​In 1890 the polymath W. E. B. Du Bois, arguably the greatest mind America has given birth to, delivered his Harvard University Commencement address on the subject of “Jefferson Davis as a Representative of Civilization.” With the succession of the South, Davis, who had been a Representative, Senator, and Secretary of War throughout his career, would now ascend as the President of the Confederacy. For decades after his death and the fall of the “rebels,” Davis would be celebrated as a hero, a great man of history. Till this day, various states of the U.S. South continue to celebrate June 3rd, his birthday, as an official holiday.
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Speaking in the last decade of the 19th century, the allure of Davis was still alive and well, and in this context Du Bois would reflect on what Davis’s persona, his figure, means for civilization. Du Bois tells us that “there is something noble in the figure of Jefferson Davis: and judged by every canon of human justice, there is something fundamentally incomplete about that standard.” Here was a figure that by the dominant standards of the time was a “success.” He rose to the highest halls of power, and inspired millions of faithful believers in the process. But the values that he fought for along the way, the values that earned him the positions he acquired, would be worrisome by anyone committed to a sense of rational and just civilization.

Davis was, for Du Bois, a representative of a different type of civilization: Teutonic Civilization, where “individualism is coupled with the rule of might,” and governance is carried out with “the cool logic of the Club.” Teuton here, for Du Bois, is not the anthropological category used for early Germanic tribes. Instead, it is a civilizational paradigm. This paradigm, this civilizational model, writes Du Bois, “has made the logic of modern history.” Teutonic Civilization is premised on “the advance of a part of the world at the expense of the whole; the overweening sense of the I, and the consequent forgetting of the Thou.” Davis was an archetype, at the level of the individual, of the sort of men Teutonic civilization produces and exalts. For a civilization where “people fight to be free in order that another people should not be free,” Du Bois holds, Davis stands as a heroic representative. At the youthful age of 22, Du Bois provided his audience with a dialectical analysis of the different types of individuals various societies and civilizational models produce and uphold as idols.

Civilization enriches humanity culturally, intellectually, and materially. Teutonic civilization does the contrary, it takes from humanity, retards development, and makes the goods which have been universally produced for all to enjoy the privileged property of a select few. Since 1890, Teutonic civilization – which can perhaps be more accurately labeled anti-civilization – has dug its claws deeper into the American trajectory. In the minds of many people around the world, today American civilization is par excellence Teutonic civilization. American life doesn’t seem to be able to exist without waging hybrid war on most of humanity. This is a very unfortunate predicament that has befallen my country, considering how it was, in fact, the American revolution which was the first anti-colonial struggle in the hemisphere, a struggle that affirmed the right of every nation to make their own revolution. In doing so, it would inspire all of the subsequent anti-colonial struggles of the period, from the French Revolution of 1789 to the Haitian Revolution of 1804. It is one of the great tragedies of history that the country born out of affirming the right to revolution has been the keenest on preventing others around the world from affirming that right. Just as the values that have predominated have not been those of the American civilizational paradigm – the democratic creed of Jefferson, Paine, etc. – the individuals that are upheld – in most instances – as examples of success are, like Jefferson Davis, archetypes of Teutonic anti-civilization.

Mike Pompeo, the bastard child of Deep State institutions and institutionalized Calvinist insanity, is one of today’s many representatives of Teutonic anti-civilization. His career, whether in Congress (2010-17), as CIA Director (2017-18), or Secretary of State (2018-21), is marked by his bellicosity against any country which dares to stand up for itself and affirm its sovereignty from U.S. meddling. While pretending to be a “Christian,” his work is dominated by the most un-Christ-like activities, from lying to wage hybrid war on countries to complicity in crimes against humanity – there has not been one regime change operation in the last decade he has not loved. His life’s project is captured nicely in a statement he made at Texas A&M University, describing his time as CIA director: “I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.” I must have missed those sections of Exodus 20:2-17 and Deuteronomy 5:6-21 in the Bible, where cheating, stealing, and lying for the interests of the financial elite is presented as the Christian way of life.

There is something very interesting about the last sentence of his statement, which implies that lying, cheating, and stealing are part and parcel of the “glory of the American experiment.” The question to be asked here is the one that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. posed for us long ago – which America? The America of the poor working majority? Or, the America of the few owners of big capital. Like Jefferson Davis, who was a representative of the Southern Planter (i.e., slave-owning) class, the champions of Teutonic anti-civilization, Pompeo is the champion of the parasitic elite that goes around plundering and debt trapping for its financial interest – something it does to both foreign lands and to the American people and resources. He is a champion of the Teutonic civilization which has occupied America since the counterrevolution of property in 1876, when the northern forces betrayed the promise of radical, abolition democracy given to the enslaved black working class of the U.S. south.

Over the last decade, Teutonic Pompeo has been complicit, supportive, and instrumental in the following crimes of U.S. imperialism: spearheading the “maximum pressure” policy against Iran, which included imposing criminal unilateral coercive measures (sanctions), assassinating the heroic terrorist slayer, General Qasem Soleimani, and unilaterally withdrawing from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the Iran Nuclear Deal), which put humanity on the precipice of WW3; he supported and spearheaded efforts to sanction and overthrow sovereign governments in Latin America, from Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia, which was successfully overthrown in 2019 (the coup government would be defeated within a year); he gave, like most AIPAC-bought American politicians, unwavering support for Israel’s crimes against Palestinians, both in Gaza and the West Bank, where he was the first U.S. Secretary of State to visit an illegal settlement; against China, he has waged a comprehensive effort to intensify the New Cold War under the guise of combatting “communist authoritarianism,” arguing that “if we bend a knee now, our children’s children may be at the mercy of the Chinese Communist Party.” This attitude has been central to his support for provocations in the South China Sea, his criminal promotion of Separatism, and his proliferating of the Sinophobic “China Virus” rhetoric during the Covid Pandemic. This is just the tip of the iceberg of a life committed to being a “swamp monster,” a shill for the parasitic American deep state.

How such a figure was able to attach himself to the Make America Great Again movement (MAGA) remains a mystery to some. How could the MAGA base, which is animated by discontented working class people seeking to end the “forever wars,” dismantle the deep state, and reindustrialize the country to usher in a new era of prosperity for American workers, support a shill like Pompeo, who is a representative of everything they hate? Simple, they never did. Even back when Pompeo was a part of the first Trump government, him and other Warhawks like John Bolton and Elliott Abrams were despised by the working class MAGA base. In fact, in these sectors the dominant narrative for why Trump failed to substantially follow through on the promises of dismantling the deep state in the first term is credited to Pompeo and the other cohort of Warhawks, who duped innocent Mr. Trump into supporting policies contrary to the narrative that won his popular base over to him. 

The simultaneous presence of swamp monsters like Pompeo with a campaign and movement aimed at “draining the swamp” is not to be scoffed at simply as an inconsistency in Trump’s judgment. We should not dismiss this contradiction by simply attributing its source to subjective factors such as these. Instead, this contradiction – that between a movement aiming to “drain the swamp and the swamp monsters within its highest quarters – is objective in character. This contradiction is the basic dynamic that is animating both Trump and the MAGA movement. It is the “principal contradiction,” as Mao would say, which is structuring the internal movement of this political process. The MAGA phenomenon is a microcosm that reflects the larger tensions within the American trajectory. It is a process wherein the two Americas of Dr. King can be found. It is a true unity of opposites, and the struggle of these opposites steers its trajectory.

In 2016, this MAGA microcosm of the larger contradiction of the American trajectory was still quite embryonic in character. The contradictions seemed manageable. For any process pervaded by such tensions, the first few moments always give the illusion of a reconcilability on the horizon. It is this youthful mirage which always emerges at the beginning of similar processes which led to the tradition of modern utopian socialists in Europe and America. The utopians, working at the time when the contradictions of industrial capitalism had just started manifesting themselves, held that these could be escaped from and harmonized. Their idea was not – as Marx and Engels would later postulate – to identify the basic contradiction, understand its fundamentally antagonistic character, and side with the principal aspect embodying the potential for a new world (the working class). Instead, they fell for the mirage, and held that the basic contradictions could be undone, not dialectically overcome. It took time for the mirage to be pierced, and for the fundamentally antagonistic character of the contradiction to become evident to serious observers. Only with time, with the development of the object of study itself, was the transition able to be made from this utopian framework to scientific socialism.

Today we are in a similar period of transition for the MAGA movement. The mirage of the potential harmonization of its basic contradiction is pierced by the reality of its development. In other words, the contradiction is demonstrating its fundamentally antagonistic character. The objectivity of the tension between the progressive MAGA working class base (which stands against war, the deep state, and for economic prosperity) with the Teutonic elements in its leadership (while Pompeo is no longer in the government, other Pompeos have taken his place – Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, Mike Huckabee, Mike Waltz, et. al.) is showing itself to be untenable. The antagonistic character of the contradiction is heading towards a rupture – toward the eventual divorcing of the progressive MAGA working class elements from the swamp monsters and Warhawks that occupy leading positions in Trump’s government. 

Plastered across X (Twitter), the most politicized social media platform in the West, are post from working class MAGA people expressing their discontent with Trump’s regime. The phrase, “Trump has betrayed MAGA,” has become popular in some of these spaces, especially after the recent bombings of Yemen. MAGA commentators have noticed how, back in May of 2024, Trump critiqued the Biden administration for bombing the courageous Yemeni resistance, stating the following:

“It's crazy. You can solve problems over the telephone. Instead, they start dropping bombs. I see, recently, they're dropping bombs all over Yemen. You don't have to do that. You can talk in such a way where they respect you and they listen to you.”

Where did this diplomacy style go? Were Biden’s bombs any less destructive than Trump’s?

While he has taken steps to end the proxy war against Russia, the campaign promise of ending the war on day one is still waiting to be materialized after three months. Additionally, figures like Colonel Doug Macgregor have explicitly criticized the performative de-escalation of Trump on this issue, which hasn’t significantly addressed, in concrete material terms, the bellicosity of the Zelensky regime.

Other sectors of MAGA have criticized Trump’s willingness to follow Israel’s lead in military affairs, particularly in the Middle East. Many take issue with his readiness to escalate tensions with Iran, including his threats to bomb its nuclear facilities. Such an action, they argue, would not only destabilize the region but could trigger global chaos with unpredictable consequences. Journalists like Tucker Carlson, who are bit more consistent with popular MAGA sentiments than those in the government, have even gone as far as criticizing the sanctions regime the U.S. applies to nations across the world. In a recent interview with the Prime Minister of Qatar, Tucker expressed his confusion at how such a policy, which has never achieved anything but making people suffer, continues to be used. While commentators like Carlson and Macgregor continue to be supportive of Trump, the popular MAGA base is estranging itself more and more from Trump.

These discontent workers have not only taken note of Trump’s continued bellicosity (after he promised to be an “anti-war” president) and his failure to dismantle the deep state in any significant and not merely symbolic capacity, but also, how in the country itself no serious policies are being taken or proposed to improve the dire living situation of the working masses, who are growing more impoverished and drowning deeper in debt as time passes. This situation led the prominent working-class X influencer, “Texas Trucker,” to tweet at Trump, Secretary of the Department of Transportation Sean Duffy, and Vice President J.D. Vance the following: “It's sad. Is all truckers in America going to have to join the American Communist Party to get justice in America. They seem to be the only ones standing with us and for us.” The melancholy in this statement demonstrates the awareness of Trump’s betrayal of MAGA, and the realization that the essential demands of the MAGA working class base can only be realized through another political project.

America is in a similar turning point as it was at the time of the Civil War (the second American Revolution). At that time, two routes were presented to the American trajectory. One path led deeper toward Teutonic anti-civilization. The other toward the construction of a fully American civilization, premised on a radical, abolition democracy. For a period of time, America affirmed the later path. It ensured, for a small but not insignificant period of time, that the interests of human beings and civilization were primary. It was this period of social upheaval and revolution that led Du Bois to compare the Civil War and Reconstruction to the Bolshevik, Chinese, and French Revolutions. In 1876 this hope collapses. The northern capitalist class (which could’ve very well played a role akin to the one played by the national, patriotic bourgeoisie in China) betrayed black and white workers in the South, who were building their own dictatorship of labor. Du Bois described this poetically when he said that “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”

In the aftermath of this betrayal, those who were betrayed didn’t simply give up on their ideals. On the contrary, as Du Bois writes in The Souls of Black Folk, “there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes.” In the face of the betrayal of the ideal by the ruling class, the popular base, the black workers, affirmed that it was only through their emancipation that the ideals could be realized. Today the working class MAGA base is faced with the same predicament the black proletariat, as Du Bois called it, was in. Its leaders have betrayed its ideals. Neither Trump nor his government of Warhawks will seriously dismantle the deep state, end the “forever wars,” or uplift the lives of the American worker. The MAGA worker is coming to realize this, and with this realization comes another one – only they can save themselves. These ideals, which affirm a rupture from the path of Teutonic anti-civilization, and toward a genuine American civilizational project, will not be enacted by the whims of billionaires like Trump, but through the struggle of the discontented worker affirming his power.

If the tendencies we have outlined continue, it is likely that in the coming years we will be seeing the clear divorce of MAGA from Trump. The American worker will, in time, come to realize that only socialism – a society of, by, and for the people, can actually Make America Great Again. Seismic shifts, not just in the country’s trajectory, but in geopolitics as a whole, will occur when this realization emerges and is acted upon. 

 Truth is cheap. Not in the sense that it is worthless. But quite literally, it just is there. All that an understanding of truth requires is our ability to comprehend the world; to see how things are connected to each other, how they exist in various processes, and how they always carry within them opposing tendencies, upon whose interaction, movement is produced.

Our spontaneous interaction with the world is always-already embedded in a view that sees how things are constantly changing and affecting everything else around them.

It is in the schools where we learn how to disconnect things from their time and place. And this action of abstract thought, although helpful to obtain certain forms of detailed knowledge of particulars, corrupts our spontaneous awareness of the dynamic integration of reality.

This is not to say that truth is simple. After all, once we are developed enough to ask the question, the bias towards disconnection and staticity would’ve already been inserted in our minds by the dominant institutions.

A process of “brain washing” our “brain washing” is necessary.

But nonetheless, truth is always readily available. To acquire truth there is no need to massage reality. The way the world is, is sufficient.  Truth does not require makeup crews. It is.

Lies, however, have a high cost of maintenance. To lie is to fabricate. To lie is to distort. It requires effort.

The lie, unlike the truth, is not just there. The presence of the lie presupposes its absence. The lie is there because it wasn’t.

The lie is there because the way the world was, was insufficient for the men and institutions who lie.

Lies are costly. They require the wholesale creation of new worlds, based disingenuously on the world.

To lie is, as Michael Parenti would say, to invent reality. The liar, which includes men and their historically determined institutions, is the demiurgos of a new universe.

From the matter of the world, they provide form to a new one.

But this is costly.

The lie is haunted by the ever-present reality of change. Change presents the real possibility for fissures to arise in the invented world.   

The lie clings hopelessly on to the purity of the first moment, the moment when it fooled fools into entering its invented world.

The liar must operate, out of necessity, with a purity fetish. They must resist the desecration of the sanctity of their invented world by the developments in the real world.

​Truth is in the attunement of our understanding of the world and the real changes in it. Lies long for Parmenidean permanence.

In a real world where nothing is permanent and fixed, lies, the invented world, is constantly in an existential struggle against reality. Reality wears it out; it increases, in time, the costliness of the invented world’s survival.

The lovers of purity are, consciously or not, lovers of lies.

Lies are not only based on purity, that is, the pure moment when the invented world obtains followers, its own beings-in-the-world. Purity itself is a lie. They are partners in a crime against the real world, against truth.

The final crack will be dealt by those who were thrown into the invented world. Their own followers will be their headsmen.

It is popular to say that a “lie has no legs.”

It would be more correct to say that a lie’s legs are as capable as the pocketbooks that secure the prosthetics.

Billions are needed, for instance, to sustain the Zionist entity’s Hasbara program. Only a phone, a universal object in the modern world, is needed to record the truth.

With millions of phones that have recorded and shared the genocide, truth has pierced, for many, the invented worlds of imperialist lies.

The costly resources forwarded to sustain lies-based new worlds are no guarantee of the long-term survival of these worlds.

The prosthetic, expensive though it might be, could break with constant stress.

That is what the truth, the world, provides lies, the invented worlds. It provides it with a constant stress, a haunting ever-presence that looms over the invented world. At nodal points it cracks it, and like Shiva, becomes a destroyer of worlds.

José Martí held that a lie can run for a hundred years, but the truth can catch up to it in a minute.

In that hundred years of running, the lie felt the truth breathing down its neck, like a shadow which becomes a striking shade when the moment is right.

Today the invented world of the imperialists is seeing the stress fractures of the evermore-visible truth.

No amount of money will fix the prosthetic legs of their lies, of their invented worlds.

The question, today, is not whether it will crack, but when.

​However, it is clear to even the most dogmatic defenders of the old unipolar world that we are in a period of revolutionary transition. The logic which animates geopolitical relations is being radically altered. The days were the U.S. unilaterally imposed its will on the world are coming to an end. Today a new, multipolar geopolitical logic is being born, and it is governed by a mutual respect between nations and civilizations, and an intercourse of trade based on win-win, not win-lose, relations.

It is fair to say, then, that we are living in the “end of the end of history.”

This should not have been unexpected for anyone with the slightest awareness of history itself. History shows that development is an ever-going phenomenon; it demonstrates that everything that comes to be, irrespective of how final and secure it may at first appear, will eventually, as Goethe said, “perish wretchedly.”

The “end of history” was never the “end of history.” It was simply a period were the U.S.’s imperialist power could go unchallenged by any formidable rival. The “end of history” was nothing but a short interlude in a global struggle against Western imperialism, wherein the U.S. held on to a ceaselessly weakening unipolar dominance.  

This short interlude provided the time for a resurgence of global powers that could challenge the U.S.’s plan for a “New American Century.” These new global powers, such as China, Russia, Iran, etc., are working upon the legacy of rich ancient civilizations, whose millennium-long cultural insights and experience they have managed to incorporate into their rapid modernization. It has been a modernization, importantly, which has been free of the perils which accomplished Western capitalist “modernization,” namely, the genocide of the Amerindian populations, the African slave trade, and centuries of colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism. Internally, far from witnessing the extreme national inequalities which accompanied growth in the capitalist West, these civilizations have managed, as China says, to promote “common prosperity,” to greater or lesser extents, amongst their people. It has genuinely been a tide that has lifted all, or at least most, boats.

​For the German philosopher, G. W. F. Hegel, “the History of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom… Freedom is the sole truth of Spirit.” Fukuyama’s phrase on the “end of history” was first uttered by Hegel, who proclaimed that the “History of the World travels from East to West… Europe is absolutely the end of History.” If history is understood as the development of the self-consciousness of the concept of freedom, as Hegel understood it, then “the East knew only that One is Free; the Greek and Roman world, that some are free; [and] the German-Christian World knows that All are free.”

In terms of conceptual recognition, the West today continues to recognize that “all are free.” In fact, it precisely carries out its imperialist operations around the world under the auspices of promoting freedom, democracy, and equality. It uses the concepts of freedom, democracy, and equality to entrench the most profound real unfreedoms, tyrannies, and inequalities in the world. Far from allowing the self-consciousness of the concept of freedom be the means through which actual freedom is realized, a superficial, merely formal recognition of freedom is sustained precisely to reproduce unfreedom in actuality.

Furthermore, through its mass media and indoctrinating educational system, it prevents its population from even accessing the appropriate lexicon through which to communicate such unfreedom. The unfreedoms experienced can never be an inherent feature of the system; ultimate responsibility is always externalized to some pariah “other.”
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The unfreedoms of the American people are thus blamed on China, Russia, Iran, etc., and not on the U.S. capitalist system that produced them. In doing so, a dual effect is produced:

1) blame for the real unfreedom is exported to a convenient “other” who challenges U.S. imperial power, and 2) in externalizing the responsibility for your conditions of unfreedom, the limitations to your power appear merely external, i.e., you continue to operate as if you are still free, but “blocked off” from realizing such freedoms by the boogeyman “other.”

Paradoxically, this predicament was eloquently expressed by a Western philosopher who always manages to make support for the imperialist West seem “progressive,” Slavoj Žižek, who noted that “we ‘feel free’ because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”

Instead of thinking about freedom’s relationship with historical development as conceptual, we should think of it in terms of actuality. The same Hegel which suggests that we think of historical development as the universalizing of the concept of freedom, also equips us with a concrete conception of universality which readily provides us with the tools to affect this turn. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel writes that “Man knows what he is, and only when he does so is he actually what he is. Without this, knowing reason is nothing, nor is freedom.” We can be as self-conscious of our freedom as we want, but if there isn’t actual freedom in our lives, that self-consciousness of freedom is empty and hollow. It is merely freedom in form, without content.  

Therefore, Hegel writes that “Freedom can, however, be also abstract freedom without necessity, which false freedom is self-will, and for that reason it is self-opposed, unconsciously limited, an imaginary freedom which is free in form alone.” This is the empty, indeterminate freedom we have in the West. As the French philosopher Michel Clouscard articulated, it is a freedom where “everything is allowed but nothing is possible.” Freedom is always determinate; it is precisely the recognition of necessity, and the ability to positively act upon such a recognition.

This recognition of necessity, in the contemporary social conjuncture, is fundamentally a recognition of the laws of social development shaping our social trajectory. If we are not aware of the real systemic forces that produce the changes we observe in our world, we neither have the recognition of necessity nor the ability to affect our trajectory. This is what the ideological apparatuses of the West, the media, the schools, and the entertainment industry, provide the current social order, namely, the ability to prevent people from recognizing necessity. Even in times of deep social crisis – such as the crisis of legitimacy prevalent in the U.S. – the institutions of knowledge production provide ready-made alternative explanations for the reality at hand. As mentioned earlier, there is always an “other” upon which blame could be placed. This, therefore, systematically produces a recognition of false necessity, and hence, an unfreedom experienced as freedom.  

If we understand history as the history of the actuality of freedom, it is evident that we are far from its “end.” However, the collapse of the Western capitalist order that once fooled Hegel into seeing in its abstract proclamation of freedom the “end of history” (a mistake much more unforgiveable when it occurs almost two centuries after with Fukuyama), is a positive step in humanity’s trajectory towards real freedom. The recognition of our recognition of a false necessity, therefore, stands as an important mediational moment for our recognition of real necessity.

Multipolarity is opening the world to what Marx called the “realm of freedom” by recognizing the laws of capitalist social development, and actively intervening to undermine them. This is, fundamentally, what is at stake when countries like China, Russia, Iran, etc. place social and common good over and above the accumulation of capital. That supremacy of capital which warrants labeling the system capital-ISM is being actively undermined by the multipolar world. While this change, as Hegel said, “imports dissolution, [it] involves at the same time the rise of a new life.” The new world being born, as economist Oscar Rojas has described it, is premised on international relations between “associated free producers,” i.e., sovereign countries engaging in win-win geopolitical relations, and is leading humanity into a “communitarian mode of production,” where the aims of socially carried out production are not the accumulation of capital in private hands, but social utility and benefit.

Hegel was right, then, about the sun of world-history setting in the West. But its setting has long passed. Today humanity is in an astronomical dawn. Once again, the sun is rising in the East. While it is not fully out, its light has become visible. A new day is here.

This article was published originally in The China Academy. ​

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]
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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.
​
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
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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
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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.