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.

​Karl Marx’s 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy[i] represents one of the clearest reflections of the development of his and Engels’ thought. In what amounts to a short four and a half pages, Marx concisely exhibits the resulting conclusions of more than two decades worth of studies – from his first encounter with the economic question in 1842-3 via the polemic over landed property and forest theft, to the latest decade and a half painfully spent in the British Museum in London (except for the short interruption of the 48 revolutions) divided between the political writings for the New York Tribune and his economic studies for this text and for Capital, which this text is a dress rehearsal for. Although endless work can be done on these four and a half pages, I would like to limit myself to a clarification of the famed and famously misinterpreted spatial metaphor of the economic foundation and the political-legal superstructure. 

The most common misunderstanding of this metaphor posits that the economic foundation absolutely determines the ideological superstructure. In this view, all legal, political, philosophical, and religious structures and forms of consciousness are reducible to a reflection of the present economic situation. This perspective, held primarily by various vulgar Marxists of the second international and by critics of Marx (esp. the Weberian conception of Marxism), has come to be labeled as economically reductive and subsequently critiqued by dozens of 20th century Marxist, e.g., Althusser, Gramsci, Lukács, Lenin.

On the other hand, as a reaction to this economic reductionism, some Marxists have rejected the conception that the economic foundation influences the superstructure any more than the superstructure influences the economic. This perspective holds that there is a mutual conditioning of the two spheres, a dialectical interpenetrative relation between the opposing poles of the economic foundation and the ideological superstructure, where, as Marcuse states, “ideology comes to be embodied in the process of production itself.”[ii] The various reactions to economic determinism may take different forms, generally, what they share is a refusal to describe the influence of the economic realm on the ideological as ‘determinist’ – unless couched within a framework that equalizes the determination of the superstructure on the economic in a dialectical fancy of interpenetrative determination.   

Funny enough, Marx’s preface presents the relation between the economic and the superstructural with an ambiguity which seems to foreshadow both misinterpretations. First, he states that “the mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life,” then that “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness” (KM, 20-21). These two sentences chronologically follow each other but refer to two different (albeit synonymous) concepts for describing the relationship between material life and the ideological superstructure, viz., conditions and determines.

Although synonymous, ‘conditions’ carries conceptually an openness for a less rigid affecting relationship. To say that something conditions can range from meaning that it influences to determines. Given the conceptual ambiguity, it would seem that the economic reductionist group would read conditions qua determines while the group which reacts to the reductionists would read conditions qua influences. Between this binary of blue and red pill, can we ask for another color?

I think Marx offers us blue and red for us to make purple, indubitably the most beautiful color keeping with Plato. In essence, both misunderstandings are partly correct – the economic foundation determines the superstructure, but the superstructure can also influence the economic foundation.

As Althusser noted,[iii] in a seemingly contradictory manner the superstructure is determined by the economic base while nonetheless sustaining a “relative autonomy” in relation to it, effectively allowing it to have “reciprocal action” upon it. It is important to note that this Althusserian formulation is actually a reconceptualization of how Engels dealt with the issue in a 1890 letter response to Conrad Schmidt. In this letter from an aged Engels, we find an elucidation for this often-misunderstood spatial metaphor, and consequently, a clarification of the scope of rigidity the concept of determination carries in his and Marx’s works.
​
This letter, along with the others with which it was jointly published as Engels on Historical Materialism, gives a fascinating insight into how determination ought to be read in the Marxist tradition. Before Engels deals with the question of the economic foundation’s determination of the superstructure, he examines production’s (as in the moment, the “point of departure,”[iv] not the whole) determinative relation to the moment of exchange, and the moment of exchange’s determinative relation to the newly separated money market. He says,
​

​The same relational function of determination/conditioning is sustained with the economic foundation and the political superstructure (and afterwards with the legal, philosophical, and scientific aspects of the superstructure):
​

​These passages not only demonstrate with utmost clarity how a determinative relation can sustain within it a relative independence (what Althusser later calls ‘relative autonomy’) which allows the determined variable a capacity to react and influence that which determines it, but in demonstrating the translatability into various spheres of how this relationship functions, Engels is providing a general formulative understanding of the question on determination. In essence, the variable which determines (or conditions) sets the parameters for the determined variable, such that the determined variable presupposes the other’s boundaries for its activity. Concretely, the superstructure presupposes a specific economic foundation which has set a historical boundary on it. Within this determined space, the superstructure is relatively autonomous, enough so that it becomes capable of emergent qualities which can have a reactive or “counter-active influence” upon that which determines it.
​
Philosophically, the position can be labeled as compatibilist, i.e., there is a soft determination which allows for the conditioned autonomous expression of that which is determined. Therefore, although the determination of the economic foundation on the superstructure is not absolute (hard determinism), neither is it nonexistent. Engels critiques both positions: he argues it is “altogether pedantic to seek economic causes for all” things, asserting that in doing so Paul Barth is “contending against windmills,” while also criticizing the position which altogether either denies determination or places the primary source of determination on the wrong variable as participating in “ideological conceptions” whereby the real relationship is inverted and placed on its head, making one take the “effect for the cause.”

​Why do these misunderstandings arise? As the conclusion in Engels’ letter states,
​

Dear compañero ,[29]
Though belatedly, I am completing these notes in the course of my trip through Africa,[30] hoping in this way to keep my promise. I would like to do so by dealing with the theme set forth in the title above. I think it may be of interest to Uruguayan readers.

A common argument from the mouths of capitalist spokespeople, in the ideological struggle against socialism, is that socialism, or the period of building socialism into which we have entered, is characterized by the abolition of the individual for the sake of the state. I will not try to refute this argument solely on theoretical grounds but rather to establish the facts as they exist in Cuba and then add comments of a general nature. Let me begin by broadly sketching the history of our revolutionary struggle before and after the taking of power.

As is well known, the exact date of the beginning of the revolutionary struggle — which would culminate in January 1959 — was July 26, 1953. A group led by Fidel Castro attacked the Moncada barracks in Oriente Province on the morning of that day. The attack was a failure; the failure became a disaster; and the survivors ended up in prison, beginning the revolutionary struggle again after they were freed by an amnesty. In this process, in which there was only the germ of socialism, the individual was a fundamental factor. We put our trust in him — individual, specific, with a first and last name — and the triumph or failure of the mission entrusted to him depended on that individual's capacity for action. Then came the stage of guerrilla struggle. It developed in two distinct environments: the people, the still sleeping mass that had to be mobilized; and its vanguard, the guerrillas, the motor force of the mobilization, the generator of revolutionary consciousness and militant enthusiasm. This vanguard was the catalyzing agent that created the subjective conditions necessary for victory.

Here again, in the framework of the proletarianization of our thinking, of this revolution that took place in our habits and our minds, the individual was the basic factor. Every one of the combatants of the Sierra Maestra who reached an upper rank in the revolutionary forces has a record of outstanding deeds to his or her credit. They attained their rank on this basis

This was the first heroic period, and in which combatants competed for the heaviest responsibilities, for the greatest dangers, with no other satisfaction than fulfilling a duty. In our work of revolutionary education we frequently return to this instructive theme. In the attitude of our fighters could be glimpsed the man and woman of the future.[31]

On other occasions in our history the act of total dedication to the revolutionary cause was repeated. During the October [1962 missile] crisis and in the days of Hurricane Flora [in October 1963] we saw exceptional deeds of valor and sacrifice performed by an entire people.[32] Finding the method to perpetuate this heroic attitude in daily life is, from the ideological standpoint, one of our fundamental tasks.

In January 1959, the revolutionary government was established with the participation of various members of the treacherous bourgeoisie. The presence of the Rebel Army was the basic element constituting the guarantee of power. Serious contradictions developed right away. In the first instance, in February 1959, these were resolved when Fidel Castro assumed leadership of the government, taking the post of prime minister. This process culminated in July of the same year with the resignation under mass pressure of President Urrutia.[33]

In the history of the Cuban Revolution there now appeared a character, well defined in its features, which would systematically reappear: the mass. This multifaceted being is not, as is claimed, the sum of elements of the same type (reduced, moreover, to that same type by the ruling system), which acts like a flock of sheep. It is true that it follows its leaders, basically Fidel Castro, without hesitation. But the degree to which he won this trust results precisely from having interpreted the full meaning of the people's desires and aspirations, and from the sincere struggle to fulfill the promises he made.

The mass participated in the agrarian reform and in the difficult task of administering state enterprises;[34] it went through the heroic experience of the Bay of Pigs;[35] it was hardened in the battles against various groups of bandits armed by the CIA; it lived through one of the most important decisions of modern times during the October [missile] crisis; and today it continues to work for the building of socialism.

Viewed superficially, it might appear that those who speak of the subordination of the individual to the state are right. The mass carries out with matchless enthusiasm and discipline the tasks set by the government, whether in the field of the economy, culture, defense, sports, etc. The initiative generally comes from Fidel, or from the revolutionary leadership, and is explained to the people, who make it their own. In some cases the party and government take a local experience and generalize it, following the same procedure.

Nevertheless, the state sometimes makes mistakes. When one of these mistakes occurs, one notes a decline in collective enthusiasm due to the effect of a quantitative diminution in each of the elements that make up the mass. Work is paralyzed until it is reduced to an insignificant level. It is time to make a correction. That is what happened in March 1962, as a result of the sectarian policy imposed on the party by Aníbal Escalante.[36] Clearly this mechanism is not enough to ensure a succession of sensible measures. A more structured connection with the mass is needed, and we must improve it in the course of the coming years. But as far as initiatives originating in the upper strata of the government are concerned, we are currently utilizing the almost intuitive method of sounding out general reactions to the great problems we confront.

In this Fidel is a master. His own special way of fusing himself with the people can be appreciated only by seeing him in action. At the great public mass meetings one can observe something like the dialogue of two tuning forks whose vibrations interact, producing new sounds. Fidel and the mass begin to vibrate together in a dialogue of growing intensity until they reach the climax in an abrupt conclusion crowned by our cry of struggle and victory. The difficult thing to understand for someone not living through the experience of the revolution is this close dialectical unity between the individual and the mass, in which both are interrelated and, at the same time, in which the mass, as an aggregate of individuals, interacts with its leaders.

Some phenomena of this kind can be seen under capitalism, when politicians appear capable of mobilizing popular opinion. But when these are not genuine social movements — if they were, it would not be entirely correct to call them capitalist — they live only so long as the individual who inspires them, or until the harshness of capitalist society puts an end to the people's illusions.

In capitalist society individuals are controlled by a pitiless law usually beyond their comprehension. The alienated human specimen is tied to society as a whole by an invisible umbilical cord: the law of value.[37] This law acts upon all aspects of one's life, shaping its course and destiny. The laws of capitalism, which are blind and are invisible to ordinary people, act upon the individual without he or she being aware of it. One sees only the vastness of a seemingly infinite horizon ahead. That is how it is painted by capitalist propagandists who purport to draw a lesson from the example of Rockefeller[38] — whether or not it is true — about the possibilities of individual success. The amount of poverty and suffering required for a Rockefeller to emerge, and the amount of depravity entailed in the accumulation of a fortune of such magnitude, are left out of the picture, and it is not always possible for the popular forces to expose this clearly. (A discussion of how the workers in the imperialist countries gradually lose the spirit of working-class internationalism due to a certain degree of complicity in the exploitation of the dependent countries, and how this at the same time weakens the combativity of the masses in the imperialist countries, would be appropriate here, but that is a theme that goes beyond the scope of these notes.)

In any case, the road to success is portrayed as beset with perils — perils that, it would seem, an individual with the proper qualities can overcome to attain the goal. The reward is seen in the distance; the way is lonely. Furthermore, it is a contest among wolves. One can win only at the cost of the failure of others.

That is why it is very important to choose the right instrument for mobilizing the masses. Basically, this instrument must be moral in character, without neglecting, however, a correct use of the material incentive — especially of a social character.[41]

As I have already said, in moments of great peril it is easy to muster a powerful response with moral incentives. Retaining their effectiveness, however, requires the development of a consciousness in which there is a new scale of values. Society as a whole must be converted into a gigantic school.

In rough outline this phenomenon is similar to the process by which capitalist consciousness was formed in its initial period. Capitalism uses force, but it also educates people in the system. Direct propaganda is carried out by those entrusted with explaining the inevitability of class society, either through some theory of divine origin or a mechanical theory of natural law. This lulls the masses, since they see themselves as being oppressed by an evil against which it is impossible to struggle.

Next comes hope of improvement — and in this, capitalism differed from the earlier caste systems, which offered no way out. For some people, the principle of the caste system will remain in effect: The reward for the obedient is to be transported after death to some fabulous other world where, according to the old beliefs, good people are rewarded. For other people there is this innovation: class divisions are determined by fate, but individuals can rise out of their class through work, initiative, etc. This process, and the myth of the self-made man, has to be profoundly hypocritical: it is the self-serving demonstration that a lie is the truth.

In our case, direct education acquires a much greater importance.[42] The explanation is convincing because it is true; no subterfuge is needed. It is carried on by the state's educational apparatus as a function of general, technical and ideological education through such agencies as the Ministry of Education and the party's informational apparatus. Education takes hold among the masses and the foreseen new attitude tends to become a habit. The masses continue to make it their own and to influence those who have not yet educated themselves. This is the indirect form of educating the masses, as powerful as the other, structured, one.

But the process is a conscious one. Individuals continually feel the impact of the new social power and perceive that they do not entirely measure up to its standards. Under the pressure of indirect education, they try to adjust themselves to a situation that they feel is right and that their own lack of development had prevented them from reaching previously. They educate themselves.

In this period of the building of socialism we can see the new man and woman being born. The image is not yet completely finished — it never will be, since the process goes forward hand in hand with the development of new economic forms.

Aside from those whose lack of education makes them take the solitary road toward satisfying their own personal ambitions, there are those — even within this new panorama of a unified march forward — who have a tendency to walk separately from the masses accompanying them. What is important, however, is that each day individuals are acquiring ever more consciousness of the need for their incorporation into society and, at the same time, of their importance as the motor of that society.

They no longer travel completely alone over lost roads toward distant aspirations. They follow their vanguard, consisting of the party, the advanced workers, the advanced individuals who walk in unity with the masses and in close communion with them.[43] The vanguard has its eyes fixed on the future and its reward, but this is not a vision of reward for the individual. The prize is the new society in which individuals will have different characteristics: the society of communist human beings.

The road is long and full of difficulties. At times we lose our way and must turn back. At other times we go too fast and separate ourselves from the masses. Sometimes we go too slow and feel the hot breath of those treading at our heels. In our zeal as revolutionaries we try to move ahead as fast as possible, clearing the way. But we know we must draw our nourishment from the mass and that it can advance more rapidly only if we inspire it by our example.

Despite the importance given to moral incentives, the fact that there remains a division into two main groups (excluding, of course, the minority that for one reason or another does not participate in the building of socialism) indicates the relative lack of development of social consciousness. The vanguard group is ideologically more advanced than the mass; the latter understands the new values, but not sufficiently. While among the former there has been a qualitative change that enables them to make sacrifices in their capacity as an advance guard, the latter see only part of the picture and must be subject to incentives and pressures of a certain intensity. This is the dictatorship of the proletariat operating not only on the defeated class but also on individuals of the victorious class.

All of this means that for total success a series of mechanisms, of revolutionary institutions, is needed.[44] Along with the image of the multitudes marching toward the future comes the concept of institutionalization as a harmonious set of channels, steps, restraints and well-oiled mechanisms which facilitate the advance, which facilitate the natural selection of those destined to march in the vanguard, and which bestow rewards on those who fulfill their duties and punishments on those who commit a crime against the society that is being built.

This institutionalization of the revolution has not yet been achieved. We are looking for something new that will permit a complete identification between the government and the community in its entirety, something appropriate to the special conditions of the building of socialism, while avoiding at all costs transplanting the commonplaces of bourgeois democracy — such as legislative chambers, for example — into the society in formation.

Some experiments aimed at the gradual institutionalization of the revolution have been made, but without undue haste. The greatest brake has been our fear lest any appearance of formality might separate us from the masses and from the individual, which might make us lose sight of the ultimate and most important revolutionary aspiration: to see human beings liberated from their alienation.

Despite the lack of institutions, which must be overcome gradually, the masses are now making history as a conscious collective of individuals fighting for the same cause. The individual under socialism, despite apparent standardization, is more complete. Despite the lack of a perfect mechanism for it, the opportunities for self expression and making oneself felt in the social organism are infinitely greater.

It is still necessary to deepen conscious participation, individual and collective, in all the structures of management and production, and to link this to the idea of the need for technical and ideological education, so that the individual will realize that these processes are closely interdependent and their advancement is parallel. In this way the individual will reach total consciousness as a social being, which is equivalent to the full realization as a human creature, once the chains of alienation are broken. This will be translated concretely into the reconquering of one's true nature through liberated labor, and the expression of one's own human condition through culture and art.

In order to develop a new culture, work must acquire a new status.[45] Human beings-as-commodities cease to exist, and a system is installed that establishes a quota for the fulfillment of one's social duty. The means of production belong to society, and the machine is merely the trench where duty is performed. A person begins to become free from thinking of the annoying fact that one needs to work to satisfy one's animal needs. Individuals start to see themselves reflected in their work and to understand their full stature as human beings through the object created, through the work accomplished. Work no longer entails surrendering a part of one's being in the form of labor power sold, which no longer belongs to the individual, but becomes an expression of oneself, a contribution to the common life in which one is reflected, the fulfillment of one's social duty.

We are doing everything possible to give work this new status as a social duty and to link it on the one hand with the development of technology, which will create the conditions for greater freedom, and on the other hand with voluntary work based on the Marxist appreciation that one truly reaches a full human condition when no longer compelled to produce by the physical necessity to sell oneself as a commodity. Of course, there are still coercive aspects to work, even when it is voluntary. We have not transformed all the coercion that surrounds us into conditioned reflexes of a social character and, in many cases, is still produced under the pressures of one's environment. (Fidel calls this moral compulsion.) There is still a need to undergo a complete spiritual rebirth in one's attitude toward one's own work, freed from the direct pressure of the social environment, though linked to it by new habits. That will be communism. The change in consciousness does not take place automatically, just as change in the economy does not take place automatically. The alterations are slow and not rhythmic; there are periods of acceleration, periods that are slower, and even retrogressions.

Furthermore, we must take into account, as I pointed out before, that we are not dealing with a period of pure transition, as Marx envisaged in his Critique of the Gotha Program, but rather with a new phase unforeseen by him: an initial period of the transition to communism, or of the construction of socialism. This transition is taking place in the midst of violent class struggles, and with elements of capitalism within it that obscure a complete understanding of its essence.[46]

If we add to this the scholasticism that has held back the development of Marxist philosophy and impeded a systematic treatment of the transition period, whose political economy has not yet been developed, we must agree that we are still in diapers and that it is necessary to devote ourselves to investigating all the principal characteristics of this period before elaborating an economic and political theory of greater scope.

The resulting theory will, no doubt, put great stress on the two pillars of the construction of socialism: the education of the new man and woman and the development of technology. Much remains to be done in regard to both, but delay is least excusable in regard to the concept of technology as a basic foundation, since this is not a question of going forward blindly but of following a long stretch of road already opened up by the world's more advanced countries. This is why Fidel pounds away with such insistence on the need for the technological and scientific training of our people and especially of its vanguard.

In the field of ideas that do not lead to activities involving production, it is easier to see the division between material and spiritual necessity. For a long time individuals have been trying to free themselves from alienation through culture and art. While a person dies every day during the eight or more hours in which he or she functions as a commodity, individuals come to life afterward in their spiritual creations. But this remedy bears the germs of the same sickness: that of a solitary being seeking harmony with the world. One defends one's individuality, which is oppressed by the environment, and reacts to aesthetic ideas as a unique being whose aspiration is to remain immaculate. It is nothing more than an attempt to escape. The law of value is no longer simply a reflection of the relations of production; the monopoly capitalists — even while employing purely empirical methods — surround that law with a complicated scaffolding that turns it into a docile servant. The superstructure imposes a kind of art in which the artist must be educated. Rebels are subdued by the machine, and only exceptional talents may create their own work. The rest become shamefaced hirelings or are crushed.

A school of artistic experimentation is invented, which is said to be the definition of freedom; but this “experimentation” has its limits, imperceptible until there is a clash, that is, until the real problems of individual alienation arise. Meaningless anguish or vulgar amusement thus become convenient safety valves for human anxiety. The idea of using art as a weapon of protest is combated.

Those who play by the rules of the game are showered with honors — such honors as a monkey might get for performing pirouettes. The condition is that one does not try to escape from the invisible cage.

When the revolution took power there was an exodus of those who had been completely housebroken. The rest — whether they were revolutionaries or not — saw a new road. Artistic inquiry experienced a new impulse. The paths, however, had already been more or less laid out, and the escapist concept hid itself behind the word “freedom.” This attitude was often found even among the revolutionaries themselves, a reflection in their consciousness of bourgeois idealism.

In countries that have gone through a similar process, attempts have been made to combat such tendencies with an exaggerated dogmatism. General culture became virtually taboo, and the acme of cultural aspiration was declared to be the formally exact representation of nature. This was later transformed into a mechanical representation of the social reality they wanted to show: the ideal society, almost without conflicts or contradictions, that they sought to create.

Socialism is young and has its mistakes. We revolutionaries often lack the knowledge and intellectual audacity needed to meet the task of developing the new man and woman with methods different from the conventional ones; conventional methods suffer from the influences of the society that created them. (Once again the theme of the relationship between form and content is posed.) Disorientation is widespread, and the problems of material construction absorb us. There are no artists of great authority who also have great revolutionary authority. The members of the party must take this task in hand and seek the achievement of the main goal: to educate the people.

What is sought then is simplification, something everyone can understand, something functionaries understand. True artistic experimentation ends, and the problem of general culture is reduced to assimilating the socialist present and the dead (therefore, not dangerous) past. Thus socialist realism arises upon the foundations of the art of the last century.[47] The realistic art of the 19th century, however, also has a class character, more purely capitalist perhaps than the decadent art of the 20th century that reveals the anguish of the alienated individual. In the field of culture, capitalism has given all that it had to give, and nothing remains but the stench of a corpse, today's decadence in art.

But why try to find the only valid prescription in the frozen forms of socialist realism? We cannot counterpose “freedom” to socialist realism, because the former does not yet exist and will not exist until the complete development of the new society. We must not, from the pontifical throne of realism-at-all-costs, condemn all art forms since the first half of the 19th century, for we would then fall into the Proudhonian mistake of going back to the past, of putting a strait-jacket on the artistic expression of the people who are being born and are in the process of making themselves. What is needed is the development of an ideological-cultural mechanism that permits both free inquiry and the uprooting of the weeds that multiply so easily in the fertilized soil of state subsidies.

In our country the error of mechanical realism has not appeared, but rather its opposite. This is because the need for the creation of a new individual has not been understood, a new human being who would represent neither the ideas of the 19th century nor those of our own decadent and morbid century.

What we must create is the human being of the 21stcentury, although this is still a subjective aspiration, not yet systematized. This is precisely one of the fundamental objectives of our study and our work. To the extent that we achieve concrete success on a theoretical plane — or, vice versa, to the extent that we draw theoretical conclusions of a broad character on the basis of our concrete research — we will have made a valuable contribution to Marxism-Leninism, to the cause of humanity.

By reacting against the human being of the 19th century we have relapsed into the decadence of the 20th century. It is not a very grave error, but we must overcome it lest we leave open the door for revisionism. The great multitudes continue to develop. The new ideas are gaining a good momentum within society. The material possibilities for the integrated development of absolutely all members of society make the task much more fruitful. The present is a time of struggle; the future is ours.

To sum up, the fault of many of our artists and intellectuals lies in their original sin: they are not true revolutionaries. We can try to graft the elm tree so that it will bear pears, but at the same time we must plant pear trees. New generations will come that will be free of original sin. The probability that great artists will appear will be greater to the degree that the field of culture and the possibilities for expression are broadened.

Our task is to prevent the current generation, torn asunder by its conflicts, from becoming perverted and from perverting new generations. We must not create either docile servants of official thought, or “scholarship students” who live at the expense of the state — practicing freedom in quotation marks. Revolutionaries will come who will sing the song of the new man and woman in the true voice of the people. This is a process that takes time. In our society the youth and the party play a big part.[48] The former is especially important because it is the malleable clay from which the new person can be built with none of the old defects. The youth are treated in accordance with our aspirations. Their education is every day more complete, and we do not neglect their incorporation into work from the outset. Our scholarship students do physical work during their vacations or along with their studies. Work is a reward in some cases, a means of education in others, but it is never a punishment. A new generation is being born. The party is a vanguard organization. It is made up of the best workers, who are proposed for membership by their fellow workers. It is a minority, but it has great authority because of the quality of its cadres. Our aspiration is for the party to become a mass party, but only when the masses have reached the level of the vanguard, that is, when they are educated for communism. Our work constantly strives toward this education. The party is the living example; its cadres must teach hard work and sacrifice. By their action, they must lead the masses to the completion of the revolutionary task, which involves years of hard struggle against the difficulties of construction, class enemies, the maladies of the past, imperialism.

Now, I would like to explain the role played by the personality, by men and women as individuals leading the masses that make history. This is our experience; it is not a prescription.

Fidel gave the revolution its impulse in the first years, and also its leadership.[49] He always set its tone; but there is a good group of revolutionaries who are developing along the same road as the central leader. And there is a great mass that follows its leaders because it has faith in them. It has faith in those leaders because they have known how to interpret its aspirations.

It is not a matter of how many kilograms of meat one has to eat, or of how many times a year someone can go to the beach, or how many pretty things from abroad you might be able to buy with present-day wages. It is a matter of making the individual feel more complete, with much more inner wealth and much more responsibility.

People in our country know that the glorious period in which they happen to live is one of sacrifice; they are familiar with sacrifice. The first ones came to know it in the Sierra Maestra and wherever they fought; later, everyone in Cuba came to know it. Cuba is the vanguard of America and must make sacrifices because it occupies the post of advance guard, because it shows the masses of Latin America the road to full freedom. Within the country the leadership has to carry out its vanguard role. It must be said with all sincerity that in a real revolution, to which one gives his or her all and from which one expects no material reward, the task of the vanguard revolutionary is both magnificent and agonizing.

At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality. Perhaps it is one of the great dramas of the leader that he or she must combine a passionate spirit with a cold intelligence and make painful decisions without flinching. Our vanguard revolutionaries must idealize this love of the people, of the most sacred causes, and make it one and indivisible. They cannot descend, with small doses of daily affection, to the level where ordinary people put their love into practice.

The leaders of the revolution have children just beginning to talk, who are not learning to say “daddy”; their wives, too, must be part of the general sacrifice of their lives in order to take the revolution to its destiny. The circle of their friends is limited strictly to the circle of comrades in the revolution. There is no life outside of it.

In these circumstances one must have a large dose of humanity, a large dose of a sense of justice and truth in order to avoid dogmatic extremes, cold scholasticism, or an isolation from the masses. We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity is transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force.

​The revolutionary, the ideological motor force of the revolution within the party, is consumed by this uninterrupted activity that comes to an end only with death, unless the construction of socialism is accomplished on a world scale. If one's revolutionary zeal is blunted when the most urgent tasks have been accomplished on a local scale and one forgets about proletarian internationalism, the revolution one leads will cease to be a driving force and sink into a comfortable drowsiness that imperialism, our irreconcilable enemy, will utilize to gain ground. Proletarian internationalism is a duty, but it is also a revolutionary necessity. This is the way we educate our people.

Of course there are dangers in the present situation, and not only that of dogmatism, not only that of freezing the ties with the masses midway in the great task. There is also the danger of the weaknesses we can fall into. The way is open to infection by the germs of future corruption if a person thinks that dedicating his or her entire life to the revolution means that, in return, one should not be distracted by such worries as that one's child lacks certain things, that one's children's shoes are worn out, that one's family lacks some necessity.

In our case we have maintained that our children must have, or lack, those things that the children of the ordinary citizen have or lack; our families should understand this and struggle for it to be that way. The revolution is made through human beings, but individuals must forge their revolutionary spirit day by day.

Thus we march on. At the head of the immense column — we are neither ashamed nor afraid to say it — is Fidel. After him come the best cadres of the party, and immediately behind them, so close that we feel its tremendous force, comes the people in its entirety, a solid structure of individual beings moving toward a common goal, men and women who have attained consciousness of what must be done, people who fight to escape from the realm of necessity and to enter that of freedom.

This great throng organizes itself; its organization results from its consciousness of the necessity of this organization. It is no longer a dispersed force, divisible into thousands of fragments thrown into the air like splinters from a hand grenade, trying by any means to achieve some protection from an uncertain future, in desperate struggle with their fellows.
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We know that sacrifices lie ahead and that we must pay a price for the heroic fact that we are, as a nation, a vanguard. We, as leaders, know that we must pay a price for the right to say that we are at the head of a people that is at the head of America.[50] Each and every one of us readily pays his or her quota of sacrifice, conscious of being rewarded with the satisfaction of fulfilling a duty, conscious of advancing with everyone toward the new man and woman glimpsed on the horizon.

​Allow me to draw some conclusions:[51]

​The basic clay of our work is the youth; we place our hope in it and prepare it to take the banner from our hands. If this inarticulate letter clarifies anything, it has accomplished the objective that motivated it. Accept our ritual greeting — which is like a handshake or an “Ave Maria Puríssima”:

Notes
[29]. This letter was sent to Carlos Quijano, director of the Uruguayan weekly publication, Marcha . It was published on March 12, 1965, under the title, “From Algiers, for Marcha . The Cuban Revolution Today.” In the original edition the following editor's note was added: “Che Guevara sent this letter to Marcha from Algiers. This document is of the utmost importance, especially in order to understand the aims and goals of the Cuban Revolution as seen by one of the main actors in that process. The thesis presented is intended to provoke debate and, at the same time, give a new perspective on some of the foundations of current socialist thought.” On November 5, 1965, the letter was republished and presented as “Exclusive: A Special Note from Che Guevara.” A memo explained that Marcha 's readers in Argentina had not been able to read the original publication, because the week that it was first published the magazine was banned in Buenos Aires. Subheadings are based on those used in the original Cuban edition. They have been added by the publisher.
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[30]. When Che sent the letter to Quijano, he had been touring Africa since December 1964. During this African tour, Che held many meetings with African revolutionary leaders.

[31]. Che's concept of the man or woman of the future, as first evident in the consciousness of the combatants in Cuba's revolutionary war, was explored by his article, “Social Ideals of the Rebel Army” (1959). These ideas were further developed in a speech, “The Revolutionary Doctor” (1960), where he described how Cuba was creating “a new type of individual” as a result of the revolution, because “there is nothing that can educate a person... like living through a revolution.” These first ideas were deepened as part of Che's concept of the individual as a direct and conscious actor in the process of constructing socialism. This article presents a synthesis of his ideas on this question.

[32]. These two events in the early years of the revolution seriously tested the valor of the Cuban people in the face of disaster: first, the October [Missile] Crisis of 1962, during which the U.S. actions aimed at overthrowing the Cuban Revolution brought the world to the brink of crisis; and second, Hurricane Flora, which battered the eastern region of Cuba on October 4, 1963, resulting in over a thousand deaths. Nevertheless, Che believed that if, in fact, a new society was to be created, the masses needed to apply the same kind of consciousness in everyday activities as they had heroically displayed in such special circumstances.

[33]. The revolutionary victory of January 1, 1959, meant that for the first time in their history, the Cuban people attained a genuine level of popular participation in power. At first, the government was made up of figures from traditional political parties that had in one way or another supported the revolution. As measures were adopted that affected the ruling classes, some dissent emerged that became the germ of the future counterrevolution, which was subsequently supported and funded by the U.S. Government. In this early confrontation, President Manuel Urrutia was forced to resign due to public pressure when it became clear that he was presenting obstacles to measures that would benefit the population as a whole. It was at this time, with the full backing of the Cuban people, that Fidel assumed government leadership and became Prime Minister.

[34]. The Agrarian Reform Law of May 17, 1959, after only four months of taking power, was seen as the decisive step in fulfilling the revolutionary program proposed at Moncada in 1953. Che participated in the drafting of this new law along with other comrades proposed by the revolutionary leadership.

[35]. On April 17, 1961, mercenary troops that were trained and financed by the U.S. Government, along with exile counterrevolutionary groups, invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. This was part of the U.S. plan to destabilize and ultimately overthrow the revolution. In these circumstances, the Cuban masses, who felt that they were the participants in a genuine process of social transformation, showed they were ready to defend the gains of the revolution and were able to defeat any attempt to destroy it.

[36]. The manifestations of sectarianism, which emerged in Cuba in the 1960s, forced the revolutionary leadership to take measures that would impede any tendency toward separating the government from the masses. As part of that leadership, Che participated in this process and analyzed on many occasions the grave consequences of such a separation. He expressed these views, for example, in the prolog he wrote for the book, The Marxist-Leninist Party , published in 1963, where he explained: “Mistakes were made in the leadership; the party lost those essential qualities that linked them with the masses, the exercise of democratic centralism and the spirit of sacrifice... the function of the driving force of ideology is lost... [F]ortunately the old bases for this type of sectarianism have been destroyed.”

[37]. The debate over the role of the law of value within the construction of socialism formed part of Che's outline of an economic framework and his initial ideas for the Budgetary Finance System. Due to his revolutionary humanist perspective, Che rejected any notion that included using capitalist tools or fetishes. These ideas were widely discussed in his article, “On the Concept of Value,” published in the magazine Our Industry in October 1963. Here we see the beginning of the economic debate that Che initiated in those years and which had international significance. This polemic was conducted in his typically rigorous style. Outlining the guidelines to be followed, Che wrote: “We want to make it clear that the debate we have initiated can be invaluable for our development only if we are capable of conducting it with a strictly scientific approach and with the greatest equanimity.”

[38]. Nelson Rockefeller, who became one of the wealthiest people in the United States, acquired his capital by a “stroke of luck,” so the story goes, when his family discovered oil. Rockefeller's economic power brought him great political influence for many years — especially with regard to Latin America policy — irrespective of who was in the White House.

[39]. For Che, socialism could not exist if economics was not combined with social and political consciousness. Without an awareness of rights and duties, it would be impossible to construct a new society. This attitude would be the mechanism of socialist transition and the essential form of expressing this would be through consciousness. In this work, Che analyzed the decisive role of consciousness as opposed to the distortions produced by “real existing socialism,” based on the separation of the material base of society from its superstructure. Unfortunately, historical events proved Che right, when a moral and political crisis brought about the collapse of the socialist system. Among Che's writings on this question are: “Collective Discussion: Decisions and Sole Responsibilities” (1961), “On the Construction of the Party” (1963), “Awarding Certificates for Communist Work” (1964) and “A New Attitude to Work” (1964).

[40]. From early on Che studied the concept of underdevelopment as he tried to define the realities of the Third World. In his article, “Cuba: Historical Exception or Vanguard in the Anticolonial Struggle?” (1961), Che asked: “What is 'underdevelopment'? A dwarf with an enormous head and swollen chest is 'underdeveloped,' insofar as his fragile legs and short arms do not match the rest of his anatomy. He is the product of an abnormal and distorted development. That is what we are in reality — we, who are politely referred to as 'underdeveloped.' In truth, we are colonial, semicolonial or dependent countries, whose economies have been deformed by imperialism, which has peculiarly developed only those branches of industry or agriculture needed to complement its own complex economy.”

[41]. Che argued that the full liberation of humankind is reached when work becomes a social duty carried out with complete satisfaction and sustained by a value system that contributes to the realization of conscious action in performing tasks. This could only be achieved by systematic education, acquired by passing through various stages in which collective action is increased. Che recognized that this would be difficult and would take time. In his desire to speed up this process, however, he developed methods of mobilizing people, bringing together their collective and individual interests. Among the most significant of these instruments were moral and material incentives, while deepening consciousness as a way of developing toward socialism. See Che's speeches: “Homage to Emulation Prize Winners” (1962) and “A New Attitude to Work” (1964).

[42]. In the process of creating the new man and woman, Che considered that education should be directly related to production and that it should be conducted on a daily basis as the only way for individuals to better themselves. This should also be undertaken in a collective spirit, so that it contributes to the development of consciousness and has a greater impact. On a practical level he developed an education system within the Ministry of Industry that guaranteed a minimum level of training for workers, so that they could meet the new scientific and technolgical challenges Cuba faced.

[43]. Che discussed the role of the vanguard at key points. First, he defined the vanguard as a necessary element in leading the struggle and within the first line of defense. After the revolution, Che saw the vanguard as providing the real impulse for the masses to participate actively in the construction of a new society; at the head of the vanguard being the party. For this reason, Che occasionally insisted that the revolution was an accelerated process wherein those who play an active role have the right to become tired but not to become tired of being the vanguard.

[44]. In the period when Che was a leader, the Cuban Revolution had not yet reached a level of institutionalization so that old power structures had been completely eliminated. Nevertheless, Che argued that such institutionalization was important as a means of formalizing the integration of the masses and the vanguard. Years later in 1976, after the First Congress of the Cuban Communist Party, this task of institutionalization was codified, as an expression of the power structures created by the revolution.

[45]. It was Che's view that work played a crucial role in the construction of a new society. He analyzed the differences between work undertaken within a capitalist society and that which was free of alienation in a socialist society. He was aware of what was required so that workers would give their utmost and put duty and sacrifice ahead of individual gain. In a speech in 1961, Che referred to daily work as, “the most difficult, constant task that demands neither an instant violent sacrifice nor a single minute in a comrade's life in order to defend the revolution, but demands long hours ever day...”

[46]. In order to understand the construction of socialism as a process that would eliminate the persistent roots of the previous society, Che examined the inherited relations of production. He insisted that two fundamental changes must occur as the only way to put an end to the exploitation of one human being by another and to achieve a socialist society: an increase in production and a deepening of consciousness.

[47]. An article such as Socialism and Man in Cuba could not avoid a discussion of culture, given the enormous changes that were taking place in Cuban society and power structures at the time. It was not an easy task to reflect on the concept of socialist culture in a country that was just emerging from underdevelopment and was still characterized by a neocolonial culture, imposed by a dominant class. There was a constant struggle between the values of the past and the attempt to construct an all-encompassing culture based on solidarity between people and real social justice. The struggle was made more difficult, not only by the persistence of the past culture but also by dogmatic and authoritarian tendencies of so-called “socialist realism” in socialist countries. The antidote was to defend the best and most unique aspects of Cuban culture, avoiding excesses, and by trying to construct a culture that would express the feelings of the majority without vulgarity and schemas. This is the perspective that has been maintained in the development of revolutionary culture in Cuba, and neither neoliberalism nor globalization has been able to impede the genuine process of popular culture. This is the expression of a truly socialist society.

[48]. The role of the party and revolutionary youth in the construction of a new society was broadly analyzed by Che: “On the Construction of the Party,” “The Marxist-Leninist Party,” “To be a Young Communist” and “Youth and Revolution.”

[49]. The harmony established between Fidel and Che from their first meeting in Mexico in 1955 represented a coming together of common ideals and a common approach to the liberation of Latin America and the building of a new society. Che referred to Fidel on many occasions in his writings and speeches, evaluating his qualities as a leader and statesman with sincere admiration and respect. Fidel reciprocated these feelings countless times. Their relationship should be investigated more deeply in order to gain a greater understanding of a transcendental historical era. For further reference see Che's Episodes of a Revolutionary War , Guerrilla Warfare , “Cuba: Historical Exception or Vanguard in the Anticolonial Struggle?”, “Political Sovereignty and Economic Independence” and “The Marxist-Leninist Party.”

[50]. The study of the different stages of the Cuban Revolution — from guerrilla warfare to the achievement of revolutionary power — is systematically reflected in all Che's writings and speeches. He always highlighted the significance of Cuba's example for the rest of the Third World, as a symbol of freedom and showing the fruits of the initial stages of constructing socialism in an underdeveloped country. Aside from those already cited, see: “Farewell to the International Brigades for Voluntary Work” (1960) and “The Cuban Revolution's Influence in Latin America” (1962).

[51]. Che's conclusions here summarized some of the most important concepts permeating his works, which are beautifully synthesized in this volume. These ideas provide a complete spectrum that encompasses philosophy, ethics and politics, spanning a range of complex questions.

Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’s life-long friend and co-developer of what has become known as Marxism, scientific socialism, dialectical materialism, and in the twentieth century as a result of the Russian Revolution, Marxism-Leninism, was born two hundred years ago on November 28, 1820, in what is now Wuppertal, Germany (then Barman, Prussia). This article commemorates the bicentenary of Engels’ birth by pointing out some of his most important contributions to the development of Marxist theory.
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Marx and Engels first met in 1842 in Cologne. Engels was 22 and had been active as a student in the democratic and progressive movements in Prussia and was on his way to England to join in the management of a factory partially owned by his father. His father, a conservative bourgeois, had taken Engels out of his university studies because he disapproved of his involvement in radical student movements opposed to the undemocratic Prussian monarchy. These movements were based based on the philosophical and political works of G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), and the students were known as the “Young Hegelians.” Marx was the editor of a radical democratic newspaper (Rheinische Zeitung), and Engels wanted to meet him. Engels had already made a name for himself as a radical journalist while a student. After Marx hired him as a foreign correspondent, he continued on to Manchester where the factory was located. His father’s hope that he would settle down and become a respectable businessman was not going to be realized.

Engels spent two years in England, where he met with radical working-class leaders and wrote articles on current events and an important essay on political economy from a socialist point of view, as well as worked in his father’s factory. In 1844, on a trip back to Prussia, he stopped off in Paris to visit with Marx; the two had corresponded and wanted to meet up to compare their views on socialism. Marx was in Paris as a refugee, as the authorities in Cologne had expelled him for his political views. They spent ten days together and found out they had the same world outlook. They decided to collaborate and produce a joint work which put forth their views on socialism and philosophical materialism supporting the working class, as opposed to the Young Hegelians who based their views on philosophical idealism and were liberals opposed to communist and socialist views.

Engels continued on to Prussia. A year later, their collaboration resulted in the publication of the first of many works the two would produce in the creation of dialectical materialism—the philosophy of the working-class struggle for emancipation and the creation of socialism. The Holy Family; or, Critique of Critical Criticism: Against Bruno Bauer and Company was not a full-fledged exposition of dialectical materialism, but it was a harbinger of things to come.

Engels stayed in Prussia from the fall of 1844 to the spring of 1845. While there he wrote his well-known The Condition of the Working Class in England. The book created quite a stir in Germany when it was published in 1845. Engels discussed the working-class movement in terms of materialism and the need for socialism. He also stressed the importance of workers’ organizations and especially unions and the use of strikes to win acceptance of their demands from the bourgeoisie. He was also active in the socialist movement, wrote articles for the socialist press, and, as might have been expected, became estranged from his conservative father.

Things were getting too hot in Prussia for Engels. With the authorities upset with his activities and the police spying on him, Engels worried about being arrested, so in the spring of 1845 he moved to Brussels. He chose Brussels because Marx was there, as he had to leave Paris for the same reasons. It was at this time that the pair worked out a full-fledged version of dialectical materialism. Engels had almost gotten there on his own, but Marx had worked out a more advanced view that Engels immediately recognized as such. Here they decided to collaborate on another book to iron out their ideas and solidify their new philosophy in contradistinction to both the objective idealism of Hegel and the materialism of Feuerbach (an influential student of Hegel whose materialist system inspired Marx and Engels but who was not dialectical in his thinking).
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Their new book was finished by 1846 but never published in their lifetime. The German Ideology had been accepted for publication, but political and financial difficulties had arisen and the publication was shelved until after the Russian Revolution when it was published by the Soviets. It had served its purpose though; in writing it Marx and Engels had finally arrived at full agreement both politically and philosophically and were ready to devote their lives to the struggle for communism. They packed away the manuscript and, as Marx remarked, “left it to the gnawing criticism of the mice.”

Marx and Engels became involved in building socialist organizations in Brussels, and their writings were being spread in Germany and elsewhere through the socialist press. There were many different versions of “socialism” in the 1840s, but dialectical materialism began to slowly catch on to such an extent that in 1846 the Brussels followers of Marx and Engels sent Engels to Paris to make contact with the leading French groups and German exiles advocating socialism and democratic rights. So impressed were the leading French socialists that the editor of a major socialist paper, La reform, appointed Engels a correspondent. He also made contact with the leading group of German socialist exiles in Paris, The League of the Just.

In 1847 the League asked Marx and Engels to become members. The influence exerted by their ideas soon came to dominate the thinking of most League members, and in June Engels went to London to attend the League’s First Congress. By the end of the congress the League had renamed itself the Communist League, and a new slogan, “Workers of the World, Unite,” was adopted, superseding the bourgeois liberal (and male chauvinist, pace Schiller and Beethoven) “All Men Are Brothers.” Brussels became the center for the Communist League and its internationally circulated newspaper Deutsche Brüsseler Zeitung, with Marx and Engels writing the articles on theory.

In the fall of 1847 Engels went to Paris to help the Communist League and prepare for its Second Congress. He reworked the draft program the League has drawn up, named it the “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” and sent it to Marx to look over. The Second Congress (December 1847) adopted dialectical materialism as its policy, and Marx and Engels collaborated on getting the Manifesto ready for the press. It was published in February 1848, and the international communist movement was launched.

The publication coincided with the 1848 February Revolution in France. Revolutions broke out all over Europe that year as the revolutionary bourgeoisie consolidated its political and economic power at the expense of the remnants of the old feudalist order. In France, Louis Philippe, the last of the French kings, was forced to abdicate, and the Second Republic was proclaimed. The revolution spread to Germany and southern and eastern Europe. Engels joined Marx in Cologne to work at the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, the Germany daily newspaper published by Marx.

In 1849 Engels participated in revolutionary fighting in the Rhine Province, and when the revolutionaries were defeated he escaped to Switzerland. From there he made his way to London and helped reorganize the Communist League. In 1850 he wrote another of his important historical works, The Peasant War in Germany.

The year 1850 also saw Engels’ return to Manchester and his father’s factory. Marx was now living in London, and the two were in constant communication. With the revolution having been defeated, they now engaged in research and the elaboration of their theories. Because Engels was running his father’s factory, he was able to help Marx financially; this allowed Marx the time he needed to write Das Kapital, one of two most important books published in the 19th century (it came out in 1867, the other was Darwin’s Origin of Species, published in 1859). Lenin said that without Engels’ aid Marx would have been “unable to complete” Das Kapital. As it was, Marx only lived to complete volume 1, and Engels, with Marx’s drafts and notes, completed volumes 2 and 3 and saw them through to print.
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Throughout the 1850s Marx, and especially Engels, concentrated on elaborating the practical aspects of dialectical materialism regarding the struggles of the working class to create unions and in the various national liberation movements that existed at that time, such as in Ireland, Poland, Hungary, the Balkans, and India, including the anti-slavery movement in the U.S.

In 1864 Marx and Engels were instrumental in the founding of the First International. Throughout its existence Engels was a major contributor to the International’s positions on war, colonization, the U.S. Civil War, and the fight against the anarchist movements, which opposed the views of Marx and Engels and the Communist League, under the influence of Mikhail Bakunin (whose views are kept alive and well in the 21st century by anarchists representing the views of the petty bourgeois radicals and not the working class).

In 1872 or 1873 Engels began another important book, Dialectics of Nature, which he worked on intermittently for ten years but never finished. After Engels’ death Edward Bernstein showed the manuscript to Albert Einstein, who thought it worth publishing even though the physics and mathematical parts were weak and out of date. It was published, finally, by the Soviet Union in 1925 (the Marx-Engels Institute). It has limited value, since the sciences have made qualitatively giant strides from the mid-19th century, but it shows how Engels used dialectical materialism to interpret scientific advances dialectically. It also has many interesting sections in which Engels put forth the rudiments of ideas that were later to become part of our contemporary scientific understanding of the world (especially in his discussion of human evolution and some aspects of modern physics, although in antiquated terms no longer in use).

One of the reasons his book on nature was never completed was that he was busy on other  important projects in the 1870s, such as following the developments and advising the growing socialist parties in France, Germany, England, and other countries while also writing important theoretical works: The Housing Question, On Authority, and The Bakuninists at Work (all in 1873), as well as one of the most important works in all Marxist literature, Anti-Dühring (1878).
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Anti-Dühring covered the whole gamut of dialectical materialism, and three chapters on the history of socialism were so popular that Engels was asked to issue them as a separate work. He reworked these chapters and in 1880 published them in the work we know as Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.

The great collaboration of Marx and Engels came to an end on March 14, 1883, when Marx died at age 65, leaving Engels alone as the de facto intellectual leader of the world socialist movement. Marx left behind a trove of unfinished works which it was left for Engels to edit and see published. Engels had, as well, two more major works of his own to complete in the eleven years left to him.

Engels managed to get volume 2 of Das Kapital properly arranged and edited, and it was published in 1885, followed by volume 3 in 1894. He put so much work into these volumes that Lenin said they should be seen as joint works of Marx and Engels. At the same time he was editing Marx’s manuscripts and turning pages of notes and hastily jotted-down ideas into readable texts, he managed to write two works of his own that have become Marxist classics. In 1884 The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State came out (“one of the fundamental works of modern socialism”—Lenin). His final major work, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, was published in 1886.


It was in this period that Engels advised the Marxist parties to avoid sectarianism and dogma and to work to develop mass working-class parties. He also gave the classical definition of “opportunism” (still a big problem)—“letting the great basic considerations be consigned to oblivion by transient daily interests,” in other words, “sacrificing the future of the movement to the present.”


This period also saw the founding of the Second International (1889) in Paris in which Engels played a leading role. The First International (International Workingmen’s Association) had been basically set up by Marx and Engels in 1864 and was dissolved in 1876 to prevent its being taken over by the anarchist followers of Bakunin (who died that year in Bern). This international, which excluded the anarchists, lasted to 1916 when it fell apart because most of its national units, pledged to resist war, ended up supporting their own nations in World War I. It was succeeded by the Third International (1919–1943).


Engels, who in these years maintained his position as the most influential leader of the world socialist movement, began to have health problems in the 1890s and died of laryngeal cancer on August 5, 1895. A short time before his death, a young Russian revolutionary, V. I. Ulyanov, made a trip to London, hoping to meet with Engels but was turned away because Engels was too ill to meet with anyone. After his death his daughter Eleanor Aveling and two close friends, Friedrich Lessner and Eduard Bernstein, carried out his last request to be cremated and his ashes scattered in the ocean off Beachy Head, near Eastbourne in East Sussex on the south coast of England.



Cover image: Fondo Antiguo de la Biblioteca de la Universidad de Sevilla, Creative Commons (public domain).

In the pantheon of 1930s revolutionary writers, Michael Gold has too long faltered on the historic periphery. A close associate of Hemingway, Reed, O’Neill, Hughes, St. Vincent Millay, Claude McKay, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Richard Wright, Carl Sandburg, Upton Sinclair, and James T. Farrell, Gold was not only overshadowed by the celebrity of others but blighted by decades of enduring discord from within and rabid anti-communism from without. And while his novel Jews Without Money (1932) was a bestseller, catapulting him to grand renown in his time, Gold’s own story has been painfully disappeared.
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Writers on the political left, in any case, have always looked to the breadth of Mike Gold’s mission: fiction writer, poet, playwright, prolific journalist and Daily Worker columnist, editor of New Masses and multiple other journals, he was also a champion cultural organizer and inspiring public speaker. Odd, that with so much literary adoration about him, with equal amounts of derision from other quarters, Gold’s biography would arrive at this late juncture. But given the depth of quality in Patrick Chura’s Michael Gold: The People’s Writer, the long, ridiculous wait was worth every decade.

Chura, an English professor at the University of Akron, tore into the definitive research to tell the story, enliven the realities, and reveal the hidden. The biography, written not in the language of the academic but more in narrative fashion, glows with the evidence of investigative details. Chura shows an ability to absorb streams of reportage, unpublished poetry, early pencil visions of fiction, memoir notes, letters, seemingly lost first drafts as well as overlooked and forgotten works of a certain stature. It’s all here.

As biographers are wont to do, Chura exposes the reader to the days of his subject, offering not only facts and analysis, but the ability to see these through Gold’s eyes — to feel the sweat and survive the strain of his often conflicted life. As told by Chura, Gold’s early life of poverty was centered around his family home, a crowded, nearly airless flat infested with lice and crushing dysphoria. Born Itzok Granich in 1894, Gold faced long hours of childhood labor when his ailing, bed-ridden father lost his struggling business, and the family became destitute. An excerpt of one of his earliest writings stated, “The streets of the East Side were dark with grey; wet gloom; the boats of the harbor cried constantly, like great bewildered gulls, like deep booming voices of calamity.” Much later, Gold would write of his formative years: “It was in a tenement that I first heard the sad music of humanity rise to the stars. The sky above the airshafts was all my sky; and the voices of the tenement neighbors in the airshaft were the voices of all my world. There, in my suffering youth, I feverishly sought God and found Man.”

Chura may not be a New Yorker, but his book is a true snapshot of the city’s streets and shadows over the lengthy period bridging the early 20th century and Gold’s later years but in particular his 1920s–40s period of greatest activity. The reader is walked through 102 West 14th Street, then headquarters of the John Reed Club, and the offices of the Communist Party at 35 East 12th Street. It’s no small irony that rent for a single bedroom apartment in either now tops $5,000 per month, and apartment sales in the latter recently averaged more than $4 million.

Chura also brings alive Gold’s radicalization as a teen, his early publication in the Masses, grave financial and emotional struggles while briefly at Yale, his journalist roots, youthful membership in the Provincetown Players, relationship with Dorothy Day, unfailing dedication to the Communist Party, and founding of the New Playwrights. But Gold’s “creative writing” was never confined to poetry, fiction, or drama. In his 1921 article “Towards Proletarian Art,” Gold eloquently warned that “a mighty national art cannot arise save out of the soil of the masses.” And of the Sacco and Vanzetti executions in 1927 Boston, he presciently reported, “It is August 14th, eight days before the new devil’s hour. . . . I am writing this in the war zone, in the psychopathic respectable city that is crucifying two immigrant workers . . . respectable Boston is possessed with the lust to kill . . . the subconscious superstition that the death of Sacco and Vanzetti can restore their dying culture and industry. At last, they have a scapegoat. . . . They are insane with fear and hatred of the new America.”
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This packed biography also reveals the protagonist’s battles with major depression and his lesser-known literature, including previously lost or forgotten verse and his 1929 collection 120 Million (after Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 150,000,000), long out of print. Gold’s numerous speaking engagements are cited, including some specific moments experienced at lecterns here and abroad. Such details feed into international travel, not the least of which was to Kharkov in the Soviet Union for the International Union of Revolutionary Writers conference and Paris for the First International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture. Interactions with European notables including Andre Gide, E. M. Forster, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Vladimir Mayakovsky, poet laureate of the Soviet Union, are also highlighted. And while it’s clear that the author remains a proponent of Mike Gold, the many conflicts surrounding the man are here examined with jarring clarity.

Though deeply committed to both the Communist Party USA and the wider Communist International, Gold’s rebellious, unbridled nature never allowed for the discipline exhibited by other party officials. The missed meetings and avoided functionary duties soon clarified that Gold’s decades as a revolutionist began in the company of anarchists. Ironically, his fights against party bureaucracy were eclipsed by the attacks he launched on progressive and liberal writers who’d apparently strayed from the mission.

This combination — and a constant rain of blows from the right — established an array of opponents that stretched over a lifetime. Following early battles with Masses’ editor Max Eastman, his association with Claude McKay, too, became embittered (though he described McKay’s sonnets as “crystal songs”). Gold’s editorials railed against Gertrude Stein and sought to shred Thornton Wilder, but a particular hellishness was saved for former friends, most blatantly Ernest Hemingway. After publication of For Whom the Bell Tolls, Gold’s review called the book “a minor story” despite its “narrative genius,” as it was “so painfully fair to fascists.” The heroic figure of Robert Jordan, according to Gold, was ignorant of the class conflict in Franco’s Spain, which Gold saw as central to the story. Famously, Hemingway left a message at the New Masses office directing the critic to “go fuck himself.” In his book, The Hollow Men, an overview of writers he saw as having turned their backs on the revolution, particularly those originating from wealthier backgrounds (yes, he wrote of “Ernest Slummingway”), Gold’s opinions were unfettered, often bloodthirsty in the pursuit of forging an all-important literary force toward an egalitarian society and in opposition of fascism.
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Following word of the 1938 Moscow purges and, most painfully, the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact a year later, Gold was in the grip of conflict over what we later came to see as Stalin’s despotism. Yet, following his own advice to young writers, Gold would “write, persist, struggle,” toeing the party line through his doubt. During the worst of the Second World War, he became a constant source for the fight against fascism, and though a target of the Dies-led House Committee on Un-American Activities and constantly profiled by the FBI, Gold maintained a busy literary schedule in writing and editing. This sense of mission was maintained through his last, despairing years. While Gold was never to complete the second novel he’d long planned, his “Change the World” column was maintained through 1966, and the artful quality of his work remained glaringly so. He died in May 1967 after more than a half-century of embodying the cultural worker.

Michael Gold, always one to analyze Marxian, seeking the wider, greater reality, wrote near the end of his life of the blacklist and McCarthy terrors, citing on manifold levels: “The lined faces which had seen the trouble and white hair as the result of sleepless nights. . . . We had lost all our youth.”

​Published in People’s World, May 18, 2021.
Image: Mike Gold, Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0).

In order to be viable, a left-wing secular humanism must recognize the complicated dynamics associated with organized religion and its influence on political parties and social movements. Crucial questions emerge that must be addressed. How much should religion influence the development of new parties? What should a left political party’s stance toward religion be, especially in regards to individual members? How can we advocate for atheism or materialism, in any form, while allying with those who are ideologically different? One of the most insightful, and definitely controversial, political theorists who reckoned with these questions was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.  A deeply influential figure of 20th century world history, Lenin led the intellectual and political transformation of rural, peasant eastern Europe into the first sustained socialist government of the world, the Soviet Union. His revolutionary Marxism influenced movements around the globe, from Cuba and China to the Pan-African socialists of the 1960s and 1970s. His books Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism and State and Revolution are still required reading for those interested in radical, left politics generally and Marxism in particular.*

In this analysis, we will delve into two of Lenin’s essays: “Socialism and Religion”, published in the Bolshevik newspaper Novaya Zhizn (New Life) on December 3, 1905, and “On the Significance of Militant Materialism,” published in the philosophical journal Pod Znamenem Marksizma (Under the Banner of Marxism) on March 12, 1922. Each shows both the consistency of Lenin’s thought on the religious question as well as his evolution as a political theorist before the revolution and after. In these short but incisive pieces, Lenin defended traditional secularist values, such as the separation of church and state, liberty of conscience, and free religious association, while also calling for the political separation of religion from political parties and strategically advocating for the atheist/materialist worldview. While it would be too much to say that Lenin was a “humanist” in the general sense of the term, he was nevertheless a secularist whose insights on religion provide left humanists with clear, tactical advice on the interrelationship between faith and politics in the public sphere.

As a historical materialist, Lenin outlined in “Socialism and Religion”  how capitalism as a mode of production creates the economic and cultural conditions of the society it constructs. “Present-day society is wholly based on the exploitation of the vast masses of the working class by a tiny minority of the population, the class of the landowners and that of the capitalists,” he wrote. In effect, the capitalist society “is a slave society, since the ‘free’ workers, who all their life work for the capitalists, are ‘entitled’ only to such means of subsistence as are essential for the maintenance of slaves who produce profit, for the safeguarding and perpetuation of capitalist slavery.” These conditions create what Marx called “alienation,” or a separation from ourselves, our work, and even life itself. Lenin echoed this notion when he declared, “the economic oppression of the workers inevitably calls forth and engenders every kind of political oppression and social humiliation, the coarsening and darkening of the spiritual and moral life of the masses.”

This “coarsening and darkening” manifests itself most starkly in the form of religion, which Lenin further elucidated. “Religion is one of the forms of spiritual oppression which everywhere weighs down heavily upon the masses of the people, over burdened by their perpetual work for others, by want and isolation,” he penned. As the conditions of life continually degrade under the forces of capitalism, a reversion to spiritual concerns courses through the working class. By contrast, leaders of such a society, organized around the principle of exploitation, use religion as a tool for laundering their guilt. Thus, religion becomes a palliative for not only those at the bottom but for those at the top. Recalling Marx’s famous line from A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Lenin said, “Religion is opium for the people. Religion is a sort of spiritual booze, in which the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or less worthy of man.” 

Lenin countered this view by stressing the importance of class consciousness, whereby the working class acknowledges its lot in life, begins to actively critique capitalist society, and strives to change it. The “modern class-conscious worker,” Lenin expounded, “reared by large-scale factory industry and enlightened by urban life, contemptuously casts aside religious prejudices, leaves heaven to the priests and bourgeois bigots, and tries to win a better life for himself here on earth.” Lenin again echoed Marx and Engels’ foundational work, The German Ideology, wherein they wrote, “In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven.” As such, the “modern class-conscious worker” discovers the indispensable connection between socialism and science, as it “frees the workers from their belief in life after death by welding them together to fight in the present for a better life on earth.” Lenin’s socialism was one rooted in materialism, historical analysis, class consciousness, and scientific discovery. 

With this understanding in mind, what is a socialist’s proper attitude towards religion? Lenin broke it down into two major components: the private (relating to the individual) and the political (relating to the party). He summed up this distinction well in a brief passage: “We demand that religion be held a private affair so far as the state is concerned. But by no means can we consider religion a private affair so far as our party is concerned.” 

In relation to the private, Lenin struck a chord reminiscent of the eighteenth century Enlightenment thinkers Voltaire and John Locke, demonstrating that Marxism (and Leninism) is not a rejection of the Enlightenment, but a manifestation of its better aspects. Lenin believed that “everyone must be absolutely free to profess any religion he pleases, or religion whatever, i.e., to be an atheist, which every socialist is, as a rule.” Lenin advocated for liberty of conscience, wherein every person can believe or not believe without the fear of government intrusion. Additionally, Lenin declared that “complete separation of Church and State is what the socialist proletariat demands of the modern state and the modern church.” Religions, in effect, should be “absolutely free associations of like-minded citizens, associations independent of the state.” The lesson here for us in the 21st century is that a viable socialist project is one that defends individual rights while fighting for the common cause of the working class, i.e. emancipation from the capitalist mode of production.

Where Lenin stepped beyond the eighteenth century conception of religious liberty is his view that socialists are, “as a rule,” atheists. While many socialists in history have been atheists of one stripe or another (Marx, Mikhail Bakunin, Emma Goldman), there is a Christian socialist tradition that he dismisses. It’s not out of malice, but rather ideology. Marxism, traditionally, has largely been an atheistic worldview. Marx himself rejected religion on materialist grounds, arguing that if societies developed beyond scarcity, religious feelings would dissipate and organized religion itself would wither. Lenin saw his conception of atheism as an extension of Marx’s, hence his pronouncement that socialists are generally atheists. It should be emphasized here that, like science, there is no “royal road” to socialism. Socialists come from many different backgrounds and belief systems, so it is important for us as left humanists to understand and embrace these differences. 

Lenin, grasping the importance of movement building and solidarity, grasped the value in supporting religious movements whose interests align with the socialists. In 1905, within the tumult of an emerging revolution, the “police-ridden feudal autocracy” of Russia forced Russian Orthodox members to spy on citizens. They protested the move and Lenin enthusiastically supported their actions. “We socialists must lend this movement our support,” he said, “carrying the demands of honest and sincere members of the clergy to their conclusions, making them stick to their words about freedom, demanding that they should resolutely break all ties between religion and the police.” Like Lenin in 1905, the socialists of today must support religious groups who yearn for their freedoms in an open society, especially when it involves fighting the police state.

In contrast with the private view of religion, Lenin maintained that the role of the party is to support not only the separation of church and state, but use its influence to rid society of malevolent religious beliefs and practices. Since a “party is an association of class-conscious, advanced fighters for the emancipation of the working class,” he writes, “such an association cannot and must not be indifferent to lack of class-consciousness, ignorance, or obscurantism in the shape of religious beliefs.” The party acts as an institution of critical thinking, wherein members use their position to educate others on the harmful absurdities of superstitious thinking, what Lenin calls the “struggle against every religious bamboozling of the workers.” It also acts as a disseminator of knowledge. Since a party’s outlook should be materialist, according to Lenin, its party programme “necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism,” namely “the publication of the appropriate scientific literature.” Taking a cue from Engels, Lenin advocates for a party “to translate and disseminate the literature of the eighteenth-century French Enlighteners and atheists.” (He returns to this idea in “On the Significance of Militant Materialism.”)

However, Lenin acknowledged the limits of propaganda with regards to the religious question. While education is vital, the material conditions of a society must also change in order for secularism to thrive, precisely because those conditions created the religious impulse in the first place. “It would be bourgeois narrow-mindedness,” Lenin wrote, “to forget that the yoke of religion that weighs upon mankind is merely a product and reflection of the economic yoke within society.” This passage reinforces Lenin’s view that religion is a product of material forces, and as such, will only wither away when those material forces are restructured by a united working class for the benefit of all.  

Lenin, who valued working class solidarity, understood dividing the proletariat along religious lines for party purity as impractical and disastrous. Admitting to a party some of the working class whose religious beliefs coincide with a commitment to science and class struggle was a necessity. Additionally, he stressed that the religious question should only be addressed when appropriate, specifically when it relates to material forces and class struggle. He deemed it foolish to split the burgeoning proletariat “on account of third-rate opinions or senseless ideas, rapidly losing all political importance, rapidly being swept out as rubbish by the very course of economic development” and that only in unity “the proletariat will wage a broad and open struggle for the elimination of economic slavery, the true source of the religious humbugging of mankind.” The secular humanist left, therefore, should be direct about its lack of religious beliefs and commitment to a naturalist, materialist view of the world. Yet, we should not use our convictions as a cudgel with which to harm those of religious beliefs, nor do they preclude us from working with religious organizations on raising class consciousness and advocating for a post-capitalist world.

The 1917 “October Revolution'', which overthrew the bourgeois government instituted after the fall of the Tsars, brought Lenin to the center of political power. “On the Significance of Militant Materialism,” written five years after the revolution, continued Lenin’s exploration of religion amidst the Bolshevik party’s attempt to build “actually existing socialism.” Pod Znamenem Marksizma, or Under the Banner of Marxism, was a journal established in 1922 with the goal of “popularizing militant materialism and atheism,” as mentioned in the notes of Lenin’s selected works. Lenin’s essay was a rejoinder to one written by fellow revolutionary Leon Trotsky, published in the journal’s inaugural issue. “In such a deeply fractured, critical, and unstable era as ours,” Trotsky wrote, “education of the proletarian vanguard requires serious and reliable theoretical foundations.” Those theoretical foundations must be materialist, “so that the greatest events, the powerful tides, rapidly changing tasks, and methods of the party and state do not disorganize his consciousness and do not break down his will before the threshold of his independent responsible work.” Like Lenin, Trotsky insisted that education, of both Marxist and non-Marxist texts, led to the development of a flourishing, socialist society.

Lenin began his article praising Trotsky’s remarks and reiterating the importance of a broad education in materialism. Communists and non-Communists, who are nevertheless committed to materialism, should align to advance their educational goals. This partnership represented a forward move in revolutionary actions, specifically in relation to Lenin’s concept of the “vanguard.” As Paul D’Amato wrote in Socialist Worker, “Lenin's concept of the ‘vanguard’ party is the simple idea that working-class militants and other activists who have come to the conclusion that the whole system must be dismantled must come together into a single organization in order to centralize and coordinate their efforts against the system.” However, the vanguard would itself be democratic and open to outside influences. Lenin reaffirmed this position when discussing alliances with non-Communists: 

This is especially true on the issue of education. Lenin defended the rich history of materialist thinking in Russia and declared, “it is our absolute duty to enlist all adherents of consistent and militant materialism in the joint work of combating philosophical reaction and the philosophical prejudices of so-called educated society.” The lesson for us today is that secular humanists must align and support those who defend the materialist view of reality and history, to fight against the forces of idealism and ahistoricism, what Lenin (quoting Joseph Dietzgen) named the “graduated flunkeys of clericalism.” 
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Another indispensable element of Lenin’s framework regarding materialism and education is “militancy,” which refers to “the sense of unflinchingly exposing and indicting all modern ‘graduated flunkeys of clericalism’, irrespective of whether they act as representatives of official science or as freelances calling themselves ‘democratic Left or ideologically socialist’ publicists.” Publications dedicated to materialism should not pull punches when it comes to critiquing ideas, those who propagate them, and their relationship to society. In that vein, militancy has two components: militant materialism and militant atheism. Militant materialism emphasizes the “connection between the class interests and the class position of the bourgeoisie and its support of all forms of religion on the one hand, and the ideological content of the fashionable trends on the other.” In other words, it grounds philosophical, literary, and scientific currents in material conditions and class structures. Militant atheism is just what it sounds like: clearly and unapologetically defending a non-theistic worldview. 

Lenin’s militancy might sound like something akin to the “New Atheism” of intellectuals like Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins, but it is nothing of the sort. Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins, and many others of this camp critique religion almost exclusively on ideological grounds, ripping it from the contexts of history and political economy. It’s also expressed in a way that resorts to racism, xenophobia, and imperialism, things Lenin stood strongly against. Lenin’s militant atheism, on the other hand, arises from Marxism and probes the material forces that developed and inculcated religions. He also doesn’t use atheism as a pretext to defend bourgeois political projects, like imperialism or colonialism. It’s a left atheism, rooted in the materialist process and completely different from the ahistorical, anti-materialist bromides of the New Atheists. 

Alas, atheism is challenging for many to adopt, especially in the working class. This is why broad literacy in the materialist thinkers of the past holds such a large place in Lenin’s conception of revolutionary politics. Like in “Socialism and Religion,” Lenin advocated in “Militant Materialism” for the translation and dissemination of “the militant atheist literature of the late eighteenth century for mass distribution among the people.” As these writers were clearly not Marxists, Lenin acknowledges their limitations and advocates for annotated editions that contextualize these thinkers; doing so provides the public with “most varied atheist propaganda material...from the most diverse spheres of life” Thus, militant materialism is only developed via Marxist and non-Marxist thought working in tandem to educate modern society, providing readers with incisive critiques of religion. It would be to the detriment of the working class and its development to ignore these valuable readings.

In contrast to the classic writings of atheism, Lenin decried the “modern scientific critics of religion” who “almost invariably ‘supplement’ their own refutations of religious superstitions with arguments which immediately expose them as ideological slaves to the bourgeoisie.” He provided two examples demonstrating this trend. The first is Professor Robert Y. Wipper, who, in his book, The Origin of Christianity, relayed the relevant science refuting archaic superstitions while refusing to take a position on said mysticism. He claimed to be “above both ‘extremes— the idealist and the materialist.” Lenin, cutting through the cant, called this waffling on religious matters “toadying to the ruling bourgeoisie, which all over the world devotes to the support of religion hundreds of millions of rubles from the profits squeezed out of the working people.” Marxists should be consummate materialists, Lenin asserted, and ideological fence-sitting of this kind was not to be tolerated. 

The second example cited by Lenin comes from German intellectual Arthur Drews and his book, The Christ Myth.** Drews argued in this work that Jesus Christ, as a historical figure, never existed, yet advocated for a “renovated, purified and more subtle religion” that would withstand “the daily growing naturalist torrent.” Like with Wipper, Lenin lacked patience with this viewpoint, as it only reinforced traditional religious structures and existing class dynamics. “Here we have an outspoken and deliberate reactionary,” Lenin quipped, “who is openly helping the exploiters to replace the old, decayed religious superstitions by new, more odious and vile superstitions.” Nevertheless, Lenin encouraged translating and disseminating works from  Drews and others like him, as they were vital to the struggle against even more reactionary forces of religious belief. 

On a practical level,  Lenin still actively encouraged Marxists to ally with “the progressive section of the bourgeoisie” in the “struggle against the predominating religious obscurantists.” He sees Drews’ mistakes as akin to those of the eighteenth-century writers, and to reject the value of Drews’ work would be denying the worth of the enlightenment thinkers. This is an interesting point to linger on. Lenin, the ur-example of militant materialism and Marxism, still saw the work of non-Marxists as vital to the struggle for better conditions, both intellectually and materially. Despite flaws, their views still provided immense worth to the movement. It is the role of Marxists to expose these errors while also championing their better ideas. Lenin presented a crucial lesson for left humanists: despite our own misgivings about some religious ideas, we shouldn’t reject collaborating with religionists who share our goals. Whether we’re encouraging people to leave religious fundamentalism or uniting on a common cause like universal healthcare, humanists and religionists can cooperate for the improvement of society. Lenin’s mixture of ideological orthodoxy and practical policy is a superb example of the dialectical thinking vital to a conception of left-wing secular humanism.

Alongside considerations of non-Marxist philosophy or history informing the working class on materialism, Lenin maintained that the advancements of modern science and its practitioners should also play a role. Militant materialism, in his estimation, should forge an “alliance with those modern natural scientists who incline towards materialism and are not afraid to defend and preach it as against the modish philosophical wanderings into idealism and scepticism which are prevalent in so-called educated society.” Additionally, modern scientists should be educated in dialectical materialism, the philosophical framework developed by Marx and Engels (following Hegel) that emphasizes the complex interactions of materials forces that create our real, lived experience. Thus, scientists engaged in research should review the dialectical writings of Hegel, Marx, and Engels and apply them systematically, which, as Lenin pointed out, would inoculate them against “intellectual admirers of bourgeois fashion” who “‘stumble’ into reaction.” Much like Marxist philosopher of science Roy Bhaskar argued decades later, Lenin recoginzed the integrative power of dialectical philosophy as indispensable, since “natural science is progressing so fast and is undergoing such a profound revolutionary upheaval in all spheres that it cannot possibly dispense with philosophical deductions.” 

V. I. Lenin’s “militant materialism”, while contentious, provides essential lessons to left secular humanists on the variegated interaction between religion and socialism. As a theorist of the political party, Lenin advocated for the separation of church and state, freedom of conscience, and political participation with religionists, while defending atheism and materialism as core value propositions of the Marxist left. In regards to mass education, Lenin encouraged the dissemination of materialist and atheist writers, Marxist and non-Marxist, as a means of growing the working class’s conception of secularism. In true dialectical fashion, Lenin’s ideas are a study in contrasts. He’s an ideologue dedicated to a steadfast conception of materialism and a pragmatist when it comes to movement building and consciousness raising. With this, he’s following Marx and Engels, who advocated the same thing in the Communist Manifesto. While not everything he champions might translate to our struggles today, Lenin’s secularism, materialism, and atheism nevertheless leaves a clear and influential example for us to learn from. 


Notes

​* It is not the place of this essay to litigate the horrors that emerged from the Stalinist period. For a Marxist analysis of Lenin and the period after his death, see Rob Sewell’s excellent essay, “In Defense of Lenin” (2014). 

** Mythicism, or the belief that Jesus Christ was not a historical person, is a hotly-debated subject within the broader secular community, though not within traditional historical scholarship. The fact that Lenin may have entertained this idea is intriguing, to say the least. To learn more about mythicism and its issues, see Bart Erhman’s book, Did Jesus Exist? (2012). 
​

The oppressed and their ruling class oppressors have an anti-dialogical relationship with one another, which is to say there is no meaningful dialogue that occurs between them. Instead, the ruling class lays sole claim upon all of the knowledge, norms, and rules that govern our society. In place of a dialogical discourse with the oppressed, the ruling class prescribes authoritative narratives to them. This is how the ruling class is able to exert and maintain their domination of the world, and in doing so, deny any chance for a transformative, radical, and liberating revolution. The ruling class conceals the possibilities of full liberation by “gifting” the oppressed a minimalistic range of rights and liberties that are purely legalistic in constitution and devoid of any economic considerations. This has to be stopped. But how?
​
In what follows, I will attempt to answer this question by advancing a Marxist program for revolutionary vanguard pedagogy. In the first section of this paper, I will elucidate Karl Marx’s distinction between a limited form of freedom, known as “political emancipation,” from a more maximal approach, which he calls “human emancipation.” Additionally, I will introduce Paulo Freire’s pedagogical theorization of the “banking model” of education, which stands in contrast to his formulation of a “problem-posing” method. I will also argue here that political emancipation, as a purely legalistic configuration of rights and liberties, is the only sort of “liberation” that can be conferred to the oppressed by the ruling class. Human emancipation will not be gifted to the oppressed – it must be fought for. In the second section of this paper, I will present the aforementioned pedagogical principles as they relate to revolutionary theory. To do this I will draw upon the works of Vladimir Lenin in conjunction with Freire. In the final section of my paper, I will discuss the differences between these two theorists when it comes to matters concerning the proper timing for vanguard action. Here I will favor Lenin’s skepticism towards a subservience to spontaneity over Freire’s dedication to patience. As such, this paper is centered on what I propose to be the paramount responsibility of revolutionary vanguard leadership, namely, to educate, agitate, and awaken the oppressed

The oppressed cannot rely on their oppressors to bestow upon them the kinds of rights and liberties that are necessary to achieve their full liberation. For this reason, Marx distinguishes two forms of emancipation in his essay “On the Jewish Question.” On the one hand, there is political emancipation, which is purely legalistic and particularly limited in scope and scale. On the other hand, there is human emancipation, which requires the abolition of economic oppression. Human emancipation necessitates this in addition to the attainment of civil rights and liberties for everyone, and as such, can be understood as a maximalist approach towards freedom.
​
As a formal liberal judicial model of rights, political emancipation occurs when the ruling class grants civil rights and liberties to people through the supposed universal application of law, thereby bringing disenfranchised groups into the already existing social-political superstructure.[1] While on face-value this sounds freedom affirming, it in truth only offers a limited conception of equality.[2] This is because political emancipation ignores the consideration of one’s class and is devoid of any concern for one’s material relations. In short, political emancipation is purely legalistic in composition.

As a result, political emancipation conceals oppression by giving it a more human face. Indeed, I argue alongside Marx that juridical equality masks other forms of social inequality. While those who are politically emancipated may be free in a sense of the word, they may still remain unfree in material matters. To put it another way, even if all citizens are equal on political grounds, they can still be unequal economically. As a consequence, the ruling class has divided human life into two; the individual in the political realm, and the individual in civil society. The former is regarded as a citizen of a community who is the bearer of abstract rights. The latter individual is regarded as an isolated monad who is merely concerned with their own private affairs.[3]

However, this is not to say that political emancipation should not be sought after in our struggle for liberation. In fact, quite the contrary is true. While political emancipation may not be sufficient for the liberation of the oppressed, it is a necessary condition of such. This is because a free and equal society requires the political emancipation of all people. But even if people are politically equal there still might be underlying social inequalities that obstructs a fully exhaustive explication of justice and fairness. For this reason, political emancipation should be considered as only an inclusionary measure, and not a liberatory one. Political emancipation is a great step towards emancipation, but it is only that - a step. Human emancipation requires great leaps forward instead.

​Most notably, methods of prescription are integral to the oppressed-oppressor relationship.[4] I find that this is a direct consequence of the way in which the ruling class manages any discourse that pertains to the knowledge, norms, and rules of how a society functions. Freire designates this as the “banking model” of education.[5] In the banking model, knowledge is considered to be a gift that is given from the teacher to the student. Consequently, the banking model of education enables the ruling class to narrate and dictate information to the oppressed, who in turn are only able to passively receive and listen to these commands. Ultimately, the banking model culminates into practices in which the ruling class acts as the teachers, while the oppressed are categorized as students who are to be controlled.  

Additionally, in the banking model of education, the teacher narrates a certain set of content to their students. Here, the task of the teacher is to deposit into the students minds a series of fixed knowledge, norms, and rules, as if their minds were empty containers to be filled. In turn, the student’s job then is to record, memorize, and repeat the information given to them. These students are not permitted to reflect or engage with this content. In this model it is not for the student to ask why two times two equals four, but rather, only to know that it simply is four.[i] In light of this, the banking model can be said to be quite mechanistic in composition. 

Subsequently, the ruling class has taken the banking model as the way in which the knowledge, norms, and rules of society are applied, presenting themselves as the teachers, while at the same time positioning the oppressed as their students. Anti-dialogical by its very nature, the banking model has been so successful for the ruling class because there is no room for any participation on the side of the oppressed, with the exception of absorbing what is dictated to them. As a result, the banking model does not allow the oppressed to actively participate and transform the world around them. 

This makes the banking model a particularly dangerous pedagogical approach, as it allows the ruling class to place limitations on the rights and liberties that the oppressed can have. At best, political emancipation is the only form of freedom that can be advanced when the ruling class is permitted to act as teachers who have the exclusive authority to prescribe knowledge, norms, and rules. The ruling class utilizes these pedagogical tactics to ensure their complete control of all our social-political actions and behaviors. In this worldview, it is not for the oppressed to ask or challenge why we must continue to live in a capitalist society, but only to know that it simply is the case that we do.

With the backing of the banking model of education the ruling class is able to prohibit all potential revolutionary changes. Simply put, the ruling class uses the banking model to make the possibility of human emancipation untenable. However, it should be noted that a revolution is not a project in which one liberates another. The ruling class cannot and will not lead us in the struggle to overcome oppression. To believe the oppressors would liberate the oppressed is indeed a naive notion. This is why the oppressed must not rely on the knowledge given to them by the ruling class. As Freire attests, “Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift” (47). Emancipation cannot be gifted to the oppressed because the ruling class places strict limitations on what kind of emancipation can be achieved in their social-political system. Even though political emancipation has traditionally come from the ruling class by way of integrating citizens into their fold, there is no question that human emancipation cannot come from within this currently existing superstructure. 

As such, the oppressed cannot use the State apparatus as a means of liberation. In the essay “The Civil War in France” Marx insists that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes” (Marx, 302). To put this another way, the oppressed cannot replace the bourgeois State with a proletariat State, as this would simply be a transference of domination. This would only amount to a substation of power and would not necessarily promote the end of oppression as such. Rather than reconstructing social-political power, an organization such as this merely rearranges it. Hence, the conditions of human emancipation would not be sufficiently met by the creation of a proletariat State. In sum, a full form of freedom cannot be achieved through the mere rearrangement of society, rather, it must be completely reconstructed anew. 

The conditions needed for the total negation of alienation and exploitation requires the destruction of the oppressor State apparatus. On these grounds, Marx postulates two distinct movements that must occur prior to the actualization of a truly free and equal society. First, the bourgeois State must be smashed. This can be achieved through revolution. The second movement is the withering away of the new State.[6] But what does this mean and how does it happen? While there is no simple or singular answer to this riddle, it must be asserted that the withering away of the oppressor State can only happen when every person is given the opportunity to engage in dialogical discourse and action with one another. 

With all of this in mind, I will now argue that any attempt to liberate the oppressed must involve their active and reflective participation in how society is shaped. For this reason, members of revolutionary vanguard leadership cannot rely on the same pedagogy used by the ruling class. According to Freire, the oppressed should not be dictated “liberatory” propaganda, nor can they be told what to think or how to act.[7] Instead, Freire asserts the best route to freedom occurs when there is constant and continual dialogue between all members of society. Revolutionary leaders cannot act as banking model teachers in relation to the oppressed, for they must instead enter into a co-intentional form of education with them. This is the only way to combat the contradictions that exist between the student and the teacher - the oppressed and the oppressor - as posited by the ruling class. Thus, communication should be acknowledged as having paramount significance for all matters concerning revolutionary liberation.

When dialogical discourse happens, both parties become teachers and students equiprimordially. As Freire states, “Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers” (Freire, 80). Freire calls this form of dialogue between teachers and students the “problem-posing model” of education.[8] As the problem-posing model is dialogical, it stands in direct contrast with the banking model. Whereas the banking model teacher prescribes information to students, the problem-posing teacher-student discovers knowledge alongside their fellow student-teachers. Freire says this about the problem-posing teacher-student, “Here, no one teaches another, nor is anyone self-taught. People teach each other” (Freire, 80). Freire’s interpretation of a liberatory pedagogy therefore does not place the oppressed student as a passive listener, but rather, as a critical and active participant. Through dialogue, trust, and love the problem-posing model allows the student-teacher and the teacher-student to work together with one another as co-authors of knowledge, norms, and rules. 

​Overall, education is dialogical if students can contribute to the discourse at hand and it is anti-dialogical when they cannot. Indeed, dialogical action necessitates the possibility of participation. In short, the “Banking education resists dialogue; problem-posing education regards dialogue as indispensable to the act of cognition which unveils reality. Banking education treats students as objects of assistance; problem-posing education makes them critical thinkers” (Freire, 83). This is valuable insight for those who are involved in the revolutionary struggle. From this interpretation we can see that when vanguard leaders fight apart from the oppressed it can only amount to fighting for liberation for themselves and not the people.

It follows then, revolutionary leaders cannot adhere to the banking model in order to gain support from the people. Their pedagogy cannot be a top-down approach, as this would mirror the model of the oppressor-oppressed. Freire writes on this matter, “The revolutionary's role is to liberate, and be liberated, with the people - not to win them over” (Freire, 95). Fundamentally, the role of the revolutionary leader is not one of salvation, but instead, of encouragement.[9]

Since human emancipation cannot and will not be gifted to the oppressed, a revolution towards such must be fought for. But who is to do the organizing for these endeavors, and how should it be done? I propose that this is the responsibility of those who are conscious of issues of class, that is, the revolutionary vanguard leaders. But as I have stated earlier, the way in which a vanguard organizes themselves with the oppressed cannot be done in the same manner that the ruling class does. Instead, they must rally the oppressed in a dialogical fashion. To organize or mobilize the oppressed by means of manipulation, or without them altogether, would be a contradiction of human emancipation, and thus, could not be considered a revolutionary movement. These false vanguards may have different objectives than the ruling class does, but there can be no road to liberation if their pedagogical practices align with the banking model of education. Dialogue and participation from the people is what distinguishes a revolution from a military coup. Leaders of a coupes do not have dialogue with the people, it is done “for” the people. But an attempt to carry out the revolution “for” the people is the same as to carry out the revolution without them, and will never result in the manifestation of human emancipation. Again, it must be stressed: liberation is not a gift, it must be fought for.

According to Freire, the strive for one’s freedom is not a concession that can be bestowed upon the oppressed by revolutionary leadership, as it is something that they must become convicted of on their own accord. Yet, Freire notes the average and everyday person is oftentimes not socially or politically conscious. As a result, he advises revolutionary leaders to wait and bide their time patiently, striking only when a mass of people are class conscious. He writes on the matter:

As we can see from Freire’s account, revolutionary leaders cannot make up the minds for the oppressed, for this is what the oppressor does. Therefore, for Freire, a true revolutionary leader does not impose their values on others.

Accordingly, Freire believes revolutionary leaders should not deposit communiques and programs of action to the oppressed. He writes, “There are two principles here: one is the actual needs of the masses rather than what we fancy they need, and the other is the wishes of the masses, who must make up their own minds instead of our making up their minds for them” (Freire, 94). Hence, the oppressed, as masters of their own education, must compose their own program of freedom. Freire continues, “By imposing their word on others, they falsify that word and establish a contradiction between their methods and their objectives” (126). It is clear Freire maintains the position that revolutionary leaders cannot truly know what the oppressed desire by themselves. They can come to an agreement about what sort of freedom they think the oppressed should have, but this is not the same as the oppressed having knowledge on such matters for themselves. In this respect, a revolution built around the pillars and programs of the revolutionary leaders becomes the vanguard’s revolution, and not the revolution of the oppressed. Freire argues that in an instance such as this revolutionary leaders merely replace the role of the bourgeois so they may carry out their own vision of society. 

It is here that I disagree with Freire. I believe that revolutionary leaders should not wait until the time comes when the oppressed awaken from their socially and politically conscious slumber. Nor can vanguards keep revolutionary discourse to themselves. The indifference towards class consciousness on the part of the oppressed is one of the main reasons why revolutionary movements have moved so slowly and progressed so little. As such, the first task of the vanguard is to cultivate this theory. Then they must educate, agitate, and awaken the oppressed. 

The problem is then, how should revolutionary leaders educate the oppressed? As problematic as this issue may be, it is clear that we cannot rely on the oppressed to spontaneously formulate the decision to revolt. According to Lenin, revolutionary potential is fundamentally hindered by a subservience to spontaneity. He proclaims we cannot look to spontaneity for a chance at a revolution, as spontaneity is what we have ‘at the present moment.’[10] For Lenin, an adherence to spontaneity only advances the continued subordination of bourgeois ideology. In other words, spontaneity can only lead us to more domination of bourgeois social-political systems. This line of thought is marked by the thinking, “there can be no other way; there is no alternative!” Adherence to the status-quo is easy for the oppressed to follow because it is so entrenched in their daily life and way of thought. This is why Lenin argues that a revolutionary movement must combat spontaneity. I agree with Lenin on this issue.

Yet, it cannot be denied that class consciousness exists by way of spontaneity to a certain extent. This is evident when workers go on strike, or when they demand better wages, working conditions etc. However, this is what Lenin calls “trade-unionism,” which is not the same as a class consciousness proper. Per Lenin, “The spontaneous working-class movement is by itself able to create (and inevitably does create) only trade-unionism, and working-class trade-unionist politics is precisely working-class bourgeois politics” (Lenin, 125). Accordingly, trade-unionism should be considered as class consciousness in its embryonic form. Demands and strikes show flashes of consciousness, yet not the full awakening of such. Indeed, spontaneity can only develop this minimal level of class consciousness.[11] Nevertheless, trade-unionism is a good thing, insofar as without it the oppressed lack any hope for progress. But these demands do not lead us to a true challenge against the oppressor-superstructure. Similar to political measures of emancipation, trade-unionist demands do not show knowledge about the antagonisms of class struggle, and as such, they are fundamentally limited when compared to human emancipation. 

Vanguards are therefore needed because the oppressed are not yet at their height of class consciousness. The aim of the vanguard then, is to help the oppressed develop class consciousness in order to promote a movement that stands in opposition to the oppressor ruling class. In this way, the vanguards task is to prepare the oppressed for revolution. This means revolutionary leaders should spread their understanding of socialism with fervor and zeal to the average and everyday person. The potential for revolution gains momentum by awakening the oppressed to this cause.

One of the greatest weaknesses to any revolutionary momentum is the lack of consciousness among most people. Indeed, it appears as if the oppressed are content with political emancipation alone. But this is simply because they have not awakened to the realization that human emancipation is an imperative of justice and fairness. Thus, the task of the vanguard is to educate the oppressed about their political and social standing.

Aiming at this goal, Lenin advises revolutionary leaders to use what is known as “exposure literature.” This is the use of leaflets, manifestos, and other writings devoted to exposing the truth of the oppressor-oppressed relationship. The aim of exposure literature is to rouse the oppressed into an awareness of their current material social conditions. For this reason, exposure literature should be utilized to create a stance against the ruling class. Lenin even considered exposure literature to be a declaration of war against the bourgeois status-quo.[12] This is because it is through these writings that the oppressed can become better acquainted with the alienation and exploitation that they suffer at the hands of the ruling class. For once the oppressed learn about the possibility of full liberation through human emancipation the scraps of humanity granted by the ruling class in the form of political emancipation will no longer be satisfactory. These works of agitation should help expand and deepen the demands of the oppressed. Correspondingly, vanguards, as revolutionary theorists, are called upon to publish works that expand upon and intensify the political exposures of the oppressed. 

​​To stress, a revolution cannot be spontaneous. For a revolution to happen there needs to be an attempt at such. Human emancipation will not simply arise out of nowhere, and it will definitely not be gifted by the ruling class. It is therefore the responsibility of the revolutionary vanguard to educate, agitate, and awaken the oppressed out of their social-political slumber and help them achieve a sense of class consciousness. 

Emancipation, as I have argued, cannot be gifted by the oppressor. As we have seen, there exists a relationship between the oppressed and the oppressor that is fundamentally anti-dialogical. This is because the oppressed are currently unable to be meaningfully involved in the formation of society. In order for the oppressed to gain such a role requires a radical revolution in which they are encouraged to become a part of society as active members. Through the works of Marx and Freire, we learn that this cannot come about through a mere reversal of roles. Moreover, through the works of Marx and Lenin we learn that while political emancipation and trade unionism are good steps in the right direction, they are only that - steps. To gain either of these is no great leap towards liberation, as they are necessary, but not sufficient conditions for such. 

How we reach the manifestation of human emancipation is what is at stake now. Whereas Lenin argues that the oppressed need to be agitated from without, Freire contends that revolution requires patience. Lenin makes the charge that agitation is the only route out of trade unionism, while Freire claims that such a position isolates the revolutionary leadership from the oppressed. Who then, is correct? 

If we are led to believe as Freire does, we might lose the potential for a more immediate revolution. This is because Freire wants revolutionary leaders to tread cautiously and patiently towards revolution. For Freire, revolution must be a desire of the oppressed which must come about by their own fruition. This line of thinking has both its merits and its pitfalls. If a revolution is initiated by the people it will take on a much more authentic character than if it was not. In this way, a revolution is truly made by the oppressed. Freire envisions the oppressed entering into dialogue with each other to decide what form of liberation they themselves want, and is not something that is directed “for” them. Assuredly, this has a strong dialogical characteristic about it. Patience of this sorts is beneficial in remaining cognizant of the desires of the oppressed. As Freire argues, any sort of revolution that is not aware of such matters falls under the banking model of education. This is undoubtedly the case when revolutionary leaders treat the knowledge that they hold of class consciousness as a gift. This is why Freire comes to the conclusion that no matter how well intentioned this gift of revolutionary knowledge is, an approach such as this will ultimately result in the banking model, thereby continuing the tradition of oppression. 

However, as Lenin reckons, spontaneity cannot be relied upon for revolutionary struggle. Spontaneity has created the conditions of present society, which is anything but revolutionary. To be sure, spontaneity has resulted in the mass adherence to the status-quo, and is allied with the forces of pacification. Modern capitalist society has become increasingly structured around the notion of the “pacification of the proletariat.” This is all to say that a large number of the oppressed have become pacified in regard to their social and material conditions. While members of the oppressed might understand themselves as oppressed, they might at the same time be content with their lot in life. Why revolt against the superstructure when they can go home and watch Netflix? Why enter into a political dialogue with anybody when they can play the latest version of Angry birds? Why care about the massive inequalities of wealth in the world when they can consume whatever they want from the comfort of their couches, with free two-day shipping? In other words, liberation is hard, turning on the television is easy. Capitalism has become extremely efficient at quelling thoughts of dissent by way of increased modes of commodification. Everything is commodified in the eyes of capital, which consequently results in the consent of the continuation of the oppressors strangle on knowledge, norms, and rules of society. The oppressed do not see themselves as such, but rather as a consumer. The oppressed have thus become complacent with the status-quo. With such complacency, many oppressed wonder why they should even bother being political at all?

This is exactly why exposure literature and measures of agitation on the part of revolutionary leaders is so important. Problem posing education should be used to rouse the oppressed from their complacency with bourgeoisie rule. The oppressed need to be awakened out of their current state of mind, or else they will forever remain subjugated. As I have stated previously, the commodification of all aspects of life has made it extremely difficult for many members of the oppressed class to see themselves as beings who are alienated and exploited. Exposure literature and agitation serves as the rod that revolutionary leaders can use to pry the oppressed out of this state of slumber. It is likely that nothing will change if we are to stick to the rule of spontaneity. This is not to say, however, that the revolutionary leader should act “for” the oppressed. They may rouse them into a state of dissent, but they cannot act alone. Revolution requires action from the people. To act without the people and without dialogue is not a revolution, it is a military coupe. 

Given the current state of social-political affairs, it seems as if there is little hope for a radical and revolutionary struggle that is guided by the desire for human emancipation, if there is any at all. This is because the ruling class has complete control over the knowledge, norms, and rules that govern our society. This is done through the prescription of the banking model of education, which allows the oppressors to garner total control of the kinds of freedom the oppressed can obtain. A limitation such as this prevents the possibility of full human emancipation. 

On these grounds, it is the responsibility of the revolutionary vanguard leadership to educate, agitate, and awaken the oppressed out of their slumber, guiding them into an awareness of class struggle. But as I have maintained, a vanguard pedagogy cannot mimic the banking model tactics used by the ruling class. A revolution cannot be done “for” the oppressed, and as such, they must be given the capability to dialogically engage in the discourse regarding the arrangement of societies knowledge, norms, and rules.

The question arises then, is Lenin’s revolutionary vanguard theory anti-dialogical? I hold the position that it is not. As Lenin demonstrates, agitation is not the same thing as telling someone what to do. Agitation involves exposing the social and political conditions of the oppressed. It remains the decision of the oppressed what to do with that information. Agitation is important because without it many members of the oppressed would fall into the complacency set forth by spontaneity. Agitation is not anti-dialogical, as it encourages participation in dialogue. Indeed, without agitation there is likely to be no dialogue. Agitation is done so that the oppressed may enter into dialogue with the oppressed. Agitation is not done as a narrative monologue, as is the case in the banking model. Agitation is done as a problem-posing dialogue. Agitation serves to initiate the conversation between those with class consciousness and those without. In short: agitation is a call to dialogue. 

​Notes
​
​[1] Marx defines “political emancipation” as that which occurs when “The state abolishes, in its own way, distinctions of birth, social rank, education, occupation, when it declares that birth, social rank, education, occupation, are non-political distinctions, when it proclaims, without regard to these distinction, that every member of the nation is an equal participant in national sovereignty, when it treats all elements of the real life of the nation from the standpoint of the state” (Marx, 8).
 
[2] Marx writes on the issue, “The limits of political emancipation are evident at once from the fact that the state can free itself from a restriction without man being really free from this restriction, that the state can be a free state without man being a free man” (Marx, 7).
 
[3] Per Marx, “Political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one hand, to a member of civil society, to an egoistic, independent individual, and, on the other hand, to a citizen, a juridical person” (Marx, 21).

[4] According to Freire, “Every prescription represents the imposition of one individual's choice upon another, transforming the consciousness of the person prescribed to into one that conforms with the prescribers consciousness. Thus, the behavior of the oppressed is a prescribed behavior, following as it does the guidelines of the oppressor” (Freire, 47).
 
[5] Freire provides us with this definition, “This is the “banking” concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits” (Freire, 72).
​
[6] For more on this see Marx’s essay “The Civil War in France.”

[7] As Freire implores, “Those truly committed to the cause of liberation can accept neither the mechanistic concept of consciousness as an empty vessel to be filled, nor the use of banking methods of domination (propaganda, slogans—deposits) in the name of liberation” (Freire, 77).

​[8] Freire provides us with this definition, “In problem-posing education, people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation” (Freire, 83).

[9] Cautiously, Freire advises revolutionary leaders to “not go to the people in order to bring them a message of "salvation," but in order to come to know through dialogue with them both their objective situation and their awareness of that situation” (Freire, 95)

​[10] See (Lenin, 67) for more on this.

​[11] For Lenin, “This shows that the “spontaneous element,” in essence, represents nothing more nor less than. consciousness in an embryonic form… The strikes of the nineties revealed far greater flashes of consciousness… The revolts were simply the resistance of the oppressed, whereas the systematic strikes represented the class struggle in embryo, but only in embryo” (Lenin, 74).

​[12] See (Lenin, 120) for more.

Work Cited
​
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. 

Marx, Karl. Karl Marx Selected Writings. Edited by Lawrence Hugh Simon, Hackett, 1994. 

Vladimir, Lenin. Essential Works of Lenin: “What Is to Be Done?” and Other Writings. Edited by Henry M. Christman, Dover Publications Incorporated, 1987. 

The socialist and communist idea has long inspired the search for a better way of life.* Many things that are today taken for granted from Social Security to unemployment insurance come out of this quest. Indeed, it would be difficult to overstate its impact. This applies not only to day-to-day working-class struggles but also to the realm of ideas. Socialist thought has reconfigured the ideological landscape, altering ways of thinking and doing while reshaping culture and science. Dialectics revolutionized the social sciences, Marx’s political economy upended the study of wealth and work, as his science of class struggle politics redrew the world’s borders. Many commonly accepted concepts like the responsibility of government to care for its citizens, social equality and special compensatory measures to overcome past discrimination, arise directly out of the socialist tradition.

Even in the aftermath of the implosion of  the early 1990’s  and the ensuing ideological collapse and confusion, the communist ideal endures. Rather than abandoning its prospect – one deeply rooted in capitalism’s ongoing crises – people continue to seek alternatives: millions believe another world is still possible.
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Yet the very ambiguity of this hope is suggestive. It would be naive to ignore doubts about the viability of the socialist alternative. How to answer these doubts is a central question. This involves not only socialism as practiced but also as imagined: questions abound about the doctrine that gave rise to the social revolutions of the 20th century. This is doubly so because Marxism-Leninism sets a very high internal standard: the criteria of truth are in practice.

Does the practice suggest the theories of Marx and Lenin were misapplied or was something inherently wrong with them? How these questions are placed is important. Some, for example, have suggested that the theory of scientific socialism was “correct” but for mistakes in implementation. However, “correct” ideas do not exist outside history in a realm unto themselves waiting to be applied or misapplied by fallible and frail men and women. To postulate the existence of a correct theory that lies only in wait of implementation without evaluating the world-view itself in light of the rigorous tests of the historical experience itself would betray more than a hint of idealism: the concept that ideas precede human activity or have an independent existence. Again, theory must be confirmed by practice.
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Yet, the relationship between theory and practice must not be construed mechanically as a simple scientific formula: the application of a thesis, its test and corresponding result. A more useful way to pose this issue is as a problem of history. It is not simply a question of truth or falseness, success or failure, but how true or how false, how successful or unsuccessful at a given moment in history. Truth travels relatively through time. Viewed from this prism, Marxism’s “truth” was born out by its early successes, its “untruth” by the more recent defeats. Both represent an aspect or moment in socialism’s real history, a history that continues to unfold.

What is forgotten in considering this real history is that as a newly emerging science, Marxism is still evolving. Each historical moment represents a stage in its development. All too often, each moment was thought of as complete. Still more, it may not have been realized the extent to which each moment shaped the problems the new science was forced to deal with, which in turn, shaped how the doctrine came to be defined, with each definition seen as comprising the essential truth.

With each generation believing themselves to be in possession of this truth there appeared over the years a certain one-sidedness in interpretation and presentation of the new world-view. By one-sidedness is meant an unbalanced, mechanical, narrow juxtaposition of one aspect of Marxism over another or seeing one side of the doctrine as comprising the doctrine in its entirety. One-sidedness is a tendency to view things statically separate and opposed instead of seeing them in their interrelation as dimensions or aspects of one another.
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This one-sidedness has been a persistent problem throughout socialism’s history. Initially it arose as a problem of growth. In the heady days of its youth, after settling accounts with other left trends scientific socialism quickly became a dominant ideological force. Early successes were so sweeping that Lenin, charting Marxism’s growth, boasted of “complete victory” as the main philosophical expression of labor at the 19th and beginning of the 20th century.

At the same time however, weaknesses began to be felt. The “strength” of scientific socialism’s wide reach was also accompanied by a “weakness” represented by a lowering of the theoretical level. As the doctrine rapidly spread, Marxism was interpreted in what Lenin described as “extremely one-sided and mutilated form.”
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What began as a growing pain may have become more pronounced through the years culminating in a full-blown ideological trend with the consequence that socialist partisans couldn’t see the whole forest for the trees inhabiting the great ideological continent uncovered by Marx.

When considering the issue of one-sidedness it is crucial to bear in mind that Marxism is a living science. As a living doctrine, Marxism grows and declines, shifts and changes in response to the class battles of which it is part. In other words, it has different aspects, or sides that come to the fore or retreat according to the conditions of life. A period of upsurge and growth will lay stress on the side of Marxism that focuses on politics, strategy and tactics, united front work. A period of repression or a serious defeat may cause despair and disarray, triggering a serious internal crisis of Marxism such as was experienced in the early 1990s in wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. In such a period, another dimension of Marxism that lays stress on class fundamentals, fighting liquidationism, etc., becomes more pronounced. In the mid-to-late 1990s as the labor movement adopted a greater class-struggle orientation, the balance shifted again. The anti-globalization, peace and democratic movements took greater initiative, reopening space for left ideas and thinking. Precisely, because it is a living science, one or another “side” will advance or retreat. What is appropriate for one period may not be for another.

It is crucial to respond to these ebbs and flows. Mistakes resulting in stagnation, inactivity and isolation are the result of an inability to shift from one or another. These mistakes may assume a “left” or “right” form. One pits the class struggle against the fight for democracy, a second evolution over revolution, a third elevates one form of struggle over all others. Each seems to raise now this element of the philosophy, now that tactic to the level of principle.

An outline of Marxism’s internal history would be useful in establishing the various phases of its self-conceptualization and in what ways one-sidedness has appeared. As is well known because of Marx’s economic work, aspects of the science – especially philosophy – take the form of aphorisms as in the Thesis on Feuerbach. Tracing the emergence of different concepts and additions – for example it was G. Plekhanov who coined the phrase dialectical materialism – would help illuminate how it was rounded and developed: or revised.

Each attempt is important and has political implications. We are familiar with attempts to separate different parts of the philosophy as well as its developers: Marx from Engels, Lenin from both. Similarly well known are the various schools of Marxism that have emerged. One accepts historical materialism while denying political economy; another accepts political economy but refuses dialectics, a third adores dialectics but will have nothing of Marx’s theory of surplus value. Interestingly, few accept the theory of scientific socialism.

Lenin made a studied efforts to overcome this one-sidedness. In his The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism, is presented perhaps the first balanced summary. He posits the philosophy as an “integral world conception” adding its three sources, German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism, which are also its component parts. He describes Marxist philosophy as “matured philosophical materialism,” attaching equal weight to dialectical and historical materialism as well the concept of socialism premised on worker’s class struggle.
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Lenin’s balanced formulation stands in sharp contrast to earlier and later Marxists’ stress on one or another side of the world-view while leaving out important parts. G. Plekhanov for example in his important book The Fundamental Problems of Marxism defines the world-view as consisting of philosophical materialism and political economy, and neglects to include the category of scientific socialism. Plekhanov’s concept seems one-sided in so far as it neglects one of the principal legs upon which Marxism stands. Lenin corrects this omission. At the same time however, it might be said he too does not succinctly conceptualize in summary form just what the doctrine is. A rendering of component elements, even placing them together, does not necessarily complete the picture or say what the picture is of. Viewed as a whole, is the new world-view simply the sum of its parts or is the whole greater than the sum? This question becomes particularly interesting in light of Lenin’s own notes on dialectics from the Philosophical Notebooks: “The cognition of a whole and the division of its various parts is the chief question of dialectics.” Thus, it appears Lenin’s own cognition of the Marxist “whole” appears a little shy. As Antonio Gramsci pointed out in place of the various approximations a more balanced restatement that comes from the heart of the world-view might be in order. The point is not what is “correct” but what is truer, more balanced and closer to life.

Consideration should be given to whether this one-sidedness has contributed to a series of alterations of Marxism. First, from the side of “orthodoxy” (Plekhanov) and then from others we are more familiar with (Bernstein); and secondly, from the side of the Stalin leadership up to an including other leading Party collectives ending with the collapse of the USSR. Lenin could be seen as a correction of the double revision, marking a return to original paths.
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The ideology that emerged out of the CPSU as well as what became known as Euro-Communism, then, might be understood as contiguous “left and right” currents born of the same one-sided ideological impulse. Keeping in mind that old thinking habits die hard, a review of what the CPSU called Marxism-Leninism is in order. To a great measure, much of the communist movement relied on its stilted and wooden texts and while largely indigestible its influence should not be underestimated. At the same time, it must be recognized that Marxism-Leninism is a worldwide movement extending far beyond the CPSU with a rich and varied experience. In this regard, Lenin’s contribution must be considered as original and lasting, marking not only a return to authenticity but also a development along new lines. Still socialism’s experience in the 20th century became quite diverse and others have made significant contributions as well. Some countries have in fact begun the practice of adding the designation of the “Thought” of their national leader to account for these contributions. One wonders how far this naming process can go and what its future impact will be.

Another issue arises: scientific socialism was born into a world filled with superstition, religion and other forms of pre-scientific thought. As it traverses the long and difficult climb, from unreason to reason and superstition to science, the need for a more objective categorization is making itself felt. Naming a science after its discoverers may not contribute to its development. To avoid one-sidedness care should be given to embracing, critically reviewing and assimilating the Marxist legacy in its entirety. Needless to say, this includes China.
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Finally, it is worth considering how one-sidedness impacted the Communist movement in the US. The history of Communist Party shows an ongoing tension in balancing class and all-class democratic struggles like those involving racial and national minorities, women’s equality or LGBT rights.

Variously, one issue is placed over and against another. On the one hand, owing to the influence of Lenin’s general theory of democracy and its stress on championing the racially and nationally oppressed, stellar contributions were made in theorizing the national question and advancing the struggle for equality. Similarly, Communists have without doubt played significant roles in fighting for women’s equality. On the other hand, from the ill-advised Black Belt thesis, to a reluctance to support the Equal Rights Amendment, to the glacier-like slowness in warming to gay rights, the Communist movement has had difficulty in responding with agility and deftness to democratic struggles. Why?

The problem is complex. It is difficult to establish a causal link between ideology and the practical political choices made in the course of daily life. Indeed, even in the presence of a more balanced view, political life does not occur in a vacuum. Ongoing pressure from the right tends to push away from maintaining consistent working-class positions. Added to this are the pernicious influences of racism, sexism and homophobia, all of which combine in different ways.

Notwithstanding these realities, there has been a tendency to not see class and democratic struggles in their mutual relation. There has been a persistent under-appreciation and suspicion of the struggle for democracy: to see it as detracting from the class struggle, a trend Lenin himself battled. At the same time there has been misapplication of race and nationality as was the case with the self-determination and certain interpretations of  the African American centrality thesis. In fact one form of one-sidedness (seeing only class) breeds another (elevating race over class). A patent sectarianism that only sees class is cause in the first case; a movement away from consistent class positions and drift toward left nationalism is consequence in the second.
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Yet another dimension of one-sidedness may be seen in the approach to ideology itself or the lack thereof. Because on inadequate attention to ideological work, policy runs the risk of substituting for theory. Again the problem is complicated. Because of the relationship between theory and practice, Party policy does assume theoretical form. At the same time, policy is shaped by the art of the possible: what is politically feasible, unfortunately is not always what is right, nor is it necessarily what is “correct.” What emerges as policy due to the demands of inner unity is often a series of compromises.

Additionally, the problem appears from another side: for new theory to be created areas lying outside the realm of the agreed must be engaged. It is in the clash between agreed on practice (policy) and ideas outside its realm that new theory is created. This applies to thinking both within and without the Communist Party.

Important contributions are being made from writers and activists not organized in political parties. In fact in the US a majority of those within the socialist and communist tradition do not belong to the organized left.

These issues raise important questions about the very approach to the creation of ideology and its role in the class struggle. The main forms of the battle of ideas today do not occur in the realm of high theory between isolated groups of intellectuals, but rather in the arena of broad popular culture: film, literature, music, television, the Internet, etc. It is precisely here that the left must be engaged.

This becomes important when considering where the main emphasis should be directed: at intellectuals or others engaged in ideological production? Or should it rather center on the broad working-class left? The answer to this question goes to the very heart of our discussion. Because it is so important, the question might be sharpened as follows: who should lead?

It should be recalled that implicit in the founding of Marxist-Leninist parties was concept of working-class leadership and developing a new sources for ideological production. Not only must the “educators to be educated,” but new educators themselves must arise from the ranks of working class. How to achieve this remains largely unsolved. Owing to the manner and time in which socialism was introduced into the world this concept of working-class political and ideological leadership has faced a troubled history. As is well known, before the introduction of the public school in the late 19th century workers rarely had the opportunity to obtain a higher education. As a result, intellectuals were largely formed from the ranks of the middle and upper classes. It is no mystery, then, why they were first to articulate the socialist vision. However, from the time of Marx to this day, they tend to dominate the working-class movement ideologically and politically. What are the roots of this problem?

Part of an answer can be traced to Lenin’s idea that socialist ideology had to be introduced to the working-class movement from the outside: that left to itself the working-class movement would only spontaneously develop trade union consciousness. An aspect then of the role of the party was to interject socialist ideas. It is not difficult to imagine how this formula could lend itself to a paternalistic relationship between workers and leaders, particularly if those leaders come from other class strata.

When viewed as a problem of history growing out of that particular country at that particular moment “bringing socialism in from outside” may well have been the only approach possible. Considered as a general principle applicable across the board, however, it is at best highly problematic and at worse deeply mistaken.
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On the other hand Lenin’s notion should not be understood narrowly: his point was that unless introduced by conscious forces, (that is, a working-class revolutionary party) all struggles would invariably fall short of realizing the need for social revolution.

Given the general educational and cultural level of working-class people in the US, there is absolutely no reason for this to continue. For these reasons a central task of the Communist movement today is to renew the fight for working-class leadership at all levels, including ideologically.

Significantly, notwithstanding certain problems this fight for working-class ideological leadership has been one of the hallmarks of the US communist movement. So much so that it has contributed to the growth of anti-intellectualism in its ranks. It would be extremely shortsighted not to make a correction. Fighting for working-class leadership should in no way preclude deep relations with academic workers and building unity between workers and intellectuals.

A final note: these issues must be approached forthrightly as skeptical listeners will not be convinced by knee-jerk defensiveness and religious-like appeals to Marxism’s eternal truth. One cannot ignore the problem of dogmatism. It has ossified thought and turned what was once a living doctrine into a stale and lifeless thing and remains perhaps the biggest obstacle to reviving the communist idea and rekindling its rigorous creative spirit. While doing so it must be borne in mind that as a theory of class struggle, Marxism can only be conceived of polemically, in perpetual struggle with its ideological adversaries. One cannot ignore the problem of revisionism. At the same time, there is a need for boldness: As a theory of dialectical materialism, Marxism can only be understood critically, as an unceasing quest for truth through practice, driven now forward, now backward by the struggle between opposites, their mutual negation, their quantitative transformation and qualitative change.
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It is hoped these critical notes will play a modest role in moving the discussion forward.

​In Marx’s ambitious work Capital: Critique of Political Economy he has a daunting goal: to describe the functioning of capitalism that corrects the blindness of the preceding political economists that he had encountered. He seeks to denaturalize capitalism and to demonstrate the exploitative nature of its very foundations. This chapter epitomizes the method used throughout the text, which Marx builds on the back of the concept of the commodity form. Using the most quotidian concepts, like commodity and then the money equivalent, Marx makes the seemingly familiar feel mysterious through his “microscopic” gaze (Marx 90)[1]. Furthermore, through this scientific methodology, Marx reveals the strange homogenizing urge of capitalism, where everything is made equivalent through the money form. For example, where labor, previous to capitalism, was understood by its particular characteristics —what type of labor? What product? — under capitalism it becomes understood as an average “congealed” form of labor, with no particularities. Tracking capitalism’s impulse to make uniform provides a trail that Marx tracks, from the commodity form all the way to the “fetishism of commodity”.

Capitalism, like the systems that came before it, lays claim to its own naturalness as proof of its necessity and inevitability. Seeking to problematize that viewpoint, Marx seeks to make the seemingly natural and unexamined aspects of capitalism alien. This reexamination, from a distance, of the foundational concepts of capitalism begins with the very smallest constitutive element: the commodity form. Marx acknowledges that, “the analysis of these forms seems to turn upon minutiae. It does in fact deal with minutiae, but they are of the same order as those dealt with in microscopic anatomy” (Marx 90). Though it “seems” to be minute, the commodity form is the heart of Marx’s labor theory of value, which posits that value is generated, not in the sphere of exchange, but in the sphere of production, when labor is performed.

Marx adopts a scientific mode of inquiry, rather than an outrightly polemical or didactic mode. This choice manifests in many ways, from the metaphors he uses to more methodological questions of organization. He sketches out his view of capitalism as a living organism in his preface to the first German edition of Capital, saying that political economists had studied capitalism as one might an animal. “The value-form, whose fully developed shape is the money-form, is very elementary and simple. Nevertheless, the human mind has for more than 2,000 years sought in vain to get to the bottom of it all, whilst on the other hand, to the successful analysis of much more composite and complex forms, there has been at least an approximation” (Marx 89-90). In contrast, Marx seeks to describe the cellular level of capitalism. More importantly still, he seeks to prove that it is not the commodity that is “the economic cell-form” but rather value derived from labor.

Turning his microscope to the commodity form, Marx argues that the commodity form is only an advent of capitalism. In order to be a commodity, an article must have “use-value” and “exchange-value”. The former essentially means that the object in question has utility that is separate and beyond its ability to be exchanged. While use-value is transhistorical, because objects have had utility since humans began using tools, the latter is contingent upon the advent of capitalism. Exchange-value means that one object can be exchanged for a certain quantity of another; the two object-types being exchanged need not be equivalent in quality and indeed, they rarely are. When viewed only as a bearer of exchange-value, the particular utility of an object is not considered. The exchange of two qualitatively different items is made possible because they share one common property: “that of being products of labor” (MER 305).

This shared fact of being products of labor presumes that this labor is qualitatively the same, even though the true production process might require very different methods —spinning yarn versus carving wood, for example— and thus appear to be quite different. However, in the logic of capital, there is an abstract form of labor, what Marx terms a “congelation of homogeneous human labor” (MER 305). Essentially, this means that labor is quantified with the “socially necessary” time needed to produce something “under normal conditions” and “with the average degree of skill” (MER 305). Thus, value is a result of the labor-power expended on average, by an unskilled laborer, to produce the commodity in question. Simply put, commodity is best understood as value embodied. For example, the ingredients of a cake —sugar, flour, milk— lack as much value as the fully baked cake itself. Since the necessary components are purchased either way, the difference must be understood to be in the labor performed by the baker upon the materials which produced the higher value cake, as opposed to the unacted upon (un-labored) ingredients alone.

In order for an object to have value —and so become a commodity— it must possess a use-value and an exchange-value. If it lacks the first, then the object will not be purchased, no matter the hours of labor spent producing it. Lacking the second would mean that no labor had gone into producing it, though it can still have a use-value. Marx’s specific term for such an object is “the spontaneous products of nature” like sunshine or wind, which qualify as something with use-value but that cannot be exchanged precisely because no labor-power has been expended on it. Where use-value relies on the qualitative, meaning it depends on the specificity of the object’s particular utility, exchange-value is the reverse. This means that value is “totally independent of [its] use-value” (MER 305). This dichotomy between the particularity of transhistorical use-value and the homogeneity of exchange-value plays out again and again in Marx’s account, exposing capital’s desire for exchange of uniform equivalents more generally.

After detailing the components of the general commodity form, Marx proceeds to talk about the specific commodity form of labor-power. Marx distinguishes between the production of goods in previous eras from the production of goods under capitalism, pointing to the division of labor as a key difference. Citing textiles—a common example for Marx— as an instance of change in history, Marx writes “wherever the want of clothing forced them to it, the human race made clothes for thousands of years, without a single man becoming a tailor” (MER 309). Without a sphere of exchange such division would be highly impractical. Yet, for all the dividing of labor into specializations that capitalism necessitates, there is presumed to be an abstracted idea of the average worker’s ability to perform relatively unskilled labor. This more general concept of labor might seem to undermine Marx’s claim about the division of labor’s importance, but it instead serves to highlight the lack of true “specialization”; any human can perform the kind of tasks that Marx’s labor theory of value rests upon. This sense of labor as homogenous is not, however, able to be translated across societies. Marx makes it quite clear that abstract labor can only be abstracted for current societal contexts; it cannot be translated across borders or eras. In other words, the abstract labor of a farmer in the 17th century will not be the same abstracted labor for contemporary workers, and so it should not be applied universally.

The “special form” of the commodity of labor-power is distinct because in its consumption, more value is generated (MER 310). The essential nature of the general commodity is one of consumption. Purchasing something gives access to the use-value of the object, which is used and then used up. In this normal paradigm, the object is depleted of value through use. In contrast to this general commodity form, the commodity of labor-power generates more value as it is used, for the laborer generates new value through their labor. So, the use-value of labor-power is its potential to generate still yet more value. This quality is what supports the labor theory of value.

While abstract labor is simply what the average person can be expected to produce over a duration of time, how might one account for more skilled labor under this theory of value? Marx writes that this should be understood as “simple labor intensified” or “multiplied simple labor”. So, one hour of skilled labor might be equal to three unskilled labor hours. Given that these are made equivalent, Marx argues that all labor in his system should be understood as unskilled, “to save ourselves the trouble of making the reduction” (MER 311). Once again, the desire for standardization and uniformity of capitalism stands in contrast with the particularities of different labor.

Marx has set out in the section to give an account first of the commodity form, as an essential building block of capital. After he describes this basic structure, he moves to the more particular question of a universal equivalent commodity. The necessity of this universal equivalent commodity, namely a money form, is essential for the functioning of capitalism. In order to describe a universal equivalent, Marx describes first how two commodities can be made to relate to each, so that one commodity expresses itself as the equivalent of another, different commodity. Marx writes, “the relative form and the equivalent form are two intimately connected, mutually dependent and inseparable elements of the expression of value; but, at the same time, are mutually exclusive, antagonistic extremes” (MER 314). In order to form a relationship between two commodities it is necessary to make one relational to the other, translating its value into another form. This second commodity simply expresses the first, but cannot express beyond that. In other words, there can only be one “unit” or one commodity which expresses itself and the other, relational commodity as well.

The first commodity, which Marx terms “the relative form”, is embodied in the second chosen commodity. To return to the baking metaphor, we’ll assume that three bags of flour is the equivalent value of one cake. Cake is here the equivalent, and flour is the relative. This relational form points to the “special form” of labor as a creator of value. It is the cake and the flour’s state as products of labor that allow for their equivalence. It is a creation of equivalence that, “brings into relief the specific character of value-creating labour, and this it does by actually reducing the different varieties of labour embodied in the different kinds of commodities to their common quality of human labour in the abstract” (MER 316). One only needs to take this relational comparison a bit farther to arrive at a universal equivalent. In the previous example, cake is fitted to the role of universal equivalent, but a true money-form allows for easier still expression of relations of value-created-by-labor. The money form becomes the only equivalent, achieving “a directly social form” because it allows for relations of meaning to form between commodities and this new equivalent (Marx 161). However, the larger sociality of relation between laborers is further obscured.

The homogenizing impulse that Marx has revealed with his comparisons between use-value and exchange-value, concrete labor and abstract labor, gains full expression with the mysteriously mute fetishism of commodity. All relationship between laborers is disappeared behind the gleam of the universal equivalent; meaning is displaced from its proper understanding of the sociality of labor, onto the abstracted universal equivalent commodity, the money form, which he discusses in the next chapter. It is a commodity, because it is value embodied —and thus, labor embodied— and because it has use-value, in that it allows for easy exchange between products, thus able to “satisfy the manifold wants of the individual producer” (MER 322). This ease of exchange directly obscures the “peculiar social character of the labor that produces” this fetishism of commodity (MER 321).
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Though, as Marx observes, “a commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood”, through tracing the origin of the value derived from commodity to the expenditure of labor-power, Marx reveals the essentially unnatural and mysterious nature of the building block of capitalism: the commodity form. Examined under his “microscopic” view, the familiar is made alien to us, and capital can begin to be “de-naturalized”.

​“Well, Karl, what do you know about the Legalists and Han Fei in particular?”
 
 
“I remember what Reese [“Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion” by William L. Reese] says.  That he lived in the Third Century B.C., that he was the Prince of Han and committed suicide in 233 B.C. because the King of Qin wouldn’t accept his services. He is the major philosopher in the Legalist School.”
 
 
“Pretty good. Chan calls this school the most radical of the schools for its rejection of Confucianism (morality) and Moism (religion). Remember, the Qin Kingdom conquered the other Chinese Kingdoms and the Qin Dynasty (221-206 B.C.) set up the imperial system, under the First Emperor, that ruled China until 1912. The dubious claim to fame of the Legalists is that they helped set up the ideological framework for the Qin. Han Fei was the most important of a line of Legalist philosophers. He also studied under Xunzi and, unjustly I think, some of his more ‘totalitarian’ tendencies have been read back into his teacher. Legalist predecessors were Kuan Chung (Seventh Century B.C.), Lord Shang, Prime Minister of Qin (Fourth Century B.C.), his contemporary, the Prime Minister of Han, Shen Buhai and Shen Dao (c.350-275 B.C.). Chan notes that his fellow student with Xunzi, Li Si, who died in 208 B.C. was behind the suicide of Han Fei. I can’t believe he killed himself just because he couldn’t get a job with the future First Emperor!”
 
 
“That does seem strange. Here is some more info in Creel [H.G. Creel “Confucius and the Chinese Way”]. It seems Li Si actually turned the King against Han Fei by telling him that he would not support Qin in a war against Han. Han Fei was tossed into prison and forced to kill himself by Li Si. That makes more sense.”
 
 
“It also makes Li Si a fake sage! That type of behavior seems completely against all the teachings of the philosophers we have so far discussed! Xunzi would not have liked that at all. Why did he do it?”
 
 
“His motive makes it even worse. He knew that Han Fei was a better philosopher than he, and he was jealous that the King would prefer him. Li Si was already a minister in Qin when Han Fei came to offer his services.”
 
 
“So, are we ready to look at the “Han Feizi” and see what this new philosophy was all about?”
 
 
“I’m ready, Fred.”
 
 
“Chan says Han Fei is most famous for his synthesis of Legalist views and for his discussion of the Dao which influenced all the Daoists of note. I will begin with Chan’s first selection ‘1. The Synthesis of Legalistic Doctrine.’ Han Fei starts by noting that Confucianism and Moism are the most popular philosophies and attacks them for trying to pretend they represent the wisdom of the old sage kings. Han Fei is against using the past as a model for the present and future. He says, since no one can really tell what the old sage-kings' true teachings were or how to apply them today, then, ‘To be sure of anything without corroborating evidence is stupidity, and to base one’s argument on anything about which one cannot be sure is perjury. Therefore those who openly base their arguments on the authority of the ancient kings and who are dogmatically certain of Yao and Shun are men either of stupidity or perjury.’ “
 
 
“Technically, while Mo may have mentioned Yao and Shun, it was Wen and Tang and Wu and Yu that he appeals to most of the time in the Chan extracts. But in principle Han Fei’s argument is against both Mo and Confucius.”
 
 
“This next quote shows that the Legalists were in favor of a government of laws and not of men! ‘Although there is a naturally straight arrow or a naturally round piece of wood [once in a hundred generations] which does not depend on any straightening or bending, the skilled workman does not value it. Why? Because it is not just one person who wishes to ride and not just one shot that the archer wishes to shoot [so bending and straightening of wood is needed as a skill-tr]. Similarly, the enlightened ruler does not value people who are naturally good and who do not depend on reward and punishment. Why? Because the laws of the state must not be neglected, and government is not for only one man. Therefore the ruler who has the technique does not follow the good that happens by chance but practices the way of necessity ....’ And Chan remarks, ‘In the necessity of straightening and bending, note the similarity to Xunzi. The theory of the originally evil nature of man is a basic assumption of the Legalists.”
 
 
“I still say that Xunzi was not like the Legalists. I pointed this out at the start of our discussion on the Xunzi.”
 
 
“And I said I agreed with you. You will be happy to know that Chan also agrees with you and not with Fung [Fung Yu-lan, “A Short History of Chinese Philosophy”] who holds that Han Fei based his doctrines on those of Xunzi.”
 
 
“Well, I like that! Just what does old Chan have to say about this issue Fred?”
 
 
“He says the bending and straightening in Xunzi meant education and the like, but Han Fei only relied on rewards and punishments. Chan said, ‘Xunzi had a firm faith in man’s moral reform but the Legalists have no such faith.’ And, he adds, ‘It is misleading, at least, to say, as Fung does, that Han Feizi based his doctrines on the teachings of Xunzi.’ This is because they ‘were utterly different in their attitudes toward man as a moral being.’”
 
 
“I’ll buy that. So, let’s go on with some more of the ‘Han Feizi’.”
 
 
“Sure. Han Feizi says the enlightened ruler needs four things to ensure his success. Namely, the ‘timeliness of the seasons,’ the support of the people, ‘skills and talents,’ and finally a position of power. He says, ‘Acting against the sentiment of the people, even Meng Pen and Xia Yu (famous men of great strength) could not make them exhaust their efforts. Therefore with timeliness of the seasons the grains will grow of themselves.’ In fact with all four conditions, then, ‘Like water flowing and like a boat floating, the ruler follows the course of Nature and enforces an infinite number of commands. Therefore he is called an enlightened ruler....’”
 
 
“Sounds like Daoism.”
 
 
“You couldn’t be more right Karl. Chan’s comment on that quote I just gave is, ‘Of all the ideas of the Legalists, perhaps the most philosophical is that of following Nature, which was derived from the Daoists.’ And, although he did not include it in his “Source Book”, Chan says that one of the chapters in the “Han Feizi” is a commentary on the thought of Laozi.”
 
 
“That’s excellent. Does he get more specific about law?”
 
 
“Try this. ‘The important thing for the ruler is either laws or statecraft. A law is that which is enacted into the statute books, kept in government offices, and proclaimed to the people. Statecraft is that which is harbored in the ruler’s own mind so as to fit all situations and control all ministers. Therefore for law there is nothing better than publicity, whereas in statecraft, secrecy is desired....’”
 
 
“Sounds a little like Machiavelli.”
 
 
“He goes on, ‘Ministers are afraid of execution and punishment but look upon congratulations and rewards as advantages. Therefore, if a ruler himself applies punishment and kindness, all ministers will fear his power and turn to the advantages.’”
 
 
“Yes, I remember this. The ‘two handles’ of government--reward and punishment. Machiavelli says a prince is better off being feared than loved, and I see that Han Fei also goes in for the fear factor.”

“Yes he does. A minister gets punished if he does something small after having said he would do something big, but also if he expects to do something small and it turns out to be big. Han Fei says, ‘It is not that the ruler is not pleased with the big accomplishments but he considers the failure of the big accomplishments to correspond to the words worse than the big accomplishments themselves. Therefore he is to be punished....’”
 
 
“That certainly won’t encourage ministers to surpass themselves! That seems counter-productive. I understand being punished for big talk and little deeds, but if you set out to do only a little yet accomplish something big despite yourself, I think it is not wise for the ruler to punish you. Suppose you said you would delay the enemy while the ruler collects his forces and instead you are able to defeat the enemy. What is the sense of being punished?”
 
 
“I agree with you Karl but that is the way Legalists play the game. Here is what Chan says about it. ‘Like practically all ancient Chinese schools, the Legalists emphasized the theory of the correspondence of names and actualities. But while the Confucianists stressed the ethical and social meaning of the theory and the Logicians stressed the logical aspect, the Legalists were interested in it primarily for the purpose of political control. With them the theory is neither ethical nor logical but a technique for regimentation.’”
 
 
“Well that it is, but it will not really work in the interests of the ruler. In fact the Qin Legalist state fell apart shortly after the death of the First Emperor. Don’t forget that Han Fei had to commit suicide, a victim perhaps of his own Machiavellian position.”
 
 
“Here is a big attack on the Confucianists.”
 
 
“This should be good!”
 
 
“This attack is also directed at Mozi so his doctrines were still around. ‘At present Confucianists and Moists all praise ancient kings for their universal love for the whole world, which means that they regarded the people as parents [regard their children].... Now, to hold that rulers and ministers act towards each other like father and son and consequently there will necessarily be orderly government, is to imply that there are no disorderly fathers or sons. According to human nature, none are more affectionate than parents who love all children, and yet not all children are necessarily orderly.’”
 
 
“So here come the ‘two handles’.”
 
 
“It seems to be the case Karl. Han Fei says that you have to have laws against the disorderly people in the state. He makes the point that ‘people are submissive to power and few of them can be influenced by the doctrines of righteousness.’”
 
 
“That’s the case in empirical states that haven’t been designed to conform to Confucian ideals. Why should we limit ourselves to these kinds of state?”
 
 
“Because that is being realistic. Look, Han Fei says, at what happened to Confucius in the real world. In the real world ‘Duke Ai of Lu was an inferior ruler. When he sat on the throne as the sovereign of the state, none within the borders of the state dared refuse to submit. For people are originally submissive to power and it is truly easy to subdue people with power. Therefore Confucius turned out to be a subordinate and Duke Ai, contrary to one’s expectation, became a ruler. Confucius was not influenced by Duke Ai’s righteousness; instead, he submitted to his power. Therefore on the basis of righteousness, Confucius would not submit to Duke Ai, but because of the manipulation of power, Confucius became a subordinate to him. Nowadays in trying to persuade rulers, scholars do not advocate the use of power which is sure to win, but say that if one is devoted to the practice of humanity and righteousness, one will become a true king.’”
 
 
“Just the view of Plato as well as al-Farabi [872-950 A.D, great Islamic Aristotelian]. But you don’t have to tell me that Han Fei thinks that that is bunk.”
 
 
“With a vengeance! It looks to me that he wouldn’t support any of the Confucian policies and would rather see a big military state--Sparta rather than Athens! He says, ‘The state supports scholars and knights-errant in times of peace, but when an emergency arises it has to use soldiers. Thus those who have been benefited by the government cannot be used by it and those used by it have not been benefited.’”
 
 
“It does look like a professional army would fulfill his ideas. But, that type of army is parasitical in times of peace and it makes oppression by the government so much the easier. I presume his reference to ‘knights-errant’ is a swipe at the Moists.”
 
 
“Here are some more of his ideas, ‘If in governmental measures one neglects ordinary affairs of the people and what even the simple folks can understand, but admires the doctrines of the highest wisdom, that would be contrary to the way of orderly government. Therefore subtle and unfathomable doctrines are no business of the people.... Therefore the way of the enlightened ruler is to unify all laws but not to seek for wisemen and firmly to adhere to statecraft but not to admire faithful persons. Thus laws will never fail and no officials will ever commit treachery or deception.’”
 
 
“You know Fred, I don’t think that this is an either/or type of situation. I’m sure the Confucians would also agree that the people should not be left out of consideration. They always advocated education. That doesn’t mean that just because you have the elementary schools you have to abandon the university--which is what Han Fei seems to be saying. His emphasis on ‘statecraft’--the secret machinations of the ruler’s brain seems to conflict with his confidence in the ‘laws’ and introduces arbitrariness into the system. As for officials never committing treachery or deception--look what happened to him. Either Li Si, a Legalist himself, committed treachery or Han Fei was engaged in deception and the future First Emperor was right to imprison him. But the consensus is that Han Fei was innocent. Therefore he was the victim of ‘statecraft’ and in this instance the laws failed. I think it was this contradiction in his system that led to its untenability in the long run and why Confucianism, which is more balanced and nuanced, somewhat succeeded. I would also like to point out that his stress on the ‘common people’ is probably due to the influence of Daoism and this influence is also the reason he failed to integrate popular education and ‘the doctrines of the highest wisdom.’ For him these doctrines didn’t exist in the Confucian or Moist sense.”
 
 
“I think you are right Karl. These next words have a real Daoist flavor. He says, ‘In regard to the words [of traveling scholars], rulers of today like their arguments but do not find out if they correspond to the facts. In regard to the application of these words to practice, they praise their fame but do not demand accomplishment. Therefore there are many in the world whose talks are devoted to argumentation and who are not thorough when it comes to practical utility.... In their deeds scholars struggle for eminence but there is nothing in them that is suitable for real accomplishment. Therefore wise scholars withdraw to caves and decline the offering of positions.’”
 
 
“Very Daoist! Too bad Han Fei did not take his own advice. If he had gone to live in a cave somewhere instead of going off to take a position in Qin, and struggling for eminence with Li Si, he would not have ended up having to commit suicide.”
 
 
“Here is the last quote from this section of Chan. ‘Therefore in the state of the enlightened ruler, there is no literature of books and records but the laws serve as the teaching. There are no sayings of ancient kings but the officials act as teachers. And there are no rash acts of the assassin; instead, courage will be demonstrated by those who decapitate the enemy [in battle]. Consequently, among the people within the borders of the state, whoever talks must follow the law, whoever acts must aim at accomplishment, and whoever shows courage must do so entirely in the army. Thus the state will be rich when at peace and the army will be strong when things happen.’”
 
 
 
“Wow! This is no good. ‘No literature of books’--this will result in a violation of the Prime Directive as the only views available will be Legalist and thus authority rather than reason will end up ruling people’s minds.”

“Chan says, ‘The advocation of prohibiting the propagation of private doctrines eventually led to the Burning of Books in 213 B.C. and in the periodic prohibitions of the propagation of personal doctrines throughout Chinese history.’”
 

“Chan wrote that before the ‘Cultural Revolution’, which was neither ‘cultural’ nor a ‘revolution,’ we can see the bad effects of this doctrine are still alive. Not allowing ‘personal doctrines’ means only state sanctioned ‘truth’ is allowed, a sure condition for ending up as far away from being able to find ‘truth’ as you can imagine. I hate to seem critical of the Chinese government, especially as it has raised the Chinese people out of feudal despair and into the modern world, but they should heed Carl Sagan’s advice that ‘The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.’” I’m not singling out China. Every government in the world could do better in this respect.”
 
 
“Well put Karl, but now I’m going to go over the other section that Chan has in his “Source Book”, namely Han Fei’s discussion of Daoism, which Chan calls ‘one of the most important.’ Chan calls this section ‘Interpretations of Dao.’ Are you ready for this?”
 
 
“Ready!”

 
“OK, here goes, ‘Dao is that by which all things become what they are. It is that with which all principles are commensurable. Principles are patterns (wen) according to which all things come into being, and Dao is the cause of their being. Therefore it is said that Dao puts things in order (li). Things have their respective principles and cannot interfere with each other, therefore principles are controlling factors in things. Everything has its own principle different from that of others, and Dao is commensurate with all of them [as one]. Consequently, everything has to go through the process of transformation. Since everything has to go through the process of transformation, it has no fixed mode of life. As it has no fixed mode of life, its life and death depend on the endowment of material force (qi) [by Dao]. Countless wisdom depends on it for consideration. And the rise and fall of all things is because of it. Heaven obtains it and therefore becomes high. The earth obtains it and therefore can hold everything....’”
 
 
“He seems to be following Laozi fairly closely.”
 
 
“Yes indeed, as the following shows as well. ‘Whatever people use for imagining the real [as the skeleton to image the elephant] is called form (xiang). Although Dao cannot be heard or seen, the sage decides and sees its features on the basis of its effects. Therefore it is called [in the ‘Laozi ] “shape without shape and form without objects.”’”
 
 
“Sort of like ‘Gravity” with Newton. It couldn’t be seen or heard but the effects, as with the falling apple, led Newton to work out its features. The great law that controls everything, like Gravity, that is the Dao.”
 
 
“Han Fei goes on. ‘In all cases principle is that which distinguishes the square from the round, the short from the long, the course from the refined, and the hard from the brittle. Consequently, it is only after principles become definite that Dao can be realized.’”
 
 
“But Dao is the basis of principle! To keep my Newton analogy going, I would have to say that it is only when objects are manifesting their attraction that Gravity can be realized.”
 
 
“It is the ‘eternal’ Dao that Han Fei is interested in. He says, ‘Only that which exists from the very beginning of the universe and neither dies nor declines until heaven and earth disintegrate can be called eternal. What is eternal has neither change nor any definite particular principle itself. Since it has no definite particular principle itself, it is not bound in any particular locality. This is why [it is said in the ‘Laozi’] that it cannot be told. The sage sees its profound vacuity (xu) and utilizes its operation everywhere. He is forced to give it the name Dao. Only then can it be talked about. Therefore it is said, “The Dao that can be told of is not the eternal Dao.”’”
 
 
“Does Chan say why this is ‘most important’?”
 
 
“Yes he does. He goes into this passage with a long comment. ‘This is one of the earliest and most important discussions of Dao. It is of great importance for two reasons. First, principle (li) has been the central concept in Chinese philosophy for the last eight hundred years, and Han Fei was one of the earliest to employ the concept. Secondly, to him Dao is not an undifferentiated continuum in which all distinctions disappear. On the contrary, Dao is the very reason why things are specific and determinate. This is a radical advance and anticipated the growth of Neo-Daoism along this direction in the third and fourth centuries A.D.’”
 
 
“That completes our treatment of Han Fei?”
 
 
“It does. You know, I think we need to discuss Laozi and Daoism as this philosophy is almost equal to Confucianism in Chinese thought. If we want to really understand China today then we must understand the ‘Dao’ of Chinese Communism so we should get a grip on the thought of Laozi.
 
 
O.K., let’s do it next.

​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.

​Antonio Gramsci is one of the most relevant theorists in the history of Marxism - he is also one of the most misunderstood. Self-proclaimed heterodox leftists of all latitudes have made “neogramcism” their banner, finding in the Sardinian revolutionary a symbol of the break with real socialism, Marxism-Leninism and the materialist theory of history. Perhaps the best known figure in this intellectual trend has been the Argentine Ernesto Laclau, who once again made a key concept such as hegemony fashionable in the academic mainstream.
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Laclau defined his neogramscism as "post-Marxist", having completely abandoned historical and dialectical materialism, and conceived of social reality as a fundamentally discursive, unstable and radically contingent construct, in which the different forces dissatisfied with the present social arrangement could, through the elaboration of highly porous ideas and slogans, join a political force capable of challenging the common sense of society to the powers that be (that is, hegemony). Here, the conquest of socialism and communism gave way to a "radical democracy", in which every area of ​​social life was left open to democratic deliberation to reconfigure the established order.

It is necessary to differentiate Laclau, as well as other self-proclaimed “neo-Gramscians” and followers of Gramsci (whether they are “post-Marxists” or “heterodox Marxists”), from the man himself. For, although there are many who seek to decouple Gramsci and his thought from Marxism-Leninism, his effort cannot be understood if it is not as the attempt of a communist, committed to the revolutionary spirit of the October Revolution, to bring Marxist theory to life in territories that had previously remained unexplored. For, if the Bolshevik triumph had captured the imagination and hopes of Gramsci and a whole generation of Western revolutionaries, the reality of post-World War I Europe forced them to confront failure and the rise of reaction.

​One of the things that is fascinated about Gramsci is the extent to which he emphasizes the role of subjectivity and political will over the relentless inertia of the relations of production and the productive forces. There are those who think that the construction of socialism and emancipation has more to do with the will of human beings than with the creation of certain material conditions that make it possible; however, one must understand the weight that Gramsci gives to the subjective dimension of politics in its context.

The Bolshevik triumph in Russia represented for him “the rebellion against Marx’s Capital ”, insofar as it embodied the triumph of a Marxism (that of Lenin) that came to be understood fundamentally as“ concrete analysis of the concrete situation ”with a view to the strategic organization of political action, over the positivist orthodoxy of the Second International, which clung to a linear and evolutionary model of history, in which the backward countries had to largely imitate the history of the West (necessarily having to go through industrial capitalism and the formation of liberal democracy before attempt a socialist revolution) before making their own. The Social Democrats of the Second International would place their hands on their head with the events in Russia, where the popular masses - mostly peasants - carried out the first successful socialist revolution of the 20th century.

These events would profoundly mark a socialist like Gramsci, whose homeland was part of the southern periphery of Europe. However, none of this implied a voluntaristic understanding of politics: on the contrary, the Italian communist understood perfectly that the possibility of the Russians to create a socialist society was anchored in the availability of advanced technical-scientific resources in other parts of the world, which could be implemented by the communists to develop their productive forces without handing over the reins of government to the bourgeoisie.
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The emphasis on revolutionary organization and will did not imply a disregard for the objective conditions that constrained them; on the contrary, the consideration of these conditions should give rise to a form of collective action that found in the present an opportunity to make history, without applying abstract schemes alien to the singularity of the context. If Gramsci emphasized the weight of human agency, it was always from the coordinates of Leninism, which he saw as a truly dialectical materialism, which marked a distance with a mechanistic materialism, as harmful to revolutionary theory as voluntary idealism.

However, the context that the Italian Communists would have to face would be very different from the Russian one. With the rise of fascism, Gramsci, who had become head of the CPI and had been elected deputy, would be put in prison, and would remain there practically until the end of his short life. It would be there where he would elaborate the bulk of his theoretical writings, gathered in the famous volume known as The Prison Notebooks.

In his writings from this stage of his life, Gramsci touches on a host of highly relevant topics, from history and economics to politics and philosophy, passing through education and culture. However, if there is an axis that articulates this scattered compendium, this will be the problem of the defeat of socialism in Europe (in particular, in Italy): why had the winds of change coming from the East finished evaporating? And why had the bourgeois reaction managed to take hold where socialism and the working class had failed? It is from this fundamental concern that Gramsci's interest in the question of hegemony arises.

In his opinion, the dominance of the capitalist class over the whole of society could not be understood if it was reduced exclusively to a form of violent coercion (political or economic); rather, the power of it was to be thought of as an articulation of coercive force and persuasion. The first would correspond to what Gramsci called "political society": the strictly coercive apparatuses of the State, such as the legal apparatus, the armed forces, the police, etc. However, the second would correspond to “civil society”, which was rather the space of consensus and persuasion, where the beliefs, values ​​and norms shared by the different members of a society were produced: the family environment, educational and religious institutions, the media, unions, etc.

It was in the context of thinking about the formation of this sociocultural "common sense" that Gramsci recovered and expanded the Leninist concept of hegemony, which would come to refer to the political domain of a social class (the bourgeoisie), anchored in its pact with other social classes (such as the petty bourgeoisie) and their undisputed control of the cultural field, making common sense of their particular interests and worldview. From his point of view, it would have been this form of hegemonic control, and not its coercive power, that would have allowed the bourgeoisie to subdue the progressive forces of the continent and strengthen its dominance.

It would be these theoretical elaborations that would lead Gramsci to take an interest in fields that Marxist theory had typically relegated to a more marginal place, such as the culture, tradition and faith of the popular classes. From his point of view, the Bolshevik triumph in Russia, as it had occurred in the context of war, had only been possible because the aristocratic and bourgeois elites had not managed to consolidate hegemony, and this allowed Lenin and the Bolsheviks to win in a war of maneuvers (basically, defeating them in an open confrontation in the period of the Russian Civil War).

On the other hand, where the hegemony of the bourgeoisie and its allies was entrenched, the only way to seize political power and transform the relations of production was through the formation of a “historical bloc” of a “national-popular” character. With the proletariat at the head, an alliance of the popular or subaltern classes (poor and middle peasants, progressive layers of the petty bourgeoisie, and, in a context such as Latin America, the indigenous peoples) had to be formed which, united by a popular progressive culture, (through a new philosophy and a new morality, new artistic and literary expressions, and a new spirituality that articulates the experiences of the people in a key revolutionary manner) could be transformed into a counter-hegemonic force, ready to contest the bourgeois common sense of society in a "war of positions", intervening politically and finally fracturing capitalist control of the means of production.

A good recent example of how the consolidation of this popular hegemony can not only win the ideological dispute to the bourgeoisie, but also guarantee the vitality of a revolutionary process, is the recent victory of the MAS in Bolivia after the coup against Evo Morales in 2019. Despite the tragic political defeat, the forces of reaction could not finish imposing themselves on Bolivian society, since the profound changes in the national culture carried out by the MAS during its years in power, had earned it the massive support of a heterogeneous but ideologically favorable people for their political project. For this reason, eventually the coup plotters had no choice but to stop postponing the elections and accept their defeat and the return to power of their enemies.
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Of course, the coup against Morales also leaves the lesson that a victory in the war of positions does not guarantee the uninterrupted continuity of the revolution. It is also necessary to be prepared to win in the war of maneuvers, to defend by arms the transformation of society when the reactionaries make it necessary. However, it is clear that the thought of Antonio Gramsci, far from implying a break with Marxism-Leninism, represents a crucial, truly dialectical development of the materialist theory of history, one that is of great importance for thinking about the context of contemporary bourgeois democracies.

​“Bill of Rights Socialism” was first put forward by Gus Hall, Chairman of the Communist Party, USA, in his 1990 pamphlet The American Way to Bill of Rights Socialism. Emile Shaw wrote in 1996 that Bill of Rights Socialism “conveys the idea that we will incorporate U.S. traditions into the structure of socialism that the working class will create.” Since then, the CPUSA has continued to deepen and expand this theory to correspond with the real needs of struggle.

The CPUSA is not alone in this project; other communist parties have also been applying Marxism-Leninism creatively to produce important innovations, bringing socialist construction into the modern age while also adapting their own path to their unique national conditions.

How could it be otherwise? All struggles for socialism have unfolded within the context of their particular national circumstances. In Vietnam, it produced “Ho Chi Minh Thought.” In Cuba, the revolution linked itself to the legacy of Jose Martí. The many innovations in China are known as “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.” No struggle has ever discounted their unique political traditions and general national conditions and been successful in achieving liberation.
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US republican traditions were deeply influenced by the Roman republic, where political sovereignty was derived from a free citizenry rather than a single monarch. According to Irish philosopher and world-renowned political theorist Philip Pettit, this centuries-old tradition of republicanism can be defined by “three core ideas” familiar to any US citizen:
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​These “three core ideas” form the bedrock of the political tradition of the U.S. republic. Bill of Rights Socialism, then, must grapple with these three core ideas if we are to synthesize the revolutionary struggle of the working class with the unique political conditions of the United States.
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​The ideological core of the U.S. is its emphasis on the concept of “freedom.” Anyone with even a passing familiarity of U.S. politics knows that every single other question revolves around this core ideal. No other single concept, even that of democracy, holds as much power as this idea. Pettit distinguishes two approaches to freedom: liberalism and republicanism, both of which were present at the birth of the United States.

Liberalism developed out of the European enlightenment period. It was a product of the rising bourgeoisie, which sought to guarantee freedom of commerce while leaving many other areas of domination untouched. Its basis is the freedom of the individual to own and dispose of property with a minimum of state interference.
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Republican freedom is rooted in the Roman idea that to be free, a person must not suffer dominatio. This means that a free person must be free not only of active interference of political power but also inactive, latent interference by any outside force. Freedom is not only an act, but a status. The real enemy of freedom in the republican tradition is not just interference by political authorities; it is the arbitrary power that some people may have over others.2 Pettit elaborates: “[Freedom] means that you must not be exposed to a power of interference on the part of any others, even if they happen to like you and do not exercise that power against you.”3

​Specifically, this means you are not free if you have a good boss or a good landlord who has the power to arbitrarily intervene against your employment or housing, but simply chooses not to do so. If that power exists, even in a latent and unexercised way, working-class people cannot be understood to have the status of freedom, since this “freedom” may arbitrarily change at any given moment. Working people under capitalism live in day-to-day dependence on the employing class.
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Pettit articulates what he refers to as the “eyeball test” to help clarify what republican freedom means:
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​This definition of freedom should be intuitively familiar to all working-class people. Are you free if you have to pretend to be friends with your boss, bite your tongue, or fake your laughter to stay on the boss’s good side? When at-will employment prevails in so many workplaces, can working-class people be free if they can be fired for any reason or no reason at all? According to the republican definition of freedom, the answer is unequivocal: Working people are not free under capitalism.

Crucially, this means republicanism is distinct from the libertarian theory of freedom. Rather than being concerned exclusively with a vertical theory of freedom, where the state alone is seen as a threat to freedom, republicanism is also concerned with the arbitrary power private citizens can have over one another. Republican freedom means freedom not only from arbitrary state interference, but also from abusive partners, racial and national discrimination, and the private tyrannies of modern capitalism. Republican freedom has always meant more than just free markets.
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Bill of Rights Socialism, then, recognizes the inherent contradiction of “freedom” in monopoly capitalism — it is a smokescreen for the objective increase of unfreedom for the sake of profit. In today’s stage of capitalist development, the objective condition of most of U.S. society and the broader world is to be unfree and dominated by finance monopoly capitalism and imperialism. Second, Bill of Rights Socialism asserts that this contradiction can be resolved only by putting an end to the dictatorship of monopoly capital through a popular, democratic revolution that elevates the working class to the leading, decisive social element constituting state power.
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​The second “core idea” of republicanism is the “range of constitutional constraints associated broadly with the mixed constitution.” This tradition of the “mixed constitution” (mixed government) developed out of revolutionary class struggle as a way to balance the contradiction between the general “human” struggle for emancipation and the particular class project upon which the new state must be founded.

The most well-known republic in ancient history was formed in Rome with the overthrow of the Roman monarch Lucius Tarquinius Superbus by the patrician aristocracy of Rome. Tarquinius’ rule had become so intolerable to the aristocracy that they resolved by degrees to overthrow him.
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Yet the patricians by themselves could not bring to bear enough force to decisively win in their revolutionary struggle. The revolution was sparked when the masses of plebians rioted over the rape of Lucretius by Tarquinius’ son and her subsequent suicide. This mass activity was critical for the aristocracy to unite and banish the monarchy and replace it with two consuls who would be able to “check” one another through a veto.

​The mixed constitutions of republics emerged out of this historical process as the institutionalization of a balanced form of class rule. The Roman aristocracy was able to secure its position of power in the Roman Senate. Yet spontaneous plebian activity in the revolutionary struggle forced the patricians to integrate the popular class into its republican system as well. Checks and balances in a republic are reflections of the underlying balance of class forces at a particular moment when that republic is first constituted.
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Machiavelli makes this observation explicitly in his Discourses on Livy:
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​According to political scientist Kent Brudney, Machiavelli “accepted the class basis of political life and believed that class conflict could be beneficial to a republic.” The “creative possibilities of class conflict” were recognized for “their importance to the maintenance of Roman liberty.” Brudney continues: “The episodes of conflict between the Roman patriciate and the Roman people were vital to the development of good laws and to the continuity of Rome’s founding principles.”6
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This class-struggle understanding of mixed constitutionalism was also at the fore in the debates around the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Scholar James Wallner directly connects the debates around the creation of the Senate with Machiavelli’s theory of institutionalized class struggle:
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​Wallner points to Federalist Paper No. 62, where James Madison wrote: “The necessity of a senate is not less indicated by the propensity of all single and numerous assemblies to yield to the impulse of sudden and violent passions, and to be seduced by factious leaders into intemperate and pernicious resolutions.”

​The recent Shay’s Rebellion had been sparked by Massachusetts farmers demanding debt relief that was opposed by the merchant class that dominated the state government. This rebellion pressed the Federalist framers to consider the inclusion of an “aristocratic” senate capable of effectively subduing the “violent passions” of the masses, something missing from the Articles of Confederation that had preceded it.8

​Thus, we see that “mixed constitutions” of republics are only the institutionalization of class struggle. If the republic is supposed to make the affairs of public power a question of public input, it must always balance the class foundation of the state with at least the nominal political participation of the masses. Ruling class power in a republic is always concentrated in the senate, and popular power is always located in a “lower” branch of government. This balance creates a dynamism between the two while also developing a hegemonic understanding of the state as representing “the whole people,” even if the state is always constituted under a specific class basis.
Bill of Rights Socialism deepens the theory of the mixed constitution and gives it a proletarian character. Rather than calling for the abolition of the senate as such, Bill of Rights Socialism recognizes the need to reconstitute the republic along proletarian class lines, transforming the current senate founded on the “wisdom” of slave owners and oligarchs into an “industrial” senate that is instead based on the wisdom and experience of the leaders of the working class.

Like Lenin’s soviets, the industrial senate would be built out of “the direct organisation of the working and exploited people themselves, which helps them to organise and administer their own state in every possible way.” Leaders, drawn from the broad working-class majority, would carry with them both an intimate knowledge of all parts of the production process and a distinct working-class perspective into the development of public policy. And like both the soviets and senates past, the industrial senate would be insulated from universal direct election, with a focus on cultivating tested working-class leadership collaborating to build and protect a common vision of a democratic socialist republic. The class character of the senate would serve as a “check” on one side of the equation.9

But Bill of Rights Socialism can grow only out of the success of a massive people’s front. Led by the organized working class, this front would also contain all progressive people and class allies, including small farmers, small- and medium-size-business owners, the self-employed, and independent intellectuals and professionals. The primary stage of socialism does not end class struggle but transforms it under the decisive political rule of the working class. A “People’s House” would provide a democratic space for these other class elements to make constructive and progressive contributions to building socialism without sacrificing or obscuring the working-class nature of the new republic.

Further, experience from the last century indicates that even a working-class state can degenerate bureaucratically without broader popular participation and oversight. In addition to incorporating non-proletarian class elements constructively into the workers’ republic, the lower house would also provide a space for the exercise of universal suffrage and the direct election of representatives by the whole people. These popular representatives could play a consultative role to the industrial senate and provide institutional oversight. This would provide a “check” on the other side of the equation.
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The “checks and balances” between the industrial senate and the people’s house would capture the “quarrels and the noise” familiar to American democracy while preserving absolutely the republic’s fundamental class nature. This dynamic interrelationship creates the conditions for the third core idea of republicanism to prevail, the “contestatory citizenry.”

​The third core idea of republicanism depends on the active engagement of its citizens “to track and contest public policies and initiatives.” Freedom can be secured only through struggle. This ideal has been a fundamental political principle of all oppressed people struggling for their democratic rights and freedom in the United States. Frederick Douglass taught us years ago the price of freedom:
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​The contestatory citizenry forms a fundamental basis for the Bill of Rights and so must serve as a basis for Bill of Rights Socialism. These rights include freedom of speech, of assembly, of faith and conscience, and the right to be informed about the functioning of public power. Politically critical art, protests, and organizations must play a fundamental role in the construction of socialism in the United States and thus must be protected under Bill of Rights Socialism.

​Struggle does not only occur between oppressor and oppressed, between exploiter and exploited. Struggle also goes on within the oppressed and exploited. Historical development has created an unevenness within the working class: divisions around race, sex, sexuality, religion, cultural beliefs, nationality, language, and so on. This unevenness can be overcome only after a long period of struggle to resolve these divisions and build a unity through our diversity; to give real content to the national motto “E Pluribus Unum.” While the initial steps in this process of internal struggle for unity within the working class and democratic forces must be made before the establishment of socialism by building a people’s front, the establishment of socialism does not mechanically erase the social unevenness within that people’s front overnight.

Revolution and reform are distinct, but also deeply interrelated. The development of social scientific methods and professional specialization has produced the historical capacity to carry out deep and broad reforms to the social system in a planned, scientific, and rational way. Reform can and must always go on, improving social institutions and making sure they advance with the times. However, reform does not happen abstractly, but according to the degree of political will brought to bear on the process. Reform in a social system hits a wall when the ruling class is no longer willing to exercise its political will to allow the reform process to deepen and expand according to the needs of the populace.
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Revolution is not in and of itself the solution to social problems; revolution is the punctuated transformation from one form of class rule to the next. This transformation in class rule does not replace reform, but unlocks it to unfold more deeply, at a faster pace, and in a more thoroughgoing way than the degenerate ruling class that was replaced could or would allow. By elevating the working class to the level of the ruling class in a workers’ republic, the struggle for reforms is not ended but transformed. Republicanism allows this reform struggle to take place both on an individual, contestatory foundation protected by a socialist Bill of Rights, as well as within the bounds of law constrained by socialist constitutional forms.
​

​Let us be crystal clear: the United States needs a socialist revolution. The old ruling class, dominated by finance monopoly capital and incapable of keeping pace with the needs of the time, must be overthrown and in its place the working class, at the head of a mass democratic movement of all oppressed people and classes, must be elevated to rule in its place. The class basis of the current republic must not be ignored but instead placed at the center of the conversation.

But the struggle is not to “abolish” the republican form outright. There are no serious ideas, to be perfectly frank, on what to put in its place. The soviet system was for the Soviets, the Chinese system for the Chinese, so on.
The struggle is to revolutionize the republic to preserve the republican system at a higher level of development. Indeed, the fundamental argument of Bill of Rights Socialism must be that only a socialist revolution can preserve the republican liberties and democratic rights that so many oppressed and exploited people have fought hard and made tremendous sacrifices to secure. Socialist revolution means the deepening of democracy under the decisive state leadership of the working class.

This essay is only a theoretical sketch to show the consistency between Marxism-Leninism and the “core ideas” of the republican political tradition. There are an almost limitless number of questions that arise from its premise: Can a workers’ republic be secured through the amendment process or through a new Constitutional Convention? How exactly should an industrial senate be ordered and secured? Should it be through indirect election, sortition (selection by lottery), selection, or a combination? How does federalism fit into this picture? How can we more explicitly articulate its relationship to imperialism and oppressed nations? And many more.
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Only through thoughtful struggle — not isolated contemplation or outrageous sloganeering — can the political soil be tilled to allow new possibilities to develop. Bill of Rights Socialism is not an “answer” in itself but a path to be blazed by combining the creative leadership of the Communist Party with the limitless dynamism and transformative potential of millions of Americans from all backgrounds linked together in the struggle for peace, prosperity, democracy, and republican freedom.

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Sources

1. Philip Pettit, “Three Core Ideas,” On the People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy, Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 5.
2. Philip Pettit, “The Communitarian Opposition,” On the People’s Terms, p. 11.
3. Pettit, “Three Core Ideas,” p. 7.
4. Pettit, “Social Justice and Equality,” On the People’s Terms, p. 84.
5. Kent M. Brudney, “II. Machiavelli on Social Class and Class Conflict,” Political Theory, vol. 12, no. 4, 1984, pp. 507–519., doi:10.1177/0090591784012004003.
6. Ibid.
7. James Wallner, “Real Purpose of the Senate: To Check the Actions of the House,” LegBranch, R Street Institute, 5 Dec. 2018, www.legbranch.org/real-purpose-of-the-senate-to-check-the-actions-of-the-house/.
8. Ibid.
9. Vladimir Lenin, “The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky,” PRRK: Bourgeois and Proletarian Democracy, Marxists.org.
10. Frederick Douglass, “(1857) Frederick Douglass, ‘If There Is No Struggle, There Is No Progress,’” BlackPast, 8 Aug. 2019.

​In her 2020 text Marxism and Intersectionality: Race, Gender, Class and Sexuality under Contemporary Capitalism, Ashley J. Bohrer sets out to demystify the erroneous conception that the traditions of Marxism and Intersectionality are incompatible. In finding that in academia the interactions between these two traditions have been “grounded more in caricature than in close reading,” Bohrer sets out to expose and correct what she calls the “synecdochal straw person fallacy” present in the way each tradition has interacted with the other (AB, 14, 20). In noting that both traditions represent active ways of “reading, understanding, thinking, and dreaming beyond the deep structures of exploitation and oppression that frame our world,” her starting point is historical, i.e., she begins by outlining the historical precursors of the intersectional tradition (AB, 21). In doing so, she situates the origins of intersectional thought in spaces inseparably linked to communist and socialist activism, organizations, and parties. Nonetheless, it is important to note before we continue that her goal is not to ‘synthesize’ the two traditions, or to subsume the one under the other, but to articulate a ‘both-and’ approach, in which the conditions for the possibility of “theoretical coalitions between perspectives, in which the strengths of each perspective are preserved” arises (AB, 23).
           
​Bohrer sets the groundwork for her project by situating the historical unity of the intersectional tradition and socialism. She begins by examining the 19th century thinkers Maria Stewart, Sojourner Truth, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Bohrer argues that these three central foremothers of the intersectional tradition had concerns not limited to the dynamics of race and gender, i.e., the three understood that concerns of “labor, class, capitalism, and political economy” were inseparable from concerns of race and gender (AB, 35). In Stewart she demonstrates the presence of an early (1830s) notion of surplus value at hand in the analysis of enslaved black women’s work, who she saw as performing the labor that allowed for the profits of the owner. In Truth she examines her lucid development of the structural role reproductive labor played for capitalism, and more specifically, how the exploitation of this reproductive labor takes a variety of forms according to race. Lastly, in Wells-Barnett she examines how her groundbreaking work on lynching not only demystifies the narrative of the black male rapist, but postulates that “lynching was predominantly a tool of economic control,” used to keep the black community economically subordinated to white capitalist (AB, 40).

Bohrer proceeds to examine the three key intersectional forerunners of the first half of the 20th century: Louise Thompson Patterson, Claudia Jones, and W.E.B. Du Bois, all which were at some point members of the Communist Party. In Patterson we see the development of the concept of ‘triple exploitation’ used to describe the unique position black working-class women have under capitalism, placing them in a context in which they are exploited as workers, women, and blacks. Influenced by Patterson’s notion of ‘triple-exploitation’ and the Marxist-Leninist concept of ‘superexploitation,’ Claudia Jones refurnishes and expands on both – reconceptualizing the former as ‘triple-oppression,’ and redefining the latter to account for the uniquely exploitative position black women occupy under capitalism. In postulating black women’s position as ‘superexploited,’ Jones considers black women, not the white industrial proletariat, the “most revolutionary segment of the working class” (AB, 50). Lastly, in Du Bois we see expressed a profound understanding that race, class, and gender are tied with “simultaneous significance” to the structural contradictions of capitalism (AB, 51). This simultaneous significance of the three requires an individual and systematic understanding of oppression to be fully comprehended.

Bohrer closes out her historical contextualization by looking at the last half of the 20th century. She begins by looking at the three approaches to thinking about the relations of class, race, and gender that arise in the 1960s-80s. These three are: double and triple jeopardy, standpoint theory, and sexist racism. Bohrer argues that although these three played a great role in the development of the intersectional tradition, they are still “distinct from a full theory of intersectionality,” for they contain, in different ways, the reifying, homogenizing, and essentializing ways of thinking of race, class, and gender that intersectionality attempts to move beyond (AB, 35). Bohrer then examines the anti-capitalist critiques present in the intersectional thought of the Combahee River Collective, Patricia Hill Collins, Angela Davis, bell hooks, and Audre Lorde. In the Combahee River Collective, we see the inclusion of class, race, gender, and sexuality as interlocking systems of oppression that “permeate all moments of capitalist exploitation” (AB, 74). The same sentiment, conceptualized in various ways, permeates throughout the work of Collins (matrix of domination), Davis, hooks (white supremacist capitalist patriarchy), and Lorde (white male heterosexual capitalism).

Having contextualized the historical unfolding of the intersectional tradition, Bohrer moves on to examine what she considers to be the best forms of intersectionality, i.e., the ones that do not leave class behind, and the best forms of Marxism, i.e., the ones that do not consider race, sex, and other forms of oppression secondary and epiphenomenal to class-based exploitation. Beyond this, she also examines the disputes each side has with the other, and how these end up being largely based on synecdochal straw person fallacies.

Bohrer begins by attempting to lay out as refined a definition as possible to the question ‘what is intersectionality?’. To get to the refined, Bohrer starts with the general, stating that broadly “intersectionality is a term that brings together a variety of positions on the relationships between modes of oppression and identity in the contemporary world” (AB, 81). From here, Bohrer goes on to postulate five definitions of intersectionality as presented by some of its key theorists: Kimberlé Crenshaw, Leslie McCall, Patricia Hill Collins, Ange-Marie Hancock, and Vivian May. By showing there is disputes between intersectional thinkers on how intersectionality should be thought of, Bohrer breaks the conceptions of intersectionality as a homogenous theoretical approach, and demonstrates that there is plurality, disputes, and discussion actively happening within the tradition. Nonetheless, she marks six central postulates of intersectional thinking that permeate in most intersectional theorists. These are: 1- anti single axis thinking – the various forms of oppression are enmeshed within each other and inseparable; 2- anti ranking oppressions – no one oppression is any more important than another, i.e., being constructed relationally, you cannot solve one without solving the others; 3- Think of oppression in multiple registers – structurally, individually, representationally, etc.; 4- Identity is politically and theoretically important – identity is never pure, it is always “multi-pronged, group-based, historically-constituted, and heterogenous;” 5- Inextricable link of theory and practice – activism and the theoretical are linked; and 6- Power is described and attacked – intersectionality is not neutral, it is both “descriptive and normative,” it describes and critiques power (AB, 93, 95).

Having laid out the plurality of approaches, and also the unifying central postulates of intersectionality, Bohrer proceeds to examine the ways in which some Marxist theorists distort and fallaciously critique intersectionality. I will here lay what I take to be the six (out of eight) most important and frequent critiques of intersectionality, and the responses Bohrer gives to each. The first critique argues that intersectionality is individualistic, and thus, in line with the ethos of capitalism. But, as we saw in the previous postulates, identity for the intersectional theorist is group based and historically constructed. The second critique reduces intersectionality to postmodernism and poststructuralism. In doing so, Bohrer references Sirma Bilge in arguing that what is taking place is the “whitening of intersectionality,” i.e., a framework originated and guided by black women is subsumed under a white man predominated field (AB, 107). The third critique postulates intersectionality as liberal multiculturalism, falling within the logic of neoliberalism. Bohrer argues that although intersectional discourse is whitewashed and misused by neoliberal representationalism, intersectional theorists are ardent critics of this and fight to sustain the radical ethos of intersectionality. The fourth critique argues that intersectionality does not sufficiently account for issues of class. Bohrer contends, through Linda Alcoff, that in order to properly understand class, one must understand it enmeshed in race, sex, and gender. The fifth critique argues that intersectional theorists fail to account for the historical causes of that which they describe and critique. Bohrer responds that the intersectional theorists do account for the historical causes of the matrices of domination, but that instead of attributing the cause to one thing, they take a multi-dimensional approach. The last critique we will examine states that intersectionality multiplies identities and makes it harder for solidarity to arise. Bohrer’s response to this is that we must refrain from thinking of solidarity as the lowest common denominator of sameness, solidarity must be thought of as the building of coalitions of difference, united by a sameness in interest, not identity.

Bohrer now embarks on repeating with Marxism what she just did with intersectionality. She begins by devoting her time to demonstrating that what she calls the reductive ‘orthodox story’ of Marxism, which postulates Marxism “as a fundamentally class-oriented, economically-reductionist, teleological theory of waged factory labor,” is not the only form of Marxism (AB, 124). Bohrer approaches this task by postulating seven assumptions the ‘orthodox story’ makes, and then responds to each in a way that demonstrates how Marx, Engels, and queer, feminist, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist Marxists have addressed these questions free of the reductive assumptions of the ‘orthodox story.’ Some of these non-reductive approaches include: 1- looking beyond waged labor to examine the labor that is structurally necessary but unpaid; 2- looking at how the division of labor is racialized and sexualized; 3- examining the necessary role violence and oppression attendant in colonialism, land expropriation, and slavery played in the development of capitalism, not just as a function, but as an integral structural part of the system; 4- looking at the non-homogeneity of capitalism, i.e., examining how it can take different forms; and 5- looking at the politico-social apparatuses developed to reinforce these practices.

Building on the non-reductive forms of Marxism she just espoused, Bohrer now embarks on the task of showing how many critiques of Marxism coming from the intersectional tradition, like the Marxist critique of intersectionality previously examined, are based largely on misunderstandings or understandings limited to the reductive ‘orthodox story.’ Concretely, Bohrer examines four common criticisms of Marxism from intersectional theorist:

​Bohrer argues these critiques are largely limited in scope to the ‘orthodox story’ of Marxism which she has already established is merely one form out of many in the Marxist tradition. These intersectional critiques of Marxism become unwarranted when the form of Marxism examined is of the non-reductive type she appraised in chapter three.
           
​The theoretically novel portion of her text begins by her looking at the relationship between exploitation and oppression. She argues that instead of reducing one onto the other, like has been done by the intersectional and Marxist traditions in the past, we must conceive of the two as having an ‘elective affinity,’ i.e., a “kind of consonance or amenability.” (AB, 200) This means, she argues, that we must think of the two as ‘equiprimordial’, i.e., related to each other as “equally fundamental, equally deep-rooted, and equally anchoring of the contemporary world” (AB, 199). In order to fully understand a phenomenon in capitalism we must understand how exploitation and oppression “feed off and play into one another as mutually reinforcing and co-constituting aspects of the organization of capitalist society” (AB, 201). Beyond this, she argues that “a full understanding of how class functions under capitalism requires understanding how exploitation and oppression function equiprimordially” (Ibid.). Therefore, four central points must be understood to capture capitalism non-reductively: “1) capitalism cannot be reduced to exploitation alone; 2) capitalism cannot be reduced to class alone; 3) class cannot be reduced to exploitation alone; 4) race, gender, sexuality cannot be reduced to oppression alone” (AB, 204).
           
Although the equiprimordial lens Bohrer introduces for thinking of the relationship between oppression and exploitation may be helpful, the development of the concept is stifled by her limited understanding of the notion of class in Marx’s work. Bohrer argues that instead of limiting class to being constituted only through exploitation, like in Marx, thinking of class equiprimordially allows us to see it constituted through exploitation and oppression. To expand on her point Bohrer references Rita Mae Brown who states that, “Class is much more than Marx’s definition of relationship to the means of production. Class involves your behavior, your basic assumptions about life[…]how you are taught to behave, what you expect from yourself and from others, your concept of a future, how you understand problems and solve them, how you think, feel, act…” (AB, 202). Although Marx never provides an explicit systematic study of class, for when he attempts the task in Ch. 52 of Capital Vol 3 the manuscript breaks off after a few paragraphs, we can nonetheless see his conception of class throughout his political works. Examining how Marx deals with class in his 18th Brumaire on Louis Bonaparte shows the previous sentiment from Brown and Bohrer to be problematic. In relation to the French peasantry, he states that,

​This constitutes a notion of class that although influenced, is not reducible to the group’s relation to the means of production. It would seem then, that Marx’s notion of class is fundamentally relational in two ways, first as a relation a group bears to the means of production, and second as the relation a group’s mode of life and culture bears to another. Thus, unlike Bohrer states, already in Marx’s conception of class, when understood fully and not synecdochally, class can already be constituted through exploitation and oppression.
           
​Bohrer also develops what she refers to as the ‘dialectics of difference’ present in both traditions as the way of understanding capitalism as a “structure and a logic” (AB, 208). In demonstrating how both traditions show capitalism developing contradictions in the real world, Bohrer’s first move is rejecting the reductive Aristotelean binary logic that finds contradiction to designate falsehood and which attributes normative statuses of ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ to the polarities. Instead, Bohrer argues that in both traditions the world is understood dialectically, i.e., in a way in which the plurality of the ‘middle’ that binary logic excludes is included, and in a way in which the polarities of the binary are taken to be in a dynamic tension, not a static opposition. Dialectics of difference does not ignore or flatten polarities and contradictions but engages with them and resists through the inclusion of the excluded middle. This dialectic has nothing to do with the simplified and progressivist triad (thesis-antithesis-greater synthesis) present in popular conception. Instead of the beaten down reductive triad, Bohrer concludes by offering three metaphors for modeling dialectics: Collins’ matrix, the Frankfurt school’s constellation, and the prism metaphor. These three metaphors, to be effective, must be used together as “overlapping on one another” (AB, 229).
           
Having examined the descriptive potential of a non-reductive dialectic, Bohrer proceeds to espouse its prescriptive implications, i.e., “how do we organize from these contradictions? how do we put the dialectic of difference into transformative practice?” (Ibid.) Bohrer begins by postulating that we must develop a theoretical framework that accounts for the intergroup differentiation logic of capitalist incommensurability (the inconsistent logics of racialization: logic of elimination – natives, logic of exclusion – blacks, and the logic of inclusion – latino/a) and that accounts for the intragroup homogenization logic of capitalist commensurability. Her response is a redefinition of how we conceive of solidarity. Solidarity must not be understood as the lowest common denominator of identity sameness, but as based on coalitions of difference and incommensurability united by mutual interest in transcending a system in which life is suppressed and molded in and by structures of exploitation and oppression. These coalitions, she argues, are to be built from the structural interconnectedness that capitalism already provides. It is, therefore, solidarity based on unity, not uniformity. As she states: