​In leading foreign policy magazines across the United States, the rise of China is treated as a threat which the U.S. must effectively challenge. Since at least President Barack Obama’s 2011 “pivot to Asia,” American foreign policy has been crafted towards “containing” China, and “de-linking” it from the global economy.

As has been historically the case for all empires, its treatment of its up-and-coming competition has required various tactics of dehumanization. In the eyes of their population, they need the competitor to appear as a barbaric “other,” a being fully foreign to everything their people hold sacred. This is how hybrid wars against the “otherized” country are legitimated in the native population; fear of one’s way of life being threatened drives people who have no real, material interest in supporting these policies into supporting them.

The “pivot to Asia” has been conjoined with a healthy dose of Sinophobia. Even the propaganda spewed about China itself presupposes orientalist tropes about the “backwards” Eastern peoples more predisposed to despotism than the “enlightened” Westerners. Without this ideological basis, the media’s job of convincing Americans that China is ran by an autocratic “dictator,” who somehow calls all the shots in a country of 1.4 billion people, would be significantly harder. It is a predisposed dehumanization of the Chinese that premises the acceptance of baseless claims about a “Uyghur genocide,” for which those who have plundered the predominantly Muslim countries of the Middle East for a century have never provided evidence for.

But is there any basis in this otherization? Is the “Chinese dream” and way of life really that different from the ideals that regular American people hold as common sense? All evidence points to the contrary. In many ways, the reality Chinese people experience with their socialist democracy lives up to the American ideals far better than the reality Americans experience in the U.S. itself.
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​The most influential American thinkers and leaders in American history, those whose insights have crystallized into the common sense of many Americans, have all been distrustful of those who consider it their main purpose to simply accumulate capital at the expense of society.

Thomas Jefferson, for instance, held that there was a fundamental distinction between the aristocratic and democratic man: the former is rooted in big business elitism, the latter in the people’s will. Jefferson considered that if the aristocratic man came into power, the American experiment in democracy would be threatened. Hindsight has shown how right he was!

Abraham Lincoln, for instance, held that “labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” For Lincoln, the substance of the American project was “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” as he eloquently stated in his Gettysburg Address. He would be disappointed to see how today we have government of, by, and for big corporations, investment firms, and banks.

In the 20th century, no American thinkers are as influential as the polymath, John Dewey, and the brilliant Civil Rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr. While every year American politicians pay lip service to Dr. King, and while Dewey’s literal nickname was “America’s philosopher of democracy,” what is often left out of the conversation was how both were vehemently critical of how America was failing to live up to its democratic ideals, and how, if it wanted to make these ideals real, it required some form of socialism.

Dr. King argued that “if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life, nor liberty, nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.” China’s efforts in lifting 800 million out of poverty and eliminating absolute poverty would align with Dr. King’s understanding of what is required for authentic American democracy far greater than the condition most American working people live in, more than 60% of which are a lost paycheck away from homelessness and most of which are drowning in debt-slavery.

Likewise, for Dewey we must stop thinking about democracy as something “institutional and external;’” instead, we should treat democracy as a “way of life,” one governed by the “belief in the common man.” For Dewey, genuine democracy is a consistent practice. It has less to do with showing up to a poll every two to four years and more to do with the ability of common people to steadily exert their collective power over the affairs of everyday life. Dewey would conclude that the ideals of the founders would be realized “only as control of the means of production and distribution is taken out of the hands of individuals who exercise powers created socially for narrow individual interests.” It is in China, where capital is forced to serve the people and not the other way around, where this vision is most plentifully realized.

Dewey would wholeheartedly agree with Chinese president Xi Jinping, who asserted that “democracy is not an ornament to be used for decoration; it is to be used to solve the problems that the people want to solve.” As Xi Jinping has noted,

If the people are awakened only at the time of voting and go into dormancy afterward; if the people only listen to smashing slogans during election campaigns but have no say afterward; if the people are only favored during canvassing but are left out after the election, such a democracy is not a true democracy.

One could see words like these coming out of the mouths of a John Dewey or a Martin Luther King Jr. The ideas governing China’s socialist whole-process people’s democracy should look anything but foreign to Americans – it is what our leading democratic theorists hoped the US system would develop into. If Americans are faithful to the democratic creed of the Declaration of Independence, and to the leading theorists of our country, who have developed these into notions of socialist democracy with American characteristics, then we should be praising China for how incredibly comprehensive their socialist democracy is.

Instead of accepting the lies U.S. politicians and media spew, all of which are aimed are “otherizing” and “demonizing” China, the American people must realize that it is China where the American ideals are best embodied. Professor Zhang Weiwei is, without a doubt, correct to point out that Lincoln’s dictum “of, by, and for the people,” is much more substantially realized in China.

Instead of accepting the easily disprovable lies of U.S. officials, who in condemning China are themselves standing in an anti-American position, the American people should fight to realize Lincoln’s vision. When our government is actually of, by, and for the people, the conditions will be present for us seeing China’s rise not as a threat we must contain, but an effort we can applaud. Ultimately, if Americans are faithful to their democratic creed, they will realize that we must learn from China and work together to build a peaceful, cooperative, and ecological shared future for mankind.

Marxist revolutionaries strive to analyze the surrounding bourgeois, capitalist world with the goal of fundamentally changing it. But the hegemony of bourgeois metaphysical modes of thinking in capitalist societies–modes that always end up assuring us that the essential institutions of bourgeois society are not susceptible to change and are as permanent as the law of gravity–can sometimes derail this goal.

Karl Marx (1818-83), like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) before him, emphasized that human societies can and do undergo dramatic transformations, moving from one social order to another where each formation is governed by its own distinct laws, and a discontinuous logic separates one social order from the next. In other words, both their philosophies exhibit an appreciation for a historical perspective almost totally lacking in preceding philosophical systems.

Accordingly, both Marx and Hegel found the dominant scientific method of their time, the method of physics with its static laws, to be inadequate for capturing the logic of social transformations. Hegel was the first to turn to the dialectical method, whose origins go back at least to Plato, and used it to capture the logic of these historical leaps while at the same time systematically developing the logic of the dialectic itself.

Marx, who was heavily influenced by Hegel, adopted his dialectic, but, as we will see, gave it a critical turn, declaring in the 1873 Afterward to the second German edition of Capital, Volume I: “My dialectical method is not only different from the Hegelian, but its direct opposite.” Nevertheless, their respective dialectical methods share fundamental features in common. In the same Afterward Marx credited Hegel with being “the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner.”

This essay will begin with an explication of these “general forms,” particularly when applied to understanding humanity; then show how they were employed by Marx in his revolutionary analysis of bourgeois society; and conclude by offering examples of both dialectical and metaphysical modes of thinking as applied to current social practices. As we shall see below, metaphysical thinking presently dominates both everyday thought and bourgeois philosophical modes of analysis. Dialectical thought, while not rejecting metaphysical thinking altogether, attempts to supersede it.

While the dialectic is a powerful weapon that can help us escape from the shackles of bourgeois thinking, it does not offer an unambiguous tool that will produce the same results no matter who employs it. It is not a mechanical instrument. Nevertheless, it does provide some useful guidelines for revolutionary socialists who seek to understand our surrounding world for the purpose of changing it.

Preliminaries: The philosophical context

Understanding Hegel’s dialectical method requires an acquaintance with the method it was constructed to supersede–the prevailing natural scientific method that dominated the philosophical/scientific scene of Hegel’s time–particularly the method of physics, a form of thought that Hegel designated as “metaphysical.” Initiated in the 15th —16th centuries in Europe in conjunction with the rise of capitalism, this natural scientific method conceived nature as composed of discrete elements that could be understood in isolation from one another and that interacted in predictable ways according to inflexible laws such as cause and effect. As Friedrich Engels observed in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific: “To the metaphysician, things and their mental reflexes, ideas, are isolated, are to be considered one after the other and apart from each other, are objects of investigation fixed, rigid, given once for all.” The goal of the scientist was to discover the laws governing the interaction of these objects (for example, the law of gravity) and logically deduce predictions based on these laws, which then allowed humanity to advance its control over nature and more successfully satisfy human material needs. The natural sciences made huge gains during this period in discovering the laws of nature, thanks to Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), Isaac Newton (1643-1727), and many others.

Impressed by the positive impact of the natural sciences on humanity, philosophers quickly borrowed its method and applied it to humans with the hope of organizing society along “scientific” lines. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) justified this transition by arguing that human beings, after all, were no more than complicated mechanisms, where “the heart [is] but a spring; and the nerves but so many strings; and the joints but so many wheels” (The Leviathan, Introduction). He added society was nothing more than an artificial man and hence could be captured by the same method as nature.

Hobbes proceeded to argue that people are by nature competitive, distrustful of one another, and desiring of glory and hence engage in acts that are entirely predictable. For example, they will be aggressive with one another unless restrained by the threat of force. Using these assumptions about the nature of the individual, Hobbes proceeded to deduce the appropriate governmental structure for society.

Philosophers of this period, then, assumed that people had a fixed nature in the same way as natural objects. That is, just as water has certain permanent characteristics that allow us to predict its behavior, and the falling of an object to the ground is completely predictable if the relevant variables are known and animal species have their fixed nature, human nature is equally fixed and predictable. Many agreed with Hobbes about the essential qualities of this nature: people are selfish, competitive and self-serving. Perhaps most importantly because of its methodological implications, they believed humans were essentially individualistic, meaning that each individual was assumed to possess a full range of human characteristics apart from their relation to other human individuals. Human societies were simply the sum of these atomic units and nothing more.

Hegel’s revolutionary approach to the question of human reality required that he adopt a revolutionary method to capture its logic–the dialectic. His dialectical method, therefore, cannot be separated from the content of his social theory: “… this dialectic is not an activity of subjective thinking applied to some matter externally, but it is rather the matter’s very soul putting forth its branches and fruit organically.” (Philosophy of Religion)

Here are some of the defining features of that social theory:

First, societies are living organisms, which means they are composed of members that derive their identity from their place in the organism. Each member reciprocally interacts with other members as well as with their encompassing society, but society has a far greater influence on the individual than vice versa. In a significant sense, individuals are not even human apart from this social context, which provides them with language, a style of thinking, customs, a religion, morality, etc. As Hegel observed, “The individual is the offspring of his people, of his world …; he may spread himself out as he will, he cannot escape out of his time any more than out of his skin ….” (History of Philosophy).

Anthropologists have made a similar observation. In a 1947 document addressed to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, the American Anthropological Association, in arguing that human rights should not be confined to individual rights but extended to community rights, emphasized that individual identity is inextricably tied to the surrounding community:

"If we begin as we must, with the individual, we find that from the moment of his birth not only his behavior, but his very thought, his hopes, aspirations, the moral values which direct his action and justify and give meaning to his life in his own eyes and those of his fellows, are shaped by the body of custom of the group of which he becomes a member… [T]he personality of the individual can develop only in terms of the culture of his society."

In other words, Hegel offers a radical rejection of the prevailing philosophical assumptions of his time that individuals are atomistic and autonomous, that they have a fully developed personality apart from their social relations, that societies are nothing more than the sum of these individuals, and that it makes sense to view the origin of societies as resulting from individuals engaging in contracts with one another where they agree to respect certain basic rules, etc.

Second, since all natural organisms undergo a process of development to maturity–the acorn, for example, develops into an oak tree and children become adults–Hegel claimed humanity itself has matured through the ages. Just as the acorn has embedded in it its destiny to become an oak tree, humanity, which initially is governed more by instincts and feelings, is driven to become rational, free and self-conscious, a goal that guides the entire process: “We have defined the goal of history as consisting in the [human] spirit’s development towards self-consciousness,” (Philosophy of World History) a goal Hegel equated with fully developed freedom and rationality: “… for freedom by definition, is self-knowledge” (Philosophy of World History). This end-goal guides the entire (teleological) process: “Just as in the living organism generally, everything is already contained, in an ideal manner, in the germ and is brought forth by the germ itself, not by an alien power, so too must all the particular forms of living mind grow out of its Notion as from their germ” (The Philosophy of Mind). In other words, in the early stages, humanity was more instinctual than rational but gradually rationality became the more powerful drive: “World history begins with its universal end … it is as yet only an inward, basic unconscious impulse, and the whole activity of world history … is a constant endeavor to make the impulse conscious.” (Philosophy of World History) So, for Hegel, human history follows a logical path, or as he puts it, “… reason governs the world, and … world history is therefore a rational process.” (Philosophy of World History)

Third, and following from the previous point, each stage of history has its own unique logic that permeates all its institutions. According to Hegel,

The forms of thought or the points of view and principles which hold good in the sciences and constitute the ultimate support of all their matter, are not peculiar to them, but are common to the condition and culture of the time and of the people… All its knowledge and ideas are permeated and governed by a metaphysic such as this; it is the net in which all the concrete matter which occupies mankind in action and in impulses, is grasped (History of Philosophy).

Accordingly, Hegel rejects the notion of a fixed human nature but argues that humans exhibit different qualities during different stages of history. This changing human nature distinguishes humans from other animal species, which lack consciousness and the ability to reflect on themselves and fundamentally change their behavior.

Fourth, the transition from one historical stage to the next results from contradictions that emerge in the earlier stage, as will be explained below.

Hegel’s dialectical exposition of practical freedom

For Hegel, the free will or the completely self-determined will goes to the heart of what it means to be a human being. But we are not born with this capacity in a fully developed state. Rather, a modern individual must mature into adulthood to be able to exercise freedom in its most advanced form, and humanity has required millennia to acquire the proper social institutions that allow human freedom to attain its full potential. Hegel believed that, through the ages, humans have practiced three basic forms of freedom; each subsequent form, having been built on its predecessor, is more sophisticated and liberating. He did not consider these stages as completely distinct: the lower forms of freedom do not entirely disappear but are incorporated into the higher forms so that the highest form is a rich synthesis of all three.

Personal freedom for Hegel represents the most elementary form. The individual “freely” chooses which impulses (desires/interests) to pursue, without this choice being determined by the impulse. Hegel describes personal freedom, which constitutes the first step in his dialectical presentation, as “abstract immediacy” or “the undifferentiated stage,” meaning we do not thoughtfully reflect on our options but arbitrarily decide without thinking which to pursue. Bourgeois theorists in modern capitalist societies, perhaps because they are surrounded by an economy that sets a premium on self-interest and greed, typically assume personal freedom is the only kind of freedom and go no further. Hobbes, for example, defined freedom as, “In deliberation, the last appetite or aversion immediately adhering to the action, or to the omission thereof, is that we call the will” (The Leviathan, Part I, Chapter 6). In other words, the will is all about desires and feelings, not about thoughtful choices.

The second step of the dialectic is “particularity” or “difference” and amounts to looking at the real world to find the particular ways in which personal freedom, which initially was merely a vague undifferentiated universal, is realized. Hegel points to the institution of private property where individuals are granted the exclusive right over designated material objects as the purest manifestation of personal freedom since individuals can pursue their passions without fear of interference by others. However, this dominion over property, to operate successfully, requires laws to protect the rights of property owners, including laws governing the exchange of property by means of contracts as well as an agency mandated to enforce these laws. Without this legal apparatus, the will of the individual would not be free because of constant threats by other members of society who attempt to monopolize these material objects for their own pleasure.

Consequently, this first conception of human freedom, which appeared to be a simple and unambiguous relation between a person and an object, requires a network of social relations–laws and a police force–to operate successfully. But then a contradiction arises: while individuals might enjoy the protection of their own property by state laws, those same laws, when used to protect the property rights of their neighbors, can feel like external coercion, especially if they covet their neighbor’s property. Hence, personal freedom does not fulfill the promise of a fully self-determined will–a will free of external constraints. It encounters its “negation” because of the constraining force of society’s laws.

Hegel emphasized the human mind seeks unity and cohesion: “But the spirit cannot remain in a state of opposition. It seeks unification, and in this unification lies the higher principle” (Philosophy of World History). Accordingly, when contradictions flow from a position, the impulse is to seek their resolution by forging a new, hopefully contradiction-free conception. This represents the third step of the dialectic–a mediated unity or the negation of the negation, meaning that a new unifying framework or totality emerges that manages to retain the past conception of a free will but resolves the contradictions by situating them in a more comprehensive, nuanced unity, which amounts to a paradigm (world view) shift or a qualitative transformation rather than simply a quantitative addition. We have a simple illustration of Hegel’s reasoning when we consider a person who measures 5 feet tall, then later measures 5 feet and 5 inches, an apparent contradiction. Of course, the contradiction can be resolved by bringing into consideration that the individual is growing; a temporal dimension is added to the picture, which was previously present only implicitly, and in this way the contradiction is resolved in a larger, more comprehensive totality.

Returning to Hegel’s analysis of freedom, moral freedom for Hegel represents this advance over personal freedom: it retains the idea of the pursuit of desires and the necessity of law and a system of justice required for this pursuit. But the law is no longer conceived as being imposed externally but as constructed entirely by the individual through a process of thoughtful reflection without borrowing assumptions from society. Immanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) moral law that we should always treat other people as an end and never as a means is an example. Since individuals themselves construct these laws based on their own sense of morality, the laws are not experienced as an external constraint but as a liberating guide to action, allowing for the pursuit of some impulses while rejecting others, depending on whether they conform to or violate the law. We have a new totality, then, in the sense that a new conception of free will and the individual emerges–an individual who has desires and impulses but also has the faculty of reason that generates moral laws which serve as a guide to acting on these desires and impulses. With this transition to moral freedom human nature shifts from being less impulsive to being more thoughtful and therefore, according to Hegel, freer.

The first step of Hegel’s dialectic was the abstract universal. The second step is constituted by particulars or differences or contradictions. Hegel calls the third dialectical step “mediated unity” or a new “totality,” as was exemplified in the concept of moral freedom. It represents a new paradigm where the pursuit of desires remains but is now mediated by a moral law–a law that is no longer external to the individual but incorporated into the individual’s will with the result that the will is thoughtful, not impulsive or arbitrary. While representing the conclusion of the first of the three-step dialectical progression, moral freedom in turn becomes the first step–the immediate, the abstract, formal universal–in relation to a new dialectical progression.

Once again, we look to see the particular forms moral freedom assumes when put into practice. And once again we find that moral freedom succumbs to contradictions. First, it cannot be realized by isolated individuals apart from their social relations but requires that individuals be socialized and educated to think rationally about possible principles of action. On the most basic level, the individual requires language, a capacity that cannot be acquired without socialization. Second, these moral principles generated by the isolated individual are, according to Hegel, too abstract, formal, and empty to serve as reliable guides in navigating life’s choices. For example, Kant offered a second version of his moral law: ask if it would be consistent to will that everyone do what you are proposing to do. Stealing property from someone else would not pass such a test because thieves do not want others to steal from them. But a problem arises here. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, for example, Hegel raises the question, “Ought it be an absolute law that there should be property?” In other words, is the institution of private property an unqualified good or does it harbor contradictions such as in the case of stealing? Would it fail to pass one of Kant’s moral laws? If contradictions arise, then the proposal fails. The answer Hegel supplies is that neither private property nor its opposite, “to each according to his need,” is self-contradictory, and therefore abstract, empty, formal laws alone are insufficient to serve as a guide. Contradictions only arise if we presuppose the existence of some social practice such as private property. Then stealing represents a contradiction of it. Unless one borrows concrete values and practices from the surrounding society, everything passes these highly abstract moral-law tests. But moral freedom purported to provide a law that was centered exclusively in the isolated individual–hence, a contradiction.

Both these problems point to the fact that moral freedom alone cannot provide a coherent account of a fully self-determined will but must be supplemented with the indispensable role of social institutions, whether in the form of education or institutions such as private property, which leads to the third and highest form of practical freedom. Social or ethical freedom, while incorporating elements from both personal and moral freedom, represents a culminating advance by avoiding the contradictions that encumbered its predecessors. Taking into consideration the lessons that emerged from both personal and moral freedom, namely that freedom cannot be fully realized by an isolated individual, Hegel argues in favor of a more social and encompassing version of free will. Social freedom envisions individuals coming together to construct–through rational discussion–the kind of social and political institutions that embody a rational logic or universal justice. Here, people collectively take control of their world, either directly or through their representatives, and mold it to their will by creating institutions that safeguard personal and moral freedom. Personal freedom is preserved through the institution of private property. Moral freedom, while supplemented by the surrounding culture, persists in the sense that individuals may critically evaluate their surrounding social institutions. In this way the individual is still allowed to exercise their unique individuality but now exercises it within a rational social framework.

Social freedom represents a revolutionary advance in several respects. First, the philosophical assumption that individuals are primordial and societies are secondary and inessential, which dominated the thought of Hegel’s contemporaries, is replaced by a philosophy built on the premise that human beings, while containing an element of individuality, are essentially social and cannot reach their full human potential apart from their membership in society. In The Philosophy of Mind, for example, Hegel argues: “Only in such a manner is true freedom realized; for since this consists in my identity with the other, I am only truly free when the other is also free and is recognized by me as free. This freedom of one in the other unites men in an inward manner, whereas needs and necessity bring them together only externally.” Second, by abandoning the supremacy of the isolated individual and replacing it with a collective subject, the world seems to undergo a transformation: from the standpoint of the isolated individual, the social world appears immutable but becomes pliant when confronted by large numbers of people who act collectively with a conscious plan. Third, human freedom in its fullest sense is not a matter of acting impulsively or thoughtlessly indulging in desires but acting rationally. Fourth, what counts as rational action is not determined by the isolated individual but by people in communication with one another and results from an open discussion. As Hegel said, “What is to be authoritative nowadays derives its authority, not at all from force, only to a small extent from habit and custom, really from insight and argument.” (Philosophy of Religion) Fifth, individuals act collectively not merely to create social institutions that will serve to safeguard personal and moral freedom. If this were the case, then individual freedom would remain supreme. Rather, social freedom also becomes an end in-itself. Individuals realizing their identity, in addition to having an individual side, is essentially tied to their surrounding community, its culture and social practices. We understand that we are not autonomous, fully defined humans apart from society but that we are more like members of a living organism. People feel that they are truly themselves when they are actively engaged with other members of the community, formulating policies where all are equally respected and each has the opportunity to influence the opinion of others. In this way individuals can experience a deep satisfaction by exercising their full social humanity.

A summary of Hegel’s dialectic

Hegel employs multiple ways to describe the dialectical process, but they are all pointing to the same general features. We have already touched on his description of the dialectic as starting with “abstract immediacy” or the “undifferentiated” stage. He also refers to this first step as “the abstract universal” or an “unconscious impulse.” The second step involves the “particular” (or “difference”), meaning the ways in which the first step plays out in existence. The third step unites the first two steps in a “mediated unity.” But Hegel also describes this process more abstractly as moving from the universal, to the particular, and then to the individual. In other words, we start with a vague idea or impulse, look at the particular ways it appears in the world, and then formulate a new more differentiated universal that resolves the contradictions appearing in the second step by situating them in a more encompassing, more complex universal. This third step then serves as the starting point for a new dialectical progression until the final point is reached. Hegel also describes the second step as the negation of the first step since the second step reveals contradictions, while the third step, which resolves the contradictions in a larger totality, is the negation of the negation.

But Hegel uses another important formulation where something transitions from being “in-itself” to being “for-itself.” The in-itself is implicit, meaning that we are not aware of it, while the for-itself is where the implicit has become explicit and we have become conscious of it. For example, in our investigation of moral freedom we started with the moral actor as an isolated individual. But upon reflection we come to understand that the ability of an individual to act morally presupposes being socialized to think rationally and requires established social practices to serve as a context within which to employ moral principles. We become conscious of this necessary social context by reflecting on the practice of moral freedom; if we do not reflect, we do not become aware of it and, accordingly, cannot proceed thoughtfully. For Hegel, then, the process of history amounts to becoming increasingly self-conscious of what we are unconsciously presupposing so that we choose a course of action, not because we are impelled by unconscious impulses, but because we consciously conclude it represents the most reasonable alternative. He adds in Philosophy of World History, as was mentioned before: “… freedom, by definition, is self-consciousness,” and later adds, “We have defined this goal of history as consisting in the [human] spirit’s development towards self-consciousness, or in it making this world conform to itself (for the two are identical).” In other words, by engaging in collective action according to a plan that has been consciously adopted based on “insight and argument” rather than individuals pursuing their own selfish ends, we can create rational institutions that conform to our ideas of what is right. For example, Hegel argues in The Philosophy of Mind:

Man is implicitly rational; herein lies the possibility of equal justice for all men and the futility of a rigid distinction between races which have rights and those which have none.

Marx’s use of the dialectic

Marx’s social philosophy shares many fundamental points with Hegel’s. Otherwise, the dialectic would be irrelevant.

First, Marx also regards society as an organism, meaning that the isolated individual apart from society is no longer considered a meaningful construct. Rather, individuals are subordinate and to a large degree defined by their surrounding society.

Individuals producing in society–hence socially determined individual production–is, of course, the point of departure. The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades…. (Introduction to the Grundrisse) [“Robinsonades” refers to Daniel Dafoe’s fictional character, Robinson Crusoe and the conception of humans as self-made individuals.]

Only in a community [with others has each] individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible. (The German Ideology)

Second, both see history as progressing in the direction of humanity becoming progressively free, rational, and self-conscious. Marx says, for example: “Reason nevertheless prevails in world history” (Comments on the North American Events, Die Presse, October 12, 1862). For Marx, as humanity gains more control over its material environment through technological advances, the potential for taking control of social relations and exercising social freedom by collectively directing the economy according to a rational plan, as opposed to letting the blind forces of the market dictate economic decisions, becomes increasingly possible. The overthrow of capitalism and move towards communism makes this imminently possible: “Let us finally imagine, for a change, an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labor power in full self-consciousness as one single social force.” (Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 1) And:

With the community of revolutionary proletarians, on the other hand, who take their conditions of existence and those of all members of society under their control, it is just the reverse; it is as individuals that the individuals participate in it. It is just this combination of individuals [assuming the advanced stage of modern productive forces] which puts the conditions of the free development and movement of individuals under their control…. (The German Ideology)

Third, Marx also viewed history as composed of distinct stages, but diverges from Hegel in their identification because of his materialist/economic approach to history. Accordingly, the categories he identifies are first communal societies, followed by the slave societies of Greece and Rome, then feudalism, then capitalism, to be followed sometime in the future by communism. Like Hegel, Marx argued each stage contains its own distinct logic: “The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life” (Preface to Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy). This means that the nature of the family, education, culture in general, philosophy, the state and politics, not to mention human nature, are all organically connected to the economic infrastructure at any particular historical stage.

Fourth, the emergence of fundamental contradictions within society is responsible for its revolutionary transformation. For Marx, these contradictions are above all generated in the economy with the development of classes divided by antagonistic and contradictory interests, leading to the downfall of one society after another while giving birth to new, higher forms: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” (Manifesto of the Communist Party)

As a result of these points of commonality, Marx adopts Hegel’s dialectic with the same schema of abstract, undifferentiated universal, followed by its negation in the form of particular determinations, and then to their resolution in a new mediated, more encompassing universal, or the negation of the negation. Marx’s 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse contains the most extended discussion of his method:

The economists of the seventeenth century, e.g., always begin with the living whole, with population, nation, state, several states, etc.; but they always conclude by discovering through analysis a small number of determinant, abstract, general relations such as division of labor, money, value, etc. As soon as these individual moments had been more or less firmly established and abstracted, there began the economic systems, which ascended from the simple relations, such as labor, division of labor, need, exchange value, to the level of the state, exchange between nations and the world market. The latter is obviously the scientifically correct method. The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse.

Here Marx is describing the dialectic that starts with the abstract universal (population, etc.), then moves to particular determinations (the division of labor, money, etc.), and concludes by reconstructing a new universal that contains these determinations in the form of a mediated unity.

Marx’s monumental work, Capital, is an attempt to take the abstract notion of a pre-capitalist economy and show that, when it plays out in reality and develops into capitalism, the first stage of equality where everyone is an owner and performs their own labor is soon “negated” and replaced by a society composed of two opposed, unequal classes where a minority enjoys huge wealth while the majority struggles to survive. In other words, capitalism is preceded by “individual private property” or what has been referred to as “simple commodity production” or “simple exchange” (the abstract universal). In this stage individuals own their tools, etc., they perform labor and then own the product of their labor which they can take to the market for purposes of exchange–a system that at the outset lacks class divisions, equality prevails, and exploitation is absent. But capitalism negates this stage: as it develops, some of these producers go bankrupt (perhaps demand is lacking for their product, or perhaps they were wiped out by bad weather) and must seek employment from others to survive, which amounts to the first step towards capitalism proper where some in society (the capitalist class) own the means of production while others (the working class) own only their ability to work and must seek employment from those with the means of production. But capitalists have a competitive advantage over individual producers because of their size and efficiency, which results in more and more individual producers being thrown into the working class. Inevitably, wealth becomes concentrated in the hands of a minority of capitalists while the vast majority of the population is converted into workers employed by them. These classes are the particular determinations that flow from the original starting point of simple commodity production. Marx describes this movement in this way: “The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labor of the proprietor.” (Capital, Volume I, Chapter 32)

But when society is divided into two vastly unequal classes with opposed interests, where the working class represents the vast majority of the population but is increasingly exploited, workers come to the realization that they are not simply autonomous individuals but members of a class defined by class exploitation. Instead of being unaware of their class membership, they become class-conscious. Their class membership, which was unconscious and “in-itself” becomes conscious and “for-itself.” Workers realize their misery is not the result of their own individual failure but of their class membership and can then engage in class struggle to liberate themselves as a class by abolishing the capitalist class system and replacing it with communism. This represents the negation of the negation: “But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It [the system that replaces capitalism] is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer but gives him individual property based on the acquisitions of the capitalist era: i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production.” (Capital, Volume I, Chapter 32)

In The Critique of the Gotha Program (1875), Marx argued that capitalist society could not immediately be replaced by a full-blown communist society but rather its revolutionary transformation would proceed dialectically: capitalism, with its deep division into antagonistic classes, would be replaced by its negation where classes would be abolished by adopting a new system of wealth distribution where people would be rewarded according to the amount of labor they performed, meaning that capitalists, too, would need to work to get an income. But Marx was quick to point out in this essay that this stage of the revolution had its problems because of contradictory results:

The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.

But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right.

With the appearance of this contradiction, eventually a new principle of distribution would be introduced, representing the negation of the negation:

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly–only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs! (The Critique of the Gotha Program)

In other words, people will no longer be treated with an abstract universal law of distribution blind to divergent individual needs but distribution will be conducted in an organic way so the different needs of individuals will be factored into the distribution of wealth. Of course, such a principle cannot be immediately adopted after the overthrow of capitalism because human nature will still be stamped with the effects of capitalism, where self-interest and an abstract, individualistic sense of entitlement prevail. Once this mindset is slowly eradicated by new social relations that engender a sense of solidarity, distribution can be established on a more personal, humanitarian, organic basis.

A quick review of the dialectic

The first contact we have with the surrounding world occurs with our senses–sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell–that provide us with a series of sense experiences with little connection among them. Gradually we begin to forge these connections and our world appears more continuous and rational. We organize our experiences according to their relation in time and space, by placing similar experiences under the same category and then connect these categories by means of relations such as cause and effect, substance and accidents, etc. Everyday thinking or what passes for common sense operates on this metaphysical level with its rigid categories. We see our surrounding world as static. One tree, for example, might die and be replaced by another, but the category “tree” remains. The law of gravity never changes. In a similar way we assume the surrounding society is immutable. Those who advocate radical change are dismissed as unrealistic. This apparently static universe is tied to the assumption that thought on the one hand is entirely divorced from the world of existence on the other. Universal categories such as tree, animal, private property, and wage labor are seen as purely mental constructs, while existence is composed of purely material objects or practices. The possibility of changing our material/social world to conform to our ideas so that ideas become a part of reality is beyond consideration.

However, once we turn our attention to humanity’s long history and note that human societies during different epochs have displayed vastly different forms, each with their own distinct economy, political system, philosophy, human nature, etc., then the question arises: is there a logical connection between these social formations so that history itself is rational, or is history governed by pure chance? Hegel’s dialectic was an attempt to affirm the former alternative. Accordingly, it takes us beyond the level of the fixed categories into the realm of an organic system that undergoes development with an underlying logic connecting one stage to the next, illuminating the long journey of humanity to self-knowledge, rationality and freedom–with the understanding, of course, that many regressions along the way can stall progress. Both Marx and Hegel come to the realization that all past societies have been our [humanity’s] own creation, although without conscious planning, and each subsequent social formation represents an advance over its predecessor since it represents a gain in self-knowledge or technical control over nature, culminating in the realization that we can consciously make history according to a collective plan.

While rigid metaphysical thinking dominates common sense, nevertheless some individuals, perhaps without any special training, intuitively recognize the need to go further and take into consideration the social/historical context to better understand human reality. They may also be open to the possibility of radical social upheaval and revolutionary change. To this extent, they are taking a step in the direction of dialectical thinking, an impulse that can be greatly enhanced by an introductory acquaintance with its forms.

Examples of dialectical and metaphysical modes of thinking

1. The metaphysical practice of assigning grades to student work

When children enter school, capitalist culture deems it appropriate to motivate their behavior by assigning grades to their work depending on its quality, emphasizing to the student how important grades are for their entire future. The grade is supposed to represent an accurate reflection of the student’s performance and/or abilities. But this claim is fraught with contradictions.

For example, teachers cannot appeal to a single, unambiguous, universal standard of measurement when assigning grades. Are students being measured according to how much improvement they make during the school term so that they are not penalized if they enter the class less prepared than other students? Or are they graded on how their performance compares to that of the other students, in which case their grade can fluctuate according to who is in the class? Is it possible that all the students in a class do outstanding work and all deserve an ‘A’? Instead of assuming today’s grades are inflated, might the grading policies of the past have been deflated? The teacher’s performance also plays a role in a student’s grade. If the teacher does a poor job explaining the material to the students, or the test questions are confusing or unrelated to the material covered in class, the student’s grade can be adversely affected. Or the teacher might simply grade unfairly where they give generous grades to students they like.

It is hard to say what will replace grades, if anything, in a socialist society, but surely grades as we know them will be abolished.

2. Casting moral blame as a metaphysical exercise

Capitalist society, with its hyper individualism, creates a culture in which individuals cast moral judgments on one another purely as individuals, stripped of any social or historical context, with the assumption that the individual is entirely responsible for who they are and what they do. People who live in poverty are themselves to blame, as if poverty results above all from a failure of individual will-power rather than social policies designed to ensure part of the population remains poor.

This tendency is particularly egregious in a situation where one nation has colonized a second nation or people. When an occupation drags on for decades, as in Gaza and the West Bank, and the oppressed population is treated with daily violence and cruelty; where Israel arrests Palestinians in the occupied territories without charging them with crimes; humiliates them in public by making Palestinians remove their clothes and dance; keeps them imprisoned indefinitely or tries them in rigged military courts; or incarcerates those in Gaza in an open-air prison where only enough food is allowed in to keep the population barely above starvation; when medical supplies allowed to enter are insufficient; where Palestinians are routinely and illegally pushed out of their houses and off their land with impunity or murdered with impunity; when the oppressed population lashes out in violent desperation after exhausting non-violent alternatives, moral condemnation suddenly rises to the occasion: those who have lived comparatively privileged lives are quick to condemn the Palestinian people for resorting to indiscriminate violence, thereby stripping the victims of their humanity by stripping them of their social/historical context.

3. Metaphysical politics

US foreign policy, instead of viewing other societies, for example, Iraq or Afghanistan, as rich, complex, organic unities of culture, religion, economic practices, and system of government, assumes that by merely changing the government they can transform the country into a liberal western democracy, blind to the fact that the government does not exist in isolation but has deep connections to the surrounding economy and culture. Accordingly, U.S. foreign policy adventures typically end in abysmal failures.

Even on the left many assume that working-class power can be achieved by electing socialists to office who will then, presumably, transform the nation from capitalism to socialism. However, electing politicians to office in capitalist societies does not require collective action on the part of the working class. The election process reflects the capitalist culture of operating as isolated individuals: everyone casts their ballot privately. The individualistic culture of capitalism remains intact. The Bernie Sanders’ “movement,” which was so highly acclaimed by many on the left, remained within the framework of capitalist individualism with its top-down decision-making where Sanders alone dictated policy, and everyone one else could either sign on or stay out. People participated as individuals, and nothing in the Sanders’ campaign remotely challenged that dynamic. His supporters were not afforded the opportunity to come together, discuss policy, and vote on how to proceed, a process that would have forged bonds among participants. Unsurprisingly, the “movement” collapsed the day after Sanders lost the election. Capitalism cannot be transformed into socialism without challenging the culture of the isolated individual.

Moreover, revolutionary change cannot be achieved by a political elite at the top through piecemeal reforms as the German Social Democrat Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932) once proposed and many today consider possible. First, such an approach fails to take into consideration the counterattack the capitalist class will launch the moment these reforms become threatening. It fails to take into consideration that capitalist democracy tilts decisively in favor of the capitalists, especially with money that can be used to remove undesirable politicians. Second, progressive politicians who are elected to office join a political elite who have thoroughly adapted to the pervasive, corrupt capitalist culture that can quickly drown newcomers in a sea of self-interest and greed where money and power reign supreme. Third, and perhaps most importantly, capitalist culture is again not challenged because for the most part the working class remains passive and disengaged.

4. A dialectical approach to the union movement

The recently unionized Amazon workers were confronted with a contradiction. Some argued the workers should organize a strike to pressure Amazon into negotiating a contract with favorable provisions. But others argued that the workers could not afford to strike, that they were living paycheck to paycheck and could not stay out long enough to win. Both sides had valid points. Here, a dialectical resolution could have been forged by bringing the larger union movement that is currently on the rise into the picture. An appeal could have been made to these other unions–many have large financial reserves–to contribute to a strike fund to support the Amazon workers long enough to prevail. The contradiction is resolved by enlarging the focus and situating the Amazon union in the totality of the union movement.

5. A dialectical political strategy

For these reasons, Marx and Engels insisted that the overthrow of capitalism and introduction of socialism must be accomplished by the working class itself, defying the prevailing capitalist assumption that workers lack the insight and initiative. In an 1879 letter Engels explained: “At the founding of the International we expressly formulated the battle cry: The emancipation of the working class must be achieved by the working class itself.” (Marx-Engels Correspondence, September 17-18, 1879) When workers escape their passivity and act collectively to liberate themselves, they take the first step in building a new culture: workers in large numbers abandon their inter-competition and individual isolation; they organize themselves, a skill they have already acquired from their union experience; they discuss among themselves possible strategies in going forward, listening to one another and adjusting their positions when convinced of a better alternative, all while strengthening their social bonds. Then, by adopting policies that have the support of the majority, the individual perspective of each member is respected but the will of the majority prevails, enabling them to act collectively. The relations among workers undergo a dialectical transformation: instead of operating as isolated individuals, they transform themselves into members of an organic totality prepared to collectively change the world. This means, then, the capitalist state cannot remain intact after a working-class revolution since it has been constructed specifically to serve the interests of the capitalist class by requiring that workers participate as isolated individuals, not as members of an association. For this reason, Marx insisted that in the move to socialism, the capitalist state must be “smashed” and replaced by a workers’ state, where members of the working class do not participate as isolated individuals but as members of a community. In the 1871 Paris Commune, for example, workers participated through their neighborhood communes where they would discuss policies and direct their representatives how to vote. Similarly, in the early days of the Soviet Union workers, soldiers and peasants participated through their respective soviets. They would meet, debate policies, vote and direct their elected representatives to implement their decisions.

A December 2019 New York Times article, “When Does Activism Become Powerful?” by Hahrie Han (Johns Hopkins University), reported that empirical studies confirm activism becomes powerful when “leaders built organizations designed to strengthen relationships with and among members”, and “that people were the source of their power.” The article continued: “These organizations put people in settings where they would build connections with one another, learn to work together and negotiate about the things they wanted, even with people who were different from them.” In contrast, “three million people marching down a boulevard may not bring about change”—precisely because they do not establish relations among one another and remain atomized.

During the process of working-class activation, human nature undergoes a change. Capitalism’s hyper individualism is rejected and instead we have what Hegel described in the Phenomenology of Spirit as the “’I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I’.” Workers embrace humanistic social relations where together they support one another, gain a sense of camaraderie, and take control of their lives by adopting new policies that champion a better world. The union slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all,” is taken to heart, and “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (Manifesto of the Communist Party, Chapter 2). When workers begin to create this working-class culture, and when they score big wins over their employers through massive strikes, etc., the movement can spread quickly. Others in the working class are then inspired by their courage, their values and their victories and want to become a part of this historic uprising. Hence, a new logic begins to rapidly spread that can lead to a revolutionary upheaval where working people take charge of society and proceed to transform it according to their own definitions of democracy, justice and freedom.

Conclusion

Metaphysical thinking can undermine this undertaking. Unable to imagine sudden, unexpected, upheavals where the logic of one historical stage is replaced by a new logic, it leads to the reinforcement of capitalist institutions, encourages reformism, and sidelines the working class. But these profound transformations can take place when large numbers of workers decide to put up a fight, as happened in the 1930s, and could happen again at any time. While not overthrowing capitalism, the uprisings of the 1930s changed its nature for decades to come.

It is time for today’s working class to finish the job their predecessors began. The dialectic is waiting to serve them.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: I am particularly grateful to Bill Leumer for his helpful suggestions and to Frederick Neuhouser for his extraordinarily lucid books and articles on Hegel with thoughtful step-by-step elucidations of some of Hegel’s most abstruse ideas, making them accessible in ways that few others have done.

Now that I have learned about Marxism, a philosophy that places the workers – the proletariat – as the most important part of any economy, and not the company owners and their managers – the bourgeoisie – I am inspired to bond with everyday people.

My experience in a union as a doctor has been quite an eye-opening experience. The comaraderie that we working doctors have developed to address managerial intrusions into our medical practice has also inspired me to urge all workers to unionize.

​The other day, picking up some take-out food, I even urged a sweet Olive Garden employee to trade numbers with her co-workers in other Olive Gardens to unionize, to be a strong voice to handle work stress, abusive managers, schedule changes, benefits, and pay raises, etc.
I could see the lightbulb in this young woman's head as she contemplated organizing. I felt good encouraging a complete stranger to strategize with her co-workers to problem-solve.
Some say unions are corrupt. Yes, some maybe have corporate-captured leadership, but the potential for life-changing solidarity is worth joining a union. Who knows? Maybe your charisma, your voice is just what your union may need to push for better work conditions.
These words: comaraderie, solidarity are the crux of what we need in the world–unity! After seeing the success of Amazon and Starbucks unionizations, I have come to realize that our real problem, our real enemy, is not one another, but the corporations and the politicians they buy.

Marxism has taught me that a worker's labor should not be taken for granted and that there is strength in numbers. Unity is the opposite of individualism. Unity requires a connection between people to create a collective. This unity excites me because it's the only thing that can defeat the total world domination that a handful of corporations have today.

Corporations, businesses like those in Big Oil, Big Technology, Big Banks, Big Pharma, Big Beef, Big Weapons Manufacturers, etc are literally ruining all life on Earth, via environmental pollution, political bribery, resource and wage theft. I'm convinced we workers do not need CEOs and administrators to tell us how to do jobs that we are very capable of optimizing ourselves.
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This Marxist understanding has given me a new love for America. We, the 99%, who aren't billionaires and hundred millionaires, have much more in common with each other - regardless of our political and social identities, than with the 1% that is price-gouging all goods, products, property, real estate for an immoral profit.

Why is Marxism or some anti-corporate ideology so important to spread all over America? Because American capitalism “looks good on paper” but is actually the destruction of all local economies due to monopoly or oligopoly (rule by few). Aren't Amazon, Walmart, and Target literally destroying all local competition in your town? Doesn't McDonald's, Burger King and other gigantic corporations, have the best real estate to run their restaurants (many times, multiple restaurants in the same town) pushing out the mom-and-pop diners struggling to make a living? Have you seen the corporate domination of farmlands in Southern California, where average families have little chance of owning any farming land to make their own organic food? Did you know Bill Gates owns more farmland than anyone else in America, to make his patent-ready GMO food? Why did Apple disadvantage apps on its App store, and favor Apple apps, if capitalism is supposed to be some fantasy-world place of free market competition?
Marxism, the unity of workers to demand better wages, work conditions, and time off (vacations, weekends, better shifts, pensions), shouldn't be a dirty word in America. But unfortunately it is. Can we agree that sending troops to Vietnam, to “stop Marxism/Communism”, was immoral and completely backfired resulting in thousands of suicidal veterans forgotten by the capitalist leaders who sent them to kill kids and spray poison on basic food, like rice?

Even when I'm discussing or disagreeing with people on line, no matter how much we may disagree, I always keep in my mind that this person is not the enemy, and the real threat is the greedy corporate system that requires poverty to lure desperate workers back to jobs with immorally low wages, while billionaires get richer and richer, even through worldwide pandemics.

Marxism has even helped me to not blame a low level worker for poor service at a restaurant or store, but instead to blame the upper management for understaffing the kitchen/floor, underpaying the workers, and passing on the abuse from top management down to the workers who do all of the grunt work for a business.

I hope that you read up more on Marxism and learn to use it as a tool for American unity like I have done.

I had done a course in Marxism in college years ago (actually, it was called 'Marxism and Existentialism', done by a very new-left lecturer, so you can imagine the bad taste it left in my mouth). We studied the German idealists in a separate course, although Marx should have been the culmination of that module. Instead they lumped Marx in with existentialism, which didn’t appeal to me.

Perhaps that was intentional. Our philosophy department was headed by a Thomist who was a founding member of a far right ‘Christian’ party here in Ireland until he realised that no-one was buying his bs upon which realisation, he moved to America where he joined the faculty of a Von Mises university. He would, wouldn't he. I think the logic there is that if you can't control society as a fascist, you become a libertarian to argue that society should not control you; frustrated power-bid and consequent paranoia.

Our token leftist as I say was a real Frankfurt school enthusiast who I really didn’t get on with. All this to say that my Marxist education prior to doing the online Midwestern Marx course was more a question of miseducation. 

The biggest flaw (apart from an unhelpful penchant for eclecticism) in my understanding was- and this is a point that was driven home to me especially in reading Stalin – my entrenched idealism. I falsely assumed, even if only unconsciously, that an ideology had to begin with getting the abstracts right. Getting a kind of static geometrical representation in my head of what was going on in the ideology. And of course, that is anathema to proper Marxism as I have now learned.

Furthermore, I hadn’t understood the implications of the phrase “from the abstract to the concrete” in either Hegel or Marx, which is a very big failing. I had, given my prior philosophical tastes and absorptions, assumed it was some kind of mystical formula – something akin to the Buddhist idea of the world being a manifestation of the storehouse consciousness (alaya vijnana). I understand now that it is, like that Buddhist concept, both an epistemological and ontological characterisation, but unlike the Buddhist one, it takes place historically and makes up the proper Marxist worldview. This is the worldview through which we can get a hold on what is unfolding in history and society and what needs to be done, and importantly, what we need to do if we’re to advance the struggle.

It is in the material conditions of the society that the prime determining factors of the human situation are located, not in some noetic abstract inner realm. The great mesh of causes and conditions, and most importantly the character of the way the society produces the necessities+, is the shaping basis for all in human experience. The life pattern of that base is the dialectic of historical materialism.

Those dynamic processes, innate and directing of the flow of nature are immanent in us and pattern  our human mental faculties which serve as the inventory for both our experience of the world (and ourselves) and our ways of engaging in our activity within the world. The way nature or the universe is is reflected in the organisation of our minds which have arisen from and in nature. If nature changes according to the dialectical principle, then so too should the best philosophy be one which recognises this dynamic flux where all things are intimately related and change through mutual interactions. In fact, the reality that is the cosmos is both other than a vast and dynamic web of interdependency and all things, each and every thing, arises from the web of causes and conditions, having no independent substance which would make it independent of all else.  Marxism recognises this fundamental characteristic of the world as a dynamic totality of dependent origination and mutual development of things, including humans.

From the Purity Fetish, as proposed by Carlos Garrido, I learned that Purity fetishism is a particular vice in western thought which, when manifest in socialist discourse and attitude, appears as an intense literalism and intolerance, often combined with heavy emphases on radical and contrarian posturing both reactionary and liberal.

These purisms are especially directed towards existing socialist states such as Cuba and China, in line with Washington imperialist policy, but also causing vicious fracturing and impotence within any nascent leftist resurgence. And here, though my absence from being on twitter has saved me from a lot of it, nevertheless I see instances of exactly what Carlos has identified as the purity fetish all the time on other social media platforms; radical posturing and sloganeering, mostly directed at already existing socialist states and mostly from those whose radical (at least in rhetoric) stances can only render them as appearing bizarre if not ridiculous to ordinary people.
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This can be seen to be occurring also in the ‘mirror of wokeness’ left, a largely stylistic and aesthetic variant of the more traditional, academic radical-recuperater safety-valve that the ruling class can rely on to misdirect energy and potential. This new form manifests as the plastic contrarianism and enthusiastic embrace of culture-war issues from a purportedly conservative side, doing little more than aping the worst excesses of the tabloid media’s decades long assault on working class consciousness and ending up, just as the ultra purist left, supporting the maintenance of the system and edifying the ruling class.

After the beginning of the reforms, an ideological trend emerged in China called “bourgeois liberalization. The phenomenon of bourgeois liberalization, to this day, exerts a pernicious influence on China’s development process and the building of a socialist culture. How does the Communist Party define this liberalization? According to Deng Xiaoping:

Since the fall of the Gang of Four an ideological trend that we call bourgeois liberalization has emerged. Its exponents idolize the “democracy” and “freedom” of Western capitalist countries and reject socialism. This cannot be tolerated. China must modernize, but she must not promote liberalization or take the capitalist path, as Western countries have done. [1]

Deng Xiaoping’s quotation clearly shows us that, from the very beginning, the problem of bourgeois liberalization has always been the object of attention by the leaders of the Communist Party of China. Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yun, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, etc., dealt with this problem several times. However, it is not wrong to say that over the years, far from being solved, it still exists and exerts considerable influence. Faced with the new political line approved after the 3rd Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the CCP held in 1978, which established a break with the previous line of “taking class struggle as the main link,” placing economic construction and socialist modernization at the center of the Party’s activity, a very active political tendency arose, which defended the idea that besides reforms in the economic sphere, it was also necessary to carry out reforms of a political nature, calling for more “democracy” and “freedom. This ideological current became quite politically active, especially from the 1980s onwards, seeking to divert the Reform and Opening from its original path and direction of perfecting the socialist system, to the path of restoring capitalism and the bourgeois-type political system, as happened in the Soviet Union.

At first, especially among intellectual circles, an anti-Mao Zedong wave swept the country, leading to an open contestation of the resolutions presented by the CCP in its historic document On Some Problems in the History of Our Party from the Founding of the PRC to the Present Day in 1981. The document, while stating that Mao Zedong made some mistakes at the end of his life, is quite clear in its recognition and exaltation of the Chinese leader’s historical role in the history of Party and Republic building. The document clearly states that Mao Zedong’s successes far outweigh his mistakes. Says the resolution:

Comrade Mao Zedong was a great Marxist and a great proletarian revolutionary, strategist and theoretician. It is true that he made serious mistakes during the “cultural revolution,” but if we judge his activities as a whole, his contributions to the Chinese revolution arguably outweigh his mistakes. His merits are of the first order and his mistakes of the second order. He rendered invaluable service in founding and building our Party and the People’s Liberation Army of China, winning victory for the cause of liberating the Chinese people, founding the People’s Republic of China, and advancing our socialist cause. He made great contributions to the liberation of the oppressed nations of the world and the progress of humanity. [2]

The advocates of bourgeois liberalization, taking advantage of the debates started all over the country on how to evaluate the first thirty years of China’s socialist construction process, used it as an excuse to put forward their anti-communist ideas. The problem of bourgeois liberalization reached alarming levels and ended up resulting in the counter-revolutionary riots of 1989, showing that even though the Party had carried out campaigns to fight the so-called “spiritual pollution”, at that time, several mistakes and failures were committed by the Party in terms of the way it conducted the work of political and ideological education of the Party cadres, and of the population in general. Such a mistake was recognized by Deng Xiaoping himself, who stated at that time, “Our most serious mistake was in education – we did not provide enough education for the youth, including the students.” [3]

The founding leaders of the People’s Republic of China have always paid great attention to the problem of ideological education. Mao Zedong, in the classic work How to Correctly Solve the Contradiction Among the People draws attention to the protracted character of the ideological struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. According to Mao Zedong:

A long period is still needed to decide the outcome of the ideological struggle waged in our country between socialism and capitalism, since the influence of the bourgeoisie and the intellectuals who come from the old society will persist in China for a long time as a class ideology. If we do not understand this situation well, or if we do not understand it fully, we run the risk of making the gravest of mistakes, that of ignoring the need to conduct the struggle on the ideological plane. [4]

The CCP has over the years developed a very consistent ideological political line to deal with the problem of bourgeois liberalization. Jiang Zemin, for example, stated, “The practice of ideological work confirms that if proletarian thought does not occupy its position, it will be occupied by non-proletarian thoughts. We must pay attention and learn from these lessons.” [5]

However, while recognizing that the Party has always called attention to the need to strengthen ideological work, one cannot fail to recognize that Xi Jinping’s coming to power represents a turning point in the Communist Party of China’s political line. Particularly important for us to understand the political and ideological content of Xi Jinping’s thinking is the analysis of his speech delivered at a conference on propaganda and ideological work on August 19, 2013. In this speech, while remaining faithful to the principles established by previous leaders (Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao), Xi Jinping advances important reflections and formulations on how to develop political and ideological work in China. Although at that time the Communist Party of China had not yet coined the term “new era of socialism,” it is clear that the ideas contained in this important document are the compass that will guide the Party in what they call the “new era of socialism,” an era that officially begins as of the holding of the 19th Congress, held in 2017. In this speech, Xi Jinping says:

Economic construction is the central work of the Party, ideological work is extremely important work of the Party. Everyone clearly understands the positions of both areas of work, but in some localities and departments, it is clear that there is the phenomenon that in words the importance of both aspects of work is recognized, but there is no clarity when it comes to applying this principle. Doing the ideological and propaganda work requires that, first of all, this problem be solved. [6]

Economic construction of the country is still the central work of the entire Party. This important definition, first put forward during the 3rd Plenary Session of the 11th Communist Party of China in 1978, starts from the understanding that China, being a still backward country (especially when compared to the developed emphasising central capitalist countries), needs to put economic construction and the promotion of the development of the productive forces at the center of its attention. As Marxist economist Zhou Xincheng recognizes, establishing economic construction as the central work is “the result of the main contradiction of society,” so it cannot be understood as a subjective decision. [7] In emphasizing that ideological work is an “extremely important work”, Xi Jinping calls attention to the need for the entire Party to have a correct understanding of this work, recognizing that in many respects it has not been correctly performed, and has even been neglected.
Wang Qishan, current Vice President of the People’s Republic of China and a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China, in an article published in the People’s Daily, emphasized that Xi Jinping has “clarified confused ideas, recovering lost positions, reversing the wrong path, establishing the authority of the Central Committee, basically reversing the situation of weakening Party leadership.” [8]

The statements made by Wang Qishan are a recognition, by a senior Party and government leader, that many things need to be corrected if the cause of socialism in China is to continue advancing along a correct path. The weakening of the Party leadership is something that is closely related to ideological and educational work. Ideological work is precisely one of the main fronts on which the Party must exercise its leadership role, making sure that the mistakes made in this area are rectified, and the cause of socialism in China continues to advance in a healthy way. Ideological work, being a “work of utmost importance,” cannot be neglected under the excuse that “developing the economy” is the central aspect of Party work. As former leader Chen Yun stated:

If we promote socialist material progress and not socialist cultural and ideological progress at the same time, we will deviate from the correct path. If institutions or leading cadres forget or slow down their efforts to build socialist civilization, culturally and ideologically, they will not be able to do a good job in building socialist civilization materially and will even turn away from socialist and communist ideals. This is very dangerous. [9]

In this sense, the events in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe are the most concrete example of what are the results produced by the underestimation of political and ideological work, as well as of a mistaken political line, in which the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, especially after the death of Josef Stalin, began to gradually distance itself from Marxism-Leninism. To illustrate with an example: American professor David Kotz, in an article where he recounts his experience in the Soviet Union, talks about an episode where he allegedly asked an official if he was a member of the Communist Party. According to Kotz, the officer replied, “Yes, I am a member of the Communist Party, but I am not a Communist. [10]

Experiences such as those reported by Professor David Kotz help us to understand what was the internal ideological environment prevailing in the PCUS and in Soviet society itself, already on the eve of its dissolution. The Soviet example should also serve as a lesson for the Chinese Communists, since this phenomenon is not uncommon in country either. Here we are facing a problem closely related to the question of political and ideological convictions that should guide the activity and action of Party members. As for this problem, the Chinese have been aware of its existence from the moment it began to manifest itself in an acute way.

Thus, the reasons that made the dissolution of the Soviet Union possible are the subject of constant reflection by the leaders of the CCP. Xi Jinping also went so far as to explicitly refer to the Soviet example to issue a warning to the CCP. According to Xi Jinping, by starting with the denial of Lenin and Stalin, the Soviet Union embarked on the path of historical nihilism, something that prepared the ideological ground for the justification of the “peaceful evolution” from socialism to capitalism. According to Xi Jinping:

Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party fall from power? One important reason was that the struggle in the field of ideology was extremely intense, completely denying the history of the Soviet Union, denying the history of the Soviet Communist Party, denying Lenin, denying Stalin, creating historical nihilism and muddled thinking. Party organs at all levels had lost their functions, the military was no longer under Party leadership. In the end, the Soviet Communist Party, a great party, dispersed, the Soviet Union, a great socialist country, disintegrated. [11]
It was on the ideological terrain and the lack of vigilance in the face of forces hostile to socialism that the Soviet Union was defeated. Mao Zedong, many years earlier, analyzing the importance of ideology in the process of seizing political power, whether from revolutionary or reactionary classes, stated: “Anyone who wants to overthrow a political regime must first create public opinion and do some ideological preparatory work. This goes for the counter-revolutionary classes as well as the revolutionary classes.” [12]

As soon as this problem appeared before the socialist camp and the Communist Parties, the Communist Party of China was in the front line of its denunciation, going on to develop a constant ideological struggle against the revisionist ideas which were propagated by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, ideas which in practice contributed to the strategy being put forward by US imperialism. However, especially after the beginning of the Reform and Opening, at various levels the Party let down its guard in the face of the danger of peaceful evolution, which gave free course to the strengthening of imperialist cultural influence and the propagation of bourgeois liberalization. The anti-communist protests, which peaked in 1989 in the events in Tiananmen Square, prove such a thesis. Deng Xiaoping himself, commenting on the end of the Cold War and the general crisis of the socialist camp, recognized that:

It seems that one Cold War has come to an end, but that two others have already begun: one is being waged against all the countries of the South and the Third World, and the other against socialism. The Western countries are staging a third world war without firearms. By this I mean that they want to promote the peaceful evolution of socialist countries to capitalism. [14]

The beginning of the trade war against China, the fierce campaign promoted by imperialism on the issue of Xinjiang and the attempt to politicize and blame China for the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, are nothing more than aspects of this ideological struggle promoted by US imperialism against Chinese socialism. To face this new challenge, it is essential that the Party and society strengthen ideological work and strengthen their understanding of Marxist theory. The question of ideological work and education, far from being something trivial, is a vital issue for the continuity and permanence of the Communist Party of China as the leading force of the Chinese nation and the cause of building socialism in China. The fact that such a problem has been recognized by the highest leaders as something pressing reveals how serious the ideological situation was in the country before Xi Jinping came to power.

One of the main evidences of this problem in the ideological realm is the marginalization suffered by Marxism in recent years. Xi Jinping has been paying close attention to this problem, aiming to restore and consolidate the authority and leading role occupied by Marxism as the theoretical basis guiding socialist construction and modernization in China. To warn about the problem of marginalization of Marxism, far from being an exaggeration, is something quite clear to anyone minimally familiar with the internal situation of the country and with the prevailing ideological environment within Chinese society. The Marxist economist Liu Guoguang, in analyzing the ideological situation in theoretical circles – especially in the field of political economy – in China stated:

For some time, in the field of economic science research and teaching, the influence of western economics has increased and the guiding position of economic science of Marxism has been weakened and marginalized. In the field of economic theory research and teaching, it seems that nowadays Western economics has become the dominant trend; many students consciously or unconsciously take Western economics as the dominant economic trend in our country. Some people consider Western political economy to be the guiding thought for development and reform in China, some economists openly advocate that Western political economy should be seen as the dominant trend, replacing the guiding position of Marxist economics. Western bourgeois ideology permeates both economic research work and the work of formulating economic decisions. I am very concerned about this phenomenon. [15]

It is not only in the realm of the study and teaching of economics that Marxism undergoes a process of marginalization. Also in the fields of history, philosophy, arts, etc., Marxism has been marginalized to various degrees. The Party uses the term “historical nihilism” to describe all sorts of ideas that seek to explain Chinese history, especially the history of the CCP and the construction of socialism, in a distorted way. In the ideological realm, the main target of “historical nihilism” is precisely Marxism, the official state ideology that should theoretically guide and direct all activities and sectors of the country. Historian Gong Yun, a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Scientists, explaining the influence of historical nihilism in today’s China, said:

In the last two decades, although historical nihilism has been criticized in academic circles, the effect of these criticisms has not yet been obvious. The views advocated by historical nihilism have a wide social influence, especially in the new media, some newspapers, and among ordinary people. Historical nihilism has formed a certain social soil and created serious consequences of division and antagonism. [16]

Since the 18th CCP Congress, several internal ideological campaigns to combat historical nihilism have been carried out, and Xi Jinping himself even analyzed such a phenomenon in one of his speeches. At the February 20, 2021, in a Party history study conference, Xi Jinping said, “We must take a clear stand against historical nihilism, strengthen ideological orientation and theoretical analysis, clarifying the vague and one-sided understandings regarding some historical events in our Party’s history.” [17]

It is precisely because the situation has reached such a critical level that Xi Jinping pays close attention to the problem of the need to consolidate the leading position of Marxism in the ideological field. It is also for this reason that in recent years there have been repeated calls for Party cadres to raise their ideological-political level and deepen their study and knowledge of the classics of Marxism. Speaking specifically about the marginalization of Marxism, Xi Jinping said that:

Some people consider Marxism outdated, that China currently does not follow Marxism; some people consider Marxism to be just ideological “preaching” without rationality and scientific systematization. In practical work, in some fields Marxism has been marginalized, turned into something empty, symbolic. [18]

The strengthening of the guiding role of Marxism is fundamental to ensuring that the Party cadres have a correct view of the trends of social development, understand the fundamental differences between capitalism and socialism, and increase their political, ideological and cultural confidence in the political system of socialism with Chinese characteristics. Only by mastering Marxism can one correctly understand the real goals of the Reform and Opening up policy, and ensure that it continues to move in the right direction. This is the reason why Xi Jinping insists on the need to consolidate the position of Marxism as the guiding ideology of the Reform and Opening up process, as well as of all the political work undertaken by the Communist Party of China. As Xi Jinping stated:

At the present time, the environment, target, scope and methods of ideological propaganda are undergoing great changes, but the main task of ideological and propaganda work has not and cannot change. Ideological and propaganda work must consolidate the guiding position of Marxism in the ideological sphere and consolidate a common ideological basis for the united struggle of the entire Party and people. [19]
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Consolidating the guiding role of Marxism, making it increasingly a real material force guiding the process of building socialism in China, is a mandatory condition for the Party to strengthen its leadership and governance capacity, as well as to continue achieving new successes in the process of building socialism with Chinese characteristics.

As we stated at the beginning of the article, the restructuring of the property system in China has given rise to capitalist-type relations of production, so they produce a certain type of ideology that corresponds to the character of these relations. Economist Wu Xuangong defends the idea that currently “there are a large number of economic phenomena and problems in China that did not exist in the past and are contrary to the nature and principles of socialism. Such problems stem from the fact that in present-day China, in addition to the “main contradiction of socialist society, there is also the main contradiction of capitalism.” [20]

It is therefore correct for us to analyze what role the ideology produced by these new capitalist relations of production play in the general set of socialism with Chinese characteristics, and how the Party will deal with this contradiction in the medium and long term. The recognition of the contradictions and problems that have appeared in the country in the last 40 years – and their effects in the realm of ideology – reveals a great concern on the part of Chinese Marxist theorists to seek and find the appropriate explanations to correctly solve the problem. To do so, one must keep in mind the basic principle of Marxism that existence determines consciousness, or the economic base determines the superstructure; therefore, it would not be correct to consider that the increased dangers presented by bourgeois liberalization are works of chance, or that they arise magically. They manifest themselves ultimately as ideological representations of new petty-bourgeois and bourgeois social classes that are bound by multiple ties to capitalist private property, and are also the product of the increased ideological infiltration promoted by Western countries, especially the United States and all its ideological apparatus of political and cultural domination, to the extent that there has been a certain loosening of ideological and class education, as well as an advance in the penetration of foreign capital in the country. As Wu Xuangong stated, “The belief in socialism gradually weakened, so that Marxism was marginalized; the emphasis on self-interest, as well as the pursuit of material interests, became a trend.” [21]

In the 1990s, Deng Xiaoping and many Party cadres considered the idea of explaining the problem of bourgeois liberalization through the analysis of economic relations to be mistaken, because they saw it as an attempt to put a brake on the advance of reforms. Under those conditions it was not wrong to put the problem in those terms. However, today this problem presents itself in a completely different way than it did in the 1980s and 1990s. At that time a new bourgeoisie had not completely formed, and the problem of class struggle manifested itself basically only as a struggle against the remnants of backward ideologies and elements directly linked to imperialism working to sabotage socialist construction. Today capitalist private property has acquired an infinitely more important position and role than it did in the past, which has resulted in a significant change in the economic and ownership structure in China. This has fundamentally changed the way in which the Chinese working masses relate to the means of production, a fact that poses serious risks to the Party and the very cause of socialism in the country. Without taking into account the influence that the relations of production originating in capitalist private property and the pressure they exert for the reforms as a whole to take the direction of bourgeois liberalization, it is impossible to understand the essence of the problem. This is a question that needs to be observed by all those who wish to make a realistic analysis of the current stage of development of socialism in China. As the economist Liu Guoguang warned:

Bourgeois liberalization occurs not only in the political field, but also in the economic field. Privatization, liberalization, and marketization; opposition to public ownership, government intervention, and opposition to socialism, these are all things that are all related to the economic field. It is not enough to oppose bourgeois liberalization, politically. To prevent bourgeois liberalization in the economic field is to prevent the economic field from deteriorating. If the economic field deteriorates (is privatized, turned into capitalism), the political field will also deteriorate. This is a basic common principle of Marxism. [22]

Capitalist private property, even though in the primary stage of socialism it may play a positive role as an accessory element in the development of the socialist economy, ultimately represents the relations of production of a capitalist type, possessing objectives and laws of operation distinct from socialist property in its most varied forms. It is necessary, therefore, to differentiate between what are the positive effects that capitalist private property can create for the development of the productive forces, from what is the ideology it inevitably produces, and the negative effects generated by capitalist relations of production in the most varied domains of social life. It is natural that, as private property increases in importance and influence in the overall economy, its laws start to influence the various levels of Chinese social-economic formation (including influencing and exerting pressure on socialist public property), broadening and expanding its capacity for political, economic and ideological intervention. Therefore, it is not an exaggeration to say that the most serious economic and social problems that exist in China today are the direct result of the intervention of the contradictions produced by the capitalist relations of production.

In view of this inevitability, it is of utmost importance that the Party be very clear that the goal of the Reform and Opening-Up is to perfect the development of the socialist system, to promote the development of the productive forces and gradually consolidate and broaden the influence and extension of the public sector of the economy, the sector that represents the socialist relations of production. The existence of private property in China is justified by the relative backwardness of the level of development of the productive forces. With the advance and development of the productive forces, with the advance of modernization, the duty of the reforms is to adjust the role of the socialist relations of production, in a first moment expanding the influence and the scope of action of the public ownership of the means of production, gradually putting an end to the tendency that has persisted since the beginning of the Reform and Opening policy, namely, the tendency of much faster increase and development of private property and the gradual decrease of the participation of the state and public sector, creating the economic and material conditions to overcome the primary stage of socialism. Obviously, such changes and adjustments will be accompanied by a sharp ideological struggle, which is also one of the forms in which class struggle manifests itself.  Thus, the theories and ideas that seek to present capitalist relations of production as “socialist,” or ideas that say that, in the Chinese case, “private property is not synonymous with capitalism,” are not correct.

The advance towards a more advanced stage of socialist construction is not yet completely on the agenda (the new era of socialism is situated in the scope of the primary stage of socialism), but it is clear that the problems and contradictions that China is facing today are already quite different from the problems that confronted the country in the preceding decades, something recognized by the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of China, which defined that there is a “new principal contradiction” in the new era of socialism. The old definition, which said that the main contradiction in China was the contradiction between the low level of development of the productive forces and the growing demands of the masses, has given way to a new main contradiction, this being the contradiction between unbalanced and inadequate development and the growing needs of the people for a better life.

Many Marxist intellectuals in China consider that, at the present stage, in order to overcome the negative effects of unbalanced development, the most important mission facing the Communist Party is to struggle to effectively build a harmonious society, to combat the negative effects produced by the expansion of private property, and to regain certain positions lost by the public economy in recent years. For such a major operation, it is more than necessary to strengthen ideological work and prepare public opinion. Objectively, this is a problem that places in opposition two projects of society that correspond to distinct worldviews and class interests. The attacks on Marxism and the tendencies that seek to diminish its role – or even deny it – are evidently expressions of the class interests of those social groups and actors who do not want to advance along the path of socialism. Many of these groups use the banner of reform and openness to justify their reactionary ideas and their opposition to the system of socialism with Chinese characteristics, although they often do this in a veiled way.

The struggle between bourgeois ideas, with all their effects, and the ideas of the proletariat, represented by Marxism, is a long-lasting struggle, which will exist intensely throughout the period of the primary stage of socialism in China (and even afterwards), a context where China still needs to promote its development in a hegemonically capitalist world. In the primary stage of socialism, even if within a determined scale, class struggle still exists and it obviously exerts its influence in the ideological field. On the need to keep guard and initiative on the ideological front, pointing out that in socialism there is still class struggle, Jiang Zemin, in his speech commemorating the 78th anniversary of the Party’s founding, stated:

Class struggle is no longer the main contradiction in our country, but for a certain period it will continue to exist within a certain limit, moreover under certain conditions it may intensify. This kind of struggle expresses in a concentrated way the opposition of bourgeois liberalization to the four fundamental principles. The core of this struggle is still a problem of political power. This type of struggle is closely connected with the struggle between infiltration and anti-infiltration, subversion and counter-subversion, peaceful evolution and fighting the peaceful evolution that exists between us and hostile forces. [23]

The Communist Party of China’s position on class struggle under socialism has always been very consistent and has not changed much since the beginning of the Reform and Opening-up policy. After criticizing the conception of class struggle that was in force during the period of the “cultural revolution”, the Party started to defend that the class struggle in socialism does not occupy the position of main contradiction, but that it still continues to exist within certain limits. However, some figures, already completely influenced by revisionism and imperialist ideas, allege that the Marxist concept of class struggle is “outdated” and when any mention is made of this basic concept of Marxism, they immediately claim that there is a danger of the resurgence of a new “cultural revolution”. It is important to point out that there is a significant difference between saying that the “class struggle continues to exist within certain limits” and saying that “the class struggle does not exist” or that such a theory would be something “outdated”. As Xi Jinping stated:

We must adhere to the political position of Marxism. The political position of Marxism is primarily a class position, which implements class analysis. Some people say that this idea no longer corresponds to the present era, which is a mistaken point of view. When we say that the class struggle in our country is not the main contradiction, we are not saying that in our country the class struggle within certain limits no longer exists, or that in the international sphere it doesn’t exist either. After the Reform and Opening, our Party’s ideas on this problem have always been quite clear. [24]

The definition, which recognizes that class struggle exists within certain limits, takes into account the concrete reality of China today, a reality where the various contradictions that exist can be resolved within the framework of the socialist system. The Communist Party of China, being the leading force of the state, has in its hands the political, economic and institutional instruments that enable it to adjust, modify and apply policies that help solve the problems and contradictions that exist between the various social classes, including the contradictions between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. This does not mean that, also in this sphere of work, there are no errors and shortcomings, almost always produced by errors in the sphere of political and ideological work. Without a firm Marxist vision the Party cannot correctly exercise its role as the vanguard of the working masses in China, nor can it firmly defend the interests of these classes.

The fundamental error of the Communist Party of China view’s of class struggle in the period of the “cultural revolution” was precisely that it broadened the scope of class struggle, which in practice contributed to the Party’s treating certain contradictions that existed within the people as if they were antagonistic contradictions. It was a view that did not correspond to the concrete situation of the Chinese society at the time; today the main mistake regarding the theory of class struggle is committed by those who deny its objective existence. The historical experience of the history of the construction of socialism at a world level teaches that class struggle continues to exist in socialism – even though it is not the main contradiction in socialist societies -, therefore, it is not correct to deny or underestimate its action.
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To deny the existence of class struggle in socialism is as serious an error as trying to artificially broaden its scope. The errors of the “cultural revolution” do not alter the fact that class struggle is an objective reality, and that it continues to exist in the primary stage of socialism. In the Chinese case, given the expansion of capitalist relations of production, it is obvious that class contradictions, including the contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, can intensify again. Without recognizing the existence of class struggle, it is impossible to adopt measures to resolve the various social contradictions that exist in Chinese society, which in the medium and long term would result in the amplification of social contradictions, causing contradictions that are currently non-antagonistic in character to quickly become antagonistic contradictions.

The success achieved by the CCP in leading the Chinese nation along the path of socialism has shown the world the vitality and scientificity of Marxist theory. In view of the undeniable successes achieved by the Party, given the intense political and ideological struggle going on, it is to some extent inevitable that abroad certain figures who follow the Chinese development process try to explain it by turning a blind eye to the most important and essential elements that define such process. Quite popular are the ideas that China’s development would be the result produced by a “developmentalist” state in the style of Taiwan, Singapore, or South Korea, or a “civilizational state,” emphasizing here the “civilizational superiority” of the Chinese nation. To give an example of the confusions, Martin Jacques, an author who plays a very important role in investigating the Chinese development process, and openly opposes attempts to launch a new cold war against the Asian country, in an article published by the Global Times, stressed that “it is impossible to understand China in terms of traditional Marxism,” adding that the CCP is “deeply influenced by Confucianism” and that the best way to understand it would be to describe it as a “hybrid between Confucianism and Marxism. Also in the article the author makes a point of highlighting the fact that the CCP is quite different from the former Communist Party of the Soviet Union and that they would have “very little in common.” [25]

We recognize that in all these statements – with the exception that the Communist Party of China and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union have very little in common” – there is a portion of truth, however, we believe it is not unreasonable to say that the author does not address the crux of the problem, which is precisely to analyze how the sinicization of Marxism is the main element that explains the success and rise of China, and that the ideological system of socialism with Chinese characteristics is not an eclectic mix between two philosophies with completely different bases and goals (Marxism and Confucianism). Confucianism, of course, is an important pillar of the millennial traditional Chinese culture, and obviously the Communist Party of China recognizes and incorporates its progressive elements. However, it cannot be denied that throughout its century-old history, the Chinese progressive and revolutionary movement, of which the Communist Party of China is a direct product, has always been very critical of Confucianism, and all this long before the “great proletarian cultural revolution” emerged on the scene of history in the late 1960s. Martin Jacques’ statement that the Communist Party of China is “rooted and deeply influenced by Confucianism” is a “half-truth” turned into an “absolute truth,” for it denies another basic fact that needs to be taken into consideration, namely, that the Communist Party of China was born amidst an intense ideological and political struggle against Confucian ideology and all that it represented and still represents in the developmental history of the Chinese nation. That there are Chinese authors and personalities – including within the Party – who advocate a “new Confucianism,” or who try to explain Chinese success within the framework of “Confucianism,” is another problem, very much related to the ideological confusion generated by years of a relatively uncontrolled development of bourgeois ideas, something we have already discussed in this article.

In fact, the problem of the relationship between traditional Chinese culture and Marxism in China is a topic that deserves a separate article, such is the complexity of the subject. However, this is not to say that for the Communist Party of China, Confucianism and Marxism are two philosophies on the same footing, or, in Martin Jacques’ own words, a “hybrid between Confucianism and Marxism. As Hou Weimin, a member of the Institute of Marxism of the Chinese Academy of Social Scientists, put it:

Since the Reformation and the Opening-up, there have been two types of anti-Marxist thinking. One is the ideological tendency to promote the restoration of feudalism; cultural conservatism and neo-Confucianism belong to this category. This trend of thought is characterized by advocating the “Confucianization of China “and “Confucianization of the Communist Party” under the banner of carrying forward traditional culture by establishing “Confucian colleges” in which Confucian scholars familiar with Confucian classics rule China. Supported by some people abroad, this thinking prevailed for some time. However, its absurdity is obvious if a more proper investigation is made. Its main points have the smell of feudal zombies, so it is hard for it to get a response from the masses. The other thought is the tendency to promote the restoration of capitalism, called bourgeois liberalization by Deng Xiaoping. [26]

About the “few similarities” between the Communist Party of China and the former Communist Party of Soviet Union, it is evident how the way Martin Jacques throws such information into his article misleads the reader into confusion. Which Communist Party of the Soviet Union is he referring to? The Party of Lenin and Stalin or the Party of Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev? Superficial statements such as those made by the author open much room for confusion and misinterpretation regarding the history of the Communist Party of China and its evolution over the years. It is necessary to point out that between the Communist Party of China and the former Communist Party of the Soviet Union there is the difference that the former was able to integrate Marxism to the Chinese reality, avoiding committing the same mistakes that the Soviet Party committed in the past, due to its complete abandonment of Marxist theory; the latter, on the other hand, gradually distanced itself from Marxism and capitulated before the ideological offensive promoted by the capitalist countries. However, it is undeniable that the Communist Party of China learned many things from the Soviet experience, so that it is correct to state that there were “great similarities” between both parties, and that the Soviet experience was, from the beginning, a source of inspiration and study for the Chinese communists. As Zhou Xincheng noted:

Initially, we had no experience in how to build socialism. We could only learn from the Soviet Union, which had decades of experience in socialist construction. The basic experience of socialist construction in the Soviet Union was to be studied, including its political adherence to the Communist Party leadership and the dictatorship of the proletariat; economic adherence to the system of public ownership of the means of material production, distribution according to labor, elimination of exploitation and elimination of polarization; ideological adherence to Marxism as a guide, etc. This reflects the basic principles of scientific socialism, its common law, possessing universal value. Therefore, we have always regarded our socialist cause as a continuation of the October Revolution. [27]
Even today many elements in the Chinese political system bear great similarities to the model that was gradually established in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The political model that establishes the Communist Party’s direction over the activities of the state and society – a system that today even some bourgeois theorists sympathetic to China tend to defend – is a direct influence of the Soviet-type political system, even if between them there are some differences (e.g. in the Chinese case there is at the same time a system of political consultation that allows the existence of other parties). Although perhaps this is not his intention, in practice Martin Jacques ends up establishing an opposition between two historical phenomena umbilically connected -the Russian and Chinese revolution- diminishing the position of Marxism-Leninism and concealing the direct link that the process of building socialism with Chinese characteristics has with the struggle of the international proletariat and also with the Russian revolution itself, in the name of the idea that the Communist Party of China “is different from all the other parties in the world.

Still on the relationship between socialism with Chinese characteristics and Soviet socialism, it is interesting to note that Xi Jinping, when analyzing the various stages of the development of the history of socialist thought and movement, divides it into six stages, citing precisely Lenin’s experience and his leadership in the October Revolution as an integral part of these stages, as well as the gradual formation of the Soviet system already in the Stalin period (respectively, the third and fourth stage of the development of the history of socialism). In other words, Xi Jinping highlights as an integral part of the development of socialist thought – in which, obviously, socialism with Chinese characteristics is included – the experience of the construction of socialism in Russia, from the victory of the October Revolution to the formation of the Soviet system with the foundation and construction of socialism in the Soviet Union, an experience led by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

[1] Deng Xiaoping 邓小平. “Gao zichan jieji ziyou hua jiushi zou ziben zhuyi daolu 搞资产阶级自由化就是走资本主义道路 [To engage in bourgeois liberalization is to take the path of capitalism],” Dengxiaoping wenxuan, v.3, Renmin chuban she 人民出版社，2008, pg.123.

[2] Communist Party of China. Resolution on Certain Historical Issues in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China – Adopted by the Sixth Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, 1981. Accessed at: https://www.marxists.org/portugues/tematica/1981/06/27.html

[3] Deng Xiaoping 邓小平. “Women youxinxin ba zhongguo de shijian hao chengji 我们有信心把中国的事情做得更好 [We are confident that we can handle China’s affairs well],” Dengxiaoping wenxuan, Renmin chubanshe 人民出版社，2008，pg.327

[4] Mao Tsetung. On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People: Selected Readings from the Works of Mao Tsetung, Foreign Language Press, 1971, pg.

[5] Jiang Zemin 江泽民. “Zai jinian zhongguo gongchandang chengli qishiba zhounian zuotan hui shang de jianghua 在纪念中国共产党成立七十八周年座谈会上的讲话 [Speech commemorating the 78th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China],” 1997. Accessed at: http://www.peopledaily.com.cn/item/ldhd/Jiangzm/1999/jianghua/jh0007.html

[6] Xi Jinping 习近平. “Ba xuanchuan sixiang gongzuo zuo de geng hao 把宣传思想工作做得更好 [Do ideological and propaganda work better].” Lun jianchi dang yiqie gongzuo de lingdao 论坚持党一切工作的领导, Zhongyang wenxian chuban she 中央文献出版社, 2019, pg. 23.

[7] Zhou Xincheng 周新城. “Guandu zhongguo thesis shehui zhuyi de ruogan lilun wenti 关于中国特色社会主义的若干理论问题 [On some theoretical problems of socialism with Chinese characteristics],” Jingji ribao chubanshe 经济日报出版社，2015, pg. 357.

[8] Wang Qishan 王崎上. “Kaiqi xin shidai, ta shang xin zhengcheng 开启新时代，踏上新征程 [Starting a new era and embarking on a new journey],” Renmin Ribao 人民日报， 2017, November 7, 2017. Acessado em: http://www.xinhuanet.com//2017-11/07/c_1121915946.htm

[9] Chen Yun 陈云. “Bixu jiuzheng hushi jingshen wenming jianshe de xianxiang 必须纠正忽视精神文明建设的现象 [We should correct the tendency to neglect the establishment of spiritual civilization],” Chenyun Wenxuan 陈云文选, v.3, Renmin chubanshe, 2015, pg. 354.

[10] David M. Kotz 大卫-科茨. “Sulian jieti yuanyin shi jingying jituan zhuzhang ziben zhuyi 苏联解体原因是精英集团主张资本主义 [The reason for the collapse of the Soviet Union was that elitist groups advocated capitalism].” Zhongguo jingji wang 中国经济网, 2013. Accessed at: http://www.wyzxwk.com/Article/lishi/2013/09/306710.html

[11] Xi Jinping 习近平. “Guanyu jianchi he fazhan zhongguo thesis shehui zhuyi de ji ge wenti 关于坚持和发展中国特色社会主义的几个问题 [Some questions on maintaining and developing socialism with Chinese characteristics],” Qiushi 求实, n.7, 2009. Accessed at: http://www.qstheory.cn/dukan/qs/2019-03/31/c_1124302776.htm

[12] Mao Zedong. Speech At The Tenth Plenum Of The Eighth Central Committee, 1962. Accessed at: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-8/mswv8_63.htm

[13] Liang Zhu 梁柱. “Mozedong fanfa sixiang yong bu tuishai 毛泽东反腐思想永不褪色 [Mao Zedong’s thoughts on corruption will never dissipate],” Zhongguo shehui kexue bao 中国社会科学报, 2014. Acessado em: http://dangshi.people.com.cn/n/2014/0116/c85037-24142270.html

[14] Deng Xiaoping 邓小平. “Jianchi shehui zhuyi, fangzhi heping yanbian 坚持社会主义，防止和平演变 [Adhering to socialism and preventing peaceful evolution],” Dengxiaoping wenxuan 邓小平文选, v.3, Renmin chubanshe 人民出版社, 2008, pg. 344.

[15] Liu Guoguang 刘国光. “Zhongguo shehuizhuyi zhengzhi jingjixue de ruogan wenti 中国社会主义政治经济学的若干问题 [Some problems of the political economy of socialism with Chinese characteristics],” Jinan chubanshe 济南出版社, 2017, pg. 33.

[16] Gong Yun 龚云. “Zai lishi xuwu zhuyi zhong jianchi lishi weiwu zhuyi 在历史虚无主义中坚持历史唯物主义 [Criticizing historical nihilism by persisting in historical materialism].” Accessed at: http://www.wyzxwk.com/Article/yulun/2016/07/367869.html

[17] Xi Jinping 习近平. “Zai dang shu xuexi jiaoyu dongyuan dahui shang de jianghua 在党史学习教育动员大会上的讲话 [Speech at the mobilization and study conference on Party history],” 2021. Acessado em: https://www.ccps.gov.cn/xtt/202103/t20210331_148208.shtml

[18] Xi Jinping 习近平. “Zai zhexue shehui kexue gongzuo zuotan zhong de sikao 在哲学社会科学工作座谈会上的讲话 [Speech at the philosophy and social science workers seminar],” 2016. Acessado em: http://www.xinhuanet.com/politics/2016-05/18/c_1118891128_2.htm

[19] Xi Jinping 习近平. “Ba xuanchuan sixiang gongzuo zuo de geng hao 把宣传思想工作做得更好 [Do ideological and propaganda work better].” Lun jianchi dang yiqie gongzuo de lingdao 论坚持党一切工作的领导, Zhongyang wenxian chuban she 中央文献出版社, 2019, pg. 23.

[20] Wu Xuangong 吴宣恭. “Yunyong lishi weiwuzhuyi jianshe zhongguo thesis shehui zhuyi zhengzhi jingji xue 运用历史唯物主义建设中国特色社会主义政治经济学 [Use historical materialism to build the political economy of socialism with Chinese characteristics].” Fujian shifan daxue xuebao (zhexue shehui kexue ban) 福建师范大学学报 ( 哲学社会科学版), 2017.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Liu Guoguang 刘国光. “Zhongguo shehuizhuyi zhengzhi jingjixue de ruogan wenti 中国社会主义政治经济学的若干问题 [Some problems of the political economy of socialism with Chinese characteristics],” Jinan chubanshe 济南出版社, 2017, pg. 33.

[23] Jiang Zemin 江泽民. “Jiāngzémín zài qìngzhù jiàndǎng qishi zhōunián dàhuì shàng de jiǎnghuà 江泽民在庆祝建党70周年大会上的讲话 [Speech at the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the founding of the party],” 1991. Accessed at: http://www.qunzh.com/pub/jsqzw/xxzt/jd95zn/zyls/201606/t20160601_20990.html

[24] Speech by Xi Jinping at the School of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. February 17, 2014. Quoted in Zhou Xincheng 周新城，”Jianchi jiqiao jiben yuanli fenxi shehui wenti坚持运用马克思主义基本原理分析社会经济问题 [Adhere in using the principles of Marxism in investigating economic and social problems].” Jingji ribao chuban she 经济日报出版社, 2016, pg. 228 .

[25] Martin Jacques. Why there has been an overwhelming failure to understand CPC in West, Global Times, April 6, 2021. Accessed at: https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202104/1220314.shtml

[26] Hou Weimin 侯为民. “Pipan yu chuangxin- Zhou xincheng jiaoshou jingji sixiang sumiao 批判与创新–周新城教授经济思想素描 [Critique and Innovation: an outline of Professor Zhou Xincheng’s economic thought]”，Guanli xue kan 管理学刊, 2014.
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 [27] Zhou Xincheng 周新城. “Jianguo qishi nian shi qingzhu shehui zhuyi lishi fazhan, jinian zhonghua renmin gongheguo chengli qishi zhounián 建国70年是庆祝社会主义历史发展, 纪念中华人民共和国成立70周年. Accessed at: http://www.kunlunce.com/llyj/fl1/2019-05-17/133451.html

Returning to the text in 2022, its unique take on some old Marxist questions as well as some weaknesses were more apparent. While some of the arguments working in the background to the book are of their time, in particular, the desire to offer a necessary Marxist antidote to the New Social Movement debates of the 1980s/1990s, many of Lebowitz’s arguments continue to press upon critical points in Marxist theory and have since been taken further by social reproduction theorists and others. Beyond Capital, first published in 1992 and then significantly revised in 2004, still offers a refreshing and critical intervention into why capitalism persists despite ongoing crises, and what is revealed when the working class is approached as subject instead of merely the object of capital reproduction and crisis. Underpinning these arguments is the age-old question of how to reconcile subjectivity and revolutionary consciousness with the abstract forces of capitalist reproduction.

Lebowitz bases his argument on the premise that Marx’s Capital was an unfinished project. What is missing, he suggests, is the book on wage labour where Marx would have competed the totality of capitalist reproduction by offering the standpoint of wage labour, through which class subjectivity could be analysed. Yet without this book we are stuck with a one-sided Marxism where only capital is subject. Within this missing book we might find the theoretical foundations to explore how the economic and political are integral to one another, as well as how the intertwined processes of domination, expropriation, and exploitation operate through the living complex human being behind the abstract notion of labour power. Ultimately, Lebowitz is trying to guard against the argument that what drives capital is capital where struggle is an after effect. Although the way he develops his argument, in particular the need to find a perfect mirror or other to existing one-sided categories, can feel forced at times, and certain discussions for example on value and competition remain undeveloped, these are barriers that can (and have) been overcome by others, rather than limitations of the argument itself. Drawing out from the specifics, the overall purpose of Beyond Capital as a treatise against capitalo-centricism, and the steps he takes to get there continue to open up debates in necessary ways.

Exploring the missing book on wage labour, Lebowitz begins with the question of needs, and demonstrates that working class needs, or socially necessary labour time, is socially and historically contingent. This flexibility is what distinguishes us from other animals, in that needs shift according to what is available. As a commodity, labour power is unique in that the price of labour power (our wage) can determine our value. Yet, within capitalism, the only way that workers can satisfy their needs is through wage labour and consumption through the market. Although this is a relatively straightforward argument, it is also the foundation for one of the red threads throughout the book: that there is an integral but contradictory relation between these categories within the totality of capitalism. In simple terms, the worker is both labour power and consumer, and although necessary needs are the result of class struggle, ‘each new need becomes a new link in the golden chain that secures workers to capital’, citing Lebowitz. As such, within capitalism, the capacity for workers to realise their needs relies upon capital as mediator, which is where capital’s power comes from.
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Touching on, without fully entering, labour theory of value debates, what is suggested at here is an argument similar to Harry Cleaver on the value of labour for capital. When Lebowitz asks ‘Why, for example, does capital require a definite quantity of labour if the technical composition of capital is rising?’ his answer can be found in the way that new needs are produced and the reproduction of wage labour. For as long as capital remains mediator, what is reproduced – the value of labour for capital – is a relation of dependence. Rather than labour having a value as a definite input to production, the value of labour for capital is the power relation that is reproduced, and conversely according to Lebowitz:

Thinking in more concrete terms, when wages decrease the quality of labour power may decrease, or when productivity rises the amount of labour needed to produce each product may decrease, but critically the wage relation is still reproduced. Again, gingerly opening a door to fierce feminist debates on unproductive/productive labour, without delving deep into their claims, Lebowitz concludes that ‘What we are presented with is productive labour for capital, labour which serves the need and goal of capital – valorisation,’ where this is made possible because of the reproduction of this relation of dependence.

To re-centre class struggle as a key dynamic rather than after-effect of capitalist reproduction, Lebowitz approaches needs from multiple standpoints, and by doing so demonstrates how needs for labour and needs for capital from these different standpoints are incommensurate. This is reflected in his concept of a political economy of wage labour as the “other” to the political economy of capital. While framed as the counter to capital and reflecting the above tensions, the political economy of wage labour remains within the totality of capitalism. It is not equal in power—even if his graphics seem to suggest some equality – a constant annoyance in the reading group!—and serves a necessary function in the reproduction of the system as whole. What this concept allows us to do is approach the multiple circuits of production and reproduction from different standpoints (here touching on although not referencing feminist standpoint theory as much as Lukács’ approach to proletarian praxis), which centres rather than sidelines working class experience, logics, and needs. As such, unlike some autonomists or feminist interventions, Lebowitz makes a convincing argument that these other circuits are not autonomous from capital but rather operate within the totality and remain mediated by the demands of valorisation.
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However, this mediation does not mean that the political economy of wage labour is the same as the political economy of capital. The political economy of wage labour although essential to the reproduction of capitalism as a whole also exceeds it. Put differently, human experience is more than that which is visible on the terms of capital: concrete labour is not commensurate with abstract labour and it is this “extra” or messiness that Lebowitz, alongside many social reproduction theorists, are interested in. The worker is both wage labourer and non-wage labourer and this occurs through the same labouring body. There is—to borrow David McNally’s terms—a unity in difference within the totality, a totality understood here as a methodological premise that points to the way that the economic mediates and colours these other integral parts of the totality in complex and contradictory ways.

​In looking at the complex and dual role that schools, hospitals, or water services play as sites of social reproduction, workplaces, but also necessary conditions for the reproduction of capitalism as a whole, we can begin to untangle the strategic complexities of class struggle and demands, but also return to Lebowitz’s driving questions – why does capitalism persist? And why is the working class not revolting?
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As such, the crisis theory that is put forward is layered, dynamic, and can only be understood fully by approaching crisis from these different standpoints. Making a distinction between limits and barriers where limits tend to be turned into barriers that can be overcome, it becomes clearer how crises are central to the dynamism of capitalism and are more often crises in, rather than of, the system. Again, re-framing common categories through a new lens, Lebowitz argues that M-C-M’ – understood as the need for continuous growth – could be re-framed as growth – barrier – growth where ‘the story of capital within the sphere of production is that of its tendency to drive beyond all barriers.’ Although more implicit rather than explicit, this dovetails with much current debate on primitive accumulation as a necessarily continuous process, and could offer an interesting take on current discussions on de-growth, although neither are pursued in the book. While capital’s dynamism comes from its capacity to transform limits into barriers—creating new sites for accumulation, new needs, and new dependencies—the one limit for Lebowitz that cannot be overcome is that of the working class.

However, like all Lebowitz’s claims and going back to his original question of why the working class—the real limit—is not revolting, the answer is not straightforward. Even if we can analytically approach the working class as a unified subject, this does not mean it sees itself that way. As Lebowitz argues, ‘Once we consider the worker as subject, then the conditions within which workers themselves are produced (and produce themselves) emerge as an obvious part of the explanation for the continued existence of capitalism.’ If we are to take seriously the conditions within which the working class are (re)-produced, it is a subject mediated by structures of exploitation, oppression and domination. Offering a critical counter to more orthodox Marxist analysis of his time and another link to social reproduction theory, Lebowitz demonstrates how race and in particular gender divisions are not secondary struggles, because ‘as long as our subject is capital, it may be appropriate to consider these human beings only in their characteristic as wage-labourer. Yet, as soon as the subject becomes wage labour, it is necessary to consider the other relations in which people exist.’ There are multiple standpoints and strategic barriers within the working class. For example, wage labour for women may weaken patriarchal power relations within the household and could represent a way out of domestic slavery, while the family wage—a core tenet of welfare state policy—might strengthen the power of the male breadwinner model. While such binary terminology is of its time, the implication of this argument is that there is no singular experience of exploitation and that the male blue collar worker and his trade union is not necessarily the singular agent of change. As counter, Lebowitz calls on us to recognise all struggles against capital as the mediator of needs and tackle the separation of workers, or as Bhattacharya suggests against capital in general, as potential class struggles. It is the underlying power of capital as a whole that must be confronted, not only the power of individual bosses or capitalists. Ultimately, we need to go beyond merely economic struggles, and recognise the integral relation between the economic and political. However, how we do this, beyond developing a broad and inclusive understanding of the working class and class struggle that can include the home and neighbourhood, remains largely undefined.

To conclude, Beyond Capital remains an important intervention into Marxist theory and methodology. Lebowitz offers a refreshing take on longstanding questions around capitalism’s durability and the subjectivity of the working class. He opens analytical problems that others, especially social reproduction theorists, have taken further in fruitful ways. While we are left without a clear political strategy, we are given analytical tools to understand the working class as a diverse actor who equally struggles in their workplace, in their home, and in their neighbourhood. Moreover, the process of struggle, although not simple is productive, as through struggle the separation of the working class (the power of capital for Lebowitz) may be overcome and new subjects produced. As he suggests, the process of struggle itself is useful:

Beyond Capital helps us to understand why capitalism continues to persist despite endless crises, by drawing our attention to the messiness of human beings and the multiple circuits that reproduce capitalism as a complex and contradictory totality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do you think?