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

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

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

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

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

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

Lenin’s arguments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Tactics today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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