.”

“It goes on, ‘Since it [the Way] can wait for a hundred generations for a sage without a doubt, it shows that he knows [the principles of man]. Therefore every move he makes becomes the way of the world, every act of his becomes the model of the world, and every word he utters becomes the pattern of the world.’”

“That is just nonsensical ‘sage worship’ and is not in the true spirit of Confucius. This is obviously an attempt to establish Confucianism as some sort of official ideology in a post Qin world.”

“If you think that then you will love this encomium to the sage from Chapter 31:
All embracing and extensive as heaven and deep and unceasingly springing as an abyss!
He appears and all people respect him, speaks and all people believe him, acts and all people are pleased with him. Consequently his fame spreads overflowingly over the Middle Kingdom (China, the civilized world), and extends to barbarous tribes. Wherever ships and carriages reach, wherever the labor of man penetrates, wherever the heavens overshadow and the earth sustains, wherever the sun and the moon shine, and wherever frosts and dew fall, all who have blood and breath honor and love him. Therefore we say he is a counterpart of Heaven.

So there you have it Karl..”

“I see. This is the basis almost of a religion. There will be no sages like this. Maybe the Buddha would qualify but this work is too early for Buddhism to have influenced it.”

“I am going to finish up now with some quotes from Chapter 33. Get out your Book of Odes Karl, because there are some quotes from it in these passages.”

“I have it right here Fred.”

“'The Book of Odes says, "Over her brocaded robe, she wore a plain and simple dress, for she disliked the loudness of its color and patterns. Thus the way of the superior man is hidden but becomes more prominent every day, whereas the way of the inferior man is conspicuous but gradually disappears."’”

“This Ode (number 57) says just the opposite of what you read Fred, so some liberty was taken in this quote. Waley translates the passage as ‘A splendid woman and upstanding;/ Brocade she wore, over an unlined coat....’ It is reversed but this does not undermine the philosophical point.”

“’The Book of Odes says, “Although the fish dive and lie at the bottom it is still quite clearly seen.” Therefore the superior man examines his own heart and sees that there is nothing wrong there, and that he is not dissatisfied with himself.’”

“This is number 192 Fred:
The fishes are in the pond,
But they still cannot be happy,
For the deeper they dive,
The clearer they shine.
My grieved heart is deeply saddened
Thinking about the state’s vicious ways.

“Maybe there is more here than meets the eye. Is this an indication that the Confucian philosopher is not really happy serving an unjust state but still tries to do his best to live up to Confucian ideals? But it would be better to withdraw--or would it. This is the problem of giving up your post to protest injustice, but then having no influence, or staying in the hopes of being able to do a little good that otherwise would never get done.”

“’The Book of Odes says, “Though the ceiling looks down upon you, be free from shame even in the recesses of your own house.” Therefore the superior man is reverent without any movement and truthful without any words.’”

“That ode, Fred, is No. 256. In itself it is not as good as the use to which it has been put in your quote. Waley has:
When receiving gentlemen of your acquaintance
Let your countenance be peaceful and mild;
Never for an instance be disolute.
You are seen in your house;
You do not escape even in the curtained alcove.
Do not say: ‘Of the glorious ones
None is looking at me.’
A visit from the spirits
Can never be foreseen;
The better reason for not discussing them.”

“The quote you gave suggests that the philosopher should be upright both in public and private. This is just the proper attitude to have. The ode suggests that you should be so because the ‘spirits’ may be watching! This is a very primitive view and would not be consistent with what we know about Confucius’ attitude toward such supernatural balderdash. There is another part of this long ode that I like so I will share it with you. It is good advice and for the right reason this time. ‘Be always mild and good tempered./ A scratch on a scepter of white jade/ Can be polished away;/
A slip of the tongue/ Cannot ever be repaired.’”

“’The Book of Odes says, “Throughout the sacrifice not a word is spoken, and yet [the worshipers are influenced and transformed] without the slightest contention.” Therefore the superior man does not resort to rewards and the people are encouraged to virtue.’”

“This is ode 302 Fred, and á la Waley the quote is ‘Because we come in silence/ Setting all quarrels aside,/ They [the ancestors] make safe for us a ripe old age....’ I can’t see anything in this ode that makes it relevant to your quote. It is all about ‘rewards’ and sacrifices to the ancestors to get them to do things for the people making the offerings. The conclusion regarding the behavior of the ‘superior man’ and the resulting ‘virtue’ of the people just doesn’t seem related to the subject matter of the ode!”

“It seems odes are quoted out of context just to make a point Karl. At any rate our last quote goes ‘The Book of Odes says, “He does not display his virtue, and yet all the princes follow him.” Therefore when the superior man is sincere and reverent, the world will be in order and peace.’”

“Again, Waley’s version is somewhat different. ‘None are strong save the men of Zhou,/ Every land obeys them./ Nothing so glorious as their power,/ All princes imitate them.’ The power or virtue is on display, else how could they be imitated? Anyway, we are not going to have world peace and order because of the imitation by others of some role model Are you done with Chan?”

“Yes.”

“OK, here is the closing quote from Chenyang Li on the work. ‘The Doctrine of the Mean presents a Confucian system of moral metaphysics and philosophy of moral practice. This work has helped shape Chinese civilization for more than two thousand years, and there is no doubt that it will continue to do so in the foreseeable future.’ But I hope people will be a little more critical of some of its views along the lines I have suggested in this discussion.”

“What should we turn to next Karl?”

“I think we should spend some time on Yi Jing or Book of Changes. I know Chan doesn’t devote a lot of space to this work but it is very popular and we should read and discuss it.”

“Fine by me. A Marxist look at the Yi Jing”

To read the Confucius Dialogue click here.
To read the Mencius Dialogue click here.
To read the Xunzi Dialogue click here. 
​To read the Mozi Dialogue click here.
To read the Laozi Dialogue click here.
To read the Zhuangzi Dialogue click here.
To read the Gongsun Dialogue click here.
To read the Great Learning Dialogue click here.