To mark the 132nd anniversary of the birth of Chinese revolutionary Mao Zedong, December 26, Fight Back News Service is circulating quotes from some of his writings on the United States and its role in the world.

“Chiang Kai-shek and his supporters, the U.S. reactionaries, are all paper tigers too. Speaking of U.S. imperialism, people seem to feel that it is terrifically strong. Chinese reactionaries are using the ‘strength’ of the United States to frighten the Chinese people. But it will be proved that the U.S. reactionaries, like all the reactionaries in history, do not have much strength. In the United States there are others who are really strong – the American people.”

— Talk with the American correspondent Anna Louise Strong, August 1946

“Apart from those who are deliberately deceiving the people or are utterly naive, no one will believe that a treaty can make U.S. imperialism lay down its butcher’s knife and suddenly become a Buddha, or even behave itself a little better.”

— Statement Opposing Aggression Against Southern Vietnam and Slaughter of Its People by the U.S. – Ngo Dinh Diem clique, August, 1963

“The United States has all along attempted to control the Congo. It used the United Nations forces to carry out every sort of evil deed there. It murdered the Congolese national hero Lumumba, it subverted the lawful Congolese government. It imposed the puppet Tshombe on the Congolese people, and dispatched mercenary troops to suppress the Congolese national liberation movement. And now, it is carrying out direct armed intervention in the Congo in collusion with Belgium and Britain. In so doing, the purpose of U.S. imperialism is not only to control the Congo, but also to enmesh the whole of Africa, particularly the newly independent African countries, in the toils of U.S. neo-colonialism once again. U.S. aggression has encountered heroic resistance from the Congolese people and aroused the indignation of the people of Africa and of the whole world.”

— Declaration of Support of the People of the Congo, December 1964

“The speedy development of the struggle of the American Negroes is a manifestation of sharpening class struggle and sharpening national struggle within the United States; it has been causing increasing anxiety among U.S. ruling circles. The Kennedy Administration is insidiously using dual tactics. On the one hand, it continues to connive at and take part in discrimination against Negroes and their persecution, and it even sends troops to suppress them. On the other hand, in the attempt to numb the fighting will of the Negro people and deceive the masses of the country, the Kennedy Administration is parading as an advocate of ‘the defense of human rights’ and ‘the protection of the civil rights of Negroes,’ calling upon the Negro people to exercise ‘restraint’ and proposing the ‘civil rights legislation’ to Congress. But more and more Negroes are seeing through these tactics of the Kennedy Administration. The fascist atrocities of the U.S. imperialists against the Negro people have exposed the true nature of so-called American democracy and freedom and revealed the inner link between the reactionary policies pursued by the U.S. Government at home and its policies of aggression abroad.”

— Statement Supporting the American Negroes in Their Just Struggle Against Racial Discrimination by U.S. Imperialism, August 8, 1963

“The Afro-American struggle is not only a struggle waged by the exploited and oppressed Black people for freedom and emancipation, it is also a new clarion call to all the exploited and oppressed people of the United States to fight against the barbarous rule of the monopoly capitalist class. It is a tremendous aid and inspiration to the struggle of the people throughout the world against U.S. imperialism and to the struggle of the Vietnamese people against U.S. imperialism. On behalf of the Chinese people, I hereby express resolute support for the just struggle of the Black people in the United States.”

— Statement by Comrade Mao Tse-tung, Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, in Support of the Afro-American Struggle Against Violent Repression, April 16, 1968

“The Black masses and the masses of white working people in the United States have common interests and common objectives to struggle for. Therefore, the Afro-American struggle is winning sympathy and support from increasing numbers of white working people and progressives in the United States. The struggle of the Black people in the United States is bound to merge with the American workers’ movement, and this will eventually end the criminal rule of the U.S. monopoly capitalist class.”

— Statement by Comrade Mao Tse-tung, Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, in Support of the Afro-American Struggle Against Violent Repression, April 16, 1968

“A new upsurge in the struggle against U.S. imperialism is now emerging throughout the world. Ever since the Second World War, U.S. imperialism and its followers have been continuously launching wars of aggression and the people in various countries have been continuously waging revolutionary wars to defeat the aggressors. The danger of a new world war still exists, and the people of all countries must get prepared. But revolution is the main trend in the world today.

“Unable to win in Vietnam and Laos, the U.S. aggressors treacherously engineered the reactionary coup d’etat by the Lon Nol Sirik Matak clique, brazenly dispatched their troops to invade Cambodia and resumed the bombing of North Vietnam, and this has aroused the furious resistance of the three Indo Chinese peoples. I warmly support the fighting spirit of Samdech Norodom Sihanouk, Head of State of Cambodia, in opposing U.S. imperialism and its lackeys. I warmly support the Joint Declaration of the Summit Conference of the Indo Chinese Peoples. I warmly support the establishment of the Royal Government of National Union under the Leadership of the National United Front of Kampuchea. Strengthening their unity, supporting each other and persevering in a protracted people’s war, the three Indo-Chinese peoples will certainly overcome all difficulties and win complete victory.

“While massacring the people in other countries, U.S. imperialism is slaughtering the white and black people in its own country. Nixon’s fascist atrocities have kindled the raging flames of the revolutionary mass movement in the United States. The Chinese people firmly support the revolutionary struggle of the American people. I am convinced that the American people who are fighting valiantly will ultimately win victory and that the fascist rule in the United States will inevitably be defeated.”

— People of the World, Unite and Defeat the U.S. Aggressors and All Their Running Dogs, May 23, 1970

#RevolutionaryTheory #Mao #Socialism #MarxismLeninism

The following paper by Mick Kelly, the Political Secretary of Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), was presented at the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) International Theoretical Conference on Fascism in the 21st Century in the Imperialist Heartlands. Sydney Loving of the Central Committee of FRSO also participated in the conference, which took place November 28-29, in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

Comrades and friends,

Let me start by thanking the National Democratic Front of the Philippines for organizing this most important event. In providing a venue for revolutionaries to address the big theoretical issues facing our respective movements, the NDFP is making a real contribution to our collective efforts to shatter the chains of monopoly capitalism.

The question of fascism is an important one, and it can impact one’s strategy, tactics, and a host of organizational measures; in fact, the fascism question can be one of life and death. There is also a wealth of important texts that address the issue, and of special importance are those of works of R. Palme Dutt and Georgi Dimitrov – both of which received wide circulation by the Communist International.

Comrades might be interested to know that the issue of fascism is a mass question among large numbers of progressive people in the U.S., given the wave of attacks unleashed by the reactionary Trump administration, Over the past 9 months, millions of people, in big cities and small towns, have taken to the streets. The extremely sharp struggles against mass deportations – including the uprising in Los Angeles and high level of struggle in Chicago and Portland, Oregon – make up one of the main issues shaping domestic politics.

We see the overall conditions as extremely favorable for building communist organization. As FRSO has been able to play an important role in these fights, we continue to be in a period of extraordinary growth.

What fascism is

For some, “Fascism” as an invective – a sort of swear word, the worst thing that you can call someone or some action of government – as opposed to a political category with a scientific definition. This is a long-standing tendency on the part of the petty bourgeois left, and certainly there is no one here who does that. Others, like the Trotskyites [1], see fascism as the product of a mass movement of the petty bourgeoisie. That is not correct either.

We are in agreement with the definition adopted by 13th plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International which states fascism is, “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.”

At the 7th Congress of the Communist International, Dimitrov pointed out, “The accession to power of fascism is not a ordinary succession of one bourgeois government by another, but a substitution of one state form of class domination of the bourgeoisie – bourgeois democracy – for another form, open terrorist dictatorship.” [2]

This is an important point. While it is true there is not a qualitative difference between fascism and bourgeois democracy, in the sense that they are both ways that the monopoly capitalist wield state political power, there is a qualitative difference in so far as one is very different than the other when it comes to democratic rights of working and oppressed people.

Fascism and capitalist democracy are different forms of political rule. The fact that there is real difference between the two means that revolutionaries will employ different tasks, objectives, and organizational measures depending on the form of bourgeois rule. Communist organizing in a period of open terror is for all practical purposes illegal.

Fascist governments wage aggressive wars characterized by extremes of national chauvinism. In fact, bourgeois democratic governments have always done the same and often resort to the use of open terror to maintain control of their colonies or neo-colonies. In fact, the use of open terror in the neo-colonial or colonial settings is a feature that is common to fascist and bourgeois democratic governments.

In his important work The State and Revolution, Lenin points out, “A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism, and, therefore, once capital has gained possession of this very best shell (through the Palchinskys, Chernovs, Tseretelis and Co.), it establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic can shake it.”

Why would the ruling class give up this “best possible political shell”? Stalin responds that it is because they have to:

In this connection the victory of fascism in Germany must be regarded not only as a symptom of the weakness of the working class and a result of the by the betrayals of the working class by Social-Democracy, which paved the way for fascism; it must also be regarded as a sign of weakness of the bourgeois, a sign that the bourgeois is no longer able to rule by the old methods of parliamentary and bourgeois democracy, and, as a consequence, is compelled in its home policy to resort to terrorist methods of rule — as a sign it is no longer to find a way out of the present situation on the basis of a peaceful foreign policy, and, as a consequence, is compelled to resort to a policy of war. [3]

Finally let me quote from R. Palme Dutt, “Fascism is not inevitable. Fascism is not a necessary stage of capitalist development through which all countries must pass. The social revolution can forestall Fascism, as it has done in Russia. But if the social revolution is delayed, then the menace of fascism becomes urgent.” [4]

So, there are several themes that should be circled back to. First, fascism employs open terrorism. Sure, there can be courts and parliaments, but open terrorism is what the fascist state is organized around and for. Secondly, fascism is a tool of the financial oligarchy – particularly its most reactionary and chauvinist sectors. And finally, there is the issue of extreme national chauvinism and fascism’s war-like nature.

To what degree is there a fascist danger in the U.S.?

In the entire epoch of monopoly capitalism, fascism is a latent tendency and therefore a possibility, given that the necessary conditions are present. In a context where the decline of U.S. imperialism is accelerating, where polarization is sharpening in the political superstructure, it is necessary to have a materialist evaluation of the objective conditions. That includes a realistic assessment of an immediate fascist danger.

When identifying what fascism is, in our view the most essential feature is the use of open terror by the ruling class, meaning the legal possibilities to organize for socialism are slim to nonexistent. That is not currently the situation in the United States, and communists in the U.S. need to utilize every avenue and opportunity to build the people’s struggle while developing revolutionary organization.

It is a fact that there are fascist groups and there are people in government who are pro-fascist. These elements are present in the military too. Their attacks should be met head on. The events of January 6, 2021, when Trump attempted to block the peaceful transfer of power and his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, speaks volumes about the lengths reactionaries will go to – as well as some of the limitations that necessity places on them.

The U.S. has always repressive place. Even as it went to war on German fascism and was an important part of the world anti-fascist coalition, 120,000 Japanese Americans were put in concentration camps.

Whatever assessment one has about a fascist danger, repression and resistance to repression need to be taken seriously. This means opposing reactionary laws and measures that restrict our democratic rights. It also means pushing back hard against legal attacks we face. Over the past 15 years our organization has faced a fair amount of repression, [5] and we have developed some capacity to deal with it. The most recent example was the defense of an immigrant rights activist and comrade who was charged with conspiracy to further civil disorder in the aftermath of the anti-ICE rebellion in Los Angles. We build a broad, national defense campaign and charges were dropped.

All quantity includes quality – and there is a whole political landscape between capitalist democracy and open terror (fascism) that could be very different from what we have experienced over the past 50 years.

Fascism is a tool of the most reactional monopoly capitalists to prevent revolution. In the U.S. today, we are not in a revolutionary situation. An effective strategy against fascism would necessitate building the broadest possible united front to stop it, like for example the Popular Front employed by U.S. communists from the mid-1930s on. If there is an immediate danger of capitalist democracy being replaced by open terror, we can and will adjust our strategy and organizational functioning accordingly.

Comrades: communists have a rich history of resisting repression and defeating fascism. It was Soviet soldiers who planted the flag bearing a hammer and sickle on the ruins of the “thousand-year Reich.” Our comrades of the Philippines have repeatedly demonstrated it is possible to grow and thrive in the context of U.S.-sponsored terror. The road might be a hard one, but our future is bright.

Let me close with a quote from the outstanding revolutionary and Marxist-Leninist Mao Zedong:

I have said that all the reputedly powerful reactionaries are merely paper tigers. The reason is that they are divorced from the people. Look! Was not Hitler a paper tiger? Was Hitler not overthrown? I also said that the tsar of Russia, the emperor of China and Japanese imperialism were all paper tigers. As we know, they were all overthrown. U.S. imperialism has not yet been overthrown, and it has the atom bomb. I believe it also will be overthrown. It, too, is a paper tiger.

Long live proletarian internationalism! Long live the unity of the world’s peoples! Victory is certain, together we will win!

Notes

[1] Trosky states in Fascism: What it is and how to fight it, “The fascist movement in Italy was a spontaneous movement of large masses, with new leaders from the rank and file. It is a plebian movement in origin, directed and financed by big capitalist powers. It issued forth from the petty bourgeoisie, the slum proletariat, and even to a certain extent from the proletarian masses; Mussolini, a former socialist, is a “self-made” man arising from this movement.”

[2] Dimitrov, The Fascist offensive and the tasks of the Communist International in the fight for uniy of the working class against fascism, 7th Congress of the Communist International, page 127

[3] J. Stalin, Report to the 17th Party Congress, CW vol. 13, page 300

[4] R. Palme Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution

[5] In 2010 more than 70 FBI agents carried out coordinate raids against antiwar and international solidarity activist – including the homes of a number of FRSO members.

#RevolutionaryTheory #FRSO #Statement #Fascism #NDFP #Philippines #Lenin #Stalin #Mao #MarxismLeninism

In his extraordinary work, The Foundations of Leninism, J.V. Stalin, the principal leader of the Soviet Union after Lenin, explained, “Theory is the experience of the working-class movement in all countries taken in its general aspect.” In other words, theory is based on the summation of practical experience. General lessons are drawn from that experience, and then applied, tested and enriched through application in practice to our particular conditions. The 1938 work The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) – Short Course stands out as an invaluable wellspring of theory because it provides a summation of the experiences of the Bolshevik Revolution from a Marxist-Leninist perspective. It is a summation that we can and must learn from to apply to the revolutionary tasks at hand here and now.

Indeed, such was the value of the Short Course that during the Yan’an Rectification Movement, Mao Zedong wrote, “... in studying Marxism-Leninism, we should use the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), Short Course as the principal material. It is the best synthesis and summing-up of the world communist movement of the past hundred years, a model of the integration of theory and practice, and so far the only comprehensive model in the whole world. When we see how Lenin and Stalin integrated the universal truth of Marxism with the concrete practice of the Soviet revolution and thereby developed Marxism, we shall know how we should work in China.”

Stalin’s role in writing the Short Course

The authorship of the Short Course has long been a topic of discussion. Some have asserted that it was written by Stalin. Others have said it was written by a committee. The fact is that it was written by a committee of party historians under the political and theoretical guidance of Stalin. 

The book Stalin’s Master Narrative, edited by David Brandenberger and Mikhail Zelenov, shows exactly what Stalin’s contributions to the book were. He revised or rewrote significant portions of the book, and cut major sections as well. For example, he cut sections that praised his individual contributions too highly, as well as sections that overestimated or overstated the scope and strength of the counterrevolutionary Trotskyite conspiracy. Meanwhile, the section on Dialectical and Historical Materialism is entirely Stalin’s work. 

Liberals, Trotskyites, and anti-communist academics often look at Stalin’s direct involvement in the authorship of the Short Course and use that to dismiss the book as self-promotion. The revisionist Khrushchev even listed Stalin’s authorship of the Short Course among Stalin’s “crimes” in order to denigrate Stalin and bury this important text. Modern scholarship has revealed the “crimes” of Stalin in the so-called “Secret Speech” to be fabrications by Khrushchev, and this is no different. Khrushchev blames Stalin for self-aggrandizing in the book, but we now know that Stalin had no patience for such lavish personal praise, and we can see that he cut such praise heavily from the book. 

In any case, Marxists ought to understand that Stalin’s leading role in the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet State placed him in a unique position to give an accurate, Marxist-Leninist summation of events, in the interests of developing communist theory and practice. The purpose of the book, contrary to what the revisionists and other anti-communists claim, was to educate the Party from top to bottom in Marxist-Leninist theory from a decidedly practical point of view. Indeed, if there is one current that runs steadily throughout the book, it is the unity of theory practice. 

The unity of theory and practice in the Short Course

We can see then that one of the remarkable things that the Short Course does is to unite the practice that it is summing up with the theory that guided it at the time. In this way, it looks at the major works of Lenin and Stalin and contextualizes them, explains why they were written, and breaks down their main points in relation to the struggles that they sought to inform. 

As the book traces the history of the Bolsheviks from 1883 with the formation of the Emancipation of Labor group, through the development of the Soviet Constitution adopted in December of 1936, it strives to draw out both theoretical and practical lessons that can be taken up by revolutionaries, and to show the dialectical unity between theory and practice. It is a work of historical materialism, after all. So in it we see how the important ideological, political and organizational questions arose from the material reality of the time and place in which they were born.

The Short Course takes the time to explain practically all of Lenin’s major works and how they contributed to the revolution. It explains how many of Lenin’s writings formed the foundation for the Bolshevik party. Thus, it explains how Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? formed the ideological foundation for the Marxist-Leninist party. It explains how Lenin’s One Step Forward, Two Steps Back similarly formed the organizational foundation. And it explains how Lenin’s Materialism and Emperio-Criticism formed the philosophical foundation. In this way, the Short Course is an essential textbook on Leninist theory.

We can draw innumerable practical lessons from the book as well. For example, we can see how the Bolsheviks, despite being relatively small, were able, as early as 1905, to organize and mobilize the masses of the workers and peasants of the Russian Empire in order to have an influence that far exceeded their own numbers. It not only explains, but demonstrates, the necessity of armed struggle to smash the bourgeois dictatorship and institute the dictatorship of the proletariat: working class state power with the goal of building socialism and advancing towards communism. And it shows in practice how the Bolsheviks went about building socialism in the Soviet Union, for the first time in history. 

In its conclusion, the Short Course sums up its lessons. It emphasizes the central role of the revolutionary proletarian party itself: “The history of the Party teaches us, first of all, that the victory of the proletarian revolution, the victory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, is impossible without a revolutionary party of the proletariat, a party free from opportunism, irreconcilable towards compromisers and capitulators, and revolutionary in its attitude towards the bourgeoisie and its state power.”

Second, it emphasizes the pivotal role of theory, “The history of the Party further teaches us that a party of the working class cannot perform the role of leader of its class, cannot perform the role of organizer and leader of the proletarian revolution, unless it has mastered the advanced theory of the working-class movement, the Marxist-Leninist theory.”

Third, it emphasizes the necessity of the hegemony of the working class party among the class, “The history of the Party further teaches us that unless the petty-bourgeois parties which are active within the ranks of the working class and which push the backward sections of the working class into the arms of the bourgeoisie, thus splitting the unity of the working class, are smashed, the victory of the proletarian revolution is impossible.”

Fourth, it emphasizes ideological struggle against opportunism, “The history of the Party further teaches us that unless the Party of the working class wages an uncompromising struggle against the opportunists within its own ranks, unless it smashes the capitulators in its own midst, it cannot preserve unity and discipline within its ranks, it cannot perform its role of organizer and leader of the proletarian revolution, nor its role as the builder of the new, Socialist society.”

Fifth, it emphasizes criticism and self-criticism, “The history of the Party further teaches us that a party cannot perform its role as leader of the working class if, carried away by success, it begins to grow conceited, ceases to observe the defects in its work, and fears to acknowledge its mistakes and frankly and honestly to correct them in good time.”

And finally, it emphasizes the mass line, “the history of the Party teaches us that unless it has wide connections with the masses, unless it constantly strengthens these connections, unless it knows how to hearken to the voice of the masses and understand their urgent needs, unless it is prepared not only to teach the masses, but to learn from the masses, a party of the working class cannot be a real mass party capable of leading the working class millions and all the labouring people.”

The Short Course today

The lessons of the history of the Bolshevik party are as vital today as ever. Not only is this book a textbook of Marxism-Leninism, but, as Mao said, the Short Course is also “a model of the integration of theory and practice.” We can see many of our own problems reflected in it, and by studying how the Bolsheviks addressed those problems, we can better understand how to move forward. The Short Course addresses party building, organization, the national question, imperialism, war and peace, strategy and tactics, and so much more, all in an accessible and understandable way. 

Often, when we read the writings of Lenin, we may feel detached from the broader context in which they were written. This book can serve to bridge the gap between those texts and their context, helping us to better understand their meaning and purpose. In that way, we can better understand how to apply the general theoretical lessons of those important texts to our own particular conditions. 

The problems that faced the Bolsheviks are not unique, and many of them still plague revolutionaries all over the world, including in the United States. Indeed, while our conditions may not be the same, the theory of Marxism-Leninism is essential for understanding and advancing our own revolution. We are still in the era of imperialism and proletarian revolution. Our enemy is the capitalist class. Our goal is socialism, and ultimately, communism. And our way forward is the path first charted by Lenin, Stalin, and the Bolsheviks. 

#RevolutionaryTheory #RedReviews #USSR #Stalin #MarxismLeninism

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.

#RevolutionaryTheory #Socialism #MarxismLeninism #MLTheory #RedTheory

50 years ago, on April 30, the gates of the Presidential Palace in Saigon were broken by a tank—a tank driven by a fighter for a unified and independent Vietnam. The flag of the U.S.-backed puppet regime came down, and the flag of the National Liberation Front replaced it.

Saigon, the capital of French colonialism, and then American imperialism, was no more. Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City—named for the communist leader who stood at the forefront of Vietnam’s fight for national liberation.

On July 17, 1966, Ho Chi Minh stated, “The war may last five years, ten years, 20 years, or even longer. Ha Noi, Hai Phong, and some cities and factories may be devastated. But the Vietnamese people will never be afraid! Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom. When victory comes, our people will rebuild our country, stronger and more beautiful than ever before.”

So, it came to be, after long decades of heroic struggle, the many had defeated the few. A small country defeated a big one, and Vietnam at last was liberated. A few weeks earlier, on April 18, the Cambodian puppet regime of Lon Nol was sent packing; in the capital city of Phnom Penh, streets were named after the students killed at an anti-war protest at Kent State. Laos would get free as well and embark on the socialist road.

A crucial factor in these victories was forward-looking leaders who made use of the science of Marxism-Leninism. When talking about how he became a communist, Ho Chi Minh said, “There is a legend, in our country as well as in China, on the miraculous ‘Book of the Wise.’ When facing great difficulties, one opens it and finds a way out. Leninism is not only a miraculous ‘book of the wise,’ a compass for us Vietnamese revolutionaries and people: it is also the radiant sun illuminating our path to final victory, to socialism and communism.”

The struggle to liberate Vietnam was a titanic battle that shook the world. Both the People’s Republic of China and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics proved important aid that helped make the victory possible.

Here in the United States, the movement against the war on Vietnam would have a profound impact. It brought many millions into the streets. By the war’s end, the anti-war movement was a movement in solidarity with Vietnam, and the predominant flag at U.S. demonstrations was the flag of the National Liberation Front. The struggle in Vietnam also contributed to the emergence of a new communist movement in the country, which in turn would lead to the founding of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.

The victory in Vietnam proves that those who have a just cause and history on their side will win. Since the early 1970s, U.S. imperialism has been a state of decline, and that decline is picking up speed today.

We continue to draw inspiration from past victories and are certain that there will be many more—from Palestine to the Philippines—and yes, right here in the U.S. To quote the outstanding revolutionary Mao Zedong, “While the road ahead is tortuous, the future is bright.”

#FRSO #Statement #RevolutionaryTheory #International #Vietnam #MarxismLeninism #HoChiMinh #AntiWarMovement

In 1951 the principal leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, published Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR. While it is a rather small book, its importance in the Marxist-Leninist understanding of socialism is quite large, and it deserves to be studied carefully. The book itself is a product of the discussions and debates in preparation of the excellent textbook, Political Economy, published by the Economics Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. Preparation of this textbook under Stalin’s guidance began as early as the late 1930s and was nearing completion in 1941 before it was delayed by the outbreak of World War II. As a result, it wasn’t finally published until 1954, shortly after Stalin’s death. 

Stalin’s Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR came out of this process, specifically from a 1951 conference concerning the Political Economy textbook. The Foreword to the First Edition of the Political Economy textbook makes note of this conference. It says, “Of very great importance for the work on this textbook was the economic discussion organized in November 1951 by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In the course of this discussion, in which hundreds of Soviet economists took an active part, the draft for a textbook of political economy submitted by the authors was subjected to a thorough critical examination.”

Stalin’s Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR is a summation of his views from this conference. It was printed in the party journal, Bolshevik, just prior to the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It presented Stalin’s thoughts on the issues raised by the conference and answered questions. It deals with a number of important questions or problems dealing with the laws governing political economy, particularly as it relates to socialist construction in light of the experiences of the Soviet Union up to that point. 

Stalin’s arguments

From the very beginning, Stalin drives home that when we are talking about socialist construction, we are talking about a law-governed process. He writes, “Marxism regards laws of science – whether they be laws of natural science or laws of political economy – as the reflection of objective processes which take place independently of the will of man. Man may discover these laws, get to know them, study them, reckon with them in his activities and utilize them in the interests of society, but he cannot change or abolish them.” In other words, we can’t just do whatever we want. We are bound by the laws of social and historical development. It is important to keep this point in mind.

Stalin addresses several dogmatic misconceptions regarding socialism. First, he discusses the question of commodity production under socialism. Stalin writes, 

“Certain comrades affirm that the Party acted wrongly in preserving commodity production after it had assumed power and nationalized the means of production in our country. They consider that the Party should have banished commodity production there and then. In this connection they cite Engels, who says: ‘With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer.’ These comrades are profoundly mistaken.”

Stalin is addressing a common dogmatic mistake. He points out that “Engels has in mind countries where capitalism and the concentration of production have advanced far enough both in industry and in agriculture to permit the expropriation of all the means of production in the country and their conversion into public property.” Stalin notes that the Bolshevik Revolution took place under different conditions and thus has to face the question differently. “And so, what is to be done if not all, but only part of the means of production have been socialized, yet the conditions are favourable for the assumption of power by the proletariat – should the proletariat assume power and should commodity production be abolished immediately thereafter?” These are the different conditions in which the USSR found itself. 

Stalin makes a very important point regarding commodity production under socialism: 

“It is said that commodity production must lead, is bound to lead, to capitalism all the same, under all conditions. That is not true. Not always and not under all conditions! Commodity production must not be identified with capitalist production. They are two different things. Capitalist production is the highest form of commodity production. Commodity production leads to capitalism only if there is private owner-ship of the means of production, if labour power appears in the market as a commodity which can be bought by the capitalist and exploited in the process of production, and if, consequently, the system of exploitation of wage workers by capitalists exists in the country. Capitalist production begins when the means of production are concentrated in private hands, and when the workers are bereft of means of production and are compelled to sell their labor power as a commodity. Without this there is no such thing as capitalist production.”

Stalin notes that there are two different production sectors in the USSR, “state, or publicly-owned production, and collective-farm production, which cannot be said to be publicly owned.” He notes that the collective farms are not ready to move beyond commodity relations. “At present the collective farms will not recognize any other economic relation with the town except the commodity relation – exchange through purchase and sale,” Stalin writes. “Because of this, commodity production and trade are as much a necessity with us today as they were, say, thirty years ago, when Lenin spoke of the necessity of developing trade to the utmost.” Thus Stalin explains that this is a “special kind of commodity production” which is a “commodity production without capitalists … concerned mainly with the goods of associated socialist producers.” 

Stalin further points out that some other conceptions, drawn from the Marxist analysis of capitalism, also cannot be artificially applied to the conditions of socialism. “Talk of labor power being a commodity, and of ‘hiring’ of workers sounds rather absurd now, under our system: as though the working class, which possesses means of production, hires itself and sells its labor power to itself,” Stalin explains. He goes on to say, “It is just as strange to speak now of ‘necessary’ and ‘surplus’ labor: as though, under our conditions, the labor contributed by the workers to society for the extension of production, the promotion of education and public health, the organization of defence, etc., is not just as necessary to the working class, now in power, as the labor expended to supply the personal needs of the worker and his family.” 

Related to this is the question of the Law of Value, and whether it continues to exist under socialism. The Marxist conception of the Law of Value under capitalism can be summed up like this: The value of any commodity is equal to the socially necessary labor time required to produce that commodity. In capitalist society the Law of Value causes the price of commodities to gravitate towards their value. In this way it regulates the distribution of labor-power and the means of production within the society and motivates technical progress. Stalin notes, “Value, like the law of value, is a historical category connected with the existence of commodity production.” Nevertheless, “the law of value can be a regulator of production only under capitalism, with private ownership of the means of production, and competition, anarchy of production, and crises of overproduction.” The function of the law of value under socialism is thus restricted primarily to the circulation and exchange of commodities, namely consumer goods. 

Stalin also discusses the necessity of abolishing the contradictions between town and country, and between mental and manual labor. This means, primarily, further developing the productive forces, raising agriculture to the level of industry, and raising manual labor to the level of technical work through cultural and scientific education. These are essential tasks of the period of socialist construction. 

Stalin goes on to further address questions regarding the world market and the deepening crisis of capitalism, and the continuing inevitability of inter-imperialist wars after the peace of the second World War. 

Stalin also goes on to explain the difference between the basic laws of capitalism and socialism. He says the basic law of capitalism can be put like this: “the securing of the maximum capitalist profit through the exploitation, ruin and impoverishment of the majority of the population of the given country, through the enslavement and systematic robbery of the peoples of other countries, especially backward countries, and, lastly, through wars and militarization of the national economy, which are utilized for the obtaining of the highest profits.” In contrast, Stalin says that the basic law of socialism is “the securing of the maximum satisfaction of the constantly rising material and cultural requirements of the whole of society through the continuous expansion and perfection of socialist production on the basis of higher techniques.”

The rest of the book goes into more particular aspects of the discussion around the Soviet Political Economy textbook. This is also worth careful attention, especially where Stalin answers particular questions and misconceptions, but unfortunately it's beyond our scope to get into all of that in this short review. 

Relevance of Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR for today

Stalin’s book sums up the lessons of socialist construction in the world’s first socialist state up to that point based on the principles of Marxist-Leninist science. For that reason alone, it is invaluable. Marx and Engels, the founders of modern scientific socialism, were rightfully hesitant to try to predict what socialist society would look like, though they were able to draw upon the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871, and from the basic laws of historical materialism, some fundamental points that have held true. This is most apparent in Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program. But until the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, it wasn’t possible to concretely sum up the sustained experience of socialism in practice. Stalin’s book does just that, drawing on 34 years of socialist construction.

These lessons are important for Marxists to grasp. It is essential for those who aspire to a socialist future to understand what socialism is, and Stalin’s work lays the foundation for just such an understanding. From here, we can also look at the experiences of socialism in practice over the past 74 years since Stalin’s book was written and draw further lessons. Notably, many countries have built socialism in conditions different from those of the Soviet Union, and we can draw positive and negative lessons from their experiences. For example, we see that after the rise of Khrushchev, revisionism took hold in the USSR. The revolutionary principles of Marxism-Leninism were “revised” to accommodate a lengthy process of “economic reforms” that accelerated ideological degeneration and finally to capitalist restoration in 1991. The people’s democracies of Eastern Europe fell earlier, in 1989. But some socialist countries were able to survive and thrive. Today, the People’s Republic of China, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba and Democratic Korea still follow the socialist road, and have built socialism based on their own particular conditions. We have a lot to learn from studying their experiences as well. 

China in particular stands out. Looking at People’s China today is like looking into the future. By creatively applying Marxist-Leninist principles to Chinese conditions, the Communist Party of China has modernized their country, wiped out extreme poverty, and set out well on the way towards building prosperous and harmonious socialist society.

As General Secretary Xi Jinping said at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of China, “To uphold and develop Marxism, we must integrate it with China's specific realities. Taking Marxism as our guide means applying its worldview and methodology to solving problems in China.” Xi also says in this same report that “We have identified the principal contradiction facing Chinese society as that between unbalanced and inadequate development and the people's ever-growing needs for a better life, and we have made it clear that closing this gap should be the focus of all our initiatives.” This is perfectly in line with Stalin’s basic law of socialism discussed above, applied to the contemporary Chinese situation. 

The United States is an advanced imperialist country, the most powerful monopoly capitalist power in world history. While the U.S. is, of course, very different from Tsarist Russia or pre-revolutionary China, with its own history and problems, it too is governed by the laws of capitalist development, and likewise, the process of building socialism in this country will also proceed according to objective laws. Understanding the experiences of the socialist countries helps us to understand those laws and learn from those rich experiences. 

Revolutionaries today would do well to study Stalin’s Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR as well as the 1954 Political Economy textbook to which it contributed.

#RevolutionaryTheory #RedReviews #MarxismLeninism #Stalin

Naturally, we trace the origin of Marxism-Leninism to the theories of Karl Marx. The science of revolution bears his name, after all, together with Lenin’s. But of course we should understand that Marx wasn’t born a Marxist. This brings us to the question, which of Marx’s theories can we say are representative of Marxism? In other words, when did Marx become a Marxist, and why? By answering this, we not only proof ourselves against the dogmatist error or thinking Marxism is “whatever Marx wrote,” but we also come to a clearer understanding of what distinguishes Marxism as such.

First, let’s agree that by the time of The Communist Manifesto in 1848, we are presented with the basic ideas of Marxism. This point is not controversial. So, let’s take a look at what Marx was writing and doing before that and see if we can discern when Marxism emerged within Marx’s work. Marx’s writings in the first volume of the Marx/Engels Collected Works begin as early as 1835 when Marx was 17 years old, but nobody thinks those earliest writings are representative of Marx’s scientific socialism. 

The question arises in earnest in his early philosophical works from 1843 and 1844, from The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right to The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. These were written before Marx began his lifelong friendship and collaboration with Friedrich Engels.

The Manuscripts bear little resemblance to the later Marx. They don’t concern themselves with class struggle, revolution, or exploitation. Absent are the categories of historical materialism, such as mode of production, productive forces, ideology, and so on. Instead, the 1844 Manuscripts base their critique of capitalism on the concept of “alienation.” This is an idea drawn from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Feuerebach’s The Essence of Christianity. Hegel argues that God alienates himself in man, and Feuerbach argues that man alienates himself in God. Marx then argues that the worker is alienated in capitalism – from what the workers produce, from the act of production, from nature, and from themselves and others. The work is full of idealist philosophical jargon like “species-being” and “life-essence.” Nevertheless, the solution, Marx says, is communism. But it is an idealized and abstract communism. As Marx puts it in the 1844 Manuscripts, 

“Communism is the positive supersession of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the true appropriation of the human essence through and for man; it is the complete restoration of man to himself as a social, i.e., human, being, a restoration which has become conscious and which takes place within the entire wealth of previous periods of development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature, and between man and man, the true resolution of the conflict between existence and being, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species. It is the solution of the riddle of history and knows itself to be the solution.”

This is very abstract! There’s no real program, no way to get there, beyond the call for the reclamation of the human essence. Marx has not yet made the leap from “interpreting the world” to changing it. 

Meanwhile, Engels, also prior to his collaboration with Marx, wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England, which was published in 1845. This book, examining in meticulous detail the facts of working class life at the heart of the industrial revolution, is entirely concrete, and it had a tremendous impact on Marx, who read it later in 1844 prior to its publication. After reading Engels’s book, Marx abandoned his The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts altogether.

Shortly after that, Marx and Engels began their partnership in Paris to work on the book The Holy Family. In 1845 Karl Marx was expelled from France and moved to Brussels, Belgium.

While in Brussels, he produced, together with Engels, one of the most important works in the history of the international communist movement, The German Ideology, written from 1845 to 1846. This was followed not long after by Marx’s book The Poverty of Philosophy. These texts, The Holy Family, The German Ideology, and The Poverty of Philosophy, play an important role for Marx and Engels, in that their goal is to challenge the Young Hegelians, the so-called “True Socialists,” and Proudhon and his followers. This served to clear the way, ideologically, for Marxism to take its place in the workers’ movement. By 1846 Marx and Engels formed the Communist Correspondence Committee, with the goal of organizing a proletarian socialist party. The Committee was a precursor of the Communist League, for which the Manifesto was written on the eve of the Revolutions of 1848.

In all of this work prior to 1848 The German Ideology stands out. Interestingly, it was never published during Marx’s lifetime. And yet, today, it is widely recognized as the principal text in which Marx and Engels developed historical materialism. It wasn’t published until 1932 by the Marx-Engels-Lenin institute in the Soviet Union. Understanding the role The German Ideology played in the development of Marx’s thought is crucial. We can see a number of important differences between Marx’s thought prior to his partnership with Engels and after. 

Prior to 1845, Marx was himself a Young Hegelian. The Young Hegelians were a group of left-leaning philosophers strongly influenced by G.W.F. Hegel and his student, Ludwig Feuerbach. The ideas of the Young Hegelians were still thoroughly liberal and idealist. After reading The Condition of the Working Class in England and beginning his work with Engels, Marx’s entire outlook shifted profoundly to emphasize class struggle at its very core. Almost immediately, his focus in 1845 became the critique of idealist and metaphysical philosophical trends in the socialist movement – trends to which Marx himself was previously sympathetic. 

In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels write that the Young Hegelians are “sheep, who take themselves and are taken for wolves,” and “their bleating merely imitates in a philosophic form the conceptions of the German middle class.” 

“Since the Young Hegelians consider conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact all the products of consciousness, to which they attribute an independent existence, as the real chains of men,” write Marx and Engels “… it is evident that the Young Hegelians have to fight only against these illusions of consciousness.” How does Marx, who until only recently considered himself a Young Hegelian, break from this? He writes that “It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers to inquire into the connection of German philosophy with German reality, the relation of their criticism to their own material surroundings.” So, in The German Ideology, Marx and Engels do exactly that. They then set out to outline their materialist conception of history, how ideas arise from real material processes, and how class struggle functions as the motor of social change. 

Thus Marx broke firmly with the Young Hegelians and established the theory of historical materialism. Furthermore, he came to see historical change as a law-governed process that could be understood scientifically. The French Marxist-Leninist philosopher, Louis Althusser, beginning in the early 1960s, makes the point that The German Ideology represents the key work of what he refers to as Marx’s “epistemological break.” 

As Althusser puts it in For Marx, “There is an unequivocal ‘epistemological break’ in Marx’s work which does in fact occur at the point where Marx himself locates it, in the book, unpublished in his lifetime, which is a critique of his erstwhile philosophical (ideological) conscience: The German Ideology.” Althusser goes on to say that “This ‘epistemological break’ divides Marx’s thought into two long essential periods: the ‘ideological’ period before, and the scientific period after, the break in 1845.” In other words, this is the point where Marx’s epistemology matures.

Epistemology in philosophy refers to how we know what we know. In this way, it was a conscious and intentional break from bourgeois ideology, which had until then permeated Marx’s thinking. As Althusser later puts it in his 1974 book, Essays in Self-Criticism, “Theoretically, he wrote these manuscripts on the basis of petty-bourgeois philosophical positions, making the impossible political gamble of introducing Hegel into Feuerbach, so as to be able to speak of labor in alienation, and of History in Man.” 

On the other side of this break, we have the development of dialectical and historical materialism, the critique of political economy, and the elaboration of scientific socialism. Even after the break, “long years of positive study and elaboration were necessary before Marx could produce, fashion and establish a conceptual terminology and systematics that were adequate to his revolutionary theoretical project,” Althusser explains. In other words, after the break from bourgeois ideology, Marxism didn’t immediately burst upon the scene complete but was elaborated and developed over a period of time. 

To think of this break as a purely theoretical exercise, producing immediate theoretical results, would itself be idealism. The break was driven by the practical demands of the growing revolutionary movement. As Engels says in his book Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, “the Revolution of 1848 thrust the whole of philosophy aside as unceremoniously as Feuerbach had thrust aside Hegel. And in the process, Feuerbach himself was also pushed into the background.” By philosophy here, Engels means idealist philosophy. In any case, the most important takeaway here is that Marx’s works prior 1845 are working within the framework of bourgeois ideology, not Marxism. 

The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 were translated into English for the first time in 1959 and immediately caused quite a stir among the revisionists as well as among academic “Marxists” in the West. The timing here is significant. These two groups, the revisionists and their academic fellow-travelers, were interested in rebranding socialism as a kind of “humanism” in the wake of Khrushchev’s “destalinization.”

At the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, Khrushchev set out to “revise” Marxism, stripping away its revolutionary essence and its fundamentally proletarian class character. With the notable exception of Albania and China, most parties followed along. This revisionist rebranding of socialism as humanism would later find expression in the 1989 counter-revolutions in Eastern Europe. There, as history has shown, the slogan “socialism with a human face” truly meant bourgeois liberalization and the embrace of individualism. It is to Althusser’s credit that he immediately saw this trend for what it was and struggled against it. In this context, there is a very clear reason that these revisionists and academics were so taken with the work of the early Marx: it isn’t Marxist. 

As Marxist-Leninists today, this helps us clarify a few essential points. First, Marxism isn’t just whatever Marx said. That’s dogmatism. And that kind of dogmatism can also be put into the service of Marxism’s enemies. On the contrary, Marxism is the proletarian revolutionary science of social change, founded on a fundamental break from bourgeois ideology, idealism, and metaphysical thinking of all sorts. Marx’s ideas developed and changed over the course of his career. The important thing is to master Marxism-Leninism as a science. 

Second, Marxism's purpose is not simply to understand the world, but to change it. Theory and practice are inextricably linked. Revolutionary practice depends on Marxism to be successful, and Marxism, as a science, is enriched and developed through practice. It was through building the socialist movement, organizing the Communist Correspondence Committee and the Communist League, and then through participating in the upheavals of the 1848 revolutions, that Marxism grew out of abstraction to an engagement with the real world in concrete terms. As revolutionaries today, always faced with the modern challenges of dogmatism, revisionism, and all kinds of bourgeois academic ideas masquerading as some kind of Marxism, these lessons are as important as ever. 

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

#RevolutionaryTheory #Marx #MarxismLeninism

In 1942, Mao Zedong and the Communist Party of China launched a rectification movement in the Yan’an base area during the difficult years of the Second United Front. This was in the middle of the War of Resistance Against Japan. During this time, the civil war between the Communist Party of China and the reactionary Kuomintang was put on hold in order to unite and fight back against the invasion of Japanese fascism.

What was the Yan’an Rectification Movement? Essentially it was a movement to educate the party in Marxism-Leninism. It was part of a longer process of correcting major errors which truly began at the Zunyi Conference in 1935 and culminated in the Seventh National Congress of the CPC in 1945. As explained in the book A Concise History of the Communist Party of China, “After the Zunyi Meeting, the Party line had developed along a correct Marxist path. However, the subjectivism and dogmatism that had so seriously damaged the Party’s cause needed to be fully addressed from an ideological standpoint.” The Zunyi Conference in 1935 had repudiated major errors in leadership, consolidating the party’s leading core around Mao Zedong. But the problems in the center up to that point caused ripples throughout the party as a whole that had to be addressed. The Yan’an Rectification Movement set out to do exactly that.

In A History of the Modern Chinese Revolution, Ho Kan-chih explains the particular ideological context of the Yan’an Rectification Movement as follows:

“As the Party was working in the rural areas, it could not help being constantly affected by the broad mass of petty bourgeoisie which surrounded it. The bourgeoisie also tried every means to influence the Party. After the outbreak of the anti-Japanese war, a large number of progressives of peasant or urban petty-bourgeois origin joined the Party. … It was also inevitable that those members of petty-bourgeois origin who had not yet been sufficiently steeled ideologically and politically should attempt in various ways to influence the Party with their ideology and working style, and, in some cases, even to 'reform' the Party according to petty-bourgeois ideology and ways of thinking. This had led to a contradiction within the Party between proletarian and non-proletarian ideologies, especially between proletarian and petty-bourgeois ideologies. Confronted with this grave problem within its own ranks, the Party decided to take up the urgent task of educating these members in Marxism-Leninism.”

Ho goes on to explain, “The Rectification Campaign was mainly directed against tendencies towards subjectivism in the approach to study, towards sectarianism in the style of Party work and towards their form of expression – stereotyped Party jargon in literary work.” To this end, Mao Zedong wrote three short texts dealing with each of these in turn. These three essays formed the basis of the rectification movement, attacking petty-bourgeois ideology and its manifestations: “Reform Our Study.” “Rectify the Party’s Style of Work,” and “Oppose Stereotyped Party Writing.”

“Reform Our Study”

In “Reform Our Study,” Mao Zedong takes aim at subjectivist attitudes towards study, especially the problems of dogmatism and empiricism. Mao highlights three errors in particular: “neglect of the study of current conditions, neglect of the study of history and neglect of the application of Marxism-Leninism.”

Fundamentally, these problems originate from studying Marxism in the abstract, rather than studying theory in connection to practice, as it relates to China's concrete conditions and the specific tasks of the Chinese revolution. Mao explains this very clearly, saying,

“Although we are studying Marxism, the way many of our people study it runs directly counter to Marxism. That is to say, they violate the fundamental principle earnestly enjoined on us by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, the unity of theory and practice. Having violated this principle, they invent an opposite principle of their own, the separation of theory from practice. In the schools and in the education of cadres at work, teachers of philosophy do not guide students to study the logic of the Chinese revolution; teachers of economics do not guide them to study the characteristics of the Chinese economy; teachers of political science do not guide them to study the tactics of the Chinese revolution; teachers of military science do not guide them to study the strategy and tactics adapted to China's special features; and so on and so forth.”

To get at the heart of this, Mao contrasts the subjectivist attitude towards study to the Marxist-Leninist attitude. He writes,

“Many of our people … are doing research work but have no interest in studying either the China of today or the China of yesterday and confine their interest to the study of empty ‘theories’ divorced from reality. Many others are doing practical work, but they too pay no attention to the study of objective conditions, often rely on sheer enthusiasm and substitute their personal feelings for policy. Both kinds of people, relying on the subjective, ignore the existence of objective realities.”

Contrary to this is the Marxist-Leninist attitude towards study:

“With this attitude, one studies the theory of Marxism-Leninism with a purpose, that is, to integrate Marxist-Leninist theory with the actual movement of the Chinese revolution and to seek from this theory the stand, viewpoint and method with which to solve the theoretical and tactical problems of the Chinese revolution. Such an attitude is one of shooting the arrow at the target. The ‘target’ is the Chinese revolution, the ‘arrow’ is Marxism-Leninism. … To take such an attitude is to seek truth from facts.”

Based on this, Mao makes three proposals towards the rectification of the problem of subjectivism in study. First, he says we should make “a systematic and thorough study of the situation around us.” Second, he proposes a thorough and systematic study of the history of China “in the several fields of economic history, political history, military history and cultural history.” And third, he proposes that the whole Party study the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), Short Course. Mao correctly states that this book “is the best synthesis and summing-up of the world communist movement of the past hundred years, a model of the integration of theory and practice…”

“Rectify the Party’s Style of Work”

In “Rectify the Party’s Style of Work” Mao continues from where he left off in “Reform Our Study.” First, he tackles the problem of the relationship between practical work and theoretical work.

“We want theorists who can, in accordance with the Marxist-Leninist stand, viewpoint and method, correctly interpret the practical problems arising in the course of history and revolution and give scientific explanations and theoretical elucidations of China's economic, political, military, cultural and other problems. Such are the theorists we want. To be a theorist of this kind, a person must have a true grasp of the essence of Marxism-Leninism, of the Marxist-Leninist stand, viewpoint and method and of the theories of Lenin and Stalin on the colonial revolution and the Chinese revolution, and he must be able to apply them in a penetrating and scientific analysis of China's practical problems and discover the laws of development of these problems. Such are the theorists we really need.”

In other words, theoretical work must not be abstract but must be aimed at the needs of the Chinese revolution. “It is necessary to master Marxist theory and apply it,” Mao says, “master it for the sole purpose of applying it.”

Mao holds up Karl Marx himself as an example of the kind of theorists we need. He says, “Marx undertook detailed investigations and studies in the course of practical struggles, formed generalizations and then verified his conclusions by testing them in practical struggles – this is what we call theoretical work.”

Mao makes an important point. Both dogmatism and empiricism are subjectivist errors that misunderstand the dialectical relationship between theory and practice, and he says that both of these must be corrected.

“Those with book learning must develop in the direction of practice; it is only in this way that they will stop being content with books and avoid committing dogmatist errors. Those experienced in work must take up the study of theory and must read seriously; only then will they be able to systematize and synthesize their experience and raise it to the level of theory, only then will they not mistake their partial experience for universal truth and not commit empiricist errors.”

A big part of this essay deals with the problem of sectarianism. Mao breaks down several remnants of sectarianism within the party. Mao highlights a number of expressions of sectarianism within the Party: “relations between the part and the whole, relations between the individual and the Party, relations between outside and local cadres, relations between army cadres and other cadres working in the locality, relations between this and that army unit, between this and that locality, between this and that department and relations between old and new cadres.” In all of these instances, Mao’s emphasis is on putting the interests of the party and the revolution first.

There is also the problem of sectarianism in the party’s external relations. Mao writes “we cannot defeat the enemy by merely uniting the comrades throughout the Party, we can defeat the enemy only by uniting the people throughout the country.” In other words, because the Communist Party is based upon a very high degree of organizational discipline and political unity, it must be a minority in relation to the broad revolutionary masses of the people. For that reason, it is necessary for the party to unite everyone who can be united in order to defeat the class enemy.

“Oppose Stereotyped Party Writing”

At the end of “Rectify the Party’s Style of Work” Mao promises to deal with the problem of stereotyped party writing later. In “Oppose Stereotyped Party Writing,” Mao delivers on this promise. “Stereotyped Party Writing” means something specific. The term is referring to a formal, bureaucratic writing style popular with Chinese intellectuals at the time. We might compare it to a kind of overly academic style today, filled with technical jargon and a web of subheadings, long-winded, opaque, dry, and lifeless.

Instead, Mao explains that while we should explain things thoroughly and completely, we should do so simply and clearly, concisely, and in terms that are intelligible and engaging to our audience. Concerning composing leaflets and doing broad propaganda work aimed at the masses, Mao quotes Georgi Dimitrov (then the head of the Communist International) on this issue: “When writing or speaking always have in mind the rank-and-file worker who must understand you, must believe in your appeal and be ready to follow you!”

According to the book A Concise History of the Communist Party of China, “Party members followed the rectification approach of first carefully studying the relevant documents and carrying out criticism and self-criticism.” The book goes on to say,

“The rectification movement was a thoroughgoing Marxist education movement that produced tremendous results. The Movement correctly combined Marxism-Leninism with the Chinese reality, and awakened the entire Party to the Marxist ideological line of seeking truth from facts. The movement initiated large-scale discussions throughout the Party about how to regard the tenets of Marxism in light of reality, how to combine the basic tenets of Marxism with the realities of the Chinese revolution, and what attitude to adopt toward some of the major questions in the Party’s history.”

That is how the CPC sums up the lessons of the Yan’an Rectification Movement today, and its lessons are valuable for us as well.

Why should we study Mao’s writings from the Yan’an Rectification Movement today?

These days more and more people are being won over to the idea that capitalism is a failed system, and more and more people are coming to the conclusion that socialism and Marxism provide the answers to the problems posed by the continuing decline of the imperialist system.

But at the same time, just as in China at the time of the Yan’an Rectification Movement, many of these people are coming to Marxism from a petty bourgeois class background, or without a clear view on how to study. They don’t understand the absolute necessity of studying Marxism concretely as it relates to real practice in the real world. So instead, they watch streamers and videos, listen to podcasts, or read books and articles from academics that merely talk about Marxist ideas abstractly. They get their education in Marxism from people with no practical experience in organizing the masses to confront the class enemy. They learn to quote Marx and Lenin, but they don’t learn to apply the methodology of Marx and Lenin to the concrete problems that face us here and now.

These modern subjectivists don’t aim the arrow of Marxism-Leninism at the target of revolution in the United States, or use Marxism to sum up real practical experiences in organizing. The purpose of studying Marxism-Leninism is to master it and apply it. Instead, some think that before they can engage in practical work, they must first master theory, failing to understand that theory cannot be mastered in isolation from practice. Meanwhile, some others go on doing practical work in isolation from theory, thinking that theory is for someone else to deal with. Still theory and practice are isolated from one another. They make the same mistake from the other side. As a consequence, people substitute petty bourgeois radicalism or pragmatism for Marxism.

Because of this wrongheaded subjectivist approach to theory, people are “shooting blindly” or “shooting at random” when it comes to practical work, instead of “aiming the arrow at the target.”

The success of the Yan’an Rectification Movement also speaks for itself. Volume 1 of An Ideological History of the Communist Party of China says, “The years between the Zunyi Conference in 1935 to the Seventh National Congress of the CPC in 1945 were an important period in which the Party changed from a path of several setbacks to a series of continuous victories, and the whole process of organization saw rapid growth.”

We can learn a lot from the lessons of the Yan’an Rectification Movement, but we must think about how these lessons apply to our practical work in the U.S. today. Like the CPC, we too should understand the reality of our concrete conditions here in the U.S. – “seeking truth from facts.” We should study the history of the United States from the perspective of Marxism-Leninism. The Political Program of the FRSO addresses U.S. history, but we can still go deeper. For example, we can read the works of U.S. Marxist-Leninists like William Z. Foster’s Outline Political History of the Americas and The History of the Communist Party of the United States, Harry Haywood’s Black Bolshevik, and Frank Chapman’s Marxist-Leninist Perspectives on Black Liberation and Socialism, among others. And, last but not least, we should “aim the arrow at the target” by applying Marxist-Leninist theory to the concrete tasks of revolutionary organizing here and now.

Mao once famously said that if you want to know the taste of pear you have to change the pear by eating it. This is also true of theory. If you want to truly understand dialectical and historical materialism, you have to apply them to the problems of practical mass struggles.

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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Lenin’s important work, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, is a pamphlet written in 1918, responding to a pamphlet by the principal leader of the Second International, Karl Kautsky, entitled The Dictatorship of the Proletariat. 

The Great October Revolution of 1917 had won, and at the time of Lenin’s writing in October and November of 1918, socialism was just beginning to be built in the former Russian empire. The Second International had already split over how to relate to the First World War.

Karl Kautsky was a major figure at the time, though now he is largely remembered through the lens of Lenin’s polemics against him. He had been an associate of Friedrich Engels and had even edited Marx’s Theories of Surplus-Value. He was widely regarded within the Second International as the leading expert on so-called “Orthodox Marxism” after the death of Engels, to the point that some even called him “the Pope of Marxism.” But if the imperialist world war didn’t do enough to reveal Kautsky’s true opportunist colors, the Bolshevik Revolution certainly did. Only one year into the first sustained attempt at building socialism anywhere on Earth, and Kautsky came out strongly opposed to it. 

A series of polemics were exchanged between Kautsky and the Bolsheviks, beginning with Kautsky’s pamphlet against the dictatorship of the proletariat and Lenin’s response. The gist of Kautsky’s argument was to attempt to distort Marxism in favor of a theory of peaceful transition to socialism, against smashing the bourgeois state machinery, and against the very notion of the class nature of the state. It was an attempted broadside against the Bolshevik Revolution. On Kautsky’s side, these polemics would go on to help define the revisionist and social democratic theory of peaceful transition to socialism. And like his extraordinary book The State and Revolution, Lenin’s The Proletarian Revolution and Renegade Kautsky is not only a study of the Marxist theory of the state, but also an important Marxist-Leninist refutation of social democratic reformism. 

Having now set the stage, let’s look at the argument that Lenin presents in his response to Kautsky. It must be said that The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky gives us Lenin at his most polemical. Lenin’s wit is on full display as he unrelentingly lambasts Kautsky. It is a very entertaining read. It is a level of polemical ferocity that one doesn’t often see from Lenin, reserved only for those whom he has determined are beyond help. 

Lenin’s argument

Lenin begins by quoting Kautsky, laying out the crux of his position. “Kautsky formulates the question as follows: ‘The contrast between the two socialist trends’ (i.e., the Bolsheviks and non-Bolsheviks) ‘is the contrast between two radically different methods: the dictatorial and the democratic.’” 

Lenin immediately points out that Kautsky is obscuring the class nature of the state, by “speaking of democracy in general, and not of bourgeois democracy.” Kautsky further tries to dismiss Marx’s own writings on the dictatorship of the proletariat, saying that the theory of dictatorship of the proletariat “rests upon a single word of Karl Marx’s.”

Marx himself explains that “Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Lenin reminds us that, in fact, Marx’s theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat is more than a “single word” written in passing, presumably of no importance. He writes 

“First of all, to call this classical reasoning of Marx’s, which sums up the whole of his revolutionary teaching, ‘a single word’ and even ‘a little word,’ is an insult to and complete renunciation of Marxism. It must not be forgotten that Kautsky knows Marx almost by heart, and, judging by all he has written, he has in his desk, or in his head, a number of pigeon-holes in which all that was ever written by Marx is most carefully filed so as to be ready at hand for quotation. Kautsky must know that both Marx and Engels, in their letters as well as in their published works, repeatedly spoke about the dictatorship of the proletariat, before and especially after the Paris Commune. Kautsky must know that the formula ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is merely a more historically concrete and scientifically exact formulation of the proletariat’s task of ‘smashing’ the bourgeois state machine, about which both Marx and Engels, in summing up the experience of the Revolution of 1848, and, still more so, of 1871, spoke for forty years, between 1852 and 1891.”

Kautsky attempts to obscure the issue, insisting that “dictatorship means the abolition of democracy,” and that it means “the undivided rule of a single person, unrestricted by laws.” Lenin responds by saying “It is natural for a liberal to speak of ‘democracy’ in general; but a Marxist will never forget to ask: ‘for what class?’” Lenin is quick to point out that the dictatorship of the proletariat is

“not the dictatorship of a single individual, but of a class.” And he goes to explain that “To transform Kautsky’s liberal and false assertion into a Marxist and true one, one must say: dictatorship does not necessarily mean the abolition of democracy for the class that exercises the dictatorship over other classes; but it does mean the abolition (or very material restriction, which is also a form of abolition) of democracy for the class over which, or against which, the dictatorship is exercised.”

In other words, capitalist democracy doesn't exist over and above the class struggle. It is bourgeois dictatorship over the working class. Likewise, the dictatorship of the proletariat is the dictatorship of one class over another, of the working class over its former explorers and oppressors, the capitalist class. It smashes the capitalist state machinery and replaces it with working class state power in the service of socialism. 

In his defense of peaceful transition to socialism, Kautsky even goes so far as to claim the Paris Commune of 1871 as a victory for “pure democracy.” Lenin points out that the Paris Commune “waged war against Versailles as the workers’ government of France against the bourgeois government.” Lenin then goes on to quote Engels: 

“Have these gentlemen” (the anti-authoritarians) “ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is an act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon—all of which are highly authoritarian means. And the victorious party must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the Paris Commune have lasted more than a day if it had not used the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie? Cannot we, on the contrary, blame it for having made too little use of that authority?”

On the question of bourgeois and proletarian democracy, Lenin writes. “If we are not to mock at common sense and history, it is obvious that we cannot speak of ‘pure democracy’ as long as different classes exist; we can only speak of class democracy.” By obscuring the class nature of democracy in favor “democracy in general” Kautsky (and his social democratic followers) fail to see, as Lenin puts it, that “Proletarian democracy is a million times more democratic than any bourgeois democracy; Soviet power is a million times more democratic than the most democratic bourgeois republic.”

In other words, proletarian democracy is a democracy of a new type. Lenin explains concretely how this is so: 

“The old bourgeois apparatus—the bureaucracy, the privileges of wealth, of bourgeois education, of social connections, etc. (these real privileges are the more varied the more highly bourgeois democracy is developed)—all this disappears under the Soviet form of organisation. Freedom of the press ceases to be hypocrisy, because the printing-plants and stocks of paper are taken away from the bourgeoisie. The same thing applies to the best buildings, the palaces, the mansions and manor houses. Soviet power took thousands upon thousands of these best buildings from the exploiters at one stroke, and in this way made the right of assembly—without which democracy is a fraud—a million times more democratic for the people. Indirect elections to non-local Soviets make it easier to hold congresses of Soviets, they make the entire apparatus less costly, more flexible, more accessible to the workers and peasants at a time when life is seething and it is necessary to be able very quickly to recall one’s local deputy or to delegate him to a general congress of Soviets.”

When Kautsky objects, saying “why do we need dictatorship when we have a majority?” Lenin responds with Marx’s answer: “to break down the resistance of the bourgeoisie … to inspire the reactionaries with fear … to maintain the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie … that the proletariat may forcibly hold down its adversaries.” This is necessary because while “the exploiters can be defeated at one stroke in the event of a successful uprising at the center, or of a revolt in the army,” Lenin writes, “but except in very rare and special cases, the exploiters cannot be destroyed at one stroke.” He goes on to explain that “If the exploiters are defeated in one country only – and this, of course, is typical, since a simultaneous revolution in a number of countries is a rare exception – they still remain stronger than the exploited, for the international connections of the exploiters are enormous.” Furthermore, he points out that “The transition from capitalism to communism takes an entire historical epoch. Until this epoch is over, the exploiters inevitably cherish the hope of restoration, and this hope turns into attempts at restoration.” History has proven Lenin correct on each of these points.

Lenin goes on to defend particular elements of Soviet democracy from Kautsky’s attacks. While space prevents us from outlining the entirety of that argument here, we’ve covered many of the most important theoretical parts of the pamphlet and would encourage carefully reading the entire work. 

The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky today

The lessons of Lenin’s polemic with Kautsky over the dictatorship of the proletariat are important and deserve careful attention. The social democrats, revisionists, petty bourgeois radicals, and ordinary bourgeois liberals are united in the defense of democracy in the abstract and reject the necessity of proletarian dictatorship. While many can see exploitation and oppression under capitalism for what it is, reformists encourage the belief that “democracy” can permanently transform societies social relations – that we can vote our way to socialism. But, as Lenin explains and as history demonstrates, this simply isn’t the case. 

Further, the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat is one of the main points of attack by opponents of Marxism on the historical experience of the Soviet Union and on the socialist countries today, who rely upon proletarian dictatorship in defense of socialism against both imperialist intervention and capitalist restoration, while at the same time expanding a real working class democracy. 

The task that stands before us is to build a revolutionary communist party that is capable of taking power away from the capitalist class of exploiters and oppressors and putting it into the hands of the working class and its allies. The accelerating decline of monopoly capitalism demands that we do this, for the sake of building a more just socialist society – a society built upon the foundation of proletarian democracy and protected by proletarian dictatorship.

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The purpose of Marxist analysis is so that we can know how to make revolution, so that we understand the terrain of struggle, formulate correct strategy and tactics, and identify our friends and enemies. We must understand the contradictions at work in society and unite all who can be united if we want to win. So, we need to be very careful and precise in that analysis.

It is also important to challenge and correct theoretical errors that can lead us in the wrong direction. There’s a tendency from some on the left to argue that the United States should be understood today as a settler-colonial state. Such a position may seem at first glance to be obvious; many accept this position without careful consideration, simply taking its correctness as given. By automatically accepting the correctness of this position, these perhaps well-meaning revolutionaries fail to understand the ways in which this theory deviates from Marxism, and fail to consider its deeper implications for revolutionary strategy.

Overall, this is a relatively amorphous tendency, with a lot of varying positions that don’t always agree on the particulars. But, so far as there is one, the basic argument from the proponents of this theory goes something like this: The United States remains today a settler-colonial state. People of European descent, regardless of their actual class position, are settlers, and are seen as continuing to benefit from and perpetuate a colonial system. In other words, the people of the United States are divided into two camps, with the colonized in one camp, and the settlers in the other. Some even go so far as to say that this makes up the principal contradiction in the U.S. This is furthermore viewed as a fundamentally antagonistic contradiction.

This ought to be contrasted with the Marxist-Leninist view, which sees the United States as an advanced imperialist country. Again, we see a division of U.S. society into two camps. On the one hand there is the camp of the capitalists, and on the other the oppressed and exploited masses of workers and oppressed nationalities. The principal contradiction is therefore between the capitalist class on the one hand, and the multinational working class and its allies on the other, particularly the oppressed nations. Historical development is a law governed process, and it is a law of capitalist development that this basic class struggle is the fundamental contradiction inherent to capitalist society.

What’s at stake in the debate over settler-colonialism in the United States?

To put it as plainly as possible, if the proponents of the U.S. settler-colonialism theory are correct, then there is no basis whatsoever upon which to build a multinational working class communist party in this country. Indeed, such a view sees the “settler working class” as instruments of colonialism, hostile to the interests of the colonized people, rather than viewing all working and oppressed people as natural allies in the struggle against imperialism, our mutual oppressor.

Obviously, this is a very important strategic point, and it cannot go unaddressed. We should examine where this theory comes from and look at how it can be answered by Marxist-Leninist science.

Some points of historical development

We can all agree that the United States began as a settler-colonial project, founded on the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans. We can furthermore agree that the legacy of this period of U.S. history persists. National oppression and the oppression of indigenous people continues.

However, some people believe it's as simple as “once a settler-colony, always a settler-colony.” This is metaphysical thinking. While it is true that the legacy of settler-colonialism in the United States certainly persists, the systems of oppression have not remained static. Dialectical materialism understands that the nature of a thing is defined by the contradictions inherent to it. Things aren’t fixed, but always changing and developing according to these contradictions. This is true of capitalism in the U.S. as it has developed as well. At different periods in U.S. history, different contradictions have taken the principal, determining role. As contradictions shift, so too does the terrain of struggle.

U.S. settler-colonialism is a particular social formation with a particular set of contradictions at the heart of it. Historically it is a transitionary period in the early development of the capitalist mode of production. It is characterized by the dominant role played by the contradiction between settlers on the one hand and colonized people on the other. This contradiction is the main thing shaping the trajectory of the capitalist mode of production in the period of “primitive accumulation” during its nascent development. In this way, settler-colonialism fueled the rapid growth of the capitalist mode of production in the early United States.

Those who came to the American colonies, of course, were not an undifferentiated, classless mass. As Philip S. Foner notes in the first volume of his History of the Labor Movement in the United States, “Probably half the immigrants to Colonial America were indentured servants. By 1770 a quarter of a million had entered America, of whom more than a hundred thousand were victims of kidnaping or prisoners sentenced to service.” This is, of course, in addition to “five hundred thousand Negro slaves, approximately 20 per cent of the colonial population.”

As the capitalist mode of production developed, this transitional settler-colonial period had to give way to mature competitive capitalism, bringing forth new contradictions. These contradictions changed and developed enough that the United States underwent two bourgeois revolutions, the War of Independence which overthrew the British colonial system and the Civil War, which overthrew the slave system of the Southern planter class.

As the book An Economic History of the Major Capitalist Countries by Kang Fan puts it, “American victory in the war [of Independence] and the subsequent establishment of the United States overthrew England's colonial rule in North America. Domestically, it swept aside many feudal remnants, and it opened the road for the development of capitalism.” Lenin called the War of Independence “one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few,” and after that war the U.S. was no longer a colony.

Industrialization brought about heightened contradictions between labor and capital. After the intensified industrial buildup of the Civil War, monopoly capitalism emerged in the United States out of the merger of banking capital with industrial capital into finance capital, bringing the capitalist mode of production into its most fully developed and final stage. The rise of monopoly capitalism brought about the end of competitive capitalism.

In a relatively short span of time, the U.S. went from being a colony to an imperialist power. The old colonial system based on the export of commodities was transformed into an imperialist system based on the export of capital. The financial oligarchy which came to dominate the U.S. sought to solve its growing crises through the oppression of whole nations and peoples, at home and abroad, in order to extract super-profits to prop up its rotten system. The multinational working class and the liberation movements of oppressed nationalities found themselves with a common enemy – the monopoly capitalist class. Thus, a united front against monopoly capitalism, based on the strategic alliance of the multinational working class and the oppressed nations, became both possible and necessary.

The national question in the U.S.

When we talk about oppressed nations in the United States, we have to be very clear. The United States is the greatest imperialist power in the world. It isn’t a colony. Like Tsarist Russia prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, it is a “prison house of nations.”

Within the borders of the U.S. there are oppressed nations. What is an oppressed nation? As Stalin defines it in Marxism and the National Question, “A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.” These oppressed nations are nations without states. They don’t govern themselves. The oppressed nations in the U.S. are the African American nation, with its homeland in the Black Belt South, the Chicano nation in the Southwest, and the Hawaiian nation. This national oppression exists to allow the U.S. monopoly capitalist class to draw super-profits from a higher rate of exploitation of the oppressed nationalities. This national oppression is the material basis of racist ideas, and uprooting national oppression is therefore the key to demolishing racist and white chauvinist thinking.

To be perfectly clear, it is important to note that oppressed nations are not the same thing as colonies. The correct demand for a colony is immediate independence. This is the demand we must put forward regarding Puerto Rico and other colonies, where basic democratic rights are denied and which are merely objects of plunder. The demand that must be raised regarding an oppressed nation, on the other hand, is self-determination. This is a very important distinction.

Self-determination is a democratic demand. It means that the oppressed nation ought to democratically determine its own destiny. Historically imposed obstacles to genuine political power must be systematically dismantled. And most importantly, self-determination means the right to separate in its historically constituted national territory and govern itself however it sees fit. But self-determination isn’t forced separation, just as the right to divorce isn’t forced separation. Indeed, the purpose is to create the basis for unity on a truly equal footing. Thus, self-determination is the demand of the oppressed nations in the U.S.

The demands of indigenous peoples deserve special consideration and are distinct: full sovereignty and national development of indigenous peoples, and the protection of their cultures, languages and traditions.

Finally, it must be noted that in the era of imperialism, the national question is bound up with proletarian socialist revolution. No longer is the bourgeoisie a revolutionary class. Imperialism closes off the path of independent capitalist development for the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations. The national liberation movements therefore must ally themselves with the working class struggle, with an orientation towards socialism – or find themselves diverted into neocolonialism. In the U.S. this means that the strategic alliance between the multinational working class and the liberation movements of the oppressed nationalities is central to the united front against monopoly capitalism.

The multinational working class

For any of this to be any more than wishful thinking, a real revolutionary movement is necessary. For such a movement to be successful in the United States, such as it really is, it must have working class leadership, and the working class in the U.S. is fundamentally multinational in character.

What does this mean? The U.S. isn’t an apartheid system, like “Israel” or “Rhodesia” for example. The horrific system of Jim Crow segregation that followed the betrayal of Reconstruction was itself uprooted by the Black liberation movement. While national oppression remains, de jure segregation no longer exists. The working class, as a result of its historical development, is therefore multinational in character.

This is because workers of all nationalities, both oppressed nationality workers and white workers, toil shoulder to shoulder on assembly lines and shop floors, in kitchens, warehouses and offices, from coast to coast. Even as national oppression puts greater pressure on oppressed nationality workers, they are still forged into one multinational working class together with their white siblings as they suffer exploitation together under the same bosses.

This is also true within the territories of the oppressed nations, though there tend to be greater numbers of oppressed nationality workers proportional to white workers in those places as a simple demographic fact. The higher rate of exploitation in the oppressed nations drives down living standards for the entire multinational working class.

Mao Zedong famously said, “In the final analysis, national struggle is a matter of class struggle. Among the whites in the United States, it is only the reactionary ruling circles that oppress the black people.” Mao was explaining that while many white workers may have racist and white chauvinist ideas that have to be overcome, those ideas are the ideology of the class enemy. It is that class enemy, the capitalists, who wield the instruments of oppression against the oppressed nationalities. The ruling class, not white workers, are the bosses and the landlords. The ruling class are the ones who control the police and the courts. It is the monopoly capitalist class who reap the super-profits from national oppression.

Sources of the error

The facts of the matter are clear. Where then, does the confusion on this question come from? There are two main ideological factors leading to the development of the theory of U.S. settler-colonialism. These are, first of all, petty bourgeois radicalism, and second, a desire to “copy and paste” from the Palestinian experience.

First let’s talk about petty bourgeois radicalism. As Mao once put it, “In class society, everyone lives as a member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of a class.” So what is the material basis of this theory about settler-colonialism in the U.S.? Petty bourgeois radicalism is characterized, as Lenin puts it, by “the instability of such revolutionism, its barrenness, and its tendency to turn rapidly into submission, apathy, phantasms, and even a frenzied infatuation with one bourgeois fad or another.” The petty bourgeoisie, the class of small business owners or petty capitalists, is under immense pressure. They are under pressure from the working class on the one hand, whom they exploit generally, and the monopoly capitalists on the other hand, with whom they cannot compete. Because they are driven to ruin by the monopoly capitalists, and ultimately have no future as a class, they sometimes take up radical, even revolutionary, ideas, however inconsistently. These petty bourgeois radicals pride themselves on taking the most outwardly revolutionary position, regardless of whether or not it holds up to scientific analysis. Lenin writes that the petty bourgeois radical “easily goes to revolutionary extremes, but is incapable of perseverance, organization, discipline and steadfastness.” They are not members of the working class and do not grasp the centrality of the working class in the socialist revolution. They take up all sorts of petty bourgeois ideas about the backwardness or ignorance of the working class and take a pessimistic and defeatist attitude regarding the revolutionary potential of the working class. So, they seek revolutionary potential elsewhere. The only way to make such a position fit into a Marxist analysis is to revise the fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism – namely the key role of the working class.

Second, many see the heroic struggle of Palestinian resistance against Zionism and wish to copy and paste an analysis of the Palestinian struggle onto U.S. conditions. Largely this comes from a desire to use what is happening in Palestine to draw attention to the need for revolution in the U.S. As admirable as this is, the United States is not Palestine, and so this obscures as much as it illuminates.

The contradictions at work are not the same. This is a fact clearly understood by the Marxist-Leninists in Palestine. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine themselves say in “Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine”, their main programmatic document, “The class structure in an underdeveloped community naturally differs from that of industrial communities. In an industrial community there is a strong capitalist class opposite a numerous working class, and the basic struggle in such communities is a sharp clash between these classes.” In other words, we have to understand the strategic array of various forces based on the class contradictions at work. The Palestinians have done their own analysis of their concrete conditions, and we must likewise analyze our own.

The Palestinians find themselves occupied by an apartheid state, much like Zimbabwe prior to liberation. The principal contradiction in Palestine is certainly that between the Palestinian resistance movement on the one hand and the Zionists and their imperialist supporters on the other. That is the contradiction that is clearly driving things forward. In the U.S., where people of all nationalities are forged into one multinational working class, there is a basis to build a multinational working class party. Under Israeli apartheid, there is no such multinational working class. The analogy breaks down when faced with concrete reality.

Indeed, the situation the Palestinian comrades find themselves in isn’t the norm on a global scale. In fact, it is quite rare. Some of the most recent examples include Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, none of which remain settler-colonies. Unlike in Palestine, which is occupied by the Zionist apartheid state, in much of the underdeveloped world neocolonialism holds sway, where a class of compradores and traitors rules on behalf of the imperialists, creating a show of nominal independence while the economic life of the country is in fact entirely subservient to the imperialist powers. Settler-colonialism is used in Palestine because Israel is the lynchpin of U.S. hegemony in the Middle East. Because U.S. power in the Middle East depends on the survival of its regional proxy, oppression is especially sharp.

Strategy for revolution

Revolution in the United States requires Marxist-Leninist analysis. Furthermore, it requires the leadership of the multinational working class, organized in a Marxist-Leninist party. The misguided theory of settler-colonialism in the United States has to be overcome if we are to accomplish this historic task.

This erroneous theory of settler-colonialism is an obstacle to building the strategic alliance that must be at the core of any revolutionary strategy that can hope to be successful. We have to base that strategy on the contradictions that are truly driving things forward in the real world, and that contradiction is between the capitalist class on the one hand, and the oppressed and exploited masses of workers and oppressed nationalities on the other.

We live in the belly of the beast, in the heart of the most vicious imperialist power in the world. We have to turn the whole order of things upside down, and, if we’re going to do that, then we have to accomplish several major tasks.

Our central task is party building. We have to fuse Marxism-Leninism with the multinational working class and build a revolutionary communist party that can contend for power. And we have to build around that party a united front against monopoly capitalism, with the strategic alliance of the multinational working class and oppressed nationalities at its core. In order to do this, we have to be crystal clear in our analysis, so that we can put that analysis to work.

Only the multinational working class, allied with the liberation movements of oppressed nationalities, can overthrow the rule of the capitalists, smash the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, build socialism, and end exploitation and oppression once and for all.

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Lenin’s important book, “Left Wing” Communism, An Infantile Disorder, was written in 1920. According to the subtitle of the original manuscript, it was intended to be “a popular exposition on Marxist strategy and tactics.” After the victory of the Great October Socialist Revolution in 1917, the working class in the former Russian Empire had smashed its chains and set out on the road to socialism. Revolutionaries all over the world were eager to understand how the Bolsheviks had succeeded in defeating Tsarism and imperialism. Lenin, therefore, wrote this book to help guide the international communist movement and to sum up some of the critical lessons of the revolution in Russia.  

Reading this book by Lenin, one point is made clear again and again – there are no ready-made formulas that can be applied whenever and wherever just the same, but, rather, the concrete analysis of concrete conditions is paramount, and everything must be undertaken in accordance with the present time, place and conditions. Marxism-Leninism is a revolutionary science. It understands that there are general laws of motion that hold true. At the same time, those general laws must be applied creatively to any particular situation based on a dialectical analysis of the material processes at work. 

Lenin’s argument

Lenin begins this text with a look at what is universal in the experience of the Russian revolution. He says that “the Russian model … reveals to all countries something – and something highly significant – of their near and inevitable future.” 

From the outset, Lenin stresses that “the experience of the victorious dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia has clearly shown even to those who are incapable of thinking or have had no occasion to give thought to the matter that absolute centralization and rigorous discipline of the proletariat are an essential condition of victory over the bourgeoisie.” This is Lenin’s first point, that a party of the Bolshevik type is absolutely necessary if the working class is to win power. 

After a summation of the history of Bolshevism, Lenin begins to draw some conclusions. The first of these is that Bolshevism gained strength through struggle against opportunism within the revolutionary movement. Lenin writes that “Bolshevism’s principal enemy within the working-class movement” from 1914 until the time of his writing this book, was, “First and foremost, the struggle against opportunism which in 1914 definitely developed into social-chauvinism and definitely sided with the bourgeoisie, against the proletariat.” This is the “right” opportunist trend. This struggle is well known, Lenin says. If we want to study it, we can look at Lenin’s other texts like The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky. Here he wants to focus on another enemy of the working class, the trend of “left” opportunism. This takes shape as “petty-bourgeois revolutionism,” and Lenin explains how this arises ideologically from the material class position of the petty bourgeoisie, among whom it is rooted. 

“...[T]he petty proprietor, the small master (a social type existing on a very extensive and even mass scale in many European countries), who, under capitalism, always suffers oppression and very frequently a most acute and rapid deterioration in his conditions of life, and even ruin, easily goes to revolutionary extremes, but is incapable of perseverance, organization, discipline and steadfastness.”

He draws particular attention to “the instability of such revolutionism, its barrenness, and its tendency to turn rapidly into submission, apathy, phantasms, and even a frenzied infatuation with one bourgeois fad or another.” Surely everyone who has spent any time organizing has encountered these people and knows exactly what Lenin means. 

Drawing from the Bolshevik experience, Lenin writes, “The struggle that Bolshevism waged against ‘Left’ deviations within its own Party assumed particularly large proportions on two occasions: in 1908, on the question of whether or not to participate in a most reactionary ‘parliament’ and in the legal workers’ societies, which were being restricted by most reactionary laws; and again in 1918 (the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk), on the question of whether one ‘compromise’ or another was permissible.”

These are today still the points where the ultra-leftists try to drag the revolutionary struggle into the mire: how to relate to bourgeois elections, how to relate to the trade unions, and how to deal with the question of compromise. 

Bourgeois elections

Looking at how Lenin and the Bolsheviks dealt with the question of bourgeois elections, we would benefit from quoting the following paragraph in full: 

“The Bolsheviks’ boycott of “parliament” in 1905 enriched the revolutionary proletariat with highly valuable political experience and showed that, when legal and illegal parliamentary and non-parliamentary forms of struggle are combined, it is sometimes useful and even essential to reject parliamentary forms. It would, however, be highly erroneous to apply this experience blindly, imitatively and uncritically to other conditions and other situations. The Bolsheviks’ boycott of the Duma in 1906 was a mistake, although a minor and easily remediable one.  The boycott of the Duma in 1907, 1908 and subsequent years was a most serious error and difficult to remedy, because, on the one hand, a very rapid rise of the revolutionary tide and its conversion into an uprising was not to be expected, and, on the other hand, the entire historical situation attendant upon the renovation of the bourgeois monarchy called for legal and illegal activities being combined. Today, when we look back at this fully completed historical period, whose connection with subsequent periods has now become quite clear, it becomes most obvious that in 1908–14 the Bolsheviks could not have preserved (let alone strengthened and developed) the core of the revolutionary party of the proletariat, had they not upheld, in a most strenuous struggle, the viewpoint that it was obligatory to combine legal and illegal forms of struggle, and that it was obligatory to participate even in a most reactionary parliament and in a number of other institutions hemmed in by reactionary laws (sick benefit societies, etc.).”

So, should revolutionaries participate in bourgeois elections, and how should they go about it? Lenin doesn’t exactly give us a final “yes” or “no” which is true always and everywhere. He does say that “participation in a bourgeois-democratic parliament … actually helps that proletariat to prove to the backward masses why such parliaments deserve to be done away with; it facilitates their successful dissolution, and helps to make bourgeois parliamentarianism ‘politically obsolete’.” 

We should harbor no illusions that a peaceful, electoral transition to socialism is possible. However, revolutionaries must engage with the masses in electoral politics, simply because that is where the masses are at, and we want to create more favorable conditions for revolutionary work. We should use the mass line to take up the demands of the advanced among the masses and, with the lens of Marxist analysis, find ways to see them through. Then we sum up those experiences with the advanced and draw conclusions.  

It has to be stressed that Lenin’s main point in this regard is that particular conditions demand particular tactics. The goal is to build the revolutionary movement, which can only be done together with the masses in real struggle, and tactical decisions must start from there. 

Work in the trade unions

On the trade unions, Lenin writes, 

“The trade unions were a tremendous step forward for the working class in the early days of capitalist development, inasmuch as they marked a transition from the workers’ disunity and helplessness to the rudiments of class organization. When the revolutionary party of the proletariat, the highest form of proletarian class organization, began to take shape (and the Party will not merit the name until it learns to weld the leaders into one indivisible whole with the class and the masses) the trade unions inevitably began to reveal certain reactionary features, a certain craft narrow-mindedness, a certain tendency to be non-political, a certain inertness, etc. However, the development of the proletariat did not, and could not, proceed anywhere in the world otherwise than through the trade unions, through reciprocal action between them and the party of the working class.”

Lenin could not be clearer when he says, “If you want to help the ‘masses’ and win the sympathy and support of the ‘masses’, you … must absolutely work wherever the masses are to be found.” 

This is why we must not shun work in the unions, even if they are led by business unionists who want “class peace” or sellouts who are in it only for themselves. Instead, we have to fight for class struggle unionism and build the militant minority in order to put the unions on a class struggle basis. These are the main mass organizations of the working class. They are not sufficient for revolutionizing the class structure of society by themselves, but they are where the advanced fighters of the working class are to be found, and we will win them over by fighting shoulder to shoulder with them. 

“Left-Wing” Communism today

We find ourselves in interesting times, and the lessons of Lenin’s text deserve careful consideration. First, the working class has no organized vanguard. There is no communist party in the United States. While some claim the name, none in practice can honestly say that their cadres are the “generals of the proletarian army.” This means that the central task is to build such a party. We must do that by winning over the advanced fighters of the working class and oppressed nationality movements to Marxism-Leninism through practice. As Mao Zedong clearly put it, “A leading group that is genuinely united and linked with the masses can be formed only gradually in the process of mass struggle, and not in isolation from it.” In other words, party building has to be done in the course of real mass struggles. How else could we build a party comprised of the true leaders of the masses? 

Furthermore, we are deep into an unusual presidential election season, and we are simultaneously witnessing a U.S.-backed genocide being carried about by the Zionists in Palestine. These are issues that many are talking about and that shouldn’t be ignored. It is unavoidable that we should discuss Lenin’s text in this context, particularly in regard to how we address bourgeois elections generally, and this one in particular. 

One of the main ways the broad masses engage with politics is through bourgeois elections. We may know that bourgeois elections, a contest for rulership between two sections of the capitalist class, is “politically obsolete,” but that doesn’t mean anything if the masses haven’t yet come to the same conclusion. Furthermore, while elections cannot fundamentally change the class nature of society, they can influence the conditions under which we are fighting to build a revolutionary movement. This has been proven in practice, such as in the struggle for community control of the police. 

All that said, how do we concretely analyze electoral questions? When we look at bourgeois elections, we need to consider four questions: 1) Does one candidate represent a special danger? 2) Is the election a referendum on a major social question, such as war? 3) Does a contending campaign embody a particular social movement, such as the Black liberation movement? 4) Is the election part of a significant political movement independent of the two main capitalist parties? 

Of course, all of these questions are in play, but in the present moment it is crystal clear that genocide in Palestine, and the heroic fight for liberation being fought by the Palestinian Resistance, is primary. The advanced fighters in many mass movements are united in this understanding. Solidarity with Palestine and the demand to end the genocide are at the forefront of the peoples struggles, and the Palestinian liberation movement is at the center of revolutionary process that can defeat the Zionist proxy of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East. Those who get this question wrong will lose the confidence of the advanced and will be rightly seen as betrayers of the Palestinian people. 

For the reason, we have to be clear that in the present moment the U.S. presidential election is a referendum on the genocide. It has never been clearer – as we are presented with a choice between the reactionary Trump, on the one hand, and the architects of genocide on the other – that this is a failed system and that the choice presented to us is rotten to the core. Neither choice is acceptable.

Communists must unite with the advanced, using Marxism to analyze the situation and find the way forward. Lenin’s book stresses this same point. Today, that way forward is to unite with and help lead the struggle to stop the genocide and to fight for a free Palestine, from the river to the sea. 

More than anything else, Lenin’s book “Left Wing” Communism shows us how to apply Marxism to the dynamic and complex mass struggles in which we find ourselves, and how to navigate those struggles, always with the goal of building towards revolution and socialism.

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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Five Essays on Philosophy collects five important essays on dialectical materialism and Marxist epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, by Mao Zedong. It includes the articles “On Practice” and “On Contradiction” as well as “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People,” “Speech at the Chinese Communist Party's National Conference on Propaganda Work,” and “Where do Correct Ideas Come From?” 

The extraordinary thing about these essays is that they are tremendously practical. This isn’t something often associated with philosophical works, but Mao demonstrates in simple and straightforward terms the way that philosophy can be used by the working class. As Marx said in his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” Mao shows us how to do that.

On Practice 

The first article in the collection is “On Practice: On the Relation Between Knowledge and Practice, Between Knowing and Doing,” from 1937. Together with “On Contradiction” this was originally delivered as a lecture to the Anti-Japanese Military and Political College in the Yenan base area during the United Front against Japan. The aim of “On Practice” together with “On Contradiction” was to correct tendencies towards dogmatism and empiricism among cadres in the Communist Party of China at the time by giving a thorough explanation of the practical implications of Marxism-Leninism’s theoretical foundations. 

What do we mean by dogmatism and empiricism? Put simply, both disregard the dialectical interconnectedness of theory and practice. Dogmatism ignores the lessons of practical experience, while empiricism ignores the need for theory to guide practice. 

Practice is the source and aim of theory. This is the main point of “On Practice.“ The two must be understood as deeply interconnected.

“On Practice” explains the materialist premise that our ideas arise from our material reality, namely from our social practice in production, class struggle, and scientific experiment. Mao points out, “Of these other types of social practice, class struggle in particular, in all its various forms, exerts a profound influence on the development of man's knowledge. In class society everyone lives as a member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of a class.” 

Mao explains it like this: 

“Marxists hold that man's social practice alone is the criterion of the truth of his knowledge of the external world. What actually happens is that man's knowledge is verified only when he achieves the anticipated results in the process of social practice (material production, class struggle or scientific experiment). If a man wants to succeed in his work, that is, to achieve the anticipated results, he must bring his ideas into correspondence with the laws of the objective external world; if they do not correspond, he will fail in his practice. After he fails, he draws his lessons, corrects his ideas to make them correspond to the laws of the external world, and can thus turn failure into success.”

Because knowledge is based on practice, our knowledge progresses from a lower to a higher level as we gain experience, building upon itself. Mao explains that knowledge proceeds through stages, from perceptual knowledge to rational knowledge. Beginning with perception of the world around us, we then form theories and ideas. Mao sums all of this up like this:

“Discover the truth through practice, and again through practice verify and develop the truth. Start from perceptual knowledge and actively develop it into rational knowledge; then start from rational knowledge and actively guide revolutionary practice to change both the subjective and the objective world. Practice, knowledge, again practice, and again knowledge. This form repeats itself in endless cycles, and with each cycle the content of practice and knowledge rises to a higher level. Such is the whole of the dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge, and such is the dialectical-materialist theory of the unity of knowing and doing.”

On Contradiction

Mao’s essay “On Contradiction” is an explanation of dialectical materialism and how it can be applied by revolutionaries as a method of analysis to guide practice. Here he explains how change occurs, so that we can transform society in accord with its laws of motion. 

Mao gets straight to the point, saying “The law of contradiction in things, that is, the law of the unity of opposites, is the basic law of materialist dialectics.” He explains that Marxist philosophy is materialist, meaning that it sees material processes as being the driving force of social change. He explains that it is dialectical because it sees things as interconnected and driven forward mainly by its internal contradictions, and, secondarily, in its interrelations with other things.

Mao argues that reality is a process, and that any complex process is made up of a system of contradictions. Within this system of contradictions, while there are many different contradictions at work, one is always principal. In other words, the principal contradiction is the contradiction that is determining the overall motion of the process as a whole. At the same time, each contradiction is asymmetrical. One side – the principal aspect of the contradiction – is dominant. Finally, there are different types of contradictions that can be resolved in different ways, antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions. 

The main way that change occurs is through the transformation of quantity into quality, where the buildup of quantity leads to a qualitative leap, and the two aspects of a contradiction exchange places. In capitalist society, an example would be the build-up of consciousness and organization by the working class, and the building of a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist party. This would represent the quantitative accumulation of force by the secondary aspect of the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie that is fundamental to capitalism. The primary aspect of that contradiction is the bourgeoisie. It is the ruling class. It controls the means of production, the state, the media, the police and the army. But a revolution represents a qualitative leap, whereby the secondary aspect of the contradiction, the working class, has accumulated enough force that the two aspects can exchange places. Socialism puts the working class in charge. The proletariat becomes the principal aspect of the contradiction. 

Mao emphasizes the importance of grasping the principal contradiction. This is the contradiction that is determining the overall motion of the process. He gives an example, saying,

“in capitalist society the two forces in contradiction, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, form the principal contradiction. The other contradictions, such as those between the remnant feudal class and the bourgeoisie, between the peasant petty bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie, between the proletariat and the peasant petty bourgeoisie, between the non-monopoly capitalists and the monopoly capitalists, between bourgeois democracy and bourgeois fascism, among the capitalist countries and between imperialism and the colonies, are all determined or influenced by this principal contradiction.”

In other words, Marxists should strive to understand which contradiction is principal and which contradictions are secondary. Understanding this tells us where to focus our attention and where and how to aim our blows as we fight to change society. While the fundamental class conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is principal within the imperialist countries themselves, that contradiction is heavily influenced by the contradiction between imperialism and the oppressed nations, which is driving imperialism’s decline on a global scale. This analysis has to guide our strategy, meaning that the multinational working class must lead a united front against monopoly capitalism, with the strategic alliance between the working class and the movements of oppressed nationalities at its core. 

On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People 

“On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People” was written by Mao in 1957 and delivered as a speech to the Eleventh Session of the Supreme State Conference. It helped guide the Communist Party through the “Hundred Flowers” campaign and the Anti-Rightist campaign that followed. 

The main point of the essay is to explain the difference between antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions within the context of the situation in China at the time, during socialist construction, and to give some guidance on how the contradictions in socialist society ought to be approached and resolved. 

Antagonistic contradictions are essentially a zero-sum game. One side’s gain is the other side’s loss. For example, the bourgeoisie gets its wealth at the expense of the working class, so this contradiction is antagonistic. Everything good for the capitalists is bad for the workers, and vice versa. Because this contradiction is fundamentally antagonistic, it can only be resolved antagonistically, through the revolutionary change of which class is in power. But other contradictions are non-antagonistic, meaning there is room to come to agreement, unity and compromise. The contradictions within the united front are like this, and can be resolved through discussion, debate and persuasion, in the course of our united practical struggle. 

Mao sums this idea up like this. “This democratic method of resolving contradictions among the people was epitomized in 1942 in the formula ‘unity – criticism – unity’. To elaborate, that means starting from the desire for unity, resolving contradictions through criticism or struggle, and arriving at a new unity on a new basis. In our experience this is the correct method of resolving contradictions among the people.”

If we use this method of “unity – criticism – unity” to resolve contradictions among the people, contradictions within our organizations and within the masses in the united front work that we do, we can prevent the real contradictions that exist from becoming antagonistic. This is essential if we are to unite all who can be united against the enemy, the monopoly capitalist class. 

Five Essays on Philosophy today

Five Essays on Philosophy wraps up with Mao’s “Speech at the Chinese Communist Party’s National Conference on Propaganda Work” from 1957 and a short article from 1963 entitled “Where Do Correct Ideas Come From?” 

In the speech on propaganda work, Mao argues that “While we have won basic victory in transforming the ownership of the means of production, we are even farther from complete victory on the political and ideological fronts. In the ideological field, the question of who will win out, the proletariat or the bourgeoisie, has not yet been really settled. We still have to wage a protracted struggle against bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology.” It emphasizes the importance of waging ideological struggle against both dogmatism and revisionism. Therefore, Mao says, “Both dogmatism and revisionism run counter to Marxism. Marxism must necessarily advance; it must develop along with practice and cannot stand still. It would become lifeless if it were stagnant and stereotyped. However, the basic principles of Marxism must never be violated, otherwise mistakes will be made. It is dogmatism to approach Marxism from a metaphysical point of view and to regard it as something rigid. It is revisionism to negate the basic principles of Marxism and to negate its universal truth.”

“Where Do Correct Ideas Come From?” is largely a concise reiteration of the ideas explained in greater length in “On Practice.” Mao writes, “the one and only purpose of the proletariat in knowing the world is to change it. Often, correct knowledge can be arrived at only after many repetitions of the process leading from matter to consciousness and then back to matter, that is, leading from practice to knowledge and then back to practice. Such is the Marxist theory of knowledge, the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge.” 

Today it is essential that we use Marxist-Leninist philosophy to analyze our conditions and guide our practice as we work to advance the struggle. The lessons of “On Practice,” that practice is the source and aim of theory, is essential to all that we do. The lessons of “On Contradiction,” that we must grasp the principal contradiction in order to formulate strategy for revolution, is likewise essential if we are to accomplish anything. And we must understand that antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions both require their own methods of resolution. We have to struggle for proletarian ideology against bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideological trends like dogmatism and revisionism. And we must always do this in a way that allows us to unite all who can be united against our common enemy. Studying Five Essays on Philosophy by Mao Zedong can help tremendously as we seek to apply Marxist-Leninist theories to the tasks before us.

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The Foundations of Leninism is a collection of lectures given by J.V. Stalin to Sverdlov University in 1924, shortly after the death of Lenin in January of that year. The nine lectures that make up the book cover topics of history, methodology, style of work, theory, and strategy and tactics, as well as exposition and analysis of particular issues, such as the party, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the national question, and the peasant question. On each of these topics, Stalin lays out the Leninist position succinctly and concretely. 

Stalin’s lectures and the book that came out of them have to be understood in the context of the period in which it was written. After the death of Lenin, a sharp ideological struggle over the direction of the Soviet Union gripped the party and the masses. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) needed to chart a course for how to transition from the New Economic Policy, which sought to stabilize the economy following the “war communism” of the Civil War period, to the period of socialist construction.

During Lenin’s illness the Trotskyites headed up a group of opportunists who put forward the “Declaration of Forty-Six Oppositionists.” According to the History of the CPSU (Bolsheviks) – Short Course, “In their declaration, they prophesied a grave economic crisis and the fall of the Soviet power and demanded freedom of factions and groups as the only way out of the situation.” The History goes on to explain, “The platform of the forty-six was followed up by the publication of a letter by Trotsky …[which] harped on the old Menshevik themes which the Party had heard from him many times before.” After a long discussion in all levels of the party, Trotsky’s opposition line was defeated at the Thirteenth Party Conference. But, as the History of the CPSU explains, “In the autumn of 1924, Trotsky published an article entitled, ‘The Lessons of October’ in which he attempted to substitute Trotskyism for Leninism.” 

It is in this context that Stalin’s Foundations of Leninism was published. For this reason, the 1949 book Joseph Stalin: A Political Biography by the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute calls Foundations of Leninism “a most effective weapon in demolishing Trotskyism ideologically, and in defending, explaining, and developing Leninism.” The book systematically laid out “everything new and distinctive associated with the name of Lenin, everything he contributed to the development of Marxist theory.” Foundations of Leninism thus draws clear lines of demarcation between Leninism and all forms of opportunism. 

The Marxism of the current era

As Stalin writes in the introduction, “The foundations of Leninism is a big subject.” We can’t address all of it here. But we can touch on some of the major points. 

First, let’s look at Stalin’s definition of Leninism: “Leninism is Marxism of the era of imperialism and the proletarian revolution.” He expands further on this, saying, 

“To be more exact, Leninism is the theory and tactics of the proletarian revolution in general, the theory and tactics of the dictatorship of the proletariat in particular. Marx and Engels pursued their activities in the pre-revolutionary period, (we have the proletarian revolution in mind), when developed imperialism did not yet exist, in the period of the proletarians’ preparation for revolution, in the period when the proletarian revolution was not yet an immediate practical inevitability. But Lenin, the disciple of Marx and Engels, pursued his activities in the period of developed imperialism, in the period of the unfolding proletarian revolution, when the proletarian revolution had already triumphed in one country, had smashed bourgeois democracy and had ushered in the era of proletarian democracy, the era of the Soviets.”

In other words, Leninism further develops Marxism in the current period, the era of imperialism, or monopoly capitalism, when the contradictions of capitalism are pushed to their extreme. It develops revolutionary theory, strategy and tactics, in this context. It is under these new conditions that Leninism seeks to address the problems posed to the revolutionary movement by the contradictions inherent in the imperialist system. Stalin emphasizes that “Leninism emerged from the proletarian revolution, the imprint of which it cannot but bear,” and that “it grew and became strong in clashes with the opportunism of the Second International, the fight against which was and remains an essential preliminary condition for a successful fight against capitalism,” and thus, “the ruthless struggle against this opportunism could not but constitute one of the most important tasks of Leninism.” 

Stalin emphasizes that there are three contradictions which imperialism brings forward that need to be understood as carrying particular importance. First, there is the contradiction between labor and capital. Second, there is the contradiction among the financial groups and imperialist powers. And third, there is the contradiction between the imperialist nations and the oppressed nations and peoples of the world. “Such, in general,” writes Stalin, “are the principal contradictions of imperialism which have converted the old, ‘flourishing’ capitalism into moribund capitalism.” 

Theory and practice 

Stalin lays particular importance on Leninism’s method of analysis. He emphasizes that this method relied upon testing the theoretical dogmas and policies of the parties of the Second International. These dogmas and policies were found to be insufficient for leading a revolutionary movement forward. Stalin breaks down several of these dogmas piece by piece, showing how Leninist theory must reject dogmatism and combine theory with practice in the course of revolutionary struggle. This is summed up by noting, “It is precisely this critical and revolutionary spirit that pervades Lenin's method from beginning to end.”

On the importance of theory in Leninism, Stalin notes, “Some think that Leninism is the precedence of practice over theory in the sense that its main point is the translation of the Marxist theses into deeds, their “execution”; as for theory; it is alleged that Leninism is rather unconcerned about it. … We also know that theory is not held in great favor by many present-day Leninist practical workers, particularly in view of the immense amount of practical work imposed upon them by the situation.” 

Against this, Stalin puts forward an excellent definition of Marxist theory: “Theory is the experience of the working-class movement in all countries taken in its general aspect.” For Leninism, theory and practice must be united. Theory without practice is worthless, and practice without theory “gropes in the dark.” 

Explaining the importance of theory, Stalin emphasizes that “theory can become a tremendous force in the working-class movement if it is built up in indissoluble connection with revolutionary practice.” Indeed, writes Stalin, “theory, and theory alone, can give the movement confidence, the power of orientation, and an understanding of the inner relation of surrounding events; for it, and it alone, can help practice realize not only how and in which direction classes are moving at the present time, but also how and in which direction they will move in the near future.”

Stalin brings particular attention to two theoretical points of Lenin’s: first, the criticism of spontaneity and the importance of a vanguard party, and second, Lenin’s theory of proletarian revolution. 

The first point here is to emphasize that Leninism understands that the spontaneous economic battles of the working class are not sufficient to bring about a socialist revolution, but rather that a political struggle against the bourgeois state, led by an organized and disciplined vanguard, made up of its most advanced and class conscious workers, armed with the most advanced revolutionary theory (Marxism-Leninism) is necessary to overthrow the dictatorship of capital and build working class state power. Today, when no such vanguard party exists as a material reality, the central task of Marxist-Leninists is to build one. 

The second point is to understand that Lenin understood the era of imperialism to be the eve of socialist revolution due to the internal contradiction of the monopoly capitalist system. Previously, the socialist movement believed that socialist revolution must first come to the most advanced capitalist countries first. Contrary to this, Leninism asserts, “The front of capital will be pierced where the chain of imperialism is weakest, for the proletarian revolution is the result of the breaking of the chain of the world imperialist front at its weakest link.” In 1917, this weak link was Tsarist Russia. 

Proletarian dictatorship

The Foundations of Leninism explains Lenin’s theory of the state clearly and succinctly. 

“The state is a machine in the hands of the ruling class for suppressing the resistance of its class enemies. In this respect the dictatorship of the proletariat does not differ essentially from the dictatorship of any other class, for the proletarian state is a machine for the suppression of the bourgeoisie. But there is one substantial difference. This difference consists in the fact that all hitherto existing class states have been dictatorships of an exploiting minority over the exploited majority, whereas the dictatorship of the proletariat is the dictatorship of the exploited majority over the exploiting minority.”

Stalin outlines two essential conclusions that Lenin draws from this theory of the state. First, the state isn’t a “complete” democracy, but rather, it is democracy for the working class for the sake of the repression of the capitalist class. Second, the proletarian dictatorship “cannot arise as the result of the peaceful development of bourgeois society and of bourgeois democracy; it can arise only as the result of the smashing of the bourgeois state machine, the bourgeois army, the bourgeois bureaucratic apparatus, the bourgeois police.” 

“In other words,” writes Stalin, “the law of violent proletarian revolution, the law of smashing of the bourgeois state machine as a preliminary condition for such a revolution, is an inevitable law of the revolutionary movement in the imperialist countries of the world.” 

The National Question 

The National Question, the question of how the socialist revolution should relate to the nations oppressed by imperialism, is of particular importance to Leninism. Self-determination is a key point here. “Leninism broadened the conception of self-determinism, interpreting it as the right of the oppressed peoples of the dependent countries and colonies to complete secession, as the right of nations to independent existence as states.” Further, Stalin explains, “the national question can be solved only in connection with and on the basis of the proletarian revolution, and that the road to victory of the revolution in the West lies through the revolutionary alliance with the liberation movement of the colonies and dependent countries against imperialism. The national question is a part of the general question of the proletarian revolution, a part of the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Leninism also recognizes that “the revolutionary character of a national movement under the conditions of imperialist oppression does not necessarily presuppose the existence of proletarian elements in the movement, the existence of a revolutionary or a republican programme of the movement, the existence of a democratic basis of the movement.” This an essential point to drive home, especially today as Zionists and opportunists both demand the denunciation of Hamas and the division of the Palestinian resistance in the face of U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza. Every socialist must understand that the defeat of Israel, as a tool of U.S. imperialism, as a blow against the monopoly capitalist class, and must therefore unequivocally support the unified Palestinian resistance in its just struggle for liberation. 

The same is true within the U.S. where revolutionaries must recognize the right to self-determination of the Black, Chicano and Hawaiian nations, including their right to secede in their national territories of the Black Belt South, the Southwest and Hawai’i, respectively. Likewise, revolutionaries in the U.S must support immediate independence for the colonies, and the sovereignty of native peoples. 

This is why the strategic alliance between the multinational working class and the liberation struggles of the oppressed nationalities must form the core of the united front against monopoly capitalism in the U.S. 

Strategy and tactics

The Foundations of Leninism has a lot to say about Leninist revolutionary strategy and tactics. Here we will emphasize the distinction that Stalin makes between revolutionary strategy and tactics and reformism. While Stalin was drawing from a body of practice where a revolutionary situation was at hand in Russia and many other places, there is much to here to inform our thinking today.

“To a reformist,” writes Stalin, “reforms are everything, while revolutionary work is something incidental, something just to talk about, mere eyewash. That is why, with reformist tactics under the conditions of bourgeois rule, reforms are inevitability transformed into an instrument for strengthening that rule, an instrument for disintegrating the revolution.”

“To a revolutionary, on the contrary,” Stalin explains, “the main thing is revolutionary work and not reforms; to him reforms are a by-product of the revolution. That is why, with revolutionary tactics under the conditions of bourgeois rule, reforms are naturally transformed into an instrument for strengthening the revolution, into a strongpoint for the further development of the revolutionary movement.”

In other words, revolutionaries struggle for reforms in order to build the revolutionary movements and set the conditions for revolutionary struggle. This is why we say again and again that there are three cardinal principles in revolutionary organizing: we must win all that can be won and strike blows against the enemy; we must raise the level of consciousness and organization of the masses; and we must win the advanced from these struggles to Marxism-Leninism and build revolutionary organization. 

Foundations of Leninism today

Today we still live in the era of imperialism and proletarian revolution, and Marxism-Leninism is theory that the working class needs to understand and put into practice in order to overthrow the old society and build a new one, socialism, where working people are in power and can put the needs of the people first.

As imperialism lashes out everywhere, from Palestine to the Philippines, we need to understand the lessons of Leninism, and stand in solidarity with oppressed people everywhere in our fight against our common enemy – the monopoly capitalist class at the head of the U.S. imperialist machine of oppression, war, exploitation, misery and death. U.S. imperialism is in a period of prolonged decline, during which it only becomes more vicious.

We have to be organized to fight back. Lenin emphasized that there are objective and subjective conditions for a revolution to take place. The objective conditions are that there is an economic crisis that becomes a political crisis for the ruling class, where they can no longer rule in the old way and we can no longer live in the old way. The subjective conditions are that the working class is conscious of itself as a class, and that it is organized, with a party capable of leading a broad revolutionary movement. 

The objective conditions can be analyzed and impacted by struggle, but the subjective conditions are even more within our power to change to our benefit. We can and must use Marxism-Leninism to grasp the tasks of the movement, build the organization and consciousness among the masses, and prepare ourselves to seize the time. Reading The Foundations of Leninism can help a great deal in helping revolutionaries orient themselves for the struggles ahead.

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