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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Citations

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

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

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

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

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

[6] Ibid.

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

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

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

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

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

Western Imperialist Financialization and the Global South’s Economic Development

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Degrowth Communism” Contra the Classics of Marxism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overcoming the “System of Waste”

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

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

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

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

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

"Govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature."[27]

China, Sustainable Development, and Socialist Ecological Civilization

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

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

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

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

Citations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[8] Ibid.

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

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

[11] Cabral, “The Weapon of Theory.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[23] Ian Angus, Canadian Bolsheviks, 40.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

“The gradual crumbling that left unaltered the face of the whole,” writes the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit, “is cut short by a sunburst which, in one flash, illuminates the features of the new world.” What he has described are the nodal points where, after the contradictions within totalities intensify, conditions are created for great ruptures for qualitative leaps into new worlds.

This is what multipolarity signifies. It is a geopolitical revolution, a qualitative leap into a radically new world. It is premised on the intensification of the contradictions inherent in the Western imperialist system, especially the unipolar form it took since 1991 when it had free reign to dominate the world after the fall of the Eastern socialist bloc. That was a time when the West proclaimed, laughably, that we had arrived at the “end of history.” The subject for this proclamation, of course, was Francis Fukuyama – but he spoke on behalf of the arrogance and hubris of the Western world as a whole. The West’s short-lived fantasy of the end of history has itself come to an end. As Vladimir Putin said in a seminal speech of September 2022, “The world has entered a period of a fundamental, revolutionary transformation.”

In proclaiming the end of history, the West showed an ignorance of the best insights its thinkers have provided to the world. How absurd is it that the civilization that gave birth to Heraclitus and Goethe and Hegel and Marx could come to naively accept such a static and historical position? It was Heraclitus who taught us that “everything flows and nothing abides” and that “everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.” It was Goethe, speaking through Mephistopheles in Faust, the greatest work in the history of German literature, who wrote that “all that comes to be deserves to perish wretchedly.” The unipolar world, dominated by the US and its NATO junior partners, came to be in the last decade of the 20th century. But, as Mephistopheles might have predicted, three decades later, we are seeing it perish wretchedly.

We are in a period of transition where the drive, as Pepe Escobar has written, “towards a multipolar, multinodal, polycentric world” is evident. Putin, in his speech at the recent St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), called it a “harmonic multipolar world.” Here too, Putin is developing insights that should not be foreign to the West. “The world’s virtue,” wrote the great Pythagoras, “is harmony.” It is one that contains within it a relational complementarity between the many. It is a world, as Mexican economist Oscar Rojas has written, where nations and civilizations can function as Free Associated Producers – sovereign, unhindered by external powers seeking to unilaterally impose their will on the world.

Putin is also here following in the footsteps of the insights developed by China’s civilizational state, as Zhang Weiwei calls it, which has always emphasized “building a harmonious society” and a “harmonious world” (the latter popularized by Hu Jintao), phrases developed from the ancient Chinese concept of taihe (overall harmony). It is a worldview in line with China’s constitutional commitment to “work to build a community with a shared future for mankind,” a frequent expression used by Xi Jinping and top Chinese leadership. This future is premised on developing a world that breaks from the unilateral imposition of one nation’s will over another and instead centers itself on win-win relations between sovereign nations and civilizations.

The expansion of multipolar institutions such as BRICS+, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Eurasian Economic Union, and others are beginning to build the skeleton for the new world. The proposals for a new BRICS+ payment infrastructure and an “apolitical, transactional form of cross-border payments,” called The Unit, which is “anchored in gold (40%) and BRICS+ currencies (60%),” signifies significant steps toward de-dollarization – an integral component of breaking US global dominance and building a multipolar world.

As an American, I inhabit a world that is crumbling wretchedly. While I look cheerfully upon the development of the new world (what I have called a post-Columbian, post-1492 world), I recognize that it is the elite of my country, those who our politicians represent, who are fighting tooth and nail to preserve their global system and abort the birth of the new world.

The leaders of the West are right to assume that they are fighting an existential struggle. However, they’re wrong in postulating that what is at stake is "democracy" or Western values and civilization. Instead, what is actually at stake is their colonial and imperialist dominance over the whole world. What is actually at risk of perishing wretchedly is not the West per se, but the system – erected more than 500 years ago – which elevates the accumulation of capital to the level of supremacy, over and above the community, the individuals and families, and civilizational traditions. It is the system that brought forth the genocide of the natives, the enslavement of the Africans, the looting of the world, and the impoverishment, oppression, and indebtedness of working people within the West itself, it is this system, which stands as a vampire sucking the lifeblood of humanity, which is finding an end to its reign.

Where does this leave America? Where does this leave Americans?

​We must recall the famous words of Peruvian indigenous politician Dionisio Yupanqui, uttered in his 1810 speech to the Cortes de Cádiz, “A people that oppresses another cannot be free.” The American people have not been benefactors of the global dominance of their imperialist government. For all their government’s talk of democracy, freedom, and government of, by, and for the people, what the American people have actually experienced has been an oligarchy, dictatorship, and government of, by, and for the owners of big corporations, banks, and investment firms. The so-called representatives of the American people have, all along, been in reality the representatives of the exploiters, oppressors, and parasitic creditors of the American people.

What we have seen, as American political theorist Michael Parenti has written, is how the American empire has “fed off the republic.” In the words of Tupac, the American hip-hop sensation, the imperialist state has always had money for war but never to feed the poor. There are always hundreds of billions that can be scrambled for Neo-Nazis in Ukraine and for the Zionist entity to continue its genocide in Palestine, but never for infrastructure, for fighting poverty, illiteracy, and ignorance, and for guaranteeing housing and healthcare – there is never money for lifting the living standards of the hard-working people upon whose backs and labor the existence of the country is premised.

If multipolarity means an existential threat to the American elite, what does it mean for the American people? Quite simply – HOPE.

The real enemies of the American people are those who wish to colonize Russia, China, and Iran… those who sanction a third of the world’s population and who seek to loot the resources and super exploit the labor of foreign lands. It is those – currently being defeated by Russia and the Axis of Resistance in multinodal frontlines – who send our countrymen abroad to lose limbs, scar their souls, and sometimes return in caskets, all to murder people whom they had more in common with than the filthy parasites who sent them there and who profited from their misfortune.

The real enemies of the American people are those who keep us poor, indebted, and desperate, and it is this same enemy – and the system they’re a personification of – that the multipolar world is challenging.

The interests of the American people, therefore, are in line with the interests of the Russian struggle against NATO encroachment, of the Axis of Resistance’s struggle against the Zionist entity, and of China’s struggle against US encirclement, delinking, and provocations in Taiwan.

The interests of the American people, in short, are aligned with the bourgeoning multipolar world. It is in the interests of America to be a pole in the multipolar world.

America, as a young civilizational project, is in many ways similar to China. China’s ancient (yet highly modern) civilization emphasizes, as Zhang Weiwei writes, the “Confucian idea of unity in diversity.” But so does the American project, at least its best parts – the parts the people are most fond of. The Confucian idea of unity in diversity is captured in E Pluribus Unum (out of many, one), the motto of the United States. Here we find an acknowledgment of the importance of pluralism that is contained within monism, that is, of particulars that are contained within a totality through which they obtain their meaning, and reciprocally, influence its general trajectory.

The premises for accepting America as a pole within the multipolar world are, therefore, already present in the values the American people accept as common sense. We would be a part of that complementary many, of that multiplicity, which would both be conditioned by the new relations of a multipolar world but reciprocally capable of playing a constructive role in its development.

This could be the future the American people are incorporated in once the world dominated by their parasitic leaders is brought down. However, this transition will never be offered to us by those same interests who threaten humanity with a global holocaust via a third, nuclearized, World War to sustain their decrepit hegemony and global power.

America’s incorporation into this bright new future can only be, as was our revolution in 1776, a product of a deep struggle against the old, decaying world of our oligarchs and political class. It is a world that has to be won by the fighting spirit of the American people. As the cleavage in our country between the elite and the people becomes more pronounced than ever before, it will be the forces that can give the people’s varied forms of dissent some coherence, unity, and direction, which will ultimately win out. Only then can America be incorporated as a constructive partner in the building of a multipolar world. Only then, when our society is actually of, by, and for the people, will the impetus of global dominance be squashed, and America find itself as a participant in building a community with a shared future for mankind.

​The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once called Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara the “most complete human being of our age.” Today, 96 years after his birth, it is still difficult to find a better example of the socialist human being than the one who proclaimed courageously with his unforgettable last words, “Shoot, coward! You are only going to kill a man!” Che was for Fidel Castro “the most extraordinary of [the] revolutionary comrades;” a man with an infectious character who organically lifted those around him to emulate his revolutionary virtues of “altruism,” “selflessness,” and the “immediate [and] instantaneous willingness” he had towards “carrying out the most difficult missions” for the socialist struggle. Although carried by a Herculean courage and a spartan attitude in the face of difficulties, in the speech Fidel gives in memory of Che he says that it is
​
In the field of ideas, in the field of feelings, in the field of revolutionary virtues, in the field of intelligence, apart from its military virtues, where we feel the tremendous loss his death has meant for the Revolutionary movement.

The bourgeois Ideologues who serve as the theoretical and rhetorical mouthpieces of the capitalist ruling class will pile garbage on the reputation of any historical figure who successfully advances the struggle for socialism, Che Guevara is no exception. As he had already eloquently noted in a 1961 speech in Santa Clara, “it is the nature of imperialism which bestializes men, turning them into wild blood thirsty beasts willing to behead, to kill, to destroy the last image of a revolutionary, of a partisan, of a regime that has either fallen under its boot, or still fights for freedom.” However, Che lived his life in a way that made him exceedingly difficult for the bourgeois imperialist media to criticize. How can you, after all, criticize someone who fell defending “the cause of the poor and the humble of this Earth,” and that, as Fidel noted, did so in such “an exemplary and selfless way” that “not even his most bitter enemies dare to dispute?”

Che believed that a necessary component in the construction of a socialist society is the creation of a ‘new socialist man,’ free of the selfish and individualistic traits that are common among individuals existing within capitalist relations of production. For Che, every revolutionary should strive to exemplify the new socialist man in their actions, through being honest, hardworking, incredibly studious, and willing to labor for the good of the collective society. This marks a radical transition away from the capitalist notion of growth centered on an individual’s accumulation of capital and commodities, and towards a socialist notion of growth centered on human flourishing – towards a notion of the human being as the unique expression of the ensemble of relations they are embedded in as individuals dialectically interconnected to the social. As Che told the Union of Young Communists (UJC) in a 1962 speech, “the young communist must strive to be the first in everything…to be the living example and mirror through which our companions who do not belong to the young communist see themselves.” This meant that young communists must

be essentially human. To be so human you become closer and closer to perfecting the best attributes of being human. To purify the best attributes of man through work, studies, and the exercise of continual solidarity with our people and all people around the world. To develop to the maximum his sensibilities, to the point of feeling anguished when a man is assassinated in another corner of the world, and enthusiastic when in some corner of the world, a new flag of freedom is raised.

Che himself became increasingly disciplined as he got older and serves as a shining example of the socialist virtue-ethic he hoped would shape the next generations of Cuban communists. Since his death, generations of young Cubans have exerted themselves in the process of constructing the new socialist human being through the maxim: “pioneers for communism; we will be like Che.”

For Che, the transition to socialism could not just be reduced to changes in political economy, a fundamental transformation of the human being through the development of socialist culture was necessary. As Michael Löwy notes, Che held “the conviction that socialism is meaningless and consequently cannot triumph unless it holds out the offer of a civilization, a social ethic, a model of society that is totally antagonistic to the values of petty individualism, unfettered egoism, [bourgeois] competition, [and] the war of all against all that is characteristic of capitalist civilization [and] this world in which ‘man eats man.’” Not only was it necessary to raise the intellectual and cultural life of the mass of working people by developing “a consciousness in which there is a new scale of values,” but this transformation should not be limited to the ideological-political superstructure; it must also embed itself in the economic foundation of society through what he prescribed as the need for “a complete spiritual rebirth in one's attitude toward one's own work.” As Vijay Prashad notes, “it was this new moral framework that motivated Guevara’s agenda to build socialism… if a new society had to be created, it had to be created through a new moral fiber.”

Like any successful historical revolutionary, Che stressed the importance of reading and intensive study. Guevara himself was known to read incessantly throughout the entire course of his life. As a young boy playing soccer in Argentina, he would read Marxist theory while waiting to play on the bench, especially when horrific asthma attacks would pull him from the games. As the Cuban guerrillas waged their revolutionary struggle in the Sierra Maestra, Che would teach classes on Marxist economics and philosophy to the revolutionaries who would be tasked with managing Cuban society after the gangster dictator Batista was toppled. When he was in Africa at the forefront of anti-colonial struggles, he was reading none other than G.W. F. Hegel. In this manner, in the germs of the Cuban revolutionary process Che had already planted the seeds for the creation of the new socialist man, and the elevation of the people’s intellectual and moral life. The embryo of the proclamation Che made in Socialism and Man in Cuba, to have ”society as a whole…converted into a gigantic school,” was already being realized even under the extraordinarily difficult circumstances guerilla warfare entailed.

Che understood that the education of the Cuban masses had very practical implications for the long-term success of the Cuban revolution. When he was young, he had thought the US empire was controlled by evil wizards and dark princes who wanted to rule the world and cared not who they slaughtered in order to do so. It was after reading books like Vladimir Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism that Che came to understand that it was capital who perpetrated the violent imperialism he saw all around him in Latin America, rather than a diabolical cabal of evil wizards. It was the will of capital which dictated the murderous actions of the American Government in Guatemala, from which Che barely escaped with his life. If the people of Latin America could be made to understand this, it would be far more difficult for the US imperialists to convince them that it’s in their benefit to reinstate capitalist relations of production – which the US often tries to do via propaganda and other techniques to foment color revolutions.

After six decades of internationally denounced sanctions and hybrid warfare on Cuba, the blood soaked hands of the American empire have been unable to overthrow the construction of socialism in the country. Even in the periods where the U.S.’s warfare on Cuba has produced the most formidable of challenges in attaining the necessary materials to ensure the subsistence of the Cuban people, the mass of Cubans have brazenly continued the revolutionary process, with the slogan of their Bronze Titan Antonio Maceo engraved on their chest – “Whoever tries to take over Cuba will only collect the dust of their blood-soaked soil, if they do not perish in the fight.”

The Cuban people, in the face of a battle against Goliath, have understood the proclamation the revolution’s Apostle José Martí had made in Nuestra America – that “Barricades of ideas are worth more than barricades of stone,” that the revolutionary ideals Cuban socialism strives for are infinitely preferrable than the hardships Goliath’s war might provide. It is in part these revolutionary ideals and ethics embedded in Cuban culture and consciousness which have allowed a socialist nation with limited resources to survive right under the nose of the U.S. empire; while other projects with far more resources and material potential went down the road of capitalist restoration, plunging millions of people into poverty and conditions unseen since before the October revolution. It is in great part thanks to the emphasis Che laid in the construction of a new man, of a new culture and set of ideals and practices, that the Cuban revolution continues to be a beacon of hope for revolutionaries around the world, and a thorn in the nose of imperialists who would want nothing more than to pillage Cuban resources, superexploit Cuban workers, and use Havana as the sin-city vacation spot they once did.

By studying the emphasis Che laid on developing the new socialist human being and the new socialist culture, we give ourselves the ability to understand the success of Cuban socialism more concretely. Additionally, for those of us in countries currently fighting for the seizure of power by the working masses, studying Che’s life and work reminds us of the necessary role the intellectual and moral leadership of the revolutionary vanguard plays in disarticulating working people away from bourgeois hegemony, and towards the new set of socialist ideals, passions, desires, and ethical life necessary for the attainment of a society free of alienation, oppression, exploitation, and war.  

​The Classical Marxist View of the State
​
Today* we hear libertarians speak at length about the problems of ‘big government,’ which they often equate with socialism. The question of the state is, in their minds, reduced to a quantitative discussion. What matters is how much state? Big state or small state? Small state good, big state bad. Silly as it may sound, assumptions such as these are pervasive in the American political horizon. It is a theoretical childishness that, while taken to the extreme by libertarians, is far from being limited to them.

The idea of the state as an abstraction, as an entity that is ideally and substantially the same, with differences reducible to degrees (quantity) and accidental properties, has pervaded the vast majority of bourgeois political philosophy. The theorists of the “universal class” in civil society, i.e., the bourgeoisie, have considered the state they have fought for (in, for instance, feudal Europe) and the states they have created, as the state. They have always projected the particularities of their state into a universalized abstraction of the state in general, categorically bemusing the particular for the abstract universal. The bourgeois state is, in their hands, treated as the state qua state. While some of their best theorists, like Rousseau and Hegel, entertained a serious level of historical self-awareness with regard to this question, they still formulate a theory of the state that is abstract, i.e., disconnected from an awareness of the state’s interconnection with historically evolving modes of production (even though, in comparison with the others, it is much more concrete).

The concrete understanding of the state would first be formulated by Marx and Engels in the middle of the 1840s, from texts like “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” to The German Ideology, The Poverty of Philosophy, and the Manifesto. In these works the modern state is understood as “the form of organization which the bourgeois necessarily adopt both for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and interests”…“the real basis of the state” is the “material life of individuals… their mode of production and forms of intercourse, which mutually determine each other.” The question of the state qua state, or of an absolute idea of the state in general, is meaningless. The state is “a product of society at a particular stage of development.” The state does not exist as a transhistorical entity over and above human history. The state becomes a historical necessity, as Engels would write after Marx’s death, because “at a definite stage of economic development,” owing to and influencing the development of the monogamous family, private property, and the “cleavage of society into classes,” the state presents itself as the means of the economically dominant class keeping “class antagonisms in check.” The state is, Engels writes,

The admission that society has involved itself in insoluble self-contradiction and is cleft into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to exorcise. But in order that these antagonisms, classes with conflicting economic interests, shall not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, a power, apparently standing above society, has become necessary to moderate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of “order”; and this power, arisen out of society, but placing itself above it and increasingly alienating itself from it, is the state. (229).
As was further concretized with the experience of the Paris Commune in 1871, Marx and Engels in their writings came to understand that all state institutions (both the ideological and coercive ones) have to be made anew in each new form of life. The state exists as a concrete universal, that is, its universal existence is premised on its ability to take a variety of different particular forms in accordance with different historical contexts. It is not sufficient, for instance, for the working class to take up the ready-made state of the bourgeoisie and rule. The institutions themselves are crafted to reproduce the order of the ruling capitalist class. It is not enough to change what class is now to ‘rule’. For the working class to rule, for the dictatorship of the proletariat to function, the whole bourgeois state and its institutions have to be destroyed and replaced by a new working-class state and socialist institutions. The bourgeois state has to be dialectically sublated. This means that the state as an instrument of dictatorship and hegemony for the dominant class is sustained, but that the dominant class will now be (for the first time in the history of the state) the majority – workers, peasants, professionals, etc. In other words, the state (universal), has to be given a new particular form (dictatorship of the proletariat). As V. I. Lenin would later write in State and Revolution, where he masterfully and comprehensively outlines the views of Marx and Engels, “the supersession of the bourgeois state by the proletarian state is impossible without a violent revolution. The abolition of the proletarian state, i.e., of the state in general, is impossible except through the process of “withering away".”

The next major advancement in the Marxist theory of the state would arise from the imprisoned Italian Communist Party leader, Antonio Gramsci, who would develop the understanding of the emergence of the integral state. Far from being a break from the relationship of state and civil society expressed in the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin (as some “Gramscians” in the bourgeois academy hold), what Gramsci observed was a development in Europe (and eventually spreading elsewhere) where civil society would itself be integrated under the leadership of the state. This meant that the direct frontal attack that allowed the Bolshevik revolution to succeed in a peripheral country with no integral state could not be replicated in Europe. Instead of the war of maneuver taking primacy, the war of positions, that is, the battle for hegemony, the war for the hearts and minds of the people (the subaltern) would be primary. Consent, not coercion, was the dominant form through which the European states sustained the dominant order. Coercion, i.e., the armed bodies of men of the state which Lenin tells us about, or the repressive state apparatuses Althusser would later on, was, of course, always in the background ready to show itself wherever consent dwindled, and people started rocking the boat. But in general, the fabric which sustains the dominant order was consent – i.e., the hegemony of the ruling class, exerted and sustained through their ideological institutions.

The crisis of capitalism would not only be understood in the traditional terms of Marxist political economy, as the crisis of overproduction where we see, on the basis of the contradictory value production at the foundation of the cell-form of the form of life, the “manifestation of all the contradictions of bourgeois economy.” A sign of the system in crisis is also seen in the collapse of the hegemony so central to reproducing the existing state of affairs. It is when a crisis of legitimacy ensues (usually, of course, a product of the objective economic developments of the general crisis-prone system), when people’s trust in the ruling institutions and ideas dwindle, that the ruling order is shaken to its core. It is these moments, when the people are no longer willing to continue on in the old way, where objectively revolutionary conditions can be said to be present. It is this crisis of legitimacy, this dwindling of hegemony in the American integral state, that I wish to explore here. How can the American state be said to be in crisis? What does this mean for the U.S. socialist left? Why have we failed? How can we succeed? All of these are central questions in my work, and I will try to address them briefly below.

The Crisis of Legitimacy in the U.S.

The principal question for any socialist movement today, be it in the U.S. or outside, is where it stands on issues of war and peace – what will be its position regarding American imperialism? As the great W. E. B. Dubois had long ago noted, “the government of the United States and the forces in control of government regard peace as dangerous.” The foundation of American society, as it exists under the tyranny of capital, is war. They have built up a grand machinery of lies, pumping out through all mediums the twisted facts and invented realities needed to support their topsy-turvy narrative of world events – and thereby, obtain consent for their crimes. The famous phrase of Nazi ideologue Joseph Goebbels applies aptly to the U.S. state, “truth is the mortal enemy of lies, and by extension, the greatest enemy of the state.” They have slaughtered people and allowed whole populations to face the meat grinder of war to defend the right of accumulation for the owners of big capital – the monopoly-finance capitalist class. To defend the ‘rights’ of those who have pillaged the world for centuries. Those who make a killing out of killing. Who trade in the annihilation of life for profit.

As everyone knows, wherever there is oppression and immiseration there will be, sooner or later, resistance. This is a universal law of all human societies fractured by class antagonisms. It is this dialectic of class struggles which pushes humanity forward, often producing the births of whole new social systems from the ashes of a previous one. But these moments of societal renewal, where a new class comes into a position of power and creates a world in its own image, are not guaranteed – even if the conditions for producing it are. There is always the possibility, as Marx and Engels had long ago noted, of a general societal dissolution. To put it in terms fitting with the contradictions of the capitalist mode of life, it isn’t only socialism which stands as a possibility within the embryo of capitalism, equally capable of actualizing itself is, as Rosa Luxemburg long ago noted, barbarism.

The human element, what in traditional communist literature is called the subjective factor or the subjective conditions, are indispensable. It does not matter how bad things get, how clearly revolutionary the objective conditions are, without the subjective factor all is nil. It is the organized masses, led by the most conscious within their ranks, that make, out of the objectively revolutionary conditions, the revolutions.

For Lenin and the communist tradition, objectively revolutionary conditions require the presence of a few key factors: 1- the worsening of the masses’ living conditions, 2- their inability to go on in the old way, 3- their willingness to act (and not just passively accept dissatisfaction), and 4- a crisis in the ruling class itself, where even they cannot continue on in the old way. These objective conditions are present, and intensifying daily, in American society. I chronicle them in detail in my book, The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism.

We are faced with the first generations in American history to live lives worse than their parents. Precarity has become a general reality for working people, the majority of whom are a lost paycheck away from joining the 600 thousand homeless wandering around in a country with 33 times more empty homes than homeless people. Debt slavery has also become, in our highly financialized capitalism, a generalized reality drowning most working-class Americans. Hundreds of thousands die yearly for lacking the financial means to access medical services or overdosing on opioid drugs pushed by the medico-pharmaceutical industrial complex in cahoots with the government, the universities, and NGOs. Social decay is evident as former industrial powerhouse cities are plagued by zombified humans and rusted remains of the industries that once were the basis of decent working-class communities. The American dream has become a joke for working-class people who have more and more come to realize what the comedic-critic George Carlin once said: it’s called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.

But the American people are waking up. All around the country militant union struggles are being waged like we haven’t seen in many decades. Workers are coming to see themselves more and more as a class, one that produces the fruits society enjoys, but which is impoverished and indebted by parasitic capitalist overlords and the politician class that represents them. Across the country concepts like the ‘deep state,’ the ‘swamp,’ ‘the globalists,’ and others have been popularized to describe the oligarchic forces that control the state and all institutions without the slightest semblance of democratic accountability. While these terms are somewhat foreign to the Marxist lexicon, the concepts they represent are not. What is the globalism dissenting workers speak off of not imperialism? What is it if not the need of the capitalist class to export capital abroad to have cheap resources handy and cheap labor to superexploit? How are these conditions created today if not through dollar hegemony and international financial organizations such as the IMF and World Bank, who debt trap countries of the global south and impose structural adjustment programs on them that guarantee privatization of public property, austerity for the people, deregulations for the Western multinationals coming in to loot, and liberalization, all under the auspices of ‘free markets.’ We must recall Lenin’s question – free for whom? To do what?

What is the deep state, for instance, if not the dictatorship of the capitalist class, in whose development any semblance of democratic accountability fades away? While not using the term deep state, key Marxist thinkers in the 20th century, such as Georg Lukács, would describe the development of the deep state in the following manner:

Whoever pursues the historical development of capitalist society knows that the power of elected public bodies continuously declines in comparison to its military and civilian bureaucrats working under "official secrecy.''

Working people, therefore, are expressing various forms of dissent in the only language and conceptual framework available to them. What communists should do is help give these varied forms of dissent the systematic coherence and direction only the Marxist worldview can provide – not, as most of the institutional left does, shame workers for not using the right terms and being ‘backwards’ with regard to fringe social issues.

But the crisis of the American state is not limited to the conditions it has put its people into, and the dissent, on the basis of this, that the public expresses. It is also seen in the fact that the U.S. state, which is fundamentally the heart of capitalist imperialism, is seeing its global hegemony crumble right before its very eyes. China has become the epicenter of the world economy – a non-imperialist great power, as Hugo Chavez once called them. Russia is developing into one of the most impressive productive economies in the world, and has been able to successfully fight off the Western encroachment and proxy war while strengthening its economy and military and weakening NATO (for instance, look at the spiral of deindustrialization Germany, the economic powerhouse in Europe, has been subjected to after their going along with the U.S.’s sanctioning of Russia and after Mr. Biden’s blowing up of the Nordstream Pipelines – the main energy source of their industries). The genocide carried out against the Palestinians couldn’t be a clearer indication that the almost global approval the West received for its crimes in previous eras is now gone. The world is watching as the U.S. funds and equips the Zio-nazi state’s genocide. All across the globe the device on people’s pockets have allowed them to follow the chronicling of Israel’s colonial savagery. While the fact that it has continued for more than seven months shows that in some important ways U.S. imperialism still reigns, the mass discontent it is created in the global majority is objectively intensifying the process of its decline – and this decline, conjoined with the rise of BRICS+ and the emerging multipolar world order, is visible right before our very eyes.

But these conditions, although functioning as the prime matter for building a revolutionary movement, are not enough. Why is that? I turn to Lenin, who says that “it is not every revolutionary situation that gives rise to a revolution; revolution arises only out of a situation in which the above-mentioned objective changes are accompanied by a subjective change, namely, the ability of the revolutionary class to take revolutionary mass action strong enough to break (or dislocate) the old government, which never, not even in a period of crisis, ‘falls’, if it is not toppled over.”

Repeating the Failure: The Crisis of the Activist Left in the U.S.

Like Sisyphus, the left of the last two decades seems condemned to roll the rock up simply to see it fall… rinsing and repeating continuously every few years. Since the protest movement against the invasion of Iraq, to Occupy Wall Street, to the Bernie Movement, to the Black Lives Matter Protests, to the current protests against the Zionist Genocide, the left has seen itself condemned to pull hundreds of thousands, and sometimes even millions, into the streets to express anger with whatever injustice is latched onto, only to then, after a few weeks or months, have everything return to square one.

I genuinely hope that the protest for a permanent ceasefire breaks this trend.

But if we are honest with ourselves, what fruit has borne out of the last two decades of protests? Did the Iraq protests stop the invasion and further destruction of the middle east? Did the occupy wall street protests stop financial speculation and overthrow the 1 percent? Did the Bernie movement win political power and bring with it the much-promised political revolution? Did the BLM protests actually challenge policing, the prison industrial complex, and the system which has made them necessary? The answer is not only No. The answer is, besides not achieving their desired ends, they have often accomplished quite the contrary. Movements such as Bernie’s and BLM, whatever still remains of it, were clearly just absorbed into the liberal, frankly most dominant, wing of the ruling class. They became what I’ve called a controlled form of counter hegemony, presenting a veneer of radicality on what is essentially a bourgeois politics that serves to reinforce the status quo with radical sounding language.
Giving up is, of course, not an option. The necessity for struggle is in the air. What do we do then?

The Need for Self-Criticism

I think we must start with being open to self-critique. Far too often even the attempt at doing so will receive backlash from those who are more comfortable with continuing the failures. Marxism is to dogma as water is to oil. If one is present the other cannot be, or at least not for long. If the tactics of the past have not worked, then it’s time to go back to the drawing board and ask: why have the working masses not been won over to our side? Why have all the movements we’ve led this century ended in disappointment? It is okay to fail, but what is insane is to continue to fail in the same way while expecting a different outcome.

When questions such as these are tackled by the dominant left, the blame is almost always placed upon working people. Working people are not enlightened enough, too brute to realize how bourgeois ideology manipulates them, etc. While components of the narrative are true, the question is, so what? What is the point of communists if not precisely to piers through that, to win the struggle for the hearts and minds of the people – to rearticulate the rational kernels of the spontaneous common sense they’ve developed within the bourgeois order towards socialism, either producing active militants in the process or the sympathetic mass which it leads. In my view, the chunk of the blame for our failures lies on the left itself. On its middle-class composition and the purity fetish outlook it operates with.

Professional-Managerial Composition of the Left

Therefore, while we find objectively revolutionary conditions in the U.S., we have a deep crisis in the subjective factor, that is, a poverty of revolutionary organizations and their worldviews. Most of the organizations of the socialist left are governed by the professional managerial class, what in the time of Marx and Engels was simply called the intelligentsia. What were supposed to be working-class organizations, vehicles for the conquest of political power by this class, have become centers of petty-bourgeois radicalism, as Gus Hall used to say. This analysis is not new, many theorists have pointed out how, since the late 1970s, along with the State Department's attack on communists and socialists in the labor unions, and its promotion, through programs such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, of a compatible anti-communist left, the working-class left has been destroyed and replaced by middle-class "radical recuperators," as Gabriel Rockhill calls them. The U.S. State Department, as I show in my work, has been effective in creating a "controlled counter-hegemonic left," a left that speaks radically but in substance always allies itself with imperialism.

This is far from a condemnation of intellectuals in general, but the reality is that, as it currently exists in the U.S., the dominance of the professional managerial class within socialist organizations is deeply alienating to workers, who are less concerned with their middle-class moralism than with surviving in a declining society.

The Purity Fetish and the Three Central Forms it Takes

On an ideological level, I have shown that this middle-class left suffers from the purity fetish, a worldview that makes them relate to the world on the basis of purity as a condition for support. If something doesn't live up to the pure ideas that exist in their heads, it's rejected and condemned. In essence, it is the absence of a dialectical materialist worldview, a flight from a reality governed by movement, contradictions, and interconnectedness, and toward a pure and lofty ideal safe from desecration by the meanness of reality. This purity fetish, I argue in my work, takes three central forms in the United States:

1) Because a bloc of conservative workers are too imperfect or "backward" for the American left, they are considered baskets of deplorables or agents of a "fascist threat." Instead of raising the consciousness of the so-called backward section of the working population, the purity fetish left condemns them, effectively removing about 30-40% of American workers from the possibility of being organized. This is a ridiculous position which divorces socialists from those working in the pressure points of capital. The purity fetish left, therefore, eschews the task of winning over workers irrespective of the ideas they hold. In doing so, they simply sing to the choir, i.e., the most liberal sections of the middle classes that already agree with them on all the social issues they consider themselves to be enlightened on.

2) The second form that the purity fetish takes is a continuation of the way it is generally present in the tradition of Western Marxism, which has always rejected actually existing socialism because it does not live up to the ideal of socialism in their heads. In doing so, they have often become the leftist parrots of empire, failing to recognize how socialism is to be built, that is, how the process of socialist development occurs under the extreme pressures of imperialist hybrid warfare in a world still dominated by global capital. In its acceptance of capitalist myths about socialism, this left acquiesces to the lie that socialism has always failed, and arrogantly posits itself as the first who will make it work. Instead of debunking the McCarthyite lies with which the ruling class has fed the people, this left accepts them.

3) The third form of the purity fetish is the prevalence of what Georgi Dimitrov called national nihilism: the total rejection of our national past because of its impurities. A large part of the American left sees socialism as synonymous with the destruction of America. Bombastic ultra-left slogans dominate the discourse of many of the left-wing organizers, who treat the history of the United States in a metaphysical way, blind to how the country is a totality in motion, pregnant with contradictions, with histories of slavery, genocide, imperialism, but also with histories of abolitionist struggles, workers' struggles, anti-imperialist and socialist struggles. It is a history that produces imperialists and looters, but also produced Dubois, King, Henry Winston, and other champions of the people’s struggle against capital, empire, and racism.

This purity fetish left forgets that socialism does not exist in the abstract, that it must be concretized in the conditions and history of the peoples who have won the struggle for political power. As Dimitrov put it, it must be socialist in content and national in form. Or, as it is stated in the great José Carlos Mariátegui’s work, socialism cannot be a “carbon copy, it must be a heroic creation. We have to give life, with our own reality, in our own language, to socialism.” Socialism, especially in its early stages, must always have the specific characteristics of the history of the people: in China it is called socialism with Chinese characteristics, in Venezuela Bolivarian socialism, in Bolivia it means embedding socialism within the indigenous traditions of communalism.  etc.  Kim Il Sung once wrote “What assets do we have for carrying on the revolution if the history of our people’s struggle is denied.” This is effectively what the national nihilists, rooted in the purity fetish outlook, do.

Their national nihilism, contrary to their intentions, leads them into a liberal tinted American exceptionalism, which holds that while all countries have had to give their socialist content a national form, the U.S., in its supposedly uniquely evil history, is the exception. Like German guilt pride, it is a way of expressing supremacism through guilt.

To put it in philosophical terms, there cannot be – contrary to the tradition of Western philosophy – abstract universals devoid of the specific forms they take in various contexts. On the contrary, as the Hegelian and Marxist traditions (both rooted in dialectical worldviews) maintain, the universal can only be actual when it is concretized through the particular. In other words, if we don't take the rational progressive kernels of our national past and use them to fight for socialism, we will not only be doomed to misinterpret U.S. history, but we will fail, as we have, to connect with our people and successfully develop a socialist struggle in our context.

In every instance, the purity fetish of the middle-class left forbids them not only from properly understanding the world, but from changing it. It is no coincidence that the part of the world in which Marxist theoreticians find everything too impure to support is also the one that has failed, even under the most objectively fertile conditions, to produce a successful and meaningful revolutionary movement.

Conclusion

In short, conditions in the U.S. are objectively revolutionary. But the subjective factor is in deep crisis. Processes of social change cannot succeed if these two conditions are not united. For the U.S. left to succeed, it must re-centralize itself in the working masses and dispel its purity fetish outlook, replacing it with the dialectical materialist worldview – the best working tool and sharpest weapon, as Engels pointed out, that Marxism offers the proletariat. It needs a party of the people guided by this outlook, what has been traditionally called a communist party. Although some might bear that name today and tarnish it with decades of fighting for the liberal wing of the ruling class, the substance of what a communist party stands for, what it provides the class struggle, is indispensable for our advancement. It is the only force that can unite the people against the endless wars of empire that not only lead to the deaths of millions around the world, but also to the immiseration of our people and cities, who live under a state that always has money for war, but never any to invest in the people. Only when the people actually come into a position of power and create a society of, by, and for working people, can this fate change. For this we need a communist party, a people’s party. 

Notes

* This was a presentation given at the National Autonomous University of Mexico City for the International Seminar on Law and the State in Marxist Thought. 

​Roman land tenure was based increasingly on the appropriation of conquered territory, which was declared public land, the ager publicus populi. The normal practice was to settle war veterans on it, but the wealthiest and most aggressive families grabbed such land for themselves in violation of early law.
​
Cassius’ Indecent Proposal

The die was cast in 486 BC. After Rome defeated the neighboring Hernici, a Latin tribe, and took two-thirds of their land, the consul Spurius Cassius proposed Rome’s first agrarian law. It called for giving half the conquered territory back to the Latins and half to needy Romans, who were also to receive public land that patricians had occupied1. But the patricians accused Cassius of “building up a power dangerous to liberty” by seeking popular support and “endangering the security” of their land appropriation. After his annual term was over he was charged with treason and killed. His house was burned to the ground to eradicate memory of his land proposal (Livy, History of Rome 2.41).

Patricians Versus Plebs

The fight over whether patricians or the needy poor plebians would be the main recipients of public land dragged on for 12 years. In 474 the commoners’ tribune, Gnaeus Genucius, sought to bring the previous year’s consuls to trial for delaying the redistribution proposed by Cassius (Livy 2.54 and Dionysius 9.37-38). He was blocked by that year’s two consuls, Lucius Furius and Gaius Manlius, who said that decrees of the Senate were not permanent law, “but measures designed to meet temporary needs and having validity for one year only.” The Senate could renege on any decree that had been passed.

A century later, in 384, M. Manlius Capitolinus, a former consul (in 392) was murdered for defending debtors by trying to use tribute from the Gauls and to sell public land to redeem plebian debts, and for accusing senators of embezzlement and urging them to use their takings to redeem debtors. It took a generation of turmoil and poverty for Rome to resolve matters. In 367 the Licinio-Sextian law limited personal landholdings to 500 iugera (125 hectares, under half a square mile; see Livy 6.35-36). Indebted landholders were permitted to deduct interest payments from the principal and pay off the balance over three years instead of all at once.

Gifts of Land

Most wealth throughout history has been obtained from the public domain, and that is how Rome’s latifundia were created. The most fateful early land grab occurred after Carthage was defeated in 204. Two years earlier, when Rome’s life-and-death struggle with Hannibal had depleted its treasury, the Senate had asked families to voluntarily contribute their jewelry or other precious belongings to help the war effort. Their gold and silver were melted down in the temple of Juno Moneta to strike the coins used to hire mercenaries.

Upon the return to peace, the aristocrats depicted these contributions as having been loans, and convinced the Senate to pay their claims in three installments. The first was paid in 204, and a second in 202. As the third and final installment was coming due in 200, the former contributors pointed out that Rome needed to keep its money to continue fighting abroad, but had much public land available. In lieu of cash payment they asked the Senate to offer them land located within fifty miles of Rome, and to tax it at only a nominal rate. A precedent for such privatization had been set in 205 when Rome sold valuable land in the Campania to provide Scipio with money to invade Africa.

The recipients were promised that “when the people should become able to pay, if anyone chose to have his money rather than the land, he might restore the land to the state.” Nobody did, of course. “The private creditors accepted the terms with joy; and that land was called Trientabulum because it was given in lieu of the third part of their money” (Livy 28.46).

Latifundia Changed Rome’s Economy Forever

Arnold Toynbee2 describes this giveaway of Rome’s ager publicus as the turning point polarizing its economy by deciding, “at one stroke, the economic and social future of the Central Italian lowlands.” Most of this land ended up as latifundia cultivated by slaves captured in the wars against Carthage and Macedonia and imported en masse after 198. This turned the region into “predominantly a country of underpopulated slave-plantations” as the formerly free population was driven off the land into overpopulated industrial towns. In 194 and again in 177 the Senate organized a program of colonization that sent about 100,000 peasants, women, and children from central Italy to more than twenty colonies, mainly in the far south and north of Italy. Some settlers lost their Roman citizenship, and they must have remained quite poor as the average land allotment was small.

The Gracchi and Civil War

In 133, Tiberius Gracchus advocated distributing ager publicus to the poor, pointing out that this would “increase the number of property holders liable to serve in the army.” He was killed by angry senators who wanted the public land for themselves. Nonetheless, a land commission was established in Italy in 128, “and apparently succeeded in distributing land to several thousand citizens” in a few colonies, but not any land taken from Rome’s own wealthy elite. The commission was abolished around 119 after Tiberius’s brother Gaius Gracchus was killed.3

Appian (Civil Wars 1.1.7) describes the ensuing century of civil war as being fought over the land and debt crisis.

“For the rich, getting possession of the greater part of the undistributed lands, and being emboldened by the lapse of time to believe that they would never be dispossessed, absorbing any adjacent strips and their poor neighbors’ allotments, partly by purchase under persuasion and partly by force, came to cultivate vast tracts instead of single estates, using slaves as laborers and herdsmen, lest free laborers should be drawn from agriculture into the army. At the same time the ownership of slaves brought them great gain from the multitude of their progeny, who increased because they were exempt from military service. Thus certain powerful men became extremely rich and the race of slaves multiplied throughout the country, while the Italian people dwindled in number and strength, being oppressed by penury, taxes and military service.”

How Land Changed Rome’s Army

Dispossession of free labor from the land transformed the character of Rome’s army. Starting with Marius, landless soldiers became soldati, living on their pay and seeking the highest booty, loyal to the generals in charge of paying them. Command of an army brought economic and political power. When Sulla brought his troops back to Italy from Asia Minor in 82 and proclaimed himself Dictator, he tore down the walls of towns that had opposed him, and kept them in check by resettling 23 legions (some 80,000 to 100,000 men) in colonies on land confiscated from local populations in Italy.

Sulla Steals Estates and Sells Them for Support

Sulla drew up proscription lists of enemies who could be killed with impunity, with their estates seized as booty. Their names were publicly posted throughout Italy in June 81 BC, headed by the consuls for the years 83 and 82, and about 1,600 equites (wealthy publican investors). Thousands of names followed. Anyone on these lists could be killed at will, with the executioner receiving a portion of the dead man’s estate. The remainder was sold at public auctions, the proceeds being used to rebuild the depleted treasury. Most land was sold cheaply, giving opportunists a motive to kill not only those named by Sulla, but also their personal enemies, to acquire their estates. A major buyer of confiscated real estate was Crassus, who became one of the richest Romans through Sulla’s proscriptions.

By giving his war veterans homesteads and funds from the proscriptions, Sulla won their support as a virtual army in reserve, along with their backing for his new oligarchic constitution. But they were not farmers, and ran into debt, in danger of losing their land. For his more aristocratic supporters, Sulla distributed the estates of his opponents from the Italian upper classes, especially in Campania, Etruria, and Umbria.

Battle of Generals

Caesar likewise promised to settle his army on land of their own. They followed him to Rome and enabled him to become Dictator in 49. After he was killed in 44, Brutus and Cassius vied with Octavian (later Augustus), each promising their armies land and booty. As Appian (Civil Wars 5.2.12-13) summarized: “The chiefs depended on the soldiers for the continuance of their government, while, for the possession of what they had received, the soldiers depend on the permanence of the government of those who had given it. Believing that they could not keep a firm hold unless the givers had a strong government, they fought for them, from necessity, with good-will.” After defeating the armies of Brutus, Cassius, and Mark Antony, Octavian gave his indigent soldiers “land, the cities, the money, and the houses, and as the object of denunciation on the part of the despoiled, and as one who bore this contumely for the army’s sake.”

 Imperial Estates

The concentration of land ownership intensified under the Empire. Brown4 notes that by the time Christianity became the Roman state religion, North Africa had become the main source of Roman wealth, based on “the massive landholdings of the emperor and of the nobility of Rome.” Its overseers kept the region’s inhabitants “underdeveloped by Roman standards. Their villages were denied any form of corporate existence and were frequently named after the estates on which the villagers worked, held to the land by various forms of bonded labor.”

A Christian from Gaul named Salvian5 described the poverty and insecurity confronting most of the population ca. 440:

“Faced by the weight of taxes, poor farmers found that they did not have the means to emigrate to the barbarians. Instead, they did what little they could do: they handed themselves over to the rich as clients in return for protection. The rich took over title to their lands under the pretext of saving the farmers from the land tax. The patron registered the farmer’s land on the tax rolls under his (the patron’s) own name. Within a few years, the poor farmers found themselves without land, although they were still hounded for personal taxes. Such patronage by the great, so Salvian claimed, turned free men into slaves as surely as the magic of Circe had turned humans into pigs.”

Church Estates

Church estates became islands in this sea of poverty. As deathbed confessions and donations of property to the Church became increasingly popular among wealthy Christians, the Church came to accept existing creditor and debtor relationships, land ownership, hereditary wealth, and the political status quo. What mattered to the Church was how the ruling elites used their wealth, regardless of how they obtained it as long as it was destined for the Church, whose priests were the paradigmatic “poor” deserving of aid and charity.

The Church sought to absorb local oligarchies into its leadership, along with their wealth. Testamentary disposition undercut local fiscal balance. Land given to the Church was tax-exempt, obliging communities to raise taxes on their secular property in order to maintain their flow of public revenue (many heirs found themselves disinherited by such bequests, leading to a flourishing legal practice of contesting deathbed wills). The Church became the major corporate body, a sector alongside the state. Its critique of personal wealth focused on personal egotism and self-indulgence, nothing like the socialist idea of public ownership of land, monopolies, and banking. In fact, the Crusades led the Church to sponsor Christendom’s major secular bankers to finance its wars against the Holy Roman Emperors, Moslems, and Byzantine Sicily.

References  

1. Roman Antiquities by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 8.77.2.
2. Hannibal’s Legacy by Arnold Toynbee, 1965, II: pp. 250-51 and pp. 341-373.
3. Conquerors and Slaves by Keith Hopkins, 1978, pp. 61-63.
4. Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD by Peter Brown, 2012, pp. 330, 366, and 327.
5. De gubernatione Dei (“The Government of God”) 5.9.45, paraphrased and discussed in Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD by Peter Brown, 2012, pp. 433-450.

​The recent (apparently) accidental death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash, along with Iran’s prolific foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, has prompted much speculation and discussion about what changes in Iran’s political power arrangement may occur. How will this affect the nation of Iran itself? What are the prospects of the Resistance Axis against Zionism that Iran leads? As is often the case, the discussion in both the mainstream media and even many progressive/left media traffic in cliches and superficiality, even going so far to make Chicken Little proclamations that the Islamic Republic will imminently fall due to the death of some of its leadership. This mistakes the true pillars of power in the Islamic Republic of Iran to be individual clerics and politicians (rather than the foundational institutions these leaders stand on).

In the following essay I intend to make the argument that Iran’s system has a deeply grassroots character built on mass working class support, which makes its political system extremely difficult to dislodge- despite the best efforts of the US Pentagon and the CIA, the Zionist entity, the Gulf monarchies and their Wahabbi/Salafi proxies. It can be argued that Iran is not only anti-imperialist, but socialist, a rare model of Islamic socialism that has not existed elsewhere since Libya’s model of Islamic socialism was destroyed in 2011.

How Iran’s unique economy developed

First, some historical context is necessary. In its 2,500 years of history, Iran/Persia has never had an economy that could be considered a free market. The state has always played a dominant role. From the ancient Persian Empire onwards a powerful, centralized monarchy ran what could be considered a ‘palace economy’ whereby the great bulk of resources went to the king and his officials, who redistributed resources as they saw fit. In essence, the palace planned the economy (this system also existed in ancient Egypt, Babylonia and China).

This system had a nobility, but they never had the same power or status that the feudal nobility possessed in medieval Europe. The Persian emperor was so vastly wealthier than all the nobles put together that they were completely subordinate to him. The emperor was also obligated to protect the serfs from the worst abuses of the nobles, and “Debt Jubilees”, in which the emperor canceled the debts of peasants to their lords, were a tradition.

Iran/Persia got its first exposure to the global capitalist system with the rise of the petroleum economy. Oil was discovered by British speculators in Abadan in 1901, and 13 years later British capitalists acquired effective control over all major oil production in Iran, a monopoly they held for 37 years via the Anglo Iranian Oil Company. For 2/3rds of a century Iran’s oil production was dominated by foreign imperialists: first the British until the 1950’s and later the US from the 1950’s until the 1979 revolution. As bad as this exploitation was, it was largely confined to this one industry. Since petroleum was fairly disconnected from the rest of Iran’s economy, foreign exploitation of that commodity did not have the same debilitating and deforming effect on the countries overall economic development that, for example, the British cotton industry had in Egypt and India, which meddled deeply in those countries' food production. Iran was never formally colonized, meaning it kept much of its traditional economic structure and social cohesion intact.

The Pahlavi Ancient regime

The Shah Reza Pahlavi, Iran’s last monarch who reigned from 1941 to 1979, was a brutal US backed autocrat. Nonetheless, some of his policies unwittingly set the stage for Iran’s revolutionary economic system today. Desiring to turn Iran into a great modern power, the Shah enacted a series of reforms between 1963 and 78 that radically altered Iranian society, known as the “White Revolution” (white being the color of the monarchy). These included major land reforms in the countryside, where the rural estates of big landowners were broken up and redistributed as small plots to the peasantry. This completely upended the rural feudal order. The Shah did this not out of benevolence to the peasants but to break the power of the traditional landed nobility, who he compensated by granting them ownership of businesses in the major cities.

The Shah also reinvested some of Iran’s massive oil revenues into the country's manufacturing base outside the oil sector, kick starting an industrial revolution in the country. He imposed trade barriers and tariffs to keep out foreign competitors and protect local Iranian industrial capitalists. Paved roads and railways connecting the major Iranian cities were built for the first time. Urbanization accelerated and the modern working class exploded in numbers (the urban population went from 7.2 million in 1960 to 18.2 million in 1979, which was 33% to 50% of the total population in two decades). Iran produced virtually no steel in 1960, by 1977 it was producing as much steel as Britain.

But the fruits of this modernization and development in the 1960’s-70’s did not reach the overwhelming majority of Iranians, and this is what doomed the monarchy. In 1973 85% of all private industry in Iran was owned by only 45 families. The Iranian capitalist class was tiny and completely dependent on the Shah for contracts and favors- the Shah preferred it this way, as he wanted to be sure no one amongst the Iranian bourgeoisie became potential rivals. Thus, the Iranian capitalists had no political independence from the monarchy.

Iran’s middle class was somewhat larger, about 5% of the population, or around 2 million out of 40 million people total. Many were culturally liberal and adopted Western fashions and trends. But 95% of the Iranian people remained deeply exploited, impoverished and highly religious workers, farmers, artisans and small shopkeepers. They grew to resent the monarchy’s rampant corruption, the neglect of the urban and rural poor, the Shah’s alliance with Western imperialist powers and disrespect for traditional religious and social norms.

The Shah, obsessed with centralizing power around himself, had systematically weakened and reduced the size of two classes which had a vested interest in defending his regime, the landed nobility and the urban bourgeoisie. He also alienated much of the middle class with his refusal to make liberal political reforms and his personalized, autocratic rule. He wound up with millions of enemies and only a handful of allies.

These tensions came to a boiling point in 1978-79, when the working-class majority, in alliance with nationalist minded petit bourgeois and Islamic clergy, rose up in their millions against the monarchy.

Thus, the revolution in Iran quite swiftly destroyed the political power of the Iranian bourgeoisie, who were expropriated or fled the country when the monarchy collapsed. In 1979 state power passed from the hands of the monarchy which ruled in the interests of a handful of capitalists and aristocrats to a vanguard of Islamic clergy whose base of mass support rested on the impoverished working class/peasant majority. The centrally planned economy which was already in place was redirected in service of the Iranian people and nation as a whole instead of a small elite.

What is important to recognize is that while the Islamists, liberals and Marxists who took part in the revolution against the Shah had different ideas regarding what path Iran would take following the deposing of the monarchy, there was significant cross pollination in terms of their ideas. Shia populism, representing a dissident strand of Islam that had often been at odds with the wealthy and the powerful in the Muslim world over the centuries, had common ground with many aspects of socialist thought.

A notable example of this was the political and religious development of Mahmoud Taleghani, a leading intellectual influence on the Iranian Islamic Revolution and a lieutenant of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Taleghani was imprisoned alongside Iranian Marxists under the Shah and frequently engaged in debates and discussions with them. While rejecting Marxism on the grounds that he found historical materialism incompatible with Islamic faith, he took their arguments seriously and socialism heavily influenced his ideas. In Taleghani’s famous book “Islam and Ownership” he argued in favor of collective ownership of natural resources in the national interest, saying this was in line with Quranic teachings. Taleghani was even called ‘the Red Mullah’ for this reason.

In the economic policies implemented by the leadership of the Islamic Revolution since 1979, conceptions of social justice, the uplifting of the poor and an opposition to usurious financial speculation at odds with healthy national development have helped shape Iran’s economic institutions.

How do these state institutions of Islamic socialism operate in Iran? Let’s examine them in turn.

1. The Bonyads

One aspect of Iran’s post 1979 economy which is very non capitalist is known as the Bonyads. These are Islamic charity organizations, essentially run as cooperatives, which are responsible for providing social services and welfare to Iran’s working classes. They are usually administered by religious clergy. Although they receive state funds and subsidies, they are not directly state run and make the day-to-day decisions as to how funds are allocated and spent. Eighty percent of Bonyads are estimated to run at a loss yet continue receiving state subsidies because their function is social, not profit driven. Twenty to thirty percent of Iran’s entire economy consists of these Bonyad enterprises. One of the more famous Bonyads, the Mostazafan Foundation of Islamic Revolution, is the single largest holding company in the entire Middle East. It consists of the Shah’s expropriated personal properties.

The Bonyads employ up to five million Iranians, causing Western business outlets and pro neoliberal Iranian opposition groups to complain that these organizations are ‘overstaffed’, bloated and inefficient. In a capitalist framework, having large institutions devoted to reducing unemployment as an end in itself makes no sense, but under the religious and economic justice priorities of the Bonyads it makes perfect sense. In Islam “zakat”, or charity is one of the Five Pillars of Faith for any true believer. Iran is unique in that it took a practice that was normally the prerogative of individuals to carry it out and made it a central duty of the state to subsidize and promote.

2. The Basij

This is another component of Iran’s revolutionary system and how the government is connected with the working masses. The Basij is often incorrectly described as only a pro government militia. Although that is one of its functions, it doesn’t come close to describing the actual picture.

The Basij were first created during Iran’s 1980-88 war with Iraq, where local councils were set up on a community, village and neighborhood level to defend the Islamic Revolution from foreign invasion and internal counterrevolution. When the war ended in 1988, the Basij took on many other functions besides military, community service, education, health clinics, infrastructure construction/repair, and disaster relief. Their mandate is to serve the Iranian masses. Joining is voluntary, and the only requirement for joining is that you agree with the principles of the Iranian Islamic Revolution.

Today the Basij councils have 17 million members. Each council has a “base” at a neighborhood or village level. Approximately 60-80,000 of these bases exist nationwide, with as few as ten people or as many as 100+ assigned to each base. Their recruits are overwhelmingly drawn from the working class and the poor. Half the Basij are youth, and one third are women. Basij are not only Muslims- there are also Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Basij as well.

A required part of becoming a member of the Basij is ideological, religious and political education. Members are expected to take classes in the Quran, studying the works of key thinkers of the Iranian Revolution (for example, Ayatollah Khomeini, Morteza Motahhari, Ali Shariati, Mahmoud Taleghani), the struggle in Palestine, ethical codes of conduct, and other subjects. The Basij are under the direct command of the Supreme Leader of Iran and answer to no one else.

One of the appeals of the Basij is access to higher education, 40% of undergraduate university positions and 20% of graduate school positions are reserved for Basij members, making it attractive for working class people to join.

When you look beyond the ideology espoused, the structure and function of the Basij is almost identical to that of the Communist Party apparatus that existed in the USSR and which still exists in China, Cuba, Vietnam and the DPRK today. The Supreme Leader of Iran, the Guardian Council and the religious clergy in the holy city of Qom function as the politburo/party vanguard, while the Basij councils are the equivalent of the soviets in Russia or the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution in Cuba, which keep the leadership rooted in the working masses. Whether the ideology is Marxism Leninism or Shia populism/Islamic socialism, the institutions themselves are very similar.

One cannot possibly understand how the Islamic Republic has held together for 45 years in the face of war, sanctions, imperialist encirclement, and ethnic separatist terrorism if one doesn’t recognize the popular and working-class backbone of the Iranian state.

3. Iranian Revolutionary Guard

It might seem strange to include them in an analysis of Iran’s economic system, but the Revolutionary Guard are key players in Iran’s planned economy. They directly own and control much of Iran’s vital infrastructure outside the oil industry- roads, natural gas, railways, even banking. Many of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard were Basij militia in their youth, and thus have been heavily vetted as patriotic and committed to the ideas of the Islamic Revolution. The purpose of them managing Iran’s infrastructure is Iran’s national security above all else.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards are important to mention because Western media coverage often talks about Iran’s state run assets being ‘privatized’, especially during the tenure of President Ahmadinejad (2005-2013), when in reality most of these so called privatizations transferred state run enterprises (under the purview of the Iranian parliament) to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. So, Iranian assets were moved from state control to state control- not privatization at all, not in the neoliberal sense anyway.

So, between the Bonyads, the officially state-run sector, and enterprises run by the Revolutionary Guards, the majority of Iran’s economy is either directly controlled by the state or subsidized by it.

In conclusion, the lesson to be taken from this overview of Iran’s economy is that whether you can technically label Iran’s economy as socialist or not (despite the many controversies over what socialism is), it is crystal clear that it is NOT a neoliberal or free market system. The main purpose of this economic model is to 1) Ensure the economic sovereignty and national security of Iran and 2) Provide a safety net for the working classes and rural poor who are the main base of support for the Islamic Republic. It is not about enriching individuals.

Even allowing for corruption where unscrupulous individuals misuse such institutions to enrich themselves (a problem in every socialist system including the USSR and China), it is a very difficult environment for a conventional bourgeoisie to grow, much less flourish. The arch neoliberal heritage Foundation ranks Iran in terms of ‘economic freedom’ (openness of its markets) in the bottom ten, along with the DPRK, Cuba, and Venezuela.

Contradictions and Ongoing Challenges of Iran’s Islamic Socialism

Obviously, the threat of a direct military confrontation with Zionism is dominating the headlines, as is ISIS terrorism (the heinous attacks on the memorials for General Soleimani that killed over 100 people this January comes to mind). But the biggest vulnerability of the Islamic Republic are the class contradictions arising from within Iran itself. Without resolving these contradictions, Iran cannot continue to be the effective leader of the Resistance Axis and the player in the emerging multi polar world it aspires to be.

In certain ways, the Islamic Revolution is burdened by one of its greatest successes: the expansion of its middle classes. In 1979 only 5% of Iran’s population was middle class, now over 34% is. This was not a mere accident, but a result of government policy. In the wake of the Iran Iraq war, the government provided university scholarships for millions of family members of veterans of the conflict; In effect, Iran’s version of the GI Bill. This gave many working-class men and women access to a university education for the first time and allowed them to enter the middle class. In a twist of irony, this very class created by the Islamic Revolutionaries has largely come to turn against the Islamic socialist system.

Liberals and even many Marxists ignore the class dimension of these clashes in Iranian society. This class conflict is best represented and explained by the two main parties in Iranian politics. There are the Reformists (as represented by President Khatami who was in office from 1997-2005) and President Rouhani (served 2013-2021), and the Principalists (represented by President Ahmadinejad when he served 2005-2013), and Raisi (who served from 2021 until his death in 2024). The Iranian middle class tends to vote for the Reformers, the working class tends to vote for the Principalists. There are of course exceptions, but these are the general trends.

The Iranian middle class tends to desire more personal freedoms and resents the conservative religious laws enforced by the clergy. As aspiring entrepreneurs, they feel stifled by the large public sector, and demand privatization of the state-run enterprises/the bonyads. Many are also unenthusiastic about Iran’s commitment to the Palestinians and other anti-imperialist causes, feeling that these constitute an unnecessary drain on Iran’s resources.

By contrast the working class/rural poor majority, roughly 2/3rds of the population, feels differently. They support maintaining the state sector (since they materially benefit from it), and since they are extremely religious, tend to view cultural liberalization as creeping Western influence.

The two camps have come into increasing conflict with each other. The West funds, encourages, and carries out information warfare in support of the Reformist camp, since they see them as more likely to destabilize and bring down the Islamic Republic.

In 2009, President Ahmadinejad won re-election, and the Reformers cried fraud, mobilizing a largely upper middle-class movement known as the Green Movement. Working class Principalists supporters, Basij activists, and police fought against them in the streets and dozens were killed, and thousands arrested. Western and Iranian exile media gave overwhelmingly positive coverage to the Green Movement.

The same playbook unfolded in 2021-2022. In 2021, another Principalist, Raisi, won Iran’s national elections. The next year, the same middle-class forces that supported the Green Movement seized upon the death of Mahsa Amini to kick start mass protests against the government- protests which became violent. Hundreds were killed by the police and security forces as well as by the protesters themselves (the exact numbers of those killed and the circumstances of their deaths is hotly disputed). There was also an ISIS terrorist attack on a Shia shrine at the same time as the protests, further contributing to the destabilization.

How can these contradictions in Iranian society be resolved? The harsh US sanctions on Iran give encouragement to the Reformist/middle class tendencies, who believe that if Iran relaxes its anti-Western posture, drops its anti-neoliberal and anti-imperialist policies (especially its support for Palestine), the sanctions will be lifted and the new prosperity from trade with the West will boost the middle class. This was the logic of President Rouhani's nuclear deal with the Obama administration in 2015. While it did initially succeed in increasing Iran’s trade with Europe, the Trump administration pulling out of the deal and assassinating General Soleimani in 2020 proved the Principalist arguments against the agreement correct, and badly damaged the credibility of the Reformist camp.

By contrast, the late President Raisi’s strategy has been to turn to the rising Chinese/Russian economic bloc for economic support instead, working around the US sanctions and not compromising on the Islamic Republic's anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist principles. It seems likely that with time, prosperity coming from trade via the Belt and Road will help create a different middle class, one that has access to the consumer goods and opportunities it desires, but one that is also loyal to the Islamic Revolution and turns to the East instead of the West for inspiration.

Therefore, the notion that the Iranian system is a house of cards in imminent danger of collapse is in error. Given the deep well of support and legitimacy the system has with the majority of the population, a rapid collapse is unlikely barring a nuclear conflict or some equivalent catastrophe. Hopefully, the turn towards the BRICS and multipolarity will be continued by whoever Raisi’s successor is in a prudent fashion to resolve Iran’s external and internal contradictions. Iran’s upcoming Presidential elections on June 28 will provide more clarity on the path forward, but a continuation of the path the late Raisi took is likely, due to the factors outlined in this essay.

Sources/Further reading:

Kevan Harris, A Social Revolution: Politics and the Welfare State in Iran(University of California Press, 2017)

Razmin Mazaheri, Socialism’s Ignored Success:Iranian Islamic Socialism(PT. Badak Merah Semesta, 2020).

Vali R. Nasr, The Shia Revival(W.W. Norton, 2006).

Mahmoud Taleghani, Islam and Ownership(Mazda Publishers, 1983).

Woman, Life, Fiction: Exposing the Lies Behind Iran’s 2022 Color Revolution.(January 8, 2024) RTSG publications. https://rtsg.substack.com/p/woman-life-fiction

Graphic of social gains of the Iranian Revolution:

Author 

​Marius Trotter is a writer residing in Massachusetts. He comments on history, politics, philosophy and theory. He can be reached by his email [email protected]

​I.- The transformation of the MPK
 
According to a materialist vision of history, the Capitalist Mode of Production (MPK[1]) underwent a qualitative  change in the transition to the twentieth century. Although the dominance of capitalist private property continues to be in force, two phases can be distinguished in the vector of competition: 1) the classical form, an MPK based on the free competition of capitalist units (MPK-LC) and 2) the transitional form, an MPK based on the annulment of competition derived from the advent of joint-stock companieswhich constitute oligopolies organized into cartels of production and exchange on the scale of the world market (MPK-SA).
 
The difference is that the MPK-LC operates under private capital while the MPK-SA does so under shared capital. This is what Marx (2015) points out as "the abolition [Aufhebung] of capital as private property within the limits of the capitalist mode of production itself" (p.562). This leap implied the expansion of the MPK-LC on a global scale through the development of the financial system, the time vector 1914-1944-1971 reflects the long geopolitical  journey established by the United States' unilateral dominance through the monopoly of the world currency. Since it has been propped up by military force and the imposition of debt, the mode of production is converted from a simple joint-stock company into financial imperialism (MPK-IF).[2]
 
This implies not only the geopolitical arrangement between blocs and equilibrium forces, but also the geo-economic  arrangement that orients the dominant channels of profit valorization to their next level: the capitalization of interest (i.e., the advent of the domination of capital at interest[3]). At this point it is necessary to remember that there is a leap between the use of money as credit and money as capital. Therefore, capitalism is not financialized [4] but simply that it has fulfilled its historical mission and what was once an abstraction today is presented as a real abstraction, it is the consummation of the capitalist telos.
 
II.- Differentiation between the political State and the economic State
 
Marxist analysis starts from a vision of totality via the analysis of the Historical Modes of Production (MPH) that constitute their evolutionary interconnection through the dialectic between Productive Forces (FP) and Social Relations of Production (PSR) whose tensions are derived from the coincidence (or not) between the two. Thus, the FP achieved by the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century pushed, first, to a world war and then to a renewal of the form of property through the use of the financial system. It is this tension that causes the need to distinguish between the political state and the economic state.
 
In this way, the institutionality produced at Bretton Woods constituted power links between states. The monopolization of the world currency generated the possibility of modulating the three constituent functions of the MPK: Commercial Capital (KC), Productive Capital (KP) and Monetary Capital (KD), giving hegemony to the latter. That is, the valuation of profit was subsumed under the capitalization of interest. The form of property underwent mutations since under this regime the capital in functions is divided between a management or financial aristocracy and the capitalist as owner.
 
The development of the financial system on a global scale is made up of the credit system (core), the payment system and the stock market, entities that constituted an economic state that seeks the capture of the debtor republics around the hegemonic country that, given its exceptionality, functions as a monarchy issuing money-credit. The central point for the discussion is to understand the dialectical relations in which a certain form is modified depending on the domain on which it is found. The analytical gap between the nation state and the global state has produced, from my point of view, the concealment of the corresponding modulator, given the FP achieved, of the node that allows the modification of the form of property when financial capital is dominant: the monetary standard[5].
 
 III.- The form of ownership and its impact on the RSPs
 
The form of property should not be confused with its derived legal existence, but rather the economic form that generates a certain type of distribution, not only of the results of production but also of the means of production. Thus, a society based on private property will be qualitatively different from one based on social property. Different types of RSPs will be needed. The current problem has to do with the fact that capitalization allows a permanent flow of available social labor to the propertied classes, even without participating directly in the productive processes. Thus, the republics become zones of extraction of surplus value via debt.
 
In fact, the current geopolitical system in which the United States serves as the hegemonic pole, Europe and Japan as the semi-periphery and the rest of the world as subordinate countries, has its basis in the type of debt management that one has. While the United States can issue credit money, the semi-fair can benefit from this issuance, but it remains subject to the strategies imposed by the hegemonic country. The case of subordinate countries has the characteristics that their public budgets and industrial policies are intervened under the weight of creditors and their international rating systems.
 
These are the constraints that, for example, are often forgotten when making an assessment of the circumstances in which the 4T is unfolding.
 
IV.- The crisis of the dollar system and the emergence of new blocs
 
Currently the dollar system is experiencing its classic crisis, that is, the moment in which the FPs that operate in the development of money capital systematically clash with the stagnant RSPs expressed in the geopolitical equilibrium. The crisis of 2008 is the breaking point at which financial imperialism had to abandon the mythical horizon of a perpetual mechanism of profits. Like any crisis, the reality of the RSPs was shown in full light, in this case, junk or subprime loans showed something that Karl Polanyi had already witnessed since the crisis of 1929: the flimsy foundations on which capitalist rotation rests as a monetary economy.
 
Since 2008, a whole disturbance of the MPK-IF has been developing, since a new bloc called BRICS has emerged, which, having gone from being at first an aspirationist declaration, today has a real force that, like tectonic plates, the imminent clash has generated new civilizational frontiers, as is the case of the NATO versus BRICS proxy war on Ukrainian soil and the Palestinian genocide at the hands of a Zionist entity that seeks instability in a strategic place such as the Middle East. This is why de-dollarization is a central task.
 
V.- The Global Economic State and Limited Sovereignty
 
The Global Economic State (EEG) represents the global relationship that exists between nation states as real producers (domains of the KP).  What the monopoly of the world currency has meant is, thanks to the interrelations of capitals around the competition for magnitudes of global social capital (KSG), an interdependence that inhibits nation states from exercising sovereignty in their economic policies. Countries depend on their internal contradictions, no doubt, but also on global relations of domination.
 
The paradigmatic case of the sudden flight of capital and the speculative movements of vulture capital exemplifies the coercion with which the world market imposes itself on the interests of any population on the planet. The dollar-based financial system also inhibits the possibility of direct relations between countries without the intermediation of the dominant pole.
 
This EEG, derived from its global scale, is barely recognizable by populations, this explains to a large extent how protests are usually unsuccessful if they are only directed against the political state in its particularity or if they enunciate capitalism as an abstraction that only exists in the idea and not in the concrete.
 
VI.- The search for a new monetary standard
 
The central point is that, despite the violence that is generated by a type of socialization, that is, the search for a new monetary standard points to a change in its design, not to a simple substitution of one currency for another, it is a matter of using FPs that allow the RSP to be modulated through a pattern that allows direct interaction between the different republics.
 
In other words, the capacity that remains latent is that of a socialization outside the constraints of the latest capitalist version, that is, the MPK-IF is transformed into a mode of social production that points towards the possibility of establishing relations between producers, but under free association. This frames the evolutionary horizon proposed by Marx as the economic form that results from capitalist metabolism: the Associated Free Producers (PLA). And, since this happens under a principle of socialization, we can enunciate the transition period as MPS-PLA. The K for capital is replaced by the S for social.
 
That is, the period from the 20th century to the 21st century, if we look at it from the perspective of capitalist development, it is about the MPK-IF, but if this process is observed from the hypothesis of the transition theory, it is about the construction of the MPS-PLA. The removal of the paper-based monetary standard has given way to a digital-based pattern. Its objective would be, as shown by blockchain technology, to dispense with the validation of a central bank to carry out direct exchanges. This would be the basis of the MPS-PLA.
 
VII.- Production of subjectivity and transition to MPC
 
This comparative analysis of interfaces entails, in turn, the need for reflection on the production of subjectivity, derived from the fact that the capitalist ideological system has managed to dissipate the intelligibility of its internal mechanisms and has eternalized its imaginary. Hence, in current discussions, capitalism is enunciated as if it were an eternal substance without processes of change.
 
Thus, in the contemporary left, and especially that which practices the fetish of purity, as Carlos Garrido puts it, they reduce all novelty in the mode of production, especially that of China, as if it were a capitulation of the communist revolution to the market (Garrido 2023). That is to say, the unnoticed social impulse that develops the dominance of money capital is hidden and closes the doors to the internationalism necessary to exercise the new geopolitics based on free and non-subordinate relations.
 
What is at stake is to consolidate the objective of economic metabolism, moving from a vision of accumulation to one based on the reproduction of life. In addition, it brings into view the critical horizon that currently haunts us: the metabolic rupture between the social and the natural. With this I want to point out that the PLAs move from the specifically social to the social-natural, that is, to the organic composition of the social as an expression of the natural, but also the new natural that arises from the social, that is, what I call: communitarian, while the illusory community transitions towards a real organic community once it internalizes the new FP achieved after MPK.
 
Once all this content returns to the vision of analysis, let's say that the content of the use values is recovered and the global vision is recovered as the construction of architectures, not for capitalization or valorization, but for the reproduction of the enrichment capacities of the social-natural experience. In this case, the end of accumulation is abandoned and, therefore, capitalism is overcome. Hence, the enunciation of this phase in which the metabolic breakdown is overcome can be called the community mode of production (CPM) based on associated free broodstock (RLA).

Notes

[1] I will always use K to refer to capital for the purpose of using a distinctive that allows a clear notation.

[2] Maurizio Lazzarato (2023) points out: "Globalization, halfway between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, radically changes capitalism because, among other things, a new relationship between State and capital is established within it. The concept of imperialism perfectly captures this turning point: sovereign action, administrative action and military action are absolutely necessary in this new stage for the life and development of capital (as well as for the development of technology and science)" (p.68)

[3] In the theories of surplus value, Marx (1989) points out: "With capital at interest, this automatic fetish is perfected, the value that valorizes itself, the money that gives birth to money, without the scars of its origin being visible in this form. The social relation here acquires its finished manifestation, as the relation of a thing (money, commodity (to itself)." (p.404)

[4] It is worth making this distinction because in the standard discussion of the financial domain it has become common to think of speculation as a deviation from the productive when, as is known, exchange value is the absolute destination of capitalist accumulation.

[5] Karl Polanyi (2017) points out: "The breakdown of the international gold standard constituted the invisible link between the disintegration of the world economy that began during the transition to the twentieth century and the transformation of the entire civilization in the 1930s. Unless we realize the vital importance of this factor, it is not possible to see clearly either the mechanism that threw Europe into an inexorable disaster, or the circumstances that explain the astonishing fact that the forms and contents of a civilization rested on such precarious foundations" (p.82)
 
Bibliography


Garrido, C.L. (2023). The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism. Midwestern Marx Publishing Press. Dubuque.

Lazzarato, M. (2023). The imperialism of the dollar: crisis of US hegemony and revolutionary strategy. Lemon Ink. Buenos Aires.

Marx, K. (1989). Theories on Surplus Value III. Fondo de Cultura Económica. Mexico

Marx, K. (2015). Capital: the global process of capitalist production. Volume III, vol. 7. Siglo veintiuno editores. Mexico.

Polanyi, K. (2017). The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Fondo de Cultura Económica. Mexico.

Author 

Dr. Oscar D. Rojas Silva is a Professor of Political Economy at FES-Acatlán UNAM.

​Such is the extent of Islamophobia in Western societies since the start of this century that the notion that there even could be such a thing as ‘Islamic Science’ would be met with scepticism in some quarters. The 9/11 attacks and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistran and Iraq spawned a wave of anti-Muslim bigotry in Europe and North America that now make it the dominant form of racism in those parts of the world. The ill-conceived ‘War on Terror’ devised by Bush and Blair provoked counterattacks from the Muslim world by terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda and Isis which exacerbated the negative stereotype of Islam that has prevailed in the West for decades.

Hard-right politicians such as Farage in the UK, Le Pen in France and the AFD in Germany have perniciously exploited the othering of Islamic communities in their countries for electoral advantage. Across Europe, Islamophobic policies such as burka bans and restrictions on Muslim worship have become increasingly normalised. The EU has adopted a ‘Fortress Europe’ siege mentality which condemns thousands of refugees, most of whom come from majority Muslim states, to watery graves in the seas surrounding the continent. In the UK, the government’s Prevent agenda is nominally aimed at tackling all forms of extremism but, in reality, blatantly penalises the Islamic community more than any other.

Historic ironySamuel Huntington’s book The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order, published in 1996, became one of the key texts that provided academic cover for this resurgence of Islamophobia in the West. Huntington took his title from a phrase used by another neocon U.S. commentator, Bernard Lewis, in an article titled ‘The Roots of Muslim Rage,’ written the same year. In that piece, Lewis claimed:

It should by now be clear that we are facing a mood and movement in Islam far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations. The perhaps irrational, but surely historic receptions of an ancient rival against our Christian heritage, our secular present and the world-wide expansion of both. It is crucially important that we on our side should not be provoked into an equally historic but also equally irrational reaction against that rival.

The great historic irony of Huntington and Lewis’ attempt to validate the assertion of U.S. military power in the Middle East since 9/11 is that many of the intellectual and technical innovations that allowed the West to rise to global hegemony from the seventeenth century onwards were devised by thinkers from that same region during what is known to historians as ‘the golden age of Islam’, lasting approximately from the nineth century to the fourteenth CE.

In one of the great outpourings of human creativity that matches Periclean Athens or Renaissance Florence, geniuses such as Al-Farabi, Al-Hazen and Ibn Sina made breakthrough discoveries in subjects such as chemistry, mathematics and medicine that shaped thinking for generations to come. Over time, these innovations would be transmitted north to Europe and be deployed for the purposes of colonial aggression by rising capitalist powers such as England, Holland and Portugal, ironically often against Islamic states such as Egypt and Turkey, which had previously surpassed them in terms of scientific achievement. The BBC Science presenter, Jim Al Khalili summarises this myth-busting historical point which the likes of Huntingdon, Farage and Le Pen would never acknowledge:

What is only now becoming clear (to many in the west) is that during the dark ages of medieval Europe, incredible scientific advances were made in the Muslim world. Geniuses in Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus and Cordoba took on the scholarly works of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, Greece, India and China, developing what we would call “modern” science. New disciplines emerged—algebra, trigonometry and chemistry as well as major advances in medicine, astronomy, engineering and agriculture. Arabic texts replaced Greek as the fonts of wisdom, helping to shape the scientific revolution of the Renaissance.

Insurgent powerIslam emerged as a potent political force in the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century CE, unifying the Bedouin tribes of the desert with the growing wealth of merchants and traders in urban centres such as Mecca and Medina. The decline of neighbouring empires in Byzantium and Persia created a vacuum which the energised forces of the Prophet Mohammed were able to fill with revolutionary rhetoric premised on the equality of all peoples before the unifying figure of the deity, Allah. This appealed to the urban poor and slaves of the region, and accounts for the explosive growth of the faith in the decades following Mohammed’s revelation of his revolutionary message around 610 CE. Marxist historian of religion, Paul Siegel, notes how the insurgent power of early Islam was able to topple decaying elites in Persia, Syria and Egypt:

Beyond these countries Islam expanded like a compressed force that had been released. Within a century of Muhammad’s death (AD 632) it conquered the vast expanse between the Himalayas and the Pyrenees, an empire larger than the Roman Empire at its height. The great cities of Damascus, Jerusalem, Aleppo, and Antioch were taken. Alexandria, the foremost commercial city in all the world, fell after a siege lasting over a year. The border of China was reached; North Africa was added to the Islamic empire; Spain was acquired; Europe itself seemed threatened, as it was for centuries. Nothing had ever been seen like this amazing series of victories.

State-sponsored enlightenmentThe rapid conquests by the armies of the Prophet provided access for the new Islamic empire to the vast intellectual legacy of the ancient world. The new rulers of the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties which presided over this golden age of the next few centuries had the political awareness to absorb the culture heritage of Greece, Persia and India and to encourage their own scholars and scientists to add to it. They were guided by the exhortations of the Prophet to value research and study in all areas of knowledge The Koran declares: ‘An hour’s study of nature is better than a year’s prayer’ and ‘go in quest of knowledge even to China.’

The modern demonisation of Islam as an anti-intellectual force by the hard right completely ignores this era of state-sponsored enlightenment which stretched across four thousand miles, from the Atlantic to the edge of India. Words such as algebra, algorithm, alcohol and zero which have become hard-wired into our way of life can be traced back to this epochal era when science took a quantum leap towards modernity. Noticeably, this was not a male-only intellectual resurgence either with prominent Islamic theorists such as Fatima al-Fihri and Sutayta al-Mahamili contributing as well.

The geographical spread of Islamic territories was part of the reason in 762 why the Caliph Al-Mansur established a research centre, and prototype university—known as the House of Wisdom in his new capital city of Baghdad. This included a library and teaching facilities for the pursuit of knowledge in subjects such as law, medicine, geography and mathematics. The necessity to produce workable maps for merchants across the empire provided the rationale for the advancement of academic study, as did the requirement for pilgrims to be guided on the annual Haj to Mecca by pioneering research in astrology and astronomy, at that time, regarded as related subjects. One of the greatest figures in the House of Wisdom was the ninth-century Uzbek mathematician, Al-Khwarizmi, who became its director under the Caliph Al-Mamum.

Arabic numeralsAl-Khwarizmi’s pivotal contribution to mathematics was his development of the number system which we now use ubiquitously, known pointedly as ‘Arabic numerals’. More manageable than the clunky system of Roman numerals which had prevailed in the West up to that point, Arabic numerals, which utilised the concept of zero and decimal notation, originally came from India and had been introduced to the House of Wisdom by a group of Hindu mathematicians invited there in 771. The multicultural and non-nationalistic nature of Islamic scholarship in the golden age, as evidenced in this case, is one of its most impressive aspects. The Caliphs pursued an explicit policy of tracking down and deciphering documents and ideas from non-Islamic civilisations known as the Translation Movement.

It would be another half a millennium after Al-Khwarizmi until this more sophisticated form of calculation would penetrate European thinking, partly thanks to a twelfth-century translation of his work, Concerning the Hindu Art of Reckoning. Al-Khwarizmi was also tasked by the Caliph with calculating the circumference of the Earth, which he did with an incredible degree of accuracy. His lasting influence right up to our time is perfectly illustrated by the fact that the word ‘algorithm’, which of course refers to an inescapable element of the digital age, is based on a Latinised corruption of his name. The Marxist historian of mathematics, Dirk Struik, reflects on Khwarizmi’s significance:

Al-Khwarizmi’s work plays an important role in the history of mathematics, for it is one of the main sources through which Indian numerals and Arabic algebra came to Western Europe. Algebra, until the middle of the nineteenth century, revealed its Eastern origin by its lack of an axiomatic foundation, in this respect sharply contrasting with Euclidean geometry. The present day school algebra and geometry still preserve these tokens of their different origin.

PolymathsA figure from the Islamic golden age who is possibly more familiar to many British schoolchildren due to his importance in the history of medicine as studied at GCSE is Ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna. Like many of the thinkers of this milieu, he was a polymath whose books, Canon of Medicine and Book of Healing not only dominated the subject long after his lifetime in the eleventh century but also contained digressions on topics such as logic, geometry, astronomy and philosophy. Our notion of academic specialisms usually pursuing avenues of thought unrelated to each other is a product of the division of mental labour which accompanied the rise of capitalism and would have been alien to polymaths such as Al-Khwarizmi and Ibn Sina. Their concept of ‘science’ as a focus of study would have been much more wide-ranging than we are brought up to see it and would have including the above areas, plus even recognising poetry and music as valid forms of expressing ideas.

Born in Persia in 980 CE, Ibn Sina was a child prodigy who had memorised the Koran by the age of ten and went on to become the most authoritative physician, not only in the Islamic world, but also in medieval Europe. He proved his expertise by saving the life of the Caliph from a potentially life-threatening diarrhoeal infection and, as a reward, was granted access to the huge library of the Samanid dynasty at Bukhara. This treasure-trove of learning from antiquity, plus his own insatiable curiosity and hands-on experience, led Ibn Sina to develop many remarkable insights in a wide range of fields, such as discovering that light is made up of particles, the ground beneath our feet is made up of layers of geological strata and that disease can spread through water.

The Aristotelian LeftIntriguingly, a modern Marxist thinker who was particularly impressed by the work of Ibn Sina was Ernst Bloch, an intellectual refugee from Stalinist Eastern Europe who in numerous philosophical works, sought to devise a conceptual framework that might enable the left to rebuild its emancipatory and utopian agenda after the degeneration of the October Revolution. In Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left, first published in 1952, Bloch postulated that the materialist aspects of Ibn Sina’s research in medicine and science could be seen as anticipating the much later theories of dialectical and historical materialism, as devised by Marx and Engels in the nineteenth century.

According to Bloch: ‘Avicenna was a doctor and not a monk, a natural philosopher, not a theologian … without Avicenna, Marx would not have been able to upend the Hegelian world idea so naturally.’ Similarly, the great Lebanese Marxist historian, Hussain Muruwwah in his 1979 study of the golden age of Islam, Materialist Trends in Arabo-Islamic Philosophy, hailed Ibn Sina as an antecedent of the modern left who ‘combined metaphysics with political engagement and was persecuted for it … certainly a living embodiment of a sublime progressive idea called the unity of life.’

Bloch also regards the twelfth-century Islamic thinker, Ibn Rushd, as another progressive figure from the golden age who unwittingly sowed an intellectual seed that would ultimately blossom into Marxism centuries later. Known as Averroes in the West, he was a product of the diverse and multicultural society that existed in Islamic Spain, before being toppled by the Christian reconquest in 1492. In his lifetime, his birthplace of Cordoba rivalled Baghdad as the cradle of intellectual dynamism in the medieval world. In dazzlingly brilliant works such as The Incoherence of The Incoherence, Ibn Rushd sought to defend the legitimacy of reason and science as expressions of religious faith. Bloch argues that the capitalist West (but also the left that would emerge to challenge it) owe a debt to these figures: ‘it is Ibn Sina, along with Ibn Rushd, who—unlike Western scholars—represent one of the sources of our enlightenment and above all, of a most singular materialist vitality, developed out of Aristotle in a non-Christian manner.’

Hopefully, in a future enlightened society that has seen the back of Farage, Le Pen and the other progenitors of Islamophobia, intellectual heroes such as Al-Khwarizmi, Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd will receive the recognition in the non-Islamic world that they already hold among their co-religionists today.

​Dear participants and guests of the Plenum!
​
It has long been noted that during periods of events of world-historical importance, time seems to speed up. What in another period lasted for years, in critical, revolutionary conditions fits into weeks and days. Previously familiar foundations are shaking and collapsing. Gilding is falling off the “sacred” statues. The world is changing quickly.

For the average person, this is a time of anarchy and chaos. He always wants to quickly return to his usual routine and often does not understand: the past will not repeat itself. It has sunk into oblivion.

Communists have their own view of the course of events. Armed with historical materialism and dialectics, they see the true causes and “hidden mechanisms” of the historical process. There are no inexplicable zigzags for them. Followers of Marxism-Leninism do not float “at the will of the waves”; they do not wander blindly in the darkness of the unknown. They accurately understand the background of the phenomena.

In the confusion of 1917, when the three-hundred-year-old Romanov monarchy collapsed, only the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, fully “felt the nerve” of the moment. The course of events then gave rise to a variety of parties and movements. And everyone, it would seem, had a historic chance. But it was the Bolsheviks, deeply understanding the needs and aspirations of the popular majority, who came to victory .

Knowing the laws of history, Lenin’s party did not get lost in the extremely compressed events. It is no coincidence that he himself called for treating the revolution as an art and reminded his comrades that “ history will not forgive delays for revolutionaries who could win today (and will certainly win today), risking losing a lot tomorrow, risking losing everything .”

It is no coincidence that, coming from life, the most talented authors felt the passage of time akin to the genius of Lenin . No wonder Gogol compared Russia with a rushing bird or three, and Tyutchev wrote:

Blessed is he who has visited this world
In his fatal moments,
The all-good ones called him,
As a companion to a feast,
He is a spectator of their high spectacles…

A premonition of great changes visited Russian writers and poets at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. And the prophetic lines of Mayakovsky sounded :

Where people’s eyes break short,
the head of the hungry hordes,
in the crown of thorns revolutions
The sixteenth year is coming.

And here are the words of Alexander Blok from the article “ Intellectuals and Revolution ”: “ We, Russians, are living through an era that has few equals in greatness. The artist’s job, the artist’s duty, is to see what is intended, to listen to the music that thunders in the “wind-torn air.” What is the plan? Redo everything. Arrange so that everything becomes new; so that our deceitful, dirty, boring, ugly life becomes a fair, clean, cheerful and beautiful life… This is called revolution .”

Humanity today is on the verge of dramatic changes. Without understanding their causes, dynamics and consequences, it is easy to become a victim of circumstances, or even of the darkest and most evil forces. The task of our party is to give clear guidelines to the working people, answer the most difficult questions and propose solutions, and on this basis – to unite forces in the fight against reaction, fascism and the military threat. To the fight for socialism!

Imperialist crisis and threats to humanity

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels , exposing the greedy interior of capitalism, discovered that the contradictions underlying this formation inevitably lead to crises. The Communist Manifesto emphasized: “ Bourgeois relations have become too narrow to accommodate the wealth they have created. – How does the bourgeoisie overcome crises? On the one hand, through the forced destruction of an entire mass of productive forces, on the other hand, through the conquest of new markets and more thorough exploitation of old ones. What, therefore? Because it prepares for more comprehensive and more devastating crises and reduces the means to counter them .”

IN AND. Lenin established that imperialism is the highest and final stage of the bourgeois era . He noted that the internal contradictions of capitalism are intensifying, the process of its “internal decomposition” is reaching its utmost severity and the end is inevitable. But the founder of Bolshevism warned against illusions and pointed out that the general crisis of capitalism would last an entire era.

Lenin warned that capital would cling to power, even at the cost of millions of victims and bloody wars. In March 1918, at the VII emergency congress of the RCP (b), he uttered stern and visionary words. Let’s listen to them: “ Marxists have never forgotten that violence will inevitably accompany the collapse of capitalism on all its scale and the birth of a socialist society. And this violence will be a world-historical period, an entire era of the most diverse wars – imperialist wars, civil wars within the country, the interweaving of both, national wars, the liberation of nationalities crushed by the imperialists, various combinations of imperialist powers… This era is the era of gigantic collapses , massive military violent decisions, crises – it has begun, we see it clearly .”

At this stage, the temporary stabilization of capitalism is already a thing of the past . The destruction of the Soviet Union and the system of socialist countries gave respite to the global oligarchy. At the end of the twentieth century, the bourgeoisie lost a powerful rival, whose successes were recognized even by the enemies of the communists.

“ Can capitalism survive? No, I don’t think so ,” admitted economist and sociologist Joseph Schumpeter . According to him, the development of the capitalist system will inevitably ” create conditions in which it cannot survive and will give way to socialism .” “ You can hate socialism… , ” concluded Schumpeter, “ but still foresee its coming .”

And here is what US President John Kennedy said in 1961 in an interview with the Izvestia newspaper: “ I was in the Soviet Union in 1939, as a student, and I understand that many changes have taken place there and that the standard of living of the people is increasing… The Soviet Union is a powerful military power. It has great nuclear power. It has missiles, planes, a large number of divisions, and other countries are connected with it. No one will ever invade the Soviet Union again. There is no military force that could do this .”

While still a senator, Kennedy admitted in 1958: “ Many of us still find it difficult to believe that the Russians have a better university than ours. We believed that our superior wealth would give our children a better education. But we failed to allocate more than an insignificant share for these purposes – at most 3 percent of our national income, in contrast to the Soviet 10 percent… We were greatly mistaken about Russian intellectual delusions. We were wrong about their supposed ignorance… Our lag in educational achievement comes at a cost .”

It is difficult to imagine that in that situation Western politicians seriously counted on sanctions in the fight against the USSR. It is also clear why NATO members hope for success today. They believe that the economy of our country, which they, their agents and vassals in Russia “ torn to shreds ,” will one day not survive.

Kennedy’s words only confirm the scale of the 1991 disaster. Due to unprecedented betrayal, the development of the USSR was interrupted. Western capital acquired a huge market and sources of raw materials. This gift injected fresh strength into the muscles of capitalism and helped soften the growing contradictions.

The destruction of the Soviet Union was regarded in the West as a triumph . On December 25, 1991, US President George H. W. Bush congratulated the nation on its victory in the Cold War in a Christmas address. A month later, in Congress, he declared: “ Communism is dead… With the help of God, America won the Cold War… The greatest victory over the USSR was won, and at the hands of its internal opposition .” These words resonate with pain in our hearts. But US politicians should have studied Lenin carefully. Then they would understand that it is too early to celebrate.

Firstly, the “death of communism” did not happen. Our ideas and our movement are alive . The Communist Party of the Russian Federation celebrated 30 years of its revival . Our comrades include both opposition and ruling communist parties. And together we look confidently into the future.

The secret of the vitality of our ideas is not difficult to reveal. The point is that capitalism has not gone away. With it, exploitation, inequality, poverty, and lack of rights for billions of working people remained. The desire of the masses to correct this injustice is also alive.

Secondly, the destruction of the USSR increased parasitism within the capitalist system . “ Imperialism is a huge accumulation of money capital in a few countries , ” wrote Lenin . He called the consequence the growth of the “rentier layer, i.e. people who live by cutting coupons.” These are persons whose profession is idleness . The export of capital strengthens the isolation of rentiers from production and “ leaves the imprint of parasitism on the entire country, which lives on the exploitation of the labor of several overseas countries and colonies .”

Currently, financial fraud has become global. Entire regions began to suffer from them. Consider, for example, the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998. In 2008, the “bubble” burst on a global scale. Capitalism began to sink faster and faster into the abyss of crisis. Along with economics, it inevitably also covers politics .

In the last century, inter-imperialist contradictions led to two world wars and gave birth to the monster of fascism . Is humanity safe from a repetition of this scenario? Of course no! To be sure, just look around.

Capitalism of the 20s of the 21st century is just as “pregnant” with fascism as in the 20s of the 20th century . The sprouts of inhuman ideology are visible everywhere. This is clearly visible both in the international politics of the leading powers and in their internal life. Far-right movements are gaining strength. The ideology of neo-Nazism is once again receiving patronage at the highest levels of government.

Supporters of extreme right-wing ideas also operate in our country. This is especially dangerous for multinational Russia. Everyone needs to understand well: if anti-Soviet people, Russophobes and outright Vlasovites are nominated for the role of the main fighters against Bandera, nothing good will come of it.

Just like a hundred years ago, only the masses of working people led by communists can block the path to fascism. Today , an effective strategy for defeating the unconditional evil of neo-Nazism is extremely important for us . First of all, it is necessary to clearly indicate what fascism is, where its origins are, what its breeding ground is and how it should be ended .

Makeup for a monster

Dear comrades! On April 22, 2023, at the International Anti-Fascist Forum in Minsk, in the Manifesto for the unification of the peoples of the world, we emphasized: “ Nazism became a direct product of the crisis of capitalism. It grew out of the thirst of big capital to maintain power over the working people at any cost. For their own selfish purposes, the imperialists took the path of supporting the darkest forces. They brought Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and their ideological accomplices to power. From political fringes, the Nazis turned into arbiters of the destinies of many millions of people.

The peoples of the world have no right to forget the experience of fighting fascism… Then fascism turned out to be stronger. This paved the way for the worst war in human history. The final, decisive steps were taken towards the ovens and gas chambers of Buchenwald and Mauthausen, Dachau and Sobibor, Majdanek and Auschwitz .”

For a century now, bourgeois ideologists of various shades have been trying to confuse the issue of fascism and divert attention from the essence of the problem . In the information and educational space of many countries, especially the West, fascism is assessed only as an anomaly and a “tragic dislocation.” Allegedly, the only issue is the defeat of Germany in the First World War and the humiliating conditions of the Versailles Peace. Ideological jugglers explain the persistence of fascism by the machinations of “totalitarian regimes.” According to their mentality, all illiberal systems are related and alien to democracy. Speculation on analogies between fascism and communism is an important part of the West’s propaganda baggage.

We remember well how, in a matter of years, Nazi ideas took hold of millions of minds. The fascists came to power in such dissimilar countries as Germany, Italy, Hungary, Finland, and Spain. How do bourgeois ideologists explain this fact? Back in 1939, the American Philosophical Society held a symposium where it assessed fascism as a totalitarian ideology and “ a revolt against the entire historical civilization of the West .”

Political scientist R. Murstin insisted on the kinship of socialism and fascism. His “argument” is the one-party system in the USSR and the countries of the “brown” bloc. This crafty approach was actively exploited during the Cold War. In 1952, a conference in the United States characterized totalitarian systems as “ closed societies in which everything – from the upbringing of children to the production of products – is controlled from a single center .”

In accordance with the order – to denigrate the Soviet Union – the most unprincipled authors were involved in the case. In 1956,  Zbigniew Brzezinski and Karl Friedrich, in their work “ Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy ,” identified the characteristics of totalitarianism, combining fascism and Soviet socialism.

Karl Popper’s book “ The Open Society and Its Enemies ” also became a reference book for anti-communists . Hiding the premises of fascism, he scholastically deduced the existence of a “closed society.” He indiscriminately included all Nazi and socialist regimes and any societies based on collectivism. Popper called their features the lack of freedom of choice, blind obedience to laws, customs and prohibitions.

Popper called the founders of totalitarianism… Plato, Hegel and Marx . Plato did not please him because he was supposedly “ the first political ideologist who thought in terms of classes .” And Hegel and Marx, in his opinion, substantiated the totalitarianism of the 20th century. Popper proclaimed liberal-bourgeois democracies as “ open societies ”, where reason and freedom reign, and people are aware of their individuality.

Another “guru” of liberalism, Friedrich von Hayek , declared that collectivism and central planning are the “road to slavery.” He declared the differences between collectivism, fascism and communism to be insignificant.

Today this line is being continued. People like US political scientist Tom Nichols call fascism an ideology that elevates the state over the individual, “ worships military power, hates liberal democracy, and wallows in nostalgia and historical grievances .”

All these constructions are propaganda cliches . They do not stand up to any serious scientific criticism.

So, what is attributed to fascism? Tight police control? But the leader in the number of prisoners is the United States.

One party system? There are many countries with such a system. But even where a multi-party system is enshrined in law, one or two parties have dominated for decades. For example, in Japan it is the Liberal Democratic Party, in the USA it is the Republican and Democratic parties.

Suppressing opponents and justifying war? So this is an integral feature of all class-divided societies since ancient times.

After the anti-Soviet coup, Yeltsin’s entourage imposed Western approaches in Russia . They tried to label communists and patriots as red-browns. To substantiate this line, Presidential Decree No. 310 was signed in 1995, ostensibly for the sake of combating “ manifestations of fascism and other forms of political extremism .” Soon a “cut-off” description of the concept of “fascism” appeared, where the emphasis was on asserting the superiority of a certain nation or race, on the denial of democracy, and the suppression of political opponents and dissent.

Pro-Western liberal doctrine has become part of educational programs and many publications. This is exactly how the Encyclopedia of Sociology for 2009 interprets fascism. The unified textbook on the history of Russia for 10th grades in 2023 bypasses the definition of fascism. And in the textbook on general history it is assessed as “ an ideological movement and political movement based on the desire for maximum consolidation of the nation through the complete subordination of society to a dictatorial state .”

The authors of such assessments highlight the political, cultural and other external signs of fascism. But they “lose sight” of the social and economic factors of its emergence. Such manipulations are intended to “put makeup” on the Nazi monster.

The social roots of fascism are not only an “academic” issue. Henry E. Turner, in his book Fascism and Capitalism in Germany , emphasized: “If the widely held belief that fascism is a product of capitalism is true, then such a system cannot be defended . ”

We communists will never agree with those who ignore the key fact: fascism is a creation of big capital and a spokesman for its interests. We are obliged to resolutely expose any attempts to disguise the causes that give rise to Nazi evil. According to the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, solidarity on this issue is one of the fundamental conditions for the creation of any alliances and coalitions with the participation of communists.

Fascism is a form of capitalist rule

Nationalism, totalitarian control over society, leaderism and other features of fascist dictatorships are only derivative products, a kind of superstructure over the base. In fact, fascism is a natural result of the development of Western, capitalist society .

This was most succinctly expressed by the report of Georgiy Dimitrov at the VII Congress of the Comintern . It emphasized that in conditions of a sharp aggravation of the general crisis of capitalism and the revolutionary activity of the working masses, fascism launched a broad offensive. Bourgeois circles are increasingly seeking salvation in fascism in order to rob the working people, incite war, attack the Soviet Union, enslave China and prevent revolution.

“Imperialist circles ,” noted G. Dimitrov, “ are trying to shift the entire burden of the crisis onto the shoulders of the working people. For this they need fascism. They are trying to solve the market problem by enslaving weak peoples, increasing colonial oppression and redividing the world through war. For this they need fascism. They strive to get ahead of the growth of the forces of revolution by crushing the revolutionary movement of workers and peasants and a military attack on the Soviet Union – the stronghold of the world proletariat. For this they need fascism .”

The conclusion was drawn: “ Fascism is an open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, the most chauvinistic and the most imperialist elements of finance capital .”

Thus, fascism became the reaction of the big bourgeoisie to the deepening crisis of capitalism . Saving its system from destruction, capital rejects democracy and turns to terror, reinforcing it with demagoguery. To deceive the working people, fascism uses pseudo-socialist slogans. With the help of nationalism and social demagogy, he mobilizes part of the population in the interests of the exploitative system. Its main mass base is the middle strata of capitalist society.

The populist disguise of fascism was exposed by the French communist writer Henri Barbusse: “ Fascisms differ from each other only in appearance; essentially they are all the same. Their doctrine, which recruits adherents among the youth, the petty bourgeoisie and the church flock, is just the old capitalism, only embellished and re-tinted. Fascism remains and will forever remain just a varnish on disgusting rubbish .”

Fascism became a natural form of development of capitalism at the stage of imperialism . Lenin also emphasized: “ Politically, imperialism is generally a desire for violence and reaction… Democracy corresponds to free competition. Monopoly corresponds to political reaction .”

The higher the concentration of capital, the narrower the ruling class . Power is concentrated in the hands of a handful of representatives of financial capital. The conditions for establishing control over the state and society by aggressive oligarchic groups are being formed.

The transition to imperialism was accompanied by increasing unevenness of economic development . The bourgeoisie of the “belated” countries sought to rely on the support of the state in order to confront the countries of “old capitalism” that created their own colonial empires. The struggle for a “place in the sun” and fear of the labor movement led to the growth of militarism and authoritarian aspirations of the ruling classes. An atmosphere of chauvinistic frenzy was building up. Personnel were recruited for fascist organizations.

The cultural and ideological roots of fascism also grew from the early stages of capitalism. The idea of ​​white supremacy justified colonial conquest, genocide of the indigenous population, and the slave trade. Residents of the colonies were viewed as inferior beings. Human rights did not apply to them.

Thus, the basis for the mass herding of Indian tribes into reservations was the “Doctrine of Discovery” adopted in 1825 by the US Supreme Court. Ownership of land was assigned to those who “discovered” it. For centuries, the Indians who lived there were deprived of this right.

They tried to justify racism. Thomas Carlyle in the essay “ Question of the Black Sea ” complained that “Nigers” are the only “boobs” of colored races that do not die out, faced with a white man. In his opinion, God assigned the fate of blacks to be slaves of those “who were born their masters.” Carlyle angrily called the fighters for the abolition of slavery “unions for the defense of scoundrels.”

The ideologist of British imperialism, S. Rhodes , also used monstrous myths . According to him, “ God wants the dominance of the Anglo-Saxon race ” and he needs to be helped. “ The British are the best race, worthy of world domination ,” he argued.

The British Empire of the 19th century was set as an example for the Germans by Hitler in his book Mein Kampf. The racial doctrine of Nazi Germany was largely based on the works of the Englishman Huston Chamberlain. Goebbels called him “the father of our spirit.”

Capital didn’t just use fascist organizations. He literally nurtured them, taking care of them “from the cradle . ” Since its creation, the German Nazi Party has received generous donations – many times greater than other political forces.

The focus on the reaction was not accidental. Despite the terror, despite the murder of the leaders of the German proletariat Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg , the labor movement in Germany grew. The country experienced the proclamation of the Bavarian Soviet Republic, a series of general strikes, and the Hamburg Uprising. Capital responded to the prospect of a proletarian revolution by supporting Nazism .

In 1922, a group of industrialists formed in Bavaria who bet on Hitler. Among them are H. Aust , A. Pietsch , H. Bruckman , von Maffey . Then the funding of the Nazis from abroad begins. The NSDAP received large funds from the United States from Henry Ford . The Nazi leader called Ford his inspiration. His portrait was in Hitler’s Munich residence. In 1938, Ford was awarded the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest foreign decoration of the Third Reich.

The list of fascist sponsors grew quickly. It was replenished by magnates von Borsig and F. Thyssen . The Rhine-Westphalian Coal Syndicate began making payments to the Nazis from the sale of every ton of coal. One of the leaders of the concern “I.G. Farbenindustry” W. Kepler in 1928 organized a meeting between Hitler and 650 industrialists in Heidelberg.

Hitler had no prospects without the support of the German magnates F. Thyssen , G. Krupp , J. Schacht. Hundreds of other representatives of the ruling class financed the fascist party and provided it with the support of the monopolies, the generals and the Reichswehr. From the first years of the NSDAP, von Staus, a member of the board of the Deutsche Bank, was among its supporters . The Nazis were supported by major bankers Schacht, von Stein, Fischer, von Schroeder , Reinhart and others.

The British-Dutch oil king G. Deterding also played a sinister role . This rabid anti-communist supported the ultra-right in various countries, including emigrant organizations of Russian White Guards. From 1921, Deterding generously sponsored the Nazis. In 1930, the Fuhrer received a significant amount from the English Lord Rothemere . At the end of 1934, a British bank provided a loan of 750 thousand pounds sterling to the German Reichsbank.

The establishment of Hitler’s power was preceded by his meeting with major tycoons on February 20, 1933. Prominent bankers, heads of the Krupp, Siemens, AEG, I.G. concerns were present. Farbenindustry”. Hitler’s plans to liquidate the remnants of democracy found full support. The Nazis received an additional 3 million marks. Exactly a week later, the Reichstag was set on fire, and political reprisals began.

The fascist dictatorship was established with the favor of the Western powers. Hitler violated the restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles. He stopped paying reparations and began to expand the war industry. In 1935, the German armed forces were created. Universal conscription is introduced. The ground army reaches 500 thousand people. Hitler begins to expand his “living space.” Germany’s main suppliers during this period were the USA and Britain. They freed Berlin from debt payments, provided loans, and supplied copper ore and other strategic raw materials.

Western firms helped Hitler establish military production . The British concern Vickers was involved in the construction of the German submarine fleet. The creation of the Third Reich Air Force was not without Anglo-American participation. Armor-piercing British shells for naval artillery and other weapons were sold to Berlin. It is no coincidence that the similarity of this situation with modern Western arms supplies to the Nazi-Bandera regime in Ukraine suggests itself .

With the beginning of the global carnage, the gold looted by the Nazis entered the vaults of the Swiss National Bank and was converted there into the currency needed by the Third Reich. Behind the façade of “democratic societies,” the financial oligarchy manipulated the transmission belts of the universal tragedy. The ruins of Warsaw and Kyiv, Minsk and Coventry, Stalingrad and Rotterdam, the death and destruction wreaked by the fascist VAU, the barbaric atrocities of the Nazis, their gas chambers in Dachau, Auschwitz, Treblinka – the monopolies of the USA and other “democracies” are directly involved in this. In pursuit of profit, trust owners and financial tycoons secretly collaborated with the Reich through shell companies and neutral countries until the end of World War II.

In Italy, the period 1919-1920. called the “red biennium”. An unprecedented strike movement swept the country. Metallurgists, miners, machine builders, railway workers, and textile workers launched a struggle for an 8-hour working day, for improved working conditions and pay. The creation of factory councils and the occupation of enterprise workers began. Farm laborers, sharecroppers, and tenants actively participated in the struggle for land. Under their pressure, in September 1919, the Visokka law transferred part of the lands of large latifundists to peasants and agricultural cooperatives.

The entrepreneurs were angry and found a “strong hand.” Mussolini’s connections with monopolies date back to the First World War . In 1914, he was financed by French and English capital, and the future Duce campaigned for Italy to enter the war on the side of the Entente. It was financed by the Edison, Ansaldo, FIAT groups, the Paroli arms factories, the largest banks and the union of sugar producers.

The fascists’ coming to power in Italy was greeted approvingly in the ruling and business circles of the United States . Italy was allocated more and more loans, turning a blind eye to territorial seizures. In 1925-1928, the United States provided Italy with 22 loans worth $317 million, and even more in 1929. In terms of the volume of direct American investment, Italy has reached fourth place in Europe after Great Britain, Germany and France.

The symbiosis of “liberal democracy” and fascism continued after the end of World War II. The Americans and British saved many Nazi criminals . Many Nazis went into the service of the United States and participated in the creation of NATO. The head of the 12th (intelligence) department of the Wehrmacht General Staff, General R. Gehlen, not only escaped punishment, but also became the creator of the German intelligence service – BND.

The former head of the German Army Group B, Lieutenant General H. Speidel, served as head of the armed forces department of the German Ministry of Defense. He then became commander of NATO’s Allied Land Forces in Central Europe.

General A. Heusinger , responsible for atrocities on the territory of the USSR, rose to the rank of chairman of the NATO military committee.

The Nazis and collaborators were recruited for the information war against the USSR. Radio Liberty announcer Igor Glazenap was the head of the Nazi police in the village of Gremyache, and then rose to the rank of SS officer. Another employee of the Sultan Tarif radio station participated in the execution of the anti-fascist poet Musa Jalil . The editor of Radio Liberty’s European service, Imrich Kruzljak, was a Gestapo employee and head of the propaganda department of the fascist government of Slovakia.

Without recognizing the generic connection with capitalism, it is impossible to give an objective analysis of fascism . The current situation is increasingly favorable to the revival of Nazism. The path is being paved for the strengthening of ultra-right organizations and their conquest of power. The reason is that capitalism has entered its most acute crisis in 100 years. This is caused by two main factors.

First, it is the undermining of Euro-Atlantic hegemony . The West is rapidly losing its position as the only capitalist “center” capable of dictating its will to everyone else. “ The unevenness of economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism ,” Lenin wrote. The economies of a number of non-Western countries are growing confidently. The share of the BRICS states in global GDP at purchasing power parity increased to 35% and exceeded the share of the G7. The contribution of the BRICS countries to global production is even higher – 37%.

China’s economy has overtaken the United States in terms of purchasing power parity . In the next 10 years, it could become the largest in the world in terms of “regular” GDP. In terms of growth rates, China is ahead of the United States. The yuan continues to strengthen.

The situation is changing. More and more countries are not ready to submit to the dictates of Western capital . In their quest for true independence, the peoples of Latin America and Asia are “catching up” with the countries of Africa. The United States and the European Union, especially France, received a slap in the face from Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. Pro-Western regimes were expelled from these countries and “showed the door” to foreign military contingents.

Millions of people reject imperialism and its bloody crimes . Protests against the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people are growing. Countries demand the lifting of the blockade on Cuba and reaffirm the “one China” principle. The West has failed to put together a global front against Russia. The peoples of the world do not want to be pawns in other people’s games and sacrifice their interests.

Secondly, discontent is growing in Western countries themselves . There is also an increase in sympathy for socialism . According to polls, in the US presidential elections, a record number of voters want to vote for “third” candidates unaffiliated with Republicans and Democrats. In the US, the stronghold of capitalism, only 49% of people aged 18 to 34 support the capitalist system. 51% admit to having a positive view of socialism. Almost a third are critical of the institution of private property.

The scale of the strike movement was record-breaking. Last year, there were 470 strikes in the United States with 539 thousand participants. This is 141% more than a year earlier. This is the maximum since the beginning of the century. Recent protests include strikes by teachers in Michigan and Minnesota, bus drivers in Missouri, breweries in Texas, and lumber mills in West Virginia. People demand higher salaries, stable insurance contributions, and a reduction in workload. 

There have not been such numbers of strikes in the UK since the 1980s. In February – April last year, the protests were the largest since they were recorded, that is, since 1931. 

There is nothing surprising about this. Workers respond to capital by taking away their rights and guarantees. In the United States, after the cancellation of “pandemic” benefits, the poverty rate jumped from 7.8 to 12.4%. Every fifth resident of the European Union faces the threat of poverty. The number of poor Britons has increased from 1.5 to 3.8 million in five years. Measures of real inequality in Europe have rolled back eight decades.
Capitalism brings poverty and decay to the whole world . More than 800 million people experience chronic hunger. 282 million of them are teetering on the brink of starvation. The most difficult situation is in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Yemen. The connection with capitalism is direct here.

According to Oxfam, half of the global wealth created over the past 10 years has been appropriated by the top 1%. Over the last 3 years, this share has increased to 63%. Almost another third of wealth goes to the next 9% of “lucky” people. As a result, nine-tenths of the Earth’s inhabitants are content with a modest 10% increase in global assets. It is not the pandemic or the “grain crisis”, but capitalism, which breeds inequality, that is the main reason for the steady mass impoverishment.

According to Chinese analysts, over the past year the number of dollar billionaires in the world increased by 167 people. Their total wealth increased by 9%. Billionaires in the financial sector (+10%), consumer goods (+8%), food and beverage (+7%) and real estate (+7%) grew their wealth the most actively.

There is no need to talk about the incredible talents of these people. Unless they are distinguished by their “talent” of immorality. Thus, the richest businessmen – Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk – pay 1% and 3.3% of their income as taxes, respectively. This is the result of the merging of capital and power . 11% of billionaires hold or have competed for political office in the recent past. Donald Trump became the first dollar billionaire as US President. Emmanuel Macron worked as an investment banker for the Rothschild empire. Rishi Sunak is the richest prime minister in British history.

The transformation of big business into a closed caste is becoming more and more obvious. Over the past year, more than half of the increase in the fortunes of billionaires was due to inheritances received.

It is estimated that even a small increase in taxes on the wealth of the super-rich would lift billions of people out of poverty. However, the neoliberal guidelines of the authorities do not allow this to be done . According to the Lancet magazine (USA), at least 100 million people annually join the ranks of the poor due to the insufficient development of public medicine. Less than half of the funds requested for 2023 for the UN World Food Program have been received. Capital and its governments have completely different priorities .

The Brown Wave and the Need to Mobilize the Left

Comrades! The global demand for change is obvious. Humanity is not ready to put up with a system that dooms it to vegetation and degradation and threatens it with nuclear war . Global capital is taking steps to strengthen its power and prevent its destruction.

At the XV Congress of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation we assessed how the bourgeoisie reacts to the crisis. The imperialists are increasing the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of the largest financial and economic groups . The power of large monopolies and their influence on the IMF, World Bank, WTO, NATO and other supranational structures is growing. The interests of globalists are promoted by the Davos Forum, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Club and other similar centers. The power of capital is increasingly merging with the institutions of power. The largest companies have at their disposal the growing repressive apparatus of the strongest states. Imperialism intensifies the policy of neocolonialism.

Time has confirmed the analysis of our party congress. Capital combats the falling rate of profit with increased exploitation, increased speculation, and military adventures . The world’s predators are also capable of global military conflict.   The West organized a coup in Ukraine and provoked a bloody conflict in Donbass. The situation in the Asia-Pacific region has become more complicated. The situation in the Middle East has worsened. Hot spots on the African continent are multiplying. Capital is increasingly encouraging neo-fascist methods in both the foreign and domestic policies of bourgeois states.

Contradictions in the world are growing against the background of the split of the Western bourgeoisie into two “factions”: “globalist” and “nationalist”. But in the reanimation of fascism, both of them are dirty. “Globalists” continue to parasitize the ideas of democracy and human rights. But this does not prevent them from supporting neo-Nazis on the “periphery.” Ukraine is clear proof of this.

The second camp of the bourgeoisie speculates on the topic of “trampling traditional values” and actively uses the “image of the enemy.” Immigrants and other “outsiders” are listed as enemies. Characteristic are the anti-immigrant rhetoric of Trump, the Spanish party Vox, Alternative for Germany, the Portuguese Chegi and many others.

Both movements express the interests of financial empires. They are trying to restrain the growth of the labor movement and rely on caveman, rabid anti-communism. In the fight against China, Western elites emphasize that their enemy is the Communist Party. In 2019, US think tanks close to the White House created the Committee on the Present Danger: China . Its participants emphasize: “ There is no hope for coexistence with China as long as the Communist Party is in power .”

Despite the change of administrations, Washington is strengthening its anti-Chinese policy. It is enshrined in the US National Security Strategy. The Western oligarchy considers successes in the development of the PRC to be the main threat to its hegemony . Beijing is accused of almost genocide of the Muslim population, of violating the rights of residents of Hong Kong and Tibet. The AUKUS bloc is being created to encircle China. The situation around Taiwan is escalating. Hostility towards China is being fueled in every possible way in Japan, the Philippines, and other countries. Through economic war they are trying to deprive China of modern technologies.

Trump attacked China directly, imposing sanctions, punitive tariffs and other measures on behalf of the United States. The Biden team has relied on building coalitions. In addition to the AUKUS bloc, a trilateral alliance of the USA – Japan – South Korea is being created. The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD) received a second wind.

Global capital thinks in terms of domination . Therefore, the US political elite is united in promoting American interests, regardless of party differences. Her interest is visible everywhere, be it the wars in Syria or Yemen, the tragedy of Donbass, the “umbrella revolution” in Hong Kong, conflicts in the Middle East.

Over the past 10 years, Washington has dramatically increased its debt. By the end of 2013, the White House spent $5 billion just to launch Bandera’s project in Ukraine. By starting wars, US strategists hope to resolve accumulated internal problems. Fascism remains a tool in the hands of the American imperialists.

There are more and more signs that the leading capitalist powers are on the verge of establishing right-wing dictatorships . One of the signs is hate speech . The same Trump says in all seriousness that the influx of migrants to the United States is the result of a conspiracy by the Chinese Communist Party and Latin American governments. “ They bring crime and disease. They are rapists. They are poisoning the blood of our country ,” Trump incites and promises the largest deportation in history.

Adherents of left-wing views should also be targeted. The Trump team’s think tank , the Heritage Foundation, has prepared a plan to cleanse government agencies and the education system of “unreliable” individuals. The ex-president himself promises to dissolve the Ministry of Education, which has been “ infiltrated by radical fanatics and Marxists .” He regularly threatens to crack down on communists and socialists.

Trump just vented his heartburn over the Vladimir Putin-Xi Jinping talks in China . In his opinion, this meeting threatens the very existence of the United States.

In Florida, a Republican stronghold, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed three education bills into law in 2021. A course on the “evil” of communism has been introduced into the curriculum. In state schools, it is now impossible to obtain a certificate without course work on the topic “ Victims of Communism Day .” Already this year, Desantis ordered teaching children about the “evil of communism” starting in kindergarten. Recently this gentleman advocated repression against participants in pro-Palestinian protests. He threatened students with expulsion, and teachers with dismissal.

Anticommunism usually goes hand in hand with the whitewashing of fascist dictatorships . The Spanish party Vox advocates the rehabilitation of Franco and organizes rallies in memory of the Blue Division, which fought on the side of Hitler against our country.

The Portuguese Chega increased its representation in the country’s parliament from 12 to 50 seats. It unites fans of the Salazar regime and demands that references to socialism be removed from the country’s Constitution.

The Hungarian authorities are promoting the erection of monuments to the Nazi henchman M. Horthy. Prime Minister V. Orban called him “an exceptional statesman.”

The influence of the right-wing Alternative for Germany is increasing . The neo-fascist National Democratic Party also operates in the country. From time to time there are calls to end the policy of repentance for the crimes of fascism, and not to portray Hitler as an absolute evil.

In Italy, a coalition led by the Brothers of Italy came to power in 2022 . This party grew out of the neo-fascist organization “Italian Social Movement”, created by former figures of the Mussolini regime. The current Prime Minister, Georgia Meloni , also began her career there . Three years ago, the granddaughter of fascist dictator Raquele Mussolini won elections to the Rome city council. And this year, the country’s Supreme Court ruled that the fascist salute is not a crime and can be freely used at rallies.

Top officials are becoming more and more bold in declaring their beliefs. Senate Speaker Ignazio La Russa proudly admits that he keeps a bust of Mussolini at home and calls “ the ideological racism of the left against Italians ” the worst racism. If earlier, the speaker adds, the left forced people to believe Stalin, today they criticize opponents of immigration and the “Islamic threat.”

Just like a hundred years ago, ultra-right forces act as a “combat unit” of big capital . Most often, as supporters of extreme neoliberal policies, they advocate cutting corporate taxes, eliminating labor rights, and limiting the powers of trade unions.

In the same Italy, the Meloni government, having come to power, began attacks on workers. Thus, according to the pension reform plan, benefits will be available to citizens who have made contributions for at least 41 years.

The solidarity position of the ultra-right in support of Israel’s atrocities is also characteristic . His actions were endorsed by the Hungarian government, Vox, Cega and other forces. Anti-immigrant and anti-Islamic rhetoric is designed to shift attention from the class causes of the crisis to ethnic ones, to divide workers, and to “bring capital and its orders out of harm’s way.”

A kind of review of the forces of the “brown international” was held in Hungary under the guise of the “ International Conference of Conservative Political Actions ”. Almost 500 delegates took part in it. Among them are the leaders of the Dutch Freedom Party, the Spanish Vox, the Belgian Flemish Interest party, the Conservative People’s Party of Estonia, the Polish Law and Justice party and others.

It would be a mistake to assume that the revival of fascism is an exclusively Western phenomenon. Such trends are also typical for other countries. The influence of the far right is growing in Latin America. Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro admired the military dictatorship, called blacks and Indians subhuman, and called for the destruction of communists. The head of Argentina, Javier Miley , is following the same path . Rodolfo Barra was appointed as the country’s Attorney General . In his tumultuous youth, he was an activist in a neo-fascist group responsible for attacks and murders. The vice president, Victoria Villarruel , bows to the military dictatorship of 1976-1983, which saved the country from “communist terrorists.” The far-right Republican Party is gaining popularity in Chile. Its founder, Jose Antonio Cast , the son of a Wehrmacht officer who fled to Chile and the brother of a prominent figure in the Pinochet dictatorship, states that now, like half a century ago, there is a struggle “between freedom and communism.”

In India, Hindutva , the movement of Hindu exclusivity , claims to be the state ideology . Its adherents call Islam and Christianity “alien” religions, “brought by invaders,” demanding their eradication. Active anti-Muslim policies are manifested in the demolition of mosques and even physical violence.

One of the ideologists of Hindu nationalism, Vinayak Savarkar, admired Hitler. Similar figures in today’s India are put in the place of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru , who are accused of making concessions to China and “godless communists”. The recent opening of the new Parliament building was timed to coincide with the 140th anniversary of Savarkar’s birth.

Indian nationalists are calling for the restoration of the “great motherland.” This includes Afghanistan, Pakistan, Chinese Tibet, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Nepal and a number of other countries. Anti-Chinese sentiment is fueled. “Ram Navami” – Hindu processions in areas inhabited by adherents of other religions – are accompanied by attacks on temples and clashes.

The 23rd Congress of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) noted that by inciting religious contradictions, the ruling class is trying to distract people from the crisis and undermine the solidarity of workers. The congress emphasized: “ The ruling party is consolidating power through nationalist, jingoistic demagoguery and communal polarization. Under this cover, the looting of national wealth, the legalization of crony capitalism, corruption and authoritarianism are taking place .”

A distinctive feature of many growing “poles” is the strengthening of nationalist movements. Often they are clothed in religious form. Often there is a play on patriotic feelings through calls for “restoration of former greatness” and “protection of traditional values.” An image of an enemy is being created within the country and outside its borders.

Behind the screen of the “struggle for the idea of ​​a nation,” the pragmatic motives of the “national” bourgeoisie are often hidden . With the help of nationalism, a number of problems are solved. Firstly, the achievement of greater independence from the “old” capitalist centers is justified. Secondly, a blow is dealt to the comprador part of its own bourgeois elite, which looks to the West. Thirdly, the protest movement is suppressed. Working people are distracted from the fight for their interests by ideological surrogates about the “great future of the nation.” Those who nevertheless dared to stand up for the rights of workers are branded as “traitors to national interests.” “National capital” strives for unlimited influence within the country .

The left is called upon to draw important conclusions. The concept of a multipolar world has given rise to the belief that the weakening of the West will automatically lead to a just world order. Yes, the weakening of US imperial claims gives new opportunities to progressive forces. But a just world will not arise on its own. There is a serious fight ahead for him. Moreover, a multipolar world of warring nationalisms would be fraught with new threats. To build a safe and just world, communist and workers’ parties must strengthen their strength, solidarity and loyalty to principles .

As for globalist capital, its appeal to reaction and neo-fascism has another fundamental reason. This was a consequence of the war he lost on the intellectual front. Today you will not hear from US leaders assessments equal in honesty and depth to Kennedy’s conclusions. The more they concede in the struggle of ideas, the higher their temptation to resolve the issue by force.

All bourgeois concepts of recent times have turned out to be unpromising . Today it is quite obvious that the destruction of the USSR did not mean the “end of history” proclaimed by F. Fukuyama. The “clash of civilizations” that S. Huntington prophesied did not happen . Both bourgeois philosophers disgraced themselves. Russia, which developed for centuries in a common cultural context with Europe, has refused to keep pace with the current West. Together with China, it opposes contenders for world domination.

The BRICS symbolism is especially characteristic here . The countries that formed the basis of the association: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa – represent completely different national, cultural and civilizational traditions. But they do not fight in mortal combat, but become increasingly closer in the pursuit of a just world.

Thus, the latest bourgeois concepts that claimed to “explain everything” did not stand the test of time.

The main fault lines of our time lie not along civilizational lines, but along issues of justice . Consequently, in the analysis of the processes and phenomena of the modern world, Marxist-Leninist methodology reaffirms its accuracy and fruitfulness . Other approaches, methods, and methods for assessing the situation have either discredited themselves or can only be used as auxiliary ones.

Some bourgeois concepts even predict outright degradation for humanity. Thus, the idea of ​​the evolution of humanity with the transition to the “New Middle Ages” was put forward. These ideas gained currency with the publication of Roberto Vacchi’s essay ” The Near Medieval Future ” in 1973 . The debate was supported by Umberto Eco with his essay “ The Middle Ages have already begun” and John Nicholas Gray in his work “ Wake of the Enlightenment ”.

For the world oligarchy, it is obvious that the transition to the “New Middle Ages” involves a sharp reduction in the number of humanity. Specific options and tools for such a transition are discussed. The characteristic features of this doctrine are cave nationalism, anti-communism and anti-Sovietism.

In the late 1980s, Jacques Attali’s book ” The New Nomads ” was published. In it, “ordinary citizens of the world” were asked to turn into biomass, roaming the Earth in search of somewhere more satisfying. At the same time, words about the “golden billion” were heard. The United States was actually given the right to “punish and pardon” the inhabitants of the planet, to impose its values ​​and way of life on them.

From such ideas there remains half a step to a new separation of people with the identification of a mass of “subhumans” . And this has always served as a justification for terror, torture, massacres and monstrous experiments. And today we already see the genocide of the Palestinians, US biological laboratories around the world, and the unwillingness of Western governments to support the poorest countries during periods of mass epidemics.

We also see how Bandera’s trash declares the residents of Donbass subhuman. How do Western politicians respond to this? Firstly, they actively support this Nazi regime. Secondly, they say that the genocide of Russians in Donbass “is funny.” And, thirdly, they themselves are ready to participate in the “cancellation” of Russian culture.
Strengthen the front of anti-fascist forces in Russia

After the events in New York on September 11, 2001, a lot of speculation arose on topics about global racial, ethnic, religious confrontation, about the beginning of the “battle of civilizations.” However, even then, based on the principles of analysis of our party, in the book “ Globalization and the Fate of Humanity ” it was possible to identify and show that all this is just a smoke screen. It is used by the creators of the “new world order” to achieve the following goals :

– To achieve the alignment of the world into a “pyramid of subordination.” At the top will be the United States, next to it will be its allies, and at the bottom will be the states of the “third world.” Russia, Ukraine, the republics of Transcaucasia, Central Asia and other post-Soviet countries will also vegetate there.

– Create a supranational power structure subordinate to the United States . A government that is essentially dictatorial and hostile to billions of people on the planet.

– Establish control over the world’s sources of energy and raw materials. Subjugate the financial system and thereby take control of the entire economy of the planet.

– Carry out military defeat of countries trying to defend their national-state interests . Deal with leaders who oppose American hegemony.

– Tightly control information flows . Impose your system of values ​​on the world. Suppress all dissidents under the pretext of classifying them as terrorists.

– Completely and completely block Russia as a force capable of resisting such plans . To do this, including through the military presence of NATO on the territory of the former republics of the USSR. 

At the same time, the conclusion was made: “ Imperialist globalization is a struggle for enslavement, division and redistribution of the world and its resources. This is the struggle of united imperialism against the world “periphery”, the struggle of various imperialist groups among themselves.”

More than 20 years have passed. The correctness of those assessments has been confirmed. Capitalism is degrading and bringing rot in everything: in the economy, in social life, in culture and ideology. Any mimicry of imperialism is not capable of changing its essence . The division of the world along the axis “rich North – poor South” for some time weakened the conflict between proletarians and exploiters within Western countries. But, having learned to partially extinguish contradictions at the national level, capitalism only gives them a global character.

The delay in the transition to socialism in individual countries brings socialist changes on a global scale closer. What is happening is not a smoothing out of the contradictions of monopoly capitalism, but their globalization and aggravation at the planetary level.

Global trends are also manifesting themselves in Russia. We are obliged to take the strengthening of right-wing tendencies in our country very seriously . These are not random incidents or the machinations of individuals, but a deep pattern in the development of capitalism. The interests of the bourgeois class make themselves felt.
Firstly, part of Russian capital strives for autonomy from the West and wants to occupy a global “niche” in the form of its own zone of influence.

Secondly, the fear of leftist, pro-Soviet sentiments in Russian society is taking its toll. They prevent home-grown capital from establishing a “classical” system of exploitation in our country and completely removing all the social gains of the Soviet era.

Thirdly, the weakness of the raw materials model of Russian capitalism forces the ruling class to actively maneuver, pursuing a policy of Bonapartism. However, he would like to “simplify” the situation. He would be happy to replace the methods of political manipulation with harsh administrative and police control. 

The opportunities for bourgeois circles to parasitize the Soviet era are limited . Yes, they have learned well to separate form from content and speculate on the Great Victory, the conquest of space and other victories. But, emasculating their essence, they persistently “forget” that these victories were guaranteed by socialism and Soviet power. However, even the emasculated truth hits oligarchic circles. On the one hand, people compare the past era with the current one – and the result is not in favor of the latter. On the other hand, deliberate attempts to “forget” or denigrate the role of socialism, communists, Lenin and Stalin displease true patriots.

The reasons for the ambivalence towards the Soviet era lie in the class nature of power . Hence the drapery of the Lenin Mausoleum, the Yeltsin Center, and the monuments to the Reds and Kolchaks. The roots must be sought in the vitality of the legacy of the “dashing nineties,” with which our party waged and is waging a firm and consistent struggle. 

In August 2006, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation issued a Memorandum “On the tasks of the struggle against imperialism and the need for international condemnation of its crimes.” This was our response to the reactionaries in PACE and the Council of Europe, who fiercely promoted the idea of ​​condemning “totalitarian regimes.” Thus, they are trying to equalize the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Frankly speaking, not all Russian parties acted from principled positions at that time.

Moreover, even after the bombing of Yugoslavia by the United States and its satellites, our country was compulsively drawn into the Russia-NATO partnership . This resulted in attempts to conduct joint exercises in the Nizhny Novgorod region and create a NATO air base near Ulyanovsk. The active protest of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and our allies put an end to these dangerous plans.

Attempts to harness Russia to the chariot of the American military were coupled with strange initiatives of the “party in power.” We had to launch a fight against the attempts of United Russia member Sigutkin to reshape the Victory Banner, to “sully” the hammer and sickle. It took several years to return Victory Day over militaristic Japan to the number of holidays and memorial dates . Only now is the situation with teaching aids beginning to improve. But at the round table in the State Duma, we proved that the unified history textbook needs to be further improved.

There are enough people in ruling circles who want to free themselves from the need to flirt with the Soviet past . They are looking for other sources for their legitimation. For these purposes they are trying to adapt the tsarist era, the White Guard and the ideas of such authors as Ilyin.

We communists insist: this is the path to capitulation, the path to a dead end, to the destruction of the country from within . Ultimately, tsarist Russia collapsed due to social contradictions and under the weight of a war for the interests of foreign capital. Taking it as a model means ignoring the consequences of subordinating the country to foreign capital, justifying the split between the government and the people, and agreeing with the prospect of total decay and ultimate destruction.

In this regard, we confirm the importance of the program position of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation: the patriotic tasks of strengthening Russia and the socialist prospects of the country coincide.

We insist: praising the White Army means approving the collusion of its generals with foreign interventionists. To proclaim Ilyin, Shmelev and Solzhenitsyn as “teachers of the nation” means to justify the forces of national betrayal. All this together means a betrayal of the centuries-old path of our people. The search for the advanced part of Russian society has always been accompanied by a thirst for truth and justice. It is enough to remember these people: Radishchev and Novikov, Pushkin and Pushchin, Herzen and Ogarev, Belinsky and Chernyshevsky, Petrashevsky and Tyutchev, Turgenev and Nekrasov, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Gorky and Mayakovsky, Blok and Yesenin . We consider any attempts to replace the indigenous people’s democratic tradition with concepts alien to it as vicious.

It is an unworthy occupation to turn into gurus people who, in their hatred of the working people, who threw off the yoke of the tsar, landowners and capitalists, turned to fascism. This connection was not at all accidental.

In 1931, in Harbin, white emigrants formed the All-Russian Fascist Party. Its branches were created in Europe, Latin America, the USA, and Canada. The party was distinguished by ardent anti-communism, admiration for the fascists and cooperation with their dictatorships to overthrow Soviet power. Party leader K. Rodzaevsky praised Mussolini and Hitler and proclaimed that Russia should become the next stronghold of fascism.

It was the largest organization of the “Russian diaspora”. Since 1936, she tried to organize subversive actions in the USSR. The head of the German branch of the party, S. Ivanov, established close contacts with the Abwehr. At the beginning of the war, he was sent to Soviet territory, where, with other emigrants, he formed the “Russian National People’s Army” from prisoners of war, the predecessor of the Vlasov ROA.

The most famous ideologist of Russian fascism was Ivan Ilyin . He was delighted with the coming to power of the fascists in Italy, and then in Germany. In May 1933, in the article “ National Socialism. New spirit ,” he wrote: “ What is happening in Germany is a huge political and social revolution… What did Hitler do? He stopped the process of Bolshevisation in Germany and thereby rendered the greatest service to all of Europe… While Mussolini leads Italy, and Hitler leads Germany, European culture is given a reprieve… ” Even after the defeat of the Nazis, Ilyin declared that fascism was right, and suffered a temporary defeat due to “mistakes.”

The popularization of this figure in Russia follows the same patterns as the rehabilitation of Bandera and his accomplices in Ukraine. They were also declared “fighters for Ukrainian independence” and “Ukrainian spirit.” It was also said that they fought both Hitler and the Soviets.

To whitewash Ilyin, they use the fact that in 1938 he left Germany for Switzerland. Yes, he left, but did not change his views. He continued his pro-Nazi and anti-communist journalistic activities. Despite this, a monument to Ilyin was unveiled in Yekaterinburg, and a memorial plaque was unveiled on the building of Moscow State University. Since 2013, international “Ilyinsky Readings” have been held. The Ilyin Higher Political School was created at the Russian State University for the Humanities. There are, it seems, those who are ready to push the idea of ​​national capitalism into Russian society .

The policies of the Russian authorities often duplicate approaches already worked out by the right-wing forces of the West. To protect the interests of capital, it is customary to use the image of an enemy. Today, the “collective West” acts as an external threat, and, of course, there is every reason for this. Following this, other, more controversial topics appear. Circles around the government are promoting the theme of “bad migrants,” focusing on their reluctance to assimilate. At the same time, they are silent about the fact that Russian capital and criminal circles benefit from uncontrolled migration. The lack of rights of such a workforce makes it possible to reduce wages for both foreign and Russian workers. The lack of stable employment creates a breeding ground for the activities of criminal groups. An effective system for integrating migrants into the Russian cultural space has not been created.

The next contender for the image of the internal enemy is the left forces. Considering the strong pro-Soviet sentiments of citizens, the authorities do not dare to act “impudently”. But step by step they are trying to form a negative image of communists. This is the answer to the question of why the authorities need the “Yeltsin Center”, the glorification of Ilyin, monuments to Krasnov and Kolchak and other “oddities”.

The best response to attempts to distort our ideas and our political line is to actively work to achieve the program objectives of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. The most important direction of our activity is the unification of anti-fascist forces in the fight against imperialism, reaction and the military threat.

Party experience: know, be proud, spread

Dear comrades! An important condition for the formation of a firm anti-fascist position is properly structured educational, educational, civil and patriotic work . Many branches of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation are actively involved in this great cause.

Our party has always and at all levels strongly condemned attempts to remove educational tasks from educational programs. We resolutely opposed attempts to replace the education of citizenship and patriotism, morality and high aesthetic feelings with the education of a qualified consumer.

The open battle with neo-fascism did not cancel, but in a new way launched the battle for the minds and souls of people . Despite the patriotic oaths that have become fashionable at all levels of government, truly patriotic politics are still far away. This requires us to continue the struggle, promoting in every possible way the growth of civic consciousness. Our comrades on the ground are multiplying the ideological and moral values ​​that are so necessary for the people to win the battle against neo-Nazism.

The key condition for the formation of strong anti-fascist views is the fight against anti-Sovietism. A special part of this patriotic work is preserving the memory of the Great Patriotic War, exposing distortions of history, and memorial activities.

Countering the historical falsifications of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, our youth and women’s movements held many seminars, exhibitions, round tables, scientific and practical conferences. They were dedicated to the socialist revolution, V.I. Lenin and I.V. Stalin, the fighters for Soviet power, people’s heroism during the years of the battle with fascism, the cosmic triumph of the USSR, our glorious Komsomol members and pioneers.

It became a matter of honor for us to revive the symbols of the Soviet era, destroyed by the Bandera regime in the Donbass , Zaporozhye and Kherson regions. With the active participation of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation committees, more than 20 monuments to V.I. were restored . Lenin. Such work was carried out in Genichesk, Melitopol, Lisichansk, Melov and other settlements liberated from the armed forces of the Kiev junta. These efforts became an important part of the long-term struggle of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation for recognition of the outstanding role of V.I. Lenin and I.V. Stalin in the history of our Fatherland .

Communists and Komsomol members of Moscow and the Moscow region cooperate with the Gorki Leninskie Museum-Reserve, holding clean-up days, conferences and meetings. Cooperation with Lenin museums is carried out in Ulyanovsk, Kazan, Samara . Students of the Center for Political Studies get acquainted with the exhibition of the Museum of the Great Patriotic War on Poklonnaya Hill.

Together with us, more and more people are in favor of returning the name Stalingrad to the legendary citadel on the Volga. The leading role in the public committee of the Volgograd region is played by members of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and allies of our party. The Lenin Komsomol faction in the youth parliament at the Legislative Assembly of the Kirov Region took the initiative to name one of the streets of Kirov Stalingradskaya. The idea received widespread support. The City Duma is working on it. It is extremely important to support this work everywhere.

In the Nizhny Novgorod region, on the territory of the urban district of Bor, a monument to I.V. Stalin, work is underway to create a cultural and educational “Stalin Center”. A foundation has been established in Vladimir whose task is to protect the memory of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief and raise funds for the creation of a memorial to him. A bust of the Generalissimo was unveiled to Stalin in the courtyard of the museum in Rovny, Saratov region. Communist deputies initiated the restoration of the monument to Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya in Saratov .

The subject of constant concern for our comrades is memorial sites associated with the history of the Great Patriotic War. In North Ossetia-Alania, in honor of the 80th anniversary of the end of the battle for the Caucasus near the village of Elkhotovo, the republican committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation opened the “Walk of Fame” of 12 busts of Heroes of the Soviet Union.

As part of the patriotic project “Bow to the soldiers of the Great Victory!” Party members of Kalmykia, in places of fierce battles, installed granite slabs with the names of more than 2.5 thousand Soviet soldiers. 

In just the last two years, the forces of communists and supporters of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation have created, restored and reconstructed more than 200 monuments, memorials and mass graves .  

We continue to pay special attention to exposing the falsifications of the Soviet past, revealing the inadmissibility of attempts to glorify traitors and renegades. In the Penza and Samara regions there is a struggle to eliminate monuments and memorial signs to the White Czechs. One of the results of our struggle was that the Czech authorities stopped funding the program to install monuments in Russia. A memorial plaque to those killed during the White Czech rebellion has been restored in Penza.

At the initiative of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the public of Irkutsk demands that the monument to the “hangman” Kolchak be removed from the city. Communists and Komsomol members of the Rostov region are seeking the demolition of the statue of the Nazi henchman Krasnov in the village of Elanskaya. Efforts to dismantle the bust of General Wrangel, unveiled on the territory of the cadet school of the Don Technical University, were crowned with success.

As part of the “Save the Soviet” campaign, Leningrad Komsomol members defended the names of Soviet streets in the city center. Our young comrades held pickets at the embassies of the Baltic countries against the distortion of the role of the Soviet Union in World War II. Komsomol members do a lot of work to preserve memorable places. Today we thank everyone who cares for the graves of fighters for Soviet power and defenders of the socialist Fatherland. It should be noted here the work of Komsomol members of Moscow, Khakassia, Leningrad region, Belgorod, Bryansk, Ivanovo, Tula, Naberezhnye Chelny.

The Communist Party of the Russian Federation is a party of patriots, a party of irreconcilable struggle against neo-Nazism and Banderaism. In order to form public opinion, round tables, conferences, meetings, and joint events with veterans, defense sports, local history, and search public organizations are held. Among them: “Books for rural libraries” ( Udmurt Republic), “Grandchildren of the Winners” ( Belgorod region), “Feat of the people” and “First thing – airplanes” ( Voronezh region ) , “Timur and his team: XXI century” ( Kursk region), “Living Voice of Victory” ( St. Petersburg ), “The City Speaks of Heroes” ( Sevastopol ) and others. This work is of particular importance for the education of the younger generation.

The projects “ Banner of Our Victory ” and “ Young Heroes of the Fatherland ” allow Komsomol members to work in schools. The branches of the Leningrad, Sevastopol, Omsk and Mordovia Komsomol of the Russian Federation pay great attention to the search movement . In Sevastopol, Komsomol members created a primary branch under DOSAAF, military-historical games “ Legacy of the Winners ” are held, and work is underway to preserve the DOSAAF airfield. In Samara on November 7, Komsomol members take part in a reconstruction parade. In Kursk, on the occasion of the anniversary of Arkady Gaidar, the re-creation of the Timur movement was launched.

New threats facing the people of Russia increase the role and responsibility of the people’s teacher. For more than 30 years, the search association “Shield” in the Kostroma region has been led by a member of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation Valery Nikolaevich Chigorev . His pedagogical talent and extensive experience allowed him to form a squad of cabin boys from the students of the Peter and Paul School, closely interacting with the crew of the Northern Fleet submarine “Kostroma” .

In the Dyullyukinsky secondary school of the Verkhnevilyuysky ulus, under the leadership of a party veteran, honored teacher of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), reserve lieutenant colonel Vladimir Nikolaevich Nikolaev, a parachute club has been operating for students in grades 10-11 for more than a quarter of a century . The guys take prizes at competitions in military applied sports.

Honorary citizen of the Chusovsky municipal district of the Perm Territory, first secretary of the district committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation Mikhail Venediktovich Anisimov led the development of the target Program “Patriotic education of the population for 2021 – 2025” . Its military-patriotic events involved more than 4 thousand people.

Communists are fighters on the political front. Each of us is called to live and work in such a way that we have the moral right to say to others: “Do as I do.” In the context of the aggression of the NATO military against Russia, mass patriotic work with citizens requires a systematic, comprehensive approach. A good example here is set by communist governors A.E. Klychkov, V.O. Konovalov, A.Yu. Russians. Every family of mobilized soldiers and volunteers, wounded and dead soldiers in the Oryol region was taken under state patronage. In the Ulyanovsk region there is a charitable foundation “For Victory” , which has donated more than three million rubles worth of equipment to the front line. The head of Xakasia participated in the delivery of tens of thousands of New Year’s gifts to Donetsk and Lugansk children.

Taking care of the needs of the front is the duty of any party leader. We thank everyone who is involved today in the great work of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and the Headquarters of the protest movement to collect assistance and send convoys of humanitarian aid to Donbass and Novorossiya. With the support of the party, the “ Young Patriot ” center operates in Snegiri, near Moscow. Participants in his health sessions are boys and girls from the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics.

Communists of the Novosibirsk region held the “Magic Thread” event , during which residents knitted warm socks for soldiers of the Russian Army. The Kaliningrad regional committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation organized a school of tactical medicine, where anyone can learn how to provide first aid. In the building of the Belgorod regional party committee there is a collection point and distribution of humanitarian aid to internally displaced persons.

Wartime mobilizes and unites like no other. More than fifty of our comrades became part of the territorial defense units in the Belgorod region. Their forces formed the fourth defensive line.

Thanks to targeted work, SVO members joined the ranks of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation in the republics: Karachay-Cherkessia , Komi , Crimea , Mordovia , Tatarstan , Chuvashia and Sakha – Yakutia , in the Kamchatka Territory, in the Voronezh , Kostroma , Novgorod and Ulyanovsk regions. The Omsk communists had an interesting experience . In the ranks of the company of the volunteer battalion, they created the primary department “Sturm 217” .

The moral duty of our party is to perpetuate the memory of communists and Komsomol members who fell in battles with Bandera’s evil spirits. In Sevastopol, a street was named and a memorial plaque was installed to our Komsomol leader Alexander Cheremenov , who was posthumously awarded the Order of Courage. In February – March of this year, an exhibition was held in the Tyumen Regional Duma in memory of a member of our party, war correspondent Rostislav Zhuravlev .

The formation of strong anti-fascist beliefs, the education of patriotism and citizenship is the constant concern of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and our allies. It is extremely important to consider the development of the Red Tie Pioneer movement as part of this multifaceted work. This year, Pioneer Day on Red Square was again bright and convincing. Our predecessors accumulated rich traditions of the children’s movement. Today they must find their continuation in our affairs and plans.

In harsh times, the importance of civic-patriotic education increases decisively . Enormous problems have been building up here for more than thirty years. They were a direct consequence of the collaborator course of those who seized power in Russia in the early 1990s. Such wounds take a long time to heal. You need to act responsibly and competently and without delay.

On the other hand, you need to understand that wounded national pride can be used by the darkest forces of a revanchist nature. Part of large capital willingly uses them in their own interests. The bourgeoisie can move quickly from jingoistic rhetoric to demagogic calls in the spirit of “destroy the red-browns.” Here we must be extremely vigilant and decisive.

The repainted Western liberals will never forgive us for the fact that it was the Communist Party of the Russian Federation that took a consistently patriotic position . Our very existence serves as a reproach for them, a reminder of how some of them received grants from Soros, others promoted Creder’s textbooks, others destroyed Gogol’s theater, others encouraged the obscenity of gallery owners in the spirit of Gelman, others filled bookstore shelves with the writings of Rezun-Suvorov, Solzhenitsyn and Bykov.

The fight for our country’s right to live and develop, for its great socialist future, is becoming fiercer every day. This situation is not for a few days. We must be fully prepared for this long-term confrontation with the enemy.   

The workers’ weapon is  solidarity

The only consistent and effective force that can resist reaction and stop the monster of fascism are the communists and the masses of working people rallied around them. The 20th century proved this . The 21st century continues to prove this .

More and more examples of success in the fight against reaction are appearing before our eyes. In Brazil, the right-wing government of Bolsonaro was removed from power by the will of the masses. The fight against Miley’s anti-popular reforms in Argentina is unfolding under the leadership of leftist forces. Indian communists are at the forefront of resistance to Hindutva. The Communist Party of Turkey exposes the neo-Ottoman aspirations of Erdogan and his connections with the pro-fascist Gray Wolves. Left forces are actively opposing the “brown wave” in Europe . The communists of China, Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea, and Laos remain an example of loyalty to the cause of socialism.

Meanwhile, in the world of capital, the deepening crisis is spurring the growth of reactionary tendencies, the rollback of democratic norms, and an attack on the rights of the working class. Global capital, led by the ruling circles of the United States, resorts to the support of neo-fascists and radical nationalists in the struggle for the redivision of the world. In a number of countries, the glorification of Nazism reaches the level of state policy. In the struggle against the working people, the bourgeoisie is increasingly using the extreme right. The history of World War II is being rewritten. The crimes of the fascists are hushed up. Their rehabilitation is taking place. Monuments to anti-fascists are being dismantled. The results of the Nuremberg trial of Nazi criminals are ignored.

It is necessary to understand that the importance of the fight against imperialism, neo-fascism and the threat of world war will only increase. And this work goes on every day. The International Meetings of Communist and Workers’ Parties make an important contribution to the unity of left-wing forces .

In October 2023, at the Meeting of Parties in Turkish Izmir, a resolution was adopted “ Stop the spread of fascism, prevent a new tragedy of humanity .” It emphasizes: “ In the twentieth century, the Soviet Union, led by the Communist Party, defeated fascism… In the 21st century, the sworn enemy of the working class, fascism again raised its head and gained access to the levers of power… Fascism becomes one of the main weapons in the hands of the world bourgeoisie in her struggle against the working class .”

The participants of the International Meeting called for united efforts in the fight against reaction, neo-Nazism and militarism. The conclusion is drawn: “ A new era of testing once again requires coordinated action within the framework of a broad anti-fascist front of progressive forces .”

Thus, the conclusions of the International Anti-Fascist Forum , convened on the initiative of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and the UPC-CPSU on April 22, 2023 in Minsk, receive support. Representatives from 50 countries took part in it. The Manifesto for the unification of the peoples of the world was adopted . This document deeply argues for the urgent need to unite anti-fascist forces.

The Manifesto states: “ The red flag over the Reichstag in May 1945 is not only a special fact of the past. The meaning and significance of the Great Victory over fascism is directed to the future. They sound an alarm bell, calling to the hearts of new generations. As in the thirties of the last century, the black smoke of military fires is spreading across our planet. It increasingly obscures the horizon. People of good will need unity and courage in their principled struggle.

The situation is extremely alarming. Neocolonialism makes its presence known in Africa and America. The imperialists are heating up the situation in Asia. Blood is being shed amid the roar of cannonade in Europe and other parts of the planet. The grief and suffering of people is increasing… The beast of Nazism has licked its old wounds and is quickly gaining strength. He grew bolder and crawled out of his wolf’s den in search of new victims.

World evil has returned in neoliberal guise. It created a global system of robbery of entire countries and peoples. It has stained itself with aggression against Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria. Attempts have been made to overthrow legitimate governments in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Belarus. Sanctions pressure has been deployed against the peoples of Russia and China, Cuba and the DPRK. Military threats and political blackmail are used. On the eve of World War II, Hitler’s stormtroopers were controlled by financial capital. In the 21st century, he also controls the newly-minted Nazis.”

The anti-fascist forum in Minsk recorded: “ The direct support of the United States and its NATO allies elevated the ideology of Nazism to the rank of state ideology in Ukraine. For many years now, Bandera’s ghouls have been ruling the bloody ball in Kyiv, mocking the masses. They turned Ukraine into a concentration camp for dissidents, closed objectionable media, banned opposition activities, and launched reprisals against communists. All those who preserved the ideals of the brotherhood of peoples and loyalty to the Great Victory over fascism were subjected to repression. The Nazis burned people alive in Odessa, blew them up and killed them from around the corner. From year to year, Azov militants with a wolf hook on their chevrons terrorized Donbass . ”

Today we confirm full solidarity with the conclusion of the Minsk forum: “In the fiery years of the Second World War, a great fighting alliance of opponents of fascist barbarity was formed – an alliance of communists and patriots, tyrant fighters and democrats. It was created despite social and ideological differences, and differences in political and religious views. This was the call of the times. The new era of challenges persistently demands the unity of action of all people of good will. Let us unite in the fight against neo-Nazism, reaction and militarism! Long live the united front of progressive forces! Long live the solidarity of workers and peoples in the fight against fascism!

Together with our comrades in the UPC-CPSU, we are ready to initiate the Second International Anti-Fascist Forum . I am sure that the Plenum participants will unanimously support this idea!

We have to use our international connections to ensure that the theme of the fight against neo-fascism is heard everywhere and firmly. We will use our multilateral and bilateral ties for this purpose. The Communist Party faction in the State Duma is called upon to continue its active participation in the preparation and holding of international parliamentary forums, the Russia – Africa and Russia – Latin America forums, and in the work of parliamentary friendship groups. It is important to actively use the possibilities of public diplomacy.

We have reminded more than once: history has proven that the communists were the most consistent and therefore the most successful in the fight against fascism.

In the days of the battle with the Nazi invasion, Mikhail Sholokhov wrote: “ I hate the Nazis hard for everything that they did to my homeland and to me personally… And if love for the homeland is kept in our hearts and will be kept as long as these hearts beat , then we always carry hatred on the tips of our bayonets . ”

Dear comrades! You and I were united by love for the Motherland, pride in the Soviet era, hatred of fascism and war, which capitalism inevitably gives rise to. The willingness to devote his life to the cause of the socialist reconstruction of society is what distinguishes a true communist.

In the name of the right of peoples to follow the path of socialism, our party will continue the work of uniting all people of good will – supporters of a fair life, honest work and social progress!

With deep faith in our rightness, in the cause of Marx-Lenin-Stalin, we move forward and know: socialism will win!

Let us always be firm in our choice!

Good luck to all of us!

New big victories in the struggle for the interests of the working people!

​Author​

Gennady Andreyevich Zyuganov has been the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and served as Member of the State Duma since 1993. He is also a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe since 1996.

Republished from the Marx Engels Lenin Institute 

​Why were Clean Slates so important to Bronze Age societies? From the third millennium in Mesopotamia, people were aware that debt pressures, if left to accumulate unchecked, would distort normal fiscal and landholding patterns to the detriment of the community. They perceived that debts grow autonomously under their own dynamic by the exponential curves of compound interest rather than adjusting themselves to reflect the ability of debtors to pay. This idea never has been accepted by modern economic doctrine, which assumes that disturbances are cured by automatically self-correcting market mechanisms. That assumption blocks discussion of what governments can do to prevent the debt overhead from destabilizing economies.
​
The Cosmological Dimension of Clean Slates

Mesopotamia’s concept of divine kingship was key to the practice of declaring Clean Slates. The prefatory passages of Babylonian edicts cited the ruler’s commitment to serve his city-god by promoting equity in the land. Myth and ritual were integrated with economic relations and were viewed as forming the natural order that rulers were charged with overseeing; in this context, canceling debts helped fulfill their sacred obligation to their city-gods. Commemorated by their year-names and often by foundation deposits in temples, these amnesties appear to have been proclaimed at a major festival, replete with rituals such as Babylon’s ruler raising a sacred torch to signal the renewal of the social cosmos in good order—what the Romanian historian Mircea Eliade called “the eternal return,” the idea of circular time that formed the context in which rulers restored an idealized status quo ante. By integrating debt annulments with social cosmology, the image of rulers restoring economic order was central to the archaic idea of justice and equity.

(Mis)Interpreting the Meaning of ‘Freedom’

The Hebrew word used for the Jubilee Year in Leviticus 25 is dêror, but not until cuneiform texts could be read was it recognized as cognate to Akkadian andurarum. Before the early meaning was clarified, the King James Version translated the relevant phrase as: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land, and to all the inhabitants thereof.” But the root meaning of andurarum is to move freely, as running water—or (for humans) as bondservants liberated to rejoin their families of origin.

The wide variety of modern interpretations of such key terms as Sumerian amargi, Akkadian andurarum and misharum, and Hurrian shudutu serve as an ideological Rorschach test reflecting the translator’s own beliefs. The earliest reading was by Francois Thureau-Dangin1, who related the Sumerian term amargi to Akkadian andurarum and saw it as a debt cancellation. Ten years later Schorr (1915) related these acts to Solon’s seisachtheia, the “shedding of burdens” that annulled the debts of rural Athens in 594 BC. The Canadian scholar George Barton2 translated Urukagina’s and Gudea’s use of the term amargi as “release,” although the Jesuit Anton Deimel3 rendered it rather obscurely as “security.”

Maurice Lambert4 initially interpreted Urukagina’s amargi act as an exemption from taxes, on the ground that most of the debts being annulled were owed to the palace. His subsequent 1972 discovery of Enmetena’s kindred proclamation dating some fifty years earlier led him to see amargi as signifying a debt cancellation. F. R. Kraus5 had followed this view in 1954, and greatly elaborated his survey of Babylonian proclamations in his 1984 survey of rulers “raising the torch” to signal debt cancelations.6

In America, Samuel Kramer (History Begins at Sumer [New York, 1959]) interpreted these acts as tax reductions. In a letter to The New York Times the day President Reagan took office in 1981, he even urged the president-elect to emulate Urukagina and cut taxes! The term amargi became popular with U.S. libertarians seeking an archaic precedent for their tax protests.

Kramer7 further belittled Urukagina’s reforms as soon “gone with the wind,” being “too little, too late,” as if they were failures for not solving the debt problem permanently. In a similar vein Stephen Lieberman8, deemed Babylonian debt cancelations ineffective on the ground that they kept having to be repeated: “The need to repeat the enactment of identical provisions shows that the misharum provided relief, but did not eliminate the difficulties which made it necessary.…What seems to have been needed was reform which would have eliminated all need for such adjustments.” He did not suggest just what could have created an economy free of credit cycles.

A Practical Solution

Mesopotamian rulers were not seeking a debt-free utopia but coped pragmatically with the most adverse consequences of rural debt when it became top-heavy. Usury was not banned, as it would be in Judaism’s Exodus Code, but its effects were reversed when the debt overhead exceeded the ability to pay on a widespread basis. These royal edicts retained the economy’s underlying structure The palace did not deter new debts from being run up, and kept leasing out land to sharecroppers, who owed the usual proportion of crops and were obliged to pay the usual interest penalties for non-delivery.

Igor Diakonoff9 emphasized that “the word andurarum does not mean ‘political liberation.’ It is a translation of Sumerian amargi ‘returning to mother,’ that is, ‘to the original situation.’ It does not mean liberation from some supreme authority but the canceling of debts, duties, and the like.

The Assyrian term “washing the tablets” (hubullam masa’um10; may refer to dissolving them in water, akin to breaking or pulverizing them. Likening it to the Babylonian term meaning “to kill the tablet,” Kemal Balkan11 explained that the idea was to cancel grain debts by physically destroying their records. Along more abstract lines, Raymond Westbrook12 likens the idea of “washing” to a ritual cleansing of the population from inequities that would displease Sumerian and Babylonian patron deities. Urukagina’s edict thus was held to have cleansed Lagash from the moral blemish of inequity.

Some Anachronistic Creditor-Oriented Views of Clean Slates

Instead of enforcing debt contracts at the cost of social and military instability, Sumer and Babylonia preserved economic viability via Clean Slates. Today’s creditor-oriented ideology denies the success of Clean Slates overriding free-market relations. It depicts the archaic past as much like our own world, as if civilization was developed by individuals thinking in terms of modern orthodoxy, letting interest rates be determined simply by market supply and demand, duly adjusted for risk of non-payment.

Modern economic theory assumes that debts normally can be paid, with the interest rate reflecting the borrower’s profit. The implication is that the fall in interest rates from Mesopotamia to Greece and Rome resulted from falling profit rates and/or the greater security of investment. In this view, debt cancellations would only have aggravated debt problems, by increasing the creditor’s risk and hence the interest rate.

Modernist assumptions distract attention from what actually happened. No writer in antiquity is known to have related interest rates to profit rates or risk, or to the use of seeds or breeding cattle to produce offspring. We may well ask whether it was fortunate for the survival of Babylonian society that its rulers were not “advanced economic theoreticians” of the modern sort. If they had not proclaimed Clean Slates, creditors would have reduced debtors to bondage and taken their lands irreversibly. But in canceling crop debts, rulers acknowledged that the palace had taken all that it could without destroying the economy’s foundations. If they had demanded that debt arrears be made up by cultivators forfeiting their family members and land rights to royal collectors (who sought to keep debt charges on the crop yield for themselves), the palace would have lost the services of these debtors for corvée labor and in the armed forces to resist foreign attack.

Markets indeed became less stable as economies polarized in classical antiquity. Yet it was only at the end of antiquity that Diodorus of Sicily (I.79) explained the most practical rationale for Clean Slates. Describing how Egypt’s pharaoh Bakenranef (720-715) abolished debt bondage and canceled undocumented debts, Diodorus wrote that the pharaoh’s guiding logic was that:

“the bodies of citizens should belong to the state, to the end that it might avail itself of the services which its citizens owed it, in times of both war and peace. For he felt that it would be absurd for a soldier, perhaps at the moment when he was setting forth to fight for his fatherland, to be haled to prison by his creditor for an unpaid loan, and that the greed of private citizens should in this way endanger the safety of all.”

That would seem to be how early Mesopotamian rulers must have reasoned. Letting soldiers pledge their land to creditors and then lose this basic means of self-support through foreclosure would have expropriated the community’s fighting force—or led to their flight or defection. By the 4th century BC, the Greek military writer known as Tacticus recommended that a general attacking a town might promise to cancel the debts owed by its inhabitants if they defected to his side. Likewise, defenders of towns could strengthen the resistance of their citizens by agreeing to annul their debts.

This emergency military tactic no longer reflected a royal duty to restore economic self-reliance as a guiding principle of overall order. What disappeared was the relief of debtors from their obligations and reversal of their land sales or forfeitures when natural disasters blocked their ability to pay or after a new ruler took the throne. The oligarchic epoch had arrived, abolishing any public power able to cancel the society-wide debt overgrowth.

1. Les inscriptions de Sumer et d’Akkad, 1905, pp. 86-87
2. The Royal Inscriptions of Sumer and Akkad, 1929.
3. Sumerische Tempelwirtschaft der Zeit Urukaginas und seiner Vorgänger, 1930, p. 9.
4. “Les ‘Reformes’ d’Urukagina,” La Revue Archéologique 60, 1956, pp. 169-184..
5. Ein Edikt des Königs Ammisaduqa von Babylon (SD 5, [Leiden]).
6. Fritz Rudolph Kraus, Königliche Verfügungen in altbabylonischer Zeit, 1984.
7. Samuel Noah Kramer History Begins at Sumer 1959, p. 49.
8. Stephen J. Lieberman “Royal ‘Reforms’ of the Amurrite Dynasty,” Bibliotecha Orientalis 46, 1989, pp. 241-259.
9. “The City-States of Sumer” and “Early Despotisms in Mesopotamia,” in Early Antiquity 1991, pp. 67-97, p. 234.
10. A. Kirk Grayson Assyrian Royal Inscriptions: From the beginning to Ashur-resha-ishi I, Volume 1 of the Records of the Near East  Harrassowitz, 1972, p. 7.
11. “Cancellation of Debts in Cappadocian Tablets from Kultepe,” Anatolian Studies Presented to Hans C. Guterbock, 1974, pp. 29-36, p. 33.
12. Raymond Westbrook, “Social Justice in the Ancient Near East,” in Morris Silver and K. D. Irani, eds., Social Justice in the Ancient World, 1995, pp. 149-163.

​Last week, US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Charles Q. Brown told the NYT that US/NATO troops on the ground in Ukraine is 'inevitable'.
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This is despite the fact that Biden has said doing so is ruled out because it would lead to WWIII, which would almost definitively lead to nuclear war and the deaths of millions.

The ruling capitalist class is willing to put the world on the precipice of nuclear devastation before admitting that their status as global hegemon is dwindling and that multipolarity is on the rise.

It is willing to loot $95 billion from American taxpayers under the auspices of furthering the war against Russia and China and the genocide against the Palestinians – when in reality most of that money goes back into the pockets of the military industrial complex who our politicians serve.

The world is changing, and those which benefited from the old order are digging their claws onto humanity trying to prevent it from advancing into a higher, more free, equitable, and democratic, mode of life.

The lives of the American people continue to deteriorate as generations of youth are the first in the country's history to have a worst living standard and prospect of life than their parents. Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck and are drowning in debts accumulated for attempting to do something so ludicrous as survive or access basic education.

Today, we are not only wage slaves to the owners of big capital… but indebted to them for our own enslavement.

The country is collapsing. The infrastructure, like popular trust in the media and politicians, is dwindling. We are in the midst of a crisis of legitimacy and empire like we have never experienced before.

José Martí used to say that a lie can last a hundred years, but the truth catches up to it in a second. Well, those seconds have arrived for millions of Americans, for whom the truth has caught up to the lies they’ve been generationally fed. The power of the lies transmitted by the elite and their media has faded. It has wasted itself in repetition and given way to its opposite: the truth, the mortal enemy of our state’s hegemony.

Americans: things DO NOT have to be this way. They are not divinely ordained to be this way. This is a product of a social system – capitalism – that has developed historically and is currently collapsing before our very eyes.

The frail status of our octogenarian leaders encapsulates perfectly the status of the system.

American workers, the American people, DO NOT have sovereignty. We are an occupied people. Our state and the politicians that uphold it are beholden to only one interest – those of the capitalist elite.

Big corporations, banks, and investment firms are in command. Our rulers are servants of the accumulation of their capital. It is a dictatorship of capital that we live under. And it is high time that the yoke of big capital which oppresses us is thrown off.

The supposed representatives of the people are in reality the representatives of the oppressors and exploiters of the people. They represent those who send our brothers and sisters abroad to lose limbs, scar their souls, and sometimes return in caskets, all to murder people whom they had more in common with than the filthy parasites who sent them there, and who profited from their misfortune.

In 1776 we had a revolution because we recognized that our interests and those of the British empires could not co-exist under the same entity. This contradiction burst into a revolution - the first of many more anti-colonial revolutions in the hemisphere.

Then in 1865, through the general strike of the Black proletariat, we overthrew the Southern planter class and its cotton kingdom, whose very existence undermined the democratic ideals of 1776 and placed the nation in a contradictory predicament.

With the overthrow of Reconstruction in 1876, the advancements of our second revolution (1865) are rolled back, and a state of fascism and apartheid is installed in the U.S. South, with state sanctioned lynching being the order of the day.

But this counterrevolution did not break the democratic spirit of American workers, and specifically the superexploited and oppressed black proletariat. For decades the civil rights revolution fought to overthrow the apartheid system imposed in the aftermath of 1876.

Finally in 1964, with the guidance of the brilliant and revolutionary Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., legally sanctioned apartheid would be done away with. A new moment in the struggle would present itself, as the de jure lines which segregated our people and working class were lifted.

Now our people are more integrated than ever. They are ready to fight – together – as a united working class.

Dissent amongst their ranks is taking many forms, but they all are in motion against the system that keeps them poor, indebted, and desperate.

The task of communists today is to give this spontaneous and varied dissent some coherence and direction.

This is not imposed on workers from outside. It is much more immanent. It simply clarifies that which they already know implicitly. It makes explicit what is implicit in their consciousness.

This is why, whenever we talk about the Marxist worldview with our coworkers and community members, a frequent response is "wow, this simply puts words onto what I have been feeling for a long time."

The Marxist worldview is a yeast that allows the spontaneous consciousness that is already present in a dissenting working class to rise to the level of socialist class consciousness – to the understanding that they, working people, can change the world, and, that the movement of history tends towards that direction!

It is only this popular unity of working people, led by an American Communist Party, a genuine peoples party, that can Free America, and through this, Free Palestine, Cuba, Venezuela, and all other victims of U.S. imperialism!

​Author

Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live-broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE.