The great labor leader and former General Secretary and Chairman of the CPUSA, William Z. Foster, wrote hundreds of articles and pamphlets, giving a Marxist-Leninist analysis to the events and struggles of the day. He also wrote a number of longer books, especially in his later years. 

Foster wrote three major books summing up his experience as a revolutionary organizer in the trade union movement, From Bryan to Stalin (1937), Pages From a Worker’s Life (1939), and American Trade Unionism (1947). These are essential works on the labor movement that every revolutionary should study.

Foster also wrote five major histories, where he looked at particular aspects of history from a distinctly Marxist-Leninist, historical materialist perspective. These important works are Outline Political History of the Americas (1951), History of the Communist Party of the United States (1952), The Negro People in American History (1954), History of the Three Internationals (1955), and Outline History of the World Trade Union Movement (1956). 

All of these books are tremendously valuable works of Marxist-Leninist analysis, but here we’re going to focus on his book on the history of the Black liberation struggle in the U.S., The Negro People in American History.

Foster’s analysis

Foster sets out the purpose of his book clearly. He writes

“The general purpose of the present book, written from the standpoint of Marxism-Leninism, is to outline the growth of the American Negro people in relation to the historical development of the American nation. Concretely, the book also aims to stimulate further the present struggle of the Negro people for the fullest freedom along with their white allies, to analyze the factors making for the historical growth into ‘a nation within a nation,’ and to indicate the main lines of the young nation’s perspective of further social development.”

From this standpoint, Foster looks at the history African Americans going back to Africa and its colonization, through the international slave trade, slavery in the American colonies, the role of African Americans in the American Revolution of 1776, the rise of the Abolition movement, Republicanism, and the Civil War, Reconstruction and the counter-revolution against it, up through the Jim Crow period. 

The scope of The Negro People in American History is enormous, so for our purposes we’ll only zero in on a few points of particular interest so that we can get a look at how Foster puts Marxism-Leninism to work in analyzing the contradictions in motion in the history of the Black liberation struggle.

Let’s look at how Foster addresses the African American National Question, the central point of the “nation within a nation,” as he put it. This central question runs throughout the book, especially the chapters on Reconstruction, and the chapters on “The Communist Party and Negro Question” and “The Negro People As an Oppressed Nation.” 

Foster, first of all, recognizes the revolutionary character of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Foster says “The Civil War was a revolution, the second in United States history. It was a bourgeois-democratic revolution… because it brought about ‘a transference of power from one class to another.’” 

Indeed, the Civil War deposed the Southern Planter class that had until then “dominated the Federal Government” and put “the Northern industrialists firmly in the political saddle.” Foster notes that “The general effect of the war was to clear away barriers in the path of capitalism and to stimulate that system into tremendous expansion.” The main barrier in question was the outmoded and archaic system of chattel slavery in the South, which acted as a fetter, holding back industrial capitalist development, then centered in the North. 

Foster also astutely points out that the revolutionary demands of the African American people aimed “straight at the heart of the Confederacy.” These were the demands for “(a) the emancipation of the the slaves; (b) the arming of Negro slaves and freedmen; © the enfranchisement of the Negro people; (d) the abolition of Jim Crow and social inequality; and (e) the redistribution of land in the South.” Foster goes on to explain,

“The degree of revolutionary content in the Federal Government’s policy was always measured by the extent to which it adopted and was enforcing the national demands of the Negro people. The sequel showed that the Government never really made the Negro people’s demands its own. It always considered them something alien, to be picked up or dropped as political or military expediency dictated…” 

Foster explains that “The revolution, despite its final betrayal [toppling Reconstruction in 1877], brought basic advancement to the Negro people, achieving some of their major demands. Most important of all, it freed them from the terrible, centuries-old bondage of chattel slavery. It also won for them the legal right to vote, the right to education and to bear arms in the national defense.” 

But the betrayal of Reconstruction led to counter-revolution, disenfranchisement, lynch-terror and all of the other horrors of the Jim Crow system, including robbing African Americans in the South of political power, stripping them of their land, and thrusting them back onto the plantations under peonage and sharecropping. This period, coinciding with the rise of monopoly capitalism in the United States and its compulsion towards the super-exploitation of the African American people, marks the origin of the African American oppressed nation in the Black Belt South. 

Foster writes,

“Joseph Stalin, the greatest of all authorities on the national question, formulated the following classical Marxist definition of a nation: ‘a nation is an historically evolved stable community of language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a community of culture.’ … On the basis of this scientific definition, clearly the Negro people in the Black Belt of the South comprise a nation, and those in the North and West constitute a national minority.” 

Foster then proceeds to look at each of these aspects of nationhood and explain exactly how they apply to the African American people of the Black Belt. He therefore raises the Leninist demand for self-determination. “It is right which must be conceded to the Negro nation in the Black Belt of the United States, to be used under such concrete forms as it so resolves.” This means it is up to the African American people of the Black Belt South to decide how they want to relate to the United States, whether that means secession, federation, or some other relationship. 

Foster’s The Negro People in American History today

The key role of the Black liberation struggle within the revolutionary movement as a whole has been on sharp display, especially since the uprisings that swept the country after the police murder of George Floyd. Clarity on the African American national question is therefore more important than ever. Foster’s book on the history of the Black liberation struggle in the United States is a key work of Marxist-Leninist historical analysis. It casts a bright light on the revolutionary currents and material contradictions that have propelled the Black liberation movement forward. 

As Frank Chapman said in his excellent book Marxist-Leninist Perspectives On Black Liberation and Socialism, regarding the strategic alliance between the Black liberation movement and the multinational working class struggle at the heart of the united front against monopoly capitalism, “...a key to building such an alliance is the recognition of the centrality of the struggle for Black Liberation in the struggle for socialism in the United States of America.” Understanding the material forces at work, not only the current balance of forces, but the historical trajectory of those contradictions, is absolutely essential for revolutionaries to grasp as we move forward.

J. Sykes is the author of the book “The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism”. The book can be purchased by visiting frso.org/books

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

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

Stalin’s role in writing the Short Course

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

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

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

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

The unity of theory and practice in the Short Course

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Short Course today

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

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

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

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One of the major problems of revolutionary organizing has always been the contradiction between building movements of the broad masses, and those movements being led by a relatively small, disciplined and unified vanguard. How does a revolutionary organization, based on democratic centralism and united around a Marxist-Leninist program, mobilize the masses far beyond its own membership? The answer to the question is a method of leadership used by all communists from the Bolsheviks onward, called the mass line. Mao Zedong’s short essay, “Some Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership” is a key, systematic explanation of the mass line in Marxist-Leninist theory. 

After the Yan’an Rectification Movement launched in 1942, cadre education was given special attention. As a result, many of Mao’s articles from the period in Yan’an are particularly clear and concise. “Methods of Leadership,” from June 1943, is no exception. Along the lines set out by the 1942 Rectification Movement, Mao’s aim is “To combat subjectivist and bureaucratic methods of leadership,” by promoting “scientific, Marxist methods of leadership.” The lessons distilled in this short essay are drawn from Mao’s experience leading the Autumn Harvest Uprising, the Chinese Soviet Republic, and the Long March.

Mao’s argument

“There are two methods which we Communists must employ in whatever work we do,” Mao explains. “One is to combine the general with the particular; the other is to combine the leadership with the masses.” This is Mao’s first point. 

Elaborating, Mao goes on to say, “In any task, if no general and widespread call is issued, the broad masses cannot be mobilized for action. But if persons in leading positions confine themselves to a general call – if they do not personally, in some of the organizations, go deeply and concretely into the work called for, make a break-through at some single point, gain experience and use this experience for guiding other units – then they will have no way of testing the correctness or of enriching the content of their general call, and there is the danger that nothing may come of it.” 

Too often those who claim to be revolutionaries stop short at the general call, but don’t go to the masses to organize and mobilize them. They broadly proclaim, “We need socialism!” but fail to link the call for socialism with the masses' felt needs and day-to-day struggles in a practical way. Then they fall into pessimism and blame the masses when they fail to take up their ideas. Mao, instead, suggests that we use the mass line.

Mao says that “However active the leading group may be, its activity will amount to fruitless effort by a handful of people unless combined with the activity of the masses.” In other words, the broad masses have to be drawn into the struggle. “On the other hand,” Mao explains, “if the masses alone are active without a strong leading group to organize their activity properly, such activity cannot be sustained for long, or carried forward in the right direction, or raised to a high level.” This is the problem we see with spontaneous uprisings and rebellions. They burn bright and hot and are a clear demonstration of the people’s righteous anger, but, without revolutionary leadership, they aren’t sustainable and eventually they burn out. 

“The masses in any given place are generally composed of three parts, the relatively active, the intermediate and the relatively backward. The leaders must therefore be skilled in uniting the small number of active elements around the leadership and must rely on them to raise the level of the intermediate element and to win over the backward elements.” This is an essential point. The relatively active, or advanced, are the people who want to fight back against their exploitation and oppression. They may not yet be Marxist-Leninists, but they see that things have to change and that the route to change is through struggle. These are the people that communists must find and organize with, shoulder to shoulder. By fighting together with the advanced and summing up our experiences, we can work to win them over to Marxism-Leninism. 

By relying on these advanced fighters, the broad, intermediate elements can be pulled into the struggle, and many of them can be raised to the level of the advanced. The intermediate are a much larger section of the masses, not active, but generally aware that things are bad and shouldn’t be like this. The advanced fighters show them the power of active struggle, and can draw them into those struggles. 

Finally, there are the backwards elements. These are the people who carry water for the class enemy among the people. They have all kinds of backwards ideas, and promote those ideas among the people. Some of them may be won over while others must be isolated. 

The important point to take away from this breakdown of “advanced, intermediate and backwards” is that revolutionaries should focus their attention and energy on the advanced, active fighters. By doing that, the effects of their work will ripple outwards to the broad masses like waves from a pebble tossed into a pond. 

Finally, Mao links the mass line to the Marxist theory of knowledge, explaining how we learn through practice, moving from a lower to a higher level, together with the masses.

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

People learn through struggle, and we have to start from where people are at and advance them step by step. Through the course of struggle, we have to sum up our successes and failures, subject ourselves and our comrades to criticism and self-criticism, learn from and fix our shortcomings, and carry forward that which is proved correct through practice. Then we apply these lessons to our mass work as we move forward. 

What does Mao mean by “concentrate” the ideas of the masses? This is an important point. A key ingredient to Mao’s mass line slogan of “from the masses, to the masses,” is Marxist-Leninist theory. It means using Marxism-Leninism to transform those ideas from “scattered and unsystematic ideas” into a focused strategy that can be implemented on the ground. It means taking the felt needs and demands of the masses, applying the science of Marxism-Leninism to understand the contradictions at work, and steering those felt needs and demands in a direction that brings the greatest number of people possible into conflict with the enemy. 

Mao’s “Methods of Leadership” today

Today, we find ourselves in the particular position of having no true communist party in the United States. There is no organized and advanced detachment of the entire working class, whose cadre are what Stalin called “the generals of the proletarian army.” We are therefore faced with the central task of building just such a party. But as Mao tells us, “A leading group that is genuinely united and linked with the masses can be formed only gradually in the process of mass struggle, and not in isolation from it.” In other words, party building is impossible to accomplish apart from serious mass work. 

This means we must understand and utilize the mass line every single day. Whether we are working in the trade unions, struggling for Black and Chicano national liberation, or fighting for a free Palestine, among many other important struggles, we are working to accomplish three objectives. As the Political Program of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization puts it, “Our party building work should be placed in the context of our three objectives: To win all that can be won while weakening our enemies; Raise the general level of consciousness, struggle, and organization in our immediate battles; and Win the advanced to Marxism-Leninism, thus building revolutionary organization.” 

The only way to build an organization comprised of the “generals of the proletarian army” is to recruit the best and most dedicated fighters in the people’s struggles, learn together with them through the crucible of day-to-day battles against the class enemy, and through the summation of those experiences, demonstrate in practice the power of Marxism-Leninism.

#RevolutionaryTheory #RedReviews #Mao

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

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

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

Stalin’s arguments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Relevance of Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR for today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Reform Our Study”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Rectify the Party’s Style of Work”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oppose Stereotyped Party Writing”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lenin’s argument

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky today

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

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

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

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

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

Lenin’s argument

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bourgeois elections

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

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

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

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

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

Work in the trade unions

On the trade unions, Lenin writes, 

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

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

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

“Left-Wing” Communism today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More than anything else, Lenin’s book “Left Wing” Communism shows us how to apply Marxism to the dynamic and complex mass struggles in which we find ourselves, and how to n