​To understand the Cuban Embargo, one must understand that it is only one aspect in the broader goal of America to rule over Cuba. The US has long had an interest in colonizing Cuba. In 1823, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams wrote a letter to U.S Minister to Spain Hugh Nelson about the possibility of annexing Cuba within the next fifty years. The Cuban sugar industry at that time had been incredibly lucrative and drew the attention of American investors. Twenty five years later, in 1848, James Polk offered to buy Cuba from Spain for $100,000,000. This offer was rejected.

​Though the US may have never formally colonized Cuba, its economic domination of the island could be comparable to that of any colonial power. By the 1870s, 75% of Cuba’s sugar was exported to the US. In 1895, US investments in Cuba were valued up to $95,000,000. Cuba’s industries and economy quickly became subordinated to US corporations. In 1894, 90% of Cuba’s exports went to the US and 38% of its imports were from the US. Cuba served as a valuable geopolitical outpost for the US. It would be valuable in defending Florida and New Orleans, along with serving as an outpost and springboard for further economic and political control of Latin America.

While Cuba might have technically gained independence from the US in 1902, the Platt Amendment, however, kept Cuba in a continual state of colonial subjugation. The Platt Amendment allowed the US to intervene in Cuba at any time. It also set up US control of Cuba’s foreign policy and its public finances. In addition, much of Cuba’s wealth remained in US hands. In essence, the Platt Amendment and the presence of US corporations reduced the notion of Cuban independence to a myth. By the 1920s two thirds of Cuba’s sugar production was controlled by US companies and in 1929, US investments in Cuba reached almost a billion dollars and 62% of it went into the sugar industry. By the 1950s Cuba was the largest recipient of US aid and the US controlled almost all the important industries in Cuba. By 1955, 90% of telecommunications and electric services, 40% of the sugar industry, and 50% of public service railways were in the hands of American investors. Four years later, the US controlled 90% of all the mines, 80% of the utilities, and almost all the cattle ranches and the entire oil industry.

However, this vast investment in Cuba did not benefit the majority of Cubans, instead much of this wealth was repatriated back to the US or consumed by the American and Cuban elites on the island. That’s not to forget of course that US investment in Cuba heavily favored multinationals, and many of these corporations didn’t have to pay taxes to the Cuban government and were allowed to keep their profits, thus doing very little to develop an independent Cuban economy or help the lives of everyday Cubans. In fact, life for everyday Cubans was quite miserable under Batista and American imperialism. In 1953, the average Cuban family made six dollars a week and 15-20% of the labor force was unemployed. The average salary of a rural Cuban was $91. Sugar companies also owned 75%  of the arable land and only employed 25,000 people full time and 500,000 people as part time workers during the harvest season which only lasted for about two to four months, for the rest of the year these people were relegated to poverty and unemployment. Only 2% of people in Cuba had running water and 9% of people had electricity. The vast majority of people in the rural areas lived in huts. The life expectancy was 59 years and infant mortality was 60 out of 1000 live births.

The notions that Cuba prior to Castro was a ritzy tropical paradise couldn’t be further from the truth. The vast majority of the population lived in poverty and a system of racial segregation--as horrible as the one in the US if not worse--was institutionalized and barred Afro-Cubans from accessing any employment opportunities other than domestic or manual labor. The only people who truly benefited from Batista’s Cuba were white wealthy landowners, business elites, and the professional class. These were the people that fled immediately after the revolution, not common workers or campesinos. The Cuban revolution was a true revolution of independence. It freed Cuba from the neo-colonial clutches of the United States which subjected the Cuban economy to the whim of monopolistic expansion by American corporations. There is no political independence without economic independence. Castro’s land reform and nationalization of major industries allowed Cuba to buck the reins of US imperialism and chart its own path of development without the destructive interference of an imperialistic power.

The US sees an independent Cuba as a threat to its grasp over the rest of Latin America and its own status as a global hegemonic power. Therefore, it can’t let Cuba’s socialist development succeed. Though the US has attempted various methods to sabotage the development through means of terrorism and assasination, the Embargo, otherwise known as the blockade has been the most enduring inhibitor to a prosperous and socialist Cuba. The blockade is incredibly thorough and applies not only to U.S. nationals and businesses based in the United States but also to businesses and nationals outside of the US as well.

​In 1917, the worker-peasant alliance in economically-backward Russia began the formation of  the first state in the world that truly belonged to the hardworking masses. The Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin, displayed to the whole world that it was possible for ordinary people to achieve self-determination. With counter-revolutionaries, loyalists, monarchists and revivalists attempting to purge Russia from within and imperialists waging war from outside, the tale the first “Really Existing Socialism” began under circumstances of great challenge. Nonetheless, the red star had begun to shine. Its light extended beyond the borders of the USSR, through Eastern Europe, all the way to the colonised third-world. Mired in the tactics of internationalism and world-socialism, the successful revolution offered its amicable hands to its toiling comrades of the third-world, who were struggling against the excesses of imperialism.

Before going further, it is important to note that communism in India had its origins in the material conditions of India, in its process of historical development, and its efforts to resolve the contradictions of British imperialism on the one hand, and feudal landlordism on the other. Communism in India was not a formula implanted into the minds of people by bureaucrats sitting in Moscow, as certain right-wing ideologues claim. That being said, the Bolshevik Revolution and the worker’s state it established, had a profound impact on the Indians grappling with their reality, and also provided them some theoretical frameworks.

The national and colonial questions, as they were called, were not peripheral ponderings that arbitrarily occurred in the minds of the Third International revolutionaries. For Lenin, and many others, national liberation and the anti-colonial struggle was central to the process of overthrowing capitalism. This extends from the idea that imperialism was integral for capitalism to function - which was to become Lenin’s core thesis in ‘Imperialism – The Highest Stage of Capitalism’. These revolutionaries found it preposterous that many communists of the colonizing countries (read Europe) did not concern themselves with the colonial question. In the second Congress of the Comintern, Lenin stated, “All Communist parties should render direct aid to the revolutionary movements among the dependent and underprivileged nations … and in the colonies.” 

On this day, celebrating the 104th anniversary of the October Revolution, let us take a look at what this revolution meant to the masses of India, the country where I live.

The world had changed immensely since the collapse of the First International, and the reformism, anarchism and Eurocentrism of the Second International led many revolutionaries to utter disappointment. The 1905 revolutionary coup in Russia had failed. Lenin had further solidified his understanding of imperialism as an inevitable extension of capitalism, and understood the importance of an international communist organisation that could truly connect with the people of the colonized countries.  Overdetermined by these conditions, the Third International (or Comintern) was formed.

​In the second Congress of the Comintern, held between July and August 1920, there were delegates from across the world, including the colonized countries. M.N Roy, a young communist of Indian origins, was representing the Mexican communist party, which he had helped form during his self-exile from India. Abani Mukherjee represented India. Lenin delivered his draft-thesis on ‘National and Colonial Questions’ which substantiated the need for the communist movement to grapple with the material conditions of colonised country and agree on some strategies and tactics to lead the spread of the revolution in the colonized world. He called for suggestions and criticisms from the delegates of various nationalities, who understood their own reality better.

​Although M.N Roy was representing Mexico in the Second Congress of the Comintern, his remarks were almost entirely about the struggle in India. In response to Lenin’s address and call for criticism, M.N Roy put forward the arguments which form the basis the famous Lenin-Roy Debate. The debate can be fragmented into three areas of contention: (a) the economic mode-of-production in the colonies, (b) the role and nature of the national bourgeoisie of the colonized countries, and by obvious extension from the previous two points, (c) the mode of struggle and strategy to be applied in the colonized countries.

Lenin had remarked (in the thesis mentioned earlier) that unlike what Marxism had originally anticipated, the colonized world does not go through the subsequent historical stages and their economic mode-of-production remains backward. In the colonized countries, capitalism gets the liberty to be overwhelmingly vicious and ruthless. The character of the national bourgeoisie in those countries is also inversely affected, as the colonizers don’t allow the nationalist bourgeoisie to play the role of developing the productive forces according to its own needs and interests. However, Lenin insisted that there needs to be a strategic support and alliance with the national bourgeoisie of the colonized countries, in the process of overthrowing colonialism. In the USSR, a form of bourgeois-democratic revolution had happened before the socialist revolution could succeed. In the colonized world, the overthrow of colonialism in alliance with the national bourgeoisie would mark a similar step, paving way for socialism.

Roy disagreed on the count that the nationalist bourgeoisie of India was mired in reactionary conservatism. He argued that it was due to Lenin’s lack of awareness about the material conditions of India that the latter ascribed a progressive and revolutionary role to the Indian national bourgeoisie. Roy argued that the bourgeois-nationalist movement led by the Indian National Congress and Gandhi, was backward looking. If the communists had to align with them, the national bourgeoisie would eventually take over control of the alliance and subvert the movement. People would be led to be satisfied with bourgeois-democratic forms of capitalism and nothing more. For clarity of the Russian comrades, Roy compared Gandhi’s movement with the populist movements that had happened in Russia earlier: these were motivated by religious zeal and cultural revivalism, and were reactionary even if they might have appeared to be progressive. 

The final resolution of the Congress settled on the following line:

“With regard to those states and nationalities where a backward, mainly
feudal, patriarchal or patriarchal-agrarian regime prevails, the following
must be borne in mind: All communist parties must give active support
to the revolutionary movements of liberation….”

Initially, the phrase towards the end had assured support to “bourgeois-democratic liberation movements”. But Roy’s intervention had successfully warranted its upgrade to “revolutionary movements of liberation”.

The struggle in India was not only the struggle of the INC and Gandhi, argued Roy. The working-class and peasantry had begun to organise. It was a duty of the Communist International to support those movements.

​The Communist Party of India was formed in Tashkent, sometime between 1920 and 1921, the dates are contestable. It was consolidated in the Communist Conference in Kanpur, on December 1925.

Maxim Gorky wrote his iconic novel ‘Mother’, after the failure of the 1905 coup. It tells the story of Mother Nilovna, a working-class woman who slowly turns to the radical path when her son Pavel (aka Pasha) exposes her to the communist movement taking place then. Avtar Singh Sandhu, a militant communist poet from Punjab, read the novel in the 70s and declared his pen name to be ‘Pash’ – named after Pasha. Between the time when the novel was written to lighten up the struggling revolutionaries of Russia, and when it was read and perceived by Pash, came so many events of thrill and solidarity. 

Pash wrote about Comrade Bhagat Singh:

“The awakening of the people of Punjab
To a revolutionary consciousness,
Was done for the first time
By Bhagat Singh.

On the day that he was hanged,
They had recovered from his lock-up cell,
Among his belongings
A Lenin book,
On which he had marked the page
Till where he had read;

Now it is our turn
To read the book to that page, and read it further;
To lead the struggle to that stage, and lead it further.”

Among others, Maxim Gorky – a comrade of the revolution and a literary genius, held the idea that the revolutionary Soviet republic should have a revolutionary printing press that actively translated a wide range of texts across different languages. A publishing house for world literature was established in 1919, which survived for five years. A magazine titled ‘Literature of the World Revolution’ was launched in 1931. The most significant was the creation of Publishing Co-operative of Foreign Workers (ITIR), which translated books into foreign languages. Through Comintern connections, ITIR employed mostly migrants from different parts of the world, who brought in their indigenous wisdom. In its first year, it translated to seventeen European languages and five Asian languages. Within two decades, it was translating to various Indian, Arab and African languages. In 1963, ITIR would merge with another organization to give rise to the legendary Progress Publishers. Thousands of books from these publications would come to India, throughout the period of the Soviet Union’s existence. This would bring all kinds of books, from old fairy-tales from across the world, to analyses on political economy.

The impact of the Bolshevik Revolution on art was manifold. ‘Amar Lenin’, a short film by Ritwik Ghatak portrays a working-man from rural Bengal who comes across a jatra about the Bolsheviks going from village to village, understanding the troubles of the peasants and arming them with theory. (A jatra is a drama form practised primarily in Rural Bengal, characterised by music and theatrics.) This was a part of Ghatak’s cinema of praxis, a concept he held on to, even after his fallout with the communist party. There were several such instances where Bolshevism arose in art and armed the working people with confidence to fight.

The vigorous impact of the revolution, may be summed up with a few lines from a poem by Sukanta Bhattacharya:

“We sailed across the murderous seas, we reach the safe shore,
The fields of freedom have arrived, we see no chains anymore;

Only a voice, that whispers my words from within
Saying out it seems as though that I am Lenin.”

It is important to note that Marxism came to India through Soviet Russia. For a sufficient period of time, Indian people who were exploring different paths of liberation, found their theory in Lenin’s writings and were thus introduced to Marxism. In the Western world, several factions of Marxist thought, both in the academic arena and the political, tend to skip Lenin. The essence of Western Marxism lies in the rejection of Soviet interpretation of Marx, which is denounced as ‘objectivist’. They go further to say that this form of Marxism was derived from Engel’s misrepresentation of Marx, and has no bearing to the original Marx at all. Other schools of the New Left make it a point to develop “anti-Stalinism” in their politics, to avoid bureaucracy and totalitarian control.

​Revolutionaries in our world – the colonized world, do not have that luxury. For us, revolution runs through Leninism, which we see as the only path through which we can build socialism. Our party offices and pamphlets, alongside our own indigenous revolutionaries and heroes, have posters of Lenin, Stalin and Engels (and Mao). Not for us the defeatism of Trotsky. Not for us the entitlement of Eurocommunism. It is crucial for us, all the more, to uphold and defend the legacies of the great Bolshevik revolution.

​Three decades have passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The renegades of capitalism have declared the “end of ideology”. The agents of the market who had begun their penetration in the Indian soil with liberalisation in the 80s, are making attempts to seep in further into every nook and corner of the country, their most recent prey being Bhagat Singh’s Punjab. In 2018, a statue of Lenin in the state of Tripura was demolished by the fascist forces, among other reasons, to drive home the point that communism is dead and done with. Yet, there are communist parties, trade-unions and students unions striving to organize and put forth the demands of the hardworking masses. There are countless people finding solace in the red-flag, as the only genuine alternative to the dominant corporate oligarchy. Surely, one may find a know-it-all bourgeois news-anchor screaming, “The USSR collapsed long ago, so what are you on about!” Across the streets and corners, in ghettoes and slums, in villages and universities, one will also find a steadfast communist, answering, “What if the reactionary forces destroy the Taj Mahal some day? Will we stop falling in love?”

​This is a very personal attempt at presenting the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution in India. This is not a comprehensive overview. Therefore, I have had to omit certain figures and events, which may have been important. There have been important communist and socialist movements parallel to the CPI, such as the famous HSRA with Bhagat Singh, which I have omitted.  I also recognise that in the section on art, my references come from Bengal and North India. I have left out a rich plethora of art from South India, simply because of my lack of knowledge of it. Among the poems mentioned, the poem by Pash was written in Punjabi and the one by Sukanta was written in Bangla. Both have been translated by the present author.

References

Chowdhuri, S. R. (2007). Leftism in India: 1917-1947. Palgrave.

Prashad, V. (2019). The East was read: Socialist culture in the third world. LeftWord.

​Riddell, J., Prashad, V., & Mollah, N. (2019). Liberate the colonies!: Communism and colonial freedom, 1917-1924. LeftWord Books. (The section on Lenin’s Draft Thesis on the National and Colonial Questions, and M.N Roy’s supplementary thesis on the same.

​“For “academics” I have here substituted “up lifters”, i.e., believers in law-abiding progress without a political struggle, progress under the autocracy. Such up lifters are to be found in all sections of Russian society, and everywhere, like the student “academics”, they confine themselves to the narrow range of professional interests, the improvement of their particular branches of the national economy or of state and local administration; everywhere they fearfully shun “politics”, making no distinction (as the academics make none) between the “politically minded” of different trends, and implying by the term politics everything that concerns the form of government.”
​
- Vladimir Lenin, “The Tasks of the Revolutionary Youth”

​We live in difficult times. The class struggle persists, but with preponderant power in the hands of the ruling class. The socialist revolution appears to be postponed indefinitely. The imperial agents of free-markets and economic liberalism have gripped our world and seem to hold power with an iron fist. Trade unions have been made illegal, obsolete or overwhelmingly weak across the world. In India, the country where I live, the old trade unions are struggling to find newer ways to organise and newer ones are finding space to breathe. 
           
In the USA, the AFL-CIO has long abandoned any element of class struggle, with all the socialist and communist factions within it being purged away. In India, the BJP (i.e., the electoral party faction of the fascist outfit RSS) has its own trade union. The fascists have made their way into working-class ghettoes, tea-plantation mills, urban industrial areas and everywhere else the socialists were supposed to have gained strength. They drive a Hindu revivalist agenda, or a Brahmanical agenda, depending on the context of the people and make it increasingly harder for socialist trade unions to organise.
           
The BJP won its first term in 2014, with the popular consensus being critical of the previously elected neo-liberal elite government of INC. Narendra Modi assured the people that the country will be freed from the corrupt INC rule. He assured the Hindu majority that their pride will be restored. In other words, Make India Great Again. The BJP won. Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister of the country that prides itself to be the world’s largest democracy.
           
Modi’s first term as the Prime Minister involved several cases of lynching of Muslims (mostly from the working class) in the name of protecting the holy cow. It involved a prolonged delay in the release of data on farmer suicides, a phenomenon that has been rising since the 90s when the Indian government took the neo-liberal route. Among other atrocious realities, the neo-fascist rule involved a fundamentally McCarthyist attack on intellectualism in general, with fairly liberal historians such as Romila Thapar and economists such as Amartya Sen, being remarked as Marxists and therefore “anti-national”. This manifested in a protracted war on students across the country through cancellation of fellowships that were essential for financially and socially backward students. A legitimising ideology was created by propagating the idea that students are a waste of public money, that students pursue research in topics that are irrelevant to India’s glory and that they are conspiring with terrorists to undermine Indian sovereignty. Corporate media, television, and more crucially, state-sponsored en-masse WhatsApp forwards played a huge role in legitimising this ideology.
           
Students across the country struck the streets into a protest termed as the Occupy UGC movement (UGC being the University Grants Commission.) (1) Rohit Vemula, a young student from Hyderabad was a part of this movement. He belonged to a marginalised caste. He was witch-hunted by the authorities and compelled to commit suicide. His death followed another media propaganda campaign to wash down the caste angle. His death sparked the fire of revolt and protest across the country. His suicide note has the chilling effect that is bound to radicalise anybody with an iota of humanity. (2)

​The protests of the Occupy UGC movement and those demanding justice for Rohit Vemula, caused the surfacing of student leader Kanhaiya Kumar, the erstwhile student union president of Jawaharlal Nehru University and a member of AISF, the student-wing of the Communist Party of India (CPI). Certain allegations were made about anti-national slogans being raised in the university on 9 February, 2016. Kanhaiya Kumar was arrested, along with a few other students. After his release from a brief period in jail, Kanhaiya Kumar found himself declared a traitor in the national ideology. He was vilified, but also popularised. The speech he gave right after his release went viral in the internet and secular liberals as well as leftists saw a hero in him. His excellent oratory skills coupled with leftist rhetoric gained him abundant charm. (3) The CPI leadership saw great potential in Kanhaiya and was quick to promote him into the party’s highest policy-decision board. The quickness of his rise within the party is unimaginable in the history of communist movement in India. His subsequent standing in the elections struck enough fear in the BJP candidate Giriraj Singh who was to stand in the same constituency. Kanhaiya crowd-funded his election campaign. Several liberal celebrities and comedians supported his campaign. Kanhaiya Kumar lost the elections, but became a celebrity championing the cause of dissent. (4)
           
Kanhaiya Kumar, in his radical speeches made as a student leader in the campus, made serious criticism of the INC, which he correctly identified as a representative of the ruling class. This was pre-2016. Recently, Kanhaiya Kumar has addressed the media and confirmed that he has joined the INC. In his announcement, he stated a bunch of reasons, which boil down to the idea that INC is the oldest national party in India that upholds secularism and democracy, and thus the only way to battle the influence of BJP would be to align with the INC. CPIML-L politburo member Kavita Krishnan has written an article pointing out the fallacies in Kanhaiya’s argument, and exposing his opportunism. (5) The liberals that upheld him, had a gleeful reaction to see him dissociate from the communist movement. D Raja, the General Secretary of CPI, made a statement condemning him. “It shows that he has no ideological and political commitment other than his personal ambitions,” read the official statement by the party. Shubham Banerjee, another important member of the CPI and a leader of its student wing said that he had observed opportunistic tendencies in Kanhaiya for quite some time, but didn’t have any reason to think that he would join a bourgeois electoral party. (6) It is certainly true that Kanhaiya’s speeches criticised the style of governance that Modi pursued, condemning the communalism and intolerance. However, these were at best liberal. The speeches never mentioned communism or even the communist party he was representing. Kanhaiya’s campaigns in his home district of Begusarai, were done under the banner of ‘Team Kanhaiya’, and not that of his party, CPI. His radicalism from student days has long dried out. He is now a steadfast politician, who knows the rules of the game.
           
This article is not about Kanhaiya Kumar, or any individual for that matter. However, this case of opportunism strikes me personally because the initial arrest of young Kanhaiya Kumar and the spectacle that was made of it, played a huge role in my turn towards radical politics. I am aware that this was the case for many young people across the country, at least those from a petty-bourgeois class background. When I was still in junior-high, I binge-watched every Kanhaiya Kumar speech and conference that I could get my hands on. I had also read his PhD thesis on African decolonisation and his personal memoir called “From Bihar to Tihar”. Kanhaiya pursuing opportunism did not surprise me one bit, the turn he was to take had become fairly obvious. There was an expectation in the CPI that Kanhaiya would translate his massive popularity into mass mobilisation and energy for class struggle. That expectation was let down.

​A couple of decades ago, in the same campus of JNU stood another young communist leader: Chandrashekhar Prasad, endearingly called ‘Chandu’. Chandu was a member of AISA, the student-wing of the Communist Party of India Marxist Leninist Liberation (CPIML-L). Chandu had begun his tryst with student politics in AISF (the same organisation that Kanhaiya was a part of). However, soon he made his shift to AISA, having become disillusioned by the revisionist tendencies of his previous organisation. AISA was then in its formative years, since its parent party (CPIML-L) had only began to make its shift from underground politics to broad mass-based organising. (7) Chandu is known to have been a charismatic leader and a brilliant student, who could present his arguments pertinently in the intellectual arena, as well as connect mirthfully with the working-class. He was pursuing his post-doctoral research thesis on forms of popular folk theatre of Bihar, the state where he was from. He wished to return to Bihar right after the completion of his education and struggle to improve the political scenario of the state, which was then dominated by government cronies and goons.

In 1997, while planning a general strike in Bihar, Chandu was shot dead, along with one of his comrades, Shyam Narayan Yadav. This was nothing new in the Laloo Yadav-led Bihar state, where political assassinations and cronyism was manifold. Chandu’s death sparked protests across the country, especially among students. The protests were faced with violent police repression but succeeded to gain so much ground that a dialogue had to be arranged between the students and the nation’s then Prime Minister I.K Gujral. Gujral dismissed the students demands for justice as “impractical”. The protests did succeed in forcing a probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation, however, the crony parliamentarian Shahabuddin, who had ordered the political assassination, was not arrested due to lack of evidence. (8) Chandu’s inspiration leads forwards young revolutionaries across the country, and his efforts at organising the initial years of AISA, bloom flowers today, with thousands of members across the country – the author of this article included.

​I do not intend to present a hagiography of Chandu, there is quite an amount of that available: the corporate Hindi film industry even displayed the desire to produce a commercial biopic of him, but was met with strong opposition from the party which Chandu had been loyal to in his life.  Neither do I wish to present a contrast between two student leaders who grew out of similar circumstances and conditions of repression, but went in radically different directions. That contrast should be fairly obvious and not much is to be made of it. What is important for us, is to recognise the concrete elements of Chandu’s politics that could lead young student radicals closer to the revolutionary cause, and away from petty opportunism.

Certain words from Lenin form the epigraph of this article. What one needs to understand is that students (and I mean students pursuing higher-education) do not automatically constitute an inherently progressive strata. A very tiny minority of a country’s population even comes close to higher education, and an even tinier portion of that minority comes from marginalised backgrounds. Higher-education spaces are an arena of the elite. Even those that enter universities are often victims of the dominant ideology, which leads them to be negligent to politics – let alone working-class politics. For these reasons, various communist party documents go ahead with the implicit assumption that students are generally petty-bourgeois. Thus, even when the liberal intelligentsia leads us to see an amount of glory in student protests and dissent, we must recognise its limitations. Lenin’s words echo this sentiment.

That being said, no sensible person will deny that students form an important part of society and have a role to play in political transformation. From the young Red Guards of the Chinese Cultural Revolution to the hundreds of déclassé students in Naxalbari uprising in India, there is no denying of the role students play. The catch being that: in these uprisings and others, students were required to uproot themselves from the elite setting of the academia and form new roots in the ghettoes, slums, villages and dwellings of the workers and peasants. They were required to engage with the exploited classes and understand their needs, and fight alongside them for revolutionary change. They were required to transform their abstract political understanding into materially feasible programs, by engaging with the exploited class.

In our times, the Chandus are less in number and the Kanhaiyas are ever expanding. In the context of the U.S, the same has been pointed out by many including the Marxist sociologist Vivek Chibber. The individuals are shaped and designed by the political domains of their time. In our domain of performative woke politics and postmodernist identity-politics, the broader left has lost touch with the working-class. Leftist students, being a subset, have met the same fate. There has been a broad acceptance of theories of intersectionality that focus on upward mobility and individualise the collective experiences of oppression. At its extreme, this shift causes the working-class to be incorrectly portrayed as a regressive reactionary class that isn’t well versed with politically correct diction and hence needs to be rebuild after the sanctimonious images of these woke students and the intelligentsia. (9)

To bring alive the struggle against fascism, neoliberalism and the bourgeois-landlord alliance, to lead the struggle for revolutionary change, the left will have to relocate itself along the lines of Naxalbari, along the lines of the Cultural Revolution, along the lines of Chandu. The student left will have to stop obsessing over its own self and stand in alliance with the workers and peasants who have little to lose but their chains.

​References
1. Pisharoty, Sangeeta Barooah. What Lies Behind the 'Occupy UGC' Protest. The Wire, India. [Online] November 24, 2015. https://thewire.in/education/what-lies-behind-the-occupy-ugc-protest.
2. The Wire Staff. My Birth is My Fatal Accident: Rohith Vemula's Searing Letter. The Wire, India. [Online] January 17, 2019. https://thewire.in/caste/rohith-vemula-letter-a-powerful-indictment-of-social-prejudices.
3. HT Correspondant. Kanhaiya Kumar released from jail, says will write his story now. Hindustan Times. [Online] March 3, 2016. https://www.hindustantimes.com/india/jnu-students-union-leader-kanhaiya-kumar-released-from-jail/story-EMqrXflBIlkyhat12crKUP.html.
4. Kumar, Manish. Elections 2019: Why Giriraj Singh Won't Take His Rival Kanhaiya Kumar's Name. NDTV. [Online] April 24, 2019. https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/lok-sabha-elections-2019-why-giriraj-singh-wont-take-his-rival-kanhaiya-kumars-name-2028063.
5. Krishnan, Kavita. How To Not Fight Fascism. Liberation. [Online] November 2021. https://liberation.org.in/liberation-2021-november/how-not-fight-fascism.
6. Host, Swarup Katha Channel. CPI & AISF Leader Shuvam Banerjee on Kanhaiya Kumar. YouTube. [Online] September 29, 2021. https://youtu.be/JqxWuTfQh7s.
7. Banerjee, Sumanta. In the Wake of Naxalbari. Kolkara : A. P. Printers, 2014. 978-81-7955-116-5.
8. Kant, Krishna. The Gun That Killed JNU's Chandrashekhar 20 Years Ago Was 'Secular'. The Wire, India. [Online] April 1, 2017. https://thewire.in/politics/gun-killed-jnus-chandrashekhar-secular.
9. Chibber, Vivek. Whatever Happened To Class? Himal South Asian. [Online] November 21, 2017. https://www.himalmag.com/whatever-happened-to-class/.

​Recently Caleb Maupin, an American Marxist and activist, released a book entitled “BreadTube Serves Imperialism: Examining The New Brand of Internet Pseudo-Socialism”. This book was an attempt to deconstruct the phenomenon of BreadTube, an online entertainment trend turned subgenre which has a focus on media analysis, social issues, and generally “left-wing” politics. This attempt is understandable if not commendable; not only is criticism always welcome but BreadTube in particular is deeply flawed. Its politics are vaguely left-wing, yet rarely if ever provide any concrete calls to action. Its aversion towards economic analysis leaves its criticisms blunted at best. And of course its nature as a business means that of all its many flaws, BreadTube is incentivized not to fix the vast majority of them. A more economic analysis might bore people, and undoubtedly wouldn’t have the same level of appeal to BreadTube’s largely labor-aristocratic audience. Calls to action would require more concrete organizing, something BreadTube entirely lacks. Even if this were attempted, BreadTube’s reformist nature and focus almost entirely on social issues means that such organizing likely wouldn't get far. As the saying goes, “You can't have capitalism without racism.” 

This, alongside BreadTube’s relatively small outreach, brings into question whether the topic of online agitation is even one worthy of discussion. This could and should be explored in more depth in the future, however for now suffice it to say that yes, online agitation is ultimately niche and largely irrelevant. This is not to say it has no merit, but rather that it should not be hyper fixated on. There are certainly a fair share of high quality agitators online, including on the YouTube platform (channels such as Hakim, BadEmpanada, and others provide well researched and digestible content, suitable for agitation), however even the largest explicitly Marxist channel, Hakim, has only recently reached 100k subscribers.[1] Of that number, how many were Marxists before discovering his channel? How many are or plan to be actually organized? No amount of YouTube videos, social media posts, or articles written by arrogant teenagers can make up for on the ground organizing. This does not mean online agitation is useless, but it should be viewed in context.

Maupin opens his book by claiming that “The internet culture of “Social Justice Warriors” and the emergence of a group of pseudo-leftist internet voices called “BreadTube” is an attempt to counter the influence of right-wing voices among the US population, with the covert backing of the rival faction of imperialists.”(pg.6) Maupin does not even attempt to back this bold claim up, instead preferring to compare the alliance between social-democrats and Marxist-Leninists against fascism in the 30s to the alleged alliance between BreadTube and Marxist-Leninists to combat the right wing in America. Maupin claims that BreadTube is more dangerous than the social democrats, because the latter were genuinely committed to a version of Marxism which, while watered down, is still far better than the antithetical views held by the BreadTubers. Ignoring that the revisionism championed by figures such as Karl Kautsky and Eduard Berstein was and is itself antithetical to Marxism, Maupin vastly overstates the importance and danger of BreadTube.

He writes “BreadTube voices generally believe technological progress is an affront to mother nature, and that societies around the world are kept in a state of deindustrialization and underdevelopment are more “pure” and “beautiful”, close to some kind of spiritual ideal.”(pg.10) This claim goes completely unsourced, and no effort is made to prove that these views are held by all or even any members of BreadTube. “While Social Democracy in the 1920s tended to oppose illegal activities and militant labor activism, BreadTube has taken the opposite extreme. Bread Tubers tend to favor an escalation of street violence against the right-wing at a time  when these forces are much better armed and have a much better organized base among the population. If the eventual escalation that BreadTubers seem committed to inciting were to occur, the result would most likely be a huge crackdown on all political activism by the state, if not an outright victory for the right-wing. Furthermore, BreadTube often seems to almost incite lawless violence and hooliganism against Marxist-Leninists, 21st Century Socialists and  Anti-Imperialists at the same time that they call for mob violence against the right-wing. Bread Tube is actively working to change the political discourse, labelling anti-war and anti- imperialist voices as “Red Browns” and “Nazbols,” equating them with Nazis, and  setting the  stage of mob violence and state repression against them.”(pg.11)

 It is true that BreadTube has a love for nonsensical terms such as “tankie” and “red fascist”, the latter demonstrating with great efficiency the utter political ignorance of much of this crowd. Yet Maupin’s claims that BreadTube frequently incites reckless violence and adventurism are once more completely unsourced. No attempt is made to prove such claims, yet this supposed adventurism makes up the core of Maupin’s argument that BreadTube is more dangerous than the revisionists of the 30s. Maupin goes on to write “The  purpose of  this  book is  to  debunk and  expose the dangerous pseudo-leftism which BreadTube espouses. Genuine leftism and  Marxism is  the  only way out of  the  crisis. The primitivist, worker-coop, “non-authoritarian” society BreadTubers advocate is not  really achievable or  desirable.” A noble goal, and Maupin is quite right; anti-communism, a fixation on worker-coops, and a rejection of Marxism and as such any concrete and scientific analysis of Capitalism, are all failures of BreadTube. Yet, as we will see, Maupin fails to properly explain and critique these failures.

When it comes to discussing the individual personalities which make up BreadTube, Maupin takes the route of character assassination. Rather than discuss each entertainer's merits and flaws in relation to agitation, Maupin chooses to hyperfocus on their personal lives, usually implying that these details delegitimize the entertainer. He puts forward the claim that BreadTube peddles a conspiracy, one that states Nazis have infiltrated the US government.(pg.116) It has become tedious to note, however I feel I am obligated to remind the reader once more that not a single source is provided to support this claim. In fact, throughout the entirety of the book, Maupin provides almost no sources to support his characterizations of BreadTube. How is the reader to believe a word Maupin writes, when he refuses to make even the barest effort at supporting his claims? Does he expect the reader to already be highly familiar with BreadTube and its flaws? If so, surely there is no reason to read the book. 


Regarding Thought Slime, he writes “Matt’s videos tend to fixate on things like slime, feces, genitalia, and other things deemed to be ugly. Matt’s channel is much like the Netflix show 13 Reasons Why in that while it appears to be sympathetic to the mentally ill, it more or less encourages and enables people to fixate on their depressed, rageful, and suicidal feelings, wallowing in self-pity, anger, and hopelessness. This begs a fair question: How many of Matt’s mostly teenage and largely transgender audience have actually committed suicide after stewing with Matt for hours on their dark feelings? The answer is of course unknown.”(pg.24) About Vaush, Maupin writes “The personality of the 25-year-old indicates signs of narcissism and sex addiction. Some have speculated that his blatant rudeness and inability to comprehend other people’s views indicates he may be on the autistic spectrum.”(pg.19) This hyperfocus on the personalities of BreadTube cannot substitute for a proper analysis of their work, something Maupin forgets or ignores for the entirety of his book. 

Maupin proceeds to run through a history of counter-gangs and their use during the cold war. Again, he expects the reader to take his claims at face value. Rather than serving as a brief but well sourced education on Counter Gangs, this section serves instead as the means by which Maupin makes the reader comfortable with the notion that Counter Gangs have been deployed frequently, and that as such it isn't such a stretch to believe BreadTube represents just another example. This reasoning is entirely intellectually dishonest. That an event has occurred in the past, regardless of its frequency, does not in and of itself mean it is happening again in the present. Without a proper analysis of the conditions which have historically led to the phenomenon, no claim can be made that the phenomenon is occurring or will occur. Maupin makes no such study of the conditions of counter gangs, instead simply listing instances of their occurrence, and as such he cannot reasonably claim that BreadTube is another such example.

He goes on to write “The important thing to remember about counter-gangs in the late Cold War is that they are generally not conscious deceivers. Some will read the above contents and believe that African Maoists, UNITA, Left-Wing Intellectuals, or the Bread Tubers of 2021, are all “secret CIA agents” or some other crude interpretation. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is no doubt that the fighters of UNITA, the Wahhabis who fought alongside Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan, the intellectuals who pushed EuroCommunism, or even the BreadTubers of our time, legitimately believed in what they said and did. While they may be naive about the support they receive, what makes them useful proxies is their sincerity. Selecting certain ignorant and confused young people to be the voice of the movement and perhaps carefully nudging them to frame their rhetoric in a certain way is key. By rewarding them with patrons and clicks, the narrative can be carefully reinforced. A new “socialism” that is not anti-imperialist, not even genuinely anti-capitalist, but is very useful in containing and beating back the right-wing can be cultivated to serve imperialism.”(pg.48) 

Maupin is correct in suggesting that a significant portion of the American population distorts socialism, and is equally correct in suggesting that the bourgeoisie encourage such distortion. Yet Maupin again provides no evidence to support his claims. If BreadTube is being provided support, how? In what way is support given? In what quantity and how frequently? Are only the larger entertainers supported, or does support extend to smaller voices as well? Why do the bourgeoisie consider online entertainers to be worthy of their attention, so much so that they would provide assistance to said groups? Do they find the relatively small audiences of such entertainers to be dangerous? Or do they see potential for growth and are instead attempting to co-opt the movement before it grows too large? Perhaps it's something else entirely? None of these questions are answered. Is the idea that a group of young, politically minded liberals, seeing a large amount of far right branded entertainment on their mediums of choice, decided to produce the very content they enjoyed, and to counter the far right while doing so, is that idea so ridiculous? Is the idea that, as more voices began to fill this niche, more people became exposed to such content and were inspired to produce their own, so absurd? Is it inconceivable that their ignorance, the result of a constant and overwhelming propaganda campaign, allowed them to conflate liberalism and social democracy with socialism? And if these ideas are so far flung, if the bourgeoisie do utilize covert aid to prop up this ideologically distorted entertainment, if BreadTubers do have handlers, and if this phenomenon truly is a coordinated and professionally orchestrated campaign of propaganda, where is the evidence? Maupin provides none. Vague and inconsistent speculation is no substitute for materialist analysis. 

Maupin’s second chapter criticizes BreadTube for its ignorance of and blatant distortion of Marxist theory. These criticisms are entirely valid, and indeed one of BreadTube’s greatest flaws, though it should be noted that Maupin does not provide examples of such misunderstandings in his sections “The Marxist Definition of Capitalism”, “Imperialism: The Capitalism of Our Time”, “The Marxist Definition of Socialism”, and more. In the section “Marx Wasn’t A Statist” we find Maupins first reference to a specific work of BreadTube, when he criticizes Thought Slime’s video “Prager University Does Not Understand Democracy”. The section Maupin takes issue with is the one in which Thought Slime says “Lenin called the centralization of control over the state and economy Democratic Centralism.”[2] Maupin is right to take issue, as this is a complete mischaracterization of Democratic Centralism. In truth, Democratic Centralism was the means by which Lenin and the Bolsheviks organized their party. The system, roughly speaking, revolved around the notion that democracy should be exercised to the fullest extent during times of decision making, but that when a decision was made it had to be followed by all members of the party, irrespective of individual objections. Thought Slime is an anarchist, and it is possible that they take issue with the level of adherence to the party line required by the Bolsheviks, however they are still incorrect in their depiction of Democratic Centralism and Maupin is right to call this out. It should be noted however that Marx is not mentioned in this video, and Thought Slime makes no claim to the label Marxist, nor do they claim that their views of the state are in line with Marx’s. 

Maupin goes on to claim both that Vaush has misunderstood Marx’s work “Civil War in France”, and that Vaush has misunderstood socialism as merely being a society of worker co-ops. These criticisms would be valid if Maupin’s claims could be verified, however his lack of citations means they cannot be. He writes “BreadTube’s insistence that socialism is merely a worker cooperative scheme reveals further the thesis of this book, that BreadTube is largely the creation of the more powerful, globalist wing of the ruling class in its efforts to beat back the rebellions of Trump and lower level capitalists. The pro-imperialist narrative, where Communist revolutions “only made life worse” is repeated by BreadTube voices, despite being overwhelmingly inconsistent with reality.”(pg.93) This anti-communist narrative is espoused not just by BreadTube, but on the contrary is parroted by almost all members of the major capitalist countries. This is not an indication that BreadTube is a bourgeois creation. BreadTube, in all its willful ignorance,[3] has neither the experience nor study to refute anti-communism, and as such thoroughly lacks the will.

Maupin goes on to criticize BreadTube’s view of fascism in his chapter “Nazi! Nazi! Nazi!”. He denies Contrapoints’ claim that fascism can be broken down into three core beliefs, those beliefs being “a belief in the sacredness of the white race, the conspiracy theory that Jews seek to conduct “White Genocide” or “replacement”, and the ultimate goal of creating a “white ethno-state””.(pg.115) Maupin notes that these beliefs summarize the vast majority of white nationalists, but that they are not themselves fundamentally tied to the phenomenon of fascism. Maupin is entirely correct. Fascism, being “Capitalism in Decay'', need not be white, and Contrapoints’ definition is more in line with white nationalism than fascism.[4] Of course, this mistake is understandable as the two often overlap, however Contrapoints should have done better given the intended educational nature of her video. Maupin’s error, if it can be called such, is in blatantly misrepresenting Contrapoints’ video. 

I mentioned the three beliefs which Contrapoints claims can summarise Fascism. In truth, these beliefs were paraphrased. Contrapoints actually breaks these beliefs down as follows: 
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1. People of European heritage are or ought to constitute a biological, cultural, and political unity known as “the white race”-sometimes dog-whistled as “Western culture.”
2.  Jews are masterminding the destruction of the white race through multiculturalism and non-white immigration (“white genocide” or “ethnic replacement”)
3. The only way to save the white race is to establish a “white homeland,” or “ethnostate,” from which non-whites and degenerates must be purged.

This summarising of Contrapoints’ claims does no harm in this case, yet Maupin’s allergy to citation or even consistent quotation rears its head in a far more damaging manner later. Maupin attempts to paint Contrapoints as participating in a political witch hunt. He writes “The overwhelming majority of people in the United States feel patriotic, but according to Contrapoints, statements like “I love my country” could be interpreted as coded fascist messaging.”(pg.117) This is incorrect. Contrapoints says, just under four minutes into her video, “The idea that appreciating European culture is in some way linked to establishing a white ethnostate is just nonsense.”[5] Maupin continues “Gestures like “Thumbs up” or “OK” signs are used by millions of Americans each day, but according to Contrapoints, these could indeed be secret Nazi hand signs.”(pg.117)

Regarding the Thumbs Up sign, Maupin could be referring to an emoji in which the index finger is being pointed up. Contrapoints uses this as an example of a sign which, while seeming mundane, could become a dog whistle in the future due to the rapidity in which fascists discard and replace dog whistles. This is done to keep said dog whistles from being exposed, something vital if they are to function properly. It is also possible Maupin simply used the Thumbs Up symbol as an example. Regarding the OK sign, the shooter in the Christchurch terrorist attack flashed this symbol in a court appearance. Members of groups such as the Proud Boys have used the sign extensively, and it spread like fire in 2017 across the more backwards and, one might even say, degenerate corners of the internet.[6] These corners are havens for far right extremists who, until recently, would be hounded and ostracized in public. With the deepening of the capitalist crisis, and the subsequent heightening of contradictions, there has been a wave of far right reaction which has made the public a substantially more hospitable place for the very sort of people who utilize the OK sign as a dog whistle. To deny that this sign has been and often still is used this way is absurd. 

Maupin also quotes Contrapoints as saying “I am not a fascist is exactly what a fascist would say.”(pg.120) This quotation is dishonest, and is used to again paint Contrapoints as involved in a witch hunt. Maupin writes “Is it true that many White Nationalists conceal their views, and operate covertly in broader conservative circles? Yes. Is it true that many advocates of a white ethnostate who harbor anti-semitic views will conceal this message when creating broader content? Yes.”

However, Contrapoints video basically argues that anything can be a dog whistle, anyone can be a fascist, and all that is necessary to prove it is something as meaningless as a hand gesture, a slip of the tongue, or most importantly a disagreement with the mainstream of the left.”(pg.116) The full Contrapoints quote is as follows, “This means that if someone acts like a fascist, has fascist beliefs, repeats fascist talking points, and hangs out with other fascists, the fact that they publicly denounce fascism should be worth absolutely nothing to you and shouldn't even enter into your consideration of whether they're a fascist. After all, “I'm not a fascist'' is exactly what a fascist would say.” Contrapoints is not attempting to paint fascism as so vague a phenomenon that anyone can be accused of it, but rather is stating that if one's actions are consistently in support of fascism then public denouncement of fascism becomes worthless. This attempt to use the quote out of context is telling. Additionally, Contrapoints explicitly says “You should never assume someone is a fascist just because of their hair or because of the emoji they use. These are only little pieces of a larger puzzle.” This misrepresentation is solidified when Maupin writes “Of course, in the world view extolled by much of BreadTube, if you dare disagree that the west is a bastion of tolerance and freedom, while China, Russia, Syria, and Venezuela are evil “fascist” regimes, you must be a fascist yourself. Who cares if you are anti-racist, or have spent over a decade working against racism; remember: “I am not a fascist is exactly what a fascist would say.”” Either Maupin is knowingly mis-representing Contrapoints, is being lazy in his research (something hard to believe as these refutations are all provided within the very same video Maupin quotes), or is simply so blinded by his thesis that he ignores all evidence which contradicts it. 

This dogmatic commitment to undue criticism is revealed further in Maupin’s fourth chapter, “Understanding Left-Pessimism”. Maupin provides the following quote, “When exactly do you think capital will be done making money? How much money is enough for the ultra-rich jackasses who already have most of it? We’ve long ago sailed past it because several of them own incalculable sums, so much that they could not spend it in a thousand lifetimes and yet they don't stop, despite the consequences, the human cost, the environmental cost, they keep going… There are only so many resources to be extracted from the earth until there aren't any left… They keep going forever, or more realistically, until they can't, and at that point we are doomed… A human being intuitively understands the concept of finite resources… We the consumer, particularly, those of us in the west, bear some responsibility in this too. We buy shit we dont need and throw away shit other people could use.”(pg.125)

Maupin writes “While Matt accepts the premise that capitalism is capable of creating endless growth, Matt thinks this is bad.”(pg.126.) and “In their video championing “de-growth”, Thought Slime argues that humans have gone too far. The problem isn't that working people are increasingly impoverished due to capitalism's inherent creation of poverty amidst plenty, the problem is that average working people have too much stuff. As American workers are seeing their wages go down, their homes foreclosed, and their children condemned to a life of student debt, the problem is that they are still too comfortable. Thought Slime anticipates an ecological apocalypse unless human consumption can be urgently reduced. Matt insists their “degrowth” model is not the same as capitalist austerity.”(pg.126 and pg.127)

This is a complete misunderstanding of Thought Slime’s words. Matt is not arguing for de-growth, rather they are arguing that capitalists, by not engaging in a more sustainable mode of consumption, are destroying the planet. This fact is undeniable. He says “They keep going forever, or more realistically, until they can't, and at that point we are doomed… A human being intuitively understands the concept of finite resources…” This is a complete acknowledgement of the inability of capitalism to create infinite growth. Matt is arguing that, instead of producing infinite growth, capitalism will instead grow until, in all their characteristic recklessness and disregard for life, capitalists have utterly destroyed the earth. While it is true that Matt falls into an individualistic and rather meaningless criticism when he says “We the consumer, particularly those of us in the west, bear some responsibility in this too. We buy shit we dont need and throw away shit other people could use.”, this is not what Maupin takes issue with. Again he overlooks the legitimate issues of BreadTube, instead misrepresenting Thought Slime and arguing against a strawman. That this would happen once in the published book of a self proclaimed Marxist is problematic. That it would happen repeatedly, seemingly carelessly, is unacceptable and speaks to a larger issue. 

Maupin seems to have approached his criticism of BreadTube from an emotional, rather than analytical, perspective. This is a shame because BreadTube is indeed a deeply flawed and ultimately ineffective phenomenon, and Maupin notes many of these flaws. Yet rather than deconstructing BreadTubes failings using a materialist analysis, Maupin attacks the character of these entertainers, misrepresents their arguments, and aimlessly speculates at a theory he never makes a serious effort at proving. To say that this work is disappointing is an understatement.

My aim is not to tear down the character of Caleb Maupin, nor is it to discourage criticism of BreadTube and other fascinating but ultimately flawed phenomena. Rather, it is to show that just because a work appears to be on “our” side, that is, a Marxist and ultimately revolutionary side, does not mean that work is devoid of criticism. As Maupin’s book shows, a work can profess itself to be Marxist and still be deeply flawed, so much so that, on account of its methodology, one must ask if it is even Marxist at all. There exists a trend on the left which extolls all that proclaims itself Marxist, regardless of merit. This trend goes hand in hand with the idea of the “Anti-Imperialist State”, an entirely un-Marxist notion. These contrarians vehemently deny any and all criticism of previous socialist experiments, current socialist or self proclaimed socialst nations such as the People's Republic of China, and pass anti-americanism off as activism. 

To be anti-American is not enough. To be anti-imperialist is not enough. To be anti-capitalist is not enough. Were the Mensheviks not all these things? Were the left wing terrorists, those who held to the “Propaganda of the Deed” not all these things? Was the Soviet Union, or rather, most of its leaders, not all these things? Yet the Mesheviks did not bring about the Russian Revolution. The terrorists[7] did not bring about the Russian Revolution. And for all its many achievements, the Soviet Union ultimately failed to defend the revolution. Are we to subscribe to a sort of ultimate determinism whereby not just general trends in society but the entire fate of revolutionaries and revolutionary nations is predetermined? Were the Mensheviks doomed to failure. What about the terrorists? The Soviet Union itself? Or was it these groups ideological failings that, among other things, paved the way for their practical failings?

If we subscribe to the latter notion then we must not allow theories, nations, and individuals to go uncriticized simply because they adorn themselves in Marxist clothing. Bernstein, Kautsky, and many other opportunists referred to themselves as Marxists. We know that ideological failing can take on a subtle, almost pedantic form. Yet just as the opportunists failings have and are overt, so too may ours be covert. To say that BreadTube is a flawed phenomenon of little use is an understatement. To say that its failings include paranoia in relation to fascists, a desire for de-growth, and being part of a covert CIA plot is blatantly false, or at the very least unsubstantiated.

And of course, if we instead subscribe to the contrarian view, and an entirely deterministic view by extension, then this is all of no importance. Let us continue along the paths we have already walked, uncritical of whether those paths are always the most sound. Marxists march along, for fate itself is one our side. God knows it's been kind to us so far.

Notes

1. The channel “Second Thought” has over a million subscribers and is a self proclaimed Marxist, however as his channel does not focus on this Marxism, instead providing a more timid and introductory anti-capitalism that rarely if ever dips into outright Marxism, I have decided not to include him. This is not meant as a judgment on Second Thought’s channel, rather an acknowledgement of the channel's content.

2. “Prager University Does Not Understand Democracy.” YouTube, Thought Slime, 5 Feb. 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX1nS9L46L4. Accessed 24 Sept. 2021.

3. This will to ignorance being rivaled only perhaps by that loud and catastrophically large portion of the population which believes that the most effective path to combating “the elites”, “big tech”, and “the mainstream media”, is increased privatization, so that these very fine people may acquire more, not less, of a stranglehold on our lives. This ignorance, mind numbing though it may be, is largely our failing, and must be remembered as such if it is to be combatted.

4. It should be noted that Contrapoints’s definition is intended to describe contemporary fascists, making her error more understandable. It is true that fascism or proto-fascism is predominantly a white phenomenon. Still, this is by no means a prerequisite, and speaks more to the conditions of western capitalist countries than it does to some sort of racial requirement.

5. “Decrypting the Alt-Right: How to Recognize a F@Scist | ContraPoints.” YouTube, ContraPoints, 1 Sept. 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sx4BVGPkdzk. Accessed 24 Sept. 2021.

6. “Ok Hand Sign Added to List of Hate Symbols.” BBC News, BBC, 27 Sept. 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-49837898.

​7. I use this term in its more classical sense, removed from the derogatory connotations it has since taken on. In their day, these terrorists would likely be referred to simply as anarchists, despite the fact that many of those who engaged in “excitative terror” were  Marxists, Reactionaries, and ascribed to various other ideologies.

​Mental health crises: depression, schizophrenia and various other disorders, have engulfed the 21st century post-globalisation world. The rate of suicide is at an ever higher magnitude and in our present hyper-connected age of mass media and advanced communication, loneliness is a major issue concerning a large chunk of the population.

We are living in the time of neoliberalism, a set of economic policies characterised by market deregulation, privatisation of previously-nationalised industries or resources, and a support for rugged-individualism and competition on an ideological level. It is accompanied by a rejection of society as a concept and social solidarity as a value. The spread of neoliberalism came with a cut-back on social security and Keynesian welfarism, with cancellation of pensions and monetary support schemes that were helpful to workers in need.

Former UK Prime Minister and neoliberal ideologue, Margaret Thatcher had once said, “There is no such thing as a society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” This blanket rejection of societal causes to the multiple problems of humanity has become injected in the modern public discourse. One of the results of this heuristic is that a politically-oriented problem such as the mental health crisis, is generally looked at entirely from the point of view of an individual.

The approach towards dealing with the mental health crisis has been an atomised and individualistic one. Most explanations and proposed solutions amount to a form of genetic or biological determinism. In this article, I look into studies that provide both qualitative and quantitative data to argue that mental health issues are often products of the dominant economic system and its inherent tendency to multiply finance capital at the cost of its human labour force and their mental stability. 
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The mental health crisis is a direct result of the atomised, coercive and alienating nature of the dominant economic system. A failure to recognise societal causes by obscuring them with genetic and biological determinism will only lead to making matters worse. In fact, any solution without regard to larger systemic and political change will at best be superficial and not lead to long term improvement of the mental state of the population.

The article ‘Capitalism and Mental Health’ by David Matthews (for Monthly Review) begins by recognising that the world is being engulfed by a persistent mental health crisis. The empirical data at hand is fearsome. The World Health Organisation (WHO) stated that three hundred million people across the world suffer from depression, twenty-three million people show symptoms of schizophrenia and eight hundred thousand individuals commit suicide annually (Matthews, 2019). 
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The data illustrates the claim that mental health conditions have gradually worsened over the previous decade in the most industrialised blocks, or what Paul Baran refers to as ‘monopoly-capitalist nations’ such as Britain. Biological and genetic explanations, i.e. those which reduce mental health problems to genomic dysfunction, dominate the discourse to the point of discouraging any enquiry regarding social causes of the issues. Make no mistake: biological or psychological explanations are not to be discarded; but a deeper look is to be taken at the economic and political conditions, which Matthews holds as the primary cause of the mental health crisis (Matthews, 2019).

Let us go back in time to sociologist Emile Durkheim. His book ‘Suicide’ published as far back as 1897 took into account plenty of empirical data to suggest that suicides are directly related to social and political factors. He stressed that the industrial society of his time, with its rising focus on individual self-interest and rejection of social and communal living, was a major factor for rising cases of suicide (Durkheim, 1966).

In his book Durkheim laid out the grounds by refuting theories of suicide based on psychology, genetics and biology (as well climate and geography.) Those factors, he concluded, do not amount to any valid causation of suicide. Certainly not in the large-scale that they were occurring. Suicide, according to Durkheim was not a personal situation, but a socially caused condition (Durkheim, 1966).

Durkheim categorized suicide into three types: egoistic, altruistic and anomic. Egoistic suicides were caused by extreme loneliness and also extreme individualism – both of which are imminent features of capitalism and more specifically the neoliberal monopoly capitalism that is dominant today. A person prone to this form of suicide is characterised by a certain egoism that renders him ‘detached from society’. This is also the kind of personality trait encouraged and idolised today by neoliberal ideology through media advertisements and civil society institutions (Durkheim, 1966).
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A serious survey of Durkheim’s theory goes on to show that the politically-oriented nature of suicides is not a revolutionary discovery by the research studies in hand. These have been matters of concern for more than a century now. The fact that this appears radical, tells us something about the nature of neoliberal ideology which has normalised the handing over of complete responsibility of mental illnesses to the individual, with wilful ignorance of societal causes (Durkheim, 1966).

Cultural theorist Mark Fisher in his book ‘Capitalist Realism’ argues that the dominant cultural logic of late capitalism (that he terms ‘capitalist realism’) attempts to create a false layer of reality over what is real. An example he provides is the de-politicization of mental health issues. He writes, “Capitalist Realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather.” (Fisher, 2009)
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He points out that mid-twentieth century radical thinkers ranging from Foucault in his book ‘Madness and Civilisation’ to Deleuze and Guattari in their book ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ had illustrated that ‘madness’ was not natural but political. Fisher goes further to assert the political nature of not only ‘madness’ in the extreme, but also the relatively commonplace mental disorders (Fisher, 2009).

The domination of monopoly capital subjugates the vast majority of the population to a working life that is neither meaningful to them nor satisfactory. The only source of escape is recreation and entertainment, which in the present system amounts to consumption and more consumption of commodities. This form of leisure doesn’t add any meaning or value to one’s life. We therefore associate our recreation with idleness, giving rise to a certain amount of guilt, thus making the experience of pleasure, not pleasurable at all. Through their lack of substance, both work and leisure increasingly lose their inner content and meaning. (Matthews, 2019)

Philosopher Slavoj Zizek termed this phenomenon ‘ideological enjoyment’, which is further drawn from the Lacanian psychoanalytical concept of “jouissance” (which is a French term for extreme enjoyment to the point of exhaustion). This is an aspect of the present day dominant ideology which bestows on the people a vague notion of entertainment which is neither fulfilling nor enjoyable, however is sought after by a multitude of people (Zizek, 2009).
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Matthews points out that this ideological validation for such kinds of enjoyment is a necessary means to keep the consumer society running. The system is designed to concentrate finance capital into the hands of the few and hence has no responsibility to be considerate of the population whose basic needs it fails to deliver. This structural phenomenon of monopoly capitalism, according to Baran and Sweezy, results in “the spread of increasingly severe psychic disorders.” (Matthews, 2019)

A thinker who can provide us with insight on the matter at hand, is Erich Fromm. Let us take a look at his body of work in some detail.

Erich Fromm (March 23, 1900 – March 18, 1980) was a psychoanalyst whose works focused on the questions of innate nature of human beings and relations with social surroundings. He had a keen focus on individual human liberation that he considered to be unachievable without the liberation of entire humanity, with a restructuring of the entire socio-economic system.

He belonged to the Neo-Freudian school of psychodynamics, having some major disagreements and controversies with his contemporaries. Fromm had a deep and everlasting influence of the Marxist dialectical materialist approach to the progression of history and change in society. He considered the development of history and the subsequent changes in society an important aspect that shapes peoples’ feelings of freedom and relationship with their own self and their fellow beings (Ferguson, 2016).

Fromm agreed with Freud on the tenet that much of human behaviour and experience is the result of a cause that is unconscious, however, he considered the Freudian term ‘unconscious’ a rather mystical representation of mental causative thoughts and processes of which a person is not conscious.

Fromm’s criticism of Freud was primarily about the ideas of Oedipus complex and libido theory. He was of opinion that a human’s personal development was influenced by his interactions with the society he lived in and the power structures present in it, as opposed to predominantly biological and libido-driven factors (Cherry, Biography of Social Psychologist Erich Fromm, 2020).

During his period of study in the University of Munich, he attended seminars organised by dissident psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel about ways in which Marxist and Freudian thought could be reconciled, keeping in mind the emancipation of alienated humanity. (Ferguson, 2016).
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Despite having a major influence of the Freudian thought, Fromm indisputably considered Marx the greater thinker, which he made no secret of in his book ‘Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounters with Freud and Marx’ (Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion, 1962) .

Among his contemporary Neo-Freudians, Fromm stood out because of his deep concern with the fate of the social and psychological well-being of the collective humanity. His writings were marked by an emphasis on the importance of the individual and its liberty to think freely. He held that in order to bring about a positive mental transcendence for humanity, one not only had to increase self-consciousness and non-deterministic free thinking, but also had to strive towards altering the social, economic and political circumstances under which they lived.

Fromm believed that in the age of ever-increasing capitalist tyranny and control over information and thoughts; humans can broadly be categorized into five character types, four of which are the repulsive results of the unevenly designed society (receptive, exploitative, hoarding and marketing character types), while the fifth one is a productive character type, which is possessed by only a minority of people. The receptive character tends to seek constant help and support from his fellow beings, while not being keen to return any of it. The exploitative character is motivated by a selfish desire to attain success and tries to do so at the cost of other people by lying and cheating. The hoarding type tends to collect and stockpile loads of material commodities as their possession, in order to deal with the insecurity caused by their lack of social connection with other humans. The material type tends to look at human relationships merely in terms of the benefits they can gain from it. (Cherry, Fromm's Character Orientations, 2020)

One of Fromm’s most significant works is his first book Escape from Freedom, which he wrote in 1941. This was when his country (Germany) was at the pinnacle of Nazi fanaticism, with various other countries heading towards totalitarianism. He proposed in his book that freedom has a dialectical nature and can be perceived to be of two types: positive and negative. The constructive kind of freedom which humans want to arrive at was positive freedom, and the desire to escape from tyranny and control was negative freedom. 

Before the industrial revolution, humans were enslaved and bound permanently to their social positions. No value was ascertained to their individual development. Fromm held that this type of non-individualistic society, while enslaving humans, offered them a sense of security. With the rise of capitalism, we were bestowed upon with a certain freedom that was utterly superficial and left the people in a state of anxiety and powerlessness arising from too much focus on the self, with little regard to the need for community. The individualism that was promoted had little to do with individuality and creative endeavour, and more to do with self-centeredness and narcissism.

Fromm wrote that alongside a desire to be free, humans also possessed a desire to submit to authority and conform to norms. This object of submission, Fromm held, did not necessarily have to be an external authority such as a dictator, but could also be inner ideals of morality, duty and popular opinion. This tendency to submit and conform, along with the narrowness of the political and social conditions of capitalism and bourgeois democracy, result in humans gathering in the bandwagons in support of totalitarian dictators. This was Fromm’s explanation for the rise of fascism as an inevitable result of the capitalist political and economic system. This was in stark contrast to the dominant idea that fascism was an isolated case of aberration from the normal. (Popova, The Paradox of Freedom).

In another significant book The Sane Society, Fromm points out that Western society is not mentally stable by and large and not sane. He adds that the cause of mental health deterioration is not entirely personal, and to a large extent a result of the chaos of power imbalance in the society itself. Humanity as a collective and as individuals, has been alienated, and various thinkers have tried to devise a cause for it. Marx considered it something primarily determined by material reality, while Tolstoy considered it to be the result of a departure from the spiritual values that defined humanity. Fromm tells us that the cause for modern day alienation is ‘robotism’. This is the transformation of humans into unfeeling, unauthentic creatures whose intelligence has evolved, but the emotional capacity to correctly utilize that intelligence, still stays undeveloped. (Popova, The Sane Society)

On an individual level, Fromm proposes that human beings need to awaken to self-consciousness and understanding of their true needs, as opposed to superficial needs that they have been indoctrinated to. Fromm calls for a ‘humanistic communitarian society’ which can be summed up in his own words as:
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“A society in which man relates to man lovingly, in which he is rooted in bonds of brotherliness and solidarity, rather than in the ties of blood and soil; a society which gives him the possibility of transcending nature by creating rather than by destroying, in which everyone gains a sense of self by experiencing himself as the subject of his powers rather than by conformity, in which a system of orientation and devotion exists without man’s needing to distort reality and to worship idols.” (Fromm, Conclusion, 1955)

Human beings are characterised, among other things, by their need to express themselves and make use of their creative faculties. The activities at workplace, where the majority of the population spends a huge amount of their day, have the potential to provide them with utmost happiness and satisfaction. However, that is not the case since most workers in the industrial world are alienated from the products of their labour, they have no autonomy over what work is done or ownership over the fruits of their labour, i.e. the finished products. Work, therefore, is a source of major frustration and alienation of humans from their society and from themselves.

This idea is strengthened by more modern psychological theories such as the self-determination theory (SDT) which states that the intrinsic motivation to perform work is dependent on the feeling of competence, autonomy and relatedness. The capitalist system does not allow its workers the right to those feelings.
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Matthews’ study backs up the ideas of alienation with sufficient empirical data suggesting that vast majority of people feel disenfranchised from the work they do and find no meaningfulness. Matthews quotes a survey in Britain where 47% of employees would consider finding a new job, citing such reasons as not enjoying work and feeling unimportant in the process. Severe mental health conditions such as depression, stress and anxiety as a result of unsatisfactory work, are only increasing. A study in 2017 estimated that 60% of British employees had suffered work-related mental problems, with anxiety and depression topping the list. Despite such a correlation, the negative feeling regarding work has become so common, that it is seen not as an ill-condition specific to our economic system, but as a natural reaction to work (Matthews, 2019).

In his book ‘The Society of the Spectacle’, Guy Debord wrote, “The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. Its technologies are based on isolation, and they contribute to that same isolation. From automobiles to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions that engender "lonely crowds." In Debord’s list of technologies, among automobiles and television, today one could certainly add social media (Debord, 1992).
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The nature of the capitalist economic system disables the capacity for the emotional and intellectual commitments required for leading fulfilling relationships. This causes conversations to reduce into superficial niceties and small talk. In a survey conducted in 2017 in Britain, 13% of the people admitted to having no close friends, and another 17% having poor quality friendships. The core tenet of capitalist ideology, with its focus on individualism and competition, takes away any sense of solidarity between people. People tend to see other people as obstacles to their own needs. An employee survey in 2016 has illustrated that 27% people work longer than they would want to and that negatively impacts their personal life and relationships (Matthews, 2019).

​I hope to have been able to make it clear that the rise in mental health problems, is neither an individual issue, nor a coincidence or aberration led by faulty actors. It is an inevitable outcome of the dominant economic and political system that we live in. It is important to note, that medical solutions are extremely important. In our efforts to galvanise and push our governments to legislate for healthcare for all, we must add mental health and therapy. Certainly, the process and nature of therapy that is dominant today, is also not free from being influenced by the dominant neoliberal ideology. In fact there are serious questions to be asked about what kind of role psychotherapy plays in our society, but that is for another article.