The revolutionary struggle that brought about the first socialist state in the former Russian Empire in 1917 had its first major upheavals years earlier. The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) had split into two factions, the Bolsheviks (meaning majority, led by V.I. Lenin) and Mensheviks (meaning minority, led by Julius Martov) in 1903. The RSDLP remained as one party formally, but the two factions, practically, had separate centers, presses, and programs. As The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) – Short Course puts it, “on the eve of the first Russian revolution, when the Russo-Japanese war had already begun, the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks acted as two separate political groups.”

The Russo-Japanese war broke out in 1904, and the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks each took a different stance toward the war. “The Mensheviks, including Trotsky, were sinking to a position of defending the ‘fatherland’ of the tsar, the landlords and the capitalists,” says the Short Course. “The Bolsheviks, headed by Lenin, on the other hand, held that the defeat of the tsarist government in this predatory war would be useful, as it would weaken tsardom and strengthen the revolution.”

By 1905 the struggle came to a head. The Short Course sums it up like this: 

“The workers' recourse to mass political strikes and demonstrations, the growth of the peasant movement, the armed clashes between the people and the police and troops, and, finally, the revolt in the Black Sea Fleet, all went to show that conditions were ripening for an armed uprising of the people. This stirred the liberal bourgeoisie into action. Fearing the revolution, and at the same time frightening the tsar with the spectre of revolution, it sought to come to terms with the tsar against the revolution; it demanded slight reforms ‘for the people’ so as to ‘pacify’ the people, to split the forces of the revolution and thus avert the ‘horrors of revolution.’ ‘Better part with some of our land than part with our heads,’ said the liberal landlords. The liberal bourgeoisie was preparing to share power with the tsar.’

In this time of great upheaval, the RSDLP lacked unity over tactics on how to move forward. The Bolsheviks called the Third Congress in order to assess the situation and formulate tactics that the whole party would be bound to carry out. But the Mensheviks boycotted the Third Congress and called their own “conference” in order to formulate their own tactical line apart from the Bolsheviks. 

The Third Party Congress correctly assessed that the liberal bourgeoisie didn’t want complete victory for the revolution but would instead seek compromise with the tsar on the basis of forming a constitutional monarchy. Therefore, it called for the proletariat to lead the bourgeois-democratic revolution, allied closely with the peasantry, since those were the class forces fundamentally interested in complete victory. The Menshevik conference, on the other hand, insisted that the democratic revolution be led by the liberal bourgeoisie, and that revolutionary socialists should make every effort to avoid frightening the liberal bourgeoisie and thereby undermining the revolution. The Bolsheviks advocated the revolutionary overthrow of tsarism, and the continuation of the revolution from its bourgeois-democratic stage to its socialist stage, while the Mensheviks instead advocated a policy of compromise and reform. 

Lenin’s arguments

Lenin’s book, Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution appeared two months after the Third Congress, in July 1905. It explained and developed the Bolshevik tactical line as it exposed and criticized the Menshevik tactical line. 

There are three main points in Lenin’s book that must be emphasized. 

First, Lenin argued that the proletariat must be the leader and guiding force of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. Thus, in Two Tactics Lenin writes, 

“Marxism teaches the proletarian not to keep aloof from the bourgeois revolution, not to be indifferent to it, not to allow the leadership of the revolution to be assumed by the bourgeoisie but, on the contrary, to take a most energetic part in it, to fight most resolutely for consistent proletarian democracy, for carrying the revolution to its conclusion. We cannot jump out of the bourgeois-democratic boundaries of the Russian revolution, but we can vastly extend these boundaries, and within these boundaries we can and must fight for the interests of the proletariat, for its immediate needs and for the conditions that will make it possible to prepare its forces for the future complete victory.”

For this reason, Lenin writes, “The outcome of the revolution depends on whether the working class will play the part of a subsidiary to the bourgeoisie, a subsidiary that is powerful in the force of its onslaught against the autocracy but impotent politically, or whether it will play the part of leader of the people’s revolution.” To do this, Lenin held that it was necessary for the proletariat to ally itself with the peasantry, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, to isolate the liberal bourgeoisie and force it out of leadership of the revolution. 

Second, Lenin argued that the means for overthrowing tsarism and achieving a democratic republic was through revolutionary armed struggle. 

In Two Tactics Lenin writes, “In order to be able to exercise this pressure from below, the proletariat must be armed—for in a revolutionary situation matters develop with exceptional rapidity to the stage of open civil war – and must be led by the Social-Democratic Party. The object of its armed pressure is that of ‘defending, consolidating and extending the gains of the revolution,’ i.e., those gains which from the standpoint of the interests of the proletariat must consist in the fulfilment of the whole of our minimum program.”

Against the Mensheviks, who advocated for reform during a revolutionary situation, Lenin wrote, “under the circumstances … amendments are moved by means of street demonstrations, interpolations are introduced by means of offensive action by armed citizens, opposition to the government is effected by forcibly overthrowing the government.” 

Third, Lenin argued that the revolution should have two stages, and that the revolution must not come to a halt with the victory of the bourgeois-democratic stage. Instead, it must strive immediately to pass into the socialist stage.

Therefore, Lenin writes in Two Tactics, “The proletariat must accomplish the socialist revolution, by allying to itself the mass of the semi-proletarian elements of the population in order to crush by force the resistance of the bourgeoisie and to paralyze the instability of the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie.”

The Short Course points out, “This was a new theory which held that the Socialist revolution would be accomplished not by the proletariat in isolation as against the whole bourgeoisie, but by the proletariat as the leading class which would have as allies the semi-proletarian elements of the population, the ‘toiling and exploited millions.’” It goes on to explain, “According to this theory the hegemony of the proletariat in the bourgeois revolution, the proletariat being in alliance with the peasantry, would grow into the hegemony of the proletariat in the Socialist revolution, the proletariat now being in alliance with the other laboring and exploited masses, while the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry would prepare the ground for the Socialist dictatorship of the proletariat.”

The hegemony of the proletariat in the bourgeois-democratic revolution, the necessity of revolutionary armed struggle, and the importance of carrying the revolution forward from the democratic to the socialist stage: these are the most important lessons to draw from Lenin’s Two Tactics. 

Two Tactics today

After 1905, the democratic revolution in Russia entered a period of retreat, and wouldn’t be completed until February of 1917, after which the Bolsheviks did indeed push the revolution forward to the victorious October socialist revolution. 

Regarding Lenin’s book, Two Tactics, the Short Course says, “Its invaluable significance consists in that it enriched Marxism with a new theory of revolution and laid the foundation for the revolutionary tactics of the Bolshevik Party with the help of which in 1917 the proletariat of our country achieved the victory over capitalism.”

It is important that revolutionaries study this cornerstone of Marxist-Leninist theory today. Indeed, it explains in clear terms how revolutionaries should relate to the movements for democracy and the other class forces involved in those movements. It lays out the basic principles at the core of Leninist tactics. The lessons of Two Tactics apply to our own struggle in the U.S., where different class forces are united in struggle against monopoly capitalism. At the core of this united front is the strategic alliance of the multinational working class on the one hand and the movements of the oppressed nations and nationalities for liberation on the other hand. Lenin’s Two Tactics explains clearly the importance of the leadership of the proletariat and its need for allies. And while we must push forward and develop the struggle to defend and expand democracy in a revolutionary way, we must advance to the overthrow of the capitalist system and struggle for socialism.

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It has to be acknowledged that this is a touchy subject. But we should try to look at this question objectively, with an eye towards transforming society and putting an end to the root causes of gun violence.

Capitalism is the root cause of the epidemic of gun violence in the United States. U.S. capitalist society is an utterly militarized society. The U.S. Defense Department budget in 2023 was over $700 billion. In the 2024 fiscal year it will be over $800 billion. Since the police murder of George Floyd in 2020, and the widespread rebellions that followed, police budgets are also on the rise. In 2022, Biden’s budget sought $37 billion for policing. In many cities, these are militarized police with high-tech weaponry. The U.S. military and police kill with impunity, unleashing untold violence on anyone, especially people of oppressed nationalities, who stands in the way of profit maximization by the monopoly capitalist class.

All of this goes to promote an omnipresent culture of violence in the United States. This culture of violence comes from the top down, where it blends with the alienation inherent in modern capitalism, the hopelessness of sharpening economic stagnation, and the hateful white chauvinist ideology promoted to prevent the strategic alliance between the multinational working class and oppressed nationalities. This poisonous brew gives rise to the toxic situation in which we find ourselves. Everyone asks, “What is to be done?” And there is not an easy answer. Unfortunately, the liberal demand for increased gun control will not solve the problem, and we can look at history to understand why this is the case.

What are the origins of gun control in the United States? The United States “founding fathers'' were advocates of revolutionary violence. But after they used revolutionary violence to overthrow the British and gain independence for the U.S., they also advocated state violence, especially against workers, indigenous people, and enslaved Africans. The right to bear arms was formalized by the Bill of Rights, which included the Second Amendment, though in practice this only applied to white citizens, and was driven primarily by fear of slave revolts.

In the 1857 Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court ruled that citizenship didn’t apply to people of African descent. Chief Justice Roger Taney, in arguing against equal citizenship to African Americans in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case, worried that it “would give to persons of the negro race” the right “to keep and carry arms wherever they went.”

During the U.S. Civil War to end slavery, Black regiments, including liberated slaves, were armed to aid the Union army in overthrowing the Southern planter slavocracy. After this, during Reconstruction, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1868 granted African Americans formal equality as citizens, but by 1877 this was reversed in practice by the Hayes-Tilden betrayal of Reconstruction. This was followed by the removal of federal troops from the South, and the rise of the white-supremacist Redeemer governments. The institution of Jim Crow and lynch terror saw African Americans stripped of their hard-won democratic rights, including the right to bear arms, as they were thrust back onto the plantations as sharecroppers. During this period, African Americans were forged into an oppressed nation, subject to super-exploitation in both agriculture and industry. This was enforced by the Dixiecrat Jim Crow laws and the paramilitary terror of the Ku Klux Klan.

The democratic right to bear arms was denied in practice to Black people in the South, though some still armed themselves. Indeed, throughout the Jim Crow period, there is a tradition of armed resistance in the Black Belt South that includes the Alabama Sharecroppers Union, the Deacons of Defense, and the Monroe, North Carolina NAACP leader Robert F. Williams.

The Mulford Act, banning the open carry of loaded firearms, was passed in California in 1967 (with the noteworthy support of the NRA) in a direct attack on the Black Panther Party, to roll back the rights they exercised in arming themselves in defense of their communities. Before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King Jr. was denied a firearm permit after his house was firebombed. Indeed, disarming oppressed nationalities to prevent self-defense has historically gone hand in hand with their oppression. Thus, we have to understand that the question of gun control in the U.S. is tied to the question of national oppression.

Huey P. Newton, the co-founder of the Black Panther Party, in his article from June 20, 1967, “In Defense of Self Defense,” quoted Mao Zedong: “We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.” This is an important point, and one that Mao Zedong drew from Marxist theory about the nature of the state. Mao understood that “political power grows from the barrel of a gun,” meaning that the state power of the ruling class is enforced and held by violence.

This was a lesson Karl Marx also emphasized, saying, “Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.” Again, we can look at history to understand this concretely. In fact, this is exactly what happened in Chile after the election of the President Salvador Allende, who was a Marxist. The U.S. funded a military coup in 1973 and installed the fascist Augusto Pinochet. The coup was successful largely because the Chilean people were not armed to resist it. A 1972 gun control law put civilian arms under military supervision, that is, under Pinochet’s control. As a result, more than 3000 Chileans were executed or disappeared.

Indeed, Lenin writes in “The Military Programme of the Proletarian Revolution” from late 1916, “An oppressed class which does not strive to learn to use arms, to acquire arms, only deserves to be treated like slaves.” He goes on to say that “We cannot, unless we have become bourgeois pacifists or opportunists, forget that we are living in a class society from which there is no way out, nor can there be, save through the class struggle.” Further, Lenin drives home the point, saying,

“A bourgeoisie armed against the proletariat is one of the biggest fundamental and cardinal facts of modern capitalist society. And in face of this fact, revolutionary Social-Democrats are urged to ‘demand’ ‘disarmament’! That is tantamount of complete abandonment of the class-struggle point of view, to renunciation of all thought of revolution. Our slogan must be: arming of the proletariat to defeat, expropriate and disarm the bourgeoisie. These are the only tactics possible for a revolutionary class, tactics that follow logically from, and are dictated by, the whole objective development of capitalist militarism. Only after the proletariat has disarmed the bourgeoisie will it be able, without betraying its world-historic mission, to consign all armaments to the scrap-heap. And the proletariat will undoubtedly do this, but only when this condition has been fulfilled, certainly not before.”

Lenin writes, “To put ‘disarmament’ in the programme is tantamount to making the general declaration: We are opposed to the use of arms. There is as little Marxism in this as there would be if we were to say: We are opposed to violence!” Lenin’s point is a simple one. Though we want peace, Marxists are not pacifists. We need to be able to defend ourselves and our movements from potential reactionary violence. The path to peace must pass through revolution.

The problem of gun violence in the United States is primarily rooted in capitalist alienation, the drive for profit from the gun manufacturers, the culture of militarism, ongoing racist national oppression, and the accompanying ideology of white chauvinism. It is only by doing away with capitalism, which stands at the root of all of this, that we can solve this problem.

This is why Marxist-Leninists have always opposed gun control. We live in a time when violence is ubiquitous. It is everywhere, all around us. We see it on the news as the U.S. wages war all over the globe. We see it in the streets where police murder Black and brown people with impunity. We see it from far-right militias and reactionary, lone terrorists. We even see it in our schools and workplaces. The military and the police are armed, and the reactionaries of all stripes are armed.

It can’t be said clearly enough: we Marxists want nothing more than peace. But we do face objective facts. And, unfortunately, it is inevitable that reactionary violence against the masses of working and oppressed people will continue to keep pace with the threat posed to the capitalist system by the growth and development of the movements for socialism and national liberation. We’ve seen this again and again. The U.S. ruling class always resorts to violence to preserve its interests, at home and abroad. So even today, when generally legal mass organizing is the task at hand, we should not allow ourselves to be disarmed and made defenseless in the face of the increasing repression that is sure to come.

J. Sykes is the author of the book “The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism”. The book can be purchased by visiting tinyurl.com/revsciMLbook.

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Marxism-Leninism is the science of revolutionary social change. It allows us to understand the laws of motion of society and to understand how to organize in line with those laws. This will allow us to resolve the contradictions inherent in capitalism that lead to exploitation, oppression, poverty, waste, crisis and war. By using Marxism, we can transform the world we live in into a just world, where the working class, who produces the vast wealth of society, is able to put that wealth to work and solve the problems that capitalism creates.

It is essential, then, that the working class take up Marxism in order to fulfill its historic mission. Marxism must be fused with the working class movement. But Marxism can seem intimidating and complex, and daunting to study. Many don’t know how to begin.

First, studying Marxism can be done on one’s own, or in a group setting. Studying with others is the best option, since varied perspectives, discussion and debate can help to unravel complex topics. Group study can become the nucleus of new Marxist organization. This is a great tool for building organization where it doesn’t exist yet. If you get together locally with a handful of friends or coworkers to study some Marxist texts, that group can think together about how to put the ideas expressed in those texts into practice. The practical struggle of the working class is both the source and the aim of Marxist theory. It is through social practice that we really come to understand things in a deep and thoroughgoing way. By testing theory in practice, then summing up that practice to apply once more, both our theory and our practice advance to a higher level. This is the basics of the Marxist theory of knowledge.

So what should we study? Many would think that the study of Marxism should begin with the study of Marx, and so they would say to read The Communist Manifesto or even Capital. If you want to read the classics of Marxist theory, the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao, then there is much to be gained from doing so. Each of these great revolutionaries have written texts of tremendous importance in developing Marxism, and they form the foundation of Marxism-Leninism. In the United States, Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries like Harry Haywood, Claudia Jones, and William Z. Foster wrote a great deal that is valuable. But while it is good to read those things, that’s probably not the best place to start. If one wants to study biology, one doesn’t typically begin by reading Darwin’s Origin of Species, but rather with a textbook in biology written in a modern way that helps to explain and contextualize those ideas. Marxism is no different. The important thing is to have a plan for study that you can follow through on, and that actually works for achieving your goals.

One of the best texts to begin with is The Political Program of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization. This relatively short text explains in plain language the way that Marxism fits in with organizing for revolutionary change in the United States under current conditions. It analyzes the conditions in which we find ourselves and shows the way forward. Reading this text will help to contextualize Marxist theory, and help the reader understand what the pressing issues of the day are. It will also raise more questions, which will help guide further study and you look to deepen your understanding. After the program, you should read The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism by J. Sykes. This book looks at the various elements of Marxism from a practical point of view and in a concise and accessible way. This book can serve as a primer on the fundamentals of revolutionary theory. Understanding these fundamentals will help considerably as you go forward.

You will want to understand how to put what you are learning into practice. The pamphlet Some Points on the Mass Line can help you understand how Marxism can be applied most effectively in organizing. After this, there are many useful texts to help address particular questions. Since the class struggle is central to Marxism, you should study how it can be carried out under present conditions. The pamphlet Class Struggle on the Shop Floor by FRSO is essential for understanding how class struggle relates to the trade union movement. Furthermore, by this point you should understand that the national question is important. The strategic alliance between the multinational working class and the liberation movements of oppressed nationalities is central to organizing a united front against monopoly capitalism. To learn more about the African American national question, you should read the FRSO pamphlet The Third International and the Struggle for a Correct Line on the African American National Question, and the book,  Marxist-Leninist Perspectives on Black Liberation and Socialism by Frank Chapman. On the Chicano national question, you should read My Journey to Aztlan by Marisol Marquez. There’s a lot to study on these pivotal issues, but these are the best to start with.

In both the Russian revolution and the Chinese revolution, the nucleus of the revolutionary organizations that formed the core of those struggles grew from the simple seeds of small, Marxist study groups. Lenin and Mao each began by organizing study groups, and then connected those study groups to the practical movement. In this way they were able to build revolutionary parties based on Marxism and rooted in the practical struggles of the working and oppressed masses. In the United States today, the central task of revolutionaries is to build a new, revolutionary communist party that can contend for power. The Freedom Road Socialist Organization is working in cities across the country to build such a party. You should study the FRSO program and join in the fight.

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Postmodernism is a weapon in the ideological arsenal of the capitalist ruling class. Like any ideology, postmodernism has a class basis, and arose as the result of particular historical conditions. It represents the thinking of the petit bourgeois intellectuals and exerts ideological pressure from the liberal petit bourgeoisie in the people’s movements. In this article we are going to look more closely at the origins of postmodern theory, its development, and its effects.

What is postmodernism? It is both a cultural and artistic movement and a trend in theory based in subjective idealism. It emphasizes relativism and contingency while rejecting any theory that claims to be able to explain reality from an objective, rational and universal standpoint. Postmodernism occupies a hazy theoretical terrain, where borders between one school of thought and another are obscure and bleed into one another. In this way, postmodernism likewise attempts to insert itself into Marxism, sometimes presenting itself as “post-Marxism” and “neo-Marxism.” Let’s look at how the postmodernists try to pull this off.

Postmodernism first arose from the world of art and literature as early as the 1930, from the writing of Federico de Onis. But later, postmodernism passed from being an aesthetic categorization to the realm of social theory. How can we understand this development?

On one hand, it is noteworthy that it is part of a broad cultural movement that was funded and encouraged by imperialist intelligence services. As Frances Stonor Saunders notes in her book Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, “During the height of the Cold War, the U.S. government committed vast resources to a secret programme of cultural propaganda in western Europe.” The mission of this program, according to Saunders, “was to nudge the intelligentsia of western Europe away from its lingering fascination with Marxism and Communism towards a view more accommodating of ‘the American way’.” The CIA funded everything from cultural magazines to museums and symphonies, all in order to drive people away from Marxism. Because ideology exerts pressure on the material base of society, this “cultural cold war” helped to fertilize the soil in which the imperialists sowed the seeds of counterrevolution, which they approached more directly by funding and directing counterrevolutionary groups and organizing coups.

On the other hand, this ideological attack also relied upon contradictions within the international communist movement itself, and this “Cultural Cold War” was only able to gain traction as a result of these contradictions. By 1956, the international communist movement began to fracture around fault lines created by Nikita Khrushchev’s slanders of Stalin in his “secret speech” to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Khrushchev vilified Stalin in order to cast doubt on the historic experience upon which Marxism-Leninism is based. By casting doubt upon that experience, Khrushchev created an opening that allowed him to revise core elements of Marxism-Leninism, such as the proletarian class character of the USSR and CPSU, and the ultimate necessity of armed struggle in order to transition from capitalism to socialism.

Khrushchev’s speech also led many to deny the progressive historical character of socialism in the USSR and to abandon Marxism. This also led to major divisions within the communist movement. While the Communist Party of China and the Party of Labor of Albania correctly criticized Khrushchev’s attempts to revise and distort Marxism, a whole assortment of revisionists followed Khrushchev. They sought to cast aside the revolutionary essence of Marxism-Leninism in favor of all kinds of reformist, pessimist and class-conciliationist theories.

During this period of ideological disarray, the petit bourgeois intellectuals who led the charge in pulling the left away from Marxism relied on dissident and revisionist currents within Marxism to attack it from within, such as they had always done by promoting Trotsky in his struggle against Stalin and the Soviet Union. An important factor in the development of postmodernism, therefore, was the trend in philosophy known as “Western Marxism.” This group of philosophers, largely from western Europe, from Karl Korsch and György Lukács and Jean-Paul Sartre, all largely carried out, in one way or another, a reversal of Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, which demanded that theory’s source and aim was revolutionary practice.

Instead, these Western Marxists worked to divorce Marxism from the practical struggles of the working class and retreated into the academic ivory tower. Furthermore, as the Western Marxist academic Perry Anderson notes in his book In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, they each attempted to merge Marxism with elements of non-Marxist (metaphysical and idealist) philosophy, such as with Martin Heidegger’s metaphysics or with Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories. The result was a muddle, and by the 1970s most of Western Marxism was engaged in self-obsessed navel-gazing or had become narrowly preoccupied with cultural criticism and aesthetics. No wonder this is the “Marxism” promoted in the universities of the imperialist countries.

In the late 1960s and early 70s, the sociologists Alain Touraine and Daniel Bell began to argue that we had entered a new “post-industrial” period of capitalism. Dazzled by consumerism, this misguided theory formed the theoretical foundation for the left’s retreat from the working class and the development of “post-Marxist” political theory. Practically, this period saw the rise of the “new left.” This left called itself “new” because, unlike the so-called “old” communist left, they were not oriented towards the working class. Indeed, as the revisionist communist parties failed to connect Marxism with the practical movements of the working class, the void was filled by groups like Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panther Party. Both of these groups made important and lasting contributions, but because neither was able to connect meaningfully with the broader multinational working class, both eventually succumbed to their errors.

The New Communist Movement also developed from this context, with the intent of rebuilding the communist movement and bringing Marxism back to the working class. While the best elements of the New Communist Movement eventually united into the Freedom Road Socialist Organization in the 1980s, the rest eventually were consumed either by ultra-left errors or by social-democratic reformism.

This brings us to the postmodernists themselves. A significant theoretical trend in this period was the wave of post-structuralist theorists. Structuralism, broadly, argued that things had to be understood in terms of their structural interrelations. A core premise of structuralism is that “consciousness is structured like a language.” They believed that our thoughts and ideas weren’t a reflection of objective material reality, but rather that the “symbolic order” of language, along with all of its linguistic rules, stood in a mediator between reality and our conception of reality. This premise isn’t fundamentally opposed to Marxism. As Stalin said in “Marxism and Problems of Linguistics”, “Whatever thoughts arise in the human mind and at whatever moment, they can arise and exist only on the basis of the linguistic material, on the basis of language terms and phrases. Bare thoughts, free of the linguistic material, free of the ‘natural matter’ of language, do not exist.” Siraj explains in Post-modernism Today that the problem with the structuralist understanding is that “all aspects of the social world are shaped by the structure of language.” In other words, for the structuralists, it isn’t class struggle, but language that shapes society. Stalin’s main point was that language doesn’t act as a superstructure. The structuralists go into the realm of idealism by arguing that language is determinant.

Post-structuralism seeks to expand upon this by arguing that these linguistic structures are constituted by systems of power. These theorists, such as the French philosophers Michel Foucault, drifted into abstraction, relativism, and subjective idealism. The post-structuralists argued that we cannot criticize systems of power by relying on binary notions like exploiter and exploited that ground Marxist class analysis. Instead, they argued that we should use textual interpretation, drawing from linguistics, anthropology and psychology, to criticize power.

Furthermore, since reality is shaped by language and power, the postmodernists opposed any notion of objectivity and universalism as what Jean-François Lyotard called “meta-narratives.” These “meta-narratives,” they said, were just big stories, or overarching myths, that we tell in a futile attempt to make sense of a reality that we cannot ultimately comprehend. Historical necessity and universality therefore were discarded as everything is judged to be contingent and relative. As the postmodernists would have it, Marxism is mythology. Therefore, they subjected these “meta-narratives” to the same idealist linguistic criticism. Since we could only analyze language and not reality itself, language came to stand in for material reality. The post-structuralists, therefore, focused largely on critical analysis of art and literature, but the ideas they developed spread into the then largely petit bourgeois and student-led social movements. There, postmodern discourse based on difference, identity and language struggle to displace the centrality of class analysis and the universality of Marxism-Leninism as the ideology of the working class struggle against capitalist exploitation and oppression.

Michel Foucault was probably the most influential postmodern theorist, so we should examine his main ideas. He was a student of Althusser who devoted himself to developing the thought of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in a postmodern context. Foucault was originally drawn to Western Marxism, but later rejected Marxism completely. Nevertheless, he presents himself as a friend of the oppressed, focusing his work on the treatment and mistreatment of mental illness (in Madness and Civilization and The Birth of the Clinic), prisoners (in Discipline and Punish), and sexual repression (The History of Sexuality).

In his early works, Foucault bases his analysis on what he refers to as an “archaeological” method (which he details in his book, The Archaeology of Knowledge). This method basically says that systems of knowledge are governed by rules, of which we aren’t conscious, that define our conceptual framework and place boundaries on what we can think in any given period. For Foucault, this meant that in different periods people thought in ways that may seem completely alien to us from the point of view of our current period. This is the basis of the postmodern idea that truth isn’t objective, but rather, that truth is socially constructed. Furthermore, it also forms the basis for the postmodern idea that any given “discourse” should “stay in its lane” since it isn’t capable of understanding where the others are coming from. In other words, we have no universal, shared experience. This mentality leads to subjectivism and relativism, and an inability to strategically unite different struggles. Further, it makes it impossible to name any particular struggle as the principal contradiction that drives the process, which we could leverage to maximize our effectiveness across struggles.

Therefore, this archaeological method was silent on how one period transitioned to another. For this, Foucault adopted what he called a “genealogical” method, derived from Nietzsche. Foucault’s genealogy intended to argue that history was contingent, rather than the outcome of any sort of law governed historical process. Things happened by accident. Thus, Foucault’s theory is a direct attack on Marxist historical materialism, which holds that history is governed by knowable laws, and that we can interact with those laws in order to transform society.

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison represents the essence of Foucalt’s thinking on the question of power. Here he offers his critique of power as such, by looking at the prison system. According to Foucault, power does three things: it observes, it judges, and it disciplines. The purpose is to create “docile bodies,” to enforce normalized behavior, or, in other words, conformity.

Following Nietzsche, Foucault’s genealogy centers around “the body.” Power is exercised over bodies to make them work like cogs in machines that function within society. Thus, in The History of Sexuality, Foucault explains his theory of “biopower.” Unlike earlier, modern forms of power based on violence and expropriation, Foucault argues that biopower “endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply [life], subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations.” In this sense, just like mental hospitals and prisons, everything from urban planning, medical care, and education exists for the scientific management and administration of bodies, to make those bodies function in a normalized, docile way, like cogs in a humming social machine.

This is a critique of power that many on the left find very appealing, especially petit bourgeois radicals and anarchists. Foucault, by critiquing power, may appear to be a friend to the powerless, but he is a false friend. In fact, he isn’t critiquing the power that is being wielded against working and oppressed people by the capitalist state, but power as such. Foucault rejects and opposes anything that would reproduce power, including the sorts of knowledge, authority, hierarchy and discipline that are essential to organizing a revolution and transforming society. Without power, the working class cannot reshape society to end exploitation and oppression. In this regard, Foucault leaves us with no real way out. For Foucault, knowledge and power are intertwined as power-knowledge. Rationality itself, for Foucault, is coercive. Nevertheless, only “discourse,” though limited and constrained by power, is left open by Foucault as a viable way to subvert power.

The recently declassified CIA report entitled “France: Defection of the Leftist Intellectuals” deals largely with the trajectory of this trend in theory and praises the “spirit of anti-Marxism … that will make it difficult for anyone to mobilize significant intellectual opposition to U.S. policies.” It goes on to say that “The wide acceptance of this more critical approach to Marxism and the Soviet Union has been accompanied by a general decline of intellectual life in France that has undermined the political involvement of leftist intellectuals.” In this report, the CIA credits Foucault with the “critical demolition of Marxist influence in the social sciences,” which it celebrates as a “profound contribution to modern scholarship.” Needless to say, if the CIA thinks something is good, then it certainly isn’t.

Like Western Marxism, these days postmodern theory mainly haunts the halls of university literature departments. But some “post-Marxist” hucksters like Slavoj Žižek still influence the petit bourgeois left. Žižek’s philosophy is a strange brew of Hegelian idealism, Western Marxism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis poured over an endless stream of pop culture references. In the article “Capitalism’s Court Jester,” Gabriel Rockhill writes about Žižek, saying “this Eastern European native informant increasingly presented his post-Marxism as nothing short of the most radical form of Marxism.” Indeed, this has always been one of their favorite tricks. From the time of Trotsky to today, what unites all of these petit bourgeois theorists is the conceit that they are “critiquing Marxism from the left.” Rockhill explains that “Žižek became a front man in the global theory industry by borrowing his most important insights from the Marxist tradition but subjecting them to a playful postmodern cultural mash-up to crush their substance…”

But Žižek doesn’t confine himself to academic matters. He’s made a name for himself critiquing movies and pop culture. He also loves to chime in on the political issues of the day. For example, in a recent article for The New Statesman from August 14, 2023, entitled “Ukraine must go to war with itself,” Žižek writes that “Ukraine itself is fighting at two fronts: against Russian aggression and for what sort of country Ukraine will be after the war. If Ukraine survives, will it be a nationalist fundamentalist country such as Poland or Hungary? Will it be a de facto colony of global capitalism, or something else?” This aloof, “critical” approach allows him to pretend like his support for the proxy war against Russia is coming “from the left,” while in actuality he is carrying water for the U.S. imperialists and NATO.

Postmodernism has always been a weapon of the bourgeoisie. It is a weapon aimed primarily at Marxism, while pretending to be an intellectual ally of the left. But postmodernism is no friend of the left. It is an ideological wedge meant to divide Marxism from the movements of working and oppressed people, and to displace proletarian ideology with the ideology of the petit bourgeoisie. As such, Marxists should give no ground to postmodernism, but should fight for the ideology of the working class as the only ideology that can guide the revolutionary transformation of society.

J. Sykes is the author of “The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism”. The book can be purchased by visiting tinyurl.com/revsciMLbook.

#MLTheory #MarxismLeninism

Without a doubt, modern science has achieved a great deal. It has given us automation with the potential to free us from toil, medical innovations that extend life expectancy, and an understanding of the laws of physics and nature. It allows us to light and heat our homes with the push of a button, and to communicate instantly across the world. It gives us the ability to produce enough to fulfill the wants and needs of everyone. Science is a cornerstone of modern society in terms of what we produce and what we consume.

And yet, despite all of that, we live in a world where automation doesn’t free us, but instead threatens our livelihood with unemployment. These great medical innovations are inaccessible to millions. And the most basic wants and needs of the masses of the people go tragically unfulfilled. Our world is instead characterized by poverty, waste, war and environmental crisis. Why does science seem incapable of solving these issues?

The reason is simple. We live in a class society, where the exploiting classes, especially the monopoly capitalists, enrich themselves at the expense of working and oppressed people here and all over the world. In the United States and much of the rest of the world, modern science is bound to the interests of this monopoly capitalist class.

The dominant ideas in society are a reflection of the interests of the dominant class, and science is no exception. As the British Marxist philosopher Maurice Cornforth writes in his essay, “Dialectical Materialism and Science”, “Modern science is the creation of the bourgeoisie. It is one of the most typical products of bourgeois society. And it carries the mark of its bourgeois origin in its methods and in its ideas.” In other words, science is a part of the ideological superstructure, which arises from and reinforces the mode of production, the economic base of society.

No doubt, the ideologues of the bourgeoisie will object: “Not so! Science is perfectly objective and untouched by class interest!” Well, let’s see.

Ultimately, the ruling class takes a pragmatist approach to science. It isn’t interested in science merely for the sake of expanding knowledge, understanding and human progress. On the contrary, its approach to science is guided by one thing and one thing only: obtaining the highest rate of profit. Capitalism takes the pragmatist notion of “truth’s cash value” to its extreme. Capitalist innovation relies entirely on the anarchy of production to determine what technology is developed and what is left behind. Financial interests and lobbying groups, such as those of the coal and oil industries, play a tremendous role in holding back technology that would present a challenge to their bottom line, such as the development of green technology, for example.

We can also see how the monopoly capitalist class has a history of manipulating scientific research for the sake of oppression. The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould writes in his book, The Mismeasure of Man, “The history of scientific views on race, for example, serves as a mirror of social movements.” Gould argues that science is “socially embedded” and that “culture influences what we see and how we see it.” This is why, according to Gould, racist biological determinism was for some time the norm in evolutionary science. Science thus became a weapon in the arsenal of white chauvinism and national oppression, promoting racist theories like phrenology and eugenics.

Geneticist Richard Lewontin writes in Biology as Ideology, “Modern biology is characterized by a number of ideological prejudices that shape the form of its explanations and the way its researches are carried out.” Biological determinism has long been used to justify national oppression against African Americans, Chicanos, and others, in order to justify the super-exploitation of the oppressed nations.

We also see biological determinism being used to attack women and LGBTQ people. For example, the ideology of transgender oppression is grounded in a metaphysical view of biological sex which it pits against a dialectical understanding of gender. What does this mean? As Engels puts it in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, “To the metaphysician, things and their mental reflexes, ideas, are isolated, are to be considered one after the other and apart from each other, are objects of investigation fixed, rigid, given once for all. He thinks in absolutely irreconcilable antitheses. …For him, a thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude one another; cause and effect stand in a rigid antithesis, one to the other.” Biological determinism in regard to gender is metaphysical in this way, seeing sex and gender as inextricably linked, determined entirely by biological chromosomes, fixed, absolute, and immutable. This biological determinism is then used as a cudgel against trans people – as an ideological justification for their oppression hiding behind a claim to scientific truth, all in the service of maintaining the capitalist gendered division of labor.

In workplaces like Amazon and UPS, technology and science are used to track and discipline workers who don’t make productivity quotas. Artificial Intelligence is being used to replace workers in a number of fields. This is the kind of science and technology that the bourgeoisie is interested in developing and promoting.

In other fields science is likewise bound by the ideology of the ruling class. For example, genetically modified and hybrid seed production is driven primarily by the profit motive of agribusiness, rather than in the improvement of food in both quality and quantity. Take the agribusiness giant Monsanto, notorious for producing Agent Orange and for its seed patents. Monsanto instituted seed savings bans in order to ensure that farmers would have to buy seeds from them each season. Farmers defying Monsanto’s ban, even unwittingly, have found themselves fined for patent infringement.

In Colombia, for example, farmers who couldn’t afford to buy Monsanto’s “Roundup Ready” seeds often ended up with their crops devastated by Monsanto’s aerial pesticides, or had their crops destroyed for containing patented seeds, even if those seeds were simply carried over by birds. Meanwhile, monoculture takes root at the expense of biodiversity, and the environmental crisis driven by capitalism escalates. This is just one example of how the brunt of capitalist environmental devastation falls upon those oppressed by imperialism. This is also true within the U.S., where environmental destruction disproportionately impacts working class and oppressed nationality communities.

The capitalists always and everywhere put profit over people and the planet. Coal and oil fueled the engines of the industrial revolution, and as such the technologies developed in the course of the industrial revolution were developed in line with and dependent upon the consumption of fossil fuels. This led not only to tremendous pollution, but also to the development of a fossil fuel industry with vast wealth and power. The U.S. imperialist financial oligarchy is deeply invested in fossil fuels and fossil fuel-dependent technology, to the point that they will go to any lengths to protect their oil interests, including military intervention at the cost of millions of lives. They oppose the development of clean energy technology and even promote climate change denial, taking a head-in-the-sand approach to the trajectory towards an uninhabitable planet.

While capitalism in its early phase promoted scientific progress and pushed technology forward in unprecedented ways, that is no longer the case as the fundamental class relations of society have come to hold back scientific progress. Marx explains this in broad terms. In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy he wrote, “At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters.” The progressive advance of the productive forces is the main factor in driving science forward. Now, the only way to free the productive forces of society from the fetters of the relations of production is social revolution.

Socialists aren’t luddites. On the contrary, socialism champions scientific advance. Socialism fundamentally changes the way science is used by society. In this sense, socialism is science unleashed. Socialism utilizes the science most despised by the capitalist class, Marxism-Leninism, which analyzes the laws of motion at work in society in order to reshape society to serve the needs of working and oppressed people. This partisan science of the working class is put to work to remove the fetters placed upon the productive forces by capitalist class relations. Just as capitalist class interest has come to hold science back, so too can working class interest propel science forward.

Socialism replaces the anarchy of production and the drive for the highest rate of profit with socialist planning. Cyclical crises of overproduction are eliminated. Scientific education is prioritized. In this way, science is no longer a tool to increase profit, oppress people – and to line the pockets of the ruling class at the expense of everyone else. Instead, the working class in power can put science to work to make a world free of exploitation, toil, want, waste and war.

This is the world the socialist countries are in the process of creating. Look at socialist China, where extreme poverty has been eliminated, and where developing green energy and reorienting development towards environmental sustainability has become a top priority. Even the New York Times has to admit “There is no doubt about it: China is doing more than any other country when it comes to renewable energy and electric vehicles.” In this article from the NYT morning newsletter from August 14, 2023, German Lopez asks, “How?” The answer, he says, is “China has poured a lot of money into the research, development and use of clean energy, using its extensive manufacturing base to build solar panels and wind turbines and bring down prices worldwide. It has provided subsidies to buyers of electric vehicles, as the U.S. now does. And it has pursued, and surpassed, aggressive goals: China vowed to double its capacity of wind and solar power by 2030. It is on track to meet that goal five years ahead of schedule.”

What the New York Times doesn’t acknowledge is that this great achievement is a result of China’s socialist system. It can do this because the working class is in power. Unlike the United States and the other capitalist countries, the Chinese economy isn’t compelled by a drive for maximum profit at the expense of the people and the planet. We need to follow their example, but the only way to do that is through the socialist transformation of society. If we want science to play a truly liberating and progressive role, we have to free it from the shackles of capitalist ideology. And the only way to do that is to get rid of this parasitic, wasteful and destructive class of monopoly capitalists once and for all.

J. Sykes is the author of “The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism”. The book can be purchased by visiting tinyurl.com/revsciMLbook.

#UnitedStates #MarxismLeninism #MLTheory

It is growing more and more common to hear people repeating core elements of conspiracy theories. Many of these conspiracy theories grow from the fringes of right-wing extremist groups, then begin to creep into the mainstream through websites like Elon Musk’s Twitter (now renamed “X”), or through podcast personalities like Alex Jones, Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan, or through “influencers” on social media. They have grown even more prevalent since Donald Trump’s rise to power, as he himself promoted many of them from the Oval Office in Washington.

Indeed, conspiracy theories abound. Some appear ridiculous, such as “Area 51,” the “Mandela Effect,” or the “Flat Earth” conspiracy theories. Others are clearly more dangerous, like anti-vaccine conspiracy theories or the so-called “Great Replacement Theory.” Often many of these conspiracy theories are tied together and bleed into one another. Whatever they are, they ultimately blame social problems, real or imagined, on the secret schemes of a small group of shadowy elites.

Conspiracy theories present a problem that everyone interested in progressive social change should consider. It is important for people who want to change society for the better to be able to analyze what is going on, and since the ruling class does actually conspire, it is understandable that some conspiracy theories leave people confused. The rise of conspiracy theories coincides with a rise in public skepticism and distrust towards the government. And since the government is indeed untrustworthy, how do we tell what’s real and what isn’t? We should look at a few of these conspiracy theories and examine how we can tell fact from fiction.

First, on a fundamental level, how do we know anything? How do we know if what we think is correct or not? Marxism-Leninism provides us with a scientific theory of knowledge based on dialectical materialism. Knowledge is based on experience in social practice, in the class struggle, in production, and in scientific experimentation. Based on these experiences, we can formulate theories, test those theories against material reality in practice, and then use that practical experience to refine our theories. In doing this, we can come to understand the laws that govern different processes and find out how to interact with those laws to move forward effectively.

In the case of conspiracy theories, it can be helpful to understand a principle of critical thinking from philosophy called Occam’s razor. Occam’s razor basically says that if something could be explained equally well in more than one way, then the explanation that requires fewer guesses, assumptions and leaps is more likely to be true. So, when faced with any question, we should ask ourselves what we actually know about what’s going on, and what our guesses and assumptions are. If we find that there is another explanation that explains all aspects of the phenomenon equally well but requires less guesses and assumptions, we should operate from that explanation. The Chinese leader and Marxist theorist Mao Zedong put this another way when he said, with his characteristic directness, that we should “seek truth from facts.”

Let’s focus, then, on some of the more dangerous conspiracy theories. Take for example, the conspiracy theories currently promoted by U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. This is a man known to promote a host of conspiracy theories, from the idea that vaccines cause autism to the idea that chemicals in our water are responsible for turning children transgender. This is happening, according to these conspiracy theories, due to the maniacal schemes of a shadowy group of conspiring elites.

These assertions are not based on evidence, but that doesn’t matter to these people like RFK Jr. who promote them, because it takes far more time and effort to untangle and debunk them than to just throw them out there and see what sticks. They feed on conservative fear and uncertainty and protect themselves from rational and scientific refutation by saying that anyone attempting to debunk the theory must be in on the conspiracy or an agent of those who are.

Relying on conspiracy theories to whip up a political base is a strategy regularly employed by demagogues, from Hitler’s reliance on anti-Semitic conspiracy theories to Trump’s promotion of ideas like the “Great Replacement.” According to this conspiracy theory, certain “elites” (here an anti-Semitic dog whistle) intend to engage in “genocide” against white people through policies of immigration.

The right-wing outcry against so-called “Cultural Marxism” and “woke” culture dovetails with this white genocide conspiracy theory, in that it argues that things like affirmative action and diversity, equity and inclusion programs are an insidious plot from “globalists” (another dog whistle) to oppress white people. This dovetails with another popular conspiracy theory, that left-wing protest is funded by the “globalists.” Often this has been expressed by saying that Antifa, Black Lives Matter and other groups are funded by George Soros. These theories all trace their roots back to the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,'' based on a forged document detailing an alleged plot for Jewish world domination.

All of these conspiracies rely on spurious evidence and outright lies, and require a tangled web of guesses and assumptions to string together. They attempt to explain events in terms of conspiring groups of powerful elites, who are pulling the strings like super-villains right out of comic books. In reality, history is driven by objective laws, not the whims of secret cabals.

Nevertheless, there is indeed a financial oligarchy that has come to dominate much of the world. But this isn’t some secret cabal operating from the shadows. It is the billionaire class of U.S. monopoly capitalists who control many of the world’s financial institutions. This class of monopoly capitalists use their money and power to control the levers of state power, to dominate the media, and to maximize profits at the expense of the rest of us.

They don’t rule from the shadows, but openly wage war against the poor and oppressed in broad daylight. And they don’t do this because they got together and decided to do some imperialism, but because the laws of motion of capitalism demand it. The growing crises of the capitalist system required imperialist expansion in search of super-profits to delay this rotten system's inevitable demise. Ultimately, it isn’t the individual capitalists who determine things, but the overall, law-governed motion of the capitalist system.

The demagogue's trick is often to rely on lies, and also on distortions based on half-truths. The monopoly capitalist class does indeed conspire to dominate the world. Its real conspiracies are well documented and clearly evident. Examples include the counterintelligence programs against communist and national liberation groups in the United States (COINTELPRO), or attempts to destabilize and overthrow governments that go against the interests of imperialism. The conspiracy theorists will then make all kinds of leaps from this without any evidence to make their claims. Further, they will twist and invert facts to support their ideas. For example, often anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists will claim that one arm of the alleged Jewish plot for world domination is to use “the Jewish lobby” to control the U.S. government. This is a distortion. The reality is that things are the other way around. U.S. support for Zionism and the Israeli apartheid state, is cynically used by U.S. imperialism to justify its foothold for hegemony in the Middle East. Between Israel and the U.S., it is the U.S that is in charge, as it uses Israel as a proxy for military control of the region.

What, then, is the point of these conspiracy theories? It isn’t difficult to understand. Trump used allusions to the white-genocide, “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory to scapegoat immigrants for problems like unemployment – problems which are rooted in capitalist crisis. These lies serve to justify inequality and national oppression that is visited upon African Americans, Chicanos and Latinos, native peoples and others.

Trump also used conspiracy theories to attack his political opponents. Early on, he was an outspoken proponent of “Birtherism” during Barack Obama’s presidency, a racist conspiracy theory which claimed that Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. and was thus not eligible to be president. He also promoted the idea there was a “deep state” conspiracy, which connected to the absurd QAnon conspiracy, to claim that the election was stolen from him in 2020 by an evil shadow government, from which he alone could save the American people.

Conspiracy theories are ideological. Ideology arises from the material base of society. Ruling class ideology has the function of reinforcing and reproducing that base. That means that bourgeois ideology props up the prevailing relations of production, the class relations of ownership and power, and the sum of existing social relations. This ideology is expressed in many forms through media, education and cultural institutions.

Capitalist ideology finds expression in the basic principles of liberalism and the tenets of the “American Dream.” But it is also served by the promotion of conspiracy theories. They are promoted by those who have an interest in distorting facts and spreading misinformation and confusion. While they often give the appearance of being outwardly subversive or anti-government, the reality is that the objective effect of the conspiracy theory is to misdirect people away from the real causes of their problems, rooted in the capitalist system itself. Instead they are sent on a wild goose chase, hunting for the clues of a secret cabal of shadowy conspirators.

In order to effectively organize and change society, we need to understand it and the laws that drive it. Ultimately the point of analysis is to change the world. The source and aim of Marxism-Leninism is the practical, revolutionary struggle of the working class. The broad masses of the people need to come to understand the nature of the class that oppresses them, and to understand that the way to defeat them, at the most basic level, is to act together in their own class interests. We have to identify the real enemy to know how to fight them. Conspiracy theories stand in the way of developing this class consciousness. They spread confusion where the advance of the class struggle demands scientific and sober analysis. The best way to fight the spread of conspiracy theories is to fuse the science of Marxism-Leninism with the movement of the multinational working class.

J. Sykes is the author of “The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism”. The book can be purchased by visiting tinyurl.com/revsciMLbook.

#UnitedStates #MarxismLeninism #MLTheory

Max Shachtman was one of the original founders of the Trotskyite movement in the United States. He was a pragmatist, an opportunist even among opportunists, who led the first major split from the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 1940. At that time, he broke with the orthodox Trotskyite position that the USSR should be understood as a “degenerated workers state” and that it instead had come to be ruled by a new “bureaucratic collectivist” class.

Under the cloak of the theory of the “degenerated workers state” the Trotskyites kept up the pretense of support for the Soviet Union while making every effort to subvert and delegitimize it. Shachtman abandoned that pretense and raised the slogan of “Neither Washington nor Moscow, but international socialism.” Shachtman instead said the Trotskyites should form a so-called “Third Camp” equally opposed to both. In reality, however, the Third Camp Trotskyites aimed most of their fire at the communist movement and the Soviet Union.

Shachtman didn’t limit himself to opposing socialism in the USSR. He also opposed national liberation here in the United States. Shachtman wrote an entire book devoted to denying the right to self-determination for the African American Nation in the Black Belt. In his essay “Race and Revolution” from 1933, while Communist-led sharecroppers were militantly resisting Jim Crow terror in the Deep South, Shachtman argued that national self-determination for African Americans was a “reactionary utopia.”

Later, two other figures rose to prominence among the Trotskyites that would come to shape Shachtmanite Trotskyism as it developed: Hal Draper and Tony Cliff. Draper was part of the group who split with Shachtman from SWP, while Cliff was a founder of British Trotskyism.

To put it briefly, Hal Draper argued that so-called “Stalinism” (that is, Marxism-Leninism) represented “socialism from above” whereas Trotskyism represented “socialism from below.” According to Draper, “Stalinism” imposes socialism on the masses “from above” while Trotskyism seeks the “self-emancipation” of the masses, “from below.” Of course, this is nonsense, as anyone with experience with either can attest.

Anyone who has ever encountered Trotskyism in practice can attest to its commandist, rule-or-ruin methods among the masses. This is what working class “self-emancipation” by the Trotskyites looks like! On the contrary, the Marxist-Leninist organizational method of the mass line, based on the principle of “from the masses to the masses'' represents the dialectical method of leadership, where correct ideas are drawn from the felt needs of the masses, concentrated and honed by theory, and then propagated among the masses through struggle. This is the way to build towards revolution. “Socialism from above” and “socialism from below” aren’t metaphysically separated as the Trotskyites would have it, but are dialectically intertwined.

Tony Cliff was a British Trotskyite who disagreed outwardly with Max Shachtman on many points, but truly represents an extension of his Third Camp theory. Cliff’s book State Capitalism in Russia critiques Trotsky’s theory of the “degenerated or deformed workers states” and Shachtman’s theory of “bureaucratic collectivism” in favor of the theory that the socialist countries are “state capitalist.”

According to Cliff, the socialist countries are “state capitalist” because the Law of Value still operates, they still engage in commodity production, and surplus value still exists. Cliff argues that a “permanent arms economy” prevents cyclical crises, ignoring the fact that constant military spending isn’t sufficient to prevent crises of overproduction in the imperialist countries. Regarding countries like Cuba and China, that Trotsky would call “deformed workers states,” Cliff says they are undergoing “deflected, state capitalist, permanent revolution.”

The simple truth is that Cliff argues from an idealist position. He fails to understand, as outlined by Marx in “Critique of the Gotha Program” and further explained by Lenin in The State and Revolution, that socialism cannot help but carry forward elements of capitalism. In reality, however, the fundamental contradiction of capitalism is the contradiction between socialized production and private accumulation. This contradiction is at the heart of the crises that plague capitalism over and over again. The reason the socialist countries don’t experience these crises is that this contradiction largely no longer exists in socialist countries, or where it does it is only on a very small scale. The commanding heights of the economy in the socialist countries are controlled by the state, and the value created by the workers goes primarily into the betterment of society rather than the pockets of the members of the capitalist class.

Of course, problems exist in the socialist countries. Contradictions continue in the period of the socialist transition, including classes and class struggle. But socialism’s reason for existence is to eliminate those problems step by step. This demands a scientific and materialist approach, starting not with ideals, but with the way things really are.

In the United States, the most significant group to come out of this current was the International Socialist Organization (ISO), a group that constantly placed itself on the wrong side of nearly every struggle. The ISO were Third Camp Trotskyites who drew heavily from Draper and Cliff. They opposed the anti-imperialist struggles and the socialist countries internationally, and took either a rule-or-ruin approach to the mass struggles here, or merely shouted from the sidelines. Like the SWP in the 1930s, with its dissolution and entry into the Socialist Party to commandeer the SP or steal away its members, history has repeated itself with the ISO. The ISO likewise dissolved itself in 2019, and by now most of its former members are hiding out in the social-democratic big-tent organization, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

These modern-day Shachtmanites now try to inject their petty bourgeois ideology into the people’s struggles through DSA. For example, in an article from June 23, 2023 in The Tempest, entitled “Time for DSA’s internationalists to show solidarity with Ukraine,” they argue for the U.S. State Department’s line of support for the U.S./NATO proxy war in Ukraine against Russia and argue in favor of U.S. taxpayer money funding arms for Ukrainian forces. This position only diverts money away from people’s needs at home while supporting the imperialist war waged by the United States. It is shameful for so-called “socialists” and “internationalists” to support the cynical scheme to send the Ukrainian people to die as proxies for the hegemonic ambitions of the U.S. monopoly capitalist class and their NATO allies. U.S. imperialism is the main enemy of the working class and oppressed people of the world. This is a point these “third camp” Trotskyites emphatically refuse to understand.

From every angle, beginning with Trotsky himself and moving through Cannon and Shachtman to Draper and Cliff, Trotskyism again and again presents itself as a lapdog of the U.S. ruling class against socialism and anti-imperialist struggles. Under the cover of its demand for “socialism from below” it opposes socialism everywhere it exists. While pretending to uphold proletarian democracy, it approaches the masses with a sectarian and dogmatic rule-or-ruin attitude. It is an ideology that has failed to lead a successful revolution anywhere, and it is a trap laid at the feet of the workers movement. It is an important task of Marxist-Leninists to expose the true nature of this ideology everywhere it rears its head.

#UnitedStates #MLTheory #AgainstTrotskyism

As we wrap up our series on Trotskyism, let’s turn to the sad and shameful record of Trotskyism in the United States. This article will look at the Socialist Workers Party.

The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is the oldest Trotskyite group in the United States, tracing its origins back to the expulsion of the Trotskyites, who were led by James P. Cannon and Max Shachtman, from the Communist Party in 1928. They formed a group called the Communist League of America, which shortly thereafter merged with the American Workers Party to form the Workers Party of the United States. That organization dissolved itself and entered the Socialist Party of America (SP) in its entirety, attempting to try to take it over or pull activists away from it.

It didn’t take long before the Trotskyists were expelled from the SP and formed the Socialist Workers Party in 1938. By 1940, the SWP would split, with Max Shachtman taking a sizable minority with him to form a new Trotskyite organization called the Workers Party.

The great U.S. communist leader, William Z. Foster, wrote about the origins of the Socialist Workers Party in his important 1952 book, The History of the Communist Party of the United States. He explains that the formation of the SWP was rooted in the expulsion of the Trotskyites from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the Comintern in 1928. It will be worthwhile to quote Foster on this at length.

“At the time of the sixth congress of the Comintern in 1928 Trotsky was in exile, as a criminal against the Revolution. He made an appeal to the congress to try to get it to repudiate the decision of the Communist Party and the government of the Soviet Union. The congress, however, overwhelmingly rejected this insolent proposal. Nevertheless the scheme found a secret supporter in James Cannon, one of the Communist Party delegates from the United States. Upon Cannon’s return to this country he began at once to spread clandestine Trotskyite propaganda with his friends. They advocated withdrawal from the existing unions, abandonment of the united front, and carried on a bitter factional struggle. The Bittelman-Foster leaders, learning what was going on, preferred charges against Cannon, Max Shachtman, and M. Abern, and all were promptly expelled by the Party as splitters, disrupters, and political degenerates. About 100 of Cannon’s followers were also finally ousted from the Party.

“Upon their expulsion the Trotskyites formed themselves into an opposition league, which, after several internal splits and two slippery amalgamations–first with the Musteites in 1934, and the second with the Socialist Party in 1936–finally emerged, in January 1938, as the Socialist Workers Party … The reason-for-being for this party, which is the American section of the so-called Fourth International, with its pathological antagonism toward the Communist Party and the Soviet Union, is to serve as a tool of reaction. It carries on its counter-revolutionary work against the Party and the U.S.S.R. under cover of a cloud of super-revolutionary phrases.”

The Socialist Workers Party today is similar, except to say that it is even smaller, more sectarian, and more irrelevant than ever. It still opposes Marxism-Leninism and socialism under the cover of an attack on “Stalinism,” and it still opposes national liberation struggles in the name of “permanent revolution.”

As a result of its role in the 1934 Teamster strike in Minneapolis, the SWP managed to stay afloat throughout the 1930s. It also grew as a result of its entry into and then expulsion from the Socialist Party, by taking part of their membership with them in the split. After that, the SWP was the largest Trotskyite grouping in the world, and the most prominent force in Trotsky’s “Fourth International.”

The SWP began to decline in strength when Max Shachtman led a large split in 1940. He argued that the mainstream Trotskyite view of the USSR as a “degenerated workers state” was wrong, and that the Soviet bureaucracy formed a new ruling class. Shachtman called this “bureaucratic collectivism.” While the SWP gave lip-service to defense of the Soviet Union as they attacked and denounced in the same breath, Shachtman and his followers abandoned the pretense, instead arguing for a Trotskyite “third camp” opposed to both capitalism and the USSR.

Today, the SWP tails behind the most backward section of the U.S. working class. Take for example, the article in the SWP newspaper, The Militant, entitled “Biden brags about ‘State of the Union’ as boss attacks on workers grind on,” from February 27, 2023. There, they decry “Democrats’ ‘woke’ anti-woman policies on gender and promotion of ‘critical race theory’ — policies that are detested by millions of workers.” These and their many statements like them are bare-faced repetitions of transphobic, right-wing talking points that shamelessly attempt to pit LGBTQ people against women, alongside far-right attacks on education and the Black Liberation movement.

In another article from June 12, 2023, ironically entitled “A genuine revolution means leading masses in their millions,” SWP leader Mary-Alice Waters repeats again the right-wing talking point that schools “teach those whose skins are white that they are racists by birth,” raising once more the boogeyman of the Republican far right, Critical Race Theory, to unite with the reactionaries. She goes on to bemoan being called a transphobe for “defending the biological fact that there are two sexes.” She doesn’t stop there, however. She digs in even deeper, saying, “Whether under the flag of ‘cancel culture,’ ‘critical race theory,’ the anti-Jewish ‘Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions’ movement or something else, these are reactionary forces alien to the working class and its allies,” repeating the Zionist lie that support for the liberation of Palestine is antisemitic.

This should all come as no surprise from Trotskyites, but it is still appalling to see people who call themselves socialists and who claim to speak for the working class carry water for the most reactionary elements within the U.S. ruling class, and to try and help them spread their poisonous ideology amongst the workers movement.

The Socialist Workers Party was always a sad shadow of the genuine communist movement in the United States, and it has only fallen farther and farther as it tries to desperately find its footing in a world where it has lost any scrap of relevance. In 2019, a U.S. Trotskyite group, the International Socialist Organization, dissolved itself. Hopefully the SWP isn’t far behind.

#UnitedStates #MLTheory #AgainstTrotskyism

Minneapolis, MN – The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism, published by the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, is a concise and fantastic book detailing the fundamentals of Marxism. Written by J. Sykes, the book is an excellent introduction for those looking to learn the science of revolution, the history, methods and outlook of scientific socialism. It breaks down complex questions of philosophy, organizing and others into easily understandable terms, making it good for beginners and an excellent primer for those who already have a grasp on Marxism-Leninism and are looking to sharpen their understanding. For those seeking to do away with capitalism and its system of corporate exploitation, class oppression and national oppression, this is the book for you.

Introducing the science of revolution

The book begins with an explanation, not only of the purpose of its publication, but of a brief history of Marxism-Leninism. Sykes makes clear that Marxism didn’t just fall out of the sky one day, it arose out of the three component parts: socialism, political economy, and philosophy, and was (and continues to be) refined over the course of the practical experience and application of it in the struggles of working and oppressed people the whole world over.

In addition to dealing with the basics of Marxism, the book addresses problematic bourgeois ideological currents like post-modernism, Sakai’s take on settler colonialism, and pragmatism, which are harmful to the efforts to construct a revolutionary movement in this country.

Theory and practice

As Sykes says,

“Practice is the sole criterion of truth”, continuing, “Revolutionary theory is a guide to action, and it changes and develops as the world changes and develops, building upon itself just as Marx and Engels built upon the advanced theory of their time. In the early part of the 20th century, Vladimir Lenin and the experience of the October Revolution and socialist construction in the Soviet Union further developed the science of revolution in many ways. Lenin’s analysis of the further development of capitalism into monopoly capitalism led to his development of the theory of Imperialism and the importance of anti-imperialist struggles for national liberation.”

This is why The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism doesn’t focus simply on communist theory in the abstract, separated from real world conditions and struggles, but in the source (practice) its application, and use of it in those struggles. It also doesn’t take Marxism as an unchanging dogma, but as a science that is constantly being developed and enriched in its source, practice, as a tool that becomes sharper, not duller, with use.

Sykes explains how knowledge and theory develops from practical experience, to be summed up and learned from, to apply again. The book as well explains the “mass line,” the communist method of organizing and leadership from and to the masses, and how not only we as revolutionaries learn with it, but how the people as a whole learn from the process of taking our felt needs, issues and demands, studying and breaking them down, and synthesizing them into actionable plans, demands and slogans, and so raising the consciousness of the people.

A book for revolutionaries new and old

Throughout the entirety of The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism, important concepts such as imperialism, historical materialism and national oppression are all explained in an easily digestible manner. Questions of organizing, history and leadership are explained in clear and concise terms, and the book never steps away from discussing the practical use and understanding of each concept, and ties Marxist-Leninist theory firmly with the struggles of the masses that continues to develop and enrich it.

This book comes at a period of major importance today. As Mick Kelly, political secretary of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, states in the forward, “Not since the rise of the new communist movement in late 1960s and early 70s have we seen such large numbers of people arriving at the conclusion that monopoly capitalism is a failed system, and that revolution and socialism are necessities. Many new revolutionaries are making the leap and helping to build revolutionary organization.”

For those revolutionaries, new and old, looking to build such an organization, this book will undoubtedly be a vital and practical read.

The book can be purchased from FRSO organizers, or by visiting tinyurl.com/revsciMLbook.

#MinneapolisMN #BookReviews #MLTheory #redTheory

By now it should come as no surprise that Trotskyism, with its ultra-left emphasis on “pure proletarian revolution” originating in Trotsky’s theory of “permanent revolution,” that Trotskyism’s errors extend to the national question.

But, before we can get into Trotsky’s view on the subject, what is the national question? When Marxists talk about the “national question” we’re talking about the analysis of the problems posed to the revolutionary movement by the materialist process by which nations form and develop, and the role that plays in revolutionary change. Practically, we’re talking about how the proletarian revolutionary movement should relate to oppressed nations and nationalities.

Marx and Engels wrote about this in relation to a number of important issues while they were alive, especially concerning the Irish and Indian struggles for national liberation against the British Empire, and in the context of the Black liberation struggle, especially in relation to the abolition struggle and the U.S. Civil War. Their support for these struggles was unequivocal. Lenin and Stalin further developed Marxist-Leninist theory on the national question. Lenin and Stalin understood that it was necessary for communists to support self-determination for oppressed nations as an essential element of the struggle against our common enemy, monopoly capitalism, or imperialism. African American Marxist-Leninists like Harry Haywood and Claudia Jones applied these theories to the concrete analysis of the national question in the United States.

In 1933, Trotsky says plainly, in “The Negro Question in America,” “The Negroes are a race and not a nation.” In almost the same breath, Trotsky claims to support self-determination for African Americans. But if Black people in the U.S. are not a nation, what could this possibly mean? Lenin was crystal clear on the meaning of self-determination, practically: “The right of nations to self-determination means only the right to independence in a political sense, the right to free, political secession from the oppressing nation.” Trotsky would have us believe there is some other kind of self-determination, some kind of racial, rather than national, self-determination. For Trotsky, the slogan of “self-determination” should be used as “transitional demand” to recruit Black workers to the cause of a purely proletarian revolution. This isn’t support, but rather it is the cynical manipulation of the demand for Black self-determination. He pays lip-service to self-determination but robs it of its meaning in order to twist it to his own aims.

The U.S. Trotskyite theoretician Max Shachtman isn’t any better on the question. In some ways he’s even worse. He likewise states, in his pamphlet Race and Revolution from 1933, “The American Negroes do not constitute a nation separate and apart from the rest of the population of the country.” His conclusion is that African American liberation in the Black Belt is a “reactionary utopia.” He is opposed even to Trotsky’s lip-service to self-determination. At least, unlike Trotsky, he doesn’t mince words.

Shachtman argues that an oppressed nation must be distinct in every way from the nation that oppresses it. It is not enough for Shachtman, for example, that the African American people speak a common language (English), but rather they must speak a common language unique to them. The same holds true of culture, economic life, and so on. He also gives a lot of weight to the migrations of African Americans out of the Black Belt South, in order to deny that this is their historically constituted national territory. But would anyone deny that Ireland and Palestine remain the national territory of the Irish and Palestinian people, despite migrations resulting from the oppression of imperialism and its lackeys in Ireland and Palestine? Only the imperialists and their agents would make such a claim.

To the Trotskyites, the question of Black liberation or Chicano liberation is a race question. It is a question of overcoming racial prejudice to unite the multinational working class against the capitalist classes and strata, large and small. It is a purely ideological struggle, with no real material basis. Further, by limiting the question to a question of race, the Trotskyites fail to comprehend the inherently anti-imperialist nature of the national liberation struggles. They call the national bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie reactionaries, and would exclude them from being allies in the united front against monopoly capitalism.

We have already seen how the Trotskyites demand for pure proletarian revolution has led them astray on the issues of the alliance with the peasantry and the united front. Their wrong views on the national question are a branch from the same poisonous weed. The only way the working class in the United States will win socialism is to build a united front against monopoly capitalism, and the cornerstone of that united front is the strategic alliance between the multinational working class and the movement of oppressed nationalities for national liberation. There is no path for victory that does not include support for the self-determination of the African American Nation in the Black Belt South, the Chicano Nation in Aztlan in the Southwest, and the Hawaiian Nation. By denying that essential point, the Trotskyites would set the proletarian revolution up to fail.

#UnitedStates #MarxismLeninism #MLTheory #AgainstTrotskyism

Trotskyism disagrees with Marxism-Leninism on a number of important theoretical points. These disagreements aren’t limited to the field of theory but have a real practical impact on the movements of working class and oppressed peoples. In our day-to-day struggles, we see them come up again and again. Practically, the question of the united front illustrates very clearly the glaring difference between Marxism-Leninism and Trotskyism. This is a question of extreme theoretical importance, with tremendous practical consequences, so we should examine it closely.

What is the united front? It is the organizational expression of a broad unity of action by diverse forces against a common enemy. The purpose of the united front, the reason for its existence, is to unite the many to defeat the few.

In order to defeat the monopoly capitalist class – the imperialists who seek to plunder and rule the world through monetary influence and force of arms – the masses in their millions must unite broadly in order to attack the enemy from every angle. This requires a broad unity, beyond the tight, militant discipline demanded by revolutionary communists. We can and must unite millions of people – everyone whose material interests are opposed to those of the monopoly capitalists. One certainly doesn’t have to be a communist to understand that the interests of the monopoly capitalists are opposed to our own.

We can and must fight together with the mass organizations of the working class, such as the trade unions. And we must also unite broadly with classes outside of our own. Building the strategic alliance between the working class and the movements of oppressed nationalities is essential to building the united front against monopoly capitalism. Thus, we should build and unite with the Black and Chicano liberation movements, including uniting with the national bourgeoisie who wants to fight back against the imperialist system at the core of national oppression. We must also seek to unite with progressive forces among the petty bourgeoisie, a doomed class crushed daily under the weight of the monopoly capitalists.

The Trotskyites aren’t interested in this kind of united front, this uniting broadly with different class forces who are materially at odds with the monopoly capitalists. As always, they want pure proletarian revolution, and their understanding of the united front reflects that. To them, the united front should be a unity of socialist forces dominated by the Trotskyites. It is a unity of working-class forces arrayed against all other classes and strata. This is what we saw in how they addressed the Bolshevik revolution in opposition to the peasantry, and the Chinese revolution as well.

The united front, properly understood, means that there are many contradictory forces at work, all seeking to lead it based on their own material interests. Thus, the communists must strive to maintain the independence and initiative with the united front, and should strive to lead it in a revolutionary direction. But how should communists exercise leadership in the united front? Through persuasion and example, and through the use of the mass line.

Mao Zedong explained the mass line like this.

“In all the practical work of our Party, all correct leadership is necessarily ‘from the masses, to the masses’. This means: take the ideas of the masses (scattered and unsystematic ideas) and concentrate them (through study turn them into concentrated and systematic ideas), then go to the masses and propagate and explain these ideas until the masses embrace them as their own, hold fast to them and translate them into action, and test the correctness of these ideas in such action. Then once again concentrate ideas from the masses and once again go to the masses so that the ideas are persevered in and carried through. And so on, over and over again in an endless spiral, with the ideas becoming more correct, more vital and richer each time. Such is the Marxist theory of knowledge.”

Understanding the mass line is crucial to understanding how communists should relate to the mass organizations of the united front. We have to understand, as Mao put it, that the masses are composed of advanced, intermediate and backwards elements. The advanced are the activists who want to fight to make things better. The intermediate are the broad group who are not yet active, but aren’t opposed to progress. The backwards are the reactionaries who push back against change, oppose progress and champion the ideas of the enemy among the masses.

The role of communists among the masses is to organize and unite with the advanced, active fighters. These are the people who are articulating the masses' felt needs. Together with the advanced, we can develop organizations, struggles and campaigns around these felt needs in order to mobilize the broad intermediate section of the masses while isolating or winning over the backwards in the course of the struggle. By doing this, we can win important victories and land blows ag