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

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

Introducing the science of revolution

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

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

Theory and practice

As Sykes says,

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

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

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

A book for revolutionaries new and old

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

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

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

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

#MinneapolisMN #BookReviews #MLTheory #redTheory

After waging revolution from 1927 to 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed from Tiananmen Gate that “the Chinese people have stood up!” This marked the end of imperialist domination in China and the beginning of socialism in the newly founded People’s Republic of China, led by the Communist Party. The Chinese revolution has continued through socialist construction from then until today, and we would do well to sum up some of its many heroic achievements in order to better understand, from a Marxist-Leninist perspective, the process of socialist revolution and socialist construction.

The achievements of socialism in China during Mao Zedong’s lifetime were tremendous. In 1949, Chinese life expectancy was 38 years. By the 1970s it had risen to 68 years. As John Ross says in his book China’s Great Road, “China’s rate of increase of life expectancy in the three decades after 1949 was the fastest ever recorded in a major country in human history.” China’s current life expectancy has overtaken that of the U.S. and is now 78.2 years.

Literacy also dramatically increased. In 1949, approximately 80 to 90% of China’s population was illiterate. The Communist Party launched a mass literacy and education campaign, and within ten years adult illiteracy fell to 43% and has steadily declined since. By 1979 illiteracy was only 16.4% in the cities and 34.7% in the countryside. Currently, the literacy rate in China is 99.8%, greatly exceeding the U.S. at 79%.

All of this was achieved as a direct result of the socialist system, which avoids the anarchy of production and the chronic cycles of boom and bust. In fact, since 1978, China has had the fastest sustained growth in a major economy in all of human history, with an annual average growth rate of 9.5%. Because China isn’t a capitalist country, the economy isn’t affected by the cyclical crises that are characteristic of and plague the capitalist mode of production.

Among China’s greatest achievements is the elimination of extreme poverty. Over just the past 40 years, the number of people in China living in extreme poverty has fallen by 800 million, accounting for three quarters of total global poverty reduction. This process began in the 1930s, with land reform in the liberated areas at the beginning of the Chinese revolution. This meant the expropriation of the landlords, division of their land among the peasants, and canceling debts. This is how the Communist Party of China (CPC) destroyed feudalism in the countryside.

After taking power in 1949, the CPC expanded land reform from the liberated areas to the entire country, and started setting up agricultural production cooperatives to mechanize agriculture and develop the forces of production throughout the country. The means of production were nationalized. China’s industrial output increased at an average annual rate of 13.5%. By 1977, China’s industrial output was 38 times what it was in 1949 when the revolution took power.

China has also succeeded in building a harmonious society composed of many different nationalities. The CPC helped to liberate the oppressed nationalities, such as the Tibetan people, from feudalism. The People’s Republic of China constitution and laws grant equality to the country’s nationalities and promotes economic and cultural development. Discrimination is outlawed and Articles 112 through 122 of the constitution of the People’s Republic of China detail the rights of the formerly oppressed nationalities to autonomous self-government.

As a result of their vast revolutionary experience, the Chinese communists have also made many great contributions to Marxist-Leninist theory. In the course of the civil war and the war of resistance against Japan, Mao Zedong developed the theory of protracted people’s war, a military strategy of advancing a revolution in stages by surrounding the cities from the countryside, applicable broadly to semi-colonial and semi-feudal countries with a large peasantry like China was.

Mao and his comrades also developed the theory of the United Front and the Mass Line as core strategic methods of organizing and mobilizing the broad masses of the people for revolution. Mao also made important contributions to Marxist philosophy with his essays “On Practice” and “On Contradiction,” among many others. And after Khrushchev came to power in the Soviet Union in the mid-1950s, the CPC made important contributions to the defense of Marxism-Leninism against revisionism in the polemics of the Great Debate.

China has been a beacon to oppressed nations and peoples all over the world, especially in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In the United States, Mao Zedong and the Chinese Revolution were a guiding light to the Black liberation movement, especially for groups like the Black Panther Party, which used the Little Red Book, Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, as a revolutionary handbook. After the Communist Party USA’s abandonment of Marxism-Leninism for revisionism in the 1950s, the young communists who set out to build a new communist party in the 1970s also drew upon the theory and practice of Mao Zedong and the CPC.

In 1985 in the Soviet Union, Gorbachev instituted his liberal reforms, Perestroika and Glasnost, hurling the USSR towards the precipice of capitalist restoration in 1991. Similar counterrevolutionary currents arose in other parts of the socialist world, including China. Many in the USSR and Eastern Europe failed to defeat counterrevolution. Mick Kelly sums up the trajectory that led to a similar situation in China in the 1989 work Continuing the Revolution is Not a Dinner Party: “While the intentions were the best, the ultra-left errors of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1975) slowed the development of socialism in China. Right errors in the post Mao/Hua period then created the material conditions and allowed the political space to open for bourgeois liberalization.” But when right opportunists led by Zhao Ziyang attempted to restore capitalism in China in 1989, the CPC managed to rise to the challenge. They held firm to Marxist-Leninist principles, overcame the crisis, defended socialism and the proletarian dictatorship, and came out stronger on the other side.

The Communist Party of China has proved in practice that it is prepared to avoid the fate of the USSR. As Xi Jinping said in a speech in 2021, “It is easier to breach a fortress from within. In this sense, degeneracy, corruption and betrayal from within the Party have been the gravest threat since its founding. The Party would lose the people’s support if it betrays its political character as a Marxist party and fundamental purpose. Over its century-long journey, our Party has stayed alert to risks of corruption and disintegration, and maintains its progressive and wholesome nature.” In this regard, China has launched a successful anti-corruption campaign to make sure the Party continues to serve the people.

As China develops its productive forces in order to eliminate scarcity and bring common prosperity to the Chinese people, China is also breaking new ground in combining socialist construction with ecological sustainability. In his article, “China is Building a Truly Ecological Civilization,” Carlos Martinez writes that the People’s Republic of China is aggressively pursuing decarbonization, reducing reliance on coal in favor of wind and solar energy. China is also carrying out the largest reforestation project in the world, expanding forest coverage from 12% to 23% from 1980 to 2020. China is able to do this because they have a socialist, planned economy, whereas capitalism can only blindly pursue the highest rate of profit.

Similarly, as a result of its socialist system, China is able to prioritize public health over profit, as seen by its COVID policy. The United States has had over one million deaths as result of its poor handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, while, at the time of this writing, China’s has had over 1000 times fewer, relative to its population.

What China has accomplished is nothing short of extraordinary. From when Mao and his comrades first set out on their Long March, until today, the Chinese revolution has served to teach and inspire revolutionaries all over the world.

As Xi Jinping said at the recent 20th National Congress of the CPC, “Marxism is the fundamental guiding ideology upon which our Party and our country are founded and thrive. Our experience has taught us that, at the fundamental level, we owe the success of our Party and socialism with Chinese characteristics to the fact that Marxism works, particularly when it is adapted to the Chinese context and the needs of our times,” and “…only by applying dialectical and historical materialism can we provide correct answers to the major questions presented by the times and discovered through practice, and can we ensure that Marxism always retains its vigor and vitality.”

#UnitedStates #PeoplesStruggles #Socialism #MarxismLeninism #MLTheory #redTheory

How is it possible that the Soviet Union, bastion of socialism and proletarian internationalism, collapsed in 1991? What factors led to its collapse, and what were the results? We should look at both the material and ideological basis for the restoration of capitalism in the USSR. As Marxist-Leninists, what lessons can we draw from the experience of the fall of the Soviet Union?

Capitalism was restored in the USSR in 1991, but the process that led to that point began much earlier. Nikita Khrushchev came to lead the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) shortly after the death of Stalin in 1953. Under his leadership, the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956 marked the first major turning point towards revisionism in the USSR. Revisionism, in the name of “revising” Marxism, advocates for Marxism in words, but opportunism in deeds.

Ideologically, Khrushchev’s revisionism attacked the foundations of Marxism-Leninism in a number of ways, namely by advocating the transformation of the proletarian dictatorship into a “state of the whole people,” the party of the working class into the “party of the whole people,” by advocating for “peaceful coexistence between capitalism and socialism,” and by advocating for the “peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism.”

Like Trotsky before him, in the name of attacking “Stalinism,” Khrushchev set about to attack Marxism-Leninism. In his so-called “secret speech” Khrushchev launched his campaign of “de-Stalinization.” Of course, this didn’t go without resistance, so in order to carry this out, he maneuvered to defeat the revolutionary left in the party leadership, which made up the majority in the politburo. Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich and the rest of the left were all sidelined by Khrushchev as an “Anti-Party group.”

From there, the communists of China and Albania led the way in criticizing the errors of Khruschev’s revisionism and the dangers it posed to the international communist movement. As the Communist Party of China wrote in “On the Question of Stalin'' in 1963, “In repeating their violent attacks on Stalin, the leaders of the CPSU aimed at erasing the indelible influence of this great proletarian revolutionary among the people of the Soviet Union and throughout the world, and at paving the way for negating Marxism-Leninism, which Stalin had defended and developed, and for the all-out application of a revisionist line.” By attacking Stalin’s leadership and the history of the CPSU, Khrushchev struck a blow at Marxism-Leninism itself, weakening the confidence of the international communist movement in Marxism-Leninism.

In a significant article from 1992 entitled “An Assessment of the Collapse of the Soviet Union,” the outstanding Belgian communist leader, Ludo Martens, wrote, “the revisionism of Khrushchev opened a transitional period from socialism to capitalism. Old and new bourgeois elements needed thirty years to grow strong enough to capture and consolidate their power in the fields of politics, ideology and the economy. The process of degeneration, begun in 1956, took three decades to finish off socialism.”

Practically, as Keeran and Kenny emphasize in their 2004 book Socialism Betrayed, “Khrushchev favored incorporating a range of capitalist or Western ideas into socialism, including market mechanisms, decentralization, some private production, the heavy reliance on fertilizer and the cultivation of corn, and increased investment in consumer goods.” After this, the Kosygin Reforms in 1965 further liberalized the economy, emphasizing profitability, material incentives and commodity production to an even further degree. Guided by revisionism instead of Marxism-Leninism, these policies had a corrosive effect on the socialist system.

In those ensuing decades, we see first Brezhnev and then Gorbachev as the principal leaders of the USSR. While Brezhnev corrected some of Khruschev’s worst errors, he continued down the path that Khrushchev set out upon in the 20th Congress. The Soviet Union during the period of his leadership saw the party further divorce itself from the masses of the people as bureaucracy grew. Furthermore, the U.S. made every effort to destabilize the USSR during this period, most successfully by funding the Mujahideen to bog the Red Army down in Afghanistan, draining the Soviet Union’s resources.

Bad leadership, and a lack of Marxist-Leninist scientific clarity, only exacerbated the problem, leading to Gorbachev’s liberal “Perestroika” and “Glasnost” reforms, and finally to the open liquidation of the CPSU and the USSR, against widespread protest, under Yeltsin. In a 1991 referendum, the Soviet people overwhelmingly voted against dissolving the USSR. Nearly 80% wanted to maintain the Soviet Union, but Yeltsin and Gorbachev defied both the Soviet constitution and the Soviet people.

Like Khrushchev before him, Gorbachev put forward his attacks on Marxism-Leninism as an attack on “Stalinism.” The result was “shock therapy” and impoverishment for the masses of the people, total privatization, the rampant plundering of the state and national economy, and the unbridled hegemony of U.S. imperialism no longer counterbalanced by the USSR.

Life expectancy declined dramatically after 1991. The economy of the former Soviet Union suffered a crisis worse than the Great Depression. Indeed, despite all of its flaws during the period from 1956 to 1991, the collapse of the USSR was a disaster for the masses of the people of the USSR and the whole world.

We can draw at least four important lessons from this experience.

First, adhering to the principles of Marxism-Leninism is vital. Marxism-Leninism is the scientific analysis of our concrete conditions and summation of our practical experiences that lets us navigate the complex contradictions with which we are faced. If we abandon Marxism-Leninism for revisionism, accepting ideas like “peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism,” counter to objective laws, we disarm ourselves for the tasks ahead of us. The opponents of socialism love to claim that “socialism is great in theory but doesn’t work in practice.” On the contrary, when the Soviet Union united their revolutionary practice with Marxist-Leninist theory, socialism worked wonders. Indeed, when the USSR held to Marxist-Leninist principles, from 1917 to the mid-1950s, they piled success on top of success. When they cast Marxism-Leninism aside at the 20th Congress, they set about piling difficulty on top of difficulty.

Second, the party and the state must maintain its class character: the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. The revisionist theories of “party of the whole people” and “state of the whole people” opened up the party and state to the influence of the class enemy. The working class is the only class with no material interest in the exploitation of others, and only the working class is capable of guiding the transition through socialism from capitalism to communism. Furthermore, the dictatorship of the proletariat is a weapon necessary to resist the forces of reaction and capitalist restoration from bourgeois forces within and without. The party of the working class must lead the proletarian state to construct socialism, restrict bourgeois right, and combat the forces of counterrevolution and reaction.

Third, classes and class struggle do not end with the establishment of socialism. This experience confirms what Lenin said in 1919: “The class struggle does not disappear under the dictatorship of the proletariat; it merely assumes different forms.” The communist party must persevere in carrying out the class struggle under socialism in order to restrict and overcome bourgeois right and guide society towards the goal of communism. According to Lenin, the socialist state is tasked with “creating conditions in which it will be impossible for the bourgeoisie to exist, or for a new bourgeoisie to arise.” Starting in the mid-1950s, the USSR took the opposite approach, but there were errors even earlier. Ludo Martens, in his important book Another View of Stalin, writes, “After 1945, the struggle against opportunism was restricted to the highest circles of the Party and did not assist in the revolutionary transformation of the entire Party.” Thus the broad masses and party as a whole were unprepared to resist the revisionist turn of the mid-1950s. Proletarian democracy, mass education in Marxism, and criticism and self-criticism are safeguards to the working class’s success in the class struggle under socialism.

Fourth, capitalist restoration is a protracted process, that ends with a sudden leap. Some in the international communist movement mistook the rise of revisionism in the USSR for the complete restoration of capitalism. This led them to see the Soviet Union as an enemy. Some even went so far as to claim that the USSR was “social-imperialist.” Against this view, Harry Haywood wrote in 1984, “Without a monopoly capitalist class and without capitalist relations of production there is no fundamental and compelling logic in the Soviet economy that creates a need to export capital and exploit other countries through trade. As a result, it also has no colonies and no empire to sustain.” On the contrary, the reality is the USSR was a bulwark against U.S. hegemony and a powerful ally to movements for revolution and liberation all over the world.

We have to understand this from a dialectical materialist point of view. Marxism holds that material reality isn’t simply determined by the ideas of a few leaders, and while those ideas can affect material reality, that is a process that takes time. Socialist revolution follows dialectical laws. According to those dialectical laws, the principle and secondary aspect of a contradiction can exchange places in a qualitative leap. Under socialism, the proletariat in power is the principal, determining aspect of this contradiction, and the bourgeoisie is secondary. Quantitative accumulation of strength by the bourgeoisie can flip this relationship, which is exactly what happened over the course of 30 years in the USSR. Revisionism weakened the socialist state and disarmed it against the threat of capitalist restoration. But the Soviet Union’s course towards capitalist restoration wasn’t irreversible, and its final collapse was a tragedy for working and oppressed people everywhere.

Despite the fall of socialism in the USSR, we have the People’s Republic of China, Democratic Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cuba, which all continue to advance and are a beacon to working and oppressed people everywhere. Imperialism is in decline and the movements for revolution and national liberation are today gaining ground. Socialism may face attacks from within and without, and those attacks may lead to setbacks, but in the long view, the victory of socialism is inevitable. As Mao Zedong once put it, though the road is torturous, the future is bright!

#UnitedStates #PeoplesStruggles #Socialism #MarxismLeninism #MLTheory #redTheory

As Marxist-Leninists in the United States, we can draw lessons from the experiences of others in carrying out revolution and building socialism. While every revolutionary struggle must be firmly based on the concrete analysis of its own conditions, we should still study closely both the successes and failures in the rich experience of the Soviet Union. From that experience we can draw both lessons from their struggle as well as inspiration from their heroic achievements. In the next article we will examine the causes of the collapse of the USSR and draw lessons from it, but here let’s look at all that it achieved.

First, the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, developed Marxism-Leninism and applied it to the particular conditions of the Russian Empire. They fused Marxism with the workers movement and built a militant and revolutionary Communist Party that overthrew tsarism and capitalism and put the state into the hands of the toiling masses, the dictatorship of the proletariat. The dictatorship of the rich was smashed and a new democracy based on the Soviets (councils) of workers and peasants, was built in its place.

During the course of the revolution the Bolsheviks advanced the mass-line slogan of “Peace, Land and Bread,” opposing the imperialist war and advancing a program of land reform and ending poverty and hunger. World War I had claimed nearly 3 million dead from the people of the Russian Empire. Lenin mobilized mass anger against tsarist repression and raised the slogan of “revolutionary defeatism” to turn the imperialist war into a civil war through which the working and oppressed masses could throw off the yoke of the tsar, the bourgeoisie and the landlords. Uniting with the poor peasants, the Bolsheviks led the working class through a revolution in two stages, first to defeat tsarism, and then to defeat bourgeois reaction and imperialism. The revolution’s first stage brought about the 1917 February Revolution. The Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917 soon followed, which smashed the bourgeois state and established the Soviet Union.

The counterrevolutionary White Terror, led by the defeated bourgeoisie against the newly founded Soviet government, was aided by the imperialist countries. After a lengthy Civil War, the Soviet Red Army was victorious in defending their revolution and the Soviet Union could set about with the tasks of socialist construction. Lenin set out the basic principles that would guide the process of building socialism, but this had only just begun by the time he died in 1924.

Under the leadership of Lenin, the Third (Communist) International was founded to support revolutionary movements all over the world. The Soviet Union became the center and base of the international communist movement the world over. While Stalin led the Soviet people in building socialism, the Communist International continued to support proletarian internationalism all over the world, from Asia, Africa and Latin America to Europe and the United States. The Communist International allowed the working people of the entire world to come together to coordinate and to share experiences and summation.

From 1924 to 1953, Stalin led the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the masses of workers and peasants in carrying out and developing Lenin’s plans for building socialism. Stalin led the Bolshevik party in carrying out this Leninist line against opportunist and counterrevolutionary currents, such as those of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Bukharin.

Industrialization was achieved between 1921 and 1941, developing the productive forces to the point where the basic needs of the people could be met. The priority of the government was to see that people were fed, clothed, housed and guaranteed quality health care and education. Millions of peasants were educated, creating the first fully literate society in history. The Soviet Union guaranteed free and compulsory education in the arts and sciences. Educated and freed from capitalist relations of production, the Soviet Union advanced from a backwards, semi-feudal country to a major industrial power in just 30 years. In the countryside, landlords (Kulaks) were expropriated and farming was collectivized and mechanized. Horse-drawn plows were replaced by modern tractors.

According to Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny in their book Socialism Betrayed,

“In fifty years, the country went from an industrial production that was 12 percent of that in the United States to industrial production that was 80 percent and an agricultural output 85 percent of the U.S. Though Soviet per capita consumption remained lower than in the U.S., no society had ever increased living standards and consumption so rapidly in such a short period of time for all its people.”

The Soviet Union guaranteed not only free education and health care. Trade unions had the power to veto firings and even recall managers. Prices were regulated by the state and basic food and housing was subsidized. Rent took up only 2 or 3%, and utilities only 4 or 5% of a family’s income. While socialism still has a wage scale with higher and lower incomes due to the persistence of bourgeois right (the lingering inequalities carried over from capitalism), the highest paid individuals in the USSR only made ten times that of the average worker. To put that gap in perspective, Keeran and Kenny point out that by the late 1990s, corporate executives in the U.S. made 480 times the wage of an average worker.

The Soviet Union fought tooth and nail to uproot both national oppression and gender oppression. The Soviet Republics of the formerly oppressed nations exercised their self-determination and their autonomy and national development was prioritized. Every effort was made to stamp out racism, bigotry and national chauvinism. At the same time, the Soviet Union worked tirelessly to abolish the gendered division of labor and dismantle the laws and customs that upheld gender oppression, misogyny and male chauvinism.

In 1936, the so-called “Stalin Constitution” set about to take proletarian democracy in the USSR to even further heights. As Anna Louise Strong wrote in her book The Soviets Expected It,

“Stalin’s great moment when he first appeared as leader of the whole Soviet people was when, as Chairman of the Constitutional Commission, he presented the new Constitution of the Socialist State. A commission of thirty-one of the country’s ablest historians, economists, and political scientists had been instructed to create ‘the world’s most democratic constitution’ with the most accurate machinery yet devised for obtaining ‘the will of the people.’ They spent a year and a half in detailed study of every past constitution in the world, not only of governments but of trade unions and voluntary societies. The draft that they prepared was then discussed by the Soviet people for several months in more than half a million meetings attended by 36,500,000 people. The number of suggested amendments that reached the Constitutional Commission from the popular discussions was 154,000. Stalin himself is known to have read tens of thousands of the people’s letters.”

The red banner of socialism flew as a beacon of hope to the workers and oppressed peoples of the world. Following the bitter experience of the Civil War period, the CPSU knew that the imperialists would not let such a challenge go unanswered. In 1931, ten years before the German Nazi invasion of the USSR, Stalin said, “We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they will crush us.” Stalin was correct in his assessment of the challenge and the danger that faced them, and they did close the distance. Likewise, Stalin led the CPSU in defeating the organization of a “fifth column” of enemy agents, spies and saboteurs with the USSR. The Soviet people heroically built their industry and developed their productive forces so that they were able to eventually turn the tide of the German invasion at Stalingrad and push the Nazis all the way back to Berlin. The Soviet Union lost 20 million people in this life or death struggle, bearing the brunt of the war and taking the lead in saving the world from fascism. During and after World War II, the Soviet Union was pivotal to the establishment of socialism in China, Korea and Eastern Europe.

After Stalin’s death in 1953, despite the growth of opportunist and revisionist currents within the CPSU, especially following the 20th and 22nd Congresses in 1956 and 1961, the Soviet Union continued to be a force for peace and democracy against imperialism and war. It aided and defended revolutionary movements all over the world, from defending Eastern European socialism from imperialist-backed counterrevolution, to supporting socialist revolution in Cuba and Vietnam.

The achievements of socialism in the USSR prove that the working class, guided by Marxism-Leninism, can create a society based on serving the people instead of the blind pursuit of profit, and despite all of the imperialist propaganda that would have you believe otherwise, can accomplish truly amazing things.

#UnitedStates #MarxismLeninism #MLTheory #redTheory

The historic task of the working class in the socialist revolution is to eliminate all oppression. This includes the liberation of women and LGBTQ people from the shackles of patriarchy.

In her 1949 article “We Seek Full Equality for Women,” Claudia Jones states, “Marxism-Leninism exposes the core of the woman question and shows that the position of women in society is not always and everywhere the same, but derives from woman’s relation to the mode of production.”

In The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Friedrich Engels gives us a historical materialist analysis of patriarchy’s foundation and explains how gender oppression is related to reinforcing the mode of production. Basically, Engels explains that patriarchal family relations and the gendered division of labor have their origin in the very beginning of class society and private property.

Engels writes, “the pairing family … is founded on male supremacy for the pronounced purpose of breeding children of indisputable paternal lineage. The latter is required, because these children shall later on inherit the fortune of their father. The monogamous family is distinguished from the pairing family by the far greater durability of wedlock, which can no longer be dissolved at the pleasure of either party. As a rule, it is only the man who can still dissolve it and cast off his wife.”

Thus the traditional patriarchal family has the original purpose of ensuring the inheritance of male property. Under capitalism, the family also serves the purpose of regulating reproductive labor by enforcing a gendered division of labor. Reproductive labor is the domestic labor required to reproduce labor-power — that is, the labor required for the workers survival, such as cooking, cleaning, childcare and other housework traditionally assigned to women while the men work outside the home

Even today in the U.S., where many women work outside the home, women earn 80 cents for every dollar earned by men, and also continue to carry the majority of the burden of domestic labor. Furthermore, this gendered division of labor means not only women taking up most domestic tasks at home, but also being disproportionately driven into generally lower paying jobs, such as in the service sector or clerical work.

The ruling class benefits from this gendered division of labor by using women and LGBTQ people as a reserve source of labor, driving down wages overall, and as a source of super-profits resulting from these lower pay rates. This is even more true for oppressed nationalities. In her 1949 article, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of Negro Women,” Claudia Jones was correct to observe that “Negro women — as workers, as Negroes, and as women — are the most oppressed stratum of the whole population.”

It is this gendered division of labor that serves as the foundation for women’s and LGBTQ oppression and serves as the material basis for misogyny and male chauvinism. This is also the basis for attacks on LGBTQ rights. Today we see an ongoing, reactionary pushback against rights previously won through struggle, from reactionary “don’t say gay” bills to the overturning of Roe v. Wade which guaranteed the right to abortion.

Thus the goal of gender oppression is to maintain the gendered division of labor and the patriarchal family, primarily for the sake of ensuring the inheritance of property, gender-based super-profits, and the regulation of domestic, reproductive labor. For this reason, it works to suppress anything that would challenge that system, including both women’s liberation and LGBTQ liberation. LGBTQ equality presents a direct challenge to this oppressive system, and so LGBTQ people are also subject to severe repression, including discrimination in employment, housing, education, and healthcare, and denial of the right to marriage equality.

The working class as a whole must set itself the task of abolishing these oppressive, gendered social relations. The Bolshevik leader Alexandra Kollontai put it well in her 1909 article “The Social Basis of the Woman Question.”

“While for the feminists the achievement of equal rights with men in the framework of the contemporary capitalist world represents a sufficiently concrete end in itself, equal rights at the present time are, for the proletarian women, only a means of advancing the struggle against the economic slavery of the working class. The feminists see men as the main enemy, for men have unjustly seized all rights and privileges for themselves, leaving women only chains and duties. For them a victory is won when a prerogative previously enjoyed exclusively by the male sex is conceded to the ‘fair sex’. Proletarian women have a different attitude. They do not see men as the enemy and the oppressor; on the contrary, they think of men as their comrades, who share with them the drudgery of the daily round and fight with them for a better future. The woman and her male comrade are enslaved by the same social conditions; the same hated chains of capitalism oppress their will and deprive them of the joys and charms of life. It is true that several specific aspects of the contemporary system lie with double weight upon women, as it is also true that the conditions of hired labor sometimes turn working women into competitors and rivals to men. But in these unfavorable situations, the working class knows who is guilty.”

Kollantai and the Bolsheviks laid the primary blame for gender oppression at the feet of the capitalist ruling class, and the socialist revolution in the Soviet Union aimed to accomplish much more than simply winning additional privileges for women. It set about uprooting the material basis for gender oppression. The first step in doing this was by establishing legal gender equality. Women were immediately granted the right to vote and hold public office. But it also backed up that legal equality by granting women economic independence from men by dismantling the gendered division of labor. The number of women in the workforce more than doubled between 1917 and 1930. Likewise, the 1918 Family Code was truly revolutionary. Marriage was separated from the Church. Couples were allowed to choose their own surname, and guaranteed the equal right to divorce. The Soviet Union was the first country in the world to legalize abortion in 1920. Women were granted eight-week paid maternity leave and the same wage standards as men. Importantly, public cafeterias and child care facilities were created to remove the burden of domestic labor from the shoulders of women.

We can look at the socialist countries today for further practical lessons. For example, Socialist Cuba has guaranteed free gender affirming surgery since 2008. Further, Cuba deepened its commitment to gender equality in September of 2022, when it passed a revolutionary Family Code, legalizing equal marriage and adoption rights regardless of sexual orientation and recognizing the rights of surrogate mothers.

It should not be assumed that women’s and LGBTQ liberation are tasks left solely for after the revolution. It is an immediate task of all revolutionaries and progressive people to uproot gender-based oppression. We must take seriously, today and tomorrow, the task of completely destroying, root and branch, patriarchy and all systems of male supremacy in order to build a just, socialist society.

#UnitedStates #Socialism #PeoplesStruggles #MarxismLeninism #MLTheory #redTheory

The Russian Empire under the Tsar was rightly called a “prisonhouse of nations,” because it oppressed, within its borders, whole nations of people. The Bolsheviks saw that it was a principal task of the socialist revolution to dismantle national oppression and support self-determination for the oppressed nations.

The United States is likewise a prisonhouse of nations, where the African American nation in the Black Belt South, the Chicano nation in the Southwest and the Hawaiian nation are all oppressed within the borders of the imperialist U.S. It will be a principal task of the socialist revolution in the U.S. to answer the national question, and we can draw on the experience of the Bolsheviks and others to understand how to do that.

The great African American communist leader and Marxist-Leninist theorist Harry Haywood lived in the Soviet Union, from 1925 to 1930, where he witnessed firsthand how the national question was handled there. In his autobiography Black Bolshevik, Haywood explained his experience there and the theory that guided the USSR on the national question. He writes,

“...the formation of peoples into nations is an objective law of social development around which the Bolsheviks, particularly Lenin and Stalin, had developed a whole body of theory. According to this theory, a nation is a historically constituted stable community of people, based on four main characteristics: a common territory, a common economic life, a common language and common psychological makeup (national character) manifest in common features in a national culture. Since the development of imperialism, the liberation of oppressed nations has become a question whose final resolution would only come through proletarian revolution.”

Haywood goes on to explain that the overthrow of the tsar and the construction of socialism required the unity of nationalities, and that this unity had to be based on “equality before the law for all nationalities – with no special privileges for any one people – and the right of the colonies and subject nations to separate.”

Thus, after the Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution, these principles were turned into the law of the land. Socialism set out to remove the effects of national oppression within the liberated nations of the former Russian Empire. Resources were diverted to them to raise their standards of living, education, health, and so on, while respecting and developing their cultural and political institutions. For example, Haywood writes of witnessing this policy in action in Crimea and the Caucasus in 1927 and 1928:

“The languages and culture which had been stifled under the czarist regime were now being developed. The language of the Crimean people was a Turko-Tartar language, but before the Revolution, almost all education, such as there was, was in the Russian language. Now there were schools established which used the native language.”

Abolishing national oppression is the first step, since it is the material basis of racism and prejudice. But as Haywood explains, after the Bolshevik revolution,

“…remnants of national and racial prejudice from the old society were attacked by education and law. It was a crime to give or receive direct or indirect privileges, or to exercise discrimination because of race or nationality. Any manifestation of racial or national superiority was punishable by law and was regarded as a serious political offense, a social crime.”

Haywood explains that in all of his five years in the Soviet Union, he only experienced a single instance of racism, which was met with outrage from bystanders, leading to an impromptu mass meeting and the arrest of the perpetrator. It may be hard to imagine in the U.S. today, where the police murder Black, Chicano, and other oppressed people with impunity every day, but in the USSR in the 1920s, a racial slur led to a night in jail for the offender. Creating a just society free of racism and national oppression was taken seriously.

It isn’t possible to predict exactly how the national question will be resolved in the course of socialist revolution. What we can say is that the U.S. colonies, such as Puerto Rico and Guam, must be granted their independence – if they have not already achieved by their own efforts. The full sovereignty of native peoples must be respected as must the right to national development. And the Black, Chicano and Hawaiian oppressed nations must have the right to self-determination, to choose whether or not to separate their historically constituted national territory.

The national question in the United States will be solved in practice by the working and oppressed people themselves in the course of socialist revolution. But we can draw many lessons from the experiences of others. In the Soviet Union this played out through the formation of Soviet republics of the formerly oppressed nations. In China it led to national autonomous regions.

In any case, the national question must be answered correctly both before and after the revolution, for its purpose is twofold. First, it is necessary to right the past wrongs of U.S. imperialism and see that they are not perpetuated. As Lenin said, the right of national self-determination, like the right to divorce, can be the only basis for a true, voluntary unity. Second, that unity is the only way we can defeat the oppressors. Only the strategic alliance of the multinational working class and the movements for national liberation can form the core of the united front necessary to topple monopoly capitalism, and only by freeing all peoples can the working class itself ever hope to be free.

#UnitedStates #NationalOppression #MarxismLeninism #MLTheory #redTheory

The task of socialism is to transition from capitalist society to communist society, from a society ruled by and for the rich, based on exploitation and oppression, to a society without classes and without exploitation and oppression. When the working class takes power and expropriates the wealth and power of the capitalist class, the dictatorship of the proletariat will have to eliminate the contradictions carried over from capitalist society in a planned, thoroughgoing, and step-by-step way. One of the most important tasks of the socialist state is the elimination of what Marx called “bourgeois right.” We already touched on bourgeois right in our previous article, “What is Socialism?” but it is a very important subject and needs to be understood clearly.

In his Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx says there are two stages to communist society, a lower and higher stage. To make things clearer, Marxism-Leninism has come to refer to the lower stage as socialism, and the higher stage as communism. In the lower stage, socialism, the guiding principle is “from each according to their ability, to each according to their work.” In the higher stage, communism, the guiding principle is “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” The goal of socialism is to transition to communism – to get from a society where distribution is based on work to a society where distribution is based on need.

In capitalist society, “bourgeois right” refers to the legal rights of property ownership and the social and political power that the capitalist derives from owning capital. Thus, in capitalist society, bourgeois right forms the basis of the capitalist relations of production, allowing for the capitalist to privately accumulate wealth from the exploitation of labor in the social process of production.

Socialist revolution intends to expropriate the expropriators – to do away with private ownership of the means of production, and therefore do away with private accumulation of wealth. However, as Marx says, socialism is born from the womb of capitalism and carries with it the birthmarks of capitalism. One of these birthmarks is bourgeois right. But bourgeois right is qualitatively different under socialism than under capitalism, since private ownership of the means of production has been abolished. So what remains of bourgeois right?

Lenin explains this very well in his book The State and Revolution:

“In the first phase of communist society (usually called Socialism) ‘bourgeois right’ is not abolished in its entirety, but only in part, only in proportion to the economic revolution so far attained, i.e., only in respect of the means of production. ‘Bourgeois right’ recognizes them as the private property of individuals. Socialism converts them into common property. To that extent—and to that extent alone— ‘bourgeois right’ disappears.

“However, it continues to exist as far as its other part is concerned; it continues to exist in the capacity of regulator (determining factor) in the distribution of products and the allotment of labor among the members of society. The socialist principle: ‘He who does not work, neither shall he eat,’ is already realized; the other socialist principle: ‘An equal amount of products for an equal amount of labor,’ is also already realized. But this is not yet Communism, and it does not yet abolish ‘bourgeois right,’ which gives to unequal individuals, in return for unequal (really unequal) amounts of labor, equal amounts of products.

“This is a ‘defect,’ says Marx, but it is unavoidable in the first phase of Communism [Socialism]; for if we are not to indulge in utopianism, we must not think that having overthrown capitalism people will at once learn to work for society without any standard of right; and indeed the abolition of capitalism does not immediately create the economic premises for such a change.

“And there is no other standard than that of ‘bourgeois right.’ To this extent, therefore, there still remains the need for a state, which, while safeguarding the public ownership of the means of production, would safeguard equality in labor and equality in the distribution of products.”

In other words, if the distribution of what is produced is measured by labor, then the problem that arises is that the labor input is unequal. Some people are more fit, or stronger. Some have children to take care of and other responsibilities while others don’t. Some workers may suffer from health issues while others don’t. Some may live farther from their place of work. Some may have better access to tools and machinery, some may work on land that is more or less suitable. Similarly, some may have an easier time learning and thus are able to attain higher levels of education. For some, networking and building connections may come naturally, or as a result of old family connections. All of these basic inequalities allow for uneven accumulation of wealth, and all of these basic inequalities require solutions.

Opponents of Marxism often put this basic inequality between individuals forward as a refutation of socialism, as if Marx didn’t understand or address this. On the contrary, this basic inequality between individuals is one of the most pressing issues that socialism can and must resolve. Marxism-Leninism understands very well that bourgeois right represents a danger, as it functions as a backwards drag on socialist development. If bourgeois right under socialism is left unchecked, then this uneven accumulation of wealth, power, and privilege can lead to corruption, the sharpening of class antagonism, and a material basis for bourgeois ideology and the revisionist degeneration of the proletarian dictatorship. Unchecked, bourgeois right functions as the material basis for the restoration of capitalism.

A fundamental task of the socialist state must be to combat and uproot bourgeois right. How is this accomplished? Lenin points to two factors in the citation above. First, people must learn to work for society without the bourgeois right of equal pay for equal work, and, second, the material basis that would allow for distribution based on need rather than work must be in place.

Transforming the way people think about labor and society is a long-term project, based on education and persuasion rooted in practical experience. This means dismantling the influence of bourgeois ideology and educating the masses of the people in the ideology of the working class, the science of Marxism-Leninism. Experience in the socialist countries has shown that this is possible, and that it takes time. Revolutionizing the productive forces to create a society where everyone can have what they need without any use for a distribution system based on work is also possible. It requires the elimination of scarcity, and thus, also takes time.

Ultimately, the transition through socialism to communism depends on solving the contradictions that linger in socialist society, both antagonistic and non-antagonistic. The class struggle continues under the dictatorship of the proletariat. The socialist state must resolve the contradictions that constrain the development of the productive forces, the contradiction between town and country, the contradiction between mental and manual labor, the contradictions rooted in the national question and patriarchy, and the contradiction between the leaders and the led. The correct handling of these contradictions and others are what keeps the proletarian dictatorship on track towards the goal of communism.

#UnitedStates #Socialism #MarxismLeninism #MLTheory #redTheory

In our previous article on the relationship between the superstructure and the economic base in historical materialism, we explained that the superstructure is basically the cultural, ideological, political and legal aspect of the mode of production, which arises from the economic base and, in turn, supports and helps reproduce the economic base. We also looked at how ideology arises from class struggle. Both bourgeois ideology and proletarian ideology arise from the class struggle in the capitalist mode of production, and, since the capitalist class is dominant and controls the superstructure under capitalism, their ideology is likewise dominant.

Socialism will turn the productive relations (the class relations) of society on their head, putting the working class in power. Also, it will also revolutionize the superstructure, giving control of the cultural, ideological, political and legal apparatuses of the state to the working class.

In his 1923 article, “On Cooperation,” Lenin writes,

“Two main tasks confront us, which constitute the epoch – to reorganize our machinery of state, which is utterly useless, in which we took over in its entirety from the preceding epoch; during the past five years of struggle we did not, and could not, drastically reorganize it. Our second task is educational work among the peasants. And the economic object of this educational work among the peasants is to organize the latter in cooperative societies. If the whole of the peasantry had been organized in cooperatives, we would by now have been standing with both feet on the soil of socialism. But the organization of the entire peasantry in cooperative societies presupposes a standard of culture, and the peasants (precisely among the peasants as the overwhelming mass) that cannot, in fact, be achieved without a cultural revolution.”

Lenin’s point here is that working class culture, that is, the ideology of the working class, must be used to reshape society, and that those ideas must be made to take root firmly among all of the allied classes and strata in the continuing class struggle against the bourgeoisie during socialism. The first task, as Lenin saw it, was political and legal. The state had to be reorganized to align with the needs of the socialist revolution. The laws of the old society had been written to benefit the capitalist class at the expense of the broad masses of the people. They were written first and foremost to protect private property, and they had to be rewritten to the benefit of the Soviet workers and peasants. The whole state apparatus had to be rebuilt in line with principles of proletarian, Soviet democracy.

The second task was educational. But this educational work (increasing literacy, Marxist education, cultural enrichment) had to be connected to the practice of reshaping society. In other words, theory was to be learned through practice, and the petty bourgeois ideology of the peasantry was to be overcome through practice. The Russian peasants had to be convinced through practical experience of the superiority of Marxism and the socialist system. At the same time, cultural institutions like theater, ballet, symphonies and opera, which had previously been the exclusive property of the capitalists, were likewise democratized. Museums, film houses, publishing houses, and the press were all nationalized. Even orchestras were brought to the factories to play for the workers.

When the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, only 41.7% of the population was literate. By 1939, in just 22 years, literacy rose to 87.4%. To give some perspective to this statistic, the current literacy rate in the United States in 2022 is 79%. This revolution in education in the Soviet Union involved the creation of national alphabets for several oppressed nationalities, along with a tremendous upsurge in broad scientific and technical education. The Soviet Union was a poor and backwards country, with underdeveloped productive forces. Building socialism requires the development of the productive forces in order to eliminate scarcity, and developing the productive forces requires an educated working class, technically and politically, that has the knowledge and the will to reshape society in its own image.

Every socialist state has had to revolutionize the superstructure in this way, both in terms of building a state of the working class, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and in terms of revolutionizing culture and ideology. Giving the masses of the people a broad education in science, technology, literature and culture is important to creating a society that has the scientific knowledge and understanding to propel itself forward. It is also essential that the ideology of the working class commands the heights of the superstructure. Marxism-Leninism is the science of revolution, and as such it must guide the socialist political, legal and military apparatuses, as well as guide the education and cultural development of the people.

We can learn from the successes and failures of past and present practice. The revisionist degeneration and collapse of the Soviet Union and a number of other socialist countries at the end of the 20th century demonstrates that only the ideology of the working class, Marxism-Leninism, can safeguard the gains of socialism and guide it forward in continuing the revolution towards building a communist society. In part this means waging a class struggle within the superstructure.

The experience of China in the late 1960s and 70s also shows us that the cultural revolution must be a protracted struggle rather than a hurried one, and that it must rely on careful and planned education and persuasion under the guidance and leadership of the party. Socialist countries such as Cuba and China have likewise shown that to persevere under the guidance of Marxism-Leninism, counter-revolution and imperialist intervention can be thwarted as the gains of the revolution are advanced and consolidated.

Marxism-Leninism has always understood that it is not sufficient to seize the means of production without also carrying out a broad and thorough revolution of the superstructure. Only by smashing the state apparatuses of the bourgeoisie and replacing them with the dictatorship of the proletariat, can the working class reshape society according to the needs of the broad masses of the people – and, only by educating the masses of the people in Marxism and by developing a well-educated, scientific socialist culture, can the gains of the revolution be safeguarded and carried forward.

#UnitedStates #MarxismLeninism #MLTheory #redTheory

Marxism isn’t just a philosophical and analytical framework based on dialectical and historical materialism, or a critique of political economy. It is also a theory of revolutionizing society and building socialism. Based on the laws of motion of the capitalist societies that precede it, and the experiences of socialist construction from 1917 until today, Marxism-Leninism is able to give us a vision and roadmap for the socialist transformation of society. Of course, every country has its own concrete path to follow, based on its own time, place and conditions, but we can still draw some lessons from those experiences.

Marx and Engels didn’t invent socialism. Socialist theories existed before them, but they were the first to bring socialism down to earth. Before Marx and Engels put socialist theory on a materialist and scientific basis, the Utopian socialists cooked up all kinds of pie-in-the-sky ideas about utopian societies. But the main errors for the Utopians were that they didn’t understand that socialism required a certain material basis upon which to be built, and they didn’t understand the contradictions that drove the existing class forces, particularly the working class and the capitalist class, to struggle for and against socialism. Non-Marxist “socialist” tendencies today, like the social democrats and the anarchists, persist even now in these utopian errors.

Therefore, we need to examine what the Marxist theory of socialism entails. In that regard, there are two main points to understand about socialism. First, it is based on the state power of the working class, and second, its aim is to transition from capitalism to communism.

When we talk about working class state power, we mean what Marx and Lenin called “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” The working class must take state power in order to reshape society according to its interests, to revolutionize the forces of production and the relations of production, and to expropriate and suppress the defeated capitalist class. To take the power to shape society out of the strangling grip of a handful of billionaires and their agents, and to put into the hands of the working and oppressed people of this country, will not only make the country tremendously more democratic, but it will put this new, proletarian democracy to work in a way that can reshape society and uproot exploitation and oppression altogether.

The dictatorship of the proletariat has the task of organizing production and distribution in a way that can unleash the productive forces. Likewise, the proletarian state has the task of organizing the legal, political and cultural superstructure of society in such a way as to promote and reinforce the socialist mode of production. And finally, the proletarian state has the task of safeguarding the gains of the revolution against counter-revolution from within and imperialist intervention from without.

As Lenin pointed out, for Marx, socialism isn’t something that is just concocted, complete and fully formed at birth, but rather it is “something which develops out of capitalism.” In the “Critique of the Gotha Program,” Marx writes, “What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.”

For this reason, according to Marx, socialism has to be understood as developing through stages. Marx explains that there are principles that can guide socialism during its lower and higher stages. During the first stage, which we’ve come to understand as the stage of socialist construction prior to the state’s “withering away,” the main organizing principle is “from each according to their ability, to each according to the work.” During this lower stage of socialism, “bourgeois right” still plays a major role. “The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.” The problem here, Marx says, is that one worker may be “superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor.”

Regarding the higher stage, Marx writes, “In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”

In other words, the contradictions that are brought over from the previous mode of production must be eliminated step by step. This is the primary task of socialism, and the most important of those tasks is to eliminate the basis of class division and develop the productive forces to the point where scarcity is altogether eliminated, and the surplus allows for distribution according to need rather than according to labor.

Marx says “But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.”

In our forthcoming articles we’ll look at some of the major contradictions at work in socialist society, in the base and the superstructure, and we’ll also look at the concrete experience of the socialist countries from 1917 until today.

Lenin was correct to say that the goal of socialism is communism. The purpose of the dictatorship of the proletariat is to eliminate the reason for its own existence. By advancing the forces of production and by developing on this basis socialist relations of production, the socialist state creates the conditions for it to wither away, bringing society ever closer to the higher, classless and stateless, stage of communism.

#UnitedStates #PeoplesStruggles #Socialism #MarxismLeninism #MLTheory #redTheory

Communists have a proud history of fighting on the front lines of the resistance to fascism, from the International Brigades in Spain, to the Antifascist Resistance in occupied Europe, to the heroic struggle of the Soviet people to defend the USSR and defeat Nazi Germany. The Soviets liberated the survivors of the death camps and led the assault on Berlin. From that practice, theory has been developed to analyze what fascism is, how it develops, and how it should be fought.

It is common on the left to hear the United States described as fascist. This is especially true among the youth and some petty bourgeois radicals, who want to emphasize how terrible and repressive the U.S. really is. But is this an accurate description of the class enemy in the United States, and what difference does it make?

First, let’s define what fascism is. The commonly accepted definition among Marxist-Leninists is the one used by the Communist International. The Thirteenth Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI), in 1933, defined fascism in power as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.”

This is different from some other definitions of fascism popular among the left today. Take, for example, the definition given by George Jackson in his book Blood In My Eye. He says, “But both Marxists and non-Marxists alike can agree on at least two of its general factors: its capitalist orientation and its anti-labor, anti-class nature.” From this, Jackson concludes, “these two factors almost by themselves identify the U.S. as a fascist-corporative state.”

Many people take up this view. People rightly see that the United States is repressive, and so they call it fascist, almost as a rhetorical or agitational device, or as an invective against it. Indeed, fascism is capitalist and anti-labor, but there’s more to it than just that. Marxists must be precise and scientific, because our practical and strategic orientation hinges on our scientific analysis of current conditions. The question, “What is to be done?” has to be answered based on these concrete conditions.

Between the ECCI definition and Jackson’s there are some very important differences. Most importantly, Jackson concludes that the U.S. is currently fascist. But if we look concretely and historically at the U.S., the Communist International definition seems to have a better grip on the material reality and historical development on how bourgeois democracy transforms into fascism, as a result of the class struggle.

The problem is that Jackson’s definition isn’t qualitatively different from bourgeois democracy in any stage of its history. Bourgeois democracy has always been a democracy for the rich, and a repressive dictatorship for the rest of us. U.S. capitalism, since its inception, has relied on genocide and national oppression, as well brutal repression of any movements for progressive change. It has always had a capitalist and anti-labor orientation. What good is to call the U.S. fascist if fascism isn’t qualitatively different from bourgeois democracy generally?

The main difference between these two ways of looking at fascism turns around the point of “open terrorist dictatorship.” Certainly, if we look at the fascist states of the 20th century, such as in Italy and Germany, we see something qualitatively different than what we have here. That doesn’t describe our current conditions. Currently, the ruling class can suppress the rights of people, but has to resort to some legal maneuvers to do so. With fascism, the gloves come off. Repression is no longer hidden behind a veil of bourgeois legal norms. “Open terrorist dictatorship” means that legal, above-ground organizing is practically impossible, and the entire resistance to fascism, both the communists and the broader united front, must operate underground in conditions of covertness and illegality.

There is a dialectical relationship between bourgeois democracy and fascism. Fascism is latent in imperialist countries. In its dealings with its colonies and neo-colonies, open terrorist dictatorship is often the principal, or dominant aspect of the contradiction. But within the United States, bourgeois democracy is the principal aspect. This contradiction is largely driven by the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

Since the class struggle drives this contradiction, and the revolutionary movement is relatively weak, the ruling class doesn’t need to ramp up repression and resort to fascism at this moment. Certainly, it isn’t the case that communist organization has been outlawed and forced underground. And there’s a good reason why it hasn’t been. Simply put, if the monopoly capitalist class doesn’t need to resort to fascism, they would prefer not to. The revolutionary movement in the United States is not strong enough for the U.S. ruling class to outlaw it and resort to open violence against its leaders and militants.

Stalin, in his Report to the 17th Congress of CPSU in 1934, put it like this:

“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.”

The ruling class will not resort to fascism until the point is reached when it can no longer rule in the old way, because the movement of the working class and oppressed nationalities has become so well organized, so militant, and so powerful a threat to the monopoly capitalist class, that the ruling class can see the danger of their downfall and defeat before them.

Currently, there are fascist elements among the U.S. reactionaries, many of whom have been emboldened by Trump. Some of these elements even attempted to seize power on January 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol. These elements should be taken seriously and resisted by any means necessary. It is certainly possible that the most reactionary elements of finance capital in the United States will resort to fascism, driven by the development of the revolutionary movement to desperation, and of course we should prepare for that eventuality.

The far-right paramilitary groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, along with their enablers within the “Make America Great Again” wing that currently dominates the GOP, didn’t rise up so boldly out of nowhere. The current rise in reaction is a response to the growing progressive current among the masses, most sharply demonstrated by the uprisings in cities across the country after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020. The George Floyd uprisings pushed the peoples struggles forward in ways we haven’t seen in decades. As the people rose up in anger, we saw a great increase in reactionary violence against the people from both state and non-state forces. As the level of struggle and organization among the broad masses of the people increases, so too will the forces of reaction likely escalate.

But as things stand it only confuses the issue to mischaracterize the current state of bourgeois democracy as fascism in power when it clearly isn’t. Fascism isn’t just reaction in general. It is reaction of a particular type. We don’t need the invective of fascism to know that we should do everything we can to overthrow this horrible system of exploitation, oppression, waste and war. Bourgeois democracy is bad enough.

#UnitedStates #MarxismLeninism #MLTheory #redTheory

Our enemy is monopoly capitalism, the capitalist and imperialist system that exploits the working class here in the United States and oppresses whole nations of people, here and around the world. The monopoly capitalist class, the imperialists, are well organized, and control both the legal and political institutions of the government as well as the military and police. It will take the masses of the people in their millions to overthrow them. We can’t do it alone. The working class must be organized, and it must organize together broadly with its allies. This “united front” against monopoly capitalism is the revolutionary strategy that will carry us forward toward being able to overthrow the imperialists.

When some forces talk about a united front, they mean something like a coalition of communist groups and organizations. That is not what we mean. We need to be organized much more broadly than that, bringing whole classes and strata together under leadership of the working class and its party. When we talk about a united front, we are talking about building just such a broad movement, with the strategic alliance of the multinational working class and the oppressed nationalities at its core. The purpose of this is to establish and maintain a broad unity of action in opposition to the monopoly capitalist class.

The communist party – the Marxist-Leninist vanguard, organized, and advanced detachment and general staff of the working class that must eventually lead the united front – doesn't exist yet. It is through the mass organizing work in the people's struggles that we will build it, together with the united front itself.

We looked at the Marxist-Leninist conception of the “party of a new type” in a previous article. As we said, that party has a very high standard of unity, based on the working class and its ideology, Marxism-Leninism. It is organized according to democratic centralism and demands a great deal of long-term commitment and discipline from its cadre. Because of this, it will never be an organization that contains all of the forces necessary to bring down monopoly capitalism on its own. By standing at the center of the much larger united front, this broader unity and broader organization of the masses becomes possible.

If we understand the united front against monopoly capitalism as a united front of classes, led by the working class and directed against our common enemy, then an analysis of those classes to determine who our friends and enemies are is essential.

The best analysis of the current class structure of the United States is in the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) Program. That document looks at the various classes – the monopoly capitalists, the non-monopoly capitalists, the petty bourgeoisie, the working class, and the lumpen proletariat – and analyzes their class interests and trajectory. Based on that analysis, it concludes that the united front must unite everyone who can be united against the monopoly capitalists, including the petty bourgeoisie, whose existence as a class is precarious because of the monopoly capitalists, and the non-monopoly capitalists of the oppressed nationalities – the national bourgeoisie – who suffer national oppression under imperialism. The objective conditions of monopoly capitalism will push some elements within those classes in a revolutionary direction.

One particularity of U.S. imperialism is that it oppresses entire nations within its borders, such as the Chicano nation of Aztlan in the Southwest and the African American nation in the Black Belt South. Because of this, the Black and Chicano liberation movements within the U.S. have an anti-imperialist character. Practically, this means the struggle against racist national oppression must confront the monopoly capitalist class directly. The strategic alliance of the workers’ movement and the national liberation struggles forms the core of the united front for this reason.

Even so, as Mao Zedong said, within the united front, we must maintain our independence and initiative. The united front contains within it a unity and struggle of class forces. The forces we unite with have their own class interests and their own organizations. Some sections of the petty bourgeoisie and the Black and Chicano national bourgeoisie are still exploiting classes, even if not on the scale of the monopoly capitalists. As a class, they want to shake off the monopoly capitalists in order to stabilize and secure their own place in the capitalist system.

We can only lead the united front by persuasion and by example, and we must do our best to do so. To give up leadership would be disastrous. The working class, while seeking broad unity, cannot follow the lead of these other class forces or submit its own class interests to theirs. We can struggle for leadership in a way that prioritizes unity, without giving up our independence and initiative within the united front. Ultimately, only the class-conscious proletariat can lead the revolution towards the construction of socialism and the elimination of exploitation and oppression.

Let’s look more closely at what this looks like in practice. As we’ve discussed previously, the masses are the makers of history, and the correct method of leadership is “from the masses to the masses.” We need to unite broadly with the masses, using Marxism-Leninism to concentrate the felt needs and immediate demands of the masses and focus them towards the long term goal of revolution. We need to rely on the advanced activists in the mass movements to mobilize the broad intermediate, and to win over or isolate the backwards. This is the mass line, and it is how we must conduct our work in the united front. This is true in the current period when our work is legal and above ground, and it would likewise be true if conditions changed, and our work was outlawed and forced underground.

Practically, it plays out something like this: Different classes and strata within the masses come together based on their own class interests, and the advanced within them put forward demands, such as, for example, money for people's needs at home rather than for war abroad. Some mass organizations will be formed spontaneously, while others must be initiated based on the needs of the moment. In either case, the mass organizations formed around these fights will draw in activists from different classes affected by this issue. Our job as communists is to unite everyone who can be united and direct them towards confronting the monopoly capitalists that are the cause of the problem.

We will do everything we can to win all that can be won for the people while striking blows against the enemy. And in the course of that struggle we will make every effort to build consciousness and organization. By drawing in the broad intermediate we can build the mass organizations of the united front. Simultaneously, we can make gains towards building the communist party by winning the advanced to Marxism-Leninism.

The struggle for socialism in the United States will be a protracted struggle, and we must unite broadly with all of the allies we can find. Monopoly capitalism is a system that exploits and oppresses millions of people here and around the world. Therefore, it creates the conditions for us to build the broad unity we need to defeat it.

#UnitedStates #PeoplesStruggles #monopolyCapitalism #MLTheory #redTheory #unitedFront

Marxism-Leninism is the science of revolution. The purpose of revolutionary theory is to guide revolutionary practice. Nevertheless, since Marxism was young, there have always been opportunists and revisionists who tried to distort its revolutionary essence. The leading edge of this attack on Marxism – from the misleaders of the Second International, Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky in the early 1900s, to Khrushchev’s modern revisionism, beginning with the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1956 – has been the advocacy of a peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism.

Can the bourgeois state be reformed and led peacefully towards socialism? What is there to learn from past attempts? Even as recently as Bernie Sanders’ campaigns for the presidency, we saw the ruling class unite to deny the possibility of a Sanders candidacy. Even his mild, social democratic reforms were too much for the U.S. monopoly capitalist class.

As Lenin said, and history has proven, “Never…will the exploiters submit to the decision of the exploited majority without trying to make use of their advantages in a last desperate battle, or series of battles.” Just look at the revolutionary movements of the past: for example, the U.S. aerial bombing of the coal miners of Blair Mountain in West Virginia in 1921, or, more recently, the FBI and police repression of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s and 70s, and the jailing and murder of its leaders like Fred Hampton. Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., in spite of his firm commitment to non-violence, was assassinated. All of these movements were met with counter-revolutionary violence.

Summing up the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871, Marx said, “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” Instead, it must be smashed, and this is especially true of its military, the force that maintains the power of the ruling class. This is why Marx said that “under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.” Gun control leaves working and oppressed people defenseless.

Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto, “communists disdain to hide their views and aims.” Revolutionaries must always be honest and clear. Nobody wants war or violence, but the reality is that history has never moved forward without it. The bourgeoisie knows this. They’ve enshrined revolutionary violence in their founding documents. The U.S. Declaration of Independence even calls it a “right” and a “duty.” And to this day, the monopoly capitalists maintain their class dictatorship with violence against working and oppressed people through their police and military. But for them, it is violence for the sake of capital and profit.

Lenin wrote in The State and Revolution, “The supersession of the bourgeois state by the proletarian state is impossible without a violent revolution.” Unfortunately, many communist parties, especially during and after the Second World War, became confused on this question. They came to believe that a desire for peaceful coexistence between capitalist and socialist countries likewise meant the possibility of a peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism. In 1944, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) leader Earl Browder took the wartime alliance between the U.S. and the Soviets against Hitler so far as to liquidate the party entirely. This was resisted by the international communist movement as a whole, and the party was restored. But this wasn’t the first such error for the CPUSA, and it wouldn’t be the last. Even prior to Browder, the CPUSA had already been criticized by Stalin and the Communist International in 1927 for the “American exceptionalism” of Jay Lovestone, who argued that America wasn’t subject to the laws of history, including the need for revolution.

According to the outstanding African American Marxist-Leninist theorist and revolutionary leader, Harry Haywood, “it was right opportunism, this time expressed largely in the slogan of ‘peaceful, parliamentary and constitutional transition to socialism’ which plunged the Party into its third and fatal crisis.” This was in 1957. Haywood writes that “The Sixteenth Party Convention was a fateful turning point in our Party’s history—the point from which the Party turned inevitably and unalterably down the road to revisionism, the point from which the task of building a new anti-revisionist communist party became the primary task of Marxist-Leninists.”

In the late 1950s many parties, especially in Europe and the United States, were following Khrushchev’s lead in advocating for peaceful transition to socialism. The Communist Party of China (CPC) intervened in 1957 with the article, “Outline of Views on the Question of Peaceful Transition.” There, the CPC said, “If too much stress is laid on the possibility of peaceful transition, and especially on the possibility of seizing state power by winning a majority in parliament it is liable to weaken the revolutionary will of the proletariat, the working people and the Communist Party and disarm them ideologically.”

Later, in 1963, in one of the most important documents of the Great Debate between the CPC and the CPSU, The Proletarian Revolution and Khrushchev’s Revisionism, the CPC wrote, “The proletariat would, of course, prefer to gain power by peaceful means. But abundant historical evidence indicates that the reactionary classes never give up power voluntarily and that they are always the first to use violence to repress the revolutionary mass movement and to provoke civil war, thus placing armed struggle on the agenda.” Everyone knows this is true. But the advocates of peaceful transition would leave the masses unprepared for such an eventuality, instead feeding the working class a pipe dream of a peaceful, electoral, and constitutional road to socialism. For the socialist revolution to be successful, the working class requires what Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communists called the “three magic weapons” of the revolution: the party, the armed struggle, and the united front.

Of course, to deny the possibility of peaceful transition shouldn’t be taken to mean that the immediate task is the revolutionary overthrow of the monopoly capitalist class. A revolutionary struggle is a struggle of the masses in their millions. It requires objective and subjective conditions to be successful. Objectively, the economic crisis must bring about a political crisis, where working and oppressed people can no longer live in the old way, and the ruling class can no longer rule in the old way. On the subjective side, the proletariat must be class-conscious and organized, and must have a Marxist-Leninist Party capable of serving as the advanced detachment and revolutionary general staff of the class.

Revolution is a protracted struggle and the tactics that struggle uses depend upon time, place and conditions. Currently, the material conditions of a revolution do not yet exist. There is no revolutionary economic and political crisis, the working class has a relatively low level of class consciousness and is disorganized, and there is no vanguard, Marxist-Leninist party. We must therefore proceed step by step. At this stage and under these conditions, the main work of revolutionaries is mass organizing, prioritizing party building and the united front against monopoly capitalism. The present aim must be raising the level of consciousness and organization of the working class. We must engage with the masses around immediate demands for basic reforms, better wages, ending police violence, stopping imperialist war and intervention, and so on, to strike blows against the enemy and win all that can be won for the people. We can and should even engage with bourgeois elections – not with any reformist aims, but with the aim of affecting and optimizing the conditions of struggle. Our tactics must keep pace with where the masses are at, politically, and seek to move them forward. The long term goal in the midst of the day-to-day struggle is to prepare the working class and oppressed nationalities to be able to seize the time when such a revolutionary crisis arises.

Communists must be forward looking. Even now, when revolutionary struggle is not an immediate task and we are in a period of generally legal mass organizing, communists should study the strategy, tactics and experience of past and present revolutions around the world in light of our own particular conditions.

In the last analysis, a revolution is the highest form of class struggle, a life or death struggle between the exploiting class and the masses of working and oppressed people. It is, as Mao Zedong said, “an act of violence where one class overthrows another.”

From the October Revolution in 1917 that established the world’s first socialist state, to today – wherever the working class has taken power we have done so through revolutionary means. To recognize this fact isn’t to seek out violence. Truly, communists want peace, and abhor violence. It is a matter of facing facts. It is merely to have an objective, materialist, and scientific view of the role of force in history. The monopoly capitalist class backs up their rule with force – they will use force to maintain their rule. And for our part, the working class will never be able to gain any power that they are not organized and prepared to take.

#UnitedStates #MarxismLeninism #MLTheory #redTheory

The central point of the Marxist-Leninist understanding of the state is that it is always and everywhere the product of antagonistic class contradictions. It arose from such contradictions, and as long as classes exist, so too will the state. Marx and Engels were the first to understand the state in this way, and it was Engels, in his book The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, who did the most to develop the materialist understanding of how and why and the state arises in human history.

The state arises historically due to material conditions in society, namely due to the development of classes with opposing class interests. Engels says, “But in order that these antagonisms, these classes with conflicting economic interests, might not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, it became necessary to have a power, seemingly standing above society, that would alleviate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of ‘order’; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state.”

Engels goes on to explain that the state not only arises in order to hold class antagonism in check but arises out of those class struggles themselves. This means that the state is controlled by the class that makes up the principal, or dominant, aspect of that contradiction. “Because the state arose from the need to hold class antagonisms in check,” writes Engels, “but because it arose, at the same time, in the midst of the conflict of these classes, it is, as a rule, the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class, which, through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class, and thus acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class.”

In our earlier article on the superstructure, we looked at how the political and legal institutions, along with repressive apparatuses of the police and military, arise from the economic base of society, in order to reproduce and reinforce the economic base. The state is the legal system and the political institutions of the dominant class, and it is also the “special bodies of armed men” who defend the interests of that class. When Mao Zedong said that “political power grows from the barrel of a gun,” he meant precisely the ability of a class to take and hold state power. In the case of the capitalist class, the guns that enforce their political power are in the hands of the military and the police, who wage war on working and oppressed people at home and abroad on their behalf.

Basically, every state is a dictatorship of one class. The ancient slave societies, even the ancient “democracies,” were dictatorships of slaver owners over slaves. The feudal kingdoms and principalities were dictatorships of the landlords over the peasants. And modern bourgeois democracy is the dictatorship of the capitalist class over the working class. Each of these historic states is a product in the superstructure of the fundamental contradiction between the forces and relations of production within the base.

How does a supposedly “democratic” capitalist state exercise its class dictatorship? When the United States was founded, it was very clear who the state existed for. The only people who could vote were wealthy, white, male landowners. The struggle of working and oppressed people, including armed struggle, such as in the Civil War to abolish chattel slavery, extended the democratic rights once held by this small group to larger and larger sections of the population. But even then, the capitalist class maintains its monopoly on economic and political power. With its money it controls not only the economy, but the press, the government, and the police and military as well.

If the failure of Bernie Sanders' bids for the Democratic Party presidential nomination tells us anything, it is that the capitalist state is designed from top to bottom to serve the interests of the rich and resist any fundamental change in that status quo. We can look at Chile in 1973 as another good example of this. Even though Salvador Allende was able to come to power through the democratic structures of the bourgeois state, he was unable to retain that power. The capitalist class maintained their control of enough of the military to overthrow Allende in a bloody, U.S.-backed coup.

According to Lenin in The State and Revolution, “The supersession of the bourgeois state by the proletarian state is impossible without a violent revolution. The abolition of the proletarian state, i.e., of the state in general, is impossible except through the process of ‘withering away’.” What does this mean? This is an important point. If the state is the product of class antagonism, and arises from those class antagonisms, then so long as class antagonism exists, so too will the state. The only way to get rid of the state is to get rid of class antagonism all together. A revolutionary struggle to smash the capitalist state is necessary, but the only way to abolish the state as such is to abolish classes altogether.

The bourgeois state cannot be democratically reformed. The “democratic” institutions of that state exist in the service of the ruling class. It must be smashed outright and replaced by the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. The dictatorship of the proletariat has a number of interrelated tasks. First, it must oppress the overthrown bourgeoisie and their agents who want to restore the old order. It likewise must defend itself from hostile imperialist powers who want to dominate and control it. Second, it must construct socialism, a society based on the progressive elimination of all class antagonism. As Lenin says, the goal of socialism is communism. Once internal class antagonism has been done away with, and the external threat of imperialist war and intervention no longer exists, the socialist state will “wither away,” since the material forces that necessitate and give rise to it no longer exist to reproduce and reinforce it. The step-by-step, planned and organized transformation of class society into a classless society, coupled with the tenacity of imperialism, cause this to be a slow, protracted process.

The state cannot be abolished in one blow, as the anarchists would have it. Neither can the institutions of its rule, such as the military and the police. The apparatuses of the state arise necessarily from class antagonism, which cannot be uprooted overnight. Even if we managed somehow to abolish the police, for example, without abolishing the capitalist ruling class itself, then the capitalists would simply replace them with privatized police, which would essentially function as extrajudicial death squads. There are no shortcuts here. The entire state apparatus of the capitalists must be smashed, the expropriators must be expropriated, and the working class must have the power of its own state in order to systematically uproot class exploitation and oppression once and for all.

To sum up, the Leninist theory of the state is that it is a product of class antagonism. The superstructure arises from and enforces the material base of society. This means that the state, as the product of class antagonism, serves to reinforce and reproduce the class antagonism that gave rise to it, so that the exploiting class in power can conduct its exploitative business as smoothly as possible. But the proletariat has the distinction of being the first class in history that doesn’t exploit any other class. This means that the proletarian state has a historic mission that no state before it could achieve. The goal of the proletarian state is not to maintain itself at the expense of other classes, but to get rid of class antagonism, exploitation and oppression altogether, thus creating the material conditions needed to wither away.

#UnitedStates #MarxismLeninism #MLTheory #redTheory

In order to have a successful revolution that can overthrow the capitalist ruling class, put the working class into power, and build socialism, we need to be organized in the way that is best suited to that task. The great leader of the Bolshevik revolution, V.I. Lenin, took up this question of Marxist revolutionary organization in 1902 in his book, What is to be Done? In this book, Lenin for the first time gives us the theory of the “Party of a new type.”

In this early period of the revolutionary movement in Russia, much like in the U.S. today, there were many groups and organizations contending for leadership of the working-class movement. No organization had been able to assume leadership and merge itself with the advanced fighters of the entire workers’ movement. But Lenin saw this as the critical task of the day. He saw the need for the workers to form a party, but not a party of the old type, that based itself on contesting parliamentary elections, but a new type of party that could lead a revolutionary, life-or-death battle against the ruling class.

One such group was known as the “Economists,” because they argued that the working class should limit itself to the economic struggle, leaving aside the political struggle. They argued that the working class would organize itself and its economic battles spontaneously, without conscious leadership. Lenin, on the other hand, argued that the working class must engage with politics outside of their immediate economic struggle, and that they could not achieve emancipation from economic exploitation without a political struggle against tsarism. Lenin also argued that the Economists tailed behind the spontaneity of the masses, leaving the working class unarmed against an enemy that was armed to the teeth. He argued that without fusing socialist consciousness and Marxist theory with the workers’ movement, the working class would be groping blindly in the dark. All in all, Lenin summed up the Economists as propagating a reformist trend in the workers’ movement and as being opposed to revolution.

In the process of the struggle against the Economists, Lenin explained what features were necessary for a revolutionary party. Stalin, in his Foundations of Leninism, lists six distinguishing features of this new, Leninist type of party.

First, the party must be the advanced detachment of the working class. This means that the party must be large enough that it comes to contain the best leaders of the entire workers’ movement. By merging itself with the most advanced leaders of the workers’ movement, the party fuses Marxist-Leninist theory with the working class. The party is therefore the political leader of the class, and its general staff. In this way, the party can use what Mao Zedong would later refer to as the “Mass Line” to lead revolutionary struggle, uniting with the advanced fighters in order to mobilize the broad intermediate and win over or isolate the backward elements. It does this by taking up the immediate demands of the masses, using Marxist theory to analyze the contradictions at work, and then bringing that back to the masses in a concentrated, strategic, and revolutionary form. With the mass line, the party and the masses together can win all that can be won in these struggles, while further developing consciousness and building revolutionary organization.

Second, the party must be the organized detachment of the working class. This means not everyone is in the party, and one cannot simply declare oneself a member. The members must be organized and disciplined. This means the party is organized according to “democratic centralism.” This means that the party is democratically organized, but centrally guided. Lower bodies, in which all members must participate, must submit to higher bodies. The members of the party, while able to debate the party’s general line and determine it democratically, must carry out that line once it is decided. Criticism and self-criticism must be practiced by all of the party cadres at all levels to overcome shortcomings.

Third, the party must be the highest form of class organization of the working class. The party is one of the organizations of the working class, but not the only one. These other organizations include trade unions, mass organizations, civic and cultural groups, and other parts of the broad united front against monopoly capitalism. These are organizations with a broad base of unity organized around immediate demands, particular tasks, campaigns and struggles. They require less discipline and less unity to participate in than the party itself, and can therefore include a much broader section of the masses. But the party must strive to give leadership to all of these groups, by means of persuasion and by example, so that the revolution can move forward in a strategic and unified way.

Fourth, the party must be an instrument of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Every state is a dictatorship of one class over the other. Capitalist society is a democracy for the rich, and dictatorship for the rest of us. It is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Socialist society will be true democracy for the working and oppressed masses, orders of magnitude more democratic than the capitalist “democracies,” but it will also exercise dictatorship against the defeated bourgeoisie and their agents who want to restore capitalism. The party must be an instrument both for overthrowing the bourgeoisie and for keeping them from organizing counter-revolution, and for maintaining and expanding the dictatorship of the proletariat. As Stalin puts it, this means

“imbuing the millions of proletarians with the spirit of discipline and organization; it means creating among the proletarian masses a cementing force and a bulwark against the corrosive influence of the petty-bourgeois elemental forces and petty-bourgeois habits; it means enhancing the organizing work of the proletarians in re-educating and remolding the petty-bourgeois strata; it means helping the masses of the proletarians to educate themselves as a force capable of abolishing classes and of preparing the conditions for the organization of socialist production. But it is impossible to accomplish all this without a party which is strong by reason of its solidarity and discipline.”

Fifth, the party must embody unity of will. In other words, factionalism goes against the purpose of the party. Once a decision is reached and democratically agreed upon, the cadres of the party must do their best to carry it out to the fullest. The minority submits to the majority.

Sixth, and finally, the party must strengthen itself by purging itself of opportunist elements. Factionalism forms out of opportunism. This doesn’t mean people cannot disagree, but those who would form factions, break the unity of the will of the party, shamelessly break its discipline, or act as enemy agents, thereby hindering it from carrying on with its work, have to be removed from the ranks of the party membership for it to be able to act effectively.

Lenin drafted the “Theses on the Organisational Structure of the Communist Parties and the Methods and Content of their Work,” which were adopted at the 3rd Congress of the Communist International in 1921. These theses further elaborated the function and tasks of the Marxist-Leninist party and deserve careful study.

As Mao Zedong once put it, “If there is to be revolution, there must be a revolutionary party.” Today, there is no party like this in the United States, no revolutionary vanguard, no advanced, organized detachment and general staff of the proletariat. The Communist Party USA, despite its many great achievements and proud history, had entirely abandoned its role as revolutionary vanguard by the end of the 1950s. It is up to the Marxist-Leninists in this country to build a new communist party. The FRSO Program goes into depth on this task and its importance:

“In our view, it is the central task of revolutionaries to create a new communist party – a political party that is serious about revolution in this country. Such a party cannot be proclaimed or declared into being. It will be the product of bringing together or fusing Marxism with the workers movement. In a practical sense this means that a substantial section of the activists, organizers, and leaders need to take up the science of revolution, Marxism-Leninism, in order to build a communist party that is, in fact, the advanced and organized detachment of the multi-national working class. This process will be the result of an organized effort, and it cannot come about spontaneously.”

Essential to this task is building the united front against monopoly capitalism, with the strategic alliance of the workers’ movement and the oppressed nationalities at its core.

Contradictions are sharpening every day, and the world cries out for things to be done. U.S. imperialism is in decline, and its laws of motion will push it into deeper and deeper crises. This will create the objective conditions necessary for revolution in this country. But in order to seize the time, subjective conditions are also necessary: we must have the organization that is required to contend for power. We must build it.

#UnitedStates #MarxismLeninism #MLTheory #redTheory

In the previous two articles in this series, we’ve discussed imperialism, or monopoly capitalism, which Lenin called “the last stage of capitalism.” We explained how imperialism and monopoly capitalism are synonymous, the laws of motion inherent in capitalism that lead to imperialism, how imperialism means war, and how imperialism has affected the national question. In our last article, we talked about how and why the contradiction between imperialism and the national liberation movements is the principal contradiction on a world scale.

In 1916, Lenin wrote, “Imperialism, as the highest stage of capitalism in America and Europe, and later in Asia, took final shape in the period 1898–1914. The Spanish-American War (1898), the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05) and the economic crisis in Europe in 1900 are the chief historical landmarks in the new era of world history.”

But imperialism was met everywhere with the resistance of the colonized peoples. In some places, it was thrown off by national liberation movements that won liberation. Where the proletariat has taken power, like in Vietnam, Cuba or China, for example, they have consolidated the gains of their liberation and built socialism. In other countries they have met with challenges to maintain an independent course, as the imperialists have tried to find other ways to keep those countries under their yoke. Why?

In his 1965 book, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, Kwame Nkrumah writes, “Once a territory has become nominally independent it is no longer possible, as it was in the last century, to reverse the process. Existing colonies may linger on, but no new colonies will be created. In place of colonialism as the main instrument of imperialism we have today neo-colonialism.”

Nkrumah defines neo-colonialism like this: “The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.”

The Chinese Communist Party put it this way in the 1963 article “Apologists for Neo-Colonialism”:

“The facts are clear. After World War II the imperialists have certainly not given up colonialism, but have merely adopted a new form, neo-colonialism. An important characteristic of such neo-colonialism is that the imperialists have been forced to change their old style of direct colonial rule in some areas and to adopt a new style of colonial rule and exploitation by relying on the agents they have selected and trained. The imperialists headed by the United States enslave or control the colonial countries and countries which have already declared their independence by organizing military blocs, setting up military bases, establishing “federations” or “communities”, and fostering puppet regimes. By means of economic “aid” or other forms, they retain these countries as markets for their goods, sources of raw material and outlets for their export of capital, plunder the riches and suck the blood of the people of these countries. Moreover, they use the United Nations as an important tool for interfering in the internal affairs of such countries and for subjecting them to military, economic and cultural aggression. When they are unable to continue their rule over these countries by “peaceful” means, they engineer military coups d’etat, carry out subversion or even resort to direct armed intervention and aggression.”

Another term for this is semi-colonialism, but the meaning is the same. The term, “semi-colonialism,” comes from the Communist International (Comintern), which categorized countries as imperialist, colonial, and semi-colonial, and gave different guidance regarding revolutionary strategy based on that categorization. Typically, a semi-colonial country is characterized by large peasantry, a relatively small proletariat, a significant landlord class, a national bourgeoisie, and a comprador bourgeoisie. The semi-colony is “independent,” formally, but remains dominated by the imperialists in a number of ways.

According to Nkrumah,

“The methods and form of this direction can take various shapes. For example, in an extreme case the troops of the imperial power may garrison the territory of the neo-colonial State and control the government of it. More often, however, neo-colonialist control is exercised through economic or monetary means. The neo-colonial State may be obliged to take the manufactured products of the imperialist power to the exclusion of competing products from elsewhere. Control over government policy in the neo-colonial State may be secured by payments towards the cost of running the State, by the provision of civil servants in positions where they can dictate policy, and by monetary control over foreign exchange through the imposition of a banking system controlled by the imperial power.”

Most recently we’ve seen this in the form of loans from the imperialist powers, often through an institution like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the World Bank. These loans have heavy strings attached, in the form of imposing Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP) upon the recipient as a condition of the loan. These SAPs impose privatization of industry and natural resources, opening them up to foreign capital. They also impose austerity programs, cutting wages and increasing taxes upon the people of the neo-colonial state. The economy is all around liberalized, the legal system made more favorable to capital and more hostile to labor, and all barriers to its super-exploitation by foreign finance capital are removed.

Imperialist trade agreements like the North American and Central American Free Trade Agreements (NAFTA and CAFTA) impose “free trade zones” to make it easier for U.S. companies to overpower the economies of Mexico and Central America. The domestic comprador bourgeoisie directly benefits, lining their own pockets as the bought-and-paid-for representatives of foreign capital in these countries.

Often military aid will also be an element of neo-colonialism, as the imperial power uses the military of the neo-colonial country, funded, armed and trained by the imperialists, to carry out proxy wars and counter-insurgency on its behalf. The United States alone has almost 800 military bases spread over 80 countries throughout the world. Through these regional proxies, like Israel or Ukraine, and through the domination of the NATO military alliance, the U.S. can extend its geopolitical hegemony even further.

All the money pumped into the neo-colonial government not only serves to open those countries up for super-exploitation by the imperialists, but also serves as an outlet for the export of capital by the monopoly capitalists. Nkrumah puts it well when he says, “The result of neo-colonialism is that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world. Investment under neo-colonialism increases rather than decreases the gap between the rich and the poor countries of the world.”

And of course, a government that is unwilling to submit to this control, or that steps out of line, or elects a government unfriendly to the imperialists, faces the very real and constant threat of coups, military intervention, and other forms of regime change.

In some cases, the imperialists have granted de facto independence as a concession to a liberation struggle, only to transition the newly formed government into neo-colonial domination. In other cases, one imperialist power may encourage and aid an independence movement in order to pull a colony away from the orbit of another imperialist rival, only to dominate the newly independent government as a neo-colony.

Take for example the Philippines. In Philippine Society and Revolution, Jose Maria Sison argues,

“Though the reactionaries claim that the Philippines is already independent, it is not in fact completely so … The truth is that U.S. imperialism persists in violating the national sovereignty of the Filipino people and in strangulating Philippine independence. Before and after the grant of nominal independence, U.S. imperialism made sure that it would continue to control the Philippine economy, politics, culture, military and foreign relations. It has extorted unequal treaties and one-sided privileges that transgress the national sovereignty, territorial integrity and national patrimony of the Filipino people. U.S. imperialism continues to arrogate unto itself the privilege of giving armed protection to the local exploiting classes. Though there is now the illusion that the present government is self-determining, its basic policies and the election and appointment of its highest officials are mainly determined by U.S. imperialism. The clearest evidence that the Philippines is still a colony of the United States consists of economic enclaves lorded over by U.S. enterprises and also of huge U.S. military bases. These colonial enclaves can be removed only by means of an armed national revolution to assert Philippine independence.”

We see in the socialist countries something different. Because working and oppressed people are in power in those countries, instead of the bourgeoisie, they have, by and large, successfully resisted attempts by the imperialists to reassert their dominance. In some cases, the imperialists were able to orchestrate counter-revolutions and coups, sometimes with the help of opportunists and revisionists within the socialist government. In those cases, those countries have been met with balkanization, “shock therapy,” and terrible declines in their living standards. But in the case of Cuba, Vietnam, China, Laos, and the DPRK, imperialism has failed to regain control. Because the working class controls the commanding heights of the socialist economies of these countries and operates them in a planned way to benefit the people first and foremost, they have been able to develop their productive forces, expand their economies and improve the conditions of their people, while defending themselves from both foreign intervention and economic blackmail from the imperialist powers.

The move from formal independence to neo-colonialism in any country is a setback for people of the whole world whenever and wherever it occurs. But the absolute and irreconcilable antagonism at the root of the entire imperialist system cannot be papered over by the imperialists and their puppets. Imperialism is a system in decline. The working class here in the United States is becoming more conscious and organized. The socialist countries are on the rise. The national liberation movements are growing in strength, from the Philippines and the Middle East to Latin America.

As the Communist Party of China said in 1963, “However hard the imperialists disguise their intentions and bestir themselves, however hard their apologists whitewash and help neo-colonialism, imperialism and colonialism cannot escape their doom. The victory of the national liberation revolution is irresistible.”

#UnitedStates #MarxismLeninism #MLTheory #redTheory

Imperialism means monopoly capitalism, but it brings along with it war and national oppression. Because of the peculiar dynamics of imperialism in the era of proletarian revolution, the national question takes on a particular importance, and, concretely, must be understood and dealt with practically in ways that differ from the pre-imperialist period of competitive capitalism.

What do we mean by the “national question” and why is this important? Essentially, Marxist-Leninists, when referring to the national question, are referring to the analysis of the problems posed to the revolutionary movement by the materialist process by which nations form and develop, and the role that plays in revolutionary change.

The Second International failed the test posed by the national question. Founded under the guidance of Marx’s collaborator, Friedrich Engels, the Second International helped to lead the international workers movement at the turn of the 20th century, from 1889 to 1916. But after Engels’s death in 1895, the leaders of the Second International found that they were not up to the task, and unable to grapple with the problems posed to the workers’ movement by the rise of imperialism, and their analysis and leadership gave way to revisionism and opportunism.

To Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein, who came to dominate the Second International, socialism was something for Europeans, while imperialism was expected to develop the productive forces of the colonies. This opportunist and social-chauvinist position was correctly condemned by Lenin and was a primary reason for the break with the Second International and the formation of the Third, Communist International.

The opportunists of the Second International committed two errors regarding imperialism and the national question. First, they believed that imperialism would lead to peace and development among nations and lay the groundwork for a peaceful transition to socialism. Kautsky called this ultra-imperialism, where all the imperialist powers would merge under one global economic interest. This led them to their second error, which was to fail to grasp how imperialism changed the nature of the national question itself.

There are two periods in the development of the national question. In the earlier, pre-imperialist period of capitalism, nations were formed through bourgeois-democratic revolutions out of the remnants of feudalism. This is the way the nations of western Europe came into being. In Marxism and the National Question, Stalin outlined the definition by which Marxist-Leninists would from then on understand what a nation is: a stable community of people formed on the basis of a common territory, language, economic life, and psychological makeup, manifested in a common culture. The revolutionary class at the forefront of the formation of these nations in this first period was the bourgeoisie.

In the second period of the development of the national question, the era of imperialism and proletarian revolution, the national question becomes a national-colonial question. Imperialism develops unevenly, and the imperialist powers, having grabbed up as much of the world as they can, freeze the oppressed nations into a semi-feudal state. The aspects of nationhood are not free to develop on their own, as they are oppressed by the imperialists. Their common territory is plundered and occupied, marred by artificially imposed boundaries. Their language is suppressed, their economic life stunted, and their culture stolen and trampled upon.

Because imperialism means that the world is divided up among the imperialist powers, then the question of bourgeois-democratic revolutions is taken off the table for the colonized people. The national liberation struggle thus often begins as a national-democratic revolution, uniting the broad masses with the national bourgeoisie against the imperialists and their domestic agents, the comprador class. But unless it proceeds to the stage of proletarian-socialist revolution, the national bourgeoisie will almost certainly be bought off to replace the pro-imperialist compradors. In this way nominal independence, short of socialist revolution, has been met with semi-colonialism, or neo-colonialism, and the monopoly capitalists continue to assert their control through economic pressure, and by installing and propping up pro-imperialist governments.

Thus, in this second period of the development of the national question, imperialism limits the possibility of a bourgeois-led, democratic revolution, and the national question becomes solvable within the context of, and as a part of, the proletarian revolution. The revolutionary class at the forefront of the formation of the national liberation struggles in this second period must therefore be the proletariat of the oppressed nation, in alliance with the broad anti-imperialist classes.

Stalin, in his work Foundations of Leninism, addressed the issue of opposing national oppression and the fight for socialism:

“Leninism has proved, and the imperialist war and the revolution in Russia has confirmed, that 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.”

We see then that there are two tendencies regarding the national question at work under imperialism. On the one hand, imperialism seeks to unite vast territories under its control, for the purposes of the super-exploitation of their lands, peoples and resources, and for the export of capital in the form of factories, infrastructure, military aid and predatory loans. However, imperialism can only accomplish this by way of violence and oppression. This gives rise to the second tendency, which is expressed in the struggle of the oppressed nations to liberate themselves from imperialism. Under imperialism, these two tendencies are utterly irreconcilable, and in fact, this antagonistic contradiction between imperialism and the oppressed nations makes up the principal contradiction on a world scale.

Because the monopoly capitalist class is not only the exploiter of the working class, but also responsible for the oppression of these nations, the role of communists is to unite the working-class struggle for socialism with the anti-imperialist national liberation movements. The working class and the national liberation struggles are natural allies, bound together by a common enemy. Every blow by the workers against the monopoly capitalist class is a blow against the architects of national oppression, and every victory for the anti-imperialist liberation struggles likewise weakens the monopoly capitalist class.

Thus, communists in the United States must support the anti-imperialist liberation movements of oppressed nations, be they in Palestine, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, the Chicano nation in the Southwest, or the African American nation in the Black Belt South. This means raising the demand for self-determination, meaning the right for the oppressed nation to determine its future as a nation, including the right to separate and form an independent state in its national territory.

Some have argued that advocating for self-determination would lead to the formation of small and weak states, therefore helping imperialism automatically. However, Lenin argued that the purpose of self-determination was not to divide peoples, but to be able to unite freely, without compulsion. Lenin compared this to the right to divorce, as the basis of a freely chosen union.

It must be stated that the concrete analysis of concrete conditions, as always, must be taken into account, and the demand for self-determination, like any democratic demand, should be judged according to whether or not it ultimately helps or hinders imperialism.

The fight against national oppression, including the recognition of the right of self-determination, is the foundation on which the strategic alliance between the multinational working class and the oppressed nationalities is built. In the current era, that strategic alliance is absolutely indispensable. Nothing can be accomplished without it.

#UnitedStates #MarxismLeninism #MLTheory #redTheory

Now that we’ve spent some time looking at the basic concepts of Marx’s critique of political economy, let’s move on to Lenin’s analysis of imperialism. Toward the end of the 1800s, the internal laws of motion of capitalism caused it to enter a new and final stage in its development – monopoly capitalism. In the essay “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism,” Lenin defines it like this:

“Imperialism is a specific historical stage of capitalism. Its specific character is threefold: imperialism is monopoly capitalism; parasitic, or decaying capitalism; moribund capitalism. The supplanting of free competition by monopoly is the fundamental economic feature, the quintessence of imperialism. Monopoly manifests itself in five principal forms: (1) cartels, syndicates and trusts—the concentration of production has reached a degree which gives rise to these monopolistic associations of capitalists; (2) the monopolistic position of the big banks—three, four or five giant banks manipulate the whole economic life of America, France, Germany; (3) seizure of the sources of raw material by the trusts and the financial oligarchy (finance capital is monopoly industrial capital merged with bank capital); (4) the (economic) partition of the world by the international cartels has begun. There are already over one hundred such international cartels, which command the entire world market and divide it “amicably” among themselves—until war redivides it. The export of capital, as distinct from the export of commodities under non-monopoly capitalism, is a highly characteristic phenomenon and is closely linked with the economic and territorial-political partition of the world; (5) the territorial partition of the world (colonies) is completed.”

Lenin goes on to point out, “Imperialism, as the highest stage of capitalism in America and Europe, and later in Asia, took final shape in the period 1898–1914. The Spanish-American War (1898), the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05) and the economic crisis in Europe in 1900 are the chief historical landmarks in the new era of world history.”

It is important to stress that, as Marxist-Leninists understand it, imperialism and monopoly capitalism are identical. You can’t have one without the other.

In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx writes that monopoly arises dialectically from competition. Marx argued that, by the process of capitalism’s own internal laws of motion, capital becomes more and more centralized, more and more concentrated, into the hands of fewer and fewer capitalists. But it was Lenin who saw the practical results of this process and properly understood the relationship between imperialism and the proletarian revolution.

Every modern industry is currently dominated by only a handful of monopolistic companies. The big banks have become intertwined with industry, creating finance capital and with it a financial oligarchy. They exploit workers both at home and abroad. These financial oligarchs have come to dominate bourgeois states, using their money to manipulate the media and buy politicians, and thereby use the imperialist military to partition and repartition the world according to their own economic interests. This has led to two world wars for the sake of the imperialist re-division of the world.

A main feature of imperialism is national and colonial oppression. We’ll go into more detail on this later, but for now, it is important to understand that national oppression is a product of monopoly capitalism. Seeking relief from the chronic crises of capitalism, the monopoly capitalists seek to dominate markets and export capital around the globe. They rob and pillage from the so-called Third World and bring the spoils of super-profits back home. This process locks down and enforces semi-colonial and semi-feudal relations in those countries, stunting their development. U.S. imperialism lives parasitically on the oppression of whole nations and peoples. The U.S. holds colonies in the Caribbean like Puerto Rico and the Pacific such as Guam and the Marshall Islands. Within its own borders, imperialism likewise uses national oppression to dominate the Hawaiian nation, the Chicano nation in the Southwest, and the African American nation in the Black Belt in the South.

By the end of World War II, the United States arose as the dominant imperialist power. However, it has since racked up a series of military defeats against the rising national liberation struggles, notably Vietnam in the 1970s, which marked the beginning of U.S. imperialism’s decline. The rise of the socialist countries contributed greatly to that decline. And while the U.S. currently stands at the forefront of the imperialist powers, inter-imperialist rivalry still exists, and other imperialist blocs, such as the European Union and Japan, also seek to dominate world markets.

Currently, however, the principal contradiction on the world scale is the contradiction between imperialism on the one hand and the movements for national liberation on the other. It is the anti-imperialist struggles of the masses of the oppressed nations that are the major force against imperialism today.

Wars of national liberation that weaken imperialism are progressive. As Stalin said in Foundations of Leninism, “The struggle that the Emir of Afghanistan is waging for the independence of Afghanistan is objectively a revolutionary struggle, despite the monarchist views of the Emir and his associates, for it weakens, disintegrates and undermines imperialism.” Revolutionaries in imperialist countries should be what Lenin called “revolutionary defeatists,” opposing and seeking the defeat of their own countries in imperialist wars.

Modern imperialism has a lot of tools at its disposal. It relies upon and maintains a massive web of military bases and military alliances such as NATO, imposes sanctions, and resorts to economic coercion and blackmail through institutions like the IMF, WTO and World Bank. It uses direct military intervention and instigates coups for the purposes of destabilization and regime change, or pours billions of dollars into proxy wars through states like Israel and Ukraine. Because it is in decline, it grows more belligerent and desperately looks for any way it can to shift the balance of power back into its favor.

Marxist-Leninists analyze imperialism because we want to put that analysis to work. We need to understand who our friends and enemies are, and we need to understand how and why our enemies do what they do so that we can act most effectively to bring the imperialist monster of slaughter and plunder down once and for all.

#UnitedStates #MarxismLeninism #MLTheory #redTheory

It is a fact of historical materialism that the development of the productive forces reduces the amount of labor required by production. As technology and techniques improve, the amount of work required to meet human needs is reduced. This should be a fact that liberates humanity from toil, freeing us to pursue our interests, hobbies, goals of self-development, and so on.

But that’s not what has happened, and there is a material reason why that hasn’t happened. In fact, under capitalism, it cannot happen. The capitalist relations of production – the relations of class, division of labor and ownership – stand in the way of that. Because the means of production are concentrated in the hands of a small group who get rich at the expense of those who do the work, expropriating for themselves the wealth the workers produce, instead of liberating us, technical advancement under capitalism furthers inequality and sharpens class struggle.

These technical and technological improvements in industry and agriculture mean that the number of workers needed for production is reduced. In other words, as the capitalists invest more constant capital into technology, the variable capital invested in labor power is reduced. The result of this is that the demand for living labor is decreased by the development of industry as technology plunges millions into unemployment, while those still employed live precariously under threat of unemployment.

In other words, the general law of capitalist accumulation is that it accelerates the working class being supplanted by machinery, while those cast into unemployment act as a reserve army of labor for capital, driving down wages overall as a result of the large supply of workers in need of employment.

The workers, of course, organize and fight back to resist this – to raise wages and improve working conditions, counterbalancing this somewhat. But nevertheless, as a general tendency the worsening position of the working class in the capitalist mode of production holds true. We can see this very well in the ever-increasing wealth inequality between the working and oppressed people on the one hand, and the rich on the other hand.

The result of all of this is crisis. The capitalists are compelled by competition amongst themselves to achieve the highest rate of profit. The nature of this competitive drive is that those capitalists who cannot achieve this are crushed by their more ruthlessly efficient competitors. So, they must always update and develop the productive forces in order to increase efficiency, expand production and extract as much surplus value from the workers as they can. But demand is limited by the purchasing power of the masses of the people, who are being squeezed tighter and tighter. The wages of the working class cannot afford to buy all that is produced, leading to overproduction.

Simply put, these crises of overproduction mean that commodities are produced far in excess of effective demand, resulting in difficulties in finding markets for those commodities, falling prices and then restriction of production. This leads the economy into a period of contraction, stagnation, recession and even depression. Currency manipulation, speculation and bank failures can worsen these crises and change some of the particulars, even leading to problems of inflation as they scramble to find ways out of the crisis.

But since the crisis of overproduction generally causes prices to fall, the capitalists will take this opportunity to replenish and replace obsolete machinery, update technology and position themselves to overtake their competitors. The big capitalists will consume the enterprises of the smaller capitalists, and over time the economy will begin to recover. But this recovery will be at the expense of the waste and destruction of the excess commodities and productive forces, and the further destitution of millions. And these cycles of boom and bust repeat themselves again and again.

Dialectically, these crises are rooted in the fundamental contradiction at the heart of the capitalist mode of production: the contradiction between social production and private accumulation. The social character of production, the division of labor, specialization and efficiency lead to ever expanding production, while the accumulation of profit and wealth by the capitalist class at the expense of the workers means the working class simply cannot afford to purchase what is produced.

The reality is that these crises of overproduction demonstrate to everyone the limits of the capitalist system. They show exactly how the capitalist relations of production act as fetters, as chains, binding the development of the productive forces. If not for these fetters – the relationship of ownership of capitalist society – the expansion of production would be a force to eliminate scarcity and toil. Capitalism’s productive relations stand in the way of that. As long as things continue like this, we will never be free from these objective laws of capitalist crisis. Only socialist revolution, turning this system upside down, can put an end to these destructive cycles of crisis and ruin and create the basis for a new, just, society.

#UnitedStates #CapitalismAndEconomy #Labor #PeoplesStruggles #Socialism #MarxismLeninism #MLTheory #redTheory #overproduction

When we enter into employment, our bosses are trying to play a trick on us. They want us to understand the process one way, when, in fact, something else is happening. They want us to think that we have agreed, as equals, upon a deal, where they pay us an agreed upon hourly wage, and we, in turn, do some agreed upon labor for them. They make a profit and we get paid, and everyone gets what they agreed upon. At least, that’s how they want us to understand the process.

But what is really going on here? In the end, they’ve somehow got all of the money and we did all of the work. The capitalist bosses are like stage magicians, using misdirection to draw our attention away from what is really happening: that they are fleecing us. This fleecing of the working class by the capitalists is the source of all of their profits. It is the reason they are getting richer and richer, and we’re struggling to keep our heads above water. According to Marx’s analysis in Capital, the method of this basic exploitation is the production of surplus value.

Remember, in our previous articles we talked about commodities, and how they combine within themselves both use-value and exchange-value. That is, they are produced to fulfill some use, need, or want, but they are also produced for the sake of exchange on the market. We also talked about the Law of Value, which means the value of any commodity is equal to the socially necessary labor time required to produce that commodity. Finally, in our last article, we talked about constant and variable capital, and we examined how, if a certain quantity of constant capital and variable capital are invested by a capitalist into the production process, then by the end of that process these values will have reproduced or renewed themselves in the final product. But, if the labor power of the worker has exceeded the socially necessary labor time required for the worker to go on living and working, then there will be a surplus created, which the capitalist pockets as profit. That surplus is what Marx called surplus value.

Let’s break this down a little more. In a note to the Communist Manifesto, Engels defines the two main forces of the class struggle, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, like this: “By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.”

The working class sells their labor power to the capitalists in order to live. Whether you work on an oil rig, in a tobacco field, a warehouse, shipping and delivering packages, or making coffee at a cafe, you’re selling your labor power to the capitalist in order to live. Everyone who works for a living understands this. We work for the capitalists because we need a wage to live. Life is already hard, but if we don’t work, life gets harder and much more precarious. The capitalists act like this is a free choice, but it isn’t. It is a choice made under duress: work or starve.

So, as Marx says in Value, Price, and Profit, “What the working man sells is not directly his labour, but his labouring power, the temporary disposal of which he makes over to the capitalist.” Labor power becomes a commodity, sold by the worker to the capitalist. But what is the value of this commodity? According to Marx, “Like that of every other commodity, its value is determined by the quantity of labour necessary to produce it.” In other words, the base value of labor power is the cost of living.

As we pointed out in our last article, capital invested in labor is variable, because it can not only reproduce itself, but also produce a surplus in the labor process. Labor-power is a special commodity because the capitalists are able to use it to produce value exceeding its cost.

Lenin explains it like this: “The owner of money buys labor power at its value, which, like the value of every other commodity, is determined by the socially necessary labor time requisite for its production (i.e., the cost of maintaining the worker and his family). Having bought enough labor power, the owner of money is entitled to use it, that is, to set it to work for a whole day – 12 hours, let us say. Yet, in the course of six hours (“necessary” labor time) the worker creates product sufficient to cover the cost of his own maintenance; in the course of the next six hours (“surplus” labor time), he creates “surplus” product, or surplus value, for which the capitalist does not pay.”

This is the point where our capitalist stage magician uses sleight of hand to misdirect us. It appears, because the worker is paid an hourly wage, that they are being paid for all of their time, but this sleight of hand disguises the fact that part of it is really going unpaid. In other words, during the first part of the day, the capitalist makes enough money from your labor power to pay for your wages for the whole day, and so for the rest of the day you’re working for free.

The capitalist can increase the rate of surplus value in two ways. First, they can increase the length of the working day. If six hours covers the cost of our daily maintenance, and the next six are surplus labor, then the capitalist can obviously get more surplus labor by increasing the length of the working day. Now if the working day is two hours longer, that’s two more hours of surplus labor. Marx called this absolute surplus value. However many hours you add to the day beyond the necessary labor time is surplus labor. The only limit is that there are only 24 hours in a day. And in the beginnings of industrial capitalism, the capitalists did just that, extending the working day as much as they possibly could. The working class saw through this trick and struggled tooth and nail to limit the length of the working day. Thanks to the blood of the labor movement, we now have an eight-hour day in the U.S., overtime protections and so on, though the bosses continue to push back against this.

However, this isn’t the only way the capitalist can increase the rate of surplus value. The second method, which Marx called relative surplus value, involved intensifying production, or increasing the intensity of labor. This means getting the workers to produce more in the same or less time. They achieve this by improving technology, increasing efficiency, speeding up the machinery, increasing production quotas, and so on. In this way, in a 12-hour day, the worker is able to spend, say, four hours, rather than six, in necessary labor time. The worker produces enough to pay for their whole day’s pay in four hours, rather than six, leaving eight hours of surplus labor.

As Joe Burns puts it in his book Class Struggle Unionism, “The billionaires call this profit. Class struggle unionists call it theft.” That’s the basics of surplus value, and it is the source of the vast and ongoing accumulation of wealth by the capitalist class, stolen, by sleight of hand, from the workers themselves. This surplus value is the basis for the fundamental class antagonism between the working class and the capitalist class. Their profit only comes at our expense. Their profit is money that we earned but were never paid for, and as a result, they prosper while we suffer. Only socialist revolution, where the working class takes power and seizes the means of production from the capitalists, can change this basic fact and set things right, so that we are each paid according to our work and so that we can rebuild society to take care of everyone’s needs.

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